Ancestor is also the Creator (Dog-rib Indians), he
can hardly be, and is not, regarded as a mortal. Tamoi, of the Guaranis,
was 'the ancient of heaven,' clearly no mortal man. The Maori Maui was the
first who died, but he is not one of the original Maori gods. Haetsh,
among the Kamchadals, precisely answers to Yama. Unkulunkulu will be
described later.[3]

This is the list: Where the First Ancestor is equivalent to the Creator,
and is supreme, he is--from the first--deathless and immortal. When he
dies he is a confessed ghost-god.

Now, ghost-worship and dead ancestor-worship are impossible before the
ancestor is dead and is a ghost. But the essential idea of Mungan-ngaur,
and Baiame, and most of the high gods of Australia, and of other low
races, is that _they never died at all_. They belong to the period before
death came into the world, like Qat among the Melanesians. They arise in
an age that knew not death, and had not reflected on phantasms nor evolved
ghosts. They could have been conceived of, in the nature of the case, by a
race of immortals who never dreamed of such a thing as a ghost. For these
gods, the ghost-theory is not required, and is superfluous, even
contradictory. The early thinkers who developed these beings did not need
to know that men die (though, of course, they did know it in practice),
still less did they need to have conceived by abstract speculation the
hypothesis of ghosts. Baiame, Cagn, Bunjil, in their adorers' belief, were
_there_; death later intruded among men, but did not affect these divine
beings in any way.

The ghost-theory, therefore, by the evidence of anthropology itself, is
not needed for the evolution of the high gods of savages. It is only
needed for the evolution of ghost-propitiation and genuine dead-ancestor
worship. Therefore, the high gods described were not necessarily once
ghosts--were not idealised _mortal_ ancestors. They were, naturally, from
the beginning, from before the coming in of death, immortal Fathers, now
dwelling on high. Between them and apotheosised mortal ancestors there is
a great gulf fixed--the river of death.

The explicitly stated distinction that the high creative gods never were
mortal men, while other gods are spirits of mortal men, is made in every
quarter. 'Ancestors _known_ to be human were _not_ worshipped as
[original] gods, and ancestors worshipped as [original] gods were not
believed to have been human.'[4]

Both kinds may have a gen