Myth, Ritual, and Religion

Front matter

CONTENTS. →←

SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY

Origin of attempts to explain myths—(1.) Among the old heathen races a practical and moral need of apology for mythical acts of gods—(2.) Modern historical curiosity—Ancient apologetics, poetic, priestly, philosophic—The two elements in myth, rational and irrational—Examples: Method of Homer, omission and selection—Method of Pindar—Ancient physical, etymological, political, historical, mystic, and symbolical explanations of Greek myths—The assaults of the Christian Fathers on myths—Plutarch, Porphyry, and their refutation by Eusebius—Short sketch of later theories of myth—Bryant, Creuzer, Otfried Müller, Lobeck—The philologists, Kuhn, Schwartz, Max Müller—Objections of Mannhardt—Limitations of philology.

Volume 1

MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION.

Ballantyne Press ballantyne, hanson and co. edinburgh and london

MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION.

BY

ANDREW LANG.

VOL. I.

LONDON: LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 1887.

All rights reserved.

TO

WILLIAM YOUNG SELLAR, LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF HUMANITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

This Book

IS

DEDICATED

BY

HIS AFFECTIONATE KINSMAN

AND

VERY OLD ST. ANDREWS PUPIL

Not listed on the contents page: | PAGE

Preface | vii

CONTENTS. →←

SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY

Origin of attempts to explain myths—(1.) Among the old heathen races a practical and moral need of apology for mythical acts of gods—(2.) Modern historical curiosity—Ancient apologetics, poetic, priestly, philosophic—The two elements in myth, rational and irrational—Examples: Method of Homer, omission and selection—Method of Pindar—Ancient physical, etymological, political, historical, mystic, and symbolical explanations of Greek myths—The assaults of the Christian Fathers on myths—Plutarch, Porphyry, and their refutation by Eusebius—Short sketch of later theories of myth—Bryant, Creuzer, Otfried Müller, Lobeck—The philologists, Kuhn, Schwartz, Max Müller—Objections of Mannhardt—Limitations of philology.

NEW SYSTEM PROPOSED

Chapter I. recapitulated—Proposal of a new method: Science of comparative or historical study of man—Anticipated in part by Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C.C.C., Cambridge), and Mannhardt—Science of Tylor—Object of inquiry: to find condition of human intellect in which marvels of myth are parts of practical everyday belief—This is the savage 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—Connected with general theory of evolution—Puzzling example of myth of the water-swallower—Professor Tiele's criticism of the method—Objections to method, and answer to these—See Appendix B.

THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—CONFUSION WITH NATURE—TOTEMISM | |

The mental condition of savages the basis of the irrational element in myth—Characteristics of that condition: (1.) Confusion of all things in an equality of presumed animation and intelligence—(2.) Belief in sorcery—(3.) Spiritualism—(4.) Curiosity—(5.) Easy credulity and mental indolence—The curiosity is satisfied, thanks to the credulity, by myths in answer to all inquiries—Evidence for this—Mr. Tylor's opinion—Mr. Im Thurn—Jesuit missionaries' Relations—Examples of confusion between men, plants, beasts, and other natural objects—Reports of travellers—Evidence from institution of totemism—Definition of totemism—Totemism in Australia, Africa, America, the Oceanic Islands, India, North Asia—Conclusion: Totemism being found so widely distributed, is a proof of the existence of that savage mental condition in which no line is drawn between men and the other things in the world—This confusion is one of the characteristics of myth in all races.

THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—MAGIC—METAMORPHOSIS—METAPHYSIC—PSYCHOLOGY | |

Claims of sorcerers—Savage scientific speculation—Theory of Causation—Credulity, except as to new religious ideas—"Post hoc, ergo propter hoc"—Fundamental ideas of magic—Examples: incantations, ghosts, spirits—Evidence of rank and other institutions in proof of confusions of mind exhibited in magical beliefs.

NATURE-MYTHS | |

Savage fancy, curiosity, and credulity illustrated in nature-myths—In these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general animation of everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis—Sun-myths, Asian, Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, Californian, Brazilian, Maori, Samoan–Moon-myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican, Zulu, Macassar, Greenland, Piute, Malay— Thunder-myths—Greek and Aryan sun and moon myths—Star-myths—Myths, savage and civilised, of animals, accounting for their marks and habits—Examples of custom of claiming blood kinship with lower animals—Myths of various plants and trees—Myths of stones, and of metamorphosis into stones, Greek, Australian, and American—The whole natural philosophy of savages expressed in myths, and survives in folklore and classical poetry, and legends of metamorphosis.

