The Homeric Hymns | Page 6

report from
America beliefs absolutely parallel in many ways to the creeds now
reported from Australia. Among these notions are "ideas of moral
judgment and retribution after death," which in Australia Mr. Tylor
marks as "imported." {23b} In my opinion the certainty that the beliefs
in America were not imported, is another strong argument for their
native character, when they are found with such striking resemblances
among the very undeveloped savages of Australia.
Savages, Mr. Hartland says in a censure of my theory, are "guiltless" of
Christian teaching. {24} If Mr. Hartland is right, Mr. Tylor is wrong;
the ideas, whatever else they are, are unimported, yet, teste Mr. Tylor,
the ideas are comparable with those of the black man's white
supplanters. I would scarcely go so far. If we take, however, the best
ideas attributed to the blacks, and hold them disengaged from the
accretion of puerile fables with which they are overrun, then there are
discovered notions of high religious value, undeniably analogous to
some Christian dogmas. But the sanction of the Australian gods is as
powerfully lent to silly, or cruel, or needless ritual, as to some moral
ideas of weight and merit. In brief, as far as I am able to see, all sorts of
ideas, the lowest and the highest, are held at once confusedly by
savages, and the same confusion survives in ancient Greek belief. As
far back as we can trace him, man had a wealth of religious and
mythical conceptions to choose from, and different peoples, as they
advanced in civilisation, gave special prominence to different elements
in the primal stock of beliefs. The choice of Israel was unique: Greece
retained far more of the lower ancient ideas, but gave to them a beauty
of grace and form which is found among no other race.
If this view be admitted for the moment, and for the argument's sake,
we may ask how it applies to the myths of Apollo. Among the ideas
which even now prevail among the backward peoples still in the

neolithic stage of culture, we may select a few conceptions. There is the
conception of a great primal anthropomorphic Being, who was in the
beginning, or, at least, about whose beginning legend is silent. He made
all things, he existed on earth (in some cases), teaching men the arts of
life and rules of conduct, social and moral. In those instances he retired
from earth, and now dwells on high, still concerned with the behaviour
of the tribes.
This is a lofty conception, but it is entangled with a different set of
legends. This primal Being is mixed up with strange persons of a race
earlier than man, half human, half bestial. Many things, in some cases
almost all things, are mythically regarded, not as created, but as the
results of adventures and metamorphoses among the members of this
original race. Now in New Zealand, Polynesia, Greece, and elsewhere,
but not, to my knowledge, in the very most backward peoples, the place
of this original race, "Old, old Ones," is filled by great natural objects,
Earth, Sky, Sea, Forests, regarded as beings of human parts and
passions.
The present universe is mythically arranged in regard to their early
adventures: the separation of sky and earth, and so forth. Where this
belief prevails we find little or no trace of the primal maker and master,
though we do find strange early metaphysics of curiously abstract
quality (Maoris, Zunis, Polynesians). As far as our knowledge goes,
Greek mythology springs partly from this stratum of barbaric as
opposed to strictly savage thought. Ouranos and Gaea, Cronos, and the
Titans represent the primal beings who have their counterpart in Maori
and Wintu legend. But these, in the Greece of the Epics and Hesiod,
have long been subordinated to Zeus and the Olympians, who are
envisaged as triumphant gods of a younger generation. There is no
Creator; but Zeus--how, we do not know--has come to be regarded as a
Being relatively Supreme, and as, on occasion, the guardian of morality.
Of course his conduct, in myth, is represented as a constant violation of
the very rules of life which he expects mankind to observe. I am
disposed to look on this essential contradiction as the result of a series
of mythical accretions on an original conception of Zeus in his higher
capacity. We can see how the accretions arose. Man never lived

consistently on the level of his best original ideas: savages also have
endless myths of Baiame or Daramulun, or Bunjil, in which these
personages, though interested in human behaviour, are puerile, cruel,
absurd, lustful, and so on. Man will sport thus with his noblest
intuitions.
In the same way, in Christian Europe, we may contrast Dunbar's pious
"Ballat of Our Lady" with his "Kynd