THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE.
In the foregoing pages we have reached the primordial fact of our
psychical and physical nature, in which, as it appears to us, both myth
and science have their origin. After first considering the animal
kingdom as a whole, we have seen that the interaction between external
phenomena and the consciousness of an organism results in the
spontaneous vivification of the phenomenon in question, so that the
origin of the mythical representation of nature is found in the innate
faculty of animal perception.
Nor could it be otherwise. The internal activity and intrinsic sense of
conscious and deliberate life which inspires animals and men, while the
latter are still ignorant of the rational order of things, is
necessarily reflected both in the external objects of perception and in
the internal emotions, as if they were operating causes independent of
the will of the percipient. It is impossible for an animal, which is
unable by voluntary observation to make, any analytic distinction
between the subject and the object, and their respective effects, to
consider such phenomena as mechanical entities, subject to necessary and
eternal laws. The animal therefore accepts the idea suggested by his
spontaneous and subjective nature, that these phenomena are alive.
Grass, fruits, plants, water, the movement of material bodies, ordinary
and extraordinary meteors, all are implicitly apprehended by him as
subjects endowed with will and purpose after the manner of mankind. Nor
can the living subjectivity of the phenomenon ever be gauged by the
animal in whom the deliberate power of reflection is wanting. His life
is consequently passed in a world of living subjects, not of phenomena
and laws which mechanically act together; it is, so to speak, a
permanent _metaphor_.
Man himself, so far as his animal nature is concerned, acts in the same
way, and although he subsequently attains to the exercise of reasoning
powers in virtue of the psychical reduplication of himself, the
primitive faculty persists, and hence comes the mythical creation of a
peculiar world of conceptions which give rise to all superstitions,
mythologies, and religions. This is also the process of science itself,
as far as the classifying method and intrinsic logical form are
concerned. The historical source of the two great streams of the
intellect, the mythical and the scientific, is found in the primitive
act of _entifying_ the phenomenon presented to the senses.
We must briefly describe the evolution of these two mythical and
scientific faculties of the mind; we must investigate the mode and cause
of their divergence from a common source, through what transformations
they pass, in order to see in what way the one is gradually dried up,
while the other increases in volume and force. The reader must forgive
us if we use some repetition in developing a subject on which we have
already touched, since without such repetition the present historical
explanation would be obscure.
The first stage of knowledge consists in the observation of the things
which surround us, and this first stage, which is necessary also in
science, is the common property of animals. Their observation of
themselves and of external things is psychologically and physiologically
the same as that of man, and in both cases there is a subjective
animation of the phenomena themselves. The primitive source of science
in its observation of phenomena was the same as that of myth and of the
special fetish; without such observation it would have had no existence.
In immediate succession to this primitive fact, which is common to the
whole animal kingdom, there arose--if we consider the general process
without the limitations of circumstances, places, time, and a thousand
accidents--two kinds of faculties which were identical in form, although
they had different effects, and produced opposite results. For in the
case of mythical entification the tendency to impersonation was always
increasing and becoming more distinctly zoomorphic and anthropomorphic,
and in this form it was crystallized or mummified, while science on the
other hand was always enlarging its sphere and dissipating the first
mythical form of its conception, until nothing was left but a purely
rational idea.
When this evolution takes place in peoples and races which are incapable
of improvement, or have a limited capacity for advanced civilization,
the faculty of myth remains in the ascendant; and as past and present
history shows, mythical stagnation and intellectual barrenness may
follow, until intellectual development is arrested and even destroyed.
If on the other hand the evolution takes place in peoples and races
capable of indefinite civilization, myth gradually disappears and
science shines forth victoriously.
Even in historical and civilized races the two cycles go on together,
since while robust intellects throw off as they advance the mythical
shell in which they were first inclosed, the ignorant masses continue
their devotions to fetishes and myths, which they can infuse even into
the grandest religious teaching. They perhaps might also perish,
crystallized in their miserable superstitions, unless, in virtue of the
race to which they belong, the nobler minds were gradually to succeed in
illuminating and raising them into a purer atmosphere. In our Aryan
race, and in our own country we have all seen the ideas of Christianity
transformed into the earlier fetishes and pagan myths; the saints are
merely substituted for the gods and demi-gods, for the deities of
groves, of the sea and of war, as they are found in ancient mythology.
The legends of the saints and of Christ himself are grafted on similar
legends of the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, and Paradise has
assumed the appearance and form of Olympus. The paintings still extant
in the catacombs of Rome, which mark the transformation of the old into
the new religion, speak plainly enough by their symbols and figures.
Myth is logically identical with the scientific process in its intrinsic
character; starting from a vague subjectivity which gradually assumes a
human shape, the first intellectual vitality is lost, unless it is
revived by a higher impulse. Science, on the other hand, which begins in
myth, gradually divests this subjectivity of its anthropomorphic
character, until pure reason is attained, and with this the power of
indefinite progress.
The theory which has hitherto been generally accepted by mythologists,
even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical
evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were
combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and
hence he rose by an analogous process to a more or less vague conception
of monotheism.
This theory, true as to the principal forms which myth successively
assumes, is not accurate with respect to the stages of development, and
it is also erroneous in some particulars of the actual history of the
various mythologies of different peoples.
In the early chapters of this work we have briefly touched on such a
development, and the reader must pardon us for returning to the subject,
now that we have to give an historical account of the process of
evolution. In fact, the fetish, in the general sense of the term, is not
the first form of myth which is revealed in the dawn of human life. In
order to estimate its positive value, it is necessary to analyze such a
conception with greater accuracy, and then to verify it historically
with the help of the science of ethnology.
