20 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[November 1, 1887. 



of language," to the forgetting of the purer primitive 

 meaning untlerlpng the names of the gods and heroes of 

 mytholog}', and which it is contended, by an appeal to their 

 supposed etymologies, were, in the first instance, names of 

 the sun, the dawn, the tliunder, and so forth. 



The arguments in support of this, presented in attractive 

 guise and with much show of reason, in Professor Max 

 Miiller's well-known essay, reprinted in the first volume of 

 his " Chips," and elaborated in Sir George Cox's " Mythology 

 of the Aryan Nations," have held the fiekl for some years, 

 being only now and then attacked by skirmisliers, or by the 

 light artillery of clever parody. But of late a growing 

 feeling of the insufficiency of a method which rests chiefly 

 on evidence from words as to whose meaning experts difler, 

 and which, moreover, interprets only the myths and rituals 

 of ancient and modern civilisations, while ignoring or under- 

 valuing those of savage races, has arisen, the result of 

 which is to condemn that method as untenable in the main, 

 and as applicable only to a very small portion of the great 

 body of myth. 



The impetus to this discrediting of etymology as the sole 

 key to interpretation came from a comparison of the myths 

 of the higher with those of the lower races, which brought 

 out the fundamental likenesses between them in the coarse 

 and wild elements common to each. Anthropologists ex 

 plain the presence of these elements in Greek, Vedic, and 

 other mythologies, as survivals from the lower culture out 

 of which Greeks and Brahmans have emerged. They are 

 the old Adam which has never been cast out. Like the 

 ancestral l^istory of the type which the embryo repeats in its 

 advance from the egg to the full-grown state, myths pre- 

 serve traces of the intellectual and spiritual tj'pes in which 

 their earliest forms were cast, and thus add their witness to 

 the unity and continuity of history. 



Thus viewed, myths, rituals, and religions, wherever 

 found and in whatever refined or unrefined connection, fall 

 into their related place in the general march of man's de- 

 velopment. It is of this sound and verified method of 

 anthro|)ology — which has no limitation of race or zone — 

 that Mr. Lang is the most prominent and cultured ex- 

 ponent. He can claim for it, as his letter to Eusebius in 

 the delightful " Letter's to Dead Authors " shows, a vener- 

 able antiquity, since the learned Bishop of Cresarea, in 

 treating of the " pagan " mythologies, argued that " they 

 descend from a period when men in their lawless barbarism 

 knew no better than to tell such tales. Ancient folk in the 

 exceeding savagery of their lives made no account of God, 

 but betook them to all manner of abominations. Growing 

 a little more civilised, men sought after something divine, 

 which they found in the heavenly bodies. Later they fell 

 to worshipping living persons, especially medicine men and 

 conjurors, and continued to worship them even after their de- 

 cease, the Greek temjjles being really tombs of the dead. 

 (Which, by the way, applies to every Roman Catholic church, 

 since, according to Papal traditions, unconsciously conserv- 

 ing the barbaric worship of ancestors, there can be no altar 

 where there are no relics.) Finally, the civilised ancients, 

 with a conservative reluctance to abandon their old myths, 

 invented for them moral or physical explanations like those 

 of Plutarch and others earlier and later." 



Mr. Lang's diligence has also unearthed an essay by 

 Fontenelle, a nephew of Corneille, which was published in 

 1758, and in which he explains the absurdities of the old 

 mythologies as the legacy of the savage and ignorant an- 

 cestors from which every civilised race is descended. He 

 " concludes that all nations made the astounding part of 

 their myths while they were savages, and retained them 

 from custom and religious conservatism." This could not be 

 better or more briefly put. 



The space given to a quarterly review article would only 

 suffice to furnish an outline of the profusion of illustration 

 from ancient and modern sources with which Mr. Lang 

 supports his general thesis. The present volumes — as easy 

 to read as a novel, and far more entertaining than nine- 

 tenths of the novels published nowadays — are a careful and 

 elaborate restatement of all that Mr. Lang has hitherto 

 published in fugitive form or in the more collected essays 

 comprised in his earlier book on " Custom and Myth," 

 which was the subject of a lengthy notice in this journal 

 three years ago. 



Brushing aside the notion that even in the lowest and 

 crudest myths we touch the beginnings of thought, Mr. 

 Lang gives a rapid but sufficient survey of the interpretation 

 of ancient and modern mythologists, wisely transferring his 

 answer — complete and crushing as it is — to the objections 

 raised against the anthropological methods, chiefly by Pro- 

 fessor Max Miiller, to an appendix. The body of the book 

 is thus relieved of contentious matter, and filled with ex- 

 amples drawn from the lower and the higher culture, 

 bringing out with clearness the remarkable coincidences 

 between the myths of Greeks and Bushmen, of Finns and 

 Kaffirs, of Aztecs and Zulus. Some prominence is given at 

 the outset to the widespi-ead — we may say universal — attri- 

 bution of life and personality to everything by savages, and 

 to their belief in descent from sun, animal, or plant, as the 

 key to their theologies, rites, and customs. Very much 

 remains unexplained, but the agreement of the evidence 

 drawn from races between whom no intercourse has taken 

 place since their first dispersion leaves little doubt that 

 such practices as the prohibition against marriage between 

 members of the .same tribe-name or totem, and against 

 eating the animal which gives its name to the totem, arise 

 from belief in the near kinship of man and brute. 



Mr. Lang's skill in disentangling an intricate subject 

 from the webs of theory-spinners is markedly shown in his 

 two chapters on the gods of the Indian Aryans and on the 

 mythology of Egypt. His sanity of view is apparent in the 

 conclusions at which he arrives concerning the latter, and 

 which agree with the general conclusions reached through- 

 out the volumes. " In Egypt, as elsewhere, a mythical and 

 a religious, a rational and an irrational, stream of thought 

 flowed together, and even to some extent mingled their 

 waters. The rational tendency, declared in prayers and 

 hymns, amjilifies the early belief in a protecting and friendly 

 power making for righteousness. The irrational tendency, 

 declared in myth and ritual, retains and elaborates the early 

 confusions of thought between man and beast and God, and 

 between things animate and inanimate. On the one hand, 

 we have almost a recognition of supreme divinity ; on the 

 other, savage rites and beliefs shared by Australians and 

 Bushmen. Egyptian religion and myth are thus no isolated 

 things ; they are Ijut the common stuff of human thought 

 decorated or distorted under a hundred influences in the 

 course of unknown centuries." 



Mr. Lang has an easy task in explaining why certain 

 groups of myth, even those of whole races, as Finns and 

 Scandinavians, should be excluded, at least, for the present, 

 unless his volumes are to grow to unwieldy size. But he 

 gives no reasons for the omissions, here and there, which 

 betray a reluctance to include the myths and legends of 

 .Judaism and Christianity as due to the like ciiuses which 

 explain the myths and legends of other religions. Silence 

 upon this subject does harm in fostering prejudices which 

 ai-e strengthened when the mythologies and cosmogonies of 

 a Semitic tribe are treated as an integral part of sacred 

 writings into which there enter elements as coarse and crude 

 as those which are found in Yedic hymns and savage 

 legends. For example, Yahweh f Jehovah) smells the sweet 



