Names what archaic religion considers as both beneficent and terrible, being the name for what both protects the community from without and threatens it from within.
The sacred is good to respect at a distance, and to ritually and reverently propitiate in quest of its protection; it is terrible in its proximity, being imagined as the unearthly cause of natural calamities: plague, drought, famine.
Ritual propitiation does not allay these scourges, but scrupulous attention, variation and refinement of ritual techniques may advance technologies, affording possibilities of pre-scientific induction in metallurgy, agriculture, and animal husbandry.