Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2) — Inside the Classic

The Savage Mind as Myth-Maker

Lang devotes two chapters to delineating what he calls “the mental condition of savages.” He identifies five characteristics: confusion of all things in an equality of presumed animation and intelligence, belief in sorcery, spiritualism, curiosity, and easy credulity combined with mental indolence. This condition, he argues, is the basis of the irrational element in myth. To support his case, he cites travellers’ reports, Jesuit missionary relations, and the institution of totemism—found in Australia, Africa, America, the Oceanic Islands, India, and North Asia. Totemism, for Lang, is a proof that savages do not clearly distinguish between men, plants, beasts, and other natural objects. He quotes Hume’s essay on natural religion to suggest a universal tendency to conceive all beings like ourselves, transferring to objects the qualities of which we are intimately conscious.

Cosmogonic Myths Without a Cosmos

In his chapter on non-Aryan myths of origin, Lang notes a paradox: the very word “cosmogonic” implies an orderly universe, yet the myth-makers had no such concept. Their answers to “Who made the world?” are piecemeal and contradictory. He recounts an anecdote of a Scottish minister’s daughter who solved the problem with the impromptu myth that “God first made a little place to stand on, and then he made the rest.” Savages, Lang contends, lack the conception of God as a moral being who watches conduct; at most they have “the small-change of the idea God”—a belief in magnified non-natural medicine-men or extra-natural beings with human and magical attributes, often wearing fur, fins, and feathers. This chapter surveys myths from Australia, the Andaman Islands, Bushmen, Zulus, Hurons, Iroquois, Navajoes, Maoris, Aztecs, and Peruvians, stressing the similarity of ideas across vastly different conditions of society and culture.

Survivals in Greek and Sanskrit Tradition

Lang’s central thesis is that the wildest elements in Greek legend and the Sanskrit Brahmanas are relics—whether borrowed or inherited—of the savage mental status. He argues that savages pass on to their gods the magical powers they themselves claim: metamorphosis, shape-shifting, flying, invisibility, conversing with the dead, and miraculous healing. As worshippers become more reasonable, they forget that they once claimed such endowments, but the gods of myth retain them. Lang thus positions his work against earlier mythological systems, particularly Max Müller’s philological approach, and aligns himself with the anthropological tradition of Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, and especially Edward Tylor. The method, he claims, accounts not only for the origin of myths but also for their wide diffusion, as similar savage conditions produce similar stories across the globe.

Lang’s volume is best read as a sustained argument for the anthropological study of myth, grounded in the evidence of contemporary savagery rather than in linguistic reconstruction alone. Readers should note that Lang explicitly limits his inquiry to the irrational element in myth; he does not claim to explain all mythology, nor does he address the origins of religion itself. The work is a companion to the second volume, which continues the survey of divine myths and applies the method to specific traditions.

I’ve always admired how Lang’s old myths keep their tangled, primal roots, whispering of a mind we’ve half-forgotten. There’s a quiet kinship there with those early biblical strata in Prolegomena to the History of Israel — Edition Insights — both patiently unearth what lies beneath polished scripture and story, finding not error, but memory.