human beings who
could marry princes and princesses as they do in so many fairy tales.
Damayanti addressed the tiger, as well as the mountain and tree,
saying:

I approach him without fear.
"Of the beasts art thou the monarch, all this forest thy
domain;...
Thou, O king of beasts, console me, if my Nala thou hast
seen."[307]

A tribal totem exercised sway over a tribal district. In Egypt, as
Herodotus recorded, the crocodile was worshipped in one district and
hunted down in another. Tribes fought against tribes when totemic
animals were slain. The Babylonian and Indian myths about the
conflicts between eagles and serpents may have originated as records
of battles between eagle clans and serpent clans. Totemic animals were
tabooed. The Set pig of Egypt and the devil pig of Ireland, Scotland,
and Wales were not eaten except sacrificially. Families were supposed
to be descended from swans and were named Swans, or from seals and
were named Seals, like the Gaelic "Mac Codrums", whose surname
signifies "son of the seal"; the nickname of the Campbells, "sons of
the pig", may refer to their totemic boar's head crest, which
commemorated the slaying, perhaps the sacrificial slaying, of the boar
by their ancestor Diarmid. Mr. Garstang, in _The Syrian Goddess_,
thinks it possible that the boar which killed Adonis was of totemic
origin. So may have been the fish form of the Sumerian god Ea. When an
animal totem was sacrificed once a year, and eaten sacrificially so
that the strength of the clan might be maintained, the priest who
wrapped himself in its skin was supposed to have transmitted to him
certain magical powers; he became identified with the totem and
prophesied and gave instruction as the totem. Ea was depicted clad in
the fish's skin.

Animism, the other early stage of human development, also produced
distinctive modes of thought. Men conceived that the world swarmed
with spirits, that a spirit groaned in the wind-shaken tree, that the
howling wind was an invisible spirit, that there were spirits in
fountains, rivers, valleys, hills, and in ocean, and in all animals;
and that a hostile spirit might possess an individual and change his
nature. The sun and the moon were the abodes of spirits, or the
vessels in which great spirits sailed over the sea of the sky; the
stars were all spirits, the "host of heaven". These spirits existed in
groups of seven, or groups of three, and the multiple of