MYTHOLOGY
[Sidenote: Status of fable in the mind.]
Primitive thought has the form of poetry and the function of prose.
Being thought, it distinguishes objects from the experience that reveals
them and it aspires to know things as they are; but being poetical, it
attributes to those objects all the qualities which the experience of
them contains, and builds them out imaginatively in all directions,
without distinguishing what is constant and efficacious in them. This
primitive habit of thought survives in mythology, which is an
observation of things encumbered with all they can suggest to a dramatic
fancy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the common
root and raw material of both. Free poetry is a thing which early man is
too poor to indulge in; his wide-open eyes are too intently watching
this ominous and treacherous world. For pure science he has not enough
experience, no adequate power to analyse, remember, and abstract; his
soul is too hurried and confused, too thick with phantoms, to follow
abstemiously the practical threads through the labyrinth. His view of
things is immensely overloaded; what he gives out for description is
more than half soliloquy; but his expression of experience is for that
very reason adequate and quite sincere. Belief, which we have come to
associate with religion, belongs really to science; myths are not
believed in, they are conceived and understood. To demand belief for an
idea is already to contrast interpretation with knowledge; it is to
assert that that idea has scientific truth. Mythology cannot flourish in
that dialectical air; it belongs to a deeper and more ingenuous level of
thought, when men pored on the world with intense indiscriminate
interest, accepting and recording the mind’s vegetation no less than
that observable in things, and mixing the two developments together in
one wayward drama.
[Sidenote: It requires genius.]
A good mythology cannot be produced without much culture and
intelligence. Stupidity is not poetical. Nor is mythology essentially a
half-way house between animal vagueness in the soul and scientific
knowledge. It is conceivable that some race, not so dreamful as ours,
should never have been tempted to use psychic and passionate categories
in reading nature, but from the first should have kept its observations
sensuous and pure, elaborating them only on their own plane,
mathematically and dialectically. Such a race, however, could hardly
have had lyric or dramatic genius, and even in natural science, which
requires imagination, they might never have accomplished anything. The
Hebrews, denying themselves a rich mythology, remained without science
and plastic art; the Chinese, who seem to have attained legality and
domestic arts and a tutored sentiment without passing through such
imaginative tempests as have harassed us, remain at the same time
without a serious science or philosophy. The Greeks, on the contrary,
precisely the people with the richest and most irresponsible myths,
first conceived the cosmos scientifically, and first wrote rational
history and philosophy. So true it is that vitality in any mental
function is favourable to vitality in the whole mind. Illusions incident
to mythology are not dangerous in the end, because illusion finds in
experience a natural though painful cure. Extravagant error is unstable,
unless it be harmless and confined to a limbo remote from all
applications; if it touches experience it is stimulating and brief,
while the equipoise of dulness may easily render dulness eternal. A
developed mythology shows that man has taken a deep and active interest
both in the world and in himself, and has tried to link the two, and
interpret the one by the other. Myth is therefore a natural prologue to
philosophy, since the love of ideas is the root of both. Both are made
up of things admirable to consider.
[Sidenote: It only half deceives.]
Nor is the illusion involved in fabulous thinking always so complete and
opaque as convention would represent it. In taking fable for fact, good
sense and practice seldom keep pace with dogma. There is always a race
of pedants whose function it is to materialise everything ideal, but the
great world, half shrewdly, half doggedly, manages to escape their
contagion. Language may be entirely permeated with myth, since the
affinities of language have much to do with men gliding into such
thoughts; yet the difference between language itself and what it
expresses is not so easily obliterated. In spite of verbal traditions,
people seldom take a myth in the same sense in which they would take an
empirical truth. All the doctrines that have flourished in the world
about immortality have hardly affected men’s natural sentiment in the
face of death, a sentiment which those doctrines, if taken seriously,
ought wholly to reverse. Men almost universally have acknowledged a
Providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions
and fears in the presence of events; and yet, if Providence had ever
been really trusted, those preferences would all have lapsed, being seen
to be blind, rebellious, and blasphemous. Prayer, among sane people, has
never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end; a proof
that the sphere of expression was never really confused with that of
reality. Indeed, such a confusion, if it had passed from theory to
practice, would have changed mythology into madness. With rare
exceptions this declension has not occurred and myths have been taken
with a grain of salt which not only made them digestible, but heightened
their savour.
