THE MYTH AND THE MYTHICAL CYCLES.
Returning again to the definition of the elemental religious
sentiment--“a Wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power”--it
enables us to class all those notions, opinions and narratives, which
constitute mythologies, creeds and dogmas, as theories respecting the
nature and action of the unknown power. Of course they are not
recognized as theories. They arise unconsciously or are received by
tradition, oral or written, and always come with the stamp of divinity
through inspiration and revelation. None but a god can tell the secrets
of the gods.
Therefore they are the most sacred of all things, and they partake of
the holiness and immutability which belong to the unknown power itself.
To misplace a vowel point in copying the sacred books was esteemed a sin
by the Rabbis, and a pious Mussulman will not employ the same pen to
copy a verse of the Koran and an ordinary letter. There are many
Christians who suppose the saying: “Heaven and earth shall pass away,
but My Words shall not pass away,” has reference to the words of the Old
and New Testament. “What shall remain to us,” asked Ananda, the disciple
of Buddha, “when thou shalt have gone hence into Nirvana?” “My Word
(_dharma_),” replied the Master. Names thus came to be as holy as the
objects to which they referred. So sacred was that of Jehovah to the
Israelites that its original sound was finally lost. Such views are
consistent enough to the Buddhist, who, assuming all existence to be but
imaginary, justly infers that the name is full as much as the object.
The science of mythology has made long strides in the last half century.
It has left far behind it the old euphemeristic view that the myth is a
distorted historical tradition, as well as the theories not long since
in vogue, that it was a system of natural philosophy, a device of shrewd
rulers, or as Bacon thought, a series of “instructive fables.” The
primitive form of the myth is now recognized to be made up from the
notions which man gains of the manifestations of force in external
nature, in their supposed relations to himself. In technical language it
may be defined as _the apperception of man and nature under synthetic
conceptions_.[156-1]
This primitive form undergoes numerous changes, to trace and illustrate
which, has been the special task assumed by the many recent writers on
mythology. In some instances these changes are owing to the blending of
the myth with traditions of facts, forming a quasi-historical narrative,
the _saga;_ in others, elaborated by a poetic fancy and enriched by the
imagination, it becomes a fairy tale, the _märchen_. Again, the myth
being a product of creative thought, existing in words only, as language
changes, it alters through forgetfulness of the earlier meanings of
words, through similarities in sounds deceiving the ear, or through a
confusion of the literal with the metaphorical signification of the same
word. The character of languages also favors or retards such changes,
pliable and easily modified ones, such as those of the American Indians,
and in a less degree those of the Aryan nations, favoring a developed
mythology, while rigid and monosyllabic ones, as the Chinese and Semitic
types, offer fewer facilities to such variations. Furthermore, tribal or
national history, the peculiar difficulties which retard the growth of
a community, and the geographical and climatic character of its
surroundings, give prominence to certain features in its mythology, and
to the absence of others. Myths originally diverse are blended, either
unconsciously, as that of the Roman Saturn with the Greek Cronus; or
consciously, as when the medieval missionaries transferred the deeds of
the German gods to Christian saints. Lastly, the prevailing temperament
of a nation, its psychology, gives a strong color to its mythical
conceptions, and imprints upon them the national peculiarities.
The judicious student of mythology must carefully weigh all these
formative agents, and assign each its value. They are all present in
every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when
he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a
myth and these governing agencies.
Such is the science of mythology. The philosophy of mythology undertakes
to set forth the unities of form which exist in various myths, and
putting aside whatever of this uniformity is explainable historically,
proposes to illustrate from what remains the intellectual need myths
were unconsciously framed to gratify, to measure their success in this
attempt, and if they have not been wholly successful, to point out why
and in what respect they have failed. In a study preliminary to the
present one, I have attempted to apply the rules of mythological science
to the limited area of the native American race; in the present chapter
I shall deal mainly with the philosophy of mythology.
The objection may be urged at starting that there is no such unity of
form in myths as the philosophy of mythology assumes; that if it
appears, it is always explainable historically.
A little investigation sets this objection aside. Certain features must
be common to all myths. A divinity must appear in them and his doings
with men must be recorded. A reasonable being can hardly think at all
without asking himself, “Whence come I, my fellows, and these things
which I see? And what will become of us all?” So some myth is sure to be
created at an early stage of thought which the parent can tell the
child, the wise man his disciple, containing responses to such
questions.
But this reasoning from probability is needless, for the similarity of
mythical tales in very distant nations, where no hypothesis of ancient
intercourse is justified, is one of the best ascertained and most
striking discoveries of modern mythological investigation.[159-1] The
general character of “solar myths” is familiar to most readers, and the
persistency with which they have been applied to the explanation of
generally received historical facts, as well as to the familiar fairy
tales of childhood, has been pushed so far as to become the subject of
satire and caricature. The myths of the Dawn have been so frequently
brought to public notice in the popular writings of Professor Max
Müller, that their general distribution may be taken as well known. The
same may be said of the storm myths. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who thought
deeply on the religious nature of man, said early in this century:
“Wholly similar myths can very readily arise in different localities,
each independent of the others.”[160-1]
This similarity is in a measure owing to the similar impressions which
the same phenomenon, the sunrise or the thunder-storm for instance,
makes on the mind--and to this extent the science of mythology is
adequate to its explanation. But that it falls short is so generally
acknowledged, that various other explanations have been offered.
These may be classed as the skeptical explanation, which claims that the
likeness of the myths is vastly exaggerated and much more the work of
the scholar at his desk than of the honest worshipper; the historical
explanation, which suggests unrecorded proselytisms, forgotten
communications and the possible original unity of widely separated
nations; the theological explanations, often discrepant, one suggesting
caricatures of the sacred narrative inspired by the Devil, another
reminiscences of a primeval inspiration, and a third the unconscious
testimony of heathendom to orthodoxy;[161-1] and lastly the metaphysical
explanation, which seems at present to be the fashionable one, expressed
nearly alike by Steinthal and Max Müller, which cuts the knot by
crediting man with “an innate consciousness of the Absolute,” or as
Renan puts it, “a profound instinct of deity.”
The philosophy of mythology, differing from all these, finding beyond
question similarities which history cannot unriddle, interprets them by
no incomprehensible assumption, but by the identity of the laws of
thought acting on similar impressions under the guidance of known
categories of thought. Nor does it stop here, but proceeds to appraise
these results by the general scheme of truth and error. It asks for
what psychological purpose man has so universally imagined for himself
gods--pure creations of his fancy;--whether that purpose can now or will
ultimately be better attained by an exercise of his intellect more in
accordance with the laws of right reasoning; and thus seeking to define
the genuine food of the religious desire, estimates the quality and
value of each mythological system by the nearness of its approach to
this standard.
The philosophy of mythology, starting with the wish or prayer as the
unit of religious thought, regards all myths as theories about the
unknown power which is supposed to grant or withhold the accomplishment
of the wish. These theories are all based upon the postulate of the
religious sentiment, that there is order in things; but they differ from
scientific theories in recognizing volition as an efficient cause of
order.
The very earliest efforts at religious thought do not rise to the
formation of myths, that is, connected narratives about supernatural
beings. All unknown power is embraced under a word which does not convey
the notion of personality; single exhibitions of power which threaten
man’s life are supposed to be the doings of an unseen person, often of a
deceased man, whose memory survives; but any general theory of a
hierarchy, or of the world or man, is not yet visible. Even such
immature notions are, however, so far as they go, framed within the
category of causality; only, the will of the god takes the place of all
other force. This stage of religious thought has been called Animism, a
name which does not express its peculiarity, which is, that all force is
not only supposed to proceed from mind, but through what metaphysicians
call “immanent volition,” that is, through will independent of relation.
Mind as “emanant volition,” in unison with matter and law, the “seat of
law,” to use an expression of Professor Boole’s, may prove the highest
conception of force.
As the slowly growing reason reached more general notions, the law which
prescribes unity as a condition of thought led man early in his history
to look upon nature as one, and to seek for some one law of its changes;
the experience of social order impressed him with the belief that the
unseen agencies around him also bore relations to each other, and
acknowledged subjection to a leader; and the pangs of sickness, hunger
and terror to which he was daily exposed, and more than all the “last
and greatest of all terribles, death,” which he so often witnessed,
turned his early meditations toward his own origin and destiny.
Around these three subjects of thought his fancy busied itself, striving
to fabricate some theory which would solve the enigmas which his reason
everywhere met, some belief which would relieve him from the haunting
horror of the unknown. Hence arose three great cycles of myths, which
recur with strangely similar physiognomies in all continents and among
all races. They are the myths of the Epochs of Nature, the Hierarchy of
the Gods, and of the Paradise lost but to be regained. Wherever we turn,
whether to the Assyrian tablets or to the verses of the Voluspa, to the
crude fancies of the red man of the new world or the black man of the
African plateau, to the sacred books of the modern Christian or of the
ancient Brahman, we find these same questions occupying his mind, and in
meaning and in form the same solutions proffered. Through what
intellectual operations he reached these solutions, and their validity,
as tested by the known criteria of truth, it is the province of the
philosophy of mythology to determine.
Let us study the psychological growth of the myth of the Epochs of
Nature. This tells of the World, its beginning, its convulsions and its
ending, and thus embraces the three minor cycles of the cosmogonical,
the cataclysmal and the eschatological myths.
Nature is known to man only as _force_, which manifests itself in
_change_. He is so constituted that “the idea of an event, a change,
without the idea of a cause, is impossible” to him. But in passing from
the occurrence to its cause the idea of Time is unavoidable; it presents
itself as the one inevitable condition of change; itself unwearing, it
wears out all else; it includes all existence, as the greater does the
less; and as “causation is necessarily within existence,”[165-1] time is
beyond existence and includes the nonexistent as well. Whatever it
creates, it also destroys; and as even the gods are but existences, it
will swallow them. It renders vain all pleasures, and carries the balm
of a certain oblivion for all woes.
This oppressive sense of time, regarded not in its real meaning as one
of the conditions of perception, but as an active force destroying
thought as well as motion, recurs continually in mythology. To the
Greek, indefinite time as Cronos, was the oldest of the gods, begetting
numberless children, but with unnatural act consuming them again; while
definite time, as the Horæ, were the blithe goddesses of the order in
nature and the recurrent seasons. Osiris, supreme god of the Egyptians,
was born of a yet older god, Sev, Time. Adonis and Aeon acknowledge the
same parentage.[165-2] The ancient Arab spoke of time (_dahr_, _zaman_)
as the final, defining principle; as uniting and separating all things;
and as swallowing one thing after another as the camel drains the water
from a trough.[166-1] In the Koran it is written: “Time alone destroys
us.” Here and there, through the sacred songs of the Parsees, composed
long before Aristotle wrote, beyond all the dust and noise of the
everlasting conflict of good and evil, of Ahura Mazda and Anya-Mainyus,
there are glimpses of a deeper power, Zeruana Akerana, Eternal Duration,
unmoved by act or thought, in the face of which these bitter opponents
are seen to be children, brethren, “twin sons of Time.”[166-2] The
Alexandrian Gnostics, in their explanations of Christian dogmas,
identify Aeon, infinite time, with God the Father, as the source and
fount of existence; not merely as a predicate of the highest, but the
Highest himself.
This heavy-weighing sense of the infinity of duration, and the urgency
of escaping from the weariness of thinking it, led to the construction
of the myth of the Creation. Man devised it so that he might be able to
say, “in the beginning.” But a new difficulty met him at the
threshold--as change must be in existence, “we cannot think of a change
from non-existence to existence.” His only refuge was to select some
apparently primordial, simple, homogeneous substance from which, by the
exertion of volition, things came into being. The one which most
naturally suggested itself was _water_.[167-1] This does in fact cover
and hide the land, and the act of creation was often described as the
emerging of the dry land from the water; it dissolves and wears away the
hard rock; and, diminishing all things, itself neither diminishes nor
increases. Therefore nearly all cosmogonical myths are but variations of
that one familiar to us all: “And God said, Let the waters under the
heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear;
and it was so.” The manifestation of the primordial energy was supposed
to have been akin to that which is shown in organic reproduction. The
myths of the primeval egg from which life proceeded, of the mighty bird
typical of the Holy Spirit which “brooded” upon the waters, of Love
developing the Kosmos from the Chaos, of the bull bringing the world
from the waters, of Protogonus, the “egg-born,” the “multispermed,” and
countless others, point to the application of one or the other, or of
both these explanations.[167-2]
In them the early thinkers found some rest: but not for long. The
perplexity of the presence of this immediate order of things seemed
solved; but another kept obtruding itself: what was going on before that
“beginning?” Vain to stifle the inquiry by replying, “nothing.”[168-1]
For time, which knows no beginning, was there, still building, still
destroying; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it. What
then is left but the conclusion of the Preacher: “That which hath been,
is now; and that which is to be, hath already been?” Regarding time as a
form of force, the only possible history of the material universe is
that it is a series of destructions and restorations, force latent
evolving into force active or energy, and this dissipated and absorbed
again into latency.
Expressed in myths, these destructions and restorations are the Epochs
of Nature. They are an essential part of the religious traditions of the
Brahmans, Persians, Parsees, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Mexicans, Mayas,
and of all nations who have reached a certain stage of culture. The
length of the intervening periods may widely differ. The kalpa or great
year of the Brahmans is so long that were a cube of granite a hundred
yards each way brushed once in a century by a soft cloth, it would be
quite worn to dust before the kalpa would close: or, as some Christians
believe, there may be but six thousand years, six days of God in whose
sight “a thousand years are as one day,” between the creation and the
cremation of the world, from when it rose from the waters until it shall
be consumed by the fire.
There were also various views about the agents and the completeness of
these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the
doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the gods can survive the fire of the
last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance
of the virgin world after the icy winter and the fiery summer of the
Great Year. The Brahmans hold that the higher classes of gods outlive
the wreck of things which, at the close of the day of Brahm, involves
all men and many divinities in elemental chaos; while elsewhere, in the
later Puranas and in the myths of Mexico, Peru, and Assyria, one or a
few of the race of man escape a deluge which is universal, and serve to
people the new-made earth. This latter supposition, in its application
to the last epoch of nature, is the origin of the myth of the Flood.
In its general features and even in many details, the story of a vast
overflow which drowned the world, and from which by the timely succor
of divinity some man was preserved, and after the waters had subsided
became the progenitor of the race, is exceedingly common among distant
tribes, where it is impossible to explain it as a reminiscence of a
historic occurrence, or by community of religious doctrine. In Judea
Noah, in India Manu, in Chaldea Xisuthrus, in Assyria Oannes, in Aztlan
Nata, in Algonkin tradition Messou, in Brazil Monan, etc., are all
heroes of similar alleged occurrences. In all of them the story is but a
modification of that of the creation in time from the primeval
waters.[170-1]
“As it was once, so it shall be again,” and as the present age of the
world wears out, the myth teaches that things will once more fall back
to universal chaos. “The expectation of the end of the world is a
natural complement to the belief in its periodical destructions.” It is
taught with distinctness by all religious systems, by the prophetess in
the Voluspa, by the Hebrew seers,[171-1] by the writer of the
Apocalypse, by the Eastern sages, Persian and Indian, by the Roman
Sibyl, and among the savage and semi-civilized races of the New World.
Often that looked for destruction was associated with the divine plans
for man. This was an addition to the simplicity of the original myth,
but an easy and a popular one. The Indian of our prairies still looks
forward to the time when the rivers shall rise, and submerging the land
sweep from its surface the pale-faced intruders, and restore it to its
original owners. Impatient under the ceaseless disappointments of life,
and worn out with the pains which seem inseparable from this condition
of things, the believer gives up his hopes for this world, and losing
his faith in the final conquest of the good, thinks it only attainable
by the total annihilation of the present conditions. He looks for it,
therefore, in the next great age, in the new heaven and the new earth,
when the spirit of evil shall be bound and shut up, and the chosen
people possess the land, “and grow up as calves of the stall.”[172-1]
This is to be inaugurated by the Day of Judgment, “the day of wrath, the
dreadful day,” in which God is to come in his power and pronounce his
final decrees on those who have neglected the observance due him. The
myth, originally one relating to the procession of natural forces, thus
assumed with the increasing depth of the religious sentiment more and
more a moral and subjective coloring, until finally its old and simple
form was altogether discarded, or treated as symbolic only.
The myth of the Epochs of Nature was at first a theory to account for
the existing order of nature. For a long time it satisfied the inquiring
mind, if not with a solution at least with an answer to its queries.
After geologic science had learned to decipher the facts of the world’s
growth as written on the stones which orb it, the religious mind fondly
identified the upheavals and cataclysms there recorded with those which
its own fancy had long since fabricated. The stars and suns, which the
old seer thought would fall from heaven in the day of wrath, were seen
to be involved in motions far beyond the pale of man’s welfare, and,
therefore, the millennial change was confined to the limits of our
planet. Losing more and more of its original form as an attempted
explanation of natural phenomena, the myth now exists in civilized
nations as an allegorical type of man’s own history and destiny, and
thus is slowly merging into an episode of the second great cycle of the
mythus, that of the Paradise lost and regained. It, too, finds its
interpretation in psychology.
Broadly surveying the life of man, philosophers have found in it much
matter fit either for mockery or tears. We are born with a thirst for
pleasure; we learn that pain alone is felt. We ask health; and having
it, never notice it till it is gone. In the ardent pursuit of enjoyment,
we waste our capacity of appreciation. Every sweet we gain is sauced
with a bitter. Our eyes forever bent on the future, which can never be
ours, we fritter away the present, which alone we possess. Ere we have
got ourselves ready to live, we must die. Fooling ourselves even here,
we represent death as the portal to joy unspeakable; and forthwith
discredit our words by avoiding it in every possible way.
Pitiable spectacle of weakness and folly, is it capable of any
explanation which can redeem man from the imputation of unreason? Is
Wisdom even here justified of her children by some deeper law of being?
The theologian explains it as the unrest of the soul penned in its house
of clay; the physiologist attributes it to the unceasing effort of
organic functions to adapt themselves to ever varying external
conditions. They are both right, for the theologian, were his words
translated into the language of science, refers to the _effort to adapt
condition to function_, which is the peculiar faculty of intelligence,
and which alone renders man unable to accept the comfort of merely
animal existence, an inability which he need never expect to outlive,
for it will increase in exact proportion to his mental development.
Action, not rest, as I have elsewhere said, must be his ideal of life.
In even his lowest levels man experiences this dissatisfaction. It may
there be confined to a pain he would be free from, or a pleasure he
dreams of. Always the future charms him, and as advancing years increase
the number of his disappointments and bring with them the pains of
decrepitude, he also recurs to the past, when youth was his, and the
world was bright and gay. Thus it comes that most nations speak of some
earlier period of their history as one characterized by purer public
virtues than the present, one when the fires of patriotism burned
brighter and social harmony was more conspicuous. In rude stages of
society this fancy receives real credit and ranks as a veritable record
of the past, forming a Golden Age or Saturnian Era. Turned in the
kaleidoscope of the mythus, it assumes yet more gorgeous hues, and
becomes a state of pure felicity, an Eden or a Paradise, wherein man
dwelt in joy, and from which he wandered or was driven in the old days.
It is almost needless to quote examples to show the wide distribution of
this myth. The first pages of the Vendidad describe the reign of Yima in
“the garden of delight,” where “there was no cold wind nor violent heat,
no disease and no death.” The northern Buddhist tells of “the land of
joy,” Sukhavati, in the far west, where ruled Amitabha, “infinite
Light.”[175-1] The Edda wistfully recalls the pleasant days of good King
Gudmund who once held sway in Odainsakr, where death came not.[175-2]
Persian story has glad reminiscences of the seven hundred years that
Jemschid sat on the throne of Iran, when peace and plenty were in the
land.
The garden “eastward in Eden” of the Pentateuch, the land of Tulan or
Tlapallan in Aztec myth, the islands of the Hesperides, the rose garden
of Feridun, and a score of other legends attest with what strong
yearning man seeks in the past the picture of that perfect felicity
which the present never yields.
Nor can he be persuaded that the golden age has gone, no more to return.
In all conditions of progress, and especially where the load of the
present was the most wearying, has he counted on a restoration to that
past felicity. The paradise lost is to be regained. How it is to be done
the sages are not agreed. But they of old were unanimous that some
divinity must lend his aid, that some god-sent guide is needed to rescue
man from the slough of wretchedness in which he hopelessly struggles.
Therefore in the new world the red men looked for the ruler who had
governed their happy forefathers in the golden age, and who had not died
but withdrawn mysteriously from view, to return to them, protect them,
and insure them long bliss and ease. The ancient Persians expected as
much from the coming of Craoshanç; the Thibetan Buddhists look to the
advent of a Buddha 5000 years after Sakyamuni, one whose fortunate names
are Maîtrêya, the Loving one, and Adjita, the Unconquerable;[176-1] and
even the practical Roman, as we learn from Virgil, was not a stranger to
this dream. Very many nations felt it quite as strongly as the
Israelites, who from early time awaited a mighty king, the Messiah, the
Anointed, of whom the Targums say: “In his days shall peace be
multiplied;” “He shall execute the judgment of truth and justice on the
earth;” “He shall rule over all kingdoms.”
The early forms of this conception, such as here referred to, looked
forward to an earthly kingdom, identified with that of the past when
this was vigorous in the national mythology. Material success and the
utmost physical comfort were to characterize it. It was usually to be a
national apotheosis, and was not generally supposed to include the human
race, though traces of this wider view might easily be quoted from
Avestan, Roman, and Israelitic sources. Those who were to enjoy it were
not the dead, but those who shall be living.
As the myth grew, it coalesced with that of the Epochs of Nature, and
assumed grander proportions. The deliverer was to come at the close of
this epoch, at the end of the world; he was to embrace the whole human
kind in his kingdom; even those who died before his coming, if they had
obeyed his mandates, should rise to join the happy throng; instead of a
mere earthly king, he should be a supernatural visitant, even God
himself; and instead of temporal pleasures only, others of a spiritual
character were to be conferred. There are reasons to believe that even
in this developed form the myth was familiar to the most enlightened
worshippers of ancient Egypt; but it was not till some time after the
doctrines of Christianity had been cast into mythical moulds by the
oriental fancy, that it was introduced in its completed form to modern
thought. Although expressly repudiated by Jesus of Nazareth himself, and
applied in maxim and parable as a universal symbol of intelligence to
the religious growth of the individual and race, his followers reverted
to the coarser and literal meaning, and ever since teach to a greater or
less extent the chiliastic or millennial dogma, often mathematically
computing, in direct defiance of his words, the exact date that event is
to be expected.
If we ask the psychological construction of this myth, and the ever
present conditions of man’s life which have rendered him always ready to
create it and loath to renounce it, we trace the former distinctly to
his sense of the purposive nature of the laws of thought, and the latter
to the wide difference between desire and fulfilment. His intellectual
nature is framed to accord with laws which are ever present but are not
authoritative; they admonish but they do not coerce; _that_ is done
surely though oft remotely by the consequences of their violation. At
first, unaware of the true character of these laws, he fancies that if
he were altogether comfortable physically, his every wish would be
gratified. Slowly it dawns upon him that no material gratification can
supply an intellectual craving; that this is the real want which haunts
him; and that its only satisfaction is _to think rightly_, to learn the
truth. Then he sees that the millennial kingdom is “not of this world;”
that heaven and earth may pass away, but that such truth as he seeks
cannot pass away; and that his first and only care should be as a
faithful and wise servant to learn and revere it.
The sentiments which created this mythical cycle, based as they are now
seen to be on ultimate psychological laws, are as active to-day as ever.
