The Athenæum (Feb. 1868) contained the following paragraph, which affords a marked modern illustration of this tendency to the confusion of various traditions in the popular mind:—
"Samson Mohammedan.—At Miss Heraud's reading of 'Samson Agonistes,' the Rev. Henry Allon, who presided, mentioned a fact illustrative of the way in which tradition deals with ancient legends. As he stood on the site of the Temple of Gaza, two learned Mussulmans assured Mr. Allon that Samson was not a Jew but a Mussulman, and that he pulled down the temple, not on the head of the Philistines, but on that of the assembled Christians who had persecuted the Mohammedans."
I have before observed that the European languages referred to are not asserted to have sprang from the Sanscrit, but that all, on the contrary, have a common source. The Vedic hymns, however, are the oldest preserved specimens of any of these cognate tongues.[39] Considerable change must have taken place in the southern Aryan speech before the period when they were written; yet they retain to a great extent, reliable evidence of the common origin of the languages referred to. Max Müller is very explicit on this subject. He says,—
"Even in the Veda, where dyu occurs as a masculine, as an active noun, and discloses the same germs of thought which in Greece and Rome grew into the name of the supreme god of the firmament, Dyu, the deity, the lord of heaven, the ancient god of light, never assumes any powerful mythological vitality, never rises to the rank of a supreme deity. In the earlier lists of Vedic deities, Dyu is not included, and the real representative of Jupiter in the Veda is not Dyu, but Indra, a name of Indian growth, and unknown in any other independent branch of Aryan language. Indra was another conception of the bright sunny sky, but, partly because its etymological meaning was obscured, partly through the more active poetry and worship of certain Rishis, this name gained a complete ascendancy over that of Dyu, and nearly extinguished the memory in India of one of the earliest, if not the earliest, name by which the Aryans endeavoured to express their first conception of the deity. Originally, however, and this is one of the most important discoveries which we owe to the study of the Veda—originally Dyu was the bright heavenly deity in India as well as in Greece."
The early mythology of the Aryans, and doubtless of all other savage nations, was more or less a species of, perhaps unconscious, anthropomorphism or a personification of the powers or forces of nature. This is beautifully illustrated by a superstition yet existent among the Ojibbeway Indians in North America. North-west of Fort Garry lies the lake Manitobah, which has recently given its name to the new province formed out of the Red River region. This name is derived from the circumstance that a "mysterious voice" is said to be occasionally heard at night in a small island in its midst. The Indians never approach it, believing it to be the home of the Manitobah, or the "Speaking God." The "voice" is said to result, as in the case of Charybdis, from the beating of the waves upon the rocks and shingle of the shore. One writer says:—"Along the northern coast of the island there is a long low cliff of fine grained compact limestone, which, under the stroke of the hammer, clinks like steel. The waves beating on the shore at the foot of the cliff cause the fallen fragments to rub against each other, and to give out a sound resembling the chimes of distant church bells. This phenomenon occurs when the gale blows from the north, and then, as the winds subside, low, wailing sounds, like whispering voices, are heard in the air. Travellers assert that the effect is very impressive, and they have been awakened at night under the impression that they were listening to church bells."[40]
The kind of personification referred to would, in the case of primæval man, have certainly but a very remote affinity to that conscious artistic personification employed by the cultivated poets and sculptors of after ages. Mr. G. W. Cox, in his "Mythology of the Aryan Nations," presents this distinction in very forcible language. He says,—
"The sun would awaken both mornful and inspiriting ideas, ideas of victory and defeat, of toil and premature death. He would be the Titan, strangling the serpents of the night before he drove his chariot up the sky; and he would also be the being who, worn down by unwilling labour undergone for men, sinks wearied into the arms of the mother who bore him in the morning. Other images would not be wanting; the dawn and the dew and the violet clouds would not be less real and living than the sun. In his rising from the east he would quit the fair dawn, whom he should see no more till his labour drew towards its close. And not less would he love and be loved by the dew and by the morning herself, while to both his life would be fatal as his fiery car rose higher in the sky. So would man speak of all other things also; of the thunder and the earthquake and the storm, not less than of summer and of winter. But it would be no personification, and still less would it be an allegory or metaphor. It would be to him a veritable reality, which he examined and analysed as little as he reflected on himself. It would be a sentiment and a belief, but in no sense a religion."
In other words, primæval savages did not work artistically, but simply observed, thought, and expressed themselves in the only manner in which they were able.
Kelly describes the usual course of a myth as "beginning in a figurative explanation of meteoric facts, it next became a hieratic mystery, and then descended from the domain of religion to that of magic and popular story."
I have previously observed that the word "Edda," the title of the work which records the wild mythical cosmogony of the Scandinavian race, (a mixture of oriental and northern legend), means "Mother of Poetry." Language itself is largely made up of figures of speech, or as Jean Paul Richter says it is a "dictionary of faded metaphors," the original meaning of which is fully understood but by the philologist. It is not surprising, therefore, that the unknown should, under certain conditions, be figuratively described by means of the known, or that personifications of this class eventuated in the belief in absolute personal existences, in the minds of doubtless well-meaning, but, nevertheless, ignorant men. A few verses from H. H. Wilson's translation of the Vedic hymns will show the nature of this personification:—