Mythology

MYTHOLOGY (Gr. µuBoXo'yia, the science which examines pihot, myths or legends of cosmogony and of gods and heroes. Mythology is also used as a term for these legends themselves. Thus when we speak of " the mythology of Greece " we mean the whole body of Greek divine and heroic and cosmogonic legends. When we speak of the " science of mythology " we refer to the various attempts which have been made to explain these ancient narratives. Very early indeed in the history of human thought men awoke to the consciousness that their religious stories were much in want of explanation. The myths of civilized peoples, as of Greeks and the Aryans of India, contain two elements, the rational and what to modern minds seems the irrational. The rational myths are those which represent the gods as beautiful and wise beings. The Artemis of the Odyssey " taking her pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer, while with her the wild wood-nymphs disport them, and high over them all she rears her brow, and is easily to be known where all are fair," is a perfectly rational mythic representation of a divine being. We feel, even now, that the conception of a " queen and huntress, chaste and fair," the lady warden of the woodlands, is a beautiful and natural fancy which requires no explanation. On the other hand, the Artemis of Arcadia, who is confused with the nymph Callisto, who, again, is said to have become a she-bear, and later a star, and the Brauronian Artemis, whose maiden ministers danced a bear-dance, are goddesses whose legend seems unnatural, .and is felt to need explanation. Or, again, there is nothing not explicable and natural in the conception of the Olympian Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god who " turns everywhere his shining eyes " and beholds all things. But the Zeus whose grave was shown in Crete, or the Zeus who played Demeter an obscene trick by the aid of a ram, or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who was merely a rough stone, or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and in great need of explanation. It is this irrational and unnatural element - .as Max Muller says, " the silly, savage and senseless element " - that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it.

Early Explanations of Myths

The earliest attempts at a crude science of mythology were efforts to reconcile the legends of the gods and heroes with the religious sentiment which recognized in these beings objects of worship and respect. Closely as religion and myth are intertwined, it is necessary to hold them apart for the purposes of this discussion. Religion may here be defined as the conception of divine, or at least supernatural powers entertained by men in moments of gratitude or of need and distress, in hours of weakness, when, as Homer says, " all folk yearn after the gods." Now this conception may be rude enough, and it is nearly related to purely magical ideas, to efforts to secure supernatural aid by magical ceremonies. Still the roughest form of spiritual prayer has for its basis the hypothesis of beneficent beings, visible or invisible. The senseless stories or myths about the gods are soon felt to be at variance with this hypothesis. As an example we may take the instance of Qing, the Bushman hunter. Qing, when first he met white men, was asked about his religion. He began to explain, and mentioned Cagn. Mr Orpen, the chief magistrate of St John's Territory, asked: " Is Cagn good or malicious? how do you pray to him? " Answer (in a low imploring tone): " `0 Cagn! 0 Cagn! are we not your children? do you not see our hunger? give us food;' and he gives us both hands full " (Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874). Here we see the religious view of Cagn, the Bushman god. But in the mythological account of Cagn given by Qing he appears as a kind of grasshopper, supernaturally endowed, the hero of a most absurd cycle of senseless adventures. Even religion is affected by these irrational notions, and the gods of savages and of many civilized peoples are worshipped with cruel, obscene, and irrational rites. But, on the whole, the religious sentiment strives to transcend the mythical conceptions of the gods, and is shocked and puzzled by the mythical narratives. As soon as this sense -of perplexity is felt by poets, by priests, or by most men in an age of nascent criticism, explanations of what is most crude and absurd in the myths are put forward. Men ask themselves why their gods are worshipped in the form of beasts, birds, and fishes; why their gods are said to have prosecuted their amours in bestial shapes; why they are represented as lustful and passionate - thieves, robbers, murderers and adulterers. The answers to these questions sometimes become myths themselves. Thus both the Mangaians and the Egyptians have been puzzled by their own gods in the form of beasts. The Egyptians invented an explanation - itself a myth - that in some moment of danger the gods concealed themselves from their foes in the shapes of animals.' The Mangaians, according to W. W. Gill, hold that " the heavenly family had taken up their abode in these birds, fishes, and reptiles." 2 A people so curious and refined as the Greeks were certain to be greatly perplexed by even such comparatively pure mythical narratives as they found in Homer, still more by the coarser legends of Hesiod, and above all by the ancient local myths preserved by local priesthoods. Thus, in the 6th century before Christ, Xenophanes of Colophon severely blamed the poets for their unbecoming legends, and boldly called certain myths " the fables of men of old." s Theagenes of Rhegium (520 B.C.?), according to the scholiast on Iliad, xx. 67, 4 was the author of a very ancient system of mythology. Admitting that the fable of the battle of the gods was " unbecoming," if literally understood, Theagenes represented it as an allegorical account of the war of the elements. Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestus were fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was water, Artemis was the moon, Kai Ta Xoora 6Aoiws. Or, by another system, the names of the gods represented moral and intellectual qualities. Heraclitus, too, disposed of the myth of the bondage of Hera as allegorical philosophy. Socrates, in the Cratylus of Plato, expounds " a philosophy which came to him all in an instant," an explanation of the divine beings based on crude philological analyses of theif names. Metrodorus, rivalling some recent flights of conjecture, resolved not only the gods but even heroes like Agamemnon, Hector and Achilles " into elemental combinations and physical agencies." 5 Euripides makes Pentheus (but he was notoriously impious) advance a " rationalistic " theory of the story that Dionysus was stitched up in the thigh of Zeus.

When Christianity became powerful the heathen philosophers evaded its satire by making more and more use of the allegorical and non-natural system of explanation. That method has two faults. First (as Arnobius and Eusebius reminded their heathen opponents), the allegorical explanations are purely arbitrary, depend upon the fancy of their author, and are all equally plausible and equally unsupported by evidence.6 Secondly, there is no proof at all that, in the distant age when the myths were developed, men entertained the moral notions and physical philosophies which are supposed to be " wrapped up, " as Cicero says, " in impious fables." Another system of explanation is that associated with the name of Euemerus (316 B.C.). According to this author, the myths are history in disguise. All the gods were once men, whose real feats have been decorated and distorted by later fancy. This view suited Lactantius, St Augustine and other early Christian writers 1 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride. 2 Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, p. 35 (1876).

' Xenoph. Fr. i. 42.4 Dindorf's ed., iv. 231.

5 Grote, Hist. of Greece, (ed. 2869) i. 404.

6 Cf. Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 151-152, on allegorical interpretation of myths in the mysteries.

very well. They were pleased to believe that Euemerus " by hostorical research had ascertained that the gods were once but mortal men." Precisely the same convenient line was taken by Sahagun in his account of Mexican religious myths. As there can be no doubt that the ghosts of dead men have been worshipped in many lands, and as the gods of many faiths are tricked out with attributes derived from ancestor-worship, the system of Euemerus retains some measure of plausibility. While we need not believe with Euemerus and with Herbert Spencer that the god of Greece or the god of the Hottentots was once a man, we cannot deny that the myths of both these gods have passed through and been coloured by the imaginations of men who practised the worship of real ancestors. For example, the Cretans showed the tomb of Zeus, and the Phocians (Pausanias x. 5) daily poured blood of victims into the tomb of a hero, obviously by way of feeding his ghost. The Hottentots show many tombs of their god, Tsui-Goab, and tell tales about his death; they also pray regularly for aid at the tombs of their own parents.' We may therefore say that, while it is rather absurd to believe that Zeus and Tsui-Goab were once real men, yet their myths are such as would be developed by people accustomed, among other forms of religion, to the worship of dead men. Very probably portions of the legends of real men have been attracted into the mythic accounts of gods of another character, and this is the element of truth at the bottom of Euemerism.

Later Explanations of Mythology

The ancient systems of explaining what needed explanation in myths were, then, physical, ethical, religious and historical. One student, like Theagenes, would see a physical philosophy underlying Homeric legends. Another, like Porphyry, would imagine that the meaning was partly moral, partly of a dark theosophic and religious character. Another would detect moral allegory alone, and Aristotle expresses the opinion that the myths were the inventions of legislators " to persuade the many, and to be used in support of law " (Met. xi. 8, 19). A fourth, like Euemerus, would get rid of the supernatural element altogether, and find only an imaginative rendering of actual history. When Christians approached the problem of heathen mythology, they sometimes held, with St Augustine, a form of the doctrine of Euemerus? In other words, they regarded Zeus, Aphrodite and the rest as real persons, diabolical not divine. Some later philosophers, especially of the 17th century, misled by the resemblance between Biblical narratives and ancient myths, came to the conclusion that the Bible contains a pure, the myths a distorted, form of an original revelation. The abbe Banier published a mythological compilation in which he systematically resolved all the Greek myths into ordinary history. 3 Bryant published (1774) A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, wherein an Attempt is made to divest Tradition of Fable, in which he talked very learnedly of " that wonderful people, the descendants of Cush," and saw everywhere symbols of the ark and traces of the Noachian deluge. Thomas Taylor, at the end of the i 8th century, indulged in much mystical allegorizing of myths, as in the notes to his translation of Pausanias (1794) At an earlier date (1760) De Brosses struck on the true line of interpretation in his little work Du Culte des dieux fetiches, ou parallele de l'ancienne religion de l'Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie. In this tract De Brosses explained the animal-worship of the Egyptians as a survival among a civilized people of ideas and practices springing from the intellectual condition of savages, and actually existing among negroes. A vast symbolical explanation of myths and mysteries was attempted by Friedrich Creuzer. 4 The learning and sound sense of Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus, exploded the idea that the Eleusinian and other mysteries revealed or concealed matter of momentous religious importance. It ought not to be forgotten 1 Hahn, Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi, p. 113.