The first manifestations of mythical ideas must be considered in man as
an animal; that is, as the result of his spontaneous intercourse with
the world, independently of the psychical faculty peculiar to himself,
after he had acquired by subsequent evolution of mind and body the
faculty and habit of reflection. This first stage does not involve any
definite fetish, that is, an immediate belief in a special object which
exerts its influence on the human soul, even when it is remote and
unseen: such a fetish is a secondary stage in human development. The
first mythical representations of animals, and of man, so far as his
animal nature is concerned, are not confined to fixed objects, which
can be retained in the mind as operative under all circumstances; they
are indefinite, and diffused through all the phenomena which are
successively perceived and vivified. The unseen wind which rises and
falls, the moving cloud, the flash of lightning and roar of thunder, the
dawn, the rushing torrent--when any of these things are perceived by
animals and primitive men, they are endowed with subjective life and are
supposed to act with deliberate purpose; and this is the first form of
myth. But when they are not present (I here speak of the animal nature
of man) they do not remain in the mind as persistent beings to which the
tribute of worship inspired by hope or fear must be paid; these and
other phenomena only inspire such sentiments when they are actually
present.
It is no vain distinction which I mate between the first vague and
intermittent form of myth suggested by phenomena actually present, and
that of the first stage of fetish: this distinction marks the difference
between the mythical representation of animals and the classifying and
reflective process peculiar to man.
Comte was the first to remark, quite incidentally, that animals might
sometimes attain to the idea of a fetish; Darwin gave the instance of a
dog which was scared by the movement of an open umbrella in a meadow,
although he remained quiet when it was unshaken by the wind; and Herbert
Spencer, partly accepting these ideas, adduces two somewhat similar
instances of the behaviour of dogs. It seems to us that these great men
are mistaken on the one hand in assuming that the first essential origin
of myth is not to be found in the animal kingdom, and on the other in
supposing that these facts have only an _accidental_ value, and that
animals only occasionally acquire a vague consciousness of the fetish.
Those readers who have gone with us so far will perceive that these were
not mere accidents of rare occurrence in animal life, but that they are
the necessary effect of mythical representation in its first stage,
although they cannot in any way be supposed to be produced by fetishism,
properly so called. For if the dog were frightened and agitated by the
movement of the umbrella, or ran away, as Herbert Spencer tells us, from
the stick which had hurt him while he was playing with it, it was
because an unusual movement or pain produced by an object to which habit
had rendered him indifferent, aroused in the animal the congenital sense
of the intentional subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the
first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent form of fetishism.
I must therefore repeat that the first form of myth which spontaneously
arises in man as an animal, is the vague but intentional subjectivity of
the phenomena presented to his senses. This subjectivity is sometimes
quiescent and implicit, and sometimes active, in which case it may
arouse the fear of evil, or the hope of physical pleasures.
As in man the reflex power slowly and gradually grows--although at first
in an exclusively empirical form--so he slowly and gradually accepts the
first form of fetishism, which consists in the permanent and fixed
individuation of a phenomenon or object of nature, as a power which he
reflectively believes to be the artificer of good or evil.
In this stage it is no longer the phenomenon actually present which
arouses the apprehension of an intentional subjectivity, while its image
and efficacy disappear with the sensible object; the phenomenon, or the
inanimate or animate form, is reflectively retained by the memory, in
which it appears as a malignant or benignant power. In a word, the first
stage of fetishism, which is the second form of the evolution of myth,
is the universal and primitive sense of myth in nature, which man alone
is capable of applying permanently to some given phenomenon, such as
wind, rain, and the like, or lakes, volcanoes, and rocks, and these
remain fixed in the mind as powers of good or evil. In the earlier stage
of myth the scene is constantly changing, while in the latter, certain
objects or phenomena remain fixed in the memory, exciting the same
emotions whether they are present or absent, and to this consciousness
we may trace the dawn of worship.
Ethnography affords plain proofs of the fetishism which preceded the
civilization of many peoples, and among those which still remain in the
stage of fetishism we can trace the primitive form of a vague
impersonation of natural objects and phenomena.[28]
As we have already seen, every animal and unfamiliar object is in this
first stage of fetishism regarded as the external covering of a
spiritual power which has assumed what is believed to be the primordial
form of the fetish; this fetish takes the place of the natural
phenomenon, and is believed to be capable of exercising a direct
subjectivity which is vague but perfectly real.
We pass from this first form of fetish to the second, namely to the
veneration of objects, animals, plants, and the like, in which an
extrinsic power is supposed to be incarnated. Many ages elapsed before
man attained to this second stage of fetishism, since it was necessarily
preceded by a further and reflex elaboration of myth, namely, the
genesis of a belief in spirits.
Herbert Spencer and Tylor are among the writers who have given a
masterly description of this phase of the human intellect, and history
and ethnography have confirmed the accuracy of their researches and
conclusions. The shadow cast by a man's own body, the reflection of
images in the water, natural echoes, the reappearance of images of the
departed in dreams, the general instinct which leads man to vivify all
he sees, produced what may be called the reduplication of man in
himself, and the savage's primitive theory of the human soul. Originally
this soul was multiplied into all these natural phenomena, but it was
afterwards distributed by the mythical faculty into three, four, five,
or more powers, personifying the spirits. This belief in a multiplicity
of souls in man is not only still extant among more or less rude peoples
of the present day in Asia, Europe, Africa, America, and Polynesia, but
it is also the foundation of the belief of more civilized nations on the
subject, including our own Aryan race. Birch and others observe that the
Egyptians ascribed four spirits to man--Ba, Akba, Ka, and Khaba. The
Romans give three:
"Bis duo sunt homines, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra."
The same belief is found among nearly all savages. The Fijians
distinguish between the spirit which is buried with the dead man and
that more ethereal spirit which is reflected in the water and lingers
near the place where he died. The Malagasy believe in three souls, the
Algonquin in two, the Dakotan in three, the native of Orissa in four.
Since a fetish, strictly so called, is the incarnation of a power in
some given object, it must be preceded by this rude belief in spirits
and shades. Such a complex elaboration takes time, since it involves a
previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to
the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the
heavens and all parts of the world. Hence arose the belief in
transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation,
which was ultimately constituted by fetishism. The comparative study of
languages shows that including the Aryan and Semitic races, the belief
in spirits was developed in all peoples, and in all of them we also find
a belief in the transmigration of souls.
The transmigration of the human soul was first believed to take place in
the body of a new-born child, since at the moment of death the soul of
the dying person entered into the foetus. The Algonquins buried the
corpses of their children by the wayside, so that their souls might
easily enter into the bodies of the pregnant women who passed that way.
Some of the North American tribes believed that the mother saw in a
dream the dead relation who was to imprint his likeness on her unborn
child. At Calabar, when the mother who has lost a child gives birth to
another, she believes that the dead child is restored to her. The
natives of New Guinea believe that a son who greatly resembles his dead
father has inherited his soul. Among the Yorubas the new-born child is
greeted with the words: "Thou hast returned at last!" The same ideas
prevail among the Lapps and Tartars, as well as among the negroes of the
West Coast of Africa. Among the aborigines of Australia the belief is
widely diffused that those who die as black return as white men.
Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise distinction between
man and brutes, so that, as Tylor observes, they readily accept the
belief of the transmigration of the human soul into an animal, and then
into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in the incarnation of
the true fetish. Among some of the North American tribes the spirits of
the dead are supposed to pass into bears. An Eskimo widow refused to eat
seal's flesh because she supposed that her husband's soul had migrated
into that animal. Others have imagined that the souls of the dead passed
into birds, beetles, and other insects, according to their social rank
when still alive. Some African tribes believe that the dead migrate into
certain species of apes.
By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently show more fully, the
transition was easy to the incarnation of a spirit, whether that of a
man or of some other being, into any object whatever, which was thereby
invested with beneficent or malignant power. It is easy to show that in
this second stage of fetishism, which some have believed to be the
primitive form of myth, there would be no further progress in the
mythical elaboration of spirits, their mode of life, their influence and
possible transmigrations. This elaboration is indeed a product of the
mythical faculty, but in a rational order; it is a logical process,
mythical in substance, but purely reflective in form. For which reason
it was impossible for animals to attain to this stage.
Some peoples remained in this phase of belief, while others advanced to
the ulterior and polytheistic form. This may also be divided into two
classes; those who classify and ultimately reduce fetishes into a more
general conception, and those whose conception takes an anthropomorphic
form. Let us examine the genesis of both classes.
When the popular belief in spirits had free development, the number of
spirits and powers was countless, as many examples show. To give a
single instance--the Australians hold that there is an innumerable
multitude of spirits; the heavens, the earth, every nook, grove, bush,
spring, crag, and stone are peopled with them. In the same way, some
American tribes suppose the visible and invisible world to be filled
with good and evil spirits; so do the Khonds, the Negroes of New Guinea,
and, as Castren tells us, the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe.
Consequently, fetishes, which are the incarnation of these spirits in
some object, animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, are
innumerable, since primitive man and modern savages have created such
fetishes, either at their own pleasure or with the aid of their priests,
magicians, and sorcerers.
Man's co-ordinating faculty, in those races which are capable of
progressive evolution, does not stop short at this inorganic
disintegration of things; he begins a process of classification and, at
the same time, of reduction, by which the numerous fetishes are, by
their natural points of likeness and unlikeness in character and form,
reduced to types and classes, which, as we have already shown, comprise
in themselves the qualities of all the particular objects of the same
species which are diffused throughout nature.
By this spontaneous process of human thought, due to the innate power of
reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a
tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise
simplification. Let us try to trace in this historic fact the
classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism
succeeds to irregular and anarchical fetishism.
In the Samoan islands, a local god is wont to appear in the form of an
owl, and the accidental discovery of a dead owl would be deplored, and
its body would be buried with solemn rites. The death of this particular
bird does not, however, imply the death of the god himself, since the
people believe him to be incarnated in the whole species. In this fact
we see that a special fetish is developed into a specific form; thus a
permanent type is evolved from special appearances.
Acosta has handed down to us another belief of the comparatively
civilized Peruvians, which recalls the primitive genesis of their
mythical ideas. He says that the shepherds used to adore various stars,
to which they assigned the names of animals; stars which protected men
against the respective animals after whom they were called. They held
the general belief that all animals whatever had a representative in
heaven, which watched over their reproduction, and of which they were,
so to speak, the essence. This affords another example of the more
general extension and classification, and, at the same time, of the
reduction of the original multitude of fetishes.
Some of the North American Indians asserted that every species of animal
had an elder brother, who was the origin of all the individuals of the
species. They said, for example, that the beaver, which was the elder
brother of this species of rodents, was as large as one of their cabins.
Others supposed that all kinds of animals had their type in the world of
souls, a _manitu_, which kept guard over them. Ralston, in his "Songs of
the Russian People," tells us that Buyan, the island paradise of Russian
mythology, contains a serpent older than all others, a larger raven, a
finer queen bee, and so of all other animals. Morgan, in his work upon
the Iroquois, observes that they believe in a spirit or god of every
species of trees and plants.
From these beliefs and facts, drawn from different peoples and different
parts of the world, we can understand how a vague and inorganic
fetishism gradually became classified into types which constitute the
first phase of polytheism. The logical effort which transformed the
manifold beliefs into types goes on, but from their vague and indefinite
nature, not only the power, but also the extrinsic form of man is easily
infused into them, so that they are invested with human faculties and
sensations, and also with the anthropomorphic form and countenance of
which we have spoken elsewhere. In fact, when the special fetishes which
are naturally alike are united in a single type, the object, animal, or
phenomenon which corresponds to it in this early stage of polytheism is
no longer perceived, but a _numen_ is evolved from this type, which has
not only human power, but a human form; and hence follow the specific
idols of serpents, birds, and all natural phenomena, in which the
primitive fetish has been incarnated.[29]
In this second stage of polytheism, anthropomorphism appears in an
external form, and the specific type is transformed into the idol which
represents and dominates over it, inspiring the commission of beneficent
or hurtful acts. Of this it is unnecessary to adduce examples, since all
the mythologies which have reached this polytheistic stage are
anthropomorphic, and in these the specific type, which serves as the
first step to polytheism, subsequently becomes a completely human idol.
