ing of stories related about the doings of human beings and mythic personages, which always assume that the ghosts of the other personages influence the ghosts of men, or that the ghosts of men influence the ghosts of other personages. This is the essence of barbaric myth or romance, for myth and romance are one in this stage of culture.
Power Myth—In the second stage of myth or romance we discover a radical development in the personages of the story. A new class of deities is found. From the same linguistic cause which we have set forth, the conspicuous phenomena of nature are personified as gods. The powers of the universe as they are known in that stage of society become the heroes of myth. The animal gods remain, and with them the human beings; but all the gods of savagery are assigned minor parts, and the new gods constitute a superior order of beings.
This stage is popularly known through the writings of Max Müller and others who have devoted much time to the study of Sanskrit literature. It is set forth in the popular accounts of Norse mythology and also in Germanic mythology. Again we find it well recorded in Homer and Hesiod. In fact, there is now a large body of literature gathered from various lands which is being carefully studied for the purpose of discovering the characteristics of this stage of myth.
While romance is beast fable in savagery, romance is power myth in barbarism. To understand this transmutation we must see the change which is wrought in the concepts of worlds or in cosmology. It is a change which begins in savagery, but is more highly developed in barbarism. The concepts of space worlds control the concepts of the savage mind to such an extent that all of the attributes of bodies are referred to the worlds as properly belonging to them. Thus colors originally come to be classified as seven, for the act of expressing concepts in words is more potent than the sense of vision in controlling the judgment of the color of objects.
