Now this foundation is exactly that on which Renan’s assumption of the absence of mythology from the Semites rests—an assumption which can by no means be admitted, first, because it is unhistorical; and secondly, because it would necessarily follow from it that race-distinctions differentiate the psychological bases of intellectual activity. ‘The Semites cannot form a myth,’ is a proposition the possibility of which could be allowed only if such an assertion as ‘This or that race has no digestive power, or no generative power,’ could be treated otherwise than as an a priori absurdity. But it is even more remarkable that Renan, notwithstanding his conviction of the ‘uniform psychological constitution of the human race,’ in which he finds the justification of a common story of the Deluge springing up everywhere without borrowing,[[54]] and although he finds the gaps in the chronology of the antediluvian period of the Biblical history filled up, ‘par des noms d’anciens héros, et peut-être de divinités qu'on retrouve chez les autres peuples sémitiques,’[[55]] still speaks of the possibility, indeed of the necessity, that the Semitic race should be destitute of myths.
Renan’s hypothesis had to encounter many a hard battle soon after its publication. The theologians were highly pleased at what was said about the monotheistic tendency of Semitism, but thought it blasphemy for Renan to find in Monotheism le minimum de religion and in Polytheism a higher and more civilised stage of religion. And philologists, historians and philosophers assailed the foundations of Renan’s pile. Steinthal subjects the notion introduced by Renan, of a monotheistic instinct, to acute psychological criticism. Max Müller does the same, and points to the history of the Hebrews and the other Semites, to resolve the dreams of Semitic Monotheism into their nullity. Abraham Geiger and Salomon Munk (Renan’s successor in the chair of the Collége de France) wish to limit to the Hebrew nation the assertion of Semitic Monotheism. Yet what is said about Mythology is not much objected to by any of these critics (with the exception of Steinthal). Indeed, one of the pioneers of modern Comparative Mythology, while combating the monotheistic instinct, takes up a position on the mythological question not very far from Renan’s own: ‘What is peculiar to the Aryan race is their mythological phraseology, superadded to their polytheism; what is peculiar to the Semitic race is their belief in a national god—in a god chosen by his people, as his people had been chosen by him.’[[56]]
Mythological science has at the present day ceased to hold fast to the divisions of race in relation to the formation of myths. At least it has acted so in relation to that class of nations which, though not exhibiting a single race or several closely connected races, has (faute de mieux) been termed the Turanian—a purely negative designation, which only asserts its members to be neither Semites nor Aryans. Max Müller himself wishes to see the Turanian mythology investigated by the same method which is employed in the Aryan; and he is not shaken by the result, which exhibits a striking identity between Aryan and Turanian myths. He is not shaken even by consideration of the psychological force, which must be taken into account in the first instance in the criticism and valuation of myths. ‘If people cannot bring themselves to believe in solar and celestial myths among the Hindûs and Greeks,’ says this leading investigator, ‘let them study the folk-lore of the Semitic and Turanian races. I know there is, on the part of some of our most distinguished scholars, the same objection against comparing Aryan to non-Aryan myths, as there is against any attempt to explain the features of Sanskrit or Greek by a reference to Finnish or Bask. In one sense that objection is well founded, for nothing would create greater confusion than to ignore the genealogical principle as the only safe one in a scientific classification of languages, of myths, and even of customs. We must first classify our myths and legends, as we classify our languages and dialects.... But there is in a comparative study of languages and myths not only a philological, but also a philosophical and more particularly a psychological interest, and though even in this more general study of mankind the frontiers of language and race ought never to disappear, yet they can no longer be allowed to narrow or intercept our view.’[[57]] Thus Müller also lays especial stress upon the psychological point of view, and, whatever he concedes to race-distinctions, still takes for granted the universality of the formation of myths as a psychological postulate. He exhibits, however, the application of his principle to the Turanian only in concrete examples. The Semitic, which, as we saw above, cannot be excluded in reference to the universality of the formation of myths, is left out altogether. Yet Müller appears in respect of the Semitic to have passed beyond the position on which he stood in 1860, when writing his essay ‘Semitic Monotheism.’[[58]] Advancing in the footsteps of the master, a recent American mythologist, John Fiske, has drawn the Turanian into the domain of comparative mythology, and worked out a portion of the American stories collected by Brinton,[[59]] according to the laws of the new method,[[60]] while the German Schirren, and also Gerland less completely, had already subjected the Polynesian myths to a similar treatment.[[61]]
