ATHENA CHALINITIS.*
(Athena in the Heavens.)
* "Athena the Restrainer." The name is given to her as having helped
Bellerophon to bridle Pegasus, the flying cloud.
LECTURE ON THE GREEK MYTHS OF STORM, GIVEN (PARTLY) IN UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE, LONDON, MARCH 9, 1869.
1. I will not ask your pardon for endeavoring to interest you in the
subject of Greek Mythology; but I must ask your permission to approach
it in a temper differing from that in which it is frequently treated.
We cannot justly interpret the religion of any people, unless we are
prepared to admit that we ourselves, as well as they, are liable to
error in matters of faith; and that the convictions of others, however
singular, may in some points have been well founded, while our own,
however reasonable, may be in some particulars mistaken. You must
forgive me, therefore, for not always distinctively calling the creeds
of the past "superstition," and the creeds of the present day "religion;"
as well as for assuming that a faith now confessed may sometimes be
superficial, and that a faith long forgotten may once have been sincere.
It is the task of the Divine to condemn the errors of antiquity, and of
the philologists to account for them; I will only pray you to read, with
patience, and human sympathy, the thoughts of men who lived without blame
in a darkness they could not dispel; and to remember that, whatever
charge of folly may justly attach to the saying, "There is no God," the
folly is prouder, deeper, and less pardonable, in saying, "There is no
God but for me."
2. A myth, in its simplest definition, is a story with a meaning attached
to it other than it seems to have at first; and the fact that it has such
a meaning is generally marked by some of its circumstances being
extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, unnatural. Thus if I
tell you that Hercules killed a water-serpent in the lake of Lerna, and
if I mean, and you understand, nothing more than that fact, the story,
whether true or false, is not a myth. But if by telling you this, I mean
that Hercules purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly
miasmata, my story, however simple, is a true myth; only, as, if I leftit
in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it will
be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some singular
circumstance; for instance, that the water-snake had several heads, which
revived as fast as they were killed, and which poisoned even the foot
that trod upon them as they slept. And in proportion to the fulness of
intended meaning I shall probably multiply and refine upon these
improbabilities; as, suppose, if, instead of desiring only to tell you
that Hercules purified a marsh, I wished you to understand that he
contended with the venom and vapor of envy and evil ambition, whether in
other men's souls or in his own, and choked that malaria only by supreme
toil,--I might tell you that this serpent was formed by the goddess whose
pride was in the trial of Hercules; and that its place of abode as by a
palm-tree; and that for every head of it that was cut off, two rose up
with renewed life; and that the hero found at last that he could not kill
the creature at all by cutting its heads off or crushing them, but only
by burning them down; and that the midmost of them could not be killed
even that way, but had to be buried alive. Only in proportion as I mean
more, I shall certainly appear more absurd in my statement; and at last
when I get unendurably significant, all practical persons will agree that
I was talking mere nonsense from the beginning, and never meant anything
at all.
3. It is just possible, however, also, that the story-teller may all
along have meant nothing but what he said; and that, incredible as the
events may appear, he himself literally believed--and expected you also
to believe--all this about Hercules, without any latent moral or history
whatever. And it is very necessary, in reading traditions of this kind,
to determine, first of all, whether you are listening to a simple person,
who is relating what, at all events, he believes to be true, (and may,
therefore, possibly have been so to some extent), or to a reserved
philosopher, who is veiling a theory of the universe under the grotesque
of a fairy tale. It is, in general, more likely that the first
supposition should be the right one: simple and credulous persons are,
perhaps fortunately, more common than philosophers; and it is of the
highest importance that you should take their innocent testimony as it
was meant, and not efface, under the graceful explanation which your
cultivated ingenuity may suggest, either the evidence their story may
contain (such as it is worth) of an extraordinary event having really
taken place, or the unquestionable light which it will cast upon the
character of the person by whom it was frankly believed. And to deal
with Greek religion honestly, you must at once understand that this
literal belief was, in the mind of the general people, as deeply rooted
as ours in the legends of our own sacred book; and that a basis of
unmiraculous event was as little suspected, and an explanatory symbolism
as rarely traced, by them, as by us.
You must, therefore, observe that I deeply degrade the position which
such a myth as that just referred to occupied in the Greek mind, by
comparing it (for fear of offending you) to our story of St. George and
the Dragon. Still, the analogy is perfect in minor respects; and though
it fails to give you any notion of the Greek faith, it will exactly
illustrate the manner in which faith laid hold of its objects.
4. This story of Hercules and the Hydra, then, was to the general Greek
mind, in its best days, a tale about a real hero and a real monster. Not
one in a thousand knew anything of the way in which the story had arisen,
any more than the English peasant generally is aware of the plebeian
original of St. George; or supposes that there were once alive in the
world, with sharp teeth and claws, real, and very ugly, flying dragons.
On the other hand, few persons traced any moral or symbolical meaning in
the story, and the average Greek was as far from imagining any
interpretation like that I have just given you, as an average Englishman
is from seeing is St. George the Red Cross Knight of Spenser, or in the
Dragon the Spirit of Infidelity. But, for all that, there was a certain
undercurrent of consciousness in all minds that the figures meant more
than they at first showed; and, according to each man's own faculties of
sentiment, he judged and read them; just as a Knight of the Garter reads
more in the jewel on his collar than the George and Dragon of a
public-house expresses to the host or to his customers. Thus, to the
mean person the myth always meant little; to the noble person, much; and
the greater their familiarity with it, the more contemptible it became to
one, and the more sacred to the other; until vulgar commentators
explained it entirely away, while Virgil made the crowning glory of his
choral hymn to Hercules.
