The Religious Sentiment Part 11

[150-1] In his treatise _De Veritate_, itself the subject, as its author thought, of a special revelation, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, gives as one of the earmarks of a real revelation: "ut afflatum Divini numinis sentias, ita enim internae Facultatum circa veritatem operationes a revelationibus externis distinguuntur." p. 226.

[151-1] Spinoza, _Espistolae et Responsionnes_, Ep. x.x.xiv.

THE MYTH AND THE MYTHICAL CYCLES.

SUMMARY.

Myths are inspirations concerning the Unknown. Science treats them as apperceptions of the relations of man and nature. Moments of their growth, as treated by mythological science. Their similar forms, explained variously, the topic of the philosophy of mythology. The ante-mythical period. Myths have centred chiefly around three subjects, each giving rise to a Mythical Cycle.

I. The Epochs of Nature.

The idea of Time led to the myth of a creation. This starting the question, What was going on before creation? recourse was had to the myth of recurrent epochs. The last epoch gave origin to the Flood Myths; the coming one to that of the Day of Judgment.

II. The Paradise lost and to be re-gained.

To man, the past and the future are ever better than the present.

He imagines a Golden Age in the past and believes it will return.

The material Paradise he dreams of in his ruder conditions, becomes a spiritual one with intellectual advancement. The basis of this belief.

III. The Hierarchy of the G.o.ds.

The earliest hierarchy is a dual cla.s.sification of the G.o.ds into those who help and those who hinder the fruition of desire. Light and darkness typify the contrast. Divinity thus conceived under numerical separateness. Monotheisms do not escape this. The triune nature of single G.o.ds. The truly religious and only philosophic notion of divinity is under logical, not mathematical unity. This discards mythical conceptions.

CHAPTER V.

THE MYTH AND THE MYTHICAL CYCLES.

Returning again to the definition of the elemental religious sentiment--"a Wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power"--it enables us to cla.s.s all those notions, opinions and narratives, which const.i.tute mythologies, creeds and dogmas, as theories respecting the nature and action of the unknown power. Of course they are not recognized as theories. They arise unconsciously or are received by tradition, oral or written, and always come with the stamp of divinity through inspiration and revelation. None but a G.o.d can tell the secrets of the G.o.ds.

Therefore they are the most sacred of all things, and they partake of the holiness and immutability which belong to the unknown power itself.

To misplace a vowel point in copying the sacred books was esteemed a sin by the Rabbis, and a pious Mussulman will not employ the same pen to copy a verse of the Koran and an ordinary letter. There are many Christians who suppose the saying: "Heaven and earth shall pa.s.s away, but My Words shall not pa.s.s away," has reference to the words of the Old and New Testament. "What shall remain to us," asked Ananda, the disciple of Buddha, "when thou shalt have gone hence into Nirvana?" "My Word (_dharma_)," replied the Master. Names thus came to be as holy as the objects to which they referred. So sacred was that of Jehovah to the Israelites that its original sound was finally lost. Such views are consistent enough to the Buddhist, who, a.s.suming all existence to be but imaginary, justly infers that the name is full as much as the object.

The science of mythology has made long strides in the last half century.

It has left far behind it the old euphemeristic view that the myth is a distorted historical tradition, as well as the theories not long since in vogue, that it was a system of natural philosophy, a device of shrewd rulers, or as Bacon thought, a series of "instructive fables." The primitive form of the myth is now recognized to be made up from the notions which man gains of the manifestations of force in external nature, in their supposed relations to himself. In technical language it may be defined as _the apperception of man and nature under synthetic conceptions_.[156-1]

