ANDREW LANG’İN ESERLERİNDE FOLKLOR, MİTOLOJİ, DİN VE YÜCE VARLIK ANLAYIŞI

Öz

Although Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was known as the fiction writer, poet, essayist and literary critic of his time, he was the greatest contributor to the anthropology of his time with his ideas regarding folklore, mythology and religion. For him, mythology consists of codes conveying meaningful and universal signs. Religion is die rational expression of faith though mythology is the irrational expression. In contrast to the ideas of the positivists, Andrew Lang discovered that, among primitive tribes, who can be regarded as the social groups still having the traces of primitive faiths, there is a belief in a ‘supreme being’, who has no beginning and no end, the maker of everything, who is in favour of human beings. This Being, who never demands sacrifice, should be the trace of a primitive faith among the primitives, undergoes a degeneration process and thus secondary beings and later polytheism appears.