MAN AND MYTHOLOGIES
What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the
Day-Dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can
come true. To compare them to travellers’ tales is not to deny that they
may be true tales, or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the
sort of tales the traveller tells to himself. All this mythological
business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely
forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a
work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise
it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by
the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never
heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are
allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems. We do not
submit a sonnet to a mathematician or a song to a calculating boy; but
we do indulge the equally fantastic idea that folk-lore can be treated
as a science. Unless these things are appreciated artistically they are
not appreciated at all. When the professor is told by the barbarian that
once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the
learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true,
he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best
Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and
stars in a box, unless he claps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a
child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter.
This test is not nonsensical; primitive children and barbaric children
do laugh and kick like other children; and we must have a certain
simplicity to repicture the childhood of the world. When Hiawatha was
told by his nurse that a warrior threw his grandmother up to the moon,
he laughed like any English child told by his nurse that a cow jumped
over the moon. The child sees the joke as well as most men, and better
than some scientific men. But the ultimate test even of the fantastic is
the appropriateness of the inappropriate. And the test must appear
merely arbitrary because it is merely artistic. If any student tells me
that the infant Hiawatha only laughed out of respect for the tribal
custom of sacrificing the aged to economical housekeeping, I say he did
not. If any scholar tells me that the cow jumped over the moon only
because a heifer was sacrificed to Diana, I answer that it did not. It
happened because it is obviously the right thing for a cow to jump over
the moon. Mythology is a lost art, one of the few arts that really are
lost; but it is an art. The horned moon and the horned mooncalf make a
harmonious and almost a quiet pattern. And throwing your grandmother
into the sky is not good behaviour; but it is perfectly good taste.
Thus scientists seldom understand, as artists understand, that one
branch of the beautiful is the ugly. They seldom allow for the
legitimate liberty of the grotesque. And they will dismiss a savage myth
as merely coarse and clumsy and an evidence of degradation, because it
has not all the beauty of the herald Mercury new lighted on a
heaven-kissing hill; when it really has the beauty of the Mock Turtle of
the Mad Hatter. It is the supreme proof of a man being prosaic that he
always insists on poetry being poetical. Sometimes the humour is in the
very subject as well as the style of the fable. The Australian
aborigines, regarded as the rudest of savages, have a story about a
giant frog who had swallowed the sea and all the waters of the world;
and who was only forced to spill them by being made to laugh. All the
animals with all their antics passed before him and, like Queen
Victoria, he was not amused. He collapsed at last before an eel who
stood delicately balanced on the tip of its tail, doubtless with a
rather desperate dignity. Any amount of fine fantastic literature might
be made out of that fable. There is philosophy in that vision of the dry
world before the beatific Deluge of laughter. There is imagination in
the mountainous monster erupting like an aqueous volcano; there is
plenty of fun in the thought of his goggling visage as the pelican or
the penguin passed by. Anyhow the frog laughed; but the folk-lore
student remains grave.
Moreover, even where the fables are inferior as art, they cannot be
properly judged by science; still less properly judged as science. Some
myths are very crude and queer like the early drawings of children; but
the child is trying to draw. It is none the less an error to treat his
drawing as if it were a diagram, or intended to be a diagram. The
student cannot make a scientific statement about the savage, because the
savage is not making a scientific statement about the world. He is
saying something quite different; what might be called the gossip of the
gods. We may say, if we like, that it is believed before there is time
to examine it. It would be truer to say it is accepted before there is
time to believe it.
I confess I doubt the whole theory of the dissemination of myths or (as
it commonly is) of one myth. It is true that something in our nature and
conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them may be original.
One man does not borrow the story from the other man, though he may tell
it from the same motive as the other man. It would be easy to apply the
whole argument about legend to literature; and turn it into a vulgar
monomania of plagiarism. I would undertake to trace a notion like that
of the Golden Bough through individual modern novels as easily as
through communal and antiquated myths. I would undertake to find
something like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from the
fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess
of Ruritania. But though these flowers may spring from the same soil, it
is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to hand. Those
flowers are always fresh.
The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often.
