Part 8

No people have held up this _destructive_ side of death, this negative theory of a future, with sharper outline than the Greeks and Hebrews. What a contrast to the teaching of modern religions is that line, "They that go down unto the pit shall not hope for thy truth!" Other people have found themselves unable to rest at this point; they have endowed their place with a personality, but, still strongly impressed with its horrors, this personality is grim and fearful. Even with the Greeks, Hades is a person, not a place; with the Teutons, Hel has gone through the same transformation: and a thousand other images of horror to be met with in different creeds, devouring dragons, dogs who, like Cerberus, threaten those who are journeying to the underground kingdom, can be shown by their names to have sprung from merely negative images of death, the unseen, the coverer, the concealer, the cave of night.

In contrast therefore with all these myths stand those which, after death, send the soul upon a journey to some paradise, believed generally to lie in the west. If these first are myths of hell, the second series may be fairly described as myths of heaven. Nor can it be certainly proved that the more cheerful view of the other world is of a later growth in time than the first which seems so primitive. We see indications of it in the interments of old stone-age grave mounds. While among historical people the older Hebrews are the exponents of the gloomier Sheol, the most hopeful picture of the soul's future finds expression in the ritual service of the Egyptians. There we have a complete history of the dead man's journey across the Nile and through the twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, until at last it reaches the home of the sun. And, to come nearer home, among all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the evidences of a double belief, the belief in death as of a dim underground place or as a devouring monster, and the contrasting faith in death as a journey undertaken to reach a new country where everything is better and happier than upon earth.

This is the myth of an earthly paradise, not, like our heaven, disconnected altogether from the world, but a distant land lying somewhere in the west, and forming part of the imaginary geography of those times: so the belief is, more than others, a realistic one, mingling with the daily experience of men and influencing deeply their daily life. The necessary portal of death is even sometimes lost sight of altogether, as when in the Middle Ages we find men undertaking more than one expedition in search of the earthly paradise, and when we find the current belief that in certain weathers was visible from the west coast of Ireland that happy island to which St. Brandon and his disciples had been carried when they left this world. For this reason, though the notion of the western paradise is essentially the same for all the human race, its local colouring constantly varies, changing with the geographical position of each people: if they change their homes and advance, as they will probably do, towards the land of promise, it moves away before them, as the rainbow moves from us. The Egyptians had their myth of the soul's journey, drawing all its distinctive features from the special character of their land, chiefly from the commanding influence which a great neighbouring desert exercised upon their imagination. But for our ancestors, the parents of the Indo-European races, the place of the desert was supplied by the sea.

The most probable conjecture has fixed the cradle of our race in that corner of land which lies westward the steep range of the Beloot Tagh mountains, an off-shoot of the Himalayas, and northward from the high barren land of Cabul. This country, the ancient Bactriana, is the most habitable district to be found anywhere in Central Asia. There the hills stretch out in gentle slopes towards the west, and enclose fertile valleys, whose innumerable streams, fed by the mountains east and south, all go to swell the waters of the Oxus, now called the Jihon. Farther north lies another fruitful country, watered by the Jaxartes, separated from the first by a range of hills much inferior to those which divide both lands from Yarkand and Cashgar on the east, and from Cabul on the south. Both the great rivers empty themselves into the Sea of Aral, between which and the Caspian, sharply cutting off the fertile country from that sea, stretches the Khiva desert, a barren land affording a scanty nourishment to the herds of wandering Turkic tribes. There is good reason to believe, however, that this desert did not always exist, but that in times not extraordinarily remote the Caspian Sea, joined to the Sea of Aral, extended over a much larger area than it at present covers: it is known even now to be sinking steadily within its banks. With such a contraction of the great sea the desert would grow by a double process, by the laying bare its sandy bed and by the withdrawal of a neighbouring supply of moisture from the dry land. So it may well have been that the fruitful territory wherein in remotest ages were settled our Aryan ancestors, stretched so far west as to border upon a large inland Asiatic sea. It has even been conjectured that the turning of so much fertile land into desert was the proximate cause of those migrations which sent the greater part of the Aryan races westward--to people, at last, all the countries of Europe. The root which is common to the European languages for the names of the sea, means, in the Indian and Iranian languages, a desert: how can we account for this fact better than by supposing that after the European nations had left their early home, their brethren, who remained behind and who long afterwards separated into the people of India and Persia, came to know as a desert the district which their fathers had once known as the sea?