This primitive form undergoes numerous changes, to trace and ill.u.s.trate which, has been the special task a.s.sumed by the many recent writers on mythology. In some instances these changes are owing to the blending of the myth with traditions of facts, forming a quasi-historical narrative, the _saga;_ in others, elaborated by a poetic fancy and enriched by the imagination, it becomes a fairy tale, the _marchen_. Again, the myth being a product of creative thought, existing in words only, as language changes, it alters through forgetfulness of the earlier meanings of words, through similarities in sounds deceiving the ear, or through a confusion of the literal with the metaphorical signification of the same word. The character of languages also favors or r.e.t.a.r.ds such changes, pliable and easily modified ones, such as those of the American Indians, and in a less degree those of the Aryan nations, favoring a developed mythology, while rigid and monosyllabic ones, as the Chinese and Semitic types, offer fewer facilities to such variations. Furthermore, tribal or national history, the peculiar difficulties which r.e.t.a.r.d the growth of a community, and the geographical and climatic character of its surroundings, give prominence to certain features in its mythology, and to the absence of others. Myths originally diverse are blended, either unconsciously, as that of the Roman Saturn with the Greek Cronus; or consciously, as when the medieval missionaries transferred the deeds of the German G.o.ds to Christian saints. Lastly, the prevailing temperament of a nation, its psychology, gives a strong color to its mythical conceptions, and imprints upon them the national peculiarities.

The judicious student of mythology must carefully weigh all these formative agents, and a.s.sign each its value. They are all present in every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a myth and these governing agencies.

Such is the science of mythology. The philosophy of mythology undertakes to set forth the unities of form which exist in various myths, and putting aside whatever of this uniformity is explainable historically, proposes to ill.u.s.trate from what remains the intellectual need myths were unconsciously framed to gratify, to measure their success in this attempt, and if they have not been wholly successful, to point out why and in what respect they have failed. In a study preliminary to the present one, I have attempted to apply the rules of mythological science to the limited area of the native American race; in the present chapter I shall deal mainly with the philosophy of mythology.

The objection may be urged at starting that there is no such unity of form in myths as the philosophy of mythology a.s.sumes; that if it appears, it is always explainable historically.

A little investigation sets this objection aside. Certain features must be common to all myths. A divinity must appear in them and his doings with men must be recorded. A reasonable being can hardly think at all without asking himself, "Whence come I, my fellows, and these things which I see? And what will become of us all?" So some myth is sure to be created at an early stage of thought which the parent can tell the child, the wise man his disciple, containing responses to such questions.

But this reasoning from probability is needless, for the similarity of mythical tales in very distant nations, where no hypothesis of ancient intercourse is justified, is one of the best ascertained and most striking discoveries of modern mythological investigation.[159-1] The general character of "solar myths" is familiar to most readers, and the persistency with which they have been applied to the explanation of generally received historical facts, as well as to the familiar fairy tales of childhood, has been pushed so far as to become the subject of satire and caricature. The myths of the Dawn have been so frequently brought to public notice in the popular writings of Professor Max Muller, that their general distribution may be taken as well known. The same may be said of the storm myths. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who thought deeply on the religious nature of man, said early in this century: "Wholly similar myths can very readily arise in different localities, each independent of the others."[160-1]

This similarity is in a measure owing to the similar impressions which the same phenomenon, the sunrise or the thunder-storm for instance, makes on the mind--and to this extent the science of mythology is adequate to its explanation. But that it falls short is so generally acknowledged, that various other explanations have been offered.

These may be cla.s.sed as the skeptical explanation, which claims that the likeness of the myths is vastly exaggerated and much more the work of the scholar at his desk than of the honest wors.h.i.+pper; the historical explanation, which suggests unrecorded proselytisms, forgotten communications and the possible original unity of widely separated nations; the theological explanations, often discrepant, one suggesting caricatures of the sacred narrative inspired by the Devil, another reminiscences of a primeval inspiration, and a third the unconscious testimony of heathendom to orthodoxy;[161-1] and lastly the metaphysical explanation, which seems at present to be the fas.h.i.+onable one, expressed nearly alike by Steinthal and Max Muller, which cuts the knot by crediting man with "an innate consciousness of the Absolute," or as Renan puts it, "a profound instinct of deity."

