“It has been handed down,” he says, “by early and very ancient people, and
left to those who came after, in the form of myths, that these (the first
principles of the world) are the gods, and that the divine embraces the
whole of nature. The rest has been added mythically, in order to persuade
the many, and in order to be used in support of laws and other interests.
Thus they say that the gods have a human form, and that they are like to
some of the other living beings, and other things consequent on this, and
similar to what has been said. If one separated out of these fables, and
took only that first point, namely, that they believed the first essences
to be gods, one would think that it had been divinely said, and that while
every art and every philosophy was probably invented ever so many times
and lost again, these opinions had, like fragments of them, been preserved
until now. So far only is the opinion of our fathers, and that received
from our first ancestors, clear to us.”
I have quoted the opinions of these Greek philosophers, to which many more
might have been added, partly in order to show how many of the most
distinguished minds of ancient Greece agreed in demanding an
interpretation, whether physical or metaphysical, of Greek mythology,
partly in order to satisfy those classical scholars, who, forgetful of
their own classics, forgetful of their own Plato and Aristotle, seem to
imagine that the idea of seeing in the gods and heroes of Greece anything
beyond what they appear to be in the songs of Homer, was a mere fancy and
invention of the students of Comparative Mythology.
There were, no doubt, Greeks, and eminent Greeks too, who took the legends
of their gods and heroes in their literal sense. But what do these say of
Homer and Hesiod? Xenophanes, the contemporary of Pythagoras, holds Homer
and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece. In this he
agrees with Herodotus, when he declares that these two poets made the
theogony for the Greeks, and gave to the gods their names, and assigned to
them their honors and their arts, and described their appearances. But he
then continues in a very different strain from the pious historian.(20)
“Homer,” he says,(21) “and Hesiod ascribed to the gods whatever is
disgraceful and scandalous among men, yea, they declared that the gods had
committed nearly all unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud.”
“Men seem to have created their gods, and to have given to them their own
mind, voice, and figure. The Ethiopians made their gods black and
flat-nosed; the Thracians red-haired and blue-eyed.” This was spoken about
500 B. C. Herakleitos, about 460 B. C., one of the boldest thinkers of
ancient Greece, declared that Homer deserved to be ejected from public
assemblies and flogged; and a story is told that Pythagoras (about 540 B.
C.) saw the soul of Homer in Hades, hanging on a tree and surrounded by
serpents, as a punishment for what he had said of the gods. And what can
be stronger than the condemnation passed on Homer by Plato? I shall read
an extract from the “Republic,” from the excellent translation lately
published by Professor Jowett:—
“But what fault do you find with Homer and Hesiod, and the other great
story-tellers of mankind?”
“A fault which is most serious,” I said: “the fault of telling a lie, and
a bad lie.”
“But when is this fault committed?”
“Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and
heroes—like the drawing of a limner which has not the shadow of a likeness
to the truth.”
“ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing is certainly very blamable; but what
are the stories which you mean?’ ”
“ ‘First of all,’ I said, ‘there was that greatest of all lies in high
places, which the poet told about Uranos, and which was an immoral lie
too—I mean what Hesiod says that Uranos did, and what Kronos did to him.
The fact is that the doings of Kronos, and the sufferings which his son
inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought not to be lightly told
to young and simple persons; if possible, they had better be buried in
silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a very
few might hear them in a mystery, and then let them sacrifice not a common
(Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; this would have
the effect of very greatly reducing the number of the hearers.’ ”
“ ‘Why, yes,’ said he, ‘these stories are certainly objectionable.’ ”
“ ‘Yes, Adeimantos, they are stories not to be narrated in our state; the
young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is
far from doing anything outrageous, and that he may chastise his father
when he does wrong in any manner that he likes, and in this will only be
following the example of the first and greatest of the gods.’ ”
“ ‘I quite agree with you,’ he said; ‘in my opinion those stories are _not
fit to be repeated_.’ ‘Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard
the habit of quarrelling as dishonorable, should anything be said of the
wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one
another, which are quite untrue. Far be it from us to tell them of the
battles of the giants, and embroider them on garments; or of all the
innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and
relations. If they would only believe us, we would tell them that
quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any
quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin
by telling children, and the same when they grow up. And these are the
sort of fictions which the poets should be required to compose. But the
narrative of Hephaestos binding Here his mother, or how, on another
occasion, Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being
beaten—such tales must not be admitted in our state, whether they are
supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For the young man cannot
judge what is allegorical and what is literal, and anything that he
receives into his mind at that age is apt to become indelible and
unalterable; and therefore the tales which they first hear should be
models of virtuous thoughts.’ ”
To those who look upon mythology as an ancient form of religion, such
freedom of language as is here used by Xenophanes and Plato, must seem
startling. If the Iliad were really the Bible of the Greeks, as it has not
infrequently been called, such violent invectives would have been
impossible. For let us bear in mind that Xenophanes, though he boldly
denied the existence of all the mythological deities, and declared his
belief in One God, “neither in form nor in thought like unto mortals,”(22)
was not therefore considered a heretic. He never suffered for uttering his
honest convictions: on the contrary, as far as we know, he was honored by
the people among whom he lived and taught. Nor was Plato ever punished on
account of his unbelief, and though he, as well as his master, Sokrates,
became obnoxious to the dominant party at Athens, this was due to
political far more than to theological motives. At all events, Plato, the
pupil, the friend, the apologist of Sokrates, was allowed to teach at
Athens to the end of his life, and few men commanded greater respect in
the best ranks of Greek society.
