room
for the play of social emotions and for the creation of biographies of
individual deities. It is the humanized god that has emotional life, and
it is in this mythical life that the religious feeling of the worshiper
is expressed with greatest fullness of detail.

+952+. The development of mythology through all its gradations of
fullness and fineness can be traced in the religious systems of the
world.[1734] Where there is no recognizable worship there is, of course,
no mythology. This is the case in Australia, in Pygmy lands, in Tierra
del Fuego, in parts of New Guinea, and perhaps elsewhere.[1735] Scarcely
above these are parts of Central and Southern Africa, the countries of
the Bantu, the Hottentots, and the Bushmen.[1736] A feeble mythological
invention appears among the Zulus, whose conception of gods is
indistinct;[1737] and the Masai and the Nandi, who are somewhat farther
advanced in the construction of deities, show mythopoeic imagination
in a single case only (the famous myth of the embrace of the earth and
the sky), and this is perhaps borrowed.[1738] Along with these we may
place the Todas whose theogonic conceptions appear to have been cramped
by their buffalo cult, and their mythical material is small and
vague.[1739]

+953+. A somewhat higher stage of mythopoeic development is represented
by peoples of Oceania and North America. The myths are still
prevailingly cosmologic and sociologic, but the beginning of
biographical sketches of supernatural Powers is visible. The Melanesian
Qat and the Polynesian Maui are on the border line between
culture-heroes and gods, but they are real persons, and their
adventures, while they describe origins, are also descriptions of
character. Hawaii and Borneo have departmental gods and a body of
stories about them.[1740] Certain tribes of Redmen have not only divine
genealogical systems but also narratives resembling the Melanesian in
character, the line between myth proper and folk-lore being often hard
to trace.[1741] The stories fall into more or less well-defined groups,
and of the Coyote and, less definitely, of certain other personages
biographies might be written.

+954+. The half-civilized peoples of Madagascar, West Africa (Dahomi,
Ashanti, Yoruba), the Malay Peninsula, and Southern India (Khonds) have
more coherent figures and stories of divine personages.[1742] Here
something like living human beings appear, though there is crudeness in
the portraiture,