Modern Mythology

Modern Mythology

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Modern Mythology, by Andrew Lang
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Title: Modern Mythology
Author: Andrew Lang
Release Date: January 3, 2005 [eBook #14576]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN
MYTHOLOGY***

Transcribed from the 1897 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

MODERN MYTHOLOGY
DEDICATION
Dedicated to the memory of John Fergus McLennan.

INTRODUCTION
It may well be doubted whether works of controversy serve any useful
purpose. 'On an opponent,' as Mr. Matthew Arnold said, 'one never
does make any impression,' though one may hope that controversy
sometimes illuminates a topic in the eyes of impartial readers. The
pages which follow cannot but seem wandering and desultory, for they
are a reply to a book, Mr. Max Muller's Contributions to the Science of

Mythology, in which the attack is of a skirmishing character.
Throughout more than eight hundred pages the learned author keeps up
an irregular fire at the ideas and methods of the anthropological school
of mythologists. The reply must follow the lines of attack.
Criticism cannot dictate to an author how he shall write his own book.
Yet anthropologists and folk-lorists, 'agriologists' and 'Hottentotic'
students, must regret that Mr. Max Muller did not state their general
theory, as he understands it, fully and once for all. Adversaries rarely
succeed in quite understanding each other; but had Mr. Max Muller
made such a statement, we could have cleared up anything in our
position which might seem to him obscure.
Our system is but one aspect of the theory of evolution, or is but the
application of that theory to the topic of mythology. The archaeologist
studies human life in its material remains; he tracks progress (and
occasional degeneration) from the rudely chipped flints in the ancient
gravel beds, to the polished stone weapon, and thence to the ages of
bronze and iron. He is guided by material 'survivals'--ancient arms,
implements, and ornaments. The student of Institutions has a similar
method. He finds his relics of the uncivilised past in agricultural usages,
in archaic methods of allotment of land, in odd marriage customs,
things rudimentary--fossil relics, as it were, of an early social and
political condition. The archaeologist and the student of Institutions
compare these relics, material or customary, with the weapons, pottery,
implements, or again with the habitual law and usage of existing savage
or barbaric races, and demonstrate that our weapons and tools, and our
laws and manners, have been slowly evolved out of lower conditions,
even out of savage conditions.
The anthropological method in mythology is the same. In civilised
religion and myth we find rudimentary survivals, fossils of rite and
creed, ideas absolutely incongruous with the environing morality,
philosophy, and science of Greece and India. Parallels to these things,
so out of keeping with civilisation, we recognise in the creeds and rites
of the lower races, even of cannibals; but there the creeds and rites are
not incongruous with their environment of knowledge and culture.
There they are as natural and inevitable as the flint-headed spear or
marriage by capture. We argue, therefore, that religions and mythical
faiths and rituals which, among Greeks and Indians, are inexplicably

incongruous have lived on from an age in which they were natural and
inevitable, an age of savagery.
That is our general position, and it would have been a benefit to us if
Mr. Max Muller had stated it in his own luminous way, if he wished to
oppose us, and had shown us where and how it fails to meet the
requirements of scientific method. In place of doing this once for all, he
often assails our evidence, yet never notices the defences of our
evidence, which our school has been offering for over a hundred years.
He attacks the excesses of which some sweet anthropological
enthusiasts have been guilty or may be guilty, such as seeing totems
wherever they find beasts in ancient religion, myth, or art. He asks for
definitions (as of totemism), but never, I think, alludes to the
authoritative definitions by Mr. McLennan and Mr. Frazer. He assails
the theory of fetishism as if it stood now where De Brosses left it in a
purely pioneer work--or, rather, where he understands De Brosses to
have left it. One might as well attack the atomic theory where Lucretius
left it, or the theory of evolution where it was left by the elder Darwin.
Thus Mr. Max Muller really never conies to grips with his opponents,
and his