Chapter VII · THE GODS AND THE SONS OF GOD

The reader has probably been wondering all this time when I should return to the many questions which remained unanswered at the end of Chapter II., and with only a few of which I have been able to deal in the intervening four chapters. It is my intention to deal with them now, and straightway to begin by offering a solution of the problem of the identity of the gods and the sons of god.

The question in a nutshell is really this: Who was Uranus? To which race of mankind did he belong? When did he live? And what has become of the great race of beings of which he was probably only a degenerate offshoot?

Was he of the same race as the God of the Semites—the Jehovah of the Old Testament? And if, as I believe, he was so, was the race sufficiently large and widely distributed to have representatives both in Asia and Central Europe?

These questions are interesting enough, and if we accept Herbert Spencer’s profound explanation of the origin of all gods, they must be answered; but first of all, by way of shedding some light upon the whole of the general question, it might be as well to discover when, or approximately when, all this happened.

When did Prometheus defy Zeus?

It is a very strange and illuminating fact that although some Greeks, who were contemporaries of Herodotus, were actually foolish enough to imagine that they were only ten or twelve generations removed from the gods,—a calculation which would have placed the original mingling of the superior with the inferior race in the seventh or eighth century B.C.,—Æschylus appears to have had but few illusions regarding the vast antiquity of the Age of Zeus and Prometheus. O. Peschel informs us that in the lost finale of his trilogy, Æschylus made Prometheus say that he had languished 30,000 years in chains.⁠[208]⁠

Thus, in the opinion of one of the most enlightened artists among the ancient Greeks, the crime of Prometheus must have occurred 30,000 plus an unknown number of years B.C.—The figure looks ridiculous. In the popular mind, 30,000 years and more B.C. represents a time when man was still a denizen of the trees, and not yet quite free from his caudal appendage.

But truth to tell it is amazing how extraordinarily near to the probable facts Æschylus actually was. How did he guess? Or was there perhaps a tradition in his time that the events described in the myth of Prometheus must have occurred many tens of thousands of years before the historical period? Whatever the source of his knowledge may have been, we shall see that his calculation was singularly wise.

One of the greatest authorities on the subject of the original discovery of fire, and other cognate anthropological problems, is a certain Belgian scientist of the name of A. Rutot. Other anthropologists have incidentally discussed the question of the discovery of fire and the approximate date when it is supposed to have occurred; Rutot, however, is not only an eminent anthropologist, but he has also given special attention to the question of fire.

Now it is his opinion that the use of fire was certainly familiar to man in Europe at the dawn of the Quaternary Era.⁠[209]⁠

The Quaternary Era is subdivided as follows:—⁠[210]⁠

Recent Period

⎧ ⎪ ⎨ ⎪ ⎩

Later Iron Age lasted 300 B.C. to A.D. 100.

Early Iron Age, 1000 B.C.

Bronze Age, 2500 B.C.

Copper Age, 3000 B.C.

Neolithic Age lasted 15,000 to 25,000 years.

Pleistocene

Paleolithic Age lasted 500,000 to 1,500,000 years.

Professor Arthur Keith’s⁠[211] estimate of these periods does not differ materially from those given above. According to him the table should read as follows:—

Recent Period

⎧ ⎨ ⎩

Metallic Age, 4000 years back.

Neolithic 25,000 years back.

Pleistocene

⎧ ⎨ ⎩

Late Paleolithic Age, 150,000 years back.

Early Paleolithic Age, 200,000 to 400,000 years back.

Eolithic from 100,000 to 150,000 years back.

Thus he would suggest as a minimum for the duration of the Pleistocene Period 450,000 years, and as a maximum 700,000 years; but he thinks it right to state that a much higher figure is given by most authorities. We have seen that H. v. Buttel-Reepen gives 500,000 to 1,500,000 years for this period.

If we take Professor Keith’s maximum figures, therefore, and suppose the Pleistocene Period to have lasted 700,000 years, we shall not be so very far removed from H. v. Buttel-Reepen’s estimate. Now adding to this about 30,000 years for the recent period—that is to say, for the Neolithic and Metallic Ages together—we arrive at a total of 730,000 years for the whole of the Quaternary Period, at the dawn of which Rutot tells us fire was first used.⁠[212]⁠

But the use of fire, as I have already pointed out, although it constituted a big event in the history of mankind, is not the same thing as the production of fire. Obviously, if natural agencies are depended upon for the use of fire, it cannot be said to constitute an habitual practice among men, because natural conflagrations, volcanic eruptions, etc., are not of daily occurrence. None of the more complicated adaptations of human life to the use of fire, which would appear to require careful trial and experiment, could therefore be expected to have developed while man merely depended upon chance for a flame. If we are to reckon the date from which a real civilisation of fire began, we must therefore endeavour to establish the time when man was first able to produce fire.

Now since pottery is precisely one of those human adaptations of fire, which we would imagine required a period of evolution, during which careful trials and experiments could be prosecuted with a constant supply of flame, the temptation would be to reckon the first discovery of the means of fire-production from the date of the first introduction of ceramics, or possibly a few centuries earlier. This, however, I am not prepared to do, because I refuse to believe that all men, all the world over, are always Promethean,—that is to say, ever ready to push to its ultimate development, regardless of consequences, every fresh discovery that they make. Even in recent times we have the example of the Chinese, for instance, who never developed their discoveries of steam and gunpowder. It would not therefore be safe—not to mention scientific—to suppose that the discovery of fire-production was followed, even after a lapse of a few centuries, by the art of ceramics, among all races. It could only have been followed in this way by the art of ceramics, among a people animated by the Promethean spirit.

Buttel-Reepen places the first appearance of ceramics in the Neolithic Period. We are justified in supposing, therefore, that, given a race animated by the Promethean spirit, who produced pottery say a quarter of the way through the Neolithic Period, or about 18,000 years B.C., the discovery of fire-production may have occurred among that race, say, in the year 19,500 B.C.

