savage and senseless elements in the legends of the gods will be shown
to have a natural significance, as descriptions of sky, storms, sunset,
water, fire, dawn, twilight, the life of earth, and other celestial and
terrestrial existences. Stated in the barest form, these results do
not differ greatly from the conclusions of Theagenes of Rhegium,
who held that “Hephaestus was fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was
water, Artemis was the moon, καὶ τὰ λοιπα ὁμοίως.” But Max Müller’s
system is based on scientific philology, not on conjecture, and is
supported by a theory of the various processes in the evolution of
myths out of language.
It is no longer necessary to give an elaborate analysis of this theory, because neither in its philological nor mythological side has it any advocates who need be reckoned with. The attempt to disengage the history of times forgotten and unknown, by means of analysis of roots and words in Aryan languages, has been unsuccessful, or has at best produced disputable results. Max Müller’s system was a result of the philological theories that indicated the linguistic unity of the Indo-European or “Aryan” peoples, and was founded on an analysis of their language. But myths precisely similar in irrational and repulsive character, even in minute details, to those of the Aryan races, exist among Australians, South Sea Islanders, Eskimo, Bushmen in Africa, among Solomon Islanders, Iroquois, and so forth. The facts being identical, an identical explanation should be sought, and, as the languages in which the myths exist are essentially different, an explanation founded on the Aryan language is likely to prove too narrow. Once more, even if we discover the original meaning of a god’s name, it does not follow that we can explain by aid of the significance of the name the myths about the god. For nothing is more common than the attraction of a more ancient story into the legend of a later god or hero. Myths of unknown antiquity, for example, have been attracted into the legend of Charlemagne, just as the bons mots of old wits are transferred to living humorists. Therefore, though We may ascertain that Zeus means “sky” and Agni “fire,” we cannot assert, with Max Müller, that all the myths about Agni and Zeus were originally told of fire and sky. When these gods became popular they would inevitably inherit any current exploits of earlier heroes or gods. These exploits would therefore be explained erroneously if regarded as originally myths of sky or fire. We cannot convert Max Müller’s proposition “there was nothing told of the sky that could not in some form or other be ascribed to Zeus” into “there was nothing ascribed to Zeus that had not at some time or other been told of the sky.” This is also, perhaps, the proper place to observe that names derived from natural phenomena—sky, clouds, dawn and sun—are habitually assigned by Brazilians, Ojibways, Australians and other savages to living men and women. Thus the story originally told of a man or woman bearing the name “sun,” “dawn,” “cloud,” may be mixed up later with myths about the real celestial dawn, cloud or sun. For all these reasons the information obtained from philological analysis of names is to be distrusted. We must also bear in mind that early men when they conceived, and savage men when they conceive, of the sun, moon, wind, earth, sky and so forth, have no such ideas in their minds as we attach to these names. They think of sun, moon, wind, earth and sky as of living human beings with bodily parts and passions. Thus, even when we discover an elemental meaning in a god’s name, that meaning may be all unlike what the word suggests to civilized men. A final objection is that philologists differ widely as to the true analysis and real meaning of the divine names. Max Müller, for example, connects Kronos (Κρόνος) with χρόνος, “time”; Preller with κραἰνω, “I fulfil,” and so forth.
The civilized men of the Mythopoeic age were not obliged, as Max Müller held, to believe that all phenomena were persons, because the words which denoted the phenomena had gender-terminations. On the other hand, the gender-terminations were survivals from an early stage of thought in which personal characteristics, including sex, had been attributed to all phenomena. This condition of thought is demonstrated to be, and to have been, universal among savages, and it may notoriously be observed among children. Thus Max Müller’s theory that myths are “a disease of language” seems destitute of evidence, and inconsistent with what is historically known about the relations between the language and the social, political and literary condition of men.
