Volume II Part 28 (1/2)
Demeter is accepted as Greek, with the significance of ”Mother Earth”.
But the meaning and the roots of Athene, Apollo, Artemis, Hermes, Cronus, Aphrodite, Dionysus--we might add Poseidon and Hephaestus--are very far from being known. Nor is there much more general agreement as to the original elemental phenomena or elemental province held by all of these G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses. The moon, the wind, the twilight, the sun, the growth and force of vegetation, the dark, the night, the atmosphere, have been shuffled and dealt most variously to the various deities by learned students of myth. This complete diversity of opinion must be accepted as a part in the study.
The learned, as a rule, only agree in believing (1) that the names hold the secret of the original meaning of the G.o.ds; and (2) that the G.o.ds are generally personifications of elements or of phenomena, or have been evolved out of such personifications. Beyond this almost all is confusion, doubt, ”the twilight of the G.o.ds”.
In this darkness there is nothing to surprise. We are not wandering in a magical mist poured around us by the G.o.ds, but in a fog which has natural causes. First, there is the untrustworthiness of attempts to a.n.a.lyse proper names. ”With every proper name the etymological operation is by one degree more difficult than with an appellative.... We have to deal with two unknown quant.i.ties,” origin and meaning; whereas in appellatives we know the meaning and have only to hunt for the origin.
And of all proper names mythological names are the most difficult to interpret. Curtius has shown how many paths may be taken in the a.n.a.lysis of the name Achilles. The second part may be of the stem: people, or the stem: stone. Does the first part of the word mean ”water” (cf. aqua), or is it equivalent to: (”bulwark” or ”the people”)? Or is it akin to: ”one who causes pain”? Or is the: ”prothetic”? and is (it) the root, and does it mean ”clear-s.h.i.+ning”? Or is the word related to (------), and does it mean ”dark”?
All these and other explanations are offered by the learned, and are chosen by Curtius to show the uncertainty and difficulty of the etymological process as applied to names in myth. Cornutus remarked long ago that the great antiquity of the name of Athene made its etymology difficult. Difficult it remains.* Whatever the science of language may accomplish in the future, it is baffled for the present by the divine names of Greece, or by most of them, and these the most important.**
* Cf. Curtius, Greek Etym., Engl, transl., i. 137-139.
** Gruppe, Griech. Culte und Mythtis, p. 169, selects Iapetos, Kadmos, Kabeiros, Adonis, Baitylos, Typhon, Nysos (in Dionysos), Acheron, Kimmerians and Gryps, aa certainly Phoenician. But these are not the names of the high G.o.ds.
There is another reason for the obscurity of the topic besides the darkness in which the origin of the names has been wrapped by time. The myths had been very long in circulation before we first meet them in Homer and Hesiod. We know not whence the G.o.ds came. Perhaps some of them were the chief divine conceptions of various h.e.l.lenic clans before the union of clans into states. However this may be, when we first encounter the G.o.ds in Homer and Hesiod, they have been organised into a family, with regular genealogies and relations.h.i.+ps. Functions have been a.s.signed to them, and departments. Was Hermes always the herald? Was Hephaestus always the artisan? Was Athene from the first the well-beloved daughter of Zeus? Was Apollo from the beginning the mediator with men by oracles?
Who can reply? We only know that the divine ministry has been thoroughly organised, and departments a.s.signed, as in a cabinet, before we meet the G.o.ds on Olympus. What they were in the ages before this organisation, we can only conjecture. Some may have been adopted from clans whose chief deity they were. If any one took all the Samoan G.o.ds, he could combine them into a family with due functions and gradations. No one man did this, we may believe, for Greece: though Herodotus thought it was done by Homer and Hesiod. The process went on through centuries we know not of; still less do we know what or where the G.o.ds were before the process began.
Thus the obscurity in which the divine origins are hidden is natural and inevitable. Our attempt has been to examine certain birth-marks which the G.o.ds bear from that hidden antiquity, relics of fur and fin and feather, inherited from ancestral beasts like those which ruled Egyptian, American and Australian religions. We have also remarked the brilliant divinity of beautiful form which the G.o.ds at last attained, in marble, in gold, in ivory and in the fancy of poets and sculptors. Here is the truly h.e.l.lenic element, here is the ideal--Athene arming, Hera with the girdle of Aphrodite, Hermes with his wand, Apollo with the silver bow--to this the h.e.l.lenic intellect attained; this ideal it made more imperishable than bronze. Finally, the lovely shapes of G.o.ds ”defecate to a pure transparency” in the religion of Aristotle and Plutarch. But the G.o.ds remain beautiful in their statues, beautiful in the hymns of Pindar and the plays of Sophocles; hideous, often, in temple myth, and ancient _xoanon_, and secret rite, till they are all, good and evil, cast out by Christianity. The most brilliant civilisation of the world never expelled the old savage from its myth and its ritual.
