In order to appreciate truly our neighbour’s impressions and points of
view, we must constantly detach ourselves from our own special way of
seeing and feeling; this habit of abstraction--which is most difficult
to every one--is indispensable when we are endeavouring to understand
the natures of persons who lived many thousands of years ago, and who
thought and spoke in a totally different manner from ourselves.
In seeking to grasp the phraseology of myths we perceive that its
chief elements consist in a repetition of phrases in which the acts of
nature are used as embodiments of the idea, under the figures of day
and night, dawn and twilight, the sun and the moon, the heavens and the
earth, as they stand in relation to man.
When we in the present century speak of the last hours of the
day, we use precise and exact terms; we say, “It is late; the sun
is setting; the moon rises; it is night.” Our ancestors also had
occasion to mention these same hours, but as they did not speak of
the facts of nature without investing them with some of their own
personality, they preferred to say, “Dawn flies before the sun.” “The
sun loves--pursues--embraces the dawn.” “She dies in the arms of the
sun.” They spoke of the sun growing old--decaying--dying. Besides
these general terms our ancestors used special designations, which the
nature of their language suggested; the hymns of the Rig-Veda supply
instances. One of these modes of speech it would be difficult for me
to render in French, but the English language has the impersonal verb
which will illustrate my meaning, for all such atmospheric phenomena
such as rain, thunder, the light of day; instead of _it_ rains, _it_
thunders, _it_ shines, our ancestors said, _he_ rains, _he_ thunders,
_he_ shines, without knowing who was this _he_, who for us is the third
person masculine; but, naturally for them, _he_ meant the rainer, the
thunderer, the lightener, or, in other words--the agent.
Mythology, taken in its entirety, is the outcome of myths which
preceded it. If the original meaning of the Greek word Logos--as both
word and thought--has revealed to us a forgotten truth; the original
meaning of _mythos_ is also indispensable for the study of mythology.
This Greek term means simply _word_ as opposed to _deed_, and hardly
differed at first from Logos. Afterwards, however, a distinction was
made between myth,--a fable, a story, and logos, a historical account.
Thus a myth was at first a word. Almost all terms used in the first
spontaneous stage of language had for their basis striking metaphors,
whose signification may have been forgotten, and these terms having
lost their original as well as poetical meaning, remained words only,
current in familiar conversation.
I give the following myths as they have come down to us.
Endymion is the son of Zeus and Kalyke, but he is also the son of
Æthlios, a king of Elis, who is himself called a son of Zeus; for,
according to Greek customs, the reigning race of Elis derived its
origin from the king of the gods. Endymion is one of the many names
of the sun, but with special reference to the setting or dying sun;
it is derived from a verb which originally meant _to dive into_; an
expression such as “the sun dived” presupposes an earlier conception,
that it dived into the sea. But the verb _enduo_ is never used in
classical Greek for setting, because the simple verb _duo_ had become
the technical term for sunset. Thus this myth of Endymion owes its
origin to the use probably of _enduo_ in some Greek dialect, though not
the commonly received term for sunset. The original meaning of Endymion
being once forgotten, what was told originally of the setting sun was
now told of a name, which in order to have any meaning, had to be
changed into a god or hero.
This handsome prince or shepherd, according to the different versions
of the tale, went to Karia, where on Mount Latmos he had strange
adventures; he slept in a cave to which the rays of the moon, Selene,
penetrated, and in the ancient poetical and proverbial language of
Elis it was said, “Selene loves and watches Endymion; Selene embraces
Endymion and kisses him into sleep.” The name Selene is so transparent
that the word moon pierces through it; we should have guessed that
the moon was intended, even if tradition had only preserved her other
name, Asterodia--“wanderer amongst the stars”; the names Hecate or
Lucina do not force us to acknowledge their fitness, they present to
our imagination a totally different figure (as they suggest opaqueness)
from Selene. Learned writers at times still put forward the explanation
with regard to mythology that it “was a past which was never a
present,” but this myth of Endymion was “present” with the people of
Elis at the period of its narration.
These and similar expressions were repeated long after their meaning
had ceased to be understood; and as the human mind is generally as
anxious for a reason as ready to invent one, the poets added to this
story several details, and reasons why Endymion sank into eternal sleep
after a life of but one day; and if allusions were made to these by a
popular poet, it became a mythological fact, repeated and embellished
by later poets.
