st or a bird.
Here is nothing like the notion of an omnipotent, invisible, spiritual
being, the creator of our religion; here is only la monnaie of the
conception."

It ought to have occurred to the author that he was here traversing the
main theory of his own book, which is that RELIGION is one thing, myth
quite another thing. That many low races of savages entertain, in hours
of RELIGIOUS thought, an elevated conception of a moral and undying
Maker of Things, and Master of Life, a Father in Heaven, has already
been stated, and knowledge of the facts has been considerably increased
since this work first appeared (1887). But the MYTHICAL conceptions
described in the last paragraph coexist with the religious conception in
the faiths of very low savages, such as the Australians and Andamanese,
just as the same contradictory coexistence is notorious in ancient
Greece, India, Egypt and Anahuac. In a sense, certain low savages HAVE
the "conception of God, as we understand what we mean by the word". But
that sense, when savages come to spinning fables about origins, is apt
to be overlaid and perplexed by the frivolity of their mythical fancy.

With such shifting, grotesque and inadequate fables, the cosmogonic
myths of the world are necessarily bewildered and perplexed. We have
already seen in the chapter on "Nature Myths" that many things, sun,
moon, the stars, "that have another birth," and various animals and
plants, are accounted for on the hypothesis that they are later than the
appearance of man--that they originally WERE men. To the European mind
it seems natural to rank myths of the gods before myths of the making or
the evolution of the world, because our religion, like that of the more
philosophic Greeks, makes the deity the fount of all existences, causa
causans, "what unmoved moves," the beginning and the end. But the
myth-makers, deserting any such ideas they may possess, find it
necessary, like the child of whom we spoke, to postulate a PLACE for the
divine energy to work from, and that place is the earth or the heavens.
Then, again, heaven and earth are themselves often regarded in the
usual mythical way, as animated, as persons with parts and passions, and
finally, among advancing races, as gods. Into this medley of incongruous
and inconsistent conceptions we must introduce what order we may, always
remembering that the order is not native to the subject, but is brought
in for the purpose of study.

The ori