I. (continued 3)

Whose emotions have not been stirred by the story of Llewellyn the Great going out hunting, and missing his favourite dog; of his return, to be greeted by the creature with more than usual pleasure in his eye, but with jaws besmeared with blood; of the anxiety with which Llewellyn rushed into the house, to find the cradle where had lain his beautiful boy upset, and the ground around it soaked with blood; of his thereupon killing the dog, and then seeing the child lying unharmed beneath the cradle, and sleeping by the side of a dead wolf, from whose ravenous maw the faithful Gellert had delivered it? Most of us, in our visits to North Wales, have stood by Gellert’s grave at Beddgelert, little suspecting that the affecting story occurs in the folk-lore of nearly every Aryan people, and of several non-Aryan races, as the Egyptians and Chinese.

Probably it comes to us as many other tales have come, through collections like the well-known Gesta Romanorum, compiled by mediæval monks for popular entertainment. In the version given in that book the knight who corresponds to Llewellyn, after slaying his dog, discovers that it had saved his child from a serpent, and thereupon breaks his sword and departs on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But the monks were no inventors of such tales; they recorded those that came to them through the pilgrims, students, traders, and warriors who travelled from west to east and from east to west in the Middle Ages, and it is in the native home of fable and imagery the storied Orient, that we must seek for the earliest forms of the Gellert legend. In the Panchatantra, the oldest and most celebrated Sanskrit fable-book, the story takes this form:—An infirm child is left by its mother while she goes to fetch water, and she charges the father, who is a Brahman, to watch over it. But he leaves the house to collect alms, and soon after this a snake crawls towards the child. In the house was an ichneumon, a creature often cherished as a house pet, who sprang at the snake and throttled it. When the mother came back, the ichneumon went gladly to meet her, his jaws and face smeared with the snake’s blood. The horrified mother, thinking it had killed her child, threw her water-jar at it, and killed it; then seeing the child safe beside the mangled body of the snake, she beat her breast and face with grief, and scolded her husband for leaving the house.

We find the same story, with the slight difference that the animal is an otter, in a later Sanskrit collection, the Hitopadesa, but we can track it to that fertile source of classic and mediæval fable, the Buddhist Jâtakas, or Birth Stories, a very ancient collection of fables, which, professing to have been told by the Buddha, narrates his exploits in the 550 births through which he passed before attaining Buddhahood. In the Vinaya Pitaka of the Chinese Buddhist collection, which, according to Mr. Beal, dates from the fifth century A.D., and is translated from original scriptures supposed to have existed near the time of Asoka’s council in the third century B.C., we have the earliest extant form of the tale. That in the Panchatantra is obviously borrowed from it, the differences being in unimportant detail, as, for example, the nakula, or mongoose, is killed by the Brahman on his return home, the wife having neglected to take the child with her as bidden by him. He is filled with sorrow, and then a Deva continues the strain:—

The several versions of the story which could be cited from German, Russian, Persian, and other Aryan folk-lore, would merely present certain variations due to local colouring and to the inventiveness of the narrators or transcribers; and, omitting these, it will suffice to give the Egyptian variant or corresponding form, in which the tragical has given place to the amusing, save, perhaps, in the opinion of the Wali. This luckless person “once smashed a pot full of herbs which a cook had prepared. The exasperated cook thrashed the well-intentioned but unfortunate Wali within an inch of his life, and when he returned, exhausted with his efforts at belabouring the man, he discovered among the herbs a poisonous snake.”

In pointing to the venerable Buddhist Birth Stories as the earliest extant source of Aryan fables, it should be added that these were with the Buddha and his disciples the favourite vehicle of carrying to the hearts of men those lessons of gentleness and tenderness towards all living things which are a distinctive feature of that non-persecuting religion.

§ VIII.

MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS.

With the important exception of reference to the change effected in the Jewish doctrine of spirits, and its resulting influence on Christian theology, by the transformation of the mythical Ahriman of the old Persian religion into the archfiend Satan, but slight allusion has been made in these pages to the myths and legends of the Semitic race. Under this term, borrowed from the current belief in their descent from Shem, are included extant and extinct people, the Assyrians, Chaldeans or Babylonians, Phœnicians, Arabs, Syrians, Jews, and Ethiopians.

