Mittelalters (1853); J. Görres, Die christliche Mystik (new ed., 1879-| MYTHOLOGY (Gr. uveoλoyia, the science which examines ulo, myths or legends of cosmogony and of gods and heroes. Mythology is also used as a term for these legends themselves. Thus when we speak of " the mythology of Greece " we mean the whole body of Greek divine and heroic and cosmogonic legends. When we speak of the" science of mythology we refer to the various attempts which have been made to explain these ancient narratives. Very early indeed in the history of human thought men awoke to the consciousness that their religious stories were much in want of explanation. The myths of civilized peoples, as of Greeks and the Aryans of India, contain two elements, the rational and what to modern minds seems the irrational. The rational myths are those which represent the gods as beautiful and wise beings. The Artemis of the Odyssey "taking her pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer, while with her the wild wood-nymphs disport them, and high over them all she rears her brow, and is easily to be known where all are fair," is a perfectly rational mythic representation of a divine being. We feel, even now, that the conception of a "queen and huntress, chaste and fair," the lady warden of the woodlands, is a beautiful and natural fancy which requires no explanation. On the other hand, the Artemis of Arcadia, who is confused with the nymph Callisto, who, again, is said to have become a she-bear, and later a star, and the Brauronian Artemis, whose maiden ministers danced a bear-dance, are goddesses whose legend seems unnatural, and is felt to need explanation. Or, again, there is nothing not explicable and natural in the conception of the Olympian Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god who turns everywhere his shining eyes" and beholds all things. But the Zeus whose grave was shown in Crete, or the Zeus who played Demeter an obscene trick by the aid of a ram, or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who was merely a rough stone, or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and in great need of explanation. It is this irrational and unnatural elementas Max Müller says, "the silly, savage and senseless element" --that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it. Early Explanations of Myths.-The earliest attempts at a crude science of mythology were efforts to reconcile the legends of the gods and heroes with the religious sentiment which recognized in these beings objects of worship and respect. Closely as religion and myth are intertwined, it is necessary to hold them apart for the purposes of this discussion. Religion may here be defined as the conception of divine, or at least supernatural powers entertained by men in moments of gratitude or of need and distress, in hours of weakness, when, as Homer says, 'all folk yearn after the gods." Now this conception may be rude enough, and it is nearly related to purely magical ideas, to efforts to secure supernatural aid by magical ceremonies. Still the roughest form of spiritual prayer has for its basis the hypothesis of beneficent beings, visible or invisible. The senseless stories or myths about the gods are soon felt to be at variance with this hypothesis. As an example we may take the instance of Qing, the Bushman hunter. Qing, when first he met white men, was asked about his religion. He began to explain, and mentioned Cagn. Mr Orpen, the chief magistrate of St John's Territory, asked: "Is Cagn good or malicious? how do you pray to him?" Answer (in a low imploring tone): "O Cagn! O Cagn! are we not your children? do you not see our hunger? give us food;' and he gives us both hands full" (Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874). Here we see the religious view of Cagn, the Bushman god. But in the mythologicai account of Cagn given by Qing he appears as a kind of grasshopper, supernaturally endowed, the hero of a most absurd cycle of senseless adventures. Even religion is affected by these irrational notions, and the gods of savages and of many civilized peoples are worshipped with cruel, obscene, and irrational rites. But, on the whole, the religious sentiment strives to transcend the mythical conceptions of the gods, and is shocked and puzzled by the mythical narratives. As soon as this sense of perplexity is felt by poets, by priests, or by most men in an age of nascent criticism, explanations of what is most crude and absurd in the myths are put forward. Men ask themselves why their gods are worshipped in the form of beasts, birds, and fishes; why their gods are said to have prosecuted their amours in bestial shapes; why they are represented as lustful and passionate-thieves, robbers, murderers and adulterers. The answers to these questions sometimes become myths themselves. Thus both the Mangaians and the Egyptians have been puzzled by their own gods in the form of beasts. The Egyptians invented an explanation-itself a myth-that in some moment of danger the gods concealed themselves from their foes in the shapes of animals. The Mangaians, according to W. W. Gill, hold that "the heavenly family had taken up their abode in these birds, fishes, and reptiles."2 A people so curious and refined as the Greeks were certain to be greatly perplexed by even such comparatively pure mythical narratives as they found in Homer, still more by the coarser legends of Hesiod, and above all by the ancient local myths preserved by local priesthoods. Thus, in the 6th century before Christ, Xenophanes of Colophon severely blamed the poets for their unbecoming legends, and boldly called certain myths "the fables of men of old." Theagenes of Rhegium (520 B.C.?), according to the scholiast on Iliad, xx. 67, was the author of a very ancient system of mythology. Admitting that the fable of the battle of the gods was unbecoming," if literally understood, Theagenes represented it as an allegorical account of the war of the elements. Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestus were fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was water, Artemis was the moon, kai тà λοñà оuoiws. Or, by another system, the names of the gods represented moral and intellectual qualities. Heraclitus, too, disposed of the myth of the bondage of Hera as allegorical philosophy. Socrates, in the Cratylus of Plato, expounds " a philosophy which came to him all in an instant," an explanation of the divine beings based on crude philological analyses of their names. Metrodorus, rivalling some recent flights of conjecture, resolved not only the gods but even heroes like Agamemnon, Hector and Achilles "into clemental combinations and physical agencies." Euripides makes Pentheus (but he was notoriously impious) advance a 46 rationalistic" theory of the story that Dionysus was stitched up in the thigh of Zeus. When Christianity became powerful the heathen philosophers evaded its satire by making more and more use of the allegorical and non-natural system of explanation. That method has two faults. First (as Arnobius and Eusebius reminded their heathen opponents), the allegorical explanations are purely arbitrary, depend upon the fancy of their author, and are all equally plausible and equally unsupported by evidence. Secondly, there is no proof at all that, in the distant age when the myths were developed, men entertained the moral notions and physical philosophies which are supposed to be "wrapped up," as Cicero says, "in impious fables." Another system of explanation is that associated with the name of Eucmerus (316 B.C.). According to this author, the myths are history in disguise. All the gods were once men, whose real feats have been decorated and distorted by later fancy. This view suited Lactantius, St Augustine and other early Christian writers 1 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride. Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, p. 35 (1876). Cf. Lobeck. Aglaophamus, i. 151-152, on allegorical interpretation of myths in the mysteries. very well. They were pleased to believe that Euemerus "by | that Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary in North America, while historical research had ascertained that the gods were once but inclined to take a mystical view of the secrets concealed mortal men." Precisely the same convenient line was taken by Iroquois myths, had also pointed out the savage element by Sahagun in his account of Mexican religious myths. As surviving in Greek mythology." there can be no doubt that the ghosts of dead men have been Recent Mythological Systems.-Up to a very recent date worshipped in many lands, and as the gods of many faiths are students of mythology were hampered by orthodox traditions, tricked out with attributes derived from ancestor-worship, and still more by ignorance of the ancient languages and of the system of Euemerus retains some measure of plausibility. the natural history of man. Only recently have Sanskrit and While we need not believe with Euemerus and with Herbert the Egyptian and Babylonian languages become books not Spencer that the god of Greece or the god of the Hottentots absolutely sealed. Again, the study of the evolution of human was once a man, we cannot deny that the myths of both these institutions from the lowest savagery to civilization is essentially gods have passed through and been coloured by the imaginations a novel branch of research, though ideas derived from an of men who practised the worship of real ancestors. For unsystematic study of anthropology are at least as old as example, the Cretans showed the tomb of Zeus, and the Phocians Aristotle. The new theories of mythology are based on the (Pausanias x. 5) daily poured blood of victims into the tomb belief that "it is man, it is human thought and human of a hero, obviously by way of feeding his ghost. The language combined, which naturally and necessarily pro Hottentots show many tombs of their god, Tsui-Goab, and tell duced the strange conglomerate of ancient fable." But, while tales about his death; they also pray regularly for aid at the there is now universal agreement so far, modern mythologists tombs of their own parents.1 We may therefore say that, differed essentially on one point. There was a school (with while it is rather absurd to believe that Zeus and Tsui-Goab internal divisions) which regarded ancient fable as almost were once real men, yet their myths are such as would be entirely "a disease of language," that is, as the result of condeveloped by people accustomed, among other forms of religion, fusions arising from misunderstood terms that have survived in to the worship of dead men. Very probably portions of the speech after their original significance was lost. Another school legends of real men have been attracted into the mythic accounts (also somewhat divided against itself) believes that misunderof gods of another character, and this is the element of truth stood language played but a very slight part in the evoluat the bottom of Euemerism. tion of mythology, and that the irrational element in myths is merely the survival from a condition of thought which was once common, if not universal, but is now found chiefly among savages, and to a certain extent among children. The former school considered that the state of thought out of which myths were developed was produced by decaying language; the latter maintains that the corresponding phenomena of language were the reflection of thought. For the sake of brevity we might call the former the "philological" system, as it rests chiefly on the study of language, while the latter might be styled the "historical or "anthropological" school, as it is based on the study of man in the sum of his manners, ideas and institutions. Later Explanations of Mythology.