very well. They were pleased to believe that Euemerus “by historical research had ascertained that the gods were once but mortal men.” Precisely the same convenient line was taken by Sahagun in his account of Mexican religious myths. As there can be no doubt that the ghosts of dead men have been worshipped in many lands, and as the gods of many faiths are tricked out with attributes derived from ancestor-worship, the system of Euemerus retains some measure of plausibility. While we need not believe with Euemerus and with Herbert Spencer that the god of Greece or the god of the Hottentots was once a man, we cannot deny that the myths of both these gods have passed through and been coloured by the imaginations of men who practised the worship of real ancestors. For example, the Cretans showed the tomb of Zeus, and the Phocians (Pausanias x. 5) daily poured blood of victims into the tomb of a hero, obviously by way of feeding his ghost. The Hottentots show many tombs of their god, Tsui-Goab, and tell tales about his death; they also pray regularly for aid at the tombs of their own parents.[1] We may therefore say that, while it is rather absurd to believe that Zeus and Tsui-Goab were once real men, yet their myths are such as would be developed by people accustomed, among other forms of religion, to the worship of dead men. Very probably portions of the legends of real men have been attracted into the mythic accounts of gods of another character, and this is the element of truth at the bottom of Euemerism.
Later Explanations of Mythology.—The ancient systems of explaining what needed explanation in myths were, then, physical, ethical, religious and historical. One student, like Theagenes, would see a physical philosophy underlying Homeric legends. Another, like Porphyry, would imagine that the meaning was partly moral, partly of a dark theosophic and religious character. Another would detect moral allegory alone, and Aristotle expresses the opinion that the myths were the inventions of legislators “to persuade the many, and to be used in support of law” (Met. xi. 8, 19). A fourth, like Euemerus, would get rid of the supernatural element altogether, and find only an imaginative rendering of actual history. When Christians approached the problem of heathen mythology, they sometimes held, with St Augustine, a form of the doctrine of Euemerus.[2] In other words, they regarded Zeus, Aphrodite and the rest as real persons, diabolical not divine. Some later philosophers, especially of the 17th century, misled by the resemblance between Biblical narratives and ancient myths, came to the conclusion that the Bible contains a pure, the myths a distorted, form of an original revelation. The abbé Banier published a mythological compilation in which he systematically resolved all the Greek myths into ordinary history.[3] Bryant published (1774) A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology, wherein an Attempt is made to divest Tradition of Fable, in which he talked very learnedly of “that wonderful people, the descendants of Cush,” and saw everywhere symbols of the ark and traces of the Noachian deluge. Thomas Taylor, at the end of the 18th century, indulged in much mystical allegorizing of myths, as in the notes to his translation of Pausanias (1794). At an earlier date (1760) De Brosses struck on the true line of interpretation in his little work Du Culte des dieux fétiches, ou parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Égypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie. In this tract De Brosses explained the animal-worship of the Egyptians as a survival among a civilized people of ideas and practices springing from the intellectual condition of savages, and actually existing among negroes. A vast symbolical explanation of myths and mysteries was attempted by Friedrich Creuzer.[4] The learning and sound sense of Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus, exploded the idea that the Eleusinian and other mysteries revealed or concealed matter of momentous religious importance. It ought not to be forgotten that Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary in North America, while inclined to take a mystical view of the secrets concealed by Iroquois myths, had also pointed out the savage element surviving in Greek mythology.[5]
Recent Mythological Systems.—Up to a very recent date students of mythology were hampered by orthodox traditions, and still more by ignorance of the ancient languages and of the natural history of man. Only recently have Sanskrit and the Egyptian and Babylonian languages become books not absolutely sealed. Again, the study of the evolution of human institutions from the lowest savagery to civilization is essentially a novel branch of research, though ideas derived from an unsystematic study of anthropology are at least as old as Aristotle. The new theories of mythology are based on the belief that “it is man, it is human thought and human language combined, which naturally and necessarily produced the strange conglomerate of ancient fable.”[6] But, while there is now universal agreement so far, modern mythologists differed essentially on one point. There was a school (with internal divisions) which regarded ancient fable as almost entirely “a disease of language,” that is, as the result of confusions arising from misunderstood terms that have survived in speech after their original significance was lost. Another school (also somewhat divided against itself) believes that misunderstood language played but a very slight part in the evolution of mythology, and that the irrational element in myths is merely the survival from a condition of thought which was once common, if not universal, but is now found chiefly among savages, and to a certain extent among children. The former school considered that the state of thought out of which myths were developed was produced by decaying language; the latter maintains that the corresponding phenomena of language were the reflection of thought. For the sake of brevity we might call the former the “philological” system, as it rests chiefly on the study of language, while the latter might be styled the “historical” or “anthropological” school, as it is based on the study of man in the sum of his manners, ideas and institutions.
The System of Max Müller.—The most distinguished and popular advocate of the philological school was Max Müller, whose views may be found in his Selected Essays and Lectures on Language. The problem was to explain what he calls “the silly, savage and senseless element” in mythology (Sel. Ess. i. 578). Max Müller says (speaking of the Greeks), “their poets had an instinctive aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, yet they would relate of their gods what would make the most savage of Red Indians creep and shudder”—stories, that is, of the cannibalism of Demeter, of the mutilation of Uranus, the cannibalism of Cronus, who swallowed his own children, and the like. “Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.”
Max Müller refers the beginning of his system of mythology to the discovery of the connexion of the Indo-European or, as they are called, “Aryan” languages. Celts, Germans, speakers of Sanskrit and Zend, Latins and Greeks, all prove by their languages that their tongues may be traced to one family of speech. The comparison of the various words which, in different forms, are common to all Indo-European languages must inevitably throw much light on the original meaning of these words. Take, for example, the name of a god, Zeus, or Athene, or any other. The word may have no intelligible meaning in Greek, but its counterpart in the allied tongues, especially in Sanskrit or Zend, may reveal the original significance of the terms. “To understand the origin and meaning of the names of the Greek gods, and to enter into the original intention of the fables told of each, we must take into account the collateral evidence supplied by Latin, German, Sanskrit and Zend philology” (Lect. on Lang., 2nd series, p. 406). A name may be intelligible in Sanskrit which has no sense in Greek. Thus Athene is a divine name without meaning in Greek, but Max Müller advances reasons for supposing that it is identical with ahana, “the dawn,” in Sanskrit. It is his opinion, apparently, that whatever story is told of Athene must have originally been told of the dawn, and that we must keep this before us in attempting to understand the legends of Athene. Thus again (op. cit. p. 410), he says, “we have a right to explain all that is told of him” (Agni, “fire”) “as originally meant for fire.” The system is simply this: the original meaning of the names of gods must be ascertained by comparative philology. The names, as a rule, will be found to denote elemental phenomena. And the silly,
- ↑ Hahn, Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi, p. 113.
- ↑ De civ. dei., vii. 18; viii. 26.
- ↑ La Mythologie et les fables expliquées par l’histoire (Paris, 1738; 3 vols. 4to).
- ↑ Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker (Leipzig and Darmstadt, 1836-1843).
- ↑ Mœurs des sauvages (Paris, 1724).
- ↑ Max Müller, Lectures on Language (1864), 2nd series, p. 410.
