[13. COSMOGONIC AND THEOGONIC MYTHS.]
In view of the relationship of heroes and gods, not only with respect to origin but also as regards the fact that they both embody personal ideals, it would appear but natural, having treated of the hero saga, that we inquire at this time concerning the corresponding deity saga. A search for the latter, however, will at once reveal a surprising fact. There is no deity saga at all, in the sense in which we have a hero saga that has become a favourite field of epic and dramatic poetry. The reason for this lack is not difficult to see. There can be no real deity saga because, in so far as gods possess characteristics which differentiate them from men, and therefore also from heroes, they have no history. Immortal, unchangeable, unassailable by death or sickness, how could experiences such as befall the hero also be the lot of gods? If we examine the narratives that approach somewhat to the deity saga, we will find that they consist, not of a connected account of the experiences of the gods, but of isolated incidents that again centre about human life, and particularly about the beneficent or pernicious intervention of the gods in the destinies of heroes. We may recall the participation of the Greek gods in the Trojan war, or the interest of Jahve, in Israelitic saga, in the fortunes of Abraham, Jacob, etc. These are isolated occurrences, and not history; or, rather, we are given the history of heroes, in which the gods are at times moved to intervene. In so far, therefore, as there are approximations to deity saga, these, in their entirety, are woven into hero saga; apart from the latter, the former but report particular actions, which may, doubtless, throw light on the personal character of the god, but which of themselves do not constitute a connected history. Greek mythology offers a clear illustration of this in the so-called Homeric hymns. These hymns must not be ascribed to Homer or merely to singers of Homeric times. They are of later composition, and are designed for use in cult. Their value consists precisely in the fact that they portray the god by reference to the various directions of his activity, thus throwing light partly on the nature of the god and partly, and especially, on his beneficent rulership of the human world. It is this last fact that gives these poems the character of religious hymns.
Nevertheless, there is one class of myths in which the gods themselves actually appear to undergo experiences. I refer to those sagas and poems which are concerned with the birth of the gods, and with the origin of their rulership over the world and over the world-order which they have created, namely, to the cosmogonic and theogonic myths. These myths relate solely to a world of demons and gods, and they deal, as a rule, with an age prior to the existence of man, or with one in which the creation of man is but a single episode. Again, however, one might almost say that the exception proves the rule. For upon close examination it will be found that the gods who figure in these cosmogonies are not those with whose traits the hero saga, and the hymnology connected with it, have made us familiar. The gods whom the cosmogonic myths portray differ from those who protect and direct human life. They are not real gods, even though they bear this name, but are powerful demons. Except in name, the Zeus of Hesiodic theogony has scarcely anything in common with the Zeus of the Homeric hierarchy of gods. This fact does not reflect any peculiarity of the poet, as it were, but is due to the nature of the subject-matter itself. Even though theogonic myths were not elaborated into poetic form until a relatively late period, they are nevertheless of a primitive nature. Analogues to them had existed among primitive peoples long before the rise of the hero saga, hence at an age when the preconditions of god-ideas proper were still entirely lacking. The cosmogonic gods of the Greeks and Germans, as well as those of the ancient Babylonians, are of the nature of purely demoniacal beings. They lack the chief attribute of a god, namely, personality. Moreover, the myths themselves—if we disregard their form, which was the product of later literary composition—are not at all superior to the cosmogonies of the Polynesians and of many of the native tribes of North America. Obviously, therefore, it betokens a confusion of god-ideas proper with these cosmogonic beings, when it is maintained, as sometimes occurs, that the mythology of these primitive peoples, especially that of the Polynesians, is of a particularly advanced character. This should not be claimed for it, but neither may this be said of the Hesiodic theogony or the Babylonian creation myths. It is true that these myths are superior to the earlier forms of demon belief, for they at least develop a connected view of the origin of things. Primitive myth accepts the world as given. The origin of the world-order as a whole still lies beyond its field of inquiry. Though it occasionally relates how animals came into being, its imagination is essentially concerned with the origin of man, whom it regards as having sprung from stones or plants, or as having crept up out of caves. Even when this stage is transcended and an actual cosmogony arises, the latter nevertheless remains limited to the circle of demon conceptions, which are essentially the same in the myths of civilized peoples as in those of so-called peoples of nature. According to a cosmogonic myth of the Polynesians, for example, heaven and earth were originally a pair of mighty gods united in embrace. The sons who were born to these gods strove to free themselves and their parents from this embrace. Placing himself on the floor of mother earth, therefore, and extending his feet toward the heavens, one of these sons pushed father heaven upward, so that ever since that time heaven and earth have been separated. This mistreatment aroused another of the divine sons, the god of the winds. Thus a strife arose, whose outcome was a peaceful condition of things. This is a cosmogonic myth whose essential elements belong to the same circle of ideas as the cosmogony of the Greeks. In the latter also, Uranus and Gæa are said to have held each other in an embrace, as the result of which there came the race of the Titans. One might regard this as a case of transference were the idea not obviously a grotesque development of a märchen-motive found even at a more primitive period. According to the latter, heaven and earth were originally in contact, and were first separated by a human being of prehistoric times—an idea undoubtedly suggested by the roofing-over of the hut. The Babylonian myth gives a different version of the same conception. It ascribes the separation of heaven and earth to the powerful god Marduk, who cleaves in two the original mother Thiamat. From one part, came the sea; from the other, the celestial ocean. As in many other nature myths, heaven is here conceived as a great sea which forms the continuation, at the borders of the earth, of the terrestrial sea. This then suggests the further idea that the crescent moon is a boat moving over the celestial ocean.
