a porpoise, the Kurnai
have borrowed from our Hymn of the Dolphin Apollo. It is absurd to
maintain that the Son of the God, the go-between of God and men, in
savage theology, is borrowed from missionaries, while this being has so
much more in common with Apollo (from whom he cannot conceivably be
borrowed) than with Christ. The Tundun-porpoise story seems to have
arisen in gratitude to the porpoise, which drives fishes inshore, for the
natives to catch. Neither Tharamulun nor Hobamoc (Australian and
American Gods of healing and soothsaying), who appear to men as serpents,
are borrowed from Asclepius, or from the Python of Apollo. The processes
have been quite different, and in Apollo, the oracular son of Zeus, who
declares his counsel to men, I am apt to see a beautiful Greek
modification of the type of the mediating Son of the primal Being of
savage belief, adorned with many of the attributes of the Sun God, from
whom, however, he is fundamentally distinct. Apollo, I think, is an
adorned survival of the Son of the God of savage theology. He was not,
at first, a Nature God, solar or not. This opinion, if it seems valid,
helps to account, in part, for the animal metamorphoses of Apollo, a
survival from the mental confusion of savagery. Such a confusion, in
Greece, makes it necessary for the wise son of Zeus to seek information,
as in the Hymn to Hermes, from an old clown. This medley of ideas, in
the mind of a civilised poet, who believes that Apollo is all-knowing in
the counsels of eternity, is as truly mythological as Dunbar's God who
laughs his heart sore at an ale-house jest. Dunbar, and the author of
the Hymn, and the savage with his tale of Tundun or Daramulun, have all
quite contradictory sets of ideas alternately present to their minds; the
mediaeval poet, of course, being conscious of the contradiction, which
makes the essence of his humour, such as it is. To Greece, in its
loftier moods, Apollo was, despite his myth, a noble source of
inspiration, of art, and of conduct. But the contradiction in the low
myth and high doctrine of Apollo, could never be eradicated under any
influence less potent than that of Christianity. {34} If this theory of
Apollo's origin be correct, many pages of learned works on Mythology need
to be rewritten.

THE HYMN TO HERMES

[Hermes with the boy Dionysos. Statue by Praxiteles, found at Olympia:
lang35.jpg]

The Hymn to Hermes is remarkable for the corruption