_MYTHOLOGY._
The Notion of a Systematic Pantheon.--Homer and
Hesiod.--Mythology before Homer.--Supposed Conditions
of the Mythopoeic Age.--Vico.--The Childhood
of the World.--Goethe's Boyhood.--Mythology is
a Body of Rudimentary Thought, Penetrated with
the Spirit of the Nation.--Different Views of
the Greek Myths.--Grote.--Relics of a Primitive
Revelation.--The Symbolic Hypothesis.--Rationalism and
Euhemerus.--Fetichism.--Poetic Theory.--The Linguistic
Theory.--Comparative Philology.--Solar Theory.--The
Myth of Herakles: its Solar Interpretation--its Ethical
Significance.--Summary of the Points Suggested with
Regard to Mythology.--Mediæval Myths.--The Action of
the Greek Intelligence upon Mythology: in Art--in
Philosophy.--Persistence of the National Polytheism.--Homer
Allegorized at Alexandria.--Triumph of Christianity.--The
Greek Pantheon in the Middle Ages.--Greek Mythology
Recovers Poetic and Artistic Value in the Renaissance.
It has been remarked with justice that, when we use the word mythology,
we are too apt to think of a Pantheon, of a well-defined hierarchy of
gods and demigods and heroes, all fabulous indeed, but all arranged
in one coherent system. This conception of Greek mythology arises
partly from the fact that we learn to know it in dictionaries, compiled
from the works of authors who lived long after the age in which myths
were produced, and partly from the fact that the conditions under
which myth-making was a possibility are so far removed from us as to
be almost unintelligible. Yet there is some truth in what, upon the
whole, is an erroneous view. Although the Greek myths, in their origin,
were not a well-digested system, still they formed a complete body
of national thought, on which the intelligence of the Greek race, in
its art and its religion, was continually working, until it took the
final form in which we have it in our dictionaries. What remained in
the Pantheon of Apollodorus and Hyginus, remained there by no freak of
accident. What was omitted by Homer and by Hesiod was omitted by no
operation of blind chance. The spirit of the Greeks was concerned in
the purification and the preservation of their myths, and the unity of
that spirit constitutes the unity of their mythology.
Two great poets gave to Greek mythology the form which it maintained in
the historic period. Herodotus says that "Homer and Hesiod named the
gods, and settled their genealogies for the Hellenes." What this means
is, that at a certain prehistoric epoch, the epoch of epic poetry,
mythology had passed from the primitive and fluid state, and had
become the subject-matter of the arts. Between the mythopoeic liberty
of creation and the collections of the grammarians was interposed the
poetry, the sculpture, and the religious ritual of the historic Greeks.
What we have to deal with at the present moment is, not mythology as
it appears in art, but the genesis of the myths conceived as a body of
Greek thought and fancy in their infantine or rudimentary stages.
What was mythology before Homer? How did it come into existence? How
were the Greeks brought to believe that there was a supreme father of
gods and men called Zeus, a wise patroness of arts and sciences called
Pallas, a pure and glorious and far-darting deity called Phoebus? There
is no one who does not acknowledge something sublime and beautiful
in this part of the Greek mythology. Even those who do not care to
comprehend the growth of these conceptions admit that the genius of the
race shone with splendor peculiar to itself in their creation.
To this question must be counterpoised another. What are we to think
about the many repulsive, grotesque, and hideous elements of Greek
mythology--the incest and adultery of Zeus, the cannibalism of Kronos,
the profligacy of Aphrodite, the cruelty of Phoebus? When thought
began to be conscious of itself in Greece these abominations moved the
anger of the philosophers. Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Pindar,
and Plato, in succession, recognized that the mythical fables were
incompatible with the notion of deity, and rejected them forthwith.
Modern students have been so disgusted by the same indecencies that
some of them have abandoned Greek mythology as hopeless, while others
have taken refuge in the extraordinary paradox that myths are a disease
of language. These methods of dealing with the problem are alike
unphilosophical. It is impossible for the historian to reject what
formed the groundwork of religious and artistic thought in Greece. It
is childish to represent the human mind as a sort of bound Mazeppa,
stretched helpless on the wild horse, Language, which carries it away
into the wilderness.
In order to understand the two questions which have been propounded,
we must make a demand upon our imagination, and endeavor to return,
in thought at least, to the conditions of a people in the mythopoeic
age--the age, that is to say, in which not only were myths naturally
made, but all the thinking of a nation took the form of myths. We must
go back to a time when there were no written records, when there were
no systems of thought, when language had not been subjected to analysis
of any kind, when abstract notions were unknown, when science had
not begun to exist, when history was impossible, and when the whole
world was a land of miracles. There was no check then laid upon fancy,
because nothing as yet was conceived as thought, but everything existed
as sensation. In this infancy the nation told itself stories, and
believed in them. The same faculties of the mind which afterwards gave
birth to poetry and theology, philosophy and state-craft, science and
history, were now so ill-defined and merely germinal that they produced
but fables. Yet these faculties were vigorous and vivid. The fables
they produced were infinite in number and variety, beautiful, and so
pregnant with thought under the guise of fancy that long centuries
scarcely sufficed for disengaging all that they contained. In dealing
with Greek mythology it must be remembered that the nation with whose
mythopoeic imagination we are concerned was the Greek nation.[8] It had
already in itself all Hellas, as the seed enfolds the plant.
A famous passage in Vico's work _Della Metafisica Poetica_ may here
be paraphrased, in order to make the conditions under which we must
imagine myths to have arisen more intelligible:[9] "Poetry, which was
the first form of wisdom, began with a system of thought, not reasoned
or abstract, as ours is now, but felt and imagined, as was natural in
the case of those primitive human beings who had developed no reasoning
faculties, but were all made up of senses in the highest physical
perfection, and of the most vigorous imaginations. In their total
ignorance of causes they wondered at everything; and their poetry was
all divine, because they ascribed to gods the objects of their wonder,
and thought that beings like themselves, but greater, could alone
have caused them. Thus they were like children whom we notice taking
into their hands inanimate things, and playing and talking with them
as though they were living persons. When thunder terrified them, they
attributed their own nature to the phenomenon; and being apt to express
their most violent passions by howls and roarings, they conceived
heaven as a vast body, which gave notice of its anger by lightnings
and thunderings. The whole of nature, in like manner, they imagined to
be a vast animated body, capable of feeling and passion." Vico then
proceeds to point out how difficult it is for us, who, through long
centuries, have removed ourselves as far as possible from the life of
the instincts, senses, and imagination, whose language has become full
of abstract terms, whose conception of the universe has been formed
by science, whose thought is critical and reflective, and who have
been educated in a rational theology, to comprehend the attitude of
primitive humanity in its personifying stage of thought.
In this childhood of the world, when the Greek myths came into
existence, the sun was called a shepherd, and the clouds were his
sheep; or an archer, and the sunbeams were his arrows. It was easier
then to think of the sea as a husky-voiced and turbulent old man, whose
true form none might clearly know, because he changed so often and was
so secret in his ways, who shook the earth in his anger, and had the
white-maned billows of the deep for horses, than to form a theory of
the tides. The spring of the year became a beautiful youth, beloved
by the whole earth, or beloved, like Hyacinthus, by the sun, or,
like Adonis, by the queen of beauty, over whom the fate of death was
suspended, and for whose loss annual mourning was made. Such tales the
Greeks told themselves in their youth; and it would be wrong to suppose
that deliberate fiction played any part in their creation. To conceive
of the world thus was natural to the whole race; and the tales that
sprang up formed the substance of their intellectual activity. Here,
then, if anywhere, we watch the process of a people in its entirety
contributing to form a body of imaginative thought, projecting itself
in a common and unconscious work of art. Nor will it avail to demur
that behind the Greeks there stretched a dim and distant past, that
many of their myths had already taken shape, to some extent, before the
separation of the Aryan families. That is now an ascertained fact, the
bearings of which will have to be discussed farther on in this chapter.
