This would seem, unless they ignore all difficulties, a better standpoint for those who think, through the application of the solar legends, “to unlock almost all the secrets of mythologies;;” and any theory connected with the sun and sun-worship has this advantage, that it can be extended to everything under the sun!
It is sufficiently obvious that no system can be held to have settled these questions, which, if there were myths before there was a mythology, does not appropriate these antecedent myths, or exclude counter explanations; and it is equally clear that there can have been no mythology of which the solar legends were the offspring, if the legends embody thoughts which transcend the mythology; and no mythic period if they testify to facts and ideas incompatible with its existence.
Allowing for a certain confusion arising out of “polyonomy,” this sort of confusion, if there were nothing else, ought not to baffle the ingenuity of experts like Mr Max Müller and Mr Cox. Such complications should be as easily disentangled as the superadded figures in Egyptian chronology (vide [chapter vi.]) when the key has been found.
But does Mr Max Müller profess to have brought the various legends into harmony? On the contrary (ii. 142), he frankly admits—“Much, no doubt, remains to be done, and even with the assistance of the Veda, the whole of Greek mythology will never be deciphered and translated.”
I have no wish to push an admission unfairly, but this appears to me fatal as regards the argument with which I am dealing.[135] If there are myths which never will be deciphered, this must be because they have had some non-astral or non-solar origin, which I consider to be almost equivalent to saying that they must have had some pre-astral origin. What that precise origin was I think I have been able sufficiently to indicate in italicising the subjoined sentences from Mr Max Müller. If these enigmas can be shown to be strictly local and Grecian, cadit quæstio; but if they are common to other mythologies, and these the oldest, I must say they have the look of antecedent existence. At any rate, like those inconvenient boulders in the sand and gravel strata, they require the intervention of some glacial period to account for them.[136]
I have already hinted that a further consideration appears to me to incapacitate the theory of nature-worship, in any of its disguises, from being taken as the exclusive, or even the primitive form of idolatry, or of perverted tradition; and it is this,—that all the explanations, even the most ingenious, even those which would be accounted “primitive and organic,” have their counter explanations, traceable in the corruptions of truth and the perversions of hero-worship. Take, for instance, the name Zeus, which is in evidence of the primitive monotheism, and which stood in Greece, as Il or Ra in Assyria, for the true Lord and God, and which has its equivalents in Dyaus (“from the Sanscrit word which means ‘to shine’;”); Dyaus-pater (Zeus-pater), Jupiter; Tiu (Anglo-Saxon, whence Tuesday); and Zia (High German)—vide Cox’s “Mythology.”
What more natural than to associate the Almighty with the heaven where He dwelt? Mr Max Müller (“Comparative Myth.,” “Chips,” ii. 72) says—“Thus Ζευς, being originally a name of the sky, like the Sanscrit Dyaus, became gradually a proper name, which betrayed its appellative meaning only in a few proverbial expressions, such as Ζευς ὕει, or sub Jove frigido.” Taking this passage in connection with what is said (p. 148, of Welcker)—“When we ascend with him to the most distant heights of Greek history, the idea of God as the Supreme Being stands before us as a simple fact. Next to the adoration of one God, the Father of heaven, the Father of men, we find in Greece a worship of nature.” I conclude that Mr Max Müller means, as Mr Cox means, that the names, Zeus or Dyaus, was applied to the one true God, whose existence was otherwise and previously known to them.[137] At starting, therefore, we find that the language borrowed from nature was only called in to give a colouring and expression to a previously known and familiar truth; and here, too, we also see the commencement of incongruity. The simple idea of the heavens might have been harmoniously extended by the imagination; but, complicated with the idea of personality, it gave birth to the awkward and incongruous expression, “Ζεύς ὕει, or sub Jove frigido,” a phrase which never could have been originated by the Grecian mind, unless the personality of Jove had been the idea most prominently before the mind. But if the knowledge of the Deity, or even the conception of the personality of Zeus was operative in the mythic period, it must have been operative to the extent of embodying what was known or recollected of his dealings in love and anger with mankind, in the legends which they wove, and also of blending them with the confusions which “polyonomy;” occasioned. The introduction of this element would seriously embarass Mr Cox, and would give to Mr Gladstone’s explanation an “à priori;” probability.
Take, again, the following passage from Mr Max Müller (p. 107)—“The idea of a young hero, whether he is called Baldr, or Sigurd, or Sigrit, or Achilles, or Meleager, or Kephalos, dying in the fulness of youth—a story so frequently told, localised, and individualised—was first suggested by the sun dying in all his youthful vigour, either at the end of a day, conquered by the powers of darkness, or at the end of the sunny season, stung by the thorn of winter.”
Here is a myth evidently very widely diffused. Let it be interpreted by what is told us at p. 108—
“Baldr, in the Scandinavian Edda, the divine prototype of Sigurd and Sigrit, is beloved by the whole world. Gods and men, the whole of nature, all that grows and lives, had sworn to his mother not to hurt the bright hero. The mistletoe alone, that does not grow on the earth, but on trees, had been forgotten, and with it Baldr was killed at the winter solstice....