It is always by its applicability to things known, not by its
revelation of things unknown and irrelevant, that a myth at its birth
appeals to mankind. When it has lost its symbolic value and sunk to the
level of merely false information, only an inert and stupid tradition
can keep it above water. Parables justify themselves but dogmas call for
an apologist. The genial offspring of prophets and poets then has to be
kept alive artificially by professional doctors. A thing born of fancy,
moulded to express universal experience and its veritable issues, has to
be hedged about by misrepresentation, sophistry, and party spirit. The
very apologies and unintelligent proofs offered in its defence in a way
confess its unreality, since they all strain to paint in more plausible
colours what is felt to be in itself extravagant and incredible.
[Sidenote: Its interpretative essence.]
Yet if the myth was originally accepted it could not be for this falsity
plainly written on its face; it was accepted because it was understood,
because it was seen to express reality in an eloquent metaphor. Its
function was to show up some phase of experience in its totality and
moral issue, as in a map we reduce everything geographically in order to
overlook it better in its true relations. Had those symbols for a moment
descended to the plane of reality they would have lost their meaning and
dignity; they would tell us merely that they themselves existed bodily,
which would be false, while about the real configuration of life they
would no longer tell us anything. Such an error, if carried through to
the end, would nullify all experience and arrest all life. Men would be
reacting on expressions and meeting with nothing to express. They would
all be like word-eating philosophers or children learning the catechism.
The true function of mythical ideas is to present and interpret events
in terms relative to spirit. Things have uses in respect to the will
which are direct and obvious, while the inner machinery of these same
things is intricate and obscure. We therefore conceive things roughly
and superficially by their eventual practical functions and assign to
them, in our game, some counterpart of the interest they affect in us.
This counterpart, to our thinking, constitutes their inward character
and soul. So conceived, soul and character are purely mythical, being
arrived at by dramatising events according to our own fancy and
interest. Such ideas may be adequate in their way if they cover all the
uses we may eventually find in the objects they transcribe for us
dramatically. But the most adequate mythology is mythology still; it
does not, like science, set things before us in the very terms they will
wear when they are gradually revealed to experience. Myth is expression,
it is not prophecy. For this reason myth is something on which the mind
rests; it is an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digested
and transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue.
[Sidenote: Contrast with science.]
Scientific formulas, on the contrary, cry aloud for retranslation into
perceptual terms; they are like tight-ropes, on which a man may walk but
on which he cannot stand still. These unstable symbols lead, however, to
real facts and define their experimental relations; while the mind
reposing contentedly in a myth needs to have all observation and
experience behind it, for it will not be driven to gather more. The
perfect and stable myth would rest on a complete survey and steady
focussing of all interests really affecting the one from whose point of
view the myth was framed. Then each physical or political unit would be
endowed with a character really corresponding to all its influence on
the thinker. This symbol would render the diffuse natural existences
which it represented in an eloquent figure; and since this figure would
not mislead practically it might be called true. But truth, in a myth,
means a sterling quality and standard excellence, not a literal or
logical truth. It will not, save by a singular accident, represent their
proper internal being, as a forthright unselfish intellect would wish to
know it. It will translate into the language of a private passion the
smiles and frowns which that passion meets with in the world.
[Sidenote: Importance of the moral factor.]
There are accordingly two factors in mythology, a moral consciousness
and a corresponding poetic conception of things. Both factors are
variable, and variations in the first, if more hidden, are no less
important than variations in the second. Had fable started with a clear
perception of human values, it would have gained immensely in
significance, because its pictures, however wrong the external notions
they built upon, would have shown what, in the world so conceived, would
have been the ideals and prizes of life. Thus Dante’s bad cosmography
and worse history do not detract from the spiritual penetration of his
thought, though they detract from its direct applicability. Had nature
and destiny been what Dante imagined, his conception of the values
involved would have been perfect, for the moral philosophy he brought
into play was Aristotelian and rational. So his poem contains a false
instance or imaginary rehearsal of true wisdom. It describes the Life of
Reason in a fantastic world. We need only change man’s situation to that
in which he actually finds himself, and let the soul, fathomed and
chastened as Dante left it, ask questions and draw answers from this
steadier dream.
[Sidenote: Its submergence.]
