o
heed their admonitions. They had never heard that the robin was the bird
of Thor; they merely rehearsed the remnant of the superstition which
had survived to their own times, while the essential part of it had long
since faded from recollection. The reason for regarding a robin's
life as more sacred than a partridge's had been forgotten; but it left
behind, as was natural, a vague recognition of that mythical sanctity.
The primitive meaning of a myth fades away as inevitably as the
primitive meaning of a word or phrase; and the rabbins who told of a
worm which shatters rocks no more thought of the writhing thunderbolts
than the modern reader thinks of oyster-shells when he sees the word
ostracism, or consciously breathes a prayer as he writes the phrase good
bye. It is only in its callow infancy that the full force of a myth is
felt, and its period of luxuriant development dates from the time when
its physical significance is lost or obscured. It was because the Greek
had forgotten that Zeus meant the bright sky, that he could make him
king over an anthropomorphic Olympos. The Hindu Dyaus, who carried his
significance in his name as plainly as the Greek Helios, never attained
such an exalted position; he yielded to deities of less obvious
pedigree, such as Brahma and Vishnu.

Since, therefore, the myth-tellers recounted merely the wonderful
stories which their own nurses and grandmas had told them, and had no
intention of weaving subtle allegories or wrapping up a physical
truth in mystic emblems, it follows that they were not bound to
avoid incongruities or to preserve a philosophical symmetry in their
narratives. In the great majority of complex myths, no such symmetry is
to be found. A score of different mythical conceptions would get wrought
into the same story, and the attempt to pull them apart and construct a
single harmonious system of conceptions out of the pieces must often end
in ingenious absurdity. If Odysseus is unquestionably the sun, so is the
eye of Polyphemos, which Odysseus puts out. [42] But the Greek poet knew
nothing of the incongruity, for he was thinking only of a superhuman
hero freeing himself from a giant cannibal; he knew nothing of Sanskrit,
or of comparative mythology, and the sources of his myths were as
completely hidden from his view as the sources of the Nile.

We need not be surprised, then, to find that in one version of the
schamir-myth the cloud is the bird which carries the worm