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Updated: May 17, 2025
Exact identifications of these pictures with the animals by which the Hopi are or were surrounded, is, of course, impossible, for they are not realistic representations, but symbolic figures of mythic beings unknown save to the imagination of the primitive mythologist.
The anthropologist knows that, if he takes up a new book of travels in the remotest lands, he will find mention of strange customs perfectly familiar to him in other parts of the ancient and modern world. The mythologist would be surprised if he encountered in Papua or Central Africa, or Sakhalin, a perfectly new myth.
Anyhow the subject is one concerning which the comparative mythologist has, at different times, drawn opposite theories; but of this there can be no doubt, that plant-worship was a primitive faith of mankind, a fact in connection with which we may quote Sir John Lubbock's words, how, "By man in this stage of progress everything was regarded as having life, and being more or less a deity."
Are not the choicest fables of the poets, That were the fountains and first springs of wisdom, Wrapped in perplexed allegories?" BEN JONSON, Alchemist, act ii. sc. i. The distinguished German mythologist Müller defines a symbol to be "an eternal, visible sign, with which a spiritual feeling, emotion, or idea is connected."
If this were a question of scholarship merely, it would be simply foolhardy to differ from men like Max Muller, Adalbert Kuhn, Breal, and many others. But a revolutionary mythologist is encouraged by finding that these scholars usually differ from each other.
This last idea has been worked out by Mr. Andrew Lang, who judging by his book on The Making of Religion should be classed as a Comparative Religionist rather than as a Comparative Mythologist.
The statement of Herodotus that Homer and Hesiod "made the Greek theogony, and assigned to the gods their epithets and distinguished their prerogatives and their functions, and indicated their form," would not, of course, be accepted in a literal sense by any modern mythologist.
Though the growth of philosophy and decay of superstition may be good for a nation, the process is certainly conducive to the destruction of its myth and much of its poetry. The true mythologist takes myth for myth, enters into its spirit, and enjoys it.
It is the business of the comparative mythologist to trace the pedigree of the ideas from which such a conception may have sprung; while to the critical historian belongs the task of ascertaining and classifying the actual facts which this particular conception was used to interpret.
But such scanty folklore as we possess assures us that the storm, on the other hand, weathered Gladstone; and that the poem quoted refers to quite another person, also named William, and probably identical with William Tell that is, with the sun, which of course brings us back to Roth's view of the hawk, or solar Gladstone, though this argument in his own favour has been neglected by the learned mythologist.
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