For the moment it is enough to reply that not the similarities, but the
differences, brought to light by the study of comparative mythology are
important for the historian of each several race. The raw material of
silk may interest the merchant or the man of science; the artist cares
for the manufactured fabric, with its curious patterns and refulgent
hues.
In order further to illustrate the conditions of the mythopoeic age, a
passage from the _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ of Goethe might be quoted. If
it is not a mere fancy to suppose that the individual lives, to some
extent at least, in his own self the life of humanity, and therefore
to conclude that the childhood of the world can be mirrored in the
childhood of a man, a poet like Goethe is precisely fitted, by the
record of his own boyhood, to throw light upon the early operations of
the human mind. For, in one sense of the term, the mythopoeic faculty
never dies with poets. In their own persons they prolong the youth and
adolescence of the race, retaining the faculty, now lost to nearly
all, of looking on the universe as living. Goethe, then, relates that
when he was at school at Frankfort, he used to invent stories about
himself and the places he frequented, half consciously, and half by
a spontaneous working of his fancy. These stories he told to his
school-fellows so vividly that they accepted them as fact. "It greatly
rejoiced them," he says, "to know that such wonderful things could
befall one of their own playmates; nor was it any harm that they did
not understand how I could find time and space for such adventures, as
they must have been pretty well aware of all my comings and goings, and
how I was occupied the whole day." He goes on to recount one of these
marvellous narratives. The scene of it was laid in Frankfort, in a
street familiar to his school-fellows. Down this street, which had a
long blank wall surmounted by trees, he supposed himself to have been
walking one day, and to have found a door in the wall, not noticed by
him on any previous occasion. His curiosity being aroused, he knocked
at the door, and, after some delay, was admitted. Inside he found
a garden full of wonders--fountains and fair nymphs, exotic shrubs
and quaint old men, magicians, knights, sylphs, and all the proper
furniture of a romance. Goethe's comrades, the first time that they
heard him describe this enchanted pleasure-ground in glowing terms,
already more than half believed in its existence; "and," says the poet,
"each of them visited alone the place, without confiding it to me or
to the others, and discovered the nut-trees," but none found the door.
Still, they did not disbelieve what Goethe told them, but preferred
to imagine that the magic door had once, at least, been seen by him,
and opened for him only, though it remained invisible and closed
for them. And herein they were literally right, for Goethe trod an
enchanted ground of poetry which few can hope to win. The story proved
so fascinating that he had to tell it over and over again, always
repeating the same order of events, until, he says, "by the uniformity
of the narrative I converted the fable into truth in the minds of my
hearers."
This, then, may be used as an illustration of the mythopoeic faculty.
All that was needed for the growth of myths was creative mind on the
one side and receptive and believing mind on the other. It did not,
probably, require a Goethe to make a myth, though we may still believe
that the greatest and best myths owed their form to the intervention
at some period of unknown and unacknowledged Goethes. When the logical
faculty was in abeyance, when the critical faculty had not been
aroused, when sympathy was quick, language fertile, fancy exuberant,
and belief sincere, there was nothing to check mythopoetry. The
nation had to make the step from boyhood to adolescence before the
impulse ceased. Nor was there any education from without in a fixed
body of systematized knowledge to coerce its freedom. Forming the
first activity of the intellect, it held in solution, as it were, the
rudiments of religion and morality, of psychological reflection, of
politics, geography, and history. Had there been any one to ask the
myth-maker: Who told you this strange tale? what is your authority
for imposing it upon us? he would have answered: The goddess told me,
the divine daughter of memory, as I walked alone. And this he would
sincerely and conscientiously have believed; and those who heard him
would have given credence to his words; and thus his intuitions became
their intuitions. Creative faculty and credence, insight and sympathy,
two forms of the same as yet scarcely divided operation of the mind,
gave permanence to myths. What the fathers received they transmitted
to their sons. Successive generations dealt freely with them, moulding
and remodelling, within the limits set upon the genius of the race.
Hundreds may have been produced simultaneously, and among them must
have raged a fierce struggle for existence, so that multitudes perished
or were hopelessly defaced, just as in the animal and vegetable
kingdoms whole species disappear or survive only in fragments and
fossils.
It cannot be too often repeated that the power which presided over the
transmission of the myths was the spirit of the people. An inherent
selective instinct in the nation determined which of them should
ultimately survive; and thus a body of legend, truly national, was
formed, in which the nation saw itself reflected. When, therefore, we
say that Greek mythology is Hellenic and original, we are admitting
this unconscious, silent, steady, irresistible faculty of the mind to
fashion gods in its own image, to come to a knowledge of itself in its
divinities, to create a glorified likeness of all that it admires in
its own nature, to deify its truest and its best, and to invest its
thought in an imperishable form of art. Nor will it here again avail to
demur that Zeus was originally the open sky, Pallas the dawn, Phoebus
and Artemis the sun and moon. The student of the Greeks accepts this
information placidly and gratefully from the philologer; but he passes
immediately beyond it. For him Zeus, Pallas, Phoebus, Artemis are no
longer the sky and dawn, the sun and moon. Whatever their origin may
have been, the very mythopoeic process placed them in quite a different
and more important relation to Greek thought when it handed them over
to Hesiod and Homer, to Pindar and Æschylus, to Pheidias and Polygnotus.
To discuss the bearings of the linguistic and solar theories of
mythology may be reserved for another part of this essay. It is
enough, at this point, to bear in mind that there was nothing in
the consciousness of the prehistoric Greeks which did not take the
form of myth. Consequently their mythology, instead of being a
compact system of polytheism, is really a whole mass of thought,
belonging to a particular period of human history, when it was
impossible to think except by pictures, or to record impressions of
the world except in stories. That all these tales are religious or
semi-religious--concerned, that is to say, with deities--must be
explained by the tendency of mankind at an early period of culture to
conceive the powers of nature as persons, and to dignify them with
superhuman attributes. To the apprehension of infantine humanity
everything is a god. Viewed even as a Pantheon, reduced to rule and
order by subsequent reflection, Greek mythology is, therefore, a
mass of the most heterogeneous materials. Side by side with some of
the sublimest and most beautiful conceptions which the mind has ever
produced, we find in it much that is absurd and trivial and revolting.
Different ages and conditions of thought have left their products
embedded in its strange conglomerate. While it contains fragments of
fossilized stories, the meaning of which has either been misunderstood
or can only be explained by reference to barbaric customs, it also
contains, emergent from the rest and towering above the rubbish, the
serene forms of the Olympians. Those furnish the vital and important
elements of Greek mythology. To perfect them was the work of poets and
sculptors in the brief, bright blooming time of Hellas. Yet, when we
pay these deities homage in the temple of the human spirit, let us not
forget that they first received form in the mythopoeic age--the age of
"the disease of language," as Max Müller whimsically states it.
In order to comprehend a problem so complex as that which is offered
by mythology, we must not be satisfied with approaching it from one
point of view, but must sift opinion, submit our theory to the crucible
in more than one experiment, and, after all our labor, be content
to find that much remains still unexplained. Therefore, it will not
do to accept without further inquiry the general description of the
mythopoeic faculty which has just been advanced. After examining the
various methods which may be adopted for dealing with the myths, and
welcoming the light which can be thrown upon the subject from different
quarters, it will, perhaps, be possible to return to the original
position with a fuller understanding of the problem. If nothing else
be gained by this process, it is, at least, useful to be reminded that
intricate historical questions cannot be settled by one answer alone;
that a variety of agencies must be admitted; and that the domination of
a favorite hypothesis is prejudicial to the end which serious inquiry
has in view.
