Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/41



NIMISM is a very wide-spread form of primitive religion. It has no gods in the sense of the advanced pagan religions; it only believes that earth and heaven are ruled by countless spirits, either sedentary or wandering. These spirits can make their earthly abode in men, animals, or plants, or any object that may be remarkable for size or form. As soon as man, in his fear of these primitive deities, tries to placate them by sacrifices, they develop into tutelary spirits and fetishes, and then into gods. Some scholars claim that all religions have sprung from a primitive animism. Whether this be true or not, such an origin fits the primitive Egyptian religion especially well and explains its endless and confused pantheon. The Egyptians of the historical period tell us that every part of the world is filled by gods, an assertion which in our days has often been misinterpreted as if those gods were cosmic, and as though a primitive kind of pantheism underlay these statements. Yet the gods who lived, for instance, in the water, like the crocodile Sobk, the hippopotamus-deity Êpet, etc., did not represent this element; for the most part they merely inhabited a stretch of water. We find that in general the great majority of the old local gods defy all cosmic explanation: they still betray that once they were nothing but local spirits whose realm must primarily have been extremely limited. In the beginning there may have been a tendency to assume tutelary spirits for every tree