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 158 The Religion of the Veda

last an indifferent vehicle for far-reaching Specula- tions, or the ﬁner sort of religious feeling.

The Sanskrit word again “ ﬁre,” at all events, is Indo-European; Latin gm, Lithuanian ages}, Old Slavic ogni. Some kind of worship of the sacriﬁce ﬁre, and with it some degree of personiﬁcation, is likely to have taken place in Indo-European times. The Greeks and Romans, as well as the Aryans, offered libations to the ﬁre when using it to convey offerings to their gods. But there was no deﬁnite result that we know of ; the chaste ﬁgure of I'Iestia of the Greeks, or Vesta of the Romans, contrasted with boisterous male Agni, shows that the initial conception must have been faint and unstable, to enable it to produce shapes so thoroughly diverse. In the main God Agni is in every essential aproduct of the poet-priests of the Rig»Veda.

In India, as elsewhere, ﬁre was produced by fric~ tion, and this mode of starting ﬁre was obligatory as far as the sacriﬁce ﬁre was concerned. The two ﬁre” sticks, or drills, called amps, are therefore Agni’s parents, the upper stick being the male, the lower the female. They produce him under the name of Ayn “Living”; wonderful to narrate, from the dry wood the god is born living. At once he becomes the type of human progeny, and faintly ﬁgures as, or suggests the ﬁrst man and the originator of the