SECT. I. On the Mixed Character of the Supernatural System, or Theo-Mythology, of Homer.

Though the poems of Homer are replete, perhaps beyond any others, with refined and often latent adaptations, yet it may be observed in general of the modes of representation used by him, that they are preeminently the reverse of systematic. Institutions or characters, which are in themselves consistent, probably gain by this method of proceeding, provided the execution be not unworthy of the design. For it secures their exhibition in more, and more varied, points of view, than can possibly be covered by the more didactic process. But the possession of this advantage depends upon the fact, that there is in them a harmony, which is their base, and which we have only to discover. Whereas, if that harmony be wanting, if in lieu of it there be a groundwork of fundamental discrepancy, then the conditions of effect are wholly changed. The multiplied variety of view becomes a multiplication of incongruity; each new aspect offers a new problem: and the more masterly the hand of the artist, the more arduous becomes the attempt to comprehend and present in their mutual bearings the pictures he has drawn, and the suggestions he has conveyed.

Thus it has been with that which, following German example, I have denominated the Theo-mythology of Homer. By that term it seems not improper to designate a mixture of theology and mythology, as these two words are commonly understood. Theology I suppose to mean, a system dealing with the knowledge of God and the unseen world: mythology, a system conversant with the inventions of man concerning them. In the Homeric poems I find both of these largely displayed: but with this difference, that the first was in visible decline, the second in such rapid and prolific development, that, while Homer is undoubtedly a witness to older fable, which had already in his time become settled tradition, he is also in this department himself evidently and largely a Maker and Inventor, and the material of the Greek mythology comes out of his hands far more fully moulded, and far more diversified, than it entered them.

Of the fact that the Homeric religion does not present a consistent and homogeneous whole, we have abundant evidence in the difficulties with which, so soon as the literary age of Greece began, expositors found themselves incumbered; and which drove them sometimes upon allegory as a resource, sometimes, as in the case of Plato, upon censure and repudiation[1].

Extended relations of God to man.

I know not whether it has been owing to our somewhat narrow jealousies concerning the function of Holy Scripture, or to our want of faith in the extended Providence of God, and His manifestations in the world, or to the real incongruity in the evidence at our command, or to any other cause, but the fact, at least, seems to me beyond doubt, that our modes of dealing with the Homeric poems in this cardinal respect have been eminently unsatisfactory. Those who have found in Homer the elements of religious truth, have resorted to the far-fetched and very extravagant supposition, that he had learned them from the contemporary Hebrews, or from the law of Moses. The more common and popular opinion[2] has perhaps been one, which has put all such elements almost or altogether out of view; one which has treated the Immortals in Homer as so many impersonations of the powers of nature, or else magnified men, and their social life as in substance no more than as a reflection of his picture of heroic life, only gilded with embellishments, and enlarged in scale, in proportion to the superior elevation of its sphere. Few, comparatively, have been inclined to recognise in the Homeric poems the vestiges of a real traditional knowledge, derived from the epoch when the covenant of God with man, and the promise of a Messiah, had not yet fallen within the contracted forms of Judaism for shelter, but entered more or less into the common consciousness, and formed a part of the patrimony of the human race[3].

But surely there is nothing improbable in the supposition, that in the poems of Homer such vestiges may be found. Every recorded form of society bears some traces of those by which it has been preceded: and in that highly primitive form, which Homer has been the instrument of embalming for all posterity, the law of general reason obliges us to search for elements and vestiges belonging to one more primitive still. And, if we are to inquire in the Iliad and the Odyssey for what belongs to antecedent manners and ideas, on what ground can it be pronounced improbable, that no part of these earlier traditions should be old enough to carry upon them the mark of belonging to the religion, which the Book of Genesis represents as brought by our first parents from Paradise, and as delivered by them to their immediate descendants in general? The Hebrew Chronology, considered in connection with the probable date of Homer, would even render it difficult or irrational to proceed upon any other supposition: nor if, as by the Septuagint or otherwise, a larger period is allowed for the growth of our race, will the state of this case be materially altered. For the facts must remain, that the form of society exhibited by Homer was itself in many points essentially patriarchal, that it contains, in matter not religious, such, for instance, as the episode of the Cyclops, clear traces of a yet earlier condition yet more significant of a relation to that name, and that there is no broadly marked period of human experience, or form of manners, which we can place between the great trunk of human history in Holy Scripture, and this famed Homeric branch, which of all literary treasures appears to be its eldest born. Standing next to the patriarchal histories of Holy Scripture, why should it not bear, how can it not bear, traces of the religion under which the patriarchs lived?

The immense longevity of the early generations of mankind was eminently favourable to the preservation of pristine traditions. Each individual, instead of being as now a witness of, or an agent in, one or two transmissions from father to son, would observe or share in ten times as many. According to the Hebrew Chronology, Lamech the father of Noah was of mature age before Adam died: and Abraham was of mature age before Noah died. Original or early witnesses, remaining so long as standards of appeal, would evidently check the rapidity of the darkening and destroying process.

Let us suppose that man now lived but twenty years, instead of fourscore. Would not this greatly quicken the waste of ancient traditions? And is not the converse also true?

Sufficiently proved from Holy Scripture.

Custom has made it with us second nature to take for granted a broad line of demarcation between those who live within the pale of Revelation, and the residue of mankind. But Holy Scripture does not appear to recognise such a severance in any manner, until we come to the revelation of the Mosaic law, which was like the erection of a temporary shelter for truths that had ranged at large over the plain, and that were apparently in danger of being totally absorbed in the mass of human inventions. But before this vineyard was planted, and likewise outside its fence, there were remains, smaller or greater, of the knowledge of God; and there was a recognised relation between Jehovah and mankind, which has been the subject of record from time to time, and the ground of acts involving the admonition, or pardon, or correction, or destruction, of individuals or communities.

