THE PRIMITIVE IDEA OP GOD. 275 



to be medicine-men, in order that they might fully 

 enter into communion with the manitous which were 

 supposed to animate them; and there seems little 

 doubt that these men, though often impostors, were 

 sometimes possessed with a real religious frenzy. 



A darker feature of the belief in manitous was 

 the dread of those imagined to be evil- disposed, 

 and which often filled the poor savage with extreme 

 terror, and embittered his life with the apprehension 

 of the ills that might be inflicted on him by those 

 mysterious powers. In some cases, more especially, 

 these superstitious terrors were excessive, and took 

 possession of whole tribes, impelling to actions of 

 folly and cruelty equal to those of our own ancestors 

 in darker days, when they became afflicted with a 

 witch-panic or with dread of the " evil eye." 



I have already stated that the carvings on ivory 

 and bone found in the caves of the Dordogne, in 

 France, might be regarded as the totems of their 

 possessors, the emblems of their guardian manitous. 

 This has a bearing on the significance which we are 

 to attach to the carving supposed to represent the 

 mammoth, found in one of these caves, and which 

 has so often been figured and described as an evi- 

 dence that man existed before the disappearance of 

 this animal. That some great warrior or chief of 

 the PalaBolithic age had the mammoth for his armorial 

 bearing and for the emblem of his guardian genius 

 is no doubt significant of a time when the creature 

 was known, at least by tradition. Anything beyond 



