Chapter 7

If people cannot bring themselves to believe in solar and celestial myths among the Hindus and Greeks, let them study the folk-lore of the Semitic and Turanian races. I know there is, on the part of some of our most distinguished scholars, the same objection against comparing Aryan to non-Aryan myths, as there is against any attempt to explain the features of Sanskrit or Greek by a reference to Finnish or Bask. In one sense that objection is well founded, for nothing would create greater confusion than to ignore the genealogical principle as the only safe one in a scientific classification of languages, of myths, and even of customs. We must first classify our myths and legends, as we classify our languages and dialects. We must first of all endeavor to explain what wants explanation in one member of a family by a reference to other members of the same family, before we allow ourselves to glance beyond. But there is in a comparative study of languages and myths not only a philological, but also a philosophical, and, more particularly, a psychological interest, and though even in this more general study of mankind the frontiers of language and race ought never to disappear, yet they can no longer be allowed to narrow or intercept our view. How much the student of Aryan mythology and ethnology may gain for his own progress by allowing himself a wider survey over the traditions and customs of the whole human race, is best known to those who have studied the works of Klemm, Waitz, Bastian, Sir John Lubbock, Mr. Tylor, and Dr. Callaway. What is prehistoric in language among the Aryan nations, is frequently found as still historic among Turanian races. The same applies with regard to religions, myths, legends, and customs. Among Finns and Lapps, among Zulus and Maoris, among Khonds and Karens, we sometimes find the most startling analogies to Aryan traditions, and we certainly learn, again and again, this one important lesson, that as in language, so in mythology, there is nothing which had not originally a meaning, that every name of the gods and heroes had a beginning, a purpose, and a history.

Jupiter was no more called Jupiter by accident, than the Polynesian _Maui_, the Samoyede _Num_, or the Chinese _Tien_.(42) If we can discover the original meaning of these names, we have reached the first ground of their later growth. I do not say that, if we can explain the first purpose of the mythological names, we have solved the whole riddle of mythology, but I maintain that we have gained firm ground. I maintain that every true etymology gives us an historical fact, because the first giving of a name was an historical fact, and an historical fact of the greatest importance for the later development of ancient ideas. Think only of this one fact, which no one would now venture to doubt, that the supreme deity of the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, is called by the same name as the supreme deity of the earliest Aryan settlers in India. Does not this one fact draw away the curtain from the dark ages of antiquity, and open before our eyes an horizon which we can hardly measure by years? The Greek _Zeus_ is the same word as the Latin _Ju_ in _Jupiter_, as the German _Tiu_; and all these were merely dialectic varieties of the Vedic _Dyaus_.(43) Now _dyaus_ in Sanskrit is the name of the sky, if used as a feminine; if used as a masculine, as it is still in the Veda, it is the sky as a man or as a god—it is Zeus, the father of gods and men. You know, of course, that the whole language of ancient India is but a sister dialect of Greek, Latin, of German, Keltic, and Slavonic, and that if the Greek says _es-ti_, he is, if the Roman says _est_, the German _ist_, the Slave _yesté_, the Hindu, three thousand years ago, said _as-ti_, he is. This _as-ti_ is a compound of a root _as_, to be, and the pronoun _ti_. The root meant originally _to breathe_, and dwindled down after a time to the meaning of _to be_. All this must have happened before a single Greek or German reached the shores of Europe, and before a single Brahman descended into the plains of India. At that distant time we must place the gradual growth of language and ideas, of a language which we are still speaking, of ideas which we are still thinking; and at the same time only can we explain the framing of those names which were the first attempts at grasping supernatural powers, which became in time the names of the deities of the ancient world, the heroes of mythology, the chief actors in many a legend, nay, some of which have survived in the nursery tales of our own time.(44)

