[1. GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE HEROIC AGE]
The expression 'the age of heroes and gods' may meet with objection no less than may 'totemic age.' The latter has an air of strangeness, because the conceptions of totem and totemism, borrowed from modern ethnology, have as yet remained unfamiliar to historians, and especially to the historians of civilization. The former expression may be objected to on the ground that the conceptions 'heroes' and 'gods' are altogether too familiar to be extended beyond their specific meaning and applied to an entire age. The word 'hero' suggests to us perhaps the Homeric Achilles, or Siegfried of the Niebelungen saga—those mighty, victorious warriors of epic song who, as we have already seen, gradually evolved out of the heroes of primitive märchen. It is self-evident, however, that, when applied to a great and important period of culture, the expression 'hero' must not be limited to the narrow meaning which it possesses in hero-lore. True, we must not go so far as does Carlyle when, in his "Heroes and Hero Worship," he begins the race of heroes with Odin of the Northmen and ends it with Shakespeare and Goethe, thus extending the heroic age from prehistoric times down to the present. Nevertheless, if we would do justice to the significance of the conception 'heroic' as applied to an important period of human development, we must be permitted to include under the broader conception 'heroic age,' not merely the heroic hero but also the hero who has factored in the spiritual realm, as the founder of cities or states, or the creator of religions. These latter heroes were gradually evolved, in the course of political and religious development, out of the ancient epic heroes; in them, the heroic age continues its existence after the heroes of the powerful and crafty types have disappeared. In this broader significance of the word, a hero is any powerful individuality whatsoever, and the general characteristic of this new age, therefore, is the predominance of the individual personality. Externally, this expresses itself primarily in the fact that the age regards even all past events as the deeds of individual persons. Bound up with this is a progressive individualization of human personalities, and a constant refinement of the crude distinctions that characterize the tale of adventure and the older hero-lore.
The gods of this age are likewise patterned entirely after powerful human personalities. They are anthropomorphic in every respect—human beings of a higher order, whose qualities, though found only among men, are magnified to infinitude. Just as the hero is a man endowed with more than ordinary human capacities, so the god is a hero exalted above the measure of earthly heroes. This itself implies that the hero necessarily precedes the god, just as man antedates the hero. Any fairly detailed account of this period, therefore, must deal with the hero before considering the god. The god is created after the image of the hero, and not, as traditional mythology still believes, the hero after the image of the god. It would, indeed, be a strange procedure for man first to create the ideal conception of his god and only subsequently to transform this into human outlines, and thus produce the hero. In the advance from man to the anthropomorphic god, the hero would surely already have been encountered. This, of course, does not imply that gods may not occasionally be transformed into heroes; it simply means that in the development as a whole the hero must have preceded the god. The relation here is precisely the same as that found everywhere else in connection with the development and degeneration of mythological conceptions. The fact of sequence, however, must not be interpreted to mean that we can point to a time in which there were heroes but no gods. Hero and god belong together. Both reflect an effort to exalt human personality into the superhuman. In this process, no fixed line may be drawn separating the hero, whose activity still falls within the human sphere, from the god, who is exalted above it. In fact, the differences between hero and god are by no means merely quantitative, measurable in terms of the elevation above the plane of human characteristics; the differentiating marks are essentially qualitative. The hero remains human in all his thought and action. The god, on the other hand, possesses not merely human capacities raised to their highest power, but also characteristics which are lacking in man and therefore also in the hero. Especially noteworthy among the latter is the ability through his own power to perform magical acts, and thus to interfere at will in the course of nature as well as in human life. True, the hero of saga and poetry also employs magical agencies. The means of magic which he controls, however, have been bestowed upon him by some strange demoniacal being, either by one of those demons which, in the form of a man, an animal, or a fantastic monster, are recognized even by the early mythical tales as magical beings, or by a god, who, as such, combines the highest qualities of the hero with those of the demon. The conception of an anthropomorphic god, therefore, results from a fusion of hero with demon. Of these, the hero is a new creation, originating in the mental life of this later age. He was long foreshadowed, however, first by the animal ancestor (especially in so far as the latter brought blessings and good fortune), and then by the subsequent cult of human ancestors. But the figure of the hero is not completely developed until the human personality enters into the very forefront of mythological thought; then, through regular transitions, the value placed on personal characteristics is enhanced until the ideal of the hero is reached. Doubtless the hero may still incidentally be associated with the ancestor, yet personality as such has now come so to dominate the interest of the age that in comparison with it the genealogical feature is but secondary.
