Myth, Ritual, and Religion / New System Proposed

New System Proposed

Chapter I. recapitulated--Proposal of a new method: Science of
comparative or historical study of man--Anticipated in part by
Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C. C. C., Cambridge),
and Mannhardt--Science of Tylor--Object of inquiry: to find
condition of human intellect in which marvels of myth are parts of
practical everyday belief--This is the savage state--Savages
described--The wild element of myth a survival from the savage
state--Advantages of this method--Partly accounts for wide
DIFFUSION as well as ORIGIN of myths--Connected with general
theory of evolution--Puzzling example of myth of the water-
swallower--Professor Tiele's criticism of the method--Objections
to method, and answer to these--See Appendix B.

The past systems of mythological interpretation have been briefly
sketched. It has been shown that the practical need for a
reconciliation between RELIGION and MORALITY on one side, and the
MYTHS about the gods on the other, produced the hypotheses of
Theagenes and Metrodorus, of Socrates and Euemerus, of Aristotle
and Plutarch. It has been shown that in each case the reconcilers
argued on the basis of their own ideas and of the philosophies of
their time. The early physicist thought that myth concealed a
physical philosophy; the early etymologist saw in it a confusion of
language; the early political speculator supposed that myth was an
invention of legislators; the literary Euhemerus found the secret
of myths in the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island.
Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan
philosophers, touched with Oriental pantheism, recognised in myths
certain pantheistic symbols and a cryptic revelation of their own
Neo-platonism. When the gods were dead and their altars fallen,
then antiquaries brought their curiosity to the problem of
explaining myth. Christians recognised in it a depraved version of
the Jewish sacred writings, and found the ark on every mountain-top
of Greece. The critical nineteenth century brought in, with
Otfried Muller and Lobeck, a closer analysis; and finally, in the
sudden rise of comparative philology, it chanced that philologists
annexed the domain of myths. Each of these systems had its own
amount of truth, but each certainly failed to unravel the whole web
of tradition and of foolish faith.

Meantime a new science has come into existence, the science which
studies man in the sum of all his works and thoughts, as evolved
through the whole process of his development. This science,
Comparative Anthropology, examines the development of law out of
custom; the development of weapons from the stick or stone to the
latest repeating rifle; the development of society from the horde
to the nation. It is a study which does not despise the most
backward nor degraded tribe, nor neglect the most civilised, and it
frequently finds in Australians or Nootkas the germ of ideas and
institutions which Greeks or Romans brought to perfection, or
retained, little altered from their early rudeness, in the midst of
civilisation.

It is inevitable that this science should also try its hand on
mythology. Our purpose is to employ the anthropological method--
the study of the evolution of ideas, from the savage to the
barbarous, and thence to the civilised stage--in the province of
myth, ritual, and religion. It has been shown that the light of
this method had dawned on Eusebius in his polemic with the heathen
apologists. Spencer, the head of Corpus, Cambridge (1630-93), had
really no other scheme in his mind in his erudite work on Hebrew
Ritual.[1] Spencer was a student of man's religions generally, and
he came to the conclusion that Hebrew ritual was but an expurgated,
and, so to speak, divinely "licensed" adaptation of heathen customs
at large. We do but follow his guidance on less perilous ground
when we seek for the original forms of classical rite and myth in
the parallel usages and legends of the most backward races.

[1] De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus, Tubingae, 1782.

Fontenelle in the last century, stated, with all the clearness of
the French intellect, the system which is partially worked out in
this essay--the system which explains the irrational element in
myth as inherited from savagery. Fontenelle's paper (Sur l'Origine
des Fables) is brief, sensible, and witty, and requires little but
copious evidence to make it adequate. But he merely threw out the
idea, and left it to be neglected.[1]

[1] See Appendix A., Fontenelle's Origine des Fables.

Among other founders of the anthropological or historical school of
mythology, De Brosses should not be forgotten. In his Dieux
Fetiches (1760) he follows the path which Eusebius indicated--the
path of Spencer and Fontenelle--now the beaten road of Tylor and
M'Lennan and Mannhardt.

In anthropology, in the science of Waitz, Tylor, and M'Lennan, in
the examination of man's faith in the light of his social, legal,
and historical conditions generally, we find, with Mannhardt, some
of the keys of myth. This science "makes it manifest that the
different stages through which humanity has passed in its
intellectual evolution have still their living representatives
among various existing races. The study of these lower races is an
invaluable instrument for the interpretation of the survivals from
earlier stages, which we meet in the full civilisation of
cultivated peoples, but whose origins were in the remotest
fetichism and savagery."[1]

[1] Mannhardt op. cit. p. xxiii.

It is by following this road, and by the aid of anthropology and of
human history, that we propose to seek for a demonstrably actual
condition of the human intellect, whereof the puzzling qualities of
myth would be the natural and inevitable fruit. In all the earlier
theories which we have sketched, inquirers took it for granted that
the myth-makers were men with philosophic and moral ideas like
their own--ideas which, from some reason of religion or state, they
expressed in bizarre terms of allegory. We shall attempt, on the
other hand, to prove that the human mind has passed through a
condition quite unlike that of civilised men--a condition in which
things seemed natural and rational that now appear unnatural and
devoid of reason, and in which, therefore, if myths were evolved,
they would, if they survived into civilisation, be such as
civilised men find strange and perplexing.

Our first question will be, Is there a stage of human society and
of the human intellect in which facts that appear to us to be
monstrous and irrational--facts corresponding to the wilder
incidents of myth--are accepted as ordinary occurrences of everyday
life? In the region of romantic rather than of mythical invention
we know that there is such a state. Mr. 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
agencies of magic and of spirits are regarded as at least as
probable and common as duels and concealments of wills seem to be
thought by European novelists. 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, and 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 similar adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals,
trees, stars, and all else that puzzles us in the civilised
mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life?
Our answer is, that everything in the civilised mythologies which we
regard as irrational seems only part of the accepted and natural
order of things to contemporary savages, and in the past seemed
equally rational and natural to savages concerning whom we have
historical information.[1] Our theory is, therefore, that the
savage and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, a
legacy from the fancy of ancestors of the civilised races who were
once in an intellectual state not higher, but probably lower, than
that of Australians, Bush-men, Red Indians, the lower races of South
America, and other worse than barbaric peoples. As the ancestors of
the Greeks, Aryans of India, Egyptians and others advanced in
civilisation, their religious thought was shocked and surprised by
myths (originally dating from the period of savagery, and natural in
that period, though even then often in contradiction to morals and
religion) 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 unto themselves in action and in experience, and
that the allegorical softening down of myths is the explanation
added later by descendants who had attained to purer ideas of
divinity, yet dared not reject the religion of their ancestors."[2]
The senseless element in the myths would, by this theory, be for the
most part a "survival"; and the age and condition of human thought
whence 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.

[1] We have been asked to DEFINE a savage. He cannot be defined in
an epigram, but by way of choice of a type:--

1. In material equipment the perfect savage is he who employs
tools of stone and wood, not of metal; who is nomadic rather than
settled; who is acquainted (if at all) only with the rudest forms
of the arts of potting, weaving, fire-making, etc.; and who derives
more of his food from the chase and from wild roots and plants than
from any kind of agriculture or from the flesh of domesticated
animals.

2. In psychology the savage is he who (extending unconsciously to
the universe his own implicit consciousness of personality) regards
all natural objects as animated and intelligent beings, and,
drawing no hard and fast line between himself and the things in the
world, is readily persuaded that men may be metamorphosed into
plants, beasts and stars; that winds and clouds, sun and dawn, are
persons with human passions and parts; and that the lower animals
especially may be creatures more powerful than himself, and, in a
sense, divine and creative.

3. In religion the savage is he who (while often, in certain
moods, conscious of a far higher moral faith) believes also in
ancestral ghosts or spirits of woods and wells that were never
ancestral; prays frequently by dint of magic; and sometimes adores
inanimate objects, or even appeals to the beasts as supernatural
protectors.

4. In society the savage is he who (as a rule) bases his laws on
the well-defined lines of totemism--that is, claims descent from or
other close relation to natural objects, and derives from the
sacredness of those objects the sanction of his marriage
prohibitions and blood-feuds, while he makes skill in magic a claim
to distinguished rank.

Such, for our purpose, is the savage, and we propose to explain the
more "senseless" factors in civilised mythology as "survivals" of
these ideas and customs preserved by conservatism and local
tradition, or, less probably, borrowed from races which were, or
had been, savage.

[2] Aglaoph., i. 153. Had Lobeck gone a step farther and examined
the mental condition of veteres et priscae gentes, this book would
have been, superfluous. Nor did he know that the purer ideas were
also existing among certain low savages.

It is universally admitted that "survivals" of this kind do account
for many anomalies in our institutions, in law, politics, society,
even in dress and manners. If isolated fragments of earlier ages
abide in these, it is still more probable that other fragments will
survive in anything so closely connected as is mythology with the
conservative religious sentiment and tradition. Our object, then,
is to prove that the "silly, savage, and irrational" element in the
myths of civilised peoples is, as a rule, either a survival from
the period of savagery, or has been borrowed from savage neighbours
by a cultivated people, or, lastly, is an imitation by later poets
of old savage data.[1] For example, to explain the constellations
as metamorphosed men, animals, or other objects of terrestrial life
is the habit of savages,[2]--a natural habit among people who
regard all things as on one level of personal life and intelligence.
When the stars, among civilised Greeks or Aryans of India, are also
popularly regarded as transformed and transfigured men, animals and
the like, this belief may be either a survival from the age when the
ancestors of Greeks and Indians were in the intellectual condition
of the Australian Murri; or the star-name and star-myth may have
been borrowed from savages, or from cultivated peoples once savage
or apt to copy savages; or, as in the case of the Coma Berenices, a
poet of a late age may have invented a new artificial myth on the
old lines of savage fancy.

[1] We may be asked why do savages entertain the irrational ideas
which survive in myth? One might as well ask why they eat each
other, or use stones instead of metal. Their intellectual powers
are not fully developed, and hasty analogy from their own
unreasoned consciousness is their chief guide. Myth, in Mr.
Darwin's phrase, is one of the "miserable and indirect consequences
of our highest faculties". Descent of Man, p. 69.

[2] See Custom and Myth, "Star-Myths".

This method of interpreting a certain element in mythology is, we
must repeat, no new thing, though, to judge from the protests of
several mythologists, it is new to many inquirers. We have seen
that Eusebius threw out proposals in this direction; that Spencer,
De Brosses, and Fontenelle unconsciously followed him; and we have
quoted from Lobeck a statement of a similar opinion. The whole
matter has been stated as clearly as possible by Mr. B. B. Tylor:--

"Savages have been for untold ages, and still are, living in the
myth-making stage of the human mind. It was through sheer
ignorance and neglect of this direct knowledge how and by what
manner of men myths are really made that their simple philosophy
has come to be buried under masses of commentator's rubbish. . ."[1]
Mr. Tylor goes on thus (and his words contain the gist of our
argument): "The general thesis maintained is that myth arose in
the savage condition prevalent in remote ages among the whole human
race; that it remains comparatively unchanged among the rude modern
tribes who have departed least from these primitive conditions,
while higher and later civilisations, partly by retaining its
actual principles, and partly by carrying on its inherited results
in the form of ancestral tradition, continued it not merely in
toleration, but in honour".[2] Elsewhere Mr. Tylor points out that
by this method of interpretation we may study myths in various
stages of evolution, from the rude guess of the savage at an
explanation of natural phenomena, through the systems of the higher
barbarisms, or lower civilisations (as in ancient Mexico), and the
sacerdotage of India, till myth reaches its most human form in
Greece. Yet even in Greek myth the beast is not wholly cast out,
and Hellas by no means "let the ape and tiger die". That Mr. Tylor
does not exclude the Aryan race from his general theory is plain
enough.[3] "What is the Aryan conception of the Thunder-god but a
poetic elaboration of thoughts inherited from the savage stage
through which the primitive Aryans had passed?"[4]

[1] Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., i. p. 283.

[2] Op. cit., p. 275.

[3] Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., ii. 265.

[4] Pretty much the same view seems to be taken by Mr. Max Muller
(Nineteenth Century, January, 1882) when he calls Tsui Goab (whom
the Hottentots believe to be a defunct conjuror) "a Hottentot Indra
or Zeus".

The advantages of our hypothesis (if its legitimacy be admitted)
are obvious. In the first place, we have to deal with an actual
demonstrable condition of the human intellect. The existence of
the savage state in all its various degrees, and of the common
intellectual habits and conditions which are shared by the backward
peoples, and again the survival of many of these in civilisation,
are indubitable facts. We are not obliged to fall back upon some
fanciful and unsupported theory of what "primitive man" did, and
said, and thought. Nay, more; we escape all the fallacies
connected with the terms "primitive man". We are not compelled (as
will be shown later)[1] to prove that the first men of all were
like modern savages, nor that savages represent primitive man. It
may be that the lowest extant savages are the nearest of existing
peoples to the type of the first human beings. But on this point
it is unnecessary for us to dogmatise. If we can show that,
whether men began their career as savages or not, they have at
least passed through the savage status or have borrowed the ideas
of races in the savage status, that is all we need. We escape from
all the snares of theories (incapable of historical proof) about
the really primeval and original condition of the human family.

[1] Appendix B.

Once more, our theory naturally attaches itself to the general
system of Evolution. We are enabled to examine mythology as a
thing of gradual development and of slow and manifold modifications,
corresponding in some degree to the various changes in the general
progress of society. Thus we shall watch the barbaric conditions of
thought which produce barbaric myths, while these in their turn are
retained, or perhaps purified, or perhaps explained away, by more
advanced civilisations. Further, we shall be able to detect the
survival of the savage ideas with least modification, and the
persistence of the savage myths with least change, among the classes
of a civilised population which have shared least in the general
advance. These classes are, first, the rustic peoples, dwelling far
from cities and schools, on heaths or by the sea; second, the
conservative local priesthoods, who retain the more crude and
ancient myths of the local gods and heroes after these have been
modified or rejected by the purer sense of philosophers and national
poets. Thus much of ancient myth is a woven warp and woof of three
threads: the savage donnee, the civilised and poetic modification of
the savage donnee, the version of the original fable which survives
in popular tales and in the "sacred chapters" of local priesthoods.
A critical study of these three stages in myth is in accordance with
the recognised practice of science. Indeed, the whole system is
only an application to this particular province, mythology, of the
method by which the development either of organisms or of human
institutions is traced. As the anomalies and apparently useless and
accidental features in the human or in other animal organisms may be
explained as stunted or rudimentary survivals of organs useful in a
previous stage of life, so the anomalous and irrational myths of
civilised races may be explained as survivals of stories which, in
an earlier state of thought and knowledge, seemed natural enough.
The persistence of the myths is accounted for by the well-known
conservatism of the religious sentiment--a conservatism noticed even
by Eusebius. "In later days, when they became ashamed of the
religious beliefs of their ancestors, they invented private and
respectful interpretations, each to suit himself. For no one dared
to shake the ancestral beliefs, as they honoured at a very high rate
the sacredness and antiquity of old associations, and of the
teaching they had received in childhood."[1]

[1] Praep. E., ii. 6, 19.

Thus the method which we propose to employ is in harmony both with
modern scientific procedure and with the views of a clear-sighted
Father of the Church. Consequently no system could well be less
"heretical" and "unorthodox".

The last advantage of our hypothesis which need here be mentioned
is that it helps to explain the DIFFUSION no less than the ORIGIN
of the wild and crazy element in myth. We seek for the origin of
the savage factor of myth in one aspect of the intellectual
condition of savages. We say "in one aspect" expressly; to guard
against the suggestion that the savage intellect has no aspect but
this, and no saner ideas than those of myth. The DIFFUSION of
stories practically identical in every quarter of the globe may be
(provisionally) regarded as the result of the prevalence in every
quarter, at one time or another, of similar mental habits and
ideas. This explanation must not be pressed too hard nor too far.
If we find all over the world a belief that men can change
themselves and their neighbours into beasts, that belief will
account for the appearance of metamorphosis in myth. If we find a
belief that inanimate objects are really much on a level with man,
the opinion will account for incidents of myth such as that in
which the wooden figure-head of the Argo speaks with a human voice.
Again, a widespread belief in the separability of the soul or the
life from the body will account for the incident in nursery tales
and myths of the "giant who had no heart in his body," but kept his
heart and life elsewhere. An ancient identity of mental status and
the working of similar mental forces at the attempt to explain the
same phenomena will account, without any theory of borrowing, or
transmission of myth, or of original unity of race, for the world-
wide diffusion of many mythical conceptions.

But this theory of the original similarity of the savage mind
everywhere and in all races will scarcely account for the world-
wide distribution of long and intricate mythical PLOTS, of
consecutive series of adroitly interwoven situations. In presence
of these long romances, found among so many widely severed peoples,
conjecture is, at present, almost idle. We do not know, in many
instances, whether such stories were independently developed, or
carried from a common centre, or borrowed by one race from another,
and so handed on round the world.

This chapter may conclude with an example of a tale whose DIFFUSION
may be explained in divers ways, though its ORIGIN seems
undoubtedly savage. If we turn to the Algonkins, a stock of Red
Indians, we come on a popular tradition which really does give
pause to the mythologist. Could this story, he asks himself, have
been separately invented in widely different places, or could the
Iroquois have borrowed from the Australian blacks or the Andaman
Islanders? It is a common thing in most mythologies to find
everything of value to man--fire, sun, water--in the keeping of
some hostile power. The fire, or the sun, or the water is then
stolen, or in other ways rescued from the enemy and restored to
humanity. The Huron story (as far as water is concerned) is told
by Father Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary, who lived among the
Hurons about 1636. The myth begins with the usual opposition
between two brothers, the Cain and Abel of savage legend. One of
the brothers, named Ioskeha, slew the other, and became the father
of mankind (as known to the Red Indians) and the guardian of the
Iroquois. The earth was at first arid and sterile, but Ioskeha
destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and
guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes.[1]

[1] Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, p. 103 (Paris, Cramoisy,
1637).

Now where, outside of North America, do we find this frog who
swallowed all the water? We find him in Australia.

"The aborigines of Lake Tyers," remarks Mr. Brough Smyth, "say that
at one time there was no water anywhere on the face of the earth.
All the waters were contained in the body of a huge frog, and men
and women could get none of them. A council was held, and . . . it
was agreed that the frog should be made to laugh, when the waters
would run out of his mouth, and there would be plenty in all
parts."

To make a long story short, all the animals played the jester
before the gigantic solemn frog, who sat as grave as Louis XV. "I
do not like buffoons who don't make me laugh," said that majestical
monarch. At last the eel danced on the tip of his tail, and the
gravity of the prodigious Batrachian gave way. He laughed till he
literally split his sides, and the imprisoned waters came with a
rush. Indeed, many persons were drowned, though this is not the
only Australian version of the Deluge.

The Andaman Islanders dwell at a very considerable distance from
Australia and from the Iroquois, and, in the present condition of
the natives of Australia and Andaman, neither could possibly visit
the other. The frog in the Andaman version is called a toad, and
he came to swallow the waters in the following way: One day a
woodpecker was eating honey high up in the boughs of a tree. Far
below, the toad was a witness of the feast, and asked for some
honey. "Well, come up here, and you shall have some," said the
woodpecker. "But how am I to climb?" "Take hold of that creeper,
and I will draw you up," said the woodpecker; but all the while he
was bent on a practical joke. So the toad got into a bucket he
happened to possess, and fastened the bucket to the creeper. "Now,
pull!" Then the woodpecker raised the toad slowly to the level of
the bough where the honey was, and presently let him down with a
run, not only disappointing the poor toad, but shaking him
severely. The toad went away in a rage and looked about him for
revenge. A happy thought occurred to him, and he drank up all the
water of the rivers and lakes. Birds and beasts were perishing,
woodpeckers among them, of thirst. The toad, overjoyed at his
success, wished to add insult to the injury, and, very
thoughtlessly, began to dance in an irritating manner at his foes.
But then the stolen waters gushed out of his mouth in full volume,
and the drought soon ended. One of the most curious points in this
myth is the origin of the quarrel between the woodpecker and the
toad. The same beginning--the tale of an insult put on an animal
by hauling up and letting him down with a run--occurs in an African
Marchen.[1]

[1] Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 429, 430; Brinton,
American Hero Myths, i. 55. Cf. also Relations de la Nouvelle
France, 1636, 1640, 1671; [Sagard, Hist. du Canada, 1636, p. 451;]
Journal Anthrop. Inst., 1881.

Now this strangely diffused story of the slaying of the frog which
had swallowed all the water seems to be a savage myth of which the
more heroic conflict of Indra with Vrittra (the dragon which had
swallowed all the waters) is an epic and sublimer version.[1] "The
heavenly water, which Vrittra withholds from the world, is usually
the prize of the contest."

[1] Ludwig, Der Rig-Veda, iii. p. 337. See postea, "Divine Myths
of India".

The serpent of Vedic myth is, perhaps, rather the robber-guardian
than the swallower of the waters, but Indra is still, like the
Iroquois Ioskeha, "he who wounds the full one".[1] This example of
the wide distribution of a myth shows how the question of
diffusion, though connected with, is yet distinct from that of
origin. The advantage of our method will prove to be, that it
discovers an historical and demonstrable state of mind as the
origin of the wild element in myth. Again, the wide prevalence in
the earliest times of this mental condition will, to a certain
extent, explain the DISTRIBUTION of myth. Room must be left, of
course, for processes of borrowing and transmission, but how
Andamanese, Australians and Hurons could borrow from each other is
an unsolved problem.

[1] Gubernatis, Zoological Myth. ii. 395, note 2. "When Indra
kills the serpent he opens the torrent of the waters" (p. 393).
See also Aitareya Brahmana, translated by Haug, ii. 483.

Finally, our hypothesis is not involved in dubious theories of
race. To us, myths appear to be affected (in their origins) much
less by the race than by the stage of culture attained by the
people who cherish them. A fight for the waters between a
monstrous dragon like Vrittra and a heroic god like Indra is a
nobler affair than a quarrel for the waters between a woodpecker
and a toad. But the improvement and transfiguration, so to speak,
of a myth at bottom the same is due to the superior culture, not to
the peculiar race, of the Vedic poets, except so far as culture
itself depends on race. How far the purer culture was attained to
by the original superiority of the Aryan over the Andaman breed, it
is not necessary for our purpose to inquire. Thus, on the whole,
we may claim for our system a certain demonstrable character, which
helps to simplify the problems of mythology, and to remove them
from the realm of fanciful guesses and conflicting etymological
conjectures into that of sober science. That these pretensions are
not unacknowledged even by mythologists trained in other schools is
proved by the remarks of Dr. Tiele.[1]

[1] Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel., "Le Mythe de Cronos," January, 1886.
Dr. Tiele is not, it must be noted, a thorough adherent of our
theory. See Modern Mythology: "The Question of Allies".

Dr. Tiele writes: "If I were obliged to choose between this method"
(the system here advocated) "and that of comparative philology, it
is the former that I would adopt without the slightest hesitation.
This method alone enables us to explain the fact, which has so
often provoked amazement, that people so refined as the Greeks, . . .
or so rude, but morally pure, as the Germans, . . . managed to
attribute to their gods all manner of cowardly, cruel and
disorderly conduct. This method alone explains the why and
wherefore of all those strange metamorphoses of gods into beasts
and plants, and even stones, which scandalised philosophers, and
which the witty Ovid played on for the diversion of his
contemporaries. In short, this method teaches us to recognise in
all those strange stories the survivals of a barbaric age, long
passed away, but enduring to later times in the form of religious
traditions, of all traditions the most persistent. . . . Finally,
this method alone enables us to explain the origin of myths,
because it endeavours to study them in their rudest and most
primitive shape, thus allowing their true significance to be much
more clearly apparent than it can be in the myths (so often
touched, retouched, augmented and humanised) which are current
among races arrived at a certain degree of culture."

The method is to this extent applauded by a most competent
authority, and it has been warmly accepted by a distinguished
French school of students, represented by M. Gaidoz. But it is
obvious that the method rests on a double hypothesis: first, that
satisfactory evidence as to the mental conditions of the lower and
backward races is obtainable; second, that the civilised races
(however they began) either passed through the savage state of
thought and practice, or borrowed very freely from people in that
condition. These hypotheses have been attacked by opponents; the
trustworthiness of our evidence, especially, has been assailed. By
way of facilitating the course of the exposition and of lessening
the disturbing element of controversy, a reply to the objections
and a defence of the evidence has been relegated to an
Meanwhile we go on to examine the peculiar characteristics of the
mental condition of savages and of peoples in the lower and upper
barbarisms.

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Categories: The Golden Bough ROMAN ANTIQUITIES The Mabinogion SELECT EPIGRAMS FROM THE GREEK A Myth, Ritual, and Religion Ancient Greece

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