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 a “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
