the Greeks passed through the savage intellectual condition in which we
find the Australians.

The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth? Do
peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other? The answer is,
that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth, if it be
race which confers on a people its national genius, and its capacity of
becoming civilised. If race does this, then race affects, in the most
powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one is likely to
confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor either with a myth
from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the substance, the original
set of ideas, may be much the same. In all three you have
anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal shapes, tricky,
capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed with magical
powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda, of any of the
Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much above the gods of
savage mythology. This stuff of myth is quod semper, quod ubique, quod
ab omnibus, and is the original gift of the savage intellect. But the
final treatment, the ultimate literary form of the myth, varies in each
race. Homeric gods, like Red Indian, Thlinkeet, or Australian gods, can
assume the shapes of birds. But when we read, in Homer, of the arming of
Athene, the hunting of Artemis, the vision of golden Aphrodite, the
apparition of Hermes, like a young man when the flower of youth is
loveliest, then we recognise the effect of race upon myth, the effect of
the Greek genius at work on rude material. Between the Olympians and a
Thlinkeet god there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter
of Cnidos and an image from Easter Island. Again, the Scandinavian gods,
when their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape
of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of
their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless sacrifices,