stocks and poles (Tis and Jack and Cinderella) as enable them to find a
precarious perch.

To drop similitudes, we must be prepared, in unravelling our tangled
mythology, to go through several processes. We must, of course, note the
parallelisms and get back to the earliest attribution-names we can find.
But all system is of late creation, it does not begin till a certain
political stage, a stage where the myths of coalescing clans come into
contact, and an official settlement is attempted by some school of
poets or priests. Moreover, systematization is never so complete that it
effaces all the earlier state of things. Behind the official systems of
Homer and Hesiod lies the actual chaos of local faiths preserved for us
by Pausanias and other mythographers. The common factors in the various
local faiths are much the majority among the factors they each possess;
and many of these common factors are exceedingly primitive, and resolve
themselves into answers to the questions that children still ask, still
receiving no answer but myth--that is, poetic and subjective hypothesis,
containing as much truth as they can receive or their inventors can
grasp.

Who were our forbears? How did day and night, sun and moon, earth and
water, and fire come? How did the animals come? Why has the bear no
tail? Why are fishes dumb, the swallow cleft-tail? How did evil come?
Why did men begin to quarrel? How did death arise? What will the end be?
Why do dead persons come back? What do the dead do? What is the earth
shaped like? Who invented tools and weapons, and musical instruments,
and how? When did kings and chiefs first come?

From accepted answers to such questions most of the huge mass of
mythology arises. Man makes his gods in his own image, and the doctrines