Myth, Ritual, and Religion/Volume 1/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS.
The question of the origin of a belief in Deity does not come within the scope of a strictly historical inquiry. No man can watch the idea of God in the making or in the beginning. We are acquainted with no race whose beginning does not lie far back in the unpenetrated past. Even on the hypothesis that the natives of Australia, for example, were discovered in a state of culture more backward than that of other known races, yet the institutions and ideas of the Australians must have required for their development an incalculable series of centuries. The notions of man about the Deity, man's religious sentiments, and his mythical narratives, must be taken as we find them. There have been, and are, many theories as to the origin of the conception of a supernatural being or beings, concerned with the fortunes of mankind, and once active in the making of the earth and its inhabitants. There is the hypothesis of an original divine tradition, darkened by the smoke of foolish mortal fancies. There is the hypothesis of an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced to man by the very nature of his knowledge and perceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise a finite and an infinite. There is the hypothesis that gods were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, seeking in his early speculations for the causes of things, and conscious of his own powers as an active cause, projected his own shadow on the mists of the unknown, and peopled the void with figures of magnified non-natural men, his own parents and protectors, and the makers of many of the things in the world.
Since the actual truth cannot be determined by observation and experiment, the question as to the first germs of the divine conception must here be left unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and examine apart the two chief elements in the earliest as in the latest ideas of Godhead. Among the lowest and most backward, as among the most advanced races, there coexist the mythical and the religious elements in belief. The rational factor (or what approves itself to us as the rational factor) is visible in religion; the irrational is prominent in myth. The Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in hours of danger and necessity "yearns after the gods," and has present in his heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element. The same man, when he comes to speculate on causes or to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always traces back to the belief in a power that is benign and works for righteousness. Myth, even in Homer or the Rig-Veda, perpetually falls back on the old stock of absurd and immoral divine adventures.
It would be rash, in the present state of knowledge, to pronounce that the germ of the serious Homeric sense of the justice and power of the Divinity is earlier or later than the germ of the Homeric stories of gods disguised as animals, or imprisoned by mortals, or kicked out of Olympus. The rational and irrational aspects of mythology and religion may be of coeval antiquity for all that is certainly known, or either of them, in the dark backward of mortal experience, may have preceded the other. There is probably no religion nor mythology which does not offer both aspects to the student. But it is the part of advancing civilisation to adorn and purify the rational element, and to subordinate and supersede the irrational element, as far as religious conservatism, ritual, and priestly dogma will permit.
It has been said that we have no specimen of races in which myths of deities are just budding, in which the religious sentiment is first unfolding itself. Unfortunately, too, there is not a regular closely connected progress of religious and mythical ideas visible in in the history of man. The strata do not lie in convenient and consecutive fashion, each above the other. We have to examine myths of unrelated peoples in an ascending order of civilisation, from Bushmen and Australians to Maoris, from Maoris to Aztecs or Incas, thence to Egyptians, and so to Aryans of India and to Greeks. There are so many mythical strata, and at each ascending step we find the matter of mythical faith the same, with successive modifications, perhaps improvements, in belief, introduced as the human spirit itself begins to see more clearly. But it would be too much to expect to find a wholly unbroken series of phenomena in the evolution of ideas, any more than in the evolution of vegetable and animal life.
A better text for the study of the development of the gods in their mythical aspect can scarcely be found than that which Plutarch offers us in his essay on "The Cessation of Oracles." Plutarch was an enlightened Greek of the first century A.D. He was moderately acquainted with comparative mythology, which he studied chiefly in the legends of Greece and Egypt. His object was, like that of other Greek students from the seventh century before Christ downwards, to account to himself for the senseless, horrible, and fantastic elements in the legends of beings who bore the name of gods. His own conception of Godhead, of Deity, was that of a pure theism. "God is perfectly good, and in no one virtue wanting, least of all in what concerns justice and love."[1] This is the ideal of the divine nature to which the Greek intellect attained. On the other hand, Plutarch, a deeply religious man, found the divine beings worshipped "with eating of raw flesh and tearing to pieces of victims, . . . abusive language and other mad doings."[2] He found, too, in the sacred chapters stories of "the rapes, the wanderings, the hidings, and banishments, and servitudes of the gods," and his philosophy was hardly put to it to reconcile his conservative faith and his philosophical certainty. Plutarch, therefore, falls back upon a theory which leaves the temple legends and sacred chapters historically true, while it saves the moral credit of that purely spiritual Being Who "is perfectly good, and in no one virtue wanting."