But, although mythology was not religion in our sense of the word, and
although the Iliad certainly never enjoyed among Greeks the authority
either of the Bible, or even of the Veda among the Brahmans, or the Zend
Avesta among the Parsis, yet I would not deny altogether that in a certain
sense the mythology of the Greeks belonged to their religion. We must only
be on our guard, here as everywhere else, against the misleading influence
of words. The word Religion has, like most words, had its history; it has
grown and changed with each century, and it cannot, therefore, have meant
with the Greeks and Brahmans what it means with us. Religions have
sometimes been divided into _national_ or _traditional_, as distinguished
from _individual_ or _statutable_ religion. The former are, like
languages, home-grown, autochthonic, without an historical beginning,
generally without any recognized founder, or even an authorized code; the
latter have been founded by historical persons, generally in antagonism to
traditional systems, and they always rest on the authority of a written
code. I do not consider this division as very useful(23) for a scientific
study of religion, because in many cases it is extremely difficult, and
sometimes impossible, to draw a sharp line of demarcation, and to
determine whether a given religion should be considered as the work of one
man, or as the combined work of those who came before him, who lived with
him, nay, even of those who came after him. For our present purpose,
however, for showing at once the salient difference between what the
Greeks and what we ourselves should mean by Religion, this division is
very serviceable. The Greek religion was clearly a national and
traditional religion, and, as such, it shared both the advantages and
disadvantages of this form of religious belief; the Christian religion is
an historical and, to a great extent, an individual religion, and it
possesses the advantage of an authorized code and of a settled system of
faith. Let it not be supposed, however, that between traditional and
individual religions the advantages are all on one, the disadvantages on
the other side. As long as the immemorial religions of the different
branches of the human race remained in their natural state, and were not
pressed into the service of political parties or an ambitious priesthood,
they allowed great freedom of thought and a healthy growth of real piety,
and they were seldom disgraced by an intolerant or persecuting spirit.
They were generally either honestly believed, or, as we have just seen,
honestly attacked, and a high tone of intellectual morality was preserved,
untainted by hypocrisy, equivocation, or unreasoning dogmatism. The
marvellous development of philosophy in Greece, particularly in ancient
Greece, was chiefly due, I believe, to the absence of an established
religion and an influential priesthood; and it is impossible to overrate
the blessing which the fresh, pure, invigorating, and elevating air of
that ancient Greek philosophy has conferred on all ages, not excepting our
own. I shudder at the thought of what the world would have been without
Plato and Aristotle, and I tremble at the idea that the youth of the
future should ever be deprived of the teaching and the example of these
true prophets of the absolute freedom of thought. Unfortunately, we know
but little of the earliest fathers of Greek philosophy; we have but
fragments, and those not always trustworthy, nor easily intelligible, of
what they taught on the highest questions that can stir the heart of man.
We have been accustomed to call the oracular sayings of men like Thales,
Pythagoros, Xenophanes, or Herakleitos, philosophy, but there was in them
as much of religion as in the songs of Homer and Hesiod. Homer and Hesiod
were great powers, but their poems were not the only feeders of the
religious life of Greece. The stream of ancient wisdom and philosophy
flowed parallel with the stream of legend and poetry; and both were meant
to support the religious cravings of the soul. We have only to attend
without prejudice to the utterances of these ancient prophets, such as
Xenophanes and Herakleitos, in order to convince ourselves that these men
spoke with authority to the people,(24) that they considered themselves
the equals of Homer and Hesiod, nay, their betters, and in no way fettered
by the popular legends about gods and goddesses. While modern religions
assume in general a hostile attitude towards philosophy, ancient religions
have either included philosophy as an integral part, or they have at least
tolerated its growth in the very precincts of their temples.
After we have thus seen what limitations we must place on the meaning of
the word Religion, if we call mythology the religion of the ancient world,
we may now advance another step.
