The Ugly Scars


The ugly scars were the problem! A civilised fancy is not puzzled for a
moment by a beautiful beneficent Sun-god, or even by his beholding the
daughters of men that they are fair. But a civilised fancy _is_ puzzled
when the beautiful Sun-god makes love in the shape of a dog. {5} To me,
and indeed to Mr. Max Muller, the ugly scars were the problem.

He has written--'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of
the word, is what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or
miraculous.' But he explained these blots on the mythology of Greece,
for example, as the result practically of old words and popular sayings
surviving in languages after the original, harmless, symbolical meanings
of the words and sayings were lost. What had been a poetical remark
about an aspect of nature became an obscene, or brutal, or vulgar myth, a
stumbling block to Greek piety and to Greek philosophy.

To myself, on the other hand, it seemed that the ugly scars were remains
of that kind of taste, fancy, customary law, and incoherent speculation
which everywhere, as far as we know, prevails to various degrees in
savagery and barbarism. Attached to the 'hideous idols,' as Mr. Max
Muller calls them, of early Greece, and implicated in a ritual which
religious conservatism dared not abandon, the fables of perhaps neolithic
ancestors of the Hellenes remained in the religion and the legends known
to Plato and Socrates. That this process of 'survival' is a vera causa,
illustrated in every phase of evolution, perhaps nobody denies.