Mythology

The following article is from the Encyclopedia Britannica 1911
http://97.1911encyclopedia.org/M/MY/MYTHOLOGY.htm
(As it has been scanned it has errors and needs serious editing!)

I also have a page on my website on Greek Myths and Greek Gods that has some interesting information.
Greek Gods and myths

Geoff Haselhurst


MYTHOLOGY (Gr. ,r-wOo?.oyia, the science which examines myths or legends of cosmogony and of gods and heroes. Mythology is also used as a term for these legends themselves. Thus when we speak of the mythology of Greece we mean the whole body of Greek divine and heroic and cosmogonic legends. When we speak of the science of mythology we refer to the various attempts which have been made to explain these ancient narratives. Very early indeed in the history of human thought men awoke to the consciousness that their religious stories were much in want of explanation. The myths of civilized peoples, as of Greeks and the Aryans of India, contain two elements, the rational and what to modern minds seems the irrational. 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 huntress, chaste and fair, the lady warden 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 is felt to need explanation. 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. 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 was merely a rough stone, or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and in great need of explanation. It is this irrational and unnatural element as Max Muller says, the silly, savage and senseless element that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it.
Early Explanations of Myihs.The earliest attempts at a crude science of mythology were efforts to reconcile the legends of the gods and heroes with the religious sentiment which recognized in these beings objects of worship and respect. Closely as religion and myth are intertwined, it is necessary to hold them apart for the purposes of this discussion. Religion may here be defined as the conception of divine, or at least supernatural powers entertained by men in moments of gratitude or of need and distress, in hours of weakness, when, as Homer says, all folk yearn after the gods. Now this conception may be rude enough, and it is nearly related to purely magical ideas, to efforts to secure supernatural aid by magical ceremonies. Still the roughest form of spiritual prayer has for its basis the hypothesis of beneficent beings, visible or invisible. The senseless stories or myths about the gods are soon felt to be at variance with this hypothesis. As an example we may take the instance of Qing, the Bushman hunter. Qing, when first he met white men., was asked about his religion. He began to explain, and mentioned Cagn. Mr Orpen, the chief magistrate of St Johns Territory, asked: Is Cagn good or malicious? how do you pray to him? Answer (in a low imploring tone): 0 Cagn!

0 Cagn! are we not your children? do you not see our hunger? give us food; and he gives us both hands full (Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874). Here we see the religious view of Cagn, the Bushman god. But in the mythological account of Cagn given by Qing he appears as a kind of grasshopper, supernaturally endowed, the hero of a most absurd cycle of senseless adventures. Even religion is affected by these irrational notions, and the gods of savages and o~ many civilized peoples are worshipped with cruel, obscene, and irrational rites. But, on the whole, the religious sentiment strives to transcend the mythical conceptions of the gods, and is shocked and puzzled by the mythical narratives. As soon as this sense of perplexity is felt by poets, by priests, or by most men in an age of nascent criticism, explanations of what is most crude and absurd in the myths are put forward. -Men ask themselves why their gods are worshipped in the form of beasts, birds, and fishes; why their gods are said to have prosecuted their amours in bestial shapes; why they are represented as lustful and passionatethieves, robbers, murderers and adulterers. The answers to these questions sometimes become myths themselves. Thus both the Mangaians and the Egyptians have been puzzled by their own gods in the form of beasts. The Egyptians invented an explanationitself a myththat in some moment of danger the gods concealed themselves from their foes in the shapes of animals.i The Mangaians, according to W. W. Gill, hold that the heavenly family had taken up their abode in these birds, fishes, and 2

A people so curious and refined as the Greeks were certain to be greatly perplexed by even such comparatively pure mythical narratives as they found in Homer, still more by the coarser legends of Hesiod, and above all by the ancient local myths preserved by local priesthoods. Thus, in the 6thcentury before Christ, Xenophanes of Colophon severely blamed the poets for their unbecoming legends, and boldly cal]ed certain myths the fables of men of old.1 Theagenes of Rhegium (520 B.C.?), according to the scholiast on. Iliad, xx. ~ was the author of a very ancient system of mythology. Admitting that the fable of the battle of the gods was unbecoming, if literally understood, Theagenes represented it as an allegorical, account of the war of the elements. Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestus were fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was water, Artemis was the moon, cal r Xour uotws. Or, by another system, the names of the gods represented moral and intellectual qualities. Heraditus, too, disposed of the myth of the bondage of Hera as allegorical philosophy. Socrates, in the Cratylus of Plato, expounds a philosophy which came to him all in an instant, an explanation of the divine beings based on crude philological analyses of their names. Metrodorus, rivalling some recent flights of conjecture, resolved not only the gods but even heroes like Agamemnon, Hector and Achilles into elemental combinations and physical agencies. 5 Euripides makes Pentheus (but he was notoriously impious) advance a rationalistic theory of the story that Dionysus was stitched up in the thigh of Zeus.

When Christianity became powerful the heathen philosophers evaded its satire by making more and more use of the allegorical and non-natural system ~f explanation. That method has two faults. First (as Arnobius and Eusebius reminded their heathen opponents), the allegorical explanations are purely arbitrary, depend upon the fancy of their author, and are all equally plausible and equally unsupported by evidence.6 Secondly, there is no proof at all that, in the distant age when the myths were developed, men entertained the moral notions and physical philosophies which are supposed to be wrapped up, as Cicero says, in impious fables. Another system of explanation is that associated with the name of Euemerus (316 B.c.). According to this author, the myths are history in disguise. All the gods were once men, whose real feats have been decorated and distorted by later fancy. This view suited Lactantius, St Augustine and other early Christian writers 2 Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, p. 35 (1876).

Xenoph. Fr. i. 42. Dindorfs ed., iv. 231.

