Page:Mythology Among the Hebrews.djvu/79

Rh What Max Müller says of Semitic speech, that 'those who used the word were unable to forget its predicative meaning, and retained in most cases a distinct consciousness of its appellative power,' is not true, at least of this portion of Semitism.

Now this is the very earliest step in the transformation of the myth. As we have seen, this transformation is conditioned only by a psychological operation, and is therefore common to every mythology. Some scholars are inclined to draw nothing that precedes this transformation into the domain of myths at all, and to say that these begin only when, as Max Müller says, the language (i.e. the living consciousness of the original signification of the multifarious names) dies. But we hold that there is every reason to regard the stage at which those expressions lived in the human mind with their original appellative sense, as one of the proper mythic stages. That event which Max Müller treats as the commencement of the development of the myth, indicates the first link in the long chain of transformations which make up the history of the myth. It is not a characteristic of the myth, that the speaker is no longer conscious of speaking of physical phenomena. As soon as ever he perceives physical phenomena as events in human life, he has at once made a myth; and every name by which he designates a physical phenomenon forms a myth. For if unintelligibility or obsoleteness of language were a condition of a myth's existence, then there could be no myth when the Greek calls Hêlios the brother of Selênê, since both these names have been retained in their original sense, and the Greek knew that the former name meant Sun and the latter Moon, though of Hêraklês and Helenê he had no similar consciousness left. Similarly, it could not be a myth when the Roman said that Aurora opens the gates of the Sun and strews roses on his way, since every Roman knew that the name Aurora denoted the Dawn.