The special development in India of the fire-priest that brings down fire from heaven, when compared with the personification of the 'twirler' (Promantheus) in Greece, shows that no detailed myth was current in primitive times.[22] The name of the fire-priest, _brahman_ = fla( g)men( ?), is an indication of the primitive fire-cult in antithesis to the _soma_-cult, which latter belongs to the narrower circle of the Hindus and Persians.

Here, however, in the identity of names for sacrifice (_yajna, yacna_) and of _barhis_, the sacrificial straw, of _soma = haoma_, together with many other liturgical similarities, as in the case of the metres, one must recognize a fully developed _soma_-cult prior to the separation of the Hindus and Iranians.
Of demigods of evil type the _Y[=a]tus_ are both Hindu and Iranian, but the priest-names of the one religion are evil names in the other, as the _devas_, gods, of one are the _daevas_, demons, of the other.[23] There are no other identifications that seem at all certain in the strict province of religion, although in myth the form of Manus, who is the Hindu Noah, has been associated with Teutonic Mannus, and Greek Minos, noted in Thucydides for his sea-faring.

He is to Yama (later regarded as his brother) as is Noah to Adam.
We do not lay stress on lack of equation in proper names, but, as Schrader shows (p.

596 ff.), very few comparisons on this line have a solid phonetic foundation.

Minos, Manu; Ouranos, Varuna; Wotan, V[=a]ta, are dubious; and some equate flamen with blotan, sacrifice.
Other wider or narrower comparisons, such as Neptunus from _nap[=a]t ap[=a]m,_ seem to us too daring to be believed.