2 De civ. dei., vii. 18; viii. 26.

3 La Mythologie et les fables expliquees par l'histoire (Paris, 1738; 3 vols. 4to).

4 Symbolik and Mythologie der alten Volker (Leipzig and Darmsstadt, 1836-1843).

that Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary in North America, while inclined to take a mystical view of the secrets concealed by Iroquois myths, had also pointed out the savage element surviving in Greek mythology.5 Recent Mythological Systems. - Up to a very recent date students of mythology were hampered by orthodox traditions, and still more by ignorance of the ancient languages and of the natural history of man. Only recently have Sanskrit and the Egyptian and Babylonian languages become books not absolutely sealed. Again, the study of the evolution of human institutions from the lowest savagery to civilization is essentially a novel branch of research, though ideas derived from an unsystematic study of anthropology are at least as old as Aristotle. The new theories of mythology are based on the belief that " it is man, it is human thought and human language combined, which naturally and necessarily produced the strange conglomerate of ancient fable."' But, while there is now universal agreement so far, modern mythologists differed essentially on one point. There was a school (with internal divisions) which regarded ancient fable as almost entirely " a disease of language," that is, as the result of confusions arising from misunderstood terms that have survived in speech after their original significance was lost. Another school (also somewhat divided against itself) believes that misunderstood language played but a very slight part in the evolution of mythology, and that the irrational element in myths is merely the survival from a condition of thought which was once common, if not universal, but is now found chiefly among savages, and to a certain extent among children. The former school considered that the state of thought out of which myths were developed was produced by decaying language; the latter maintains that the corresponding phenomena of language were the reflection of thought. For the sake of brevity we might call the former the " philological " system, as it rests chiefly on the study of language, while the latter might be styled the " historical " or " anthropological " school, as it is based on the study of man in the sum of his manners, ideas and institutions.

The System of Max Muller

The most distinguished and popular advocate of the philological school was Max Muller, whose views may be found in his Selected Essays and Lectures on Language. The problem was to explain what he calls " the silly, savage and senseless element " in mythology (Sel. Ess. i. 578). Max Muller says (speaking of the Greeks), " their poets had an instinctive aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, yet they would relate of their gods what would make the most savage of Red Indians creep and shudder " - stories, that is, of the cannibalism of Demeter, of the mutilation of Uranus, the cannibalism of Cronus, who swallowed his own children, and the like. " Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting." Max Muller refers the beginning of his system of mythology to the discovery of the connexion of the Indo-European or, as they are called, " Aryan " languages. Celts, Germans, speakers of Sanskrit and Zend, Ldtins and Greeks, all prove by their languages that their tongues may be traced to one family of speech. The comparison of the various words which, in different forms, are common to all Indo-European languages must inevitably throw much light on the original meaning of these words. Take, for example, the name of a god, Zeus, or Athene, or any other. The word may have no intelligible meaning in Greek, but its counterpart in the allied tongues, especially in Sanskrit or Zend, may reveal the original significance of the terms. " To understand the origin and meaning of the names of the Greek gods, and to enter into the original intention of the fables told of each, we must take into account the collateral evidence supplied by Latin, German, Sanskrit and Zend philology " (Lect. on Lang., 2nd series, p. 406). A name may be intelligible in Sanskrit which has no sense in Greek. Thus Athene is a divine name without meaning in Greek, but Max Muller advances reasons for supposing that it is identical with ahana, " the dawn," in Sanskrit. It is his opinion, apparently, that whatever story is told of Athene must have originally been told of the dawn, and that we must keep this before us in attempting to understand the legends of Athene. Thus again (op. cit. p. 410), he says, " we have a right to explain all that is told of him " (Agni, " fire ") " as originally meant for fire." The system is simply this: the original meaning of the names of gods must be ascertained by comparative philology. The names, as a rule, will be found to denote elemental phenomena. And the silly, 5 Mceurs des sauvages (Paris, 1724).

s Max Muller, Lectures on Language (1864), 2nd series, p. 410.

xIx. 5 savage and senseless elements in the legends of the gods will be shown to have a natural significance, as descriptions of sky, storms, sunset, water, fire, dawn, twilight, the life of earth, and other celestial and terrestrial existences. Stated in the barest form, these results do not differ greatly from the conclusions of Theagenes of Rhegium, who held that " Hephaestus was fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was water, Artemis was the moon, Kai ra Xoura bµoiws." But Max Muller's system is based on scientific philology, not on conjecture, and is supported by a theory of the various processes in the evolution of myths out of language.

It is no longer necessary to give an elaborate analysis of this theory, because neither in its philological nor mythological side has it any advocates who need be reckoned with. The attempt to disengage the history of times forgotten and unknown, by means of analysis of roots and words in Aryan languages, has been unsuccessful, or has at best produced disputable results. Max Muller's system was a result of the philological theories that indicated the linguistic unity of the Indo-European or " Aryan " peoples, and was founded on an analysis of their language. But myths precisely similar in irrational and repulsive character, even in minute details, to those of the Aryan races, exist among Australians, South Sea Islanders, Eskimo, Bushmen in Africa, among Solomon Islanders, Iroquois, and so forth. The facts being identical, an identical explanation should be sought, and, as the languages in which the myths exist are essentially different, an explanation founded on the Aryan language is likely to prove too narrow. Once more, even if we discover the original meaning of a god's name, it does not follow that we can explain by aid of the significance of the name the myths about the god. For nothing is more common than the attraction of a more ancient story into the legend of a later god or hero. Myths of unknown antiquity, for example, have been attracted into the legend of Charlemagne, just as the bons mots of old wits are transferred to living humorists. Therefore, though we may ascertain that Zeus means " sky " and Agni " fire," we cannot assert, with Max Muller, that all the myths about Agni and Zeus were originally told of fire and sky. When these gods became popular they would inevitably inherit any current exploits of earlier heroes or gods. These exploits would therefore be explained erroneously if regarded as originally myths of sky or fire. We cannot convert Max Muller's proposition " there was nothing told of the sky that could not in some form or other be ascribed to Zeus" into " there was nothing ascribed to Zeus that had not at some time or other been told of the sky." This is also, perhaps, the proper place to observe that names derived from natural phenomena - sky, clouds, dawn and sun - are habitually assigned by Brazilians, Ojibways, Australians and other savages to living men and women. Thus the story originally told of a man or woman bearing the name " sun," " dawn," " cloud," may be mixed up later with myths about the real celestial dawn, cloud or sun. For all these reasons the information obtained from philological analysis of names is to be distrusted. We must also bear in mind that early men when they conceived, and savage men when they conceive, of the sun, moon, wind, earth, sky and so forth, have no such ideas in their minds as we attach to these names. They think of sun, moon, wind, earth and sky as of living human beings with bodily parts and passions. Thus, even when we discover an elemental meaning in a god's name, that meaning may be all unlike what the word suggests to civilized men. A final objection is that philologists differ widely as to the true analysis and real meaning of the divine names. Max Muller, for example, connects Kronos (Kpbvos) with xpbvos, "time "; Preller with Kpatvw, " I fulfil," and so forth.

The civilized men of the Mythopoeic age were not obliged, as Max Muller held, to believe that all phenomena were persons, because the words which denoted the phenomena had genderterminations. On the other hand, the gender-terminations were survivals from an early stage of thought in which personal characteristics, including sex, had been attributed to all phenomena. This condition of thought is demonstrated to be, and to have been, universal among savages, and it may notoriously be observed among children. Thus Max Muller's theory that myths are " a disease of language " seems destitute of evidence, and inconsistent with what is historically known about the relations between the language and the social, political and literary condition of men.

Theory of Herbert Spencer

The system of Herbert Spencer, as explained in Principles of Sociology, has many points in common with that of Max Muller. Spencer attempts to account for the state of mind (the foundation of myths) in which man personifies and animates all phenomena. According to his theory, too, this habit of mind may be regarded as the result of degeneration, for in his view, as in Max Muller's, it is not primary, but the result of misconceptions. But, while language is the chief cause of misconceptions with Max Muller, with Spencer it is only one of several forces all working to the same result. Statements which originally had a different significance are misinterpreted, he thinks, and names of human beings are also misinterpreted in such a manner that early races are gradually led to believe in the personality of phenomena. He too notes " the defect in early speech " - that is, the " lack of words free from implications of vitality " - as one of the causes which " favour personalization." Here, of course, we have to ask Spencer, with Max Muller, why words in early languages " imply vitality." These words must reflect the thought of the men who use them before they react upon that thought and confirm it in its misconceptions. So far Spencer seems at one with the philological school of mythologists, but he warns us that the misconstructions of language in his system are " different in kind, and the erroneous course of thought is opposite in direction." According to Spencer (and his premises, at least, are correct), the names of human beings in an early state of society are derived from incidents of the moment, and often refer to the period of the day or the nature of the weather. We find, among Australian natives, among Abipones in South America, and among Ojibways in the North, actual people named Dawn,Gold Flower of Day, Dark Cloud, Sun, and so forth. Spencer's argument is that, given a story about real people so named, in process of time and forgetfulness the anecdote which was once current about a man named Storm and a woman named Sunshine will be transferred to the meteorological phenomena of sun and tempest. Thus these purely natural agents will come to be " personalized " (Prin. Soc. 392), and to be credited with purely human origin and human adventures. Another misconception would arise when men had a tradition that they came to their actual seats from this mountain, or that lake or river, or from lands across the sea. They will mistake this tradition of local origin for one of actual parentage, and will come to believe that, like certain Homeric heroes, they are the sons of a river (now personified), or of a mountain, or, like a tribe mentioned by Garcilasso de la Vega, that they are descended from the sea. Once more, if their old legend told them that they came from the rising sun, they will hold, like many races, that they are actually the children of the sun. By this process of forgetfulness and misinterpretation, mountains, rivers, lakes, sun and sea would receive human attributes, while men would degenerate from a more sensible condition into a belief in the personality and vitality of inanimate objects. As Spencer thinks ancestor-worship the first form of religion, and as he holds that persons with such names as sun, moon and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural phenomena - dawn, wind, sky, night and the rest - are a kind of transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real men and women. " Partly by confounding the parentage of the race with a conspicuous object marking the natal region of the race, partly by literal interpretation of birth names, and partly by literal interpretation of names given in eulogy " (such as Sun and Bull, among the Egyptian kings), and also through " implicit belief in the statements of forefathers," there has been produced belief in descent from mountains, sea, dawn, from animals which have become constellations, and from persons once on earth who now appear as sun and moon. A very common class of myths (see ToTEMrsM) assures us that certain stocks of men are descended from beasts, or from gods in the shape of beasts. Spencer explains these by the theory that the remembered ancestor of a stock had, as savages often have, an animal name, as Bear, Wolf, Coyote, or what not. In time his descendants came to forget that the name was a mere name, and were misled into the opinion that they were children of a real coyote, wolf or bear. This idea, once current, would naturally stimulate and diffuse the belief that such descents were possible, and that the animals are closely akin to men.

The chief objection to these processes is that they require, as a necessary condition, a singular amount of memory on the one hand and of forgetfulness on the other. The lowest contemporary savages remember little or nothing of any ancestor farther back than the grandfather. But men in Spencer's Mythopoeic age had much longer memories. On the other hand, the most ordinary savage does not misunderstand so universal a custom as the imposition of names peculiar to animals or derived from atmospheric phenomena. He calls his own child Dawn or Cloud, his own name is Sitting Bull or Running Wolf, and he is not tempted to explain his great-grandfather's name of Bright Sun or Lively Raccoon on the hypothesis that the ancestor really was a raccoon or the sun. Moreover, savages do not worship ancestresses or retain lively memories of their great-grandmothers, yet it is through the female line in the majority of cases that the animal or other ancestral name is derived. The son of an Australian male, whose kin or totem name is Crane, takes, in many tribes, his mother's kin-name, Swan or Cockatoo, or whatever it may be, and the same is a common rule in Africa and America among races who rarely remember their great-grandfathers. On the whole, then (though degeneracy, as well as progress, is a force in human evolution), we are not tempted to believe in so strange a combination of forgetfulness with long memory, nor so excessive a degeneration from common sense into a belief in the personality of phenomena, as are required no less by Spencer's system than by that of Max Muller.

Preliminary Problems

We have stated and criticized the more prominent modern theories of mythology. It is now necessary first to recapitulate the chief points in the problem, and then to attempt to explain them by a comparison of the myths of various races. The difficulty of mythology is to account for the following among other apparently irrational elements in myths: the wild and senseless stories of the 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 Muller 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 ways. The missionary is sometimes anxious to prove that religion can only come by revelation, and that certain tribes, having received no revelation, have no religion or religious myths at all. Sometimes the missionary, on the other hand, is anxious to demonstrate that the myths of his heathen flock are a corrupted version of the Biblical narrative. In the former case he neglects the study of savage myths; in the latter he unconsciously accommodates what he hears to what he calls " the truth." The traveller who is not a missionary may either have the same prejudices, or he may be a sceptic about revealed religion. In the latter case he is perhaps unconsciously moved to put burlesque versions of Biblical stories into the mouths of his native informants, or to represent the savages as ridiculing the Scriptural traditions which he communicates to them. Yet again we must remember that the leading questions of a European inquirer may furnish a savage with a thread on which to string answers which the questions themselves have suggested. " Have you ever had a great flood ? " " Yes " " Was any one saved ? " The question starts the invention of the savage on a deluge-myth, of which, perhaps, the idea has never before entered his mind. There still remain the difficulties of all conversation between civilized men and unsophisticated savages, the tendency to hoax, and other sources of error and confusion. By this time, too, almost every explorer of savage life is a theorist. He is a Spencerian, or a believer in the universal prevalence of the faith in an " All-Father," or he looks everywhere for gods who are " spirits of vegetation." In receiving this kind of evidence, then, we need to know the character of our informant, his means of communicating with the heathen, his power of testing evidence, and his good faith. His testimony will have additional weight if supported by the " undesigned coincidences " of other evidence, ancient and modern. If Strabo and Herodotus and Pomponius Mela, for example, describe a custom, rite or strange notion in the Old World, and if mariners and missionaries find the same notion or custom or rite in Polynesia or Australia or Kamchatka, we can scarcely doubt the truth of the reports. The evidence is best when given by ignorant men, who are astonished at meeting with an institution which ethnologists are familiar with in other parts of the world.

Another method of obtaining evidence is by the comparative study of savage laws and institutions. Thus we find in Asia, Africa, America and Australia that the marriage laws of the lower races are connected with a belief in kinship or other relationship with animals. The evidence for this belief is thus entirely beyond suspicion. We find, too, that political power, sway and social influence are based on the ideas of magic, of metamorphosis, and of the power which certain men possess to talk with the dead and to visit the abodes of death. All these ideas are the stuff of which myths are made, and the evidence of savage institutions, in every part of the world, proves that these ideas are the universal inheritance of savages.

Savage men are like ourselves in curiosity and anxiety causas cognoscere rerum, but with our curiosity they do not possess our powers of attention. They are as easily satisfied with an explanation of phenomena as they are eager World. to possess an explanation. Inevitably they furnish themselves with their philosophy out of their scanty stock of acquired ideas, and these ideas and general conceptions seem almost imbecile to civilized men. Curiosity and credulity, then, are the characteristics of the savage intellect. When a phenomenon presents itself the savage requires an explanation, and that explanation he makes for himself, or receives from tradition, in the shape of a myth. The basis of these myths, which are just as much a part of early conjectural science as of early religion, is naturally the experience of the savage as construed by himself. Man's craving to know " the reason why " is already " among rude savages an intellectual appetite," and " even to the Australian scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience."' How does he try to satisfy this craving ? E. B. Tylor replies, " When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it. " Against this statement it has been urged that men in the lower stages of culture are not curious, but take all phenomena for granted. If there were no direct evidence in favour of Tylor's opinion, it would be enough to point to the nature of savage myths themselves. It is not arguing in a circle to point out that almost all of them are nothing more than explanations of intellectual difficulties, answers to the question, How came this or that phenomenon to be what it is ? Thus savage myths answer the questions - What was the origin of the world, and of men, and of beasts ? How came the stars by their arrangement 1 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 369 (1871).

and movements? How are the motions of sun and moon to be accounted for? Why has this tree a red flower, and this bird a black mark on the tail? What was the origin of the tribal dances, or of this or that law of custom or etiquette? Savage mythology, which is also savage science, has a reply to all these and all similar questions, and that reply is always found in the shape of a story. The answers cannot be accounted for without the previous existence of the questions.

We have now shown how savages come to have a mythology. It is their way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity, their way of realizing the world in which they move. But they frame their stories, necessarily and naturally, in harmony with their general theory of things, with what we may call " savage metaphysics." Now early man, as Max Muller says, " not only did not think as we think, but did not think as we suppose he ought to have thought." The chief distinction between his mode of conceiving the world and ours is his vast extension of the theory of personality. To the savage, and apparently to men more backward than the most backward peoples we know, all nature was a congeries of animated personalities. The savage's notion of personality is more a universally diffused feeling than a reasoned conception, and this feeling of a personal self he impartially distributes all over the world as known to him. One of the Jesuit missionaries in North America thus describes the Red Man's philosophy: 2 " Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees." Crevaux, in the Andes, found that the Indians believed that the beasts have piays (sorcerers and doctors) like themselves. 3 This opinion we may name personalism, and it is the necessary condition of savage (and, as will be seen, of civilized) mythology. The Jesuits could not understand how spherical bodies like sun and moon could be mistaken for human beings. Their catechumens put them off with the answer that the drawn bows of the heavenly bodies gave them their round appearance. " The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird," say the Bushmen, and g' oo ka! kai, a respectable Bushman once saw the personal wind at Haarfontein. 4 The Egyptians, according to Herodotus (iii. 16), believed fire to be 6rtpiov g µ ' vxov, a live beast. The Bushman who saw the Wind meant to throw a stone at it, but it ran into a hill. From the wind as a person the Bhinyas in India (Dalton, p. zoo) claim descent, and in Indian epic tradition the leader of the ape army was the son of the wind. The Wind, by certain mares, became the father of wind-swift steeds mentioned in the Iliad. The loves of Boreas are well known. These are examples of the animistic theory applied to what, in our minds, seems one of the least personal of natural phenomena. The sky (which appears to us even less personal) has been regarded as a personal being by Samoyeds, Red Indians, Zulus,5 and traces of this belief survive in Chinese, Greek and Roman religion.

We must remember, however, that to the savage, Sky, Sun, Sea, Wind, are not only persons, but they are savage persons. Their conduct is not what civilized men would attribute to characters so august; it is what uncivilized men think probable and befitting among beings like themselves.

The savage regards all animals as endowed with personality. " Its tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs," says a Jesuit father about the North-American savage Indians (Relations, loc. cit.). In Australia the Theory of natives believe that the wild dog has the power of speech, like the cat of the Coverley witch in the Spectator. The Breton peasants, according to P. Sebillot, credit all birds with language, which they even attempt to interpret. The old English and the Arab superstitions about the language of beasts are examples of this opinion surviving among civilized races. The bear in Norway is regarded as almost a man, and his dead body is addressed and his wrath deprecated by Samoyeds and Red Indians. " The native bear 2 Relations (1636), p. 534. a Voyages, p. 159.4 South African Folk-Lore Journal (May 1880). E. B. Tylor, op. cit. ii. 256.