The construction of such a name as Eos does not differ materially from
that of any other name, but as all roots expressed at the first denote
action, it follows that for all an agent must be found; the name of
Eos in Sanscrit is Ushas, dawn, or “the bright one” from the root Vas,
to shine; thus Eos meant originally “he or she shines.” But who was
“he” or “she”? Thus the inevitable myth is evolved. For us the dawn
is only the natural illumination of the sky, the brightness of the
morning; our ancestors received a different impression by the break of
day. After having coined a word meaning “he or she shines,” that is
the light, or Eos, the Greeks continued to portray each step of Eos as
she preceded the appearance of the sun on the celestial vault; “Eos
is followed by the sun--is loved by the sun”; she is conceived as a
bright and beautiful woman; if she appeared veiled in clouds, she would
be considered as a veiled bride; thus the epithets and relationships
showered on Eos become intelligible, she is the daughter of Hyperion,
thus her father would be the high heaven, since _hyper_ corresponds to
the Latin _super_; she is the sister of Helios and Selene, the sun and
the moon. As soon as a name such as Eos was first enunciated and used
in daily conversation, it grew and gathered new materials round itself;
all the names surrounding Eos in Greek and Aurora in Latin show us how
inevitably what we call mythology springs up from the soil of language.
Even such simple sentences as “Eos appears, disappears, or dies” are
changed at once into myth, fable, and legend, and it soon becomes
impossible to draw a line between what is simple language and what is
myth.
We do not unfortunately always possess the original form of each legend
as it first passed from mouth to mouth in the towns and country; thus
our chief sources are the ancient chroniclers, who took mythology for
history, and used only so much of it as answered their purpose, and
these accounts do not reach us at first hand.
We find a legend in Greek mythology which has much exercised the
learned; the nymph Daphne flies before Phœbus Apollo, her mother, the
earth, moved by compassion, takes her to her bosom, and immediately a
laurel appears and fills the abyss into which Daphne had vanished. The
mythologists asked themselves what could be the meaning of this; the
more phlegmatic amongst them considered that it had no special meaning
at all, but was simply to be looked upon as a fable; why seek further
for a hidden import? Why? Because people do not relate such stories
concerning their gods and heroes without some good motive.
In the legend of Endymion the Greek language supplies all that is
needed to make it intelligible, but there are many instances of the
difficulty, or even the impossibility of explaining certain Greek names
by the help of Greek only; since a name is not converted into a myth
until its original meaning has become obscured in the language which
gave it birth, though still perfectly comprehensible in another of the
same family, it behoves the classical philologist to surrender all
etymological researches of this nature to the comparative philologist,
whose privilege it is to seek to discover the signification of a Greek
word by confronting it with contemporary witnesses from the German,
Celtic, or Sanscrit. In the Teutonic languages, for instance, day
has several names which are derived from the root _dah_, to burn, to
be hot; and this same root has also given rise to the Greek name for
dawn. In Sanscrit it is called Ahana, from _ahan_ or _dahan_, the root
of which is _ah_; _dah_ and _dahan_ may have lost their initial _d_,
or this letter may have been added to the root _ah_; these gains and
losses are met with frequently.
The Sanscrit name Ahana, known before Greek and Sanscrit became
separated, occurs but once in a hymn of the Rig-Veda; in India this
mythological germ withered away, and even the name Ahana would not have
survived, but for this single verse which saved it from oblivion; but
it developed into a splendid growth in Greece, in the legend of Eos,
which I have quoted.
In this hymn addressed to Ushas we read: “We have crossed the frontier
of this darkness; Ahana shining forth gives light, lighting up all the
world, awakening mortals to walk about--she received praise from every
thinker.” Ahana rises from the head of Dyu, the forehead of the sky;
she shows herself in the east, she advances and awakens the sleepers.
In Sanscrit _budh_ means to wake and to know, but light in Sanscrit has
again a double meaning, and means knowledge, much more frequently and
distinctly than light; this explains how Ahana, in awakening mortals,
causes persons to know.
The stories of Daphne and of Ahana are closely allied, and the one
explains the other. As long as we remain ignorant of the fact that at
first Daphne and Aurora were one, this myth is inexplicable; but turn
the name Ahana into Greek, and you have the Dawn in the features of a
nymph loved by Apollo, and dying when the bright sun touched her with
his rays.
