But our purpose is not to present an exhaustive {19} analysis of the types of myth which early man wove about the world in which he found himself. What it is important to grasp is the slow growth from an almost animal state of ignorance to a more enlightened, moral, and socially ordered life. This evolution took time, and such progress as was made was always in danger of being overthrown by the hardening of myth and cult into a strait-jacket of superstition and hysterical fear. This danger was always great just because reason could secure no firm foothold upon reality. Man's life was one of constant fear. He felt himself assailed by evil spirits and surrounded by taboos and laws, to violate which meant disaster. When we glance over history, we find only two things which have shown promise of power to raise man out of this slough of fear,--ethical monotheism and reason. How far is this a genuine antithesis? May it not be that the real strength and freeing power of ethical monotheism is due to the reason which created it and speaks through it? Upon one set of myths of extreme importance for religion we have, however, scarcely touched. Yet the study of this group and its explanation has been a signal triumph for the science of comparative religion. It is a great pity that the general public knows, as yet, so little about the researches made by scholars into the wide-spread ritual of communion and purification, by means of which the participant becomes one with his deity and is even assured of salvation and immortality. The interesting fact is, that, here again, we find ideas which are essentially primitive and magical given a new setting. What was once social, and largely a ritual concerned with the re-birth of vegetation in the Spring, becomes personal, and a symbol of the resurrection of a {20} believer in another world. In its first form and motivation, this set of ideas turns around the tribe's material needs. Only with the growth of self-consciousness is it applied to the individual.