THE ECLIPSE OF SOLAR MYTHOLOGY

BY RICHARD M. DORSON

WE smile condescendingly today at the solar mythologists. So restrained a scholar as Stith Thompson refers to the extinct school as “absurd,” “fantastic,” “ridiculous,” even dangerous to the sanity of the modern reader.¹ Max Müller and his disciples are chided for not recognizing the inanity of their own theories, and Andrew Lang is lauded for piercing them with ridicule.

Max Müller’s sun has indeed set. But was the leading Sanscrit scholar of his day a fool? And why did Lang have to spend a quarter of a century in demolishing ideas so patently absurd? The famous Chips now sell at the old-book stalls for ten cents a volume, but they once graced the parlor tables of thoughtful Victorians, and in at least one instance distracted a groom on his honeymoon.² Viewed as part of the intellectual growth of the nineteenth century, solar mythology assumes a more honorable aspect.³ Its devotees contributed a yeasty ferment to the newly baptized field of folklore, and drew the attention of a host of scholars and readers to traditional narratives. Thompson neglects to comment on the intensity and drama of this fray, nor does he indicate that it was a two-way battle, lethal for both combatants. For Müller gave as good as he received, and riddled Lang’s own cherished concept of “savage” survivals. Before the smoke had cleared, this acrid debate over the origins of myths had gready broadened the base of folklore scholarship.

Solar mythology primarily deserves the attention of folklore students for the role it played in the history of our subject. In England, where the leading action took place, the comparative mythologists asserted and defended their position throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. As Lang himself conceded, without their provocation he and his fellow-folklorists might never have stirred into existence. One wonders indeed what Lang could have written on folklore without the enticing target of Müller, whose name re-echoes on Lang’s pages; if Müller were a dying god, apparently he enjoyed successive rebirths, for the Scot kept slaying him through numerous publications. To unravel this intricate literature of controversy, bursting into many books, dipping frequently into periodical essays and reviews, and spreading across the continent, would require another book. This paper will confine itself to England, and to the two principal protagonists, with some consideration of Müller’s chief allies, George W. Cox and Robert Brown, and of two American supporters, Daniel G. Brinton and John Fiske.

The historian of any field of learning would be proud to relate the encounter of two such brilliant luminaries as Andrew Lang and the Right Honorable Friedrich Max Müller. Between them they furnished English gentlemen with a well-stocked library. Coming to England from his native Germany as a youth of twenty-six, eager to translate the Sacred Books of India, Max Müller settled in Oxford and never left. He won a vast audience with limpid essays on such forbidding subjects as the science of language and the religion of India, and became so famous that when he considered leaving Oxford University in 1875 at the invitation of European governments, a special decree at Convocation and a prayerful eulogy from the Dean of Christ Church broke precedent to retain him free from all teaching duties.⁴ When Müller died in 1900, Queen Victoria sent his widow a personal telegram of sympathy, and royalty around the world added their condolences.

Andrew Lang, who would survive his adversary twelve years, wrote a gracious letter to Mrs. Max Müller, and spoke of her husband’s “good humour and kindness perhaps unexampled in the controversies of the learned and half-learned.”⁵ Classical “performer,” essayist, historian, poet, critic, anthropologist, sports writer, Lang ranged over so many fields of letters and learning that today a whole battery of specialists deliver lectures at St. Andrews on his contributions to their chosen fields.⁶ His fecundity and wit were the despair of his contemporaries, who writhed from his thrusts in the evening papers, the weekly and monthly reviews, and the endless books he wrote, edited, and prefaced.⁷

In 1856 Max Müller published a long essay on “Comparative Mythology” which reoriented all previous thinking on the origin of myths. The treatise astonished and delighted philologists, classicists, and literary scholars; John Fiske recalls the excitement that swept him on first reading the “noble essay,” and Cox and Lang equally pay it tribute.⁸ Only ten years earlier William Thorns had devised the term “folk-lore” to embrace the study of popular antiquities, and had begun comparative annotations of beliefs and tales in Notes and Queries. Only five years before had the first book appeared which used “Folklore” in its title.⁹ The study of mythology remained in a separate, sterile compartment; even Thomas Keightley, who wrote on both fairy legends and Greek myths, produced only a conventional manual of classical mythology interpreting the Homeric gods and heroes as pretty allegories.¹⁰ Müller now offered a key to the understanding of Aryan traditions, whether myths of the gods, legends of heroes, or tales of the people, through the science of comparative philology and the new revelation of Vedic Sanscrit.

From the appearance of this essay to the last years of his life Müller expanded and championed his method. The Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series (1864) included five chapters relating to solar mythology. Three years later Müller brought together in the second volume of his Chips from a German Wor\shop his occasional “Essays on Mythology, Traditions, and Customs” dating from (and including) his epochal monograph. This volume particularly intrigues the intellectual historian by recording Müller’s reactions, in the form of review-essays, to classical folklore works emerging in the 1860’s: the tale-collections of Callaway, Dasent, and Campbell, and the seminal researches of Tylor. A lecture “On the Philosophy of Mythology” formed part of the Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873).¹¹ In his Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as illustrated by the religions of India (1878), Müller turned critic, and to the question “Is Fetishism a Primitive Form of Religion?” replied with a strong negative; at the same time he discussed the problem of securing reliable evidence from savages on their beliefs. Here Müller strikes at the anthropological evolutionists. The chapters on “The Lessons of the; Veda” and “Vedic Deities” in India: What Can It Teach Us (1882) tentatively apply the solar theory to savages.

He considerably extended his critique of rival methods in his Gifford Lectures for 1888 on Natural Religion (1889), in analyzing the three schools of mythology contending in England. In Physical Religion (1891), Müller devoted particular attention to Agni, the Vedic god of fire, and demonstrated his religious and mythological components in two chapters, “The Mythological Development of Agni” and “Religion, Myth, and Custom.” Again in Anthropological Religion (1892), the four-time Gifford lecturer touched on such favorite themes as the unreliability of anthropological evidence, and the contradictory reports about savage ideas and ways. Because mythology formed a vital link in his chain of being, along with thought, language, and religion, Müller rarely omitted the solar theory from his general discussions of cultural and religious origins. In these books Müller never mentioned Lang by name, although he referred continually to “ethno-psychological” mythologists who studied the tales of savages without learning their languages. Lang remarked on this omission in his review of a new edition of the Chips (1894), a review which finally drew blood and led Müller to produce two thick volumes on Contributions to the Science of Mythology (1897).¹² Here he massed the arguments of his lifelong researches for a personal clash with Lang, repeated everything he had previously written, and repeated his repetitions throughout the twin volumes.

Lang was equally voluminous and repetitious. He tells us that, with other undergraduates at Oxford in the 1860’s, he read Müller’s writings on mythology, without conviction; after graduating in 1868, his reading in the myths of savage races hardened his distrust of Müller into a contrary hypothesis.¹³ The first fruits of this thinking appeared in a ground-breaking article, “Mythology and Fairy Tales,” published in the Fortnightly Review in 1872. Lang continued to snipe away in the magazines at Müller’s solar interpretations¹⁴ until the year 1884, when he unloosed a formidable barrage of more permanent criticism. He gathered together his essays illustrating the anthropological approach and undermining the philological method, in Custom and Myth, a popular work which enjoyed frequent reprintings. A major article on “Mythology” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, subsequently translated into French in book form,¹⁵ closely examined and dissected Müller’s theory. A detailed introduction to Margaret Hunt’s translation of Grimm’s Household Tales paid special attention to the hypotheses of Müller’s leading disciple, George W. Cox. When Müller wrote three articles in the ‘Nineteenth Century in 1885 confidently developing his system, even to bringing non-Aryan myths within the solar formula, Lang entered his objections in the first number for 1886, in a brisk piece on “Myths and Mycologists.”¹⁶

Pushing forward his examination of “savage” myths and tales, Lang produced his most substantial work in the field of mythology and folklore in 1887 with his two- volume study, Myth, Ritual, and Religion. Here he amassed world-wide evidence to support his contention that primitive peoples everywhere possessed similar beliefs, tales, and customs, which survived in classic Greek myths and in modern peasant lore. This exposition powerfully influenced the new generation of folklorists who had in 1878 formed a Folk-Lore Society and initiated a folklore journal. Following Müller’s exhaustive rebuttal in his Science of Comparative Mythology, Lang replied the same year (1897) with a point-by-point rejoinder in Modern Mythology. Curiously, also in this year, the last and most intense of their public disagreement, Lang visited Müller at Norham Gardens, and subsequently they exchanged cordial letters.¹⁷

Numerous other figures entered into the mythological controversy before, during, and after the debate just outlined. In a lecture delivered before the Royal Institution in 1871, Müller rose to a greater heat of anger than he ever displayed against Lang, for the smashing denunciation of comparative mythology uttered in that very room a year before by the Greek scholar, John Stuart Blackie.¹⁸ Both Müller and Cox fought a rearguard action with the Right Honorable William E. Gladstone, who insisted on interpreting Greek myths as a degraded form of Revelation. Robert Brown refuted Lang’s refutation of Müller’s Science of Comparative Mythology with his own book of jibes and sneers, which elicited a smoking retort from Lang. Müller and Lang joined hands in pouncing on the mythological innovations of Herbert Spencer, who ascribed the beginnings of myths to savage worship of ancestors. Then they fell to arguing whether Mannhardt in Germany, Tiele in Holland, Canizzaro or Morselli in Italy, Gaidoz in France, and Horatio Hale in the United States supported the philological or ethnological position. But these sideshows merely heightened interest in the main event.