We have glanced at the principal interpretations which have been proposed
by the ancients themselves of the original purpose and meaning of
mythology. But there is one question which none, either of the ancient or
of the modern interpreters of mythology, has answered, or even asked, and
on which, nevertheless, the whole problem of mythology seems to turn. If
mythology is history changed into fable, why was it so changed? If it is
fable represented as history, why were such fables invented? If it
contains precepts of moral philosophy, whence their immoral disguise? If
it is a picture of the great forms and forces of nature, the same question
still returns, why were these forms and forces represented as heroes and
heroines, as nymphs and shepherds, as gods and goddesses? It is easy
enough to call the sun a god, or the dawn a goddess, after these
predicates have once been framed. But how were these predicates framed?
How did people come to know of gods and goddesses, heroes and nymphs, and
what meaning did they originally connect with these terms? In fact, the
real question which a philosophy of mythology has to answer is this—Is the
whole of mythology an invention, the fanciful poetry of a Homer or Hesiod,
or is it a growth? Or, to speak more definitely, Was mythology a mere
accident, or was it inevitable? Was it only a false step, or was it a step
that could not have been left out in the historical progress of the human
mind?
The study of the history of language, which is only a part of the study of
the history of thought, has enabled us to give a decisive answer to this
question. Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent
necessity of language, if we recognize in language the outward form and
manifestation of thought: it is, in fact, the dark shadow which language
throws on thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes
altogether commensurate with thought, which it never will. Mythology, no
doubt, breaks out more fiercely during the early periods of the history of
human thought, but it never disappears altogether. Depend upon it, there
is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not
perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and
because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth. We are ready
enough to see that if the ancients called their kings and heroes
Διογενεῖς, sprung of Zeus, that expression, intended originally to convey
the highest praise which man can bestow on man, was apt to lapse into
mythology. We easily perceive how such a conception, compatible in its
origin with the highest reverence for the gods, led almost inevitably to
the growth of fables, which transferred to divine beings the incidents of
human paternity and sonship. But we are not so ready to see that it is our
fate, too, to move in allegories which illustrate things intellectual by
visions exhibited to the fancy. In our religion, too, the conceptions of
paternity and sonship have not always been free from all that is human,
nor are we always aware that nearly every note that belongs to human
paternity and sonship must be taken out of these terms, before they can be
pronounced safe against mythological infection. Papal decisions on
immaculate conception are of no avail against that mythology. The mind
must become immaculate and rise superior to itself; or it must close its
eyes and shut its lips in the presence of the Divine.
If then we want to understand mythology, in the ordinary and restricted
sense of the word, we must discover the larger circle of mental phenomena
to which it belongs. Greek mythology, is but a small segment of mythology;
the religious mythologies of all the races of mankind are again but a
small segment of mythology. Mythology, in the highest sense, is the power
exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental
activity; and I do not hesitate to call the whole history of philosophy,
from Thales down to Hegel, an uninterrupted battle against mythology, a
constant protest of thought against language. This will require some
explanation.
Ever since the time of Wilhelm von Humboldt, all who have seriously
grappled with the highest problems of the Science of Language have come to
the conviction that thought and language are inseparable, that language is
as impossible without thought as thought is without language; that they
stand to each other somewhat like soul and body, like power and function,
like substance and form. The objections which have been raised against
this view arise generally from a mere misunderstanding. If we speak of
language as the outward realization of thought, we do not mean language as
deposited in a dictionary, or sketched in a grammar; we mean language as
an act, language as being spoken, language as living and dying with every
word that is uttered. We might perhaps call this speech, as distinguished
from language.
Secondly, though if we speak of language, we mean chiefly phonetic
articulate language, we do not exclude the less perfect symbols of
thought, such as gestures, signs, or pictures. They, too, are language in
a certain sense, and they must be included in language before we are
justified in saying that discursive thought can be realized in language
only. One instance will make this clear. We hold that we cannot think
without language. But can we not count without language? We certainly can.
We can form the conception of _three_ without any spoken word, by simply
holding up three fingers. In the same manner, the hand might stand for
five, both hands for ten, hands and feet for twenty.(25) This is how
people who possessed no organs of speech would speak; this is how the deaf
and dumb _do_ speak. Three fingers are as good as three strokes, three
strokes are as good as three clicks of the tongue, three clicks of the
tongue are as good as the sound _three_, or _trois_, or _drei_, or
_shalosh_ in Hebrew, or _san_ in Chinese. All these are signs, more or
less perfect, but being signs, they fall under the category of language;
and all we maintain is, that without some kind of sign, discursive thought
is impossible, and that in that sense, language, or λόγος, is the only
possible realization of human thought.
Another very common misunderstanding is this: people imagine that, if it
be impossible to think, except in language, language and thought must be
one and the same thing. But a true philosophy of language leads to the
very opposite result. Every philosopher would say that matter cannot exist
without form, nor form without matter, but no philosopher would say that
therefore it is impossible to distinguish between form and matter. In the
same way, though we maintain that thought cannot exist without language
nor language without thought, we do distinguish between thought and
language, between the inward and the outward λόγος, between the substance
and the form. Nay, we go a step beyond. We admit that language necessarily
reacts on thought, and we see in this reaction, in this refraction of the
rays of language, the real solution of the old riddle of mythology.