"Around thee, powerless to infect thy soul,
Rose, in his crested crowd, the Lerna worm."
"Non te rationis egentem
Lernæus turbâ capitum circumstetit anguis."
And although, in any special toil of the hero's life, the moral
interpretation was rarely with definiteness attached to the event, yet
in the whole course of the life, not only for a symbolical meaning, but
the warrant for the existence of a real spiritual power, was apprehended
of all men. Hercules was no dead hero, to be remembered only as a victor
over monsters of the past--harmless now as slain. He was the perpetual
type and mirror of heroism, and its present and living aid against every
ravenous form of human trial and pain.
5. But, if we seek to know more than this and to ascertain the manner in
which the story first crystallized into its shape, we shall find
ourselves led back generally to one or other of two sources--either to
actual historical events, represented by the fancy under figures
personifying them; or else to natural phenomena similarly endowed with
life by the imaginative power usually more or less under the influence of
terror. The historical myths we must leave the masters of history to
follow; they, and the events they record, being yet involved in great,
though attractive and penetrable, mystery. But the stars, and hills, and
storms are with us now, as they were with others of old; and it only
needs that we look at them with the earnestness of those childish eyes to
understand the first words spoken of them by the children of men, and
then, in all the most beautiful and enduring myths, we shall find, not
only a literal story of a real person, not only a parallel imagery of
moral principle, but an underlying worship of natural phenomena, out of
which both have sprung, and in which both forever remain rooted. Thus,
from the real sun, rising and setting,--from the real atmosphere, calm in
its dominion of unfading blue, and fierce in its descent of tempest,--the
Greek forms first the idea of two entirely personal and corporal gods,
whose limbs are clothes in divine flesh, and whose brows are crowned with
divine beauty; yet so real that the quiver rattles at their shoulder, and
the chariot bends beneath their weight. And, on the other hand,
collaterally with these corporeal images, and never for one instant
separated from them, he conceives also two omnipresent spiritual
influences, as the sun, with a constant fire, whatever in humanity is
skilful and wise; and the other, like the living air, breathes the calm
of heavenly fortitude, and strength of righteous anger, into every human
breast that is pure and brave.
6. Now, therefore, in nearly every myth of importance, and certainly in
every one of those which I shall speak to-night, you have to discern
these three structural parts,--the root and the two branches: the root,
in physical existence, sun, or sky, or cloud, or sea; then the personal
incarnation of that, becoming a trusted and companionable deity, with
whom you may walk hand in hand, as a child with its brother or its
sister; and, lastly, the moral significance of the image, which is in all
the great myths eternally and beneficently true.
7. The great myths; that is to say, myths made by great people. For the
first plain fact about myth-making is one which has been most strangely
lost sight of,--that you cannot make a myth unless you have something to
make it of. You cannot tell a secret which you don't know. If the myth
is about the sky, it must have been made by somebody who has looked at
the sky. If the myth is about justice and fortitude, it must have been
made by someone who knew what it was to be just or patient. According to
the quantity of understanding in the person will be the quantity of
significance in his fable; and the myth of a simple and ignorant race
must necessarily mean little, because a simple and ignorant race have
little to mean. So the great question in reading a story is always, not
what wild hunter dreamed, or what childish race first dreaded it; but
what wise man first perfectly told, and what strong people first
perfectly lived by it. And the real meaning of any myth is that which it
has at the noblest age of the nation among whom it is current. The
farther back you pierce, the less significance you will find, until you
come to the first narrow thought, which, indeed, contains the germ of the
accomplished tradition; but only as the seed contains the flower. As the
intelligence and passion of the race develop, they cling to and nourish
their beloved and sacred legend; leaf by leaf it expands under the touch
of more pure affections, and more delicate imagination, until at last the
perfect fable burgeons out into symmetry of milky stem and honied bell.
8. But through whatever changes it may pass, remember that our right
reading of it is wholly dependent on the materials we have in our own
minds for an intelligent answering sympathy. If it first arose among a
people who dwelt under stainless skies, and measures their journeys by
ascending and declining stars, we certainly cannot read their story, if
we have never seen anything above us in the day but smoke, nor anything
around us in the night but candles. If the tale goes on to change clouds
or planets into living creatures,--to invest them with fair forms and
inflame them with mighty passions,--we can only understand the story of
the human-hearted things, in so far as we ourselves take pleasure in the
perfectness of visible form, or can sympathize, by an effort of
imagination, with the strange people who had other loves than those of
wealth, and other interests than those of commerce. And, lastly, if the
myth complete itself to the fulfilled thoughts of the nation, by
attributing to the gods, whom they have carved out of their fantasy,
continual presence with their own souls; and their every effort for good
is finally guided by the sense of the companionship, the praise, and the
pure will of immortals, we shall be able to follow them into this last
circle of their faith only in the degree in which the better parts of our
own beings have been also stirred by the aspects of nature, or
strengthened by her laws. It may be easy to prove that the ascent of
Apollo in his chariot signifies nothing but the rising of the sun. But
what does the sunrise itself signify to us? If only languid return to
frivolous amusement, or fruitless labor, it will, indeed, not be easy for
us to conceive the power, over a Greek, of the name of Apollo. But if,
fir us also, as for the Greek, the sunrise means daily restoration to the
sense of passionate gladness and of perfect life--if it means the
thrilling of new strength through every nerve,--the shedding over us of a
better peace than the peace of night, in the power of the dawn,--and the
purging of evil vision and fear by the baptism of its dew;--if the sun
itself is an influence, to us also, of spiritual good--and becomes thus
in reality, not in imagination, to us also, a spiritual power,--we may
then soon over-pass the narrow limit of conception which kept that power
impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the thought of an angel who
rejoiced as a strong man to run his course, whose voice calling to life
and to labor rang round the earth, and whose going forth was to the ends
of heaven.
