CHAPTER V.
MYTH.
Nature of Myth.—Myth and religion have distinct sources. We have seen above[1] that there is a phase of religion antecedent to myth. On the other hand, the earliest form of myth has no religious significance. It is the result of an idle play of fancy without any definite purpose. I have known a child of two or three years of age, who, when he saw a light cloud pass over the rising moon, exclaimed "She is putting on her clothes." Not that he believed the moon to be an animated being, or that he thought that clouds were really her clothes. His childish imagination was stirred by an instinctive impulse, to be compared with that which prompts the gambolling of a kitten who rushes from one place to another without any definite object, or to the butting of a young ruminant before his horns have grown. Closely related to such spontaneous efforts is the myth invented solely for the amusement of the hearer. May we not place in this category some of the nature myths of savages which to all appearance have no worship or belief associated with them, and belong to a pre-religious stage of development. Then we have the myths which are explanatory of some custom, rite, natural phenomenon, political institution, names of places or persons, &c. With these we may associate the genealogical myth. There is also the blunder myth, arising frequently from a misunderstanding of language, and the lie—a myth framed with intent to deceive. All these classes of fiction are abundantly exemplified in the old Japanese books.
More important for our present purpose is the religious myth, that
Mysterious veil, of brightness made,
At once the lustre and the shade
of religious conceptions. Like the metaphor, of which it may be regarded as an expansion, it suggests the True by means of the Untrue. It is an acknowledged necessity of religious teaching. In the infancy of language there is no other means of expressing spiritual verities than by physical symbols—in other words by myth and metaphor. And even when a language has acquired some capacity for the direct expression of spiritual facts, it is found that the old methods must still be resorted to in order to excite the interest and impress the imagination of the ignorant multitude. It is not to be supposed that the makers of such myths believed that they were true in their natural physical acceptation. Take for example the parable of the prodigal son. There is no reason to believe that the "far country," "the husks that the swine did eat," "the fatted calf," and the prodigal himself were not figments of Our Lord's imagination. Nor if the story had been true in all its details would this circumstance have added one whit to the value of the lesson taught by it. I believe that the author of the Mosaic story of the Fall of Man would be much surprised to know that his drama, which deals so forcibly in concrete form with temptation, sin, and its punishment, had been taken by the world for many centuries as a narrative of actual fact.
Some high authorities apply a different measure to pagan and savage myth. Dr. Pfleiderer, in his 'Philosophy of Religion,' says that "it must be carefully borne in mind that the religious phantasy, in producing such poetic symbolical legends, is not in the habit of distinguishing, nor can distinguish between the ideal truth and its sensible investment." The late Mr. Fiske held substantially the same view. He goes so far as to apply it to Dante, whose "Charon beating the lagging shades with his oar," "Satan crushing in his monstrous jaws the arch-traitors Judas, Brutus, and Cassius," "Bertrand de Born looking at his own dissevered head," he regards as "in the minds of Dante and his readers living, terrible realities." True it is that a stern reality underlies these grotesque fancies. But it is not of the physical order. No one knew better than Dante the virtue of the altro intende in such matters. We may be quite sure that he did not believe in a real inscription over the gate of Hell, in Italian terza rima, and composed by himself. It is a mistake, I submit, to imagine him, "like Katerfelto, with his hair on end at his own wonders." When Dickens tells us that he decidedly looked on his heroes as living persons we must take this statement cum grano salis. We know what would have happened if some one had offered him, by way of payment, a cheque bearing the signature of Mr. Boffin, Dombey & Son, or the Brothers Cheeryble.
