Modern Mythology

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Lang Andrew. Modern Mythology

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

REGENT MYTHOLOGY

THE STORY OF DAPHNE

THE QUESTION OF ALLIES

MANNHARDT

PHILOLOGY AND DEMETER ERINNYS

TOTEMISM

THE VALIDITY OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

THE PHILOLOGICAL METHOD IN ANTHROPOLOGY

CRITICISM OF FETISHISM

THE RIDDLE THEORY

ARTEMIS

THE FIRE-WALK

THE ORIGIN OF DEATH

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX A: The Fire-walk in Spain

APPENDIX B: Mr. Macdonell on Vedic Mythology

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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 Müller’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 Müller 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 Müller made such a statement, we could have cleared up anything in our position which might seem to him obscure.

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It is with no enthusiasm that I take the opportunity of Mr. Max Müller’s reply to me ‘by name.’ Since Myth, Ritual, and Religion (now out of print, but accessible in the French of M. Marillier) was published, ten years ago, I have left mythology alone. The general method there adopted has been applied in a much more erudite work by Mr. Frazer, The Golden Bough, by Mr. Farnell in Cults of the Greek States, by Mr. Jevons in his Introduction to the History of Religion, by Miss Harrison in explanations of Greek ritual, by Mr. Hartland in The Legend of Perseus, and doubtless by many other writers. How much they excel me in erudition may be seen by comparing Mr. Farnell’s passage on the Bear Artemis 5 with the section on her in this volume.

Mr. Max Müller observes that ‘Mannhardt’s mythological researches have never been fashionable.’ They are now very much in fashion; they greatly inspire Mr. Frazer and Mr. Farnell. ‘They seemed to me, and still seem to me, too exclusive,’ says Mr. Max Müller. 6 Mannhardt in his second period was indeed chiefly concerned with myths connected, as he held, with agriculture and with tree-worship. Mr. Max Müller, too, has been thought ‘exclusive’ – ‘as teaching,’ he complains, ‘that the whole of mythology is solar.’ That reproach arose, he says, because ‘some of my earliest contributions to comparative mythology were devoted exclusively to the special subject of solar myths.’ 7 But Mr. Max Müller also mentions his own complaints, of ‘the omnipresent sun and the inevitable dawn appearing in ever so many disguises.’

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