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 THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHICAL ENVIRONMENT 
 UPON RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 
 
 BY 
 
 R. H. WHITBECK 
 
 University of Wisconsin 
 
 REPRINTED FROM 
 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW 
 Vol. V, No. 4 (April, 1918) 
 
 AMERICAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY 
 BROADWAY AT 156th STREET 
 NEW YORK 
 

 
| 
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{REPRINTED FROM The Geographical Review, VoL. V, No. 4, APRIL, 1918.] 
 
 THE INFLUENCE OF GEOGRAPHICAL ENVIRONMENT 
 UPON RELIGIOUS BELIEFS* 
 
 By R. H. WHITBECK 
 University of Wisconsin 
 
 In his ‘‘ History of Mankind’’ Ratzel says:' ‘‘Ethnography knows no 
 race devoid of religion, but only differences in the degree to which religious 
 ideas have developed.’’ Tolstoy (‘‘What Is Religion?’’) is even more 
 emphatic: ‘‘.... never in any society of men since men first became rational 
 creatures could they live or have they lived without a religion.’’ Notwith- 
 standing such unequivocal declarations, there are reported cases of tribes 
 in Australia, Tasmania, and some islands of Oceania among whose members 
 no evidence of religious ideas could be detected. Such tribes, however, 
 have been exceedingly rare; moreover, the utter absence of religion among 
 them is not admitted by all who observed and mingled with them.? It is 
 almost universally true that mankind, wherever found, has possessed some 
 beliefs that were essentially religious. Among the very lowest of these 
 superstitions is the fetish worship of the negro tribes of Africa. In the 
 main, this consisted of a crude worship of inanimate objects—even stones, 
 or pieces of wood—believed to possess some charm or magic. 
 
 ScoPE OF THIS ARTICLE 
 
 With this or similar irrational superstitions of the lowest races this paper 
 does not deal. Rather is it concerned with religion in the middle stages of 
 human culture; religions which were the product of thoughtful observation 
 of natural phenomena; those religions which represent the human mind 
 eroping for an explanation of the seemingly supernatural. Most of these 
 religions belonged to peoples who have a recorded history and who have 
 left a literature, hymns, or sacred books—the Aryans of India, the early 
 Persians, the Egyptians, Hebrews, Norse, and Teutons; or people of more 
 recent time but not high culture whom modern scholars have studied, such 
 as the North American Indians, the Aztecs, the Incas, and the tribes of 
 Central and Northern Asia. Among such peoples, wherever they existed, 
 there has always been found a religion befitting their stage of culture and 
 clearly influenced by their geographical environment. 
 
 
 
 
 
 * The writer wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Miss Annie Kirch, formerly a graduate student 
 in the Department of Geology and Geography in the University of Wisconsin; also the criticism of the 
 manuscript by Professor W. L. Westermann of the Department of History. 
 
 1 Friedrich Ratzel: History of Mankind (translated from the 2nd German edition), 3 vols., London, 
 1896-98; reference in Vol. 1, p. 40. 
 
 2 Wilhelm Bousset: What Is Religion? (trans.), New York, 1907, pp. 1 and 11. 
 
 316 
 
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT 317 
 
 FAacToRS IN RELIGION 
 
 Many factors combine to mold a people’s religious beliefs. Geographical 
 environment necessarily is one of these—sometimes a conspicuous influence, 
 sometimes only perceptible in minor ways. In certain of the old religions, 
 that of Greece for example, made up of elements borrowed from many 
 sources and modified by the contributions of many peoples through a long 
 past, the influence of geographical environment had nearly ceased to be 
 distinguishable. As a matter of fact, most of the historic religions of the 
 Mediterranean region and southwestern Asia had had a long evolution and 
 had acquired this composite character when we first know of them, yet all 
 of them reflect the influence of the lands and climates in which they grew, 
 and some of them to a notable degree. 
 
