says, “now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth,”
and if occasion has not been given to the adversary to blaspheme, he has
been supplied with ample material for banter and ridicule. Some of the
happiest illustrations of this are made by Mr. Foster in his amusing and
really informing essay on “Nature Myths in Nursery Rhymes,” reprinted in
_Leisure Readings_,[32] an essay which it seems the immaculate critics
took _au sérieux_! With a little exercise of one’s invention, given also
ability to parody, it will be found that many noted events, as well as the
lives of the chief actors in them, yield results comforting to the solar
mythologists. Not only the _Volsungs_ and the _Iliad_, but the story of
the Crusades and of the conquest of Mexico; not only Arthur and Baldr, but
Cæsar and Bonaparte, may be readily resolved, as Professor Tyndall says we
all shall be, “like streaks of morning cloud, into the infinite azure of
the past.” Dupuis, in his researches into the connection between astronomy
and mythology, had suggested that Jesus was the sun, and the twelve
apostles the zodiacal signs; and Goldziher, analysing the records of a
remote period, maintains the same concerning Jacob and his twelve sons. M.
Senart has satisfied himself that Gotama, the Buddha, is a sun-myth.
Archbishop Whately, to confound the sceptics, ingeniously disproved the
existence of Bonaparte; and a French ecclesiastic has, by witty
etymological analogies, shown that Napoleon is cognate with Apollo, the
sun, and his mother Letitia identical with Leto, the mother of Apollo;
that his _personnel_ of twelve marshals were the signs of the zodiac; that
his retreat from Moscow was a fiery setting, and that his emergence from
Elba, to rule for twelve months, and then be banished to St. Helena, is
the sun rising out of the eastern waters to set in the western ocean after
twelve hours’ reign in the sky. But upon this solar theory let us cite
what Dr. Tylor, whose soberness of judgment renders him a valuable guide
along the zigzag path of human progress, says: “The close and deep
analogies between the life of nature and the life of man have been for
ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who, in simile or in argument,
have told of light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth, growth,
change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no one-sided interpretation can
be permitted to absorb into a single theory such endless many-sided
correspondences as these. Rash inferences which, on the strength of mere
resemblance, derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature, must be
regarded with utter mistrust, for the student who has no more stringent
criterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn, will find them
wherever it pleases him to seek them.”
The investigations of comparative mythologists, more particularly in this
country and Germany, have thrown such valuable light on the history of
ideas, that it will be instructive to learn what excited the inquiry. The
researches of Niebuhr and his school into the credibility of early history
made manifest that the only authority on which the chroniclers relied was
tradition. To them--children of an uncritical age--that tradition was
venerable with the lapse of time, and binding as a revelation from the
gods. To us the charm and interest of it lie in detecting within it the
ancient deposit of a mythopœic period, and in deciphering from it what
manner of men they must have been among whom such explanation of the
beginnings had credence. And in such an inquiry nothing can be “common or
unclean,” nothing too trivial or puerile for analysis; for where the most
grotesque and impossible are found, there we are nearer to the conditions
of which we would know more.
The serious endeavour to get at the fact underlying the fabulous was
extended to the great body of mythology which had not been incorporated
into history, and the interpretations of which satisfied only those who
suggested them. As hinted already, the Greeks had sought out the meaning
of their myths, with here and there a glimpse of the truth gained; but
this was confined to the philosophers and poets. Euhêmeros degraded them
into dull chronicle, making Heraklês a thief who carried off a crop of
oranges; Jove a king crushing rebellion; Atlas an astronomer; Pythôn a
freebooter; Æolus a weather-wise seaman, and so on. Plutarch tried to
“restore” them, but only defaced them, and after centuries of neglect they
were discovered by Lord Bacon to be allegories with a moral. Then Banier
and Lemprière emptied out of them what little life Euhêmeros had left, and
the believers in Hebrew as the original speech of mankind saw in them the
fragments of a universal primitive revelation! Even Professor Max Müller
is so upset by the many loathsome and revolting stories in a mythology
current in the land of Lykurgos and Solon, such as the marriage of his
mother Jocasta by Œdipus, and the swallowing of his own children by
Cronus, that he inquires (as if he half believed it possible) whether
there was not “a period of temporary insanity through which the human mind
had to pass,” and a degradation from lovely metaphor to coarse fact which
only a “disease of language,” or the confusion arising from the forgotten
meanings of words, explains. There is no need, however, for assumptions of
this or of any other kind. This is best shown by a summary of facts which
led, more or less directly, to the formulation of the solar theory.
