Men have for ages been more or less conscious of that great mental district lying between disbelief and belief, where room is found for all mythic interpretation, good or bad. It being admitted that some legend is not the real narrative which it purports to be, they do not thereupon wipe it out from book and memory as simply signifying nothing, but they ask what original sense may be in it, out of what older story it may be a second growth, or what actual event or current notion may have suggested its development into the state in which they find it? Such questions, however, prove almost as easy to answer plausibly as to set; and then, in the endeavour to obtain security that these off-hand answers are the true ones, it becomes evident that the problem admits of an indefinite number of apparent solutions, not only different but incompatible. This radical uncertainty in the speculative interpretation of myths is forcibly stated by Lord Bacon, in the preface to his ‘Wisdom of the Ancients.’ ‘Neither am I ignorant,’ he says, ‘how fickle and inconsistent a thing fiction is, as being subject to be drawn and wrested any way, and how great the commodity of wit and discourse is, that is able to apply things well, yet so as never meant by the first authors.’ The need of such a caution may be judged of from the very treatise to which Bacon prefaced it, for there he is to be seen plunging headlong into the very pitfall of which he had so discreetly warned his disciples. He undertakes, after the manner of not a few philosophers before and after him, to interpret the classic myths of Greece as moral allegories. Thus the story of Memnon depicts the destinies of rash young men of promise; while Perseus symbolizes war, and when of the three Gorgons he attacks only the mortal one, this means that only practicable wars are to be attempted. It would not be easy to bring out into a stronger light the difference between a fanciful application of a myth, and its analysis into its real elements. For here, where the interpreter believed himself to be reversing the process of myth-making, he was in fact only carrying it a stage further in the old direction, and out of the suggestion of one train of thought evolving another connected with it by some more or less remote analogy. Any of us may practise this simple art, each according to his own fancy. If, for instance, political economy happens for the moment to lie uppermost in our mind, we may with due gravity expound the story of Perseus as an allegory of trade: Perseus himself is Labour, and he finds Andromeda, who is Profit, chained and ready to be devoured by the monster Capital; he rescues her and carries her off in triumph. To know anything of poetry or of mysticism is to know this reproductive growth of fancy as an admitted and admired intellectual process. But when it comes to sober investigation of the processes of mythology, the attempt to penetrate to the foundation of an old fancy will scarcely be helped by burying it yet deeper underneath a new one.
Nevertheless, allegory has had a share in the development of myths which no interpreter must overlook. The fault of the rationalizer lay in taking allegory beyond its proper action, and applying it as a universal solvent to reduce dark stories to transparent sense. The same is true of the other great rationalizing process, founded also, to some extent, on fact. Nothing is more certain than that real personages often have mythic incidents tacked on to their history, and that they even figure in tales of which the very substance is mythic. No one disbelieves in the existence of Solomon because of his legendary adventure in the Valley of Apes, nor of Attila because he figures in the Nibelungen Lied. Sir Francis Drake is made not less but more real to us by the cottage tales which tell how he still leads the Wild Hunt over Dartmoor, and still rises to his revels when they beat at Buckland Abbey the drum that he carried round the world. The mixture of fact and fable in traditions of great men shows that legends containing monstrous fancy may yet have a basis in historic fact. But, on the strength of this, the mythologists arranged systematic methods of reducing legend to history, and thereby contrived at once to stultify the mythology they professed to explain, and to ruin the history they professed to develop. So far as the plan consisted in mere suppression of the marvellous, a notion of its trustworthiness may be obtained, as Sir G. W. Cox well puts it, in rationalizing Jack the Giant-Killer by leaving out the giants. So far as it treated legendary wonders as being matter-of-fact disguised in metaphor, the mere naked statement of the results of the method is to our minds its most cruel criticism. Thus already in classic times men were declaring that Atlas was a great astronomer who taught the use of the sphere, and was therefore represented with the world resting on his shoulders. To such a pass had come the decay of myth into commonplace, that the great Heaven-god of the Aryan race, the living personal Heaven himself, Zeus the Almighty, was held to have been a king of Krete, and the Kretans could show to wondering strangers his sepulchre, with the very name of the great departed inscribed upon it. The modern ‘euhemerists’ (so called from Euhemeros of Messenia, a great professor of the art in the time of Alexander) in part adopted the old interpretations, and sometimes fairly left their Greek and Roman teachers behind in the race after prosaic possibility. They inform us that Jove smiting the giants with his thunderbolts was a king repressing a sedition; Danae’s golden shower was the money with which her guards were bribed; Prometheus made clay images, whence it was hyperbolically said that he created man and woman out of clay; and when Daidalos was related to have made figures which walked, this meant that he improved the shapeless old statues, and separated their legs. Old men still remember as the guides of educated opinion in their youth the learned books in which these fancies are solemnly put forth; some of our school manuals still go on quoting them with respect, and a few straggling writers carry on a remnant of the once famous system of which the Abbé Banier was so distinguished an exponent.[[346]] But it has of late fallen on evil days, and mythologists in authority have treated it in so high-handed a fashion as to bring it into general contempt. So far has the feeling against the abuse of such argument gone, that it is now really desirable to warn students that it has a reasonable as well as an unreasonable side, and to remind them that some wild legends undoubtedly do, and therefore that many others may, contain a kernel of historic truth.