The latest of these indications, such as the visit of the Wise Men from the East, are not the most remarkable: because first the captivity in Babylon, and subsequently the dissemination of Jewish groups through so many parts of the world, could not but lead to direct communications of divine knowledge, at least, in some small degree. From such causes, there would be many a Cornelius before him who became the first-fruits of the Gentiles. Yet even the interest, which probably led to such communications from the Jew, must have had its own root in relics of prior tradition, which attested the common concern of mankind in Him that was to come. But in earlier times, and when the Jewish nation was more concentrated, and was certainly obscure, the vestiges of extra-patriarchal and extra-judaical relations between God and man are undeniable. They have been traced with clearness and ability in a popular treatise by the hand of Bishop Horsley[4].

Let us take, for instance, that case of extreme wickedness, which most severely tries the general proposition. The punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins was preceded by a declaration from the Most High, importing a direct relation with those guilty cities[5]; and two angels, who had visited Abraham on the plains of Mamre, ‘came to Sodom at even.’ Ruth the Moabitess was an ancestress, through king David, of our Lord. Rahab in Jericho, ‘by faith,’ as the Apostle assures us, entertained the spies of the Israelites. Job, living in a country where the worship of the sun was practised, had, as had his friends, the knowledge of the true God. Melchizedek, the priest of On, whose daughter Joseph married, and Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, are other conspicuous instances. Later in time, Nineveh, the great Assyrian capital, received the message of the prophet Jonah, and repented at his preaching. Here the teaching organ was supplied from among the Jews: but Balaam exhibits to us the gift of inspiration beyond their bounds. Once more; many centuries after the Homeric manners had disappeared, and during the captivity, we find not only a knowledge of God, but dreams and signs vouchsafed to Assyrian kings, and interpreted for them by the prophet Daniel. We have, in short, mingling with the whole course of the Old Testament, a stream of evidence which shows the partial remnants of the knowledge of God, apart from that main current of it which is particularly traced for us in the patriarchal and Mosaic histories. Again, many centuries after Homer, when all traces of primitive manners had long vanished, still in the Prometheus of Æschylus, and in the Pollio of Virgil, we have signs, though I grant they are faint ones, that the celestial rays had not even then ‘faded into the light of common day’ for the heathen world. It would really be strange, and that in a high degree, if a record like that of Homer, with so many resemblances to the earliest manners in other points, had no link to connect it with them in their most vital part.

The question one of history.

The general proposition, that we may expect to find the relics of Scriptural traditions in the heroic age of Greece, though it leads, if proved, to important practical results, is independent even of a belief in those traditions, as they stand in the scheme of revealed truth. They must be admitted to have been facts on earth, even by those who would deny them to be facts of heavenly origin, in the shape in which Christendom receives them: and the question immediately before us is one of pure historical probability. The descent of mankind from a single pair, the lapse of that pair from original righteousness, are apart from and ulterior to it. We have traced the Greek nation to a source, and along a path of migration, which must in all likelihood have placed its ancestry, at some point or points, in close local relations with the scenes of the earliest Mosaic records: the retentiveness of that people equalled its receptiveness, and its close and fond association with the past made it prone indeed to incorporate novel matter into its religion, but prone also to keep it there after its incorporation.

If such traditions existed, and if the laws which guide historical inquiry require or lead us to suppose that the forefathers of the Greeks must have lived within their circle, then the burden of proof must lie not so properly with those who assert that the traces of them are to be found in the earliest, that is, the Homeric, form of the Greek mythology, as with those who deny it. What became of those old traditions? They must have decayed and disappeared, not by a sudden process, but by a gradual accumulation of the corrupt accretions, in which at length they were so completely interred as to be invisible and inaccessible. Some period therefore there must have been, at which they would remain clearly perceptible, though in conjunction with much corrupt matter. Such a period might be made the subject of record, and if such there were, we might naturally expect to find it in the oldest known work of the ancient literature.

If the poems of Homer do, however, contain a picture, even though a defaced picture, of the primeval religious traditions, it is obvious that they afford a most valuable collateral support to the credit of the Holy Scripture, considered as a document of history. Still we must not allow the desire of gaining this advantage to bias the mind in an inquiry, which can only be of value if it is conducted according to the strictest rules of rational criticism.

Invention combined with tradition.

We may then, in accordance with those rules, be prepared to expect that the Hellenic religion will prove to have been in part constructed from traditional knowledge. The question arises next, Of what other materials in addition was it composed? The answer can be but one; Such materials would be supplied by invention. But invention cannot absolutely create; it can only work upon what it finds already provided to its hand. The provision made in this instance was simply that with which the experience of man supplied him. It was mediate or immediate: mediate, where the Greek received matter from abroad, and wrought upon it: immediate, where he conceived it for himself. That experience lay in two spheres—the sphere of external nature, and the sphere of life. Each of these would afford for the purpose the elements of Power, Grandeur, Pleasure, Beauty, Utility; and such would be the elements suited to the work of constructing or developing a system that was to present objects for his worship. We may therefore reasonably expect to find in the religion features referable to these two departments for their origin;—first, the powerful forces and attractive forms of outward nature; secondly, the faculties and propensities of man, and those relations to his fellow-men, amidst which his lot is cast, and his character formed.

If this be so, then, in the result thus compounded out of tradition purporting to be revealed, and out of invention strictly human, we ought to recognise, so long as both classes of ingredients are in effective coexistence, not strictly a false theology, but a true theology falsified: a true religion, into which falsehood has entered, and in which it is gradually overlaying and absorbing the original truth, until, when the process has at length reached a certain point, it is wholly hidden and borne down by countervailing forces, so that the system has for practical purposes become a false one, and both may and should be so termed and treated.

I admit that very different modes of representing the case have been in vogue. Sometimes by those to whom the interest of Christianity is precious, and sometimes in indifference or hostility to its fortunes, it is held that the basis of the Greek mythology is laid in the deification of the powers of nature. The common assumptions have been such as the following: That the starting-point of the religion of the heroic age is to be sought only in the facts of the world, in the ideas and experience of man. That nature-worship, the deification of elemental and other physical powers, was the original and proper basis of the system. That this system, presumably self-consistent, as having been founded on a given principle, was broken up by the intervention of theogonic revolutions. That the system, of which Jupiter was at the head, was an imperfect reconstruction of a scheme of divine rule out of the fragments of an earlier religion, and that it supplanted the elder gods. In short, the Greek mythology is represented as a corrupt edition, not of original revealed religion, but of a Nature-worship which, as it seems to be assumed, was separated by a gulf never measured, and never passed, from the primitive religious traditions of our race. Further it seems to be held, that the faults and imperfections of the pagan religion have their root only in a radical inability of the human mind to produce pure deity; that they do not represent the depravation of an ancient and divine gift, but rather the simple failure of man in a work of invention. Indeed, we need not wonder that it should fail in a process which, critically considered, can mean little else than mere exaggeration of itself and from its own experience[6], and which must be so apt to become positive caricature.