Kur-bo-roo is the sage counsellor of the aborigines in all their difficulties. When bent on a dangerous expedition, the men will seek help from this clumsy creature, but in what way his opinions are made known is nowhere recorded." 1 H. R. Schoolcraft mentions a Red Indian story explaining how " the bear does not die," but this tale Schoolcraft (like Herodotus in Egypt) " cannot bring himself to relate." He also gives examples of Iowas conversing with serpents. These may serve as examples of the savage belief in the human intelligence of animals. Man is on an even footing with them, and with them can interchange his ideas. But savages carry this opinion much further. Man in their view is actually, and in no figurative sense, akin to the beasts. Certain tribes in Java " believe that women when delivered of a child are frequently delivered at the same time of a young crocodile." 2 The common European story of a queen accused of giving birth to puppies shows the survival of the belief in the possibility of such births among civilized races, while the Aztecs had the idea that women who saw the moon in certain circumstances would produce mice. But the chief evidence for the savage theory of man's close kinship with the lower animals is found in the institution called totemism - the belief that certain stocks of men in the various tribes are descended by blood descent from, or are developed out of, or otherwise connected with, certain objects animate or inanimate, but especially with beasts. The strength of the opinion is proved by its connexion with very stringent marriage laws. No man (according to the rigour of the custom) may marry a woman who bears the same kin name as himself, that is, who is descended from the same inanimate object or animal. Nor may people (if they can possibly avoid it) eat the flesh of animals who are their kindred. Savage man also believes that many of his own tribe-fellows have the power of assuming the shapes of animals, and that the souls of his dead kinsfolk revert to animal forms.

E. W. Lane, in his introduction to the Arabian Nights (i. 58), says he found the belief in these transmigrations accepted seriously in Cairo. H. H. Bancroft brings evidence to prove that the Mexicans supposed pregnant women would turn into beasts, and sleeping children into mice, if things went wrong in the ritual of a certain solemn sacrifice. There is a well-known Scottish legend to the effect that a certain old witch was once fired at in her shape as a hare, and that where the hare was hit there the old woman was found to be wounded. J. F. Lafitau tells the same story as current among his Red Indian flock, except that the old witch and her son took the form of birds, not of hares. A Scandinavian witch does the same in the Egil saga. In Lafitau's tale the birds were wounded by the magic arrows of a medicine man, and the arrow-heads were found in the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan 3 people chiefly transform themselves into badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras (Bancroft, i. 740) " possessed the power of transforming men into wild beasts." J. F. Regnard, the French dramatist, found in Lapland (1681) that witches could turn men into cats, and could themselves assume the forms of swans, crows, falcons and geese. Among the Bushmen 4 " sorcerers assume the form of beasts and jackals." M. Dobrizhofer, a missionary in Paraguay (1717-1791), learned that " sorcerers arrogate to themselves the power of changing men into tigers " (Eng. trans., i. 63). He was present at a conversion of this sort, though the miracle beheld by the people was invisible to the missionary. Near Loanda Livingstone noted that " a chief may metamorphose himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and resume his proper form." The same accomplishments distinguish the Barotse and Balonda. 5 Among the Mayas of Central America sorcerers could transform themselves " into dogs, pigs and other animals; their glance was death to a victim " (Bancroft, ii. 797). The Thlinkeets hold that their shamans have the same powers.' A bamboo in Sarawak is known to have been a man. Metamorphoses into stones are as common among Red Indians and Australians as in Greek mythology. Compare the cases of Niobe and the victims of the Gorgon's head. ? Zulus, Red Indians, Aztecs,' Andaman Islanders and other races believe that their dead assume the shapes of serpents and of other creatures, often reverting to the form of the animal from which they originally descended. In ancient Egypt 1 R. Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 446 (1878). a J. Hawkesworth, Voyages, iii. 756.

Lord Redesdale, Tales of Old Japan (1871).

4 Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 15, 40.

Missionary Travels, pp. 615, 642.

6 W. H. Dall, Alaska, p. 423 (1870).

Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions, pp. 130, 134.

Sahagun, French trans., p. 226.

the usual prayers demand for the deceased the power of going and coming from and to everywhere under any form they like." 9 A trace of this opinion may be noticed in the Aeneid. The serpent that appeared at the sacrifice of Aeneas was regarded as possibly a " manifestation " of the soul of Anchises (Aeneid, v. 84) " Dixerat haec, adytis quum lubricus anguis ab imis Septem ingens gyros, septena volumina, traxit," and Aeneas is " Incertus, geniumne loci, famulumne parentis Esse putet." On the death of Plotinus, as he gave up the ghost, a snake glided from under his bed into a hole in the wall." Compare Pliny n on the cave " in quo manes Scipionis Africani majoris custodire draco dicitur." The last peculiarity in savage philosophy to which we need call attention here is the belief in spirits and in human intercourse with the shades of the dead. With the savage natural death is not a universal and inevitable ordinance. " All men must die " is a generalization which he has scarcely reached; in his philosophy the proposition is more like this - " all men who die die by violence." A natural death is explained as the result of a sorcerer's spiritual violence, and the disease is attributed to magic or to the action of hostile spirits. After death the man survives as a spirit, sometimes taking an animal form, sometimes invisible, sometimes to be observed " in his habit as he lived " (see Apparitions). The philosophy of the subject is shortly put in the speech of Achilles (Iliad, xxiii. 103) after he has beheld the dead Patroclus in a dream: " Ay me, there remaineth then even in the house of Hades a spirit and phantom of the dead, for all night long hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and making moan." It is almost superfluous to quote here the voluminous evidence for the intercourse with spirits which savage chiefs and medicine men are believed to maintain. They can call up ghosts, or can go to the ghosts, in Australia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, North America, Zululand, among the Eskimo, and generally in every quarter of the globe. The men who enjoy this power are the same as they who can change themselves and others into animals. They too command the weather, and, says an old French missionary, " are regarded as very Jupiters, having in their hands the lightning and the thunder " (Relations, loc. cit.). They make good or bad seasons, and control the vast animals who, among ancient Persians and Aryans of India, as among Zulus and Iroquois, are supposed to grant or withhold the rain, and to thunder with their enormous wings in the region of the clouds.

Another fertile source of myth is magic, especially the magic designed to produce fertility, vegetable and animal. From the natives of northern and central Australia to the actors in the ritual of Adonis, or the folk among whom arose the customs of crowning the May king or the king of the May, all peoples have done magic to encourage the breeding of animals as part of the food supply, and to stimulate the growth of plants, wild or cultivated. In the opinion of J. G. Frazer, the human representatives or animal representatives, in the rites, of the spirit of vegetation; of the corn spirit; of the changing seasons, winter or summer, have been developed into many forms of gods, with appropriate myths, explanatory of the magic, and of the sacrifice of the chief performer. In the same way the adoration of living human beings, the deification of living kings - whose title survives in our king or queen of the May, and in the rex nemorensis, the priest of Diana in the grove of Aricia - has been most fruitful in myths of divine beings. These human beings are often sacrificed, for various reasons, actual or hypothetical, and gods and heroes are almost as likely to be explained as spirits of vegetation now, as they were likely to become solar mythological figures in the system of Max Muller. It is certainly true that divine beings in most mythologies are apt to acquire solar with other elemental attributes, including vegetable attributes. But that the origins of such mythical beings were, ab initio, either solar or vegetable, or, for that matter, animal, it would often be hard to prove.

Frazer's ideas are to be found in a work of immense erudition, The Golden Bough (London, 1900). Two studies by him, pursuing 9 Records of the Past, x. 10. to Plotini vita, pp. 2, 95.

H. N. xv. 44, 85.

the same set of ideas in more detail, are Adonis, Attis, Osiris (1906) and Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship (1905). See A. Lang, Magic and Religion (London, 1901), for a criticism in detail of the general theory as set forth in The Golden Bough. Whatever may be said, Frazer has certainly made the most important of recent contributions to the study of mythology. He has fixed the attention of students on a mass of early ideas, previously much neglected save by W. Mannhardt, and on the facts of ritual, which preserve these ideas and represent them in a kind of mystery plays.

We are now in a p' icion to sum up the ideas of savages about man's relations to the world. We started on this inquiry because we found that savages regarded sky, wind, sun, earth and so forth as practically men, and we had then to ask, what sort of men, men with what powers ? The result of our examination, so far, is that in savage opinion sky, wind, sun, sea and many other phenomena have, being personal, all the powers attributed to real human persons. These powers and qualities are: (I) relationship to animals and ability to be transformed and to transform others into animals and other objects; (2) magical accomplishments, as - (a) power to visit or to procure the visits of the dead; (b) other magical powers, such as control over the weather and over the fertility of nature in all departments. Once more, the great forces of nature, considered as persons, are involved in that inextricable confusion in which men, beasts, plants, stones, stars, are all on one level of personality and animated existence. This is the philosophy of savage life, and it is on these principles that the savage constructs his myths, while these, again, are all the scientific explanations of the universe with which he has been able to supply himself.

Examples of Mythology

Myths of the origin of the world and man are naturally most widely diffused. Man has everywhere asked himself whence things came and how, and his myths are his earliest extant form of answer to this question. So confused and inconsistent are the mythical answers that it is very difficult to classify them according to any system. If we try beginning with myths of creative gods, we find that the world is sometimes represented as pre-existent to the divine race. If we try beginning with myths of the origin of the world, we frequently find that it owes its origin to the activity of preexistent supernatural beings. According to all modern views of creation, the creative mind is prior to the universe which it created. There is no such consistency of opinion in myths, whether of civilized or savage races. Perhaps the plan least open to objection is to begin with myths of the gods. But when we speak of gods, we must not give to the word a modern significance. As used here, gods merely mean non-natural and powerful beings, sometimes " magnified non-natural men," sometimes beasts, birds or insects, sometimes the larger forces and phenomena of the universe conceived of as endowed with human personality and passions. When Plutarch examined the Osirian myth (De Isid. xxv.) he saw that the " gods " in the tale were really " demons," " stronger than men, but having the divine part not wholly unalloyed " - " magnified nonnatural men," in short. And such are the gods of mythology.

