ing increase upon me. The main cause was that whereas Mr.
Max Muller explained Greek myths by etymologies of words in the Aryan
languages, chiefly Greek, Latin, Slavonic, and Sanskrit, I kept finding
myths very closely resembling those of Greece among Red Indians, Kaffirs,
Eskimo, Samoyeds, Kamilaroi, Maoris, and Cahrocs. Now if Aryan myths
arose from a 'disease' of Aryan languages, it certainly did seem an odd
thing that myths so similar to these abounded where non-Aryan languages
alone prevailed. Did a kind of linguistic measles affect all tongues
alike, from Sanskrit to Choctaw, and everywhere produce the same ugly
scars in religion and myth?



The Ugly Scars


The ugly scars were the problem! A civilised fancy is not puzzled for a
moment by a beautiful beneficent Sun-god, or even by his beholding the
daughters of men that they are fair. But a civilised fancy _is_ puzzled
when the beautiful Sun-god makes love in the shape of a dog. {5} To me,
and indeed to Mr. Max Muller, the ugly scars were the problem.

He has written--'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of
the word, is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or
miraculous.' But he explained these blots on the mythology of Greece,
for example, as the result practically of old words and popular sayings
surviving in languages after the original, harmless, symbolical meanings
of the words and sayings were lost. What had been a poetical remark
about an aspect of nature became an obscene, or brutal, or vulgar myth, a
stumbling block to Greek piety and to Greek philosophy.

To myself, on the other hand, it seemed that the ugly scars were remains
of that kind of taste, fancy, customary law, and incoherent speculation
which everywhere, as far as we know, prevails to various degrees in
savagery and barbarism. Attached to the 'hideous idols,' as Mr. Max
Muller calls them, of early Greece, and implicated in a ritual which
religious conservatism dared not abandon, the fables of perhaps neolithic
a

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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