Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted
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comparative mythology by John Fiske >> Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted
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Ancient as the Homeric poems undoubtedly are, they are modern
in comparison with the tale of Achilleus and Helena, as here
unfolded. The date of the entrance of the Greeks into Europe
will perhaps never be determined; but I do not see how any
competent scholar can well place it at less than eight hundred
or a thousand years before the time of Homer. Between the two
epochs the Greek, Latin, Umbrian, and Keltic lauguages had
time to acquire distinct individualities. Far earlier,
therefore, than the Homeric "juventus mundi" was that "youth
of the world," in which the Aryan forefathers, knowing no
abstract terms, and possessing no philosophy but fetichism,
deliberately spoke of the Sun, and the Dawn, and the Clouds,
as persons or as animals. The Veda, though composed much later
than this,--perhaps as late as the Iliad,--nevertheless
preserves the record of the mental life of this period. The
Vedic poet is still dimly aware that Sarama is the fickle
twilight, and the Panis the night-demons who strive to coax
her from her allegiance to the day-god. He keeps the scene of
action in the sky. But the Homeric Greek had long since
forgotten that Helena and Paris were anything more than
semi-divine mortals, the daughter of Zeus and the son of the
Zeus-descended Priam. The Hindu understood that Dyaus ("the
bright one") meant the sky, and Sarama ("the creeping one")
the dawn, and spoke significantly when he called the latter
the daughter of the former. But the Greek could not know that
Zeus was derived from a root div, "to shine," or that Helena
belonged to a root sar, "to creep." Phonetic change thus
helped him to rise from fetichism to polytheism. His
nature-gods became thoroughly anthropomorphic; and he probably
no more remembered that Achilleus originally signified the
sun, than we remember that the word God, which we use to
denote the most vast of conceptions, originally meant simply
the Storm-wind. Indeed, when the fetichistic tendency led the
Greek again to personify the powers of nature, he had recourse
to new names formed from his own language. Thus, beside Apollo
we have Helios; Selene beside Artemis and Persephone; Eos
beside Athene; Gaia beside Demeter. As a further consequence
of this decomposition and new development of the old Aryan
mythology, we find, as might be expected, that the Homeric
poems are not always consistent in their use of their mythic
materials. Thus, Paris, the night-demon, is--to Max Muller's
perplexity--invested with many of the attributes of the
bright solar heroes. "Like Perseus, Oidipous, Romulus, and
Cyrus, he is doomed to bring ruin on his parents; like them he
is exposed in his infancy on the hillside, and rescued by a
shepherd." All the solar heroes begin life in this way.
Whether, like Apollo, born of the dark night (Leto), or like
Oidipous, of the violet dawn (Iokaste), they are alike
destined to bring destruction on their parents, as the night
and the dawn are both destroyed by the sun. The exposure of
the child in infancy represents the long rays of the
morning-sun resting on the hillside. Then Paris forsakes
Oinone ("the wine-coloured one"), but meets her again at the
gloaming when she lays herself by his side amid the crimson
flames of the funeral pyre. Sarpedon also, a solar hero, is
made to fight on the side of the Niblungs or Trojans, attended
by his friend Glaukos ("the brilliant one"). They command the
Lykians, or "children of light"; and with them comes also
Memnon, son of the Dawn, from the fiery land of the Aithiopes,
the favourite haunt of Zeus and the gods of Olympos.
The Iliad-myth must therefore have been current many ages
before the Greeks inhabited Greece, long before there was any
Ilion to be conquered. Nevertheless, this does not forbid the
supposition that the legend, as we have it, may have been
formed by the crystallization of mythical conceptions about a
nucleus of genuine tradition. In this view I am upheld by a
most sagacious and accurate scholar, Mr. E. A. Freeman, who
finds in Carlovingian romance an excellent illustration of the
problem before us.
The Charlemagne of romance is a mythical personage. He is
supposed to have been a Frenchman, at a time when neither the
French nation nor the French language can properly be said to
have existed; and he is represented as a doughty crusader,
although crusading was not thought of until long after the
Karolingian era. The legendary deeds of Charlemagne are not
conformed to the ordinary rules of geography and chronology.
