Out of Zeus all things have been made.”
If we are agreed upon this, then I have no contention with Mr Max Müller; but with Max Müller as an auxiliary, I direct my argument to the attack of Dr Dollinger’s position (“The Gentile and the Jew,” I. B. ii. p. 64)—“The beginnings of Greek polytheism,” viz., “the deification of Nature and her powers, or of particular sensible objects, lay at the root of all the heathen religions, as they existed from old time, amongst the nations now united under the Roman empire.”
According to Mr Lewes (“Hist. of Phil.,” i. 44), it was Xenophanes who first confused the sky with the Deity—“Overarching him was the deep blue infinite vault, immovable and unchangeable, embracing him and all things—that he proclaimed to be God.” (Contrast the Peruvian tradition, infra, [p. 304.]) St Clement of Alexandria (Strom. v. p. 601, Max Müller, chapter i. p. 366.) says, on the contrary, that Xenophanes maintained that there was but “one God, and that he was not like unto men, either in body or mind.”
[138] Granting the tendency to nature-worship, I conclude that the conspicuous luminaries of the heavens would become primary objects of such worship. In amusing illustration of this I remember a friend of mine telling me that he happened to ask a young lad, the son of one of his tenants, who had just returned from a voyage to the Northern seas, how he liked his captain? He said, “Oh, he was an awful man—he swore by the sun, moon, and stars.” Still less do I deny the tendency to sun-worship. It was, as Gibbon tells us (ii. 438, iii. 150), the last superstition Constantine abandoned before his conversion, and the first to which Julian betook himself after his apostacy.
It may, moreover, be urged, that the sun figures in all these legends. I say, on the other hand, so also does the serpent. This serpent may be the serpent “of darkness,” and still be the serpent of tradition, but how darkness or night is aptly personified by a serpent I am at a loss to perceive. Then again the sun may always be only the symbol of what is bright and heavenly. But when (Max Müller, ii. 171) we see this serpent Zohak, called by the Persians “by the name of Dehak, i.e., ten evils, because he introduced “ten evils into the world,” we cannot help recalling the profane expressions attributed to the devil when he saw the ten commandments—proscribing the ten evils in question.
[139] Mr Max Müller may perhaps lay stress upon the circumstance that Baldr dies at the winter solstice. But this equally bears out the tradition noticed by Lenormant, that immediately after the Fall, there came upon the world a great cold. (Vide supra, [ch. vii.])
[140] From the “Elder Edda.” (Quoted from Dr Dasent’s “Norsemen in Iceland.” Oxford Essays, 1858.)
[141] What is still more remarkable, the same tradition is found in the “Popol Vul;” (Mexican traditions), and as it is there given, fits in still more exactly with the solution I have suggested. It is there said that the first race of men were created “out the earth,” the third out “of a tree called Tzité.”[B] If the “Popol Vul;” came under Christian or European influences in the 17th century, it would have been more likely to have been brought into harmony with the Bible, rather than with either Homer, Hesiod, or the Edda. Let us pursue the myth a little further. Mr W. K. Kelly, “Indo-Europ. Tradition and Folklore;” (vide Max Müller, ii. 197) says, “This healing virtue, which the mistletoe shares with the ash, is a long descended tradition, for the Kushtha ... a healing plant, was one that grew beneath the heavenly Asvattha,” which is elsewhere called “the imperishable Asvattha or Peepul (Ficus religiosus), out of which the immortals shaped the heaven and the earth,” which legend Mr Kelly further traces in the German Yggdrasil (although Mr Max Müller from his own point of view dissents); at the foot of which tree (p. 207) “lies the serpent Nidhöggr, and gnaws its roots.” Neither Mr Max Müller nor Mr Kelly discuss the point with reference to the view suggested above.
[B] Tiki was the great progenitor among New Zealanders.—Shortland, p. 56.
[142] Gen. i. 1, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth. 2. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. 5. And He called the light day and the darkness night; and there was evening and morning one day.”