upon the gods the consequences, and even in a degree the facts, of
their own fault or folly, the proceeding is not so entirely illogical
as we might at first suppose. For that great conception of an all-good
and all-wise Being had undergone a miserable transmutation, bringing it
more and more towards the form of an evil power. Hence, perhaps, it is
that we find these reproaches to the Deity put into the mouth even of
Menelaus, one of the noblest and purest characters among the heroes of
Homer[14].
[14] Il. iii. 365, and xiii. 631-5.
Again, this degradation of the divine idea was essentially connected
with the parcelling it out into many portions, according to the system
of polytheism. That system at once brought down all the attributes from
their supreme perfection to scales of degree: established finite and
imperfect relations in lieu of the perfect and infinite: carried into
the atmosphere of heaven an earthy element. The disintegration of the
Unity of God prepared the way for the disintegration of His several
attributes, and especially for weakening and effacing those among them,
which man had chiefly lost his capacity to grasp.
When once we have substituted for the absolute that which is in degree,
and for the perfect that which is defective, we have brought the
divine element within the cognizance of the human: the barrier of
separation is broken down, and, without any consciousness of undue
license, we thenceforward insensibly fashion it as we please. Each
corruption, as it takes its place in the scheme of popular ideas, is
consolidated by the action of new forces, over and above those which,
even if alone, were sufficient to engender it: for the classes, who
worked the machinery both of priestly caste, and of civil government,
found their account in accumulating fable up to a mountain mass. Each
new addition found a welcome: but woe to him, who, by shaking the
popular persuasion of any one article, endangered the very foundations
of the whole.
Such is an outline, though a faint and rude one, of what may be called
the _rationale_, or the law of cause and effect, applicable to the
explanation of the progressive and, at length, total corruption of the
primitive religion.
~_Inducements to Nature-worship._~
We may also endeavour to trace the motives which might determine the
downward movement of the human mind in the direction, partially or
wholly according to circumstances, of what is called Nature-worship.
On the one side lay the proposition handed down from the
beginning--there is a God. On the other side arose the question--where
is He? It was felt that on the whole He was not in man, though there
was in man what was of Him. It was obvious to look for Him in the
mighty agencies, and in the sublime objects of Nature, which, though
(so thought might run,) they did not reveal Him entirely, yet disclosed
nothing that was not worthy to belong to Him. Here is a germ of
Nature-worship. Hence it is that we find Aristotle, at a period when
thought was alike acute, deliberate, and refined, declare it to be
beyond all doubt that the heavenly bodies are far more divine than
man[15].
[15] Καὶ γὰρ ἀνθρώπου ἄλλα πολὺ θειότερα τὴν φύσιν, οἷον τὰ φανερώτατά
γε, ἐξ ὧν ὁ κοσμὸς συνέστηκεν. Eth. Nicom. VI. vii. 4.
Now this germ could not be one only. Trains of thought and reasoning,
essentially alike, would, according to diversities of minds and
circumstances, lead one to place the God in one natural sphere or
agency, and another to place him in another. There was no commanding
principle either to confine or to reconcile these variations; thus the
same cause, which brought deity into natural objects, would also tend
to exhibit many gods instead of one.
Such was the path by which man might travel from Theism to
Nature-worship. But other paths, starting from other points, would lead
to the same issue.
Suppose now the case of the mind wholly without the tradition of a
God. To such a mind, the vast and overmastering but usually regulated
forces, and the beautiful and noble forms of nature, would of
themselves suggest the idea of a superior agency; yet, again, not
of one superior agent alone, but of many. Thus some men would build
upwards, while others, so to speak, were building downwards, and they
would meet on the way.
And, again, a third operation could not but assist these two former,
and combine with their results. For the unaided intellect of man seems
not to have had _stamina_ to carry, as it were, the weight of the
transcendent idea of one God, of God infinite in might, in wisdom, and
in love. Again, it was awful as well as ponderous; because it was so
remote from man, and from his actual state. He therefore lightened the
idea, as it were, by dividing it from one into many; and he brought it
nearer to himself, nearer to his sympathies, by humanizing its form and
attributes. By this process he in time destroyed indeed his reverence,
but he also beguiled his fears, and created for himself objects not of
dread, so much as of familiar association.
