GHOST WORSHIP AND TREE WORSHIP. 657 



children. But this is a natural function of the ancestral ghosts, 

 who, as the fathers of the tribe, are often — nay, one may even say 

 habitually — envisaged under phallic guises. It is also a well- 

 known function of the sacred stones, which originate in standing 

 stones or grave slabs (as I have endeavored to show elsewhere), 

 and which are universally regarded as of phallic potency. Indeed, 

 to this day barren women in Brittany go to pray at ancient mono- 

 liths (thinly Christianized by having a small cross stuck on top) 

 for the birth of children, which, says the Hebrew poet appositely, 

 "are the gift of Jahveh."* Thus every one of the attributes 

 claimed for the tree-spirits turns out on examination to be also an 

 attribute of the ancestral ghost. 



There are, I think, three main objects of human worship all 

 the world over. The first is the ghost, or actual soul of the dead 

 man, which gets sublimated or magnified in course of time into 

 the spirit or shade, and then into the god. The second is the 

 sacred stone. The third is the sacred tree. And these three are 

 one. The ghost is the core and central reality of the whole vast 

 superstructure of faith and practice. The sacred stone derives its 

 sanctity from standing at the head of the dead man's grave. The 

 sacred tree owes its position equally to its identification with the 

 spirit of the chief or father who lies buried beneath it. In the 

 striking and almost prophetic words of a great poet, God is in- 

 deed " the shade cast by the soul of man." f 



How easily these three forms of primitive godhead run into 

 one another has already been abundantly pointed out in many 

 departments. The whole of The Golden Bough is from one point 

 of view one long exposition of the interchangeability of the man- 

 god and the tree-spirit or corn-spirit — an interchangeability which 

 may surprise us the less when we remember that to this day one 

 half of Christendom confidently identifies its own man-god with 

 a piece of consecrated wheaten wafer. Mr. Frazer shows us how 

 the slain god and the corn or the tree absolutely merge in the 

 minds of their worshipers, so that at last it becomes almost im- 

 possible to separate them in thought one from the other. I believe 

 the same thing to be true of sacred stones. Men worshiped stones, 

 identified stones with their fathers, talked of themselves as de- 

 scended from stones, looked upon the stones with affection and 

 reverence, prayed to them, made gifts to them of wine and ghee, of 

 milk and honey, till they almost forgot there was ever any differ- 

 ence at all to speak of between stones and humanity. The Laches, 



* Priapus, the garden god, is a phallic deity : the ark of Khem represents a garden, and 

 Khem himself is always phallic. Fertility, I take it, is the common note of all these con- 

 ceptions. 



f Swinburne, Songs before Sunrise. 