NON-ARYAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN | |

Confusion of myths—Various origins of man and of things—Myths of Australia, Andaman Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus, Hurons, Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldeans, Thlinkeets, Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians—Similarity of ideas pervading all those peoples in various conditions of society and culture.

INDO-ARYAN MYTHS—SOURCES OF EVIDENCE | |

Authorities—Vedas—Brahmanas—Social condition of Vedic India—Arts—Ranks—War—Vedic fetishism—Ancestor-worship—Date of Rig-Veda Hymns doubtful—Obscurity of the Hymns—Difficulty of interpreting the real character of Veda—Not primitive, but sacerdotal—The moral purity not innocence, but refinement.

INDIAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN | |

Comparison of Vedic and savage myths—The metaphysical Vedic account of the beginning of things—Opposite and savage fable of world made out of fragments of a man—Discussion of this hymn—Absurdities of Brahmanas—Prajapati, an Aryan Unkulunkulu or Qat—Evolutionary myths—Marriage of heaven and earth—Myths of Puranas, their savage parallels—Most savage myths are repeated in Brahmanas.

GREEK MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND MAN | |

The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer—Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features—The hypothesis that many of these are savage survivals—Are there other examples of such survival in Greek life and institutions?—Greek opinion was constant that the race had been savage—Illustrations of savage survival from Greek law of homicide, from magic, religion, human sacrifice, religious art, traces of totemism, and from the mysteries—Conclusion: that savage survival may also be expected in Greek myths.

GREEK COSMOGONIC MYTHS | |

Nature of the evidence—Traditions of origin of the world and man—Homeric, Hesiodic, and Orphic myths—Later evidence of historians, dramatists, commentators—The Homeric story comparatively pure—The story in Hesiod, and its savage analogues—The explanations of the myth of Cronus, modern and ancient—The Orphic cosmogony—Phanes and Prajapati—Greek myths of the origin of man—Their savage analogues.

SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS | |

The origin of a belief in God beyond the ken of history and of speculation—Sketch of conjectural theories—Two elements in all beliefs, whether of backward or civilised races—The Mythical and the Religious—These may be coeval, or either may be older than the other—Difficulty of study—Text from Plutarch—Gods and demons—Correspondence of savage and civilised divine myths—Their immorality—Dualism—The development of gods—Bestial, personal, elemental, departmental, pure anthropomorphic—Survival of the fittest.

ERRATA.

Vol. I.

Page | 19, | line | 8, | for "οῦδενὸς" read "οὐδενὸς."

" | 99, | " | 26, | for "European" read "Europeans."

" | 284, | " | 14, | for "St. Gregory" read "Gregorius Pardus."

" | 285, | " | 19, | read "κἀπομαγμάτων."

" | 293, | " | 25, | delete "now and then."

Preface

PREFACE. →←

The following work is not a "key to all mythologies," but an attempt to disengage and examine, as far as possible, separately, and, as far as possible, historically, the various elements of religion and myth. The evidence of ritual is adduced because of the conservative tendencies of rites on which the prosperity of tribes and states is believed to depend. While the attempt is made to show that the wilder features of myth survive from, or were borrowed from, or were imitated from, the ideas of people in the savage condition of thought, the existence—even among savages—of comparatively pure, if inarticulate, religious beliefs or sentiments is insisted on throughout. It is pointed out that neither history, experiment, nor observation enables us to reach the actual Origins, nor to determine with certainty whether the religious or the mythical, the irrational or the sympathetic, element is the earlier, or whether both are of equal antiquity. Thus the problem—Why do people who possess a sentiment or instinct of the existence of a good being or beings habitually attach to his name or their names the recklessly immoral myths?—is practically left I unsolved. The process lies beyond our ken, beyond the view of history.