-The ancient systems of explaining what needed explanation in myths were, then, physical, ethical, religious and historical. One student, like Theagenes, would see a physical philosophy underlying Homeric legends. Another, like Porphyry, would imagine that the meaning was partly moral, partly of a dark theosophic and religious character. Another would detect moral allegory alone, and Aristotle expresses the opinion that the myths were the inventions of legislators "to persuade the many, and to be used in support of law" (Met. xi. 8, 19). A fourth, like Euemerus, would get rid of the supernatural element altogether, and find only an imaginative rendering of actual history. When Christians approached the problem of heathen mythology, they sometimes held, with St Augustine, a form of the doctrine of Euemerus. In other words, they regarded Zeus, Aphrodite and the rest as real persons, diabolical not divine. Some later philosophers, especially of the 17th century, misled by the resemblance between Biblical narratives and ancient myths, came to the conclusion that the Bible contains a pure, the myths a distorted, form of an original revelation. The abbé Banier published a mythological compilation in which he systematically resolved all the Greek myths into ordinary history. Bryant published (1774) A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, wherein an Attempt is made to divest Tradition of Fable, in which he talked very learnedly of " that wonderful people, the descendants of Cush," and saw everywhere symbols of the ark and traces of the Noachian deluge. Thomas Taylor, at the end of the 18th century, indulged in much mystical allegorizing of myths, as in the notes to his translation of Pausanias (1794). At an earlier date (1760) De Brosses struck on the true line of interpretation in his little work Du Culte des dieux fétiches, ou parallèle de l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie. In this tract De Brosses explained the animal-worship of the Egyptians as a survival among a civilized people of ideas and practices springing from the intellectual condition of savages, and actually existing among negroes. A vast symbolical explanation of myths and mysteries was attempted by Friedrich Creuzer. The learning and sound sense of Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus, exploded the idea that the Eleusinian and other mysteries revealed or concealed matter of momentous religious importance. It ought not to be forgotten 1 Hahn, Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi, p. 113. De civ. dei., vii. 18; viii. 26. La Mythologie et les fables expliquées par l'histoire (Paris, 1738; 3 vols. 4to). Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (Leipzig and Darmstadt, 1836-1843). " The System of Max Müller.-The most distinguished and popular advocate of the philological school was Max Müller, whose views problem was to explain what he calls "the silly, savage and senseless may be found in his Selected Essays and Lectures on Language. The element "in mythology (Sel. Ess. i. 578). Max Müller says (speaking of the Greeks)," their poets had an instinctive aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, yet they would relate of their gods what would make the most savage of Red Indians creep and shudder "-stories, that is, of the cannibalism of Demeter, of the mutilation of Uranus, the cannibalism of Cronus, who swallowed his own children, and the like. "Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting." Max Müller refers the beginning of his system of mythology to the discovery of the connexion of the Indo-European or, as they are called, Aryan languages. Celts, Germans, speakers of Sanskrit and Zend, Latins and Greeks, all prove by their languages that their tongues may be traced to one family of speech. The comparison of the various words which, in different forms, are comlight on the original meaning of these words. Take, for example, mon to all Indo-European languages must inevitably throw much the name of a god, Zeus, or Athene, or any other. The word may have no intelligible meaning in Greek, but its counterpart in the allied tongues, especially in Sanskrit or Zend, may reveal the original of the names of the Greek gods, and to enter into the original intention "To understand the origin and meaning significance of the terms. of the fables told of each, we must take into account the collateral evidence supplied by Latin, German, Sanskrit and Zend philology " Lect. on Lang., 2nd series, p. 406). A name may be intelligible in Sanskrit which has no sense in Greek. Thus Athene is a divine name without meaning in Greek, but Max Müller advances reasons for supposing that it is identical with akana," the dawn," in Sanskrit. It is his opinion, apparently, that whatever story is told of Athene must have originally been told of the dawn, and that we must keep this before us in attempting to understand the legends of Athene. Thus again (op. cit. p. 410), he says. we have a right to explain all that is told of him" (Agni, "fire") "as originally meant for hire.' The system is simply this: the original meaning of the names of gode must be ascertained by comparative philology. The names, as a rule, will be found to denote elemental phenomena. And the silly, Mœurs des sauvages (Paris, 1724). Max Müller, Lectures on Language (1864), and serics, p. 410. | savage and senseless elements in the legends of the gods will be shown vitality." These words must reflect the thought of the men who use to have a natural significance, as descriptions of sky, storms, sunset, them