Max Müller arrived at his solar interpretation of myths through comparative philology. He tells in his autobiography of his exhilaration in turning from classical studies to the novelties of Sanscrit; he heard Klee and Brockhaus at the University of Leipzig in the years 1838 to 1841 with the sense of peering into the dawn of civilization.¹⁹ His fascination for Sanscrit took him to Berlin in 1844 to hear Bopp, a founder of comparative philology, to Paris the next year to collate Sanscrit manuscripts under the direction of Burnouf, and to London in 1846 to seek the patronage of the East India Company in publishing a projected translation of the Rig-Veda. Müller candidly reveals in later life what a priggish bookworm he was when a stripling in Paris, sleeping one night out of three and starving himself to continue his studies, with never a thought for society or gaiety. But at twenty-three he had found his life’s work, the study of the ancient literature of India, and his master thesis, that the religion, the thought, the language, and the mythology of the Aryan people could be unveiled from the Vedas.²⁰

Both Müller and Lang puzzled over an anomaly no scholar had yet explained, the barbarous elements in Greek myths. How could so civilized a people repeat such degrading stories about their gods? The mystery can be cleared up, Müller reasons, by tracing the names of the Greek deities to their Sanscrit equivalents, and then reading in the Veda, the oldest literary monument of the Aryan peoples, to perceive the true nature of the gods. All the Indo-European peoples belonged to a common Aryan stock; after the migration of the European groups from their Indie homeland, the parent language, and the mythology it related, splintered into various offshoots. A time came when the original meanings of the names of the Vedic gods were forgotten, and survived only in mythical phrases and proverbs of uncertain sense. Stories then developed to explain these phrases. From this “disease of language” myths were born.

Müller postulated a “mythopoeic” age when truly noble conceptions of the Aryan gods first arose. This age occurred, not at the beginning of civilization, but at a stage early enough so that language could not convey abstract notions. Two processes developed to carry the burden of communication: polyonomy, where one word carried many meanings, and homonymy, where one idea became attached to different words. Dyaus, the supreme god, might be understood as sky, sun, air, dawn, light, brightness. Conversely, a number of different words might signify the sun, with its complex of associations. These phenomena of mythopoeic thought and speech thickened the confusion resulting from the “disease of language.”

Metaphors thus operated in two ways. The same verb root, for instance “to shine,” could form the name of the sun or a term for the brightness of thought. Then again, nouns so formed could be transferred poetically to other objects; the rays of the sun become fingers, clouds are called mountains, the rain-clouds are referred to as cows with heavy udders, the lightning receives the appellation arrow or serpent. These metaphorical words are “Appellatives,” and form the substance of myths.²¹ Müller always stressed that solar interpretation must be based on strict phonetic rules. The “ponderous squibs” that had reduced the nursery song of sixpence, or Napoleon, or a gendeman named Mr. Bright, or Max Müller himself, to solar myths, all went wide of the mark in ridiculing the excesses of comparative mythologists who failed to identify similar gods and heroes with etymological proofs.²²

Clearly, mythopoeic man constructed his pantheon around the sun, the dawn, and the sky. How could it be otherwise?, Müller asked. “What we call the Morning, the ancient Aryans called the Sun or the Dawn ... What we call Noon, and Evening, and Night, what we call Spring and Winter, what we call Year, and Time, and Life, and Eternity—all this the ancient Aryans called Sun. And yet wise people wonder and say, How curious that the ancient Aryans should have had so many solar myths. Why, every time we say ‘Good morning,’ we commit a solar myth. Every poet who sings about ‘the May driving the Winter from the field again’ commits a solar myth. Every ‘Christmas number’ of our newspapers—ringing out the old year and ringing in the new—is brimful of solar myths. Be not afraid of solar myths ....”²³

The major triumph of comparative mythology lay in the equation Dyaus=Zeus, which associated the supreme gods of the Greeks and Vedic pantheons. If they were identical, their families of lesser gods and goddesses must equally be kin. Dyaus is the Vedic sky-god, and now the ugly mystery of the Greek myth of Cronus and Zeus is cleared up. Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, at the behest of his mother, Gaea, who was both Uranus’s wife and daughter. Cronus then married his own sister and swallowed his children as fast as they were born. But Zeus escaped when his mother substituted for him a stone swaddled like a baby. Then Zeus compelled Cronus to disgorge his brothers and sisters. Scarcely a fitting tale to introduce the beauties of Greek mythology to the younger generation! But now we see plainly that the marriage of Uranus and Gaea represents the union of Heaven and Earth. The paternal cannibalism of Cronus originally signified the heavens devouring and later releasing, the clouds, and the act of Zeus depicts the final separation of Heaven and Earth, and the commencement of man’s history.²⁴

In making their equations, Müller and other comparative philologists of his day filled their pages with a series of acrostic puzzles that inevitably arrived, after conjecture, surmise, and supposition, at a predestined goal. For Müller it was the sun, for Kuhn the storm-clouds, for Schwartz the wind, for Preller the sky.²⁵ With increasing acerbity Müller told Lang and all non-Sanscritists to stay out of these arguments,²⁶ but on occasion he did provide English readers with homely examples of the “forgetfulness of language,” which he dubbed “modern mythology.” The arms of Oxford, displaying an ox crossing a ford, represented such a popular etymology. Look how “cocoa” has absorbed “cacao,” how “God” is associated with “good,” how “lark,” as sport, suggests the bird. We speak of “swallowing” one’s pride, and perhaps an early swallower was named Cronus.²⁷ One dramatic illustration that Müller offered to clinch his point dealt with the modern myth of the barnacle goose, reported by sailors and travelers who had seen birds hatched from shellfish. Working back in time through his sources, Müller eventually arrived at a twelfth century Irish version from Giraldus Cambrensis. Then he gives the key. Irish birds would be called Hiberniculae, a name eventually shortened to Berniculae, which easily becomes Bernacula, and is confused with “barnacles.” In this way linguistic confusion creates the myth of birds being born from barnacles. Similarly, speculates Müller, the legend of Dick Whittington and his cat could have arisen from misapprehension of the French “achat,” trade, to which Whittington actually owed his wealth, but which in English was rendered “a cat.”²⁸. Unravel this kind of verbal confusion, and the puzzling elements in Greek myths appear as legends springing up around divine names which, before the Aryan separation, signified the sun and the dawn.

Andrew Lang read the classics at Oxford in the years just after the bombshell of Darwin burst over the Western world. The theory of biological evolution led logically into the hypothesis of human evolution, so it seemed in the dazzling researches of Edward B. Tylor, whom Lang always cites with reverence. The major works of Tylor appeared in 1865 and 1871, at the very outset of Lang’s career, and set his mind in the path of evolutionary anthropology, with a conviction equal to Müller’s faith in comparative philology. Confounded, like Müller, by the irrational and brutal aspects of Greek myths, Lang moved naturally from his early Homeric studies into the realm of mythology and folklore. His system began with the premise that the history of mankind followed a uniform development from savagery to civilization, and that relics of primitive belief and custom survived still among the rural peasantry, and among contemporary savages. These relics, or “survivals,” could assist in reconstructing the earliest stages of human life and culture, much as the fossil bones of a prehistoric creature could conjure up an extinct species. Previous evidence secured from travelers and missionaries, and new testimony steadily being gathered by conscientious collectors, offered a mass of data on the traditions of savages and peasants. Everywhere the same beliefs, and survivals of beliefs, manifested themselves; primitive man ascribed spirits to the trees, the animals, and the elements, he worshipped the animal protector of his clan, he credited the shaman with powers of transformation. Myths and fairy tales continually reveal the concepts of animism, totemism, fetishism, for they hark back to the stage of culture when men did not sharply distinguish between the human and the natural world. Collections of savage folktales and rural folklore demonstrate the continued credence in metamorphosis and other magic. So there is nothing surprising in the myth of Cronus, which obviously dates from an era of cannibalism. Aryan traditions can only be understood through comparison with non-Aryan myths and legends the world over. We learn about Greek gods from red Indian totems.²⁹

No compromise could reconcile two such widely divergent theories, and Lang promptly turned his cunning scalpel into Müller’s delicate hypotheses. Again and again he pointed to the disagreements among the experts on the Greek-Vedic equations, the cornerstone of Müller’s edifice. Then he asked embarrassing questions. Since all primitive men have myths, why did not myths originate before the Mythopoeic Age? Why would mythopoeic man remember phrases and forget their meanings? Why does Müller devise the cumbersome processes of polyonymy and homonymy to explain a very simple phenomenon, namely, that savages regarded the elements as persons? Lang pointed out possibilities for error within the etymological method: antique legends could gravitate to modern heroes whose names would merely mislead the inquirer; names for elements were often taken by savages (as among the red Indians), and would again produce false scents.³⁰ Folk etymologies exist, of course, but mainly in connection with place-names.³¹ In any case, how can Comparative Mythology explain the myths of non-Aryan races, lower in culture than the Vedic Aryans, unacquainted with Sanscrit, yet possessing legends similar to those found in India and Greece?

Lang never denied the presence of solar myths, and lunar and star myths as well, and offered copious examples in his Myth, Ritual, and Religion. They issue, he reiterated, not from any “disease of language” but from the animistic stage of culture, which personalized the elements and accepted metamorphosis. Thus the mythical Zeus has “all the powers of the medicine-man and all the passions of the barbarian.”³² Relentlessly Lang bombarded the solar mythologists with examples from Australia, Africa, North and South America, and the south Pacific islands of savage traditions that resembled those of civilized peoples. The believed tales of primitive culture survive in the myths and Märchen of a later day, and account for their odd features. “It is almost as necessary for a young god or hero to slay monsters as for a young lady to be presented at court; and we may hesitate to explain all these legends of an useful feat of courage as nature-myths.”³³ Where Müller and his followers invariably interpreted the hero vanquishing the dragon as the sun conquering the night, Lang saw an ancient storytelling formula.