The book does not pretend to be exhaustive. For various reasons, the myths of various races are omitted or touched on but in passing. In the first place, I remember the woes predicted for him who "says all that he has to say on any subject." Therefore the myths of the Finns and of the Scandinavians are only alluded to incidentally. Babylonian myths and religion are still in a condition so perplexed and obscure that I have not the audacity to cross their frontier. Had Professor Sayce's Hibbert Lectures on this topic been published while these chapters were unwritten, I might have attempted to use Professor Sayce as a guide in so difficult a region. Roman myths are so entangled with those of Greece (different as is the genius of the Latin people), that I have only borrowed a few illustrations from the practice and belief of Rome. Of Mongolian, Chinese, and Japanese mythology I am almost entirely ignorant, and Celtic developments appear scarcely less hard to understand. Here, too, we may expect much aid from the Hibbert Lectures of Professor Rhys.

The book throughout, where it deals with the myths of the Sanskrit-speaking people and of the Egyptians, relies on the reports brought by learned translators and commentators from these literatures; while in treating of the lower and the American peoples, the reports of missionaries, travellers, historians, commentators, and occasionally of great compilations like Mr. Bancroft's, are employed in the same way. The authorities, I think, are usually acknowledged in the notes; nor, of course, does one pretend to decide upon the differences of the learned. An attempt is made to state these differences, and my own bias is probably manifest enough in each instance. Where the philological interpretation of proper names is concerned (especially in the chapter on Greek Gods), I see little just now to warrant any decided opinion.

I have endeavoured to keep controversy about Method as much as possible within the bounds of an Appendix to volume ii., but probably have not always avoided the temper of polemics.

A book like this would be practically impossible without the learned labours of men like Preller, Lobeck, Maspero, Roscher (with his allies in his great and valuable Ausführliches Lexikon, now (1887) in course of publication), Muir, Max Müller, Bergaigne, and many others whose names frequently recur.

In revising the proof-sheets, I have had the kind assistance of Mr. E. B. Tylor for part of the American chapters; of M. Charles Michel (Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de Gand) for the chapters on India; of Mr. Evelyn Abbott of Baliol for the Greek chapters; and of Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole for the chapter on Egyptian Religion and Myths. Professor Robertson Smith has also assisted me in various points; and Mr. H. H. Risley, of the Bengal Civil Service; Mr. J. J. Atkinson, late of Noumea; and Mr. Brander Matthews have sent me interesting information. The gentlemen who have so kindly and carefully read the proofs must not be considered in any degree responsible for errors that may have escaped their notice, nor for ideas which, I dare say, they often do not share.

In the notes I have occasionally used references from books not within my reach, but quoted by authorities, and likely to prove useful to students who can lay their hands on the volumes. In most cases, I think, these references are printed within brackets.

The difficulty of correcting the numerals in references is considerable, and I can hardly hope that none of the 6's have become 0's, the 3's 5's, and so forth. Like the witty lady who had just seen a book through the press, about these references I may say horresco referens!

It was my original intention to have added studies of Deluge Myths, Fire Myths, Myths of the Origin of Death, and Myths of the Homes of the Dead. Three of these studies were even written, in whole or in part, but it appears better to reserve them for "a more convenient season." The Deluge alone, a very peculiar tradition, which possibly (in my opinion) rests on some universal fact, might well sweep over two volumes as large as these.

An essay in the Nineteenth Century (September 1886) contained some of the material used in the chapter on Egyptian Divine Myths, and the relations of "Demeter and the Pig" were stated in the same periodical (April 1887). A few remarks on Greek temple-rites appeared in the Saturday Review as "The Seamy Side of Greek Religion." Of the shorter Appendices, that on Mr. Morgan's theory of the Aztec civilisation, and that on Fontenelle's Origine des Fables, were more or less published in the St. James's Gazette, and "The Hare in Egyptian Religion" in Mélusine. These fragments have been used with the courteous permission of the several editors.

The article on "Mythology" in the Encyclopædia Britannica, translated as "La Mythologie" (Paris, Dupret, 1886) by M. Parmentier, with a preface and notes by M. Ch. Michel of Gand, was a brief sketch made from this book while in course of construction.

I must apologise for occasional allusions to other writings of my own on these topics, and for repetitions in this book; the latter are mainly, so to speak, like "cross references" in a dictionary or index.

Chapter 1 : Systems of mythology

MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION.

CHAPTER I.

SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY.

