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Updated: May 13, 2025
Add to which, that in various mythologies, Greek, Scandinavian, and others, the oldest beings are giants; that according to a traditional genealogy the gods, demi-gods, and in some cases men, are descended from these after the human fashion; and that while in the East we hear of sons of God who saw the daughters of men that they were fair, the Teutonic myths tell of unions between the sons of men and the daughters of the gods.
For if it is indisputable that humanity, in affirming God, or all that is included in the word me or spirit, only affirms itself, it is equally undeniable that it affirms itself as something other than its own conception of itself, as all mythologies and theologies show.
Even if a rotten morality in his young gods is to be assumed, this would be proper as in the young gods of the mythologies. The Teuton marriage refers plainly to property. The language has prominent terms indicating how espousal means goods with a woman attached to them. There is scarcely an equivalent in English.
Drawing his evidence from the actual statements of old writers, but more from legends and the mythologies of antiquity, he came to the conclusion that a system of descent through women had, in all cases, preceded the rise of kinship through males. Almost at the same time Dr. J. F. McLennan, ignorant of the work of Bachofen, came to the same opinion.
Perhaps, it should be added, that these essays are, so to speak, only flint-flakes from a neolithic workshop. But lack of leisure and other causes make it probable that my 'Key to All Mythologies' will go the way of Mr. Casaubon's treatise.
Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales give excellent suggestions as to the right use to be made of the old mythologies. Many of the supplementary readers now being so widely used in the public schools are good, simple versions of these old stories which helped to make the world what it should be.
It is their profession; they live in it. No one can read Beowulf or the Eddas without being struck by the great resemblance between Grendel, the hideous, semi-human night prowler, and the Kewahqu', a precisely similar monster, who rises from the depths of waters to wantonly murder man. I do not recall any two beings in any other two disconnected mythologies so strangely similar.
Nevertheless, after making due allowances for differences in the artistic method of treatment, there is between the mythologies of the Old and the New Worlds a fundamental resemblance. We come upon solar myths and myths of the storm curiously blended with culture-myths, as in the cases of Hermes, Prometheus, and Kadmos.
If belief is waning in the primitive mythologies, and if the social life of the Empire is moved by unrest and despair, the problem is to find a greater satisfaction. There have been spoken many beautiful words by the Roman scholars which are sweet premonitions of immortality.
These phantasms are, moreover, personified by the classifying process of types, they are transformed into human images, and arranged in a hierarchy, and to this the various religions and mythologies of the world owe their origin.
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