Forlong - Rivers of Life

Preface. xxvii
means altogether, to do with. Spellings and present articulations are too modern for
tbose remote and all but dead “First Causes.” 1 Etymology is not likely to help us
in recognizing Heraklês in Bala-Râma or Samson; Apollo or Ab-Elo in Krishna,
or a Baal in Elohê, Aluê or Yahuê, although these last interchanged during early
Hebrew thought and even in our Bible translations. We therefore proceed on other
and divers lines.
It will be shown that Turanian races ruled for untold ages in and around the
aeknowledged cradle of mankind as well as over most of our planet, starting civilisations,
mythologies, faiths and arts, before the national classification of languages, so that
from the central home. would radiate the radical base of most things which we find
at the dawn of histories. This base, geographical and other, is not a point easily
approached, and we must not therefore attempt to throw our philological bonds over
it, and deny that the prominent and ever present ancient nouns or terms by which
those dwellers in high Asian Edens or Merus named their Gods, rites, fêtes or divine
ideas, could by any possibility slip into our Aryan or Shemitik speech.
Gods and divine ideas would evolve pari passu with the growth of the human
mind. and this would be very mature and well defined not only before language
differentiated, but when roots were real words—the symbols of things he saw and felt.
This would be a period very distant from that in which abstract ideas were expressed
and inflectional and agglutinating languages arose. The Gods and religious ideas had
to travel, and the deities did so if not in propria persona, at least in proprio simulacro
and over vast continents, carrying with them their rites, fêtes and attributes, and the
embodiment of these last, in the architecture of arks and temples. 2 Only very
gradually did these change to suit the climate and civilization of the worshipers,
and still more slowly wonld names take inflectional and other forms owing to
fonetik growth or decay.
No one who has for years freely spoken the tongues of the different classes,
with Aryan, Turan, Shemite and Drâvid (as the writer has done, sometimes for
weeks together never hearing English spoken), but knowa how closely interlaced all
deities and divine ideas are with their names and attributes, and how this is specially
the case amongst illiterate speakers when these are thrown indifferentIy together in
friendly discussion. We dispute none of the fundamental laws of language as hitherto
ascertained, but find on entering such fresh fields of enquiry that new laws are disclosed
1 Largely treated of in Chap. ix., Vol. II, as at pages 463-470, &c.
2 This is illustrated at pages 357-8, Vol. I, and elsewhere.