Regarding the Greek myths in their totality as a thickly tufted
jungle of inexplicable stories, and presupposing the activity of the
mythopoeic faculty to be a play of irrational fancy, it is possible
for the political historian to state them as he finds them, and then
to pass on and to disregard them. This is, practically speaking,
what Grote has done, though the luminous and exhaustive treatment of
mythology in his sixteenth chapter proves his complete mastery of
the subject from the philosophic point of view. Solely occupied with
history, and especially interested in political history, when he has
once recognized "the uselessness of digging for a supposed basis of
truth" in legends which relate to "a past which was never present," he
is justified in leaving them alone. The strong political bias which
concentrates attention upon the development of constitutions and the
history of states, while it throws the æsthetic activity of the race
into the background, sufficiently accounts for this negative relation
to the myths. Its value for our purpose consists in the recognition
that mythology must not be confounded with history.
Another method of dealing with mythology requires a passing notice,
and a brief dismissal. It has not unfrequently been suggested at
uncritical periods of culture, and by uncritical minds in our own
age, that the Greek myths are the degradation of primitive truth
revealed to mankind by God. As they are Christians who advance this
view, the essential dogmas of Christianity are sought for in the Greek
Pantheon. The three persons of the Trinity, the personality of the
devil, the Divine Redeemer, and so forth, are read into the sagas of
Kronos and Prometheus and Phoebus. To bring arguments against a theory
so visionary, and so devoid of real historical imagination, would
be superfluous. Otherwise, it might be questioned how a primitive
revelation, after undergoing such complete disintegration and
debasement, blossomed forth again into the æsthetical beauty which no
one can deny to be the special property of the Greek race. According
to the terms of the hypothesis, a primal truth was first degraded, so
as to lose its spiritual character; and then, from this corruption of
decay, arose a polytheism eminently artistic, which produced works of
beauty in their kind unsurpassable, but in their essence diverse from
the starting-point of revelation. Moreover, the very dogmas which these
visionaries detect in Greek mythology had an historical development
posterior to the formation of the Greek Olympus. It was, for instance,
the Greek genius in its old age which gave the substantiality of
thought to the doctrine of the Trinity. The only good to be got from
the consideration of this vain method is the conviction that a problem
like that of Greek mythology must be studied in itself and for itself.
Whatever its antecedents may have been, its outgrowth in poetry,
philosophy, and sculpture--in other words, its realized or permanent
manifestation--is not Christian, and has nothing but general human
elements in common with Christianity.
A third hypothesis for the explanation of Greek myths, which used
to find much favor with the learned, may be stated thus. Myths were
originally invented by priests and sages, in order to convey to
the popular mind weighty truths and doctrines which could not be
communicated in abstract terms to weak intelligences. Thus, each myth
was a dark speech uttered in parables. The first fatal objection to
this theory is that it does not fulfil its own conditions. To extract a
body of doctrine from the vast majority of the myths is not possible.
Moreover, it is an inversion of the natural order to assume that
priests and sages in a very early age of culture should have been
able to arrive at profound truth, and clever enough to clothe it in
parable, and yet that, as the nation grew in mental power, the truths
should have been forgotten, and the symbols which expressed them have
been taken as truth in and for itself. Without, however, entering
into a discussion of this hypothesis in detail, it is enough to point
out that it implies the same incapacity for realizing the early
conditions of society which is involved in Locke's and Adam Smith's
theory of the Origin of Language. It presupposes fully developed
intelligence, whereas we are concerned precisely with the first and
germinal commencement of intelligence. At the same time there is a
certain foundation for the symbolic theory. Just in the same way as all
language is unconsciously metaphorical, so all myths are parabolical,
inasmuch as they involve the operation of thought seeking to express
itself externally. The mistake lies in maintaining that the parabolic
form was deliberately used in the prehistoric period. Its deliberate
employment must rather be confined to the age of self-conscious
thinking. Thus the myths by which Plato illustrated his philosophy,
the Empedoclean parable of Love and Hate, the Choice of Herakles
invented by the sophist Prodicus, are purposely symbolical. It is also
worth noticing that, among genuine myths, those which seem to justify
this hypothesis are of comparatively late origin, or are immediately
concerned with psychological questions--such, for example, as the myths
of Cupid and Psyche and of Pandora and Epimetheus.
A fourth way of dealing with mythology is to rationalize it, by
assuming that all the marvellous stories told about the gods and heroes
had historical foundation in the past. Myths, according to this method,
become the reminiscences of actual facts, the biographies of persons,
which in course of time have lost their positive truth. In order to
recover and reconstitute that truth, it is necessary to reduce them to
prose. Thus Hecatæus, who was one of the earliest among the Greeks to
attempt this interpretation, declared that Geryon was a king of Epirus,
and that Cerberus was a serpent haunting the caverns of Cape Tænarus.
Herodotus, in like manner, explained the sacred black dove of Dodona
by saying that she was a woman, who came from Egyptian Thebes, and
introduced a peculiar cult of Zeus into Hellas. After the same fashion,
Python, slain by Phoebus, was supposed to have been a troublesome
freebooter. Æolus was changed into a weatherwise seaman, the Centaurs
into horsemen, Atlas into an astronomer, Herakles into a strong-limbed
knight-errant. It was when the old feeling for the myths had died
out among the learned, when physical hypotheses were adopted for the
explanation of the heavens and the earth instead of the religious
belief in nature-deities, and when prose had usurped on poetry, that
this theory was worked into a system. Euhemerus, the contemporary of
the Macedonian Cassander, wrote a kind of novel in which he made out
that all the gods and heroes had once been men. Ennius translated
this work into Latin, and the rationalizing method was called
Euhemerism. The hold which it has retained upon the minds of succeeding
ages is sufficient to show that it readily approves itself to the
understanding. It seems to make everything quite smooth and easy. When,
for instance, we read the revolting legend of Pasiphaë we like to fancy
that after all she only fell in love with a captain called Taurus, and
that Dædalus was an artful go-between. Unfortunately, however, there is
no guide more delusive than Euhemerism. It destroys the true value of
mythology, considered as the expression of primitive thought and fancy,
reducing it to a mere decayed and weed-grown ruin of prosaic fact.
Plato was right when he refused to rationalize the myths, and when,
by his own use of myths, he showed their proper nature as the vehicle
for thoughts as yet incapable of more exact expression. At the same
time it would be unphilosophical to deny that real persons and actual
events have supplied in some cases the subject-matter of mythology. The
wanderings of Odysseus, the Trojan War, the voyage of the Argonauts,
the kingdom of Minos, the achievements of Herakles, have, all of them,
the appearance of dimly preserved or poetized history. Yet to seek to
reconstruct history from them, "to dig for a supposed basis of truth"
in them, is idle. The real thing to bear in mind is that great men and
stirring events must have been remembered even in the mythopoeic age,
and that to eliminate them from the national consciousness would have
been impossible. A nucleus of fact may, therefore, have formed the
basis of certain myths, just as a wire immersed in a solution of salts
will cause the fluid to condense in crystals round it. But, as in the
case just used by way of illustration, we do not see the wire, but the
crystals, after the process has been finished, so in mythology it is
not the fact but the fancy which attracts our attention and calls for
our consideration. This illustration might be extended so as to apply
to any substratum, linguistic, solar, symbolical, or other, that may
be supposed to underlie the fancy-fabric of mythology. The truth to be
looked for in myths is psychological, not historical, æsthetic rather
than positive.
In order to make the relation of actuality to imagination in the
mythopoeic process still more intelligible, another illustration can
be drawn from nature. Pearls are said to be the result of a secretion
effused from the pearl-oyster round a piece of grit or thorn inserted
between its flesh and the shell in which it lives. To the production of
the pearl this extraneous object and the irritation which it causes are
both necessary; yet the pearl is something in itself quite independent
of the stimulating substance. Just so the myth, which corresponds to
the pearl, is a secretion of the national imagination which has been
roused into activity by something accidental and exterior.
It is possible to take a fifth line and to refer mythology to
fetichism. Strictly speaking, fetichism can never explain the problem
of the mythopoeic faculty, except in so far as we may assume it to have
formed a necessary stage of human development anterior to polytheism.
