There was, however, another class of gods about which we can be somewhat less certain; these are the animal-gods and animal-headed gods which developed out of the totems of the various villages. Such bestial types, Professor Sayce remarks, “take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt,” say rather, the custom of Egypt, “was still totemism.” But in what precise relation totemism stood to the main line of the evolution of gods I do not feel quite so sure in my own mind as does Mr. Herbert Spencer. It seems to me possible that the totem may in its origin have been merely the lucky-beast or badge of a particular tribe (like the regimental {174}goat or deer); and that from being at first petted, domesticated, and to some extent respected on this account, it may have grown at last, through a confusion of ideas, to share the same sort of divine honours which were paid to the ghosts of ancestors and the gods evolved from them. But Mr. Frazer has suggested a better origin of totemism from the doctrine of the Separable Soul, which is, up to date, the best explanation yet offered of this obscure subject. Be that as it may, if the totems were only gradually elevated into divinities, we can easily understand Mr. Renouf’s remark that the long series of tombs of the Apis bulls at Sakkarah shows “how immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later times than in the former.” May I add that the _worship_ of totems, as distinct from the mere _care_ implied by Mr. Frazer’s suggestion, very probably arose from the custom of carving the totem-animal of the deceased on the grave-stake or grave-board? This custom is still universal among the Indian tribes of Northwestern America. Nevertheless, whatever be the true origin of the totem-gods, I do not think totemism militates in any way against the general principle of the evolution of the idea of a god from the ghost, the Dead Man, or the deified ancestor. For only after the concept of a god had been formed from ancestor-cult, and only after worship had been evolved from the customary offerings to the mummy or spirit at the tomb, could any other object by any possibility be elevated to the godhead. Nor, on the other hand, as I have before remarked, do I feel inclined wholly to agree with Mr. Spencer that every individual god was necessarily once a particular Dead Man. It seems to me indubitable that after the idea of godhead had become fully fixed in the human mind, some gods at least began to be recognised who were directly framed either from abstract conceptions, from natural objects, or from pure outbursts of the mythopoeic faculty. I do not think, therefore, that the existence {175}of a certain (relatively unimportant) class of totem-gods in Egypt or elsewhere is necessarily inconsistent in any way with our main theory of the origin of godhead.