Let us then assume that this was the case with some of these Maklu petitions, and let us consider what is implied when we make the assumption. What is implied is that there are some wishes, for instance those embodied in these Maklu petitions, which may be realised by means of spells, or may quite appropriately be preferred to the gods of the community. Such are wishes for the well-being of the individual worshipper and for the defeat of evil-doers who would do or are doing him wrong. When it is recognised that individuals--as well as the community--may come with their plaints before the gods of the community, the functions of those gods become enlarged, for they are extended to include the protection of individual members of the community, as well as the protection of the community, as such; and the functions of the community's gods are thus extended and enlarged, because the members of the community have become, in some degree, individuals conscious of their individuality. The importance, for the science of religion, of this development of self-consciousness is that the consciousness of self must be realised before self can consciously be abandoned, that is before self-will can be consciously surrendered. As is shown by the Maklu petitions, there may come, in the course of the evolution of religion, a stage in which it is recognised that the individual worshipper may petition the gods for deliverance from the evil which afflicts them. And the petitions used appear in some cases, as we have seen, to have been adopted into the ritual of the gods, word for word as they were found already in existence. If then they were, both in the words in which they were expressed, and in the purpose which they sought to achieve, such that they could be taken up, as they were and without change, into the ritual of the community's gods, it would seem that, even before they were so taken up, they could not have been wholly, if at all, alien to the spirit of religion. What marks them as religious, in the cuneiform inscriptions, is their context: it shows that the power, relied on for the accomplishment of the desires expressed in these petitions, was the power of the gods. Remove the context, and it becomes a matter of ambiguity, whether the wish is supposed, by those who utter it, to depend for its realisation on some power, possessed and exercised by those who express the wish, or whether it is supposed to depend on the good will of some being vaguely conceived, and not addressed by name. But if eventually the wish, and the words in which it was expressed, are taken up into the worship of the gods, there seems a balance of probability that the wish was from the beginning rather in the nature of religion than of magic, rather a petition than a command; though the categories were not at first discriminated, and there was at first no clear vision of the quarter from which fulfilment of the wish was hoped for.