The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v1.c13.s2.47

v1.c13.s2.47

It is clear that the relations between the two species of divinities, the gods of nature, especially the lesser deities, and the spirits of animistic belief, must have been close in the extreme, and that there may have been a tendency for the latter sphere to intrude on the former, especially with the development of the belief in the transmigration of the soul, the origin of which we will have cause to consider later. Thus in the Petavatthu ² the spirit resident in a tree declares that it is not a god nor a Gandharva nor Indra, breaker of cities, but a dead man from Beruva, and the same text ³ places on the same basis the souls of the dead and the deity of a spot, clearly suggesting that the two are closely akin. These passages cannot safely be used with Oldenberg ⁴ in support of the derivation of spirits from the souls of the dead: the spirit in the tree in more primitive thought must surely have been, as the Vedic evidence proves, a tree spirit, and the *genius loci* was not, we may be sure, primitively merely the soul of a dead man.