Chapter III · (continued 3)

The god-idea, accordingly, is the product of two component factors. One of these, the demoniacal, has had a long history, extending back to the beginnings of mythological thought; the other, the heroic, begins to assert itself the very moment that the figure of the hero appears. This implies that god-ideas are neither of sudden origin nor unchangeable, but that they undergo a gradual development. The direction of development is determined by the relation which its two component factors sustain to each other. The earliest god-ideas are predominantly demoniacal in nature—personal characteristics are few, while magical features are all the more pronounced. Then the heroic element comes to the fore, until it finally acquires such dominance that even the magical power of the god appears to be a result of his heroic might, rather than a survival of the demoniacal nature which was his from the very beginning. In connection with this change, it is significant to note that, as the god loses his original demoniacal character, he comes to be attended by subservient beings who remain, in every respect, demons. On the one hand, these beings execute the divine commands; on the other hand, however—as an echo, one might say, of the age of demons which precedes that of gods—they are superior even to the gods in that they possess magical powers. These beings must be regarded as survivals of the age of demons. Between them and the gods proper there are intermediate beings, just as there are between heroes and gods, those of the latter sort being exemplified particularly by such heroes as have been exalted into deities. Inasmuch as all the intermediate forms that arise in the course of this transition continue in existence even up to the culmination of the development, the gods constantly become more numerous. Side by side with the gods, demons maintain their sway. At times, they contend with the gods; in other instances, they are subservient to them; again, as in the earliest periods of mythological thought, they are without any knowledge whatsoever of the existence of gods. The hero also is invariably associated with the god. With the decline of the heroic age, therefore, the realm of gods also disappears. Though the religious developments that ensue have their origin in deity beliefs, they nevertheless discard the original nucleus of these beliefs—namely, the gods themselves—or, at any rate, they retain gods only in a greatly altered form.

That gods belong essentially to the heroic age appears also in the fact that the divine realm mirrors in detail the relations of political society developed subsequently to the beginning of the heroic age. The world of gods likewise forms a divine State. It is at most at an early period that the tribal gods of various peoples betray the influence of the ancient tribal organization that preceded the State. In the supremacy of a single god, however, the idea of rulership, which is basal to the State, is transferred also to the divine realm. This is true whether the ruling deity exercises command over a subservient host of demons and subordinate gods, or whether he has at his side a number of independent gods, who represent, in part, an advisory council, such as is found associated with the earthly ruler, and, in part, since the different gods possess diverse powers, a sort of celestial officialdom. Finally, the multiplicity of independent States is mirrored in the multiplicity of the independent realms ruled over by the gods. The differentiation, in this latter case, corresponds with the main directions of human interest. The development is influenced, moreover, by those natural phenomena that have long factored in the capacity of assimilative elements. Over against the bright celestial gods are the subterranean gods who dwell in the gloomy depths. For the inhabitants of the sea-coast and of islands, furthermore, there is a ruler of the sea. The importance of the god of the sea, however, is subordinate to that of the rulers of the celestial and the nether worlds, so that those over whom he holds sway never develop into clearly defined personalities, but always retain more of a demoniacal character. All the more important, therefore, are the contrasts between the celestial and the nether worlds, as the two realms which include the real destiny of man. At death, man must enter the nether world; to rise from the gloom of this realm of the dead to the heaven and immortality of the celestial gods becomes his longing. Thus, deity beliefs enter into reciprocal relations with soul conceptions. The further stages of this development carry us far beyond the heroic age, and reflect the influence of a diversity of motives. The discussion of this point will occupy our attention in later pages.

12. THE HERO SAGA.

If the gods be described as personalities, each one of whom possesses a more or less definite individuality, it is at once evident that the conception of an animated natural phenomenon—the idea, for example, that the setting sun is a being which a dark cloud-demon is devouring—cannot in and of itself as yet be called a god-idea. Just as the character of a man may be known only from the manner in which he reacts towards the objects of his experience, so also is the nature of a god revealed only in his life and activity, and in the motives that determine his conduct. The character of the god is expressed, not in any single mythological picture, but in the myth or mythological tale, in which the god figures as a personal agent. It is significant to note, however, that the form of myth in which god-ideas come to development is not the deity saga, in the proper sense of the term, but the hero saga, which becomes a combined hero and deity saga as soon as both gods and heroes are represented as participating in the action. The deity saga proper, which deals exclusively with the deeds of gods and demons, is, as we shall see below, only of secondary and of later origin. It is not to such deity sagas, therefore, that we must turn if we would learn the original nature of gods. This circumstance in itself offers external evidence of the fact that gods did not precede heroes, but, conversely, that heroes preceded gods. Or, at least, to be more accurate, the idea of the divine personality was developed in constant reciprocity with that of the hero personality, in such wise, however, that with reference to details the hero paved the way for the god, and not conversely.

But how did the idea of hero arise? Was it a free and completely new creation of this age, based merely on actual observations of individuals who were paragons of human ability? Or did it have precursors in the totemic era? As a matter of fact, this second question must be answered unqualifiedly in the affirmative. The hero was not unknown in the preceding age. At that time, however, he was not a hero in the specific sense which the word first acquired in the heroic age; on the contrary, he was a märchen-hero, if we may use the word 'hero' in connection with the concepts of this earlier period. On the threshold of the heroic age, the märchen-hero changes into the hero proper. The former represents the central theme of the earlier form of myth narrative, the märchen-myth, as does the hero that of the more developed form, the saga. The marks that distinguish the märchen-hero, as he still survives in children's tales, from the hero of saga, are important ones and are fraught with significance for the development of myth as a whole. The märchen-hero is usually a child. In the form in which he gradually approximates to the hero proper, he is more especially, as a rule, a boy who goes forth into the world and meets with adventures. In these adventures, he is aided by various powers of magic, which he either himself possesses or which are imparted to him by friendly magical beings. Opposed to him are hostile, demoniacal beings, who seek his destruction. It is in their overthrow that the action usually consists. Thus, fortune comes to this hero, in great part, from without, and magic plays the decisive rôle in his destiny; his own cunning and skill may be co-operating factors, but they rarely determine the outcome. Not so the hero of the saga. This hero is not a boy, but a man. The favourite theme of the saga is particularly the young man in the bloom of life. In his acts, moreover, this hero is dependent, for the most part, upon himself. True, he, as well as the märchen-hero, is familiar with magic and miracle, but it is primarily by his own power that he overcomes the hostile forces that oppose him. A suggestive illustration of this is Hercules, that figure of Greek saga who is pre-eminently the typical hero among the most diverse peoples and in widely different ages. Hercules is an entirely self-dependent hero. He indeed performs marvellous deeds, but these are never more than extreme instances of what an ordinary man might do were his strength multiplied a hundred or a thousand fold. Hercules is not a magician, but a being of transcendent power and strength. As such, he is able even to carry the weight of the sky on his shoulders; as such, he can overcome monsters, such as the Nemean lion and the Lernæan hydra, or bring Cerberus, the most terrible of these monsters, from the nether world. These are deeds which surpass every measure of human power, but which nevertheless still lie in the general plane of human actions. Thus, just as the magic-working boy was superseded by the man of might, so also does the true magical hero disappear from mythology. The saga, then, differs from the märchen-myth in the character of its hero. The Hercules saga itself, however, is an illustration of the fact that the former may have no connection whatsoever with historical events, any more than has the latter. Moreover, the earliest sagas, particularly, not infrequently still remind one of the märchen in that they are obviously a composite of several narratives. Of this fact also, the saga of Hercules offers a conspicuous example. The deeds of the hero appear to have but an accidental connection with one another. True, later sagas represent these deeds as adventures which the hero undertook at the command of King Eurystheus of Mycene. But even here we obviously have only a loose sort of framework which was at some later period imposed upon the original tales in order to bind the cycle together as a whole. It is not improbable that these various sagas of a hero who vanquished monsters, rendered lands habitable, and performed other deeds, originated independently of one another. Not only may their places of origin have been different, but their narratives may have had their settings in different localities. Possibly, therefore, it was not until later that the sagas were combined to portray the character of a single individual, who thus became exalted into the national hero. But, though the hero saga resembles the märchen in the fact that it grows by the agglutination of diverse legendary materials, it differs from it in the possession of a characteristic which is typical of this stage of development. That which binds together the separate elements of the hero saga is a unitary thought, generally associated with great cultural changes or with historical events.

