Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Altertumskunde
(ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INDO-ARYAN RESEARCH)
HERAUSGEGEBEN VON G. BÜHLER.
III. BAND, I. HEFT A.
VEDIC MYTHOLOGY
BY
A. A. MACDONELL.
I. INTRODUCTION.
i. Religion and mythology. Religion in its widest sense includes on the one hand the conception which men entertain of the divine or supernatural powers and, on the other, that sense of the dependence of human welfare on those powers which finds its expression in various forms of wor ship. Mythology is connected with the former side of religion as furnishing the whole body of myths or stories which are told about gods and heroes and which describe their character and origin, their actions and surroundings. Such myths have their source in the attempt of the human mind, in a primitive and unscientific age, to explain the various forces and phenomena of nature with which man is confronted. They represent in fact the conjectural science of a primitive mental condition. For statements which to the highly civilised mind would be merely metaphorical, amount in that early stage to explanations of the phenomena observed. The intellectual difficulties raised by the course of the heavenly bodies, by the incidents of the thunderstorm, by reflexions on the origin and constitution of the outer world, here receive their answers in the form of stories. The basis of these myths is the primitive attitude of mind which regards all nature as an aggregate of animated entities. A myth actually arises when the imagination interprets a natural event as the action of a personified being resembling the human agent. Thus the observation that the moon follows the sun without overtaking it, would have been transformed into a myth by describing the former as a maiden following a man by whom she is rejected. Such an original myth enters on the further stage of poetical embellishment, as soon as it becomes the property of people endowed with creative imagination. Various traits are now added according to the individual fancy of the narrator, as the story passes from mouth to mouth. The natural phenomenon begins to fade out of the picture as its place is taken by a detailed representation of human passions. When the natural basis of the tale is forgotten, new touches totally unconnected with its original significance may be added or even transferred from other myths. When met with at a late stage of its development, a myth may be so far overgrown with secondary accretions unconnected with its original form, that its analysis may be extremely difficult or even impossible. Thus it would be hard indeed to discover the primary naturalistic elements in the characters or actions of the Hellenic gods, if we knew only the highly anthropomorphic deities in the plays of Euripides. B. DELBRUCK, ZVP. 1865, pp. 266 99; KUHN, Uber Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung, Berliner Ak. der Wissenschaften 1873, pp. 123 51; MAX MULLER, Comparative Mythology. Oxford Essays. II; Philosophy of Mythology. Selected Indo-arische Philolo^ie. III. 1 A. 1
