By some such process as this, it may fairly be supposed, the forms of the Gods were slowly exhaled from the actual figures of men and women, of youths and girls, who year after year took part in the ancient rituals. Just as the Queen of the May or Father Christmas with us are idealized forms derived from the many happy maidens or white-bearded old men who took leading parts in the May or December mummings and thus gained their apotheosis in our literature and tradition--so doubtless Zeus with his thunderbolts and arrows of lightning is the idealization into Heaven of the Priestly rain-maker and storm-controller; Ares the god of War, the similar idealization of the leading warrior in the ritual war-dance preceding an attack on a neighboring tribe; and Mercury of the foot-running Messenger whose swiftness in those days (devoid of steam or electricity) was so precious a tribal possession. And here it must be remembered that this explanation of the genesis of the gods only applies to the SHAPES and FIGURES of the various deities. It does not apply to the genesis of the widespread belief in spirits or a Great Spirit generally; that, as I think will become clear, has quite another source. Some people have jeered at the 'animistic' or 'anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a kind of superior pity they speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored mind sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind." But I must confess that to me the "poor Indian" seems on the whole to show more good sense than his critics, and to have aimed his rude arrows at the philosophic mark more successfully than a vast number of his learned and scientific successors. A consideration of what we have said above would show that early people felt their unity with Nature so deeply and intimately that--like the animals themselves--they did not think consciously or theorize about it. It was just their life to be--like the beasts of the field and the trees of the forest--a part of the whole flux of things, non-differentiated so to speak. What more natural or indeed more logically correct than for them to assume (when they first began to think or differentiate themselves) that these other creatures, these birds, beasts and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same blood as themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and having the same interior nature? What more reasonable (if indeed they credited THEMSELVES with having some kind of soul or spirit) than to credit these other creatures with a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the Guiana Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with beings." Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored mind--unless indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense of the Schools--but rather a very directly perceptive mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing