291. Elements of the Myth. The myths preserved in the literatures of many civilized nations, such as the Greek, present to the imaginative and the moral sense aspects fraught with contradiction. In certain myths the gods display themselves as beautiful, wise, and beneficent beings; in others they indulge in cruel, foolish, and unbeautiful practices and adventures. These contradictory elements have been called the reasonable and the senseless. A myth of Mother Earth (Demeter) mourning the loss of her daughter, the Springtide, is reasonable; a myth of Demeter devouring, in a fit of abstraction, the shoulder of the boy Pelops, and replacing it with ivory, is capricious, apparently senseless. "It is this silly, senseless, and savage element," as Max Müller says, "that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it."
292. Reasonable Myths. If myths were always reasonable, it would not be difficult to reach an agreement concerning some way by which they may have come into existence.
Imagination. If we assume that the peoples who invented these stories of supernatural beings and events had, with due allowance for the discrepancy in mental development, imaginations like our own, there is nothing in the history of reasonable myths to baffle our understanding. For, at the present time, not only children and simple-minded men, like sailors or mountaineers, but cultivated men of ordinary poetic sensibility, bestow attributes of life upon inanimate things and abstract ideas. The sun is nowadays thirsty, the ship is a woman, the clouds threaten, charity suffereth long, the waves are angry, time will tell, and death swallows all things. The sun still rises, and, as Mr. Jasper maintains, "do move." By personification we, every day, bestow the attributes of human beings upon inanimate nature, animals, and abstractions. By our metaphors we perpetuate and diffuse the poetic illusion; we talk not perhaps of the arrows of Apollo, but of a sunstroke; our poetry abounds in symbols of the moon, of the swift-wingèd wind, of the ravening sea. In our metonymies we use the sign for the thing signified, the crown for the king, the flag for the honor of the country; and the crown and the flag are to-day possessed of attributes and individuality just as efficient as those that endowed the golden handmaids of Vulcan or the eagle of Jove. Nor is hyperbole any less in use among us than it was among the ancients; we glorify our political heroes with superlatives, they dignified theirs with divinity.
Belief. But this resemblance in habits of imagination, while it may help us to appreciate the mental condition of primitive peoples, accentuates the distinction between our imagination and theirs. They, at some time or other, believed in these personifications. We do not believe. But their belief is easier to comprehend when we remember that the myths of savages are not a deliberate invention of any one individual, but are constructed by generations of people, and that many of them cluster about beings who were actually worshiped. Among primitive nations the sense of awe in the presence of magnificent objects of nature—mountains, the sky, the sun, the sea—is universal. It springs from the fact that savages do not deem themselves superior to nature. They are not conscious of souls whose flight is higher than that of nature. On the contrary, since sun, sea, and winds move, the savage invests them with free will and personality like man's. In proportion, however, as their size is grander or their movement more tremendous, these objects must be possessed of freedom, personality, and power exceeding those of man. Why, then, should not the savage believe, of beings worthy of worship and fear and gratitude, all and more than all that is accredited to man? Why not confer upon them human and superhuman passions and powers? If we were living, like the Greek of old, close to the heart of nature, such personification of natural powers would be more easy for us to appreciate.
"If for us also, as for the Greek," says Ruskin,[376] "the sunrise means daily restoration to the sense of passionate gladness and of perfect life—if it means the thrilling of new strength through every nerve,—the shedding over us of a better peace than the peace of night, in the power of the dawn,—and the purging of evil vision and fear by the baptism of its dew;—if the sun itself is an influence, to us also, of spiritual good,—and becomes thus in reality, not in imagination, to us also, a spiritual power,—we may then soon overpass the narrow limit of conception which kept that power impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the thought of an angel who rejoiced as a strong man to run his course, whose voice, calling to life and to labor, rang round the earth, and whose going forth was to the ends of heaven."
Regarding thus the religious condition of the savage, we may comprehend the existence of myths and his acceptance of them.
293. Unreasonable Myths. But he would maintain this attitude of acceptance only in the matter of good and beneficent gods and of righteous or reasonable myths.
For how could a human being believe of the god whom he worshiped and revered, deeds and attributes more silly and more shameful than man can conceive of his fellow man? When, therefore, we find senseless and shameless myths existing side by side with stories of the justice and righteousness of the same god, we must conclude that, since the worshiper could not believe both sets of attributes, he preserved his religious attitude before the good god only by virtue of rejecting the senseless myth.