The Homeric Hymns | Page 7

Kittok," in which God has his eye
on the soul of an intemperate ale-wife who has crept into Paradise.
"God lukit, and saw her lattin in, and leugh His heart sair." Examples of
this kind of sportive irreverence are common enough; their root is in
human nature: and they could not be absent in the mythology of savage
or of ancient peoples. To Zeus the myths of this kind would come to be
attached in several ways.
As a nature-god of the Heaven he marries the Earth. The tendency of
men being to claim descent from a God, for each family with this claim
a myth of a separate divine amour was needed. Where there had existed
Totemism, or belief in kinship with beasts, the myth of the amour of a
wolf, bull, serpent, swan, and so forth, was attached to the legend of
Zeus. Zeus had been that swan, serpent, wolf, or bull. Once more, ritual
arose, in great part, from the rites of sympathetic magic.
This or that mummery was enacted by men for a magical purpose, to
secure success in the chase, agriculture, or war. When the performers
asked, "Why do we do thus and thus?" the answer was, "Zeus first did
so," or Demeter, or Apollo did so, on a certain occasion. About that
occasion a myth was framed, and finally there was no profligacy,
cruelty, or absurdity of which the God was not guilty. Yet, all the time,
he punished adultery, inhospitality, perjury, incest, cannibalism, and
other excesses, of which, in legend, he was always setting the example.
We know from Xenophanes, Plato, and St. Augustine how men's
consciences were tormented by this unceasing contradiction: this
overgrowth of myth on the stock of an idea originally noble. It is thus
that I would attempt to account for the contradictory conceptions of
Zeus, for example.
As to Apollo, I do not think that mythologists determined to find, in

Apollo, some deified aspect of Nature, have laid stress enough on his
counterparts in savage myth. We constantly find, in America, in the
Andaman Isles, and in Australia, that, subordinate to the primal Being,
there exists another who enters into much closer relations with mankind.
He is often concerned with healing and with prophecy, or with the
inspiration of conjurers or shamans. Sometimes he is merely an
underling, as in the case of the Massachusetts Kiehtan, and his more
familiar subordinate, Hobamoc. {30} But frequently this go-between of
God and Man is (like Apollo) the Son of the primal Being (often an
unbegotten Son) or his Messenger (Andaman, Noongaburrah, Kurnai,
Kamilaroi, and other Australian tribes). He reports to the somewhat
otiose primal Being about men's conduct, and he sometimes
superintends the Mysteries. I am disposed to regard the prophetic and
oracular Apollo (who, as the Hymn to Hermes tells us, alone knows the
will of Father Zeus) as the Greek modification of this personage in
savage theology. Where this Son is found in Australia, I by no means
regard him as a savage refraction from Christian teaching about a
mediator, for Christian teaching, in fact, has not been accepted, least of
all by the highly conservative sorcerers, or shamans, or wirreenuns of
the tribes. European observers, of course, have been struck by (and
have probably exaggerated in some instances) the Christian analogy.
But if they had been as well acquainted with ancient Greek as with
Christian theology they would have remarked that the Andaman,
American, and Australian "mediators" are infinitely more akin to
Apollo, in his relations with Zeus and with men, than to any Person
about whom missionaries can preach. But the most devoted believer in
borrowing will not say that, when the Australian mediator, Tundun, son
of Mungun-gnaur, turns into a porpoise, the Kurnai have borrowed
from our Hymn of the Dolphin Apollo. It is absurd to maintain that the
Son of the God, the go-between of God and men, in savage theology, is
borrowed from missionaries, while this being has so much more in
common with Apollo (from whom he cannot conceivably be borrowed)
than with Christ. The Tundun-porpoise story seems to have arisen in
gratitude to the porpoise, which drives fishes inshore, for the natives to
catch. Neither Tharamulun nor Hobamoc (Australian and American
Gods of healing and soothsaying), who appear to men as serpents, are
borrowed from Asclepius, or from the Python of Apollo. The processes

have been quite different, and in Apollo, the oracular son of Zeus, who
declares his counsel to men, I am apt to see a beautiful Greek
modification of the type of the mediating Son of the primal Being of
savage belief, adorned with many of the attributes of the Sun God, from
whom, however, he is fundamentally distinct. Apollo, I think, is an
adorned survival of the Son of