Plutarch's explanation is that the gods of myth, the gods who "demanded human sacrifices," and were guilty of rapes, and suffered imprisonment and slavery, were merely dæmons. "The tales are not of the gods, but contain the sufferings and vicissitudes of dæmons," he writes.[3] In the same dialogue a speaker avers that "to take those dæmons, . . . and impute to them calamities endured, wanderings imposed by Heaven, and finally to suppose in their case deaths, as if they were mere men, seems to me too bold and uncivilised a theory."
This brings us to the point we would be at. The gods of myth, above all among the lower races, answer to the dæmons of Plutarch's argument. In highly uncivilised fashion, the myth-mongers attribute to them abominable and incredible adventures. These adventures survive in religion, till the worshippers of a comparatively lofty Zeus or Indra find themselves expected to believe that their gods are often in animal form, are almost always wizards, adulterers, murderers, are frequently placed in ludicrous positions, and even die "as if they were mere men." A proper study of the evolution of the gods of myth will lead us up from beings more frequently bestial than human in form to the half-anthropomorphic deities of Egypt after the ancient Empire, and finally to the gods, usually anthropomorphic, of Greece and India. To the very last, however, the old stuff of savage fancy,—fancy like that of Bushmen and of Murri of Australia,—will be found persistently surviving in the temple legends, mysteries, and rites even of Greece.
Our working hypothesis thus stated, the next step is to examine the common features in the extra-natural beings or gods of savage and civilised myths. A brief general summary must first be given, and that will be followed by the evidence of a cloud of witnesses. Both savage and civilised myths agree in alleging that a strange and powerful race were long on the earth before the making or the evolution or the emergence of man, and that for many years after the appearance of man these extra-natural characters were actively concerned with his fortunes. Though, perhaps, not strictly human, this earlier race was capable of every kind of human intercourse, dwelt with man, instructed him in the arts, punished and tormented him, and beheld his daughters that they were fair. In both civilised and savage myths we find that the world, or that various things in the world, were made by this extra-natural race. Its members were gifted with precisely the same supernatural power as we have seen that the savage medicine-man or sorcerer claims for himself. They could assume animal shapes at will; nay, among the most backward peoples the beings of this powerful race were actually beasts, endowed with human attributes and with magical and supernatural powers. In savage and civilised myths they can raise the dead, can visit the dwellings of the departed, can convert men and women into animal, and vegetable, and mineral shapes, or raise them to be stars. These "dæmons," then, as Plutarch would have called them, these gods of Australian, or Greek, or Indian, or Finnish, or Scandinavian myths, are simply an idealised, non-natural set of sorcerers and magicians. Like the magicians and sorcerers and chiefs of contemporary untutored peoples, they can fly in the air, can affect the weather, can bring or avert rain and tempest. Such are their qualities; and yet so subject are they to mortal limitations, that they can be overcome by men in battle, can be imprisoned, reduced to servitude, and even put to death, though they generally attain a speedy resurrection. Their dealings with men are capricious; they are often represented as punishing his iniquities by changing him into a plant, stone, or animal, and by chastising him with fire or flood. Yet they constantly set him a bad example; they are thieves, liars, murderers, incestuous adulterers. Some of them teach him the arts, others persecute him for a caprice or in pursuit of an amour. Among themselves these mythical beings live in a manner as far as possible from being exemplary. They have internal feuds, wars of gods and Titans, of Devas and Asuras; they have dynastic disputes, and even are guilty of parricide. The earliest wars of these gods are usually suggested by an early omnipresent dualistic philosophy.