 Why should it not be so? Would anyone expect a people’s religion, 
 or philosophy, or lterature to grow up without being influenced by the 
 physical environment amid which it unfolded? In the very nature of 
 things any system of religious belief, in order to grow into acceptance as 
 a belief, must be in some sort of harmony with the mode of life, the economic 
 interests, and the geographical environment of the people. It is obvious 
 that if a tribe or group of tribes came to believe in the existence of certain 
 deities, they must have had experiences which engendered these beliefs; for 
 such beliefs grow out of experience, however distorted or illogical may be 
 the deductions from it. No small part of the religions of the type with 
 which we are dealing grew out of man’s early attempt to explain the 
 _ phenomena of nature which he saw about him but which he could not 
 comprehend. For example, he had not the shghtest knowledge of why it 
 lightened, thundered, or rained; why the wind blew, or the winter came; 
 why the sun rose and set. To him all such phenomena were mysteries, and 
 he tried to satisfy his mind concerning them by inventing fanciful myths 
 as we now invent more scientific hypotheses. 
 
 Basses oF Myrus 
 
 Tylor considers that all myths are early man’s inventions to satisfy his 
 desire to know ‘‘why?’’;? Andrew Lang regards them as savage man’s 
 way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity. He says that 
 savages give personality to sky, wind, sun, earth, etc., and think of them 
 as beings of some sort actuated by such motives as they themselves entertain. 
 
 Max Miiller inclines to the belief that religion grows out of ‘‘man’s 
 sense of the Infinite as awakened by natural objects calculated to stir that 
 sense.’’® 
 
 Bousset says: ‘‘Everything that is unusual, strange, or unexpected 
 
 3 E. B. Tylor: Primitive Culture, 2 vols., London, 1871. 
 4 Andrew Lang: ‘‘ Mythology’ in Encyclopzedia Britannica, lth edit., Vol. 19, p. 128. 
 5 F, Max Miiller: Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, New York, 1891. 
 
318 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW 
 
 attracts the religious attention of the savage...... Religion rests upon 
 fear of more or less unknown powers which everywhere surround the 
 existence of man.’’® Frazer states it thus: ‘‘A god is always brought in 
 to play the part of a cause: it is the imperious need of tracing the causes 
 of events which has driven man to discuss or invent a deity.’ 
 
 RELATION OF NATURE TO HUMAN LIFE 
 
 Early man was impressed by those particular phenomena of nature 
 which seemed most to affect his life. These might be the sun, the rain, the 
 wind, the overflow of a river, or something else. At any rate they would 
 be the elements of his particular environment. The ocean, for example, 
 would not, in the very nature of the case, be expected to play a part in the 
 mythology of the tribes of interior Asia or of Central Africa; but it did 
 play a part in the mythologies of Greece, Rome, and Scandinavia. The 
 annual overflow of a river was a matter of utmost consequence to the people 
 of Egypt; the cause of the periodical rise of the Nile was a mystery, but 
 the people knew that their very lives depended upon it, and the adoration 
 of the Nile inevitably became a part of their religion; but there was no 
 such river to influence the religion of Palestine or Norway or Persia.® 
 Again, the occurrence or the failure of the monsoon rains is a matter of 
 plenty or of famine to the people of India, and these seasonal rains could 
 scarcely escape playing a part in the early religions of that country; but to 
 the aborigines of the Amazon Valley, where the rain is so frequent as to be 
 an annoyance, the rain giver might easily be held in disfavor. 
 
