this or that deity. The essential point is that all agreed in declaring that the god was born or died.
Once more—and this is a point of some importance when we are told that priests differ from each other in their statements—we must remember that these very differences are practically universal in all mythology, even in that of civilised races. Thus, if one savage authority declares that men came originally out of trees, while his fellow-tribesman avers that the human race was created out of clay, and a third witness maintains that his first ancestors emerged from a hole in the ground, and a fourth stands to it that his stock is descended from a swan or a serpent, and a fifth holds that humanity was evolved from other animal forms, these savage statements appear contradictory. But when we find (as we do) precisely the same sort of contradictions everywhere recurring among civilised peoples, in Greece, India, Egypt, as well as in Africa, America, and Australia, there seems no longer any reason to distrust the various versions of the myth which are given by various priests or chiefs. Each witness is only telling the legend which he has heard or prefers, and it is precisely the co-existence of all these separate monstrous beliefs which makes the enigma and the attraction of mythology. In short, the discrepancies of savage myths are not an argument against the authenticity of our information on the topic, because the discrepancies themselves are repeated in civilised myth. Semper et ubique, et ab omnibus. To object to the presence of discrepant accounts is to object to mythology for being mythological.
Another objection is derived from the "unwillingness of savages to talk about religion," and from the difficulty of understanding them when they do talk of it. Mr. Müller mentions the case of Salvado, a Benedictine missionary in Australia, "who, after three years, came to the conclusion that the natives did not adore any deity, true or false. Yet he found out afterwards that the natives believed in an omnipotent being who had created the world." Yes, but
