CHAPTER VIIMYTHS
In order to appreciate truly our neighbour’s impressions and points of view, we must constantly detach ourselves from our own special way of seeing and feeling; this habit of abstraction—which is most difficult to every one—is indispensable when we are endeavouring to understand the natures of persons who lived many thousands of years ago, and who thought and spoke in a totally different manner from ourselves.
In seeking to grasp the phraseology of myths we perceive that its chief elements consist in a repetition of phrases in which the acts of nature are used as embodiments of the idea, under the figures of day and night, dawn and twilight, the sun and the moon, the heavens and the earth, as they stand in relation to man.
When we in the present century speak of the last hours of the day, we use precise and exact terms; we say, “It is late; the sun is setting; the moon rises; it is night.” Our ancestors also had occasion to mention these same hours, but as they did not speak of the facts of nature without investing them with some of their own personality, they preferred to say, “Dawn flies before the sun.” “The sun loves—pursues—embraces the dawn.” “She dies in the arms of the sun.” They spoke of the sun growing old—decaying—dying. Besides these general terms our ancestors used special designations, which the nature of their language suggested; the hymns of the Rig-Veda supply instances. One of these modes of speech it would be difficult for me to render in French, but the Englishlanguage has the impersonal verb which will illustrate my meaning, for all such atmospheric phenomena such as rain, thunder, the light of day; instead ofitrains,itthunders,itshines, our ancestors said,herains,hethunders,heshines, without knowing who was thishe, who for us is the third person masculine; but, naturally for them,hemeant the rainer, the thunderer, the lightener, or, in other words—the agent.
Mythology, taken in its entirety, is the outcome of myths which preceded it. If the original meaning of the Greek word Logos—as both word and thought—has revealed to us a forgotten truth; the original meaning ofmythosis also indispensable for the study of mythology. This Greek term means simplywordas opposed todeed, and hardly differed at first from Logos. Afterwards, however, a distinction was made between myth,—a fable, a story, and logos, a historical account. Thus a myth was at first a word. Almost all terms used in the first spontaneous stage of language had for their basis striking metaphors, whose signification may have been forgotten, and these terms having lost their original as well as poetical meaning, remained words only, current in familiar conversation.
I give the following myths as they have come down to us.
Endymion is the son of Zeus and Kalyke, but he is also the son of Æthlios, a king of Elis, who is himself called a son of Zeus; for, according to Greek customs, the reigning race of Elis derived its origin from the king of the gods. Endymion is one of the many names of the sun, but with special reference to the setting or dying sun; it is derived from a verb which originally meantto dive into; an expression such as “the sun dived” presupposes an earlier conception, that it dived into the sea. But the verbenduois never used in classical Greek for setting, because the simple verbduohad become the technical term for sunset.Thus this myth of Endymion owes its origin to the use probably ofenduoin some Greek dialect, though not the commonly received term for sunset. The original meaning of Endymion being once forgotten, what was told originally of the setting sun was now told of a name, which in order to have any meaning, had to be changed into a god or hero.
This handsome prince or shepherd, according to the different versions of the tale, went to Karia, where on Mount Latmos he had strange adventures; he slept in a cave to which the rays of the moon, Selene, penetrated, and in the ancient poetical and proverbial language of Elis it was said, “Selene loves and watches Endymion; Selene embraces Endymion and kisses him into sleep.” The name Selene is so transparent that the word moon pierces through it; we should have guessed that the moon was intended, even if tradition had only preserved her other name, Asterodia—“wanderer amongst the stars”; the names Hecate or Lucina do not force us to acknowledge their fitness, they present to our imagination a totally different figure (as they suggest opaqueness) from Selene. Learned writers at times still put forward the explanation with regard to mythology that it “was a past which was never a present,” but this myth of Endymion was “present” with the people of Elis at the period of its narration.
These and similar expressions were repeated long after their meaning had ceased to be understood; and as the human mind is generally as anxious for a reason as ready to invent one, the poets added to this story several details, and reasons why Endymion sank into eternal sleep after a life of but one day; and if allusions were made to these by a popular poet, it became a mythological fact, repeated and embellished by later poets.