Origin of attempts to explain myths—(1.) Among the old heathen races a practical and moral need of apology for mythical acts of gods—(2.) Modern historical curiosity—Ancient apologetics, poetic, priestly, philosophic—The two elements in myth, rational and irrational—Examples: Method of Homer, omission and selection—Method of Pindar—Ancient physical, etymological, political, historical, mystic, and symbolical explanations of Greek myths—The assaults of the Christian Fathers on myths—Plutarch, Porphyry, and their refutation by Eusebius—Short sketch of later theories of myth—Bryant, Creuzer, Otfried Müller, Lobeck—The philologists, Kuhn, Schwartz, Max Müller—Objections of Mannhardt—Limitations of philology.

The interpretation of the myths or early divine and heroic legends of various races has become a subject of curious but almost disinterested inquiry. It is a matter of historical importance to understand how, and when, and why the ancestors of the civilised races filled the blank of their past by tales about bestial gods and godlike beasts. But Christian conduct and faith are no longer affected by the answers to these questions which we may discover or invent. Whatever the people of the past may have intended when they said that Zeus swallowed his wife, or that Cronus mutilated his father and ate his children, their meaning cannot possibly affect our notions of the domestic duties, or encourage us to believe that impiety may be acceptable in the sight of deities who themselves are impious.

While mythology is thus no more to us than an affair of historical or antiquarian study, we must remember that the interpretation of myths was once a thing full of vital interest to men whose moral and religious beliefs were deeply concerned. To every civilised race there has come the moment when people have anxiously asked, "Are the old legends of the gods literally true, and, if not literally true, in what sense are they to be believed?" Thus Aristotle, in speaking of the education of the young, writes: "Let the rulers take care that there be no image or picture representing unseemly actions, except in the temples of those gods at whose festivals the law permits even ribaldry;" such, for example, as the obscene public rites of Dionysus. Pausanias describes temple pictures of the most incredible and unnatural horror, the gods represented being Hera and Zeus. We cannot imagine, fortunately, what the misery of an educated Greek must have been when his children had to face the unspeakable examples of divine lust. Habit, of course, blunted the horror.

Yet it is never a pleasant hour when mortals inquire of themselves, "Is our Heavenly Father a large hare or an amorous ram, or a kind of sorcerer capable of pursuing his love in the form of an ant, or a serpent, or a swan? Is he impious, lustful, cowardly, easily deceived, unjust, and cruel, as the temple legends declare, and illustrate in Mystery plays and pictures?" But all the old civilised races have had to live through that hour and to encounter these problems. "How individuals found religious consolation is," says C. O. Müller, "a very interesting inquiry."

In Greece, as early as the sixth century B.C., we are all familiar with Xenophanes' poem complaining that the gods were credited with the worst crimes of mortals—in fact, with abominations only known in the orgies of Nero and Elagabalus. We hear Pindar refusing to repeat the tale which told him the blessed were cannibals. In India we read the pious Brahmanic attempts to expound decently the myths which made Indra the slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable sin. In Egypt, too, we study the priestly or philosophic systems by which the clergy strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from their own deities. From all these efforts of civilised and pious believers to explain away the stories about their own gods we may infer one fact—the most important to the student of mythology—the fact that myths were not evolved in times of clear civilised thought. It is when Greece is just beginning to free her thought from the bondage of too concrete language, when she is striving to coin abstract terms, that her philosophers and poets first find the myths of Greece a stumbling-block.

All early attempts at an interpretation of mythology are so many efforts to explain the myths on some principle which shall seem not unreasonable to men living at the time of the explanation. Therefore the pious remonstrances and the forced constructions of early thinkers like Xenophanes, of poets like Pindar, of all ancient Homeric scholars and Pagan apologists, from Theagenes of Rhegium (525 B.C.), the early Homeric commentator, to Porphyry, almost the last of the heathen philosophers, are so many proofs that to Greece, as soon as she had a reflective literature, the myths of Greece seemed impious and irrational. The essays of the native commentators on the Veda, in the same way, are endeavours to put into myths felt to be irrational and impious a meaning which does not offend either piety or reason. We may, therefore, conclude that it was not men in an early stage of philosophic thought (as philosophy is now understood)—not men like Empedocles and Heraclitus, nor reasonably devout men like Eumæus, the pious swineherd of the Odyssey—who evolved the blasphemous myths of Greece, of Egypt, and of India. We must look elsewhere for an explanation. We must try to discover some actual, and demonstrable, and widely prevalent condition of the human mind, in which tales that even to remote and rudimentary civilisations appeared irrational and unnatural would seem natural and rational. To discover this intellectual condition has been the aim of all mythologists who did not believe that myth is a divine tradition depraved by human weakness, or a distorted version of historical events.

