Give not way to hasty impulse,
By forgetting the claims of true friendship
You may heedlessly injure a kind heart (person)
As the Brahman killed the nakula.”
The several versions of the story which could be cited from German,
Russian, Persian, and other Aryan folk-lore, would merely present certain
variations due to local colouring and to the inventiveness of the
narrators or transcribers; and, omitting these, it will suffice to give
the Egyptian variant or corresponding form, in which the tragical has
given place to the amusing, save, perhaps, in the opinion of the Wali.
This luckless person “once smashed a pot full of herbs which a cook had
prepared. The exasperated cook thrashed the well-intentioned but
unfortunate Wali within an inch of his life, and when he returned,
exhausted with his efforts at belabouring the man, he discovered among the
herbs a poisonous snake.”
In pointing to the venerable Buddhist _Birth Stories_ as the earliest
extant source of Aryan fables, it should be added that these were with the
Buddha and his disciples the favourite vehicle of carrying to the hearts
of men those lessons of gentleness and tenderness towards all living
things which are a distinctive feature of that non-persecuting religion.
§ VIII.
MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS.
With the important exception of reference to the change effected in the
Jewish doctrine of spirits, and its resulting influence on Christian
theology, by the transformation of the mythical Ahriman of the old Persian
religion into the archfiend Satan, but slight allusion has been made in
these pages to the myths and legends of the Semitic race. Under this term,
borrowed from the current belief in their descent from Shem, are included
extant and extinct people, the Assyrians, Chaldeans or Babylonians,
Phœnicians, Arabs, Syrians, Jews, and Ethiopians.
The mythology of the Aryan nations has had the advantage of the most
scholarly criticism, and the light which this has thrown upon the racial
connection of peoples between whom all superficial likeness had long
disappeared, as well as upon the early condition of their common
ancestors, is of the greatest value as aid to our knowledge of the mode of
man’s intellectual and spiritual growth. And the comparisons made between
the older and cruder forms underlying the elaborated myth and the myths of
semi-barbarous races have supported conclusions concerning man’s
primitive state identical with those deduced from the material relics of
the Ancient and Newer Stone Ages, namely, that the savage races of to-day
represent not a degradation to which man has sunk, but a condition out of
which all races above the savage have, through much tribulation, emerged.
An important exception to this has, however, been claimed on behalf of at
least one branch of the Semitic race--namely, the Hebrews or Jews. This
claim has rested on their assumed selection by the Deity for a definite
purpose in the ordering and directing of human affairs; but no assumption
of supernatural origin can screen the documents of disputed authorship and
uncertain meaning on which that claim is based from the investigation
applied to all ancient records; nor can the materials elude dissection
because hitherto regarded as organic parts of revelation. The real
difficulties are in the structure of the language and in the scantiness of
the material as contrasted with the flexile and copious mythology of the
Aryan race. And the investigation has been in some degree checked by the
mistaken dicta of authorities such as M. Renan and the late Baron Bunsen;
the former contending that “the Semites never had a mythology,” and the
latter (although any statement of his carries far less weight) that “it is
the grand, momentous, and fortunate self-denial of Judaism to possess
none.”
But, independently of the refusal of the student of history to admit that
exceptional place has been accorded of direct Divine purpose to any
particular race, the discoveries of literatures much older than the
Hebrew, and in which legends akin to those in the earlier books of the Old
Testament are found, together with the proofs of historical connection
between the peoples having these common legends, have given the refutation
to the distinctive character of the Semitic race claimed by M. Renan. That
a people dwelling for centuries, as the Hebrews did, in a land which was
the common highway between the great nations of antiquity; a people
subject to vicissitudes bringing them, as the pipkin between iron pots,
into collision and subject relations to Egyptians, Persians, and other
powerful folk, should remain uninfluenced in their intellectual
speculations and religious beliefs, would indeed be a greater miracle than
that which makes their literature inspired in every word and vowel-point.
