§ 2. What therefore especially distinguishes the Nomad’s myth from the Agriculturist’s is mainly referable to the different position occupied at these two stages by the dark night-sky on the one hand and the brilliant, warm, sunny sky on the other. The myth is not a merely objective[[154]] expression for the phenomena of nature. For what is ordinarily and in common life called purely objective description, is almost an impossibility, seeing that no one with all possible exertion, restraint and self-abnegation can put off all his individuality; and this is true, in a much higher degree, of the myth. It is incorrect to speak of objective reporters or historians. For how would it be possible for me, giving a report on an event, whether as eye-witness or as critical sifter of the statements of others, to speak of it without being myself the Speaker? And the single fact that I am the speaker, impresses on my report a different stamp from that which the report of another would have borne. Compare so-called objective historical narratives from different decads—not to speak of hundreds or thousands of years. How much more must the subjectivity of the myth-creators be impressed on the myths of different periods of civilisation! Now it is undoubtedly true that the special, sharply characteristic intellectual individuality of persons is only developed in direct proportion with the advance of the culture of the mind. The more education a man has, the more can he give expression to his inner self and make its influence felt; and with the advance of education, the just claims of Individuality will also receive more and more attention, both in society and in law. This process can be traced upwards from animals of low organisation to man, and within the human race can be confirmed through its various stages of development, geographical and historical. At the myth-creating stage, intellectual uniformity prevails almost universally, in all individuals. Consequently here only the sum total of the men who are creating language and myth has any power; the individual could not effect anything of his own, different from the work of others. There is no such thing as either language or myth of a single individual;[[155]] and what Steinthal says in reference to national songs, is equally true of both of them, that the mind which produces them, ‘is the mind of a multitude of persons without individuality, held together by physical and mental relationship; and whatever is mentally produced by this multitude is a creation of the common mind, i.e. of the nation.’[[156]] And just for this reason the common mind in each of the various epochs of civilisation has its own characteristic impress, a tendency and fundamental conception, which distinguish it from those of the preceding epoch.
Among the Nomads, then, the dark, cloudy heaven of night is the sympathetic mythical figure; they imagine it conquering, or if it is overcome, give to its fall a tragic character, so that it falls lamented and worthy rather of victory than of ruin; and the Nomad’s grief for the defeated power is propagated from age to age far beyond the mythical period. The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter is still lamented from time to time by the daughters of Israel. It is just the reverse with the myth of the Agriculturist. He makes the brilliant heaven of day-time conquer, and the gloomy cloudy heaven or the dark night fall; he accompanies the victory of the warm heaven of the day with cries of triumph and applause, and his hymns immortalise what he felt and thought on this victory. Here it is the defeat of the sunny heaven that attunes him to lamentation. The fallen Samson is a tragical figure. Every reader will be able himself to supply the application of these general propositions to the myth of the Hebrews, if he pays attention to the chapter in which the chief figures of the Hebrew mythology were brought forward, with the chief traits by which they are accompanied in Mythology. I should deem it superfluous to prosecute this application further, as it is to be found in every case in the nature of the myth itself.
