Father, Unkulunkulu, who made the world. But in the stratum of
savage thought in which barbaric or Aryan folk-lore is for the most part
based, we find no such exalted speculation. The ancestors of the rude
Veddas and of the Guinea negroes, the Hindu pitris (patres, "fathers"),
and the Roman manes have become elemental deities which send rain or
sunshine, health or sickness, plenty or famine, and to which their
living offspring appeal for guidance amid the vicissitudes of life.
[179] The theory of embodiment, already alluded to, shows how thoroughly
the demons which cause disease are identified with human and object
souls. In Australasia it is a dead man's ghost which creeps up into
the liver of the impious wretch who has ventured to pronounce his
name; while conversely in the well-known European theory of demoniacal
possession, it is a fairy from elf-land, or an imp from hell, which
has entered the body of the sufferer. In the close kinship, moreover,
between disease-possession and oracle-possession, where the body of the
Pythia, or the medicine-man, is placed under the direct control of
some great deity, [180] we may see how by insensible transitions
the conception of the human ghost passes into the conception of the
spiritual numen, or divinity.

To pursue this line of inquiry through the countless nymphs and dryads
and nixies of the higher nature-worship up to the Olympian divinities
of classic polytheism, would be to enter upon the history of religious
belief, and in so doing to lose sight of our present purpose, which has
merely been to show by what mental process the myth-maker can speak
of natural objects in language which implies that they are animated
persons. Brief as our account of this process has been, I believe
that enough has been said, not only to reveal the inadequacy of purely
philological solutions (like those contained in Max Muller's famous
Essay) to explain the growth of myths, but also to exhibit the vast
importance for this purpose of the kind of psychological inquiry into
the mental habits of savages which Mr. Tylor has so ably conducted.
Indeed, however lacking we may still be in points of detail, I think we
have already reached a very satisfactory explanation of the genesis of
mythology. Since the essential characteristic of a myth is that it is
an attempt to explain some natural phenomenon by endowing with human
feelings and capacities the senseless factors in the phenomenon, and
since it ha