Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
This is a long text for our remarks on Hottentot mythology; but it is
necessary to prove that there are not two schools only of mythologists:
that there are inquirers who neither follow the path of the Abbe Banier,
nor of the philologists, but a third way, unknown to, or ignored by Mr.
Muller. We certainly were quite unaware that Banier and Euhemeros were
very specially concerned, as Mr. Muller thinks, with savage mythology;
but it is by aid of savage myths that the school unknown to Mr. Muller
examines the myths of civilised peoples like the Greeks. The disciples
of Mr. Muller interpret all the absurdities of Greek myth, the gods who
are beasts on occasion, the stars who were men, the men who become
serpents or deer, the deities who are cannibals and parricides and
adulterers, as the result of the influence of Aryan speech upon Aryan
thought. Men, in Mr. Muller's opinion, had originally pure ideas about
the gods, and expressed them in language which we should call figurative.
The figures remained, when their meaning was lost; the names were then
supposed to be gods, the nomina became numina, and out of the
inextricable confusion of thought which followed, the belief in cannibal,
bestial, adulterous, and incestuous gods was evolved. That is Mr.
Muller's hypothesis; with him the evolution, a result of a disease of
language, has been from early comparative purity to later religious
abominations. Opposed to him is what may be called the school of Mr.
Herbert Spencer: the modern Euhemerism, which recognises an element of
historical truth in myths, as if the characters had been real characters,
and which, in most gods, beholds ancestral ghosts raised to a higher
power.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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