Mere inferences are often taken for facts, but, under normal conditions, the imaginative man is not the dupe of his own inventive faculty. It may be said that, however true this may be of more modern religious myth, the attitude of the "primitive man" towards the naïve creations of his fancy is different. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a primitive man. However far we may go back, we shall find men with parents, and preceded by an infinite line of ancestors. Still there can be no harm in using this term to designate mankind at some ill-defined stage of progress above the highest lower animal and below the savage of our own days. Strange things are told us of the primitive man. He is said to be unable to distinguish between his imaginations and facts, and that he is in the habit of taking his dreams[2] for real occurrences. Fiske says: "Our primitive ancestors knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things...... The only force they knew was the force of which they were directly conscious—the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all the outward world to be endowed with volition and to be directed by it." Of course our primitive ancestors expressed themselves differently from ourselves. They did not talk about laws of nature and the necessary regularity of things. But can we conceive them ignorant of the law of the regular alternation of night and day, of summer and winter, of the phases of the moon? Did not the "primitive man" know just as well as Newton that when an apple is detached from a tree it falls to the ground? He knew that from a blow as cause we may expect pain, wounds, or even death as the effect. He had sufficient acquaintance with dynamics to be aware that he could not raise himself from the ground more than a few feet, and with chemistry to have learnt that the savour of food is improved or spoilt, according to circumstances, by the application of fire. Nor is it true that he ascribed all forces to volition. It is only by exception that the child, the savage, and the primitive man attribute life to inanimate things. This requires imagination, a faculty which is notoriously feebler with them than with the adult civilized man. The progress of humanity is from a sporadic towards a general recognition of will in or behind the material universe, from fitful and sportive fancies involving this idea to an earnest and steady conviction of its truth, and from the fragmentary personification of the part as animated to the conception of a living, universal whole. Agnosticism, which ignores volition in matter, belongs, therefore, to the lower end of the scale of progress. Where it appears in civilized man, it is a case of arrested development. The average savage is a materialist, who associates volition with the energies of nature in a much less thorough and systematic way than the Christian, who believes that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without the Father.
We must not confound the primitive maker of religious myth with the primitive man. It would lead to error if we modelled our idea of the average modern European on Bunyan, Milton, or Dante.
It is sometimes asserted that the impossible and miraculous occurrences which we so often meet with in the narratives of the primæval myth-maker are to him true. Why should he be limited to fact in this way? No doubt his standard of truth is different from our own. He would regard as possible many things which we know to be impossible. But is it necessary to suppose that his knowledge that a thing was impossible should prevent him, any more than our modern storytellers, from utilizing it in his imaginative work? Jules Verne well knew that a voyage round the moon is an impossibility. The unknown author or authors of 'Cinderella' surely need not be credited with a belief that pumpkins can be converted into coaches by the stroke of a fairy wand; the inventor of the story of the birth of Minerva from the brain of Jupiter knew quite well that such obstetrical operations were not feasible; and it is unnecessary to believe that the myth-makers of the Kojiki and Nihongi thought that children could be produced by crunching jewels in the mouth and spitting them out.
There is, however, an exception to the rule that a storyteller does not believe in the truth of his own inventions. It is notoriously possible for the author of a fictitious narrative to become, after a time, unable to distinguish it from a statement of actual facts. There is a case on record in which a learned judge communicated to the Psychical Society in perfect good faith a ghost story, all the principal features of which were proved to be imaginary. They had their origin in his own talent as a distinguished raconteur. But this is a morbid phenomenon which must not be confounded with the normal action of the imagination in the child, the savage, or the primitive (or, indeed, any other) myth-maker.
The inability to distinguish between imagination and fact is really not a special characteristic of the primitive man or savage, but of the literal-minded of all ages, in presence of the creations of imaginative genius. Some few primitive men may distinguish between the spiritual kernel and its imaginative envelopment. But for the multitude this is impossible. Unable to discriminate between these two elements, and dimly conscious that the whole is a valuable possession, they wisely accept it indiscriminately as actual fact.
De Gubernatis, in his 'Zoological Mythology,' relates a story which illustrates the respective attitudes of the myth-maker and his hearers. He tells us that "when he was four years old, as he was walking one day with a brother, the latter pointed to a fantastical cloud on the horizon, and cried, 'Look down there: that is a hungry wolf running after the sheep.' He convinced me so entirely of that cloud being really a hungry wolf that I instantly took to my heels and escaped precipitately into the house." Take, again, the following sun-myth, fresh coined from the mint of Mr. George Meredith:—
"The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green and the pine stems redder gold: leaving brightest footprints upon thickly weeded banks, where the foxglove's last upper bells incline and bramble shoots wander amid moist herbage," &c.
This myth, like the old Greek tales of Prometheus and Tantalus, which Wordsworth calls
Fictions in form, but in their substance truths,
has a spiritual significance of which Mr. Meredith cannot have been unconscious. Though nobody at the present day supposes that the author or his readers take it for a narrative of actual events, cannot we fancy Macaulay's New Zealander, being told as a fact some traditional, time-worn, corrupt, and ill-interpreted version of it, and, especially if he is a literal-minded philosopher, wondering how it was possible for the English to believe in such a concatenation of anthropomorphic fancies?
