II. PROMETHEUS AND HERCULES OR HERAKLES.
I have elsewhere ([p. 202]) alluded to the confusion of Prometheus, as the creator of man, with Prometheus, the first man created. But the most curious instance of reduplication is the further confusion of what I may call the human Prometheus, with his deliverer Hercules,—Hercules and Prometheus both in different ways embodying traditions of Adam! Prometheus is the Adam[144] of Paradise and the Fall, Hercules is Adam the outcast from Paradise, with his skin and club sent forth on his long labours and marches through the world. But how can Hercules, who frees Prometheus from the rock, be the same as Prometheus who is bound to the rock? If, however, we are entitled to hope that Adam in the labour of his long exile worked off the sentence and expiated the guilt on account of which Adam, the culprit, was sentenced, may we not accept this as an adequate explanation? Is it a forced figure that he should be said to unbind him from the rock, to drive off the vulture which preys upon him, and thus finally liberate him?
This disjunction of Adam and separate personification in the two periods of his life, before and after the Fall, will accord well enough with the addition in some legends of a brother Epimetheus, and I submit that this explanation is as good as that (vide Smith’s “Myth. Dict.”) which regards the legend as purely allegorical, and Prometheus and Epimetheus as signifying “forethought;” and “afterthought.”
The travels of Hercules, it must be confessed, as traditionally recorded, are somewhat eccentric. But are they explicable on any solar theory? He begins by travelling from west to east; he then proceeds south, and although he traverses Africa westward, he diverges abruptly to the north, from which he proceeds south, and ends as he began by travelling from west to east. All this, however, is perfectly explicable if we are prepared to admit Bryant’s (“Mythology,” ii. 70) historical surmises, and to go along with him so far as to believe that the tradition was mainly preserved through Cuthite or Chusite channels. We can, then, see a probability in the conjecture that the descendants of Chus, in preserving the tradition of the travels of Hercules (Herakles), superadded or substituted the scenes and incidents of their own wanderings, after they had settled down in the place of their final location.
CHAPTER IX
ASSYRIAN MYTHOLOGY.
“But surely there is nothing improbable in the supposition, that in the poems of Homer such vestiges may be found. Every recorded form of society bears some traces of those by which it has been preceded, and in that highly primitive form, which Homer has been the instrument of embalming for all posterity, the law of general reason obliges us to search for elements and vestiges more primitive still.... The general proposition that we may expect to find the relics of scriptural traditions in the heroic age of Greece, though it leads, if proved, to important practical results, is independent even of a belief in those traditions, as they stand in the scheme of revealed truth. They must be admitted to have been facts on earth, even by those who would deny them to have been facts of heavenly origin, in the shape in which Christendom receives them; and the question immediately before us is one of pure historical probability. The descent of mankind from a single pair, the lapse of that pair from original righteousness, are apart from and ulterior to it. We have traced the Greek nation to a source, and along a path of migration which must in all likelihood have placed its ancestry, at some point or points, in close local relations with the scenes of the earliest Mosaic records: the retentiveness of that people equalled its receptiveness, and its close and fond association with the past, made it prone indeed to incorporate novel matter into its religion, but prone also to keep it there after its incorporation.
“If such traditions existed, and if the laws which guide historical inquiry require or lead us to suppose that the forefathers of the Greeks must have lived within their circle, then the burden of proof must lie not so properly with those who assert that the traces of them are to be found in the earliest, that is, the Homeric form of the Greek mythology, as with those who deny it. What became of those old traditions? They must have decayed and disappeared, not by a sudden process, but by a gradual accumulation of the corrupt accretions, in which at length they were so completely interred as to be invisible and inaccessible. Some period, therefore, there must have been at which they would remain clearly perceptible, though in conjunction with much corrupt matter. Such a period might be made the subject of record, and if such there were, we might naturally expect to find it in the oldest known work of the ancient literature.
“If the poems of Homer do, however, contain a picture, even though a defaced picture, of the primeval religious traditions, it is obvious that they afford a most valuable collateral support to the credit of the Holy Scripture, considered as a document of history. Still we must not allow the desire of gaining this advantage to bias the mind in an inquiry, which can only be of value if it is conducted according to the strictest rules of rational criticism.”—Gladstone on Tradition in “Homer and the Homeric Age,” vol. ii. sect. i.
Having laid, as I think, in what has been premised in the last chapter, grounds for a presumption that primitive traditions may be shrouded in the ancient mythology, I proceed to seek traditions of the patriarch Noah among the inscriptions and monuments of the Chaldæans; for then we shall find ourselves in a period when the results of modern archæological science are in contact with the events and incidents of primitive patriarchal life recorded in Scripture; and, in seeking them where we shall best find them, in the able and discriminating pages of Rawlinson, we shall at least feel that we are treading on safe and solid ground.