Volume I Part 2 (2/2)

As ”a minimum definition of religion,” Mr. Tylor has suggested ”the belief in spiritual beings”. Against this it may be urged that, while we have no definite certainty that any race of men is dest.i.tute of belief in spiritual beings, yet certain moral and creative deities of low races do not seem to be envisaged as ”spiritual” at all. They are regarded as EXISTENCES, as BEINGS, unconditioned by Time, s.p.a.ce, or Death, and n.o.body appears to have put the purely metaphysical question, ”Are these beings spiritual or material?”(1) Now, if a race were discovered which believed in such beings, yet had no faith in spirits, that race could not be called irreligious, as it would have to be called in Mr. Tylor's ”minimum definition”. Almost certainly, no race in this stage of belief in nothing but unconditioned but not expressly spiritual beings is extant. Yet such a belief may conceivably have existed before men had developed the theory of spirits at all, and such a belief, in creative and moral unconditioned beings, not alleged to be spiritual, could not be excluded from a definition of religion.(2)

(1) See The Making of Religion, pp. 201-210.

(2) ”The history of the Jews, nay, the history of our own mind, proves to demonstration that the thought of G.o.d is a far easier thought, and a far earlier, than that of a spirit.” Father Tyrrell, S. J., The Month, October, 1898. As to the Jews, the question is debated. As to our own infancy, we are certainly taught about G.o.d before we are likely to be capable of the metaphysical notion of spirit. But we can scarcely reason from children in Christian houses to the infancy of the race.

For these reasons we propose (merely for the purpose of the present work) to define religion as the belief in a primal being, a Maker, undying, usually moral, without denying that the belief in spiritual beings, even if immoral, may be styled religious. Our definition is expressly framed for the purpose of the argument, because that argument endeavours to bring into view the essential conflict between religion and myth. We intend to show that this conflict between the religious and the mythical conception is present, not only (where it has been universally recognised) in the faiths of the ancient civilised peoples, as in Greece, Rome, India and Egypt, but also in the ideas of the lowest known savages.

It may, of course, be argued that the belief in Creator is itself a myth. However that may be, the att.i.tude of awe, and of moral obedience, in face of such a supposed being, is religious in the sense of the Christian religion, whereas the fabrication of fanciful, humorous, and wildly irrational fables about that being, or others, is essentially mythical in the ordinary significance of that word, though not absent from popular Christianity.

Now, the whole crux and puzzle of mythology is, ”Why, having attained (in whatever way) to a belief in an undying guardian, 'Master of Life,'

did mankind set to work to evolve a chronique scandaleuse about HIM?

And why is that chronique the elaborately absurd set of legends which we find in all mythologies?”

In answering, or trying to answer, these questions, we cannot go behind the beliefs of the races now most immersed in savage ignorance. About the psychology of races yet more undeveloped we can have no historical knowledge. Among the lowest known tribes we usually find, just as in ancient Greece, the belief in a deathless ”Father,” ”Master,” ”Maker,”

and also the crowd of humorous, obscene, fanciful myths which are in flagrant contradiction with the religious character of that belief. That belief is what we call rational, and even elevated. The myths, on the other hand, are what we call irrational and debasing. We regard low savages as very irrational and debased characters, consequently the nature of their myths does not surprise us. Their religious conception, however, of a ”Father” or ”Master of Life” seems out of keeping with the nature of the savage mind as we understand it. Still, there the religious conception actually is, and it seems to follow that we do not wholly understand the savage mind, or its unknown antecedents. In any case, there the facts are, as shall be demonstrated. However the ancestors of Australians, or Andamanese, or Hurons arrived at their highest religious conception, they decidedly possess it.(1) The development of their mythical conceptions is accounted for by those qualities of their minds which we do understand, and shall ill.u.s.trate at length. For the present, we can only say that the religious conception uprises from the human intellect in one mood, that of earnest contemplation and submission: while the mythical ideas uprise from another mood, that of playful and erratic fancy. These two moods are conspicuous even in Christianity. The former, that of earnest and submissive contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and ”the dim religious light” of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of the human race. They stand as near each other, and as far apart, as Love and l.u.s.t.

(1) The hypothesis that the conception was borrowed from European creeds will be discussed later. See, too, ”Are Savage G.o.ds borrowed from Missionaries?” Nineteenth Century, January, 1899.

It will later be shown that even some of the most backward savages make a perhaps half-conscious distinction between their mythology and their religion. As to the former, they are communicative; as to the latter, they jealously guard their secret in sacred mysteries. It is improbable that reflective ”black fellows” have been morally shocked by the flagrant contradictions between their religious conceptions and their mythical stories of the divine beings. But human thought could not come into explicit clearness of consciousness without producing the sense of shock and surprise at these contradictions between the Religion and the Myth of the same G.o.d. Of this we proceed to give examples.

