pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[8] men, and the universe, and customs and organizations of society. Many of them, indeed, are early efforts at a reconciliation of the tales of gods and heroes with the religious sentiment, which recognized in these beings objects for worship and respect.[9]

THE 'SAVAGE' ELEMENT IN MYTH

But these tales remained full of irrational and savage notions, a legacy from primitive ancestors. They chimed ill with later religious sentiment, which was shocked and puzzled by them, and priests and poets attempted to explain them away. Thus, among the Greeks, Theagenes of Rhegium (c.520 B.C.) considered the tale of the battle of the gods 'unbecoming,' and represented it as an allegorical account of the war of the elements. The Egyptians, according to Plutarch, puzzled by the circumstance that so many of their gods were pictured in animal form, invented as an explanation the tale that in a moment of danger the gods concealed themselves in the bodies of animals. As peoples grew more civilized they attempted to cleanse their national or tribal myths from the coarse and barbarous tone which savage predecessors had given them, and many of the myths of the higher civilizations of antiquity, as they have come down to us to-day, have obviously passed through one or more stages of refinement and revision at the hands of some priest, poet, or philosopher anxious to free his race from its supposed coarse and savage pristine history.[10]

A PERUVIAN PRIEST-MYTH

A good example of how older myths are accounted for by a modern priesthood[11] is the story of Pacari Tampu, the 'House of the Dawn,' a legend of the Collas, a Peruvian tribe. From the caverns of Pacari Tampu issued four brothers and a sister. The eldest ascended a mountain and cast stones to all the cardinal points of the compass to signify that he had taken possession of the land. The other three were envious of him, and the youngest succeeded in inducing him to enter a cave, whereupon the youngest brother closed the mouth of the cave with a great stone and imprisoned the eldest there for ever. On pretence of seeking his lost brother he then persuaded the second to ascend a high mountain, from which he cast him, and, as he fell, by dint of magic art changed him into a stone. The third brother, scenting treachery, fled. The first brother would appear to symbolize the oldest known Peruvian religion, that of the thunder-god Pachacamac, the second that of an intermediate fetishism or stone-worship, the third the cult of Viracocha, the water-god, while the fourth seems to be the more modern sun-worship, which in the end triumphed officially over all, as is proved by the name of the youngest brother, 'Pirrhua Manca' ('Son of the Sun ').

MADNESS OR MENTAL CHILDHOOD?

Max Müller seriously suggested that the "savage and irrational" element in myth arose out of a "period of temporary madness through which the human mind had to pass." "Was it," he asks, "a madness identically the same in the south of India and the north of Iceland?" The state of mind, the mental attitude, was and is, of course, very much the same among savages or barbarians from Cape Horn to Novaia Zemlia; but no 'madness' is mingled with the mental equipment of primitive man, although he is irrational. What Professor Müller mistook for 'madness' was the child-like propensity of the savage or barbarian, or even the uncultured person, to delusion, ignorance, and distortion of facts and experiences. The imbecility of savage theories and stones is due to a scanty stock of acquired ideas and lack of experience in wielding the higher powers of reason. In short, savage or primitive man, although highly observant, explains such facts as come within his range of view by employing imagination rather than reason.[12] He is in a condition of mental childhood, when imagination is very much more powerful than reason. Thus he imagines that all other physical entities in nature are, like himself, gifted with powers of speech, volition, and thought. This is called 'animism'—i.e. the bestowal of a soul (Lat anima) upon all objects.[13] The winds and the waters speak and obviously travel; the trees are articulate; the lower animals he regards as his equals. He does not bring reason, as we understand it, to bear upon his experience. The 'wonders' in these tales are no marvels to him; the brutalities of savage life recounted in them, the barbarian atmosphere and colour, are his everyday experiences.[14] He hands the tale on; but his descendants fail to comprehend its meaning and aim; its almost animal savagery repels them, and at length more advanced generations, shocked at what seems to them blasphemous nonsense, discard it altogether, or so cleanse and refine it as not infrequently to render its original meaning entirely undiscoverable.

SAVAGERY IN GREEK MYTH

As an example of how the savage element displays itself in the mythic tales of such a refined and poetically gifted people as the Greeks, the myth of the birth of Zeus may be instanced. When Cronus had displaced Uranus, the first monarch of Olympus, he took to wife Rhea, one of the Titan race. Gæa, his mother, however, prophesied that as he had overthrown Uranus, he himself would be overthrown by one of his own children. So uneasy did he become in consequence of this prediction that whenever a child was born to him he tore it from its mother's arms and swallowed it whole. Five children did he swallow in this manner, greatly to the grief of Rhea, who, lamenting to Gæa the loss of her offspring, was advised by her next time she had a child to take a stone and wrap it in swaddling-clothes and give it to Cronus to swallow as if it were the infant, at the same time carefully concealing the real child in some secluded place until it reached maturity. This Rhea did, and Cronus duly swallowed the stone she gave him, imagining it to be one of his own children and therefore his possible future destroyer. But Rhea hid the child in a cave in the island of Crete, where the goat Amalthea nourished him with her milk. There were placed in the infant's vicinity armed men, who, whenever he cried, performed a war-dance, clashing their spears and shields to drown his wailing; and so within a year the boy grew to full manhood. At length Gæa gave Cronus a draught which made him vomit up the stone he had swallowed, together with the five children previously devoured—two gods and three goddesses. These young gods made war upon the elder deities, and after a ten years' struggle were victorious over them, banishing them to the dismal region of Tartarus.

In this myth the savage element is strikingly apparent.