After this anthropomorphic classification has been reached by logical
elaboration, a new field is opened for the reduction of special types
into those which are more general, as had been previously the case in
the early stages of myth. By continually concentrating, and at the same
time by enlarging the value of the conception, it is united in a single
form which constitutes the dawn and genesis of monotheism. This
methodical process, which is characteristic of human thought, may be
traced in all peoples which have really attained to the monotheistic
idea, in the Aryan and Semitic races, in China, Japan, and Egypt, in
Peru and Mexico; the belief may also be obscurely traced in an inchoate
form among savage and inferior tribes, as, for example, among the
Indians of Central and North America, and among some of the inhabitants
of Africa and barbarous Asia.
While this conception took a more or less definite form among the more
advanced peoples, the earlier and debased myths maintained their ground,
and still continue to do so. Of this we have examples in Europe itself,
and among its more civilized peoples which have been transplanted
elsewhere; for while in one direction a capacity for classification
leads to a purer monotheistic conception, and even to rational science,
the great majority of the common people, and even of those of higher
culture, still hold many ideas which are polytheistic and
anthropomorphic, and some which really belong to the debased stage of
fetishism and vulgar superstition.
Other causes contribute to produce the natural and intrinsic concurrence
of the several stages of myth which are found existing together in the
life of a people. Such, for example, is the conquest effected by a more
civilized nation over another race, inferior by nature or retarded by
other circumstances. The mythical ideas of the conquered people remain,
and are even diffused through the lower classes of the conquering race;
or they are ingrafted by a synthetic and assimilating process, so as to
modify other mythical and religious beliefs. This compound of various
stages and various beliefs also occurs through the moral and
intellectual diffusion of dogma, without the acquisition of really new
matter. Manifest proofs of these various stages of myth, co-existent
together, may be traced in the development of the Vedic ideas among the
earlier aboriginal nations, and conversely; as in the case of the Aztecs
and Incas in Mexico and Peru, whose earlier beliefs were mixed with
those of their conquerors. The same thing may be observed in the
development of Judaism during the Babylonish captivity, in the biblical
and messianic doctrines which were grafted on pagan beliefs, and in the
teaching of Islam, as it was adopted in the East and among the black
races of Africa.
We must make allowance for these extrinsic accidents if we are to
describe correctly the natural course and logical evolution of myth.
Even with respect to the special evolution of myth in a separate people,
unmixed with others, while it is normal in what may be termed its
general form and categorical phases, yet like all natural objects and
phenomena, and much more in all which concerns the human mind, there are
variations in its forms, and it attains its ends by many ways.
If we take a wider view of the general and reciprocal influences of
ethnic myths; as respects the historic results of mythologies, we shall
see that if every race evolved its sphere of myth in accordance with the
canons laid down by us, their effect upon each other would work together
for a common result more quickly than when each is taken apart. The
reader must allow me to make my meaning clear by the following passage
from my work on the "Dottrina razionale del Progresso," which I
published in 1863, in the "Politecnico," Milan, on the fusion of the
monotheistic conception of the Semitic race with the beliefs of Greece
and Rome at the dawn of Christianity:--
"Christianity was originally based on the absolute idea of the divine
first Principle, to which one portion of the Semitic race had attained
by intellectual evolution, and by the acumen of the great men who
brought this idea to perfection. Either because of their clearer
consciousness, or from their environment and the physical circumstances
of the race, the Semitic people passed from the primitive ideas of
mythology to the conception of the absolute and infinite Being, while
other races still adhered to altogether fanciful and anthropomorphic
ideas of this Being. Our race had an Olympus, like the others, and
throughout its history this Olympus was always assuming new forms,
although a human conception was the basis of its religious ideas. The
Chinese and Semitic races were the first to rise to the conception of an
absolute first principle, but in both cases the conception was more or
less unfruitful.
"The gradual transition from consciousness to conception, from the fact
to the idea, from the idol to the law, from the symbol to the thought,
from the finite to the infinite, is the characteristic and essential
course taken by the human mind. But, practically, this process is more
gradual or more rapid, is retarded or advanced, attains its aim or stops
short in its first rudiments, according to the race in which it occurs.
So it was that, as we have just said, the Chinese and Semitic races were
the first to reach the final goal of this psychological progress; other
peoples, such as the Aryans and their offshoots, savages and partially
civilized races, remained in the early stages of this dialectic scale.
Undoubtedly, in our own race, the early religious conceptions which
constituted a simple worship of nature in various forms were constantly
becoming of purer character, and they were not only exalted in their
spiritual quality, but in the Greek and Roman religions they attained to
something like scientific precision. Yet even in these higher
aspirations the race did not surrender its mythical faculty, to which it
was impelled by its physical and psychological constitution, and the
pure conception was unconsciously overshadowed by symbolic ideas. We can
plainly see how far this symbolism, peculiar to the race, obscured the
minds of Plato and Aristotle, and of almost all the subsequent
philosophers. In the Semitic and Chinese races this inner symbolism of
the mind, with reference to the interpretation of nature, was less
tenacious, intense, and productive, and they soon freed themselves from
their mental bonds in order to rise to the conception of the absolute
Being, distinct from the world. When this idea had been grasped by rude
and popular intuition, men of the highest intellectual power perfected
the still confused conception, and founded upon it science, civil and
political institutions, and national customs.
