A Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology

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This volume which embraces the divine beliefs and imagination of various races the world over, bears in fact not on one mythology but many of them. Advances in comparative mythology have made it amply clear that we acquire a better and larger understanding of the ancient religions and the symbolic forms of these several races, if we study them in their interrelationships, rather than in isolation. It is then that we grasp the creative idea in man and learn how nearly the old myths touch the essence of our humane and divine philosophy.

This dictionary, prepared with these wider interests of mythological studies in view, is precisely the kind of reference book which most people need for the comparative study of mythology as a factor in the evolution of human thought and culture.

Nor one mythology, but several, will be found concentrated within the pages of this volume, which embraces, as Ymir did in himself a whole race of giants, the great imaginations and divine beliefs of the races of the East, North, and extreme West. The difficulty of the subject is not only in the world-wide extent of the area covered, but lies too in the comparatively recent advance of our knowledge in many of its regions and literatures. Only within the past year or two have some of the facts it tables been made good. A collection of Egyptian relics and objects was exhibited at University College, London, this summer of 1912, brought back by the British School of Archæology in Egypt from its last winter's work under the direction of Pro- fessor Flinders Petrie, which told us of a city older in its foundation than Memphis. This was but 35 miles south of Cairo, which one might think was well within the lines of recorded antiquity, yet there a cemetery was unearthed (now known as Tarkhan-the name of the nearest village), whose burials ranged over five dynasties, from the earliest time to the Pyramid era. Out of one of those tombs came four seals of a king, Narmer-Mena, the fourth of which was the great seal of the Fayum, with the shrine and sacred crocodile, and more crocodiles in rows on the curly waves of a lake; while a reliquary from the same ground was carved in the shape of a beetle, showing that the sacred beetle was then already venerated. At Memphis itself, a new gigantic alabaster sphinx was unearthed, and statues in red granite of Rameses II. and the god Ptah, who, as we read in the following pages, was another type of the " All-Father "-Father of Beginnings, Architect of the Universe.

Comparative mythology has led the way to a new and a larger understanding of the old deities like Ptah, or Tlaloc of the Mexicans, or Pillan of the Araucanian Indians who was the "Supreme Essence" in their belief; and it has taught us that the religious and symbolic forms, here set down in brief, are not dead, but vitally and indestructibly significant if we read them aright. It is when we relate the Classical Mythology of Greece and Rome to that of Egypt, and see behind Zeus the forms of a succession of Eastern and Celtic divinities, or behind Bacchus the Vedic Soma, that we begin to grasp the creative idea in man, and learn how nearly the old myths touch the essence of our humane and divine philosophy. We see in Krishna the evolution of a hero into a god, and may compare him if we will with the Celtic figure of an Arthur who some mythologists say is a devol;;ed deity.

In preparing this volume its authors have striven to keep the wider interests of comparative mythology in view; but that is a science which is growing, which has new evidences yet to collect from cemeteries like Tarkhan, books like the "Popol Vuh," and the inscribed stones of Britain, France, and elsewhere, and the pages must be looked upon as a memoir or a dictionary to sve now, and to be revised from time to time hereafter.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages