Higher religions have developed on a pre-existing basis, in response to an impulse of the religious spirit seeking better self expression. They have grown out of primitive religion, and all of them exhibit traces of their lineage. The survival of primitive traits in developed religion is a recurring phenomenon.
Evidently a higher religion can only emerge from a lower by a process of selection and development. Certain elements in early religion were intractable to development, while others were ca pable of it. To the former must be reckoned the strongly local character and particularist tendency of primitive religion. Spirits or powers attached to a definite spot, or embodied in a specific object, are not easily elevated or expanded.' Sentiment is con servative, and the being reverenced is too much lacking in indi vidual quality to be readily transformed into a personal god. On the other hand, though the feeling of the clan that its objects of worship belong to it resists absorption in a larger cult, the strong sense of affinity with divine powers is capable of being elevated to a higher religious relationship. The same holds of primitive rites of communion. So too primitive ideas of Tabu and Interdic tion have naturally passed into conceptions of the sacred and not sacred, the pure and the impure, ideas that play a great part in developed religion. Again the cult of the dead, passing into that of family ancestors (see ANCESTOR-WORSHIP) easily expands with the enlargement of society : it has contributed important elements to national religion as in the case of China and ancient Rome. There are then higher possibilities in primitive religion, but they can only come to fruition with the emergence of new needs and a wider outlook.
Higher religions emerge after the tribal has been superseded by the national culture. The transition to the more developed stage was the outcome of social changes which were reflected in the growth of man's inner life. This enrichment of personal life carried with it the need of a revised idea of the objects of wor ship and of the religious relation. The old spiritism, with its multitude of indefinite powers and capricious daemons, no longer corresponded to man's better ordered life and his varied and spe cialized interests. The larger and more constant values of a social
order based on agriculture required divine beings capable of re sponding to its wants, and the rise of polytheism was the answer to these religious demands. The polytheistic system was the ex pression of man's vision of the world, a world of diverse depart ments and manifestations though not a real unity. But polytheism marks an advance. For it helped (a) to liberate religion from its bondage to purely local associations. And (b), it replaced the colourless powers or numina of older belief by a number of divine beings of more specific character and with more or less definite spheres of activity. A god, as distinguished from a spirit, is a being with determinate qualities which embody the values of which men are conscious.
(I) The Emergence of Gods.—The formless spirits supply only a shifting and uncertain basis on which to evolve a god. It has been suggested that the Greek deities Hermes and Artemis were developed in this way, and the Roman goddess Juno has been con strued as the general personification of the fertility numen or Juno of every woman. In any case such a process is infrequent. And the instances in which a totem has grown into a god, if they do occur at all, are extremely rare. What is clear is, that many of the greater gods have a connection with the phenomena of nature, and show traces of this relationship. Sometimes the connection is quite definite. Thus the Egyptian Ra and the Babylonian Shamash are sun-gods. The Greek Zeus, to whom corresponds the Vedic Dyaus, is a sky-god, and Ushas of the Vedic Hymns is a dawn-goddess. But there are many instances where the connection of a deity with nature cannot be precisely stated, though the general fact is not in doubt. Thus it remains uncertain what the natural basis of the Egyptian Osiris is ; and we cannot say more of the Vedic Varuna and Vishnu than that they are connected with light and the heaven. The later development of a deity usually furnishes a very slender clue to his real origin. Moreover when the identifica tion of a deity with a phenomenon of nature is transparent and precise, it is difficult for the god to develop by assuming new and higher qualities.