The philosophy of mythology, differing from all these, finding beyond question similarities which history cannot unriddle, interprets them by no incomprehensible a.s.sumption, but by the ident.i.ty of the laws of thought acting on similar impressions under the guidance of known categories of thought. Nor does it stop here, but proceeds to appraise these results by the general scheme of truth and error. It asks for what psychological purpose man has so universally imagined for himself G.o.ds--pure creations of his fancy;--whether that purpose can now or will ultimately be better attained by an exercise of his intellect more in accordance with the laws of right reasoning; and thus seeking to define the genuine food of the religious desire, estimates the quality and value of each mythological system by the nearness of its approach to this standard.

The philosophy of mythology, starting with the wish or prayer as the unit of religious thought, regards all myths as theories about the unknown power which is supposed to grant or withhold the accomplishment of the wish. These theories are all based upon the postulate of the religious sentiment, that there is order in things; but they differ from scientific theories in recognizing volition as an efficient cause of order.

The very earliest efforts at religious thought do not rise to the formation of myths, that is, connected narratives about supernatural beings. All unknown power is embraced under a word which does not convey the notion of personality; single exhibitions of power which threaten man's life are supposed to be the doings of an unseen person, often of a deceased man, whose memory survives; but any general theory of a hierarchy, or of the world or man, is not yet visible. Even such immature notions are, however, so far as they go, framed within the category of causality; only, the will of the G.o.d takes the place of all other force. This stage of religious thought has been called Animism, a name which does not express its peculiarity, which is, that all force is not only supposed to proceed from mind, but through what metaphysicians call "immanent volition," that is, through will independent of relation.

Mind as "emanant volition," in unison with matter and law, the "seat of law," to use an expression of Professor Boole's, may prove the highest conception of force.

As the slowly growing reason reached more general notions, the law which prescribes unity as a condition of thought led man early in his history to look upon nature as one, and to seek for some one law of its changes; the experience of social order impressed him with the belief that the unseen agencies around him also bore relations to each other, and acknowledged subjection to a leader; and the pangs of sickness, hunger and terror to which he was daily exposed, and more than all the "last and greatest of all terribles, death," which he so often witnessed, turned his early meditations toward his own origin and destiny.

Around these three subjects of thought his fancy busied itself, striving to fabricate some theory which would solve the enigmas which his reason everywhere met, some belief which would relieve him from the haunting horror of the unknown. Hence arose three great cycles of myths, which recur with strangely similar physiognomies in all continents and among all races. They are the myths of the Epochs of Nature, the Hierarchy of the G.o.ds, and of the Paradise lost but to be regained. Wherever we turn, whether to the a.s.syrian tablets or to the verses of the Voluspa, to the crude fancies of the red man of the new world or the black man of the African plateau, to the sacred books of the modern Christian or of the ancient Brahman, we find these same questions occupying his mind, and in meaning and in form the same solutions proffered. Through what intellectual operations he reached these solutions, and their validity, as tested by the known criteria of truth, it is the province of the philosophy of mythology to determine.

Let us study the psychological growth of the myth of the Epochs of Nature. This tells of the World, its beginning, its convulsions and its ending, and thus embraces the three minor cycles of the cosmogonical, the cataclysmal and the eschatological myths.

Nature is known to man only as _force_, which manifests itself in _change_. He is so const.i.tuted that "the idea of an event, a change, without the idea of a cause, is impossible" to him. But in pa.s.sing from the occurrence to its cause the idea of Time is unavoidable; it presents itself as the one inevitable condition of change; itself unwearing, it wears out all else; it includes all existence, as the greater does the less; and as "causation is necessarily within existence,"[165-1] time is beyond existence and includes the nonexistent as well. Whatever it creates, it also destroys; and as even the G.o.ds are but existences, it will swallow them. It renders vain all pleasures, and carries the balm of a certain oblivion for all woes.

