Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/349

 The Sociological Significance of Myth. 327

of culture belonging to different peoples, then there would be full opportunity for wonder and mystery such as are necessary to set in action the mythic fancy.

Imagine a society founded on the simple dual principle coming into contact with a people organised in totemic clans and having as a fundamental part of their psychology the belief in the identity of certain groups of men with certain kinds of beast or plant. Here we have every ground for curiosity amounting to wonder and for a sense of mystery amounting to awe. To the non-totemic people the social grouping founded on identity with animals must appear strange and wonderful ; the totemic members of the united people would be plied with questions concerning the motives and causes of the strange relation, and ample scope would be allowed for the play of imagination out of which myths arise.

I have elsewhere suggested ^^ that the various forms of social organisation found in Australia are the outcome of such a blend of peoples as I have just asked you to imagine, and this paper only takes the suggestion a step further. If the narratives of the Australians are myths, I can only see in them evidence of the blending of peoples ; it may be of peoples possessing widely different forms of totemism, or it may be of a totemic people with one to whom relations with totemic animals and plants were altogether new and strange.

At this point I must return to the creation-myths which seemed to furnish so great an obstacle to the acceptance of the generalisation that man does not make myths about the familiar. Here, again, I believe that the explanation lies in the complexity of culture. So long as mankind lives undisturbed, so long will his own existence and that of the earth on which he lives form such a part of the established and constant order of his life that his imagination will be untouched. If, however, men come from elsewhere, and

"Z(?^. cit.