32 MYTHOLOGY OF THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS. 
from Central Europe, the champions of the new philosophy, and its con- 
sequent religion, discovered, among those who dwelt by the glaciers of 
the north, a barbaric philosophy which they have preserved to history 
in the Eddas and Sagas, and Norse literature is full of a philosophy in a 
transition state, from physitheism to psychotheism; and, mark! the 
people discovered in this transition state were inventing an alphabet— 
they were carving Runes. Then a pure physitheism was discovered in 
the Aztec barbarism of Mexico; and elsewhere on the globe many people 
were found in that stage of culture to which this philosophy properly 
belongs. Thus the existence of physitheism as a stage of philosophy is 
abundantly attested. Comparative mythologists are agreed in recog- 
nizing these two stages. They mightnot agree to throw all of the higher 
and later philosophies into one group, as I have done, but all recognize 
the plane of demarkation between the higher and the lower groups as I 
have drawn it. Scholars, too, have come essentially to an agreement that 
physitheism is earlier and older than psychotheism. Perhaps there may 
be left a “doubting Thomas” who believes that the highest stage of 
psychotheism—that is, monotheism—was the original basis for the phi- 
losophy of the world, and that all other forms are degeneracies from that 
primitive and perfect state. If there be such a man left, to him what I 
have to say about philosophy is blasphemy. 
Again, all students of comparative philosophy, or comparative my- 
thology, or comparative religion, as you may please to approach this 
subject from different points of view, recognize that there is something 
else; that there are philosophies, or mythologies, or religions, not in- 
cluded in the two great groups. All that something else has been 
vaguely called fetichism. I have divided it into two parts, hecastotheism 
and zodtheism. The verity of zoétheism as a stage of philosophy rests 
on abundant evidence. In psychotheism it appears as devilism in obedi- 
ence to a well-known law of comparative theology, viz, that the gods of 
a lower and superseded stage of culture oftentimes become the devils of 
a higher stage. So in the very highest stages of psychotheism we find 
beast-devils. In Norse mythology, we have Fenris the wolf, and Jor- 
mungandur the serpent. Dragons appear in Greek mythology, the bull 
is an Hgyptian god, a serpent is found in the Zendavesta; and was 
there not a scaly fellow in the garden of Eden? So common are these 
beast-demons in the higher mythologies that they are used in every 
literature as rhetorical figures. So we find, as a figure of speech, the 
great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, with tail that with 
one brush sweeps away a third of the stars of heaven. And where- 
ever we find nature-worship we find it accompanied with beast-worship. 
In the study of higher philosophies, having learned that lower phi- 
losophies often exist side by side with them, we might legitimately con- 
clude that a philosophy based upon animal gods had existed previous 
to the development of physitheism; and philologic research leads to the 
same conclusion. But we are not left to base this conclusion upon an 
