This phenomenon, the priority of the lunar to the solar worship, is asserted also by the adherents of a theory of the history of civilisation usually called the Gynaecocratic, which was founded and worked out by the Swiss savant Bachofen in a large book entitled 'The Gynaecocracy of Antiquity.' To the adherents of this theory, who suppose the lordship of man to have been preceded by a long period in which the female sex bore rule, the lunar worship is closely allied to the importance of woman, while the solar worship is connected with the rule of man. I do not, of course, deem it a part of my present task to criticise the Gynaecocratic theory, which has certainly had but small success in the learned world, or to take up a position either for or against it. Yet it is satisfactory that the phenomenon in the history of religion which we have brought into prominence may find confirmation in another quarter, where the premisses are utterly different.
§5. The first founder of Comparative Mythology, Professor A. Kuhn, starting from the truth 'that every stage of social and political growth has a more or less peculiar mythological character of its own, and that the fact of these, so to speak, mythological strata lying side by side or crossing one another often renders the solution of mythological enigmas more difficult,' insisted, primarily with reference to Aryan mythology, that the mythological products of each of the great epochs of civilisation ought to be sifted with reference to the cycles of myths peculiar to each epoch.[1] He himself ventured on the first beginnings or elements of such a sifting in a very interesting and instructive academical treatise 'On stages of development in the formation of Myths.'[2] Kuhn finds the criterion of a myth's belonging to one or another period
- ↑ I must explain that the preceding four sections were already written down, before I could get a sight of Kuhn's essay, which appeared later.
- ↑ Ueber Entwickelungsstufen der Mythenbildung, Berlin 1874; from the Abhandlungen der königl. Akademie d. Wiss. zu Berlin (phil.-hist. Klasse), 1873. pp. 123–137.
