personification of types.

Beginning with the mysterious conception of some particular spring as a
malignant or beneficent fetish which, although personified, still
retains its concrete form, the classifying action of the intelligence
gradually constructs, from its points of resemblance to other springs, a
generic type which includes them all. This typical conception,
personified in its turn, next represents a unique power, of which all
the individual and accidental springs are only manifestations. Thus it
is clear that man, in the personification of this type or specific
conception, is no longer bound to the actual form of the special object
which first represented it, but he may be said to mould a more
indefinite and plastic substance into which he can with spontaneous or
facile art incarnate his whole person. Hence this substance will assume
an anthropomorphic form, and will issue, not in a mysterious being of
extrinsic and indefinite form, but in a person with human features,
obvious to human senses.

It was thus, when the fetish attained to a specific type, that mythical
anthropomorphism was generated, and polytheism, properly so-called; a
polytheism which represents in its figures and images the humanization
and personification of specific types. These afterwards diverge into
specifications which vary with the number of phenomena that are united
in a single idea or conception. The first polytheistic Olympus consisted
of natural types, and at a much later period they became moral or
abstract, in accordance with the spontaneous evolution of the
intelligence itself.

It was in fact in this way that all the specific myths of the general
phenomena of nature had their origin, and in our Aryan race we can,
starting from the Rig-Veda, follow their splendid development among
Graeco-Latins, Celts, Germans, and Slavs; it may also be traced in the
memory and historic evolution of other races, and with less distinctness
among those which are barbarous and savage.[21]

To take some example which may throw light upon our theory of the
evolution of myth, let us consider that of _Holda_ in the German
Pantheon, since it is a generic type of the special primitive fetishes
of sources, already in process of formation before the dispersion of the
Aryan tribes. Mannhardt (_Deutsche Mythologie_) has shown what was the
primitive form of the conception of _Holda_ and of the _Nornas_, that
is, of the phenomenal appearances of water; Ho