ity. In savage culture there is hardly a single event into which
religious considerations do not enter. The savage does not merely
believe in a supernatural world, he lives in it; it is as real to him as
anything around him, and far more potent in its action. Above all, it is
important to bear in mind that although one is compelled to speak of the
natural and the supernatural when dealing with early beliefs, no such
separation is present to the primitive intelligence. The division
between the natural and the supernatural in the external world is the
reflection of a corresponding division in the world of thought, and this
arises only at a subsequent stage. What is afterwards recognised as the
supernatural pervades everything. In a sense it is everything, since
most of what occurs is by the agency or connivance of animistic forces.

In such a world, where even the ordinary events of life have a
supernatural significance, the strange and sometimes terrifying
phenomena of sexual life carry peculiarly strong evidences of
supernatural activity. Events which are to the modern mind the most
obvious consequences of sex life are to the primitive mind proofs of
supernatural or ghostly agency. Nothing, for example, would appear less
open to misconception than the connection between sexual relations and
the birth of children. Yet, on this head, Mr. Sidney Hartland has
produced a mass of evidence, gathered from all parts of the world, and
leading to the conclusion that in the most primitive stages of human
culture, conception and birth are ascribed to direct supernatural
influence. Setting out from a study of the world-wide vogue of the
belief in supernatural birth--contained in the author's earlier work,
_The Legend of Perseus_--Mr. Hartland finds in this a survival of a
culture stage in which all birth is believed to be supernatural.
Survivals of this belief that birth is a phenomenon independent of the
union of the sexes are found in the existence of numerous semi-magical
devices to obtain children, still practised in many parts of Europe, and
which were practised on a much more extensive scale during the medieval
period; in the ignorance of man concerning physiological functions in
general, the existence of Motherright which appears to have universally
antedated Fatherright--the origin of which he traces to economic causes,
and to the animistic nature of primitive beliefs in general.[68]

Such a conclusion is not without verifica