The construction of such a name as Eos does not differ materially from that of any other name, but as all rootsexpressed at the first denote action, it follows that for all an agent must be found; the name of Eos in Sanscrit is Ushas, dawn, or “the bright one” from the root Vas, to shine; thus Eos meant originally “he or she shines.” But who was “he” or “she”? Thus the inevitable myth is evolved. For us the dawn is only the natural illumination of the sky, the brightness of the morning; our ancestors received a different impression by the break of day. After having coined a word meaning “he or she shines,” that is the light, or Eos, the Greeks continued to portray each step of Eos as she preceded the appearance of the sun on the celestial vault; “Eos is followed by the sun—is loved by the sun”; she is conceived as a bright and beautiful woman; if she appeared veiled in clouds, she would be considered as a veiled bride; thus the epithets and relationships showered on Eos become intelligible, she is the daughter of Hyperion, thus her father would be the high heaven, sincehypercorresponds to the Latinsuper; she is the sister of Helios and Selene, the sun and the moon. As soon as a name such as Eos was first enunciated and used in daily conversation, it grew and gathered new materials round itself; all the names surrounding Eos in Greek and Aurora in Latin show us how inevitably what we call mythology springs up from the soil of language. Even such simple sentences as “Eos appears, disappears, or dies” are changed at once into myth, fable, and legend, and it soon becomes impossible to draw a line between what is simple language and what is myth.
We do not unfortunately always possess the original form of each legend as it first passed from mouth to mouth in the towns and country; thus our chief sources are the ancient chroniclers, who took mythology for history, and used only so much of it as answered their purpose, and these accounts do not reach us at first hand.
We find a legend in Greek mythology which has muchexercised the learned; the nymph Daphne flies before Phœbus Apollo, her mother, the earth, moved by compassion, takes her to her bosom, and immediately a laurel appears and fills the abyss into which Daphne had vanished. The mythologists asked themselves what could be the meaning of this; the more phlegmatic amongst them considered that it had no special meaning at all, but was simply to be looked upon as a fable; why seek further for a hidden import? Why? Because people do not relate such stories concerning their gods and heroes without some good motive.
In the legend of Endymion the Greek language supplies all that is needed to make it intelligible, but there are many instances of the difficulty, or even the impossibility of explaining certain Greek names by the help of Greek only; since a name is not converted into a myth until its original meaning has become obscured in the language which gave it birth, though still perfectly comprehensible in another of the same family, it behoves the classical philologist to surrender all etymological researches of this nature to the comparative philologist, whose privilege it is to seek to discover the signification of a Greek word by confronting it with contemporary witnesses from the German, Celtic, or Sanscrit. In the Teutonic languages, for instance, day has several names which are derived from the rootdah, to burn, to be hot; and this same root has also given rise to the Greek name for dawn. In Sanscrit it is called Ahana, fromahanordahan, the root of which isah;dahanddahanmay have lost their initiald, or this letter may have been added to the rootah; these gains and losses are met with frequently.
The Sanscrit name Ahana, known before Greek and Sanscrit became separated, occurs but once in a hymn of the Rig-Veda; in India this mythological germ withered away, and even the name Ahana would not have survived, but for this single verse which saved it from oblivion; butit developed into a splendid growth in Greece, in the legend of Eos, which I have quoted.
In this hymn addressed to Ushas we read: “We have crossed the frontier of this darkness; Ahana shining forth gives light, lighting up all the world, awakening mortals to walk about—she received praise from every thinker.” Ahana rises from the head of Dyu, the forehead of the sky; she shows herself in the east, she advances and awakens the sleepers. In Sanscritbudhmeans to wake and to know, but light in Sanscrit has again a double meaning, and means knowledge, much more frequently and distinctly than light; this explains how Ahana, in awakening mortals, causes persons to know.
The stories of Daphne and of Ahana are closely allied, and the one explains the other. As long as we remain ignorant of the fact that at first Daphne and Aurora were one, this myth is inexplicable; but turn the name Ahana into Greek, and you have the Dawn in the features of a nymph loved by Apollo, and dying when the bright sun touched her with his rays.
