Note 3 — Chapter VIII · CONSERVATIVE POSITIONS

And this figures as a refutation. For our traditionalist, comparative mythology does not and cannot exist; for him there can be no fundamental connection between any two nominal myths unless they are absolutely identical in all their details; and the goat-footed Pan and the goat-footed Satan (certainly descended from the Goat-God Azazel) are merely “very different beings,” though Satan for the later Jews and Jesuists actually corresponded to Pan (who is not a mere satyr for the Greeks) not only in being the spirit of concupiscence3 but in being “the God of this world,” as the Gospel myth in effect shows him to be. And this exhibition of ignorance of every principle of mythology passes for “scholarship,” and will be duly so certificated by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who undertakes to preside in that department, as in politics, with about equal qualifications.