The moon-lit sky of night appears in the Myth of Civilisation averse to all the blessings which the Sun grants to the agriculturist. In this character it appears frequently, especially in the American mythology;[[558]] whereas in the Oriental the connexion between the moon and water suggests the idea that the moon produces fertility and freshness in the soil (see supra, p. [160]). In the Voguls’ story of civilisation, a small fragment of which, from the collections made by Antony Reguly, is contained in the important work of the Hungarian Academician Paul Hunfalvy on the ‘Country and People of the Voguls,’[[559]] Kulyater is the builder of the first city. The solar character of Kulyater cannot be doubted, if the following portion of the Vogul story be taken into consideration: ‘He dwelt in a house locked with seven iron locks. Tarom was angry with him, and seized him by one foot, and he fell into the heart of the foaming sea.’ This is the sunset. The reason why the Founder of Cities (whom the Vogul reckons among the evil spirits and regards as the originator of death[[560]]) appears here in an unfavourable light is the same as that which we shall discover for the tone of dislike which the Hebrew story adopts towards the agriculturist Cain. Till they became Russified the Voguls remained prevailingly a hunting people, and their myths did not rise to the elevation of the view of the world possessed by agriculturists. The Vogul story of the Creation[[561]] reflects exactly the ideas of a hunting and fishing people; it speaks only of the chase and of catching fish.
Now we have seen that the Myth of Civilisation expresses the same idea in nations of the most different races. Even in the Japanese myths of civilisation, published by the learned Japanese Dira Kittao,[[562]] a thoroughly solar character is evident. Manufactures and arts, social order and law are always attributed to the Sun as author, not only by Aryans, but even by the still unclassified American tribes. If the knowledge of the American languages were more advanced than it is in our time, and if the mutual relations of those languages were not ‘exceedingly perplexing, for the same reason as those presented by the Polynesian and African dialects, and in a yet higher degree,’[[563]] we might gain some understanding of the origin of the many proper names which we encounter in the above myth and in the other members of the copious American mythology; and this would lead us to a far more accurate idea of their origin and life than is possible with petrified myths of civilisation. Nevertheless, before we part from them, we will still just notice that the introduction of social laws, political constitutions and religious institutions such as are ascribed in the Muyscas’ myth to the Sun himself as an old man, is frequently attributed to the sons of the Sun. There is no need to prove that in such stories the sons of the Sun are identical with their father the Sun. So e.g. Orpheus, son of the Sun, calls into cities men living a savage life in the forests, and urges them to a more civilised life. Again, the Indian legislator Vaivasuta is son of the Sun. And, not to neglect again here American mythology, the two sons of the Sun, Manco Copac and Mama Oello, are brought forward in the Peruvian myth of civilisation as teachers of civilisation. There is no reason whatever to identify Mama Oello with the Moon, as J.G. Müller does;[[564]] and it would even run counter to the very nature of the Myth of Civilisation. For, as we saw in the previously cited American myth, the Moon is the very power that paralyses the work of the Sun in introducing civilisation and law. To this place belongs also the idea, which is found in many nations, that the founders of their legislation and religion were born from virgins, made to conceive by the Sun’s rays.[[565]] This element of the solar myth still operates in a story told by the Persian poet Ferîd al-Dîn ʿAṭṭâr, who introduces a maiden’s dream as follows: ‘Then the Christian maiden saw in a dream that a Sun fell into her lap, opened his mouth and said, etc.[[566]]’
§ 2. The sources of the ancient Hebrew mythology have preserved no less considerable remains of the Hebrew people’s myth of civilisation; and it moves in the same direction as has been indicated above. The invention of arts and manufactures, morals, law, and social order, is attributed to Solar figures. Especially note-worthy in this connexion is the fourth chapter of Genesis, where mention is made of the beginning of the building of cities, and of the invention of agricultural and of musical instruments; and the ninth chapter of the same book, in which the first commencement of social order secured by law is related. All this is attached to names of which other mythical features besides those concerning civilisation are recorded, features which point to their solar significance, and serve to fill up the story of the civilising activity of their bearers.
