J AX. 12, 1883.] 



KNOWLEDGE 



19 



THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 



By Edward Clodd. 



IMIE application of the scientific method to the study of 

 man has given a wider meaning to the word " myth " 

 tlian that commonly found in the dictionaries. These ex- 

 plain it as fable, as designedly fictitious, whether for amuse- 

 ment only, or to point a moral. The larger meaning wliich 

 it holds to-day includes much more than this — to wit, the 

 wliolc area of intellectual products which lie beyond the 

 liistoric liorizon and overlap it, elFacing on nearer view 

 the lines of separation. For the myth, as fable only, has 

 no place for the crude fancies and grotesijue imaginings of 

 barbarous races of the present day, and of races at 

 low levels of culture in the remote past. And so 

 long as it was looked upon as the vagrant of fancy, 

 with no serious meaning at the heart of it, and as 

 corresponding to no yearning of man after the truth 

 of things, sober treatment of it was impossible. J?ut 

 now that it, with its prolific oflspring, legend and tradition, 

 is seen to be a necessary travailing througli which the 

 mind of man passed in its slow progress towards certitude, 

 the study and comparison of its manifold, yet, at the 

 centre, allied forms, and of the conditions out of which 

 they arose, takes rank among the serious inquiries of our 

 time. 



Kot that the inquiry is a new one. Five hundred years 

 before Christ, i.e., in the days of Euripides, the Greeks had 

 identified the gods of their Olympus with the sun and sky, 

 although Anaxagoras was sentenced to death and after- 

 wards banished for calling the moon a lump of lifeless 

 matter, and in succeeding times myths were either emptied 

 of their meaning or exalted to historic rank. In the 

 hands of Christian apologists, from the ages of the Fathers 

 to the present day " heathen " mythologies have been 

 cited as witnesses to the corruptions of the faith, and, 

 under the solvent of blundering etj'mologies, have been 

 made to yield traces of a primitive revelation and of the 

 doctrine of a Trinity ! But if the inquiry is not a new 

 one, the method of its prosecution is — a method justified by 

 its works. Because, for the assigning of its due place in 

 the order of man's mental and spiritual development to 

 myth, there is needed that knowledge concerning his 

 origin, concerning the conditions out of which he has 

 emerged, and concerning the mythologies of lower races 

 and their survival in unsuspected forms in the higher races, 

 which was not only beyond the reach, but the conception 

 also, of men until this century. 



Except, therefore, as curiosities of literature, we may 

 dismiss the Lempriere of our school-days, and with him 

 " Casaubon "-Bryant and his key to all the mythologies — 

 a key that fits no lock ; with him, too, in all respect be 

 it added, Jlr. Gladstone, with his visions of the Messiah 

 in Apollo, and of the Logos in Athene. 



After this short preface, we may start with the brief and 

 plain statement, to be justified by what follows, that the 

 birthplace of myth is in the endeavour of primitive man to 

 interpret the meaning of his surroundings. By primitive 

 man, I do not, of course, mean the nameless savage of the 

 old Stone Age, who, if he had brains and leisure enough to 

 make guesses about things, has left us no witness of the 

 fact. His relics, and those of his successors to a period 

 which is but as yesterday in the history of our kind, are 

 material only, and not until we possess the symbols of man's 

 thought, whether in language or rude picture, do we get an 

 inkling of the meaning which the universe had for him, in the 

 detail of his pitiless daily life, in the Shapes and motions of 

 surrounding objects, and in the majesty of the heavens above 



him. Even then the thought is more or less crystallised, 

 and if we would watch it in the fluent form, we must have 

 keen eye for the like process going on among savages yet 

 untouched by the Time - Spirit, although higher in the 

 scale than the Papuans and hill tribes of the Vindhya. 

 For we cannot so far lull our faculty of thought as to 

 realise the mental vacuity of the savage, but we may, from 

 survivals nowadays, lead up to reasonable guesses of savage 

 ways of looking at things in bygone ages, and the more so 

 when we can detect relics of these among the ignorant and 

 superstitious of modern times. 



What meaning, then, had primitive man's surroundings 

 to him when eye and ear could be diverted from prior 

 claims of the body, and he could repose from watching for 

 his prey and from listening to the approach of wild beast or 

 enemy 1 He had the advantage, from greater demand for 

 their exercise, in keener senses of sight, hearing, smell, 

 and touch than we enjoy ; nor did he fail to take in facts 

 in plenty. Only there was this vital defect and difference, 

 that in his brain every fact was pigeon-holed, charged with 

 its own narrow meaning only, as in small minds among 

 ourselves we find place given to inane, peddling detail, and 

 no advance made to general and wide conception of things. 

 In sharpest contrast to the poet's utterance — 



" Nothing is this world is single. 

 All things by a law divine 

 In each other's being mingle," 



ever}' fact is unrelated to every other fact, and, therefore, 

 interpreted wrongly. 



Man, in his first outlook upon Nature, was altogether 

 ignorant of the character of the forces by which he was 

 environed ; ignorant of that unvarying relation between 

 effect and cause which it needed the experience of ages 

 and the generalisations therefrom to apprehend, and to 

 express as " laws of nature." He had not even the 

 intellectual resource of later times in inventing miracle 

 to explain where the necessary relation between events 

 s>emed broken or absent. 



His first attitude was that of wonder, mingled with 

 fear — fear as instinctive as the dread of the brute for him. 

 The sole measure of things was himself; consequently, 

 everything that moved or that had power of movement, 

 did so because it was alive. A personal life and will 

 was attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall, 

 ocean and tree, and the varying phenomena of the 

 sky at dawn or noonday, at grey eve or black- 

 clouded night, were the manifestation of the controlling 

 life that dwelt in all In a thousand different forms this 

 conception was expressed. The thunder was the roar of a 

 mighty beast ; the lightning a serpent darting at its prey, 

 an angry eye flashing, the storm demon's outshot forked 

 tongue ; the rainbow a thirsty monster ; the waterspout a 

 long-tailed dragon. This was not a pretty or powerful 

 conceit, not imagery, but an explanation. The men who 

 thus spoke of these phenomena meant precisely what they 

 said. What does the savage know about heat, light, 

 sound, electricitj', and the other modes of motion through 

 which the Proteus-force beyond our ken is manifest ? How 

 many persons who have enjoyed a " liberal " education can 

 give correct answers, if asked ofT-hand, explaining how 

 glaciers are bom of the sunshine, and why two sound.s, 

 travelling in opposite directions at equal velocities, " inter- 

 fere " and cause silence 1 I have been surprised at the 

 number of young men, hailing from schools of renown, 

 who have given me the most ludicrous replies when asked 

 the cause of day and night and the distance of the earth 

 from the sun. 



That the comparison between things inanimate and 



