Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/62

52 definiteness by the corroborating testimony of other members of the tribe, there would naturally arise a desire to gain the favor or avert the displeasure of these powerful beings by gifts and offerings similar to what would have given pleasure during life; these offerings would usually be made at the grave, cave, or house where the dead body was laid, and thus the tomb would become an altar or temple, as we see the tomb and temple associated even in civilized communities. In addition to the belief that the ghost of a dead ancestor or relative has the power to pass into the body of a beast, is the fact that the languages of the lower races of man are so imperfect that metaphorical names require to be interpreted literally, and consequently primitive speech is unable to transmit to posterity the slight shades of difference between an animal and a person named after that animal; moreover, having no knowledge of proper names, naming after animals, from some fancied resemblance or association of ideas, is most common, and hence we find such names as Black-Hawk, Little-Crow, Lone-Wolf, and Sitting-Bull. In the course of a few generations these animals would be looked upon as the ancestors of respective tribes, and would be reverenced and sacrificed to as deities. Besides explaining animal gods, this hypothesis accounts for sundry anomalous beliefs, the divinities half-brute and half-human, the animals that talk and play active parts in human affairs, the doctrine of metempsychosis, etc.

On the other hand, the pantheistic theory assumes that whatever caused the sentiment of awe, wonder, or fear, in the mind of primitive man, would be deified and worshiped; that the first objects that would excite these emotions would be the sun, moon, and stars, clouds, wind, rain, thunder, lightning, etc.; that from their ignorance of even the rudiments of physical science, together with the want of exactness of early language and its wealth of metaphor and personification, these cosmic objects and forces would be conceived of as individual entities, each having absolute personal volition: and since these metaphoric names would vary with the varying conception of each one of these fervent old pantheists, there would thus arise that almost endless polyonomy which has been the fertile source of so many of the myths that have puzzled and horrified mankind ever since their origin was forgotten. Moreover, since all metaphors depend upon some real or fancied resemblance of things less known to things better known, all of these deified powers of nature would be invested with forms and attributes similar to the animals and men with which they were already familiar, though in a magnified degree; and from this conception, by a very natural and usual transition of thought, the human or animal form, which had at first been sacred only as the eidolon of the god, would in a short time be thought to possess some intrinsic sanctity independent of that divine association.