In an Assyrian inscription, Ahura Mazda is said to have created joy for _all_ creatures: a belief which Mazdean Dualism impugns. So far as can be guessed, the earliest Iranian faith was the worship of good spirits—of a Good Spirit. Less pure extra-beliefs may, or rather must, have existed contemporaneously, but they remained in the second rank. The cult of good spirits was the home-cult of shepherd and herdsman offered to the genii of their flocks and herds. While these genii answered the purpose of the lares or little saints everywhere dear to humble hearts, it is probable that in character they already resembled the Fravashis or archetypes that were to play so great a part in Mazdean doctrine. The cult of the Good Spirit, the national and kingly cult, was the worship of one God whose most worthy symbol, before Zoroaster as after, was the sun and whose sacrament with men was fire. The early Iranian had no temple, no altar: he went up into a high place and offered his prayer and sacrifice without priest or pomp. If we wish to trace his faith back to an Indian source, instead of bringing on the scene Varuna and Indra, it will be better to inquire whether there were elements of the same faith underlying the unwieldy fabric of Vedic religion. The answer is, that there were. The grandest text in the Rig-Veda, the one text recognised from farthest antiquity as of incalculable value, is the old Persian religion contained in a formula: “That Sun’s supremacy—God—let us adore Which may well direct.” “Enable with perpetual light, The dulness of our blinded sight.” So great a virtue was attributed to the Gayatri that the mind which thought it was supposed to unite with the object of thought: the eyes of the soul looked on Truth, of which all else is but the shadow. This is the spirit in which it is still repeated every day by every Hindu. The sacrosanct words were “Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva,” or, yet more often, they are described as “the mother of the Vedas,” which, if it means anything, means that they are older than the Vedas. The point most to be noticed about the Gayatri is that its importance cannot be set aside by saying that this text is to be explained by Henotheism: the habit of referring to each god immediately addressed as supreme. Nor was the text selected arbitrarily by Western monotheists: for thousands of years before any European knew it, the natives of India had singled it out as the most solemn affirmation of man’s belief in the Unseen. It is open to argument, though not to proof, that the Gayatri crystallises a creed which the Iranians took with them in their migration. Peoples then moved in clans, not in a motley crowd gathered on an emigrant steamer. The clan or clans to which the Iranians belonged may have clung to a primordial faith, not yet overlaid by myths which materialised symbols and mysteries which made truth a secret.