ideals respectively of the
Aztec or of the Apache types. And so in the mental sphere of each member
of a tribe the many images of the well-known Warriors or Priests or
wise and gracious Women of that tribe did inevitably combine at last
to composite figures of gods and goddesses--on whom the enthusiasm
and adoration of the tribe was concentrated. (1) Miss Harrison has
ingeniously suggested how the leading figures in the magic rituals of
the past--being the figures on which all eyes would be concentrated; and
whose importance would be imprinted on every mind--lent themselves to
this process. The suffering Victim, bound and scourged and crucified,
recurring year after year as the centre-figure of a thousand ritual
processions, would at last be dramatized and idealized in the great
race-consciousness into the form of a Suffering God--a Jesus Christ or
a Dionysus or Osiris--dismembered or crucified for the salvation of
mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man--or rather the succession of Priests
or Medicine-Men--whose figures would recur again and again as leaders
and ordainers of the ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the
composite-image of a God in whom were concentrated all magic powers.
"Recent researches," says Gilbert Murray, "have shown us in abundance
the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain."
Here is the germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man
may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual
representative of the glorified and composite being who exists in the
mind of the tribe (just as a present-day King may be unworthy, but is
surrounded all the same by the agelong glamour of Royalty). "The real
[gr qeos], tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in
clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the
mountain is once climbed the god will move to the upper sky. The
medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some
connection with the great god more intimate than that of other men... he
knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him." (2) Thus
did the Medicine-man, or Priest, or Magician (for these are but three
names for one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the god.

(1) See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions
of the Race-Life."

(2) The Four Stages, p. 140.

And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in
chapter iv ab