There is a good, helpful extra-natural being, Qat, or Michabo, or Ormuzd, and an evil extra-natural being, Loki, or Ahriman, or Tangaroa the Fool, and these authors of good and evil, with their families, engage in an endless vendetta. Finally, the good powers, the Devas, for example, are wont to triumph over the less good, the Asuras. As time goes on, all the members of these races withdraw more and more from the society of men; some wholly disappear; some are slain, some vanish, but are expected to return; the more triumphant of them, the fittest, survive in the prayers, the memories, the temples, the altars of humanity.
Finally, as we read in Plutarch, philosophers merge the virtues even of these surviving gods in the conception of one spiritual and perfect existence, pure deity, and in divers manners explain away the no longer credible or creditable legends. These pious explanations are the first utterances of the science of mythology. The lines of development in the primal conception of gods appear to run somewhat as follows:—The lowest shape of a belief in mythical gods is that which we find among Australians, Bushmen, Melanesians, natives of West Africa, Ahts, Cahrocs, Thlinkeets, and other American peoples, who habitually regard their gods as powers in bestial shape, with human attributes and passions, and with faculties which are supernatural, indeed, but not more supernatural than the magical gifts claimed, as we have seen, by living, and assigned to dead sorcerers. In many cases the zoomorphic characteristics of a god are probably carried on from the more ancient figure of a tribal totem. Many examples of such a process will be observed. These gods are seldom or never natural elements or forces. They are idealised and magnified men or beasts, with magical accomplishments. Perhaps next in the scale come the gods who are in essence great forces of Nature, such as wind, storms, and sky, and moon and sun. These forces are thought of as persons, and as persons either human or bestial in semblance, or capable of manifesting themselves in human or bestial shape. Sometimes they are fabled to have been dwellers on earth, who later betook themselves to heavenly and remote abodes. Gods of this kind are still found, for example, in the religion of the Maoris, and of other races in the same stage of middle barbarism.
Higher still in the ascending series, and more spiritual (though even yet addicted to appearing in animal avatars, or to assuming animal guises for the prosecution of their intrigues and the achievement of their adventures) are the mythical deities of Mexicans, Peruvians, Finns, and Scandinavians. Into the composition of these gods enter not only the old magical and bestial notions, and the notion of great personal forces of Nature, but also what we may call the departmental theory. The larger divisions of natural phenomena and of human interests have now their presiding deities, gods or goddesses of love, of war, of agriculture, of commerce, or of art. These ideal persons supersede or mingle with the other and presumably older members of the national pantheons, and share their supernatural accomplishments.
In this process there is a natural tendency for gods to double their parts, or rather, perhaps one should say, for each part to have its "under-study." For example, there is a time in the mythical and religious evolution, as we have said, when each great national force and phenomenon (like everything else in the world known to men) is a person. Wind is a person, sky or heaven is a person, each river is a person, the sea is a person. But the tendency of advancing human thought is gradually to withdraw the conception of personality from the things in the world, gradually to restrict it to man, and to beings conceived to exist in man's image. The time thus arrives when the sun is in common thought usually regarded as a mere physical phenomenon, and when the personal element or the old personal conception of the sun separates itself, and becomes a god, anthropomorphic, full of special and novel characteristics, and limitless in movements and activities. Such a god (probably) is the Greek Apollo.
If we look at the sky, again, the process is identical. The visible sky ceases, in the general thought of men, to be a person, and the old personal conception separates itself, assumes anthropomorphic form, and becomes (under an old name for sky) the deity called Zeus, a deity with supreme powers. But he, unluckily for religion, attracts into his legend or inherits very many of the most repulsive myths of the early savage and magical extra-natural beings, and this misfortune befalls all, or nearly all, the gods of the higher mythologies, such, for example, as Indra.
