The Classic Myths in English Literature and in Art (2nd ed.) (1911)

"Let fire, burning this handCleanse, too, the Ring from its curse."

She applies the torch:

"So cast I the brandOn Valhall's glittering walls. —When ye see in the kindling fire,Siegfried and Brünnhild' consumed;When ye see the river-daughtersBear the Ring away to the deep:To northward thenLook through the night!When the heaven there gleamsWith a holy glow,Then know ye allThat Valhall's end ye behold!"

Her horse is brought. She mounts it and springs into the flames, which flare up and seize on the hall itself. The river overflows and rolls over the fire. The Rhine-maidens swim up and regain the Ring. Hagen rushes into the flood to get it from them, but is dragged down to the depths by their arms as they swim away. In the sky is seen a vision of Valhalla in flames.

The breed of the gods is gone like breath. The loveless Ring has worked its curse. Each in his turn its lords have bitten the dust. And Brünnhilde reads the moral:

"Not goods nor goldNor glory of godsCan fashion a blessing for weal,Can win a blessing from woe, —But Love alone!"

PART II

THE HISTORY OF MYTH

CHAPTER XXX

THE ORIGIN AND ELEMENTS OF MYTH

289. Kinds of Myth. If we classify the preceding stories according to the reason of their existence, we observe that they are of two kinds, – explanatory and æsthetic.

(1) Explanatory myths are the outcome of naïve guesses at the truth, of mistaken and superstitious attempts to satisfy the curiosity of primitive and unenlightened peoples, to unveil the mysteries of existence, make clear the facts of the universe and the experiences of life, to account for religious rites and social customs of which the origin is forgotten, to teach the meaning and the history of things. There are certain questions that nearly every child and every savage asks: What is the world and what is man? Who made them? What else did the maker do? and what the first men? Whence came the commodities of life? Why do we celebrate certain festivals, practice certain ceremonials, observe solemnities, and partake of sacraments, and bow to this or the other god? What is death, and what becomes of us after death? The answers to such questions crystallized themselves gradually into stories of the creation, of the gods, and of the heroes – forefathers of men, but magnified, because unfamiliar, mysterious, and remote.

Old literatures abound in explanatory myths of so highly imaginative a character that we moderns are tempted to read into them meanings which probably they never possessed. For the diverse and contradictory significations that have in recent years been proposed for one and the same myth could not all, at any one time, have been entertained by the myth-makers. On the other hand, the current explanations of certain myths are sufficiently apparent to be probable. "To the ancients," says John Fiske,375 "the moon was not a lifeless body of stones and clods; it was the horned huntress Artemis, coursing through the upper ether, or bathing herself in the clear lake; or it was Aphrodite, protectress of lovers, born of the sea foam in the East, near Cyprus. The clouds were not bodies of vaporized water; they were cows, with swelling udders, driven to the milking by Hermes, the summer wind; or great sheep with moist fleeces, slain by the unerring arrows of Bellerophon, the sun; or swan-maidens, flitting across the firmament; Valkyries hovering over the battle field to receive the souls of falling heroes; or, again, they were mighty mountains, piled one above another, in whose cavernous recesses the divining wand of the storm-god Thor revealed hidden treasures. The yellow-haired sun, Phœbus, drove westerly all day in his flaming chariot; or, perhaps, as Meleager, retired for awhile in disgust from the sight of men; wedded at eventide the violet light (Œnone, Iole) which he had forsaken in the morning; sank as Hercules upon a blazing funeral pyre, or, like Agamemnon, perished in a blood-stained bath; or, as the fish-god, Dagon, swam nightly through the subterranean waters to appear eastward again at daybreak. Sometimes Phaëthon, his rash, inexperienced son, would take the reins and drive the solar chariot too near the earth, causing the fruits to perish, and the grass to wither, and the wells to dry up. Sometimes, too, the great all-seeing divinity, in his wrath at the impiety of men, would shoot down his scorching arrows, causing pestilence to spread over the land."

(2) Æsthetic myths have their origin in the universal desire for amusement, in the revulsion of the mind from the humdrum of actuality. They furnish information that may not be practical, but is delightful; they elicit emotion – sympathy, tears, and laughter – for characters and events remote from our commonplace experience but close to the heart of things, and near and significant and enchanting to us in the atmosphere of imagination that embraces severed continents, inspires the dead with life, bestows color and breath upon the creatures of a dream, and wraps young and old in the wonder of hearing a new thing. The æsthetic myth, first, removes us from the sordid world of immediate and selfish needs, and then unrolls a vision of a world where men and things exist simply for the purpose of delighting us. And the enduring measure of delight which the æsthetic myth affords is the test of what we call its beauty.

A myth, whether explanatory or æsthetic, is of unconscious growth, almost never concocted with a view to instruction.

According to their subjects, æsthetic myths are either historic or romantic. (a) If historic, they utilize events which have a skeleton of fact. They supply flesh and sinew of divine or heroic adventure and character, blood and breath of probability and imagination. In historic myths the dependence of gods, heroes, and events upon the stern necessity of an overruling power, of fate or providence, is especially to be observed. Of this class is the Iliad of Homer.

(b) If romantic, the myths are characterized by bolder selection or creation of fundamental events; indeed, events appear to be chosen with a view to displaying or developing the character of the hero. In such myths circumstances are not so important as what the hero does with circumstances. The hero is more independent than in the historic myth; his liberty, his choice, – in judgment, in conduct, and in feeling, – his responsibility, are the center of interest. In romantic myths like the Odyssey this sense of freedom does not impel the poet to capricious use of his material. But lesser bards than Homer have permitted their heroes to run riot in adventures that weary the imagination and offend the moral judgment.

290. Divisions of Inquiry. We are next led to ask how these myths came into existence, and how it is that the same myth meets us under various forms in literatures and among peoples widely separate in time and place. These are questions of the Origin and Distribution of myths; and in this chapter we shall discuss the former.

291. Elements of the Myth. The myths preserved in the literatures of many civilized nations, such as the Greek, present to the imaginative and the moral sense aspects fraught with contradiction. In certain myths the gods display themselves as beautiful, wise, and beneficent beings; in others they indulge in cruel, foolish, and unbeautiful practices and adventures. These contradictory elements have been called the reasonable and the senseless. A myth of Mother Earth (Demeter) mourning the loss of her daughter, the Springtide, is reasonable; a myth of Demeter devouring, in a fit of abstraction, the shoulder of the boy Pelops, and replacing it with ivory, is capricious, apparently senseless. "It is this silly, senseless, and savage element," as Max Müller says, "that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it."

292. Reasonable Myths. If myths were always reasonable, it would not be difficult to reach an agreement concerning some way by which they may have come into existence.

Imagination. If we assume that the peoples who invented these stories of supernatural beings and events had, with due allowance for the discrepancy in mental development, imaginations like our own, there is nothing in the history of reasonable myths to baffle our understanding. For, at the present time, not only children and simple-minded men, like sailors or mountaineers, but cultivated men of ordinary poetic sensibility, bestow attributes of life upon inanimate things and abstract ideas. The sun is nowadays thirsty, the ship is a woman, the clouds threaten, charity suffereth long, the waves are angry, time will tell, and death swallows all things. The sun still rises, and, as Mr. Jasper maintains, "do move." By personification we, every day, bestow the attributes of human beings upon inanimate nature, animals, and abstractions. By our metaphors we perpetuate and diffuse the poetic illusion; we talk not perhaps of the arrows of Apollo, but of a sunstroke; our poetry abounds in symbols of the moon, of the swift-wingèd wind, of the ravening sea. In our metonymies we use the sign for the thing signified, the crown for the king, the flag for the honor of the country; and the crown and the flag are to-day possessed of attributes and individuality just as efficient as those that endowed the golden handmaids of Vulcan or the eagle of Jove. Nor is hyperbole any less in use among us than it was among the ancients; we glorify our political heroes with superlatives, they dignified theirs with divinity.