In examining the myths of the gods we shall begin with the conceptions of the most backward tribes, and advance to the divine legends of the ancient civilized races. It will appear that, while the non-civilized gods are often theriomorphic, made in accordance with the ideas of non-civilized men, the civilized gods retain many characteristics of the savage gods, and these characteristics are the " irrational element " in the divine myths.

Myths of Gods: Savage Ideas

It is not easy to separate the discussion of savage myths of gods from the problem, Whence and how arose the savage belief in gods ? The orthodox anthropological explanation has been that of E. B. Tylor, which closely resembles Herbert Spencer's " ghost theory." By reflection on dreams, in which the self, or " spirit," of the savage seems to wander free from the bounds of time and space, to see things remote, and to meet and recognize dead friends or foes; by speculation on the experiences of trance and of phantasms of the dead or living, beheld with waking eyes; by pondering on the phenomena of shadows, of breath, of death and life, the savage evolved the idea of a separable soul or spirit capable of surviving bodily death. The spirit of the dead may tenant a material object, a " fetish," or may roam hungry and comfortless and need propitiation by food, for unpropitiated it is dangerous, or may be reincarnated, or may " go to its own herd " in another world. Again, it is naturally kind to its living kinsfolk, and so may be addressed in prayer. These are the doctrines of animism, and, according to the usual anthropological theory, these spirits come to thrive to god's estate in favourable circumstances, as where the dead man, when alive, had great man y or wakan, a great share of the ether, so to speak, which, in savage metaphysics, is the viewless vehicle of magical influences. Thus the ghost of the hero or medicine man of a kin or tribe may be raised to divine rank, while again - the doctrine of spirits once developed, and spirits once allotted to the great elemental forces and phenomena of nature, sky, thunder, the sea, the forests - we have the beginnings of departmental deities, such as Agni, god of fire; Poseidon, god of the sea; Zeus, god of the sky - though in recent theories Zeus appears to be regarded as primarily the god of the oak tree, a spirit of vegetation.

On this theory animism, the doctrine of spirits, is the source of all belief in gods. But it is found that among the lowest or least cultured races, such as the south-eastern tribes of Australia, who do not propitiate ancestral spirits by offerings of food, or address them in prayer, there often exists a belief in an " All-Father," to use Howitt's convenient expression. This being cannot have been evolved out of the cult of ancestors, where ancestors are not worshipped; and he is not even regarded as a spirit, but, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, as " a magnified non-natural man." He existed before death came into the world, and he still exists. His home is in or above the sky, but there was a time when he walked the earth, a potent magic-worker; endowed mankind with such arts and institutions as they possess; and left to them certain rules of life, ethics and ritual. Often he is regarded as the maker of things, or of most things, and of mankind; or mankind are his children, descended from disobedient sons of his, whom he cast out of heaven. Very frequently he is the judge of souls, and sends the good and bad to their own places of reward and punishment. He is usually supposed to watch over human conduct, but this is by no means invariably the case. Sometimes he, like the Atnatu of the Kaitish tribe of central Australia, is only vigilant in matters of ritual, such as circumcision, subincision and the use of the sacred bull-roarer, the Greek poµt30s. As an almost universal rule, in the lowest culture, no prayers are addressed to this being; he has no sacrifices, no dwelling made with hands; and the images of him, in clay, that are made and danced round with invocations of his name at the tribal ceremonies of initiation, are destroyed at the close of the performances. If the name of " god " is denied to such beings because they receive little cult, it may still be admitted that the belief might easily develop into a form of theism, independent of and underived from animism, or the ghost theory.

The best account of this All-Father belief in the lowest culture is to be read in R. Howitt's Native Races of South-East Australia. Under the names of Baiame, Pundjel, Mulkari, Daramulun and many others, the south-eastern tribes (both those who reckon descent in the female and those who reckon by the male line) have this faith in an All-Father, the attributes varying in various communities. The most highly developed All-Father is the Baiame or Byamee of the Euahlayi tribe of north-western New South Wales, to whom prayers for the welfare of the souls of the dead are, or recently were, addressed - the tribe dwelling a hundred miles away from the nearest missionary station (Protestant).' In the centre of Australia, Atnatu, self-created, is known, as has been said, to the Kaitish tribe, next neighbours of the Arunta of the Macdonnell Hills. Among the Arunta, Mr Strehlow (Globus, May 1907) finds such a being as Atnatu, and also among some other adjacent tribes, as the Luritja. See, too, Strehlow and von Leonhardi, in Veriiffentlichungen aus dem stiidtischen Volker-Museum (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1907, vol. i.). But Messrs B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, who discovered Atnatu, did not find any trace of an All-Father among the Arunta, or any other of the tribes to the north and north-east of the centre. Mr Strehlow's branch of the Arunta they did not examine.

It is plain that the All-Father belief, in favourable circumstances, especially if ghost worship remained undeveloped, might be evolved into theism. But all over the savage world, especially in Africa, spirit worship has sprung up and choked the All-Father, who, however, in most savage regions, abides as a name, receiving no sacrifice, and, save among the Masai, seldom being addressed in prayer. A list of such otiose great beings in the background of religion is given in Lang's The Making of Religion (1898). Since the publication of that book much additional evidence has accrued from Africa and Melanesia, where the belief occurs in a few islands, but, in the majority, is absent or unrecorded. Most of the fresh evidence is given in La Notion de l'&re supreme chez les peuples non-civilises, by Rene Hoffmann (Geneva, 1907). See also the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1899-1907), vols. xxix., xxxii., xxxiv., xxxv., and the works of Miss Mary Kingsley, and Spieth, Die EweStamme, Reimer (Berlin, 1906), and Sundermann in Warneck's Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift, vol. xi. An excellent statement is that of Pere Schmidt, S.V.D., in Anthropos, Bd. III., Hft. 3 (1908), pp. 559611. Tylor's efforts to show that these All-Fathers were derived from missionary or other European influences (Nineteenth ' 'See' Mrs Langloh Parker's The Euahlayi Tribe. Century, 1892) have not been successful (see Lang, Magic and Religion, " The Theory of Loan Gods ") and N.W.Thomas in Man (1905), v., 49 et seq. The All-Father belief is most potent among the lowest races, and always tends to become obsolete under the competition of serviceable ancestral spirits, or gods made in the image of such spirits, who can be bribed by sacrifices or induced by prayers to help man in his various needs.

The belief in the All-Father in south-eastern Australia is concealed from the women and children who, at most, know his exoteric name, often meaning " Our Father," and is revealed only to the initiate, among whom are a very few white men, like Howitt. Mrs Langloh Parker, of course, was not initiated (indeed, no white man has gone through the actual and very painful rites), but confidences were made to her with great secrecy. The All-Father, even at his best, among the Kurnai, Kamilaroi and Euahlayi, is the centre of many grotesque and sportive myths. He usually has a wife and children, not in all cases born, but rather they are emanations. One of these children is often his mediator with men, and has the charge of the rites and the mystic bull-roarer. The relation is that of Apollo to Zeus in Greek myth.

Many of the wilder myths are the expressions of the sportive and humorous faculties. Some arise naturally thus: Baiame, say, originated everything, therefore he originated the grotesque mummeries and dances of the mysteries. To explain these, myths have been developed to show that they arose in some grotesque incident of Baiame's personal existence on earth. Many Greek myths, most derogatory to the dignity of Demeter, Dionysus, Zeus or Hera, arose in the same way, as explanations of buffooneries in the Eleusinian or other mysteries. In medieval literature the most sacred persons of our religion have grotesque associations attached to them in the same manner.

While the All-Father belief is common in the tribes of southeastern Australia, the tribes round Lake Eyre, the Arunta (as known to Messrs Spencer and Gillen), and the other central and northern tribes, are credited with no germs of belief in what is called a supreme, and may truly be styled a superior being. That being, in many cases, but not so commonly in Australia, has a malevolent opposite who thwarts his work, an Ahriman to his Ormuzd. In one district, where the superior being is a crow, his opposite is an eagle-hawk. These two birds in many tribes give names to the two great exogamous and intermarrying divisions; in their case there is a va et vient of divine, human and theriomorphic elements, just as in the Greek myths of Zeus. As a rule, however, the Australian AllFather is anthropomorphic, and fairly well described in the native term when they speak English as " the Big Man," powerful, deathless, friendly, " able to go everywhere and do everything," " to see whatever you do." The existence of the belief in this being was accepted by T. Waitz, and, though disputed by many squatters and most anthropologists, is now admitted on the strength of the evidence of Howitt, Cameron, Mrs Langloh Parker, Dawson, W. E. Roth in Ethnological Studies, and many other close observers. The belief being esoteric, a secret of the initiated, necessarily escaped casual inquirers.

Meanwhile, among some of the Arunta of the centre, among the Dieri and Urabunna tribes near Lake Eyre and their congeners, and among the tribes north by east of the Arunta, no such belief has been discovered by Messrs Spencer and Gillen, from whom the tribes kept no secrets, or by Mr Siebert, a missionary among the now all but extinct Dieri. There is just a trace of a dim sky-dwelling being, Arawotja, possibly an all but obliterated survival of an AllFather. Howitt speaks too of the Dieri Kutchi, who inspires medicine-men with ideas, but about him our information is scanty. Among all these tribes religion now takes another line, the belief in a supernormal race of Titanic beings, with no superior, who were the first dwellers on earth; who possessed powers far exceeding those of the medicine-men of to-day; and who, in one way or another, were connected with, or developed from, the totem animals,vegetables and other objects. These beings modified the face of the country; in Arunta belief rocks and trees arose to mark the places where they finally " went into the ground " (Oknanikilla), and their spirits still haunt certain places such as these; and are reincarnated in native women who pass by. These beings, in Arunta called " the people of the Alcheringa, or dream time " (but cf. Strehlow in Globus, ut supra), originated the tribal rites of initiation. In Dieri they are called Mura-Mura, and to them prayers are made for rain, accompanied by rain-making magic ceremonies, which in this case may be a symbolical expression of the prayers. There is a large body of myths about the Alcheringa folk, or Mura-Mura (see Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, Native Tribes of Northern Australia, and Howitt, Native Tribes of SouthEastern Australia), and the myths of their wanderings, prodigies and institution of rites and magic are represented in the dances of the mysteries. Most of the magic is worked (Intichiuma in Arunta) by the members of each totem kin or group for the behoof of the totem as an article of food supply. These rites are common in North America, but are worked by members of gilds or societies, not by totem kins.