Müller never conceded an inch. He stuck fast to his etymologies, and berated Lang for discussing Sanscrit matters on which he was ignorant. However, he dissociated himself from any conclusions not based on the identifications of Greek and Sanscrit proper names, and considered his follower Cox unwary for submitting proofs based solely on analogies.³⁴ While Lang never learned Sanscrit, his opponent increasingly considered ethnological materials. Further, Müller strongly counterattacked the ethnological position, and criticized the ambiguities and convenient vagueness of such terms as totemism, animism, fetishism, and savages.³⁵ He disparaged the data obtained from savages by missionaries and travelers as credulous, biased, and colored by public opinion and priestly authority,³⁶ and demanded that observers master the native languages.³⁷ (English anthropologists today criticize their American colleagues for not learning languages.) Are all savages alike? he asked, and answered that further study of savage myths and customs would reveal more contradictions than ever the philologists brewed, “with this important difference, that scholars can judge of etymologies by themselves, while many a Baron Munchhausen escapes entirely from our cross-examination.”³⁷ Think what a hodge-podge of creeds and customs a curious Finn would find in England, especially if he had to rely on interpreters! Unless the motive is the same in each case, the customs extracted from different cultures are not true analogies.³⁸

So Müller anticipated the lethal shafts modern anthropology would direct at comparative ethnologists such as Frazer. For totemism he reserved his choicest barbs. Totems conveniently appeared wherever the ethnologist found some belief or rite involving an animal. Should Müller’s friend, Abeken, whose name means small ape, and who displays an ape in his coat of arms, be assigned the ape as his totem? “It is true I never saw him eating an ape, but I feel certain this was not from any regard for his supposed ancestor or totem, but was with him a mere matter of taste.”³⁹ What does animism and totemism explain, in any event? To say that the myth of Daphne can be understood because Samoans and Sarawakians believed women could change into trees is to explain ignotum per ignotius; why would they believe such a thing?⁴⁰ Müller thus threw back at Lang his charge that philology failed to account for the nasty and senseless stories about Greek gods.

Far from abandoning his philological “fortress,” Müller sallied forth to annex folklore territory. The ethno-psychological school shared his objectives, and he would gladly work with them, provided they observed proper scholarly caution and learned languages.⁴¹ Müller stoutly asserted his friendship for ethnology. He spoke warmly of Tylor, whose Researches into the Early History of Mankind he reviewed sympathetically, but with the admonition that the comparison of customs should keep within the bounds of comparative languages.⁴² Indeed, he quoted “My friend, Mr. Tylor,” in support of solar mythology, and for evidence on the unreliability of travelers’ reports.⁴³ Müller himself had strenuously pleaded for the establishment of an archives on “Ethnological Records of the English Colonies,” recognizing the great opportunity afforded by the dominions, colonies, and missionary societies of the British Empire, but the project was allowed to languish.⁴⁴ He had once compiled a Mohawk grammar, and would certainly learn savage tongues if time permitted.⁴⁵ Since life was finite, he must rely on scholarly missionaries who had themselves translated the tales of primitive peoples; and so he consulted closely with Patteson, Cod- rington, and Gill on Melanesian and Polynesian dialects, with Bleek and Hahn on African folklore, and with Horatio Hale on American Indian dialects.⁴⁶ He knew the work of Rev. J. S. Whitmee, who hoped to collect “choice myths and songs” that would make possible a comparative study of Polynesian mythology.⁴⁷ And he supplied a preface for the book of traditions brought back from the island of Mangaia by the Rev. W. Wyatt Gill, in which he pointed eagerly to this record of mythopoeic men who believe in gods and offer them human sacrifices.⁴⁸ In 1891 the Oxford don served as president of the Ethnological Section of the British Association.⁴⁹

The modern reader of Max Müller’s mythological theory may find himself astonished at the sophistication of the Sanscrit scholar in matters ethnological. With startling insight he dissected the stereotyped notion of a “savage,” to show how the qualities imputed to him applied just as readily to the civilized man. “When we read some of the more recent works on anthropology, the primordial savage seems to be not unlike one of those hideous india-rubber dolls that can be squeezed into every possible shape, and made to utter every possible noise....”⁵⁰ Contemporary “savages” have lived as long as civilized races, and are nothing like primitive man. Actually the Andaman Islanders enjoyed a felicitous existence that a European laborer would gladly embrace.⁵¹

Then, after playfully juxtaposing the contradictory reports about savages, which reveal only the ignorance of the beholders, Müller does an unexpected turnabout. In an article entitled “Solar Myths,” he relies exclusively on “scholarlike” ethnologists to support his thesis. Almost in the words of Lang, he speaks about “the surprising coincidence in the folklore, the superstitions and customs of the most remote races,” and proceeds to explore this mystery. He finds that among the non-Aryan peoples also, the trail always leads back through the disease of language to a solar myth. Legends of the Polynesian Maui become intelligible when we recognize that his name signifies the sun, or’fire, or the day; the Hottentot deity Tsui-goab, now understood as Broken-Knee, originally meant the red dawn or the rising sun; Michabo, the Great Hare of the Algonkins, can be traced back to the god of Light. So, thanks to the ethnological school of comparative mythology, the preoccupation of early man everywhere with the life-giving sun, about which he spun his legends and riddles and myths, becomes manifest.⁵²

In his books too Müller compares crude New Zealand origin tales with Greek myths, and juxtaposes the Polynesian Maui with gods of the Veda, in the manner of Lang, but in the interests of solarism.⁵³ The Kalevala fascinated him as much as the Scot, and he corresponded with Krohn about Finnish folklore.⁵⁴ Like the most confirmed ethno-folklorist, he culled myths from the Eskimos, the Hottentots, and the Esthonians, to illustrate the male and female personifications of sun, moon, and stars already known from his Aryan examples.⁵⁵ He produces superstitious customs of Scottish, Irish, and German peasants, which acquire a mythological hue.⁵⁶ And he makes a vigorous plea for the methods of comparative folklore in studying mythology, before Lang had ever published a full-scale attack on his system.⁵⁷ Reading these comments, one recognizes that Lang was often pillorying a straw man—as Müller protested.⁵⁸

In comparing non-Aryan with Aryan myths, Müller remained ever faithful to philological principles and the solar viewpoint. If myths had degenerated into heroic legends, and these into nursery tales, the reflection of the sun still shone, even in Red Riding Hood and Cinderella, and perhaps could be retraced etymologically.⁵⁹ He praised the ethnological work of Lewis Morgan and John Wesley Powell in the United States, based entirely on linguistics, and pointed triumphantly to the etymology for Gitse-Manito whose root, “to warm,” clearly led back to the” sun.⁶⁰ Müller’s own inquiries into Mordvinian myths, relying on collections made by linguistic scholars, revealed the same solar origins he had traced for Vedic gods. When Letts spoke of the golden boat that sinks into the sea, or the apple that falls from the tree, they referred unwittingly to the setting sun.⁶¹

At the end of the long debate, it was Lang who gave ground. Modern Mythology finds him curiously on the defensive, qualifying his position on totemism, and admitting the differences between himself and Frazer on totemic survivals. Instead of referring to Samoan “totems,” Lang will henceforth speak of Samoan “sacred animals,” as more exact, since to prove sacred beasts are totems requires definite evidence.⁶² In revising his Myth, Ritual, and Religion, in 1899, Lang made such extensive concessions that Hartland, who reviewed the new edition in Folk-Lore, the organ of the anthropological school, averred Lang had delivered himself into his opponents’ hands.⁶³ Speculating on religious origins, Lang came to accept, on the basis of anthropological evidence, the same conception of “high gods” and pure spiritual ideas among primitive peoples that Müller supported intuitively and philosophically. Lang challenged Tylor on the animistic origins of religious belief, and ceased to present the upward ascent of man as a clear-cut evolutionary climb.⁶⁴ In his new edition he added the sentence, “The lowest savagery scarcely ever, if ever, wholly loses sight cf a heavenly father,” after the statement, “The most brilliant civilization of the world never expelled the old savage from its myth and ritual.” Again, he appends two new sentences to his chapter on “Mexican Divine Myths” to soften the original conclusion that even the Spanish Inquisition advanced over barbarous Mexican ritual. The new ending holds that wild polytheistic myths grow around gods unknown to low savage races, who recognize a “moral primal Being.”⁶⁵ In asserting the Godliness of early man, Lang elevates the savage mentality, and so injures his thesis that survivals or borrowings from savages explain the irrational elements in myths and fairy tales.

The solar theory was carried to lengths far exceeding the etymological boundaries of Max Müller by his most aggressive disciple, George William Cox. An Oxford graduate, clergyman, self-styled baronet (his claim was posthumously denied), and a popular writer on Greek history and mythology, Cox developed what his master called the “analogical” school of comparative mythology. He presented this viewpoint first in conventional retellings of classical myths,Tales from Greek Mythology (1861), and Tales of the Gods and Heroes (1862),⁶⁶ then in a deceptive Manual of Mythology (1867), which by a series of leading questions and loaded answers converted innocent school children to solarism, until finally he engulfed the adult reading public with two large volumes on The Mythology of the Aryan Nations (1870), and An Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and Folklore (1881). Throughout these writings Cox quotes, cites, and invokes the name of Max Müller on nearly every page, and reduces all Aryan myths, legends, and fairy tales to the contest between sun and night. Müller’s “Essay on Comparative Mythology” first charmed him into a field previously “repulsive.” Building on that solid foundation he had completely reconstructed the original mythology of India and Greece, through one new insight: the resemblance of all Aryan narratives to each other. Max Müller had demonstrated by etymological proofs the identity of certain Homeric and Vedic gods, and their common origin, through “failure of memory” (which Cox preferred to “disease of language”), in phrases about the sun. Now Sir George will interpret the meaning of myths and legends which defied philological assault, through the comparison of their narrative elements.⁶⁷ By this method, the striking fact became apparent that every Greek hero performed the same feats, be he Achilles, Odysseus, Heracles, Theseus, Bellerophon, Appollon, Meleagros, or even Paris. Where his master regarded Paris as the night, Cox saw in him aspects of both night and day; Paris begins his career as a power of darkness, but ends as a solar deity.⁶⁸ Continually Cox called attention to the similarities in the legends of heroes, to their spears and arrows and invincible darts which represented the rays of the sun, to their wonderful steeds and magic swords. All their adventures follow the same pattern of a long Westward journey filled with labors and struggles, and this is the course of the daily sun. “The story of the sun starting in weakness and ending in victory, waging a long warfare against darkness, clouds, and storms, and scattering them all in the end, is the story of all patient self-sacrifice, of all Christian devotion.”⁶⁹ The Achilleus is a splendid solar epic, portraying the contest between sun and night, and reaching its climax when Achilles tramples on the blood of his enemies as the glorious sun tramples out the dark clouds.⁷⁰

Sir George of course had no patience with euhemerism. He blasted the article in the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica asserting the historicity of heroes, and denied all factual basis for the saga of Grettir or the cycle of King Arthur, or any other solar hero. Four-fifths of the folklore of Northern Europe he swept into his solar net. Legends of death are blood-stained sunsets; stupid demons and ogres are the dark powers who must be conquered by light-born heroes; the episodes of heroes hidden in caves reflect the waxing and waning year.⁷¹ Sigurd, William Tell, Roland, the Biblical David, all tell the same tale (and in his last mythological study Cox annexed Beowulf and Hamlet).⁷² The fairy tales too conform to the elemental pattern. All the humble heroes who find riches and conquer dragons, whether Boots or the frog prince or Cinderella, are solar deities; Hansel and Gretel are dawn-children, and the ubiquitous gold that rewards the valiant hero is the golden light of the sun.⁷³ Under Cox’s solar touch black becomes white, for the name of the horse “Black” can signify light and whiteness, as befits the steed of a solar hero.⁷⁴ Small wonder that Max Müller confessed dizziness at viewing this solar empire he had innocently opened up.⁷⁵

Certain insights in Cox’s work show a growing sophistication toward folklore. His extension of Müller’s etymological equations into the area of structural comparisons was actually moving onto the sounder ground of type and motif analysis. The great heroes of epic and legend do betray astonishing resemblances, which have evoked the historical thesis of the Chadwicks, that comparable periods of cultural history produce an “Heroic Age,” and the ritual-origins theory popularized by Lord Raglan, who substitutes the dying and reborn god for the waning and waxing sun. Cox recognized common elements in myths, legends, and Marchen, and understood more perceptively than Müller that a cluster of incidents hangs together to form a folktale complex. He pointed out that Müller had confused a fable in the Hitopadesa with the Master Thief, and commented, “The possible affinity of thievish stratagems in all countries can scarcely account for a series of extraordinary incidents and astounding tricks following each other in the same order, although utterly different in their outward garb and coloring.”⁷⁶ He himself then confused the Master Thief with the legend of Rhampsinitus.⁷⁷ To protect his pan-Aryan theory, Cox had to deny the possibility that solar legends spread by borrowing, and obtusely contended that the greater the resemblance, the less the chance for diffusion! He conceived of borrowing in purely literary terms, and argued that a borrowed tale must perfectly match its original. Similar but not identical narratives indicate a common source, in Vedic India.⁷⁸ Mythology and folklore converge in Cox’s solarism, and he claimed as their only distinction the possibility of subjecting a myth to philological analysis.⁷⁹

In his well-known introduction to the Hunt edition of Grimm’s Household Tales, Lang dealt at length with the theories of Sir George, and in some perplexity. The edge of his wit was turned by the unpredictable departure of the pupil from his master, for on some points Cox veered so abruptly from Max Müller that he landed squarely in Lang’s arms. When Sir George posited an animistic state of savagery conducive to mythmaking, and conceived that animistic ideas grew from savage thought, not from confused language, Lang naturally applauded. The foe of solarism approved the way Cox refused to trace myths merely through names, as Müller demanded, and he supported Coxs view that Märchen can be both the remains and the sources of myth.⁸⁰

A mystified Lang could not see how Sir George, quoting Müller chapter and verse, drew inferences congenial to the anthropological viewpoint. Cox should have gone to the evidence about savage customs and ideas, not to the philologists, Lang said, and then his correct inferences might have led to correct conclusions. Unfortunately, those conclusions echoed Müller’s, in reading the sun and the clouds and the dew into every myth and tale, and Lang mocked the two solarists impartially when he came to analyze their reconstructions. He laughed polyonymy and the forgetfulness-of-words into the ground, as he attempted by these processes to explain the Jason myth, and then he showed how simply the anthropologists could decipher the story. But Cox never became the bête noire to Lang that Müller was, and the Scot may have considered that, born a bit later, Sir George would have found the right tutor.⁸¹

No adversary in the camp of the comparative mycologists smarted from Lang’s barbs with such pain as Robert Brown, Junior, of Barton-on-Humber. Brown labored manfully during the 1870’s and ‘8o’s to establish the influence of the ancient Semitic cultures on Hellenic religious mythology. Invitingly he wrote, “he who is wearied with the familiar aroma of the Aryan field of research may stimulate and refresh his jaded senses with new perfumes wafted from the shores of the Euphrates and the Nile.”⁸² As Max Müller sought to draw the Greek pantheon into the folds of Vedic conceptions, so Robert Brown, the Assyriologist and Egyptologist, attempted to clasp Hellas within the orbit of Near Eastern cults and myths. Comparative mythology had launched a powerful pincers movement on classical Greece, from India and from Egypt, which bid fair to rob Athens of most claims to originality. If Müller demanded that mycologists study Sanscrit, and Lang insisted they read ethnology, Brown declared they must acquaint themselves with the latest research on Chaldea, Assyria, Phoenicia, Arabia, Persia, and Egypt. Semitic Asia had contributed at least as many divinities to the Greek pantheon as had Aryan India!⁸³ The extent of these contributions Brown measured in studies of Poseidôn (1872), The Great Dionysiak Myth, 2. vols. (1877-1878), The Unicorn (1881), and The Myth of Kirkê (1883), and summarized his position, in the face of Lang’s taunts, in Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology (1898).⁸⁴

Although this last work originated as a rebuttal to Modern Mythology, Brown by no means slavishly followed Müller and Cox. His Semitic bias naturally led him into differences with the Vedic scholar, whose school he criticized for excessive pan- Aryanism.⁸⁵ Cox, rather than Müller, dominates his footnotes, however, and the “Aryo-Semitic” mythologist steadily refers to the interpretations in The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, with due respect to its author (who returned the compliments), but with cavils at his neglect of Semitic gods.⁸⁶ Brown’s thesis compelled him to grant some historical basis to legends, in spite of all the harsh words then accorded euhemerism, for he necessarily supported his arguments with geographical and historical facts of commerce, travel, and migration throughout the Aegean area. Cox and Müller laughed away all history behind myth, secure in the one historical point that Aryan peoples emigrated from India and carried their language and myths with them; but Brown had to demonstrate that physical contact, not an ancient linguistic inheritance, gave Greek deities a Semitic gloss. Art and archaeology documented his position, and clothed the bare bones of philology.⁸⁷ Therefore, he called into evidence the Egyptian character of a splendid belt worn by Heracles, or the Phoenician skill at packaging reflected in the “curious knot” Circe taught Odysseus how to tie.⁸⁸ To show his eclecticism, Brown scoffed at some excesses of the “Natural Phenomena Theory.”⁸⁹ How could Polyphemos be the eye of the sun, blinded by the solar hero Odysseus, for would the sun blind himself? How could Skeiron, the wind, be first slain and then devoured by a tortoise?⁹⁰

Most of Brown’s explications, however, conform to rigid solar orthodoxy. The trip of Odysseus to the underworld represents the span of a day and a night, during which the sun descends beyond the horizon, and all the mythical figures the solar hero meets in the depths are also solar characters: Tityos stretched on the ground attacked by two vultures is the sun besieged by the powers of darkness; Tantalos reaching for water that always recedes is the suffering sun, and so is Sisyphos, trying vainly to push a solar stone over the brow of the hill that is heaven, and so of course is Heracles, drawing his bow in the midst of the dead. Thus the dead sun suffers every night.⁹¹ Throughout the massive data on Dionysos the solar character of the complex divinity predominates. One myth associated with his name has a lion chase a leopard into a cave; the leopard emerges from another entrance, re-enters the cave and devours the lion, who has been caught fast, from behind. Here the lion is the flaming sun, and the cave and the leopard are both the dark night; night mounts into heaven behind the hidden sun and gnaws him to death—although he will be reborn at the East portal next morning.⁹² No narrow solar mythologist, Brown displayed lunar and stellar sympathies, and analyzed the Unicorn as “the wild, white, fierce, chaste Moon,” and Circe as the moon-goddess beloved by the solar Heracles. Medusa is the “Serpentine-full-moon, the victim of the solar Perseus,” and her petrifying stare signifies the moon-glare of a soundless night.⁹³

On every occasion Brown reasserted the Semitic provenience of gods and myths found in Greece. After following the trail of Dionysos through the poets and dramatists and cults, in gems and vases and epithets, Brown placed the origin of the vast complex in Chaldea. “Here, then, is Dumuzi-Tammuz on Assyrian and Kaldean ground, side by side, and in truth identical with Dian-nisi-Dionysos, the judge-of-men, the ruling, judging, sinking, life-giving, all-sustaining Sun, diurnal and nocturnal ....”⁹⁴ As the myth traveled Westward across the Aegean, Hellenic culture softened some of its wilder orgiastic features, although traces remained in the Eleusinian mysteries. The sea-god Poseidon too originated in Chaldea, and entered Greece through Phoenicia and Libya; he resembles the Biblical Noah and the Chaldean Oannes, a creature that rose out of the sea and instructed men in the arts and letters.⁹⁵ An Egyptian papyrus of the twelfth Dynasty first presents in mythical form the great solar voyage across heaven, as the tale of an archaic sea-captain who visited the land of shadows.⁹⁶ From such data, Brown felt justified in capping the debate between Lang and Müller with the formation of the new Aryo-Semitic school of comparative mythology.⁹⁷

