They have referred it to a revelation.[1] Andrew Lang, approaching the same facts in a different spirit, has drawn from them conclusions which contain certainly a valuable element of truth. He revives the discredited view of the existence, at the origin of human society, of a relatively noble religious belief, and of its subsequent degeneration into rites of propitiation and conciliation addressed to beings greatly inferior in power and in worth to the original High God, and he claims that his "theory, rightly or wrongly, accounts for the phenomena, the combination of the highest divine and the lowest animal qualities in the same being. But I have yet to learn how, if the lowest myths are the earliest, the highest attributes came in time to be conferred on the hero of the lowest myth."[2]
In my opinion, the priority of the High Gods is not the important point in the interpretation of the facts I have just cited; and, further, it would not necessarily follow from priority that the lower beings are degraded High Gods. The truth of the matter, as I see it, is that the High Gods proceeded from an independent and specific source; they are, or were originally, the Makers. The essential elements of my theory are that man comes to the idea of superhuman beings along several routes, that the characteristics of these beings depend upon
- ↑ See Father Wilhelm Schmidt in "L'origine de l'idée de Dieu," Anthropos, vol. iii. (1908), iv. (1909). These papers are researches at second-hand by a well-informed person who is evidently before all else a priest of the Roman Catholic Church and an apologist of the traditional Christian system.
- ↑ The Making of Religion, 2nd ed.. Preface, p. xvi. As to the origin of the belief in a kind of germinal Supreme Being, he makes in the preface to the second edition (p. x) the following suggestion:—"As soon as man had the idea of 'making' things, he might conjecture as to a Maker of things . . . He would regard this unknown Maker as a 'magnified non-natural man'." What is still happening to William James on account of The Varieties of Religious Experience happened to Andrew Lang. The authority of his name was claimed in support of a theory of revelation. In the preface to the second edition of The Making of Religion, he declares that he never intended to countenance the belief in an original revelation.
