is represented as a constant violation of the very rules of life which he
expects mankind to observe. I am disposed to look on this essential
contradiction as the result of a series of mythical accretions on an
original conception of Zeus in his higher capacity. We can see how the
accretions arose. Man never lived consistently on the level of his best
original ideas: savages also have endless myths of Baiame or Daramulun,
or Bunjil, in which these personages, though interested in human
behaviour, are puerile, cruel, absurd, lustful, and so on. Man will
sport thus with his noblest intuitions.

In the same way, in Christian Europe, we may contrast Dunbar's pious
"Ballat of Our Lady" with his "Kynd Kittok," in which God has his eye on
the soul of an intemperate ale-wife who has crept into Paradise. "God
lukit, and saw her lattin in, and leugh His heart sair." Examples of
this kind of sportive irreverence are common enough; their root is in
human nature: and they could not be absent in the mythology of savage or
of ancient peoples. To Zeus the myths of this kind would come to be
attached in several ways.

As a nature-god of the Heaven he marries the Earth. The tendency of men
being to claim descent from a God, for each family with this claim a myth
of a separate divine amour was needed. Where there had existed Totemism,
or belief in kinship with beasts, the myth of the amour of a wolf, bull,
serpent, swan, and so forth, was attached to the legend of Zeus. Zeus
had been that swan, serpent, wolf, or bull. Once more, ritual arose, in
great part, from the rites of sympathetic magic.

This or that mummery was enacted by men for a magical purpose, to secure
success in the chase, agriculture, or war. When the performers asked,
"Why do we do thus and thus?" the answer was, "Zeus first did so," or