The mythology of the Aryan nations has had the advantage of the most scholarly criticism, and the light which this has thrown upon the racial connection of peoples between whom all superficial likeness had long disappeared, as well as upon the early condition of their common ancestors, is of the greatest value as aid to our knowledge of the mode of man’s intellectual and spiritual growth. And the comparisons made between the older and cruder forms underlying the elaborated myth and the myths of semi-barbarous races have supported conclusions concerning man’s primitive state identical with those deduced from the material relics of the Ancient and Newer Stone Ages, namely, that the savage races of to-day represent not a degradation to which man has sunk, but a condition out of which all races above the savage have, through much tribulation, emerged. An important exception to this has, however, been claimed on behalf of at least one branch of the Semitic race—namely, the Hebrews or Jews. This claim has rested on their assumed selection by the Deity for a definite purpose in the ordering and directing of human affairs; but no assumption of supernatural origin can screen the documents of disputed authorship and uncertain meaning on which that claim is based from the investigation applied to all ancient records; nor can the materials elude dissection because hitherto regarded as organic parts of revelation. The real difficulties are in the structure of the language and in the scantiness of the material as contrasted with the flexile and copious mythology of the Aryan race. And the investigation has been in some degree checked by the mistaken dicta of authorities such as M. Renan and the late Baron Bunsen; the former contending that “the Semites never had a mythology,” and the latter (although any statement of his carries far less weight) that “it is the grand, momentous, and fortunate self-denial of Judaism to possess none.”

But, independently of the refusal of the student of history to admit that exceptional place has been accorded of direct Divine purpose to any particular race, the discoveries of literatures much older than the Hebrew, and in which legends akin to those in the earlier books of the Old Testament are found, together with the proofs of historical connection between the peoples having these common legends, have given the refutation to the distinctive character of the Semitic race claimed by M. Renan. That a people dwelling for centuries, as the Hebrews did, in a land which was the common highway between the great nations of antiquity; a people subject to vicissitudes bringing them, as the pipkin between iron pots, into collision and subject relations to Egyptians, Persians, and other powerful folk, should remain uninfluenced in their intellectual speculations and religious beliefs, would indeed be a greater miracle than that which makes their literature inspired in every word and vowel-point. The remarkable collection of cuneiform inscriptions (so called from their wedge-like shape: Latin, cuneus, a wedge) on the baked clay cylinders and tablets of the vast libraries of Babylon and Nineveh, has brought out one striking fact, namely, that the Semitic civilisation, venerable as that is, was the product of, or at least, greatly influenced by, the culture of a non-Semitic people called the Akkadians, from a word meaning “highlanders.” These more ancient dwellers in the Euphrates valley and uplands were not only non-Semitic but non-Aryan, and probably racially connected with the complex group of peoples embracing the Tatar-Mongolians, the distinguishing features of whose religion are Shamanistic, with belief in magic in its manifold forms. “In Babylonia, under the non-Semitic Akkadian rule, the dominant creed was the fetish worship, with all its ritual of magic and witchcraft; and when the Semites conquered the country, the old learning of the land became the property of the priests and astrologers, and the Akkadian language the Latin of the Empire.”[56]

It was during the memorable period of the Exile that the historical records of the Jews underwent revision, and from that time dates the incorporation into them of legends and traditions which, invested with a purity and majesty distinctively Hebrew, were borrowed from the Babylonians, although primarily Akkadian. They are here, as elsewhere, the product of the childhood of the race, when it speculates and invents, framing its theory of the beginnings, their when and how; when it prattles of the Golden Age, which seems to lie behind, in the fond and not extinct delusion that “the old is better;” when it frames its fairy tales, weird or winsome, in explanation of the uncommon, the unknown, and the bewildering.

The Babylonian origin of the early biblical stories is now generally admitted, although the dogmas based upon certain of them still retard the acceptance of this result of modern inquiry in some quarters. That reluctance is suggestively illustrated in Dr. Wm. Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, where, turning to the heading “Deluge,” the reader is referred to “Flood” and thence to “Noah!”

