§ IV.
THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH.
The cogency of the evidence concerning the development of belief in Satan out of light-and-darkness myths is generally admitted, but it is of a kind that must not be pushed too far. For the phases of Nature are manifold; manifold also is the life of man; and we must not lend a too willing ear to theories which refer the crude explanations of an unscientific age, when the whole universe is Wonderland, to one source. Cave hominem unius libri, says the adage, and we may apply it, not only to the man of one book, but also to the man of one idea, in whom the sense of proportion is lacking, and who sees only that for which he looks. Here such caution is introduced as needful of exercise against the comparative mythologists who, not content with showing—as abundant evidence warrants—that myth has its germs in the investment of the powers of nature with personal life and consciousness, contend that the great epics of our own and kindred races are, from their broadest features to minutest detail, but nature-myths obscured and transformed.
Certain scholars, notably Professor Max Müller, Sir G. W. Cox, and Professor de Gubernatis, as interpreters of the myths of the Indo-European peoples, and Dr. Goldziher, as an interpreter of Hebrew myth and cognate forms, maintain that the names given in the mythopœic age to the sun, the moon, and the changing scenery of the heaven as the fleeting forms and myriad shades passed over its face, lost their original signification wholly or partially, and came to be regarded as the names of veritable deities and men, whose actions and adventures are the disguised descriptions of the sweep of the thunder-charged clouds and of the victory of the hero-god over their light-engulfing forces. But it is better to state the theory in the words of its exponents, and for that purpose a couple of extracts from Sir George Cox’s Mythology of the Aryan Nations will suffice.
In the spontaneous utterances of thoughts awakened by outward phenomena, we have the source of myths which must be regarded as primary. But it is obvious that such myths would be produced only so long as the words employed were used in their original meaning. If once the meaning of the word were either in part or wholly forgotten, the creation of a new personality under this name would become inevitable, and the change would be rendered both more certain and more rapid by the very wealth of words which were lavished on the sights and objects which most impressed their imagination. A thousand phrases would be used to describe the action of a beneficent or consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious wind; and every word or phrase become the germ of a new story as soon as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name. Thus, in the polyonymy (by which term Sir George Cox means the giving of several names to one object), which was the result of the earliest form of human thought, we have the germ of the great epics of later times, and of the countless legends which make up the rich stores of mythical tradition ... and the legends so framed constitute the class of secondary myths (p. 42).
Henceforth the words which had denoted the sun and moon would denote not merely living things but living persons.... Every word would become an attribute, and all ideas, once grouped round a single object, would branch off into distinct personifications. The sun had been the lord of light, the driver of the chariot of the day; he had toiled and laboured for the sons of men, and sunk down to rest, after a hard battle, in the evening. But now the lord of light would be Phoibos Apollôn, while Helios would remain enthroned in his fiery chariot, and his toils and labours and death-struggles would be transferred to Heraklês. The violet clouds which greet his rising and his setting would now be represented by herds of cows which feed in earthly pastures. There would be other expressions which would still remain as floating phrases, not attached to any definite deities. These would gradually be converted into incidents in the life of heroes, and be woven at length into systematic variations. Finally, these gods and heroes, and the incidents of their mythical career, would receive each “a local habitation and a name.” These would remain as genuine history when the origin and meaning of the words had been either wholly or in part forgotten (p. 51).
