The theological and Messianic traditions which we find recorded in Scripture, when compared with the Homeric theogony, will be found to correspond with a large and important part of it: and, moreover, with a part of it which in the poems themselves carries a cluster of distinctive marks, not to be explained except by the discovery of this correspondence. The evidence, therefore, of the meaning of this part of the Homeric system is like that which is obtained, when, upon applying a new key to some lock that we have been unable to open, we find it fits the wards, and puts back the bolt.
In his learned and acute Essay[29] on Comparative Mythology, Professor Max Müller undertakes to illustrate a doctrine that appears to be the exact opposite of Mr. Grote’s ‘Past which was never present.’ If I understand him rightly, there was at some one time a present for every portion of the reputed past[30]: so that, by a reference to eastern sources, the nature of that present, and of the original consistent meaning for what afterwards on becoming unintelligible is justly called a myth, has in many cases been, and may yet in many more come to be, unveiled. Originally impersonations of ideas and natural powers, the heathen gods never represented demons or evil spirits[31], and were ‘masks without an actor,’ ‘names without being:’ while their reality, consisting in their relation to the facts of the universe, faded and escaped from perception in the course of time. The myths of the Veda are still in the stage of growth: Hesiod and Homer too are of the ‘later Greeks,’ and not only the Theogony of Hesiod is ‘a distorted caricature,’ but the poetry of Homer[32] is extensively founded on myths fully grown, and in the stage of decay, that is to say, long severed from their corresponding deities.
I do not doubt that in all mythology at its origin, there has been both a shell and a substance: and that the tendency of the two to part company, which we see even under the sway of revealed religion, must have operated with far more power, where ordinarily at least, man was thrown back, without other aid, upon his reason and his conscience, beset as they were and are with overpowering foes.
But then, as it seems to me, we must anticipate great changes in the shell itself. It will not retain, when empty, the identity of the form; which has lost the support that it had from within when full. On the contrary, it will become unlike its original self, as well as unlike its archetype or substance, so that probably much of it must always remain without a key.
Upon the other hand, as there was already a true religion in the world when an untrue one began to gather upon and incrust it, there must arise the question already put; what, according to the theory before us, became of this true religion? It did not disappear in a day: there was no wilful renunciation of it by single or specific acts, no sharp line drawn between it and the false; but the human element was gradually more and more imported into the divine, operating by continual and successive disintegrations of the original ideas. If so, then there seems to be nothing unreasonable in the belief that the traces of them might long remain discernible in the adulterated system, even if only as the features of a man are discernible in the mask of a buffoon.
No doubt it would be unreasonable to look for such traces in Homer, if he were indeed, in the popular sense of the term, which probably Professor M. Müller does not intend, a later Greek; a Greek dealing with a mythological system of which his nation had already had its use, from which the creative principle had departed, and which was on the road from ripeness to decay. I am far from saying that there are no myths in Homer, where the original and interior meaning has ceased to be discernible: but I shall seek to show that the contrary may be confidently averred, and fully shown, with respect to the great bulk of his mythology, and that we see in him two systems, both alive, and in impact and friction, though with very unequal forces, one upon the other; the first, that of traditional truth, and the second, of the inventive impersonation of nature both material and invisible. And certainly it is very striking that, with one or two very insignificant exceptions, all those ancient fables, which Professor Müller treats as having become unintelligible without the key of the Veda, and which he explains by means of it, are fables unknown to Homer, and drawn from much later sources.
Steps of the downward process.
The general view, then, which will be given in these pages of the Homeric Theo-mythology is as follows: That its basis is not to be found either in any mere human instinct gradually building it up from the ground, or in the already formed system of any other nation of antiquity; but that its true point of origin lies in the ancient Theistic and Messianic traditions, which we know to have subsisted among the patriarchs, and which their kin and contemporaries must have carried with them as they dispersed, although their original warmth and vitality could not but fall into a course of gradual efflux, with the gradually widening distance from their source. To travel beyond the reach of the rays proceeding from that source was to make the first decisive step from religion to mythology.
To this divine tradition, then, were added, in rank abundance, elements of merely human fabrication, which, while intruding themselves, could not but also extrude the higher and prior parts of religion. But the divine tradition, as it was divine, would not admit of the accumulation of human materials until it had itself been altered. Even before men could add, it was necessary that they should take away. This impairing and abstraction of elements from the divine tradition may be called disintegration.
Before the time of Homer, it had already wrought great havock. Its first steps, as far as the genesis of the mythology throws light upon them, would appear to have been as follows: objectively, a fundamental corruption of the idea of God; who, instead of an Omnipotent wisdom and holiness, now in the main represented on a large scale, in personal character, the union of appetite and power; subjectively, the primary idea of religion was wholly lost. Adam, says Lord Bacon, was not content with universal obedience to the Divine Will as his rule of action, but would have another standard. This offence, though not exaggerated into the hideousness of human depravity in its later forms, is represented without mitigation in the principles of action current in the heroic age. Human life, as it is there exhibited, has much in it that is noble and admirable; but nowhere is it a life of simple obedience to God.