Thus, still confining ourselves to the American continent, we have the ancient hymns of the Zunis, in no way Christianised, and never chanted in the presence of the Mexican Spanish, These hymns run thus:  ’Before the beginning of the New Making, Awonawilona, the Maker and container of All, the All-Father, solely had being.’  He then evolved all things ’by thinking himself outward in space.’  Hegelian! but so are the dateless hymns of the Maoris, despite the savage mythology which intrudes into both sets of traditions.  The old fable of Ouranos and Gaia recurs in Zuni as in Maori.[37]

I fail to see how Awonawilona could be developed out of the ghost of chief or conjurer.  That in which all things potentially existed, yet who was more than all, is not the ghost of a conjurer or chief.  He certainly is not due to missionary influence.  No authority can be better than that of traditional sacred chants found among a populace which will not sing them before one of their Mexican masters.

We have tried to escape from the bias of belief in a primitive divine tradition, but bias of every kind exists, and must exist.  At present the anthropological hypothesis of ancestor-worship as the basis, perhaps (as in Mr. Spencer’s theory) the only basis of religion, affects observers.

Before treating the theory of Degeneration let us examine a case of the anthropological bias.  The Fijians, as we learned from Williams, have ancestral gods, and also a singular form of the creative being, Ndengei, or, as Mr. Basil Thomson calls him, Degei.  Mr. Thomson writes:  ’It is clear that the Fijians humanised their gods, because they had once existed on earth in human form....  Like other primitive people, the Fijians deified their ancestors.’  Yet the Fijians ’may have forgotten the names of their ancestors three generations back’!  How in the world can you deify a person whom you don’t remember?  Moreover, only malevolent chiefs were deified, so apparently a Fijian god is really a well-born human scoundrel, so considerable that he for one is not forgotten—­just as if we worshipped the wicked Lord Lyttelton!  Of course a god like Ahone could not be made out of such materials as these, and, in fact, we learn from Mr. Thomson that there are other Fijian gods of a different origin.

’It is probable that there were here and there, gods that were the creation of the priests that ministered to them, and were not the spirits of dead chiefs.  Such was the god of the Bure Tribe on the Ra coast, who was called Tui Laga or “Lord of Heaven.”  When the missionaries first went to convert this town they found the heathen priest their staunch ally.  He declared that they had come to preach the same god that he had been preaching, the Tui Laga, and that more had been revealed to them than to him of the mysteries of the god.’

Mr. Thomson is reminded of St. Paul at Athens, ’whom then ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.’[38]