it is easy to
see that they are made up of the same materials, and that they describe
the same persons or ideas or things whether they are told in Greece or
India or Norway or Brittany. Wherever they are found they make it
certain that they come from a very remote time and grew out of ideas or
feelings and ways of looking at the world which a great many men shared
in common in many places.

When a man sneezes, people still say in some countries, "God bless you."
They do not know why they say it; they simply repeat what they heard
older people say when they were children, and do not know that every
time they use these words they recall the age when people believed that
evil spirits could enter into a man, and that when a man sneezed he
expelled one of these spirits. It is a very old and widely spread
superstition that when a dog howls at night someone not far away is
dying or will soon die. Many people are uncomfortable when they hear a
dog howling after dark, not because they believe that dogs have any
knowledge that death is present or coming, but because their ancestors
for many centuries believed that the howling of a dog was ominous, and
the habits of our ancestors leave deep traces in our natures.

Now, every time the melancholy howling of a dog at night makes a child
uncomfortable, he recalls the old superstition which identified the
roaring or wailing of the wind with a wolf or dog into which a god or
demon had entered, with power to summon the spirits of men to follow him
as he rushed along in the darkness. In the old homes in the forests,
thousands of years ago, children crowded about the open fire and
trembled when a great blast shook the house, for fear that the gigantic
beast who made the sound would call them and they would be compelled to
follow him. We think of wind as air in motion; they thought of it as the
breath and sound of some living creature. When we say that the wind
"whistled in the keyhole," or "kissed the flowers," or "drove the
clouds" before it, we are using poetically the language our forefathers
used literally.

We speak of "the siren voice of pleasure," "the blow of fate," "the
smile of fortune," and do not remember, often do not know, that we are
recalling that remote past when people believed that there were Sirens
on the coast of Crete whose voices were so sweet that sailors could not
resist them and were drawn on to the rocks and drowned; that fate was a
terrible, relentless, passi