There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms
in Shakespeare. Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic;
everything is seed-time and harvest; everything is ghosts and
grave-offerings; everything is the golden bough of sacrifice; everything
is the sun and moon; everything is everything. Every folk-lore student
who knew a little more than his own monomania, every man of wider
reading and critical culture like Andrew Lang, has practically confessed
that the bewilderment of these things left his brain spinning. Yet the
whole trouble comes from a man trying to look at these stories from the
outside, as if they were scientific objects. He has only to look at them
from the inside, and ask himself how he would begin a story. A story may
start with anything and go anywhere. It may start with a bird without
the bird being a totem; it may start with the sun without being a solar
myth. It is said there are only ten plots in the world; and there will
certainly be common and recurrent elements. Set ten thousand children
talking at once, and telling tarradiddles about what they did in the
wood; and it will not be hard to find parallels suggesting sun-worship
or animal-worship. Some of the stories may be pretty and some silly and
some perhaps dirty; but they can only be judged as stories. In the
modern dialect, they can only be judged aesthetically. It is strange
that aesthetics, or mere feeling, which is now allowed to usurp where
it has no rights at all, to wreck reason with pragmatism and morals with
anarchy, is apparently not allowed to give a purely aesthetic judgment
on what is obviously a purely aesthetic question. We may be fanciful
about everything except fairy-tales.
Now the first fact is that the most simple people have the most subtle
ideas. Everybody ought to know that, for everybody has been a child.
Ignorant as a child is, he knows more than he can say and feels not only
atmospheres but fine shades. And in this matter there are several fine
shades. Nobody understands it who has not had what can only be called
the ache of the artist to find some sense and some story in the
beautiful things he sees; his hunger for secrets and his anger at any
tower or tree escaping with its tale untold. He feels that nothing is
perfect unless it is personal. Without that the blind unconscious beauty
of the world stands in its garden like a headless statue. One need only
be a very minor poet to have wrestled with the tower or the tree until
it spoke like a titan or a dryad. It is often said that pagan mythology
was a personification of the powers of nature. The phrase is true in a
sense, but it is very unsatisfactory; because it implies that the forces
are abstractions and the personification is artificial. Myths are not
allegories. Natural powers are not in this case abstractions. It is not
as if there were a God of Gravitation. There may be a genius of the
waterfall; but not of mere falling, even less than of mere water. The
impersonation is not of something impersonal. The point is that the
personality perfects the water with significance. Father Christmas is
not an allegory of snow and holly; he is not merely the stuff called
snow afterwards artificially given a human form, like a snow man. He is
something that gives a new meaning to the white world and the
evergreens; so that snow itself seems to be warm rather than cold. The
test therefore is purely imaginative. But imaginative does not mean
imaginary. It does not follow that it is all what the moderns call
subjective, when they mean false. Every true artist does feel,
consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths;
that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil. In other
words, the natural mystic does know that there is something _there_;
something behind the clouds or within the trees; but he believes that
the pursuit of beauty is the way to find it; that imagination is a sort
of incantation that can call it up.
Now we do not comprehend this process in ourselves, far less in our most
remote fellow-creatures. And the danger of these things being classified
is that they may seem to be comprehended. A really fine work of
folk-lore, like _The Golden Bough_, will leave too many readers with the
idea, for instance, that this or that story of a giant’s or wizard’s
heart in a casket or a cave only ‘means’ some stupid and static
superstition called ‘the external soul.’ But we do not know what these
things mean, simply because we do not know what we ourselves mean when
we are moved by them. Suppose somebody in a story says ‘Pluck this
flower and a princess will die in a castle beyond the sea,’ we do not
know why something stirs in the subconsciousness, or why what is
impossible seems also inevitable. Suppose we read ‘And in the hour when
the king extinguished the candle his ships were wrecked far away on the
coast of the Hebrides.’ We do not know why the imagination has accepted
that image before the reason can reject it; or why such correspondences
seem really to correspond to something in the soul. Very deep things in
our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small,
some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond
our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances,
and many more emotions past finding out, are in an idea like that of the
external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power
in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very
emphatically an external soul. The best critics have remarked that in
the best poets the simile is often a picture that seems quite separate
from the text. It is as irrelevant as the remote castle to the flower or
the Hebridean coast to the candle. Shelley compares the skylark to a
young woman in a turret, to a rose embedded in thick foliage, to a
series of things that seem to be about as unlike a skylark in the sky as
anything we can imagine. I suppose the most potent piece of pure magic
in English literature is the much-quoted passage in Keats’s
_Nightingale_ about the casements opening on the perilous foam. And
nobody notices that the image seems to come from nowhere; that it
appears abruptly after some almost equally irrelevant remarks about
Ruth; and that it has nothing in the world to do with the subject of the
poem. If there is one place in the world where nobody could reasonably
expect to find a nightingale, it is on a window-sill at the seaside. But
it is only in the same sense that nobody would expect to find a giant’s
heart in a casket under the sea. Now, it would be very dangerous to
classify the metaphors of the poets. When Shelley says that the cloud
will rise ‘like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,’ it
would be quite possible to call the first a case of the coarse primitive
birth-myth and the second a survival of the ghost-worship which became
ancestor-worship. But it is the wrong way of dealing with a cloud; and
is liable to leave the learned in the condition of Polonius, only too
ready to think it like a weasel, or very like a whale.
