m that mythology reaches its most luxuriant growth; and when
polytheism disappears, mythology tends to disappear with it. Thus, the
light which mythology may be expected to throw on the idea of God is
one, which, however it may illumine the polytheistic idea of God, will
not be found to shine far beyond the area of polytheism.

Myths then are narratives, in which the doings of some god or gods are
related. And those gods existed in the belief of the community, before
tales were told, or could be told, about them. Myths therefore are the
outcome of reflection--of reflection about the gods and their
relations to one another, or to men, or to the world. Mythology is not
the source of man's belief of the gods. Man did not begin by telling
tales about beings whom he knew to be the creations of his own
imagination, and then gradually fall into the error of supposing them
to be, after all, not creatures of his own imagination but real
beings. Mythology is not even the source of man's belief in a
plurality of gods: man found gods everywhere, in every external object
or phenomenon, because he was looking for God everywhere, and to every
object, in turn, he addressed the question, 'Art thou there?'
Mythology was not the source of polytheism. Polytheism was the source
of mythology. Myths preserve to us the reflections which men have made
about their gods; and reflection, on any subject, cannot take place
until the thing is there to be reflected upon. The result of prolonged
reflection may be, indeed must be, to modify the ideas from which we
started, for the better--or, it may be, for the worse. But, even so,
the result of reflection is not to create the ideas from which it
started.

From this point of view, it becomes impossible to accept the theory,
put forward by Max Mueller, that mythology is due to 'disease of
language.' According to his theory, simple statements were made of
such ordinary, natural processes as those of the rising, or the
setting, of the sun. Then, by disease of language, the meaning of the
words or epithets, by which the sun or the dawn were, at the
beginning, designated or described, passed out of mind. The epithets
then came to be regarded as proper names; and so the people, amongst
which these simple statements were originally made, found itself
eventually in possession of a number of tales told of persons
possessing proper names and doing marvellous things. Thus, Max
Mueller's theory not only accounted