My time, I see, is nearly over, but before I finish, I feel that I have a duty to perform from which I ought not to shrink. Some of those who have honored me with their presence to-night may recollect that about a year ago a lecture was delivered in this very room by Professor Blackie, in which he tried to throw discredit on the scientific method of the interpretation of popular myths, or on what I call Comparative Mythology. Had he confined his remarks to the subject itself, I should have felt most grateful for his criticisms, little minding the manner in which they were conveyed—for a student of language knows what words are made of. Nor, had his personal reflections concerned myself alone, should I have felt called upon to reply to them thus publicly, for it has always seemed to me that unless we protest against unmerited praise, we have no right to protest against unmerited abuse. I believe I can appeal to all here present, that during the many years I have had the honor to lecture in this Institution, I have _not once_ allowed myself to indulge in any personal remarks, or attacked those who, being absent, cannot defend themselves. Even when I had to answer objections, or to refute false theories, I have always most carefully avoided mentioning the names of living writers. But as Professor Blackie has directed his random blows, not against myself, but against a friend of mine, Mr. Cox, the author of a work on Aryan Mythology, I feel that I must for once try to get angry, and return blow for blow. Professor Blackie speaks of Mr. Cox as if he had done nothing beyond repeating what I had said before. Nothing can be more unfair. My own work in Comparative Mythology has consisted chiefly in laying down some of the general principles of that science, and in the etymological interpretation of some of the ancient names of gods, goddesses, and heroes. In fact, I have made it a rule never to interpret or to compare the legends of India, Greece, Italy, or Germany, except in cases where it was possible, first of all, to show an identity or similarity in the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, or German names of the principal actors. Mr. Cox having convinced himself that the method which I have followed in mythology rests on sound and truly scientific principles, has adopted most, though by no means all, of my etymological interpretations. Professor Blackie, on the contrary, without attempting any explanation of the identity of mythological names in Greek and Sanskrit which must be either disproved or explained, thunders forth the following sentence of condemnation: “Even under the scientific guidance of a Bopp, a Bott, a Grimm, and a Müller, a sober man may sometimes, even in the full blaze of the new sun of comparative philology, allow himself to drink deep draughts, if not of _maundering madness_, at least of _manifest hallucination_.”

If such words are thrown at my head, I pick them up chiefly as etymological curiosities, and as striking illustrations of what Mr. Tylor calls “survivals in culture,” showing how the most primitive implements of warfare, rude stones and unpolished flints, which an ethnologist would suppose to be confined to prehistoric races, to the red Indians of America or the wild Picts of Caledonia, turn up again most unexpectedly at the present day in the very centre of civilized life. All I can say is, that if, as a student of Comparative Mythology, I have been drinking deep draughts of maundering madness, I have been drinking in good company. In this respect Mr. Cox has certainly given me far more credit than I deserve. I am but one out of many laborers in this rich field of scientific research, and he ought to have given far greater prominence to the labors of Grimm, Burnouf, Bopp, and, before all, of my learned friend, Professor Kuhn.

But while, with regard to etymology, Mr. Cox contents himself with reporting the results of other scholars, he stands quite independent in his own treatment of Comparative Mythology. Of this Professor Blackie seems to have no suspicion whatever. The plan which Mr. Cox follows is to collect the coincidences in the legends themselves, and to show how in different myths the same story with slight variations is told again and again of different gods and heroes. In this respect his work is entirely original and very useful; for although these coincidences may be explained in different ways, and do not afford a proof of a common historical origin of the mythologies of India, Greece, Italy, and Germany, they are all the more interesting from a purely psychological point of view, and supply important material for further researches. Mr. Tylor has lately worked with great success in the same rich mine; extending the limits of mythological research far beyond the precincts of the Aryan world, and showing that there are solar myths wherever the sun shines. I differ from Mr. Cox on many points, as he differs from me. I shall certainly keep to my own method of never attempting an interpretation or a comparison, except where the ground has first been cleared of all uncertainty by etymological research, and where the names of different gods and heroes have been traced back to a common source. I call this the _nominalistic_ as opposed to the _realistic_ method of Comparative Mythology, and it is the former only that concerns the student of the Science of Language. I gratefully acknowledge, however, the help which I have received from Mr. Cox’s work, particularly as suggesting new clusters of myths that might be disentangled by etymological analysis.

But not only has Professor Blackie failed to perceive the real character of Mr. Cox’s researches, but he has actually charged him with holding opinions which both Mr. Cox and myself have repeatedly disavowed, and most strenuously opposed. Again and again have we warned the students of Comparative Mythology that they must not expect to be able to explain everything. Again and again have we pointed out that there are irrational elements in mythology, and that we must be prepared to find grains of local history on which, as I said,(45) the sharpest tools of Comparative Mythology must bend or break. Again and again have we shown that historical persons(46)—not only Cyrus and Charlemagne, but Frederick Barbarossa and even Frederick the Great—have been drawn into the vortex of popular mythology. Yet these are the words of Professor Blackie: “The cool way in which Max Müller and his English disciple, Mr. Cox, assume that there are no human figures and historical characters in the whole gallery of heroes and demi-gods in the Greek Mythology, is something very remarkable.”

I readily admit that some of the etymologies which I have proposed of mythological names are open to criticism; and if, like other scholars, Professor Blackie had pointed out to me any cases where I might seem to him to have offended against Grimm’s law or other phonetic rules, I should have felt most grateful; but if he tells me that the Greek Erinys should not be derived from the Sanskrit Sara_n_yû, but from the Greek verb ἐρινύειν, to be angry, he might as well derive _critic_ from _to criticise_;(47) and if he maintains that a name may have two or three legitimate etymologies, I can only answer that we might as well say that a child could have two or three legitimate mothers.

I have most reluctantly entered upon these somewhat personal explanations, and I should not have done so if I alone had been concerned in Professor Blackie’s onslaught. I hope, however, that I have avoided anything that could give just offence to Professor Blackie, even if he should be present here tonight. Though he abuses me as a German, and laughs at the instinctive aversion to external facts and the extravagant passion for self-evolved ideas as national failings of all Germans (I only wonder that the story of the camel and the inner consciousness did not come in), yet I know that for many years German poetry and German scholarship have had few more ardent admirers, and German scholars few more trusty friends, than Professor Blackie. Nationality, it seems to me, has as little to do with scholarship as with logic. On the contrary, in every nation he that will work hard and reason honestly may be sure to discover some grains of truth. National jealousies and animosities have no place in the republic of letters, which is, and I trust always will be, the true international republic of all friends of work, of order, and of truth.

III.

ON FALSE ANALOGIES IN COMPARATIVE THEOLOGY.

Very different from the real similarities that can be discovered in nearly all the religions of the world, and which, owing to their deeply human character, in no way necessitate the admission that one religion borrowed from the other, are those minute coincidences between the Jewish and the Pagan religions which have so often been discussed by learned theologians, and which were intended by them as proof positive, either that the Pagans borrowed their religious ideas direct from the Old Testament, or that some fragments of a primeval revelation, granted to the ancestors of the whole race of mankind, had been preserved in the temples of Greece and Italy.

Bochart, in his “Geographia Sacra,” considered the identity of Noah and Saturn so firmly established as hardly to admit of the possibility of a doubt. The three sons of Saturn—Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto—he represented as having been originally the three sons of Noah: Jupiter being Ham; Neptune, Japhet; and Shem, Pluto. Even in the third generation the two families were proved to have been one, for Phut, the son of Ham, or of Jupiter Hammon, could be no other than Apollo Pythius; Canaan no other than Mercury; and Nimrod no other than Bacchus, whose original name was supposed to have been Bar-chus, the son of Cush. G. J. Vossius, in his learned work, “De Origine et Progressu Idolatriæ” (1688), identified Saturn with Adam, Janus with Noah, Pluto with Ham, Neptune with Japhet, Minerva with Naamah, Vulcan with Tubal Cain, Typhon with Og. Huet, the friend of Bochart, and the colleague of Bossuet, went still farther; and in his classical work, the “Demonstratio Evangelica,” he attempted to prove that the whole theology of the heathen nations was borrowed from Moses, whom he identified not only with ancient law-givers, like Zoroaster and Orpheus, but with gods and demi-gods, such as Apollo, Vulcan, Faunus, and Priapus.

All this happened not more than two hundred years ago; and even a hundred years ago, nay, even after the discovery of Sanskrit and the rise of Comparative Philology, the troublesome ghost of Huet was by no means laid at once. On the contrary, as soon as the ancient language and religion of India became known in Europe, they were received by many people in the same spirit. Sanskrit, like all other languages, was to be derived from Hebrew, the ancient religion of the Brahmans from the Old Testament.

There was at that time an enthusiasm among Oriental scholars, particularly at Calcutta, and an interest for Oriental antiquities in the public at large, of which we in these days of apathy for Eastern literature can hardly form an adequate idea. Everybody wished to be first in the field, and to bring to light some of the treasures which were supposed to be hidden in the sacred literature of the Brahmans. Sir William Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, published in the first volume of the “Asiatic Researches” his famous essay, “On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India;” and he took particular care to state that his essay, though published only in 1788, had been written in 1784. In that essay he endeavored to show that there existed an intimate connection, not only between the mythology of India and that of Greece and Italy, but likewise between the legendary stories of the Brahmans and the accounts of certain historical events as recorded in the Old Testament. No doubt, the temptation was great. No one could look down for a moment into the rich mine of religious and mythological lore that was suddenly opened before the eyes of scholars and theologians, without being struck by a host of similarities, not only in the languages, but also in the ancient traditions of the Hindus, the Greeks, and the Romans; and if at that time the Greeks and Romans were still supposed to have borrowed their language and their religion from Jewish quarters, the same conclusion could hardly be avoided with regard to the language and the religion of the Brahmans of India.

The first impulse to look in the ancient religion of India for reminiscences of revealed truth seems to have come from missionaries rather than from scholars. It arose from a motive, in itself most excellent, of finding some common ground for those who wished to convert and those who were to be converted. Only, instead of looking for that common ground where it really was to be found—namely, in the broad foundations on which all religions are built up: the belief in a divine power, the acknowledgment of sin, the habit of prayer, the desire to offer sacrifice, and the hope of a future life—the students of Pagan religion as well as Christian missionaries were bent on discovering more striking and more startling coincidences, in order to use them in confirmation of their favorite theory that some rays of a primeval revelation, or some reflection of the Jewish religion, had reached the uttermost ends of the world. This was a dangerous proceeding—dangerous because superficial, dangerous because undertaken with a foregone conclusion; and very soon the same arguments that had been used on one side in order to prove that all religious truth had been derived from the Old Testament were turned against Christian scholars and Christian missionaries, in order to show that it was not Brahmanism and Buddhism which had borrowed from the Old and New Testament, but that the Old and the New Testament had borrowed from the more ancient religions of the Brahmans and Buddhists.

This argument was carried out, for instance, in Holwell’s “Original Principles of the Ancient Brahmans,” published in London as early as 1779, in which the author maintains that “the Brahmanic religion is the first and purest product of supernatural revelation,” and “that the Hindu scriptures contain to a moral certainty the original doctrines and terms of restoration delivered from God himself, by the mouth of his first created Birmah, to mankind, at his first creation in the form of man.”

Sir William Jones(48) tells us that one or two missionaries in India had been absurd enough, in their zeal for the conversion of the Gentiles, to urge “that the Hindus were even now almost Christians, because their Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa were no other than the Christian Trinity;” a sentence in which, he adds, we can only doubt whether folly, ignorance, or impiety predominates.

Sir William Jones himself was not likely to fall into that error. He speaks against it most emphatically. “Either,” he says, “the first eleven chapters of Genesis—all due allowance being made for a figurative Eastern style—are true, or the whole fabric of our national religion is false; a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn. But it is not the truth of our national religion as such that I have at heart; it is truth itself; and if any cool, unbiassed reasoner will clearly convince me that Moses drew his narrative through Egyptian conduits from the primeval fountains of Indian literature, I shall esteem him as a friend for having weeded my mind from a capital error, and promise to stand amongst the foremost in assisting to circulate the truth which he has ascertained.”

But though he speaks so strongly against the uncritical proceedings of those who would derive anything that is found in the Old Testament from Indian sources, Sir William Jones himself was really guilty of the same want of critical caution in his own attempts to identify the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome with the gods and heroes of India. He begins his essay,(49) “On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India,” with the following remarks:—

“We cannot justly conclude, by arguments preceding the proof of facts, that one idolatrous people must have borrowed their deities, rites, and tenets from another, since gods of all shapes and dimensions may be framed by the boundless powers of imagination, or by the frauds and follies of men, in countries never connected; but when features of resemblance, too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism, without fancy or prejudice to color them and improve the likeness, we can scarce help believing that some connection has immemorially subsisted between the several nations who have adopted them. It is my design in this essay to point out such a resemblance between the popular worship of the old Greeks and Italians and that of the Hindus; nor can there be any room to doubt of a great similarity between their strange religions and that of Egypt, China, Persia, Phrygia, Phœnice, and Syria; to which, perhaps, we may safely add some of the southern kingdoms, and even islands of America; while the Gothic system which prevailed in the northern regions of Europe was not merely similar to those of Greece and Italy, but almost the same in another dress, with an embroidery of images apparently Asiatic. From all this, if it be satisfactorily proved, we may infer a general union or affinity between the most distinguished inhabitants of the primitive world at the time when they deviated, as they did too early deviate, from the rational adoration of the only true God.”

Here, then, in an essay written nearly a hundred years ago by Sir W. Jones, one of the most celebrated Oriental scholars in England, it might seem as if we should find the first outlines of that science which is looked upon as but of to-day or yesterday—the outlines of Comparative Mythology. But in such an expectation we are disappointed. What we find is merely a superficial comparison of the mythology of India and that of other nations, both Aryan and Semitic, without any scientific value, because carried out without any of those critical tests which alone keep Comparative Mythology from running riot. This is not intended as casting a slur on Sir W. Jones. At his time the principles which have now been established by the students of the science of language were not yet known, and as with words, so with the names of deities, similarity of sound, the most treacherous of all sirens, was the only guide in such researches.

It is not pleasant to have to find fault with a man possessed of such genius, taste, and learning as Sir W. Jones, but no one who is acquainted with the history of these researches will be surprised at my words. It is the fate of all pioneers, not only to be left behind in the assault which they had planned, but to find that many of their approaches were made in a false direction, and had to be abandoned. But as the authority of their names continues to sway the public at large, and is apt to mislead even painstaking students and to entail upon them repeated disappointments, it is necessary that those who know should speak out, even at the risk of being considered harsh or presumptuous.