Custom and Myth | Page 9

needs out of the same material. In the case of the
arrow-heads, the need was for something hard, heavy, and sharp--the
material was flint. In the case of the myths, the need was to explain
certain phenomena--the material (so to speak) was an early state of the
human mind, to which all objects seemed equally endowed with human
personality, and to which no metamorphosis appeared impossible.
In the following essays, then, the myths and customs of various peoples
will be compared, even when these peoples talk languages of alien
families, and have never (as far as history shows us) been in actual
contact. Our method throughout will be to place the usage, or myth,
which is unintelligible when found among a civilised race, beside the
similar myth which is intelligible enough when it is found among
savages. A mean term will be found in the folklore preserved by the
non-progressive classes in a progressive people. This folklore
represents, in the midst of a civilised race, the savage ideas out of
which civilisation has been evolved. The conclusion will usually be
that the fact which puzzles us by its presence in civilisation is a relic
surviving from the time when the ancestors of a civilised race were in
the state of savagery. By this method it is not necessary that 'some sort
of genealogy should be established' between the Australian and the
Greek narrators of a similar myth, nor between the Greek and
Australian possessors of a similar usage. The hypothesis will be that the
myth, or usage, is common to both races, not because of original
community of stock, not because of contact and borrowing, but because
the ancestors of the Greeks passed through the savage intellectual
condition in which we find the Australians.
The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth?
Do peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other? The
answer is, that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth,
if it be race which confers on a people its national genius, and its
capacity of becoming civilised. If race does this, then race affects, in
the most powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one
is likely to confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor
either with a myth from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the

substance, the original set of ideas, may be much the same. In all three
you have anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal shapes,
tricky, capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed with
magical powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda, of
any of the Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much
above the gods of savage mythology. This stuff of myth is quod semper,
quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, and is the original gift of the savage
intellect. But the final treatment, the ultimate literary form of the myth,
varies in each race. Homeric gods, like Red Indian, Thlinkeet, or
Australian gods, can assume the shapes of birds. But when we read, in
Homer, of the arming of Athene, the hunting of Artemis, the vision of
golden Aphrodite, the apparition of Hermes, like a young man when
the flower of youth is loveliest, then we recognise the effect of race
upon myth, the effect of the Greek genius at work on rude material.
Between the Olympians and a Thlinkeet god there is all the difference
that exists between the Demeter of Cnidos and an image from Easter
Island. Again, the Scandinavian gods, when their tricks are laid aside,
when Odin is neither assuming the shape of worm nor of raven, have a
martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of their own. Race comes out in
that, as it does in the endless sacrifices, soma drinking, magical
austerities, and puerile follies of Vedic and Brahmanic gods, the deities
of a people fallen early into its sacerdotage and priestly second
childhood. Thus race declares itself in the ultimate literary form and
character of mythology, while the common savage basis and stuff of
myths may be clearly discerned in the horned, and cannibal, and
shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of Greece, of India, of the North.
They all show their common savage origin, when the poet neglects
Freya's command and tells of what the gods did 'in the morning of
Time.'
As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there
must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples,
the traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing
alien women into the families--all these things favoured the migration
of myth. But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it, we
can seldom trace a popular legend on its travels.