In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.
From William Robertson Smith
The god can no more exist without his people than the nation without its god.
The god, it would appear, was frequently thought of as the physical progenitor or first father of his people.
The myths connected with individual sanctuaries and ceremonies were merely part of the apparatus of the worship; they served to excite the fancy and sustain the interest of the worshipper... no one cared what he believed about its origin.
This being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths.
We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit.
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