CHAPTER V
MYTH
Panic. Tuesday. Money. Sorcery. Man.
Let us take two common English words, panic and cereal, and compare them etymologically; we owe both of them to the personages of classical mythology. Cereal comes to us from Ceres, the Roman goddess of corn and flowers, and panic is from Pan, a Greek Nature-god, who was regarded as the protector of flocks and herds. But here the resemblance ends; for not only is one Latin and the other Greek, but one is the name of an object which we can touch and see, while the other relates to that inner world of human consciousness which cannot be grasped with hands. Now it is important to notice that the word is very much more closely connected with the thing in the case of panic than in the case of cereal. Certainly, we are interested to know that one of our words for corn is derived from the name of a Roman goddess, but we do not feel that it has much effect on our own ideas about corn. We feel, in fact, that a study of the word cereal will tell us something about Rome, but very little either about corn or about ourselves. With panic it is different. In that intangible inner world words are themselves, as it were, the solid materials. Yet they are not solid as stones are, but rather as human faces, which sometimes change their form as the inner man changes, and sometimes, remaining practically unaltered, express with the same configuration a developed personality. “Human speech and human thought,” said the psychologist, Wundt, “are everywhere coincident.... The development of human consciousness includes in itself the development of modes of expression. Language is an essential element of the function of thinking.”
There was a time when no such word as panic existed, just as there was a time when no such word as electric existed, and in this case, as in the other, before the word first sprang into life in somebody’s imagination, humanity’s whole awareness of the phenomenon which we describe as ‘panic’ must have been a different thing. The word marks a discovery in the inner world of consciousness,[22] just as electric[23] marks a discovery in the outer world of physical phenomena. Now it was said that the connection of the latter word, in its Greek form, with amber would be informative if we had no other means of determining the electrical properties of that substance. Words like panic are important, because we really have no other means of determining how the ancients, who lived before the days of literature and written records, thought and felt about such matters. The word enables us to realize that the early Greeks could become conscious of this phenomenon, and thus name it, because they felt the presence of an invisible being who swayed the emotions of flocks and herds. And it also reveals how this kind of outlook[24] changed slowly into the abstract idea which the modern individual strives to express when he uses the word panic. At last, as that idea grows more abstract still, the expression itself may change; yet, just as the power to think of the “quality” of an article was shown to be the gift of Plato, so it would be impossible for us to think, feel, or say such things as ‘crowd-psychology’ or ‘herd-instinct’ if the Greeks had not thought, felt, said ‘Pan’—as impossible as it would be to have the leaf of a plant without first having a seed tucked into the warm earth. Hero, which originally meant a being who was half-human and half-divine, is a similar descendant from Greek religion which could not be extinguished from our vocabulary without restricting our outlook.
As to the number of words which are indirectly descended from prehistorical religious feeling, it is not possible to count them. We can only say that the farther back language as a whole is traced, the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence or malignance—what may be called the soul-qualities—of natural phenomena, such as clouds or plants or animals, make a more vivid impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances.[25] Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical influence. But, as the period which has elapsed since the beginning of the Aryan culture is only a tiny fragment of the whole epoch during which man has been able to speak, it is only in glimpses that we can perceive this; in a word here and a word there we trace but the final stages of a vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind of outlook which we loosely describe as ‘mythological’ to the kind which we may describe equally loosely as ‘intellectual thought’. To comprehend the process fully, we must build up the rest of it in the imagination, just as, from seeing a foot of cliff crumble away at Dover, we may set wings to time and call up the immemorial formation of the English Channel.
The English words diurnal, diary, dial are derived from the Latin ‘dies’ (day), while journal comes to us, via the French language, from the same word. These syllables conceal among themselves the central religious conception common to the Aryan nations. As far back as we can trace them, the Sanskrit word ‘dyaus’, the Greek ‘zeus’ (accusative ‘dia’), and the Teutonic ‘tiu’ were all used in contexts where we should use the word sky; but the same words were also used to mean God, the Supreme Being, the Father of all the other gods—Sanskrit ‘Dyaus pitar’, Greek ‘Zeus pater’, Illyrian ‘Deipaturos’, Latin ‘Juppiter’ (old form ‘Diespiter’). We can best understand what this means if we consider how the English word heaven and the French ‘ciel’ are still used for a similar double purpose, and how it was once not a double purpose at all. Indeed, there must still be English and French people for whom the spiritual ‘heaven’ is identical with the visible sky. But if we are to judge from language, we must assume that when our earliest ancestors looked up to the blue vault they felt that they saw not merely a place, whether heavenly or earthly, but the bodily vesture, as it were, of a living Being. And this fact is still extant in the formal resemblance between such words as diary and divine.
