Chapter 9

That the Teutonic nations received the names of the week-days from their Greek and Roman neighbors admits of no doubt. For commercial and military arrangements between Romans and Germans some kind of _lingua franca_ must soon have sprung up, and in it the names of the week-days must have found their place. There would have been little difficulty in explaining the meaning of Sun-day and Mon-day to the Germans, but in order to make them understand the meaning of the other names, some explanations must have been given on the nature of the different deities, in order to enable the Germans to find corresponding names in their own language. A Roman would tell his German friend that _dies Veneris_ meant the day of a goddess who represented beauty and love, and on hearing this the German would at once have thought of his own goddess of love, _Freyja_, and have called the _dies Veneris_ the day of _Freyja_ or Friday.(58)

If _Jupiter_ was described as the god who wields the thunderbolt, his natural representative in German would be _Donar_,(59) the Anglo-Saxon _Thunar_, the Old Norse _Thor_; and hence the _dies Jovis_ would be called the day of _Thor_, or Thursday. If the fact that Jupiter was the king of the gods had been mentioned, his proper representative in German would, no doubt, have been _Wuotan_ or _Odin_.(60) As it was, _Wuotan_ or _Odin_ was chosen as the nearest approach to _Mercury_, the character which they share in common, and which led to their identification, being most likely their love of travelling through the air,(61) also their granting wealth and fulfilling the wishes of their worshippers, in which capacity Wuotan is known by the name of _Wunsch_(62) or _Wish_. We can thus understand how it happened that father and son changed places, for while _Mercurius_ is the son of _Jupiter_, _Wuotan_ is the father of _Donar_. _Mars_, the god of war, was identified with the German _Tiu_ or _Ziu_, a name which, though originally the same as _Zeus_ in Greek or _Dyaus_ in Sanskrit, took a peculiarly national character among the Germans, and became their god of war.(63)

There remained thus only the _dies Saturni_, the day of Saturn, and whether this was called so in imitation of the Latin name, or after an old German deity of a similar name and character, is a point which for the present we must leave unsettled.

What, however, is not unsettled is this, that if the Germans, in interpreting these names of Roman deities as well as they could, called the _dies Mercurii_, the same day which the Hindus had called the day of _Budha_ (with one _d_), their day of _Wuotan_, this was not because “the doctrines of the gentle ascetic existed in the bosom of Odin or his followers, while dwelling near the roots of the Caucasus,” but for very different and much more tangible reasons.

But, apart from all this, by what possible process could Buddha and Odin have ever been brought together in the flesh? In the history of ancient religions, Odin belongs to the same stratum of mythological thought as _Dyaus_ in India, _Zeus_ in Greece, _Jupiter_ in Italy. He was worshipped as the supreme deity during a period long anterior to the age of the Veda and of Homer. His travels in Greece, and even in Tyrkland,(64) and his half-historical character as a mere hero and a leader of his people, are the result of the latest Euhemerism. Buddha, on the contrary, is not a mythological, but a personal and historical character, and to think of a meeting of Buddha and Odin, or even of their respective descendants, at the roots of Mount Caucasus, would be like imagining an interview between Cyrus and Odin, between Mohammed and Aphrodite.