In all of these myths the gods are given the characteristics of mighty demons. They appear as the direct descendants of the ancient cloud, water, and weather demons, merely magnified into giant stature in correspondence with their enormous theatre of action. Thus, as regards content, these cosmogonic myths are märchen of a very primitive type, far inferior to the developed märchen-myths, whose heroes have already acquired traits of a more personal sort. In form, however, cosmogonic myths strive towards the gigantic, and thus lie far above the level of the märchen-myth. Though the complete lack of ethical traits renders the gods of cosmogonic myths inferior in sublimity to gods proper, they nevertheless rival the latter in powerful achievement. Indeed, however much cosmogony may fail to give its gods the characteristics requisite for true gods, it does inevitably serve to enhance the divine attribute of power. A further similarity of cosmogonic and theogonic myths to the most primitive märchen-myths appears in the fact that they seem directly to borrow certain elements from widely disseminated märchen-motives. I mention only the story of Kronos. Kronos, according to the myth, devours his children. But his wife, Rhea, withholds the last of these—namely, Zeus—giving him instead a stone wrapped in linen; hereupon Kronos gives forth, together with the stone, all the children that he had previously devoured. This is a märchen of devourment, similar or derivative forms of which are common. For example, Sikulume, a South African märchen-hero, delays pursuing giants by throwing behind him a large stone which he has besmeared with fat; the giants devour the stone and thus lose trace of the fugitive.
But there is also other evidence that cosmogonic myths are of the nature of märchen, magnified into the immense and superhuman. In almost all such myths, particularly in the more advanced forms, as found among cultural peoples, an important place is occupied by two conceptions. The first of these conceptions is that the creation of the world was preceded by chaos. This chaos is conceived either as a terrifying abyss, as in Germanic and particularly in Greek mythology, or as a world-sea encompassing the earth, as in the Babylonian history of creation. In both cases we find ideas of terrible demons. Sometimes these demons are said to remain on the earth, as beings of a very ancient time anteceding the creation—examples are Night and Darkness, described in Greek mythology as the children of Chaos. Other myths represent the demons as having been overcome by the world-creating god. Thus there is a Babylonian saga that tells of an original being which enveloped the earth in the form of a snake, but whose body was used by the god in forming the heavens. As a second essential element of cosmogonies we find accounts of battles of the gods, in which hostile demons are vanquished and a kingdom of order and peace is established. These demons are thought of as powerful monsters. They induce a live consciousness of the terrors of chaos, not only by their size and strength but often also by their grotesque, half-animal, half-human forms, by their many heads or hundreds of arms. Obviously these Titans, giants, Cyclopes, and other terrible beings of cosmogony are the direct descendants of the weather demons who anteceded the gods. Does not the idea of a world-catastrophe that prepares the way for the rulership of the gods at once bring to mind the image of a terrible thunderstorm? As the storm is followed by the calm of nature, so chaos is succeeded by the peaceful rulership of the gods. Inasmuch, however, as the gods are the conquerors of the storm demons, they themselves inevitably revert into demoniacal beings. It is only after the victory has been won that they are again regarded as inhabiting a divine world conceived in analogy with the human State, and that they are vested with control over the order and security of the world.
All this goes to show that cosmogonic myths, in the poetic forms in which cosmogonies have come down to us, are relatively late mythological products. True, they represent the gods themselves as demoniacal beings. Nevertheless, this does not imply that god-ideas did not exist at the time of their composition; it indicates merely that the enormous diversity of factors involved in the creation of the world inevitably caused the gods to lose the attributes of personal beings. The cosmogonies of cultural peoples, however, differ from the otherwise similar stories of those semi-cultural peoples whose mythology consists exclusively of such cosmogonic märchen. In the latter case, real god-ideas are lacking. The gods have remained essentially demons. In the higher forms of this semi-culture, where political development has had an influence on the world of gods, as was once the case among the peoples of Mexico and Peru, divine beings may approximate to real gods. In cosmogonic myths themselves, however, this never occurs. Thus, these myths invariably constitute a stage intermediate between the mythology of demons and that of gods; they may originate, however—and this is what probably happens in the majority of cases—through a relapse of gods into demons. An illustration of the latter is the Hesiodic cosmogony. The weather-myth which the poet has elaborated obviously incorporated ancient märchen-myths that do not differ essentially from the original märchen as to content, but only as respects their grotesque and gigantic outlines. Compared with the gods of the hero saga, therefore, the cosmogonic myths of cultural peoples are of relatively late origin; to discuss the latter first, as is still done in our accounts of the mythology of the Greeks, Germans, etc., may easily lead to misconceptions. Of course, the creation of the world came first, but it is not at all true that the myth of the world's creation anteceded all others. On the contrary, the latter is a late and sometimes, perhaps, the last product of the mythological imagination. This is particularly apt to be the case where, as so clearly appears in the Biblical account of the creation, there is involved a specific religious impulse that is seeking to glorify the world-creating god. This religious impulse imposes upon the older mythical material a new character. Hence we find that, of the two elements universally characteristic of the cosmogonic myth, it is only the idea of chaos that is retained, while the account of struggles with the monsters of earliest times disappears. Nevertheless, though the creating god has lost his demoniacal character, he has not yet attained a fully developed personality;—this is precluded by the enormity of the world, which transcends all human measure. He himself is in every respect an unlimited personal will, and is, therefore, really just as much a superpersonal being as the battling gods of other cosmogonies are subpersonal. That such a cosmogony, unique in this respect, may be original, is, of course, impossible. Indeed, the dominant conviction of Oriental antiquarians to-day is that the Biblical account of the creation rests on older and more primitive ideas derived from the Babylonian cosmogony, whose main outlines we have described above. This may doubtless be true, and yet no compelling proof of the contention can be adduced, for it is precisely those features in which both accounts are identical—namely, chaos, the original darkness, and the separating and ordering activity of the god—that are common property to almost all cosmogonies. The Biblical account of the creation, however, may not be classed with myths. It is a religious production of priests who were dominated by the thought that the national god rules over the people of Israel and over the world. Hence alone could it substitute a creation out of nothing for the ordering of a chaos, though the latter feature also persists in the Biblical account. The substitution, of course, dates from a later time than the myth, and represents a glorification of divine omnipotence which is entirely impossible to the latter.
A sort of offshoot of cosmogonic myths, though in striking antithesis to them, is the flood saga. This still retains, in their entirety, the characteristics of the original märchen-myth. It belongs to a variety of widely prevalent myths which, like the creation myths, appear to some extent to have originated independently in various parts of the earth, but also to have spread widely from one region to another. Evidence indicative of the independent origin of many of these sagas is to be found in the fact that, in many tropical regions, accounts of a flood, or so-called deluge sagas (Sintflutsagen), are represented by sagas of conflagration (Sintbrandsagen), according to which the world was destroyed, not by a general deluge, but by fire. In neither word has the prefix Sint any connection with Sünde (sin), with which popular etymology commonly connects it. Sint (old high German sin) is a word that has disappeared from modern German and means 'universal.' A Sintflut, thus, is a universal, in distinction from a merely local, flood. In so far, the sagas of universal flood and conflagration already approximate to the myths relating to the destruction of the world. Now, the Biblical story of the flood has so many elements in common with that of the Babylonians that we are compelled to assume a borrowing, and hence a transference, of material. The rescue of a single man and his household, the taking of animals into the ship, its landing upon the summit of a mountain, the dispatching of birds in quest of land—of these elements, some might possibly have originated independently in different parts of the earth. The rescue of individuals, for example, is included in almost all flood and conflagration legends, the direct source of the idea being the connection between the antediluvian and postdiluvian worlds. Of the combination of all of these elements into a whole, however, we may say without hesitation that it could not have arisen twice independently. The universal motive of the flood saga and that which led to its origin in numerous localities, without any influence on the part of foreign ideas, is obviously the rain as it pours down from the heavens. For this reason flood sagas are particularly common wherever rain causes devastating and catastrophic floods, whereas they are lacking in such regions as the Egyptian delta, where there are periodic inundations by the sea, as well as in the Arabian peninsula and in the rainless portions of Africa. As a rule, therefore, they are both rain sagas and flood sagas. They naturally suggest, further, the idea of a boatman who rescues himself in a boat and lands upon a mountain. According to an American flood myth which has preserved more faithfully than that of western Asia the character of the märchen, the mountain upon which the boatman lands rises with the flood and settles again as the flood subsides.
