The Magian religion as it appears in Herodotus and other Greek authors, however, seems to have shown none of the hostility to the powers of darkness so apparent in the religious literature collected by the Sassanian kings. “The whole circuit of the firmament” was, according to Herodotus, their greatest god or Zeus; and he says that they also “sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the earth, to fire and water, and to the winds”; but that “they do not, like the Greeks, believe the gods to have the same nature as men[809].” He also tells us that later they borrowed from the Arabians and the Assyrians the worship of a goddess whom he calls Mitra, and although he is probably wrong as to the origin and sex of this deity, his evidence shows that Semitic admixture counted for something in the Magian worship. In other respects, the Magian seems to have been a primitive faith given up to the worship of the powers of nature or elements, which it did not personify in the anthropomorphic manner of either the Semites or the Greeks, and to have paid little attention to public ceremonies or ritual. It follows therefore that, like the religions of many uncivilized people of the present day, it would draw no very sharp distinction between good and evil gods, and would be as ready to propitiate or make use of the evil, that is those hostile to man, as the good or benevolent. Plutarch, who describes the religion of the Magi more than three centuries after Herodotus, when the name of Zoroaster the Persian prophet and the dualistic belief favoured by his teaching had long been popularly known in the West, says that the Magi of his time held Mithras to be the “Mediator” or intermediary between “Oromazes” or Light on the one hand, and “Areimanios” or Darkness and Ignorance on the other, and that they used to make bloody sacrifices to the last-named in a place where the sun never comes[810]. It is easy to see how such a cult, without the control of public ceremonies and with its unabashed traffic with the powers of evil, would be likely to degenerate into compulsion or magic.