This century has witnessed the rise of a school of powerful thinkers and
true philanthropists who maintained that the noblest object is the
securing to our fellow-men the greatest material comfort possible; that
the religious aspirations will do well to content themselves with this
gospel of humanity; and that the approach of the material millennium,
the perfectibility of the human race, the complete adaptation of
function to condition, the “distant but not uncertain final victory of
Good,”[179-1] is susceptible of demonstration. At present, these views
are undergoing modification. It is perceived with more or less
distinctness that complete physical comfort is not enough to make a man
happy; that in proportion as this comfort is attained new wants develope
themselves, quite as importunate, which ask what material comfort
cannot give, and whose demand is neither for utility nor pleasurable
sensation. Such wants are created by the sense of duty and the love of
truth.
The main difference between the latest exponents of the utilitarian
doctrines and the heralds of distinctively religious thought, is that
the former consider that it is most important in the present condition
of man for him to look after his material welfare; while the latter
teach that if he first subject thought and life to truth and duty, “all
these things will be added unto him.” Wordsworth has cast this latter
opinion, and the myths which are its types, into eloquent verse:
“Paradise and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic main, why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.”
The incredulity and even derision with which the latter doctrine is
received by “practical men,” should not affright the collected thinker,
as it certainly is not so chimerical as they pretend. The writer De
Senancourt, not at all of a religious turn, in speculating on the
shortest possible road to general happiness, concluded that if we were
able to foretell the weather a reasonable time ahead, and if men would
make it a rule to speak the truth as near as they can, these two
conditions would remove nine-tenths of the misery in the world. The
more carefully I meditate on this speculation, the better grounded it
seems. The weather we are learning to know much more about than when the
solitary Obermann penned his despondent dreams; but who shall predict
the time when men will tell the truth?
I now pass to the third great mythical cyclus, which I have called that
of the Hierarchy of the Gods. This was created in order to define that
unknown power which was supposed to give to the wish frustration or
fruition. It includes every statement in reference to the number,
nature, history and character of supernatural beings.
The precise form under which the intellect, when the religious
conception of unknown power first dawns upon it, imagines this unknown,
is uncertain. Some have maintained that the earliest religions are
animal worships, others that the spirits of ancestors or chiefs are the
primitive gods. Local divinities and personal spirits are found in the
rudest culture, while simple fetichism, or the vague shapes presented by
dreams, play a large part in the most inchoate systems. The prominence
of one or the other of these elements depends upon local and national
momenta, which are a proper study for the science of mythology, but need
not detain us here. The underlying principle in all these conceptions of
divinity is that of the _res per accidens_, an accidental relation of
the thought to the symbol, not a general or necessary one. This is seen
in the nature of these primitive gods. They have no decided character as
propitious or the reverse other than the objects they typify, but are
supposed to send bad or good fortune as they happen to be pleased or
displeased with the votary. No classification as good and evil deities
is as yet perceptible.
This undeveloped stage of religious thought faded away, as general
conceptions of man and his surroundings arose. Starting always from his
wish dependent on unknown control, man found certain phenomena usually
soothed his fears and favored his wishes, while others interfered with
their attainment and excited his alarm. This distinction, directly
founded on his sensations of pleasure and pain, led to a general, more
or less rigid, classification of the unknown, into two opposing classes
of beings, the one kindly disposed, beneficent, good, the other
untoward, maleficent, evil.
At first this distinction had in it nothing of a _moral_ character. It
is in fact a long time before this is visible, and to-day but two or
three religions acknowledge it even theoretically. All, however, which
claim historical position set up a dual hierarchy in the divine realms.
Ahura-mazda and Anya-mainyus, God and Satan, Jove and Pluto, Pachacamac
and Supay, Enigorio and Enigohatgea are examples out of hundreds that
might be adduced.
The fundamental contrast of pleasure and pain might be considered enough
to explain this duality. But in fact it is even farther reaching. The
emotions are dual as well as the sensations, as we have seen in the
first chapter. All the operations of the intellect are dichotomic, and
in mathematical logic must be expressed by an equation of the second
degree. Subject and object must be understood as polar pairs, and in
physical science polarization, contrast of properties corresponding to
contrast of position, is a universal phenomenon. Analogy, therefore,
vindicates the assumption that the unknown, like the known, is the field
of the operation of contradictory powers.
A variety of expression is given this philosophic notion in myths. In
Egypt, Syria, Greece and India the contrast was that of the sexes, the
male and female principles as displayed in the operations of nature. The
type of all is that very ancient Phrygian cult in which by the side of
Ma, mother of mountains and mistress of herds, stood Papas, father of
the race of shepherds and inventor of the rustic pipe.[183-1] Quite
characteristic was the classification of the gods worshipped by the
miners and metal workers of Phrygian Ida. This was into right and left,
and the general name of Dactyli, Fingers, was given them. The right gods
broke the spells which the left wove, the right pointed out the ore
which the left had buried, the right disclosed the remedies for the
sickness which the left had sent. This venerable division is still
retained when we speak of a _sinister_ portent, or a _right_ judgment.
It is of physiological interest as showing that “dextral pre-eminence”
or right-handedness was prevalent in earliest historic times, though it
is unknown in any lower animal.
The thoughtful dwellers in Farsistan also developed a religion close to
man’s wants by dividing the gods into those who aid and those who harm
him, subject the one class to Ahura-Mazda, the other to Anya-Mainyus.
Early in their history this assumed almost a moral aspect, and there is
little to be added to one of the most ancient precepts of their
law--“Happiness be to the man who conduces to the happiness of
all.”[184-1]
When this dual classification sought expression through natural
contrasts, there was one which nigh everywhere offered itself as the
most appropriate. The savage, the nomad, limited to the utmost in
artificial contrivances, met nothing which more signally aided the
accomplishment of his wishes than _light_; nothing which more certainly
frustrated them than _darkness_. From these two sources flow numerous
myths, symbols, and rites, as narratives or acts which convey religious
thought to the eye or the ear of sense.
As the bringers of light, man adored the sun, the dawn, and fire;
associated with warmth and spring, his further meditations saw in it the
source of his own and of all life, and led him to connect with its
worship that of the reproductive principle. As it comes from above, and
seems to dwell in the far-off sky, he located there his good gods, and
lifted his hands or his eyes when he prayed. As light is necessary to
sight, and as to see is to know, the faculty of knowing was typified as
enlightenment, an inward god-given light. The great and beneficent
deities are always the gods of light. Their names often show this. Deva,
Deus, means the shining one; Michabo, the great white one; the Mongols
call Tien, the chief Turanian god, the bright one, the luminous one; the
northern Buddhist prays to Amitabha, Infinite Light; and the Christian
to the Light of the World.
On the other hand, darkness was connected with feelings of helplessness
and terror. It exposed him to attacks of wild beasts and all accidents.
It was the precursor of the storm. It was like to death and the grave.
The realm of the departed was supposed to be a land of shadows, an
underground region, an unseeing Hades or hell.
The task would be easy to show many strange corroborations of these
early chosen symbols by the exacter studies of later ages. Light, as the
indispensable condition of life, is no dream, but a fact; sight is the
highest sentient faculty; and the luminous rays are real intellectual
stimulants.[186-1] But such reflections will not escape the
contemplative reader.
I hasten to an important consequence of this dual classification of
divinities. It led to what I may call the _quantification of the gods_,
that is, to conceiving divinity under notions of number or quantity, a
step which has led to profound deterioration of the religious sentiment.
I do not mean by this the distinction between polytheism and monotheism.
The latter is as untrue and as injurious as the former, nor does it
contain a whit the more the real elements of religious progress.
It is indeed singular that this subject has been so misunderstood. Much
has been written by Christian theologians to show the superiority of
monotheisms; and by their opponents much has been made of Comte’s _loi
des trois états_, which defines religious progress to be first
fetichism, secondly polytheism, finally monotheism. Of this Mr. Lewes
says: “The theological system arrived at the highest perfection of which
it is capable when it substituted the providential action of a single
being, for the varied operations of the numerous divinities which had
before been imagined.”[187-1] Nothing could be more erroneous than the
spirit of this statement; nothing is more correct, if the ordinary talk
of the superiority of monotheism in religion be admitted.
History and long experience show that monotheistic religions have no
special good effect either on the morals or the religious sensibility of
races.[187-2] Buddhism,[187-3] Mohammedanism and Judaism are, at least
in theory, uncompromising monotheisms; modern Christianity is less so,
as many Catholics pray to the Virgin and Saints, and many Protestants to
Christ. So long as _the mathematical conception of number_, whether one
or many, is applied to deity by a theological system, it has not yet
“arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable.”
For let us inquire what a monotheism is? It is a belief in one god as
distinct from the belief in several gods. In other words, it applies to
God the mathematical concept of unity, a concept which can only come
into cognition by virtue of contrasts and determinations, and which
forces therefore the believer either to Pantheism or anthropomorphism to
reconcile his belief with his reason. No other resource is left him.
With monotheism there must always be the idea of numerical separateness,
which is incompatible with universal conceptions.
Let him, however, clear his mind of the current admiration for
monotheisms, and impress upon himself that he who would form a
conception of supreme intelligence must do so under the rules of pure
thought, not numerical relation. The logical, not the mathematical,
unity of the divine is the perfection of theological reasoning. Logical
unity does not demand a determination by contrasts; it conveys only the
idea of identity with self. As the logical attainment of truth is the
recognition of identities in apparent diversity, thus leading from the
logically many to the logically one, the assumption of the latter is
eminently justified. Every act of reasoning is an additional proof of
it.[188-1]
Nor does the duality of nature and thought, to which I have alluded, in
any wise contradict this. In pure thought we must understand the
dichotomic process to be the distinction of a positive by a privative,
both logical elements of the same thought, as I have elsewhere shown.
The opposites or contraries referred to as giving rise to the dualistic
conceptions of divinity are thus readily harmonized with the conception
of logical unity. This was recognized by the Hindoo sage who composed
the Bhagavad Gità, early in our era. Krishna, the Holy One, addressing
the King Ardjuna says: “All beings fall into error as to the nature of
creation, O Bharata, by reason of that delusion of natural opposites
which springs from liking and disliking, oh thou tormentor of thy
foes!”[189-1]
The substitution of the conception of mathematical for logical unity in
this connection has left curious traces in both philosophy and religion.
It has led to a belief in the triplicate nature of the supreme Being,
and to those philosophical triads which have often attracted thinkers,
from Pythagoras and Heraclitus down to Hegel and Ghiberti.
Pythagoras, who had thought profoundly on numbers and their relations,
is credited with the obscure maxim that every thought is made up of a
definite one and an indefinite two (a μονας and an αοριστος δυας). Some
of his commentators have added to rather than lessened the darkness of
this saying. But applied to concrete number, it seems clear enough. Take
any number, ten, for example, and it is ten by virtue of being a _one_,
one ten, and because on either side counting upward or downward, a
different number appears, which two are its logical determinants, but,
as not expressed, make up an _indefinite two_.
So the number one, thought as concrete unity, is really a trinity, made
up of its definite self and its indefinite next greater and lesser
determinants. The obscure consciousness of this has made itself felt in
many religions when they have progressed to a certain plane of thought.
The ancient Egyptian gods were nearly all triune; Phanes, in the Orphic
hymns the first principle of things, was tripartite; the Indian
trinities are well known; the Celtic triads applied to divine as well as
human existence; the Jews distinguished between Jehovah, his Wisdom and
his Word; and in Christian religion and philosophy the doctrine of the
trinity, though nowhere taught by Christ, has found a lasting foothold,
and often presents itself as an actual tritheism.[190-1]
The triplicate nature of number, thus alluded to by Pythagoras, springs
from the third law of thought, and holds true of all concrete notions.
Every such notion stands in necessary relation to its privative, and to
the logical concept of next greater extension, _i. e._, that which
includes the notion and its privative, as I explained in the first
chapter. This was noted by the early Platonists, who describe a certain
concrete expression of it as “the intelligential triad;” and it has been
repeatedly commented upon by later philosophers, some of whom avowedly
derive from it the proof of the trinitarian dogma as formulated by
Athanasius. Even modern mathematical investigations have been supposed
to point to a _Deus triformis_, though of course quite another one from
that which ancient Rome honored. A late work of much ability makes the
statement: “The doctrine of the Trinity, or something analogous to it,
forms, as it were, the avenue through which the universe itself leads us
up to the conception of the Infinite and Eternal One.”[191-1] The
explanation of this notion is the same as that of the “Trinity of the
Gentiles,” always hitherto a puzzling mythological concept.