You will now see why these somewhat abstruse disquisitions were necessary
for our immediate purpose, and I can promise those who have hitherto
followed me on this rather barren and rugged track, that they will now be
able to rest, and command, from the point of view which we have reached,
the whole panorama of the mythology of the human mind.
We saw just now that the names of numbers may most easily be replaced by
signs. Numbers are simple analytical conceptions, and for that very reason
they are not liable to mythology: name and conception being here
commensurate, no misunderstanding is possible. But as soon as we leave
this department of thought, mythology begins. I shall try by at least one
example to show how mythology not only pervades the sphere of religion or
religious tradition, but infects more or less the whole realm of thought.
When man wished for the first time to grasp and express a distinction
between the body and something else within him distinct from the body, an
easy name that suggested itself was _breath_. The breath seemed something
immaterial and almost invisible, and it was connected with the life that
pervaded the body, for as soon as the breath ceased, the life of the body
became extinct. Hence the Greek name ψυχή,(26) which originally meant
breath, was chosen to express at first the principle of life, as
distinguished from the decaying body, afterwards the incorporeal, the
immaterial, the undecaying, the immortal part of man—his soul, his mind,
his Self. All this was very natural. When a person dies, we too say that
he has given up the ghost, and ghost, too, meant originally spirit, and
spirit meant breath.
A very instructive analogous case is quoted by Mr. E. B. Tylor from a
compendium of the theology of the Indians of Nicaragua, the record of
question and answer in an inquest held by Father Francisco de Bobadilla in
the early days of the Spanish conquest. Asked, among other things,
concerning death, the Indians said: “Those who die in their houses go
underground, but those who are killed in war go to serve the gods
(_teotes_). When men die, there comes forth from their mouth something
which resembles a person, and is called _julio_ (Aztec _yuli_, ‘to live’).
This being is like a person, but does not die, and the corpse remains
here.” The Spanish ecclesiastics inquired whether those who go on high
keep the same body, features, and limbs as here below; to which the
Indians answered, “No, there is only the heart.” “But,” said the
Spaniards, “as the hearts are torn out” (they meant in the case of
warriors who fell into the hands of the enemy), “what happens then?”
Hereupon the Indians replied: “It is not precisely the heart, but that
which is in them, and makes them live, and which quits the body when they
die;” and again they said, “It is not their heart which goes up on high,
but that which makes them live, that is, the breath coming out from their
mouth, which is called _julio_.” “Then,” asked the Spaniards, “does this
heart, _julio_, or soul, die with the body?” “When the deceased has lived
well,” replied the Indians, “the _julio_ goes up on high with our gods;
but when he has lived ill, the _julio_ perishes with the body, and there
is an end of it.”
The Greeks expressed the same idea by saying that the ψυχή had left the
body,(27) had fled through the mouth, or even through a bleeding
wound,(28) and had gone into Hades, which meant literally no more than the
place of the Invisible (Ἁίδης). That the breath had become invisible was
matter of fact; that it had gone to the house of Hades, was mythology
springing spontaneously from the fertile soil of language.
The primitive mythology was by no means necessarily religious. In the very
case which we have chosen, philosophical mythology sprang up by the side
of religious mythology. The religious mythology consisted in speaking of
the spirits of the departed as ghosts, as mere breath and air, as
fluttering about the gates of Hades, or ferried across the Styx in the
boat of Charon.(29)
The philosophical mythology, however, that sprang from this name was much
more important. We saw that _Psyche_, meaning originally the breathing of
the body, was gradually used in the sense of vital breath, and as
something independent of the body; and that at last, when it had assumed
the meaning of the immortal part of man, it retained that character of
something independent of the body, thus giving rise to the conception of a
soul, not only as a being without a body, but in its very nature opposed
to body. As soon as that opposition had been established in language and
thought, philosophy began its work in order to explain how two such
heterogeneous powers could act on each other—how the soul could influence
the body, and how the body could determine the soul. Spiritualistic and
materialistic systems of philosophy arose, and all this in order to remove
a self-created difficulty, in order to join together again what language
had severed, the living body and the living soul. The question whether
there is a soul or spirit, whether there is in man something different
from the mere body, is not at all affected by this mythological
phraseology. We certainly can distinguish between body and soul, but as
long as we keep within the limits of human knowledge, we have no right to
speak of the living soul as a breath, or of spirits and ghosts as
fluttering about like birds or fairies. The poet of the nineteenth century
says:—
“The spirit does but mean the breath,
I know no more.”
And the same thought was expressed by Cicero two thousand years ago:
“Whether the soul is air or fire, I do not know.” As men, we only know of
embodied spirits, however ethereal their bodies may be conceived to be,
but of spirits, separate from body, without form or frame, we know as
little as we know of thought without language, or of the Dawn as a
goddess, or of the Night as the mother of the Day.