Some fifty years ago a good many idle speculations, products of a reverent
and uncurbed fancy concerning Hebrew as the primitive speech of mankind,
were laid to rest when the sober guess of Schlegel as to the connection of
the leading languages of Europe and those of India and Persia, was
converted into certainty by Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Schleicher, and later
scholars.
By the application of the comparative method to philology, _i.e._ the
interpretation of any set of facts by comparison with corresponding facts,
due allowance being made for differences which Grimm’s law (see _infra_)
explains, the relation of Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Keltic to
one another and to Indian and Persian, and their consequent descent from a
common parent language, was proved. To this group the term Aryan (from a
Sanskrit word cognate with the root _ar_, our English word _ear_, to
plough), is given, a term which ancient records show was applied by the
Asiatic Aryans to themselves as the lords of the soil, the dominant race.
The names Indo-Germanic, and, more appropriately as roughly defining the
peoples included thereunder, Indo-European, have been suggested in its
stead, but Aryan, as the more convenient term, has come into general use.
The survival of grammatical forms common to the Aryan ancestors, and the
likeness between words necessary for daily use, evidenced to one parent
primitive speech, and, passing from words to the ideas and things which
they connoted, philologists were able to infer what manner of men these
Aryans were, and under what conditions they dwelt. In the enthusiasm
excited by so brilliant a discovery the soberest scholars were apt to
over-colour their accurately-outlined picture of old Aryan life; to read
modern meanings into the ancient words. But, making good allowance for
this, the sketch which was presented in Max Müller’s famous paper on
_Comparative Mythology_[33] remains a credit to scholarship in its vivid
generalisations from immaterial data.
Professor Max Müller, in agreement with Pictet and others, placed the
original settlement of the Aryans as probably in the region between the
Hindu Kush Mountains and the Caspian Sea. But the opinion of later
scholars of cooler judgment leans to Europe rather than to Asia as the
primitive home of the Aryan tribes. The scanty hints which survive point
to a larger acquaintance with European flora and fauna than with Asiatic;
to a southward course, whilst silent about westward migration; the
movement of races inclines from less genial to more genial zones; the
traditions of certain branches, as the Greeks, tell of them as
autochthones, or born on the soil where they are found; and the judgment
of experts is decisive as to the greater nearness of the European
languages to the original speech as contrasted with Sanskrit and Iranian.
These are the principal reasons adduced in support of the theory of a
European origin. Benfey places the old Aryan home in the neighbourhood of
the Black Sea, Schrader and Geiger in Middle Germany, Karl Penka in
Scandinavia. But in speculating on the exact habitation of congeries of
tribes requiring vast tracts of country for support, no rigid boundaries
can be fixed, and there is room for the play of both theories, the more so
as theories they must remain.[34]
At the back of this unsettled question lies the interesting subject of the
civilisation of pre-Aryan races on the European-Asiatic Continent. In the
Newer Stone Age this continent was inhabited by races of short stature,
with long and narrow skulls, and probably dark complexions, races whom the
Aryans, a tall, round-skulled, fair-complexioned race, conquered, and with
whom they so largely intermingled that the varieties of fair and dark
people in Europe at this day, speaking an Aryan language, are past finding
out. Indeed, there are probably no unmixed races throughout Europe and
Asia; the conquering race imposed its language on the conquered, and thus
is explained the community of speech without community of race which must
be recognised in the composite European peoples.
