Myth, Ritual, and Religion, vol 1 | Page 4

Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus, Hurons, Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldaeans, Thlinkeets, Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians-- Similarity of ideas pervading all those peoples in various conditions of society and culture.
CHAPTER VII.
-- INDO-ARYAN MYTHS--SOURCES OF EVIDENCE.
Authorities--Vedas--Brahmanas--Social condition of Vedic India-- Arts--Ranks--War--Vedic fetishism--Ancestor worship--Date of Rig- Veda Hymns doubtful--Obscurity of the Hymns--Difficulty of interpreting the real character of Veda--Not primitive but sacerdotal--The moral purity not innocence but refinement.
CHAPTER VIII.
-- INDIAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
Comparison of Vedic and savage myths--The metaphysical Vedic account of the beginning of things--Opposite and savage fable of world made out of fragments of a man--Discussion of this hymn-- Absurdities of Brahmanas--Prajapati, a Vedic Unkulunkulu or Qat-- Evolutionary myths--Marriage of heaven and earth--Myths of Puranas, their savage parallels--Most savage myths are repeated in Brahmanas.
CHAPTER IX.
-- GREEK MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND MAN.
The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer-- Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features--The hypothesis that many of these are savage survivals--Are there other examples of such survival in Greek life and institutions?--Greek opinion was constant that the race had been savage--Illustrations of savage survival from Greek law of homicide, from magic, religion, human sacrifice, religious art, traces of totemism, and from the mysteries--Conclusion: that savage survival may also be expected in Greek myths.
CHAPTER X.
-- GREEK COSMOGONIC MYTHS.
Nature of the evidence--Traditions of origin of the world and man-- Homeric, Hesiodic and Orphic myths--Later evidence of historians, dramatists, commentators--The Homeric story comparatively pure--The story in Hesiod, and its savage analogues--The explanations of the myth of Cronus, modern and ancient--The Orphic cosmogony--Phanes and Prajapati--Greek myths of the origin of man--Their savage analogues.
CHAPTER XI.
-- SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS.
The origin of a belief in GOD beyond the ken of history and of speculation--Sketch of conjectural theories--Two elements in all beliefs, whether of backward or civilised races--The Mythical and the Religious--These may be coeval, or either may be older than the other--Difficulty of study--The current anthropological theory-- Stated objections to the theory--Gods and spirits--Suggestion that savage religion is borrowed from Europeans--Reply to Mr. Tylor's arguments on this head--The morality of savages.

PREFACE TO NEW IMPRESSION.
When this book first appeared (1886), the philological school of interpretation of religion and myth, being then still powerful in England, was criticised and opposed by the author. In Science, as on the Turkish throne of old, "Amurath to Amurath succeeds"; the philological theories of religion and myth have now yielded to anthropological methods. The centre of the anthropological position was the "ghost theory" of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the "Animistic" theory of Mr. E. R. Tylor, according to whom the propitiation of ancestral and other spirits leads to polytheism, and thence to monotheism. In the second edition (1901) of this work the author argued that the belief in a "relatively supreme being," anthropomorphic was as old as, and might be even older, than animistic religion. This theory he exhibited at greater length, and with a larger collection of evidence, in his Making of Religion.
Since 1901, a great deal of fresh testimony as to what Mr. Howitt styles the "All Father" in savage and barbaric religions has accrued. As regards this being in Africa, the reader may consult the volumes of the New Series of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, which are full of African evidence, not, as yet, discussed, to my knowledge, by any writer on the History of Religion. As late as Man, for July, 1906, No. 66, Mr. Parkinson published interesting Yoruba legends about Oleron, the maker and father of men, and Oro, the Master of the Bull Roarer.
From Australia, we have Mr. Howitt's account of the All Father in his Native Tribes of South-East Australia, with the account of the All Father of the Central Australian tribe, the Kaitish, in North Central Tribes of Australia, by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (1904), also The Euahlayi Tribe, by Mrs. Langley Parker (1906). These masterly books are indispensable to all students of the subject, while, in Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's work cited, and in their earlier Native Tribes of Central Australia, we are introduced to savages who offer an elaborate animistic theory, and are said to show no traces of the All Father belief.
The books of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen also present much evidence as to a previously unknown form of totemism, in which the totem is not hereditary, and does not regulate marriage. This prevails among the Arunta "nation," and the Kaitish tribe. In the opinion of Mr. Spencer (Report Australian Association for Advancement of Science, 1904) and of Mr. J. G. Frazer (Fortnightly Review, September, 1905), this is the earliest surviving form of totemism, and Mr. Frazer suggests an animistic origin for the institution. I have criticised these views in The Secret of the Totem (1905), and proposed a different solution of the