Though breath, or spirit, or ghost are the most common names that were
assigned through the metaphorical nature of language to the vital, and
afterwards to the intellectual, principle in man, they were by no means
the only possible names. We speak, for instance, of the _shades_ of the
departed, which meant originally their shadows. Those who first introduced
this expression—and we find it in the most distant parts of the
world(30)—evidently took the shadow as the nearest approach to what they
wished to express; something that should be incorporeal, yet closely
connected with the body. The Greek εἰδῶλον, too, is not much more than the
shadow, while the Latin _manes_ meant probably in the beginning no more
than the Little Ones, the Small Folk.(31) But the curious part, as showing
again the influence of language on thought, an influence more powerful
even than the evidence of the senses, is this, that people who speak of
the life or soul as the shadow of the body, have brought themselves to
believe that a dead body casts no shadow, because the shadow has departed
from it; that it becomes, in fact, a kind of Peter Schlemihl.(32)
Let us now return to mythology in the narrower sense of the word. One of
the earliest objects that would strike and stir the mind of man, and for
which a sign or a name would soon be wanted, is surely the Sun. It is very
hard for us to realize the feelings with which the first dwellers on the
earth looked upon the sun, or to understand fully what they meant by a
morning prayer, or a morning sacrifice. Perhaps there are few people here
present who have watched a sunrise more than once or twice in their lives;
few people who have ever known the true meaning of a morning prayer, or a
morning sacrifice. But think of man at the very dawn of time: forget for a
moment, if you can, after having read the fascinating pages of Mr. Darwin,
forget what man is supposed to have been before he was man; forget it,
because it does not concern us here whether his bodily form and frame were
developed once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the
creation itself, which from the first monad or protoplasm to the last of
the primates, or man, is not, I suppose, to be looked on as altogether
causeless, meaningless, purposeless; think of him only as man (and man
means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow, though full of
germs—germs of which I hold as strongly as ever no trace has ever, no
trace will ever, be discovered anywhere but in man; think of the Sun
awakening the eyes of man from sleep, and his mind from slumber! Was not
the Sunrise to him the first wonder, the first beginning of all
reflection, all thought, all philosophy? was it not to him the first
revelation, the first beginning of all trust, of all religion? To us that
wonder of wonders has ceased to exist, and few men now would even venture
to speak of the sun as Sir John Herschel has spoken, calling him “the
Almoner of the Almighty, the delegated dispenser to us of light and
warmth, as well as the centre of attraction, and as such, the immediate
source of all our comforts, and, indeed, of the very possibility of our
existence on earth.”(33)
Man is a creature of habit, and wherever we can watch him, we find that
before a few generations have passed he has lost the power of admiring
what is regular, and that he can see signs and wonders only in what is
irregular. Few nations only have preserved in their ancient poetry some
remnants of the natural awe with which the earliest dwellers on the earth
saw that brilliant being slowly rising from out the darkness of the night,
raising itself by its own might higher and higher, till it stood
triumphant on the arch of heaven, and then descended and sank down in its
fiery glory into the dark abyss of the heaving and hissing sea. In the
hymns of the Veda the poet still wonders whether the sun will rise again;
he asks how he can climb the vault of heaven? why he does not fall back?
why there is no dust on his path? And when the rays of the morning rouse
him from sleep and call him back to new life; when he sees the sun, as he
says, stretching out his golden arms to bless the world and rescue it from
the terrors of darkness, he exclaims, “Arise, our life, our spirit has
come back! the darkness is gone, the light approaches!”
For so prominent an object in the primeval picture-gallery of the human
mind, a sign or a name must have been wanted at a very early period. But
how was this to be achieved? As a mere sign, a circle would have been
sufficient, such as we find in the hieroglyphics of Egypt, in the graphic
system of China, or even in our own astronomical tables. If such a sign
was fixed upon, we have a beginning of language in the widest sense of the
word, for we have brought the Sun under the general concept of roundness,
and we have found a sign for this concept which is made up of a large
number of single sensuous impressions. With such definite signs mythology
has little chance; yet the mere fact that the sun was represented as a
circle would favor the idea that the sun was round; or, as ancient people,
who had no adjective as yet for round or _rotundus_,(34) would say, that
the sun was a wheel, a _rota_. If, on the contrary, the round sign
reminded the people of an eye, then the sign of the sun would soon become
the eye of heaven, and germs of mythology would spring up even from the
barren soil of such hieroglyphic language.
But now, suppose that a real name was wanted for the sun, how could that
be achieved?