Not so with the demon-idea. Though it has come down from very remote times and has assumed many forms as a result of varying cultural conditions, the demon has always remained a magic being, arousing now hope, now fear and terror. This was its nature up to the very time when the ideal of the hero arose. This new idea it then appropriated, just as it did, in earlier times, the ideas of a soul that survives the deceased, of the totem animal, of the ancestor, and of other mythological figures. The very nature of the demon has always been constituted by such incorporated elements. From this point of view, the god also is only a new form of demon. In its earlier forms, however, as spirit-demon, animal-demon, and, finally, even as ancestor-demon, the demon was an impersonal product of the emotions, and possessed characteristics which underwent constant transformations. When it became a hero, it for the first time rose to the level of a personal being. Through the enhancement of the qualities of the hero it was then elevated into the sphere of the superhuman. Thus it came to constitute a human ideal far transcending the hero. This accounts for the uniqueness of the god-conception, and for the fact that, though the god assumes the essential characteristics of the demon, the two are nevertheless more widely distinct than were any of the earlier forms of demon conceptions from those that anteceded them. The rise of the god-idea, therefore, ushers in a new epoch of religious development. Just because of the contrast between personal god and impersonal demon, this epoch may be designated as that of the origin of religion, in the narrower and proper sense of the word. The various forms of pure demon-belief are preparatory to religion; religion itself begins with the belief in gods. The relation which the belief in demons sustains to the belief in gods is another evidence that hero and god must be grouped together, for there can be no clearly marked temporal difference in the origin of these two ideals of personality. Just as soon as the figure of the human hero arises, it assimilates the demon-conception, which was already long in existence and which continually underwent changes as a result of the various ideas with which it came into contact. Alongside of the being that arose from this fusion, however, there continued also the hero in his purity, as well as the demon, whose various forms were at most crowded into the background by the appearance of the gods. To however great an extent, therefore, the age of heroes and gods may introduce a completely new spiritual movement that proves fundamental to all future culture and religion, it nevertheless also includes all the elements of previous development. These elements, moreover, are not merely present in forms that have been altered and in part completely changed by the processes of assimilation; side by side with such forms, there are always also the original elements, which may be traced back to the earliest beginnings of mythological thought. The dominant factor determining the character of this new age, however, is the hero. The ideal of human personality which the hero engenders in the folk consciousness conditions all further development, and especially the origin of the god. For this reason the 'age of heroes and gods' might also, and more briefly, be called the heroic age.
As the direct incarnation of the idea of personality, it is the hero about whom the new development of myth and religion centres. Similarly, the hero also stands in closest relation to the transformations that occur in all other departments of human life. Enormous changes in economic conditions and in the forms of life dependent upon them, new social institutions, with their reactions upon custom and law, transformations and creations in all branches of art—all give expression to the new development upon which this age has entered. Here also, just as at the beginning of the anteceding age, there are numerous reciprocal relations between these various factors. The hero and the god cannot be conceived apart from the State, whose founding marks the beginning of this period. Custom and law are just as much results of the new political society as they are themselves essential factors in its creation. Neither the State nor the worship of gods protected by it could survive apart from the great changes in economic life that took place at the beginning of this period, and that were further established and perfected in the course of time. Thus, here also each element reinforces every other; all the factors of life are in constant interaction. At the beginning of the totemic period, as we have seen, it was the new creations of mythological thought that constituted the centre from which radiated all the other elements of culture. At the beginning of the age of heroes and gods it is the creative power of the religious consciousness whose activities most accurately mirror the various spiritual achievements of the period.
[2. THE EXTERNAL CULTURE OF THE HEROIC AGE.]
