(September 1890)

PAUSANIAS, in whose description of Greece we find the popular legends unsophisticated as yet by the philosopher and the grammanan, after relating how Rhea gave to her cannibal mate, Kronos, a foal to eat instead of the little Poseidon, and afterwards in lieu of Zeus, a stone wrapt up in swaddling clothes, goes on to say : “As to these fables, I considered them childish when I began this work, but when I got as far as this book (the eighth) I formed this view, that those who were reckoned wise among the Greeks spoke of old in riddles, and not directly; so I imagine the fable about Kronos to be Greek wisdom.” (viii, 8) The myths of the Greeks are riddles for us still, but they were not intended as such; they expressed the childish conceptions of the world formed by savages; they were the records of their daily lives, embellished by so uncontrolled and fiery an imagination that, as Morgan says, “all primitive religions are grotesque, and to some extent unintelligible.” But what is fabulous and unintelligible to people that take a sober view of nature, appears, on the contrary, simple and natural enough to young and uncultivated minds. The Scandinavian Viking had as firm a belief in the power of the spells of witches to raise storms as the French paysan has in the efficacy of his prayers to produce rainfall for his own, and hailstorms for his neighbours’ vineyards; as the little English boy has in the incidents of the drama of the death and burial of Cock Robin, a nursery, tale that modern mythologists might, without any excessive strain of imagination, transform into a solar myth of Hindoo origin. It is only in the course of time, and when the phenomena which had produced them have passed away, that early popular productions of the intellect are converted into myths. This holds good also of hieroglyphics. At first they were simply meant to express the animals and objects they represented, but the scribes having modified the drawings for convenience’ sake, they ceased to be intelligible to all but the initiated. It is precisely because the true popular legends are naïve and spontaneous productions of the intellect that we are enabled by their study to reconstruct the customs and the ideas of pre-historic men.

The study of the Vedas, like new wine, has intoxicated many a Sanskrit scholar. It is their boast to have round the magic key that shall unlock the secrets alike of the riddle that puzzled Pausanias and of numberless others. Resuscitating a very old theory, they affirm that almost all myths are meteorological allegories.

There are, however, more things contained in a myth than the motions of celestial bodies or changes of the atmosphere.

Bachofen, in his work of genius, Das Mutterecht, has unravelled in the Greek myths the ancient forms of the family, which the great American thinker, Lewis Morgan, succeeded in tracing among the savages of America and Polynesia. Mr. Andrew Lang has, with equal wit and humour, shown that the gross fables of the Greeks owed their origin to the modes of thought habitual to savages.

The myth of Athena, some peculiarities of the origin of which I here propose to examine, is one of supreme importance, not only because Athena was the tutelary goddess of the city that has played so unique a part in the history of mankind, but also because the legends that have grown round her name in the course of time may, if rightly interpreted, afford us an insight into the pre-historic times of Greece.