All such truths are analytic, that is, they are true, not merely for a given time or place, but at all times and places conceivable, or, time and space out of the question, they still remain formally true. Of course, therefore, they cannot refer to historic occurrences nor phenomena. The modern position, that truth lies in facts, must be forsaken, and with the ancients, we must place it in ideas.
If we define inspiration as that condition of mind which is in the highest degree sensitive to the presence of such truth, we have of it the only worthy idea which it is possible to frame. The object of scientific investigation is to reach a truth which can neither be denied nor doubted. If religion is willing to content itself with any lower form of truth, it cannot support its claims to respect, let alone reverence.
It may be said that the subjects with which the religious sentiment concerns itself are not such as are capable of this absolute expression. This is, however, disclaimed by all great reformers, and by none more emphatically than by him who said: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my statements (λογοι) shall not pass away.” There is clear reference here to absolute truths. If what we know of God, duty and life, is not capable of expression except in historic narrative and synthetic terms, the sooner we drop their consideration the better. That form sufficed for a time, but can no longer, when a higher is generally known. As the mathematical surpasses the historic truth, so the former is in turn transcended by the purely logical, and in this, if anywhere, religion must rest its claims for recognition. Here is the arena of the theology of the future, not in the decrees of councils, nor in the records of past time.
Inspiration, in its religious sense, we may, therefore, define to be that condition of mind in which the truths relating to deity and duty become in whole or in part the subjects of immediate perception.
That such a condition is possible will be granted. Every reformer who has made a permanent betterment in the religion of his time has possessed it in some degree. He who first conceived the Kosmos under logical unity as an orderly whole, had it in singular power; so too had he who looking into the mind became aware of its purposive laws which are the everlasting warrants of duty. Some nations have possessed it in remarkable fulness, none more so than the descendants of Abraham, from himself, who left his kindred and his father’s house at the word of God, through many eminent seers down to Spinoza, who likewise forsook his tribe to obey the inspirations vouchsafed him; surpassing them all, Jesus of Nazareth, to whose mind, as he waxed in wisdom, the truth unfolded itself in such surpassing clearness that neither his immediate disciples nor any generations since have fathomed all the significance of his words.
Such minds do not need development and organic transmission of thought to enrich their stores. We may suppose the organization of their brains to be so perfect that their functions are always accordant with true reasoning, so self-prompting, that a hint of the problem is all they ask to arrive at its demonstration. Blaise Pascal, when a boy of twelve, whose education had been carefully restrained, once asked his father what is geometry. The latter replied that it is a method devised to draw figures correctly, but forbade any further inquiry about it. On this hint Pascal, by himself, unassisted, without so much as knowing the name of a line or circle, reached in a few weeks to the demonstration of the thirty-second problem of the first book of Euclid! Is it not possible for a mind equally productive of religious truth to surpass with no less ease its age on such subjects?
As what Newton so well called “patient thought,” constant application, prolonged attention, is the means on which even great minds must rely in order to reach the sempiternal verities of science, so earnest continued prayer is that which all teachers prescribe as the only avenue to inspiration in its religious sense. While this may be conceded, collaterals of the prayer have too often been made to appear trivial and ridiculous.
In the pursuit of inspiration the methods observed present an interesting similarity. The votary who aspires to a communion with the god, shuts himself out from the distraction of social intercourse and the disturbing allurements of the senses. In the solitude of the forest or the cell, with complete bodily inaction, he gives himself to fasting and devotion, to a concentration of all his mind on the one object of his wish, the expected revelation. Waking and sleeping he banishes all other topics of thought, perhaps by an incessant repetition of a formula, until at last the moment comes, as it surely will come in some access of hallucination, furor or ecstasy, the unfailing accompaniments of excessive mental strain, when the mist seems to roll away from the mortal vision, the inimical powers which darkened the mind are baffled, and the word of the Creator makes itself articulate to the creature.
Take any connected account of the revelation of the divine will, and this history is substantially the same. It differs but little whether told of Buddha Sakyamuni, the royal seer of Kapilavastu, or by Catherine Wabose, the Chipeway squaw,105 concerning the Revelations of St. Gertrude of Nivelles or of Saint Brigida, or in the homely language of the cobbler George Fox.
