receive no cult.

_Animism and the Origin of Religion._--Two animistic theories of the
origin of religion have been put forward, the one, often termed the
"ghost theory," mainly associated with the name of Herbert Spencer,
but also maintained by Grant Allen, refers the beginning of religion
to the cult of dead human beings; the other, put forward by Dr. E.B.
Tylor, makes the foundation of all religion animistic, but
recognizes the non-human character of polytheistic gods. Although
ancestor-worship, or, more broadly, the cult of the dead, has in many
cases overshadowed other cults or even extinguished them, we have no
warrant, even in these cases, for asserting its priority, but rather
the reverse; not only so, but in the majority of cases the pantheon is
made up by a multitude of spirits in human, sometimes in animal form,
which bear no signs of ever having been incarnate; sun gods and moon
goddesses, gods of fire, wind and water, gods of the sea, and above
all gods of the sky, show no signs of having been ghost gods at any
period in their history. They may, it is true, be associated with
ghost gods, but in Australia it cannot even be asserted that the gods
are spirits at all, much less that they are the spirits of dead men;
they are simply magnified magicians, super-men who have never died; we
have no ground, therefore, for regarding the cult of the dead as the
origin of religion in this area; this conclusion is the more probable,
as ancestor-worship and the cult of the dead generally cannot be said
to exist in Australia.

[v.02 p.0055]

The more general view that polytheistic and other gods are the
elemental and other spirits of the later stages of animistic creeds,
is equally inapplicable to Australia, where the belief seems to be
neither animistic nor even animatistic in character. But we are
hardly justified in arguing from the case of Australia to a general
conclusion as to the origin of religious ideas in all other parts of
the world. It is perhaps safest to say that the science of religions
has no data on which to go, in formulating conclusions as to the
original form of the objects of religious emotion; in this connexion
it must be remembered that not only is it very difficult to get
precise information of the subject of the religious ideas of people of
low culture, perhaps for the simple reason that the ideas themselves
are far from precise, but also that, as has been pointed out above,
the conception of