ON THE BEGINNINGS

As its subtitle, Primitive Man, his Religion and his Gods, indicates, this passive volume presents an all-embracing study of religious beliefs and practices among primitive peoples the world over and throughout the ages. Approaching his ast subject from the point of view of the anthropologist and archaeologist, the author writes of religious cults and superstitions from the days of Paleolithic ave-dwellers to those of Malayan head-hunters, from the Sumerians and Hittites o present-day African Bushmen and Pygmies. Basing his study on the evidence of archaeological remains and existing myths, he tells of rites widely separated in time and distance but astonishingly similar in practice; here are mother-goddesses, riests slain in ritual sacrifice, and sacred virgins; fertility and burial rites; religious castrations and tortures; sacred trees and animals, superstitions concerning birth, death, food, love-making, and the creation of the world. Carefully documented and encyclopedic in scope, this weighty book will be more at some in classrooms and libraries than on bedside tables; an excellent reference volume, it will be valued by scholars for its extensive bibliography as well as for its contents.