ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν á¼€Îξῃ νόος ἀνÎÏος κ.Ï„.λ.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν á¼€Îξῃ νόος ἀνÎÏος κ.Ï„.λ.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν á¼€Îξῃ νόος ἀνÎÏος κ.Ï„.λ.
ὡς δ’ ὅτ’ ἂν á¼€Îξῃ νόος ἀνÎÏος κ.Ï„.λ.
Homer, then, spoke out in simplicity, and in good faith, the religion of his day, under those forms of poetry with which all religions have a well-grounded affinity: for the imagination, which is the fountain-head of poetic forms, is likewise a genuine, though faint, picture, of that world which religion realizes, through Faith its groundwork, ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen[19].’
And, indeed, he had no other form in which to speak forth his soul. That which we call the invention of the Greeks at work upon the subject-matter of religion was, in fact, the voice of human nature, giving expression in the easiest and simplest manner to its sense of the great objects and powers amidst which its lot was cast. It has been well said by Professor M. Müller, in an able Essay[20]on ‘Comparative Mythology,’ that ‘abstract speech is more difficult, than the fulness of a poet’s sympathy with nature.’ Thus it was not so much that poetry usurped the office of religion, as that their respective functions brought them of necessity to a common ground and a common form of proceeding. Homer saw, heard, or felt the action of the sun, the moon, the stars, the atmosphere, the winds, the sea, the rivers, the fountains, the soil; and he knew of family affections, of governing powers, of ahealing art, of a gift and skill of mechanical construction. Action, in each of these departments, could not but be referred to a power. How was that power to be expressed?
On Impersonation in Homer.
At least for the Greek mind, less subtle, as Aristotle has observed, than the Oriental, it was more natural to deal with persons, than with metaphysical abstractions. It was foreign to the mental habit of the heroic age to conceive of abstract essences; as it still remains difficult, more difficult perhaps than, in the looseness of our mental processes, we suppose, for the men of our own generation. Even now, in the old age of the world, we have many signs of this natural difficulty, which formerly was a kind of impossibility. Especially we have that one which leads all communities, and above all their least instructed classes, to apply the personal pronounsheorsheto a vast multitude of inanimate objects, both natural, and the products of human skill and labour. These objects are generally such as stand in a certain relation to action: they either do, suffer, or contain.
If then the Nature-forces could not be expressed, or at least could not be understood as abstractions, to express them as persons was the only other course open to the poet. It was not an effort to follow this method: it would have required great effort to adopt any other. How spontaneous was the impulse which thus generated the mythological system, we may observe from this, that it not only personified in cases where, an agency being seen, its fountain was concealed from view, but it likewise went very far towards personification even in cases where inanimate instruments were wielded by human beings, and where, as the source of the phenomenon was perceived, there was no occasion to clothe it with a separate vitality. Hence that copiousvivifying power which Homer has poured like a flood through his verse. Hence his bitter arrow (πικÏὸς), his darts hungry for human blood (λιλαιόμενα χÏόος ἆσαι), his ground laughing in the blaze of the gleaming armour (γÎλασσε δὲ πᾶσα πεÏὶ χθὼν χαλκοῦ ὑπὸ στεÏοπῆς). Hence again his free use of sensible imagery to illustrate metaphysical ideas: for example, his black cloud of grief, his black pains, his purple death[21]. Hence that singularly beautiful passage on the weeping of the deathless horses of Achilles for Patroclus[22]. Hence too it is, that he does not scruple to carry imagery, drawn from the sphere of one sense, into the domain of another, an operation which later poets have found so difficult and hazardous. He has an iron din[23], a brazen voice[24], a brazen or iron heaven[25], a howling or shouting fire, a blaze of lamentation[26]. Hence, by a system of figure bolder perhaps than has been used by any other poet, he invests the works of high art in metal with the attributes of life and motion. This daring system reaches its climax in the damsel satellites[27]of gold, that support the limping gait of Vulcan: in the dogs of metal, that guard the palace of Alcinous: in the elastic arms of Achilles, which, so far from being a weight upon him, themselves lift him from the ground: and in the animated ships of the Phæacians, which are taught by instinct to speed across the sea, and to pilot their own course to the points of their destination[28]. On every side we see a redundance of life, shaping, and even forcing, for itself new channels: and thus it becomes more easyfor us to conceive the important truth that, when he impersonates, he simply takes what was for him the easiest and the most effective way to describe. Every where he is carrying on a double process of action and reaction: on the one hand bringing Deity down to sensible forms; on the other, adorning and elevating humanity, and inanimate nature, with every divine endowment.
