would be used to describe the action of the beneficent or consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious wind: and every word or phrase became the germ of a new story, as soon as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name.[1]
Secondary myths.Thus in the Polyonymy which was the result of the earliest form of human thought, we have the germ of the great epics of later times, and of the countless legends which make up the rich stores of mythical tradition. There was no bound or limit to the images suggested by the sun in his ever varying aspects; and for every one of these aspects they would have a fitting expression, nor could human memory retain the exact meaning of all these phrases when the men who used them had been scattered from their original home. Old epithets would now become the names of new beings, and the legends so framed would constitute the class of secondary myths. But in all this there would be no disease of language. The failure would be that of memory alone,—a failure inevitable, yet not to be regretted, when we think of the rich harvest of beauty which the poets of many ages and many lands have reaped from these half-remembered words.[2]
Polyonomy, as affecting the growth of mythology.It mattered little, then, of what object and phenomenon they might happen to speak. It might be the soft morning light or the fearful storm-cloud, the wind or the thunder. In each case there would be Polyonymy, the employment of many names to denote the same thing. In each case, their words would express truthfully the- ↑ "That Titanic assurance with which we say, the sun must rise, was unknown to the early worshippers of nature, or if they also began to feel the regularity with which the sun and the other stars perform their daily labour, they still thought of free beings kept in temporary servitude, chained for a time, and bound to obey a higher will, but sure to rise, like Herakles, to a higher glory at the end of their labours."—Max Müller, "Comparative Mythology," Chips, &c., ii. 96.
- ↑ In his Lectures on Language, second series, 358, Professor Max Müller asserts that "whenever any word, that was at first new metaphorically, is new without a clear conception of the steps that led to its original metaphorical meaning, there is danger of mythology; whenever those steps are forgotten and artificial steps put in their places, we have mythology, or, if I may say so, we have diseased language, whether that language refers to religious or secular interests." The mythology thus produced he terms the bane of antiquity. This view is opposed by M. Baudry in his able paper, De l'Interprétation Mythologique. After quoting the sentence just cited, he adds, "Voilà le langage accusé de maladie et de révolte, fort injustement à notre avis, car la faute n'est qu'aux défaillances de la mémoire, qui a gardé le mot mais oublié le sens. Ce mal arrive tantôt pour un mot, tantôt pour une figure symbolique dont on a. perdu la clef. Mais parce qu'une representation mal comprise d'un évêque debout devant des catéchumènes plongés dans la cuve baptismale a donné lieu à la légende de saint Nicholas ressuscitant les enfants, en faut-il conclure aussi que la sculpture était malade?" But after all there is no real antagonism between the view taken by Professor Max Müller and that of M. Baudry. With the former, mythology arises when the steps which led to a metaphor are in greater or less degree forgotten; in other words, from a failure of memory, not from disease in language.