before they react upon that thought and confirm it in its miswater, fire, dawn, twilight, the life of earth, and other celestial and conceptions. So far Spencer seems at one with the philological terrestrial existences. Stated in the barest form, these results do school of mythologists, but he warns us that the misconstructions not differ greatly from the conclusions of Theagenes of Rhegium, of language in his system are" different in kind, and the erroneous who held that "Hephaestus was fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was course of thought is opposite in direction." According to Spencer water, Artemis was the moon, kai rà λoimà òμoíws." But Max Müller's (and his premises, at least, are correct), the names of human beings system is based on scientific philology, not on conjecture, and is in an early state of society are derived from incidents of the moment, supported by a theory of the various processes in the evolution of and often refer to the period of the day or the nature of the weather. myths out of language. We find, among Australian natives, among Abipones in South It is no longer necessary to give an elaborate analysis of this theory, America, and among Ojibways in the North, actual people named because neither in its philological nor mythological side has it any Dawn,Gold Flower of Day, Dark Cloud, Sun, and so forth. Spencer's advocates who need be reckoned with. The attempt to disengage argument is that, given a story about real people so named, in process the history of times forgotten and unknown, by means of analysis of time and forgetfulness the anecdote which was once current of roots and words in Aryan languages, has been unsuccessful, or about a man named Storm and a woman named Sunshine will be has at best produced disputable results. Max Müller's system was a transferred to the meteorological phenomena of sun and tempest. result of the philological theories that indicated the linguistic unity Thus these purely natural agents will come to be "personalized" of the Indo-European or " Aryan " peoples, and was founded on an (Prin. Soc. 392), and to be credited with purely human origin and analysis of their language. But myths precisely similar in irrational human adventures. Another misconception would arise when men and repulsive character, even in minute details, to those of the had a tradition that they came to their actual seats from this mounAryan races, exist among Australians, South Sea Islanders, Eskimo, tain, or that lake or river, or from lands across the sea. They will Bushmen in Africa, among Solomon Islanders, Iroquois, and so mistake this tradition of local origin for one of actual parentage, forth. The facts being identical, an identical explanation should and will come to believe that, like certain Homeric heroes, they are be sought, and, as the languages in which the myths exist are essen- the sons of a river (now personified), or of a mountain, or, like a tially different, an explanation founded on the Aryan language is tribe mentioned by Garcilasso de la Vega, that they are descended likely to prove too narrow. Once more, even if we discover the from the sea. Once more, if their old legend told them that they original meaning of a god's name, it does not follow that we can came from the rising sun, they will hold, like many races, that they explain by aid of the significance of the name the myths about the are actually the children of the sun. By this process of forgetfulness god. For nothing is more common than the attraction of a more and misinterpretation, mountains, rivers, lakes, sun and sea would ancient story into the legend of a later god or hero. Myths of un- receive human attributes, while men would degenerate from a more known antiquity, for example, have been attracted into the legend sensible condition into a belief in the personality and vitality of of Charlemagne, just as the bons mots of old wits are transferred inanimate objects. As Spencer thinks ancestor-worship the first to living humorists. Therefore, though we may ascertain that Zeus form of religion, and as he holds that persons with such names as means" sky" and Agni" fire," we cannot assert, with Max Müller, sun, moon and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory that all the myths about Agni and Zeus were originally told of results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural fire and sky. When these gods became popular they would inevit-phenomena-dawn, wind, sky, night and the rest-are a kind of ably inherit any current exploits of earlier heroes or gods. These transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real exploits would therefore be explained erroneously if regarded as men and women. Partly by confounding the parentage of the originally myths of sky or fire. We cannot convert Max Müller's race with a conspicuous object marking the natal region of the race, proposition" there was nothing told of the sky that could not in partly by literal interpretation of birth names, and partly by literal some form or other be ascribed to Zeus" into "there was nothing interpretation of names given in eulogy "(such as Sun and Bull, ascribed to Zeus that had not at some time or other been told of the among the Egyptian kings), and also through "implicit belief in sky." This is also, perhaps, the proper place to observe that names the statements of forefathers," there has been produced belief in derived from natural phenomena-sky, clouds, dawn and sun-descent from mountains, sea, dawn, from animals which have become are habitually assigned by Brazilians, Ojibways, Australians and constellations, and from persons once on earth who now appear other savages to living men and women. Thus the story originally as sun and moon. A very common class of