But why, it may be asked, was Daphne supposed to have been changed
into a laurel-tree? The dawn was called daphne, the burning; so was
the laurel--as wood that burns easily, and whose flame throws a bright
light--two different objects, but alike under one aspect, though two
distinct acts. The root _dah_ is found in daphne for laurel equally
with Daphne, dawn, the synonymy of the two names producing the myth of
Daphne. Although this legend first came to life on Greek soil, it would
have been unintelligible without the help of the Veda, as the later
Sanscrit supplied no key to it.
The Sanscrit root _Ah_ is also the germ of the name of Athena, the
termination of the name corresponding to Ahana; Athene is said to
spring from the head of Zeus. This extraordinary birth, though
post-Homeric, is no doubt of ancient date, since it repeats exactly
the birth of Ahana. The Hellenists maintain that the Greeks were
unconscious that the word Athene meant the dawn; doubtless few amongst
them knew that Zeus originally meant the surface or forehead of the
sky. It is also true that when the people of Athens worshipped Athene
as their tutelary deity, she became something very different from the
Indian Ushas; but if we notice carefully all the many and various ideas
concerning this Greek goddess, we shall be led to the supposition that
her cradle was no other than that of the dawn, namely, the east, the
forehead of the sky, or Zeus. Neither in the Veda, nor in Homer, is
there any mention of the mother of the dawn, although both mention _her
parents_.
It is a curious fact that in the mythology of Italy, Minerva, who was
identical with Athene, should from the beginning have assumed a name
apparently expressive of the intellectual rather than the physical
character of the Dawn-goddess. Minerva or Menerva is clearly connected
with _mens_, the Greek _menos_, the Sanscrit _manas_, mind; _mane_
in Latin is morning; _manare_ is specially used of the rising sun;
and _matuta_, another name of the same category, is the Dawn. The
root _man_, which in all Aryan languages means thought, was at a very
early time, like the Sanscrit _budh_, destined to express the revived
consciousness of the whole of nature at the approach of the light of
the morning. The equation Ahane = Athene is both phonetically and
mythologically irreproachable, the correlative Minerva can also be
explained mythologically.
To reject the explanations of these myths which Comparative Philology
furnishes, it would be necessary to prove that Ahana and Eos do not
mean the dawn, that Athene does not correspond with Ahana, and that
Helios is not the sun.
Mythologists have sometimes failed to discover the primitive character
of certain myths, because they have not looked beyond the Greek
etymology. The word Erinnys, “hovering in the gloom,” corresponds
exactly to the Sanscrit Saranyû = “break of day.” Poets sometimes speak
of the Dawn as avenging the crimes committed in the dark; the myth of
Erinnys denotes this same idea. Instead of our lifeless and abstract
expression, “A crime is sure to be discovered,” the old proverbial and
poetical saying amongst the Greeks and Hindoos was, Erinnys--Saranyû,
“will bring misdeeds to light.” At first this phrase was free from all
mythological taint, but it was afterwards transformed into a myth by
the Greeks, as they were ignorant of the true signification of the name
of Erinnys.
When the mythology of Greece fails to furnish an explanation of many
of the Greek phrases, because it belongs to a later date than the
classical period, the Veda may then be questioned, and will supply us
with the information, by disclosing an ancient substratum of human
thought, such as existed amongst the inhabitants of one of the most
important regions of the world, India. It is with as much pleasure as
assurance that we repeat to those learned scholars, who decline to open
their eyes in order to see, or see only what they consider should be
there, the Brahmanic saying, “It is not the fault of the post that the
blind man passes it without noticing it.”
It seems astonishing that a people so richly endowed as the Greeks
should have found pleasure in romancing so constantly concerning the
sun and the moon, the day and the night, the dawn and the twilight;
but the custom of repeating these mythological phrases, which much
resembled each other, dated from an epoch before the Greeks, when
nothing more powerfully attracted and fascinated the imagination of
man than the aspect of nature’s forces, especially the return of the
sun, bringing with it each morning light and heat and life. Repeated
thus incessantly these phrases became idiomatic, and were retold long
after the thread connecting them with the simple facts of nature was
broken and lost to memory. At first some old grandmother would repeat
them, partly understanding them in their true natural sense, and partly
metaphorically; the sons of the old people would repeat them with a
partial understanding; but the grandsons would relate them only for
their peculiarities, or for the charm of their style and setting;
and the great-grandchildren would hand them on at random, with no
comprehension of their meaning. At a much later period when all these
sayings, with no connection between them, had become traditional, the
poets would embody them in verse, giving them their first form and
permanence in a cycle of legends. They congratulated themselves on the
treasure-trove, but marvelled that the Greeks should enclose these
bald phrases of perpetual iteration in the casket of their literature.