Nature of the myths of Homer.
Homer, then, is full of mythical matter. But the wordmyth, of which in recent controversies the use has been so frequent, is capable of being viewed under either of two principal aspects.
In one of these, it signifies a story which is not contemporary with the date of the facts it purports to relate, but is in reality an after-view of them, which colours its subject, and exaggerates,ad libitum, according to conditions of thought and feeling which have arisen in the interval.
In the other of these senses, it is an allegory which has simply lost its counterpart: it was true, but by separation from that which attached it to fact, it has become untrue: being now of necessity handled, if handled at all, as a substantive existence, it has passed into a fable, and is only distinguished from pure fable, in that it once indicated truths contemporary with itself, though probably truths lying in a different region from its own.
It is in this last sense that the term myth is chiefly, and most legitimately, applicable to the religious system of the Homeric poems: but they may also probably contain more or less of the mythical element in the former sense.
We, having obtained knowledge of the early derivation and distribution of mankind, and of the primitivereligion, from sources other than those open to Homer, shall find in this knowledge the lost counterpart of a great portion of the Homeric myths.
The theological and Messianic traditions which we find recorded in Scripture, when compared with the Homeric theogony, will be found to correspond with a large and important part of it: and, moreover, with a part of it which in the poems themselves carries a cluster of distinctive marks, not to be explained except by the discovery of this correspondence. The evidence, therefore, of the meaning of this part of the Homeric system is like that which is obtained, when, upon applying a new key to some lock that we have been unable to open, we find it fits the wards, and puts back the bolt.
In his learned and acute Essay[29]on Comparative Mythology, Professor Max Müller undertakes to illustrate a doctrine that appears to be the exact opposite of Mr. Grote’s ‘Past which was never present.’ If I understand him rightly, there was at some one time a present for every portion of the reputed past[30]: so that, by a reference to eastern sources, the nature of that present, and of the original consistent meaning for what afterwards on becoming unintelligible is justly called a myth, has in many cases been, and may yet in many more come to be, unveiled. Originally impersonations of ideas and natural powers, the heathen gods never represented demons or evil spirits[31], and were ‘masks without an actor,’ ‘names without being:’ while their reality, consisting in their relation to the facts of the universe, faded and escaped from perception in the course of time. The myths of the Veda are still inthe stage of growth: Hesiod and Homer too are of the ‘later Greeks,’ and not only the Theogony of Hesiod is ‘a distorted caricature,’ but the poetry of Homer[32]is extensively founded on myths fully grown, and in the stage of decay, that is to say, long severed from their corresponding deities.
I do not doubt that in all mythology at its origin, there has been both a shell and a substance: and that the tendency of the two to part company, which we see even under the sway of revealed religion, must have operated with far more power, where ordinarily at least, man was thrown back, without other aid, upon his reason and his conscience, beset as they were and are with overpowering foes.
But then, as it seems to me, we must anticipate great changes in the shell itself. It will not retain, when empty, the identity of the form; which has lost the support that it had from within when full. On the contrary, it will become unlike its original self, as well as unlike its archetype or substance, so that probably much of it must always remain without a key.
Upon the other hand, as there was already a true religion in the world when an untrue one began to gather upon and incrust it, there must arise the question already put; what, according to the theory before us, became of this true religion? It did not disappear in a day: there was no wilful renunciation of it by single or specific acts, no sharp line drawn between it and the false; but the human element was gradually more and more imported into the divine, operating by continual and successive disintegrations of the original ideas. If so, then there seems to be nothing unreasonable in the belief that the traces of them might long remain discerniblein the adulterated system, even if only as the features of a man are discernible in the mask of a buffoon.
