major religions extirpated nearly every trace of the major pagan pantheons. Elements of the practice can be seen even today, with Christian accretions, where statues to various saints (such as St. Francis) protect gardens and grottos. Even the gargoyles found on older churches, could be viewed as guardians partitioning a sacred space. For centuries, Christianity fought a mop-up war against these lingering minor pagan deities, but they proved tenacious. For example, Martin Luther's Tischreden have numerous quite serious references to dealing with kobolds.<ref name="DWB">See Brüder Grimm, Wörterbuch", s.v. "kobold", "poltergeist", etc.</ref> Eventually, rationalism and the Industrial Revolution threatened to erase most of these minor deities, until the advent of romantic nationalism rehabilitated them and embellished them into objects of literary curiosity in the 19th century. Since the 20th century this literature has been mined for characters for role-playing games, video games, and other fantasy personae, not infrequently invested with invented traits and hierarchies somewhat different from their mythological and folkloric roots. Origins in animism and ancestor worship Shinto as an exemplar of development The general dynamics of the origin and development of household deities over a considerable span may be traced and exemplified by the historically attested origins and current practices of the Shinto belief system in Japan. As the Japanologist Lafcadio Hearn put it: Drawing the picture with broader strokes, he continues: Furthermore, Many Japanese houses still have a shrine (kamidana, kami shelf) where offerings are made to ancestral kami, as well as to other kami. Cultural evolution and survival Edward Burnett Tylor, one of the main founders of the discipline of cultural anthropology, spoke of survivals, vestiges of earlier evolutionary stages in a culture's development. He also coined the term animism. Tylor disagreed with Herbert Spencer, another founder of anthropology, as well as of sociology, about the innateness of the human tendency towards animistic explanations, but both agreed that ancestor worship was the root of religion and that domestic deities were survivals from such an early stage. Animism and totemism In contradistinction to both Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, who defended theories of animistic origins of ancestor worship, Émile Durkheim saw its origin in totemism. In reality this distinction is somewhat academic, since totemism may be regarded as particularized manifestation of animism, and something of a synthesis of the two positions was attempted by Sigmund Freud. In Freud's Totem and Taboo, both totem and taboo are outward