They might as well ask why the Greeks apparently sanctioned all the
irregular verbs their language holds by retaining them in their
grammar. Is it not a historical fact that cannot be denied that the
whole Aryan peoples, without exception, have conserved as the heritage
of their common origin not only the names of their divinities, their
legends, and their folk-lore, but also remains of their primitive
language. Here is a noteworthy statement. Comparative Philology has
proved that there is nothing really irregular in a language, and
that what was formerly considered so in declensions and conjugations
is the stratum on which the edifice of each language raised itself
progressively. This same apparent irregularity is found also in
mythology, because it is itself only a sort of dialect or offshoot of
language.
Since the _raison d’être_ of myths, as such, is a forgetfulness of
the original sense of the words, we cannot hope to be able to explain
all the mythological recitals; no one has more clearly stated the
difficulty, nor expressed it with greater modesty, than he who has laid
the most lasting foundation of comparative mythology. Grimm says: “I
shall indeed interpret all that I can, but I cannot interpret all that
I should like.”[49]
In examining these archives, which, if only on account of their
antiquity, are very superior to any other evidence for our purpose, we
learn that identification differs from comparison. It is only possible
to identify two or more divinities by seeing if one name applies
equally to all, and by showing that this name denotes the essence of
each; this result is obtained when, for instance, we note a general
resemblance between a god or a hero of the Veda, and a god or hero
of Hesiod, and discover that though their names may be phonetically
dissimilar, yet that they have one source. Uranus, in the language of
Hesiod, is used as a name for the sky--“a firm place for the blessed
gods”; and the poet says that Uranus covers everything, and that when
he brings the night he is stretched out, everywhere embracing the
earth. This sounds like a reproduction of the name of Varuna, which
is derived from a root _Var_, to cover (the Sanscrit term _varutra_,
overcoat, would prove this if need be). The name Uranus in the Greek
apparently retains something of its primitive meaning, which is not
the case with the name of Zeus and Apollo. Varuna and Uranus evidently
both express the same mythological concept, that of the covering,
enclosing sky; this may even be one of the most ancient discoveries
of comparative mythology. In the same way we prove that Ushas, Eos,
Daphne, Ahana, and Athene were five names of the dawn, and that they
can be traced back to a time before Greek and Sanscrit were separated.
Thus, whilst one legend becomes differentiated from another by its
own peculiar form and attributes, the name of its original prototype
remains etymologically the same, though taking varying forms amongst
the various peoples who use the legend; it is in this immutable
name that the continuity of ideas lies, which nothing obliterates,
and which traverses the centuries, and connects the mythologies of
countries as totally distinct as India, Greece, and Ireland. But we
must remember that all that is taken for etymology is not always so;
the explanations which Homer gives of the names of the divinities only
proves that at his time the original meaning had been forgotten. To
us who now know the true principles of mythology, it is clear that it
represents a prehistoric period of language, and the light it throws
on the times that followed, has the same importance with regard to the
study of the human mind, that geology and paleontology have for the
knowledge of the earth.
Sometimes we come upon difficulties of another kind when we seek to
translate the language of the poets into our modern forms of thought
and speech. In consequence of the absence of merely auxiliary words
in mythological language, each word, whether noun or verb, had its
full original power, it was heavy and unwieldy, it said more than it
ought to say. Here is an example: _Nyx_ (night), the mother of _Moros_
(fate), of _Ker_ (destruction), of _Thanatos_ (death), of _Hypnos_
(sleep), and of the _Oneïroi_ (dreams), and these,--her progeny,
_Night_ is said, by the poet, to have borne without a father. She has
also other children: _Momos_ (blame), _Oizys_ (woe), the _Hesperides_,
which are the evening stars, _Nemesis_ (vengeance), _Apate_ (fraud),
_Philotes_ (lust), _Geras_ (old age), and _Eris_ (strife). Now let
us use our modern expressions. “The stars are seen as the night
approaches,” “we sleep, we dream, we die,” “we run into danger during
night,” “nightly revels lead to strife, angry discussions, and
woe,” “many nights bring old age, and at last death,” “an evil deed
concealed at first by the darkness of night will at last be revealed
by the day,” “night herself will be revenged on the criminal”; and we
have translated the language of Hesiod, a language to a great extent
understood by the people to whom it was addressed many hundreds of
years ago, and it is made comprehensible to us by the addition of some
auxiliary words. This is hardly mythological language, but rather a
poetical and proverbial kind of expression known to all poets whether
modern or ancient, and frequently to be found in the language of common
people when it becomes proverbial.