The basis was not in Nature-worship.

Again, Dean Prideaux, in his Connection of Sacred and Profane History, gives the following genesis of the Greek mythology. From the beginning, he says, there was a general notion among men, founded on a sense that they were impure, of the necessity of a mediator with God. There being no mediator clearly revealed, man chose mediators for himself, and took the sun, moon, and stars, as high intelligences well fitted for the purpose. Hence we find Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Apollo, Mercury, Venus, and Diana, to be first ranked in the polytheism of the ancients: for they were their first gods[7].

This theory is not in correspondence with the facts of the heroic age. There is no sense whatever of an impurity disabling men from access to God; no clear or general opinion of the necessity of mediation; no glimpse even of a god superior to Jupiter and the rest with whom they were on behalf of man to mediate.

And, again, the opinion, that the origin of the religion lay in Nature-worship, has had the support both of high and also of recent authorities. The eminent and learned Dr. Döllinger, in his ‘Heidenthum und Judenthum,’ says, that the deification of Nature, its forces, or the particular objects it offered to the senses, constituted the groundwork of the Greek, as well as of the other heathen religions. The idea of God continued to be powerful even when it had been darkened, and the godhead was felt as present, and active everywhere in the physical order. In working out his general rule for each mythological deity in particular, this author conceives the original form of their existence to have been that of a Nature-power, even where the vestiges of such a conception have, under subsequent handling, become faint or imperceptible. Thus Juno, Minerva, Latona, Diana, and others in succession, are referred to such an origin[8].

Now in dealing with this hypothesis, I would ask, what then has become of the old Theistic and Messianic traditions? and how has it happened they have been amputated by a process so violent as to make them to leave, even while the state of society continued still primitive, no trace behind them? But further. I would urge with confidence that the ample picture of the religion of the heroic ages, as we have it in Homer, which is strictly for this purpose in the nature of a fact, cannot be made to harmonize with the hypothesis which refers it to such a source. The proof of this statement must depend mainly on the examination which we have to institute in detail: but I am anxious at once to bring it into view, and to refer briefly to some of the grounds on which it rests, because it is susceptible of demonstration by evidence as contradistinguished from theory. On the other hand, when I proceed farther, evidence and theory must of necessity be mixed up together; and dissent from a particular mode of tracing out the association between the traditional and inventive elements of the system might unawares betray the reader into the conclusion, that no such distinct traditional elements were to be found, but that all, or nearly all, was pure fable. I say, then, there is much in the theo-mythology of Homer, which, if it had been a system founded in fable, could not have appeared there. It stands before us like one of our old churches, having different parts of its fabric in the different styles of architecture, each of which speaks for itself, and which we know to belong to the several epochs in the history of the art, when their characteristic combinations were respectively in vogue.

Nor is the system from invention only.

While on the one hand it has deities, such as Latona, without any attributes at all, on the other hand, we find in it both gods and goddesses, with an assemblage of such attributes and functions as have no common link by which invention could have fastened them together. They are such, likewise, as to bring about cross divisions and cross purposes, that the Greek force of imagination, and the Greek love of symmetry, would have alike eschewed. How could invention have set up Pallas as the goddess at once of peace and its industries, of wisdom, and of war? Its object would clearly have been to impersonate attributes; and to associate even distinct, much less conflicting attributes, in the same deity, would have been simply to confuse them. How again could it have combined in Apollo, who likewise turns the courses of rivers by his might, the offices of destruction, music, poetry, prophecy, archery, and medicine? Again, if he is the god of medicine, why have we Paieon? if of poetry, why have we the Muses? If Minerva be (as she is) goddess of war, why have we Mars? if of the work of the Artificer, why have we also Vulcan? if of prudence and sagacity, and even craft[9], why Mercury?

And again, the theory is, that the chief personages of the mythology are representatives of the great powers of the physical universe. I ask, therefore, how it happens that in the Homeric, or, as we may call it, primitive form of the system, these great powers of the universe are for the most part very indistinctly and partially personified, whereas we see in vivid life and constant movement another set of figures, having either an obscure or partial relation, or no relation at all, to those powers? Such a state of the evidence surely strikes at the very root of the hypothesis we are considering: but it is the state of the evidence which we actually find before us. Take for instance Time, Ocean, Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars, Air; all these prime natural objects and agents are either not personified at all in Homer, or so indistinctly and mutely personified that they are the mere zoophytes of his supernatural world, of which the gorgeous life and brilliant movement are sustained by a separate set of characters. Of these more effective agents, some are such as it is impossible rationally to set down for mere impersonations of ideas; while others are plainly constituted as lords over, and not beings derivative from, those powers or provinces of nature, with which they are placed in special relations. It cannot for instance rationally be said that the Homeric Jupiter is a mere impersonation of the air which he rules, or the Homeric Neptune of the sea, or the Homeric Aidoneus (or Aides) of the nether world. For to the first of these three, many functions are assigned having no connection with the air. As for example, when he gives swiftness of foot to Æneas on Mount Ida, that he might escape the pursuit of Achilles[10]. In the case of the second, there is a rival figure, namely, Nereus, who never that we know of leaves the sea, who is the father of the Sea-nymphs, and who evidently fulfils the conditions of Sea impersonated far better than does Neptune; Neptune, who marched upon the battle-field in Troas, and who, with Apollo, had himself built the walls of Ilium. Besides all this, the sea, to which Neptune belongs, is itself not one of the great elemental powers of the universe, but is derived, like rivers, springs, and wells, from Father Ocean, who fears indeed the thunderbolt of Jupiter, but is not bound to attendance even in the great chapter of Olympus[11]. As to Aidoneus, he can hardly impersonate the nether world, because in Homer he does not represent or govern it, but only has to do with that portion of it, which is inhabited by the souls of departed men. For, as far beneath his realm as Earth is beneath Heaven, lies the dark Tartarus of Homer, peopled with Κρόνος and his Titans. Nor, on the other hand, do we know that the Elysian fields of the West were subject to his sway. The elemental powers are in Homer, though not altogether, yet almost altogether, extrinsic to his grand Olympian system.

