This, the monarch of all mountains, ask I of the king of men;
    O all-honoured Prince of Mountains, with thy heavenward soaring
        peaks ... 
    Hast thou seen the kingly Nala in this dark and awful wood.... 
    Why repliest thou not, O Mountain?”

She similarly addresses the Asoka tree: 

    “Hast thou seen Nishadha’s monarch, hast thou seen my only
        love?... 
    That I may depart ungrieving, fair Asoka, answer me....” 
    Many a tree she stood and gazed on....[305]

It will be recognized that when primitive men gave names to mountains, rivers, or the ocean, these possessed for them a deeper significance than they do for us at the present day.  The earliest peoples of Indo-European speech who called the sky “dyeus”, and those of Sumerian speech who called it “ana”, regarded it not as the sky “and nothing more”, but as something which had conscious existence and “self power”.  Our remote ancestors resembled, in this respect, those imaginative children who hold conversations with articles of furniture, and administer punishment to stones which, they believe, have tripped them up voluntarily and with desire to commit an offence.

In this early stage of development the widespread totemic beliefs appear to have had origin.  Families or tribes believed that they were descended from mountains, trees, or wild animals.

Aesop’s fable about the mountain which gave birth to a mouse may be a relic of Totemism; so also may be the mountain symbols on the standards of Egyptian ships which appear on pre-dynastic pottery; the black dwarfs of Teutonic mythology were earth children.[306]

Adonis sprang from a tree; his mother may have, according to primitive belief, been simply a tree; Dagda, the patriarchal Irish corn god, was an oak; indeed, the idea of a “world tree”, which occurs in Sumerian, Vedic-Indian, Teutonic, and other mythologies, was probably a product of Totemism.

Wild animals were considered to be other forms of human beings who could marry princes and princesses as they do in so many fairy tales.  Damayanti addressed the tiger, as well as the mountain and tree, saying: 

    I approach him without fear. 
    “Of the beasts art thou the monarch, all this forest thy
        domain;... 
    Thou, O king of beasts, console me, if my Nala thou hast
        seen."[307]

A tribal totem exercised sway over a tribal district.  In Egypt, as Herodotus recorded, the crocodile was worshipped in one district and hunted down in another.  Tribes fought against tribes when totemic animals were slain.  The Babylonian and Indian myths about the conflicts between eagles and serpents may have originated as records of battles between eagle clans and serpent clans.  Totemic animals were tabooed.  The Set pig of Egypt and the devil pig of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were not eaten except sacrificially.