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Max Muller has just confessed, as a reason for incompetence to criticise Mannhardt's labours, 'my want of knowledge of the materials with which he dealt the popular customs and traditions of Germany. And yet he asks where there is any difference between his system and Mannhardt's. Mannhardt's is the study of rural survival, the system of folklore. Mr.
In that essay I take, as an example of the method, the Scottish and Northumbrian Kernababy, the puppet made out of the last gleanings of harvest. This I compared to the Greek Demeter of the harvest-home, with sheaves and poppies in her hands, in the immortal Seventh Idyll of Theocritus. In entire ignorance of Mannhardt's corn-spirit, or corn-mother, I was following Mannhardt's track. Indeed, Mr.
For Mannhardt's method is the reverse of that practised under the old colours to which he is said to have returned. Mannhardt's Method 'My method is here the same as in the Tree-cult. I start from a given collection of facts, of which the central idea is distinct and generally admitted, and consequently offers a firm basis for explanation. I illustrate from this and from well-founded analogies.
For the purpose of the present inquiry I also omit all the rites of leaping sportfully, and of driving cattle through light fires. People are said 'pyras circumire et transilire in futuri mali averruncatione' to 'go round about and leap over lighted pyres for the purpose of averting future evils, as in Mannhardt's theory of the Hirpi.
Shall we say that he meant 'most myths, 'a good many myths, 'a myth or two here and there'? Whatever he meant, he meant that he was 'still more than very far removed from looking upon all myths' as Mr. Max Muller does. Mannhardt's next passage I quote entire and textually from Mr. Max Muller's translation:
I do not feel so satisfied as he does of Mannhardt's re-conversion. Mannhardt's Attitude to Philology We have heard Mannhardt, in a letter partly cited by Mr. Max Muller, describe his own method. He begins with what is certain and intelligible, a mass of popular customs. These he explains by analogies. He passes from the known to the obscure.
In the passages here produced as proof of Mannhardt's conversion, he is not investigating a myth at all, or a name which occurs in mythology. He is trying to discover the meaning of the practices of the Lupercalia at Rome. In February, says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Romans held a popular festival, and lads ran round naked, save for skins of victims, whipping the spectators.
I therefore supplement Mannhardt's evidence from European folk-lore by evidence from savage life, and by a folk-lore case which Mannhardt did not know. The Fire-walk A modern student is struck by the cool way in which the ancient poets, geographers, and commentators mention a startling circumstance, the Fire- walk.
Did they really appear? Were the myths, say the myths of Daphne, really solar? That is precisely what we hesitate to accept. In the same way Mannhardt's preoccupation with vegetable myths has tended, I think, to make many of his followers ascribe vegetable origins to myths and gods, where the real origin is perhaps for ever lost. The corn-spirit starts up in most unexpected places. Mr.
Max Muller does tell us that 'if I did not refer to his work in my previous contributions to the science of mythology the reason was simple enough. He had Mr. Frazer as his prophet but not till ten years after his death. Mannhardt's Letters 'Mannhardt's state of mind with regard to the general principles of comparative philology has been so exactly my own, says Mr.
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