In Greece, as early as the sixth century B. C., we are all familiar with Xenophanes' poem(1) complaining that the G.o.ds were credited with the worst crimes of mortals--in fact, with abominations only known in the orgies of Nero and Elagabalus. We hear Pindar refusing to repeat the tale which told him the blessed were cannibals.(2) In India we read the pious Brahmanic attempts to expound decently the myths which made Indra the slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable sin.

In Egypt, too, we study the priestly or philosophic systems by which the clergy strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from their own deities. From all these efforts of civilised and pious believers to explain away the stories about their own G.o.ds we may infer one fact--the most important to the student of mythology--the fact that myths were not evolved in times of clear civilised thought. It is when Greece is just beginning to free her thought from the bondage of too concrete language, when she is striving to coin abstract terms, that her philosophers and poets first find the myths of Greece a stumbling-block.

(1) Ritter and Preller, Hist. Philos., Gothae, 1869, p. 82.

(2) Olympic Odes, i., Myers's translation: ”To me it is impossible to call one of the blessed G.o.ds a cannibal.... Meet it is for a man that concerning the G.o.ds he speak honourably, for the reproach is less. Of thee, son of Tantalus, I will speak contrariwise to them who have gone before me.” In avoiding the story of the cannibal G.o.d, however, Pindar tells a tale even more offensive to our morality.

All early attempts at an interpretation of mythology are so many efforts to explain the myths on some principle which shall seem not unreasonable to men living at the time of the explanation. Therefore the pious remonstrances and the forced constructions of early thinkers like Xenophanes, of poets like Pindar, of all ancient Homeric scholars and Pagan apologists, from Theagenes of Rhegium (525 B. C.), the early Homeric commentator, to Porphyry, almost the last of the heathen philosophers, are so many proofs that to Greece, as soon as she had a reflective literature, the myths of Greece seemed impious and IRRATIONAL. The essays of the native commentators on the Veda, in the same way, are endeavours to put into myths felt to be irrational and impious a meaning which does not offend either piety or reason. We may therefore conclude that it was not men in an early stage of philosophic thought (as philosophy is now understood)--not men like Empedocles and Herac.l.i.tus, nor reasonably devout men like Eumaeus, the pious swineherd of the Odyssey--who evolved the blasphemous myths of Greece, of Egypt and of India. We must look elsewhere for an explanation. We must try to discover some actual and demonstrable and widely prevalent condition of the human mind, in which tales that even to remote and rudimentary civilisations appeared irrational and unnatural would seem natural and rational. To discover this intellectual condition has been the aim of all mythologists who did not believe that myth is a divine tradition depraved by human weakness, or a distorted version of historical events.

Before going further, it is desirable to set forth what our aim is, and to what extent we are seeking an interpretation of mythology. It is not our purpose to explain every detail of every ancient legend, either as a distorted historical fact or as the result of this or that confusion of thought caused by forgetfulness of the meanings of language, or in any other way; nay, we must constantly protest against the excursions of too venturesome ingenuity. Myth is so ancient, so complex, so full of elements, that it is vain labour to seek a cause for every phenomenon.

We are chiefly occupied with the quest for an historical condition of the human intellect to which the element in myths, regarded by us as irrational, shall seem rational enough. If we can prove that such a state of mind widely exists among men, and has existed, that state of mind may be provisionally considered as the fount and ORIGIN of the myths which have always perplexed men in a reasonable modern mental condition. Again, if it can be shown that this mental stage was one through which all civilised races have pa.s.sed, the universality of the mythopoeic mental condition will to some extent explain the universal DIFFUSION of the stories.

Now, in all mythologies, whether savage or civilised, and in all religions where myths intrude, there exist two factors--the factor which we now regard as rational, and that which we moderns regard as irrational. The former element needs little explanation; the latter has demanded explanation ever since human thought became comparatively instructed and abstract.

To take an example; even in the myths of savages there is much that still seems rational and transparent. If savages tell us that some wise being taught them all the simple arts of life, the use of fire, of the bow and arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we understand them at once. Nothing can be more natural than that man should believe in an original inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the imaginary discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. So far all is plain sailing. But when the savage goes on to say that he who taught the use of fire or who gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit or a crow, or a dog, or a beaver, or a spider, then we are at once face to face with the element in myths which seems to us IRRATIONAL. Again, among civilised peoples we read of the pure all-seeing Varuna in the Vedas, to whom sin is an offence. We read of Indra, the Lord of Thunder, borne in his chariot, the giver of victory, the giver of wealth to the pious; here once more all seems natural and plain. The notion of a deity who guides the whirlwind and directs the storm, a G.o.d of battles, a G.o.d who blesses righteousness, is familiar to us and intelligible; but when we read how Indra drank himself drunk and committed adulteries with Asura women, and got himself born from the same womb as a bull, and changed himself into a quail or a ram, and suffered from the most abject physical terror, and so forth, then we are among myths no longer readily intelligible; here, we feel, are IRRATIONAL stories, of which the original ideas, in their natural sense, can hardly have been conceived by men in a pure and rational early civilisation. Again, in the religions of even the lowest races, such myths as these are in contradiction with the ethical elements of the faith.

<script>