There is a further differentia of the saga as compared with the märchen. Wherever magic enters into the saga to affect the course of events, the chief vehicle of magical powers is not the hero himself—at most, he has been equipped by others with magical powers and implements. Such demoniacal powers as the saga may introduce into its narrative are usually vested in accessory persons. This fact is closely connected with the self-dependent character of the hero-personality, who may, it is true, employ magic in so far as he has received such power from external sources, but who himself possesses none but human attributes. The saga of the Argonauts, for example, is so replete with magic as not to be surpassed in this respect even by the magical märchen. Moreover, the various elements incorporated in the saga are all pure märchen motives—the golden fleece, the talking ship, the closing cliffs, as well as the sorceress Medea and the whole wonderland of Colchis. Those who man the Argo, however, are not magicians, but heroes in the strictly human sense of the word. The same fact stands out even more strikingly in the case of the saga of Odysseus, at any rate in the form in which the Homeric epic presents it. We may here discern an entire cycle of tales, whose separate elements are also to be found elsewhere, some of them in wide distribution. But in the midst of this märchen-world stands the absolutely human hero, contrasting with whom the fabulous events of the narrative run their course as a fantastic show. The hero overcomes all obstacles that block the course of his journey by his own never-failing shrewdness and resourcefulness. Herein again the märchen-myth gives evidence of being preparatory to the hero saga. At the time when the hero ideal arose, the old märchen ideas were as yet everywhere current. Together with the belief in demons and magic, they, also, found their way into the heroic age. For a long time they continued to be favourite secondary themes, introduced in portraying the destiny of heroes. Nevertheless märchen ideas became subordinate to the delineation of heroic figures, whose surpassing strength was described, very largely, in terms of victory over demoniacal powers. Thus, in the course of the development, the heroic elements gradually increased; the märchen ideas, on the other hand, disappeared, except when some poet intentionally selected them for the enrichment of his tale, as was obviously done by the author of the Odyssey.

The disappearance of the elements derived from the märchen-myth, however, must in part be attributed to another factor. This factor, which is closely bound up with the entire culture of the heroic age, consists in the increasing influence of historical recollections. Particularly illuminative, as regards this point, are the Greek and Germanic sagas. The sagas of Hercules and the Argonauts, which, from this point of view, belong to a relatively early stage, are purely mythical creations. So far as one can see, no actual events are referred to by them. The Trojan saga, on the other hand, clearly exhibits the traces of historical recollections; its historical setting, moreover, seems to cause the events that transpire within it to approximate more nearly to the character of real life. Even here, indeed, ancient magical motives still cast their fantastic shadows over the narrative. Occasionally, however, the miracle appears in a rationalized form. The magician of the märchen gives place to the seer who predicts the future. What the miracle effected is now accomplished by the overpowering might and the baffling cunning of the strong and wily hero. In this change, the external accessories may sometimes remain the same, so that it is only the inner motives that become different. Thus, it is not impossible that the wooden horse which was said to have been invented by Odysseus and to have brought into Troy the secreted warriors of the besieging hosts, was at one time, in märchen or in saga, an actual magical horse, or a help-bringing deity who had assumed this form. In this case, the poet may possibly be presenting a rationalistic reinterpretation of an older magical motive, with the aim of exalting the craftiness of his hero. In the account of Achilles' youth, on the other hand, and in the story of Helen which the poet takes as his starting-point, the märchen-idea of the saga obviously affects the action itself, though it is significant to note that these purely mythical features do not belong to the plot so much as to its antecedent history. In so far as the heroes directly affect the course of action, they are portrayed as purely human. The same is true of the German Niebelungen saga. Just as Achilles, a mythical hero not at all unlike the märchen-hero, was taken over into the historical saga, so also was Siegfried. But here again the märchen motives, such as the fight with the dragon, Siegfried's invulnerability through bathing in its blood, the helmet of invisibility, and others, belong to the past history of the hero, and are mentioned only incidentally in the narrative itself. By referring these specifically märchen miracles to the past, the saga seems to say, as it were, that its heroes were at one time märchen-heroes.

In this course of development from the purely mythical to the historical, the saga may approach no more closely to historical reality than does the purely mythical tale. But while this may be the case, it is nevertheless true that the saga more and more approximates to that which is historically possible. Moreover, it is not those sagas which centre about an historical hero that are particularly apt to be free from elements of the original märchen. Very often the reverse is true. An original märchen-hero may become the central figure of an historical saga, and, conversely, the account of an historical personality may become so thoroughly interwoven with märchen-like tales of all sorts that history entirely disappears. A striking antithesis of this sort occurs in Germanic mythology. Compare the Dietrich saga with the later development of the Niebelungen saga in the form rendered familiar by the Niebelungenlied. Siegfried of the Niebelungen saga originates purely as a märchen-hero; Dietrich of Bern is an historical personage. But, while the Niebelungenlied incorporates a considerable number of historical elements—though, of course, in an unhistorical combination—the Dietrich of the saga retains little more than the name of the actual king of the Goths. There are two different conditions that give rise to sagas. In the first place, historical events that live in folk-memory assimilate materials of ancient märchen and sagas, and thus lead to a connected hero saga. Secondly, an impressive historical personality stimulates the transference of older myths as well as the creation of others, though these, when woven into a whole, resemble a märchen-cycle rather than a hero saga proper.

An important intermediate phenomenon of the sort just mentioned, is not infrequently to be found in a specific form of myth whose general nature is that of the hero saga, even though it is usually distinguished from the latter because of the character of its heroes. I refer to the religious legend. Some of these legends, such as the Buddha, the Mithra, and the Osiris legends, border upon the deity saga. Nevertheless, the religious legend, as exemplified also in the mythological versions of the life of Jesus, represents an offshoot of the hero saga, springing up at those times when the religious impulses are dominant. That it is a hero saga is evidenced particularly by the fact that it recounts the life and deeds of a personality who is throughout exalted above human stature, but who, nevertheless, attains to divinity only through his striving, his suffering, and his final victory. In so far, the religious hero very closely resembles the older class of heroes. Nevertheless, instead of the hero of the heroic period, pre-eminent for his external qualities, we have the religious hero, who is exalted by his inner worth into a redeeming god. But it is only because these divine redeemers fought and conquered as men—a thing that would be impossible to gods proper who are exalted from the beginning in supermundane glory—that they constitute heroes of saga, in spite of the fact that they fought with other weapons and in other ways than the heroes of the heroic age. And, therefore, none of these redeemer personalities, whether they have an historical background, as have Jesus and Buddha, or originate entirely in the realm of the mythological imagination, as in the case of Osiris and Mithra, belong to the realm of the saga once they are finally elevated into deities. Even Buddha's return in the endless sequence of ages is not to be regarded as an exception to this rule, for the hope of salvation here merely keeps projecting into the future the traditional Buddha legend. The redeeming activity of the one who is exalted into a god is to be repeated in essentially the same manner as the saga reports it to have occurred in the past.

Contrasting with the redemption legend is the saint legend. The former portrays the fortunes and final victory of a god in the making; the latter tells of the awakening of a human being to a pure religious life, of his temptations and sufferings, and his final triumph. Thus, it has a resemblance to the redeemer legend, and yet it differs from it in that its hero remains human even when he ascends into heaven to receive the victor's crown; the lot that thus befalls him is identical with that of all the devout, except that he is more favoured. This leads to further differences. The hero of the redemption legend is conscious of his mission from the very beginning; in the case of the saint, conversion to a new faith not infrequently forms the starting-point of the legend. Common to the two forms, however, is the fact that suffering precedes the final triumph. The traits that we have mentioned constitute the essential difference between these forms of the legend and the hero saga proper. The latter, also, is not without the element of suffering; the Greek saga has developed the specific type of a suffering hero in the figure of Hercules, as has the German saga in that of Balder. In the case of religious legends, however, the strife-motives of the saga are transferred to the inner life; similarly, the suffering of the saint, and especially that of the redeemer, is not merely physical but also mental. Indeed, the original form of the Buddha legend, which is freest from mythological accretions, is an illustration of the fact that this suffering may be caused exclusively by the evils of the world to be redeemed. The suffering due to a most intense sympathy is so intimate a part of the very nature of the redeeming god-man, that it is precisely this which constitutes the most essential difference between the religious legend and the ordinary hero saga, whose interest is centred upon the actions and motives of external life. And yet the external martyrdom of the redeemer intensifies this difference in a twofold way. In the first place, it directly enhances the impression of the inner suffering; secondly, it gives heightened expression both to the evil which evokes the sympathy of the redeemer, and to the nobility of this sympathy itself. In all of these characteristics, however, the redemption legend belongs to the following era rather than to hero saga and the heroic age.

The saint legend exhibits a number of essential differences. It is frequently only through a miracle of conversion, due to external powers, that the saint becomes holy; moreover, it is not, as a rule, through miracles of his own performance that he manifests himself as a saint in the course of his later life and sufferings. The miracles that transpire come as divine dispensations from without, whether they effect his conversion or surround him, particularly at the close of his life's journey, with the halo of sanctity. Thus, to whatever extent the saint may come, in later cult, to supersede the protective undergods and demons of early times, he nevertheless remains human. It is for this very reason, however, that magic and miracle gain a large place in his life. The latter is all the more possible by virtue of the fact that the mythological imagination is not bound by any fixed tradition, and need, therefore, set itself no limits whatsoever either in the number of saints or in the nature of their deeds. Moreover, the legend is almost totally lacking in those factual elements which the hero saga acquires, in its later development, as a result of the historical events that are woven into it. This is not the case with the legend. Here it is at most the name of an historical personality that is retained, while everything else clearly bears the marks of imagination and of myth creation. Hence the saint legend is not to be counted among the factors that underlie the development from the purely mythical tale to the saga, whose content, though not real, is at any rate possible. On the contrary, the tendency of the saint legend is retrogressive, namely, toward a return to the märchen stage of myth. This is all the more true, not merely because elements that are generally characteristic of märchen are disseminated from legend to legend, but also because the saint legend appropriates widely current märchen conceptions. Märchen of very diverse origins found their way into the Christian, as well as the Buddhistic, legends; moreover, occasional Buddhistic legends, with the clear marks of an Oriental origin upon them, were changed into Christian legends. Thus, the saint legend combines two characteristics. As compared with the hero saga, its motives are internalized; moreover, it represents a decided relapse into the pure märchen form of myth. Though apparently contradictory, these characteristics are really closely related, inasmuch as the internalization of motives itself removes any barriers imposed by historical recollection upon the free play of the mythological imagination.