myths (see TOTEMISM) told of a man or woman bearing the name' "" dawn,"" cloud," assures us that certain stocks of men are descended from beasts, may be mixed up later with myths about the real celestial dawn, or from gods in the shape of beasts. Spencer explains these by the cloud or sun. For all these reasons the information obtained from theory that the remembered ancestor of a stock had, as savages philological analysis of names is to be distrusted. We must also often have, an animal name, as Bear, Wolf, Coyote, or what not. bear in mind that early men when they conceived, and savage men In time his descendants came to forget that the name was a mere when they conceive, of the sun, moon, wind, earth, sky and so forth, name, and were misled into the opinion that they were children of a have no such ideas in their minds as we attach to these names. real coyote, wolf or bear. This idea, once current, would naturally They think of sun, moon, wind, earth and sky as of living human stimulate and diffuse the belief that such descents were possible, beings with bodily parts and passions. Thus, even when we dis- and that the animals are closely akin to men. cover an elemental meaning in a god's name, that meaning may be all unlike what the word suggests to civilized men. A final objection is that philologists differ widely as to the true analysis and real meaning of the divine names. Max Müller, for example, connects Kronos (Kpóvos) with xpóros, "time"; Preller with xpalvw, "I fulfil," The civilized men of the Mythopoeic age were not obliged, as Max Müller held, to believe that all phenomena were persons, because the words which denoted the phenomena had genderterminations. On the other hand, the gender-terminations were survivals from an early stage of thought in which personal characteristics, including sex, had been attributed to all phenomena. This condition of thought is demonstrated to be, and to have been, universal among savages, and it may notoriously be observed among children. Thus Max Müller's theory that myths are "a disease of language seems destitute of evidence, and inconsistent with what is historically known about the relations between the language and the social, political and literary condition of men. Theory of Herbert Spencer. The system of Herbert Spencer, as explained in Principles of Sociology, has many points in common with that of Max Müller. Spencer attempts to account for the state of mind (the foundation of myths) in which man personifies and animates all phenomena. According to his theory, too, this habit of mind may be regarded as the result of degeneration, for in his view, as in Max Müller's, it is not primary, but the result of misconceptions. But, while language is the chief cause of misconceptions with Max Müller, with Spencer it is only one of several forces all working to the same result. Statements which originally had a different significance are misinterpreted, he thinks, and names of human beings are also misinterpreted in such a manner that early races are gradually led to believe in the personality of phenomena. He too notes" the defect in early speech "-that is, the "lack of words free from implications of vitality"-as one of the causes which "favour personalization." Here, of course, we have to ask Spencer, with Max Müller, why words in early languages "imply and so forth. " sun, The chief objection to these processes is that they require, as a necessary condition, a singular amount of memory on the one hand and of forgetfulness on the other. The lowest contemporary savages remember little or nothing of any ancestor farther back than the grandfather. But men in Spencer's Mythopoeic age had much longer memories. On the other hand, the most ordinary savage does not misunderstand so universal a custom as the imposition of names peculiar to animals or derived from atmospheric phenomena. He calls his own child Dawn or Cloud, his own name is Sitting Bull or Running Wolf, and he is not tempted to explain his great-grandfather's name of Bright Sun or Lively Raccoon on the hypothesis that the ancestor really was a raccoon or the sun. Moreover, savages do not worship ancestresses or retain lively memories of their great-grandmothers, yet it is through the female line in the majority of cases that the animal or other ancestral name is derived. The son of an Australian male, whose kin or totem name is Crane, takes, in many tribes, his mother's kin-name, Swan or Cockatoo, or whatever it may be, and the same is a common rule in Africa and America among races who rarely remember their great-grandfathers. On the whole, then (though degeneracy, as well as progress, is a force in human evolution), we are not tempted to believe in so strange a combination of forgetfulness with long memory, nor so excessive a degeneration from common sense into a belief in the personality of phenomena, as are required no less by Spencer's system than hy that of Max Müller. Preliminary Problems.