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Now if the storm-wind is a host of Pitris, or one great Pitri who appears as a fearful giant, and is also a pack of wolves or wish-hounds, or a single savage dog or wolf, the inference is obvious to the mythopoeic mind that men may become wolves, at least after death. And to the uncivilized thinker this inference is strengthened, as Mr.
Sometimes, of course, he added, the ghost is the resultant of some horrible cruelty or murder, mankind, from various motives, refusing to let the memory of the crime die out, but more usually the ghost is born of the early mythopoeic imagination of man that cherishes the marvellous. One never hears of a new ghost nowadays. Science, no doubt, is an iconoclast in the matter.
+868+. Babylonia, then, is the chief mythopoeic center for the Semitic region, but we are not warranted in extending its influence as myth-maker beyond this region. The myths of the Indo-European peoples have in general the stamp of independent creation. The relation between the Semitic and the Egyptian mythologies is still under discussion.
The former, and to some extent the latter, still live in the mythopoeic state of mind regarding bees, for instance, as persons who must be told of a death in the family. Their myths are still not wholly out of concord with their habitual view of a world in which an old woman may become a hare.
Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely probable by the modern investigations into the workings of the mythopoeic spirit in post-Christian times. Charlemagne and Roland, St.
As for the Church, I cannot conceive anything better for the culture of a country than the presence in it of a body of men whose duty it is to believe in the supernatural, to perform daily miracles, and to keep alive that mythopoeic faculty which is so essential for the imagination.
Nevertheless it is realized that beings have existed from time to time far larger and more powerful in every way than the ordinary human being, and the mythopoeic tendency of the human mind has doubtless supplied the rest, and accredited to them marvellous powers which they did not in reality possess.
It is ever the fate of a great name to be enshrined in fable, and Alexander soon became the hero of romantic story, scarcely more wonderful than the actual, but growing from age to age with the mythopoeic spirit which can work as freely in fact as fiction.
Max Muller at once maintaining that a feature of language, gender-terminations, caused the mythopoeic state of thought, and quoting with approval the statement that the mythopoeic state of thought caused gender-terminations. Mr. Max Muller's whole system of mythology is based on reasoning analogous to this example.
The child can recognize no essential difference between nature and the supernatural, and the products of mythopoeic fancy which have been spun about natural objects, and which have lain so long and so warm about the hearts of generations and races of men, are now the best of all nutriments for the soul.
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