The remarkable collection of cuneiform inscriptions (so called from their
wedge-like shape: Latin, _cuneus_, a wedge) on the baked clay cylinders
and tablets of the vast libraries of Babylon and Nineveh, has brought out
one striking fact, namely, that the Semitic civilisation, venerable as
that is, was the product of, or at least, greatly influenced by, the
culture of a non-Semitic people called the Akkadians, from a word meaning
“highlanders.” These more ancient dwellers in the Euphrates valley and
uplands were not only non-Semitic but non-Aryan, and probably racially
connected with the complex group of peoples embracing the
Tatar-Mongolians, the distinguishing features of whose religion are
Shamanistic, with belief in magic in its manifold forms. “In Babylonia,
under the non-Semitic Akkadian rule, the dominant creed was the fetish
worship, with all its ritual of magic and witchcraft; and when the Semites
conquered the country, the old learning of the land became the property of
the priests and astrologers, and the Akkadian language the Latin of the
Empire.”[56]
It was during the memorable period of the Exile that the historical
records of the Jews underwent revision, and from that time dates the
incorporation into them of legends and traditions which, invested with a
purity and majesty distinctively Hebrew, were borrowed from the
Babylonians, although primarily Akkadian. They are here, as elsewhere, the
product of the childhood of the race, when it speculates and invents,
framing its theory of the beginnings, their when and how; when it prattles
of the Golden Age, which seems to lie behind, in the fond and not extinct
delusion that “the old is better;” when it frames its fairy tales, weird
or winsome, in explanation of the uncommon, the unknown, and the
bewildering.
The Babylonian origin of the early biblical stories is now generally
admitted, although the dogmas based upon certain of them still retard the
acceptance of this result of modern inquiry in some quarters. That
reluctance is suggestively illustrated in Dr. Wm. Smith’s _Dictionary of
the Bible_, where, turning to the heading “Deluge,” the reader is referred
to “Flood” and thence to “Noah!”
So much for the legendary; but the analysis of the more strictly mythical,
the names of culture-ancestors and heroes, sons of Anak and of God,
scattered over the Pentateuch, is not so easy a matter. The most important
work in this direction has been attempted by Dr. Goldziher,[57] but even
his scholarship has failed to convince sympathetic readers that Abraham
and Isaac are sun-myths, and that the twelve sons of Jacob are the
zodiacal signs! Under the Professor’s etymological solvent the personality
of the patriarchs disappears, and the charming idylls and pastorals of old
Eastern life become but phases of the sun and the weather. The Hebrew,
like the Aryan myth-maker, speaks of the relations of day and night, of
gray morning and sunrise, of red sunset and the darkness of night, as of
love and union, or strife and pursuit, or gloomy desire and coy evasion.
Abh-râm is the High or Heaven-Father (from _râm_, “to be high”) with his
numberless host of descendants. Yis-châk, commonly called Isaac, denotes
“he who laughs,” and so the Laughing one, whom the High Father intends to
slay, is the smiling day or the smiling sunset, which gets the worst of
the contest with the night sky, and disappears. Sarah signifies princess,
or the moon, the queen who rules over the great army glittering amidst the
darkness. The expulsion of Hagar (derived from a root _hajara_, meaning
“to fly,” and yielding the word hijrâ or “flight,” whence the Mohammadan
Hegira) is the Semitic variant of that inexhaustible theme of all
mythology, the battle of Day and Night; Hagar flying before the inconstant
sun and the jealous moon. And so on through the whole range of leading
characters in Hebrew history; Cain and Abel, in which Dr. Goldziher, to
whom they are the sun and dark sky, overlooks the more likely explanation
of the story as a quarrel between nomads and tillers of the soil;
Jephthah, in which the sun-god kills at mid-day the dawn, his own
offspring; Samson, or more correctly Shimshôn, from the Hebrew word for
sun, the incidents of whose life, as expounded by Professor Steinthal,[58]
are more clearly typical of the labours of the sun; Jonah and the fish, a
story long ago connected with the myth of Herakles and Hêsionê; “as on
occasion of the storm the dragon or serpent swallows the sun, so when he
sets he is swallowed by a mighty fish, waiting for him at the bottom of
the sea. Then when he appears again on the horizon, he is spat out on the
shore by the sea-monster.”[59]
These bare references must suffice to show that there is in Hebrew
literature a large body of material which must undergo the sifting and the
criticism already applied with success to Indo-European and non-Aryan
myth. This done, the Semitic race will contribute its share of evidence in
support of those conditions under which it has been the main purpose of
this book to show that myth has its birth and growth.