A. H. Keane definitely states that it is his belief that the means of fire-production were first discovered within the Neolithic culture.⁠[213]⁠

Since, however, according to an eminent authority fire was used 500,000 to 600,000 years before that time, it seems difficult to believe that it took 600 millenniums for man to find the means of fire-production.

Personally, after a careful study of the various authorities of England, France and Germany, I am inclined to believe that the means of fire-production were discovered long before the close of the Paleolithic Age—an assertion with which I think the late Mr. Piette and many more anthropologists would agree; but that the discovery probably never reached a type of man animated by the Promethean spirit until early in the Neolithic Period; hence the relatively late appearance of pottery.

When I use the expression “a type of man animated by the Promethean spirit,” I should like to remind the reader that I mean a people rather like the Americans, the modern Germans and ourselves, who, with the minds of boy-scouts, enjoy speed for speed’s sake, revel in mechanical contrivances of all kinds, retain until a very late age a keen interest in any device that complicates existence, and whose chief concern and joy in life is to press every possible discovery, chemical or mechanical, to its furthest possible development, without a thought of the consequences,—that is to say, regardless of the misery, ill-health, ugliness or degeneration that they may be creating. It is a type that has no art of life, that cannot construct in life; it can construct only bridges, towers, engines, canals, material things and romances. In life it is only destructive and anarchical, loathing order as much as a school-boy does, and ignoring culture. Like the boy-scout, it does not understand women and is usually mastered by them. It is sentimental, very stupid, except in regard to mechanical and chemical questions, and always absolutely certain that the pursuits wherein it finds its pleasure are the only pursuits worth anything. The men of this type make good policemen, the women good charwomen; in fact, these two characters will probably survive as striking examples of the type long after all the engineers and the chemists have been forgotten.

There is another type, however; though, unfortunately for mankind, its influence seems to make itself felt but very slightly in modern Western civilisation. It is a type of more benevolent, more wise and more adult thought. It is a type that produces men who develop beyond the boy-scout stage in taste and interests. It is a hypermetropic type, that has the capacity of looking ahead, and measuring the consequences of trifling mechanical innovations against the greater object, which is the happiness of mankind. It has little interest in complicating life for complexity’s sake. Where human life does not seem to be promised any desirable advantage by a new mechanical toy, it discards that toy. It refuses to sacrifice one healthy child to the most magnificent mechanical invention that has ever been devised. It has no respect for the engineer or the chemist. It regards them as unscrupulous schoolboys who must be kept in check, and who have the class of mind which never grows up and delights until the end of its days in tying a tin kettle to a cat’s tail. It regards the civilisation created by the engineer and the chemist, as precisely humanity with a heavy iron boiler tied to its ankles. It sees no object in existence unless life is beautiful, healthy, vigorous and joyful. It values simplicity more than anything,—in fact, it is the identification mark of all those who belong to this type that they can flourish and develop their highest faculties in simple surroundings and with the gratification of simple tastes. It practises an art of life, which as a rule it sets higher than artistic production; but once the art of life is mastered it turns its attention to the productive arts, and then creates the most beautiful masterpieces. It always gives birth to men who ultimately save their fellows from the absurd and hopeless muddles and miseries created by the boy-scout mind of the Promethean type, and these men have frequently been deified in the history of humanity. It understands women, and while mastering them makes them happier and keeps them healthier than the Promethean type does. For want of a better term, this type might be called the Dionysian, since their radical hostility to the Promethean type and the Promethean type’s bottomless loathing of them is so well depicted in the ancient Greek myth.

Now it seems to me only a matter of caution to reckon with the possibility that these types may have existed side by side long ages before the historical period, more particularly as we have in Greek legend, which records the life and people of prehistoric times, three men, Zeus, Prometheus and Dionysus, who are sufficiently accurately described in the fables for us to be able to classify each without the slightest hesitation, in one or the other class.

Prometheus is obviously the prototype, the archetype, the beau-ideal of the Prometheans, while Zeus and Dionysus are clearly leading representatives of the other race, the Dionysians. Thus it is probable that all demons, devils, and loathed creatures—that is to say, all creatures who have brought misery upon men—are extremes of the Promethean type; while all gods, saviours, good prophets, great legislators, sons of God, guardian angels, patron saints, etc., are of the Dionysian type, the men-gods whom I have described with sufficient detail elsewhere.⁠[214]⁠

If, then, Zeus belonged to the type of Dionysians, we not only understand that he may have had good reason for withholding fire from mortals (the inferior people) except on certain conditions, but we are also assured by the evidence of the myth itself, that he and his people—the gods, the superior beings—did possess the means of fire-production at the time of the confluence of the two peoples.

But the myth tells us more. It leads us very strongly to suspect that while the superior beings, to which Zeus had bred true, possessed the means of fire-production, they had not apparently pushed its application to life even so far as to produce pottery. It tells us even more than this: seeing that the evils of the fire-civilisation came upon the ancestors of the Greeks only after the crime of Prometheus, it may be presumed that these evils had been avoided theretofore by the kith and kin of Zeus. That is to say, they had possessed fire, but had not developed its application to human life, because they appear to have foreseen the consequences of such a developed application. Also, on the evidence of the myth alone, we gather that they were infinitely wise,—much wiser than the hybrid people that ultimately created the Promethean civilisation,—so wise, indeed, that they were deified by the inferior race.

We have to look, therefore, for a people which inhabited Europe and Asia early in the Neolithic era, who possessed the means of fire-production, but did not exploit these means to an unlimited extent; who were infinitely wise; who were, however, no longer at their zenith, seeing that they voluntarily mingled with an inferior people; who were artistic and who led simple lives corresponding more or less to the outline given of the Dionysians above.

Owing to the fact that they apparently did not produce pottery (according to the myth) and yet knew the means of fire-production, and in view of the belief that the art of ceramics first appeared early in the Neolithic era, we must place these people, not only early in the Neolithic era, but, seeing that they were degenerate at the time we encounter them as gods, we must place their zenith somewhere in the Paleolithic Age.