9. The time, then, at which I shall take up for you, as well as I can
decipher it, the traditions of the gods of Greece, shall be near the
beginning of its central and formed faith,--about 500 B.C.,--a faith of
which the character is perfectly represented by Pindar and Æschylus, who
are both of them outspokenly religious, and entirely sincere men; while
we may always look back to find the less developed thought of the
preceding epoch given by Homer, in a more occult, subtle,
half-instinctive, and involuntary way.
10. Now, at that culminating period of the Greek religion, we find,
under one governing Lord of all things, four subordinate elemental
forces, and four spiritual powers living in them and commanding them.
The elements are of course the well-known four of the ancient world,--
the earth, the waters, the fire, and the air; and the living powers of
them are Demeter, the Latin Ceres; Poseidon, the Latin Neptune; Apollo,
who has retained always his Greek name; and Athena, the Latin Minerva.
Each of these are descended from, or changed from, more ancient, and
therefore more mystic, deities of the earth and heaven, and of a finer
element of æther supposed to be beyond the heavens;* but at this time
we find the four quite definite, both in their kingdoms and in their
personalities. They are the rulers of the earth that we tread upon, and
the air that we breathe; and are with us closely, in their vivid
humanity, as the dust that they animate, and the winds that they bridle.
I shall briefly define for you the range of their separate dominions, and
then follow, as far as we have time, the most interesting of the legends
which relate to the queen of the air.
* And by modern science now also asserted, and with probability argued,
to exist.
11. The rule of the first spirit, Demeter, the earth mother, is over the
earth, first, as the origin of all life,--the dust from whence we were
taken; secondly, as the receiver of all things back at last into silence
--"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." And, therefore, as
the most tender image of this appearing and fading life, in the birth and
fall of flowers, her daughter Proserpine plays in the fields of Sicily,
and thence is torn away into darkness, and becomes the Queen of Fate--not
merely of death, but of the gloom which closes over and ends, not beauty
only, but sin, and chiefly of sins the sin against the life she gave; so
that she is, in her highest power, Persephone, the avenger and purifier
of blood--"The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me out of the
ground." Then, side by side with this queen of the earth, we find a
demigod of agriculture by the plough--the lord of grain, or of the thing
ground by the mill. And it is a singular proof of the simplicity of
Greek character at this noble time, that of all representations left to
us of their deities by their art, few are so frequent, and none perhaps
so beautiful, as the symbol of this spirit of agriculture.
12. Then the dominant spirit of the element water is Neptune, but
subordinate to him are myriads of other water spirits, of whom Nereus is
the chief, with Palæmon, and Leucothea, the "white lady" of the sea; and
Thetis, and nymphs innumerable who, like her, could "suffer a sea
change," while the river deities had each independent power, according
to the preciousness of their streams to the cities fed by them,--the
"fountain Arethuse, and thou, honoured flood, smooth sliding Mincius,
crowned with vocal reeds." And, spiritually, this king of the waters is
lord of the strength and daily flow of human life--he gives it material
force and victory; which as the meaning of the dedication of the hair, as
the sign of the strength of life, to the river or the native land.
13. Demeter, then, over the earth, and its giving and receiving of life.
Neptune over the waters, and the flow and force of life,--always among
the Greeks typified by the horse, which was to them as a crested
sea-wave, animated and bridled. Then the third element, fire, has set
over it two powers: over earthly fire, the assistant of human labor, is
set Hephæstus, lord of all labor in which is the flush and the sweat of
the brow; and over heavenly fire, the source of day, is set Apollo, the
spirit of all kindling, purifying, and illuminating intellectual wisdom,
each of these gods having also their subordinate or associated powers,--
servant, or sister, or companion muse.
14. Then, lastly, we come to the myth which is to be our subject of
closer inquiry,--the story of Athena and of the deities subordinate to
her. This great goddess, the Neith of the Egyptians, the Athena or
Athenaia of the Greeks, and, with broken power, half usurped by Mars,
the Minerva of the Latins, is, physically, the queen of the air; having
supreme power both over its blessing of calm, and wrath of storm; and,
spiritually, she is the queen of the breath of man, first of the bodily
breathing which is life to his blood, and strength to his arm in battle;
and then of the mental breathing, or inspiration, which is his moral
health and habitual wisdom; wisdom of conduct and of the heart, as
opposed to the wisdom of imagination and the brain; moral, as distinct
from intellectual; inspired, as distinct from illuminated.
15. By a singular and fortunate, though I believe wholly accidental,
coincidence, the heart-virtue, of which she is the spirit, was separated
by the ancients into four divisions, which have since obtained acceptance
from all men as rightly discerned, and have received, as if from the
quarters of the four winds of which Athena is the natural queen, the name
of "Cardinal" virtues: namely, Prudence (the right seeing, and
foreseeing, of events through darkness); Justice (the righteous bestowal
of favor and of indignation); Fortitude (patience under trial by pain);
and Temperance (patience under trial by pleasure). With respect to these
four virtues, the attributes of Athena are all distinct. In her
prudence, or sight in darkness, she is "Glaukopis," "owl-eyed."* In her
justice, which is the dominant virtue, she wears two robes, one of light,
and one of darkness; the robe of light, saffron color, or the color of
the daybreak, falls to her feet, covering her wholly with favor and
love,--the calm of the sky in blessing; it is embroidered along its edge
with her victory over the giants (the troublous powers of the earth), and
the likeness of it was woven yearly by the Athenian maidens and carried
to the temple of their own Athena, not to the Parthenon, that was the
temple of all the world's Athena,--but this they carried to the temple of
their own only one who loved them, and stayed with them always. Then her
robe of indignation is worn on her breast and left arm only, fringed with
fatal serpents, and fastened with Gorgonian cold, turning men to stone;
physically, the lightning and hail of chastisement by storm. Then in her
fortitude she wears the crested and unstooping hemlet;** and lastly, in
her temperance, she is the queen of maidenhood--stainless as the air of
heaven.
