Modern Mythology : Large Print

The ugly scars were the problem! A civilised fancy is not puzzled for a moment by abeautiful beneficent Sun-god, or even by his beholding the daughters of men thatthey are fair.

But a civilised fancy is puzzled when the beautiful Sun-god makes lovein the shape of a dog. {5} To me, and indeed to Mr. Max Muller, the ugly scars werethe problem.He has written-'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of theword, is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.' But heexplained these blots on the mythology of Greece, for example, as the resultpractically of old words and popular sayings surviving in languages after theoriginal, harmless, symbolical meanings of the words and sayings were lost.

Whathad been a poetical remark about an aspect of nature became an obscene, or brutal,or vulgar myth, a stumbling block to Greek piety and to Greek philosophy.To myself, on the other hand, it seemed that the ugly scars were remains of thatkind of taste, fancy, customary law, and incoherent speculation which everywhere,as far as we know, prevails to various degrees in savagery and barbarism.

Attachedto the 'hideous idols,' as Mr. Max Muller calls them, of early Greece, and implicatedin a ritual which religious conservatism dared not abandon, the fables of perhapsneolithic ancestors of the Hellenes remained in the religion and the legends knownto Plato and Socrates.

That this process of 'survival' is a vera causa, illustrated inevery phase of evolution, perhaps nobody denies.Thus the phenomena which the philological school of mythology explains by adisease of language we would explain by survival from a savage state of society andfrom the mental peculiarities observed among savages in all ages and countries.

Ofcourse there is nothing new in this: I was delighted to discover the idea in Eusebiusas in Fontenelle; while, for general application to singular institutions, it was acommonplace of the last century. {6a} Moreover, the idea had been widely used byDr. E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture, and by Mr. McLennan in his Primitive Marriageand essays on Totemism.