§ 3. What has to be said on the historical aspect of the method of mythical investigation follows from the mode in which the myth grows under the influence of historical factors. If, after the first transformation of the myth occasioned by a purely psychological process, there are factors which immediately cause its further development, it is of course the business of mythic investigation to find out those transformative forces which have fastened themselves on a previous stage of development. Beginning therefore from the latest aspect of the myth, we have to follow it further and further up, to arrive by help of the thread of historical research at a knowledge of the process of historical development which operated on the myth and caused the transformation. Thus we ascend step by step to the point at which the above-described psychological process caused the individualising of the mythic figures. From this point it is only a step to the original formation of the myth, at which the appellations proper to the mythic figures are not proper names but appellative nouns. It is easy to see that, while investigation takes a retrograde course, beginning with the latest form of the myth and going back to arrive at its original form, exposition will take the contrary direction and pourtray its historical transformation in the natural order of growth, beginning with the primitive form discovered by analysis, and demonstrating successive transformations by the aid of history.
It is advisable, before we proceed to the materials of Hebrew mythic investigation, to elucidate the course of this historical method by a well-known example.
Let us take the story which is presented in Genesis, chap. XXII. Abraham, the forefather of the Hebrew people, at the behest of Elôhîm, is about to offer his only son Isaac as a sacrifice, but is prevented by an angel of Jahveh, who shows him a ram entangled in the thicket, which he may offer as a sacrifice to Jahveh instead of his son. The various religious tendencies connected with the two Divine names, Elôhîm and Jahveh are scarcely so prominent in any part of the Pentateuch as in the small passage under consideration. We see here the divergence of the religious ideas on both sides in reference to the value of human sacrifice. Not yet fully released from the Canaanitish system, the early Elohistic religious tendency as yet regards it as an unobjectionable performance. Jahveism abominates it, and is satisfied with the temper which is ready to sacrifice—the intentio; though this may very well be brought to express itself in the substituted sacrifice of a beast or something else. Hence our story makes Elôhîm demand the human offering, and Jahveh recommend the substitution.[[117]] The present form of the legend is accordingly the product of the religious polemic waged by the Prophets against the popular view of religion which still clung to the Canaanitish system; and the apologists of the Jahveistic idea intend to show by it the advance which their own religious views had taken beyond those of earlier times.[[118]] The divergent ideas held by these two Hebrew religious parties on human sacrifice are also to be seen in the legislative portions of the Bible. In these we can distinguish passages in which the sacrifice of the first-born of beasts is not clearly discriminated from the sanctification of the first-born child, from others in which the latter has already gained a merely theocratic meaning and is put in connexion with the deliverance of the people out of Egypt. Therefore, what is deeply impressed on these passages of legislation, viz. the battle between the Canaanitish religious tendency and the national Hebrew idea of Jahveh according to the Prophets, finds a memento in the conformation of the existing very late myth of the sacrifice of Isaac. It has the same purpose as the passage of Deuteronomy (XII. 31), in which the polemic against human sacrifice as a religious institution of the Canaanites comes most prominently forward: ‘Thou shalt not do so unto Jahveh thy God; for every abomination to Jahveh which he hateth have they done unto their Elôhîm; for even their sons and their daughters they have burned in the fire to their Elôhîm.’ This polemic tendency in the service of the Jahveh-idea, and the religious views attached to it, gave the myth in question the form in which it is known to us. But that cannot be the original form. Stripped of its Jahveistic coating, the myth remains in the following form: ‘Elôhîm demanded from Abraham the sacrifice of his only son, and Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac for Elôhîm.’ But again, the myth could take this form only in a time when the religious idea of Elôhîm had already gained such full life in the Hebrew people as to impel them to sacrifice what was dearest to them. When the myth had this form, accordingly, there was in Canaan already a monotheistic religion, the centre of which was Elôhîm the object of adoration, while the ancestors of the Hebrew people were his pious servants and favourites. This coating also must be stripped off, if we wish to trace the myth analytically to its primitive form. When we have stripped off the religious coating, we have still not yet penetrated to the central germ; for, independently of any religious tendency, Abraham remains as Patriarch, as a national figure; and this brings us into the historical epoch when the Hebrew people, attaining to a consciousness of national peculiarity and opposition to the surrounding Canaanitish peoples, constructed their own early history. Accordingly, the national coating has now to be thrown off; and then Abraham meets us as a (so to say) cosmopolitan figure—not yet transformed into the likeness of one nation, but still as a person, an individual. This stage of mythic development brings us to the psychological process which caused the mythological persons to come forth at the beginning; and behind this stage we find the original form of the myth: ‘Abram kills his son Isaac’ At that primitive stage these expressions naturally signified no more than the words imply. ‘אַבְרָםʾabrām Abh Râm, the Lofty Father, kills his son יִצְחָקyiṣḥāq Yiṣchâḳ, the Laugher.’ The Nightly Heaven and the Sun, or the Sunset, child of the Night,[[119]] fell into a strife in the evening, the result of which is that the Lofty Father kills his child; the day must give way to night.
