Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/76

BOOK I.

Light thrown on both by the Vedic hymns.So marvellous is that chronicle of heathen mythology, as it lies spread out before us in the light of the ancient speech, marvellous not only as showing how nations, utterly severed from each other, preserved their common inheritance, but as laying bare that early condition of thought without which mythology could never have had a being. Yet, if it has much to astonish us, it has nothing to bewilder or even to perplex, for the simultaneous developement of the same myths by countless tribes unknown to each other would be a marvel too vast even for the greediest credulity to swallow—a standing miracle without purpose and without meaning. To the earliest records of Aryan literature is due the discovery that the vehement accusations of Christian controversialists and the timid explanations of heathen apologists were alike unfounded,^[1] that the impersonations of the old mythology had no substantial existence, and that the mythical narratives which grew up around them were not wrought out by a vile and corrupt imagination deliberately profaning the deposit of a revealed truth which it was hopeless that they should understand. To the language of the early Vedic hymns we owe our knowledge that the developement of such a mythology was inevitable, and that the phrases of that early speech, when their original meaning was once forgotten or misapprehended, would give rise to just those coarse, sensual, and immoral images, from which the purer feeling of later times would instinctively recoil.

Stages in the growth of mythical systems.Step by step this analysis of mythology leads us back to what would seem to be the earliest condition of the human mind, and from that onwards through the mythopœic age to the philosophy of historical Greece. On the general character of its course there can be no doubt, nor is the question materially affected by the hypothesis that a period of pure monotheism intervened between the earliest time and that which multiplied the mythical inhabitants of Asgard or Olympos.^[2] In one sense the supposition may be true: in another it might be truer to say that the monotheism so attained never died away. It was impossible that any real fetish worship could arise while man had not arranged his first conceptions with regard to the nature of all material things, or even to his own. If from the consciousness of his own existence he attributed the

spirits which, far more perhaps than a habit of submission to church authority, impeded or repressed all researches in physical science. Gerbert of Ravenna (Sylvester II.) and Roger Bacon alike acquired the reputation of dabbling in diabolical lore. In the time of Galileo, the accusers confined themselves to the simple charge of an unlawful use of human intellect.

1. Grote, History of Greece, part i. ch. i. p. 15.
2. Dasent, Norse Tales, introduction, p. Ixvii. Max Müller, "Semitic Monotheism;" Chips from a German Workshop, vol. i.