Both assume to make hierography a simple province of their respective empires. Sometimes linguists wish to interdict anthropologists from illustrating by comparison myths that do not belong to the same group of languages; sometimes ethnographists and students of folk-love accuse linguistics of having reduced mythology to a mirage, and, under the pretext that philologists do not agree in their etymologies, deny that they have contributed to the knowledge of myths, even within the circle of the Indo-European languages.[1] Let us examine the force of these conflicting pretensions:
The comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages is incontestably not sufficient to interpret the myths of peoples belonging to other ethnic groups, or to explain all the mythology of the Aryan peoples. Where myths occur under a form nearly identical among different races, beginning with the uncivilized people of our own epoch, we have a general fact, the source of which should be sought elsewhere than in the language or the isolated history of a particular race. Every one has heard of were-wolves. An explanation of the origin of lycanthropy has been sought in a supposed Greek pun, resting upon the assonance of λύκος wolf, and λενκὸς white. Tradition may have spoken of personages dressed in white; whence a popular legend that they were transformed into wolves. But anthropology disposes of this theory by telling us that among uncivilized peoples very distant one from another, in Asia, Africa, and America, the power is attributed to some men of transforming themselves into wild or dangerous animals, and explains that such a belief flows naturally from the idea that the savage forms of the mutual relations of man and the animal world,[2]
It is nevertheless true that philology alone can disengage the original sense of some names and some myths from the confusion of gradual changes and parasitical surcharges. How could we have been able to penetrate the myth of Prometheus, or write the real history of Jupiter, without the study of Sanskrit?[3] Sir John Lubbock attempts to explain the origin and attributes of Mercury, or Hermes, by the usage, widely extended among non-civilized peoples, of paying worship to erect stones. These stones, we observe, mark the respective limits of the tribes, are set up in pastures, point out roads, designate the location of markets and intertribal meeting-places, bear inscriptions, and cover tombs. Hence, Mercury came to be regarded as the patron of shepherds, travelers, merchants, and, sarcastically, of thieves, the
- ↑ See, in particular, in the "Athenæum" of August 30, 1884.
- ↑ "To those who live m countries where wicked people and witches are supposed constantly to assume the form of wild beasts," says Sir A. C. Lyal, writing of India, "the explanation of lycanthropy by a confusion between λύκος and λενκὸς appears utterly idle."
- ↑ Even Mr, Andrew Lang, who holds to the possibility of accounting for myths without the aid of philology, had to have recourse to it when he came to the Indo-European myths. (See, in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," vol. xvii, p. 153.)