* There are many other meanings in the epithet; see farther on, §91, pp.
133, 134.
** I am compelled, for clearness' sake, to mark only one meaning at a
time. Athena's helmet is sometimes a mask, sometimes a sign of anger,
sometimes of the highest light of æther; but I cannot speak of all this
at once.
16. But all these virtues mass themselves in the Greek mind into the two
main ones,--of Justice, or noble passion, and Fortitude, or noble
patience; and of these, the chief powers of Athena, the Greeks have
divinely written for them, and for all men after them, two mighty songs,
--one, of the Menis,* Mens, passion, or zeal, of Athena, breathed into a
mortal whose name is "Ache of heart," and whose short life is only the
incarnate brooding and burst of storm; and the other is of the foresight
and fortitude of Athena, maintained by her in the heart of a mortal whose
name is given to him from a longer grief, Odysseus, the full of sorrow,
the much enduring, and the long-suffering.
* This first word of the Iliad, Menis, afterwards passes into the Latin
Mens; is the root of the Latin name for Athena, "Minerva," and so the
root of the English "mind."
17. The minor expressions by the Greeks in word, in symbol, and in
religious service, of this faith, are so many and so beautiful, that I
hope some day to gather at least a few of them into a separate body of
evidence respecting the power of Athena, and of its relations to the
ethical conception of the Homeric poems, or, rather, to their ethical
nature; for they are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in
their essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility
to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us now which is
one of the most curious errors of modernism,--the peculiar and judicial
blindness of an age which, having long practised art and poetry for the
sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language
when they were both didactic; and also, having been itself accustomed to
a professedly didactic teaching, which yet, for private interests,
studiously avoids collision with every prevalent vice of its day (and
especially with avarice), has become equally dead to the intensely
ethical conceptions of a race which habitually divided all men into two
broad classes of worthy or worthless,--good, and good for nothing. And
even the celebrated passage of Horace about the Iliad is now misread or
disbelieved, as if it were impossible that the Iliad could be instructive
because it is not like a sermon. Horce does not say that it is like a
sermon, and would have been still less likely to say so if he ever had
had the advantage of hearing a sermon. "I have been reading that story
of Troy again" (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome whom he cared
for), "quietly at Præneste, while you have been busy at Rome; and truly
I think that what is base and what is noble, and what useful and useless,
may be better learned from that, than from all Chrysippus' and Crantor's
talk put together."* Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only,
but of all other great art whatsoever; for all pieces of such art are
didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first, you
shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work in
bettering yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly
with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtile
that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion
of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only
find by slow mining for it,--which is withheld on purpose, and
close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it
in a furnace of your own heating. And this withholding of their meaning
is continual, and confessed, in the great poets. Thus Pindar says of
himself: "There is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the
wise, but, for the many, they need interpreters." And neither Pindar,
nor Æschylus, nor Hesiod, nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or
teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional
reservation; nay, beyond this, there is often a meaning which they
themselves cannot interpert [sic],--which it may be for ages long after
them to intrepert [sic],--in what they said, so far as it recorded true
imaginative vision. For all the greatest myths have been seen by the men
who tell them, involuntarily and passively,--seen by them with as great
distinctness (and in some respects, though not in all, under conditions
as far beyond the control of their will) as a dream sent to any of us by
night when we dream clearest; and it is this veracity of vision that
could not be refused, and of moral that could not be foreseen, which in
modern historical inquiry has been left wholly out of account; being
indeed the thing which no merely historical investigator can understand,
or even believe; for it belongs exclusively to the creative or artistic
group of men, and can only be interpreted by those of their race, who
themselves in some measure also see visions and dream dreams.
* Note, once for all, that unless when there is question about some
particular expression, I never translate literally, but give the real
force of what is said, as I best can, freely.
So that you may obtain a more truthful idea of the nature of Greek
religion and legend from the poems of Keats, and the nearly as beautiful,
and, in general grasp of subject, far more powerful, recent work of
Morris, than from frigid scholarship, however extensive. Not that the
poet's impressions or renderings of things are wholly true, but their
truth is vital, not formal. They are like sketches from the life by
Reynolds or Gainsborough, which may be demonstrably inaccurate or
imaginary in many traits, and indistinct in others, yet will be in the
deepest sense like, and true; while the work of historical analysis is
too often weak with loss, through the very labor of its miniature
touches, or useless in clumsy and vapid veracity of externals, and
complacent security of having done all that is required for the portrait,
when it has measured the breadth of the forehead and the length of the
nose.
18. The first of requirements, then, for the right reading of myths, is
the understanding of the nature of all true vision by noble persons;
namely, that it is founded on constant laws common to all human nature;
that it perceives, however darkly, things which are for all ages true;
that we can only understand it so far as we have some perception of the
same truth; and that its fulness is developed and manifested more and
more by the reverberation of it from minds of the same mirror-temper, in
succeeding ages. You will understand Homer better by seeing his
reflection in Dante, as you may trace new forms and softer colors in a
hillside, redoubled by a lake.
