The discovery of a closer relationship than had been formerly suspected between the mythologies of various nations is a very important one, as it enables us to trace the growth of the stories told of gods and heroes, from the mature form in which we first become acquainted with them in the religious systems of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians, to the primitive shape in which the same creeds were held by the more metaphysical and less imaginative Eastern peoples among whom they originally sprang up. In some respects this task of tracing back the poetical myths of Greek and Northern poets to the simpler, if grander, beliefs of the ancient Egyptians or Chaldæans or Hindus is not unlike our search in a perfected language for its earliest roots. We lose shapeliness and beauty as we come back, but we find the form that explains the birth of the thought, and lets us see how it grew in the minds of men. One chief result arrived at by this comparison of creeds, and by unravelling the meaning of the names of ancient gods and heroes, is the discovery that a worship of different aspects and forces of nature lies at the bottom of nearly all mythologies, and that the cause of the resemblance between the stories told of the gods and heroes (a resemblance which strikes us as soon as we read two or three of them together) is that they are in reality only slightly different ways of describing natural appearances according to the effect produced on different minds, or to the variations of climate and season of the year. Having once got the key of the enigma in our hands, we soon become expert in hunting the parable through all the protean shapes in which it is presented to us. The heroes of the old stories we have long loved begin to lose their individuality and character for us. And instead of thinking of Apollo, and Osiris, and Theseus, and Herakles, and Thor as separate idealizations of heroic or godlike character; of Ariadne, and Idun, and Isis as heroines of pathetic histories, our thoughts as we read are busied in tracing all that is said about them to the aspects of the sun in his march across the heavens, through the vicissitudes of a bright and thundery eastern, or a gusty northern, day, and the tenderly glowing and fading colours of the western sky into which he sinks when his course is run.
Our first feeling on receiving this simple explanation of the old stories of mythology is rather one of disappointment than of satisfaction; we feel that we are losing a great deal—not the interest of the stories only, but all those glimpses of deep moral meanings, of yearnings after Divine teachers and rulers, of acknowledgment of the possibility of communion between God and man, which we had hitherto found in them, and which we are sure that the original makers of them could not have been without. It seems to rob the old religions of the essence of religion—spirituality—and reduce them to mere observations of natural phenomena, due rather to the bodily senses than to any instincts or necessities of the soul. But here the science of language, with which we were about to quarrel as having robbed us, comes in to restore to the old beliefs those very elements of mystery, awe, and yearning towards the invisible, which we were fearing to see vanish away. As is usually the case on looking deeper, we shall find that the explanation which seemed at first to impoverish really enhances the beauty and worth of the subject brought into clearer light. It teaches us to see something more in what we have been used to call mere nature-worship than appears at first sight.
When we were considering the beginnings of language, we learned that all root-words were expressions of sensations received from outward things, every name or word being a description of some bodily feeling, a gathering-up of impressions on the senses made by the universe outside us. With this stock of words—pictorial words, we may call them—it is easy to see that when people in early times wanted to express a mental feeling, they were driven to use the word which expressed the sensation in their bodies most nearly corresponding to it. We do something of the same kind now when we talk of warm love, chill fear, hungry avarice, and dark revenge—mixing up words for sensations of the body to heighten the expression of emotions of the mind. In using these expressions we are conscious of speaking allegorically, and we have, over and above our allegorical phrases, words set aside especially for describing mental actions, so that we can talk of the sensations of our bodies and of our minds without any danger of confounding them together. But in early times, before words had acquired these varied and enlarged meanings, when men had only one word by which to express the glow of the body when the sun shone and the glow of the mind when a friend was near, the difficulty of speaking, or even thinking, of mental and bodily emotions apart from each other must have been very great. Only gradually could the two things have become disentangled from one another, and during all the time while this change was going on an allegorical way of speaking of mental emotions and of the source of mental emotions must have prevailed. It is not difficult to see that while love and warmth, fear and cold, had only one word to express them, the sun, the source of warmth, and God, the source of love, were spoken of in much the same terms, and worshipped in songs that expressed the same adoration and gratitude. It follows, therefore, that while we acknowledge the large proportion in which the nature element comes into all mythologies, we need not look upon the worshippers of nature as worshippers of visible things only. They felt, without being able to express, the Divine cause which lay behind the objects whose grandeur and beauty appealed to their wonder, and they loved and worshipped the Unseen while naming the seen only. As time passed on and language developed, losing much of its original significance, there was, especially among the Greeks and Romans, a gradual divergence between the popular beliefs about the gods and the spirit of true worship which originally lay behind them. People no longer felt the influence of nature in the double method in which it had come to them in the childhood of the race, and they began to distinguish clearly between their bodies and their minds, between the things that lay without and the emotions stirred within. Then the old nature-beliefs became degraded to foolish and gross superstitions, and yearning souls sought God in a more spiritual way.