§ IX.
CONCLUSION.
The multitude of subjects traversed in the foregoing sections has
compelled presentment in so concise a form that any attempt to gather into
a few sentences the sum of things said would be as a digest of a digest,
and it is, therefore, better to briefly emphasise the conclusions to which
the gathered evidence points. It was remarked at the outset, when
insisting on the serious meaning which lies at the heart of myths, that
they have their origin in the endeavour of barbaric man to explain his
surroundings. The mass of fact brought together illustrates and confirms
this view, and has thereby tended to raise what was once looked upon as
fantastic, curious, and lawless, to the level of a subject demanding sober
treatment and examination on strictly scientific methods.
Archbishop Trench, in his _Study of Words_, quotes Emerson’s happy
characterisation of language as fossil poetry and fossil history: “Just as
in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life,
the graceful fern, or the finely-vertebrated lizard, such as have been
extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone,
so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the
feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very
names have perished, preserved and made safe for ever.” In like manner we
may speak of myths as fossil ethics and fossil theology, but, with more
appositeness, as embryonic ethics and theology, since they contain
potentially all the philosophies and theologies “that man did ever find.”
And to the student of the history of humanity who rejoices in the sure
foundation on which, tested in manifold ways, the convictions of the
highest and noblest of the race rest, the value of myth is increased in
its being a natural outgrowth of the mind when, having advanced to the
point at which curiosity concerning the causes of surrounding things
arises, it frames its crude explanations. For not that which man claims to
have received as a message from the gods, as a revelation from heaven, but
that which he has learned by experience often painful and bitter, and
which succeeding generations have either verified or improved upon, or
disproved altogether, is, in the long run, of any worth. Through it alone,
as we follow the changes wrought in the process from guess to certainty,
can we determine what was the intellectual stage of man in his mental
infancy, and how far it finds correspondences in the intellectual stage of
existing barbaric races.
Thus, the study of myth is nothing less than the study of the mental and
spiritual history of mankind. It is a branch of that larger, vaster
science of evolution which so occupies our thoughts to-day, and with it
the philosopher and the theologian must reckon. The evidence which it
brings from the living and dead mythologies of every race is in accord
with that furnished by their more tangible relics, that the history of
mankind is a history of slow but sure advance from a lower to a higher; of
ascent, although with oft backslidings. It confirms a momentous canon of
modern science, that the laws of evolution in the spiritual world are as
determinable as they are in the physical. To this we, for the enrichment
of our life and helpful service of our kind, do well to give heed.
Wherever we now turn eye or ear the unity of things is manifest, and their
unbroken harmony heard. With the theory of evolution in our hands as the
master-key, the immense array of facts that seemed to lie unrelated and
discrete are seen to be interrelated and in necessary dependence--“a
mighty sum of things for ever speaking.” That undisturbed relation of
cause and effect which science has revealed and confirmed extends
backwards as well as reaches forwards; its continuity involves the
inclusion of man as a part of nature, and the study of his development as
one in which both the biologist and the mythologist engage towards a
common end.
II.
DREAMS: THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.
“The physical world is made up of atoms and ether, and there is no room
for ghosts.”
W. K. CLIFFORD.
“If ghos’es want me to believe in ’em, let ’em leave off skulking i’ the
dark and i’ lone places--let ’em come where there’s company and candles.”
GEORGE ELIOT.
DREAMS: THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.
§ I.
