Confining ourselves generally to the second millennium B.C., we have surveyed the religions of the adjacent peoples between the valley of the Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean; and have observed that morphologically they are generally on the same plane of polytheism, but that those of Mesopotamia and Hellas reveal inner differences, striking and vital enough to be serious stumbling-blocks to a theory of affiliation. These differences concern the {305} personality of the divinities and their relations to the various parts of the world of nature; the most salient being the different attitude of the two peoples to the divine luminaries of heaven and to the chthonian powers of the lower world. They concern the cosmogonies of East and West, their views of the creation of the world, and the origin of man; on these matters, certain myths which are easily diffused do not appear to have reached Hellas in this early period. They concern the religious temperaments of the Babylonian and Hellene, which appear as separate as the opposite points of the pole; the rapturous fanatic and self-abasing spirit of the East contrasting vividly with the coolness, civic sobriety, and self-confidence of the West. They concern the eschatologic ideas of the two peoples: the cult of the dead and some idea of a posthumous judgment being found in early Hellas, while the former was rare, and the latter is scarcely discoverable, in Mesopotamia. They concern, finally, the ritual; and here the salient points of contrast are the different views of the sacrifice, of the sacrificial victim, and the sacrificial blood; the different methods of purification and the expulsion of sin; the ritual of sorrow associated with the death of the god, so powerful in Babylonia and so insignificant (by comparison) in Hellas; the un-Hellenic Mylitta-rite, and the service of the “hierodoulai”; and, to conclude with the most vital difference of all, the manifestations of magic and its relation to the national religions, so complex, so pregnant for thought and faith, and so dominant in Mesopotamia; on the other hand, so insignificant and unobtrusive in Hellas.