For six years did Sakyamuni wander in the forest, practising the mortifications of the flesh and combatting the temptations of the devil, before the final night when, after overcoming the crowning enticements of beauty, power and wealth, at a certain moment he became the “awakened,” and knew himself in all his previous births, and with that knowledge soared above the “divine illusion” of existence. In the cave of Hari, Mohammed fasted and prayed until “the night of the divine decisions;” then he saw the angel Gabriel approach and inspire him:
“A revelation was revealed to him:
One terrible in power taught it him,
Endowed with wisdom. With firm step stood he,
There, where the horizon is highest,
Then came he near and nearer,
A matter of two bowshots or closer,
And he revealed to his servant a revelation;
He has falsified not what he saw.”106
With not dissimilar preparation did George Fox seek the “openings” which revealed to him the hollowness of the Christianity of his day, in contrast to the truth he found. In his Journal he records that for months he “fasted much, walked around in solitary places, and sate in hollow trees and lonesome places, and frequently in the night walked mournfully about.” When the word of truth came to him it was of a sudden, “through the immediate opening of the invisible spirit.” Then a new life commenced for him: “Now was I come up in Spirit through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God. All things were new: all the creation gave another smell unto me than before.” The healing virtues of all herbs were straightway made known to him, and the needful truths about the kingdom of God.107
These are portraitures of the condition of entheasm. Its lineaments are the same, find it where we may.
How is this similarity to be explained? Is it that this alleged inspiration is always but the dream of a half-crazed brain? The deep and real truths it has now and then revealed, the noble results it has occasionally achieved, do not allow this view. A more worthy explanation is at hand.
These preliminaries of inspiration are in fact but a parody, sometimes a caricature, of the most intense intellectual action as shown in the efforts of creative thought. The physiological characteristics of such mental episodes indicate a lowering of the animal life, the respiration is faint and slow, the pulse loses in force and frequency, the nerves of special sense are almost inhibited, the eye is fixed and records no impression, the ear registers no sound, necessary motions are performed unconsciously, the condition approaches that of trance. There is also an alarming similarity at times between the action of genius and of madness, as is well known to alienists.
When the creative thought appears, it does so suddenly; it breaks upon the mind when partly engaged with something else as an instantaneous flash, apparently out of connection with previous efforts. This is the history of all great discoveries, and it has been abundantly illustrated from the lives of inventors, artists, poets and mathematicians. The links of such a mental procedure we do not know. “The product of inspiration, genius, is incomprehensible to itself. Its activity proceeds on no beaten track, and we seek in vain to trace its footsteps. There is no warrant for the value of its efforts. This it can alone secure through voluntary submission to law. All its powers are centred in the energy of production, and none is left for idle watching of the process.”108
The prevalent theory of the day is that this mental action is one essentially hidden from the mind itself. The name “unconscious cerebration” has been proposed for it by Dr. Carpenter, and he has amply and ably illustrated its peculiarities. But his theory has encountered just criticism, and I am persuaded does not meet the requirements of the case. Whether at such moments the mind actually receives some impulse from without, as is the religious theory, or, as science more willingly teaches, certain associations are more easily achieved when the mind is partially engaged with other trains of ideas, we cannot be sure. We can only say of it, in the words of Dr. Henry Maudsley, the result “is truly an inspiration, coming we know not whence.” Whatever it is, we recognize in it the original of that of which religious hallucination is the counterfeit presentment. So similar are the processes that their liability to be confounded has been expressly guarded against.109
The prevalence of such caricatures does not prove the absence of the sterling article. They rather show that the mind is conscious of the possibility of reaching a frame or mood in which it perceives what it seeks, immediately and correctly. Buddhism distinctly asserts this to be the condition of “the stage of intuitive insight;” and Protestant Christianity commenced with the same opinion. Every prayer for guidance in the path of duty assumes it. The error is in applying such a method where it is incompatible, to facts of history and the phenomena of physical force. Confined to the realm of ideas, to which alone the norm of the true and untrue is applicable, there is no valid evidence against, and many theoretical reasons for, respecting prayer as a fit psychological preparation for those obscure and unconscious processes, through which the mind accomplishes its best work.
The intellect, exalted by dwelling upon the sublimest subjects of thought, warmed into highest activity by the flames of devotion, spurning as sterile and vain the offers of time and the enticements of sense, may certainly be then in the mood fittest to achieve its greatest victories. But no narrowed heaven must cloud it, no man-made god obstruct its gaze. Free from superstition and prejudice, it must be ready to follow wherever the voice of reason shall lead it. All inspired men have commenced by freeing themselves from inherited forms of Belief in order that with undiverted attention they might listen to the promptings of the divinity within their souls. One of the greatest of them and one the most free from the charge of prejudice, has said that to this end prayer is the means.110
He who believes that the ultimate truth is commensurate with reason, finds no stumbling-block in the doctrine that there may be laws through whose action inspiration is the enlightenment of mind as it exists in man, by mind as it underlies the motions which make up matter. The truth thus reached is not the formulæ of the Calculus, nor the verbiage of the Dialectic, still less the events of history, but that which gives what validity they have to all of these, and moreover imparts to the will and the conscience their power to govern conduct.
