MYTH
_Panic._ _Tuesday._ _Money._ _Sorcery._ _Man._
Let us take two common English words, _panic_ and _cereal_, and
compare them etymologically; we owe both of them to the personages
of classical mythology. _Cereal_ comes to us from Ceres, the Roman
goddess of corn and flowers, and _panic_ is from Pan, a Greek
Nature-god, who was regarded as the protector of flocks and herds.
But here the resemblance ends; for not only is one Latin and the
other Greek, but one is the name of an object which we can touch
and see, while the other relates to that inner world of human
consciousness which cannot be grasped with hands. Now it is important
to notice that the _word_ is very much more closely connected with
the _thing_ in the case of _panic_ than in the case of _cereal_.
Certainly, we are interested to know that one of our words for corn
is derived from the name of a Roman goddess, but we do not feel that
it has much effect on our own ideas about corn. We feel, in fact,
that a study of the word _cereal_ will tell us something about Rome,
but very little either about corn or about ourselves. With _panic_ it
is different. In that intangible inner world words are themselves, as
it were, the solid materials. Yet they are not solid as stones are,
but rather as human faces, which sometimes change their form as the
inner man changes, and sometimes, remaining practically unaltered,
express with the same configuration a developed personality. “Human
speech and human thought,” said the psychologist, Wundt, “are
everywhere coincident.... The development of human consciousness
includes in itself the development of modes of expression. Language
is an essential element of the function of thinking.”
There was a time when no such word as _panic_ existed, just as there
was a time when no such word as _electric_ existed, and in this
case, as in the other, before the word first sprang into life in
somebody’s imagination, humanity’s whole awareness of the phenomenon
which we describe as ‘panic’ must have been a different thing. The
word marks a discovery in the inner world of consciousness,[22] just
as _electric_[23] marks a discovery in the outer world of physical
phenomena. Now it was said that the connection of the latter word, in
its Greek form, with _amber_ would be informative if we had no other
means of determining the electrical properties of that substance.
Words like _panic_ are important, because we really have no other
means of determining how the ancients, who lived before the days of
literature and written records, thought and felt about such matters.
The word enables us to realize that the early Greeks could become
conscious of this phenomenon, and thus name it, because they felt
the presence of an invisible being who swayed the emotions of flocks
and herds. And it also reveals how this kind of outlook[24] changed
slowly into the abstract idea which the modern individual strives to
express when _he_ uses the word _panic_. At last, as that idea grows
more abstract still, the expression itself may change; yet, just as
the power to think of the “quality” of an article was shown to be
the gift of Plato, so it would be impossible for us to think, feel,
or say such things as ‘crowd-psychology’ or ‘herd-instinct’ if the
Greeks had not thought, felt, said ‘Pan’—as impossible as it would
be to have the leaf of a plant without first having a seed tucked
into the warm earth. _Hero_, which originally meant a being who
was half-human and half-divine, is a similar descendant from Greek
religion which could not be extinguished from our vocabulary without
restricting our outlook.
As to the number of words which are indirectly descended from
prehistorical religious feeling, it is not possible to count them.
We can only say that the farther back language as a whole is traced,
the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems
at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence
or malignance—what may be called the soul-qualities—of natural
phenomena, such as clouds or plants or animals, make a more vivid
impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances.[25]
Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical
influence. But, as the period which has elapsed since the beginning
of the Aryan culture is only a tiny fragment of the whole epoch
during which man has been able to speak, it is only in glimpses that
we can perceive this; in a word here and a word there we trace but
the final stages of a vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind
of outlook which we loosely describe as ‘mythological’ to the kind
which we may describe equally loosely as ‘intellectual thought’. To
comprehend the process fully, we must build up the rest of it in the
imagination, just as, from seeing a foot of cliff crumble away at
Dover, we may set wings to time and call up the immemorial formation
of the English Channel.
The English words _diurnal_, _diary_, _dial_ are derived from the
Latin ‘dies’ (day), while _journal_ comes to us, via the French
language, from the same word. These syllables conceal among
themselves the central religious conception common to the Aryan
nations. As far back as we can trace them, the Sanskrit word ‘dyaus’,
the Greek ‘zeus’ (accusative ‘dia’), and the Teutonic ‘tiu’ were all
used in contexts where we should use the word _sky_; but the same
words were also used to mean _God_, the Supreme Being, the Father
of all the other gods—Sanskrit ‘Dyaus pitar’, Greek ‘Zeus pater’,
Illyrian ‘Deipaturos’, Latin ‘Juppiter’ (old form ‘Diespiter’). We
can best understand what this means if we consider how the English
word _heaven_ and the French ‘ciel’ are still used for a similar
double purpose, and how it was once not a double purpose at all.
Indeed, there must still be English and French people for whom the
spiritual ‘heaven’ is identical with the visible sky. But if we
are to judge from language, we must assume that when our earliest
ancestors looked up to the blue vault they felt that they saw not
merely a place, whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture,
as it were, of a living Being. And this fact is still extant in the
formal resemblance between such words as _diary_ and _divine_.
The French ‘Dieu’, with its close resemblance to ‘dies’, retains the
luminous suggestion of _day_ and _sky_ very much more vividly than
any of our words from the same stem, but we have kept the Teutonic
form nearly intact in _Tuesday_. The fact that ‘Tiu’s day’ came in
as a translation of the Latin ‘Dies Martis’ (surviving in French
‘mardi’) also suggests that for the Teutons, alone among the Aryans,
the supreme Father-God afterwards became their god of war; and this
may throw some light both on their fundamental character and on the
nature of the experiences which they encountered during the thousand
odd years of their sojourn in the northern forests.
It must not be assumed that the “ancestors” spoken of above are
identical with the Aryans described in Chapter I. By the time of
the dispersion the thought of “sky” may have been quite separated
in the average Aryan mind from the thought of “God”, or it may not
have been. We cannot say; we only know that at one time, among the
speakers of the Aryan language, these two thoughts were one and the
same. It is impossible to fix a point in time, and then to cut a kind
of cross-section, and define the exact relation between language and
thought at that particular moment. This relation—and especially
in the domain of religion—is a fluid and flickering thing, varying
incredibly in individual minds, leaping up and sinking down like a
flame from one generation to another. Consequently no two theories on
the religious beliefs held by the Aryans in the third millennium B.C.
are alike; and we are concerned here only with those modern words
which are the product of Aryan religious consciousness at some time
or another in its history.
They come to us, naturally, by different routes, a few by the
south-eastern and any number by the north-western group. _Pariah_,
a non-Aryan word which has come into our language from the East,
derives its peculiar forcibility from the age-old division of India’s
population into castes. _Ignite_ is from the Latin ‘ignis’, which
is derived from the same parent word as the Sanskrit ‘Agni’, the
fire-god. In _magic_ we have a reminiscence of the Persian ‘Magi’,
mighty prophets and interpreters of dreams, of whom three were
said to have found their way to Bethlehem; but unless it be in the
modern trade-name _Mazda_, there is little, if any, trace in our
language of the great Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, with its
everlasting conflict between light and darkness, Ahura Mazdao and
Ahriman. The meagreness in our language of these relics of Hindoo
and Persian religion is again eloquent of the total separation of
the north-western and south-eastern Aryans. The whole vast structure
of Eastern philosophy, with its intricate classifications cutting
completely across our own, was practically a sealed book to the West
until after the French re-established a commercial connection with
India in the eighteenth century. Signs are not wanting, however, that
the rapid growth of interest in this ancient and lofty outlook, which
has taken place in Europe during the last fifty years, may enrich
our vocabulary with some extracts from the ancient terminology, such,
for example, as _maya_—the soul’s external environment considered
as being ‘illusion’, or as obscuring and concealing the spiritual
reality, and _karma_, the destiny of an individual as it is developed
from incarnation to incarnation.
To turn from these nations to a member of the north-western group,
such as Greece, is like passing from an arid desert into a land
flowing with milk and honey. _Panic_ and _hero_ have already been
mentioned. _Iris_ (the flower, and also the part of the human
eye), together with the beautiful word _iridescent_, have come to
us from the Greek goddess Iris, whose outer form was the rainbow.
_Titanic_ is from the Titans, huge earth-beings who rebelled against
God much as did the fallen angels in Genesis. _Hermetically_ (in
‘hermetically sealed’) comes to us from the Greek messenger-god,
Hermes, by a roundabout route (see Chapter VII); and in more or less
common use are _Aphrodisiac_, _Apolline_, _Asia_, _Atlas_, _chimera_,
_daedal_, _Dionysiac_, _Elysian_, _Europe_, _Hades_, _harmony_,
_lethal_, _Muse_ and _music_, _mystery_, _nemesis_, _nymph_, _paean_,
_panacea_, _phaeton_, _protean_, _satyr_, _siren_, _stygian_. The
word _erotic_, from Eros, a Greek god of love, is an interesting
example of the way in which the experiences of past civilizations
evaporate into essential refinements of modern speech. Because of
differences between Greece and Rome, which it took about two thousand
years to work out on the stage of history, we are now able to make a
fine distinction, such as that between _erotic_ and _amorous_.
The true Roman god of love, however, though in the world of phantasy
he still survives in his original form, _Cupid_, has only actually
entered our language in the word _cupidity_. In the difference
between the material associations of _cupidity_ and the more
imaginative ones of _erotic_ we begin already to divine a fundamental
dissimilarity between Greek and Roman mythology. Other words which
come to us from Roman religion are _cereal_, _genius_, _fate_,
_fortune_, _fury_, _grace_, _June_, _mint_, _money_, _Saturday_,
_vesta_, the names of the planets, _contemplate_, _sacrifice_,
_temple_, _Host_ (from ‘hostia’, the victim which was sacrificed),
_augury_, and _auspice_. The last two words take us back to the Roman
custom of divining the will of the gods by watching the flights
of birds. ‘Aves-specere’ meant ‘to see birds’, and we still have
the first word preserved to us in _aviary_. _Fury_ and _grace_ are
translations of Greek names; but in some of the others—especially
_money_ and _mint_, from the goddess Moneta—we behold the late
reflection of a highly significant process. It is this: As time went
on, Roman religious feeling quickly changed in two almost opposite
ways. On the one hand it attached itself more and more to concrete
and material objects, and, on the other, its gods and goddesses
were felt less and less as living beings, and more and more as mere
abstract intellectual “conceptions”. Yet these two changes were not
really opposite, but complementary. For as the visible part of a
goddess like Ceres became more and more solid, as she came more and
more to be used simply as a synonym for _corn_, the invisible part of
her naturally grew more and more attenuated. Thus, the mythical world
was much less real to the Romans than it had been to the Greeks. It
was more like a world of mental abstractions.
Soon there was a “god”, or part of a god, for every object and every
activity under the sun, and when the empire was founded, each
emperor, as he died, automatically became a divinity. To-day the
first two “divine” emperors, _Julius_ and _Augustus_, take their
places beside _Juno_, the Queen of Heaven, in our monthly calendar.
We may say, in fact, that by the time Christianity began to spread
in the Roman Empire, Roman official religion had become divorced
from feeling altogether, its dry bones remaining little more than
a convenient system of nomenclature. Not that the new religion had
no serious rivals; but the doctrines of Stoics and Epicureans, the
Mystery Schools, and cults such as that of Mithras, had little
historical connection with Roman mythology. Yet if Rome contributed
no discoveries of value concerning the relations of human beings to
the gods, it was perhaps for this very reason that she was able to
concentrate more exclusively upon working out their relations with
each other; and in so doing she created jurisprudence.
But in the later days of the empire, when this attenuation of the
imaginative and supernatural element in Roman mythology had already
gone beyond its logical conclusion, when Rome had absorbed the myths
of Greece and Egypt and sterilized them both, the soul of Europe was
stirring afresh in the north. Contact between the Roman tongue and
that of their subjects, the Celtic “Galli” in north Italy and beyond
the Alps, had grown more and more intimate. Gradually there came into
being a sort of hybrid Low Latin, the father of modern French and
the other Romance languages, which in many cases expressed Celtic
notions and feelings in Latin forms. So it was that new life came to
be breathed into some of the dead abstractions of Roman mythology;
but it was a very different life from the old one. Thus, the old
Roman deity Sors (Chance) had long ago developed for the Romans
into a purely abstract idea, referring to the drawing of lots. But
up in the north, far away from the capital, the ‘sortiarius’ became
a mysterious teller of fortunes by that means. As the years went
on, the syllables softened and smoothed and shortened themselves,
until they became the old French ‘sorcier’ from which ‘sorcerie’ was
formed, and so our English _sorcery_. It is strange to think how far
this word has travelled from its origin; and in the work of a modern
poet we find it travelling even farther, changing from a process into
a sort of mysterious realm:
Heart-sick of his journey was the Wanderer;
Foot-sore and sad was he;
And a Witch who long had lurked by the wayside,
Looked out of sorcery....
It was much the same with ‘Fata’. For the Romans themselves the
old goddesses called the Fata, or _Fates_, turned quickly into an
abstracted notion of destiny. But contact with the dreamy Celts
breathed new life into their nostrils, and ‘Fata’ in Late Latin
became spiritual once more. The sharp sounds were softened and
abraded until they slipped imperceptibly into Old French ‘fée’
(Modern English _fay_), and so _fa-ery_ and _fairy_. _Demon_ is the
result of a similar metamorphosis.
Now in dealing with mythology nothing is more misleading than to
compare the gods of different nations, assuming that those who
have etymologically similar names meant the same thing to their
worshippers. For instance, it has been pointed out that the name
Tiu descends from a word which also developed elsewhere into Dyaus
and Zeus, but to suggest that Tiu was the “same god” as Zeus would
be quite meaningless. And it is the same with the other persons of
northern mythology, such as Thor, the thunder-god, from whom we
have _Thursday_, or Wotan (Odin) who taught men language and gave
up his eye in order to possess his beloved Fricka (_Wednesday_ and
_Friday_). There are many external resemblances, etymological and
otherwise, between this Teutonic mythology and the mythology of
Greece, but for the historical study of human consciousness it is the
differences between them which are really significant. Here there
is no room to consider either the resemblances or the differences,
except in so far as they are preserved for us in the words we use.
And we notice at once how small is the number of our words which
refer to the Teutonic myths. Where relics still remain they seem to
be either—like _elf_, _goblin_, _pixy_, _puck_, _troll_—the names of
the creatures themselves, still used but no longer felt to exist, or
else—like _cobalt_ and _nickel_, the names given by German miners to
demoniac spirits—they have lost all memory of their original meaning.
There are, of course, exceptions, such as _Easter_, from an old
Teutonic goddess of the spring, _Old Nick_ from ‘nicor’, a fabulous
sea-monster, and _nightmare_ from the demon Mara, while the concepts
_earth_ and _lie_ (untruth) may possibly have been brought to birth
in men’s minds by the divinities Erda and Loki. But compared with the
number of derivations from older myths these examples are practically
negligible. There is an accidental quality about them, and few have
entered very deeply into our language. The Aryan family was now
growing older and more firmly knit. While Slavs, Teutons, and Celts
were still uncivilized, their cousins, the Greeks and Romans, had
already developed an elaborate culture. Had the former been left
alone like the latter, their mythology, too, might in time have grown
down into the language. But that was not to be. The great Aryan
family did not lose touch long enough. When Rome came, and with her
Christianity, the missionaries naturally assured the believers in
Thor and Wotan that Thor and Wotan were not. And coming, as they
did, from a developed civilization, they not only ousted the old
Teutonic gods from the language, but brought with them a supply of
ready-made Greek and Latin words, many of which—did they but know
it—drew their peculiar shades of meaning from a pagan mythology which
they held in equal abhorrence. The classical gods and goddesses faded
so slowly into the thin air of abstract thought that the process was
hardly perceived, but the Nibelungs and Valkyries, the Siegfrieds and
Fafnirs of Teutonic myth, were doomed while they were still alive.
