sted, that state of
mind may be provisionally considered as the fount and ORIGIN of the
myths which have always perplexed men in a reasonable modern mental
condition. Again, if it can be shown that this mental stage was one
through which all civilised races have passed, the universality of the
mythopoeic mental condition will to some extent explain the universal
DIFFUSION of the stories.

Now, in all mythologies, whether savage or civilised, and in all
religions where myths intrude, there exist two factors--the factor
which we now regard as rational, and that which we moderns regard as
irrational. The former element needs little explanation; the latter
has demanded explanation ever since human thought became comparatively
instructed and abstract.

To take an example; even in the myths of savages there is much that
still seems rational and transparent. If savages tell us that some wise
being taught them all the simple arts of life, the use of fire, of the
bow and arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we understand them
at once. Nothing can be more natural than that man should believe in an
original inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the imaginary
discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. So far all is plain
sailing. But when the savage goes on to say that he who taught the use
of fire or who gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit or a crow, or a
dog, or a beaver, or a spider, then we are at once face to face with the
element in myths which seems to us IRRATIONAL. Again, among civilised
peoples we read of the pure all-seeing Varuna in the Vedas, to whom
sin is an offence. We read of Indra, the Lord of Thunder, borne in his
chariot, the giver of victory, the giver of wealth to the pious; here
once more all seems natural and plain. The notion of a deity who guides
the whirlwind and directs the storm, a god of battles, a god who blesses
righteousness, is familiar to us and intelligible; but when we read how
Indra drank himself drunk and committed adulteries with Asura women, and
got himself born from the same womb as a bull, and changed himself into
a quail or a ram, and suffered from the most abject physical terror, and
so forth, then we are among myths no longer readily intelligible; here,
we feel, are IRRATIONAL stories, of which the original ideas, in their
natural sense, can hardly have been conceived by men in a pure and
rational early civilisation. Again, in the religions of even the
lowest