Lacking the sparkle of Lang and the limpid style of Müller, Brown appears at a disadvantage when he comes fuming into the controversy. His antiquarian volumes are filled with rejoinders to dead authorities, classical quotations, genealogical tables of deities, philological equations, and the accumulation of recondite evidence more or less germane to the inquiry. In Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology Brown tried to match Lang at his own game of taunt and gibe, not without some trepidation in tackling an opponent who might have given pause to Heracles himself. Brown and Müller both complained that Lang’s numerous journalistic outlets, daily, weekly, and monthly, gave him opportunity to throw up an artificial cloud of scorn over solar mythology.⁹⁸ Now the Egyptologist bitterly accused Lang of misrepresenting himself, Müller, and Cox; he pointed to the world-wide evidence for solar myths (which Lang never denied), and attacked the theory of totemism and survivals on the grounds that Hellenic constellation-names and legends derive from the advanced civilization of the Phoenicians.⁹⁹ If philologists disagree, one can still be right; and they do agree on the general outlines of the Natural Phenomena Theory. The intense pique of Brown emerges on nearly every page, and produces a curious appendix, entitled “Professor Aguchekikos On Totemism,” intended as a jeu d’esprit paraphrasing the anti-solar arguments of Lang himself. The satire purports to be a review written in 4886 A.D. of a learned study on Anglican Totemism in the Victorian Epoch, which infers the prevalence of totemism from the animal names of clans, such as the Bulls and the Bears, who once struggled in a “stock exchange,” and from such archaic expressions as calling a man “a snake in the grass.”¹⁰⁰

Although Lang flicked Robert Brown with the same whip he used on all his adversaries, including his friends, on this victim he drew the most blood. Brown refers furiously to an anonymous review of The Myth of Kirkê in the Saturday Review, obviously by Lang, where the Scot had ridiculed the solar theory, saying that Robinson Crusoe, like Odysseus, lived in a cave, and so must be the sun. A debate ensued in the Academy, in which, “according to general opinion the brilliant journalist came off but second best.”¹⁰¹ In Custom and Myth Lang called the views elaborated by Brown in The Law of Kosmic Order, that the Accadians named the stars after celestial myths, “far-fetched and unconvincing.” Even granting that the Greeks obtained their star-names from Chaldea, did the Eskimos and Melanesians name stars after Accadian fancies? The Accadians too must have inherited beliefs from a savage past, which they used in naming the constellations.¹⁰² In another chapter Lang dealt with Brown’s analysis of the magic herb moly, given Odysseus to ward off the spells of Circe. Brown construed moly as originally a star, known to the ancient Accadians, that guarded a solar hero; Lang thought it simply a magical herb of the kind everywhere credited by savages. He quotes Brown in the Academy for 3 January 1885, as contending that “if Odysseus and Kirkê were sun and moon here is a good starting-point for the theory that the moly was stellar.” Then he inserted the lance. “This reminds one of the preacher who demonstrated the existence of the Trinity thus: Tor is there not, my brethren, one sun, and one moon,—and one multitude of stars?’”¹⁰³ The Accadian theory, he sighs, is becoming as overdone as the Aryan. In a preface to a new edition of Custom and Myth (1898), Lang replied to Brown’s attack earlier that year with blistering severity.¹⁰⁴

A word must be given to the massive two-volume work on Zoological Mythology, or The Legends of Animals, by Angelo De Gubernatis, which appeared in 1872. The Italian professor of Sanscrit published this work in English as a tribute, no doubt, to the reputation of Max Müller and the lively interest in England in Comparative Mythology. Ruefully the author remarked, “It has fallen to me to study the least elevated department of mythology,”¹⁰⁵ the appearance of gods in animal forms, assumed when they broke a taboo, or served a term of punishment. A vast body of popular lore now described the actions of Aryan gods in animal disguises, where formerly they had appeared as celestial phenomena. Beginning with myths about the sacred bull and cows of the Rigvedas, who represent the sun-god Indras and the clouds, Gubernatis moved to Slavonic and other European parallel tales, and then systematically considered further beasts recurring in Märchen, in the usual solar terms. The soul of the ass is the sun; the whale is the night; the peacock is the starry sky| the crab is the moon; birds of prey are lightning and thunderbolts; the serpent- devil is the power of darkness.¹⁰⁶ In Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack’s mother is the blind cow, that is, the darkened aurora; she scatters beans, and the bean of abundance, which is the moon, grows up to the sky; this Jack climbs to the wealth of the morning light.¹⁰⁷ Gubernatis necessarily brought many folktales within his net, and recognized some kinships; for instance, he discerned the tale-type of the man or animal trapped by putting his hands or paws in the cleft of a tree trunk,¹⁰⁸ and he uncovered the legend of the peasant who overheard the talking bulls on Christmas eve prophesy his own death.¹⁰⁹

The mythological disputants of the period continually refer to this zoological compendium. Brown praised Gubernatis for recognizing the solar character of the hog,¹¹⁰ and Lang scoffed at him for interpreting the cat as the moon and the mouse as the shadows of night. How, when the moon-cat is away, can there be any light to make playful mice-shadows?¹¹¹ Even the sympathetic reviewer in The Scotsman complained that this overdose of celestial interpretations was blunting his confidence in comparative mythology.¹¹²

The solar theory found strong support across the Atlantic in the ethnologist Daniel Brinton, who wrote widely on American Indian culture and language. In The Myths of the New World (1868), a work reprinted for the remainder of the century, Brinton compared the origin and creation myths and culture-hero legends of North and South American Indian tribes, to ascertain their inner meanings. The tropes of language and the rites of worship offered him clues, and before long he had found the answer. “As the dawn brings light, and with light is associated in every human mind the ideas of knowledge, safety, protection, majesty, divinity, as it dispels the spectres of night, as it defines the cardinal points, and brings forth the sun and the day, it occupied the primitive mind to an extent that can hardly be magnified beyond the truth.”¹¹³ Through the confusion of language, early man’s reactions to the dawn and the sun became transferred to animals or persons. Thus the Algonkin Michabo or Manabozho, the Great Hare, comes from the root “wab,” which means both “rabbit” and “white,” and in its latter sense originates the words for the East, dawn, light, day, and morning. All the legends about the Great Hare can easily be translated into solar myths. Michabo is both the spirit of light who dispels the darkness, and the lord of the winds. Degrading trickster stories associated with Michabo proceed from late and corrupt versions of an inspiring mythology.¹¹⁴

Primeval man worshipped no brutes, but his own dim perception of the One, construed as lightness and whiteness. Hence the first White men were regarded as gods. Brinton was especially struck with the recurrence of the number four in different tribal legends, and interpreted the four demiurgic brothers as the four winds and the four cardinal points. Declaring he was no slavish solar mythologist, Brinton proudly emphasized the attention he gave to the moon, and the space he devoted to gods of thunderstorms and lightning.¹¹⁵

Max Müller purred with delight on reading the pages of this unexpected ally across the sea. Still licking his wounds from the thrusts of Lang in 1884, the Oxford professor in his article on “Solar Myths” the next year quoted gleefully long passages from Brinton that illustrated the solar theory. “When copying these lines,” he marveled, “I felt almost as if copying what I had written myself,” and he was all the more pleased because his own work “could in no way have influenced the conclusions of this eminent American writer.”¹¹⁶ While Brinton quoted from Müller only once, on the Dawn and the Sun,¹¹⁷ he showed familiarity with the celestial theories of continental writers, and confidently asserted the parallels between Indian and European heavenly deities.¹¹⁸ Happily Müller underscored Brinton’s contention that Indian myths conformed to the world-view of early man everywhere, and in the etymology of “wab” he saw the Algorjkin counterpart of the Sanscrit root div or dyu that produced Dyaus and Zeus.¹¹⁹

Replying in the very next issue of the ‘Nineteenth Century, Lang poured his vitriol on the Americanist. When there are twenty known Algonkin totems, why does Brinton single out the hare for his dubious etymology; and ignore the bear, turtle, crane, wolf, coyote, and the others? All we know of early Indian opinion directly contradicts this monotheistic conception of the Great Hare—and supports, of course, totemism.¹²⁰ Lang failed to strike at a particularly vulnerable spot in Brinton’s argument, his exclusion of the trickster aspect of Manabozho. Another weakness, Brinton’s postulate of the psychological unity of mankind, came too close to Lang’s own views for exposure, although where Lang saw animism, Brinton perceived sun- worship. Irritatedly Lang concludes, “Obviously there is not much to be learned by trying to follow the curiously devious trail of Dr. Brinton through the forest of mythology.”¹²¹

The well-known American historian and evolutionist, John Fiske, also entered the arena of Comparative Mythology with one extremely popular book, Myths and Myth-Makers (1873), which ran through eleven editions in fifteen years. In a manner anticipating the pleasant discursiveness of Andrew Lang’s Custom and Myth, Fiske rambled through the byways of folklore and mythology, to delineate his thesis from different angles. One essay treats the same topic that Lang considers, the divining rod, but where the Scot sees the rod as evidence of a surviving superstition, the American finds in it a representation of the lightning.¹²² Fiske shows a remarkable acquaintance with the literature of both mythology and folklore, and quotes equally from the German philologists, the English solarists, ethnological collectors of primitive tales, including Brinton, and the British county fieldworkers, who rarely appear even in the citations of Lang. Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, produced by the unquenchable clergyman, Baring-Gould, especially stimulated his thought.

