An Introduction to Mythology

by Lewis Spence

Professor George Elliot Smith, of University College, London, has brought to the problems of archæology a mental freshness and originality of outlook that have placed him in the front rank of the science in a surprisingly short space of time. He is the chief supporter of the theory that by slow degrees the civilization of ancient Egypt spread itself over the habitable globe, even to far America. His sledge-hammer logic and array of excellent if rather limited illustrations are capable of daunting the most doughty opponent. In his recent book, The Evolution of the Dragon, he probes as deeply into the basic mysteries of mythology as Dr Rendel Harris, of whose work he says: "Our genial friend has been cultivating his garden on the slopes of Olympus, and has been plucking the rich fruits of his ripe scholarship and nimble wit. At the same time, with rougher implements and cruder methods, I have been burrowing in the depths of the earth, trying to recover information concerning the habits and thoughts of mankind many centuries before Dionysus and Apollo and Artemis and Aphrodite were dreamt of. In the course of these subterranean gropings no one was more surprised than I was to discover that I was getting entangled in the roots of the same plants whose golden fruit Dr Rendel Harris was gathering from his Olympian heights. But the contrast in our respective points of view was perhaps responsible for the different appearance the growths assumed. To drop the metaphor, while he was searching for the origins of the deities a few centuries before the Christian era began, I was finding their more or less larval forms flourishing more than twenty centuries before the commencement of his story. For the gods and goddesses of his narrative were only the thinly disguised representatives of much more ancient deities decked out in the sumptuous habiliments of Greek culture."

The Evolution of the Dragon contains three essays, "Incense and Libations," "Dragons and Rain-gods," and "The Birth of Aphrodite," all of which are of the first importance to students of mythic science, as illustrating the possibility of tracing evolved divine figures to their primitive forms. The first essay begins with Professor Smith's well-known hypothesis that the reasons for the adoption of custom are not "simple and obvious," and are not inspired by reason, but by tradition. Man is not an inventive animal, and two independent inventions of any custom, story, or article of utility are improbable. The part played by the ancient Egyptians in the development of certain arts and beliefs was a paramount one. The necessity for obtaining wood, spices, and gums for the mummification of the dead forced them to make long voyages; and consequently they became the missionary carriers of the religious customs and ideas they had evolved at home, disseminating these throughout the Mediterranean world. Professor Smith then traces the early idea of godhead to the apotheosized ruler or king, whose posthumous benevolence rendered the land fertile. He believes that animism received its definite form in Egypt, where it was fostered by the art of mummification, and spread thence broadcast. The development of animism was enormously complex. It received its first great impetus from an early Egyptian king who believed that he could restore the breath of life to the dead by means of the magic wand. Then the burning of incense before a body or statue was intended to convey to it the warmth, the sweat, and the colours of life. Mummification, indeed, "laid the foundation of the ideas which subsequently were built up into a theory of the soul: in fact, it was intimately connected with the birth of all those ideals and aspirations which are now included in the conception of religious belief and ritual." The development of animism, too, brought the supernatural idea of the properties and functions of water, an idea which had previously sprung up in connexion with agriculture, into a more definite form. It was a factor in the development of the paraphernalia of the gods and of current popular belief, of the temple and its ritual, and led to a definite formulation of the conception of deities.

The second essay, "Dragons and Rain-gods," is the longest of the three. The dragon legend, says Professor Smith, is the history of the search for the elixir of life. "The original dragon was a beneficent creature, the personification of water, and was identified with kings and gods." "The dragon myth, however, did not really begin to develop until an ageing king refused to be slain, and called upon the Great Mother as the giver of life to rejuvenate him. Her only elixir was human blood; and to obtain it she was compelled to make a human sacrifice. Her murderous act led to her being compared and ultimately identified with a man-slaying lioness or a cobra. The story of the slaying of the dragon is a much-distorted rumour of this incident; and in the process of elaboration the incidents were subjected to every kind of interpretation, and also confusion with the legendary account of the conflict between Horus and Set." Thus the Great Mother became confused with Horus as the avenger of the god, and legendary complications caused Horus to be regarded as her son. But the infamy of her deeds of destruction seems to have led to her being further confused with the rebellious followers of Set. "Thus an evil dragon emerged from this blend of the attributes of the Great Mother and Set."

