If the movements of Eos are inexplicable, they are not without a certain picturesqueness. But what shall we say of the myth concerning Saturn, who, on account of a prediction that he would be killed by his children, swallowed them as soon as they were born, with the exception of Jupiter, who was saved by the substitution of a stone, which Saturn afterwards brought up with the children he had swallowed. Or again, what can be said of the feast offered to the gods by Tantalus to test their omniscience; he caused the members of the body of his son Pelops to be mixed with other meats; a shoulder was eaten before Jupiter discovered the deception; he ordered the remainder to be thrown into a copper from which Pelops emerged alive with one shoulder lacking, and one made of ivory was given to him. Can anything more grotesque be imagined? And our children are subjected to this regimen, and their memories charged with these fables, under the pretext that they will the better appreciate the chefs-d’œuvre of classical literature.
The enigmatical part of this period of language will be more evident if we examine the early traditional history which began at its close, and at which time a light appeared in Greece destined to flood the world with a splendour hitherto unknown; it was the epoch which produced Thales, Pythagoras and Heraclitus, who, in the midst of much ignorance, had thoughts of wonderful lucidity. A national literature was beginning, where we find indications of the germs of political societies; the creation of laws, and the development of morals. And we ask ourselves: Whence come these sages? Who were their masters? How could these glorious days of Greek civilisation have been preceded by several generations whose principal occupation seemed to consist in inventing and repeating to satiety absurd fables concerning gods, heroes, and other beings whom no human being had ever seen; which fables contravene the simplest principles of logic, morality and religion? The ancient sages themselves were harsh in their judgment of these revolting stories contained in Grecian mythology; Xenophanes, a contemporary of Pythagoras, considered Hesiod and Homer responsible for these superstitions, and blamed them for attributing to the gods all that was most reprehensible in man. Heraclitus was of opinion that Homer deserved to be banished from the public assemblies, and Plato wrote, “Mothers and nurses tell their children stories full of misstatements and immoralities which are gathered from the poets.”
Thus spoke philosophers 500 years before our era, because they knew that if the “gods commit anything that is evil they are no gods.”
“Taken by themselves and in their literal meaning, most of these ancient myths are absurd and irrational, and frequently opposed to the principles of thought, religion, and morality which guided the Greeks as soon as they appear to us in the twilight of traditional history.”[47]
Many explanations have been sought to account in a rational manner for these strange tales; writers have striven to discover what can have given rise to such ridiculous inventions; some have asserted that it was the intention of the authors of mythology to convey to the people a knowledge of certain facts of nature, and certain moral truths whilst clothing them in allegorical form, and by endowing the divinities with certain virtues which it would become men to imitate and acquire; and that the worship of these divinities was instituted that man might be more fully impressed, that the likeness of the virtues upheld might be more deeply engraved in the heart of the pious worshipper. Zeus, was mind; Athene, art; Hercules, energy and perseverance in labours of great difficulty; whilst the Homeric heroes, Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hector represented physical activities. According to another theory the object with which the myths were composed was political, the laws of government were supposed to emanate from the gods; and whoso refused to recognise the excellence of the institutions of the country was held to be in revolt against the gods themselves. The philosopher Euhemerus was the author of a third theory, called the historical; he represented the mythological personages not as gods, but as kings, heroes, and philosophers, who, after their death, had received divine honours among their fellow men; in this system Eolus, the god of the winds, became a skilful mariner who could foretell atmospheric changes; Atlas, supporting the sky and earth on his wide shoulders, had been formerly a great astronomer; Jupiter, a ruler of Crete; Hercules, a knight-errant. Although these ancient writers interpreted the fables in so many different ways, they all agreed in denying that an atom of truth is found in these stories concerning the gods, and they insisted that no myth must be taken au pied de la lettre. At a later period it was thought that reminiscences of a barbaric age could be found in which the ancestors of the Greeks apparently occupied themselves by stealing, killing, deceiving, and eating their offspring. “Lactantius, St Augustine, and the first missionaries, in their attacks on the religious belief of the Greeks, and Romans availed themselves of these arguments of Euhemerus, and taunted them with worshipping gods that were no gods, but known and admitted to have been merely deified mortals.”[48] In later times the same theory was revived; certain theologians, rather lacking in penetration, looked to Greek mythology for traces of sacred personages, they imagined that they could recognise in Saturn and his three sons, Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the features of Noah and his sons, Ham, Japhet, and Shem; and in a recently published book the author suggests that when Hesiod describes the garden of the Hesperides, we have a tradition of the garden of Eden.
Thus from the moment when, for the first time, the ancient philosophers questioned “why?” from the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, to our own practical and matter-of-fact century, mythology has not ceased to compel attention, and to furnish endless matter of conjecture. Learned writers have sought in physical sciences, history, and metaphysics, an explanation of this phenomenon; but in spite of this vast labour inspired by a love of science, and carried on for more than two thousand years, the secret of the sphinx of mythology remains undisclosed, and we still ask, “what is mythology?” Is it an invention of Homer and Hesiod? Or is it a phase in the development of the human mind, a deviation in the growth of reason?
The school of philology has a solution of its own to offer; will it be as futile as the others? After hearing it shall we still say the Sphinx is mute? This school takes upon itself to assert that the explanation of the mystery can only be found in the Science of Language. It is a fact that the history of language—which is the history of the human mind—enables us to answer the preceding questions categorically. Yes. Mythology was inevitable, an inherent part of language itself, to be considered, not as a simple external symbol, but as the only incorporation of thought possible. Mythology, in the widest acceptation of the term, is the shadow which language casts on thought; and the whole history of philosophy from Thales to Hegel has been one uninterrupted struggle with mythology, a constant protest between thought and language.
CHAPTER VII
MYTHS
In order to appreciate truly our neighbour’s impressions and points of view, we must constantly detach ourselves from our own special way of seeing and feeling; this habit of abstraction—which is most difficult to every one—is indispensable when we are endeavouring to understand the natures of persons who lived many thousands of years ago, and who thought and spoke in a totally different manner from ourselves.
In seeking to grasp the phraseology of myths we perceive that its chief elements consist in a repetition of phrases in which the acts of nature are used as embodiments of the idea, under the figures of day and night, dawn and twilight, the sun and the moon, the heavens and the earth, as they stand in relation to man.