Without, then, anticipating this or that particular result from the inquiry into the mode and proportions in which traditional and inventive elements are combined in the poems of Homer, it may safely be denied that his picture of the supernatural world could have been drawn by means of materials exclusively supplied by invention from the sources of nature and experience.

Traditive origin of Sacrifice.

And indeed there is one particular with respect to which the admission will be generally made, that the Greek mythological system stood indebted at least to a primitive tradition, if not to a direct command; I mean the institution of sacrifice. This can hardly be supposed to have been an original conception in every country; and it distinctly points us to one common source. Sacrifice was, according to Dr. Döllinger[12], an inheritance which descended to the Greeks from the pristine time before the division of the nations. Without doubt the transmission of ritual, depending upon outward action, is more easy than that of ideas. But the fact that there was a transmission of something proves that there was a channel for it, open and continuous: and the circumstances might be such as to allow of the passage of ideas, together with institutions, along it.

It cannot be necessary to argue on the other side in any detail in order to show, that for much of his supernatural machinery, Homer was indebted to invention, whether his own or that of generations, or nations, which had preceded him. Had his system been one purely traditional in its basis, had it only broken into many rays the integral light of one God, it would have presented to us no such deity as Juno, who is wholly without prototype, either abstract or personal, in the primitive system, and no such mere reflections of human passions as are Mars and Venus: not to speak of those large additions, which we are to consider as belonging not so much to the basis and general outline of the system, as to the later stages of its development.

Let us now endeavour to inquire what mental, moral, and physical influences would be likely, in early times, to give form and direction to that alterative process, which the primitive ideas of religion, when removed beyond the precinct of Revelation and the knowledge of the Sacred Records, had to undergo.

This law of decline we may examine, first ideally, according to the influences likely to operate on the course of thought with respect to religion: and then with reference to that which is specifically Greek, by sketching in outline the actual mode of handling the material at command, which resulted in the creation of the Homeric or Olympian system. The first belongs to the metaphysical genesis of the system: the second to its historical formation.

Tendency of primitive religion to decay.

So long as either the Sacred Records, or the Light which supplied them, remained within reach, there were specific means either in operation, or at least accessible, which, as far as their range extended, would serve to check error, whether of practice or speculation, and to clear up uncertainty, as the sundial verifies or corrects the watch. But the stream darkened more and more, as it got farther from the source. The Pagan religion could boast of its unbroken traditions; like some forms of Christianity, and like the government of France until 1789. But its uninterrupted course was really an uninterrupted aberration from the line of truth; and to boast of the evenness of its motion was in effect to boast of the deadness of the conscience of mankind, which had not virtue enough even to disturb progressive degeneracy by occasional reproach. In later times, the Pagan system had its three aspects: it was one thing for the populace, another for statesmen, and a third for philosophers. But in Homer’s time it had suffered no criticism and no analysis: the human self-consciousness was scarcely awakened; introspection had not begun its work. Imagination and affection continually exercised their luxuriant energies in enlarging and developing the system of preternatural being and action. However copiously the element of fiction, nay, of falsehood, entered into it, yet for the masses of mankind it was still subjectively true[13].

All was forward movement. Man had not, as it were, had time to ask himself, is this a lie? or even, whither does it tend? His soul, in those days of infancy, never questioned, always believed. Logical inconsistency, even moral solecism, did not repel it, nor slacken the ardour of its energies in the work of construction: construction of art, construction of manners, construction of polity, construction of religion. This is what we see, in glowing heat, throughout the poems of Homer, and it is perhaps the master key to their highest interest. They show us, in the province we are now considering, heroes earning their title to the Olympian life, mute nature everywhere adjusting herself to the scheme of supernatural impersonations, and religion allied to the human imagination, as closely as it was afterwards by Mahomet wedded to the sword. Everywhere we see that which is properly called myth, in the process of formation. Early mythology is the simple result of the working of the human mind, in a spirit of belief or of credulity, upon the material offered to it by prior tradition, by the physical universe, by the operations of the mind, and by the experience of life.

We may, as follows, accompany the vicious series through which thought might probably be led, with respect to the theory of religion.

If we begin with the true and pure idea of God, it is the idea of a Being infinite in power and intelligence, and though perfectly good, yet good by an unchangeable internal determination of character, and not by the constraint of an external law.

Such was the starting-point, from which the human mind had to run its career of religious belief or speculation. But the maintenance subjectively of the original form of the image in its clearness depended, of course, upon the condition of the observing organ; and that organ, again, depended for its health on the healthiness of the being to whom it belonged. Hence we must look into the nature of man, in order to know what man would think respecting the nature of God.

Downward course of the idea of God.

Now man, the prey of vicious passions, though he holds deeply rooted within himself the witness to an extrinsic and objective law of goodness, which he needs in order to develop what he has of capacity for good, and to bring into subjection the counteracting and rebellious elements, is nevertheless prevailingly under the influence of these last. Hence, in the absence of special and Divine provision for the remedy of his inward disease, although both conscience and also the dispensations of Providence shadow forth to him a law of goodness from without, yet the sense of any internal law of goodness in himself becomes, with the lapse of time, more and more dim and ineffectual.

Thus, as he reflects back upon his own image conceptions of the Deity, the picture that he draws first fails in that, wherein he himself is weakest. Now, the perception of mere power depends upon intellect and sense: and as neither intellect nor sense have received through sin the same absolutely mortal wound which has reached his spiritual being, he can therefore still comprehend with clearness the idea and the uses of power, both mental and physical. Accordingly, the Godhead is for him preternaturally endowed with intelligence and force. But how was he to keep alive from his own resources the moral elements of the divine ideal? Coercive goodness, goodness by an external law, goodness dependent upon responsibility, was, by the nature of the case, inapplicable to Deity as such: while of goodness by an internal law, he had lost all clear conception, and he could not give what he had not got.