13. COSMOGONIC AND THEOGONIC MYTHS.

In view of the relationship of heroes and gods, not only with respect to origin but also as regards the fact that they both embody personal ideals, it would appear but natural, having treated of the hero saga, that we inquire at this time concerning the corresponding deity saga. A search for the latter, however, will at once reveal a surprising fact. There is no deity saga at all, in the sense in which we have a hero saga that has become a favourite field of epic and dramatic poetry. The reason for this lack is not difficult to see. There can be no real deity saga because, in so far as gods possess characteristics which differentiate them from men, and therefore also from heroes, they have no history. Immortal, unchangeable, unassailable by death or sickness, how could experiences such as befall the hero also be the lot of gods? If we examine the narratives that approach somewhat to the deity saga, we will find that they consist, not of a connected account of the experiences of the gods, but of isolated incidents that again centre about human life, and particularly about the beneficent or pernicious intervention of the gods in the destinies of heroes. We may recall the participation of the Greek gods in the Trojan war, or the interest of Jahve, in Israelitic saga, in the fortunes of Abraham, Jacob, etc. These are isolated occurrences, and not history; or, rather, we are given the history of heroes, in which the gods are at times moved to intervene. In so far, therefore, as there are approximations to deity saga, these, in their entirety, are woven into hero saga; apart from the latter, the former but report particular actions, which may, doubtless, throw light on the personal character of the god, but which of themselves do not constitute a connected history. Greek mythology offers a clear illustration of this in the so-called Homeric hymns. These hymns must not be ascribed to Homer or merely to singers of Homeric times. They are of later composition, and are designed for use in cult. Their value consists precisely in the fact that they portray the god by reference to the various directions of his activity, thus throwing light partly on the nature of the god and partly, and especially, on his beneficent rulership of the human world. It is this last fact that gives these poems the character of religious hymns.

Nevertheless, there is one class of myths in which the gods themselves actually appear to undergo experiences. I refer to those sagas and poems which are concerned with the birth of the gods, and with the origin of their rulership over the world and over the world-order which they have created, namely, to the cosmogonic and theogonic myths. These myths relate solely to a world of demons and gods, and they deal, as a rule, with an age prior to the existence of man, or with one in which the creation of man is but a single episode. Again, however, one might almost say that the exception proves the rule. For upon close examination it will be found that the gods who figure in these cosmogonies are not those with whose traits the hero saga, and the hymnology connected with it, have made us familiar. The gods whom the cosmogonic myths portray differ from those who protect and direct human life. They are not real gods, even though they bear this name, but are powerful demons. Except in name, the Zeus of Hesiodic theogony has scarcely anything in common with the Zeus of the Homeric hierarchy of gods. This fact does not reflect any peculiarity of the poet, as it were, but is due to the nature of the subject-matter itself. Even though theogonic myths were not elaborated into poetic form until a relatively late period, they are nevertheless of a primitive nature. Analogues to them had existed among primitive peoples long before the rise of the hero saga, hence at an age when the preconditions of god-ideas proper were still entirely lacking. The cosmogonic gods of the Greeks and Germans, as well as those of the ancient Babylonians, are of the nature of purely demoniacal beings. They lack the chief attribute of a god, namely, personality. Moreover, the myths themselves—if we disregard their form, which was the product of later literary composition—are not at all superior to the cosmogonies of the Polynesians and of many of the native tribes of North America. Obviously, therefore, it betokens a confusion of god-ideas proper with these cosmogonic beings, when it is maintained, as sometimes occurs, that the mythology of these primitive peoples, especially that of the Polynesians, is of a particularly advanced character. This should not be claimed for it, but neither may this be said of the Hesiodic theogony or the Babylonian creation myths. It is true that these myths are superior to the earlier forms of demon belief, for they at least develop a connected view of the origin of things. Primitive myth accepts the world as given. The origin of the world-order as a whole still lies beyond its field of inquiry. Though it occasionally relates how animals came into being, its imagination is essentially concerned with the origin of man, whom it regards as having sprung from stones or plants, or as having crept up out of caves. Even when this stage is transcended and an actual cosmogony arises, the latter nevertheless remains limited to the circle of demon conceptions, which are essentially the same in the myths of civilized peoples as in those of so-called peoples of nature. According to a cosmogonic myth of the Polynesians, for example, heaven and earth were originally a pair of mighty gods united in embrace. The sons who were born to these gods strove to free themselves and their parents from this embrace. Placing himself on the floor of mother earth, therefore, and extending his feet toward the heavens, one of these sons pushed father heaven upward, so that ever since that time heaven and earth have been separated. This mistreatment aroused another of the divine sons, the god of the winds. Thus a strife arose, whose outcome was a peaceful condition of things. This is a cosmogonic myth whose essential elements belong to the same circle of ideas as the cosmogony of the Greeks. In the latter also, Uranus and Gæa are said to have held each other in an embrace, as the result of which there came the race of the Titans. One might regard this as a case of transference were the idea not obviously a grotesque development of a märchen-motive found even at a more primitive period. According to the latter, heaven and earth were originally in contact, and were first separated by a human being of prehistoric times—an idea undoubtedly suggested by the roofing-over of the hut. The Babylonian myth gives a different version of the same conception. It ascribes the separation of heaven and earth to the powerful god Marduk, who cleaves in two the original mother Thiamat. From one part, came the sea; from the other, the celestial ocean. As in many other nature myths, heaven is here conceived as a great sea which forms the continuation, at the borders of the earth, of the terrestrial sea. This then suggests the further idea that the crescent moon is a boat moving over the celestial ocean.

In all of these myths the gods are given the characteristics of mighty demons. They appear as the direct descendants of the ancient cloud, water, and weather demons, merely magnified into giant stature in correspondence with their enormous theatre of action. Thus, as regards content, these cosmogonic myths are märchen of a very primitive type, far inferior to the developed märchen-myths, whose heroes have already acquired traits of a more personal sort. In form, however, cosmogonic myths strive towards the gigantic, and thus lie far above the level of the märchen-myth. Though the complete lack of ethical traits renders the gods of cosmogonic myths inferior in sublimity to gods proper, they nevertheless rival the latter in powerful achievement. Indeed, however much cosmogony may fail to give its gods the characteristics requisite for true gods, it does inevitably serve to enhance the divine attribute of power. A further similarity of cosmogonic and theogonic myths to the most primitive märchen-myths appears in the fact that they seem directly to borrow certain elements from widely disseminated märchen-motives. I mention only the story of Kronos. Kronos, according to the myth, devours his children. But his wife, Rhea, withholds the last of these—namely, Zeus—giving him instead a stone wrapped in linen; hereupon Kronos gives forth, together with the stone, all the children that he had previously devoured. This is a märchen of devourment, similar or derivative forms of which are common. For example, Sikulume, a South African märchen-hero, delays pursuing giants by throwing behind him a large stone which he has besmeared with fat; the giants devour the stone and thus lose trace of the fugitive.

But there is also other evidence that cosmogonic myths are of the nature of märchen, magnified into the immense and superhuman. In almost all such myths, particularly in the more advanced forms, as found among cultural peoples, an important place is occupied by two conceptions. The first of these conceptions is that the creation of the world was preceded by chaos. This chaos is conceived either as a terrifying abyss, as in Germanic and particularly in Greek mythology, or as a world-sea encompassing the earth, as in the Babylonian history of creation. In both cases we find ideas of terrible demons. Sometimes these demons are said to remain on the earth, as beings of a very ancient time anteceding the creation—examples are Night and Darkness, described in Greek mythology as the children of Chaos. Other myths represent the demons as having been overcome by the world-creating god. Thus there is a Babylonian saga that tells of an original being which enveloped the earth in the form of a snake, but whose body was used by the god in forming the heavens. As a second essential element of cosmogonies we find accounts of battles of the gods, in which hostile demons are vanquished and a kingdom of order and peace is established. These demons are thought of as powerful monsters. They induce a live consciousness of the terrors of chaos, not only by their size and strength but often also by their grotesque, half-animal, half-human forms, by their many heads or hundreds of arms. Obviously these Titans, giants, Cyclopes, and other terrible beings of cosmogony are the direct descendants of the weather demons who anteceded the gods. Does not the idea of a world-catastrophe that prepares the way for the rulership of the gods at once bring to mind the image of a terrible thunderstorm? As the storm is followed by the calm of nature, so chaos is succeeded by the peaceful rulership of the gods. Inasmuch, however, as the gods are the conquerors of the storm demons, they themselves inevitably revert into demoniacal beings. It is only after the victory has been won that they are again regarded as inhabiting a divine world conceived in analogy with the human State, and that they are vested with control over the order and security of the world.