6 Grote, Hist. of Greece, (ed. 1869) i. 404.

1 Cf. Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 151152, on allegorical interpreta. tion of myths in the mysteries.

very well. They were pleased to believe that Euemerus by historical research had ascertained that the gods were once but mortal men. Precisely the same convenient line was taken by Sahagun in his account of Mexican religious myths. As there can be no doubt that the ghosts of dead men have been worshipped in many lands, and as the gods of many faiths are tricked out with attributes derived from ancestor-worship, the system of Euemerus retains some measure of plausibility. While we need not believe with Euemerus and with Herbert Spencer that the god of Greece ar the god of the Hottentots was once a man, we cannot deny that the myths of both these gods have passed through and been colored by the imaginations of men who practised the worship of real ancestors. For example, the Cretans showed the tomb of Zeus, and the Phocians (Pausanias x. 5) daily poured blood of victims into the tomb of a hero; obviously by way of feeding his ghost. The Hottentots show many tombs of their god, Tsui-Goab, and tell tales about his death; they also pray regularly for aid at the tombs of their own parents.1 We may therefore say that, while it is rather absurd to believe that Zeus and Tsui-Goab were o.nce real men, yet their myths are such as would be developed by people accustomed, among other forms of religion, to the worship of dead men. Very probably portions of the legends of real men have been attracted into the mythic accounts of gods of another character, and this is the element of truth at the bottom of Euemerism.

Later Explanations of Mythology.The ancient systems of explaining what needed explanation in. myths were, then, physical, ethical, religious and historical. One student, like Theagenes, would see a physical philosophy underlying Homeric legends. Another, like Porphyry, would imagine that the meaning was partly moral, partly of a dark theosophic and religious character. Another would detect moral allegory alone, and Aristotle expresses the opinion that the myths were theinventions of legislators to persuade the many, and to be used in support of law (Met. xi. 8, 19). A fourth, like Euemerus, would get rid of the supernatural element altogether, and find only an imaginative rendering of actual history. When Christians approached the pioblem of heathen mythology, they sometimes held, with St Augustine, a form of the doctrine of Euemerusi In other words, they regarded Zeus, Aphrodite and the rest as real persons, diabolical not divine. Some later philosophers, especially of the 17th century, misled by the resemblance between Biblical narratives and ancient Iiiyths, came to the conclusion that the Bible contains a ptire, the myths a distorted, form of an original revelation. The abb Banier published a mythological compilation in which he systematically resolved all the Greek myths into ordinary history.3 Bryant published (1774) A New System, or an Analysis of Ancien~ Myt/iology,wherein an Attempt is made to divest Tradition of Fable, in which he talked very learnedly of that wonderful people, the descendants of Cush, and saw everywhere symbols of the ark and traces of the Noachian deluge. Thomas Taylor, at the end of the 18th century, indulged in much mystical allegorizing of myths, as in the notes to his translation of Pausanias (1794) At an earlier date (1760) Dc Brosses struck on the true line oi interprefation in his little work Du Culte des dicux fetiches, on parallie de lancienne religion de lEgypte avec la religios actuelle de Nigritie. In this tract Dc Brosses explained thc animal-worship of the Egyptians as a survival among a civilized people of ideas and practices springing from thf intellectual condition of savages, and actually existing amoni negroes. A vast symbolical explanation of myths and mysterid was attempted by Friedrich Creuzer.4 The learning and sounc sense of Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus, exploded the idea that thi Eleusinian and other mysteries revealed or concealed matte of momentous religious importance. It ought not to be forgottef Hahn, Tsuni-Goani, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi, p. 113

1 Dc civ. dei., vii. 18; viii. 26.

La Mythologie et les fables expliquees par lhistoire (Paris, 1738 3 you. 4to).

Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker (Leipzig and Darni stadt, 1836-1843).

that Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary in North America, while inclined to take a mystical view of the secrets concealed by Iroquois myths, had also pointed out the savage element surviving in Greek mythology.i Recent Mythological Systeins.Up to a very recent date students of mythology were hampered by orthodox traditions, and still more by ignorance of the ancient languages and of the natural history of man. Only recently have Sanskrit and the Egyptian and Babylonian languages become books not absolutely sealed. Again, the study of the evolution of human institutions from the lowest savagery to civilization is essentially a novel branch of research, though ideas derived from an unsystematic study of anthropology are at least as old as Aristotle. The new theories of mythology are based on the belief that it is man, it is human thought and human language combined, which naturally and necessarily produced the strange conglomerate of ancient fable.6 But, while there is now universal agreement so far, modern niythologists differed essentially on one point. There was a school (with internal divisions) which regarded ancient fable as almost entirely a disease of language, that is, as the result of confusions arising from misunderstood terms that have survived in speech after their original significance was lost. Another school (also somewhat divided against itself) believes that misunderstood language played but a very slight part in the evolution of mythology, and that the irrational element in myths is merely the survival from a condition of thought which was once common, if not universal, but is now found chiefly among savages, and to a certain extent among children. The former school considered that the state of thought out of which myths were developed was produced by decaying language; the latter maintains that the corresponding phenomena of language were the reflection of thought. For the sake of brevity we might call the former the philological system, as it rests chiefly on the study of language, while the latter might be styled the historical or anthropological school, as it is based on the study of man in the sum of his manners, ideas and institutions.

The System of Max Miiller.The most distinguished and popular advocate of the philological school was Max Muller, whose views may be found in his Selected Essays and Lectures on Language. The problem was to explain what lie calls the silly, savage and senseless element in mythology (Set. Ess. i. 578). Max Muller says (speaking of the Greeks), their poets had an instinctive aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, yet they would relate of their gods what would make the most savage of Red Indians creep and shudder stories, that is, of the cannibalism of Demeter, of the mutilation of Uranus, the cannibalism of Cronus, who swallowed his own children, and the like. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.

Max Muller refers the beginning of his systeth of mythology to the discovery of the connection of the Indo-European or, as they are called, Aryan languages. Celts, Germans, speakers of Sanskrit and Zend, Latins and Greeks, all prove by their languages that their tongues may be traced to one family of speech. The comparison of the various words which, in different forms, are common to all Indo-European languages must inevitably throw much light on the original meaning of these words. Take, for example, the name of a god, Zeus, or Athene, or any other. The word may have no intelligible meaning in Greek, but its counterpart in the allied tongues, especially in Sanskrit or Zend, may reveal the original significance of the terms. To understand the origin and meaning of the names of the Greek gods, and to enter Into the original intention of the fables told of each, we must take into account the collateral evidence supplied by Latin, German, Sanskrit and Zend philology (Lect. on Lang., 2nd series, p. 406). A name inay be intelligible in Sanskrit which has no sense in Greek. Thus Athene is a divine name without meaning in Greek, but Max Muller advances reasons foi supposing that it is identical with akana, the dawn, in Sanskrit, It is his opinion, apparently, that whatever story, is told of Athen~ must have originally been told of the dawn, and that we must keeg this before us in attempting to understand the legends of Athene, Thus again (op. cit. p. 410), he svys, we have a right to explair all that is told of him (Agni, fire ) as originally meant for fire. The system is simply this the original meaning of the names of goth must be ascertained by comparative philology. The names, as 1 rule, will be found to denote elemental phenomena. And the.silly i Mrurs des sauvages (Paris, 1724).