Yet once again; it may, I think, be shown that a kind of natural
necessity led man to denominate actual powers, which he saw and felt
about him, not through the medium of generalization by abstract names,
but by making them persons.
Thus easy, and almost inevitable, under mental laws, was the road
to Nature-worship. The path, that led into the deeper corruption of
Passion-worship, has been already traced.
~_Progressive deterioration._~
It is then in entire accordance with what has preceded, that, when the
Pagan system has come into its old age, we should find it so wholly
deprived of all the lineaments of original beauty, grandeur, and
goodness, that we can read the destructive philosophy and poetry of the
atheistic schools, and of Lucretius in particular, without the strong
sentiment of horror, which in themselves they are fitted to excite.
Milton, in the First Book of Paradise Lost, treats the Pagan gods as
being, under new names, so many of the fallen angels, who with Satan
had rebelled, and with him had been driven out from heaven, so that the
world of heathen from the first had simply
‘devils to adore for deities.’
Whether this sentiment be poetically warrantable or not, (and for my
own part I cannot but think it was one too much connected with a cold
and lowered form of Christian doctrine,) it is not historically sound.
We should distinguish broadly between this assertion, that the Pagan
religion was an original falsehood, and the declaration of St. Paul,
‘I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice
to devils, and not to God[16].’ To the same class as the words of the
Apostle, belong, as I conceive, these (and other) sentences of Saint
Augustine[17]; _non sunt dii, maligni sunt spiritus, quibus æterna
tua felicitas pœna est.... Proinde si ad beatam pervenire desideras
civitatem, devita dæmonum societatem_. For these terrible descriptions
apply not to the infancy, but to the decrepitude of Paganism. The
difference between them was as the difference between the babe in arms,
and the hoary sinner on the threshold of death: and while the one
representation summarily cuts man off from God, the other only shows to
how fearful a distance he had by degrees travelled away. As time went
on, and the _eidola_ of succeeding generations were heaped one upon
another, the truly theistic element in the Pagan mythology was more and
more hidden and overborne, until at length its association with evil
was so inveterate and thorough, that the images, which the citizen or
matron of the Roman empire had before the mind as those of gods, bore
no appreciable resemblance to their divine original, but more and more
amply corresponded with that dark side of our nature, on which we are
accessible to, and finally may assume the likeness of, the evil one.
[16] 1 Cor. x. 20.
[17] De Civ. Dei, ii. 29.
But the critical error that we seem to have committed may be thus
described; we have thrown back upon the Homeric period the moral and
mythological character of the system, such as we find it developed in
later Greece and Rome: forgetful of the long and dim interval, that
separates Homeric religion from almost every subsequent representation,
and not duly appreciating the title of the poems to speak with an
almost exclusive authority for their own insulated epoch.
~_Paganism in its decay._~
Further, it is reasonable to remember that some of the powerful
alteratives, which in subsequent ages told upon the form and substance
of this wonderful mythology, had not begun to act in the time of Homer.
These alteratives were speculative thought, and political interests.
Philosophy, ever dangerous to the popular religion of Greece in the
days of its maturity and prosperity, became its ally in the period of
its decline, when its original vitality had entirely ebbed away, and
when the _Vexilla Regis_, raised aloft throughout the Roman empire,
drove it to seek refuge in holes and corners. Then the wit of man
was set to repair the tottering fabric; to apologize for what was
profligate, to invent reasons for what was void of meaning, to frame
relations between the depraved mythology, and the moral government of
the world. Even that corrupt and wicked system had, as it were, its
epoch of death-bed repentance.
