from the same root as the Sanskrit _indu_, drop, sap, but the etymology is
doubtful. What is not doubtful is that he is the god of the bright sky,
and although, like the other gods invoked in the hymns of the _Rig-Veda_,
a departmental or tribal deity, he is a sort of _primus inter pares_, of
whose many titles, Vritrahan or “Vritra-slayer” is the pre-eminent one.
The benefits showered by him upon mortals caused the attribution of moral
qualities to him, and he was adored as “lord of the virtues,” while the
juice of the sacred soma plant was offered in his honour, for which reason
he is also called Somapâ or “soma-drinker.” It is his struggle with Vritra
which is a constant theme of the Vedic hymns, the burden of which remind
us of the praises offered in the Psalms to Yahweh as a man of war, as
mighty in battle. “The gods do not reach thee, nor men, thou overcomest
all creatures in strength.... Thou thunderer, hast shattered with thy bolt
the broad and massive cloud into fragments, and has sent down the waters
that were confined in it to flow at will; verily thou alone possessest all
power.” The primitive physical meaning of the myth is clear. Indra is the
sun-god, armed with spears and arrows, for such did the solar rays
sometimes appear to barbaric fancy. The rain-clouds are imprisoned in
dungeons or caverns by Vritra, the “enveloper,” the thief, serpent, wolf,
wild boar, as he is severally styled in the _Rig-Veda_. Indra attacks him,
hurls his darts at him, they pierce the cloud-caverns, the waters are
released, and drop upon the earth as rain.
This explanation, which has many parallels in savage myth, is
self-consistent as fitting into crude philosophy of personal life and
volition in sun and cloud, and is fraught with deep truth of meaning in
regions like the Punjaub, where drought brought famine in its train.
The Aryans were a pastoral people, their wealth being in flocks and
herds.[21] The cow yielded milk for the household; her dung fertilised the
soil; her young multiplied the wealth of the family at an ever-increasing
rate, and she naturally became the symbol of fruitfulness and prosperity,
ultimately an object of veneration; while, for the functions which the
bull performed, he was the type of strength. The Aryan’s enemy was he who
stole or injured the cattle; the Aryan’s friend was he who saved them from
the robber’s clutch.
Intellectually, the Aryan tribes were, speaking broadly, in the mythopœic
stage, and the personification of phenomena was rife among them. Their
barbaric fancy, as kindred myths all the world over testify, would find
ample play in the fleeting and varied scenery of the cloud-flecked
heavens, suggestive, as this would be, of bodies celestial and bodies
terrestrial. To these children of the plain the heavens were a vast, wide
expanse, over which roamed supra-mundane beasts, the two most prominent
figures in their mythical zoology being the cow and the bull. The sun,
giver of blessed light, was the bull of majesty and strength; the white
clouds were cows, from whose swelling udders dropped the milk of
heaven--the blessed rain. But there were dark clouds also, clouds of night
and clouds of storm, and within these lurked the monster-robber; into them
he lured the herds, and withheld both light and rain from the children of
men. To the sun-god, therefore, who smote the thief-dragon, Vritra, with
his shaft, and set free the imprisoned cows, went up the shout of praise,
the song of gratitude. This myth survives in many legends of the Aryan
race, and their family likeness is unmistakable. In its Latin guise it
appears as Hercules[22] and Cacus, although the preciseness of detail
narrated by Virgil, Livy, and other writers, has given it quasi-historical
rank. Hercules, after his victory over Geryon, stops to rest by the Tiber,
and while he is sleeping the three-headed monster, Cacus, steals some of
his cattle, dragging them by their tails into his cavern in Mons
Avertinus. Their bellowing awakens Hercules, who attacks the cavern, from
the mouth of which Cacus vomits flames, and roars as in thunder. But the
hero slays him and frees the cattle, a victory which the earlier Romans
celebrated with solemn rites at the Ara Maxima. In Greek myth the most
familiar examples are the struggles between the sun-god, Apollo, and the
storm-dragon, Pythôn, and the deliverance of the Princess Andromeda by
Perseus from the sea-monster sent by Poseidôn to ravage the land. In the
northern group we have the battle of Siegfried with the Niflungs, or
Niblungs, and of Sigurd with the dragon Fafnir, who guards golden
treasures; while, in the _Edda_, Thor goes fishing with the giant Hymir,
and catches the demon Loki, whose foul brood are Hell, the wolf Fenri, and
the Earth-girdling Serpent. Amongst ourselves, Beowulf, hero of the poem
of that name, attacks the dragon or fire-drake Grendel, who, with his
troll-mother, haunts a gloomy marsh-land. Thence he stole forth at night
to seize sleeping champions, taking them to his dwelling-place to devour
them, and this in such numbers that scarce a man was left. One pale night,
Beowulf awaited the coming of the monster, and, gripping him tightly,
snapped his limbs asunder, so that he died.
