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Fortune, which under the humbler name of luck seems but a word, is a very divinity when it guides the most important actions of a man's life. Always it has seemed to me that this divinity is not blind, as the mythologists affirm; she had brought me low only to exalt me, and I found myself in high places, only, as it seems, to be cast into the depths.
After this, who can doubt the bountifulness of the Christian Mythology? Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded put Satan into the pit let him out again given him a triumph over the whole creation damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, there Christian mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together.
Unaroused by any strong stimulus in their ponderings over the riddle of the universe, the sober, plodding scientists and the calm, truth-loving philosophers gained a peaceful victory over the mythologists. The Gods of China The Birth of the Soul The dualism noted in the last chapter is well illustrated by the Chinese pantheon.
Thus Atlas and Hercules clubbed to raise and underprop the falling sky, if you'll believe the wise mythologists, but they raised it some half an inch too high, Atlas to entertain his guest Hercules more pleasantly, and Hercules to make himself amends for the thirst which some time before had tormented him in the deserts of Africa.
Some faint idea of the savage ignorance of Russia may be had from the history of the Siberian exiles and the fiendish persecutions of the Jewish people. Siberia is the Ice Hell of the old Norse mythologists, into which men, women and children have been indiscriminately cast on the bare suspicion of desiring to better the wretched condition of the Russian people.
The conception advocated by me gives their due to the nature mythologists just as much as to the psychologists that oppose them. The necessity of reckoning with an anagogic content of myths results from the fact that religions with their ethical valuations, have developed from mythical beginnings. And account must be taken of these relations.
Nor is the record perfect, though it is not so poor in most cases as was once believed. The Brothers Grimm, patriarchs alike as mythologists and folk-lorists, the Castor and Pollox of our studies, have proved this as regards the Teutonic nations, just as they showed us, by many a striking example, that in great part folk-lore was the mythology of to-day, and mythology the folk-lore of yesterday.
This method is fairly well established and orthodox when we deal with usages and superstitious beliefs; but may we apply the same method when we deal with myths? Here a difficulty occurs. Mythologists, as a rule, are averse to the method of folklore.
The symbol by which the Mythologists represented the Ark was an immense egg. This was supposed to have been produced by Ether and Chaos, at the bidding of Time, the one ethereal being who created the universe. In the sacred rites of Osiris, Isis, and the Dionysia of Bacchus, the Ark or Ship was introduced.
From this to the use of janua to designate a door in general, whether guarded by an image of Janus or not, would be an easy and natural transition. If there is any truth in this conjecture, it may explain very simply the origin of the double head of Janus, which has so long exercised the ingenuity of mythologists.
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