Thus, these ancient Aryans stood with their backs toward the mountains and their faces toward the sea. All their prospect, all their future, seemed to be that way; when their migrations began they were undertaken in that direction--towards the west. Most important of all in the formation of a creed, their sun-god, or sun-hero,[9] was seen by many of them quenching his beams in the waters; the home of the sun is always likewise the home of souls. What more natural, nay, what so necessary, as that the Aryan paradise should lie westward beyond the sea? It has been said just now that the Indian word for desert corresponds etymologically with the European word for sea: that word must have been, in the old Aryan, something like _mara_, from which we get the Persian _meru_, desert, the Latin _mare_, the Teutonic (German and English) _meer_. But from identically the same root we likewise get the Sanksrit and the Zend (old Persian) _mara_, death, the Latin _mors_, the old Norse _mordh_, the German _mord_, our _murder_, all signifying originally the same thing.[10] What, then, does this imply? The word which the old Aryans used for sea they used likewise for death. How would this be possible, unless this, their first sea, were likewise the sea of death, the necessary stage upon the road to paradise?

It might have been expected that such a connection of ideas would have endowed the sea with an entirely terrible character, precluding any attempt to explore its solitudes, or the lands which lay beyond. It has been already said that as a matter of experience we find that the _earthly_ paradise often comes to be realized so vividly that men lose the fear which should attach to any attempt at finding it. They were not religious, heavenward-looking men who, in Mr. Morris's poem, set out in quest of the happy land; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a true instinct, and that of all those mediæval mariners who were lost in their search after St. Brandon's isle, none knew that they had found what they were seeking--Death. The Greeks eagerly cherished delusions of the same kind; and long before they had summoned up courage sufficient to navigate the Mediterranean they had invented the myths of their western islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired Rhadamanthus was taken when expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, or of those gardens kept by the daughters of the west,[11] where decay and death could not enter. It is likely enough that for the Aryans _their_ western sea did long retain its more fearful meaning, _a death_; but that they at last gained courage to look upon it only as _the road_[12] to the land of which they had long been dreaming.

How much more weighty a position the sea takes in men's thoughts than is warranted by their real familiarity with it! Into the mass of sedentary lives--the vast majority--it enters but seldom as an experience, provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of all countries which possess a sea-board, how full is the literature of reference to this one phenomenon of physical nature! The sun and the moon, and all the heavenly bodies, the familiar sights and sounds of land, are the property of all; and yet allusions to these are not more common in literature than allusions to the sea: one might fancy that man was amphibious, with a power of actually living _upon_, and not only _by_, the water. Charles Lamb acutely penetrates the cause of a certain disappointment we all feel at the sight of the sea for the first time. We go with the expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the commensurate antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from true voyages, and what we cherish as credulously from romances and poetry, come crowding their images, and exacting strange tributes from expectation. Thus we are imbued with thoughts of the sea before we have had any sight of it ourselves, merely by the sea's great influence acting through the total experience of humanity. "We think of the great deep and of those who go down unto it: of its thousand isles, and of the vast continents it washes; of its receiving the mighty Plata, or Orellana, into its bosom, without disturbance or sense of augmentation; of Biscay swells and the mariner--

"For many a day and many a dreadful night, Incessant labouring round the stormy cape;

of fatal rocks and the 'still-vexed Bermoothes;' of great whirlpools and the water-spout; of sunken ships and sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths." We must not narrow the influence of the sea in mythology within the compass of man's mere experience of it. Few among the Aryans lived by the Caspian shore; but the Sea of Death appears in one form or another in the religious belief of all the Aryan people. The tradition of the sea, its real wonders, and greater fancied terrors, must have passed from one to another, from the few who lived within sight and sound of the waters to others quite beyond its horizon, to whom it was not visible even as a faint silvery line.

It is natural that, in early myths, no accurate distinction should have been drawn between the sea and rivers with which the Aryans were familiar. The Caspian was imagined a broad river bounding the habitable earth, the origin of the Oceanus of the Greeks; and the sea of death is, in its earliest form, a river of death. All after-forms of mythical geography, moreover, such as we find among Indians, Greeks, or Norsemen, are but graftings upon this central idea. As the Aryans changed their homes, the new experiences gradually blotted out the old. The Greek transferred his thoughts about the Caspian to the Mediterranean, and when his geography extended, the Oceanus was pushed farther and farther away, until the later Euhemerist geographers came to confound it with the Atlantic. Thus it is but by accident that we give to ocean the meaning which it now bears. The first ocean was the mythical river which flowed round the earth, and the real physical forerunner of the myth was not the Atlantic or any of our oceans, but the Caspian Sea as it stretched before the eyes of the ancient Aryan folk.