THE MYTH AND THE MYTHICAL CYCLES
SUMMARY
Myths are inspirations concerning the Unknown. Science treats them as apperceptions of the relations of man and nature. Moments of their growth, as treated by mythological science. Their similar forms, explained variously, the topic of the philosophy of mythology. The ante-mythical period. Myths have centred chiefly around three subjects, each giving rise to a Mythical Cycle.
I. The Epochs of Nature.
The idea of Time led to the myth of a creation. This starting the question, What was going on before creation? recourse was had to the myth of recurrent epochs. The last epoch gave origin to the Flood Myths; the coming one to that of the Day of Judgment.
II. The Paradise lost and to be re-gained.
To man, the past and the future are ever better than the present. He imagines a Golden Age in the past and believes it will return. The material Paradise he dreams of in his ruder conditions, becomes a spiritual one with intellectual advancement. The basis of this belief.
III. The Hierarchy of the Gods.
The earliest hierarchy is a dual classification of the gods into those who help and those who hinder the fruition of desire. Light and darkness typify the contrast. Divinity thus conceived under numerical separateness. Monotheisms do not escape this. The triune nature of single gods. The truly religious and only philosophic notion of divinity is under logical, not mathematical unity. This discards mythical conceptions.
CHAPTER V
THE MYTH AND THE MYTHICAL CYCLES
Returning again to the definition of the elemental religious sentiment – “a Wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power” – it enables us to class all those notions, opinions and narratives, which constitute mythologies, creeds and dogmas, as theories respecting the nature and action of the unknown power. Of course they are not recognized as theories. They arise unconsciously or are received by tradition, oral or written, and always come with the stamp of divinity through inspiration and revelation. None but a god can tell the secrets of the gods.
Therefore they are the most sacred of all things, and they partake of the holiness and immutability which belong to the unknown power itself. To misplace a vowel point in copying the sacred books was esteemed a sin by the Rabbis, and a pious Mussulman will not employ the same pen to copy a verse of the Koran and an ordinary letter. There are many Christians who suppose the saying: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Words shall not pass away,” has reference to the words of the Old and New Testament. “What shall remain to us,” asked Ananda, the disciple of Buddha, “when thou shalt have gone hence into Nirvana?” “My Word (dharma),” replied the Master. Names thus came to be as holy as the objects to which they referred. So sacred was that of Jehovah to the Israelites that its original sound was finally lost. Such views are consistent enough to the Buddhist, who, assuming all existence to be but imaginary, justly infers that the name is full as much as the object.
The science of mythology has made long strides in the last half century. It has left far behind it the old euphemeristic view that the myth is a distorted historical tradition, as well as the theories not long since in vogue, that it was a system of natural philosophy, a device of shrewd rulers, or as Bacon thought, a series of “instructive fables.” The primitive form of the myth is now recognized to be made up from the notions which man gains of the manifestations of force in external nature, in their supposed relations to himself. In technical language it may be defined as the apperception of man and nature under synthetic conceptions.111
This primitive form undergoes numerous changes, to trace and illustrate which, has been the special task assumed by the many recent writers on mythology. In some instances these changes are owing to the blending of the myth with traditions of facts, forming a quasi-historical narrative, the saga; in others, elaborated by a poetic fancy and enriched by the imagination, it becomes a fairy tale, the märchen. Again, the myth being a product of creative thought, existing in words only, as language changes, it alters through forgetfulness of the earlier meanings of words, through similarities in sounds deceiving the ear, or through a confusion of the literal with the metaphorical signification of the same word. The character of languages also favors or retards such changes, pliable and easily modified ones, such as those of the American Indians, and in a less degree those of the Aryan nations, favoring a developed mythology, while rigid and monosyllabic ones, as the Chinese and Semitic types, offer fewer facilities to such variations. Furthermore, tribal or national history, the peculiar difficulties which retard the growth of a community, and the geographical and climatic character of its surroundings, give prominence to certain features in its mythology, and to the absence of others. Myths originally diverse are blended, either unconsciously, as that of the Roman Saturn with the Greek Cronus; or consciously, as when the medieval missionaries transferred the deeds of the German gods to Christian saints. Lastly, the prevailing temperament of a nation, its psychology, gives a strong color to its mythical conceptions, and imprints upon them the national peculiarities.
The judicious student of mythology must carefully weigh all these formative agents, and assign each its value. They are all present in every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a myth and these governing agencies.