This circumstance, that the stories of the so-called Turanian humanity lend themselves to the comparative method of investigation quite as easily as the legendary treasure of the Aryan nations, is a proof how common to all mankind is the mythological capacity, how false it is to follow ethnological categories and assign it to one race and deny it to another; and on the other hand, how the subject-matter, the perception of which forms the ground-work of the oldest mythology, is everywhere the same—the phenomena of nature and the contests of alternating elements. For very many and various races, incapable as yet of linguistic classification, endowed with the most diverse physical constitutions, inhabiting the most differing climates from the highest northern to the furthest southern latitudes, and speaking languages the most incongruous, have taken refuge in the vast unlimited house of Turanism, until legitimate parents are found for them. Turanism is therefore the best test of the controverted universality of mythological capacity. There is then no tenable reason why, for the sake of fair-sounding but meaningless distinctions, we should introduce the Semites into history with the loss of a nose, as it were, and interpret the history of the intellectual development of that race by a principle which essentially proclaims that the Semites were not born into life as infants, and never saw the sunlight till they were men, or even old men.
§ 4. Such reflections may have determined the French Assyriologist François Lenormant quite recently, to claim mythology for the Semitic race also; although in so doing he does not mention the Hebrews at all.[[62]] For, notwithstanding the alluring mythological subject-matter deposited in the literature of its traditions, the Hebrew nation has always been a stepchild of mythological inquiry, and still awaits an investigator to do full justice to it. It is easy to be understood that a mistaken religious interest, which identified itself with the Biblical literature and warned off mythological inquiry with an energetic Noli me tangere, sharpened, it may be, with a dose of canonical or uncanonical excommunication, blockaded the passage of investigation on this path. I call it a mistaken interest, because the true interests of religion are advanced, not imperilled, by the results of science. Disregarding men of the calibre of Nork and a few other inferior disciples of the school of Creuzer, we can affirm that, with the exception of a few essays, even the freest and most earnest interpreters of the Bible have examined, and do still examine, the Biblical books only as products of literature, bringing to light valuable results as to the times and tendencies of the original composition and subsequent editing of the several parts of the Canon. But on the origin and significance of the persons themselves who figure in the Biblical stories, even the freest interpreters are silent, as if the Hebrews were a people quite apart, and not to be measured by the measure of History and Psychology.
Even those who are willing to know something of Semitic myths in general resist the assumption of Hebrew myths. No one has defined his position on this point so unambiguously as Baron Bunsen, who has thought so much and so profoundly on religious matters. It is really extraordinary that this immortal man, who exerted so stimulating an influence on the studies of his young friend Max Müller, and who welcomed the latter’s pioneer-essay ‘Comparative Mythology’ with ‘especial pleasure’ at the ‘pure popular poetry of the feeling for nature,’ exhibited so little comprehension of the aims of the new direction given to mythological studies by Müller. His view of the connexion of the Aryan mass of mythology is consequently very confused. This is especially to be regretted, because the displacement of the true point of view in mythical speculation, and the continual concessions to Creuzer and Schelling, hindered him from making permanently useful the philosophical labour expended on the understanding of the Egyptian theology. Bunsen did not separate Religion from Myths, and consequently he sees what he calls Consciousness of a God in a genealogised and systematised Mythology. It is therefore not surprising that he advanced no further than his predecessors in relation to the Hebrew myths. He speaks of the ‘spirit of the Jewish people, historically penetrated through and through with aversion to mythology,’[[63]] and concentrates his thoughts on this theme in the sixth, seventh, and eighth of the theses in which he exhibits the relation of the Egyptian mythology to the Asiatic. According to these, ‘the Bible has no Mythology; it is the grand, momentous, and fortunate self-denial of Judaism to possess none.’ As if a myth—which Bunsen himself had called ‘pure popular poetry of the feeling for nature’—were an abomination, a defilement of the human mind, a sinful act voluntarily performed, which the Elect can deny themselves! On the other hand, ‘the national sentiment mirrored in Abraham, Moses, and the primeval history generally from the Creation to the Deluge, and the expression of it, are rooted in the mythological life of the East in the earliest times,’ and ‘in the long period from Joseph to Moses, there have been interwoven with the life and actions of this greatest and most influential of all the men of the first age [Abraham] and the history of his son and grandson, many ancient traditions from the mythology of those tribes from whose savage natural life the Hebrews were extracted, to their own good and that of mankind and for higher ends.’[[64]] According to this there are Myths belonging to the Hebrews, but not Hebrew Myths—only borrowed ones, obtained from ‘Primeval Asia.’
