especially may be creatures more powerful than himself, and, in a
sense, divine and creative.

3. In religion the savage is he who (while often, in certain
moods, conscious of a far higher moral faith) believes also in
ancestral ghosts or spirits of woods and wells that were never
ancestral; prays frequently by dint of magic; and sometimes adores
inanimate objects, or even appeals to the beasts as supernatural
protectors.

4. In society the savage is he who (as a rule) bases his laws on
the well-defined lines of totemism--that is, claims descent from or
other close relation to natural objects, and derives from the
sacredness of those objects the sanction of his marriage
prohibitions and blood-feuds, while he makes skill in magic a claim
to distinguished rank.

Such, for our purpose, is the savage, and we propose to explain the
more "senseless" factors in civilised mythology as "survivals" of
these ideas and customs preserved by conservatism and local
tradition, or, less probably, borrowed from races which were, or
had been, savage.

[2] Aglaoph., i. 153. Had Lobeck gone a step farther and examined
the mental condition of veteres et priscae gentes, this book would
have been, superfluous. Nor did he know that the purer ideas were
also existing among certain low savages.


It is universally admitted that "survivals" of this kind do account