Myths and Dreams — Reading Notes

The Semitic Mythological Debate

Clodd directly challenges the claim by Ernest Renan that “the Semites never had a mythology,” and the similar assertion by Baron Bunsen that Judaism’s greatness lay in possessing none. He counters by pointing to cuneiform discoveries from Babylonian and Nineveh libraries, which reveal that Semitic civilization was heavily influenced by the non-Semitic, non-Aryan Akkadians. These “highlanders” practiced fetish worship and magic, and their language became the Latin of the empire. Clodd argues that the Hebrews, dwelling in a land that was a common highway between great nations, could not have remained uninfluenced in their intellectual speculations. He cites the Babylonian origin of early biblical stories, noting that during the Exile, Jewish records incorporated legends borrowed from the Babylonians, themselves Akkadian in origin. The reluctance to accept this, he observes, is illustrated by the circular cross-references in Dr. William Smith’s Bible dictionary, where “Deluge” leads to “Flood” and then to “Noah.”

Language as a Key to Mythic Structure

Clodd emphasizes that the investigation of Hebrew myth has been hampered by “the structure of the language and the scantiness of the material” compared to the “flexile and copious mythology of the Aryan race.” He points to the work of Dr. Goldziher as the most important attempt to analyze the mythical names of culture-ancestors and heroes scattered through the Pentateuch. This linguistic focus aligns with Clodd’s broader method: he treats myths as products of “the childhood of the race,” when it speculates and invents, framing theories of beginnings and explaining the uncommon. The Akkadian influence, he notes, is visible in the very vocabulary of Babylonian religion, where the old learning became the property of priests and astrologers. By grounding his argument in language and textual transmission, Clodd avoids mere speculation and ties his conclusions to recoverable historical evidence.

Continuity of Ideas Across Races

Throughout the excerpts, Clodd insists on the continuity of ideas between barbaric and civilized races, a theme he announces in the preface. He selects examples from barbaric cultures as “nearest correspondences” to the primitive mind, but also cites civilized races to show that familiarity or prejudice obscures this continuity. In the section on Hebrew myth, he applies this principle directly: the biblical stories, though invested with “purity and majesty distinctively Hebrew,” are ultimately borrowed from Babylonian and Akkadian sources. Clodd’s argument is not merely comparative; it is developmental. He sees myth as a universal stage of thought, not a special revelation. The footnotes and acknowledgments to Spencer, Tylor, and Lang place his work within the Victorian anthropological tradition, but his specific focus on dreams as a parallel source of supernatural belief gives the book its distinctive dual structure.

Clodd’s method is cumulative: he builds his case through specific linguistic and textual evidence, not through sweeping assertions. Readers will find that the book’s value lies in its detailed footnotes and its willingness to engage with contemporary scholarly debates, such as the Renan controversy. The two-part structure—myth and dreams—invites cross-referencing, and Clodd’s own admission of repetition suggests that the sections are best read as interdependent. For those interested in Victorian anthropology, this work offers a clear, if dated, synthesis of the era’s thinking on the origins of religion.

Reading Clodd’s account of dreams as doorways to older selves, I remembered sitting on my grandmother’s porch, tracing constellations she’d named after her own childhood fears. Another autumn, Shoulder to shoulder — Reading Notes felt equally intimate, how shared burdens become quiet folklore. Both books whisper that our night-terrors and daily loyalties are just echoes, warm and strangely familiar.