All this goes to show that cosmogonic myths, in the poetic forms in which cosmogonies have come down to us, are relatively late mythological products. True, they represent the gods themselves as demoniacal beings. Nevertheless, this does not imply that god-ideas did not exist at the time of their composition; it indicates merely that the enormous diversity of factors involved in the creation of the world inevitably caused the gods to lose the attributes of personal beings. The cosmogonies of cultural peoples, however, differ from the otherwise similar stories of those semi-cultural peoples whose mythology consists exclusively of such cosmogonic märchen. In the latter case, real god-ideas are lacking. The gods have remained essentially demons. In the higher forms of this semi-culture, where political development has had an influence on the world of gods, as was once the case among the peoples of Mexico and Peru, divine beings may approximate to real gods. In cosmogonic myths themselves, however, this never occurs. Thus, these myths invariably constitute a stage intermediate between the mythology of demons and that of gods; they may originate, however—and this is what probably happens in the majority of cases—through a relapse of gods into demons. An illustration of the latter is the Hesiodic cosmogony. The weather-myth which the poet has elaborated obviously incorporated ancient märchen-myths that do not differ essentially from the original märchen as to content, but only as respects their grotesque and gigantic outlines. Compared with the gods of the hero saga, therefore, the cosmogonic myths of cultural peoples are of relatively late origin; to discuss the latter first, as is still done in our accounts of the mythology of the Greeks, Germans, etc., may easily lead to misconceptions. Of course, the creation of the world came first, but it is not at all true that the myth of the world's creation anteceded all others. On the contrary, the latter is a late and sometimes, perhaps, the last product of the mythological imagination. This is particularly apt to be the case where, as so clearly appears in the Biblical account of the creation, there is involved a specific religious impulse that is seeking to glorify the world-creating god. This religious impulse imposes upon the older mythical material a new character. Hence we find that, of the two elements universally characteristic of the cosmogonic myth, it is only the idea of chaos that is retained, while the account of struggles with the monsters of earliest times disappears. Nevertheless, though the creating god has lost his demoniacal character, he has not yet attained a fully developed personality;—this is precluded by the enormity of the world, which transcends all human measure. He himself is in every respect an unlimited personal will, and is, therefore, really just as much a superpersonal being as the battling gods of other cosmogonies are subpersonal. That such a cosmogony, unique in this respect, may be original, is, of course, impossible. Indeed, the dominant conviction of Oriental antiquarians to-day is that the Biblical account of the creation rests on older and more primitive ideas derived from the Babylonian cosmogony, whose main outlines we have described above. This may doubtless be true, and yet no compelling proof of the contention can be adduced, for it is precisely those features in which both accounts are identical—namely, chaos, the original darkness, and the separating and ordering activity of the god—that are common property to almost all cosmogonies. The Biblical account of the creation, however, may not be classed with myths. It is a religious production of priests who were dominated by the thought that the national god rules over the people of Israel and over the world. Hence alone could it substitute a creation out of nothing for the ordering of a chaos, though the latter feature also persists in the Biblical account. The substitution, of course, dates from a later time than the myth, and represents a glorification of divine omnipotence which is entirely impossible to the latter.

A sort of offshoot of cosmogonic myths, though in striking antithesis to them, is the flood saga. This still retains, in their entirety, the characteristics of the original märchen-myth. It belongs to a variety of widely prevalent myths which, like the creation myths, appear to some extent to have originated independently in various parts of the earth, but also to have spread widely from one region to another. Evidence indicative of the independent origin of many of these sagas is to be found in the fact that, in many tropical regions, accounts of a flood, or so-called deluge sagas (Sintflutsagen), are represented by sagas of conflagration (Sintbrandsagen), according to which the world was destroyed, not by a general deluge, but by fire. In neither word has the prefix Sint any connection with Sünde (sin), with which popular etymology commonly connects it. Sint (old high German sin) is a word that has disappeared from modern German and means 'universal.' A Sintflut, thus, is a universal, in distinction from a merely local, flood. In so far, the sagas of universal flood and conflagration already approximate to the myths relating to the destruction of the world. Now, the Biblical story of the flood has so many elements in common with that of the Babylonians that we are compelled to assume a borrowing, and hence a transference, of material. The rescue of a single man and his household, the taking of animals into the ship, its landing upon the summit of a mountain, the dispatching of birds in quest of land—of these elements, some might possibly have originated independently in different parts of the earth. The rescue of individuals, for example, is included in almost all flood and conflagration legends, the direct source of the idea being the connection between the antediluvian and postdiluvian worlds. Of the combination of all of these elements into a whole, however, we may say without hesitation that it could not have arisen twice independently. The universal motive of the flood saga and that which led to its origin in numerous localities, without any influence on the part of foreign ideas, is obviously the rain as it pours down from the heavens. For this reason flood sagas are particularly common wherever rain causes devastating and catastrophic floods, whereas they are lacking in such regions as the Egyptian delta, where there are periodic inundations by the sea, as well as in the Arabian peninsula and in the rainless portions of Africa. As a rule, therefore, they are both rain sagas and flood sagas. They naturally suggest, further, the idea of a boatman who rescues himself in a boat and lands upon a mountain. According to an American flood myth which has preserved more faithfully than that of western Asia the character of the märchen, the mountain upon which the boatman lands rises with the flood and settles again as the flood subsides.

The flood sagas of cultural peoples, however, combine these very ancient märchen elements with a projection of the cosmogonic myth into a later event of human history. The flood deluging the earth is a return to chaos; indeed, often, as in the sagas of western Asia, chaos itself is represented as a mighty abyss of water. This is then connected with the idea of a punishment in which the god destroys what he has created, preserving from the universal destruction only the righteous man who has proved worthy of such salvation. Thus, the universal flood (Sintflut) actually develops into a sin flood (Sündflut). This change, of course, represents an elaboration on the part of priests, who projected the religious-ethical feature of a divine judgment into what was doubtless originally a purely mythological saga, just as they transformed the creation myth into a hymn to the omnipotence of the deity. But this prepares the way for a further step. The counterpart of these cosmological conceptions is projected not merely into a past which marks the beginning of the present race of men, but also into the future. Over against the transitory world-catastrophe of the universal flood, there looms the final catastrophe of the actual destruction of the world, and over against a preliminary judgment of the past, the final judgment, at which this life ends and that of the yonder world begins.

Thus, we come to the myths of world destruction, as they are transmitted in the apocalyptic writings of later Israelitic literature and in the Apocalypse of John, who betrays the influence of the earlier writers. At this point we leave the realm of myth proper. The latter is always concerned with events of the past or, in extreme cases, with those of the immediate present. No doubt, the desires of men may reach out indefinitely into the future. Myth narrative, however, in the narrower sense of the term, takes no account of that which lies beyond the present. In general, moreover, its scene of action is the existing world, however much this may be embellished by the imagination. Myth reaches its remotest limit in cosmogonies. Even here, however, no absolute limit is attained, for the world-creation is represented as having been preceded by chaos. The idea of a creation out of nothing, which dislodges the idea of an original chaos, arises from religious needs and is not mythological in character. Similarly, the apocalyptic myth of world-destruction has passed beyond the stage of the myth proper. It is a mythological conception, which, though combining elements of the cosmogonic myth with fragments of märchen and sagas, is, in the main, the expression of a religious need for a world beyond. These myths, therefore, are not original myth creations, as are the cosmogonic myths, at least in part. They are the product of religious reflection, and, as such, they are dominated primarily by the desire to strengthen the righteous in his hopes and to terrify his adversary. Thus, the history of the cosmogonic myth here repeats itself in a peculiarly inverted form. With the exception of occasional survivals, the religious hymn, which is the ripest development of the cosmogonic myth, excludes the struggles of demons and wild monsters of the deep; the myth of the destruction of the world, on the other hand, constantly seeks, by its fantastic imagery, to magnify fears and punishments, as well as blessed hopes. As a result, all these accounts clearly bear the traces of a laborious invention seeking to surpass itself and thus to atone for the lack of original mythological imagination. We may call to mind the monster which the Book of Daniel describes as coming forth from the sea, provided with enormous iron teeth, and bearing on its head ten horns, among which an eleventh horn appears, which possesses eyes, and a mouth that speaks blasphemous words. Such things may be invented by the intellect, but they are impossible as natural creations of the mythological imagination. The motives underlying such exaggerations beyond the mythologically possible are to be found in factors which, though extending far back into the beginnings of mythology, nevertheless attain their development primarily in this age of gods and heroes. These factors are the ideas of the beyond.