A comparative study of ancient religions and mythologies, as will be seen from these instances, is not a subject to be taken up lightly. It requires not only an accurate acquaintance with the minutest details of comparative philology, but a knowledge of the history of religions which can hardly be gained without a study of original documents. As long, however, as researches of this kind are carried on for their own sake, and from a mere desire of discovering truth, without any ulterior objects, they deserve no blame, though, for a time, they may lead to erroneous results. But when coincidences between different religions and mythologies are searched out simply in support of preconceived theories, whether by the friends or enemies of religion, the sense of truth, the very life of all science, is sacrificed, and serious mischief will follow without fail. Here we have a right, not only to protest, but to blame. There is on this account a great difference between the books we have hitherto examined, and a work lately published in Paris by M. Jacolliot, under the sensational title of “La Bible dans l’Inde, Vie de Jeseus Christna.” If this book had been written with the pure enthusiasm of Lieutenant Wilford, it might have been passed by as a mere anachronism. But when one sees how its author shuts his eyes against all evidence that would tell against him, and brings together, without any critical scruples, whatever seems to support his theory that Christianity is a mere copy of the ancient religion of India, mere silence would not be a sufficient answer. Besides, the book has lately been translated into English, and will be read, no doubt, by many people who cannot test the evidence on which it professes to be founded. We learn that M. Jacolliot was some years ago appointed President of the Court of Justice at Chandernagore, and that he devoted the leisure left him from the duties of his position to studying Sanskrit and the holy books of the Hindus. He is said to have put himself in communication with the Brahmans, who had obtained access to a great number of MSS. carefully stored up in the depths of the pagodas. “The purport of his book is” (I quote from a friendly critic), “that our civilization, our religion, our legends, our gods, have come to us from India, after passing in succession through Egypt, Persia, Judea, Greece, and Italy.” This statement, we are told, is not confined to M. Jacolliot, but has been admitted by almost all Oriental scholars. The Old and New Testaments are found again in the Vedas, and the texts quoted by M. Jacolliot in support of his theory are said to leave it without doubt. Brahma created Adima (in Sanskrit, the first man) and gave him for companion Heva (in Sanskrit, that which completes life). He appointed the island of Ceylon for their residence. What follows afterwards is so beautifully described that I may be pardoned for quoting it. Only I must warn my readers, lest the extract should leave too deep an impression on their memory, that what M. Jacolliot calls a simple translation from Sanskrit is, as far as I can judge, a simple invention of some slightly mischievous Brahman, who, like the Pandits of Lieutenant Wilford, took advantage of the zeal and credulity of a French judge:—

“Having created the Man and the Woman (_simultaneously_, not one after the other), and animated them with the divine afflatus—the Lord said unto them: ‘Behold, your mission is to people this beautiful Island [Ceylon], where I have gathered together everything pleasant and needful for your subsistence—the rest of the Earth is as yet uninhabitable, but should your progeny so increase as to render the bounds of paradise too narrow a habitation, let them inquire of me by sacrifice and I will make known my will.’

“And thus saying, the Lord disappeared....

“Then Adam and Eve dwelt together for a time in perfect happiness; but ere long a vague disquietude began to creep upon them.... The Spirit of Evil, jealous of their felicity and of the work of Brahma, inspired them with disturbing thoughts;—‘Let us wander through the Island,’ said Adam to his companion, ‘and see if we may not find some part even more beautiful than this.’ ...

“And Eve followed her husband ... wandering for days and for months; ... but as they advanced the woman was seized with strange and inexplicable terrors: ‘Adam,’ said she, ‘let us go no farther: it seems to me that we are disobeying the Lord; have we not already quitted the place which he assigned us for a dwelling and forbade us to leave?’

“ ‘Fear not,’ replied Adam; ‘this is not that fearful wilderness of which he spake to us.’ ....

“And they wandered on....

“Arriving at last at the extremity of the Island, they beheld a smooth and narrow arm of the sea, and beyond it a vast and apparently boundless country, connected with their Island only by a narrow and rocky pathway arising from the bosom of the waters.

“The wanderers stood amazed: the country before them was covered with stately trees, birds of a thousand colors flitting amidst their foliage.

“... ‘Behold, what beautiful things!’ cried Adam, ‘and what good fruit such trees must produce; ... let us go and taste them, and if that country is better than this, we will dwell there.’

“Eve, trembling, besought Adam to do nothing that might irritate the Lord against them. ‘Are we not well here? Have we not pure water and delicious fruits? Wherefore seek other things?’

“ ‘True,’ replied Adam, ‘but we will return; what harm can it be to visit this unknown country that presents itself to our view?’ .... And as he approached the rocks, Eve, trembling, followed.

