That venerable people, whose massive cities built before Rome was founded still survive, held that there was a single source of all existence, animate and inanimate. Its immediate agents were the mysterious “veiled gods,” whose number was unknown and whose names were never uttered. They were the channels of the divine Will, through which it passed to the twelve highest known gods, called the _Consentes_ or Companions, and these transmitted it through those innumerable spirits, whom the Latins called Genii, to its realisation in objective existence. The word _genius_ means a producer or begetter; but not in any literal sense, for not only every man and animate being had such a genius, but also every plant, every city, every place, every inanimate object, had one also. Clearly, therefore, the word refers to an act of the creative power in the abstract or spiritual sense. The genii were the proximate causes of existence, but they were themselves “emanations from the great gods,” and these in turn were merely the channels of the inexhaustible source of all life beyond. This was the doctrine of the Etruscans and also of the Greeks. I may compare it with the belief of one of the most brutish of barbarian hordes, the Itelmen of Kamtschatka. Beyond all visible things, say they, is the ultimate Power, Dusdachtschish, invisible, remote. No worship and no offerings are tendered him other than that certain pillars are erected and decked with flowers and garlands in his honour. Their Jupiter is Kutka. It was said of him that he had married all creatures and was the common father of all. It was he who made land and water in their present forms and invented all arts. To him the visible world owed its existence, though not its origin. Many discreditable stories were told of him, and he is as much cursed for the evils of life as praised for its advantages. It is he who finds souls for all existences, and preserves their spirits when the body decays. We must not be blinded to the true significance of such myths by the often material, coarse, and vulgar images under which they are presented. Indeed, if they are properly comprehended, we may explain and redeem from obloquy much in the heathen legends which Arnobius[200] and other fathers of the Church denounced with bitter and vehement imprecation. We should consider whether they are not naïve symbols, chosen, with a crude innocence of evil, to convey objectively the idea of the eternally renewed life of nature. This reflection will explain to us the true significance of those objects from ancient and savage cults which are preserved in the locked rooms of museums, in their secret drawers and curtained cases. They are too apt to be construed as proofs of impurity and degradation. Such an interpretation would be sadly at variance with the fact.