PRIMITIVE BELIEF 
 
OUTLINES 
 
 OF 
 
 PEIMITIVE BELIEF 
 
 AMONG THE INDO-EUROPEAN RACES 
 
 BY 
 
 CHAELES FEANC1S EAEY, M.A., F.S.A. 
 
 OF THK BRITISH MUSEUM 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1882 
 
till 
 
TO 
 
 A. M. K. 
 
 AND 
 
 K. II. K. 
 
PEE FACE. 
 
 THERE are two roads along which students are now 
 travelling towards (we may reasonably hope) the saim 
 goal of fuller knowledge touching Prehistoric Belief. 
 One way is that of Comparative Mythology, which 
 has become so favourite a pursuit with the present 
 generation. In this method the myth is taken for the 
 centre-point of the enquiry, and just as a specimen 
 in natural history may be it is traced through all 
 the varieties and sub-species that are to be discovered 
 in various lands. The other method, which is an 
 historical rather than a scientific one, may be -called 
 the study of the History of Belief. In it our eyes are 
 for the time being fixed upon a single race of men ; 
 and it is the relationship of these people to the 
 world by which they are surrounded that we seek 
 to know. The following outlines of early Aryan 
 belief belong to the class of studies, which are dis- 
 tinctly historical in character. They are not designed 
 to establish any new theory of the origin of belief 
 among mankind ; nor are they meant to deal with 
 theories which relate to creeds other than the Indo- 
 European. They are essentially a record of facts ; 
 
Vlll PEEFACE. 
 
 for the facts of early Aryan belief are of a kind as 
 surely ascertainable as the laws of marriage or of 
 primitive society among the Aryan races. That the 
 pictures which are here held up are blurred and im- 
 perfect I am well aware. But some indulgence may 
 be claimed for what are, owing to the necessities of 
 the case and to the incompleteness of our present 
 knowledge, mosaics and not paintings. 
 
 The active discussion which has of late arisen 
 over some of the secondary questions of Indo-Euro- 
 pean mythology has tended to obscure our actual 
 attainments in this field of enquiry. This must neces- 
 sarily have been the case with the general reader, 
 who cannot be expected to keep the science constantly 
 in view nor to register its slow advance. By such a 
 reader a whole system of mythological interpretation 
 is supposed to stand or fall upon the question 
 whether certain stories can be proved to have sprung 
 out of- ' sun myths,' or certain other tales to have 
 been called into existence through an ' abuse of 
 language.' But still more has this discussion tended 
 to throw into the background the historical method 
 of enquiry into the early history of belief, and to 
 hide altogether the results which it has reached. 
 To this field of research some matters of high im- 
 portance in comparative mythology are only of 
 secondary consequence, and therefore some difficulties 
 which have stood in the way of the one study do not 
 impede the other. One of the subjects, for instance, 
 which has been most eagerly debated among mytho- 
 
PREFACE. ix 
 
 legists is the question as to what are and where we 
 are to look for the originals, the actual first forms 
 of those tales which go to make up any system of 
 mythology ; and it is upon the answer which should 
 be given to that question that schools are at present 
 most divided. The difficulty does not press with the 
 same insistence upon him who seeks merely to get a 
 clear notion of belief in some of its particular phases. 
 He can find out who are the beings that people the 
 myth system upon which he is. engaged, and what 
 are the stories related of them, without troubling 
 himself to discover whether the same stories were 
 once told concerning beings of another order. It is 
 with the members of the Aryan pantheon as it is 
 with such half-mythic beings as the Charles of the 
 Carlovingian or the Arthur of the Arthurian ro- 
 mance. The tales told of the two may have won- 
 derful points of resemblance, but we can distinguish 
 between the legend of the Frankish emperor and 
 the legend of the British king. Or, again, that which 
 is recounted of Charles and Arthur may with varia- 
 tions have been told of Eed Indian heroes or of Zulu 
 gods ; but this does not affect the fact that for the 
 particular times and places under consideration the 
 stories attach to Charles and his paladins or to 
 Arthur and his knights. We are not compelled to 
 trace the myths to their remotest origin to under- 
 stand the nature of the two legends. 
 
 There can, in truth, be little doubt that in some 
 crude form most of the myths of the Indo-European 
 system existed among human beings at a date much 
 
X PKEFACE. 
 
 earlier than the era in which we first distinguish the 
 Aryan races. I hardly suppose that the most ardent 
 hunter after histories which tell of the loves of the 
 Sun and the Dawn would maintain that it was from 
 the observation of the Sun and of the Dawn that 
 mankind first gained its idea of two lovers. The 
 tales come to attach themselves to those mythic 
 beings whom at any particular stage of culture the 
 people have most in their thoughts. What was once 
 related of a tree or of an animal may come to be 
 told of the sun and of the earth. Wherefore it is 
 only after a complete study of the belief in question 
 that we can form a judgment as to the nature of the 
 existences to which such tales are likely to relate. 
 When we have settled this point we can compare the 
 myths of systems which belong to the same stage of 
 thought, with a reasonable assurance that like stories 
 will attach to like individualities. 
 
 Now concerning the creed of the primitive Aryas : 
 Comparative Mythology has made it possible for us 
 to reconstruct this in outline for a time which pre- 
 cedes the historical age. The process whereby we 
 arrive at our knowledge in this case is precisely the 
 process whereby we gain almost all the knowledge 
 which we possess concerning the prehistoric life of 
 the Aryas, their laws of marriage, their social con- 
 ditions, their advance in arts or in agriculture. 
 As to the principal result of this enquiry all, or 
 almost all, who have entered upon it are agreed. It 
 has been established that this primitive Aryan creed 
 rested upon a worship of external phenomena, such 
 
PKEFACE. xi 
 
 as the sky, the earth, the sea, the storm, the wind, 
 the sun that is to say, of phenomena which were 
 appreciable by the senses, but were at the same time 
 in a large proportion either abstractions or gene- 
 ralisations. It is this form of creed which I have 
 throughout the present volume distinguished as 
 _Nature Worship, and of necessity it is the one with 
 which we shall be almost exclusively concerned. 
 
 Therefore, seeing that concerning the character 
 of this early Aryan belief all those are agreed who 
 have made a critical study of the Indo-European 
 mythologies, it is obvious that it stands in quite a 
 different category from the disputed questions of 
 comparative mythology. To me individually, after a 
 study of certain among the Indo-European systems, 
 the presence of this nature worship at the root of 
 them seems incontrovertible. But, what is of infi- 
 nitely more importance, I find that the specialists in 
 every field Vedic, Persian, Greek, Eoman, Teutonic, 
 Celtic have believed themselves to discover this 
 nature worship at the back of the historic creeds 
 they knew so well ; and I cannot persuade myself 
 that all their judgments are mistaken, or that there 
 should be such a coincidence of error coming from 
 so many different sides. 
 
 For, whether we ask Yedic scholars, as Ben fey, 
 Max Miiller, Kuhn, Eoth, Breal, Grassmann, Guber- 
 natis, Bergaigne, students of Greek mythology, as 
 Welcker, Preller, Maury, of German, as Grimm, 
 Simrock, we find that those who are first in each of 
 the several branches of research, or those who have 
 
xil PEEFACE. 
 
 studied them all, are alike agreed upon this parti- 
 cular question. However in minor matters they may 
 differ, upon this matter their judgment is uniform. 
 This at least must be res judicata, a question no 
 longer admitting of dispute. 
 
 The sources of our information touching the pre- 
 historic beliefs of the Indo-Europeans are sufficiently 
 well known not to need a recapitulation here. The 
 most important which I have made use 'of in this 
 volume may be roughly divided into four classes. 
 (1) The Vedas, and chiefly the Big Veda ; (2) the 
 Greek literature of mythology, especially the pre- 
 historic poets, Homer and Hesiod ; (3) the Icelandic 
 Eddas and Sagas ; (4 ) mediaeval legends and epics, 
 together with modern popular tales and traditions, 
 almost all of which preserve some relics of ancient 
 heathenism. In the case of the Yedas I have been 
 obliged to avail myself of translations. Of the 7?ig 
 Yeda there now exist two almost complete transla- 
 tions into German, those of H. Grassmann and 
 Ludwig. The beautiful metrical rendering of H. 
 Grassmann is the one to which I have been most 
 indebted. 
 
 C. F. K 
 
 LONDON, 1882. 
 
\3RAf? y^X, 
 rHB 
 
 NIVERSITY 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAOR 
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 NATURE OP BELIEF AS HERE DEALT WITH. 
 
 1. Limits of the Enquiry. 
 
 Primitive Beliefs can be studied in a strictly historical fashion The 
 aid which Philology brings to this enquiry, both in supplying 
 facts and in supplying principles of research Impossibility of 
 finding agreement as to the definition of Religion Necessity I'm- 
 a Definition of Belief Material character of primitive ideas 
 demonstrated from the history of language The transition from 
 concrete to abstract terms Relationship lift ween material and 
 metaphysical or ethical notions which is shown by this change 
 This relationship also explains the nature of belief \Yhich 
 implies a sense of moral or metaphysical ideas underlying the 
 physical ones Definition of belief as the capacity for worship 
 Belief and poetic creation Mr. Herbert Spencer's definition of 
 religion, how far applicable to belief as here considered Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold's definition of religion Distinction between 
 religion and mythology 
 
 2. Early Phases of Belief. 
 
 The phases of thought shown in the growth of language are likewise 
 traceable in the growth of belief Various senses in which the 
 words ' fetich ' and ' fetichisin ' have been used Fetichistn under- 
 stood as a form of magric does not describe a definite phase of 
 belief For it may coexist with many different phases Fetichisni 
 understood as a worship of individual and concrete inanimate 
 
XIV UOWTKNT8. 
 
 PAOB 
 
 objects does constitute a definite phase of "belief The next dis- 
 tin, J phase is Nature Worship, which is the worship of external 
 phenomena, as the sky, the earth, the sea, the storm, &c. The 
 decisive evidences of nature worship which are furnished by 
 comparative philology Method of comparative philology in gain- 
 ing- a knowledge of prehistoric times Instanced in the words yd 
 (cow), diihitar (daughter) Dyaus the sky god of the proto-Aryas 
 Nature worship the cause of henotheism, and an explanation 
 of polytheism Change to a personal god Zeus and tkeos Our 
 enquiries stop short before the full development of the personal 
 god Influence of the passions and of strong emotion on belief . 29 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE EARLY GROWTH OP BELIEF. 
 
 Abundant traces of a primitive fetichism in the Aryan creeds The 
 three chief fetiches were trees, rivers, and mountains The 
 house tree Odysseus' chamber The roof tree of the Norsemen 
 From the house tree to the world tree Yggdrasill Tanema- 
 huta of the Maoris Sacredness of birds Prophetic power of 
 birds Wise women who change themselves into birds Winged 
 animals, how they arose Prophetic power which remains with the 
 fetich after it has ceased to be a god With trees With moun- 
 tains and with rivers The tree ancestor Greek and Persian 
 houses descended from trees Ask and Embla (Ash and Elm) 
 the universal parents in the Edda Mediaeval legend touching \> 
 the Tree of Life From the tree ancestor comes the tree of the-"* 
 tribe or the village tree, so well known to the German races The 
 patrician and plebeian trees in Home Passage of the soul into 
 a tree Philemon and Baucis, Myrrha, &c. Mountain gods 
 River gods Oceanus compared to Yggdrasill Fetichism gave 
 the first impulse to a love of country Animal worship Serpent 
 worship Its connection with worship of rivers Symbolical ser- 
 pents Jormungandr The Python Worship of stocks and 
 stones a relic of fetichism Worship of unshapen agalmata in 
 Greece Sculptured trees Influence of fetich worship on the 
 beginnings of art Survivals of_fetichism Vitality of the belief 
 in magic Transition from feticli worship to nature worship 
 The intermediate stage The dryads, nvmphs, fauns, apsaras, 
 centaurs, &c. Music born of streams The contest between the 
 newer and the older gods , 63 
 
CONTENTS. XV 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE AEYAS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Agni's birth He devours his parents Significance of this incident 
 as showing the religious condition ot' the Vedic worshipper 
 The idealisation to which Agni attains Other nature gods are 
 more dependent upon climatic influences It is necessary, there- 
 fore, to enquire to what climatic influences the ancestors of the 
 Indo-European races were exposed The cradle of the Aryan 
 race in Bactria Nature of that land Contrasted with Egypt and 
 Chaldea The village community Diversities of creed Migra- 
 tions of the Aryas Fetich gods had to he left behind The 
 Vedas Religious rather than mythological The pre- Vedic 
 creed of Eastern Aryas Dyaus, Prithivi Active and passive 
 gods Rivalry between Dyaus and Indra, and between Varuna 
 and Indra Hymn to Indra and Varuna The god of the lower - 
 heaven and the god of the upper heaven Indra as a supreme 
 god His might His combats Ahi, Vritra, and iSambara 
 Relationship of Agni to Indra Traces of tire worship in other 
 Indo-European creeds Agni as a hero^Prometheus How the 
 nature gods lose their distinct individualities Mitra and Varuna 
 Originally personified the day and night skies Then tin-. 
 meeting of day and night, the horizons at morning and evening 
 Hymn to Varuna and Mitra Hymn to Mitra alone The Aavin 
 The mythic day : the white dawn, the red dawn (Ushas) 
 Hymn to Ushas The sun (Surya) Hymn to Surya The storm 
 winds (the Marute) Hymn to the Maruts Meeting of Indra 
 and the Maruts The midday battle Sunset Hymn to Savitar 
 as the setting sun 08 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 ZEUS, APOLLO, ATHENE. 
 
 Complexity of Greek belief Necessity of comparing it with the 
 Vedic and Teutonic creeds Lack of individuality of Greek gods 
 in the historic age Zeus, Apollo, and Athene stand out from 
 among the rest Relics of nature origin shown in their charac- 
 ters The Zeus of Pheidias The migration of the European 
 nationalities The Yavanas The lonians The two routes taken 
 by those who came to form the Greek nationality The lonians 
 crossed the ^Egaean The Pelasgians went round by the Helles- 
 
 a 
 
XVI CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 pont The oldest Greek divinities Zeus as the storm The 
 Pelasgic Zeus Combat with a still older fetich worship The 
 gods and the Titans The wives of Zeus Nearly all originally 
 earth goddesses Hera distinct from the others Poseidon and 
 Hades-Pluton divinities of the older pantheon So also Ares 
 and Heracles, who were sun gods. 
 
 Worship of Apollo and Athene softened the natures of the 
 other Greek gods The Dorians Spread of their influence The 
 birth of Apollo Apollo at Delphi His fight with the Python 
 His wanderings His relationship to Heracles Death of the 
 sun god Of Heracles Of Apollo, implied in one myth The 
 harrowing of hell Apollo and Zeus. 
 
 Goddesses born of water Aphrodite, Athene Tritogeneia 
 Earth and cloud goddesses Athene's virgin nature as Pallas, 
 Parthenos Shows her essential identity with Artemis Athene's 
 second birth Hymn to Athene Athene Polias Polybulos 
 Polymetis Athene and the Gorgon Athene in the Iliad In the 
 Odyssey Apollo and Athene the mediators Zeus the highest 
 Greek ideal of God 155 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 MYSTERIES. 
 
 Position of the earth divinities in every creed These are always 
 honoured by rustic dances and processions Antiquity of Greek 
 mysteries Universality of mysteries Their original intention 
 was to celebrate the return of spring The myth of Derneter and 
 Persephone, from the Homeric hymn Mysteries must have 
 existed before the use of agriculture Changes which that use 
 introduced into them Triptolemus Peasant festivals The 
 Lupercalia Emotional element in mysteries The orgy The 
 use of music in the Eleusinia Comparison with a mystic drama 
 prepared by St. Francis Original meaning of the wanderings of 
 Demeter Image of the earth-goddess dragged from place to 
 place The ceremonial of the Eleusinia Older and newer ele- 
 ments in it A processional chaunt The resurrection of the 
 seed Mysteries became associated with thouq-hts about the 
 other world The decay of the Homeric religion Growth of 
 the hope of immortality Aristophanes' picture of the under- 
 world Growing moral sense Neoplatonism Worship of 
 Serapis and Isis in Greece In Rome Romans adopted mysteries 
 of Serapis and Isis Plutarch's version of the story of Osiris and 
 IsLs His explanation of it Last stage of the mysteries . . 214 
 
CONTENTS. xvii 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE OTHER WORLD. 
 
 1. The Under World, the River of Death, and the Bridge of Souls. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Alternations of belief and unbelief touching the other world 
 traceable at all times In the Middle Airrs us in Greece 
 Interpretations from nature have not diilered greatly from age 
 to age The soul as the breath The ' unseen place' The 
 nether kingdom The funeral feast Remains of, in Stone Age 
 grave mounds Reappearance of the ghost through the mouth of 
 the grave Personification of grave as animal (e.g. Cerl>erus, 
 Feurir) or as human being (e.g. Hades, Hel) .Journey of the 
 soul to the West The Egyptian notions concerning this journey 
 The Aryas by the Caspian The Caspian became their Sea of 
 Death, or, earlier still, River of Death Oceanus succeeded to the 
 same place Separation between myths of River of Death and of 
 Sea 01 Death The former became more characteristic of Kastern 
 Aryas, the latter of Western Journeys to seek the Kurthly 
 Paradise Svegder l-'ioluersson The Indian streams Vijaranadi 
 and Vaiterawi Introduction of the custom of burning the dead 
 The soul and the smoke of the pyre The heavenly llridge of 
 Souls The Milky Way in Vedic mythology The' Surameyaa 
 the guardians of the bridge The A'iuvad Sirat Asbru or 
 Bifrost The Winter Street 261 
 
 2. The Sea of Death. 
 
 Among the Indo-Europeans the Greeks first became familiar with 
 the sea So among them sprang up the great epic of the Sea of 
 Death, the Odyssey Contrast between the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 in respect of the worlds with which they deal Though Homer 
 does not consciously relate fables, the old imagery of the Sea, of 
 Death had become associated with the Mediterranean, and is thus 
 reproduced in the Odyssey Odysseus' voyage Sleep Home (the 
 Lotophagi) Giant Land (the Cyclopes) Wind Home ' 
 
 island) The Lse&trygoninns Circe a Goddess of Death Can 
 only waft Odysseus to Hades Odysseus in the kingdom of Hades 
 Calypso another Goddess of Death She sends Odysseus to 
 Paradise, i.e. the Land of the Phteacians The palace and garden 
 of Alcinoiia Odysseus' return ....... 295 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTEE VII. 
 
 THE BELIEFS OF HEATHEN GERMANY. 
 1. The Gods of the Mark. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 General uniformity of German heathenism wherever found The 
 climatic influences under which it was matured The German 
 village community Life beneath trees Worship in the forest 
 The mark Description of a holy grove at Upsala in the eleventh 
 century Celtic worship beneath trees The gods of the mark, 
 Odhinn (Wuotan), Thorr (Donar), and Tyr (Zio) Odhinn the 
 wind Tyr (Dyaus) superseded by Odhinn Odhinn as the 
 All-father As the god of wisdom The Counsellor (Gagnrad) 
 and the Terrible (Yggr) As the storm wind The god of 
 battles Odhinn and the Valkyriur Nature origin of the Valky- 
 riur Description of, from the lay of Volund Brynhild or 
 Sigrdrifa Her first meeting with Sigurd German gods less 
 immortal than those of Greece and Rome Preparations against 
 the Gods' Doom (Ragnarok) The Urdar fount Picture of the 
 Norseman's world: Asgard Yggdrasill Heimdal The Mid- 
 gard Sea The Iron "Wood Jotunheimar Thorr's journeys to 
 Jotunheim His visit to the hall of tltgar'oloki To Hymir To 
 Thrymr We have better means of testing the Teutonic belief 
 about the giant race than any that are afforded us in the Eddas ; 
 namely, in the poem of Beowulf Hrothgars palace De- 
 scription of Grendel Beowulf's fight with him, and with the 
 mother of Grendel ......... 325 
 
 2. The Gods of the Homestead. 
 
 There was also a peaceful side to German belief Represented by 
 Balder and Freyr among gods, and by the goddesses Nerthus, 
 Frigg, Freyja Freyr and GerS, the story of the anodos 
 Freyja and Odhur, the story of the kat/iodos The image of 
 Nerthus dragged from place to place Elements of a mystery 
 in this ceremonial Traces of its survival in the Middle Ages 
 Rustic rites which have descended from heathen times Easter 
 fires May fires The maypole Description of May-day fes- 
 tivities in Stubbs' * Anatomie of Abuses ' Witches and the 
 Walpuryisnacht Dragging the plough on Shrove Tuesday or 
 Plough Monday The twelve Days The Three Kings Super- 
 stitions connected with Yuletide ...... 368 
 
CONTENTS. XIX 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 
 
 PAQR 
 
 1. Visits to the Under World. The Death of Balder. 
 
 Fatalism of the Teutonic creed Frequent images of death in its 
 mythology Loki the personification of the funeral tire His 
 double nature His giant wife, Angrboo'a His children, 
 Fenrir, Jb'rmungandr, and Hel, who are three personifications of 
 death Jotunheimar The out-world fire Fire surrounding 
 the House of Death The ghost of Ilfl<ri Hundingsbane 
 Skirnir in Jb'tunheim Fiolsvith and Svipdag (Xlhinn's Hrl-rido 
 The Vala at the gate of the under world I'tguro'loki Thorr's 
 visit to him in reality a descent to Ilflhrim Mc:miii;jr of the 
 three contests The death of Balder Ills fum-nil Ilrri'ioor's 
 ride to Heiheim Hope of Balder's returning from the Land of 
 Shades Nors> funeral rites imitated those of Balder Ibn Ilau- 
 kal's description of the fuiu-rul ritrs of th.- linns The St. John's 
 fires in the twelfth century At the present day, in Germany 
 In Brittany In England Reflection of the mythology of the 
 under world in epics and popular tales Brynhild on the Ilin- 
 darljoll Sigurd's leap over the flame The Sleeping Beauty . 384 
 
 2. Ragnarok. 
 
 Formation of the world Ginnungagap, Hvergelmir, Muspell's-heim 
 The end of the world The Firnbul-winter of three years' 
 duration The three cocks who proclaim the dawning of llag- 
 narb'k The giant ships which steer across the M id<rard Sea 
 Surt (Swart) rides over Asbru to join the giants The opposing 
 powers meet on Vigrid's plain The three great combats 
 Burning of the world, which afterwards sinks in the sea The 
 rise of a new world, over which Balder is to rule Muspilli 
 Heiheim survived in the mediaeval purgatory Visions of purga- 
 toryBy St. Fursey By Drihthelm By Charles the Fat St. 
 Patrick's purgatory Vision of Tundale 419 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE EAETHLY PAEADISE. 
 
 Effect of Christianity in changing men's belief concerning the other 
 world The Earthly Paradise, however, continued to exist 
 rather in spite of than through its influence Prejudice in favour 
 
XX CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 of a Paradise in the West The Western Sea still the Sea of 
 Death England the home of souls Procopius' story concerning 
 Brittia Claudian alludes to the same myth The ghost of 
 Grhnvald The ferry of Carnoet Ireland the home of souls 
 The Island of Saints St. Brandan's Isle Dante's account of 
 Ulysses' last voyage Dante hears witness to the "belief in an 
 Earthly Paradise in the West Voyage of Gorm the Wise to 
 farther Biarmia Voyage of St. Brandan The Island of Sheep 
 The Paradise of Birds Aval on Arthur's voyage thither 
 Ogier the Eane in Avalon He revisits earth and again returns 
 to Paradise The Paradise Knight Sceaf Lohengriu , . 433 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 HEATHENISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 The heathenism of Northern Europe cannot be studied in heathen 
 literature or heathen times alone It is therefore desirable to 
 give a glance at some of its lingering effects in the Middle Ages, 
 though this can be no more than a glance. The Middle Ages 
 ages of mythology rather than of history The age of the Teutonic 
 conquests in Roman territory was that which gave birth to the 
 great German epic, the Nibelungen The germ of the story to be 
 traced in the second part of Beowulf, in the Vb'lsung Saga, and 
 in the Nibelungen-Lied This germ is the slaying of a dragon 
 (worm), and thereby winning a hoard of gold -Afterwards over- 
 laid with the story of the loves and jealousies of Brynhild 
 (Brunhild) and Godrun (Kriemhild) In the histories of Sigurd 
 and Siegfried are combined the characteristic elements in the 
 histories of Thorr and Balder The low morality of the Nibelun- 
 gen due to the special era in which it had its birth The fatal 
 enchantment of wealth which fell upon the victorious Germans 
 Rustic mythologies which probably existed contemporaneously 
 with this great epic The vitality of folk lore Heroic myth of 
 Arthur The Legends of the Saints Relics of popular mytho- 
 logy in them The Beast Epic ' Reineke Fuchs' The inaugu- 
 ration of the Middle Ages by the crowning of Charles the Great as 
 Emperor The establishment of German influence upon mediaeval 
 thought was symbolised by the same event The ' Chansons de 
 Geste ' Points of likeness between Charlemagne and Odhinn 
 Reappearance of the Valkyriur Berchta Roland compared to 
 Thorr To Siegfried To Heimdal His horn Ragnarok and 
 Roucesvalles The last home of German heathenism now the 
 
CONTENTS. 23li 
 
 PA OB 
 
 home of German popular tales The Wild Huntsman The 
 Stretmann The Pied Piper of Hamelin Van der Dekkeii The 
 real meaning of the punishment in every case The Wandering 
 Jew The world of the Middle Ages Growth of castles 
 Change in the character of convents Feudalism and Catholi- 
 cism Feudalism had some of its roots in the ancient German 
 village community Catholicism likewise had some of its roots in 
 the same distant past But in both feudalism and Catholicism a 
 living organism was turned to stone The Gothic cathedral and--\* 
 the holy grove Witchcraft Transformation of Odhinn into 
 Satan and of the Valkyriur into witches The wood maidens in 
 Saxo's story of Balder us and Hotherus Witchcraft was a dis- 
 tinct cult, originally probably of the ancient divinities It also 
 included a certain social organisation, and thus was opposed 
 both to Catholicism and to feudalism Dawn of the Renaissance 
 era Effect of the crusades Want of coined money Mercenary 
 soldiers Rise of the burghers The fablitnu' Mendicant orders 
 Dante the last voice of mediaeval Catholicism . . . 4G1 
 
 INDEX . 521 
 
/ 
 
 ^'fV^V 
 
 .-H* ^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 NATURE OF BELIEF AS HEKE DEALT WITH. 
 
 1. Limits of the Enquiry. 
 
 THE world around us is what we believe it is, and nothing 
 more; wherefore the history of belief, so long as the 
 belief be genuine, is real history, and can be studied by 
 merely historical methods. This kind of enquiry can be 
 made independent of any theory of the origin or nature 
 of belief, just as much as history, a record of events, may 
 be made independent of the science of history. Of late 
 years, however, this historical way of regarding belief has 
 been almost lost sight of, and mythology, since it became 
 comparative, has concerned itself almost exclusively with 
 a scientific enquiry into the genesis of myths. It has, as 
 must be confessed by those who have followed its re- 
 searches, been, at the expense of some extravagances here 
 and there, fruitful in great results. It has so changed 
 our whole outlook over the field of religion and of legend- 
 ary beliefs, that we have hardly yet been able to recog- 
 nise the change. Perhaps with some of us it has been 
 that we have been so affected by the new spirit that 
 we can scarcely, even by an effort of imagination, realise 
 a tone of thought upon these matters such as was uni- 
 versally current but a few years ago ; albeit that tone of 
 thought and method of interpretation still breathe in our 
 
2 OUTLINES OF PKIMIT1VE BELIEF. 
 
 classical dictionaries, and in those other 6 standard au- 
 thors ' who are considered good enough to instruct the 
 mind of youth. Now that the researches of comparative 
 mythologists have so far cleared the ground, we are in a 
 position to retrace our steps a little ; to return once more 
 to the historical method, only in a far different spirit and 
 with a far, clearer outlook ; to take up again in a wider 
 field the kind of enquiry which once busied itself with 
 single religious systems and never looked beyond them. 
 
 There was once a time when the legendary beliefs of 
 nations were in histories related side by side with the 
 actual experiences of those peoples, as if both were of equal 
 reality and had an interest of the same kind. A little 
 later on historians tried to place all the mythologies in a 
 crucible of criticism, and hoped to extract from them 
 some golden grains of actual fact. Now we know that 
 both these methods are wrong. We have learned that 
 myths have quite a different canon of interpretation from 
 the events of history ; that they tell of a quite different 
 order of facts ; that the one cannot be rendered in terms 
 of the other. But we know also, or if we do not, it is 
 time that we should recognise the truth, that myths, or 
 better still that 'beliefs., have a history of their own quite 
 as important as any history of events. To interpret belief 
 under this aspect is the object of the following pages. 
 And though this labour differs essentially from labours in 
 comparative mythology, still it is a task to which com- 
 parative mythology must ever be a lamp and guide. 
 
 I would not have these chapters considered simply 
 as essays in the science of comparative mythology. They 
 are not essentially enquiries how and why beliefs have 
 come to be what they are, but what they have come to be. 
 It is only because the ground has been broken by scientific 
 study that we are able to glean from it historic facts ; yet 
 still the method and aims of the historian are altogether 
 different from those of the scientist. The qualifications for 
 the pursuits of the one do not promise success to the other. 
 
USE OF PHILOLOGY. 
 
 But the History of Belief, in its early mythologic 
 stage, is a new study, and is, therefore, without those 
 canons of criticism which past generations of students 
 have bequeathed to the modern historian in other fields. 
 For this reason, and because in dealing with ages so 
 primitive we are at once brought face to face with psycho- 
 logical problems applicable to the whole human race, it is 
 needful for me to preface the other chapters of this book 
 with one of a scientific kind, in order, if possible, to make 
 clear the principles which have guided me in the narrative 
 parts which follow. Let those who have no relish for 
 psychological questions pass by this chapter if they will. 
 
 There is one very simple proposition which applies to 
 all fields of historical enquiry, and which surely in no 
 other field than this would have been called in question. 
 It is that, when we are studying the beliefs of a people 
 whose language and literature we know, it is to this 
 language and literature that we must turn for the history 
 of their thoughts. My investigation, for example, being 
 narrowed altogether within the circle of the Indo- 
 European creeds, I am not compelled to defend the results 
 at which I shall arrive against arguments and facts drawn 
 from other fields of enquiry, from other languages and 
 other literatures. I read one theory of the origin and 
 growth of Egyptian religion or of Semitic beliefs ; quite 
 another theory, perhaps, of the birth of the creeds of 
 South Africa or of Australia. Am I convicted of error 
 if my results do not square with these ? I do not think 
 so. Nor will I say that what I have discovered, or 
 believe myself to have found, in the history of Indo- 
 European thought, is binding upon all other investigators. 
 The student in any one field no doubt thinks that he 
 has discovered the key to all truth. One writer will 
 say that our history begins with too low a conception of 
 man's faculties ; another that the conception is too high. 
 It may be I do not say it is too low for the Semitic 
 race; it may be too high for the Negritic race. But 
 
 B 2 
 
4 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIV 7 E BELIEF. 
 
 that does not prove that, for the Indo-European races, 
 the estimate is unjust. In future, therefore, when any- 
 thing is said of primitive man, let it be understood that 
 the primitive man spoken of is he who in time developes 
 into an Aryan. He is the first among the proto-Aryans. 
 He is no chance primeval being, but has, let us say, the 
 potentiality of Aryan culture about him. 
 
 In the case of this special people, when we desire to 
 pry into their primitive thoughts, we are not compelled to 
 proceed by guess work or vague analogies, but can call up 
 two voices to speak to us of their past. The first voice is 
 what we may call their literature, widening the use of 
 that word somewhat to include religious or mythological 
 poems, Vedic hymns, Greek epics, Icelandic lays, which, 
 ages before they became in strict sense a literature, had 
 been handed down by oral tradition from bard to bard. 
 These poems are the conscious expression of men's thoughts 
 in prehistoric days. The other voice, not less mighty for 
 the revelation of truth, may be called the unconscious 
 expression of the same men's thoughts ; a kind of thinking 
 aloud. This comes from the history of their language, 
 whose slow development has of recent years been laid 
 bare by the researches of Comparative Philology. This is 
 our best and truest guide ; it is the lamp unto the feet 
 and the light unto the path of all future explorers in the 
 tangled ways of psychology. It is an undesigned testi- 
 mony which cannot lie ; without it the study of mythology 
 is like surgery divorced from anatomy, or astronomy bereft 
 of mathematics. It shows us not only facts which would 
 otherwise be hidden, but, by its own great achievements, 
 it points out to us the method of enquiry which can alone 
 yield results. 
 
 According to Mr. Herbert Spencer, religion may be 
 defined as an ' a priori theory of the universe ; ' and there 
 is, the writer tells us, a subsidiary and unessential element 
 in religion, namely, the moral teaching, ' which is in all 
 cases a supplementary growth.' ' Leaving out,' he says, 
 
A DEFINITION OF BELIEF NEEDFUL. 5 
 
 'the accompanying moral code, which is in all cases a sup- 
 plementary growth, religion may be defined as an a priori 
 theory of the universe.' l But it is clear that this definition 
 would not be universally accepted, for we find Mr. Mat- 
 thew Arnold saying in his ' Literature and Dogma,' 2 that 
 ( Religion, if we follow the intention of human thought 
 and human language in the use of the word, is ethics, 
 heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling ; the passage from 
 morality to religion is made when to morality is applied 
 emotion ; and the true meaning of religion is not simply 
 morality, but morality touched by emotion.' Mr. Max 
 Miiller has defined Eeligion more simply, as the smsus 
 numinis, the sense of our dependence upon some thing 
 (or some one) else. 'All nations join, in some way or 
 other, in the words of the Psalmist, " He that hath made 
 us and not we ourselves." ' 3 In face of these divergences 
 among the doctors and leaders of thought, we may reason- 
 ably suppose that it would be scarcely possible to get any 
 two men to agree in the meaning which they attached to 
 the word religion. And though our .study is not so much a 
 study of religion as of belief, which is a something at 
 once wider than religion and more definite, still, even in 
 the case of belief, I cannot anticipate with certainty that 
 I shall carry the reader along with me in the meaning 
 which I give to that word. But, on the other hand, in 
 the case of a word of so vague, though so common a use, 
 all that can be fairly demanded is that I should make 
 clear the sense in which I employ it. It is, indeed, mainly 
 to this object that the present chapter is devoted to the 
 getting some clear notion as to what we are to recognise 
 as the essential and primitive beliefs of men, and then, as 
 a necessary consequence, to the presentation of some of 
 the forms which belief has taken in the course of man's 
 early development. 
 
 We are no longer obliged to call in a ' Darwinian 
 
 1 Mrgt Principles, 3rd ed. pp. 43, 44. 2 Pp. 20, 21. 
 
 Lectures on the Science of Language, second series, p. 436. 
 
6 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 theory, 5 nor the aid of any external physical demonstration, 
 to prove all that it is really important to know touching 
 the evolution of human nature. It matters not in this 
 respect whether for our first parent we are to reckon with 
 an ape or a man the ' goodliest of men since born his 
 sons ; ' for, whatever the state of outward perfection which 
 our first parent displayed, we are sure of this at least, 
 that that perfection could not have extended to the mind. 
 The real significance of our origin lies in the origin of 
 our thoughts, in their beginning and their earliest changes, 
 and these it is easy to show must have been of the 
 rudest. 
 
 Philologists may continue long to dispute over the 
 precise origin of language ; but philology has brought us 
 so far that there can be now no question that the primitive 
 speech of mankind was of the rudest character, devoid 
 almost utterly of abstract words, unfit for the use of any 
 kind of men save such as were in the earliest stage of 
 thought. 
 
 It is probably true that the mental and moral attain- 
 ment of any people, all that shows their progress along the 
 path of civilisation, is (in mathematical phrase) in a direct 
 ratio with the number of their abstract words. If, there- 
 fore, the history of language points back to - a time when 
 man had no abstractions, what could have been his mental 
 condition then P If we look at our own language, or at 
 any other which we know, we see its words divisible into 
 two classes those which express objects appreciable by 
 the senses ; and those which express ideas Imving no 
 existence in the physical world ; such words as pen, iiik, 
 and paper (meaning this particular pen, ink, and paper) on 
 the one side, and such words as fear, virtue, right, upon 
 the other. We perceive with very little reflection that 
 without the possession of these latter words the ideas 
 which they bespeak could not be present to the mind ; and 
 with a very little additional reflection we can understand 
 that the number of such abstract ideas recorded by any 
 
LANGUAGE ROOTED IN SENSATION. V 
 
 language is a very fair measure of the advancement of 
 those who use it. 
 
 4 Without abstract words man can have no clear con- 
 ception of abstract ideas. If all his language speaks of 
 physical sensation only, if he hare no such expressions in 
 it, or few such, as thought, virtue, right, his intellectual and 
 moral nature must be in the embryo only. Though he be 
 outwardly the goodliest of men, inwardly he cannot be 
 much above the brute. It will be said by some,'* Man has 
 only degraded to such a state since the fall; he began 
 with endowments of the highest.' Well, if tbat were to 
 be conceded, it would not alter the position in which we 
 stand for setting out upon our enquiries. Whatever the 
 primal Adam may have been, the forerunner of the Aryan 
 race must have been in the degraded condition we have 
 described. This language plainly tells. Albeit philologers 
 have not yet insisted very strongly upon it, yet this con- 
 clusion is forced upon us by the facts of philology ; and, 
 indeed, lies so patent there, that it cannot be blinked or 
 set aside. The history of individual words are indi- 
 cations of it, for the farther we trace such words back 
 towards their primitive roots, the nearer do they come to 
 bearing meanings purely physical in place of the meta- 
 physical significations which at a later time they wear. 
 As we travel backwards toward these sources of language, 
 we see the stream of thought becoming more and more 
 mixed and thickened with earthly matter, and the sounds 
 approach the nearer to the old physical uses. Language 
 never arrives at the point of containing none but words 
 of mere sensation ; but then we can never get back to 
 the language of the Prime. It shows an approach that 
 way. One by one the roots seem to desert from the 
 metaphysical or abstract class, and range themselves in 
 the ranks of the physical and concrete class. And of this 
 process we shall presently have occasion to note some 
 examples. 
 
 A conviction of the material nature of primitive 
 
8 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 thought is suggested, or compelled, not by this inductive 
 reasoning alone. We cannot fashion for ourselves any 
 theory of the origin of speech which would not point to 
 the same conclusion any reasonable theory, that is, 
 which would make speech a part of the acquirements 
 of the human race. The fact that man alone possesses 
 the gift of language is often pointed to as a reason 
 for supposing the method of his acquirement of language 
 a thing so utterly miraculous, as to be without the pale 
 even of speculation. But it should be remembered that 
 speech is only the flower (as we may call it) of certain 
 inward faculties, most of which can still be traced in the 
 course of growth. Man is not less distinguished from 
 animals by his powers of abstract reasoning than by 
 speech; and it is as reasonable to suppose him acquiring 
 at once, and by a miraculous gift, the knowledge 'that 
 two straight lines cannot enclose a space,' or that 'the 
 three internal angles of a triangle are together equal to 
 two right angles,' as to suppose him at once starting 
 with the possession of a finished language. If he did 
 not start with his finished language, he must have 
 acquired it, as he acquired his mathematical truths, by 
 slow experience and experiment. Of what kind then 
 would this experiment be ? 
 
 The use of speech is for the interchange of ideas be- 
 tween man and man ; its very existence implies a passage 
 from one mind to another, and the difference between words 
 and thoughts may be defined by saying that the former are 
 so much of thought as can be carried from A to B. 
 Words are not thoughts, but thoughts converted into 
 sounds, to be afterwards reconverted into thoughts ; just 
 as, in a modern experiment, sound is converted into elec- 
 tricity, and then resolved into sound again. Wherefore 
 the real force of a word may be compared to the force of 
 the current in the telephone ; it is, not the full thought 
 with which A utters it, but the amount of thought which 
 it can convey from A to B. Let us now suppose the case 
 
WITHOUT WORDS NO CLEAE IDEAS. 9 
 
 of a primitive A and B first learning ihe use of words. 
 In whatever way they may have lighted upon the notion 
 of expressing by sound what was passing in their minds, 
 it is easy to see that the first experiment owed its success 
 to the fact that the same idea happened to be present in 
 two minds at once. If A made a sound, and this sound 
 happened to convey what A was thinking or feeling to B, 
 the success was due to the fact that B was thinking or 
 feeling the same thing at the same moment ; and A in his 
 turn must have had some foreknowledge of this, or he 
 could never tell that his experiment had succeeded, and 
 by that knowledge be tempted to try it again. There is 
 only one class of ideas which can be in the mind of one 
 man, and be known by another to be present there the 
 ideas, namely, of physical sensation. All language, there- 
 fore, must have taken its origin there. To speak more 
 plainly, such ideas as horse, tree, wolf, run, flow, river, 
 must have been the first to receive names ; because A and 
 B could run together, and could see horses, trees, and 
 wolves and rivers at the same time. But inward ideas 
 anxiety, love, thought would receive their names later, and 
 by a metaphorical transfer of the words from physical to 
 meta-physical ideas. 
 
 In the case suggested of an imaginary A and B trying 
 to be mutually intelligible, it might seeni as if the physical 
 meaning of the root sounds of a language were determined 
 by external necessity the necessity for an instantaneous 
 common experience of the idea not by any defect in the 
 constitution of human nature at this primitive time. 
 There is nothing, it may be said, to prove that humanity 
 was incapable of conceiving metaphysical ideas, even 
 though it is proved that it could not at first have ex- 
 pressed them. The result is really the same, however. 
 It belongs to our mental constitution that, without any 
 distinct names for them, we can entertain no clear ideas. 
 Without language to give it form, we can have at the best 
 only the rudiments of thought. Whether the first words 
 
10 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 'were percepts or concepts, whether they were nouns, adjec- 
 tives, or verbs, are questions which may be argued out of 
 their place, but which do not concern us here. Indeed, 
 the nearer we look at the matter, the more does the dis- 
 tinction between percept and concept, between noun and 
 adjective, seem to fade away. Suppose a sound to be 
 drawn, as it were, out of A by some sudden physical sen- 
 sation ; before it can become current between A and B it 
 must be, in a great degree, modified by thought and by 
 memory, or loss of memory. The cry which A makes 
 when he sees a red fox run by may stand in A's mind 
 partly for the actual sensation of the very, animal, its form 
 and colour and all, partly for the mere effect of its rapid 
 motion ; and it must (one would suppose) depend largely 
 upon chance whether the memory of the fox is next 
 awakened by the next thing which runs by, by the next 
 red thing seen, or by the next thing which in form and 
 vitality shows its likeness to the fox. Taking this for an 
 example of the first word ever uttered, it must, one would 
 say, be to a great extent an accident whether this first 
 word comes in the end to be a substantive, an adjective, 
 or a verb. 
 
 This suggestion I only throw out here, and pass the 
 subject by ; for, as I have said, it concerns our future 
 enquiries but little. This much it is needful to remember : 
 that though the earlier words of a language express physical 
 sensations, they express them as they are interpreted by the 
 human mind. There may be nay, we shall see hereafter 
 often is something more in these sensations than we, 
 with our powers of abstraction and of distinction between 
 different orders of ideas, should be disposed to look for 
 there. 
 
 Agreeably, it has been already said, to this a priori 
 reasoning are the facts of philology, which show us a 
 physical root as the foundation of the words which seem 
 most abstract. Right, which we took just now as an ex- 
 ample of the metaphysical class of words, had once its 
 
OEIGIN OF ABSTRACT TEEMS. 11 
 
 place in the physical body ; and without the need of any 
 deep philological knowledge we can see what its first 
 meaning was. We at once connect the Latin rectus with 
 porrectus, meaning stretched out or straight. This brings 
 us back to the German recken, to stretch. We therefore 
 get upon the scent of right as meaning first straight, and 
 earlier still ' stretched,' stretched and straight being really 
 the same words, and the straight string being the stretched 
 string. We have further if further proof were wanted 
 a Greek root, opsy- opeywcri, opsysi, with the same signifi- 
 cance of stretched or straight ; and, finally, we find that 
 all these words are connected with a Sanskrit arj, which 
 means * to stretch.' What is stretched, then, is straight, 
 and the straight way is the right way. Will (Latin volo, 
 voluntas) is a word which seems remote enough from any 
 physical thing ; yet this, too, may be shown to be grounded 
 in sensation. In the first place, will is only the more in- 
 stantaneous wish, and is connected with the German 
 wdhlen, to choose, and ultimately with the Sanskrit var, to 
 choose, ' to place, or draw out first.' With this root we must 
 connect the Latin verus, veritas, the Lithuanian and Scla- 
 vonic vera, vera, ' belief.' Verus, or veritas, is, therefore, what 
 is credible, or, earlier still, the thing chosen ; and the old 
 Latin proverb, reduced to its simplest terms, stands thus : 
 ' Great is the thing chosen ; it will prevail.' There is, it 
 may be added, another Sanskrit word, vdra, and a Lithu- 
 anian valyti, meaning * heap,' coming from the same root 
 and the same physical idea, to draw together being the 
 same thing as to draw. Wherefore the origin of the Latin 
 veritas, as well as of voluntas, will, is merely the physical 
 process of drawing ; and the change from this original 
 sense to two such opposite ideas as truth and heap can 
 easily be followed. 
 
 Our individual words thought, think, cannot, I believe, 
 be followed back to an origin in sensation. But are we, 
 on this account, justified in doubting that they had such 
 a beginning? The question will best be answered by 
 
12 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 turning to other sounds which have been used for the 
 same idea ; to see whether they can show an equally in- 
 dependent existence. The Greek and Latin words which 
 have the same significance, pavQavw, memini, mens, &c., 
 can be followed further backward than can our thought, 
 think, and can be shown to have meant at first nothing 
 more than ' measure.' 
 
 Examples such as those which we have just chosen 
 show best the inmost workings of the human mind. There 
 are others in which the mode of transfer from physical to 
 abstract senses is more obvious and superficial. As I shall 
 show presently, the examples of the first class open the way 
 to an understanding of the genesis of belief; those of the 
 second are more instructive in the same way with regard 
 to the growth of myths. For myths are the flower and 
 the most superficial appearances of belief. As an example 
 of the more obvious kind of change from physical to 
 metaphysical meanings, we may take that expressed by 
 our use of the phrases ' cold-hearted ' or 'hard-hearted.' 
 With us such a phrase is pure metaphor, but not so with 
 ancient writers. In reading Homer, for example, it is no 
 easy matter to say when the physical aspect of /cfjp (heart) 
 or of ^f%^ (breath, soul) is most present to the mind of 
 the poet, and when the metaphysical or metaphorical 
 aspect. Examples of this kind might be multiplied 
 without end. 
 
 Will it be said by the candid reader, after considering 
 even these few examples, that confusion of ideas between 
 physical and metaphysical could possibly have arisen in 
 an exactly opposite way from that which I have supposed 
 was the order of their growth namely, by a transfer 
 through metaphor of the metaphysical idea to the physical 
 thing : that, for example, the idea of moral Tightness 
 came before the idea of straightness, and was applied to 
 this latter by analogy ; that the idea of truth came before 
 the idea of selecting, choosing, or heaping together ; the idea 
 of thought preceded the idea of measuring? The two 
 
ORIGIN OF ABSTRACT TERMS. 13 
 
 orders of ideas could not have both been in the mind at 
 the same time ; that is certain. Had they been so present 
 we should have had two separate orders of words devoid 
 of etymological connection. Therefore either the moral 
 idea was taken from the physical one, or the physical 
 from the moral. Have we any hesitation in deciding 
 which process actually took place ? l 
 
 But somehow a deeper than a purely physical sense 
 has come in time to attach itself to all and each of these 
 words. By whatever process and the process differs 
 somewhat in each individual case straight has come to 
 mean right, heap, truth, measure, think, and so forth ; the 
 ethical meaning has grown over the physical meaning, 
 and in many places hidden it altogether. And as this 
 gradual development is not arbitrary, nor one to be illus- 
 trated by a few examples only, but a continuous change 
 parallel with the growth of human speech, it must express 
 a certain faculty or tendency in human thought. This 
 faculty had we learnt fully to understand, we should know 
 much. We should have gained the key to that which is 
 most essential in our nature, the capacity of abstract 
 thought and of moral sense. 
 
 Having formed a certain elementary language of root 
 sounds, man desired to communicate to his neighbour 
 ideas to which he found no correspondence in external 
 nature. How was he to act then ? He was now brought 
 to the verge of perhaps the greatest step which has ever 
 
 1 I find a writer upon mythology saying that 'the adherents of the 
 theory of primitive fetichism, primeval barbarism, and the like, when 
 hard pressed by the evidence which shows the simplicity and the purity of 
 the religious views of archaic man, are wont to take refuge in " boundless 
 time," where indeed they are perfectly safe from our pursuit '...-. and 
 that ' of primitive man we know little, but dogmatise much,' the writer 
 quoting as a proof of such dogmatism assertions by Ludwig Noire and others 
 of less repute, and ending ' such asseitions jn the absence of evidence are 
 of course valueless ' (The Religion and Mythology of the Aryans of Northern 
 Jtl'iirojye, by R. Brown, F.S.A.) Certainly all assertions are valueless in the 
 absence of evidence. But is there, in the history of the development of 
 words, no evidence on the question of the development of human thought 1 
 
14 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 been taken by the human mind. To have hit upon the 
 notion of making certain sounds, which should convey the 
 idea of external things this was much ; but much more 
 is it if he can contrive to convey the ideas which are 
 passing in his own mind. Exactly how this was done we 
 cannot know; no doubt it was a development which pro- 
 ceeded by very slow degrees. Sometimes the internal 
 idea might be conveyed as the simple expression of some 
 outward object, just as the name of some dreaded animal 
 might come to be used for fear, or else for the same 
 feeling men might employ some of its outward expres- 
 sions, trembling and the like. But, as for the expression 
 of most internal ideas, it seems pretty clear that there was 
 in the mind of primitive man some subtle and necessary 
 connection between them and external phenomena. For 
 the same reason which obliged the first words to have 
 physical meanings the necessity for a consensus or agree- 
 ment in their use must operate still, in determining the 
 transfer from physical to metaphysical uses. It could be 
 no fanciful connection which associated certain mental 
 ideas virtue, right with physical roots, and but for the 
 fact that there was the connection in the human mind no 
 words for mental or moral conceptions would ever have 
 been invented. 
 
 The deaf and dumb, when they desire to express a 
 good man, do so by moving the hands forward in a 
 straight line ; the wicked man they express by motion in a 
 crooked line. This sign is recognised as one of those 
 which are spontaneous and common to human nature. It 
 is with them no acquired metaphorical association between 
 right and straight, but a spontaneous association of ideas. 
 An example such as this seems for a moment to lift the 
 veil from before the history of man's development in 
 thought. 
 
 The habit of confounding and involving the two orders 
 of ideas, the physical and the moral, was general only in 
 primitive stages of thought, but survivals of the same 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF 'GREAT' AND 'HIGH.' 15 
 
 habit are found among us, and even these are hard to 
 explain. Great and high, low and base are used, and so 
 far back as we can trace language have been used, in such 
 a double sense. One hardly sees how there can be any 
 pleasure to the moral feelings gained from taking a longer 
 rather than a shorter time in moving over a given surface 
 or up to a given point ; and no more than this is implied 
 in the words great, high used in their literal meaning. 
 What is there more moral in motion upwards than in mo- 
 tion downwards? Yet it can scarcely be maintained that 
 it is an accidental association of ideas which makes high 
 imply good, and low evil, in face of the peculiar attribute of 
 man that he alone among the animals can look upward, 
 and that he has always chosen an upward gaze for his 
 attitude of prayer and worship. 
 
 It is impossible to do more than note these one or two 
 examples of a process which goes on throughout the 
 whole range of human development, a process which, to 
 sum it in gross, is nothing less than the recognition of a 
 something behind the material world which man learned 
 the first to know. It is true that with the knowledge of 
 good comes the knowledge of evil, and words for good and 
 high imply words for evil and base. But still it is through- 
 out a growth of the moral capacities of man. Between 
 the perfect conception of the moral abstraction and the 
 condition of mind in which no moral idea has yet been 
 thought of there is a vast interval, which the human 
 faculty of development has slowly over-bridged. It is the 
 history of the transition from one state to another, which 
 I would call the Early History of Belief. 
 
 In the conception of right, for example, we have, after 
 its first meaning 6 stretched,' the secondary and partly 
 moral one of fit and suitable. Few would be inclined to 
 question the assertion that right had once this meaning 
 and no higher one. Yet when man has got so far as this 
 he has scarcely yet attained a complete moral sense. 
 What moral feeling mingles with his use of the word 
 
16 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 applies only to particular occasions. He has no thought 
 of a general law. Still he may have moral ideas. Though 
 he calls it unsuitable to injure his neighbour or to desert 
 nis tribe, he deems it so in obedience to an instinct of 
 clanship teaching him to love his kind. Or again, to come 
 to matters more directly relating to religion, though the 
 savage worships a visible physical object, a tree, a river, 
 or a mountain, he may do so in obedience to an instinct of 
 admiration for what is great and high, and in dim recogni- 
 tion of moral greatness and height. We have in Sanskrit 
 a root ri, and in the sister language, the Zend, the root 
 ere, from which we may argue back to a lost proto- Aryan l 
 word which meant (at first) motion, but more especially 
 motion upwards, such as we understand from the same root 
 when it appears in the Latin orire. But that same root ri 
 comes to mean in the Sanskrit to move, to excite, to raise ; 
 and finally it enters into the word cm/a, which means, 
 as an adjective, excellent, beloved, and as a substantive 
 master, lord. As soon, then, as a word, which originally 
 meant movement only, comes to be used especially in the 
 sense of movement upwards, the moral meaning begins to 
 develope therefrom : it absorbs into itself gradually the 
 idea of quite internal emotions, excitement, elevation, and 
 comes at last to mean noble, beloved. Is not such an 
 example as this the chronicle and brief abstract of the 
 growth of human thought? 
 
 Now transfer this method of thought from words to 
 things, and we have the first and most important chapter 
 in the history of Belief. I have said that Belief covers 
 the range of things which are believed to exist ; but it is 
 
 1 The word Aryan is commonly used as a designation for the forgotten 
 ancestors of us and of the whole Indo-European family. The use is not 
 quite a correct one, for Aryan has never to our knowledge been applied 
 save to the Eastern (Indo- Persic) division of the race. We have every 
 reason to believe, however, that our ancestors once called themselves 
 Aryas or by some word closely akin to that one. Proto-Aryas, proto-Aryan, 
 are the most scientific terms we can find, but it will often be convenient 
 to use the shorter words Aryas, Aryan in the same sense. 
 

 THE CAPACITY FOR WORSHIP. 17 
 
 something beside the recognition of what exists in outward 
 sensation. It is the answering voice of human conscious- 
 ness, or conscience, to the call of this something behind. 
 The call is from the outward beauty ; the response is from 
 inward seeing, or the sense of moral beauty. Without the 
 inward development the human mind would be incapable 
 of even the outward pleasure of beauty, and without the 
 outward call, without the influence of the charm or wonder 
 or the terror of nature, man would never have acquired the 
 capacity for discerning a something beyond nature. It is 
 this capacity which I call Belief, and the more we con- 
 sider it, the more clearly we shall see that it is essentially 
 the capacity for worship. For what I have only called the 
 recognition of a something behind the physical object is, 
 in reality, a worship of the something (or Some One) be- 
 hind it. Primitive man has a belief in the great thing, the 
 tree, river, mountain, or what not.' This belief is an affec- 
 tion of the mind, very different from the simple sense that 
 the thing is physically broad and high. Along with the 
 physical sensation goes a subtler inward feeling, a sense 
 not easily measurable as physical sensations are, but still 
 discoverable. We know it to be there by the answer 
 which the material sensation has called out of man's heart, 
 and which makes itself audibly known in his worship. 
 
 Perhaps, therefore, if we were pressed for a single and 
 concise definition of that human faculty called belief, 
 which we have taken for our study here, we could hardly 
 find a better one than this, that it is the ( capacity for 
 worship.' For if you will consider the nature of man you 
 will find that with him it always has been and still is true, 
 that that thing in all his inward or outward world which 
 he sees worthy of worship, is essentially the thing in which 
 he believes ; and conversely that he who worships nothing 
 believes in nothing. Wherefore it has been truly said that 
 'the man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually 
 wonder and worship,' though he hold all the results of 
 scientific knowledge in his single head, ' is but a Pair of 
 
 G 
 
18 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Spectacles behind which there is no Eye.' l This definition 
 of Belief will be found to serve us in the investigations 
 which we have undertaken. And even if it be objected to 
 by anyone, I may fairly fall back upon the proved impos- 
 sibility of getting- all men to agree upon a definition in 
 these vexed questions of religion and belief. All that can 
 fairly be asked is, that our studies should continue to be 
 what they profess to be at starting ; that is to say, that the 
 same definition of belief should be adhered to throughout. 
 The real importance of history does not lie in the in- 
 terest of the separate events, the battles, sieges, treaties, 
 speeches, which it records ; for the events themselves are 
 often commonplace enough, and might be matched with 
 little trouble elsewhere. There have been savage wars 
 numberless among unhistoric peoples as full of incident, 
 of strange turns of fortune nay, perhaps as full of heroism 
 and devotion as the great wars of history. But we pass 
 by the doings of African savages or of Red Indians without 
 heed, because these races are of such a nature that their 
 experience of life has never reacted in any effective way 
 upon their national character. Their haps, their tides of 
 fortune, have left them where they found them, because they 
 have not the power of profiting by the past, or of carrying 
 its teachings forward to form part of a new present. And 
 as it is with the events of history, so is it with the com- 
 monest physical sensations ; the importance these have in 
 the history of man's growth is not limited to his actual 
 experience of them. So far, indeed, as that experience 
 goes, its past history is no matter worth recording. We 
 do not care to be reminded that primitive man, or man in 
 any stage of his upward development, felt that the fire was 
 warm, that stones were hard, that water was soft and 
 bright. It is the reflection, as it were, of these experiences 
 in the mind of our race which is still living ; for out of 
 such physical sensations man created a world which was 
 not physical. And he has passed on this aftergrowth of 
 1 Sartor Resartus. 
 
LOVE, HUMANITY, AND BELIEF. 19 
 
 experience to be the inheritance of all future ages. ( No- 
 thing of it that doth fade/ but it suffers a * sea change.' 
 And the fashion of that change the lessons of philology 
 which we have just learned can partly tell us. 
 
 There is nothing mystical in such a doctrine as this of 
 the origin of belief ; it does but make belief at one with the 
 whole upward progress of the human mind ; it can be de- 
 monstrated step by step from the history of language that 
 is to say, by an undesigned testimony which cannot lie. 
 As surely as love, hate, right, and ivrong have had their 
 physical antecedents, and as surely as these sensations 
 have developed in time into thoughts and feelings, so surely 
 have the outward things, as the mere rocks and trees, 
 which were in themselves objects of worship, grown in 
 time to be abstract gods, or to be One abstract God. We 
 cannot explain further the instinct or the inspiration whicli 
 does this. But if it is a stumbling-block to us in religious 
 matters, it must be a stumbling-block throughout the 
 whole range of the moral faculties. 
 
 As regards an ideal life those aims, I mean, which, 
 for the satisfaction which they give to our aspirations, 
 may be put forward as a fall and sufficient reason for life 
 itself this ideal and these aims seem to be threefold, and 
 to spring out of three separate instincts which man and 
 beast have in common. The difference, however, between 
 man and the lower animals lies in this, that the instincts 
 of animals are in what science calls a position of stable 
 equilibrium ; if you move them, so soon as the emotion 
 is passed they return to the state they were in before. 
 But man by each emotion is pushed towards something 
 better, and never remains constant to the position he holds. 
 His instincts develope into passions, into ideals of life, and 
 the grosser parts of them fall away. Now the three 
 instincts which seem to have chiefly worked to push man 
 forward on his path are these. First there is the sexual 
 instinct, which we know both in its brute form and also 
 (happily) in that ideal state which in modern times and in 
 
 c 2 
 
20 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Christian countries it has been able to reach. Next there 
 is the gregarious tendency, which makes men and animals 
 collect together in bands, for purposes of mutual help, and 
 which, still advancing, raises men up to a perfect love of 
 country or of humanity. Last of all there is this still 
 more subtle instinct of Belief, which lies at the root not 
 of religion only, but of all imaginative creation, for all 
 poetry and art (as the actual history of poetry and art 
 abundantly testifies) have their roots in wonder and in 
 worship. This faculty, too, is perhaps shared by the beasts 
 in some measure. Even animals have a certain capacity 
 for looking upward : as Bacon says, the beasts look up 
 to man, as man to God. But their eyes are, we know, 
 commonly bent down to earth; and if the instinct of 
 belief is shared by beasts, it is so in but a small degree. 
 
 It is essential to belief that it should believe, not make 
 Relieve. And this furnishes a certain distinction between 
 the history of belief and the history of art and poetry, 
 which, in the lighter kinds, are often engaged rather with 
 fancy than conviction; though, in truth, these are far 
 less often so engaged than some would suppose. Sidney, 
 in his ( Apologie for Poetrie,' gives graceful expression to a 
 common but untrue opinion touching poetic creation, sup- 
 posing it to consist in mere fancy, and to be quite independ- 
 ent of a belief in the reality of its creations. ' There is no 
 other art,' he says, 'but this delivered to mankind that hath 
 not the works of nature for his principal object, without 
 which they could not consist, and on which they so depend 
 as they become actors and players, as it were, of what 
 nature will have set forth.' And then he goes on to claim 
 that ' only the poet, disdaining to be tied by any such 
 subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, 
 doth grow in effect another nature, in making things 
 either better than nature bringeth forth, or quite new 
 forms such as never were in nature, as the Heroes, Demi- 
 gods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like : so as he 
 goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the 
 

 POETIC CREATION. 21 
 
 narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only 
 within the zodiac of his own wit.' 
 
 The view itself is false : the warrant of nature's gifts, 
 be it narrow or not, has been wide enough for man ; and 
 the instances which Sidney has chosen to support his 
 view only confirm the contrary. The Cyclops is a personi- 
 fication of the stormy sky ; his one eye is the sun looking 
 red and angry through the clouds, as we so often see it at 
 the end of a tempestuous day. 1 The Chimacra is herself 
 the cloud which drops rain as the goat drops milk. 2 The 
 Furies (Erinyes) are descended from the Vedic Saranyu, 
 the dawn. 3 Beings like these are the first fruits of man's 
 poetic faculty in its commerce with nature. But they are 
 not spun out from his imagination independently of such 
 prompting: they are in the most literal way the actors 
 and players of what nature will have set forth. And it is 
 with such creations, with beings whose character is deter- 
 mined for them to a great extent by the phenomena 
 which they personify, that the student in the history of 
 Belief has first to do. It is long before he need be con- 
 cerned with a god or a supernatural being who is a pure 
 abstraction: he first gains acquaintance with those simpler 
 divine ones of primitive days who are gods of the sunshine 
 and the storm, of the earth glad in its greenery or stripped 
 bare by wintry decay, of the countless laughing waves of 
 the sea, of the wind which bloweth where it listeth. 
 
 Before abandoning this discussion over the definition 
 
 1 The Cyclops is not, as some mythologists loosely say, a personification 
 of the storm ; for ' the storm ' as so used is an abstraction, whereas the 
 thing personified in 'this and the other cases is some actual phenomenon 
 of nature. Therefore each one of the Cyclops must be thought of first of 
 all as the stormy sky. Afterwards they become separated into different 
 parts of the phenomenon of the storm: one is the roll (fyrfvTqs), another 
 is the flash ((rrepdTnjj), a third the bright whiteness of sheet lightning 
 
 apy. 
 
 2 x'V a 'P a > a sne g a t i s derived from xeijua, winter (also storm), 
 being a winterling, i.e. yearling. 
 
 8 There is some dispute over the real nature of the Erinys. In another 
 chapter I have sought to reconcile the opinions of Kuhn and Max Miiller 
 on Sarawyu (Ch. III.) See also below, p. 28 
 
22 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of belief, it may be as well to compare it with those other 
 definitions of religion which we noted jnst now. It does 
 not, it must be confessed, quite square itself with these ; 
 certainly not quite with those two sharply contrasted ones, 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer's and Mr. Matthew Arnold's. Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer's definition in full is this : 
 
 4 Leaving out the accompanying moral code, which is 
 in all cases a supplementary growth, a religious creed 
 is definable as an a priori theory of the universe. The 
 surrounding facts being given, some form of agency is 
 alleged which, in the opinion of those alleging it, accounts 
 for these facts. . . . However widely different speculators 
 may disagree in the solution which they give of the same 
 problem, yet by implication they all agree there is a 
 problem to be solved. Here, then, is an element which all 
 creeds have in common. Religions diametrically opposed 
 in their overt dogmas are yet perfectly at one in their 
 conviction that the existence of the world with all it con- 
 tains and all that surrounds it is a mystery ever pressing 
 for interpretation. On this point, if on no other, there is 
 entire unanimity.' 
 
 How stands our instinct of belief in relation "to that 
 something which is made up of a conviction that the 
 world with all it contains and all that surrounds it is a 
 mystery ever pressing for interpretation ? Evidently the 
 mystery which hangs around their origin and extent is a 
 great element in the fear with which most parts of nature 
 are regarded by primitive man ; and fear is, I suppose, of 
 all the inward feelings which man acquires consciousness 
 of, the most primitive. The history of words bears witness 
 to this fact. Other metaphysical words, such as right, 
 courage, show how, at a comparatively late time, the 
 abstract notions have worked their way out of physical 
 sensations. But the only physical root connected with 
 fear is the visible effect of it, trembling and failing of the 
 limbs. We are justified in arguing from the evidences 
 of language that neither sense of right nor courage were 
 
VHE 
 
 UNIVERSIT 
 
 MR. SPENCER'S DEFINITION OF RELIGION. 23 
 
 Imitive elements in human experience, but that fear 
 s so. No doubt, then, but that this mighty affection 
 the mind, which in time softened down into awe and 
 worship, has been among the earliest and chiefest of the 
 emotions which have contributed to the shaping of belief. 
 The sense of the unknown concerning the origin of things 
 is necessarily a concurrent cause of the fear which they 
 inspire. The sense of the unknown must, therefore, be a 
 great feature in all primitive creeds. 
 
 By these considerations we seem to be led towards Mr. 
 Spencer's conclusions, but we are not brought to them. 
 For it is not the sense of the unknown as an instinct or 
 an emotion which in fact, according to this writer, has 
 contibuted to the -formation of creeds. According to him 
 it is not the mere feeling of mystery which is paramount 
 in belief, but the desire to explain away that mystery. 
 For him religion is before all else a Theory of the Universe. 
 Now such an assertion cannot pass unchallenged, unless 
 religion be a thing having no foundation in Belief. 
 
 Belief comes into existence when man is not reasonable 
 enough to have a theory about anything, while he is still 
 mainly a feeling animal, possessing only some adumbra- 
 tions or instincts of thought. It is not possible that, for 
 man in such a condition, either his belief or his religion 
 could be the kind of theorising which Mr. Spencer sup- 
 poses it. Out of Mr. Spencer's definition of religion 
 proceeds directly his theory of the origin of religion. All 
 worship began, he says, in the worship of ancestors. The 
 ghosts of dead men were the first objects of religious 
 belief. It is no doubt natural that, starting with the 
 definition which he gives, the philosopher should have 
 been led to the conclusion which he has arrived at con- 
 cerning the origin of religion. We can understand pretty 
 well that if man had before all things else desired a theory 
 of the universe, a theory of the origin of the sunshine 
 and the rain, had he been scientifically minded and given 
 to reasoning from the analogy of outward experience, he 
 
24 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 might have been led to think that these phenomena were 
 caused by human agents. His natural conclusion, pro- 
 ceeding on such grounds, would be that other beings like 
 mankind were at work up there in the heaven and among 
 the clouds. Man is the only agent detected in the process 
 of acting and intending : reasonable analogy would suggest 
 that man, though invisible, was the author of other acts 
 even when remote from our earthly sphere. This is just 
 what Mr. Herbert Spencer thinks the primitive savage did 
 believe. The men who sent the rain and sunshine were 
 only different from the men on earth in the fact that their 
 sphere was different; their power, perhaps, was more 
 extended. This different sphere and wider power were 
 reached through the portal of death. .All agents in the 
 world not human, or at least not mortal, were the dead 
 ancestors of the tribe. Hence the worship of ancestors 
 is, according to our author, the origin of all religion. 
 
 All this is consistent with Mr. Spencer's definition of 
 religion ; but it is not, I venture to think, consistent with 
 the facts. Such might well have been the form of primi- 
 tive belief, had man started with his theory of the universe, 
 and tried to reason of the origin of all things from the 
 knowledge he possessed. But man is not so reasonable 
 a being at the outset, and this truth the history of 
 language shows us well. Man's instincts far outweigh his 
 reasonings, and religion is the child of instinct, not of 
 logic. It is, I venture to think, because Mr. Spencer has 
 neglected the teaching of comparative philology upon this 
 point that he has been led to the conclusions he has 
 reached. The abstract words which express a power of 
 reasoning are among the last which attain their place in a 
 language ; the intermediate ones are those which tell of 
 the instinctive recognition of an abstract side to physical 
 sensation. Man's first belief and worship were things 
 very different from a ' theory of the universe ; ' and these 
 bein so much more instinctive than reasonable, it fell out 
 that at first the physical parts of nature were worshipped 
 
MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD'S DEFINITION. 25 
 
 mtially for themselves. It was at the first the very 
 essence of the divine thing that it was not human. We 
 shall see in the early history of belief how necessary is 
 this condition of the non-humanity of the nature gods. 1 
 
 Nor, again, could Mr. Matthew Arnold's definition of 
 religion be made to serve us for a definition of belief. 
 That was, it will be remembered, that religion was 
 f morality touched by emotion.' Such a definition is very 
 far from holding good for the instinct which we are con- 
 sidering. For a long time belief has so little to say 
 to morality, that throughout the chapters of this volume 
 we shall scarcely ever have to contemplate religion in its 
 distinctly moral aspect. When a belief has become 
 anthropomorphic, and the nature god has changed into a 
 divinity like unto man in character, then the laws of being 
 which apply to human actions become his laws also. The 
 gods, then, should grow, and do for the .most part, into 
 ideals of human nature, and the worship of them becomes, 
 in effect, a worship of goodness. This, however, only 
 takes place after a great lapse of time. God, when the 
 word was first used, was not synonymous with good. The 
 
 1 Nothing but Mr. Herbert Spencer's great name, and the value of his 
 researches in other fields (and perhaps some unsuspected influence of the 
 otl'ntin anti-theologiinim), could have ma'ie his theory of the origin of 
 religion, and his arguments in support of his theory, so eagerly accepted 
 as they have been by a large number of intelligent students and thinkers. 
 It is natural for many persons to like even to be 'damned with Tully.' 
 But, in truth, Mr. Spencer's researches in other fields do not give him the 
 weight of a special authority in this one. There is but one key to psycho- 
 logy of this kind, and that is philology ; and to this the philosopher has 
 never turned any special attention. Physiology, and even ethnology, are 
 guides far less safe than the undesigned testimony given by the history of 
 words. Accordingly, as he is really treading in a sphere which is unfamiliar, 
 Mr. Spencer's footsteps are here far less firm than in other places. Mr. 
 Spencer, upon any other subject, would hardly use the ' totem theory' in 
 the way he does to support his views. The totem is the name of the dead 
 ancestor who is supposed to have become the ruler of any special part of 
 nature. Mr. Spencer accounts for the apparent fact that men do actually 
 worship the cloud and sea and sky by supposing that some ancestor had 
 received as a totem the name of ' cloud ' or ' sea ' or sky.' Surely by such 
 a wide method of supposing ' anything may be made of anything,' to use 
 a happy phrase of Mr. Matthew Arnold. (See Sociology, p. 385 sqq.) 
 
26 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 idea of the divinity has ever responded to the instinct of 
 worship, and that worship was given first of all to things 
 which impressed the senses. While the things of nature were 
 still the gods, the in oral law could scarcely apply to them. 
 Whatever Butler may argue to the contrary, there is no 
 direct moral lesson in nature's works. She brings to 
 death, she brings to life ; and that is all we see in her. The 
 essence of primitive belief lies in the same outward world 
 and in its changes ; not in any likeness to humanity, but in 
 their very difference from it, lie the wonder and the charm 
 of these external things. I will not say that there is no 
 hidden teaching in this kind of nature worship. It is true 
 enough that all things which excite the wonder or the 
 awe of man, whatever quickens his perception of inward 
 and spiritual things, all that awakens his thought and 
 imagination, are his masters. When fear shall in time 
 have changed into awe, and wonder into worship, then 
 man will have passed beyond the region of Nature to a 
 spiritual nature, and what is great outwardly will have 
 given place to what is great in virtue. But such a con- 
 summation is not at the beginning. 
 
 We may, indeed, to a certain extent, conciliate Mr. 
 Arnold's definition of religion in this way. We may agree 
 to consider as religious only those beliefs in which the 
 moral element 1ms become clearly established. Professor 
 de Gubernatis intends some such distinction when, in his 
 lectures on the Yedic mythology, 1 he separates what he 
 calls the mythologic and the religious periods of the Yedic 
 creed. The first period is that in which the divinities 
 worshipped were strictly nature gods, the second stage 
 begins when the god is something more than a mere visible 
 appearance. He may still be worshipped in phenomena ; 
 but he is separated from them in the thought of his 
 votaries, and can be contemplated as one apart, living in 
 and by himself. The visible world, the heavens, or the 
 cloud, or the sunshine, is - deemed only his dwelling-place 
 1 Letture sopra la Mitologia Vedica, pp. 28, 29. 
 
MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION. 27 
 
 or his enfolding garment. And because the god has now 
 become an abstraction, and can be worshipped as such, 
 Professor de Gubernatis calls this condition of a creed its 
 religious phase: the earlier phase he calls the mytho- 
 logical one. A distinction like this is without doubt 
 somewhat in accordance with Mr. Matthew Arnold's defi- 
 nition of religion ; but it does not really go hand in hand 
 with it. For still the chief feeling in the mind, either 
 during the first stage of belief or the second, is not 
 morality ' touched by emotion,' or otherwise ; still the 
 mainspring is the instinct, and morality, when it enters, 
 comes in by the way. 
 
 "We may have occasion hereafter sometimes to make 
 use of that distinction which Professor de Gubernatis has 
 drawn between the mythological and the religious phases 
 of belief; meaning by the first the period during which 
 the gods are essentially material things with a nature 
 remote from human nature, and by the second the period 
 during which they are essentially idealised beings with 
 natures more or less in conformity with ours. But in 
 giving these names I never mean it to be thought that 
 either religion is totally excluded from the earlier (the 
 mythic) age, or myth excluded from the religious age. 
 There is always mythology alongside of the more religious 
 kind of worship, and religion growing up beside mytho- 
 logy. Only at first there is a preponderance of myth- 
 making, and later on a preponderance of the religious 
 feeling. While the gods are purely of nature's belongings 
 it is easy to see that it will be a time for the growth of 
 stories concerning them. The myths are, be it ever 
 remembered, the creatures of real belief, not of mere 
 fancy, as Sidney would have them be. The conception of 
 the Cyclops was founded on what men had seen ; and the 
 myth of the Cyclops could only grow in natural wise, so 
 long as men really believed that the stormy sky was a 
 being and the sun his eye. When the Cyclops had be- 
 come a mere one-eyed giant, then all new tales told of 
 
28 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 him would be but inventions, and would deserve a much 
 lower place in the history of belief. When the gods have 
 become like men, and have lost all memory of the pheno- 
 mena out of which they sprang, they have laid aside the 
 individuality of their characters ; henceforward they will 
 tend more and more towards uniformity of nature ; and 
 this uniform nature will more and more adapt itself to a 
 godlike ideal. Thus the influence of moral ideas will 
 become paramount while the influence of the experience 
 of outward nature fades away. 
 
