gives the ancient myths a new direction, do they turn into either History or Religion. The latter always arises out of the materials of Mythology, and then finds its historical task to be to work itself upwards into independence. Then, while the mythology out of which it sprang is growing less and less intelligible, and therefore also less and less expressive, Religion must in the progress of its development sever its connexion with Mythology, and unite itself with the scientific consciousness, which now occupies the place of the mythological.
How Mythology becomes Religion is shown most clearly by Dualism. Nothing can be less correct than the belief that the dualistic system of religion had from its very origin an ethical meaning. This, as well as the limitation of Dualism to Irân and Babylon,[1] is refuted by the frequent occurrence of the dualistic conception of the world among the most various savage peoples.[2] The ethical significance of Dualism is decidedly secondary; it is the form of development of the main theme of all mythology, the relation of light to darkness, proper to a higher stage of culture. Many mythological fancies, and especially the Sun's voyage by ship in the nether world, became religious eschatological ideas when the mythical meaning itself was lost from the mind, and gave rise to new ideas of life in the nether world, resurrection, ascent to heaven, &c.; this was first established in reference to the old Egyptian mythology.[3] So also Dualism as it appears in Irân is a myth that has taken an ethical sense. This is best seen in the facts that the northern Algonquins, with whom Dualism is almost as fixed a principle as in Irân, call the good and evil principles respectively Sun and Moon,
- ↑ Spiegel still does this up to a recent dato in his Eranische Alterthumskunde, II. 19.
- ↑ See Tylor, Primitive Culture, II. 287 et seq.
- ↑ The story of Osiris and Typhon e.g. originally personified the vegetative life of nature and the struggles incident to it, but was afterwards transferred to the destinies of the human soul. See Ebers, Durch Gosen zum Sinai, Leipzig 1872, p. 477.