I have exhibited Bunsen’s position at some length, because, with all his advanced ideas on the essence and significance of Mythology, he still to this day dominates the minds of those who, while admitting the possibility of Semitic Mythology, are up in arms against the existence of Hebrew myths.
§ 5. Nevertheless, I hope it is clear from the above that Hebrew mythology is a priori possible. The following chapters will give occasion to prove in what this existence consists. It will then appear that the Hebrew myths, necessarily owing their existence to the same psychological operation as the Aryan or the so-called Turanian, must consequently have the same original signification as these. Hence the figures of Hebrew mythology denote the very natural phenomena whose appellations lie before us in those figures’ names. These names, however, are not symbolic,[[65]] but are antiquated appellatives of the natural phenomena denoted by them, just as the words, Sun, Moon, Rain, &c. This must be distinctly proclaimed, as some who misunderstand the modern method of Mythology pervert it in a false and antiquated way by the introduction of symbolism.
We must also beware of confounding the original Myth with Religion or, still worse, with the Consciousness of God. This confusion is the source of most of the erroneous estimates and notions of Mythology, which even the latest methods of investigating myths has not entirely removed. The very earliest activity of the human intellect can only work upon what falls immediately under the cognisance of the senses, and upon what through its frequency and the regularity of its return prompts men most readily to speech. Such things are the daily natural phenomena, the change of light and darkness, of rain and sunshine, and all that accompanies these changes. What primitive man spoke on these things, is the Myth. It is psychologically impossible that the earliest activity of the human mind should have been anything else but this. We cannot speak of a consciousness of God, a sensus numinis, as existing in the earliest Mythological period. Not till later, when some process in the history of language gives the ancient myths a new direction, do they turn into either History or Religion. The latter always arises out of the materials of Mythology, and then finds its historical task to be to work itself upwards into independence. Then, while the mythology out of which it sprang is growing less and less intelligible, and therefore also less and less expressive, Religion must in the progress of its development sever its connexion with Mythology, and unite itself with the scientific consciousness, which now occupies the place of the mythological.
How Mythology becomes Religion is shown most clearly by Dualism. Nothing can be less correct than the belief that the dualistic system of religion had from its very origin an ethical meaning. This, as well as the limitation of Dualism to Irân and Babylon,[[66]] is refuted by the frequent occurrence of the dualistic conception of the world among the most various savage peoples.[[67]] The ethical significance of Dualism is decidedly secondary; it is the form of development of the main theme of all mythology, the relation of light to darkness, proper to a higher stage of culture. Many mythological fancies, and especially the Sun’s voyage by ship in the nether world, became religious eschatological ideas when the mythical meaning itself was lost from the mind, and gave rise to new ideas of life in the nether world, resurrection, ascent to heaven, &c.; this was first established in reference to the old Egyptian mythology.[[68]] So also Dualism as it appears in Irân is a myth that has taken an ethical sense. This is best seen in the facts that the northern Algonquins, with whom Dualism is almost as fixed a principle as in Irân, call the good and evil principles respectively Sun and Moon, and that among the Hurons the Evil principle is the grand-mother of the Good:[[69]] the Night is the mother or grand-mother, or, in general, the ancestress of the Day. Here religious dualism has not quite put off the character of its origin in Mythology. On the other hand, the Iranic system at a very early age (that of the Avesta) elevated Dualism into the region of pure morals, and yet at a later (the epic period) formed out of the original myth the localised story of the war of Zohak against Ferîdûn.[[70]]