The Norseman, especially the Icelander,[13] lived so close to the ocean, that the older myth was forgotten beside the aspect of nature so familiar to him. In the middle of his earth stood a high mountain, on which was a strong city, Asgaard, the house of the Æsir or gods. Below Asgaard lay the green and fruitful earth, man's home. Then outside flowed or lay the great mid-earth ocean, just like the Greek ocean in character, despite all differences of climate and country. At other times the mid-earth sea is personified as a devouring monster, Jörmungandr ("great monster"), the name of the mid-gaard serpent who lies at the bottom of the encircling sea, shaking the earth when he moves.[14] Beyond, lies the ice-bound land of giants--Jötunheim, giant's home--dark like the Cimmerian land, and peopled with beings as weird and terrible as the Cyclops or the Gorgons.

Gradually the myths of the river of death and the sea of death from being one became two. The second was confined to those nations who lived upon the sea-shore, and lost in great part its early shape; but neither Indians, Greeks, nor Norsemen forgot the myth of the mortal river. The Indian retained it singly; for when his turn for wandering came, he passed over the eastern mountains and reached a land where no sea was any longer to be seen or heard of. In the mythical language of the Vedas, the mortal river is called Vaitera_n_i; it lies "across the dreadful path to the house of Yama,"[15] the god of Hell.

From the belief in the river of death no doubt arose also the practice of committing the dead to the care of the sacred Ganges; for just as the Hindus kindle a funeral fire in the boat which bears the dead down this visible stream of death, so used the Norsemen to place their hero's body in his ship, and then having lighted it send it drifting out seawards with the tide. In conjunction with that thought of the other world which placed the final resting-place in a dark kingdom underground, the river is seen in Greek mythology transferred to Hades; but it is multiplied into four, which have all grown out of one, inasmuch as they were feigned to flow out of the upper-earth river Oceanus:--

"Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate; Sad Acheron, of sorrow, black and deep; Cocytus named of lamentation loud Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage."

These pictures are not quite in character with the Hellenic thought about the future state. But it is certain that the more gloomy images of death are preserved in connection with the rivers of Hades, with Hades itself, and all that it contains. So it is with the northern Styx, Gjöll,[16] as it is called in the Eddas. This, too, is an underground stream lying, like the Indian, on the road to the gates of death.

Thus a separation arises between the sea and the river myths. If we wish for something more cheerful than the pictures of Styx and Gjöll and Vaitera_n_i, we must look, for the tales of an earthly paradise which sprang up when men had lost their first terror of the sea, but had not lost the beliefs to which their earliest thoughts about that sea gave birth.

Such beliefs are those which lie enshrined in the Odyssey. This poem is full of images of death, but they are not self-conscious ones, only mythical expressions first applied to the passage of the soul from life, and then made literal and physical by their transference to the unexplored western sea. What the Caspian may have been to the ancient Aryan, such was the Mediterranean to the Greek. The Ægean was his home-like water; there he might pass from island to island without losing sight of land; and he soon learnt to trust himself to its care, and to know its currents and its winds. Long before he had navigated beyond Cape Malea, all the coasts of the Ægean had become parts of his familiar world: outside this was the region of the unknown. The Iliad tells us what the early Greeks thought about the first. Myths may have mingled with the legend of the fall of Troy, but the story in Homer is essentially realistic, rationalistic even. The very powers of the immortals and their doings seem petty and limited. The Odyssey, on the other hand, is the product of the Greek imagination working in fields unturned by experience, free from any guiding impulse of knowledge; and here step in those monstrous shapes and strange adventures which differ altogether from the probable events of the Iliad. We feel at once that we are in a new world, a world not so much of supernatural beings as of magic; lands of glamour and illusion, most like the giant-land of the Norsemen; for we are getting towards the twilight regions of the earth and the borders of Hades.

