Category: Mythology, Legends & Folklore
The increasing number of essays, pamphlets, works, and reviews of works on speculative subjects, with which the literature of England at present teems, compels the conclusion that the public mind has been greatly unsettled or strangely transformed since the days when John Bull...
I think we have already distinct evidence that the Fecial Law was something more than our Treaty and Diplomatic Law. Let us examine it more particularly in action. If the law of...
25. CHAPTER XIV.Dr Newman in his inaugural discourse as Rector of the Dublin University ("On the Place held by the Faculty of Arts in the University Course"), which I think never received the a...
21. CHAPTER XI.Boulanger (1722-59), a freethinker, and the friend and correspondent of Voltaire, was so dominated by his belief in the universal Deluge as a fact, that he made its consequences...
23. i. 101, 123, 211), along with flint doubtless (but this was commonthroughout the bronze age, as Sir John himself admits), at an early period;--and bronze, though comparatively rare, yet exists among the very early Assyrian remains--there seems...
8. CHAPTER VII."Tradition reveals the past to us, and consequently it reveals to us also the future. It is the tie which binds the past, the present, and the future together, and is the scienc...
3. CHAPTER III.The scriptural narrative seems to establish:--(1.) That human society did not commence with the fortuitous concurrence of individuals, but that, though originating with a single...
19. CHAPTER X.I must add that this enumeration by no means exhausts the list. It is not my purpose, however, to pursue the subject in all its ramifications. I shall limit myself to the examin...
11. xiii. 235), and the classical epic of the Ceropes, "foundedon the transformation of a set of jugglers into monkeys." But if compared with the above tradition, I think that the only two instances (Tylor, i. 341) which seem to bear out th...
13. ii. 12):--"There is much in the theo-mythology of Homer which, if it had been a system founded on fable, could not have appeared there. It stands before us like one of our old churches, h...
1. CHAPTER I.The increasing number of essays, pamphlets, works, and reviews of works on speculative subjects, with which the literature of England at present teems, compels the conclusion th...
15. CHAPTER IX."But surely there is nothing improbable in the supposition, that in the poems of Homer such vestiges may be found. Every recorded form of society bears some traces of those by w...
4. CHAPTER IV.To many it may seem a fundamental objection that my theory supposes a chronology altogether out of keeping with modern discovery; and I fancy there is a somewhat general impress...
24. CHAPTER XIII.Taking as the basis of this theory that the law of nations forms part of a tradition, that the stream of this tradition has never ceased to flow, and that the diffusion of its w...
5. CHAPTER V.Although the testimony of history is definite and decisive as to the chronology of the world, within the limits of a few hundred years, there is a general assumption, in all bra...
7. CHAPTER VI.Having probed the chronologies of India, Babylonia, Phoenicia,[75] China, &c., and having found that one and all, when touched with the talisman of history, shrink within the li...
20. iv. 1023) cites more than twenty ancient authors who speakof Ogyges as appertaining in their eyes to what was _most primitive_ in Greece. He is son of Neptune. He is the first founder of the kingdom of Thebes. Servius represents him _a...
22. CHAPTER XII."We have little knowledge of the times which preceded the Deluge.... A single consideration interests us, and it must never be lost sight of, and that is, that chastisements are...
6. cv. 23), which soon became one of the earliest, most civilised,and flourishing kingdoms of antiquity, and was established before Abraham's days (Gen. xii. 14-20), and in the glorious reign of Sesostris ... while Ham's posterity, in the line...
16. i. 223, a curious additional instance of the same word havingconnections with "boat" and arc (_tobe_) might be discovered in Kibotos, the name of a mountain in Phrygia, where the ark is said to have rested (Gainet, i. 220). Also we have a...
2. CHAPTER II.But underlying the question of the law of nations, and determining it, is the question whether or not there is a law of nature--a rule of right and wrong, independent of, and an...
12. CHAPTER VIII.Since all antediluvian traditions meet in Noah, and are transmitted through him, there is an _à priori_ probability that we shall find all the antediluvian traditions confused i...
17. i. 83) says--"Les Argiens avoient encore une autre fêtependant laquelle ils précipitoent dans un abîme un agneau.... ils étoient armés de javelines, ils appelloient _Bacchus_ au son des trompettes et l'invitoient _à semontrer hors d...
18. i. 609, appears to me valuable in proof of the transitionfrom ancestral to solar worship, or at least of their interfusion:--"The sun was probably named in Babylonia both San and Sanei, before his title took the definite _Semitic_ for...
10. ii. 103), where one of their chiefs speaks thus--"For we must tell youthat long before one hundred years our ancestors _came out of this very ground_.... You _came out of the ground_ in a country that lies beyond the seas." Now, even if we consent...
9. id. 104--"Belus, the deity above mentioned, cut off his ownhead, upon which the other gods mixed the blood as it gushed out _with the earth_, and _from thence_ men _were formed. On this_ account it is that they are rational and partake...
14. ii. 70) historical surmises, and to go along with him so far as tobelieve that the tradition was mainly preserved through Cuthite or _Chus_ite channels. We can, then, see a probability in the conjecture that the descendants of Chus, in preserv...