While maintaining that ‘all comparative mythology must rest on comparison of names as its most certain basis’ (a system which Mannhardt declares explicitly to be so far ‘a failure’), Mr. Max Müller says, ‘It is well known that in his last, nay posthumous essay, Mannhardt, no mean authority, returned to the same conviction.’ I do not know which is Mannhardt’s very last essay, but I shall prove that in the posthumous essays Mannhardt threw cold water on the whole method of philological comparative mythology.
However, as proof of Mannhardt’s return to Mr. Max Müller’s convictions, our author cites Mythologische Forschungen (pp. 86-113).
What Mannhardt said
In the passages here produced as proof of Mannhardt’s conversion, he is not investigating a myth at all, or a name which occurs in mythology. He is trying to discover the meaning of the practices of the Lupercalia at Rome. In February, says Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Romans held a popular festival, and lads ran round naked, save for skins of victims, whipping the spectators. Mannhardt, in his usual way, collects all the facts first, and then analyses the name Luperci. This does not make him a philological mythologist. To take a case in point, at Selkirk and Queensferry the bounds are ridden, or walked, by ‘Burleymen’ or ‘Burrymen.’ [{48}] After examining the facts we examine the words, and ask, ‘Why Burley or Burry men?’ At Queensferry, by a folk etymology, one of the lads wears a coat stuck over with burrs. But ‘Borough-men’ seems the probable etymology. As we examine the names Burley, or Burry men, so Mannhardt examines the name Luperci; and if a true etymology can be discovered, it will illustrate the original intention of the Lupercalia (p. 86).
He would like to explain the Lupercalia as a popular play, representing the spirits of vegetation opposing the spirits of infertility. ‘But we do not forget that our whole theory of the development of the rite rests on a hypothesis which the lack of materials prevents us from demonstrating.’ He would explain Luperci as Lupiherci—‘wolf-goats.’ Over this we need not linger; but how does all this prove Mannhardt to have returned to the method of comparing Greek with Vedic divine names, and arriving thence at some celestial phenomenon as the basis of a terrestrial myth? Yet he sometimes does this.
My Relations to Mannhardt
If anything could touch and move an unawakened anthropologist it would be the conversion of Mannhardt. My own relations with his ideas have the interest of illustrating mental coincidences. His name does not occur, I think, in the essay, ‘The Method of Folklore,’ in the first edition of my Custom and Myth. In that essay I take, as an example of the method, the Scottish and Northumbrian Kernababy, the puppet made out of the last gleanings of harvest. This I compared to the Greek Demeter of the harvest-home, with sheaves and poppies in her hands, in the immortal Seventh Idyll of Theocritus. Our Kernababy, I said, is a stunted survival of our older ‘Maiden,’ ‘a regular image of the harvest goddess,’ and I compared κορη. Next I gave the parallel case from ancient Peru, and the odd accidental coincidence that there the maize was styled Mama Cora (μητηρ κορη!).
In entire ignorance of Mannhardt’s corn-spirit, or corn-mother, I was following Mannhardt’s track. Indeed, Mr. Max Müller has somewhere remarked that I popularise Mannhardt’s ideas. Naturally he could not guess that the coincidence was accidental and also inevitable. Two men, unknown to each other, were using the same method on the same facts.
Mannhardt’s Return to his old Colours
If, then, Mannhardt was re-converted, it would be a potent argument for my conversion. But one is reminded of the re-conversion of Prince Charles. In 1750 he ‘deserted the errors of the Church of Rome for those of the Church of England.’ Later he returned, or affected to return, to the ancient faith.