Greek mythology, together with Greek nature-worship, would, according
to this fifth method of interpretation, have to be regarded as a
refinement on the savage dread of fetiches. Beginning with a servile
prostration before the powers of nature, this attitude of simple awe
would have been gradually elevated to the height which it attained in
Homer and Hesiod. In the progressive amelioration of the race myths
would thus have occupied a middle place between the fetich and the free
divinities of art. Putting aside all the difficulties which involve the
question whether fetichism is rightly regarded as the first attitude
of man towards nature, it is clear that the fetichistic hypothesis
cannot cover the whole field of our inquiry. What it does do is to
offer an explanation of the origin of nature-worship, and to account
for the fact that external objects are regarded as living, sentient
beings in the myths. Long before the philosophers of Ionia conjectured
that the stars are fiery vapors, people fancied they were gods. It
has been well observed that the Greeks never speak of a god _of the_
sun, or a goddess _of the_ moon. They worshipped the sun as a god in
Helios, the moon as a goddess in Selene. This direct reference of the
mind to natural things as objects of adoration may, possibly, be a
purified form of fetichism. But, taken by itself alone, fetichism is
not adequate to account for the many-sided, many-featured product of
the mythical imagination, which continued active long after the age
of savagery. Nor, indeed, have the historians, who attribute great
importance to this stage of religious feeling, claimed for it so much.
According to yet a sixth view the myths are to be considered as
nothing more or less than poems. This theory is not, at first sight,
very different from that which is involved in the first account given
of the mythopoeic faculty. It is clear that the stories of Galatea,
of Pan and Pitys, of Hesperus and Hymenæus, and, in a deeper sense,
perhaps, of Prometheus and Pandora, are pure poems. That is to say, the
power which produced them was analogous to the power which we observe
in poetic creation at the present day, and which has continued the
mythopoeic age into the nineteenth century. Yet we should lose a great
deal in exactitude and fulness of conception if we identified mythology
with poetry. Poetry is conscious of its aim; it demands a fixed form;
it knows itself to be an art, and, as an art, to be different from
religion and distinguished from history. Now, mythology in its origin
was antecedent to all such distinctions, and to all the conscious
adaptations of means to ends. Behind the oldest poetry which we possess
there looms a background of mythology, substantially existing, already
expressed in language, nebulous, potential, containing in itself the
germs of all the several productions of the human intellect. The
whole intellect is there in embryo; and behind mythology nothing is
discoverable but thought and language in the same sphere. Therefore we
lose rather than gain by a too strict adherence to what may be termed
the poetical hypothesis, although the analogy of poetry, and of poetry
alone, places us at the right point of view for comprehending the
exercise of the myth-making faculty.
Before completing the circle of inquiry by a return with fuller
knowledge to the point from which we started, it is necessary to
discuss a seventh way of dealing with the problem, which professes to
be alone the truly scientific method. It may be called the linguistic
theory, since it rests upon analysis of language, and maintains that
mythology is not so much an independent product of the human mind,
expressed in words, as a morbid phase of language, considered as
a thing apart. Max Müller, who has given currency to this view in
England, states expressly that "Mythology, which was the bane of the
ancient world, is in truth a disease of language. A myth means a word,
but a word which, from being a name or an attribute, has been allowed
to assume a more substantial existence;" and again, under mythology "I
include every case in which language assumes an independent power and
reacts on the mind, instead of being, as it was intended to be, the
mere realization and outward embodiment of the mind." The first thing
which strikes a student accustomed to regard mythology as a necessary
and important phase in the evolution of thought, when he reads these
definitions, is the assumption that #mythos# is synonymous with what
we mean by word, instead of including the wider content of a story
told in words. He is thus led to suspect a theory which contrives to
make the problem of mythology pass for a branch of philology. Nor
can he comprehend in what sense mythology may be called "a disease
of language" rather than a disease of the mind which uses language.
Does Max Müller mean that language suffered, or that the thinking
subject suffered through the action of the bane? He probably means the
former; but, if so, language must be supposed to live a life apart from
thought, triumphing over the freedom of the human mind, and imposing
its figments on the intellect. Such a belief might seem due partly to
a too exclusive study of language in itself, in the course of which
the philologer comes to regard it as disconnected from thought, and
partly to the neglect of the fact that it is the same human subject
which produces language and myths, that language and thought in their
origin are inseparable, but that when language has once been started,
it has to serve the various purposes of thought, and lend itself to
myth and poem, philosophical analysis and religious dogma. Another
point to criticise is the inevitable corollary that the soul of a great
nation, like the Greeks, for instance, in the course of its advance to
the maturity of art and freedom, passes through a period of derangement
and disease, by which its civilization is vitiated, its vitality
poisoned at the root, and all its subsequent achievements tainted;
and that this spiritual phthisis can be traced to a sickly state of
language at a very remote historical period when as yet the nation was
scarcely constituted. Seriously to entertain this view is tantamount
to maintaining that corruption and disease may be the direct efficient
causes of the highest art on which humanity can pride itself, since it
is indubitable that the poems of Homer and the sculptures of Pheidias
are the direct outgrowth of that "bane of the ancient world" which,
to quote another pithy saying of Max Müller, converted _nomina_ into
_numina_. It is hardly necessary to point out the curious want of faith
in the Welt-Geist (or God) which this implies; the unimaginative habit
of mind we should encourage if we failed to discern the excellence
of a civilization that owed its specific character to mythology;
the unphilosophical conclusions to which we might be brought if we
denied that the intelligence is free while following the fixed laws
of its evolution, and that the essential feature in this evolution
is the advance from rudimentary to more developed thought. Language,
however potent in reaction upon thought, is after all the vehicle
and instrument of thought, and not its master. This leads to yet a
further criticism: granting that language was "intended to be the mere
realization and outward embodiment of the mind"--though this is a wide
begging of the most difficult of all questions--it does not follow
that in mythology language is not pursuing its appointed function. If
the mythological phase of thought is less apparent among the Semitic
than among the Aryan nations, are we to say that this is so because
the Semitic languages escaped the whooping-cough of mythology, or not
far rather because the mind of the Aryan races had a greater aptitude
for mythology, a greater aptitude for art? In the fifth place, the
definition of mythology is too wide for the special purpose of the
problem. Bacon long ago pointed out that one of the chief sources of
error arises from our tendency to mistake words for realities. This
imperfect adjustment of language to the purposes of thought is not
peculiar to the mythopoeic age. When we use such phrases as "vital
force," we are designating the results of observation and experience
by a word which ought not to be regarded as more than a sign. Yet,
because "vital force" has sometimes been recognized as something
positive and substantially existent, we cannot on that account call
it a myth without impoverishing the resources of language, and making
one word do the work of two. The truth, therefore, is, that in the
mythopoeic as in every other age, words have done violence to thought;
nor need it be contested that the _idola fori_ were more potent in the
infancy than in the maturity of intelligence. While concerned with
this branch of our critique, it is curious to observe the satisfaction
with which the advocates of the linguistic theory use it as the means
of rehabilitating the moral character of the ancient Greeks, by trying
to make out that the tales of Oedipus, Pelops, and Kronos owe their
repulsive elements to verbal mistakes. To the student it is undoubtedly
a relief to fancy that the incest of Jocasta was originally no more
than a figurative way of speaking about the alternations of day and
night. He derives, indeed, the same sort of contentment by this
method as the rationalist who explains the legend of Pasiphaë upon
Euhemeristic principles. Yet it is surely a poor way of whitewashing
the imagination of the ancients to have recourse to a theory which
sees in myths nothing better than a mange or distemper breaking out
in language, and tormenting the human mind for a season. Nor can the
theory be stretched so far as to exonerate the nation from its share of
interest in these stories. The people who made the supposed linguistic
mistakes delighted in the grotesque and fantastic legends which were
produced. Even if words deluded them, their wills were free and their
brains at work while under the pernicious influence. The real way of
exculpating the conscience of the Greeks, indicated both by philosophy
and common-sense, is to point out that in the age of reflection
the tragic poets moralized these very myths, and made them the
subject-matter of the gravest art, while the sages instituted a polemic
against the confusion of fabulous mythology with the pure notion of
Godhead obtained by reflection.
