If kings need restraint, much more do invisible gods: and many nations have sought to limit their prerogative, either by Magic or by legal fictions which, in relation to gods, can have only a magical operation. Whilst the tone of the _Rigveda_ is truly religious (though even there “the idea is often expressed that the might and valour of the gods is produced by hymns, sacrifices and especially offerings of soma”), “in the Yajurveda the sacrifice itself has become the centre of thought and desire, its correct performance in every detail being all-important. Its power is now so great that it not only influences but compels the gods to do the will of the officiating priest.”[333] In Egyptian rites of sacrifice and prayer, the kind of victim and the manner of slaying and cutting it up were minutely and unchangeably decreed. “The formulas accompanying each act of the sacrificial priest contained a certain number of words, whose due sequence and harmonies might not suffer the slightest modification even by the god himself, under penalty of losing their efficacy. They were always recited with the same rhythm, according to a system of melody in which every tone had its virtue, combined with movements that confirmed the sense and worked with irresistible effect; one false note, a single discord between the succession of gestures and the utterance of the sacramental words, any hesitation, any awkwardness in the accomplishment of a rite, and the sacrifice was vain.”[334] But if all was in order, the god was bound to grant the petition. Babylonian religious ceremonies “had for the most part the same end and object as the magical text used with them; they were not so much a communion with the deities of heaven, as an attempt to compel them by particular words to relieve the worshipper from trouble, or to bestow upon him some benefit.” Ceremonies, therefore, were useless unless accurately performed in word and deed; “ritual was a sort of acted magic.”[335] These accounts of the religious ceremonies of the highest barbaric civilisations are almost in the same words as William Ellis uses in his account of worship at Raiatea about the beginning of the nineteenth century; except that Ellis does not say that the Polynesian gods were bound to grant the requests so presented. Accordingly, I have treated the Raiatean example under Retrogradation, and those of Egypt and Babylon as cases of half-conscious policy. No doubt both retrogradation and policy were present in all cases; but it seems reasonable to suppose that the latter predominated where order was more settled (an analogue of the order required in heaven) and thought was better trained.