 Of the growth of morality in belief, and of the way in 
 which it may develope along with the contemplation of mere 
 external phenomena, we have an excellent example in one 
 among those mythic beings which Sidney enumerates. 
 All the three the Cyclops, the Chimsera, the Furies are 
 fearful creations ; but the first two draw all their terror 
 directly from the things which they personify ; they are 
 fearful because the storm itself is fearful. No natural 
 dread surrounds Erinys, who is the Dawn ; l her terrible- 
 ness arises solely from a moral character which the Dawn, 
 is led to take upon her. She is the detector of crimes ; at 
 first in the merely passive way in which we say that all 
 crimes will some day come to light, afterwards in a more 
 active sense. In time the Erinyes become altogether 
 moral beings, and purely abstract ones, ' the honoured 
 ancient deities, supporters of the throne of Justice, dear 
 to Zeus,' whom .ZEschylus knows. Yet all this moral cha- 
 racter springs out of their natural character. They become 
 the detectors of crimes solely because the daylight must 
 be a detector of crimes. 
 
 These three examples are fairly typical of the whole 
 range of beings who play the mythic dramas of a people. 
 Though all must have had a beginning in outward nature, 
 
 1 This is Max Mullet's explanation of the origin of the Erinyes (Chips, 
 ii. 153) ; and it seems to me a valid one, despite the criticisms of Welcker 
 (Griech. Gotterl. iii. p. 75, &c.) and the different origin found for Sararayu 
 by Kuhn (Zeitscli. fiir verg. Sp. i. 439). Gubernatis makes some suggestions 
 which tend to reconcile these discrepancies (Mitel. Ved. p. 156). 
 

 EARLY PHASES OF BELIEF. 29 
 
 some (as the Greek furies do) will have strayed far, others 
 less far from it. Some will keep the whole nature which 
 belongs to outward things, some will half clothe them- 
 selves with a human personality. But never in early 
 times shall we have a god unlinked to external phenomena. 
 Wherefore if we read of some primitive race retiring to wor- 
 ship in its rocky fastnesses or woody solitudes, as Tacitus 
 says the Germans retired to their forest haunts and wor- 
 shipped an Unseen Presence there, we must not think of 
 them going to meditate upon the riches and goodness, nor 
 yet upon the power and wonder, of God. The presence 
 made known to them may be an unseen, it is certainly not 
 an unfelt one ; it is in the breath of the wind or in the mur- 
 muring of the stream ; it is in the storm or in the whirl- 
 wind, but it is not yet in the voice of the heart. The 
 sensations of this external nature stir man's imagination, 
 they raise his awe; and this stirring of the inner senses 
 constitutes his worship. And let those doubt that religion 
 may have had such beginnings who have never listened 
 to the voices which arise from the solitudes of nature; 
 those who have never known the brightness of sunny fields 
 and streams, the sad solemnity of forests, and the majesty 
 of mountains or of the sea. 
 
 2. Early Phases of Belief. 
 
 Thus much to show the mere existence and the essential 
 character of this faculty of Belief. We have now to say 
 something concerning the phases of it. Here the history of 
 language will still be our guide. What we have at present 
 learned of the parallel histories of religion and of language 
 is this : That, as at first all words expressed only the 
 ideas of definite material objects, but many of these words 
 which had once a purely material significance came in 
 time to have a purely moral or metaphysical significance, 
 so throughout all the natural world, though men at first 
 gained from it only ideas of outward sensation, these in 
 time changed, and metaphysical and moral ideas came to 
 
30 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 take their place. In the case of words the change from 
 the physical to the metaphysical use was not, we may be 
 sure, made at a bound. Stretched did not suddenly come 
 to mean right, nor heap to mean truth. 
 
 Now one stage in that slow process of change we can 
 certainly detect. The first step was 'made when the name 
 for an individual thing had expanded its meaning to take 
 in a class of things. When words, from being individual, 
 or what we now call proper names, had grown to be generic 
 terms, they had already become half abstractions, for they 
 had become names for aggregates of qualities and not for 
 individual things. I took just now stretched as the example 
 of a word in its most material form ; but in reality a. word 
 was in its most material form only so long as it was not 
 an adjective, but expressed some single object. If we could 
 imagine for a moment the word straight or stretched as the 
 name, not of any string, but of some particular string, 
 then we should have a word in its most primitive possible 
 condition. The next stage would be when the same word 
 was used to express a class of objects in this case all 
 strings which had been stretched. The stage which would 
 immediately follow would be that the word should come 
 to be an adjective (an attribute), and no longer an indi- 
 vidual name. We have every reason to suppose that the 
 process of the human thought, exemplified by the history 
 of words, is traceable equally well in the development of 
 belief; whence it would follow that belief too has passed 
 from individual objects to groups of things, and thence 
 has fastened upon some attribute, still physical, but no 
 longer apprehensible by all the senses, which belonged to 
 the whole class. In a word, religion began with fetichism, 
 with the worship, we will suppose, of an individual tree ; 
 it passed on to the worship of many trees, of the grove of 
 trees, and it soon proceeded thence to a worship of some 
 invisible belonging of the grove. This might be the sacred 
 silence which seems to reign in the wood, or the storm 
 which rushes through it, or any of the dim, mysterious 
 

 MEANING OF 'FETICH.' 31 
 
 forest sounds. From the visible and tangible things of 
 earth religion looked farther away to the heavenly bodies, 
 or to the sky itself. And then at last it emerged from the 
 nature-worshipping stage, and the voice of God, which 
 was heard once in the whirlwind, was now heard only 
 in the still small voice within. 
 
 With the last phase of all we shall in these chapters 
 have nothing to do ; nothing directly, at all events. It 
 scarcely needs to be said that no one of the three phases 
 of belief which I have described is to be found in its purity 
 among any of the peoples whose religious career we are 
 going to study. Each phase is found mingled with some 
 other. All the Indo-European races have arrived at some 
 point in the third condition of development ; that is to say, 
 all have achieved some idea of an abstract god, who is 
 separate from phenomena. Bat few or none of them have 
 completely left behind any of the other two conditions of 
 belief. Wherefore it lies in our hands which phase we 
 choose to study. The strata of belief are like the geolo- 
 gical strata; primitive ones may be discovered sometimes 
 quite near the surface ; the nature of the former are no 
 more to be told by measuring their distance from us in 
 time than that of the latter by any measurement from the 
 surface of the earth. It is the character and not the 
 actual time of the formation which allows us to call it 
 primitive; and both the first two phases of belief, both 
 pure fetichism and that which, to distinguish it from 
 fetichism, we may call nature worship, both, wherever they 
 are encountered, may fairly be called phases of primitive 
 belief. 
 
 The same kind of difficulty over the meaning of a word 
 which has obscured discussion upon the nature of religion 
 itself has been stirred up, in a minor degree, about the 
 word fetich ; and here with less excuse, for this word 
 carries with it no strength of old association. It was never 
 during the days of its early use applied with scientific ex- 
 
32 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 actness, and it was first employed at a time when the study 
 of belief had, in any effective way, hardly begun. If, 
 therefore, we were to wrest the word, a little from its first 
 application, in order to make it serve us in a scientific 
 sense, there would be no great harm. 
 
 Mr. Max Miiller has, with many strong arguments, 
 called in question the very general assumption system a- 
 tised somewhat in the hands of Comte that fetichism lies 
 at the root of all religion. His arguments have certainly 
 been sufficient to make us reconsider our use of the word 
 fetichism, and in future to define it more exactly ; but I 
 do not think they have really shaken the position which 
 Comte has taken up on this point. It is one thing to show 
 that the great positive philosopher has not used f fetichism' 
 in its etymological significance, or even that he has not 
 always attached to the term the same meaning, and that 
 others who followed him have been yet more vague in the 
 use of the word ; it is another thing to show that there 
 has been no primitive belief clinging to the worship of 
 visible external things. 
 
 Fetich (feitiqo) was, it is known, the general name by 
 which the Portuguese sailors in African seas called the 
 charms and talismans they wore their beads, or crosses, 
 or images in lead or wood. Seeing that the native 
 Africans likewise had their cherished amulets (their gri- 
 gris), deemed by them sacred and magically powerful, the 
 Portuguese called these by the same name of fetich. 
 Then, in 1760, came De Brosses, with his book on ' Les 
 Dieux fetiches,' proposing this condition of belief as an 
 initial state of religion. His term as well as his views 
 were adopted, and fetichism assumed a fixed place in the 
 history of religion. 
 
 Neither ihefeitigo of the Portuguese mariner, nor any 
 Christian amulet or relic, is distinctive of a primitive phase 
 of belief; and if it were a in ere. question of etymology this 
 would be enough to show that 'fetichism' did not cor- 
 rectly describe the phase of belief which we do intend to 
 
FETICHISM AND MAGIC. 33 
 
 
 
 designate by that word. The power which is possessed by 
 the little image of a saint or of the Virgin, by a bit of the 
 true Cross, or any other fiiti$o, is not inherent in the wood 
 or metal itself, but has been given it from elsewhere. The 
 sailor does not imagine that the thing he carries is the 
 actual author of the gale or the calm. However ignorant 
 the Christian may be, and however superstitious may be 
 his attitude before the image of his saint, he never adores 
 that as a thing existing of itself ; he must have a notion 
 of something else standing, as it were, behind it, and, in 
 one way or another, giving it the power to act. The real 
 test of his belief lies, not in what he thinks about the 
 fetich, but in his conception of this Something behind. 
 
 It is superstitious, no doubt, to believe that an image 
 may move, may sigh and groan, but it is not primitive 
 fetichism ; for the very sighing and groaning are noted 
 as miraculous, and that they are so thought shows a know- 
 ledge that the thing is after all but dead matter. There 
 would be nothing wonderful in the movement of an image 
 possessed of vitality, and yet the belief in the possibility 
 of such a vital image would savour far more of the earliest 
 phases of thought. Even the Italian peasant woman who 
 beats her idol does not so, I imagine, with the intention 
 of hurting it, but with the dim belief that she can, through 
 it, hurt some other being who seems to have played her 
 false. The life of this being is, in some way, bound up 
 with his likeness, but the saint and the image are not one. 
 
 In the same spirit of superstition did persons, in the 
 Middle Ages, make likenesses in wax of some enemy, say 
 incantations over it, pierce it with pins, set it to melt 
 before the fire, in the firm conviction that they were 
 wreaking their vengeance upon him when far away. All 
 this is, if you will, the grossest superstition ; it implies a 
 very low conception of the supernal powers ; but ft is 
 not an example of fetichism in its really primitive form. 
 That many persons, Comte included, have spoken of this 
 kind of superstition as belonging to the earliest phase of 
 
 D 
 
34 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 belief lias greatly tended to confuse men's ideas of what 
 fetichism is to be taken to mean, and has led others justly 
 to question as Professor Max Miiller has done whether 
 fetichism is so primitive as it is said to be. 
 
 Others again have confounded fetichism with magic, 
 and so have come to speak of all religion as founded upon 
 magic rites. This too I conceive to be an error. No 
 belief can go so far as to think that everything possesses 
 magical power; this would be the very bull of credulity, 
 comparable to that extreme doctrine, of (Irish) republican- 
 ism, that one man is as good as another and better too. 
 But if all things are not alike magical, whence arises the 
 superiority of one thing over another in this respect ? Does 
 the magic power rest with the thing itself? If this is so, 
 what distinguishes magic from a rude form of natural 
 science? It maybe a mistake to imagine, for example, 
 that a piece of salt or a lion's tail can cure a fever, but 
 the mistake is scarcely in itself a superstition. And why 
 should the piece of salt be chosen as the repository of this 
 strange power, and not rather a piece from the bark of a 
 tree of the Cinchona tribe which really possesses it ? Is 
 it not evident that the superstition of magic arises from 
 the belief that their potencies are arbitrarily implanted in 
 certain selected objects ? And the very word c arbitrarily ' 
 implies the recognition of a power outside the object. 
 Without such a tacit belief in a power behind the phe- 
 nomenon magic would be nothing else than a rude experi- 
 mental science. The modern and more cultured magician 
 pronounces his charm over the thing he designs to use ; he 
 never imagines that the magical qualities are inherent in 
 the thing, but always that they come through the agency 
 of the incantation that is to say, from a supernal being, 
 be he but the Devil. The unscientific character of his 
 belief lies just in this : that he looks for the attributes of 
 a substance elsewhere than in the substance itself. If 
 fetichism were a superstition of this kind, we should have 
 to look beyond the fetich-worshipper's views concerning 
 
FETICHISX AND MAGIC. 35 
 
 the material things to his views about the power which 
 sent the magic. Only when we had discovered these, could 
 we tell what place the savage had attained in the stages 
 of religious development. 
 
 To sum up in one example the whole difference between 
 early fetichism and late superstition : The Portuguese 
 sailor prays to his fetich to save him from shipwreck, be- 
 cause he believes that he is somehow thus influencing nn 
 Unseen Being who has power over the winds and over 
 the waves. The African, too, has a notion of such an Un- 
 seen Being when he prays to his cjri-yri to save him from 
 the storm. Had he no such notion he would pray to the 
 winds and waves themselves not to drown him. 
 
 De Brosses* fetiches are of the late or magical kind. 
 Anything, according to this writer, may be a fetich a lion's 
 tail, a piece of salt, a stone, a plant, or an animal. And 
 yet, as we have shown, everything cannot be a fetich. The 
 worship paid to the lion's tail, to the piece of salt, to the 
 flower, or what not, implies, though it does not outwardly 
 express, a belief in something beyond the visible things. 
 Therefore it would be very unsafe to assert that the African 
 gives us an example of the earliest conditions of religious 
 growth. Nevertheless that primitive fetichism has existed 
 we cannot doubt. 
 
 If the facts which we gathered from the history of 
 words, and arrayed in the first part of this chapter, go for 
 anything, there must have been a time when man was in- 
 capable of conceiving supernal forces, such as are required 
 for the magical kind of fetichism ; for his whole thoughts 
 were centred in the actual. Now it must be that many of 
 the qualities which objects of the material world were in 
 primitive times thought to possess had been reflected back 
 upon them from the feelings which those objects stirred in 
 the beholder. -We saw a while ago how this was continu- 
 ally the case. The high thing was endowed with moral 
 qualities, because looking upward aroused some moral 
 thoughts. In a general way all material things share in a 
 
 D 2 
 
36 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 certain vitality, which is shed upon them by the subject ; 1 
 in a more particular sense certain objects are selected for 
 worship on account of the special emotions which they 
 excite. All worship of the fetich must have arisen out 
 of that subtle connection between things and thoughts of 
 which we have already said so much ; a thing which was 
 great and high was on that account alone admirable, calling 
 out from man a faint fore-note of the moral sense. The 
 very fact that there was as yet nothing but material nature, 
 and no thought or emotion recognisable in itsfclf alone, 
 tended to surround all the world of sense with a thin 
 atmosphere of thought and emotion ; an instinct of belief 
 attached itself to these outward things. The seeds of 
 future poetry and ethic were being carried on the wings 
 of sensation, but had not yet settled and taken root. 
 
 It is to signify this condition of thought that we can 
 alone fairly use the word ' fetichism/ if we intend it to 
 express an early stage of belief. This fetichism, which is 
 really primitive, owns no thought beyond the material 
 object. Here the fetich was not the means of concentrating 
 the mind upon an internal idea of God; because man, in 
 the days when religion first began, had no idea of God at 
 all. God is a notion of the most abstract character, and 
 our race, we well know, did not start upon its career fur- 
 nished with a stock of abstract ideas. Man did not say 
 to himself, 'That mountain or that river shall symbolise 
 my idea of God ; ' still less did he say, ' These things are 
 the abode of God; ' he only made the objects themselves 
 into gods by worshipping them. 
 
 Although in this condition of thought nothing was 
 wholly divine, and yet everything was in a fashion divine 
 for a voice spoke to man out of each object of sense it 
 not the less necessarily followed that worship, to any ob- 
 servable extent, could only attach itself to certain con- 
 spicuous objects, which should in time develope into what 
 
 1 It is this capacity of reflecting vitality on immaterial things which 
 Mr. Tylor calls animism. Primitive Culture, passim. 
 
FROM FETICHISM TO NATURE WORSHIP. 37 
 
 we may fairly call gods. It is not in the case of this kind 
 of fetichisrn as it is in the case of the magical fetichism, 
 where any object, however insignificant, may be the re- 
 ceptacle of potency from without. Here the worship must 
 be proportionate to the impressiveness of the thing ; we 
 may even say that it must be proportionate to the great- 
 ness or the height of the thing. In. truth, it would seem 
 that the great fetich gods of the early world were three, 
 and three only the tree, the mountain, and the river. 1 
 Lesser fetiches took their holiness from the greater the 
 stone from the mountain, the branch or the block of wood 
 from the tree. But such lesser fetiches were not wor- 
 shipped in the prime of fetichism. They are in almost 
 every case where they are to be met with the survivals 
 from an earlier belief. 
 
 Names, we know, from being individual become generic. 
 The first word for river must have indicated some par- 
 ticular stream ; later on it came to imply all those quali- 
 ties which rivers have in common, and with the benefit of 
 a wider scope for language man lost a certain distinctness 
 and picturesqueness in it. The word tree, when for us it 
 meant only the single tree outside a nursery window, was 
 in a fashion far more expressive than it has since been. 
 While the generalising process of language goes on, it 
 leads to a gradual detachment of their attributes from the 
 individual things, and the formation of these attributes or 
 adjectives into a class of ideas by themselves. The mind 
 learns to separate the brightness and the swiftness of flow- 
 ing water from any one example of these qualities, and 
 the result is that we get the conception of the attributes 
 brightness and swiftness by themselves. The same change 
 took place in belief. The holiness which once belonged 
 to a single object was distributed over the aggregate of 
 existences of the same kind, and the idea ' holiness ' was 
 
 1 The sea, as will be presently more fully explained, is by primitive man 
 reckoned in the class of rivers. 
 
38 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 thus abstracted in a certain degree from the particular 
 holy thing in a certain degree, but not entirely. The 
 tree, for example, became less personally sacred than sur- 
 rounded by an atmosphere of sacredness ; and this sanctity 
 now belonged, not to one tree, but to the whole grove of 
 trees. The general idea in this way replaced the indi- 
 vidual one ; and in the course of time the sense of holiness 
 was transferred to other belongings of the grove far less 
 tangible and real than the trees. As I have suggested 
 above, the sacred silence, the murmuring of streams, the 
 rushing of the wind, may constitute the next hierarchy of 
 gods. 
 
 The stage of belief, when no worship was bestowed upon 
 pure ideals that is to say, upon qualities we may call the 
 second stage in the development of belief. It is a phase 
 which was far from having been quite abandoned even in 
 the historical ages of most among the Indo-European folk, 
 and which has, in consequence, more often come under 
 the notice of casual observers than has fetichism. We 
 often enough come across traces of the worship of trees 
 in the creeds of Aryan races ; but we still more frequently 
 hear the grove spoken of as having preceded the temple. 
 ( Trees,' says Pliny, ' were the first temples. Even at 
 this day the simple rustic, of ancient custom, dedicates his 
 noblest tree to God. And the statues of gold and ivory 
 are not more honoured than the sacred silence which reigns 
 about the grove.' 1 It was the same sacred silence of the 
 grove which, according to Tacitus, the Germans wor- 
 shipped in their forest fastnesses. Aristophanes, in a 
 revolt against the image worship and the superstition of 
 his day, proposes half seriously to revert to such earlier 
 customs as that of worship in the grove ; he calls upon the 
 Athenians to leave their closed shrines and to sacrifice in 
 the open air, and in place of the temple, with its golden 
 doors, to dedicate the olive tree to new gods. 2 
 
 Such a state of feeling as this was, when it arose, a 
 1 H. N. xii. 2. 2 Aveg. 
 
NATUEE WORSHIP. 39 
 
 decided advance upon the gross conceptions of fetichism. 
 Then, on every side, the more material things were loosen- 
 ing their hold upon men's imagination and falling from 
 their former place, and worship was transferred to things 
 either more abstract or more remote from common expe- 
 rience, things which were wide, far-reaching, or heavenly. 
 Instead of the tree, the mountain, and the river, man 
 chose for his gods the earth, the storm, the sky, the sun, 
 the sea. 1 Men were well upon the road towards a personal 
 divinity that is to say, to the deification of qualities or 
 attributes. The idea of personality (and by personality I 
 mean all which constitutes the inner being, the I), the idea 
 of personality apart from matter must have been growing 
 more distinct when men could attribute personality to such 
 an abstract phenomenon as the sky. 
 
 It is of the existence of this second stage in the 
 development of belief that Comparative Philology fur- 
 nishes us with such decisive proofs and such interesting 
 examples. And as it is chiefly with beliefs in this stage 
 that the chapters of this volume are concerned, and as the 
 nature of the general testimony to the existence of this 
 special phase of belief which is afforded by language can 
 so easily be shown, it will be well if we turn aside an 
 instant from an historical enquiry in order to glance at 
 the method of Comparative Philology when dealing with 
 questions such as these. 
 
 We know, of course, nothing directly of our Aryan 
 ancestors themselves, but we know the various tongues 
 which have descended from their primitive speech the 
 Sanskrit, the Zend, the Greek, the Latin, the Teutonic, 
 
 1 It is, of course, obvious that the phenomena here enumerated do not 
 all show an equal remoteness from fetichism, nor an abstraction of the 
 same sort. The earth, taken as a whole, is a general notion of a very wide 
 kind ; but, as it is actually considered in mythology, it is perhaps the 
 nearest to a fetich god of all the five phenomena given above. It always 
 tends to coincide with some particular bit of the earth, some individual 
 mountain or valley. The sea begins by being a mere river fetich, but when 
 men have learnt something of its boundless extent it becomes distinctly an 
 abstract idea. 
 
40 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEP 
 
 the Celtic, the Slavonian and which all stand in a rela- 
 tionship more or less intimate with it. By examining the 
 relationship which exists between words of the same 
 meaning in different Indo-European languages, we draw 
 one most valuable conclusion touching the life of these 
 ancient Aryas. If the names of anything in the children 
 languages all appear to have sprung from one root, we 
 argue that the thing was known to the Aryan progenitors, 
 and by them endowed with a name which is the parent 
 of the names which have come down to us. If the Aryas 
 had not known the thing, they could not have given it a 
 name ; and conversely, if they have not given it a name 
 they could not have known the thing. Once more : if the 
 name existed among the Aryas it will be found again 
 (somewhat changed, no doubt) among their children ; 
 conversely, if the same word does not pervade the 
 children languages it has not pre-existed in the parent 
 one. These are the general principles on which we build 
 up the sum of our knowledge of prehistoric times. When, 
 for example, we find such a word as the Sanskrit go (cow) 
 corresponding by proper laws of change ! to names for the 
 same animal in Greek, Latin, Persian, German, &c., we 
 argue that the ancient Aryas were acquainted with horned 
 cattle. The words in the offshoot languages point back 
 to a word not unlike them, in the parent tongue ; and as 
 the word has continued to denominate the same thing to 
 the children, it must have denominated the thing (viz. 
 horned cattle) to the parents. 
 
 Further than this, if we want to get the nearest ap- 
 proximation to the lost Aryan word 2 we turn first to the 
 Sanskrit to give it us ; because we both know historically 
 that Sanskrit is the oldest among the brother languages 
 and likewise find, upon examination, that Sanskrit can 
 
 1 Skr. go (gaus), Zend gao, Gr. ftovs, Lat. bos, Germ, kuh, Eng. cow, 
 Irish bo, Slavonic gov-iado (ox). 
 
 2 It has been already said that proto-Aryan is a better word to express 
 the lost speech of our ancestors than Aryan, though, for the sake of short- 
 ness and simplicity, the latter will be for the future employed. 
 

 DYlUS, THE SKY GOD. 41 
 
 generally show us how a word acquired its meaning, when 
 the other tongues are silent upon this matter. Our word 
 daughter is a good instance in point. It corresponds to 
 the Sanskrit duhitar, the Persian dochtar, the Greek 
 Bvydrrjp, 1 &c. ; and so we come to the same conclusion 
 about daughter which we arrived at concerning horned 
 cattle, namely, that the old Aryas had a word from which 
 ours is a descendant. But, in this instance, we have a 
 clear proof thai, among the various forms which have 
 come down to us, that preserved in the Sanskrit is the 
 oldest, because in that only can we see how the word was 
 formed. We connect duhitar with a verb dtih, to milk, 
 and recognise the origin of our ' daughter ; to have been 
 * the milker J the milkmaid of the family. 
 
 Now let us apply the same method of research to 
 mythology. We find a Zeus, chief god among the Greeks, 
 a Jupiter 2 among the Romans; we have a Zio (Tiv or 
 Tyr), an important divinity with the Teutons, and a 
 Dyaus with the old Indians. All these words are from 
 the same root; and as we reasoned in the case of go, 
 so must we reason now namely, that the root of these 
 words was the name of an Aryan divinity. As, moreover, 
 this name is the most widespread of all *the mythical 
 names in the Indo-European family, we are justified in 
 assuming that the lost parent-word betokened a chief, if 
 not the chief, Aryan god. We might call him Dyaus, 
 because Dyaus, we conjecture, most nearly replaces the 
 lost name. But more than this. As was the case with 
 duhitar among all the words for daughter, so Dyaus, 
 among all similar names, is the only one whose origin 
 can be accounted for. Dyaus means sky. 3 No doubt 
 
 1 F-->r Svxdr-rjp, by change of aspirates. 
 
 2 From Uyii us-pi tar, father Dyaus, gen. Jovis, dat. Jovi (Aiovffi 
 Mommsen, Unterital. Dial., p. 191). 
 
 3 The bright ski/ especially, as it is connected with the word dir, to 
 shine. Most philologists, yielding to their too common habit of treating 
 the abstraction or generalisation (adjective or verb) as the parent of all 
 the concrete words of the sarne class, have spoken of Dyuus (Dyo) as derived 
 
 OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
42 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 therefore but that the lost proto-Dyaus was also the sky. 
 Nay, if any further proof of this were needed, Zeus and 
 Jupiter, though their names no longer recalled the heavens, 1 
 nevertheless largely did recall the sky in their natures. 
 And how could this have been unless the god from whom 
 they sprang had possessed the properties and the powers of 
 a sky god in a more eminent degree than they? In 
 truth, the old Aryan god was the sky. Whenever the 
 Aryan used the name of this his divinity, the -sky must at 
 the same time have been present in his thoughts, and in 
 the most literal sense he worshipped that portion of nature 
 as a god. Doubtless the old Aryas worshipped other 
 phenomena likewise ; but these too they adored under 
 their physical names and not as separate entities. 
 
 When we have not the direct help of etymology, as in 
 the case of Dyaus, to determine the original nature of a 
 divine being, we have the help scarcely less valuable if 
 rightly used of comparative mythology, In the various 
 pantheons which spring from one parent creed we find 
 the same gods recurring in slightly different guises ; and 
 here and there they betray the substance on which their 
 being is grounded. 
 
 It is not' difficult to see that the clothing of these 
 things with human form is the last stage of the three 
 initial ones in the history of belief, and that anthropo- 
 morphism, when it has once arisen, can never degenerate 
 into nature worship. If Zeus or Odhinri is once conceived 
 clearly as an unseen being, as some one sitting apart in 
 Olympus or in Asgard, there is little danger that lie will 
 come to be confounded with the visible storm. He may 
 be the storm-sender, but he cannot be the actual pheno- 
 menon which he rules. Yet even such gods as Zeus and 
 Odhinn drop here and there a token to show that they 
 
 from the root div, to shine. It would be quite as reasonable to speak of 
 die derived from dyb. Probably, however, neither comes directly from the 
 other, both from a lost parent- word which may also have meant sky. 
 1 Or only occasionally, as in the phrase ' sub Jove.' 
 
NATURE WORSHIP THE CAUSE OF HENOTHEISM. 43 
 
 were once not unseen beings, but visible things, bound 
 within the limits which included their special phenomena. 
 The indication in this or the other instance may be slight ; 
 it accumulates, as we find a hundred examples ; and when, 
 following the creed back to its more primitive forms, or 
 comparing it with some kindred system which is less 
 advanced, we see the god, whose personality at one time 
 seemed so clear, fading gradually away till he dissolves in 
 air, or cloud, jor rain, or sunshine, the inference with respect 
 to the total genesis of belief grows so exacting that we 
 cannot choose but receive it. 
 
 If it be true and who will deny it ? that no idea can 
 be clearly grasped unless there be a word to express it, we 
 must confess that the Aryas, in the condition in which we 
 now suppose them, were still without a god. The word 
 which expressed the thing they worshipped meant also the 
 sky, or it meant the wind, or the sea, or the earth. When 
 they saw these things they worshipped ; when the pheno- 
 mena were absent they were forgotten. For the memories 
 of savages are short ; their emotions are very transitory, 
 and are almost always under the immediate influence of 
 outward sensations. Even in later times, when the god 
 is a personality and has a name of his own, so long as he 
 is associated with phenomena, he will suffer the same 
 kind of alternate reverence and neglect. Gubernatis 
 notices concerning Indra, the . storm god, that in some of 
 the Vedic hymns he is only reverenced when he is active ; 
 when he is inactive he is scarcely thought of. 1 
 
 As one by one the phenomena pass in review each one 
 while it is present seems to be the god, and is worshipped 
 with all the ardour of which the suppliant is capa,ble. 
 When we read the votary's prayers to any part of nature, 
 we might fancy he worshipped no other part. But this is 
 not the case. The explanation of this seeming changeable- 
 ness from god to god lies in the shortness of the savage's 
 memory and the difficulty which he finds in realising any- 
 1 Letture sopra, la Mittologia Vcdica, p. 28. 
 
44 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 tiling but his present sensation. The sun is at one moment 
 his only god ; but it sinks to rest, and now he prays to the 
 heaven, studded with its thousand stars. Again these are 
 overclouded, and from the clouds issues the blinding flash 
 or the awful roll of thunder ; and then the pure sky is for- 
 gotten and he prays to the lightning and the storm. A 
 stage of belief such as this, when each divinity seems for 
 the time to stand by himself and to be prayed to alone, has 
 been called by Mr. Max Miiller henotheism. 1 "The cause of 
 henotheism, then, lies in the worship of actual physical 
 phenomena. The same nature origin of the gods affords 
 a satisfactory explanation of polytheism ; and polytheism 
 is a state of belief not so easily accounted for as some 
 suppose. 
 
 The belief in one god is a thing not difficult to under- 
 stand ; for whether it be true or false it is a belief 
 of which we have a hundred examples around us. The 
 god-idea is a distinct creation of the human mind : it is a 
 conception in itself. The very essence of this conception 
 is the difference between god and man. But to what 
 instinct does the belief in many gods respond? The 
 difference between god and god cannot be an observed 
 difference, as that between tree and tree or between man 
 and man. The general terms tree and man express an 
 aggregate of qualities found to be common to a great 
 number of different objects, as these objects come within 
 the range of our experience. But god is not a general 
 term of this class. The god-idea does not include any- 
 thing which is a part of outward experience. If there were 
 a great many different gods, our knowledge of them would 
 not be of an external, experimental kind. Our abstract 
 word c god' would not have been obtained by means of a 
 generalisation of the qualities which the polloi theo'i had 
 in common, in the same way that 'tree' is a generalisa- 
 
 1 ' If we must have a general name for the earliest form of religion 
 among the Vedic Indians, it can be neither monotlielsm nor polytheism, but 
 only henothffigm.' Hibbert Lectures, p. 260. 
 
NATURE WORSHIP THE CAUSE OF POLYTHEISM. 45 
 
 tion of the qualities of many trees. On the contrary, the 
 many gods would owe their common name to the fact that 
 they shared in some inward quality which we had pre- 
 viously determined was essential to divinity. But to what 
 in this case would the polloi theoi owe the difference of 
 their natures ? Why should Zeus be unlike Hermes, and 
 why Apollo different from both? The explanation once 
 universally given, and even now thought c generally suffi- 
 cient,' is that the characters of the gods are the result of 
 mere invention, and in fact, the children of fancy. But 
 such a notion is, as we have before agreed, inconsistent 
 with the seriousness of true belief. It was the explanation 
 which Sidney gave of the birth of the Chimsera and of 
 the Furies ; and if the explanation was insufficient for 
 the beings which people the outer circles of mythology, 
 far less sufficient is it for those who occupy the central 
 place in a creed. 
 
 When, however, we realise that the gods were once 
 confounded with natural phenomena, all difficulty in 
 accounting for their characters is taken away. Apollo is 
 not like Hermes, because the sun is not like the wind. 
 Just so long as the natures of both are connected with out- 
 ward nature will their characters remain apart, and yet 
 the belief in both remain real. When they become alto- 
 gether abstract conceptions, either the two will merge in 
 one or one of them will lose his divine character. He will 
 then become a subject for fancy and for the invention of 
 poets ; he will no longer be an object of worship. 
 
 This nature- worshipping stage of belief, then, is, so 
 long as it remains pure, the stage of the most pure and 
 unmixed polytheism. So long, and only so long, as the 
 name of the god and the name of the element, the portion 
 of nature, are one; so long as the being is thus identified 
 with earth, or sky, or sea ; and so long as no being is wor- 
 shipped under a name which has ceased to be the expres- 
 sion of an outward thing the polytheistic belief remains ; 
 for while this state continues it is impossible that the 
 
46 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 deity of one element can have control over the god of 
 another, seeing that each is, of necessity, confined to his 
 own province. 
 
 Evidently the nature-worshipping stage of belief is a 
 change and an advance upon fetichism. The more the 
 deity is raised above the level of common things, the more 
 great and high does he become; and becoming thus 
 greater, the more does he tend to absorb into himself the 
 thoughts of the worshipper. He approaches so much the 
 nearer to an abstract god. 
 
 The third and last stage in early religious development 
 is the anthropomorphic stage, which links nature worship 
 on to monotheism. We have seen how, while the nature 
 worship remaine'd, the creed was purely polytheistic ; how, 
 as the sea could have no control over the sky, nor the sky 
 over the earth, the gods who represented these things 
 must remain apart. But in time the change does come. 
 Then Zeus and Zio no more recall to those who use their 
 sacred names the overspreading heaven ; all they suggest 
 is the idea of beings having, in some way, the character 
 of the sky, in an obscure and mystic way not obvious to 
 the sense of the worshipper. Zeus and Zio have grown 
 into proper names, designations of persons and not of 
 things ; and the gods stand out as clear and as thinkable, 
 in virtue of this name, as any absent friend may be. The 
 Aryans have made an immense step forward when they 
 have arrived at this point. 
 
 Through the natural changes which time works in 
 every mythic system may be traced this process of finding 
 a name for that aggregation of ideas which is gradually 
 settling into what we understand by the word god. With 
 the Greeks and Romans Dyaus remained the chief god, 
 because in his changed names, Zeus and Jupiter, he no 
 longer represented the sky ; in India, on the contrary, 
 because Dyaus did recall some natural appearance he 
 ceased to be the chief divinity, and his place was supplied 
 
ZEUS AND THEOS. 47 
 
 >y Indra, for Indra's name has not a direct physical 
 meaning. 1 
 
 Had the Indians and the Greeks continued always in 
 the same spiritual condition -the name of their highest 
 god might indeed have changed such changes are in the 
 nature of mythology but no change would have been 
 effective to abstract their thoughts from the phenomena 
 of sense. The alterations would have been in a direction 
 the very opposite to that which they actually took. Dyaus 
 would have remained the chief god of the Indians, and 
 another old Aryan god, Varuna (in the form Ouranos), 
 would have become the chief god of the Greeks ; because 
 Dyaus and Ouranos, in Sanskrit and Greek, still stood for 
 the sky. 
 
 Suppose Dyaus, then, to have become a proper name. 
 We have not yet seen how it grows to be a generic 
 one. This last consummation cannot be far off. When a 
 phenomenon, a thing, is changed into a person, and bap- 
 tised with an appellation of its own, the tendency will 
 arise to call other phenomena of nature by the same 
 name. We shall have a sea Zeus, an earth Zeus, while 
 men will mean thereby only what we understand by the 
 words sea god, earth god. We do see survivals of such 
 a method of nomenclature in the pantheons of Greece and 
 Rome in such a name, for example, as Zeus Chthonios, 
 which is really synonymous with Hades, and designates a 
 different personage from the Zeus Olympios ; in the Zeno- 
 poseidon, of whom weThave some traces, 2 and in the use by 
 the Latins of the word Junones as a synonym for god- 
 desses. An example of the same kind is the association 
 of Indra's name with almost all the other gods of the 
 Veda e.g. Indragni, Indrasomo, Indravayu, Indravaruno. 
 These must mean merely God Agni, God Soma, &c. But 
 of course the essential part of the process had been com- 
 
 1 For the suggested etymologies of the word Indra see Ch. III. v 
 
 2 Athenseus, ii. 42. Cf. also the Zei/s MyXctxrios of Paros and Corcyra ; 
 Boeckh, Cm-pus In. Gr. ii. 1870, 2418 ; and Maury, Rel. de la Grece, i. 63. 
 
48 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 pleted before any one of the Aryan creeds had emerged 
 into the light. Yet as Dyaus, Zeus, Jupiter, 6sos, deus^ 
 Sanskrit deva, Persian div l (dens), are all from the same 
 root, we can scarcely doubt that as the personal names 
 Zeus and Jupiter were derived from the sky god, so were 
 likewise the abstract or general terms Osos, deus, ' god.' 
 
 It is just as if at first the Aryas said 6 sky, sky ' to the 
 object of their adoration ; then changing the word a 
 little, they called their god Skoi, and, lastly, invented a 
 third abstract word, skey, for a god. I assume that Skoi 
 was invented before skey, Zeus before ilieos, because this 
 seems the most conformable to the natural process of 
 thought. It must be said, however, that comparative 
 philology gives us no information upon this point. The 
 mere absence of any certain indication tells us this much 
 only, that the one change came treading close upon the 
 heels of the othp.r. 
 
 With the growth of the personal god sprang up the 
 distinctly ethic parts of the creed those moral laws 
 which, us Mr. Spencer says, are subsequent to the be- 
 ginninq- of worship. There is little moral teaching in 
 the works of nature : the thunder and the lightning are 
 not bound by the laws which bind us ; the wind bloweth 
 where it listeth ; and it is wasted breath to cavil at the 
 doings of these things. The character, therefore, of the 
 early gods is discovered by observing what they are, not 
 by considering what they should be. 
 
 I am that I am, and they that level 
 At my abuses reckon up their own. 
 
 But when the god has clothed himself in human guise he 
 ha,s taken therewith the responsibilities of human nature ; 
 he must, in the end, conform to one code of right and 
 wrong. It will be long, no doubt, before -he does this. 
 
 1 The fact that the Persian div means devil is a matter of no conse- 
 quence here. The change of meaning, in fact, came chiefly accidentally. 
 That at least is Darmesteter's view (Avesta, Introd.) Others attribute it 
 to the reforming spirit of Zoroastrianism. 
 
STRATA OF BELIEF. 49 
 
 Zens cannot, if he wonld, shake off his former nature. 
 His shameless amours were innocent when he was, in very 
 fact, the heaven which impregnates all nature by its fer- 
 tilising rains. All the race of men are sons of heaven and 
 earth, so all are born of Zeus. Earth has many names, 
 being not uniform, but different in different places; so 
 Zeus has many wives. 
 
 No religion which we shall encounter among the Aryan 
 folk has stopped short before it reached this third stage, 
 that of practical monotheism. Each one, that is to say, 
 has got its general name for god. But phases of belief are 
 not to be measured by the mere lapse of time, no more than 
 geological strata are to be measured by their distance 
 from the centre of the earth. Some primitive formation 
 may lie quite near the surface, side by side with another 
 formation which is of yesterday. Wherefore along with 
 quite modern notions on religious matters we may trace 
 the forms of primitive belief. It is in our own hand which 
 parts of the science we choose to make our study. 
 
 We shall find examples sufficient of all the early phases 
 of religious growth in the creeds of the Aryan peoples ; 
 and, what is better, we may study these phases not as 
 petrified remains, but in a continual process of growth 
 and change. Just as in Highland or in Irish cottages, 
 among the fishermen's huts of Brittany, or in the Russian 
 mir, or among the peasants of Greece, we may listen to 
 stories whose prototypes were told long centuries agone 
 upon the banks of the Oxus and the Jaxartes by the remote 
 fore-elders of our race, so among the same people of to- 
 day we shall detect the signs of a creed which the more 
 enlightened among those far-off Aryas were already be- 
 ginning to leave behind. The countryman who conies to 
 his well-dressing, or dances round his may-pole, pays 
 ancestral vows to the power of tree and stream. He 
 cherishes his piece of wood or scrap of linen as zealously 
 as the African his gri-gri, though he may call the one a 
 piece of the true Cross and the other a fragment of the 
 
 E 
 
50 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 linen napkin ; he worships his misshapen images and his 
 Black Virgin in the same spirit whereby the ancient Greek 
 held sacred his Black Demeter, his Ephesian Artemis, and 
 thought them more worthy of honour than the finest ex- 
 amples of Greek art. Such an one as he is our best friend 
 when we want to tread in the ways of a past belief. As 
 we see in his mind the alternations between superstition 
 and something higher than superstition, so we believe that 
 in him the race renews its ancient conflict, its struggles 
 and questionings, before the slow advance of thought ; and 
 if his better instincts gain the day, then the victory of all 
 humanity is won once more. 
 
 There is one other point which we must touch upon in 
 enumerating the motive causes of belief touch upon, but 
 110 more. All beliefs have had their origin in sensation, 
 but those sensations have been most efficient which have 
 called forth most of the inward response, which have given 
 rise to the strongest emotion. Emotion, in truth, is so 
 much at the root of all worship that a kind of emotional 
 worship (or ritual) seems often to precede any definite form 
 of creed. Men worship they know not what. The current 
 of human thought and feeling does not run smoothly<| 
 men are subject to moments of ecstasy when, without 
 knowing why, they obey an influence from outside them 
 which they cannot gauge. Tennent, in his description of 
 that degraded race of Ceylon the Veddahs, 1 after telling 
 us that they have no knowledge of a god nor of a future 
 state, no idols nor temples, yet goes on to give an account 
 of a ceremony practised among them which, in the proper 
 
 1 Tennent's Ceylon, ii. 437. The Veddahs, when Tennent saw them, 
 were divided into three different classes, the rock Veddahs, the village 
 Veddahs, and the coast Veddahs, of whom the first onjy p r esented something 
 like an image of primitive life. They, as the name implies, lived in caves 
 or beneath trees, never in houses. I do not know whether they were really 
 so primitive a race as he supposes whether, I mean, their culture may not 
 have declined. This is always the point difficult to decide about savage 
 races. 
 

 INFLUENCE OF THE PASSIONS. 51 
 
 sense of the word, we may call religious. It was a wild 
 dance executed by one who professed to drive out disease, 
 and who must have thought by this performance to gain 
 some supernatural power or a kind of inspiration. ' The 
 dance, 5 says Sir E. Tennent, ( is executed in front of an 
 offering of something eatable placed on a tripod on sticks. 
 The dancer has his head and girdle decorated with green 
 leaves. At first he shuffles with his feet to a plaintive 
 air, but by degrees he works himself into a state of great 
 excitement and action, accompanied by moans and screams, 
 and during this paroxysm he professes to be inspired with 
 instruction for the curing of the patient.' The description 
 of the Veddah dance might be transcribed for that of any 
 Oriental darweesh or fakeer; it would not be much mis- 
 placed if it were applied to the orgies of the Bacchantes 
 or the worshippers of the Phrygian Mother Goddess. 
 When the belief in any dogmatic creed that is, in any 
 theory of the world and of God and man seems to be 
 breaking up, men return as if by natural instinct to these 
 wild forms of worship, which are earlier than any dogma. 
 So in Greece the rites of Eleusis, and the mystic worship 
 of Isis in Rome, outlived the genuine belief in the Greek 
 and Roman divinities; and when men felt the creed of 
 mediaeval Christendom trembling beneath their feet, they 
 too broke out into like orgies of emotion. Such were those 
 which swept over Europe in the fourteenth century, the 
 processions of penitents, of flagellants, and the strange 
 Dance of Death. 
 
 All this shows how much worship is an affair of in- 
 stinct. Certain excitements are more especially allied to 
 strong emotion ; and foremost among all these we must 
 place the incitement of love and wine ; wherefore we need 
 not be surprised if these indulgences play a great part in 
 every primitive creed. Indeed, as ecstasies are earlier 
 than pantheons though not, I suppose, earlier than any 
 sense of supernatural existence it might seem as if 
 Phallic and Bacchic worship were more essential than any 
 
 K 2 
 
52 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 other part of the early religion. What are degrading uses 
 for a people at all advanced in culture are not so for the 
 lowest of mankind ; and, were the subject suitable for dis- 
 cussion here, it would be easy to show that these indul- 
 gences, as they are the main authors of a formulated 
 worship, and so one may say of religion, are likewise great 
 instigators to the growth of morality. '\sp6s^ holy, is from 
 a root which means to agitate; and if Eros be, as some 
 say, the same with Hermes, he is a god of agitation, of 
 rapid motion, as well as of love. The saying of a Papuan 
 Islander (quoted by Mr. Spencer) suggests the origin of 
 the worship of the vine. When spoken to concerning 
 God he replied, * Then this god is certainly your arrack, 
 for I never feel so happy as when I have had my fill of 
 that. 5 
 
 Wherefore all through the history of belief we shall 
 find one or both of these two gods the god of love or 
 th.e god of wine possessing a mighty power. For one 
 class of people and for one climate the one indulgence, for 
 other sorts the other. Aphrodite for the southern Greeks 
 and the Greeks of the islands, and for the Asiatic people of 
 warm Semitic blood. Dionysus for Thrace and the shep- 
 herds of the north, and chiefly too for the Aryan Indian l 
 .and Persian. 2 Wine for the German, 3 love for the Celt. 4 
 ' For beauty and amorousness, the sons of Gaedhil.' 
 
 This part of the history of religion needs only to be 
 hinted at here. It is not a subject suitable for a popular 
 treatise. Moreover, it has little direct bearing upon the 
 subjects of the following chapters, which are not, as a rule, 
 concerned with creeds in their emotional aspect. 
 
 1 The place which is occupied in the Vedic ritual by the intoxicating 
 plant soma is a sufficient proof of this. 
 
 2 Herod, i. 134. 
 
 3 See Tacitus, Germ. 22. The custom of deliberating when drunk, 
 common to Persians and Germans, arose no doubt from a belief in the in- 
 spiration of the vine. 
 
 4 Cf . Diodorus Sic. v. ; Strabo, iv. ; Athen. xiii. 8. 
 
U JN IVJ^JA^i-JL : 
 
 ARYAN FETICH WORSHIP. 53 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE EAELY GROWTH OP BELIEF. 
 
 HAVING now dealt with and done with (for the rest of the 
 present volume) a preliminary psychological investigation 
 into the nature of belief, we may turn all argument and 
 discussion being for the future laid aside to the actual 
 phases of it selected for study ; that is to say, to an 
 enquiry which is of a strictly historical kind. In the last 
 chapter we saw that human thought in this matter of 
 belief might be considered as passing through three 
 important stages. The first is the fetich- worshipping 
 stage, when man's thoughts are concentrated purely upon 
 visible concrete substances. The second we called the 
 nature-worshipping stage. In it the objects of belief are 
 still external and sensible, but they are also, in a certain 
 degree, generalised, and are not often tangible. The 
 third is the anthropomorphic or ethical stage, when the 
 divinity is conceived as a being like .mankind, and the 
 ethical qualities of that being have to be taken fully 
 into account. This third condition of belief lies quite 
 beyond the sphere of the present enquiry. 
 
 The first condition that of fetichism might likewise 
 be thought outside* our studies, seeing that none of the 
 Indo-European creeds, of which we have any cognisance, 
 are found in that primitive condition. But yet we know, 
 not by theory only but by a hundred proofs, that our fore- 
 fathers have been in the fetich-worshipping phase ; and, 
 therefore, the traces of fetich worship among the Indo- 
 European races cannot be altogether left out of account. 
 The proofs of that pre-existing state are still visible, and 
 
54 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 it is not to be supposed that the later forms of Aryan 
 creeds have been uninfluenced bj these foregone expe- 
 periences. We have, therefore, in this chapter to note 
 some of the traces of fetichism in the Aryan creeds ; and, 
 having glanced at these, to mark, where we can, the pro- 
 cesses by which that fetich worship developed into the 
 worship of nature in her less material shapes. 
 
 I need not revive the discussion raised in the last 
 chapter over the various uses of the word fetichism, nor 
 repeat the distinction which was there drawn between that 
 fetichism which is a distinct phase of belief and fetichism 
 which is thaumaturgic merely, and which may coexist 
 with widely different creeds. Fetichism which is really 
 primitive chooses for worship only the greater and more 
 imposing objects of sight and sense. The gods of the 
 early world are the rock and the mountain, the tree, the 
 river, the sea. 1 Lesser fetiches get their sacredness from 
 the greater a stone from the mountain ; a stump, or 
 block, or stick, from the tree. 
 
 Tennent, we noticed, after assuring us that the 
 Veddahs had no religion, no knowledge of a god or of a 
 future state, yet went on to describe the dance of the 
 medicine man, which, was certainly of a ritualistic cha- 
 racter. The charmer seemed to invoke some kind of 
 inspiration in order to drive out disease. During the per- 
 formance of his dance he was girt, we were told, with 
 branches about the head and loins. This is almost the only 
 part of the ritual observance which is given in detail. Is 
 it too much to assume that these leaves and branches were 
 fragments from the Veddah's fetich tree, and that the 
 medicine man deemed that they helped him to gain his 
 inspiration ? The use of these fragments was, in that case, 
 certainly thaumaturgic ; but it points directly to a belief 
 which lay behind. 
 
 1 In fact, the sea, as was said in the first chapter, is at first thought of 
 only as a mighty river. Wherefore we get, as the three great fetichisms of 
 the world, tree, river, and mountain worship. 
 
TREE GODS. 55 
 
 As the home of man must first be found in the caves, 
 or beneath the shelter of a mountain, or under the branches 
 of a tree, I can imagine the tree and mountain fetiches to 
 have been the most primitive of all. 
 
 In the last chapter I said that the original man might 
 be credited with any goodliness of outward form, but that 
 his intelligence must be supposed the most limited con- 
 ceivable. In reality we know that man's body is stunted 
 and deformed when his mind and spirit are so ; and that 
 we must think of our earliest ancestors as being not very 
 far (at least) removed from the brutes, herding together 
 in woods and caves, gleaning a precarious subsistence 
 from roots and berries and wild fruits, and what of game 
 they could kill with their rude weapons ; in constant dread 
 of the fiercer beasts of the forest, and always at war with 
 them ; never stirring far from the common home, ignora.nt 
 of all things beyond that narrow bound, fearful always, 
 and, through fear, credulous especially concerning things 
 remote. When man became first conscious of himself he 
 knew himself a social being. Marriage was not, but there 
 was a tribal life ; and we can picture this first small em- 
 bryo of future commonwealths forming itself under a 
 tree. Its branches are the resting-place at night; and, 
 when the members of the tribe have separated during the 
 day in search of food, the tree is the rendezvous for their 
 evening return. Their first approach toward house- 
 building is to pull down some branches as a screen against 
 wind and rain ; these they fasten into the earth, wattling 
 other dead branches through them, and a kind of .hut is 
 made. 1 
 
 Certain it is that, among people who live in woody 
 lands, we find long continuing the habit of using a tree 
 trunk for the main pillar of the house, of building cir- 
 cular walls round that tree, and sloping the roof down 
 
 1 The picture with which M. Violet-le-Duc begins his Habitations of 
 Men in all Ages, though fanciful, is surely not pure imagination. Some 
 such beginning of the tree house must have occurred. 
 
56 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 to them from it. Of such kind was the house of our 
 northern ancestors. Those who have read the saga of 
 Volsung will remember how, when that king was enter- 
 taining the Goths in his palace, came in the god Odhinn, 
 likened to an old man, and how he left sticking in the 
 branstock, the tree which supported the roof of the palace, 
 the famous sword Gram, so fruitful a source of sorrow in 
 after years. In the elder Edda, Brynhild hails Sigurd 
 with the title 'brynpings apaldr,' literally apple tree of 
 war, 1 using the term as synonymous with pillar of war a 
 chance phrase which shows how universal was the use of 
 trees in the way I have described. Nor was that use con- 
 fined to the German races, though it was most conspicuous 
 among them. There must certainly be an allusion to the 
 same habit of building grown old-fashioned and mis- 
 understood in Homer's day in that description of the 
 wonderful chamber and bed of Odysseus, whose secret he 
 and Penelope only knew. We remember how, when the 
 hero had come to his house, and his wife still hesitated to 
 recognise him, he bade her try him by questions, and 
 Penelope spoke concerning a certain room and a certain 
 bed in the well-wrought chamber which Od} r sseus him- 
 self had made. Then the hero said, ' No living mortal 
 among men, strong in youth though he were, could well 
 remove it, for a wonder bides in that well-made bed. 
 There was a thick-leaved olive tree in the court, vigorous, 
 flourishing. It was thick as the pillar of a house. And 
 round this I built a chamber, finishing it with close- 
 fitting stones, and roofing it above. . . . And I made 
 smooth the trunk with brass, right well and masterly, and 
 planed it with a plane, working it into a bed-post. And 
 from this I made a bed, polishing it all brightly with gold 
 and ivory. . . .' 2 This is the description of a tree-built 
 
 1 Sigrdrifiimdl, 5. It does not take away from the significance of this 
 phrase that apple trees were new things to the Norsemen when the above 
 Eddaic song was written. 
 
 2 Od. xxiii. 187 sqq. 
 
THE WORLD TREE. 57 
 
 house. But in this case the ancient forms of building had 
 become overlaid with other uses : the tree trunk no longer 
 stood simple and bare ; it was hidden in brass, and polished 
 smooth like a pillar. 
 
 All this is mere prosaic fact ; but soon we pass on to 
 the region of belief and mythology. The -Norseman on 
 the image of his own house fashioned his picture of the 
 entire world. The earth, with the heaven for a roof, was, 
 to him, but a mighty chamber, and likewise had its great 
 supporting tree, passing through the midst and branching 
 far upward among the clouds. This was the mythical ash 
 called Yggdrasill, Odhinn's ash. ' It is of all trees the 
 greatest and the best. Its branches spread over all this 
 world of ours and over heaven. Three roots sustain it, and 
 wide apart they stand ; for one is among the ^Esir (the 
 gods), and another among the Hrimthursar (frost giants), 
 where once lay the chasm of chasms ; the third is above 
 Nifl-hel (Mist-hell).' So speaks the younger Edda; 1 and 
 the elder in still more beautiful language, but to the same 
 effect : 
 
 I know an ash standing Yggdrasill bight, 
 
 A lofty tree laved with limpid water ; 
 
 Thence come the dews into the dales that fall ; 
 
 Green stands it ever over Fate's fountain. 2 
 
 Deep down are the roots of Yggdrasill in gloomy 
 Nifl-hel, the Northern Tartarus ; and yet from under 
 these roots wells up the fountain of life. In obedience, no 
 doubt, to the same original belief in an earth-supporting 
 tree do we read in classical mythology of the mystical oak 
 ($7770$) of Dodona, which had its roots in Tartarus, 3 while 
 
 1 Edda Snorra, D. 15. Pn the worship of trees by the Scandinavians 
 see the passage quoted from Adam of Bremen in Ch. VII. And compare 
 with that (for other heathen people) what is said in Zonoras, Annal. 3 ; 
 Leon Isaur. 82. 
 
 2 Voluspa, 19. On the Teutonic earth tree see Kuhn, Herabk. des 
 Fevers, 118-137 ; Windischmann, Zor. St. 165-177 ; Mannhardt, Germ. Myth. 
 641-671 ; and Kuhn's Zcitschr.f. verg. Sp. xv. 93 sqq. 
 
 8 Schol. ad Virg. Georg. ii. 291. 
 
58 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 at the roots of this same tree there was likewise a magic 
 fountain, which by its murmurings gave forth the 
 oracles of Zeus. Yggdrasill stood ever green over Fate's 
 fountain ; this oak of Dodona never changed nor shed its 
 leaves. 
 
 In such cases as these, because the people have 
 advanced far from primitive thought, mythology and 
 experience, the real and the ideal, are kept separate. 
 But to savage men it may well seem that the tree which 
 is his home does touch the sky and hold it up. The 
 Maoris have a tale how that the earth and sky were once 
 so closely embracing that the children whom they had 
 begotten found no room to live ; how those took counsel 
 together by what means they might separate their two 
 parents, and how the first tree Tanemahuta, 1 the father 
 of trees accomplished this feat by pressing continually 
 upwards, until with great pain he had rent apart the sky 
 and earth. An idea like this is the origin of the mythical 
 earth tree. 
 
 It has often been noted how man, alone among all the 
 animals, has the power of gazing upward to heaven, while 
 the rest of moving things have their faces bent ever 
 towards the earth. This faculty like our sense of 
 morality, our sense of God came to us not all at once, 
 but gradually through lapse of time. Savages are said 
 scarcely ever to raise their eyes, and their heads are 
 naturally inclined with a downward gaze, so that it must 
 be an effort for them to look at the sky and the heavenly 
 bodies. Primeval man lived upon roots and berries, or 011 
 the lesser animals and the vermin which he gathered from 
 the soil, and so habit as well as nature kept his eyes 
 fixed upon the ground. We need not therefore wonder if, 
 in their half-glances upward, our forefathers had not 
 leisure to observe that the tree-top was not really close 
 against the sky, and that what childish ignorance still 
 
 1 Sir George Grey, Polynesian Myth. pp. 1-4. 
 

 SACRED BIRDS. 59 
 
 fancies ! was more certainly believed by them. They may 
 well have deemed that the upper branches hid them- 
 selves in infinitely remote ethereal regions. If it be true 
 that ' high ' is the word most expressive of moral perfec- 
 tion, we are not at liberty to doubt that with such upward 
 gazes as primitive man could take there went a dim sense 
 of elevation of mind and character, high instincts which 
 his mortal nature could only half understand. 
 
 Man abode on the ground, beneath the tree-shade, or 
 in the tree's lower branches ; the denizens of the upper 
 regions were the birds. These last must therefore, very 
 early in the history of belief, have seemed wonderfully 
 sacred and wise. Before man had advanced far enough 
 to worship the heaven itself or the heavenly bodies, while 
 he was still bound to a narrow phase of belief, birds 
 became expressive to his mind of height, and of intimacy 
 with those far-off branches of the tree or with that 
 unsearched mountain summit which were then his 
 heaven. Later on, when the gods had become celestial, 
 and, leaving the earth, had gone to dwell in the heaven 
 itself, the birds still were seen flying thither. The 
 worship of birds as divine existences, therefore, belongs 
 of right to men of the prime, before statues were carved 
 or shrines were built. * No need to raise for them temples 
 of stone nor doorways witli golden doors ; for they in 
 fruit trees and dark oak shall dwell, and in the olive tree 
 receive our vows.' 2 
 
 When the birds ceased to be divinities they remained 
 still the best diviners, for they, it was thought, shared 
 most intimately in the counsels of the gods, and were the 
 
 1 I remember, I remember 
 
 The fir trees dark and high: 
 
 I used to think their slender tops 
 
 Were close against the sky. 
 
 It was a childish ignorance ; 
 
 But now 'tis little joy 
 To know I'm further off from heaven 
 
 Than, when I was a boy. HOOD. 
 Aristoph. Aves, 615, &c. 
 
60 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 most trustworthy of omens. Each of the greater gods 
 among the Greeks had his own special bird, which he sent 
 on missions of a prophetic nature. From Zeus came aii 
 eagle, from Apollo a hawk, and from Athene a crane ; l 
 Aphrodite had her doves. It was, with the Greeks, the 
 very acme of profanity to. fright away the denizens of a 
 sacred enclosure. 2 With the Germans and the Celts 
 divination from birds was as common as with the Greeks 
 and Eomans. Odhinii (or Wuotan) had his two hawks or 
 ravens whirling round his throne; and every morning 
 they flew ' earth's fields over ' 3 to watch the ways of men. 
 We also know that among the Norsemen it was the 
 greatest gift of prophecy to understand the language of 
 birds though a man might sometimes wish he had not 
 known it ; for they told of the future, its evil as well as 
 its good. In one of the Yolsung lays of the elder Edda 
 there is a beautiful passage which tells how Sigurd, when 
 he had eaten Fafnir's heart, had his ears opened in this 
 wise, and heard the eagles above telling one another of 
 his own deeds, and what would be his end. 4 
 
 The 4 wise women ' of many different systems of mytho- 
 logy seem to possess in common the gift of being able to 
 change themselves into birds. Perhaps the more im- 
 mediate prototypes of the angels of mediaeval Christianity 
 were the maidens of Odhinn, 5 at once amazons and 
 prophetesses, who were called Valkyriur (Walachuriun). 
 They were likewise called swan maidens, because they took 
 sometimes the form of swans. In the Bible the Spirit of 
 God Himself, when it becomes visible to man, appears in 
 the shape of a dove. 
 
 The worship of birds is of all forms of animal worship 
 the most exalted and spiritual, because it has to do with 
 
 1 Homer, passim, esp. 11. x. 274 ; xii. 200. 
 
 2 Herod, i. 159. Grimnismal, 20. 
 
 4 Fafnismal, 31 to end. 
 
 5 I do not mean their prototypes in art, but in popular belief, at any 
 rate in northern Europe. Concerning these Valkyriur, see Chs. VII. 
 and X. 
 
PROPHETIC POWEK OF FETICH. 61 
 
 regions remotest from common earth. This is why the 
 holy birds linger long in late forms of belief, and survive 
 generally as the symbol of those gods-and goddesses whose 
 proper dwelling-place is the heaven. A bird, for instance, 
 would come appropriately from Zeus, or Athene, or Apollo, 
 the sky, the air, the sun, or from Odhinn, the storm wind, 
 but less appropriately from Demeter, the earth goddess, 
 or from Poseidon, the god of the waves. And I suppose 
 that when we encounter the figures of winged beasts in 
 ivligious art, as we do so conspicuously in the religious 
 art of Assyria, we .are to take it that the gods whom the 
 beasts symbolise have been raised from earth to heaven. 
 These mythic beings combine the majesty of the beast 
 chosen the courage of the lion, say, or the strength of the 
 bull, or the swiftness of the horse with the spirituality 
 and special sacredness of birds. Such winged creatures 
 are not unknown to Greek art. 1 They have made their 
 way into the religion of the Hebrews, and thence into 
 Christian belief; the cherubim, it seems, were the same 
 as the Assyrian and Phoenician griffin. 2 
 
 Seeing that birds have attributed to them a gift of 
 prophecy, partly in virtue of the antiquity of their worship, 
 it is natural that all fetiches should be themselves oracular. 
 Prophecy belongs to the region of magic, and magic rites 
 are almost always a survival from some old form of belief, 
 
 1 E.g. Pegasus. The griffin, too, is tolerably common in some Greek art. 
 Both come through Asiatic influences. Cf. Layard, Nineveh, ii. 461, for 
 Pegasus, and for the griffin next note. 
 
 - I mean etymologically the same, as well as the same in their original 
 representation. Kuenen supposes that the cherubim who stood upon the 
 ark of the tabernacle had the shape of griffins (Rel. of I&rael, i. p. 280). 
 The cherubim are, he says, embodiments of the clouds ; they are, therefore, 
 essentially the same as the Yalkyriur of the North, who, I say, foreran the 
 Christian angels in the popular belief of northern Europe. It may be well 
 to add that the double eagle which in Christian art was designed to repre- 
 sent the double greatness of the Holy Koman Empire (spiritual and material 
 rule combined in one, or perhaps only the united Empires of East and 
 West) is likewise drawn from Eastern iconography. Texier, Aide Mineure ; 
 also A. de Longperier, Revue Arch. O. S. vol. ii. p. 76. The monument 
 bearing representations of this and other fabulous winged creatures was 
 appropriately discovered on the site of the ancient Pteria. 
 
62 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the meaning of which, has been forgotten, and the use in 
 consequence distorted. The earlier gods, which were near, 
 and visible, and tangible, and a part of nature, became a 
 natural means of communication between man and the 
 later gods, who were supernatural and unseen. Wherefore 
 the power of divining remained with the tree itself, and 
 with the mountain and the river. The oracles of Zeus 
 were conveyed by the whispering leaves of the oaks of 
 Dodona; and the laurel of Apollo at Delphi is another 
 instance of an oracular tree. We should not be far wrong 
 in supposing that the fabulous ash, Yggdrasill, was magical 
 in this way. We know, at any rate, that the wise women 
 of the North, the Norns, lived hard by one of the roots of 
 this tree of life. The divining rod has inherited its qualities 
 from the divining tree. 
 
 The prophetic powers of mountains resided generally 
 in their caves. The wise women, or witches, of heathen and 
 mediaeval legend had their homes always either in a wood 
 or in a cave. 1 Among the Romans we know how a voice 
 from a cave used to bring the prophecy of the sybil. 2 It 
 was in a cave or cleft between two steep rocks that the 
 Pythoness received her divine inspiration. 
 
 Finally, more than either tree or mountain, waters 
 have been great in gifts after this kind. Rivers, foun- 
 tains, and wells have, in all ages, been accounted sacred 
 and prophetic. From our wishmg-wells back to the foun- 
 tain of Urd, from which the Nornir watered the roots of 
 Yggdrasill, or to Mini's well (if this be not the same), whither 
 Odhinn went to buy wisdom, is one continuous stream of 
 illustration of this belief, which need not be here set forth 
 in full. That the notion was as familiar to the Greeks, 
 the fountain of Parnassus, by which Apollo's priestess 
 stood, the poetic inspiration (jj,avrsla) of prophet and poet 
 from Parnassus and Helicon, may serve to remind us. 
 
 It is no strained imagination, but almost a statement 
 of sober fact, that belief so common among the nations, 
 1 See Chaps. VII. and X, 2 ^n. vi. 
 
DESCENT FROM TREES. 63 
 
 bher that all mankind or that some particular races cf it 
 were descended from a tree ; for it is certain that tribal 
 life very often began under one, and such tribal life in all 
 probability preceded any distinct division of the family ; 
 it preceded marriage rites or much recognition of chil- 
 dren by their parents. When at last the tribe began to 
 distinguish itself from other tribes the consciousness of 
 
 O 
 
 the ego, as in all cases, arising out of contact with the 
 non-ego its members had to assume a common parentage. 
 From whom 9 From whom more likely than from the 
 great fetich of the race, so much longer-lived than man 
 (nay, perhaps immortal ; for who could remember when it 
 had not been there ?), so kind, so protecting ; surpassing us 
 in size and strength, even as a god surpasses mortals ? 
 That man was born of a god has always seemed a natural 
 way of accounting for his existence; and in primitive 
 times there was no god beside the fetich. Among the 
 Greeks certain families kept the idea of a tree parentage ; 
 the Pelopidse, for example, were said to have been descended 
 from a plane. Among the Persians the Achsemenidao be- 
 lieved the same concerning their house. Cadmus was 
 born of Myrrha after she had undergone transformation 
 into a tree. 1 Even Ares, according to one legend, had a 
 like descent. Romulus and Remus had been found under 
 the famous Ficus ruminalis* 'In the legend which we have 
 received it is in this instance only a case of finding ; but 
 if we could go back to an earlier tradition, we should pro- 
 bably see that the relation between the mythical twins 
 and the tree had been more intimate. The origin of the 
 Myrmidons was perhaps really of the same kind. Ovid 
 relates how when JEacus had prayed to Zeus to give him 
 a new race of men, who might fill the place of a nation 
 destroyed by pestilence, he fell asleep beneath a tree. As 
 he slept he thought he saw myriads of ants dropping 
 
 1 Ovid, Met. x. 
 
 2 According to tradition the twins and their mother were cast into the 
 Tiber, the former in a cradle, which was stranded beneath a fig tree the 
 Ficus ruminalis which was held sacred for long ages afterwards 
 
64 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 from the branches or issuing- from the roots ; and these, 
 when he awoke, had changed into men l The introduction 
 of the ants is, I suspect, a fanciful later addition. And 
 yet the myth, as it now stands, not ill expresses the con- 
 trast between man in the days when he lived beneath the 
 tree or hung upon its branches, and nourished himself 
 partly on its fruits a pygmy compared to all the rest of 
 nature and that later humanity, his descendants, which 
 counted in its ranks such a race of heroes as Achilles and 
 his comrades. 
 
 In other myth systems, notably in the Norse, the idea 
 of a descent from the tree has been applied to the whole 
 human race. According to the Edda, all mankind are 
 descended from Ask and Embla, the ash and the elm. The 
 story is that Odhinn and his two brothers were journeying 
 over the earth, when they found these two stocks ' void 
 of future,' and breathed into them the power of life. 
 
 From out their following Spirit they owned not, 
 
 There came three Sense they had not, 
 
 Mighty and merciful Blood nor vigour, 
 
 ^Esir to our home. Nor colour fair. 
 
 Tbey fonnd on earth, Spirit gave Odhinn, 
 
 Almost lifeless, Thought gave Hoenir, 
 
 Ask and Embla, Blood gave Lodr 
 
 Fntureless. And colour fair. 2 
 
 The following story, too, I find in mediaeval legendary 
 lore. It seems to spring directly from the myth of the 
 Yggdrasill tree of life and from the Ask and Embla myth, 
 though there may be other Oriental sources for it which I 
 do not know. The Tree of Life, says a trouvere of the 
 thirteenth century, was, a thousand years after the sin of 
 the first man, transplanted from the garden of Eden to 
 the garden of Abraham, and an angel came from heaven 
 to tell the patriarch that upon this tree should hang the 
 Redeemer of mankind. But first from the same tree of 
 life Jesus should be born, and in the following wise. First 
 1 Met. vii. 683. Voluspa, 17, 18. 
 
TREE OF THE TRIBE. 65 
 
 was to be born a knight, Fanouel, 1 who, through the scent 
 merely of the flower of that living tree, should be 
 engendered in the womb of a virgin ; and this knight, 
 again, without knowing woman, should give birth to St. 
 Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary. Both these 
 wonders fell out as they were foretold. A virgin bore 
 Fanouel by smelling the tree ; and Fanouel, having once 
 come unawares to that tree of life, and cut a fruit from it, 
 wiped his knife against his thigh, in which he inflicted a 
 slight wound and thus let in some of the juice. Presently 
 his thigh began to swell, and eventually St. Anne was 
 born therefrom. 2 
 
 So from all these instances we see that there was once 
 a fuller meaning than metaphor in the language which 
 spoke of the roots and branches of a family ; or in such 
 expressions as the pathetic, ' Ah, woe, beloved shoot ! ' of 
 Euripides. 
 
 Even when the literal notion of the descent from a 
 tree had been lost sight of,the close connection between the 
 prosperity of the tribe and the life of its fetich was often 
 strictly held. 3 The village tree of the German races was 
 originally a tribal tree, with whose existence the life of the 
 village was involved ; and when we read of Christian 
 saints and confessors that they made a point of cutting 
 down these half-idols, we cannot wonder at the rage they 
 called forth, nor that they often paid the penalty of their 
 courage. 4 
 
 Trees of the same kind were the two called the 
 patrician and the plebeian, which stood before the temple 
 of Quirinus in Koine, and whereof we are told the folio w- 
 
 1 Also called Fanoiaix in the poem. The name of the poem is Notre 
 Dame Kte. Marie. It is taken from a rhymed Bible of the thirteenth 
 century. 
 
 2 Leroux de Lincy, Lc Livre des Legendes, p. 24. 
 
 3 ' Bei den Romern wie jede Kultusstatte, jeder Tempel seinen Gottes- 
 baum, so hat jeder Staat, jede stadt, jeder Familiensitz, jeder Zweig einer 
 Familie einen solchen.' K. Boetticher, JJaumhultus dcr Hcllenen u. Itomer, 
 p. 20. 
 
 4 See Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, ch. iv. 
 
 P 
 
66 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 ing story. The two trees were myrtles (sacred to Venus), 
 as signifying the amity which existed between the two 
 orders of society of which the city was composed ; and at 
 first, we may believe, they grew up side by side, in equal 
 strength. But when the fathers began to increase their 
 power at the expense of the plebs, the patrician tree 
 waxed greater, overgrowing the other, which seemed to 
 wither beneath its hurtful shade. After the Marsian war, 
 however, the patrician myrtle grew old, its vigour returned 
 to the tree of the plebs, and the power of the Senate 
 diminished from day to day. 1 
 
 To that from which all races sprang, to that they may 
 again return. Wherefore arises that common superstition 
 that the souls of the dead have gone to inhabit trees. 
 Empedocles says that there are two destinies for the souls 
 of highest virtue to pass either into trees or into the 
 bodies of lions. 2 Philemon and Baucis were rewarded 
 by the former lot for their charity to Zeus, who came a 
 poor wanderer to their house. And this story is the more 
 worthy of remark because it bears no inconsiderable 
 resemblance to the story of the three Norse gods wander- 
 ing over the earth and finding Ask and Embla, from whom 
 they created mankind. 3 Philemon and Baucis lived till 
 extreme old age, serving in the temple of Jove, and then 
 at the last, both together, they were transformed into 
 
 trees. 4 
 
 Frond ere Philemona Baucis, 
 
 Baucida conspexit senior frondere Philemon. 
 
 
 
 'Yaleque, 
 
 conjnx ! ' dixere simul, simul abdita texifc 
 Ora frutex. 
 
 The same poem relates how, to the prayer "of penitent 
 
 Pliny, H. N. 2 .Elian, ffigt. Anim. xii. 7. 
 
 8 The'resemblance between the classical and the Northern myths appears 
 the closer if we take the Rigsmdl as a connecting link between the history 
 of Baucis and Philemon and the verse of the Voluspa quoted just now. 
 
 * Met. viii. 714. 
 

 THE MOUNTAIN GOD. 67 
 
 Myrrh a, the gods granted that she should be turned into 
 a tree. Though she has lost understanding with her 
 former shape, she still weeps, and the drops which fall 
 from her bark (i.e. the myrrh) preserve the story of their 
 , mistress, so that she will be forgotten in no age to come. 1 
 Her child was Cadmus. How the same myth has been 
 preserved and repeated in after ages, and has survived in 
 the greatest poems of the world, needs not to be told here. 
 No one will have forgotten Dante in hell passing through 
 that leafless wood, in the bark of every tree of which was 
 imprisoned the soul of a suicide. Unwittingly, from one 
 of these trees he plucked a little twig. Then from the 
 wound thus made (as from green wood burning) came, 
 with bubbling, steam and blood, and last of all a voice, 
 which was the voice of Pietro delle Vigne, the minister of 
 Frederick. Tasso and our Spenser have given us pictures 
 founded on the same old-world belief. 
 
 What has been here sketched out concerning tree 
 worship will apply, changing what should be changed, to 
 the worship of mountains.. The mountain is higher than 
 the tree, more majestic and remote, and in a manner 
 more abstract. It is of the two the less fitted to be the 
 parent of a race or tribe ; and we do not, in fact, tind so 
 often the belief in a descent from mountains as in a 
 descent from either trees or rivers. Mountain worship is, 
 in most respects, an advance on tree worship ; for when, to 
 the growing intelligence of mankind, the tree becomes 
 relatively small, the high hill is still immeasurable and 
 has its head buried in the clouds. And from this cause 
 mountain worship is more often to be seen persisting into 
 later phase.s of belief, and is less characteristic of the 
 earlier ones. Zeus may, in times relatively far advanced, 
 still be worshipped in the actual form of a mountain. 2 
 
 Of the oracular character which belongs to the 
 mountain fetich I have already spoken. Some of the 
 most venerable and ancient temples among the Greeks 
 Met. xx. 4, &c. 2 See Ch. IV. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 were situate in a deep gorge between high rocks, as, for 
 example, the shrine of Apollo at Tempe and the temple 
 of Demeter at Eleusis. The gods themselves, when they 
 were not throned high on the mountain summits, as on 
 Olympus, often found a dwelling-place in its deep clefts. 1 
 
 The river fetich has some special qualities and asso- 
 ciations which I shall speak of presently. It has others 
 which it shares with the tree fetich. Among the latter is 
 its position as a progenitor, and of this belief we have the 
 most conspicuous examples in Greek mythology. In 
 truth, worship of the river and mountain fetiches has 
 found its chief partisans in Greece and in Italy, while the 
 cult of trees was especially cl*aracteristic of the Teuton 
 and the Celt. 2 The nations of Northern Europe lived in 
 regions, as Tacitus describes them, f either rugged with 
 forest or dank with marsh, 3 but the Greeks in a bright 
 land not much wooded. Wherefore a difference of creeds 
 followed this difference of surroundings. In Greek mytho- 
 logy Oceanus is found to have many of the attributes 
 which in the Norse mythology belonged to the mythic 
 world-tree Yggdrasill. It corresponds in many respects to 
 the world ash, the symbol of life and of time, and to that 
 other ash (if another it really were) from which the human 
 race proceeded. For example, Oceanus was the beginning 
 of all things, the parent alike of gods and of men. He 
 was the first and the last, the Alpha and Omega of life. 
 The etymology of the name Oceanus seems to" show that 
 the very foundation of his nature was as a primeval exist- 
 ence, a forefather. 4 Oceanus was the parent of all waters, 
 
 ' Cf. II. i. 495, v. 753 ; Hesiod. Th. 113 (VT^XOS oAtWoio). 
 