The theory of development which seems to underlie the linguistic
doctrine is, that thought in its earliest stage is positive and clear
and adequate. The first savage who thinks sees the sun, for example,
and calls it the sun; but in talking about the sun he begins to use
figurative language, and so converts his simple propositions into
myths. At this point, argues the philologer, he goes wrong and becomes
the victim of delusions. The fallacy in this view appears to lie in
attributing to the simple and sensuous apprehension of the savage the
same sort of simplicity as that which we have gained by a process of
abstraction, and consequently inferring that the importation of fancy
into the thinking process implies a species of degeneracy. The truth
seems rather to be quite the contrary. If we grant, for the sake of
argument, that the first thoughts are in a certain sense simple, they
have nothing in common with the generalizations of the understanding.
Except in relation to immediate perceptions, their generality is empty
until it has been filled up with the varied matter of the senses and
the imagination. Mythology and poetry are, therefore, an advance upon
the primitive prose of simple apprehension. What was a mere round
ball becomes a dædal world; and it is not till the full cycle of the
myth-creating fancy has been exhausted that the understanding can
return upon a higher level by abstraction to intellectual simplicity.
The same is true about theology. The first dim sense of the divine in
nature as a unity may possibly have been prior to the many deities
of polytheism; men may have looked upon the open sky and called
that god. Yet it was not a retrogression, but an advance from that
first perception to the mythological fulness and variety which gave
concreteness to the notion of the deity. In this way the whole content
of human nature--feeling, sense, activity, and so forth--was imported
into the original and hollow notion; or, to state the process with
greater accuracy, the germ of thought, by unfolding its potentiality,
showed that what had seemed a barren unit was a complicated organism
with a multiplicity of parts. It remained for a further stage of
thought, by reflection and abstraction, to return at a higher level to
the conception of intellectual unity. What we have to guard against is
the temptation to attribute our own abstractedness, the definiteness of
positivism, the purity of monotheism, to the first stage of thought.
Ours is the triumph of the understanding in its vigor over bewildering
fulness; theirs was the poverty and nakedness of a first awakening
of intelligence. The same critique might be applied to the theory
that language starts with universals. Here, again, all turns upon the
question, What sort of universals? Unless we are cautious, we run the
risk of ending in a view almost identical with the theory of primitive
revelation, by following which to its conclusions we are forced to
regard the history of the human race, not as a process of development,
but as a series of disastrous errors and of gradual decline.
What remains the solid outcome of the linguistic theory is that in the
mythopoeic age, when there was no criticism and no reflection possible,
the _idola fori_ were far more powerful than now, and consequently many
legends were invented to account for words of which the true meaning
had been forgotten. Accordingly philology is one of the keys by which
the door of mythology may be unlocked. At the same time, considering
the complex relations of thought to language, especially in their
commencement, it is wrong to concentrate attention upon language.
In like manner, it will be admitted that the genders of the nouns
contributed their quota to the personification of female and male
deities; but it would be wrong to argue that the _numina_ were divided
into male and female because the _nomina_ were so distinguished. In
order to appreciate the personifying instinct, we must go back in
imagination to a point beyond the divergence of thought and language;
and we shall find that if priority can be assigned to either, it will
be to thought, as that by which alone the human subject can be said to
be. Language has sex because sex is a property of the talking being.
The deities are male and female, not because their names have genders,
but because the thinking being, for whom sex is all-important, thinks
its own conditions into the world outside it.
The linguistic theory for the interpretation of mythology is based
upon comparative philology, which has proved beyond all contest that
the Aryan races had not only their grammar, but a certain number of
their myths in common before the separation of the Hindoo, Hellenic,
and Teutonic stocks. The Vedic literature exhibits the mythological
material in rudiment, and its style approximates to that of poetry.
Hence it has been assumed that the disease of language was less
virulent in the oldest Aryan writings than it afterwards became in
Hesiod and Homer--the _nomina_ had not as yet been so utterly deformed
and corrupted into _numina_. The inefficiency of arguments like this
is that they have no value except in relation to a previously adopted
view. To the opponent of the linguistic as the only scientific method
for the explanation of myths, it is left to answer: What you regard
as corruption of language I regard as development of thought. What
interests me in Greek mythology is precisely this: that the Aryan poems
have passed into complicated stories illustrative of pure Hellenic
modes of thought and feeling, which in their turn will give occasion
for epics, dramas, statues, and philosophies. In the same way, the
amount of similarity which comparative mythology has demonstrated in
the myths of all the members of the Aryan family is, from the Greek
historian's point of view, far less important than their differences.
The similarity belongs to the stock as it existed in prehistoric
times. The differences mark the external conditions and internal
qualities of the nations as they played their part in the world's
history. The "disease of language" which severally afflicted the
Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Scandinavians, turns out
to be a faithful mirror of their concrete life. Any one, by way of
illustration, can work out the problem of national psychology offered
by the nature-worship of the sun in Ormuzd, in Phoebus, and in Balder.
The pale and beautiful Balder, who must perish, and whose death
involves the world in wailing; the radiant and conquering Phoebus,
the healing deity, the purifier, the voice of prophecy and poetry and
music; Ormuzd, the antagonist of darkness and of evil, the object of
desire and adoration to the virtuous and pure--these sun-gods answer
to the races, as their geographical conditions and their spirit made
them. Nor is this all. The mythology of each nation has a physiognomy
and character of its own--that of the Greeks being clearness and
articulation in opposition to the formlessness and misty vagueness of
the Hindoos. To mistake a Greek tale of deity or hero for a Hindoo tale
of deity or hero is impossible. While the student of prehistorical
antiquities will, therefore, direct attention to the likeness revealed
by comparative mythology, the historian of nations will rather be
attracted by those differences which express themselves in mature art,
literature, and religion.[10]
One of the most salient points of similarity between the several
families of Aryan myths concerns those which are called solar legends.
In all of these we read of children fated to slay their fathers, of
strong giants condemned to obey the rule of feeble princes, of heroic
young men forced to quit their first love for another woman. The
heroes of these stories are marked out in their cradle by miraculous
signs and wonders, or are suckled by wild beasts in the absence of
their parents; in their youth they slay serpents sent to destroy
them; in their manhood they shine forth as conquerors. Their death
is not unfrequently caused by slight and unforeseen, though fated,
occurrences--by a weapon that strikes the only vulnerable part of their
body, in the case of Achilles and Siegfried; by a twig of mistletoe,
in the case of Balder; by a thorn, in the case of Isfendiyar; by an
envenomed mantle, in the case of Herakles. One great mythus fascinated
the imagination of Norsemen and Hindoos, Greek and Persian, German
and Roman; interwove itself with their history; gave a form to their
poetry; and assumed a prominent place in their religion. So far, it
may be said that comparative philology has established something
solid, which is at the same time of vast importance for the student of
prehistorical antiquity. It is also not improbable that these legends
referred originally to the vicissitudes of the sun in his yearly and
daily journeys through the heavens. Thus much may be conceded to the
solar theorists, remembering always that this primitive astronomical
significance, if it existed, was forgotten by the races for whom the
myths became the material of poetry and religion. But, unfortunately,
the discovery has been strained beyond its proper limits by students
who combine a solar theory with the linguistic in their interpretation
of mythology. In their hands all the myths are made to refer to the sun
and the moon, to dawn and evening. "The difficulty," says Max Müller,
"which I myself have most keenly felt is the monotonous character
of the dawn and sun legends. Is everything the dawn? is everything
the sun? This question I had asked myself many times before it was
addressed me by others." How consistently Professor Max Müller found
himself obliged to answer this question in the affirmative is known
to every student of his works, not to mention those of Mr. Cox. The
hand-books of mythology which are now in vogue in England expound
this solar theory so persistently that it is probable a race is
growing up who fancy that the early Greeks talked with most "damnable
iteration" of nothing but the weather, and that their conversation on
that fruitful topic fell sick of some disease, breeding the tales of
Thebes and Achilles and Pelops's line, as a child breeds measles. It is
therefore necessary to subject it to criticism.
