cluster
around Zeus.

Again, it is notoriously the nature of man to attribute every institution
to a primal inventor or legislator. Men then, find themselves performing
certain rites, often of a buffooning or scandalous character; and, in
origin, mainly magical, intended for the increase of game, edible plants,
or, later, for the benefit of the crops. _Why_ do they perform these
rites? they ask: and, looking about, as usual, for a primal initiator,
they attribute what they do to a primal being, the Corn Spirit, Demeter,
or to Zeus, or to Baiame, or Manabozho, or Punjel. This is man's usual way
of going back to origins. Instantly, then, a new set of parasitic myths
crystallises round a Being who, perhaps, was originally moral. The savage
mind, in short, has not maintained itself on the high level, any more than
the facetious mediaeval myths maintained themselves, say, on the original
level of the conception of the character of St. Peter, the keeper of the
keys of Heaven.

All this appears perfectly natural and human, and in this, and in other
ways, what we call low Myth may have invaded the higher realms of
Religion: a lower invaded a higher element. But reverse the hypothesis.
Conceive that Zeus, or Baiame, was _originally_, not a Father and
guardian, but a lewd and tricky ghost of a medicine-man, a dancer of
indecent dances, a wooer of other men's wives, a shape-shifter, a
burlesque droll, a more jocular bugbear, like Twanyirika. By what means
did he come to be accredited later with his loftiest attributes, and with
regard for the tribal ethics, which, in practice, he daily broke and
despised? Students who argue for the possible priority of the lowest, or,
as I call them, mythical attributes of the Being, must advance an
hypothesis of the concretion of the nobler elements around the original
wanton and mischievous ghost.

Then let us suppose that the Arunta Twanyirika, a confessed bugbear,
discredited by adults, and only invented to keep women and children in
order, was the original germ of the moral and fatherly Baiame, of South
Eastern Australian tribes. How, in that case, did the adults of the tribe
fall into their own trap, come to believe seriously in their invented
bugbear, and credit him with the superintendence of such tribal ethics as
generosity and unselfishness? What were the processes of the conversion of
Twanyirika? I do not deny that this theory may be correct, but I wish to
see an hypothesis of the p