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAVAGE AND CIVILISED MAN.
The evidence as to pre-historic man’s material furniture and surroundings,
which was first gathered from and restricted to ancient river valleys and
bone caverns of Great Britain, France, and Belgium, is no longer isolated.
It is supported by evidence which has been collected from every part of
the globe inhabited in past or present times, and its uniform character
has enabled us to determine what lies beyond an horizon which within the
last half century was bounded by the hazy line of myth and tradition. So
rigid seemed the limit defining man’s knowledge of his past that some
forty years ago even the Geological Society of London recorded with barest
reference the unearthing of relics witnessing to his presence in Britain
hundreds of thousands of years ago. The canon was closed, and no one
ventured to add to the sayings of the book. But the discoveries which had
disproved belief in the earth’s supremacy in the universe, and in its
creation in six days, led the way to researches into the history of the
life upon its surface, and especially of that which, in the language of
ancient writ, was “made in the image of God.” When the long-forbidding
line, imaginary as the equator and lacking its convenience, was crossed,
there was found the evidence of the conditions under which man emerged
from a state quite other than that which had formed the burden of legends
sacred with the hoariness of time. Those conditions, it is well-nigh
needless to remind the reader, accord with that theory which holds man to
be no specially-created being, started on this earth, fully equipped,
Minerva-like, with all ripeness of wisdom and loftiness of soul, but the
last and long result of an ever-ascending series of organisms ranging from
the lowest, shapeless, nerveless specks to _homo sapiens_, “the foremost
in the files of time.” Evolution is advance from the simple to the
complex. The most primitive forms reach maturity in a shorter time than
the higher forms, and fulfil their purpose quicker, and this doctrine
applies not only in relation to man and the inferior creatures, but as
between the several races of man himself. Herein the differences, which
are determined by size, still more by increase in complexity, of
brain-stuff, are greater than between the lowest man and the highest
animals--that is to say, the savage and civilised man are farther apart
than the savage and the anthropoid ape. The cranial capacity of the
modern Englishman surpasses that of the non-Aryan inhabitant of India by a
difference of sixty-eight cubic inches, while between this non-Aryan skull
and the skull of the gorilla the difference in capacity is but eleven
inches,[60] and if we were to take into account the differences in
structural complexity, as indicated by the creasing and furrowing of the
brain surface, the contrast would be still more striking.
The brains of the earliest known races, the men of the Ancient Stone Age,
ape-like savages who fought with woolly-haired elephants, cave-lions, and
cave-bears, amidst the forests and on the slopes of the valleys and hills
where London now stands, and who in the dawn of human intelligence,
applying means to ends, came off victorious, were doubtless much nearer to
the chimpanzee with his thirty-five cubic inches than to the Papuan with
his fifty-five cubic inches. Indeed, we need not travel beyond this age
or island; it suffices to compare the brain quality of the rustic,
thinking of “maistly nowt,” with that of the highest minds amongst us, as
evidence of the enormous diversity between wild and cultivated stocks of
mankind.
Unless we are so enchained to fond delusions as to place man in a kingdom
by himself, and deny in the sympathetic, moral, and intellectual faculties
in brutes the germs of those capacities which, existing in a pre-human
ancestry, have flowered in the noblest and wisest of our race, we may find
in such differences as are shown to occur between civilised and primitive
man further evidence of the enormous time since the latter appeared. For
unnumbered ages man--then physically hardly distinguishable from apes--may
have remained stationary. Certainly the relics from the Drift show no
advance: given no change in the conditions, the species do not vary, and
man, once adapted to his surroundings, changed only as these changed. But,
obscure as are the causes, there came a period when conditions arose
inducing some variation, no matter how slight, in brain development, which
was of more need than any variation in the rest of the body, and when an
impetus was given which, leaving the latter but slightly affected,
quickened the former, so that man passed from the highest animality to the
lowest humanity. Slowly, in the course of a struggle not yet ended, “the
ape and tiger” were subdued within him, and those social conditions
induced to which are due that progress which ever draws him nearer to the
angels.