 FRIENDLY AND UNFRIENDLY Gops 
 
 A god is beneficent if he gives us what we in our particular environment 
 most feel the need of, and he is malevolent if he withholds it or sends what 
 we do not desire. Happenings over which man has no control may be 
 either beneficial or baneful to him; he can not account for these except 
 on the supposition that there are good deities and evil ones, and so 
 mythologies always involve the existence of friendly gods and unfriendly 
 ones. The satan of Egypt, according to Plutarch, was Typhon, a malevolent 
 deity that sent the hot wind and dried up the pools and the soil and 
 parched the vegetation. The satan of India was Vritra, the serpent which, 
 in the form of clouds, caught and held back the rain, for the ancient 
 Hindus thought the rain fell from above the clouds and was caught by 
 them. Indra, the beneficent god, pierced them with his lightning and 
 liberated the rain. In Norway the evil deities were the frost giants (or 
 
 6 Bousset, op. cit., pp. 35-37. 
 
 7J. G. Frazer: Belief in Immortality (Gifford Lectures), New York, 1918, Vol. 1, p. 22. 
 
 8 Plutarch considered that Osiris, one of Egypt’s two chief deities, originally typified the Nile, and Isis 
 the land of Egypt, and that their wedding was the overflow of the Nile. 
 
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT 319 
 
 mountains) against whom Thor and Odin and other deities waged relent- 
 less war.® 
 
 It is not surprising that a primitive people should thus associate the 
 phenomena of nature which benefited them with good deities and the 
 phenomena that injured them with bad deities, and that all this reasoning 
 was influenced by the character of the land and climate in which the people 
 lived.*° 
 
 Various HEAVENS 
 
 In all religions that recognize a future life, heaven is a place where 
 happiness is to be had; but man’s conception of what complete happiness 
 consists in is inseparable from his mode of life, as well as from his stage of 
 enlightenment. To the American Indian’s thought heaven was a hunting- 
 eround, abounding in game, and a place to which dogs as well as men might 
 eo. The Indian’s conception of paradise was born of his mode of living, 
 and that was a response to his particular environment while he was in a 
 certain stage of development—the hunting stage. But his heaven would 
 not be that of pastoral tribes of steppes, of island fisher folk, of agricultural 
 peoples of flood plains, or of nomads in deserts., When James Bryce visited 
 the lofty plateaus of the Central Andes he wrote: ‘‘One is never warm 
 except when actually in the sunlight...... The inhabitants get accustomed 
 to these conditions and shiver in their ponchos, but the traveler is rather 
 wretched after sunset and feels how natural was sun-worship in such a 
 country.’’"? 
 
 Tuer BLEssInGc ofr RAIN 
 
 Among the Indian tribes of our Southwest religious ceremonies were 
 notably directed to the securing of rain. The majority of all the ceremonies 
 of the Hopis are for rain and crops, and their prayers to clan or other gods 
 are to secure these things.12 Summarizing his account of the elaborate 
 ceremonials of the Hopi Indians, whose word for ‘‘blessing’’ is the same 
 as for ‘‘rain,’’ Fewkes says:** ‘‘The necessities of life have driven man 
 into the agricultural condition, and the aridity of the climate has forced 
 him to devise all possible means at his control to so influence his gods as to 
 
 
 
 9** The influence that the outward features of a country exercise upon the thoughts and feelings of 
 men, especially during the vigorous, imaginative, poetic, and prophetic childhood of a nation, can hardly 
 be overestimated. Necessarily, therefore, do we find this influence affecting and modifying a nation’s 
 mythology, which is a childlike people’s thoughts and feelings, contemplating nature reflected in a system 
 of religion.’”’ (R. B. Anderson: Norse Mythology, 8rd edit., Chicago, 1879, p. 64.) 
 
 10 ** The Vedic poems furnish indisputable evidence that such as this was the origin and growth of 
 Greek and Teutonic mythology. In these poems the names of many, perhaps of most, of the Greek gods 
 indicate natural objects.... In them Daphneis....the morning twilight....; the cattle of Helios... 
 are....the light-colored clouds... ; Herakles [is] the toiling and struggling sun.’’ (G.W.Cox: Mythology 
 of the Aryan Nations, 2 vols., London, 1870; reference in Vol. 1, p. 52.) 
 