6 Max MUller. Lectures on Language (1864), 2nd series, p. 410.

savage and senseless elements in the legends of the gods will be shown to have a natural significance, as descriptions of sky, storms, sunset, water, fire, dawn, twilight, the life of earth, and other celestial and terrestrial existences. Stated in the barest form, these results do not differ greatly from the conclusions of Theagenes of Rhegium, who held that Hephaestus was fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was water, Artemis was the moon, eai r& Xoiii-h huofw1. But Max Mullers system is based on scientific philology, not on conjecture, and is supported by a theory of the various processes in the evolution of myths out of language.

It is no longer necessary to give an elaborate analysis of this theory, because neither in its philological nor mythological side has it any advocates who need be reckoned with. The attempt to disengage the history of times forgotten and unknown, by means of analysis of roots and words in Aryan languages, has been unsuccessful, or has at best produced disputable results. Max Mullers system was a result of the philological theories that indicated the linguistic unity of the Indo-European or Aryan peoples, and was founded on an analysis of their language. But myths precisely similar in irrational and repulsive character, even in minute details, te those of the Aryan races, exist among Australians, South Sea Islanders, Eskimo, Bushmen in Africa, among Solomon Islanders, Iroquois, and so forth. The facts being identical, an identical explanation should be sought, and, as the languages in which the myths exist are essentially different, an explanation founded on the Aryan language is likely to prove too narrow. Once more, even if we discover the original meaning of a gods name, it does not follow that we can explain by aid of the significance of the name the myths about the god. For nothing is more common than the attraction of a more ancient story into the legend of a later god or hero. Myths of unknown antiquity, for example, have been attracted into the legend of Charlemagne, just as the bans mots of old wits are transferred to living humorists. Therefore, though we may ascertain that Zeus means sky and Agni fire, we cannot assert, with Max Muller, that all the myths about Agni and Zeus were originally told of fire and sky. When these gods became popular they would inevitably inherit any current exploits of earlier heroes or gods. These exploits would therefore be explained erroneously if regarded as originally myths of sky or fire. We cannot convert Max Mullers proposition there was nothing told of the sky that could not in some form or other be ascribed to Zeus into there was nothing ascribed to Zeus that had not at some time or other been told of the sky. Tins is also, perhaps, the proper place to observe that names derived from natural phenomenasky, clouds, dawn and sun are habitually assigned by Brazilians, Ojibways, Australians and other savages to living men and women. Thus the story originally told of a man or woman bearing the name sun, dawn, cloud, may be mixed up later with myths about the real celestial dawn, cloud or sun. For all these reasons the information obtained from philological analysis of names is to be distrusted. We must also bear in mind that early men when they conceived, and savage men when they conceive, of the sun, moon, wind, earth, sky and so forth, have no such ideas in their minds as we attach to these names. They think of sun, moon, wind, earth and sky as of living human beings with bodily parts and passions. Thus, even when we discover an elemental meaning in a gods name, that meaning may be all unlike what the word suggests to civilized men. A final objection is that philologists differ widely as to the true analysis and real meaning of the divine names. Max Muller, for example, connects Kronos (Kpcsvoi) with ~,pv1, time; Preller with Kpaiiw, I fulfil, and so forth.

The civilized men of the Mythopoeic age were not obliged, as Max Muller held, to believe that all phenomena were persons, because the words which denoted the phenomena had genderterminations. On the other hand, the gender-terminations were survivals from an early stage of thought in which personal characteristics, including sex, had been attributed to all phenomena. This condition of thought is demonstrated to be, and to have been, universal among savages, and it may notoriously be observed among children. Thus Max Mullers theory that myths are a disease of language seems destitute of evidence, and inconsistent with what is historically known about the relations between the language and the social, politicaland literary condition of men.

Theory of herbert SpencerThe system of Herbert Spencer, ai explained in Principles of Sociology, has many points in common with that of Max Muller. Spencer attempts to account for the state of mind (the foundation of myths) in which man personifies and animates all phenomena. According to his theory, too, this habit of mind may be regarded as the result of degeneration, for in hi~ v,ew, as in Max Mullers, it is not primary, but the result of niisconceptions. But, while language is the chief cause of misconceptions with Max Muller, with Spencer it is only one of several forces a! working to the same result. Statements which originally had 1 different significance are misinterpreted, he thinks, and names oi human beings are also misinterpreted in such a manner that earl) races are gradually led to believe in the personality of phenomena He too notes the defect in early speech that is, the lack a words free from implications of vitality as one of the causu which favor personalization. Here, of course, we have to asi Snencer. with Max Muller. why words in early lannuanes imnh vitality. These words must reflect the thought of the men who use them before they react upon that thought and confirm it in its misconceptions. So far Spencer seems at one with the philological school of mythologists, but he warns us that the misconstructions of language in his system are different in kind, and the erroneous course of thought is opposite in direction. According to Spencer (and his premises, at least, are correct), the names of human beings in an early state of society are derived from incidents of the moment, and often refer to the period of the day or the nature of the weather. We find, among Australian natives, among Abipones in South America, and among Ojibways in the North, actual people named Dawn,Gold Flower of Day, Dark Cloud, Sun, and so forth. Spencers argument is that, given a story about real people so named, in process of time and forgetfulness the anecdote which was once current about a man named Storm and a woman named Sunshine will be transferred to the meteorological phenomena of sun and tempest. Thus these purely natural agents will come to be personalized (Prin. Soc. 392), and to be credited with purely human origin and human adventures. Another misconception would arise when men had a tradition that they came to their actual seats froth this mountain, or that lake or river, or from lands across the sea. They will mistake this tradition of local origin for one of actual parentage, and will come to believe that, like certain Homeric heroes, they are the sons of a river (now personified), or of a mountain, or, like a tribe mentioned by Garcilasso de la Vega, that they are descended from the sea. Once more, if their old legend told them that they came from the rising sun, they will hold, like many races, that they are actually the children of the sun. By this process of forgetfulness and misinterpretation, mountains, rivers, lakes, sun and sea would receive human attributes, while men would degenerate from a more sensible condition into a belief in the personality and vitality of inanimate objects. As Spencer thinks ancestor-worship the first form of religion, and as he holds that persons with such names as sun, moon and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural phenomenadawn, wind, sky, night and the restare a kind of transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real men and women.. Partly by confounding the parentage of the race with a conspicuous object marking the natal region of the race, partly by literal interpretation of birth names, and partly by literal interpretation of names given in eulogy (such as Sun and Bull, among the Egyptian kings), and also through implicit belief in the statements of forefathers, there has been produced belief in descent from mountains, sea, dawn, from animals which have become constellations, and from persons once on earth who now appear as sun and moon. A very common class of myths (see TOTEMIsM) assures us that certain stocks of men are descended from beasts, or from gods in the shape of beasts. Spencer explains these by the theory that the remembered ancestor of a stock had, as savages often have, an animal name, as Bear, Wolf, Coyote, or what not. In time his descendants came to forget that the name was a mere name, and were misled into the opinion that they were children of a real coyote, wolf or bear. This idea, once current, would naturally stimulate and diffuse the belief that such descents were possible, and that the animals are closely akin to men.

