Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)Lang, Andrew
Religion
Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Lang, Andrew
Myth; Mythology; Religion; Rites and ceremonies
These studies ought to be comparative, otherwise they are worthless. As
Mr. Hartland calls Daramulun "an eternal Creator with a game leg" who
"died," he may call Zeus an "eternal father, who swallowed his wife,
lay with his mother and sister, made love as a swan, and died, nay, was
buried, in Crete". I do not think that Mr. Hartland would call Zeus "a
ghost-god" (my own phrase), or think that he was scoring a point against
me, if I spoke of the sacred and ethical characteristics of the Zeus
adored by Eumaeus in the Odyssey. He would not be so humorous about
Zeus, nor fall into an ignoratio elenchi. For my point never was
that any Australian tribe had a pure theistic conception unsoiled and
unobliterated by myth and buffoonery. My argument was that AMONG
their ideas is that of a superhuman being, unceasing (if I may not say
eternal), a maker (if I may not say a Creator), a guardian of certain
by no means despicable ethics, which I never proclaimed as supernormally
inspired! It is no reply to me to say that, in or out of Mysteries, low
fables about that being are told, and buffooneries are enacted. For,
though I say that certain high ideas are taught in Mysteries, I do not
think I say that in Mysteries no low myths are told.
I take this opportunity, as the earliest, to apologise for an error in
my Making of Religion concerning a passage in the Primitive Culture of
my friend Mr. E. B. Tylor. Mr. Tylor quoted(1) a passage from Captain
John Smith's History of Virginia, as given in Pinkerton, xiii. pp.
13-39, 1632. In this passage no mention occurs of a Virginian deity
named Ahone but "Okee," another and more truculent god, is named. I
observed that, if Mr. Tylor had used Strachey's Historie of Travaile
(1612), he would have found "a slightly varying copy" of Smith's text of
1632, with Ahone as superior to Okee. I added in a note (p. 253): "There
is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including Smith's remarks
published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this work with his own MS.
in the British Museum." Here, as presently will be shown, I erred, in
company with Strachey's editor of 1849, and with the writer on Strachey
in the Dictionary of National Biography. What Mr. Tylor quoted from an
edition of Smith in 1632 had already appeared, in 1612, in a book
(Map of Virginia, with a description of the Countrey) described on the
title-page as "written by Captain Smith," though, in my opinion, Smith
may have had a collaborator. There is no evidence whatever that Strachey
had anything to do with this book of 1612, in which there is no mention
of Ahone. Mr. Arber dates Strachey's own MS. (in which Ahone occurs) as
of 1610-1615.(2) I myself, for reasons presently to be alleged, date
the MS. mainly in 1611-1612. If Mr. Arber and I are right, Strachey must
have had access to Smith's MS. before it was published in 1612, and we
shall see how he used it. My point here is that Strachey mentioned Ahone
(in MS.) before Smith's book of 1612 was published.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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