The services thus rendered by philosophers were late and ineffectual;
but it was the civil power, which had been all along the greatest
conservator of the classical mythology. It felt itself to have an
interest in surrounding public authority with a veneration greater
than this world could supply: a commanding interest, with the pursuit
of which its necessities forbade it to dispense. Whatever exercised an
influence in subduing and enthralling the popular mind, answered its
purpose in the view of the civil magistrate. Hence his multifarious
importations into religion, each successively introduced for this
purely subjective and temporal reason, removed it farther and farther
from the ground of truth. Every story that he added to the edifice made
its fall more certain and more terrible. _Numerosa parabat excelsæ
turris tabulata._ But in Homer’s time there is no trace of this
employment of religion by governments, as a means of sheer imposition
upon their subjects.
So likewise in Homer there is no sign that conscious speculation
on these subjects had begun. Indeed, of that kind of thought which
involves a clear mental self-consciousness, we may perhaps say, that
the first beginning, at least for Europe and the West, is marked by the
very curious simile in the Iliad[18]--
[18] Il. xv. 80.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν ἀΐξῃ νόος ἀνέρος κ.τ.λ.
Homer, then, spoke out in simplicity, and in good faith, the religion
of his day, under those forms of poetry with which all religions have a
well-grounded affinity: for the imagination, which is the fountain-head
of poetic forms, is likewise a genuine, though faint, picture, of that
world which religion realizes, through Faith its groundwork, ‘the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen[19].’
[19] Heb. xi. 1.
And, indeed, he had no other form in which to speak forth his soul.
That which we call the invention of the Greeks at work upon the
subject-matter of religion was, in fact, the voice of human nature,
giving expression in the easiest and simplest manner to its sense
of the great objects and powers amidst which its lot was cast. It
has been well said by Professor M. Müller, in an able Essay[20] on
‘Comparative Mythology,’ that ‘abstract speech is more difficult,
than the fulness of a poet’s sympathy with nature.’ Thus it was not
so much that poetry usurped the office of religion, as that their
respective functions brought them of necessity to a common ground and
a common form of proceeding. Homer saw, heard, or felt the action of
the sun, the moon, the stars, the atmosphere, the winds, the sea, the
rivers, the fountains, the soil; and he knew of family affections, of
governing powers, of a healing art, of a gift and skill of mechanical
construction. Action, in each of these departments, could not but be
referred to a power. How was that power to be expressed?
[20] Oxford Essays, 1856, p. 36.
~_On Impersonation in Homer._~
At least for the Greek mind, less subtle, as Aristotle has observed,
than the Oriental, it was more natural to deal with persons, than
with metaphysical abstractions. It was foreign to the mental habit of
the heroic age to conceive of abstract essences; as it still remains
difficult, more difficult perhaps than, in the looseness of our
mental processes, we suppose, for the men of our own generation. Even
now, in the old age of the world, we have many signs of this natural
difficulty, which formerly was a kind of impossibility. Especially we
have that one which leads all communities, and above all their least
instructed classes, to apply the personal pronouns _he_ or _she_ to a
vast multitude of inanimate objects, both natural, and the products of
human skill and labour. These objects are generally such as stand in a
certain relation to action: they either do, suffer, or contain.
If then the Nature-forces could not be expressed, or at least could
not be understood as abstractions, to express them as persons was the
only other course open to the poet. It was not an effort to follow
this method: it would have required great effort to adopt any other.