Of course it is not meant, that this was a conscious operation. Rarely indeed, in reflective and critical periods, does it happen that man can keep a log-book of wind, weather, and progress, for the mind, or tell from what quarter of the heavens have proceeded the gales that impel it on its course.

But, by this real though unconscious process, goodness would soon disappear from his conception of the Godhead, while high power and intelligence might remain. And hence it is not strange, if we find that Homer’s deities, possessed of power beyond their faculty of moral direction, are for the most part, when viewed in the sphere of their personal conduct, on a lower level than his heroes.

When therefore these latter charge, as is not unfrequent with them, upon the gods the consequences, and even in a degree the facts, of their own fault or folly, the proceeding is not so entirely illogical as we might at first suppose. For that great conception of an all-good and all-wise Being had undergone a miserable transmutation, bringing it more and more towards the form of an evil power. Hence, perhaps, it is that we find these reproaches to the Deity put into the mouth even of Menelaus, one of the noblest and purest characters among the heroes of Homer[14].

Again, this degradation of the divine idea was essentially connected with the parcelling it out into many portions, according to the system of polytheism. That system at once brought down all the attributes from their supreme perfection to scales of degree: established finite and imperfect relations in lieu of the perfect and infinite: carried into the atmosphere of heaven an earthy element. The disintegration of the Unity of God prepared the way for the disintegration of His several attributes, and especially for weakening and effacing those among them, which man had chiefly lost his capacity to grasp.

When once we have substituted for the absolute that which is in degree, and for the perfect that which is defective, we have brought the divine element within the cognizance of the human: the barrier of separation is broken down, and, without any consciousness of undue license, we thenceforward insensibly fashion it as we please. Each corruption, as it takes its place in the scheme of popular ideas, is consolidated by the action of new forces, over and above those which, even if alone, were sufficient to engender it: for the classes, who worked the machinery both of priestly caste, and of civil government, found their account in accumulating fable up to a mountain mass. Each new addition found a welcome: but woe to him, who, by shaking the popular persuasion of any one article, endangered the very foundations of the whole.

Such is an outline, though a faint and rude one, of what may be called the rationale, or the law of cause and effect, applicable to the explanation of the progressive and, at length, total corruption of the primitive religion.

Inducements to Nature-worship.

We may also endeavour to trace the motives which might determine the downward movement of the human mind in the direction, partially or wholly according to circumstances, of what is called Nature-worship.

On the one side lay the proposition handed down from the beginning—there is a God. On the other side arose the question—where is He? It was felt that on the whole He was not in man, though there was in man what was of Him. It was obvious to look for Him in the mighty agencies, and in the sublime objects of Nature, which, though (so thought might run,) they did not reveal Him entirely, yet disclosed nothing that was not worthy to belong to Him. Here is a germ of Nature-worship. Hence it is that we find Aristotle, at a period when thought was alike acute, deliberate, and refined, declare it to be beyond all doubt that the heavenly bodies are far more divine than man[15].

Now this germ could not be one only. Trains of thought and reasoning, essentially alike, would, according to diversities of minds and circumstances, lead one to place the God in one natural sphere or agency, and another to place him in another. There was no commanding principle either to confine or to reconcile these variations; thus the same cause, which brought deity into natural objects, would also tend to exhibit many gods instead of one.

Such was the path by which man might travel from Theism to Nature-worship. But other paths, starting from other points, would lead to the same issue.

Suppose now the case of the mind wholly without the tradition of a God. To such a mind, the vast and overmastering but usually regulated forces, and the beautiful and noble forms of nature, would of themselves suggest the idea of a superior agency; yet, again, not of one superior agent alone, but of many. Thus some men would build upwards, while others, so to speak, were building downwards, and they would meet on the way.

And, again, a third operation could not but assist these two former, and combine with their results. For the unaided intellect of man seems not to have had stamina to carry, as it were, the weight of the transcendent idea of one God, of God infinite in might, in wisdom, and in love. Again, it was awful as well as ponderous; because it was so remote from man, and from his actual state. He therefore lightened the idea, as it were, by dividing it from one into many; and he brought it nearer to himself, nearer to his sympathies, by humanizing its form and attributes. By this process he in time destroyed indeed his reverence, but he also beguiled his fears, and created for himself objects not of dread, so much as of familiar association.

Yet once again; it may, I think, be shown that a kind of natural necessity led man to denominate actual powers, which he saw and felt about him, not through the medium of generalization by abstract names, but by making them persons.

Thus easy, and almost inevitable, under mental laws, was the road to Nature-worship. The path, that led into the deeper corruption of Passion-worship, has been already traced.

Progressive deterioration.

It is then in entire accordance with what has preceded, that, when the Pagan system has come into its old age, we should find it so wholly deprived of all the lineaments of original beauty, grandeur, and goodness, that we can read the destructive philosophy and poetry of the atheistic schools, and of Lucretius in particular, without the strong sentiment of horror, which in themselves they are fitted to excite.

Milton, in the First Book of Paradise Lost, treats the Pagan gods as being, under new names, so many of the fallen angels, who with Satan had rebelled, and with him had been driven out from heaven, so that the world of heathen from the first had simply

Whether this sentiment be poetically warrantable or not, (and for my own part I cannot but think it was one too much connected with a cold and lowered form of Christian doctrine,) it is not historically sound. We should distinguish broadly between this assertion, that the Pagan religion was an original falsehood, and the declaration of St. Paul, ‘I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God[16].’ To the same class as the words of the Apostle, belong, as I conceive, these (and other) sentences of Saint Augustine[17]; non sunt dii, maligni sunt spiritus, quibus æterna tua felicitas pœna est.... Proinde si ad beatam pervenire desideras civitatem, devita dæmonum societatem. For these terrible descriptions apply not to the infancy, but to the decrepitude of Paganism. The difference between them was as the difference between the babe in arms, and the hoary sinner on the threshold of death: and while the one representation summarily cuts man off from God, the other only shows to how fearful a distance he had by degrees travelled away. As time went on, and the eidola of succeeding generations were heaped one upon another, the truly theistic element in the Pagan mythology was more and more hidden and overborne, until at length its association with evil was so inveterate and thorough, that the images, which the citizen or matron of the Roman empire had before the mind as those of gods, bore no appreciable resemblance to their divine original, but more and more amply corresponded with that dark side of our nature, on which we are accessible to, and finally may assume the likeness of, the evil one.

