Abstract
II.
THE chapters on mythology, which naturally follow J- those on language, form an admirable summary of the history of myth from its vigorous infancy in the earlier ages of human thought through the various stages of growth and maturity onwards to second childhood, death by ossification of the heart, and final post-mortem existence through millenniums of disembowelled mummydom. Myth, in fact, is as ubiquitous, as multiform, as language. Nay, it is perhaps more ubiquitous, more multiform. The spaniel, who fawns on his master or flies at a beggar, who bays at the moon or cowers from the thunder, has evidently framed to himself some simple dog-theory in connection with certain phenomena, which is closely analogous to, if it be not absolutely identical with, a rudimentary myth. It is, indeed, probably not too much to say that wherever a phenomenon is stated or explained, whether with or without the intervention of language, there exists a myth, though a higher knowledge than that which creates the myth is always requisite in order to recognise its mythic character. The Ptolemaic system of astronomy, for instance, has been long ago conclusively demonstrated to be a myth, although a myth belonging to an advanced stage of culture, and a thousand and a thousand others are everywhere around us only waiting for the extension of knowledge to effect the metamorphosis requisite for their recognition. It is evident that if this theory of myth be even approximately correct, the statement or explanation of any phenomenon in language is in effect merely the creation of another phenomenon out of which' myth may be evolved adinfinitum; in short that myth is essentially the outcome of the complex action, reaction, interaction, and counteraction of human thought on the one hand, and the sensible phenomena of the universe, including those of language, on the other. The sensible phenomena of the universe may thus not inaptly be regarded from the standpoint of Democritus or Lucretius as continually throwing off films or likenesses of themselves, which fiims or likenesses, once seized and appropriated by language, become additional phenomena, with a vitality, so to speak, and reproductive power of their own. On the other hand, if, in accordance with the spirit of Scandinavian philosophy, we regard philosophy itself, art, poetry, science, morality, and religion all the products of human thought as a single living organism, we may then consider myth as the former substance of the organism, the physical atoms which have been gradually eliminated and replaced in the process of growth and development. Or, not to complicate matters by the introduction of evolution, civilised knowledge, as a whole, may be likened to an old canoe, of which no plank nor nail is the same as when she started on her first voyage, and myth to the old timbers and metal which once formed a part of her, but have now been some lost, some metamorphosed into wholly different shapes, some utilised again in the construction of other vessels. We can thus understand how every department of thought has absorbed and assimilated more or less of myth, how myth has absorbed and assimilated more or less of every product of the human intellect. It is, in fact, the non-appreciation of the true place of myth in human knowledge, which has led so many earlier students of mythology astray. One school looked on all mythology as crystallised poetry; another as indurated chronicle; a third as frozen philosophy; a fourth as petrified religion, and so forth; each school doing something towards really making mythology what it believed mythology to be, and all, as a net result, extracting from one of the most vitally-interesting investigations a mere caplt mortuum of doubly-distilled platitude, and quintessential commonplace. So long as “mythology “meant simply an acquaintance from without with the Greek and Roman Pantheon, such a result was, perhaps, inevitable. Unfortunately the doctrines of these schools are not even yet by any means universally recognised as being themselves mythic; and many of them are still to be found reproduced in contemporary works of no inconsiderable learning, to supply future students with illustrations of Mr. Tylor's theory of survival. It must be admitted, too, that even the late brilliant achievements of more scientific inquirers still leave a vast field untouched for classification and comparison. Nor is this task an easy one. A myth is always the statement or explanation of a phenomenon, and myths may thus be classified according to the phenomena to which they refer; but first of all “to catch your myth,“and then to determine the phenomenon to which it refers, are feats, for the most part, beyond the skill of ordinary students. An amusing instance of these difficulties is afforded by Mr. Tylor himself. “No legend,“he observes, “no allegory, no nursery rhyme, is safe from the her-meneutics of a thorough-going mythologic theorist. Should he, for instance, demand as his property the nursery ' Song of Sixpence,' his claim would be easily established: obviously the four-and-twenty blackbirds are the four-and-twenty hours, and the pie that holds them is the underlying earth, covered with the over-arching sky; how true a touch of nature it is that when the pie is opened that is, when day breaks, the birds begin to sing; the King is the Sun, and his counting out his money is pouring out the sunshine, the golden shower of Danae; the Queen is the Moon, and her transparent honey the moonlight; the Maid is the 'rosy-fingered' Dawn, who rises before the Sun, her master, and hangs out the clouds, his clothes, across the sky; the particular blackbird, who so tragically ends the tale by snipping off Jier nose, is the hour of sunrise. The time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing to prove it a Sun-myth, that one thing being a proof by some argument more valid than analogy.“This is exquisitely ingenious; but what if the rhyme should turn out to be, after all, only a quite genuine nursery riddle, of the type which Mr. Tylor has so admirably illustrated elsewhere? An archetypal clock, presented as a haute nouveaute to some Edward HI. or Richard II. would satisfy all the conditions of the enigma. The large circular face would represent the pie; the four-and-twenty hours duly figured thereon, in accordance with the liberal notions of archaic horology, would correspond to the four-and-twenty blackbirds; the striking, possibly with chimes, to the song of the birds; the king in his counting-house, counting out his money, would felicitously symbolise the hour-hand counting out the time, which is money, in majestic solitude, unaccompanied as yet by any fussy revolutionary minute-hand; the queen in the pantry, eating bread and honey, would typify the stealthy activity of the fine wheel-teeth of steel and brass; the maid in the garden, hanging out the clothes, would appropriately allegorise the wooden drum on which the weights were suspended by lines, at a distance from the works; while the magpie, which seems a preferable heading to “black-bird“who snaps off the maid's nose, would probably be none other than the ingenious mechanist who wound up the instrument, and, having done so, removed the key from the nozzle of the drum. Whatever may be thought of this interpretation, it seems exceedingly probable that the rhyme is really a riddle, and, indeed, many other unintelligible jingles are most likely referable to the same category. One of them, if a riddle, does also unquestionably enunciate a sun-myth. In the immortal Jack and Jill who went up a hill to fetch a pail of water, we may clearly recognise the sun and moon under an enigmatic, not to say riddle-iculous exterior, and after satisfying ourselves as to their identity, we may further admire the curious felicity with which the difference of sex between Helios and Selene' etymologically identical with the difference between leos, a lion, and leaina, a lioness is indicated in the English ditty. To return, however, from the precincts of the nursery, Prof. Max Miiller, with a natural bias in the direction of his own brilliant researches, seems to ascribe the origin of myth somewhat too exclusively to the influence of language, just as in his interpretation of myth he appears to pay a rather too marked attention to the Dawn-Goddess to do full justice to the claims of other less seductive divinities. The Professor himself, however, will probably be among the first to recognise the value of Mr. Tylor's distinction between material and verbal myth, and to acquiesce in the classification which considers the former as primary, the latter as secondary in the order of evolution.
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Primitive Culture* . Nature 4, 138–140 (1871). https://doi.org/10.1038/004138a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/004138a0