The French ‘Dieu’, with its close resemblance to ‘dies’, retains the luminous suggestion of day and sky very much more vividly than any of our words from the same stem, but we have kept the Teutonic form nearly intact in Tuesday. The fact that ‘Tiu’s day’ came in as a translation of the Latin ‘Dies Martis’ (surviving in French ‘mardi’) also suggests that for the Teutons, alone among the Aryans, the supreme Father-God afterwards became their god of war; and this may throw some light both on their fundamental character and on the nature of the experiences which they encountered during the thousand odd years of their sojourn in the northern forests.
It must not be assumed that the “ancestors” spoken of above are identical with the Aryans described in Chapter I. By the time of the dispersion the thought of “sky” may have been quite separated in the average Aryan mind from the thought of “God”, or it may not have been. We cannot say; we only know that at one time, among the speakers of the Aryan language, these two thoughts were one and the same. It is impossible to fix a point in time, and then to cut a kind of cross-section, and define the exact relation between language and thought at that particular moment. This relation—and especially in the domain of religion—is a fluid and flickering thing, varying incredibly in individual minds, leaping up and sinking down like a flame from one generation to another. Consequently no two theories on the religious beliefs held by the Aryans in the third millennium B.C. are alike; and we are concerned here only with those modern words which are the product of Aryan religious consciousness at some time or another in its history.
They come to us, naturally, by different routes, a few by the south-eastern and any number by the north-western group. Pariah, a non-Aryan word which has come into our language from the East, derives its peculiar forcibility from the age-old division of India’s population into castes. Ignite is from the Latin ‘ignis’, which is derived from the same parent word as the Sanskrit ‘Agni’, the fire-god. In magic we have a reminiscence of the Persian ‘Magi’, mighty prophets and interpreters of dreams, of whom three were said to have found their way to Bethlehem; but unless it be in the modern trade-name Mazda, there is little, if any, trace in our language of the great Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, with its everlasting conflict between light and darkness, Ahura Mazdao and Ahriman. The meagreness in our language of these relics of Hindoo and Persian religion is again eloquent of the total separation of the north-western and south-eastern Aryans. The whole vast structure of Eastern philosophy, with its intricate classifications cutting completely across our own, was practically a sealed book to the West until after the French re-established a commercial connection with India in the eighteenth century. Signs are not wanting, however, that the rapid growth of interest in this ancient and lofty outlook, which has taken place in Europe during the last fifty years, may enrich our vocabulary with some extracts from the ancient terminology, such, for example, as maya—the soul’s external environment considered as being ‘illusion’, or as obscuring and concealing the spiritual reality, and karma, the destiny of an individual as it is developed from incarnation to incarnation.
To turn from these nations to a member of the north-western group, such as Greece, is like passing from an arid desert into a land flowing with milk and honey. Panic and hero have already been mentioned. Iris (the flower, and also the part of the human eye), together with the beautiful word iridescent, have come to us from the Greek goddess Iris, whose outer form was the rainbow. Titanic is from the Titans, huge earth-beings who rebelled against God much as did the fallen angels in Genesis. Hermetically (in ‘hermetically sealed’) comes to us from the Greek messenger-god, Hermes, by a roundabout route (see Chapter VII); and in more or less common use are Aphrodisiac, Apolline, Asia, Atlas, chimera, daedal, Dionysiac, Elysian, Europe, Hades, harmony, lethal, Muse and music, mystery, nemesis, nymph, paean, panacea, phaeton, protean, satyr, siren, stygian. The word erotic, from Eros, a Greek god of love, is an interesting example of the way in which the experiences of past civilizations evaporate into essential refinements of modern speech. Because of differences between Greece and Rome, which it took about two thousand years to work out on the stage of history, we are now able to make a fine distinction, such as that between erotic and amorous.
The true Roman god of love, however, though in the world of phantasy he still survives in his original form, Cupid, has only actually entered our language in the word cupidity. In the difference between the material associations of cupidity and the more imaginative ones of erotic we begin already to divine a fundamental dissimilarity between Greek and Roman mythology. Other words which come to us from Roman religion are cereal, genius, fate, fortune, fury, grace, June, mint, money, Saturday, vesta, the names of the planets, contemplate, sacrifice, temple, Host (from ‘hostia’, the victim which was sacrificed), augury, and auspice. The last two words take us back to the Roman custom of divining the will of the gods by watching the flights of birds. ‘Aves-specere’ meant ‘to see birds’, and we still have the first word preserved to us in aviary. Fury and grace are translations of Greek names; but in some of the others—especially money and mint, from the goddess Moneta—we behold the late reflection of a highly significant process. It is this: As time went on, Roman religious feeling quickly changed in two almost opposite ways. On the one hand it attached itself more and more to concrete and material objects, and, on the other, its gods and goddesses were felt less and less as living beings, and more and more as mere abstract intellectual “conceptions”. Yet these two changes were not really opposite, but complementary. For as the visible part of a goddess like Ceres became more and more solid, as she came more and more to be used simply as a synonym for corn, the invisible part of her naturally grew more and more attenuated. Thus, the mythical world was much less real to the Romans than it had been to the Greeks. It was more like a world of mental abstractions.
Soon there was a “god”, or part of a god, for every object and every activity under the sun, and when the empire was founded, each emperor, as he died, automatically became a divinity. To-day the first two “divine” emperors, Julius and Augustus, take their places beside Juno, the Queen of Heaven, in our monthly calendar. We may say, in fact, that by the time Christianity began to spread in the Roman Empire, Roman official religion had become divorced from feeling altogether, its dry bones remaining little more than a convenient system of nomenclature. Not that the new religion had no serious rivals; but the doctrines of Stoics and Epicureans, the Mystery Schools, and cults such as that of Mithras, had little historical connection with Roman mythology. Yet if Rome contributed no discoveries of value concerning the relations of human beings to the gods, it was perhaps for this very reason that she was able to concentrate more exclusively upon working out their relations with each other; and in so doing she created jurisprudence.
But in the later days of the empire, when this attenuation of the imaginative and supernatural element in Roman mythology had already gone beyond its logical conclusion, when Rome had absorbed the myths of Greece and Egypt and sterilized them both, the soul of Europe was stirring afresh in the north. Contact between the Roman tongue and that of their subjects, the Celtic “Galli” in north Italy and beyond the Alps, had grown more and more intimate. Gradually there came into being a sort of hybrid Low Latin, the father of modern French and the other Romance languages, which in many cases expressed Celtic notions and feelings in Latin forms. So it was that new life came to be breathed into some of the dead abstractions of Roman mythology; but it was a very different life from the old one. Thus, the old Roman deity Sors (Chance) had long ago developed for the Romans into a purely abstract idea, referring to the drawing of lots. But up in the north, far away from the capital, the ‘sortiarius’ became a mysterious teller of fortunes by that means. As the years went on, the syllables softened and smoothed and shortened themselves, until they became the old French ‘sorcier’ from which ‘sorcerie’ was formed, and so our English sorcery. It is strange to think how far this word has travelled from its origin; and in the work of a modern poet we find it travelling even farther, changing from a process into a sort of mysterious realm:
It was much the same with ‘Fata’. For the Romans themselves the old goddesses called the Fata, or Fates, turned quickly into an abstracted notion of destiny. But contact with the dreamy Celts breathed new life into their nostrils, and ‘Fata’ in Late Latin became spiritual once more. The sharp sounds were softened and abraded until they slipped imperceptibly into Old French ‘fée’ (Modern English fay), and so fa-ery and fairy. Demon is the result of a similar metamorphosis.
Now in dealing with mythology nothing is more misleading than to compare the gods of different nations, assuming that those who have etymologically similar names meant the same thing to their worshippers. For instance, it has been pointed out that the name Tiu descends from a word which also developed elsewhere into Dyaus and Zeus, but to suggest that Tiu was the “same god” as Zeus would be quite meaningless. And it is the same with the other persons of northern mythology, such as Thor, the thunder-god, from whom we have Thursday, or Wotan (Odin) who taught men language and gave up his eye in order to possess his beloved Fricka (Wednesday and Friday). There are many external resemblances, etymological and otherwise, between this Teutonic mythology and the mythology of Greece, but for the historical study of human consciousness it is the differences between them which are really significant. Here there is no room to consider either the resemblances or the differences, except in so far as they are preserved for us in the words we use. And we notice at once how small is the number of our words which refer to the Teutonic myths. Where relics still remain they seem to be either—like elf, goblin, pixy, puck, troll—the names of the creatures themselves, still used but no longer felt to exist, or else—like cobalt and nickel, the names given by German miners to demoniac spirits—they have lost all memory of their original meaning.
There are, of course, exceptions, such as Easter, from an old Teutonic goddess of the spring, Old Nick from ‘nicor’, a fabulous sea-monster, and nightmare from the demon Mara, while the concepts earth and lie (untruth) may possibly have been brought to birth in men’s minds by the divinities Erda and Loki. But compared with the number of derivations from older myths these examples are practically negligible. There is an accidental quality about them, and few have entered very deeply into our language. The Aryan family was now growing older and more firmly knit. While Slavs, Teutons, and Celts were still uncivilized, their cousins, the Greeks and Romans, had already developed an elaborate culture. Had the former been left alone like the latter, their mythology, too, might in time have grown down into the language. But that was not to be. The great Aryan family did not lose touch long enough. When Rome came, and with her Christianity, the missionaries naturally assured the believers in Thor and Wotan that Thor and Wotan were not. And coming, as they did, from a developed civilization, they not only ousted the old Teutonic gods from the language, but brought with them a supply of ready-made Greek and Latin words, many of which—did they but know it—drew their peculiar shades of meaning from a pagan mythology which they held in equal abhorrence. The classical gods and goddesses faded so slowly into the thin air of abstract thought that the process was hardly perceived, but the Nibelungs and Valkyries, the Siegfrieds and Fafnirs of Teutonic myth, were doomed while they were still alive. Thus our fathers beheld the death of Baldur with their own eyes, and were awake during the twilight of the gods.
Of course, where the events of Teutonic myth and legend were associated with a particular locality, they have left their mark in the names of places. These, naturally enough, are found for the most part in Germany. In Great Britain—apart from Asgardby, Aysgarth, Wayland Smith, Wansdyke, Wednesbury, and some others—the place-names that have come to us from pre-Christian religion are principally Celtic, and are usually found—like Cader Idris, Cader Arthur, Arthur’s Seat, Kynance Cove, ...—in Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. Apart from place-names, galahad is a relic of Celtic legend which has found a permanent place and a modern usage in the language; and there may be one or two others. But not many. In England the whole Celtic nation and language died early out of the common consciousness, and it died even more suddenly than the persons of Teutonic myth. This explains the freshness and delight which many young writers of the last generation found in the language and legend of Irish antiquity. To resuscitate, as Keats did, the invisible beings of classical mythology was to dig down into the roots of our present everyday outlook; to take part in the Celtic revival was to feel that you were looking out on the world through an entirely new window—or at any rate through one which had not been cleaned for centuries.
We only owe one English word to the Slavonic myths, and that is the unpleasant vampire, which was brought back from the East by travellers in the eighteenth century.
The general relation between language and myth is, as the word myth (Greek ‘muthos’—word) suggests, almost unfathomable; but before leaving the limited Aryan aspect, which is all we have had space to touch on here, one interesting etymology ought to be mentioned, which has sometimes been taken to conceal the whole root and purpose of Aryan culture in the history of mankind. The Hindoos look back to a great teacher called Manu. Whether this individual himself, or his name, is historical or mythical is not particularly important. Hindoo sacred language and literature reveal at any rate a prehistoric belief among certain classes of society that Manu was the originator of their culture and religion. Now ‘manu’ is also their word for man; and about this word, as it appears in the different Aryan languages, there are two interesting points. The first is that wherever it crops up it bears the double meaning of ‘human being’ and ‘member of the male sex’; the second that it is thought to be cognate with the root ‘men’, implying ‘to think’, which appears also in English mind, Latin ‘mens’,... We have seen that to the external view one of the most remarkable characteristics in which Aryans differed from the races they supplanted was their patriarchal system. The etymology of the word man suggests the inner reason for this, for it hints at a dim consciousness among the Aryans that the essential function of the human being—at any rate of the Aryan human being—is to think.
Side by side with the conception of the human being as a “thinker”, we find an instinctive feeling that the human race is especially represented by its male portion. To the Aryan outlook, wherever we find it, the human being is man, and God is God the Father. What exotic matriarchies may have held sway before humanity began to worship logic and masculinity we cannot say, for our language throws light only on that tiny portion of humanity’s inner and outer history which is the peculiar contribution of the Aryan races; and, in doing so, it suggests that, in spite of their tendency towards monogamy and a rigid family organization, the “subjection” of women has its roots very deep in Aryan psychology. In this respect Greece and Rome differed but little in essence from India and Persia. The impulse towards a different conception of women, both in their own minds and in the minds of men, which has been giving an increasing amount of trouble to the European races for the last two thousand years, was really, as we shall see, implanted in the Aryan outlook by foreign religions.