Two facts follow from this psychology of day-dreams, which must be kept
in mind throughout their development in mythologies and even religions.
First, these imaginative impressions are often strictly local. So far
from being abstractions turned into allegories, they are often images
almost concentrated into idols. The poet feels the mystery of a
particular forest; not of the science of afforestation or the department
of woods and forests. He worships the peak of a particular mountain, not
the abstract idea of altitude. So we find the god is not merely water
but often one special river; he may be the sea because the sea is single
like a stream; the river that runs round the world. Ultimately doubtless
many deities are enlarged into elements; but they are something more
than omnipresent. Apollo does not merely dwell wherever the sun shines;
his home is on the rock of Delphi. Diana is great enough to be in three
places at once, earth and heaven and hell, but greater is Diana of the
Ephesians. This localised feeling has its lowest form in the mere fetish
or talisman, such as millionaires put on their motor-cars. But it can
also harden into something like a high and serious religion, where it is
connected with high and serious duties; into the gods of the city or
even the gods of the hearth.
The second consequence is this: that in these pagan cults there is every
shade of sincerity--and insincerity. In what sense exactly did an
Athenian really think he had to sacrifice to Pallas Athene? What scholar
is really certain of the answer? In what sense did Dr. Johnson really
think that he had to touch all the posts in the street or that he had to
collect orange-peel? In what sense does a child really think that he
ought to step on every alternate paving-stone? Two things are at least
fairly clear. First, in simpler and less self-conscious times these
forms could become more solid without really becoming more serious.
Day-dreams could be acted in broad daylight, with more liberty of
artistic expression; but still perhaps with something of the light step
of the somnambulist. Wrap Dr. Johnson in an antique mantle, crown him
(by his kind permission) with a garland, and he will move in state under
those ancient skies of morning; touching a series of sacred posts
carved with the heads of the strange terminal gods, that stand at the
limits of the land and of the life of man. Make the child free of the
marbles and mosaics of some classic temple, to play on a whole floor
inlaid with squares of black and white; and he will willingly make this
fulfilment of his idle and drifting day-dream the clear field for a
grave and graceful dance. But the posts and the paving-stones are little
more and little less real than they are under modern limits. They are
not really much more serious for being taken seriously. They have the
sort of sincerity that they always had; the sincerity of art as a symbol
that expresses very real spiritualities under the surface of life. But
they are only sincere in the same sense as art; not sincere in the same
sense as morality. The eccentric’s collection of orange-peel may turn to
oranges in a Mediterranean festival or to golden apples in a
Mediterranean myth. But they are never on the same plane with the
difference between giving the orange to a blind beggar and carefully
placing the orange-peel so that the beggar may fall and break his leg.
Between these two things there is a difference of kind and not of
degree. The child does not think it wrong to step on the paving-stone as
he thinks it wrong to step on the dog’s tail. And it is very certain
that whatever jest or sentiment or fancy first set Johnson touching the
wooden posts, he never touched wood with any of the feeling with which
he stretched out his hands to the timber of that terrible tree, which
was the death of God and the life of man.
As already noted, this does not mean that there was no reality or even
no religious sentiment in such a mood. As a matter of fact the Catholic
Church has taken over with uproarious success the whole of this popular
business of giving people local legends and lighter ceremonial
movements. In so far as all this sort of paganism was innocent and in
touch with nature, there is no reason why it should not be patronised by
patron saints as much as by pagan gods. And in any case there are
degrees of seriousness in the most natural make-believe. There is all
the difference between fancying there are fairies in the wood, which
often only means fancying a certain wood as fit for fairies, and really
frightening ourselves until we will walk a mile rather than pass a house
we have told ourselves is haunted. Behind all these things is the fact
that beauty and terror are very real things and related to a real
spiritual world; and to touch them at all, even in doubt or fancy, is to
stir the deep things of the soul. We all understand that and the pagans
understood it. The point is that paganism did not really stir the soul
except with these doubts and fancies; with the consequence that we
to-day can have little beyond doubts and fancies about paganism. All the
best critics agree that all the greatest poets, in pagan Hellas for
example, had an attitude towards their gods which is quite queer and
puzzling to men in the Christian era. There seems to be an admitted
conflict between the god and the man; but everybody seems to be doubtful
about which is the hero and which is the villain. This doubt does not
merely apply to a doubter like Euripides in the Bacchae; it applies to a
moderate conservative like Sophocles in the Antigone; or even to a
regular Tory and reactionary like Aristophanes in the Frogs. Sometimes
it would seem that the Greeks believed above all things in reverence,
only they had nobody to revere. But the point of the puzzle is this:
that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole
thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of
architecture for a castle in the clouds.
