Note 43 — Chapter III · ROOTS OF THE MYTH

[To this inductive argument the only answer, thus far, seems to be to argue, as does Dr. Conybeare, that while “no one nowadays accepts the Book of Joshua offhand as sound history,” nevertheless Joshua is there “a man of flesh and blood.”43 On the same reasoning, Samson cannot be an Evemerized deity, though his mythical character is clear to every mythologist. Such considerations our amateur meets by alleging that if “half-a-dozen or more” men “come along” mistaking an “astral myth” for a man, we should “think we were bewitched, and take to our heels.”44 In this connection Dr. Conybeare represents me as declaring Jesus to be “an astral myth.” It is not clear whether Dr. Conybeare, who supposes totems to be Gods, knows what “astral myth” means, so I impute rather hallucination than fabrication. The rational reader is aware that no such theory has been put or suggested by me.45 But as to his thesis, which would seem to imply that even solar deities could never be supposed by “half-a-dozen” to be real men, it is sufficient to point out that Herakles, the typical solar Hero-God, was believed by millions in antiquity to be a real man; and that Samson, obviously = the Semitic Shamas or Shimshai, a variant of Herakles, was believed by millions of Jews to have been a real man. It is needless here to go into the cases of Achilles and Ulysses; but the reader who would know more of mythology than has been discovered by Dr. Conybeare and his newspaper reviewers may usefully investigate these themes.