Such is the “solar myth” theory. “We can hardly,” as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, “now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth,” and if occasion has not been given to the adversary to blaspheme, he has been supplied with ample material for banter and ridicule. Some of the happiest illustrations of this are made by Mr. Foster in his amusing and really informing essay on “Nature Myths in Nursery Rhymes,” reprinted in Leisure Readings,[32] an essay which it seems the immaculate critics took au sérieux! With a little exercise of one’s invention, given also ability to parody, it will be found that many noted events, as well as the lives of the chief actors in them, yield results comforting to the solar mythologists. Not only the Volsungs and the Iliad, but the story of the Crusades and of the conquest of Mexico; not only Arthur and Baldr, but Cæsar and Bonaparte, may be readily resolved, as Professor Tyndall says we all shall be, “like streaks of morning cloud, into the infinite azure of the past.” Dupuis, in his researches into the connection between astronomy and mythology, had suggested that Jesus was the sun, and the twelve apostles the zodiacal signs; and Goldziher, analysing the records of a remote period, maintains the same concerning Jacob and his twelve sons. M. Senart has satisfied himself that Gotama, the Buddha, is a sun-myth. Archbishop Whately, to confound the sceptics, ingeniously disproved the existence of Bonaparte; and a French ecclesiastic has, by witty etymological analogies, shown that Napoleon is cognate with Apollo, the sun, and his mother Letitia identical with Leto, the mother of Apollo; that his personnel of twelve marshals were the signs of the zodiac; that his retreat from Moscow was a fiery setting, and that his emergence from Elba, to rule for twelve months, and then be banished to St. Helena, is the sun rising out of the eastern waters to set in the western ocean after twelve hours’ reign in the sky. But upon this solar theory let us cite what Dr. Tylor, whose soberness of judgment renders him a valuable guide along the zigzag path of human progress, says: “The close and deep analogies between the life of nature and the life of man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who, in simile or in argument, have told of light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no one-sided interpretation can be permitted to absorb into a single theory such endless many-sided correspondences as these. Rash inferences which, on the strength of mere resemblance, derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature, must be regarded with utter mistrust, for the student who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn, will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them.”
The investigations of comparative mythologists, more particularly in this country and Germany, have thrown such valuable light on the history of ideas, that it will be instructive to learn what excited the inquiry. The researches of Niebuhr and his school into the credibility of early history made manifest that the only authority on which the chroniclers relied was tradition. To them—children of an uncritical age—that tradition was venerable with the lapse of time, and binding as a revelation from the gods. To us the charm and interest of it lie in detecting within it the ancient deposit of a mythopœic period, and in deciphering from it what manner of men they must have been among whom such explanation of the beginnings had credence. And in such an inquiry nothing can be “common or unclean,” nothing too trivial or puerile for analysis; for where the most grotesque and impossible are found, there we are nearer to the conditions of which we would know more.
The serious endeavour to get at the fact underlying the fabulous was extended to the great body of mythology which had not been incorporated into history, and the interpretations of which satisfied only those who suggested them. As hinted already, the Greeks had sought out the meaning of their myths, with here and there a glimpse of the truth gained; but this was confined to the philosophers and poets. Euhêmeros degraded them into dull chronicle, making Heraklês a thief who carried off a crop of oranges; Jove a king crushing rebellion; Atlas an astronomer; Pythôn a freebooter; Æolus a weather-wise seaman, and so on. Plutarch tried to “restore” them, but only defaced them, and after centuries of neglect they were discovered by Lord Bacon to be allegories with a moral. Then Banier and Lemprière emptied out of them what little life Euhêmeros had left, and the believers in Hebrew as the original speech of mankind saw in them the fragments of a universal primitive revelation! Even Professor Max Müller is so upset by the many loathsome and revolting stories in a mythology current in the land of Lykurgos and Solon, such as the marriage of his mother Jocasta by Œdipus, and the swallowing of his own children by Cronus, that he inquires (as if he half believed it possible) whether there was not “a period of temporary insanity through which the human mind had to pass,” and a degradation from lovely metaphor to coarse fact which only a “disease of language,” or the confusion arising from the forgotten meanings of words, explains. There is no need, however, for assumptions of this or of any other kind. This is best shown by a summary of facts which led, more or less directly, to the formulation of the solar theory.
Some fifty years ago a good many idle speculations, products of a reverent and uncurbed fancy concerning Hebrew as the primitive speech of mankind, were laid to rest when the sober guess of Schlegel as to the connection of the leading languages of Europe and those of India and Persia, was converted into certainty by Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Schleicher, and later scholars.
