Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/365



a paper on "The Common Sense of Myth," I suggested that myths are not the creations of unbridled fancy, but in many cases at least are sober historical records. The idea is not new; it is as ancient as Euhemerus; but those who have undertaken to interpret myths as history have themselves indulged their own unbridled fancy, and have drawn entirely on their own imagination in order to reconstruct the original forms, without seeking for guidance among the available facts. They have been content to guess; they have been influenced in their guesses, not by evidence, but by their own preconceived ideas, which, being of a rationalistic turn, have led them to rationalise myths, and treat them as allegories. Had they put their trust not in pure reason, but in observation, they might have discovered that myths are true in an even more literal sense than they ever suspected.

The examples I quoted in my previous paper were drawn from an unfamiliar part of the world where an argument is hard to follow, because it winds through a mass of strange facts which tend to bewilder. I now propose to use our own Indo-European traditions, and begin with a myth with which almost every school-boy is acquainted.

The gods of ancient Greece, as we all know, drank nectar and ate ambrosia; that is the common version; but it should be known that they are sometimes represented