race declares
itself in the ultimate literary form and character of mythology, while
the common savage basis and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in
the horned, and cannibal, and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of
Greece, of India, of the North. They all show their common savage
origin, when the poet neglects Freya's command and tells of what the
gods did 'in the morning of Time.'

As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there
must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples,
the traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing
alien women into the families--all these things favoured the migration
of myth. But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it,
we can seldom trace a popular legend on its travels. In the case of
the cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed
they had borrowed their religions from each other. When the Greeks
first found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they
leaped to the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from
Egypt. We, who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points
in common with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians--people
quite unconnected with Egypt--feel less confident about the
hypothesis of borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus
Bagaeus, and Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later
times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free
hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder
Dionysiac revels, and so forth. But this habit of borrowing was
regarded with disfavour by pious conservatives, and was probably, in
the width of its hospitality at least, an innovation. As Tiele
remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from the Assyrian _Daian nisi_
'judge of men,' a name of the solar god Samas, without ascertaining
that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and was a god of the
sun. These derivations, 'shocking to common-sense,' are to be
distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning. Some Assyrian
scholars actually derive _Hades_ from _Bit Edi_ or _Bit Hadi_--'though
unluckily,' says Tiele, 'there is no such word in the Assyrian text.'
On the whole topic Tiele's essay[15] deserves to be consulted.
Granting, then, that elements in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite,
and other gods, may have been imported with the strange
AEgypto-Assyrian vases and jewels of the Sid