observers, of course, have been struck by (and have probably exaggerated
in some instances) the Christian analogy. But if they had been as well
acquainted with ancient Greek as with Christian theology they would have
remarked that the Andaman, American, and Australian "mediators" are
infinitely more akin to Apollo, in his relations with Zeus and with men,
than to any Person about whom missionaries can preach. But the most
devoted believer in borrowing will not say that, when the Australian
mediator, Tundun, son of Mungun-gnaur, turns into a porpoise, the Kurnai
have borrowed from our Hymn of the Dolphin Apollo. It is absurd to
maintain that the Son of the God, the go-between of God and men, in
savage theology, is borrowed from missionaries, while this being has so
much more in common with Apollo (from whom he cannot conceivably be
borrowed) than with Christ. The Tundun-porpoise story seems to have
arisen in gratitude to the porpoise, which drives fishes inshore, for the
natives to catch. Neither Tharamulun nor Hobamoc (Australian and
American Gods of healing and soothsaying), who appear to men as serpents,
are borrowed from Asclepius, or from the Python of Apollo. The processes
have been quite different, and in Apollo, the oracular son of Zeus, who
declares his counsel to men, I am apt to see a beautiful Greek
modification of the type of the mediating Son of the primal Being of
savage belief, adorned with many of the attributes of the Sun God, from
whom, however, he is fundamentally distinct. Apollo, I think, is an
adorned survival of the Son of the God of savage theology. He was not,
at first, a Nature God, solar or not. This opinion, if it seems valid,
helps to account, in part, for the animal metamorphoses of Apollo, a
survival from the mental confusion of savagery. Such a confusion, in
Greece, makes it necessary for the wise son of Zeus to seek information,
as in the Hymn to Hermes, from an old clown. This medley of ideas, in
the mind of a civilised poet, who believes that Apollo is all-knowing in
the counsels of eternity, is as truly mythological as Dunbar's God who