of primogeniture, while Hesiod is all for the opposite and probably
earlier custom of Jüngsten-recht, and makes supreme Zeus the
youngest of the sons of Cronus. Among the other gods Dionysus
is but slightly alluded to in Homer as the son of Zeus and Semele,
as the object of persecution, and as connected with the myth of
Ariadne. The name of Hermes is derived from various sources, as
from ὁρμᾶν and ὁρμή, or, by Max Müller, the name is connected
with Sarameya (Sky). If he had originally an elemental character,
it is now difficult to distinguish, though interpreters connect him
with the wind. He is the messenger of the gods, the bringer of good
luck, and the conductor of men’s souls down the dark ways of death.
In addition to the great Homeric gods, the poet knows a whole
“Olympian consistory” of deities, nymphs, nereids, sea-gods and
goddesses, river-gods, Iris the rainbow goddess, Sleep, Demeter
who lay with a mortal, Aphrodite the goddess of love, wife of Hephaestus
and leman of Ares, and so forth. As to the origin of the gods,
Homer is not very explicit. He is acquainted with the existence
of an older dynasty now deposed, the dynasty of Cronus and the
Titans. In the Iliad (viii. 478) Zeus says to Hera, “For thine anger
reck I not, not even though thou go to the nethermost bounds of
earth and sea, where sit Iapetus and Cronus . . . and deep Tartarus
is round about them.” “The gods below that are with Cronus” are
mentioned (Il. xiv. 274; xv. 225). Rumours of old divine wars
echo in the Iliad, as (i. 400) where it is said that when the other
immortals revolted against and bound Zeus, Thetis brought to his
aid Aegaeon of the hundred arms. The streams of Oceanus (Il. xiv.
246) are spoken of as the source of all the gods, and in the same book
(290) “Oceanus and mother Tethys” are regarded as the parents
of the immortals. Zeus is usually called Cronion and Cronides,
which Homer certainly understood to mean “son of Cronus,” yet it
is expressly stated that Zeus “imprisoned Cronus beneath the earth
and the unvintaged sea.” The whole subject is only alluded to
incidentally. On the whole it may be said that the Homeric deities
are powerful anthropomorphic beings, departmental rulers, united
by the ordinary social and family ties of the Homeric age, capable
of pain and pleasure, living on heavenly food, but refreshed by the
sacrifices of men (Od. v. 100, 102), able to assume all forms at will,
and to intermarry and propagate the species with mortal men and
women. Their past has been stormy, and their ruler has attained
power after defeating and mediatizing a more ancient dynasty of his
own kindred.
From Hesiod we receive a much more elaborate—probably a more ancient, certainly a more barbarous—story of the gods and their origin. In the beginning the gods (here used in a wide sense to denote an early non-natural race) were begotten by Earth and Heaven, conceived of as beings with human parts and passions (Hesiod, Theog. 45). This idea recurs in Maori, Vedic and Chinese mythology. Heaven and Earth, united in an endless embrace, produced children which never saw the light. In New Zealand, Chinese, Vedic, Indian and Greek myths the pair had to be sundered.[1] Hesiod enumerates the children whom Earth bore “when couched in love with Heaven.” They are Ocean, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion, Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys and the youngest, Cronus, “and he hated his glorious father.” Others of this early race were the Cyclopes, Bronte, Sterope and Arge, and three children of enormous strength, Cottus, Briareus (Aegaeon) and Gyes, each with one hundred hands and fifty heads. Uranus detested his offspring, and hid them in crannies of Earth. Earth excited Cronus to attack the father, whom he castrated with a sickle. From the blood of Uranus (this feature is common in Red Indian and Egyptian myths) were born furies, giants, ash-nymphs and Aphrodite. A number of monsters, as Echidna, Geryon and the hound of hell, were born of the loves of various elemental powers. The chief stock of the divine species was continued by the marriage of Rhea (probably another form of the Earth) with Cronus. Their children were Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon. All these Cronus swallowed; and this “swallow-myth” occurs in Australia, among the Bushmen, in Guiana, in Brittany (where Gargantua did the swallow-trick) and elsewhere. At last Rhea bore Zeus, and gave Cronus a stone in swaddling bands, which he disposed of in the usual way. Zeus grew up, administered an emetic to Cronus (some say Metis did this), and had the satisfaction of seeing all his brothers and sisters disgorged alive. The stone came forth first, and Pausanias saw it at Delphi (Paus. x. 24). Then followed the wars between Zeus and the gods he had rescued from the maw of Cronus against the gods of the elder branch, the children of Uranus and Gaea—Heaven and Earth. The victory remained with the younger branch, the immortal Olympians of Homer. The system of Hesiod is a medley of later physical speculation and of poetic allegory, with matter which we, at least, regard as savage survivals, like the mutilation of Heaven and the swallow-myth.[2]