Fiske begins his essays like an orthodox solar mythologist. He explains away William Tell as a sun myth, views the historical Cyrus and Charlemagne as solar heroes, follows Cox on the dual aspect of Paris embracing both sun and night, and seeks to reconcile the storm-myths of Kuhn with the dawn-myths of Müller, as two aspects of the same interpretation.¹²³ The epic of the Iliad and the drama of Hamlet alike derive from primary myths about the sun, although Homer and Shakespeare never suspected the fact.¹²⁴

A strange note nevertheless creeps into this conventional solar analysis. The petulant complaint that Cox overpresses his solar analogies seems but a passing mood, especially when the historian lashes at the euhemerism of Gladstone and Robert Brown.¹²⁵ But there is no mistaking Fiske’s position by the time the final chapter is reached. For all his delight on first reading Müller’s “Essay on Comparative Mythology,” he sees carelessness and fallacies in its reasoning. The Sanscrit scholar has pressed the philological method into far greater service than it can render; other disciplines are needed to analyze myths, those of history (i.e., ethnology), and psychology. Müller has inverted the story of man’s mythmaking; metaphors came from myths, and not myths from diseased metaphors. A new mythmaking does invent later stories about gods and heroes whose original physical meanings are forgotten, and here lies the difference between the simple nature-myths of savages, and the more fanciful—and often inconsistent—tales of the Greeks. No confusion of language is involved, but merely the propensity of early man everywhere to build stories from his beliefs. “And in all countries may be found the beliefs that men may be changed into beasts, or plants, or stones; that the sun in some way tethered or constrained to follow a certain course; that the storm-cloud is a ravenous dragon; and that there are talismans which will reveal hidden treasures.”¹²⁶ In the end Fiske quotes Tylor page after page, draws illustrations from primitive folklore, and postulates fetishism and animism as an early stage in the universal evolution of man. All this he does to refute the narrow philological approach of Müller, and to assert the ubiquity of solar myths from a more scientific point of view! John Fiske proves the reality of the Hegelian synthesis, for in his book the ideas of Lang and Müller intertwine like the rose and the briar.

With the death of Max Müller, in 1900, the cause of solar mythology lost its most lustrous name, and rapidly ebbed. When Lang revised his article on “Mythology” for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1911, he condensed his three columns of criticism on “The System of Max Müller” to a scanty half-column in small type, as a dead issue. Supplanting George W. Cox’s Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and Folklore came An Introduction to Folk-Lore (1895, new ed. 1905), by Marian Roalfe Cox, the disciple of Lang, Clodd, and Nutt, who faithfully follows the anthropological method. In the pamphlet series, “Popular Studies in Mythology, Romance and Folklore,” designed for the general public, Sidney Hartland dealt with the topic Mythology and Folktales: Their Relation and Interpretation (1900), and buried the philological mythologists under the anthropological viewpoint. Hartland wrote that Lang had given the coup de grace to comparative mythology in 1887 with his Myth, Ritual, and Religion;¹²⁷ but this statement ignores the subsequent writings of Müller and Brown, and the modifications Hartland himself pointed out in the revised edition of Myth, Ritual, and Religion. The eclipse of the solar theorists came in large part from the organization of the Folk- Lore Society in 1878, and the steady exposition in its journals and memoirs, and in the separate writings of its vigorous and prolific members, of the evolutionary interpretation. No Society of Comparative Mythology was formed.

One leaves a review of the great controversy with considerable respect for its protagonists. Müller emerges with scarcely less honor than Lang; the giants slew each other, although the corpse of cultural evolutionism bled more slowly than the dismembered torso of solarism. A spirit of fire and excitement vanished from the scene when the solar mythologists went under; Lang turned to fencing half-heartedly with his own colleagues, debating with Hartland over primitive religion, with Clodd about psychical research, and with Jacobs on the diffusion of tales, but he never rose to his earlier heights, or sustained so intense a campaign. One generation later when Lang and Hartland and Clodd had passed on, the Folk-Lore Society itself would become an outmoded survival, lacking direction or purpose or audience. But from 1856 to 1900 all England followed the battle between solar mythologists and “savage” folklorists. The new field collections were eagerly scanned upon their appearance, and pressed by the disputants into their respective dialectics. We envy the multiplicity of learned articles and books published, read, and bought in those literate Victorian days. And if we scorn the deluded theories of those embattled scholars,¹²⁸ let us remember that they had theories, based in erudition and presented with grace to an intellectually curious public absorbed in the furor concerning the early ideas of man.

Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan

¹ Stith Thompson, The Folktale (New York, 1946), pp. 371-375. The conventional view that Max Müller was a second-rate Victorian, slain by Lang’s ethnology, is asserted by Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge, La., 1949), pp. 44-48, 58-65. Chase is unaware of Müller’s interest in ethnology, and discusses the theories of myth held by Lang and Müller without any reference to the history of folklore, although they are inseparably connected. His ignorance of folklore leads him into the astonishing statement that Lang failed to show interest in folktales until late in life (pp. 61, 77). To Chase, myth is art, and he judges mythologists by his own prejudices.

² Andrew Lang, “Max Müller,” Contemporary Review, LXXVIII (1900), 785.

³ For the history of folklore theory, even in England, one must turn to European studies. There is gratifying detail on Müller and Lang in Giuseppe Cocchiara, Storia del folklore in Europa (Edizioni Scientifiche Einaudi, 1952), ch. 16, “Nel ‘laboratorio’ di Max Müller,” pp. 309-324, and ch. 24, “II primitivo che è in noi,” pp. 461-469. A discussion of “Die Astralmythologie” appears in Åke Ohlmarks, Heimdalls Horn und Odins Auge: Erstes Buch (I-II), Heimdallr und das Horn (Lund and Kopenhagen, 1937), pp. 3-22, but the author fails to distinguish between religion and mythology in discussing Müller and Lang (pp. 6-8). Actually they rather agreed on the origin of religious ideas.

⁴ Georgina Max Müller, The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller, 2 vols. (New York, London, and Bombay, 1902), II, 7 and Appendix C, “Speech of Dean Liddell,” 475-479.

⁵ Georgina Max Müller, Life and Letters, II, 452.

⁶ See Concerning Andrew Lang, Being the Andrew Lang Lectures delivered before the University of St. Andrews 1927-1937 (Oxford, 1949).

⁷ Roger L. Green has written Andrew Lang, A Critical Biography, with a Short-Tide Bibliography of the Works of Andrew Lang (Leicester, Eng., 1946).

⁸ Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers (Boston and New York, 1888), p. 209; Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1870), I, v-vi; Lang, Custom and Myth (London, 1893), p. 58. Müller’s essay was first published in Oxford Essays (1856) and reprinted in Chips from a German Workshop, II (London, 1867), 1-143. It was separately issued as Comparative Mythology, an essay edited with additional notes and an introductory preface on solar mythology by A. Smythe Palmer (London, 1909).

⁹ Thomas Sternberg, The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (London, Northampton, Oundle, and Brackley, 1851).

¹⁰ Thomas Keightley, The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy (London, 1831).

¹¹ This lecture was reprinted in Müller’s Selected Essays on Language, Mythology, and Religion, I (London, 1881), along with other folkloristic essays previously published in Chips, II, and a lecture of 1870, “On the Migration of Fables.”

¹² Müller does not identify the review in his several repetitions of Lang’s comment in Contributions to the Science of Mythology, 2 vols. (London, New York, and Bombay, 1897), I, II, 32, 184. He does mention Lang, and only with praise, in articles in the Nineteenth Century on “The Savage,” XVII (Jan., 1885), 117, and “Solar Myths,” XVIII (Dec., 1885), 905.

¹³ Andrew Lang, Modern Mythology (London, 1897), PP. 3-4.

¹⁴ E.g., “Mr. Max Müller’s Philosophy of Mythology,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s. XXIV (August, 1881), 166-187, a detailed criticism of Müller’s Selected Essays; and “Anthropology and the Vedas,” Folk-Lore Journal, I (1883), 107-114, which disputes the idea in Müller’s Lectures on India, and what it can teach us [sic] that the Vedas offer earlier information about mythological origins than do savage beliefs.

¹⁵ La Mythologie, traduit de l’anglais par Leon Parmentier, avec une préface par Charles Michel, et des additions de l’auteur (Paris, 1886). The book also included material from Custom and Myth, and Lang’s article on “Prometheus” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The preface by Parmentier (v-xxxi) contains a useful resumé of the literature on comparative mythology. Lang gives interesting details on hearing Scottish “contes populaires” in his youth, and so being led into comparative folklore, in his preface (xxxv-xli).

¹⁶ Lang, “Myths and Mycologists,” Nineteenth Century, XIX (Jan. 1886), 50-65. The force of Lang’s rebuttal was diminished by a postscript Müller added to his article on “Solar Myths,” Nineteenth Century, XVIII (Dec., 1885), 919-922, replying to a criticism of “solarism” by William E. Gladstone in the November issue. Müller denied that he was trying to give all mythology a solar origin.

¹⁷ Georgina Max Müller, Life and Letters, II, 381.

¹⁸ See Müller, Selected Essays on Language, Mythology, and Religion (London, 1881), I, 617-623, in “On the Philosophy of Mythology,” and Blackie, Horae Hellenicae: Essays and Discussions on some Important Points of Greek Philology and Antiquity (London, 1874), pp. 167-196, “On the Scientific Interpretation of Popular Myths with special reference to Greek mythology.”

¹⁹ Müller, My Autobiography, A Fragment (New York, 1909), pp. 147-150, and also Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 303.

²⁰ Chs. 5 and 6 in My Autobiography give rich details on Müller’s early years in France and England.

