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In Egypt there were three months when the land was overflowed with water; hence, they had only nine working months out of doors, and from this fact sprang the Nine Muses, while the Three Sirens represented the three months of inactivity in work, or three months of pleasure and festivity. In nearly all mythologies, we find that the gods assembled on some high mountain to take counsel.
We know that the mythologies of the ancient Germans and the Scandinavians were in many respects, though not in all, one and the same system, and we find many of the characters of the Nibelungenlied among the divine beings alluded to in the Edda. It is unlikely that the dramatis personae of a German murder story would find its way into even the most decadent form of Scandinavian belief.
Though some of the essays in this volume have appeared in various serials, the majority of them were written expressly for their present purpose, and they are now arranged in a designed order. During some years of study of Greek, Indian, and savage mythologies, I have become more and more impressed with a sense of the inadequacy of the prevalent method of comparative mythology.
And yet, in their place as historical phenomena, the legends of the saints are as remarkable as any of the Pagan mythologies; to the full as remarkable, perhaps far more so, if the length and firmness of hold they once possessed on the convictions of mankind is to pass for anything in the estimate and to ourselves they have a near and peculiar interest, as spiritual facts in the growth of the Catholic faith.
It is an induction, as wide as the world being based on mythologies from all parts of the world that myths are aetiological, that their purpose is to give the reason of things, to explain the origin of fire, agriculture, civilisation, the world of anything, in fact, that to the savage seems to require explanation.
The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a philosophy of literature set in poetry; the work of one who found himself the master of histories, mythologies, philosophies, sciences, and national literatures, in the encyclopaedical manner in which modern erudition, with its international intercourse of the whole earth's population, researches into Indian, Etruscan, and all Cyclopaean arts, geology, chemistry, astronomy; and every one of these kingdoms assuming a certain aerial and poetic character, by reason of the multitude.
In the early period of Renaissance sculpture, Mino da Fiesole, Pollaiuolo, and Filarete added works in bronze and marble, which blent the grace of Florentine religious tradition with quaint neo-pagan mythologies.
The fate of the eagle is recounted in another tablet of the Etana series, which again furnishes an episode paralleled in the mythologies of other nations. The eagle has lost favor with Shamash. Enmity has arisen between the eagle and the serpent, and, curiously enough, the latter stands under the protection of the sun-god.
I am at one with the genius of the place; I have escaped customs, habits, conventions of every sort; the false growths of civilisation have fallen away and left me in primitive strength and freshness once more; my own personality disappears, and I am breathing the universal life; I have gone back to the far beginning of things, and I am once more in that dim, rich moment of primeval contact with Nature out of which all mythologies and literatures have grown.
It is our happiness to live in a time when all religions are at last outgrowing their mythologies, and emancipated men are stretching out their hands to share together "the luxury of a religion that does not degrade."
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