These brief illustrations would hardly be complete without some reference
to our national saint. Opinions differ as to his merits, Gibbon
stigmatising him as a fraudulent army contractor,[23] while the researches
of M. Ganneau seek to establish his relation to the Egyptian Horus and
Typhon. Be this as it may, the stirring old legend tells how George of
Cappadocia delivered the city of Silene from a dragon dwelling in a lake
hard by. Nothing that the people could give him satisfied his insatiate
maw, and in their despair they cast lots who among their dearest ones
should be flung to the dread beast. The lot fell to the king’s daughter,
and she went unflinchingly, like Jephthah’s daughter, to her fate. But on
the road the hero learns her sad errand, and bidding her fear not, he,
making sign of the cross, brandishes his lance, attacks and transfixes the
dragon, and leading him into Silene, beheads him in sight of all the
people, who, with their king, are baptized to the glory of Him who made
St. George the victor.[24]
(_f._) _The Devil._
While, however, the myth of Indra and Vritra has in its western variants
remained for the most part a battle between heroes and dragons, the moral
element rarely obscuring the physical features, it gave rise among the
Iranians or ancient Persians to a definite theology, the strange fortunes
of which have, as remarked above, profoundly affected Christendom.
Although in the Vedic hymns the features of the primitive nature-myth
reappear again and again, Indra himself boasting, “I slew Vritra, O
Maruts, with might, having grown strong with my own vigour; I who hold the
thunderbolt in my arms, I have made these all-brilliant waters to flow
freely for man,” we find an approach in them to some conception of that
spiritual conflict of which the physical conflict was so complete a
symbol. Indra as victor, is an object of adoration and invested with
purity and goodness; Vritra, as the enemy of men, is an object of dread,
and invested with malice and evil.
But while in the Zend-Avesta, the Scriptures of the old Iranian religion,
the struggle between Thraetaôna and the three-headed serpent Azhi-Dahâka
(in which names are recognisable the Traitana and Ahi of the _Veda_ and
the Feridun and Zohak of Persian epic) is narrated, the moral idea is
dominant throughout. The theme is not the attack of the sun-god to recover
stolen milch cows from the dragon’s cave, but the battle between Ormuzd,
the Spirit of Light, and Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness. The one seeks to
mar the earth which the other has made. Into the fair paradise,
Airayana-Vaêjô, “a delightful spot,” as the Avesta calls it, “with good
waters and trees,” and into other smiling lands which Ormuzd has blessed,
Ahriman sends “a mighty serpent ... strong, deadly frost ... buzzing
insects, and poisonous plants ... toil and poverty,” and, worse than all,
“the curse of unbelief.”[25] Between these two spiritual powers and their
armies of good and bad angels the battle rages for supremacy in the
universe, for possession of the citadel of Mansoul.
Early in the history of the Asiatic Aryan tribes there had arisen a
quarrel between the Brahmanic and Iranian divisions. The latter had
become a quiet-loving, agricultural people, while the former remained
marauding nomads, attacking and harassing their neighbours. In their
plundering inroads they invoked the aid of spells and sacrifices, offering
the sacred soma-juice to their gods, and nerving themselves for the fray
by deep draughts of the intoxicating stuff. Not only they, but their gods
as well, thereby became objects of hatred to the peaceful Iranians, who
foreswore all worship of freebooter’s deities, and transformed these
_devas_ of the old religion into demons. That religion, as common to the
Indo-European race, was polytheistic, a worship of deities each ruling
over some department of nature, but a worship exalting now one, now
another god, be it Indra, or Varuna, or Agni, according to the indications
of the deity’s supremacy, or according to the mood of the worshipper. As
remarked by Jacob Grimm, “the idea of the devil is foreign to all
primitive religions,” obviously because in all primitive thought evil and
good are alike regarded as the work of deities. In the Old Testament,
Yahweh is spoken of as the author of both;[26] the angels, whether charged
with weal or woe, are his messengers. In the _Iliad_ Zeus dispenses
both:--
“Two urns by Jove’s high throne have ever stood,
The source of evil one, the other good;
From thence the cup of mortal man he fills,
Blessings to these, to those distribute ills,
To most, he mingles both,”[27]
and ’tis a far cry from this to the loftier conception of Euripides: “If
the gods do evil, then are they no gods.” So there was a monotheistic--or,
as Professor Max Müller terms it, a henotheistic--element in the Vedic
religion which in the Iranian religion, and this mainly through the
teaching of the great thinker and reformer Zarathushtra (Zoroaster), was
largely diffused. In his endeavour to solve the old problem of reconciling
sin and misery with omnipotent goodness, he supposes “two primeval
causes,” one of which produced the “reality,” or good mind; the other the
“non-reality,” or evil mind. Behind these was developed belief in a
philosophical abstraction, “uncreate time,” of which each was the product;
but such doctrines were too subtle for the popular grasp, and, wrapped in
the old mythological garb, they appeared in concrete form as dualism.
