As the process of distillation evolved in the skilled hands of Scottish Highlanders and islanders, the primitive spirits, though still potent, gradually became more palatable as the centuries passed.
From wolves to whales, primitive cultures worshiped the spirits of powerful animals.
Various minor nature spirits—such as the spirits of water, fire, mountains, winds, and other spirits recognized in primitive religions are generally neutral, but, in order to keep them that way or to make them beneficial to man, proper sacrifices and rituals must be performed.
At a higher stage, the spiritual principle is attributed to aspects of reality other than human beings, and all things are believed to possess spirits that are their effective and animating elements; for example, primitive peoples generally believe that spirits cause sickness and control their destinies.
According to a primitive Slavic belief, a forest spirit, leshy, regulates and assigns prey to hunters.
The art that remained after these colossal excisions included such items as folk songs that peasants might sing in the fields as they worked and pictures and stories either illustrating the tenets of primitive Christianity or fostering the spirit of Christianity by promoting brotherhood.
In one of the work's most striking insights, Cohn claimed that Joachim of Fiore, a 12th-century Calabrian abbot, anticipated Marxism, with Joachim's successive ages of the Father, the Son and the Spirit reappearing as primitive communism, class society and the final withering away of the state.
The centuries of civilization fall away and the brutal kill or be killed spirit that supposedly characterized primitive man emerges.
Like the demons and evil spirits of nature in primitive religions, the fallen angels were viewed as the agents of famine, disease, war, earthquakes, accidental deaths, and various mental or emotional disorders.
