'lives
in terror of the souls of the dead as harmful spirits.' This might yield
a Devil; it would not yield a God who 'makes for righteousness.'
Happily, 'deified ancestors are regarded, on the whole, as kindly
spirits.' The dead ancestor is 'now passed into a deity.'[7] Examples of
ancestor-worship follow. But we are no nearer home. For among the Zulus
many Amatongo (ancestral spirits) are sacred. 'Yet their father
[i.e. the father of each actual family] is far before all others when
they worship the Amatongo.... They do not know the ancients who are dead,
nor their laud-giving names, nor their names.'[8] Thus, each new
generation of Zulus must have a new first worshipful object--its own
father's Itongo. This father, and his very name, are, in a generation or
two, forgotten. The name of such a man, therefore, cannot survive as that
of the God or Supreme Being from age to age; and, obviously, such a real
dead man, while known at all, is much too well known to be taken for the
creator and ruler of the world, despite some African flattering titles and
superstitions about kings who control the weather. The Zulus, about
as 'godless' a people as possible, have a mythical first ancestor,
Unkulunkulu, but he is 'beyond the reach of rites,' and is a centre of
myths rather than of worship or of moral ideas.[9]

After other examples of ancestor-worship, Mr. Tylor branches off into a
long discussion of the theory of 'possession' or inspiration,[10] which
does not assist the argument at the present point. Thence he passes to
fetishism (already discussed by us), and the transitions from the
fetish--(1) to the idol; (2) to the guardian angel ('subliminal self');
(3) to tree and river spirits, and local spirits which cause volcanoes;
and (4) to polytheism. A fetish may inhabit a tree; trees being
generalised, the fetish of one oak becomes the god of the forest. Or,
again, fetishes rise into 'species gods;' the gods of _all_ bees, owls,
or rabbits are thus evolved.

Next,[11]

'As chiefs and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser
spirits.... With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric system of
religion is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the
spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human tribe.'

Very good; but whence comes the great God among tribes which have neither
chief nor king and probably never had, as among the Fuegians, Bushmen, and
Australians? The maker and