The belief in these Mura-Mura or Alcheringa folk may obviously develop, in favourable circumstances, into a polytheism like that of Greece, or of Egypt, or of the Maoris. The old Irish gods in the poetic romances appear to have the same origin and shade away into the fairies. The baser Greek myths of the wanderings, amours and adventures of the gods, myths ignored by Homer, are parallel to the adventures of the Alcheringa people, and the fable of the mutilation of Osiris and the search for the lost organ by Isis, actually occurs among the Alcheringa tales of Messrs Spencer and Gillen. Among the Arunta, the Alcheringa folk are part of a strangely elaborate theory of evolution and of animism, which leaves no room for a creative being, or for a future life of the spirit, which is merely reincarnated at intervals.

Thus the doctrines of evolution and of creation, or the making of things, stand apart, or blend, in the metaphysics and religion of the lowest and least progressive of known peoples. The question as to which theory came first, whether Alcheringaism is a scientific effort that swept away All-Fatherism, or whether All-Fatherism is a religious reaction in despair of science and of the evolutionary doctrine, is settled by each inquirer in accordance with his personal bias. It has been argued that All-Fatherism is an advance, conditioned by coastal influences - more rain and more food - concomitant with a social advance to individual marriage, and reckoning of kin in the male line. But tribes far from the sea, as in northern New South Wales and Queensland, have the All-Father belief, with individual marriage and female descent, while tribes of the north coast, with male descent, are credited with no All-Father; and the Arunta, as far as possible from the sea, have no All-Father (save in Strehlow's district), and have individual marriage and male reckoning of descent in matters of inheritance; while the Urabunna and Dieri, with female descent and the custom of pirrauru (called " group marriage " by Howitt), are not credited with the All-Father belief. Thus coastal conditions have clearly no causal influence on the development of the All-Father belief. If they had, the natives of central Queensland, remote from the sea, should not have their All-Father (Mulkari), and the natives of the northern and northeastern coasts should have an All-Father, who is still to seek. The Arunta of Messrs Spencer and Gillen may have possessed and deposed the Altjira superior being of the Arunta known to Mr Strehlow, like the Atnatu of the adjacent Kaitish, or the All-Father of the neighbouring Luritja; or these beings may be more recent divergences of doctrine, departures from pure Alcheringaism with no AllFather. At present, at least, it is premature to dogmatize on these problems.' The chief being among the supernatural characters of Bushman mythology is the insect called the Mantis.' Cagn or Ikaggen, the Mantis, is sometimes regarded with religious respect as African a benevolent god. But his adventures are the merest nightmares of puerile fancy. He has a wife, an adopted daughter, whose real father is the " swallower " in Bushman swallowing myths, and the daughter has a son, who is the Ichneumon. The Mantis made an eland out of the shoe of his son-in-law. The moon was also created by the Mantis out of his shoe, and it is red, because the shoe was covered with the red dust of Bushman-land. The Mantis is defeated in an encounter with a cat which happened to be singing a song about a lynx. The Mantis (like Poseidon, Hades, Metis and other Greek gods)was once swallowed, but disgorged alive. The swallower was the monster Ilkhwai-hemm. Like Heracles when he leaped into the belly of the monster which was about to swallow Hesione, the Mantis once jumped down the throat of a hostile elephant, and so destroyed him. The heavenly bodies are gods among the Bushmen, but their nature and adventures must be discussed among other myths of sun, moon and stars. As a creator Cagn is sometimes said to have " given orders, and caused all things to appear to be made." He struck snakes with his staff and turned them into men, as Zeus did with the ants in Aegina. But the Bushmen's mythical theory of the origin of things must, as far as possible, be kept apart from the fables of the Mantis, the Ichneumon and other divine beings. Though animals, these gods have human passions and character, and possess the usual magical powers attributed to sorcerers.

Concerning the mythology of the Hottentots and Namas, we have a great deal of information in a book named Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi (1881), by Dr T. Hahn. This author collected the old notices of Hottentot myths, and added material from his own researches. The chief god of the Hottentots is a being named Tsuni-Goam, who is universally regarded by his worshippers as a deceased sorcerer. According to one old believer, " Tsui-Goab " (an alternative reading of the god's name) " was a great powerful chief of the Khoi-Khoi - in fact, he was the first Khoi-Khoib from whom all the Khoi-Khoi tribes took their name." He is always 1 The drawback to knowledge is the rarity of full acquaintance with native languages. Strehlow, Roth and Ridley seem best equipped on the linguistic side. Spencer and Gillen do not tell us that they have a colloquial knowledge of any Australian language. Gason, author of a work on the Dieri tribe, knew their language well, but several of his statements appear to be inaccurate. Mrs Langloh Parker describes her methods of checking and controlling native statements made in English.

2 Accounts of the Mantis and of his performances will be found in the Cape Monthly Magazine(July 1874), and in Dr Bleek's Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore. represented as at war (in the usual crude dualism of savages) with " another chief " named Gaunab. The prayers addressed to TsuiGoab are simple and natural in character, the " private ejaculations " of men in moments of need or distress. As usual, religion is more advanced than mythology. It appears that, by some accounts, Tsui-Goab lives in the red sky and Gaunab in the dark sky. The neighbouring race of Namas have another old chief for god, a being called Heitsi Eibib. His graves are shown in many places, like those of Osiris, which, says Plutarch, abounded in Egypt. He is propitiated by passers-by at his sepulchres. He has intimate relations in peace and war with a variety of animals whose habits are sometimes explained (like those of the serpent in Genesis) as the result of the curse of Heitsi Eibib. Heitsi Eibib was born in a mysterious way from a cow, as Indra in the Black Yaj;'r-Veda entered; nto and was born from the womb of a being who also bore a cow. The RigVeda (iv. 18, i) remarks, " His mother, a cow, bore Indra, an unlicked calf " - probably a metaphorical way of speaking. Heitsi Eibib, like countless other gods and heroes, is also said to have been the son of a virgin who tasted a particular plant, and so became pregnant, as in the German and Gallophrygian marchen of the almond tree, given by Grimm and Pausanias. Incest is one of the feats of Heitsi Eibib. Tsui-Goab, in the opinion of his worshippers, as we have seen, is a deified dead sorcerer, whose name means Wounded Knee, the sorcerer having been injured in the knee by an enemy. Dr Hahn tries to prove (by philology's " artful aid ") that the name really means " red dawn," and is a Hottentot way of speaking of the infinite. The philological arguments advanced are extremely weak, and by no means convincing. If we grant, however, for the sake of argument, that the early Hottentots worshipped the infinite under the figure of the dawn, and that, by forgetting their own meaning, they came to believe that the words which really meant " red dawn" meant " wounded knee " we must still admit that the devout have assigned to their deity all the attributes of an ancestral sorcerer. In short, " their Red Dawn," if red dawn he be, is a person, and a savage person, adored exactly as the actual fathers and grandfathers of the Hottentots are adored. We must explain this legend, then, on these principles, and not as an allegory of the dawn as the dawn appears to civilized people. About Gaunab (the Ahriman to Tsui-Goab's Ormuzd) Dr Hahn gives two distinct opinions. "Gaunab was at first a ghost, a mischief-maker and evil-doer " (op. cit. p. 85). But Gaunab he declares to be " the night-sky " (p. 126). Whether we regard Gaunab, Heitsi Eibib and Tsui-Goab as originally mythological representations of natural phenomena, or as deified dead men, it is plain that they are now venerated as non-natural human beings, possessing the customary attributes of sorcerers. Thus of Tsui-Goab it is said, " He could do wonderful things which no other man could do, because he was very wise. He could tell what would happen in future times. He died several times, and several times he rose again " (statement of old Kxarab in Hahn, p. 61).

The mythology of the Zulus as reported by H. Callaway (Unkulunkulu, 1868-1870) is very thin and uninteresting. The Zulus are great worshippers of ancestors (who appear to men in the form of snakes), and they regard a being called Unkulunkulu as their first ancestor, and sometimes as the creator, or at least as the maker of men. It does not appear they identify Unkulunkulu, as a rule, with " the lord of heaven," who, like Indra, causes the thunder. The word answering to our lord is also applied," even to beasts, as the lion and the boa." The Zulus, like many distant races, sometimes attribute thunder to the " thunder-bird," which, as in North America, is occasionally seen and even killed by men. " It is said to have a red bill, red legs and a short red tail like fire. The bird is boiled for the sake of the fat, which is used by the heavendoctors to puff on their bodies, and to anoint their lightning-rods." The Zulus are so absorbed in propitiating the shades of their dead (who, though in serpentine bodies, have human dispositions) that they appear to take little pleasure in mythological narratives. At the same time, the Zulus have many " nursery tales," the plots and incidents of which often bear the closest resemblance to the heroic myths of Greece, and to the marchen of European peoples.' These indications will give a general idea of African divine myths. On the west coast the " ananzi " or spider takes the place of the mantis insect among the Bushmen. For some of his exploits Dasent's Tales from the Norse (2nd ed., Appendix) may be consulted. For South African religion see Lang. Magic and Religion; Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind; Junod, Les Barotsa; Spieth, Die Ewe-Stamme; Frazer, The Golden Bough. Turning from the natives of Australia, and from African races of various degrees of culture, to the Papuan inhabitants of Melanesia, we find that mythological ideas are scarcely on a higher level. An excellent account of the myths of the Banks Islanders and Solomon Islanders was given in Journ. Anthropol. Inst. (Feb. 1881) by the Rev. R. H. Codrington. The article contains a critical description of the difficulty with which missionaries obtain information about the prior creeds. The people of the ' These are collected by Callaway, Zulu Nursery Tales (1868). Similar Kafir stories, also closely resembling the popular fictions of European races, have been published by Theal. Many other examples are published in the South African Folk-Lore Journal (1879,1880).