The first point for notice is that mythology lends itself almost as
well to meteorological as to solar theories. Kuhn and Schwartz, as
Professor Müller himself informs us, arrived at the conclusion that
"originally the sun was conceived implicitly as a mere accident in the
heavenly scenery." Instead, therefore, of finding the sun and the dawn
in all the myths, they are always stumbling upon clouds and winds and
thunder. This differing of the doctors is, after all, no great matter.
Yet it warns us to be careful in adopting so exclusively, as is the
present fashion, either the solar or the meteorological hypothesis.
A second consideration which inclines to caution is the facility
of adapting the solar theory to every story, whether fabulous or
historical. In this sense the famous tract which proved that Napoleon
the Great only existed in the mythical imagination may be taken as a
_reductio ad absurdum_ of the method. A third ground for suspension of
judgment lies in the very elaborate manipulation which the etymologies
of such words as Eros, Erinnys, and the Charites have undergone before
they yielded up their solar content. But the multiplication of general
objections is not to the present purpose. It is enough to bear in
mind that, however important the sun was to the ancient Aryans, he
could not have been everything: he was, after all, but one among many
objects of interest; and what requires to be still more remembered, is
that the Greeks themselves in dealing with the tales of Achilles, or
of Kephalos and Prokris, did not know that they were handling solar
stories. It is, therefore, misleading to base hand-books which serve
as introductions to Greek literature and art upon speculation about
the solar groundwork of the myths. In the works of Homer and Hesiod,
of Æschylus and Sophocles, the myths were animated with spiritual,
intellectual, and moral life. To draw the lessons from them which those
poets drew, to demonstrate the grandeur of the imagination which could
deal with those primeval tragic tales, should be the object of the
educator; not to fill his pages with extremely doubtful matter about
sun and dawn _ad infinitum_. The true relation of the solar theory
to a Greek myth may be illustrated by the tale of Herakles, whom the
Greeks themselves may perhaps have recognized as a solar deity, since
Herodotus identified him with a Phoenician god.[11] We are therefore
justified in dealing with this hero as a personification of the sun.
Herakles is the child of Zeus. He strangles in his cradle the serpents
of the night. He loves Iole, or the violet-colored clouds of dawn. He
performs twelve labors, corresponding to the twelve months of the solar
year. He dies of a poisoned robe amid flames that may be taken for the
blood-red sunset clouds. The maiden Iole, now evening and not morning,
visits him again in death; and he ascends from his funeral pyre of
empurpled mountain peaks to heaven. Let all this be granted. So far
the solar theory carries us. But is this all? In other words, is this,
which the current hand-books tell us about Herakles, the pith of the
matter as it appeared to the Greeks? When we turn to the _Philosophy of
History_ of Hegel, who worked by another than the solar method, and was
more anxious to discover thoughts than etymologies, we read: "Hercules
is among the Hellenes that spiritual humanity which, by native energy,
attains Olympus through the twelve far-famed labors; but the foreign
idea that lies at the basis is the sun completing its revolution
through the twelve signs of the Zodiac." Here we touch the truth. The
solar foundation of the mythus is wholly valueless and unimportant--in
other words, is alien to its essence, when compared with the moral
import it acquired among the Greeks. It is the conception of life-long
service to duty, of strength combined with patience, of glory followed
at the cost of ease, of godhead achieved by manhood through arduous
endeavor--it is this that is really vital in the myth of Herakles. By
right of this the legend entered the sphere of religion and of art. In
this spirit the sophist enlarged upon it, when he told how Herakles in
his youth chose virtue with toil rather than pleasure, incorporating
thus the high morality of Hesiod with the mythical element. If myths
like these are in any sense diseased words about the sun, we must go
further and call them immortalized words, words that have attained
eternal significance by dying of the disease that afflicted them. The
same remarks apply to all the solar and lunar stories--to Achilles,
Endymion, Kephalos, and all the rest. As solar myths these tales had
died to the Greeks. As poems, highly capable of artistic treatment, in
sculpture, or in verse, pregnant with humanity, fit to form the subject
of dramatic presentation or ethical debate, they retained incalculable
value. The soul of the nation was in them. And that is their value for
us.
To deny the important part which the sun, like the earth or the sea,
played in early mythology would be absurd. To dispute the illumination
which comparative philology has thrown not only upon the problem of
the myths, but also upon the early unity of races until recently
divided in our thought, would be still more ridiculous. The point at
issue is simply this, that in Greek mythology there is far more than
linguistic and solar theories can explain, and that _more_ is precisely
the Greek genius. The philologer from his point of view is justified
in directing attention to the verbal husk of myths; but the student of
art and literature must keep steadily in view the kernel of thought and
feeling which the myths contain. It is only by so doing that the poetry
and art which sprang from them can be intelligently studied. Thus the
modern text-books of mythology are misleading, in so far as they draw
the learner's mind away from subjects of historical importance to bare
archæology.
As the result of analysis, the following propositions may be advanced.
In the earliest ages the races to whom we owe languages and literature
and art possessed a faculty which may be called the mythopoeic, now
almost wholly extinct, or rather superseded by the exercise of other
faculties which it contained in embryo. The operation of this faculty
was analogous to that of the poetic; that is to say, it was guided
by the imagination more than by the dry light of the understanding,
and its creative energy varied in proportion to the imaginative vigor
of the race which exercised it. The distinction here introduced is
all-important; for only thus can we explain the very different nature
of the Greek and Roman religions. The tendency to personification which
distinguishes mythology was due to the instinct of uncivilized humanity
to impute to external objects a consciousness similar to that by which
men are governed--in other words, to regard them as living agents with
wills and passions like our own. If fetichism be the rudimentary phase
of this instinct, polytheism indicates an advance by which the mind
has passed from the mere recognition of spiritual power in nature to
the investment of that power with personal and corporeal qualities.
But just as the imagination varies in degree and force in different
races, so will this power of carrying the personifying instinct onward
into art be found to vary. The Romans stopped short at allegories;
in other words, they did not carry their personification beyond the
first stage. The Greeks created divine personalities. Many myths
contain moral and philosophical ideas conveyed in parables, and some
of them have indubitable reference to real events and persons. But in
no case of a primitive and genuine mythus are we to expect deliberate
fiction or conscious symbolism, or, again, to seek for a discoverable
substratum of solid fact. Entering the sphere of mythology, facts
become etherealized into fancies, the actual value of which lies in the
expression of the national mind, so that mythical and spiritual are in
this respect synonymous. To use a metaphor, a myth is a Brocken-spectre
of the thought which produced it, and owes the features by which we
can distinguish it to the specific character of the people among
whom it sprang into existence. The analysis of language shows that
the whole Aryan family held a great number of their myths in common,
that many legends are stories told to account for words and phrases
which had lost their original significance, and that in these stories
the alternations of night and day and the procession of the seasons
played a very important part. Philology can, however, furnish no more
than the prolegomena to mythology. After hearing its report, the
student of Greek art and literature must take the Greek myths at a
Greek valuation--must consider what they were for the Athenians, for
example, and not what they had once been. Finally, it may be remembered
that to hope for a complete elucidation of a problem so far removed
from observation and experiment would be vain. The conditions of the
mythopoeic age cannot be reconstituted; and were they to reappear
through the destruction of civilizations, the reflective understanding
would not be present to examine and record them.
The difficulty which besets the problem of mythology, owing to the
remote antiquity of the myth-making age, is to some extent removed
by observing the operation of the mythopoeic faculty in the historic
period. Given social circumstances similar, if even only in a limited
degree, to those of the prehistoric age; given a defect of the critical
and reflective faculty, an absence of fixed records, and a susceptible
condition of the popular imagination, myths have always sprung up.
