Omit only that part which speaks the bitterness of disappointed hopes which once centred round the doing as prouder livers do, and the rest breathes the fresh air of mountain life, different altogether from our life, free alike from its cares and temptations and moral responsibilities. Belarius gazes up with an unawful eye into the heavenly depths, and fearlessly pays his morning orisons. ‘Hail, thou fair heaven!’ There is no sense here of sin, humility, self-reproach. And in this respect—taking this for the moment as the type of an Aryan religion—how strongly it contrasts with the utterances of Hebrew writers! Is this the voice of natural as opposed to inspired religion? Not altogether; for the Semitic mind was throughout antiquity imbued with a deeper sense of awe or fear—awe in the higher religion, fear in the lower—than ever belonged to the Aryan character. We see this difference in the religions of Egypt and Assyria; and it will be remembered that, when speaking of the earliest records of the Semitic and Aryan races, we took occasion to say that it may very well have been to their admixture of Semitic blood that the Egyptians stood indebted for the mystic and allegorical part of their religious system; for among all the Semitic people, whether in ancient or modern times, we may observe a tendency—if no more—towards religious thought, and towards thoughts of that mystic character which characterized the Egyptian mythology.
But the Aryans grew up and formed themselves into nations, and developed the germs of their religion apart from external influence, and in a land which from the earliest times had belonged to them alone. Their character, their religion, their national life, were their own; and though in after-times these went through distinctive modifications, when the stems of nations that we know, Greeks, Latins, Germans, and the rest, grew out of the Aryan stock, they yet bore amid these changes the memory of a common ancestry. The land in which they dwelt was favourable to the growth of the imaginative faculties, and to that lightness and brightness of nature which afterwards so distinguished the many-minded Greeks, rather than to the slow, brooding character of the Eastern mind. There, down a hundred hillsides and along a hundred valleys trickled the rivulets whose waters were hurrying to swell the streams of the Oxus and the Jaxartes. And each hill and valley had its separate community, joined, indeed, by language and custom to the common stock, but yet living a separate simple life in its own home, which had, one might almost say, its individual sun and sky as well as hill and river. No doubt in such a land innumerable local legends and beliefs sprang up, and these, though lost to us now, had their effects upon the changes which among the many branches of the race the Aryan mythology underwent—a mythology which before all others is remarkable for the endless diversity of its legends, for the infinite rainbow-tints into which its essential thoughts are broken.
Sky-and
sun-gods.
Despite these divergences, the Aryans had a common chief deity—the sky, the ‘fair heaven.’ This, the most abstracted and intangible of natural appearances, at the same time the most exalted and unchanging, seemed to them to speak most plainly of an all-embracing deity. And though their minds were open to all the thousand voices of nature, and their imaginations equal to the task of giving a personality to each, yet none, not even the sun himself, imaged so well their ideal of a highest All-Father as did the over-arching heaven.
The traces of this primitive belief the Aryan people carried with them on their wanderings. This sky-god was the Dyâus (the sky) of Indian mythology, the Zeus of the Greeks, the Jupiter of the Romans, and the Zio, Tew, or Tyr of the Germans and Norsemen. For all these names are etymologically allied. Zeus (gen. Dios) and Dyâus are from the same root; so are Jupiter (anciently Diupiter) and the compound form Dyâus-pitar (father Dyâus); and Zio and Tew also bear traces of the same origin. Indeed, it is by the reappearance of this name as the name of a god among so many different nations that we argue his having once been the god of all the Atyan people. The case is like that of our word daughter. As we find this reappearing in the Greek thugatêr, and the Sanskrit duhitar, we feel sure that the old Aryans had a name for daughter from which all these names are derived; and as we find the Sanskrit name alone has a secondary meaning, signifying ‘the milker,’ we conclude that this was the original meaning of the name for a daughter. Just so, Zeus and Jupiter and Zio and Dyâus show a common name for the chief Aryan god; but the last alone explains the meaning of that name, for Dyâus signifies the sky.