But the Solar figures are authors not of manufactures and civil order only: the human race itself has the Sun as its author, through whose children mankind is propagated. The name Âdâm, Abû-l-bashar ‘father of all flesh,’ as the Arabs call him, is, as is obvious at a glance, a solar appellation ‘the Red’; etymologically the same word as Edôm. When the Hebrew story of civilisation derives the human race from the Red one, it does the same as the Greeks when they call the mother of mankind Pyrrha ‘the Red.’[[567]] The Hebrews call the mother of mankind Chawwâ (Eve) ‘the mother of all that lives’ (Gen. III. 29),[[568]] i.e., ‘the Circulating’ (in Arabic ḥawa V), a name of the Sun, the feminine synonym of Zebhûlûn ‘the Round;’ a very ancient appellation of the Sun, the traces of which we meet also in the Vedas, where (Rigveda, I. 174. 5) the Sun is called a Wheel, or, as he frequently is in other passages, a Chariot. This is based not only on the conception of the Horses of the Sun drawing his chariot, but on the original conception of this chariot, as consisting of a single wheel or of a cylinder on a sloping plain, as Lazarus Geiger has admirably demonstrated.[[569]]
It is also to be considered that the mythological genealogy of the Hebrews makes the world to be peopled by the descendants of Cain, children of the Sun, and that a second progenitor of the human race, Noah, is likewise a solar figure. We must here of course disregard the late Seth-genealogy, at the time of the drawing up of which even the minimum of mythical conception necessary to the working-out of the Myth of Civilisation had already vanished. It is not impossible that originally two or even more now forgotten versions of the myth of population existed—one which called the first father of the human race Adam, and another which attached the propagation of mankind to the name Noah, and that then, by the interposition of the story of the Flood which made the whole human race perish, the two versions grew into harmony with one another in the popular mind. But in any case it is certain that the Hebrews made Solar figures the ancestors of mankind.
Thus among the Hebrews also it was the Solar myth that answered the question concerning the primeval origin of agricultural civilisation; and thus was completed the picture of what modern interpreters love to call the ‘Origins.’ It is this side of the formation of legends which maintains its life and productiveness longest among men. For there is always a latent instinct and powerful impulse in the mind of man to cancel all notes of interrogation, and to gain and to give intelligence on the origin of all that surrounds him. We well know how many stories are current in the mouth of the people, stories of comparatively modern origin, which have for their subject the rise of rivers, mountains and institutions. How charming are the Hungarian stories invented to explain the origin of the two great rivers which traverse that beautiful country! and who knows not into what petty details this impulse of the human mind pushes its way? It treats nothing as a matter of course and as sufficiently explained by the mere fact of its existence; it finds everywhere a Why and a How, that must be answered. It not only seeks reasons of existence, and dives into cosmogonies, for the overpowering universe of the world and the grander features of it, mountains and seas; but even what distinguishes one being from another—the ox’s horns and the camel’s short ears, the lion’s mane and the black stripes on the ass’s back—it cannot leave unexplained. It is the same noble instinct that created the fables on the origin of things, and that encourages the grand discoveries of the truths of natural history: the instinct that impels us to understand aright all that lies around us.
It may be affirmed that among the Semites this impulse to explain the origins of things maintained its longest existence as a living power, productive of stories. Even on the subjects on which the Biblical accounts gave information, men did not rest satisfied with these accounts, but allowed free and unlimited scope to stories.[[570]] A large part, indeed almost the whole, of the Arabian answers to questions concerning the Origins, is a Postislamic product of popular story. All that the Arabs learned on the subject from tradition or from stories still in process of formation was collected in works entitled Kutub al-awâʾil, or ‘Libri Principiorum.’ The best known and widest circulated of these, is the Kitâb al-awâʾil, written by Jelâl al-Dîn al-Suyûṭî, a voluminous writer of the tenth Mohammedan century, a part of which was published by Professor Richard Gosche, with an instructive introduction on literary history.[[571]] In former times it was so extensively circulated in the East that a revised version was also prepared, which was everywhere copied even before the clean copy (tabyîḍ) was made.[[572]] But several hundred years before al-Suyûṭî, an Andalusian scholar, Tâj al-Dîn b. Ḥammûyâ al-Sarachshî (born A.H. 576) had written a work in eight volumes on the Origins of Things; and I believe that this work, of which the classic historian of the Moors in Spain[[573]] gives an account, is the most extensive of its kind. In the above-quoted work, Gosche maintains the view that the whole Sêpher tôledôth, which is familiar to us as one of the original elements of which the composite Book of Genesis consists, was mainly concerned with these ‘Origins,’ and is the Hebrew representative of the copious Awâʾil literature of the Arabs. But we cannot admit this, when we consider that this book of sources, to judge from its known fragments, has rather a genealogical character, and, though containing the myths of civilisation, does not embrace the cosmogony, which is of a decidedly later origin. Therefore, if we must at any price find an analogy in Arabic literature to the Sêpher tôledôth, we ought rather to look to the many works composing the copious genealogical literature of the Arabs, called Kutub al-ansâb.[[574]]
§ 3. In regard to the Hebrew myths of civilisation we must pay attention to another circumstance; to do which we must again go back to what has been said above on the phases of development of the myths. In determining the amount of mythical matter which was worked out in any period of development of human civilisation, we must not, as was fully explained above, start from the materials and the elements employed in the myths in question, so much as from the direction or tendency of the myth and the general ideas which prevail in it. But yet this view requires some qualification, insofar as the designation of some human occupation is employed in the phraseology of the myth. I mention this with especial reference to the name Ḳayin (Cain), which denotes Smith.[[575]] It is obvious that this manufacture must have already existed in society before such a name could come to be employed in a myth. But, on the other hand, the myth of the war of the Sun with the Cloud or the Wind cannot have so recent an origin. We must accordingly concede to the Myth of Civilisation an influence upon the form of the mythic matter—an influence which not only produced an alteration in the tendency of the myth, but also introduced new names and figures, which, as is evident from the linguistic meaning of the names themselves, arose at the stage of conscious civilisation. The story of the murder of Abel belongs, no doubt, to the primitive myths which were already formed at the nomadic stage; a solar name must have been given to his murderer, just as in the dialectic variant of Hebhel (Abel), namely, Yâbhâl (Jabal), his father Lemekh (Lemech) is named as the murderer. Later, at the stage of the Myth of Civilisation, the murderer of Abel is called Ḳayin (Cain), the smith and inventor of agricultural implements, whose name is indeed also a solar appellation, but one that already belonged to the Myth of Civilisation. The same case occurs in the story of Jacob. Originally, in the nomadic myth, Jacob’s hostile brother was called Edôm, the Red, the Sun. For this name the Myth of Civilisation substituted ʿÊsâv (if we explain this as the Worker, the Accomplisher; see p. 139);—again a name which is essentially solar, but could arise only with the Myth of Civilisation.
In this wise the Myth of Civilisation, starting from the general ideas of the agriculturist, opened a wider circle of vision in the notions held of the Sun, and with the new enlarged circle created new names for the Sun, which then drove into obscurity some older appellations belonging to the primitive form of the myth.
§ 4. Before we conclude our diagnosis of the Myth of Civilisation, we will cast a momentary glance at the forms in which this group of myths shows itself in other Semitic nations. The founder of civilisation in the Assyrian and Babylonian myth is the Oannes of Berosus. ‘During the daytime Oannes held intercourse with men, taught them sciences and arts, the building of cities and temples, laws and the introduction of the measurement of planes; further, he showed them how to sow and reap: in a word, he instructed them in everything necessary to social life, so that after his time they had nothing new to learn.’ In a word, Oannes is the teacher of civilisation and inventor of all art and sciences, all law and order. That this founder of civilisation has a solar character, like similar heroes in all other nations, is shown in the very next words of Berosus: ‘But when the Sun set, Oannes fell into the sea, where he used to pass the night.’ Here evidently only the Sun can be meant, who in the evening dips into the sea, and comes forth again in the morning and passes the day on the dry land in the company of men. He is half fish half man, and in this respect identical with the Canaanitish Dâgôn, whose name denotes ‘Fish.’ Dâgôn also is, with the Assyrians as well as with the Canaanites, the god of fertility of the soil and founder of civilisation. He is ‘Inventor of the plough, distributor of grain, protector of the cornfield;’ and in Assyria we find him represented with his head covered by a horned cap.[[576]] The combination of the two characters is to be explained, not by supposing that the idea of the god of fertility was connected with that of the rapid propagation of the fish, but by the solar meaning given in mythology to the fish. It must not be overlooked that in this connexion the fish is always spoken of as rising out of the water—like the Sun, who, having passed the night in the water, issues forth again in the morning.