Excerpt from Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 The following work is not a "key to all mythologies," but an attempt to disengage and examine, as far as possible, separately, and, as far as possible, historically, the various elements of religion and myth. The evidence of ritual is adduced because of the conservative tendencies of rites on which the prosperity of tribes and states is believed to depend. While the attempt is made to show that the wilder features of myth survive from, or were borrowed from, or were imitated from, the ideas of people in the savage condition of thought, the existence - even among savages - of comparatively pure, if inarticulate, religious beliefs or sentiments is insisted on throughout. It is pointed out that neither history, experiment, nor observation enables us to reach the actual Origins, nor to determine with certainty whether the religious or the mythical, the irrational or the sympathetic, element is the earlier, or whether both are of equal antiquity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.