Such is the science of mythology. The philosophy of mythology undertakes to set forth the unities of form which exist in various myths, and putting aside whatever of this uniformity is explainable historically, proposes to illustrate from what remains the intellectual need myths were unconsciously framed to gratify, to measure their success in this attempt, and if they have not been wholly successful, to point out why and in what respect they have failed. In a study preliminary to the present one, I have attempted to apply the rules of mythological science to the limited area of the native American race; in the present chapter I shall deal mainly with the philosophy of mythology.
The objection may be urged at starting that there is no such unity of form in myths as the philosophy of mythology assumes; that if it appears, it is always explainable historically.
A little investigation sets this objection aside. Certain features must be common to all myths. A divinity must appear in them and his doings with men must be recorded. A reasonable being can hardly think at all without asking himself, “Whence come I, my fellows, and these things which I see? And what will become of us all?” So some myth is sure to be created at an early stage of thought which the parent can tell the child, the wise man his disciple, containing responses to such questions.
But this reasoning from probability is needless, for the similarity of mythical tales in very distant nations, where no hypothesis of ancient intercourse is justified, is one of the best ascertained and most striking discoveries of modern mythological investigation.112 The general character of “solar myths” is familiar to most readers, and the persistency with which they have been applied to the explanation of generally received historical facts, as well as to the familiar fairy tales of childhood, has been pushed so far as to become the subject of satire and caricature. The myths of the Dawn have been so frequently brought to public notice in the popular writings of Professor Max Müller, that their general distribution may be taken as well known. The same may be said of the storm myths. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who thought deeply on the religious nature of man, said early in this century: “Wholly similar myths can very readily arise in different localities, each independent of the others.”113
This similarity is in a measure owing to the similar impressions which the same phenomenon, the sunrise or the thunder-storm for instance, makes on the mind – and to this extent the science of mythology is adequate to its explanation. But that it falls short is so generally acknowledged, that various other explanations have been offered.
These may be classed as the skeptical explanation, which claims that the likeness of the myths is vastly exaggerated and much more the work of the scholar at his desk than of the honest worshipper; the historical explanation, which suggests unrecorded proselytisms, forgotten communications and the possible original unity of widely separated nations; the theological explanations, often discrepant, one suggesting caricatures of the sacred narrative inspired by the Devil, another reminiscences of a primeval inspiration, and a third the unconscious testimony of heathendom to orthodoxy;114 and lastly the metaphysical explanation, which seems at present to be the fashionable one, expressed nearly alike by Steinthal and Max Müller, which cuts the knot by crediting man with “an innate consciousness of the Absolute,” or as Renan puts it, “a profound instinct of deity.”
The philosophy of mythology, differing from all these, finding beyond question similarities which history cannot unriddle, interprets them by no incomprehensible assumption, but by the identity of the laws of thought acting on similar impressions under the guidance of known categories of thought. Nor does it stop here, but proceeds to appraise these results by the general scheme of truth and error. It asks for what psychological purpose man has so universally imagined for himself gods – pure creations of his fancy; – whether that purpose can now or will ultimately be better attained by an exercise of his intellect more in accordance with the laws of right reasoning; and thus seeking to define the genuine food of the religious desire, estimates the quality and value of each mythological system by the nearness of its approach to this standard.
The philosophy of mythology, starting with the wish or prayer as the unit of religious thought, regards all myths as theories about the unknown power which is supposed to grant or withhold the accomplishment of the wish. These theories are all based upon the postulate of the religious sentiment, that there is order in things; but they differ from scientific theories in recognizing volition as an efficient cause of order.
The very earliest efforts at religious thought do not rise to the formation of myths, that is, connected narratives about supernatural beings. All unknown power is embraced under a word which does not convey the notion of personality; single exhibitions of power which threaten man’s life are supposed to be the doings of an unseen person, often of a deceased man, whose memory survives; but any general theory of a hierarchy, or of the world or man, is not yet visible. Even such immature notions are, however, so far as they go, framed within the category of causality; only, the will of the god takes the place of all other force. This stage of religious thought has been called Animism, a name which does not express its peculiarity, which is, that all force is not only supposed to proceed from mind, but through what metaphysicians call “immanent volition,” that is, through will independent of relation. Mind as “emanant volition,” in unison with matter and law, the “seat of law,” to use an expression of Professor Boole’s, may prove the highest conception of force.
As the slowly growing reason reached more general notions, the law which prescribes unity as a condition of thought led man early in his history to look upon nature as one, and to seek for some one law of its changes; the experience of social order impressed him with the belief that the unseen agencies around him also bore relations to each other, and acknowledged subjection to a leader; and the pangs of sickness, hunger and terror to which he was daily exposed, and more than all the “last and greatest of all terribles, death,” which he so often witnessed, turned his early meditations toward his own origin and destiny.