The chief objection to these processes is that they require, as a necessary condition, a singular amount of memory on the one hand and of forgetfulness on the other. The lowest contemporary savages remember little or nothing of any ancestor farther back than the grandfather. But men in Spencers Mythopoeic age had much longer memories. On the other hand, the most ordinary savage does not misunderstand so uniyersal a custom as the imposition of names peculiar to animals or derived from atmospheric phenomena. He calls his own child Dawn or Cloud, his own name is Sitting Bull or Running Wolf, ~mnd he is not tempted to explain his great-grandfathers name of Bright Sun or Lively Raccoon on the hypothesis that the ancestor really was a raccoon or the sun. Moreover, savages do not worship ancestresses or retain lively memories of their great-grandmothers, yet it is through the female line in the majority of cases that the animal or other ancestral name is derived. The son of an Australian male, whose kin or totem name is Crane, takes, in many tribes, his mothers kin-name, Swan or Cockatoo, or whatever it may be, and the same is a common rule in Africa and America among races who rarely remember their great-grandfathers. On the whole, then (though degeneracy, as well as progress, is a force in human evolution), we are not tempted to believe in so strange a combination of forgetfulness with long memory, nor so excessive a degeneration from common sense into a belief in the personality of phenomena, as are required no less by Spencers system than b) that of Max Muller.

Preliminary Problems.We have stated and criticized tht more prominent modern theories of mythology. It is nos~ necessary first to recapitulate the chief points in the problem and then to attempt to explain them by a comparison of thi myths of various races. The difficulty of mythology is ti account for the following among other apparently irrationa elements in myths: the wild and senseless stories of th~

beginnings of things, of the origin of men, sun, stars, animals, death, and the world in general; the infamous and absurd adventures of the gods; why divine beings are regarded as incestuous, adulterous, murderous, thievish, cruel, cannibals, and addicted to wearing the shapes of animals, and subject to death in some stories; the myths of metamorphosis into plants, beasts and stars; the repulsive stories of the state of the dead; the descents of the gods into the place of the dead, and their return thence. It is extremely difficult to keep these different categories of myths separate from each other. If we investigate myths of the origin of the worid, we often find gods in animal form active in the work of world-making. If we examine myths of human descent from animals, we find gods busy there, and if we try to investigate the myths of the origin of the gods, the subject gets mixed up with the mythical origins of things in general.

Our first question will he. Is there any stage of human society, and of the human intellect, in which facts that appear to us to be monstrous and irrational are accepted as ordinary occurrences of every day life ? E. W. Lane, in his preface to the Arabian Nights, says that the Arabs have an advantage over us as story-tellers. They can introduce such incidents as the change of a man into a horse, or of a woman into a dog, or the intervention of an af~eet, without any more scruple than our own novelists feel in describing a duel or the concealment of a will. Among the Arabs the actions of magic and of spirits are regarded as at least as probable and common as duels and concealments of wills in European society. It is obvious that we need look no farther for the explanation of the supernatural events in Arab romances. Now let us apply this system to mythology. It is admitted that Greeks, Romans, Aryans of India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, 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 these divine adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and converse with the dead, and all else that puzzles us in the civilized mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life? Our answer is that everything in the civilized mythologies which we regard as irrational seems only part of the accepted and rational order of things (at least in the case of medicine-men or magicians) to contemporary savages, and in the past seemed equally rational and natural to savages concerning whom we have historical information. Our theory is, therefore, that the savage and senseless clement in mythology is, for the most part, a legacy from ancestors of the civilized races who were in an intellectual state not higher than tJiat of Australians, Bushmen, Red Indians, the lower races of South America, Mincopies, and other worse than barbaric, peoples. As the ancestors of the Greeks, with the Aryans of India, the Egyptians, and others advanced in civilization, their religious thought was shocked and surprised by myths (originally dating from the period of savagery, and natural in that period) which were preserved down to the time of Pausanias by local priesthoods, or which were stereotyped in the ancient poems of Hesiod and Homer, or in the Brahrnanas and Vedas of India, or were retained in the popular religion of Egypt. This theory recommended itself to Lobeck. We may be]ieve that ancient and early tribes framed gods like themselves in action and in experience, and that the allegorical clement in myths is the addition of later peoples who had attained to purer ideas of divinity, yet dared not reject the religion of their ancestors (Aglaoph. i. 153). The senseless element in the myths would by this theory be for the most part a survival. And the age and condition of human thought from which it survived would be one in which our most ordinary ideas about the nature of things and the limits of possibility did not yet exist, when all things were conceived of in quite other fashionthe age, that is, of savagery. It is universally admitted that survivals of this kind do accotint for many anomalies in out institutions, in law, politics, society, even in dress and manners. If isolated fragments of an earlier age abide in these, it is still more probable that other fragments will survive in anything so closely connected as mythology with the conservative religious sentiment.

