Zootheism is the offspring of hecastotheism. As the primitive believer
assigns special potency or mystery to the strong and the swift, he
gradually comes to give exceptional rank to self-moving animals; as his
experience of the strength, alertness, swiftness, and courage of his
animate enemy or prey increases, these animals are invested with
successively higher and higher attributes, each reflecting the mental
operations of the mystical huntsman, and in time the animals with which
the primitive believers are most intimately associated come to be regarded
as tutelary daimons of supernatural power and intelligence. At first the
animals, like the undifferentiated things of hecastotheism, are regarded
in fear or awe by reason of their strength and ferocity, and this regard
grows into an incipient worship in the form of sacrifice or other
ceremonial; meanwhile, inanimate things, and in due season rare and
unimportant animals, are neglected, and a half dozen, a dozen, or a score
of the well-known animals are exalted into a hierarchy of petty gods,
headed by the strongest like the bear, the swiftest like the deer, the
most majestic like the eagle, the most cunning like the fox or coyote, or
the most deadly like the rattlesnake. Commonly the arts and the skill of
the mystical huntsman improve from youth to adolescence and from
generation to generation, so that the later animals appear to be easier
snared or slain than the earlier; moreover, the accounts of conflicts
between men and animals grow by repetition and are gilded by imagination
as memory grows dim; and for these and other reasons the notion grows up
that the ancient animals were stronger, swifter, slier, statelier,
deadlier than their modern representatives, and the hierarchy of petty
gods is exalted into an omnipotent thearchy.
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