Modern Mythology by Andrew Lang

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MODERN MYTHOLOGY

DEDICATION

Dedicated to the memory of John Fergus McLennan.

INTRODUCTION

It may well be doubted whether works of controversy serve any useful
purpose. 'On an opponent,' as Mr. Matthew Arnold said, 'one never does
make any impression,' though one may hope that controversy sometimes
illuminates a topic in the eyes of impartial readers. The pages which
follow cannot but seem wandering and desultory, for they are a reply to a
book, Mr. Max Muller's Contributions to the Science of Mythology, in
which the attack is of a skirmishing character. Throughout more than
eight hundred pages the learned author keeps up an irregular fire at the
ideas and methods of the anthropological school of mythologists. The
reply must follow the lines of attack.

Criticism cannot dictate to an author how he shall write his own book.
Yet anthropologists and folk-lorists, 'agriologists' and 'Hottentotic'
students, must regret that Mr. Max Muller did not state their general
theory, as he understands it, fully and once for all. Adversaries rarely
succeed in quite understanding each other; but had Mr. Max Muller made
such a statement, we could have cleared up anything in our position which
might seem to him obscure.

Our system is but one aspect of the theory of evolution, or is but the
application of that theory to the topic of mythology. The archaeologist
studies human life in its material remains; he tracks progress (and
occasional degeneration) from the rudely chipped flints in the ancient
gravel beds, to the polished stone weapon, and thence to the ages of
bronze and iron. He is guided by material 'survivals'--ancient arms,
implements, and ornaments. The student of Institutions has a similar
method. He finds his relics of the uncivilised past in agricultural
usages, in archaic methods of allotment of land, in odd marriage customs,
things rudimentary--fossil relics, as it were, of an early social and
political condition. The archaeologist and the student of Institutions
compare these relics, material or customary, with the weapons, pottery,
implements, or again with the habitual law and usage of existing savage
or barbaric races, and demonstrate that our weapons and tools, and our
laws and manners, have been slowly evolved out of lower conditions, even
out of savage conditions.

The anthropological method in mythology is the same. In civilised
religion and myth we find rudimentary survivals, fossils of rite and
creed, ideas absolutely incongruous with the environing morality,
philosophy, and science of Greece and India. Parallels to these things,
so out of keeping with civilisation, we recognise in the creeds and rites
of the lower races, even of cannibals; but _there_ the creeds and rites
are _not_ incongruous with their environment of knowledge and culture.
There they are as natural and inevitable as the flint-headed spear or
marriage by capture. We argue, therefore, that religions and mythical
faiths and rituals which, among Greeks and Indians, are inexplicably
incongruous have lived on from an age in which they were natural and
inevitable, an age of savagery.

That is our general position, and it would have been a benefit to us if
Mr. Max Muller had stated it in his own luminous way, if he wished to
oppose us, and had shown us where and how it fails to meet the
requirements of scientific method. In place of doing this once for all,
he often assails our evidence, yet never notices the defences of our
evidence, which our school has been offering for over a hundred years. He
attacks the excesses of which some sweet anthropological enthusiasts have
been guilty or may be guilty, such as seeing totems wherever they find
beasts in ancient religion, myth, or art. He asks for definitions (as of
totemism), but never, I think, alludes to the authoritative definitions
by Mr. McLennan and Mr. Frazer. He assails the theory of fetishism as if
it stood now where De Brosses left it in a purely pioneer work--or,
rather, where he understands De Brosses to have left it. One might as
well attack the atomic theory where Lucretius left it, or the theory of
evolution where it was left by the elder Darwin.

Thus Mr. Max Muller really never conies to grips with his opponents, and
his large volumes shine rather in erudition and style than in method and
system. Anyone who attempts a reply must necessarily follow Mr. Max
Muller up and down, collecting his scattered remarks on this or that
point at issue. Hence my reply, much against my will, must seem
desultory and rambling. But I have endeavoured to answer with some kind
of method and system, and I even hope that this little book may be useful
as a kind of supplement to Mr. Max Muller's, for it contains exact
references to certain works of which he takes the reader's knowledge for
granted.