By the application of the comparative method to philology, i.e. the interpretation of any set of facts by comparison with corresponding facts, due allowance being made for differences which Grimm’s law (see infra) explains, the relation of Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Keltic to one another and to Indian and Persian, and their consequent descent from a common parent language, was proved. To this group the term Aryan (from a Sanskrit word cognate with the root ar, our English word ear, to plough), is given, a term which ancient records show was applied by the Asiatic Aryans to themselves as the lords of the soil, the dominant race. The names Indo-Germanic, and, more appropriately as roughly defining the peoples included thereunder, Indo-European, have been suggested in its stead, but Aryan, as the more convenient term, has come into general use.
The survival of grammatical forms common to the Aryan ancestors, and the likeness between words necessary for daily use, evidenced to one parent primitive speech, and, passing from words to the ideas and things which they connoted, philologists were able to infer what manner of men these Aryans were, and under what conditions they dwelt. In the enthusiasm excited by so brilliant a discovery the soberest scholars were apt to over-colour their accurately-outlined picture of old Aryan life; to read modern meanings into the ancient words. But, making good allowance for this, the sketch which was presented in Max Müller’s famous paper on Comparative Mythology[33] remains a credit to scholarship in its vivid generalisations from immaterial data.
Professor Max Müller, in agreement with Pictet and others, placed the original settlement of the Aryans as probably in the region between the Hindu Kush Mountains and the Caspian Sea. But the opinion of later scholars of cooler judgment leans to Europe rather than to Asia as the primitive home of the Aryan tribes. The scanty hints which survive point to a larger acquaintance with European flora and fauna than with Asiatic; to a southward course, whilst silent about westward migration; the movement of races inclines from less genial to more genial zones; the traditions of certain branches, as the Greeks, tell of them as autochthones, or born on the soil where they are found; and the judgment of experts is decisive as to the greater nearness of the European languages to the original speech as contrasted with Sanskrit and Iranian. These are the principal reasons adduced in support of the theory of a European origin. Benfey places the old Aryan home in the neighbourhood of the Black Sea, Schrader and Geiger in Middle Germany, Karl Penka in Scandinavia. But in speculating on the exact habitation of congeries of tribes requiring vast tracts of country for support, no rigid boundaries can be fixed, and there is room for the play of both theories, the more so as theories they must remain.[34]
At the back of this unsettled question lies the interesting subject of the civilisation of pre-Aryan races on the European-Asiatic Continent. In the Newer Stone Age this continent was inhabited by races of short stature, with long and narrow skulls, and probably dark complexions, races whom the Aryans, a tall, round-skulled, fair-complexioned race, conquered, and with whom they so largely intermingled that the varieties of fair and dark people in Europe at this day, speaking an Aryan language, are past finding out. Indeed, there are probably no unmixed races throughout Europe and Asia; the conquering race imposed its language on the conquered, and thus is explained the community of speech without community of race which must be recognised in the composite European peoples.
With this qualification the kinship of the Aryan-language-speaking peoples is demonstrated, and the like kind of evidence by which this is proved has been applied to establish the identity of their mythologies, legends, and folk-tales. The meaning of the proper names of these once determined, the key to the meaning of the myth or tale was clear; because, it is contended, the names contain the germs or oldest surviving part. This is to make the last first; but the result, as already shown in the Aryan light-and-darkness myths, has been to bring out a few striking correspondences in Greek and Vedic names, although by no means so intimate and frequent as the solar mythologists assume. The uniform behaviour of the untutored mind before like phenomena to which barbaric myth witnesses prepares us for general correspondences, but not in such details as we find in the Aryan group. On what theory these, notably in the case of the folk-tales, are to be accounted for, it is not easy to say, for the mode of their diffusion from India to Iceland is obscure. But the fact abides that nursery stories told in Norway and Tyrol, in Scotland and the Deccan, are identical. After allowing for local colouring and for changes incident to the lapse of time, they are the variants of stories presumably related in the Aryan fatherland at a period historically remote, and, moreover, are told in words which are phonetically akin. Their resemblances in minor incident and detail are not easily explained by theories of borrowing, for apparently no trace of intercourse between the Asiatic Aryans and the Aryans of extreme Western Europe occurs until after the domiciling of the stories where we find them. Nor did they with such close resemblances as appear between the German Faithful John and the Hindu Rama and Luxman; between our own Cinderella, the German Aschenpüttel and the Hindu Sodewa Bai, spring native from their respective soils.[35] And there is just that unlikeness in certain details which might be expected from the different positions and products of the several Aryan lands. They explain, for example, the absence from Scandinavian folk-tale of creatures like the elephant, the giant, ape, and turtle, which figure in the Brahmanic.
