n, a stage in which it is recognised that the
individual worshipper may petition the gods for deliverance from the
evil which afflicts them. And the petitions used appear in some cases,
as we have seen, to have been adopted into the ritual of the gods,
word for word as they were found already in existence. If then they
were, both in the words in which they were expressed, and in the
purpose which they sought to achieve, such that they could be taken
up, as they were and without change, into the ritual of the
community's gods, it would seem that, even before they were so taken
up, they could not have been wholly, if at all, alien to the spirit of
religion. What marks them as religious, in the cuneiform inscriptions,
is their context: it shows that the power, relied on for the
accomplishment of the desires expressed in these petitions, was the
power of the gods. Remove the context, and it becomes a matter of
ambiguity, whether the wish is supposed, by those who utter it, to
depend for its realisation on some power, possessed and exercised by
those who express the wish, or whether it is supposed to depend on the
good will of some being vaguely conceived, and not addressed by name.
But if eventually the wish, and the words in which it was expressed,
are taken up into the worship of the gods, there seems a balance of
probability that the wish was from the beginning rather in the nature
of religion than of magic, rather a petition than a command; though
the categories were not at first discriminated, and there was at first
no clear vision of the quarter from which fulfilment of the wish was
hoped for.

From this point of view, optative sentences, sentences which express
the wishes of him who pronounces them, may, in the beginning, well
have been ambiguous, because there was, in the minds of those who
uttered them, no clear conception of the quarter to which they were
addressed: the idea of God may have been vague to the extreme of
vagueness. Some of these optative sentences however, were such that
the community as a whole could join in them; and they were
potentially, and became actually, prayers to the god of the community.
The being to whom the community, as a whole, could pray, was thereby
displayed as the god of the community. The idea of God became, so far,
somewhat less vague, somewhat more sharply defined. Optative
sentences, however, in which the community could not join, in which no
one but the person who framed the