It seems to me that this theory is much too complicated and multiplies difficulties, as will be seen if we ponder for a moment the history of the Mother-goddess in Mexico. In Mexican myth the earth is represented as a monster, Cipactli, the pictures of which suggest a crocodile, a swordfish, or a dragon, probably a dragon, that great earth-monster common to the mythologies of many races and most conveniently called the 'earth-dragon,' The sign 'Cipactli' became the first in the calendar, and with it are connected the creative deities and the Earth-Mother or Great Mother. Circumstances exist which lend colour to the idea that, as in other countries, the Mexican Mother was at one time regarded as forming the earth, the soil. At the terrible and picturesque festival of the Xalaquia ('She who is clothed with the soil') a sacrificed virgin enriched and recruited with her blood the frame of the worn-out goddess, who had been, says Seler, "merged in the popular imagination with the all-nourisher, the all-begetter, the earth." Perhaps the best evidence that the Earth-Mother was evolved from the earth-dragon is the colossal stone figure which once towered above the entrance to the temple of Uitzilopochtli in Mexico and is now housed in the museum of that city. In this figure, as in a similar though less massive statue from Tehuacan, the characteristics of the Cipactli animal are reproduced in a wealth of scale, claw, and tusk. The direct descent of the Great Mother from the earth-animal, the personification of the earth-beast as a divine being, explains her savage wantonness and spares us the necessity for the elaborate genealogy with which Professor Elliot Smith so ably dowers her. He cannot allege that Egypt had no earth-dragon, because Apep is alluded to in the Book of Overthrowing Apep as a crocodile and a serpent, and that he was developed from the earth-beast seems fairly clear. He might also say that the Mexican myth was a distorted echo of the Egyptian. But the evolutionary process is too apparent in Mexican art to permit of such an hypothesis.

The last paper, "The Birth of Aphrodite," traces that goddess, not to the mandrake, as Dr Harris does, but to the cowrie-shell. The cowrie was an amulet employed to increase the fertility of women, and in time came to be personified in statuettes. Hence arose the idea of a Great Mother, a giver of health, life, and good luck. "These beliefs," says the Professor, "had taken shape long before any definite ideas had been formulated as to the physiology of animal reproduction, and before agriculture was practised." It is impossible to quote more from the work of this most suggestive and stimulating of all modern writers on mythology, and I can only here warn my readers against the unwisdom of leaving his essays unread.

The great ability with which Professor Elliot Smith presents his thesis is as obvious as the probability of most of his ideas, but it seems to me that he regards them too much as proven facts, and that he fails to recognize the insecurity of hypotheses based upon the present inadequate data of early religious manifestations. These essays are the outcome of a brilliant mind impatient of the lumbering slowness of the mythological machine, and they show a kind of prophetic gift which pierces beyond proof, and may be accepted as infallible, if uncanny, or rejected as over-adventurous. For my part, I feel that Professor Smith is right in by far the greater number of his beliefs, but I can scarcely admit that he supplies me with sufficient proof. Rather would I say that his book affects me as a work of genuine theoretical inspiration and insight, and not as a cold catalogue of established facts. Professor Smith is the Galileo of mythology—a science which has brought forth many personalities of ponderous erudition, but few geniuses. This does not mean that he is illogical, or that his papers are not prepared with adequate and even meticulous care. It means that he is looking out of a casement through which he alone has the right of vision, and, seeing things so plainly as he does, he expects those who do not possess similar gifts to participate in his clairvoyance. His proofs, if few, are always apposite. The reviewer might wish that each of the essays occupied three portly volumes instead of a demy octavo book of 234 pages, and included a much larger number of confirmatory illustrations.

RECAPITULATION

The space allotted to this chapter would be greatly exceeded if we alluded to the numerous collectors of myth who have enriched the science with their labours. So far we have limited ourselves to the work of the great theorists, and we will now recapitulate their ideas, and draw therefrom our conclusions, accepting only what we believe to be correct and 'safe,' and adding our own inferences and deductions. Summarized, these ideas are as follows:

(1) The anthropological school showed that the identity between Aryan and savage myth could not be explained upon a linguistic basis.

(2) Tylor laid stress upon the value of the comparison of myth and the 'test of recurrence.' He did not entirely discount philological evidence, but denied the large place claimed for allegory.