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Before passing to other developments of this general view, let me point out how not simply animal-worship is thus accounted for, but also the conception, so variously illustrated in ancient legends, that animals are capable of displaying human powers of speech and thought and action. Mythologies are full of stories of beasts and birds and fishes that have played intelligent parts in human affairs–creatures that have befriended particular persons by giving them information, by guiding them, by yielding them help; or else that have deceived them, verbally or otherwise. Evidently all these traditions, as well as those about abductions of women by animals and fostering of children by them, fall naturally into their places as results of the habitual misinterpretation I have described.

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The probability of the hypothesis will appear still greater when we observe how readily it applies to the worship of other orders of objects. Belief in actual descent from an animal, strange as we may think it, is one by no means incongruous with the unanalyzed experiences of the savage; for there come under his notice many metamorphoses, vegetal and animal, which are apparently of like character. But how could he possibly arrive at so grotesque a conception as that the progenitor of his tribe was the sun, or the moon, or a particular star? No observation of surrounding phenomena affords the slightest suggestion of any such possibility. But by the inheritance of nicknames that are eventually mistaken for the names of the objects from which they were derived, the belief readily arises–is sure to arise. That the names of heavenly bodies will furnish metaphorical names to the uncivilized, is manifest. Do we not ourselves call a distinguished singer or actor a star? And have we not in poems numerous comparisons of men and women to the sun and moon; as in Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the princess is called “a gracious moon,” and as in Henry VII., where we read–“Those suns of glory, those two lights of men?” Clearly, primitive peoples will be not unlikely thus to speak of the chief hero of a successful battle. When we remember how the arrival of a triumphant warrior must affect the feelings of his tribe, dissipating clouds of anxiety and brightening all faces with joy, we shall see that the comparison of him to the sun is quite natural; and in early speech this comparison can be made only by calling him the sun. As before, then, it will happen that, through a confounding of the metaphorical name with the actual name, his progeny, after a few generations, will be regarded by themselves and others as descendants of the sun. And, as a consequence, partly of actual inheritance of the ancestral character, and partly of maintenance of the traditions respecting the ancestor’s achievements, it will also naturally happen that the solar race will be considered a superior race, as we find it habitually is.

The origin of other totems, equally strange, if not even stranger, is similarly accounted for, though otherwise unaccountable. One of the New-Zealand chiefs claimed as his progenitor the neighbouring great mountain, Tongariro. This seemingly-whimsical belief becomes intelligible when we observe how easily it may have arisen from a nickname. Do we not ourselves sometimes speak figuratively of a tall, fat man as a mountain of flesh? And, among a people prone to speak in still more concrete terms, would it not happen that a chief, remarkable for his great bulk, would be nicknamed after the highest mountain within sight, because he towered above other men as this did above surrounding hills? Such an occurrence is not simply possible, but probable. And, if so, the confusion of metaphor with fact would originate this surprising genealogy. A notion perhaps yet more grotesque, thus receives a satisfactory interpretation. What could have put it into the imagination of any one that he was descended from the dawn? Given the extremest credulity, joined with the wildest fancy, it would still seem requisite that the ancestor should be conceived as an entity; and the dawn is entirely without that definiteness and comparative constancy which enter into the conception of an entity. But when we remember that “the Dawn” is a natural complimentary name for a beautiful girl opening into womanhood, the genesis of the idea becomes, on the above hypothesis, quite obvious.[32]