-We have stated and criticized the more prominent modern theories of mythology. It is now necessary first to recapitulate the chief points in the problem, and then to attempt to explain them by a comparison of the The difficulty of mythology is to myths of various races. account for the following among other apparently irrational elements in myths: the wild and senseless stories of the beginnings of things, of the origin of men, sun, stars, animals, death, and the world in general; the infamous and absurd adventures of the gods; why divine beings are regarded as incestuous, adulterous, murderous, thievish, cruel, cannibals, and addicted to wearing the shapes of animals, and subject to death in some stories; the myths of metamorphosis into plants, beasts and stars; the repulsive stories of the state of the dead; the descents of the gods into the place of the dead, and their return thence. It is extremely difficult to keep these different categories of myths separate from each other. If we investigate myths of the origin of the world, we often find gods in animal form active in the work of world-making. If we examine myths of human descent from animals, we find gods busy there, and if we try to investigate the myths of the origin of the gods, the subject gets mixed up with the mythical origins of things in general. Our first question will be, Is there any stage of human society, and of the human intellect, in which facts that appear to us to be monstrous and irrational are accepted as ordinary occurrences of every day life? E. W. Lane, in his preface to the Arabian Nights, says that the Arabs have an advantage over us as story-tellers. They can introduce such incidents as the change of a man into a horse, or of a woman into a dog, or the intervention of an afreet, without any more scruple than our own novelists feel in describing a duel or the concealment of a will. Among the Arabs the actions of magic and of spirits are regarded as at least as probable and common as duels and concealments of wills in European society. It is obvious that we need look no farther for the explanation of the supernatural events in Arab romances. Now let us apply this system to mythology. It is admitted that Greeks, Romans, Aryans of India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, Egyptians of the Ptolemaic and earlier ages, were as much puzzled as we are by the mythical adventures of their gods. But is there any known stage of the human intellect in which these divine adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and converse with the dead, and all else that puzzles us in the civilized mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life? Our answer is that everything in the civilized mythologies which we regard as irrational seems only part of the accepted and rational order of things (at least in the case of "medicine-men" or magicians) to contemporary savages, and in the past seemed equally rational and natural to savages concerning whom we have historical information. Our theory is, therefore, that the savage and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, a legacy from ancestors of the civilized races who were in an intellectual state not higher than that of Australians, Bushmen, Red Indians, the lower races of South America, Mincopies, and other worse than barbaric peoples. As the ancestors of the Greeks, with the Aryans of India, the Egyptians, and others advanced in civilization, their religious thought was shocked and surprised by myths (originally dating from the period of savagery, and natural in that period) which were preserved down to the time of Pausanias by local priesthoods, or which were stereotyped in the ancient poems of Hesiod and Homer, or in the Brahmanas and Vedas of India, or were retained in the popular religion of Egypt. This theory recommended itself to Lobeck. "We may believe that ancient and early tribes framed gods like themselves in action and in experience, and that the allegorical element in myths is the addition of later peoples who had attained to purer ideas of divinity, yet dared not reject the religion of their ancestors" (Aglaoph. i. 153). The senseless element in the myths would by this theory be for the most part 122 survival." And the age and condition of human thought from which it survived would be one in which our most ordinary ideas about the nature of things and the limits of possibility did not yet exist, when all things were conceived of in quite other fashion-the age, that is, of savagery. It is universally admitted that "survivals" of this kind do account for many anomalies in out institutions, in law, politics, society, even in dress and manners. If isolated fragments of an earlier age abide in these, it is still more probable that other fragments will survive in anything so closely connected as mythology with the conservative religious sentiment. If this view of mythology can be proved, much will have been done to explain a problem which we have not yet touched, namely, the distribution of myths. The science of mythology has to account, if it can, not only for the existence of certain stories in the legends of certain races, but also for the presence of stories practically the same among almost all races. In the long history of mankind it is impossible to deny that stories may conceivably have spread from a single centre, and been handed on from races like the Indo-European and the Semitic to races as far removed from them in every way as the Zulus, the Australians, the Eskimo, the natives of the South Sea Islands. But, while the possibility of the diffusion of myths by borrowing and transmission must be allowed for, the hypothesis of the origin of myths in the savage state of the intellect supplies a ready explanation of their wide diffusion. Archaeologists are acquainted with objects of early art and craftsmanship, rude clay pipkins and stone weapons, which can only be classed as "human," and which do not bear much impress of any one national taste and skill. Many myths may be called "human " in this sense. They are the rough products of the early human mind, and are not yet characterized by the differentiations of race and culture. Such myths might spring up anywhere among untutored men, and anywhere might survive into civilized literature. Therefore where similar myths are found among Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, Mangaians and others, it is unnecessary to account for their wide diffusion by any hypothesis of borrowing, early or late. The Greek "key" pattern found on objects in Peruvian graves was not necessarily borrowed from