History in English words

by Owen Barfield

To turn from these nations to a member of the north-western group, such as Greece, is like passing from an arid desert into a land flowing with milk and honey. Panic and hero have already been mentioned. Iris (the flower, and also the part of the human eye), together with the beautiful word iridescent, have come to us from the Greek goddess Iris, whose outer form was the rainbow. Titanic is from the Titans, huge earth-beings who rebelled against God much as did the fallen angels in Genesis. Hermetically (in ‘hermetically sealed’) comes to us from the Greek messenger-god, Hermes, by a roundabout route (see [Chapter VII]); and in more or less common use are Aphrodisiac, Apolline, Asia, Atlas, chimera, daedal, Dionysiac, Elysian, Europe, Hades, harmony, lethal, Muse and music, mystery, nemesis, nymph, paean, panacea, phaeton, protean, satyr, siren, stygian. The word erotic, from Eros, a Greek god of love, is an interesting example of the way in which the experiences of past civilizations evaporate into essential refinements of modern speech. Because of differences between Greece and Rome, which it took about two thousand years to work out on the stage of history, we are now able to make a fine distinction, such as that between erotic and amorous.

The true Roman god of love, however, though in the world of phantasy he still survives in his original form, Cupid, has only actually entered our language in the word cupidity. In the difference between the material associations of cupidity and the more imaginative ones of erotic we begin already to divine a fundamental dissimilarity between Greek and Roman mythology. Other words which come to us from Roman religion are cereal, genius, fate, fortune, fury, grace, June, mint, money, Saturday, vesta, the names of the planets, contemplate, sacrifice, temple, Host (from ‘hostia’, the victim which was sacrificed), augury, and auspice. The last two words take us back to the Roman custom of divining the will of the gods by watching the flights of birds. ‘Aves-specere’ meant ‘to see birds’, and we still have the first word preserved to us in aviary. Fury and grace are translations of Greek names; but in some of the others—especially money and mint, from the goddess Moneta—we behold the late reflection of a highly significant process. It is this: As time went on, Roman religious feeling quickly changed in two almost opposite ways. On the one hand it attached itself more and more to concrete and material objects, and, on the other, its gods and goddesses were felt less and less as living beings, and more and more as mere abstract intellectual “conceptions”. Yet these two changes were not really opposite, but complementary. For as the visible part of a goddess like Ceres became more and more solid, as she came more and more to be used simply as a synonym for corn, the invisible part of her naturally grew more and more attenuated. Thus, the mythical world was much less real to the Romans than it had been to the Greeks. It was more like a world of mental abstractions.

Soon there was a “god”, or part of a god, for every object and every activity under the sun, and when the empire was founded, each emperor, as he died, automatically became a divinity. To-day the first two “divine” emperors, Julius and Augustus, take their places beside Juno, the Queen of Heaven, in our monthly calendar. We may say, in fact, that by the time Christianity began to spread in the Roman Empire, Roman official religion had become divorced from feeling altogether, its dry bones remaining little more than a convenient system of nomenclature. Not that the new religion had no serious rivals; but the doctrines of Stoics and Epicureans, the Mystery Schools, and cults such as that of Mithras, had little historical connection with Roman mythology. Yet if Rome contributed no discoveries of value concerning the relations of human beings to the gods, it was perhaps for this very reason that she was able to concentrate more exclusively upon working out their relations with each other; and in so doing she created jurisprudence.

But in the later days of the empire, when this attenuation of the imaginative and supernatural element in Roman mythology had already gone beyond its logical conclusion, when Rome had absorbed the myths of Greece and Egypt and sterilized them both, the soul of Europe was stirring afresh in the north. Contact between the Roman tongue and that of their subjects, the Celtic “Galli” in north Italy and beyond the Alps, had grown more and more intimate. Gradually there came into being a sort of hybrid Low Latin, the father of modern French and the other Romance languages, which in many cases expressed Celtic notions and feelings in Latin forms. So it was that new life came to be breathed into some of the dead abstractions of Roman mythology; but it was a very different life from the old one. Thus, the old Roman deity Sors (Chance) had long ago developed for the Romans into a purely abstract idea, referring to the drawing of lots. But up in the north, far away from the capital, the ‘sortiarius’ became a mysterious teller of fortunes by that means. As the years went on, the syllables softened and smoothed and shortened themselves, until they became the old French ‘sorcier’ from which ‘sorcerie’ was formed, and so our English sorcery. It is strange to think how far this word has travelled from its origin; and in the work of a modern poet we find it travelling even farther, changing from a process into a sort of mysterious realm:

Heart-sick of his journey was the Wanderer;

Foot-sore and sad was he;

And a Witch who long had lurked by the wayside,

Looked out of sorcery....

It was much the same with ‘Fata’. For the Romans themselves the old goddesses called the Fata, or Fates, turned quickly into an abstracted notion of destiny. But contact with the dreamy Celts breathed new life into their nostrils, and ‘Fata’ in Late Latin became spiritual once more. The sharp sounds were softened and abraded until they slipped imperceptibly into Old French ‘fée’ (Modern English fay), and so fa-ery and fairy. Demon is the result of a similar metamorphosis.

Now in dealing with mythology nothing is more misleading than to compare the gods of different nations, assuming that those who have etymologically similar names meant the same thing to their worshippers. For instance, it has been pointed out that the name Tiu descends from a word which also developed elsewhere into Dyaus and Zeus, but to suggest that Tiu was the “same god” as Zeus would be quite meaningless. And it is the same with the other persons of northern mythology, such as Thor, the thunder-god, from whom we have Thursday, or Wotan (Odin) who taught men language and gave up his eye in order to possess his beloved Fricka (Wednesday and Friday). There are many external resemblances, etymological and otherwise, between this Teutonic mythology and the mythology of Greece, but for the historical study of human consciousness it is the differences between them which are really significant. Here there is no room to consider either the resemblances or the differences, except in so far as they are preserved for us in the words we use. And we notice at once how small is the number of our words which refer to the Teutonic myths. Where relics still remain they seem to be either—like elf, goblin, pixy, puck, troll—the names of the creatures themselves, still used but no longer felt to exist, or else—like cobalt and nickel, the names given by German miners to demoniac spirits—they have lost all memory of their original meaning.