Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/148

Rh 136 MYTHOLOGY ception of the Olympian Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god who &quot; turns every where his shining eyes &quot; and beholds all things. But the Zeus whose grave was shown in Crete, or the Zeus who played Demeter an obscene trick by the aid of a ram, or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who was merely a rough stone, or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, is a being whose myth is felt to be un natural and in great need of explanation. It is this irrational and unnatural element as Mr Max Miiller says, &quot; the silly, senseless, and savage element &quot; that makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long found it. Early Explanations of Myths. The earliest attempts at a crude science of mythology were efforts to reconcile the legends of the gods and heroes with the religious sentiment which recognized in these beings objects of worship and respect. Closely as religion and myth are intertwined, it is necessary to hold them apart for the purposes of this discussion. Religion may here be defined as the conception of divine or at least supernatural powers, entertained by men in moments of gratitude or of need and distress, in hours of weakness, when, as Homer says, &quot; all folk yearn after the gods.&quot; Now this conception may be rude enough, and it is nearly related to purely magical ideas, to efforts to secure supernatural aid by magical ceremonies. Still the roughest form of spiritual prayer has for its basis the hypothesis of beneficent beings, visible or invisible. The senseless stories or myths about the gods are soon felt to be at variance with this hypothesis. As an example we may take the instance of Qing, the Bushman hunter. Qing, when first he met white men, was asked about his religion. He began to explain, and mentioned Cagn. Mr Orpen, the chief magistrate of St John s Territory, asked, &quot; Is Cagn good or malicious ? how do you pray to him 1 &quot; Answer (in a low imploring tone), &quot; Cagn ! O Cagn ! are we not your children ? do you not see our hunger 1 give us food ; and he gives us both hands full &quot; (Cape Monthly Maga zine, July 1874). Here we see the religious view of Cagn, the Bushman god. But in the mythological account of Cagn given by Qing he appears as a kind of grasshopper, supernaturally endowed, the hero of a most absurd cycle of senseless adventures. Even religion is affected by these irrational notions, and the gods of savages and of many civilized peoples are worshipped with cruel, obscene, and irrational rites. But, on the whole, the religious sentiment strives to transcend the mythical conceptions of the gods, and is shocked and puzzled by the mythical narratives. As soon as this sense of perplexity is felt, by poets, by priests, or by most men in an age of nascent criticism, explana tions of what is most crude and absurd in the myths are put forward. Men ask themselves why their gods are wor shipped in the form of beasts, birds, and fishes ; why their gods are said to have prosecuted their amours in bestial shapes ; why they are represented as lustful and passion ate thieves, robbers, murderers, and adulterous. The answers to these questions sometimes become myths them selves. Thus both the Mangaians and the Egyptians have been puzzled by their own gods in the form of beasts. The Egyptians invented an explanation itself a myth that in some moment of danger the gods concealed themselves from their foes in the shapes of animals. 1 The Mangaians, according to Mr Gill, hold that &quot; the heavenly family had taken up their abode in these birds, fishes, and reptiles.&quot; 2 A people so curious and refined as the Greeks were 1 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride. 2 Myths and Sony s from the South Pacific, p. 35, 1876. certain to be greatly perplexed by even such comparatively pure mythical narratives as they found in Homer, still more by the coarser legends of Hesiod, and above all by the ancient local myths preserved by local priesthoods. Thus, in the Gth century before Christ, Xenophanes of Colophon severely blamed the poets for their unbecoming- legends, and boldly called certain myths &quot;the fables of men of old.&quot; 3 Theagenes of Rhegium (520 B.C. T), accord ing to the scholiast on Iliad, xx. 67, 4 was the author of a very ancient system of mythology. Admitting that the fable of the battle of the gods was &quot;unbecoming,&quot; if liter ally understood, Theagenes represented it as an allegorical account of the war of the elements. Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestus were fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was water, Artemis was the moon, Kal ra XOLTTO. o/Wws. Or, by another system, the names of the gods represented moral and intellectual qualities. Heraclitus, too, disposed of the myth of the bondage of Hera as allegorical philosophy. Socrates, in the Cratylus of Plato, expounds &quot;a philosophy which came to him all in an instant,&quot; an explanation of the divine beings based on crude philological analyses of their names. Metrodorus, rivalling some recent flights of conjecture, resolved not only the gods but even heroes like Agamemnon, Hector, and Achilles &quot;into elemental combina tions and physical agencies.&quot; 5 Euripides makes Pentheus (but he was notoriously impious) advance a &quot; rationalistic &quot; theory of the story that Dionysus was stitched up in the thigh of Zeus. When Christianity became powerful the heathen philosophers evaded its satire by making more and more use of the allegorical and non-natural system of explanation. That method has two faults. First (as Arnobius and Eusebius reminded their heathen opponents), the allegorical explanations are purely arbitrary, depend upon the fancy of their author, and are all equally plaus ible and equally unsupported by evidence. 6 Secondly, there is no proof at all that, in the distant age when the myths were developed, men entertained the moral notions and physical philosophies which are supposed to be &quot; wrapped up,&quot; as Cicero says, &quot; in impious fables.&quot; Another system of explanation is that associated with the name of Euemerus (316 B.C.). According to this author, the myths are history in disguise. All the gods Avere once men, whose real feats have been decorated and distorted by later fancy. This view suited Lactantius, St Augustine, and other early Christian writers very well. They were pleased to believe that Euemerus &quot; by historical research had ascertained that the gods were once but mortal men.&quot; Precisely the same convenient line was taken by Sahagun in his account of Mexican religious myths. As there can be no doubt that the ghosts of dead men have been worshipped in many lands, and as the gods of many faiths are tricked out with attributes derived from ancestor-worship, the system of Euemerus retains some measure of plausibility. While we need not believe with Euemerus and with Mr Herbert Spencer that the god of Greece or the god of the Hottentots was once a man, we cannot deny that the myths of both these gods have passed through and been coloured by the imaginations of men who practised the worship of real ancestors. For example, the Cretans showed the tomb of Zeus, and the Phocians (Pausanias, x. 5) daily poured blood of victims into the tomb of a hero, obviously by way of feeding his ghost. The Hottentots show many tombs of their god, Tsui-Goab, and tell tales about his death ; they also pray regularly for aid at the tombs of their own parents. 7 We 3 Xenoph., Fr., i. 42. 4 Dindorf s ed., vol. iv. p. 231. 5 Grote, Hist, of Greece, i. 404, ed. 1869. 6 Cf. Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 151-152, on allegorical interpreta tion of myths in the mysteries. 7 Hahu, Tsuni-Guam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi, p. 113.