To resume.  The high Gods of savagery—­moral, all-seeing directors of things and of men—­are not explicitly envisaged as spirits at all by their adorers.  The notion of soul or spirit is here out of place.  We can best describe Pirnmeheal, and Napi and Baiame as ‘magnified non-natural men,’ or undefined beings who were from the beginning and are undying.  They are, like the easy Epicurean Gods, nihil indiga nostri.  Not being ghosts, they crave no food from men, and receive no sacrifice, as do ghosts, or gods developed out of ghosts, or gods to whom the ghost-ritual has been transferred.  For this very reason, apparently, they seem to be spoken of by Mr. Grant Allen as ’gods to talk about, not gods to adore; mythological conceptions rather than religious beings.’[6] All this is rather hard on the lowest savages.  If they sacrifice to a god, then the god is a hungry ghost; if they don’t, then the god is ‘a god to talk about, not to adore,’ Luckily, the facts of the Bora ritual and the instruction given there prove that Mungan-nganr and other names are gods to adore, by ethical conformity to their will and by solemn ceremony, not merely gods to talk about.

Thus, the highest element in the religion of the lowest savages does not appear to be derived from their theory of ghosts.  As far as we can say, in the inevitable absence of historical evidence, the highest gods of savages may have been believed in, as Makers and Fathers and Lords of an indeterminate nature, before the savage had developed the idea of souls out of dreams and phantasms.  It is logically conceivable that savages may have worshipped deities like Baiame and Darumulun before they had evolved the notion that Tom, Dick, or Harry has a separable soul, capable of surviving his bodily decease.  Deities of the higher sort, by the very nature of savage reflections on death and on its non-original casual character, are prior, or may be prior, or cannot be shown not to be prior, to the ghost theory—­the alleged origin of religion.  For their evolution the ghost theory is not logically demanded; they can do without it.  Yet they, and not the spirits, bogles, Mrarts, Brewin, and so forth, are the high gods, the gods who have most analogy—­as makers, moral guides, rewarders, and punishers of conduct (though that duty is also occasionally assumed by ancestral spirits)—­with our civilised conception of the divine.  Our conception of God descends not from ghosts, but from the Supreme Beings of non-ancestor-worshipping peoples.

As it seems impossible to point out any method by which low, chiefless, non-polytheistic, non-metaphysical savages (if any such there be) evolved out of ghosts the eternal beings who made the world, and watch over morality:  as the people themselves unanimously distinguish such beings from ghost-gods, I take it that such beings never were ghosts.  In this case the Animistic theory seems to me to break down completely.  Yet these high gods of low savages preserve from dimmest ages of the meanest culture the sketch of a God which our highest religious thought can but fill up to its ideal.  Come from what germ he may, Jehovah or Allah does not come from a ghost.