Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
Let us return to the example of the flint arrow-heads. Everywhere
neolithic arrow-heads are pretty much alike. The cause of the
resemblance is no more than this, that men, with the same needs, the
same materials, and the same rude instruments, everywhere produced the
same kind of arrow-head. No hypothesis of interchange of ideas nor of
community of race is needed to explain the resemblance of form in the
missiles. Very early pottery in any region is, for the same causes,
like very early pottery in any other region. The same sort of
similarity was explained by the same resemblances in human nature,
when we touched on the identity of magical practices and of
superstitious beliefs. This method is fairly well established and
orthodox when we deal with usages and superstitious beliefs; but may
we apply the same method when we deal with myths?
Here a difficulty occurs. Mythologists, as a rule, are averse to the
method of folklore. They think it scientific to compare only the myths
of races which speak languages of the same family, and of races which
have, in historic times, been actually in proved contact with each
other. Thus, most mythologists hold it correct to compare Greek,
Slavonic, Celtic, and Indian stories, because Greeks, Slavs, Celts,
and Hindoos all speak languages of the same family. Again, they hold
it correct to compare Chaldæan and Greek myths, because the Greeks and
the Chaldæans were brought into contact through the Phœnicians, and
by other intermediaries, such as the Hittites. But the same
mythologists will vow that it is unscientific to compare a Maori or a
Hottentot or an Eskimo myth with an Aryan story, because Maoris and
Eskimo and Hottentots do not speak languages akin to that of Greece,
nor can we show that the ancestors of Greeks, Maoris, Hottentots, and
Eskimo were ever in contact with each other in historical times.
Now the peculiarity of the method of folklore is that it will venture
to compare (with due caution and due examination of evidence) the
myths of the most widely severed races. Holding that myth is a product
of the early human fancy, working on the most rudimentary knowledge of
the outer world, the student of folklore thinks that differences of
race do not much affect the early mythopœic faculty. He will not be
surprised if Greeks and Australian blacks are in the same tale.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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