 1l James Bryce: South America: Observations and Impressions, New York, 1912, p. 172. 
 
 12 J, W. Fewkes: An Interpretation of Katcina Worship, Journ. Amer. Folk-Lore, Vol. 14, 1901, p. 92. 
 
 13 J, W. Fewkes: The Tusayan Ritual, Ann. Rept. Smithsonian Inst. for 1895, pp. 683-700, 
 
320 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW 
 
 force them to send the rains to aid him. Wherever we turn in an intimate 
 study of the ceremonials of the Tusayan Indians, we see the imprint of the 
 arid deserts by which they are surrounded, always the prayer for abundant 
 crops and rains for his parched fields.’’ Hach environment will breed its 
 own mode of thought, its own philosophy of life, its own religious beliefs. 
 
 THE Desert NomaAp’s PARADISE 
 
 In Norse mythology, heaven was a place of warmth and hell a place of 
 eold and mist; but in the religions of Palestine and Arabia, hell is a place 
 of heat—of eternal fire. To the Arab of the desert, paradise was dreamed 
 of as an oasis, or a garden, always having flowing water, shade trees, and 
 fruit. A few of many passages in the Koran will indicate the desert 
 nomad’s idea of paradise; Mohammed naturally pictured to his followers 
 the kind of heaven which desert tribes would desire, and so he writes: 
 ‘‘This is the description of paradise, which is promised to the pious. It 
 is watered by rivers; its food is perpetual, and its shade also: this shall 
 be the reward of those who fear God; but the reward of the infidel shall 
 be hell-fire.’’4* And again: ‘‘Those who fear God shall dwell in gardens, 
 amidst fountains.’’?° ‘‘God will introduce those who shall believe, and act 
 righteously, into gardens through which rivers flow.’’*® 
 
 This same conception of the fitting place for the good and for the wicked 
 after death was taught by Zoroaster to the Persians more than a thousand 
 years before the Koran was written. In Max Miller’s translation of the 
 ‘‘Sacred Books of the East’’ is given Zoroaster’s picture of the abode of 
 the wicked after death:17 ‘‘If a person sins, his dwelling place shall be 
 the place on this earth wherein is least water and fewest plants; whereof 
 the ground is cleanest and driest and least passed through by flocks and 
 herds.’’ Plainly, this is a pastoral people’s conception. 
 
 RAIN AND RESURRECTION 
 
 Even the Mohammedan’s belief in the resurrection of the dead seems to 
 be based upon what he saw about him in his arid environment. He saw 
 the annual death of the sparse vegetation, but later saw this spring into 
 life when the rain came. Mohammed writes: ‘‘God sendeth down water 
 from heaven and causeth the earth to revive after it hath been dead. 
 Verily herein is a sign of the resurrection unto people who harken.’’!® 
 ‘‘Consider therefore the traces of God’s mercy; how he quickeneth the 
 earth, after its state of death; verily the same will raise the dead; for he is 
 almighty.’’?® ‘‘One sign of the resurrection unto them is the dead earth; 
 we quicken the same by the rain, and produce thereout various sort of 
 grain, of which they eat.’’*° 
 
 14 Koran, Ch. 13. 15 Tbid., Ch. 15. 16 Tbid., Ch. 20. 
 
 17 F, Max Miiller: The Sacred Books of the East, London, 1879-1895, Vol. 4, p.3. 
 18 Koran, Ch. 16. 19 Tbid., Ch. 30. 20 Ibid., Ch. 36. 
 
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT 321 
 
 Tuer WALLED CITy 
 
 To the ancient Hebrew of Palestine, living in an agricultural and 
 pastoral land surrounded by marauding desert tribes and always open to 
 raids, a walled city seems to have been the symbol of safety, a place to 
 which one might flee and find peace and security. Through the association 
 of ideas the Hebrew writers made heaven a walled city with gates of 
 pearl and streets of gold. Such a conception would not occur to people 
 whose warring life and whose environment did not make the walled city 
 a place of security, refuge, and desire. 
 