The lowest savagery scarcely ever, if ever, wholly loses sight of a heavenly Father.
In conclusion, we may deprecate the charge of _exclusivism_. The savage element is something, nay, is much, in Greek myth and ritual, but it is not everything. The truth, grace and beauty of the myths are given by ”the clear spirit” of h.e.l.las. Nor is all that may be deplored necessarily native. We may well believe in borrowing from Phoenicians, who in turn may have borrowed from Babylon. Examples of this process have occasionally been noted. It will be urged by some students that the wild element was adopted from the religion of prehistoric races, whom the Greeks found in possession when first they seized the sh.o.r.es of the country. This may be true in certain cases, but historical evidence is not to be obtained. We lose ourselves in theories of Pelasgians and Pre-Pelasgians, and ”la Grece avant les Grecs”. In any case, the argument that the more puzzling part of Greek myth is a ”survival” would not be affected. Borrowed, or inherited, or imitated, certain of the stories and rites are savage in origin, and the argument insists on no more as to that portion of Greek mythology.
CHAPTER XIX. HEROIC AND ROMANTIC MYTHS.
A new cla.s.s of myths--Not explanatory--Popular tales--Heroic and romantic myths--(1) Savage tales--(2) European Contes-- (3) Heroic myths--Their origin--Diffusion--History of their study--Grimm's theory--Aryan theory--Benfey's theory-- Ancient Egyptian stories examined--Wanderung's theorie-- Conclusion.
The myths which have hitherto been examined possess, for the most part, one common feature. All, or almost all of them, obviously aim at satisfying curiosity about the causes of things, at supplying gaps in human knowledge. The nature-myths account for various aspects of Nature, from the reed by, the river-side that once was a fair maiden pursued by Pan, to the remotest star that was a mistress of Zeus; from the reason why the crow is black, to the reason why the sun is darkened in eclipse.
The divine myths, again, are for the more part essays in the same direction. They try to answer these questions: ”Who made things?” ”How did this world begin?” ”What are the powers, felt to be greater than ourselves, which regulate the order of events and control the destinies of men?” Myths reply to all these questionings, and the answers are always in accordance with that early nebulous condition of thought and reason where observation lapses into superst.i.tion, religion into science, science into fancy, knowledge into fable. In the same manner the myths which we do not treat of here--the myths of the origin of death, of man's first possession of fire, and of the nature of his home among the dead--are all tentative contributions to knowledge. All seek to satisfy the eternal human desire to _know_. ”Whence came death?” man asks, and the myths answer him with a story of Pandora, of Maui, of the moon and the hare, or the bat and the tree. ”How came fire to be a servant of ours?” The myths tell of Prometheus the fire-stealer, or of the fire-stealing wren, or frog, or coyote, or cuttlefish. ”What manner of life shall men live after death? in what manner of home?” The myth answers with tales of Pohjola, of Hades, of Amenti, of all that, in the Australian black fellow's phrase, ”lies beyond the Rummut,” beyond the surf of the Pacific, beyond the ”stream of Ocea.n.u.s,” beyond the horizon of mortality. To these myths, and to the more mysterious legend of the Flood, we may return some other day. For the present, it must suffice to repeat that all these myths (except, perhaps, the traditions of the Deluge) fill up gaps in early human knowledge, and convey information as to matters outside of practical experience.
But there are cla.s.ses of tales, or _marchen_, or myths which, as far as can be discovered, have but little of the explanatory element. Though they have been interpreted as broken-down nature-myths, the variety of the interpretations put upon them proves that, at least, their elemental meaning is dim and uncertain, and makes it very dubious whether they ever had any such significance at all. It is not denied here that some of these myths and tales may have been suggested by elemental and meteorological phenomena. For example, when we find almost everywhere among European peasants, and among Samoyeds and Zulus, as in Greek heroic-myths of the Jason cycle, the story of the children who run away from a cannibal or murderous mother or step-mother, we are reminded of certain nature-myths. The stars are often said* to be the children of the sun, and to flee away at dawn, lest he or their mother, the moon, should devour them. This early observation may have started the story of flight from the cannibal parents, and the legend may have been brought down from heaven to earth. Yet this were, perhaps, a far-fetched hypothesis of the origin of a tale which may readily have been born wherever human beings have a tendency (as in North America and South Africa) to revert to cannibalism.
