even though he was not at first conceived of as a spirit.  We know, by our own experience, how difficult it has become for us to think of an eternal, powerful, and immortal being, except as a spirit.  Yet this way of looking at the Supreme Being, merely as being, not as spirit, must have existed, granting that the idea of spirit has ghost for its first expression, as, by their very definition, the high gods of savages are not ghosts, and never were ghosts, but are prior to death.

Here let me introduce, by way of example, a Supreme Being not of the lowest savage level.  Metaphysically he is improved on in statement, morally he is stained with the worst crimes of the hungry ghost-god, or god framed on the lines of animism.  This very interesting Supreme Being, in a middle barbaric race, is the Polynesian Taa-roa, as described by Ellis in that fascinating book ’Polynesian Researches.’[39] ’Several of their taata-paari, or wise men, pretend that, according to other traditions, Taa-roa was only a man who was deified after death.’  Euhemerism, in fact, is a natural theory of men acquainted with ancestor-worship, but a Euhemeristic hypothesis by a Polynesian thinker is not a statement of national belief.  Taa-roa was ’uncreated, existing from the beginning, or from the time he emerges from the po, or world of darkness.’  In the Leeward Isles Taa-roa was Toivi, fatherless and motherless from all eternity.  In the highest heavens he dwells alone.  He created the gods of polytheism, the gods of war, of peace, and so on.  Says a native hymn, ’He was:  he abode in the void.  No earth, no sky, no men!  He became the universe.’  In the Windward Isles he has a wife, Papa the rock = Papa, Earth, wife of Rangi, Heaven, in Maori mythology.  Thus it may be argued, Taa-roa is no ‘primaeval theistic idea,’ but merely the Heaven-God (Ouranos in Greece).  But we may distinguish:  in the Zuni hymn we have the myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, but Heaven is not the Eternal, Awonawilona, who ‘thought himself out into the void,’ before which, as in the Polynesian hymn, ’there was no sky.’[40]

Whence came the idea of Taa-roa?  The Euhemeristic theory that he was a ghost of a dead man is absurd.  But as we are now among polytheists it may be argued that, given a crowd of gods on the animistic model, an origin had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa.  This would be more plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental polytheism to develop them out of.  In Tahiti, Atuas are gods, Oramutuas tiis are spirits; the chief of the spirits were ghosts of warriors.  These were mischievous:  they, their images, and the skulls of the dead needed propitiation, and these ideas (perhaps) were reflected on to Taa-roa, to whom human victims were sacrificed.[41]

Now this kind of horror, human sacrifice, is unknown, I think, in early savage religions of Supreme Beings, as in Australia, among the Bushmen, the Andamanese, and so on.  I therefore suggest that in an advanced polytheism, such as that of Polynesia, the evil sacrificial rites unpractised by low savages come to be attached to the worship even of the Supreme Being.  Ghosts and ghost-gods demanded food, and food was therefore also offered to the Supreme Being.