 “Whether a people conceive of heaven as a place of eternal rest, or as a 
 oarden with shade and flowing water, or.as a happy hunting ground, or a 
 walled city, or as a great hall like the Norse Valhalla, where those who 
 die in battle continue to fight for Odin, will naturally depend upon what 
 that particular people regards as the acme of happiness; and this in turn 
 will depend upon the special kinds of discomfort, privation, unhappiness, 
 want, and suffering to which that people is subjected—in short the adverse 
 elements in its environment. 
 
 MetapHors DRAWN FROM ENVIRONMENT 
 
 Religious teachings and doctrines are commonlye metaphorical in phrase- 
 ology. This being the case the metaphors must be drawn from the peoples’ 
 environment if they are to be effective.2t, The Founder of Christianity 
 said, ‘‘I am the vine; ye are the branches.’’ He probably would not have 
 chosen that phraseology in England or Norway. Referring to his followers 
 he said, ‘‘Feed my lambs,’’ ‘‘The sheep shall be separated from the goats,’’ 
 ‘‘T am the good shepherd and know my sheep,’’ ‘‘The shepherd giveth his 
 life for his sheep,’’ ‘‘I will send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,’’ 
 and scores of similar expressions. It is said that when the missionaries in 
 Greenland sought to present these passages to the Eskimo they found it 
 necessary to change ‘‘sheep’’ and ‘‘lambs’’ to ‘‘seals’’ and ‘‘little seals’’; 
 otherwise the figure meant nothing to him. The repeated references of 
 our Bible to the vine, the fig, the olive, the sheep, and the goats, are clearly 
 a response to the environment and mode of life characteristic of Palestine 
 and regions like it. Had the Founder of Christianity lived elsewhere, the 
 parables and the metaphors which he used must have been differently 
 chosen to be made impressive.”” 
 
 Norse MytTHOLOoGY 
 
 Among all of the Teutonic and Celtic peoples trees and groves played 
 a part in religious ideas. According to the ancient Norse mythology the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 21‘* Tn all the phrases which describe India the local coloring arising from the climate of northern 
 India may be plainly discerned.” (Cox: op. cit., p. 161.) 
 
 22 *‘ The character of mythical speech must necessarily be modified and its very phrases suggested by 
 the outward features and phenomena of the country..... The speech of the tropics .. . would tell rather 
 of splendor than of gloom.... But in the frost-bound regions of the North, the speech of the people would. 
 with a peculiar intensity of feeling, dwell on the tragedy of nature.’ (Jbid., p. 37.) 
 
322 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW 
 
 original man and woman were created from an ash and an elm tree, and 
 Odin’s mighty ash, Yeedrasill, supported the universe. Such conceptions 
 were as consistent in the forest lands of northern Europe as was the worship 
 of the Nile in Egypt or of the sun in Peru. 
 