Learned and ingenious as the old systems of rationalizing myth have been, there is no doubt that they are in great measure destined to be thrown aside. It is not that their interpretations are proved impossible, but that mere possibility in mythological speculation is now seen to be such a worthless commodity, that every investigator devoutly wishes there were not such plenty of it. In assigning origins to myths, as in every other scientific enquiry, the fact is that increased information, and the use of more stringent canons of evidence, have raised far above the old level the standard of probability required to produce conviction. There are many who describe our own time as an unbelieving time, but it is by no means sure that posterity will accept the verdict. No doubt it is a sceptical and a critical time, but then scepticism and criticism are the very conditions for the attainment of reasonable belief. Thus, where the positive credence of ancient history has been affected, it is not that the power of receiving evidence has diminished, but that the consciousness of ignorance has grown. We are being trained to the facts of physical science, which we can test and test again, and we feel it a fall from this high level of proof when we turn our minds to the old records which elude such testing, and are even admitted on all hands to contain statements not to be relied on. Historical criticism becomes hard and exacting, even where the chronicle records events not improbable in themselves; and the moment that the story falls out of our scheme of the world’s habitual course, the ever repeated question comes out to meet it—Which is the more likely, that so unusual an event should have really happened, or that the record should be misunderstood or false? Thus we gladly seek for sources of history in antiquarian relics, in undesigned and collateral proofs, in documents not written to be chronicles. But can any reader of geology say we are too incredulous to believe wonders, if the evidence carry any fair warrant of their truth? Was there ever a time when lost history was being reconstructed, and existing history rectified, more zealously than they are now by a whole army of travellers, excavators, searchers of old charters, and explorers of forgotten dialects? The very myths that were discarded as lying fables, prove to be sources of history in ways that their makers and transmitters little dreamed of. Their meaning has been misunderstood, but they have a meaning. Every tale that was ever told has a meaning for the times it belongs to; even a lie, as the Spanish proverb says, is a lady of birth (‘la mentira es hija de algo’). Thus, as evidence of the development of thought, as records of long past belief and usage, even in some measure as materials for the history of the nations owning them, the old myths have fairly taken their place among historic facts; and with such the modern historian, so able and willing to pull down, is also able and willing to rebuild.
Of all things, what mythologic work needs is breadth of knowledge and of handling. Interpretations made to suit a narrow view reveal their weakness when exposed to a wide one. See Herodotus rationalizing the story of the infant Cyrus, exposed and suckled by a bitch; he simply relates that the child was brought up by a herdsman’s wife named Spakô (in Greek Kynô), whence arose the fable that a real bitch rescued and fed him. So far so good—for a single case. But does the story of Romulus and Remus likewise record a real event, mystified in the self-same manner by a pun on a nurse’s name, which happened to be a she-beast’s? Did the Roman twins also really happen to be exposed, and brought up by a foster-mother who happened to be called Lupa? Positively, the ‘Lempriere’s Dictionary’ of our youth (I quote the 16th edition of 1831) gravely gives this as the origin of the famous legend. Yet, if we look properly into the matter, we find that these two stories are but specimens of a widespread mythic group, itself only a section of that far larger body of traditions in which exposed infants are saved to become national heroes. For other examples, Slavonic folk-lore tells of the she-wolf and she-bear that suckled those superhuman twins, Waligora the mountain-roller and Wyrwidab the oak-uprooter; Germany has its legend of Dieterich, called Wolfdieterich from his foster-mother the she-wolf; in India, the episode recurs in the tales of Satavahana and the lioness, and Sing-Baba and the tigress; legend tells of Burta-Chino, the boy who was cast into a lake, and preserved by a she-wolf to become founder of the Turkish kingdom; and even the savage Yuracarés of Brazil tell of their divine hero Tiri, who was suckled by a jaguar.[[347]]
Scientific myth-interpretation, on the contrary, is actually strengthened by such comparison of similar cases. Where the effect of new knowledge has been to construct rather than to destroy, it is found that there are groups of myth-interpretations for which wider and deeper evidence makes a wider and deeper foundation. The principles which underlie a solid system of interpretation are really few and simple. The treatment of similar myths from different regions, by arranging them in large compared groups, makes it possible to trace in mythology the operation of imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental law; and thus stories of which a single instance would have been a mere isolated curiosity, take their place among well-marked and consistent structures of the human mind. Evidence like this will again and again drive us to admit that even as ‘truth is stranger than fiction,’ so myth may be more uniform than history.