But why, it may be asked, was Daphne supposed to have been changed into a laurel-tree? The dawn was called daphne, the burning; so was the laurel—as wood that burns easily, and whose flame throws a bright light—two different objects, but alike under one aspect, though two distinct acts. The rootdahis found in daphne for laurel equally with Daphne, dawn, the synonymy of the two names producing the myth of Daphne. Although this legend first came to life on Greek soil, it would have been unintelligible without the help of the Veda, as the later Sanscrit supplied no key to it.
The Sanscrit rootAhis also the germ of the name of Athena, the termination of the name corresponding to Ahana; Athene is said to spring from the head of Zeus. This extraordinary birth, though post-Homeric, is no doubt of ancient date, since it repeats exactly the birth of Ahana.The Hellenists maintain that the Greeks were unconscious that the word Athene meant the dawn; doubtless few amongst them knew that Zeus originally meant the surface or forehead of the sky. It is also true that when the people of Athens worshipped Athene as their tutelary deity, she became something very different from the Indian Ushas; but if we notice carefully all the many and various ideas concerning this Greek goddess, we shall be led to the supposition that her cradle was no other than that of the dawn, namely, the east, the forehead of the sky, or Zeus. Neither in the Veda, nor in Homer, is there any mention of the mother of the dawn, although both mentionher parents.
It is a curious fact that in the mythology of Italy, Minerva, who was identical with Athene, should from the beginning have assumed a name apparently expressive of the intellectual rather than the physical character of the Dawn-goddess. Minerva or Menerva is clearly connected withmens, the Greekmenos, the Sanscritmanas, mind;manein Latin is morning;manareis specially used of the rising sun; andmatuta, another name of the same category, is the Dawn. The rootman, which in all Aryan languages means thought, was at a very early time, like the Sanscritbudh, destined to express the revived consciousness of the whole of nature at the approach of the light of the morning. The equation Ahane = Athene is both phonetically and mythologically irreproachable, the correlative Minerva can also be explained mythologically.
To reject the explanations of these myths which Comparative Philology furnishes, it would be necessary to prove that Ahana and Eos do not mean the dawn, that Athene does not correspond with Ahana, and that Helios is not the sun.
Mythologists have sometimes failed to discover the primitive character of certain myths, because they have not looked beyond the Greek etymology. The wordErinnys, “hovering in the gloom,” corresponds exactly to the Sanscrit Saranyû = “break of day.” Poets sometimes speak of the Dawn as avenging the crimes committed in the dark; the myth of Erinnys denotes this same idea. Instead of our lifeless and abstract expression, “A crime is sure to be discovered,” the old proverbial and poetical saying amongst the Greeks and Hindoos was, Erinnys—Saranyû, “will bring misdeeds to light.” At first this phrase was free from all mythological taint, but it was afterwards transformed into a myth by the Greeks, as they were ignorant of the true signification of the name of Erinnys.
When the mythology of Greece fails to furnish an explanation of many of the Greek phrases, because it belongs to a later date than the classical period, the Veda may then be questioned, and will supply us with the information, by disclosing an ancient substratum of human thought, such as existed amongst the inhabitants of one of the most important regions of the world, India. It is with as much pleasure as assurance that we repeat to those learned scholars, who decline to open their eyes in order to see, or see only what they consider should be there, the Brahmanic saying, “It is not the fault of the post that the blind man passes it without noticing it.”