This oppressive sense of time, regarded not in its real meaning as one of the conditions of perception, but as an active force destroying thought as well as motion, recurs continually in mythology. To the Greek, indefinite time as Cronos, was the oldest of the G.o.ds, begetting numberless children, but with unnatural act consuming them again; while definite time, as the Horae, were the blithe G.o.ddesses of the order in nature and the recurrent seasons. Osiris, supreme G.o.d of the Egyptians, was born of a yet older G.o.d, Sev, Time. Adonis and Aeon acknowledge the same parentage.[165-2] The ancient Arab spoke of time (_dahr_, _zaman_) as the final, defining principle; as uniting and separating all things; and as swallowing one thing after another as the camel drains the water from a trough.[166-1] In the Koran it is written: "Time alone destroys us." Here and there, through the sacred songs of the Pa.r.s.ees, composed long before Aristotle wrote, beyond all the dust and noise of the everlasting conflict of good and evil, of Ahura Mazda and Anya-Mainyus, there are glimpses of a deeper power, Zeruana Akerana, Eternal Duration, unmoved by act or thought, in the face of which these bitter opponents are seen to be children, brethren, "twin sons of Time."[166-2] The Alexandrian Gnostics, in their explanations of Christian dogmas, identify Aeon, infinite time, with G.o.d the Father, as the source and fount of existence; not merely as a predicate of the highest, but the Highest himself.

This heavy-weighing sense of the infinity of duration, and the urgency of escaping from the weariness of thinking it, led to the construction of the myth of the Creation. Man devised it so that he might be able to say, "in the beginning." But a new difficulty met him at the threshold--as change must be in existence, "we cannot think of a change from non-existence to existence." His only refuge was to select some apparently primordial, simple, h.o.m.ogeneous substance from which, by the exertion of volition, things came into being. The one which most naturally suggested itself was _water_.[167-1] This does in fact cover and hide the land, and the act of creation was often described as the emerging of the dry land from the water; it dissolves and wears away the hard rock; and, diminis.h.i.+ng all things, itself neither diminishes nor increases. Therefore nearly all cosmogonical myths are but variations of that one familiar to us all: "And G.o.d said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so." The manifestation of the primordial energy was supposed to have been akin to that which is shown in organic reproduction. The myths of the primeval egg from which life proceeded, of the mighty bird typical of the Holy Spirit which "brooded" upon the waters, of Love developing the Kosmos from the Chaos, of the bull bringing the world from the waters, of Protogonus, the "egg-born," the "multispermed," and countless others, point to the application of one or the other, or of both these explanations.[167-2]

In them the early thinkers found some rest: but not for long. The perplexity of the presence of this immediate order of things seemed solved; but another kept obtruding itself: what was going on before that "beginning?" Vain to stifle the inquiry by replying, "nothing."[168-1]

For time, which knows no beginning, was there, still building, still destroying; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it. What then is left but the conclusion of the Preacher: "That which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been?" Regarding time as a form of force, the only possible history of the material universe is that it is a series of destructions and restorations, force latent evolving into force active or energy, and this dissipated and absorbed again into latency.

Expressed in myths, these destructions and restorations are the Epochs of Nature. They are an essential part of the religious traditions of the Brahmans, Persians, Pa.r.s.ees, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Mexicans, Mayas, and of all nations who have reached a certain stage of culture. The length of the intervening periods may widely differ. The kalpa or great year of the Brahmans is so long that were a cube of granite a hundred yards each way brushed once in a century by a soft cloth, it would be quite worn to dust before the kalpa would close: or, as some Christians believe, there may be but six thousand years, six days of G.o.d in whose sight "a thousand years are as one day," between the creation and the cremation of the world, from when it rose from the waters until it shall be consumed by the fire.

There were also various views about the agents and the completeness of these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the G.o.ds can survive the fire of the last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance of the virgin world after the icy winter and the fiery summer of the Great Year. The Brahmans hold that the higher cla.s.ses of G.o.ds outlive the wreck of things which, at the close of the day of Brahm, involves all men and many divinities in elemental chaos; while elsewhere, in the later Puranas and in the myths of Mexico, Peru, and a.s.syria, one or a few of the race of man escape a deluge which is universal, and serve to people the new-made earth. This latter supposition, in its application to the last epoch of nature, is the origin of the myth of the Flood.

