NATURE WORSHIP. The worship of the heavens, the planets, the elements, the mani festation of all forms of life, vegetable and ani mal, including the personified life attributed to inanimate objects. Nature worship, though probably everywhere occasioned by the natural impulse of man to fear the terrific manifesta tions of nature and to show great respect for the powerful and the mysterious, has taken many different by-paths in the development of the various human races and families. The early investigators into the phenomena of nat ural religons failed to recognize this diversity of development, and they proceeded to build universal theories on divergent growths. Hence all of their theories have either partially or completely fallen by the wayside, or have sur vived the test of time only as a diminutive part of the original whole. Yet the work of the early investigator has not been done in vain; for, inasmuch as he has thought deeply he has set others thinking. Concerning no part of the extensive field of mythology have more diver gent theories been advanced than nature wor ship. By various writers the origin of worship has been traced to ancestor deification, to the fructification engendered by earth and slcy, to the fear inspired in primitive man by the light ning, storms and winds, to the fearful ravages of mysterious all-powerful beings who brought diseases and death. Others claim that the first worship of man was given to powerful and cunning animals and especially to the serpent. Still other writers have maintained that man's first gods were his own ancestors; while others see him worshiping the glory and majesty of the sun and the mystic beauty and mysterious healing powers of the moon. Others have traced his first religious ideas to the rains and the mists and have placed his primitive gods on the mountains amid the sources of the streams or in the clouds, the home of the rains.
To these early mythological investigators it never seemed to occur that man's early concep tions of this nature were not at all religious in the modern acceptation of the terms; that they grew out of fear and mysterious dread. This
primitive religious conception continued one of the strong features of man's worship far down into the monotheistic age of religion. Meta phorically the Jehovah of the Hebrews was a god of mysterious might who rode upon the winds and planted his footsteps upon the storm. At the sound of the horns of the priests of Israel walled cities fell down, just as the forests of old fell before the whistles of the wind gods. The fervid poetry of the greatest of the Hebrew poets is fairly alive with images borrowed from the polytheistic nature worshipers who sur rounded them or with whom the race came into contact during its periods of exile. In this He brew poetry every phase of nature seems alive, as it is in the Greek and Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian and Indian poetry. In primitive Hindu literature in the poetic imagery of China and Japan nature appears as one great Whole deified in different yet, in many respects, suggestively similar ways. Among the Amer ican Indians the deification of the more striking forms of nature is everywhere evident. These primitive ideas became conventionalized, elab orated, amalgamated with other ideas and they long continued to act upon and to be reacted upon by society. A primitive belief was that people were drowned because spirits hidden in the depths dragged them down. The wind was supposed to cry like a lost child. The combi nation of the two made the Llorona of Spanish lands in Europe and America, who, crying like a lost child, leads the unwary, after nightfall, into a pool or bog where she or her attendants catches him by the legs and drags him down to death. Many primitive nature myths and unions of myths have become much more complicated than the Llorona. In fact little in nature wor ship even among the most primitive races now existing is to be found in anything like its orig inal form. Hence the analysis of nature myths is a very complex and difficult matter. Yet the general conception of how primitive man thought is not difficult to understand.