Before going further, it is desirable to set forth what our aim is, and to what extent we are seeking an interpretation of mythology. It is not our purpose to explain every detail of every ancient legend, either as a distorted historical fact or as the result of this or that confusion of thought caused by forgetfulness of the meanings of language, or in any other way; nay, we must constantly protest against the excursions of too venturesome ingenuity. Myth is so ancient, so complex, so full of elements, that it is vain labour to seek a cause for every phenomenon. We are chiefly occupied with the quest for an historical condition of the human intellect to which the element in myths, regarded by us as irrational, shall seem rational enough. If we can prove that such a state of mind widely exists among men, and has existed, that state of mind may be provisionally considered as the fount and origin of the myths which have always perplexed men in a reasonable modern mental condition. Again, if it can be shown that this mental stage was one through which all civilised races have passed, the universality of the mythopœic mental condition will to some extent explain the universal diffusion of the stories.

Now, in all mythologies, whether savage or civilised, there exist two factors—the factor which we now regard as rational, and that which we moderns regard as irrational. The former element needs little explanation; the latter has demanded explanation ever since human thought became comparatively instructed and abstract.

To take an example; even in the myths of savages there is much that still seems rational and transparent. If savages tell us that some wise being taught them all the simple arts of life, the use of fire, of the bow and arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we understand them at once. Nothing can be more natural than that man should believe in an original inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the imaginary discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. So far all is plain sailing. But when the savage goes on to say that he who taught the use of fire or who gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit, or a crow, or a dog, or a beaver, or a spider, then we are at once face to face with the element in myths which seems to us irrational. Again, among civilised peoples we read of the pure all-seeing Varuna in the Vedas, to whom sin is an offence. We read of Indra, the Lord of Thunder, borne in his chariot, the giver of victory, the giver of wealth to the pious; here once more all seems natural and plain. The notion of a deity who guides the whirlwind and directs the storm, a god of battles, a god who blesses righteousness, is familiar to us and intelligible; but when we read how Indra drank himself drunk and committed adulteries with Asura women, and got himself born from the same womb as a bull, and changed himself into a quail or a ram, and suffered from the most abject physical terror, and so forth, then we are among myths no longer readily intelligible; here, we feel, are irrational stories, of which the original ideas, in their natural sense, can hardly have been conceived by men in a pure and rational early civilisation.

Again, if we look at Greek religions tradition, we observe the co-existence of the rational and the apparently irrational elements. 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 goddess, chaste and fair," the abbess, as Paul de Saint-Victor calls her, 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 needs to be made intelligible. 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, and protects the righteous, and deals good or evil fortune to men. 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 deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, or the Zeus who made love to women in the shape of an ant or a cuckoo, is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and bewildering. It is this irrational and unnatural element, as Mr. Max Müller says, "the silly, senseless, and savage element," that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it.

We have offered examples—Savage, Indian, and Greek—of that element in mythology which, as all civilised races have felt, demands explanation.

To be still more explicit, we may draw up a brief list of the chief problems in the legendary stories attached to the old religions of the world—the problems which it is our special purpose to notice. First we have, in the myths of all races, the most grotesque and inconsistent conceptions of the character of the gods. Beings who at one moment are spoken of as spiritual, holy, immortal, omniscient, and kindly, are suddenly represented as fashioned in the likeness not only of man, but of the beasts; as subject to death, as ignorant and impious.

