The subjects which show this antagonism are all of vital importance. They include friendly and inimical relations with the dead; marriage as a sacred tribal rite and marriage as a rule of polyandrous society; birth ceremonies which tell of admittance into a sacred circle of kinsmen, and birth ceremonies which breathe of revenge and hostility; the reverential treatment of the aged folk and the killing of them off; the preservation of human life as part of the tribal blood, and human sacrifice as a certain cure for all personal evils; the worship of waters as a strongly localised cult, preserved because it is local by whatsoever race or people are in occupation and in successive occupation of the locality; totemic beliefs connected with animals and plants contrasted with ideas entirely unconnected with totemism--all this, and much more which has yet to be collected and classified, reveals two distinct streams of thought which cannot by any process be taken back to one original source. This fact of definite antagonism between different sets of surviving beliefs existing together in one country leads to several very important conclusions. This is the case with the Irish Sids. These beings are said to be scattered over Ireland, and around them assembled for worship the family or clan of the deified patron. While there were thus a number of topical deities, each in a particular spot where he was to be invoked, the deities themselves with the rest of their non-deified but blessed brother spirits had as their special abode "Lands of the Living," the happy island or islands somewhere far away in the ocean. Now this Sid worship, we are told by Irish scholars, "had nothing to do with Druidism--in fact, was quite opposed to it," the Sids and the Druids being "frequently found at variance with each other in respect to mortals."[471]