brides from alien stocks, and the law which forbids marriage with a woman
of a man's own family.  Slaves and captured brides would bring their
native legends among alien peoples.

But there is another possible way of explaining the resemblance (granting
that it is proved) of the Greek and Australian Pleiad myth.  The object
of both myths is to account for the grouping and other phenomena of the
constellations.  May not similar explanatory stories have occurred to the
ancestors of the Australians, and to the ancestors of the Greeks, however
remote their home, while they were still in the savage condition?  The
best way to investigate this point is to collect all known savage and
civilised stellar myths, and see what points they have in common.  If
they all agree in character, though the Greek tales are full of grace,
while those of the Australians or Brazilians are rude enough, we may
plausibly account for the similarity of myths, as we accounted for the
similarity of flint arrow-heads.  The myths, like the arrow-heads,
resemble each other because they were originally framed to meet the same
needs out of the same material.  In the case of the arrow-heads, the need
was for something hard, heavy, and sharp--the material was flint.  In the
case of the myths, the need was to explain certain phenomena--the
material (so to speak) was an early state of the human mind, to which all
objects seemed equally endowed with human personality, and to which no
metamorphosis appeared impossible.

In the following essays, then, the myths and customs of various peoples
will be compared, even when these peoples talk languages of alien
families, and have never (as far as history shows us) been in actual
contact.  Our method throughout will be to place the usage, or myth,
which is unintelligible when found among a civilised race, beside the
similar myth which is intelligible enough when it is found among savages.
A mean term will be found in the folklore preserved by the
non-progressive classes in a progressive people.  This folklore
represents, in the midst of a civilised race, the savage ideas out of
which civilisation has been evolved.  The conclusion will usually be that
the fact which puzzles us by its presence in civilisation is a relic
surviving from the time when the ancestors of a civilised race were in
the state of savagery.  By this method it is not necessary that 'some
sort of genealogy should be established' between the Australian and the
Greek narrators of a similar myth, nor between the Greek and Australian
possessors of a similar usage.  The hypothesis will be that the myth, or
usage, is common to both races, not because of original community of
stock, not because of contact and borrowing, but because the ancestors of
the Greeks passed through the savage intellectual condition in which we
find the Australians.

The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth?  Do
peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other?  The answer is,
that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth, if it be
race which confers on a people its national genius, and its capacity of
becoming civilised.  If race does this, then race affects, in the most
powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth.  No one is likely to
confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor either with a myth
from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the substance, the original
set of ideas, may be much the same.  In all three you have
anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal shapes, tricky,
capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed with magical
powers.  So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda, of any of the
Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much above the gods of
savage mythology.  This stuff of myth is quod semper, quod ubique, quod
ab omnibus, and is the original gift of the savage intellect.  But the
final treatment, the ultimate literary form of the myth, varies in each
race.  Homeric gods, like Red Indian, Thlinkeet, or Australian gods, can
assume the shapes of birds.  But when we read, in Homer, of the arming of
Athene, the hunting of Artemis, the vision of golden Aphrodite, the
apparition of Hermes, like a young man when the flower of youth is
loveliest, then we recognise the effect of race upon myth, the effect of
the Greek genius at work on rude material.  Between the Olympians and a
Thlinkeet god there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter
of Cnidos and an image from Easter Island.  Again, the Scandinavian gods,
when their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape
of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of
their own.  Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless sacrifices,
soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of Vedic and
Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into its sacerdotage
and priestly second childhood.  Thus race declares itself in the ultimate
literary form and character of mythology, while the common savage basis
and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in the horned, and cannibal,
and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of Greece, of India, of the
North.  They all show their common savage origin, when the poet neglects
Freya's command and tells of what the gods did 'in the morning of Time.'

As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there
must have been much transmission of myth.  The migrations of peoples, the
traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing alien
women into the families--all these things favoured the migration of myth.
But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it, we can
seldom trace a popular legend on its travels.  In the case of the
cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed they
had borrowed their religions from each other.  When the Greeks first
found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they leaped to
the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from Egypt.  We,
who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points in common
with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians--people quite
unconnected with Egypt--feel less confident about the hypothesis of
borrowing.  We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and
Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia.  In later times, too, the
Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien
gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so
forth.  But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious
conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at