The savage understands perfectly the difference between a sacred and a secular story, between a narrative of the doings of the gods handed down from his ancestors, and the creation of the idle fancy brought forth to amuse a circle of listeners.
I have already referred to the strange similarity in the myths of savage nations far asunder in space and kinship. The explanation of this is not to be found in borrowing or in recollections from a common, remote unity; but in the laws of the human mind. The same myths are found all over the world, with the same symbolism and imagery, woven into cycles dealing with the same great questions of human thought. This is because they arise from identical psychic sources, and find expression under obligatory forms, depending on the relations of man to his environment, and on the unity of mental process throughout the race.
It is not possible for me at the present time to enter far into the vast temple of mythology. I must content myself with selecting a few of the most prominent mythical cycles, aiming by these to show how they form the ground-plan and substructure of the whole edifice of mythical narrative.
I will select seven which are the most prominent, those relating to: 1. the Cosmical Concepts; 2. the Sacred Numbers; 3. the Drama of the Universe; 4. the Earthly Paradise; 5. the Conflict of Nature; 6. the Returning Saviour; and 7. the Journey of the Soul.
1. The Cosmical Concepts.—Wherever man is placed on the earth, he is guided in his movements by space and direction. These are among the earliest notions he derives from the impressions on his senses. His anatomical conformation, the anterior and posterior planes of his body and his right and left sides, lead him to a fourfold division of space, as before him and behind him, to one side or the other. He conceives the earth, therefore, as a plain with four quarters, the chief directions as four, to wit, the cardinal points, and the winds as four principal currents from these points. The sky is to him a solid covering, supported at each of its four corners by a tree, a pillar, or a giant, and is itself divided into four courts or regions like the earth.
These were his cosmical concepts, his primal ideas of the universe, and they entered deeply into his life, his acts, and his beliefs. He founded his social organisation on them, he pitched his tents or built his cities on their model, he oriented his edifices to simulate them, and framed his myths to explain and perpetuate them.
We find these concepts practically universal. The symbolic figures which represent them are scratched in the soil at the Bora, or initiation ceremonies of the Australians; they are etched into the pots and jars we dig up in the mounds of the Mississippi valley; they are painted in strange figures on the manuscripts of the Mayas and Mexicans; they reappear in the mysterious symbols of the svastika and the Chinese Ta-Ki; they underlie the foundation stones of Egyptian pyramids, and recur in the lowest strata of Babylonian ziggarats.[139]
2. The Sacred Numbers.—The cosmical concepts were closely connected with the sacred numbers. Wherever we turn in myth and rite, in symbolism or sacred art, we find certain numbers which have a hallowed priority in religious thought. These numbers are pre-eminently the three and the four, and those derived from them. They are distinctly antithetic in character, arising from contrasting psychical sources, which I will briefly explain.
The number four derives its sacredness in mythology from the cosmical concepts just mentioned. It was, therefore, connected with the objective and phenomenal world, and had a material and concrete origin and applications.
The number three, on the other hand, was surrounded with the halo of sanctity from the operations of the mind itself. These, the processes of thinking, are carried on by a triple or rather triune action of the intelligence, which logicians express in the three fundamental “laws of thought,” and in the trilogy of the syllogism. These ever-present laws of thinking impress themselves on the mind and mental acts whether they are recognised or not, and all the more absolutely in that involuntary action in which, as “sub-limital consciousness” or “psychic automatism,” I have revealed to you the true source of the conception of the Divine.[140]