“Placing his wife upon his shoulders, he proceeded to cross the space that separated him from the object of his desires, but no sooner did he touch the shore than trees, flowers, fruits, birds, all that they had perceived from the opposite side, in an instant vanished amidst terrific clamor; ... the rocks by which they had crossed sunk beneath the waters, a few sharp peaks alone remaining above the surface, to indicate the place of the bridge which had been destroyed by Divine displeasure.

“The vegetation which they had seen from the opposite shore was but a delusive mirage raised by the Spirit of Evil to tempt them to disobedience.

“Adam fell, weeping, upon the naked sands, ... but Eve throwing herself into his arms, besought him not to despair; ... ‘let us rather pray to the Author of all things to pardon us.’ ....

“And as she spake there came a voice from the clouds, saying,

“ ‘Woman! _thou_ hast only sinned from love to thy husband, whom I commanded thee to love, and thou hast hoped in me.

“ ‘I therefore pardon thee—and I pardon him also for _thy_ sake: ... but ye may no more return to paradise, which I had created for your happiness; ... through your disobedience to my commands the Spirit of Evil has obtained possession of the Earth.... Your children reduced to labor and to suffer by your fault will become corrupt and forget me....

“ ‘But I will send Vish_n_u, who will be born of a woman, and who will bring to all the hope of a reward in another life, and the means by prayer of softening their sufferings.’ ”

The translator from whom I have quoted exclaims at the end, as well he might:—

“What grandeur and what simplicity is this Hindu legend! and at the same time how simply logical!... Behold here the veritable Eve—the true woman.”

But much more extraordinary things are quoted by M. Jacolliot, from the Vedas and the commentaries.

On p. 63 we read that Manu, Minos, and Manes, had the same name as Moses; on p. 73, the Brahmans who invaded India are represented as the successors of a great reformer called Christna. The name of Zoroaster is derived from the Sanskrit Sûryastara (p. 110), meaning “he who spreads the worship of the Sun.” After it has been laid down (p. 116) that Hebrew was derived from Sanskrit, we are assured that there is little difficulty in deriving Jehovah from Zeus.(65) Zeus, Jezeus, Jesus, and Isis are all declared to be the same name, and later on (p. 130) we learn that “at present the Brahmans who officiate in the pagodas and temples give this title of Jeseus—_i. e._ the pure essence, the divine emanation—to Christna only, who alone is recognized as the Word, the truly incarnated, by the worshippers of Vish_n_u and the freethinkers among the Brahmans.”

We are assured that the Apostles, the poor fishermen of Galilee, were able to read the Veda (p. 356); and it was their greatest merit that they did not reject the miraculous accounts of the Vedic period, because the world was not yet ripe for freedom of thought. Kristna, or Christna, we read on p. 360, signified in Sanskrit, sent by God, promised by God, holy; and as the name of Christ or _Christos_ is not Hebrew, whence could it have been taken except from Krishna, the son of Devakî, or, as M. Jacolliot writes, Devanaguy?

It is difficult, nay, almost impossible, to criticise or refute such statements, and yet it is necessary to do so; for such is the interest, or I should rather say the feverish curiosity, excited by anything that bears on ancient religion, that M. Jacolliot’s book has produced a very wide and very deep impression. It has been remarked with some surprise that Vedic scholars in Europe had failed to discover these important passages in the Veda which he has pointed out, or, still worse, that they had never brought them to the knowledge of the public. In fact, if anything was wanting to show that a general knowledge of the history of ancient religion ought to form part of our education, it was the panic created by M. Jacolliot’s book. It is simply the story of Lieutenant Wilford over again, only far less excusable now than a hundred years ago. Many of the words which M. Jacolliot quotes as Sanskrit are not Sanskrit at all; others never have the meaning which he assigns to them; and as to the passages from the Vedas (including our old friend the Bhagaveda-gîta), they are not from the Veda, they are not from any old Sanskrit writer—they simply belong to the second half of the nineteenth century. What happened to Lieutenant Wilford has happened again to M. Jacolliot. He tells us the secret himself:—