How spontaneous was the impulse which thus generated the mythological
system, we may observe from this, that it not only personified in cases
where, an agency being seen, its fountain was concealed from view, but
it likewise went very far towards personification even in cases where
inanimate instruments were wielded by human beings, and where, as the
source of the phenomenon was perceived, there was no occasion to clothe
it with a separate vitality. Hence that copious vivifying power which
Homer has poured like a flood through his verse. Hence his bitter
arrow (πικρὸς), his darts hungry for human blood (λιλαιόμενα χρόος
ἆσαι), his ground laughing in the blaze of the gleaming armour (γέλασσε
δὲ πᾶσα περὶ χθὼν χαλκοῦ ὑπὸ στεροπῆς). Hence again his free use of
sensible imagery to illustrate metaphysical ideas: for example, his
black cloud of grief, his black pains, his purple death[21]. Hence that
singularly beautiful passage on the weeping of the deathless horses of
Achilles for Patroclus[22]. Hence too it is, that he does not scruple
to carry imagery, drawn from the sphere of one sense, into the domain
of another, an operation which later poets have found so difficult and
hazardous. He has an iron din[23], a brazen voice[24], a brazen or iron
heaven[25], a howling or shouting fire, a blaze of lamentation[26].
Hence, by a system of figure bolder perhaps than has been used by
any other poet, he invests the works of high art in metal with the
attributes of life and motion. This daring system reaches its climax
in the damsel satellites[27] of gold, that support the limping gait of
Vulcan: in the dogs of metal, that guard the palace of Alcinous: in the
elastic arms of Achilles, which, so far from being a weight upon him,
themselves lift him from the ground: and in the animated ships of the
Phæacians, which are taught by instinct to speed across the sea, and to
pilot their own course to the points of their destination[28]. On every
side we see a redundance of life, shaping, and even forcing, for itself
new channels: and thus it becomes more easy for us to conceive the
important truth that, when he impersonates, he simply takes what was
for him the easiest and the most effective way to describe. Every where
he is carrying on a double process of action and reaction: on the one
hand bringing Deity down to sensible forms; on the other, adorning and
elevating humanity, and inanimate nature, with every divine endowment.
[21] Il. v. 83. xvii. 591. xviii. 2, 4.
[22] Il. xvii. 426-40.
[23] Il. xvii. 424.
[24] Il. xviii. 222: more strictly, a voice of bronze.
[25] Il. xv. 328. xvii. 425, 565.
[26] Od. xx. 353.
[27] Il. xviii. 417. For the Shield, notice xviii. 539, 599-602. xix.
386.
[28] Od. viii. 556.
~_Nature of the myths of Homer._~
Homer, then, is full of mythical matter. But the word _myth_, of which
in recent controversies the use has been so frequent, is capable of
being viewed under either of two principal aspects.
In one of these, it signifies a story which is not contemporary with
the date of the facts it purports to relate, but is in reality an
after-view of them, which colours its subject, and exaggerates, _ad
libitum_, according to conditions of thought and feeling which have
arisen in the interval.
In the other of these senses, it is an allegory which has simply
lost its counterpart: it was true, but by separation from that which
attached it to fact, it has become untrue: being now of necessity
handled, if handled at all, as a substantive existence, it has passed
into a fable, and is only distinguished from pure fable, in that it
once indicated truths contemporary with itself, though probably truths
lying in a different region from its own.
It is in this last sense that the term myth is chiefly, and most
legitimately, applicable to the religious system of the Homeric poems:
but they may also probably contain more or less of the mythical element
in the former sense.
We, having obtained knowledge of the early derivation and distribution
of mankind, and of the primitive religion, from sources other than
those open to Homer, shall find in this knowledge the lost counterpart
of a great portion of the Homeric myths.
The theological and Messianic traditions which we find recorded in
Scripture, when compared with the Homeric theogony, will be found
to correspond with a large and important part of it: and, moreover,
with a part of it which in the poems themselves carries a cluster of
distinctive marks, not to be explained except by the discovery of this
correspondence. The evidence, therefore, of the meaning of this part of
the Homeric system is like that which is obtained, when, upon applying
a new key to some lock that we have been unable to open, we find it
fits the wards, and puts back the bolt.