But the critical error that we seem to have committed may be thus described; we have thrown back upon the Homeric period the moral and mythological character of the system, such as we find it developed in later Greece and Rome: forgetful of the long and dim interval, that separates Homeric religion from almost every subsequent representation, and not duly appreciating the title of the poems to speak with an almost exclusive authority for their own insulated epoch.

Paganism in its decay.

Further, it is reasonable to remember that some of the powerful alteratives, which in subsequent ages told upon the form and substance of this wonderful mythology, had not begun to act in the time of Homer. These alteratives were speculative thought, and political interests. Philosophy, ever dangerous to the popular religion of Greece in the days of its maturity and prosperity, became its ally in the period of its decline, when its original vitality had entirely ebbed away, and when the Vexilla Regis, raised aloft throughout the Roman empire, drove it to seek refuge in holes and corners. Then the wit of man was set to repair the tottering fabric; to apologize for what was profligate, to invent reasons for what was void of meaning, to frame relations between the depraved mythology, and the moral government of the world. Even that corrupt and wicked system had, as it were, its epoch of death-bed repentance.

The services thus rendered by philosophers were late and ineffectual; but it was the civil power, which had been all along the greatest conservator of the classical mythology. It felt itself to have an interest in surrounding public authority with a veneration greater than this world could supply: a commanding interest, with the pursuit of which its necessities forbade it to dispense. Whatever exercised an influence in subduing and enthralling the popular mind, answered its purpose in the view of the civil magistrate. Hence his multifarious importations into religion, each successively introduced for this purely subjective and temporal reason, removed it farther and farther from the ground of truth. Every story that he added to the edifice made its fall more certain and more terrible. Numerosa parabat excelsæ turris tabulata. But in Homer’s time there is no trace of this employment of religion by governments, as a means of sheer imposition upon their subjects.

So likewise in Homer there is no sign that conscious speculation on these subjects had begun. Indeed, of that kind of thought which involves a clear mental self-consciousness, we may perhaps say, that the first beginning, at least for Europe and the West, is marked by the very curious simile in the Iliad[18]—

Homer, then, spoke out in simplicity, and in good faith, the religion of his day, under those forms of poetry with which all religions have a well-grounded affinity: for the imagination, which is the fountain-head of poetic forms, is likewise a genuine, though faint, picture, of that world which religion realizes, through Faith its groundwork, ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen[19].’

And, indeed, he had no other form in which to speak forth his soul. That which we call the invention of the Greeks at work upon the subject-matter of religion was, in fact, the voice of human nature, giving expression in the easiest and simplest manner to its sense of the great objects and powers amidst which its lot was cast. It has been well said by Professor M. Müller, in an able Essay[20] on ‘Comparative Mythology,’ that ‘abstract speech is more difficult, than the fulness of a poet’s sympathy with nature.’ Thus it was not so much that poetry usurped the office of religion, as that their respective functions brought them of necessity to a common ground and a common form of proceeding. Homer saw, heard, or felt the action of the sun, the moon, the stars, the atmosphere, the winds, the sea, the rivers, the fountains, the soil; and he knew of family affections, of governing powers, of a healing art, of a gift and skill of mechanical construction. Action, in each of these departments, could not but be referred to a power. How was that power to be expressed?

On Impersonation in Homer.

At least for the Greek mind, less subtle, as Aristotle has observed, than the Oriental, it was more natural to deal with persons, than with metaphysical abstractions. It was foreign to the mental habit of the heroic age to conceive of abstract essences; as it still remains difficult, more difficult perhaps than, in the looseness of our mental processes, we suppose, for the men of our own generation. Even now, in the old age of the world, we have many signs of this natural difficulty, which formerly was a kind of impossibility. Especially we have that one which leads all communities, and above all their least instructed classes, to apply the personal pronouns he or she to a vast multitude of inanimate objects, both natural, and the products of human skill and labour. These objects are generally such as stand in a certain relation to action: they either do, suffer, or contain.

If then the Nature-forces could not be expressed, or at least could not be understood as abstractions, to express them as persons was the only other course open to the poet. It was not an effort to follow this method: it would have required great effort to adopt any other. How spontaneous was the impulse which thus generated the mythological system, we may observe from this, that it not only personified in cases where, an agency being seen, its fountain was concealed from view, but it likewise went very far towards personification even in cases where inanimate instruments were wielded by human beings, and where, as the source of the phenomenon was perceived, there was no occasion to clothe it with a separate vitality. Hence that copious vivifying power which Homer has poured like a flood through his verse. Hence his bitter arrow (πικρὸς), his darts hungry for human blood (λιλαιόμενα χρόος ἆσαι), his ground laughing in the blaze of the gleaming armour (γέλασσε δὲ πᾶσα περὶ χθὼν χαλκοῦ ὑπὸ στεροπῆς). Hence again his free use of sensible imagery to illustrate metaphysical ideas: for example, his black cloud of grief, his black pains, his purple death[21]. Hence that singularly beautiful passage on the weeping of the deathless horses of Achilles for Patroclus[22]. Hence too it is, that he does not scruple to carry imagery, drawn from the sphere of one sense, into the domain of another, an operation which later poets have found so difficult and hazardous. He has an iron din[23], a brazen voice[24], a brazen or iron heaven[25], a howling or shouting fire, a blaze of lamentation[26]. Hence, by a system of figure bolder perhaps than has been used by any other poet, he invests the works of high art in metal with the attributes of life and motion. This daring system reaches its climax in the damsel satellites[27] of gold, that support the limping gait of Vulcan: in the dogs of metal, that guard the palace of Alcinous: in the elastic arms of Achilles, which, so far from being a weight upon him, themselves lift him from the ground: and in the animated ships of the Phæacians, which are taught by instinct to speed across the sea, and to pilot their own course to the points of their destination[28]. On every side we see a redundance of life, shaping, and even forcing, for itself new channels: and thus it becomes more easy for us to conceive the important truth that, when he impersonates, he simply takes what was for him the easiest and the most effective way to describe. Every where he is carrying on a double process of action and reaction: on the one hand bringing Deity down to sensible forms; on the other, adorning and elevating humanity, and inanimate nature, with every divine endowment.