 2 There are frequent references to river worship in Homer (cf. II. 
 xi. 726, xx. a council of the gods which rivers attend : ^xi. 130 ; Oil. v. 
 446), but, so far as I remember, none to the worship of trees. It is very 
 probable that fountains were much worshipped by the Celts. We find in 
 the Middle Ages numerous ordinances forbidding this form of paganism. 
 See Capitularies, i. tit. 64, 789, c. 63, and viii. tit. 326, c. 21. Leges Luit- 
 prandi, ii. tit. 38, 1. Vita Miff. ii. ]5. 
 
 3 < Aut sylvis horrida aut paludibus fceda.' Germ. 5. 
 
 4 See Ch. VI. Ogyges. 
 
FETICH ISM AND LOVE OF COUNTEY. 69 
 
 the encircler of the world. 1 He included in his circle all 
 living nature, for beyond this river lay only the land of 
 darkness and of death. 2 Oceanus, again, was complete in 
 himself, and so for ever returning upon his own course. 3 
 Other rivers were the progenitors of special families 
 Asopus, Inachus. A descent from rivers is not at all 
 uncommon among Homeric heroes : witness Asteropseus, 
 whom Achilles slew beside Xanthus ' he was the son of 
 broad-flowing Axios ' and Menesthios, the son of Sper- 
 cheios, and others. 4 
 
 Fetichism discharged a great duty in that it first 
 formed the patriotic instincts, by giving to men a notion 
 of fatherland and an attachment to a particular soil. The 
 fetich gods could not be moved, and in the worship of 
 them, in the sense of safety and sacredness which they 
 spread like an aroma round one spot, there was found just 
 the force needed to awaken a sense of nationality and of 
 fellowship among men. The value of a safe, protected' 
 spot must be great in proportion as all other places are 
 strange and fearful ; by the fetich worshipper the outer 
 world is not dreaded only on account of its visible 
 dangers for the wild beasts who hover round, for the 
 savage men of a different tribe and an alien creed who 
 may be near it is likewise ghost-haunted, and may be the 
 home of evil spirits and unseen unfriendly powers. And 
 so, moved by this fear, all those who are akin draw near 
 together. It has often been noticed how the sense of 
 kinship among nations springs more from a common 
 faith than from any other tie ; this outweighs the bonds 
 of blood, of language, and of country. We see examples 
 enough of this even now, when the orthodox Slav is the 
 bitterest enemy of the Catholic Slav, when the Shiah 
 Persian or Afghan is more hateful than any common foe 
 to his Sunni brother. It was well, therefore, that at first 
 
 1 TL. xiv. 246, xxi. 196 ; JEsch. Prom. 636, &c. 2 See Ch. VL 
 
 tyoppoos. 11. xviii. 399 ; Od. xx. 65. 
 
 * 11. xxi. 141, &c. ; xvi. 173. 
 
70 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the ties of country and of kinship and of creed should have 
 been inseparably united. 
 
 Greek national life sprang up around some local shrine. 
 For the guard of the temple and the honour of the god, 
 towns or villages entered into Amphictyonies associa- 
 tions of the neighbours to it and these Amphictyonies 
 in time grew into States. 'Only one form existed in 
 ancient Greece for the combination of peoples namely, a 
 common religious worship, which at fixed times assembled 
 a number round a generally acknowledged sanctuary, and 
 laid upon all the participators in it the obligation of 
 certain common principles. Such festivals associations 
 or Amphictyonies are coeval with Greek history, or may 
 even be said to constitute the first expression of a common 
 national history. 5 1 The principle of the Amphictyony was 
 conceived in the genuine spirit of fetichism ; for, to unen- 
 lightened minds, the temple itself is a kind of fetich. The 
 temples of paganism were, as an orator of the latter days 
 of paganism declared, ' the life and soul of the country ; 2 
 under their protection the peasant planted and sowed ; to 
 their guardianship he committed his wife and child.' We 
 can guess, then, how dear in times far more ancient than 
 these must have been the river by which a tribe had settled, 
 the mountain in whose caves they lived, or the tree which 
 sheltered them. 
 
 So much for the characteristics of fetichism in its 
 prime. A hundred more examples might be given 
 of the worship of trees and rivers and hills, and of the 
 traces of such worship in later creeds. But the main 
 characteristics of the faith would return again and again, 
 and only grow wearisome by repetition. Nevertheless, 
 before we quite leave the subject we have to notice one 
 peculiar form of worship which seems to be connected with 
 fetichism and more peculiarly with the cult of rivers. 
 
 1 Curtius, Hist, of Greece, i. 111. 
 
 2 Vvxb, & fiaffi\ev, rots aypols ra tepd. Libanius in a speech to Theodo- 
 sius on behalf of the ancient temples. 
 
ANIMAL WORSHIP. 71 
 
 I do not propose to enter into a discussion concerning 
 the religious significance of animal worship, taken as a 
 whole. The origin of it has never yet been satisfactorily 
 explained, 1 and until it has been made more clear we are 
 not justified in adopting arbitrary theories concerning it. 
 Some peoples have furnished themselves with elaborate 
 reasons for their worship of animals : they have made them 
 symbolical of moral qualities, or even of some natural phe- 
 nomena. Sekhet, the bright-eyed cat or lioness goddess 
 of the Egyptians, was made to stand for the sun, or else 
 for the moon, because the cat's or lioness' eyes shine at 
 night ; the eagle, in like manner, symbolised the sun. Ex- 
 planations like these have always been given by people 
 who had themselves advanced too far beyond the sphere of 
 animal worship to understand its meaning. Such notions 
 may have seemed satisfactory to Egyptian priests in the 
 days of Herodotus; they cannot possibly seem so to a 
 student of the history of belief to-day. Failing some 
 better interpretation, we may assume that, beside that 
 honour which was paid to superiority in size or strength, 
 the reason for animal worship lay in some human feature 
 or quality the majesty of the. lion, the walk of the bear, 
 the human cry of the cat suggesting thus the doctrine 
 of the migration of souls. This would reserve for animals 
 a great amount of reverence, such as that paid to dead 
 ancestors, though this would still fall short of actual wor- 
 ship ; and, perhaps, the cult of animals has always been 
 rather an element in other creeds than a distinct creed 
 itself. 
 
 From other kinds of animal worship, however, the 
 worship of the serpent stands apart. It is of all forms 
 probably the widest spread and most deeply rooted ; and 
 yet its origin is, of all perhaps, the hardest to understand. 
 Fergusson suggests its great longevity as one reason, its 
 deadly power both mysterious and deadly as another. 
 
 1 For I think, as I have said, the totem theory quite insufficient to 
 explain it ; or perhaps I should rather say it is too sufficient a way. 
 
72 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Tlie first, by itself, is certainly not reason enough ; besides, 
 it would not be easy for man to ascertain this fact without 
 paying close attention to this reptile, which would be in 
 itself peculiar. And the objection to the other reason is 
 that serpent worship as Fergusson admits l is not one 
 which is strongly marked by fear. 
 
 For my own part, I believe in this one instance that 
 the use of the animal is symbolical, and that in almost 
 every case the serpent stands for the river. It would, of 
 course, be impossible, or even if possible unsuitable, to 
 produce in this place all the reasons which have led me to 
 such an opinion. But there can be no harm if we turn 
 aside for a moment to glance at the chief among them. 
 
 The river of rivers to the Greeks and Romans was that 
 great Oceanus of which I spoke just now the earth- 
 encircling stream which flowed between the world of men 
 and the kingdom of Hades. 2 The belief in that stream, 
 as we shall see more clearly in a future chapter, was by no 
 means confined to the classical ancients, but was shared 
 in by all the members of the Indo-European family. It 
 has been already said more than once, and shown, that 
 the most primitive belief concerning the sea is that it is 
 only a mighty river ; wherefore it .follows that if in any 
 system of mythology a sea is found in the place which a 
 river occupies in some other system, the myth concerning 
 the sea is later than the myth concerning the stream. 
 Now in the creed of the Teuton races we find generally 
 th.it instead of the whole of man's earth being surrounded 
 by a river like Oceanus, it is girt in ' by a wide and deep 
 sea.' 'The gods,' says the younger Edda, ' made a vast 
 sea, and in the midmost thereof fixed the earth.' 3 What, 
 then, we are tempted to ask, has become of the river? 
 Have the traces of that earlier myth quite disappeared ? 
 
 I believe that that river has been transformed into the 
 mid-earth serpent ('inrSgarSsormr'), called Jormungandr, 
 
 1 Fergusson, Tree and Serpent Worship, beginning. 
 * Od. xi., &c. 3 Edda Snorra, D. 8. 
 
THE SERPENT JORMUNGANDR. 73 
 
 who, in the later form of the mythology which we know, 
 is described as lying at the bottom of the rnid-gard sea 
 curled up with his tail in his mouth. 
 
 Jormungandr has been generally considered the per- 
 sonification of the mid-earth sea ; I say he is rather the 
 personification of the mid-earth river. Now the difference 
 between a sea and a river is precisely this, that one is 
 still and the other is continually flowing. But how is a 
 river to lie all round the earth and yet be for ever flow- 
 ing, unless it flows into itself? Here was the first diffi- 
 culty which arose when men tried to reconcile the old and 
 vague ideas of primitive belief with the exacter know- 
 ledge of later times. They generally met the difficulty 
 by making the river flow in upon itself. The Greek 
 Oceanus was imagined to flow in this returning way ; it 
 was, as we have seen, dyfroppoos, returning everlastingly in 
 its own bed. Jormungandr lies, we are told, with his 
 tail in his mouth, and that tail is continually growing 
 into his body. This image certainly suggests the idea of a 
 river flowing in upon itself like Oceanus. 1 
 
 In this case, then, we seem to have discovered a river 
 which is certainly transformed into a serpent. In the 
 battles between Thorr, the hero god of the North, and this 
 Jormungandr we seem to see the prototypes of most of 
 those dragon fights whose relation delighted the ears of 
 Middle Age Europe, from the fight of Sigurd with Fafnir 
 to that of our St. George. Here then are a large number 
 of serpents and dragons whose connection with rivers is 
 tolerably certain. 
 
 Now turn to Greece. The serpent fights of Hellenic 
 mythology the combats of Apollo with the Python, or of 
 Heracles with the Lernean hydra, or with the serpent 
 Ladon, who guarded the apples of the Hesperides show, 
 even at the first glance, a close resemblance to those 
 
 1 I have discussed this origin of Jormurg-andr at greater length in a 
 paper on the ' Mythology of the Eddas, 1 Trans, of the Roy. Soc. of 
 Literature, vol. xii. 
 
74 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of Thorr with Jormungandr. This alone would suggest 
 that the above-mentioned serpents might have had an 
 origin similar to the origin of the Norse sea-serpent. We 
 are not, however, limited to this argument by analogy. 
 In the case of the Python, at any rate, the close associa- 
 tion between her and a river can be demonstrated. We 
 remember that the fight between Apollo and the Python, 
 as told in the Homeric hymn, springs directly out of the 
 enmity of the fountain goddess Telphusa to the sun god. 
 This Telphusa (or Delphusa) was, unquestionably, some 
 ancient fetich river, whose worship the Dorian cult of 
 Apollo displaced ; and so the myth describes her contriving 
 a stratagem to rid herself of her rival. She sent him to 
 the deep cleft of Parnassus, where the Python, her other 
 self, dwelt ; when Apollo had slain this monster, he 
 returned and polluted the fountains of Telphusa. M. 
 Maury, in his ' Religions de la Grece,' l quotes from Herr 
 Forchhammer an ocular experience of the death of the 
 Python beneath the arrows of the sun god. In the great 
 amphitheatre of Delphi, whose very name was taken from 
 the concavity of the valley (&s\<j)vs, belly) which was the 
 site of the town, is poured, during the rainy season, a 
 rapid torrent which passes between the two rocks formerly 
 called Nauplia and Hyampeia. During spring the 
 waters dry up and evaporate, so that in summer the 
 torrent brings no water to Delphi. The fountains of 
 Castalia and Cassotis are supplied simply by the subter- 
 ranean flow of the waters from Mount Parnassus. The 
 drying up of this torrent, through the heat of the sun 
 (Apollo), is the death of the great serpent. The writer 
 goes on to point out how the name of this serpent is first 
 AsX^w?? that is, full of water (from 8e\(f>vs and vvos for 
 olvos; in this connection any liquid) and afterwards 
 Astylwrj, empty-belly (8s\^>vs y Ivdw). Ovid says that this 
 Python was born from the earth after the deluge of 
 Deucalion 5 Claudius tells us that he devoured rivers, i.e. 
 
 1 i. 134. 
 
THE PYTHON. 75 
 
 his tributaries. We must not, of course, consider the 
 slaying of the Python as a local myth only ; but it was 
 localised at Delphi and there spoke of a particular 
 stream. 
 
 The dragon fights of Heracles seem to group them- 
 selves in pairs; he strangles two serpents in his cradle, 
 and in later life he kills the hydra and the serpent Ladon ; 
 but we must remember also that he fights with and 
 conquers two rivers, Peneius and Alpheius. 
 
 The two great Vedic serpents are Ahi and Vritra. In 
 the form which they wear in the hymns they seem to be 
 symbolical of the clouds rather than of any thing terrestrial. 
 But, I think, it is quite possible that they were rivers 
 before they became clouds, and afterwards were trans- 
 ferred from earth to heaven. Ahi and Vritra are still 
 designated generally the ' concealers ' or ' containers of 
 the water.' 
 
 I will not go so far as to assert that serpents had 
 originally no more than this symbolical meaning. I can- 
 not pretend to account for their primitive worship. Only 
 I take it for certain that, at a very early time, rivers 
 became, through symbolism, confounded with serpents ; 
 that in all the mythologies which we have opportunities 
 of studying, this identification has gone. so far that the 
 worship of the two is inextricably involved ; and hence 
 that the cult of serpents, in any wide extent, is dependent 
 upon one among the three chief forms of fetichism. We 
 have already 'disposed of the great original serpents the 
 Urschlanyen, if I may so call them of Greek and German 
 mythology : the more we see of the countless tribe of 
 their descendants, the more we shall be reminded of the 
 progeny of Ocean us. 
 
 A characteristic of the river, noted in it more than in 
 any other fetich, was that of being the ( oldest inhabitant ' 
 of the country where it flowed : the notion of the river 
 having been there before man came, and possessing the 
 land in its own right, was ever upheld. To this notion 
 
76 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the river owed, in part, its title of king. Just so the 
 snake was pictured as autochthonous, first dweller-in the 
 soil, whereby it became the guardian of ancient treasures, 
 whether these treasures were life-giving fruits, apples of 
 the Hesperides or of Eden, or, as in the vulgarer and 
 later German myths, only a great primeval hoard. 1 The 
 snake is a child of earth, and symbolises the oldest dwellers 
 011 the soil. When Cyrus was marching upon Sardis, 
 a wonder was reported to Croesus as he lay in that city. 
 The town was suddenly seen to be full of snakes, and the 
 horses on every side were trampling them to death. And 
 this was taken for a sign that the new comers, the Per- 
 sians, would overcome the men of Lydia. 2 In Arcadia 
 rivers were addressed by the title of king (ava%), z perhaps 
 as progenitors of the race or as first possessors of the 
 land. The serpent, too, is often styled a king, and wears 
 a crown ; this still more frequently in German and Celtic 
 than in Greek tradition. The ' serpent king ' is still one 
 of the most popular characters of modern folk-lore. 4 In 
 Germany upon those days which are now become the fes- 
 tivals of the Church great honours are paid to him. If he 
 comes and partakes of the cakes or sweetmeats prepared 
 for him and left upon the hearth, he brings luck to the 
 house. He is thus a sort of guarantee, of stability, like 
 the house tree itself. Or we may fancy him some ancestor 
 of the house, who still watches over it. 
 
 The connection between tree and serpent worship is 
 very close, though not so intimate as some writers would 
 have us suppose. 5 But, however intimate, it says nothing 
 
 1 The term ' heathen hoard ' (' hae'Snum hord ') is used to describe the 
 buried treasure which Beowulf gained by slaying the fiery serpent (Beowulf, 
 4546). The meaning, of course, is that the treasure was of immense 
 antiquity. 
 
 2 Herod, i. 77-80. 
 
 3 As by Odysseus, Od. v. 445. 
 
 4 A. Wuttke, Deutsche Vollisabcrglau'be^ pp. 50-5. 
 
 5 Mr. Fergusson has, I think, given a quite false impression by treating 
 of Tree and Serpent Worship as if the two were always associated in belief, 
 He is obliged himself to acknowledge that such is not the case. 
 
SERPENT WORSHIP. 77 
 
 against the symbolic character of the mythic serpent, and 
 its origin in the river ; for the worship of trees and of rivers 
 is likely to go more often together than that of either of 
 these fetiches combined with mountains ; for this reason, 
 among others, that the tree can scarcely grow save in a 
 land where streams abound. It is a fact that we cannot 
 let our thoughts rest upon any familiar religion without 
 at once recalling a dozen examples of tree and serpent 
 worship, which are as many instances of the survival of a 
 still more ancient fetichism. I am, however, ready to 
 admit that in the later form of creed the serpent often 
 plays a part which does not seem of right to belong to 
 the river. The fetich river is nearly always a life-giving 
 power : it is the predecessor of the fontaine dejouvence ; it 
 is the Urdar fount from which were watered the roots of 
 the world tree Yggdrasill. The serpent is, on the contrary, 
 often a destructive and evil power, as was* that ' subtle 
 beast ' of Genesis, and Jormungandr himself, with all the 
 dragons his descendants ; as was the Python, or those an- 
 tagonists of Heracles the serpent Ladon and the Lernean 
 hydra. But even these destructive serpents are found 
 in close association with the tree of life. The serpent 
 of Genesis entwines it ; Ladon guards the apples of the 
 Hesperides ; NrShogg, another Eddaic snake, is twined 
 round the roots of Yggdrasill. 
 
 Among instances of a more direct worship was that of 
 the brazen serpent set up in the wilderness which was 
 still worshipped by the Jews in the days of Hezekiah ; or 
 (to confine ourselves to our proper province) the serpents 
 which were to be found in most of the temples of Greece ; 
 one in the Erechtheum at Athens, which was kept close 
 beside the sacred olive tree, another in the temple of the 
 Great Goddesses. The reptile was, we know, before all 
 things sacred to Asclepios, arid was kept in his house ; as, 
 for example, in the great temple at Epidauros. It would 
 seem that the sun god has the special mission of over- 
 coming and absorbing into himself this form of fetich ; 
 
78 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 this is why Apollo slays the Python and why the snake is 
 sacred to Asclepios. 1 
 
 We now leave this anomalous form, serpent worship, 
 and return to the direct history of fetichism. It is evi- 
 dently essential to the true fetich I mean to the fetich 
 which is worshipped and not used only as a charm that 
 it be a natural product and not the work of man. Men 
 could not begin by themselves creating their own gods : a 
 fact sufficiently obvious (though it has been lost sight of 
 by many writers) to anyone who considers what man's 
 creations really are. All making that is to say, all art 
 is no more than imitation and reproduction, and has, in 
 Sidney's phrase, ' the works of nature for his principal 
 object ; to become, as it were, but the actor and player of 
 what nature will have set forth.' We cannot conceive the 
 process of mind by which man, who had never seen a god, 
 could make* one, or how he could give bodily shape to 
 what had hitherto been but an abstraction of his mind. 
 Obviously, the made fetich must be an imitation of some 
 thing, and if that made fetich is held sacred it must be 
 because the thing which it resembled had been first 
 worshipped. 
 
 The later fetich, then whether it be an imitation of 
 the earlier one or a portion of it, like the stick or stone 
 which an African savage sets up in his forest exists only 
 in virtue of the earlier unmade one. It is impossible at 
 least it has proved so as yet to fathom the degree of 
 worship the African savage pays to this stock or stone, 
 or to say what ideas his mind associates with it. This 
 alone is certain, that his creed is a survival from earlier 
 phases of belief, and, like other survivals, is a thing 
 anomalous in itself. It may coexist with various different 
 shades of intelligence and of religious perception. The 
 stick or stone may still (in virtue of survival) be con- 
 sidered as in itself a thing divine, or it may be used as a 
 
 1 Pausanias (ii. c. 28, 1 ; see also x. 45, xxii. 11) says that Asclepios 
 was adored under the form of a serpent at Epidauros. 
 
STOCKS AND STONES. 79 
 
 means of concentrating the mind on an unseen presence. 
 Those fetiches which have a distinctly magical character 
 such, for example, as pyrites not only allow of, but re- 
 quire the belief in unseen gods at the back of the visible 
 phenomena which give them birth ; a thunder stone 
 could not be sacred till men had come to believe in a god 
 of thunder. Therefore this kind of fetiches, of which 
 writers have often spoken as if they were the products of 
 the earliest fetich-worshipping phase of belief, are not 
 really so. 
 
 The later fetiches are not without interest to our study 
 as survivals. I can imagine that the nations among whom 
 fetichism was once most rife have a special tendency to 
 reverence these concrete material objects. Fetiches of 
 this sort have always been very common in the Asiatic 
 religions ; for which reason the highest Asiatic religion, 
 Hebraism (and Mohammedanism after that), set its face 
 against the imitation of anything which was ' in heaven 
 or earth, or in the water under the earth.' But not with 
 entire success. The conical- shaped stones (mag$ebas) and 
 the stumps (asheras ; the word also signifies a grove) 
 which were conspicuous in the religions of the Syrians 
 and Phoenicians were often adored by the chosen people. 
 An example of a Mohammedan fetich exists in the black 
 stone which is the central object of reverence in the 
 Kaaba at Mecca, and which all pilgrims salute. 
 
 The fetiches last spoken of may have had some connection 
 with phallic worship. But when this was the case they 
 were used as symbols only ; and it is impossible to believe 
 that the origin of their use lay in symbolism. Far more 
 reasonable is it to suppose that everything of this sort has 
 taken its place in worship because it was a survival and a 
 representative of the once divine mountain or divine tree. 
 Of course, in the instances just given, it is a case of sur- 
 vival that is to say, of superstitio only. We know enough 
 of the creed of the Syrians and of the Phoenicians to be 
 in no danger of supposing that these asheras and 
 
80 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 bas were their very gods ; nor is there any fear lest the 
 Mohammedan should confound with the veritable Allah 
 the black stone of the Kaaba, though he kisses this at 
 the crowning rite of his long pilgrimage. 
 
 Of the same kind with these Asiatic stones and stumps 
 were the holy objects (agalmata not yet images) of the 
 Greeks. Take, for example, the two stumps joined by a 
 third in the shape of the letter II, which was worshipped 
 as the image of the Dioskuri (Castor and Pollux). 1 A 
 rough piece of wood, called the sceptre of Agamemnon, 
 was worshipped at Argos ; another * which had come down 
 from heaven ' was worshipped at Thebes as the Cadmeian 
 Dionysus. The thyrsus of this last god and the Palladium 
 (agalma of Pallas) are other instances in point. Nor 
 were the stone agalmata less numerous. There was the 
 column which represented the Zeus Meilichios of Sicyon; 2 
 at Hyettus, in Bceotia, was a rough stone which men 
 called the agalma of Heracles ; 3 at Thespise, an antique 
 agalma of Eros (chief divinity of this Phryne city) of the 
 same kind ; 4 and at Pharse (Achaia) were thirty stones of 
 quadrangular shape, each bearing the name of some god. 
 ' In truth,' Pausanias adds, when he has spoken of these 
 last, ' among all the Hellenes rude stones once received 
 adoration as things divine.' 5 
 
 Objects such as these may, I have said, have been 
 chiefly used to concentrate the mind on some inward idea, 
 as children use sticks and stones to play with, and endow 
 them with the names of real or imaginary persons. Savages 
 will do the same in a most serious fashion ; and the witch 
 of the Middle Ages, following the example of children 
 and savages in this, made a waxen image to represent an 
 absent person. Yet in every case the image ends by being, 
 
 1 Winckelmann, Hist, de VArt, i. ch. i. Pausanias imagines this to be- 
 the origin of the letter n (viii.). 2 Max. Tyr. and Clemens Alex. ii. 
 
 3 Pans. ix. 24, 3. 4 Id. ix. 27, 1. 
 
 5 Paus. vii. 22, 3. Cf. Lenormant in the Revue de VHist. des Rel. 1881, 
 Les B Styles.' 
 
81 
 
 to some extent, confused with the being represented, and 
 so becomes endowed with a sort of vitality and, if it is the 
 image of a god, with a sort of sacredness. The habit, 
 therefore, of regarding such mere blocks and shapeless 
 masses with religious reverence might continue into the 
 days of a refined creed. It did continue among the Greeks 
 into the days of high artistic conception, and by so doing 
 had an important influence upon the development of 
 Greek art. 
 
 After a while, as religion progressed toward a personal 
 and more human conception of God, the stones or the 
 blocks (or the trees as they stood) began to be carved into 
 rough likenesses of human beings. When the image of 
 the god was made out of a tree still growing, he was 
 called endendros (EvS-svSpos). We have Zeus Endendros, 
 Apollo Endendros, Dionysus Endendros. The thyrsus of 
 Dionysus, made out of a vine prop, was sometimes shaped 
 at the end into the image of a rude bearded head. The 
 terminus of still later times was a relic of this curious 
 and noteworthy stage of belief. 
 
 This was in truth eminently a transition period of 
 thought ; it was marked, as transition times always are, 
 by much confusion, by an attempted adaptation of the 
 older elements of belief to those new ones which had in 
 reality superseded them. When the thing the stone or 
 stump was no longer an actual god, it was still to men's 
 thought permeated by a divine essence as by a sap. So 
 that when a statue had to be made, a substance of such a 
 kind that it was in itself holy, that which had once been 
 a fetich, was found far more suitable for the purpose than 
 any chance fragment of wood or stone. Wherefore we 
 see many instances of oracular command to carve an 
 image out of some particular holy tree. 1 Clearly a higher 
 order of divinity would reside in an ill-made statue of this 
 
 1 See Bcetticher, Baumcultus, p. 214. The original image of Athene 
 Polias was made from her sacred olive tree (Plutarch, T/iemist. 10). 
 
 G 
 
82 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 sort than in the finest work of art which had no mystery 
 or holiness mingling with its substance. 
 
 The tree fetich was a thing prayed to of itself: its 
 existence independent of man, its nature not human 
 nature. The carved tree shared the sacredness of the 
 uncarved one, and the face upon it only implied this 
 much, that the fetich confessed a likeness to mankind. It 
 was never meant to assert an identity between the divine 
 and human characters. As these rude images (agalmata) 
 must have been the beginning of sculpture among the 
 Greeks, 1 it cannot but have followed that the remains of 
 the fetichistic spirit deeply affected the early development 
 of Greek art. We musb not look upon the rude archaic 
 statue as in any way representing man's ideal of human 
 nature, or even his nearest approach to such an ideal. 
 The mouth with its fixed smile, the eyes with their dull 
 stare, were put there in the spirit in which they might be 
 suggested by writing the words mouth and eyes upon the 
 block ; or as ' the plaster, or the loam, or the rough-cast ' 
 stood for ' wall ' with the performers of that ' tedious brief 
 play of Pyramus and Thisbe.' 2 The real life, I mean, of 
 the agalma, and its real influence upon the imagination, 
 
 1 Greek national art was not, of course, a pure creation of the Greek 
 mind, but, in a certain degree, a legacy from Assyrian, Egyptian, and 
 Phoenician art ; for, no doubt, the mere delight in the representation of life, 
 as displayed in the earlier art of these lands without any special considera- 
 -tion for the thing represented, was the first thing which stirred in the 
 
 Greeks their aesthetic taste. But the art which was merely imitative was 
 not yet Hellenic. What was needed was that the Greeks should use the 
 power acquired by imitation for the expression of Greek ideas. As we 
 know, they did use it chiefly to express their belief about the gods and 
 heroes. 
 
 2 It is well worth noticing about archaic art that it has a double way 
 of expressing itself, partly as a complete representation of the thing 
 designed and partly as a sort of catalogue of the parts which make up the 
 thing. Thus in a profile face the eye is always drawn as if seen full, not 
 because the artist ever saw it in that way, but because he knew there was 
 an eye at this place, and his full drawing of an eye was the only thing 
 which expressed ' eye ' to his mind. In the same way the joints are 
 articulated in a very curious way. To borrow a term from heraldry, we 
 might call this ' canting art.' It forms, I think, an important stage in the 
 growth of hieroglyphics. 
 
FETICH WORSHIP AND ART. 83 
 
 lay in the thing itself. That would quite alone be 
 wondrous and mystic, whereas the expression given to it 
 was but an accessory. With us it is the very opposite. 
 The only meaning of the statue is in its expression ; with- 
 out that the marble is lifeless indeed. 
 
 If we succeed at all in realising a state of mind such 
 as that of the worshipper of shapeless agalmata, we shall 
 understand how an interest and a veneration might attach 
 to the objects as things far greater than any which in later 
 times attached to a statue as the realisation of an idea. 
 This explains why we find so many instances in which an 
 archaic image has been enshrined in the most holy place 
 of a temple ; while all around, used as accessories only, 
 were the triumphs of a later art. None of these later 
 statues albeit they were statues of gods, and in some 
 cases of the same god as he who dwelt within the shrine 
 could rival the ancient image in the popular affections. 
 Twenty lesser instances of such a state of things will at 
 once occur to the reader. The great typical instance is 
 that of the Artemisium at Ephesus. Some remains of 
 this wonder of the world have, in quite recent days, been 
 recovered and brought to this country ; and we may judge 
 from them (if we were in doubt before) that in outward 
 decorative art it was inferior to no production of its own 
 age. In the holy of holies still stood the time-honoured 
 image of the Ephesian Artemis, that hideous figure only 
 part human, part bestial or worse, and part still a block. 
 This had been the central object of all, from earliest to 
 latest days. For the sake of this the three temples had 
 risen one upon the site of the other. 1 A real Greek Ar- 
 temis might adorn the sculptures of the walls, might be 
 allowed presence as an ornament merely, but the popular 
 worship was paid to the deformed figure within. 
 
 It seems not improbable that when an artist, such as 
 Pheidias or Polycleitus, was commissioned to execute the 
 
 * > J. T. Wood, Discoveries at Ejthcsvs, p. 263. 
 
 G 2 
 
84 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 great statue of any temple, as the Athene of the Par- 
 thenon, the Zeus Olympics at Elis, the Hera at Argos, his 
 representation was more archaic and stiff than what the 
 artist would have produced if left to his own fancy merely. 
 I think the descriptions which we have of the greater 
 statues suggest such a custom in art. There can be no 
 doubt that there was, relatively, far less room for the 
 sculptor's talent in the figure of the great Athene 
 Partheiios clad, as she was, in full armour with spear 
 and helmet than in that other figure of the same goddess 
 which adorned the frieze of her temple. 1 It is certain, 
 again, that we see this influence of tradition in early 
 Italian art. The greater divinities if I may use that 
 expression are more stiff and conventional, more archaic, 
 than those who accompany them. The Virgin and Child 
 remind us more of the primitive Byzantine type than do 
 the angels who fly around. So late as down to the time 
 of Botticelli this difference of treatment can easily be 
 detected. 
 
 By far the most important and deeply interesting of 
 all the chapters in the history of design is that which 
 shows us the Greek sculpture passing away from these 
 traditions, leaving its archaic work behind it, and making 
 its thoughts really speak in the productions of its hand ; 
 when the features no longer remain so many labels 
 expressing the fact of vitality, but are fashioned to show 
 the depth and meaning of life. A supreme moment, for 
 example, I would call it in the life of the world when the 
 old archaic mouth, fixed and meaningless, has the lips 
 turned downwards, and begins to take that curve which 
 
 1 It is of course obvious that a draped figure would be more seemly for 
 worship than an undrapedone. It is known that the people of Cos refused 
 Praxiteles' statue of the nude Aphrodite, and that it was in consequence 
 transferred to Cnidus. On the other hand (at a much earlier date than 1 he 
 time of Praxiteles), nude Aphrodites were portrayed on the friezes of 
 temple walls. This witnesses, at any rate, to the distinction made in 
 popular thought between the great statue and those others which were 
 merely ornamental. 
 
THE GROWTH OF 
 
 ever since has served to express depth of feeling and 
 greatness of soul. Sometimes we almost seem to detect 
 the moment of this transition. 1 When the step has once 
 been made, the change goes rapidly on, and soon the 
 human form keeps but slight and not entirely unpleasing 
 traces of its archaism. The stiff, expressionless face is 
 replaced by one which is only so far stiff that it shows 
 not the passing wave of emotion, but the fixed character 
 of the wearer. The limbs which formerly could neither 
 stand, nor sit, nor kneel with grace, 2 can do all these things 
 naturally, but they do not readily change from one atti- 
 tude to another, and there is not in the figures of this 
 time the portrayal of quick or dramatic movement any 
 more than of transient thought. This firmness of atti- 
 tude and expression, implying a certain self-reliance and 
 stability of character, is therefore in part an inheritance 
 from archaic tradition, but it not the less constitutes the 
 characteristic of the highest art. 
 
 And, Vithout doubt, this age in representation, as 
 compared with any which follow it, is that in which the 
 thing portrayed is the most real and living to artist 
 and beholder ; as what is ingrained and firm and seems 
 perpetual must always be more real, and so more vener- 
 able, than what is fleeting and passionate. The archaic 
 statue, in spite of its absence of expression, was always 
 looked upon as a thing quite real and living. And this 
 from two causes : first, because of the relic of fetichism 
 which made the mere thing block of wood or stone a 
 living existence ; and secondly, because the carved image, 
 rude as it was, was still the first representation of a human 
 being yet put before the world. To us it is shapeless 
 enough, a thing of nought ; to primitive man it was a 
 wonder. The stone, alive in itself and merely as a stone, 
 
 1 I could point to two coins of JSnus, in Thrace, closely resembling each 
 other in style, which yet have this distinction, that the moulh of one is 
 essentially the archaic mouth, that of the other essentially the Greek rnouth. 
 
 2 See, for instance, the ^Eginetan marbles. 
 
86 - OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 had in addition pat on a likeness to human kind ; it was 
 endowed with eyes, a mouth, a nose, could touch and 
 taste and smell. With some of the stiffness of the bygone 
 times the early fine sculpture inherited a sense of reality, 
 of wonder too and awe, attaching to the image itself, such 
 as could never belong to it when art grew more familiar. 
 
 All this was of a piece with early Greek belief, which 
 was at first unquestioning, taking the world as it found it, 
 arid attracted with an intenser love for individual objects 
 in that world than other men had been. The grand style 
 of sculpture may be said to belong to the age of intense 
 and true belief in the divinity of nature. 
 
 We have thus seen two ways in which, outside its own 
 sphere, fetichism affected the development of thought. 
 One was in the direction of politics, by infusing into men 
 the germs of patriotism and a special attachment to the 
 soil on which they were born ; the other was in the di- 
 rection of art, by giving men a sense of the sacredness of 
 things as things, out of which reverence was m time to 
 grow the sense of the beauty and holiness of all parts of 
 nature. 
 
 The last effects of fetichism in the history of belief 
 were not done with even when the fetich had quite disr- 
 appeared. If the worship of the river or mountain left 
 deep traces in the hearts of the people, then the river 
 and mountain gods, or gods who suited best with such cha- 
 racters, would still hold sway with the people. Wherefore 
 beings who seem to have been born in this way from the 
 earth and the things of earth, often outlive all the other 
 members of a pantheon, and show themselves again when 
 they are least to be looked for. We shall see in another 
 chapter how such divinities seem sometimes longer lived 
 than all other portions of a creed. 
 
 When beings of the fetich kind make their reappear- 
 ance under changed conditions of thought, it is like 
 the birth (which sometimes happens) from two white- 
 
SUKVIVALS OF FETICHISM. 87 
 
 skinned parents of one who bears all the marks of the 
 yellow-skinned races an instance of what is called atavism, 
 or reversion to the original type. To the lower orders of 
 Egypt their great fetich god, the Nile, was probably more 
 worship-worthy than the elemental deities who were 
 honoured by the priests and upper classes. And it is no 
 doubt on this account that we have to note the strange 
 appearance as late as the end of the sixth century of our 
 era, when Egypt and all Northern Africa had been long 
 since Christianised, of the Nile god. 1 Ka and Amun, 
 Thoth and Ptah, Osiris and Horus, had been long since 
 slain by Christ and buried in oblivion; but this Nile god 
 was imprinted deep in men's hearts, and was not yet for- 
 gotten. We find the Khone worshipped in France down 
 to the twelfth century, and the dead committed to its care 
 as the dead still are to the care of the Ganges. Fetichisin 
 survives in the honours paid to wells and fountains, 
 common in Germany and in some parts of France, and in 
 England known under the name of ' well-dressing,' a simple 
 rustic festival, wherein procession is made to the well or 
 fountain and flowers as offerings are cast therein. Some 
 slight ritual, a rustic dance or something of the sort, 
 accompanies the ceremony. Tree worship is preserved in 
 the Christmas tree, 2 in which the boughs of the tree (like 
 the oak of Dodona, green still though it is winter) are 
 hung with flowers and ribbons. Tree worship survives in 
 the dance round the maypole. 
 
 The fetich is essentially a local god ; it is, therefore, a 
 survival of the spirit of fetichism that habit among the 
 Greeks (of which Plato complains 3 ) of speaking of the 
 statue as the god, and thus of speaking of particular 
 shrines and particular places as being under the protection 
 of the local god, who was really the local statue. Men 
 
 1 Simocatta (vii. 1C) relates the appearance in the Nile of a huge man, 
 who was seen rising out of the river as fur as his waist. He was believed 
 to be the Nile god. Maury, 'Magic. 
 
 2 Though this is for us only a recent importation from Germany. 
 8 fojmblic. 
 
88 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 spoke Of laying 1 an offering on the knees of Athene, 
 because it was laid upon the knees of her statue. They 
 spoke of their Apollo Lyksens, Apollo of Triopium, of their 
 Ismenean Apollo, as if these were all separate divinities ; 
 as a Catholic might have spoken, or might speak, of Our 
 Lady of Loretto, Our Lady of Lonrdes, as if each were 
 a special local Virgin. When, before the battle of Platsea, 
 the Greeks and Persians stood face to face, an oracle 
 promised victory to the Athenians if they would pay their 
 vows to certain divinities, including Hera of Citheron, and 
 to some local heroes, and if they fought in their own 
 country, especially in the plain of Demeter Eleusina and 
 Persephone. The Athenians were perplexed with this 
 answer. ' For,' said they, ' we are directed to fight upon 
 our own soil, and yet to pay our vows to Hera" of Citheron 
 and to the local nymphs and heroes. 5 How could these 
 help them, they thought, if they moved away from the 
 territory over which their power extended, and yet this 
 was Platsean and not Athenian soil. The difficulty was 
 removed, we remember, by the gift of the district from the 
 Platseans to the Athenians. 1 The existence of the diffi- 
 culty shows the localisation of such a great goddess as 
 Hera. This is one of the survivals from the days of fetich 
 worship. 
 
 The last faint echoes of this belief are fonnd in the 
 uses of objects such as the relics of the Roman Catholics, 
 the very feiti$os from which the belief has received its 
 name. The bone of the saint, the nail from the true 
 Cross, are fetiches of this sort. In such instances as 
 these the creed is so far dying out that it is degenerating 
 into mere magic. 
 
 Every creed has its special kind of superstition, which 
 is in fact superstitio, or the standing over of some ideas 
 derived from the old belief into a new stasre. The special 
 
 o i 
 
 superstition of fetichism is magic ; wherefore we find 
 
 magic common among savage races, many of whom, it is 
 
 1 Plutarch, Vita Arist. 
 
. VITALITY OF BELIEF IN MAGIC. 89 
 
 probable, are emerging from the earliest phase of belief. 
 What I mean by magic is the belief in exceptional 
 qualities residing in particular parts of matter, along with 
 the recognition that these things are matter and have not 
 a will of their own. As has been before pointed out, when 
 any stone or any lion's tail may be magical it is impossible 
 to suppose that the inherent power belongs by right to the 
 thing. If a stone merely as a stone were endowed with 
 power and will to do hurt or good, then by analogy every 
 stone would be endowed with this power. There would 
 then be no exceptional power in any, and magic would 
 become swallowed up by the very commonness of it. 
 Magic, of course, exists along with almost any form of 
 belief, but also it may exist unaccompanied by anything 
 which we can fairly call belief. It may be a mere survival. 
 Travellers have often believed themselves to have dis- 
 covered examples of magic rites without any religion. 
 Tennent, we have seen, believed so. 1 We cannot, however, 
 say whether the other element is really absent, whether 
 these travellers have encountered a creed in a state of decay, 
 or whether the deeper belief has been only hidden from 
 them. On the other hand, we can point to some cases in 
 which belief has been actually abandoned and the sense 
 of magic has remained behind. In such a phase the be- 
 lief in magic presents before us an exceedingly anomalous 
 condition of mind ; it is scepticism plus the superstition 
 of fetichism. But, anomalous as it is, it is not infrequent. 
 Magic generally becomes more or less prominent when 
 belief is in a state of decay. We know how well this 
 truth was illustrated by the practice of magic in Rome in 
 the days of the Empire. In Italy in the days of the 
 Renaissance we have not the same frequency of definite 
 magical rites, but, on the other hand, we have the com- 
 pletest example on record of the prominence of the magic 
 sense in belief. 2 
 
 1 Supra, p. 50. 
 
 2 I do not think that magic and witchcraft should always be classed 
 
90 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Sisinondi has given us a picture of the popular belief 
 in Italy at this period. We see how there religion had 
 become divorced not only from morality but almost from 
 all recognition of a Personality at the back of the world 
 of sense. What was recognised was the thing called 
 priesthood, with certain mysterious rights which it pos- 
 sessed. The highest of priests, the Pope, was nothing 
 as a man, and other potentates might make war upon 
 him, cheat him, be cheated by him, and yet never touch 
 the sacerdotal part. The disgraceful conduct of a prelate 
 did not seem more disgraceful because of his ecclesiastical 
 dignity; a Pope might use the basest treason, and 
 men were not more scandalised because he was a Pope ; 
 and, on the other hand, his enemy might employ what 
 force or artifice he chose to rob him of his earthly terri- 
 tories. 1 All this was only dealing with the priest or pope 
 upon his civil side that is to say, as a man. But touch 
 the side of doctrine that is to say, attempt to interfere 
 with the stream of magical power which flowed into pope 
 or priest and you at once made yourself an outcast from 
 all human sympathy. ' The very persons who, in secular 
 affairs, put so slight a rein upon their ambition and upon 
 their political passions, trembled only at the name of the 
 Hussites. They did not ask if their doctrine was damnable, 
 if it was opposed to the f undanrental doctrines on which 
 are based the structure of society and the relationship of 
 man and God: all they cared to know was that the 
 teaching was condemned ; then their only desire was to 
 destroy it by fire and sword.' It was not in these days, as 
 in the Middle Ages it had been, a misconception of what 
 the heretic believed that made men desire his destruction ; 
 it was really no question of belief at all. The Hussite 
 was one who threatened to tap the sacred founts of power 
 
 together. The essential feature of the witch's craft is the compact with 
 Satan ; magic of the sceptical sort is a kind of bastard experimentalism 
 empiricism. 
 
 1 See Sismondi, Rcpub. Ital. vol. ix. ch. Ixx. 
 

 TRANSITION TO NATURE WORSHIP. 91 
 
 not material power, but immaterial, magical which 
 hitherto had flowed in through the Church; and men 
 were naturally willing to light for their share of the gift, 
 which they honestly believed themselves to possess, quite 
 independently of their personal character. The relation- 
 ship of this fount of magic to a Supernal Being was 
 almost utterly lost sight of. Its source was no longer 
 thought of. Eather was it deemed of a nature like the 
 wind, of which men cannot tell whence it cometh. This 
 alone they knew, that from old time it had belonged to 
 the Church, to the priesthood, and had been transmitted 
 from man to man by a regular rite, a kind of incantation. 
 And now these Hussites would try and pollute or turn the 
 sources. Should they not at all sacrifices be hindered 
 from so doing ? 
 
 I do not know that the whole history of human thought 
 can offer us a better example than this of the belief in 
 magic, unalloyed by any other kind of belief. 
 
 The clearly marked creed which follows next after 
 fetichism is the worship of the great phenomena of the 
 world, those phenomena, as I have before said, which are 
 to a certain degree abstractions. The wind and the storm 
 are not definite things, .as trees and mountains are. In 
 the' class of phenomena we must place the heavenly bodies 
 for they are not only celestial, but in a manner abstracted 
 also. In this stage of belief it is not so much the disc 
 of the sun which men worship as all the phenomena asso- 
 ciated with sunlight its brightness, warmth, vitality, and 
 so forth. The sky god includes in his nature more ap- 
 pearances than are visible at any particular moment ; the 
 dawn too is, in part, an abstraction. All these existences 
 belong to the second order of divinities. Most of the gods 
 of this order are further distinguished by the fact that 
 they reveal themselves only to one or two of the senses, 
 while the fetich gods can be explored by all at once ; the 
 wind can be felt and -heard only, the sun only felt and 
 
92 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 seen. It belongs to the mystery of our nature that of 
 those things which we know least we can imagine most ; 
 and it is a part of the second stage in the growth of belief 
 that the mind begins to supply from within what is no 
 longer given by the senses without. 
 
 The earth and sea may seem doubtfully to belong to 
 the higher class of divinities. But it is evident that 
 neither earth nor sea, when thought of as a whole, is a 
 finite object, but each an abstraction, or at least a gene- 
 ralisation. Nevertheless the sea may be narrowed in 
 imagination to some particular bay; the earth may be 
 confined to some particular mountain or valley. Where- 
 fore these terrene divinities lie nearer to the race of 
 fetiches than any celestial phenomena do; and we find 
 they often slide back into the earlier class. When the 
 creed has reached its higher developments the earth and 
 sea gods and goddesses remain behind, to be cherished and 
 specially worshipped by the lower strata of society. 1 
 
 As all the following chapters of the volume will deal 
 with divinities of this second and higher order, there is no 
 need to say more about them here. There is, however, 
 a small intermediate class of beings whom we, in the 
 study of religious systems, are scarcely disposed to speak 
 of as gods, who have yet in their, time received no small 
 share of worship, and who have filled in ancient creeds a 
 wider space than we perhaps suppose. They belong, 
 strictly speaking, to neither camp, and therefore they 
 have been left behind in the march. We cannot call 
 these gods anything better than the generalisation of the 
 old fetiches. They thus form an exact middle term be- 
 tween these fetiches and those wider generalisations of 
 nature worship. We spoke of them in the last chapter. 
 They are the fetiches transformed just as the word tree is 
 transformed by coming to mean not one particular tree but 
 all the members of the grove. Supposing, for example, 
 that the men who have once worshipped only trees come 
 1 See Chapter V.' 
 
NYMPHS AND DKYADS. 93 
 
 in time to worship the wind as the spirit of their forest, 
 then, as a middle term in this transition, they will have 
 worshipped the forest itself. If from having worshipped 
 the river they come (as we shall see they do) to worship 
 the cloud and then the air, as a middle term they will 
 have worshipped the generalisation of their rivers, or, 
 perhaps, for something more intangible than the rivers 
 themselves, the mists which rise up from them. The 
 divinities of this transition class are now lost to us that 
 is to say, they survive only in a distorted form in the Un- 
 dines, nymphs, and dryads of the creeds we know. 
 
 I imagine that the tree oracles of Greece portray this 
 stage of transition rather than real fetichism. The power 
 of divination which belonged to them was common to the 
 whole grove, and not to any particular tree in it ; this, at 
 any rate, seems to have been the general rule. All the 
 trees of Dodona, for example, carried the message of 
 Zeus ; nay, it was not so much the trees themselves 
 which did this as the wind which moved them. And yet 
 there was likewise here a remnant of individual tree 
 worship ; for we read also of one particular oak, peculiarly 
 sacred to Zeus, bigger than all the other trees of the 
 wood, and remaining ever green all the year round. 
 Even a fragment of this tree could prophesy, for it was a 
 piece of this which Athene placed in the prow of Jason's 
 ship 'Argo,' and that figure-head was as a pilot to the 
 Argonauts throughout their voyage. 
 
 The rivers change in their way as the trees in theirs. 
 They turn first into the mists which rise from the stream, 
 no longer tangible and fixed in form, but formless beings 
 apsaras, as they were called in Indian mythology, who 
 anon float up into heaven and mingle with the clouds. 
 The apsaras (which means the formless ones) are, in later 
 mythologies, spoken of as if they were nymphs ; but this 
 is after the anthropomorphic spirit has touched them ; at 
 first, as their name well shows, they were nothing so cor- 
 poreal as the nymphs. In this stage of belief, man's 
 
94 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 worship is passing on to a race of beings who are at best 
 but half embodied; who are not wholly ideal, and yet not 
 in the strict sense material. The mist rises up, becomes 
 the cloud, mingles with the air. While still on earth it 
 was the nymph or faun. The clouds in heaven are the 
 gandharvas (Vedic), the centaurs; in the North they are 
 the Valkyriur, Odhinn's swan maidens. Aphrodite, the 
 foam-born, and Athene, at first Tritogeneia (water-born) 
 and afterwards the Queen of the Air, are of the same 
 confraternity. 1 
 
 As it was the mist arising from the Delphic stream 
 which sent the priestess into her holy madness, we may 
 in the matter of oracular gift liken these exhalations of 
 the rivers to the winds which blow through groves such as 
 that of Dodona. 
 
 No need to tell how numerous were and are these 
 half-earthy divinities in India, in Greece, in heathen 
 Germany, among the Celts and Slavs. Their name is 
 legion fauns, dryads, nereids, nymphs, Undines, gand- 
 harvas, and (more expressive than all other names) 
 apsaras, formless ones. 2 They are presented to us by 
 art as beings with human shape, sometimes mixed of 
 human and animal ; others (the dryads, for example) are 
 of human and vegetable nature conjoined ; in the heart of 
 the people they have scarcely a shape, but ara a presence 
 only the presence of their old friends the forest and the 
 stream. The doubtfulness of art concerning their shape 
 and nature portrays the uncertainty of popular thought 
 
 1 See Chapter IV. 
 
 2 It is, on the whole, exceptional to find these fountain beings of the 
 masculine gender. In Greece, however, the rivers were generally male, 
 the lakes female. This, I say, must be looked upon as rather peculiar. It 
 is noticeable that the gandharvas of Indian myth may be of both sexes, 
 but the centaurs are always represented as males. When the fountain 
 nymph is associated with that idealised fount which is known in myth as 
 the fountain of life, she becomes the Fate (Parca, Mcera, or Norn). The 
 Scandinavian Norn is not distinguishable from the Valkyria ; Fates, as 
 fees, fairies, returned again to their simpler universal character. The 
 Mome are connected with the Celtic Maine, from mar, meir, simply a ' maid.' 
 
MUSIC BORN OF STREAMS. 95 
 
 about them. Atalanta is one of the most typical of these 
 stream maidens. She was born on Mount Parthenon by 
 the banks of a river. By a stroke of her lance she once 
 made water spring from the rock. 1 Her name (drdXXw) 
 expresses the leaping water. 
 
 Arcadia, where the old beliefs were the longest lived, 
 was the great home of nymph worship. Of the same race 
 as the nymphs were the Muses. They were called nymphs 
 sometimes. They too were originally streams. 2 
 
 Certainly one of the most beautiful among ancient 
 beliefs is that which has associated the discovery of music 
 with the sound of waters. Next in importance after the 
 invention of writing comes, it seems to me, this art, the 
 production of harmonised sound. In respect of its sponta- 
 neity it stands midway between drawing and writing. 
 The first is a purely imitative art, and, so far as we can 
 tell, spontaneous from human nature. Writing is so little 
 spontaneous that it has been invented almost accidentally, 
 and once found has been passed on from nation to nation 
 and not rediscovered. Music is more simple than writing, 
 and may have several different sources. The melody in 
 the vibration of a single stretched string, as of a strung 
 bow, might easily be noticed. Traditionally, music has 
 always been considered an imitative art, like drawing; 
 the vibrating string was supposed to mimic some melo- 
 dious sound in nature ; and among the many which we 
 hear rustling of leaves, the cries of animals in hollow 
 distance, echoes from caves, and the wind amid pine trees, 
 or any of those softened murmurs which come to us from 
 the depth of the forest none have been found so impres- 
 sive as the music of waters. The moaning of the waves 
 round the shore gave rise to the myth of the sirens ; and, 
 whatever the truth may have been, the Greek undoubtedly 
 believed that some stream of Pieria or of Helicon had given 
 
 1 Pans. iii. 24, 2. 
 
 2 The Lydians called the Muses vv^ai (Steph. Dyz. s.v. T6pfa&os ; Pho 
 tius, S. V. Nu/i</>cu). 
 
96 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BE ,IEF. 
 
 birth to Greek music. By these banks the Doric shepherd 
 first learnt to string his lyre. 
 
 Or be it that music arose with Pan and the Arcadians, 
 where too the worship of streams most prevailed. The 
 flute of all instruments best suggests the bubbling sound 
 of brooks. Perhaps the use of the lyre, the instrument of 
 Apollo and Hermes, was only a higher order of music 
 which came in with the worship of these gods and super- 
 seded the music of the pipe. If that be so then the 
 contest with Marsyas is the rivalry between the old music 
 and the new, expressing a deeper rivalry in creed and 
 manners ; 1 for the melodies of the flute or the pan-pipes 
 are those of contemplative lives and dreamy ease, but 
 Apollo was the introducer of war music and of the prean. 
 
 The sober truth about Marsyas' skin was, I suspect, 
 that it was a sheepskin placed in a certain river in Asia 
 Minor in such a way that the water running through it 
 gave it a tuneful sound ; not less, however, is Marsyas the 
 typical river god, who sets up his earthly music in despite 
 of the airs of heaven. 
 
 The sound of this plaintive early music of nature, and 
 the thought of the simple Arcadian worship of the 
 nymphs and satyrs, might well give men a fondness for 
 the days gone by, and make them contrast favourably the 
 old nature worship with the worship of gods after they 
 had become transformed into personalities. I will not say 
 that the gods/ when they had grown personal and active, 
 were at first, in any moral sense, the superiors of these 
 peaceful deities of stream and mountain. At first the god 
 who represented merely the power of will without its 
 moral responsibility was a bad substitute for those early 
 will-less things, the deified phenomena of nature ; just as a 
 child is a better thing to contemplate than a young man 
 under the sway of his passions in their force. We can 
 have small reverence for the new usurping Zeus of the 
 
 1 See Prof. Percy Gardner, ' Greek River Worship,' Trs. of Rvy. Soc, Lit. 
 vol. xi. 
 
MUSIC BORN OF STREAMS. 
 
 97 
 
 ' Prometheus Vinctus.' And this is why the poet in that 
 play gives us so beautiful a picture of the nature god, 
 Ocean, and the nymphs, which are the river mists, coming 
 to sympathise with the Titan in his sufferings. And, as 
 against Zeus the usurper, Prometheus appeals to all the 
 divinities who are the pure expression of outward things to 
 the swift-winged breezes ; the deep, uncounted, laughing 
 waves ; the all-seeing eye of the sun ; and earth, the mother 
 of all. 
 
98 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 THE ARYAS. 
 
 ONE of the singers of the Big- Veda relates to us the birth 
 of Agni, the fire, and its attendant circumstances. The 
 fire itself is produced by the rubbing of two sticks ; and 
 so, naturally enough, we are told that these are the 
 parents of the god. But, behold! the fire seizes upon 
 these same sticks and consumes them ; so Agni is scarce 
 born when he devours those who brought him forth. 
 This is a terrible truth to be obliged to tell. 
 
 This deed now make I known, earth, O heaven 
 The son new-born devours his parents. 1 
 
 poet is shocked, as he well may be, at the thought of 
 such a parricide, and would fain not tell the story but 
 that he knows it true. And so he only adds, with 
 humility of heart 
 
 But I, a mortal, cannot gauge a god ; 
 Agni knows and does the right. 
 
 Could anything better than such a passage as this 
 express the condition of a belief which is dealing still 
 with the phenomena of sense, and which has nevertheless 
 got some way in the apprehension of moral truths ; which 
 is, in fact, well advanced in the second phase of belief, but 
 not yet past it ? First observe how completely we have here 
 got beyond the earliest fetich worship and those beliefs 
 akin to fetichism which we discussed in the last chapter. 
 Agni is not simply a material thing. He is certainly 
 
 1 Big- Veda, x. 7, 9. 
 

 AGNI THE PIKE GOD. 99 
 
 nothing which can be touched and handled; he cannot 
 even be fully apprehended by the senses ; he is a generali- 
 sation, and therefore in part an idea only. Agni is not 
 one single flame, but then neither is he an abstract god 
 of fire. He is both one and many flames, and to his 
 character still clings the character of his element. It is a 
 fact that the flame consumes the wood which gave it life 
 the father who created it and the mother who bore it. 
 Being so certain a fact, it must be told. Still Agni is a 
 divinity and knows what is right. The notion of righteous- 
 ness attaches to the god before he has clothed himself 
 in a human character or become subject to the 4aws of 
 man. 
 
 To the fetich worshipper the stick which produced the 
 fire would have been a god. Nay, there can be no doubt 
 that many among the contemporaries of this poet of the 
 Rig-Veda, and many in long subsequent times, did worship 
 as a god the fire drill, or swastika. This became in after 
 years personified in the person of Prometheus. 1 While to 
 that same fetich worshipper the fire itself would have 
 been too abstract and intangible a substance to be made 
 into a divinity. To the poet priest who chaunted this 
 Yedic hymn it was quite otherwise. The wood itself was 
 mortal, for the wood itself was material; and just because 
 the fire was not material, but so subtle and mysterious, 
 just because it appealed so much to his imaginative 
 faculties, it was made into a god, and Agni was 
 worshipped. In the Vedic hymns Agni is often called 
 c an immortal born of mortals.' 2 
 
 I do not pretend that the Vedic worshipper is always 
 
 1 See Kuhn, Herabkunft des Feuers, where the myth of Prometheus 
 springing from the pramantha, or fire drill (also ' butter churn '), is very 
 beautifully worked out ; also in the Zeitschr. fiir very. Spr. xx. 201. The 
 swastika symbol ^fi, so well known on Buddhist monuments, has been 
 interpreted as this fire drill ; it has also, however, been interpreted as the 
 symbol of the sun. See E. Thomas and Percy Gardner, in the Numismatic 
 Chronicle for 1880. Schwartz (Urspr. der Myth.) connects Prometheus 
 with the whirlwind. 
 
 2 B. V. iii. 29, 13 ; x. 79,1. 
 
 H 2 
 
100 OUTLINES .OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 a perfect example of man in the state of nature worship. 
 Nor do I mean to say that Agni always adheres so strictly, 
 as here he does, to his true character. The Yedic hymns 
 are a miscellaneous collection of poems composed at 
 various times intervals of hundreds of years even be- 
 tween some of them and handed down from age to age 
 by oral tradition only. They therefore express many dif- 
 ferent phases of belief. Agni sometimes makes us forget 
 that he is the fire. Sometimes he seems quite human as 
 he comes down to drink the libations which are poured out 
 for him and joins Indra in his battles against the enemy. 
 Still we shall scarcely find in any historic creed such 
 speaking examples of nature worship as are to be met 
 with throughout the pages of the Yedic hymns. Nor, 
 perhaps, does any Yedic god illustrate more fully in his 
 character the various influences of sensation upon belief 
 than does this god of fire. 
 
 In the instance 'just chosen we have seen the curb 
 which external experience puts upon the satisfaction of 
 the moral sense. Let us now look at the matter from the 
 other side, and see what a point of spiritual and moral 
 idealism may be reached without any departure from need- 
 ful adherence to outward fact, without leaving the region 
 of externals and ' those things which nature herself will 
 have set forth.' In another hymn, earlier in date probably 
 than the hymn previously quoted, there is again allusion 
 made to Agni's birth from the wood. But in this con- 
 nection we find that the god had likewise a parentage in 
 the clouds, where he was born in the form of lightning. 
 6 1 will tell (or have told), Agni, thy old and new births.' ! 
 The new birth is from the wood ; the old birth was from 
 the clouds. The god, we see, lived first in heaven, and 
 was there doubtless long before the race of man was seen 
 here below. But somehow Agni descended from heaven 
 
 1 R. V. i. 20. Notice in this hymn also for immediate and future use 
 how Agni was born of the seven streams (vv. 3, 4), did not lie concealed 
 there (9), and became a protector by his shining in the house (15, 18). 
 
AGNI. 101 
 
 and became imprisoned in the wood, whence the act of 
 man first taught him by Manu ' can set Agni free. This 
 re-birth from the wood is in very truth an incarnation of 
 the fire god, for man too, we know, was descended from the 
 tree ; his flesh is made from the wood. Wherefore Agni 
 clothes himself not only in a material but in a carnal form 
 when he comes to earth. 
 
 Agni's birth in heaven was wondrous, miraculous 
 even. ' Scarce born, he filled the two worlds ' that of the 
 heaven, namely, and of the earth. This is an image, 
 perhaps, of the lightning flashing suddenly, and seeming 
 to fill all the space of air ; or, perhaps, it is the red of 
 morning, for that too is called Agni ; or may be, again, it 
 is the fire of the sun itself. In such an aspect of his 
 being, the heavenly aspect, Agni is everything that is 
 great : in moral strength as in physical force he stands 
 next to Indra, far before any other divinity. And yet, 
 for all that, Agni consents to become imprisoned in the 
 wood ; he has a life on earth and shares the toils and 
 troubles of man. He is, on this account, among all the 
 celestials, the god who cares most for human kind. ' Pro- 
 tect us,' the priest calls out to him in need, f protect us 
 by thy shining in the house.' We know how dearly 
 cherished was that protection of the fire god. The most 
 sacred function in the domestic life of the Aryas was the 
 keeping alive the house fire ; the duty of doing this was 
 always assigned to the paterfamilias, and that which 
 made men most desirous for heirs male, and made them, 
 if they had none of their body, seek to gain one by adop- 
 tion, was the wish that the same fire should be kept 
 alive when they were gone. Luck would desert the house, 
 and the dead father would suffer in the other world, if the 
 
 1 Manu (the thinker) is the typical first man, and the same with the 
 Greek Minos (Benfey, Hermes, Minos n. Tartaros). If we do not accept 
 Kuhn's origin for Prometheus he too would be an equivalent of Manu. 
 Prometheus and Manu perform the same office in respect to fire. Manu 
 and Minos are of course lawgivers ; so are Yama and Yima (Zend) also 
 types of the first man. 
 
102 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 fire went out; just in the same way that in earlier modes 
 of thought luck was fancied to desert the family or the 
 Tillage if the house tree or the village tree died down, or 
 if the water of the fetich stream ran dry. 
 
 Another sacred duty was observed when the flame of 
 sacrifice was kindled, and again, in another shape, Agni 
 appeared on earth. On this flame libations were poured 
 of the intoxicating soma l juice, the sacramental drink of 
 Vedic Indians. Agni was invited to partake of this liba- 
 tion ; and as the flame licked up the drink Agni was said, 
 in the language of the Yedas, to take his share of the 
 sacrifice, to drink of the soma. After this he sprang up 
 heavenward and vanished in air ; he had gone back to his 
 celestial home. Thus man having first set Agni free 
 from his prison house the wood, was likewise the means 
 whereby the god reached once more the mansions of the 
 blessed. 
 
 There was one sacrifice more rare and more solemn 
 than the daily enkindling of straw or pouring of soma 
 upon the flame ; this was when the dead man was burnt 
 upon the pyre and offered up, as it were, unto the god of 
 fire. Agni received the soul and bore it up to heaven. 2 
 
 Thus in every way Agni is shown as a messenger 
 between heaven and earth : he comes down in the light- 
 ning and he returns in the flame of sacrifice. He is 
 constantly invited to call the gods down to the feast 
 which is preparing for them at the altar. He only among 
 the heavenly ones is seen to devour what is offered to him. 
 
 And, again, Agni may be sometimes the internal 
 flame, the source of all 'passion, of the passion of passions 
 
 1 Asclepias acida is the botanical name of this plant. From its juice 
 can be concocted an alcoholic drink which was much cherished by the 
 Indians and Persians (by the latter called lioma}, and which played an 
 important part in their ritual. The soma drink was a sacramental draught, 
 and as such corresponded to the mystic millet water (kykeon) of the 
 Eleusinian celebrations. 
 
 2 Of burning the dead, and the beliefs which attach to that custom, 
 more hereafter (Ch. VI.) 
 
AGNI. 103 
 
 to primeval man, the most sacred of his emotions, love. 
 Soma is the god of wine, Agni of the other great motive 
 power in men's lives and beliefs. 1 This emotion being 
 accounted in primitive language especially holy, therefore 
 Agni is essentially the holy one. I would not wrest to 
 any fanciful resemblance the points of likeness between 
 this ancient divinity and the later avatars of Indian and 
 Christian creeds ; but it is evident the god stands ready 
 to take the part afterwards given to Vishnu. And whether 
 or no we choose to consider that the ideals which Vishnu, 
 and still more Christ, express are implanted in human 
 nature, it is evident that, without passing beyond his 
 legitimate functions as a nature god, Agni is able to 
 realise some of the qualities of such an ideal. He is in- 
 carnate, after a fashion, being born of the wood ; he is, in 
 a peculiar sense, the friend of man ; he is the messenger 
 and mediator between heaven and earth ; and lastly, he is 
 in a special manner the holy one, the fosterer of strong 
 emotion, of those mystic thoughts which arise when in 
 any way the mind is violently swayed. Agni is all this 
 without laying aside the elemental nature in which he is 
 clothed. And this one example may prepare us for the 
 manysidedness of nature gods : 
 
 Agni is messenger of all the world * 
 
 Skyward ascends his flame, the Merciful, 
 With onr libations watered well ; 
 And now the red smoke seeks the heavenly way, 
 And men enkindle Agni here. 
 
 We make of thee onr herald, Holy One ; 
 * Bring down the gods unto our feast. 
 O son of might, and all who nourish man ! 
 Pardon us when on you we call. 
 
 > See Ch. I. 
 
104 OUTLINES OF PEIMTTIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Thoa, Agni, art the ruler of the house ; 
 
 Thou at the altar art our priest. 
 O purifier, wise and rich in good, 
 
 sacrificer, bring us safety now. 1 
 
 In one respect Agni is different from the other gods. 
 He alone, almost, is independent of climatic influences. 
 Not so the god of the wind, or of the sun, or of the sea. 
 People may live near the water, and see for ever before 
 them the broad, level, unploughed plain ; or they may 
 live inland in close-shut valleys, watered only by one 
 small stream, on whom ' the swart star sparely looks ; ' or 
 they may live in the perpetual shade of woods, or on 
 broad arid plains where the sun's heat is well-nigh 
 intolerable ; or in dark frosty lands, where the sun dies 
 during one part of his yearly round and is for this period 
 never seen by night or day. It is impossible that the 
 gods of nature can remain the same with peoples exposed 
 to such varying influences. With fetiches it is different. 
 The differences between fetich and fetich are noticeable, 
 indeed, within a small locality, but in the sum, among a 
 large body of people, they may be expected to balance 
 one another. The differences of climatic nature gods are 
 wide and cannot be bridged over. We have but to study 
 and interpret ^he characters of some of the great sun -gods 
 of Eastern lands Ra, say, or Moloch to Understand 
 the sort of sun these lands lay beneath ; and we have only 
 to remember the differences in latitude and in the face of 
 nature between these Eastern countries and the countries 
 of Europe to see why the sun god is so different a being 
 in the creed of the Asiatic to what he is in the creed of 
 the European. 
 
 It is desirable, therefore, that, before we come to 
 examine any of the known creeds of the Ind<*-European 
 race, we should try to gain some idea of the earlier 
 climatic influences to which its ancestors were subjected, 
 
 1 B. V. vii. 16. 
 
THE CKADLE OF THE ARYAN RACES. 
 
 105 
 
 while they were still one people, at the time in which the 
 germs of later creeds were but beginning to put forth 
 shoots. Five distinct * languages,' in the Biblical sense 
 of that word, have, it is well known, issued from the 
 Aryan nest namely, the Aryas proper or later Aryas, 
 the Indo-Persic family, the Grseco-Italic, the Celtic, the 
 Teutonic, the Lithuano-Slavonic. Some of these have 
 kept no memory of that first home ; some have be- 
 lieved themselves autochthonous, or children of the soil, 
 in the land where history discovers them. Others (the 
 Norsemen, for example, out of the Teutonic family) 
 have had some vague tradition of an Eastern origin ; 
 and one people, the Persians, have a tolerably clear and 
 consistent legend of the changes of home which preceded 
 their settlement in Iran. But of course the story puts on 
 a mythic disguise. It is related by their Zend Avesta l 
 that the good and great spirit, Ahura-Mazda, created in 
 succession sixteen paradises ; but that the evil one, Angra- 
 Mainyus, came after him, like the sower of tares, and 
 polluted these paradises one after the other. It is impos- 
 sible to trace out a clear line of travel by the identifica- 
 tion of these places. Some cannot be identified; the 
 order of them has been misplaced. But interpreting the 
 story by the rules which must guide us in leading mythic 
 language, we are, I think, justified in seeing the evidence 
 of a passage at some former time from the high land of 
 Bactriana toward the Persian Gulf, and this theory of an 
 original home in Bactriana would suit with what we know 
 of the movements of other Aryan races. 
 
 To the weight of this traditionary evidence we must 
 add the cumulative testimony of a number of small coinci- 
 dences, which, though each is slight in itself, afford not 
 inconsiderable evidence in the sum. If we find that the 
 
 1 First Fargard. Pictet (Les Origines Indo-Europeennes, ch. i.) has de- 
 voted some space and much ingenuity to an endeavour to trace the course 
 of the migrations made by the Iranian people. With what success I am no 
 judge. Darmesteter repudiates the attempt (Avesta, Intr.) 
 
106 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 species of metals, flowers, animals, trees, which the old 
 Aryans were acquainted with are those which are to be 
 fonnd in Bactriana ; if we find that the early life of these 
 Aryas was of the kind likely to be adopted in a country 
 such as that is, and under the influences of sun and sky 
 which that land is subject to, we are justified, I think, in 
 assuming the Persian tradition to be a true one. The 
 way in which we may rediscover the social and natural 
 surroundings of the proto-Aryas is that very method 
 whereby, in a former chapter, we arrived at certain con- 
 clusions touching the knowledge which our ancestors had 
 of horned cattle, of a sky god, Dyaus, and of the relation- 
 ship of a daughter. For the method which was there 
 applied to but one or two things may, it is evident, be 
 extended to all the region of possible knowledge. The 
 late M. Pictet has used this method with eminent talent 
 and success ; and amid many other conclusions concerning 
 the old Aryas he arrives at this, that their first traceable 
 home must have been in the Bactrian land. 
 
 This country is the one which lies westward from the 
 Beloor Tagh, northward from the Hindoo Koosh and all 
 the region of barren Afghanistan. It is a land once cele- 
 brated among the countries of the world for its fertility, 
 and though it has fallen now on evil days it is still one of 
 the best cultivated parts of Central Asia, in both a mate- 
 rial and a moral sense. 1 The high ranges behind them 
 cut off the inhabitants from all communication with the 
 east and south. In the hills innumerable streams are 
 born, which, flowing westward, go to swell the waters of 
 the Oxus and the Jaxartes. The hills, the streams, and 
 the valleys which these last have hollowed out give a 
 peculiar character to the scenery, a character of perpetual 
 change. 'Bactriana, 5 says Quintus Curtius, 2 * is in its 
 nature a very varied land. In some parts trees abound, 
 and the vines yield fruit remarkable for its size and sweet- 
 
 1 Bokhara is at this day a centre of Mohammedan learning. 2 vii. 4. 
 
BACTRIA. 107 
 
 Innumerable fountains water the fertile soil. 
 
 lere the climate is favourable they sow corn ; else- 
 where the ground furnishes pasture for the flocks. 5 And 
 a traveller of more recent date, Sir Alexander Burnes 
 one of the very few who in modern days have penetrated 
 to this region speaks in much the same terms of the 
 variety in the aspect of nature, though he has less to say 
 about the fertility of the soil. 1 From his account it is 
 interesting to learn how many of the trees are familiar to 
 European eyes; even the maythorn is to be met with 
 there, though scarcely anywhere else in Asia. 
 
 Now it so happens that of the great monarchies of 
 the ancient world, the earliest, those which seem to have 
 passed on their traditions to all which followed, arose in 
 lands the very opposite of the one here described. Egypt 
 and Chaldsea have close resemblances in the main cha- 
 racteristics of their scenery and position. Each is by 
 comparison a narrow strip of cultivable soil cut out of the 
 desert, and each owes its fertility altogether to one cause, 
 the great river or rivers which flow through its midst. In 
 Egypt the irrigation from the Nile is natural ; in the land 
 of the Tigris and Euphrates irrigation is obtained by arti- 
 ficial means : this is all the difference between the two 
 countries. Both, too, are singularly rich, and their 
 riches seem the greater in comparison with the barrenness 
 and poverty which lie at their doors. For Egypt and 
 Chaldsea are, in reality, tracts reclaimed from one and the 
 same desert the groat infertile belt which extends half 
 round the world, stretching from the borders of China on 
 the east to the western coast of Africa. Wherefore in 
 such countries as Egypt and Chaldsea everything is 
 present which is likely to attach the people to the soil on 
 which they live, and to stay their imaginations from ever 
 wandering to regions beyond those which they know 
 
 1 For now irrigation has to be effected by artificial means, and where 
 the canals have fallen into disrepair drought has ensued. See Expedition 
 of Lieut. A. 
 
108 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 familia,rly. Their fertile land is a land of life, but all 
 around them lies the country of death. Such a state of 
 things is likely to beget a certain dulness in the fancy and 
 a settled routine in life ; everything will determine men. 
 to a fixed society and government, and to a fixed religion. 
 The great river is at hand to serve for the oldest and chief 
 god of the land ; the impossibility of travel rivets tighter 
 that chain of association and of reverence and of fear 
 which holds men close to the neighbourhood of their fetich. 
 All these effects were produced in Egypt and Chaldsea. 
 Feeling themselves so securely fixed in their home, and 
 generally prosperous there, like men quibus Jupiter ipse 
 nocere non potest, 1 the Egyptians and Chaldseans, and the 
 successors of the Chaldseans, the Assyrians, gave them- 
 selves to a ' great bravery of building,' and the immense 
 temples and tombs which arose all over their lands became 
 a new race of fetiches, and also a kind of sentries and 
 watch-towers to keep the people where they were. They 
 were contented, but they were slaves. Their rulers were 
 tyrants the temporal rulers, their Barneses, their Tiglath 
 Pilesers, and Sennacheribs and the spiritual kings, their 
 gods, fiercest and most cruel of all of whom was the great 
 sun god, Moloch, c the king ' par excellence. 2 
 
 The home of the Aryas, on the contrary a land of 
 innumerable streams and separate valleys, naturally di- 
 vided into as many political districts would be incom- 
 patible with the formation of a great monarchy such as 
 those which sprang up in Egypt and Assyria. And we 
 know that the beginnings of social life among the Aryas 
 were not of the Asiatic kind ; their political unit was the 
 villao-e, a cluster of homesteads, that is to say, a sort of 
 miniature republic, associated under certain laws, and 
 
 1 The Egyptian priests, Herodotus tells us, descanted to- him of the 
 risk of depending upon Zeus for fertility. They were, of course, right 
 from a purely experiential point of view. Can we doubt that the respective 
 characters of the religions of Egypt and Greece were affected by the 
 different natures of their gods in this and other respects 1 
 
 2 Moloch is melek, a king. 
 
THE VILLAGE COMMUNITY. 109 
 
 each, one governed, subject to these laws and customs, by 
 its individual chief or head-man. This village community 
 is the germ out of which the later institutions of European 
 statecraft have had their rise. In the Indian village, in 
 the Russian. mir, and in the Swiss canton, we see it in a 
 condition nearest to its original purity. 
 