Banks Islands are chiefly ancestor-worshippers, but they also believe in, and occasionally pray to, a being named I Qat, one of the prehuman race endowed with supernatural powers who here, as elsewhere, do duty as gods. Here is an example of a prayer to Qat - the devotee is supposed to be in danger with his canoe: " Qate! Marawa! look down on me, smooth the sea for us two that I may go safely on the sea. Beat down for me the crests of the tide-rip; let the tide-rip settle down away from me, beat it down level that it may sink and roll away, and I may come to a quiet landing-place." Compare the prayer of Odysseus to the river, whose mouth he had reached after three days' swimming on the tempestuous sea. " ' Hear me, 0 king, whosoever thou art, unto thee I am come as to one to whom prayer is made ... nay, pity me, 0 king, for I avow myself thy suppliant.' So spake he, and the god stayed his stream, and withheld his waves, and made the water smooth before him " (Odyssey v. 450). The prayer of the Melanesian is on rather a higher religious level than that of the Homeric hero. The myths of Qat's adventures, however, are very crude, though not so wild as some of the Scandinavian myths about Odin and Loki, while they are less immoral than the adventures of Indra and Zeus. Qat was born in the isle of Vanua Levu; his mother was either a stone at the time of his birth, or was turned into a stone afterwards, like Niobe. The mother of Apollo, according to Aelian, had the misfortune to be changed into a wolf. Qat had eleven brothers, not much more reputable than the Osbaldistones in Rob Roy. The youngest brother was " Tangaro Loloqong, the Fool." His pastime was to make wrong all that Qat made right, and he is sometimes the Ahriman to Qat's Ormuzd. The creative achievements of Qat must be treated of in the next section. Here it may be mentioned that, like the hero in the Breton mdrehen, Qat " brought the dawn " by introducing birds whose notes proclaimed the coming of morning. Before Qat's time there had been no night, but he purchased a sufficient allowance of darkness from I Qong, that is, night considered as a person in accordance with the law of savage thought already explained. Night is a person in Greek mythology, and in the fourteenth book of the Iliad we read that Zeus abstained from punishing Sleep " because he feared to offend swift Night." Qat produced dawn, for the first time, by cutting the darkness with a knife of red obsidian. Afterwards " the fowls and birds showed the morning." On one occasion an evil power (Vui) slew all Qat's brothers, and hid them in a food-chest. As in the common " swallowing-myths " which we have met among bushmen and Australians, and will find among the Greeks, Qat restored his brethren to life. Qat is always accompanied by a powerful supernatural spider named Marawa. He first made Marawa's acquaintance when he was cutting down a tree for a canoe. Every night (as in the common European story about bridge-building and church-building) the work was all undone by Marawa, whom Qat found means to conciliate. In all his future adventures the spider was as serviceable as the cat in Puss in Boots or the other grateful animals in European legend. Qat's great enemy, Qasavara, was dashed against the hard sky, and was turned into stone, like the foes of Perseus. The stone is still shown in Vanua Levu, like the stone which was Zeus in Laconia. Qat, like so many other " culture-heroes," disappeared mysteriously, and white men arriving in the island have been mistaken for Qat. His departure is sometimes connected with the myth of the deluge. In the New Hebrides, Tagar takes the role of Qat, and Suqe of the bad principle, Loki, Ahriman, Tangaro Loloqong, the Australian Crow and so forth. These are the best known divine myths of the Melanesians. For their All-Fathers see Holmes, J. A. I., vol. xxxv., and O'Farrell, J. A. I., vol. xxxiv., with Sundermann in Warneck's Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift, vol. xi. 1884.

It is " a far cry " from Vanua Levu to Vancouver Island, and, ethnologically, the Ahts of the latter region are extremely remote from the Papuans with their mixture of Malay and Polynesian blood. The Ahts, however, differ but little in their mythological beliefs from the races of the Banks Islands or of the New Hebrides. In Sproat's Scenes from Savage Life (1868) there is a good account of Aht opinions by a settler who had won the confidence of the natives between 1860 and 1868. " There is no end to the stories which an old Indian will relate," says Mr Sproat, when " one quite possesses his confidence." "The first Indian who ever lived " is a divine being, something of a creator, something of a first father, like Unkulunkulu among the Zulus. His name is Quawteaht. He married a pre-existent bird, the thunderbird Tootah (we have met him among the Zulus), and by the bird he became the father of Indians. Wispohahp is the Aht Noah, who, with his wife, his two brothers and their wives escaped from the deluge in a canoe. Quawteaht is inferior as a deity to the Sun and Moon. He is the Yama of an Aht paradise, or home of the dead, where " everything is beautiful and abundant." From all that is told of Quawteaht he seems to be an ideal and powerful Aht, imaginatively placed at the beginning of things, and quite capable of intermarriage with a bird. His creative exploits must be considered later. Quawteaht is the Aht Prometheus Purphoros, or fire-stealer.

Passing down the American continent from the north-west, we find Yehl the chief hero-god and mythical personage among the Tlingits. Like many other heroes or gods, Yehl had a miraculous birth. His mother, a Tlingit woman, whose sons had all been slain, met a friendly dolphin, which advised her to swallow a pebble and a little sea-water. The birth of Yehl was the result. In his youth he shot a supernatural crane, and can always fly about in its feathers, like Odin and Loki in Scandinavian myth. He is usually, however, regarded as a raven, and holds the same relation to men and the world as the eagle-hawk Pund-jel does in Australia. His great opponent (for the eternal dualism comes in) is Khanukh, who is a wolf, and the ancestor or totem of the wolf-race of men as Yehl is of the raven. The opposition between the Crow and Eagle-hawk in Australia will be remembered. Both animals or men or gods take part in creation. Yehl is the Prometheus Purphoros of the Tlingits, but myths of the fire-stealer would form matter for a separate section. Yehl also stole water, in his bird-shape, exactly as Odin stole " Suttung's mead " when in the shape of an eagle.' Yehl's powers of metamorphosis and of flying into the air are the common accomplishments of sorcerers, and he is a rather crude form of first father, " culture-hero " and creator.2 Among the Karok Indians we find the great hero and divine benefactor in the shape of, not a raven, nor an eagle-hawk, nor a mantis insect, nor a spider, but a coyote. Among both Karok and Navaho the coyote is the Prometheus Purphoros, or, as the Aryans of India call him, Matarisvan the fire-stealer. Among the Papagos, on the eastern side of the Gulf of California, the coyote or prairie wolf is the creative hero and chief supernatural being. In Oregon the coyote is also the " demiurge," but most of the myths about him refer to his creative exploits, and will be more appropriately treated in the next section.

Moving up the Pacific coast to British Columbia, we find the musk-rat taking the part played by Vishnu, when in his avatar as a boar he fished up the earth from the waters. Among the Tinneh a miraculous dog, who, like an enchanted fairy prince, could assume the form of a handsome young man, is the chief divine being of the myths. He too is chiefly a creative or demiurgic being, answering to Purusha in the Rig Veda. So far the peculiar mark of the wilder American tribe legends is the bestial character of the divine beings, which is also illustrated in Australia and Africa, while the bestial clothing, feathers or fur, drops but slowly off Indra, Zeus and the Egyptian Ammon, and the Scandinavian Odin. All these are more or less anthropomorphic, but retain, as will be seen, numerous relics of a theriomorphic condition.

See C. Hill-Tout and F. Boas in various publications, and, generally, the volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, U.S.A. For Ti-ra-wa, " the Ruler of the Universe," also styled A-ti-us, " father," among the Pawnees, see G. B. Grinnell, Pawnee Hero Stories (1893).

Maori and Polynesian Beliefs

Passing from the lower savage myths, of which space does not permit us to offer a larger selection, we turn to races in the upper strata of barbarism. Among these the Maoris of New Zealand, and the Polynesian people generally, are remarkable for a mythology largely intermixed with early attempts at more philosophical speculation. The Maoris and Mangaians, and other peoples, have had speculators among them not very far removed from the mental condition of the earliest Greek philosophers, Empedocles, Anaximander, and the rest. In fact the process from the view of nature which we call personalism to the crudest theories of the physicists was apparently begun in New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans. In Maori mythology it is more than usually difficult to keep apart the origin of the world and the origin and nature of the gods. Long traditional hymns give an account of the " becoming out of nothing " which resulted in the evolution of the gods and the world. In the beginning (as in the Greek myths of Uranus and Gaea), Heaven (Rangi, conceived of as a person) was indissolubly united to his wife Earth (Papa), and between them they begat gods which necessarily dwelt in darkness. These gods were some in vegetable, some in animal form; some traditions place among these gods Tiki the demiurge, who (like Prometheus) made men out of clay. The offspring of Rangi and Papa (kept in the dark as they were) held a council to determine how they should treat their parents, " Shall we slay them, or shall we separate them?" In the Hesiodic fable, Cronus separates the heavenly pair by mutilating his oppressive father Uranus. Among the Maoris the god Tutenganahan cut the sinews which united Earth and Heaven, and Tane Mahuta wrenched them apart, and kept them eternally asunder. The new dynasty now had earth to themselves, but Tawhiramatea, the wind, abode aloft with his father. Some of the gods were in the forms of lizards and fishes; some went to the land, some to the water. As among the gods and Asuras of the Vedas, there were many wars in the divine race, and as the incantations of the Indian Brahmanas are derived from those old experiences of the Vedic gods, so are the incantations of the Maoris. The gods of New Zealand, the greater gods at least, may be called " departmental "; each person who is an elementary force is also the god of that force. As Te Heu, a powerful chief, said, there is division of labour among men, and so there is among gods. " One made this, another that; Tane made trees, Ru mountains, Tanga-roa fish, and so forth." 3 The " departmental " arrangement prevails among the polytheism of civilized peoples, ' Dasent, Bragi's Telling: Younger Edda, P. 94.

