animated like a man by a soul which continues to exist after bodily death, powerful as ever for good and harm. Then this idea blends with the thought of the creature as being an incarnate deity, seeing, hearing, and acting even at a distance, and continuing its power after the death of the animal body to which the divine spirit was attached. Thus the Kamchadals, in their simple veneration of all things that could do them harm or good, worshipped the whales that could overturn their boats, and the bears and wolves of whom they stood in fear. The beasts, they thought, could understand their language, and therefore they abstained from calling them by their names when they met them , but propitiated them with certain appointed formulas.[1] Tribes of Peru, says Garcilaso de la Vega, worshipped the fish and vicuñas that provided them food, the monkeys for their cunning, the sparrowhawks for their keen sight. The tiger and the bear were to them ferocious deities, and mankind, mere strangers and intruders in the land, might well adore these beings, its old inhabitants and lords.[2] How, indeed, can one wonder that in direct and simple awe, the Philippine islanders, when they saw an alligator, should have prayed him with great tenderness to do them no harm, and to this end offered him of whatever they had in their boats, casting it into the water.[3] Such rites display at least a partial truth in the famous apophthegm which attributes to fear the origin of religion: 'Primos in orbe deos fecit timor.'[4] In discussing the question of the souls of animals in a previous chapter, instances were adduced of men seeking to appease by apologetic phrase and rite the animals they killed.[5] It is instructive to observe how naturally such personal intercourse between man and animal may pass into full worship, when the creature is powerful
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ANIMISM.