Greece, nor did Greeks necessarily borrow from Aztecs the wave pattern which is common to both. The same explanation may be applied to Greek and Aztec myths of the deluge, to Australian and Greek myths of the original theft of fire. Borrowed they may have been, but they may as probably have been independent inventions. " It is true that some philologists deprecate as unscientific the comparison of myths which are found in languages not connected with each other. The objection rests on the theory that myths are a disease of language, a morbid offshoot of language, and that the legends in unconnected languages must therefore be kept apart. But, as the theory which we are explaining does not admit that language is more than a subordinate cause in the development of myths, as it seeks for the origin of myths in a given condition of thought through which all races have passed, we need do no more than record the objection. The Intellectual Condition of Savages. Our next step must be briefly to examine the intellectual condition of savages, that is, of races varying from the condition of the Andaman Islanders to that of the Solomon Islanders and the ruder Red Men of the American continent. In a developed treatise on the subject of mythology it would be necessary to criticize, with a minuteness which is impossible here, our evidence for the very peculiar mental condition of the lower races. Max Müller asked (when speaking of the mental condition of men when myths were developed), "was there a period of temporary madness through which the human mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in the south of India and the north of Iceland?" To this we may answer that the human mind had to pass through the savage stage of thought, that this stage was for all practical purposes 'identically the same everywhere, and that to civilized observers it does resemble a temporary madness." Many races are still abandoned to that temporary madness; many others which have escaped from it were observed and described while still labouring under its delusions. Our evidence for the intellectual ideas of man in the period of savagery we derive partly from the reports of voyagers, historians, missionaries, partly from an examination of the customs, institutions, and laws in which the lower races gave expression to their notions. " As to the first kind of evidence, we must be on our guard against several sources of error. Where religion is concerned, travellers in general and missionaries in particular are biased in several distinct ways. The missionary is sometimes anxious to prove that religion can only come by revelation, and that certain tribes, having received no revelation, have no religion or religious myths at all. Sometimes the missionary, on the other hand, is anxious to demonstrate that the myths of his heathen flock are a corrupted version of the Biblical narrative. In the former case he neglects the study of savage myths; in the latter he unconsciously accommodates what he hears to what he calls "the truth. The traveller who is not a missionary may either have the same prejudices, or he may be a sceptic about revealed religion. In the latter case he is perhaps unconsciously moved to put burlesque versions of Biblical stories into the mouths of his native informants, or to represent the savages as ridiculing the Scriptural traditions which he communicates to them. Yet again we must remember that the leading questions of a European inquirer may furnish a savage with a thread on which to string answers which the questions themselves have suggested. Have you ever had a great flood?" "Yes " "Was any one saved?" The question starts the invention of the savage on a deluge-myth, of which, perhaps, the idea has never before entered his mind. There still remain the difficulties of all conversation between civilized men and unsophisticated savages, the tendency to hoax, and other sources of error and confusion. By this time, too, almost every explorer of savage life is a theorist. He is a Spencerian, or a believer in the universal prevalence of the faith in an All-Father," or he looks everywhere for gods who are spirits of vegetation." In receiving this kind of evidence, then, we need to know the character of our informant, his means of communicating with the heathen, his power of testing evidence, and his good faith. His testimony will have additional weight if supported by the "undesigned coincidences" of other evidence, ancient and modern. If Strabo and Herodotus and Pomponius Mela, for example, describe a custom, rite or strange notion in the Old World, and if mariners and missionaries find the same notion or custom or rite in Polynesia or Australia or Kamchatka, we can scarcely doubt the truth of the reports. The evidence is best when given by ignorant men, who are astonished at meeting with an institution which ethnologists are familiar with in other parts of the world. savages. about the Another method of obtaining evidence is by the comparative study of savage laws and institutions. Thus we find in Asia, Africa, America and Australia that the marriage laws of the lower races are.connected with a belief in kinship or other relationship with animals. The evidence for this belief is thus entirely beyond suspicion. We find, too, that political power, sway and social influence are based on the ideas of magic, of metamorphosis, and of the power which certain men possess to talk with the dead and to visit the abodes of death. All these ideas are the stuff of which myths are made, and the evidence of savage institutions, in every part of the world, proves that these ideas are the universal inheritance of Savage men are like ourselves in curiosity and anxiety causas cognoscere rerum, but with our curiosity they do not possess Savage Ideas our