Now, was there any people, infinitely wise and unusually tall,⁠[215] which reached its zenith in the Paleolithic Age, which was simple, artistic, degenerate in early Neolithic times; which did not produce pottery despite the knowledge of fire-production; and which became absorbed by other peoples early in the Neolithic era? Was there such a people, numerous enough to extend over Europe and Asia and to supply a representative who became the god of the Jews, representatives who became the gods of the Greeks, and still more representatives who became the gods of the Persians and the Indians?

Certainly there was such a people, and their description by modern anthropologists corresponds exactly with the characteristics detailed above.

This race was the Cro-Magnon race, than which probably there has never been any greater on earth. It was a tall, long-headed and infinitely wise race, the cranial capacity of some of its members being greater than the cranial capacity of any European examined during the historical period;—it was a highly artistic race; it reached its zenith in Paleolithic times, at the end of the Pleistocene Period, declined during early Neolithic times, when it became absorbed by the Aryans, or a round-headed race, and disappeared. It spread all over southern Europe and western Asia.

There is, as far as I can judge, no reason whatsoever why the remote ancestors of the Greeks should not have encountered certain branches of this race shortly before its complete absorption into other stocks. And since this complete absorption occurred during the early millenniums of the Neolithic Period, I think we are entitled in the light of other evidence, mythological and anthropological, to regard it at least as highly probable that the Cro-Magnons were the “gods” of all Western and Near Eastern civilisations.

The negative evidence which we have not yet considered is in itself sufficiently cogent. It can be marshalled as follows:—

(a) There was no race at that period, and never has been since, anything like the Cro-Magnon race for wisdom, simplicity, size and Dionysian virtues.⁠[216]⁠

(b) The Cro-Magnon race is known to have disappeared through absorption. If they did not mingle with the remote ancestors of existing races, with whom could they have mingled?⁠[217]⁠

(c) The Aryan race is known to have gone through the later Stone Age in Europe, probably in Central Europe. If it did not encounter the Cro-Magnon race, how did it avoid them? It is believed to have spread north, south, east and west during the Neolithic Period, and branches of it even reached the shores of Britain during the later Stone Age.⁠[218] If certain branches of it avoided the Cro-Magnon race, all certainly could not have been so unfortunate.

On Herbert Spencer’s hypothesis alone we are justified, owing to the myth of Uranus and Ge, in concluding that the Greek branch of the Aryan family must at one time have encountered a people very much superior to themselves. We know of such a people having existed in Europe towards the end of the Paleolithic and the beginning of the Neolithic Period.

We also know from the myth that the Greek Aryans mingled with this superior people, and that the likelihood of one or the other becoming completely absorbed after the mingling is demonstrated by other similar crosses with which we are familiar. Blends of two races tend to disappear and there is reversion to one of the two primitive types.⁠[219] This is particularly so when there is a pronounced difference between the types.

Furthermore we know that this happened in the later Stone, or Neolithic Age. The fire-myth of the Greeks is also connected with the story of their mingling with the superior people, and follows close upon this event. Tradition associates the principal agent in this affair, Prometheus, with the introduction of pottery,—another event belonging to the early millenniums of the Neolithic Age.

Anthropologists tell us, moreover, that the long-headed Cro-Magnons were absorbed towards the beginning of the Neolithic Age by a round-headed race. Now the Aryans were a round-headed or brachycephalic race. It does not seem unlikely, therefore, that Uranus was a Cro-Magnon, and that he and his people first encountered the remote ancestors of the Greeks about 10,000 to 15,000⁠[220] years before the metallic period, or about 20,000 years before Æschylus. When, therefore, Æschylus makes Prometheus say that he has lingered 30,000 years in chains, he shows that he was at least aware of the vast antiquity of the myth. If it was a guess, it was a singularly shrewd one. If a tradition, mysteriously illuminating.

I have no doubt that a similar process of reasoning, applied to the first and second verses of the sixth chapter of Genesis would lead us to the conclusion that the God of the Jews and the Christians was also a Cro-Magnon; but I am not concerned with this aspect of the question, nor have I the time or the space to discuss it. I can only allude to it en passant, as a suggestion which I think worth making, and leave it to others to follow it up if they think fit.

My next business will be to reveal who were the people constituting the Cro-Magnons.

It may seem to the reader a little odd, and even perhaps incredible, that there should have existed in Europe in late Paleolithic and early Neolithic times a race which was so infinitely superior to the highest-bred modern European as to justify me in claiming that no greater race has ever appeared on earth, to our knowledge, either before or since.

A glance at the tables I have given above reveals the fact that if such a race really existed, it must have reached its zenith, on the lowest estimate, about 30,000 years ago, and according to maximum figures, at least double that length of time before our era.

Now Darwinism is so popular, and the belief that a few millenniums work radical evolutionary changes is so universal, that the tendency has been, even among scientists, to suppose that the further one recedes by tens of thousands of years from the present age, the more brutal, more bestial and more simian our ancestors must be found to have been.

The modern European is so arrogant, and so deeply convinced of his immense superiority over the men of the past, even the recent past, that he is innocently incredulous if you tell him that he is probably very much inferior to a people that existed 50,000 years ago. I say he is innocently incredulous. I mean by that, that he is not even aware of being overweening or unjustifiably vain, when he protests scoffingly at the thought of such a possibility. He does not even require Darwin to help him in refuting you. He knows it must be impossible.

This stupid conceit which characterises everybody at the present day, except perhaps the Chinese,⁠[221] is not altogether the fault of the modern man. He is so much dazzled by the complications of a purely Promethean civilisation, that he has come to believe that such complications alone are inseparable from a state of high civilisation. In fact his newspapers, his books, even his nurses, tell him so daily. He is convinced that the Cro-Magnons did not have electric trams or tinned beef, and therefore concludes that they cannot have been better than himself. He is right in his conviction regarding the trams and the tinned beef; he is wrong in the conclusion he draws from it.

