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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



between tree worship pure and simple and its offspring, grove 

 worship. This transition from the special cult of the single tree 

 to the general cult of the wood or forest, comes about, I take it, 

 through the medium of the lemenos. And what is the temenos ? 

 Well, I think, we get the first clew toward an answer to that 

 question in Mr. William Simpson's brilliant identification of the 

 temple and the tomb, already so well foreshadowed by Mr. Her- 

 bert Spencer. For if the temple is only a magnified tomb where 

 offerings on a large scale are habitually made to the sainted 

 ghost or the deified ancestor, then clearly the temenos is just the 

 representative of the inclosed space surrounded by a wall about 

 the primitive barrow. In the center stands the temple — that is to 

 say, the actual tomb itself ; all round it stand the sacred trees 

 planted upon or about the holy grave, and regarded as the actual 

 representatives of the deified hero. These trees form, I think, 

 the great link of transition to the sacred grove. For when once 

 people had grown accustomed to the prime idea that certain trees 

 were to be considered as sacred from their close connection with 

 a deified ancestor, it would be but a slight and natural step to re- 

 gard other trees as sacred because they stood near a holy site, or 

 even to manufacture an artificial sanctity by planting trees about 

 a cenotaph temple. Thus, when Xenophon, for instance, built a 

 temple to Artemis, and planted around it a grove of many kinds 

 of fruit trees, and placed in it an altar and an image of the god- 

 dess, nobody for one moment would pretend to suppose that he 

 erected it over the body of an actual dead Artemis. But the point 

 is, that men would never have begun building temples and conse- 

 crating groves at all, if they had not first built houses for the 

 dead god-chief, and planted trees and shrubs and flowers and gar- 

 dens upon his venerated tumulus. 



And this point leads me up to an important qualification. It 

 is not necessarily true — nay, it is demonstrably false — that every 

 individual god was originally a dead man. In late stages of cul- 

 ture, gods are quite unmistakably manufactured out of abstrac- 

 tions, as when the Roman Senate decreed in due form the erection 

 of a temple to the purely factitious goddess Concordia. But no- 

 body could ever have thought of making Concordia or any other 

 like abstraction into a deity, unless they had been first thorough- 

 ly familiarized with the idea of many gods, derived originally 

 from the deified ancestor or chief, and unless also these gods had 

 already been envisaged as " departmental " — that is to say, as pos- 

 sessing certain definitely distributed functions and prerogatives 

 over certain particular actions or portions of Nature. The posses- 

 sion of such special prerogatives, however, does not in the least 

 militate against the primitive humanity of such departmental 

 gods ; for the Christian saints have often similar prerogatives, 