No doubt it would be unreasonable to look for such traces in Homer, if he were indeed, in the popular sense of the term, which probably Professor M. Müller does not intend, a later Greek; a Greek dealing with a mythological system of which his nation had already had its use, from which the creative principle had departed, and which was on the road from ripeness to decay. I am far from saying that there are no myths in Homer, where the original and interior meaning has ceased to be discernible: but I shall seek to show that the contrary may be confidently averred, and fully shown, with respect to the great bulk of his mythology, and that we see in him two systems, both alive, and in impact and friction, though with very unequal forces, one upon the other; the first, that of traditional truth, and the second, of the inventive impersonation of nature both material and invisible. And certainly it is very striking that, with one or two very insignificant exceptions, all those ancient fables, which Professor Müller treats as having become unintelligible without the key of the Veda, and which he explains by means of it, are fables unknown to Homer, and drawn from much later sources.
Steps of the downward process.
The general view, then, which will be given in these pages of the Homeric Theo-mythology is as follows: That its basis is not to be found either in any mere human instinct gradually building it up from the ground, or in the already formed system of any other nation of antiquity; but that its true point of origin lies in the ancient Theistic and Messianic traditions, which we know to have subsisted among the patriarchs, and which their kin and contemporaries must have carriedwith them as they dispersed, although their original warmth and vitality could not but fall into a course of gradual efflux, with the gradually widening distance from their source. To travel beyond the reach of the rays proceeding from that source was to make the first decisive step from religion to mythology.
To this divine tradition, then, were added, in rank abundance, elements of merely human fabrication, which, while intruding themselves, could not but also extrude the higher and prior parts of religion. But the divine tradition, as it was divine, would not admit of the accumulation of human materials until it had itself been altered. Even before men could add, it was necessary that they should take away. This impairing and abstraction of elements from the divine tradition may be called disintegration.
Before the time of Homer, it had already wrought great havock. Its first steps, as far as the genesis of the mythology throws light upon them, would appear to have been as follows: objectively, a fundamental corruption of the idea of God; who, instead of an Omnipotent wisdom and holiness, now in the main represented on a large scale, in personal character, the union of appetite and power; subjectively, the primary idea of religion was wholly lost. Adam, says Lord Bacon, was not content with universal obedience to the Divine Will as his rule of action, but would have another standard. This offence, though not exaggerated into the hideousness of human depravity in its later forms, is represented without mitigation in the principles of action current in the heroic age. Human life, as it is there exhibited, has much in it that is noble and admirable; but nowhere is it a life of simple obedience to God.
This disintegration of primitive traditions forms thesecond stage, a negative one, in the process which produced the Homeric Theo-mythology.
When the divine idea, and also the idea of the relation between man and his Maker, had once been fundamentally changed, there was now room for the introduction without limit of what was merely human into religion. Instead of man’s being formed in the image of God, God was formed in the image of man. The ancient traditions were made each to assume a separate individual form; and these shapes were fashioned by magnifying and modifying processes from the pattern that human nature afforded.
Again, as man does not exist alone and individually, but in the family, so thenexusof the family was introduced as the basis of a divine order. This we may call, resting on the etymology of the word, the divine Å’conomy of the Homeric religion.
But as with man, so with the supernatural world, on which his own genius was now powerfully reflected, families themselves, when multiplied, required a political order; and therefore, among the gods also a State and government are formed, a divine polity. Human care, by a strange inversion, makes parental provision for the good government of those deities whom it has called into being.
The propagation, for which a physical provision was made among men, takes place within the mythological circle also, under the laws of his intelligent nature. The ranks of the Immortals are filled with persons metaphysically engendered. These persons they represent concrete forms given to abstract ideas, or, to state nearly the same thing in other words, personal modes of existence assigned to powers which man saw as it were alive and at work in the universe, physical or intelligent, aroundhim. But here too a distinction is to be observed. Sometimes the deity was set above the natural power, as its governor and controller: sometimes he merely signified the power itself put in action. The former mode commonly points to tradition; the latter always to invention.