It seems astonishing that a people so richly endowed as the Greeks should have found pleasure in romancing so constantly concerning the sun and the moon, the day and the night, the dawn and the twilight; but the custom of repeating these mythological phrases, which much resembled each other, dated from an epoch before the Greeks, when nothing more powerfully attracted and fascinated the imagination of man than the aspect of nature’s forces, especially the return of the sun, bringing with it each morning light and heat and life. Repeated thus incessantly these phrases became idiomatic, and were retold long after the thread connecting them with the simple facts of naturewas broken and lost to memory. At first some old grandmother would repeat them, partly understanding them in their true natural sense, and partly metaphorically; the sons of the old people would repeat them with a partial understanding; but the grandsons would relate them only for their peculiarities, or for the charm of their style and setting; and the great-grandchildren would hand them on at random, with no comprehension of their meaning. At a much later period when all these sayings, with no connection between them, had become traditional, the poets would embody them in verse, giving them their first form and permanence in a cycle of legends. They congratulated themselves on the treasure-trove, but marvelled that the Greeks should enclose these bald phrases of perpetual iteration in the casket of their literature. They might as well ask why the Greeks apparently sanctioned all the irregular verbs their language holds by retaining them in their grammar. Is it not a historical fact that cannot be denied that the whole Aryan peoples, without exception, have conserved as the heritage of their common origin not only the names of their divinities, their legends, and their folk-lore, but also remains of their primitive language. Here is a noteworthy statement. Comparative Philology has proved that there is nothing really irregular in a language, and that what was formerly considered so in declensions and conjugations is the stratum on which the edifice of each language raised itself progressively. This same apparent irregularity is found also in mythology, because it is itself only a sort of dialect or offshoot of language.
Since theraison d’êtreof myths, as such, is a forgetfulness of the original sense of the words, we cannot hope to be able to explain all the mythological recitals; no one has more clearly stated the difficulty, nor expressed it with greater modesty, than he who has laid the most lasting foundation of comparative mythology. Grimmsays: “I shall indeed interpret all that I can, but I cannot interpret all that I should like.”[49]
In examining these archives, which, if only on account of their antiquity, are very superior to any other evidence for our purpose, we learn that identification differs from comparison. It is only possible to identify two or more divinities by seeing if one name applies equally to all, and by showing that this name denotes the essence of each; this result is obtained when, for instance, we note a general resemblance between a god or a hero of the Veda, and a god or hero of Hesiod, and discover that though their names may be phonetically dissimilar, yet that they have one source. Uranus, in the language of Hesiod, is used as a name for the sky—“a firm place for the blessed gods”; and the poet says that Uranus covers everything, and that when he brings the night he is stretched out, everywhere embracing the earth. This sounds like a reproduction of the name of Varuna, which is derived from a rootVar, to cover (the Sanscrit termvarutra, overcoat, would prove this if need be). The name Uranus in the Greek apparently retains something of its primitive meaning, which is not the case with the name of Zeus and Apollo. Varuna and Uranus evidently both express the same mythological concept, that of the covering, enclosing sky; this may even be one of the most ancient discoveries of comparative mythology. In the same way we prove that Ushas, Eos, Daphne, Ahana, and Athene were five names of the dawn, and that they can be traced back to a time before Greek and Sanscrit were separated. Thus, whilst one legend becomes differentiated from another by its own peculiar form and attributes, the name of its original prototype remains etymologically the same, though taking varying forms amongst the various peoples who use the legend; it is in this immutable name that the continuity of ideas lies, which nothingobliterates, and which traverses the centuries, and connects the mythologies of countries as totally distinct as India, Greece, and Ireland. But we must remember that all that is taken for etymology is not always so; the explanations which Homer gives of the names of the divinities only proves that at his time the original meaning had been forgotten. To us who now know the true principles of mythology, it is clear that it represents a prehistoric period of language, and the light it throws on the times that followed, has the same importance with regard to the study of the human mind, that geology and paleontology have for the knowledge of the earth.
Sometimes we come upon difficulties of another kind when we seek to translate the language of the poets into our modern forms of thought and speech. In consequence of the absence of merely auxiliary words in mythological language, each word, whether noun or verb, had its full original power, it was heavy and unwieldy, it said more than it ought to say. Here is an example:Nyx(night), the mother ofMoros(fate), ofKer(destruction), ofThanatos(death), ofHypnos(sleep), and of theOneïroi(dreams), and these,—her progeny,Nightis said, by the poet, to have borne without a father. She has also other children:Momos(blame),Oizys(woe), theHesperides, which are the evening stars,Nemesis(vengeance),Apate(fraud),Philotes(lust),Geras(old age), andEris(strife). Now let us use our modern expressions. “The stars are seen as the night approaches,” “we sleep, we dream, we die,” “we run into danger during night,” “nightly revels lead to strife, angry discussions, and woe,” “many nights bring old age, and at last death,” “an evil deed concealed at first by the darkness of night will at last be revealed by the day,” “night herself will be revenged on the criminal”; and we have translated the language of Hesiod, a language to a great extent understood by the people to whom it was addressed many hundreds of yearsago, and it is made comprehensible to us by the addition of some auxiliary words. This is hardly mythological language, but rather a poetical and proverbial kind of expression known to all poets whether modern or ancient, and frequently to be found in the language of common people when it becomes proverbial.
“In Greece the mortal element, inherent in all gods, was eliminated to a great extent by the conception of heroes. Whatever was too human in the ancient legends told of Zeus and Apollo was transferred to so-called half gods or heroes, who were represented as the sons or favourites of the gods. The two-fold character of Herakles as a god and as a hero is acknowledged even by Herodotus, and some of his epithets would have been sufficient to indicate his solar and originally divine character. But in order to make some of the legends told of the solar deity possible or conceivable, it was necessary to represent Herakles as a more human being, and to make him rise to the seat of the immortals only after he had endured toils and sufferings incompatible with the dignity of an Olympian god.”[50]The divinities of a second and third order, who were sometimes solicited for special favours, were perhaps placed in the same category as some provincial or local saints, who were considered more accessible and more pitiful in certain places, just as some physicians make a practice of curing those ills only of which they had made a speciality.
There were also abstract divinities, representing certain virtues in the eyes of the people, which were highly esteemed and useful to possess; each of these qualities which were conceived separately, and considered in the superlative degree, were from that time raised to the rank of a divine person, thus altars and temples were dedicated to Courage, Strength, and Piety; Fame was likewise thus honoured. “Great Fame is never lost though scattered abroad,” said Hesiod, “it is in itself a divinity.”
The language of mythology was in use at a late period. History tells us that the Greek town of Cyrene in Libya was founded about the thirty-seventh Olympiad, the ruling race came from Thessaly; the foundation of the colony was due to the oracle of Apollo at Pytho. This simple historical fact has been thus rendered, from the habit of not recounting events as they happened. “The heroic maid Cyrene, who lived in Thessaly, was loved by Apollo, and carried off to Libya.”
The question has been often asked, what can be the origin of the fables which are identical in character and form, whether we find them on Indian, Greek, Italian, Persian, Slavonic, Celtic, or Teutonic soil. Was there a period of temporary insanity, through which the human mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in the south of India and in the north of Ireland? The necessity of solving this problem became more imperative when collections of these ancient traditions were brought from countries which formerly were almost unknown to us; incredible tales came from all parts, from amongst the Hottentots, the Patagonians, Zulus, Esquimaux, and Mongols; in all cases we were able to recognise the fables with which we were already so well acquainted, from having seen them in Aryan literature. When Max Müller first published his essays on the Greek myths, the mythologists acknowledged generally that it was very natural he should devote so much time to the explanation of the Greek legends, since these same stories had been universally found in all parts of the globe, from the one pole to the other; stories of men and women turned into trees, trees transformed into men, men behaving as animals, animals talking as if they were men, men swallowed by gods and brought up again whole, as were the children of Kronos; in all places the same adventures were told of the sun and moon, also swallowed, but the swallower not known. The Greek myths—so it was asserted by thelearned who did not care to abandon the old paths—form only one page of that vast mythology created by the disordered imagination of nations in their infancy; the epidemic was general, and it is useless to seek for a definite or peculiar meaning in such and such a local myth.
Nevertheless, in presence of these striking likenesses, impartial and clear-sighted science recognised that there must be something in the human mind that of necessity tended to mythology, nay, that there must be some reason in all the unreason that goes by the name of myth. That “something” Max Müller discovered to be language, in its natural progress from roots to words, up to definite and special names. Mythology has now been acknowledged to be an inevitable phase in the growth of language and thought; a form of expression which changes non-personal beings into personal, and all relationships into actions; it is a mental phenomenon so peculiar that it would be difficult to avoid the admission that it emanated from a distinct stratum, it is metaphoric language and thought; and it is the duty of the geologist of language to establish the authenticity of this epoch of organic life in humanity, which is contemporaneous with the most ancient forms of language.
If Hegel compares the discovery of the common origin of Greek and Sanscrit to that of a new world, the same may be said with regard to the common origin of all the mythologies, for already the science of Comparative Mythology has risen to the same importance as Comparative Philology.
The supposition that grammatical gender of nouns must necessarily be the cause of personification, and produce myths which had no previous existence at the time when this denotation of sex did not yet exist, has been proved incorrect. But the following fact, which concerns language more than mythology, is not so evident at first sight, viz., that however the various languages may differ externally,and however they may lack gender, yet they have without exception what is analogous to it, and takes its place; this is a system of fundamental classification to which all equally submit, and which each language supplies; the result is that at the foundation of thought common to all humanity, certain forms are found answering the purpose of gender. Each myth and each legend was at first the intelligible expression of an intelligible thought, and as the thought contained in each recital must evidently be the same wherever there were men to repeat it, the science of Comparative Mythology seeks to place its hand on the expression which best renders this one and the selfsame thought, under different aspects.
What is commonly called Hindoo mythology is of little or no avail for comparative purposes, because nothing is systematically arranged. Names are used in one hymn of the Rig-Veda as appellatives, in another as names of gods. There are as yet no genealogies, and no recorded marriages between gods and goddesses. As the conception of the poet varied, so varied the nature of these gods; the myths are arranged with little order. Nowhere is the wide distance which separates the ancient poems of India from the most ancient literature of Greece more clearly felt than when we compare the growing myths of the Veda with the full-grown, or already decaying myths on which the poetry of Homer is founded. The Veda is the real theogony of the Aryan races, while that of Hesiod is a copy only of the original image. The Hindoo Rishis differed much amongst themselves in their representation of things; some of them attributed the dispersion of clouds by a solar hero, to the will of some supreme or divine being; others considered the combatants to be the supreme beings themselves, who dispersed the clouds full of lightning and thunder, making the sky serene after the fight. These are the two distinct interpretations of the solar and atmospheric schools; the dualism in nature,which at a later period took the character of light and darkness, even of good and evil, was at the beginning the dualism of day and night, spring and winter, life and death, represented by the two great luminaries of the physical world.
The characteristic traits of the moon which made the deepest impression on our ancestors were its increase, and afterwards its gradual diminution, until its total disappearance. The eclipses, though filling the minds of the people with sudden fear at first, did not continue long to awaken dread or curiosity, as they were of rare occurrence and transitory; the moon, it was thought, was swallowed and afterwards disgorged by some hostile power; but the monthly increase and diminution required some other explanation. The Hindoos, in seeking to discover the abode of the gods and of their own ancestors, assigned the brilliant sky to the former, and where, therefore, should the Fathers live if not in the vast vault and in the moon? This was, in fact, the belief of the whole Aryan race. But the subject is complicated, since in an earlier period of lunar mythology, we find in the Vedic Pantheon a divinity of the name of Soma, which certain poets identify with the plant of that name, whose intoxicating juice played an important part in the sacrifices; there is no doubt a great obscurity with regard to these two rival powers, to which the same name had been given, and on which mythologists have found it difficult to enlighten us; but quite recently exponents of the Rig-Veda have discovered that Soma originally meant the moon itself, thus the Rishis allow it to be apparent in their hymns that there were at one time two Somas—the plant and its juice, and at an earlier period the other Soma, known only to the old Brahmans, which was the moon. A belief held by the Hindoos was that the moon supplied nourishment to the gods, which was the cause of the diminution; its increase was explained by the entrance into it of the souls of their ancestors; thegods swallowing these also as an integral portion of the moon.
All these ideas were of slow development, and of successive growth; no portion of mythology had a systematic elaboration.
I will add as a curious scientific fact, that lately botanists have sought in vain in Northern India and in Persia for a plant whose qualities correspond to those of the Soma as described in the Vedic hymns; they are more or less agreed that it must be akin to theEphedra, but as this plant abounded in the whole country between Siberia and the Iberian Peninsula, there was no hope of discovering the locality of the Aryans by means of the habitat of the plant.
It has been often asserted that these stories of men and things that have been swallowed must have come from countries formerly inhabited by cannibals; learned writers, even Herbert Spencer—to quote one instance—consider, not without some appearance of reason, that Hindoos, Greeks, Romans and Germans could hardly have put forth similar stories of this kind had there been no foundation in fact. But the verbs to eat, to swallow, will admit of divers interpretations; we say of a man that it was impossible for him to swallow such an insult, or that he has consumed his fortune; and this mode of speech surprises no one; where we speak of an eclipse, the inhabitants of the shores of the Baltic say that the moon or sun is in the act of being eaten; in India instead of saying such an one has been flogged, it would be said, he has tasted the whip. A little reflection will convince us that if nations who had nothing in common but human nature, spoke of the night as covering, hiding, swallowing various beings, especially the sun and the day, it was not more unreasonable on their part than to say, as we do, that day and night follow each other, instead of expressing ourselves after a more scientific manner, and not lesscorrectly, in saying that day and night are the successive effects of the rotation of the earth on its axis.
Having discovered that mythological phraseology was sometimes due to misconceptions of names, and that poetical fantasies had their share, philologists quoted an instance of the imagination being misled by a simple mistake; that of the name “Great Bear” being given to a certain group of stars. The Sanscrit rootArksignified to brighten, to praise, to glorify, to celebrate; man praised, glorified, celebrated the sun, moon and stars; for these purposes the wordArkwas used. For all we know the substantiverikmay really have conveyed all these meanings during the earliest period of the Aryan language; but if we look at the fully developed branches of that family of speech, we find that in this, its simplest form,rikhas been divested of all meaning in the Rig-Veda except one; it only means a song of praise, a hymn, that gladdens the heart of man, and brightens the countenance of the gods. The other words, however, which rik might have expressed were not entirely given up, but the root was rendered more definite; thusarkiandarkiswere formed, these no longer meant hymns of praise, but light, ray. It is difficult to understand howRiksha, in the sense of bright, has become the name of “the bear”; might it not be on account of his brilliant tawny fur, or from his bright eyes? No one knows. Certain it is that in Sanscrit bears were calledRiksha. But the wordRikshahad also another meaning, as shown by a passage in the Rig-Veda 1, 24, 10. “These stars (riksha) fixed high above, which are seen by night; whither did they go by day?” The Commentator observed that the wordrikshais not used in the sense of stars in general, but that according to tradition the name is only given to that particular constellation, which in later Sanscrit is called “the Seven Rishis,” or “the Seven Sages.” And thus it happened that when the dispersion took place,and the Aryans left their primitive home and settled in Europe, they ceased to use the plural form “Arktoi,” or many bears, and spoke of the group of seven stars as the Bear, the Great Bear, without knowing why these stars had originally received that name.
It did not escape the notice even of the less erudite that the gods of Greece and Rome and of other Aryan nations had a close connection with the most striking phenomena of nature; they also recognised the same origin amongst the divinities of the Semitic nations, as well as those of Egypt, Africa and America; this could, of course, be accounted for by the presence of the same primitive stratum of human thought, resembling those deeper geological layers, which only show themselves in a partial and fragmentary manner.
But none of these mythologists attached the least importance to thenamesof the divinities, and if they were told that they were nothing but names, it sounded almost like heresy to them, and they ignored the fact that one of the latest scientific discoveries was being submitted to them. Yet it is indubitable that the sun and the moon were in the places occupied by them at present before they were named; but not till they were named was there a Savitar, a Helios, a Selene or a Mene. If then it is the name which makes the gods in mythology, in enabling us to distinguish one from another, it follows that we must call the Science of Language to our aid in order to solve the problem of mythology, since that alone discloses the causes which have despoiled the names of their primitive meaning, and that alone shows how the germs of decrepitude, inherent in language, affect both the phonetic portion and also the signification of words, since words naturally react on thought and mould it.