Or, if the reader prefers a story which is really a myth, take the history of Hasting at the siege of Luna, with which most readers will be acquainted, and how he gained an entry into the town by feigning death and obtaining that his body should be carried within the walls for Christian burial. _That_ is undoubtedly a myth; it is found to be sporadic among the histories of the Vikings and of the Normans, their descendants. Should we discover that a very similar story has been current among the Incas of Peru, how far could that discovery affect our estimate of the supposed character of Hasting?
When the reader has made up his mind upon this subject he will be in a position, we have said, to estimate the weight which we ought to attach to discoveries of this kind in reference to historic creeds; because the heroes of these creeds are evidently in the position of historic personages for those who hold the belief. As long as the Norsemen think that they hear Odin rushing along at night upon his horse Sleipnir, Odin is for them an historic personage; as long as Greeks think that it is Zeus who is ‘thundering from Ida,’ Zeus is as real to them as William the Bastard was to the English nation--more real than Hasting was to Dudo. And I maintain that an understanding of what the Greeks thought about Zeus, or the Norsemen about Odin, is very little furthered by (in Mr. Tylor’s words) a vague notion that at some other time they thought something quite different.
We may, however, legitimately go a little way behind the date of our documents. Our comprehension of the feudal system of land tenure is not much assisted by comparing it with systems in use among the Zulus; but it is useful to study the land tenure prevalent among the German nationalities before the feudal system properly so called was introduced. In the same way, behind the actual religious ideas shadowed forth in the Vedic hymns, in Homer, or in the Eddaic poems, we may, I maintain, legitimately go back to a time when the divine beings of these creeds were more nearly identified with natural phenomena out of which they sprang. It is just this condition of the Aryan creeds which I have sought to portray in the chapters devoted to the subject. In the actual documents before us the gods of Greece or Scandinavia do not take the guise of the heaven, or the sun, or the wind. But enough remains in their natures to show that it was out of these phenomena that they emerged to become the independent personalities which we know. This is what is meant by the _nature_ or _origins_ of Indra, Zeus, Odin, etc., as the expressions are used above.