He is a myth, and, what is more, he is a solar myth,--an
avatar, or at least a representative, of Odin in his solar
capacity. If in his case legend were not controlled and
rectified by history, he would be for us as unreal as
Agamemnon.
History, however, tells us that there was an Emperor Karl,
German in race, name, and language, who was one of the two or
three greatest men of action that the world has ever seen, and
who in the ninth century ruled over all Western Europe. To the
historic Karl corresponds in many particulars the mythical
Charlemagne. The legend has preserved the fact, which without
the information supplied by history we might perhaps set down
as a fiction, that there was a time when Germany, Gaul, Italy,
and part of Spain formed a single empire. And, as Mr. Freeman
has well observed, the mythical crusades of Charlemagne are
good evidence that there were crusades, although the real Karl
had nothing whatever to do with one.
Now the case of Agamemnon may be much like that of
Charlemagne, except that we no longer have history to help us
in rectifying the legend. The Iliad preserves the tradition of
a time when a large portion of the islands and mainland of
Greece were at least partially subject to a common suzerain;
and, as Mr. Freeman has again shrewdly suggested, the
assignment of a place like Mykenai, instead of Athens or
Sparta or Argos, as the seat of the suzerainty, is strong
evidence of the trustworthiness of the tradition. It appears
to show that the legend was constrained by some remembered
fact, instead of being guided by general probability.
Charlemagne's seat of government has been transferred in
romance from Aachen to Paris; had it really been at Paris,
says Mr. Freeman, no one would have thought of transferring it
to Aachen. Moreover, the story of Agamemnon, though
uncontrolled by historic records, is here at least supported
by archaeologic remains, which prove Mykenai to have been at
some time or other a place of great consequence. Then, as to
the Trojan war, we know that the Greeks several times crossed
the AEgaean and colonized a large part of the seacoast of Asia
Minor. In order to do this it was necessary to oust from their
homes many warlike communities of Lydians and Bithynians, and
we may be sure that this was not done without prolonged
fighting. There may very probably have been now and then a
levy en masse in prehistoric Greece, as there was in mediaeval
Europe; and whether the great suzerain at Mykenai ever
attended one or not, legend would be sure to send him on such
an expedition, as it afterwards sent Charlemagne on a crusade.
It is therefore quite possible that Agamemnon and Menelaos may
represent dimly remembered sovereigns or heroes, with their
characters and actions distorted to suit the exigencies of a
narrative founded upon a solar myth. The character of the
Nibelungenlied here well illustrates that of the Iliad.
Siegfried and Brunhild, Hagen and Gunther, seem to be mere
personifications of physical phenomena; but Etzel and Dietrich
are none other than Attila and Theodoric surrounded with
mythical attributes; and even the conception of Brunhild has
been supposed to contain elements derived from the traditional
recollection of the historical Brunehault. When, therefore,
Achilleus is said, like a true sun-god, to have died by a
wound from a sharp instrument in the only vulnerable part of
his body, we may reply that the legendary Charlemagne conducts
himself in many respects like a solar deity. If Odysseus
detained by Kalypso represents the sun ensnared and held
captive by the pale goddess of night, the legend of Frederic
Barbarossa asleep in a Thuringian mountain embodies a portion
of a kindred conception. We know that Charlemagne and Frederic
have been substituted for Odin; we may suspect that with the
mythical impersonations of Achilleus and Odysseus some
traditional figures may be blended. We should remember that in
early times the solar-myth was a sort of type after which all
wonderful stories would be patterned, and that to such a type
tradition also would be made to conform.