If this view of mythology can be proved, much will have been donetoexplainaproblemwhichwe have not yet touched, namely, the distribution of myths. The science of mythology has to account, if it can, not only for the existence of certain stories in the legends of certain races, but also for the presence of stories practically the same among almost all races. In the long history of mankind it is impossible to deny that stories may conceivably have spread from a single centre, and been handed on from races like the Indo-European and the Semitic to races as far removed from them in every way as the Zulus, the Australians, the Eskimo, the natives of the South Sea Islands. But, while the possibility of the diffusion of myths by borrowing and transmission must be allowed for, the hypothesis of the origin of myths in the savage state of the intellect supplies a ready explanation of their wide diffusion. Archaeologists are acquainted with objects of early art and craftsmanship, rude clay pipkins and stone weapons, which can only be classed as human, and which do not bear much impress of any one national taste and skill. Many myths may be called human in this sense. They are the rough products of the early human mind, and are not yet characterized by the differentiations of race and culture. Such myths might spring up anywhere. among untutored men, and anywhere might survive into civilized literature. Therefore where similar myths are found among Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, Mangaians and others, it is unnecessary to account for their wide diffusion by any hypothesis of borrowing, early or late. The Greek key pattern found on objects in Peruvian graves was not necessarily borrowed from Greece, nor did Greeks necessarily borrow from Aztecs the wave pattern which is common to both. The same explanation may be applied to Greek and Aztec myths of the deluge, to Australian and Greek myths of the original theft of fire. Borrowed they may have been, but they may as probably have been independent inventions.

It is true that some philologists deprecate as unscientific the comparison of myths which are found in languages not connected with each other. The objection rests on the theory that myths are a disease of language, a morbid offshoot of language, and that the legends in unconnected languages must therefore be kept apart. But, as the theory which we are explaining does not admit that language is more than a subordinate cause in the development of myths, as it seeks for the origin of myths in a given condition of thought through which all races have passed, we need do no more than record the objection.

The Intellectual Condition of Save ges.Our next step must be briefly to examine the intellectual condition of savages, that is, of races varying from the condition of the Andaman Islanders to that of the Solomon Islanders and the ruder Red Men of the American continent. In a developed treatise on the subject of mythology it would be necessary to criticize, with a minuteness which is impossible here, our evidence for the very peculiar mental condition of the lower races. Max Muller asked (when speaking of the mental condition of men when myths were developed), was there a period of temporary madness through which the human mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in the south of India and the north of Iceland? To this we may answer that the human mind had to pass through the savage stage of thought, that this stage was for all practical purposes identically the same everywhere, and that to civilized observers jt does resemble a temporary madness. Many races are still abandoned to that temporary madness; many others which have escaped from it were observed and described while still laboring under its delusions. Our evidence for the intellectual ideas of man in the period of savagery we derive partly from the reports of voyagers, historians, missionaries, partly from an examination of the customs, institutions, and laws in which the lower races gave expression to their notions.

As to the first kind of evidence, we must be on our guard against several sources of error. Where religion is concerned, trayellers in general and missionaries in particular are biased in several distinct ways. The missionary is sometimes anxious to prove that religion can only come by revelation, and that certain tribes, having received no revelation, have no religion or religious myths at all. Sometimes the missionary, on the other hand, is anxious to demonstrate that the myths of his heathen flock are a corrupted version of the Biblical narrative. In the former case he neglects the study of savage myths; in the latter he unconsciously accommodates what he hears to what he calls the truth. The traveller who is not a missionary may either have the same prejudices, or he may be a sceptic about revealed religion. In the latter case he is perhaps unconsciously moved to put burlesque versions of Biblical stories into the mouths of his native informants, or to represent the savages as ridiculing the Scriptural traditions which he communicates to them. Yet again we must remember that the leading questions of a European inquirer may furnish a savage with a thread on which to string answers which the questions themselves have suggested. Have you ever had a great flood? Yes Was any one saved? The question starts the invention of the savage on a deluge-myth, of which, perhaps, the idea has never before entered his mind. There still remain the difficulties of all conversation between civilized men and unsophisticated savages, the tendency to hoax, and other sources of error and confusion. By this time, too, almost every explorer of savage life is a theorist. He is a Spencerian, or a believer in the universal prevalence of the faith in an All-Father, or he looks everywhere for gods who are spirits of vegetation. In receiving this kind of evidence, ther, we need to know the character of our informant, his means of communicating with the heathen, his power of testing evidence, and his good faith. His testimony will have additional weight if supported by the undesigned coincidences of other evidence, ancient and modern. If Strabo and Herodotus and Pomponius Mela, for example, describe a custom, rite or strange notion in the Old World, and if mariners and missionaries find the same notion or custom or rite in Polynesia or Australia or Kamchatka, we can scarcely doubt the truth of the reports. The evidence is best when given by ignorant men, who are astonished at meeting with an institution which ethnologists are familiar with in other parts of the world.

Another method of obtaining evidence is by the comparative study of savage laws and institutions. Thus we find in Asia, Africa, America and Australia that the marriage laws of the lower races are connected with a belief in kinship or other relationship with animals. The evidence for this belief is thus entirely beyond suspicion. We find, too, that political power, sway and social influence are based on the ideas of magic, of metamorphosis, and of the power which certain men possess to talk with the dead and to visit the abodes of death. All these ideas are the stuff of which myths are made, and the evidence of savage institutions, in every part of the world, proves that these ideas are the universal inheritance of savages.

Savage men are like ourselves in. curiosity and anxiety causas cognoscere rerum, but with our curiosity they do not possess Savage Ideas our powers of attention. They are as easily satisfied about the with an. explanation of phenomena as they are eager World. to possess an explanation. Inevitably they furnish themselves with their philosophy out of their scanty stock of acquired ideas, and these ideas and general conceptions seem almost imbecile to civilized men. Curiosity and credulity, then, are the characteristics of the savage intellect. When a phenomenon presents itself the savage requires an explanation, and that explanation he makes for himself, or receives from tradition, in the shape of a myth. The basis of these myths, which are just as much a part of early conjectural science as of early religion, is naturally the experience of the savage as construed by himself. Mans craving to know the reason why is already among rude savages an intellectual appetite, and even to the Australian scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience.f How does he try to satisfy this craving? E. B. Tylor replies, When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it. Against this statement it has been. urged that men in the lower stages of culture are not curious, but take all phenomena for granted. If there were no direct evidence in favor of Tylors opinion, it would be enough to point to the nature of savage myths themselves. It is not arguing in a circle to point out that almost all of them are nothing more than explanations of intellectual difficulties, answers to the question, How came this or that phenomenon to be what it is? Thus savage myths answer the questionsWhat was the origin of the world, and of men, and of beasts? How came the stars by their arrangement and movements? How are the motions of sun and moon to be accounted for? Why has this tree a red flower, and this bird a black mark on the tail? What was the origin of the tribal dances, or of this or that law of custom or etiquette? Savage mythology, which is also savage science, has a reply to all these and all similar questions, and that reply is always found in the shape of a story. The answers cannot be accounted for without the previous existence of the questions.