 The effects of this beginning of social life among 
 the Aryas has been visible in all their later history ; one 
 of the chief of these effects has been that they have 
 never been apt to form themselves into very great or per- 
 manent monarchies. The kingdom of the Medes and 
 Persians under Cyrus might, indeed, seem at first sight 
 a striking exception to this rule ; but it is not so much so 
 as it appears. Although the monarchy of Cyrus certainly 
 did resemble the autocracies of Egypt and Babylon, it 
 could never have come into existence if these last had not 
 preceded it. It was a distinct imitation of the great 
 Semitic and African kingdoms, not a natural growth ; 
 and it was only achieved by un-Aryanising the people. 
 The foundation of the permanent rule of Cyrus lay in the 
 older and more settled monarchies which the kingdom of 
 the Medes and Persians absorbed into itself. Chaldsea 
 and Egypt were full of ancient cities, and it was the 
 possession of such strongholds as were to be found there 
 which gave its stability to the rule of the AchscmenidsB. 
 The walled towns which had a short time before begun to 
 spring up in the land of the Persians themselves were built 
 in imitation of the older walled towns of Chaldsea. That 
 this was the case is very well shown by the picture which 
 Herodotus gives us l of the condition of the Medes at an 
 earlier time, when they had first shaken themselves free 
 from the Assyrian yoke, and his account of the founda- 
 tion of their native line of kings. For a long time these 
 Medes lived in separate villages, without any central 
 authority, and lawlessness prevailed throughout the land. 
 
 1 i. 96-98. 
 
110 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 At length Deioces, the son of Phraortes, having attained 
 great influence by his justice and firmness, succeeded in 
 having himself raised to the throne. Desiring to secure 
 his power, he caused the city of Ecbatana to be built. It 
 was beneath the walls of this, its first city, that the foun- 
 dations of the Median kingdom were laid. 
 
 The conditions into which the Medes relapsed so soon 
 as they had shaken off the Assyrian yoke might be 
 matched in a hundred examples taken from the history of 
 people of Aryan stock at such a time as the pressure of 
 some firm hand had been removed. 
 
 Just in the same way, after the death of Charlemagne, 
 the Franldsh nation split up from one into many king- 
 doms and duchies. So did almost all the Teuton peoples 
 who had joined in the invasions of the Roman Empire in 
 like manner split up when the fear of an opposing power 
 no longer kept them together. The Goths of Spain or of 
 Italy, the Lombards, and the English all tell the same 
 story which is told by the history of the Medes. 
 
 The Aryan religion must have been as republican and 
 as manysided, as was the social life of the people. Each 
 small assemblage of houses which stood beside a rivulet 
 or a lake, in the clearing of a forest, or under the shadow 
 of a hill, was a world unto itself. And no doubt each 
 village had its own fetich, its supernatural protector, in 
 the stream or tree which was in its midst. The village 
 tree has survived, if not as a divinity, at the very least as 
 a recognised institution almost to our own time. The 
 local worship of mountains and of streams in like wise 
 has left deep traces in the creeds of Europe. If the 
 remains of fetichism could be so vital, fetichism itself 
 must have had a lengthened sway. But the people could 
 never have become the Aryan nation had their notions of 
 unity been confined to the local fetich and the village 
 commune. They acquired an idea of a wider fellowship. 
 They spoke a common tongue, and in that language they 
 acknowledged themselves as one people the aryas, or 
 

 DIVERSITIES OF CREED. ]11 
 
 noble ones in contradistinction to the barbarians, 'the 
 inarticulate, 5 or to the turanians, the ' wanderers,' who for 
 them filled up the roll of outer humanity. 
 
 The beliefs of the Aryas expanded with their policy; or 
 it were truer, perhaps, to say that their social life widened 
 as their creed widened. 1 And with the change there came 
 to the front the higher kind of gods who were pan-Ar} an, 
 and who at last put to silence the older but lesser village 
 gods. 
 
 Something has been already said of the obvious ad- 
 vantage which, in respect of a permanent hold on men's 
 minds, the elemental religion has over the fetichism 
 which precedes it the superiority which the worship of 
 clouds, or skies, or suns, or storms has over the worship of 
 trees and rivers and mountains. If a people change their 
 home they cannot take the fetich with them ; and there- 
 fore the nation will be without a god, unless either a new 
 fetich is at once found (which is scarce likely) or men are 
 willing to worship some part of nature which cannot be 
 BO easily abandoned. The nation is almost sure in such 
 circumstances to turn and worship the great elemental 
 gods. 
 
 But even if the people do not leave their homes, and 
 only coalesce somewhat in national life, the elemental god 
 has still an immense advantage over his fetich rival in 
 respect of his universality. He alone can be the god of 
 the whole people. Although in each village the people are 
 still most inclined to fetichism, and the village stream or 
 tree is in consequence more honoured than the sun or the 
 wind, still that tree or stream has no claim to reverence 
 from the men of another village. They have probably their 
 individual village tree, who, rather than a friend, is a 
 rival and an enemy to the other fetich. When neighbour 
 communities cease being at war and become friendly, the 
 union is likely to be signalised by the sacrifice to each 
 
 See p. 69. 
 
112 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 others' prejudices of the rival gods : the thing they now 
 need is a divinity whom all have worshipped alike. He 
 must be something higher and more celestial than the 
 fetich, a wider Nature god. This is, in fact, an instance 
 exactly parallel to that seeming paradox of reputation 
 whereby we are met with the difficulty that the greatest 
 genius is never first in repute among his contemporaries. 
 Why, it may fairly be asked, should future times be always 
 so much more discriminating than present ones? To 
 which the answer, of course, is that the great genius would 
 never really have a majority of suffrages in any age, but 
 that his suffrages, such as they are, go on accumulating 
 from age to age, while his rival of one generation, the 
 popular writer of that time, puts out of memory his rival 
 of a previous generation. The popular writer, for the 
 purposes of our illustration, represents the fetich god, for 
 the elemental god stands the genius, and for the rivalry 
 of different ages we substitute the rivalry of different 
 localities. 
 
 Each separate village in old Bactriana had, we may 
 suppose, its fetich god, while the gods of all the Aryan 
 nations were the sky and the sun, the earth and the sea. 
 The more the people gravitated together, the more did 
 these universal deities come to the front, and the divini- 
 ties of fragments of the people fall into the background. 
 The decisive change was probably made when the migra- 
 tions of the Ayras began, and all the fetiches had to be 
 left behind. 
 
 For hundreds of years had the proto-Aryas inhabited 
 their fertile Bactrian home, until they grew into a con- 
 siderable nation ; the older tribes backed against the 
 eastern hills, the younger extending westward into the 
 plain as far as the borders of the Caspian. 1 At length, 
 either because they grew too large for the land they dwelt 
 in or because they felt more and more the pressure of alien 
 
 1 See Ch. VL 
 
THE MIGRATIONS OF THE ARYAS. 113 
 
 peoples those Tartar races who still form the population 
 of Central Asia from what cause, indeed, we cannot de- 
 termine now, they broke up into separate nations, which*, 
 one by one, set off upon those long journey ings not de- 
 stined to come to a termination until some at least among 
 the people had reached the very ends of the earth. The 
 fetich god could be no protection in the new unknown 
 world to which the travellers turned. But the sun went 
 with them ; he even pointed the way they were to travel 
 as he passed on before them to the west. 1 The sky, clear 
 or cloudy, was still overhead ; the ruddy morn and evening 
 showed their familiar faces ; the pillar of cloud went 
 before them by day, and the pillar of fire by night ; the 
 storms followed them on their path, and the moon with 
 all her attendant stars. These, therefore, were the gods 
 to whom henceforward they must turn to pray. 
 
 The younger tribes, whom we saw settled to the west- 
 ward, were the first to migrate. They left behind them 
 the older inhabitants, the Aryas par excellence, from whom 
 afterwards descended the Indians and Iranians. But even 
 these had at last to abandon their country. Whatever 
 the reason for the others' departure, theirs, one would 
 suppose, must have been involuntary, under the force of 
 superior and hostile powers. For they did not go west- 
 ward, but crossed the steep hills which were behind them. 
 The Iranians, as we saw, struggled to the high table-land 
 of Pamir, which tradition afterwards represented as the 
 land made evil by Ahrimanes. The Indians crossed the 
 Hindoo Koosh and debouched upon the plain of the Indus ; 
 and it was during their residence in the territory of the 
 five streams, the Panjab, 2 that these Aryas of India com- 
 posed the body of their first sacred poetry those Vedic 
 hymns which are a memorial not of their faith only, but 
 also, in an indirect way, of the still earlier Aryan religion 
 of Bactria. 
 
 1 Ibid. 
 
 2 The Ganges is unknown to the Vedic hymn- writers. 
 
 I 
 
114 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 But let the reader be upon his guard upon his guard 
 once for all against the notion that any distinct doctrine 
 of mythology can be gleaned from the poems of the Yeda. 
 Something has already been said of the difference between 
 mythology and religion, so far as to show how the pre- 
 sence of one must to a great extent preclude that of 
 the other. Mythology, in a manner, precedes religion. 
 Mythology is an interpretation of natural phenomena, 
 through the enkindiing of imagination indeed, and with 
 some sense of worship going along with the interpretation, 
 but by men not in that state of strong emotion which we 
 may distinctly call religious. The tales of mythology are 
 records of facts of .facts seen, no doubt, though an imagina- 
 tive atmosphere, but yet regarded as passing events and 
 not in a peculiar relation to the observer. The ego of the 
 narrator of myths is not vividly present in his conscious- 
 ness. With religion and with the literature of devotion it 
 is very different. These imply an intense concentration 
 of thought upon the spiritual (unsensuous) side of the 
 external phenomena : they imply a condition of feeling in 
 which the ego is of pre-eminent importance in relation to 
 all outward things, in which the external world is re- 
 garded or neglected in exact proportion as it calls out 
 an answering emotion from the human heart. The Vedic 
 poems are of the religious kind ; they are distinctly devo- 
 tional in character, and are therefore rightly described as 
 hymns. And thus being intended as vehicles of feeling, 
 not as the records of events, they offer a marked contrast 
 to those epic poems which are our earliest authorities for 
 the belief of most other members of the Indo-European 
 family to the epos of Homer, for example, and the eddas 
 and sagas of the German peoples. This gives the Yedas 
 a certain poverty on the mythologic side ; it also tends to 
 make the beliefs which they record seem more advanced 
 in development than they really are. Yet, for all that, 
 the Yedas reveal some aspects of belief more primitive 
 than are to be found either in Greece or in Scandinavia : 
 

 RELIGIOUS CHARACTER OF THE VEDAS. 115 
 
 some facts without the light shed by which the religious 
 history of the Aryan folk would have remained for ever 
 obscure. 
 
 Professor Max Miiller has already called attention to 
 one remarkable phase of belief which the Vedas illustrate, 
 and which, but for its survival in these hymns, would 
 perhaps never have been noticed. He has called this 
 phase henotheism, 1 by which is meant the worship of one 
 god out of the pantheon as if he were the only divinity, 
 and the passing on then to pay the same vows and honours 
 to another deity. Henotheism expresses quite a different 
 tone- of mind from monotheism, and arises mainly, as in 
 the last chapter was pointed out, from the shortness of 
 memory which leads men to neglect and overlook that 
 phenomenon which is not actually present, and so to forget 
 for a time the god whose nature is bound up with this 
 phenomenon. Wherefore it is evident that in the Vedas, 
 where henotheism is so rife, we have got most near to the 
 condition of belief in which the god was identified with 
 that visible power of nature whence he took his name ; 
 to that state of things in which Indra was worshipped 
 while active, but forgotten when he was not so. Indra is 
 throughout the Vedas really the sky or the storm ; and 
 though he receives the general titles suited to a universal 
 ruler, yet when we see him in action his deeds are those 
 possible to a storm god only. Agni is in verity the fire, 
 and his ways are the ways of that element alone. 
 
 It is through the combination of this genuine poly- 
 theism with the language of devotion that henotheism 
 becomes conspicuous. Of course it was thought that the 
 god would be nattered by being addressed in such a style 
 of adulation as if he only were the lord and king. But 
 men to whom all the gods seemed equally present, would 
 
 What I have called pure poli/theism, is, as has been shown, a different 
 je of belief from that which is commonly called by the same name, 
 ris pure polytheism is in the most intimate relationship to hsnothcism 
 (Ch. I.) 
 
 12 
 
116 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 have felt the risk of offending quite as much the god who 
 was really supreme. If there were anyone like Zeus, 
 who was so mighty that if a chain were suspended from 
 heaven, and he were at one end and all the other gods 
 were pulling at the other, they could not displace him, 
 then henotheism would not be safe ; nor would it be pos- 
 sible. If there were no personal god sitting apart and 
 directing all the rest, if every god were (more or less) 
 limited within his own sphere, then the immoderate desire 
 to obtain the special gift which this or that divinity held 
 in hand, the carelessness of the savages about the future, 
 and their natural forgetfulness that there were other 
 powers and other gifts beside this one, would far outweigh 
 the fear of losing some subsequent favour of a rival god. 
 Henotheism, then, is only possible in a certain condition 
 of belief; wherefore the discovery of it in a conspicuous 
 form in the Yedas is a guarantee that we shall find much 
 else that is really primitive in them. 
 
 We ought, before we speak of the actual Yedic creed, 
 to try and get some notion of the pre-Vedic one which all 
 our ancestors had in common, or at all events of that which 
 the Aryas brought with them to their Indian home before 
 the first Vedic hymn was raised. All the Indo-European 
 people possessed in common, as we have seen, a sky god, 
 Dyaus, whose name, connected with (if not sprung from) a 
 root div, to shine, points him out especially as the bright 
 heaven. The fact that those first cousins of Dyaus, Zeus 
 and Jupiter, have little in their natures to suggest the 
 bright heaven or clear sky, might lead us to suppose that 
 the Indian Dyaus had been originally the heaven in all its 
 aspects, the heaven by night as well as the heaven by day ; 
 but that his nature had been subsequently divided, and 
 his character in consequence changed. If this was the 
 case the rule over the night sky was given over to Yaruwa, 
 * the coverer.' Later on in Indian mythology Dyaus comes 
 to signify the sun, but when it does so the word is feminine 
 
THE PRE-VEDIC CREED. . 117 
 
 the sun is feminine in Sanskrit and the masculine 
 Dyaus is still a different being from the sun itself. Essen- 
 tially, then, we must say that Dyaus was ever to the 
 Indians the bright upper sky, the sun's home ; but he was 
 not the sun itself. 
 
 Dyaus was evidently one among the greatest, probably 
 he was once the greatest god of the Indians in the pre- 
 Yedic age. But in the hymns Dyaus is much neglected. 
 Scarcely one is addressed exclusively to him, and the 
 mention of him, when it occurs, is rather incidental than 
 of the character of actual worship. 
 
 Dyaus has a proper companion and helpmeet in the 
 earth goddess, and she, too, belongs rather to the pre- 
 Vedic times than to the Vedic. It is so natural to 
 imagine the heaven and the earth as the two first beings, 
 the progenitors of all life in the world, that in evecy 
 system almost they stand at the head of the pantheon. 
 In a former chapter we saw how the New Zealand story 
 represented the heaven and the earth Kangi and Papa 
 they are there called as the begetters of all other living 
 things, who yet required to be torn apart that their 
 children might continue to live. This primary embrace 
 of earth and heaven is what most primitive people would 
 hit upon to account for the origin of all things. Where- 
 fore we may believe that far back in the Vedic creed stood 
 first of all the heaven father, and by his side the earth 
 mother. 
 
 The Yedic earth goddess is Prithivi. Whenever Dyaus 
 and Prithivi are made the subject of a hymn they are in- 
 voked together, almost as a conjoint being (Dyavaprithivi) . 
 In such hymns the ordinary characteristics of Dyaus and 
 Prithivi are held before our eyes : the two are represented 
 to us strictly in their phenomenal existence. They have 
 not the same power of choice and will, nothing of the 
 strong personality, which belongs to Indra and Agni. 
 Dyaus produces the rain, and sends down the fertilising 
 streams ; Prithivi bears on her bosom the immense weight 
 
] 18 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of the mountains, and from her womb sends forth the lofty 
 trees. 1 
 
 What is specially remarkable in the hymns to Prithivi 
 is that the singer, even while he is worshipping the earth 
 goddess, seems to have his thoughts still turned heaven- 
 wards, still to be thinking of the clouds ^ind of the rain. 
 It is a peculiarity of the Vedic creed that it is eminently 
 celestial, and scarcely ever concerned with mundane 
 things ; and the tendency seems to express itself even in 
 the worship of the earth goddess. This fact has led 
 Professor Gubernatis 2 to declare that the original signifi- 
 cance of Prithivi etymologically 'the large, the ex- 
 tended' was not the earth, but the heaven, and that 
 there were two Prithivis, the celestial and the terrestrial, 
 of which the celestial was the elder. This, I think, we 
 cannot say. In a former chapter we have seen how easily 
 divinities who were first known in the terrene days of 
 belief may get transferred from earth to heaven ; much as 
 the Assyrian bulls and lions, worshipped no doubt in days 
 of animal worship, had a pair of wings given them and 
 were straightway idealised and sent to heaven. I believe 
 that the great celestial serpents the clouds Ahi and 
 Vrita, the chief enemies of Indra, were once terrestrial 
 rivers ; 3 and I believe in the same way that Prithivi, from 
 being a mere earth goddess, got a place in the sky in order 
 that she might sit beside her spouse, the heaven god. We 
 shall see other instances of a transfer of this kind. 4 
 
 As Prithivi thus remained a distinct being, and at the 
 same time lost her connection with the ground, appearing 
 henceforth rather as the consort of the heaven than as the 
 goddess of the earth, she became by name distinguishable 
 from the soil, which last was, in Yedic Sanskrit, known 
 under the name of Gau. Gau is an older word than 
 Prithivi, and was itself once the name of the earth goddess 
 (whence the Greek goddess Gaia). Prithivi was then only 
 
 1 Cf. R. V. v. 84. * Letture sopra la M. Ved. pp. 59-64. 
 
 See Chapter II. * See Chapter IV. 
 
DYAUS AND PtflTHIVI. 119 
 
 one of the epithets of Gau. But as religion changed Gau 
 sank into insignificance and Prithivi came to the front. 
 Just so in the Greek mythology Gaia (Ge) was the pure 
 and simple earth ; Demeter (Ge-meter) was the earth with 
 something more of personality added on. Ge, in Greek 
 mythology, continued to be a goddess, but she was charac- 
 terless ; the force of personality remained with Demeter. 
 
 In the Vedic hymns we see Prithivi in her turn losing 
 worship and losing individuality because the creed has be- 
 come too celestial for her. 
 
 We cannot explain so easily the neglect into which 
 Dyaus has fallen, which seems the more extraordinary 
 when we remember how once widely worshipped and how 
 ancient a divinity he was. Nevertheless the fact remains. 
 Part of his nature Dyaus passed over to Varuraa, who was 
 also a personification of the heaven, but most often, I 
 think, of the heaven at night. Varuna's name signifies 
 the encompasser or coverer (root var, to cover or conceal) ; 
 he is the same with the Greek ovpavos. Varuna, however, 
 did not succeed to the supremacy which Dyaus once 
 claimed. That, was transferred to Indra. 
 
 The raising of Indra to the place of highest god is the 
 great advance which Vedic religion has made upon the 
 older proto- Aryan belief. Dyaus is the father of Indra, 
 just as Kronos is the father of Zeus and Ouranos of 
 Kronos ; and this alone would lead us to suppose that the 
 heaven god was the older. 1 Now, however, Dyaus' chief 
 claim to reverence is through his son. 
 
 1 The sonship of Zeus to Kronos is a myth of comparatively recent 
 birth in Greek mythology, and arises, as Welcker has shown ( Griechische 
 Gotterlehre, i. 140), merely from a confusion of words. Kronion, which is 
 the same as Chronion, was at first an epithet applied to Zeus, showing him 
 as existing through all time not so much ' born of time,' but rather the 
 4 one of time,' the old one, a common way of speaking of gods (cf . the 
 Unkulonkulu of the Zulus, the ' old, old ' Wa'inamo'inen of the Kalewala). 
 When this meaning had been forgotten Zeus became merely the son of 
 Kronos, and Kronos became a new being. The notion of personifying the 
 abstract idea time would never have entered the minds of a primitive 
 people. When Kronos came into being he was endowed with a certain 
 
120 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Thy father Dyans did the best of things 
 When he became thy father, Indra, 1 
 
 sings one of the Yedic poets. Evidently Indra is acknow- 
 ledged as a later god, but also a greater than his fore- 
 runner. 
 
 If we succeed in understanding the condition of mind 
 accessary for that purely natural religion when the 
 livinity was by name identified with his visible counter- 
 part the sea or the sky, or whatever it might be we 
 can realise how, to become so deified, a phenomenon must 
 be constantly present to the senses; or, if not always 
 present thus, it must at least recur so regularly and so 
 often that the notion of its existence is firmly impressed 
 upon men's thoughts. The sun is not always seen, but he 
 rises and sets with the most perfect regularity, and in 
 fine climates his face is rarely hidden by day. He, there- 
 fore, is fitted to be from the first among the greatest of 
 the nature gods. Yet even the sun is not, in most my- 
 thologies, the supreme god ; very often he falls far short of 
 being so ; and that he does this is owing, in chief measure, 
 to his disappearance at night. When men's memories 
 
 character, and this was really taken from the old heaven god known as 
 Varurca, Ouranos who, as we have seen, belonged to an age before that 
 in which Zeus came to be worshipped as a god of storms. In fact, Dyaus' 
 nature divided in twain ; the heaven side went to Varuwa, the storm side 
 went to Zeus ; and therefore in the Greek creed Ouranos belonged to a 
 very early stage of worship, and corresponded almost exactly to the Latin 
 Saturnus. When Kronos appeared he assumed the character of Ouranos, 
 who was henceforward almost completely forgotten. The record of the 
 change, however, is distinctly preserved in the myths ; for the birth of 
 Zeus from Kronos, the treatment of his children by the latter, &c., almost 
 exactly reproduce the relative positions of Kronos and Ouranos. There- 
 fore, knowing as we do that Kronos is of later origin than either Zeus or 
 Ouranos, we are justified in removing this middle term, and we at once get 
 back to the birth of Zeus from Ouranos, the jealousy of Zeus entertained 
 by his father, and the way in which the newer god dispossessed the old. 
 If, therefore, I speak of the Greeks looking back to the Saturnian time of 
 their religion (Ch. IV.), I do not mean that there ever was a time when 
 Kronos was worshipped instead of Zeus, but that the Greeks looked back, 
 without knowing it, to the older worship of their Ouranos, which really 
 did precede the cult of their Zeus. 
 > B. V. iv. 17, 3. 
 
ACTIVE AND PASSIVE GODS. 121 
 
 are very short it will fare still worse with phenomena 
 whose appearance is more uncertain or at longer in- 
 tervals. 
 
 The state of belief which has been characterised as 
 henotheism, and which consists in worshipping the phe- 
 nomenon which is immediately present and neglecting 
 those phenomena which are past, evidently arises imme- 
 diately out of that still earlier phase of thought (still 
 earlier and still more akin to fetichism) when the phe- 
 nomenon to be recognised as divine must be always 
 present to the senses. Henotheism is, in fact, a kind of 
 reversion to this state of feeling : it forgets all phenomena 
 which are absent, and makes a protest against the place 
 of memory in a creed. For these reasons a storm god (or 
 god storm) is not likely to have been placed high in the 
 pantheon during the earliest days of nature worship. 
 When, however, the divinity and the phenomenon were 
 not so absolutely identified, when the notion of the former's 
 possessing a separate existence has begun to creep in. 
 the god could be thought of without the aid of visible, 
 presentation. He was still perhaps identified with the 
 phenomenon in character, but he had now a different name 
 from it, and so could be contemplated alone. He might 
 be sitting apart. He might peradventure be sleeping or 
 upon a journey. And the personality now became more 
 impressive if the deeds of the god were somewhat 
 irregular and arbitrary. This is the time for a god such 
 as the storm god (Indra or Zeus) to rise to power. 
 
 We may suppose that in those climates where the 
 Indian sung his song of praise unlike ours the heavens 
 were most often seen in their garment of unblemished 
 blue. Nothing is certainly more divine and impressive 
 than such a sight at first. 1 But there is withal some- 
 
 1 I anticipate here some objection on the part of the acute reader. 
 'Such a phrase as at first,' he will say, < imagines man awakening suddenly 
 into the world, opening his eyes upon its wonders, and at once falling to 
 the invention of a mythology grounded upon these first impressions. But 
 
122 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 thing monotonous about it. This god has not his chang- 
 ing fits, his passion and his kindness. He is too serene 
 to be very ardently loved or feared, for that eternal calm 
 can have small sympathy with the shorf, and troubled life 
 of man. With Indra it is very different. He is the god 
 of storms ; he is the sky, but the sky of clouds and rain 
 and lightning. His coining is rare, but it is terrible. 
 Sometimes, doubtless, Indra seems to be worshipped only 
 when he is present and seen. But throughout the whole 
 Yedic series we see the awe which he inspires when 
 he does come ; in them we seem to behold the very 
 flash of his arrows and to hear the reverberation of his 
 thunder. 
 
 I think that the evidences of a transfer of worship 
 from the older sky god to Indra are very clear in the 
 Vedic poems. There is a kind of rivalry between the two ; 
 or when Indra's contest is not with Dyaus it is with Yaruna 
 (ovpavos) . It is acknowledged by Yedic scholars l that 
 Yaruna was worshipped before Indra, and Yaruna is, in 
 one aspect, only another name for the older Dyaus. The 
 following hymn is a record of the rivalry between Indra 
 and Yarmia. The poet makes them both uphold their 
 
 such an imagination is quite inconsistent with the slow development of 
 human faculties. There is nothing shorter lived in the human thought 
 than the sense of wonder.' This last statement is, in reality, only par- 
 tially true. The sudden sense of wonder soon fades, but there is a slow 
 abiding sense which never leaves human nature, and which, if it did desert 
 mankind, would carry away with it all his power of poetry and all his 
 power of belief. Wherefore the at first of the worship of the sky must be 
 taken to mean that period during which man, having passed away from 
 fetichism, had not yet advanced beyond it far enough to be able to worship 
 any god who was not a constantly present phenomenon. The gradual 
 fading of the influence of the sky on belief is coeval with the slow de- 
 velopment of the notion of a being, to some extent, apart from phenomena. 
 It seems to us possible in a short time to grow familiar with and weary of 
 any particular phenomenon, because we can now run rapidly back through 
 the stage of thought which human nature has taken ages to make com- 
 plete. In this respect it was with Belief as it was with Reason : the 
 simplest and most obvious deductions which a child makes now in a few 
 hours took mankind centuries to make for the first time. 
 1 By Roth and by Gubernatis (Lettitre, &c., 189). 
 

 KIVALRY BETWEEN VARUA^ AND INDRA. 123 
 
 claims to worship, and then he himself sums up between 
 them, preferring the active and warlike god : 
 
 VARUXA SPEAKS. ! 
 
 I am the king, to me belongetli rule, 
 I the life-giver of the heavenly host ; 
 The gods obey the bidding of Varuna, 
 I am the refuge of the human kind. 
 
 I am, Indra, Varuwa, and mine are 
 
 The deep wide pair of worlds, the earth and heaven ; 
 
 Like a wise artist, made I all things living ; 
 
 The heaven and the earth, I them sustain. 
 
 INDRA SPEAKS. 
 
 On me do call all men, the rich in horses, 
 Who through the hurry of the battle go ; 
 I sow the dreadful slaughter there ; I, Indra, 
 In my great might stir up the dust of combat. 
 
 This have I done ; the might of all the immortals 
 Restraineth never me, nor shall restrain. 
 
 THE POET SPEAKS. 
 
 That this thou dost, know all men among mortals ; 
 This to Varuwa makest thou known, ruler. 
 Indra, in thee we praise the demon slayer, 
 Through whom the pent-up streams are free to flow. 
 
 Such a change as that from Dyaus or Yarutia to Indra 
 is incidental to the transition from nature worship to the 
 personal god. That it is so is shown by the fact that 
 changes, identical in significance, have been made by 
 other peoples of the Indo-European family. All have 
 
 1 R. V. iv. 42. Vanma is the coverer, from root var (to cover, enclose, 
 keep). Cf. Skr. varana, Zend varena, covering. This is very suitable for 
 the night sky, and like that image of Lady Macbeth's 
 
 ' Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, 
 To cry, Hold, hold 1 " ' 
 
124 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 abandoned Dyaus. The Teutons took in his place Wuotan 
 or Odhinn, who is first of all a god of storm. The Greeks 
 and Romans kept the name of the older sky god Zeus 
 Dyaus but they modified his nature in the same direction 
 in which Indians and Germans changed the natures of 
 their divinities. Dyaus meant originally the bright 
 heaven ; Zeus was as essentially a god of thunder and of 
 rain vs^sX^spsra^ the cloud-collector. He, and Jove 
 too, corresponded as to their natures almost exactly with 
 Indra. 
 
 Yet the unmoved, all-embracing heaven better realises 
 some ideals of a divinity than these fitful storm-gods do ; 
 and if a people pass from the one to the other it will not 
 be without some loss. In its high moods the fancy will look 
 back to former days, when the gods were of a larger pattern 
 than those of to-day. Men will tell of some past Saturnian 
 reign when lives were longer and not so eager and bitter 
 as they have become, when their forefathers enjoyed the 
 fruits of earth without strife and labour. For, after all, 
 the sky of clouds is the lower sky. The Greeks, we know, 
 made a distinction between arjp and aWrjp, the lower and 
 the upper air. Dyaus, when he grew to be Zeus, did in 
 reality sink from the latter to the former : he descended 
 to the cloud regions. According to one theory of ety- 
 mology, Indra expresses the same change in his very 
 name. 1 
 
 The world over which the cloudy Indra ruled was the 
 world of farm and valley and low fertile pastures ; but the 
 mountaineer, whose way led him to higher ranges and on 
 to the great peak of the Himalayas, saw, as he climbed 
 upwards, that he had passed the heaven of rain and 
 thunder. The clouds, which used to seem so far overhead, 
 were now stretched beneath his feet like a carpet. The 
 storm flashed, but he was beyond its reach ; yet still, far as 
 
 1 This etymology is proposed by Gubernatis (Letture, &c., p. 188). I 
 am, I confess, inclined to look upon the derivation given with great sus- 
 picion, but I will not venture to pronounce positively against it. 
 
THE UPPER AND THE LOWER HEAVEN. 125 
 
 ever above him, spread the highest vault of heaven, whence 
 shone the sun, or on him looked the everlasting stars. 
 
 Wherefore the earlier associations never quite lost their 
 hold, and the sky god asserted again and again his para- 
 mount influence upon men's imagination. As we are at 
 present dealing only with Indian mythology, it is enough 
 to notice how in time, in the Brahmin creed, Indra suc- 
 ceeded to the complete nature of Dyaus ; while his active 
 powers, along with his thunderbolts and lightning flash, 
 were taken from him and given to a younger divinity 
 namely, to Vishnu. Vishnu is the Brahmin saviour, the 
 incarnate god. 
 
 In truth, there is in this rivalry between Dyaus and 
 Indra an element which is universal and ingrained in the 
 religious instinct. At first, in such early times as these 
 Vedic ones, the instinctive feeling is not consciously ex- 
 pressed, but expressed unconsciously by these changes of 
 creed. We can now recognise the counter- workings of this 
 instinct as independent of any particular phase of belief, 
 as belonging not to this period specially, but to all time. 
 The contest between the heaven and the storm gods is an 
 expression of two diverse tendencies of the human mind 
 when dealing with religious ideas. There is first an im- 
 pulse upward, a desire to press the thoughts continually 
 forward in an effort to idealise the Godhead; but by 
 exalting or seeming to exalt Him to the highest regions 
 of abstraction, this tendency is likely to rob the Deity of 
 all fellowship with man, and man of all claims upon His 
 sympathy and love. Then comes in the second impulse, 
 which often at one stroke brings down the god as near as 
 possible to the level of mankind, leaving him at the last 
 no better than a demi-god or superior kind of man. One 
 we may call the metaphysical or the religious, the other 
 the mythological impulse ; and we shall never rightly 
 understand the history of religion until we have learned to 
 recognise these two streams of tendency interpenetrating 
 every system. 
 
126 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF, 
 
 Indra, then, once rose to a supreme place because he 
 was more active and changeful than Dyaus, and better 
 satisfied those instincts which desire to see the deity like 
 mankind. Soon he assumed the qualities and title which 
 had belonged to his father, and clothed himself with the 
 character befitting a Supreme God. In the Vedic creed, 
 such as we see it, Dyaus has almost 'altogether faded away. 
 Indra there represents the ideal godhead : he is the Father 
 and the Supreme One, the god to whom all highest wor- 
 ship turns. 
 
 It results from this that in the Vedic hymns Indra has 
 to a great extent put off his mythological nature, in order 
 to clothe himself more completely with the majesty of 
 divinity. The instinct of worship is devoted to him ; the 
 story-telling parts of the creed are reserved for lesser 
 gods. Of Indra's deeds we shall have something to say 
 hereafter; but there is not very much variety in them. 
 On the other hand, we can have 110 difficulty in allowing 
 that he, among all the gods of the Vedic Indian, exercised 
 the deepest influence on belief. Next to Indra stood Agni. 
 To say that among the most genuine and ancient hymns 
 of the Rig Veda about 265 are addressed to Indra, 233 
 to Agni, while no other god can lay claim to more than a 
 quarter of this latter number, 1 is enough to show in what 
 direction, towards what parts of nature, the religious 
 thought of these Aryas turned. We have a further wit- 
 ness to the supremacy of Indra and Agni in the fact that 
 nine out of the ten books of the Eig Veda begin with a 
 series of hymns addressed to them, as though their wor- 
 ship must precede all other. The worship of Indra is the 
 central feature of Vedic mythology. As Dyaus has quite 
 resigned his throne before the beginning of the Vedas, 
 Indra must be looked upon in every way as the supreme 
 
 1 Soma, indeed, can apparently do so ; for the whole of one book (the 
 ninth) is devoted to him. But, in fact, the hymns of this book are all of a 
 ritualistic character : they are concerned with the ceremonies of worship in 
 which Soma plays so important a part, But they are not written distinctly 
 in praise of the Indian Bacchus. 
 
THE MIGHT OF INDEA. 127 
 
 god. He is still a representative of the storm ; but as 
 he is also the highest god, it is needful that he should be 
 something more than this. He has already taken upon 
 himself a great part of the nature of the older god of 
 heaven. 'The might of all the immortals,' as we have 
 seen, 'restrains him never.' 
 
 It was the power of the god which was most wor- 
 shipped. He might be counted on for help as the special 
 god of the Aryas, 1 just as Jehovah was the special god of 
 the children of Israel. In a fine passage, which breathes 
 the spirit of the Hebrew psalm, we are told how ' he 
 shakes the heaven and the earth as the hem of his 
 garment.' 2 Indra is often called upon, as Jehovah is, to 
 show his strength and to confound those who have dared 
 to doubt his supremacy ; for here in India, as in Palestine, 
 * the wicked saith in his heart, There is no god.' 
 
 INDRA SPEAKS. 
 
 I come with might before thee, stepping first, 
 And behind me move all the heavenly powers. 
 
 THE POET SPEAKS. 
 If thou, Indra, wilt my lot bestow, 
 
 A hero's part dost thou perform with me. 
 
 To thee the holy drink I offer first ; 
 
 Thy portion here is laid, thy soma brewed. 
 Be, while I righteous am, to me a friend ; 
 
 So shall we slay of foemen many a one. 
 
 Ye who desire blessings, bring your hymn 
 
 To Indra ; for the true is always true. 
 * There is no Indra,' many say ; 'who ever 
 
 Has seen him ? Why should we his praise proclaim ? ' 
 
 INDRA SPEAKS. 
 I am here, singer ; look on me ; here stand I. 
 
 In might all other beings I o'erpass. 
 Thy holy service still my strength renews, 
 
 And thereby smiting, all things smite I down. 
 
 1 R. V. vi. 18, 3. 2 Ibid. i. 37, 6. 
 
128 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 And as on heaven's height I sat alone, 
 
 To me thy offering and thy prayer rose np. 
 Then spake my soul this word within himself: 
 ' My votaries and their children call upon me.' ! 
 
 The enemies against whom Indra fights are not, how- 
 ever, generally speaking, earthly foes. I have heard critics 
 speaking from the outside object to Vedic scholars the 
 improbability that any people would have their thoughts 
 constantly set to observe the heavenly phenomena and to 
 sing of them. And I must confess that, at the time I read 
 these criticisms, my prejudices or prejudgments went 
 altogether with the critics. But such predispositions must 
 give way to fact. We cannot determine -beforehand what 
 it is likely that a people will or will not think or believe. 2 
 And it is quite certain that almost all the Yedic hymns 
 are concerned with the skyey influences, with the heaven, 
 with day and night, with the sun, with morning and 
 evening twilight, with the clouds and with the wind. The 
 purely devotional parts of the Ii3 r mns have a certain same- 
 ness ; for the Vedic religion has already neared the con- 
 ception of a single ideal god. So long as we are concerned 
 with what Indra is we find that epithets are too few to 
 express his greatness and the many sides of his character ; 
 but we find also that the same expression, or nearly the 
 same, may be used of other gods, as of Agni or of Varuwa 
 or Mitra. 
 
 When we pass beyond the inward being and come to 
 the record of the deeds which Indra has done (not those 
 he is asked to do), we are face to face once more with the 
 fresh world of nature. Treated in this way, no longer 
 devotionally but historically, the nature of Indra is 
 limited to the phenomena of storm. He kills the enemy, , 
 
 1 R. V. viii. 89. I have followed here, as in all other cases, the trans- 
 lation of Grassmann ; Ludwig gives a somewhat different complexion to 
 this dialogue. 
 
 2 See what Schoolcraft says concerning the minute attention paid by 
 the Algic tribes to the phenomena of the sky, Algic Res. p. 48. 
 
THE ENEMIES OF INDRA. 129 
 
 it is true ; lie breaks down his strong citadel ; he destroys 
 his high hills. But who is this enemy ? He is Witra ; 
 he is Ahi, the serpent. ' Him the god struck with Indra- 
 might, and set free the all-gleaming water for the use of 
 men.' l What the serpent has done is to conceal the 
 waters of fruitfulness which Indra sets free. The hills 
 which Indra destroys are the mountains of ambara 
 'the shadowy cloud-hill of tfainbara ' 2 very evidently the 
 clouds themselves. The one great action of the god, 
 which is referred to again and again and constantly 
 prayed for, is the bringing the thunderstorm, and with it 
 the desired rain. 
 
 In reading the description of these conflicts, we detect 
 a slight confusion of mind on the part of the authors of the 
 hymns. This confusion arises from Indra's being in a 
 degree abstracted from those physical phenomena which, 
 are the substance of his nature ; so that the same pheno- 
 mena can be presented again to the imagination, and in a 
 new light. Thus, though there can be no doubt that the 
 great god is himself the storm, or still more strictly the 
 stormy sky, and though this idea of course includes all 
 the separate parts of the storm the black clouds, for 
 example, which hold in their bosoms the lightning or^ 
 the rain still it is quite possible to regard these parts as 
 separate entities. The clouds may be the servants and 
 the companions of Indra. When they appear, in that 
 aspect they are the Maruts, his band of warriors. Or the 
 clouds may be enemies of the god. The darkness which 
 
 1 i. 165, 8. The name Vritra is, I believe, from the same root, var (or 
 vri), as Varuna. Possibly, therefore, it was originally only the darkness. 
 This reappearance of one central idea (shown in root) in two forms should 
 be compared with the identity of Thorr and Thrymr (Ch. VII.) 
 
 2 ii. 24. <Sambara ( = samvara), from am and vri, is a parallel example. It 
 had not originally an evil significance, only meaning he who covers up or 
 contains the source of abundance (s"am and samba> happiness ; but .same, to 
 collect). This is an epithet for the cloud. But when ambara grew into 
 an dpponent of Indra, the name was construed to mean the concealer, or 
 secreter, or thief of wealth and happiness. 
 
 K 
 
130 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 follows their spreading over the heavens seems to proclaim 
 them powers of evil. 
 
 In this way the clouds become those deadly serpents, 
 Ahi and Yritra ; and now, behold ! Indra has sent his flash 
 and they are dissolved in rain. This water, long desired, 
 expected long, they have concealed in their folds or coils ; 
 and it is Indra who sets it free. Strong with his soma 
 drink, he hurls his bolt and strikes to atoms the stream - 
 concealing dragon. 1 In this aspect, therefore, the clouds 
 are very appropriately likened to Yritra, or to Ahi, or to 
 the mountains of $ambara. 
 
 Thus the storm and the constituents of the storm 
 are at once Indra and his companions, the Maruts, 
 and also che enemies of Indra. There is nothing more 
 common in mythology than such a double aspect of a 
 natural phenomenon, though at the same time there is 
 nothing more puzzling to the student, nor nothing which 
 seems to give a better weapon to the sarcasm of the 
 sceptic in comparative mythology, who accuses us of 
 making ' anything out of anything ' when we interpret 
 myths in this way. Zeus is a storm god scarcely less than 
 Indra is; but beings of the storm also are the Cyclops and 
 (possibly) the Gorgon. Or if Medusa be, as I hold, the 
 moon, so too is the goddess Artemis. The eye of the Cyclops 
 is the sun ; and yet the sun is not the less greatest and most 
 beneficent of gods. It is the same in the mythology of 
 the Teutons. Thorr, the god, is the wielder of the thunder- 
 bolt ; but one of Thorr's great enemies, the giant Thrymr, 
 is the thunder likewise. The sun is Balder, the Beautiful, 
 brightest and best of the .ZEsir ; or it is the eye of Odhinn, 
 which the god threw into Mini's well ; or else it is the 
 head of the giant Mimr himself, which Odhiun cut off. 
 
 Indra being promoted to be the supreme one among 
 
 the gods, Agni takes the place next to him, and becomes 
 
 the messenger between heaven and earth. How well and 
 
 how consistently with his elemental nature he fills this posi- 
 
 1 P-. V. ii. 19. 
 

 INDRA AND AGNL 131 
 
 tion we have already seen. Yet it is true that the being 
 who in most mythologies most Aryan mythologies, at any 
 ra te is the human-like god and the friend of man is not 
 the fire, but rather the sun. He is Apollo or Heracles, 
 Thorr or Balder. The promotion of Agni to this place 
 must therefore be reckoned a peculiarity of the Vedic 
 religion, but it is one which it is more needful to point 
 out than to attempt any elaborate explanation of the 
 causes of it. Indeed, in all such cases the record of the fact 
 itself is what we most want, not theories of how this fact 
 came to be theories which, as a kind of prophecies after 
 the event, are very easy to fabricate. As the thing was so, 
 we easily see that it would suggest a tone of thought in 
 conformity with the articles of belief. It is easy to 
 imagine the frame of mind which should choose an Indra 
 for the supreme divinity rather than a Dyaus, or an Agni 
 next to him rather than an Apollo or a Balder. But the 
 important thing to notice is that the inclination was pre- 
 sent among these particular people and at this particular 
 time. 
 
 The human god is he about whom myths oftenest arise, 
 and whose character is in consequence more varied than 
 the character of the Highest. This rule is illustrated in 
 the case of Agni, of whose many sided nature we have 
 already noted the most important features. Twice born, 
 once in the cloud and once again in the wood ; descending 
 from heaven in the lightning, and rising up again from the 
 altar or the funeral pyre^ Agni was, while on earth, always 
 at the service of man, watching over him in the house. 
 He was the eternal opposite of man's great enemy, the 
 darkness ; he was the chief protection against that and 
 its multitudinous terrors. We cannot now realise the 
 horror which men anciently felt of the dark, of its dangers 
 from wild beasts, of the still greater spiritual dangers to 
 which at night-time they felt themselves exposed. At night 
 ranged abroad those evil ones, those unseen deadly foes 
 who (in the words of one Yedic hymn) ' strike with hidden 
 
 K 2 
 
132 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 but victorious powers.' Therefore Agni is never allowed 
 utterly to leave the worshipper : the house fire never goes 
 out. 1 This was the rule once among all the nations of the 
 Indo-European family ; but before historic times it had 
 been more or less abandoned by most, and was preserved 
 in its strictness only by Indians and Persians. 
 
 In other Indo-European creeds those at least of Greek 
 and Roman and Teuton 2 we never find the worship of 
 the fire in its intensity, only the traces of what it has been. 
 In Hestia and Yesta it is not the whole character of Agni 
 that is presented to us, but only the house fire generalised 
 or epitomised as a great state fire. 3 Hestia is called by 
 the Homeric hymnist the most revered of goddesses. 4 At 
 Olympia, Pausanias tells us, the first sacrifices were made 
 to her. 5 This surviving custom witnesses to the decay of 
 a higher kind of worship, as does the importance attached 
 to the maintenance of the fire of Yesta in Rome, 6 and to 
 the purity of the vestal virgins, and so forth. 
 
 In Germany traces of the same kind of fire ritual are 
 found, but diminished to a small compass. At the present 
 day popular superstition forbids the letting out of the fire 
 on the hearth during certain sacred nights Christmas 
 Eve, for example, New Year's Eve, or, according to some, 
 for all the nights of the ' Twelve Days.' ( If the fire goes 
 out on the hearth the money goes out of the coffer.' 7 And, 
 
 1 Concerning the laws and customs which have been founded upon the 
 need of this perpetual house fire, see, among many other writers, F. de 
 Coulange's Cite Antique. It is doubtful whether the classic Vesta and 
 Hestia are from the root vas, to shine, or from vas, to dwell (see Zeitsch. 
 f. v. Spr. xvi. 160). May it not be from both, and the identity of these 
 two roots witness to the importance of the house fire to the house ? No 
 man could dwell without a house fire. 
 
 2 The fire god, Agni, retained his name only among the Slavonic 
 branch of the Aryan race. 
 
 3 See above on root meaning of Vesta and Hestia. 
 
 4 Hymn, in Aph. 18, 22. 
 
 5 v. 14, 5. See also Plato, Leges, ix. 2. Let us add that in Crete her 
 name was pronounced in the solemn oath before that of Zeus Cretagenes. 
 
 6 These perpetual fires were not unknown in Greece. There was one 
 kept up, for example, at Mantinea. 
 
 Wnttke, Dcutselier Volksaberglaube, pp. 63, 66, &c. 
 
INDO-EUROPEAN FIRE WORSHIP. 133 
 
 again, for a public recognition of the same duties we have 
 the custom of lighting bonfires on the hills on great days 
 of the heathen calendar the Easter or Ostara fire, the fire 
 on Walpurgisnacht (May-day* Eve), and the Johannisf euer 
 (St. John's Day fire), which was more anciently the bale- 
 fire of Balder. 1 
 
 The ritual of the fire is, in all these cases, but a faint 
 shadow of what among the Indo-European races generally 
 it had once been. Accordingly, the beings who are sup- 
 posed to represent Agiii represent but a small part of the 
 great personality of the fire god. Hestia or Vesta show 
 him as the house fire, the flame which has descended to 
 live on earth. Hephaestus and Vulcan show him in a still 
 meaner guise, as the forger's fire : this is the same cha- 
 racter in which Agni is called in the Vedas Twashtar, the 
 fabricator. In such a guise as Hephaestus or Vulcan the 
 fire god has sunk almost below the level of humanity ; for 
 he is a lame, deformed being, the laughing-stock of the 
 Olympians. 2 Nevertheless this lameness and deformity 
 are not themselves of recent origin, but have their place 
 in the character of Agni, and are associated with some of 
 the most beautiful myths concerning him. Of these, how- 
 ever, I cannot speak now. What is peculiar to Hephaestus 
 and Vulcan is that they present this side only and forget 
 the higher ones. 
 
 It is evident that the novelty and wonder of fire had 
 been lost sight of by the Greeks and Eomans and Teutons. 
 Fire had become an ordinary thing to them, and so they 
 were no longer in eager search for its presence throughout 
 the realm of nature. It is for some such reason as this 
 
 1 See Chapters VIII., X. 
 
 2 As for the northern Loki, he presents the fire in its worst aspect, a 
 being no longer divine, but one who never ceases to work evil against the 
 jEsir (Edda Snorra, D. 49). Nevertheless that Loki had not originally 
 this evil nature is witnessed by the Eddaic history itself. In a study on 
 the ' Mythology of the Eddas ' (Trs. Hoy. Soc. of Literature, vol. xii.), I 
 have discussed at some length the gradual deterioration of Loki, and 
 shown (I think the importance of the place he once held. 
 
134 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 that, in the later creeds, the earthly fire is quite dissociated 
 from the" heavenly one. With Agni it was very different : 
 from his heavenly birth he drew all the greatness of his 
 character. The god who was ^o near to man was yet seen 
 far away, not in the lightning only, but in the red of 
 morning. The Indian saw in the dawn a sort of picture 
 or allegory, if I may so call it, of the total universe, and 
 of the limitless extent of time and space. The Vedic 
 psalmist called the place of the sun's rising Aditi, i the 
 boundless ; ' for as he looked through the long layers of 
 level cloud he was swayed by the sense of endless space 
 that sort of mental vertigo which seizes us sometimes when 
 we, too, gaze either upon the endless ranges of cloud on 
 the horizon or upward among the vista of the stars. 
 Through all the regions of morning and evening bright- 
 ness the worshipper saw Agni shining, and so he called 
 him the son of Aditi, the boundless one. 
 
 Side by side, then, stood these two contradictory 
 notions Agni, the endlessly extending vista of red clouds 
 at sun-rising or sun-setting, and Agni born from the 
 rubbing of two smaj] sticks. Between the two, from one 
 to the other, extends the vast pantheistic nature of the 
 god. And yet to this external being we must add some- 
 thing more. Agni is also the unseen god, the internal 
 fire ; he is the kiudler of all passionate longings, of inspi- 
 ration, of the intoxication of thought and joy, of anger 
 and the burning desire, of revenge. 
 
 Indra and Agni represent upon the whole, as has been 
 said, the strongly religious side of Indo-Aryan belief, as 
 opposed to the lighter mythological aspect of it. It 
 belongs to the scheme of these chapters to pass slightly 
 over this religious phase, which touches too closely upon 
 the later ethical development of belief. It is not our 
 object to discover what kind of emotion the gods called 
 forth from their votaries so much as what was the outward 
 aspect in which imagination saw the gods. Indra and 
 Agni, therefore, cannot occupy a place in our enquiries 
 
AGNI AS A HERO. 135 
 
 proportionate to the place which they held in the creed of 
 the Indian. 
 
 Agni, however, has many claims upon our attention 
 on the heroic side. Being so human in some aspects of 
 him, he was not always kept at the greatest heights of 
 adoration, but descended often to the heroic level, and in 
 doing so became the subject of divers myths and stories. 
 His most striking appearance in this guise is that to 
 which reference has been already made, his great act of 
 parricide, which was acknowledged even by the singer to 
 be scarcely becoming a god, but concerning the performance 
 of which no doubt unfortunately could be raised. I will 
 not assert that this notion contains in it the germ of the 
 story related of so many heroes Cyrus, CEdipus, Perseus, 
 Orestes, Romulus, and others namely, that, voluntarily 
 or by accident, they have been guilty of this crime of 
 parricide ; but I think it possible that these personages 
 may have had some connection with Agni, and that their 
 story may be in part founded on the Agni myth. How- 
 ever, they are certainly not immediate children of the 
 fire god. 
 
 Prometheus, on the other hand, is a direct descendant 
 of the fire god. He was once not improbably the actual 
 embodiment of the fire drill; but to a mythology not 
 quite so literal he became an embodiment of fire, or the 
 fire god. Fire has its evil and destructive as well as its 
 beneficent aspect, and this bad side of the element is 
 embodied in the Titan Prometheus. Though not a parri- 
 cide, he is the foe of father Zeus ; and for his wickedness 
 he is punished. This, at least, I take to be the earlier 
 legend ; for it is one in which Prometheus closely resembles 
 the Scandinavian fire god, Loki, who is also the enemy of 
 the gods, and who, for his wickedness, is chained upon a 
 rock till the day of doom. Some returning thought of the 
 goodness of fire and its benefits has again changed the 
 Greek story, and restored the Titan by making him a 
 martyr to his love of human kind and a victim of the 
 
136 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 jealousy of the Olympians. In the story, therefore, of 
 Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, and giving it to 
 man, we have unquestionably the trace of an old Aryan 
 myth, which gave a similar part to Agni. This story 
 placed the fire god in opposition to some supreme being 
 in the Indian pantheon may be to Indra or Dyaus. And 
 Agni was punished for his temerity. Perhaps he was 
 flung from heaven as Hephaestus was, and as, we know, 
 the fire itself is often flung. Perhaps he was chained to 
 a rock as Prometheus and Loki were chained. 
 
 From Agni and Indra we pass to gods less exalted in 
 the Vedic ritual, less near to realising the ideal of a god- 
 head, but yet with individualities of their own. There is, 
 it cannot be denied, a certain indistinctness about the 
 celestial phenomena with which we are dealing in Yedic 
 mythology, as compared with those terrestrial fetich gods 
 which we discussed in the last chapter. But this seems 
 not unnatural when we consider that we have reached a 
 less material and a more imaginative region than we were 
 in before. Moreover, in the Vedas we are not even in the 
 region of pure phenomena worship, but in an intermediate 
 state between that and the cult of gods who have the 
 nature of man. 
 
 As the worshipped river grows shadowy and shapeless 
 in the mist- like apsara, ' the formless one,' so the nature 
 gods, in their turn, before they emerge again as human 
 beings, become first the pale semblances of what they once 
 were ; while they are, at the same time, the faint fore- 
 shadowings of what they will be, they are the phantoms of 
 human kind. They are no longer things ; they are not even 
 pure phenomena ; they are not beings with completely human 
 natures ; and so they hover in a middle state, and hang, 
 like the coflin of the Prophet, suspended between heaven 
 and earth. Take the sun god, for example. He was once, 
 it is certain, merely the bright disk which travels up 
 heaven's arch. But in the Vedas he is no longer this 
 

 NATURE GODS GROWN SHADOWY. 137 
 
 only ; the disk itself may be the wheel of his chariot. The 
 sun god (Suryas) comes ' dragging his wheel.' l The sun 
 god is here something unseen and imagined, but he is not 
 yet humanised. Sometimes he is called a bull, sometimes 
 a bird ; 2 but it is not meant that he is really a bull or a 
 bird. Still he is as much like these things as he is like a 
 man. He is the great ruler of the day, the all-powerful, 
 the creator as it sometimes seems of all the world. (For 
 does not the world at his call become visible, and come out 
 of darkness which is nothingness ?) Yet for all his great- 
 ness the sun god has not such a free will as man has ; he 
 cannot rule and act in any way he chooses. He is com- 
 pelled to follow his daily round ; he * travels upon change- 
 less paths.' In one word, all his being is still united 
 to the phenomenon which gives him his name, and which 
 is to mankind his outward show. 
 
 It is essentially the same with the other divine parts 
 of nature as it is with this particular one, the sun ; the 
 morning goddess is not the simple dawn, though she must 
 be in all things like the dawn. The evening goddess 
 must be like evening ; the storm and fire gods must be 
 like storm and fire. But all these things are seen through 
 a medium of imagination, and not in the prosaic aspect 
 of mere fact. 
 
 In no mythic poetry are we lifted up to a higher region 
 of imagination than we are in the Yedas. It might seem 
 as if such flights were too airy and unreal to have been 
 made by genuine belief ; and they would be so, perhaps, 
 were it not that they start from the firm ground of a more 
 primitive creed, to which the new beliefs are still partly 
 tied. If a visible thing is no longer worshipped in them, 
 still the divine being is so near the thing the phenomenon 
 in all his ways, that the certainty which attaches to 
 what the eye can actually see and the ear detect becomes 
 his by inheritance. The worshipper was himself scarcely 
 
 R. V. vii. 63. 2 Cf. x. 177. 
 
138 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 yet conscious of the distinction to be made between Indra 
 and the storm, Ushas and the dawn, Suryas and the disk 
 of the sun. 
 
 But it is harder still for us to understand such a state 
 of belief than it was for men of that time to create it, 
 seeing how much we have lost in these latter years all our 
 sense of the mystery and wonder of nature. Fetichisru 
 appears to us but senseless magic when we cannot make 
 the effort of imagination required to understand how the 
 lifeless things which it chose for its gods were once not 
 lifeless at all. The nature worship which followed fetich- 
 ism will seem still more extravagant until we realise some 
 part of the awe and splendour which were associated with 
 natural phenomena, and which, by a necessary reaction, 
 give to these vague appearances a character and being. 
 
 Turning now from the strictly religious side of Yedism, 
 and from the beings who best represent that, we come 
 first to two who stand next in majesty to Indra and Agni, 
 and next to them receive the greatest meed of praise in 
 the hymns. We want all the aid which imagination can 
 lend us to understand fully the characters of Mitra and 
 Yanma. 
 
 These gods are sometimes invoked separately, but far 
 more often together, combined, in fact, into one being, 
 Mitra- Yairma. When thus combined they become quite 
 different beings from what they are when single, and it is 
 in this combination that the peculiar refinement and diffi- 
 culty in the conception of Mitra and Yaruwa has to be 
 brought out. 
 
 Yariwa is properly the sky, meaning, as this word does, 
 the coverer, the concealer, and becoming, as it becomes 
 in Greek, ovpavos. Yanma is not, however, the same as 
 Dyaus, the bright heaven ; it is rather the sky of night, 
 and as such the god Yaruwa should be thought of when 
 he stands alone. By himself, again, Mitra seems to be the 
 sun ; such a nature is implied in the root of the name 
 mid, 'to grow warm' and also in an epithet which be- 
 
VAK1LZVA AND MITRA. 139 
 
 longs peculiarly to him, ' the friend ; ' for the sun god in 
 all Aryan creeds is, in an especial sense, the friend of 
 man. 1 Mitra, moreover, has his counterpart in another 
 Aryan system, namely, in the Iranian. Mithras of the 
 Persians was, to all seeming, a solar deity. But then, as 
 the sun is so often called the eye of Mitra and Varuwa, 2 
 it is clear that when the two are joined Mitra cannot any 
 longer be the sun. Now in the Norse mythology the sun 
 is the eye of Odhinn, but in this case Odhinn is the heaven. 
 We are justified, then, in saying that, joined together, 
 Mitra and Vanma likewise express some aspect of the 
 heaven. They cannot be absolutely the same thing ; they 
 are, then, two heavens, the bright and warm and the dark 
 and concealing. 
 
 Let us note, again, that Mitra and Varuna are in a 
 special sense the sons of Aditi, ' the boundless,' the limit- 
 less vista of clouds which we see at sunrise. There is a 
 third Aditya associated with these two Aryaman. He 
 has no existence by himself, and seems to be brought in 
 for the sake of making up an orthodox trilogy, 3 
 
 In their fullest and most transcendental sense, then, 
 Mitra and Varuna, the day and night sky, may be taken 
 for personifications of day and night. When combined 
 into one being, Mitra- Varuna, they are the image of the 
 union of day and night that is to say, of the morning. 
 But the presentation of the ideas of morning and evening 
 the two are generally coupled together to the mind 
 are very various, and these take in mythology many dif- 
 ferent shapes. 
 
 1 In the Vedic creed, however, we must say that the sun god is this 
 next after Agni. 
 
 2 R. V. i. 50, 6 ; 115, 1 and 5 ; vii. 63, 1 ; x. 37, 1. Sometimes of Mitra, 
 Varuna, and Agni, i. 115, 1. 
 
 3 We may compare these three with the curious trilogy who are intro- 
 duced at the opening of the Younger Edda namely, Har, ' the high ; ' Jaf n- 
 har, ' the equally high ; ' and ThriSi, ' the third.' A being called Thrifti could 
 never have a separate existence apart from the other two. His very name 
 shows why he was invented. In like manner Mitra and Varuna are 
 evidently an equal pair, and Aryaman is Thridi, the third. 
 
140 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer, noticing a dispute between two 
 learned philologists Max Miiller and Adelbert Kuhn. 
 concerning the nature of the Vedic Sarama (which the one 
 authority claims as the dawn", and the other as the wind), 
 remarks upon the improbability of so unreal a phenomenon 
 as the dawn being made into a god. He has his own 
 explanation of the worship of the dawn, and although that 
 is a thousandfold harder to maintain in face of the facts 
 of mythology, we may admit the force of the objections to 
 another's theory. The truth, as I fancy, is that the original 
 god or goddess is not the dawn, but rather the wind of 
 morning which ushers in the light, and which, blowing 
 upon the face of the sleeper and awakening him so, may 
 well seem the real messenger of day. In some places 
 these morning breezes are very regular, and not less con- 
 stant are those which accompany the sunset. Curtius, in 
 the opening chapter of his e History of Greece,' gives a 
 beautiful picture of the regularity of the winds which 
 govern the .ZEgsean. Every morning a breeze arises from 
 the coasts of Thrace and blows all day southward; at 
 evening it goes down, and for awhile the sea is calm. 
 Then almost imperceptibly a gentle wind arises from the 
 south. We need not wonder if in early times the ideas 
 of morn and even are merged in the notions of the wind 
 at sunrise and sun-setting, and that they only after awhile 
 became abstracted. Therefore Sarama may be the wind 
 and yet the dawn. 
 
 There may be more or less of idealism, less or more of 
 simple sensation, intermingled in the conceptions of the 
 dawn and of the sunset. The most material sense is that 
 of the winds of morning and evening. These in the 
 simplest form Mitra . and Varurza are not. But that in a 
 more general way Mitra and Varuna represent the horizons 
 of morning and evening, or the morning and evening them- 
 selves, I do not doubt. 
 
 Here is one indication. Mitra and Vanma are to be 
 worshipped morning, noon, and evening ; and Aryaman is 
 
MOEN AND EVENING. 141 
 
 but the ' third,' the supplement of their being ; so we may 
 say that Mitra, Varima, and Aryaman are to be worshipped 
 morning, noon, and evening. Aryaman would thus cor- 
 respond to the midday, Mitra and Varu?ia to the morning 
 and evening. Again and this is a stronger indication of 
 the natures of Mitra and Varuna Agni, says the Athar- 
 vaveda, in the morning is Mitra, in the evening (or at night) 
 is Varwia. Now Agni, as we have seen, is always present 
 in the clouds of sunrise and sunset : therefore to say that 
 in the morning he is Mitra, is to say that the red of dawn 
 is Mitra ; that he is Variwa in the evening means that 
 the red of evening is Varwia. There being two reds, two 
 meeting-places of the day and the night skies accounts 
 for the combination of Mitra and Varuwa into one Mitra- 
 Varuw-a. 
 
 I know that this attempt to fix for a moment the 
 shifting vane of popular belief cannot but create confusion 
 in the mind of the reader. The weathercock cannot be 
 held steady. But though it is always turning it never 
 shifts far from the normal point. I have but sought to 
 register each of these, rapid changes. Let us now free 
 our thoughts from this analysis. We have to picture 
 Varuraa and Mitra as a mighty Pair not, as I have said, 
 human and yet not pure phenomenal whose presence is 
 felt about the time when the division of the ' two worlds,' 
 the sky and earth, first becomes visible. This is all the 
 singer knows. He himself does not analyse and register 
 his thought. At the dim hour of twilight, before the sun 
 appears, he is aware of a mighty presence. In the 
 morning, so he tells us, when the sun's horses are being 
 unloosed, and while the thousand lights of the night 
 heaven are still to be seen, he catches sight of the princely 
 pair, the noblest of beings. 1 ( Heaven nor day, nor 
 streams nor spirits, have not attained your godhead, your 
 greatness. 3 2 
 
 1 Bead, for example, E. V. v. 62. 
 
 a Or, more literally, 'wealth'- (R. V. i. 151, 9). 
 
142 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 For Mitra and Varutta, then, the singer the chorus 
 of singers and of priests stands watching before the 
 day break. Ere the actual Dawn herself, the goddess 
 Ushas, opens all her treasures, or, the sun appears, these 
 mystic Twain will approach, going together side by side 
 through heaven ; l ' possessors of three realms of air,' 
 ' lords of the dew.' 2 They are coming ; and now we hear 
 the chorus rising in the still twilight. 3 
 
 If at thy rising, sun, thou shalt discover 
 Us blameless to the twain Varuwa, Mitra, 
 Then, Aditi, we singers stand in favour 
 With all the gods, and with thee, Aryaman. 
 
 Now fco the twofold world, Varuwa, Mitra, 
 
 Rises the sun god, gazing upon men, 
 
 Guardian of those who stay and those who wander, 
 
 Guardian of right and wrong among mankind. 
 
 From his high seat seven steeds with rein he governs, 
 Who bright anointed 4 him, the Light God bear. 
 Unto your throne, both loving, he approaches, 
 Summoning all things as his sheep the shepherd. 
 
 Up now have climbed your mead-besprinkled horses : 
 The sun god mounted up the flood of light. 
 The three Adityas made smooth his journey,' 
 Varuwa, Mitra, Aryaman, in concert. 
 
 For these are the avengers of much evil, 
 Varuwa, Mitra, Aryaman, together. 
 And in the house they cherish holy laws, 
 The faithful sons of Aditi, and strong. 
 
 1 R. V. i. 136, 3.' 2 R. V. v. 69; ii. 41, 6. 
 
 3 R. V. vii. 60. The meaning of the first verse is somewhat obscured 
 by the fact of its containing three vocatives, in the desire of the poet to 
 include many divinities within one canticle. The first line is addressed 
 to the sun by anticipation, for he has not yet risen. The third speaks to 
 Aditi or to the Adityas, Varuwa and Mitra. Line four includes Aryaman 
 in the address. 
 
 4 Literally butter dripping.' 
 
HYMX TO VARILYA AND MITRA. 143 
 
 These are not to deceive, Varmia, Mitra. 
 The fool also shall they correct in wisdom ; 
 Good heart and knowledge giving to the righteous 
 Upon his way, and from 'oppression freeing. 
 
 As lively watchers of the heaven and earth, 
 As wise ones bear they safe the erring mortal. 
 (In every river is there not some ford ?) 
 And they can hold ns up in our affliction. 
 
 A sure, well-guarded shelter to the Sudas 
 
 Give Aditi and Mitra and Varmza, 
 
 Guarding their children, and their children's children. 
 
 Keep far from us thy wrath divine, Strong One. 
 
 The sun is but the eye of Mitra and Varu/ia ; and yet 
 they, like the sun, move for^ever upon fixed paths; they 
 will have their way made straight through heaven. 1 
 Wherefore, seeing that right is but straight, they who 
 move upon a straight road as Mitra and Varuna do, or as 
 Surya, the sun god, does, are likewise the lovers of justice 
 and of fixed law. * The lords of right and brightness,' 2 
 one poet calls Mitra and Yaruna ; and in the first 
 character, the lovers of right, they are perpetually ad- 
 dressed. They are pure from birth. 3 Moreover, they watch 
 over man, and they are, as the hymn just quoted. says, 
 guardians of right and wrong (of the laws of right and 
 wrong) among mankind. They come as spies into the 
 house 4 a beautiful image for the soft stealing morning 
 light- --and of man's home they are, like Agni, the 
 guardians. 5 
 
 The character of being messengers to man and his 
 friends belongs to the two Adityas in the next degree to 
 Agni; but of the two it belongs rather to Mitra than to 
 Vanwa. 
 
 There are not, it has been said, many hymns addressed 
 to Mitra alone. But here is one in which his righteous- 
 
 1 Cf. R. V. i. 136 2 i. 23, 5. i. 23. 
 
 4 ii. 67, 5. 6 vii. 61, 3. 
 
144 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 ness and yet friendliness are expressed with, great sweet- 
 ness : l 
 
 To man comes Mitra down in friendly converse. 
 Mitra it was who fixed the earth and heaven. 
 Unslumbering mankind he watches over. 
 To Mitra, then, your full libations pour. 
 
 Oh, may the man for ever more be blessed 
 Who thee, Aditya, serves by ancient law ; 
 Sheltered by thee, no death him touch, no sadness, 
 No power oppress him, neither near nor far. 
 
 Prom sickness free, rejoicing in our strength 
 And our stout limbs upon the round of earth ; 
 The ordinance of Aditya duly following : 
 So stand we ever in the guard of Mitra. 
 
 Most dear is our Mitra, high in heaven, 
 Born for our gracious king, and widely ruling. 
 Oh, stand we ever in his holy favour, 
 - Enjoying high and blessed happiness ! 
 
 Yea, great is Mitra, humbly to be worshipped, 
 To man descending, to his singer gracious. 
 Then let us pour to him, the high Aditya, 
 Upon the flame a faithful offering. 
 
 Sometimes instead of Mitra, Varrwa, and Aryaman we 
 have Agni associated with the first two and instead of the 
 last. Suryas, the sun, for example, is called the eye of 
 Mitra, Varima, and Agni. 2 And these three form an 
 appropriate trilogy in the second rank of worship after 
 Indra. For, putting aside that great god who, sometimes 
 at any rate, appears an absolutely supreme ruler, as much, 
 above all others as Zeus was superior to the rest of the 
 Olympians, putting aside Indra, Agni, Mitra, and Varuwa 
 are the most godlike of all the beings of the Indian 
 pantheon. They are, therefore, we may suppose, the most 
 nearly separate from the region of phenomena, the most 
 idealised of all the divine phenomena. 
 
 1 iii. 59, 7. 2 i. 116, 1. 
 
THE ASVIff. 145 
 
 For an example of the difference between Mitra and 
 Vartma, as we see them in the hymns and that which 
 they would have appeared had they been nothing more 
 than the winds of morning in their physical sense, 
 we may compare the two Adityas with the two Asvin. 
 These last two were the Dioscuri of Indian mythology. 
 By name they were simply the horsemen, or rather 
 the charioteers no actual riding on horseback, as in the 
 later example of the Greek twin brethren, being imagined 
 in their case. 1 As they were specially noted for the 
 swiftness of their flight, they must, one would suppose, 
 have been embodiments of winds. I have, in fact, no 
 doubt that they were simply the morning and evening 
 breezes, and essentially the same as the Sarameyas, the 
 sons of Sarama, the dawn. They were, too, essentially 
 the same as Mitra and Varuwa (as morning and evening), 
 only that the latter were much more complex in nature 
 and much more idealised. 
 
 A third representation of the dawn is the maiden 
 Ushas, the sister of the Asvin, whom they carry away in 
 their swift chariots when the sun pursues her. We see 
 that the Yedic mythopcoist is never weary of personifying 
 this particular part of celestial nature. It accords with 
 this peculiarity of his creed that the dawn is almost 
 always the hour of his worship. The hymns sung at mid- 
 day or at sunset are very few compared with those which 
 usher in the day. Though it were perhaps ' to consider 
 too curiously ' should one attempt to give to each of these 
 various personifications of the dawn a distinct phenomenal 
 existence, yet for the sake of presenting them more clearly 
 before the imagination, so that each may play his part 
 
 1 They belong to a time when horsemanship, in the modern sense, was 
 not yet known. We find, that the word ahw, a horse, comes, from its con- 
 nection with the chariot of the sun (drawn by seven horses, the Harits- 
 Charites), to signify the number seven. This is as much as to say that to 
 the Vedic Indian the word ' horse ' naturally suggested the sun god. Where- 
 fore we cannot doubt that the Asvin had originally drawn the car of the 
 sun god. Before Suryas had seven horses he probably possessed two only 
 
 L 
 
146 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 in the Indian's mythic day, I will dispose them thus : 
 The first white streak of light which showed the Indian 
 the separation between earth and sky opened before the 
 eye of fancy the illimitable space which seemed to stretch 
 beyond that break. This, which is what is called the 
 white dawn alba, aube was the entry of Mitra and 
 Varima, the revelation of the 'boundless' Adityas. It 
 was through a twilight air, a windless twilight morning 
 air, that the song we heard but now broke upon our ears. 
 Anon springs up the breeze, or" the twin winds (one, yet 
 double, because they are of night as well as of morning), 
 the Asvin, driving rapidly through the quickly lightening 
 space ; and after them comes their sister the Eed Dawn, 
 Aurora, allied to Aura, the breeze, but not identical there- 
 with. She is Ushas. Close behind her, in loving chase, 
 comes Suryas, the sun. 
 
 But let us leave this rapid catalogue of the morning 
 sights and follow at a slower pace the course of the 
 mythic day as its events are told us in the hymns. Let us 
 go back to our chorus* of priests, still waiting till the sun 
 shall rise. Yaruna and Mitra appear chiefly to the eye of 
 faith ; but other, lesser things are more real. These lesser 
 beings of the pantheon are, compared with the great 
 gods, like to heroes or demi-gods and goddesses. Even 
 the sun (Surya) we are compelled to place generally in 
 this category. First comes Ushas, the Dawn, opening the 
 dark gates of night. She brings forth her car and oxen 
 to run her course. With lovely dress she clothes herself, 
 like a dancer, and unbears her bosom to the sun god. 
 'Making light for all the world, Ushas has opened the 
 darkness as a cow her stall.' And once again uprises the 
 priestly chorus with its Muezzin call to prayer : * 
 
 Dawn, full of wisdom, rich in everything, 
 
 Fairest, attend the singers' song of praise. 
 
 Oh ! thou rich goddess, old, yet ever young, 
 
 Thou, all-dispenser, in due order comest ! 
 1 iii. 61. 
 
THE MYTHIC DAY. 147 
 
 Shine forth, O goddess, thine eternal morning, 
 With thy bright cars onr song of praise awakening. 
 Thee draw through heaven the well-yoked team of horses, 
 The horses golden bright, that shine afar. 
 
 Enlightener of all being, breath of morning, 
 Thou holdest up aloft the light of gods. 
 Unto one goal ever thy course pursuing, 
 Oh, roll towards us now thy wheel again ! 
 
 Opening at once her girdle, she appears, 
 The lovely Dawn, the ruler of the stalls. 
 She, light-producing, wonder-working, noble, 
 Up mounted from the coast of earth and heaven. 
 
 Up, up, and bring to meet the Dawn, the goddess, 
 Bright beaming now, your humble song of praise. 
 To heaven climbed up her ray, the sweet dew bearing ; 
 Joying to shine, the airy space it filled. 
 
 With beams of heaven the Pure One was awakened ; 
 The Rich One's ray mounted through both the worlds. 
 To IJshas goest thon, Agiii, with a prayer 
 For goodly wealth, when she bright shining comes. 
 
 Unspeakably beautiful as poeins are all these dawn 
 hymns, but not, like those addressed to the greater gods, 
 full of awe and worship. The singer has passed out of 
 that region, when he compares Ushas to a dancer, and tells 
 of her unbaring her bosom like the udder of the cow. 
 Nothing is there either, we observe, in the above hymn 
 of a strongly moral cast no more mention of righteous- 
 ness and the guardians of the law. The blessings which 
 daylight brings are not of this sort. Daylight is the all- 
 dispenser, because, in making seen what was before hid, 
 she seems to give it to us once again. But she is not in 
 any other sense the creator or governor of the world. 
 
 Next after Ushas comes the sun god, Surya, himself. 
 
 Arise before us, Surya, again ; 
 
 As sounds our song, come with thy coursers swift. 1 
 
 1 vii. 62, 2. 
 i, 2 
 
148 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 He comes for all men alike the ' just and the unjust,' as 
 the Bible has it dragging his wheel ; J the eye of Mitra 
 and Vartma ; he who rolls up the darkness like a garment : 
 he throws off his garment, his dark cloak. 2 e Thou risest for 
 the race of gods ; thou risest for the human race, risest for 
 all, thy light to show.' 3 The stars steal away like thieves 
 before the all-seeing god of day. He, like Agni and Mitra, 
 looks friendly down upon the world and the ways of men; 
 he sends the rays, his messengers, to earth. He is a 
 warrior, and comes waving his banner ; 4 he is a charioteer, 
 and drives seven mares the harits, or the charites of 
 Greek mythology. Sometimes his flight is winged by the 
 wind ; 5 and sometimes he, with the Wind (Yayu) and with 
 A.gni, forms another trilogy in the Yedic pantheon. 
 