Around these three subjects of thought his fancy busied itself, striving to fabricate some theory which would solve the enigmas which his reason everywhere met, some belief which would relieve him from the haunting horror of the unknown. Hence arose three great cycles of myths, which recur with strangely similar physiognomies in all continents and among all races. They are the myths of the Epochs of Nature, the Hierarchy of the Gods, and of the Paradise lost but to be regained. Wherever we turn, whether to the Assyrian tablets or to the verses of the Voluspa, to the crude fancies of the red man of the new world or the black man of the African plateau, to the sacred books of the modern Christian or of the ancient Brahman, we find these same questions occupying his mind, and in meaning and in form the same solutions proffered. Through what intellectual operations he reached these solutions, and their validity, as tested by the known criteria of truth, it is the province of the philosophy of mythology to determine.
Let us study the psychological growth of the myth of the Epochs of Nature. This tells of the World, its beginning, its convulsions and its ending, and thus embraces the three minor cycles of the cosmogonical, the cataclysmal and the eschatological myths.
Nature is known to man only as force, which manifests itself in change. He is so constituted that “the idea of an event, a change, without the idea of a cause, is impossible” to him. But in passing from the occurrence to its cause the idea of Time is unavoidable; it presents itself as the one inevitable condition of change; itself unwearing, it wears out all else; it includes all existence, as the greater does the less; and as “causation is necessarily within existence,”115 time is beyond existence and includes the nonexistent as well. Whatever it creates, it also destroys; and as even the gods are but existences, it will swallow them. It renders vain all pleasures, and carries the balm of a certain oblivion for all woes.
This oppressive sense of time, regarded not in its real meaning as one of the conditions of perception, but as an active force destroying thought as well as motion, recurs continually in mythology. To the Greek, indefinite time as Cronos, was the oldest of the gods, begetting numberless children, but with unnatural act consuming them again; while definite time, as the Horæ, were the blithe goddesses of the order in nature and the recurrent seasons. Osiris, supreme god of the Egyptians, was born of a yet older god, Sev, Time. Adonis and Aeon acknowledge the same parentage.116 The ancient Arab spoke of time (dahr, zaman) as the final, defining principle; as uniting and separating all things; and as swallowing one thing after another as the camel drains the water from a trough.117 In the Koran it is written: “Time alone destroys us.” Here and there, through the sacred songs of the Parsees, composed long before Aristotle wrote, beyond all the dust and noise of the everlasting conflict of good and evil, of Ahura Mazda and Anya-Mainyus, there are glimpses of a deeper power, Zeruana Akerana, Eternal Duration, unmoved by act or thought, in the face of which these bitter opponents are seen to be children, brethren, “twin sons of Time.”118 The Alexandrian Gnostics, in their explanations of Christian dogmas, identify Aeon, infinite time, with God the Father, as the source and fount of existence; not merely as a predicate of the highest, but the Highest himself.
This heavy-weighing sense of the infinity of duration, and the urgency of escaping from the weariness of thinking it, led to the construction of the myth of the Creation. Man devised it so that he might be able to say, “in the beginning.” But a new difficulty met him at the threshold – as change must be in existence, “we cannot think of a change from non-existence to existence.” His only refuge was to select some apparently primordial, simple, homogeneous substance from which, by the exertion of volition, things came into being. The one which most naturally suggested itself was water.119 This does in fact cover and hide the land, and the act of creation was often described as the emerging of the dry land from the water; it dissolves and wears away the hard rock; and, diminishing all things, itself neither diminishes nor increases. Therefore nearly all cosmogonical myths are but variations of that one familiar to us all: “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so.” The manifestation of the primordial energy was supposed to have been akin to that which is shown in organic reproduction. The myths of the primeval egg from which life proceeded, of the mighty bird typical of the Holy Spirit which “brooded” upon the waters, of Love developing the Kosmos from the Chaos, of the bull bringing the world from the waters, of Protogonus, the “egg-born,” the “multispermed,” and countless others, point to the application of one or the other, or of both these explanations.120
In them the early thinkers found some rest: but not for long. The perplexity of the presence of this immediate order of things seemed solved; but another kept obtruding itself: what was going on before that “beginning?” Vain to stifle the inquiry by replying, “nothing.”121 For time, which knows no beginning, was there, still building, still destroying; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it. What then is left but the conclusion of the Preacher: “That which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been?” Regarding time as a form of force, the only possible history of the material universe is that it is a series of destructions and restorations, force latent evolving into force active or energy, and this dissipated and absorbed again into latency.