We have now shown how savages come to have a mythology. It is their way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity, their way of realizing the world in which they move. But they frame their stories, necessarily and naturally, in harmony with, their general theory of things, with what we may call savage metaphysics. Now early man, as Max Muller says, not only did not think as we think, but did not think as we suppose he ought to have thought. The chief distinction between his mode of conceiving the world and ours is his vast extension of the theory of personality. To the savage, and apparently to men more backward than. the most backward peoples we know, all nature was a congeries of animated personalities. The savages notion of personality is more a universally diffused feeling than a reasoned conception, and this feeling of a personal self he impartially distributes all over the world as knowh to him. One of the Jesuit missionaries in North America thus describes the Red Mans philosophy:2 Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses soot animes. Crevaux, in the Andes, found that the Indians believed that the beasts have piays (sorcerers and doctors) like themselves.3 This opinion we may name personalism, and it is the necessary condition of savage (and, as will be seen, of civilized) mythology. The Jesuits could not understand how spherical bodies like sun and moon could be mistaken for human beings. Their catechumens put them off with the answer that the drawn bows of the heavenly bodies gave them their round appearance. The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird, say the Bushmen, and g kal kai, a respectable Bushman once saw the personal wind at Haarfontemn..4 The Egyptians, according to Herodotus (iii. 16), believed fire to be O~pLov ~ijs,tvxov, a live beast. The Bushman who saw the Wind meant to throw a stone at it, but it ran into a hill. From the wind as a person. the Bhinyas in India (Dalton, p. 140) claim descent, and in Indian epic tradition the leader of the ape army wqs the son of the wind. The Wind, by certain mares, became the father of wind-swift steeds mentioned in. the Iliad. The loves of Boreas are well known. These are examples of the animistic theory applied to what, in our minds, seems one of the least personal of natural phenomena. The sky (which appears to us even less personal) has been regarded as a personal being by Samoyeds, Red Indians, Zulus,5 and traces of this belief survive in. Chinese, Greek and Roman religion.

We must remember, however, that to the savage, Sky, Sun, Sea, Wind, are not only persons, but they are savage persons. Their conduct is not what civilized men would attribute to characters so august; it is what uncivilized men think probable and befitting among beings like themselves.

The savage regards all animals as endowed with personality.

us tienrient les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs, says a Jesuit father about the North-American Savage Indians (Relations, bc. cit.). In Australia the Theoiy of natives believe that the wild dog has the power Mans Rela of speech, like the cat of the Coverley witch in the Spectator. The Breton peasants, according to P.

Sbillot, credit all birds with language, whichithey even attempt to interpret. The old English and the Arab superstitions about the language of beasts are examples of this opinion surviving among civilizedraces. The bear in Norway is regarded as almost a man, and his dead body is addressed and his wrath deprecated by Samoyeds and Red Indians. The native bear South African Folk-Lore Journal (May 1880).

i E. B. TvlOr. ot. cit. ii. 2c6.

Kur-bo-roo is the sage counsellor Of the aborigines in all their difficulties. When bent on a dangerous expedition, the men will seek help from this clumsy creature, but in what way his opinions are made known is nowhere recorded. i H. R. Schoolcraft mentions a Red Indian story explaining how the 1bear does not die, but this tale Schoolcraft (like Herodotus in Egypt) cannot bring himself to relate. He also gives examples of lowas conversing with serpents. These may serve as examples of the savage belief in the human intelligence of animals. Man is on an even footing with them, and with them can interchange his ideas. But savages carry this opinion much further. Man in their view is actually, and in no figurative sense, akin to the beasts. Certain tribes in Java believe that women when delivered of a child are frequently delivered at the same time of a young crocodile.1 The common European story of a queen accused of giving birth to puppies shows the survival of the belief in the possibility of such births among civilized- races, while the Aztecs had the idea that women who saw the moon in certain circumstances would produce mice. But the chief evidence for the savage theory of mans close kinship with the lower animals is found in the institution called totemism (q.v.)

the belief that certain stocks of men in the various tribes are descended by blood descent from, or are developed out of, or otherwise connected with, certain objects animate or inanimate, but especially with beasts. The strength of the opinion is proved by its connection with very stringent marriage laws. No man (according to the rigour of the custom) may marry a woman who bears the same kin name as himself, that is, who is descended from the same inanimate object or animal. Nor may people (if they can possibly avoid it) eat the flesh of animals who are their kindred. Savage man also believes that many of his own tribe-fellows have the power of assuming the shapes of animals, and that the souls of his dead kinsfolk revert to animal forms.