“In Greece the mortal element, inherent in all gods, was eliminated
to a great extent by the conception of heroes. Whatever was too human
in the ancient legends told of Zeus and Apollo was transferred to
so-called half gods or heroes, who were represented as the sons or
favourites of the gods. The two-fold character of Herakles as a god and
as a hero is acknowledged even by Herodotus, and some of his epithets
would have been sufficient to indicate his solar and originally divine
character. But in order to make some of the legends told of the solar
deity possible or conceivable, it was necessary to represent Herakles
as a more human being, and to make him rise to the seat of the
immortals only after he had endured toils and sufferings incompatible
with the dignity of an Olympian god.”[50] The divinities of a second
and third order, who were sometimes solicited for special favours, were
perhaps placed in the same category as some provincial or local saints,
who were considered more accessible and more pitiful in certain places,
just as some physicians make a practice of curing those ills only of
which they had made a speciality.
There were also abstract divinities, representing certain virtues
in the eyes of the people, which were highly esteemed and useful to
possess; each of these qualities which were conceived separately, and
considered in the superlative degree, were from that time raised to
the rank of a divine person, thus altars and temples were dedicated to
Courage, Strength, and Piety; Fame was likewise thus honoured. “Great
Fame is never lost though scattered abroad,” said Hesiod, “it is in
itself a divinity.”
The language of mythology was in use at a late period. History tells
us that the Greek town of Cyrene in Libya was founded about the
thirty-seventh Olympiad, the ruling race came from Thessaly; the
foundation of the colony was due to the oracle of Apollo at Pytho. This
simple historical fact has been thus rendered, from the habit of not
recounting events as they happened. “The heroic maid Cyrene, who lived
in Thessaly, was loved by Apollo, and carried off to Libya.”
The question has been often asked, what can be the origin of the fables
which are identical in character and form, whether we find them on
Indian, Greek, Italian, Persian, Slavonic, Celtic, or Teutonic soil.
Was there a period of temporary insanity, through which the human
mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in the
south of India and in the north of Ireland? The necessity of solving
this problem became more imperative when collections of these ancient
traditions were brought from countries which formerly were almost
unknown to us; incredible tales came from all parts, from amongst the
Hottentots, the Patagonians, Zulus, Esquimaux, and Mongols; in all
cases we were able to recognise the fables with which we were already
so well acquainted, from having seen them in Aryan literature. When Max
Müller first published his essays on the Greek myths, the mythologists
acknowledged generally that it was very natural he should devote so
much time to the explanation of the Greek legends, since these same
stories had been universally found in all parts of the globe, from the
one pole to the other; stories of men and women turned into trees,
trees transformed into men, men behaving as animals, animals talking
as if they were men, men swallowed by gods and brought up again whole,
as were the children of Kronos; in all places the same adventures were
told of the sun and moon, also swallowed, but the swallower not known.
The Greek myths--so it was asserted by the learned who did not care
to abandon the old paths--form only one page of that vast mythology
created by the disordered imagination of nations in their infancy;
the epidemic was general, and it is useless to seek for a definite or
peculiar meaning in such and such a local myth.
Nevertheless, in presence of these striking likenesses, impartial and
clear-sighted science recognised that there must be something in the
human mind that of necessity tended to mythology, nay, that there
must be some reason in all the unreason that goes by the name of
myth. That “something” Max Müller discovered to be language, in its
natural progress from roots to words, up to definite and special names.
Mythology has now been acknowledged to be an inevitable phase in the
growth of language and thought; a form of expression which changes
non-personal beings into personal, and all relationships into actions;
it is a mental phenomenon so peculiar that it would be difficult to
avoid the admission that it emanated from a distinct stratum, it is
metaphoric language and thought; and it is the duty of the geologist of
language to establish the authenticity of this epoch of organic life
in humanity, which is contemporaneous with the most ancient forms of
language.
