Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of AssyriaRagozin, Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna)
History
Chaldea: From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria
Ragozin, Zénaïde A. (Zénaïde Alexeïevna)
Babylonia -- History
1. In speaking of ancient nations, the words "Religion" and "Mythology"
are generally used indiscriminately and convertibly. Yet the conceptions
they express are essentially and radically different. The broadest
difference, and the one from which all others flow, is that the
one--Religion--is a thing of the feelings, while the other--Mythology--is
a thing of the imagination. In other words, Religion comes from
WITHIN--from that consciousness of limited power, that inborn need of
superior help and guidance, forbearance and forgiveness, from that
longing for absolute goodness and perfection, which make up the
distinctively human attribute of "religiosity," that attribute which,
together with the faculty of articulate speech, sets Man apart from and
above all the rest of animated creation. (See p. 149.) Mythology, on the
other hand, comes wholly from WITHOUT. It embodies impressions received
by the senses from the outer world and transformed by the poetical
faculty into images and stories. (See definition of "Myth" on p. 294.)
Professor Max Mueller of Oxford has been the first, in his standard work
"The Science of Language," clearly to define this radical difference
between the two conceptions, which he has never since ceased to sound as
a keynote through the long series of his works devoted to the study of
the religions and mythologies of various nations. A few illustrations
from the one nation with which we have as yet become familiar will help
once for all to establish a thorough understanding on this point, most
essential as it is to the comprehension of the workings of the human mind
and soul throughout the long roll of struggles, errors and triumphs,
achievements and failures which we call the history of mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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