After the Agglutinative period, and previous to the National era and “the appearance of the first traces of literature,” he places “a period represented everywhere by the same characteristic features, called the Mythological or Mythopœic age.”
It was during this period that the main part of the vast fund of mythic lore is supposed to have crystallized; for primitive man, knowing nothing whatever of physical laws, cause and effect, and the “necessary regularity of things,” yet seeking an explanation of the natural phenomena, described them in the only way possible to him, and attributed to all inanimate objects his own sentiments and passions, fancying them influenced by the same things, in the same way. This tendency to personify or animate everything is universal among savages, who are nothing but men in the primitive state; and “in early philosophy throughout the world, the sun, moon, and stars are alive, and, as it were, human in their nature.” “Poetry has so far kept alive in our minds the old animative theory of nature, that it is no great effort in us to fancy the waterspout a huge giant or a sea monster, and to depict, in what we call appropriate metaphor, its march across the field of ocean.”
As the names of the Greek gods and heroes have in a great measure been found to correspond with the Sanskrit names of physical things, we have been able to read some of the first thoughts of primitive man; and “the obvious meaning” of many words “did much to preserve vestiges of plain sense in classic legend, in spite of all the efforts of the commentators.”
According to the philologists, therefore, these thoughts had already assumed a definite form in the remote epoch when many nations, now scattered over the face of the earth, occupied the same country, spoke the same language, and formed but one people. Of course, “as long as such beings as Heaven or Sun are consciously talked of in mythic language, the meaning of their legends is open to no question, and the action ascribed to them will as a rule be natural and appropriate;” but with the gradual diffusion of this one people to various parts of the earth, the original meaning of these words was entirely lost, and they came to be looked upon eventually simply as the names of deities or heroes—very much in the way that the word “good-by” has long survived its original form as a conscious prayer, “God be with you!” and the word “ostracism” has lost all connection with an oyster shell.
The primitive meaning of a myth died away with the original meaning of a word; and it is because “the Greek had forgotten that Zeus (Jupiter) meant ‘the bright sky,’ that he could make him king” over a company of manlike deities on Olympus.
We can best explain how the many anomalies occur, and how the myths got so tangled up together that now it is almost impossible to disentangle them and trace them back to their original meanings, by comparing their descent through the ages to the course of a snowball, which, rolling down a mountain side, gathers to itself snow, earth, rocks, etc., until, in the vast agglomeration of kindred and foreign substances, the original nucleus is entirely lost to sight.
The fact that there are many different myths to explain the same phenomenon can readily be accounted for by the old saying, “circumstances alter cases.” Thus the heat of the sun, for example, so beneficial at certain times, may prove baleful and injurious at others.
The philologists, who believe that all myths (except the imitative myths, of which the tale of Berenice is a fair example) were originally nature myths, have divided them into a few large classes, which include the myths of the sky, the sun, dawn, daylight, night, moon, earth, sea, clouds, fire, wind, and finally those of the underworld and of the demons of drought and darkness.