We know that all words are derived from roots, that these roots express
general concepts, and that, with few exceptions, every name is founded on
a general concept under which the object that has to be named can be
ranged. How these roots came to be, is a question into which we need not
enter at present. Their origin and growth form a problem of psychology
rather than of philology, and each science must keep within its proper
bounds. If a name was wanted for snow, the early framers of language
singled out one of the general predicates of snow, its whiteness, its
coldness, or its liquidity, and called the snow the white, the cold, or
the liquid, by means of roots conveying the general idea of whiteness,
coldness, or liquidity. Not only Nix, nivis, but Niobe(35) too, was a name
of the snow, and meant the melting; the death of her beautiful children by
the arrows of Apollon and Artemis represents the destruction of winter by
the rays of the sun. If the sun itself was to be named, it might be called
the brilliant, the awakener, the runner, the ruler, the father, the giver
of warmth, of fertility, of life, the scorcher, the destroyer, the
messenger of death, and many other names; but there was no possibility of
naming it, except by laying hold of one of its characteristic features,
and expressing that feature by means of one of the conceptual or
predicative roots.
Let us trace the history of at least one of these names. Before the Aryan
nations separated, before there was a Latin, a Greek, or a Sanskrit
language, there existed a root _svar_ or _sval_, which meant to beam, to
glitter, to warm. It exists in Greek, σέλας, splendor; σελήνη, moon; in
Anglo-Saxon, as _swélan_, to burn, to sweal; in modern German, _schwül_,
oppressively hot. From it we have in Sanskrit the noun _svar_, meaning
sometimes the sky, sometimes the sun; and exactly the same word has been
preserved in Latin, as _sol_; in Gothic as _sauil_; in Anglo-Saxon, as
_sol_. A secondary form of _svar_ is the Sanskrit _sûrya_ for _svârya_,
the sun, which is the same word as the Greek ἥλιος.
All these names were originally mere predicates; they meant bright,
brilliant, warm. But as soon as the name _svar_ or _sûrya_ was formed, it
became, through the irresistible influence of language, the name, not only
of a living, but of a male being. Every noun in Sanskrit must be either a
masculine or a feminine (for the neuter gender was originally confined to
the nominative case), and as _sûrya_ had been formed as a masculine,
language stamped it once for all as the sign of a male being, as much as
if it had been the name of a warrior or a king. In other languages where
the name for sun is a feminine, and the sun is accordingly conceived as a
woman, as a queen, as the bride of the moon, the whole mythology of the
love-making of the heavenly bodies is changed.
You may say that all this shows, not so much the influence of language on
thought, as of thought on language; and that the sexual character of all
words reflects only the peculiarities of a child’s mind, which can
conceive of nothing except as living, as male or female. If a child hurts
itself against a chair, it beats and scolds the chair. The chair is looked
upon not as _it_, but as _he_; it is the naughty chair, quite as much as a
boy is a naughty boy. There is some truth in this, but it only serves to
confirm the right view of the influence of language on thought; for this
tendency, though in its origin intentional, and therefore the result of
thought, became soon a mere rule of tradition in language, and it then
reacted on the mind with irresistible power. As soon, in fact, as _sûryas_
or ἥλιος appears as a masculine, we are in the very thick of mythology. We
have not yet arrived at Helios as a god—that is a much later stage of
thought, which we might describe almost in the words of Plato at the
beginning of the seventh book of the “Republic,” “And after this, he will
reason that the sun is he who gives the seasons and the years, and is the
guardian of all that is in the visible world, and in a certain way the
cause of all things which he and his fellows have been accustomed to
behold.” We have not yet advanced so far, but we have reached at least the
first germs of a myth. In the Homeric hymn to Helios, Helios is not yet
called an immortal, but only ἐπιείκελος ἀθανάτοισι, like unto immortals,
yet he is called the child of Euryphaessa, the son of Hyperion, the
grandson of Uranos and Gæa.(36)
All this is mythology; it is ancient language going beyond its first
intention.
Nor is there much difficulty in interpreting this myth. Helios, the sun,
is called the son of Hyperīon, sometimes Hyperīon himself. This name
Hyperīon is derived from the preposition ὑπέρ, the Latin _super_, which
means above. It is derived by means of the suffix -ιων, which originally
was not a patronymic, but simply expressed belonging to. So if Helios was
called Hyperion, this simply meant he who dwells on high, and corresponds
to Latin _Summanus_ or _Superior_, or _Excelsior_. If, on the contrary,
Helios is called Hyperionides, this, too, which meant originally no more
than he who comes from, or belongs to those who dwell on high,(37) led to
the myth that he was the descendant of Hyperion; so that in this case, as
in the case of Zeus Kronīon, the son really led to the conception of his
father. Zeus Kronīon meant originally no more than Zeus the eternal, the
god of ages, the ancient of days; but -ιων becoming usual as a patronymic
suffix, Kronion was supposed to mean the son of Kronos. Kronos, the
father, was created in order to account for the existence of the name
Kronion. If Hyperīon is called the son of Euryphaessa, the wide-shining,
this requires no commentary; for even at present a poet might say that the
sun is born of the wide-shining dawn. You see the spontaneous generation
of mythology with every new name that is formed. As not only the sun, but
also the moon and the dawn could be called dwellers on high, they, too,
took the name of Hyperionis or Hyperionides; and hence Homer called
Selene, the Moon, and Eos, the Dawn, sisters of Helios, and daughters of
Hyperion and Euryphaessa, the Dawn doing service twice, both as mother,
Euryphaessa, and as daughter, Eos. Nay, according to Homer, Euryphaessa,
the Dawn, is not only the wife, but also the sister of Helios. All this is
perfectly intelligible, if we watch the growth of language and mythology;
but it leads, of course, to the most tragic catastrophes as soon as it is
all taken in a literal sense.