By way of an introduction to our subject, it may be interesting to quote the following significant passage from S. Laing. He is not discussing the men of the Quaternary era (which includes the Cro-Magnon race), but, if you please, the men of an era even earlier than that—men who must have lived at least 500,000 years ago; and what does he say?

“In accepting, however, the evidence of Tertiary man, we must accept with it conclusions which are much opposed to preconceived opinion. In the two best authenticated instances in which skulls have been found in presumably Tertiary strata, those of Castelnedolo and Calaveras, it is distinctly stated that they present no unusual appearance, and do not go nearly as far in a pithecoid direction as the Quartenary skulls of Neanderthal or Spy, or as those of many existing races. The Nampa image [found in Idaho] also appears to show the existence of considerable artistic skill at a period which, if not Tertiary, must be of immense antiquity. How can this be reconciled with the theory of evolution and the descent of man from some animal ancestor common to him and to the other quadrumana? Up to a certain point,—viz., the Quaternary period,—the evidence of progression seems fairly clear.... But if we accept the only two specimens known of the type of Tertiary man, the skulls of Castelnedolo and Calaveras, which are supported by such extremely strong evidence, it would seem that as we recede in time, instead of getting nearer to the missing link we get further from it.”⁠[222]⁠

Since Laing wrote this passage a good deal has been discovered and written about prehistoric man which certainly makes one reject at once the idea that there has been progressive evolution, at least for the last 50,000 years; for, in view of the Quaternary Cro-Magnons, we cannot truthfully record anything but retrogression during that period. I do not, however, think that these discoveries need necessarily make one reject the Darwinian hypothesis altogether. All they do is to make one set the antiquity of Homo Sapiens further back in the history of the world.

Even if we accept Klaatsch’s view that the Gorilla, the Orang, and the Chimpanzee do not represent collateral branches of a remote ancestral human stock, but degenerate descendants of man,—a view for which there is a good deal to be said,⁠[223]⁠—this does not necessarily refute Darwin, but merely shows, that while some of the original stock of men have degenerated into apes, others have developed into the superior species known as the modern jazz-dancers.

It does not do, however, to face this question armed, not only with a belief in Darwin, but also with the idea that the evolution of man from an anthropoid ancestor has occurred within the last 100,000 years, otherwise it is impossible to account for the race of people to whom Laing refers, in the Tertiary era 500,000 years ago, and still more impossible to explain the existence of a race superior to the present European, which existed from 30,000 to 60,000 years ago.

For the discovery of the Cro-Magnons was a revelation to anthropologists, and for a long while nobody would believe that they could possibly belong to such a remote age. Referring to the remains of this race found in caves in France and elsewhere, Professor Keith writes as follows:—

“In strength, in stature, in physique, as well as in size of brain, the Cro-Magnon race represents one of the most stalwart human races ever evolved. The discovery of such a race at so early a date ... is in direct opposition to all we anticipated.”⁠[224]⁠

And further: “The Cro-Magnon race was discovered at a period when, under Darwin’s influence, anthropologists expected to find man becoming more primitive in mind and body as his history was traced into the past. The discovery at Cro-Magnon showed that the evolution of human types was not an orderly one, for, in size of brain, and in stature, the race which flourished in the south of Europe at the close of the Glacial Period was one of the finest the world has ever seen.”⁠[225]⁠

I remind the reader that these are the words of an eminent authority who is speaking about a race that existed according to the lowest estimate 30,000 years ago.

Now, to start with the brain of these people—what was the capacity of their cranium?

Professor Keith tells us it was much greater than that of modern man. Their average cranial capacity was 1,660 c.c., or 180 c.c. above the modern average.⁠[226] Their exceptional men had skulls with a cranial capacity, according to Verneau, the eminent French anthropologist, of 1,800 to 2,000 c.c.—that is to say, higher than that of even the most eminent modern European scholar, statesman, scientist or poet.

To give the reader some idea of what this means, I give below a table prepared by Dr. H. Charlton Bastian on the cranial capacity in different human races:⁠[227]⁠

Capacity. Modern Parisians. Twelfth-Century Parisians. Negroes. Australians. Ancient Egyptians.

1,200 to 1,300 c.c. 0·0 0·0 7·4 45·0 0·0

1,300 to 1,400 c.c. 10·4 7·5 35·2 25·0 12·1

1,400 to 1,500 c.c. 14·3 37·3 33·4 20·0 42·5

1,500 to 1,600 c.c. 46·7 29·8 14·7 10·0 36·4

1,600 to 1,700 c.c. 16·9 20·9 9·3 0·0 9·0

1,700 to 1,800 c.c. 6·5 4·5 0·0 0·0 0·0

1,800 to 1,900 c.c. 5·2 0·0 0·0 0·0 0·0

Thus we see that the highest percentage among modern Parisians, who may be considered quite the most cultivated among present-day Europeans, occurs in crania with a capacity from 1,500 to 1,600 c.c., which is from 60 c.c. to 160 c.c. lower than the average Cro-Magnon skull; while the capacity found by Verneau in the skulls of the highest Cro-Magnons tops all records.⁠[228]⁠

Naturally these facts, by being, as Professor Keith says, “in direct opposition to all we anticipated,” provoked a good deal of opposition from all those whose theories were not in accordance with them; but, owing to the difficulty of disproving the alleged remote antiquity of the Cro-Magnon race, the method of attack was altered from one of dates to that of questioning the necessary relation between a large cranial capacity and superior brain power.

