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Updated: June 29, 2025
Our Mordvinian, swarthy and gray-eyed, walked beside us, casting glances of inquiry at us, as the shaggy little horse plunged along, to ascertain our degrees of satisfaction with the experiment.
Real scholars know what Mordvinian divine names mean. They do not know what many Greek divine names mean as Hera, Artemis, Apollo, Athene; there is even much dispute about Demeter. No anthropologist, I hope, is denying that Nature-myths and Nature-gods exist.
But, to my amazement, he had never heard of the Leshi and the Vodyanoi, the wood-king and water-king of the folk-tales. At all events, he had never seen them, nor heard their weird frolics in the boughs and waves. The Mordvinian contributed to the entertainment by telling us of his people's costumes and habits, and gave us a lesson in his language, which was of the Tatar-Finnish variety.
Old hymns, ritual speeches, and charms may and do survive, though unintelligible. They are reckoned all the more potent, because all the more mysterious. But an unintelligible riddle or poetical saying does not survive, so we cannot thus account for mythology as a disease of language. Mordvinian Mythology
The armed Russian and Mordvinian foresters, our guides and protectors, were in the vanguard; and as Misha seemed peaceably disposed we relinquished all designs on his pelt, consoling ourselves with the reflection that it would not be good at this season of the year.
Still in the very natural and laudable pursuit of facts which will support the hypothesis of a disease of language, Mr. Max Muller turns to Mordvinian mythology. His wife is the Earth or earth goddess, Vediava. They have a large family, given to incest. The morals of the Mordvinian gods are as lax as those of Mordvinian mortals. There are plenty of minor gods, and spirits good and bad.
Dawn was a Mordvinian girl; in Australia she was a lubra addicted to lubricity. How does this help philological mythology? Mr. Max Muller is pleased to find solar and other elemental gods among the Mordvinians. But the discovery in no way aids his special theory. Nobody has ever denied that gods who are the sun or live in the sun are familiar, and are the centres of myths among most races.
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