Helios is called ἀκάμας, the never-tiring; πανδερκής, the all-seeing;
φαέθων, the shining; and also φοῖβος, the brilliant. This last epithet
φοῖβος has grown into an independent deity Phœbus, and it is particularly
known as a name of Apollon, Phoibos Apollon; thus showing what is also
known from other sources, that in Apollo, too, we have one of the many
mythic disguises of the sun.
So far all is clear, because all the names which we have to deal with are
intelligible, or, at all events, yield to the softest etymological
pressure. But now if we hear the story of Phoibos Apollon falling in love
with Daphne, and Daphne praying to her mother, the Earth, to save her from
Phoibos; and if we read how either the earth received her in her lap, and
then a laurel tree sprang up where she had disappeared, or how she herself
was changed into a laurel tree, what shall we think of this? It is a mere
story, it might be said, and why should there be any meaning in it? My
answer is, because people do not tell such stories of their gods and
heroes, unless there is some sense in them. Besides, if Phoibos means the
sun, why should not Daphne have a meaning too? Before, therefore, we can
decide whether the story of Phoibos and Daphne is a mere invention, we
must try to find out what can have been the meaning of the word Daphne.
In Greek it means a laurel,(38) and this would explain the purely Greek
legend that Daphne was changed into a laurel tree. But who was Daphne? In
order to answer this question, we must have recourse to etymology, or, in
other words, we must examine the history of the word. Etymology, as you
know, is no longer what it used to be; and though there may still be a
classical scholar here and there who crosses himself at the idea of a
Greek word being explained by a reference to Sanskrit, we naturally look
to Sanskrit as the master-key to many a lock which no Greek key will open.
Now Daphne, as I have shown, can be traced back to Sanskrit Ahanâ, and
Ahanâ in Sanskrit means the dawn. As soon as we know this, everything
becomes clear. The story of Phoibos and Daphne is no more than a
description of what every one may see every day; first, the appearance of
the Dawn in the eastern sky, then the rising of the Sun as if hurrying
after his bride, then the gradual fading away of the bright Dawn at the
touch of the fiery rays of the sun, and at last her death or disappearance
in the lap of her mother, the Earth. All this seems to me as clear as
daylight, and the only objection that could be raised against this reading
of the ancient myth would be, if it could be proved, that Ahanâ does not
mean Dawn, and that Daphne cannot be traced back to Ahanâ, or that
_Helios_ does not mean the Sun.
I know there is another objection, but it seems to me so groundless as
hardly to deserve an answer. Why, it is asked, should the ancient nations
have told these endless stories about the Sun and the Dawn, and why should
they have preserved them in their mythology? We might as well ask why the
ancient nations should have invented so many irregular verbs, and why they
should have preserved them in their grammar. A fact does not cease to be a
fact, because we cannot at once explain it. As far as our knowledge goes
at present, we are justified in stating that the Aryan nations preserved
not only their grammatical structure, and a large portion of their
dictionary, from the time which preceded their separation, but that they
likewise retained the names of some of their deities, some legends about
their gods, some popular sayings and proverbs, and in these, it may be,
the seeds of parables, as part of their common Aryan heirloom. Their
mythological lore fills, in fact, a period in the history of Aryan
thought, half-way between the period of language and the period of
literature, and it is this discovery which gives to mythology its
importance in the eyes of the student of the most ancient history and
psychology of mankind.
And do not suppose that the Greeks, or the Hindus, or the Aryan nations in
general, were the only people who possessed such tales. Wherever we look,
in every part of the world, among uncivilized as well as a civilized
people, we find the same kind of stories, the same traditions, the same
myths.
I shall give one story from the extreme North, another from the extreme
South.
Among the Esquimaux of Repulse Bay, on the west side of Hudson’s Bay, on
the Arctic Circle, Mr. John Rae picked up the following story:—
“Many years ago, a great Esquimaux Conqueror gained so much power that he
was able to rise unto the heavens, taking with him on one occasion a
sister, a very beautiful girl, and some fire. He added much fuel to the
fire, and thus formed the Sun. For some time he and his sister lived in
great harmony, but after a time he became very cruel, and ill-treated his
sister in many ways. She bore it at first with great patience, until at
last he threw fire at her, and scorched one side of her face. This
spoiling of her beauty was beyond endurance; she therefore ran away from
him, and formed the Moon. Her brother then began, and still continues to
chase her; but although he sometimes got near, he has not yet overtaken
her, nor ever will.