Thus Dr. W. J. Sollas, in discussing the high average cranial capacity of the Mousterians (1,600 c.c.), a much more ancient people than the Cro-Magnons, who preceded these probably by several tens of thousands of years,⁠[229] while admitting that “in this respect the Mousterian race was far superior to the Australian, and even, it would appear, to the European whose average capacity is not above 1,550 c.c.,”⁠[230] proceeds to point out that “the result of numerous investigations carried out during the last quarter of a century is to show that, within certain limits, no discoverable relation exists between the magnitude of the brain—or even its gross anatomy—and intellectual power.”⁠[231]⁠

This eminent authority, however, makes the following admission on the next page: “Whatever other significance the size of the brain may possess—or lack—it is, in any case, a morphological character of great importance, and a difference of 400 c.c., or, say, 25 per cent. in average capacity, such as distinguishes the Australian from the Mousterian, cannot be disregarded. Judged from the cranial capacity alone, the surviving Australian evidently stands on a much lower plane than the extinct Mousterian.”⁠[232]⁠

This admission, however, does not go very far, and in view of the opinion of other authorities, one is inclined to question, with all due respect, whether Dr. Sollas has not allowed himself to be influenced by the Darwinian prejudice against believing that any race superior to ourselves could have existed so many thousands of years ago.

Referring to the relation of large cranial capacity to brain power, Dr. Charlton Bastian writes as follows:—

“Should it be asked whether the proportion of megalocephalous brains among highly cultured and intelligent people is likely to be greater than among uncultured and non-intelligent people, the answer to this question may be unmistakably in the affirmative—and this, as Le Bon has pointed out in regard to ‘cranial capacities,’ is the real direction in which we ought to look for evidence of class or racial superiority.”⁠[233]⁠

Dr. Charlton Bastian, moreover, adds: “Apart from the existence of actual morbid change, the large size of an organ such as the Brain gives, perhaps, a more than average warrant that its inner development will be adequately carried out, and that the organ will be highly endowed with its own proper kind of vitality. If, however, it does not fall short in either of these respects, an increased size of Brain ought to be a distinct advantage to its owner; and, should the general and special conditions of life be at all propitious, would be likely to favour the development of great mental power or the acquisition of much learning.”⁠[234]⁠

Professor Keith is, however, an authority precisely on the human skull. He has made a life study of the question, and his deeply interesting works, The Antiquity of Man and Ancient Types of Man, deal almost exclusively with the problems enunciated in their titles, from the standpoint of skulls. Now this is what he says on this very question of the Cro-Magnon crania:—

“The brain capacity is much greater—roughly 1,660 c.c., being 180 c.c. above the modern average. We have to remember that a certain amount—a small amount—of that is due simply to a big body; a big body needs a bigger brain for its animal administration. We have come across, in these heads, a puzzling and unexpected fact; we are naturally astonished to find that men who have preceded us so long ago—men of a former geological epoch—should so far outstrip their successors to-day who regard themselves as the ‘survival of the fittest,’ and believe the fittest to be the race with the biggest brains. We cannot quarrel with the facts, but how to explain them? The conclusion to be drawn is, not that brain mass, on the average, is to be rejected as an index of brain power, but that there are other virtues or characters which go to ensure success [Promethean success, for instance] of a human race in the struggle of life,—other than brain power. A philosopher may be miserable or die childless, when a brainless savage or an industrious labouring man may be happy and have a large family.”⁠[235]⁠

This is excellent. The doctrine of success is one of such widespread acceptance to-day, and it is so difficult to convince the average man—particularly if he be a Promethean—that success does not necessarily imply high, noble or even desirable qualities or qualifications, that practically the whole world retires every night to bed believing that success whether by racial survival or in individual life must be a sign of superiority, and desirable superiority.

Now, as Spencer pointed out long ago, so many loathsome parasites, such as the microbe of tuberculosis and all bacteria, the tape-worm, all intestinal worms, and in fact all parasites, are examples of successful adaptation, that success alone cannot possibly be a criterion of desirability. And this modern belief in success is one of the most vulgar errors of the Age.⁠[236]⁠

The fact, then, that the Cro-Magnons have not survived in the struggle for existence, despite their superior brain power, and probably all the nobility, high moral qualities, and immense capacity, that accompanied it, may be, as Professor Keith so ably points out, because other virtues and characters may go to ensure success in the struggle of life.

A man, for instance, may be too noble to succeed nowadays, too un-Promethean, too reluctant to plunge into the market-place or the forge, and wrest material prosperity from those of his fellows whom he finds there. And thus, although individual material failure in the eyes of the modern world is not always a proof of superiority, it frequently may be such a proof, as the lives of so many great men convincingly demonstrate.

Likewise in a race: with the Bushmen of Africa, it was their nobility, their superiority vis-à-vis the foreign invader, which led to their extermination, not their inferiority.⁠[237] The same holds good of many people either subjugated or exterminated directly by ourselves.⁠[238]⁠

Taking all these matters into consideration, and particularly in view of the weighty words of Professor Keith, I think I have been justified in assuming, as I have all through these chapters, that the great race which I had in mind, and with which I proposed to identify the gods of ancient Greece—the Cro-Magnon race, of mighty stature, of huge brain, which lead us “naturally to expect signs of a high mental development,”⁠[239] were greater than any race that has ever appeared on earth before or since.

Their artistic works, facsimile reproductions of which I have inspected, are in many respects superior to those of the Egyptians, and in my opinion certainly superior to those of the Greeks of the Hellenic Age. Dr. Salomon Reinach has expressed the view that two at least of the examples of their sculpture which he examined “are superior to all the artistic productions of the Ægean and Babylonia.”⁠[240] Speaking of their culture Marett says: “The third and last main stage of the Paleolithic epoch developed by degrees into a golden age of art.”⁠[241] Robert Munro on the same subject writes as follows: “But what is still more remarkable, under the circumstances, they developed a wonderful taste for art, and left behind them a collection of sculptures and engravings which, for spirit and artistic effect, would not disgrace our modern Landseers.”⁠[242]⁠

The late M. Piette, the renowned French anthropologist already mentioned, published a wonderful volume⁠[243] containing coloured plates representing some of their more striking artistic productions, and this book is probably the most interesting in the whole literature of art.

