With this warning in mind one may inquire at last in how far a conservative judgment can find among the Aryans themselves an identity of original conception in the different forms of divinities and religious rites.

Foremost stand the universal chrematheism, worship of inanimate objects regarded as usefully divine, and the cult of the departed dead.

This latter is almost universal, perhaps pan-Aryan, and Weber is probably right in assuming that the primitive Aryans believed in a future life.

But Benfey's identification of Tartaras with the Sanskrit Tal[=a]tala, the name of a special hell in very late systems of cosmogony, is decidedly without the bearing he would put upon it.

The Sanskrit word may be taken directly from the Greek, but of an Aryan source for both there is not the remotest historical probability.
When, however, one comes to the Lord of the Dead he finds himself already in a narrower circle.