I shall be able partly to show you, even to-night, how much, in the
Homeric vision of Athena, has been made clearer by the advance of time,
being thus essentially and eternally true; but I must in the outset
indicate the relation to that central thought of the imagery of the
inferior deities of storm.
19. And first I will take the myth of Æolus (the "sage Hippotades" of
Milton), as it is delivered pure by Homer from the early times.
Why do you suppose Milton calls him "sage"? One does not usually think
of the winds as very thoughtful or deliberate powers. But hear Homer:
"Then we came to the Æolian island, and there dwelt Æolus Hippotades,
dear to the deathless gods; there he dwelt in a floating island, and
round it was a wall of brass that could not be broken; and the smooth
rock of it ran up sheer. To whom twelve children were born in the sacred
chambers,--six daughters and six strong sons; and they dwell foreer with
their beloved father and their mother, strict in duty; and with them are
laid up a thousand benefits; and the misty house around them rings with
fluting all the day long." Now, you are to note first, in this
description, the wall of brass and the sheer rock. You will find,
throughout the fables of the tempest-group, that the brazen wall and the
precipice (occurring in another myth as the brazen tower of Danaë) are
always connected with the idea of the towering cloud lighted by the sun,
here truly described as a floating island. Secondly, you hear that all
treasures were laid up in them; therefore, you know this Æolus is lord of
the beneficent winds ("he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries"); and
presently afterwards Homer calls him the "steward" of the winds, the
master of the store-house of them. And this idea of gifts and
preciousness in the winds of heaven is carried out in the well-known
sequel of the fable: Æolus gives them to Ulysses, all but one, bound in
leathern bags, with a glittering cord of silver; and so like bags of
treasure that the sailors think they are so, and open them to see. And
when Ulysses is thus driven back to Æolus, and prays him again to help
him, note the deliberate words of the king's refusal,--"Did I not," says
he, "send thee on thy way heartily, that thou mightest reach thy country,
thy home, and whatever is dear to thee? It is not lawful for me again
to send forth favorably on his journey a man hated by the happy gods."
This idea of the beneficence of Æolus remains to the latest times, though
Virgil, by adopting the vulgar change of the cloud island into Lipari,
has lost it a little; but even when it is finally explained away by
Diodorus, Æolus is still a kind-hearted monarch, who lived on the coast
of Sorrento, invented the use of sails, and established a system of storm
signals.
20. Another beneficent storm-power, Boreas, occupies an important place
in early legend, and a singularly principal one in art; and I wish I
could read to you a passage of Plato about the legend of Boreas and
Oreithyia,* and the breeze and shade of the Ilissus--notwithstannding its
severe reflection upon persons who waste their time on mythological
studies; but I must go on at once to the fable with which you are all
generally familiar, that of the Harpies.
* Translated by Max Müller in the opening of his essay on "Comparative
Mythology."--Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii.
This is always connected with that of Boreas or the north wind, because
the two sons of Boreas are enemies of the Harpies, and drive them away
into frantic flight. The myth in its first literal form means only the
battle between the fair north wind and the foul south one: the two
Harpies, "Stormswift" and "Swiftfoot," are the sisters of the rainbow;
that is to say, they are the broken drifts of the showery south wind, and
the clear north wind drives them back; but they quickly take a deeper and
more malignant significance. You know the short, violent, spiral gusts
that lift the dust before coming rain: the Harpies get identified first
with these, and then with more violent whirlwinds, and so they are called
"Harpies," "the Snatchers," and are thought of as entirely destructive;
their manner of destroying being twofold,--by snatching away, and by
defiling and polluting. This is a month in which you may really see a
small Harpy at her work almost whenever you choose. The first time that
there is threatening of rain after two or three days of fine weather,
leave your window well open to the street, and some books or papers on
the table; and if you do not, in a little while, know what the Harpies
mean, and how they snatch, and how they defile, I'll give up my Greek
myths.
21. That is the physical meaning. It is now easy to find the mental
one. You must all have felt the expression of ignoble anger in those
fitful gusts of storm. There is a sense of provocation in their thin
and senseless fury, wholly different from the nobler anger of the greater
tempests. Also, they seem useless and unnatural, and the Greek thinks of
them always as vile in malice, and opposed, therefore, to the Sons of
Boreas, who are kindly winds, that fill sails, and wave harvests,--full
of bracing health and happy impulses. From this lower and merely greater
terror, always associated with their whirling motion, which is indeed
indicative of the most destructive winds; and they are thus related to
the nobler tempests, as Charybdis to the sea; they are devouring and
desolating, making all things disappear that come in their grasp; and so,
spiritually, they are the gusts of vexatious, fretful, lawless passion,
vain and overshadowing, discontented and lamenting, meager and insane,--
spirits of wasted energy, and wandering disease, and unappeased famine,
and unsatisfied hope. So you have, on the one side, the winds of
prosperity and health, on the other, of ruin and sickness. Understand
that, once, deeply,--any who have ever known the weariness of vain
desires, the pitiful, unconquerable, coiling and recoiling famine and
thirst of heart,--and you will know what was in the sound of the Harpy
Celæno's shriek from her rock; and why, in the seventh circle of the
"Inferno," the Harpies make their nests in the warped branches of the
trees that are the souls of suicides.
