Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/167

Rh MYTHOLOGY 155 age, capable of pain and pleasure, living on heavenly food, but refreshed by the sacrifices of men (Od., v. 100, 102), able to assume all forms at will, and to intermarry and propagate the species with mortal men and women. Their past has been stormy, and their ruler has attained power after defeating and mediatizing a more ancient dynasty of his own kindred. From Hesiod we receive a much more elaborate, prob ably a more ancient, certainly a more barbarous, story of the gods and their origin. In the beginning the gods (here used in a wide sense to denote an early non-natural race) were begotten by Earth and Heaven, conceived of as beings with human parts and passions (Hesiod, Theog., 45). This idea recurs in Maori, Vedic, and Chinese mytho logy. Heaven and Earth, united in an endless embrace, produced children which never saw the light. In New Zealand, Chinese, Vedic, Indian, and Greek myths the pair had to be sundered. 1 Hesiod enumerates the children whom Earth bore &quot;when couched in love with Heaven.&quot; They are Ocean, Cceus, Crius, Hyperion, lapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phcebe, Tethys, and the youngest, Cronus, &quot;and he hated his glorious father.&quot; Others of this early race were the Cyclopes, Bronte, Sterope, and Arge, and three children of enormous strength, Cottus, Briareus (^Egaeon), and Gyes, each with one hundred hands and fifty heads. Uranus detested his off spring, and hid them in crannies of Earth. Earth excited Cronus to attack the father, whom he castrated with a sickle. From the blood of Cronus (this feature is common in Red Indian and Egyptian myths) were born furies, giants, ash-nymphs, and Aphrodite. A number of monsters, as Echidna, Geryon, and the hound of hell, were born of the loves of various elemental powers. The chief stock of the divine species was continued by the marriage of Rhea (probably another form of the Earth) with Cronus. Their children were Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon. All these Cronus swallowed ; and this &quot;swallow- myth &quot; occurs in Australia, among the Bushmen, in Guiana, in Brittany (where Gargantua did the swallow trick), and elsewhere. At last Rhea bore Zeus, and gave Cronus a stone in swaddling bands, which he disposed of in the usual way. Zeus grew up, administered an emetic to Cronus (some say Metis did this), and had the satisfaction of seeing all his brothers and sisters disgorged alive. The stone came forth first, and Pausanias saw it at Delphi (Paus., x. 24). Then followed the wars between Zeus and the gods he had rescued from the maw of Cronus against the gods of the elder branch, the children of Uranus and Gsea, Heaven and Earth. The victory remained with the younger branch, the immortal Olympians of Homer. The system of Hesiod is a medley of later physical specu lation and of poetic allegory, with matter which we, at least, regard as savage survivals, like the mutilation of Heaven and the swallow-myth. 2 In Homer and in Hesiod myths enter the region of literature, and become, as it were, national. But it is probable that the local myths of various cities and tem ples, of the &quot; sacred chapters &quot; which were told by the priests to travellers and in the mysteries to the initiated, were older in form than the epic and national myths. Of these &quot; sacred chapters &quot; we have fragments and hints in 1 See Tylor, Prim. Cult., i. 326. - Bleek, Bushman Fnlk-Lore, pp. 6-8. Mr Max Miiller suggests another theory (Selected Essays, i. 460) : &quot; Kpovos did not exist till long after Zeus in Greece.&quot; The name KpovLwv, or Kpovidrjs, looks like a patronymic. Mr Miiller, however, thinks it originally meant only &quot;connected with time, existing through all time.&quot; Very much later the name was mistaken for a genuine patronymic, and &quot;Zens the ancient of days &quot; became &quot; Zeus the son of Cronus.&quot; Having thus got a Cronus, the Greeks and &quot;the misunderstanding could have happened in Greece only &quot; needed a myth of Cronus. They there- Herodotus, Pausanias, in the mythographers, like Apollo- dorus, in the tragic poets, and in the ancient scholia or notes on the classics. From these sources come almost all the more inhuman, bestial, and discreditable myths of the gods. In these we more distinctly perceive the savage element. The gods assume animal forms : Cronus becomes a horse, Rhea a mare ; Zeus begets separate families of men in the shape of a bull, an ant, a serpent, a swan. His mistress from Avhom the Arcadians claim descent becomes a she-bear. It is usual with mythologists to say that Zeus is the &quot; all-father, &quot;and that his amours are only a poetic way of stating that he is the parent of men. But why does he assume so many animal shapes ? Why did various royal houses claim descent from the ant, the swan, the she-bear, the serpent, the horse, and so forth? We have already seen that this is the ordinary pedigree of savage stocks in Asia, Africa, Australia, and America, while animals appear among Irish tribes, and in Egyptian and ancient English genealogies. 3 It is a plausible hypo thesis that stocks which once claimed descent from animals, sans phrase, afterwards regarded the animals as avatars of Zeus. In the same way &quot; the Minas, a non- Aryan tribe of Rajputana, used to worship the pig ; when the Brahmans got a turn at them, the pig became an avatar of Vishnu &quot; (Lyal, Asiatic Studies). The tales of divine cannibalism to which Pindar refers with awe, the mutilation of Dionysus Zagreus, the unspeakable abominations of Dionysus, the loves of Hera in the shape of a cuckoo, the divine powers of metamorphosing men and women into beasts and stars, these tales come to us as echoes of the period of savage thought. Further evidence on this point will be given below in a classification of the principal mythic legends. The general conclusion is that many of the Greek deities were originally elemental, the elements being personified in accordance with the laws of savage imaginations. But we cannot explain each detail in the legends as a myth of this or that natural pheno menon or process as understood by ourselves. Various stages of late and early fancy have contributed to the legends. Zeus is the sky, but not our sky ; he had origin ally a personal character, and that a savage or barbarous character. He probably attracted into his legend stories that did not originally belong to him. He became anthro pomorphic, and his myth was handled by local priests, by family bards, by national poets, by early philosophers. His legend is a complex embroidery on a very ancient tissue. The other divine myths are equally complex. Scandinavian Divine Myths. The Scandinavian myths of the gods are numerous and interesting, but the evidence on which they have reached us demands criticism for which we lack space. That there are in the Eddas and Sagas early ideas and later ideas tinged by Christian legend seems indubitable, but philological and historical learning has by no means settled the questions of relative purity and antiquity in the myths. The Eddie songs, according to Mr Powell, one of the editors of the Corpus Poeticum Sep- tentrionale (the best work on the subject), &quot;cannot date earlier&quot; in their present form &quot;than the 9th century,&quot; and may be vaguely placed between 800-1100 A.D. The collector of the Edda probably had the old poems recited to him in the 13th century, and where there was a break fore invented or adapted the &quot; swallow-myth &quot; so familiar to Bushmen and Australians. This singular reversion to savagery itself needs some explanation. But the hypothesis that Cronus is a late derivation from KpoW^s and Kpoviuv is by no means universally accepted. Others derive Kpocos Iron /cpatcu, and connect it with Kpovia, a kind of har vest home festival. Schwartz (Prahistorisch-anthmpologische Studien) readily proves Cronus to be the storm, swallowing the clouds. Perhaps we may say of Schwartz s view, as he says of Preller s &quot;das ist Gedankenspiel, aber nimmermehr Mythologie.&quot; 3 Elton, Origins of English History, 298-301.