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Updated: May 22, 2025
Among the pagan mythologists, Mercury, or Hermes, was always represented by a cubical stone, because he was the type of truth, and the same form was adopted by the Israelites in the construction of the tabernacle, which was to be the dwelling-place of divine truth. And, then, as to its material: This, too, is an essential element of all symbolism.
There, as Humboldt says, reigns eternal darkness, so absolute that Earth-shine or even Sunlight is never able to dispel it. Had Michael's friends the old mythologists ever known anything about it, they would doubtless have made it the entrance to the infernal regions. On the whole surface of our Earth, there is no mountain even remotely resembling it. It is a perfect type of the lunar crater.
I make not this comparison out of the least design to detract from these worthy writers, for it is well known among mythologists that weeds have the pre-eminence over all other vegetables; and therefore the first monarch of this island whose taste and judgment were so acute and refined, did very wisely root out the roses from the collar of the order and plant the thistles in their stead, as the nobler flower of the two.
As soon as learned Jesuits like Pere Lafitau began to understand their savage flocks, they said, 'These men are living in Ovid's Metamorphoses. They found mythology in situ! Hence mythologists now study mythology in situ in savages and in peasants, who till very recently were still in the mythopoeic stage of thought. Mannhardt made this idea his basis. Mr.
Nor, let it be observed, do I say that such a mythical faculty persists as such only among the ignorant masses in town or country, in the form of those very ancient superstitions which have been collected with immense labour by learned mythologists and ethnologists; on the contrary, I maintain that the mythical faculty still exists in all men, independently of this survival of old superstitions, to whatever people and class they may belong; and it will continue to exist as an innate function of the intelligence, if not with respect to the substance, which may alter, at any rate in the mode of its acts and proceedings.
So, for instance, why the sunset and sunrise is so readily conceived as a swallowing and eructation, or as a process of regeneration. It is also conceivable that the obtrusive occurrence of incest, castration of the father, etc., should make the mythologists ponder. It was bias on the part of many of them to be unwilling to see the psychological value of these things.
Philological mythologists begin with the unknown, the name of a god. The methods are each other's opposites, yet the letter in which Mannhardt illustrates this fact is cited as a proof of his return to his old colours. Irritating Conduct of Mannhardt
The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.
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.
These remarks are, indeed, the charter, so to speak, of anthropological mythology and of folklore. The old mythologists worked at a hortus siccus, at myths dried and pressed in thoroughly literary books, Greek and Latin. But we now study myths 'in the unrestrained utterances of the people, either of savage tribes or of the European Folk, the unprogressive peasant class.
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