Zoological Mythology Volume Ii Part 31

[595] Cfr. on this subject the stories recorded in the first and second chapters of the first book.

[596] _Origines_, xiv. 4.

[597] Cfr. the same, _Afana.s.sieff_, vi. 10, where the cunning workman, in reward for having vanquished the little devil in whistling, and for having made it believe that he could throw a stick upon the clouds, obtains the money which can remain in a hat which never fills.

CONCLUSION.

"E come quei che con lena affannata Uscito fuor del pelago a la riva Si volge all 'onda perigliosa e guata, Cosi l'animo mio che ancor fuggiva Si volse indietro a rimirar ..."

and the shadows of the mythological monsters rise again before me, and occupy my fearful thoughts. During these months of my solitary sojourn on Olympus, have I only been the victim of a horrible nightmare, or have I apprehended aright the reality of the changeful figures of the sky in their animal forms? The ancient mythology, which used to be taught to us at school, was filled with the incests of Jove, of Mars, and of Venus; but they were cla.s.sical myths, and the adulterers were called G.o.ds; and our good fathers, in the vain search for symbolical meanings, tortured their ingenious brains to extract from each scandal of Olympus a moral lesson for the instruction of youth. Hence it was permitted to art to represent Jove as a bull, an eagle, a swan, a seducer in an animal form, without offending decency or violating the sanct.i.ty of the schools; and the young scholars were encouraged to write their rhetorical exercises in Italian or Latin verse upon the favourite themes of cla.s.sical mythology, inasmuch as with symbols and moral allegories the vile matter could all be made divine. Platonic or metaphysical love not requiring the vehicles of sense to communicate itself, the animal forms of the G.o.d were for our old masters nothing else than symbols and allegories, conceived and intended to veil an elevated educational wisdom. But we have rocked ourselves long enough in the cradle of this infantile fantasy, and must now discard from this and kindred themes all such idle dreams. It is at last necessary to summon up the courage to front the problems of history with the same frankness and ardour with which naturalists approach the mysteries of Nature, and pierce the veil; nor is this attempt so hazardous, since, in order to demonstrate entirely our historical theses, we have certain and positive data provided for us in speech and in legend by comparative oral and written tradition. We do not invent; we simply acc.u.mulate, and then put in order the facts relating to the common history of popular thought and sentiment in our privileged race. The difficulty consists only in cla.s.sifying the facts; the facts themselves are many and evident. It is very possible to be deceived in their arrangement, and hence also in their minute interpretation; and I am, for my part, not without apprehension that I may have here and there made an unlucky venture in interpreting some particular myths; but if this may, in some degree, reflect discredit on my intelligence, which is perhaps imperfectly armed, and without sufficient penetration, this can in nowise prejudice the fundamental truths which permit comparative mythology to const.i.tute and install itself as a positive science, that may henceforth, like every science, instruct and edify with profit. The princ.i.p.al error into which the students of the new science are apt to fall, and into which I may myself have sometimes been betrayed in the course of this work, is that of confining their observations to one special favourite mythical point or moment, and referring almost every myth to it, and not taking sufficient account of their mobility and their separate history, that is, of the various periods of their manifestation. One sees in the myth only the sun, another only the moon in its several revolutions, and their amours with the verdant and resplendent earth; one sees the darkness of night in opposition to the light of day, another the same light in opposition to the gloomy cloud; one the loves of the sun with the moon, another those of the sun with the aurora. These diverse, special, and too exclusive points of view, from which the myths have hitherto been generally studied by learned men, have afforded ill-disposed adversaries an opportunity of ridiculing the science of Comparative Mythology as a science which is little serious, and which changes its nature according to the student who occupies himself with it. But this opposition is disarmed by its own weapons. For what does the concord of all learned men and scholars in this department prove? It proves, in my opinion, but one thing, and that is, the reproduction and confirmation of the same natural myths under multiplex forms, the representation by a.n.a.logous myths of a.n.a.logous phenomena, and that the variations met with in fairy tales are also found in myths. The sun chases away the darkness in the day, the moon the darkness in the night; both are called haris, or fairhaired, golden, luminous. Indras is haris; as haris, he is now in relation with the sun that thunders in the cloud (Jupiter Tonans), now with the ambrosial moon which attracts rain (Jupiter Pluvius); Zeus gives up the field to his son Dionusos, and, be it as the sun, be it as the moon, he is always Zeus the refulgent one, Diespiter or the father of light; in the first case, he pierces through the cloud, and in the second through the darkness. Even when the moon or the sun is hidden, when Zeus or Dionusos lives in his august mystery, they prepare new luminous phenomena. Thus Vish?us is haris, and as haris he is identified now with the sun, now with the moon; or, to speak with more precision, the sun haris and the moon haris are confounded in one sole mythical personage, in one G.o.d, who represents them both in various moments, that is to say, in Vish?us. It is desirable that the entirety of the myths should be studied with full comprehension of the whole field which the myth may have enriched, and of the whole period in which the myth may have been developed; but this does not prevent, in special studies, a learned man from addressing himself (as Professors Kuhn, Muller, and Breal have done) to one special point to prove one special mythological thesis. To this point he applies his lever; he might, perhaps, use it somewhere else; but this causes no prejudice to the essential truth, by bringing his demonstrations to the highest degree of clearness in one point alone. The excess of demonstration can easily be corrected, and meanwhile from these special studies, in which investigation becomes every day more profound, the myths come out in brighter colours. It would be an exaggeration to ascribe to all the myths one unvaried manner of formation, as also to think absolutely that all myths began by a simple confusion of words. Equivocalness, no doubt, played a princ.i.p.al part in the formation of myths; but this same equivocalness would not always have been possible without the pre-existence, so to speak, of pictorial a.n.a.logies. The child who even now, gazing on the sky, takes a white cloud for a mountain of snow, certainly does not yet know that _parvatas_ meant both cloud and mountain in the Vedic language; he continues, however, to elaborate his elementary myth by means of simple a.n.a.logies of images. The equivoque of words usually succeeded to the a.n.a.logy of external figures as they appeared to primitive man. He had not yet named the cloud as a mountain, and yet he already saw it. When the confusion of images took place, that of words became almost inevitable, and only served to determine it, to give it in the external sound a more consistent form, to manifest it more artistically, and to const.i.tute it into a sort of trunk upon which, with the help of new particular observations, of new images, and of new equivoques, an entire tree of mythical genealogies was to sprout out.

