Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/75

Rh one set is religious and the other not. It is hard to say, too, that one was afore or after other. In the evolution of the mysteries, what Mr. Lang calls the myths may, for aught we know, have long preceded the appearance of what he calls religion. I do not say that they did, I simply put the possibility. But if they did, what becomes of Mr. Lang's hypothesis, even as revised by Professor Starr, that "among man's earliest conceptions" is the set of ideas qualified by Mr. Lang as "religious." It is no part of my argument to deny that man had upreaching desires, and longings which expressed themselves more or less definitely (but rather less than more) in what Mr. Lang calls "religious beliefs." What I deny is that they were more truly beliefs, or more religious, than what Mr. Lang calls myths. In his use of the word myths he illustrates the inconsistency of civilised man. Replying to me, he appears, in one place at least (see p. 15), to confine the meaning of the word to "obscene or humorous tales." Even then, I doubt whether myths are the result of "indulging" man's "fancy for fiction"—tales told consciously for amusement without any hold on serious belief. Some of them, perhaps, are; many of them certainly are not. In the passage he quotes just before from Myth, Ritual, and Religion, however, he seems to include other elements, notably "the irrational," which is not necessarily either obscene or humorous. And in The Making of Religion he speaks of the story about Mungan-ngaur's relation to the Kurnai as a myth—at least by implication, for he refers to "the opposite myth, of making or creating." Now Mungan-ngaur's relation to the Kurnai is precisely what Mr. Lang designates religion. Well may I ask: Where is the distinction?

Recognising, then, the co-existence of inconsistent beliefs, I find no difficulty in accepting both myths of Daramulun: that he died, and that he is "an anthropomorphic supernatural being," as part of the beliefs of the same tribes. I need hardly say that I never meant to suggest that Daramulun was literally the ghost of a man, but only that on the principle