Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

The objection raised in these pages to the extreme application of the solar theory applies with equal force to Mr. Spencer’s limitation of the origin of myth and religion to one source. Having cleared Scylla, we must not dash against Charybdis. Religion has its origin neither in fear of ghosts, as Mr. Spencer’s theory assumes, nor in a perception of the Infinite inherent in man, as Professor Max Müller holds. Rather does it lie in man’s sense of vague wonder in the presence of powers whose force he cannot measure, and his expressions towards which are manifold. There is underlying unity, but there are, to quote St. Paul, “diversities of operation.” There is just that surface unlikeness which one might expect from the different physical conditions and their resulting variety of subtle influences surrounding various races; influences shaping for them their gods, their upper and nether worlds; influences of climate and soil which made the hell of volcanic countries an abyss of sulphurous stifling smoke and everlasting fire, and the hell of cold climates a place of deathly frost; which gave to the giant-gods of northern zones their rugged awfulness, and to the goddesses of the sunny south their soft and stately grace. The theory of ancestor-worship as the basis of every form of religion does not allow sufficient play for the vagaries in which the same thing will be dressed by the barbaric fear and fancy, nor for the imagination as a creative force in the primitive mind even at the lowest at which we know it. And, of course, beneath that lowest lies a lower never to be fathomed. We are apt to talk of primitive man as if his representatives were with us in the black fellows who are at the bottom of the scale, forgetting that during unnumbered ages he was a brute in everything but the capacity by which at last the ape and tiger were subdued within him. Of the beginnings of his thought we can know nothing, but the fantastic forms in which it is first manifest compel us to regard him as a being whose feelings were uncurbed by reason. That ancestor-worship is one mode among others of man’s attitude towards the awe-begetting, mystery-inspiring universe, none can deny. That his earliest temples, as defined sacred spots, were tombs; that he prayed to his dead dear ones, or his dead feared ones, as the case may be, is admitted. From its strong personal character, ancestor-worship was, without doubt, one of the earliest expressions of man’s attitude before the world which his fancy filled with spirits. It flourishes among barbarous races to-day; it was the prominent feature of the old Aryan religion; it has entered into Christian practice in the worship of saints, and perhaps the only feature of religion which the modern Frenchman has retained is the culte des morts. That it was a part of the belief of the Emperor Napoleon III. the following extract from his will shows:—“We must remember that those we love look down upon us from heaven and protect us. It is the soul of my great Uncle which has always guided and supported me. Thus will it be with my son also if he proves worthy of his name.”

But the worship of ancestors is not primal. The comparatively late recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship. Moreover, Nature is bigger than man, and this he was not slow to feel. Even if it be conceded that sun-myth and sun-worship once arose through the nicknaming of an ancestor as the Sun, we must take into account the force of that imagination which enabled the unconscious myth-maker, or creed-maker, to credit the moving orbs of heaven with personal life and will. The faculty which could do that might well express itself in awe-struck forms without intruding the ancestral ghost. Further, the records of the classic religions, themselves preserving many traces of a primitive nature-worship, point to an adoration of the great and bountiful, as well as to a sense of the maleficent and fateful, in earth and heaven which seem prior to the more concrete worship of forefathers and chieftains.

If for the worship of these last we substitute a general worship of spirits, there seems little left on which to differ. As aids to the explanation of the belief in animal ancestors and their subsequent deification and worship, as of the lion, the bull, the serpent, etc., we have always present in the barbaric mind the tendency to credit living things, and indeed lifeless, but moving ones, with a passion, a will, and a power to help or harm immeasurably greater than man’s. This is part and parcel of that belief in spirits everywhere which is the key to savage philosophy, and the growth of which is fostered by such secondary causes as the worship of ancestors.

§ VII.

SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY.

For proofs of the emergence of the higher out of the lower in philosophy and religion, to say nothing of less exalted matters, whether the beast-fable or the nursery rhyme, as holding barbaric thought in solution, examples have necessarily been drawn from the mythology of past and present savage races. But these are too remote in time or standpoint to stir other than a languid interest in the reader’s mind; their purpose is served when they are cited and classified as specimens. Not thus is it with examples drawn nearer home from sources at which our young thirst for the stirring and romantic was slaked. When we learn that famous names and striking episodes are in some rare instances only transformed and personified natural phenomena, or, as occurring everywhere, possibly variants of a common legend, the far-reaching influence of primitive thought comes to us in more vivid and exciting form. And although one takes in hand this work of disenchantment in no eager fashion, the loss is more seeming than real. Whether the particular tale of bravery, of selflessness, of faithfulness, has truth of detail, matters little compared with the fact that its reception the wide world over witnesses to human belief, even at low levels, in the qualities which have given man empire over himself and ever raised the moral standard of the race. Moreover, in times like these, when criticism is testing without fear or favour the trustworthiness of records of the past, whether of Jew or Gentile, the knowledge of the legendary origin of events woven into sober history prepares us to recognise how the imagination has fed the stream of tradition, itself no mean tributary of that larger stream of history, the purity of which is now subject of analysis. As a familiar and interesting example let us take the story of William Tell.

Everybody has heard how, in the year 1307 (or, as some say, 1296) Gessler, Vogt (or Governor) of the Emperor Albert of Hapsburg, set a hat on a pole as symbol of the Imperial power, and ordered every one who passed by to do obeisance to it; and how a mountaineer named Wilhelm Tell, who hated Gessler and the tyranny which the symbol expressed, passed by without saluting the hat, and was at once seized and brought before Gessler, who ordered that as punishment Tell should shoot an apple off the head of his own son. As resistance was vain, the apple was placed on the boy’s head, when Tell bent his bow, and the arrow, piercing the apple, fell with it to the ground. Gessler saw that Tell, before shooting, had stuck a second arrow in his belt, and, asking the reason, received this for answer: “It was for you; had I shot my child, know that this would have pierced your heart.”

Now, this story first occurs in the chronicle of Melchior Russ, who wrote at the end of the fifteenth century, i.e. about one hundred and seventy years after its reputed occurrence. The absence of any reference to it in contemporary records caused doubt to be thrown upon it three centuries ago. Guillimann, the author of a work on Swiss antiquities, published in 1598, calls it a fable, but subscribes to the current belief in it because the tale is so popular! The race to which he belonged is not yet extinct. A century and a half later a more fearless sceptic, who said that the story was of Danish origin, was condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt alive, and in the well-timed absence of the offender his book was ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. But the truth is great, and prevails. G. von Wyss, the Swiss historian, has pointed out that the name of Wilhelm Tell does not occur even once in the history of the three cantons, neither is there any trace that a Vogt named Gessler ever served the house of Hapsburg there. Moreover, the legend does not correspond to any fact of a period of oppression of the Swiss at the hands of their Austrian rulers.

“There exist in contemporary records no instances of wanton outrage and insolence on the Hapsburg side. It was the object of that power to obtain political ascendancy, not to indulge its representatives in lust or wanton insult,” and, where records of disputes between particular persons occur, “the symptoms of violence, as is natural enough, appear rather on the side of the Swiss than on that of the aggrandising Imperial house.”[51]

Candour, however, requires that the “evidence” in support of the legend should be stated. There is the fountain on the supposed site of the lime-tree in the market-place at Altdorf by which young Tell stood, as well as the colossal plaster statue of the hero himself which confronts us as we enter the quaint village. But more than this, the veritable cross-bow itself is preserved in the arsenal at Zurich!