their religions from each other.  When the Greeks first found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they leaped to the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from Egypt.  We, who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points in common with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians—­people quite unconnected with Egypt—­feel less confident about the hypothesis of borrowing.  We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia.  In later times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so forth.  But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at least, an innovation.  As Tiele remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from the Assyrian Daian nisi, ‘judge of men,’ a name of the solar god Samas, without ascertaining that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and was a god of the sun.  These derivations, ‘shocking to common sense,’ are to be distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning.  Some Assyrian scholars actually derive Hades from Bit Edi or Bit Hadi—­’though, unluckily,’ says Tiele, ‘there is no such word in the Assyrian text.’  On the whole topic Tiele’s essay {28} deserves to be consulted.  Granting, then, that elements in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite, and other gods, may have been imported with the strange AEgypto-Assyrian vases and jewels of the Sidonians, we still find the same basis of rude savage ideas.  We may push back a god from Greece to Phoenicia, from Phoenicia to Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we reach a legend full of myths like those which Bushmen tell by the camp-fire, Eskimo in their dark huts, and Australians in the shade of the gunyeh—­myths cruel, puerile, obscene, like the fancies of the savage myth-makers from which they sprang.

The bull-roarer. 
A Study of the Mysteries.

As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains of Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of grey-blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound.  Beginning low, with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it grows louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy roar.  If the traveller be a new comer, he is probably puzzled to the last degree.  If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says to himself, ’Why, that is the bull-roarer.’  If he knows the colony and the ways of the natives, he knows that the blacks are celebrating their tribal mysteries.  The roaring noise is made to warn all women to keep out of the way.  Just as Pentheus was killed (with the approval of Theocritus) because he profaned the rites of the women-worshippers of Dionysus, so, among the Australian blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out of the way of female, and women out of the way of male, celebrations.