2 Bancroft, vol. iv. 3 Taylor, New Zealand, p. 108 and is familiar to all from the Greek examples. Leaving the high gods whose functions are so large, while their forms (as of lizard, fish and tree) are often so mean, we come to. Maui, the great divine hero of the supernatural race in Polynesia. Maui in some respects answers to the chief of the Adityas in Vedic mythology; in others he answers to Qat, Quawteaht, and other savage divine personages. Like the son of the Vedic Aditi, 4 Maui is a rejected and abortive child of his mother, but afterwards attains to the highest reputation. As Qat brought the hitherto unknown night, so Maui settled the sun and moon in their proper courses. He induced the sun to move orderly by giving him a violent beating. A similar feat was performed by the Sun-trapper, a famous Red Indian chief. These tales belong properly to the department of solar myths. Maui himself is thought by E. B. Tylor to be a myth of the sun, but the sun could hardly give the sun a drubbing. Maui slew monsters, invented barbs for fish-hooks, frequently adopted the form of various birds, acted as Prometheus Purphoros the fire-stealer, drew a whole island up from the bottom of the deep; he was a great sorcerer and magician. Had Maui succeeded in his attempt to pass through the body of Night (considered as a woman) men would have been immortal. But a little bird which sings at sunset wakened Night, she snapped up Maui, and men die. This has been called a myth of sunset, but the sun does what Maui failed to do, he passes through the body of Night unharmed. The adventure is one of the myths of the origin of death, which are almost universally diffused. Maui, though regarded as a god, is not often addressed in prayer.' The whole system, as far as it can be called a system, of Maori mythology is obviously based on the savage conceptions of the world which have already been explained. The Polynesian system differs mainly in detail; we have the separation of heaven and earth, the animal-shaped gods, the fire-stealing, the exploits of Maui, and scores of minor myths in W. W. Gill's Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, in the researches of W. Ellis, of Williams, in G. Turner's Polynesia, and in many other accessible works.

Mexican and Peruvian Beliefs

The Maoris and other Polynesian peoples are perhaps the best examples of a race which has risen far above the savagery of Bushmen and Australians, but has not yet arrived at the stage in which great centralized monarchies appear. The Mexican and Peruvian civilizations were far ahead of Maori culture, in so far as they possessed the elements of a much more settled and highly-organized society. Their religion had its fine lucid intervals, but their mythology and ritual were little better than savage ideas, elaborately worked up by the imagination of a cruel and superstitious priesthood. In cruelty the Aztecs surpassed perhaps all peoples of the Old World, except certain Semitic stocks, and their gods, of course, surpassed almost all other gods in bloodthirstiness. But in grotesque and savage points of faith the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Vedic Indians ran even the Aztecs pretty close.

Bernal Diaz, the old " conquistador," has described the hideous aspect of the idols which Cortes destroyed, " idols in the shape of hideous dragons as big as calves," idols half in the form of men, half of dogs, and serpents which were worshipped as divine. The old contemporary missionary Sahagun has left one of the earliest detailed accounts of the natures and myths of these gods, but, though Sahagun took great pains in collecting facts, his speculations must be accepted with caution. He was convinced (like Caxton in his Destruction of Troy, and like St Augustine) that the heathen gods were only dead men worshipped. Ancestor-worship is a great force in early religion, and the qualities of dead chiefs and sorcerers are freely attributed to gods, but it does not follow that each god was once a real man, as Sahagun supposes. Euemerism cannot be judiciously carried so far as this. Of Huitzilopochtli, the famed god, Sahagun says that he was a necromancer, loved " shapeshifting," like Odin, metamorphosed himself into animal forms, was miraculously conceived, and, among animals, is confused with the humming-bird, whose feathers adorned his statues." 6 This humming-bird god should be compared with the Roman Picus (Servius, 189). That the humming-bird (Nuitziton), which was the god's old shape, should become merely his attendant (like the owl of Pallas, the mouse of Apollo, the goose of Priapus, the cuckoo of Hera), when the god received anthropomorphic form, is an example of a process common in'all mythologies. Plutarch observes that the Greeks, though accustomed to the conceptions of the animal attendants of their own gods, were amazed when they found animals worshipped as gods by the Egyptians. Mailer 7 mentions the view that the humming-bird, as the most beautiful flying thing, is a proper symbol of the heaven, and so of the heaven-god, Huitzilopochtli. This vein of symbolism is so easy to work that it must be regarded with distrust. Perhaps it is safer to attribute theriomorphic shapes of 4 Rig Veda, x. 72, 1, 8; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv. 13, where the fable from the Satapatha-Brahmana is given.

5 The best authorities for the New Zealand myths are the old traditional priestly hymns, collected and translated in the works of Sir George Grey, in Taylor's New Zealand, in Shortland's Traditions of New Zealand (1857), in Bastian's Heilige Sage der Polynesier, and in White's Ancient History of the Maori, i. 8-13.

See also Bancroft, iii. 288-290, and Acosta, pp. 352-361. Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 592.

xix. 5a gods, not to symbolism (Zeus was a cuckoo), but to survivals from that quality of early thought which draws no line between man and god and beast and bird and fish. If spiders may be great gods, why not the more attractive humming-birds ? Like many other gods, Huitzilopochtli slew his foes at his birth, and hence received names analogous to DeLµos and (1.6(os: Tylor (Primitive Culture, ii. 307) calls Huitzilopochtli an " inextricable compound parthenogenetic god." His sacrament, when paste idols of him were eaten by the communicants, was at the winter solstice, whence it may, perhaps, be inferred that Huitzilopochtli was not only a war-god but a nature-god - in both respects anthropomorphic, and in both bearing traces of the time when he was but a humming-bird, as Yehl was a raven (Muller, op. cit. p. 595). As a humming-bird, Huitzilopochtli led the Aztecs to a new home, as a wolf led the Hirpini, and as a woodpecker led the Sabines. Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec deity, is as much a sparrow (or similar small bird) as Huitzilopochtli is a humming-bird. Acosta says he retained the sparrow's head in his statue. For the composite character of Quetzalcoatl as a "culturehero " (a more polished version of Qat), as a " nature-god," and as a theriomorphic god see Muller (op. cit. pp. 583-584). Muller frankly recognizes that not only are animals symbols of deity and its attributes, not only are they companions and messengers of deity (as in the period of anthropomorphic religion), but they have been divine beings in and for themselves during the earlier stages of thought. The Mexican " departmental " gods answer to those of other polytheisms; there is an Aztec Ceres, an Aztec Lucina, an Aztec Vulcan, an Aztec Flora, an Aztec Venus. The creative myths and sun myths are crude and very early in character.

Egyptian Myths

On a much larger and more magnificent scale, and on a much more permanent basis, the society of ancient Egypt somewhat resembled that of ancient Mexico. The divine myths of the two nations had points in common, but there are few topics more obscure than Egyptian mythology. Writers are apt to speak of Egyptian religion as if it were a single phenomenon of which all the aspects could be observed at a given time. In point of fact Egyptian religion (conservative though it was) lasted through perhaps five thousand years, was subject to innumerable influences, historical, ethnological, philosophical, and was variously represented by various schools of priests. We cannot take the Platonic speculations of Iamblichus about the nature and manifestations of Egyptian godhead as evidence for the belief of the peoples who first worshipped the Egyptian gods an innumerable series of ages before Iamblichus and Plutarch. Nor can the esoteric and pantheistic theories of priests (according to which the various beast-gods were symbolic manifestations of the divine essence) be received as an historical account of the origin of the local animal-worships. It has already been shown that the lowest and least intellectual races indulge in local animal-worship, each stock having its parent bird, beast, fish, or even plant, or inanimate object. It has also been shown that these backward peoples recognize a non-natural race of men or animals, or both, as the first fathers, heroes, and, in a sense, gods. Such ideas are consonant with, and may be traced to the confused and nebulous condition of, savage thought. Precisely the same ideas are found at various periods among the ancient Egyptians. If we are to regard the Egyptian myths about the gods in animal shape, and about the non-natural superhuman heroes, and their wars and loves, as esoteric allegories devised by civilized priests, perhaps we should also explain Pund-jel, Qat, Quawteaht, the Mantis god, the Spider creator, the Coyote and Raven gods as priestly inventions, put forth in a civilized age, and retained by Australians, Bushmen, Hottentots, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Papuans, who preserve no other vestiges of high civilization. Or we may take the opposite view, and regard the story of Osiris and his war with Seth (who shut him up in a box and mutilated him) as a dualistic myth, originally on the level of the battle betweenaGaunab andTsui-Goab, or between Tagar and Suqe. We may regard the local beastand plant-gods of Egypt as survivals of totems and totem-gods like those of Australia, India, America, Africa, Siberia and other countries. In this article the latter view is adopted. The beast-gods and dualistic and creative myths of savages are looked on as the natural product of the savage reason and fancy. The same beast-gods and myths in civilized Egypt are looked on as survivals from the rude and early condition of thought to which such conceptions are natural.

In the most ancient Egyptian records the gods are not pictorially represented, and we have not obtained from these records any descriptions of adoration and sacrifice. There is a prayer to the Sky on the coffin of the king of Dynasty IV., known as Mycerinus to the Greeks. The king describes himself as the child of Sky and Earth. He also somewhat obscurely identifies himself with Osiris.

We thus find Osiris very near the beginning of what is known about Egyptian religion. This being is rather a culture-hero, a member of a non-natural race of men like Qat or Manabozho, than a god. His myth, to be afterwards narrated, is