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Updated: May 22, 2025
Ancient nature-gods are found to be living and associating with the supreme psychic deities. Thus in anthropologic science there are three ways by which, to go back in the history of any civilized people and learn of its barbaric physitheism. But of the verity of this stage we have further evidence.
Having discovered this, with a vast accumulation of evidence, we are enabled to carry philosophy back one stage beyond physitheism, and we can confidently assert that all the philosophies of civilization have come up through these three stages. And yet, there are fragments of philosophy discovered which are not zoötheistic, physitheistic, nor psychotheistic. What are they?
Fetichism, also, seems to have come from that lower grade, and all the minor deities, the spirits of mountains and hills and forest, seem to have been derived from that same stage, but with this development, that the things themselves are not worshipped, but their essential spirits. From zoötheism, as described, to physitheism the way is long.
They might not 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.
The animal gods are dethroned, and the powers and phenomena of nature are personified and deified. Let us call this stage physitheism. The gods are strictly anthropomorphic, having the form as well as the mental, moral, and social attributes of men. Thus we have a god of the sun, a god of the moon, a god of the air, a god of dawn, and a deity of the night.
With the growth of their moral qualities no physical powers are lost, and the sports of the physical bodies and phenomena become demons, subordinate to the great gods who preside over nature and human institutions. We find, also, that these superior gods are organized in societies. I have said the Norse mythology was in a transition state from physitheism to psychotheism.
In the study of higher philosophies, having learned that lower philosophies often exist side by side with them, we might legitimately conclude that a philosophy based upon animal gods had existed previous to the development of physitheism; and philologic research, leads to the same conclusion.
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 recognizing these two stages.
Thus the writings of the Greeks, the Hindoos, and the Egyptians, that give an account of their psychic gods, also contain a description of an earlier theism unconsciously recorded by the writers themselves. Psychotheism prevailed when the sentences were coined, physitheism when the words were coined. So the philologist discovers physitheism in all ancient literature.
All these tribes are found in the higher stages of savagery, or the lower stages of barbarism, and their mythologies are found to be zoötheistic among the lowest, physitheistic among the highest, and a great number of tribes are found in a transition state: for zoötheism is found to be a characteristic of savagery, and physitheism of barbarism, using the terms as they have been defined by Morgan.
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