The mythologies of the different Aryan nations are those which concern us most nearly, entering as they do into the very composition of our language, and colouring not only our literature and poetry, but our cradle-songs and the tales told in our nurseries. We shall find it interesting to compare together the various forms of the stories told by nations of the Aryan stock, and to trace them back to their earliest shape.
Egyptian
religion.
But before entering on this task, it may be well to turn our attention for a little while to a still earlier mythology, where the mingling of metaphysical conceptions with the worship of natural phenomena is perhaps more clearly shown than in any other, and which may therefore serve as a guide to help us in grasping this connection in the more highly coloured, picturesque stories we shall be hereafter attempting to unravel. This earliest and least ornamented mythology is that of the ancient Egyptians, a people who were always disposed to retain primitive forms unchanged, even when, as in the case of their hieroglyphics, they had to use the primitive forms to express thoughts which these forms could not naturally convey. That they followed this course with their religious ceremonies and in their manner of representing their gods, is perhaps fortunate for us, as it enables us to trace with greater ease the particular aspect of nature, and the mental sensation or moral lesson identified with it, which each one of their gods and goddesses embodied. We have the rude primitive form embodying an aspect or force of nature, instead of a beautiful confusing story, merely for the most part titles, addresses, and prayers, whose purport more or less reveals the spiritual meaning which that aspect of nature conveyed to the worshipper.
The chief objects of nature-worship must obviously be the same, or nearly the same, in every part of the world, so that even among different races, living far apart, and having no connection with each other, a certain similarity in the stories told about gods and heroes, and in the names and titles given to them, is observable. The sun, the moon, the heavens and stars, the sea, the river, sunshine and darkness, night and day, summer and winter,—these objects and changes must always make the staple, the back-bone so to speak, round which all mythological stories founded on nature-worship are grouped. But climate and scenery, especially any striking peculiarity in the natural features of a country, have a strong influence in modifying the impressions made by these objects on the imaginations of the dwellers in the land, and so giving a special form or colour to the national creed, bringing perhaps some Divine attribute or some more haunting impression of the condition of the soul after death, into a prominence unknown elsewhere. The religion of the ancient Egyptians was distinguished from that of other nations by several such characteristics, and in endeavouring to understand them we must first recall what there is distinctive in the climate and scenery of Egypt to our minds.
Influence
of nature in
Egyptian religion.
The land of Egypt is, let us remember, a wedge-shaped valley, broad at its northern extremity and gradually narrowing between two ranges of cliffs till it becomes through a great part of its length a mere strip of cultivatable land closely shut in on each side. Its sky overhead is always blue, and from morning till evening intensely bright, flecked only occasionally, and here and there, by thin gauzy clouds, so that the sun’s course, from the first upshooting of his keen arrowy rays over the low eastern hills to his last solemn sinking in a pomp of glorious colour behind the white cliffs in the west, can be traced unimpeded day after day through the entire course of the year. Beyond the cliffs which receive the sun’s first and last greeting stretches a boundless waste—the silent, dead, sunlit desert, which no one had ever traversed, which led no one knew where, from whose dread, devouring space the sun escaped triumphant each morning, and back into which it returned when the valley was left to darkness and night.
The neighbourhood of the desert, and the striking contrast between its lifeless wastes and the richly cultivated plains between the hills, had, as we can see, a great effect on the imaginations of the first inhabitants of the land of Egypt, and gave to many of their thoughts about death and the world beyond the grave an intensity unknown to the dwellers among less monotonous scenery. The contrast was a perpetual parable to them, or rather perhaps a perpetual memento mori. The valley between the cliffs presented a vivid picture of active and intense life, every inch of fruitful ground teeming with the results of labour—budding corn, clustering vines, groups of palm-trees, busy sowers and reapers and builders; resounding, too, everywhere with brisk sounds of toil or pleasure. The clink of anvil and hammer, the creaking of water-wheels, the bleating and lowing of flocks and herds, the tramp of the oxen treading out the corn, the songs of women, and the laughter of children playing by the river. On the other side of the cliffs, what a change! There reigned an unbroken solitude and an intense silence, such as is only found in the desert, because it comes from the utter absence of all life, animal or vegetable: no rustle of leaf or bough, no hum of an insect or whirr of a wing, breaks the charmed stillness even for a minute. There is silence, broad, unbroken sunshine, bare cliffs, rivers of golden sand—nothing else. Amenti, the ancient Egyptians called the western desert into which, as it seemed to them, the sun went down to sleep after his day’s work was done; Amenti, the vast, the grand, the unknown; and it was there they built their most splendid places of worship, there that they carried their dead for burial, feeling that it spoke to them of rest, of unchangeableness, of eternity.