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Carrying with us the inferences above drawn, however, it is a corollary that ideas and practices of these kinds will arise. When tradition preserves both lines of ancestry–when a chief, nicknamed “the Wolf”, carries away from an adjacent tribe a wife who is remembered either under the animal name of her tribe, or as a woman; it will happen that if a son distinguishes himself, the remembrance of him among his descendants will be that he was born of a wolf and some other animal, or of a wolf and a woman. Misinterpretation, arising in the way described from defects of language, will entail belief in a creature uniting the attributes of the two; and if the tribe grows into a society, representations of such a creature will become objects of worship. One of the cases cited by Mr. McLennan may here be repeated in illustration. “The story of the origin of the Dikokamenni Kirgheez,” they say, “from a red greyhound and a certain queen and her forty handmaidens, is of ancient date.” Now, if “the red greyhound” was the nickname of a man extremely swift of foot (celebrated runners have been nicknamed “greyhound” among ourselves), a story of this kind would naturally arise; and if the metaphorical name was mistaken for the actual name, there might result, as the idol of the race, a compound form appropriate to the story. We need not be surprised, then, at finding among the Egyptians the goddess Pasht represented as a woman with a lion’s head, and the god Har-hat as a man with the head of a hawk. The Babylonian gods–one having the form of a man with an eagle’s tail, and another uniting a human bust to a fish’s body–no longer appear such unaccountable conceptions. We get feasible explanations, too, of sculptures representing sphinxes, winged human-headed bulls, etc.; as well as of the stories about centaurs, satyrs, and the rest.

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Ancient myths in general thus acquire meanings considerably different from those ascribed to them by comparative mythologists. Though these last may be in part correct, yet if the foregoing argument is valid, they can scarcely be correct in their main outlines. Indeed, if we read the facts the other way upward, regarding as secondary or additional, the elements that are said to be primary, while we regard as primary, certain elements which are considered as accretions of later times, we shall, I think, be nearer the truth.

The current theory of the myth is that it has grown out of the habit of symbolizing natural agents and processes, in terms of human personalities and actions. Now, it may in the first place be remarked that, though symbolization of this kind is common among civilized races, it is not common among races that are the most uncivilized. By existing savages, surrounding objects, motions, and changes, are habitually used to convey ideas respecting human transactions. It needs but to read the speech of an Indian chief to see that just as primitive men name one another metaphorically after surrounding objects, so do they metaphorically describe one another’s doings as though they were the doings of natural objects. But assuming a contrary habit of thought to be the dominant one, ancient myths are explained as results of the primitive tendency to symbolize inanimate things and their changes, by human beings and their doings.

A kindred difficulty must be added. The change of verbal meaning from which the myth is said to arise, is a change opposite in kind to that which prevails in the earlier stages of linguistic development. It implies a derivation of the concrete from the abstract; whereas at first abstracts are derived only from concretes: the concrete of abstracts being a subsequent process. In the words of Prof. Max Mueller, there are “dialects spoken at the present day which have no abstract nouns, and the more we go back in the history of languages, the smaller we find the number of these useful expressions” (Chips, vol. ii., p. 54); or, as he says more recently–“Ancient words and ancient thoughts, for both go together, have not yet arrived at that stage of abstraction in which, for instance, active powers, whether natural or supernatural, can be represented in any but a personal and more or less human form.” (Fraser’s Magazine, April, 1870.) Here the concrete is represented as original, and the abstract as derivative. Immediately afterward, however, Prof. Max Mueller, having given as examples of abstract nouns, “day and night, spring and winter, dawn and twilight, storm and thunder,” goes on to argue that, “as long as people thought in language, it was simply impossible to speak of morning or evening, of spring and winter, without giving to these conceptions something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last, personal character.” (Chips, vol. ii., p. 55.) Here the concrete is derived from the abstract–the personal conception is represented as coming after the impersonal conception; and through such transformation of the impersonal into the personal, Prof. Max Mueller considers ancient myths to have arisen. How are these propositions reconcilable? One of two things must be said:–If originally there were none of these abstract nouns, then the earliest statements respecting the daily course of Nature were made in concrete terms–the personal elements of the myth were the primitive elements, and the impersonal expressions which are their equivalents came later. If this is not admitted, then it must be held that, until after there arose these abstract nouns, there were no current statements at all respecting these most conspicuous objects and changes which the heavens and the earth present; and that the abstract nouns having been somehow formed, and rightly formed, and used without personal meanings, afterward became personalized–a process the reverse of that which characterizes early linguistic progress.