soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of Vedic and
Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into its sacerdotage
and priestly second childhood. Thus race declares itself in the ultimate
literary form and character of mythology, while the common savage basis
and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in the horned, and cannibal,
and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of Greece, of India, of the
North. They all show their common savage origin, when the poet neglects
Freya's command and tells of what the gods did 'in the morning of Time.'

As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there
must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples, the
traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing alien
women into the families--all these things favoured the migration of myth.
But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it, we can
seldom trace a popular legend on its travels. In the case of the
cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed they
had borrowed their religions from each other. When the Greeks first
found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they leaped to
the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from Egypt. We,
who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points in common
with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians--people quite
unconnected with Egypt--feel less confident about the hypothesis of
borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and
Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later times, too, the
Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien
gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so
forth. But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious
conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at
least, an innovation. As Tiele remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from
the Assyrian Daian nisi, 'judge of men,' a name of the solar god Samas,