In Christianity the conduct of the faithful beforeGod is freely interpreted by the termhumilis, and hence humility, meaning literally slave mindor serving the tribe, isdemanded as the essence of religiosity. But this isnon-Indo-European in outlook, anafter-effect of oriental religiosity. Because he isnot a slave before an omnipotent God,the Indo-European mostly prays not kneeling nor prostrated to earth, but standing withhis eyes gazing upward and his arms stretched out before him.As a complete man with his honour unsullied, the honest Indo-European stands uprightbefore his God or Gods. No religiosity which takessomething away from man, to makehim appear smaller before a deity who has become all-powerful and oppressive, is Indo-European. No religiosity which declares the world and man to be valueless, low andunclean, and which wishes to redeem man to over-earthly or superhuman sacred values,is truly Indo-European. Where “this world” is dropped, and in its place the “other world”is raised to eternal good, there the realm of Indo-European religiosity is abandoned. ForIndo-European religiosity is of this world, and this fact determines its essential forms ofexpression. As a result it is sometimes difficult for us to comprehend its greatness today,because we are accustomed to measuring religiosityin terms of values taken fromdecidedly non-Indo-European and mainly oriental religious life, and especially fromMediaeval and early modern Christianity. It followstherefore that our view of Indo-European religiosity must suffer in the same way aswould one’s view of the structure ofthe Indo-European languages if they were describedin terms of characteristicsappropriate to the Semite languages. We are today accustomed to seek true religiosityonly in terms of the other world and to regard religiosity of this world as undeveloped orlacking in some aspect — a preliminary stage on theway to something more valuable.Thus the Jewish-Christian religious ideas transmitted to us prevent us from recognisingthe greatness of the Indo-European religiosity, sothat in comparative religious studiesIndo-European religious values are again and againrepresented purely scientifically asbeing less important, since the proponents of theseviews have unconsciously acceptedthe ideal of Oriental spiritual values as a yardstick for every religious value. Thiscriticism is also applicable to Rudolf Otto’s studycalledThe Sacred(1948). Thus thegreatness and fullness of the Indo-European world is never recognised.Whoever wishes to measure religiosity by the degreeof man’s abasement before thedivine, or by how questionable, valueless or even tainted “this world” appears to manwhen faced with that “other world”, and whoever wishes to measure religiosity by thedegree to which man feels a cleft between a transitory body and an indestructible soul,between flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma) — whosoever seeks to do this will have todeclare that the religiosity of the Indo-Europeansis truly impoverished and paltry.Gods and men are not, in the eyes of the Indo-Europeans, incomparable beings remotefrom one another, least of all to the Hellenes, towhom Gods appeared as immortal menwith great souls (cf. Aristotle:Metaphysics, III, 2, 997b), while they believed that men, aswell-formed shoots of noble genus, also possessed something divine, and as such couldclaim to approximate to divine stature — the “Godlike Agamemnon”. In the nature ofman himself, just as the deity wishes, lie possibilities, seemingly divine in origin,diogenes, and thus it is that every Indo-European people has readily tended to assume theincarnation of all aristocratic national values inhuman families, thekalok’agathia.14Indo-European religiosity is not slavery, it contains none of the implorings of adowntrodden slave to his all-powerful lord, but comprises rather the confiding fulfilmentof a community comprising Gods and men. Plato speaks in hisBanquet(188c) of a“mutual community (philia) between Gods and men”. The Teuton was certain ofthefriendship of his God, of theastvinor thefulltruiwhom he fully trusted, and with theHellenes in theOdyssey(XXIV, 514) the same certainty is found expressedin the words“friends of the Gods” (theoi philoi). In theBhagavad Gitaof the Indians (IV, 3) the GodKrishna calls the man Arjuna his friend. The highest deity such as Zeus is honoured as“Father of the Gods and of men” — as a family father, asZeus Herkeios, not as a despot.This idea is also expressed in the names of the Gods:Djaus pitarwith the Indians andJupiterwith the Romans. The name of the Indian GodMitra, which corresponded toMithrain Iran, means “friend”. Mazdaism, founded by Zoroaster, called the morallyacting man a friend of Ahura Mazda, the One Universal God, who in the era ofAchaemenides became the God of the Persian empire.According to Plato (Laws, IV,716) the man of moderation and self-control is above all “a friend of God”