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CHAPTER XI.

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THE ARGUMENT FROM MYTHOLOGY.

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Mythology, its Nature. All Myths founded in Fact. stances of the Origin of modern Myths. - Character of Greek Writers. Specimens of their Mistakes respecting foreign Names and Personages. — I. All Mythologies had a common Origin. The Roman and Greek. The Egyptian.

The Phoenician. -The Chaldean. The Hindu.-II. That Origin in the Bible Narrative of the Creation and the Flood. Myths of the Creation. - Of the Antediluvians. of Noah.

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Of the Dove. - of the Rainbow. Of the eight

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MYTHOLOGY is a species of tradition which, among pagan nations, embraces the facts and principles of religion. It is true that there are secular myths, legendary stories of individuals and tribes, -having no sacred import. Still, so active was the supposed participation of the gods in human affairs, that few of these fables are entirely destitute of allusions to them. Indeed, the whole theology of the ancient pagan world was essentially mythical; the names, characters, and actions of the gods, their

relations to men, and the modes in which they were to be worshiped, were recounted by the poets and fabulists, and formed collectively that mass of traditions and writings which we call mythology.

It is apparent, then, that the field which mythology opens to us may afford important aid in the consideration of the question now in hand. Religious belief has the strongest hold upon the heart, and is transmitted with the greatest care from one generation to another. If all men have sprung from a common parentage, we ought to find, as we ascend the stream of history, traces of a similarity in faith and religious rites among them. Even though the primitive belief and worship of one God were early lost through that depravity of heart which the apostle Paul so graphically describes in the first chapter of Romans, still the idolatry which came in its place, having been derived from common sources in the traditions of the past, ought to show those evidences of the fact which will powerfully demonstrate the original unity of those who hold it.

It is important to observe that all myths, however absurd and incredible their form, were founded upon fact. Thus says C. O. Müller: "It is quite clear that two distinct ingredients enter into mythology, viz., the statement of things done and things imagined. We always find a chain of

facts leading from history into mythology.' That is, some actual person existed, or was believed to have existed, or some event, real or supposed, took place, which formed, as it were, the nucleus of the tradition, round which, in the lapse of time, was gathered, under the influence of an active. imagination, a mass of fictitious incident, until it finally reached its present form. I am aware that some have held a different theory as to the process of its growth, believing that some abstract idea, philosophical or ethical, was the germ, which created for itself a legend of personification and narrative for its expression. Thus says George: † "Mythus is the creation of a fact out of an idea.” Professor Powell says, "A myth is a doctrine expressed in a narrative form; an abstract moral or spiritual truth, dramatized in action and personification, where the object is to enforce faith, not in the parable, but in the moral." I think these definitions are quite wrong. I do not believe a myth, properly so called, ever originated in an idea, but exactly the reverse. There is first the fact, real or supposed; then a distortion of it through misapprehension, or an amplification of it for ornament or

* Introd. to a Scientific System of Mythology, p. 9.

† Mythus and Sage, quoted by Rawlinson Hist. So., p. 231. Ibid.

"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

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

Three Goats,' a name

"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 derived from the three gowts or drains by which the water from the Swan Pool, a large 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

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