 From heaven shall Savitar protect us, 
 And from the air the Wind, 
 And Agni from the earth. 
 
 O Savifcar, thy fiery ray 
 
 Is dearer than a hundred gifts. 
 
 Protect us from .the lightning crash. 
 
 God Savitar, thy bright glance send ; 
 And oh, thou Wind, do thou too send ; 
 And, Forger, 6 bright beams forge for us. 7 
 
 But that the sun god cannot, more than Asrni, escape 
 the consequences of his actual nature, and therefore can- 
 not conform to the law of mortals, we also see. Agni 
 devours his father and mother. Surya is the child of the 
 Dawn ; and yet he pursues her as a lover, and at the last, 
 just before the day ends, he weds her. This marriage 
 can only take place at the last hour of the day ; it is the 
 signal of the sun's own death. Here is the dark story of 
 crime which wrought the doom of Thebes : it is the 
 
 1 vii. 63. 
 
 2 iv. 13, 4, where the sun is addressed under the name of Savitar. 
 8 i. 50, 5. iv. 13, 2. 5 x. 170. 
 
 6 Agni as Tvashtar, the forger. 7 x. 158. 
 
NIV] 
 
 THE MYTHIC DAY. 
 
 marriage of (Edipus and locaste. Here it is shadowed 
 forth in the pure poetry of natural mythology ; afterwards 
 it was crystallised into a legend. 
 
 We might stay for ever at this sunrise, unravelling 
 the myths which cling about this most human of the 
 gods. But time will nob stay ; the day presses onwards, 
 and each stage brings with it some new event. We saw, 
 in the language of a Vedic poet, 
 
 The watcher, him who never tires, 
 Who wanders up and down upon his path, 
 Veiling himself in things alike and unlike, 
 Who goeth here and there about the world. 
 
 And now we must let him pass on his way and note what 
 follows. 
 
 The breezes, which were gentle in the morning, and for 
 that reason were feigned to be the sons of Prishni, the 
 dew, 1 strengthen as the day grows older ; they overcloud 
 the sky, and the storm approaches. This is the coming 
 of Indra in his might. The calm of morning is forgotten ; 
 the battle of midday begins. Midday is the time of 
 labour and duty, and to the fiercer Aryas the word duty 
 meant war. It is for this great contest that Indra has 
 long been arming himself. The hundred citadels of $am- 
 baras, where the giant has hid the rains which were 
 meant to water the earth, are now seen towering in the 
 sky, peak above peak, battlement over battlement. 
 Against these Indra sallies forth to fight, but he does not 
 go alone. The sons of Prishni, who are the winds or the 
 storms, have been preparing themselves likewise. At 
 first they were things of nought ; now they are mighty 
 heroes armed with the flash and the thunder. 'They 
 spring up of their own strength ; they are dight in golden 
 armour ; their spears send forth sparks of fire.' 2 These 
 
 ' Prokris. 2 ii. 34 ; vi. 66, &c. 
 
150 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 are the ' unapproachable host ' of Marats, 1 who wander 
 through the paths of air in their swift cars ; sometimes 
 they come so near the earth that men hear the crack of 
 their driving whips. 2 
 
 Where is the fair assemblage of heroes, 
 
 The sons of Rudra, 3 with their bright horses ? 
 
 For of their birth knoweth no man other, 
 
 Only themselves their wondrous 4 descent. 
 
 The light they flash upon one another ; 
 
 The eagles fought, the winds were raging; 
 
 But this secret knoweth the wise man. 
 
 Once that Prishni her udder gave them. 8 
 
 Our race of heroes, through the Maruts be it 
 
 Ever victorious in reaping of men. 
 
 On their way they hasten, in brightness the brightest, 
 
 Equal in beauty, unequalled in might. 6 
 
 One hymn of the Eig Yeda seems to be adapted to this 
 storm hour of the day, and to describe the very moment 
 when Indra comes forth to battle, and there is joined by 
 his comrades. This hymn has been translated by Prof. 
 Max Miiller, and of his translation I avail myself. 7 
 
 First speaks the sacrificing priest : 
 
 With what splendour are the Maruts all equally endowed, 
 they who are of the same age and dwell in the same house ! 
 With what thoughts ! From whence are they come ? 
 
 1 The Maruts are probably connected etymologically with Mars (cf. 
 Z. /. v. Sp. v. 387, &c. ; xvi. 162). 2 v. 63, 5. 
 
 s Rudra is also a storm god. His name means the flash ; that of the 
 Maruts the storm. 4 Unique. 
 
 5 Prishni being here and in many other places imaged as a cow. 
 
 8 vii. 56. This poem has quite an Eddaic ring ; it is curious, therefore, 
 to find that the truest counterparts of the Vedic Maruts are to be sought 
 in the Valkyriur of the North (see Ch. VII.") The hymns addressed to the 
 Maruts, which occur in the first book of the Rig Veda, have been completely 
 and admirably translated by Professor Max Miiller. I forbear, then, from 
 giving more than one example of these, beautiful as they are, and content 
 myself with referring the reader to Professor Muller's translation. 
 
 7 The hymn is from K. V. i. 165. 
 
THE MYTHIC DAY. 151 
 
 THE MARUTS SPEAK. 
 
 From whence, Indra, dost thou come alone, thou. who 
 art mighty ? lord of men, what has thus happened unto 
 thee ? Thou greetest (us) when thou comest together with (us) 
 the bright (Maruts). Tell us, then, thou with thy bay horses, 
 what thou hast against us. 
 
 INDRA SPEAKS. 
 
 The sacred songs are mine, (mine are) the prayers ; sweet 
 are the libations ! My strength rises ; my thunderbolt is hurled 
 forth. They call for me ; the prayers yearn for me. Here are 
 my horses ; they carry me towards them. 
 
 THE MARUTS. 
 
 Therefore in company with our strong friends, having 
 adorned our bodies, we now harness our fallow deer with all our 
 might; for, Indra, according to thy custom, thou hast been with us. 
 
 INDRA. 
 
 Where, Maruts, was that custom of yours, that you should 
 join me, who am alone in the killing of Ahi ? I, indeed, am. 
 terrible, strong, powerful. I escaped from the blows of every 
 enemy. 
 
 THE MARUTS. 
 
 Thou hast achieved much with us as companions. With 
 the same valour, O hero, let us achieve, then, many things ! O 
 thou most powerful ! Indra ! whatever we, Maruts, wish 
 with our heart. 
 
 INDRA. 
 
 I slew Yritra, Maruts, with (Indra's) might, having grown 
 strong through mine own vigour ; I, who hold the thunderbolt in 
 my arms, I have made these all-brilliant waters to flow freely for 
 man. 
 
 THE MARUTS. 
 
 Nothing, powerful lord, is strong before thee ; no one is 
 known among the gods like unto thee. No one who is now born 
 will come near, no one who has been born. Do what has to be 
 done, thou who hast grown so strong. 
 
152 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 INDRA. 
 
 Almighty power be mine aloiie, whatever I may do, daring 
 in my heart ; for I indeed, Maruts, am known as terrible ; of 
 all that I threw down I, Indra, am the lord. 
 
 Maruts, now your praise has pleased me, the glorious 
 hymn which ye have made for me, ye men ! for me, for Indra, 
 for the powerful hero, as friends for a friend, for your own sake 
 and by your own efforts. 
 
 Truly, there they are, shining towards me, assuming blame- 
 less glory, assuming vigour. Marnts, wherever I have looked 
 for you, you have appeared to me in bright splendour. Appear to 
 me also now. 
 
 THE SACRIFICER SPEAKS, AND so ENDS. 
 
 Who has magnified you here, Marnts ? Come hither, 
 friends ! towards your friends. Ye brilliant Maruts, cherish 
 these prayers, and be mindful of these my rites 
 
 We see from this that the Maruts have no very dis- 
 tinct existence or purpose alone ; and, indeed, their 
 appearing always in the plural number would be enough 
 to show us that they are regarded rather as heroes than 
 as gods. It is very possible they were often confounded 
 with the dead ancestors. 1 Wherefore their coming to the 
 fight must be taken as prototypical of the coming of the 
 Greek heroes to the great fields of battle to Marathon, 
 for example, and to Platsea. It is interesting to see in 
 the Greek legends that the Dioscuri are often associated 
 with the heroes and dead ancestors ; for the Dioscuri are 
 the same witb the Asvin, and therefore, as the winds of 
 morning and evening, are the proper companions for the 
 storm gods. The Maruts are all equal : none is before or 
 after another ; none is greater or less than another ; ' of 
 the same age, dwelling in the same bouse, endowed witb 
 equal splendour. 5 2 Their proper sphere is the midday ; 
 sometimes, though, they come awakening the night. Tbey 
 slay the elephant, the buffalo, the lion ; they are unerring 
 marksmen; they draw milk from heaven's udder; they 
 1 Gubernatis, Lettwre, &c., p. 150. 2 i. 166. 
 
THE MYTHIC DAY. 153 
 
 milk the thunder cloud. 1 * To whom go ye, ye shakers, 
 and by what art, along these airy paths ? Strong must 
 your weapons be, and mighty ye yourselves, not like the 
 might of wretched mortals.' 2 
 
 And so they play their part. The last scene shifts to 
 day's ending, when the sun god is again prayed to ere he 
 leaves the earth, for he is going to that other world, his 
 nightly home, where he will meet the dead fathers (pitris) 
 of the tribe. Savitar is especially the evening sun. He 
 unyokes the steeds who have borne him along his tedious 
 path ; he calls the wanderer to rest from his journey, the 
 housewife from her web, and all men from their labour ; 
 he watches all things ever dim, and dimmer and a glory 
 done. And now, in a more subdued note, the singer pays 
 his final vows to this god, and commits himself and all 
 that he holds dear into his care. 
 
 Savitar, the god, arose, in power arose, 
 His quick deeds and his jonrney to renew. 
 He 'tis who to all gods dispenses treasure, 
 And blesses those who call him to the feast. 
 
 The god stands up, and stretches forth his arm, 
 Raises his hand, and all obedient wait ; 
 For all the waters to his service bend, 
 And the winds even on his path are stilled. 
 
 Now he unyokes the horses who have borne him ; 
 The wanderer from his travel now he frees ; 
 The Serpent-slayer's 3 fury now is stayed ; 
 At Savitar's command come night and peace. 
 
 And now rolls up the spinning wife her web ; 
 The labourer in the field his labour leaves ; 
 
 And to the household folk beneath the roof 
 The household fire imparts their share of light. 
 
 1 i. 64, 8. 2 E. V. i. 39. 
 
 8 India's 1 I have, to avoid monotony, taken some slight liberties with 
 the voices of the verbs in this poem. 
 
154 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 He who to work went forth is now returned ; 
 The longing of all wanderers turns toward home ; 
 Leaving his toil, goes each man to his house : 
 The universal mover orders so. 
 
 In the water settedst thou the water's heir, 1 
 On the firm earth badst the wild beast to roam, 
 And in the wood the fowl. Nothing, god, 
 Great Savitar, thy will dares violate. 
 
 And, as he can, each fish in the womb of water 
 (Who restless flits about) seeks now his rest ; 
 The bird 2 makes for his nest, cattle for their stall : 
 To their own home all beasts the sun god sends. 
 
 'Tis he whose ordinance none dare slight ; not Indra, 
 
 Rudra, Yaruwa, Mitra, Aryaman, 
 
 Nor evil spirits even. Savitar, 
 
 On him, on him, with humble heart I call. 
 
 > The fish. 2 Lit. ' the egg's son.' 
 
MANYSIDEDNESS OF GKEEK BELIEF. 155 
 
 CHAPTEE TV 
 
 ZEUS, APOLLO, ATHENA. 
 
 At yap, Zsv TS irdrsp KOI 'AOrjvalrj teal " 
 
 WOULD that it were more easy to draw out of the bright 
 and varied fabric of Greek religious thought those threads 
 which form the main substance of the tissue ; those deep 
 and essential beliefs over which the rest of the religion 
 and mythology of Hellas is but a woven pattern. But 
 for many reasons this is very hard to do. First, because 
 Gieece or Hellas can scarcely be looked upon as the 
 country of a single people, while it holds such a variety of 
 national sentiment, and shows as many instances of 
 national discord as of unity. And secondly, because the 
 shifting and subtle fancy of the people afforded a very 
 unstable foundation for the building up of any creed ; so 
 that what was believed among them one day might very 
 likely be laughed at the next. Just by reason of this same 
 subtlety and swiftness of thought, Greek religion, at the 
 time of our first contact with it, has already passed 
 through its earlier stages, and polytheism is seen no 
 longer in a condition of growth, but of decay. Homer 
 and the writers of the Homeric cycle alone show in the 
 formation of their mythology anything approaching to 
 a direct contact with nature. They crystallise belief, and 
 the later poets draw from them ; yet even with Homer 
 the age of creation has ceased, the age of criticism and 
 scepticism has begun. At any rate the gods have strayed 
 far away from the region to which by nature they belong. 
 They have become anthropomorphised : imagination is 
 occupied in following their lives and deeds as it would the 
 
156 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 lives of mortals. Fancy and the dramatic and creative 
 faculties have as much to do with them as has genuine be- 
 lief; there is no longer a warranty that the character and 
 actions of these gods will follow the simple lines of fact. 
 
 Once, when a god was truly a nature god, and when 
 the phenomena of nature were all truly divine, the light- 
 ning and the hail, the frost and the dew, the wind and all 
 the waves of the sea, were alike strange and mystic ; and 
 the alternations of these things were chronicled with 
 reverent awe. Ifc was inconceivable then that man should 
 set himself to invent stories of their doings, because all 
 invention must fall infinitely short of the wonder of truth. 
 In Homer we discover that much of this feeling has 
 already died away. The thunderer is still the thunderer, 
 but he is also a quarrelsome husband, a tyrannous and 
 capricious king. Hera, his feminine counterpart, is queen 
 of heaven ; but she is also the very type of a shrewish 
 wife. It follows that in spite nay, in part because of the 
 wondrous richness and variety of Greek religious myths, 
 it is not in these that the character of nature worship can 
 be most effectually studied; wherefore, perhaps, the con- 
 stant battle which rages round the interpretation of Greek 
 mythology. The Teutonic myths are simpler and far more 
 meagre ; but they show us, more clearly than the Greek 
 do, the history of their growth. The Vedic hymns, though 
 they tell us no tales, are more deeply imbued than the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey are with a conviction of the reality 
 of all they describe, and the gods themselves are nearer to 
 nature. Let it be, then, with an eye often directed to 
 these neighbour systems to the Teutonic and Celtic 
 beliefs upon the one side, and upon the other to those dis- 
 cernible in the Yedas that the student set himself to 
 the task of unravelling the intricacies of Greek mythology. 
 
 The comparative method we require is something 
 much deeper than the comparison of mere words and 
 phrases. The more we look into the history of Aryan 
 creeds, the more are we struck by the recurrence in them 
 
ZEUS, APOLLO, AND ATHENE. 157 
 
 of certain fixed sentiments or forms of belief, which 
 express themselves through different personalities in the 
 different system?. And we soon come to see that thought 
 has in these cases been governed by laws scarcely less 
 rigid than those which have determined it in the formation 
 of language. It is probable too that, as in the case of 
 language so in the case of mythology, a great number of 
 the laws of development are confined to the special race 
 with which we are dealing, and have been different among 
 Semitic people, different again among Mongols or Negroes. 
 Unless we can fathom the deeper sources of religious 
 thought in Hellas, we can never understand her mytho- 
 logy, which is but a stream flowing from those deep 
 fountains ; we must first find out where lay the real 
 belief that is to say, the germ of genuine emotion then 
 we shall be able to understand of what nature was the 
 Aberglaube which imagination and poetry fostered from 
 that seed. Now, so far as the later and historic Greece is 
 concerned, I have no doubt that the invocation quoted a 
 moment ago 
 
 Would Father Zens, and Athene, and Apollo 
 
 occurring so frequently in Homer, 1 really gives an answer 
 to our first enquiry, and that the trilogy or trinity, thus 
 specially united, represents the highest attainment of 
 Hellas in the idealism of belief. And if we imagine a 
 Greek, in the solitude of his chamber, or in the more 
 moving solitude of woods and meadows, stirred with 
 some sudden strong religious impulse, we may guess that 
 the image of one of these three greater divinities, the 
 image of Zeus, of Apollo, or of Athene, would be likely to 
 rise before his mental sight. These three deities, there- 
 fore, are they who have in the end given the tone to 
 Greek thought on religious matters, and to their natures 
 those of the other divinities have insensibly been obliged 
 
 1 II. ii. 371 ; iv. 288 ; vii. 132 ; xvi. 97. Od. iv. 341 ; vii. 311 ; xviii. 
 235 j xxiv. 376. 
 
158 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 to conform themselves. And though, we have special 
 divinities locally honoured, and in particular places held 
 to be supreme, as Hera at Argos, Aphrodite in Cyprus, 
 Hermes in Arcadia, Dionysus in Thrace ; such local wor- 
 ship must not be taken as evidence against the universal, 
 the pan-Hellenic character of the other. Because in the 
 Middle Ages at Tours St. Martin was more often invoked 
 than Christ or the Father, and at Cologne the Three Kings, 
 St. Remigius at Rheims, St. Ambrose at Milan at each 
 place, that is to say, its special patron saint it does not 
 argue that any of those who practised these special forms 
 of worship supposed that in the governance of the world 
 at large the saints were more powerful than the Trinity. 
 No more must we suppose that, though the rivalry of the 
 Greek cities led to the upholding of each city's patron in 
 opposition to some other god, the Greeks had not like- 
 wise their points of religious unity, or that there were no 
 personalities specially selected for contemplation in that 
 universal sense, who must of necessity have been the chief 
 gods of Hellas. 
 
 In the Greek images of the gods there is often so little 
 individuality that, if we took away some external attributes 
 or symbols which accompany the figures, and which are 
 no more than a kind of labels to them, we might be in 
 danger of confounding one divinity with another ; of mis- 
 taking Athene for Hera, Hermes for Apollo, Poseidon or 
 Hades for Zeus. In the case of the Panathenaic Frieze, 
 for instance, that sculptured procession which once 
 adorned the second wall of the Parthenon, we do really 
 find ourselves in such a dilemma. In the centre of the 
 composition is a group of persons, whom, by their size, 
 above the mortal stature, we know to be intended for gods, 
 but for what particular ones among the Olympians it is 
 still a matter of dispute. In the case of one or two we 
 are able to fall back upon the helping symbol as the 
 shoes and petasos of Hermes; the aegis of Athene; the 
 wings of Eros but we shall never get beyond a probable 
 
KEPKESENTATION IN AET. 159 
 
 conjecture for the greater number. The difficulty does 
 not arise solely nor even chiefly from the disfigurement of 
 the faces in this case. Some of them, at all events, are 
 well preserved ; yet we cannot say that these are dis- 
 tinguishable by the countenance alone. Poseidon, for all 
 the character which he displays, might as well be /eus. 1 
 
 I do not say that in general the antiquarian is left 
 quite at a loss. His skill is to interpret small signs which 
 would be unnoticed by common observers ; to read, as it 
 were, the mind of the artist, and not look from the posi- 
 tion of those for whose sake the artist wrought. But the 
 existence of such means of discrimination does not affect 
 the general truth of the proposition, that to the ordinary 
 glance, to anyone not initiated into the secrets of the 
 worker, there would be such a class likeness among certain 
 orders of the divine beings that no single individuality 
 would seem to step out from among them. And if we 
 take this art to reflect as art always seems to reflect the 
 best the popular religion of the day, we must confess 
 that no very strong individuality would have been felt to 
 attach to any one among the gods. 
 
 But art itself comes at a late epoch in the history of 
 Greece, and no condition of thought which existed then 
 is proof of like thoughts in the heroic age, centuries 
 before, when as yet Greek sculpture was scarcely born. 
 The religion which finds such an expression as in the 
 sculpture of the days of Pheidias is very different from 
 the creed of primitive times. Polytheism has come near to 
 its latter days when the gods have grown so much alike, 
 and when all seem to express the same ideal. So far as 
 the Greek gods are now not men, so far as they contain 
 some divine nature in them, this nature is the same for 
 all. And the god-like idea, or, to put it more in the 
 
 1 See Guide to the Elgin Room, British Museum, by C. T. Newton, 
 Michaelis' Parthenon, and Flasch's Zum Parthenon. Some of the points 
 in dispute are very curious; that, for example, between the maiden 
 Artemis and the sad matron Demeter as the bearer of the torch. 
 
160 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 language of philosophy, the abstract conception of a god, 
 will soon attach specially to some particular member of 
 the pantheon, who, like the later Zeus of the Greeks, will 
 thus become the god par excellence, o 6zos ; then the mono- 
 theistic goal will have been reached. For when in character 
 the gods have become much the same, the difference be- 
 tween one and another of them must depend altogether 
 on external surroundings. Some may have a greater ma- 
 jesty in the eyes of their worshippers, and receive more 
 reverence; but it is because their rule is wider, not be- 
 cause they are in themselves different from their brothers. 
 But for the limit of their various domains all the gods 
 would be alike ; they are many kings, whose empires are 
 not of the same extent, yet still all kings. And the most 
 powerful anon becomes in heaven, as he would become on 
 earth, an over-king to all the others, the bretwalda, as it 
 were, of the Olympian realm, until at last he brings the 
 rest under him, and reigns alone. He is the single god ; 
 the other divine powers sink to positions like those which 
 occupy the saints of the mediaeval calendar. 
 
 Amid this general uniformity in the representation of 
 the Greek divinities there is nevertheless one point of 
 separation. The goddesses are all alike and all young; 
 the matron cannot be distinguished from the maid : but 
 among the gods there is the difference between the bearded 
 and the beardless one, the mature god and the youthful 
 god in a word, between Zeus and Apollo. And it is the 
 Zeus and Apollo images that convert to a likeness to them- 
 selves those of the other gods. That fair young face which 
 we see in its dawn in archaic sculpture, and follow down- 
 wards, as it grows continually in beauty and dignity, is 
 most often the face of an Apollo. Zeus is just as much 
 the ideal of the grave, mature ruler, the divine counsellor 
 and just judge, the <yspwv of the heavenly assembly. 1 
 
 1 Not, of course, precisely the Spartan yepiav, member of the jepova-ia, 
 who must be sixty years of age. Zeus we might imagine from thirty-five 
 to forty. He would then be five to ten years above the lowest limit for the 
 Athenian ftov\-f). 
 
CHARACTERISTICS OF ZEUS, 
 
 161 
 
 Now concerning the artistic type of the Zeus coun- 
 tenance, which became in late historic days the ideal one 
 for all Greece, that, we know, was stereotyped by Pheidias 
 in his great statue of the Olympian Zeus at Elis; and 
 we remember too the story which Strabo l repeats of how, 
 when the sculptor stood in doubt as to what were the 
 truest and noblest attitude in which to portray the King 
 of Heaven, his thoughts were turned (by inspiration, as 
 he deemed) to that passage in Homer wherein Zeus is 
 described as inclining his head in answer to the prayer of 
 Thetis, while Olympus trembles at the sign 
 
 T IJ, KOI Kvaj'fyffiv TT' otypvffi vevae Kpoviw. 
 
 t <$' upa ^curat tTreppwoavro a'acro 
 oe UTT* aOai'aroio' p-iyav ft c\f\i^i'' / O\u//7roj'. a 
 
 Whether Pheidias or whether Homer, even, knew it or 
 not, in the picture of the nodding or frowning Zeus, 
 making the heavens tremble at his nod, while the hair 
 falls down over his shoulders, we have an image of the 
 sky itself at the moment of the thunder. The hair of the 
 god is nothing else than the clouds which rush together, 
 and as they meet there comes the clap which shakes the 
 earth and heaven. 
 
 So, too, do the locks of Apollo bespeak his natural 
 origin. These, which are in the early statues always 
 carefully, and in the latter ones abundantly, arranged, 
 are the rays of the sun. For Apollo was in the beginning 
 a Sun God. 
 
 Athene, again, or, as she is always to be distinguished, 
 Pallas Athene, maid Athene, 3 seems at first, perhaps, to 
 be no more than the ideal of maidenhood, the type of the 
 womanly element in the world.- But she too has her 
 origin in external nature. She is, as Ruskin has named 
 her, the ' Queen of the Air ; ' and further back in her 
 
 1 viii. 353 ; see also 396. 
 
 2 11. i. 528. Thorr, too, the thunder god of the North, used to draw his 
 brows over his eyes. See Edda Snorra, 50. 
 
 ' Pallas, the same as 7rcc\Ao|, a girl. 
 
162 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 history she was the cloud which first arose from earth 
 that is, from the river mist and then became absorbed in 
 ether. 
 
 It is, indeed, to be expected that those divinities, 
 whose influence was the deepest upon the religion of 
 historic Greece, should be likewise those who bore about 
 them the strongest aroma of their earlier condition as 
 nature gods. 
 
 The truest nature gods must needs be those whose 
 influence has been the most lasting ; for the very reason 
 which has been dwelt upon so often, that their actions 
 are real, those of the other gods are only invented, and 
 therefore fanciful. Zeus and Apollo bear in their human 
 features traces of the substance out of which they were 
 formed. If Athene does not so clearly display hers, it is 
 perhaps because she belongs to that creation of misty 
 beings rightly called by the Indians the apsaras or form- 
 less, who rise out of the rivers or from the sea. She is a 
 more ideal being, less substantial than her father and her 
 brother ; yet she too is a growth from sensible nature. 
 
 The chief thing which we have to discover, in order to 
 determine the character of a creed, is in what part of 
 nature its deities take their being : are they gods of the 
 earth, or of the sea, or of the air ? Not only Zeus, Athene, 
 Apollo, but almost all the gods of the Greek pantheon 
 were supposed to reign in heaven. Hades only had his 
 kingdom beneath the earth, and Poseidon his in the 
 sea. The Olympians, however, had not all their origin in 
 celestial phenomena ; and so, when we find a god or 
 goddess whose proper sphere is the earth exalted to 
 heaven, we may be sure that this change took place 
 through the influence of the celestial divinities. To the 
 nature of the celestials, therefore, this earth god must con- 
 form ; he will lose his own individuality, and put on 
 theirs. For it will no longer do to say, as mythologists 
 once said, that man has always looked up to heaven, and 
 made the heaven the home of his gods. Man of the 
 
MIGRATIONS OF THE GREEKS. 
 
 163 
 
 prime looked down to earth and found his gods on earth, 
 in rock, and tree, and stream ; nor did he soon forget 
 these his first divinities. Wherefore it becomes a matter 
 of highest importance, in testing the nature of man's 
 belief, to find out how far his Olympus is really celestial, 
 and how much of earthiness there is mingled with the 
 conception of his heavenly gods. 
 
 The main influence, it has been already said, which 
 must have shaken the Aryans loose from the chains of 
 fetichisni was the first migration from their cradle land. 
 It has been already noticed how, before there arose a 
 complete separation of the various nationalities Indians, 
 Persians, Greeks, Romans, Teutons, Celts, and Slavs 
 our forefathers were first divided into two bodies ; one of 
 these comprised the ancestors of the Indians and Persians, 
 while the second was the aggregate of those tribes which 
 afterwards composed the nations of Europe. So that the 
 word Indo-European will express pretty accurately these 
 nationalities as they were known to history, if 'Euro- 
 pean* stand for the races who were in time to people 
 Europe, and ' Indian ' be expanded to mean Indo-Persic 
 that is to say, the peoples who in the end migrated to 
 India and to Iran. That the separation of the two 
 groups, the Indo-Persians on the one side and the Euro- 
 pean group upon the other, had preceded any more 
 minute separation of nationalities, is proved by the early 
 use of distinguishing names for these two great divisions. 
 The ancestors of the Indo-Persians claimed for them- 
 selves alone the old title Aryas, and they gave to the 
 other body the name of Yavanas, or young ones, or other- 
 wise the * fighting ' members of the community. 1 From 
 this root we get the Javan of Scripture, the Greek Ion, 
 lonis, Ionian. 
 
 The people who at last migrated westward must have 
 
 1 Juvenis and juvare, both from the Skr. root yu, to ward off, whence 
 Skr. yuvan, juvenis, young. In the Edicts of Asoka, 33rd cent. B.C., we have 
 the word Yona (Ed. Princep. ii. 4) = Gr. Ia/oves, laovfs, Iwves. 
 
 M 2 
 
164 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 had their settlements on the western side of the old home; 
 and as those of the Aryas were backed against the Beloor 
 Tagh and the Hindoo Koosh, the Yavanas would stand as 
 a belt between this highland country and the plain or the 
 sea in front of it. They would be the first to encounter 
 any strange tribe whose wanderings brought them to the 
 land of the Aryas, and to this fact no doubt they owed 
 their name of Yavanas. 
 
 After this followed the dark period of the migrations. 
 The Yavanas in their turn split up into two divisions. 
 Three of the races, the Celts (probably), the Teutons, and 
 the Slavonians, passed in succession north of the Caspian 
 Sea and so into Europe. The remaining portion, from 
 which were to spring the Greeks and Romans, travelled 
 southward till they settled in the table-land of Asia 
 Minor, where it is likely they remained for some time. 
 It was in this central district, Phrygia, that in later his- 
 torical ages there ^vas to be found a people allied to the 
 Hellenes by language l and by many religious rites. 2 
 Some never left this seat, and, after they had mingled 
 with the indigenous people of the land, left behind them, 
 in Phrygia, a race half Greek in character, and with cus- 
 toms and beliefs which down to late times could assert 
 a claim of kinship to the Hellenic. Another division 
 travelled to Europe by the Hellespont, and from this 
 section descended the main body of the nations inhabiting 
 the two eastern peninsulas of Europe. A third made its 
 way to the sea coast of Asia Minor, and in that region, 
 favourable for all development in arts and social life, they 
 advanced rapidly in culture and far surpassed their 
 brethren of European Greece. 
 
 Of the above divisions of race, the Phrygian people 
 we may put out of all account. The Greek nation was 
 
 1 The Phrygian tongue is apparently more closely allied to the Hellenic 
 than is the Gothic to the Middle High German (Curtius, Griecli. GescJi.) 
 
 2 Especially in the worship of the ancient earth goddess, Rhea or 
 Cybele. See next chapter. 
 
THE IONIANS. 165 
 
 made up of two sections those who went round by the 
 Hellespont and those who came down to the coast of Asia 
 Minor. It was these last who were known to the Semitic 
 nationalities, certainly to the Phoanicians, perhaps to the 
 Canaanites and Israelites; it was these who were designated 
 by the name Javan. The word Javan we may translate into 
 Ionian. Wherefore, in calling these Asiatic Greeks (as a 
 body) lonians, I would not be thought to make a nicer 
 distinction than their neighbours the Phoenicians made. 
 It is true that the word was not understood in so wide 
 a significance by the Greeks themselves, at least not by 
 those of historic times. In these historic days we find 
 the Asiatic coast divided among three Greek nationalities, 
 only one of whom retained the ancient name of lonians. 
 The others called themselves Dorians and ^Eolians, and 
 all three, even the lonians, imagined themselves to have 
 been planted there not by migrations from anterior Asia, 
 but by colonisation from the opposite coast of European 
 Greece. The Dorians had been planted in this way. 
 Many even of the lonians may have been brought, by a 
 backward wave of migration, from the West to the East. 
 But the name of the lonians was far anterior to these 
 recorded migrations : so, too, was the, first settlement of 
 Greeks on the coast of Asia Minor. 
 
 The Yavanas, or lonians of Asia Minor, mingled with 
 the Oriental nations whom they found there, some of 
 whom had attained no small degree of civilisation. And 
 the lonians doubtless acquired many of their arts. Espe- 
 cially from the Phoenicians, the seafarers of those days, 
 do they seem to have learnt the art of navigation, which 
 was known only in an elementary form to the older 
 Aryans. There are, common to the Indo-European family 
 of languages, words for oar and rudder, but none for sail ; 
 and we may conclude from this that sea voyages were 
 unattempted by the Aryas of the prime, or by the 
 Yavanas when they formed one nation. Those of the 
 Grseco-Italicans who crossed the Hellespont could well 
 
166 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 have accomplished that feat with only such boats as had 
 plied upon broad rivers. But the Greeks of the Asiatic 
 coast soon learned a higher art of navigation. Presently 
 a great part of the people passed on, and settled upon 
 the countless islands of the ^Egsean and upon the eastern 
 coast of European Greece. One of the Greek words for 
 sea is quite peculiar to that language not shared, I 
 mean, by other Indo-European ones and is likewise pecu- 
 liarly significant. It is TTOI/TOS, which means literally 
 a path. 1 Can we doubt that the habit of looking upon 
 the sea as a 'path,' a way, was first opened to the minds 
 of the Greeks when they from their Phoenician neighbours 
 had learned to make the water their road to new lands ? 
 
 In the formation of the Greek nation, then, there were 
 two elements. The earlier and ruder people, who 
 travelled by the Hellespont, were the first to set foot 
 on the mainland of Europe; the other body came by 
 immigration from the coast of Asia Minor, and brought 
 some civilisation with them, and all the elements of a 
 higher life. 
 
 Of course this was not accomplished in a day : the 
 passage into Greece of the men from the Asiatic coast 
 must have been especially slow, for they had nothing to 
 tempt them to leave the rich land in which they were. 
 The settlers on the other side of the JEgsean could have 
 been no more than the overflow of their population. 
 Each successive wave which came overlapping the pre- 
 vious one was more deeply imbued with tne nascent 
 
 1 Connected with the Skr. pantha, patha and our path. It may be that 
 there is a Teutonic name for sea from the same root, viz. the A.S. fait hi 
 (Pictet, o. c. i. 113). No nautical terms were originally common to the 
 Greek and Italian languages, save those that are also common to the Indo- 
 European family. This shows that the Greeks discovered the art of sea 
 navigation after they had been separated from the Italian stock. 
 
 In reference to the effect of movement upon the development of belief, 
 the decay of fetichism, &c.,it is worth noticing that the very active nature 
 of the whole Greek race is exemplified by the number of verbal roots in the 
 Greek language. 
 
 The Latin pontus is, I believe, borrowed direct from it6vros. Pons is 
 related to pantJia. 
 
THE PELASGIANS. 
 
 167 
 
 civilisation of the Asiatic Greeks, more nearly Hellenic in 
 character as compared with the character of those who had 
 wandered far round by the Hellespont. These last formed 
 the Pelasgic element l in Greek society. 
 
 The migrators from the Asiatic coast found people 
 of more or less Semitic extraction settled in many of the 
 islands, and in those parts of the eastern shore of European 
 Greece which they first occupied. It is hardly to be sup- 
 posed that the other travellers (whom, we have called 
 Pelasgians), after they had gone round by the Hellespont, 
 found the lands into which they debouched quite bare of 
 inhabitants. But of these earlier people we know little or 
 nothing. They were probably a peaceful pastoral race. 
 Their very existence had been forgotten by the men who 
 ousted them from their homes ; for, in historic days, the 
 Greeks of Europe generally looked upon themselves as 
 autochthones that is to say, sprung from the earth on 
 which they dwelt. 
 
 The later travellers from Asia, who had grown to a 
 more complete self-consciousness and to a stronger sense 
 of nationality than their Pelasgic brethren could feel, 
 came later than the others had done to the European 
 coast. When they did come, they found in European 
 Greece a race somewhat like to themselves in language 
 and character, but much ruder in manners, with no 
 memory of the time when they all together left their 
 Aryan home, but, on the contrary, deeming themselves 
 children of the soil and firmly settled there. These people 
 had developed a certain civilisation, marked by solid 
 stone architecture unless this were, as I rather sup- 
 pose, the work of a still earlier race, and only adopted 
 by the Greeks and they had some cities. The name, 
 Pelasgians, which they received from the new comers 
 
 1 Pelasgic, according to a recent derivation, which seems to me sound, 
 is from the root of the Skr. parasja (paras far ja go), and means not, as 
 was by the Greeks supposed, 'the old,' but ' the far wanderers.' See paper 
 by K. Pischl, Zcitschri.fi fur vcrglcichende SprachforscJiung, vol. xx. 
 
168 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 from Asia, whatever its original meaning, came in time 
 to distinguish the older and ruder civilisation, which had 
 first appeared in Greece, from the newer or truly Hellenic 
 civilisation, which came from Asia. The Hellenic culture 
 superseded the Pelasgic culture ; and, but to a less extent, 
 Hellenic belief superseded Pelasgic belief. 
 
 It is needful to take into account these details of the 
 prehistoric existence of the Greek people, so far as they 
 can be reasonably conjectured ; because the character of 
 their existence, and the scenes among which that life has 
 been passed, must go far to determine the people's future 
 creed. When the proto-Greeks entered upon their life of 
 change and migration they were still in the main a nation 
 of shepherds. They had lived in a land of hill and valley 
 and rushing mountain stream, and after their wanderings 
 had begun their lot still lay amid scenes not dissimilar. 
 They travelled first to the hilly Caucasus, and thence to 
 the central table-land of Asia Minor, a region compounded 
 of barren heights and more fruitful lower lands ; and 
 thence they passed (many of them) into Thrace and 
 Macedon and Epirus. Here, even in the cultured and 
 historic ages of Greece, the inhabitants remained amid 
 wild scenes a rude bucolic race. Those who settled on 
 the western coasts of Greece proper, though now in 
 sunnier regions, were, in days near to historic times, con- 
 fined to the most barren and stormiest parts of them ; for 
 the mild eastern coasts had fallen into the hands of the 
 Ionian peoples. 1 
 
 The western people it was who first gained from their 
 Italian neighbours the name of Graeci (TpaiKot), 12 which 
 
 1 The character of Macedon and Thrace the region beyond Mount 
 Olympus is admirably described in the beginning of the seventh book of 
 Curtius' GriecMsche GescMclite, The distinction which I have drawn 
 between the two orders of civilisation, the Pelasgic and the Ionian (or 
 Hellenic), is geographically between the kingdom of the JSgasan, which 
 included the islands and both coasts of that sea, and the regions to the 
 north and west. 
 
 2 Connected with the Gaelic word crwach, a hill. This name forms a 
 
OLDEST GREEK DIVINITIES. 169 
 
 means the dwellers on the heights. Homer's description 
 of Ithaca might serve for all this part of Greece. It was 
 'rough, not fit for use of horses, yet not too btirren.' 
 Now, as the older Greeks were by degrees pushed back- 
 wards and backwards from the south and east by the 
 more enterprising lonians, and as the lonians must in 
 historic, or nearly historic, times have departed much 
 more than the old Greek people had done from their 
 primitive faith, it is in the north and west of Greece that 
 we must look for the traces of the earliest creed of the 
 Greek race. 
 
 During their days of wandering the gods of the Greeks 
 were doubtless chiefly those heavenly bodies who travelled 
 with them as they travelled, and some elemental substances 
 one of the chief among these fire which they had learned 
 to worship while they were in Bactriana ; their fetich- 
 worshipping instincts remaining, from necessity of travel, 1 
 in a sort of abeyance, until in a new settlement fresh 
 objects of reverence should be found to take the place 
 of the others. The protecting Heaven, and next to the 
 Heaven the Sun, who shed his brightness on their path, 
 and when he rose in the morning ran before them on 
 the road they were to take, were their ever-present gods. 
 The first of these we know they worshipped, him whom, 
 under the name of Dyaus, they had known in their 
 cradle home. This Dyaus-Zeus remained the chief god 
 of all. 
 
 One may fancy that the Germans and the Slavs, during 
 their migratory period, underwent an actual degeneracy 
 
 natural contrast to"E\\r)vfs, the inhabitants of low-lying and marshy lands ; 
 just as the old Greeks of Greece proper form a contrast to the lonians, who 
 imparted their civilisation to the Hellenes of later date. For when the 
 marsh is drained it becomes fruitful, like the rich Argos. 
 
 Compare the description of Ithaca, given above, or of ' black Epirus ' 
 
 (Od. xiv. 97), with the description of hollow Lacedaemon, 'where, in the 
 
 wide plain, is wealth of lotus and cypress and rye, and broad fields of 
 
 wheat' (Od. iv. 601-608 ; of. also Od. xiii. 414, ' Lacedasmon of broad 
 
 .lands'). 
 
 1 See Chapters II. and III. 
 
170 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 in culture. Their condition, when they first emerge into 
 the light of history, seems more barbarous, nearer to the 
 condition of a nomadic and hunting people, than the 
 state of their Aryan forefathers in their settled home. 
 Whether, in their time of want and difficulty and struggle, 
 the Greeks likewise passed through a period of degeneracy 
 we cannot be sure. They could not, at any rate, have 
 advanced much during their wanderings, for they were 
 still a savage people when they obtained a lasting settle- 
 ment in Greece. Their gods, too, were doubtless of a 
 rude and savage kind. Dyaus underwent the same change 
 of character which, in the last chapter, we followed 
 out in the growth of Indra worship, when we saw the 
 heaven god giving place to a more human and active god 
 of storms. We see that this happened by noting what 
 character belongs to Zeus and Jupiter, when they appear 
 in the creeds of Greece and Rome. The nature in which 
 Zeus and Jupiter most agree must have been the character 
 of the Dyaus-Zeus of the proto-Greeks and proto-Komans. 
 These gods are essentially the pictures of the stormy sky. 
 They are both alike the wielders of the thunderbolt, and 
 guardians of the wind and rain. Even in Homer the Ionian 
 Zeus, though he has grown to be much more than merely 
 this, is essentially a storm god. We have seen how the 
 very imagery which described his nod was drawn from the 
 natural imagery of the cloudy sky ; and it is needless to 
 recall all the passages wherein Zeus shows in this cha- 
 racter. The Greeks, for all the beauty of their sky and 
 air, had many opportunities for watching the phenomena 
 of storms ; for their land is varied in its character, subject 
 to sudden atmospheric changes, nursed upon the bosoms 
 of the two seas upon which it looks. Nor, I think, is 
 anything more noticeable in Homer than the number and 
 the beauty of the similes which he has gathered from such 
 watching. 
 
 Over all such doings in the air Zeus has as close and 
 special a control as Poseidon over the waves. Zeus is not 
 
ZEUS, THE STORM GOD. 171 
 
 the thunderer alone, he is the cloud-collector ; l he alike 
 sends the rain and the snow, the prospering wind to 
 sailors or the blast which hurries the drifting scud across 
 the face of the sea ; he sends a storm from land, such as 
 that which came from Ida to confound the Greeks ; 2 like 
 Jehovah, he places his bow in the cloud a sign to man, or 
 makes the cloud stand steadfast and calm upon the moun- 
 tain-top, while the might of Boreas sleeps. 
 
 Ol c Kat avrol 
 
 Ovre /3mc Tpwtav vTreltiSiffav, ovre (WMie* 
 'AXX' eftefOff vHftiKriaiv loutoref, fie rt KpoWwv 
 
 IVTrjfftV tV UKpOTToXoifflV OptfffflV 
 
 e Bopeao, teal 
 
 This is the god as he was known on the eastern shore 
 of the .jEgsean. In the special home of the old Greek race 
 the land was far more wild and storm-bound, and there the 
 special god of that race, the Pelasgic Zeus, assumed a still 
 gloomier aspect. Here it was that the wind, driving in 
 from the Mediterranean, rolled up great masses of cloud 
 which broke upon the high inland ridges, such as Ithome 
 and Lykseon, 4 so that these mountains, visible cloud- 
 collectors as they were, became the very embodiments of 
 the god. It is in these regions that we find the deepest 
 traces of the worship of the Pelasgic Zeus, the god of 
 rugged mountains and of gloomy forests. On coins of 
 
 consider the force of such an address as /cv5i<rre 
 , /c\aivf<^)fs, aidtpi vaiw. 
 
 2 II. vii. 4 ; xii. 252 ; xi. 27 ; xii. 279, where Zeus sends the snow. 
 
 3 11. v. 520-5. 
 
 * The epithet of Zeus, Zevs \VKCUOS (Paus. i. 38, 5 ; viii. 2 ; 1 Callim. //". 
 in Jov. 4), is probably a reminiscence of the ancient meaning of his name, 
 dijaux, the shining. The title is also applied to Apollo. Nevertheless 
 there is evidence that Zeus was specially worshipped on Mount Lykaeon. 
 May not, then, the name of this mountain have been taken from the name 
 of dyaus, of which lykoeus is a simple translation 1 If this be so, it suggests 
 an example of a relapse into fetichism. The mountain was first masculine, 
 6 AVKOIOS : later neuter, r5 \VKCUOV. Other epithets ^of Zeus show him to 
 have been specially worshipped on mountain- tops, e'.g. &Kpios, 
 
172 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Ithoine and of Megalopolis this last place was under the 
 shadow of Mount Lykseon, the highest peak in the Pelo- 
 ponnese we see the Pelasgic Zeus seated upon a rock; 
 whereby we learn where his dwelling was. There is 
 a similar representation of the Olympian Zeus upon the 
 coins of Elis ; and this indicates that here even the Olym- 
 pian Zeus kept the character of his Pelasgian forerunner. 
 The Zeus of Dodona was worshipped in much the same 
 fashion on Mount Dicte, in Crete. Zeus, like Odhinn, the 
 wind god of the Teutons, loved to haunt the darkest and 
 most inaccessible groves. One of these was at Elis ; 
 another, more awful still, at Dodona. The oak, which 
 was Odhinn's tree, was also Zeus's. 1 The wind which 
 whispered through the oaks of Dodona brought the oracle 
 of the god. He is commonly portrayed with a crown of 
 oak leaves. 
 
 In all this we see the mingling of an older fetichism 
 with a new creed. The mountain Lykseon or Ithome 
 preserved its former godhead when it was worshipped as 
 the very Zeus. It was not only the grove of Dodona that 
 was holy, but a certain evergreen oak in it was peculiarly 
 so. This oak no doubt was confounded in popular imagi- 
 nation with the deity. 
 
 It is not to be supposed that either the European 
 Greeks or the Asiatic Greeks, either the Pelasgians or the 
 lonians, were uninfluenced by the creeds with which they 
 came in contact. If the Pelasgians met with men in 
 quite a primitive state of fetich worship, this would tend 
 to stir in them reactionary leanings towards the primitive 
 religion which they had left behind them in Bactria, and 
 once more local gods would spring up, local mountains and 
 streams would be worshipped; indeed, we have already 
 
 1 Especially the edible oak (</>?j7^s). From this Zeus received the 
 epithet ^yuvaios, which he sometimes bore. See Zenodotus apud iSteph. 
 Byzant., Frag, de Dodona. Jupiter had the name Jupiter fagutalis (Varro, 
 De Lingua Lot. iv. 32, 1), which may have belonged to him before the 
 fagus changed from an oak into a beech. 
 
THE GODS AND THE TITANS. 173 
 
 seen such things long continued to be worshipped in 
 Greece. Gradually, no doubt, there came to be a separa- 
 tion between the creeds of the more active and intelligent, 
 those who were truer to their own nationality and to their 
 gods, and those who sank down in the social scale and 
 mixed with the earlier natives of the land. The peasantry, 
 who had in their veins the blood of this older stock, came 
 to have a separate code of belief, connected with the cult 
 of Pan and of the Arcadian Hermes, and of many a local 
 satyr and nymph, and this creed, if it was not hostile to 
 the worship of Zeus and Apollo and the other Olympians, 
 at any rate passed it by without much attention. 
 
 Often we find the two religions existing side by side, 
 and at peace ; but this peace could hardly have been 
 gained save through previous war. In such a case, when 
 the gods of the new comers put to flight the esta- 
 blished fetich gods of the land to which they came, it 
 might seem to the eye of history like some great combat 
 between the visible things of nature, the Titanic moun- 
 tains and trees, and the subtler, unhandled, but greater 
 celestial powers. That memorable gigantomachia, or war 
 between the gods and Titans, does in truth lie at the 
 threshold of all advances in culture ; only by breaking up 
 the peaceful, settled life of the prime do men begin to 
 advance in civilisation. We cannot wonder if between 
 such mighty forces the battle was grievous ; so that, as 
 Hesiod tells us, the tramp of the contending armies shook 
 the earth, and echoed far below to the depths of shadowy 
 Tartarus. 1 
 
 Seen by peasant eyes, the same combat and the in- 
 coming of Zeus and his army were the inroad of .a fierce 
 new power into the woods and valleys of the land. In 
 such eyes, the age before Zeus was a golden time ; those 
 days were days of peace and plenty, and the memory of 
 them was cherished at rustic firesides. The husbandmen 
 
 1 Tlieog, 664. 
 
174 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 believed in them, and called them the Saturnian age, the 
 age of gold, to which had succeeded an age of bronze, i.e. 
 of war ; l after which had followed a still worse age, the age 
 of iron, and of slavery, with its iron chains. It is Hesiod, 
 who sympathised at heart with the peasant state, and 
 had no love at all for war or adventure, who has given us 
 this tradition, a peasant's legend of the three ages of the 
 world. 
 
 From whatever side we view the contest, the result 
 was the same Kronos, who represented the earlier time, 2 
 and with him all the Titan brood, had to flee far away to 
 the extreme borders of earth, where stands Atlas, the 
 Titan's son, and keeps the gates of the outer world, and 
 where Day and Night, treading upon each other's heels, 
 alternate pass the brazen threshold ; and beyond Sleep and 
 his brother Death, the sons of murky Night, have their 
 home ; there must the giant race abide. 3 There sits la- 
 petus, the father of Atlas and of Prometheus, and with 
 him Kronos, joying neither in the splendour of Helios 
 Hyperion nor in the breath of winds, for deep Tartarus 
 is all around. 4 Zeus it was who dispossessed these of 
 their rule, and who took a dreadful vengeance upon one 
 Titan, only because he had been too much the friend 
 of the human race. Apollo contended with the shep- 
 herd Marsyas type of the Arcadian life and inflicted 
 upon him a cruel punishment. These new comers are 
 the gods of will, no longer the simpler divine things of 
 nature. 5 
 
 But as, when an invading nation has subdued another, 
 the war of extermination is arrested by marriage, and the 
 
 1 Weapons having been made of bronze in the epic age. 
 
 2 Kronos was essentially a Pelasgic god, as the form of his name, Kronos 
 for Chronos, shows. Pelasgic words take K for x> e.g. Kp-rjffr&s for xpriards. 
 See Maury, B^lig. de la Greee, i. 263. Maury likens Kp6vos to yepcait. It is 
 possible the name may have been a name for Dyaus (or Ouranos), and not 
 have arisen in the way Welcker supposes (see p. 119, note). In either case 
 we may take the actual form of this divinity to have sprung up in Pelasgic 
 days. 
 
 3 Hesiod. * Iliad. * See p. 96. 
 
THE WIVES OF ZEUS. 175 
 
 wives of the conquerors, taken from out of the inferior 
 race, preserve its blood ; so I suppose that there was some 
 compromise effected between the new deities and the old, 
 and that the compact was solemnised by the marriage of 
 the god of heaven to the goddess of earth. The earth 
 goddess, though her worship is allied to fetichism, is of a 
 nature far more abstract than any mere fetich. In every 
 creed she stands as the natural counterpart and partner 
 of the heaven, representing the principle of production, 
 as he does that of generation. Thus in the New Zealand 
 tale of Tanemahuta, which was referred to in the second 
 chapter, the great productive principles were called Kangi 
 and Papa, the Earth and Heaven. The closeness of their 
 embrace threatened to destroy all the children whom Papa 
 had brought forth. In the Vedas by the side of Dyaus 
 sits Prithivi, the Earth. 
 
 Each of the wives of Zeus, therefore, I imagine to have 
 been at one time or another the goddess of the earth. 
 These wives are many. 
 
 Zsv<a de QeaJy pa.6i\.v<-> Ttpoorrjv aTioxov Qe'ro Mrjriv. 
 
 dsvTEpov Tfydyero \ntapi)v Qefj.iv ..... 
 
 rpelS Si oi Evpvyojur/ xdpiroA TKKE 
 
 Avrdp 6 drjuETpoS TiotLvcpopfirfi 1$ 
 
 Ipd66o.ro 
 
 o S 7 'AxoXXoova. nai "Apreuiv 
 ap 7 alyioxmo Aio^ q)iXo 
 
 To Hesiod many of the persons here enumerated were 
 embodiments of qualities that is to say, of abstractions 
 merely. Metis was Thought, Themis was Law. Almost 
 all of them, however, were originally personifications of 
 some part of nature, and the greatest number were earth 
 goddesses. Thernis was so, for she was a Boeotian earth 
 goddess. 2 Eurynome is a counterpart of the 'wide' Pri- 
 thivi. Demeter (yn-^rijp) is another representative of 
 Prithivi-matar, mother Prithivi, mother earth. She, 
 
 1 Hesiod, Theog. 886 sqq. * Maury, I. c. i. 81. 
 
176 OUTLINES OF PKB1ITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 perhaps, inherited most of the character of the old Aryan 
 goddess. Hera, too, was once the earth. 
 
 Not only the wives but the mother of Zeus also was an 
 embodiment of the earth. She was Khea, the wife of 
 Kronos. As Kronos was, we have seen, probably only an 
 older form of Zeus, a middle term between the Zeus whom 
 we know and the Dyaus who was worshipped by the 
 Aryas, so Rhea may be an older form of Hera. Khea was 
 originally goddess of the Phrygians, 1 and the Phrygians 
 represent the earliest form of that nationality which gave 
 birth in time to the Hellenic race. As the Phrygians 
 gave birth to the Greeks, so did Rhea to Hera. The 
 former of these two names is unquestionably connected 
 with the Sanskrit root ira, earth, which in Irish becomes 
 ire, whence Erin, Ireland. 2 
 
 Concerning the worship of the earth goddess it is not 
 my cue to speak in this place ; for of this we shall have 
 something to say in the following chapter. All that we 
 need do here is to take account of this form of worship, 
 as constituting an integral part of the religion of the 
 early Greeks. 
 
 But Hera, whatever her origin, was in many ways 
 different in character from the other wives of Zeus. And 
 that she was different shows that in her person the wor- 
 ship of the earth, goddess had undergone a change. It is 
 one of the signs of the change and the advance of a creed 
 when the celestial divinities come to displace the terrestrial 
 ones, or else to effect a change in the natures of the latter. 
 In this instance the heaven god has absorbed the individu- 
 ality of his consort, and has given her instead of her old 
 character a nature modelled upon his own. It is simply 
 as the Queen of Heaven that Hera appears in the Iliad. 
 
 1 Such at least is the opinion of Maury. From Phrygia Rhea was 
 brought to Crete, where in the historical clays she is first met with. 
 
 2 One etymology proposed for Hera is 'lady,' connected with the 
 Latin herns, the German Herr. See Maury, I. c. Welcker (6fr. Gotterleh. 
 i. 302) adopts that from l^a, earth, the Sanskr. ira. Herodotus tells us 
 that Hera was a Pelasgic goddess (ii. 50). 
 
POSEID6N AND HAIX&S PLUT6N. 177 
 
 In Norse mythology we have just another such example of 
 the development of an earth goddess into the simple femi- 
 nine of the supreme god. Frigg, the partner of Odhinn, 
 and Freyja, the goddess of the earth, were originally one 
 person j 1 but their individualities became separated in 
 order that they might fulfil the requirements of a double 
 nature. One, as the wife of Odhinn, was the counterpart 
 of the heaven god ; the other was not divorced from the 
 functions which belonged to her own being. Hera, then, 
 changed her character from what it was in Pelasgic days ; 
 but still we must reckon Hera as one of the divinities be- 
 longing to that early time. There is a Pelasgic Hera as 
 well as a Pelasgic Zeus. 
 
 Another god whose worship is also as antique, 
 according to my theory, as that of Zeus, or Demeter, or 
 Hera, is Poseidon. 2 Poseidon I suppose to have been the 
 first sea god of the Greek nationality. The people could 
 not have arrived at the borders of Asia, they could not 
 have crossed the Hellespont, nor have settled in their new 
 homes in European Greece, without learning to worship 
 the dark waste of water which hemmed them in on every 
 side. Poseidon was the first embodiment of this pheno- 
 menon ; he it was whom the first mariners made their 
 patron god. But afterwards Athene in a way which we 
 shall presently trace out became the goddess of sailors, 
 and the newer generation of navigators worshipped her 
 and neglected Poseidon. Hence the rivalry between the 
 two. Odysseus is the type of the newer generation, and 
 Odysseus is persecuted by Poseidon and saved by Athene. 3 
 
 There is in most creeds a god of earth as well as a 
 goddess, with a certain difference between them. The god 
 
 1 The name Fri-gg is not improbably connected etymologically with 
 Prithiri (Grimm, D. M. i. 303). 
 
 * Kuhn believes Poseidon to have been originally a god of heaven, and 
 to have undergone the same change which passed over the Vedic Varrwa 
 (see Zeitsch. fur vcrg. Sp. i. 455, c.) This question does not concern the 
 character of Poseidon as the god of the Greeks. 
 
 3 See below. 
 
 N 
 
178 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of earth represents the active powers of generation, the 
 goddess the passive. The former is the god of the seed 
 or of the power of the seed in the ground rather than the 
 mere receptive power of earth. The receptive power of 
 earth such deities as Prithivi or Demeter represented. The 
 earth god of the Greeks was the god of the hidden trea- 
 sures of generation and of growth (Plouton). Plouton 
 came to be confounded with Hade's ; but I doubt whether 
 Hades or Aidoneus are the proper names of this Pelasgic 
 god. Rather I should suppose him to be represented by 
 Zeus Chthonius, earth Zeus ; a title equivalent to earth 
 god. 1 Hades was originally only the personification of 
 the tomb ; afterwards, however, he entered into the in- 
 heritance of the forgotten earth god and became Hades 
 Pluton. Another part of the belongings of this earth god 
 were given over to one of a younger generation, to 
 Dionysus. 
 
 It would seem, then and this is quite natural that 
 the Pelasgic gods for the most part belong to the elder gene- 
 ration of the Olympians. They are Zeus, and Demeter, 
 and Hera, and Poseidon, and Hades. In addition to these 
 it is impossible to believe but that the older Greeks had 
 their sun god. The sun is too important a being to be 
 left out of any system in which the celestial gods are 
 worshipped at all. In no system does the sun appear as a 
 parent god, but always in a relation of son ship to the sky, 
 out of which he seems to spring. Therefore the sun god 
 of the earlier time must have been one among the younger 
 generation of the Olympians. He was not Apollo, who 
 represents the later culture of the Hellenic race. Nor was 
 he Helios. We must look out for some one among the 
 second generation of the gocls who could have been the sun 
 god of this age. He must be one who afterwards fell some- 
 what into the background, because he had at last to give 
 place to Apollo. Two gods, I think, represent this divinity 
 
 1 Zeus being in this case a general, not a proper name (fleos). See 
 Ch. I. 
 
THE PELASGIAN SUN GODS. 179 
 
 Ares and Heracles. The sun of western Greece was not 
 that bright being who shone over the .ZEgsean and its islands. 
 His character was adapted to that of the Pelasgic Zeus ; 
 he was the day star, shining red in the storm or battling 
 with the clouds, rather than the same sun shining in 
 pellucid air. The traces of this first sun worship which 
 was displaced by the cultus of Apollo are to be sought 
 first in the person of Ares the fighter, %a\Ksos "Aptjs, brazen 
 Ares, who ruled in warlike Macedon and Thrace; next in 
 Heracles the labourer, who was the god of the Pelopon- 
 nese and of its peasants. There can be no question that in 
 prehistoric times the worship of the first of these two was 
 far more widely extended than we should suppose from 
 reading Homer or the poets after Homer. Traces of Ares 
 worship are to be found in the Zeus Areios, who was 
 honoured at Elis, and in the name of the Areiopagus of 
 Athens. 1 But of course the god's real home was farther 
 north. He was the national deity of the Thracians ; 2 his 
 sons led to Troy the men of Aspledon and Orchomenus 
 in Boeotia, and his daughter Harmonia was the wife of 
 Cadmus. 3 
 
 The Ares who appears in Homer has no longer a 
 foundation in the phenomenal world. He has become little 
 more than an abstraction, the spirit of the battle, to be 
 placed by the side of such beings as Eris, strife, Phobos, 
 fear, Deimos, terror, and the rest. 
 
 The adventures of Heracles are precisely those most 
 commonly ascribed to a sun god. Eead side by side with 
 those of the Teutonic Thorr 4 (Donar), they show how 
 
 1 For the chief traces of the worship of Ares in historic days see Pau- 
 sanias. 
 
 2 Cf. especially Herod, v. 7, where we are told that Thrace was the 
 principal seat of his wor: hip. 
 
 8 See Welcker. Gr. Gotterlehrc, i. 413-424, on Ares as a sun god. For 
 some curious evidences of his worship in Macedon and Thrace, furnished 
 by the coins of these districts, see Num. Ckron.for 1880, p. 49, by Prof. P. 
 Gardner. 
 
 4 I think it is because they have not studied the Greek mythology side 
 by side with the Norse, that most writers have spoken of Heracles as almost 
 
 N 2 
 
180 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 primitive must have been the worship of Heracles and 
 the myths which gathered round that worship. He per- 
 haps differs little from some god known to the ancient 
 Aryas. But when Apollo came and showed a higher ideal 
 of the god of the sun, Heracles' divinity suffered much 
 abatement until he sank at last to be a demi-god, holding 
 only by sufferance a place on Olympus. 
 
 These Pelasgians were half-savage men. The gods of 
 tempest whom they honoured the Zeus of the stormy 
 heights and wind-grieved forests ; the black Demeters, 
 fit images of the unsown earth ; Ehea, worshipped in hol- 
 low caves ; the red and angry sun ; dark-haired Poseidon, 
 the god of tempestuous seas these were well fitted to their 
 needs of worship ; they could never have satisfied the reli- 
 gious wants of Hellas. In the person of the Greeks, it has 
 been well said, humanity becomes for the first time com- 
 pletely human ; before, it was half bestial, like the satyrs of 
 Arcadia or the centaurs of Thrace ; its creed was unformed 
 and unsightly like its gods, who were still represented by 
 blocks of wood and stone. 
 
 But, as Greece grew to perfect manhood, the gods 
 became softened in nature. The Pelasgic Zeus changed 
 into a god of Olympus, the true image of a king in 
 heaven. Elis and its groves opened to the new sovereign, 
 who took his seat there unopposed. None were more 
 instrumental in this change than they who introduced 
 the new sun god, Apollo, in the stead of Ares or Heracles, 
 and a new heaven-born Athene, who outshone the earth 
 goddesses, Ehea, or Demeter, or even Hera herself. The 
 revolution, however, was a quiet one, like those slow 
 changes we learn to think of as creating new worlds or 
 new systems of planets. In the nebulous mass of the old 
 Pelasgic society, as yet without coherence or national 
 
 identical with the Tyrian Melcarth. See Curtius, Griecli. Gesoh., for a 
 recent example. So far as concerns the representation of Heracles in art, 
 I can well believe there was an indebtedness to Phoenician influence ; and 
 this extended, perhaps, to some special myths, but not to the whole concep- 
 tion in the popular mind. 
 
THE DOKIAN APOLLO. 181 
 
 existence, a vortex of more eager life was set up ; and this, 
 ever widening, drew into itself the best part of the race, 
 until a new Hellas arose to take the place of Greece. 
 
 As for the processes whereby the Apollo worship and 
 the Athene worship were introduced, at these we can do 
 little more than guess ; and yet concerning the first of 
 these tradition does seem to afford us some clue ; and that 
 which tradition appears to sketch out we may making 
 due premise that the story is not to be taken for certain 
 fact present in something of the form of a continuous 
 narrative. 
 
 The authors of Apollo worship as a Hellenic belief 
 were, it would seem, the Dorians at first a small tribe, not 
 worthy to be called a nation, who lived in the extreme 
 north of Greece, where Mount Olympus separates Macedon 
 from Thessaly. They were Zeus-worshippers ; by their con- 
 quests and settlements they carried the cult of the 
 Olympian Zeus over the whole land of Greece ; and 
 because they worshipped Zeus, the old chief god of the 
 Pelasgians was never deposed from his throne. But the 
 Dorians were before all things the votaries of the sun god, 
 Apollo; and with them the religion of Apollo travelled 
 wherever they went. The outbreak of these men of the 
 north from the bosom of the Pelasgic world, was in some 
 respects like the outbreak upon the Roman Empire of 
 certain Teutonic peoples from the vast unexplored forests 
 of Germany, and from the shores of silent northern 
 seas. Like the Scandinavians, from being mountaineers, 
 these men took to the sea, and became pirates. They 
 haunted the islands of the Archipelago, and passing 
 onward, sometimes resting where they came, sometimes 
 defeated and forced to retire, they got at last to Crete, and 
 founded the first Dorian kingdom there. 
 
 The tradition of Minos points not obscurely to the 
 time when Crete was the ruling state in the Greek world. 
 The kingdom of Minos extended, no doubt, over most of 
 the islands of the JEgsean, and over part of its Asiatic and 
 
L82 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 European shores. And Minos was a Dorian, Crete a 
 Dorian land. 1 At this time, therefore, it was that the 
 great extension of Apollo worship probably took place, 
 whereof the deepest traces were in after years discovered 
 in Caria, in Lycia, and in the Troad. It is likely enough 
 that Apollo worship was not moulded into its final shape 
 until such time as the Dorians of Thessaly had been long 
 in contact with the lonians of Asia, and that it passed 
 through many lower forms before it reached the condition 
 which we admire. There is evidence of the existence of a 
 sun worship of a not exalted character in the same land of 
 Crete. The bull-headed Minotaur can hardly have been 
 anything else than a sun god, one of the Asiatic stamp : 
 the Cnossian labyrinth has a totally Oriental appearance, 
 and reminds us of that celebrated garden of Mylitta in 
 Babylon which Herodotus describes. 2 
 
 There is no doubt that it was through much com- 
 merce with other peoples, through much friction and inter- 
 change of ideas, that the Greek religion in its entirety, 
 the cult of Apollo and of Athene alike, grew to be what 
 they were. But let us not say that Athene and Apollo 
 were on this account less truly Hellenic. It was with the 
 history of belief as it was with the history of art ; the first 
 forms were borrowed from the East, from Phoanicians, 
 Assyrians, or Egyptians. But that which infused life into 
 these forms, which placed a spirit in their bodies, and a 
 breath in their members, that was wholly Greek. 
 
 Even before the time of Minos that is, before the 
 Doric kingdom in Crete had put to silence the older 
 
 1 I do not mean to say that the original Minos was a Dorian. Minos 
 was really to the Greeks no one else than what Adam is to us, what 
 Yama was to the Indians, and Yima to the Persians. But as Yima grew 
 into the hero, Yamshid (Jamshld), so Minos became the typical earliest 
 king. The first Mngdom of the Greek race was the kingdom of Minos, 
 in Crete. This was, perhaps (as suggested, p. 166), originally an Ionian (or 
 Yavan) kingdom, but at the time to which Greek tradition points back it 
 had become by conquest a Dorian one. 
 
 2 Herod, i. 199. 
 
THE BIRTH OF APOLLO. 
 
 183 
 
 Doric rule in Olympus the shrine of Apollo had been 
 founded on Delos. Delos was afterwards deemed to be 
 the navel of the earth ; because, being in special favour 
 with Apollo, it might be thought to stand under the 
 eye of the midday sun. It was also deemed the birth- 
 place of the god, because it lay in mid-^Egaean and the 
 sun is born from the sea; and also probably because it 
 was one of the earliest shrines of the deity. This island, 
 standing as it does half-way between Europe and Asia, 
 and half-way between Olympus and Crete, is a type of 
 the cult of Apollo, which was the meeting-point between 
 the Oriental and the Occidental Greeks. 
 
 Last of all, the Dorian migrations which took place 
 about the tenth century before our era, starting from the 
 Doric tetrapolis, the cities of Erineus, Bceum, Find us, and 
 Cytinium for to this neighbourhood the Dorians of 
 Olympus and Tempe had gradually moved carried the 
 Delphic worship of the god over the whole Peloponnese. 
 Thus by example, or more direct enforcement, the new 
 creed spread on every side, until the god was honoured 
 wherever the Greek tongue was spoken 
 
 Through the calf-breeding mainland and through the isles. 1 
 
 The old poems those two hymns, for example, which 
 have been joined into one and called the Homeric hymn 
 to Apollo have not very much which is reliable to give us 
 out Df their tradition. The mythic journeys of the god have 
 but few grains of history interspersed in them, and these 
 grains are not easily discoverable. On the other hand, 
 the Homeric hymn tells not obscurely other facts which are 
 in their way historical ; it relates the nature and the deeds 
 of the sun god as he presented himself to the eyes of 
 those who composed the hymn. We know how nearly 
 the sun god has always touched the sympathies of man- 
 kind, and how he has generally assumed an office more 
 
 1 Hymn, in Apol. 21. 
 
184 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 h-uman than that of any other nature god. The sun 
 itself has many aspects. There is therefore enough in 
 the nature of the sun god to furnish more than one in- 
 dividuality. There are high sun gods and low sun gods 
 and suns who are bnt demi-gods or heroes. The manhood 
 of Apollo never sinks him low. He is human in his sym- 
 pathies, and in many incidents of his life, but he is also 
 completely god-like in dignity. 
 
 Son of the ' Concealed ' (Leto), or, in other words, of 
 the Darkness, Apollo was born in suffering upon the 
 island of Delos. The hymn tells how his mother first 
 wandered from land to land, and how one coast after 
 another refused to receive her, dreading to give birth to 
 the Far-Darter because of the anger of Hera. But at 
 last she came to rugged Delos, and to her prayer that 
 island listened : there for nine days l she laboured in pain 
 and could not be delivered, because Hera hindered the 
 birth. But at length the hour was accomplished, and 
 then the bright one leaped into light, and all the attend- 
 ant goddesses gave a shout (we have here an echo of 
 an old belief petrified in the myth of Memnon that at 
 the hour of sunrise the horizon sends forth a sound 2 ) 
 and Delos grew all golden. Then the goddesses washed 
 him in fair water, purely and holily, and (beautiful picture 
 of the sun wrapped in the golden- threaded clouds of 
 dawn) they wrapped him in a white robe, and around it 
 did a golden band. Thus arose the Far-Darter, the god 
 of the silver bow, whose arrows are the rays, whose 
 golden sword is the heat of the sun. 
 
 The hymn has much to tell us concerning the tradition- 
 
 1 The mystical number nine is especially connected with Apollo (cf. the 
 nine muses) and with the sun ; its curious repetition in the Odysseus myth 
 (see note to p. 303) is the best justification for those who would interpret 
 the wanderings of that hero as a sun myth. I think, however, I have 
 shown in Ch. VI. that the sun myth may have had its influence upon the 
 story of Odysseus without be'ng in any sense its real foundation. 
 
 2 I imagine that the origin of this myth is the realisation of the Hrtli of 
 the sun, and the cry of pain which mother Nature (or mother Earth) 
 
 at that hour. 
 
APOLLO AT DELPHI. 185 
 
 ary spread of Apollo worship, mingling these details 
 with others which belong purely to the nature myth. 
 But we have not a complete biography of Apollo, as we 
 have of Heracles, and for the reason that a life implies a 
 death, and Apollo does not die. He is immortal, un- 
 changeable among the Olympians, next in majesty to his 
 father. All the gods fear him as he goes through the 
 house of Zeus, and all rise from their seats when he 
 passes, stretching his wondrous bow. He is in this hymn 
 a terrible and proud god, who lords it over mortals and 
 immortals. If Apollo's name do really mean 'the de- 
 stroyer,* we cannot doubt that once he was as fierce and 
 dangerous as Ares himself. The sun hero is ever a war- 
 rior. The dark coils of cloud against which Indra 
 launched his thunderbolt wait to devour Apollo, unless he 
 can destroy them first. The cloud serpent Ahi is in this 
 case the Python ; and the serpent destroyer is not now 
 the god of storm, but the sun. No sooner has the god 
 been born than he begins his life of adventure and of 
 war. 
 
 His first journey was that which broiight him to 
 Delphi. The bright open country pleased the god, and he 
 wished to found a temple there. But he was turned from 
 his purpose by the river goddess, Telphusa, who fraudfully 
 persuaded him that the place, with its flocks and herds of 
 wild horses and its races and charioteers, was an unfit 
 place for the solitude of his shrine, and would have him 
 pass on to the gorge of Parnassus. This she did because 
 she desired to keep her renown in the land, and she 
 hoped that Apollo would be killed by the serpent who 
 inhabited the ravine. The god then passed on, and 
 founded a shrine at Crissa (whence it was afterwards 
 moved a little inland to the historic Delphi). Here he 
 discovered the great serpent. Hera had brought this 
 monster forth, like neither to gods nor mortals, a bane to 
 men. And her the Far-Darter slew with his arrows, and 
 she writhed among the woods, and gave up her life, spout- 
 
186 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 ing forth blood. And the sun rotted her carcass, whence 
 she was called Pytlio after death. 
 
 This last myth has a general and a local significance. 
 The general significance is the war which, according to 
 many different mythologies, the sun god carries on against 
 the river god. The great river which is the sum of all the 
 lesser fetiches of this kind is the earth river, which flows all 
 round the world and which the Greeks knew by the name 
 Oceanos. Perhaps in its widest significance the contest 
 between the sun god and the river is a combat with this 
 earth river. For this is the destroyer of the sun.- Into 
 Oceanos the sun sinks every night and dies. The river 
 smothers him in its coils and puts an end to his life ; and 
 before that could happen there must have been a battle 
 between the two. This, I suppose, is the general signifi- 
 cance of the fights between the sun god and the river ; 
 combats which come forward so conspicuously in the case 
 of the Norse god Thorr and the earth-girding serpent 
 Jormungandr. And yet this typical battle is enacted 
 again every time the sun dries up some local stream ; so 
 that in the story of the Python- slay ing, beside the deeper 
 significance which made it the same as the contests of 
 Thorr with Jormungandr, of Heracles with the Lernean 
 hydra, and the combats between Indra and Ahi, there is 
 the relic of a lesser local myth which recorded only the 
 drying up of the stream of Mount Parnassus. 
 
 Much might be said in this place of the myths re- 
 lated of Apollo ; for the myths which belong to the sun 
 are in most systems more numerous than those which 
 attach to any other phenomenon. But the subject of sun 
 myths has perhaps received an undue amount of attention 
 in comparison with the myths of any other part of nature ; 
 and therefore there is no need to stay long upon them 
 here. Among the sun myths which characterise best the 
 nature of Apollo we will glance at one or two. 
 
 In the whole repertory of folk tales there is none more 
 touching nor none which is a greater favourite in popular 
 
HIS WANDERINGS. 187 
 
 lore than that which tells of the hero hiding his great- 
 ness for a while in a servile state, or beneath a beggar's 
 gabardine, receiving the sneers and slights of his com- 
 rades in patience, because he knows that his time will 
 come and he can afford to wait. The story naturally at- 
 taches to the sun, as his life is the type of the heroic 
 one ; and, as we see from the above history, it does not 
 pass over Apollo. For the god was born upon the smallest 
 and ruggedest of all the jEgsean islands ; all other lands 
 rejected him because he was under the ban of Hera. And 
 like the prince when he throws off his disguise and gilds 
 all things with his greatness, and arms himself for heroic 
 deeds, so does Apollo seem when he makes Delos most 
 honoured of all places and rich with many gifts. Accord- 
 ing to another tale, Apollo was, after the slaughter of the 
 Python, for purification from blood, condemned to become 
 a servant and to feed the horses of Admetus ; at another 
 time he served Laomedon and built a wall for him round 
 Ilium. All these stories have the same intent. 
 
 Again, the sun is the wandering god. No sooner was 
 Apollo born than he started upon his travels. He went 
 to rocky Pytho, playing upon his harp. From Olympus 
 he descended to * sandy Lecton to the Magnesians, and 
 went amid the Perrhsebians.' Or, according to another 
 part of the hymn, taking the shape of a dolphin, he guided 
 men from Crete to Crissa, that they might spread abroad 
 his fame in that region. This plunging of the god into 
 the water, and his taking the shape of a fish, is the set- 
 ting of the sun ; and the birth of Apollo in the mid-2Egsean 
 is his rising. Both are alike parts of the sun's daily 
 journey. 
 
