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explanation; a personification, apotheosis, and the like. I know that myths frequently reach that form in which an idea or a doctrine becomes their chief import; but still I maintain that they began with simple facts or actual beings. The opposite theory, that abstract ideas or principles, in primitive times, clothed themselves in mythical forms, creating gods, and heroes, and fictitious events, as a mode of expression, endows the infancy of the race with too much of a philosophic sense. It reverses the natural order of development, imaginative childhood first, reflective and reasoning manhood afterward.

I have said that misapprehension of the original facts was a fruitful source of mythology. Professor M. Müller gives several curious instances illustrative of this in modern times.

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Many of the old signs of taverns contain what we may call hieroglyphic mythology. There was a house on Stoken-church Hill, near Oxford, exhibiting on its sign-board Feathers and a Plum.' The house itself was vulgarly called the 'Plum and Feathers;' it was originally the Plume of Feathers,' from the crest of the Prince of Wales.

"A Cat with a Wheel' is the corrupt emblem of St. Catharine's Wheel;' the Bull and Gate' was originally intended as a trophy of the taking of Boulogne by Henry VIII.; and the Goat and Com

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passes' have taken the place of the fine old Puritan sign-board, God encompasses us.'

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"There is much of this popular mythology floating about among the people, arising from a very natural and very general tendency, viz., from a conviction that every name must have a meaning. At Lincoln, immediately below the High Bridge, there is an inn bearing now the sign of the Black Goats.' It formerly had the sign of the Three Goats,' a name derived from the three gowts or drains by which the water from the Swan Pool, a largeR lake which formerly existed to the west of the city, was conducted into the bed of the Witham below. A public house having arisen on the bank of the principal of these gowts, in honor, probably, of the work when it was made, the name became corrupted into Three

Goats'

a corruption easily accomplished in the Lincolnshire dialect.

"One of our colleges at Oxford is now called and spelled Brasenose. Over the gate of the college there is a brazen nose, and the arms of the college display the same shield, and have done .so for several centuries. I have not heard of any legend to account for the startling presence of that emblem over the gate of the college; but this is simply owing to the want of poetic imagination on the part of the Oxford ciceroni. In Greece, Pausanias would have

told us ever so many traditions commemorated by such a monument. At Oxford we are simply told that the college was originally a brew-house, and that its original name, Brasen-huis (brasserie), was gradually changed to Brasenose."

Mistakes of this nature, sometimes originating in ignorance and sometimes in design, were exceedingly common among the Greeks, from whose writers we derive our chief knowledge, not only of their own mythology, but of those of other peoples. Of this propensity Bryant speaks as follows:

"As their traditions were obsolete, and filled with extraneous matter, it rendered it impossible for them to arrange properly the principal events of their country. They did not separate and distinguish, but often took to themselves the merit of transac-. tions which were of a prior date and of another clime. These they adopted, and made their own. Hence, when they came to digest their history, it was all confused, and they were embarrassed with numberless contradictions and absurdities which it was impossible to remedy. They had a childish antipathy to every foreign language, and were equally prejudiced in favor of their own. This was attended with the most fatal consequences. They were misled by the too great delicacy of their ear, and could not bear any term which appeared

to them barbarous and uncouth. On this account they either rejected foreign appellations, or so modeled and changed them, that they became, in sound and meaning, essentially different. And as they were attached to their own country and its customs, they presumed that everything was to be looked for among themselves. They did not consider that the titles of their gods, the names of cities, and their terms of worship were imported, that their ancient hymns were grown obsolete, and that time had wrought a great change. They explained everything by the language in use, without the least retrospect or allowance, and all names and titles from other countries were liable to the same rule. If the name were dissonant and disagreeable to their ear, it was rejected as barbarous; but if it were at all similar in sound to any word in their language, they changed it to that word, though the name were of Syriac original, or introduced from Egypt or Babylonia. The purport of the term was by these means changed, and the history which depended upon it either perverted or effaced."*

Many examples are given by this author in illustration of these statements, of which only a specimen or two can here be mentioned. The myth of Mount Olympus being the residence of the gods originated

* Ancient Mythology, vol. i. pp. 204, 210.

thus: Ham, the progenitor of the Egyptians, was worshiped as a god (El), being the same that the Greeks called Amun, or Ammon. Phi signifies a mouth,* and was used especially to denote the voice or oracle of a god. Hence El-Ham-Phi, or Elampi, would mean the oracle of the god Amun. The Greeks, knowing or caring nothing for the etymology, wrote it Ol-um-pos (Olympus), and then invented the legend corresponding, locating it, as oracles were generally placed, on a mountain, and making it the home of Zeus (the Greek equivalent of Amun), and of course of his divine court.

The same word, slightly changed, Am-phi-el, gave rise to another notion equally absurd. The sound of it somewhat resembled that of their own word omphalos, a navel. Hence they fabled that Delphi, the seat of the oracle of Apollo, was the navel, i. e., the center of the world. Sophocles calls it the "umbilical oracle of the earth," † and Livy, "umbilicum orbis terrarum."‡ Towns and cities, where similar oracles existed, were often called Omphalian, and their people Omphalians ; and Quintus Curtius, describing the temple of Jupi

* As in the Hebrew words Peniel, Pibeseth, Pihahiroth, Phicol, etc.

† Μεσόμφαλα Γῆς μαντεῖα. Cdip. Τyr., v. 487. + L. 38, c. 47.

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