acts corresponding to the wilder incidents of myth--are
accepted as ordinary occurrences of everyday life? In the region of
romantic rather than of mythical invention we know that there is such
a state. Mr. 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 Afreet without any more scruple than our
own novelists feel in describing a duel or the concealment of a will.
Among the Arabs the agencies of magic and of spirits are regarded as at
least as probable and common as duels and concealments of wills seem
to be thought by European novelists. 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, and
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 similar adventures, and
the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and all else
that puzzles us in the civilised mythologies, are regarded as possible
incidents of daily human life? Our answer is, that everything in the
civilised mythologies which we regard as irrational seems only part of
the accepted and natural order of things to contemporary savages, and in
the past seemed equally rational and natural to savages concerning whom
we have historical information.(1) Our theory is, therefore, that the
savage and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, a
legacy from the fancy of ancestors of the civilised races who were once
in an intellectual state not higher, but probably lower, than that of
Australians, Bush-men, Red Indians, the lower races of South America,
and other worse than barbaric peoples. As the ancestors of the Greeks,
Aryans of India, Egyptians and others advanced in civilisation, their
religious thought was shocked and surprised by myths (originally dating
from the period of savagery, and natural in that period, though even
then often in contradiction to morals and religion) 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
Brahmanas and Vedas of India,