ned, a true
god is a supernatural being with distinct anthropomorphic personality,
with a proper name or a distinctive title, exercising authority over a
certain land or people or over a department of nature or a class of
phenomena, dwelling generally in a sanctuary on the earth, or in the
sky, or in the other world, and in general sympathetic with men. Gods
have rational human qualities, human modes of procedure, and are human
beings in all things except power.[1053]

+636+. The god appears to have been at the outset a well-formed
anthropomorphic being. His genesis is different from that of the ghost,
spirit, ancestor, or totem. These, except the spirit, are all given by
experience: totems are familiar objects plainly visible to the eye;
ghosts and ancestors are known through dreams and appearances by day,
and by tradition; and the conception of the spirit is closely allied to
that of the ghost, though it is in part a scientific inference rather
than a fact of experience. In distinction from these a god is a larger
product of imagination, springing from the necessity of accounting for
the existence of things in a relatively refined way. The creator is a
beast only in low tribes, and in process of time, if the tribe continues
to grow in culture, is absorbed in the cult of a true god. It is rarely,
if ever, that a beast, whether a totem or only a sacred thing, becomes a
god proper.

The best apparent examples of such a growth are the Egyptian bull Apis,
who had his temple and ministers, the Hindu monkey-god Hanuman, and the
divine snake of the Nagas of India.[1054] But, though in these cases the
beast forms receive divine worship, it is not clear whether it is the
beast that is worshiped or a god incarnate in the beast; the question is
difficult, the data being meager. The myths in which gods appear in
beast forms do not prove a development of the former out of the latter.
It is not necessary to suppose that Zeus was once a bull, Artemis a bear
or a sow, Adonis a boar, and Aphrodite a sow or a dove. The myths may be
naturally explained as arising from the coalescence of cults, the local
sacred beast becoming attached to a local deity who had a different
birth.

The god is a figure of slow growth. Beginning as a sort of headman,
identified sometimes with an ancestor, sometimes with a beast, his
character is shaped by all the influences that go to form the tribal
life, and he thus embodies from generation to generation