The general problem at issue is apt to be lost sight of in this guerilla
kind of warfare. It is perhaps more distinctly stated in the preface to
Mr. Max Muller's Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv. (Longmans, 1895),
than in his two recent volumes. The general problem is this: Has
language--especially language in a state of 'disease,' been the great
source of the mythology of the world? Or does mythology, on the whole,
represent the survival of an old stage of thought--not caused by
language--from which civilised men have slowly emancipated themselves?
Mr. Max Muller is of the former, anthropologists are of the latter,
opinion. Both, of course, agree that myths are a product of thought, of
a kind of thought almost extinct in civilised races; but Mr. Max Muller
holds that language caused that kind of thought. We, on the other hand,
think that language only gave it one means of expressing itself.

The essence of myth, as of fairy tale, we agree, is the conception of the
things in the world as all alike animated, personal, capable of endless
interchanges of form. Men may become beasts; beasts may change into men;
gods may appear as human or bestial; stones, plants, winds, water, may
speak and act like human beings, and change shapes with them.

Anthropologists demonstrate that the belief in this universal kinship,
universal personality of things, which we find surviving only in the
myths of civilised races, is even now to some degree part of the living
creed of savages. Civilised myths, then, they urge, are survivals from a
parallel state of belief once prevalent among the ancestors of even the
Aryan race. But how did this mental condition, this early sort of false
metaphysics, come into existence? We have no direct historical
information on the subject. If I were obliged to offer an hypothesis, it
would be that early men, conscious of personality, will, and
life--conscious that force, when exerted by themselves, followed on a
determination of will within them--extended that explanation to all the
exhibitions of force which they beheld without them. Rivers run (early
man thought), winds blow, fire burns, trees wave, as a result of their
own will, the will of personal conscious entities. Such vitality, and
even power of motion, early man attributed even to inorganic matter, as
rocks and stones. All these things were beings, like man himself. This
does not appear to me an unnatural kind of nascent, half-conscious
metaphysics. 'Man never knows how much he anthropomorphises.' He
extended the only explanation of his own action which consciousness
yielded to him, he extended it to explain every other sort of action in
the sensible world. Early Greek philosophy recognised the stars as
living bodies; all things had once seemed living and personal. From the
beginning, man was eager causas cognoscere rerum. The only cause about
which self-consciousness gave him any knowledge was his own personal
will. He therefore supposed all things to be animated with a like will
and personality. His mythology is a philosophy of things, stated in
stories based on the belief in universal personality.

My theory of the origin of that belief is, of course, a mere guess; we
have never seen any race in the process of passing from a total lack of a
hypothesis of causes into that hypothesis of universally distributed
personality which is the basis of mythology.

But Mr. Max Muller conceives that this belief in universally distributed
personality (the word 'Animism' is not very clear) was the result of an
historical necessity--not of speculation, but of language. 'Roots were
all, or nearly all, expressive of action. . . . Hence a river could only
be called or conceived as a runner, or a roarer, or a defender; and in
all these capacities always as something active and animated, nay, as
something masculine or feminine.'

But _why_ conceived as 'masculine or feminine'? This necessity for
endowing inanimate though active things, such as rivers, with sex, is
obviously a necessity of a stage of thought wholly unlike our own. _We_
know that active inanimate things are sexless, are neuter; _we_ feel no
necessity to speak of them as male or female. How did the first speakers
of the human race come to be obliged to call lifeless things by names
connoting sex, and therefore connoting, not only activity, but also life
and personality? We explain it by the theory that man called lifeless
things male or female--by using gender-terminations--as a result of his
habit of regarding lifeless things as personal beings; that habit, again,
being the result of his consciousness of himself as a living will.

Mr. Max Muller takes the opposite view. Man did not call lifeless things
by names denoting sex because he regarded them as persons; he came to
regard them as persons because he had already given them names connoting
sex. And why had he done that? This is what Mr. Max Muller does not
explain. He says:

'In ancient languages every one of these words' (sky, earth, sea, rain)
'had necessarily' (why necessarily?) 'a termination expressive of gender,
and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex, so
that these names received not only an individual but a sexual character.'
{0a}

It is curious that, in proof apparently of this, Mr. Max Muller cites a
passage from the Printer's Register, in which we read that to little
children '_everything_ is _alive_. . . . The same instinct that prompts
the child to personify everything remains unchecked in the savage, and
grows up with him to manhood. Hence in all simple and early languages
there are but two genders, masculine and feminine.'