While it is not, therefore, possible to find exact analogies to the
conditions under which the Greek mythology originated, something may be
gained by directing attention to mediæval romance. The legends which
in Italy converted Virgil into a magician, the epic cycles of Charles
the Great and Arthur, the Lives of the Saints, the fable of Tannhäuser
and the Venusberg, the Spanish tale of Don Juan, and the German tale
of Faust are essentially mythical. What is instructive about mediæval
romance for the student of mythology in general is that here the
mythopoeic imagination has been either dealing with dim recollections
of past history, or else has been constructing for itself a story to
express a doctrine. After excluding the hypothesis of conscious working
to a prefixed end, we, therefore, find in these legends an illustration
of the sense in which the symbolical and rationalistic theories can
be said to be justified. In the case of Virgil, the poetry of Rome's
greatest singer never ceased to be studied during the darkest years
of the dark ages, and his name was familiar even to people who could
not read his verse. He was known to have been a pagan, and at the same
time possessed with what then seemed like superhuman knowledge. It
followed that he must have been a wizard, and have gained his power
and wisdom by compelling fiends. Having formed this notion of Virgil,
the popular fancy ascribed to him all the vast works of architecture
and engineering which remained at Rome and Naples, inventing the most
curious stories to explain why he had made them. When we turn to the
Carlovingian cycle, we discover that the great name of the Frankish
emperor, the memory of his wars, and the fame of his generals have
survived and been connected with the crusading enthusiasm which
pervaded Europe at a later period. Border-warfare between France and
Spain plays a prominent part in this epic, and gradually the figure
of Roland usurps upon the more historically important personages. To
"dig for a supposed basis of truth" in the Carlovingian cycle would
be vain; yet the view is forced upon us that without some historical
basis the cycle would not have sprung into existence, or have formed
a framework for the thought and feeling of one period of the Middle
Ages. The achievements of Arthur must be regarded as still more wholly
mythological. The more we inquire into his personality, the less we
find of real historical subsistence. A Celtic hero, how created it
is impossible to say, becomes the central figure of the most refined
romance which occupied the attention of German, French, and British
poets in the Middle Ages. Round the fictitious incidents of his
biography gathers all that chivalry, with its high sense of humanity
and its profound religious mysticism, conceived of purest and most
noble; while, at the same time, certain dark and disagreeable details,
especially the incestuous union from which Mordred sprang, remind
us of the savage and unmoralized origin of the fable. We therefore
find in the Arthurian cycle something very much analogous to the
Tale of Troy. The dim memory of a national struggle, an astronomical
myth, perchance, and many incidents of merely local interest have
been blended together and filled with the very spirit of the ages
and the races that delighted in the story as a story. This spiritual
content gives its value to the epic. Mediæval hagiography furnishes
abundant examples of the way in which facts transform themselves into
fables and mythological material is moulded into shape around some
well-remembered name, the religious consciousness externalizing itself
in acts which it attributes to its heroes. When we read the _Fioretti
di San Francesco_, we are well aware that the saint lived--his life is
one of the chief realities of the thirteenth century; but we perceive
that the signs and wonders wrought by him proceed from the imagination
of disciples ascribing to St. Francis what belongs partly to the
ideal of his own character and partly to that of monastic sanctity
in general. In the fable of Tannhäuser we meet with another kind of
reminiscence. There is less of fact and more of pure invention. The
pagan past, existent as a sort of dæmonic survival, is localized at
Hörsel. The interest, however, consists here wholly in the parabolic
meaning--whether Tannhäuser ever existed does not signify. His legend
is a poem of the Christian knight ensnared by sin, aroused to a sense
of guilt, condemned by the supreme tribunal of the Church, and pardoned
by the grace of God. In like manner, the lust for knowledge, for power,
and for pleasure, withheld by God and nature, finds expression in the
Faust legend; while inordinate carnal appetite is treated tragically
in _Don Juan_. These three legends deserve to be called myths rather
than poems in the stricter sense of the word, because they appear at
many points and cannot be traced up to three definite artistic sources,
while it is clear from their wide acceptance that they embodied
thoughts which were held to be of great importance. In them, therefore,
we find illustrated the theory which explains mythology by the
analogy of poetry. That the mediæval myths which have been mentioned
never attained the importance of Greek mythology is immediately
accounted for by the fact that they sprang up, as it were, under the
shadow of philosophy, religion, and history. They belonged to the
popular consciousness; and this popular consciousness had no need or
opportunity of converting its creatures into a body of beliefs, because
both science and orthodoxy existed. In the historic period mythology
must always occupy this subordinate position; and, perhaps, this fact
might be reflected back as a further argument, if such were needed,
against the theories that the Greek myths, while leading onward to the
Greek Pantheon and Greek art, originated as an undergrowth beneath the
decaying fabric of revealed truth or firmly apprehended philosophical
ideas. At all events, both the positive and negative circumstances
which we observe in them confirm the general view of mythology that has
been advanced.
The Homeric and Hesiodic poems were interposed between the reflective
consciousness of the Greeks in the historic age and the mass of myths
already existent in Hellas at the time of their composition, and thus
mythology passed into the more advanced stage of art. It did not,
however, cease on that account to retain some portion of its original
plasticity and fluidity. It is clear from Pindar and the fragments of
the minor lyric poets, from the works of the dramatists, from Plato,
and from other sources, that what Herodotus reports about Homer and
Hesiod having fixed the genealogies of the gods cannot be taken too
literally. Non-Homeric and non-Hesiodic versions of the same tales
were current in various parts of Greece. The same deities in different
places received different attributes and different forms of worship;
and the same legends were localized in widely separated spots. Each
division of the Hellenic family selected its own patron deities,
expressing in their cult and ritual the specific characteristics which
distinguished Dorian, Æolian, and Ionian Hellas. At the same time
certain headquarters of worship, like the shrine of Delphi and the
temple of Olympian Zeus, were strictly Panhellenic. In this way it is
clear that while Greek mythology acquired the consistence of a natural
religion, it retained its free poetic character in a great measure.
The nation never regarded their myths as a body of fixed dogma, to
alter which was impious. Great liberty, consequently, was secured for
artists; and it may be said with truth that the Greeks arrived through
sculpture at a consciousness of their gods. A new statue was, in a
certain sense, a new deity, although the whole aim of the sculptor
must, undoubtedly, have been to render visible the thoughts contained
in myths and purified by poetry, and so to pass onward step-wise to a
fuller and fuller realization of the spiritual type. It is this unity,
combined with difference, that makes the study of Greek sculpture
fascinating in itself, and fruitful for the understanding of the Greek
religion.
It lies beyond the scope of this chapter to consider how the Greek
intelligence was first employed upon the articulation of its mythology,
and next upon its criticism. The tradition of a Titanomachy, or contest
between nature-powers and deities of reason, marks the first step in
the former process. The cosmogonical forces personified in the Titans
gave place to the presiding deities of political life and organized
society, in whom the human reason recognized itself as superior to
mere nature. Olympus was reserved for gods of intellectual order, and
thus the Greeks worshipped what was best and noblest in themselves. At
the same time the cosmogonical divinities were not excluded from the
Greek Pantheon, and so there grew up a kind of hierarchy of greater
and lesser deities. Oceanus, Poseidon, Proteus, the Tritons and the
Nereids, Amphitrite and Thetis, for example, are all powers of the
sea. They are the sea conceived under different aspects, its divine
personality being multitudinously divided and delicately characterized
in each case to accord with the changes in the element. The same kind
of articulation is observable in the worship of deities under several
attributes. Aphrodite Ourania and Aphrodite Pandemos are one as well
as two. Eros and Himeros and Pothos are not so much three separate
loves, as love regarded from three different points of view. Here
the hierarchy is psychological, and represents an advance made in
reflection upon moral qualities; whereas in the former case it was
based on the observation of external nature. To this inquiry, again,
belongs the question of imported myths and foreign cults. The worship
of Corinthian Aphrodite, for example, was originally Asiatic. Yet,
on entering Greek thought, Mylitta ceased to be Oriental and assumed
Hellenic form and character. Sensuality was recognized as pertaining
to the goddess whose domain included love and beauty and the natural
desires.
