hristian dogmas. But the sanction of the Australian gods is as
powerfully lent to silly, or cruel, or needless ritual, as to some moral
ideas of weight and merit. In brief, as far as I am able to see, all
sorts of ideas, the lowest and the highest, are held at once confusedly
by savages, and the same confusion survives in ancient Greek belief. As
far back as we can trace him, man had a wealth of religious and mythical
conceptions to choose from, and different peoples, as they advanced in
civilisation, gave special prominence to different elements in the primal
stock of beliefs. The choice of Israel was unique: Greece retained far
more of the lower ancient ideas, but gave to them a beauty of grace and
form which is found among no other race.

If this view be admitted for the moment, and for the argument's sake, we
may ask how it applies to the myths of Apollo. Among the ideas which
even now prevail among the backward peoples still in the neolithic stage
of culture, we may select a few conceptions. There is the conception of
a great primal anthropomorphic Being, who was in the beginning, or, at
least, about whose beginning legend is silent. He made all things, he
existed on earth (in some cases), teaching men the arts of life and rules
of conduct, social and moral. In those instances he retired from earth,
and now dwells on high, still concerned with the behaviour of the tribes.

This is a lofty conception, but it is entangled with a different set of
legends. This primal Being is mixed up with strange persons of a race
earlier than man, half human, half bestial. Many things, in some cases
almost all things, are mythically regarded, not as created, but as the
results of adventures and metamorphoses among the members of this
original race. Now in New Zealand, Polynesia, Greece, and elsewhere, but
not, to my knowledge, in the very most backward peoples, the place of
this original race, "Old, old Ones," is filled by great natural objects,
Earth, Sky, Sea, Forests, regarded as beings of human parts and passions.

The present universe is mythically arranged in regard to their early
adventures: the separation of sky and earth, and so forth. Where this
belief prevails we find little or no trace of the primal maker and
master, though we do find strange early metaphysics of curiously abstract
quality (Maoris, Zunis, Polynesians). As far as our knowledge goes,
Greek mythology springs partly from this stratum of barbaric