Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/231

Rh imagined to grow sympathetically with the waxing of the moon. Again, Roscher industriously collects the various epithets lavished by the classical poets on the moon ; but the moon as it appears to the poet may be a different thing from the moon as it appears to a plain citizen, and is pretty certainly very different from the ideas entertained by primitive man or the ancient Greek peasant.

The above are instances in which, as it seems to me, Roscher, on insufficient or erroneous grounds, ascribes to primitive man conceptions or beliefs which are only found in later authorities. There are also other errors of method in Selene which naturally fall to be mentioned here. Thus, Roscher's demonstration that Artemis is a moon-goddess (to which he calls the reader's special attention in the preface) is effected largely by ignoring the possibility of the plurality of causes. For instance, the inference that because Artemis makes trees and plants to flourish, and the moon does the same, therefore Artemis is the moon, can only hold good as long as we overlook the possibility that other goddesses than moon-goddesses may make vegetation prosper — in other words, Artemis may be a goddess of vegetation. So, too, it does not follow that because cows are offered to Artemis as well as to the moon, or because both goddesses are represented in cow shape, therefore the moon and Artemis are identical. The reader of the Golden Bough knows that the tree-spirit appears as a bull or cow amongst primitive men ; and the writer of the Golden Bough, if he adopted Roscher's method of mythologising, might with equal justice claim that Selene is a tree-spirit and not the moon at all. Again, the "sacred marriage" celebrated at Athens between the Sun and the Moon does not, when compared with the sacred marriage celebrated elsewhere in Greece between Zeus and Hera, prove that Zeus is the Sun, and Hera the Moon, any more than it proves that Helios and Selene are the Lord and the Lady of the May respectively. Roscher concludes his researches with an appendix on