high-priest watched till he beheld the divine footprints, and then shouted to announce, 'Our great god is come.'[1] Among such rites in the Old World, the Talmud contains a salient instance; there are a great multitude of devils, it is said; and he who will be aware of them let him take sifted ashes and strew them by his bed, and in the early morning he shall see as it were marks of cocks' feet.[2] This is an idea that has widely spread in the modern world, as where in German folklore the little 'earth-men' make footprints like a duck's or goose's in the strewn ashes. Other marks, too, betoken the passage of spirit-visitors;[3] and as for ghosts, our own superstition is among the most striking of the series. On St. Mark's Eve, ashes are to be sifted over the hearth, and the footprints will be seen of any one who is to die within the year; many mischievous wight has made a superstitious family miserable by slily coming down stairs and marking the print of some one's shoe.[4] Such details as these may justify us in thinking that the lower races are apt to ascribe to spirits in general that kind of ethereal materiality which we have seen they attribute to souls. Explicit statements on the subject are scarce till we reach the level of early Christian theology. The ideas of Tertullian and Origen, as to the thin yet not immaterial substance of angels and demons, probably represent the conceptions of primitive animism far more clearly than the doctrine which Calmet lays down with the weight of theological dogma, that angels, demons, and disembodied souls are pure immaterial spirit; but that when by divine permission spirits appear, act, speak, walk, eat, they must produce tangible bodies by either condensing the air, or substituting
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ANIMISM.
