nly two methods are possible. The method, in this third
case, is to see whether the irrational features and elements of
civilised Greek myth occur also in the myths of savages who speak
languages quite unlike those from whose diseases Mr. Mueller derives
the corruption of religion. If the same features recur, are they as
much in harmony with the mental habits of savages, such as Bushmen and
Hottentots, as they are out of accord with the mental habits of
civilised Greeks? If this question can be answered in the affirmative,
then it may be provisionally assumed that the irrational elements of
savage myth are the legacy of savage modes of thought, and have
survived in the religion of Greece from a time when the ancestors of
the Greeks were savages. But inquirers who use this method do not in
the least believe that either Greek or savage gods were, for the more
part, originally real men. Both Greeks and savages have worshipped the
ghosts of the dead. Both Greeks and savages assign to their gods the
miraculous power of transformation and magic, which savages also
attribute to their conjurers or shamans. The mantle (if he had a
mantle) of the medicine-man has fallen on the god; but Zeus, or Indra,
was not once a real medicine-man. A number of factors combine in the
conception of Indra, or Zeus, as either god appears in Sanskrit or
Greek literature, of earlier or later date. Our school does not hold
anything so absurd as that Daphne was a real girl pursued by a young
man. But it has been observed that, among most savage races,
metamorphoses like that of Daphne not only exist in mythology, but are
believed to occur very frequently in actual life. Men and women are
supposed to be capable of turning into plants (as the bamboo in
Sarawak), into animals, and stones, and stars, and those metamorphoses
happen as contemporary events--for example, in Samoa.[187]

When Mr. Lane was living at Cairo, and translating the _Arabian
Nights_, he found that the people still believed in metamorphosis. Any
day, just as in the _Arabian Nights_, a man might find himself turned
by an enchanter into a pig or a horse. Similar beliefs, not derived
from language, supply the matter of the senseless incidents in Greek
myths.

Savage mythology is also full of metamorphoses. Therefore the
mythologists whose case we are stating, when they find identical
metamorphoses in the classical mythologies, conjecture that these were
first invented when the ancestors