It has fallen to me to study the least elevated department of mythology. In the primitive man, who created the myths, the same twofold tendency shows itself which we observe in ourselves--the instinct by which we are allied to the brutes, and the instinct which lifts us to the comprehension and sentiment of the divine or the ideal. The ideal was the portion of few; material instinct that of many: the ideal was the promise of human progress; material instinct represented that inert resisting matter which still acts in opposition to progress. Hence images full of elevated poesy by the side of others, vulgar and gross, which remind us of the relation of man to that petulant and lascivious brute from which it is supposed that he descends. The G.o.d who becomes a brute cannot preserve always intact his divinity; the animal form is that of his _avataras_ or of his decadence, of his fall; it is usually the form a.s.sumed by the G.o.d or the hero in consequence of a curse or a crime. The Hindoo and the Pythagorean beliefs considered the disguise of the animal as the purgatory of a guilty man. And the G.o.d-beast, the hero-beast, the man-beast cannot restrain themselves from brutish acts. The proud and ferocious King Vicvamitras, the Indian Nebuchadnezzar, when he wanders through the forest in the form of a monster, takes the nature of the forest-rakshasas, the devourer; the beautiful celestial nymphs become sea-monsters, devour the heroes who approach their fountain.

Only when the animal form is killed, when the matter is shaken off, does the G.o.d or hero a.s.sume his divine goodness, beauty, and excellence. Here mythology is not in contradiction to physiology; the character of the mythical personages is the result of their corporeal forms, of their organism, until the natural destiny changes, and a new physical transformation taking place in the species, even its moral characteristics are modified; light is good, darkness is evil, or good only inasmuch as it is supposed to enclose light in its body. From the dark wood rubbed and shaken, from the dark stone struck and dilated, comes forth the spark which causes conflagrations; from the body when exercised and made agile comes forth the splendour of look, of speech, of affection, of thought; the G.o.d breaks forth. Substance is dark, but when it is agitated it produces light; as long as it is inert, it is evil, and it is still evil as long as it attracts to itself, as if to a centre of gravity, everything that lives. In as far as the monster swallows beautiful things, it is evil; in as far as it lets them radiate and go forth, it is good. Disperse the cloud, disperse the darkness, dilate and expand the matter which tends to grow narrow and to become inert, to absorb life, and the divine light will come out of it, the splendid intelligent life will appear; the fallen hero, the hero turned to stone, who has become inert substance, will ascend again, agile and refulgent, into the divine heavens.

Certainly, I am far from believing that this was the intention of the myth. Morals have often been an appendix of fables, but they never enter into the primitive fable itself. The elementary myth is a spontaneous production of imagination, and not of reflection. When the myth exists, art and religion may make use of it as an allegory for their aesthetic and moral ends; but the myth itself is devoid of moral conscience; the myth shows, as I have said, only more or less elevated instincts. And if I have sought to compare several physiological laws with the myths, it is not because I attribute to the myth a wisdom greater than that which it contains in reality, but only to indicate that, much better than metaphysics, the science of nature, with the criteria of positive philosophy, can help us to study the original production of myths and their successive development in tradition. I have had to prove in mythology its most humble aspect, that is to say, the G.o.d enclosed in the animal; and inasmuch as amongst the various mythical animals which I have endeavoured to describe, several preserve the propitious character and resplendent form of the G.o.d, they are generally considered as the form which the deity a.s.sumes either to feed secretly upon the forbidden fruit or to fulfil a term of punishment for some former fault of his; in any case, these forms never serve to give us a superlative idea of the divine excellence and perfection. Instead of ascribing to the G.o.d all the attributes of beauty, goodness, and strength at once, instead of a.s.sociating in one all the G.o.ds, or all the sympathic forces and figures of Nature, a new divine form was created for each attribute. And because the primitive man was not so much inclined to make abstractions as comparisons (to represent strength, for instance, he had recourse to the image of the bull, the lion, or the tiger; to represent goodness, he figured it in the lamb, the dog, or the dove; to represent beauty, he chose the gazelle, the stag, the peac.o.c.k, and so on), in the primitive speech of mankind no conjunctions existed by means of which to unite the two terms of a comparison: hence a strong king became the lion, a faithful friend the dog, an agile girl the gazelle, and so on. We sometimes hear our women, in their moments of tenderness for a distant person, or in their impatience to go where their heart calls them, or in their curiosity to know what is going on at such a moment in such a place, say, "I wish I could become a bird to go there." In reality they envy only the bird's wings, in order to fly, to arrive there sooner, and for this desire alone they would renounce all the precious privileges which distinguish them as women. The same sacrifice of their own luminous forms to obtain some determinate end happens in the mythical sky. The G.o.d humbles himself in order to make use of some quality which he needs to manifest especially. Thus Indras, to put the generosity of King civis to the proof, finds it necessary to follow, in the shape of a hawk, the G.o.d Agnis, who had become a dove, and taken refuge with the king. Primitive man does not ascribe to the G.o.d any other form than those which he sees round him, and which he knows: the G.o.d cannot have wings of his own, divine wings; he must become a bird in order to be winged. Thus, to draw a chariot, or to carry a hero through the air, he must become a hippogriff, that is, horse and bird; and when he falls into the sea, he must enter a fish's body to escape drowning.

The G.o.d can therefore exercise his divine power only on the condition of entering into the forms of those animals which are supposed to have the privilege of the qualities which the G.o.d is in need of in a special mythical occurrence. But in this animal form in which the G.o.d displays in a transcendent manner some particular quality, he dims at the same time a great part of his divine splendour. Having, therefore, surprised the deity in this strange and unlucky moment, the reader will not, I hope, impute to me the poor figure which the deity has had to make in many pages of this work; nor will he think evil of me if I have deprived him, perchance, of some illusion in compensation for some imperfect, but perhaps not useless revelation.