Custom and Myth

Max Müller, Selected Essays, ii. 622.

161

Myth of Kirkê, p. 80.

162

Turner’s Samoa.

163

Josephus, loc. cit. For this, and many other references, I am indebted to Schwartz’s Prähistorisch-änthropologische Studien. In most magic herbs the learned author recognises thunder and lightning – a theory no less plausible than Mr. Brown’s.

164

Lib. xxviii.

165

Schoolcraft.

166

Talvj, Charakteristik der Volkslieder, p. 3.

167

Fauriel, Chants de la Grèce moderne.

168

Thus Scotland scarcely produced any ballads, properly speaking, after the Reformation. The Kirk suppressed the dances to whose motion the ballad was sung in Scotland, as in Greece, Provence, and France.

169

L. Preller’s Ausgewählte Aufsätze. Greek ideas on the origin of Man. It is curious that the myth of a gold, a silver, and a copper race occurs in South America. See Brasseur de Bourbourg’s Notes on the Popol Vuh.

170

See essay on Early History of the Family.

171

This constant struggle may be, and of course by one school of comparative mythologists will be, represented as the strife between light and darkness, the sun’s rays, and the clouds of night, and so on. M. Castren has well pointed out that the struggle has really an historical meaning. Even if the myth be an elementary one, its constructors must have been in the exogamous stage of society.

172

Sampo may be derived from a Thibetan word, meaning ‘fountain of good,’ or it may possibly be connected with the Swedish Stamp, a hand-mill. The talisman is made of all the quaint odds and ends that the Fetichist treasures: swan’s feathers, flocks of wool, and so on.

173

Sir G. W. Cox’s Popular Romances of the Middle Ages, p. 19.

174

Fortnightly Review, 1869: ‘The Worship of Plants and Animals.’

175

Mr. McLennan in the Fortnightly Review, February 1870.

176

M. Schmidt, Volksleben der Neugriechen, finds comparatively few traces of the worship of Zeus, and these mainly in proverbial expressions.

177

Preller, Ausgewählte Aufsätze, p. 154.

178

Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. 156. Pinkerton, vii. 357.

179

Universities Mission to Central Africa, p. 217. Prim. Cult,, ii. 156, 157.

180

Quoted in ‘Jacob’s Rod’: London, n.d., a translation of La Verge de Jacob, Lyon, 1693.

181

Lettres sur la Baguette, pp. 106-112.

182

Turner’s Samoa, pp, 77, 119.

183

Cox, Mythol. of Aryan Races, passim.

184

See examples in ‘A Far-travelled Tale,’ ‘Cupid and Psyche,’ and ‘The Myth of Cronus.’

185