When we turn to the great Aryan epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Volsungs; the Nibelungs; King Arthur and his Round Table; the Ramâyanâ and the Mahâ Bhâratâ; the Shah Nameh, and so forth, we find similarities of incident and episode which point to a common derivation from old Aryan myth. That common synonyms occur in cognate languages is to be expected, but so far as the names and the characteristics of the heroes and heroines are concerned, the phonetic identity is proven in a far less number of cases than the solar mythologists, working on their too exclusive method, argue. The key which for them unlocks the meaning of every Aryan myth is Sanskrit. In tracing the history of the Indo-European family of speech, it served as the starting-point, because it has more than any other member preserved the roots and suffixes, if not in their oldest, still in their most accessible form. And in tracing the course of Indo-European mythology, it is in the Vedic texts, chiefly the most ancient, the Rig-Veda, that we find the materials for comparative study, since in these venerable hymns of a Bible older than our own are preserved the earliest recorded forms of that mythology. That is to say, we have not in any European branch of Aryan speech any documentary relic of the age of the Rig-Veda, otherwise we might find ourselves in possession of more ancient relics of that speech. So that although the value of Sanskrit as the guide without which knowledge of the Aryan mother-tongue would have remained vague, indeed have been beyond reach, cannot be over-estimated, we must not accept as of universal worth what is local and special in it.[36]
The phonetic kinship and actual identity which comparative philologists have sought to establish between the proper names of gods and heroes of the Greek and Vedic mythologies (for the inquiry has been chiefly restricted to these two), is based on the collection of rules by which we can at once tell what sounds in one language correspond to those of its kindred tongues, called, after its discoverer, “Grimm’s Law.” This law gave the quietus to theories of common origin and variation of words based on specious resemblances (theories satirised by Dean Swift in his derivation of ostler from oatstealer), and introduced a scientific method into etymological study.
The varying pronunciation of certain words among the Aryan-speaking peoples which were common to them was discovered by Grimm to be constant; for example, a Greek th answers to an English d, and, vice versâ, a German s or z to an English t, and so forth, so that by comparing these altered forms the common form from which they spring is reached.
At what fluent period in the history of the Aryan languages these changes of one sound into another were induced is unknown, nor are their precise causes easy of ascertainment, being referable to physical influences, climatal and local, which in the course of time brought about changes in the organs of speech, such, for example, as make our th so difficult of pronunciation to a German, in whose language d takes its place, as drei for three, durstig for thirsty, dein for thine, etc. We may note tendencies to variation in children of the same household, their prattle often affording striking illustration of Grimm’s law, and it is easy to see that among semi-civilised and isolated tribes, where no check upon the variations is imposed, they would tend to become fixed and give rise to new dialects.
Tracing the operation of that law in the changes in proper names in Greek and Vedic mythology, their correlation is proved in a few important instances. The Greek Zeus, the Latin Deus (whence French Dieu and our deity, and also deuce), the Lithuanian Diewas, and the Sanskrit Dyaus all come from an old Aryan root, div or dyu, meaning “to shine.” The Sanskrit dyu, as a noun means “sky” or “day,” and in the Veda Dyaus is the bright sky or heaven. Varuna, the noblest figure in the Vedic religion, the “enveloper” or all-surrounding heaven, is cognate with the Greek Ouranos or Uranus, the common root being var, “to veil” or “cover.” Agni, the fire-god, to whom the larger number of hymns occur in the Veda, is related to the Latin ignis, fire, and so forth.