There lies within our reach, moreover, the evidence of races both ancient and modern, who so faithfully represent the state of thought to which myth-development belongs, as still to keep up both the consciousness of meaning in their old myths, and the unstrained unaffected habit of creating new ones. Savages have been for untold ages, and still are, living in the myth-making stage of the human mind. It was through sheer ignorance and neglect of this direct knowledge how and by what manner of men myths are really made, that their simple philosophy has come to be buried under masses of commentators’ rubbish. Though never wholly lost, the secret of mythic interpretation was all but forgotten. Its recovery has been mainly due to modern students who have with vast labour and skill searched the ancient language, poetry, and folk-lore of our own race, from the cottage tales collected by the brothers Grimm to the Rig-Veda edited by Max Müller. Aryan language and literature now open out with wonderful range and clearness a view of the early stages of mythology, displaying those primitive germs of the poetry of nature, which later ages swelled and distorted till childlike fancy sank into superstitious mystery. It is not proposed here to enquire specially into this Aryan mythology, of which so many eminent students have treated, but to compare some of the most important developments of mythology among the various races of mankind, especially in order to determine the general relation of the myths of savage tribes to the myths of civilized nations. The argument does not aim at a general discussion of the mythology of the world, numbers of important topics being left untouched which would have to be considered in a general treatise. The topics chosen are mostly such as are fitted, by the strictness of evidence and argument applying to them, to make a sound basis for the treatment of myth as bearing on the general ethnological problem of the development of civilization. The general thesis maintained is that Myth arose in the savage condition prevalent in remote ages among the whole human race, that it remains comparatively unchanged among the modern rude tribes who have departed least from these primitive conditions, while even higher and later grades of civilization, partly by retaining its actual principles, and partly by carrying on its inherited results in the form of ancestral tradition, have continued it not merely in toleration but in honour.
To the human intellect in its early childlike state may be assigned the origin and first development of myth. It is true that learned critics, taking up the study of mythology at the wrong end, have almost habitually failed to appreciate its childlike ideas, conventionalized in poetry or disguised as chronicle. Yet the more we compare the mythic fancies of different nations, in order to discern the common thoughts which underlie their resemblances, the more ready we shall be to admit that in our childhood we dwelt at the very gates of the realm of myth. In mythology, the child is, in a deeper sense than we are apt to use the phrase in, father of the man. Thus, when in surveying the quaint fancies and wild legends of the lower tribes, we find the mythology of the world at once in its most distinct and most rudimentary form, we may here again claim the savage as a representative of the childhood of the human race. Here Ethnology and Comparative Mythology go hand in hand, and the development of Myth forms a consistent part of the development of Culture. If savage races, as the nearest modern representatives of primæval culture, show in the most distinct and unchanged state the rudimentary mythic conceptions thence to be traced onward in the course of civilization, then it is reasonable for students to begin, so far as may be, at the beginning. Savage mythology may be taken as a basis, and then the myths of more civilized races may be displayed as compositions sprung from like origin, though more advanced in art. This mode of treatment proves satisfactory through almost all the branches of the enquiry, and eminently so in investigating those most beautiful of poetic fictions, to which may be given the title of Nature-Myths.
