I'm reading Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges's The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome. It starts off with the ancient, one might say, primitive religious beliefs embodied first in rituals around burial, preparing the body, visiting it, bring it food and wine, in effect respecting even worshiping the dead, one's ancestors, and then moves on to rituals around the hearth and keeping the family fire going, making offerings to it, thanking and pleading from it good fortune. It was initially a bit off-putting but the author sources it in ancient myths, poems, songs, plays and, having studied a bit of Greek and Roman Mythology, it became very convincing. I saw the same when I lived in Japan for a time in the old Shinto religion the people there still practice as custom without really knowing why. One imagines the American Indian with the same view of religion and life. It imbues life with mysticism, a sacredness lost to moderns who dispel it as mere myth, dismiss it as abstract imaginings of their own and denigrate it as primitive and uncultured.