Volume I Part 20 (1/2)
(3) The story of Joseph and the marchen of Jean de l'Ours are well-known examples.
Garcila.s.so gives three forms of this myth. According to ”the old Inca,”
his maternal uncle, it was the sun which sent down two of his children, giving them a golden staff, which would sink into the ground at the place where they were to rest from wandering. It sank at Lake t.i.ticaca.
About the current myths Garcila.s.so says generally that they were ”more like dreams” than straightforward stories; but, as he adds, the Greeks and Romans also ”invented fables worthy to be laughed at, and in greater number than the Indians. The stories of one age of heathenism may be compared with those of the other, and in many points they will be found to agree.” This critical position of Garcila.s.so's will be proved correct when we reach the myths of Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The myth as narrated north-east of Cuzco speaks of the four brothers and four sisters who came out of caves, and the caves in Inca times were panelled with gold and silver.
Athwart all these lower myths, survivals from the savage stage, comes what Garcila.s.so regards as the philosophical Inca belief in Pachacamac.
This deity, to Garcila.s.so's mind, was purely spiritual: he had no image and dwelt in no temple; in fact, he is that very G.o.d whom the Spanish missionaries proclaimed. This view, though the fact has been doubted, was very probably held by the Amautas, or philosophical cla.s.s in Peru.(1) Cieza de Leon says ”the name of this devil, Pachacamac, means creator of the world”. Garcila.s.so urges that Pachacamac was the animus mundi; that he did not ”make the world,” as Pund-jel and other savage demiurges made it, but that he was to the universe what the soul is to the body.
(1) Com. Real., vol. i. p. 106.
Here we find ourselves, if among myths at all, among the myths of metaphysics--rational myths; that is, myths corresponding to our present stage of thought, and therefore intelligible to us. Pachacamac ”made the sun, and lightning, and thunder, and of these the sun was wors.h.i.+pped by the Incas”. Garcila.s.so denies that the moon was wors.h.i.+pped. The reflections of the sceptical or monotheistic Inca, who declared that the sun, far from being a free agent, ”seems like a thing held to its task,”
are reported by Garcila.s.so, and appear to prove that solar wors.h.i.+p was giving way, in the minds of educated Peruvians, a hundred years before the arrival of Pizarro and Valverde with his missal.(1)
(1) Garcila.s.so, viii. 8, quoting Blas Valera.
From this summary it appears that the higher Peruvian religion had wrested to its service, and to the dynastic purposes of the Incas, a native myth of the familiar cla.s.s, in which men come ready made out of holes in the ground. But in Peru we do not find nearly such abundance of other savage origin myths as will be proved to exist in the legends of Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The reason probably is that Peru left no native literature; the missionaries disdained stories of ”devils,” and Garcila.s.so's common sense and patriotism were alike revolted by the incidents of stories ”more like dreams” than truthful records. He therefore was silent about them. In Greece and India, on the other hand, the native religious literature preserved myths of the making of man out of clay, of his birth from trees and stones, of the fas.h.i.+oning of things out of the fragments of mutilated G.o.ds and t.i.tans, of the cosmic egg, of the rending and wounding of a personal heaven and a personal earth, of the fis.h.i.+ng up from the waters of a tiny earth which grew greater, of the development of men out of beasts, with a dozen other such notions as are familiar to contemporary Bushmen, Australians, Digger Indians, and Cahrocs. But in Greece and India these ideas coexist with myths and religious beliefs as purely spiritual and metaphysical as the belief in the Pachacamac of Garcila.s.so and the Amautas of Peru.
CHAPTER VII. INDO-ARYAN MYTHS--SOURCES OF EVIDENCE.
Authorities--Vedas--Brahmanas--Social condition of Vedic India--Arts--Ranks--War--Vedic fetis.h.i.+sm--Ancestor wors.h.i.+p--Date of Rig-Veda Hymns doubtful--Obscurity of the Hymns--Difficulty of interpreting the real character of Veda--Not primitive but sacerdotal--The moral purity not innocence but refinement.
Before examining the myths of the Aryans of India, it is necessary to have a clear notion of the nature of the evidence from which we derive our knowledge of the subject. That evidence is found in a large and incongruous ma.s.s of literary doc.u.ments, the heritage of the Indian people. In this ma.s.s are extremely ancient texts (the Rig-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda), expository comments of a date so much later that the original meaning of the older doc.u.ments was sometimes lost (the Brahmanas), and poems and legendary collections of a period later still, a period when the whole character of religious thought had sensibly altered. In this literature there is indeed a certain continuity; the names of several G.o.ds of the earliest time are preserved in the legends of the latest. But the influences of many centuries of change, of contending philosophies, of periods of national growth and advance, and of national decadence and decay, have been at work on the mythology of India. Here we have myths that were perhaps originally popular tales, and are probably old; here again, we have later legends that certainly were conceived in the narrow minds of a pedantic and ceremonious priesthood. It is not possible, of course, to a.n.a.lyse in this place all the myths of all the periods; we must be content to point out some which seem to be typical examples of the working of the human intellect in its earlier or its later childhood, in its distant hours of barbaric beginnings, or in the senility of its sacerdotage.
