Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/41

Rh elements of what we moderns, whether believers or unbelievers, recognise as "religion." They have the conception of a Being, prior to death, often of unknown origin, not (in certain cases) subject to mortality, existing in, or above, the sky, who punishes breaches of his laws, in certain cases moral laws (or if you prefer it, laws of morality in the making or becoming), who, in certain instances, rewards or punishes men after death; who is often hailed as "Father;" who, like Mr. Howitt's Daramulun, "can go anywhere and do anything."

This belief I choose to call "religious," because it conforms in its rude way to and is the germ of what we commonly style "religion." On the other hand, a multitude of obscene or humorous tales are apt to be told of this being, which correspond to passages in the documents of nearly all religions, and to the Marchen about the sacred personages of the Christian religion. These tales I call "myths." The essential problem of mythology has ever been "Why do peoples, ancient and modern, tell these anecdotes about Beings of whom they give, at other times, or at the same time, such a contradictory account?" I would answer that what I call the religion represents one human mood, while the myth represents another, both moods dating from savagery. "They stand as near each other, and as far apart, as lust and love." This is where I draw the line. Religious ideas are such as, with refinements, survive in what I mean by religion, mythical ideas are such as don't, or should not.

Here, I presume, Mr. Hartland and I cannot be reconciled. He says: "If the mythology of the god be 'a kind of joke with no sacredness about it'" (my phrase) "then the myth of making or creating has no sacredness about it" (Folk-Lore, p. 296). Mr. Hartland, reasoning thus, produces a collection of myths about Australian gods, as if they were fatal to my argument. Some of them (as I shall explain) were unknown to me, but my argument, as I myself