The transition from animal to human ancestors, furthermore, is closely bound up with coincident transformations in tribal organization. Wherever a powerful chieftainship arises, and an individual, overtowering personality obtains supremacy over a tribe or clan--such supremacy as readily tends to pass down to his descendants--it is particularly likely that a cult will be developed in his honour, and, upon his death, to his memory. Since the memory of this personality outlasts that of ordinary men, the individual himself is held to live on after death, even in regions where there is no belief in a universal immortality. Hence, according to a belief prevalent particularly among the negro peoples, the ordinary man perishes with death; the chieftain, however, or a feared medicine-man, continues to live at least until all memory of him has vanished. In some parts of Africa and Oceania, moreover, the cult of the living chieftains not only involves manifestations of a servile subjection but, more characteristically still, causes even his name to be tabooed. No one is allowed to speak it, and whoever bears the same name must lay it aside when the chieftain assumes control. As a result of the change in totemic tribal organization induced by the growing significance of chieftainship, the cult of _living_ ancestors, as we may conclude from these phenomena, takes precedence over that of the just deceased, and still more over that of the long departed. In comparison with the importance which the man of nature attributes to living persons, that attaching to the dead is but slight, and diminishes rapidly as the individuals fade from memory. Individual rulers, whose deeds are remembered longer than those of ordinary men, may lay the foundations for an historical tradition. Nevertheless, the present long continues to assert a preponderating claim in belief as well as in cult. So long as man himself lives only for the present, having little regard for the future and scarcely any at all for the past, his gods also--in so far as we may apply this name to the supersensuous powers that shape his life--are _gods of the present_. True, the totem animal is secondarily also an animal ancestor. And yet it is only the living totem animal that is the object of cult and is believed to possess protective or destructive powers; compared with it, the ancestor idea fades into nebulous outlines, gaining a more definite significance only in so far as it is an expression of the tribal feeling which binds the members of the community to one another.