The ugly scars were the problem! A civilised fancy is not puzzled for a
moment by a beautiful beneficent Sun-god, or even by his beholding the
daughters of men that they are fair. But a civilised fancy _is_ puzzled
when the beautiful Sun-god makes love in the shape of a dog. {5} To me,
and indeed to Mr. Max Muller, the ugly scars were the problem.
He has written--'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of
the word, is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or
miraculous.' But he explained these blots on the mythology of Greece,
for example, as the result practically of old words and popular sayings
surviving in languages after the original, harmless, symbolical meanings
of the words and sayings were lost. What had been a poetical remark
about an aspect of nature became an obscene, or brutal, or vulgar myth, a
stumbling block to Greek piety and to Greek philosophy.
To myself, on the other hand, it seemed that the ugly scars were remains
of that kind of taste, fancy, customary law, and incoherent speculation
which everywhere, as far as we know, prevails to various degrees in
savagery and barbarism. Attached to the 'hideous idols,' as Mr. Max
Muller calls them, of early Greece, and implicated in a ritual which
religious conservatism dared not abandon, the fables of perhaps neolithic
ancestors of the Hellenes remained in the religion and the legends known
to Plato and Socrates. That this process of 'survival' is a vera causa,
illustrated in every phase of evolution, perhaps nobody denies.
Thus the phenomena which the philological school of mythology explains by
a disease of language we would explain by survival from a savage state of
society and from the mental peculiarities observed among savages in all
ages and countries. Of course there is nothing new in this: I was
delighted to discover the idea in Eusebius as in Fontenelle; while, for
general application to singular institutions, it was a commonplace of the
last century. {6a} Moreover, the idea had been widely used by Dr. E. B.
Tylor in Primitive Culture, and by Mr. McLennan in his Primitive Marriage
and essays on Totemism.