If Hegel compares the discovery of the common origin of Greek and
Sanscrit to that of a new world, the same may be said with regard to
the common origin of all the mythologies, for already the science of
Comparative Mythology has risen to the same importance as Comparative
Philology.
The supposition that grammatical gender of nouns must necessarily be
the cause of personification, and produce myths which had no previous
existence at the time when this denotation of sex did not yet exist,
has been proved incorrect. But the following fact, which concerns
language more than mythology, is not so evident at first sight,
viz., that however the various languages may differ externally, and
however they may lack gender, yet they have without exception what is
analogous to it, and takes its place; this is a system of fundamental
classification to which all equally submit, and which each language
supplies; the result is that at the foundation of thought common to all
humanity, certain forms are found answering the purpose of gender. Each
myth and each legend was at first the intelligible expression of an
intelligible thought, and as the thought contained in each recital must
evidently be the same wherever there were men to repeat it, the science
of Comparative Mythology seeks to place its hand on the expression
which best renders this one and the selfsame thought, under different
aspects.
What is commonly called Hindoo mythology is of little or no avail for
comparative purposes, because nothing is systematically arranged.
Names are used in one hymn of the Rig-Veda as appellatives, in another
as names of gods. There are as yet no genealogies, and no recorded
marriages between gods and goddesses. As the conception of the poet
varied, so varied the nature of these gods; the myths are arranged
with little order. Nowhere is the wide distance which separates the
ancient poems of India from the most ancient literature of Greece
more clearly felt than when we compare the growing myths of the Veda
with the full-grown, or already decaying myths on which the poetry of
Homer is founded. The Veda is the real theogony of the Aryan races,
while that of Hesiod is a copy only of the original image. The Hindoo
Rishis differed much amongst themselves in their representation of
things; some of them attributed the dispersion of clouds by a solar
hero, to the will of some supreme or divine being; others considered
the combatants to be the supreme beings themselves, who dispersed the
clouds full of lightning and thunder, making the sky serene after the
fight. These are the two distinct interpretations of the solar and
atmospheric schools; the dualism in nature, which at a later period
took the character of light and darkness, even of good and evil, was at
the beginning the dualism of day and night, spring and winter, life and
death, represented by the two great luminaries of the physical world.
The characteristic traits of the moon which made the deepest impression
on our ancestors were its increase, and afterwards its gradual
diminution, until its total disappearance. The eclipses, though filling
the minds of the people with sudden fear at first, did not continue
long to awaken dread or curiosity, as they were of rare occurrence and
transitory; the moon, it was thought, was swallowed and afterwards
disgorged by some hostile power; but the monthly increase and
diminution required some other explanation. The Hindoos, in seeking to
discover the abode of the gods and of their own ancestors, assigned the
brilliant sky to the former, and where, therefore, should the Fathers
live if not in the vast vault and in the moon? This was, in fact, the
belief of the whole Aryan race. But the subject is complicated, since
in an earlier period of lunar mythology, we find in the Vedic Pantheon
a divinity of the name of Soma, which certain poets identify with the
plant of that name, whose intoxicating juice played an important part
in the sacrifices; there is no doubt a great obscurity with regard to
these two rival powers, to which the same name had been given, and on
which mythologists have found it difficult to enlighten us; but quite
recently exponents of the Rig-Veda have discovered that Soma originally
meant the moon itself, thus the Rishis allow it to be apparent in
their hymns that there were at one time two Somas--the plant and its
juice, and at an earlier period the other Soma, known only to the old
Brahmans, which was the moon. A belief held by the Hindoos was that
the moon supplied nourishment to the gods, which was the cause of the
diminution; its increase was explained by the entrance into it of
the souls of their ancestors; the gods swallowing these also as an
integral portion of the moon.
All these ideas were of slow development, and of successive growth; no
portion of mythology had a systematic elaboration.
I will add as a curious scientific fact, that lately botanists have
sought in vain in Northern India and in Persia for a plant whose
qualities correspond to those of the Soma as described in the Vedic
hymns; they are more or less agreed that it must be akin to the
_Ephedra_, but as this plant abounded in the whole country between
Siberia and the Iberian Peninsula, there was no hope of discovering the
locality of the Aryans by means of the habitat of the plant.