Belief. But this resemblance in habits of imagination, while it may help us to appreciate the mental condition of primitive peoples, accentuates the distinction between our imagination and theirs. They, at some time or other, believed in these personifications. We do not believe. But their belief is easier to comprehend when we remember that the myths of savages are not a deliberate invention of any one individual, but are constructed by generations of people, and that many of them cluster about beings who were actually worshiped. Among primitive nations the sense of awe in the presence of magnificent objects of nature – mountains, the sky, the sun, the sea – is universal. It springs from the fact that savages do not deem themselves superior to nature. They are not conscious of souls whose flight is higher than that of nature. On the contrary, since sun, sea, and winds move, the savage invests them with free will and personality like man's. In proportion, however, as their size is grander or their movement more tremendous, these objects must be possessed of freedom, personality, and power exceeding those of man. Why, then, should not the savage believe, of beings worthy of worship and fear and gratitude, all and more than all that is accredited to man? Why not confer upon them human and superhuman passions and powers? If we were living, like the Greek of old, close to the heart of nature, such personification of natural powers would be more easy for us to appreciate.

"If for us also, as for the Greek," says Ruskin,376 "the sunrise means daily restoration to the sense of passionate gladness and of perfect life – if it means the thrilling of new strength through every nerve, – the shedding over us of a better peace than the peace of night, in the power of the dawn, – and the purging of evil vision and fear by the baptism of its dew; – if the sun itself is an influence, to us also, of spiritual good, – and becomes thus in reality, not in imagination, to us also, a spiritual power, – we may then soon overpass the narrow limit of conception which kept that power impersonal, and rise with the Greek to the thought of an angel who rejoiced as a strong man to run his course, whose voice, calling to life and to labor, rang round the earth, and whose going forth was to the ends of heaven."

Regarding thus the religious condition of the savage, we may comprehend the existence of myths and his acceptance of them.

293. Unreasonable Myths. But he would maintain this attitude of acceptance only in the matter of good and beneficent gods and of righteous or reasonable myths.

For how could a human being believe of the god whom he worshiped and revered, deeds and attributes more silly and more shameful than man can conceive of his fellow man? When, therefore, we find senseless and shameless myths existing side by side with stories of the justice and righteousness of the same god, we must conclude that, since the worshiper could not believe both sets of attributes, he preserved his religious attitude before the good god only by virtue of rejecting the senseless myth.

A man's religious belief would assist him to entertain only the reasonable myths. How, then, did the senseless and cruel stories come into existence? And were they ever believed?

There are many answers to these questions. They may, however, be classified according to the theory of civilization that they assume.

According to the Theory of Deterioration, or Human Depravity, man, although he had in the beginning knowledge of common facts, pure moral and religious ideas, and true poetic conceptions, has forgotten, with the lapse of time, the significance of words, facts, men, and events, adopted corrupt moral and religious notions, and given license to the diseased imagining of untrue and unlovely conceptions.

According to the Theory of Improvement, or Progress, man, beginning with crude dreams and fancies about experience, life, the world, and God, has gradually developed truer and higher conceptions of his own nature, of his relation to the world about him, of duty, of art, and of religion.

294. Theory of Deterioration. Let us consider first the interpretations of mythology that assume a backward tendency in early civilization. They are:

(1) The Historical, or better called after its author, Euhemerus (B.C. 316), the Euhemeristic. This explanation assumes that myths of the gods are exaggerated adventures of historic individuals, chieftains, medicine men, heroes; and that supernatural events are distortions of natural but wonderful occurrences. In fact, it attributes to our forefathers a disease of the memory which prompted them to pervert facts. Jupiter, Odin, and Hercules were accordingly men who, after death, had been glorified, then deified, then invested with numerous characteristics and adventures appropriate to their exalted conditions of existence.

The custom of worshiping ancestors, still existent in China and other countries, is adduced in support of this method of investigating myths, and it is undoubtedly true that the method explains the origin and growth of some myths. But it accounts rather for the reasonable than the senseless element of mythical adventure, while it fails to show how savages come to exaggerate their heroes into beings entirely out of the realm of that actual experience which is the basis of the historical assumption.

(2) The Philological Interpretation377 assumes also a disease of the memory by reason of which men misunderstand and confuse the meanings of words, and misapply the words themselves. Professor Max Müller calls this affection a disease of language. In ancient languages every such word as day, night, earth, sun, spring, dawn, had an ending expressive of gender, which naturally produced the corresponding idea of sex. These objects accordingly became in the process of generations not only persons, but male and female. As, also, the phrases expressing the existence or the activity of these natural objects lost their ancient signification under new colloquial coloring, primitive and simple statements of natural events acquired the garb and dignity of elaborate and often incongruous narratives, no longer about natural events, but about persons. Ancient language may, for instance, have said sunrise follows the dawn. The word for sun was masculine; the word for dawn, feminine. In time the sentence came to mean, Apollo, the god of the sun, chases Daphne, the maiden of the glowing dawn. But the word, Daphne, meant also a laurel that burned easily, hence might readily be devoted to the god of the sun. So Daphne, the maiden, assuming the form of Daphne, the laurel, escaped the pursuit of her ardent lover, by becoming the tree sacred to his worship.378 The merit of the philological method is, that, tracing the name of a mythical character through kindred languages, it frequently ascertains for us the family of the myth, brings to light kindred forms of the myth, discovers in what language the name was born, and sometimes, giving us the original meaning of the divine name, "throws light on the legend of the bearer of the name and on its origin and first home."379

But unfortunately there is very often no agreement among scholars about the original meaning of the names of mythical beings. The same name is frequently explained in half a dozen different ways. The same deity is reduced by different interpreters to half a dozen elements of nature. A certain goddess represents now the upper air, now light, now lightning, and yet again clouds. Naturally the attempts at construing her adventures must terminate in correspondingly dissimilar and unconvincing results. In fine, the philological explanation assumes as its starting point masculine and feminine names for objects of nature. It does not attempt to show how an object like the ocean came to be male and not female, or how it came to be a person at all. And this latter, in studying the origin of myths, is what should first be ascertained. We must not, however, fall into the error of supposing that the philologists look for the origin and growth of all myths in words and the diseases of words. Max Müller grants that mythology does not always create its own heroes, but sometimes lays hold of real history. He insists that mythologists should bear in mind that there may be in every mythological riddle elements which resist etymological analysis, for the simple reason that their origin was not etymological, but historical.

(3) The Allegorical Interpretation is akin to the philological in its results. It leads us to explain myths as embodiments in symbolic guise of hidden meaning: of physical, chemical, or astronomical facts; or of moral, religious, philosophical truth. The stories would at first exist as allegories, but in process of time would come to be understood literally. Thus Cronus, who devours his own children, is identified with the power that the Greeks called Chronos (Time), which may truly be said to destroy whatever it has brought into existence. The story of Io is interpreted in a similar manner. Io is the moon, and Argus the starry sky, which, as it were, keeps sleepless watch over her. The fabulous wanderings of Io represent the continual revolutions of the moon. This method of explanation rests upon the assumption that the men who made the allegories were proficient in physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc., and clever in allegory; but that, for some unknown reason, their descendants becoming stupid, knowledge as well as wit deserted the race. In some cases the myth was, without doubt, from the first an allegory; but where the myth was consciously fashioned as an allegory, in all probability it was preserved as such. It is not, however, likely that allegories of deep scientific or philosophical import were invented by savages. Where the myth has every mark of great antiquity, – is especially silly and senseless and savage, – it is safe to believe that any profound allegorical meaning, read into it, is the work of men of a later generation, who thus attempted to make reasonable the divine and heroic narratives which they could not otherwise justify and of whose existence they were ashamed. We find, moreover, in some cases a great variety of symbolic explanations of the same myth, one with as great claim to credence as another, since they spring from the same source, – the caprice or fancy of the expounder.

