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

Californian, Brazilian, Maori,
Samoan--Moon myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican, Zulu, Macassar,
Greenland, Piute, Malay--Thunder myths--Greek and Aryan sun and
moon myths--Star myths--Myths, savage and civilised, of animals,
accounting for their marks and habits--Examples of custom of claiming
blood kinship with lower animals--Myths of various plants and
trees--Myths of stones, and of metamorphosis into stones, Greek,
Australian and American--The whole natural philosophy of savages
expressed in myths, and survives in folk-lore and classical poetry; and
legends of metamorphosis.
CHAPTER VI.

-- NON-ARYAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND
OF MAN.
Confusions of myth--Various origins of man and of things--Myths of
Australia, Andaman 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