Body

Thus, he began to look at the spirit as a double of man, able to leave the body, live and act independently of this body. Hence it was natural for primitive man to look upon death as the final separation of the spirit from the body; but it was assumed that even after death the spirit continued to live, without interrupting its relations with its kind and tribe. Since, according to the savage, the spirit is only a double of man in the conditions of bodily existence, the burial of the dead was accompanied by rites that aim to provide him in the afterlife with all that he needed in the earthly life; with the dead began to be buried or burned food, hunting and war tools, even wives and slaves. At the same time there is a cult of the dead-offering them sacrifices, arrangement in honor of their festivals, appeal to them with requests or prayers, and so on. The purpose of this cult is to gain the favor of the deceased and protect themselves from his evil actions.

The greatest object of veneration in this case “are those who died, and during life enjoyed priority value and honor, namely, first, the fathers of families and with the growth of generations, whole rows of ancestral ancestors, and secondly, in the case of more extensive and complex social groups, various representatives of the Supreme power, priestly and military, and other influential people (wizards, soothsayers), Thus, as the souls of deceased relatives become household gods, so the souls of deceased rulers and charmers become national gods” (VL. Soloviev).

But how could the deification of nature and its phenomena arise from this cult of dead ancestors? Spencer and Taylor don’t give the same answers to this question. According to Spenser, the savage came to the religious worship of natural phenomena after he formed the idea of moving the souls of people after their death in various objects and phenomena of nature, while the worship of the souls of deceased ancestors was naturally transferred to those objects of nature, which the savage considered the home of these souls. Such a transformation of the cult of the dead into the cult of nature could be facilitated by the names and nicknames worn by the dead during their lifetime. Let any chief of a tribe be called in life Thunder, Dawn, Tiger, or swift-footed DOE; after death, he first becomes the object of religious worship, but then, when the memory of this historical person is lost and only his name remains, religious reverence is transferred from the forgotten dead to the physical object, the name of which was acquired by him. Thus there is a religious worship of thunder, dawn, tiger or deer.