 Another example of the connection between Apollo's 
 history and popular lore is to be found in the story told us 
 by Apollodorus, how soon after his birth he was carried 
 away on the back of swans to the country of the Hyper- 
 boreans, where he remained until a year had run out. 
 This is in no way different from that common Teutonic 
 
188 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 legend of the swan knight who as a child is borne away by 
 birds of the same species to some distant land, some 
 earthly paradise, and returns at last in the like fashion. 
 In the case of Lohengrin the knight comes in a barge 
 which a swan is dragging along as he swims ; and so, in 
 this example, Apollo's dolphin voyage and his swan flight 
 through the air are, in a manner, combined into one 
 picture. 
 
 The wandering Apollo led the Dorians to Crissa. But 
 I do not think this was the only occasion on which he 
 became their guide. The sun, in all migrations and in all 
 wanderings, is ever the leader ; and I have no doubt that 
 Apollo had been at the head of all the adventures of the 
 Doric race. But when these last had adopted Heracles 
 from the men of the land to which they came, they trans- 
 ferred this character of leader from the god to the denii- 
 god. As K. O. Miiller says, f everything which is related 
 of the exploits of Heracles in the north of Greece refers 
 exclusively to the history of the Dorians, and conversely all 
 the actions of the Doric race in their earliest settlements 
 are fabulously represented in the person of Heracles.' 1 
 To account for the migrations of the Dorians, a so-called 
 'return of the Heraclidse' was invented and placed under 
 the special guidance of Heracles. 
 
 The transfer to this last god or demi-god of some of 
 the deeds of Apollo had two causes, and has two aspects. 
 In one aspect it was a reassertioii of the importance of 
 the older demi-god, o him, that is to say, whom the 
 Pelasgic Greeks had worshipped before they knew Apollo. 
 But it has another significance beside this. Heracles re- 
 mained essentially the lower divinity, the peasants' god ; 
 Apollo was the god of the higher race. Wherefore it was 
 natural to ascribe to the former those deeds which were 
 most essentially human in character. Apollo was raised 
 to a loftier and remoter sphere so soon as he had been 
 
 1 Dorians, Eng. translation, p. 56. 
 
DEATHS OF APOLLO AND HERACLES. 189 
 
 purged of the more human parts of his nature, and these 
 had been passed over to Heracles. 
 
 We note the effects of this change in one matter of 
 supreme importance belonging to the mythic history of 
 the- sun. We have already seen how necessarily it belongs 
 to the sun's nature that he should be born weak, and 
 suffer hardships in his childhood ; how it belongs to him 
 that he should be a wanderer and a fighte t r. But not less 
 than all this it appertains to his character that he should 
 die. It is this last act which makes the nature of the 
 sun god approach the nearest to human nature. Where- 
 fore it is an action sure to be brought into prominence in 
 the case of a sun god who has sunk some way toward the 
 human level, and is sure to be as much as possible sup- 
 pressed in the case of a god who has come to be raised 
 very high above the level of mankind. This truth is illus- 
 trated in the persons of Heracles and Apollo. 
 
 The dea.th of Heracles is the most impressive incident 
 in all his varied history. No one who reads the account 
 of it can, I think, fail to be struck by the likeness. of the 
 picture to an image of the setting sun. The hero return- 
 ing home, has reached the shore of the JEggean, when 
 Lichas comes to meet him, bearing the fatal shirt poisoned 
 with the blood of Nessus. At starting upon his voyage 
 Heracles puts it on, and straightway the burning folds 
 cling to his body, just as the sunset clouds cling round 
 the setting sun. 1 Feeling that his end is near, Heracles 
 orders Lichas to make him a mound upon Mount (Eta 
 on the western shore of the ^Egsean, as we note and there 
 is he burned. The flame of his pyre shines out far over 
 
 1 All this has been better said in Sir G. Cox's Mythology of the Aryan 
 Nations, and. in the same writer's Tales of Ancient Greece,. I am, I confess, 
 among those who think that the learned writer has used too much in- 
 genuity in hunting out possible ' sun myths.' But that this story and 
 many others are sun myths I feel no manner of doubt. The universality 
 of folk tales argues nothing against the existence of nature myths of this 
 kind. Even if many of the tales had been invented before nature worship 
 began, they would inevitably get transferred to those gods whose characters 
 they fitted. 
 
190 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the sea as the sun's last rays shine out in the light of the 
 fiery sky. So, too, in a Northern myth, Hringhorni, the 
 funeral ship of Balder that is to say, the barque of the 
 sun is described as drifting out burning into the west. 
 The Northmen never upheld the idea that their gods were 
 immortal, and therefore it was no difficulty to them to tell 
 of the death of the sun. Neither was it difficult for the 
 Greeks to tell of the death of Heracles, because Heracles 
 was not one of the true Olympian gods. He had only by 
 sufferance his place on Olympus, and had left behind him 
 in Hades (as a sort of pledge) his shade, which still stalked 
 about those darksome fields. 1 It was far harder to realise 
 that Apollo could ever have suffered death, and accord- 
 ingly we find that the memory of that part of his career 
 was almost forgotten in the latter days. 
 
 Yet there are relics of myths which were myths of 
 Apollo's dying. One is this. When Apollo had slain the 
 Python, he had, as we have seen, to purify himself ; and 
 part of his purification consisted in serving in the stables 
 of Adrnetos, and in tending his horses on the sides of 
 Pierus. 2 Now Admetus, as Otfried Miiller has shown, is 
 really one of the by-names of Hades; so that Apollo's 
 service in this case is a descent to the under world. No 
 doubt but this is some relic of an earlier myth, which 
 gave to the great battle between Apollo and the Serpent 
 a different ending from that now known to us, making the 
 god worsted and not victorious in his fight with the powers 
 of darkness. Another indication of a descent to hell is 
 found in the share which Apollo takes in the recall of 
 Alcestis from the realm of Death and her restoration to her 
 husband. It is here that the likeness between the Greek god 
 and the Christian Saviour which has been insisted on by 
 
 1 Od. xi. 601. Heracles also makes a temporary descent to Hades, 
 and brings back Cerberus. This combat, and that of Heracles with Thana- 
 tos, in the story of Alcestis, are instances of victory over death on the part 
 of the hero. 
 
 2 II. ii. 766. 
 
RSITY 
 
 ZEUS AND APOLLO IN THE ILIAD. 
 
 many writers reaches its culminating point. Of course 
 every sun god must descend to the world of shades, but 
 all do not rise again: none rise more victoriously than 
 Apollo does, harrowing Hell, as it were, and bringing 
 back the spoils in the person of Alcestis. Just so, accord- 
 ing to Middle Age tradition, did Christ, after going down 
 into Hell, spoil from its clutches the patriarchs of the Old 
 Testament, Adam and Abel, Noah, Moses, Abraham, and 
 the greatest among the seed of Abraham. 
 
 lo era nuovo in questo loco, 
 Qnando ci vidi venire nn Possente, 
 Con segno di vittoria incorronato. 
 Trassaci 1' ombra del Primo Parente, 
 D' Abel suo figlio, e quella di Noe, 
 Di Moise legista, e ubbidiente 
 Abraarn Patrarca, e David Be, 
 Israel con suo padre, co' sui nati, 
 E con Bachele per cui tanto fe* 
 Ed altri molti ; e fecegli beati. 
 
 The history of the development of Apollo's character, 
 then, is the gradual exaltation of his nature to suit the 
 growing needs of men. All that was lowest in it, and all 
 that seemed inconsistent with the highest degree of power, 
 all that was fierce and rude, all that was too human in 
 weakness, could be transferred to one of the older sun gods 
 to Heracles, say, or to Ares until at last the god of Hellas 
 became the prototype of the highest development of Greek 
 culture. In Homer he is not only the greatest of all the 
 sun gods ; he is superior in character to almost every 
 other deity. In the Iliad, though Zeus is the most mighty 
 of the two, Apollo's is certainly the more majestic figure. 
 There is something very suggestive in the remoteness of 
 Apollo from the passion of partisanship which sways the 
 other Olympians ; first the terror of his coming to revenge 
 a slight done to himself, and then his withdrawal for a 
 long time from all part in the combat after that injury 
 has been thoroughly atoned for. 
 
192 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 One cannot help seeing a certain analogy in the 
 characters and positions of the chief actors in the drama 
 of the Iliad, Agamemnon and Achilles, and those two 
 heavenly spectators Zeus and Apollo. 1 Zeus is the king 
 of gods, as Agamemnon of men, and, despite the fact that 
 Zeus sides with the Trojans, there is a bond of union 
 between the god and the mortal. Agamemnon always ad- 
 dresses himself first to Zeus, even to the Zeus who rules 
 on Ida, and when the Achseans are sacrificing some to one 
 god, some to another, his prayer is to the King of Heaven. 2 
 The likeness between Apollo and Achilles scarcely needs to 
 be pointed out. Achilles is a sun hero and Apollo is a sun 
 god; that is really all the difference between them. Each 
 is the ideal youth, the representative, one might fairly say, 
 of ' young Greece, 5 that which was to become in after years 
 Hellas. Achilles is from the very primal Hellas, whence 
 the whole country eventually took its name. Apollo and 
 Achilles have the same sense of strength in reserve and 
 an abstinence from participation in the battle going on 
 around : each is provoked to do so only by some very near 
 personal injury. 
 
 M. Didron, in his interesting work on Christian icono- 
 graphy, gives us a sketch of the relative positions in art 
 occupied during the Middle Ages by the two first persons 
 of the Trinity, whence we can gather their positions in 
 popular belief, of which art is the mouthpiece. We find 
 that at first God the Father never appears ; His presence 
 is indicated by a hand or by some other symbol, He has 
 no visible place in the picture ; and when at last He takes 
 a bodily shape, His form is borrowed from that of His 
 Son. It is Christ who, in the monuments of the fourth 
 to the tenth centuries, is generally portrayed performing 
 
 1 On the whole it must be noticed that Zeus and Apollo, unlike Athene 
 and Hera, do not engage personally in the fight Apollo does so once or 
 twice but use their powers as nature gods. Zeus especially acts in this 
 way : Apollo does so in the case of the demolition of the Achaeans' wa.l 
 (bk. xii.) 8ee also the great tight of the gods in the xxth book. 
 
 2 Cf. II. ii. 403, 412 ; iii. 276. 
 
ZEUS AND APOLLO IN THE ILIAD. 193 
 
 those works which, in the Old Testament are ascribed to 
 Jehovah ; Christ makes the world, the sun and moon, and 
 raises Eve out of the side of Adam. Before the tenth cen- 
 tury the usual type of Christ is a very young man. After 
 that century He is some thirty years of age ; and then the 
 Father begins to be seen. He is fashioned in nearly the 
 same manner, and is no older and no younger than His Son. 
 This implies that, during the early ages of Christianity, 
 Christ had quite excluded the Father from the thoughts 
 of most men ; and I think we have only to read the 
 literature of this time the profane literature especially, 
 the histories or memoirs to see that such was the case. 
 The reason of th is was that Christ was the active Divinity ; 
 the history of His life and death, His labours and 
 sufferings, was constantly before the popular mind. He 
 absorbed all characters of the Trinity into His individual 
 person. 
 
 A similar thing, we have seen, happened in the case of 
 Indra and Dyaus, and of Zeus and his predecessor ; the 
 change might have been enacted once more in the case of 
 Zeus and Apollo. And perhaps this would have happened 
 if the Dorians had worked out their religious history for 
 themselves. For the Doric Zeus was an abstract and in- 
 active god ; he alone never would have received, never did 
 receive, great religious honours. 'The supreme deity, 
 when connected with Apollo, was neither born nor visible 
 on earth, and was perhaps never considered as having any 
 immediate influence on men.' l 
 
 As this Doric religion met with the Pelasgic creed, and 
 the active and the passive Zeus had to be rolled into one, 
 and the Apollo to conquer a place for himself in the belief 
 of all Hellas, there was at first, I doubt not, seme conflict 
 between the rival systems; much like that conflict be- 
 tween the earthly Agamemnon and Achilles. Sometimes 
 
 Apollo appears higher and sometimes lower than Zeus. 
 
 
 
 1 Miillcr, Dorian*. 
 O 
 
194 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 In Homer's picture the father is far more susceptible of 
 human passion, far less self-contained and self-reliant, 
 than his son : but then on the other hand Hesiod, writing 
 in the mainland of Greece a century or two later, neglects 
 Apollo almost completely. So that the view which 
 Homer presents of Zeus and his son may have been ex- 
 clusively an Ionic one. And, concerning Zeus, I think 
 we can see that very late as far down, for instance, as the 
 time of .ZEschylus two very different pictures might be 
 presented to the popular mind, the one that of the usurp- 
 ing god of the Prometheus, the other the Zeus to whom 
 the Suppliants pray. 
 
 The mountains have given way to Zeus in a Titan 
 struggle against the new gods ; the trees have been carved, 
 into images of unseen powers ; the fountains, dissolving 
 themselves into mists, have floated heavenwards, and thus 
 a new race of ethereal beings has supplanted those who 
 were born on earth. 
 
 An in tei mediate stage it was while the mist still 
 lingered above the river and the cloud upon the sea. At 
 such a time took place the birth of some among the great 
 goddesses of Greece. Aphrodite, for example, is one 
 among this sisterhood of the mist-born ones, rising as she 
 does from the foam and coming as she comes over the 
 waves of the far-sounding sea, borne on the soft spray ; 
 and another sister is Artemis, who is in reality a river 
 nymph. But chief of all that company is Athene Trito- 
 geneia, the daughter of Triton. 1 Triton means not water 
 in the abstract, but some definite form of it, as a par- 
 ticular inlet or river or strait, and the Athene of each 
 place had no doubt her parentage in the particular piece 
 of water known to that place. It were not too much to 
 say that the Athene of Athens was the child of Ilissus 
 
 no mean god even in late times, for he had his place 
 
 
 
 1 She is called also TrovTia, Ba\a<ra-ia, etin\oia sea-born, in a word, like 
 Aphrodite. 
 
ATHN. 195 
 
 on the pediment of the Parthenon and that out of the 
 worship of that very river first sprang the conception of 
 the Athenian goddess. For of course each place had its 
 local fountain and local nymph. It was a matter of 
 chance which of the fountain goddesses attained pre- 
 eminence and extended her name over the rest. This 
 alone is certain : whatever the history of Athene's origin, 
 whichever among the worshipped mists it may have been 
 who was her prototype, the subsequent career of the god- 
 dess was such as to make her peculiarly adaptive to Greek 
 ideas ; so that she became at last the most truly Hellenic 
 of all the watery divinities. 
 
 The same fate did not attend all. Aphrodite was born 
 in some region where she was subject to Oriental in- 
 fluences ; from which she received into her nature most 
 of the peculiar characteristics of the neighbouring Eastern 
 goddesses, such as the Astarte of the Phoenicians, the 
 Mylitta of the Babylonians. These were properly earth 
 goddesses, and had all the sensuous character which 
 belongs to this order of beings. And so Aphrodite be- 
 came earthy and sensuous. Yet she is to be seen in 
 other guises. She was sometimes represented armed like 
 Athene, and in such guise she was scarcely distinguish- 
 able from Pallas. 
 
 If, then, it was an accident of birth which transformed 
 Aphrodite into Kupris, an accident of birth and of edu- 
 cation, it was an accident also which rescued Athene 
 from such blighting influences. There are two genea- 
 logies for the race of goddesses. One is of the earth, and 
 then the deity is Prithivi or Demeter, who marries the 
 heaven god, and becomes either the ideal mother goddess 
 or else, like the Mylitta of Babylon, the Cybele of Phrygia, 
 the Astarte. of Tyre, a goddess of sensuous delights. 
 The other birth is from the stream or the sea, and then, 
 if she follow her natural instincts, the goddess rises 
 heavenward, and becomes first the cloud, and after merges 
 into the wind or the air. It belongs to the essential cha- 
 
 o 2 
 
196 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 racter of such an one that she is not sensuous. Her 
 special characteristic is her maidenhood. Athene is ever 
 called in Homer Maid Athene (Pallas- Athene). Parthenos, 
 another word for virgin, was her peculiar title. Indeed, 
 it was so recognisedly a sufficient designation of her at 
 Athens, that her temple was called the Parthenon simply, 
 instead of the more natural Athenaion (Athenaeum). In 
 the Homeric hymn addressed to her she is called Core 
 (/covprj). In another Homeric hymn, addressed to Aphro- 
 dite, it is said that there are but three whom the Queen 
 of Love has never subdued, and these are Hestia, Athene, 
 and Artemis. 
 
 And here let me turn aside a moment to point out to 
 the reader how the essential identity in the characters of 
 Athene and Artemis is indicated by their virgin natures. 
 We know how universally the latter goddess was cele- 
 brated for her chastity and modesty, so that even to see 
 her naked, as Actseon did, was a mortal offence, which did 
 not fail to meet with mortal punishment ; while, on the 
 other hand, it was a sin no less deadly for Artemis' 
 maidens to offend against the moral sense of the goddess 
 by breaking their vows of maidenhood as in the case of 
 Callisto. Now we find Athene sufficiently designated as 
 Parthenos, the maiden par excellence. And yet those who 
 had known both Athene and Artemis could never have used 
 the names Pallas and Parthenos as synonyms for Athene. 
 Seeing, then, that chastity is the leading characteristic of 
 Artemis (as the most important myths about her show), 
 and that the chastity, i.e. the maidenhood, of Athene was 
 so necessary and distinctive a part of her nature that she 
 was known as the maiden, we are justified in saying that 
 Artemis and Athene were of identical nature. 
 
 Artemis was originally a stream ; she was of the same 
 nature as her attendant nymph the c leaping ' Atalanta, 1 
 one of the great mythic huntresses of antiquity and un- 
 
 to leap. 
 
AND AETEMIS. 197 
 
 doubtedly a fountain. Athene, too, was originally born of 
 the stream. Both were, on account of this birth, pure 
 maidens; and being such, both became afterwarda con- 
 founded with the moon. 1 Apollo and Athene are neces- 
 sarily closely connected, as the idealisations of the young 
 male divinity and the young female divinity ; still closer, 
 however, is the relationship between Apollo and Artemis. 
 
 Artemis, then, was at first the same as Athene. The 
 two had the same origin in the outer world of phenomena, 
 and for awhile their characters must have unfolded side 
 by side. But the circumstances of their after lives were 
 very different. Artemis was a goddess chiefly of the less 
 cultured populations of Greece that is to say, of those 
 who dwelt in the interior of the Peloponnese. Athene, 
 on the contrary, became the tutelary divinity of the most 
 highly civilised city in all Hellas. She daily waxed 
 greater, and the other waned. Athene's history was pre- 
 served by the best literature of Greece ; Artemis was left 
 in the shade among her Arcadian shepherds, and fell 
 down to the second rank of goddesses. This difference in 
 their respective histories was partly accidental : it was, at 
 all events, independent of their essential natures, and 
 arose only out of the varied fortunes of their votaries. 
 Therefore what we have to say of the birth of the tutelary 
 goddess of Athens, of her first issue from the phenomena 
 out of which she was formed, and the earliest pages of her 
 history, may apply in great measure to Artemis as well. 
 
 I have said that at first there may be as many Trito- 
 geneias as there are separate pieces of water to give them 
 birth. Pallas- Athene, j] TrapOsvos, was once the special 
 maiden goddess of Athens, sprung from the water which 
 watered Athens : no more than this. Or, if more than 
 this, she was at all events the goddess of only one section 
 
 1 Athene's relationship to the moon appears in many ways. As a 
 mariner's goddess she was confounded with Astarte. She was also identified 
 with the Gorgon (cf. the expression yopywwis), and, whatever Medusa was 
 at first, she came to be thought of as the full moon. 
 
198 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of the Greek race. Aphrodite was the water deity of 
 another section of the Cypriotes, for example, and those 
 Greeks who came most under the influence of Asiatic 
 thought. Artemis filled the same place with a third 
 division the shepherd races of the inland. Athene stood, 
 in a fashion, between the two ; she was more Asiatic than 
 Artemis, more Greek than Aphrodite. So she was de- 
 stined to lord it over all her compeers. One of the Trito- 
 geneias must inevitably have risen to pre-eminence, and 
 have thrust the others into the shade. When this event 
 did happen, Aphrodite became the goddess of an abstrac- 
 tion Love. Artemis became the moon. 
 
 Gods and goddesses who once ruled over much greater 
 phenomena often seem to find a last refuge in one or other 
 of the heavenly bodies. Even Jupiter lived to be con- 
 founded with a star. Astarte, who was originally (I sus- 
 pect) an earth goddess, came to be, like Artemis, identified 
 with the moon. The great Mitra and Vanma, of whom 
 we spoke in the last chapter, descended first to become 
 the Asvin of Yedic mythology, and then descended further, 
 to be in the persons of the Dioscuri confounded with the 
 morning and evening stars. But to return to Athene and 
 her history. 
 
 This goddess succeeded in absorbing in herself the 
 highest parts of the characters of Artemis and Aphrodite. 
 She also in a certain measure subdued Hera to follow her 
 nature. It has been said that Hera was more a goddess 
 of heaven than of earth. But she was this, not in virtue 
 of her own nature, but of her being the wife of Zeus. 
 And in leaving her rightful element, she left behind her 
 some of her individual character. Hera had not the same 
 rights in the heavenly regions which Athene possessed. 
 When we see Hera and Athene acting in concert, as we 
 do throughout the Iliad, we must regard Athene as being 
 actually, if not in name, the leader. Hera's being is 
 merged in Athene's : she forgets that she is a wife ; she 
 acts of her own will and not in proper obedience to her 
 
HYMN TO ATHN. 199 
 
 husband. Hera is a cloud when she and Pallas come 
 flying down to the Grecian ranks side by side like two 
 doves sailing through the air. She is a heaven goddess 
 when she steals the thunders of Zeus. But Athene does 
 not need to steal from Zeus ; she wears the aegis by right ; 
 and the segis is the thunder cloud. 
 
 Zeus, from being the heaven, became the stormy sky 
 and even the cloud; Athene, in a contrary way, being 
 first the cloud, was refined as time went on into the air 
 and into the sky. She came eventually to be the Queen 
 of the Air : but we must not so think of her at first. She 
 was originally a stormy goddess ; and when not the cloud 
 itself, then the wind or the thunder storm, which are 
 born of the cloud. To her and to Zeus alone did the 
 aegis belong by right : each, it would seem, had their own 
 aegis, that terrible corselet fringed with Horror and girt 
 about with Fear, whose true nature is not difficult to 
 divine. 1 The origin of the cloud in the water is soon for- 
 gotten, and so was the first birth of Athene. To Homer 
 the epic Homer she was only Tritogeneia, daughter of 
 Triton. But to the author of the Homeric hymn and to 
 all later mythologists Athene had another and a higher 
 parentage : she was born again to be the daughter of Zeus. 
 The story of this Athene's second birth (it is really a 
 second birth and like that of Agni from the wood, only 
 she ascends from earth to heaven and he comes down 
 from heaven to earth) is that which became so favourite 
 a subject for vase paintings and sculpture, and which is in 
 the hymn thus told :-- 
 
 ' I begin my song to Pallas-Athene, the glorious grey- 
 eyed goddess, wise in counsel, having an untender heart, 
 the revered virgin, our city ward and mighty; Tritogeneia; 
 
 1 'And about her shoulders she threw the aegis fringed with Horror, 
 which Fear rings round ; thereon was Strife, and Might and chilling Rout ' 
 (/Z. v. 738 sq.) And again, in II. xv. 229, alylSa, Owvavfaffffav. The fringe is 
 the lightning which issues from the cloud. 
 
200 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 whom counselled Zeus alone brought forth from his re- 
 verend head, clothed in her warlike golden panoply, shining 
 on every side. And awe possessed all the immortals who 
 saw this thing. But she quickly leapt from the immortal 
 front of aegis-bearing Zeus, shaking her bitter spear, and 
 great Olympus quaked in fear before the wrath of the 
 grey-eyed one. And round the earth a horrid sound re- 
 sounded, and the sea was stirred and tossed its purple 
 water. Then suddenly the salt wave stood still, and Hy- 
 perion's glorious son (the sun) stayed long the going of 
 his swift-foot steeds until the maid (KovpTj) took from her 
 immortal shoulders that godlike armour ; and counselled 
 Zeus rejoiced ! ' 
 
 6 Having an untender heart ; ' and why ? What is 
 this wrath of the grey-eyed goddess which all fear? It is 
 the rage of the storm. The very word used here (ftpi^r)) 
 is expressive of the grinding thunder. It means literally 
 not so much the mere emotion of anger as the outward 
 expression of it, such as snorting. Athene is cruel 
 because the lightning is cruel, grey-eyed because the 
 cloud is grey. She has been the river and the river mist ; 
 but that is forgotten. What she seems now is the storm 
 cloud begot in the heavens in the head of Zeus. Her 
 golden panoply is the storm all armed and ready with the 
 flash. For see how the old nature meaning of the myth 
 peeps out under its thin disguise. Dread possessed all the 
 immortals when she ' leapt forth in a moment ' as the 
 lightning leaps from heaven brandishing a sharp spear ; 
 and great Olympus shook before her snorting. The storm, 
 we see, had begun. 'And all about the earth a horrid 
 din went round. . . .' 
 
 Presently we pass to another image closely allied to 
 these images, but somewhat different from them. Just 
 now Athene was the storm itself, almost the lightning 
 itself, when she leapt forth from heaven. But change the 
 image a little ; let her be simply the cloud ; then her arms 
 
THE STOKM. 201 
 
 are the thunder and the lightning. The Vedic Maruts 
 have the same panoply. * They put 011 golden armour ; 
 their spears send down sparks. They lift the mountains ; 
 the forest trees shake before them.' When the lightning 
 has gone forth and the thunder rolled, then Athene, the 
 cloud, has laid aside her weapons. Who does not know the 
 stillness with which nature awaits that moment of flash 
 and crash ? Here it is recorded how the salt wave stood still 
 and the glorious sun stayed the going of his steeds, until 
 the maid put from her shoulders that immortal panoply : 
 and counselled Zeus rejoiced the sky itself grew clear. 
 
 It is in her aspect as a grim storm goddess that Athene 
 first appears to us in Greek poetry. It is in virtue of this 
 fighting power that she is troXids, city guardian. We see 
 that well enough by the epithets which follow one another 
 in the hymn. Athene is ' untender-hearted ' (a^uXi^ov 
 r)Top s^ovcra), and therefore 'revered ' (alBoirj ) ; and because 
 she was so dread and so revered she was the best of 
 guardians for the city. Wherefore it was that the oldest 
 temple to Athene at Athens was the temple of Athene 
 Polias, and therefore was it that she was worshipped in so 
 many towns under that name. 
 
 There is so much likeness between the natures of Zeus 
 and Athene, both being at one time personifications of the 
 sky and at another time personifications of the storm, 
 that it need not surprise us to find that the epithet 
 iro\ivs belonged especially to Zeus. But we do not appre- 
 ciate the full force of such a phrase as applied either to 
 father or daughter, if we only think of the polis of 
 historic days. Let us turn for a moment to think of pre- 
 historic times that is to say, of days when Zeus and 
 Athene partook much more of the elemental nature from 
 which they had sprung, than they ever seem to do in 
 literature. In such days the TroTus- was not the ordered 
 city, the centre of a busy life, suggestive only of the ' sweet 
 security of streets,' and remote from fear of the unseen 
 power of the storm. It was, on the contrary, a little 
 
202 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 palisaded village, situate in a wild country, surrounded by 
 lonely tracts of forest and of marsh. Each village was a 
 tribe and a nation to itself; and there was war slumbering 
 or awake between each community and its neighbour. 
 Over the wild region which surrounded this little oasis 
 of human life presided the God of Storms. If he was 
 friendly to the village, if he was a true city-ward to it, 
 then he howled with destructive vengeance round the 
 tribe which was coming to its attack. This was the 
 ancient character of the Zsvs nroKisvs. When we come to 
 study the beliefs of the German races, we shall find in 
 their social condition a better example of the community 
 which I have been imagining, descended from the village 
 community of old Aryan days. We shall see how among 
 the Germans each collection of houses cut itself off from 
 neighbouring villages by a mar k or forest* track, and how 
 this mark was ever placed under the guardianship of the 
 God of Storms. 
 
 It seems strange that Athene and Zeus should have 
 remained such distinct individualities, and yet that there 
 should have been really so little distinctive in their two 
 natures. If we compare either their possessions and attri- 
 butes, or their most characteristic deeds, we shall see that 
 very many of these are partaken of by both. There often 
 is no clear distinction between Zeus and Athene. She 
 is then little else than the feminine counterpart of her 
 father. As we have seen, each was essentially a city 
 guardian ; and Athene alone beside her father possessed 
 the segis and wielded the thunder. 1 There is something 
 very appropriate in the way that in Homer the goddess 
 and the god are made to take opposite sides in the Great 
 Siege. The storm may well have seemed to range itself 
 now with one camp, now with another. The thunder 
 might come from Ida, and then it was sent by Zeus ; 2 or 
 
 1 In II. ii. 447 Athene is shown as possessing an aegis of her own ; in 
 v. 733, &c., she borrows that of her father ; in xi. 45 Athene and Hera 
 together thunder. 2 Cf. viii. 170; xvii. 593. 
 
THE GODDESS OF WISDOM. 203 
 
 it might come from the west, whitening the waves of the 
 sea, and then it was Athene and Hera flying together from 
 Olympus. But in the double natures of both Zeus and 
 Athene there is full scope for a difference in their outward 
 appearance. Zeus is not only the stormy sky ; he is like- 
 wise, and more rightfully, the clear heaven. He may be 
 a passionate and changeful being, or he may be the all- 
 knowing, the wise counsellor, the just judge. 
 
 Such changes as these belong partly to the change of 
 Athene's natural character, partly to the development of 
 her ethical nature. They can be observed passing over 
 the goddess of Homer, and they become more noticeable 
 when we pass on to poets later than Homer. In the 
 Iliad the goddess appears essentially as the fighter, 'A #771/77 
 Trpo/Aa^oy, 1 a character which is, as we have seen, inti- 
 mately connected with her old name of Athene Polias. 
 In the Odyssey another side of her nature becomes con- 
 spicuous. She is there the wise counsellor (7ro\v/3ov\os, 
 7ro\vfjLr)Tis)y and a divinity. appropriately adored by the 
 cunning seafarers and merchants for whom the Odyssey 
 was written. 
 
 I will not say, however, that this side of Athene's 
 character, ' the wise one,' was not of very ancient origin, 
 and has not as much as her fierce, stormy character its 
 origin in the phenomenon from which she grew. Nay, in 
 some respects it even seems to have the oldest birth. We 
 have seen how Athene was first of all water-born, whereby 
 she was called TpiToyevsia, irowria, 6a\daa-ia, sv7r\oia. She 
 was also a daughter of Metis, who was in later times 
 ' Counsel' (an abstraction), but in her earlier days a water 
 nymph, a daughter of ocean. 2 This birth from Metis had 
 a certain connection with the epithet TroXv/jLrjns ; and it is 
 
 1 Athene is not called PromacJios in the Iliad, but that word more than 
 any other expresses her character there. Compare especially Iliad, iv. 43 ( J, 
 where Athene is coupled with Ares and with Deimos, Phobos, and Eris ; 
 v. 29, where she is again in special opposition to Ares ; v. 333, where her 
 name is coupled with that of Enyo. 
 
 2 Preller, Griech. Myth. i. 160. 
 
204 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 not difficult to show what that connection was. Metis was 
 an Oceanic!. The Oceanids were not the waves, but the 
 rivers. And rivers have always been associated with pro- 
 phecy. Every mythology has its wise women, who are 
 the guardians of a fountain or stream. In the Eddas 
 such beings are to be seen in the ' weird sisters three ' 
 who keep the well of Urd, which stands under Yggdrasill. 
 Originally these three maidens were themselves personifi- 
 cations of wells or streams. The Pythoness was the water 
 of Delphi, and was one with the nymph Telphusa ; later 
 on she was the wise maiden of the sacred stream. The 
 wells of knowledge or of magic, or the fountains of youth 
 which we meet with in myth and legend, are no more 
 than the narrowing to particular instances of the magic 
 and sacredness and healing gifts which were once uni- 
 versally attributed to streams. And it so happens that of 
 the many kinds of supernatural power which these as 
 fetiches once possessed, their knowledge and cunning re- 
 mained with them the longest. Wherefore the serpent, 
 which is in every mythology symbolical of the river, is 
 everywhere held to be e more subtle than any beast of the 
 field.' It is not difficult, then, to see whence Athene 
 draws her cunning and wisdom. 
 
 By the process of the survival of the fittest, this was 
 the part of the goddess' nature which lived the longest ; 
 because, as men advance in civilisation, they set more 
 value upon intellectual gifts and less value upon mere 
 animal courage and capacity for fighting. Hence the 
 very noticeable change which, as we shall presently see, 
 has passed over the character of Athene when we turn 
 from the Iliad to the Odyssey. 
 
 An important deed of Pallas beside those which she is 
 made to perform in Homer, was the help which she gave 
 to Perseus in his expedition against the Gorgons. Besides 
 the aegis, Athene possessed the shield into which Medusa's 
 head had been fixed, and which was hence called the gor- 
 goneion. The adventure of Perseus is most evidently a pure 
 
MEDUSA. 205 
 
 nature myth, and the gorgoneion jnust therefore belong 
 to Athene in her nature character. Concerning Perseus 
 there is no doubt. He is the sun, the hero who, like 
 Surya, 'wanders up and down upon his path,' 1 veiling 
 himself in things alike and unlike (i.e. hiding his form 
 in the petasos of Hermes). We have first to note him on 
 his western journey, how by the fitful winds he was borne 
 through endless space, and from the lofty sky looked down, 
 on the far-removed earth, and sped over all the world ; 
 how he saw Arcturus cold and the claws of Cancer, and was 
 carried now to the east, now to the west. And then, fol- 
 lowing him on his journey, we may see him at day's 
 decline staying on the borders of Atlas' kingdom, upon 
 the edge of earth, where the sea is ever ready to receive 
 the panting horses of the Sun and his wearied car. 2 Here 
 Perseus is not the sun seen as the god who travels upon 
 right ond changeless paths, but as the sun hero who is 
 essentially a wanderer. The Medusa head, as we see it 
 in early art, presents a hideous face, with the tongue 
 lolling out and sharp teeth agrin. It is, in fact, the 
 strange misshapen waning moon, which before dawn we 
 may see hanging over the western horizon. Soon the 
 rising sun will strike it dead. Medusa herself is a kind 
 of goddess of death, the queen of that western world of 
 shades. As art advanced, she grew milder, until she 
 became like Hypnos, a soft embodiment of rest. But 
 she was Death for all that. 
 
 Some have supposed, however, that the Gorgon was 
 not originally the moon, but the storm, and to this notion 
 her connec tion with Athene gives some colour. For the 
 truth is, Athene and Medusa are one and the same being 
 seen under different aspects. Athene herself is called 
 gorgon-faced (yopy&Tris), 3 and I have little doubt that she 
 
 1 Rig Veda, *. 177, 3. 2 Cf. Met. iv. 622 sqq. 
 
 8 Topy&iris or yopywir6s is of course a general synonym for fierce-looking, 
 and as such is applied to Hector "E/crwp . . . Topyovs 6/j.fj.aT' ex wj/ (^. viii. 
 348, 9). But as a special epithet of Athene it has a deeper meaning than 
 'fierce' only. 
 
206 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 was once represented by a face not unlike that archaic 
 gorgon one. Such an instance of absorption by a divinity 
 of his or her earlier being is very common in the history 
 of mythology. The Gorgon must, then, have been at first 
 the storm, and afterwards the waning moon. The battle 
 of the sun god and the cloud is universal ; and this may 
 have been the first meaning of Perseus' slaying Medusa. 
 Afterwards a more fanciful mythology would convert it 
 into the death of the moon. 
 
 Athene's being the daughter of the cloud and also of 
 the water to inland men of the river, but to those by 
 the coast of the sea gave her a peculiar connection with 
 navigation, and made her the special patroness of those 
 among the Greek nationality who first practised such an 
 art. There was an additional reason for her becoming the 
 goddess of sailors, and that was a certain amount of 
 confusion between her and the Phoenician Astarte. To 
 inland men she or I would rather say the maiden 
 goddess, the Parthenos, the Pallax came to be represented 
 by Artemis ; to those who were most orientalised she was 
 merged in Astarte or Aphrodite ; while to the intermediate 
 class she kept her proper individuality. 
 
 Now this intermediate class was formed of precisely 
 the men who made Hellas what it was. They were the 
 Javan, the lonians, the dwellers by the sea of either coast, 
 the adventurers, the merchants, the lovers of art. Where- 
 fore Athene became patron of all these pursuits. She 
 was the sea goddess of the newer men, in opposition to 
 Poseidon, who was the sea god of the Pelasgians. Whence 
 the contest between them. 
 
 These I take to be the chief constituents which go to 
 make up the character of the water-born goddess. Some 
 essential features of this character are to be traced all 
 through the history of Athene worship, until (shall we 
 say) she reappears in neo-Platonist and Christian mytho- 
 logy as the Divine Sophia or as the Yirgin herself. But 
 of course Athene's ethic being tends continually to dim 
 
THE SEA GODDESS. 207 
 
 her natural being. We shall do well to adhere generally 
 to the rule laid down that we ought to seek in Homer 
 alone for anything like a nature god or goddess ; where- 
 fore, in concluding this sketch of Athene, we will turn 
 back again to recapitulate in a few words the leading 
 features of her character as that is portrayed in the Iliad 
 and in the Odyssey. 
 
 We have first to remember that Athene is always Trito- 
 geneia here, and we must therefore think of her always as 
 the cloud in some form. In the Iliad she is the storm 
 cloud especially. Zeus thunders from Ida 1 that is, from 
 the Troy side and his seat is there ; 2 while that of the 
 rest of the gods is on the European side namely, upon 
 Olympus. 3 Thus Zeus becomes an image of the storm 
 which from landward bears against the Greeks. Apollo 
 (the sun), too, came from the east, and so he seemed to 
 be ranged upon the side of the Dardanians. Apollo came 
 from Pergamos to oppose Athene coming from Olympus ; 
 but when the sun had sloped toward the west, Apollo's 
 power to help his allies failed him. ' So long, then, as 
 the sun was climbing to mid-heaven the weapons reached 
 both sides with equal power, and the people fell ; but when 
 the sun had passed on towards eventide, then were the 
 Greeks the mightier in despite of fate.' 4 
 
 And now for the Greek befriending deities. 5 Athene 
 is meant to be the chief and leader of these. Hera seems 
 sometimes the leader, for this is suitable to her place as 
 Queen of Heaven ; but her genius is really overpowered 
 
 1 viii. 170; xvii. 593. 2 viii. 397, &c. 3 viii. 438, &c. 
 
 4 H. xvi. 777, &c. The morning is more taken account of than the 
 evening. This is perhaps why both Apollo and Ares seem on the side of 
 the Easterns. The sun was really so till midday. The other deities who 
 side with the Trojans are Artemis and Lcto (who go with brother and 
 son) ; Xanthus, a local river god ; and Aphrodite", of Eastern origin. 
 
 5 The divinities who side with the Greeks, the Westerns and the in- 
 vaders, are Hera (only because her nature is overpowered by Athene's), 
 the two rulers of the sea, Athene and Poseidon (one as the storm, the 
 wind, or cloud, the other as the sea itself), Hermes (god of the West and 
 of Death ; see Ob. VI.), and Hephaestus. See book xx. 
 
208 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 * rebuked, as it is said Marc Antony's was by Caesar ' bj 
 the genius of Athene. We see this the more plainly when 
 we have followed the history of the goddesses into the 
 second epic ; for there we find that Hera has sunk to in- 
 significance, while Athene retains all her ancient power 
 with something added. Even in the Iliad Athene some- 
 times orders and Hera obeys ; l and this seems a very re- 
 markable thing when we remember the difference of their 
 nominal positions and the actual difference of a generation 
 between them. Generally Hera and Athene go side by 
 side, flying together, 2 or driving side by side in the chariot. 3 
 Wherefore we may take them for two embodiments of the 
 storm or the storm cloud coming ( in speed like doves ' to 
 meet Zeus, who conies up from the other side, whitening 
 the .ZEgsean as they pass over it. It has been already 
 noted how both Athene and Hera can wield the thunder. 
 
 Before we leave Athene's character in the Iliad we 
 must notice the epithets which attach to her. Tritogeneia 
 has been spoken of; Polybulos (7ro\vftov\o$) is the same 
 as Poly metis (TroXu/^Tts-), and belongs of right to this 
 river-born goddess. Agelia (a/e\evrj) she is frequently 
 named, a word of doubtful significance which may be ren- 
 dered 'forager' or 'shepherdess' (aye\rj) 9 both epithets 
 connecting Athene with Artemis ; but the second probably 
 the original one. In this case the clouds may be the 
 sheep, and Athene may be likened to the wind. Gorgopis 
 
 1 viii. 381. 
 
 2 v. 778. Athen often takes the form of a bird (especially of a 
 swallow). Moreover, the winged sandals (TreStXa), which characterise 
 Hermes in sculpture, are Athene's property as well. Now, Hermes is the 
 wind (see Ch. VI.) As Athene has the ireStKa, so has Freyja, the chief 
 among the Valkyriur (see Ch. VII.), a feather robe (fiatSrhamr). The 
 Valkyriur correspond to Athene in nature. 
 
 Next to the wind the sun may be presented in the form of a bird. He 
 is addressed as one in the Rig Veda. On II. vii. 57 Heyne comments, 
 ' Ridiculum hoc, si Minerva et Apollo in vultures mutantur aut vulturum 
 speciem assumunt. Comparatio spectat ad hoc solum, quod in arbore consi- 
 dunt et pugnam inde prospectant ' (vol. v. p. 318). Heyne, however, did 
 not suspect the nature origin of these divinities. See Zeitsch. f. verg. Sp, 
 xv. (1866), 88 sqq. s viii. 1 c. 
 
ATHN AND POSEIDON. 209 
 
 , fierce-eyed, may also be rendered Gorgon- 
 faced, and affords in either signification good reason for 
 supposing that Athene and the Gorgon were once the 
 same. 
 
 Now we pass on to the Odyssey, where Athene reigns 
 almost supreme. Odysseus is, in the language of the 
 German legends, Athene's Lielliny ; his failures and 
 successes typify the fortunes of Athene's special votaries. 
 And who are these ? They are the merchant pirates, the 
 sea rovers, the discoverers, the Greek Hawkinses and 
 Drakes, whose time of power succeeded to the older aris- 
 tocratic days commemorated in the Iliad. The poet of the 
 Iliad sang to the rich and powerful princes of the .ZEgsean 
 shores ; the poet of the Odyssey, too, sang in coast towns 
 of the JSgsean, 1 but no longer to petty kings, rather to the 
 merchantmen and the loungers in the market. Of these 
 cunning ' many-de viced ' traders Athene is the patron 
 saint. The worship of her is so fervent that it admits no 
 rivalry in her own domain, and therefore she has driven 
 to the background the older god of the sea. Athene and 
 Poseidon had been friendly in the Iliad ; in the Odyssey 
 they are constantly opposed. And because Odysseus puts 
 out the eye of the Cyclops, who is Poseidon's son, and yet 
 eventually escapes the vengeance of the Sea God, Athene 
 must be held to triumph in the end. 
 
 ' Once,' says the author of the ' Imitation,' ' the children 
 of Israel said to Moses, Speak thou to us, and we will hear 
 thee. But let not the Lord speak unto us, lest we die. This, 
 O Lord, is not my prayer, but with humility and with 
 fervour I say to Thee, as Samuel the Prophet says, Speak, 
 Lord, for Thy servant heareth.' The awfulness which 
 enwrapped the God of the Jews disappeared in the milder 
 nature of Christ. The greatness of a prophetic mission 
 is no longer needed to gain a hearing of the Deity ; and 
 
 1 He is quite ignorant of the geography of Ithaca, and indeed of all 
 coasts beyond Cape Matapau. See Bunbury's Geography of the Ancients. 
 
 P 
 
210 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the voice of the Lord is now still and small and uttered in 
 the human breast, not amid the thunders of Sinai. This 
 characterises the change from the older to the newer 
 creed; something of the same kind was the revolution 
 which the worship of Apollo and of Athene brought about 
 in the religion of Greece. It was in this case, as in 
 the other, a meeting-point between God and humanity; 
 and though there is little moral resemblance between 
 Christianity and the religion of Hellas, yet there was 
 in this particular matter a likeness in the development of 
 each. 
 
 The belief of Christianity is a belief in the beauty of 
 ' holiness ; the creed of Hellas was a belief in the beauty of 
 the world and of mankind. Nature was no longer terrible 
 to those who had grown to understand her better. They 
 were not only in a new nature, but they looked upon nature 
 with new eyes. Once Zeus had embodied all that seemed 
 most impressive in the world around the dark rugged 
 land, the storm heard in the forests, and the sea raging 
 against the shore. And he was in himself the soul of such 
 scenes. To him might have been addressed the words of 
 Patroclus to Achilles 
 
 Grey ocean bore thee, and the lofty rocks; for cruel are thy 
 thoughts. 
 
 But when Apollo and Athene had taken their place 
 beside Zeus, men saw the sun rise in a milder majesty, and 
 the airs grew calmer, and the hills were clothed with 
 purple brightness. From the bare mountains of Thrace, 
 from windy heights and perilous seas, the Greeks had passed 
 to the .ZEgsean, to its safe harbours and its thousand laugh-, 
 ing islands ; they had exchanged the lonely life of shepherds 
 for the security of streets, for commerce, and for luxury. 
 Apollo was a lover of nature, but not in her most terrible 
 aspects ; ' the high watches pleased him and the far-reach- 
 ing mountain-tops, and the rivers that run into the deep, 
 and the shores stretching dmvn to the sea, and the sea's 
 
APOLLO AND ATHENE THE MEDIATORS. 211 
 
 harbours.' l Wherever on the Asiatic coast some promon- 
 tory extended commanding a wide horizon there was sure 
 to have stood from old times a temple to the sun god. 
 From such places, from those high watches, men saw him 
 as he rose, and prayed to him when he sank into the 
 waters. He went, they deemed, to an unseen divine land 
 whither the dead heroes had gone before. And before he 
 quite descended he seemed to stand as a messenger between 
 men and that future world. It was not so much the far- 
 off heaven of the gods to which he was going, as to the 
 happy land of the blessed set apart for mortals ; and the 
 two worlds between which he stood were both human 
 habitations, though one was the world of the living and 
 the other of the dead. Therefore Apollo was always the 
 friend of man and accessible to human prayer. 
 
 Hear me, O King, who art somewhere in the rich realm of 
 Lycia or of Troy ; for everywhere canst thou hear a man in 
 sorrow, such as my sorrow is. 2 
 
 The rare capacity for art, which was the inheritance of 
 the Greek race, must soon have lightened its first fear 
 of nature, both in making -the latter more familiar and 
 in raising man in his own eyes by showing him himself 
 able in a way to fashion nature, and therefore possessed of 
 some part of the creative faculty which belongeth to God. 
 Athene and Apollo were not associated only with the 
 beauties which sunlight and calm air can give, but with 
 those fashioned beauties which are the aim of all artistic 
 striving. Athene was the patroness of the goldsmith's 
 art, of cunning workmanship and of embroidery down to 
 the housewife's skill. All the arts were Apollo's care ; but 
 most of all music that is to say, rhythmic movement of 
 limbs or of words with the harmony of sound accom- 
 panying such movement ; for such the Greek understood 
 by his word music, which meant for him the sum of all 
 culture. The Pelasgic Zeus had chosen for his home the 
 
 1 Hymn in Apol. 2 Prayer of Glaucus, II. xvi. 514 sqq. 
 
 p 2 
 
212 OUTLINES OF P1UMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 groves or the bare mountain-tops. But Apollo's dwelling 
 was a house made with hands; to him were dedicated 
 some of the earliest temples. Apollo gave the Greeks the 
 first need of surpassing the shapeless images which had 
 been sufficient representatives of the other deities. Among 
 early sculptures the statues of Apollo are by far the most 
 frequent ; and we must consider the later images of other 
 youthful gods of Hermes, for example, or the beardless 
 Dionysus as no more* than variations upon the original 
 Apollo type. 
 
 The wonderful ideal type of Greek manly beauty may 
 thus in a manner be ascribed to the worship of this sun 
 god ; the ideal of womanhood, to the worship of Athene. 
 For it were unreasonable to suppose that the perfections 
 of Greek sculpture represented the realities of life. The 
 humanity of the god or goddess was always an exalted, 
 idealised manhood. 
 
 We have, then, traced the history of these Hellenic 
 deities through a series of changes corresponding to certain 
 definite phases of religious growth, and in these phases we 
 have seen how a change of outward circumstances implied 
 a parallel change in ethic and in inward development. 
 The first appearance of Zeus upon the scene the Greek 
 Zeus, I mean, as distinguished from the Indian Dyaus is 
 indicative of the dawn of the anthropomorphic spirit, 
 when the phenomenon which moves and acts has obli- 
 terated that which was constant. As yet there was no ques- 
 tion of an ideal man, no desire for ethic or for any moral 
 law ; all that was needed was that the god should have 
 that one human quality of will and power ; and this the 
 Pelasgic god essentially possessed. Then came the rise of 
 morality ; the gods not only became men, but they became 
 ideal men ; and in this change Apollo was the conspicuous 
 figure. The statues of Apollo express the very perfecting 
 of an anthropomorphic creed. But after a while this in 
 its turn failed to satisfy the needs of men, for they 
 required their divinity to be something more than human, 
 
THE HIGHEST IDEAL OF GOD. 
 
 213 
 
 more even than the ideal human nature ; he must be an 
 abstract being, an idea which could find no embodiment in 
 visible form. And with this wish arose again the old 
 supreme god of the whole Greek race to give a name to 
 the abstraction. The Zeus whom JEschylus' suppliants 
 invoke is neither the Zeus of the East nor of the West, of 
 grove nor temple ; he is not the god of Olympus any more 
 than of Dodona ; he is merely the God, the King of kings, 
 like the Hebrews' Jehovah. 
 
 'King of kings, happiest of the happy, and of the 
 perfect, perfect in might, blest Zeus.' 
 
 And we know how the very priest of Dodona called 
 upon him in the same strain : 
 
 Ttsvs rjv, Ttsvs sa-ri, Zsvs ea-csrai, o> /jieydXs Zsv, C 
 mighty Zeus, which was and is and is to be.' 1 
 
 1 See Bausanias, x. 12, 5. 
 
214 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 MYSTEEIES. 
 
 THE greater gods of Greece those at least who, in the 
 heyday of worship, had the deepest influence upon 
 national belief were the intrusive gods, the divinities of 
 new comers into the land, the patrons of warriors and sea- 
 faring men. Such gods were the Olympian Zeus and the 
 Apollo of the hardy mountaineers of Tempe, and Athene, 
 who had brought the lonians from Asia to Greece, who 
 had shown Greek colonists the way to new countries, and 
 who taught men skill in arts and cunning in trade. But 
 behind these gods stand, half hidden in shadow, other 
 deities of older birth, they who had been worshipped in 
 ancient days by the simple and settled folk of the same 
 lands, by the mere peasant, the shepherd or the planter. 
 Such were Pan or Hermes of Arcadia, Dionysus of Thrace 
 and Macedonia ; such were Demeter and Dione and 
 Themis. The names of the beings are for the most part 
 distinctly Aryan ; but in character the gods are pre- 
 Aryan, for they belong of equal right to all nations whose 
 lives are of a quiet kind. Like gods, if with different 
 names, must from age to age have been worshipped on 
 the soil of Greece. If Athene and Apollo called out a 
 greater measure of enthusiasm and took a larger share in 
 the fostering of Hellenic culture, Pan and Demeter had, 
 in humbler fashion, a scarce less assured sway over the 
 hearts of their votaries. 
 
 This is why in every land a mystery hangs about the 
 worship of the gods of the soil : it is because of their 
 great antiquity. At a time when other creeds are novel 
 
THE DIVINITIES OF THE EARTH. 215 
 
 theirs is still antique, and many strange, dim associations 
 cling about that creed which the worshippers themselves 
 can scarcely understand. It Hes nearer than do other 
 parts of the religion to the primal fount of all religion. 
 
 It was said in a former chapter that almost before we 
 arrive at any definite belief among men, and certainly 
 before we reach their developed mythology, we find them 
 giving expression to their wild emotions by dances and 
 gestures not less wild. Almost before there is a worship 
 of things there is a sort of worship of emotion ; and this 
 gathers especially about two phases of strong excitement, 
 the one created by love, the other by wine. Passion, 
 mental or bodily, is the soul of all religious excitement ; 
 that is to say, it is the soul of all belief. The Veddic 
 charmer does after a fashion shadow forth the religion of 
 all mankind; the darweesh and the fakeer display in their 
 strange dances something which is older and more of the 
 essence of human nature than the dogma of Islam ; the 
 Christian Flagellant, he who joined in a Procession of 
 Penitents or in a Dance of Death, was the brother in faith 
 of these two, and had got back to a point where no differ- 
 ence of creed could divide. And just in "the same way, 
 before the creation of any formulated myth touching the 
 gods of Greece, earlier that the constitution of any Olym- 
 pus, must have come some ritual observance of this unre- 
 strained, passionate sort. When the pantheon was made, 
 this emotional worship associated itself with those divini- 
 ties in it who were of oldest birth that is to say, with the 
 chthonic ] or earth gods. In after times, when the primal 
 
 1 We use this word chthonic with some freedom when we apply it to 
 the first earth gods of the Greek pantheon. The chthonic divinity was 
 essentially a god of the regions under the earth ; at first of the dark home 
 of the seed, later on of the still darker home of the dead. But at first an 
 earth divinity was not worshipped under this aspect. It was and this is 
 especially true of the earth goddess not the underground region, but the 
 surface of the earth that was worshipped. Therefore, when we speak 
 of Prithivi, or (Jaia, or Demeter, or Tellus, or Ops, in their earliest forms 
 we cannot call them chthonic divinities. Later on they become more 
 nearly so. 
 
216 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 condition had been passed, the same rites, unexplained and 
 mysterious, were reverently preserved. 
 
 The earth itself is a woman : Prithivi, Demeter. 
 Perhaps, however, it is neither as Prithivi nor Demeter 
 that we ought to think of the goddess to whom the first 
 chthonic rites of Greece were paid. For the rituals which 
 grew into the mysteries may have existed in the land 
 before the coming thither of Zeus and his pantheon. But 
 the older names are gone ; we must needs use those which 
 have been handed down to us. In time Demeter came to 
 hold a place as near to the hearts of the lower orders of 
 the population, the descendants of the conquered nation- 
 alities, as she ever held to the hearts of their conquerors, 
 and a far nearer place than she held with these latter in 
 their conquering days. For it is only by a peaceful and 
 settled race that the earth goddess is ever held in high 
 esteem. This is why it was that the Dorians, the most 
 warlike among all the nations of new Greece, were ever the 
 most hostile to the cult of Demeter. After their invasion 
 of the Peloponnese, the worship of that goddess had to 
 hide itself in the rustic retirement of Arcadia, and for long 
 years so Herodotus declares 1 Arcadia was the only por- 
 tion of the Peloponnese where it was preserved. 
 
 There is in most creeds an earth god as well as an 
 earth goddess, though the former is the less important 
 personality. He represents rather the germinal power of 
 the ground than the simple earth, and he is therefore less 
 essential to primitive belief than the goddess is. This is 
 why he always holds an inferior place. He is sometimes 
 the son, sometimes the husband, of the earth. In Roman, 
 mythology he appears as Liber, who is the son of Ceres 
 and the brother of Libera, who is a kind of second Ceres. 
 In some of the Asiatic creeds, to which we shall- refer 
 anon, he is the husband of the earth goddess, but he is also 
 almost on a level with human nature ; he is the Adonis 
 
 1 Herod, ii. 171. 
 
THE DIVINITIES OF THE EARTH. 
 
 217 
 
 to the Cyprian Aphrodite, the Anchises to the Aphrodite 4 
 of the coast of Asia Minor. Of Greece proper the earth 
 god is for some places Dionysus, for others Ploutori, for 
 others Pan. Dionysus was not, I suppose, a god of native 
 birth, but became Greek by adoption, and was worshipped 
 especially in the north. Plouton, or Hades-Plouton, must 
 not be confounded with that later Hades the embodiment 
 of the tomb. Plouton is often spoken of as the son of 
 Demeter. 1 In the Eleusinian myth the same divinity, 
 Hades-Plouton, was her son-in-law. Dionysus held the 
 same relationship. 
 
 Zeus himself had to take upon him part of the nature 
 which had belonged traditionally to this god of the soil. 
 Just as there was, as well as a Zeus Olympics, a Pelasgian 
 Zeus to embody the worship of the older race, so there 
 was, as the representative of a creed still earlier, a Zeus 
 Chthonios, or Zeus of the Earth. Such a title implies a 
 complete reversal of Zeus' character as the ruler of 
 heaven. Zeus is indeed husband of the earth goddess, 
 but by right only because the heaven is married to the 
 earth. Nevertheless, we notice that in the Greek pantheon 
 there is no god to whom the surface of the earth is as- 
 signed for his special kingdom. In the division of the 
 universe by lot among the three sons of Kronos, to Posei- 
 don was given the hoary sea, to Hades the pitchy darkness, 
 to Zeus the wide heaven in the clouds and air. The earth 
 was common to all three. 2 The reason of this probably is 
 that these three sons of Kronos are all later comers than 
 the original earth god. 
 
 The divine beings who in the historic ages of Greece 
 were the heads and representatives of chthonian worship 
 were Demeter and Persephone, the Great Goddesses, as at 
 Eleusis they were called. It was no doubt because of the 
 high antiquity of their cult that to them belonged in a 
 
 1 Demeter was said to have brought forth Pluton in a thrice-ploughed 
 fallow in the island of Crete. 
 * II. xv. 187 sqq. 
 
218 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 special degree the title o-zpval, reverend, holy ; tliere was 
 something awful and mysterious about them which the 
 other gods had not. The god who was most associated 
 with these in worship was Dionysus, who was in historic 
 days but the pale shadow of what he (or his predeces- 
 sor) had been when invested with their full character 
 as earth gods. Nevertheless the shape which he took 
 in Greece seems to be one which the earth god has 
 generally assumed in the later forms of the Aryan reli- 
 gious systems. The association of three beings of the 
 same kind as these three that is to say, a mother, a 
 daughter, and a male divinity who is husband or brother 
 of the last seems generally to belong to the scheme of 
 Aryan earth worship. The same trilogy appears in the 
 Ceres, Libera, and Liber of Rome, and in the Frigg, 
 Freyja, and Freyr (Freke, Frowa, and Fro) of the Teutons. 
 
 More primitive, perhaps, than the formulated worship 
 of Demeter, Persephone, and Dionysus in Greece was that 
 form of earth worship whereof we catch faint glimpses in 
 the legend of Pan "and his rustic compeers. These were 
 honoured by country dances and unelaborate rites wild 
 dances and processions, no doubt, suiting the tastes and 
 tempers of those who used them, but not yet turned into 
 any distinct ritual. In the Greece of historic times these 
 early rites had been already supplemented by very defined 
 ceremonies, called by the name of mysteries. 
 
 The celebrations which have handed on their title for 
 a general name in future ages, the Greek jjiva-r^pia., are, 
 when we first catch sight of them, great religious revivals, 
 for even then they preserve in tradition a something which 
 has been half forgotten. They have already departed far 
 from their original use, and this we see when we compare 
 them with like ceremonies observed among less cultured 
 races. We cannot translate /-IUCTTT;?, nor any of its deriva- 
 tive words, quite into the primitive sense of them ; and our 
 modern translations, 'mystic and the rest, are separated 
 from this primitive meaning by a gap which centuries of 
 
THE MUSTERIA. 219 
 
 religious growth have made. A writer upon the myth of 
 Demeter and Persephone 1 the story which formed the 
 foundation of the mysteries which were enacted at Eleusis 
 computes that we can trace its history for a thousand 
 years. No portion of a creed, no ceremonies connected 
 with that belief, could remain unchanged so long. For 
 example, the element which we naturally associate first of 
 all with the idea of mystery is its secresy, and yet this 
 element the early mysteries contained only in a secondary 
 degree. In the Eleusinia, it is true, the pledge to silence 
 concerning the holy rites was strictly exacted, and is said 
 to have been strictly observed ; yet Plato, we know, com- 
 plained of the easy accessibility of the rites themselves, 
 and Plato lived in days when the motive cause for secresy 
 and exclusiveness had been long in operation. 
 
 When Greek thought had been aroused to speculation 
 upon the origin of the world, upon primal existences, 
 upon the difference between good and evil, upon the cause 
 of either, upon a hundred subjects, in fine, whereof it had 
 formerly no conceit, men fancied that during the ecstasies 
 of emotion to which the mystic rites gave rise they caught 
 sight of a solution to the difficulties which oppressed them. 
 And perhaps not wholly without reason ; for at such times 
 imagination anticipated the slow steps of logic, and seized 
 hold on new truths almost without knowing how. But 
 these men chose to believe further that the same truths 
 had been revealed to their ancestors and had been by them 
 obscurely handed down in an ancient ritual. Tlfe fore- 
 fathers themselves had no thought of such depths of philo- 
 sophy; these were added in later times, when the old 
 significance of the rites had been obscured or quite for- 
 gotten. Those which they instituted were the natural 
 expressions of human emotion ; scarcely more complicated 
 and abstruse than the <1 im-e of our Veddic devil charmer, 
 or than a war dance of Africans or Maoris. 
 
 1 Foerster, Raub u. Riickkehr der Perseplwnt. 
 
220 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 It is because of the original simplicity and naturalness 
 of such rites as these that, on whatever side we look, 
 within the bounds of Hellas or abroad, rituals of the same 
 kind meet our eye. The Eleusinia of Attica had their 
 rivals in the Thracian and the Samothracian mysteries in 
 honour of Dionysus and of the Cabiri : nay, we know that 
 almost every town of Greece had its own circle of cere- 
 monies, and its formal worship of one or other or of all of 
 the earth divinities. Outside the bounds of Greece are 
 first to be noted the Phrygian rites of Cybele, most near 
 among Oriental rituals to those of Hellas. 
 
 There was in Asia Minor the worship of Cybele and 
 Sandon, and in Cyprus that of Aphrodite and Adonis ; 
 there was the wounded Thammuz mourned by Tyrian 
 maids, and in Egypt the dead Osiris wept and sought for 
 by Isis. * The rites of Ceres at Eleusis differ little from, 
 these ' the rites of Osiris and Isis (it is Lactantius who 
 is speaking). 'As there Osiris is sought amid the plaints 
 of his mother, 1 so here the quest is for the lost Persephone ; 
 and as Ceres is said to have made her search with torches, 
 so (in the Osiris mystery) the rites are marked by the 
 throwing of brands.' 2 The closer we examine into these 
 various rituals and their attendant myths, the more shall 
 we be struck by their general similarity and the more 
 clearly shall we see that in origin and first intention they 
 were all the same. 
 
 What is the meaning of this likeness? The Greeks 
 suppos'ed that many of their beliefs and forms of worship 
 had been received from the Egyptians. But we know now 
 that an adoption of this kind from another race is very 
 rare in any mythology, and may be left out of account in 
 this case : so that, when resemblances such as those we 
 
 1 The writer is mistaken here, for Isis was the wife, not the mother, 
 of Osiris. 
 
 2 Lactantius, i. 21-24. Though this writer is not an authority for the 
 early ceremonial of the Isis rites, still, from what we know of the conserva- 
 tive nature of the Egyptians, we may fairly conclude that these had not 
 changed much even so late as in the days of Lactantius. 
 
UNIVERSALITY OF MYSTERIES. 221 
 
 have noticed are to be found in the religions of many 
 different peoples, they spring out of the fundamental 
 likeness of all religions, as being products of human 
 thought. This was the case with the mysteries : they had 
 their root in instinctive expressions of emotion, not in any 
 particular story nor in any traditional worship. When 
 we find the Eleusinia adopted and initiated in later times 
 and in distant places, we are not to assume that these 
 phenomena are the result of direct missionary efforts on 
 the part of its votaries, but rather that all men had a 
 natural inclination to this form of worship. 
 
 No more ought we to suppose that these rites them- 
 selves were transplanted into Greece or into Attica from 
 any earlier home. It was in part true, no doubt, that the 
 rites of Dionysus were introduced into the Eleusinian 
 mysteries from Thrace ; but it was only a partial truth. 
 For though Dionysus himself may not have been originally 
 known at Eleusis, some other earth god, for sure, was 
 known. Dionysiac worship was said, we know, to have 
 been founded by Orpheus. And then men went further, 
 and attempted to find a derivation, also from Thrace, for the 
 Eleusinian worship of Demeter and Persephone. Eumolpos, 
 the fabled introducer of those rites, is called by late writers 
 the son of Boreas (the north wind), or else of Poseidon 
 and Chi one that is to say, of the sea and of the snow. By 
 this was meant that Eumolpos had come from northern 
 Greece. The ancients always made things happen in the 
 way of importation and personal influence : the worship 
 of a god in their traditions is generally said to have been 
 introduced into a land by some particular hero. But such 
 is not the usual history of religious ideas. Either they 
 spring up naturally or they never flourish at all. 
 
 The truth is that mysteries of this kind are almost 
 universal, and it is a matter of chance which among many 
 birth-places of them attains celebrity, and comes to be 
 thought the mother of all the rest. Eleusis, which 
 means the place of ' coming ' that is to say, the coming of 
 
222 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the New Year cannot originally have been a designation, 
 of one or two particular spots only; for each locality must 
 have had its special place at which the spring and spring's 
 greenery were thought to come back and appear once 
 more to the world. In a Norse mythic poem which really 
 tells the story of the marriage of Persephone and Dionysus 
 in a different guise, it is related how a maiden, Ger$ (the 
 Earth), 1 agrees to meet the sun god, Freyr, 2 ' in the warm 
 wood of Bam,' where Barri signifies simply 'the green.' 
 Thus any green wood might be the meeting-place of Freyr 
 and GerS : but no doubt each locality fixed upon its special 
 Barri wood. Just so each place had once its Eleusis, or 
 the place of spring's coming; but one place eventually 
 outlasted and outshone all the rest. Yet even in late 
 days there were more places with this name than one : 
 there was an Eleusis in Bceotia as well as in Attica. 
 
 We can account in this way for the fact which has 
 sometimes been commented on as strange, that .the 
 Eleusinia are not spoken of by Homer (the epic Homer) 
 nor by Hesiod. The reason is to be found, not as some 
 have alleged in the lateness in time of the Eleusinian 
 form of worship, but in the commonness of such festivals 
 and the number of places in which they had their seat. 
 The importance of the special Attic celebration was of Jate 
 growth, for it was due in chief measure to the supremacy 
 of Athens. So far as the institution of the rites went, 
 that was too old to be followed back in the history of 
 belief. 
 
 Three or four hundred years ago men had a use for the 
 word mystery which we have since laid aside. It was 
 applied to those primitive representations which were the 
 first divergence from the old miracle plays in the direction 
 of the secular drama. Guilds used to be formed out of 
 the laity for the enactment of these * mysteries,' which, 
 becoming a little more secularised still, were afterwards 
 
 1 GerSi = earth. 
 
 8 At first an earth god, and afterwards a god of summer and of the sun. 
 
ORIGINAL INTENTION OF THE MYSTERIES. 223 
 
 called f moralities.' It has been questioned whether the 
 word, when thus used, had any etymological connexion 
 with the Greek fivarripLov. 1 But that is a matter which 
 concerns us nothing. This much is certain : that the 
 mystery of the Middle Ages represented in many ways the 
 character of the early Eleusinia and other celebrations of 
 the same order. All these were essentially dramas. They 
 were, if you will, miracle plays ; for the miracle which they 
 played was that old, long-standing wonder of nature, the 
 return of the New Year and of all that it brings with it, 
 the reclothing of Earth in the greenery which Winter has 
 stripped off and hidden away. Goethe, counting the stages 
 by which melancholy gains a sway over man's mind, notes 
 how at last it begets in him such a distaste of life, such an 
 intense ennui, that the very return of spring strikes his 
 fancy only as a thing foregone and wearisome through 
 constant repetition. To man in primal days (but it need 
 not be so to him alone) the same event appeared ever new, 
 and so wonderful and joyful that no colour could paint, no 
 language could dignify it enough. Man sought to present 
 the glad coming of summer in such a way that it should 
 appeal to all the senses at once ; he sang it in endless 
 rhymes, he made myths about it, and then he enacted the 
 story in a drama ; and thus he laid the foundation not of 
 the mysteries only, but of all dramatic representation. 
 
 We do not, it is true, know much of those other rites, 
 Egyptian, Asiatic, or half Hellenic, which I spoke of just 
 now ; but what we do know is enough to convince us that, 
 like the Eleusinia or the Dioriysiac festivals, they took 
 their rise in the same desire for the symbolic portrayal of 
 two great events: first, the sorrow of Nature when the 
 warmth of the sun is withdrawn and the fruitful growth 
 of plants and grasses is stayed, and then her joy when 
 these are all restored. The advent of spring was the 
 
 1 The terms moralities mysteries, sprang up only at the end of the 
 Middle Ages. Mystery is supposed by some to be derived from ministerium, 
 i.e. a guild, and to have had the spelling changed by false analogy. 
 
224 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 ' good spell ' of the heathen peoples ; the death of summer 
 was their book of doom. 
 
 As the Eleusinia constituted the chief Greek festival 
 in this kind, and the one concerning which we have most 
 information, though even here our information is meagre 
 enough, I will take this alone as a sample of the Greek 
 mystery, and allow a slight sketch of that to stand for the 
 rest. We all know the story upon which the drama was 
 founded. The tale has come down to us in a hymn, which 
 was, we may suppose, chaunted at such time as the rites 
 of Deineter and Persephone were celebrated. Plays then, 
 as in later days, required their prologue, which set forth 
 the history of the piece about to be enacted. So this 
 Homeric hymn tells the tale of the rape and return of 
 Persephone almost in the form in which her history 
 formed the subject of a mythic drama at Eleusis. 
 
 It tells us how the girl Persephone was wandering with 
 her companion maidens in the Nysian plain, gathering 
 crocus, and rose, and hyacinth, and fair violets, and, 
 more beautiful than all, the narcissus. 1 The deceitful 
 earth sent up this flower to allure the goddess a.way from 
 her fellows ; it was a wonder to be seen, for on it grew a 
 hundred blossoms, which sent forth their fragrance over 
 the laughing earth and the salt waves of the sea. But, 
 as the maiden stooped to seize the prize, the wide earth 
 gaped apart, and the awful son of Kronos leaped forth and 
 bore her away shrieking in his golden chariot. But none 
 of mortals or immortals heard her call, save only Hekate 
 (the moon) in her cave, and Helios (the sun), who sat apart 
 from the other gods in his own temple receiving the fair 
 offerings of men. . . . 
 
 But an echo of the cry reached Demeter, and grief 
 seized her mind. She rent her veil and put from her her 
 dark blue cloak, and like a bird hurried over land and 
 sea seeking her daughter. For nine days she wandered 
 
 1 The name of this flower is supposed to bear a special allusion to the 
 sleep of death, or of the winter eartti ^dpKrj, numbness or d-eadness). 
 
STOEY OF THE EAPE OF PERSEPHONE. 225 
 
 thus, a torch in her hand ; until at last Hekate came to 
 meet her, likewise bearing a light. And these two, carry- 
 ing their torches, sped forth together until they came to 
 Helios ; and the goddess spake to him. * Do thou, O 
 Sun, who from the divine air lookest down upon all earth 
 and sea, tell me if thou hast seen any one of gods or 
 men who against my daughter's will has forcibly carried 
 her away.' And he answered, ' Queen Deiueter, I grieve 
 much for thee and for thy slender-footed daughter. But 
 know that Zeus, the cloud-gatherer, has done this thing, 
 giving thy daughter to his brother Hades for his fair wife. 
 Cease then, goddess, from immoderate grief. Aidoneus, 
 who is king. of many, is no unseemly kinsman am6ng the 
 immortals. . . . ' 
 
 When Demeter had heard this she was filled with 
 sharper grief and with anger against the cloudy son of 
 Kronos, and quitting Olympus, she wandered among the 
 cities and rich fields of men, obscuring her godhead. At 
 length she came to the house of King Keleos, the ruler of 
 Eleusis. There she sat down by a well in the guise of 
 an old woman. And the daughters of Keleos saw her as 
 they came out to draw water, and they knew her not, but 
 spake to her. . . . And Demeter became nurse to Demo- 
 phoon, the son of Keleos and of his wife Metaneira. She 
 fed him on ambrosia and breathed sweetly upon him as 
 he lay in her breast. At night she concealed him in the 
 strong fire, like a brand, secretly, without his parents' 
 knowledge. And she would have rendered him immortal ; 
 but Metaneira, foolishly watching at night, saw it, and 
 smote her side and shrieked out. . . . And fair-haired 
 Demeter put from her in anger the child, and laying him 
 upon the ground, she spake to Metaneira. ' Oh, foolish 
 thou ! how hast thou erred ! For by the gods' oath I 
 swear, by the unappeasable water of Styx, I would have 
 made thy son immortal and given him unending fame. 
 But now he cannot avoid death and his fate. But un- 
 
226 OUTLINES OF TKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 dying glory shall be his, because he has sat upon my knee 
 and has slept in my arms. Know that I am Demeter. . . .' 
 Then, as she spake, the goddess changed her guise, and 
 cast off from her her eld. Beauty breathed round her, 
 and from her fragrant garment spread a sweet odour ; far 
 shone the light from that immortal flesh, and on her 
 shoulders gleamed her yellow hair, till the house was filled 
 with the sheen of it a,s with the lightning. And she left 
 the palace. . . . And when morning came Keleos sum- 
 moned his people and told them what had happened, and 
 bade them build a costly temple to fair-haired Demeter. 
 And here the goddess sat down, far apart from the councils 
 of the gods. Nor while she was there did the earth yield 
 any seed ; in vain men ploughed, and white barley fell 
 into the furrows in vain ; until Zeus sent his messenger, 
 Iris, to entreat her to return. And, one after another, 
 came all the immortals with gifts and honours, but she 
 obstinately turned from all their words. 
 
 Then at last Zeus sent down unto Erebus his golden- 
 wand ed messenger to lead away Persephone from the 
 murky land, that her mother might be comforted. . . . 
 And Hades did not disobey the command of Zeus the 
 king. Persephone rejoiced and leaped up in joy. But 
 he (Hades) had craftily given her a seed of pomegranate, 
 that she might not remain for ever above with holy 
 Demeter. Now Hades yoked his steeds to the golden 
 chariot, and Hermes seized the reins and the whii) and 
 drove straight from the abodes of death, and, cutting 
 through the deep darkness, they came to where Demeter 
 stood. . . . 
 
 But because Persephone had eaten the fruit of the 
 pomegranate she must still pass one-third of the year 
 below with her husband ; two-thirds she spends on earth 
 with her mother. 
 
 The history which we have just narrated, and which 
 occupies the first portion of the Homeric hymn to 
 Demeter, commemorates a nature myth of unfathoin- 
 
THE NATURE MYTH WHICH UNDERLIES IT. 227 
 
 able antiquity. Towards the end of the hymn the poet 
 strays into legends which have more to do with the sup- 
 posed origin of the Eleusinia and with the teaching to man- 
 kind of the use of agriculture elements neither of them, 
 as I shall presently point out, belonging to the earliest 
 myth of the earth goddess. Wherefore, over this latter 
 portion of the Homeric hymn telling how the goddess 
 Demeter came again to earth, to the Rarian plain, and 
 how the corn sprang up as she passed, how she made the 
 whole earth blithe and fruitful, how she at last appointed 
 the ' law-dispensing kings,' Triptolemos, and Diocles, and 
 Eumolpos, and Keleos, to preserve her rites over all this 
 we will pass. 
 