Among the ancients Theagenes of Rhegium, six hundred years before Christ, suggested the allegorical theory and method of interpretation. In modern times he has been supported by Lord Bacon, whose "Wisdom of the Ancients" treats myths as "elegant and instructive fables," and by many Germans, especially Professor Creuzer.

(4) The Theological Interpretation. This premises that mankind, either in general or through some chosen nationality, received from God an original revelation of pure religious ideas, and that, with the systematic and continued perversion of the moral sense, this knowledge of truth, morality, and spiritual religion fell into corruption. So in Greek mythology the attributes of the various gods would be imperfect irradiations of the attributes of the one God. A more limited conception is, that all mythological legends are derived from the narratives of Scripture, though the real facts have been disguised and altered. Thus, Deucalion is only another name for Noah, Hercules for Samson, Arion for Jonah, etc. Sir Walter Raleigh, in his "History of the World," says, "Jubal, Tubal, and Tubal-Cain were Mercury, Vulcan, and Apollo, inventors of pasturage, smithing, and music. The dragon which kept the golden apples was the serpent that beguiled Eve. Nimrod's tower was the attempt of the giants against heaven." There are doubtless many curious coincidences like these, but the theory cannot, without extravagance, be pushed so far as to account for any great proportion of the stories. For many myths antedate the scriptural narratives of which they are said to be copies; many more, though resembling the scriptural stories, originated among peoples ignorant of the Hebrew Bible. The theory rests upon two unproved assumptions: one, that all nations have had a chance to be influenced by the same set of religious doctrines; the other, that God made his revelation in the beginning once for all, and has done nothing to help man toward righteousness since then. The theological theory has been advocated by Voss and other Germans in the seventeenth century, by Jacob Bryant in 1774, and in this century most ably by Gladstone.380

295. We are now ready for the explanation of myth-making based upon the Theory of Progress. This is best stated by Mr. Andrew Lang,381 whose argument is, when possible, given in his own language. To the question how the senseless element got into myths, the advocates of this theory answer that it was in the minds and in the social condition of the savages who invented the myths. But since we cannot put ourselves back in history thousands of years to examine the habits of thought and life of early savages, we are constrained to examine whether anywhere nowadays there may exist "any stage of the human intellect in which these divine adventures and changes of men into animals, trees, stars, this belief in seeing and talking with the dead, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life." As the result of such scientific investigation, numerous races of savages have been found who at this present day accept and believe just such silly and senseless elements of myth as puzzle us and have puzzled many of the cultivated ancients who found them in their inherited mythologies. The theory of development is, then, that "the savage and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, a legacy from ancestors of civilized races who, at the time that they invented the senseless stories, were in an intellectual state not higher than that of our contemporary Australians, Bushmen, Red Indians, the lower races of South America, and other worse than barbaric people of the nineteenth century." But what are the characteristics of the mental state of our contemporary savages? First and foremost, curiosity that leads them to inquire into the causes of things; and second, credulity that impels them to invent or to accept childish stories that may satisfy their untutored experience. We find, moreover, that savages nowadays think of everything around them as having life and the parts and passions of persons like themselves. "The sky, sun, wind, sea, earth, mountains, trees, regarded as persons, are mixed up with men, beasts, stars, and stones on the same level of personality and life." The forces of nature, animals, and things have for these Polynesians and Bushmen the same powers and attributes that men have; and in their opinion men have the following attributes: