chapters will give occasion to prove in what this existence consists. It will then appear that the Hebrew myths, necessarily owing their existence to the same psychological operation as the Aryan or the so-called Turanian, must consequently have the same original signification as these. Hence the figures of Hebrew mythology denote the very natural phenomena whose appellations lie before us in those figures names. These names, however, are not symbolic,[1] but are antiquated appellatives of the natural phenomena denoted by them, just as the words, Sun, Moon, Rain, &c. This must be distinctly proclaimed, as some who misunderstand the modern method of Mythology pervert it in a false and antiquated way by the introduction of symbolism.
We must also beware of confounding the original Myth with Religion or, still worse, with the Consciousness of God. This confusion is the source of most of the erroneous estimates and notions of Mythology, which even the latest methods of investigating myths has not entirely removed. The very earliest activity of the human intellect can only work upon what falls immediately under the cognisance of the senses, and upon what through its frequency and the regularity of its return prompts men most readily to speech. Such things are the daily natural phenomena, the change of light and darkness, of rain and sunshine, and all that accompanies these changes. What primitive man spoke on these things, is the Myth. It is psychologically impossible that the earliest activity of the human mind should have been anything else but this. We cannot speak of a consciousness of God, a sensus numinis, as existing in the earliest Mythological period. Not till later, when some process in the history of language
- ↑ Even old Plutarch observed in reference to the then favourite explanation of the myths ex ratione physica: Δεῖ μὴ νομίζειν ἁπλῶς εἰκόνας ἐκείνων (i.e. of the sun and moon) τούτους (Zeus and Hera), ἀλλ' αὐτὸν ἐν ὕλῃ Δία τὸν ᾕλιον καὶ αὐτὴν τὴν Ἥραν ἐν ὕλῃ τὴν σελῄνην (Quaestiones Romanae, 77). See Cicero, De Nat. Deorum, III. 24: Longe aliter rem se habere, atque hominum opinio sit: eos enim, qui dii appellantur, rerum naturas esse, non figuras deorum.
