It is necessary to clear up the historic problem of ancestor worship to reach a sound definition of religion. And to begin with, we find the historical evidence is all against Dr. Jevons' later thesis. Not only have we the many cases in which contemporary savages, like ancient Gnostics, think of God as an ancestor or of the first man as a God¹ and the record in ancient Egypt of the process by which a deceased king became a God² but we have the relatively late doctrine in Hesiod³, according to which the men of the first age became just and beneficent daimons, passing invisibly over the earth, dispensing rewards and retributions and good fortune.

There is a risk of confusion over this last conception, which, with others of similar kind, is taken by Mr. Lang as a proof that "early men, contrary to Mr. Frazer's account, suppose themselves to be naturally immortal."⁴ Dr. Frazer's words were that, "lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like himself".⁵ Here the verbal confusion is complete. In the very act of claiming that "far from lacking the idea of eternal duration of life, 'primitive man' has no other idea," Mr. Lang admits: "Not that he formulates his ideas in such as term as 'eternal.'"⁶ But neither does he formulate it in such as phrase as "naturally immortal"; he has in fact, not clear idea how to formulate;7 and Dr. Frazer of all men should have remembered as much. As we have seen, ⁸ the savage commonly believes that he would never die save for the acts of hostile spirits, sorcerers, or enemies; yet he knows that all his race die.

What has happened is that men at a certain stage became capable of conceptually noting at once death and the apparent survival (in dreams) of men in some fashion after death, without framing any theory. But chronic crises in their political or tribal history has the effect of singling out from the vague crowd of ancestral memories those of a particular group or generation who made or led some migration or conquest; and these became for a time "the" ancestors par excellence, early man being unable to construct the human past save by way of some definite beginning. At some point in the long vista he needed a "first man", or beast or plant, or stone, or pair; and he had to make such out of some of his ancestral material, with whatever fanciful embellishments. In virtue of the same state of mind, we find tribes and even nations convinced of their special descent from one later man, who at one stage definitely ranks as a God.⁹ though another religious concept may ultimately undeify him, as in the cases of Abraham and Jacob.

As a result of all these tendencies, at a stage in which the primordial belief in the "spiritual" or occult survival of ancestors in general has begun to be definitely contradicted¹⁰ by the conceptual recognition of death, and by disbelief in the land beyond the grave, there emerges a vague compromise in the notion that either the first pair or the men of the first age were of a different order as regarded their liability to death; and this belief holds the ground until haply a general doctrine of resurrection or ghostly immortality pushes it in turn to the backgroud. But though the notion of survival of ancestors has thus in succession of forms subsisted from a very remote period, it clearly does not follow that early men conceived themselves to be immortal in th sense in which they were later held to be so by their descendents. The definite or conceptual belief is retrospective. It is, however, sufficiently general to dispose of Mr. Langs's argument that among the Australians Gods cannot be developed from ancestors. "No ghost of a man", he insists, "can grow into a god if his name is tabooed and therefore forgotten.¹¹ And again: "In Australia, where even the recent ghosts are unadored is it likely that some remote ghost is remembered as founder of the ancient mysteries?"¹² It is after this contention that, apparently without realizing the bearing of this statement upon the argument under notice, Mr. Lang triumphantly tells us that there is Australian and well as other evidence of the nearly universal vogue of a belief that the first men—i.e., ancestors—were deathless.

Obviously the very habit of tabooing proper names might conduce to the deifying of ancestors under special epithets, since that resort is always open under tabooism.¹³ The tabooing of ancestors' names, which is one of the most widespread of savage practices,¹⁴ can no more destroy the notion that those ancestors have existed than the tabooing of God-names among Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Romans put the Gods in question out of recollection.¹⁵ Was not Yahweh scrupulously specified in many Hebrew rituals as Adonai, The Lord, and by Samaritans as Shema, The Name?¹⁶ It is well to ask why savages taboo the names of the dead before we deduce views as to the consequences. The reasons doubtless vary, but some instances may illuminate the practice. Among the Battaks, were a man on becoming a father of a boy, N.N., is henceforth known only as "father of N.N.," children must not utter the names of their parents, and spouses call each other "father of N.N." and "daughter of the "——" ,naming her family. Here the idea is that to know a man's name is to have some power over his various souls.¹⁷ Among the Narrinyeri of South Australia "the name of the dead must not be mentioned until his body had decayed, lest a want of sorrow should seem to by indicated by a common and flippant use of his name. A native would have the deceased believe that he cannot hear or speak his name without weeping."¹⁸ There is no tendency to oblivion here. In other cases, again, it is clear that when at death a man's name is "buried" he is simply re-named. Among the Masai, "should there be anything which is called by that [the deceased's] name, it is given another name which is not like that of the deceased. For instance, if an unimportant person called Ol-onana (he who is soft or weak or gentle) were to die, gentleness would not be called on-nanai in that kraal, as it is the name of a corpse, but it would be called by another name, such as epolpol (it is smooth)."¹⁹ If then Ol-onana were an important person, is it to be supposed that his personality would be forgotten? Would not he too be relabelled?²⁰ All dead men's names are tabooed: is it to be supposed that the personalities, or even the old names, of all are forgotten? Re-naming would be a necessity for men as for things. Among the Narrinyeri, apparently, this would be only temporary, the original name being reverted to after the decay of the body; and even if it were not, the reminiscence would be unbroken, so that a notable man could as well be deified among name-tabooers as among tribes who had not the practice. Nor is there any force in the argument from recent disuse of such deification. Even if we admit the probability that Australian tribes have latterly²¹ ceased to deify ancestors, the fact remains that, as Mr. Lang admits, that they think of remote ancestors as undying, even as they do of gods.

Recognizing, however, that the definite conception of ancestors as abnomal in the point of deathlessness is retrospective, we must not on the other hand fall into the error of supposing that only in late ages, and by way of poetic retrospect, did men conceive of their deceased predecessors as exercising powers of the kind credited to whatever beings for the time answered to our general notion of "Gods".²² The true solution is that in men's vague ideas the early "Gods" approximated much more to themselves; and that gradually "the Gods" as such were relatively raides, the change proceeding for ages without involving the absolute negation of ancestral spirits,²³ and, à fortiori, without necessarily removing from the order of fully-established Gods all who might have been ancestors to start with.

Indeed, there is evidence, as we have seen, that in early stages of religion the Gods were actually conceived as destructible²⁴ and in the Vedas and Brâhmanas the Gods actually acquire immortality in different ways—by the help of Agni, by drinking the Soma, by continence and austerity, thus gradually raising themselves above the Asuras, with him they were originally equal.²⁵ So in Babylonian deluge epic Parnapishtim²⁶ and his wife, who had been mortal, are raised to immortality.²⁷ This conception may be a reflex of the same doctrine as first framed for mortals; but there the fact stands that the Gods were not definitely conceives as "necessarilyt immortal" to start with.