The flood sagas of cultural peoples, however, combine these very ancient märchen elements with a projection of the cosmogonic myth into a later event of human history. The flood deluging the earth is a return to chaos; indeed, often, as in the sagas of western Asia, chaos itself is represented as a mighty abyss of water. This is then connected with the idea of a punishment in which the god destroys what he has created, preserving from the universal destruction only the righteous man who has proved worthy of such salvation. Thus, the universal flood (Sintflut) actually develops into a sin flood (Sündflut). This change, of course, represents an elaboration on the part of priests, who projected the religious-ethical feature of a divine judgment into what was doubtless originally a purely mythological saga, just as they transformed the creation myth into a hymn to the omnipotence of the deity. But this prepares the way for a further step. The counterpart of these cosmological conceptions is projected not merely into a past which marks the beginning of the present race of men, but also into the future. Over against the transitory world-catastrophe of the universal flood, there looms the final catastrophe of the actual destruction of the world, and over against a preliminary judgment of the past, the final judgment, at which this life ends and that of the yonder world begins.
Thus, we come to the myths of world destruction, as they are transmitted in the apocalyptic writings of later Israelitic literature and in the Apocalypse of John, who betrays the influence of the earlier writers. At this point we leave the realm of myth proper. The latter is always concerned with events of the past or, in extreme cases, with those of the immediate present. No doubt, the desires of men may reach out indefinitely into the future. Myth narrative, however, in the narrower sense of the term, takes no account of that which lies beyond the present. In general, moreover, its scene of action is the existing world, however much this may be embellished by the imagination. Myth reaches its remotest limit in cosmogonies. Even here, however, no absolute limit is attained, for the world-creation is represented as having been preceded by chaos. The idea of a creation out of nothing, which dislodges the idea of an original chaos, arises from religious needs and is not mythological in character. Similarly, the apocalyptic myth of world-destruction has passed beyond the stage of the myth proper. It is a mythological conception, which, though combining elements of the cosmogonic myth with fragments of märchen and sagas, is, in the main, the expression of a religious need for a world beyond. These myths, therefore, are not original myth creations, as are the cosmogonic myths, at least in part. They are the product of religious reflection, and, as such, they are dominated primarily by the desire to strengthen the righteous in his hopes and to terrify his adversary. Thus, the history of the cosmogonic myth here repeats itself in a peculiarly inverted form. With the exception of occasional survivals, the religious hymn, which is the ripest development of the cosmogonic myth, excludes the struggles of demons and wild monsters of the deep; the myth of the destruction of the world, on the other hand, constantly seeks, by its fantastic imagery, to magnify fears and punishments, as well as blessed hopes. As a result, all these accounts clearly bear the traces of a laborious invention seeking to surpass itself and thus to atone for the lack of original mythological imagination. We may call to mind the monster which the Book of Daniel describes as coming forth from the sea, provided with enormous iron teeth, and bearing on its head ten horns, among which an eleventh horn appears, which possesses eyes, and a mouth that speaks blasphemous words. Such things may be invented by the intellect, but they are impossible as natural creations of the mythological imagination. The motives underlying such exaggerations beyond the mythologically possible are to be found in factors which, though extending far back into the beginnings of mythology, nevertheless attain their development primarily in this age of gods and heroes. These factors are the ideas of the beyond.