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Religion, partly on their private explanations of the Greek and Sanskrit roots, partly on passages of the Vedas, which are variously translated by different authorities. By all means, we say to comparative philologists, study Sanskrit, by all means give us a new version of the Vedas, but do not expect us to accept your conclusions till there is more harmony among yourselves. If we, for our part, were building any theory of Homeric mythology on our own interpretations of πολύτροπος, οι ἔννεπε, οι θεῶν ἐν γούνασι κεῖται, then Mr. Max Müller's attempt to carry the war into Attica might be successful. But, of course, no one dreams of founding mythological theories on controverted texts in Homer. Our argument, that the philological mythologists are all at variance among themselves, and, as Curtius thinks, are using a very precarious instrument, remains a piece of naked fact. But Mr. Max Müller finds it difficult to imagine a weaker, not to say a meaner, argument.'

Well, the reader may say-if anyone has followed us so far into the wilderness-if you are at war with these great scholars and doctors, what do you propose to offer in place of their doctrine? We propose to pursue the study of myths as we study the history of other human institutions, such as law, manufactures, arts.

The central puzzle of mythology is, and always has been, to account for the bewildering and 'senseless' elements in the religious legends of civilised races such as Greeks and Egyptians, and natives of India. How could the ancestors of Socrates come to believe that their chief god, Zeus, turned his wife into a fly and swallowed herin which he partly followed the example of his father, who had swallowed and disgorged the brothers and sisters of Zeus? Why was Zeus, again, accustomed to put on various animal forms, eagle, ant, bull, snake, and so forth, when he wooed the daughters of men, and why did other Greek and Vedic gods imitate this distressing peculiarity? Why are most of the deities of Greece associated with a whole menagerie of animals, pigs, owls, mice, wolves, sheep, horses, cuckoos, doves, and so forth, images of which were placed in the temples, while the creatures themselves often received a share of divine worship? These are only a few examples of the horrors and follies of Greek and other myths and religions, and how are these to be explained?

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Against the modern philological system of explaining what is savage and senseless' in ancient myth as a disease' (apparently a delirium) of language,' more is to be said than can be said here. We have already tried the system by its results; we have shown that it has, so far, given us little but contradictions. This might be excusable in a young science; the Egyptian and Assyrian texts were not deciphered in a day. But the whole theory of etymological explanation is faulty. Mr. Max Müller 16 calls his the historical method. But where does the history come in? He starts from a 16 Nineteenth Century, June 1884.

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hypothetical and, to my thinking, highly inconsistent theory of the state of human speech before the Aryan separation.' If we understand him, he thinks the mythopoeic period existed after dialects and languages had diverged, but before the establishment of laws and customs, and the first beginnings of religion and poetry.'17 All the historical evidence as to man in this early condition is derived from traces in language which prove men to have been practically civilised, half-nomadic, half-agricultural, accustomed to use the plough, to weave, to build, to work metals. Yet, according to the historical method, man, in this advanced condition, habitually talked in such a way that his speech became full of poetical expressions of which the meaning was somehow lost, while the words somehow endured, and came to be explained as proper names and as statements of fact, each name starting as hero or heroine of a myth.

Now where, in all our experience of humanity, do we meet with men, civilised or savage, in this state of linguistic delirium? Mr. Max Müller looks for examples in the Vedas, which, ex hypothesi, have no more to do with the matter than The Lays of Ancient Rome. The Vedas are poetry, composed long after the Aryan separation. They are not examples of the ordinary conversation of men before the Aryan separation. Nor do the Vedas, even if admitted, help the argument. They contain many poetical synonyms, but these synonyms do not lose their meaning, and do not set up, after being nomina, as numina; or, if they do, it is very rarely. The twenty-one Vedic synonyms of earth did not establish themselves as twenty-one distinct and separate gods or heroes. Their meaning did not become 'strange to the son and misunderstood by the grandson' of the people who used them. But without this process of oblivion, the names could not, ex hypothesi, have started as myths. Where, then, do we find, historically, an essentially civilised race among whom such processes are common? The historical method must give examples, must produce veræ causæ, and (as far as I am aware) no veræ causa, no examples of a semi-civilised race, with a speech full of synonyms and homonyms, and a habit of retaining these as proper names while forgetting their meaning, have ever been produced.18 Examples of such 17 Selected Essays, i. 308.

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18 Are there, then, people may ask, no myths arising from forgetfulness of the meaning of words? There are multitudes; there are all the myths springing from folk-etymologies.' Thus we have the brazen nose over Brasenose gate. Brasenose' merely means brewing house,' but the meaning was lost. We have the stories told of the 'dudding' or 'skipping' stone at Duddingston, and of Macus, who, in Roman times, kept a tavern at Longformacus. We have Harcourt, to whom the king cried, 'Stand to un, Harcourt,' in the battle at Staunton Harcourt. These are instances of myths told to explain names of which the meaning has been lost by the people. But, observe, those names survived as placc-names necessarily must do. They are not analogous to the myriad words of lost meaning which, on the historical hypothesis, survived in undivided Aryan as proper names. We have no adequate proof that such survivals ever take place in vast numbers, save when aided by the immobility of places-lakes, towns, hills, and so forth.

processes may occur here and there, but by no means sufficient to prove that the Aryan race, before its separation, was bemused in this delirium of language. Without proofs, without a large induction of facts, the so-called historical method is resting on a singular hypothesis, and does not deserve to be called historical' at all.

Even if the philologists were right in their conception of the state of the Aryan speech and mind before Sanskrit was Sanskrit, we really are but little advanced by their researches. For, supposing that mythical names came into existence as the philologists suppose, who is to interpret the names, and what can be made out of the interpretation? At present different schools not only assign different roots and meanings to many names, but look for the roots in different languages, Semitic, Accadian, Sanskrit. But if they agreed as much as they disagree, how could they possibly demonstrate that the myths were originally told of the persons to whose names they are now attached, and that, therefore, they can be interpreted in the light of those names? Every day we hear stories of contemporaries which we know were originally told of men long dead. A tale is current of General Jackson which Rabelais tells of Villon, and which occurs in a manuscript of King John's reign. I have heard a coarse rural anecdote set down to a Scotch peasant, and have found the myth in Le Moyen de Parvenir. I have traced the Beresford Ghost story back to William of Malmesbury, in its essential features. I have shown that the main points and situations of the Jason myth occur in North America and Samoa,19 among people who can hardly be supposed to have heard of Jason. How vain, then, to explain the incidents by the names in the Jason legend! It is a law of the existence of myths that pre-existent stories cluster round new great names, as of Charlemagne, Arthur, Napoleon. Granting, then, that Athene means dawn, air, thundercloud, when scholars agree on that topic, how can we prove that a tale told of her was originally told of her when her nature (as air, dawn, or cloud) was understood, and that it must therefore be interpreted as a statement about meteorological phenomena ? No such explanation can be more than precarious and conjectural, even if we did know what the name of Athene originally meant. Finally, as to names, let it not be forgotten that, even if we could analyse their meaning with absolute certainty into words for natural forces and phenomena, we should still be far from certain that (in heroic myths) natural phenomena and forces were indicated by the names. Among many races such names are the common personal names of actual people. Now, no one, I hope, will maintain, that if a word in a myth means dawn, or cloud, or storm, that myth was originally told about a real person called Dawn or Cloud. This kind of euhemerism would be absurd. But suppose the story was purely or mainly a romantic invention: in that case the narrator

19 Custom and Myth, 'A Far-travelled Tale.'

would need names for his persons, just as the novelist does. If among the people with whom he lived such names as Flower of Dawn, Red Sun, Flying Cloud, Black Storm, were as common as (or more than) Vavasour, Delamere, De Vere, Delormay, and the like among ourselves, why, he would inevitably give such names as Flower of Dawn, Red Sun, Flying Cloud, and so forth, to his fictitious characters.20 Thus it is impossible to argue, with safety, that a name in heroic myth which means a natural phenomenon originally denoted a phenomenon of nature. Thus the philological method, though it may have its uses-though, for example (as in the case of Zeus Asterios), it may perhaps indicate the foreign origin of a Greek god -yet cannot be accepted as the only safe foundation of comparative mythology.' I have exposed the nature of that safety.

