Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/73

Rh because he was the most celebrated of all the tutelar gods, and the reason for that celebrity was that the most powerful of the clans claimed him as tutelar.

Hecastotheism is a title given to the earliest form of religion known, which belongs specially to the plane of savagery. In it every object, animate or inanimate, which is remarkable in itself or becomes so by association, is a quasi god. The transition between savagery and barbarism, as well as between the religions of hecastotheism and zoötheisin, connected with them, was not sharply marked, so that all their features could coexist at a later era, though in differing degrees of importance.

This intermixture is found both among the Israelites and Indians. An illustration among many is in the worship of localities and of local gods. Conspicuous rocks, specially large trees, peculiar mountains, cascades, whirlpools, and similar objects received worship from the Indians; also the places where remarkable occurrences, as violent storms, had been noted; and among some tribes the particular ground on which the fasting of individuals had taken place, with its accompanying dreams. The Indians frequently marked these places, often by a pile of stones. The Dakotas, when they did not have the stones, used buffalo skulls.

In the Old Testament frequent allusions are made to a place becoming holy where dreams or remarkable events had occurred. They were designated by pillars. The Israelite compilers adopted the pillar of Bethel for the same reason that required Mohammed to adopt the Caaba. Though struggling for monotheism, they could not always directly antagonize the old hecastotheism.

Future State.—The topic of a future state may be divided into (1) the simple existence of the soul after death, (2) the resurrection of the body, and (3) a system of rewards and punishments in the next world.

The classical writers often distinguished two souls in the same person—one that wandered on the borders of the Styx until the proper honors had been given to the corpse; the other being a shadow, image, or simulacrum of the first, which remained in its tomb or prowled around it. The latter could be easily invoked by enchanters.

Some of the Indians thought that the souls of the dead passed to the country of their ancestors, from which they did not dare to return because there was too much suffering on the road forward and backward. Nevertheless, they believed that there was something spiritual which still existed with their human remains, and they tell stories of it. Thus there are two souls, and the Dakotas have four, one of which wanders about the earth and requires food, the second watches over the body, the third hovers around the village, and a fourth goes to the land of spirits.