The Printer's Register states our theory in its own words. First came
the childlike and savage belief in universal personality. Thence arose
the genders, masculine and feminine, in early languages. These ideas are
the precise reverse of Mr. Max Muller's ideas. In his opinion, genders
in language caused the belief in the universal personality even of
inanimate things. The Printer's Register holds that the belief in
universal personality, on the other hand, caused the genders. Yet for
thirty years, since 1868, Mr. Max Muller has been citing his direct
adversary, in the Printer's Register, as a supporter of his opinion! We,
then, hold that man thought all things animated, and expressed his belief
in gender-terminations. Mr. Max Muller holds that, because man used
gender-terminations, therefore he thought all things animated, and so he
became mythopoeic. In the passage cited, Mr. Max Muller does not say
_why_ 'in ancient languages every one of these words had _necessarily_
terminations expressive of gender.' He merely quotes the hypothesis of
the Printer's Register. If he accepts that hypothesis, it destroys his
own theory--that gender-terminations caused all things to be regarded as
personal; for, ex hypothesi, it was just because they were regarded as
personal that they received names with gender-terminations. Somewhere--I
cannot find the reference--Mr. Max Muller seems to admit that
personalising thought caused gender-terminations, but these later
'reacted' on thought, an hypothesis which multiplies causes praeter
necessitatem.

Here, then, at the very threshold of the science of mythology we find Mr.
Max Muller at once maintaining that a feature of language,
gender-terminations, caused the mythopoeic state of thought, and quoting
with approval the statement that the mythopoeic state of thought caused
gender-terminations.

Mr. Max Muller's whole system of mythology is based on reasoning
analogous to this example. His mot d'ordre, as Professor Tiele says, is
'a disease of language.' This theory implies universal human
degradation. Man was once, for all we know, rational enough; but his
mysterious habit of using gender-terminations, and his perpetual
misconceptions of the meaning of old words in his own language, reduced
him to the irrational and often (as we now say) obscene and revolting
absurdities of his myths. Here (as is later pointed out) the objection
arises, that all languages must have taken the disease in the same way. A
Maori myth is very like a Greek myth. If the Greek myth arose from a
disease of Greek, how did the wholly different Maori speech, and a score
of others, come to have precisely the same malady?

Mr. Max Muller alludes to a Maori parallel to the myth of Cronos. {0b}
'We can only say that there is a rusty lock in New Zealand, and a rusty
lock in Greece, and that, surely, is very small comfort.' He does not
take the point. The point is that, as the myth occurs in two remote and
absolutely unconnected languages, a theory of disease of language cannot
turn the wards of the rusty locks. The myth is, in part at least, a
nature-myth--an attempt to account for the severance of Heaven and Earth
(once united) by telling a story in which natural phenomena are animated
and personal. A disease of language has nothing to do with this myth. It
is cited as a proof against the theory of disease of language.

The truth is, that while languages differ, men (and above all early men)
have the same kind of thoughts, desires, fancies, habits, institutions.
It is not that in which all races formally differ--their language--but
that in which all early races are astonishingly the same--their ideas,
fancies, habits, desires--that causes the amazing similarity of their
myths.

Mythologists, then, who find in early human nature the living ideas which
express themselves in myths will hardily venture to compare the analogous
myths of all peoples. Mythologists, on the other hand, who find the
origin of myths in a necessity imposed upon thought by misunderstood
language will necessarily, and logically, compare only myths current
among races who speak languages of the same family. Thus, throughout Mr.
Max Muller's new book we constantly find him protesting, on the whole and
as a rule, against the system which illustrates Aryan myths by savage
parallels. Thus he maintains that it is perilous to make comparative use
of myths current in languages--say, Maori or Samoyed--which the
mythologists confessedly do not know. To this we can only reply that we
use the works of the best accessible authorities, men who do know the
languages--say, Dr. Codrington or Bishop Callaway, or Castren or Egede.
Now it is not maintained that the myths, on the whole, are incorrectly
translated. The danger which we incur, it seems, is ignorance of the
original sense of savage or barbaric divine or heroic names--say, Maui,
or Yehl, or Huitzilopochhtli, or Heitsi Eibib, or Pundjel. By Mr. Max
Muller's system such names are old words, of meanings long ago generally
lost by the speakers of each language, but analysable by 'true scholars'
into their original significance. That will usually be found by the
philologists to indicate 'the inevitable Dawn,' or Sun, or Night, or the
like, according to the taste and fancy of the student.

