When the existence of fetish "herbs" is denied by Mr. Max Muller, he does not, of course, forget Soma, that divine juice. It is also to be noted that in modern India, as Mr. Max Muller himself observes, Sir Alfred Lyall finds that "the husbandman prays to his plough and the fisher to his net," these objects being, at present, fetishes. In opposition to Mr. Max Muller, Barth avers that the same kind of fetishism which flourishes to-day flourishes in the Rig-Veda. "Mountains, rivers, springs, trees, herbs are invoked as so many powers. The beasts which live with man--the horse, the cow, the dog, the bird and the animals which imperil his existence--receive a cult of praise and prayer. Among the instruments of ritual, some objects are more than things consecrated--they are divinities; and the war-chariot, the weapons of defence and offence, the plough, are the objects not only of benedictions but of prayers."(1) These absolute contradictions on matters of fact add, of course, to the difficulty of understanding the early Indo-Aryan religion. One authority says that the Vedic people were fetish-worshippers; another authority denies it. (1) Barth, Les Religions de l'Inde, p. 7, with the Vedic texts. Were the Rishis ancestor-worshippers? Barth has no doubt whatever that they were. In the pitris or fathers he recognises ancestral spirits, now "companions of the gods, and gods themselves. At their head appear the earliest celebrants of the sacrifice, Atharvan, the Angiras, the Kavis (the pitris, par excellence) equals of the greatest gods, spirits who, BY DINT OF SACRIFICE, drew forth the world from chaos, gave birth to the sun and lighted the stars,"--cosmical feats which, as we have seen, are sometimes attributed by the lower races to their idealised mythic ancestors, the "old, old ones" of Australians and Ovahereroes. A few examples of invocations of the ancestral spirits may not be out of place.(1) "May the Fathers protect me in my invocation of the gods." Here is a curious case, especially when we remember how the wolf, in the North American myth, scattered the stars like spangles over the sky: "The fathers have adorned the sky with stars".(2) (1) Rig-Veda, vi. 52,4. (2) Ibid., x. 68, xi. Mr. Whitney (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, First Series, p. 59) gives examples of the ceremony of feeding the Aryan ghosts. "The fathers are supposed to assemble, upon due invocation, about the altar of him who would pay them homage, to seat themselves upon the straw or matting spread for each of the guests invited, and to partake of the offerings set before them." The food seems chiefly to consist of rice, sesame and honey.