"The idea of Christianity arose in the midst of the Semitic people
through him whose name it bears, and who perfected the religious idea
of his nation. This idea, in its Semitic simplicity, consisted in a
belief in the existence of one, eternal, infinite God, the immediate
creator of all things; it included the tradition of man's loss of his
original felicity, and the promise of a restoration of all peoples, and
of the Israelites in particular, to their former condition of earthly
happiness. Christ appeared, and while he upheld the Mosaic law and its
original idea, he declared himself to be the promised deliverer, sent of
God; the Son of God, which among the Semitic people was the term applied
to their prophets. His moral teaching gave a more perfect form to the
old law, and by his example he afforded a model of human virtue worthy
of all veneration; the germs of a marvellous civilization were to be
found in his moral and partially new teaching. The same doctrine had
been, to some extent, inculcated by the Jewish teachers, and the schools
of Hillel and Gamaliel were certainly not morally inferior to his own,
as we learn from the tradition of the Talmud, and from some passages in
the Acts of the Apostles. The origin, development, and teaching of
primitive Christianity were therefore essentially Semitic, since it had
its origin in a people of that race, and in a man of that people. Yet
the Semitic race did not become Christian; and, after so many ages have
elapsed, it still rejects Christianity. It was the Aryan race, to which
we Europeans belong, which adopted this teaching and became essentially
Christian, although this race is psychologically the most idolatrous of
the world, as far as the aesthetic idol--not the common fetish--is
concerned. Let us inquire into the cause of this remarkable fact.
"As soon as the teaching of Christ was adopted by those familiar with
Aryan civilization and opinions, an idea repugnant to Semitic
conceptions, and still unintelligible to that race, was evolved from
it--I mean the idea that the human Christ, the Son of God, was God
himself. The Semite holds that God is so far exalted above all creation,
so great and eternal in comparison with the littleness of the world and
of man, that God incarnate is not merely a blasphemy but an unmeaning
and absurd phrase. Such a dogma was therefore energetically repudiated,
and the Semitic race submitted to persecution and dispersal rather than
accept it. This is the real reason why Christianity has not been
received and will never be received by the Semitic race. When Mahomet
reorganized and perfected the Arab creed, he preserved intact the
Semitic principle of the absolute and incommunicable nature of God: the
Semitic religion has ever held that there is one God, and his prophet.
"On the other hand, Christianity was rapidly diffused among the Greek
and Latin peoples, and in all parts of Europe inhabited by our race:
even savages and barbarians accepted more or less frankly a doctrine
rejected by the Semites in whom it had its origin. Many and various
causes have been assigned for this rapid diffusion of the new doctrine,
and the old Greek and Latin fathers ascribed it to the fact that men's
minds had been naturally and providentially prepared for it. It was
attributed by others to the miseries and sufferings of the slave
population, and of the poor, who found a sweet illusion and comfort in
the Christian hope of a world beyond the grave. Some, again, suggest the
omnipotent will of a tyrant, or the extreme ignorance of the common and
barbarous people. Although all these causes had a partial effect, they
were secondary and accidental. The true and unique cause lay deeper, in
the intellectual constitution of the race to which Christianity was
preached; just as physiological characteristics are reproduced in the
species until they become permanent, so do intellectual inclinations
become engrained in the nature.
"We have said that our race is aesthetically more mythological than all
others. If we consider the religious teaching of various Aryan peoples,
from the most primitive Vedic idolatry to the successive religions of
Brahma and Zend, of the Celts, Greeks, Latins, Germans, and Slavs, we
shall see how widely they differ from the religious conceptions and
ideas of other races. The vein of fanciful creations is inexhaustible,
and there is a wealth of symbolic combinations and a profusion of
celestial and semi-celestial dramas. The intrinsic habit of forming
mythical representations of nature is due to a more vivid sense of her
power, to a rapid succession of images, and to a constant projection of
the observer's own personality into phenomena. This peculiar
characteristic of our race is never wholly overcome, and to it is added
a proud self-consciousness, an energy of thought and action, a constant
aspiration after grand achievements, and a haughty contempt for all
other nations.
"The very name of Aryan, transmitted in a modified form to all
successive generations, denotes dominion and valour; the Brahmanic
cosmogony, and the epithet of apes, given to all other races in the epic
of Valmiki, bear witness to the same fact; it is shown in the slavery
imposed on conquered peoples, in the hatred of foreigners felt by all
the Hellenic tribes; in the omnipotence of Rome, the haughtiness of the
Germanic orders; in the feudal system, in the Crusades; and finally, in
the modern sense of our superiority to all other existing races. The
quickness of perception, and the facile projection of human personality
into natural objects, led to the manifold creations of Olympus, and this
was an aesthetic obstacle to any nearer approach to the pure and absolute
conception of God, while the innate pride of race was a hindrance to our
humiliation in the dust before God. The Semites declared that man was
created in the image of God, and we created God in our own image; while
conscious of the power of the _numina_ we confronted them boldly, and
were ready to resist them. The Indian legends, and those of the
Hellenes, the Scandinavians, and the whole Aryan race, are full of
conflicts between gods and men. The demi-gods must be remembered,
showing that the Aryans believed themselves to be sufficiently noble and
great for the gods to love them, and to intermarry with them. Thus the
Aryan made himself into a God, and often took a glorious place in
Olympus, while he declared that God was made man.
"We might imagine that the doctrine of God incarnate would be as
repugnant to the ideas, feelings, and intellect of the Aryan as it was
to the Semitic race. But the anthropomorphic side of Christianity was
readily embraced by the former as a mythical and aesthetic conception,
and indeed it was they who made a metaphorical expression into an
essential dogma: the pride natural to the Aryan race made them eager to
accept a religion which placed man in a still higher Olympus: a belief
in Christ was rapidly diffused, not as God but as the Man-God. These are
the true reasons, not only for the rapid spread of Christianity in
Europe, but also for the philosophic systems of the Platonists and
Alexandrines which preceded it. Although Philo was a Hebrew, and
probably knew nothing of Christ, he attained by means of Hellenism to
the idea of the Man-God; the Platonic Word, which was merely the
projection of God into human reason, was accepted for the same reason
as the Christian dogma of the Word made man.