It chances, too, that the various parts, as we said, have often their "under-studies." If Apollo was originally the sun, it is certain that he has laid aside most of his solar attributes, and put on attributes purely human and divinely Greek. But between him and the old "sun-person" (the sun conceived as a person) of savage thought he has left Helios Hyperion, a being very like the actual sun in some regards, in others a heroic or divine character who controls the course and drives the chariot of the sun. In the same way the old personal rivers concentrate themselves into river-gods, and detach their new personality from the water, and the old personal sea perhaps becomes Nereus, or adds some of his attributes to Poseidon. Thus, through ascending strata of gradually purifying thought, we pass from the magical and theriomorphic powers, subject even to death, whom we meet in savage myths, to the deathless anthropomorphic Greek gods possessing mansions in Olympus. These retain, from the earliest religions, the guardianship of morality, though they may be far from moral in their own conduct. It is to be remembered that this conception of the gods as punishers of crime and rewarders of virtue is not absent even from the zoomorphic deities of Australia. Yet even to the gods of Greece cling the ancient legends, which the consecrative religious instinct of priesthoods and the no less strong conservatism of popular superstition retain in many places even to this day. In Egypt the old instinct showed itself by the maintenance of actual animal gods, and by the addition of bestial heads, those of birds, cats, jackals, and so forth, to the divine statues in art. In Mexico the figure of the god was accompanied by the representation of some older animal divinity, or was specialised by the addition of some trait of animal form. Even in Greece most gods were represented in art with their favourite animal attendants, mouse, cuckoo, or what not. They were invoked, like Apollo, by a number of names derived from various animals; they were even, in very archaic art, figured with animal heads, like the horse-headed Demeter, or were worshipped, like the bull Dionysus, under completely animal form. While these survivals remained in art and in ritual, myth notoriously retained the most absurd relics of savage thought. Lustful and adventurous gods in India and in Greece accomplished their amours and achieved their adventures under dozens of bestial disguises, just like sorcerers in the Red Indian or Maori märchen.
Finally came the philosophers and cultivated poets in Greece, and (in an age very remote indeed) the mystic, reflective, and pantheistic priests in Egypt. The priests did not venture to reform out of existence the animal gods, nor to let the old savage rites and legends and mysteries drop into oblivion. They retained them, supplying allegorical, historical, or physical explanations, and, in fact, they could all sign their own "Articles" "in a non-natural sense." We have already examined, in our first chapter, some of the many devices by which Greek philosophers, who had attained a pure conception of divinity, explained away the myths which they inherited from a past infinitely remote and extremely barbarous.
Such is a summary sketch of the evolution of the mythical ideas of gods. The theory thus briefly stated reposes throughout on facts. It starts from the lowest extant myths of the least developed contemporary races, and shows that these myths are derived from the intellectual and material conditions of the peoples among whom they exist. We then trace among nations of gradually advancing culture the effects produced on the original stuff of myths by clearer conceptions of the nature of man and of the world. We find, last, that the spirit of civilisation, especially among the educated classes of Greece, purged away as with fire almost all that was material, bestial, savage, in the conception of Deity, while ritual, art, myth, local priestly tradition, and popular superstition still retained much of the ancient fable not different in kind from that which yet survives among Kamilaroi, Cahrocs, Ahts, and Melanesians. But at all times the undying savage in the soul of man has been quick to revive and to reassert itself in myth. Spiritual philosophies die and decay, and in their twilight the earliest and the rudest creeds, "spiritualism," polytheism, fetishism, mystic mummery and magic, again and again reappear. They creep out from the huts of peasants, and from the battered fanes of half-forgotten rural gods; and from dark corners of the soul they return to life, as in the time of Porphyry and Plotinus, or as in the ritual rubbish of the Brahmanas, or in the witch-trials of the Middle and Modern Ages. Man can never be certain that he has expelled the savage from his temples and from his heart; yet even the lowest known savages, in hours of awe and of need, lift their hands and their thoughts to their Father and to ours, who is not far from any one of us.
END of vol. 1.