Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/72

62 attributed to the animals by which man is surrounded, or rather to the ancestral types of these animals, which are worshiped. This is the religion of zoötheism. Throughout the world, when advance was made from this plane, it was to a stage in which the powers and phenomena of nature are personified and deified. In this stage the gods are anthropomorphic, having the mental, moral, and social attributes of men, and represented under the forms of men. This is the religion of physitheism. The most advanced of the Indian tribes showed evidence of transition from zoötheism to physitheism. The Israelites, in the latter part of the period selected, showed the same transition in a somewhat higher degree than the Indians did when their independent progress was arrested.

It is needless to enlarge upon the animal gods of the Indians, or to furnish evidence that they gave some vague worship to the sun, the lightning, to fire and winds.

There is no doubt that the Israelites were for a long period in the stage of zoölatry. They persisted in the worship of animal gods—the golden calf, the brazen serpent, the fish-god, and the fly-god. The second commandment is explicitly directed against the worship of the daimons of air, earth, and water, which is known to have been common; and the existence of the prohibition shows the necessity for it, especially as it was formulated, after the practice had existed for centuries, by a religious party which sought to abolish that worship.

The god of Sinai was a god of storm and lightning, which phenomena were strange to the Israelites after their sojourn in plains. The ancient local god of the Canaanites began in the exodus to affect the religious concepts of the Israelites, so that they associated Jahveh with the god whose lands they were planting and whose influence they felt. Sinai was thenceforward the locality of their theology. Jahveh, through all after-changes, remained there as his home; he spoke with the voice of thunder, and never appeared without storm and earthquake.

Another class of gods connected with beast-worship and also with the totemic institution (to be hereafter specially noted) was tutelar, the special cult of tribes, clans, and individuals. It was conspicuous both among the Israelites and the Indians.

Jahveh may first have been a clan or tribal god, either of the clan to which Moses belonged or of the clan of Joseph, in the possession of which was the ark. No essential distinction was felt to exist between Jahveh and El, any more than between Ashur and El. Jahveh was only a special name of El, which had become current within a powerful circle, and which, therefore, was an acceptable designation of a national god. When other tutelar gods did not succeed, there was resort to Jahveh, probably in the early