absolute Monotheism, denominative and appellative will be identical.* The Hebrews, indeed, had a specific name, Jahveh, and a general term, Elohim. But the first, whatever may be said as to its meaning, was introduced because of the growing latitude in the use of the second. In Christian countries, again, where the very idea of God is exclusive, denominative and appellative tend to coalesce. We no longer distinguish between Jahveh and God; to us they are one and the same.

The formation of a term to express God in general seems possible in one of two ways—either by the gradual extension of a name to various objects of the same nature as the one first designated, or by the creation of a new word to express the new conception. Either explanation implies, so far as concerns our present subject, a growing Polytheism, and various things indicate that gods had begun to multiply before the dispersion.

Perhaps it is perilous to conjecture as to the order Indo-European thought and language here followed. But there are some significant facts. The general term, even without the Greek Ocós, has a wider prevalence than the proper name. The Celts must have been the first, or

The Hebrew prophets knew the power of a single name. Zechariah (xiv. 9) says of the time when the knowledge of the true God shall be universal, “In that day shall there be one Lord, and His Name one,' while nothing was more characteristic of Polytheism than gods like Διόνυσος πολυώνυμος, or Ίσις μυριώνυμος.

among the first, to leave the common home, but the several Celtic dialects, Irish, Cymric, Armorican, Cornish, have the cognates of deva, but not of dyaus.* It seems an almost allowable inference that the Indo-Europeans had not begun to distinguish between the individual and the general, God and gods, when the earliest departures occurred. Then the Lithuanian has deva-s, old Prussian has deiwa-s, but neither has preserved the proper name. That deva had been undergoing a process of deterioration in very early times is also evident from its complete change of meaning in Zend, where daeva is no longer God, but demon. This is all the more significant as the Iranians are representatives of an Indo-European monotheistic tendency, and their repudiation of the deity of the daevas may be interpreted as their protest against the growing Polytheism. If, then, these facts may be held to indicate the extension of an individual name so as to embrace a genus, the individual must have formed the starting-point. And if the inter-relations of dyaus and deva be studied, whatever the order of their application to the Divine Being, this aboriginal individualism becomes apparent. They spring from the same root-are branches of a common stem.† The unity of root indicates unity

Pictet, "Les Origines Indo-Europ.," vol. ii. pp. 653, 663.

The inter-relations of the words and their relation to the common root, di, to shine, may be studied as exhibited in Fick, "Vergleich. Wörterbuch," pp. 93-96, and Max Müller, "Science of Language,"

of thought. If Dyaus was first, then a deva was a being who had the nature of Dyaus, Dyaus was deva, Ζεύς ὁ θεός. The qualities perceived in him were the qualities conceived as constitutive and distinctive of a god. If deva was first, then Dyaus was the deva par excellence, the being to whom the qualities held to be divine belonged. Inquiry as to the order in which the words were applied to God may be useless enough, but their common root seems to indicate that the primitive Indo-European mind had conceived Dyaus and deca as ultimately identical; just as the Hebrew-though here the verbal does not indicate the mental connection -identified in his ultimate thinking Jahveh and Elohim.*

The radical connection thus existing between the words may be held as an evidence that a radical connection existed in the Indo-European mind between the idea of God and a specific God. However this connection is explained-whether Dyaus, or deva, or neither, but a thought anterior to both, is made the parent conception -the result is the same, a Theism which we may term individualistic. But now the question rises, What thought lay at the root of both words? The common

ii. pp. 449 ff. Dyaus seems to have as a word a simpler and more rudimentary structure than deva, but simplicity of structure may not always be evidence of priority of use in a given sense.

* Ewald, "Geschichte des Volks Israel," vol. i. p. 138 (2nd ed.).

root, div, means, as is well known, to beam, to shine; hence Dyaus, resplendent, light-giving Heaven; Deva, the bright or shining one. And so the conclusion has often been drawn, the worship of the primitive Indo-Europeans was a Nature-worship, an adoration of the elements, of the phenomena and powers of Nature. Confirmation is found in the Nature-worship so evident in the Vedas, so visible in the background of the Greek mythology. Then, again, Heaven is married to Earth, Dyaus to Prithivi, Zeus to Hera; and this marriage, as a French author has told us, "forms the foundation of a hundred mythologies." But, beginning with the last, we inquire, Is this marriage a primitive belief, or the creation of a developed mythology? Certainly there is no evidence that Earth is as old a goddess as Heaven is a god-very decided evidence to the contrary. Dyaus was known to almost all the Indo-European peoples, but each people, and often the several tribes composing it, had a different name for the Earth-goddess. Prithivi was known to the Indians alone. Zeus, in his several forms, Pelasgian and Hellenic, was one in name and the ultimate elements of his character; but almost every Greek tribe had its own Earth-mother. The place Hera

* Renan, "Hist. des Langues Sémit.," p. 496; Bunsen; "God in History," vol. i. p. 273.

+ M. Albert Réville, "Essais de Critique Religieuse," p. 383, quoted in Muir's "Sanskrit Texts," vol. v. p. 24.

occupies in the Olympian system is given by many of the local worships of Greece to different goddesses; and Homer, in elevating the Hellenic Hera to the throne, has to reduce the old Pelasgic Dione to a mere “layfigure."* The German Zio, too, has no consort, the Hertha of Tacitus being altogether a local goddess.† The separation of the sexes implies an anthropomorphism,‡ rudimentary, perhaps, but real; and the marriage of Heaven and Earth, although "the foundation of a hundred mythologies," is built upon the conception that the life in both is akin to, indeed the parent of, the life in man. Since the idea of difference of sex among the gods must precede the idea of marriage, the latter must be a later mythical product than the former, and, as names like Juno and Dione witness, the bright divinity of Heaven may have been sexualized and married to a goddess of Heaven before the mythical faculty in its career of unconscious creation deified Earth and married it to Heaven.§ Developmental coincidence can explain the uniformity of the association, but no theory which assumes it as the common starting-point of the Indo* Gladstone, "Juventus Mundi," pp. 198, 238 ff., 261 ff., 264 ff. + "De Germania," 40; Grimm, "Deut. Mythol.," vol. i. 230. Creuzer, "Symbolik und Mythol.," vol. i. p. 24.

§ Even Demeter may have been originally no earth goddess, but Dyâvâ Mâtar, the Dawn, corresponding to Dyaushpitar, the sky. So M. Müller, "Lectures, Science of Lang.," ii. p. 517. The marriage of Heaven and Earth is too artificial to be a very primitive conception.