powers of attention. They are as easily satisfied with an explanation of phenomena as they are eager World. to possess an explanation. Inevitably they furnish themselves with their philosophy out of their scanty stock of acquired ideas, and these ideas and general conceptions men. Curiosity and credulity, then, are the characteristics of the savage intellect. When a phenomenon presents itself the savage requires an explanation, and that explanation he makes for himself, or receives from tradition, in the shape of a myth. The basis of these myths, which are just as much a part of early conjectural science as of early religion, is naturally the experience of the savage as construed by himself. Man's craving to know "the reason why" is already "among rude savages an intellectual appetite," and "even to the Australian scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience." How does he try to satisfy this craving? E. B. Tylor replies, "When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it." Against this statement it has been urged that men in the lower stages of culture are not curious, but take all phenomena for granted. If there were no direct evidence in favour of Tylor's opinion, it would be enough to point to the nature of savage myths themselves. It is not arguing in a circle to point out that almost all of them are nothing more than explanations of intellectual difficulties, answers to the question, How came this or that phenomenon to be what it is? Thus savage myths answer the questions-What was the origin of the world, and of men, and of beasts? How came the stars by their arrangement E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 369 (1871). seem almost imbecile to civilized and movements? How are the motions of sun and moon to be accounted for? Why has this tree a red flower, and this bird a black mark on the tail? What was the origin of the tribal dances, or of this or that law of custom or etiquette? Savage mythology, which is also savage science, has a reply to all these and all similar questions, and that reply is always found in the shape of a story. The answers cannot be accounted for without the previous existence of the questions. We have now shown how savages come to have a mythology. It is their way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity, their way of realizing the world in which they move. But they frame their stories, necessarily and naturally, in harmony with their general theory of things, with what we may call " savage not only metaphysics." Now early man, as Max Müller says, did not think as we think, but did not think as we suppose he ought to have thought." The chief distinction between his mode of conceiving the world and ours is his vast extension of the theory of personality. To the savage, and apparently to men more backward than the most backward peoples we know, all nature was a congeries of animated personalities, The savage's notion of personality is more a universally diffused feeling than a reasoned conception, and this feeling of a personal self he impartially distributes all over the world as known to him. One of the Jesuit missionaries in North America thus describes the Red Man's philosophy: "Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animées." Crevaux, in the Andes, found that the Indians believed that the beasts have piays (sorcerers and doctors) like themselves. This opinion we may name personalism, and it is the necessary condition of savage (and, as will be scen, of civilized) mythology. Jesuits could not understand how spherical bodies like sun and moon could be mistaken for human beings. Their catechumens put them off with the answer that the drawn bows of the heavenly bodies gave them their round appearance. "The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird," say the Bushmen, and gʻ ōō ka! kai, a respectable Bushman once saw the personal wind at Haarfontein. The Egyptians, according to Herodotus (iii. 16), believed fire to be Onpiov ufvxov, a live beast. The Bushman who saw the Wind meant to throw a stone at it, but it ran into a hill. From the wind as a person the Bhinyas in India (Dalton, p. 140) claim descent, and in Indian epic tradition Wind, by certain mares, became the father of wind-swift steeds the leader of the ape army was the son of the wind. The mentioned in the Iliad. The loves of Boreas are well known. These are examples of the animistic theory applied to what, in our minds, seems one of the least personal of natural phenomena. The sky (which appears to us even less personal) has been regarded as a personal being by Samoyeds, Red Indians, Zulus," and traces of this belief survive in Chinese, Greek and Roman religion. The We must remember, however, that to the savage, Sky, Sun, Sea, Wind, are not only persons, but they are savage persons. Their conduct is not what civilized men would attribute to characters so august; it is what uncivilized men think probable and befitting among beings like themselves. the World. The savage regards all animals as endowed with personality. "Ils tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs," says a Jesuit father about the North-American Savage In Australia the Theory of Indians (Relations, loc. cit.). natives believe that the wild dog has the power Man's Rela of speech, like the cat of the Coverley witch in the tons with Spectator. The Breton peasants, according to P. Sébillot, credit all birds with language, which they even attempt to interpret. The old English and the Arab superstitions about the language of beasts are examples of this opinion surviving among civilized races. The bear in Norway is regarded as almost a man, and his dead body is addressed and his wrath "The native bear deprecated by Samoyeds and Red Indians. Relations (1636), p. 114. |