In suggesting this view, we are not opening the door to
Euhemerism. If there is any one conclusion concerning the
Homeric poems which the labours of a whole generation of
scholars may be said to have satisfactorily established, it is
this, that no trustworthy history can be obtained from either
the Iliad or the Odyssey merely by sifting out the mythical
element. Even if the poems contain the faint reminiscence of
an actual event, that event is inextricably wrapped up in
mythical phraseology, so that by no cunning of the scholar can
it be construed into history. In view of this it is quite
useless for Mr. Gladstone to attempt to base historical
conclusions upon the fact that Helena is always called "Argive
Helen," or to draw ethnological inferences from the
circumstances that Menelaos, Achilleus, and the rest of the
Greek heroes, have yellow hair, while the Trojans are never so
described. The Argos of the myth is not the city of
Peloponnesos, though doubtless so construed even in Homer's
time. It is "the bright land" where Zeus resides, and the
epithet is applied to his wife Here and his daughter Helena,
as well as to the dog of Odysseus, who reappears with
Sarameyas in the Veda. As for yellow hair, there is no
evidence that Greeks have ever commonly possessed it; but no
other colour would do for a solar hero, and it accordingly
characterizes the entire company of them, wherever found,
while for the Trojans, or children of night, it is not
required.
A wider acquaintance with the results which have been obtained
during the past thirty years by the comparative study of
languages and mythologies would have led Mr. Gladstone to
reconsider many of his views concerning the Homeric poems, and
might perhaps have led him to cut out half or two thirds of
his book as hopelessly antiquated. The chapter on the
divinities of Olympos would certainly have had to be
rewritten, and the ridiculous theory of a primeval revelation
abandoned. One can hardly preserve one's gravity when Mr.
Gladstone derives Apollo from the Hebrew Messiah, and Athene
from the Logos. To accredit Homer with an acquaintance with
the doctrine of the Logos, which did not exist until the time
of Philo, and did not receive its authorized Christian form
until the middle of the second century after Christ, is
certainly a strange proceeding. We shall next perhaps be
invited to believe that the authors of the Volsunga Saga
obtained the conception of Sigurd from the "Thirty-Nine
Articles." It is true that these deities, Athene and Apollo,
are wiser, purer, and more dignified, on the whole, than any
of the other divinities of the Homeric Olympos. They alone, as
Mr. Gladstone truly observes, are never deceived or
frustrated. For all Hellas, Apollo was the interpreter of
futurity, and in the maid Athene we have perhaps the highest
conception of deity to which the Greek mind had attained in
the early times. In the Veda, Athene is nothing but the dawn;
but in the Greek mythology, while the merely sensuous glories
of daybreak are assigned to Eos, Athene becomes the
impersonation of the illuminating and knowledge-giving light
of the sky. As the dawn, she is daughter of Zeus, the sky, and
in mythic language springs from his forehead; but, according
to the Greek conception, this imagery signifies that she
shares, more than any other deity, in the boundless wisdom of
Zeus. The knowledge of Apollo, on the other hand, is the
peculiar privilege of the sun, who, from his lofty position,
sees everything that takes place upon the earth. Even the
secondary divinity Helios possesses this prerogative to a
certain extent.
Next to a Hebrew, Mr. Gladstone prefers a Phoenician ancestry
for the Greek divinities. But the same lack of acquaintance
with the old Aryan mythology vitiates all his conclusions. No
doubt the Greek mythology is in some particulars tinged with
Phoenician conceptions. Aphrodite was originally a purely
Greek divinity, but in course of time she acquired some of the
attributes of the Semitic Astarte, and was hardly improved by
the change. Adonis is simply a Semitic divinity, imported into
Greece. But the same cannot be proved of Poseidon;[154] far
less of Hermes, who is identical with the Vedic Sarameyas, the
rising wind, the son of Sarama the dawn, the lying, tricksome
wind-god, who invented music, and conducts the souls of dead
men to the house of Hades, even as his counterpart the Norse
Odin rushes over the tree-tops leading the host of the
departed. When one sees Iris, the messenger of Zeus, referred
to a Hebrew original, because of Jehovah's promise to Noah,
one is at a loss to understand the relationship between the
two conceptions. Nothing could be more natural to the Greeks
than to call the rainbow the messenger of the sky-god to
earth-dwelling men; to call it a token set in the sky by
Jehovah, as the Hebrews did, was a very different thing. We
may admit the very close resemblance between the myth of
Bellerophon and Anteia, and that of Joseph and Zuleikha; but
the fact that the Greek story is explicable from Aryan
antecedents, while the Hebrew story is isolated, might perhaps
suggest the inference that the Hebrews were the borrowers, as
they undoubtedly were in the case of the myth of Eden. Lastly,
to conclude that Helios is an Eastern deity, because he reigns
in the East over Thrinakia, is wholly unwarranted. Is not
Helios pure Greek for the sun? and where should his sacred
island be placed, if not in the East? As for his oxen, which
wrought such dire destruction to the comrades of Odysseus, and
which seem to Mr. Gladstone so anomalous, they are those very
same unhappy cattle, the clouds, which were stolen by the
storm-demon Cacus and the wind-deity Hermes, and which
furnished endless material for legends to the poets of the
Veda.