The literal acceptation of myth or metaphor is not confined to the lower class of intellect. It was a "teacher of Israel" who could not see how "a man could enter into his mother's womb and be born again." Motoöri and Hirata, highly educated scholars, well versed in Chinese and Indian religious literature, received the stories of the Kojiki and Nihongi as genuine history.
Even Dante and Milton, men of profound spiritual insight, probably accepted in their most literal sense some of the imaginative figments of their predecessors.
There have always been literal-minded unbelievers, who reject the myth and its religious contents without discrimination, and simply value it, if at all, for its æsthetic merits. Of them, as of the literal-minded believer, "Si exempla requiris, circumspice."
The history of the religious myth may be summarized as follows: A, a man of genius, creates it, clearly distinguishing in his own mind between the kernel of religious truth and its imaginative embodiment. His disciples B and C understand him thoroughly. In this stage a myth is called a parable or allegory. Many myths proceed no further. D, F, H, * * * T and V, unable to discriminate the true element from the false, accept the whole confusedly as actual fact. E, G, * * S and U are dense to its religious significance, and think it idle nonsense, or at best, simply a good story. W and X have a glimmering notion that the imaginative part cannot be literally true, but do not dare to question it, lest they should sacrifice at the same time the valuable religious kernel. Z is a philosophic inquirer who, not without difficulty, regains the standpoint of B and C. But by this time the myth has been superseded as a vehicle of religious truth by fuller and more exact forms of expression.
The chief ideas underlying Japanese myth are, firstly, the conception—piecemeal it is true, and inadequate—of the so-called inanimate universe as being really instinct with sentient life, and exercising a loving providential care over mankind;[3] and secondly, the doctrine that honour and obedience are due to the sovereign whose beneficent rule secures to the people blessings comparable to that of the sun's light and warmth. For such, I take it, is the real meaning of the story by which the Mikados are feigned to be descendants of the Sun-Goddess. It is the Japanese version of the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Without these and similar vital elements Japanese myth would be nothing more than what some writers have supposed it, a farrago of absurdities, and its examination would belong not to the physiology, but to the pathology of the human mind.
It can hardly be maintained, however, that the poets and seers of ancient Japan achieved much success in clothing their spiritual conceptions in mythical form. There is little force or beauty in their stories, and there is a plentiful admixture of matter which, to us at least, is frivolous, revolting, or devoid of religious significance.
There is no summer and winter myth in the old Japanese books, no deluge myth, and no eclipse myth. There is, strange to say, no earthquake myth, and but one solitary mention of a God of Earthquakes. There are no astral myths, no "Returning Saviour" myth, and no "Journey of the Dead" beyond the bare mention of an "Even Pass of Yomi," or Hades. The creation of mankind is not accounted for.
Myth and Ritual.—When a myth and a ceremony relate to the same subject-matter, which comes first in order of time? Is the ceremony a dramatic commemoration of the events related in the myth, or, vice versâ, is the myth an attempt to explain the origin of the ceremony? Some go so far as to say that ritual is the source of all religious myth. The late Mr. D. G. Brinton, on the other hand, held that "every rite is originally based on a myth." Robertson Smith's view was that "in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth." No general rule can be laid down in these cases. Every such question must be decided according to the available evidence. A myth is a narrative, and a ceremony a kind of dramatic peformance. It will not be disputed that dramas have been founded on narratives, and that narratives are sometimes taken from dramas, as in the case of Lamb's 'Tales from Shakespeare.' Novels are every day dramatized, and the reverse process, though not common with ourselves, is familiar in Japan. Several of the Shinto deities are worshipped for no other reason than because they are mentioned in the myths of the Kojiki and Nihongi. It was probably the mythical account of the friendship of Ajisuki and Ame-waka-hiko which led to shrines being erected to these deities side by side at Idzumo. A literal interpretation of the obviously allegorical story of Iha-naga-hime and Kono-saku-hime led, in later times, to an actual cult of these personages. On the other hand, the ceremony of religious ablution is certainly older than the myth which represents Izanagi as washing in the sea in order to remove the pollutions of the land of Yomi. The worship of the Sun is assuredly not the outcome, but the source, of the Japanese solar myths, though it may owe to them some of its more modern features.
Many myths have no ceremonial associated with them, and there is much ceremony for which the myth-makers have not attempted to account.
- ↑ P. 16.
- ↑ See above, p. 12, and Index—'Dreams.'
- ↑ See Dr. Tylor's 'Primitive Culture,' second edition, i. 285.