"Let us see what new principles, what higher morality and civilization
were added by the diffusion of Christianity to those principles which
were the spontaneous product of the race. We must first consider what
part the pagan gods, as they were regarded by educated men, played in
the history of the European race, with respect to the individual and to
the commonwealth. The pagan Olympus, considered as a whole, and without
reference to the various forms which it assumed in different peoples,
was not essentially distinct from human society. Although the gods
formed a higher order of immortal beings, they were mixed up with men in
a thousand ways in practical life, and conformed to the ways of
humanity; they were constantly occupied in doing good or ill to mortals;
they were warmly interested in the disputes of men, taking part in the
conflicts of persons, cities, and peoples; special divinities watched
over men from the cradle to the grave, and they were loved or hated by
the gods by reason of their family and race. In short, the heavenly and
earthly communities were so intermixed that the gods were only superior
and immortal men.
"The people were accustomed to consider their deities as ever present,
distinct from, and yet inseparably joined with them; so that the
individual, the country, the tribes, were ever governed, guarded,
favoured, or opposed by special and peculiar gods. Olympus had a
history, since the acts of the gods took place in time and were
coincident with the history of nations, so that every event in heaven
corresponded with one on earth; the idea of divine justice was
exemplified in that of men, and both were perfected together. Among
pagans of the Aryan race there was a perpetual and repeated alliance
between men and gods made in the image of man. This action of the gods
both for good and evil became in its turn the rule of life for the
ignorant multitude, and they acted in conformity with the supposed will
and actions of the gods; the divine will was, however, nothing but an _a
priori_ religious conception of an idol representing the forces of
nature or some moral or religious idea. The moral perfection of nations,
as time went on, also perfected the supreme justice of Olympus, and the
moral worth of the gods increased as men became better. So that it was
not the original theological idea, but man himself, who made heaven more
perfect, and the gods morally better and more just.
"The explicit power of mental reasoning and of science was added to this
spontaneous evolution of the religious idea, so far as the improved
morality of the race perfected the heavenly justice which was its own
creation. The pagan Olympus was gradually simplified by sages and
philosophers; the illicit passions of the gods were set aside, and it
was transformed into a providential government of individuals and of
society, much more remote from direct contact with men. The conception
of the immortal gods included one supreme power, formative, protecting
or avenging, and this conception bordered on the Semitic idea of the
absolute Being, although without quite attaining to it. God was
confounded with the order of things, his laws were those of the
universe, by which he was also bound, and the righteous man lived in
conformity with these laws. When Christianity began, pagan rationalism
had arrived at the idea of a spiritual and directing power, organically
identical with the universe. It was neither the Olympus of the common
people, nor the Semitic Jehovah, but rather the conscious and inevitable
order of nature. Although, either as an Olympus or as a dogma, the deity
was confounded with men or constrained them to follow a more rational
rule of life, yet paganism clearly distinguished the gods from men in
their concrete personality, and the action of humanity was therefore
distinct from that of the deity.
"When Christianity began, the peoples of the Aryan race in Europe, or at
least those of more advanced civilization, had constituted for
themselves a heavenly Pantheon, which contained nearly all the primitive
deities, but in a more human form and exercising a juster rule over the
world, while at the same time they were regarded as quite distinct from
the society of men. Although there was in this multiplicity of divine
forms an hierarchical order of different ranks, there was no general
conception to include the destinies of the whole human race, and to
manifest by its unity its providential and historical development. Each
people believed in their own special destiny, which should either raise
them to greater glory and power or bring them to a speedy and inevitable
end; but there was no common fate, no common prosperity nor disaster.
Rome had, as far as possible, united these various peoples by the idea
of her power, by the inforcement of her laws, and by the benefits of her
citizenship, yet the Roman unity was external, and did not spring from
the intimate sense of a common lineage. While the nations were so
closely united to Rome by brute force, the subject peoples were agitated
by a desire for their ancient independence and self-government. Some of
these pagan multitudes advanced in civilization through their education
in the learning of the Romans, and in morality through their spontaneous
activity, but they did not possess any deep sense of a general
providence, and heaven and earth continued to be under the sway of an
incomprehensible fate.
"If we now turn to consider the mental conditions of educated men at
that time, we shall see that they transformed the Olympus of personal
and concrete gods into symbols of the forces of nature, and that they
had risen to a purer conception of the deity by making it agree with the
progress of reason; but this deity was so remote from earth as to have
scarcely anything to do with the government of the world. According to
the teaching of the Stoics, which was very generally diffused, man was
supposed to be so far left to himself that he was the creator of his own
virtue, and had to struggle, not only against nature and his fellow-man,
but against fate, the underlying essence of every cosmic form and
motion. If this pagan rationalism gave rise to great theoretic morality,
and produced amazing examples of private and public virtue, it had
little effect on the multitudes, nor did it contain any guiding
principle for the historical life of humanity as a whole.
"Christianity proclaimed the spiritual unity of God, the unity of the
race, the brotherhood of all peoples, the redemption of the world, and
consequently a providential influence on mankind. Christianity taught
that God himself was made man, and lived among men. Such teaching was
offered to the people as a truth of consciousness rather than of dogma,
although it was afterwards preserved in a theological form by the
preaching of Paul, and the pagan mind was more affected by sentiment
than by reason. The unity of God was associated in their aesthetic
imagination with the earlier conception of the supreme Zeus, which now
took a more Semitic form, and Olympus was gloriously transformed into a
company of elect Christians and holy fathers of the new faith. A
confused sentiment as to the mystic union of peoples, who became
brothers in Christ, had a powerful effect on the imagination and the
heart, since they had already learned to regard the world as the
creation of one eternal Being. In the ardour of proselytism and of the
diffusion of the new creed, they hailed the historical transformation of
the earthly endeavour after temporal acquisitions and pleasures into a
providential preparation for the heavenly kingdom.