To all this a reply is urged in the following pages. In agreement with
Curtius and many other scholars, we very sincerely doubt almost all
etymologies of old proper names, even in Greek or Sanskrit. We find
among philologists, as a rule, the widest discrepancies of
interpretation. Moreover, every name must mean _something_. Now,
whatever the meaning of a name (supposing it to be really ascertained),
very little ingenuity is needed to make it indicate one or other aspect
of Dawn or Night, of Lightning or Storm, just as the philologist pleases.
Then he explains the divine or heroic being denoted by the name--as Dawn
or Storm, or Fire or Night, or Twilight or Wind--in accordance with his
private taste, easily accommodating the facts of the myth, whatever they
may be, to his favourite solution. We rebel against this kind of logic,
and persist in studying the myth in itself and in comparison with
analogous myths in every accessible language. Certainly, if divine and
heroic names--Artemis or Pundjel--_can_ be interpreted, so much is
gained. But the myth may be older than the name.

As Mr. Hogarth points out, Alexander has inherited in the remote East the
myths of early legendary heroes. We cannot explain these by the analysis
of the name of Alexander! Even if the heroic or divine name can be shown
to be the original one (which is practically impossible), the meaning of
the name helps us little. That Zeus means 'sky' cannot conceivably
explain scores of details in the very composite legend of Zeus--say, the
story of Zeus, Demeter, and the Ram. Moreover, we decline to admit that,
if a divine name means 'swift,' its bearer must be the wind or the
sunlight. Nor, if the name means 'white,' is it necessarily a synonym of
Dawn, or of Lightning, or of Clear Air, or what not. But a mythologist
who makes language and names the fountain of myth will go on insisting
that myths can only be studied by people who know the language in which
they are told. Mythologists who believe that human nature is the source
of myths will go on comparing all myths that are accessible in
translations by competent collectors.

Mr. Max Muller says, 'We seldom find mythology, as it were, in situ--as
it lived in the minds and unrestrained utterances of the people. We
generally have to study it in the works of mythographers, or in the poems
of later generations, when it had long ceased to be living and
intelligible.' The myths of Greece and Rome, in Hyginus or Ovid, 'are
likely to be as misleading as a hortus siccus would be to a botanist if
debarred from his rambles through meadows and hedges.' {0c}

Nothing can be more true, or more admirably stated. These remarks are,
indeed, the charter, so to speak, of anthropological mythology and of
folklore. The old mythologists worked at a hortus siccus, at myths dried
and pressed in thoroughly literary books, Greek and Latin. But we now
study myths 'in the unrestrained utterances of the people,' either of
savage tribes or of the European Folk, the unprogressive peasant class.
The former, and to some extent the latter, still live in the mythopoeic
state of mind--regarding bees, for instance, as persons who must be told
of a death in the family. Their myths are still not wholly out of
concord with their habitual view of a world in which an old woman may
become a hare. As soon as learned Jesuits like Pere Lafitau began to
understand their savage flocks, they said, 'These men are living in
Ovid's Metamorphoses.' They found mythology in situ! Hence mythologists
now study mythology in situ--in savages and in peasants, who till very
recently were still in the mythopoeic stage of thought. Mannhardt made
this idea his basis. Mr. Max Muller says, {0d} very naturally, that I
have been 'popularising the often difficult and complicated labours of
Mannhardt and others.' In fact (as is said later), I published all my
general conclusions before I had read Mannhardt. Quite independently I
could not help seeing that among savages and peasants we had mythology,
not in a literary hortus siccus, but in situ. Mannhardt, though he
appreciated Dr. Tylor, had made, I think, but few original researches
among savage myths and customs. His province was European folklore. What
he missed will be indicated in the chapter on 'The Fire-Walk'--one
example among many.

But this kind of mythology in situ, in 'the unrestrained utterances of
the people,' Mr. Max Muller tells us, is no province of his. 'I saw it
was hopeless for me to gain a knowledge at first hand of innumerable
local legends and customs;' and it is to be supposed that he distrusted
knowledge acquired by collectors: Grimm, Mannhardt, Campbell of Islay,
and an army of others. 'A scholarlike knowledge of Maori or Hottentot
mythology' was also beyond him. We, on the contrary, take our Maori lore
from a host of collectors: Taylor, White, Manning ('The Pakeha Maori'),
Tregear, Polack, and many others. From them we flatter ourselves that we
get--as from Grimm, Mannhardt, Islay, and the rest--mythology in situ. We
compare it with the dry mythologic blossoms of the classical hortus
siccus, and with Greek ritual and temple legend, and with Marchen in the
scholiasts, and we think the comparisons very illuminating. They have
thrown new light on Greek mythology, ritual, mysteries, and religion.
This much we think we have already done, though we do not know Maori, and
though each of us can hope to gather but few facts from the mouths of
living peasants.