For reasons previously given, an analysis of the formal law itself does
not yield these elements. They belong to a certain class of values
assigned it, not to the law itself; hence it is only when deity is
conceived under the conditions of numerical oneness that the tripartite
constitution of a whole number makes itself felt, and is applied to the
divine nature.
The essence of a logical unit is identity, of a mathematical,
difference. The qualities of the latter are limitations--_so much of a
thing_; those of the former are coincidences--_that kind of a thing_.
To be sure it is no easy matter to free ourselves from the habit of
confounding identity and individuality. We must cultivate a much greater
familiarity with the forms of thought, and the character of universals,
than every-day life requires of us, before the distinction grows facile.
The individual, not the species, exists; our own personality, our
thinking faculty is what we are most certain of. On it rests the reality
of everything, the Unknown as well. But the rejection of a mathematical
unity does not at all depreciate the force of such an argument.
Individuality regarded as mathematical unity rests on the deeper law of
logical identity from which the validity of numbers rises; it is not
the least diminished, but intensified, in the conception of a Supreme
Intelligence, as the font of truth, though the confinements and
limitations of the mathematical unit fall away, and all contrasts
disappear.
The reverse conception, however, has prevailed in religious systems,
polytheistic or monotheistic. Man has projected on the cloudy unknown
the magnified picture of his own individuality and shuddered with terror
at the self-created plantasm,[TN-9] like the peasant frightened by the
spectre of the Brocken, formed by the distorted image of himself. In his
happier moments, with his hopes gratified, the same vice of thought,
still active, prevented him from conceiving any higher ideal than his
better self. “Everywhere the same tendency was observed; the gods,
always exaggerations of human power and passions, became more and more
personifications of what was most admirable and lovable in human nature,
till in Christianity there emerged the avowed ideal man.” What could it
end in but anthropomorphism, or pantheism, or, rejecting both, a
Religion of Humanity, with a background of an imbecile Unknowable?
Is it necessary to point out how none of these conclusions can satisfy
the enlightened religious sentiment? How anthropomorphism,which[TN-10]
makes God in the image of man, instead of acknowledging that man is
made in the image of God, belittles divinity to a creature of passions
and caprices? How pantheism, increasing God at the expense of man, wipes
out the fundamental difference of true and false, calls bad “good in the
making,” and virtually extinguishes the sense of duty and the permanence
of personality? And how the denial of all possible knowledge of the
absolute digs away the only foundation on which sanity can establish a
religion, and then palms off material comfort as the proper food for
religious longing?
The long story of religious effort is not from fetichism to monotheism,
as Comte read it; nor is its only possible goal inside the limits of the
ego, as Feuerbach and the other Neo-Hegelians assert; but it is on its
theoretical side to develope with greater and greater distinctness the
immeasurable reality of pure thought, to dispense more and more with the
quantification of the absolute, and to avoid in the representation of
that Being the use of the technic of concrete existence.
Little by little we learn that the really true is never true in fact,
that the really good is never good in act.[194-1] Carefully cherishing
this distinction taught by mathematics and ethics, the religious mind
learns to recognize in that only reality darkly seen through the glass
of material things, that which should fix and fill its meditations.
Passing beyond the domain of physical law, it occupies itself with that
which defines the conditions of law. It contemplates an eternal
activity, before which its own self-consciousness seems a flickering
shadow, yet in that contemplation is not lost but gains an evergrowing
personality.
This is the goal of religious striving, the hidden aim of the wars and
persecutions, the polemics and martyrdoms, which have so busied and
bloodied the world. This satisfies the rational postulates of religion.
Does some one say that it does not stimulate its emotional elements,
that it does not supply the impulses of action which must ever be the
criteria of the true faith? Is it not a religion at all, but a
philosophy, a search, or if you prefer, a love for the truth?
Let such doubter ponder well the signification of truth, its relation to
life, its identity with the good, and the paramount might of wisdom and
a clear understanding, and he will be ready to exclaim with the
passionate piety of St. Augustine: “_Ubi inveni veritatem, ibi inveni
Deum meum, ipsam veritatem, quam, ex quo didici, non sum oblitus._”
From this brief review of its character, the Myth will be seen to be one
of the transitory expressions of the religious sentiment, which in
enlightened lands it has already outgrown and should lay aside. So far
as it relates to events, real or alleged, historic or geologic, it deals
with that which is indifferent to pure religion; and so far as it
assumes to reveal the character, plans and temper of divinity, it is too
evidently a reflex of man’s personality to be worthy of serious
refutation where it conflicts with the better guide he has within him.
FOOTNOTES:
[156-1] In this definition the word _apperception_ is used in the sense
assigned it by Professor Lazarus--the perception modified by imagination
and memory. “Mythologie ist eine Apperceptionsform der Natur und des
Menschen.” (_Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_, Bd. i., s. 44). Most
recent mythologists omit the latter branch of the definition; for
instance, “A myth is in its origin an explanation by the uncivilized
mind of some natural phenomenon.” (John Fiske, _Myths and Myth Makers_,
p. 21). This is to omit that which gives the myth its only claim to be a
product of the religious sentiment. Schopenhauer, in calling dogmas and
myths “the metaphysics of the people,” fell into the same error.
Religion, as such, is always concrete.
[159-1] Half a century ago the learned Mr. Faber, in his _Origin of
Pagan Idolatry_, expressed his astonishment at “the singular, minute and
regular accordance” between the classical myths. That accordance has now
been discovered to be world-wide.
[160-1] “Ganz gleiche Mythen können sehr füglich, jede selbstständig, an
verschiedenen Oerter emporkommen.” _Briefe an Woelcker._
[161-1] The last two are the modern orthodox theories, supported by
Bryant, Faber, Trench, De Maistre and Sepp. Medieval Christianity
preferred the direct agency of the Devil. Primitive Christianity leaned
to the opinion that the Grecian and Roman myth makers had stolen from
the sacred writings of the Jews.
[165-1] Sir Wm. Hamilton, _Lectures on Metaphysics_. Appendix, p. 691.
