Still in the very natural and laudable pursuit of facts which will
support the hypothesis of a disease of language, Mr. Max Muller turns to
Mordvinian mythology. 'We have the accounts of real scholars' about
Mordvinian prayers, charms, and proverbs (i. 235). The Mordvinians,
Ugrian tribes, have the usual departmental Nature-gods--as Chkai, god of
the sun (chi=sun). He 'lives in the sun, or is the sun' (i. 236). His
wife is the Earth or earth goddess, Vediava. They have a large family,
given to incest. The morals of the Mordvinian gods are as lax as those
of Mordvinian mortals. (Compare the myths and morals of Samos, and the
Samian Hera.) Athwart the decent god Chkai comes the evil god
Chaitan--obviously Shaitan, a Mahommedan contamination. There are plenty
of minor gods, and spirits good and bad. Dawn was a Mordvinian girl; in
Australia she was a lubra addicted to lubricity.
_How does this help philological mythology_?
Mr. Max Muller is pleased to find solar and other elemental gods among
the Mordvinians. But the discovery in no way aids his special theory.
Nobody has ever denied that gods who are the sun or live in the sun are
familiar, and are the centres of myths among most races. I give examples
in C. and M. (pp. 104, 133, New Zealand and North America) and in M. R.
R. (i. 124-135, America, Africa, Australia, Aztec, Hervey Islands, Samoa,
and so on). Such Nature-myths--of sun, sky, earth--are perhaps
universal; but they do not arise from disease of language. These myths
deal with natural phenomena plainly and explicitly. The same is the case
among the Mordvinians. 'The few names preserved to us are clearly the
names of the agents behind the salient phenomena of Nature, in some cases
quite intelligible, in others easily restored to their original meaning.'
The meanings of the names not being forgotten, but obvious, there is no
disease of language. All this does not illustrate the case of Greek
divine names by resemblance, but by difference. Real scholars know what
Mordvinian divine names mean. They do not know what many Greek divine
names mean--as Hera, Artemis, Apollo, Athene; there is even much dispute
about Demeter.
No anthropologist, I hope, is denying that Nature-myths and Nature-gods
exist. We are only fighting against the philological effort to get at
the elemental phenomena which may be behind Hera, Artemis, Athene,
Apollo, by means of contending etymological conjectures. We only oppose
the philological attempt to account for all the features in a god's myth
as manifestations of the elemental qualities denoted by a name which may
mean at pleasure dawn, storm, clear air, thunder, wind, twilight, water,
or what you will. Granting Chkai to be the sun, does that explain why he
punishes people who bake bread on Friday? (237.) Our opponent does not
seem to understand the portee of our objections. The same remarks apply
to the statement of Finnish mythology here given, and familiar in the
Kalewala. Departmental divine beings of natural phenomena we find
everywhere, or nearly everywhere, in company, of course, with other
elements of belief--totemism, worship of spirits, perhaps with monotheism
in the background. That is as much our opinion as Mr. Max Muller's. What
we are opposing is the theory of disease of language, and the attempt to
explain, by philological conjectures, gods and heroes whose obscure
_names_ are the only sources of information.
Helios is the sun-god; he is, or lives in, the sun. Apollo may have been
the sun-god too, but we still distrust the attempts to prove this by
contending guesses at the origin of his name. Moreover, if all Greek
gods could be certainly explained, by undisputed etymologies, as
originally elemental, we still object to such logic as that which turns
Saranyu into 'grey dawn.' We still object to the competing
interpretations by which almost every detail of very composite myths is
explained as a poetical description of some elemental process or
phenomenon. Apollo _may_ once have been the sun, but why did he make
love as a dog?