F. \V. Lane, in his introduction to the Arabian Nights (i. 58), says he found the belief in these transmigrations accepted seriously in Cairo. H. H. Bancroft brings evidence to prove that the Mexicans supposed pregnant women would turn into beasts, and sleeping children into mice, if things went wrong in the ritual of a certain solemn sacrifice. There is a well-known Scottish legend to the effect that a certain old witch was once fired at in her shape as a hare, and that where the hare was hit there the old woman was found to be wounded. J. F. Lafitau tells the same story as current among his Red Indian flock, except that the old witch and her son took the form of birds, not of hares. A Scandinavian witch does the same in the Egil saga. In Lafitaus tale the birds were wounded by the magic arrows of a medicine man, and the arrow-heads were found in the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan people chiefly transform themselves into badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras (Bancroft, i. 740) possessed the power of transforming men into wild beasts. J. F. Regnard, the French dramatist, found in Lapland (I681) that witches could turn men into cats, and could themselves assume the forms of swans, crows, falcons and geese. Among the Bushmen sorcerers assume the form of beasts and jackals. M. Dobrizhofer, a missionary in Paraguay (I717I79f), learned that sorcerers arrogate to themselves the power of changing men into tigers (Eng. trans., i. 63). He was present at a conversion of this sort, though the miracle beheld by the people was invisible to the missionary. Near Loanda Livingstone noted that a chief may metamorphose himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and resume his proper form. The same accomplishments distinguish the Barotse and Balonda.5 Among the Mayas of Central America sorcerers could transform themselves into dogs, pigs and other animals; their glance was death to a victim (Bancroft, ii. 797). The Thlinkeets hold that their shamans have the same powers.1 A bamboo in Sarawak is known to have been a man. Metamorphoses into stones are as common among Red Indians and Australians as in Greek mythology. Compare the cases of Niobe and the victims of the Gorgons head.7 Zulus, Red Indians, Aztecs,5 Andaman Islanders and other races believe that their dead assume the shapes of serpents and of other creatures, often reverting to the form of the animal from which they originally descended. In ancient Egypt R. BroughSmyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 446 (1878). 2 J, Hawkesworth, Voyages, iii. 756.

Lord Redesdale, Talf S of Old Japan (1871).

Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 15, 40.

Missionary Travels, pp. 615, 642.

~W. H. DalI, Alaska, p. 423 (1870).

Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions, pp. 130, 134. Sahagun, French trans., p. 226.

the usual prayers demand for the deceased the power of going and coming from and to everywhere under any form they like.9 A trace of this opinion may be noticed in the Aeneid. The serpent that appeared at the sacrifice of Aeneas was regarded as possibly a manifestation of the soul of Anchises (Aeneid, v. 84) Dixerat haec, adytis quum lubricus anguis ab imis Septem ingens gyros, septena volumina, traxit, and Aeneas is Incertus, geniumne loci, famulumne parentis Esse putet.

On the death of Plotinus, as he gave up the ghost, a snake glided from under his bed into a hole in the wall. Compare Pliny n on the cave in quo manes Scipionis Africani majoris custodire draco dicitur.

The last peculiarity in savage philosophy to which we need call attention here is the belief in spirits and in human intercourse with the shades of the dead. With the savage natural death is not a universal and inevitable ordinance. All men must die is~a generalization which he has scarcely reached; in his, philosophy the proposition is more like this all men who die die by violence. A natural death is explained as the result of a sorcerers spiritual violence, and the disease is attributed to magic or to the action of hostile spirits. After death the man survives as a spirit, sometimes taking an animal form, sometimes invisible, sometimes to be observed in his habit as he lived (see APPARITIONS). The philosophy of the subject is shortly put in the speech of Achilles (Iliad, XXiii. 103) after he has beheld the dead Patroclus in a dream: Ay me, there remaineth then even. in the house of Hades a spirit and phantom of the dead, for all night long hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and making moan. It is almost superfluous to quote here the voluminous evidence for the intercourse with spirits which savage chiefs and medicine men are believed to maintain. They can call up ghosts, or can go to the ghosts, in Australia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, North America, Zululand, among the Eskimo, and generally in every quarter of the globe. The men who enjoy this power are the same as they who can change themselves and others into animals. They too command the weather, and, says an old French missionary, are regarded as very Jupiters, having in their hands the lightning and the thunder (Relations, bc. cit.). They make good or bad seasons, and control the vast animals who, among ancient Persians and Aryans of India, as among Zulus and Iroquois, are supposed to grant or withhold the rain, and to thunder with their enormous wings in the region of the clouds.

Another fertile source of myth is magic, especially the magic designed to produce fertility, vegetable and animal. From the natives of northern and central Australia to the actors in the ritual of Adonis, or the folk among whom arose the customs of crowning the May king or the king of the May, all peoples have done magic to encourage the breeding of animals as part of the food supply, and to stimulate the growth of plants, wild or cultivated. In the opinion of J. G. Frazer, the human representatives or animal representatives, in the rites, of the spirit of vegetation; of the corn spirit; of the changing seasons4 winter or summer, have been developed into many forms of gods, with appropriate myths, explanatory of the magic, and of the sacrifice of the chief performer. In the same way the adoration of living human. beings, the deification of living kingswhose title survives in our king or queen. of the May, and in the rex nemorensis, the priest of Diana in the grove of Ariciahas been mnit fruitful in myths of divine beings. These human beings are often sacrificed, for various reasons, actual or hypothetical, and gods and heroes are almost as likely to be explained as spirits of vegetation now, as they were likely to become solar mythological figures in the system of Max Muller. It is certainly true that divine beings in most mythologies are apt to acquire solar with other elemental attributes, including vegetable attributes. But that the origins of such mythical beings were, ab initio, either solar or vegetable, or, for that matter, animal, it would often be hard to prove.

Frazers ideas are to be found in a work of immense erudition, The Golden Bough (London, 1900). Two studies by him, pursuing Records of the Past, x. 10.

UI Pbotini vita, pp. 2, 95. n H. N. xv. 44, 85.

the same set of ideas in more detail, are Adonis, Attis, Osiris (1906) and Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship (1905). See A. Lang, Magic and Religion (London, f9oI), for a criticism in detail of the general theory as set forth in The Golden Bough. Whatever may be said, Frazer has certainly made the most important of recent contributions to the study of mythology. He has fixed the attention of students on a mass of early ideas, previously much neglected save by \V. Mannhardt, and on the facts of ritual, which preserve these ideas and represent them in a kind of mystery plays.

We are now in a posiLion to sum up the ideas of savages about mans relations to the world. We started on this inquiry because we found that savages regarded sky, wind, sun, earth and so forth as practically men, and we had then to ask, what sort of men, men with what powers? The result of our examination, so far, is that in savage opinion sky, wind, sun, sea and many other phenomena have, being personal, all the powers attributed to real human persons. These powers and J:lualities are: (I) relationship to animals and ability to be transformed and to transform others into animals and other objects; (2) magical accomplishments, as(a) power to visit or to procure the visits of the dead; (b) other magical powers, such as cofitrol over the weather and over the fertility of nature in all departments. Once more, the great forces of nature, considered as persons, are involved in that inextricable confusion in which men, beasts, plants, stones, stars, are all on one level of personality and animated existence. This is the philosophy of savage life, and it is on these principles that the savage constructs his myths, while the~e, again, are all the scientific explanations of the universe with which he has been able to supply himself.

