Myth, Ritual and Religion

of comparative or historical study of man — Anticipated in

e state — Savages described — The wild element of myth a survival from the savage state — Advantages of this method — Partly accounts for wide DIFFUSION as well as ORIGIN of myths — Connecte

hy; the early etymologist saw in it a confusion of language; the early political speculator supposed that myth was an invention of legislators; the literary Euhemerus found the secret of myths in the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island. Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan philosophers, touched with Oriental pantheism, recognised in myths certain pantheistic symbols and a cryptic revelation of their own Neo-platonism. When the gods were dead and their altars fallen, then antiquaries brought

of law out of custom; the development of weapons from the stick or stone to the latest repeating rifle; the development of society from the horde to the nation. It is a study which does not despise the most backward nor degraded tribe, nor

at the light of this method had dawned on Eusebius in his polemic with the heathen apologists. Spencer, the head of Corpus, Cambridge (1630-93), had really no other scheme in his mind in his erudite work on Hebrew Ritual.1 Spencer was a student of man’s religions generally, and he came to the conclusi

the system which explains the irrational element in myth as inherited from savagery. Fontenelle’s paper (Sur l’Origine des Fables) is brief, se

ld not be forgotten. In his Dieux Fetiches (1760) he follows the path which Eusebius indicated

This science “makes it manifest that the different stages through which humanity has passed in its intellectual evolution have still their living representatives among various existing races. The study of these lower r

d, inquirers took it for granted that the myth-makers were men with philosophic and moral ideas like their own — ideas which, from some reason of religion or state, they expressed in bizarre terms of allegory. We shall attempt, on the other hand, to prove that the human mind has passed through a c

, and 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 similar adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and all else that puzzles us in the civilised mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life? Our answer is, that everything in the civilised mythologies which we regard as irrational seems only part of the accepted and natural order of things to contemporary savages, and in the past seemed equally rational and natural to savages concerning whom we have historical information.4 Our theory is, therefore, that the savage and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, a legacy from the fancy of ancestors of the civilised races who were once in an intellectual state not higher, but probably lower, than that of Australians, Bush-men, Red Indians, the lower races of South America, and other worse than barbaric peoples. As the ancestors of the Greeks, Aryans of India, Egyptians and others advanced in civilisation, their religiou

ed; who is acquainted (if at all) only with the rudest forms of the arts of potting, weaving, fire-making, etc.; and who derives more

eings, and, drawing no hard and fast line between himself and the things in the world, is readily persuaded that men may be metamorphosed into plants, beasts and stars; that winds and

lieves also in ancestral ghosts or spirits of woods and wells that were never ancestral; prays frequently by d

aims descent from or other close relation to natural objects, and derives from the sacredness of those objects the

in civilised mythology as “survivals” of these ideas and customs preserved by conservatism

, as a rule, either a survival from the period of savagery, or has been borrowed from savage neighbours by a cultivated people, or, lastly, is an imitation by later poets of old savage data.6 For example, to explain the constellations as metamorphosed men, animals, or other objects of terrestrial life is the habit of savages,7— a natural habit among people who regard all things as on one level of personal life and intelligence. When the stars, among civilised Greeks or Aryans of India, are al

it is new to many inquirers. We have seen that Eusebius threw out proposals in this direction; that Spencer, De Brosses, and Fontenelle unconsciously f

ns comparatively unchanged among the rude modern tribes who have departed least from these primitive conditions, while higher and later civilisations, partly by retaining its actual principles, and partly by carrying on its inherited results in the form of ancestral tradition, continued it not merely in toleration, but in honour”.9 Elsewhere Mr. Tylor points out that by this method of interpretation we may study myths in various stages of evolution, from the rude guess of the savage at an explanation of natural phenomena, throu

ed to fall back upon some fanciful and unsupported theory of what “primitive man” did, and said, and thought. Nay, more; we escape all the fallacies connected with the terms “primitive man”. We are not compelled (as will be shown later)12 to prove that the first men of all were like modern savages, nor that savages represent primitive man. It may be that the lowest extant savages are the nearest of existing peoples to the typ

by the sea; second, the conservative local priesthoods, who retain the more crude and ancient myths of the local gods and heroes after these have been modified or rejected by the purer sense of philosophers and national poets. Thus much of ancient myth is a woven warp and woof of three threads: the savage donnee, the civilised and poetic modification of the savage donnee, the version of the original fable which survives in popular tales and in the “sacred chapters” of local priesthoods. A critical study of these three stages in myth is in accordance with the recognised practice of science. Indeed, the whole system is only an application to this particular province, mythology, of the method by which the development either of organisms or of human institutions is traced. As the anomalies and apparently useless and accid

cientific procedure and with the views of a clear-sighted Father of the Chu

egarded as the result of the prevalence in every quarter, at one time or another, of similar mental habits and ideas. This explanation must not be pressed too hard nor too far. If we find all over the world a belief that men can change themselves and their neighbours into beasts, that belief will account for the appearance of metamorphosis in myth. If we find a belief that inanimate objects are really much on a level with man, the opinion will account for incidents of myth such as that in which the wooden figure-head of the Argo

f consecutive series of adroitly interwoven situations. In presence of these long romances, found among so many widely severed peoples, conjecture is, at present, almost idle. We do n

an blacks or the Andaman Islanders? It is a common thing in most mythologies to find everything of value to man — fire, sun, water — in the keeping of some hostile power. The fire, or the sun, or the water is then stolen, or in other ways rescued from the enemy and restored to humanity. The Huron story (as far as water is concerned) is told by Father Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary, who lived among the Hurons about 16

do we find this frog who swallowed al

All the waters were contained in the body of a huge frog, and men and women could get none of them. A council was held, and . . . it

me laugh,” said that majestical monarch. At last the eel danced on the tip of his tail, and the gravity of the prodigious Batrachian gave way. He laughed till he li

of that creeper, and I will draw you up,” said the woodpecker; but all the while he was bent on a practical joke. So the toad got into a bucket he happened to possess, and fastened the bucket to the creeper. “Now, pull!” Then the woodpecker raised the toad slowly to the level of the bough where the honey was, and presently let him down with a run, not only disappointing the poor toad, but shaking him severely. The toad went away in a rage and looked about him for revenge. A happy thought occurred to him, and he drank up all the water of the rivers and lake

h of which the more heroic conflict of Indra with Vrittra (the dragon which had swallowed all the waters) is an epic an

on, though connected with, is yet distinct from that of origin. The advantage of our method will prove to be, that it discovers an historical and demonstrable state of mind as the origin of the wild element in myth. Again, the wide prevalence in the earliest t

a toad. But the improvement and transfiguration, so to speak, of a myth at bottom the same is due to the superior culture, not to the peculiar race, of the Vedic poets, except so far as culture itself depends on race. How far the purer culture was attained to by the original superiority of the Aryan over the Andaman breed, it is not necessary for our purpose to inquire. Thus, o

dly, cruel and disorderly conduct. This method alone explains the why and wherefore of all those strange metamorphoses of gods into beasts and plants, and even stones, which scandalised philosophers, and which the witty Ovid played on for the diversion of his contemporaries. In short, this method teaches us to recognise in all those strange stories the survivals of a barbaric age, long passed away, but enduring to later times in the form

is obtainable; second, that the civilised races (however they began) either passed through the savage state of thought and practice, or borrowed very freely from people in that condition. These hypotheses have been attacked by opponents; the trustworthiness of our evidence, especially, has been assailed. By way of facilitating the