The heroic era is so comprehensive and comprises so large a part of human history that any attempt to arrive at even the barest outlines of its external culture makes it clear that this culture is even less unitary than is that of the preceding period. The differentiation of phenomena naturally increases with advancing development. Even the various forms of totemic culture manifest wide differences in detail; indeed, when taken as a whole, they represent distinct stages. When we come to the heroic age, however, whose beginning is practically coincident with the beginnings of history in the usual sense of the term, and which includes within itself a large part of the succeeding course of events, the multiplicity and diversity of the forms of culture are incomparably greater. Every nation has its particular heroes, even though there are also certain general hero-types which everywhere recur. Even more does each nation have its gods. Heroes and gods are ideals created in the image of men, and therefore they always reflect—if possible, in a heightened degree—the characteristic differences of peoples. Nevertheless, amid all these differences of times and peoples, there are certain constant features that distinguish the heroic period both from the preceding age and from the era that follows. Most important of all these features is the establishment of the State. It was a long step from totemic tribal organization to political institutions. In the surge and press of the folk migrations which occurred at the beginning of the heroic period, traces of the preceding tribal organization were still everywhere present. Tribes did not change suddenly into States. Nevertheless, along with the emergence of the heroic age and its concomitant phenomena, there was a noticeable tendency towards the formation of a political order. This development pursued different courses, depending on the character of the nations or of their heroes and gods. It is primarily the resultant differences in political organization which, when considered in connection with the parallel changes in mythological and religious development, clearly show that in this period, just as in the totemic age, all other aspects of culture were closely dependent upon mythological and religious ideas. 'Totemism' connotes not merely a complex of mythological beliefs in which a certain stage of culture had its setting, but also a unique form of tribal organization, which, in spite of many differences of detail, remained constant in its general features. Similarly, political society, in the original form in which it long survived, was closely bound up with the heroic age, even though the increasing differences between national cultures led, from the very outset, to a greater diversity of forms than were to be found in the case of totemism. In spite of these differences, however, the factor fundamental to political society remained the same. The formation of States was always conditioned by individual rulership. This itself is indicative of the character of the age as a whole: its typical expression is to be found in the personalities of heroes and of gods. Again it was the migrations and wars of peoples that brought about the dissolution of the old tribal organization and the creation of political society. But these migrations and wars were on an incomparably broader scale and had more intimate interconnections than had previously been the case. This gave them a correspondingly greater significance, both intensively and extensively. As a matter of comparison, we may refer to the migrations of the Malayan race during the totemic age. It would be difficult to conceive of more extensive migrations. But they took place gradually, in separate waves, and left no traces, for the most part, beyond changes in the physical characteristics and in the languages of peoples. These migrations, which frequently involved long voyages across the sea, were carried on by but small numbers of people, who set out from restricted groups. It cannot be doubted that these migrations exercised an influence on the character and the culture of the resulting mixed races. They were never able, however, completely to transform the culture as a whole. Even when these tribal migrations occurred in oft-repeated waves, they never resulted in more than such imperfect beginnings of a political organization as we find among the Polynesians or, in other parts of the earth, among many of the semi-cultural peoples of America and Africa.
Quite different are the folk migrations that occur at the very dawn of the history of the great cultural peoples. The difference between tribal and racial migrations is an important one. When a race migrates, it retains its peculiar characteristics, its traditions, its heroes, and its gods, and transplants these into the new territory. True, these various elements do not remain unchanged. They inevitably become fused with the culture of the original inhabitants, and it is from these fusions, when they are at all deep-going, that new peoples arise. None of the great cultural nations that mark the beginning of this age of heroes and gods, from the Babylonians down to the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans, is homogeneous. Indeed, recent Babylonian investigations have shown that the Semitic immigration into Babylon was preceded by that of other peoples who were probably of different origin—namely, the Sumerians. We know of the latter only through linguistic traces in Babylonian inscriptions, of which, however, the religious parts, especially, show that the Sumerians exercised a great influence upon later civilization. Similarly, the settlement of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans in the territory which they eventually occupied, followed upon great earlier migrations to these regions. The people that finally formed the Greek race left the mountain country of Thrace and Thessaly in prehistoric times; wandering towards the sea, they fused with the original inhabitants of the regions into which they entered. In view of these migrations of early history, the theory of the desirability of racial purity, which has recently been so ardently championed in many quarters, is scarcely tenable. Political organization, on the one hand, and mythology and religion, on the other, represent important creations which for the most part sprang into existence only in the wake of migration and of the resultant fusion of peoples of different races.