Myth travels among the people, and in their hands its poetic factor
tends to predominate. It is easier to carry on the dialectic or drama
proper to a fable than to confront it again with the facts and give them
a fresh and more genial interpretation. The poet makes the fable; the
sophist carries it on. Therefore historians and theologians discuss
chiefly the various forms which mythical beings have received, and the
internal logical or moral implications of those hypostases. They would
do better to attend instead to the moral factor. However interesting a
fable may be in itself, its religious value lies wholly in its revealing
some function which nature has in human life. Not the beauty of the god
makes him adorable, but his dispensing benefits and graces. Side by side
with Apollo (a god having moral functions and consequently inspiring a
fervent cult and tending himself to assume a moral character) there may
be a Helios or a Phaëthon, poetic figures expressing just as well the
sun’s physical operation, and no less capable, if the theologian took
hold of them, of suggesting psychological problems. The moral factor,
however, was not found in these minor deities. Only a verbal and
sensuous poetry had been employed in defining them; the needs and hopes
of mankind had been ignored. Apollo, on the contrary, in personifying
the sun, had embodied also the sun’s relations to human welfare. The
vitality, the healing, the enlightenment, the lyric joy flowing into
man’s heart from that highest source of his physical being are all
beautifully represented in the god’s figure and fable. The religion of
Apollo is therefore a true religion, as religions may be true: the
mythology which created the god rested on a deep, observant sense for
moral values, and drew a vivid, if partial, picture of the ideal,
attaching it significantly to its natural ground.
[Sidenote: Myth justifies magic.]
The first function of mythology is to justify magic. The weak hope on
which superstition hangs, the gambler’s instinct which divines in
phenomena a magic solicitude for human fortunes, can scarcely be
articulated without seeking to cover and justify itself by some fable. A
magic function is most readily conceived and defined by attributing to
the object intentions hostile or favourable to men, together with human
habits of passion and discourse. For lack of resources and observations,
reason is seldom able to discredit magic altogether. Reasonable men are
forced, therefore, in order to find some satisfaction, to make magic as
intelligible as possible by assimilating it to such laws of human action
as may be already mastered and familiar. Magic is thus reduced to a sort
of system, regulated by principles of its own and naturalised, as it
were, in the commonwealth of science.
[Sidenote: Myths might be metaphysical.]
Such an avowed and defended magic usually takes one of two forms. When
the miracle is interpreted dramatically, by analogy to human life, we
have mythology; when it is interpreted rationalistically, by analogy to
current logic or natural science, we have metaphysics or theosophy. The
metaphysical sort of superstition has never taken deep root in the
western world. Pythagorean mysteries and hypnotisations, although
periodically fashionable, have soon shrivelled in our too salubrious and
biting air. Even such charming exotics as Plato’s myths have not been
able to flourish without changing their nature and passing into ordinary
dramatic mythology—into a magic system in which all the forces, once
terms in moral experience, became personal angels and demons. Similarly
with the Christian sacraments: these magic rites, had they been
established in India among a people theosophically minded, might have
furnished cues to high transcendental mysteries. Baptism might have been
interpreted as a symbol for the purged and abolished will, and Communion
as a symbol for the escape from personality. But European races, though
credulous enough, are naturally positivistic, so that, when they were
called upon to elucidate their ceremonial mysteries, what they lit upon
was no metaphysical symbolism but a material and historical drama.
Communion became a sentimental interview between the devout soul and the
person of Christ; baptism became the legal execution of a mythical
contract once entered into between the first and second persons of the
Trinity. Thus, instead of a metaphysical interpretation, the extant
magic received its needful justification through myths.
[Sidenote: They appear ready made, like parts of the social fabric.]
When mythology first appears in western literature it already possesses
a highly articulate form. The gods are distinct personalities, with
attributes and histories which it is hard to divine the source of and
which suggest no obvious rational interpretation. The historian is
therefore in the same position as a child who inherits a great religion.
The gods and their doings are _prima facie_ facts in his world like any
other facts, objective beings that convention puts him in the presence
of and with which he begins by having social relations. He envisages
them with respect and obedience, or with careless defiance, long before
he thinks of questioning or proving their existence. The attitude he
assumes towards them makes them in the first instance factors in his
moral world. Much subsequent scepticism and rationalising philosophy
will not avail to efface the vestiges of that early communion with
familiar gods. It is hard to reduce to objects of science what are
essentially factors in moral intercourse. All thoughts on religion
remain accordingly coloured with passion, and are felt to be, above all,
a test of loyalty and an index to virtue. The more derivative,
unfathomable, and opaque is the prevalent idea of the gods, the harder
it is for a rational feeling to establish itself in their regard.
Sometimes the most complete historical enlightenment will not suffice to
dispel the shadow which their moral externality casts over the mind. In
vain do we discard their fable and the thin proofs of their existence
when, in spite of ourselves, we still live in their presence.
[Sidenote: They perplex the conscience.]
This pathetic phenomenon is characteristic of religious minds that have
outgrown their traditional faith without being able to restate the
natural grounds and moral values of that somehow precious system in
which they no longer believe. The dead gods, in such cases, leave
ghosts behind them, because the moral forces which the gods once
expressed, and which, of course, remain, remain inarticulate; and
therefore, in their dumbness, these moral forces persistently suggest
their only known but now discredited symbols. To regain moral
freedom—without which knowledge cannot be put to its rational use in
the government of life—we must rediscover the origin of the gods,
reduce them analytically to their natural and moral constituents, and
then proceed to rearrange those materials, without any quantitative
loss, in forms appropriate to a maturer reflection.