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For this method we propose to substitute, as one main instrument, the method of Völkerpsychologie, or Folklore,' or 'ethnopsychology,' or anthropology, or, to use Dr. Taylor's term, the Hottentotic method.' We must compare all the myths of the world, as far as we can get trustworthy information, and we must examine the psychology of the peoples among whom these myths are current. We must try to ascertain whether myths are not the result of a certain condition of thought, rather than of a disease of language influencing thought. Employing this method, we study the psychology and the myths of savages.

Here, of course, we are met by such arguments as Mr. Max Müller employs in his article The Savage.' 21 As to our method, I differ from it, I have no taste for it,' says our learned adversary.22 I am reminded of Thackeray's Miss Tickletoby and her Lectures on English History, where she dilates on the painful impression occasioned by the contemplation of early barbarism,' and on 'the disposition of the human mind to avoid such a study.' It is full of disagreeable discoveries, but they must be faced, not avoided.

Our method is based on the following principles. The myths of the Greeks and Aryans of India are charged with the wildest, most incredible, most absurd, and morally most abominable narratives. Gods devour and disgorge their offspring, assume the shapes of beasts and birds, change men and women into trees, or birds, or bears, or stars, and conduct themselves more like omnipotent and unprincipled clowns in a pantomime than like pure natural forces or sublime anthropomorphic deities. There is nothing in the psychology of the Greeks as historically known to us to account for such senseless' beliefs. But if we examine the psychology of the lower races as

20 Gold Flower of Dawn was a young Abipone chief known to Dobrizhofer : his father was Sun. Flying Cloud and the rest are Iroquois names. Among the Australians such names are often chosen for a child from the aspect of the weather at the time of his birth, or at the moment when the name is imposed.

21 Nineteenth Century, January 1885.

22 lbid. June 1884.

actually existing, or as described in the past, we find that all these idiotic myths are in perfect accordance with their psychology. There are none of the freaks of Zeus or Indra which the medicine men of the lower races do not profess to be able to perform. They can turn into cuckoos, like Hera, or fishes, like Ares, or rams, like Indra and Zeus, and they can, like Zeus, convert a human being into a bear, while their ancestors, like Callisto, have either been bears or become stars, or in a thousand wild ways 'pass beyond the goal of ordinance.'

To be brief, then, we argue that the remote ancestors of the historical Greeks and Aryans of India had either passed through the mental stages in which we find Australians and Bushmen, or had imported into their religion an enormous number of the myths which by such a mental condition are naturally produced. Among the myths of the lower races we find all the elements that astonish and shock us in Greek myth. Among the lower races themselves we discover actually existing the psychological conditions out of which such myths are born. It is a natural inference that where, as in Greece, we find similar myths without the corresponding mental conditions, those myths are religious survivals from that condition in the past, or have been imported from people who were, or had been, in that psychological state. In either case, borrowed or native, those myths would be relics of the peculiar psychological conditions now prevailing among Bushmen and Australians.

It seems superfluous to state that, if these opinions can be proved, the method of mythology becomes a mere branch of the Darwinian, or evolutionary, method in general. That method explains many physical peculiarities as survivals or rudiments of organs more fully developed in an earlier condition of the organism. We explain many peculiarities of myths as survivals from an earlier social and mental condition of humanity.

The question of proof then becomes all important. Are the lower races actually in the psychological state which necessarily produces myths like those which shock or puzzle us among the Greeks? Is there (apart from the myths themselves) reason to believe that the Greeks had either passed through the psychological condition of the lower races, or borrowed very largely from peoples who were, or had been, in that stage?

It is against these positions that Mr. Max Müller probably argues in his article on 'The Savage.' He thinks, as I understand. him, that the very word 'savage' lacks scientific distinctness, and to please him and his followers I have tried here to avoid the term. He dilates on the difficulty of defining a savage. He mentions a number of traits, each of which, though apparently' savage,' does not necessarily prove savagery in the persons who display it in action.

Yes, but what of the people who unite all and every one of these traits in their character and conduct? Are they properly called

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