Transcriber's Note
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BY
ANDREW LANG, M.A.
HON. FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGEOXFORD
NEW EDITION
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1893
All rights reserved
TO
E. B. TYLOR
AUTHOR OF ‘PRIMITIVE CULTURE’
THESE STUDIES OF THE OLDEST STORIES
Are Dedicated
Since the first publication of Custom and Myth, manyother works have appeared, dealing on the same principleswith matters of belief, fable and ritual. Werethe book to be re-written, numerous fresh pieces ofevidence might be adduced in support of its conclusions.In Mr. Frazer’s Golden Bough (Macmillan)the student will find a carefully conceived argument,and a large collection of testimonies, bearing on thewide diffusion, among savages and civilised peoples,of ancient rites and ancient ideas. The works ofMannhardt have practically been introduced to theEnglish reader by Mr. Frazer, with much new matterof his own. The main topics are the worship ofhuman gods and the superstitions connected withvegetation. To push a theory too far is the commontemptation of mythologists, and perhaps Mr. Frazer’scornstalk does rather threaten to overshadow thewhole earth and exclude the light of sun and sky.But the reader, whatever his opinions, will findgreat pleasure and profit in Mr. Frazer’s remarkablestudies, and in those of Mannhardt, which wereunknown to myself when I wrote Custom and Myth.
In Miss Harrison’s volume on Athenian Mythsthe student will find the ætiological theory (namely,that many myths were invented to explain obscurepoints of ritual) applied in a number of classicalinstances. A singularly ingenious study of Romanmyths is presented in Mr. Jevons’s edition of[Pg viii]Plutarch’s Romaine Questions (Nutt). These are recentinstances of the use of the ‘anthropological’method, first firmly established by Mr. Tylor’sPrimitive Culture, and now holding its own as arecognised instrument in the study of the historicaldevelopment of the imagination. In Rosscher’sAusführliches Lexikon of Greek and Roman mythology,the earlier method of the philologists isusually adopted, and the work, still in course ofpublication, is most useful for its recondite learning.
These notes are meant for the guidance of anyreader who may care to push his studies furtherthan the sketches of the present volume.
On one or two points some remarks may be necessary.The author has been not unnaturally accusedof seeing Totems everywhere. He would thereforeprotest that he does not regard every beast and birdwhich appears in myths or in religious art as necessarilya Totem. But he inclines to think that whereCelts or Greeks claim descent from a god whopursued his amours in animal shape, or where atribe bears the name of an animal, regards thatanimal with religious respect, and places its effigybeside that of a god, the Totemistic hypothesiscolligates the phenomena, and deserves consideration.