 The Norse mythology is notably influenced by the geographical. environ- 
 ment, especially the cold climate, wind-swept mountains, and fiorded coast. 
 In warm and sunny Greece mountains were conceived of as a place of 
 delight, fit for gods to dwell in, especially Mt. Olympus and Mt. Ida.” In 
 the teachings of Zoroaster also the gods dwell on mountain tops. But these 
 were not the snow-capped, storm-swept, forbidding mountains of Seandi- 
 navia. In cold Norway the mountains were regarded as a race of hated 
 ciants against whom the gods continually fought; the blows of Thor’s 
 hammer, as he smote the giants, made the thunder. Odin’s eight-footed 
 horse was the wind from the four cardinal and four semi-cardinal points. 
 Baldur, the best-loved of Odin’s sons, was the summer sun that ruled for a 
 short season, only to be slain each winter. Njord was ruler of the ocean 
 winds and restrainer of the sea’s fury; while Frey, the son of Njord, pre- 
 sided over rain and sunshine and was the giver of the harvest. Each of 
 the three great Norse festivals was related to the change of the seasons. As 
 Anderson repeatedly points out, the early Norse religion was emphatically a 
 product of the Norseman’s land and climate. Although not a geographer and 
 so not viewing things with a geographic eye, he yet holds that all mythology 
 is the impersonation of nature’s forces and phenomena. He says: ‘‘Not 
 only the mythology considered as a whole, but even the character of its 
 speech and its very words and phrases must necessarily be suggested and 
 modified by the external features of the country.’’? ‘‘The harsh climate 
 of the North modified not only the Norse mythology, but also molded 
 indefinitely the national character, and then the two, the mythology and 
 the national character, acted and re-acted upon each other.’’ ‘‘Beholding 
 in external nature and in his mythology the struggle of conflicting forces, 
 he naturally looked on life as a field for warfare. The ice-bound fjords 
 and desolate fells, the mournful wail of the waving pine-branches, the stern 
 strife of frost and fire, the annual death of the shortlived summer, made 
 the Norseman somber, if not gloomy in his thoughts, and inured him to 
 the rugged independence of the country. ‘The sternness of the land in 
 which he lived was reflected in his character ; the latter was in turn reflected 
 in the tales which he told of his gods and heroes, and thus the Norseman 
 and his mythology mutually influenced each other.’’4 
 
 CHANGING GODS WITH CLIMATE 
 
 Another land in which the climate has features that powerfully influence 
 the life and prosperity of the people is India, with its recurring wet and 
 dry monsoons... If the summer monsoon brought ample rain, crops were 
 
 23 R. B. Anderson: op. cit. in footnote 9, p. 59. 24 Ibid., p. 127. 
 
RELIGION AND ENVIRONMENT 323 
 
 abundant, the people were fed, and a degree of comfort prevailed; but if 
 the rains failed, millions of people were hungry and thousands starved. A 
 phenomenon which so controlled the welfare of the people could scarcely 
 escape incorporation into their religion. The influence of this monsoon 
 climate in modifying the religion which the Aryan invaders of India 
 brought with them is most interesting. These invaders came from the arid 
 plateaus northwest of India and entered, as all its invaders by land have 
 entered, at the northwest. The hymns of the Rigveda throw a flood of 
 light upon the character of these ancient Aryans. They were pastoral 
 people and came from a region of little and uncertain rain. In India they 
 became an agricultural people whose harvests were vitally dependent upon 
 a regular recurrence of rain. The change in their environment and mode 
 of life is reflected in their change of religion. When they entered India, 
 their chief deity was Dyaus (Sky); Indra, his son, the rain-giving deity, 
 was of minor rank. As time went on a change took place; gradually 
 Dyaus shrank to a secondary deity, and Indra, the rain-giver, rose to the 
 place of supreme reverence. In his ‘‘Outlines of Primitive Belief,’’ Keary 
 says that among the most genuine hymns of the Rigveda about 265 are 
 addressed to Indra, 233 to Agni (Fire), and not over fifty or sixty to 
 Dyaus or some other god. 
 
 Here is an example of the displacement of a supreme deity by a sub- 
 ordinate one in response to a change in geographic environment. Indra 
 became the most revered god of the Aryans because, according to their 
 belief, he gave them the essential thing in their existence—rain. Murray 
 says: ‘‘In a land with the climatic conditions of India and among agri- 
 cultural people, it was but natural that the god whose fertilizing showers 
 brought the corn and vine to maturity should be regarded as the greatest 
 of all.’’> A further confirmation is given by Hopkins: ‘‘It is impossible 
 for any sober scholar to read the Rigveda and believe that the Vedic poets 
 are not worshiping natural phenomena, or that the phenomena so worshiped 
 were not the original forms of these gods.’’® He believes that climatic 
 environment conditioned the evolution of Hindu theology. 
 