This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies
round the whole world, whose remote branches under separate skies bear
like coloured birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes
of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the
forests, and buried amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins, and
carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of
Greece. These are the myths: and he who has no sympathy with myths has
no sympathy with men. But he who has most sympathy with myths will most
fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense
that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the
needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain
things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and
formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar, they do not
provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in
Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe
in God the Father Almighty’ and the rest of the Apostles’ Creed. Many
believed in some and not in others, or more in some and less in others,
or only in a very vague poetical sense in any. There was no moment when
they were all collected into an orthodox order which men would fight and
be tortured to keep intact. Still less did anybody ever say in that
fashion: ‘I believe in Odin and Thor and Freya,’ for outside Olympus
even the Olympian order grows cloudy and chaotic. It seems clear to me
that Thor was not a god at all but a hero. Nothing resembling a religion
would picture anybody resembling a god as groping like a pigmy in a
great cavern, that turned out to be the glove of a giant. That is the
glorious ignorance called adventure. Thor may have been a great
adventurer; but to call him a god is like trying to compare Jehovah with
Jack and the Beanstalk. Odin seems to have been a real barbarian chief,
possibly of the Dark Ages after Christianity. Polytheism fades away at
its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing
like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy
the need to cry out on some uplifted name or some noble memory in
moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a
child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom
it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially
satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of
surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring
out wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of
sacrifice. It is the wise and worthy idea of not taking our advantage to
the full; of putting something in the other balance to ballast our
dubious pride, of paying tithes to nature for our land. This deep truth
of the danger of insolence, or being too big for our boots, runs through
all the great Greek tragedies and makes them great. But it runs side by
side with an almost cryptic agnosticism about the real nature of the
gods to be propitiated. Where that gesture of surrender is most
magnificent, as among the great Greeks, there is really much more idea
that the man will be the better for losing the ox than that the god will
be the better for getting it. It is said that in its grosser forms there
are often actions grotesquely suggestive of the god really eating the
sacrifice. But this fact is falsified by the error that I put first in
this note on mythology. It is misunderstanding the psychology of
day-dreams. A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will
do a crude and material thing, like leaving a piece of cake for him. A
poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the
god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of _seriousness_ in both
acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude
fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the
pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes
like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses
and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown
god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break
in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had
ignorantly worshipped.
The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an
attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in
its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to the
view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even
in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an
afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a
few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise
them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality
the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle
till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk
as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and
religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that
ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been
any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology, then,
sought God through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty,
in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque
ugliness. But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own
triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It
remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand
extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the
moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy
convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the
stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through
every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world
and displace the sky, it remained true to something about which there
can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of
some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and
say, ‘My dream has come true.’ Therefore do we all in fact feel that
pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are
wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what
is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a
pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all
know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this
sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only
because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own
laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power began to clothe its images,
whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the
South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas. But there
was always a trouble in the triumph, which in these pages I have tried
to analyse in vain; but perhaps I might in conclusion state it thus.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even
natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be
stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and
beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller
when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship
would stunt and even maim him for ever. Henceforth being merely secular
would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray he is gagged;
if he cannot kneel he is in irons. We therefore feel throughout the
whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust. When
the man makes the gesture of salutation and of sacrifice, when he pours
out the libation or lifts up the sword, he knows he is doing a worthy
and a virile thing. He knows he is doing one of the things for which a
man was made. His imaginative experiment is therefore justified. But
precisely because it began with imagination, there is to the end
something of mockery in it, and especially in the object of it. This
mockery, in the more intense moments of the intellect, becomes the
almost intolerable irony of Greek tragedy. There seems a disproportion
between the priest and the altar or between the altar and the god. The
priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god. All the
order of the temple is solid and sane and satisfactory to certain parts
of our nature; except the very centre of it, which seems strangely
mutable and dubious, like a dancing flame. It is the first thought round
which the whole has been built; and the first thought is still a fancy
and almost a frivolity. In that strange place of meeting, the man seems
more statuesque than the statue. He himself can stand for ever in the
noble and natural attitude of the statue of the Praying Boy. But
whatever name be written on the pedestal, whether Zeus or Ammon or
Apollo, the god whom he worships is Proteus.