In the above example we have endeavoured to give a short sketch, less of the progress of development of the Hebrew myth, than of the method by which, observing the most prominent forces in the historical development of the intellectual life of the Hebrews, we can rise by analysis from the latest form of the myths to the original. Having reached this, we must confide ourselves to the guidance of the Science of Language; for that particular source for mythic inquiry which was treated in [§ 5] of the preceding chapter has chiefly to do with the primitive form of the myth. The myth is accompanied through all its stages of development by the same constant terms of language: these are, accordingly, the oldest matter for investigation on the mythological field.
Thus, taking it all together, the Method of mythic investigation turns on three hinges: 1. Psychology, 2. History, 3. Science of Language.
CHAPTER IV.
NOMADISM AND AGRICULTURE.
The basis of all modern Comparative Mythology, and the principle from which we start on the present studies, is that the Myth is only the expression in language of the impression made on the men of ancient time by the physical events and changes under the immediate influence of which they lived. If this is true, it cannot be questioned that the tendency and quality of the Myth must change, independently of the matter and contents which remain the same, in obedience to the advancing civilisation of men. For all progress in civilisation is marked, speaking generally, by continual development of the relation in which man stands to external nature. When a nation emerges from the stage of Nomadism and advances to an agricultural life, its relation to external nature is changed. The same thing happens when a people that lived exclusively by the chase and fishing advances to Nomadism. Since a new epoch in the development of human civilisation has commenced in our own times through the progress made in physical science, our relation to nature has again entered on a new phase. The spirit of modern civilisation has been characterised by the common-place, that reason has subdued nature.
The Myth accompanied mankind from the first germ to the highest stage of mental culture, always adapting itself to man’s intellectual field of view and changing with the measure of this field of view. It is therefore a faithful mirror of the ideas of the world held by the men of each age; and these ideas are nowhere so clearly reflected as in myths. The configuration and tendency of the myths is always dependent on the ideas of men at that particular stage of civilisation which gave the myth its form and guided it to its special tendency. The traces of these historical transformations of the myths are scarcely distinguishable for small chronological divisions; but when the larger epochs of civilisation are under consideration, they cannot fail to be noted by the explorer’s eye. And the discovery and demonstration of these transformations of the tendency of the myths in their relation to the great epochs of civilisation is one of the special problems of Comparative Mythology.
The solution of this problem has an intimate connexion with the answer to the question, ‘When does the life of the Myth begin, and when does it end? what is its terminus a quo, and what its terminus ad quem?’ This question is obviously closely bound up with the results of the psychological inquiry into the essence and conditions of production of the myth. The myth lives from the moment that man begins to interpret physical phenomena through processes brought before his eyes by his own every-day life and action; and as soon as the human mind uses in the interpretation of the phenomena of nature utterly different means from those prevalent in all myths, i.e. as soon as the phenomena of nature are not interpreted from human conditions, the myth has ended its life, and yields up its elements for other combinations. It is self-evident that the commencing point of the creation of myths cannot be later than the first beginnings of language; for Myth and Language are two modes of utterance of the same intellectual activity, and the oldest declarations of the human mind. Even in the Miocene age we find man—the so-called fossil man—in possession of fire: so that even then the conditions were already present for the first growth of the elements of a Prometheus-myth. In the Postpliocene age we find him already endowed with the first breath of religious feeling, if, as is generally done, we can allow the careful graveyards found at Aurillac, Cro-Magnon and Menton, to pass as historical data.[[120]] The end of the life of the myth coincides with the moment at which is formed out of the elements of the myth a religious conception of the world peopled with gods. The living and conscious existence of the myth is finished when the mythical figures become gods. Theology hurls the myth from its throne. But this is the end only of the living existence of the primitive myth; the myth transfigured and newly interpreted in a religious sense lives on, and only now begins to pass through a rich and various series of stages of development, each marked by a corresponding stage of the religion and civilisation of the men who possess it. There then spring from mythic elements, sagas, fables, tales, legends. And as religion in its primal origin appears in history not in opposition to myths, but as a higher development of them, the life of religion does not absolutely exclude that of myths. There remain, beside the myth which has been transformed into religion, other portions of the mythic matter which religion has not yet touched, and these live on as myths, so long as the process of religious transformation has not drawn them into its domain. Pure and free Monotheism in its highest development is the first force that comes forward as a denial of the mythic elements in religion. The religious history of the Hebrews reached this stage when Jahveism was fully developed.