For, if it at first was devoted to the unholy side of fire-cult, and if the fire-cult is older than the _soma_-cult, then this is the cult that one would expect to see most affected by the conservative vulgar, who in India hold fast to what the cultured have long dropped as superstition, or, at least, pretended to drop; though the house-ritual keeps some magic in its fire-cult.
In that case, it may be asked, why not begin the history of Hindu religion with the Atharvan, rather than with the Rig Veda?
Because the Atharvan, as a whole, in its language, social conditions, geography, 'remnant' worship, etc., shows that this literary collection is posterior to the Rik collection.

As to individual hymns, especially those imbued with the tone of fetishism and witchcraft, any one of them, either in its present or original form, may outrank the whole Rik in antiquity, as do its superstitions the religion of the Rik--if it is right to make a distinction between superstition and religion, meaning by the former a lower, and by the latter a more elevated form of belief in the supernatural.
The difference between the Rik-worshipper and Atharvan-worshipper is somewhat like that which existed at a later age between the philosophical Civaite and Durg[=a]ite.

The former revered Civa, but did not deny the power of a host of lesser mights, whom he was ashamed to worship too much; the latter granted the all-god-head of Civa, but paid attention almost exclusively to some demoniac divinity.
Superstition, perhaps, always precedes theology; but as surely does superstition outlive any one form of its protean rival.

And the simple reason is that a theology is the real belief of few, and varies with their changing intellectual point of view; while superstition is the belief unacknowledged of the few and acknowledged of the many, nor does it materially change from age to age.

The rites employed among the clam-diggers on the New York coast, the witch-charms they use, the incantations, cutting of flesh, fire-oblations, meaningless formulae, united with sacrosanct expressions of the church, are all on a par with the religion of the lower classes as depicted in Theocritus and the Atharvan.