[154] I have no opinion as to the nationality of the
Earth-shaker, and, regarding the etymology of his name, I
believe we can hardly do better than acknowledge, with Mr.
Cox, that it is unknown. It may well be doubted, however,
whether much good is likely to come of comparisons between
Poseidon, Dagon, Oannes, and Noah, or of distinctions between
the children of Shem and the children of Ham. See Brown's
Poseidon; a Link between Semite, Hamite, and Aryan, London,
1872,--a book which is open to several of the criticisms here
directed against Mr. Gladstone's manner of theorizing.
But the whole subject of comparative mythology seems to be
terra incognita to Mr. Gladstone. He pursues the even tenour
of his way in utter disregard of Grimm, and Kuhn, and Breal,
and Dasent, and Burnouf. He takes no note of the Rig-Veda, nor
does he seem to realize that there was ever a time when the
ancestors of the Greeks and Hindus worshipped the same gods.
Two or three times he cites Max Muller, but makes no use of
the copious data which might be gathered from him. The only
work which seems really to have attracted his attention is M.
Jacolliot's very discreditable performance called "The Bible
in India." Mr. Gladstone does not, indeed, unreservedly
approve of this book; but neither does he appear to suspect
that it is a disgraceful piece of charlatanry, written by a
man ignorant of the very rudiments of the subject which he
professes to handle.
Mr. Gladstone is equally out of his depth when he comes to
treat purely philological questions. Of the science of
philology, as based upon established laws of phonetic change,
he seems to have no knowledge whatever. He seems to think that
two words are sufficiently proved to be connected when they
are seen to resemble each other in spelling or in sound. Thus
he quotes approvingly a derivation of the name Themis from an
assumed verb them, "to speak," whereas it is notoriously
derived from tiqhmi, as statute comes ultimately from stare.
His reference of hieros, "a priest," and geron, "an old man,"
to the same root, is utterly baseless; the one is the Sanskrit
ishiras, "a powerful man," the other is the Sanskrit jaran,
"an old man." The lists of words on pages 96-100 are
disfigured by many such errors; and indeed the whole purpose
for which they are given shows how sadly Mr. Gladstone's
philology is in arrears. The theory of Niebuhr--that the words
common to Greek and Latin, mostly descriptive of peaceful
occupations, are Pelasgian--was serviceable enough in its day,
but is now rendered wholly antiquated by the discovery that
such words are Aryan, in the widest sense. The Pelasgian
theory works very smoothly so long as we only compare the
Greek with the Latin words,--as, for instance, sugon with
jugum; but when we add the English yoke and the Sanskrit
yugam, it is evident that we have got far out of the range of
the Pelasgoi. But what shall we say when we find Mr. Gladstone
citing the Latin thalamus in support of this antiquated
theory? Doubtless the word thalamus is, or should be,
significative of peaceful occupations; but it is not a Latin
word at all, except by adoption. One might as well cite the
word ensemble to prove the original identity or kinship
between English and French.
When Mr. Gladstone, leaving the dangerous ground of pure and
applied philology, confines himself to illustrating the
contents of the Homeric poems, he is always excellent. His
chapter on the "Outer Geography" of the Odyssey is exceedingly
interesting; showing as it does how much may be obtained from
the patient and attentive study of even a single author. Mr.
