Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [20]
The translation of another ancient sacred text introduced still another approach to mythology. It came from German Sanskrit scholar Max Müller, who translated the Rig-Veda, the earliest Hindu scriptures, beginning in 1849. Müller believed that myths were expressions of ideas that could not be conveyed in language. According to Müller, “Where we speak of the sun following the dawn, the ancient poets could only speak and think of the Sun loving and embracing the Dawn. What is with us a sunset, was to them the Sun growing old, decaying or dying.” In Müller’s view, all of the gods and mythical heroes were simply representations of nature, especially the sun. While Müller’s ideas have been largely dismissed by modern scholars, his work was another example of the incredible ferment that was sweeping the academic world in this time of radical new assessment of ancient myths. And it was spilling over into the world of religion and politics.
Around this time, the serious study of cultural anthropology was also invented, and one of its chief proponents was Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), who would later become the first professor of anthropology at Oxford University in 1896. A young Quaker suffering from tuberculosis, in 1855 Tylor was sent to the Caribbean, where he became more interested in the ways of the newly discovered remote peoples in the Americas. As a Quaker and abolitionist, Tylor was interested in what was then called “ethnology,” and his fascination was more than just academic. He had a missionary zeal, believing studies of “primitive” people could help him document “human brotherhood.” Proving the connections between races, Tylor believed, would aid the antislavery cause. The goal of his journey was, as he put it, to “trace the course which the civilization of the world has actually followed.” Among the areas he pursued most vigorously was religion, and he coined the word “animism” to describe the most simple belief in spiritual beings and in everything having a soul. According to Tylor’s 1871 landmark book Primitive Culture, there appeared to be no tribes that “have no religious conceptions whatever.” Myths, he believed, were born in the attempt to explain natural phenomena but were rooted in fear and ignorance. Tylor’s theories transformed the field, even though his ideas have been largely dismissed, in part because of their somewhat racist overtones.
The controversial but growing connection between mythology and religion reached a new height with the late-nineteenth-century work of Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he was a classical-scholar-turned-anthropologist, who believed that myths began in the great cycle of nature—birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. Frazer’s theory, which formed the basis for his twelve-volume masterwork The Golden Bough (it appeared between 1890 and 1915), developed from his attempt to explain an ancient Italian ritual called the king of the woods at Nemi, a place near Rome. According to the legend, the king of the woods held an uneasy grasp on the throne, because he was always threatened by challengers who wanted to kill him and take his place. The challenger had to break off a golden bough—hence the title of his study—from a sacred tree in the grove. The death of the king and his replacement by a younger, more virile successor ensured the fertility of the crops.
Frazer’s central idea was that