isgusting. The Bushmen
and Australians have, perhaps, no story of the origin of species quite
so barbarous in style as the anecdotes about Phanes and Prajapati which
are preserved in the Orphic hymns and in the Brahmanas. The conduct
of the earlier dynasties of classical gods towards each other was as
notoriously cruel and loathsome as their behaviour towards mortals was
tricksy and capricious. The classical gods, with all their immortal
might, are, by a mythical contradiction of the religious conception,
regarded as capable of fear and pain, and are led into scrapes as
ludicrous as those of Brer Wolf or Brer Terrapin in the tales of
the Negroes of the Southern States of America. The stars, again,
in mythology, are mixed up with beasts, planets and men in the same
embroglio of fantastic opinion. The dead and the living, men, beasts and
gods, trees and stars, and rivers, and sun, and moon, dance through the
region of myths in a burlesque ballet of Priapus, where everything may
be anything, where nature has no laws and imagination no limits.

Such are the irrational characteristics of myths, classic or Indian,
European or American, African or Asiatic, Australian or Maori. Such
is one element we find all the world over among civilised and savage
people, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. It is no wonder that
pious and reflective men have, in so many ages and in so many ways,
tried to account to themselves for their possession of beliefs closely
connected with religion which yet seemed ruinous to religion and
morality.

The explanations which men have given of their own sacred stories, the
apologies for their own gods which they have been constrained to offer
to themselves, were the earliest babblings of a science of mythology.
That science was, in its dim beginnings, intended to satisfy a moral
need. Man found that his gods, when mythically envisaged, were not made
in his own moral image at its best, but in the image sometimes of the
beasts, sometimes of his own moral nature at its very worst: in the
likeness of robbers, wizards, sorcerers, and adulterers. Now, it
is impossible here to examine minutely all systems of mythological
interpretation. Every key has been tried in this difficult lock; every
cause of confusion has been taken up and tested, deemed adequate, and
finally rejected or assigned a subordinate place. Probably the first
attempts to shake off the burden of religious horror at mythical impiety
were