Turning from Tsui Goab to his old enemy Gaunab, we learn that his name is derived from //gau, ‘to destroy,’ and, according to old Hottentot ideas, ‘no one was the destroyer but the night’ (p. 126).  There is no apparent reason why the destroyer should be the night, and the night alone, any more than why ‘a lame broken knee’ should be ‘red’ (p. 126).  Besides (p. 85), Gaunab is elsewhere explained, not as the night, but as the malevolent ghost which is thought to kill people who die what we call a ‘natural’ death.  Unburied men change into this sort of vampire, just as Elpenor, in the Odyssey, threatens, if unburied, to become mischievous.  There is another Gaunab, the mantis insect, which is worshipped by Hottentots and Bushmen (p. 92).  It appears that the two Gaunabs are differently pronounced.  However that may be, a race which worships an insect might well worship a dead medicine-man.

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The conclusion, then, to be drawn from an examination of Hottentot mythology is merely this, that the ideas of a people will be reflected in their myths.  A people which worships the dead, believes in sorcerers and in prophets, and in metamorphosis, will have for its god (if he can be called a god) a being who is looked on as a dead prophet and sorcerer.  He will be worshipped with such rites as dead men receive; he will be mixed up in such battles as living men wage, and will be credited with the skill which living sorcerers claim.  All these things meet in the legend of Tsui Goab, the so-called ‘supreme being’ of the Hottentots.  His connection with the dawn is not supported by convincing argument or evidence.  The relation of the dawn to the Infinite again rests on nothing but a theory of Mr. Max Muller’s. {209} His adversary, though recognised as the night, is elsewhere admitted to have been, originally, a common vampire.  Finally, the Hottentots, a people not much removed from savagery, have a mythology full of savage and even disgusting elements.  And this is just what we expect from Hottentots.  The puzzle is when we find myths as low as the story of the incest of Heitsi Eibib among the Greeks.  The reason for this coincidence is that, in Dr. Hahn’s words, ’the same objects and the same phenomena in nature will give rise to the same ideas, whether social or mythical, among different races of mankind,’ especially when these races are in the same well-defined state of savage fancy and savage credulity.

Dr. Hahn’s book has been regarded as a kind of triumph over inquirers who believe that ancestor-worship enters into myth, and that the purer element in myth is the later.  But where is the triumph?  Even on Dr. Hahn’s own showing, ancestor-worship among the Hottentots has swamped the adoration of the Infinite.  It may be said that Dr. Hahn has at least proved the adoration of the Infinite to be earlier than ancestor-worship.  But it has been shown that his attempt to establish a middle stage,