14. THE BELIEF IN SOULS AND IN A WORLD BEYOND.

Closely connected with the cosmogonic myth are the ideas of a world beyond into which man may enter at the close of the present life. Before such ideas could arise, there must have been some general world-conception into which they could be fitted. The ideas of a beyond, therefore, are but constituent elements of cosmogonic conceptions; indeed, they are confined to relatively advanced forms of the latter. This is indicated by the fact that the earlier mythological creations contain no clearly defined notions of a beyond. Where there is no definite world-view, such conceptions, of course, are impossible. Thus, the two ideas mutually reinforce each other. The cosmogonic myth gives a large setting to the ideas of a beyond; the latter, in turn, contribute to the details of the world picture which the cosmogonic myth has created. At any rate, when poetry and philosophy, in their endeavour to construct a coherent cosmogony, began to appropriate celestial myths, ideas of a life after death and of a world beyond were already in existence. Some of these ideas, indeed, date back to an early period.

It is an extremely, significant fact that, wherever we can trade their development at all, these ideas of a beyond follow the same definite and orderly course. The direction of this development is determined not only by the cosmogonic myth but also by the ideas regarding the soul. The formation of ideas of a beyond is impossible without a world-view transcending the limits of earthly existence; the latter, however, results from the need of ascribing to the soul a continuance after death. This need, of course, is not an original one, but is essentially conditioned by the age of gods. Among primitive peoples, the beginnings of a belief in a life after death are to be found chiefly in connection with the fear of the demon of the dead, who may bring sickness and death to the living. But just as the fear is of short duration, so also is the survival after death limited to a brief period. On a somewhat more advanced stage, as perhaps among the Soudan peoples, most of the Melanesian tribes, and the forest-dwelling Indians of South America, it is especially the prominent men, the tribal chiefs, who, just as they survive longest in memory, are also supposed to enjoy a longer after-life. This conception, however, remains indefinite and of a demoniacal character, just as does that of the soul. In all of these conceptions, therefore, the disembodied soul is represented as remaining within this world. It continues its existence in the environment; as yet there is no yonder-world in the strict sense of the word. It is important, moreover, to distinguish the early ideas of a beyond from the above-mentioned celestial märchen which narrate how certain human beings ascended into heaven. The latter are purely märchen of adventure, in which sun, moon, stars, and clouds, as well as the terrestrial monsters, dwarfs, gnomes, etc., are conceived of as belonging to the visible world. Indeed, these celestial travellers are not infrequently represented as returning unharmed to their terrestrial home. Thus, these tales generally lack the idea which, from the outset, is essential to the conception of a yonder-world—the idea, namely, of the sojourn of the soul at definite places, whether these be thought of as on, under, or above the earth. Here again, it is characteristic that at first this region is located approximately midway between this world and the one beyond. The belief takes the form of a spirit-village, a conception prevalent especially among the tribes of American Indians. Inaccessible to living beings and in some secret part of the earth, there is supposed to be a village. In this village the spirits of the dead are thought to assemble, and to continue their existence in precisely the same manner as before death, hunting and fighting just as they did in their earthly life. The spirit-village itself is described as exactly like an ordinary village. Characteristic of the totemic setting which all of these ideas still possess, is the fact that among many of the Indians of the prairies there is thought to be not only a spirit-village but also a buffalo-village, where the dead buffaloes congregate, and into which, according to the märchen, an adventurous youth may occasionally stray. Sometimes, moreover, these tales give more specific accounts of the way in which such villages are rendered inaccessible. A river spanned by an almost impassable bridge, or a dense, impenetrable forest, separates the spirit-village from the habitations of the living. Ravines and mountain caves may either themselves serve as the dwelling-places of the spirits or form the approaches to them. In addition to these conceptions, there are also others, which have, in part, found a place, even in later mythology. The dead are, represented as dwelling, not in some accessible part of the earth, but on remote islands. Such ideas are common in Polynesia, and also in other island and coast regions. Even in Homer we come upon the picture of a distant island. It is here that Menelaus found rescue on his return from Troy. The island is described as a place of happiness, where only the privileged among mortals are granted a blessed future.

A second and, on the whole, an obviously later form of ideas of a beyond, are the myths of the nether world. These for the first time tell of a beyond which is by its very nature inaccessible to human beings, or which is visited by only a few divinely privileged heroes, such as Hercules, Odysseus, and Æneas. As a third and last form of ideas of a beyond, we may mention those of a heaven, where dwell the dead, in the presence of the gods. As a rule, however, this heavenly beyond does not lead to the disappearance of the nether world. Rather are the two worlds set over against each other, as the result of the enhancement of an antithesis which arose even in connection with the realms of the nether world. The heaven becomes the abode of the blessed, of the devout and righteous, the favoured of the gods; the underworld continues, at the outset, to be the lot of the majority of human beings. The growing desire to participate in the joys of blessedness, then causes the privilege which was at first enjoyed only by a minority to become more universal, and the underworld is transformed into the abode of the guilty and the condemned. Finally, heaven becomes possible even for the latter, through the agency, more particularly, of magical purification and religious ecstasy.

Of the various ideas of the beyond that successively arise in this development, those regarding the underworld are the most common and the most permanent. This is probably due in no small measure to the custom of burying the corpse. Here the entrance into the underworld is, to a certain extent, directly acted out before the eyes of the observers, even though the mythological imagination may later create quite a different picture of the event. The custom of burial, however, cannot have been the exclusive source of these ideas, nor perhaps even the most important one. In the Homeric world, the corpse was not buried, but burned. And yet it is to Homer that we owe one of the clearest of the older descriptions of the underworld, and it can scarcely be doubted that the main outlines of this picture were derived from popular conceptions. As a matter of fact, there is another factor, purely psychological in character, which is here obviously of greater force than are tribal customs. This is the fear of death, and the terror of that which awaits man after death. This fear creates the idea of a ghostly and terrible region of the dead, cold as the corpse itself and dark as the world must appear to its closed eyes. But that which is thought of as dark and cold is the interior of the earth, for such are the characteristics of mountain caves that harbour uncanny animals. The underworld, also, is stocked with creations of fear, particularly with subterranean animals, such as toads, salamanders, and snakes of monstrous and fantastic forms. Many of the terrible beings which later myths represent as living on the earth probably originated as monsters of the underworld. Examples of this are the Furies, the Keres, and the Harpies of the Greeks. It was only as the result of a later influence, not operative at the time of the original conceptions of Hades, that myth permitted these beings to wander about the upper world. This change was due to the pangs of conscience, which transforms the ghosts of the underworld into frightful, avenging beings, and then, as a result of the misery visited even upon the living because of the crimes which they have committed, transfers them to the mundane world. Here they pursue particularly the one who has committed sacrilege against the gods, and also him whose sin is regarded as especially grievous, such as the parricide or matricide. Thus, with the internalization of the fear impulse, the demoniacal forms which the latter creates are brought forth from the subterranean darkness and are made to mingle with the living. Similarly, the joyous and hope-inspiring ideas of a beyond are projected still farther upward, and are elevated beyond the regions of this earth into heavenly spaces that seem even more inaccessible than the underworld. Prior to the age, however, which regards the heaven as the abode of the blessed, many peoples—possibly all who advanced to this notion of two worlds—entertained a different conception. This conception represents, perhaps, the surviving influence of the earlier ideas of spirit-islands. For the underworld was itself regarded as including, besides places of horror, brighter regions, into which, either through the direct favour of the gods or in accordance with a judgment pronounced upon the dead, the souls of the pure and righteous are received. As a result of the division which thus occurred, and of the antithesis in which these images of the beyond came to stand, pain and torment were added to the impressions of horror and hopelessness which the original conceptions of the underworld aroused. The contrasts that developed, however, did not prevent the underworld from being regarded as including both the region of pain and that of bliss. This seems to have been the prevalent notion among Semitic as well as Indo-Germanic peoples. The Walhalla of the Germans was also originally thought to be located in the underworld, and it is possible that it was not transferred to the heavens until the advent of Christianity. For, indeed, we are not familiar with Germanic mythology except as it took form within the period in which Christianity had already become widespread among the German tribes.

An important change in the ideas of the beyond now took place. The separation of the abodes of spirits gradually led to a distinction between the deities who were regarded as the rulers of the two regions. Originally, so long as only the fear of death found expression in the unvarying gloom of the underworld, these deities were but vaguely defined. The conceptions formed of them seem to have reflected the ideas of rulership derived from real life, just as was true in the case of the supermundane gods. Indeed, the origin of the more definite conception that the underworld is a separate region ruled by its own gods, must probably be traced to the influence of the ideas of celestial gods. But there is a still more primitive feature of myths of the beyond, one that goes back to their very beginnings, and that long survives in saga and märchen. This is the preference shown by myths of the nether world for female beings, whether as subordinate personifications of fear or as deities. Not only is the ideal of beauty and grace thought of as a female deity, an Aphrodite perhaps, but the psychological law of the intensification of contrasts causes also the fearful and terrifying sorts of deities to assume the feminine form. Such a gruesome and terrible goddess is exemplified by the Norse Hel, or, widely remote from her in time and space, by the Babylonian Ereksigal. In the Greek underworld also, it is Persephone who rules, and not Pluto, her consort. The latter seems to have been introduced merely in order that the underworld might have a counterpart to the celestial pair of rulers, Zeus and Hera. If the fear-inspiring attributes are not so pronounced in the Greek Persephone, this is due to the fact that in this case agricultural myths have combined with the underworld myths. To this combination we must later recur, inasmuch as it is of great significance for cult. The dominant place given to the female deity in the underworld myth, again brings the nether world into a noteworthy contrast with the supermundane realm of gods. In the latter, male gods, as the direct embodiments of a superhuman hero-ideal, are always predominant.

It is not alone the inner forces of fear and horror that cause the realm of the dead to be thought of as located in the interior of the earth. There is operative also an external influence imparted by Nature herself, namely, the perception of the setting sun. Wherever particular attention is called to some one entrance to the underworld, or where a distant region of the earth is regarded as the abode of the dead, this is located in the west, in the direction of the setting sun. We have here a striking example of that form of mythological association and assimilation in which the phenomena of external nature, and particularly those of the heavens, exert an influence upon myth development. It would, of course, be incorrect to assert that the setting sun alone suggested the idea of an underworld. We must rather say that this phenomenon was obviously a subordinate and secondary factor. Its influence was not clearly and consciously apprehended even as affecting the location of the underworld, though this location was determined solely by it. Because of its connection with approaching night, the setting sun came to be associated with all those feelings that caused the underworld to be regarded as a realm of shadows and of terrifying darkness. It was the combination of all these factors, and not any single one of them—least of all, a relatively secondary one, such as the sunset—that created and so long maintained the potency of this most permanent of all the ideas of a beyond.

Mention should also be made of the influence exerted, even at an early time, by soul-ideas. At the beginning of the heroic age, it was almost universally believed that after death all human beings lead a dull, monotonous life under the earth, or, as Homer portrayed it, heightening the uniformity, that all lapse into an unconscious existence. Obviously these ideas were determined, in part, by the phenomena of sleep and dreams. Just as death seemed a protracted sleep, so did the dream come to foreshadow the life after death. The characteristics of dream images, therefore, came to be attributed to the souls of the underworld. The latter, it was thought, are visible, but, like shadows, they elude the hand that grasps them and move about fleetly from place to place. This shadow-existence is a fate that is common to all. It is only exceptionally flagrant transgressions against the gods that call forth punishments which not merely overtake the guilty in this world but may also continue in the next. Such figures, therefore, as are described in connection with Odysseus' journey to Hades—Sisyphus, who must unceasingly roll uphill a stone that is constantly rolling back, and Tantalus, who languishes with hopeless desire for the fruits suspended above his head—are not as yet to be regarded as expressing ideas of retribution, even though they may be anticipatory of them. Perhaps, also, it is not without significance that these accounts are probably later accretions, of which the Homeric poems contain a considerable number, particularly the Odyssey, which is so rich in märchen elements.

Gradually, however, that which at first occurs only in occasional instances becomes more universal; the distinction in destinies comes to be regarded as applying generally. The earlier and exceptional cases of entrance into a world of the blessed or of particular punishments in Hades were connected with the favour or anger of the gods. Similarly, that which finally makes the distinction a universal one is religious cult. The object of cult is to propitiate the gods; their favour is to be won through petitions and magical acts. The gods are to grant not merely a happy lot in this world but also the assurance of permanent happiness in the next. Before this striving the shadows of the underworld give way. Though the underworld continues, on the whole, to remain a place of sorrow, it nevertheless comes to include a number of brighter regions in which the righteous may enjoy such happiness as they experienced in this world, without suffering its distresses and evil. It was this that early led to the formation of cult associations. Even during the transition of totemic tribal organization into States and deity cults, such religious associations sprang up out of the older totemic groups. During this period, the conditions of descent and of tribal segregation still imposed limitations upon the religious associations. These limitations, however, were transcended on the stage of deity cults, as appears primarily in the case of the Greek mysteries and of other secret cults of the Græco-Roman period, such as the mysteries of Mithra, Attis, Osiris, and Serapis. No doubt, the extreme forms of the cults prevalent in an age thoroughly conscious of a deep need for salvation were bound up with the specific cultural conditions of that age. And yet these cults but bring out in particularly sharp relief certain traits which, though they are not clearly apparent until later, are quite universally characteristic of the deity-worship of the heroic era. These cults arise only when the early heroic ideal, embodying certain external characteristics, has disappeared, having given way more and more to inner ideals, connected with religion and morality. This, however, occurs at the very time when minds are beginning to be more deeply troubled by the terrors of the underworld, and when, in contrast with this, the imagination creates glowing pictures of the future, for whose realization it turns to the gods. Thus arises the idea of a special region of the underworld, allotted to those cult-associates who have been particularly meritorious in the performance of religious duties. These will enter into Elysium, a vale of joy and splendour which, though a part of the underworld, is nevertheless remote from the regions of sorrow. Here the blessed will abide after death. This Elysium is no longer a distant island intended as a refuge for occasional individuals, but belongs to the established order of the underworld itself. In the sixth book of the Æneid, Virgil has sketched, with poetic embellishments, a graphic picture of this abode of the blessed as it was conceived, in his day, under the confluence of ancient mythical traditions and new religious impulses—a portrayal which forms perhaps the most valuable part of the whole poem. For, in it, the poet presents a living picture of what was believed and was striven for by many of his contemporaries.

In closest connection with this separation of realms in the underworld, is the introduction of judgeship. It devolves upon the judge of the underworld to determine whether the soul is to be admitted to the vale of joy or is to be banished into Orcus. It is significant that, in his picture of the underworld, Virgil entrusts this judgeship to the same Rhadamanthus with whom we are familiar from the Odyssey as the ruler of the distant island of the blessed. Obviously the poet himself recognized that these later conceptions developed from the earlier idea that salvation comes as a result of divine favour. After the separation of the region of the blessed from that of the outcasts, a further division is made; the two regions of the underworld are partitioned into subregions according to degrees of terror and torment, on the one hand, and of joy and blessedness, on the other. Gradations of terror are first instituted, those of blessedness following only later and in an incomplete form. The subjective factor, which precludes differences in degree when joy is at the maximum, is in constant rivalry with the objective consideration that the merits of the righteous may differ, and, therefore, also their worthiness to enjoy the presence of the deity. In contrast with this, is the much stronger influence exerted by the factor of punishment. The shadowy existence of souls in Homer's Hades is not regarded as a penalty, but merely as the inevitable result of departure from the circle of the living. Only when the hope of Elysium has become just as universal as the fear of Hades, does the latter become a place of punishment, and the former a region of rewards. Just as language itself is very much richer in words denoting forms of suffering than in those for joy, so also does the mythological imagination exhibit much greater fertility in the portrayal of the pains of the underworld than in the glorification of the Elysian fields. All the horrors that human cruelty can invent are carried over from the judicial administration of this world into that of the beyond. Gradations in the magnitude of punishments are reflected in the location of the regions appointed for them. The deepest region of the underworld is the most terrible. Above this, is the place where those sojourn who may enter Elysium at some future time, after successfully completing a period of probation.

The contrast which first appears in the form of a separation of the realms of torment and blessedness, of punishment and reward, is then carried to a further stage, again by the aid of ideas of a spacial gradation. No longer are all mortals compelled to enter the underworld; this not only loses its terrors for the blessed, but the righteous and beloved of the gods are not required to descend into it at all. Their souls ascend to heaven—a lot reserved in olden times exclusively for heroes who were exalted into gods. With this, the separation becomes complete: the souls of the righteous rise to the bright realms of heaven, those of the godless are cast into the depths. Among both the Semitic and the Indo-Germanic peoples, the antithesis of heaven and hell was established at a relatively late period. Its first clear development is probably to be found among the ancient Iranians, in connection with the early cosmogonic myths. Here the battle which the creation-myths of other cultural peoples represent as being fought between gods and demons is portrayed as the struggle of two divine beings. One of these is thought to rule over the regions of light above the earth and the other over the subterranean darkness. True, this contrast is also brought out in the battles described by other peoples as between gods and demons, and this surely has been a factor leading to the incorporation of the Iranian myth into the ideas of the beyond elsewhere entertained. The distinctive feature of Iranian cosmogony and that which gave its dualism an unusual influence upon religion and cult is the fact that the original cosmic war was restricted to a single hostile pair of gods, Ormuzd (Ahuramazda) and Ahriman (Angramainju). Here also, however, Ahriman is the leader of a host of demons—a clear indication that the myth is based on the universal conception of a battle with demons. This similarity was doubtless all the more favourable to the influence of the Iranian dualism upon other religions, inasmuch as the separation of ideas of the beyond had obviously already quite generally taken place independently of such influence, having resulted from universal motives of cult. The fact, however, that the battle was not waged, as in other mythologies, between gods and demons, but between two divine personalities, led to a further essential change. The battle no longer takes place on the earth, as did that of Zeus and the Titans, but between a god of light, enthroned on high, and a dark god of the underworld. This spacial antithesis was probably connected by the ancient Iranians with that of the two ideas of the soul, the corporeal soul, fettered to earth, and the spiritual soul, the psyche, soaring on high. Herein may possibly lie the explanation of a curious custom which markedly distinguished the Iranians from other Indo-Germanic peoples. The former neither buried nor burned their dead, but exposed them on high scaffolds, as food for the birds. It almost seems as though the 'platform-disposal,' commonly practised in totemic times and mentioned above (p. 216), had here been taken over into later culture; the only change would appear to be that, in place of the low mound of earth upon which the corpse was left to decompose, there is substituted a high scaffolding, doubtless designed to facilitate the ascent of the soul to heaven. Furthermore, many passages in the older Avesta point out that the exposure of the corpse destroys the corporeal soul, rendering the spiritual soul all the freer to ascend to heaven. This is the same antithesis between corporeal soul and psyche that long continues to assert itself in later conceptions. Indeed, it also occurs, interwoven with specifically Christian conceptions, in many passages of the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, where the corporeal soul survives in the idea of the sinfulness of the flesh, and where, in the mortification of the flesh, we still have a faint echo of the Iranian customs connected with the dead.