Examples of the results of our method will be found in the following
pages. Thus, if the myth of the fire-stealer in Greece is explained by
misunderstood Greek or Sanskrit words in no way connected with robbery,
we shall show that the myth of the theft of fire occurs where no Greek or
Sanskrit words were ever spoken. _There_, we shall show, the myth arose
from simple inevitable human ideas. We shall therefore doubt whether in
Greece a common human myth had a singular cause--in a 'disease of
language.'

It is with no enthusiasm that I take the opportunity of Mr. Max Muller's
reply to me 'by name.' Since Myth, Ritual, and Religion (now out of
print, but accessible in the French of M. Marillier) was published, ten
years ago, I have left mythology alone. The general method there adopted
has been applied in a much more erudite work by Mr. Frazer, The Golden
Bough, by Mr. Farnell in Cults of the Greek States, by Mr. Jevons in his
Introduction to the History of Religion, by Miss Harrison in explanations
of Greek ritual, by Mr. Hartland in The Legend of Perseus, and doubtless
by many other writers. How much they excel me in erudition may be seen
by comparing Mr. Farnell's passage on the Bear Artemis {0e} with the
section on her in this volume.

Mr. Max Muller observes that 'Mannhardt's mythological researches have
never been fashionable.' They are now very much in fashion; they greatly
inspire Mr. Frazer and Mr. Farnell. 'They seemed to me, and still seem
to me, too exclusive,' says Mr. Max Muller. {0f} Mannhardt in his second
period was indeed chiefly concerned with myths connected, as he held,
with agriculture and with tree-worship. Mr. Max Muller, too, has been
thought 'exclusive'--'as teaching,' he complains, 'that the whole of
mythology is solar.' That reproach arose, he says, because 'some of my
earliest contributions to comparative mythology were devoted exclusively
to the special subject of solar myths.' {0g} But Mr. Max Muller also
mentions his own complaints, of 'the omnipresent sun and the inevitable
dawn appearing in ever so many disguises.'

Did they really appear? Were the myths, say the myths of Daphne, really
solar? That is precisely what we hesitate to accept. In the same way
Mannhardt's preoccupation with vegetable myths has tended, I think, to
make many of his followers ascribe vegetable origins to myths and gods,
where the real origin is perhaps for ever lost. The corn-spirit starts
up in most unexpected places. Mr. Frazer, Mannhardt's disciple, is very
severe on solar theories of Osiris, and connects that god with the corn-
spirit. But Mannhardt did not go so far. Mannhardt thought that the
myth of Osiris was solar. To my thinking, these resolutions of myths
into this or that original source--solar, nocturnal, vegetable, or what
not--are often very perilous. A myth so extremely composite as that of
Osiris must be a stream flowing from many springs, and, as in the case of
certain rivers, it is difficult or impossible to say which is the real
fountain-head.

One would respectfully recommend to young mythologists great reserve in
their hypotheses of origins. All this, of course, is the familiar
thought of writers like Mr. Frazer and Mr. Farnell, but a tendency to
seek for exclusively vegetable origins of gods is to be observed in some
of the most recent speculations. I well know that I myself am apt to
press a theory of totems too far, and in the following pages I suggest
reserves, limitations, and alternative hypotheses. Il y a serpent et
serpent; a snake tribe may be a local tribe named from the Snake River,
not a totem kindred. The history of mythology is the history of rash,
premature, and exclusive theories. We are only beginning to learn
caution. Even the prevalent anthropological theory of the ghost-origin
of religion might, I think, be advanced with caution (as Mr. Jevons
argues on other grounds) till we know a little more about ghosts and a
great deal more about psychology. We are too apt to argue as if the
psychical condition of the earliest men were exactly like our own; while
we are just beginning to learn, from Prof. William James, that about even
our own psychical condition we are only now realising our exhaustive
ignorance. How often we men have thought certain problems settled for
good! How often we have been compelled humbly to return to our studies!
Philological comparative mythology seemed securely seated for a
generation. Her throne is tottering:

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