KOSHCHEI THE DEATHLESS 299 
Euhemerism was in the main an unsound theory, but 
it surely accounts for some things. All myths are not 
stories of the Sun and the Dawn, or of the Rain-cloud 
and the Lightning, but a great many myths are. The 
solar theory explains some things, distorted history ex- 
plains others, reminiscences of savage custom explains 
others. In such complex ways, in the dim prehistoric 
dawn of human intelligence, divers mythical ideas origi- 
nated, like the personification of the sun as an archer, 
or a frog, or the lightning as a snake. These simpler 
ideas, the rudimentary elements of folk-tales, occur all 
over the world and among races in widely different 
stages of culture. They are evidently an inheritance 
from very low stages of barbarism, and their possession 
by different and remote peoples is no proof of any com- 
munity of tradition, except in so far as it shows that 
all civilized peoples have at some time or other passed 
through similar stages of barbaric thought. There is 
no reason why the simpler mythical ideas should not 
be originated independently by different people, over 
and over again. For example, the daily repetition of 
the sun’s course across the sky, with very small varia- 
tion, aroused men’s curiosity in a very primitive stage 
of culture. Why should that bright strong creature 
always go in the same path? It was natural for sav- 
ages to answer such a question by inventing stories of 
some ancestral warrior that once caught the sun ina 
net or with a big hook and forced it ever afterward to 
do his bidding. Thus originated the Sun-catcher 
myths which we find in such numbers among bar- 
barous and savage peoples in America and Polynesia. 
The Greek, in his stories of Herakles performing 
superhuman tasks at the behest of Eurystheus, was 