It is a volume full of wonders, but such is the prejudice created by the belief that the evolutionary process is necessarily progressive, that I can sympathise with any reader who, on examining the plates it contains, refuses to believe, except on the highest authority, that these productions are the work of a race that belonged to a former geological epoch.⁠[244]⁠

M. Piette explains the prevalence of pregnant women among their figurines on the grounds that, as the Cro-Magnons probably left their children and pregnant women at home with the sedentary members of the tribe (the artists, the artisans and the scribes) when they roved the country, the artists naturally took for their adult models women in a condition which, for some reason or other, has been eschewed by the æsthetic sense of the present geological period.⁠[245]⁠

He has, however, another and better suggestion to make. He says that the prevalence of pregnant women among their subjects may have resulted from a nobler motive,—that is to say, from a sort of religious sentiment awakened in them by the mysteries of motherhood.⁠[246]⁠

Personally I am inclined to reject both these explanations. They are conceived too obviously through the optics of this age. I acknowledge M. Piette’s extremely sympathetic treatment of the whole subject, and we are immensely indebted to him for the pains to which he went in preparing this collection for us; but I feel there is a deeper meaning still to these wonderful representations of women with child.

We must remember that we are speaking of a people who lived in a pre-Promethean Age, when all the ills and woes of which Hesiod speaks had not yet come upon mankind. Is it not possible, therefore, that the whole of their attitude towards pregnancy—even towards the aspect of a pregnant woman—was entirely different from our own? Since beauty is only a convention arising from certain fundamental values,⁠[247] is it not more probable that, among a people into whose lives very little sickness and ugliness had as yet entered, the promise of life, bigness with a guarantee of the multiplication of life, was the most beautiful thing of all?

The virgin ideal, which has been prevalent now for thousands of years in the art as well as the morality of the recent geological period, is at least a negative ideal. It permeates Greek as well as Christian art. Even when they depicted Hera, the Greeks frequently made her appear as a virgin, while the sanctity of the virgin ideal in the Christian era is well known.

Now although I am prepared to admit that a good deal of this idealisation of virginity may have arisen out of the deep unconscious and ineradicable dislike of their fathers which is felt by most men who have been very much attached to their mothers, I cannot help suspecting also that, where the virgin figure is held up for general admiration, there is also a good deal of unconscious pessimism abroad. We know the deeply pessimistic strain of the ancient Greeks; we also know the pessimism of Modernity, which Schopenhauer converted into a system. We are aware, too, of the causes of a good deal of this pessimism: ill-adaptedness, ill-health, nervous irascibility, etc.

Now to the conscious pessimist, to the man who knows this vale of tears simply as a station of the cross, the spectacle of pregnancy must be a cause of positive sadness if not horror.

Again, from the women’s point of view, pregnancy in countries of the Western civilised world has become so very far removed from any idea of beauty, pleasure, easy and joyful functioning and desire, that they cannot possibly regard the condition as one exciting æsthetic enjoyment.⁠[248] An æsthetic emotion is often provoked by witnessing the ease and mastery with which an animal body overcomes a physical difficulty; but where are the signs of ease or mastery in the fatigue party from Harley Street which is usually summoned to the modern woman’s child-bed?

In these figurines and drawings of pregnant women, therefore, I am inclined to read something more significant than that which M. Piette offers in explanation of them. I am inclined to see a deep love and enthusiasm in regard to life, a fundamental and ready acceptance of all that life, and the multiplication of life, means, because it is known to be so thoroughly worth while. There is a question-mark against life now. We feel it; we know it. Even the Greeks knew it and felt it,—how much more, therefore, must we, the children of an age a thousand times less attractive in every way than theirs!

Pregnancy now may mean, in fact it frequently does mean, not only pain and sorrow, but the production of a child who is but a faint memento of life (we thank God if he is not a cretin, a cripple, a consumptive or a lunatic), a pale shadow of vitality, in whose very eyes we read the question-mark which we ourselves have already applied to all modern existence. How could pregnancy be beautiful?

Let us be careful, therefore, before we read anything more than a frank and whole-hearted approval of life into these Cro-Magnon figurines of women with child. To them, no doubt, pregnancy was a gloriously beautiful thing; all its associations, preliminary, gestatory and post-gestatory, were also probably the source of infinite delight, pride and joy, and the traditional story about the Golden Age which preceded the Promethean Age, and which has been so heartily laughed at since, receives its strongest confirmation precisely from these little statuettes of pregnant women found in prehistoric caves in the south of France.

But I have wandered from my subject.

We have seen how many authorities have borne witness to the very high artistic powers of this Cro-Magnon race which Dr. Sollas designates by the name of “the giants of Mentone,”⁠[249] and v. Buttel-Reepen calls the “dominant people” in Europe “at the close of the Glacial Period.”⁠[250] We have seen that they were exceptionally tall, and have therefore found useful confirmation of the suggestion made in Chapter II. (explanation of Subdivision I. of the myth of Prometheus) that the superior race were probably a people of remarkably fine stature. It has also, I think, been satisfactorily shown, on the grounds of their vast cranial development alone, apart from their art, that they were not only far superior to any other people that existed at the time, but that they were also actually superior to any people, including ourselves, who have appeared since.

What sort of life did they lead?

Their lives appear to have been extremely simple: hunting, feasting, art and love. They are believed to have been a very hospitable people of mild and gentle habits,⁠[251] who developed a degree of skill in surgery which was positively amazing.⁠[252] They are also said to have invented the halter and to have begun the domestication of the horse.⁠[253] They were the contemporaries in Europe of the Mammoth, the rhinoceros, the cave bear, the hyena, the saiga, the moorcock, the wood-hen, the reindeer, and many of the present type of fauna.