In its general features and even in many details, the story of a vast overflow which drowned the world, and from which by the timely succor of divinity some man was preserved, and after the waters had subsided became the progenitor of the race, is exceedingly common among distant tribes, where it is impossible to explain it as a reminiscence of a historic occurrence, or by community of religious doctrine. In Judea Noah, in India Manu, in Chaldea Xisuthrus, in a.s.syria Oannes, in Aztlan Nata, in Algonkin tradition Messou, in Brazil Monan, etc., are all heroes of similar alleged occurrences. In all of them the story is but a modification of that of the creation in time from the primeval waters.[170-1]

"As it was once, so it shall be again," and as the present age of the world wears out, the myth teaches that things will once more fall back to universal chaos. "The expectation of the end of the world is a natural complement to the belief in its periodical destructions." It is taught with distinctness by all religious systems, by the prophetess in the Voluspa, by the Hebrew seers,[171-1] by the writer of the Apocalypse, by the Eastern sages, Persian and Indian, by the Roman Sibyl, and among the savage and semi-civilized races of the New World.

Often that looked for destruction was a.s.sociated with the divine plans for man. This was an addition to the simplicity of the original myth, but an easy and a popular one. The Indian of our prairies still looks forward to the time when the rivers shall rise, and submerging the land sweep from its surface the pale-faced intruders, and restore it to its original owners. Impatient under the ceaseless disappointments of life, and worn out with the pains which seem inseparable from this condition of things, the believer gives up his hopes for this world, and losing his faith in the final conquest of the good, thinks it only attainable by the total annihilation of the present conditions. He looks for it, therefore, in the next great age, in the new heaven and the new earth, when the spirit of evil shall be bound and shut up, and the chosen people possess the land, "and grow up as calves of the stall."[172-1]

This is to be inaugurated by the Day of Judgment, "the day of wrath, the dreadful day," in which G.o.d is to come in his power and p.r.o.nounce his final decrees on those who have neglected the observance due him. The myth, originally one relating to the procession of natural forces, thus a.s.sumed with the increasing depth of the religious sentiment more and more a moral and subjective coloring, until finally its old and simple form was altogether discarded, or treated as symbolic only.

The myth of the Epochs of Nature was at first a theory to account for the existing order of nature. For a long time it satisfied the inquiring mind, if not with a solution at least with an answer to its queries.

After geologic science had learned to decipher the facts of the world's growth as written on the stones which orb it, the religious mind fondly identified the upheavals and cataclysms there recorded with those which its own fancy had long since fabricated. The stars and suns, which the old seer thought would fall from heaven in the day of wrath, were seen to be involved in motions far beyond the pale of man's welfare, and, therefore, the millennial change was confined to the limits of our planet. Losing more and more of its original form as an attempted explanation of natural phenomena, the myth now exists in civilized nations as an allegorical type of man's own history and destiny, and thus is slowly merging into an episode of the second great cycle of the mythus, that of the Paradise lost and regained. It, too, finds its interpretation in psychology.

Broadly surveying the life of man, philosophers have found in it much matter fit either for mockery or tears. We are born with a thirst for pleasure; we learn that pain alone is felt. We ask health; and having it, never notice it till it is gone. In the ardent pursuit of enjoyment, we waste our capacity of appreciation. Every sweet we gain is sauced with a bitter. Our eyes forever bent on the future, which can never be ours, we fritter away the present, which alone we possess. Ere we have got ourselves ready to live, we must die. Fooling ourselves even here, we represent death as the portal to joy unspeakable; and forthwith discredit our words by avoiding it in every possible way.

Pitiable spectacle of weakness and folly, is it capable of any explanation which can redeem man from the imputation of unreason? Is Wisdom even here justified of her children by some deeper law of being?