bake him a cake and to wash his feet, and he then promises Abraham a numerous posterity. He appears as a man among men, though, of course, as one who is superior and who possesses magical power. Only gradually does the god acquire the remoteness of the superhuman. Abraham is later represented as falling down before him, and as scarcely daring to approach him. Here also, however, the god still appears on earth. Finally, when he speaks to Moses from the burning bush, only his voice is perceptible. Thus, his sensuous form vanishes more and more, until we come to the Jahve who uses the prophets as his mouthpiece and is present to them only as a spiritual being. The purified Jahve cult, therefore, was not an original folk-religion. It was the product of priests and prophets, created by them out of a polytheism which contained a rich profusion of demon conceptions, and which was never entirely suppressed. If an original monotheism is nowhere to be found, one might be tempted to believe conversely, that _polytheism_ represents the starting-point of all mythology. In fact, until very recently this was doubtless the consensus of opinion among mythologists and historians of religion, and the idea is still widely prevalent. For, if we hold in any way to the view that the god-idea is underived, there is but one recourse, once we abandon the idea of an original monotheism. The polytheistic theory is, as a rule, connected with the further contention that god-ideas are directly due to celestial phenomena. In substantiation of this view, it is pointed out that, with the exception of the gods of the underworld, the gods are usually supposed to dwell in the heavens. Accordingly, it is particularly the great heavenly bodies, the sun and the moon, or also the clouds and storms, to which--now to the one and now to the other, according to their particular tendency--these theories trace the origin of the gods. Celestial phenomena were present to man from the beginning, and it is supposed that they aroused his reflection from earliest times on. Those mythologists who champion the celestial theory of the origin of religion, therefore, regard god-ideas as in great measure the products of intellectual activity; these ideas are supposed to represent a sort of primitive explanation of nature, though an explanation, of course, which, in contrast to later science, is fantastical, arbitrary, and under the control of emotion. During the past century, moreover, this class of hypotheses has gradually placed less emphasis on emotional as compared with rational factors. In the first instance, it was the phenomena of storms, clouds, thunder, and lightning that were thought to be the basis of deity belief; later, the sun came to be regarded as the embodiment of the chief god; the present tendency is to emphasize particularly the moon, whose changing phases may easily give rise to various mythological ideas. Does not