Along with sunshine, rain, air in motion and regeneration, fire early became for man one of the sacred elements. To him it symbolized (among many races) the sun, the great generator and the source of all heat. By the use of fire it was possible for him to greatly enlarge his range of diet, to fell the huge for est trees and Tape his canoes from them.
It enabled him to shatter great masses of rock and to shape them roughly to his ends.
Later on it enabled him to smelt metals and to attach them to his car of progress. As it was hurled from the cloud it became symbolical of the power that hurled it. As it was vomited forth from the volcanoes, it came to signify the titanic forces of the underworld and became inseparably connected with punishment for of fenses connected with the infernal regions, in various mythologies. From these primitive be liefs later religious systems borrowed much of their systematized ideas of the nature of fu ture punishment.
The Future the beneficent beings who brought their favors to the earth occupied the upper air; and as there, too, is the home of the sun, the moon and the planets which were supposed to strongly influence human life for good or evil, very many races looked upon these regions as the home of their future life. Some beliefs held that the souls of the dead went to the sun, others to the moon, still others to the great loud land, a mid-region between the earth and the home of the superior deities. Some races placed the future world in the far north or northwest, in the region of the north ern lights, whose brilliancy probably suggested the idea. Among many Indian tribes the rain bow was believed to be the bridge that spanned the great gulf separating the earth ocean and the sky ocean. Numerous other American tribes believed that the dead went to some great underground region. But all the nature reli gions presented the future life as essentially the same as that upon earth though surrounded by happier, because more fortunate conditions. Communication was not only possible between the earth and the future world but the rainbow bridge had been climbed or the great gulf had been frequently crossed in the magic stone canoe by the mortal heroes of nearly every United States Indian tribe. Some legends de pict the tribal hero as scaling the heights of heaven on the back of a great bird, or in the wicker-car of the star or sun-maidens or in nu merous other manners; for to the nature wor shiper the universe was one great whole, the parts of which were not essentially different from one another.
Theories of Nature the head of the early naturalistic school is Max Muller. He maintains, with the disciples of his school, that the worship of nature was the primary religious efforts of man; and he attempts to prove his position by means of comparative mythology. His theory, which applied only to the Indo-European races, was carried to an absurd limit by many of his school. E. B. Tylor looks upon the worship of the dead as the earli est of human cults and Herbert Spencer takes the same ground. The latter derives from this source all other forms of worship. Tylor traces the history of the so-called animistic faith, while Spencer displays its evolution. Wundt maintains that religion finds its origin in the primitive belief in human souls and in an early animism out of which a belief in magic and fetishism grew. Dunkheim believes that the to temic principle, or belief in mysterious power (the mana or magic power) is the source of all religion. All of these investigators have hit upon certain important truths, but no one of them has been able to grasp the significance of the wide field of mythology, for they all have made cate gorical statements upon which they have built up elaborate theories.
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