Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/151

Rh MYTHOLOGY 139 same name. 1 &quot;All this seems to me as clear as daylight,&quot; says Mr Miiller. So far two linguistic influences have been exhibited in their effect on mythology. One is the existence of gender terminations, producing in the human mind the belief that inanimate things spoken of as sexual must be sexual living powers. The other process (illustrated to some extent by the change of a phrase meaning &quot; sunrise follows dawn &quot; into &quot; Phoebus chases Daphne &quot;) is the retention by a verb of its full original activity. The full theory of &quot; auxiliary verbs &quot; which originally possessed &quot; a more material and expressive character &quot; than they now retain will be found in Selected Essays, i. 365. Thus the Latin fui, &quot; I was,&quot; corresponds to &amp;lt;J&amp;gt;vw, and in Greek &quot; still shows its original and material power of growing.&quot; The theory is, then, that both substantives and auxiliary verbs &quot; said more than they ought to say &quot; in the Mythopoeic age, and that this surplus of meaning, misunderstood, became the &quot; Aberglaube,&quot; the irrational surplus of faith, in the myths. (5.) The philological processes in the evolution of mytho logy are still unexhausted. It is plain that as long as every one knew that language &quot; said more than it ought to say,&quot; as long as it was discounted and understood at its true value, it would not produce much mythology. &quot; It is,&quot; says Mr Miiller, &quot; the essential character of a true myth that it should no longer be intelligible by a refer ence to spoken language.&quot; For the full development of myths, then, the old rich overweighted terms must have gone on existing, stereotyped in phrases, but their original significance must have ceased to be intelligible. But how did spoken language retain the words and the sayings, while it utterly lost their meaning 1 The process must be explained in the words of Mr Miiller himself. &quot;Most nouns, as we have seen before, were originally appellatives or predicates expressive of what seemed at the moment the most characteristic attribute of an object. But as most objects have more than one attribute, and as, under different aspects, one or the other attribute might seem more appropriate to form the name, it happened by necessity that most objects during the early period of language had more than one name. In the course of time the greater number of these names became useless, and they were mostly replaced in literary languages by one fixed name, which might be called the proper name of such objects. The more ancient a language, the richer it is in synonyms. Synonyms, again, if used constantly, must naturally give rise to a number of homonyms. If we may call the sun by fifty names expressive of different quali ties, some of these names will be applicable to other objects also, which would happen to possess the same quality. These different objects would then be called by the same name, they would become homonyms.&quot; (Sel. Ess., i. 376-8.) Thus, while one thing had many names, many things would have the same name. Again, &quot;as the meanings of metaphors are forgotten, or the meanings of roots whence words were derived became dimmed and changed, many of these words would lose their radical as well as their poetical meaning. They would become mere names handed down in the conversation of a family ; understood, perhaps, by the grandfather, familiar to the father, but strange to the son, and misunderstood by the grandson.&quot; As an ex ample, Mr Miiller gives Zew, which, &quot;originally a name of the sky, like the Sanskrit Dyaus&quot; became gradually a proper name, which betrayed its appellative meaning only in a few proverbial expressions, such as Zevs vet (&quot;Zeus, or the sky, rains&quot;), or sub Jove frigido (&quot;under the chill air &quot;). In this example, it is true, we have neither homonyms nor synonyms presented to us, nor do we see why the grandfather should have talked of the sky as a thing, while the grandson was driven to the inference that the sky was a person, and a very remarkable person too. 1 This explanation of the myth of Daphne is compiled from Selected Essays, i. 398, 399, 607, 608. Meanwhile a well-known American Sanskrit scholar denies that ahana ever meant &quot;dawn,&quot; or that it could become dahana and daphne by any philological process. (6.) Mr Miiller s next step is to collect illustrations of the processes he has described, and to adduce proofs that these processes really existed and acted. He looks for his proofs and his examples in Sanskrit poetry, in the poetry of the sacred hymns or Vedas. Here is his evidence for the action (in the Mythopceic age) of the processes he calls synonymy or polyonymy (many names for one thing) and homonymy (many things with one name) : &quot; In the Veda the earth is called urvi (wide), prithvi (broad), mahi (great), and many more names of which the Nigantha mentions twenty-one. These twenty-one words would be synonyms. But urvi (wide) is not only given as a name of the earth, but also means a river. Prithvi (broad) means not only earth, but sky and dawn. Mahi (great, strong) is used for air and speech, as well as for earth. Hence earth, river, sky, dawn, air, and speech would become homo nyms.&quot; (Sel. Ess., i. 371.) It will therefore be evident that, if the great-grandsons of the people of the Vedic age did not know whether their traditional expressions referred to earth, dawn, sky, air, or speech, confusions would arise, and from the confusions myths. Mr Miiller ends by analysing and explaining some Greek stories. We have now given as clear and distinct an account of Mr Miiller s system of mythology as is possible within our limited space. It will be observed that the explanation applies to people speaking Indo-European languages, is grounded on a view of their early history as elucidated by philology, and on the whole resolves itself into this, that &quot; mythology is a disease of language,&quot; a result of misunderstood phrases and of the gender-terminations of .words. We now approach the criticism of Mr Miiller s system, and our criticism will lead up to a new examination of the problem of mythology. (1.) Mr Miiller started with the wish to explain how the Greek poets, with their aversion to everything excessive or monstrous, came to ascribe the most abominable offences to their own gods. The gods were incestuous, were sinners of nameless sins. They disguised themselves in animal shapes ; they tasted human flesh ; they amused themselves with obscene jests ; they died and were buried ; they were born, and their birth-places were known. The first objection to Mr Miiller s system is that it does not explain, but usually keeps clear of, the very horrors that need ex planation. True, he easily shows that the sun can be regarded, now as the child, now as the bridegroom, of the dawn, and hence a story of incest may arise. The growing crop (to take ah instance familiar to the early heathen apologists) may be regarded as the child of the showery sky, and again as its bride, and hence an unbecoming story, like the loves of Zeus and Persephone, might come to be credited. Once more, Zeus may be regarded as the father of all men, and hence the separate myths of his physical amours, whence spring the royal families of Hellas, might have originated. But, even if we accept all these explanations, we still must ask Mr Miiller the questions which the early Christians asked the heathen expositors of and apologists for the myths. How are the disgusting details, the &quot;savage, silly, and senseless&quot; details, to be explained? Zeus is the heaven, and woos the earth, or the lower air, but why does he take the form of a bull or a cuckoo, why does he deceive Hera by celebrating a false marriage with a log of wood 1 Why does he try to expiate his amour with Demeter by his conduct to the ram 1 ? Why, when conceived of as the father of noble houses, does he adopt the shape of an ant, a swan, an eagle, a bull, a serpent? What mean the amours and animal metamorphoses of. the other gods ? Grant that Procris is the dew, as Mr Miiller says it is, and how do you explain her unspeakable services to King Minos ? Grant that Cronion only means &quot; the ancient of days,&quot; and that, being misunderstood to mean &quot;son of Cronus,&quot; the name gave