Volume II Part 17 (2/2)

There was on the hill the sacred well of the nymph Hagno, one of the nurses of the child Zeus. In time of drought the priest of Zeus offered sacrifice and prayer to the water according to ritual law, and it would be interesting to know what it was that he sacrificed. He then gently stirred the well with a bough from the oak, the holy tree of the G.o.d, and when the water was stirred, a cloud arose like mist, which attracted other clouds and caused rain. As the priest on a mountain practically occupied a meteorological observatory, he probably did not perform these rites till he knew that a ”depression” might be expected from one quarter or another.*

* See similar examples of popular magic in Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperiidia; Liebrecht, ii. 146. The citation is due to Freller, i. 102.

Wonderful feats of rain-prophecy are done by Australian seers, according to Mrs. Langloh Parker and others. As soon as we meet Zeus in Homer, we find that he is looked on, not as the sky, but as the deity who ”dwells in the heights of air,” and who exercises supreme sway over all things, including storm and wind and cloud. He casts the lightning forth (--------) he thunders on high (--------), he has dark clouds for his covering (--------) all these imposing aspects he is _religiously_ regarded by people who approach him in prayer. These aspects would be readily explained by the theory that Zeus, after having been the personal sky, came to be thought a powerful being who dwelt in the sky, if we did not find such beings wors.h.i.+pped where the sky is not yet adored, as in Australia. Much the same occurred if, as M. Maspero points out, in Egypt the animals were wors.h.i.+pped first, and then later the G.o.ds supposed to be present in the animals. So the sky, a personal sky, was first adored, later a G.o.d dwelling in the sky. But it is less easy to show how this important change in opinion took place, if it really occurred. A philological theory of the causes which produced the change is set forth by Mr. Keary in his book _Primitive Belief_. In his opinion the sky was first wors.h.i.+pped as a vast non-personal phenomenon, ”the bright thing”(_Dyaus_). But, to adopt the language of Mr. Max Muller, who appears to hold the same views, ”Dyaus ceased to be an expressive predicate; it became a traditional name”;* it ”lost its radical meaning”. Thus where a man had originally said, ”It thunders,” or rather ”He thunders,” he came to say, ”Dyaus” (that is, the sky) ”thunders”.

* Select Essays, ii. 419.

Next Dyaus, or rather the Greek form Zeus, almost lost its meaning of the sky, and the true sense being partially obscured, became a name supposed to indicate a person. Lastly the expression became ”Zeus thunders,” Zeus being regarded as a person, because the old meaning of his name, ”the sky,” was forgotten, or almost forgotten. The _nomen_ (name) has become a _numen_ (G.o.d). As Mr. Keary puts it, ”The G.o.d stands out as clear and thinkable in virtue of this name as any living friend can be”. The whole doctrine resolves itself into this, a phenomenon originally (according to the theory) considered impersonal, came to be looked on as personal, because a word survived in colloquial expressions after it had lost, or all but lost, its original meaning. As a result, 'all the changes and processes of the impersonal sky came to be spoken of as personal actions performed by a personal being, Zeus. The record of these atmospheric processes on this theory is the legend of Zeus.

Whatever is irrational and abominable in the conduct of the G.o.d is explained as originally a simple statement of meteorological phenomena.

”Zeus weds his mother;” that must mean the rain descends on the earth, from which it previously arose in vapour. ”Zeus weds his daughter,” that is, the rain falls on the crop, which grew up from the rainy embrace of sky and earth.

Here then we have the philological theory of the personality and conduct of Zeus. To ourselves and those who have followed us the system will appear to reverse the known conditions of the working of the human mind among early peoples. On the philological theory, man first regards phenomena in our modern way as impersonal; he then gives them personality as the result of a disease of language, of a forgetfulness of the sense of words. Thus Mr. Keary writes: ”The idea of personality as apart from matter must have been growing more distinct when men could attribute personality to such an abstract phenomenon as the sky ”. Where is the distinctness in a conception which produces such confusion? We have seen that as the idea of personality becomes more distinct the range of its application becomes narrower, not wider. The savage, it has been thought, attributes personality to everything without exception. As the idea of personality grows more distinct it necessarily becomes less extensive, till we withdraw it from all but intelligent human beings.

Thus we must look for some other explanation of the personality of Zeus, supposing his name to mean the sky. This explanation we find in a survival of the savage mental habit of regarding all phenomena, even the most abstract, as persons. Our theory will receive confirmation from the character of the personality of Zeus in his myth. Not only is he a person, but in myth, as distinct from religion, he is a very savage person, with all the powers of the medicine-man and all the pa.s.sions of the barbarian. Why should this be so on the philological theory? When we examine the legend of Zeus, we shall see which explanation best meets the difficulties of the problem. But the reader must again be reminded that the Zeus of myth, in Homer and elsewhere, is a very different being from the Zeus of religion of Achilles's prayer, from the Zeus whom the Athenians implored to rain on their fields, and from the Zeus who was the supreme being of the tragedians, of the philosophers, and of later Greece.

The early career, _la jeunesse orageuse_, of Zeus has been studied already. The child of Cronus and Rhea, countless places a.s.serted their claim to be the scene of his birth, though the Cretan claim was most popular.*

* Hesiod, _Theog_., 468; Paus., iv. 33, 2.

