iate the
shades of the dead out of a regard for their own safety and well-being.
This belief in the survival of the human spirit after death is
world-wide; it is found among men in all stages of culture from the
lowest to the highest; we need not wonder therefore that the custom of
propitiating the ghosts or souls of the departed should be world-wide
also. No doubt the degree of attention paid to ghosts is not the same in
all cases; it varies with the particular degree of power attributed to
each of them; the spirits of men who for any reason were much feared in
their lifetime, such as mighty warriors, chiefs, and kings, are more
revered and receive far more marks of homage than the spirits of common
men; and it is only when this reverence and homage are carried to a very
high pitch that they can properly be described as a deification of the
dead. But that dead men have thus been raised to the rank of deities in
many lands, there is abundant evidence to prove. And quite apart from
the worship paid to those spirits which are admitted by their
worshippers to have once animated the bodies of living men, there is
good reason to suspect that many gods, who rank as purely mythical
beings, were once men of flesh and blood, though their true history has
passed out of memory or rather been transformed by legend into a myth,
which veils more or less completely the real character of the imaginary
deity. The theory that most or all gods originated after this fashion,
in other words, that the worship of the gods is little or nothing but
the worship of dead men, is known as Euhemerism from Euhemerus, the
ancient Greek writer who propounded it. Regarded as a universal
explanation of the belief in gods it is certainly false; regarded as a
partial explanation of the belief it is unquestionably true; and perhaps
we may even go further and say, that the more we penetrate into the
inner history of natural religion, the larger is seen to be the element
of truth contained in Euhemerism. For the more closely we look at many
deities of natural religion, the more distinctly do we seem to perceive,
under the quaint or splendid pall which the mythical fancy has wrapt
round their stately figures, the familiar features of real men, who once
shared the common joys and the common sorrows of humanity, who trod
life's common road to the common end.

[Sidenote: The deification of dead men presupposes the immortality of
the human soul, or rather its surv