Of the innumerable and rather monotonous mythologies that have
flourished in the world, only the Græco-Roman and the Christian need
concern us here, since they are by far the best known to us and the best
defined in themselves, as well as the only two likely to have any
continued influence on the western mind. Both these systems pre-suppose
a long prior development. The gods of Greece and of Israel have a
full-blown character when we first meet them in literature. In both
cases, however, we are fortunate in being able to trace somewhat further
back the history of mythology, and do not depend merely on philosophic
analysis to reach the elements which we seek.
[Sidenote: Incipient myth in the Vedas.]
In the Vedic hymns there survives the record of a religion remarkably
like the Greek in spirit, but less dramatic and articulate in form. The
gods of the Vedas are unmistakably natural elements. Vulcan is there
nothing but fire, Jupiter nothing but the sky. This patriarchal people,
fresh from the highlands, had not yet been infected with the manias and
diseases of the jungle. It lived simply, rationally, piously, loving all
natural joys and delighted with all the instruments of a rude but pure
civilisation. It saluted without servility the forces of nature which
ministered to its needs. It burst into song in the presence of the
magnificent panorama spread out before it—day-sky and night-sky, dawn
and gloaming, clouds, thunder and rain, rivers, cattle and horses,
grain, fruit, fire, and wine. Nor were the social sanctities neglected.
Commemoration was made of the stages of mortal life, of the bonds of
love and kinship, of peace, of battle, and of mourning for the dead. By
a very intelligible figure and analogy the winds became shepherds, the
clouds flocks, the day a conqueror, the dawn a maid, the night a wise
sibyl and mysterious consort of heaven. These personifications were
tentative and vague, and the consequent mythology was a system of
rhetoric rather than of theology. The various gods had interchangeable
attributes, and, by a voluntary confusion, quite in the manner of later
Hindu poetry, each became on occasion any or all of the others.
Here the Indian pantheistic vertigo begins to appear. Many dark
superstitions, no doubt, bubbled up in the torrent of that plastic
reverie; for this people, clean and natural as on the whole it appears,
cannot have been without a long and ignoble ancestry. The Greeks
themselves, heirs to kindred general traditions, retained some childish
and obscene practices in their worship. But such hobgoblins naturally
vanish under a clear and beneficent sun and are scattered by healthy
mountain breezes. A cheerful people knows how to take them lightly, play
with them, laugh at them, and turn them again into figures of speech.
Among the early speakers of Sanskrit, even more than among the Greeks,
the national religion seems to have been nothing but a poetic
naturalism.
Such a mythology, however, is exceedingly plastic and unstable. If the
poet is observant and renews his impressions, his myths will become more
and more accurate descriptions of the facts, and his hypotheses about
phenomena will tend to be expressed more and more in terms of the
phenomena themselves; that is, will tend to become scientific. If, on
the contrary and as usually happens, the inner suggestions and fertility
of his fables absorb his interest, and he neglects to consult his
external perceptions any further, or even forgets that any such
perceptions originally inspired the myth, he will tend to become a
dramatic poet, guided henceforth in his fictions only by his knowledge
and love of human life.
[Sidenote: Natural suggestions soon exhausted.]
[Sidenote: They will be carried out in abstract fancy.]
When we transport ourselves in fancy to patriarchal epochs and Arcadian
scenes, we can well feel the inevitable tendency of the mind to
mythologise and give its myths a more and more dramatic character. The
phenomena of nature, unintelligible rationally but immensely impressive,
must somehow be described and digested. But while they compel attention
they do not, after a while, enlarge experience. Husbandmen’s lore is
profound, practical, poetic, superstitious, but it is singularly
stagnant. The cycle of natural changes goes its perpetual round and the
ploughman’s mind, caught in that narrow vortex, plods and plods after
the seasons. Apart from an occasional flood, drought, or pestilence,
nothing breaks his laborious torpor. The most cursory inspection of
field and sky yields him information enough for his needs. Practical
knowledge with him is all instinct and tradition. His mythology can for
that very reason ride on nature with a looser rein. If at the same time,
however, his circumstances are auspicious and he feels practically
secure, he will have much leisure to ripen inwardly and to think. He
hasten to unfold in meditation the abstract potentialities of his mind.