In his learned and acute Essay[29] on Comparative Mythology, Professor
Max Müller undertakes to illustrate a doctrine that appears to be the
exact opposite of Mr. Grote’s ‘Past which was never present.’ If I
understand him rightly, there was at some one time a present for every
portion of the reputed past[30]: so that, by a reference to eastern
sources, the nature of that present, and of the original consistent
meaning for what afterwards on becoming unintelligible is justly called
a myth, has in many cases been, and may yet in many more come to be,
unveiled. Originally impersonations of ideas and natural powers, the
heathen gods never represented demons or evil spirits[31], and were
‘masks without an actor,’ ‘names without being:’ while their reality,
consisting in their relation to the facts of the universe, faded and
escaped from perception in the course of time. The myths of the Veda
are still in the stage of growth: Hesiod and Homer too are of the
‘later Greeks,’ and not only the Theogony of Hesiod is ‘a distorted
caricature,’ but the poetry of Homer[32] is extensively founded on
myths fully grown, and in the stage of decay, that is to say, long
severed from their corresponding deities.
[29] Oxford Essays, 1856.
[30] Essays, p. 42.
[31] Ibid. p. 48.
[32] pp. 43, 47, 49, 55, 87.
I do not doubt that in all mythology at its origin, there has been
both a shell and a substance: and that the tendency of the two to part
company, which we see even under the sway of revealed religion, must
have operated with far more power, where ordinarily at least, man was
thrown back, without other aid, upon his reason and his conscience,
beset as they were and are with overpowering foes.
But then, as it seems to me, we must anticipate great changes in the
shell itself. It will not retain, when empty, the identity of the form;
which has lost the support that it had from within when full. On the
contrary, it will become unlike its original self, as well as unlike
its archetype or substance, so that probably much of it must always
remain without a key.
Upon the other hand, as there was already a true religion in the world
when an untrue one began to gather upon and incrust it, there must
arise the question already put; what, according to the theory before
us, became of this true religion? It did not disappear in a day:
there was no wilful renunciation of it by single or specific acts,
no sharp line drawn between it and the false; but the human element
was gradually more and more imported into the divine, operating by
continual and successive disintegrations of the original ideas. If
so, then there seems to be nothing unreasonable in the belief that
the traces of them might long remain discernible in the adulterated
system, even if only as the features of a man are discernible in the
mask of a buffoon.
No doubt it would be unreasonable to look for such traces in Homer,
if he were indeed, in the popular sense of the term, which probably
Professor M. Müller does not intend, a later Greek; a Greek dealing
with a mythological system of which his nation had already had its
use, from which the creative principle had departed, and which was on
the road from ripeness to decay. I am far from saying that there are
no myths in Homer, where the original and interior meaning has ceased
to be discernible: but I shall seek to show that the contrary may be
confidently averred, and fully shown, with respect to the great bulk
of his mythology, and that we see in him two systems, both alive, and
in impact and friction, though with very unequal forces, one upon the
other; the first, that of traditional truth, and the second, of the
inventive impersonation of nature both material and invisible. And
certainly it is very striking that, with one or two very insignificant
exceptions, all those ancient fables, which Professor Müller treats as
having become unintelligible without the key of the Veda, and which he
explains by means of it, are fables unknown to Homer, and drawn from
much later sources.
~_Steps of the downward process._~
The general view, then, which will be given in these pages of the
Homeric Theo-mythology is as follows: That its basis is not to be
found either in any mere human instinct gradually building it up
from the ground, or in the already formed system of any other nation
of antiquity; but that its true point of origin lies in the ancient
Theistic and Messianic traditions, which we know to have subsisted
among the patriarchs, and which their kin and contemporaries must have
carried with them as they dispersed, although their original warmth
and vitality could not but fall into a course of gradual efflux, with
the gradually widening distance from their source. To travel beyond the
reach of the rays proceeding from that source was to make the first
decisive step from religion to mythology.
To this divine tradition, then, were added, in rank abundance, elements
of merely human fabrication, which, while intruding themselves, could
not but also extrude the higher and prior parts of religion. But the
divine tradition, as it was divine, would not admit of the accumulation
of human materials until it had itself been altered. Even before men
could add, it was necessary that they should take away. This impairing
and abstraction of elements from the divine tradition may be called
disintegration.