²¹ Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in February, March, April, and May, 1863, 2nd Ser. (New York, 1869), p. 371, in the lecture on “Metaphor.”

²² Müller, Natural Religion: The Gifford Lectures Delivered before the University of Glasgow in 1888 (London, 1889), p. 487. For these squibs see “The Oxford Solar Myth” by the Rev. R. F. Littledale, in Max Müller, Comparative Mythology, An Essay, ed. Abram Smythe Palmer (London and New York, n. d.), pp. xxxi-xlvii, reprinted from Kottabos, a magazine of Trinity College, Dublin, No. 5 (1870), which proves Max Müller to be a solar hero; anon., “John Gilpin as a Solar Hero,” Fraser’s Magazine, n. s. XXIII (March, 1881), 353-371; E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. (London, 1891), I, 319-320 (the Song of Sixpence, Cortes, and Julius Caesar are “solarized”).

Although the Rev. A. Smythe Palmer reprinted a solar-myth satire along with Max Müller’s essay, he himself belongs to the school of solar interpretation. His own “Introductory Preface on Solar Mythology,” pp. v-xxix, while deploring the excesses of Cox, completely endorses and supports Müller’s “epoch-making” treatise with a barrage of references, from ethnology and poetry, on the primal role of the sun in the mind of man. In his own work, Palmer carries out Müller’s methods: The Samson-Saga and its Place in Comparative Religion (London, 1913), analyzes the solar character of Samson; Folk-Etymology, A Dictionary of Verbal Corruptions or Words Perverted in Form or Meaning, by False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy (London, 1882), and The Folk and their Word-Lore (London and New York, 1904) both illustrate what Müller called “modern mythology” or contemporary examples of the disease of language.

²³ Müller, India: What Can it Teach Us? A Course of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge (New York, 1883), p. 216. Cf. these similar statements: “I look upon the sunrise and sunset, on the daily return of day and night, On the battle between light and darkness, on the whole solar drama in all its details that is acted every day, every month, every year, in heaven and in earth, as the principal subject of early mythology” (Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series, p. 537). . . there was but one name by which they [mythopoeic men] could express love—there was but one similitude for the roseate bloom that betrays the dawn of love—it was the blush of the day, the rising of the sun. The sun has risen,’ they said, where we say, 1 love’; The sun has set,’ they said, where we say, ‘I have loved’” (Chips from a German Workshop, [New York, 1872], II, 128, from “Comparative Mythology,” [1856]). “Was not the Sunrise to him [mythopoeic man] the first wonder, the first beginning of all reflection, all thought, all philosophy? Was it not to him the first revelation, the first beginning of all trust, of all religion?” (Selected Essays on Language, Mythology, and Religion [London, 1881], I, 599-600). “‘Is everything the Dawn? Is everything the Sun?’ This question I had asked myself many times before it was addressed to me by others.... but I am bound to say that my own researches lead me again and again to the dawn and the sun as the chief burden of the myths of the Aryan race” (Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series, p. 520).

²⁴ Müller, “Jupiter, the Supreme Aryan God,” Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series, pp. 432-480; “The Lesson of Jupiter,” Nineteenth Century, XVIII (Oct. 1885), 626-650.

²⁵ Müller himself distinguishes between the “solar” and the “meterological” theories of comparative mythology, the latter championed by Adalbert Kuhn (Lectures on the Science of Language, Second Series, pp. 538-540). He attempted to reconcile them by assigning a common root to the meanings of sun, lightning, and fire (Physical Religion [New York, 1891], p. 186). See Lang, “Myths and Mythologists,” 52-53, for these disagreements; in Modern Mythology, p. 35, he gives a table of varying interpretations of Cronus, and makes the point that these differences were unknown to the English public, familiar only with Müller and not with continental mythologists (pp. 1-2).

²⁶ E.g., Natural Religion, p. 449: “... no one who is not an expert, has anything to say here.” In 1897 Müller wrote Lang personally, “Still less could I understand why you should have attacked me, or rather my masters, without learning Sanscrit... (Life and Letters, II, 381).

²⁷ Müller, Natural Religion, p. 441; “Solar Myths,” 904-905.

²⁸ Müller, Lectures on the Science of Languages, Second Series, pp. 556-568, in Lecture XII, “Modern Mythology.”

²⁹ See especially “The Method of Folklore” and “The Myth of Cronus” in Custom and Myth (London, 1884, and later editions).

³⁰ Lang, “Mythology,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed. (Chicago, 1895), XXII, 137-141, “The System of Max Müller.”

³¹ Lang, “Myths and Mythologists,” 56n.

³² Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion (London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta, 1913), II, 193-194.

³³ Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion (London, 1887), II, 196.

³⁴ See, e.g., Müller’s concluding remarks in his review of Cox’s A Manual of Mythology, in Chips from a German Workshop, II, 154-159, where he points out the possibility of ancient myths being transferred to historical heroes; and his expression of misgivings about “The Analogical School,” in Natural Religion, p. 486.

³⁵ Müller, “The Savage,” Nineteenth Century, XVII (Jan. 1885), 109-132; Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 7, 185 et seq.; Anthropological Religion, Appendix III, “On Totems and Their Various Origin,” pp. 403-410; Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religions of India (London, 1878), pp. 52-127.

³⁶ Müller, Anthropological Religion, Appendix V, “On the Untrustworthiness of Anthropological Evidence,” pp. 413-435.

³⁷ Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 280.

³⁸ Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 277, 290.

³⁹ Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, II, 600.

⁴⁰ Müller, Natural Religion, p. 441.

⁴¹ Müller iterates the necessity to learn languages, and not simply engage in the “pleasant reading” of folklore, obsessively in Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 5, 23-24, 28, 128, 232, 286; II, 462, .830-831.

⁴² Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, II, “On Manners and Customs,” 248-283, esp. 260.

⁴³ Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 143; Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 91.

⁴⁴ Müller, Natural Religion, p. 505.

⁴⁵ Müller, Natural Religion, p. 515; Life and Letters, II, 129; Anthropological Religion, pp. 169-171, where Müller gives the fullest details of his contact with an educated Mohawk.

⁴⁶ Müller, “The Savage,” 117; Natural Religion, pp. 515-517; “Mythology among the Hottentots,” Nineteenth Century (Jan., 1882), pp. 33-38. For Müller’s correspondence with Horatio Hale, president of the American Folklore Society, see Life and Letters, II, 117-118, 129, 145-146. Thus he writes in 1883, “I am glad to hear of your projects. I feel sure that there is no time to be lost in securing the floating fragments of the great shipwreck of the American languages. When you have stirred up a national interest in it for the North of America, you should try to form a Committee for the South. The Emperor of Brazil would be sure to help, provided the work is done by real scholars” (145-146).

⁴⁷ Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, pp. 74-75.

⁴⁸ William Wyatt Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (London, 1876). In his preface (pp. v-xviii) Müller explicitly rejects any one explanation for mythology, whether fetishism or the disease of language.

⁴⁹ Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 11.

⁵⁰ Müller, “The Savage,” p. 111.

⁵¹ Müller, Anthropological Religion, pp. 173-180, “The Andaman Islanders.”

⁵² Müller, “Solar Myths,” pp. 900-922, esp. 902, 906, 919.

⁵³ Müller, Natural Religion, p. 516; India: What Can It Teach Us?, pp. 169-175.

⁵⁴ Müller, Anthropological Religion, Appendix VIII, “The Kalevala,” pp. 440-446.

⁵⁵ Müller, Selected Essays on Language, Mythology and Religion, I, 609-615, in ch. X, “On the Philosophy of Mythology.” Note, e.g., “Among Finns and Lapps, among Zulus and Maoris, among Khonds and Karens, we sometimes find the most startling analogies....” (p. 615).

⁵⁶ Müller, Physical Religion, pp. 286-293, in Lecture XII, “Religion, Myth, and Custom.”

⁵⁷ Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, V (New York, 1881), p. 89; “How much the student of Aryan mythology and ethnology may gain for his own progress by allowing himself a wider survey over the traditions and customs of the whole human race, is best known to those who have studied the works of Klemm, Waitz, Bastian, Sir John Lubbock, Mr. Tylor, and Dr. Callaway” (in “On the Philosophy of Mythology,” 1871).

⁵⁸ Lang’s comments in Modern Mythology, p. xx, alleging prejudice on Müller’s part against ethnological collections, are manifesdy unfair. The unbiased reader will, I believe, agree with the statements of Müller that he was not an adversary but more nearly a collaborator with Lang (Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 11; Life and Letters, II, 381, where Müller writes Lang, “... I am perfectly certain that some good may be got from the study of savages for the elucidation of Aryan myths. I never could find out why I should be thought to be opposed to Agriology, because I was an aryologist. L’un n’empeche pas Vautre,” 8 July 1897). Note that Müller, as well as Lang, was a charter member of the Folk-Lore Society in 1878.

⁵⁹ Müller, “Solar Myths,” p. 916.

⁶⁰ Müller, Natural Religion, pp. 508-510, and 511n.

⁶¹ Müller, Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, 235 et seq.; II, 433-435.

⁶² Lang, Modern Mythology, pp. 85, 142-143. Lang writes that he begged Müller not to read the book, and vowed not to criticize his ideas again (“Max Müller,” Contemporary Review, LXXVIII [1900], 785).

⁶³ Folk-Lore, X (1899), 346-348. Hartland was then engaged in a dispute with Lang over the nature of Australian aboriginal religious ideas.

⁶⁴ See Lang’s Preface to the new edition of Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2 vols. (London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta, 1913), I, xvi.

⁶⁵ Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 1913 ed., II, 298, 105; cf. 1887 ed., II, 280, 81.

⁶⁶ These are combined in No. 721 of Everyman’s Library, Tales of Ancient Greece (London and New York, 1915, frequently reprinted), whose introduction has no doubt misled countless younger readers into interpreting all Greek myths as activities of the sun.