[165-2] Creuzer, _Symbolik und Mythologie_, Bd. ii., s. 107.
[166-1] Th. Nöldeke, _Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_, Bd. iii., s.
131.
[166-2] See a note of Prof. Spiegel to Yaçna, 29, of the _Khordah-Avesta_.
[167-1] Ἡ υγρα φυσις αρχη και γενεσις παντων.
Plutarch, _De Iside_.
According to the Koran and the Jewish Rabbis, the throne of God rested
on the primeval waters from which the earth was produced. See a note in
Rodwell’s translation of the Koran, _Sura_. xi.
[167-2] I have discussed some of these myths in the seventh chapter of
the _Myths of the New World_.
[168-1] How it troubled the early Christians who dared not adopt the
refuge of the Epochs of Nature, may be seen in the _Confessions_ of St.
Augustine, Lib. XI, cap. 10, et seq. He quotes the reply of one pushed
by the inquiry, what God was doing before creation: “He was making a
hell for inquisitive busy-bodies.” _Alta spectantibus gehennas parabat._
[170-1] Many interesting references to the Oriental flood-myth may be
found in Cory’s _Ancient Fragments_. See also, Dr. Fr. Windischmann,
_Die Ursagen der Arischen Völker_, pp. 4-10. It is probable that in very
ancient Semitic tradition Adam was represented as the survivor of a
flood anterior to that of Noah. Maimonides relates that the Sabians
believed the world to be eternal, and called Adam “the Prophet of the
Moon,” which symbolized, as we know from other sources, the deity of
water. Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, _More Nevochim_, cap. iv. In early
Christian symbolism Christ was called “the true Noah”; the dove
accompanied him also, and as through Noah came “salvation by wood and
water,” so through Christ came “salvation by spirit and water.” (See St.
Cyril of Jerusalem’s _Catechetical Lectures_, Lect. xvii., cap. 10). The
fish (ιχθυς) was the symbol of Christ as well as of Oannes. As the
second coming of Christ was to be the destruction of the world, how
plainly appear the germs of the myth of the Epochs of Nature in the
Judæo-Christian mind!
[171-1] Besides the expressions in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the
later prophets, the doctrine is distinctly announced in one of the most
sublime of the Psalms (xc), one attributed to “Moses the Man of God.”
[172-1] Malachi, ch. iv., v. 2.
[175-1] C. F. Koppen, _Die Lamaische Hierarchie_, s. 28.
[175-2] Odainsakr, ô privative, _dain_ death, _akr_ land, “the land of
immortal life.” Saxo Grammaticus speaks of it also. Another such land
faintly referred to in the Edda is Breidablick, governed by Baldur, the
Light-god.
[176-1] C. F. Koppen, _Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche_, p. 17.
[179-1] John Stuart Mill, _Theism_, p. 256.
[183-1] Creuzer, _Symbolik und Mythologie_, Bd. II., s. 47
[184-1] This is the first line of Yaçna, 42, of the _Khordah-Avesta_.
The Parsees believe that it is the salutation which meets the soul of
the good on entering the next world.
[186-1] “Sight is the light sense. Through it we become acquainted with
universal relations, this being _reason_. Without the eye there would be
no reason.” Lorenz Oken, _Elements of Physio-Philosophy_, p. 475.
[187-1] _History of Philosophy_, Vol. II. p. 638 (4th ed.)
[187-2] “The intolerance of almost all religions which have maintained
the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle in
polytheism.” Hume, _Nat. Hist. of Religion_, Sec. ix.
[187-3] “The Lamas emphatically maintain monotheism to be the real
character of Buddhism.” Emil Schlagintweit, _Buddhism in Tibet_, p. 108.
[188-1] No one has seen the error here pointed out, and its injurious
results on thought, more clearly than Comte himself. He is emphatic in
condemning “le tendance involontaire à constituer l’unité spéculative
par l’ascendant universel des plus grossières contemplations numérique,
geométrique ou mécaniques.” _Systême de Politique Positive_; Tome I., p.
51. But he was too biassed to apply this warning to Christian thought.
The conception of the Universe in the logic of Professor De Morgan and
Boole is an example of speculative unity.
[189-1] _Bhagavad Gità_, ch. iv.
[190-1] See the introduction by Mr. J. W. Etheridge to _The Targums of
Onkelos and Jonathan Ben Uzziel_ (London, 1862). St. Augustine believed
the trinity is referred to in the opening verses of Genesis.
_Confessiones_, Lib. xiii. cap. 5. The early Christian writer,
Theophilus of Antioch (circa 225), in his _Apologia_, recognizes the
Jewish trinity only. It was a century later that the dogma was defined
in its Athanasian form. See further, Isaac Preston Cory, _Ancient
Fragments, with an Inquiry into the Trinity of the Gentiles_ (London,
1832).
[191-1] _The Unseen Universe_, p. 194.
[194-1] “A good will is the only altogether good thing in the
world.”--_Kant._ “What man conceives in himself is always superior to
that reality which it precedes and prepares.”--_Comte._
THE CULT, ITS SYMBOLS AND RITES.
SUMMARY.
The Symbol represents the unknown; the Rite is the ceremony of
worship.
A symbol stands for the supernatural, an emblem for something
known. The elucidation of symbolism is in the laws of the
association of ideas. Associations of similarity give related
symbols, of contiguity coincident symbols. Symbols tend either
toward personification (iconolatry), or toward secularization. The
symbol has no fixed interpretation. Its indefiniteness shown by the
serpent symbol, and the cross. The physiological relations of
certain symbols. Their classification. The Lotus. The Pillar.
Symbols discarded by the higher religious thought. Esthetic and
scientific symbolism (the “Doctrine of Correspondences”).
Rites are either propitiatory or memorial. The former spring either
from the idea of sacrifice or of specific performance. A sacrifice
is a gift, but its measure is what it costs the giver. Specific
performance means that a religious act should have no ulterior aim.
Vicarious sacrifice and the idea of sin.
Memorial rites are intended to recall the myth, or else to keep up
the organization. The former are dramatic or imitative, the latter
institutionary. Tendency of memorial rites to become propitiatory.
Examples.