Gladstone's knowledge of the SURFACE of the Iliad and Odyssey,
so to speak, is extensive and accurate. It is when he attempts
to penetrate beneath the surface and survey the treasures
hidden in the bowels of the earth, that he shows himself
unprovided with the talisman of the wise dervise, which alone
can unlock those mysteries. But modern philology is an
exacting science: to approach its higher problems requires an
amount of preparation sufficient to terrify at the outset all
but the boldest; and a man who has had to regulate taxation,
and make out financial statements, and lead a political party
in a great nation, may well be excused for ignorance of
philology. It is difficult enough for those who have little
else to do but to pore over treatises on phonetics, and thumb
their lexicons, to keep fully abreast with the latest views in
linguistics. In matters of detail one can hardly ever broach a
new hypothesis without misgivings lest somebody, in some
weekly journal published in Germany, may just have anticipated
and refuted it. Yet while Mr. Gladstone may be excused for
being unsound in philology, it is far less excusable that he
should sit down to write a book about Homer, abounding in
philological statements, without the slightest knowledge of
what has been achieved in that science for several years past.
In spite of all drawbacks, however, his book shows an abiding
taste for scholarly pursuits, and therefore deserves a certain
kind of praise. I hope,--though just now the idea savours of
the ludicrous,--that the day may some time arrive when OUR
Congressmen and Secretaries of the Treasury will spend their
vacations in writing books about Greek antiquities, or in
illustrating the meaning of Homeric phrases.
July, 1870.
VII. THE PRIMEVAL GHOST-WORLD.
NO earnest student of human culture can as yet have forgotten
or wholly outlived the feeling of delight awakened by the
first perusal of Max Muller's brilliant "Essay on Comparative
Mythology,"--a work in which the scientific principles of
myth-interpretation, though not newly announced, were at least
brought home to the reader with such an amount of fresh and
striking concrete illustration as they had not before
received. Yet it must have occurred to more than one reader
that, while the analyses of myths contained in this noble
essay are in the main sound in principle and correct in
detail, nevertheless the author's theory of the genesis of
myth is expressed, and most likely conceived, in a way that is
very suggestive of carelessness and fallacy. There are obvious
reasons for doubting whether the existence of mythology can be
due to any "disease," abnormity, or hypertrophy of metaphor in
language; and the criticism at once arises, that with the
myth-makers it was not so much the character of the expression
which originated the thought, as it was the thought which gave
character to the expression. It is not that the early Aryans
were myth-makers because their language abounded in metaphor;
it is that the Aryan mother-tongue abounded in metaphor
because the men and women who spoke it were myth-makers. And
they were myth-makers because they had nothing but the
phenomena of human will and effort with which to compare
objective phenomena. Therefore it was that they spoke of the
sun as an unwearied voyager or a matchless archer, and
classified inanimate no less than animate objects as masculine
and feminine. Max Muller's way of stating his theory, both in
this Essay and in his later Lectures, affords one among
several instances of the curious manner in which he combines a
marvellous penetration into the significance of details with a
certain looseness of general conception.[155] The principles
of philological interpretation are an indispensable aid to us
in detecting the hidden meaning of many a legend in which the
powers of nature are represented in the guise of living and
thinking persons; but before we can get at the secret of the
myth-making tendency itself, we must leave philology and enter
upon a psychological study. We must inquire into the
characteristics of that primitive style of thinking to which
it seemed quite natural that the sun should be an unerring
archer, and the thunder-cloud a black demon or gigantic robber
finding his richly merited doom at the hands of the indignant
Lord of Light.
[155] "The expression that the Erinys, Saranyu, the Dawn,
finds out the criminal, was originally quite free from
mythology; IT MEANT NO MORE THAN THAT CRIME WOULD BE BROUGHT
TO LIGHT SOME DAY OR OTHER. It became mythological, however,
as soon as the etymological meaning of Erinys was forgotten,
and as soon as the Dawn, a portion of time, assumed the rank
of a personal being."--Science of Language, 6th edition, II.
615. This paragraph, in which the italicizing is mine,
contains Max Muller's theory in a nutshell. It seems to me
wholly at variance with the facts of history. The facts
concerning primitive culture which are to be cited in this
paper will show that the case is just the other way. Instead
of the expression "Erinys finds the criminal" being originally
a metaphor, it was originally a literal statement of what was
believed to be fact. The Dawn (not "a portion of time,"(!) but
the rosy flush of the morning sky) was originally regarded as
a real person. Primitive men, strictly speaking, do not talk
in metaphors; they believe in the literal truth of their
similes and personifications, from which, by survival in
culture, our poetic metaphors are lineally descended. Homer's
allusion to a rolling stone as essumenos or "yearning" (to
keep on rolling), is to us a mere figurative expression; but
to the savage it is the description of a fact.