The discussion of this in detail lies outside the limits of these pages.
Here, after briefly noting on what lines it must run, we are concerned
with man at that far later stage in his development when the physical and
material evidence respecting his bodily development gives place to the
psychical and immaterial evidence respecting his mental development.
Chipped flints, flakes, and scrapers of the Drift are indispensable
witnesses to his primitive state, but during the long ages that he was
making shift with them he remains within the boundaries of the zoological;
he is more geological than human. Gleams of the soul within that will one
day be responsive to grace of form and harmony of colour appear in the
rude portraits of mammoth, reindeer, urus, whale, and man himself,
scratched on ivory and horn. Indications of germinal ideas about an
after-life are present in the contents of tumuli with the skeletons in
defined positions, and with weapons presumably for the use of the departed
in the happy hunting-grounds. In these last we are nearing the historic
period, for a vast interval exists between the tomb-building races and the
men of the Reindeer Period, yet even then the ages are many before man had
so advanced as to bequeath the intangible relics of his thought,
disclosing what answer he had beat out for himself to the riddle of the
earth and the mysteries of life and death. Although the story of his
intellectual and spiritual development is a broken one, of the earlier
chapters of which we have no record, enough survives to induce and
strengthen the conviction that in this, as in aught else, there is no
real disconnection. In the shaping of the rudest pointed flint-tool and
weapon there are the germs of the highest mechanical art; in the
discordant war-whoop of the savage the latent strains of the
“Marseillaise,” as, quoting Tennyson, in the eggs of the nightingale
sleeps the music of the moon. If we cannot get so near to the elemental
forms of thought as we could wish, we must lay hold of the lowest extant,
and trace in these the connection to be sought between the barbaric and
civilised mind. We must have understanding of the mental condition of
races, still on low levels of culture, and if the result is to show that
many highly-elaborated beliefs among advanced peoples are but barbaric
philosophies “writ large,” the conception of an underlying unity between
all nations of men that do dwell, or have dwelt, on the face of the earth,
will receive additional proof.
§ II.
LIMITATIONS OF BARBARIC LANGUAGE.
Illustrations of the low intellectual stage of some extant races not quite
at the bottom of the scale, drawn from simple matters, will make clearer
how they will interpret matters of a more complex order, and interpret
them only in one way.
Of the beginning of thought we can know nothing. For numberless ages man
was marked out from the animals most nearly allied to him by that power
of more readily adapting means to ends which gave him mastery over nature.
Through that dim and dateless time he thought without knowing that he
thought. “His senses made him conversant only with things externally
existing and with his own body, and he transcended his senses only far
enough to draw concrete inferences respecting the action of these
things.”[61] He is human only when the thought reaches us through
articulate speech. Language, as a means of communication between him and
his fellows, denotes the existence of the social state, the play of the
social evolution which gives the impetus to ideas. Language is the outcome
of man’s social needs and nature; he speaks not so much because he thinks
and feels as because he must perforce tell his thoughts and feelings to
others. And by the richness or poverty of his speech we may assess the
richness or poverty of his ideas, since language cannot transcend the
thought of which it is the vehicle.
By what tones and gestures, by what signs and grimaces, the beginnings of
speech were made, we know not. Countless processions of races appeared and
vanished before language had reached a stage when the elements of which
words are built up could be separated, and the reason which governed the
choice of this and that sound or symbol discovered. Now and again, when a
correspondence is found between the roots of terms in use amongst the
higher races and the names given by lower races to the same thing, we get
nearer primitive thought, the correspondence being not always in sound or
spelling, which may be delusive, but in physical or sensible meaning. It
would be a wholesome corrective of theories concerning the origin of
languages to which many are yet wedded to show that terms not only for
things material and concrete, but also for things immaterial and abstract,
are of purely physical origin, _i.e._ have been chosen from their analogy
to something real. But the consideration of such matters lies outside the
purpose of this work.