(1) Odyssey, vi. 102.

(2) (Greek word omitted); compare Harpokration on this word.

(3) These are the features in myth which provoke, for example, the
wonder of Emeric-David. "The lizard, the wolf, the dog, the ass,
the frog, and all the other brutes so common on religious monuments
everywhere, do they not all imply a THOUGHT which we must divine?" He
concludes that these animals, plants, and monsters of myths are so many
"enigmas" and "symbols" veiling some deep, sacred idea, allegories of
some esoteric religious creed. Jupiter, Paris, 1832, p. lxxvii.

We have offered examples--Savage, Indian, and Greek--of that element in
mythology which, as all civilised races have felt, demands explanation.

To be still more explicit, we may draw up a brief list of the chief
problems in the legendary stories attached to the old religions of the
world--the problems which it is our special purpose to notice. First we
have, in the myths of all races, the most grotesque conceptions of the
character of gods when mythically envisaged. Beings who, in religion,
leave little to be desired, and are spoken of as holy, immortal,
omniscient, and kindly, are, in myth, represented as fashioned in the
likeness not only of man, but of the beasts; as subject to death, as
ignorant and impious.

Most pre-Christian religions had their "zoomorphic" or partially
zoomorphic idols, gods in the shape of the lower animals, or with the
heads and necks of the lower animals. In the same way all mythologies
represent the gods as fond of appearing in animal forms. Under these
disguises they conduct many amours, even with the daughters of men, and
Greek houses were proud of their descent from Zeus in the shape of an
eagle or ant, a serpent or a swan; while Cronus and the Vedic Tvashtri
and Poseidon made love as horses, and Apollo as a dog. Not less wild
are the legends about the births of gods from the thigh, or the head,
or feet, or armpits of some parent; while tales describing and pictures
representing unspeakable divine obscenities were frequent in the
mythology and in the temples of Greece. Once more, the gods were said
to possess and exercise the power of turning men and women into birds,
beasts, fishes, trees, and stones, so that there was scarcely a familiar
natural object in the Greek world which had not once (according to
legend) been a man or a woman. The myths of the origin of the world and
man, again, were in the last degree childish and d