It has been often asserted that these stories of men and things that
have been swallowed must have come from countries formerly inhabited
by cannibals; learned writers, even Herbert Spencer--to quote one
instance--consider, not without some appearance of reason, that
Hindoos, Greeks, Romans and Germans could hardly have put forth similar
stories of this kind had there been no foundation in fact. But the
verbs to eat, to swallow, will admit of divers interpretations; we say
of a man that it was impossible for him to swallow such an insult, or
that he has consumed his fortune; and this mode of speech surprises no
one; where we speak of an eclipse, the inhabitants of the shores of
the Baltic say that the moon or sun is in the act of being eaten; in
India instead of saying such an one has been flogged, it would be said,
he has tasted the whip. A little reflection will convince us that if
nations who had nothing in common but human nature, spoke of the night
as covering, hiding, swallowing various beings, especially the sun
and the day, it was not more unreasonable on their part than to say,
as we do, that day and night follow each other, instead of expressing
ourselves after a more scientific manner, and not less correctly, in
saying that day and night are the successive effects of the rotation of
the earth on its axis.
Having discovered that mythological phraseology was sometimes due to
misconceptions of names, and that poetical fantasies had their share,
philologists quoted an instance of the imagination being misled by a
simple mistake; that of the name “Great Bear” being given to a certain
group of stars. The Sanscrit root _Ark_ signified to brighten, to
praise, to glorify, to celebrate; man praised, glorified, celebrated
the sun, moon and stars; for these purposes the word _Ark_ was used.
For all we know the substantive _rik_ may really have conveyed all
these meanings during the earliest period of the Aryan language; but if
we look at the fully developed branches of that family of speech, we
find that in this, its simplest form, _rik_ has been divested of all
meaning in the Rig-Veda except one; it only means a song of praise, a
hymn, that gladdens the heart of man, and brightens the countenance
of the gods. The other words, however, which rik might have expressed
were not entirely given up, but the root was rendered more definite;
thus _arki_ and _arkis_ were formed, these no longer meant hymns of
praise, but light, ray. It is difficult to understand how _Riksha_, in
the sense of bright, has become the name of “the bear”; might it not
be on account of his brilliant tawny fur, or from his bright eyes? No
one knows. Certain it is that in Sanscrit bears were called _Riksha_.
But the word _Riksha_ had also another meaning, as shown by a passage
in the Rig-Veda 1, 24, 10. “These stars (riksha) fixed high above,
which are seen by night; whither did they go by day?” The Commentator
observed that the word _riksha_ is not used in the sense of stars in
general, but that according to tradition the name is only given to
that particular constellation, which in later Sanscrit is called “the
Seven Rishis,” or “the Seven Sages.” And thus it happened that when
the dispersion took place, and the Aryans left their primitive home
and settled in Europe, they ceased to use the plural form “_Arktoi_,”
or many bears, and spoke of the group of seven stars as the Bear, the
Great Bear, without knowing why these stars had originally received
that name.
It did not escape the notice even of the less erudite that the gods
of Greece and Rome and of other Aryan nations had a close connection
with the most striking phenomena of nature; they also recognised the
same origin amongst the divinities of the Semitic nations, as well as
those of Egypt, Africa and America; this could, of course, be accounted
for by the presence of the same primitive stratum of human thought,
resembling those deeper geological layers, which only show themselves
in a partial and fragmentary manner.
But none of these mythologists attached the least importance to the
_names_ of the divinities, and if they were told that they were nothing
but names, it sounded almost like heresy to them, and they ignored the
fact that one of the latest scientific discoveries was being submitted
to them. Yet it is indubitable that the sun and the moon were in the
places occupied by them at present before they were named; but not till
they were named was there a Savitar, a Helios, a Selene or a Mene. If
then it is the name which makes the gods in mythology, in enabling
us to distinguish one from another, it follows that we must call
the Science of Language to our aid in order to solve the problem of
mythology, since that alone discloses the causes which have despoiled
the names of their primitive meaning, and that alone shows how the
germs of decrepitude, inherent in language, affect both the phonetic
portion and also the signification of words, since words naturally
react on thought and mould it.
FOOTNOTES:
[49] Max Müller, _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. ii. p. 70.
[50] Max Müller, _Chips from a German Workshop_, vol. i. p. 243.