And lastly, when a supernaturalκοσμὸςor order had thus been constructed, the principles of affinity between it and the order here below exercised a reciprocally attractive force. The gods were more and more humanized, man was more and more invested with deity: deity was made cheap and common among men, and the interval from earth to heaven was bridged over by various means. These means were principally; first, the translation of men into the company of the immortals; secondly, the introduction of intermediate races; and, thirdly and most of all, the deification of heroes.
Subordinate to this general view, there arises another question: how are we to subdivide the inventive parts of the Homeric mythology? What general statements can be propounded, or criteria supplied, to show how much Greece fabricated or moulded for herself, and what she owed to Egypt, or to Phœnicia, or to other lands in the East, whose traditions she had either inherited or received?
Sources of the inventive portions.
A deep obscurity hangs over this subject. We do not know all that was contained in each of the various religions of the East at any one epoch, much less at all the periods within which they may have contributed materials to the gorgeous fabric of Homer. Many things were probably common to several of them: and where this was so, circumstantial evidence cannot availfor determining the source at which the Poet or his nation borrowed.
But several propositions may be laid down, which will tend towards describing the path of our inquiry.
First, the accounts which, transmitted by Herodotus, represent Egypt as the fountain-head of the Greek religion in its mass, are not sustained by the evidence of Homer. And even with respect to many points where the nucleus of the Greek system has something corresponding with it in the Egyptian, it neither follows that it was originally drawn from Egypt by the Greeks, nor that those from whom the Greeks received it had obtained it there. Yet there remains room for very important communications, such, for example, as the oracle of Dodona, or the worship of Minerva, which may be an historic token of an Egyptian colony at Athens.
Secondly, the correspondences between the Homeric system and the Eastern religions, as we know them, are commonly latent, rather than broad or palpable. This may, in part, be owing to the circumstance that our accounts of these religions are in great part so much later than Homer; and a greater resemblance, than is now to be traced, may have subsisted in his time.
Originality of the Olympian system.
But, thirdly, the differences are not differences of detail or degree. A different spirit pervades the Homeric creed and worship, from that which we find in Egyptian, or Median, or Persian systems. One has grovelling animalism, another has metaphysical aspirations, that we do not find in the Greek: but this is not all. If the Homeric scheme is capable of being described, as to its inventive part, by any one epithet, it will be this, that it is intensely human. I do not speak of thelater mythology; nor of Hesiod, whose Theogony so marvellously spoils what it systematizes; but of Homer, in whom the ideal Olympus attained its perfection at a stroke. In his preternaturalκοσμὸςthere is, as far as I can see, much more of what is truly Divine, much more of the residue of primeval tradition, than we can find collected elsewhere: but there is also much more of what is human. The moral form is corrupt: but I am now also speaking of it as a work of human genius, and certainly as one of the most wonderful and splendid of its products. The deep sympathy with Nature, the refined perception of beauty, the freedom, the buoyancy, the elastic movement of every figure on the scene, the intimate sense of association between the denizens of Olympus and the generations of mortal men, the imposing development of a Polity on high, the vivid nationality that riveted its hold on Greece, the richness and inexhaustible diversity of those embellishments which a vigorous fancy knows how to provide, combine to make good the title I have asserted, and, if we are to believe that Homer, in no small part, made what he described, must place his share in the formation of the system in the very foremost rank even of his achievements.
At any rate, this one thing, I think, is clear; that whatever Greece borrowed from the East, she fairly made her own. All was thrown into the crucible; all came out again from the fire recast, in such combinations, and clothed in such forms and hues, as the specific exigencies of the Greek mind required. Hence we must beware of all precipitate identifications. We must take good heed, for example, not to assume, that because Athene may be Neith by metathesis, therefore the features of the Homeric Pallas were really gatheredtogether in the Egyptian prototype of her name[33]. The strong hand of a transmuting fancy and intelligence passed as a preliminary condition upon everything foreign, not only to modify, but probably also to resolve into parts, and then to reconstruct. So that the preternatural system of Homer is, above all others, both national and original, and has, by its own vital energies, helped to maintain those characteristics even in the deteriorated copies which were made from it by so many after-generations.