First and foremost among the causes which transfigure into myths the facts of daily experience, is the belief in the animation of all nature, rising at its highest pitch to personification. This, no occasional or hypothetical action of the mind, is inextricably bound in with that primitive mental state where man recognizes in every detail of his world the operation of personal life and will. This doctrine of Animism will be considered elsewhere as affecting philosophy and religion, but here we have only to do with its bearing on mythology. To the lower tribes of man, sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal animate creatures, leading lives conformed to human or animal analogies, and performing their special functions in the universe with the aid of limbs like beasts or of artificial instruments like men; or what men’s eyes behold is but the instrument to be used or the material to be shaped, while behind it there stands some prodigious but yet half-human creature, who grasps it with his hands or blows it with his breath. The basis on which such ideas as these are built is not to be narrowed down to poetic fancy and transformed metaphor. They rest upon a broad philosophy of nature, early and crude indeed, but thoughtful, consistent, and quite really and seriously meant.
Let us put this doctrine of universal vitality to a test of direct evidence, lest readers new to the subject should suppose it a modern philosophical fiction, or think that if the lower races really express such a notion, they may do so only as a poetical way of talking. Even in civilized countries, it makes its appearance as the child’s early theory of the outer world, nor can we fail to see how this comes to pass. The first beings that children learn to understand something of are human beings, and especially their own selves; and the first explanation of all events will be the human explanation, as though chairs and sticks and wooden horses were actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and children and kittens. Thus infants take their first step in mythology by contriving, like Cosette with her doll, ‘se figurer que quelque chose est quelqu’un;’ and the way in which this childlike theory has to be unlearnt in the course of education shows how primitive it is. Even among full-grown civilized Europeans, as Mr. Grote appositely remarks, ‘The force of momentary passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and even an intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of agonizing pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from which he has suffered.’ In such matters the savage mind well represents the childish stage. The wild native of Brazil would bite the stone he stumbled over, or the arrow that had wounded him. Such a mental condition may be traced along the course of history, not merely in impulsive habit, but in formally enacted law. The rude Kukis of Southern Asia were very scrupulous in carrying out their simple law of vengeance, life for life; if a tiger killed a Kuki, his family were in disgrace till they had retaliated by killing and eating this tiger, or another; but further, if a man was killed by a fall from a tree, his relatives would take their revenge by cutting the tree down, and scattering it in chips.[[348]] A modern king of Cochin-China, when one of his ships sailed badly, used to put it in the pillory as he would any other criminal.[[349]] In classical times, the stories of Xerxes flogging the Hellespont and Cyrus draining the Gyndes occur as cases in point, but one of the regular Athenian legal proceedings is a yet more striking relic. A court of justice was held at the Prytaneum, to try any inanimate object, such as an axe or a piece of wood or stone, which had caused the death of anyone without proved human agency, and this wood or stone, if condemned, was in solemn form cast beyond the border.[[350]] The spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law (repealed within the last reign), whereby not only a beast that kills a man, but a cart-wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him and kills him, is deodand, or given to God, i.e. forfeited and sold for the poor: as Bracton says, ‘Omnia quae movent ad mortem sunt Deodanda.’ Dr. Reid comments on this law, declaring that its intention was not to punish the ox or the cart as criminal, but ‘to inspire the people with a sacred regard to the life of man.’[[351]] But his argument rather serves to show the worthlessness of off-hand speculations on the origin of law, like his own in this matter, unaided by the indispensable evidence of history and ethnography. An example from modern folklore shows still at its utmost stretch this primitive fancy that inert things are alive and conscious. The pathetic custom of ‘telling the bees’ when the master or mistress of a house dies, is not unknown in our own country. But in Germany the idea is more fully worked out; and not only is the sad message given to every bee-hive in the garden and every beast in the stall, but every sack of corn must be touched and everything in the house shaken, that they may know the master is gone.[[352]]
It will be seen presently how Animism, the doctrine of spiritual beings, at once develops with and reacts upon mythic personification, in that early state of the human mind which gives consistent individual life to phenomena that our utmost stretch of fancy only avails to personify in conscious metaphor. An idea of pervading life and will in nature far outside modern limits, a belief in personal souls animating even what we call inanimate bodies, a theory of transmigration of souls as well in life as after death, a sense of crowds of spiritual beings sometimes flitting through the air, but sometimes also inhabiting trees and rocks and waterfalls, and so lending their own personality to such material objects—all these thoughts work in mythology with such manifold coincidence, as to make it hard indeed to unravel their separate action.[[353]]