The doc.u.ments which contain Indian mythology may be divided, broadly speaking, into four cla.s.ses. First, and most ancient in date of composition, are the collections of hymns known as the Vedas. Next, and (as far as date of collection goes) far less ancient, are the expository texts called the Brahmanas. Later still, come other manuals of devotion and of sacred learning, called Sutras and Upanishads; and last are the epic poems (Itihasas), and the books of legends called Puranas. We are chiefly concerned here with the Vedas and Brahmanas. A gulf of time, a period of social and literary change, separates the Brahmanas from the Vedas. But the epics and Puranas differ perhaps even still more from the Brahmanas, on account of vast religious changes which brought new G.o.ds into the Indian Olympus, or elevated to the highest place old G.o.ds formerly of low degree. From the composition of the first Vedic hymn to the compilation of the latest Purana, religious and mythopoeic fancy was never at rest.
Various motives induced various poets to a.s.sign, on various occasions the highest powers to this or the other G.o.d. The most antique legends were probably omitted or softened by some early Vedic bard (Ris.h.i.+) of n.o.ble genius, or again impure myths were brought from the obscurity of oral circulation and foisted into literature by some poet less divinely inspired. Old deities were half-forgotten, and forgotten deities were resuscitated. Sages shook off superst.i.tious bonds, priests forged new fetters on ancient patterns for themselves and their flocks. Philosophy explained away the more degrading myths; myths as degrading were suggested to dark and servile hearts by unscientific etymologies. Over the whole ma.s.s of ancient mythology the new mythology of a debased Brahmanic ritualism grew like some luxurious and baneful parasite. It is enough for our purpose if we can show that even in the purest and most antique mythology of India the element of traditional savagery survived and played its part, and that the irrational legends of the Vedas and Brahmanas can often be explained as relics of savage philosophy or faith, or as novelties planned on the ancient savage model, whether borrowed or native to the race.
The oldest doc.u.ments of Indian mythology are the Vedas, usually reckoned as four in number. The oldest, again, of the four, is the Sanhita (”collection”) of the Rig-Veda. It is a purely lyrical a.s.sortment of the songs ”which the Hindus brought with them from their ancient homes on the banks of the Indus”. In the ma.n.u.scripts, the hymns are cla.s.sified according to the families of poets to whom they are ascribed. Though composed on the banks of the Indus by sacred bards, the hymns were compiled and arranged in India proper. At what date the oldest hymns of which this collection is made up were first chanted it is impossible to say with even approximate certainty. Opinions differ, or have differed, between 2400 B.C. and 1400 B.C. as the period when the earliest sacred lyrics of the Veda may first have been listened by G.o.ds and men. In addition to the Rig-Veda we have the Sanhita of the Sama-Veda, ”an anthology taken from the Rik-Samhita, comprising those of its verses which were intended to be chanted at the ceremonies of the soma sacrifice”.(1) It is conjectured that the hymns of the Sama-Veda were borrowed from the Rig-Veda before the latter had been edited and stereotyped into its present form. Next comes the Yajur-Veda, ”which contains the formulas for the entire sacrificial ceremonial, and indeed forms its proper foundations,” the other Vedas being devoted to the soma sacrifice.(2) The Yajur-Veda has two divisions, known as the Black and the White Yajur, which have common matter, but differ in arrangement.
The Black Yajur-Veda is also called the Taittirya, and it is described as ”a motley undigested jumble of different pieces”.(3) Last comes Atharva-Veda, not always regarded as a Veda properly speaking. It derives its name from an old semi-mythical priestly family, the Atharvans, and is full of magical formulae, imprecations, folk-lore and spells. There are good reasons for thinking this late as a collection, however early may be the magical ideas expressed in its contents.(4)
(1) Weber, History of Indian Literature, Eng. transl., p. 63.
(2) Ibid., p. 86.
(3) Ibid, p. 87. The name Taittirya is derived from a partridge, or from a Ris.h.i.+ named Partridge in Sanskrit. There is a story that the pupils of a sage were turned into partridges, to pick up sacred texts.
(4) Barth (Les Religions de l'Inde, p. 6) thinks that the existence of such a collection as the Atharva-Veda is implied, perhaps, in a text of the Rig-Veda, x. 90, 9.
Between the Vedas, or, at all events, between the oldest of the Vedas, and the compilation of the Brahmanas, these ”canonised explanations of a canonised text,”(1) it is probable that some centuries and many social changes intervened.(2)
(1) Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic studies, First Series, p. 4.
(2) Max Muller, Biographical Essays, p. 20. ”The prose portions presuppose the hymns, and, to judge from the utter inability of the authors of the Brahmanas to understand the antiquated language of the hymns, these Brahmanas must be ascribed to a much later period than that which gave birth to the hymns.”