[113]. 1899 ed., pp. 6, 7.
[114]. De Legibus Hebræorum Ritualibus, 1732.
[115]. De l’Origine des Fables: Œuvres, Vol. III., 1758.
The revival of learning made scholars acquainted with the religions not only of Greece and Rome, but of the nations with whom the Greeks and Romans had come in contact—Egyptians, Semites, Persians, and Indians. Travellers gave accounts of the religions they found in remote parts of the world, and missionaries reported on beliefs and customs of many nations. These were the sources from which were compiled the comprehensive works on religion, from Alexander Ross, View of All the Religions in the World, etc., 1652, to Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes ou Religion Universelle, 1794. All heathen religions were believed to be based on sun and star worship.
New vistas were opened up by the writings of De Brosses (1760), who investigated the beliefs of savage races and based all religion on “Fetishism.”
To quote once more from Lang: “In the beginning of the [nineteenth] century Germany turned her attention to mythology. In a pious kind of spirit, Friedrich Creuzer [1771-1858] sought to find symbols of some pure, early, and Oriental theosophy in the myths and mysteries of Greece. The great Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus (1829), brought back common-sense, and made it the guide of his vast, his unequalled learning. In a gentler and more genial spirit, C. Ottfried Müller [1797-1840] laid the foundation of a truly scientific and historical mythology. Neither of these writers had, like Alfred Maury [1857], much knowledge of the myths and faiths of the lower races, but they often seem on the point of anticipating the ethnological method.” (L.c., p. 23.)
Folklore.
The mythological aspect of the subject was illuminated by the researches of the brothers Grimm (J. L. K., 1785-1863; W. K., 1786-1859), whose collections of Märchen (1812-5) were found to contain Teutonic myths, and by their resemblance to Norse, Greek, and Vedic mythology suggested that in German folklore were remains of a common Indo-Germanic tradition. This was the beginning of the intelligent study of Folklore. Mannhardt (1865) and others investigated popular, and especially peasant, customs and beliefs connected with agriculture and vegetation; and showed that here, in what Christianity had reduced to superstition, were to be found survivals of the religions that Christianity had supplanted. Thenceforward the study of Folklore, and of the “lower mythology” of beliefs, customs, and superstitions, gradually developed into a science, which is now recognised as the valuable ally of Anthropology. Meanwhile the anthropological signification of religion was emerging from the mass of materials collected from all over the globe. Anthropology established its universality, and made many attempts to find a common factor, first in astral worship, then in Euhemerism (Banier, 1738), Fetishism (De Brosses, 1709-1777), Nature-worship (Max Müller, etc.), Ancestor-worship (Herbert Spencer, Lippert [1866], etc.), and later in Totemism. These hypotheses were based on the erroneous assumption that savage religion represented the primitive mode of thought, out of which civilised religions had evolved. Later it was realised that “The Australian black or the Andaman Islander is separated by as many generations from the beginning of religion as his most advanced contemporaries; and in these tens or hundreds of thousands of years there has been constant change, growth, and decay—and decay is not a simple return to the primal state. We can learn a great deal from the lowest existing religions, but they cannot tell us what the beginning of religion was, any more than the history of language can tell us what was the first human speech.”[[116]]
[116]. G. F. Moore, “The Hist. of Religions in the Nineteenth Cent.,” Congress Arts and Sci., St. Louis, 1904, p. 440.
Comparative Religion.