 Demeter is yq-MTiip, mother earth. Persephone was 
 called at Eleusis Core, the maiden, or, more literally still, 
 the ' germ/ Eleusis is * the coming,' not originally, I 
 suspect, of Demeter to earth, but of the returning spring. 
 And we may see how truly in this poem, even though it 
 has an epic form, all the dramatic instincts are satisfied. 
 The Norsemen had their celebrations (a kind of mystery, 
 too) of the death of the earth in winter, or perhaps one 
 should rather say of that visitation which is peculiar to 
 Northern climates the total extinction of the sun himself 
 during the coldest months. The festival (or fast) was 
 called the bale or death of Balder. It was kept by the 
 lighting of great fires, called the bale fires. 1 But, strange 
 to say, the season chosen for this celebration was not 
 winter, when the sun was really hidden, but summer nay, 
 the very height of summer, Midsummer's Eve. It was 
 thus, by taking the sun at the moment of his greatest 
 power, that a dramatic * force was given to the miracle 
 play which enacted the sun's own overthrow. Just the 
 same spirit is visible here. Persephone, the maiden, the 
 
 1 In the Middle Ages the bale fires changed their names, and became 
 St. John's fires (Johannisfeuer, feux de St. Jean), and under these names 
 are still kept up in Germany and some parts of France, and in the west or 
 extreme north of Scotland. St. John's Day of course occurs at Mid- 
 summer. 
 
 Q2 
 
228 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 image of spring 1 , is found playing in the meadows and 
 gathering the flowers of the early year at the moment 
 when Aidoneus comes to carry her below. Eightly this 
 rape should have been made to happen in the autumn ; 
 but then the force of contrast between life and death 
 would have been lost. So it happens in the spring ; and 
 probably the chief Eleusinian feasts were originally at 
 this season. 1 
 
 On the other hand, though the changes of the year 
 are gradual, those between day and night are rapid and 
 impressive. Granted that the time of year is fixed as it 
 is, both here and in the Northern myth, the drama will be 
 the most effective if the time of day in which its action 
 falls is made to be the evening. Balder 's bale fires were 
 lighted at sundown, and kept burning all through the 
 night. And here also, reading a little between the lines 
 of the hymn that is to say, making allowance for some 
 extension of time in a story which is told epically, not 
 dramatically 2 we can gather, I think, that the rape of 
 Persephone was originally thought to happen just at 
 sunset, and then the search for her to extend throughout 
 one night. Behind the expanded season myth lies the 
 more primitive myth of light and dark. For see how the 
 positions of the sun and moon are incidentally told us : 
 
 And her companions all vainly sought her. 
 Of gods or mortal men none heard her cry, 
 Saving two only, the great Perseus' daughter, 
 The goddess of the cave, mild Hekate, 
 And bright Hyperion's son, King Helios, 
 He too gave ear unto that call ; for he, 
 Taking from men their offerings beauteous, 
 In his own home sat from the gods away. 
 
 1 Originally. As is afterwards suggested, it is probable that their 
 transference to autumn denoted a change from a feast which merely cele- 
 brated the return of the year to one which was more distinctly a farmer's 
 festival. 
 
 2 Such allowances in interpreting any particular form of a myth we 
 must always be prepared to make. 
 
THE YEAR AND THE DAY. 229 
 
 The sun is away from Olympus because he is near his 
 setting ; he is sitting in his western tent by the homes of 
 men. Hekate, the moon, hears from her cave ; for she is 
 still below the earth. And now Demeter, who has caught 
 a faint echo of that cry of anguish, hurries over the earth 
 with a torch in her hand, seeking Persephone : it is night. 
 Anon she encounters Hekate, who comes to meet her, 
 likewise carrying a light : for now the moon has risen. 
 
 There is no reason why the Eleusinia, or some festivals 
 of a like kind, may not have existed before the familiar 
 use of agriculture. Demeter is much more than the 
 patroness of the husbandman's art ; she is the earth 
 mother herself, the parent of all growth. The coming of 
 spring would be not less welcome in days when men lived 
 upon the proceeds of hunting, upon flocks and herds, or 
 upon wild fruits. All life is in the hands of the fruit- 
 bearing goddess. 
 
 Tala KdpirovQ a >'/i, to K\ijtTe fjirjTepa yaiav 
 
 chaunted the Dodonian priests. 1 And they might have 
 sung the same to Gaia or to Demeter (Mother Gaia) ages 
 before corn had been first sown. 
 
 But agriculture was introduced ; and the special im- 
 portance of earth's fruitfulness as the cause of the growth 
 of the grain came in time to throw into the background 
 the earth's other miscellaneous gifts. Nevertheless this 
 change was long in taking place. The myth which is 
 connected with this aspect of the Eleusinia that is to 
 say, their aspect as celebrations of the new birth, not so 
 much of the year as of the ear, and as the special glorifi- 
 cation of the husbandman's art is the myth of Triptole- 
 mus. He, said the legend, was charged by Demeter to 
 spread abroad her worship, and to teach men the mystery 
 of sowing corn. His name explains his position in the 
 myth : he is rpLTroXos, the thrice-ploughed furrow. In 
 
 1 Pausanias, x. 12, 5. 
 
230 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 later days Triptolemus grew to be a very important 
 character in the Demeter legend. But in the Homeric 
 hymn, which is probably almost contemporary with 
 Hesiod that is to say, not later than the eighth century 
 before Christ 1 Triptolemus plays no very leading part. 
 He is one (the first, it is true) among many kings who are 
 said to have received the command of Demeter to institute 
 her rites. ' She went,' says the hymn, 6 to the law-giving 
 kings, to Triptolemus and horse-driving Diocles, and the 
 might of Eurnolpos, and to Keleos, leader of the people, 
 and to them she told how to perform her holy service.' 
 Moreover, all this history of the institution of the mysteries 
 forms a separate part of the hymn, and is in no way con- 
 nected with the main legend which was related just now. 
 
 The worship, therefore, of Demeter in her character of 
 goddess of husbandry has a second place in the intention 
 of the mysteries. In later times, say from the beginning of 
 the fifth century, when the history of the great goddesses 
 begins to be common in art, Triptolemus is rarely absent 
 from such representations. He commonly forms one of a 
 group which contains Demeter and Persephone, Hades, 
 Hekate, and Hermes. In one part of the picture may be 
 the god of the under world ; in the other is Triptolemus in 
 snaky chariot, scattering abroad the grain. When this 
 change had taken place, and the character of Triptolemus 
 had become an essential in the Persephone legend, the mys- 
 teries had come to be much less rejoicings at the return of 
 the spring than a sort of harvest homes, rejoicings for the 
 in gathered wealth which earth had yielded. 
 
 When agriculture is in its infancy men do not sow in 
 the autumn. They plant some quick-growing corn, which 
 takes a few months only to ripen ; and what is sown in 
 the early spring is reaped before the summer. The 
 .French name for buckwheat, lie sarrasin, is derived from 
 the use by the Tartars of this grain, which can be sown 
 
 1 Lenormant, however, puts it later. See Daremberg and Saglio's Die- 
 tionnaire des Antiquites,'axt. Ceres.' 
 
THE HARVEST HOME. 231 
 
 during the short sojourn which the nomadic people 
 make in one spot. Therefore m early days the festival of 
 Demeter and Core would naturally fall in the spring. 
 Later in time there came to be two festivals the one 
 dedicated to the coming up (anodos, avo&os) of Core or 
 the germ, the other to her descent (kathodes, /cdOoSos) 
 into the infernal realms. The second was Persephone's 
 marriage with Pluto that is to say, it was concerned with 
 the most germane matter of the Eleusinian myth it was, 
 beside, the festival of the sower, and was for these reasons 
 the greatest. Yet we observe that in being held in the 
 autumn it runs counter to the picture which is presented 
 to us in the Homeric hymn. The anodos was associated 
 with the worship of Dionysos ; it was celebrated in his 
 month, the flower month, and was supposed (it was an 
 addition to the old legend) to celebrate the marriage of 
 Persephone with that god. 
 
 Whether the mysteries were, as at first, feasts to the 
 spring, or, as later on they became, feasts to the goddess 
 of agriculture, harvest homes, they were, before all things, 
 peasant festivals. They belonged, I have said, to the 
 autochthones, the simple early inhabitants of the soil. 
 To that belonging they owed their vast antiquity. Con- 
 quering nations passed over the land and left these rustic 
 rites unchanged, adhering to one place, handed on by an 
 everlasting tradition from generation to generation. 1 At 
 
 1 Enough has, I imagine, been said in this and in the previous chapter 
 to show that Demeter was one among the oldest divinities worshipped in 
 Greece. Herodotus tells us so much (ii. 171). Pausanias says that she 
 was known as Demeter Pelasgis (ii. 22, 10). She was called by the same 
 title in Arcadia, the very home of all that was most ancient in Greek 
 culture (Herod. I. c.) We have seen how obstinately her worship was 
 maintained there. 
 
 Persephone is not really to be distinguished from Demeter. For 
 Demeier herself often appears as a maiden as Ar)n-f)Tr)p \K6t\ (Paus. i. 22), 
 and this is identical in meaning with the name K6pr} given to Persephone. 
 Demettr is spoken of as daughter of FT) KovpoTp6<f>os (the nursing earth). 
 Moreover in artistic representations it is very hard to make a distinction 
 between mother and daughter. (See on this subject Gerhard, 6fr. Myth. 
 240, 4 ; and in Akad. Abt. ii. 357 ; and Overbeck, Gr. Kunstmyth. ii. 442, 
 
232 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 last this creed, which had rested quiet * under the drums 
 and tramplings ' of many conquests, began to rise again. 
 The down-trodden race vindicated its old power; and the 
 stone which had been overlooked in the first building of 
 the Greek and Eoman religions became the headstone of 
 the corner. 
 
 All the charm of the unknown belongs to celebrations 
 such as these, whose beginnings lie covered up by so many 
 centuries of neglect. In Rome the festival of the Lupercalia 
 kept alive the memory of a society of shepherds and hunts- 
 men who lived before cities had been built or even agricul- 
 ture established. The same feast lived to witness the fall of 
 the Republic, to see a * kingly crown' thrice presented to 
 the Republic's destroyer ; l and, lasting far beyond that, it 
 saw the fall of the religion of Rome after the fall of its old 
 government ; it survived the introduction of Christianity, 
 and was celebrated as late as in the reign of Anthemius. 
 One may almost say that it is commemorated still at the 
 Carnival. The Eleusinia had as long a life. They were 
 finally crushed out by the monks who entered Greece in 
 A.D. 395 in the train of Alaric's invading army ; and that 
 these proselytists should have exerted themselves in the 
 
 448. See the Harpy Tomb of Xanthos for an example of the likeness be- 
 tween the two goddesses.) 
 
 From this I am led to believe that some parts of the myth of the two 
 Great Goddesses may be repetitions, as the same adventures would have to 
 be attributed to each. Thus I imagine that the wanderings of Demeter 
 belong of necessity to her as a goddess of earth, and quite alone express 
 the notion of the change from summer to winter the change in appear- 
 ance of ihe earth being mythically represented as a change from place to 
 place, a change in space. This will become more clear when we compare 
 with the Demeter mysteries those of which we have some traces among 
 the Teutonic folk (see Ch. VII.) It follows that the rape of Persephone 
 and the wanderings of Demeter are mythic repetitions of the same 
 notion. 
 
 This leads us back to a still earlier form of the mysteries when 
 Demeter and Persephone were not united, but separate. 
 
 See Daremberg and Saglio's Diet, des Ant., art. ' Ceres,' by F. Lenormant, 
 for the traces of Demeter worship in Greece. 
 
 1 * You all did see that on the Lupercal 
 
 I thrice presented him a kingly crown, 
 Which he did thrice refuse.' Julius Ctesar 
 
THE ORGY. 233 
 
 matter shows that the faith had still a hold upon the 
 affections of the people. 
 
 It has been said that there is in these rites another 
 element beside the mere joy of living and of seeing the 
 earth live again, or one may at least say a more 
 eager and passionate expression of that joy. The sub- 
 stratum of phallic worship, which lies at the root of many 
 elaborate rituals such as these, accompanies them in their 
 after development. Therefore is it that in close relation- 
 ship to the mnsterion stands the. orge. Both words have 
 been handed down for perpetual use in later ages. In 
 historic times the orgy belonged more especially to the 
 later Dionysus, the wine god. The mystery still belonged 
 to Demeter. 
 
 In such conceptions as this Bacchus, or the Yeclic 
 Soma, or Agni, are worshipped beings half physical, 
 half abstract. On the one side is the thing, the honey- 
 dew, the wine, which excites passion, or the fire which 
 symbolises it ; on the other side, the emotion itself. But 
 men do not analyse their complex feelings into their 
 different elements ; they do not recognise that fire is a 
 symbol of the passion, or that the wine is only a cause- of 
 the tumultuous emotions which they feel. The wine or 
 the fire they believe enters into them and itself consti- 
 tutes the mental condition which they know. Therefore 
 in worshipping the vine men did in fact worship the 
 strength of their feelings, and these produced in them 
 that emotional state which is necessary to belief, and 
 which lies at the foundation of all religions. To produce 
 such a condition of mind was the object of the orgy ; 
 which, in giving a more distinctly emotional, gave in the 
 end a more distinctly religious character to the mystic 
 festivals. 
 
 In another way also, pleasanter to contemplate, reli- 
 gious excitement was maintained namely, by the supreme 
 influence of music. Tradition shows us how early was the 
 use of this stimulus in the Eleusinia. There was at Eleusis 
 
234 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 a family which claimed the hereditary office of chief priest 
 (hierophant) in the celebrations. They were the Eumol- 
 pidse; and they pretended an eponymous ancestor, Eu- 
 molpos, who was supposed to have been- the first priest of 
 Demeter and Dionysus at Eleusis, and to have introduced 
 their mysteries there. In reality Eumolpos is nothing 
 more than the * sweet- voiced one,' the leader of the choir. 
 The name Eumolpidse is that of an office, not of a family : 
 it must have been in later times that the office became 
 hereditary and gave its designation to a single house. 
 But that these sweet singers (eumolpoi) sho.uld have 
 claimed the credit of originating the Demetric worship 
 argues a vast antiquity for the choral performance therein, 
 when the leading singer was likewise the officiating priest. 
 The excitement which is wrought of old observances, 
 imperfectly understood, the halo at once of mystery and 
 of antiquity, grew up rapidly around the ritual of the 
 Eleusinia. Strong emotion not much restrained, fostered 
 by music and a kind of holy drama, and surrounded by much 
 that is ancient and unexplained these are ingredients 
 which in all ages will produce the same effects. Let us note 
 that all the c mystics ' in the modern purely religious sense 
 all those, I mean, who have enshrined their thoughts of 
 God in a halo of rapt emotion have turned to such dra- 
 matic pictures as the Greeks rejoiced in at Eleusis ; and the 
 converse holds good, that wherever we find these dramatic 
 celebrations we may be sure that the doctrines which 
 they contain will take sooner or later a genuinely mystic 
 complexion. St. Francis of Assisi is the typical ' mystic ' 
 of the Middle Age. His biographer * has recorded the 
 care with which he prepared, and the pleasure he took in 
 the enaction of, a drama representing the birth of Christ, 
 as nearly like the drama we have been describing as the 
 difference between their two subjects and the lapse of 
 intervening centuries would allow. 
 
 1 Thomas of Cellano in Acta SS. Octobris, torn. 2. 
 
CATHOLIC MYSTERIES. 235 
 
 c The day of joy approached, the time of rejoicing was 
 near. The brothers (of the Order of Franciscans) are 
 assembled from many places ; the men and women of the 
 country round, according to their capacities, prepare 
 candles and torches for illuminating the night, that night 
 whose shining star lit up all future days and years. * At 
 length came the Saint, and finding everything prepared, 
 saw and was glad. Even a manger is got ready and hay 
 procured, and an ox and an ass are brought in. Honour 
 and praise are given to simplicity, to poverty and humility, 
 and Campogreco is made as it were a new Bethlehem. . . . 
 The night is illumined like the day, and is most grateful 
 to men and animals. The peasantry approach and with 
 new joys celebrate the renewal of the mysteries. He 
 (St. Francis) imitates the voice of woods, and the rocks 
 rejoicing answer. The brothers sing, paying their meed 
 of praise to the Lord. The Saint stands before the pro- 
 cession, heaving sighs, bowed with emotion and suffused 
 with a wondrous joy. They celebrate the solemn service 
 of the Mass.' 
 
 Is it not by a true instinct that the Church which 
 claims to be built by a mystic power, and to transmit its 
 spiritual influence through channels unsounded by reason, 
 shrouds its acts of worship even now in a veil of half- 
 explained drama, and wraps its dogmas round with a 
 garment of melodious sounds P 
 
 There can be no question that the mystae in the Eleu- 
 sinia, with precisely the same intention as St. Francis, re- 
 enacted in a certain defined series of dramas the chief 
 details of the myth above narrated that is to say, the 
 loss of the maiden (Core), the journeys of her mother, the 
 sorrows of the goddess by the well, the honour done her 
 in the house of Keleos, the preparation of the mystic 
 drink by which Demeter was delighted and which became 
 the sacrament of her votaries, 1 and finally the restoration 
 
 1 This mystic drink, kykeon (Kureifr), is described as having been made 
 of meal and water flavoured with mint. 
 
236 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 to her of her daughter Persephone. And then perhaps 
 came, as a pendant to this, the institution of her rites and 
 the command to Triptolemus to spread abroad the worship 
 of the Great Goddesses. 
 
 In this history of Demeter there are some features 
 which constantly recur in the myths of earth goddesses 
 wherever they are found ; others are peculiar to the Greek 
 legend. It has been already said that the mission of 
 Triptolemus belongs to the later, and therefore less essen- 
 tial, parts of the legend. There are, again, some parts of 
 the Demeter myth as describrd in the Homeric hymn 
 which have been somewhat distorted from their original 
 and universal shape, and made to take a peculiar character. 
 This has been the case with the history of the wanderings 
 of Demeter. In the Greek legend they are represented as 
 if undertaken solely in search of Persephone. In reality 
 the earth goddess is by virtue of her very nature a wan- 
 derer, and is always represented as passing from place to 
 place. Demeter's journeyings are of the very essence of 
 her character, and could not have been omitted from any 
 myth concerning her. But at the same time they could 
 not have depended entirely upon the doings of Perse- 
 phone, for this conclusive reason, that Persephone and 
 Demeter are only different forms of the same individuality. 
 
 We see that the earth goddess is a wandering goddess 
 when we come to examine the myths which concern her 
 and the ritual observances which have sprung up in her 
 honour in many different lands. We have compared 
 Demeter with some of the chthonic divinities of the East, 
 of Egypt or of Asia. Among these it is well known that 
 Isis is supposed to have wandered from land to land, and 
 in the ritual observances dedicated to this goddess no 
 small part consisted in dragging her image from place to 
 place. The Ephesian Artemis, another earth goddess, was 
 also borne about. When we take occasion, as in a future 
 chapter we shall do, to confront with the myth and ritual 
 of Demeter the myth and ritual of the earth goddess of 
 
THE WANDERINGS OF DMTR. 237 
 
 the Teutonic races, we shall see that the latter divinity 
 was also noted for her wandering nature. The essential 
 meaning of the myth in every case is this: the earth 
 goddess becomes identified in thought with the green 
 earth, and in spring she is deemed to come back again to 
 those who are waiting and longing for her. And the idea 
 is made more real by a dramatic representation, which in 
 spring time carries the goddess from village to village, 
 from farm to farm, as though her coming there did in- 
 augurate the new year. 1 
 
 But in course of time the earth goddess becomes sepa- 
 rated in mythology from the divinity of spring, and then 
 a Persephone, or an Osiris, or an Adonis, or a Freyr, or an 
 Odhur, 2 a daughter, a lover, or a husband, has to play a 
 second part in the ritual beside the earth mother. Owing 
 to this kind of change, the wanderings of Demeter have 
 taken a new character in the Greek myth. They are there 
 represented as being undertaken in the search for a lost 
 daughter that is to say, as following after the departing 
 spring, rather than as announcing its coming to the earth. 
 Agreeably with the change in the story, the received myth 
 about Eleusis itself was that it was only the place to which 
 Demeter had come in the course of her wanderings in 
 search of Persephone. That which allows us to correct 
 this account is, first, the comparison of this myth with 
 the myths of other earth goddesses ; and, secondly, the 
 appreciation of the fuller meaning which the early form 
 of the story would give to the name Eleusis. 3 
 
 The Homeric hymn speaks of Demeter going over land 
 and sea, but in language somewhat vague ; in the drama 
 the details of these wanderings were doubtless repre- 
 sented. All we know from the hymn is that the goddess 
 went like a bird over the land and water ; that for nine 
 days she traversed all the earth. Prom a comparison of 
 this myth with those preserved in the Eoman form of Isis 
 
 1 This idea is beautifully put forward by Lucretius, ii. 597-64 
 2 See Chapter VII. * See supra. 
 
238 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 worship or the Teutonic earth worship, we gather that 
 in all these cases the sea voyage was a very important 
 element. A boat was dragged about during the Isis 
 festival in Home, and a boat was the symbol of the 
 Teutonic earth goddess. This part of Demeter's journey 
 was, 1 imagine, alluded to in the phrase a\a$s /xucrrat, 
 ' To the sea mystics ! ' which was called out on the second 
 day of the Eleusinian celebrations. As none did betake 
 themselves to any sort of sea voyage, the phrase has, 
 naturally enough, been found puzzling to commentators. 
 Some have said that it meant that men were to wash 
 themselves in the sea ; but that explanation is surely in- 
 adequate. The day itself of the festival was called by the 
 name aXaSs /^vo-rat; the mere act of ablution could hardly 
 have filled up the chief part of that day's ritual. I rather 
 imagine this name to have been a relic from a time when 
 the supposed sea voyage of the goddess was literally imi- 
 tated by her votaries, though this custom was afterwards 
 omitted and the journey was made by land. 
 
 Next after this followed certain sacrifices made in the 
 city of Athens, and then was formed the procession to go 
 from Athens to that holy spot Eleusis. This journey might 
 be matched by those other ritual observances alluded to just 
 now, the bearing about of Isis, or of the Ephesian Artemis, 
 or of the Teutonic goddess. It was in itself a sort of drama : 
 it represented in its way the wanderings of Demeter, and so 
 in a degree anticipated the drama which was afterwards 
 to take place at Eleusis. In this initial procession, how- 
 ever, it was not an image of Demeter which the mystse 
 carried with them as they went, bufc an image of the boy 
 lacchos, who was identified with Dionysus and here stood 
 for the young year. It is this initiatory procession which, 
 as I suppose, contains in it the most primitive elements of 
 the ritual of the chthonic divinities. The wild dances 
 and processions in which all these rituals take their rise 
 precede the building of temples or the possibility of any 
 more formal dramas. 
 
THE ELEUSINIA. 239 
 
 As the accounts which have come down to us of this 
 great Greek festival are- from the latter days of heathenism 
 nay, the best account is from the pen of a Christian 
 father 1 they necessarily exhibit the confusion of those 
 elements which time had brought together to form a latter- 
 day mystery. And we have before us the task of distin- 
 guishing what is new from what is ancient in them. 
 There are descriptions of some processions such as might 
 have been made a thousand years before, and there are 
 symbolic phrases and rituals which betoken an age not 
 long before Christ. But it so happens that the order of 
 introduction into the ritual of each element in it roughly 
 corresponds with the place of that portion in order of 
 performance ; so that the first days of the mysteries 
 contain the most antique constituents, and we gradually, 
 as we approach the end of the festival, come to newer and 
 newer additions. 
 
 The half- forgotten drama of the procession was more 
 ancient than the conscious formulated drama which took 
 place at Eleusis ; yet even these later additions did little 
 else than repeat, with elaborations, the story which the first 
 parts were designed to set forth. On the whole the wonder 
 rather is that the simpler myths and earlier rites should 
 remain so clearly distinguishable than that they should be 
 here and there overlaid and hidden. 
 
 The greater mysteries, the Eleusinia properly so 
 called, began in the autumn, in the middle of the month 
 Boedromion. 2 The first day was called the day of the col- 
 lection (aysppos) or assembling. It was in truth a carnival 
 which preceded the nine lenten days of the regular 
 celebration : the noise and tumult on this day contrasted 
 strangely with the silence and seriousness which were 
 enjoined upon the mystse when the festival had begun. 
 The second day was called a\aSs pva-TaL, the meaning of 
 which has been explained. The sea voyage was commuted 
 
 1 Clement of Alexandria. 
 
 2 The month which commemorated the defeat of the Amazons. 
 
240 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 to a mere bathing and purification in the sea. The third 
 day was that of sacrifice to Demeter in the temple at 
 Athens; the fourth, also of sacrifices of h'rstfruits to 
 Dionysus in fris temple there ; the fifth, of sacrifices to 
 Asclepios a god who in those latter days had come 
 to be confounded with lacchos, and so with Dionysus. 
 Then on the sixth day was formed the processional cortege 
 to Eleusis, carrying along with it the image of lacchos, 
 represented as a boy bearing a torch like the Egyptian 
 Horus. 1 
 
 These initial days of the festival reproduce its character 
 in the earliest times when peasants and shepherds did 
 service to the universal mother. The dress of the mystse 
 up to this time seems to show a consciousness of the 
 antiquity of the ceremonies which they renewed. This 
 dress was a simple fawn or sheep skin (vsftpls).* On the 
 sixth day this costume was exchanged for a more civilised 
 dress to be worn at the inner mysteries. During these 
 inner mysteries the door is closed to us. Only the 
 initiated might partake in them, and they were forbidden 
 to speak of what they had seen and done. The eighth and 
 ninth days, which ended the feast, were devoted to the 
 initiation (fjuvrja-is and sTTOTrrsla) and to the grand dramatic 
 performances in the great temple at Eleusis. 
 
 But though we have been left outside the sacred 
 enclosure,, shall we be far wrong if, in picturing what is 
 doing within (while making allowance for the difference 
 of age and the difference of subject), we allow our minds 
 to wander to St. Francis and his brethren assembled from 
 
 1 Horus is the image of the rising sun, in contrast with Osiris, who is 
 the setting sun, or the sun after setting. In a wider sense that is to say, 
 in the great myth of the death of Osiris Horus seems to be taken for an 
 image of the new year. lacchos also undergoes changes of meaning. 
 Sometimes, perhaps, his torch-bearing image was deemed only the morning 
 star, for this thought is expressed in the apostrophe in the ' Frogs ' - 
 
 VVKTfpOV TeXeTTJS <p<0<T<[>6pOS CffTTJp. 
 
 2 Ncfyn's is of course properly a fawn skin. It was the general dress of 
 the Bacchantes. It is probable that a sheep-skin often did service for it. 
 
PEOCESSIONAL CHAUNT. 241 
 
 all Italy, with their torches alight, the manger prepared, 
 with the ox and the ass in their stall, the hymn rising in 
 the still night, the solemn excitement of the Saint as he 
 administers the holy mystery of the mass ? . The Greeks, 
 too, had their torchlight procession, their veiled figures 
 moving from side to side in mimic quest of the lost 
 Persephone ; they had a sort of eucharist in the mystic 
 drink kykeon ; and for a processional chaunt let us listen 
 to an ancient chorus which has come down to us, perhaps, 
 from these very Eleusinia : l 
 
 STROPHE. 
 
 Over the wide mountain ways 
 The Holy Mother harrying went, 
 Through woody tracts her steps she bent, 
 By the swift river-floods' descent, 
 Or where upon the hollow coast 
 The deep sea- waves their voice upraise, 
 Loud in her lament 
 For her nameless daughter lost. 
 And the Bacchic cymbals high 
 Sent abroad a piercing cry. 
 So ever in her car, along 
 By yoked wild beasts borne, 
 She seeks the virgin who was torn 
 From her virgin choir among. 
 In the quest, by her side, 
 Fleet as storms two others go 
 Artemis of the bow, 
 And armed Athene, gorgon-eyed. 
 
 ANTISTROPHE. 
 
 Now with many wanderings worn, 
 Her daughter's foot-prints, hope-forlorn, 
 The goddess stayed from following. 
 The snowy Idsean heights she passed, 
 Pitifully sorrowing, 
 And in the snows herself down cast. 
 
 1 Though misplaced in the Helen of Euripides. 
 
242 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 And all the while from earth's broad plain 
 Men reap no more the golden grain, 
 Nor for the flocks green pastures grow, 
 No leafy tendril sprouts again. 
 She will the human race o'erthrow, 
 The city streets to desert turn. 
 No victim dies ; no longer burn 
 The altar cakes ; the fountains now, 
 By dews unfed, no longer pour ; 
 She hath forbid their crystal flow 
 For the maiden sorrowing so 
 Now and ever more. 
 
 It is evident that Persephone was naturally little con- 
 nected with thoughts of death, of the next world and of 
 future judgment. The allusions to her myth which we 
 have gathered together and these are the most important 
 to be found in the range of Greek literature the remains 
 of the Eleusinian festival which have come down to us, 
 make it clear that it is essentially as a goddess of spring 
 that Persephone was worshipped, and that the mysteries 
 speak far more of the sorrows of Demeter above the earth 
 than of Persephone beneath it. We are not brought face 
 to face with the kingdom of Hades, as (for example) we are 
 in the myth of the death of Balder, a story which in other 
 ways nearly resembles the myths of Persephone. What 
 likeness is there between this queen of the shades and the 
 Norse goddess Hel, whose table is Hunger, Starvation her 
 knife, Care her bed, and Bitter Pain the tapestry of her 
 room ? Of course Persephone was acknowledged as a ruler 
 of the dead. She and her story are often painted upon 
 cinerary urns and upon tombs. Still we must confess that 
 in her nature there is far more of Core, the maiden, than 
 of Persephone ; and that this latter name, which means 
 light-destroyer, is as little appropriate to her whole character 
 as Apollo, the destroyer, is appropriate to the sun god. 1 
 
 1 Preller has discussed at some length and with much learning the 
 probability of their being two Persephones, whose diverse natures became 
 united into one (Demeter u. Persephone, Introd.) 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF THE SEED. 243 
 
 Moreover, where the Homeric story comes to an end 
 the arrangement was that Persephone (albeit she is called 
 Persephone there) should spend two-thirds of the year 
 above the earth, one-third only below it. To the author 
 of this hymn she was evidently not first of all a goddess 
 of death ; the god of torment has not yet taught her how 
 to frown and how to chide. I think, therefore, that we 
 may determine without much hesitation that the myth, 
 and the mysteries which preserved that myth, had at first 
 only a very slight connection with theories about death 
 and a future. 
 
 Of course the image of the seed, perishing that it may 
 rise again, speaks with a natural and simple appropriate- 
 ness of the hope which may accompany the consignment 
 of a dead man to the all-nourishing earth. But it speaks 
 only through the voice of an allegory ; and if there is one 
 thing which the history of belief teaches us more clearly 
 than others, it is that allegories of such a kind as this, the 
 parables of nature, are not among the first lessons which 
 man learns from her. Man's earliest myths are direct 
 histories ; they are meant at least to tell only of what 
 happens before his eyes or what he credulously believes to 
 be among the doings of the physical world. They are not 
 mystical interpretations from these actions, or images 
 transferred from the world of sense to the region of feeling 
 and thought. 
 
 It is not the less true, however, that we can trace along- 
 side of the simpler and earlier story of De meter and 
 Persephone the growth of a deeper mystery which touched 
 upon thoughts of the other world. And when the goddess 
 of the very fulness of youth and of spring had come to be 
 confounded with the ruler over the shades, men had 
 before them, no doubt, a lesson of the deepest signifi- 
 cance. ' In the midst of life we are in death.' This was 
 now the texb which came at the end of the fasting and 
 feasting, the torchlight processions and triumphant hymns, 
 and the nameless 'orgies after them. Has a more solemn 
 
 B2 
 
244 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 trumpet sound of warning ever rung in the ears of 
 humanity than this ? Were these things, then, only a pro- 
 logue to a dance of death ? How changed must have 
 become the mysteries when such a belief had found 
 entrance ! 
 
 The world seemed not the place it was before. 
 
 We wrongly credit the Hellenes with a complete care- 
 lessness of their destiny in a future state. Such may have 
 been their prevailing tone ; such must have been the 
 prevailing tone of a life so vigorous and joyful as their life 
 was. Greek art has little to tell us of thoughts about 
 another world. 1 But there must always have been a 
 minority who were not indifferent to these things ; and a 
 little before the historical period their views (upon the 
 speculative side at least) gained a measure of strength. 
 Greece had been long connected by some tie with Egypt, 
 whose inhabitants, among all the nations of antiquity, 
 were most deeply imbued with thoughts about death and 
 the other world. Pythagoras, however, was the first Greek 
 writer who professed to have drawn much from the wisdom 
 of the Egyptians. Another source to which Pythagoras 
 and some of his followers have evidently been indebted is 
 Persia. We still feel, and in great measure through the 
 medium of the Platonic philosophy, the effects of Persian 
 teaching upon that great primal crux of religion the 
 origin of evil ; a teaching which has spread its influence 
 over every Western land. Before the second age of Hel- 
 lenic literature, the age of the drama and of lyrical poetry, 
 of ^Eschylus and Pindar, Greece had greatly altered irom 
 its first simplicity. Colonists had gone out far and near, 
 had settled in Italy, in Gaul, and on the far shores of the 
 Pontus or at the mouth of the Nile. Even before the days 
 of contest with Persia, Greek soldiers were held in such 
 
 1 It would have had more to tell had the paintings of Polygnotus come 
 down to our time. He covered two walls of the Cnidian pilgrims' house 
 (lesche) at Delphi with paintings representing the world of shades and the 
 punishment of the wicked (Paus. x. 25-31). 
 
DECAY OF THE HOMERIC RELIGION. 245 
 
 esteem that they went as mercenaries .to the capitals of 
 the greatest Asiatic monarchies, to Nineveh and Babylon 
 as well as to Thebes. Greek merchants too traded with 
 these countries, and Greek noblemen and philosophers 
 frequented their courts. 
 
 Many questions which to the Eastern mind and in these 
 time-worn States were quite familiar, were almost new to 
 such a young people as the Hellenes ; and the result of 
 this intermixture of ideas was that Greece entered upon 
 its philosophical stage ; its mind became questioning and 
 sceptical, which had once been simple and credulous. As 
 the new ideas passed from State to Sta-te they saw the old 
 Homeric religion crumble beneath their tread. And as 
 the fixed faith of former times decayed, it left an unsatis- 
 fied craving for religious emotion of all kinds. 
 
 The mysteries had by this time gained every requisite 
 for answering to feelings so excited. They were very old ; 
 but, as the origin and true meaning of them had been 
 forgotten, they could not be exploded as easily as could 
 the plainer teaching of the Homeric religion. All the 
 stimulants to emotion which we have dwelt upon before, 
 the secresy of the mystery, the tumultuous excitement of 
 the orgy, were to be found within them ; and, in addition 
 to these motives, they now added a new one, a hint con- 
 cerning the great mystery of mysteries, the mingling of 
 death with life. The worship of ancestors and the 
 sacrifices to the departed went hand in hand with festivals 
 of flowers and the honours of Dionysus. 1 All this must 
 have given to the ceremony a new character. It must 
 
 1 The Anthesteria, the festival of flowers, was especially set apart for 
 honours to be paid to the dead (see Pauly, Real-Enajvlopadie s. v. 
 Mytteria and Bacchusi). A black cock is the victim most often associated 
 with the deities of the under world, and Persephong is very frequently 
 represented (especially so upon urns) with this bird in her hand. Now as 
 the cock is the herald of morning, it belongs rather to the goddess Core" 
 than to the infernal deities. It is, in fact, also sacred to Apollo. It is 
 probably, therefore, only an after-thought which makes the cock a black 
 one, a change corresponding to the change in Persephone's nature. In 
 the Northern mythology three cocks are to proclaim the- dawn of the Last 
 
246 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 have thrown over the festival a quite new air of sadness, 
 which was very different from the emotion with which 
 men had looked upon the play which told only of the 
 death of earth's greenery. The seeds which were now 
 planted were the bodies of beloved relatives ; they would 
 not spring up again with the returning year. The 
 mysteries entered upon a fresh phase. It was after this 
 transition from the old to the new mysteries that art 
 began to busy itself much with the story of the Great 
 Goddesses. The artistic representations of the myth occur 
 frequently on cinerary urns. Demeter herself became more 
 a picture of maternal sorrow than she should naturally 
 have been. In some of the statues of Demeter as, for 
 example, in that. beautiful one from Cnidus in the British 
 Museum- -we have an image of the true mater dolorosa of 
 the Greek creed. It is evident that the mother mourns 
 for her daughter as for one dead. Nevertheless the ulti- 
 mate consolation of the goddess was suited to teach men 
 that they need not sorrow as those that have no hope. 
 
 The teaching concerning the expectation of a future 
 life may have been the real substance of the latter-day 
 mysteries ; it may, I mean, have been the special subject 
 on which silence was so important the boon of know- 
 ledge to which initiation opened a door. It was perhaps 
 then, when this doctrine crept into the Eleusinia, that the 
 strict oath of secresy was instituted. On the first day of 
 the ceremonies the sacred herald, by public proclamation, 
 enjoined silence and reverence on the initiated. 1 After- 
 wards those who were about to witness the holy drama 
 were required one by one to swear secresy. Wherefore 
 Demosthenes says that those who have not been initiated 
 can know nothing of the mysteries by report. 
 
 Day, that great Armageddon of Teutonic religion called Ragna-rok, the 
 Doom of the Gods. Over Asgard Gods' Home a golden cock crows, over 
 Man's Home a red cock, and over Hell a cock of sooty red. 
 
 1 EvQwt'iv xpb Ka^iffraffQai TO?S TjfjLfTfpoiffi xP^, 'Speak reverently, 
 and stand aside from before our holy choir,' as Aristophanes parodies the 
 ceremony. 
 
THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY. 247 
 
 One would fain know why the mystse deemed secresy 
 so important. Did they think that they could, as it were, 
 keep the privilege of immortality to themselves by not 
 divulging too freely how it was won ; that the envious 
 upper powers might withdraw it from mankind if all 
 rushed in to share the gift ? ! Such a gift might well 
 seem a strange one at the hands of the jealous gods, as 
 it was indeed most precious. Would ifc be wise to dis- 
 tribute its benefits broadcast? When, owing to many 
 circumstances, but chiefly owing to this, that they were 
 the mysteries of the most thoughtful and spiritual nation- 
 ality of Hellas, the Eleusinia became the mysteries of 
 Greece, and all sought admission to their privileges, this 
 admission was at the outset charily granted. At first only 
 Athenian citizens might ' partake ; ' anyone born out of 
 Attica needed to get himself adopted by an Athenian 
 family. Afterwards initiation was allowed to all Hellenes. 
 ' If these things contain some secret doctrine they ought 
 not to be shown to all at no more cost than the sacrifice 
 of a common pip; : ' so Plato complains of their easy ac- 
 cessibility. Subsequently the same rites were granted to 
 the Romans. Barbarians were always excluded. 
 
 Again, one would like to know what ideas the initiated 
 had touching that future for which they were in some 
 unknown way preparing themselves. I should not think 
 it strange if, in the height of their mystic rites, in the 
 midst of blazing torches, of the sounds of music, of wild 
 cries to Dionysus, 
 
 (f>ti)ff<f)6pO a 
 
 in the gloom of night, among sacrifices and the memories 
 of friends not long since departed, the enthusiast became 
 transported to think that he was no longer in the upper 
 
 1 In the same spirit a woman of the Orkneys, when asked to repeat a 
 charm which she had for driving away evil spirits at night, expressed a 
 fear that the auditor would publish what she told him. 'And then,' said 
 she, all the gude o' it to me wad be gane.' 
 
248 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 workaday world, but had really been carried across the 
 dreaded Styx to the asphodel meadows and the banks of 
 the forgetful stream. In the Middle Ages, during the 
 fever of those darker mystic rites, which used at times to 
 sweep over the people like an epidemic, and which cul- 
 minated during the fourteenth century in the horrible 
 Dance of Death, it was common enough to find the per- 
 formers fully persuaded that they had passed the limits of 
 mortality. Sometimes they deemed they were in heaven, 
 more often that they were damned in the world below ; 
 some fancied they had got into an intermediate state 
 which was neither purgatory nor heaven nor hell. 
 
 Aristophanes, in his wild way, shows us a picture of 
 this kind of belief. The portrait is distorted certainly, but 
 not perhaps very unlike the original. The picture occurs 
 in the ' Frogs ' when Bacchus is preparing to descend to 
 the lower world, in order to fetch thence his favourite 
 Euripides. And before making the journey he goes to ask 
 the way of Heracles ; for Heracles, as we well know, had 
 been more than once into the land of shades. The hero then 
 forewarns Dionysus how, when he has descended beneath 
 the earth and crossed the Styx, he will find himself in a 
 new world in no way distinguishable from that where he 
 now is sunny meadows like those he is leaving, and 
 the bands of the initiate singing their songs to Demeter 
 and Dionysus, just as they sing them at the mysteries. 
 In truth, it is the damnation of Peter Bell : 
 
 It was a party in a parlour, 
 
 Crammed just as they on earth were crammed ; 
 
 Some sipping punch, some sipping tea ; 
 
 And by their faces you might see 
 
 All silent and all damned. 
 
 There is a fine Aristophanes-like touch of genius in 
 putting this force upon our fancy. In the original play 
 the scene would be imagined 1 to shift for a moment 
 
 1 The change of scene during the Greek plays was never more than 
 indicated to the imagination, not forced upon it, as with us. 
 
PICTURE OF THE UNDER- WORLD IN THE 'FROGS.' 249 
 
 to the banks of Styx, and to show Charon and his boat ; 
 and then the meadows which men could actually see from 
 their seats, and the sun-light which fell upon them where 
 they sat, would be transformed (by imagination) tor a 
 scene in Hades. 
 
 When Dionysus has been standing a little while in 
 these meadows * a mystical odour of torches breathes 
 round him,' and behold the chorus of the mystse come in 
 calling upon lacchos without knowing that he is present 
 and imitating in all respects the .action of the mystse 
 upon the upper earth, though the chorus which they sing 
 is (agreeably to the character of the comedy) a burlesque 
 of the chaunts which might have been heard during the 
 Eleusinian celebrations. 1 
 
 It was not, however, concerning the future state alone 
 that the priests of the mysteries professed to impart a 
 revelation. There were a hundred questions undreamt of 
 of yore which in the latter days began to press for solution 
 upon the sharpened intellect of the Hellene. His age of 
 faith had gone ; his age of philosophy had begun. As the 
 
 1 Keep silence, keep silence ; let all the profane 
 
 From our holy solemnity duly refrain ; 
 Whose souls unenlightened by taste are obscure ; 
 Whose poetical notions are dark and impure ; 
 
 Whose theatrical conscience 
 
 Is sullied by nonsense ; 
 
 Who never were trained by the mighty Cratinus 
 In mystical orgies poetic and vinous ; 
 Who delight in buffooning and jests out of season, 
 Who promote the designs of oppression and treason ; 
 Who foster sedition, and strife, and debate 
 Are traitors, in short, to the stage and the State. 
 Who surrender a fort, or in private export 
 To places and harbours of hostile resort 
 Clandestine assignments of cables and pitch ; 
 In the way that Thorycion grew to be rich 
 From a scoundrelly, dirty collector of tribute. 
 All such we reject and severely prohibit. 
 
 Frogs, Frere's translation. This admirable translator only errs occa- 
 sionally by throwing too strong an air of burlesque over Aristophanes' lines. 
 This has been the case here. 
 
250 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 firm belief of former days decayed it left behind an un- 
 satisfied craving for emotion of all kinds such longings 
 are the residuum of dying creeds and these the mysteries 
 were by their nature peculiarly fitted to satisfy. They 
 alone could raise men out of themselves until in the ecstasy 
 of their holy rites all the difficulties of life and of thought 
 seemed to fade away. Without the aid of much definite 
 dogma they formed a natural counterpoise to the growing 
 scepticism of the age. 
 
 And then this age of growing scepticism was in a sense 
 likewise an age of growing morality. The notion of a 
 moral law, at least, was more constantly present than it 
 had been of old time. I do not say the practice was 
 an improvement upon that of bygone days; but the 
 development of man had reached that stage when right is 
 no longer a thing of instinct or habit ; when righteous- 
 ness is seen not to be an affair of this or that occasion, 
 but to stand apart from all occasion, abstract and eternal. 
 The 'categorical imperative' of this sense of right and 
 wrong had risen, as it had never risen before, to be a force 
 in the world. And beside this power that of the old 
 supernatural beings seemed shadowy and unreal. Even 
 the scoffer Aristophanes witnesses to this important 
 part of what we may call the new mysticism. This con- 
 sisted not of religious excitement, still less of physical 
 excitement or orgies only, but rested in some measure 
 upon purity of morals. It may seem strange that a form 
 of worship which still included many obscene rites and 
 tLe Eleusinia, in common with all other mysteries, seem to 
 have done this could have set itself up as a preacher of 
 morality : it must seem strange to us, who have so long- 
 associated purity of morals in this particular with purity 
 of morals in every relationship, till the phrases ' an 
 immoral life,' <a moral man,' have gained a technical 
 significance. The ancients acknowledged no such neces- 
 sary interdependence between different kinds of goodness. 
 Excesses, licensed excesses, as they were, during the cele- 
 
NEOPLATONISM. 251 
 
 bration of the holy rites, did not afford a reason why the 
 priest should refrain from warning away from the celebra- 
 tion all those who were stained with usury or avarice, or 
 other vices of bad citizenship. 
 
 But, in truth, had the inconsistency been greater than 
 it was, it would not be a thing to wonder at in the new 
 mysteries. All the simplicity of the early festival had 
 passed away, and in its place had come a strange compound 
 of definite doctrine and of fancied revelation ; of unex- 
 plained and unexplainable excitement; of some hope of 
 the future combined with much fear of the mysterious 
 upper powers who were but symbolised under the names 
 of Demeter and Hades, of Dionysus and Persephone. Of 
 such kind were the mysteries of historic times. 
 
 The final stage of Greek religion we may call it the 
 third stage, that of Homer being the first, the age of 
 j33schylus and Pindar and of the rise of philosophy being 
 the second was that during which Platonisra faded into 
 Neoplatonism. It was in this last condition that the 
 worship of Demeter came to mingle with the time-hon- 
 oured mysteries of Isi& The likeness between the two 
 goddesses had been acknowledged from of old, but this 
 similarity was not the result of a transmission of religious 
 ideas from Egypt to Greece. It was only a likeness which 
 sprang from the identity of the impulse which produced 
 both mysteries. It was not until the days of the Alexan- 
 drian kingdom that the Oriental creeds first began to exer- 
 cise a strong attractive power upon Greek thought. 
 
 Whatever effect the learning and the religion of the 
 Egyptians may have had upon individual historians, such 
 as Herodotus, and upon individual philosophers like Pytha- 
 goras, it is certain that it had no deep influence upon the 
 Greek belief during the latter's heyday of development. 
 It was after the decline of belief in Greece and in Eome 
 that men were found seeking new forms of mystic excite- 
 ment in the dark places of Oriental creeds. Before the 
 time of Alexander the Great, Greece had no doubt absorbed 
 
252 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 something of the philosophy of Persia and of Egypt ; 
 but these first lessons were as nothing compared to those 
 which came to her after her conquests in Asia and Africa 
 had been completed. In this old world the energy and 
 culture of the Greeks transformed the dull life which they 
 found there, and now Greek scepticism, which had perhaps 
 first been awakened by contact with the East, paid back 
 with interest all it had received, and began to unmoor the 
 Asiatic peoples from the anchor of their former creeds. 
 But then, again, the Hellenes in their turn received in 
 exchange some of the mystic spirit which by this process 
 they had set free to wander through the air. Ifc was easier 
 to take from the Asiatic his positive belief than to quench 
 his religious nature itself, and his love of emotion and 
 mysticism. It was through the marriage of Greek phi- 
 losophy with Oriental mysticism that there sprang up in 
 Alexandria that strange system of teaching to which has 
 been given the name of Neoplatonism. 
 
 It is no part of my purpose to attempt here to follow 
 this new philosophy so unlike the calmly reasoned 
 systems of Plato and of Aristotle along the dark laby- 
 rinth through which it chose to wander. Inferior as Neo- 
 platonism is to Greek philosophy, properly so called, in 
 intellectual breadth and logical capacity, obscured as it is 
 throughout by a turbid atmosphere of mysticism and fan- 
 tastic creation, it has this element of superiority over the 
 older philosophy, that a keener moral sense displays itself 
 everywhere in it. It possesses a certain spiritual insight 
 which to the other would have been impossible. For this 
 keener moral perception belonged to the age in which 
 Neoplatonism sprang up, and to the conditions to which 
 the development of human thought had attained. Yet, as 
 has been said, this spiritual insight was not incompatible 
 with any actual backsliding in the sphere of positive duty. 
 There needed Some One who, by example as well as by 
 precept, should vivify and bring to practical fruit the 
 doctrine of right for its own sake ; and He was yet unborn. 
 
MYSTERIES OF SERAPIS AND ISIS. 253 
 
 It is easy to understand why, amid all this confusion of 
 thought and the kind of anarchy which spread throughout 
 the sphere of moral life, now that the emotions were left 
 as the only guide to men, the mysteries should have held 
 their place with a redoubled tenacity, and exercised a 
 deeper influence than they had ever gained before. Now, 
 not the Eleusinia alone, but the mystic rites of almost 
 every nation were incorporated into the ritual of the 
 Greeks. What was the separate fascination which each of 
 these rituals held we cannot tell ; but we can well under- 
 stand that the times were favourable to those orgies of 
 feeling, that intoxication of the faculties, which all the 
 mysteries alike fostered, and in which all had their root. 
 
 It is from the time of the New Platonism that we 
 must date the growth of the mysteries of Isis and Osiris 
 into that form, of which Plutarch has left us a picture in 
 his treatise upon those two divinities. Nevertheless the 
 mysteries of Isis and Osiris could never have had an 
 importance calculated to rival the Eleusinia so long as 
 the Greek supremacy remained. But from Greece that is 
 to say, from the New Greece, whose capital was Alexandria 
 these mysteries spread to Rome. And it is chiefly as a 
 phase in the history of Roman belief that the later Isis 
 worship is interesting to us. 
 
 Under the Roman supremacy it would follow, as a 
 matter of course, that the Eleusinia should fall consider- 
 ably from their former consequence. Before the Roman 
 supremacy, though much of Greek intellect and enterprise 
 had deserted the original Hellas, though Athens had been 
 eclipsed by Alexandria, yet it was to Greece proper that 
 men's thoughts still turned with supreme reverence as to 
 the mother of all wider Greece. They honoured its ancient 
 festivals, its Olympia, its Eleusinia, as the institutions 
 under which their country had grown so great, and which 
 were most truly representative of Hellenic nationality. 
 But all this was changed when Rome became the ruling 
 
254 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 power of the world, and when even the Greeks put off 
 their ancient pride of race to be enrolled in the number 
 of her citizens. The Eomans had no mysteries, properly 
 so called, of their own. They had had, indeed, in old days, 
 like all other nations, their festivals of the spring, such 
 as the Lupercalia. But these had never been developed, as 
 the Greeks had developed the Eleusinia, into a mystery of 
 what we have called the new kind. For the wants of 
 their new state of religious excitement their native 
 religious system was therefore unprepared. One would 
 have supposed the Eoman natures themselves were un- 
 suited to this phase of belief; but the event shows the 
 contrary. Almost every kind of Oriental mystery found 
 in the latter days of the Empire its enthusiastic votaries 
 in Eome ; but none more so than the rites of Osiris and 
 Isis, or of Serapis and Isis ; for under the latter names 
 these Egyptian divinities were there most frequently 
 honoured. 1 
 
 From the time of Alexander, when Greece entered 
 into such close relations with Egypt, and Alexandria 
 began to assume the supremacy which anciently belonged 
 to Athens, Isis worship began to spread in Greece, 
 and to rival in some degree the native Eleusinian rites. 
 Traces of Isis worship are found in Epirus, in Thespise 
 in Boeotia, in many of the Greek islands as, for ex- 
 ample, in Delos, Chios, and Cyprus 2 even in Athens 
 itself. To Eome this worship spread through the 
 Greeks, but was here at first discountenanced by law. 
 Apuleius says unless he has been misunderstood that 
 Isis worship was known in Eome in the time of Sulla 
 the Dictator. 3 And for a long period no Isis temple 
 might be built within the walls. Even in the time of 
 
 1 Serapis was originally a divinity quite distinct from Osiris ; but the 
 two came to be united into one being. 
 
 2 See Pauly, Real-Encyc. s. v. Isis (L. Georgii). 
 
 * Some read Sybilla for Sulla, which would make the statement useless 
 as a datum. 
 
WORSHIP OF SERAPIS AND ISIS IN ROME. 255 
 
 Augustus this prohibition held good, though there was in 
 his day a celebrated temple of Isis without the walls. 1 
 Agrippa was strongly opposed to the new cult. He 
 forbade the worship of Serapis or of Isis within a mile of 
 the city. The cult was not received into general favour 
 until the time of the Flavian emperors. Domitian was its 
 special votary ; his life had once been saved by his assum- 
 ing the disguise of a priest of Isis. Marcus Aurelius 
 built a great temple to Serapis. Commodus was priest of 
 this cult ; so were Pescennius Niger and Caracalla. Thus 
 these mysteries went on growing in importance till 
 Christian times. It is strange to see these sober Eomans 
 throwing themselves as wildly as the rest of the world into 
 this wild game ; to find an Apuleius not a pious nature, 
 one would suppose pawning his last coat to buy initiation 
 into the rites of the goddess. There was not much belief 
 at this time, perhaps, in the efficacy of the rites to bestow 
 immortality ; no more than there was any longer a firm 
 belief in the existence of the gods commemorated. Still 
 the ceremonial remained, though the myths on which it 
 was founded had been rationalised and the belief from 
 which it once drew all its support had faded away. 
 
 We can only guess at the form which the original 
 myth of Isis and Osiris wore, or at the rites which com- 
 memorated the myth ; though we have every reason to 
 believe that both myth and ritual followed the usual course 
 of the worship of the earth goddess. Nevertheless there 
 are in Egypt some peculiar characteristics in the changes 
 which in certain seasons pass over the face of earth. 
 For there the whole country is submerged during the 
 Nile's overflow, and all life there is for a time destroyed. 
 These peculiar effects of Nature seem to be reflected in the 
 Osiris myth. Death takes in it a larger share than he 
 does in the corresponding story of Persephone ; and what- 
 ever note of triumph may accompany the conclusion of the 
 
 1 Dion Cassias, liii. 2. 
 
256 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 history, it is pitched in a more subdued key than in the 
 Greek legend. 
 
 Plutarch, writing in the first century of our era, just 
 about the time when the Isis worship at Rome was in its 
 greatest ascendant, gives an account of the Lsis myth and 
 then a theological explanation of it. Both are charac- 
 teristic of the last stage in the religion of antiquity. The 
 earlier forms of the story which related the death of Osiris, 
 the mourning of his wife, her search for his body, and the 
 revenge for his death, are lost to us. In the hands of the 
 Greek the Egyptian tale stands evidently deeply indebted 
 to the Demeter myth. The main differences, however, 
 remain. The lost being is a man and not a woman (it is 
 so, as we shall see hereafter, in the Norse version of the 
 Demeter story), and this man is the husband of the earth 
 goddess. 
 
 Typhon (Seth), the Genius of Evil thus the story 
 runs in Plutarch made a conspiracy against the life of 
 Osiris. And this is how he accomplished his purpose. 
 He challenged the god to see if he could get himself 
 into a certain chest which he had previously prepared, 
 much as the fisherman in the Arab tale induced the 
 jinnee to show his power by returning into the bottle from 
 which he had just escaped. And, like that Arab fisherman, 
 no sooner had Typhon got Osiris well into the box than he 
 clapped down the lid and fastened it, and pouring melted 
 lead over it to make it secure, he carried it away. Then 
 begin Isis' wanderings in search of her husband. At 
 length she heard that the chest, which was now Osiris' 
 coffin, had been taken to Byblos, on the most eastern 
 mouth of the Nile, and hidden there in a tamarisk tree ; 
 and further, that the tree had grown all round the chest, 
 so as to hide it. Isis found, when she got to Byblos, that 
 the tamarisk had been cut down, and was now a pillar in 
 the king's palace. There she went as Demeter to the 
 house of Keleos, and became nurse to the king's son. She 
 
STOEY OF THE DEATH OF OSIEIS. 257 
 
 let him suck at her finger instead of her breast, and by 
 night she placed him in the fire, that his mortal parts 
 might be consumed away. But the mother seeing the 
 child all aflame, screamed out, and by so doing robbed him 
 of the immortality which would have been his. Then the 
 goddess discovered herself, and asked that the pillar which 
 upheld the roof should be given to her. She cut open the 
 tree and took out the chest, wherewith she set sail to 
 Egypt. ' It was now morning, and the river Phaedrus 
 sent forth a bitter wind. . . .' 
 
 Isis went next to find her son Horus, leaving the 
 chest in an obscure and desert place. But Typhon, as he 
 was hunting by night (see how the day myth still lingers : 
 Osiris is brought back in the morning and lost again at 
 night), came perchance upon it, and knowing what it 
 contained, he took out the body of the god, tore it into 
 fourteen fragments, and scattered them hither and thither 
 over the land. Then Isis set out once more in search of 
 her husband, travelling in a boat made of papyrus reeds* 
 . . . When she met with any one of the scattered remains 
 of Osiris she buried it. 
 
 After these things Osiris came from the dead and 
 appeared unto Horus, exhorting him to avenge his father. 
 And Horus fought with Typhon and slew him. 
 
 The Eleusinia were devoted in about equal parts to 
 painting the sad journeys of Demeter, and her joy at again 
 beholding her daughter. Persephone spends a third of 
 the year only below, two- thirds upon earth. Joy and 
 sorrow are about equally tempered ; this is the lesson of 
 the Demeter myth. But in the Egyptian mysteries sorrow 
 has the foremost place. Osiris is only found when dead, 
 and found only to be lost again. And though Typhon 
 too is slain, and Horus victorious, this is like a second 
 part added on to the original story ; it cannot bring com- 
 pensation to the wife who has lost her husband. And so 
 Plutarch speaks of the sober air of grief and sadness ' 
 
258 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 which appears in these ceremonies. This was a cult which 
 had grown old in length of years. The gladness of heart 
 which inspired all the mysteries at their beginning had 
 passed away, and a sober sadness taken its place. In this 
 instance, moreover, we have clearly brought before us the 
 conflict between good and evil which in the earlier 
 mysteries not yet divorced from their close connection 
 with nature nowhere appears. Eites such as these rites 
 of Isis, pictured things more solemn than the changes of 
 the year. ' Her mysteries,' says our author, * were insti- 
 tuted by Isis to be the image, or indication rather, of what 
 was then done and suffered, as a right consolation to those 
 other men and women who might at any future time be in 
 a like distress.' A divine being suffering that her suffer- 
 ings should be a consolation to humanity ! Do we not 
 here seem to be drawing near to the mysteries of Chris- 
 tianity ? 
 
 Of the same late character is Plutarch's explanation 
 of the story. He discusses and dismisses other former 
 interpretations which do indeed preserve some features 
 of the original and natural origin of the tale in favour of 
 his own, which passes beyond and includes all these. Some 
 have said, he tells us, that Isis was Egypt, and Osiris the 
 Nile, and that Typhon was the scorching heat of summer, 
 which dried up the stream ; or that Osiris was the heaven, 
 and Isis the earth ; that he was the sun and Isis the moon ; 
 or lastly, that the god was the principle of productiveness 
 in nature, Isis the recipient of the seed. They are all or 
 none of these things. Osiris is the principle of good in 
 nature, or in the soul of nature and of men. 1 Typhon is 
 the opposite, the evil principle. The great Persian theory 
 of the dual government of the world is here invoked, and 
 referred directly to the teaching of Zoroaster and the 
 Magians. ' There are two beings equally concerned in the 
 ordering of terrene affairs, a good and a bad divinity, a 
 
 1 Vuxb TOV Uavrbs. Isis and Osiris, 49. 
 
PLUTARCH'S EXPLANATION OF THE MYTH. 259 
 
 god and a dsemon. Out of the war of these two principles 
 for they are eternally united and yet for ever striving 
 one to subdue the other is produced the harmony of the 
 world.' As Euripides says, ' good and evil cannot be 
 parted, though they are so tempered that beauty and 
 order are the issue. 5 . . . And this opinion has been 
 handed down from theologians and legislators to the poets 
 and philosophers, an opinion which, though its first 
 author be unknown, has everywhere gained so firm and 
 unshaken a credence as not only to be spoken of both by 
 Greeks and barbarians, but even to be taught by them in 
 their ( mysteries ' and sacrifices tha.t the world is neither 
 wholly left to its own motions without some mind, some 
 superior reason, to guide and govern it, nor that it is one 
 such mind only that, as with helm or bridle, directs the 
 whole ; but that all the irregularities which in this lower 
 region we behold are due to the two great and opposing 
 powers, one for ever trying (as it were) to lead us to the 
 right and along a straight path, the other striving as 
 constantly to bring us in the contrary direction and to 
 error. 
 
 Certainly this great conflict between good and evil is a 
 riddle deep enough in the world's history. And men were 
 at this time beginning to learn how great and terrible a 
 mystery it was. The thought of it haunted all the philo- 
 sophy of the days in which Plutarch wrote, and only 
 partially cleared away with the triumph of Christianity. 
 This, it seems, was now the lesson which was taught by the 
 mystic rites of Greeks and Romans. Man had no more 
 to do with the fresh returning spring, with peasants' 
 festivals, or with harvest homes. What meaning would 
 such old rites have had for the city life and the elaborate 
 civilisation of those latter days ? And so their mysteries 
 were turned into epitomes of the teaching of philosophers, 
 or the speculations of moralists on the origin of good and 
 evil. To this the rustic festival of early days had grown, 
 to this its final stage. 
 
 8 2 
 
260 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Then came Christianity and silenced silenced ap- 
 parently both the newer mystic cnlt and the older nature 
 worship. The Mystics themselves became Christians, as 
 Clemens Alexandrinus did, and burnt what they had 
 adored. In the year A.D. 391 the great temple of Serapis 
 at Alexandria was set on fire by order of the government. 
 And about the same time the monks who came into 
 Greece in the wake of Alaric's invading army put a 
 perpetual finis to the worship of the great goddesses at 
 Eleusis. Yet how strange is the tribute to the vitality 
 of the ancient earth worship in this fact, that the last 
 blows which Christianity levelled at its rival, paganism, 
 should have struck at that form of creed. Zeus and 
 Apollo and Athene were far less dangerous to Christianity 
 than the gods who had in reality preceded Zeus and 
 Apollo and Athene, the gods of farm, and village, and 
 the cottage fireside, than Pan or Demeter, than Perse- 
 phone or Dionysus. This is perhaps the meaning of that 
 legend which said that before the birth of Christ a 
 mysterious voice ran along the shores of the ^Egean, pro- 
 claiming as a herald of the triumph of the coming creed, 
 not the death of Zeus or of Apollo or Athene, but that the 
 far older god of earth and earth's fruitfulness, that Great 
 Pan himself was dead. 
 
THE OTHER WORLD. 261 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE OTHER WORLD. 
 
 1. The Under World, the River of Death, and the Bridge 
 of Souls. 
 
 THERE are some phases of past thought not far removed 
 from us in time into which it is all but impossible to 
 gain real insight ; difficulties and questions which were 
 new once, but have now been settled for ever, experiments 
 not long ago untried which have now become a matter of 
 daily experience, and conditions of life and society which 
 have not long passed, and yet seem to us infinitely remote. 
 But there are some questions, though they have been 
 asked continually through all the past history of man, 
 and though men will never cease from asking them as 
 long as the human race endures, which seem still as far 
 from solution as they ever were : there are some future 
 experiences upon which mankind is always speculating, and 
 which yet can never become present experiences so long 
 as we are what we are those questions, I mean, which 
 concern the destiny of man after death, the character of 
 his journey to the undiscovered country, and the sort of 
 life he will lead when there. 
 
 Some would dissuade us from the continuance of these, 
 so they deem them, unfruitful speculations ; but it is very 
 certain that man must change his nature before they will 
 lose their fascination for him ; and till he does so change 
 he can never read without sympathy the guesses which 
 past generations of his kind have made toward the solution 
 of the same problems. To them, indeed, these solutions 
 
262 OUTLINES OF PIUMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 have lost their interest, as ours will noon do for us. What- 
 ever lot that new condition may hold in store, eternal 
 pleasure or eternal pain, they have tried it now ; whatever 
 scene is concealed by the dark curtain, they have passed 
 behind it. This is certain ; as that we soon must. So 
 long, however, as we remain here upon this upper earth, 
 we must be something above or below humanity if we 
 refuse ever to let our thoughts wander towards the changes 
 and chances of another life. 
 
 Not, indeed, that questions of this sort have ever had 
 for the majority of men in one age, or for the collective 
 mass of humankind, an all-absorbing interest. If we 
 choose to look closely into the matter, and to judge of 
 men's opinion as it is displayed in their actions (the only 
 real opinion), we shall at first, perhaps, be struck by the 
 slenderness of the belief which they possess in a future 
 state. For it is slight compared with their ' notional as- 
 sent,' that which they think they believe concerning it. 
 With the majority of us faith upon this matter is at best 
 but shadowy ; of an otiose character, suitable for soothing 
 the lots of others, arid sometimes, alas ! called into requi- 
 sition to alleviate the stings of conscience for the pain 
 which our own misconduct or neglect has introduced 
 therein. 
 
 It will be said that there was once a time when one 
 aspect, at any rate, of the future, its. terror, was realised 
 with an intensity, and- exercised an influence over life and 
 conduct, such as are unknown in our days. Perhaps this 
 was so: certainly these times were not ordinary ones. 
 33ut in our estimate of the Middle Ages we are, I think, 
 apt to lay too much stress upon the force which faith had 
 over the men of those days. We forget the other side 
 of the picture. There was on the one hand the ortho- 
 dox teaching; and whenever the Church moulded com- 
 pletely the popular belief, this world was seen as if covered 
 beneath a pall, and the next shrouded in still darker 
 gloom. As the orthodox or monastic view of life was like- 
 
OF THE 
 
 v r ERSm 
 
 BELIEF AND UNBELIEF. 263 
 
 wise the literary one, the picture of the world as it was 
 drawn by the Church has come down to us almost unre- 
 lieved by brighter colours. There was, however, another 
 spirit at work, the spirit of the laity ; and for laymen at 
 least, whatever priests might say to the contrary, life had 
 still its pleasures, and, in the indulgence of these, thoughts 
 about the next world were then, as now, laid to rest. 
 Beside the deeper course of the main stream of belief this 
 under current may be distinctly traced, a rivulet of ancient 
 paganism ; whether this were the genuine heathenism of 
 new-converted lands, or the sort of paganism or atheism 
 of countries which in comparison with their times were 
 almost over-civilised such countries, -for example, as 
 Italy or Provence. Provence began a kind of renaissance 
 of its own before the time for a renaissance had come ; it 
 ga*ve a new direction to the impulses of chivalry, it fos- 
 tered la gaie science, and sent out its companies of trouba- 
 dours, plying their art to call men away from thoughts of 
 the Day of Doom, and to drown with their songs the 
 perpetual chaunting of masses and the toll of bells. We 
 cannot overlook these elements in mediaeval life. The 
 Gothic cathedral is a lasting memorial of the genius of 
 Catholicism; but if we examine it closely, and look in 
 neglected corners or at the carvings beneath the seats, we 
 shall see strange sights, not provocative to holy meditation. 
 Dante strikes, no doubt, the truest note of his age ; but in 
 the pauses of his stately music you may hear the laughter 
 of Boccaccio. 
 
 In truth, that term ' dark ages ' overrides our fancy ; 
 ' we can never hear mention of them without an accom- 
 panying feeling, as though a palpable obscure had dimmed 
 the face of things, and that our ancestors wandered to 
 and fro groping.' l On the other hand, neither have the 
 most light-hearted and sceptical of people been able to 
 shut their eyes utterly to the warnings of death. We are 
 
 1 Ella. 
 
264 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 wont to think of the Greeks as a people of just such a 
 light-hearted and in a fashion sceptical temperament, 
 and to contrast the spirit of Hellas with the spirit of 
 mediseval Europe. Truly little thought of death or of 
 judgment after death seems to disturb the serenity of 
 Greek art such as that art has come down to us. 
 Thanatos (Death) is scarcely to be found ; l even the 
 tombs are adorned with representations of war and the 
 chase, and with figures of the dancing Hours. And yet 
 we know that Greek art was not without its darker side. 
 It had, like mediaeval poetry, its Dante Polygnotus, 
 namely who adorned the pilgrims' house at Delphi with 
 frescoes representing the judgment and the tortures of 
 the damned a Greek Campo Santo. 2 These, had they 
 been preserved, would have given us a different idea of 
 the Hellenic mind in the presence of the fact of mo % r- 
 tality, and shown us how easily we are led to exaggerate 
 the divergence in thought between different nations and 
 different times. 
 
 Where no knowledge could be gained from experience, 
 man has been driven, in solving such a question as that 
 of the character of our future life, to interpret the alle- 
 gory of nature ; and his interpretations have not varied 
 very much from age to age. Wherefore it is that, as far 
 back as we can test the belief of men, we find certain 
 theories touching the fate of the soul after death, which 
 represent in the germ at least the prevalent opinions of 
 our own day, and out of some of which our opinions have 
 arisen. 
 
 1 It has been suggested that among a group of figures sctilptured upon 
 the drum of a column brought from the Ephesian Artemisium, we have a 
 representation of Thanatos. The figure is that of a boy, young and comely 
 as Love, but of a somewhat pensive expression ; upon his thigh a sword is 
 girt, such as Eros never wears ; his right hand is raised, as though he 
 were beckoning. With him stand Deuaeter and Hermes, both divinities 
 connected with the rites of the dead. 
 
 2 Pausanias, x. 28. 
 
THE UNDERGROUND HOUSE OF THE DEAD. 265 
 
 Belief sprang up at once from the mere effort of lan- 
 guage to give expression to the unseen. Casting about 
 for a name for the essential part of man, the soul of him, 
 and using for the abstract conception such a physical 
 notion as seemed least remote from the former, language at 
 first identified this soul with the breath. All the Aryan 
 tongues give us examples of this identification. The 
 Greek ^v^ij, spiritus, is allied to ^v^co, to breathe ; in 
 Sanskrit we have dtman, soul, in Latin animus, anima 
 all three derived from original roots an, anti, breath, and 
 allied to the Greek do), arj/ju, as well as to aadpa, a heavy 
 breathing. Spiritus has the same meaning: it is allied 
 to the Slavonic pachu, odour ; pachati, to blow. The Ger- 
 man Geist and our ghost are probably in part onomato- 
 poetic, and suggest the idea of breath by their very sound. 
 Like the vital spark itself, the breath is seen to depart 
 when the man dies. But whither has it gone ? This is 
 the first question concerning the habitat of the soul; 
 and the purely negative, purely scientific answer is but to 
 confess ignorance, and to say that the breath has dis- 
 appeared. The answer actually given advances a little 
 way beyond this toward the beginning of a myth. The 
 breath has gone to the ' unseen ' or the ' concealed 
 place;' as the Greeks said to Hades (d-siBrjs), 1 as our 
 Norse ancestors said to Hel. 2 Thus out of mere migra- 
 tion we have the beginning of a myth ; the spirit becomes 
 something definite, and the place it has gone to is partly 
 realised. 
 
 This Home of the I>ead, this ' unseen ' or ' concealed ' 
 place, must needs be dark ; and it is, of course, natural 
 that there should be much confusion between the home of 
 the living soul and that of the dead body, so that the 
 
 1 It is true that another derivation has been given for Hades. It has 
 been associated with the Sanskrit Aditi, the boundless, which may be a 
 name for earth (cf. Prithivi), though I rather believe it (as Max Miiller 
 says it is) a name for the heaven or the expanse of the dawn. See Maury 
 Religions de la Grece, ii. 278- 
 
 2 Hel from Icl. at helja, to hide. 
 
266 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 former becomes more or less identified with the grave. 
 In a more expanded sense the Home of the Dead may be 
 thought of as a vast underground kingdom to which the 
 grave is but the entry. It was always imagined that if 
 the dead man did return to the upper world he came 
 through this passage and out by the grave's mouth ; and, 
 apparently, it was generally thought that he could return 
 no other way. It was also deemed that for awhile for 
 a lesser or a greater while the dead man lingered about 
 the funeral mound: thus soon after death the man's 
 ghost might be seen, but not (generally) long after death. 
 Along with the earliest traces of human burial we find 
 tokens of the custom of placing food and drink with the 
 dead body. The object of this may have been to furnish 
 the ghost with the means for beginning his journey to the 
 underground kingdom, and so of hastening his departure 
 from the neighbourhood of living men ; for it is certain 
 that there was nothing of which primitive man stood more 
 in dread than of the appearance of a ghost. In the re- 
 mains of the second Stone Age we find proofs that the 
 departed were pacified by such like gifts of food and 
 drink ; they were in these days further honoured by the 
 erection of immense monumental tombs, which even now 
 present the appearance of small hills. The pyramids of 
 Egypt are a relic of the same custom of mound- raising 
 among primitive men. At the mouth of the Stone Age 
 grave mounds was held the death wake or funeral feast, 
 traces of which are still discoverable. Within the grave 
 was placed the body of the hero, or chieftain, surrounded 
 by implements of war and of the chase, by food and drink, 
 and also by dead captives and wives. 
 
 It is impossible for us to pronounce with certainty 
 what was the original intention of rites such as these, 
 which continue quite late in the development of civilisa- 
 tion. Was it supposed that the body itself came to life 
 and required the food which was left for it in the grave 
 before it arrived at its last home ? Had it a journey to 
 
THE GEAVE THE ENTBANCE TO IT. 267 
 
 make to get to the underground land? Was the food 
 intended only for that intermediate condition of travel ? 
 Before we have any means of testing men's belief upon 
 these points, the rites which might have expressed it have 
 become in a great degree symbolical, and their simpler 
 meaning has been lost. 1 
 
 The prehistoric grave mounds witness in a curious 
 way to the prevalent notion that the grave mouth was the 
 gate by which ghosts returned to ' walk ' the earth. To 
 prevent these apparitions the men of prehistoric days had 
 recourse to a strange practical method of exorcism. 
 They strewed the ground at the grave's mouth with sharp 
 stones and broken pieces of pottery, as if they thought a 
 ghost might have his feet cut, and by fear of that be pre- 
 vented from returning to his old haunts. For unnum- 
 bered ages after the days of the mound builders the 
 same custom lived on, whereof we see here the rise. 
 Turned now to an unmeaning rite, it was put in force for 
 the graves of those, such as murderers or suicides, who 
 might be expected to sleep uneasily in their narrow 
 house. This is the custom which is referred to in the 
 speech of the priest to Laertes in Hamlet.' * Ophelia had 
 died under such suspicion of suicide that it was a stretch 
 of their rule, says the priest, to grant her Christian 
 burial. 
 
 And but the great command o'ersways onr order, 
 She should in ground unsanctified have lodged 
 To the last trumpet: for charitable prayers 
 Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her. 
 
 The grave becoming in this belief ipso facto the en- 
 trance to Hades, burial was necessary for admittance into 
 the other world. The soul who had not undergone this 
 
 1 The funeral feast held in honour of the dead (of which the twenty- 
 third book of the Iliad gives a good example for prehistoric days) is of 
 course only a relic of the feast in which the dead partook. Of a still 
 earlier form of the ceremony we have fine examples in the tomb paintings 
 of Egypt. At these the dead is present. 
 
268 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 rite flitted about aimlessly around the spot where his 
 shell, the body, lay. This is the superstition concerning 
 a murdered man. By the 'polluted covert' the ghost 
 stands, to show where the horrid deed was wrought. By 
 virtue of an easy transfer of ideas any other form of inter- 
 ment burning of the dead when that was customary 
 became also the needful passport to the land of shades. 
 Among the Homeric heroes we see every effort made to 
 secure the body for this purpose ; and when the corpse of 
 Hector cannot be recovered, some faint image of the 
 funeral rite is performed by burning his clothes. 
 