His social and ideal passions, his aptitude for art and fancy, will
arouse within him a far keener and more varied experience than his outer
life can supply. Yet all his fortunes continue to be determined by
external circumstances and to have for their theatre this given and
uncontrollable world. Some conception of nature and the gods—that is,
in his case, some mythology—must therefore remain before him always and
stand in his mind for the real forces controlling experience.
His moral powers and interests have meantime notably developed. His
sense for social relations has grown clear and full in proportion as his
observation of nature has sunk into dull routine. Consequently, the
myths by which reality is represented lose, so to speak, their
birthright and first nationality. They pass under the empire of abstract
cogitation and spontaneous fancy. They become naturalised in the mind.
The poet cuts loose from nature and works out instead whatever hints of
human character or romantic story the myth already supplies. Analogies
drawn from moral and passionate experience replace the further
portraiture of outer facts. Human tastes, habits, and dreams enter the
fable, expanding it into some little drama, or some mystic anagram of
mortal life. While in the beginning the sacred poet had transcribed
nothing but joyous perceptions and familiar industrial or martial
actions, he now introduces intrigue, ingenious adventures, and heroic
passions.
[Sidenote: They may become moral ideals.]
When we turn from the theology of the Vedas to that of Homer we see this
revolution already accomplished. The new significance of mythology has
obscured the old, and was a symbol for material facts has become a
drama, an apologue, and an ideal. Thus one function of mythology has
been nothing less than to carry religion over from superstition into
wisdom, from an excuse and apology for magic into an ideal
representation of moral goods. In his impotence and sore need a man
appeals to magic; this appeal he justifies by imagining a purpose and a
god behind the natural agency. But after his accounts with the phenomena
are settled by his own labour and patience, he continues to be
fascinated by the invisible spirit he has evoked. He cherishes this
image; it becomes his companion, his plastic and unaccountable witness
and refuge in all the exigencies of life. Dwelling in the mind
continually, the deity becomes acclimated there; the worship it receives
endows it with whatever powers and ideal faculties are most feared or
honoured by its votary. Now the thunder and the pestilence which were
once its essence come to be regarded as its disguises and its foils.
Faith comes to consist in disregarding what it was once religion to
regard, namely, the ways of fortune and the conditions of earthly
happiness. Thus the imagination sets up its ideals over against the
world that occasioned them, and mythology, instead of cheating men with
false and magic aids to action, moralises them by presenting an ideal
standard for action and a perfect object for contemplation.
[Sidenote: The sun-god moralised.]
If we consider again, for instance, Apollo’s various attributes and the
endless myths connected with his name, we shall find him changing his
essence and forgetting to be the material sun in order to become the
light of a cultivated spirit. At first he is the sky’s child, and has
the moon for twin sister. His mother is an impersonation of darkness and
mystery. He travels yearly from the hyperborean regions toward the
south, and daily he traverses the firmament in a chariot. He sleeps in a
sea-nymph’s bosom or rises from the dawn’s couch. In all this we see
clearly a scarcely figurative description of the material sun and its
motions. A quasi-scientific fancy spins these fables almost inevitably
to fill the vacuum not yet occupied by astronomy. Such myths are indeed
compacted out of wonders, not indeed to add wonder to them (for the
original and greatest marvel persists always in the sky), but to
entertain us with pleasant consideration of them and with their
assimilation to our own fine feats. This assimilation is unavoidable in
a poet ignorant of physics, whom human life must supply with all his
vocabulary and similes. Fortunately in this need of introducing romance
into phenomena lies the leaven that is to leaven the lump, the subtle
influence that is to moralise religion. For presently Apollo becomes a
slayer of monsters (a function no god can perform until he has ceased to
be a monster himself), he becomes the lovely and valorous champion of
humanity, the giver of prophecy, of music, of lyric song, even the
patron of medicine and gymnastics.
[Sidenote: The leaven of religion is moral idealism.]
What a humane and rational transformation! The spirit of Socrates was
older than the man and had long been at work in the Greeks. Interest
had been transferred from nature to art, from the sources to the fruits
of life. We in these days are accustomed as a matter of course to
associate religion with ideal interests. Our piety, unlike our barbarous
pantheistic theology, has long lost sight of its rudimentary material
object, and habituated us to the worship of human sanctity and human
love. We have need all the more to remember how slowly and reluctantly
religion has suffered spiritualisation, how imperfectly as yet its
superstitious origin has been outgrown. We have need to retrace with the
greatest attention the steps by which a moral value has been insinuated
into what would otherwise be nothing but a medley of magic rites and
poetic physics. It is this submerged idealism which alone, in an age
that should have finally learned how to operate in nature and how to
conceive her processes, could still win for religion a philosopher’s
attention or a legislator’s mercy.