So much for the legendary; but the analysis of the more strictly mythical, the names of culture-ancestors and heroes, sons of Anak and of God, scattered over the Pentateuch, is not so easy a matter. The most important work in this direction has been attempted by Dr. Goldziher,[57] but even his scholarship has failed to convince sympathetic readers that Abraham and Isaac are sun-myths, and that the twelve sons of Jacob are the zodiacal signs! Under the Professor’s etymological solvent the personality of the patriarchs disappears, and the charming idylls and pastorals of old Eastern life become but phases of the sun and the weather. The Hebrew, like the Aryan myth-maker, speaks of the relations of day and night, of gray morning and sunrise, of red sunset and the darkness of night, as of love and union, or strife and pursuit, or gloomy desire and coy evasion. Abh-râm is the High or Heaven-Father (from râm, “to be high”) with his numberless host of descendants. Yis-châk, commonly called Isaac, denotes “he who laughs,” and so the Laughing one, whom the High Father intends to slay, is the smiling day or the smiling sunset, which gets the worst of the contest with the night sky, and disappears. Sarah signifies princess, or the moon, the queen who rules over the great army glittering amidst the darkness. The expulsion of Hagar (derived from a root hajara, meaning “to fly,” and yielding the word hijrâ or “flight,” whence the Mohammadan Hegira) is the Semitic variant of that inexhaustible theme of all mythology, the battle of Day and Night; Hagar flying before the inconstant sun and the jealous moon. And so on through the whole range of leading characters in Hebrew history; Cain and Abel, in which Dr. Goldziher, to whom they are the sun and dark sky, overlooks the more likely explanation of the story as a quarrel between nomads and tillers of the soil; Jephthah, in which the sun-god kills at mid-day the dawn, his own offspring; Samson, or more correctly Shimshôn, from the Hebrew word for sun, the incidents of whose life, as expounded by Professor Steinthal,[58] are more clearly typical of the labours of the sun; Jonah and the fish, a story long ago connected with the myth of Herakles and Hêsionê; “as on occasion of the storm the dragon or serpent swallows the sun, so when he sets he is swallowed by a mighty fish, waiting for him at the bottom of the sea. Then when he appears again on the horizon, he is spat out on the shore by the sea-monster.”[59]

These bare references must suffice to show that there is in Hebrew literature a large body of material which must undergo the sifting and the criticism already applied with success to Indo-European and non-Aryan myth. This done, the Semitic race will contribute its share of evidence in support of those conditions under which it has been the main purpose of this book to show that myth has its birth and growth.

§ IX.

CONCLUSION.

The multitude of subjects traversed in the foregoing sections has compelled presentment in so concise a form that any attempt to gather into a few sentences the sum of things said would be as a digest of a digest, and it is, therefore, better to briefly emphasise the conclusions to which the gathered evidence points. It was remarked at the outset, when insisting on the serious meaning which lies at the heart of myths, that they have their origin in the endeavour of barbaric man to explain his surroundings. The mass of fact brought together illustrates and confirms this view, and has thereby tended to raise what was once looked upon as fantastic, curious, and lawless, to the level of a subject demanding sober treatment and examination on strictly scientific methods.

Archbishop Trench, in his Study of Words, quotes Emerson’s happy characterisation of language as fossil poetry and fossil history: “Just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern, or the finely-vertebrated lizard, such as have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone, so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, preserved and made safe for ever.” In like manner we may speak of myths as fossil ethics and fossil theology, but, with more appositeness, as embryonic ethics and theology, since they contain potentially all the philosophies and theologies “that man did ever find.”

And to the student of the history of humanity who rejoices in the sure foundation on which, tested in manifold ways, the convictions of the highest and noblest of the race rest, the value of myth is increased in its being a natural outgrowth of the mind when, having advanced to the point at which curiosity concerning the causes of surrounding things arises, it frames its crude explanations. For not that which man claims to have received as a message from the gods, as a revelation from heaven, but that which he has learned by experience often painful and bitter, and which succeeding generations have either verified or improved upon, or disproved altogether, is, in the long run, of any worth. Through it alone, as we follow the changes wrought in the process from guess to certainty, can we determine what was the intellectual stage of man in his mental infancy, and how far it finds correspondences in the intellectual stage of existing barbaric races.

Thus, the study of myth is nothing less than the study of the mental and spiritual history of mankind. It is a branch of that larger, vaster science of evolution which so occupies our thoughts to-day, and with it the philosopher and the theologian must reckon. The evidence which it brings from the living and dead mythologies of every race is in accord with that furnished by their more tangible relics, that the history of mankind is a history of slow but sure advance from a lower to a higher; of ascent, although with oft backslidings. It confirms a momentous canon of modern science, that the laws of evolution in the spiritual world are as determinable as they are in the physical. To this we, for the enrichment of our life and helpful service of our kind, do well to give heed. Wherever we now turn eye or ear the unity of things is manifest, and their unbroken harmony heard. With the theory of evolution in our hands as the master-key, the immense array of facts that seemed to lie unrelated and discrete are seen to be interrelated and in necessary dependence—“a mighty sum of things for ever speaking.” That undisturbed relation of cause and effect which science has revealed and confirmed extends backwards as well as reaches forwards; its continuity involves the inclusion of man as a part of nature, and the study of his development as one in which both the biologist and the mythologist engage towards a common end.