Nature of the myths of Homer.

Homer, then, is full of mythical matter. But the word myth, of which in recent controversies the use has been so frequent, is capable of being viewed under either of two principal aspects.

In one of these, it signifies a story which is not contemporary with the date of the facts it purports to relate, but is in reality an after-view of them, which colours its subject, and exaggerates, ad libitum, according to conditions of thought and feeling which have arisen in the interval.

In the other of these senses, it is an allegory which has simply lost its counterpart: it was true, but by separation from that which attached it to fact, it has become untrue: being now of necessity handled, if handled at all, as a substantive existence, it has passed into a fable, and is only distinguished from pure fable, in that it once indicated truths contemporary with itself, though probably truths lying in a different region from its own.

It is in this last sense that the term myth is chiefly, and most legitimately, applicable to the religious system of the Homeric poems: but they may also probably contain more or less of the mythical element in the former sense.

We, having obtained knowledge of the early derivation and distribution of mankind, and of the primitive religion, from sources other than those open to Homer, shall find in this knowledge the lost counterpart of a great portion of the Homeric myths.

The theological and Messianic traditions which we find recorded in Scripture, when compared with the Homeric theogony, will be found to correspond with a large and important part of it: and, moreover, with a part of it which in the poems themselves carries a cluster of distinctive marks, not to be explained except by the discovery of this correspondence. The evidence, therefore, of the meaning of this part of the Homeric system is like that which is obtained, when, upon applying a new key to some lock that we have been unable to open, we find it fits the wards, and puts back the bolt.

In his learned and acute Essay[29] on Comparative Mythology, Professor Max Müller undertakes to illustrate a doctrine that appears to be the exact opposite of Mr. Grote’s ‘Past which was never present.’ If I understand him rightly, there was at some one time a present for every portion of the reputed past[30]: so that, by a reference to eastern sources, the nature of that present, and of the original consistent meaning for what afterwards on becoming unintelligible is justly called a myth, has in many cases been, and may yet in many more come to be, unveiled. Originally impersonations of ideas and natural powers, the heathen gods never represented demons or evil spirits[31], and were ‘masks without an actor,’ ‘names without being:’ while their reality, consisting in their relation to the facts of the universe, faded and escaped from perception in the course of time. The myths of the Veda are still in the stage of growth: Hesiod and Homer too are of the ‘later Greeks,’ and not only the Theogony of Hesiod is ‘a distorted caricature,’ but the poetry of Homer[32] is extensively founded on myths fully grown, and in the stage of decay, that is to say, long severed from their corresponding deities.

I do not doubt that in all mythology at its origin, there has been both a shell and a substance: and that the tendency of the two to part company, which we see even under the sway of revealed religion, must have operated with far more power, where ordinarily at least, man was thrown back, without other aid, upon his reason and his conscience, beset as they were and are with overpowering foes.

But then, as it seems to me, we must anticipate great changes in the shell itself. It will not retain, when empty, the identity of the form; which has lost the support that it had from within when full. On the contrary, it will become unlike its original self, as well as unlike its archetype or substance, so that probably much of it must always remain without a key.

Upon the other hand, as there was already a true religion in the world when an untrue one began to gather upon and incrust it, there must arise the question already put; what, according to the theory before us, became of this true religion? It did not disappear in a day: there was no wilful renunciation of it by single or specific acts, no sharp line drawn between it and the false; but the human element was gradually more and more imported into the divine, operating by continual and successive disintegrations of the original ideas. If so, then there seems to be nothing unreasonable in the belief that the traces of them might long remain discernible in the adulterated system, even if only as the features of a man are discernible in the mask of a buffoon.

No doubt it would be unreasonable to look for such traces in Homer, if he were indeed, in the popular sense of the term, which probably Professor M. Müller does not intend, a later Greek; a Greek dealing with a mythological system of which his nation had already had its use, from which the creative principle had departed, and which was on the road from ripeness to decay. I am far from saying that there are no myths in Homer, where the original and interior meaning has ceased to be discernible: but I shall seek to show that the contrary may be confidently averred, and fully shown, with respect to the great bulk of his mythology, and that we see in him two systems, both alive, and in impact and friction, though with very unequal forces, one upon the other; the first, that of traditional truth, and the second, of the inventive impersonation of nature both material and invisible. And certainly it is very striking that, with one or two very insignificant exceptions, all those ancient fables, which Professor Müller treats as having become unintelligible without the key of the Veda, and which he explains by means of it, are fables unknown to Homer, and drawn from much later sources.

Steps of the downward process.

The general view, then, which will be given in these pages of the Homeric Theo-mythology is as follows: That its basis is not to be found either in any mere human instinct gradually building it up from the ground, or in the already formed system of any other nation of antiquity; but that its true point of origin lies in the ancient Theistic and Messianic traditions, which we know to have subsisted among the patriarchs, and which their kin and contemporaries must have carried with them as they dispersed, although their original warmth and vitality could not but fall into a course of gradual efflux, with the gradually widening distance from their source. To travel beyond the reach of the rays proceeding from that source was to make the first decisive step from religion to mythology.

To this divine tradition, then, were added, in rank abundance, elements of merely human fabrication, which, while intruding themselves, could not but also extrude the higher and prior parts of religion. But the divine tradition, as it was divine, would not admit of the accumulation of human materials until it had itself been altered. Even before men could add, it was necessary that they should take away. This impairing and abstraction of elements from the divine tradition may be called disintegration.