More than the vaguest outlines of such subjects of interest cannot
be indicated here. It is enough to have pointed out that as Greek
mythology was eminently imaginative, fertile in fancy and prolific in
dramatic incident, so it found its full development in poetry and art.
Only through art can it be rightly comprehended; and the religion for
which it supplied the groundwork was itself a kind of art. It is just
this artistic quality which distinguished the Greeks from the Romans.
As Mommsen well observes, "there was no formation of legend in the
strict sense in Italy." The Italian gods were in their origin more
matter-of-fact than Greek gods. They contained from the first a prosaic
element which they never threw aside; nor did they give occasion to the
growth of fable with its varied fabric of human action and passion.
Thus the legal and political genius of the Latin race worshipped its
own qualities in these allegorical beings.
The process hitherto described has been the passage of mythology
into religion and the expression of religion by art. When the Greek
intelligence became reflective in the first dawn of philosophy, it
recognized that the notion of divinity, #to theion#, was independent
and in some sense separable from the persons of the Pantheon in
whom it inhered. This recognition led to a criticism of the myths
by the standard of ideal godhead. Just as the Olympic deities, as
representative of pure intellect or spirit, had superseded the bare
nature-forces, so now the philosophers sought to distil a refined
conception of God from the myths in general. Their polemic was directed
against Homer, in whom, like Herodotus, they recognized the founder
of the current mythological theology. Both Pythagoras and Heraclitus
are reported to have said that Homer ought to be publicly thrust from
the assembly and scourged. Xenophanes plainly asserted that the Greek
anthropomorphism was no better than a worship of humanity with all its
vices, illustrating his critique by adding that just in the same way
might lions adore lions and horses horses. His own conception of the
deity was monotheistic, to this extent, at least, that he abstracted
from the universe a notion of divine power and wisdom, and ascribed to
it the only reality. Plato, in the _Republic_, unified these points of
view, severely criticising Homer for the immorality of his fictions,
and attributing to his own demiurgic deity those qualities of goodness,
truth, and beauty which are the highest ideals of the human spirit.
In connection with this polemic against poetical theology, we have to
notice the attempts of physical philosophers to explain the universe
by natural causes, and the great saying of Anaxagoras that reason
rules the world. Thus the speculative understanding, following various
lines of thought and adopting diverse theories, tended to react upon
mythology and to corrode the ancient fabric of Greek polytheism. In
the course of this disintegrating process a new and higher religion
was developed, which Plato expressed by saying that we ought "to
become like God, as far as this is possible; and to become like him
is to become holy and just and wise." At the same time those who felt
the force of the critique, but could not place themselves at the new
scientific point of view, remained sceptical; and against this kind of
scepticism, which implied personal lawlessness, Aristophanes directed
his satire. Whatever may have been the attitude of philosophers in
their schools, mythology meanwhile retained its hold upon the popular
mind. It was bound up with the political traditions, the gentile
customs, the ritual, and the arts of the whole race. To displace it by
a reasoned system of theology, enforced by nothing stronger than the
theories of the sages, was impossible. The extent to which philosophy
permanently affected the creed of thinking and religious men in Greece
by substituting theism for the fabulous theology of the poets has been
well expressed in Plutarch's _Life of Pericles_. "So dispassionate a
temper," he observes, "a life so pure and unblemished in authority,
might well be called Olympian, in accordance with our conceptions of
the divine beings to whom, as the natural authors of all good and of
nothing evil, we ascribe the rule and government of the world--not as
the poets represent, who, while confounding us with their ignorant
fancies, are themselves confuted by their own poems and fictions, and
call the place, indeed, where they say the gods make their abode, 'a
secure and quiet seat, untroubled with winds or clouds,' and 'equally
through all time illumined with a soft serenity and a pure light,'
as though such were a home most agreeable for a blessed and immortal
nature; and yet, in the meanwhile, affirm that the gods themselves
are full of trouble and enmity and anger, and other passions which no
way become or belong to even men that have any understanding." It is
clear that when the religious consciousness had reached this point of
purified clairvoyance the race was ready for a more spiritual theology,
which philosophers like Marcus Aurelius found in natural religion,
while the common folk accepted Christianity.
After flowing side by side for many centuries, the currents of
mythological belief and of philosophical speculation reunited at
Alexandria, where a final attempt was made to animate the Homeric
Pantheon with the spirit of metaphysical mysticism. Homer became a
priest as well as poet, and the _Iliad_ was made to furnish allegories
for an age grown old in intellectual subtlety. This was the last
period of mythology. While Hypatia was lecturing on Homer, the
Christians were converting the world. To keep the gods of Greece alive
was no longer possible. Regarded from the beginning as persons with a
body corresponding to their spiritual substance, they had in them the
certainty of dissolution. Though removed ideally beyond the sphere of
human chance and change, they remained men and women with passions like
our own. Pure spirit had not been realized in them; and blind fate had
from the first been held to be supreme above them. Unlike the incarnate
God of Christianity, they had not passed forth from the spiritual world
to abide here for a season and return to it again. Therefore they
perished. During the domination of mediæval Christianity the utmost
they could do was to haunt the memory like wraiths and phantoms, to
linger in neglected and unholy places like malignant powers of evil.
But when the force of ascetic Christianity declined, and the spirit
of humane culture re-awoke in Europe, these old gods reasserted their
ascendency--no longer as divinities indeed, but as poems forming an
essential element of the imagination. The painters and sculptors of
Italy gave once more in breathing marble and fair color form to those
immortal thoughts. The poets sang the old songs of Hellas in new
language to new measures. Even the Churchmen invoked God from Roman
pulpits as _Summus Jupiter_, and dignified Madonna with the attributes
of Artemis and Pallas.
Such is the marvellous vitality of this mythology. Such is its
indissoluble connection with the art and culture which sprang from it,
of which it was the first essential phase, and to which we owe so much.
Long after it has died as religion, it lives on as poetry, retaining
its original quality, though the theology contained in it has been
forever superseded or absorbed into more spiritual creeds.
NOTE.--I wish to qualify what I have said upon pp. 67-80
by stating that my critique of the linguistic and solar
theories is not, as I hope, directed in any impertinent spirit
against the illustrious teacher to whom, in common with most
Englishmen, I owe nearly all my knowledge of comparative
mythology, but rather against notions which have gained
currency through a too exclusive attention to the origin of
Greek mythology. I want to remind students of Greek literature
that, after all they may have learned from Sanscrit, they are
still upon the threshold of mythology as it was determined by
the genius of the Greek race. There is a danger of diverting
the mind from questions of thoughts to questions of words, and
leading people to fancy that etymological solutions are final.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] For this reason the analogy of existing barbarous races will not
help us much, inasmuch as they are not Greeks nor destined to be
Greeks. This consideration ought to weigh with those who, struck by
the depth and beauty of some Greek myths, theorize a corruption of
primitive revelation or pure theology to explain them. They ought to
remember that they are dealing with the myths of Greeks--our masters in
philosophy and poetry and art.
[9] The original is quoted in the Notes to Grote, vol. i. p. 474.
[10] The dissimilarity between Greek and Roman religion has often been
observed, and will be touched upon below. Supposing it to be proved
that the Romans can produce one relic of an Aryan myth in Romulus,
we find that their most native deities--Saturnus, Ops, Bellona,
Janus, Terminus, Concordia, Fides, Bonus Eventus, and so forth--are
abstractions which have nothing in common with Greek or other Aryan
legends. They are the characteristic product of the Roman mind, and
indicate its habit of thought. In like manner it is only by a crasis
amounting to confusion that Mercurius can be identified with Hermes, or
Hercules with Herakles.
[11] ii. 44.