The heavens and the earth and all that in them is are the raw material on which man works, and the comparative philologists have established exactly what might have been predicated, the nature-origin of the Greek, Vedic, and other Aryan myths. They might well have rested content with this confirmation which their method gives to results arrived at by other methods, and not weakened or discredited it by applying it all round to every leading name in Aryan myth. For this has only revealed the fundamental differences among themselves as to the etymologies and meanings of such names. But not satisfied with the demonstration that the majestic epics have their germs in the phenomena of the natural world, and the course of the day and year, they strain the evidence by contending that “there is absolutely nothing left for further analysis in the stories;” that their “resemblances in detail defy the influences of climate and scenery;”[37] that every incident has its birth in the journey of the sun, the death of the dawn, the theft of the twilight by the powers of darkness, evidence which, in Sir George Cox’s words, “not long hence will probably be regarded as excessive.”
They are nature-myths; but, and in this is the secret of their enduring life, they are much more than that. The impetus that has shaped them as we now know them came from other forces than clouds and storms.
Without such caution as these remarks are designed to supply, any reader of the Mythology of the Aryan Nations would conclude that the philological method had proved the meteorological origin of every epic and folk-tale among the Indo-European peoples. He would learn that, in a way rudely analogous to the supernatural guidance of the Christian Church, the several Aryan tribes had received from the fathers of the race an unvarying canon of interpretation of the primitive myths, a canon seemingly preserved with the jealous veneration with which the Jew regarded the Thorah, and the Brahman the Veda. He would also learn that the details of Norse and classic myth can be traced to the Veda, that these details, not of incident alone, but of thought and expression, survived unimpaired by time and untouched by circumstance, whilst, strange to say, the more prominent names and the leading characters became obscured in their meaning. Strange indeed, and not true. For what are the facts?
Long before the hymns of the Rig-Veda existed as we know them (and they have remained an inviolate sacred text since 600 B.C., when every verse, word, and syllable were counted) the Aryan tribes had swarmed from their parent hive across boundless steppes and over winding mountain passes, some to the westward limits of Europe, others southward into Hindustan. Among the slender intellectual capital of which they stood possessed was the common mythology of their savage ancestors, in which, as we have seen, sun and moon, storm and thunder-cloud, and all other natural phenomena, were credited with personal life and will. But that mythology had certainly advanced beyond the crude primitive form and entered the heroic stage, wherein the powers of nature were half human, half divine. Their language had passed into the inflective or highest stage, and had undergone such changes that the relationship between its several groups and their origin from one mother-tongue was obscured, and remained so until laid bare in our day. In short, the Aryan tribes had attained no mean state of civilisation, some being more advanced than the others, according as external circumstances helped or hindered, and one by one they passed from the condition of semi-civilised nomads to become fathers and founders of nations that abide to this day.
These being the facts to which language itself bears witness, how was it possible for their mythologies, i.e. their stock of notions about things, to remain unaffected and secure of transmission without organic change? The myths, unfixed in literary form, yielded themselves with ease as vehicles of new ideas; their ancient meaning, already faded, paled before the all-absorbing significance of present facts. These were more potent realities than the kisses of the dawn; the human and the personal, in its struggles, of mightier interest than the battle of rosy morn or purple eve with the sons of thunder; and Homer’s music would long since have died away were Achilles’ “baneful wrath” but a passively-told tale of the sun’s grief for the loss of the morning.
In brief, the complex and varying influences which have transformed the primitive myth are the important factors which the solar theorists have omitted in their attempted solution of the problem. They have forgotten the part which, to borrow a term from astronomy, “personal equation” has played. They have not examined myth in the light of the long history of the race; and the new elements which it took into itself, while never wholly ridding itself of the old, have escaped them. They have secured a mechanical unity, whereas, by combination of the historical with their own method, they might have secured a vital unity.
