VISITS. 113 



the month without gods . . . because the gods are supposed not to 

 be at home in their temples, but at court waiting upon their Dairi.&quot; 



These and many kindred facts force on us the conclusion 

 that from propitiatory visits, now to the living and now to 

 the dead, have been developed those visits of worship which 

 we class as religious. When we watch in a continental 

 cemetery, relatives periodically coming to hang fresh im 

 mortelles round tombs, and observe how the decayed 

 wreaths on unvisited tombs are taken to imply lack of re 

 spect for the dead when w r e remember how in Catholic 

 countries journeys are made with kindred feelings to the 

 shrines of semi-deified men called saints when we note that 

 between pilgrimages of this kind and pilgrimages made in 

 days gone by to the Holy Sepulchre, the differences are sim 

 ply between the distances travelled and the ascribed degrees 

 of holiness of the places; we see that the primitive man s 

 visit to the grave, where the ghost is supposed to reside, orig 

 inates the visit to the temple regarded as the residence of the 

 god, and that both are allied to visits of reverence to the liv 

 ing. Remote as appear the going to church and the going to 

 court, they are divergent forms of the same thing. That 

 which once linked the two has now almost lapsed; but we 

 need only go back to early times, when a journey to the 

 abode of a living superior had the purpose of carrying a 

 present, doing homage, and expressing submission, while 

 the journey to a temple was made for offering oblations, 

 professing obedience, uttering praises, to recognize the 

 parallelism. Before the higher creeds arose, the unseen 

 ruler visited by the religious worshipper was supposed to be 

 present in his temple, just as much as was the seen ruler 

 visited at his court; and though now the presence of the 

 unseen ruler in his temple is conceived in a vaguer way, he 

 is still supposed to be in closer proximity than usual. 



381. As with other ceremonies so with this ceremony. 

 &quot;What begins as a propitiation of the most powerful man 



