knowledge of God.  He believes that the Creator is a magnified non-natural man, living in the sky.’  The Gippsland or Fuegian or Blackfoot Supreme Being is just a Being, anthropomorphic, not a mrart, or ‘spirit.’  The Supreme Being is a wesen, Being, Vui; we have hardly a term for an immortal existence so undefined.  If the being is an idealised first ancestor (as among the Kurnai), he is not, on that account, either man or ghost of man.  In the original conception he is a powerful intelligence who was from the first:  who was already active long before, by a breach of his laws, an error in the delivery of a message, a breach of ritual, or what not, death entered the world.  He was not affected by the entry of death, he still exists.

Modern minds need to become familiar with this indeterminate idea of the savage Supreme Being, which, logically, may be prior to the evolution of the notion of ghost or spirit.

But how does it apply when, as by the Kurnai, the Supreme Being is reckoned an ancestor?

It can very readily be shown that, when the Supreme Being of a savage people is thus the idealised First Ancestor, he can never have been envisaged by his worshippers as at any time a ghost; or, at least, cannot logically have been so envisaged where the nearly universal belief occurs that death came into the world by accident, or needlessly.

Adam is the mythical first ancestor of the Hebrews, but he died, [Greek:  uper moron], and was not worshipped.  Yama, the first of Aryan men who died, was worshipped by Vedic Aryans, but confessedly as a ghost-god.  Mr. Tylor gives a list of first ancestors deified.  The Ancestor of the Maudans did not die, consequently is no ghost; emigravit, he ’moved west.’  Where the First Ancestor is also the Creator (Dog-rib Indians), he can hardly be, and is not, regarded as a mortal.  Tamoi, of the Guaranis, was ‘the ancient of heaven,’ clearly no mortal man.  The Maori Maui was the first who died, but he is not one of the original Maori gods.  Haetsh, among the Kamchadals, precisely answers to Yama.  Unkulunkulu will be described later.[3]

This is the list:  Where the First Ancestor is equivalent to the Creator, and is supreme, he is—­from the first—­deathless and immortal.  When he dies he is a confessed ghost-god.

Now, ghost-worship and dead ancestor-worship are impossible before the ancestor is dead and is a ghost.  But the essential idea of Mungan-ngaur, and Baiame, and most of the high gods of Australia, and of other low races, is that they never died at all.  They belong to the period before death came into the world, like Qat among the Melanesians.  They arise in an age that knew not death, and had not reflected on phantasms nor evolved ghosts.  They could have been conceived of, in the nature of the case, by a race of immortals who never dreamed of such a thing as a ghost.  For these gods, the ghost-theory