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Updated: May 13, 2025
Real scholars know what Mordvinian divine names mean. They do not know what many Greek divine names mean as Hera, Artemis, Apollo, Athene; there is even much dispute about Demeter. No anthropologist, I hope, is denying that Nature-myths and Nature-gods exist.
His explanations, by aid of Sun-songs, of certain features in Greek mythology are plausible, and may be correct. It is a popular delusion that the anthropological mythologists deny the existence of solar myths, or of nature-myths in general. These are extremely common.
The life of the hero is placed back at the beginning of things, and in this way Gilgamesh is brought into direct contact with legends of man's early fortunes, with ancient historical reminiscences, as well as with nature-myths that symbolize the change of seasons and the annual inundations. Popular philosophy also enters into the life of the hero.
And this image may have been connected with old nature-myths about the marriage of Demeter and Poseidon that is, of encroachments of the sea upon the land; and the other myths of Demeter, the earth-mother, may have clustered round the place, till the Phigalians were glad for it was profitable as well as honourable to believe that in their cavern Demeter sat mourning for the loss of Proserpine, whom Pluto had carried down to Hades, and all the earth was barren till Zeus sent the Fates, or Iris, to call her forth, and restore fertility to the world.
To such people nature-myths and sacred animals appeal with a force that Europeans rarely understand. The parrots that perch on the pinnacles of the temple and the oxen that rest in the shade of its courts are not intruders but humble brothers of mankind, who may also be the messengers of the gods. Buddhism in Practice
The conclaves of Olympus, it appears, are merely nature-myths; the stately legends clustering about them turn out to be a rather elaborate method of expressing the fact that it occasionally rains.
The best-known of these lay sermons is: "The Queen of the Air" , a splendid blending of his fancy with the Greek nature-myths of cloud and storm, represented by Athena, goddess of the heavens, of the earth, and of the heart.
We may expect to come across a god Hammurabi some day. Gilgamesh is, as we have seen, a historical personage whose career has been so thoroughly amalgamated with nature-myths that he ends by becoming a solar deity who is invoked in incantations. The tendency to connect legendary and mythical incidents with ancient rulers is part and parcel of this process of deification.
In this persistence, and in these testimonies, the alleged abnormal phenomena differ from such matters as nature-myths, customs like Suttee, Taboo, Couvade, and Totemism, the change of men into beasts, the raising of storms by art-magic. These things our civilisation has dropped, the belief in other wild phenomena many persons in our civilisation retain.
But in all this there is no 'disease of language. These are frank nature-myths, 'aetiological, giving a fabulous reason for facts of nature. Mannhardt on Marchen. But Mannhardt goes farther. Now perhaps nobody will deny that some incidents in Marchen may have been originally suggested by nature-myths.
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