ions._ Political organization, in unifying a
community under the control of a central authority, tends to efface
local self-governing groups. This process is visible in the increased
power of Melanesian chiefs, in the royal governments of Polynesia and
Western and Eastern Africa, and in the inchoate constitutional
federations of Eastern North America. In all these cases the simple clan
system is reduced to small proportions, and totemism loses its social
significance. The way in which the functions of totemic groups are thus
modified appears plainly in such governmental systems as that of the
East African Baganda (in which heads of clans have become officers of
the king's household)[896] and the Iroquois Confederation (in which the
tribes act through their representatives in a national Council or
Parliament).

+539+. _Religious conditions._ The personal guardian spirit and the
totem, when it assumes this character, sometimes receive worship--they
are treated as gods. But their role as divinities is of an inferior
nature, and it does not last long. Deities proper came into existence as
embodiments of the sense of an extrahuman government of the world by
anthropomorphic beings; they are direct products of the constructive
imagination.[897] When the true gods appear the totemic and individual
half-gods disappear. We find that totemism is feeble in proportion as
theistic systems have taken shape, and that where personal guardians are
prominent there are no well-defined gods. In Central Australia there is
only a vague, inactive form that may be called divine; a more definite
conception is found in Southeastern Australia, where the strictness of
totemism is relaxed. Melanesia and Polynesia show an increased
definiteness of theistic figures. Northwestern North America is, in
comparison with the East, undeveloped in this regard. Similar relations
between totemism and theism appear in India and South America. In a
certain number of cases the facts suggest that the former system has
been superseded by the latter.

+540+. Cults of the totem and of individual guardian spirits are to be
distinguished from certain other forms of worship with which they have
points of connection. The West African fetish is the abode of a tutelary
spirit, and finally is absorbed by local gods; it arises, however, from
belief in the sacredness and power of inanimate things, and is without
the sense of identity with the spirit that characterizes the Nor