Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/186

 164 They have referred it to a revelation. Andrew Lang, approaching the same facts in a different spirit, has drawn from them conclusions which contain certainly a valuable element of truth. He revives the discredited view of the existence, at the origin of human society, of a relatively noble religious belief, and of its subsequent degeneration into rites of propitiation and conciliation addressed to beings greatly inferior in power and in worth to the original High God, and he claims that his "theory, rightly or wrongly, accounts for the phenomena, the combination of the highest divine and the lowest animal qualities in the same being. But I have yet to learn how, if the lowest myths are the earliest, the highest attributes came in time to be conferred on the hero of the lowest myth."

In my opinion, the priority of the High Gods is not the important point in the interpretation of the facts I have just cited; and, further, it would not necessarily follow from priority that the lower beings are degraded High Gods. The truth of the matter, as I see it, is that the High Gods proceeded from an independent and specific source; they are, or were originally, the Makers. The essential elements of my theory are that man comes to the idea of superhuman beings along several routes, that the characteristics of these beings depend upon