Among recent treatises which have dealt with this interesting
problem, we shall find it advantageous to give especial
attention to Mr. Tylor's "Primitive Culture,"[156] one of the
few erudite works which are at once truly great and thoroughly
entertaining. The learning displayed in it would do credit to
a German specialist, both for extent and for minuteness, while
the orderly arrangement of the arguments and the elegant
lucidity of the style are such as we are accustomed to expect
from French essay-writers. And what is still more admirable is
the way in which the enthusiasm characteristic of a genial and
original speculator is tempered by the patience and caution of
a cool-headed critic. Patience and caution are nowhere more
needed than in writers who deal with mythology and with
primitive religious ideas; but these qualities are too seldom
found in combination with the speculative boldness which is
required when fresh theories are to be framed or new paths of
investigation opened. The state of mind in which the
explaining powers of a favourite theory are fondly
contemplated is, to some extent, antagonistic to the state of
mind in which facts are seen, with the eye of impartial
criticism, in all their obstinate and uncompromising reality.
To be able to preserve the balance between the two opposing
tendencies is to give evidence of the most consummate
scientific training. It is from the want of such a balance
that the recent great work of Mr. Cox is at times so
unsatisfactory. It may, I fear, seem ill-natured to say so,
but the eagerness with which Mr. Cox waylays every available
illustration of the physical theory of the origin of myths has
now and then the curious effect of weakening the reader's
conviction of the soundness of the theory. For my own part,
though by no means inclined to waver in adherence to a
doctrine once adopted on good grounds, I never felt so much
like rebelling against the mythologic supremacy of the Sun and
the Dawn as when reading Mr. Cox's volumes. That Mr. Tylor,
while defending the same fundamental theory, awakens no such
rebellious feelings, is due to his clear perception and
realization of the fact that it is impossible to generalize in
a single formula such many-sided correspondences as those
which primitive poetry end philosophy have discerned between
the life of man and the life of outward nature. Whoso goes
roaming up and down the elf-land of popular fancies, with sole
intent to resolve each episode of myth into some answering
physical event, his only criterion being outward resemblance,
cannot be trusted in his conclusions, since wherever he turns
for evidence he is sure to find something that can be made to
serve as such. As Mr. Tylor observes, no household legend or
nursery rhyme is safe from his hermeneutics. "Should he, for
instance, demand as his property the nursery 'Song of
Sixpence,' his claim would be easily established,--obviously
the four-and-twenty blackbirds are the four-and-twenty hours,
and the pie that holds them is the underlying earth covered
with the overarching sky,--how true a touch of nature it is
that when the pie is opened, that is, when day breaks, the
birds begin to sing; the King is the Sun, and his counting out
his money is pouring out the sunshine, the golden shower of
Danae; the Queen is the Moon, and her transparent honey the
moonlight; the Maid is the 'rosy-fingered' Dawn, who rises
before the Sun, her master, and hangs out the clouds, his
clothes, across the sky; the particular blackbird, who so
tragically ends the tale by snipping off her nose, is the hour
of sunrise." In all this interpretation there is no a priori
improbability, save, perhaps, in its unbroken symmetry and
completeness. That some points, at least, of the story are
thus derived from antique interpretations of physical events,
is in harmony with all that we know concerning nursery rhymes.
In short, "the time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing
to prove it a sun-myth, that one thing being a proof by some
argument more valid than analogy." The character of the
argument which is lacking may be illustrated by a reference to
the rhyme about Jack and Jill, explained some time since in
the paper on "The Origins of FolkLore." If the argument be
thought valid which shows these ill-fated children to be the
spots on the moon, it is because the proof consists, not in
the analogy, which is in this case not especially obvious, but
in the fact that in the Edda, and among ignorant Swedish
peasants of our own day, the story of Jack and Jill is
actually given as an explanation of the moon-spots. To the
neglect of this distinction between what is plausible and what
is supported by direct evidence, is due much of the crude
speculation which encumbers the study of myths.
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