Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/380

 340 Reviews.

Hellenic mythology is in the main derived from Babylonia. He now lays down sundry canons which define the extent to which Semitic influence may be assumed in the myths of Greece — first, when neither the name of any particular personage nor the chief mythic incidents connected with his legend appear in the other branches of religious mythology ; secondly, when Aryan nature- myths do not supply an easy and appropriate explanation of his concept and history ; thirdly, when his cult is found in regions either absolutely non-Aryan or else permeated with non-Aryan influence ; fourthly, when his form is more or less unanthropo- morphic ; fifthly, when his character and story generally are in harmony with those of mythic personages admittedly non-Aryan ; and, sixthly, when the resources of Aryan philology are powerless or inadequate to explain his name and some or many of his principal epithets.

We have no space for an adequate review of these canons of the science of mythology. The final result is that they exclude all investigation beyond the Aryan and Semitic area. With our widened knowledge of Babylonian culture, no one will be disposed to deny that it may have exercised considerable influence on the religious thought of the West. Aphrodite of Paphos, for instance, or Artemis of Ephesus is almost certainly an oriental deity im- ported into Hellenic lands. But the fact that the later cult of Aphrodite was framed more or less closely on an eastern model does not exclude the possibility of the existence of a purely Greek goddess of love to whom the kindred oriental cultus may have been affiliated. This is, in the main, the view of Mr. Farnell, the most sober authority on Grecian myths. With our experience of the results of explaining the titles of Hellenic gods from epithets in the Rig Veda, students will be well advised in hesitating to accept the same method when extended to the Semitic area.

There is, again, much to be said in favour of the view that many of the folk-explanations of the constellations may have been independently discovered. Few scholars now accept the views of Professor Max Miiller and Sir G. Cox that the conception of the Great Bear is based on a parallel between the seven shiners, the seven sages, and the seven bears, all of which depends on the assumption that this constellation has not the shadow of a likeness to a bear. But the Karens, who see in this group of stars an elephant, can hardly have been influenced either by Aryan or