Examples of Mylliology.Myths of the origin of the world and man are naturally most widely diffused. Man has everywhere asked himself whence things came and bow, and his myths are his earliest extant form of answer to this question. So confused and inconsistent are the mythical answers that it is very difficult to classify them according to any system. If we try beginning with myths of creative gods, we find that the world is sometimes represented as pre-existent to the divine race. If we try beginning with myths of the origin of the world, we frequently find that it owes its origin to the activity of preexistent supernatural beings. According to all modern views of creation, the creative mind is prior to the universe which it created. There is no such consistency of opinion in myths, whether of civilized or savage races. Perhaps the plan least open to objection is to begin with myths of the gods. But when we speak of gods, we must not give to the word a modern significance. As used here, gods merely mean. non-natural and powerful beings, sometimes magnified non-natural men, sometimes beasts, birds or insects, sometimes the larger forces and phenomena of the universe conceived of as endowed with human personality and passions. When Plutarch examined the Osirian myth (De Isid. xxv.) he saw that the gods in the tale were really demons, stronger than men, but having the divine part not wholly unalloyed magnified nonnatural men, in short. And such are the gods of mythology.

In examining the myths of the gods we shall begin with the conceptions of the most backward tribes, and advance to the divine legends of the ancient civilized races. It will appear that, while the non-civilized gods are often theriomorphic, made in accordance with the ideas of non-civilized men, the civilized gods retain many characteristics of the savage gods, and these characteristics are the irrational element in the divine myths.

Myths of Gods: Savage Ideas.It is not easy to separate the discussion of savage myths of gods from the problem, Whence and ho~ arose the savage belief in gods? The orthodox anthropological explanation has been that of E. B. Tylor, which closely resmblef Herbert Spencers ghost theory. By reflection on dreams, it which the self, or spirit, of the savage seems to wander free from the bounds of time and space, to see things remote, and to meet and recognize dead friends or foes; by speculation on the experiencef of trance and of phantasms of the dead or living, beheld with wakinf eyes; by pondering on the phenomena of shadows, of breath, 01 death and life, the savage evolved the idea of a separable soul oi spirit capable of surviving bodily death. The spirit of the dead ma~ tenant a material object, a fetish, or may roam hungry anc comfortless and need propitiation by food, for unpropitiated it h dangerous, or may be reincarnated, or may go to its own herd in another world. Again, it is naturally kind to its living kinsfolk, and so may be addressed in prayer. These are the doctrines of animism (g.e.), and, according to the usual anthropological theory, these spirits come to thrive to gods estate in favorable circumstances, as where the dead man, when alive, had great mana or wakan, a great share of the ether, so to speak, which, in savage metaphysics, is the viewless vehicle of magical influences. Thus the ghost of the hero or medicine man of a kin or tribe may be raised to divine rank, while againthe doctrine of spirits once developed, and spirits once allotted to the great elemental forces and phenomena of nature, sky, thunder, the sea, the forestswe have the beginnings of departmental deities, such as Agni, god of fire; Poseidon, god of the sea; Zeus, god of the skythough in recent theories Zeus appears to be regarded as primarily the god of the oak tree, a spirit of vegetation.

On this theory animism, the doctrine of spirits, is the source of all belief in gods. But it is found that among the lowest or least cultured races, such as the south-eastern tribes of Australia, who do not propitiate ancestral spirits by offerings of food, or address them in prayer, there often exists a belief in an All-Father, to use Howitts convenient expression. This being cannot have been evolved out of the cult of ancestors, where ancestors are not worshipped; and lie is not even regarded as a spirit, but, in Matthew Arnolds phrase, as a magnified non-natural man. He existed before death came into the wof-Id, and he still exists. His home is in or above the sky, but there was a time when he walked the earth, a potent magic-worker; endowed mankind with such arts and institutions as they possess; and left to them certain rules of life, ethics and ritual. Often he is regarded as the maker of things, or of most things, and of mankind; or mankind are his children, descended from disobedient sons of his, whom he cast out of heaven. Very frequently he is the judge of souls, and sends the good and bad to their own places of reward and punishment. He is usually supposed to watch over human conduct, but this is by no means invariably the case. Sometimes he, like the Atnatu of the Kaitish tribe of central Australia, is only vigilant in matters of ritual, such as circumcision, subincision and the use of the sacred bull-roarer, the Greek jibjq3oc. As an almost universal rule, in the lowest culture, no prayers are addressed to this being; he has no sacrifices, no dwelling made with hands; and the images of him, in clay, that are made and danced round with invocations of his name at the tribal ceremonies of initiation, are destroyed at the close of the performances. If the name of god is denied to such beings because they receive little cult, it may still be admitted that the belief might easily develop into a form of theism, independent of and underived from animism, or the ghost theory.

The best account of this All-Father belief in the lowest culture is to be read in R. Howitts Native Races of South-East Australia. Under the names of Baiame, Pundjel, Mulkari, Daramulun and many others, the south-eastern tribes (both those Australiap who reckon descent in the female and those who reckon Savages.

by the male line) have this faith in an All-Father, the attributes varying in various communities. The most highly developed All-Father is the Baiame or Byamee of the Euahlayi tribe of north-western New South Wales, to whom prayers for the welfare of the souls of the dead are, or recently were, addressedthe tribe dwelling a hundred miles away from the nearest missionary station (Protestant).i In the centre of Australia, Atnatu, self-created, is known, as has been said, to the Kaitish tribe, next neighbors of the Arunta of the Macdonnell Hills. Among the Arunta, Mr Strehlow (Globus, May 1907) finds such a being as Atnatu, and also among some other adjacent tribes, as the Luritja. See, too, Strehlow and von Leonhardi, in Veroffentlichungen ales dem stadiischen Voiker-Museum (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1907, vol. L). But Messrs B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, who discovered Atnatu, did not find any trace of an All-Father among the Arunta, or any other of the tribes to the north and north-east of the centre. Mr Strehlows branch of the Arunta they did not examine.

It ~s plain that the All-Father belief, in favorable circumstances, especially if ghost worship remained undeveloped, might be evolved into theism.