22. Now you must always be prepared to read Greek legends as you trace
threads through figures on a silken damask: the same thread runs through
the web, but it makes part of different figures. Joined with other
colors you hardly recognize it, and in different lights it is dark or
light. Thus the Greek fables blend and cross curiously in different
directions, till they knit themselves into an arabesque where sometimes
you cannot tell black from purple, nor blue from emerald--they being all
the truer for this, because the truths of emotion they represent are
interwoven in the same way, but all the more difficult to read, and to
explain in any order. Thus the Harpies, as they represent vain desire,
are connected with the Sirens, who are the spirits of constant desire; so
that it is difficult sometimes in early art to know which are meant, both
being represented alike as birds with women's heads; only the Sirens are
the great constant desires--the infinite sicknesses of heart--which,
rightly placed, give life, and wrongly placed, waste it away; so that
there are two groups of Sirens, one noble and saving, as the other is
fatal. But there are no animating or saving Harpies; their nature is
always vexing and full of weariness, and thus they are curiously
connected with the whole group of legends about Tantalus.
33.* We all know what it is to be tantalized; but we do not often think
of asking what Tantalus was tantalized for--what he had done, to be
forever kept hungry in sight of food. Well; he had not been condemned to
this merely for being a glutton. By Dante the same punishment is
assigned to simple gluttony, to purge it away; but the sins of Tantalus
were of a much wider and more mysterious kind. There are four great sins
attributed to him: one, stealing the food of the gods to give it to men;
another, sacrificing his son to feed the gods themselves (it may remind
you for a moment of what I was telling you of the earthly character of
Demeter, that, while the other gods all refuse, she, dreaming about her
lost daughter, eats part of the shoulder of Pelops before she knows what
she is doing); another sin is, telling the secrets of the gods; and only
the fourth--stealing the golden dog of Pandareos--is connected with
gluttony. The special sense of this myth is marked by Pandareos
receiving the happy privilege of never being troubled with indigestion;
the dog, in general, however mythically represents all utter senseless
and carnal desires; mainly that of gluttony; and in the mythic sense of
Hades--that is to say, so far as it represents spiritual ruin in this
life, and not a literal hell--the dog Cerberus as its gatekeeper--with
this special marking of his character of sensual passion, that he fawns
on all those who descend, but rages against all who would return (the
Virgilian "facilis descendus" being a later recognition of this mythic
character of Hades); the last labor of Hercules is the dragging him up
to the light; and in some sort he represents the voracity or devouring
of Hades itself; and the mediæval representation of the mouth of hell
perpetuates the same thought. Then, also, the power of evil passion
is partly associated with the red and scorching light of Sirius, as
opposed to the pure light of the sun: he is the dog-star of ruin; and
hence the continual Homeric dwelling upon him, and comparison of the
flame of anger to his swarthy light; only, in his scorching, it is
thirst, not hunger, over which he rules physically; so that the fable
of Icarius, his first master, corresponds, among the Greeks, to the
legend of the drunkenness of Noah.
* Printer's error: should be 23.
The story of Actæon, the raging death of Hecuba, and the tradition of
the white dog which ate part of Hercules' first sacrifice, and so gave
name to the Cynosarges, are all various phases of the same thought,--the
Greek notion of the dog being throughout confused between its serviceable
fidelity, its watchfulness, its foul voracity, shamelessness, and deadly
madness, while with the curious reversal or recoil of the meaning which
attaches itself to nearly every great myth,--and which we shall presently
see notably exemplified in the relations of the serpent to Athena,--the
dog becomes in philosophy a type of severity and abstinence.
24. It would carry us too far aside were I to tell you the story of
Pandareos' dog--or rather of Jupiter's dog, for Pandareos was its
guardian only; all that bears on our present purpose is that the guardian
of this golden dog had three daughters, one of whom was subject to the
power of the Sirens, and is turned into a nightingale; and the other two
were subject to the power of the Harpies, and this was what happened to
them: They were very beautiful, and they were beloved by the gods in
their youth, and all the great goddesses were anxious to bring them up
rightly. Of all types of young ladies' education, there is nothing so
splendid as that of the younger daughters of Pandareos. They have
literally the four greatest goddesses for their governesses. Athena
teaches them domestic accomplishments, how to weave, and sew, and the
like; Artemis teaches them to hold themselves up straight; Hera, how to
behave proudly and oppressively to company; and Aphrodite, delightful
governess, feeds them with cakes and honey all day long. All goes well,
until just the time when they are going to be brought out; then there is
a great dispute whom they are to marry, and in the midst of it they are
carried off by the Harpies, given by them to be slaves to the Furies, and
never seen more. But of course there is nothing in Greek myths; and one
never heard of such things as vain desires, and empty hopes, and clouded
passions, defiling and snatching away the souls of maidens, in a London
season.
I have no time to trace for you any more harpy legends, though they are
full of the most curious interest; but I may confirm for you my
interpretation of this one, and prove its importance in the Greek mind,
by noting that Polygnotus painted these maidens, in his great religious
series of paintings at Delphi, crowned with flowers, and playing at dice;
and that Penelope remembers them in her last fit of despair, just before
the return of Ulysses, and prays bitterly that she may be snatched away
at once into nothingness by the Harpies, like Pandareos' daughters,
rather than be tormented longer by her deferred hope, and anguish of
disappointed love.
