s and sagas current among the people whose civilization was
by the same slow movement growing too.

The development spoken of would perhaps be assisted by the erection of
monuments like piles of stones, or earthen barrows, over the dead. As
formerly in their huts, so now in their graves, the dead would be
regarded as the occupiers. Their spirits were still living, and would be
seen from time to time haunting the spot. Food would be buried with
them; and sacrifices at the moment of burial and on subsequent occasions
would be offered to them. In process of time among illiterate races
their identity would be forgotten, and then if the barrows were not
large enough to attract attention the superstitions which had their seat
there might cease. But if the barrows could not be overlooked, the
spirits supposed to haunt them might merge into some other objects of
reverence. In Denmark the barrows are invariably regarded as the haunt
of fairies; and this is frequently the case in other countries.[169]
When men once became habituated to think of a barrow as not the outward
and visible form of some spirit, but simply its dwelling-place--still
more, perhaps, if many interments took place within it, so that it
became the dwelling-place of many spirits--they would be led by an easy
transition to think of rocks, fountains, hills, and other natural
objects in the same way. The spirits once supposed to be their inner
identity would become perfectly separable in thought from them, because
merely their tenants. Thus the gulf would be bridged between the savage
philosophy of spirits described by Mr. Im Thurn, and the polytheism of
the higher heathendom, represented by Mexico, Scandinavia, and Greece.

But whether they travelled by this, or any different road, certain it is
that in the remoter times of the higher heathendom men had arrived no
further than the belief that certain spots, and preferably certain
striking objects, were the abodes of their gods. This was a doctrine
developed directly from that which regarded the more remarkable objects
of nature as the bodies of powerful spirits. Nor was it ever entirely
abandoned; for even after the more advanced and thoughtful of the
community had reached the idea of an Olympus, or an Asgard, far removed
above the every-day earth of humanity, the gods still had their temples,
and sacred legends still attached to places where events of the divine
history had happened. Consequently some localities