(f) A Totem may become a spirit; whilst, having himself no human antecedents, he can hardly be a ghost as of an ordinary mortal. Nothing can be more irregular than the life of Totemism: with some tribes it seems to die out early, or leaves few and doubtful vestiges; with others traces of it seem to remain even amidst conditions of high culture. Apparently, where it survives, the Totem tends gradually to lose his bestial or vegetal properties, or most of them, and to become an anthropomorphic spirit with his myths, in analogy with heroic or patriarchal ancestors. He has attained to a considerable degree of individuality; yet, by association and tradition, may still confer more or less sacredness upon his animal kindred (cf. [chap. ix. § 8]).
(g) To address any object with a spell, as a man is addressed in summons or command, is (as said above) an approach toward its personification. Hence corn, rice, padi, nkasa, or whatever has been the object of tribal rites and spells—the sun and moon, the earth, fire, wind, clouds and rain—having perhaps long been influenced and reinforced by Magic—are apt, when Animism has gained control of man’s imagination, to become first the embodiment and then the possession of spirits; the spells become prayers, and the rites religious ceremonies or mysteries. Such spirits, at first locally honoured, may with the evolution of the tribe or nation, the increasing intercourse of its villages, and the centralisation of its culture in some city, be released from local conditions and generalised into transcendent gods, either each of its own kind—corn or wine—or of still wider sway over agriculture or the weather. The meteorological gods are not impaired in strength by even wide migrations; for they are found to rule everywhere; and this may be a reason of their predominance in the higher religions. Plants from which intoxicants are obtained, such as soma or the vine, bringing men to a condition resembling insanity or the ravings of a sorcerer who is supposed to be possessed, are especially easy to understand as sources of inspiration. A belief in vegetation spirits, having originated in any way, may be extended according to the circumstances and mentality of a tribe, until every wood is populous with dryads.
(h) Natural objects that have, at first, been regarded with awe and therefore endowed with magical powers—mountain-tops, ravines, whirlpools, ancient trees—under Animism, become the abode of spirits; and these, again, may, by analogy with others, cease to be conceived as merely local. Among the Moors, “the jnūn, which form a special race of beings created before Adam, are generally supposed to be active on occasions or in places which give rise to superstitious fear, and in many cases they are personifications of some mysterious qualities in persons or lifeless objects.”[203]
In each of these cases, (f), (g), (h), however, an Euhemerist explanation may be offered. As to (f), Spencer, of course, argued that the Totem-ancestor is always a man, who bore the name of an animal, and was confounded with it after death; and Dr. Rivers has suggested that some gods who seem to have been derived from Totems may really represent heroes who had such Totems.[204] As to (g), Grant Allen suggested that the spirit of the corn or vine is always at first the spirit of the man upon whose grave the plant grew.[205] And as to (h), the spirit of a mountain may be the ghost of a man who was buried on the top of it; and the spirit of a whirlpool the ghost of a man who was drowned in it. Indeed some spirits may have originated in one of these ways, others in another way; and what happened in any particular case can only be determined, if at all, by examination of its particular circumstances.
(i) Abstract ideas may, at a very early stage of culture, be personified and treated as spirits. The Semang, according to Messrs. Skeat and Blagden, personify Death, Hunger, Disease;[206] and the Beloki, according to the Rev. J. H. Weeks, attribute all personal qualities to the aid of spirits; so that if one man wrestles better than another, it is because the spirit Embanda is in him.[207] The modern Greeks of Macedonia personify and propitiate Lady Small Pox.[208] In the tenth and latest book of the Rigveda, “the deification of purely abstract ideas, such as Wrath and Faith, appears for the first time.”[209] At a higher stage of culture we find Fides, Fortuna, Concordia and many others. Such things are conceived of as mysterious powers, and they have names; and so far they resemble demons. Why, then, should they not be personified and propitiated like demons?
(j) Various ways have been pointed out in which the grammatical structures of language, metaphors and other figures of speech may influence the growth of mythology.
(k) Animism having been generally adopted, spirits may be freely invented in explanatory myths. The Kalinis believe that thunder and lightning are the clang and flash of bracelets on the arms of Kidilumai, a girl who dances in heaven, as formerly on earth, for joy of the welcome rain.[210] It would be absurd to suppose that she must once have lived on earth. Some amongst the Ekoi say that Thunder is a giant marching across the sky; others that Thunder is the enemy of Lightning and, on seeing it, growls to drive it away.[211] If free invention may originate myths, it may modify old ones, with results that cannot always be interpreted upon general principles.
Finally, any spirits that have been anthropomorphised in analogy with ancestor-ghosts may be further disguised by giving them mythical family connections with the ancestors and with one another, as happened to Bacchus and Demeter.
§ 7. How Ghosts and Spirits are imagined
Ghosts and spirits have the same qualities and characters, eat the same food, appear in dreams, possess men and animals, help sorcerers, give diseases, determine the success of hunting or agriculture. At first, they are solid things, not truly incorporeal, merely invisible to ordinary people by daylight; though dogs or pigs may see them even then. A ghost is so associated with its corpse, that it is not always clear which it is that escapes from the grave and walks; and one may judge whether a dead man has yet gone to Hades or still haunts the neighbourhood, by observing whether in the morning there are footprints around his grave; and to keep the ghost from walking, one may fill the belly of the corpse with stones, or break its limbs, or bury it deep and pile the earth upon it; or one may burn it. In South-East Australia, ghosts can be heard at night jumping down from the trees or from the sky.[212] They may be heard to speak or sing, usually with thin voices, like bats: as