* Nature-Myths, vol. i p. 130. The story is ”Asterinos und Pulja” in Von Hahn's Griech. und Alban. Marchen. Compare Samojedische Marchen, Castren, Varies, uber die Alt. Volk, p. 164; Callaway, Uzembeni.
The peculiarity, then, of the myths which we propose to call ”Heroic and Romantic Tales” (_marchen contes populaires_), is the absence, as a rule, of any obvious explanatory purpose. They are romances or novels, and if they do explain anything, it is rather the origin or sanction of some human law or custom than the cause of any natural phenomenon that they expound.
The kind of traditional fictions here described as heroic and romantic may be divided into three main categories.
(1) First we have the popular tales of the lower and more backward races, with whom may be reckoned, for our present purpose, the more remote and obscure peoples of America. We find popular tales among the Bushmen, Kaffirs, Zulus, Samoans, Maoris, Hurons, Samoyeds, Eskimos, Crees, Blackfeet and other so-called savage races. We also find tales practically identical in character, and often in plot and incident, among such a people as the Huarochiris, a civilised race brought under the Inca Empire some three generations before the Spanish conquest. The characteristics of these tales are the presence of talking and magically helpful beasts; the human powers and personal existence of even inanimate objects; the miraculous accomplishments of the actors; the introduction of beings of another race, usually hostile; the power of going to and returning from Hades--always described in much the same imaginative manner. The persons are sometimes anonymous, sometimes are named while the name is not celebrated; more frequently the tribal culture-hero, demiurge, or G.o.d is the leading character in these stories. In accordance with the habits of savage fancy, the chief person is often a beast, such as Ananzi, the West African spider; Cagn, the Bushman gra.s.shopper; or Michabo, the Algonkin white-hare. Animals frequently take parts a.s.signed to men and women in European _marchen_.
(2) In the second place, we have the _marchen_, or _contes_, or household tales of the modern European, Asiatic and Indian peasantry, the tales collected by the Grimms, by Afanasief, by Von Hahn, by Miss Frere, by Miss Maive Stokes, by M. Sebillot, by Campbell of Islay, and by so many others. Every reader of these delightful collections knows that the characteristics, the machinery, all that excites wonder, are the same as in the savage heroic tales just described But it is a peculiarity of the popular tales of the peasantry that the _places_ are seldom named; the story is not localised, and the characters are anonymous. Occasionally our Lord and his saints appear, and Satan is pretty frequently present, always to be defeated and disgraced; but, as a rule, the hero is ”a boy,” ”a poor man” ”a fiddler,” ”a soldier,” and so forth, no names being given.
(3) Thirdly, we have in epic poetry and legend the romantic and heroic tales of the great civilised races, or races which have proved capable of civilisation. These are the Indians, the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Scandinavians and Germans. These have won their way into the national literatures and the region of epic. We find them in the _Odyssey_, the _Edda_ the Celtic poems, the _Ramayana_, and they even appear in the _Veda_. They occur in the legends and pedigrees of the royal heroes of Greece and Germany. They attach themselves to the dim beginnings of actual history, and to real personages like Charlemagne. They even invade the legends of the saints. The characters are national heroes, such as Perseus, Jason, aedipus and Olympian G.o.ds, and holy men and women dear to the Church, and primal heroes of the North, Sigurd and Signy.
Their paths and places are not in dim fairyland, but in the fields and on the sh.o.r.es we know--at Roland's Pa.s.s in the Pyrenees, on the enchanted Colchian coast, or among the blameless Ethiopians, or in Thessaly, or in Argos. Now, in all these three cla.s.ses of romance, savage fables, rural marchen, Greek or German epics, the ideas and incidents are a.n.a.logous, and the very conduct of the plot is sometimes recognisably the same. The moral ideas on which many of the marchen, sagas, or epic myths turn are often identical. Everywhere we find doors or vessels which are not to be opened, regulations for the conduct of husband and wife which are not to be broken; everywhere we find helpful beasts, birds and fishes; everywhere we find legends proving that one cannot outwit his fate or evade the destiny prophesied for him.
The chief problems raised by these sagas and stories are--(1) How do they come to resemble each other so closely in all parts of the world?
(2) Were they invented once for all, and transmitted all across the world from some centre? (3) What was that centre, and what was the period and the process of transmission?
Before examining the solutions of those problems, certain considerations may be advanced.
The supernatural _stuff_ of the stories, the threads of the texture, the belief in the life and personality of all things--in talking beasts and trees, in magical powers, in the possibility of visiting the diad--must, on our theory as already set forth, be found wherever men have either pa.s.sed through savagery, and retained-survivals of that intellectual condition, or wherever they have borrowed or imitated such survivals.