This sky-god, then, stood to the old Aryans for the notion of a supreme and common divinity. Whatever may have been the divinities reigning over local streams and woods, they acknowledged the idea of one overruling Providence whom they could only image to their minds as the over-spreading sky. This, we may say, was the essential feature in their religion, its chief characteristic; whereas to the Semitic nations, the sun, the visible orb, was in every case the supreme god. The reason of this contrast does not, it seems to me, lie only in the different parts which the sun played in the southern and more northern regions; or, if it arises in the difference of the climate, it not the less forms an important chapter in religious development. There are discernible in the human mind two diverse tendencies in dealing with religious ideas. Both are to be found in every religion, among every people; one might almost say in every heart. The first tendency is an impulse upwards—a desire to press the mind continually forward in an effort to idealize the deity, but, by exalting or seeming to exalt Him into the highest regions of abstraction, it runs the risk of robbing Him of all fellowship with man, and man of all claims upon His sympathy and love. Then comes the other tendency, which oftentimes at one stroke brings down the deity as near as possible to the level of human beings, and leaves him at the end no more than a demi-god or exalted man. One may be called the metaphysical, the other the mythological tendency; and we shall never be able to understand the history of religions until we learn to see how these influences interpenetrate and work in every system. They show at once that a distinction must be drawn between mythology and religion. The supreme god will not be he of whom most tales are invented, because, as these tales must appeal to human interests and relate adventures of the human sort, they will cling more naturally round the name of some inferior divinity. The very age of mythology—so far as regards the beings to whom it relates[56]—is probably rather that of a decaying religion.
In any case, there will probably be a metaphysical and a mythological side to every system. Thus among the Egyptians, Amun, the concealed, was the metaphysical god; but their mythology centred round the names of Osiris and Horus. And just so with the Aryans, the sky was the original, most abstracted, and most metaphysical god; the sun rose into prominence in obedience to the wish of man for a more human divinity. If the Semitic people were more inclined toward sun-worship, the Aryans inclined rather toward heaven-worship; and the difference is consistent with the greater faculty for abstract thought which has always belonged to our race.
The two influences of which we have spoken are perfectly well marked in Aryan mythology. The history of it may almost be said to represent the rivalry between the sky-gods and the gods of the sun. It is on account of his daily change that the last far less becomes the position of a supreme god. Born each day in the east, faint and weak he battles with the clouds of morning; radiant and strong he mounts into the midday sky; and then, having touched his highest point, he turns to quench his beams in the shadowy embrace of night. Even the Egyptians and Assyrians, in view of these vicissitudes, were driven to invent a sort of abstract sun, separated in thought from the mere visible orb. This daily course might stand as an allegory of the life of man. The luminary who underwent these changing fortunes, however great and godlike in appearance, must have some more than common relationship with the world below; he must be either a hero raised among the gods, or, better (for of this thought the Aryans too had their dim foreshadowing), he is an Avatar, an Incarnation of the Godhead, come down to take upon him for a while the painful life of men. This was the way the sun-gods were regarded by the Indo-European nations. Accordingly, while their deepest religious feelings belonged to the abstract god Zeus, Jupiter among the Greeks and Romans, Dyâus and later on Brahma (a pure abstraction) among the Indians, the stories of their mythology belonged to a more human divinity, who in most cases is the sun-god. He is the Indra[57] of the Hindus, who wrestles with the black serpent, the Night, as Horus did with Typhon; he is the Apollo of the Greeks, likewise the slayer of the serpent, the Pythôn; or else he is Heracles (Hercules), the god-man—sometimes worshipped as a god, sometimes as a demi-god only—the great and mighty hero, the performer of innumerable labours for his fellows; or he is Thor, the Hercules of the Norsemen, the enemy of the giants and of the great earth-serpent, which represent the dark chaotic forces of nature; or Frey, the bearer of the sword, or the mild Balder, the fairest of all the gods, the best-beloved by gods and men.
It is clear that a different character of worship will belong to each order of divinity. The sacred grove or the wild mountain-summit would be naturally dedicated to the mysterious pervading presence; the temple would be the natural home of the human-featured god; and this all the more because men worshipped in forest glade or upon mountain-top before they dedicated to their gods houses made with hands. Dyâus is the old, the primevally old, divinity, the ‘son of time’ as the Greeks called him.[58] Whenever, therefore, we trace the meeting streams of thought, the cult of the sun-god and the cult of the sky, to the latter belongs the conservative part of the national creed, his rival is the reforming element. In the Vedic religion of India, Indra, as has been said, has vanquished the older deity; we feel in the Vedas that Dyâus, or even another sky-god, Varuna, though often mentioned, no longer occupy a commanding place. Not, however, without concessions on both sides. Indra could not have achieved this victory but that he partakes of both natures. He is the sky as well as the sun, more human than the unmoved watching heavens, he is a worker for man, the sender of the rain and the sunshine, the tamer of the stormwinds, and the enemy of darkness.
And if any one should examine in detail the different systems of the Aryan people, he would, I think, have no difficulty in tracing throughout them the two influences which have been dwelt upon, and in each connecting these two influences with their sky-and sun-gods. Whatever theory may be used to account for it, the change of thought is noticeable. Man seems to awake into the world with the orison of Belarius upon his lips; he is content with the silent unchanging abstract god. But as he advances in the burden and heat of the day he wishes for a fellow-worker, or at least for some potency which watches his daily struggles with less of godlike sublime indifference. Hence arise his sun-gods—the gods who toil and suffer, and even succumb and die.