1
Some of the names in Greek myths are Greek, and intelligible. A few others (such as Zeus) can be interpreted by aid of Sanskrit. But even when the meaning of the name is known, we are little advanced in interpretation of the myth.
2
Compare De Cara: Essame Critico.
3
Revue de l’Hist. des Rel., ii. 136.
4
Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, p. 431.
6
A study of the contemporary stone age in Scotland will be found in Mitchell’s Past and Present.
7
About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry, killed her deceased husband’s horse. When remonstrated with by her landlord, she said, ‘Would you have my man go about on foot in the next world?’ She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.
8
‘At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelp’s flesh’ (Pliny, H. N., xxix. 4).
9
Compare Cleobulus, Fr. 2: Bergk, Lyr. Gr., iii. 201. Ed. 4.
11
Mr. Leslie Stephen points out to me that De Quincey’s brother heard ‘the midnight axe’ in the Galapagos Islands (Autobiographical Sketches, ‘My Brother’).
12
‘Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands smiling by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves and poppies in her hands’ (Theocritus, vii. 155-157).
13
In Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough is a very large collection of similar harvest rites.
15
Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel., vol. ii.
16
Pausanias, iii. 15. When the boys were being cruelly scourged, the priestess of Artemis Orthia held an ancient barbaric wooden image of the goddess in her hands. If the boys were spared, the image grew heavy; the more they were tortured, the lighter grew the image. In Samoa the image (shark’s teeth) of the god Taema is consulted before battle. ‘If it felt heavy, that was a bad omen; if light, the sign was good’ – the god was pleased (Turner’s Samoa, p. 55).
17
Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 268.
18
Fison, Journal Anthrop. Soc., Nov., 1883.
19
Taylor’s New Zealand, p. 181.
20
This is not the view of le Père Lafitau, a learned Jesuit missionary in North America, who wrote (1724) a work on savage manners, compared with the manners of heathen antiquity. Lafitau, who was greatly struck with the resemblances between Greek and Iroquois or Carib initiations, takes Servius’s other explanation of the mystica vannus, ‘an osier vessel containing rural offerings of first fruits.’ This exactly answers, says Lafitau, to the Carib Matoutou, on which they offer sacred cassava cakes.
21
The Century Magazine, May, 1883.
22
A minute account of the mysteries of Pueblo Indians, and their use of the bull-roarer, will be found
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