25. I have hitherto spoken only of deities of the winds. We pass now to
a far more important group, the deities of cloud. Both of these are
subordinate to the ruling power of the air, as the demigods of the
fountains and minor seas are to the great deep; but, as the
cloud-firmament detaches itself more from the air, and has a wider range
of ministry than the minor streams and seas, the highest cloud deity,
Hermes, has a rank more equal with Athena than Nereus or Proteus with
Neptune; and there is greater difficulty in tracing his character,
because his physical dominion over the clouds can, of course, be asserted
only where clouds are; and, therefore, scarcely at all in Egypt;* so that
the changes which Hermes undergoes in becoming a Greek from an Egyptian
and Phœnician god, are greater than in any other case of adopted
tradition In Egypt Hermes is a deity of historical record, and a
conductor of the dead to judgment; the Greeks take away much of this
historical function, assigning it to the Muses; but, in investing him
with the physical power over clouds, they give him that which the Muses
disdain,--the power of concealment and of theft. The snatching away by
the Harpies is with brute force; but the snatching away by the clouds
is connected with the thought of hiding, and of making things seem to
be what they are not; so that Hermes is the god of lying, as he is of
mist; and yet with this ignoble function of making things vanish and
disappear is connected the remnant of his grand Egyptian authority of
leading away souls in the cloud of death (the actual dimness of sight
caused by mortal wounds physically suggesting the darkness and descent
of clouds, and continually being so described in the Iliad); while the
sense of the need of guidance on the untrodden road follows necessarily.
You cannot but remember how this thought of cloud guidance, and cloud
receiving souls at death, has been elsewhere ratified.
* I believe that the conclusions of recent scholarship are generally
opposed to the Herodotean ideas of any direct acceptance by the Greeks
of Egyptian myths: and very certainly, Greek art is developed by giving
the veracity and simplicity of real life to Eastern savage grotesque; and
not by softening the severity of pure Egyptian design. But it is of no
consequence whether one conception was, or was not, in this case, derived
from the other; my object is only to mark the essential difference
between them.
26. Without following that higher clue, I will pass to the lovely group
of myths connected with the birth of Hermes on the Greek mountains. You
know that the valley of Sparta is one of the noblest mountain ravines in
the world, and that the western flank of it is formed by an unbroken
chain of crags, forty miles long, rising, opposite Sparta, to a height of
8,000 feet, and known as the chain of Taygetus. Now, the nymph from whom
that mountain ridge is named was the mother of Lacedæmon; therefore the
mythic ancestress of the Spartan race. She is the nymph Taygeta, and one
of the seven stars of spring; one of those Pleiades of whom is the
question to Job,--"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or
loose the bands of Orion?" "The sweet influences of Pleiades," of the
stars of spring,--nowhere sweeter than among the pine-clad slopes of the
hills of Sparta and Arcadia, when he snows of their higher summits,
beneath the sunshine of April, fell into fountains, and rose into clouds;
and in every ravine was a newly awakened voice of waters,--soft increase
of whisper among its sacred stones; and on every crag its forming and
fading veil of radiant cloud; temple above temple, of the divine marble
that no tool can pollute, nor ruin undermine. And, therefore, beyond
this central valley, this great Greek vase of Arcadia, on the "hollow"
mountain, Cyllene, or "pregnant" mountain, called also "cold," because
there the vapors rest,* and born of the eldest of those stars of spring,
that Maia, from whom your own month of May has its name, bringing to you,
in the green of her garlands, and the white of her hawthorn, the
unrecognized symbols of the pastures and the wreathed snows of Arcadia,
where long ago she was queen of stars: there, first cradled and wrapt in
swaddling-clothes; then raised, in a moment of surprise, into his
wandering power,--is born the shepherd of the clouds, winged-footed and
deceiving,--blinding the eyes of Argus,--escaping from the grasp of
Apollo--restless messenger between the highest sky and topmost earth--
"the herald Mercury, new lighted on a heaven-kissing hill."
* On the altar of Hermes on its summit, as on that of the Lacinian Hera,
no wind ever stirred the ashes. By those altars, the Gods of Heaven were
appeased, and all their storms at rest.
27. Now, it will be wholly impossible, at present, to trace for you any
of the minor Greek expressions of this thought, except only that Mercury,
as the cloud shepherd, is especially called Eriophoros, the wool-bearer.
You will recollect the name from the common woolly rush "eriophorum"
which has a cloud of silky seed; and note also that he wears
distinctively the flap cap, petasos, named from a word meaning "to
expand;" which shaded from the sun, and is worn on journeys. You have
the epithet of mountains "cloud-capped" as an established form with every
poet, and the Mont Pilate of Lucerne is named from a Latin word
signifying specially a woollen cap; but Mercury has, besides, a general
Homeric epithet, curiously and intensely concentrated in meaning, "the
profitable or serviceable by wool,"* that is to say, by shepherd wealth;
hence, "pecuniarily," rich or serviceable, and so he passes at last into
a general mercantile deity; while yet the cloud sense of the wool is
retained by Homer always, so that he gives him this epithet when it would
otherwise have been quite meaningless (in Iliad, xxiv. 440), when he
drives Priam's chariot, and breathes force into his horses, precisely as
we shall find Athena drive Diomed; and yet the serviceable and profitable
sense--and something also of gentle and soothing character in the mere
wool-softness, as used for dress, and religious rites--is retained also
in the epithet, and thus the gentle and serviceable Hermes is opposed to
the deceitful one.
* I am convinced that the 'eri' in 'eriounios' is not intensitive, but
retained from 'erion'; but even if I am wrong in thinking this, the
mistake is of no consequence with respect to the general force of the
term as meaning the profitableness of Hermes. Athena's epithet of
'ageleia' has a parallel significance. [Transcriber's note: words inside
single apostrophes are Greek, and use the Greek alphabet.]
