nd the whole superstition stand
forth revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.

But more; the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and carry
their wasp-fetish into a new land. But if they became poor and weakly,
their brains and imagination, degenerating with their bodies, would
degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it meant. Away from
the sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which were not so large or
formidable, they would require a remembrancer of the wasp-king; and they
would make one--a wasp of wood, or what not. After a while, according to
that strange law of fancy, the root of all idolatry, which you may see at
work in every child who plays with a doll, the symbol would become
identified with the thing symbolised; they would invest the wooden wasp
with all the terrible attributes which had belonged to the live wasps of
the tree; and after a few centuries, when all remembrance of the tree,
the wasp-prophet and chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp--aye,
even of their defeat and flight--had vanished from their songs and
legends, they would be found bowing down in fear and trembling to a
little ancient wooden wasp, which came from they knew not whence, and
meant they knew not what, save that it was a very "old fetish," a "great
medicine," or some such other formula for expressing their own ignorance
and dread. Just so do the half-savage natives of Thibet, and the
Irishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence--unless the ancient Irish
were Buddhists, like the Himalayans--tie just the same scraps of rag on
arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature, but her
lords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else.

And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree. No, it need not end there; it
may develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of superstition,
which Europe has often seen; which is common now among the Negros; {256}
which, we may hope, will soon be exterminated.

This might happen. For it, or something like it, has happened too many
times already.

That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of the
wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; not
merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy and
revenge. Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of brute
force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, she
has too often gone for comfort and he