As they held their own magnificently against the more formidable of these animals, and at the same time were too sportsmanlike to use the bow and arrow,⁠[254] which treacherously hits the foe or the quarry from a distance and from a place of safety, we may conclude that they were superior to modern men not only, as we have seen, in brains and artistic ability, but also in bravery, chivalry and nobility of nature. M. Piette, who has made a special study of their remains, has claimed that they had invented the art of writing, and that the existence of a script among them is a well-established fact. Personally I am quite prepared to accept M. Piette’s evidence for this. A. J. Evans, however, is apparently so deeply obsessed by the idea that it requires what he calls the “heirloom of the ages”⁠[255] for anything as cultivated as a form of writing to be evolved, that he seems doubtful about M. Piette’s discoveries.

He says in regard to M. Piette’s documentary evidence: “In the face of this and similar examples, are we to conclude with the late M. Piette that there was a regular alphabetic script during the Pleistocene Period which in turn had been preceded by a hieroglyphic system?... The artistic achievements of the men of the Reindeer Period attained such a high level that even such a conclusion could hardly excite surprise.... That they had sufficient intellectual capacity to evolve a system of writing can hardly be doubted.”⁠[256] But on the whole Evans leaves you questioning very much whether M. Piette really can be believed.⁠[257]⁠

Evans continues: “Whatever the intellectual capacity of these archaic people, they did not possess that heirloom of the ages, the accumulated experience of the later races of mankind. Art, indeed, seems to have come to them by nature, and they had other germs of civilisation.... Yet many of the most simple acquirements of primitive culture were unknown to them. They knew neither the potter’s nor the weaver’s nor the husbandman’s craft.”⁠[258]⁠

Here we have it again,—this unaccountable prepossession in favour of futile complications! Because they had no pottery, etc.!

But has it ever occurred to investigators like Evans that one does not necessarily want pottery? Has it never dawned upon him that one’s reasons for not having discovered the ghastly gramophone, for instance, may have been that one frankly neither wanted it, liked it, nor could tolerate it for one instant?

Supposing now that I, who loathe the gramophone and the motor-car as much as Auguste Rodin loathed both, happened to become the founder of a civilisation ultimately examined and commented upon by men like A. J. Evans. This is what we should read in their report upon it:—

“The Ludovicious civilisation shows a degree of ineptitude in regard to the production of those simple mechanical contrivances for making a home and the countryside pleasant and lively, which is quite out of keeping with the capacity shown in other directions, etc.”

It would never occur to such people even to suspect that because gramophones and motor-cars happened to be absent from the kind of civilisation I would found, I might possibly be believed to dislike gramophones and motor-cars, or to have no use for them.

In view of the vastly superior brain-power of these Cro-Magnons, I do not accept Evans’s modern and Promethean suggestion that “many of the most simple acquirements of primitive culture were unknown to them.” It is a piece of typical modern prejudice.

It reminds one of a passage in the works of another eminent Promethean, Sir Charles Lyell, which for inanity is sufficiently characteristic of the nineteenth century to render that period utterly ridiculous for ever.

Sir Charles, writing with the view of discrediting the notion that any primitive races could have been at all superior to ourselves, says: “But had the original stock of mankind been really endowed with such superior intellectual powers, and with inspired knowledge, and possessed the same improvable [!] nature as their posterity, the point of advancement [!] which they would have reached ere this would have been immeasurably higher.”⁠[259]⁠

Then speaking of the finds in old caves, he adds: “Instead of the rudest pottery or flint tools, so irregular in form as to cause the unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford unmistakable evidence of design, we should now be finding sculptured forms [they have been found] surpassing in beauty the masterpieces of Phidias and Praxiteles; lines of buried railway or electric telegraphs [!!], from which the best engineers of our day might gain invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more advanced construction than any known in Europe ... machines, perhaps, for navigating the air or exploring the depths of the ocean, or for calculating arithmetical problems beyond the wants or even the conception of living mathematicians.”⁠[260]⁠

There we have it again! Unless you can show railway lines and telegraph wires, unless, in fact, you have all the ridiculous complications of the Promethean brain, which makes the modern world such a fatuous failure, you have not got, you cannot have, you cannot even pretend to have, superior brain-power or civilisation!

Poor old Lyell! I know he is dead, and that in his time he did a good deal of honest work. But really, that passage!—Could Promethean stupidity be more hopeless? It is this sort of thing that makes one fear that if stupidity had been a disease, none of us could ever have survived the nineteenth century.

Seeing that the Cro-Magnon race must have possessed the means of fire-production, even if they did not actually discover them,⁠[261] I see no reason why, in the light of what we know of their immense superiority, we are not permitted to assume, as we can on the analogy of the Chinese attitude towards the use of steam and gunpowder, that if the Cro-Magnons did not possess pottery, the bow, and all the many evidences of a more Promethean and therefore meaner civilisation, it was because they deliberately eschewed these things, disliked them, felt no need for them.

Is it not conceivable that with their huge brain power, they might have foreseen all the ills and woes, which as Greek myth and the evidence of the modern world is with us to prove, cannot help arising from a Promethean civilisation? Is it not probable that even if they tried to produce pottery or other fire-wrought baubles, they would have had the good sense quickly to drop the experiment, and rigorously to forbid its repetition?

Civilisation is not only of one kind. Civilisation does not only mean having steam-engines, telegraph wires, factories, women members of Parliament, packed hospitals, lunatic asylums, homes for incurables, margarine and false teeth. There are other kinds, thank goodness! Is it not possible that they were rigidly developing another, simpler and better kind?

That is why I suggest, in Chapter II., in my explanation of Subdivision II. of the Prometheus myth, that Zeus, who was probably a typical Cro-Magnon, may have imposed certain restrictions upon the inferior people, when he allowed them the use of fire; and it was only when there was trouble over the observance of these restrictions, that he withdrew fire from them. The reader will remember that I also point out that the inferior people, being ignorant of the great wisdom of Zeus’s restrictions and conditions regarding the use of fire, imprudently allowed Prometheus to act as their champion, with the disastrous results that we now know.

