These ideas as to the lot of the soul after death, which were spread among a number of different peoples, may also have existed in primitive Greece but we have no proof that they were current there. As the Hellenes granted to the stars only a restricted and secondary place in their anthropomorphic religion, so in early times they had no belief, or scarcely any, in the ascent of souls to the starry sky. This doctrine was entirely strange even to the earliest Ionian thinkers. Recent research has made it more and more probable that these conceptions were introduced into Greece from the East, where astrolatry was predominant.[226] Pausanias[227] claimed to know that the Chaldeans and the Magi of India were the first to assert that the human soul is immortal, and that they convinced the Hellenes, and in particular Plato, of this doctrine. Such an affirmation, in this form, is certainly false, but it contains an element of truth. The tenet of astral immortality is ancient in the East: it probably took form in Babylon about the sixth century, when Persian Mazdeism, which believed that the righteous were lifted up to the luminous dwelling of the gods, came into contact with the sidereal religion of the Chaldeans. It was propagated in Greece especially by the Pythagoreans, for whom the soul had a celestial origin, being, as we have seen (p. 24), a fiery principle, a particle of the ether which lights the divine fires of heaven. This spark, which descended at birth in the body, which it heated and animated, reascended after death to the upper regions, whence it had come forth. Aristophanes in his _Peace_[228] greets the apparition of a new star, that of the Pythagorean poet, Ion of Chios, who had recently died, asking ironically if it be not true that “when someone dies he becomes like the stars in the air.” This is the most ancient precisely dated mention of stellar immortality (421 B. C.), and it cannot be doubted that the doctrine was that of Ion himself. Plato received it from the Pythagoreans and makes very clear allusions to it.