GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP. 503 



and we know with certainty that most at least of the Christian 

 saints were originally ordinary men and women. 



To put it briefly, though there are individual gods who need 

 not necessarily once have been individual men, there could be no 

 such thing as the idea of a god except as the reflex of the ghost 

 of man in general. 



So, too, with temples. While it is almost certainly true that 

 temples as a whole originate, as Mr. William Simpson has so 

 abundantly proved, from the tomb of the deified chief or hero, it 

 is also undoubtedly true that certain temples exist in later stages 

 of culture which are, to use once more the phrase I employed 

 above, cenotaph shrines. But these cenotaph shrines could never 

 have come into existence at all unless men's minds had already 

 long been habituated to the idea of worship at the actual tomb- 

 shrine. 



It is the same, again, with sacred stones. These, as I have 

 endeavored to show elsewhere, owe their sanctity at first to the 

 standing stones erected over the remains and tumuli of the dead. 

 But in course of time prayer offered at the grave comes readily to 

 be regarded as prayer offered to the visible and tangible object 

 then and there present — the stone that crowns and tops the bar- 

 row. Ghee or oil poured out for the ghost comes readily to be re- 

 garded as offered rather to the stone itself than to the person 

 whose grave it marks and commemorates. Especially will this 

 confusion exist in the mind of the worshiper when the worship is 

 of old date, and the personality of the deceased has been long for- 

 gotten. It is very early ancestors who become the great gods of 

 later generations. Still no one could ever have dreamed of offer- 

 ing up food or preferring requests to a lifeless stone, unless he 

 and his predecessors had long been accustomed to look upon simi- 

 lar stones as the dwelling places of his ancestors. But nowadays, 

 when the sanctity of certain stones is already a well-established 

 article of belief, the people of southern India — to take a particu- 

 lar instance — artificially manufacture sacred stones by setting 

 them up in their fields, painting them red (a substitute for blood 

 libations), and pouring offerings of oil or ghee on top of them. 

 That is to say, they treat certain casual stones, which have no 

 rational connection at all with their ancestral spirits, in exactly 

 the same way in which they or their predecessors have been in 

 the habit of treating the graves of their forefathers. 



A like evolution has taken place, I believe, in the case of sacred 

 trees and sacred groves. I do not mean for a moment to assert, 

 or even to suggest, that every individual sacred tree grows or 

 ever grew on the grave of a dead person. But I do mean to say 

 that, so far as I can see, the notion of the sanctity of trees or plants 

 could only have arisen in the first place from the reverence paid 