In Homer and in Hesiod myths enter the region of literature, and become, as it were, national. But it is probable that the local myths of various cities and temples, of the “sacred chapters” which were told by the priests to travellers and in the mysteries to the initiated, were older in form than the epic and national myths. Of these “sacred chapters” we have fragments and hints in Herodotus, Pausanias, in the mythographers, like Apollodorus, in the tragic poets, and in the ancient scholia or notes on the classics. From these sources come almost all the more inhuman, bestial and discreditable myths of the gods. In these we more distinctly perceive the savage element. The gods assume animal forms: Cronus becomes a horse, Rhea a mare; Zeus begets separate families of men in the shape of a bull, an ant, a serpent, a swan. His mistress from whom the Arcadians claim descent becomes a she-bear. It is usual with mythologists to say that Zeus is the “All-Father,” and that his amours are only a poetic way of stating that he is the parent of men. But why does he assume so many animal shapes? Why did various royal houses claim descent from the ant, the swan, the she-bear, the serpent, the horse and so forth? We have already seen that this is the ordinary pedigree of savage stocks in Asia, Africa, Australia and America, while animals appear among Irish tribes and in Egyptian and ancient English genealogies.[3] It is a plausible hypothesis that stocks which once claimed descent from animals, sans phrase, afterwards regarded the animals as avatars of Zeus. In the same way “the Minas, a non-Aryan tribe of Rajputana, used to worship the pig; when the Brahmans got a turn at them, the pig became an avatar of Vishnu” (Lyall, Asiatic Studies). The tales of divine cannibalism to which Pindar refers with awe, the mutilation of Dionysus Zagreus, the unspeakable abominations of Dionysus, the loves of Hera in the shape of a cuckoo, the divine powers of metamorphosing men and women into beasts and stars—these tales come to us as echoes of the period of savage thought. Further evidence on this point will be given below in a classification of the principal mythic legends. The general conclusion is that many of the Greek deities were originally elemental, the elements being personified in accordance with the laws of savage imaginations. But we cannot explain each detail in the legends as a myth of this or that natural phenomenon or process as understood by ourselves. Various stages of late and early fancy have contributed to the legends. Zeus is the sky, but not our sky; he had originally a personal character, and that a savage or barbarous character. He probably attracted into his legend stories that did not originally belong to him. He became anthropomorphic, and his myth was handled by local priests, by family bards, by national poets, by early philosophers. His legend is a complex embroidery on a very ancient tissue. The other divine myths are equally complex.
See L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States; Miss Jane Harrison, Prolegomena to Greek Religion; and Frazer, The Golden Bough, especially as regards the vegetable or “probably arboreal” aspect of Zeus.
Scandinavian Divine Myths.—The Scandinavian myths of the gods are numerous and interesting, but the evidence on which they have reached us demands criticism for which we lack space. That there are in the Eddas and Sagas early ideas and later ideas tinged by Christian legend seems indubitable, but philological and historical learning has by no means settled the questions of relative purity and antiquity in the myths. The Eddic songs, according to F. Y. Powell, one of the editors of the Corpus poeticum septentrionale (the best work on the subject), “cannot date earlier” in their present form “than the 9th century,” and may be vaguely placed between A.D. 800–1100. The collector of the Edda probably had the old poems recited to him in the 13th century, and where there was a break in the memory of the reciters the lacuna was filled up in prose. “As one goes through the poems, one is ever and anon face to face with a myth of the most childish and barbaric type,” which “carries one back to prae-Aryan days.” Side by side with these old stories come fragments of a different stratum of thought, Christian ideas, the belief in a supreme God. the notion of Doomsday. The Scandinavian cosmogonic myth (with its parallels among races savage and civilized) is given elsewhere. The most important god is Odin, the son of Bestla and Bor, the husband of Frigg, the father of Balder and many other sons, the head of the Aesir stock of gods. Odin’s name is connected with that of Wuotan, and referred to the Old High-German verb watan wuot＝meare, cum impetu ferri (Grimm, Teut. Myth., Eng. transl.,
- ↑ See Tylor, Prim. Cult. i. 326.
- ↑ Bleek, Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 6–8. Max Müller suggests another theory (Selected Essays, i. 460): “Κρόνος did not exist till long after Ζεύς in Greece.” The name Κρονίων, or Κρονίδης, looks like a patronymic. Müller, however, thinks it originally meant only “connected with time, existing through all time.” Very much later the name was mistaken for a genuine patronymic, and “Zeus the ancient of days” became “Zeus the son of Cronus.” Having thus got a Cronus, the Greeks—and “the misunderstanding could have happened in Greece only”—needed a myth of Cronus. They therefore invented or adapted the “swallow-myth” so familiar to Bushmen and Australians. This singular reversion to savagery itself needs some explanation. But the hypothesis that Cronus is a late derivation from Κρονίδης and Κρονίων is by no means universally accepted. Others derive Κρόνος from κραίνω, and connect it with κρόνια, a kind of harvest-home festival. Schwartz (Prähistorisch-anthropologische Studien) readily proves Cronus to be the storm, swallowing the clouds. Perhaps we may say of Schwartz’s view, as he says of Preller’s—“das ist Gedankenspiel, aber nimmermehr Mythologie.”
- ↑ Elton, Origins of English History, pp. 298–301.
