But there may be deterioration as well as advance. Wherever artistic achievement degenerates into the crude products of the artisan, the divine image may again approximate to the fetish. Religious cult may suffer a similar relapse, as is shown by many phenomena of present-day superstition. When religious emotions are restricted to very limited desires of a magical nature, the cult also may degenerate into its earliest form, so that the image of the deity or saint, reverting into a fetish, again becomes a means of magic. It is primarily such degenerate practices, or, as they might also be called, such secondary fetish-cults, that give the phenomena of so-called fetishism their permanent importance in the history of religion. The complexity of this course of development has led psychologists of religion to conflicting views in their interpretations of fetishism. On the one hand, the primitive nature of fetishes, and the fact that the earliest divine images resemble fetishes, have led to the assertion that fetishism is the lowest and earliest form of religion. On the other hand, fetishism has been regarded as the result of a degeneration, and as universally presupposing earlier or contemporary religious cults of a higher character. The latter of these views particularly, namely, the degeneration theory, is still maintained by many historians of religion, especially by those who believe that monotheism was the original belief of all mankind. The evidence for this theory is derived mainly from cultural phenomena of the present. The image of a saint, as is rightly maintained, may still occasionally degenerate into a fetish, as occurs when it is regarded as the seat of magical powers, or when its owner believes that he possesses in it a household idol capable of bringing him weal or woe. It was particularly Max Müller who championed the degeneration theory. Even in his last writings on mythology he held firmly to the view that fetishism is a phenomenon representing the decay of religious cults. But if we take into account the entire course of development of the fetish, this view collapses. Though substantiated by certain events that occur within higher religions, it leaves unconsidered the phenomena that are primitive. The earliest fetishistic ideas, as we have seen, go far back into the period of soul and demon beliefs. Developing from the latter, they were at first closely bound up with them, though they later attained a relative independence, as did so many other mythological phenomena. To think of fetishism as a degeneration of religious cults is inadmissible for the very reason that, in so far as such cults presuppose deity ideas, they cannot as yet be said to exist. A striking proof of this contention is offered particularly by that form of fetish cult, the churingal ceremony of the Australians, in which the connection with related primitive ideas may be most clearly traced. The churingal ceremony falls entirely