Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/39

 Rh to be primal, in Mr. Darwin's view, and normal; the bad or, as I say, the mythical element is secondary and aberrant (Darwin, Descent of Man, vol. i., pp. 68, 69. 1871). That is precisely my belief. Among the superstitions are the myths contradictory of religion. Among the customs are the cruel rites of Central Australia and Central N. W. Queensland. Myth results from man's want of power, or of desire, to keep on the level of his higher religious ideas. We see this in the Märchen and mummeries of popular mediæval Christianity, and in mediaeval tales about God which cannot have been adopted from a prior paganism. We have already glanced at the contradictory stories which remain in Holy Writ. The idea of the immortality of Zeus is familiar to Homer, but the grave of Zeus was shown in Crete. Manifestly people like the Australian tribes are sure to be even less apt than Hebrews, Greeks, or peasant Christians to remain on the level of their highest conceptions. They will anthropomorphise, reduce Baiame to a Wirreenun (in a tale "told to piccanninies" ), will let their fancies play freely around him. But they have among these lower fancies the loftier ideas, and these were absolutely denied to them. (As by Mr. Huxley and Sir John Lubbock.)

I can here adopt the statement of Mr. Tylor with the change of a single word. "High above the doctrine of souls, of divine manes, of local nature gods, of the great gods of class and element, there are to be discerned in barbaric theology, shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity, henceforward to be traced onward, in expanding power and brightening glory along the history of religion." Put "savage" for "barbaric," and I have no alteration to make. In the "majestic" we have "religion;" in the "quaint" we have "myth."

This brings us to an important general point: how, in