Theory of Herbert Spencer.—The system of Herbert Spencer, as explained in Principles of Sociology, has many points in common with that of Max Müller. Spencer attempts to account for the state of mind (the foundation of myths) in which man personifies and animates all phenomena. According to his theory, too, this habit of mind may be regarded as the result of degeneration, for in his view, as in Max Müller’s, it is not primary, but the result of misconceptions. But, while language is the chief cause of misconceptions with Max Müller, with Spencer it is only one of several forces all working to the same result. Statements which originally had a different significance are misinterpreted, he thinks, and names of human beings are also misinterpreted in such a manner that early races are gradually led to believe in the personality of phenomena. He too notes “the defect in early speech”—that is, the “lack of words free from implications of vitality”—as one of the causes which “favour personalization.” Here, of course, we have to ask Spencer, with Max Müller, why words in early languages “imply vitality.” These words must reflect the thought of the men who use them before they react upon that thought and confirm it in its misconceptions. So far Spencer seems at one with the philological school of mythologists, but he warns us that the misconstructions of language in his system are “different in kind, and the erroneous course of thought is opposite in direction.” According to Spencer (and his premises, at least, are correct), the names of human beings in an early state of society are derived from incidents of the moment, and often refer to the period of the day or the nature of the weather. We find, among Australian natives, among Abipones in South America, and among Ojibways in the North, actual people named Dawn, Gold Flower of Day, Dark Cloud, Sun, and so forth. Spencer’s argument is that, given a story about real people so named, in process of time and forgetfulness the anecdote which was once current about a man named Storm and a woman named Sunshine will be transferred to the meteorological phenomena of sun and tempest. Thus these purely natural agents will come to be “personalized” (Prin. Soc. 392), and to be credited with purely human origin and human adventures. Another misconception would arise when men had a tradition that they came to their actual seats from this mountain, or that lake or river, or from lands across the sea. They will mistake this tradition of local origin for one of actual parentage, and will come to believe that, like certain Homeric heroes, they are the sons of a river (now personified), or of a mountain, or, like a tribe mentioned by Garcilasso de la Vega, that they are descended from the sea. Once more, if their old legend told them that they came from the rising sun, they will hold, like many races, that they are actually the children of the sun. By this process of forgetfulness and misinterpretation, mountains, rivers, lakes, sun and sea would receive human attributes, while men would degenerate from a more sensible condition into a belief in the personality and vitality of inanimate objects. As Spencer thinks ancestor-worship the first form of religion, and as he holds that persons with such names as sun, moon and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural phenomena—dawn, wind, sky, night and the rest—are a kind of transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real men and women. “Partly by confounding the parentage of the race with a conspicuous object marking the natal region of the race, partly by literal interpretation of birth names, and partly by literal interpretation of names given in eulogy” (such as Sun and Bull, among the Egyptian kings), and also through “implicit belief in the statements of forefathers,” there has been produced belief in descent from mountains, sea, dawn, from animals which have become constellations, and from persons once on earth who now appear as sun and moon. A very common class of myths (see Totemism) assures us that certain stocks of men are descended from beasts, or from gods in the shape of beasts. Spencer explains these by the theory that the remembered ancestor of a stock had, as savages often have, an animal name, as Bear, Wolf, Coyote, or what not. In time his descendants came to forget that the name was a mere name, and were misled into the opinion that they were children of a real coyote, wolf or bear. This idea, once current, would naturally stimulate and diffuse the belief that such descents were possible, and that the animals are closely akin to men.
The chief objection to these processes is that they require, as a necessary condition, a singular amount of memory on the one hand and of forgetfulness on the other. The lowest contemporary savages remember little or nothing of any ancestor farther back than the grandfather. But men in Spencer’s Mythopoeic age had much longer memories. On the other hand, the most ordinary savage does not misunderstand so universal a custom as the imposition of names peculiar to animals or derived from atmospheric phenomena. He calls his own child Dawn or Cloud, his own name is Sitting Bull or Running Wolf, and he is not tempted to explain his great-grandfather’s name of Bright Sun or Lively Raccoon on the hypothesis that the ancestor really was a raccoon or the sun. Moreover, savages do not worship ancestresses or retain lively memories of their great-grandmothers, yet it is through the female line in the majority of cases that the animal or other ancestral name is derived. The son of an Australian male, whose kin or totem name is Crane, takes, in many tribes, his mother’s kin-name, Swan or Cockatoo, or whatever it may be, and the same is a common rule in Africa and America among races who rarely remember their great-grandfathers. On the whole, then (though degeneracy, as well as progress, is a force in human evolution), we are not tempted to believe in so strange a combination of forgetfulness with long memory, nor so excessive a degeneration from common sense into a belief in the personality of phenomena, as are required no less by Spencer’s system than by that of Max Müller.
Preliminary Problems.—We have stated and criticized the more prominent modern theories of mythology. It is now necessary first to recapitulate the chief points in the problem, and then to attempt to explain them by a comparison of the myths of various races. The difficulty of mythology is to account for the following among other apparently irrational elements in myths: the wild and senseless stories of the