Vritra survived in Ahriman, who, like him, is represented as a serpent;
and in Ormuzd we have the phonetic descendant of Ahura-mazda.
Now, it was with this dualism, this transformed survival of the sun and
cloud myth, that the Jews came into association during their memorable
exile in Babylon. Prior to that time their theology, as hinted above, had
no devil in it. But in that belief in spirits which they held in common
with all semi-civilised races, as a heritage from barbarous ancestors,
there were the elements out of which such a personality might be readily
evolved. Their _satan_, or “accuser,” as that word means, is no prince of
the demons, like the Beelzebul of later times; no dragon or old serpent,
as of the Apocalypse, defying Omnipotence and deceiving the whole world;
but a kind of detective who, by direction of Yahweh, has his eye on
suspects, and who is sent to test their fidelity. In all his missions he
acts as the intelligent and loyal servant of Yahweh. But although
therefore not regarded as bad himself, the character and functions with
which he was credited made easy the transition from such theories about
him to theories of him as inherently evil, as the enemy of goodness, and,
therefore, of God. He who, like Vritra, was an object of dread, came to be
regarded as the incarnation of evil, the author and abettor of things
harmful to man. Persian dualism gave concrete form to this conception, and
from the time of the Exile we find Satan as the Jewish Ahriman, the
antagonist of God. Not he alone, for “the angels that kept not their first
estate” were the ministers of his evil designs, creatures so numerous that
every one has 10,000 at his right hand and 1000 at his left hand, and
because they rule chiefly at night no man should greet another lest he
salute a demon. They haunt lonely spots, often assume the shape of beasts,
and it is their presence in the bodies of men and women which is the cause
of madness and other diseases.[28]
From the period when the Apocryphal books, especially those having traces
of Persian influence, were written,[29] this doctrine of an arch-fiend
with his army of demons received increasing impetus. It passed on without
check into the Christian religion, and wherever this spread the heathen
gods, like the _devas_ of Brahmanism among the Iranians, were degraded
into demons, and swelled the vast crowd of evil spirits let loose to
torment and ruin mankind.
This doctrine of demonology, it should be remembered, was but the
elaborated form of ancestral belief in spirits referred to above. In the
Christian system it was associated with that belief in magic which has its
roots in fetishism, and from the two arose belief in witchcraft. The
universal belief in demons in early and mediæval times supplied an easy
explanation of disasters and diseases; the sorcerers and charm-workers,
the wizards and enchanters, had passed into the service of the devil. For
power to work their spite and malevolence they had bartered their souls to
him, and sealed the bargain with their blood. It was enough for the
ignorant and frightened sufferers to accuse some poor, misshapen,
squinting old woman of casting on them the evil eye, or of appearing in
the form of a cat, to secure her trial by torture and her condemnation to
an unpitied death. The spread of popular terror led to the issue of Papal
bulls and to the passing of statutes in England and in other countries
against witchcraft, and it was not until late in the eighteenth century
that the laws against that imaginary crime were repealed.
There is no sadder chapter in the annals of this tearful world than this
ghastly story of witch-finding and witch-burning. Sprenger computes that
during the Christian epoch no less than _nine millions_ of persons, mostly
women of the poorer classes, were burned; victims of the survival into
relatively civilised times of an illusion which had its source in
primitive thought. It was an illusion which had the authority of Scripture
on its side;[30] the Church had no hesitation concerning it; such men as
Luther, Sir Thomas Browne, and Wesley never doubted it; the evidence of
the bewitched was supported by honest witnesses; and judges disposed to
mercy and humanity had no qualms in passing the dread sentence of the law
on the condemned.[31]
And although it exists not to-day, save in by-places where gross darkness
lurks, it was not destroyed by argument, by disproof, by direct assault,
but only through the quiet growth and diffusion of the scientific spirit,
before which it has dispersed. It could not live in an atmosphere thus
purified, an atmosphere charged with belief in unchanging causation and in
a definite order unbroken by caprice or fitfulness, whether in the sweep
of a planet or the pulsations of a human heart.
Of course the antecedents of the arch-fiend himself could not fail to be
the subject of curious inquiry in the time when his existence was no
matter of doubt. The old theologians scraped together enough material
about him from the sacred books of the Jews and Christians to construct an
elaborate biography of him; but in this they would seem to have explained
too much in certain directions and not enough in others, thus provoking a
reaction which ultimately discredited their painful research. Their
genealogy of him was carried farther back than they intended or desired,
for the popular notions credited him with both a mother and grandmother.