All pre-Christian religions have their "zoomorophic" or partially zoomorphic idols, gods in the shape of the lower animals, or with the heads and necks of the lower animals. In the same way all mythologies represent the gods as fond of appearing in animal forms. Under these disguises they conduct many amours, even with the daughters of men, and Greek houses were proud of their descent from Zeus in the shape of an eagle or ant, a serpent or a swan; while Cronus and the Vedic Tvashtri and Poseidon made love as horses, and Apollo as a dog. Not less wild are the legends about the births of gods from the thigh, or the head, or feet, or armpits of some parent; while tales describing and pictures representing unspeakable divine obscenities were frequent in the mythology and in the temples of Greece. Once more, the gods were said to possess and exercise the power of turning men and women into birds, beasts, fishes, trees, and stones, so that there was scarcely a familiar natural object in the Greek world which had not once (according to legend) been a man or a woman. The myths of the origin of the world and man, again, were in the last degree childish and disgusting. The Bushmen and Australians have, perhaps, no story of the origin of species quite so barbarous in style as the anecdotes about Phanes and Prajapati which are preserved in the Orphic hymns and in the Brahmanas. The conduct of the earlier dynasties of classical gods towards each other was as notoriously cruel and loathsome as their behaviour towards mortals was tricksy and capricious. The classical gods, with all their immortal might, are capable of fear and pain, and are led into scrapes as ludicrous as those of Brer Wolf or Brer Terrapin in the tales of the Negroes of the Southern States of America. The stars, again, in mythology, are mixed up with beasts, planets, and men in the same embroglio of fantastic opinion. The dead and the living, men, beasts, and gods, trees and stars, and rivers, and sun, and moon, dance through the region of myths in a burlesque ballet of Priapus, where everything may be anything, where nature has no laws and imagination no limits.

Such are the irrational characteristics of myths, classic or Indian, European or American, African or Asiatic, Australian or Maori. Such is the element we find all the world over among civilised and savage people, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. It is no wonder that pious and reflective men have, in so many ages and in so many ways, tried to account to themselves for their possession of beliefs closely connected with religion which yet seemed ruinous to religion and morality.

The explanations which men have given of their own sacred stories, the apologies for their own gods which they have been constrained to offer to themselves, were the earliest babblings of a science of mythology. That science was, in its dim beginnings, intended to satisfy a moral need. Man found that his gods were not made in his own moral image at its best, but in the image sometimes of the beasts, sometimes of his own moral nature at its very worst: in the likeness of robbers, wizards, sorcerers, and adulterers. Now it is impossible here to examine minutely all systems of mythological interpretation. Every key has been tried in this difficult lock; every cause of confusion has been taken up and tested, deemed adequate, and finally rejected or assigned a subordinate place. Probably the first attempts to shake off the burden of religious horror at mythical impiety were made by way of silent omission. Thus most of the foulest myths of early India are absent, and presumably were left out, in the Rig-Veda. "The religious sentiment of the hymns, already so elevated, has discarded most of the tales which offended it, but has not succeeded in discarding them all." Just as the poets of the Rig-Veda prefer to avoid the more offensive traditions about Indra and Tvashtri, so Homer succeeds in avoiding the more grotesque and puerile tales about his own gods. The period of actual apology comes later. Pindar declines, as we have seen, to accuse a god of cannibalism. The Satapatha Brahmana invents a new story about the slaying of Visvarupa. Not Indra, but Trita, says the Brahmana apologetically, slew the three-headed son of Tvashtri. "Indra assuredly was free from that sin, for he is a god," says the Indian apologist. Yet sins which to us appear far more monstrous than the peccadillo of killing a three-headed Brahman are attributed freely to Indra.

While poets could but omit a blasphemous tale or sketch an apology in passing, it became the business of philosophers and of antiquarian writers deliberately to "whitewash" the gods of popular religion. Systematic explanations of the sacred stories, whether as preserved in poetry or as told by priests, had to be provided. India had her etymological and her legendary school of mythology. Thus, while the hymn seemed to tell how the Maruts were gods, "born together with the spotted deer," the etymological interpreters explained that the word for deer only meant the many-coloured lines of clouds. In the armoury of apologetics etymology has been the most serviceable weapon. It is easy to see that by aid of etymology the most repulsive legend may be compelled to yield a pure or harmless sense, and may be explained as an innocent blunder, caused by mere verbal misunderstanding. Brahmans, Greeks, and Germans have equally found comfort in this hypothesis. In the Cratylus of Plato, Socrates speaks of the notion of explaining myths by etymological guesses at the meaning of divine names as "a philosophy which came to him all in an instant." Thus we find Socrates shocked by the irreverence which styled Zeus the son of Cronus, "who is a proverb for stupidity." But on examining philologically the name Kronos, Socrates decides that it must really mean Koros, "not in the sense of a youth, but signifying the pure and garnished mind." Therefore, when people first called Zeus the son of Cronus, they meant nothing irreverent, but only that Zeus is the child of the pure mind or pure reason. Not only is this etymological system most pious and consolatory, but it is, as Socrates adds, of universal application. "For now I bethink me of a very new and ingenious notion, . . . that we may put in and pull out letters at pleasure, and alter the accents."