With this qualification the kinship of the Aryan-language-speaking peoples
is demonstrated, and the like kind of evidence by which this is proved has
been applied to establish the identity of their mythologies, legends, and
folk-tales. The meaning of the proper names of these once determined, the
key to the meaning of the myth or tale was clear; because, it is
contended, the names contain the germs or oldest surviving part. This is
to make the last first; but the result, as already shown in the Aryan
light-and-darkness myths, has been to bring out a few striking
correspondences in Greek and Vedic names, although by no means so intimate
and frequent as the solar mythologists assume. The uniform behaviour of
the untutored mind before like phenomena to which barbaric myth witnesses
prepares us for general correspondences, but not in such details as we
find in the Aryan group. On what theory these, notably in the case of the
folk-tales, are to be accounted for, it is not easy to say, for the mode
of their diffusion from India to Iceland is obscure. But the fact abides
that nursery stories told in Norway and Tyrol, in Scotland and the Deccan,
are identical. After allowing for local colouring and for changes incident
to the lapse of time, they are the variants of stories presumably related
in the Aryan fatherland at a period historically remote, and, moreover,
are told in words which are phonetically akin. Their resemblances in
minor incident and detail are not easily explained by theories of
borrowing, for apparently no trace of intercourse between the Asiatic
Aryans and the Aryans of extreme Western Europe occurs until after the
domiciling of the stories where we find them. Nor did they with such close
resemblances as appear between the German Faithful John and the Hindu Rama
and Luxman; between our own Cinderella, the German Aschenpüttel and the
Hindu Sodewa Bai, spring native from their respective soils.[35] And there
is just that unlikeness in certain details which might be expected from
the different positions and products of the several Aryan lands. They
explain, for example, the absence from Scandinavian folk-tale of creatures
like the elephant, the giant, ape, and turtle, which figure in the
Brahmanic.
When we turn to the great Aryan epics, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; the
_Volsungs_; the _Nibelungs_; _King Arthur and his Round Table_; the
_Ramâyanâ_ and the _Mahâ Bhâratâ_; the _Shah Nameh_, and so forth, we find
similarities of incident and episode which point to a common derivation
from old Aryan myth. That common synonyms occur in cognate languages is to
be expected, but so far as the names and the characteristics of the heroes
and heroines are concerned, the phonetic identity is proven in a far less
number of cases than the solar mythologists, working on their too
exclusive method, argue. The key which for them unlocks the meaning of
every Aryan myth is Sanskrit. In tracing the history of the Indo-European
family of speech, it served as the starting-point, because it has more
than any other member preserved the roots and suffixes, if not in their
oldest, still in their most accessible form. And in tracing the course of
Indo-European mythology, it is in the Vedic texts, chiefly the most
ancient, the _Rig-Veda_, that we find the materials for comparative study,
since in these venerable hymns of a Bible older than our own are preserved
the earliest recorded forms of that mythology. That is to say, we have not
in any European branch of Aryan speech any documentary relic of the age of
the _Rig-Veda_, otherwise we might find ourselves in possession of more
ancient relics of that speech. So that although the value of Sanskrit as
the guide without which knowledge of the Aryan mother-tongue would have
remained vague, indeed have been beyond reach, cannot be over-estimated,
we must not accept as of universal worth what is local and special in
it.[36]
The phonetic kinship and actual identity which comparative philologists
have sought to establish between the proper names of gods and heroes of
the Greek and Vedic mythologies (for the inquiry has been chiefly
restricted to these two), is based on the collection of rules by which we
can at once tell what sounds in one language correspond to those of its
kindred tongues, called, after its discoverer, “Grimm’s Law.” This law
gave the quietus to theories of common origin and variation of words based
on specious resemblances (theories satirised by Dean Swift in his
derivation of _ostler_ from _oatstealer_), and introduced a scientific
method into etymological study.
The varying pronunciation of certain words among the Aryan-speaking
peoples which were common to them was discovered by Grimm to be constant;
for example, a Greek _th_ answers to an English _d_, and, _vice versâ_, a
German _s_ or _z_ to an English _t_, and so forth, so that by comparing
these altered forms the common form from which they spring is reached.
At what fluent period in the history of the Aryan languages these changes
of one sound into another were induced is unknown, nor are their precise
causes easy of ascertainment, being referable to physical influences,
climatal and local, which in the course of time brought about changes in
the organs of speech, such, for example, as make our _th_ so difficult of
pronunciation to a German, in whose language _d_ takes its place, as
_drei_ for _three_, _durstig_ for _thirsty_, _dein_ for _thine_, etc. We
may note tendencies to variation in children of the same household, their
prattle often affording striking illustration of Grimm’s law, and it is
easy to see that among semi-civilised and isolated tribes, where no check
upon the variations is imposed, they would tend to become fixed and give
rise to new dialects.