Their theory of his fall from heaven gave rise to the droll conception of
his lameness and to the legends of which the “devil on two sticks” is a
type. Their infusion of foreign element into his nature aided his
pictorial presentment in motley form and garb, as seen in the old
miracle-plays. To Vedic descriptions of Vritra’s darkness may perchance be
traced his murkiness and blackness; to Greek satyr and German
forest-sprite his goat-like body, his horns, his cloven hoofs, his tail;
to Thor his red beard; to dwarfs and goblins his red cloak and nodding
plume; to theories of transformation of men and spirits into animals his
manifold metamorphoses, as black cat, wolf, hellhound, and the like.
But his description was his doom; it was by a natural sequence that the
legends of mediæval times present him, not, with the Scotch theologians,
as a scholar and a swindler, disguising himself as a parson, but as
gullible and stupid, as over-reaching himself and as befooled by mortals.
And, like the Trolls of Scandinavian folk-lore who burst at sunrise, it
needed only the full light thrown upon his origin and development by the
researches of comparative mythologists to dissipate this creation of man’s
fears and fancies into the vaporous atmosphere where he had his birth.
§ IV.
THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH.
The cogency of the evidence concerning the development of belief in Satan
out of light-and-darkness myths is generally admitted, but it is of a kind
that must not be pushed too far. For the phases of Nature are manifold;
manifold also is the life of man; and we must not lend a too willing ear
to theories which refer the crude explanations of an unscientific age,
when the whole universe is Wonderland, to one source. _Cave hominem unius
libri_, says the adage, and we may apply it, not only to the man of one
book, but also to the man of one idea, in whom the sense of proportion is
lacking, and who sees only that for which he looks. Here such caution is
introduced as needful of exercise against the comparative mythologists
who, not content with showing--as abundant evidence warrants--that myth
has its germs in the investment of the powers of nature with personal life
and consciousness, contend that the great epics of our own and kindred
races are, from their broadest features to minutest detail, but
nature-myths obscured and transformed.
Certain scholars, notably Professor Max Müller, Sir G. W. Cox, and
Professor de Gubernatis, as interpreters of the myths of the Indo-European
peoples, and Dr. Goldziher, as an interpreter of Hebrew myth and cognate
forms, maintain that the names given in the mythopœic age to the sun, the
moon, and the changing scenery of the heaven as the fleeting forms and
myriad shades passed over its face, lost their original signification
wholly or partially, and came to be regarded as the names of veritable
deities and men, whose actions and adventures are the disguised
descriptions of the sweep of the thunder-charged clouds and of the victory
of the hero-god over their light-engulfing forces. But it is better to
state the theory in the words of its exponents, and for that purpose a
couple of extracts from Sir George Cox’s _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_
will suffice.
In the spontaneous utterances of thoughts awakened by outward
phenomena, we have the source of myths which must be regarded as
_primary_. But it is obvious that such myths would be produced only so
long as the words employed were used in their original meaning. If
once the meaning of the word were either in part or wholly forgotten,
the creation of a new personality under this name would become
inevitable, and the change would be rendered both more certain and
more rapid by the very wealth of words which were lavished on the
sights and objects which most impressed their imagination. A thousand
phrases would be used to describe the action of a beneficent or
consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious
wind; and every word or phrase become the germ of a new story as soon
as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name. Thus, in
the polyonymy (by which term Sir George Cox means the giving of
several names to one object), which was the result of the earliest
form of human thought, we have the germ of the great epics of later
times, and of the countless legends which make up the rich stores of
mythical tradition ... and the legends so framed constitute the class
of _secondary_ myths (p. 42).
Henceforth the words which had denoted the sun and moon would denote
not merely living things but living persons.... Every word would
become an attribute, and all ideas, once grouped round a single
object, would branch off into distinct personifications. The sun had
been the lord of light, the driver of the chariot of the day; he had
toiled and laboured for the sons of men, and sunk down to rest, after
a hard battle, in the evening. But now the lord of light would be
Phoibos Apollôn, while Helios would remain enthroned in his fiery
chariot, and his toils and labours and death-struggles would be
transferred to Heraklês. The violet clouds which greet his rising and
his setting would now be represented by herds of cows which feed in
earthly pastures. There would be other expressions which would still
remain as floating phrases, not attached to any definite deities.
These would gradually be converted into incidents in the life of
heroes, and be woven at length into systematic variations. Finally,
these gods and heroes, and the incidents of their mythical career,
would receive each “a local habitation and a name.” These would remain
as genuine history when the origin and meaning of the words had been
either wholly or in part forgotten (p. 51).