Thus our fathers beheld the death of Baldur with their own eyes, and
were awake during the twilight of the gods.
Of course, where the events of Teutonic myth and legend were
associated with a particular locality, they have left their mark in
the names of places. These, naturally enough, are found for the most
part in Germany. In Great Britain—apart from _Asgardby_, _Aysgarth_,
_Wayland Smith_, _Wansdyke_, _Wednesbury_, and some others—the
place-names that have come to us from pre-Christian religion are
principally Celtic, and are usually found—like _Cader Idris_, _Cader
Arthur_, _Arthur’s Seat_, _Kynance Cove_, ...—in Scotland, Wales,
and Cornwall. Apart from place-names, _galahad_ is a relic of Celtic
legend which has found a permanent place and a modern usage in the
language; and there may be one or two others. But not many. In
England the whole Celtic nation and language died early out of the
common consciousness, and it died even more suddenly than the persons
of Teutonic myth. This explains the freshness and delight which many
young writers of the last generation found in the language and legend
of Irish antiquity. To resuscitate, as Keats did, the invisible
beings of classical mythology was to dig down into the roots of our
present everyday outlook; to take part in the Celtic revival was to
feel that you were looking out on the world through an entirely new
window—or at any rate through one which had not been cleaned for
centuries.
We only owe one English word to the Slavonic myths, and that is
the unpleasant _vampire_, which was brought back from the East by
travellers in the eighteenth century.
The general relation between language and myth is, as the word
_myth_ (Greek ‘muthos’—word) suggests, almost unfathomable; but
before leaving the limited Aryan aspect, which is all we have had
space to touch on here, one interesting etymology ought to be
mentioned, which has sometimes been taken to conceal the whole root
and purpose of Aryan culture in the history of mankind. The Hindoos
look back to a great teacher called Manu. Whether this individual
himself, or his name, is historical or mythical is not particularly
important. Hindoo sacred language and literature reveal at any rate
a prehistoric _belief_ among certain classes of society that Manu
was the originator of their culture and religion. Now ‘manu’ is also
their word for _man_; and about this word, as it appears in the
different Aryan languages, there are two interesting points. The
first is that wherever it crops up it bears the double meaning of
‘human being’ and ‘member of the male sex’; the second that it is
thought to be cognate with the root ‘men’, implying ‘to think’, which
appears also in English _mind_, Latin ‘mens’,... We have seen that to
the external view one of the most remarkable characteristics in which
Aryans differed from the races they supplanted was their patriarchal
system. The etymology of the word _man_ suggests the inner reason for
this, for it hints at a dim consciousness among the Aryans that the
essential function of the human being—at any rate of the Aryan human
being—is to think.
Side by side with the conception of the human being as a “thinker”,
we find an instinctive feeling that the human race is especially
represented by its male portion. To the Aryan outlook, wherever we
find it, the human being is _man_, and God is God the Father. What
exotic matriarchies may have held sway before humanity began to
worship logic and masculinity we cannot say, for our language throws
light only on that tiny portion of humanity’s inner and outer history
which is the peculiar contribution of the Aryan races; and, in doing
so, it suggests that, in spite of their tendency towards monogamy
and a rigid family organization, the “subjection” of women has its
roots very deep in Aryan psychology. In this respect Greece and Rome
differed but little in essence from India and Persia. The impulse
towards a different conception of women, both in their own minds and
in the minds of men, which has been giving an increasing amount of
trouble to the European races for the last two thousand years, was
really, as we shall see, implanted in the Aryan outlook by foreign
religions.