There are, of course, exceptions, such as Easter, from an old Teutonic goddess of the spring, Old Nick from ‘nicor’, a fabulous sea-monster, and nightmare from the demon Mara, while the concepts earth and lie (untruth) may possibly have been brought to birth in men’s minds by the divinities Erda and Loki. But compared with the number of derivations from older myths these examples are practically negligible. There is an accidental quality about them, and few have entered very deeply into our language. The Aryan family was now growing older and more firmly knit. While Slavs, Teutons, and Celts were still uncivilized, their cousins, the Greeks and Romans, had already developed an elaborate culture. Had the former been left alone like the latter, their mythology, too, might in time have grown down into the language. But that was not to be. The great Aryan family did not lose touch long enough. When Rome came, and with her Christianity, the missionaries naturally assured the believers in Thor and Wotan that Thor and Wotan were not. And coming, as they did, from a developed civilization, they not only ousted the old Teutonic gods from the language, but brought with them a supply of ready-made Greek and Latin words, many of which—did they but know it—drew their peculiar shades of meaning from a pagan mythology which they held in equal abhorrence. The classical gods and goddesses faded so slowly into the thin air of abstract thought that the process was hardly perceived, but the Nibelungs and Valkyries, the Siegfrieds and Fafnirs of Teutonic myth, were doomed while they were still alive. Thus our fathers beheld the death of Baldur with their own eyes, and were awake during the twilight of the gods.
Of course, where the events of Teutonic myth and legend were associated with a particular locality, they have left their mark in the names of places. These, naturally enough, are found for the most part in Germany. In Great Britain—apart from Asgardby, Aysgarth, Wayland Smith, Wansdyke, Wednesbury, and some others—the place-names that have come to us from pre-Christian religion are principally Celtic, and are usually found—like Cader Idris, Cader Arthur, Arthur’s Seat, Kynance Cove, ...—in Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. Apart from place-names, galahad is a relic of Celtic legend which has found a permanent place and a modern usage in the language; and there may be one or two others. But not many. In England the whole Celtic nation and language died early out of the common consciousness, and it died even more suddenly than the persons of Teutonic myth. This explains the freshness and delight which many young writers of the last generation found in the language and legend of Irish antiquity. To resuscitate, as Keats did, the invisible beings of classical mythology was to dig down into the roots of our present everyday outlook; to take part in the Celtic revival was to feel that you were looking out on the world through an entirely new window—or at any rate through one which had not been cleaned for centuries.
We only owe one English word to the Slavonic myths, and that is the unpleasant vampire, which was brought back from the East by travellers in the eighteenth century.
The general relation between language and myth is, as the word myth (Greek ‘muthos’—word) suggests, almost unfathomable; but before leaving the limited Aryan aspect, which is all we have had space to touch on here, one interesting etymology ought to be mentioned, which has sometimes been taken to conceal the whole root and purpose of Aryan culture in the history of mankind. The Hindoos look back to a great teacher called Manu. Whether this individual himself, or his name, is historical or mythical is not particularly important. Hindoo sacred language and literature reveal at any rate a prehistoric belief among certain classes of society that Manu was the originator of their culture and religion. Now ‘manu’ is also their word for man; and about this word, as it appears in the different Aryan languages, there are two interesting points. The first is that wherever it crops up it bears the double meaning of ‘human being’ and ‘member of the male sex’; the second that it is thought to be cognate with the root ‘men’, implying ‘to think’, which appears also in English mind, Latin ‘mens’,... We have seen that to the external view one of the most remarkable characteristics in which Aryans differed from the races they supplanted was their patriarchal system. The etymology of the word man suggests the inner reason for this, for it hints at a dim consciousness among the Aryans that the essential function of the human being—at any rate of the Aryan human being—is to think.
Side by side with the conception of the human being as a “thinker”, we find an instinctive feeling that the human race is especially represented by its male portion. To the Aryan outlook, wherever we find it, the human being is man, and God is God the Father. What exotic matriarchies may have held sway before humanity began to worship logic and masculinity we cannot say, for our language throws light only on that tiny portion of humanity’s inner and outer history which is the peculiar contribution of the Aryan races; and, in doing so, it suggests that, in spite of their tendency towards monogamy and a rigid family organization, the “subjection” of women has its roots very deep in Aryan psychology. In this respect Greece and Rome differed but little in essence from India and Persia. The impulse towards a different conception of women, both in their own minds and in the minds of men, which has been giving an increasing amount of trouble to the European races for the last two thousand years, was really, as we shall see, implanted in the Aryan outlook by foreign religions.
CHAPTER VI
PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
Paper. Mystery. Idea. Analogy. Analysis. Logic. Quantity. Heresy.
The difference between Greek and Roman character, which is marked so plainly by the way in which Aryan myths developed among the two peoples and moulded the finer meanings of their languages, is evident in many other English words besides those which we can actually trace back to such myths. For instance, the Greek ‘scandalizein’ and the Latin ‘offendere’ both meant to ‘cause to stumble’, but for us there is a subtle difference between scandalize and offend; for while scandalize and scandal merely hint at the liveliness of an emotion, offend and offence convey a sober warning of its probable results. ‘Discere’ in Latin and ‘mathein’ in Greek both meant to ‘learn’; but the substantives which are derived from these verbs have come down into our language, the one as discipline and the other as mathematics. Rome turned instinctively to the external, Greece to the inner world as a vehicle for the expression of her impulses. And just as ‘learning’ for the Roman gradually came to mean ‘learning to be a soldier’, so the ordinary Latin word for ‘teacher’ (doctor) is now applied most commonly to a teacher of physical health. And these two are not the only Latin words which have hurried out of school in this way. ‘Magister’, for instance, has exchanged the class-room for the police-court and left behind the Greek ‘paidagόgos’ (pedagogue) to express the most schoolmasterish kind of schoolmaster that can be imagined. Perhaps the most significant of all is school itself. Words for ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had to borrow it, like ‘schola’, from Greece. Yet, curiously enough, the original meaning of ‘schole’ in Greek was not school at all. What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin ‘schola’, from which we have taken school. But to a Greek all this had been merely the natural way of spending his spare time. ‘Scholē’ was the common Greek word for ‘leisure.’
Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in the night. And in their writings the Greek philosophers themselves allude to sources from which they may well have taken the seeds of abstract thought. References are made as early as Pythagoras and as late as Plato to the priestly wisdom of Egypt; and when we remember that the time which elapsed between the rise of Egyptian civilization and the birth of Homer is about as long as the period between Homer’s day and our own, we need not be surprised. Moreover, we find some evidence of the debt to Egypt in our language. Two almost indispensable prerequisites for the development of philosophy are the art of writing and something to write upon. It is interesting, therefore, to observe that our word alphabet comes to us, through Latin, from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet—‘alpha’ and ‘beta’—which are themselves in the first place Phoenician words. Greek mythology looked back to Cadmus, a Phoenician, as the founder of the alphabet, and it is now believed that the Semitic Phoenicians did indeed bring writing into Greece, and that they themselves took it from the ‘hieratic script’ or priestly writing of Egypt. Jot, in the phrase ‘jot or tittle’, is an English form invented by the translators of the Authorised Version for the Greek letter ‘iota’, which is also of Phoenician origin. Bible, on the other hand, is from the Greek ‘biblos’, which meant ‘the inner bark of the papyrus’, and so ‘a book’; and paper was borrowed by the Angles and Saxons from Latin ‘papyrus’, itself a transliteration of the Greek ‘papuros’, meaning an Egyptian rush or flag, of which writing material was made. Both these words are thought to be of Egyptian origin.