(_f_) A Totem may become a spirit; whilst, having himself no human antecedents, he can hardly be a ghost as of an ordinary mortal. Nothing can be more irregular than the life of Totemism: with some tribes it seems to die out early, or leaves few and doubtful vestiges; with others traces of it seem to remain even amidst conditions of high culture. Apparently, where it survives, the Totem tends gradually to lose his bestial or vegetal properties, or most of them, and to become an anthropomorphic spirit with his myths, in analogy with heroic or patriarchal ancestors. He has attained to a considerable degree of individuality; yet, by association and tradition, may still confer more or less sacredness upon his animal kindred (cf. chap. ix. § 8). (_g_) To address any object with a spell, as a man is addressed in summons or command, is (as said above) an approach toward its personification. Hence corn, rice, padi, nkasa, or whatever has been the object of tribal rites and spells—the sun and moon, the earth, fire, wind, clouds and rain—having perhaps long been influenced and reinforced by Magic—are apt, when Animism has gained control of man’s imagination, to become first the embodiment and then the possession of spirits; the spells become prayers, and the rites religious ceremonies or mysteries. Such spirits, at first locally honoured, may with the evolution of the tribe or nation, the increasing intercourse of its villages, and the centralisation of its culture in some city, be released from local conditions and generalised into transcendent gods, either each of its own kind—corn or wine—or of still wider sway over agriculture or the weather. The meteorological gods are not impaired in strength by even wide migrations; for they are found to rule everywhere; and this may be a reason of their predominance in the higher religions. Plants from which intoxicants are obtained, such as soma or the vine, bringing men to a condition resembling insanity or the ravings of a sorcerer who is supposed to be possessed, are especially easy to understand as sources of inspiration. A belief in vegetation spirits, having originated in any way, may be extended according to the circumstances and mentality of a tribe, until every wood is populous with dryads. (_h_) Natural objects that have, at first, been regarded with awe and therefore endowed with magical powers—mountain-tops, ravines, whirlpools, ancient trees—under Animism, become the abode of spirits; and these, again, may, by analogy with others, cease to be conceived as merely local. Among the Moors, “the _jnūn_, which form a special race of beings created before Adam, are generally supposed to be active on occasions or in places which give rise to superstitious fear, and in many cases they are personifications of some mysterious qualities in persons or lifeless objects.”[203]