The host with kindness greets his guest no more,
And friends and brethren love not as of yore.”
—Hesiod.
President Goguet (“Origin of Laws,” i. 21,) had noticed the ancient allusions to “kinship through mothers,” and his statement that “women belonged to the man who seized them first.... The children who sprang from this irregular intercourse scarce ever knew who were their fathers. They knew only their mothers, for which reason they always bore their name.” For this statement he also quotes Sanchoniathon, ap. Eus. p. 34, as his principal authority. But Sanchoniathon’s statement, as we have seen, refers to the ante-diluvian period, in which it is borne out by Genesis vi. 4.
There is one fact adduced by Goguet (i. 43), viz. that the Assyrians had an analogous ceremony which must be decisive for us, though not, perhaps, for Mr M’Lennan, that the custom of seizure was ante-diluvian, since the commencement of the Assyrian monarchy in the times immediately following the flood, is one of the best established foundations of history. Vide Genesis and Rawlinson.
“This race of many languaged man.” To any one who rightly grasps the bearing of the argument, the appositeness of this quotation will, I think, be rather strengthened than diminished by the evidence that the lines of Hesiod plainly refer to post-diluvian times (vide [ch. xiii.])
[108] The Phœnician cosmogony seems to me to clinch the argument. There (vide Bunsen, Egypt, iv. 234), “The son of Eliun is called by Philo, Epigeios or autokhthon, ‘the earth-born,’ primeval inhabitant. By the latter of these expressions we have no doubt that Adam-Tadmon (‘the Kadmos of the Greeks,’ p. 195), the first man, the man of God, is implied” (“Eliun, i.e. Helyun, God the Most High,” p. 232).
There is an analogy in their confused tradition of the creation. “Eudemus says, according to the Phœnician mythology, which was invented by Môkhos, the first principle was æther and air; from these two beginnings sprang Ulômos (the eternal), the rational (conscious) God” (Bunsen, iv. 179). Bunsen, (178) adds, “as regards Môkhos the thing is clear enough; the old materialistic philosopher is matter, and that in the sense of primeval slime.” [Whence it has been suggested that we derive our word Muck, Môkh, or Môkhos.] This beginning Bunsen considers (p. 179) “a philosophising amplification of the simply sublime words of Genesis: ‘The earth was without form, and void, and darkness was over the face of the waters.’” Here we see the human reason hampered by the tradition that confused matter or chaos was somehow at the commencement, and with the conflicting tradition and conclusion of the intellect that it was, and must have been, created by a power superior to matter (“In the beginning God created heaven and earth”), emancipating itself, so far as to identify the Creator with the æther and air, as nearer the conception of a pure Spirit, and personifying matter, and so shunting it aside as the “inventor of the mythology.”
[109] Vide De Maistre (ch. xii.)
[110] Max Müller, “Chips,” &c., ii. 274. The Titans were also said to be “earth-born.” Bryant (iii. 445) says Berosus gives the following tradition of the Creation. Belus after deification being confounded with the Creator, as we have seen Prometheus, id. 104—“Belus, the deity above mentioned, cut off his own head, upon which the other gods mixed the blood as it gushed out with the earth, and from thence men were formed. On this account it is that they are rational and partake of divine knowledge. This Belus, whom men called Dis, divided the darkness and separated the heavens from the earth,” &c.