Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/121

Rh take the chief heroic rôles, while in Aryan myths gods do what the beasts had done, or, if animals occur, they are explained to be gods in animal shape. Tinnehs and Tacullies make the world to have been constructed in great part out of a mangled dog or beaver. In the Veda a mangled non-natural man, Purusha, takes the place of the beaver or dog. When a boar, in Vedic myth, fishes up the earth, the boar is Vishnu. When a coyote or musk-rat performs the same feat in America, he is a musk-rat or a coyote and nothing more. Animals, not men, are the fire-stealers, but a bird brought the Vedic Soma, as a bird brought water to the Thlinkeets. In the Brahmanas, as in all savage myths, the constellations were once animals or men. Death was a person whom the gods had to evade. The gods took animal shapes.

I have said a few words on this topic in an article called The Seamy Side of Vedic Religion. (Saturday Review, Feb. 24, 1883.) I am aware that the reply will be that the savage myths are in the Brahmanas, which are late, not in the Vedas, which are early. Well, some of the wild savage myths do occur in the Vedas, but the religious spirit has got rid of them in the devotional hymns as much as possible. They creep out again in the ritual Brahmanas, and whence do they creep, these disgusting savage legends which would make a Bushman feel a little abashed? Did priests invent them? If so, why did their inventions tally with those of my savage clients? Probably the savage myths of the Brahmanas either survived in popular traditions (which everywhere retains so much of savagery), or, in other cases, were invented in explanation of the ritual, but invented on the old lines of the popular myths. If scholars would only translate the Athava Veda, they would add another to the many boons they have already conferred on the poor, unlettered, but not ungrateful anthropologist. The anthropologist, meantime, will still maintain that the best devotional hymns of a people whose ancestors were civilised before the language in which the hymns are composed was developed, must contain much that is far from "the beginning." And he will also maintain that the same hymns and their commentary do contain matter similar to the myths of savages, and presumably relics of the savage state of fancy. These survivals are the "silly, senseless, and irrational" elements of Aryan mythology. Where is the harm in deriving from savages an element in mythology which Mr. Müller proclaims to be "savage"? One curious remark of Mr. Müller's