“One day,” he says (p. 280), “when we were reading the translation of Manu, by Sir W. Jones, a note led us to consult the Indian commentator, Kullûka Bha_tt_a, when we found an allusion to the sacrifice of a son by his father prevented by God himself after he had commanded it. We then had only one _idée fixe_—namely, to find again in the dark mass of the religious books of the Hindu, the original account of that event. We should never have succeeded but for ‘the complaisance’ of a Brahman with whom we were reading Sanskrit, and who, yielding to our request, brought us from the library of his pagoda the works of the theologian Ramatsariar, which have yielded us such precious assistance in this volume.”

As to the story of the son offered as a sacrifice by his father, and released at the command of the gods, M. Jacolliot might have found the original account of it from the Veda, both text and translation, in my “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature.” He would soon have seen that the story of _S_una_hs_epa being sold by his father in order to be sacrificed in the place of an Indian prince, has very little in common with the intended sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham. M. Jacolliot has, no doubt, found out by this time that he has been imposed upon; and if so, he ought to follow the example of Colonel Wilford, and publicly state what has happened. Even then, I doubt not that his statements will continue to be quoted for a long time, and that _Adima_ and _Heva_, thus brought to life again, will make their appearance in many a book and many a lecture-room.

Lest it be supposed that such accidents happen to Sanskrit scholars only, or that this fever is bred only in the jungles of Indian mythology, I shall mention at least one other case which will show that this disease is of a more general character, and that want of caution will produce it in every climate.

Before the discovery of Sanskrit, China had stood for a long time in the place which was afterwards occupied by India. When the ancient literature and civilization of China became first known to the scholars of Europe, the Celestial Empire had its admirers and prophets as full of enthusiasm as Sir W. Jones and Lieutenant Wilford, and there was nothing, whether Greek philosophy or Christian morality, that was not supposed to have had its first origin among the sages of China. The proceedings of the Jesuit missionaries in China were most extraordinary. They had themselves admitted the antiquity of the writings of Confucius and Lao-tse, both of whom lived in the sixth century B. C.(66) But in their zeal to show that the sacred books of the Chinese contained numerous passages borrowed from the Bible, nay, even some of the dogmas of the later Church, they hardly perceived that, taking into account the respective dates of these books, they were really proving that a kind of anticipated Christianity had been accorded to the ancient sages of the Celestial Empire. The most learned advocate of this school was Father Prémare. Another supporter of the same view, Montucci,(67) speaking of Lao-tse’s Tao-te-king, says:—

“We find in it so many sayings clearly referring to the triune God, that no one who has read this book can doubt that the mystery of the most holy Trinity was revealed to the Chinese more than five centuries before the advent of Christ. Everybody, therefore, who knows the strong feeling of the Chinese for their own teachers, will admit that nothing more efficient could be found in order to fix the dogmas of the Christian religion in the mind of the Chinese than the demonstration that these dogmas agree with their own books. The study, therefore, and the translation of this singular book (the Tao-te-king) would prove most useful to the missionaries, in order to bring to a happy issue the desired gathering in of the Apostolic harvest.”

What followed is so extraordinary that, though it has often been related, it deserves to be related again, more particularly as the whole problem which was supposed to have been solved once for all by M. Stanislas Julien, has of late been opened again by Dr. von Strauss, in the “Journal of the German Oriental Society,” 1869.

There is a passage at the beginning of the fourteenth chapter of the Tao-te-king in which Father Amyot felt certain that the three Persons of the Trinity could be recognized. He translated it:—

“He who is as it were visible but cannot be seen is called _Khi_.

“He whom we cannot hear, and who does not speak to our ear, is called _Hi_.

“He who is as it were tangible, but cannot be touched, is called _Wei_.”