The Praying Boy may be said to express a need rather than to satisfy a
need. It is by a normal and necessary action that his hands are lifted;
but it is no less a parable that his hands are empty. About the nature
of that need there will be more to say; but at this point it may be said
that perhaps after all this true instinct, that prayer and sacrifice are
a liberty and an enlargement, refers back to that vast and
half-forgotten conception of universal fatherhood, which we have already
seen everywhere fading from the morning sky. This is true; and yet it is
not all the truth. There remains an indestructible instinct, in the poet
as represented by the pagan, that he is not entirely wrong in localising
his god. It is something in the soul of poetry if not of piety. And the
greatest of poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us
the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger
language, a local habitation and a name. No poet is merely a pantheist;
those who are counted most pantheistic, like Shelley, start with some
local and particular image as the pagans did. After all, Shelley wrote
of the skylark because it was a skylark. You could not issue an imperial
or international translation of it for use in South Africa, in which it
was changed to an ostrich. So the mythological imagination moves as it
were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In
a word, mythology is a _search_; it is something that combines a
recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity
in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and
mysterious levity about all the places found. So far could the lonely
imagination lead, and we must turn later to the lonely reason. Nowhere
along this road did the two ever travel together.
That is where all these things differed from religion in the reality in
which these different dimensions met or a sort of solid. They differed
from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A
picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly
like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is not
a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of
Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth. Only in this mythical and mystical
world the portrait could exist before the person; and the portrait was
therefore more vague and doubtful. But anybody who has felt and fed on
the atmosphere of these myths will know what I mean when I say that in
one sense they did not really profess to be realities. The pagans had
dreams about realities; and they would have been the first to admit, in
their own words, that some came through the gate of ivory and others
through the gate of horn. The dreams do indeed tend to be very vivid
dreams when they touch on those tender or tragic things, which can
really make a sleeper awaken with the sense that his heart has been
broken in his sleep. They tend continually to hover over certain
passionate themes of meeting and parting, of a life that ends in death
or a death that is the beginning of life. Demeter wanders over a
stricken world looking for a stolen child; Isis stretches out her arms
over the earth in vain to gather the limbs of Osiris; and there is
lamentation upon the hills for Atys and through the woods for Adonis.
There mingles with all such mourning the mystical and profound sense
that death can be a deliverer and an appeasement; that such death gives
us a divine blood for a renovating river and that all good is found in
gathering the broken body of the god. We may truly call these
foreshadowings; so long as we remember that foreshadowings are shadows.
And the metaphor of a shadow happens to hit very exactly the truth that
is very vital here. For a shadow is a shape; a thing which reproduces
shape but not texture. These things were something _like_ the real
thing; and to say that they were like is to say that they were
different. Saying something is like a dog is another way of saying it is
not a dog; and it is in this sense of identity that a myth is not a man.
Nobody really thought of Isis as a human being; nobody really thought of
Demeter as a historical character; nobody thought of Adonis as the
founder of a Church. There was no idea that any one of them had changed
the world; but rather that their recurrent death and life bore the sad
and beautiful burden of the changelessness of the world. Not one of them
was a revolution, save in the sense of the revolution of the sun and
moon. Their whole meaning is missed if we do not see that they mean the
shadows that we are and the shadows that we pursue. In certain
sacrificial and communal aspects they naturally suggest what sort of a
god might satisfy men; but they do not profess to be satisfied. Any one
who says they do is a bad judge of poetry.
Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism than
with Christianity. Those who call these cults ‘religions,’ and ‘compare’
them with the certitude and challenge of the Church have much less
appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why
classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.
It is no very human tenderness for the hungry to prove that hunger is
the same as food. It is no very genial understanding of youth to argue
that hope destroys the need for happiness. And it is utterly unreal to
argue that these images in the mind, admired entirely in the abstract,
were even in the same world with a living man and a living polity that
were worshipped because they were concrete. We might as well say that a
boy playing at robbers is the same as a man in his first day in the
trenches; or that a boy’s first fancies about ‘the not impossible she’
are the same as the sacrament of marriage. They are fundamentally
different exactly where they are superficially similar; we might almost
say they are not the same even when they are the same. They are only
different because one is real and the other is not. I do not mean merely
that I myself believe that one is true and the other is not. I mean that
one was never meant to be true in the same sense as the other. The sense
in which it was meant to be true I have tried to suggest vaguely here,
but it is undoubtedly very subtle and almost indescribable. It is so
subtle that the students who profess to put it up as a rival to our
religion miss the whole meaning and purport of their own study. We know
better than the scholars, even those of us who are no scholars, what was
in that hollow cry that went forth over the dead Adonis and why the
Great Mother had a daughter wedded to death. We have entered more deeply
than they into the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade,
where gate within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know the
meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the
perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet
saying, ‘These things are.’ It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist
crying, ‘Why cannot these things be?’