counterpart of the male god, with
little character of her own. With gods of this type there is little
scope for mythology. The history of the god is that of the tribe; the
gods are too little independent of their human clients to form a
society by themselves, or to give rise to stories about their doings.

[Footnote 2: See Robertson Smith's _Kinship and Marriage in Early
Arabia_.]

This is one side of the natural history of the Semitic gods; but that
history has another side. The lands in which the Semites dwelt were
full from the first of sacred spots; and we have to notice that the
god of a clan is also the god of a certain piece of earth where he is
supposed to dwell, which is regarded as his property, and the
fertility of which is ascribed to his beneficence. In the Bible we
read of sacred trees, of sacred wells, of sacred stones or mounds,
and of stones or pillars which were connected with sacrifice. In
various Semitic lands there are also sacred streams and sacred caves.
The Semites in fact had their share of the inheritance the whole
world has derived from the earliest times, of prehistoric religious
sites and objects. A spirit spoke in the rustling of the branches of
the tree, counsel could be procured at the spring; wherever there
appeared to be something mysterious in nature, a spirit was believed
to dwell; and especially in woods and fertile spots, where wild
beasts originally had their lair, a spirit was thought to reside,
which was approached with fear. Many of these superstitions the
various branches of the Semites long continued to hold;[3] but the
race superseded in the main this world of spirits by a set of gods,
and the magic addressed to spirits by religious observances addressed
to gods. The genius or jinn haunting the thicket, who had no regular
worshippers, but was an object of fear to all, and had to be
propitiated or controlled by mysterious arts, gave way to the god of
a clan, who took up his residence there, and received the regular
worship of his clansmen; the stone became the symbol of a deity who
had been asked and had consented to become identified with it for the
purpose of the stated rites of the clan. In this way the clan gods
became localised as the clans tended to acquire fixed settlements,
and each sacred spot was occupied by the deity of the clan who dwelt
around it. The view was held that each god was to be found at the
spot where, on some marked occasion, he had given evidence o