Few readers, I believe, would have been much startled by this passage, or would have seen in it what Father Amyot saw. But more startling revelations were in store. The most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Rémusat, took up the subject; and after showing that the first of the three names had to be pronounced, not Khi, but I, he maintained that the three syllables I Hi Wei, were meant for _Je-ho-vah_. According to him, the three characters employed in this name have no meaning in Chinese; they are only signs of sounds foreign to the Chinese language; and they were intended to render the Greek Ἰαῶ, the name which, according to Diodorus Siculus, the Jews gave to their God. Rémusat goes on to remark that Lao-tse had really rendered this Hebrew name more accurately than the Greeks, because he had preserved the aspiration of the second syllable, which was lost in Greek. In fact, he entertained no doubt that this word, occurring in the work of Lao-tse, proves an intellectual communication between the West and China, in the sixth century B. C.

Fortunately, the panic created by this discovery did not last long. M. Stanislas Julien published in 1842 a complete translation of this difficult book; and here all traces of the name of Jehovah have disappeared.

“The three syllables, he writes, “which Abel Rémusat considered as purely phonetic and foreign to the Chinese language, have a very clear and intelligible meaning, and have been fully explained by Chinese commentators. The first syllable, I, means without color; the second, Hi, without sound or voice; the third, Wei, without body. The proper translation therefore is:—”

“You look (for the Tao, the law) and you see it not: it is colorless.

“You listen and you hear it not: it is voiceless.

“You wish to touch it and you reach it not: it is without body.”

Until, therefore, some other traces can be discovered in Chinese literature proving an intercourse between China and Judæa in the sixth century B. C., we can hardly be called upon to believe that the Jews should have communicated this one name, which they hardly trusted themselves to pronounce at home, to a Chinese philosopher; and we must treat the apparent similarity between I-Hi-Wei and Jehovah as an accident, which ought to serve as a useful warning, though it need in no way discourage a careful and honest study of Comparative Theology.

IV.

ON SPELLING.

The remarks which I venture to offer in these pages on the corrupt state of the present spelling of English, and on the advantages and disadvantages connected with a reform of English orthography, were written in fulfillment of a promise of very long standing. Ever since the publication of the Second Volume of my “Lectures on the Science of Language,” in 1863, where I had expressed my sincere admiration for the courage and perseverance with which Mr. Isaac Pitman and some of his friends (particularly Mr. A. J. Ellis, for six years his most active associate) had fought the battle of a reform in English spelling, Mr. Pitman had been requesting me to state more explicitly than I had done in my “Lectures” my general approval of his life-long endeavors. He wished more particularly that I should explain why I, though by profession an etymologist, was not frightened by the specter of phonetic spelling, while such high authorities as Archbishop Trench and Dean Alford had declared that phonetic spelling would necessarily destroy the historical and etymological character of the English language.

If I ask myself why I put off the fulfillment of my promise from year to year, the principal reason I find is, that really I had nothing more to say than what, though in few words, I had said before. Every thing that can be said on this subject has been said, and well said, not only by Mr. Pitman, but by a host of writers and lecturers, among whom I might mention Mr. Alexander J. Ellis, Dr. Latham, Professors Haldeman, Whitney, and Hadley, Mr. Withers, Mr. E. Jones, Dr. J. H. Gladstone, and many others. The whole matter is no longer a matter for argument; and the older I grow, the more I feel convinced that nothing vexes people so much, and hardens them in their unbelief and in their dogged resistance to reforms, as undeniable facts and unanswerable arguments. Reforms are carried by Time, and what generally prevails in the end, are not logical deductions, but some haphazard and frequently irrational motives. I do not say, therefore, with Dean Swift, that “there is a degree of corruption wherein some nations, as bad as the world is, will proceed to an amendment; till which time particular men should be quiet.” On the contrary, I feel convinced that practical reformers, like Mr. Pitman, should never slumber nor sleep. They should keep their grievances before the public in season and out of season. They should have their lamps burning, to be ready whenever the right time comes. They should repeat the same thing over and over again, undismayed by indifference, ridicule, contempt, and all the other weapons which the lazy world knows so well how to employ against those who venture to disturb its peace.