"In Christ, the incarnation of the supreme God, they beheld the
apotheosis of man, so acceptable to the Aryan race, since he thus became
the absolute ruler of the world and its fates. Ideas and sentiments, of
which the Semitic mind was incapable, and which were opposed to their
historical and intellectual development, moved and satisfied the Aryan
mind, and became associated as far as possible with the dogma and belief
to which the race had attained in their pagan civilization. Thus heaven,
dogma, and Christian rites assumed from the first a pagan form; and
while the original idols were repudiated in the zeal for new principles,
their common likeness was maintained by the imaginative power of the
race.
"In this way Christianity became popular, and the Semitic idea was
invested with pagan forms, in order to carry on the gradual and more
intimate spiritual transformation which is not yet terminated. Its
teaching was at first decidedly rejected and opposed by cultivated
minds, accustomed as the Greeks were with few exceptions to use their
reason. Among philosophers, the popular belief in a personal Olympus had
disappeared, and a more rational study of mankind did not allow them to
understand or comprehend a dogma which re-established anthropomorphism
under another aspect, so that this new and impious superstition became
the object of persecution. These were, however, mere exceptions, an
anticipation of the opposition of reason to mythical ideas, which became
more vigorous in every successive age, until the time arrived when
reason, educated by a long course of exercise, was able to renew the
effort with greater authority and success. The common people gradually
became Christian, and so also did educated men, who thus added the
authority of the schools to a teaching accepted by the feelings and
innate inclination of the race, and hence followed the theological
development of Christian dogma.
"These new principles and beliefs, eventually accepted by all the
nations of Europe, both barbarous and civilized, not only brought to
perfection the religious intuition characteristic of the morality and
civilization of the race, but they produced a new and renovating power
in historical and social life. This fresh virtue consisted in the belief
in a power consubstantially divine and human. Although the pagan gods
were human in their extrinsic and intrinsic form, only differing from
mortals by their mighty privileges, yet they were personally distinct
from men, and while the acts of Olympus mingled with those of earth,
they had an habitation and destinies apart. But by the new dogma, the
one God who was a Spirit took on him the substance of man and was united
with humanity as a whole, according to the Pauline interpretation, which
was generally accepted by our race. The divine nature was continually
imparted to man, the body and members in which the divine spirit was
incarnated, since the Church or mystical community of Christians was the
temple of God. Through this lively sense of the divine incarnation, the
Christian avatar with which the race had been acquainted under other
forms, God was no longer essentially distinguished from mankind in the
form of a number of concrete beings, but was spiritually infused into
men and acted through them. The Christian as man felt himself to be a
participator with God himself by a mystic intercourse. Since, therefore,
the human faculty was historically identical with the divine, and shared
in the spiritual work which was to effect the redemption of society,
this new and Christian civilization added daring, confidence, and virtue
to the natural energy of the race.
"Not many years elapsed before men ceased to contemplate the immediate
end of the world predicted by the first apostles and the Apocalypse;
they looked forward to a more distant future, and except in the case of
some particular sects, they applied the prophecies which referred to the
first generation of Christians to the future history of the race. It
was therefore Christianity which introduced into the consciousness of
our Aryan peoples the principles of a divine historic power acting on
the social economy of mankind, and in this way the natural dignity and
enterprising pride of the race was increased. Through this fresh
religious intuition and spiritual exaltation, the purity and moral
sweetness of the Semitic Nazarene became the law of society, and the
church organization gradually assimilated everything to itself, and
received divine worship in the person of the supreme Pontiff, who
continued for many ages to be the temporal ruler of consciences, of
public institutions, and of civilization. Strange daring in a race which
from its early beginnings down to our own days has been always true to
its own character, and in one form or other has displayed vigour,
energy, ambition, transforming power, and great designs.
"This remarkable process could only go on in and through those peoples
whose vigour and pride equalled their physical strength; to whom it is
death to sit still, and life to be always busy, to transform all things
to their own image, to dominate over all--over God by the intellect,
over the world by science, over other races by force of arms. After the
anthropomorphic form was given to natural phenomena, which is done to
some extent by all races, the gods were made in the image of man; full
of aesthetic imagination, of grand and vigorous conceptions, they
modified and transformed the truth of the Semitic idea, to suit their
own genius and imagination, and in this way they produced the wonderful
fabric of Christian civilization and of Catholicism. They alone accepted
a teaching which infused new spirit into social life and produced the
rule of religion over the world, and the race still stands alone in the
maintenance of its beliefs, to which science has added the powerful
simplicity of the Semitic idea, and their vigorous influence has
perpetuated and perfected human progress upon earth.[30] The Aryan race
attained to the Semitic conception in its purity and cosmic reality by
the process of reason, and only because it was endowed with all the
civilizing and moral qualities which were acquired in so many ages of
moral and intellectual energy, has the old conception been so vigorous
and productive.
"The Semitic race, on the other hand, adhered to their old faith,
rejected Christianity, as it had been formulated by the Aryans, and had
little influence on the world. The Israelites, indeed, dispersed among
other nations, retained the idea of the one spiritual God in all its
purity, and civilization would have been much indebted to them for this
rational idea of God if they had more clearly understood its scientific
bearing and the nature of man; many of them are indeed justly entitled
to fame in every department of science. But taken by themselves and as a
people, they had little effect on civilization, since they lacked the
energy of purpose, courage, mental superiority, and imagination, which
create a durable and powerful civilization.
"The Arabs, aroused for a time by Mahometan fanaticism, overran great
part of Europe, Asia, and Africa, but without influencing civilization.
While in possession of a great and productive idea, they remained a
sterile and nomad people, or founded unproductive dynasties. For the
Semitic race, the interval between God and man, and consequently between
God and civilization, was and is infinite, impassable. The Arabs
possessed nothing but the devastating force of proselytism to fertilize
their minds and social relations; and, with the exception of
architecture, geography, and cognate sciences, they were for the most
part only the transmitters of the science of others. We, on the
contrary, filled up the gulf by placing the Man-God between God and man,
and civilization has a power and vigour which has never flagged, and
which, now that dogma is transformed into reason, will not flag while
the world lasts."[31]
This extract from a work published many years ago, seems to me to
confirm the theory of myths which I have explained; it shows how they
are ultimately fused into a simple form, in conformity with the ideas of
civilized society, and it will also throw light on what is to follow.
