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Updated: May 22, 2025
And the first mythologists seem not improperly to have joined Mars and Venus together; for all nations of this character are greatly addicted either to the love of women or of boys, for which reason it was thus at Lacedaemon; and many things in their state were done by the authority of the women.
This tendency was doubtless realised and encouraged by the poets, but it was not created by them, any more than by the mythologists who defined and systematised it.
The reason, and, indeed, the justification, of the view taken by the Comparative Mythologists is patent. They found in every direction low forms of religious belief, existing among savage tribes. These were seen to accompany general lack of civilisation. Regarding civilised men as evolving from uncivilised, what more natural than to regard civilised religion as evolving from uncivilised?
Then the wicked Gandharvas sent a flash of lightning, and Urvasi, seeing her naked husband, instantly vanished. The different versions of this legend, which have been elaborately analyzed by comparative mythologists, leave no doubt that Urvasi is one of the dawn-nymphs or bright fleecy clouds of early morning, which vanish as the splendour of the sun is unveiled.
Max Muller's new book we constantly find him protesting, on the whole and as a rule, against the system which illustrates Aryan myths by savage parallels. Thus he maintains that it is perilous to make comparative use of myths current in languages say, Maori or Samoyed which the mythologists confessedly do not know.
To interdict a man from the use of fire and water, was accounted the same in effect as to send him out of life; so that if men, upon the original terms of their creation, were thus interdicted by the Creator himself, as the Heathen mythologists supposed them to be, they were sent into life upon such terms as others were sent out of it.
Mythologists who believe that human nature is the source of myths will go on comparing all myths that are accessible in translations by competent collectors. Mr. Max Muller says, 'We seldom find mythology, as it were, in situ as it lived in the minds and unrestrained utterances of the people. Nothing can be more true, or more admirably stated.
Priestley, then in America, answered Paine's work, and in quoting less than a page from the "Age of Reason" he made three alterations, one of which changed "church mythologists" into "Christian mythologists," and also raised the editorial footnote into the text, omitting the reference to Mosheim.
The Christian mythologists tell us that Christ died for the sins of the world, and that he came on Purpose to die. Would it not then have been the same if he had died of a fever or of the small pox, of old age, or of anything else? The declaratory sentence which, they say, was passed upon Adam, in case he ate of the apple, was not, that thou shalt surely be crucified, but, thou shale surely die.
Here, the Greek mythologists, the magicians of Roman Africa, the Indian mystics, all the treasures, in a word, for the lack of which contemporary dissertations are poor laughable things. Believe me, he is well avenged, the little universitarian whom they took for a madman, whom they defied. I have lived, I live, I shall live in a perpetual burst of laughter at their false and garbled erudition.
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