Tracing the operation of that law in the changes in proper names in Greek
and Vedic mythology, their correlation is proved in a few important
instances. The Greek _Zeus_, the Latin _Deus_ (whence French _Dieu_ and
our _deity_, and also _deuce_), the Lithuanian _Diewas_, and the Sanskrit
_Dyaus_ all come from an old Aryan root, _div_ or _dyu_, meaning “to
shine.” The Sanskrit _dyu_, as a noun means “sky” or “day,” and in the
_Veda Dyaus_ is the bright sky or heaven. _Varuna_, the noblest figure in
the Vedic religion, the “enveloper” or all-surrounding heaven, is cognate
with the Greek _Ouranos_ or _Uranus_, the common root being _var_, “to
veil” or “cover.” Agni, the fire-god, to whom the larger number of hymns
occur in the _Veda_, is related to the Latin _ignis_, fire, and so forth.
The heavens and the earth and all that in them is are the raw material on
which man works, and the comparative philologists have established exactly
what might have been predicated, the nature-origin of the Greek, Vedic,
and other Aryan myths. They might well have rested content with this
confirmation which their method gives to results arrived at by other
methods, and not weakened or discredited it by applying it all round to
every leading name in Aryan myth. For this has only revealed the
fundamental differences among themselves as to the etymologies and
meanings of such names. But not satisfied with the demonstration that the
majestic epics have their germs in the phenomena of the natural world, and
the course of the day and year, they strain the evidence by contending
that “there is absolutely nothing left for further analysis in the
stories;” that their “resemblances in detail defy the influences of
climate and scenery;”[37] that every incident has its birth in the journey
of the sun, the death of the dawn, the theft of the twilight by the powers
of darkness, evidence which, in Sir George Cox’s words, “not long hence
will probably be regarded as excessive.”
They are nature-myths; but, and in this is the secret of their enduring
life, they are much more than that. The impetus that has shaped them as we
now know them came from other forces than clouds and storms.
Without such caution as these remarks are designed to supply, any reader
of the _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_ would conclude that the
philological method had proved the meteorological origin of every epic and
folk-tale among the Indo-European peoples. He would learn that, in a way
rudely analogous to the supernatural guidance of the Christian Church, the
several Aryan tribes had received from the fathers of the race an
unvarying canon of interpretation of the primitive myths, a canon
seemingly preserved with the jealous veneration with which the Jew
regarded the _Thorah_, and the Brahman the _Veda_. He would also learn
that the details of Norse and classic myth can be traced to the _Veda_,
that these details, not of incident alone, but of thought and expression,
survived unimpaired by time and untouched by circumstance, whilst, strange
to say, the more prominent names and the leading characters became
obscured in their meaning. Strange indeed, and not true. For what are the
facts?
Long before the hymns of the _Rig-Veda_ existed as we know them (and they
have remained an inviolate sacred text since 600 B.C., when every verse,
word, and syllable were counted) the Aryan tribes had swarmed from their
parent hive across boundless steppes and over winding mountain passes,
some to the westward limits of Europe, others southward into Hindustan.
Among the slender intellectual capital of which they stood possessed was
the common mythology of their savage ancestors, in which, as we have seen,
sun and moon, storm and thunder-cloud, and all other natural phenomena,
were credited with personal life and will. But that mythology had
certainly advanced beyond the crude primitive form and entered the heroic
stage, wherein the powers of nature were half human, half divine. Their
language had passed into the inflective or highest stage, and had
undergone such changes that the relationship between its several groups
and their origin from one mother-tongue was obscured, and remained so
until laid bare in our day. In short, the Aryan tribes had attained no
mean state of civilisation, some being more advanced than the others,
according as external circumstances helped or hindered, and one by one
they passed from the condition of semi-civilised nomads to become fathers
and founders of nations that abide to this day.
These being the facts to which language itself bears witness, how was it
possible for their mythologies, _i.e._ their stock of notions about
things, to remain unaffected and secure of transmission without organic
change? The myths, unfixed in literary form, yielded themselves with ease
as vehicles of new ideas; their ancient meaning, already faded, paled
before the all-absorbing significance of present facts. These were more
potent realities than the kisses of the dawn; the human and the personal,
in its struggles, of mightier interest than the battle of rosy morn or
purple eve with the sons of thunder; and Homer’s music would long since
have died away were Achilles’ “baneful wrath” but a passively-told tale of
the sun’s grief for the loss of the morning.