Thus, the ideas of a twofold beyond and of a twofold soul mutually reinforce each other. Henceforth the heavenly realm is the abode of the pure and blessed spirits; the underworld, that of the wicked, who retain their sensuous natures even in the beyond, and who must, therefore, suffer physical pain and torment in a heightened degree. The thought of a spacial gradation corresponding with degrees of merit, though first developed in connection with the pains and punishments of the underworld, then comes to be applied also to the heavenly world. In this case, however, the power of the imagination seems scarcely adequate to the task of sufficiently magnifying the degrees of blessedness. Hence the imagination is forced; it becomes subservient to reflection, which engenders an accumulation of apocalyptic imagery that completely defies envisagement. In Jewish literature, one of the earliest examples of such apocalyptic accounts of the beyond is to be found in the Book of Enoch. The idea of a journey to the underworld, developed in ancient history, here apparently suggested a journey to heaven; as a result, the celestial realm was divided into various regions, graded according to height, as were those of the underworld according to depth, and leading to places of greater blessedness, as did those of the latter to increasing torment. We here have one of those dream-journeys to which dream association readily gives rise in the expectant and excited consciousness of the sleeper. Indeed, it is not improbable that the narrative is based on actual dream images. Had not the appearance of the dead in dreams already led to the belief in a shadow-soul, which now journeys to this distant world? The division of the celestial realms, in these mythical works, fluctuates between the numbers three and seven—the two numbers held sacred par excellence. In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul tells of a dream-vision in which, years before, he was caught up to the 'third heaven' of paradise.

Under the influence of expiatory rites, which were zealously practised even by the ancient mystery cults, these two worlds, the subterranean hell and the celestial paradise, were supplemented by a third region. This development was also apparently of Iranian origin. The region was held to be a place of purification, where the soul of the sinner might be prepared, through transitory punishments and primarily through lustrations, for entrance into the heavenly realm. Purgatorial lustration, after the pattern of terrestrial cult ceremonies, was believed to be effected by means of fire, this being regarded as the most potent lustrical agency, and as combining the function of punishment with that of purification. Dante's "Divine Comedy" presents a faithful portrayal of these conceptions as they were finally developed by the religious imagination of mediæval Christianity out of a mass of ideas which go back, in their beginnings, to a very ancient past, but which continually grew through immanent psychological necessity. Dante's account of the world beyond incorporates a further element. It tells of a guide, by whom those exceptional individuals who are privileged to visit these realms are led, and by whom the various souls are assigned to their future dwelling-places. The first of the visitors to Hades, Hercules, was accompanied by deities, by Athena and Hermes. Later it was one of the departed who served as guide. Thus, Virgil was conducted by his father, and Dante, in turn, was led by Virgil, though into the realms of blessedness, closed to the heathen poet, he was guided by the transfigured spirit of Beatrice. The rôle of general conductor of souls to the realms of the underworld, however, came to be given to Hermes, the psychopomp. Such is the capacity in which this deity appears in the Odyssey, in an exceedingly charming combination of later with very ancient soul-conceptions. After Odysseus has slain the suitors, Hermes, with staff in hand, leads the way to the underworld, followed by the souls of the suitors in the form of twittering birds.

These external changes in the ideas of the beyond, leading to the separation of the two realms, heaven and hell, and finally to the conception of purgatory, an intermediate realm, are dependent also on the gradual development of the idea of retribution. This is not a primitive idea. It arises only in the course of the heroic age, as supplementary to the very ancient experiences associated with the fear of death and to the notions concerning the breath and shadow souls. Moreover, it is especially important to notice that at the outset the idea was not ethical in character, but purely religious—a striking proof that morality and religion were originally distinct. The transference of the idea from religion to morals represents the final stage of the development, and occurred long after other-world mythology had reached its zenith. The first traces of the retributive idea are to be found in connection with those unusual dispensations of favour by which a hero who has won the favour of the gods is either taken up into their midst or is granted admittance to some other region of blessedness; the conception may, however, also take the form of punishments attached to certain particular offences directed against the gods. These latter exceptions already form a prelude to the more general application of the retributive idea in later times. But, even at this stage, the idea did not at once include all men within its scope, but found expression only in the desire to gain some exceptional escape from future suffering or some peculiar claim to eternal joy in the future. True, the natural impulse toward association, and the hope that united conjurations would force their way to the ears of the gods more surely than individual prayers could do, early led to cult alliances, whose object it was to minister to these other-worldly hopes. None of these alliances, however, was concerned with obtaining salvation for all; on the contrary, all of them sought to limit this salvation to a few, in the belief that by such limitation their aim would be more certain of realization. These cults, therefore, were shrouded in secrecy. This had a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it increased the assurance of the members in the success of their magical incantations—a natural result of the fact that these rites were unavailable to the masses; on the other hand, it augmented the magical power of the incantations, inasmuch as, according to an associative reaction widely prevalent in the field of magical ideas, the mysterious potency of magic led to a belief in the magical effect of secrecy. The influence of these ideas had manifested itself in much earlier times, giving rise, on the transitional stage between totemism and the deity cults, to the very numerous secret societies of cultural and semi-cultural peoples. At this period, these societies were probably always the outgrowth of the associations of medicine-men, but later they sometimes included larger circles of tribal members. As is evident particularly in the case of the North American Indians, such societies frequently constituted restricted religious groups within the clans—groups which appear to have taken the place of the earlier totemic associations. In harmony with this, and, perhaps, under the influence of the age-groups in the men's clubs, there was originally a gradation of the members, based on the degree of their sanctification and on the extent of their participation in the mystic ceremonies. In peculiar contradiction to the secrecy of such associations, membership in one of its classes was betrayed, during the festivals of the cult groups, by the most striking external signs possible, such as by the painting of the body or by other forms of decoration. Moreover, on the earlier stages of culture, the interest of all these secret societies was still centred mainly on things connected with this world, such as prosperity of crops, protection from sickness, and success in the chase. Nevertheless, there was also manifest a concern regarding a future life, especially wherever a pronounced ancestor worship or an incipient deity cult had been developed.

It is the idea of the beyond, however, that gradually crowds out all secondary motives and that gives to the mystery cults proper their characteristic stamp, bringing them into sharp contrast with the dominant ideas of the early heroic age. In the earlier period, the idea of the beyond had been enveloped in hopeless gloom; now, it fills the mystic with premonitions of eternal happiness. In striving for this experience, the mystic wishes for a bliss that is not granted to the majority of mortals. Once more all the magic arts of the past are called into play in order that the initiate may secure entrance into the portals of the yonder world; it is thither that he is transported in the ecstasy induced by these magical means. No longer is admiration bestowed upon the heroes of the mythical past, upon a Hercules and a Theseus, as it was in ancient times. The change came about slowly, and yet at the great turning-point of human history, marked by the Hellenistic age, it spread throughout the entire cultural world. Radiating far beyond the Eleusinian and Orphic mysteries, which these hopes of a yonder-world raised to new life, the same idea was appropriated by the cults of Osiris, Serapis, Attis, and Mithra. The idea of redemption, born of the longing to exchange this world, with its sufferings and wants, for a world of happiness in the beyond, took possession of the age. It is the negation of the heroic age, of the heroes which it prized, and of the gods which it revered. Along with this world, these cults of the beyond repudiate also the previously existent values of this world. The ideals of power and of property fade. Succeeding the hero ideal, as its abrogation and at the same time its consummation, is the ideal of humanity.