“When it is New Moon, the burnt side of the face is towards us; at Full
Moon it is the reverse.”
There are dialectic varieties in the Mythology of the Esquimaux as of the
Greeks and Hindus, and, with a change of gender between Sun and Moon, the
same story occurs among other tribes in the following form:—
“There was a girl at a party, and some one told his love for her by
shaking her shoulders, after the manner of the country. She could not see
who it was in the dark hut, so she smeared her hands with soot, and when
he came back she blackened his cheek with her hand. When a light was
brought she saw that it was her brother and fled. He ran after her,
followed her, and as she came to the end of the earth, he sprang out into
the sky. Then she became the sun, and he the moon, and this is why the
moon is always chasing the sun through the heavens, and why the moon is
sometimes dark as he turns his blackened cheek towards the earth.”(39)
We now turn to the South, and here, among the lowest of the low, among the
Hottentots, who are despised even by their black neighbors, the Zulus, we
find the following gem of a fable, beaming with mingled rays of religion
and philosophy:—
“The Moon, it is said, sent once an insect to men, saying, ‘Go thou to
men, and tell them, As I die, and dying live, so ye shall also die, and
dying live.’ The insect started with the message, but whilst on his way
was overtaken by the hare, who asked: ‘On what errand art thou bound?’ The
insect answered, ‘I am sent by the Moon to men, to tell them that as she
dies and dying lives, they also shall die and dying live.’ The hare said,
‘As thou art an awkward runner, let me go’ (to take the message). With
these words he ran off, and when he reached men, he said, ‘I am sent by
the Moon to tell you, As I die, and dying perish, in the same manner ye
also shall die and come wholly to an end.’ Then the hare returned to the
Moon, and told her what he had said to men. The Moon reproached him
angrily, saying, ‘Darest thou tell the people a thing which I have not
said?’ With these words she took up a piece of wood, and struck him on the
nose. Since that day the hare’s nose is slit.”
Of this story, too, there are various versions and in one of them the end
is as follows:—
“The hare, having returned to the Moon, was questioned as to the message
delivered, and the Moon, having heard the true state of the case, became
so enraged with him that she took up a hatchet to split his head; falling
short, however, of that, the hatchet fell upon the upper lip of the hare,
and cut it severely. Hence it is that we see the ‘hare-lip.’ The hare,
being duly incensed at having received such treatment, raised his claws,
and scratched the Moon’s face; and the dark parts which we now see on the
surface of the Moon are the scars which she received on that
occasion.”(40)
The Finns, Lapps, and Esthonians do not seem a very poetical race, yet
there is poetry even in their smoky huts, poetry surrounded with all the
splendor of an arctic night, and fragrant with the perfume of moss and
wild flowers. Here is one of their legends:—
“Wanna Issi had two servants, Koit and Ämmarik, and he gave them a torch
which Koit should light every morning, and Ämmarik should extinguish in
the evening. In order to reward their faithful services, Wanna Issi told
them they might be man and wife, but they asked Wanna Issi that he would
allow them to remain forever bride and bridegroom. Wanna Issi assented,
and henceforth Koit handed the torch every evening to Ämmarik, and Ämmarik
took it and extinguished it. Only during four weeks in summer they remain
together at midnight; Koit hands the dying torch to Ämmarik, but Ämmarik
does not let it die, but lights it again with her breath. Then their hands
are stretched out, and their lips meet, and the blush of the face of
Ämmarik colors the midnight sky.”
This myth requires hardly any commentary; yet as long as it is impossible
to explain the names, Wanna Issi, Koit, and Ämmarik, it might be said that
the story was but a love story, invented by an idle Lapp, or Finn, or
Esthonian. But what if Wanna Issi in Esthonian means the Old Father, and
if Koit means the Dawn? Can we then doubt any longer that Ämmarik(41) must
be the Gloaming and that their meeting in the summer reflects those summer
evenings when, particularly in the North, the torch of the sun seems never
to die, and when the Gloaming is seen kissing the Dawn?
I wish I could tell you some more of these stories which have been
gathered from all parts of the world, and which, though they may be
pronounced childish and tedious by some critics, seem to me to glitter
with the brightest dew of nature’s own poetry, and to contain those very
touches that make us feel akin, not only with Homer or Shakespeare, but
even with Lapps, and Finns, and Kaffirs.
I cannot resist, however, the temptation of inserting here a poetical
rendering of the story of Koit and Ämmarik, sent to me from the New World,
remarking only that instead of Lapland, Esthonia is really the country
that may claim the original story.