Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/164

152 MYTHOLOGY was also used in Greek mysteries. 1 Neither the use of the KWVOS nor of the clay can very well be regarded as a civilized practice retained by savages. The hypothesis that the rites and the stories are savage inventions surviving into civilized religion seems better to meet the difficulty. That the Osirian myth (much as it was elaborated and allego rized) originated in the same sort of fancy as the Tacullie story of the dismembered beaver out of whose body things were made is a conclusion not devoid of plausibility. Ty- phon s later career, " committing dreadful crimes out of envy and spite, and throwing all things into confusion," was parallel to the proceedings of most of the divine beings who put everything wrong, in opposition to the being who makes everything right. This is perhaps an early " dualistic " myth. Among other mythic Egyptian figures we have Ra, who once destroyed men in his wrath with circumstances sug gestive of the deluge ; Khnum, a demiurge, is represented at Philae as making man out of clay on a potter s wheel. Here the wheel is added to the Maori conception of the making of man. Khnum is said to have reconstructed the limbs of the dismembered Osiris. Ptah is the Egyptian Hephaestus ; he is represented as a dwarf ; men are said to have come out of his eye, gods out of his mouth, a story like that of Purusha in the Rig- Veda. As creator of man, Ptah is a frog. Bubastis became a cat to avoid the wrath of Typhon. Ra, the sun, fought the big serpent Apap, as Indra fought Vrittra. Seb is a goose, called " the great cackler ; " he laid the creative egg. 2 Divine Myths of the Aryans of India. Indra. The gods of the Vedas and Brahmanas (the ancient hymns and canonized ritual-books of Aryan India) are, on the whole, of the usual polytheistic type. More than many other gods they retain in their titles and attributes the character of elemental phenomena personified. That personification is, as a rule, anthropomorphic, but traces of theriomorphic personification are still very apparent. The ideas which may be gathered about the gods from the hymns are (as is usual in heathen religions) without consistency. There is no strict orthodoxy. As each bard of each bardic family celebrates his favourite god he is apt to make him for the moment the pre-eminent deity of all. This way of thinking about the gods leads naturally in the direction of a pantheistic monotheism in which each divine being may be regarded as a manifestation of the one divine essence. No doubt this point of view was attained in centuries extremely remote by sages of the civilized Vedic world. It is easy, however, to detect certain peculiar characteristics of each god. As among races much less advanced in civilization than the Vedic Indians, each of the greater powers has his own separate department, how ever much his worshippers may be inclined to regard him as an absolute premier with undisputed latitude of personal government. Thus Indra is mainly concerned with thunder and other atmospheric phenomena ; but Vayu is the wind, the Maruts are wind-gods, Agni is fire or the god of fire, and so connected with lightning. Powerful as Indra is in the celestial world, Mitra and Varuna preside over night and day. Ushas is the dawn, and Tvashtri is the mechanic among the gods, corresponding to the Egyptian Ptah and the Greek Hephaestus. Though lofty moral qualities and deep concern about the conduct of men are attributed 1 KM/OS t;vdpioi> ov e^TJirrai rb airapTlov, Kal eV TCUS reAercus e<5o- veiro iva poiffi. Quoted by Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 700, from Bas- tius ad Gregor., 241, and from other sources ; cf. Arnobius, v. c. 19, where the word turbines is the Latin term. 2 Wilkinson, iii. 62, see note by Dr. Birch. The authorities on Egyptian religion are given under EGYPT (vol. vii. pp. 714-719). Un fortunately Egyptologists have rarely a wide knowledge of the myths of the lower races, while anthropologists are seldom or never Egypto logists. to the gods in the Yedic hymns, yet the hymns contain traces (and these are amplified in the ritual books) of a divine chronique scandaleuse. In this chronique the gods, like other gods, are adventurous warriors, adulterers, in cestuous, homicidal, given to animal transformations, cowardly, and in fact charged with all human vices, and credited with magical powers. 3 It would be difficult to speak too highly of the ethical nobility of many Vedic hymns. The " hunger and thirst after righteousness " of the sacred poet recalls the noblest aspirations and regrets of the Hebrew psalmist. But this aspect of the Vedic deities is essentially matter for the science of religion rather than of mythology, which is concerned with the stories told about the gods. Religion is always forgetting, or explaining away, or apologizing for these stories.. Now the Vedic deities, so imposing when regarded as vast natural forces (as such forces seem to us), so benignant when appealed to as forgivers of sins, have also their mythological aspect. In this aspect they are natural phenomena still, but phenomena as originally conceived of by the personifying imagination of the savage, and credited, like the gods of the Maori or the Australian, with all manner of freaks, adventures, and disguises. The Veda,, it is true, does not usually dilate much on the worst of these adventures. The Veda contains devotional hymns ; we can no more expect much narrative here than in the psalms of David. Again, the religious sentiment of the Veda is half -consciously hostile to the stories. As M. Barth says, " Le sentiment religieux a e"cart6 la plupart de ces mythes, mais il ne les a e" cartes tous." The Brahmanas, on the other hand, later compilations, canonized books for the direction of ritual and sacrifice, are rich in senseless and irrational myths. Sometimes these myths are prob ably later than the Veda, mere explanations of ritual incidents devised by the priests. Sometimes a myth prob ably older than the Vedas, and maintained in popular tradition, is reported in the Brahmanas. The gods in the Veda are by no means always regarded as equal in supre macy. There were great and small, young and old gods (R.-V., i. 27, 13). Elsewhere this is flatly contradicted: "None of you, oh gods, is small or young, ye are all great" (R.-V., viii. 30, 1). As to the immortality and the origin of the gods, there is no orthodox opinion in the Veda. Many of the myths of the origin of the divine beings are on a level with the Maori theory that Heaven and Earth begat them in the ordinary way. Again, the gods were represented as the children of Aditi. This may be taken either in a refined sense, as if Aditi were the " infinite " region from which the solar deities rise, 4 or we may hold with the Taittirya-Brahmana b that Aditi was a female who, being desirous of offspring, cooked a brahmandana offering for the Sadhyas. Various other fathers and mothers of the gods are mentioned. Some gods, particu larly Indra, are said to have won divine rank by "austere fervour " and asceticism, which is one of the processes that makes gods out of mortals even now in India. The gods are not always even credited with inherent immortality. Like men, they were subject to death, which they over came in various ways. Like most gods, they had struggles for pre-eminence with Titanic opponents, the Asuras, who partly answer to the Greek Titans and the Hawaiian foes of the divine race, or to the Scandinavian giants and the enemies who beset the savage creative beings. Early man, living in a state of endless warfare, naturally believes that 3 For examples of the lofty morality sometimes attributed to the gods, see Max Miiller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 284 ; Rig -Veda, ii. 28 ; iv. 12, 4 ; viii. 93 sq. ; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v. 218. 4 Miiller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 230. 5 Muir, S. T., v. 55; i. 27. 6 See Sir A. Lyal, Asiatic Studies. For Vedic examples, see R.-V., x. 167, 1 ; x. 159, 4 ; Muir, S. T., v. 15.