At first it is only religious ideals that manifest this shift in values. The enjoyment of the present gives way to hopes for the future, the portrayal of which welds religious feelings into a power that proves supreme over all other impulses. It is for this very reason that the future, which the mystic already enjoys in anticipation, comes to be exclusively the reward of the devout. It is not vouchsafed to the moral man who stands outside the pale of these religious associations, for his activity centres about this world. At a much earlier period, however, these ideas became combined with ethical motives of retribution. If, accordingly, the two motives again become entirely distinct at this decisive turning-point of religious development, this only signifies that, in themselves, they are of different origin, and not that from early times forward there were no forces making for their union. These forces, however, were not so much internal as external in character. They did not spring from the religious experiences themselves, nor, least of all, from the ideas of the beyond. Their source is to be found primarily in a transference of the relations of the earthly State to the divine State, as a result of which the ruler of the latter was exalted to the position of lawgiver in the kingdom of men no less than in that of the gods. Proofs of this transference are to be found in the most ancient customs and legal enactments of all regions. Either the ethical and religious commandments are, both alike, supposed to be the very utterances of the deity, as in the case of the Mosaic decalogue, or, as is illustrated by the Babylonian code of Hammurabi, an earthly ruler expressly promulgates his law in the name of the deity, even though this law is essentially restricted to legal and ethical norms. Thus it came about that every ethical transgression acquired also a religious significance. The ethical norm was not, at the outset, religious in sanction, as is usually believed; it acquired this character only through the medium of the world-ruling divine personality. Nevertheless, the union of the ethical and the religious gradually caused the idea of retribution, which originally had no ethical significance whatsoever, to force its way into the conceptions of the beyond. It was essentially in this way that ethical transgressions came to be also religious offences, whereas, on the other hand, the rewards of the other-world continued to be restricted to the devout, or were granted to the moral man only on condition that he be devout as well as moral.

In conclusion, we must consider an offshoot of other-world ideas—the belief in the transmigration of souls. This belief is ultimately grounded in the more general ideas of soul-belief, even though its developed form appears only as a product of philosophical speculation, and has, therefore, found only a limited acceptance. In its motives, the belief most closely resembles the conception of purgatory, in so far as the latter involves the notion that the occupation of animal bodies is a means, partly of transitory punishment, and partly of purification. The idea of lustration, however, is not involved in that of metempsychosis. In its place, there is a new and unique element. It consists in the thought, expressed in Plato's "Republic," that it is proper that man should retain after death the character manifested during life, and that he should therefore assume the form of the animal which exhibits this character. There is thus manifested the idea of a relationship between man and the animal. In the distant past this idea gave rise to the animal totem; in this last form of the animal myth, it leads to the conception of the transmigration of souls. Thus, a complete inversion of values has here taken place. The significance of the totem as an ancestral animal and as an object of cult caused it to be regarded as superior to man. The animal myth, on the other hand, represents transformation into an animal as degrading, even as a severe punishment. It is precisely this difference which makes it probable that the idea of transmigration was not a free creation of Hindoo philosophers—for it was they who apparently first developed it, and from whom it passed over to the Pythagorean school and thence to Plato—but that it, also, was connected with the general development of totemic conceptions. Of course, it is not possible to trace a direct transition of the totem animal into the animal which receives the soul of a human being who is expiating sins that he has committed. It is not probable, moreover, that such a transition occurred. Doubtless, however, the idea of transmigration is connected with the fact that, beginning with the totemic age and extending far down into the period of deity beliefs, the value placed on animals underwent a change. For the Australian, the animal is an object of cult, and the totem animal is frequently also regarded as the incarnation of an ancestor or of some magical being of antiquity; the American Indian calls the animals his elder brothers; Hercules, the hero of the heroic age, is honoured because, among other things, he was instrumental in exterminating wild animals. This change, moreover, is reflected in animal myths even more than in these general evaluations. Indeed, transformation into animals is a dominant characteristic of these myths. Tracing the conception of this magical process, however, we find, step by step, a progressive degradation of the animal. In Australian legends, animal and man are either absolute equals or the animal is the superior, being endowed with special magical powers. In American märchen-myths also, we still frequently find the same conception, although transformation into an animal is here sometimes regarded as a disgrace. Finally, in many African myths, and, particularly, in those of the cultural peoples of the ancient world, such a transformation is regarded either as a serious injury resulting from evil magic or as a punishment for some crime. We may well suppose, therefore, that the Brahmans, who first incorporated this idea into the religious conceptions of retribution, were influenced by the ideas current in popular belief, which, on their part, represented the last development of earlier totem conceptions. These ideas may also have been reinforced by the belief (not even yet entirely extinct) in soul animals, into which the psyche disappears at the moment of death. Whether the Brahmans had as yet come to the notion that transformation into an animal is a simpler and more natural way of conceiving the future of the soul than ideas of a supermundane and a subterranean beyond, need not concern us. In any event, it is noteworthy that, after science had closed the path to heaven as well as that to Hades, Lessing and, in a broader sense, taking into account nature as a whole, Goethe himself, regarded metempsychosis as the most probable hypothesis concerning the way in which the desire for an endless survival of the soul will be satisfied.

15. THE ORIGIN OF DEITY CULTS.

Psychologically, myth and cult are closely interrelated. The myth is a species of idea. It consists of ideas of an imaginary and an essentially supersensuous world that constitutes a background for the phenomena of sensuous reality. This supersensuous world is created by the imagination exclusively from sensuous materials. It finds portrayal throughout the various stages of myth development, first in the märchen-myth, then in the heroic saga, and finally in the deity saga. In the latter, there are interwoven ideas of the origin and destruction of things, and of the life of the soul after death. Cult, on the other hand, comprises only actions. These relate to the demons or the gods whose lives and deeds are depicted by mythology, at first only in fragmentary sketches, but later, especially in the deity saga, after the pattern of human life. Now, inasmuch as action is always the result of feeling and emotion, it is these subjective elements of consciousness that are dominant in cult, whereas cognition plays its rôle in connection with myth. This contrast is important because of its close bearing on the development of myth as well as on that of religion, and on the essential differentiæ of the two. Not every myth has a religious content. In fact, the majority of the myths prevalent, or once prevalent, in the world, have absolutely no connection with religion, if we give to the latter any sharply defined meaning at all. At the setting of the sun, a flaming hero is swallowed by a dusky demon—this conception of nature mythology may possibly be incorporated in religious conceptions, but, in itself, it possesses no religious significance whatsoever, any more than does the idea that the clouds are demons who send rain to the fields, or that a cord wound about a tree may magically transfer a sickness to it. These are all mythological ideas, yet to call them religious would obviously leave one with a most vague conception of religion. Similarly, moreover, not every cult relating to things beyond immediate reality is a religious cult. Winding a cord about a tree, for example, might constitute part of a magic cult which aims at certain beneficent or pernicious results through the aid of demons of some sort. There is no ground, however, for identifying these cult activities with deity cult. From the very beginning, of course, every cult is magical. But there are important differences with respect to the objects upon which the magic is exercised. The same is true with respect to the significance of the cult action within the circle of possible magic actions and of the derivatives which gradually displace the latter. In view of this, it is undeniable that, in deity cult, the cult activity, in part, assumes new forms, and, in part, and primarily, gains a new content. Prior to the belief in gods, there were numerous demon cults, as well, particularly, as single, fragmentary cult practices presupposing demoniacal powers. Moreover, these demon cults and the various activities to which they gave rise, passed down into the very heart of deity cult. The question therefore arises, What marks shall determine whether a deity cult is religious in character? These marks, of course, may be ascertained only by reference to that which the general consensus of opinion unites in calling religious from the standpoint of the forms of religious belief prevalent to-day. From this point of view, a religious significance may be conceded to a deity conception if, in the first place, it possesses by its very nature—that is, objectively—an ideal worth, and, since the ideal transcends reality, a supersensuous character; in the second place, it must satisfy the subjective need of man for an ideal purpose of life. To one outside of the particular cult community, the value of this ideal may be but slight; to the community, however, at the time when it is engaged in the cult practices, the ideal is of highest worth. As the embodiments of the ideals just mentioned, the gods are always pictured by the mythological imagination in human form, since it is only his own characteristics that man can conceive as magnified into the highest values in so absolute a sense. Where the deity does not reach this stage, or where, at the very least, he does not possess this ideal value during the progress of the cult activities, the cult is not religious in nature, but prereligious or subreligious. Thus, while myth and cult date back to the beginnings of human development, they acquire a religious character only at a specific time, which comes earlier in the case of cult than in that of the myth. The gods are created by the religious emotion which finds expression in cult, and myth gives them the character of ideal personalities, after the pattern of the heroic figures of actual life. The entire life of man, with all its changes of destiny, is placed in their hands. Their cult, therefore, is no longer associated merely with special circumstances or various recurrent events, as were primitive magic and the conjuration of demons, but is concerned with the whole of life, which is now subordinated to a divine legal order fashioned after the political government. Thus, the god is soon succeeded by the divine State, and by the cult festivals dedicated to the latter. As an idealized counterpart of the human institution peculiarly characteristic of the heroic era, religious cult appears, from this point of view also, as the most distinctive creation of the age of heroes and gods.