ior patterns to help explain the phenomena of nature--such processes as sun, moon, stars, lightning, rain on one hand and such organism-specific processes as birth, sickness, death. In this regard, Frazer (8-9) says that primitive culture does not distinguish between the natural and supernatural but instead views the world as "mostly worked by supernatural agents . . . personal beings acting on impulss and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals." Evidence of ritual attending natural processes or the vicissitudes of human experience helps explain primitive worship from the Paleolithic through the Neolithic period as pointing in the direction of "the idea of a man-god" (Frazer 9), or, later, king-god.
Embedded into primitive religion is sympathetic magic, which refers to the view that man (for exmple) "can make the sun to shine, and can hasten or stay its going down" (Frazer 13). Spiritual consciousness, per se, says Frazer, including religion as propitiatory, is a much later idea, but in its primitive state still affiliated with the magic of spiritual agency:
The conception of gods as supernatural beings entirely distinct from and superior to man . . . slowly evolved in the course of history. At first the supernatural agents are not regarded as . . . superior to man. . . . [But i]f he feels himself to be so frail and slight, how vast ans powerful must he deem the beings who control the gigantic machinery of nautre! . . . With the first advance of konwledge, tehrefore, prayer and sacrifice assume th leading place in religious ritual; and magic . . . is gradually relegated to the background (Frazer 30-32).
Polytheism and anthromorphic god-concepts, as well as goddess worship (the female being the figuration and hence logical example of cycles of life and death evident in nature) were in evidence in the neolithic period. Campbell cites neolithic spirituality dominated by "the bountiful goddess Earth, as the mo...