In Crete too was the grave of Zeus: a scandal to pious heathendom. The euhemerists made this tomb a proof that Zeus was a deified man. Preller takes it for an allegory of winter and the death of the G.o.d of storm, who in winter is especially active. Zeus narrowly escaped being swallowed by his father, and, after expelling and mediatising that deity, he changed his own wife, Metis, into a fly, swallowed her, and was delivered out of his own head of Athene, of whom his wife had been pregnant. He now became ruler of the world, with his brother Poseidon for viceroy, so to speak, of the waters, and his brother Hades for lord of the world of the dead. Like the earlier years of Louis XIV., the earlier centuries of the existence of Zeus were given up to a series of amours, by which he, like Charles II., became the father of many n.o.ble families. His legitimate wife was his sister Hera, whom he seduced before wedlock ”without the knowledge of their dear parents,” says Homer,* who neglects the myth that one of the ”dear parents” ate his own progeny, ”like him who makes his generation messes to gorge his appet.i.te”. Hera was a jealous wife, and with good cause.** The Christian fathers calculated that he sowed his wild oats and persecuted mortal women with his affections through seventeen generations of men. His amours with his mother and daughters, with Deo and Persephone, are the great scandals of Clemens Alexandrinus and Arn.o.bius.*** Zeus seldom made love _in propria persona_, in all his meteorological pomp. When he thus gratified Semele she was burned to a cinder.****

* It is probable that this myth of the seduction of Hera is of Samian origin, and was circulated to account for and justify the Samian custom by which men seduced their loves first and celebrated the marriage afterwards (Scholia on _Iliad_, xiv. 201). ”Others say that Samos was the place where Zeus betrayed Hera, whence it comes that the Samians, when they go a-wooing, antic.i.p.ate the wedding first in secret, and then celebrate it openly.” Yet another myth (_Iliad_, xiv. 295, Scholiast) accounts for the hatred which Zeus displayed to Prometheus by the fable that, before her wedding with Zeus, Hera became the mother of Prometheus by the giant Eurymedon. Euphorion was the authority for this tale. Yet another version occurs in the legend of Hephaestus. See also Schol., _Theoc_., xv. 64.

** Iliad, xiv. 307, 340.

*** Arn.o.bius, Adv. Nat., v. 9, where the abominations described defy repet.i.tion. The myth of a rock which became the mother of the offspring of Zeus may recall the maternal flint of Aztec legend and the vagaries of Iroquois tradition. Compare _Clemens Alex_., Oxford, 1719, i. 13, for the amours of Zeus, Deo and Persephone, with their representations in the mysteries; also Arn.o.b., Adv. Cent., v. 20. Zeus adopted the shape of a serpent in his amour with his daughter. An ancient Tarentine sacred ditty is quoted as evidence, _Taurus draconem genuit, et taurum draco_, and certain repulsive performances with serpents in the mysteries are additional testimony.

**** Apollodorus, iii. 4, 3.

The amour with Danae, when Zeus became a shower of gold, might be interpreted as a myth of the yellow suns.h.i.+ne. The amours of Zeus under the disguise of various animal forms were much more usual, and are familiar to all.* As Cronus when in love metamorphosed himself into a stallion, as Praj.a.pati pursued his own daughter in the shape of a roebuck, so Zeus became a serpent, a bull, a swan, an eagle, a dove,**

and, to woo the daughter of Cletor, an ant. Similar disguises are adopted by the sorcerers among the Algonkins for similar purposes. When Pund-jel, in the Australian myth of the Pleiades, was in love with a native girl, he changed himself into one of those grubs in the bark of trees which the Blacks think edible, and succeeded as well as Zeus did when he became an ant.***

* The mythologists, as a rule, like the heathen opponents of Arn.o.bius, Clemens and Eusebius, explain the amours of Zeus as allegories of the fruitful union of heaven and earth, of rain and grain. Preller also allows for the effects of human vanity, n.o.ble families insisting on tracing themselves to G.o.ds. On the whole, says Preller, ”Zeugung in der Natur- religion und Mythologie, da.s.selbe ist was Schopfung inden deistischen Religionen” (i. 110). Doubtless all these elements come into the legend; the unions of Zeus with Deo and Persephone especially have much the air of a nature-myth told in an exceedingly primitive and repulsive manner. The amours in animal shape are explained in the text as in many cases survivals of the totemistic belief in descent from beasts, sans phrase.

**Lian., Hist Vwr., i. 15.

*** Dawson, Australian Aborigines; Custom, and Myth, p. 126.

It is not improbable that the metamorphosis of Zeus into an ant is the result of a _volks-etymologie_ which derived ”Myrmidons” from (------), an ant. Even in that case the conversion of the ant into an avatar of Zeus would be an example of the process of gravitation or attraction, whereby a great mythical name and personality attracts to itself floating fables.* The remark of Clemens on this last extraordinary intrigue is suggestive. The Thessalians, he says, are reputed to wors.h.i.+p ants because Zeus took the semblance of an ant when he made the daughter of Cletor mother of Myrmidon. Where people wors.h.i.+p any animal from whom they claim descent (in this case through Myrmidon, the ancestor of the famed Myrmidons), we have an example of stiraight forward totemism. To account for the adoration of the animal on the hypothesis that it was the incarnation of a G.o.d, is the device which has been observed in Egyptian as in Samoan religion, and in that of aboriginal Indian tribes, whose animal G.o.ds become saints ”when the Brahmans get a turn at them”.**

The most natural way of explaining such tales about the amours and animal metamorphoses of so great a G.o.d, is to suggest that Zeus inherited,*** as it were, legends of a lower character long current among separate families and in different localities. In the same way, where a stone had been wors.h.i.+pped, the stone was, in at least one instance, dubbed with the name of Zeus.****

* Clemens, p. 84.

** See Mr. H. H. Risley on ”Primitive Marriage in Bengal,”

in _Astatic Quarterly Review_, June, 1886.

*** In Pausanias's opinion Cecrops first introduced the belief in Zeus, the most highest.

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