To all which classic myth itself bears record. The Greeks were of Aryan stock, but the time of their settlement is unknown. The period between this and the Homeric age was, however, long enough to admit of their advance to the state of a nation rejoicing in the fulness of intellectual life. They remembered not from what rock they were hewn, from what pit they were digged. The nature-gods of their remote ancestors had long since changed their meteorological character, and appeared in the likeness of men, or, at least, played very human pranks on Olympus. In the Veda the primitive nature-myth, although exalted and purified, is persistent; under one name or another it is still the ceaseless battle between the darkness and the light; Dyaus was still the bright sky, the cattle of Siva were still the clouds. But the Greek of Homer’s time, and his congener in the far north, had forgotten all that; the war in heaven was transferred to the strife of gods and men on the shores of the Hellespont and by the bleak seaboard of the Baltic. Their gods and goddesses, improved by age and experience, put off their physical and put on the ethical; the heaven-father became king of gods and men, source of order, law, and justice; the sun and the dawn, Apollo and Athênê, became wisdom, skill, and guardianship incarnate. And the story of human vicissitudes found in solar myth that “pattern of things in the heavens” which conformed to its design.
Thus Homer, in whose day the old nature-myth had become confused with the vague traditions of veritable deeds of kings and heroes but dimly remembered, touched it as with heavenly fire unquenchable. The siege of Troy, so say the solar mythologists, “is a repetition of the daily siege of the east by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their highest treasures in the west.” It is surely a truer instinct which, recognising the physical framework of the great epics, feels that the vitality which inheres in them is due to whatever of human experience, joy, and sorrow is the burden of their immortal song. As to the repulsive features of Greek myth, one can neither share the distress of the solar theorists nor feel their difficulties. Both are self-created, and are aggravated by suggestions, serious or otherwise, of “periods of temporary insanity through which the human mind had to pass,” as the rude health of childhood is checked by whooping-cough and measles. They are explained by the persistence with which the lower out of which man has emerged asserts itself, as primary rocks pierce through and overlap later strata.
The ancestors of the Aryans were savages in the remote past, and the “old Adam” was never entirely cast out; indeed it is with us still. There are superstitions and credulities in our midst, in drawing-rooms as well as gipsy camps, quite as gross in nature, if less coarse in guise, as those extant among the Greeks. The future historian of our time, as he turns over the piles of our newspapers, will find contrasts of ignorance and culture as startling as any existing in the land of Homer, of Archimedes, and Aristotle. Spirit-rapping and belief in the “evil eye” have their cult among us, although Professor Huxley’s Hume can be bought for two shillings, and knowledge has free course. And it certainly accords best with all that we have learnt as to the mode of human progress to believe that the old lived into the new, than that the old had been cast out, but had gained re-entry, making the last state of the Greeks to be worse than the first.
In this matter the Vedic hymns do not help us much. The conditions under which they took the form that insured their transmission are ipso facto as of yesterday, compared with the period during which man’s endeavour was made to get at that meaning of his surroundings wherein is found the germ of myth throughout the world. They are the products of a relatively highly-civilised time; the conception of sky and dawn as living persons has passed out of its primitive simplicity; these heavenly powers have become complex deities; there is much confounding of persons, the same god called by one or many names. The thought is that of an age when moral problems have presented themselves for solution, and the references to social matters indicate a settled state of things far removed from the fisher and the hunter stage. Nevertheless there lurk within these sacred writings survivals of the lower culture, traces of coarse rites, bloody sacrifices, of repulsive myths of the gods, and of cosmogonies familiar to the student of barbaric myth and legend.
Enough has been said to show that the extreme and one-sided interpretations of the solar mythologists are due to a one-sided method. The philological has yielded splendid results; this the solar theorists have done; the historical yields results equally rich and fertile; this they have left undone. Language has given us the key to the kinship between the several members of the great body of Aryan myths; the study of the historical evolution of myths, the comparison of these, without regard to affinity of speech, will give us the key to the kinship between savage interpretation of phenomena all the world over. The mythology of Greek and Bushman, of Kaffir and Scandinavian, of the Red man and the Hindu, springs from the like mental condition. It is the uniform and necessary product of the human mind in the childhood of the race.