⁶⁷ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1870, reprinted 1882), I, v-vii.

⁶⁸ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 21n, 65n; II, 75-76.

⁶⁹ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 168; cf. 49, 153, 291, 308, and A Manual of Mythology, in the Form of Question and Answer, 1st American ed., from the 2nd London ed. (New York, 1868), pp. 39, 70, 78, 81, 104, 109, 117, 119, 211, for references to parallels between solar heroes; indeed, Cox never introduces a hero without indicating these parallels.

⁷⁰ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 267.

⁷¹ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 170n, 308, 322-325, 409, 135n.

⁷² Cox, An Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and Folklore (London, 1881), pp. 309, 307.

⁷³ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 159n, 132n. Frequently the fairy-tale hero wears a “garment of humiliation” representative of the toiling, unrequited sun.

⁷⁴ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 247n.

⁷⁵ Müller, Natural Religion, p. 495.

⁷⁶ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 113.

⁷⁷ “The Master Thief” is Type 1525 in Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folk-Tale (Helsinki, 1928); “Rhampsinitus” is Type 950. Cox used this supposed tale for evidence against borrowing; see his “The Migration of Popular Stories,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s. XXII (July, 1880), 96-111.

⁷⁸ Cox, The Mythology of the Aryan Nations, I, 145.

⁷⁹ Cox, An Introduction to the Science of Comparative Mythology and Folklore, p. 7n.

⁸⁰ Lang, “Household Tales: Their Origin, Diffusion, and Relation to the Higher Myths,” Introduction to Grimm’s Household Tales, with the author’s notes, trans, and ed. Margaret Hunt, 2 vols. (London, 1910), I, xxiv-xxv, xxxv, xl.

⁸¹ See Lang’s note, “Household Tales: Their Origin, Diffusion, and Relation to the Higher Myths,” p. xxiv: “When The Mythology of the Aryan Nations was written, philologists were inclined to believe that their analysis of language was the true, perhaps the only key, to knowledge of what men had been in the pre-historic past. It is now generally recognized ... that the sciences of Anthropology and Archaeology also throw much light on the human past....

⁸² Robert Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, 2 vols. (London, 1877-1878), I, 162.

⁸³ Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, I, vi; II, 334.

⁸⁴ Other relevant publications are The Religion of Zoroaster (1879), The Religion and Mythology of the Aryans of Northern Europe (1880), Language, and Theories of its Origin (1881), The Law of Kosmic Order (1882), Eridanus, River and Constellation (1883), Researches into the Origin of the Primitive Constellations of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Babylonians (1899, 1900), Mr. Gladstone As I Knew Him, And Other Essays (1902), esp. “Studies in Pausanias,” pp. 93-235.

⁸⁵ Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, I, 4; “Reply to Prof. Max Müller on ‘The Etymology of Dionysos,’ “Academy, (19 Aug. 1882), cited in Brown, The Myth of Kirkê: including the visit of Odysseus to the Shades. An Homerik Study (London, 1883), p. 83n.

⁸⁶ E.g., Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, II, 139-140, [Theseus and the Minotaur], I, 420-426 [statue of Demeter]; “Posidonic Theory of Rev. G. W. Cox,” Poseidên: A Link Between Semite, Hamite, and Aryan (London, 1872), pp. 5-9. In his preface to a new edition of The Mythology of the Aryan Nations (1882), Cox pays especial tribute to the researches of Robert Brown. In The Unicorn: A Mythological Investigation (London, 1881), p. 73, Brown cites the acceptance of his view of Bakchos-Melqarth by Cox.

⁸⁷ Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, II, 140, 213; Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, with special reference to the recent mythological works of the Rt. Hon. Prof. F. Max Müller and Mr. Andrew Lang (London, Edinburgh, Oxford, 1898), p. 202.

⁸⁸ Brown, The Myth of Kirkê, pp. 163, 92.

⁸⁹ Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, I, 229, “... one key will never open all locks”; Poseidên, pp. 79-80.

⁹⁰ Brown, Poseidên, pp. 39-40; The Great D’tonysiak Myth, I, 229.

⁹¹ Brown, The Myth of Kirkê, pp. 157-162.

⁹² Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, II, 9-11; also The Unicorn, pp. 73-78, “The Contest between the Lion and the Leopard.” In The Myth of Kirkê, Brown resolves two variants of the death of Odysseus as the same solar myth, by making a ray-fish the young sun that drops on the bald head of Odysseus, the old sun (p. 23).

⁹³ Brown, The Unicorn, p. 1; The Myth of Kirkê, pp. 47, 53.

⁹⁴ Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, II, 332.

⁹⁵ Brown, Poseidên, pp. 2, 110-116.

⁹⁶ Brown, The Myth of Kirkê, pp. 167, 101.

⁹⁷ Brown, Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, p. ix.

⁹⁸ Brown, Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, pp. 23-24; cf. Müller, Contributions to the Science of Comparative Mythology, I, vii.

⁹⁹ Brown, Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, pp. 29-31, 54-66.

¹⁰⁰ Brown, Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, pp. 205-215.

¹⁰¹ Brown, Semitic Influence in Hellenic Mythology, pp. 30-31, 34, 150.

¹⁰² Lang, Custom and Myth (London, 1893), p. 137.

¹⁰³ Lang, “Moly and Mandragora,” in Custom and Myth, p. 155n.

¹⁰⁴ This polemical preface appears only in the 1898 ed., and was withdrawn in later reprint- ings of Custom and Myth. It is titled “Apollo, the Mouse, and Mr. Robert Brown, lunior, F.S.A., M.R.S.A.,” and occupies pp. i-xix.

¹⁰⁵ Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, or The Legends of Animals, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1872), II, p. 425. Gubernatis also compiled a mythological herbarium, La Mythologie des Plantes, ou Les Légendes du Règne Végétal, 2 vols. (Paris, 1878), in dictionary form; the first volume treats mythical heroes and phenomena with plant associations (the sun is like a tree), the second considers plants as they appear in myths. Gubernatis diverges from Müller on “Bernacles,” which he traces to a bird-producing tree in India (I, 65-70).

¹⁰⁶ Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, I, 370; II, 337, 322, 356, 181, 390.

¹⁰⁷ Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, I, 244. Cf. this interpretation with that of the modern psychoanalytical school, which considers “beans” and “stalk” as symbols for the testicles and penis, and sees the tale as a masturbation fantasy (William H. Desmonde, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” American Imago, VIII [Sept. 1951], 287-288).

¹⁰⁸ Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, II, 113. This is Type 38, “Claw in Split Tree.”

¹⁰⁹ Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, I, 258n. Motif B251.1.2.2., “Cows speak to one another on Christmas” (Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature [Bloomington, Ind., 1932-36]), is well-known, but the death prophecy is not. I heard the full tale from a Mississippi-born Negro.

¹¹⁰ Brown, The Myth of Kirkê, pp. 54-55.

¹¹¹ Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 117.

¹¹² Unsigned review, The Scotsman, 26 Dec. 1872. The lengthy review omits to mention the phallic as well as solar interpretations rendered by Gubernatis (see, e.g., Zoological Mythology, II, 9-10), with far more boldness than by squeamish Robert Brown (The Myth of Kirkê, p. 23n; The Great Dionysiak Myth, I, 7n).

¹¹³ Daniel Brinton, The Myths of the New World: A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America, 3rd ed., revised (Philadelphia, 1896), p. 109. In spite of its: viewpoint, this edition is very favorably reviewed in Folk-Lore, VIII (1897), 57-59 (unsigned), alongside an equally favorable review of Franz Boas, Indianische Sagen von der nord-pacifischen Kuste Amerikas (pp. 59-62), the study which upset Brinton’s anti-diffusionism. See Robert H. Lowie, The History of Ethnological Theory (New York, 1937), p. 146.

¹¹⁴ Brinton, The Myths of the New World, pp. 194-199.

¹¹⁵ Brinton, The Myths of the New World, pp. 206, 94 et seq., 252, 163, 168.

¹¹⁶ Müller, “Solar Myths,” p. 909.

¹¹⁷ Brinton, The Myths of the New World, p. 198, quoting from Müller, The Science of Language, Second Series. Brinton refers to both Müller and Cox in his introduction to American Hero-Myths: A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent (Philadelphia, 1882), pp. 23, 31n.

¹¹⁸ Brinton, The Myths of the New World, pp. 134, 139.

¹¹⁹ Müller, “Solar Myths,” p. 911; also Natural Religion, pp. 512-513.

¹²⁰ Lang, “Myths and Mythologists,” p. 64; also Myth, Ritual and Religion (London, 1887), II, 57-59.

¹²¹ Lang, “Myths and Mythologists,” p. 64. Brinton criticized Lang for degrading the savage spiritually—the position Lang later recanted—in Essays of an Americanist (Philadelphia, 1890), p. 102.

¹²² John Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions interpreted by Comparative Mythology, 11th ed. (Boston and New York, 1888), ch. 2, “The Descent of Fire,” pp. 37-68; and Lang, Custom and Myth, “The Divining Rod,” pp. 180-196.

¹²³ Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers, p. 123. Cf. Müller, Physical Religion, pp. 186-187, “Reconciliation of the Solar and Meteoric Theories.”

¹²⁴ Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers, pp. 195-196n.

¹²⁵ Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers, pp. 211, 192-194, 204n.

¹²⁶ Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers, pp. 151, 144-148, 238.

¹²⁷ Sidney Hartland, Mythology and Folktales: Their Relation and Interpretation, 2nd ed. (London, 1914), p. 13.

¹²⁸ In a gracious letter to Mrs. Max Müller after her husband’s death Lang wrote, “Our little systems have their day, or their hour: as knowledge advances they pass into the history of the efforts of pioneers” (Georgina Max Müller, Life and Letters, II, 452).