meet with a writer who
can treat of primitive religious ideas without losing his head over
allegory and symbolism, and who duly realizes the fact that a savage
is not a rabbinical commentator, or a cabalist, or a Rosicrucian, but
a plain man who draws conclusions like ourselves, though with feeble
intelligence and scanty knowledge. The mystic allegory with which such
modern writers as Lord Bacon have invested the myths of antiquity is
no part of their original clothing, but is rather the late product of
a style of reasoning from analogy quite similar to that which we
shall perceive to have guided the myth-makers in their primitive
constructions. The myths and customs and beliefs which, in an advanced
stage of culture, seem meaningless save when characterized by
some quaintly wrought device of symbolic explanation, did not seem
meaningless in the lower culture which gave birth to them. Myths, like
words, survive their primitive meanings. In the early stage the myth is
part and parcel of the current mode of philosophizing; the explanation
which it offers is, for the time, the natural one, the one which would
most readily occur to any one thinking on the theme with which the myth
is concerned. But by and by the mode of philosophizing has changed;
explanations which formerly seemed quite obvious no longer occur to any
one, but the myth has acquired an independent substantive existence, and
continues to be handed down from parents to children as something true,
though no one can tell why it is true: Lastly, the myth itself
gradually fades from remembrance, often leaving behind it some utterly
unintelligible custom or seemingly absurd superstitious notion. For
example,--to recur to an illustration already cited in a previous
paper,--it is still believed here and there by some venerable granny
that it is wicked to kill robins; but he who should attribute the belief
to the old granny's refined sympathy with all sentient existence, would
be making one of the blunders which are always committed by those
who reason a priori about historical matters without following the
historical method. At an earlier date the superstition existed in the
shape of a belief that the killing of a robin portends some calamity;
in a still earlier form the calamity is specified as death; and again,
still earlier, as death by lightning. Another step backward reveals that
the dread sanctity of the robin is owing to the fact that he is the bird
of Thor, th