If an original monotheism is nowhere to be found, one might be tempted to believe conversely, that _polytheism_ represents the starting-point of all mythology. In fact, until very recently this was doubtless the consensus of opinion among mythologists and historians of religion, and the idea is still widely prevalent. For, if we hold in any way to the view that the god-idea is underived, there is but one recourse, once we abandon the idea of an original monotheism. The polytheistic theory is, as a rule, connected with the further contention that god-ideas are directly due to celestial phenomena. In substantiation of this view, it is pointed out that, with the exception of the gods of the underworld, the gods are usually supposed to dwell in the heavens. Accordingly, it is particularly the great heavenly bodies, the sun and the moon, or also the clouds and storms, to which--now to the one and now to the other, according to their particular tendency--these theories trace the origin of the gods. Celestial phenomena were present to man from the beginning, and it is supposed that they aroused his reflection from earliest times on. Those mythologists who champion the celestial theory of the origin of religion, therefore, regard god-ideas as in great measure the products of intellectual activity; these ideas are supposed to represent a sort of primitive explanation of nature, though an explanation, of course, which, in contrast to later science, is fantastical, arbitrary, and under the control of emotion. During the past century, moreover, this class of hypotheses has gradually placed less emphasis on emotional as compared with rational factors. In the first instance, it was the phenomena of storms, clouds, thunder, and lightning that were thought to be the basis of deity belief; later, the sun came to be regarded as the embodiment of the chief god; the present tendency is to emphasize particularly the moon, whose changing phases may easily give rise to various mythological ideas. Does not the proverbial 'man in the moon' survive even to-day as a well-known fragment of mythological conceptions of this sort? Similarly, the crescent moon suggests a sword, a club, a boat, and many other things which, though not conceived as gods, may at any rate be regarded as their weapons or implements. The gods, we are told, then gradually became distinguished from celestial objects and became independent personal beings. The heroes of the hero saga are said to be degenerated gods, as it were. When the myth attributes a divine parentage to the hero, or allows him to enter the realm of the gods upon his death, this is interpreted as indicative of a vague memory that the hero was once himself a god. The lowest place in the scale of heroes is given to the märchen-hero, though he also is supposed in the last analysis to have originated as a celestial deity. The märchen itself is thus regarded as the last stage in the decline of the myth, whose development is held to have been initiated in the distant past by the celestial myth. Accordingly, the most prevalent present-day tendency of nature mythology is to assume an orderly development of a twofold sort. On the one hand, the moon is regarded as having been the earliest object of cult, followed by the sun and the stars. Later, it is supposed, a distinction was made between gods and celestial objects, though the former were still given many celestial attributes. On the other hand, it is held that the gods were more and more anthropomorphized; their celestial origin becoming gradually obscured, they were reduced to heroes of various ranks, ranging from the heroic figures of the saga to the heroes of children's märchen. These theories of an original polytheism are rendered one-sided by the very fact that they are not based upon any investigations whatsoever concerning the gods and myths actually prevalent in folk-belief. They merely give an interpretation of hypothetical conceptions which are supposed to be original, and it is from these that the gods of actual belief are derived. Those who proceed thus believe that the task of the psychologist of religion and of the mythologist is completed with the demonstration that back of every deity of myth there lurks a celestial phenomenon. It has been maintained, for example, that every feature of the Biblical legend of Paradise had its origin in ideas connected with the moon. Paradise itself is the moon. The flaming sword of the angel who guards Paradise is the crescent moon. Adam is either the half-moon or the familiar man in the moon. Finally, Adam's rib, out of which Eve was created, is again the crescent moon.