Some writers have attempted to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than a myth of the sun's course through heaven. But surely there is too much solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of belief around it, to suit a tale relating such airy unrealities as those. The Greeks who first sung the ballads must have been thinking of a real journey upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many images and notions which had first been applied only to the sun-god would creep into such a history as that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun-myth had first pointed out the home of the dead as lying in the west; and nothing is more natural than that a people whose thoughts and hopes carried them in the track of the wandering sun should, when they came to construct an epos of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same way. They would interweave in the story such truths--or such sailors' yarns--as Phoenician mariners or adventurous Greeks brought home from the distant waters, with many images which had been first made of the sun's heavenly voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. Their geography would, indeed, be mythical; for they could have no accurate notions of the lands which they spoke of; but it would not be without a kernel of reality. Justin and Augustine may look upon the garden of the Hesperides or the garden of Alcinoüs as a reminiscence of Paradise; Strabo may assign them an exact position on the coast of Libya; and both may be right. The myth of the two gardens--the Hebrew and the Greek paradises--sprang up in obedience to an identical faculty of belief, and therefore the two stories are in origin the same. But each myth supported itself upon so much of reality as it could lay hold of: and it is likely enough that the famous golden apples which Hercules was sent to fetch owed their origin to the first oranges brought by Phoenician merchantmen to Greece.

Besides some such slender thread of reality, the adventures of Odysseus are built upon what men's imagination told them might lie in the western seas. Now in reality there was only one thing which at the bottom of their hearts they believed actually did lie there--namely, death; and beyond that, the home of the departed. Therefore their stories of adventure in the Mediterranean do all, upon a minute inspection, resolve themselves into a variety of mythical ways of describing death; and upon this as a dark background the varied colours of the tale are painted. It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the brilliant picture to acknowledge this. Nay, it gather adds to it, for behind the graceful air of the poem, sung as a poem only, we hear a deeper note telling of the passionate, obstinate questionings of futurity which belonged not more to Greece three thousand years ago than they now belong to us.

Any one acquainted with the genesis of myth would at once be disposed to see in the Odyssey the combination of two different legends; for one series of adventures comes as a tale told during the course of the second. We first see our hero on the island of Calypso, the sea-nymph; and when Hermes has brought from the gods the command for his release, he is carried thence by storms to the land of the Phæaceans. There Nausicaa finds him and brings him to her father Alcinoüs, by whom he is hospitably entertained, and at last sent back to Ithaca, his home. This forms one complete legend, the simplest and probably the first, because _into_ it is woven the account of Odysseus' earlier adventures. In the halls of Alcinoüs the wanderer tells what happened to him before he reached the cave of Calypso, and in this narrative we follow him to the island of the Lotus-eaters, to the island of the Cyclops, thence to the house of Circe, and from there to the very borders of hell itself. And we guess that we have here got hold of a later amplified legend built up out of the earlier myth. We find just such changes as this in Norse mythology; a story told in a few lines by the elder Edda, is expanded into an elaborate history in the younger. Looking again more closely at the Odyssey, we discover that many circumstances in the expanded tale bear close resemblance to one or other of the adventures in the shorter category. Take, for instance, the life with Calypso and with Circe. Both Calypso and Circe are nymphs, enchantresses; each lives alone upon her island: with each Odysseus passes a term of years, living with her as her husband, longing all the while to return to his own wife and his own home, and yet unable to do so: from each Hermes is the deliverer. What if Calypso and Circe both repeat in reality the same myth; and what if Odysseus' other great adventure, the voyage to the Phæaceans, have likewise its counterpart in the expanded story? The question of the real identity or difference of the two stories can only be decided when we have seen how much significance there is in the points of their apparent likeness.

Who is Calypso? Her name bespeaks her nature not ambiguously. It is from =kalyptein=, to cover or conceal. She is the shrouder, or the shrouded place, answering exactly therefore to Hel, which, as has before been said, comes from the verb _helja_, "to hide." How, then, can Calypso be anything else than death, as she dwells there in her cave, by the shores of the sea? How can Odysseus' life with her, his sleep in her cave, be anything else than an image of dying? The gods have determined that the hero shall not remain in this mortal sleep for ever; so Hermes is sent to command Calypso to let Odysseus go. Hermes is the god whose mission it is to lead souls down to the realm of Hades--the psychopomp, as in this office he is called. But sometimes he may come upon an opposite message, to restore men to life; the staff which closes the eyes of men may likewise open them when asleep. On such a task he comes--

"Wind-like beneath, the immortal golden sandals Bare up his flight o'er the limitless earth and the sea; And in his hand that magic wand he carried, Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber, Or wakens from sleeping."