Myth, Ritual and Religion

finition as regards this argument — Problem: the contradiction between religion and myth — Two human moods — Examples —

ion” is familiar to students. Dr. J. D. Lang wrote concerning the native races of Australia: “They have nothing whatever of the character of religion, or of religious observances, to distinguish them from the beasts that perish”. Yet in the same book Dr. Lang published evidence assigning to the natives belief in “Turramullun, the chief of demons, who is the author of disease, mischief and wisdom”.1 The belief

ix by the Rev. Mr. Ridley, containing evidence of the belief in Baiame. “Those who have l

, as BEINGS, unconditioned by Time, Space, or Death, and nobody appears to have put the purely metaphysical question, “Are these beings spiritual or material?”3 Now, if a race were discovered which believed in such beings, yet had no faith in spirits, that race could not be called irreligious, as it would have to be called in Mr. Tylor’s “minimum definition”. Almos

styled religious. Our definition is expressly framed for the purpose of the argument, because that argument endeavours to bring into view the essential conflict between religion and myth. We intend to show that this conflict between the

of such a supposed being, is religious in the sense of the Christian religion, whereas the fabrication of fanciful, humorous, and wildly irrationa

an undying guardian, ‘Master of Life,’ did mankind set to work to evolve a chronique scandaleuse about

Their religious conception, however, of a “Father” or “Master of Life” seems out of keeping with the nature of the savage mind as we understand it. Still, there the religious conception actually is, and it seems to follow that we do not wholly understand the savage mind, or its unknown antecedents. In any case, there the facts are, as shall be demonstrated. However the ancestors of Australians, or Andamanese, or Hurons arrived at their highest religious conception, they decidedly possess it.5 The development of their mythical conceptions is accounted for by those qualities of their minds which we do understand, and shall illustrate at length. For the present, we can only say that the religious conception uprises from the human intellec

rd their secret in sacred mysteries. It is improbable that reflective “black fellows” have been morally shocked by the flagrant contradictions between their religious conceptions and their mythical stories of the divine beings. But

o expound decently the myths which made Indra the slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable sin. In Egypt, too, we study the priestly or philosophic systems by which the clergy strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from their own deities. From all these efforts of civilised and pious believers to explain away the stories about their own g

oon as she had a reflective literature, the myths of Greece seemed impious and IRRATIONAL. The essays of the native commentators on the Veda, in the same way, are endeavours to put into myths felt to be irrational and impious a meaning which does not offend either piety or reason. We may therefore conclude that it was not men in an early stage of philosophic thought (as philosophy is now understood)— not men like Empedocles and Heraclitus, nor reasonably devout men like Eumaeus, the pious swineherd of the Odyssey — who evolved

ainst the excursions of too venturesome ingenuity. Myth is so ancient, so complex, so full of elements, that it is vain labour to seek a cause for every phenomenon. We are chiefly occupied with the quest for an historical condition of the human intellect to which the element in myths, regarded by us as irrational, shall seem rational enough. If we can prove that such a state of mind widely exists among

the factor which we now regard as rational, and that which we moderns regard as irrational. The former element needs lit

age laws was a rabbit or a crow, or a dog, or a beaver, or a spider, then we are at once face to face with the element in myths which seems to us IRRATIONAL. Again, among civilised peoples we read of the pure all-seeing Varuna in the Vedas, to whom sin is an offence. We read of Indra, the Lord of Thunder, borne in his chariot, the giver of victory, the giver of wealth to the pious; here once more all seems natural and plain. The notion of a deity who guides the whirlwind and directs the storm, a god of battles, a god who blesses righteousness, is familiar to us and intelligible; but when we

isto, who, again, is said to have become a she-bear, and later a star; and the Brauronian Artemis, whose maiden ministers danced a bear-dance,9 are goddesses whose legend seems unnatural, and needs to be made intelligible. Or, again, there is nothing not explicable and natural in the conception of the Olympian Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god who “turns everywhere his shining eyes, and beholds all things, and protects the righteous, and deals good or evil fortune to men.” But the Zeus whose grave was shown in Crete, or the Zeus who played Demeter an obscene trick by the aid of a ram, or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who deceived He

reek — of that element in mythology which, as al

to notice. First we have, in the myths of all races, the most grotesque conceptions of the character of gods when mythically envisaged. Beings who, in religion, leave little to be desired, and

s were frequent in the mythology and in the temples of Greece. Once more, the gods were said to possess and exercise the power of turning men and women into birds, beasts, fishes, trees, and stones, so that there was scarcely a familiar natural object in the Greek world which had not once (according to legend) been a man or a woman. The myths of the origin of the world and man, again, were in the last degree childish and disgusting. The Bushmen and Australians have, perhaps, no story of the origin of species quite so barbarous in style as the anecdotes about Phanes and Prajapati which are preserved in the Orphic hymns and in the Brahmanas. The conduct of the earlier dynasties of classical gods towards each other was as notoriously

the world over among civilised and savage people, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. It is no wonder that pious and reflective men have, in so many ages a

tion. Every key has been tried in this difficult lock; every cause of confusion has been taken up and tested, deemed adequate, and finally rejected or assigned a subordinate place. Probably the first attempts to shake off the burden of religious horror at mythical impiety were made by way of silent omission. Thus most of the foulest myths of early India are absent, and presumably were left out, in the Rig-Veda. “The religious sentiment of the hymns, already so elevated, has discarded most of the tales which offended it, but has not succeeded in discarding them all.”11 Just as the poets of the Rig-Veda prefer to avoid the more