Before the time of Homer, it had already wrought great havock. Its first steps, as far as the genesis of the mythology throws light upon them, would appear to have been as follows: objectively, a fundamental corruption of the idea of God; who, instead of an Omnipotent wisdom and holiness, now in the main represented on a large scale, in personal character, the union of appetite and power; subjectively, the primary idea of religion was wholly lost. Adam, says Lord Bacon, was not content with universal obedience to the Divine Will as his rule of action, but would have another standard. This offence, though not exaggerated into the hideousness of human depravity in its later forms, is represented without mitigation in the principles of action current in the heroic age. Human life, as it is there exhibited, has much in it that is noble and admirable; but nowhere is it a life of simple obedience to God.

This disintegration of primitive traditions forms the second stage, a negative one, in the process which produced the Homeric Theo-mythology.

When the divine idea, and also the idea of the relation between man and his Maker, had once been fundamentally changed, there was now room for the introduction without limit of what was merely human into religion. Instead of man’s being formed in the image of God, God was formed in the image of man. The ancient traditions were made each to assume a separate individual form; and these shapes were fashioned by magnifying and modifying processes from the pattern that human nature afforded.

Again, as man does not exist alone and individually, but in the family, so the nexus of the family was introduced as the basis of a divine order. This we may call, resting on the etymology of the word, the divine Œconomy of the Homeric religion.

But as with man, so with the supernatural world, on which his own genius was now powerfully reflected, families themselves, when multiplied, required a political order; and therefore, among the gods also a State and government are formed, a divine polity. Human care, by a strange inversion, makes parental provision for the good government of those deities whom it has called into being.

The propagation, for which a physical provision was made among men, takes place within the mythological circle also, under the laws of his intelligent nature. The ranks of the Immortals are filled with persons metaphysically engendered. These persons they represent concrete forms given to abstract ideas, or, to state nearly the same thing in other words, personal modes of existence assigned to powers which man saw as it were alive and at work in the universe, physical or intelligent, around him. But here too a distinction is to be observed. Sometimes the deity was set above the natural power, as its governor and controller: sometimes he merely signified the power itself put in action. The former mode commonly points to tradition; the latter always to invention.

And lastly, when a supernatural κοσμὸς or order had thus been constructed, the principles of affinity between it and the order here below exercised a reciprocally attractive force. The gods were more and more humanized, man was more and more invested with deity: deity was made cheap and common among men, and the interval from earth to heaven was bridged over by various means. These means were principally; first, the translation of men into the company of the immortals; secondly, the introduction of intermediate races; and, thirdly and most of all, the deification of heroes.

Subordinate to this general view, there arises another question: how are we to subdivide the inventive parts of the Homeric mythology? What general statements can be propounded, or criteria supplied, to show how much Greece fabricated or moulded for herself, and what she owed to Egypt, or to Phœnicia, or to other lands in the East, whose traditions she had either inherited or received?

Sources of the inventive portions.

A deep obscurity hangs over this subject. We do not know all that was contained in each of the various religions of the East at any one epoch, much less at all the periods within which they may have contributed materials to the gorgeous fabric of Homer. Many things were probably common to several of them: and where this was so, circumstantial evidence cannot avail for determining the source at which the Poet or his nation borrowed.

But several propositions may be laid down, which will tend towards describing the path of our inquiry.

First, the accounts which, transmitted by Herodotus, represent Egypt as the fountain-head of the Greek religion in its mass, are not sustained by the evidence of Homer. And even with respect to many points where the nucleus of the Greek system has something corresponding with it in the Egyptian, it neither follows that it was originally drawn from Egypt by the Greeks, nor that those from whom the Greeks received it had obtained it there. Yet there remains room for very important communications, such, for example, as the oracle of Dodona, or the worship of Minerva, which may be an historic token of an Egyptian colony at Athens.

Secondly, the correspondences between the Homeric system and the Eastern religions, as we know them, are commonly latent, rather than broad or palpable. This may, in part, be owing to the circumstance that our accounts of these religions are in great part so much later than Homer; and a greater resemblance, than is now to be traced, may have subsisted in his time.

Originality of the Olympian system.

But, thirdly, the differences are not differences of detail or degree. A different spirit pervades the Homeric creed and worship, from that which we find in Egyptian, or Median, or Persian systems. One has grovelling animalism, another has metaphysical aspirations, that we do not find in the Greek: but this is not all. If the Homeric scheme is capable of being described, as to its inventive part, by any one epithet, it will be this, that it is intensely human. I do not speak of the later mythology; nor of Hesiod, whose Theogony so marvellously spoils what it systematizes; but of Homer, in whom the ideal Olympus attained its perfection at a stroke. In his preternatural κοσμὸς there is, as far as I can see, much more of what is truly Divine, much more of the residue of primeval tradition, than we can find collected elsewhere: but there is also much more of what is human. The moral form is corrupt: but I am now also speaking of it as a work of human genius, and certainly as one of the most wonderful and splendid of its products. The deep sympathy with Nature, the refined perception of beauty, the freedom, the buoyancy, the elastic movement of every figure on the scene, the intimate sense of association between the denizens of Olympus and the generations of mortal men, the imposing development of a Polity on high, the vivid nationality that riveted its hold on Greece, the richness and inexhaustible diversity of those embellishments which a vigorous fancy knows how to provide, combine to make good the title I have asserted, and, if we are to believe that Homer, in no small part, made what he described, must place his share in the formation of the system in the very foremost rank even of his achievements.

At any rate, this one thing, I think, is clear; that whatever Greece borrowed from the East, she fairly made her own. All was thrown into the crucible; all came out again from the fire recast, in such combinations, and clothed in such forms and hues, as the specific exigencies of the Greek mind required. Hence we must beware of all precipitate identifications. We must take good heed, for example, not to assume, that because Athene may be Neith by metathesis, therefore the features of the Homeric Pallas were really gathered together in the Egyptian prototype of her name[33]. The strong hand of a transmuting fancy and intelligence passed as a preliminary condition upon everything foreign, not only to modify, but probably also to resolve into parts, and then to reconstruct. So that the preternatural system of Homer is, above all others, both national and original, and has, by its own vital energies, helped to maintain those characteristics even in the deteriorated copies which were made from it by so many after-generations.