Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/376

68 what I had heard or read in the past. I remembered Lazarus and whatever cases of resurrection may be told in books. I was striving, however, to keep my own mind out of play as much as possible; where, however, there is no such preoccupation the interpretation may be far more elaborate; in the etymological myth of Moala the myth-maker has invented a whole episode for which tradition gave him no warrant; his imagination, however, was not working entirely in the air, as myth-makers are invariably assumed to have done, but he was merely following existing models.

Prehistoric men are always credited with an abnormal degree of phantasy, they are commonly represented as evolving the most elaborate myths out of their own consciousness without any reference to tradition. When a myth explains a custom, or something in nature, it is concluded straightway that the myth was constructed entirely to meet the case. No positive proof is ever brought forward, but we can sometimes prove the contrary. The late Mr. Vincent Smith says that the Citralaksana "relates a pretty legend of the manner in which the art of painting originated, the substance of which is that the god Brahma taught a king how to bring back to life the dead son of a Brahman, by painting a portrait of the deceased, which was endowed with life, and so made an efficient substitute for the dead boy whom Yama refused to give up." Not so very long ago we might have thought that this story had been invented on purpose to explain the origin of painting, and called it an "aetiological myth"; but we now know that statues and paintings originally were not mere ornaments, but habitations provided for the spirit of a god, or of a deceased person. The myth, therefore, was not composed to explain the origin of painting, but merely records its true origin; the details may be wrong, but the substance is true. In most cases, however, the myth does