les of the
gods comes from the poignancy of life itself. Those events in nature
which affected man intensely received an intense meaning. We, who have
conquered nature in large measure, or can so predict her convulsions as
to escape the first shock of her rude forces; we, who think of her
processes as ruled by impersonal laws, cannot appreciate the directness
and unveiled immediacy of those ancient dramas which man saw around
him. Darkness is for us the absence of light, not a mysterious and
threatening presence which fills the sky while the kindly god of day
sleeps. Light consists of vibrations in ether emitted from a
tremendously hot, material substance instead of being a beneficent
force under the control of a radiant being.

But other races than the Aryan were less inclined to embellish and
humanize nature. The imagination worked less freely to add to the
visible aspect of things. The consequence of this thinness of reaction
was, that the mind rested in things as they appeared, although it could
not desist from assigning to them capacities and powers which were
superhuman. Nature was at least instinct with will, even while this
vaguely stirring will did not clothe itself in definite forms. Man
believed {23} himself surrounded by forces which affected him for good
and evil; he felt himself immersed in an ocean of life, yet he could
not discern any forms back of that which he saw with his bodily eyes.
Perhaps these other races had less of the dramatic in their
composition, less of that genial delight in far-fetched analogies and
the free play of ideas.

As time passed, the first stage of mythology with its simple naturalism
and its relative lack of imaginative elements gave way to a more human
stage. Myths of the next world came to the front, and man became more
and more concerned with his salvation in an afterlife. Comparative
religion has proven how widespread was the belief in some sort of
immortality. The Orphic cults in Greece, the Osiris and Isis cult in
Egypt, the worship of Attis and Adonis in Syria, the purification and
communion ceremonies of Mithraism, all turned about the idea of a
secret means of salvation. A common set of ideas developed in the
Mediterranean basin and found expression in liturgies and phrases of a
striking similarity. The god dies and is resurrected; the virgin
goddess gives birth to a son; the members of a religious community eat
of their god and gain strength from the sa