text:  "Among most of the Indo-European nations the conservation of religious dogmas patriarchal tradition and national poetry was confided not to accidental reminiscences and popular recitations but to a distinct order of persons who were venerated as mediators between the invisible powers and their fellow mortals as the depositories of sacred lore and interpreters of the will of the gods expressed of old to the first men and handed down either orally in divine poems or preserved in a sacred literature known only to the initiated