CHAPTER V
MYTH
Panic. Tuesday. Money. Sorcery. Man.
Let us take two common English words, panic and cereal, and compare them etymologically; we owe both of them to the personages of classical mythology. Cereal comes to us from Ceres, the Roman goddess of corn and flowers, and panic is from Pan, a Greek Nature-god, who was regarded as the protector of flocks and herds. But here the resemblance ends; for not only is one Latin and the other Greek, but one is the name of an object which we can touch and see, while the other relates to that inner world of human consciousness which cannot be grasped with hands. Now it is important to notice that the word is very much more closely connected with the thing in the case of panic than in the case of cereal. Certainly, we are interested to know that one of our words for corn is derived from the name of a Roman goddess, but we do not feel that it has much effect on our own ideas about corn. We feel, in fact, that a study of the word cereal will tell us something about Rome, but very little either about corn or about ourselves. With panic it is different. In that intangible inner world words are themselves, as it were, the solid materials. Yet they are not solid as stones are, but rather as human faces, which sometimes change their form as the inner man changes, and sometimes, remaining practically unaltered, express with the same configuration a developed personality. “Human speech and human thought,” said the psychologist, Wundt, “are everywhere coincident.... The development of human consciousness includes in itself the development of modes of expression. Language is an essential element of the function of thinking.”
There was a time when no such word as panic existed, just as there was a time when no such word as electric existed, and in this case, as in the other, before the word first sprang into life in somebody’s imagination, humanity’s whole awareness of the phenomenon which we describe as ‘panic’ must have been a different thing. The word marks a discovery in the inner world of consciousness,[22] just as electric[23] marks a discovery in the outer world of physical phenomena. Now it was said that the connection of the latter word, in its Greek form, with amber would be informative if we had no other means of determining the electrical properties of that substance. Words like panic are important, because we really have no other means of determining how the ancients, who lived before the days of literature and written records, thought and felt about such matters. The word enables us to realize that the early Greeks could become conscious of this phenomenon, and thus name it, because they felt the presence of an invisible being who swayed the emotions of flocks and herds. And it also reveals how this kind of outlook[24] changed slowly into the abstract idea which the modern individual strives to express when he uses the word panic. At last, as that idea grows more abstract still, the expression itself may change; yet, just as the power to think of the “quality” of an article was shown to be the gift of Plato, so it would be impossible for us to think, feel, or say such things as ‘crowd-psychology’ or ‘herd-instinct’ if the Greeks had not thought, felt, said ‘Pan’—as impossible as it would be to have the leaf of a plant without first having a seed tucked into the warm earth. Hero, which originally meant a being who was half-human and half-divine, is a similar descendant from Greek religion which could not be extinguished from our vocabulary without restricting our outlook.
As to the number of words which are indirectly descended from prehistorical religious feeling, it is not possible to count them. We can only say that the farther back language as a whole is traced, the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence or malignance—what may be called the soul-qualities—of natural phenomena, such as clouds or plants or animals, make a more vivid impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances.[25] Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical influence. But, as the period which has elapsed since the beginning of the Aryan culture is only a tiny fragment of the whole epoch during which man has been able to speak, it is only in glimpses that we can perceive this; in a word here and a word there we trace but the final stages of a vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind of outlook which we loosely describe as ‘mythological’ to the kind which we may describe equally loosely as ‘intellectual thought’. To comprehend the process fully, we must build up the rest of it in the imagination, just as, from seeing a foot of cliff crumble away at Dover, we may set wings to time and call up the immemorial formation of the English Channel.
The English words diurnal, diary, dial are derived from the Latin ‘dies’ (day), while journal comes to us, via the French language, from the same word. These syllables conceal among themselves the central religious conception common to the Aryan nations. As far back as we can trace them, the Sanskrit word ‘dyaus’, the Greek ‘zeus’ (accusative ‘dia’), and the Teutonic ‘tiu’ were all used in contexts where we should use the word sky; but the same words were also used to mean God, the Supreme Being, the Father of all the other gods—Sanskrit ‘Dyaus pitar’, Greek ‘Zeus pater’, Illyrian ‘Deipaturos’, Latin ‘Juppiter’ (old form ‘Diespiter’). We can best understand what this means if we consider how the English word heaven and the French ‘ciel’ are still used for a similar double purpose, and how it was once not a double purpose at all. Indeed, there must still be English and French people for whom the spiritual ‘heaven’ is identical with the visible sky. But if we are to judge from language, we must assume that when our earliest ancestors looked up to the blue vault they felt that they saw not merely a place, whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture, as it were, of a living Being. And this fact is still extant in the formal resemblance between such words as diary and divine.
The French ‘Dieu’, with its close resemblance to ‘dies’, retains the luminous suggestion of day and sky very much more vividly than any of our words from the same stem, but we have kept the Teutonic form nearly intact in Tuesday. The fact that ‘Tiu’s day’ came in as a translation of the Latin ‘Dies Martis’ (surviving in French ‘mardi’) also suggests that for the Teutons, alone among the Aryans, the supreme Father-God afterwards became their god of war; and this may throw some light both on their fundamental character and on the nature of the experiences which they encountered during the thousand odd years of their sojourn in the northern forests.
It must not be assumed that the “ancestors” spoken of above are identical with the Aryans described in [Chapter I]. By the time of the dispersion the thought of “sky” may have been quite separated in the average Aryan mind from the thought of “God”, or it may not have been. We cannot say; we only know that at one time, among the speakers of the Aryan language, these two thoughts were one and the same. It is impossible to fix a point in time, and then to cut a kind of cross-section, and define the exact relation between language and thought at that particular moment. This relation—and especially in the domain of religion—is a fluid and flickering thing, varying incredibly in individual minds, leaping up and sinking down like a flame from one generation to another. Consequently no two theories on the religious beliefs held by the Aryans in the third millennium B.C. are alike; and we are concerned here only with those modern words which are the product of Aryan religious consciousness at some time or another in its history.
They come to us, naturally, by different routes, a few by the south-eastern and any number by the north-western group. Pariah, a non-Aryan word which has come into our language from the East, derives its peculiar forcibility from the age-old division of India’s population into castes. Ignite is from the Latin ‘ignis’, which is derived from the same parent word as the Sanskrit ‘Agni’, the fire-god. In magic we have a reminiscence of the Persian ‘Magi’, mighty prophets and interpreters of dreams, of whom three were said to have found their way to Bethlehem; but unless it be in the modern trade-name Mazda, there is little, if any, trace in our language of the great Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, with its everlasting conflict between light and darkness, Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman. The meagreness in our language of these relics of Hindoo and Persian religion is again eloquent of the total separation of the north-western and south-eastern Aryans. The whole vast structure of Eastern philosophy, with its intricate classifications cutting completely across our own, was practically a sealed book to the West until after the French re-established a commercial connection with India in the eighteenth century. Signs are not wanting, however, that the rapid growth of interest in this ancient and lofty outlook, which has taken place in Europe during the last fifty years, may enrich our vocabulary with some extracts from the ancient terminology, such, for example, as maya—the soul’s external environment considered as being ‘illusion’, or as obscuring and concealing the spiritual reality, and karma, the destiny of an individual as it is developed from incarnation to incarnation.