The first and most general is that of personcation (prosopopeia of the grammarians). By it an inanimate thing is represented as animate, as in the phrar, " The oak tosses his mighty arms against the sky ;" or irra tional beings may be spoken of as persons, as in the stories of Reynard the Fox. Even actions and qualities may be thus introduced as individ uals, as in many characters in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. As a resource for literary effect orators and poets have frequent recourse to this figure of speech ; but in the early history of language and religion it led to the literal acceptance as a person of the thing or action so spoken of. When, instead of saying, " The sun rose," the savage said, '' The sun left his lair," he had begun a myth of the sun as an animate being leaving his couch, somewhat as a beast his lair, etc.
Another linguistic peculiarity rich in mythological growth was the similarity or sameness in the sounds of words of different meanings (pa y and homonymy). We have already referred to the effect of these peculiarities on the development of written speech (see above, p. 9o). Suppose a name capable of several senses, as in the case with many root words, was applied to a deity. At first there would be little liability to confusion, but in a few generations no one could remember in which of the senses it was originally intended, and a story would be invented suit able to each. This has repeatedly happened. In the Nahuatl language the root-word coa has three entirely different meanings—to wit, a serpent, a guest, and twins. Now, this word enters into the name of various divinities, especially of the Mexican culture-god Quetzalcoatl, and there were myths about him derived from each of these three disconnected meanings. Which of them was originally intended we cannot positively say.
When dialectic differences came to pass in a tongue, or when one nation only imperfectly caught the words of another, such tranfers of myths and growths of new myths became yet more frequent. The old Romans heard the Greeks relate the beautiful and striking myths of Herakles, the sun-god, his twelve labors, and the like. Having a local god of their own with a name sounding something similar, Hercules, they transferred to him all this mythological apparatus, and added it to his original and far humbler story as that of the god of enclosed fields (hercta).
Proper names of deities proved stimuli to the myth-making faculties in another way. In the sense defined by John Stuart Mill there are no proper names in any primitive tongue. He says that such names must " as their characteristic property be destitute of meaning." There are no words, proper names or others, without meaning in such tongues. Such meaningless sounds are contrary to their character, and could not easily be accepted. Hence when by force or peacefully a foreign mythology is introduced, importing the names of foreign deities, the linguistic sense of the nation endeavors to assign these meaningless sounds a signification from some word resembling them in the existing speech. This accom
plished, a myth inevitably starts up to explain and justify the meaning attributed to the imported foreign name. Thus, the very ancient Grecian deity Pan was at first a field-god whose name and cult were introduced from Asia Minor ; his name had no meaning in Greek, but that tongue has a word of the same sound, signifying " the whole," " all." This led, in later clays, Pan to be represented as the whole organic world, and in the " Hymn to Pan " he is sung as the child of Air and Water, Heaven and Earth.
Effect of Linguistic character of the language appears to react upon mythology. Tongues which are monosyllabic and isolating tend to a jejune and scanty growth of the religious imagination. The constructive elements which we have above noted have less play in idioms of that character than in those which are agglutinative or inflective. This is illustrated in the exuberance of Aryan mythology compared with the poverty of the Chinese. Of the latter Professor Max Muller observes : " We find in China an ancient, colorless, and unpoetical religion—a religion that we might almost venture to call monosyllabic, consisting of the worship of a host of single spirits, representing the sky, the sun, storms and lightning, mountains and rivers, one standing by the side of the other without any mutual attraction, without any higher principle to hold them together." The Semitic languages, with their well-defined radicals, each of three consonants, were scarcely more favorable to imagi native theology. Although generally idol-worshippers and polytheistic, their mythology is barren, and their gods are rather lay figures represent ing some quality than the living beings which the Greeks delighted to portray. To quote again from Professor M. Miiller : " The names of the Semitic deities are mostly words expressive of moral qualities ; they mean the Strong, the Exalted, the Lord, the King ; and they grow but seldom into divine personalities, definite in their outward appearance, or easily to be recognized by strongly marked features of a real dramatic character. On the other hand, we find the gods of the Aryan pantheon assume an individuality so strongly marked and permanent that with the Aryans a transition to monotheism required a powerful struggle, and seldom took effect without iconoclastic revolutions or philosophic despair. These three classes of religion are not to be mistaken, as little as the three classes of languages, the Turanian, the Semitic, and the Aryan. They mark three events in the most ancient history of the world—events which have determined the whole fate of the human race, and of which we our selves still feel the consequences in our language, in our thoughts, and in our religion." The differences here brought out must be attributed more to the contrasts in the structure of languages than to any other one cause.