Connected with these supernatural beings, which later became classed as gods, demigods, ghosts, or non-natural beings, were many tabooes or restrictions on the actions of humanity with respect to these nature spirits. The taboo might be a restriction from doing a certain thing at a certain time or under a cer tain condition ; or it might enjoin the perform ance of a certain act or ceremony under like conditions. The custom of observing tabooes added, in the course of time, a species of ven eration and of sacredness to the act and to the object of the taboo. Thus acts intended origi for the protection of the tribe, through continued repetition, grew to be part of the most sacred ceremonies. Thus the tabooes of the nature worshipers seem to have played a prominent part in the building up of their most revered religious rituals. The taboo was closely associated with the tribal totems and with tree and other worship.
Through long years of association with na ture worship particular places, days, epochs, trees, streams and persons were looked upon as sacred and, as such, subject to taboo. The em perors of the Aztecs and the Peruvians, at the time of the discovery of America, were believed by their people to be so sacred as to be almost gods; and around them clustered as many cere monial tabooes as about the temples of their most revered deities. But in each case these tabooes reacted upon the ruler himself, plac ing many restrictions upon his actions in public and in private. Moctezuma II might not place his foot upon the bare earth lest his divine char acter be thus soiled. So he was carried about in a palanquin by official royal bearers, while other attendants spread before him a gorgeous carpet to protect his imperial feet from con tamination when he left the palanquin. He might wear a suit of clothes but once, and if state or other reasons required a change of ap parel a dozen times a day, it also demanded a completely new outfit. But while to wear a suit of clothes twice would defile the emperor, the representative of the gods, it was likely to bring special heavenly blessings to anyone of noble birth wearing it. So Moctezuma's cast-off clothing was eagerly sought and proudly worn by the highest nobility in the empire. In Peru it was taboo to make the vessels of the temple of the sun in the capital of any other material than gold whose shining color represented the radiant face of the deity; while all the fur nishings of the moon goddess were required to be of silver. This latter example well illus trates the extreme growth of naturalistic ideas from commonplace, natural associations to taboo of the most rigid sacred character. About these nature tabooes grew up many legends to account for them or to explain them. The Pe ruvians asserted that gold was formed from the tears of the sun god; the Mixtecas declared that it was the sacred excrement from his shin ing body. The Colombian Indians in the neigh borhood of Bogota inaugurated their new em peror into office by painting his naked body completely with gold dust, thus symbolizing that he was the direct representative of the sun, the great racial father upon earth. Such
complicated ceremonies with their rigid, un compromising tabooes, imply a long-developed civilization or culture built upon nature wor ship.
The Nature Nature worship, which, as has already been said, had its origin in the fear of the destructive forces of nature and a desire to placate them, or in respect for virile qualities in the same, grew in time, as man be came more civil in his habits, to be a very com plicated institution. Under the Aztecs, Mayas, Quiches, Zapotecas, Mixtecas, Pueblo Indians and Peruvians in America and among the great civilized nations of Europe, northern Africa and southern and western Asia, in the pre-Christian era, nature worship had become organized, in each case, into a most complicated religio-philo sophical system which defined the attributes and sphere of action of each of the deities and ex plained his relationship to the gods as a whole, to the state, to the priesthood, to the nobility and to the masses. This called for an exten sive classification and cataloguing of the nature deities. This had already taken place in the religious systems of all the great civilized na tions in pre-Christian days. Naturally, under such a system, where almost every phase of ani mate nature was represented by its special deity, the list of the gods became very great. Yet they all came under a few primary divisions. The upper religions were occupied by the sun, moon and other planets, by the dawn and the darkness, the clouds, the thunder and the light ning, the winds of the four quarters of the heavens and their accompanying night spirits or wind spirits. In most nature religions these re gions were divided into the upper heavens, in habited by the sun, moon, planets and gods of dawn and darkness; and the lower heavens, the home of the clouds, winds, rain gods and other deities of the elements. The earth was the home of the deities of growth and fertility and the general habitat of the household penates and guardian spirits; while the regions within the earth or beyond the borders of the natural world, that is out on the great elemental ocean which, in most mythologies, surrounded the earth, were the regions of death and decay. Within the earth, too, quite frequently were the regions of birth. These ideas and divisions sprang naturally out of nature worship. At death all things go back into the earth; at birth all the vegetable kingdom evidently comes out of it. This was one of the patent facts that first appealed to the imagination of myth-mak ing primitive man. There was a tendency to divide the deities of these divine regions into beneficent and malevolent beings. Thus arose the idea of the warring of the nature gods.