Folklore as an Historical ScienceGomme, George Laurence
History
Folklore as an Historical Science
Gomme, George Laurence
Folklore
These points illustrate the unsatisfactory attitude of science and
religion to myth. There is still to notice the unsatisfactory
attitude of the folklorist. Wrong interpretation of special classes of
myth is, of course, to be anticipated in the commencement of a great
study such as folklore; but there are also wrong interpretations of
the fundamental basis of myth. Thus even Mr. Frazer, with all his vast
research into savage thought and action, doubts the possession of good
logical faculty by mankind. If mankind, he says, had always been
logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and
crime.[191] But surely we cannot doubt man's logical powers. They have
been too strong for his facts. He has applied mercilessly all the
powers of his logical faculties upon isolated observations of
phenomena, and it is this limited application which has produced the
folly and crime. I venture to think that civilised man shares with the
savage of to-day, and with the primitive ancestors of all mankind, the
charge of applying perfectly good logic to an insufficiency of facts,
and producing therefrom fresh chapters of folly and crime.
If myth is correctly defined as primitive science, as I have ventured
to suggest, it is important to know how it assumes a place among the
traditions of a people. Primitive science was also primitive belief.
If it accounted for the origin of mankind, of the sun, moon, and
stars, of the earth and the trees, it accounted for them as creations
of a higher power than man, or, at all events, of a great and
specially endowed man, and higher powers than man were of the unknown
realm. The unknown was the awful. Primitive science and primitive
belief were therefore on one and the same plane.[192] They were
subjects to be treated with reverence and with awe. The story into
which the myth was so frequently woven is not a story to those who
believe in the truth of the myth. It assumes the personal shape,
because the personal is the only machinery by which primitive man is
capable of expressing himself. It was held only by tradition, because
tradition was the only means of transmitting it, and it was of a
sacred character, because sacred things and beliefs were the only
forces which influenced primitive thought. When it was repeated to new
generations of learners, it was not a case of story-telling--it was a
matter of the profoundest importance. Everywhere among the lowest
savagery we find the secrets of the group kept from all but the
initiated, and these secrets are the traditions which have become
sacred, traditions expressed sometimes in ceremonial, sometimes in
rites, sometimes in narratives. Thus the mythological and religious
knowledge of the Bushmen is imparted in dances, and when a man is
ignorant of some myth, he will say, "I do not dance that dance,"
meaning that he does not belong to the group which preserves that
particular sacred chapter.[193] The Ashantees have an interesting
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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