Note 19 — Chapter III · ROOTS OF THE MYTH

Writers like Dr. Conybeare, who have never even realized the nature of a mythological problem, bewilder their readers by blusterously affirming that there can be no homogeneity between myth-conceptions unless the names attached to them in different regions and by different races are etymologically akin. They irrationally ask for linguistic “equations” where a linguistic equation by itself would count for nothing, the relevant fact being the equation of the myth-concepts. Blind to the salient facts that every “race” concerned had undergone mutation by conquest; that God-names and God-ideas alike passed from race to race by intermarriages,19 by the effects of enslavement, and by official adoption;20 and that conquering races constantly adopted wholly or partly the “Gods” of the conquered,21 they in effect assume that God-names and God-concepts are fixed entities, traceable solely by glossology. As if glossology could possibly pretend to trace, even on its own ground, all the transformations of proper-names and appellatives through different races and languages. The pretence that these are on all fours with the general development of language is mere scientific charlatanism.