f apologetics etymology has been the most serviceable weapon. It is easy to see that by aid of etymology the most repulsive legend may be compelled to yield a pure or harmless sense, and may be explained as an innocent blunder, caused by mere verbal misunderstanding. Brahmans, Greeks, and Germans have equally found comfort in this hypothesis. In the Cratylus of Plato, Socrates speaks of the notion of explaining myths by etymological guesses at the meaning of divine names as “a philosophy which came to him all in an instant”. Thus we find Socrates shocked by the irreverence which styled Zeus the son of Cronus, “wh

is a certain truth in his account of etymological analysis an

some condition of the human intellect out of which the absurd element in myths might conceivably have sprung. Very naturally the philosophers supposed that the human beings in whose brain and speech myths had

d when physical speculation was coming into fashion, as in the age of Empedocles, he thought that the Homeric poems must contain a veiled account of physical philosophy. This was the opinion of Theagenes of Rhegium, who wrote at a period when a crude physicism was disengaging itself from the earlier religious and mythical cosmogonic systems of Greece. Theage

philosophers. He readily proved to himself that Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestus were allegorical representations, like what such phil

ions and physical agencies”; for there is nothing new in the mythological philosophy recentl

ind of philosophical romance, Euhemerus declared that he had sailed to some No-man’s-land, Panchaea, where he found the verity about mythical times engraved on pillars of bronze. This truth he published in the Sacra Historia, where he rationalised the fables, averring that the gods had been men, and that the myths

terpretations usually disagreed and killed each other. Just as one modern mythologist sees the wind in Aeetes and the dawn in Medea, while another of the same school believes, on equally good evidence,

hich were dramatic representations of the myths. “Pretty gods you worship,” said the Fathers, in effect, “homicides, adulterers, bulls, bears, mice, ants, and what not.” T

semi-bestial gods. He shows that the various interpretations destroy each other, and goes on to point out that Greek myth is in essence only a veneered and varnished version of the faith of Egypt. He ridicules, with a good deal of humour, the old theories which resolv

s argues, the interpreters take for granted in the makers of the myths an amount of physical knowledge which they certainly did not possess. For example, if Leto were only another name for Hera, the character of Zeus would be cleared as far as his amour with Leto is concerned. Now, the ancient believers in the “physical phenomena theory” of myths made out that Hera, the wife of Zeus, was really the same person under another name as Leto, his mistress. “For Hera is the earth” (they said a

world. As for his own explanation of the myths, Eusebius holds that they descend from a period when men in their lawless barbarism knew no better than to tell such tales. “Ancient folk, in the exceeding savagery of their lives, made no account of God, the universal Creator (here Eusebius is probably wrong) . . . but betook them to all manner of abominations. For the laws of decent existence were not yet established, nor was any settled and peaceful state ordained among men, but only a loose and savage fashion of wandering life, while, as beasts irrational, they cared for no more than to fil

favour of Hellenic mythology, and no sentimental reason for wishing to suppose that the origin of its impurities

mes would require a book to itself. It must suffice here to indica

poeic men had been physicists. Aristotle hints that they were (like himself) political philosophers.24 Neo-platonists sought in the myths for Neo-platonism; most

nt, who saw everywhere memories of the Noachian deluge a

he bottom of savage and ancient fable has been recent

f Greece. Certainly the Greeks of the philosophical period explained their own myths as symbols of higher things, but the explanation was an after-thought.27 The great Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus (1829), brought back common sense, and made it the guide of his vast, his unequalled learning. In a gent

logical method is intended for a scientific application of the old etymological interpretations. Cadmus in the Bacchae of Euripides, Socrates in the Cratylus of Plato, dismiss unpalatable myths as the results of verbal confusion. People had originally said something quite sensible — so the hypothesis runs — but when their descendants forgot the meaning of their remarks, a new and absurd meaning followed from a series of unconscious puns.31 This view was supported in ancient times by purely conjectural and impossible etymologies. Thus the myth that Dionysus was sewn up in the THI

oud, or lightning where Mr. Max Muller sees the chaste Dawn. Thus Mannhardt, after having been a disciple, is obliged to say that comparative Indo-Germanic mythology has not borne the fruit expected, and that “the CERTAIN gains of the system reduce themselves to the scantiest list of parallels, such as Dyaus = Zeus = Tius, Parjanya = Perkunas, Bhaga = Bog, Varuna = Uranos” (a position much disputed), etc. Mannhardt adds his belief that a number of other “equations”— such as Sarameya = Hermeias, Saranyus = Demeter Erinnys, Kentauros = Gandharva, and many others — will not stand criticism, and he fears that these ingenious guesses will prove mere jeux d’esprit rather than actual facts.33 Many examples of the precarious and contradictory character of the results of philological mythology, many instances of “dubious etymologies,” false logic, leaps at foregone conclusions, and attempts to make what is peculiarly Indian in thought into matter of universal application, will meet us in the chapters on Indian and Greek divine legends.34 “The method in its practical working shows a fundamental lac

d races. But these are not the only problems of mythology. There is, for example, the question of the GENEALOGICAL relations of myths, where we have to determine whether the myths of peoples whose speech is of the same family are special modifications of a mythology once c