GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP. 655 



able for them in the new world they are supposed after death to 

 inhabit. 



Even more striking and conclusive, from our present point of 

 view, is another of Mr. Tylor's well-selected cases. " In Esthonian 

 districts," he says, " within the present century, the traveler might 

 often see the sacred tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, 

 standing inviolate in a sheltered spot near the dwelling-house; 

 and old memories are handed down of the time when the first 

 blood of a slaughtered beast was sprinkled on its roots that the 

 cattle might prosper, or when an offering was laid beneath the 

 holy linden, on the stone where the worshiper knelt on his bare 

 knees, moving from east to west and back, which stone he kissed 

 thrice when he had said, ' Receive the food as an offering ! ' " * To 

 this case I say confidently, " Either ancestral spirits or the devil." 

 Within the last two hundred years, indeed, there were old men in 

 Gothland who would still go to pray under a great tree, as their 

 forefathers had done in their time before them. 



That single sentence of Mr. Duff Macdonald's already quoted, 

 tells us more about the meaning of all these rites than pages of 

 conjectural talk as to indwelling divinities. " It is the great tree 

 at the veranda of the dead man's house," says this acute and 

 original observer, " that is their temple ; and if no tree grow there, 

 they erect a little shade, and there perform their simple rites." f 

 Mr. Macdonald has lived long among the people whose faith and 

 practice he so clearly describes. He thoroughly understands their 

 ideas and point of view ; and I confess I attach a great deal more 

 importance to his trained evidence in such a delicate matter than 

 to a vast amount of uncertain classical argument. Moreover, the 

 Blantyre negroes are still in the most primitive stage of religion ; 

 the process of god-making goes on among them to this hour as an 

 every-day occurrence. We catch the phenomenon of the manu- 

 facture of deity in the earliest stages of its evolution. 



On the whole, then, I think all the evidence is congruous with 

 the theory that tree worship originated in ancestor worship or 

 ghost worship, and with no alternative theory whatsoever. This 

 is the hypothesis that fits all the facts, harmonizes all the dis- 

 crepancies, and reduces to a plain meaning all the seeming absurd- 

 ities of strange savage creeds and still stranger ceremonies. And 

 to say the truth, no other hypothesis as to the origin of worship 

 has ever been offered. Mr. Spencer's ghost theory, independently 

 arrived at almost simultaneously by Mr. William Simpson, alone 

 gives us a real explanation of the facts under notice. We find 

 ourselves face to face at the outset with the very curious phe- 

 nomenon of early races who people the whole world with imagi- 



* Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 224. f Africana, vol. i, p. 59. 