If we consider the primitive genesis and evolution of myth, confirmed by
all the facts of history and ethnography, it will appear that although
the matter on which thought was exercised was mythical and fanciful, the
form and organizing method were the same as those of science. It is, in
fact, a scientific process to observe, spontaneously at first, and then
deliberately, the points of likeness and unlikeness between special
objects of perception; we must rise from the particular to the general,
from the individual to the species, thus ever enlarging the circle of
observation, in order to arrive at types, laws, and ultimate unity, or
at least a unity supposed to be ultimate, to which everything is
reduced. So that the mythical faculty of thought was scientific in its
logical form, and was exercised in the same way as the scientific
faculty.
But science does not merely consist in the systematic arrangement of
facts in which it begins, nor in their combination into general and
comprehensive laws; the sequence of causes and effects must also be
understood, and it is not enough to classify the fact without explaining
its genesis and cause. We have seen that the innate faculty of
perception involved the idea of a cause in the supposition that the
phenomenon was actuated by a subject, and while thought classified
fetishes and idols in a mythical way, an inherent power for good or evil
was ascribed to them, not only in their relation to man, but in their
effects on nature. What Vico has called "the poetry of physics"
consisted in the explanation of natural phenomena by the efficacy of
mythical and supernatural agents. From this point of view again, myth
and science pursue identically the same method and the same general form
of cognition.
Nor is this all. Science is, in fact, the _de-personification_ of myth,
arriving at a rational idea of that which was originally a fantastic
type by divesting it of its wrappings and symbols. In the natural
evolution of myth, man passes from the extrinsic mythical substance to
the intrinsic ideal by the same intellectual process, and when the types
have become ideas, he carries on intrinsically the _entifying_ process
which he first applied to the material and external phenomena.
In this case also the process is gradual; by attempting a more rational
explanation of physical phenomena, man attains to ultimate conceptions
which express direct cosmic laws, and he regards these laws as
substantial entities, which in their originally polytheistic form were
the gods who directed all things. Here the scientific myth really
begins, since natural forces and phenomena are no longer personified in
anthropomorphic beings; but the laws or general principles of physics
are transformed into material subjects, which are still analogous to
human consciousness and tendencies, although the idolatrous
anthropomorphism has disappeared.
The combination of myth and science in the human mind does not stop
here, since, as I have said, it goes on to form ideal representations.
When thought penetrates more deeply into the physical laws of the
universe, and is also more rationally engaged in the psychical
examination of man's own nature, ideas are classified in more general
types, as in the primitive construction of fetishes, anthropomorphic
idols, and physical principles; and in this way an explicit and purely
ideal system is formed, in which the images correspond with the fanciful
and physical types which were previously created.
It usually happens that thought, by the innate faculty of which we have
so often spoken, regards the ideas produced by this complex mental
labour as material entities endowed with eternal and independent
existence; and this produced the Platonic teaching, the schools in
Greece and Italy, and other brilliant illustrations of this phase of
thought. Such teaching, the result of explicit reflection, is a rival of
the critical science which followed from it. It is always active, while
constantly varying and assuming fresh forms; and it not only flourishes
in our time in the religions in which it finds a suitable soil, but
also, as we shall see, in science itself.
In addition to this complex evolution of myth as a whole, special myths
follow similar laws; since they are generated from the same facts, and
pass through the same phases, they culminate in a partial ideality, and
this involves a simple and comprehensive law of the phenomena in
question, and even a moral or providential order. For example, we may
trace the Promethean myth to the end of the Hellenic era, and the
different phases and final extinction of this particular myth are quite
apparent.
The origin of the myth, which was directly connected with the perception
of the natural phenomena of light and heat, was due to the same causes
as all others, but we will consider it in its Vedic phase, as it may be
gathered from tradition, and from the discoveries of comparative
philology, and we have a sure guide in this research in the great
linguist Kuhn, whose remarks have been enlarged and illustrated by
Baudry.
The Sanscrit word for the act of producing fire by friction is
_manthami_, to rub or agitate, and this appears from its derivative
_mandala_, a circle; that is, circular friction. The pieces of wood
used for the production of fire were called _pramantha_, that which
revolves, and _arani_ was the disc on which the friction was made. In
this phase, the fetishes are, according to our theory, in the second
stage. The Greeks and Romans, and indeed almost all other peoples, knew
no other way of kindling a fire, and in the sacred rites of the
Peruvians the task was assigned to the Incas at the annual festival of
fire. The wood of the oak was used in Germany, on account of the red
colour of its bark, which led to the supposition that the god of fire
was concealed in it. Tan is called _lohe_, or flame, in Germany. This
primitive mode of kindling a fire was known to the Aryans before their
dispersion, and friction with this object was equivalent to the birth of
the fire-god, constraining him to come down to earth from the air, from
thunder, etc.; indeed fire was also called _dueta_, the messenger between
heaven and earth. The question arose who had drawn fire from heaven, and
developed it in the _arani_. A resemblance was also traced between the
instruments for kindling fire and the organs of generation, a reciprocal
interchange of various myths, as we have before observed. _Agni_ is
concealed in _arani_, like the embryo in the womb (Rig-Veda). Thus
_pramantha_ is the masculine instrument, _arani_ the feminine, and the
act of uniting them is copulation.
_Agni_ had disappeared from earth and was concealed in a cavern, whence
it was drawn by a divine person; that is, fire had disappeared and was
concealed within the _arani_, whence it was extracted by the _pramantha_
and bestowed upon man. _Mataricvan_, the divine deliverer, is therefore
only the personification of the male organ.