tors of a similar myth, nor between the Greek and
Australian possessors of a similar usage. The hypothesis will be that
the myth, or usage, is common to both races, not because of original
community of stock, not because of contact and borrowing, but because
the ancestors of the Greeks passed through the savage intellectual
condition in which we find the Australians.

The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth?
Do peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other? The answer
is, that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth, if
it be race which confers on a people its national genius, and its
capacity of becoming civilised. If race does this, then race affects,
in the most powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one
is likely to confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor
either with a myth from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the
substance, the original set of ideas, may be much the same. In all
three you have anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal
shapes, tricky, capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed
with magical powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda,
of any of the Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much
above the gods of savage mythology. This stuff of myth is _quod
semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_, and is the original gift of the
savage intellect. But the final treatment, the ultimate literary form
of the myth, varies in each race. Homeric gods, like Red Indian,
Thlinkeet, or Australian gods, can assume the shapes of birds. But
when we read, in Homer, of the arming of Athene, the hunting of
Artemis, the vision of golden Aphrodite, the apparition of Hermes,
like a young man when the flower of youth is loveliest, then we
recognise the effect of race upon myth, the effect of the Greek genius
at work on rude material. Between the Olympians and a Thlinkeet god
there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter of Cnidos
and an image from Easter Island. Again, the Scandinavian gods, when
their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape
of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit
of their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless
sacrifices, soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of
Vedic and Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into
its sacerdotage and priestly second childhood. Thus