Andrew Lang - Modern Mythology

Now, what important questions was I gliding over? In what questions did I not expect to find reason? Why in this savage fatras about Cronos swallowing his children, about blood-drops becoming bees (Mr. Max Müller says ‘Melian nymphs’), and bees being stars, and all the rest of a prehistoric Märchen worked over again and again by the later fancy of Greek poets and by Greek voyagers who recognised Cronos in Moloch. In all this I certainly saw no ‘reason,’ but I have given in tabular form the general, if inharmonious, conclusions of more exact and conscientious scholars, ‘their variegated hypotheses,’ as Mannhardt says in the case of Demeter. My error, rebuked by Professor Tiele, is the lack of that ‘scientific exactitude’ exhibited by the explanations arranged in my tabular form.

I would reply that I am not engaged in a study of the Cult of Cronos, but of the revolting element in his Myth : his swallowing of his children, taking a stone emetic by mistake, and disgorging the swallowed children alive; the stone being on view at Delphi long after the Christian era. Now, such stories of divine feats of swallowing and disgorging are very common, I show, in savage myth and popular Märchen . The bushmen have Kwai Hemm, who swallows the sacred Mantis insect. He is killed, and all the creatures whom he has swallowed return to light. Such stories occur among Australians, Kaffirs, Red Men, in Guiana, in Greenland, and so on. In some cases, among savages. Night (conceived as a person), or one star which obscures another star, is said to ‘swallow’ it. Therefore, I say, ‘natural phenomena, explained on savage principles, might give the data of the swallowing myth, of Cronos’ 47 47 C . and M . p. 56.

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Chips , iv. 62.

Chips , iv. p. xxxv.

Chips , iv. pp. vi. vii.

Ibid . iv. p. xv.

Cults of the Greek States , ii. 435-440.

Chips , iv. p. xiv.

Chips , iv. p. xiii.

Suidas, s . v . τελμισσεις; he cites Dionysius of Chalcis, B.C. 200.

See Goguet, and Millar of Glasgow, and Voltaire.

Translated by M. Parmentier.

See ‘Totemism,’ infra .

Longmans.

M . R . R . i. 155-160.

Tylor’s Prim . Cult . i. 145.

Turner’s Samoa , p. 219.

Gill’s Myths and Songs , p. 79.

M . R . R . ii. 160.

Metam . i. 567.

Grimm, cited by Liebrecht in Zur Volkskunde , p. 17.

Primitive Culture , i. 285.

Op . cit . i. 46-81.

M . R . R . i. 160.

Erratum: This is erroneous. See Contributions , &c., vol. i. p. 6, where Mr. Max Müller writes, ‘Tuna means eel.’ This shows why Tuna, i . e . Eel, is the hero. His connection, as an admirer, with the Moon, perhaps remains obscure.

Phonetically there may be ‘no possible objection to the derivation of Απολλων from a Sanskrit form, *Apa-var-yan, or *Apa-val-yan’ (ii. 692); but, historically, Greek is not derived from Sanskrit surely!

Mythologische Forschungen , p. 275.

Baumkultus , p. 297. Berlin: 1875.

Antike Wald – und Feldkulte , p. 257. Referring to Baumkultus , p. 297.

Oriental and Linguistic Studies , second series, p. 160. La Religion Védique , iii. 293.

1, viii. cf . i. 27.

Riv . Crit . Mensile . Geneva, iii. xiv. p. 2.

Custom and Myth , p. 3, citing Revue de l’Hist . des Religions , ii. 136.

M . R . R . i. 24.

Revue de l’Hist . des Religions , xii. 256.

Op . cit . p. 253.

Op . cit . xii. 250.

P. 104, infra .

Revue de l’Hist . des Religions , xii. 259.

M . R . R . i. 25.

Rev . xii. 247.

M . R . R . i. 24.

Rev . xii. 277.

Rev . xii. 264.

M . R . R . i. 44, 45.

Custom and Myth , p. 51.

Rev . xii. 262.

Odyssey , book ix.

C . and M . p. 56.