In brief, the complex and varying influences which have transformed the
primitive myth are the important factors which the solar theorists have
omitted in their attempted solution of the problem. They have forgotten
the part which, to borrow a term from astronomy, “personal equation” has
played. They have not examined myth in the light of the long history of
the race; and the new elements which it took into itself, while never
wholly ridding itself of the old, have escaped them. They have secured a
mechanical unity, whereas, by combination of the historical with their own
method, they might have secured a vital unity.
To all which classic myth itself bears record. The Greeks were of Aryan
stock, but the time of their settlement is unknown. The period between
this and the Homeric age was, however, long enough to admit of their
advance to the state of a nation rejoicing in the fulness of intellectual
life. They remembered not from what rock they were hewn, from what pit
they were digged. The nature-gods of their remote ancestors had long since
changed their meteorological character, and appeared in the likeness of
men, or, at least, played very human pranks on Olympus. In the _Veda_ the
primitive nature-myth, although exalted and purified, is persistent; under
one name or another it is still the ceaseless battle between the darkness
and the light; Dyaus was still the bright sky, the cattle of Siva were
still the clouds. But the Greek of Homer’s time, and his congener in the
far north, had forgotten all that; the war in heaven was transferred to
the strife of gods and men on the shores of the Hellespont and by the
bleak seaboard of the Baltic. Their gods and goddesses, improved by age
and experience, put off their physical and put on the ethical; the
heaven-father became king of gods and men, source of order, law, and
justice; the sun and the dawn, Apollo and Athênê, became wisdom, skill,
and guardianship incarnate. And the story of human vicissitudes found in
solar myth that “pattern of things in the heavens” which conformed to its
design.
Thus Homer, in whose day the old nature-myth had become confused with the
vague traditions of veritable deeds of kings and heroes but dimly
remembered, touched it as with heavenly fire unquenchable. The siege of
Troy, so say the solar mythologists, “is a repetition of the daily siege
of the east by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their
highest treasures in the west.” It is surely a truer instinct which,
recognising the physical framework of the great epics, feels that the
vitality which inheres in them is due to whatever of human experience,
joy, and sorrow is the burden of their immortal song. As to the repulsive
features of Greek myth, one can neither share the distress of the solar
theorists nor feel their difficulties. Both are self-created, and are
aggravated by suggestions, serious or otherwise, of “periods of temporary
insanity through which the human mind had to pass,” as the rude health of
childhood is checked by whooping-cough and measles. They are explained by
the persistence with which the lower out of which man has emerged asserts
itself, as primary rocks pierce through and overlap later strata.
The ancestors of the Aryans were savages in the remote past, and the “old
Adam” was never entirely cast out; indeed it is with us still. There are
superstitions and credulities in our midst, in drawing-rooms as well as
gipsy camps, quite as gross in nature, if less coarse in guise, as those
extant among the Greeks. The future historian of our time, as he turns
over the piles of our newspapers, will find contrasts of ignorance and
culture as startling as any existing in the land of Homer, of Archimedes,
and Aristotle. Spirit-rapping and belief in the “evil eye” have their cult
among us, although Professor Huxley’s _Hume_ can be bought for two
shillings, and knowledge has free course. And it certainly accords best
with all that we have learnt as to the mode of human progress to believe
that the old lived into the new, than that the old had been cast out, but
had gained re-entry, making the last state of the Greeks to be worse than
the first.
In this matter the Vedic hymns do not help us much. The conditions under
which they took the form that insured their transmission are _ipso facto_
as of yesterday, compared with the period during which man’s endeavour was
made to get at that meaning of his surroundings wherein is found the germ
of myth throughout the world. They are the products of a relatively
highly-civilised time; the conception of sky and dawn as living persons
has passed out of its primitive simplicity; these heavenly powers have
become complex deities; there is much confounding of persons, the same god
called by one or many names. The thought is that of an age when moral
problems have presented themselves for solution, and the references to
social matters indicate a settled state of things far removed from the
fisher and the hunter stage. Nevertheless there lurk within these sacred
writings survivals of the lower culture, traces of coarse rites, bloody
sacrifices, of repulsive myths of the gods, and of cosmogonies familiar to
the student of barbaric myth and legend.