But it is not only from a feeling of sympathy towards the heaven of night and clouds that the Nomad puts it in the foreground. This aspect of heaven is to him also the datum, the prius, the natural, which the heaven of day afterwards opposes as foe and persecutor. With the nature of Nomadism, and especially of the night-wanderings, is also connected the Reckoning of time by Nights. This has been best preserved by the Arabs, who count by nights, instead of days, as we do. It is especially marked in the determination of the distance between two places and of the length of a journey: e.g. ‘His face perspires with desire for the payment held back for long nights (i.e. for a long time);’[[157]] ‘Between Damascus and the place where Walîd b. Yazîd lived in the desert are four nights;’[[158]] ‘I will give him five hundred dînârs and a camel, on which he can travel for twelve nights;’[[159]] in a poem of Abû Zeyd al-ʿAbshamî, ‘When the tribe travels for sixteen nights’ (iḏa-l-ḳaumu sârat sittat ʿashrata leylatan).[[160]] This Arabic idiom is so firmly established that in the opposite case, when a period is for once to be expressed in days, the equivalent expressed in nights is added as a more exact definition; e.g. ‘So that there lay between them and their home a distance of two days or three nights.’[[161]] With the reckoning of time by nights two other practices are connected. First, the Night has priority before the Day; therefore among the Arabs and the Hebrews (as also among the later Jews), the two peoples which, as we shall see, preserved the feeling of nomadism longer than the Aryans, the day begins with the evening. ‘There was evening, there was morning—one day.’ A residuum of the old nomadic conception is found in the Egyptian myth that Thum, the form of the sun’s nocturnal existence, was born before Ra, the sun’s form by day. Secondly, chronology is thereby connected chiefly with the nocturnal heaven and the moon. It is to be observed on this subject that in nations which begin to count the day from the evening, the moon is the central figure and the starting point in the chronology of greater periods.[[162]] Seyffarth, in an essay entitled, ‘Did the Hebrews before the Destruction of Jerusalem reckon by lunar months?’ (published in 1848 in the Zeitschrift der D.M.G., II. 347 sqq.), endeavoured to defend the thesis that the Hebrew chronology was originally founded on solar months, which were not supplanted by lunar months till between the second and fourth century after Christ; but he supports this theory by arguments which cannot stand against profounder criticism. It must rather be assumed that the original lunar year at the beginning of agricultural life was united with the observation of the solar periods (see Knobel, Commentary on Exodus, p.95), so as to produce very early compensation of the difference between them; but that in the various attempts at compensation, which ended with the fixing of the calendar and the arrangement of the intercalary month, the reckoning by moons remained in the foreground, as is evident in the mode of compensation. In reference to the Arabs also, Sprenger has fully proved in the essay to which we have already referred in this chapter, that the solar element of chronology was subordinate, and that in the old times before Moḥammed the lunar reckoning was in force.
As on another occasion we shall recur to the fact that among the Aryans the Indians retained a certain degree of nomadic sentiment more distinctly than any other Aryans, and that this is impressed on their literature and on many of their institutions, so here we may observe the same in reference to their chronology. In the Vedas, the oldest literature of the Sanskrit people, we find the lunar year of twelve months, with the occasional addition of a thirteenth or intercalary month.[[163]] It is remarkable that on this subject we find still more reminiscences of the nomadic life among the Persians. In the whole book of Avesta, in passages where the shining heavenly bodies are enumerated, they appear in this invariable order: Stars, Moon, and Sun, the sun always occupying the last place. And we even find also the reckoning of time by nights exactly as it is among the Arabs; which enables Spiegel to draw the just inference that the ancient Persians reckoned by lunar years.[[164]] According to Bunsen[[165]] the Delphic myth of the purification of Apollo likewise points to the conclusion that the Hellenes in later times substituted the solar for the old lunar chronology.
The Solar chronology belongs to the Agriculturist, in opposition to the Nomad. As the night and the nocturnal sky forms the foreground to the nomad, so the agricultural stage of civilisation leads the sun to victory, and the sun becomes the measure and the starting point of its chronology. With the advance to agriculture the lunar year is superseded by the Magnus Annus, or ἡλιακόν, which was also called ὁ θεοῦ ἐνιαυτός. Yet very curiously, as the remains of nomadism in general may be long visible and be unconsciously perpetuated in the ideas of the agriculturist, it is the mode of calculating time that echoes the nomadic ideas the longest, and even survives in ages of more advanced culture. Of the Gauls, e.g., Julius Caesar reports that they counted by nights, not by days.[[166]] Tacitus says the same of the ancient Germans.