 FAITH AND PHENOMENA 
 
 Keary is authority for the statement that the specialists in every field, 
 Vedic, Persian, Greek, Roman, Teutonic, and Celtic, believe themselves to 
 have discovered that the religious creeds of all these peoples go back to the 
 worship of the phenomena and objects of their natural environment.”’7 He 
 goes so far as to declare that never in early times shall we find a god unlinked 
 to external phenomena. ‘‘Wherever we turn,’’ says Brinton,’ ‘‘in time or 
 in space to the earliest and simplest religions of the world, we find them 
 
 25 A.S. Murray: Manual of Mythology, London, 1873, p. 330. 
 
 26 —. W. Hopkins: The Religions of India(Handbooks on the History of Religions, edit. by M. Jastrow), 
 Boston, 1895, p. 10. 
 
 27 C. F. Keary: Outlines of Primitive Belief, New York, 1912, p. 10. 
 
 23D. G. Brinton: Religions of Primitive Peoples New York, 1897, p. 9, 
 
324 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW 
 
 dealing with nearly the same objective facts in nearly the same subjective 
 fashion, the differences being due to local and temporal causes.’’ Speaking 
 of the origin of myths, Murray says:*® ‘‘It seems probable that the first 
 phenomena that appealed to the mind were those of the change of the 
 weather or seasons, the revolving day and the revolving year. At any rate, 
 the earliest deities, as well as we can trace them, appear to be those who 
 presided over the movements of the celestial sphere.’’ It is common among 
 - comparative mythologists to say that the farther back you trace a myth, 
 the more ‘‘atmospheric’’ the gods become. 
 
 Cox considers that the Greek and Norse mythologies sprang from the 
 same Aryan sources; that both have grown up chiefly from names which 
 have been grouped around the sun. The Greek mythology grew mainly 
 out of expressions which describe the recurrence of day and night; the 
 Norse mythology out of those which describe the alternation of summer 
 and winter.*° The difference seems entirely logical, for in Greece the 
 change from summer to winter was a moderate one; but in Norway it meant 
 the coming on of the long, dreary, sub-Arctic aati with days that had 
 only a few hours of light. 
 
 It is said that in practically all religions of the ioe order the chief 
 deity is placed in the sky and presides over the phenomena of the sky. 
 ‘‘Dyaus, Zeus, Divus, Theos, Deus, Juno, Diana, Dianus, or Janus, with 
 many others, are outgrowths from the same root dyu, ‘to shine.’ ”’ 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 In concluding his ‘‘Outlnes of Primitive Belief,’’ Keary says: ‘‘The 
 foregoing chapters must have made it plain that the creed of a people is 
 always greatly dependent upon their position on this earth, upon the 
 scenery amid which their life is passed and the natural phenomena to which 
 they become habituated; that the religion of men who live in woods will 
 not be the same as that of the dwellers in wide, open plains; nor the creed 
 of those who live under an inclement sky, the sport of storms and floods, 
 the same as the religion of men who pass their lives in sunshine and calm 
 WAR ts 
 
 It has been the aim of this paper to point out one of the significant 
 influences which give shape to a people’s religious beliefs, namely, the 
 influence of geographical environment, and to suggest how logical it is that 
 the religion of the Arab, of the Hindu, of the Egyptian, or of the Inca 
 should reflect the dominant features of their environment. The writer is 
 aware that the environment does not make the religion or necessarily even 
 dominate it, but it inevitably modifies it. ‘‘There are,’’ says Fewkes, 
 ‘‘ecertain common components of all cults which are as widely spread as the 
 races of man and exist independently of all surroundings, while there are 
 others which are profoundly affected by environment. ’’®? 
 
 29 Murray: op. cit., p. 8. 30 Cox: op. cit., pp. 80, 31, 37, 38. 31 Keary: op. cit., p. 325. 
 32 Fewkes: op. cit. in footnote 13, p. 684. 
 
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