Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/115



R. MAX MÜLLER'S new book, his Lectures on India, and what it can teach us (Longmans), is now in the hands of all Folk-lorists and students of mythology. To Mr. Max Müller's books, as they come out, all such students inevitably turn with interest and eagerness as to those of a master in his own science. What we English readers, who cannot spell out Sanskrit, know of Vedic mythology we chiefly know through Mr. Müller's works, and through those of Dr. Muir and the German translations of the Rig-Veda. If we cannot all agree with all of Mr. Müller's inferences, we look to him at least for facts and for criticisms of evidence. The following pages are concerned with a subject on which it seems that Mr. Müller and some of his readers will never be able quite to agree. What is the precise value of the Rig-Veda as an authority about the early stages of human belief? The point at issue is this: Do the Vedas, or rather does the Rig-Veda, give us information about an earlier stage of belief and of mythology than we derive from the comparative study of the religious ideas of savages? In this discussion it is well altogether to avoid the use of the word "primitive." There is no such thing known (except to Mr. Grant Allen in a vision) as primitive man. The most backward races, and the races that least show tokens of ever having been highly civilised in the past, have yet a past of incalculable length behind them; their complicated customs are not the growth of years and centuries, but perhaps of unnumbered ages. Thus the anthropologist does not call the Murri, or the Tinnehs, or the Tacullies primitive men, he only says they are backward men. And he does not call the Rig-Veda primitive either, he calls it a collection of the devotional hymns of men far advanced in civilisation. The opinion of the anthropologist is, however, that the devotional poetry of a cultivated society like that described in the Vedas seems more remote from the early stages of human thought than do the religious ideas of races that have never