[[167]] In one case, namely in the English word ‘fortnight,’[[168]] which is a speaking proof that the ancestors of those who now use the word reckoned time by nights, one of the most advanced nations of the present time has not yet left off counting by nights. Other languages also, spoken by nations which have long accepted the solar reckoning, preserve memorials of the old nomadic lunar reckoning. In Hungarian and other languages of the Ugric stock the expression ‘hopping year’ (szökő év) for leap-year,[[169]] in connexion with other similar phenomena, points to a chronology of lunar years, as the Hungarian Academician Paul Hunfalvy has very fully demonstrated, with important documents.[[170]] The residuum of the lunar chronology which has stood the longest, and which, despite the generally preponderating solar character of our reckoning of time, and despite the love of a decimal system inherent in the first French Revolution, is now fixed firmly for a long future period, is the Week—a notion specifically connected with the Moon. Yet it has long been made evident that even this division of the month into four weeks was in antiquity sometimes exchanged for a solar division into three decads. This was due to the influence of the agricultural stage of civilisation giving prominence to the Sun. We know this, e.g., of the Egyptians, and it was therefore long doubted whether they knew the division into weeks at all. But Sir Gardner Wilkinson collected a series of proofs that among the Egyptians the later system of decads was historically preceded by the division of the months into four weeks of seven days each.[[171]] It is also tolerably certain of the Mexicans, that of their two methods of reckoning time, which in later times were in force side by side, the Tonulpohualli or ‘solar reckoning’ and the Metzlapohualli or ‘lunar reckoning,’ the latter was historically the earlier, but was retained in the time of the solar chronology, as is so frequently the case in computations of time.[[172]] We ought, moreover, also to consider the computation of longer periods of time by Masika, i.e. rainy seasons, which prevails among the Unyamwesi in Africa.[[173]] How powerful is the posthumous influence even on later times of the nomadic lunar division into weeks,—an influence which again and again obtained validity, even after it had been once supplanted by the solar reckoning by decads, we see best among the Romans. They had originally a consistent lunar computation; even their year consisted of ten months, the sun’s cycle of twelve months being ignored; and they divided the month into four weeks.[[174]] Later, this fourfold division gave way to a threefold division into three decads, nonae, kalendae, idus; but yet they returned at last to the week again, and called its seven days by the names of the sun, the moon and the five planets. However, the division of the month into three decads is not always connected with solar chronology; it is also found in combination with lunar reckoning, when three phases of the moon are acknowledged (as in the three-headed forms of the moon in the Greek mythology).[[175]]
A five-days’ period has been proved to exist in many nations as the equivalent of our week (among the Chinese, Mongol tribes, Azteks, and Mexicans.)[[176]] But this division into pentads must be connected with an original quinary system of numeration, to the linguistic importance of which Pott has devoted a special treatise.[[177]] In Old Calabar on the west coast of Africa a week of eight days occurs; most curiously, as the people cannot count beyond five.[[178]] A priori this would seem impossible; but it is vouched for by an observer so accurate as Bastian.
§ 3. As the Nomadic stage of civilisation of necessity historically precedes the Agricultural, so also that stage of the myths at which the nocturnal, dark or cloudy heaven has precedence of the bright heaven of day comes before the stage at which the latter occupies the foreground and plays the part of a beloved figure or favourite. Moreover, it cannot be assumed that this second stage of the formation of myths has grown up without being preceded by the first stage; for it is simply impossible that any portion of mankind should have lived through the stage of Nomadism, which perhaps lasted for thousands of years, without having thrown its conceptions of the world into mythic forms. Everyone knows, and no one now doubts, that the most prominent figure in the mythology of the Aryans, which later at the theological stage took the rank of a supreme god, was the brilliant sunny heaven, Dyu (Dyaus, nom.), Θεός, Zeus, on whom the powerful sympathy of the Aryan was concentrated, and to whom he turned with admiring devotion as soon as he began to pray and compose hymns. On the other hand, it could not escape the notice of the inquirer on the domain of Aryan mythology and history of religion, that the very oldest and most genuine representative of the Aryan mind seems itself to form a sort of exception to this universal idea. The Indians, namely, among whom Dyu certainly was elevated to theological importance,[[179]] do not make him their supreme god, but Indra, who, as his very name shows, (indu = ‘a drop’) is identical with the rainy sky (Jupiter pluvius),[[180]] and Varuṇa, who, in contrast to the shining Mitra, was the gloomy night-sky (from var = ‘to cover’).[[181]] Max Müller, whose merit it mainly is to have raised the Aryan Dyu to the high throne which he now occupies in the history of Aryan religion, explains this strange fact by supposing that Indra drove Dyu, the oldest of the gods, from the place which he had formerly held even among the Indians. ‘If in India,’ he thinks, ‘Dyu did not grow to the same proportions as Zeus in Greece, the reason is simply that dyu retained throughout too much of its appellative power,[[182]] and that Indra, the new name and the new god, absorbed all the channels that could have supported the life of Dyu,’[[183]] so that he died away.
From what has been explained above, it is evident that the subject might present itself in a different light. It is well known that the people of India represents, both in its language and in its mythology, the oldest stage of the Aryan mind attainable by us, and after it follows the people of Iran. The ancient literature of these two nations, but that of the Indians more than that of the Persians, stands much nearer in its ideas to the nomadic life than any other documents of the Aryan mind which have been preserved to us. It is then no wonder if (it being a rule in all physical as well as intellectual development, that at a later stage of progress residua of a previous one remain behind unnoticed) these nations, which at the time of their oldest known intellectual productions were not far removed from nomadism, exhibit more traces of nomadism than others, even if they be found to have then fully passed out of the nomadic stage. We have already referred to this in treating of the nomadic elements in chronology, and now return again to the same point. In some things the Iranians preserved the traditions of nomadism more firmly and persistently than the Indians, who generally stood nearer to the original forms. This is to be explained from the fact that in Persia nomadism itself lived longer as an actual stage of civilisation, and was more fostered, than in India; for indeed it even now maintains its position there. For just as in the time of Herodotus (I. 125) the Persians were partly migratory nomads (νομάδες), partly settled agriculturists (ἀροτῆρες), so now a proportion, varying from a quarter to a half, of the population of modern Persia still leads a nomadic life.[[184]] One characteristic of the nomadic period is a social and political division into tribes, which in many civilised nations is retained into the time of fixed dwellings as a residuum of nomadism. Without pausing over the Thracians, who according to the account of Herodotus,[[185]] found it impossible to throw off all reference to tribe-differences and bring their power to bear through national unity, we will refer to the Ionians as an example, whose divisions into φρατρίαι, γένη, and γεννῆται, have been accurately traced.[[186]] Now among the Indians we find no trace of tribal divisions worth mentioning, but very soon come across the Caste—an hereditary division according to modes of occupation, which cannot be formed at any earlier stage than that of fixed dwellings, since this gave the first impulse to the practice of arts and trades, which is not conceivable at the nomadic stage. Among the Iranians, on the other hand, the tribal division maintained itself for a long time parallel with that according to occupation, which was better suited to the time of transition to a fixed life.[[187]] Even on the Caste system of the Parsees the tribal division still exerts a definite influence. The sacerdotal caste is a distinct tribe, a family, just like the Levites among the Hebrews;[[188]] and in ancient times many sacerdotal functions, ‘the smaller and less important religious duties, were assigned to the heads of the various subdivisions of the tribe.’ The name of the priests, môbed (which Spiegel explains as umâna-païti = ‘chief head of the tribe or family,’ perhaps equivalent to the Hebrew rôsh bêth âbh), in itself indicates the original universality of the bestowal of the sacerdotal functions on the head of the tribe.[[189]]
As in Iran a fundamental social institution, so among the Sanskrit people a prominent mythological fact is the notable residuum of nomadism: viz. the fact that by them the first seat and highest rank among the figures of the myth and subsequently among the gods is assigned not to Dyu, but to Varuṇa and Indra. It is not to the field-guarding, harvest-sending, shining sunny heaven, but to Varuṇa the coverer and Indra the rain-sender, that the nomad directs his admiration and sympathy, his veneration and devotion. This relation towards Indra was preserved by the Indian from the nomadic period—from a time before that remarkable people had chosen a permanent abode on the banks of the Ganges and Indus. With this agrees very well the idea which Roth worked out in an essay on ‘the highest gods of the Aryan peoples,’ that Varuṇa is as old as the Aryan period, and is the common property of all members of the race; even the conception of Indra being later than that of Varuṇa, and specially Indian.[[190]] But it is not only among the Indians that we find this memory of nomadic life impressed on the mythology; its traces may be found also in the Hellenic mythology, not however as a positive, actual existence, as in India, but still as an historical reminiscence. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, the dominion of Zeus was preceded by that of Uranus; i.e. before the Hellenic people, choosing a settled agricultural life, brought Zeus, the bright sunny heaven, into the foreground, the centre of their world was Uranus (Varuṇa), the gloomy overclouded sky. There is scarcely any serious reason for regarding, as Bunsen[[191]] and some writers on the history of religion do, the kingdom of Zeus alone as an original intellectual product of the Hellenic people, and putting aside Uranus as merely a result of Theogonic speculation, or for even seeing in Uranus a figure borrowed from a Semitic source. The succession—Uranus, Zeus—rather corresponds perfectly with the successive stages of civilisation, nomadism and agriculture, and all that Hesiod did was to clothe an historical, natural and true tradition of the Hellenic people in the form of a theogonic story. With this, other points of the Theogony seem to be clearly and unmistakably connected, namely those in which we perceive the idea of the priority of the Night. Among the powers preceding the rule of Zeus in Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos is named—a word signifying according to its original sense ‘darkness’—and Tartarus. We well know the theological meaning of the latter word—the subterranean place to which the souls of the dead go; but there is no doubt that it originally denoted ‘a gloomy pit, never lighted by the sun,’ or ‘darkness’ in general. Therefore Tartarus figures in Mythology as father of Typhon and Echidna, and therefore Nyx is his daughter. Then it agrees well with nomadic ideas that Tartarus is called ‘father of waters and springs,’ and that he bears the epithet ‘the first born’ (πρωτόγονος). On Hebrew ground also we meet a similar transition. In Job XXXVI. 20, the word laylâ ‘night’ is used quite in the sense of ‘nether world;’ which is true also of ṣalmâweth, denoting ‘darkness’ in general, and used only secondarily with special reference to Orcus.
§ 4. We have above just touched the confines of religious history, though it was strictly speaking, only a border territory of Mythology, which ought not to be confounded with religious history. But we must here allow ourselves an excursion into the neighbouring territory. For it ought not to pass unnoticed that, as the myth which has the night-sky in its foreground always precedes that which has the bright sky of day in its centre, the former corresponding to the nomadic, the latter to the settled agricultural life, the same sequence can also be observed in the history of religion. There are nations, which, when already standing at the nomadic stage, work out for themselves a theistic religion. As theistic religion always grows up out of the elements of myths, the religion of Nomadism must be essentially a worship of the night-heaven. Then, when the progress to the agricultural stage works the revolution in man’s ideas of the world, and in the relation of his mind to external nature, of which I spoke above, when he cleaves more to the Sun and pays his reverence to him, then the worship of the nocturnal starry or overclouded rainy heaven is naturally supplanted by one of the diurnal heaven and the sun, and only residua of the ancient ideas and the ancient objects of worship are propagated into the new epoch, sometimes continuing and remaining in force unmodified, and sometimes interpreted anew in the sense of the new system. The religion and the worship of the nomad stand to those of the agriculturist in the same relation of historical succession as the two similar stages of mythology to each other. At the later stage, the elements of solar religion can undoubtedly stand peacefully side by side with the residua of the earlier stage of religion. Similarly, when nomads have relations with townsmen who have a solar religion already powerfully developed, many elements of the solar worship may find their way into the nomadic religion; of which the well-known accounts of the religion of some Arabic Beduin tribes furnish plenty of examples. To this an outside observer may probably reduce the report brought by William Gifford Palgrave, the daring explorer of Central Arabia, of the adoration of the Sun among the Bedawî.[[192]] But in the order of genesis the worship of the night-sky, inclusive of that of the moon, precedes that of the day-sky and the sun. It was observed long ago that wherever sun-worship exists, moon-worship also is always to be found, being a residuum of the earlier stage of religion; but not in the reverse order.[[193]] We shall have to revert in a subsequent chapter to this fact, in speaking of the religion of the nomadic Hebrews, and will therefore only refer to a few points in the ancient Arabic religion. If Blau is right in interpreting the old Arabic proper name ʿAbd Duhmân as ‘Servant of the Darkness of Night,’[[194]] the theological importance of the night-sky to the ancient Arabs in general is proved; for it is well known that in Arabic proper names compounded with ʿAbd ‘servant’ the second member of the compound is a god’s name, or at least a name of theological meaning.[[195]] To the same class belongs the Moon-worship of the ancient Arabs, which is sufficiently attested.[[196]] The clearest evidence of a worship of the rainy sky and the storm among the Arabs is furnished by the name Ḳuzaḥ, to which storms and rainbows were attributed (see the following chapter [§ 12]). Arabian etymologists, among whom may be mentioned the author of the Ḳâmûs and the author of the Supercommentary on that dictionary, publishing at Bûlâḳ, have tried many combinations in order to find a suitable explanation of this Ḳuzaḥ, with especial reference to the meaning ‘rainbow;’ all the derivative significations of the root ḳzḥ, embellishment, variety of colour, lifting oneself, are brought forward to yield a sufficient ground for the appellation. This proves how little the Mohammedan now knows of his heathen antiquity; the use of the name Ḳuzaḥ must have been interdicted. Al-Damîrî, in his work Almasâ ʾil al-manthûrâ, finds a deep-seated error in the word itself, instead of which he wishes to read kazaʿ with ʿayn, with the meaning ‘cloud.’[[197]] But it is probable that this name Ḳuzaḥ is derived from the signification ‘mingere,’ which belongs to the corresponding verb (used specially of beasts), and that it is due to a mythological conception of the Rain. This circumstance tempts us to connect the Hebrew word bûl ‘rain, rainy month’ with the Arabic bâla, yabûlu ‘mingere.’ If so, the combination of this word with the name of the God Baʿal, which certainly does occur in Himyaric in the form Bûl, must have been made later, from a misunderstanding of the mythological relations.[[198]] The theological power of Ḳuzaḥ among the ancient Arabs is evident as well from its being explained by Moslem interpreters as the name of a devil or angel, as also from the fact that geographical appellations which are in force in the ritual of the old religion are connected with it.[[199]] These elements of the worship of the night and the cloudy and stormy sky must have priority before those of the solar worship which are found subsisting beside them. F. Spiegel states this succession to be a law in the history of religion. ‘It is not the sun,’ he says,[[200]] ‘that first attracted the attention of the savage by its light.... On the other hand, the night-sky, whose lights form a contrast to the darkness of the earth, is much more calculated to attract the gaze of the savage to itself. And among the heavenly lights it is the moon that first absorbs the sight, as well from its size as from its readily discernible changes; and after it a group of particularly brilliant stars.... We find moon-worship among almost utterly savage tribes in Africa and America; and it is noteworthy that there the moon is always treated as a man, the sun as a woman; not till later are these relations inverted. From this we may infer that the lunar worship is older than the solar.’ We cannot, however, agree with Spiegel when he gives as the reason why darkness attracted the special attention of man, that the sun was to him a matter of course. We see the same story of the lunar religion repeat itself again in the history of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion. Hur-ki (Assyrian Sin) is historically the older and earliest prominent object of worship of the ancient Accadian kingdom; and the further we advance towards the beginnings of the history, the more does the worship of the moon preponderate. The monarchs of the first dynasties regard her as their protector, and the name of the moon often enters into composition to form their proper names.[[201]] In the later empire, that of Assyria, this prevailing pre-eminence of the moon gradually ceases. She is supplanted by the sun, under whom she descends to be a deity of the second rank, the ‘Lord of the thirty days of the month,’ and ‘Illuminator of the earth.’[[202]] That Samas, the sun, is called in the Assyrian epic of Istar the son of Sin, the moon-god (IV. 2), ‘points,’ as the learned German interpreter of the cuneiform inscriptions observes, ‘to a veneration of the moon-god in Babylonia earlier than that of the sun-god,’[[203]] or else to the conception of the night preceding the day. Among the Egyptians, too, it is a later period at which the dominion of the sun is recognised. The older historical epoch—whether permeated, as Bunsen expresses it somewhat obscurely,[[204]] by a ‘cosmogonic-astral’ idea, or, as Lenormant describes it in a few bold strokes,[[205]] possessing very little positive religion at all—knows as yet nothing of solar worship. The solar worship of the Egyptians is undoubtedly the product of a later development of high culture.