Should the reader think that this is a little far-fetched, let me remind him that we have other instances in folk-lore, history and the reports of travellers in savage countries, of restrictions being imposed in regard to the use of fire, although these probably cannot compare with the drastic rules laid down by Zeus.

Thus Tylor reports an account given by the Rev. Geo. Turner about the introduction of fire among the inhabitants of Bowditch Island.

According to these people the origin of fire is traced to Mafiuke, “but unlike the Mafiuke of the mythology of some other islands, this was an old blind lady. Talangi went down to her in her lower regions, and asked her to give him some of her fire. She obstinately refused until he threatened to kill her, and then she yielded. With the fire he made her say what fish were to be cooked with it, and what were still to be eaten raw.”⁠[262]⁠

This is a remarkable instance of a myth accounting for certain restrictions being imposed in regard to the cooking of particular foods, and lends considerable colour to my whole argument.

In the same volume Tylor mentions that neither the Fuegians nor the Bushmen seemed to know how to boil food “when they first came into the view of Europe.”⁠[263] But here again, in the light of all we know regarding the Bushmen’s wonderful intelligence, is it not much more likely that the practice of boiling (which as we have seen is the most pernicious kind of cooking) had been forbidden ages before, and that tradition had perpetuated the prohibition, than that they did not know how to boil?

It is a curious coincidence that they should have happened just not to know of the most dangerous method of cooking.

In our own time, of course, we have only to think of the very light restriction of the Curfew, which was probably only a lingering vestige of a much more elaborate set of rules relating to the use of fire.

It is obvious that the prevalence of the fire-stealing myths all over the world is best accounted for by the assumption that all races of mankind not having developed with equal speed, the juxtaposition of two peoples, one possessing the means of fire-production and the other not, must have occurred sufficiently often to make the coveting and even the stealing of fire by the inferior race an almost universal tradition; but it is also equally probable that in cases where the superior race, as with the remote ancestors of the Greeks, were encountered on friendly terms,⁠[264]⁠—and the mingling of the two shows that the relationship was probably friendly,—the superior race in handing on its discoveries would endeavour, by imposing certain restrictions, to save the inferior race from the consequences which they (the superior race) knew must follow from an unlimited use of fire.

This evidently happened at some period in the remote history of the inhabitants of Bowditch Island, and it also happened in the history of the remote ancestors of the Greeks.

I have now come to the end of the principal part of my argument.

It was not absolutely necessary for the support of my thesis for me to attempt to identify the superior race with which, on the Spencerian hypothesis regarding the origin of gods, the remote ancestors of the Greeks must at some time in their history, have come into contact. Nevertheless, seeing that there was an immensely superior race in Europe at the dawn of the Neolithic era, that this race vanished by absorption early in Neolithic times, and that the remote ancestors of the Aryan race are supposed to have been of very great antiquity, and to have existed in the Stone Age before they separated; seeing, moreover, that the Cro-Magnons were a dolichocephalic race and that the Aryans were a brachycephalic race and that, as Professor Keith points out, the round-headed races of Europe absorbed the long-headed races in early Neolithic times,⁠[265] I see no reason why, in the light which all these facts throw on the mythology of Greece and the historical truths that doubtless lie concealed in it, we should not be prepared to conclude that Uranus was a Cro-Magnon chief, that his people mingled with the remote ancestors of the Greeks, and that the result of the cross was twofold, or threefold,—that is to say, that it led to a race of men some of which bred true to the original superior stock (I suggest that Zeus was one of these), some of which were a complete blend, and therefore very tall and mighty men (I suggest that Prometheus and the Titans were among these), and some of which bred true to the inferior race (we naturally hear nothing very extraordinary about these).

If this cross really occurred, and the Cro-Magnons actually did mingle with a round-headed and inferior race, we might suppose that the period following the cross would probably show a marked decline in art and culture generally. This, as a matter of fact, is precisely what we find. Although it was of course a great advantage to the remote ancestors of the Greeks to mingle their blood with so great a race as the Cro-Magnons,⁠[266] and although this admixture of Cro-Magnon blood probably accounts for a good deal of what was great in the ancient Greeks, the cross must have proved a distinct loss to the Cro-Magnon race itself and therefore to the world.

H. v. Buttel-Reepen, writing of the Age which followed the absorption of the Cro-Magnons, says: “But strange to relate, the artistic productions which characterised the end of the Pleistocene, the carvings and the wall-pictures, are altogether missing. The artistic culture seems to have vanished from Europe with the retreat of the ice, and the few drawings which were executed in Neolithic times, in the Bronze Age, and even in the Iron Age, are utterly crude and unskilful.”⁠[267]⁠

Then he proceeds to add: “This is a mystery which has not yet been satisfactorily dispelled.”⁠[268]⁠

I think that in view of all I have said there is no mystery in the matter at all. I do not see what else could have been expected. However, we shall see what v. Buttel-Reepen has to say when he has become acquainted with my argument.

In the light of recent research among savage peoples, we have seen that it is not at all unlikely that the remote ancestors of the Greeks, confronted by a race so infinitely superior to themselves, immediately proceeded to deify these Cro-Magnon people, and now that we have realised who and what they were, can we wonder that they did so? There is surely less difficulty in believing that the Cro-Magnons were called gods by a people so uncultivated as the ancient Aryans, than that the Spaniards of the sixteenth century should have been regarded as gods by the highly civilised Mexicans.⁠[269]⁠

Finally, if you ask when and where we can encounter any trace of the descendants of these wonderful Paleolithic people, who reached their zenith in late Pleistocene times, who declined during the early centuries of the Neolithic Age, and who were ultimately absorbed by the round-headed and inferior races of Europe, I cannot do better than reply with the profoundly interesting words of Professor Keith, and with these remarks I will conclude this chapter:

“Although there is no race in Europe to-day that can be regarded as representative of this Paleolithic people, yet in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Britain, individuals of this type are not rare. They are the tall men of commanding mien.”⁠[270]⁠

FOOTNOTES: