48 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, 



Greek sources ? And may we not hope, in this way, in the Hebrew Scriptures, 

 or the Sanscrit Vedas perhaps, to put our fingers on the ancient germs of 

 those anthropomorphic myths which Homer and Hesiod present to us in adult 

 completeness and full panoply ? and thus the highest end of scientific research 

 will be obtained, not only to dissect the flower, but to trace it to the seed, and 

 follow it through every stage of its rich and beautiful metamorphosis. 



XXVII. The prospect this holds out of tracing famous European religious 

 myths to their far home in the East is extremely inviting.* It satisfies at once 

 scientific minds by the promise of going to the root of a matter which has 

 hitherto been treated superficially, and that not inconsiderable class of literary 

 men and scholars who have a keener eye for an ingenious novelty, than for 

 a stable truth. When we bear in mind also the significance of the homely 

 proverb, that " far birds have fair feathers," and the well-known fact, that 

 every mother is apt to prefer her own bairn to others which may be more healthy 

 and beautiful, we shall see reason to proceed, not without hope indeed, but with 

 more than Scottish caution, in this Oriental adventure. There is a class of 

 persons in the world who have a strange pleasure in travelling a thousand leagues 

 to quarry out a truth, which they might have picked up from beneath their nose. 

 Against these seductions therefore, in the first place, while prosecuting this 

 foreign chase, we must be on our guard. We ought to know that we are hunting 

 on very deceitful ground ; that we are dealing with a class of phenomena, that, 

 like clouds and kaleidoscopic figures, are very apt to change their shape, not 

 only by their own nature, but specially also according to the position of the 

 observer ; and that the same nebulous conglomerate may at one moment 

 look very like a whale, at another moment very like Lord Beougham, and at a 

 third moment very like Olympian Jupiter. And in the prospect of such a 

 possible ridiculous conclusion to the sublime adventure on which he is starting, 

 every inquirer into the remote origin of European myths ought to take with 

 him these cautions — 



(1.) That there is no necessity and no scientific warrant for seeking a foreign 

 explanation of deities, which already sufficiently explain themselves by the 

 character which they bear, or the symbols which they exhibit in their own 

 country. 



(2.) That the formative power by which myths were created, viz., the imagina- 

 tion, possesses a wonderful magic, in virtue of which the materials on which it 

 acts, especially with a quick and vivid people unfettered by formal creeds, are 

 subjected to a perpetual process of transmutation, which renders the recogni- 

 tion of the original identity of two diverging myths an extremely difficult and 



* " The whole theology of Greece was derived from the East." — Bryant, vol. i. p. 1 84. 