28. In connection with this driving of Priam's chariot, remember that
as Autolycus is the son of Hermes the Deceiver, Myrtilus (the Auriga
of the Stars) is the son of Hermes the Guide. The name Hermes itself
means impulse; and he is especially the shepherd of the flocks of the
sky, in driving, or guiding, or stealing them; and yet his great
name, Argeiphontes, not only--as in different passages of the olden
poets--means "Shining White," which is said of him as being himself the
silver cloud lighted by the sun; but "Argus-killer," the killer of
rightness, which is said of him as he veils the sky, and especially the
stars, which are the eyes of Argus; or, literally, eyes of brightness,
which Juno, who is, with Jupiter, part of the type of highest heaven,
keeps in her peacock's train. We know that this interpretation is
right, from a passage in which Euripides describes the shield of
Hippomedon, which bore for his sign, "Argus the all-seeing, covered
with eyes; open towards the rising of the stars and closed towards
their setting."
And thus Hermes becomes the spirit of the movement of the sky or
firmament; not merely the fast flying of the transitory cloud, but the
great motion of the heavens and stars themselves. Thus, in his highest
power, he corresponds to the "primo mobile" of the later Italian
philosophy, and, in his simplest, is the guide of all mysterious and
cloudy movement, and of all successful subtleties. Perhaps the prettiest
minor recognition of his character is when, on the night foray of Ulysses
and Diomed, Ulysses wear the helmet stolen by Autolycus, the son of
Hermes.
29. The position in the Greek mind of Hermes as the lord of cloud is,
however, more mystic and ideal than that of any other deity, just on
account of the constant and real presence of the cloud itself under
different forms, giving rise to all kinds of minor fables. The play of
the Greek imagination in this direction is so wide and complex, that I
cannot give you an outline of its range in my present limits. There is
first a great series of storm-legends connected with the family of the
historic Æolus centralized by the story of Athamas, with his two wives,
"the Cloud," and the "White Goddess," ending in that of Phrixus and
Helle, and of the golden fleece (which is only the cloud-burden of Hermes
Eriophoros). With this, there is the fate of Salmoneus, and the
destruction of the Glaucus by his own horses; all these minor myths of
storm concentrating themselves darkly into the legend of Bellerophon and
the Chimæra, in which there is an under story about the vain subduing of
passion and treachery, and the end of life in fading melancholy,--which,
I hope, not many of you could understand even were I to show it you (the
merely physical meaning of the Chimæra is the cloud of volcanic lightning
connected wholly with earth-fire, but resembling the heavenly cloud in
its height and its thunder). Finally, in the Æolic group, there is the
legend of Sisypus, which I mean to work out thoroughly by itself; its
root is in the position of Corinth as ruling the isthmus and the two seas
--the Corinthean Acropolis, two thousand feet high, being the centre of
the crossing currents of the winds, and of the commerce of Greece.
Therefore, Athena, and the fountain-cloud Pegasus, are more closely
connected with Corinth than even with Athens in their material, though
not in their moral, power; and Sisyphus founds the Isthmian games in
connection with a melancholy story about the sea gods; but he himself is
'kerdotos andron', the most "gaining" and subtle of men; who having the
key of the Isthmus, becomes the type of transit, transfer, or trade, as
such; and of the apparent gain from it, which is not gain; and this is
the real meaning of his punishment in hell--eternal toil and recoil (the
modern idol of capital being, indeed, the stone of Sisyphus with a
vengeance, crushing in its recoil). But, throughout, the old ideas of
the cloud power and cloud feebleness,--the deceit of its hiding,--and the
emptiness of its banishing,--the Autolycus enchantment of making black
seem white,--and the disappointed fury of Ixion (taking shadow for
power), mingle in the moral meaning of this and its collateral legends;
and give an aspect, at last, not only of foolish cunning, but of impiety
or literal "idolatry," "imagination worship," to the dreams of avarice
and injustice, until this notion of atheism and insolent blindness
becomes principal; and the "Clouds" of Aristophanes, with the personified
"just" and "unjust" sayings in the latter part of the play, foreshadow,
almost feature by feature, in all that they were written to mock and to
chastise, the worst elements of the impious "'dinos'" and tumult in men's
thoughts, which have followed on their avarice in the present day, making
them alike forsake the laws of their ancient gods, and misapprehended or
reject the true words of their existing teachers.
30. All this we have from the legends of the historic Æolus only; but,
besides these, there is the beautiful story of Semele, the mother of
Bacchus. She is the cloud with the strength of the vine in its bosom,
consumed by the light which matures the fruit; the melting away of the
cloud into the clean air at the fringe of its edges being exquisitely
rendered by Pindar's epithet for her, Semele, "with the stretched-out
hair" ('tauuetheira'.) Then there is the entire tradition of the
Danaides, and of the tower of Danaë and golden shower; the birth of
Perseus connecting this legend with that of the Gorgons and Graiæ, who
are the true clouds of thunderous ruin and tempest. I must, in passing,
mark for you that the form of the sword or sickle of Perseus, with which
he kills Medusa, is another image of the whirling harpy vortex, and
belongs especially to the sword of destruction or annihilation; whence it
is given to the two angels who gather for destruction the evil harvest
and evil vintage of the earth (Rev. xiv. 15). I will collect afterwards
and complete what I have already written respecting the Pegasean and
Gorgonian legends, noting here only what is necessary to explain the
central myth of Athena herself, who represents the ambient air, which
included all cloud, and rain, and dew, and darkness, and peace, and wrath
of heaven. Let me now try to give you, however briefly, some distinct
idea of the several agencies of this great goddess.
31. I. She is the air giving life and health to all animals.
II. She is the air giving vegetative power to the earth.
III. She is the air giving motion to the sea, and rendering
navigation possible.
IV. She is the air nourishing artificial light, torch or lamplight;
as opposed to that of the sun, on one hand, and of consuming*
fire on the other.
V. She is the air conveying vibration of sound.
* Not a scientific, but a very practical and expressive distinction.