GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP. 489 



GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP.* 



By GEANT ALLEN. 

 I. 



FROM the myth of Attis itself, with its strange old-world im- 

 plications, let us turn our attention next to the more general 

 subject of plant and tree worship, of which the special case of the 

 Phrygian god would appear to be only a particular example. 



It will be evident at once from what has gone before that I 

 accept on the whole, without reservation of any kind, Mr. Fra- 

 zer's main view as to the importance of tree spirits and the soul 

 of vegetation in early religions. But, then, I also accept as 

 proved almost beyond the possibility of doubt Mr. Herbert Spen- 

 cer's luminous theory of the origin of polytheism from ghost 

 worship and ancestor worship. Not only do I believe that Mr. 

 Spencer has adequately made good his main thesis of the deriva- 

 tion of gods from heroic ancestors, but I have also received con- 

 siderable encouragement in my faith to this effect, from Mr. Wil- 

 liam Simpson's brilliant and admirable paper on The Worship of 

 Death, a paper much less widely known among thinkers on this 

 subject than it deserves to be. Mr. Simpson, who is the well- 

 known special artist of the Illustrated London News, has been 

 led by his direct observations in the many lands he has visited in 

 the performance of his duties to form independently a theory 

 identical in every essential respect with Mr. Herbert Spencer's. 

 Examination of temples, or their equivalents, in endless lands, 

 from China to Peru, has convinced him at last that in almost 

 every case the temple begins as a tomb or shrine of a dead per- 

 son, and the worship is primarily offered to the actual ghost of 

 the man or woman interred within it. 



Now, between these two views — Mr. Spencer's and Mr. Fra- 

 zer's — I am aware there would appear at first sight to be an im- 

 mense discrepancy. I believe Mr. Frazer himself, in particular, 

 would regard them as nothing short of absolutely irreconcilable. 

 To judge from one pregnant passage in The Golden Bough (vol. i, 

 p. 253), Mr. Frazer would appear to hold that the earliest gods of 

 mankind in the hunting and pastoral stage of society took the 

 form of animals, and that, in the agricultural stage, gods were en- 

 visaged rather as corn or fruit trees, or assumed the shape of a 

 human being representing the corn or fruit spirit. I can find no- 



* From The Attis of Caius Valerius Catullus. Translated into English Verse, with 

 Dissertations on the Myth of Attis, on the Origin of Tree Worship, and on the Galliambic 

 Metre, by Grant Allen, B. A., formerly Postmaster of Merton College, Oxford. London : 

 Uavid Nutt. 1892. 



