ween the
sky-god and those who worshipped the sky-god, and we seek in vain
amidst all the brilliant researches, which have been held to produce
evidence of the sky-god, for evidence that he was worshipped by the
Aryan-speaking Celt and Teuton. In point of fact, we never get at the
worshippers at all. There is the assumption of a state mythology
without any evidence for the existence of the state.

In place of this obvious necessity we get an immense abstraction,
worked out with all the subtle ingenuity and learning of the Cambridge
professor. Mr. Cook has, in fact, used the materials he has collected
with such amazing care to project therefrom just those mythological
conceptions which Celt and Teuton would have worked out for themselves
if they, like the Hindu and the Greek, had developed the state while
they were still free to develop their own native beliefs. This they
never did, and so their fire worship did not advance beyond its early
stages. It was separated from nature worship to become the servant of
the European tribes. It helped them to develop tribal and family
institutions. It produced for them a tribal and family worship. It did
not get beyond this, because Roman institutions and Christianity stood
in the way and prevented tribal fire worship from becoming
anthropomorphised into a mythology. This need not cause us to doubt
that the analogies claimed by these scholars are true analogies. There
were among the Celtic peoples, as among other branches of the race to
which Celt, Greek, Teuton, Scandinavian, and Hindu belonged, the
incipient elements which would go to make up a national or state
mythology, when the nation or the state emerged, as it did emerge in
the case of Greece and of Rome, from its tribal originals. But the
Celtic state did not emerge from tribalism in Britain; the Celtic
heroes were always tribal heroes. They were, as Hereward and Arthur
were, real human flesh and blood, fighting and raiding and loving and
feasting in their tribal fashion as the later heroes did in their
national fashion; because of their success as tribal heroes they had
attached to them the tribal myths; because they died as nobly as
Cuchulain died they left imperishable records among those for whom
they died. They were more than gods to the Celtic tribesman--they were
kinsmen.

The false conception of a state religion before there was a state,
appears in other studies not primarily based upon folklore research,
and not