If I must offer a guess, it is that Greeks, and Indians of India, inherited a very ordinary savage idea.  The gods in savage myths are usually beasts.  As beasts they beget anthropomorphic offspring.  This is the regular rule in totemism.  In savage myths we are not told ‘a god’ (Apollo, or Zeus, or Poseidon) ’put on beast shape and begat human sons and daughters’ (Helen, the Telmisseis, and so on).  The god in savage myths was a beast already, though he could, of course, shift shapes like any ‘medicine-man,’ or modern witch who becomes a hare.  This is not the exception but the rule in savage mythology.  Anyone can consult my Myth, Ritual, and Religion, or Mr. Frazer’s work Totemism, for abundance of evidence.  To Loki, a male god, prosecuting his amours as a female horse, I have already alluded, and in M. R. R. give cases from the Satapatha Brahmana.

The Saranyu-Erinnys myth dates, I presume, from this savage state of fancy; but why the story occurred both in Greece and India, I protest that I cannot pretend to explain, except on the hypothesis that the ancestors of Greek and Vedic peoples once dwelt together, had a common stock of savage fables, and a common or kindred language.  After their dispersion, the fables admitted discrepancies, as stories in oral circulation occasionally do.  This is the only conjecture which I feel justified in suggesting to account for the resemblances and incongruities between the myths of the mare Demeter-Erinnys and the mare Saranyu.

TOTEMISM

Totemism

To the strange and widely diffused institution of ‘Totemism’ our author often returns.  I shall deal here with his collected remarks on the theme, the more gladly as the treatment shows how very far Mr. Max Muller is from acting with a shadow of unfairness when he does not refer to special passages in his opponent’s books.  He treats himself and his own earlier works in the same fashion, thereby, perhaps, weakening his argument, but also demonstrating his candour, were any such demonstration required.

On totems he opens (i. 7)—­

’When we come to special cases we must not imagine that much can be gained by using such general terms as Animism, Totemism, Fetishism, &c., as solvents of mythological problems.  To my mind, all such general terms, not excluding even Darwinism or Puseyism, seem most objectionable, because they encourage vague thought, vague praise, or vague blame.

’It is, for instance, quite possible to place all worship of animal gods, all avoidance of certain kinds of animal food, all adoption of animal names as the names of men and families, under the wide and capacious cover of totemism.  All theriolatry would thus be traced back to totemism.  I am not aware, however, that any Egyptologists have adopted such a view to account for the animal forms of the Egyptian gods.  Sanskrit scholars would certainly hesitate before seeing in Indra a totem because he is called vrishabha, or bull, or before attempting to explain on this ground the abstaining from beef on the part of orthodox Hindus [i. 7].’