 This belief, too, explains why Elpenor, the comrade of 
 Odysseus, is found by the latter, when he goes to visit the 
 home of Hades, still wandering on the hither side of 
 Styx ; and why Patroclus' ghost comes to the bedside of 
 Achilles, and reproaches him that his funeral rites have 
 not yet been performed. In truth, the belief in the im- 
 portance of funeral rites is too widespread and too well 
 known to need further illustration in this place. 1 
 
 Among those nationalities with whom the belief in an 
 underground kingdom was most in force, the home and 
 the condition* of the dead must alike seem dark and cheer- 
 less. Enough of the old belief concerning the vanishing 
 breath remained to make the future itself shadowy ; and 
 so perhaps it was a place of emptiness and hollowness, a 
 no-life rather than one of positive pain, that made the 
 early hell. ' The senseless dead, the simulacra of mortals,' 
 Homer calls the shades ; and the same thought is ex- 
 pressed by Isaiah when he says 
 
 Sheol shall not praise Thee, Jehovah, 
 
 The dead shall not celebrate Thee ; 
 
 They that go down into the pit shall not hope for Thy truth : 
 
 The living, the living shall praise Thee, as I do this day. 2 
 
 1 So Virgil: 
 
 4 Haec omnis quam cernis inops, inhumataque turba est ; 
 Portitor ille Charon ; hi quos vehit unda sepulti.' ^En. vi. 325. 
 
 2 Isaiah xxxviii. 18, 19 ; cf. also Genesis xxxvii. 35, 1 Samuel xxviii. 19. 
 
PERSONIFICATION OF THE UNDER WORLD. 269 
 
 But when this under world takes a form of greater 
 distinctness, and men begin to try and localise it beneath 
 particular spots of the earth, they imagine more definite 
 roads leading to it ; and names, such as Styx and Avernus, 
 which were purely mythical, assume a geographical cha- 
 racter. Approaches of this kind to the realm of dark- 
 ness are the Hollenthaler, hell's glens, and the like, of 
 which we meet so many in Europe. All very d^ep caves 
 and abysses are believed to lead thither. In a more 
 imaginative way, and in the language of a finer poetry, 
 the downward road is spoken of as the 'Valley of the 
 Shadow of Death.' 
 
 But no living man ventures to the bottom of this dark 
 valley ; or if he do go he shall scarcely return. Tlie 
 secrets of that place are well kept. And great was of old 
 the fear of the infernal deities, lest men should pry into 
 their prison house. Wherefore Hades cried aloud when 
 Poseidon was shaking the earth, lest that god should rend 
 it asunder and disclose his mansions to the day ' man- 
 sions dolorous fearful which the gods themselves loathe.' 
 
 The inanimate place, the very cavernous hollow, be- 
 comes anon gifted with life ; and the mere privation of 
 an earlier faith grows into ' a more awful and confounding 
 positive.' Hell becomes a being. Most likely this being 
 was at first endowed with the figure of some ravenous 
 animal, some bird or beast of prey, a wolf, a lion, a dog, a 
 hawk, as the experience of each individual people might 
 direct. Greek mythology had its Cerberus, Norse mytho- 
 logy its Fenris wolf. In a mythology a shade more elabo- 
 rate the same thing is represented by imaginary creatures 
 dragons, griffins, or what not. The dragons which we 
 meet with in mediaeval legend were once, most of them, in 
 some way or other, embodiments of Death. At the door 
 of Strassburg Cathedral, and in one of the stained windows 
 within, the reader may see a representation of the mouth 
 
 Sheol is misrendered ' grave ' in our version. It means ' the place of the 
 dead,' not the place of dead bodies only. 
 
270 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of Hell, in the form of a great dragon's head spouting 
 flame. 
 
 Anyone who is acquainted with mediaeval sculptures 
 and paintings knows how common it is to find this kind 
 of imagery, which exists in virtue of the reversion of 
 popular mythology to primitive forms of thought. 
 
 Of a like origin with this hell dragon are most of the 
 fabulous monsters, half human and half animal, whom we 
 meet in Greek my thology the harpies, for example, the 
 sirens, or the gorgons. If the underground kingdom is 
 seen in the form of a man, he is a monstrous man, such as 
 the ogre of our nursery tales. This ogre is a descendant 
 of the Orcus of classical times, and, I doubt, he better 
 shows us the primitive conception of that being than do 
 any representations in art of the god of hell. 
 
 No people have painted the destructive aspect of death, 
 the negative theory of a future, with a sharper outline than 
 did the Greeks and Hebrews. What a contrast to the" 
 teaching of modern religions is the line 
 
 They that go down into the pit shall not hope for Thy truth. 
 
 Yet Greeks and Hebrews have not abstained from en- 
 dowing the * unseen place ' with some personality. In 
 Greek literature we may almost trace the processes by 
 which Hades, from being impersonal, becomes personal, 
 and then returns once more to be merely a place. Of a 
 man dying it is not seldom said in Homer that 'hateful 
 darkness seized him : ' ] here was a half-personality which 
 was calculated soon to lead to a complete one. Hades is 
 accordingly generally a person in Homer. The Icelandic 
 goddess, Hel, went through the same transformation that 
 we can trace in the case of Hades. From being the con- 
 cealed place she grew to be the queen of the dead, and 
 then again degenerated to be only the home of the dead. 
 Of the thousand other images of horror to be met with in 
 
 1 B.g. II v. 45. 
 
THE JOURNEY OF THE SOUL. 271 
 
 different creeds devouring dragons, fire-breathing ser- 
 pents, or dogs who, like Cerberus, threaten those who are 
 journeying to the underground kingdom the most part 
 can, from their names, be shown to have arisen out of 
 the merely negative images of death, the ' unseen/ the 
 ' coverer,' the ' concealer,' the ' cave of night.' 
 
 In contrast with all these myths stand those which 
 after death send the soul upon a journey to some happy 
 home of the departed, to a paradise which is generally 
 believed to be in the west. If the first are myths of hell, 
 the second series may be fairly described as myths of 
 heaven. Nor can it be clearly proved that the more 
 cheerful view of the other world is of a later growth in 
 time than the one which we have been describing, seeing 
 the evidence which the Stone Age interments seem to offer 
 upon this point. For if the dead man had need of his 
 weapons of war, of his captives and his wives, his life to 
 come could not have differed for the worse from his life 
 here. And if, among historic peoples, the earlier Hebrews 
 were the exponents of the gloomy Sheol, the most hopeful 
 picture of the soul's future finds expression in the ritual 
 service of the Egyptians. To come nearer home, among 
 all those peoples with whom we are allied in blood, the 
 Indo-European family of nations, we shall find the traces 
 of a double belief, the belief, on the one hand, in death as 
 a dim underground place, or as a devouring monster, and 
 the contrasting belief in death as a journey made towards 
 a new country where everything is better and happier than 
 on earth. 
 
 There is nothing distinctively Aryan in the notion of a 
 journey of the soul after death. Every nation has possessed 
 it, and almost every people, moreover, has associated it 
 with the travel of the sun to his setting. But there is 
 something in this phase of belief which makes it, wherever 
 it appears, more national and characteristic than the other 
 creed touching the under world ; and that is the necessity 
 
272 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 which its mythology is under of changing according to 
 the geographical position of those who hold it. The para- 
 dise whither the soul was imagined travelling was certainly 
 in one sense * another world,' but it was not so in the sense 
 in which we use that term. The ancient paradise was in 
 no way distinctly separated in thought from the earth on 
 which men lived ; and the way to it was always supposed 
 to lie somewhere in this visible world. Therefore the idea 
 of heaven varied according to men's outlook over this 
 earth. The Egyptian, for example, saw the sun set behind 
 a trackless desert which he had never crossed and never 
 desired to cross while alive. This desert was in his belief 
 a twilight land ruled over by the serpent king Apap. 1 It 
 lay upon the left bank of his sacred Nile, while the cities 
 of the living were upon the right bank; and so the 
 Egyptian 'Book of the Dead' gives us a picture of the 
 dead man's journey, in which all the geographical features 
 of Egypt reappear. The ritual shows the departed twice 
 ferried across a sacred River of Death (the Nile), travel- 
 ling through the dark land of Apap or of Amenti, ever 
 advancing towards the sun, light breaking upon him the 
 while, till he comes to the Palace of the Two Truths, the 
 judgment hall of Osiris : Osiris being the sun which has 
 set. Last of all we see him walking into the sun itself, 
 or absorbed into the essence of the deity. 
 
 Our Aryans used the same imagery, with variations of 
 local colouring. In both myths there is the same childlike 
 confusion of thought between the subjective and the objec- 
 tive ; between the position of the myth-maker and that of 
 the phenomenon out of which he weaves his story. Because 
 towards sunset the sun grows dim and the world too, it is 
 imagined that the sun has now reached a dim twilight 
 place, such as the Egyptians pictured in their region of 
 
 1 Apap, the immense, a personification of the desert, and hence of 
 death. He may be compared v/ith the great mid-earth serpent (midgard 
 worm) of the Norse mythology, which is a personification of the sea and 
 death in one. See infra. 
 
THE SEA OF DEATH. 273 
 
 Apap, or the Greeks in their Cimmerian land upon the 
 borders of earth. But when the sun has quite dis- 
 appeared, then inconsistently it is said that he has gone 
 to a land which is his proper home, whence his light, 
 whether by day or night, is never withdrawn. The twi- 
 light region is the land of death ; the bright land beyond 
 is the home of the blessed. Such are the general notions 
 which among a primitive people correspond to our Hell 
 and our Heaven. 
 
 In a former chapter we were able to present some picture 
 of the Aryas in their early home by the sources of the 
 Oxus and of the Jaxartes. We must once again recall 
 this picture if we wish to gain an insight into the origin 
 of their beliefs concerning the journey of the soul and the 
 other world. We saw how one division of the race, the 
 older portion, those from whom were to spring the Indians 
 and the Iranians, had their settlements close against the 
 eastern hills ; while in a circle outside these lay the tribes 
 who were to form the nations of Europe, and who before 
 they broke up and started on their wanderings bore a 
 common name, Yavanas, the younger or else the fighting 
 members of the community. At the present day a broad 
 belt of desert lies between the fertile valleys of Bactria 
 and the Caspian Sea. While Bactria is inhabited by 
 a settled and agricultural people, the great Khuwaresm 
 desert produces only vegetation enough to support a few 
 Cossacks and wandering Turkic tribes. But there is suffi- 
 cient reason to believe that this was not always the case ; 
 but that a great part of what is now dry land was once 
 the bed of the Caspian, which was joined on to the Sea of 
 Aral, and extended in every direction farther than it now 
 extends. The Caspian is known to have fallen greatly in 
 its banks, and not at a remote period, but within historical 
 times ; l the process of shrinking would in a double way 
 tend to the creation of desert, both by exposing the dry 
 
 1 Wood, SJiores of Lake Aral. 
 T 
 
274 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 bed of the sea and by rendering the other land sterile 
 when so much neighbouring water was withdrawn. 
 
 The root- word which appears in the European class of 
 languages with the meaning of ' sea, 5 stands in the Indian 
 and Iranian tongues for ' desert.' Can we explain this 
 fact better than by supposing that after the European 
 nations had left their home, their brethren who remained 
 behind, and only long after migrated to India and to 
 Persia, came to know as a desert the district which their 
 fathers had known as the sea ? 
 
 Oysters, it is known, will not live save at the mouths 
 of rivers, and philology furnishes us with proofs that these 
 shell-fish were known to the European races while they 
 were still one people. There can be no question that the 
 Greek oa-rpsov, the Latin ostrea, the Irish oisridh or oisire, 
 the Welsh oestren, the Russian usteru, the German Auster, 
 our oyster are all from the same root. 1 Therefore the 
 Yavanas while they lived together must have lived by the 
 sea. Some have thought that the growth of the desert 
 coinciding with a parallel growth of the Aryan people first 
 set our ancestors upon their wanderings. 
 
 How much more roomy a place the sea occupies in 
 men's thoughts than is warranted by their real familiarity 
 with it ! Into the mass of sedentary lives themselves the 
 great majority it enters but seldom as an experience, 
 provided a man live only a few miles inland. And yet of 
 all countries which possess a sea-board how full is the 
 literature of references to this one phenomenon of nature ! 
 The sun and moon with all the heavenly bodies, the num- 
 berless sights and sounds of land, are the property of all ; 
 and yet allusions to these are not more common in litera- 
 ture than allusions to the sea ; one might fancy that man 
 was amphibious, with a power of actually living in and 
 not only by the water. Charles Lamb acutely penetrates 
 the cause of a certain disappointment we all feel at the 
 
 1 Pictet, Oriffines, &c., i. 514. 
 
THE CASPIAN SEA, 275 
 
 sight of the sea for the first time. We go with the 
 expectation of seeing all the sea at once, the commensurate 
 antagonist of the earth. All that we have gathered from 
 narratives of wandering seamen, what we have gained from 
 the voyages, and what we cherish as credulously from 
 romances and poetry, ' come crowding their images and 
 exacting strange tributes from expectation.' Thus we are 
 already steeped in thoughts about the sea before we have 
 had any sight of it ourselves, and only from the sea's great 
 influence acting through the total experience of mankind. 
 * We think of the great deep and those who go down into it ; 
 of its thousand isles and of the vast continents it washes ; 
 of its receiving the mighty Plata or Orellana into its 
 bosom without disturbance or sense of augmentation ; of 
 Biscay swells and the mariner 
 
 For many a day and many a dreadful night 
 Incessant labouring round the stormy Cape ; 
 
 of fatal rocks and the " still vexed Bermoothes ; " of 
 great whirlpools and the waterspout ; of sunken ships and 
 sumless treasures swallowed up in the unrestoring depths.' 
 This tribute which our expectation pays to the importance 
 of the sea in men's thought shows us that we must not 
 narrow the sea's influence in mythology by the limit of 
 man's mere experience of it. Few among the Aryans 
 lived by the Caspian shore. But still the tradition of the 
 Caspian appears in one form or another in the beliefs of 
 all the race. The tradition of the sea, of its real wonders 
 and its greater fancied terrors, must have passed from one 
 to another, from the few who lived within sight and sound 
 of the waters to many quite beyond the horizon to whom 
 it was not visible even as a faint silvery line. 
 
 Only the Yavanas lived by the Caspian shore. The 
 memory of the Caspian, however, is to be found more or 
 less distinctly in all Aryan mythology. For to the Aryan 
 race generally this sea stood in the same position which 
 
 T 2 
 
276 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the desert occupied to the Egyptian. Their backs were 
 towards the mountains, their faces towards the Caspian. 
 All their prospect, all their future, seemed to lie that way : 
 when their migrations began, they were undertaken in this 
 direction, towards the west. And, most important of all, 
 their sun god was seen by many quenching his beams in 
 the waves : the home of the sun is the home of souls. 
 What more natural, nay, what so necessary, as that the 
 Aryan Paradise should lie westward beyond that water ? 
 
 It has been said that the Indian word for desert corre- 
 sponds etymologic ally with the European word for sea : 
 that word must have been in the old Aryan something 
 like mara, from which we get the Persian meru, desert, 1 
 the Latin mare, the Teutonic (German and English) meer. 
 But from identically the same root we also get the Sanskrit 
 and Zend mara, death, the Latin mors, the old Norse mordh, 
 the German Mord, our murder, all signifying originally the 
 same thing. 2 What, then, does this imply? The word 
 which the old Aryas used for sea they used likewise for 
 death; and how would this have been possible unless this 
 Caspian, their first sea, were likewise the Sea of Death, an 
 inevitable stage upon the road to Paradise ? 
 
 Though I speak of a sea it must not be forgotten that 
 to primitive man, who has not yet explored its tracts, the 
 sea is but the greatest among rivers. The Greek Oceanus 
 was a river and yet the parent of all waters : the true 
 parent of Oceanus was the Caspian. It would be natural 
 for the Aryas to suppose that this measureless stream 
 surrounded all the habitable aarth, and that beyond it lay 
 the dim region of twilight, the Cimmerian land which 
 Odysseus visited. 
 
 The sunset and the ways were o'erdarkeDed, for now we bad 
 
 come 
 To the deep-flowing Ocean's far limit, the shadowy home 
 
 1 To the Vedic Indians the word Meru came to stand for Paradise. 
 
 2 Fick, Verg. Worterb. der I.- G. Sp. i. s. v. mar. 
 
THE DEATH REGION IN THE EDDAS. 277 
 
 Where the mournful Cimmerians dwell; there the sun never 
 
 throws 
 His bright beam when to scale the high star vault in morning he 
 
 goes, 
 
 Or earthward returns from the midday to rest; for the gloom 
 Of night never ending reigns there a perpetual doom. 1 
 
 The cosmology of the Eddas has been, perhaps, partly 
 shaped by the peculiar circumstances in which the Eddas 
 arose, and the special character of the land (Iceland) in 
 which they had their birth ; but still we have traces in the 
 Eddas of a belief which was common alike to Greek and 
 Icelander. In the Norse poems the world is pictured as 
 supported in the centre by the great tree Yggdrasill, and 
 in the midmost of all is the city of the gods, Asgard, the 
 JEsirs'-(gods'-)ward. Around lies the green and fruitful 
 earth, man's-home ; and this in its turn is surrounded by 
 the mid-gard sea. Beyond that sea is a land of perpetual 
 fog and ice ; a weird and phantom land, possessed by 
 beings of another race, hateful to men. This Northern 
 Hades is called Jotunheimar, giants' home. The mid- 
 gard sea, which is a sea of death, and at a still earlier 
 time must have been a river of death, is personified in the 
 mid-gard worm, the serpent Jormungandr, who lies curled 
 at the bottom with his tail in his mouth, encircling the 
 world. He ever waxes in length, and his tail grows into 
 his inwards ; and this, as we noted before, is in exact 
 analogy with the Greek Oceanus, which returns to flow 
 into itself. If rivers are ever typified by serpents, then 
 the greatest river of all, the earth stream, is typified by 
 the mightiest of serpents, by this Jormungandr. 
 
 We spoke in a former chapter of the fight between the 
 sun god and the great river serpents of mythology, of 
 Apollo with the Python, of Thorr with Jormungandr. 
 That combat has a deeper significance when we take into 
 account that the serpents are images of death and personify 
 
 : 
 
 1 Od. xi. 12 sqq. 
 
278 OUTLINES QF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the River of Death. Thorr is slain by his adversary, and 
 Apollo (according to one myth) after his fight with the 
 other has to visit the realm of Hades. This is no more 
 than saying that the sun, like mortal man himself, has to 
 quench his beams and die in the mighty earth stream. 
 
 Gradually the notions of the River of Death and of 
 the Sea of Death from being one became two, and other 
 changes likewise sprang up through the natural confusion 
 of mythology between all the various types of mortality, 
 between the under world, Hades, which was reached from 
 the grave mouth, and the river passage or the long sea 
 voyage which were required to get to the land of souls. 
 Hades itself shifted between a place beneath the earth 
 and another far away in the west. Odysseus, to get there, 
 had to sail for many a day and many a weary night to the 
 extreme boundary of Ocean. But when he had got there 
 he met his companion Elpenor, whom he had left a little 
 while ago dead on Circe's island. Him the hero asked how 
 he could have come under the dark west more quickly 
 than Odysseus had done, sailing in a ship. 1 From such an 
 instance as this we see how far the original meaning of 
 the myths had been forgotten, and how a confusion had 
 sprung up between the Hades under men's feet and the 
 Hades at the end of the death journey, lying far away 
 in the west. It was in virtue of a similar amalgamation 
 of ideas that the mortal river soon found its way to the 
 under world. In the Greek mythology the one subter- 
 ranean stream expanded into four abhorred Styx, sad 
 Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon. These have all grown 
 mythopoetically out of ocean; as much as they were 
 feigned actually to flow from it. The Norse under world 
 had its subterranean river, named Gjoll, the sounding, 
 from gjalla, to yell, as Cocytus, from /CWKVCO, to cry. Of 
 Gjoll, as we shall meet with it again in another chapter, 
 I need say no more here. 
 
 1 Od. xi. 51 sqq. 
 
EXPEDITIONS TO FIND THE EAKTHLY PARADISE. 279 
 
 A desert, such as the Egyptian desert, or a sea like 
 the Caspian, forms a natural barrier between the living 
 and the dead. Without such a bar, if men supposed that 
 some happy land lay to the west of them, it would be 
 hardly possible that they should refrain from an attempt 
 to get there, living. In the Middle Ages the myth of the 
 soul's journey was translated into this literal shape, and 
 became the myth of the Earthly Paradise, with an out- 
 come of frequent expeditions more by many than we 
 know of now to find it. At last these expeditions ended 
 happily in the discovery, if not of a deathless land, at any 
 rate of a new world. 
 
 They were not religious, heavenward-looking men who, 
 .in Mr. Morris's poem, set out in quest of the Earthly 
 Paradise ; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a 
 true instinct, and that of all those mediaeval mariners who 
 were lost in their search after St. Brandon's Isles none 
 knew that they had found what they were seeking Death. 
 
 Must we not, then, place among such journeys that of 
 the king Svegder Fiolnersson whom we read of in the 
 Ynglinga Saga 1 who made a solemn vow to seek Odhinn 
 and the home of the gods ? Asgard had lost its grand 
 supersensuous meaning in his days ; it was simply a city 
 of the earth, and a place to be got to. Snorri tells us 
 how Svegder wandered many years upon his quest, and of 
 the strange way he found what, unknowingly, he had been 
 seeking. One day he came to an immense stone, as large 
 as a house. Beneath it sat a dwarf, who called out to 
 him that he should come in there if he wished to talk 
 with Odhinn ; and being very drunk, Svegder and his man 
 ran towards the stone. Then a door opened in the stone, 
 the king ran in, and the door immediately closed upon 
 him, so that he was never seen again. Gorm the Wise 
 was another Norseman who jnade a great expedition to 
 the end of the world. 2 The Greeks eagerly cherished 
 
 1 Cap. 15. 2 Saxo Gramrnaticus, Hist. Dan. 1. viii. 
 
280 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 delusions of the same kind; and long before they had 
 summoned up courage sufficient to navigate the Mediter- 
 ranean they had invented the myths of their western 
 islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired E-hadamanthus 
 was taken when expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, 
 or of those gardens kept by the daughters of the West, 1 
 where decay and death could not enter. 
 
 The two myths of the Sea of Death and of the River 
 of Death, which had sprung from the same source, became, 
 as time went on, divided in their characters. The wan- 
 derings of the Aryas would necessarily bring about this 
 effect: first, by showing to some peoples the difference 
 between the sea and a river; and secondly, by transferring 
 to other seas the myths which had originally gathered 
 round the Caspian. 
 
 The terrors of the Sea of Death, wherever it was, would 
 gradually diminish ; and though the early belief would not 
 be abandoned, there would grow up beside it the parallel 
 conception of a distinctly Earthly Paradise. The earliest 
 Paradise is, I have said, in a sense an earthly one, seeing 
 that its site is not absolutely removed by thought from the 
 earth. While somehow it cannot be reached save through 
 the portal of death, mythology never acknowledges that 
 the dead do actually leave the world of man. This incon- 
 sistency of thought if it is one could be preserved with- 
 out difficulty among a sedentary people. The Egyptian, 
 perhaps, never enquired why living men might not cross 
 the desert to the house of Osiris. But when a nation 
 begins to move, the thought springs into its mind, ' Why 
 is death the only road to the home whither our fathers 
 have gone ? May we not arrive at the immortal land by 
 an easier, or at any rate by a less painful route?' Come 
 what may, they resolve to try. All the Western Aryas 
 reached the sea at last ; wherefore it is in the mythology 
 of the European races that we must look for the best 
 
 1 Hesperides. 
 
THE INDIAN RIVER OF DEATH. 281 
 
 examples of the Sea of Death and of the Earthly Para- 
 dise which lay beyond. The elder Aryas, the Indians and 
 Iranians, remained much longer inland ; wherefore their 
 River of Death never was confounded with the sea ; it re- 
 mained in clear colours and sharp outline in their creed. 
 
 We cannot doubt that from the belief in the River of 
 Death arose the custom of committing the dead to the . 
 sacred Ganges ; l for just as the Hindu kindles a funeral 
 fire on the boat which bears the dead down this visible 
 stream of death, so used the Norseman to place a hero's 
 body in his ship, and then having set fire to that ship, 
 send it out seawards on the tide. And again, as by the 
 Indian the Ganges is the being entrusted with the care 
 of the dead, so to the Gaul the Rhone was the river of 
 death. Nismes became the great necropolis of southern 
 Gaul; for at that place it was customary to cast the 
 dead into the river. The custom survived even into 
 Christian times. 2 
 
 In a more distinctly mythical guise the mortal stream 
 appears in the Indian mythology under the names Vija- 
 ranadi and Yaiterani. What the Vedas have to tell us 
 touching this river has been considerably amplified in the 
 Brahmanas. In one tradition we meet with both the 
 sea and the river of death. It is said that all who leave 
 this world come first to the moon, 'heaven's immortal 
 door.' This gate few only pass ; the rest, agreeably to the 
 doctrine of the transmigration of souls, return thence to 
 earth, some as rain, some as worms, insects, lions, tigers, 
 fish, dogs, men. But he who has known Brahma goes 
 along the god's way, and comes first to the world of Fire, 
 then to that of the Wind, then to that of the Sun, to that 
 of the Moon, that of the Lightning, that of Indra, that of 
 Prajapati, at the end to that of Brahma; and this last 
 
 
 1 The Indian Gangd (Ganges) is turned into a mythic river, and is 
 made, like Oceanus, the parent of all waters. This shows the Ganges to 
 be identified with the Kiver of Death. 
 
 8 Michelet, Histoire de France^ 1. iii. < Tableau de France.' 
 
282 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 world is surrounded by a deep sea, deep as a hundred other 
 seas, and with black waves made by the tears of human 
 kind. From this sea flows a river, the ' eternal stream ' 
 (vijara nadi), which makes men young again. It is, in fact, 
 the forerunner of our mediaeval and more modern Fontaines 
 de Jouvence. The true origin of the Fontaine de Jouvence 
 is the same as the origin of this vijara nadi : that is to 
 say, both are rivers of death, and men are made young by 
 passing them, only when they thus pass into a new life. 
 Near this ' eternal stream ' is the tree Ilpa, which bears 
 all the fruits of the world : the Tree of Life in all Euro- 
 pean (and Eastern) tradition stands beside the Fountain of 
 Youth. When the good man shall come to the world of 
 Brahma, Brahma will say to his attendants, ( Receive this 
 man with honour ; for he has passed the stream Vijara nadi, 
 and will never more be old.' Then five hundred Apsaras 
 will come to meet him, bearing flowers, and fruits, and 
 clear water. 1 
 
 This is the Eiver of Death seen in its sunniest aspect. 
 The reverse side of the picture is suggested by the other 
 name of it, Vaitaram, ' the hard to cross.' Into this 
 seething flood the wicked fall. On the other side is Para- 
 dise that is to say, the home of the Pitris, or ancestors. 
 That the dead man may gain a passage over this dreadful 
 stream, a cow (called anustarawi) was offered up. 2 Vaite- 
 ram, another poem says, lies e across the dreadful path to 
 the house of Yam a,' the king of hell. 
 
 So much for this river as it stands alone. A most 
 important change must have been wrought in belief when 
 the custom of burning the dead was introduced. It 
 would seem that our Aryan ancestors themselves were 
 the introducers of this rite. We can easily understand 
 
 1 Cf. Pindar, Olymp. Odes, ii. v. 75 sqq. ed. Boeckh. See Weber, In- 
 disclie Studien, i. 359 sq. ; Weber, Chamb. 1020. 
 
 2 Another cow is offered up twelve days after the man's death. This 
 last fact is important in connection with the myths of Hackelberg, told in 
 this chapter and in the tenth chapter. See Kuhn in Haupt's Zeitsch. fiir 
 deut. Alterthum, v. 379 and vi. 117, also in his own Z.f. very. Sp. ii. 311. 
 
THE DEATH OF THE SUN. 283 
 
 how the custom may have arisen. When the god of fire 
 is such an important being as the Vedas show him to 
 have once been, the thought of committing the dead to 
 his care seems simple and natural. Agni, as we have 
 seen, was the messenger between gods and men ; he 
 called down the gods to feast at the altar, and he took 
 from the altar the smoke and odour of the sacrifice to 
 heaven. When the funeral fire had been lighted the 
 same divinity took with him the soul of man to his last 
 abode. Now, fire worship such as that of Agni was not 
 originally peculiar to the Indo-Aryas : it was in them but 
 a survival of a state of belief common to the whole Aryan 
 race, whereof we have seen in a former chapter numerous 
 proofs. 
 
 Or was it that the sun, who, as a wanderer, traced 
 out beforehand the journey of the soul, who himself sank 
 into the new world behind the waves of the jRiver of 
 Death, did also in another way suggest the burning of 
 the corpse ? The sun gods, Apollo and Heracles, Thorr 
 and Balder, do in sundry ways and in divers actions 
 present the ideal life of human kind. These are the 
 heroes of heroes ; whatever kind their death was it must 
 have been the one most worthy of imitation. The two 
 great fire funerals mentioned respectively in Greek and 
 Norse mythologies are the funerals of sun gods. 
 
 The one is that of Heracles. The hero, when he felt 
 the clinging torment of the shirt of Nessus, and knew 
 that his end was near, ordered his funeral fire to be 
 lighted on Mount (Eta, on the western shore of the 
 JEgean. 1 This myth must have been invented by Asiatic 
 Greeks, who saw the fiery sunset upon that sea. Again, 
 the body of Balder, who had been slain by his brother 
 Hoder, was placed upon the dead god's ship Hringhorni, 
 a funeral fire was lighted on the ship, and it was then 
 
 1 The funeral fire of many a hero is lighted near the sea-shore, as in 
 this case of Heracles. Cf. Achilles, II. xxiii. 124 ; Beowulf, 6297. In other 
 cases of Norse funeral fires they are lighted on a ship. See Ch. VIII. 
 
284 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 sent drifting into the sea. This is the barque of the sun 
 sinking in the waves. Most of the great epic heroes 
 many of them sun heroes followed the same custom of 
 fire burial. Of the Homeric funerals we need not speak. 
 Sigurd and Brynhild mounted their pyre, and on it placed 
 their horses, dogs, and falcons, all they had prized most 
 on earth. 
 
 Burning the dead, however, never seems to have been 
 a universal practice; rather a special honour paid to 
 warriors and kings. But then we must remember that 
 immortality itself was not, in ancient belief, granted to all 
 men alike, only to the greatest. 
 
 We see at once that, .with the use of fire burial, many 
 of the old beliefs had to be given up all those, for in- 
 stance, which depended upon the preservation of the bodily 
 remains. Of old time men had buried treasures with the 
 corpse in the expectation that they would be some kind of 
 use to it ; the body itself was then imagined to descend to 
 the under world, or to travel the western journey to the 
 sun. But now the body was visibly consumed upon the 
 pyre, on which too were placed, by a curious survival of 
 old custom, the precious things which would formerly have 
 been buried with the dead man in his grave. The body 
 and these treasures were consumed, had gone ; but 
 whither ? Had they perished utterly, and was there 
 nothing more now left than that earliest belief of an 
 *A-eiSr]$ a nowhere ? Were none true of all those myths 
 which told of the soul passing to a home of bliss ? In- 
 stead of giving up this faith, the Aryas only transformed 
 it ; they spiritualised it and stripped it of the too material 
 clothing which in earlier times it wore. The thought 
 which had once identified the life with the breath came 
 again into force. Or if some visible representation of the 
 essence of the man was still desired, men had the smoke 
 of the funeral pyre, which rose heavenwards like an as- 
 cending soul. 
 
 In the Iliad, after Patroclus' spirit (^v^rj] has visited 
 
BUENING THE DEAD. 285 
 
 Achilles in his dream, it is described as going away crying 
 shrilly and entering the ground like smoke: 
 
 We meet with the same imagery in long after years and 
 in a far distant land, when, in the description of the 
 funeral fire of Beowulf the Goth, it is said that the soul 
 of the hero ' curled to the clouds,' imaging the smoke 
 which was curling up from his pyre. There is even a 
 curious analogy betwen two words for smoke and soul in 
 the Aryan tongues. From a primitive word dhu, which 
 means to shake or blow, we get both the Sanskrit word 
 dhuma, smoke, and the Greek Qvpos, the immaterial part 
 of a man, his thought or soul. Svfj,6s was not a mere ab- 
 straction like our word mind, but that which had a certain 
 amount of separate individuality, and might even continue 
 to live when the body had been destroyed. 2 
 
 In these ways, by a change in the opinion of men 
 mingling with a survival of old custom, the funeral rites 
 were reformed, and the inanimate things the food, the 
 weapons, the clothes which would once have been buried 
 with the dead, were now burnt with him. Of such re- 
 formed rites we have a complete picture in the funeral of 
 Patroclus, and the picture is one which in all essential 
 details might serve for any of the Aryan folk. Oxen and 
 sheep were slain before the pyre of the hero, and with the 
 fat of their bodies and with honey the corpse was liberally 
 anointed. Then twelve captives were sacrificed to the 
 manes of the dead Patroclus ; they and his favourite dogs 
 were burned upon the pile. In this instance it is the 
 complete burning, as formerly it had been the complete 
 
 * 11. xxiii. 100. 
 
 2 The exact character of the Ovfi6s, how far it was an entity separate 
 from the body, I have discussed in another place, ' The Homeric Words for 
 Soul,' in Mind, October 1881. There is one example in Homer of the 6vn6s 
 continuing to exist after the body (II. vii. 131) ; but I believe this is the 
 only one. 
 
286 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 sepulture, which constitutes the needful passport to Hades. 
 And so when the fire will not burn, Achilles prays to the 
 North and the West Winds to come and consummate the 
 funeral rite. All night as the flame springs up Achilles 
 stands beside it, calling upon the name of his friend and 
 watering the ground with libations from a golden cup. 
 Toward morning the fire dies down, and then the two 
 Winds, according to the beautiful imagery of the myth, 
 their work done, * return homewards across the Thracian 
 sea.' 1 
 
 Hector's clothes, as we have seen, were burnt as a sort 
 of substitute for his body ; Patroclus' treasures were con- 
 sumed with him. The same customs were observed at the 
 funerals of the Teutonic heroes and heroines, Sigurd, 
 Beowulf, Brynhild, and the rest. 2 Csesar tells us how the 
 Gauls burnt with the dead all that they had loved. 3 Evi- 
 dently, therefore, the inanimate things, the weapons or 
 garments, as well as the captives and dogs, were believed 
 to survive in a land of essences for the use of the libe- 
 rated soul. 
 
 To the question, ' Whither does man's essence go when 
 it rises from the funeral fire ? ' the answer, if a wish alone 
 urged the thought, would be, 'To the gods.' We find 
 that in the beliefs which were most associated with the 
 habit of burying in the ground the notion of a future 
 union with the gods was not strongly insisted upon. The 
 western land, for instance, whither the sun was thought 
 to go at night, must not be confounded with the real 
 home of the gods, with Olympus or with Asgard. The 
 Greek islands of the blest were not the seat of the gods ; 
 nor was the house of Yama, which the Indians spoke of 
 as their land of the dead ; nor, in fact, has any other 
 earthly paradise been so. But, among the myths which 
 sprang up in the age of burning the dead, the hope of 
 
 1 H. xxiii. 193-230. 2 Beowulf, 6020; HelreiS Brynhildar, &c. 
 
 8 B. G. vi. 19. See Pictet, Lcs Origines, &c. ii. 519, for examples of the 
 game custom among more modern nations. 
 
THE BRLDaE OF SOULS. 287 
 
 union with, the heavenly powers gained a measure of 
 strength. The gods of the Aryan were before everything 
 gods of the air* As the soul, made visible in the smoke 
 of the funeral pyre, was seen by men to mount upwards, 
 to ' curl to the douds,' the notion of the soul's having 
 gone to join the gods chief god Dyaus, the sky was 
 impressed more vividly upon men's minds. 1 But as the 
 notion of the western journey was not abandoned, a natural 
 compromise was made, a.nd the soul was now sent upwards 
 to travel along the path of the sun : its journey now lay in 
 heaven, and it was led towards its final home by the Sun 
 or by the Wind. Still the path of the deceased lay west- 
 ward; the home of the dead ancestors was still beyond 
 the same western horizon ; there was still an Oceanus to 
 be crossed and a dark Cimmerian land to be passed 
 through. 
 
 The path thus taken by the soul becomes to the eye of 
 faith a bridge spanning the celestial arch, and carrying 
 men over the River of Death. And men would soon 
 begin asking themselves where lay this heavenly road. 
 Night is necessarily associated with thoughts of death 
 ' Death and his brother Sleep ' and of the other world. 
 The heavens wear a more awful aspect than by day. The 
 sun has forsaken us and is himself buried beneath the 
 earth ; while at once a million dwellers in the upper 
 regions, who were before unseen, appear to sight, those 
 stars which in so many mythologies are associated with 
 souls. 2 Among the stars we see a bright yet misty bow 
 bent overhead. Can this be other than the appointed 
 Bridge of Souls? The ancient Indians called this road 
 
 1 ' If, after having left the body, thou comest to the free air, thou wilt 
 be an immortal god, not subject to decay and death ' (Phocylides, St/lb. p. 97). 
 In the case of the ordinary sacrifice, if the flame mounted upward the sacri- 
 fice was accepted (cf. 11. i. 462 ; Od. iii. 459 ; Sre also Maury, R. de la 6f. 
 ch. xiii.) The same idea would naturally accompany the burning of the 
 dead. 
 
 2 For example, in Hebrew belief (cf. Kuenen, Rel. of Israel) and in 
 Russian folk-lore (cf . Ralston's S^rtgs of tlie Russian People). 
 
288 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 God's Path (panthano devayah), because, besides ita 
 being the way of souls to God, it was likewise the way of 
 God to men. They also called it cow path (meaning 
 possibly cloud path), and this designation appears again 
 in the Low German name for the same heavenly bridge. 
 Kaupat (Kuhpfad). From the ancient appellation, cow 
 path, it is probable that we get the more widely spread 
 name of the ' Milky Way.' 
 
 In the Vedic hymns the Indians oftenest speak of the 
 Milky Way as the path of Yama, the way to the house of 
 Yam a the ruler of the dead. 
 
 A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden 
 
 by men, a path I know of. 
 On it the wise who have known Brahma ascend to the world 
 
 Swarga, 1 when they have received their dismissal, 
 
 sings one. Another prays the Maruts, the Winds, not to 
 let him wander on the path of Yama, or when he does so, 
 when his time .shall come, to keep him, that he fall not 
 into the hands of Nirrtis, the Queen of Naraka (Tartarus). 4 
 
 The Maruts in this instance are appointed the guardians 
 of the soul ; and there is something very appropriate in 
 the performance of the office by these wind gods. 
 
 Agni, the fire god, is of course the one who first of all 
 takes charge of the soul when it leaves the funeral fire. 
 But next after Agni it seems appropriate that the soul 
 should be given in charge to the Wind. The duty is not, 
 however, undertaken by the Maruts only ; in other pas- 
 sages we find as guardians of the bridge two dogs, and 
 the dead man is committed to their care. But these dogs 
 are also personifications of the Wind. 
 
 Give him, O King Yama, to the two dogs, the watchers, tie 
 four-eyed guardians of the path, guardians of men. Grant him 
 safety and freedom from pain. 
 
 1 Swarga, the bright land of the blessed. The word is from the root war, 
 to shine. 
 
 2 R. V. i. 38, 5. 
 
THE BRIDGE OF SOULS. 289 
 
 And it would seem from in any other instances that 
 these two dogs of Yama have the special mission of taking 
 charge of the dead who travel to tho bright paradise 
 beyond the bridge. 
 
 Thus stands out in beauty and completeness the myth 
 of the Bridge of Souls. A narrow path spanning the arch 
 of heaven, passing over the River of Death, or over the 
 dwelling of Nirrtis, Queen of Tartarus, it reaches at last 
 to the country of the wise Pitris, the fathers of the nation. 
 These Pitris have gone to heaven before, and since their 
 death have not ceased to watch over the men of their race. 
 The path is guarded by two dogs, the hounds of Yama, 
 wardens of the way, and likewise psychopomps, or 
 conductors of the soul along this strait road. 
 
 While the European races worked up into wondrous 
 variety, as we shall see anon, tho story of the soul's journey 
 over seas, the myths of the River of Death and of the 
 Bridge of Souls were cherished most by the Indians and 
 Iranians. 
 
 The two hounds of Yama recall in the first place the 
 primitive image of the underground world as a devouring 
 creature : thus in this respect they both of them resemble 
 the classic Cerberus. Their common name is Sarameyas, 
 which connects them with the wind of dawn, Sarama ; J and 
 this, as we have seen, was also the wind of evening. The 
 Sarameyas are said to be ( born of the evening wind ' 
 that is to say, they are beings of the night. In this re- 
 spect they recall both in character and name the Greek 
 Hermes ; for the word '/>//,?}, 'Ep/^/as-, is nothing more 
 than a transliteration of the Sanskrit Sarameyas. Taken 
 together, then that is to say, under their common name, 
 Sarameyas the two dogs are like two Hermes; they 
 are two wind gods. Hermes combined in his being the 
 natures of both the wind of morning and the wind of 
 evening ; he wag the god who sent men to sleep or awoke 
 them from sleep, 2 the leader of shades to the under world, 
 1 See Chap. III. 2 Od. v. 47 ; xxiv. 4 ; &c. 
 
 U 
 
290 OUTLINES OF PBIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 and also we shall see this more fully hereafter the 
 bringer back of men from the world of death. All these 
 characters belong to the dogs of Yama in virtue of their 
 common name. They are under this name not unlike the 
 Asvin, who, as we saw, were the two winds, that of morn- 
 ing and that of evening. 1 
 
 Individually, again, the dogs are called Cerbura, the 
 6 spotted,' and Syama, the ' black.' 2 The etymological 
 connection between the first of these two names and 
 Cerberus scarcely requires to be pointed out. It is evident, 
 therefore, that the dogs of Yama contain in their nature 
 the germs of two distinct but allied creations of mytho- 
 logy first the wind god, who is also a god of evening, of 
 sleep and of death ; and secondly the hell-hound, w r ho is 
 the personification of the yawning tornb. They may some- 
 times be simply images of night. The names ' spotted ' 
 and ' black ' may seem to indicate the starry and the dark 
 night sky. 
 
 From being personifications of night it is an easy step 
 to becoming gods of sleep. Sleep and Death are ever 
 twins'; and the dead man is, in other creeds beside this 
 Indian one, given into the hands not of one brother only, 
 but of both. 
 
 fie fjnv TTOfJLirolfTiv dfjici KpcLiTD'olffi (ptpeaOat, 
 'W /ecu Qai'dra) Ci$v/j.ao(ri. 3 
 
 One of the hounds may have represented the temporal, 
 the other the eternal, sleep. Wherefore we need not be 
 surprised to find a single Sarameyas prayed to as a divinity 
 of slumber and the protector of the sleeping household, 
 as here in a beautiful hymn of the Eig Veda : 4 
 
 Destroyer of sickness, guard of the house, O thon who 
 takest all shapes, be to us a peace-bringing friend. 
 
 Bay at the robber, Sarameyas ; bay at the thief. Why bayest 
 thou at the singer of Indra ? why art thou angry with me ? Sleep, 
 Sarameyas. 
 
 1 Chap. III. 2 Wilford in As. Res. iii. 409. 
 
 U. xvi. 681; cf. also Theog. 758. 4 K. V. rii. 6 
 
THE BRIDGE OF SOULS. 
 
 The mother sleeps, the father sleeps, the hound sleeps, the 
 clan father sleeps, the whole tribe sleeps ; sleep thou, Sarameyas. 
 
 Those who sleep by the cattle ; those who sleep by the wain ; 
 the women who lie upon couches, the sweet-scented ones all 
 these we bring to slumber. 
 
 Do not these verses breathe of the fragrant air of early- 
 pastoral life ? 
 
 Sleep and Death are twin brothers, and therefore it is 
 that, like Sarpedon in the Iliad, the dead man is given to 
 them to be borne along his way. ' Give him, O King 
 Yama, to the two dogs. . . .' As dogs the Sarameyas 
 represent the horrors of death and of the under world ; as 
 the winds they are the kind guardians of the souls. No 
 doubt their terrors were for the wicked only, and so they 
 are apt images of death itself. 
 
 The Persians knew the Bridge of Souls under the name 
 of Kmv&d (pul iHnvac?), and with this bridge are connected 
 one or more dogs. Wherefore it is evident that all the 
 essential parts of the Indian myth were inherited by the 
 Persians also. In one Fargard, or chapter, of the Vendidad l 
 it is narrated how the soul of the wicked man will fly to the 
 under world ' with louder howling and fiercer pursuing than 
 flees the sheep when the wolf rushes upon it in the lofty 
 forest. No soul will come and meet his departed soul and 
 help it through the howls and pursuit in the other world ; 
 nor will the dogs who keep the Kinv&d bridge help his de- 
 parting soul through the howls and pursuit in the other 
 world.' And again in another place ? it is told how f the 
 soul enters the way made by Time, open both to the wicked 
 and to the righteous. At the head of -the Kinv&d, the holy 
 bridge made by Ahura-Mazda, they demand for their 
 spirits and souls the reward for the worldly goods which 
 they gave away here below. Then comes the strong, well- 
 formed maid, 3 with the dogs at her sides. She makes the 
 
 1 Fargard xiii. The translation is from Darmesteter's translation of the 
 Zend-Avesta. 2 Fargard xix. 
 
 3 AVe meet with this maiden keeper of the bridge in Norse mythology 
 (see Chap. VIII.) 
 
 u 2 
 
292 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 soul of the righteous go up above Hara-berezaiti ; l above 
 the Kinv&d bridge she places it, in the presence of the 
 heavenly gods themselves.' 
 
 From the Persians the bridge became known to the 
 Hebrews, and from the one or the other source it passed 
 on to the creed of Islam. Sirat is the name of the bridge 
 so vividly described by Mohammedan writers. 2 It is finer 
 than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, and is 
 besides guarded with thorns and briars along all its length. 
 Nevertheless when at the last day the good Muslim comes 
 to cross it a light will shine upon him from heaven and 
 he will be snatched across like lightning or like the wind; 
 but when the wicked man or the unbeliever approaches 
 the light will be hidden, and from the extreme narrowness 
 of the bridge, and likewise becoming entangled in the 
 thorns, he will fall headlong into the abyss of fire that is 
 beneath. 
 
 The Bridge of Souls cannot be always the Milky Way 
 even in the mythology of India; for in one hymn, 3 
 though not a Vedic one, we read 
 
 Upon it, they say, there are colours white and blue and brown 
 and gold and red. 
 
 And this path Brahma knows ; and he who has known 
 Brahma shall take it, he who is pure and glorious. 
 
 Here the singer is evidently describing the rainbow. 
 In the Norse cosmology the rainbow has the same name 
 as the Indian path of the gods. The Eddas call it As -bra, 
 the bridge of the .ZEsir, or gods. Its other name is Bifrost, 
 e the trembling mile, 5 and this name may have been origin- 
 ally bestowed upon the Milky Way, for this when we look 
 at it seems always on a tremble. Supposing the myths 
 which once belonged to the Milky Way to have been 
 passed on to the rainbow, the name of the former might 
 also have been inherited by the latter. 
 
 1 The heavenly mountain. 2 Sale's Koran, Introd. p. 91. 
 
 3 Vrhadarawyaka, Ed. Pol. iii. 4, 7-9. See Kuhn, Zevt.f. v. Sp. ii. 311, &c. 
 
THE MILKY WAY. 293 
 
 Asbru, or'Bifrost, was the bridge whereby the Northern 
 gods descended to the world. One end of it reached to the 
 famous Urdar fount, where sat the weird sisters three 
 the Nornir, or fates. ' Near the fountain which is under 
 the ash stands a very fair house, out of which come three 
 maidens named Urftr, VerSandi, and Skuld (Past, Present, 
 Future). These maidens assign the lifetime of men, and 
 are called Norns. To their stream the gods ride every 
 day along Bifrost to take council.' l It was right that 
 these awful embodiments of time and fate Past, Present, 
 Future should have their dwelling at the end of the Bridge 
 of Death. 
 
 Odhinn is the natural conductor of the dead to the 
 other world, for he is the god of the wind, and therefore 
 corresponds, in a certain degree, to the two Indian dogs, the 
 Sarameyas. ' Odhinn and Freyja ' (Air and Earth) ' divide 
 the slain,' says one legend meaning that the bodies go to 
 earth, the breaths or souls to heaven. In the Middle Ages, 
 when Odhinn worship had been overthrown, and the gods 
 of Asgard descended to Hel-home that is to say, when 
 from being divinities they became fiends Odhinn still 
 pursued his office as conductor or leader of souls. But 
 now he hounded them to the under world. Odhinn the 
 god was changed into the demon Odhinn, and one of the 
 commonest appearances of this fiend was as the Wild 
 Huntsman. To this day the Wild Huntsman Hackelberg 2 
 is well known in Germany. The peasants hear his awful 
 chase going on above their heads. He is accompanied by 
 two dogs, and he hunts, "'tis said, along the Milky Way. 3 
 
 A gentler legend concerning the Milky Way is that 
 which we find preserved in a charming poem of the Swede 
 Torpelius, called the 'Winter Street' another of tho 
 
 1 Edda Snorra, D. 15. 
 
 2 This name, Hackelberg, shows the Huntsman to be really Odhinn. 
 The name is transformed from Hackel-biirend, which means ' cloak-bearing. 
 Now the cloak of Odhinn is one of his peculiar possessions. 
 
 3 Of this Wild Huntsman I shall speak more fully in future chapters 
 (Chaps. VII. X.) 
 
294 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 names for this heavenly road. And with this in the form 
 in which it has been rendered into English l we may close 
 our list of legends connected with the River of Death and 
 Bridge of Souls. The story is of two lovers : 
 
 Her name Salami was, his Zulamyth ; 
 And both so loved, each other loved. Thus runs the tender myth : 
 
 That once on earth they lived, and, loving there, 
 Were wrenched apart by night, and sorrow, and despair ; 
 And when death came at last, with white wings given, 
 Condemned to live apart, each reached a separate heaven. 
 
 Yet loving still upon the azure height/, 
 Across unmeasured ways of splendour, gleaming bright 
 With worlds on worlds that spread and glowed and burned, 
 Each unto each, with love that knew no limit, longing turned. 
 
 Zulamyth half consumed, until he willed 
 
 Out of his strength, one night, a bridge of light to build 
 
 Across the waste and lo ! from her far sun, 
 
 A bridge of light from orb to orb Salami had begun. 
 
 A thousand years they built, still on, with faith, 
 Immeasurable, quenchless thus the legend saith 
 Until the winter street of light a bridge 
 
 Above heaven's highest vault swung clear, remotest ridge from 
 ridge. 
 
 Fear seized the Cherubim ; to Q od they spake 
 ' See what amongst Thy works, Almighty, these can make ! ' 
 God smiled, and smiling, lit the spheres with joy 
 c What in My world love builds,' He said, ' shall I shall Love 
 destroy ? ' 
 
 The bridge stood finished, and the lovers flew 
 
 Into each other's arms : when lo ! shot up and grew, 
 
 Brightest in heavens serene, a star that shone 
 
 As the heart shines serene after a thousand troubles gone. 
 
 1 By E. Keary, Evening Hours, vol. iii. The name of the bridge, the 
 Winter Street, has a genuine Teutonic character. The story, however, can- 
 not be purely Teutonic ; not at least in the form in which Torpelius tells 
 it. The names of the lovers are Hebrew. 
 
THE SEA OF DEATH. 295 
 
 2. The Sea of Death. 
 
 Of all the European races the Greeks were the first 
 who took in a friendly fashion to the sea ; a fact pretty 
 evident from what we can trace of the routes taken 
 by their brother nations, and indeed indicated by the 
 peculiarity of the Greek names for the sea, names not, 
 like mare and Meer, connected with death, but QaKaaaa, 
 salt water, or ir6vTos, a path. 1 The advantages of situa- 
 tion which Greece enjoyed are to be credited with this 
 circumstance. As Curtius points out so well, where 
 Europe and Asia meet in the JCgsean, Nature has made 
 no separation between the two worlds. * Sea and air 
 unite the coasts of the Archipelago into a connected whole ; 
 the same periodical winds blow from the Hellespont as 
 far as Crete, and regulate navigation by the same con- 
 ditions, and the climate by the same changes. Scarcely 
 one point is to be found between Asia and Europe where 
 in clear weather the mariner would feel himself left in 
 solitude between sky and water ; the eye reaches from 
 island to island, and easy voyages of a day lead from- bay 
 to bay.' It was in this nearness of shore to shore, from 
 the invitation of the islands spread out like stepping- 
 stones across the calm ^Egsean, that the Greek people, 
 when their wanderings brought them to the limits of 
 Asia Minor, did not hesitate long before they crossed over 
 to European Greece and joined the two shores under the 
 dominion of one race. 
 
 Very early in prehistoric days, long before the age of 
 Homer, they had become familiar with their own Greek 
 sea, with all its islands and all its harbours; but it was 
 long after this that their mariners had rounded Cape 
 Matapan ; longer still before the first Greek had sailed as 
 far as Sicily. Some tidings of the distant lands of the 
 Mediterranean were brought by Phcenician navigators, 
 and afterwards by their own more adventurous sailors ; 
 1 Connected with the Skr. panthas, patha and our path. 
 
296 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 and with this slender stock of real knowledge, imagina- 
 tion was busy in mingling the stories of a mythic 
 world. Whatsoever had in former times been dreamt 
 of concerning the Caspian Sea, was now transferred 
 to the Mediterranean. And in this way among the most 
 poetic and imaginative of all the Aryan peoples was 
 formed the great epic of the Sea of Death. This is the 
 Odyssey. 1 
 
 The Odyssey is generally admitted to be of a more 
 recent date than the Iliad. The morality of it is ob- 
 servably higher in character; the gods have grown 
 better, more worthy of reverence. The conception of 
 Zeus, for example, is far nobler in the Odyssey ; here he 
 appears constantly as the protector of the poor, and of 
 wanderers and strangers. 2 All these are notable points 
 of difference between the two epics. But the essential 
 distinction between the two lies in the difference of the 
 subjects with which they deal, the diversity of interests 
 which they represent. The Iliad is a tale of land battle, 
 and the theatre of ifcs action is limited to the known world 
 of the Greek, the two shores of the -ZEgsean ; the Odyssey 
 
 1 The expedition of the Argonauts was always held in Greek tradition 
 to have preceded the expedition of Odysseus. It belongs to the ' antiquity ' 
 of Homer. No circumstantial account of it, however, is to be found until 
 a much later date than that of the Odyssey ; therefore it is right to consider 
 the latter poem as the first great epic of the Sea of Death. That the 
 voyage of the Argonauts was originally of the same kind as the voyage of 
 Odysseus, and undertaken in the same direction, seems highly probable. In 
 after years the former was transmuted into an expedition to Cholchis and 
 to the river Phasis. But there is no trace of that form of the legend in 
 Homer. All that is there said is that Jason's voyage was made to the 
 house of 2Eetes (Od. xii. 70). Nowhere is it said that the land lay to the 
 eastward ; nothing in the earliest tradition points to that voyage in the 
 Euxine and up the Phasis, which we meet first in Pindar and afterwards in 
 a more elaborate shape in Apollonius Rhodius. The golden fleece might 
 seem (to a lover of dawn myths) to suggest the dawn ; but it does not so 
 any more than do the apples of the Hesperides. The myth of these latter 
 is a myth of sunset. ^Eetes is the brother of Circe, and son of Helios and 
 Perse. He is, like Circe, connected with the setting sun, and so with 
 death. He is a kind of god of death, and for that reason is called ' death- 
 designing' (o\o6(f>(wv~). Od. x. 137. 
 
 2 Cf. especially Od. vii. 165, 316; ix. 270; xiv. 57, 283-4; xvi. 422. 
 
THE ODYSSEY. 297 
 
 is a song in praise not of war, but of seafaring adventure, 
 and the hero of it is not a type of the warrior, but of the 
 navigator. For Greece, in prehistoric days, had her 
 gallant band of Columbuses and De Gamas, of Drakes 
 and Hudsons, and it was these discoverers who paved the 
 way for Greek supremacy over seas. Such men had 
 different views of life and a different worship from 
 those of the settled nobility of Greece, the Ionian prin- 
 ces, for instance, for whom the Iliad was composed; 
 and this divergency in views of life and worship ap- 
 pears very strikingly on a comparison of the two great 
 poems. 
 
 The original sea god of the Greek race had been 
 Poseidon ; but in the Odyssey Poseidon is superseded by 
 Athene, 1 who, when we put aside Zeus, stands by far the 
 first among the remaining divinities. The Odyssey seems 
 to be written expressly to glorify Athene, and to display 
 her power ; for she is the active divinity throughout. She 
 wields all those forces of nature which in the Iliad are 
 made the peculiar possession of Zeus himself, controlling 
 the storm and sending the lightning. No other deity 
 appears actively upon the scene, saving the rival of 
 Athene, the older sea god, Poseidon, and he is defeated 
 in his endeavours to bring destruction on Odysseus. With 
 Athene the Odyssey glorifies the sailor and a sailor's life. 
 It celebrates all the luxuries which the voyager brings 
 home from foreign lands ; and chiefly among them those 
 treasures of art which, first introduced by the Phoenicians, 
 were beginning at the time in which the Odyssey was 
 composed to stir the spirit of young Greece. Of the sailor, 
 as goddess of the sea (Tritogeneia), of the merchantman, 
 to whom she gives prudence and the power to deceive, of 
 
 1 In the Odyssey we see a transfer to Athene" of some of the powers 
 over the sea, which in the Iliad belong exclusively to Poseidon. In the 
 Odyssey, moreover, we find that Zeus has to a great extent delegated to 
 lesser gods the control over the phenomena of nature which were once 
 specially his, and that the powers of wind and storm are swayed alter- 
 nately by Poseidon and Athene. See particularly bk. v 
 
298 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF, 
 
 the artist, whom she endows with cunning of hand, Athene 
 is alike the patroness. 
 
 But there are further points of difference between the 
 Iliad and the Oydssey. The navigator had other dangers 
 to encounter than the warrior had, and different ad- 
 ventures to relate. The Western Sea, to which men's 
 thoughts were beginning to turn, and where Odysseus' 
 adventures lie, was not to their fancy fraught witli earthly 
 terrors only, nor with dangers that were measurable and 
 known; it was full of untried wonders, bordering as 
 it did close upon the other world ; nay, in a manner it 
 was the other world, for it was the Sea of Death. The 
 Odyssey is full of images of death, though they are not 
 self-conscious ones, only mythical expressions first used for 
 the passage of the soul from life, and then made literal by 
 their transference to the actual Western Sea. All this 
 produces a marked distinction in character between the 
 Iliad and the Odyssey. Long before the first outward- 
 bound navigator had rounded Cape Malea, all the coasts of 
 the j33gsean had become part of the familiar world of the 
 Greek; outside this only was the world of the unknown. 
 The Iliad tells us what the Greeks thought about the 
 known region. Myths no doubt mingled with the legend 
 of the fall of Troy ; but that story is, in Homer, essentially 
 realistic ; it is rationalistic even. The very powers of the 
 immortals and their deeds seem petty and limited. 
 
 And it may be that in this circumstance lies an element 
 of superior greatness in the older poem ; for a poet can 
 only attain the highest altitudes he is capable of when 
 the material of his art is composed, I will not say of fact, 
 but of belief which has become so constant and familiar 
 as to take almost the shape of fact. That sense of reality 
 which drags down prosaic minds is for him the proper 
 medium of his flight - t no sham beliefs or half-beliefs are 
 at his best moments possible to him. We should, perhaps, 
 never have had the ' Divine Comedy ' unless the vulgar 
 literalness of priestly minds, confounding metaphors with 
 
THE ODYSSEY. 299 
 
 fact, had in its pseudo-philosophy mapped out the circles 
 of Heaven and Hell, as an astronomer maps out the craters 
 of the moon. The poet of the Iliad has over him of the 
 Odyssey an advantage, so far as the former is dealing with 
 the known regions of Greek life and as the other is cast 
 abroad upon a sea of speculation and fancy. 
 
 Not of course that even the later poern had not to its 
 hearers the air of a narrative of fact, or was without some 
 foundation in experience. Some writers have attempted 
 to explain the Odyssey as nothing more than a myth of 
 the sun's course through heaven. But there is too much 
 solidity about the story, too thorough an atmosphere of 
 belief around it, to suit with a tale relating such airy 
 unrealities as these. The Greeks who first sang these 
 ballads must have been thinking of a real journey made 
 upon this solid earth. But it is easy to see how many 
 itn.iges and notions which had first been applied only to 
 the sun god on his Western journey would creep into a 
 hisfcory like that of Odysseus. Undoubtedly the sun myth 
 had first pointed out the home of the dead as lying in the 
 West; and nothing is more natural than that a people 
 whose hopes and wishes carried them in the track of the 
 wandering sun should, when they came to construct an 
 epic of travel, make the imaginary journey lie the same 
 way. 
 
 They would interweave in their story such truths or 
 such sailors' yarns as Phoenician mariners or adventurous 
 Greeks brought home from the distant waters, with many 
 images which had once been made for the sun's heavenly 
 voyage, and others which had been first applied to death. 
 Their geography would be mythical ; for they could have 
 no accurate notion of the lands which they spoke of; l but 
 
 1 Mr. Bunbury, among more recent writers, has admirably shown how 
 completely mythical is the character of the geography of the Odyssey 
 (Geography of the Ancients). See also Volcker, Homerische Geographic; and 
 Welcker, in Rhein. Mm. vol. i. N.S. p. 219, 'Die Homerische PhJiaken,' on 
 the pretended identification of Scheria and Corcyra. 
 
300 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 it would not be without a kernel of reality, a thin sub- 
 stratum of fact overlaid by a world of fancy. Euhemerist 
 geographers, like Pliny or Strabo, may try to give to the 
 Western paradises of the Greeks a local position by identi- 
 fying the gardens of the Hcsperides with the land near 
 Oeuta, or with some island in the Atlantic Ocean. Justin 
 Martyr says that these are one with the Biblical Paradise. 1 
 Each is in his way right. Can we say that the mythic 
 golden apples were not the first citrons brought to Greece ? 
 
 Beside some such slender threads of truth the adven- 
 tures of Odysseus are built upon what men's imaginations 
 told them might lie in the Western seas. Now in reality 
 there was only one thing which at the bottom of their 
 hearts they believed actually did lie there namely, Death ; 
 and beyond that death the home of the departed souls. 
 Therefore their stories of the Mediterranean do almost all, 
 upon a minute inspection, resolve themselves into a variety 
 of mythical ways of describing death, and upon this as 
 upon a dark background the varied colours of the tale are 
 painted. It need take away no jot of our pleasure in the 
 brilliant picture presented before us to acknowledge this. 
 Behind the graceful air of the poem, sung as a poem only, 
 we hear a deeper note telling of the passionate, obstinate 
 questionings of futurity which belonged not more to Greece 
 three thousand years ago than they now belong to us. 
 
 The tale of the great traveller could not at the first 
 have been so full as we find it in its present shape. 
 Evidently fresh adventures have continually been interpo- 
 lated in the history, to give it richness and variety. 2 Myths 
 at the outset are not rich nor varied; they are almost 
 always confined to a single theme, and the action in them 
 obeys the rule of e unity ' more strictly than do those of 
 the most classical dramas. It is probable, therefore, that 
 many single stories have been rolled into one to make this 
 great epic. We notice, moreover, that one series of events 
 occurs in a narrative related during the course of another 
 1 Coliort, ad Gracos, xxix. 2 Cf. Butcher and Lang, Od. 2nd ed. p. xxiv. 
 
CALYPSO AND CIRC& 301 
 
 series. All the events which Odysseus recounts while 
 sitting in the hall of Alcinoiis, though they are supposed 
 to tell the earlier history of his voyage, are no doubt 
 additions to the original tale, which follows directly the 
 course of the poem till the wanderer is brought to the 
 island of the Phseacians, and then takes up its interrupted 
 thread when his story is finished and Alcinoiis prepares 
 his return voyage to Greece. An experience of the growth 
 of myths and epics teaches us to look upon the two series 
 as two distinct legends which have in this awkward way 
 been forced into one story; one being more expanded 
 than the other, and therefore perhaps of a later date. 
 
 Looking into the two series of adventures more closely, 
 and comparing them together, we discover that many 
 circumstances of one appear to be retold in a different 
 shape in the other. Take, for instance, the life of Odys- 
 seus with Calypso and with Circe, and the manner of 
 his deliverance from each. Both Calypso and Circe are 
 nymphs and enchantresses ; with each Odysseus passes a 
 term of months or years, living with her as her husband, 
 but longing all the while to return to his own wife and 
 his own home ; from each Hermes at last sets him free. 
 What if the Calypso and Circe episodes both repeat in 
 reality the same myth? And what if Odysseus' other 
 great adventure, the voyage to the Phseacians, have like- 
 wise its counterpart in the expanded story ? The question 
 of the real identity or difference between the two series 
 of adventures can only be decided when we have had 
 time thoroughly to test the significance which there is in 
 the points of their apparent likeness. 
 
 Meanwhile who is Calypso? Her name bespeaks her 
 nature not ambiguously. It is from Kakinrrsiv, to cover 
 or conceal. She is the shrouder or the shrouded place; 
 the literal counterpart of the Norse Hel, which word is, as 
 has been said, from the Icelandic helja, e to hide.' How, 
 then, can Calypso be anything else than death, as she 
 dwells there in her cave by the shores of the sea? How 
 
302 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 can Odysseus' life with her, and his sleep in her cave, be 
 anything else than an image of dying? The gods have 
 determined that the hero shall not remain in his mortal 
 sleep for ever ; so Hermes is sent with their commands to 
 Calypso to let Odysseus go. Hermes is the god whose 
 mission it is to lead souls down to the realm of Hades 
 the psychopomp, as in this office he is called. But some- 
 times he comes upon an opposite errand, to restore men to 
 life ; the staff which closes the eyes of mortals may like- 
 wise open them when asleep. Therefore the interference 
 of Hermes between Calypso and Odysseus is full of sig- 
 nificance ; and we accordingly meet the same episode in 
 the Circe tale. If Circe's name do not reveal her nature 
 so nakedly as Calypso's name shows hers, yet we easily 
 recognise by it death in one of its many guises a ravenous 
 animal or bird, a hawk or a wolf. 1 
 
 For my part, I think that the tale divides at the point 
 where we see Odysseus in the house of one or other of the 
 two enchantresses ; and that, starting from the island of 
 Ogygia on the one hand, and from that of .SCoea on the 
 other, we have before us two successive pictures of the 
 fate of a man's soul after it has passed the house of death. 
 And I think, again, that the wanderings of Odysseus 
 before he comes to the island of Circe may be taken for 
 an image of the Western Sea on this side of the dark 
 portal, the Western Sea which, though full of suggestions 
 of mortality, has not yet quite become the Sea of Death. 
 One order of pictures we may call cosmic, or belonging to 
 this world ; the other is hypercosrnic, and appears only 
 when we have passed the boundary which separates this 
 world from the next. But of course this distinction 
 expresses only the general character of the two parts of 
 the epic. That general difference does not hinder the 
 
 1 KipKos (whence /ci'p/oj) is given as both hawk and wolf in L. and S. It is 
 most likely from a root krik, meaning to make a grating sound, and there- 
 fore probably originally applied to the bird (cf . our night-jar). We may, 
 then, compare Circe" with Charon, ' an eagle.' 
 
ELEMENTS OF THE EPIC. 
 
 303 
 
 two orders of ideas, the worldly and the other-worldly, from 
 mingling at many points. They are, indeed, so closely 
 allied as to l>e not easily distinguishable. The whole 
 journey, including both images of death and images which 
 apply to the region beyond death, is foreshadowed in the 
 earlier parts of the voyage, in those parts which precede 
 the arrival at the house of the Queen of Shades. It is, in 
 fact, as if we had first to pass through the Valley of the 
 Shadow of Death, and while there to anticipate in a faint 
 show the clearer vision which will come after dissolution 
 itself. 1 
 
 1 There being, according to my view, only one essential idea at the 
 bottom of the myth of the Odyssean voyages namely, the idea of death 
 and the next world it follows that the chief adventures of the hero must 
 constantly repeat themselves in new shapes. 
 
 The essential myth of the Sea of Death divides itself into three parts 
 viz. Death, the Earthly Paradise, and the Return Voyage to the Land of 
 the Living. Of these the first two are the most important and the most 
 constantly repeated. They should always recur in the same order. It 
 may help the reader to a due understanding of the myths if I tabulate 
 them in the order in which they were supposed to occur under the heads 
 above mentioned. The Sea of Death is entered when Odysseus has left 
 Cythera. 
 
 The The Return to 
 
 Death. Earthly Paradise, the Land of the lAmng. 
 
 Odysseus' voyage to 
 
 First Series 
 
 The Lotophagi 
 I (or sleep preceding 
 
 death). 
 The Cyclopes. 
 
 Second Series - 
 
 Third Series 
 
 Laestrygones. 
 
 Hades. 
 
 Sirens. 
 
 Fourth Series | Calypso. 
 
 within one day's sail of 
 The JSolian Ithaca. This is broken 
 Island. short in order that the 
 
 subsequent adventures 
 may be tacked on. 
 
 This is the myth of the most gloomy 
 sort. Here we only distinguish three 
 stages in the journey of the soul to 
 the land of shades. There is no Para- 
 dise beyond death. 
 
 The voyage from 
 Thrinakia should have" 
 been to the land of the 
 living, but it takes a 
 different direction for 
 the same reason which 
 altered the course of 
 the voyage fromJiolia. 
 
 | Return to Ithaca. 
 
 Thrinakia. 
 
 | Phasacians. 
 
 These parts again coalesce somewhat, and the grand division remains 
 where I have put it at the adventures with Circe and Calypso. Of those 
 
301 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 We have but to translate the story of Homer into a 
 simpler mythical language to detect the unreal character 
 of its events, and to feel fully the imaginative region into 
 which the poet has strayed. If the tale had been told 
 by our Norse fore-elders it would have been clothed in 
 such transparent language ; and we may for the nonce 
 rechristen the scenes of Odysseus' adventures with the 
 names which a Northern bard would have given them. 
 
 First, then, we have the voyage to Sleep Home. The 
 wind which bore him from Ilium carried the hero to the 
 land of the Cicones, and thence to Cythera historical 
 places within the compass of the ^Egean. After that he 
 rounded Cape Malea, and burst into the sea of wonders 
 where his course was to lie so long. The shore at which 
 Odysseus next touched was the shore of the Lotophagi, 
 who ate the lotus flower or fruit for food. ' And whoever 
 partook of that pleasant fruit no more wished to tell of 
 his coming home, nor to go back thither ; but they choose 
 rather to stay with the lotus-eaters and to forget their 
 return.' This is Sleep Home. 
 
 And now on to Giant Land, where the Cyclopes dwell. 
 The Norsemen, we know, had their Giant Home (Jotun- 
 heimar), on the borders of the world. Their gods ruled 
 over Asgard and Man's Home ; but the power of the JQsir 
 did not stretch beyond the world of men. They had only 
 so far shown their might that they were able to banish 
 the jotun brood from the ordered world. Outside the limits 
 of that the giants lived in defiance of them, and were for 
 ever threatening to invade the home of gods and men. 
 Something the same had been the history of the Titans 
 
 which follow one is essentially a story of the voyage to heaven, the other 
 essentially a story of the journey to hell. 
 
 The recurrence of the number nine has been remarked upon in the 
 adventures of Odysseus, and assigned as a reason for supposing it a sun 
 myth. The hero is nine days after first leaving the known world, i.e. after 
 rounding Cape Malea, before he sights land, the land of the Lotophagi ; he 
 is nine days again sailing homewards from the island of 
 
THE CYCLOPS. 305 
 
 and giants of the Greek cosmology. Zeus had banished 
 these to a Tartarean land, unvisited by sun or breath of 
 winds, that land where lapetus l aJhd Kronos dwell for 
 ever. 
 
 The essential picture in Greek and Norse mythology 
 is the same; it is of a sunny world ruled by the gods, 
 beyond it the dark Giant Land. To this region and to the 
 Titan brood the Cyclopes belong. 'They care not for 
 aegis-bearing Zeus, nor -the blessed gods.' 2 They plough 
 not, nor sow. They have no assemblages for council nor 
 any public law ; each is a law unto himself and to his 
 household, and heeds not his neighbour. They live in 
 caves upon the mountain-tops and through the windy 
 promontories. 3 
 
 Odysseus landed first upon an uninhabited island close 
 by the island of the Cyclopes. There immense flocks of 
 goats fed undisturbed, for the Cyclopes had never reached 
 that near coast, because they had no art of ship- building 
 and no ' crimson-prowed barks.' This is a little touch 
 of reality, a reminiscence of some land where the ignor- 
 ance of the inhabitants in matters of seamanship displa} r ed 
 so clearly by such an instance of a neighbouring island 
 unvisited had struck the attention of mariners. 
 
 Next Odysseus and his comrades went on to the 
 Cyclops' island, and while the rest stayed in the ship the 
 hero and twelve others ascended from the shore to spy out 
 the land. Here we have the first detailed picture of the 
 Giant Land of Greek mythology. When they had gone 
 but a little way inland they saw on the land's edge a cave 
 near to the sea, but high up and hidden by laurel trees. 
 Around were stalled much cattle, and sheep and goats. 
 And. a high wall was built there with deep-embedded 
 stones and with tall pines and towering oaks. 'Twas the 
 dwelling of a huge man who by himself was feeding his 
 
 1 Father of Prometheus and of Atlas. (See Ch. IV.) 
 2 Od. ix. 275. * Od. ix. 105-106, 400. 
 
 X 
 
306 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 flocks afar off. He did not fellow with his kind, but in 
 solitude fed upon evil thoughts. A horrid monster he, 
 not like food-eating men, but liker to the woody top of 
 some great mountain standing alone. 
 
 The name of this giant was Polyphemus. Odysseus and 
 his comrades hid themselves in the cavern to await Poly- 
 phemus' return. 
 
 'He came bearing a huge burden of dried wood to 
 light his evening meal. Inside th*e cave he threw it down 
 with a mighty noise, and we in terror hid ourselves in the 
 recesses of the cave. Then drove he into the wide cavern 
 of his fat flocks all those whom he would milk ; the males, 
 the rams and goats, he left outside that deep hall's door. 
 Then he fixed up a barrier great and weighty. Two-and- 
 twenty wains could not have moved that mighty rock. 
 And he sat down and milked the sheep and goats duly, 
 and to each one set its young.' And when he had lit his 
 fire he saw the wanderers and spake to them. 
 
 ' strangers, who are ye, and whence have ye plied 
 o'er the moist ways hither 'P Was it for barter, or come ye 
 as pirates, who wander, their lives in their hands, bringing 
 evil on all men ? ' 
 
 And Odysseus : e We are strayed Greeks from Troy, 
 driven by contrary winds over the sea's grea.t deep. And 
 now, in search of our homes, have we come another road 
 by other ways. . . . But do thou, best one, revere the 
 gods. We are suppliants to thee, and Zeus avenges the 
 cause of strangers and suppliants.' 
 
 And he with savage mind replied, ' Foolish art thou, O 
 wanderer, to tell me to fear or shun the wrath of the gods. 
 The Cyclopes care not for aegis-bearing Zeus nor the blessed 
 gods. . . .' Then he fell upon them and seized two of 
 the comrades of Odysseus ; seized them like whelps and 
 dashed them down to the ground, and their brains flowed 
 out and moistened the ground. f In despair, weeping, we 
 held up our hands to Zeus.' 
 
 In Saxon legend we shall hereafter meet with the 
 
THE CYCLOPS. 307 
 
 counterpart of this giant, the f eotan ' Grendel, 1 and see 
 him snatching up his victims in the same manner and 
 devouring them. The Cyclopes personify immediately the 
 storm or the stormy sky, in which the sun, like an angry 
 eye, glares through the clouds. As a part of the giant 
 race the Cyclopes represent also the uncultivated and 
 uncultivable tracts of country, the out-world region, that 
 which was in the language of other times the heathen 
 world the world of heath and wild moor. To the Teutons 
 the jotun or eotan race had the same meaning; wherefore 
 is this Grendel's home f amoiig the moors and misty hills.' 2 
 First representing the outer regions of nature, the parts 
 remotest from men and from the safety of towns and 
 villages, the giant kind in all mythologies personify like- 
 wise the outer world or other world itself, the land of 
 death. As we shall see in a future chapter, there is no 
 distinct line of demarcation between the Norse Jotunheim 
 and Helheim Giant-home and Hel's Home. Many among 
 the inhabitants of Jotunheim are by their names seen to be 
 personifications of the funeral fire, or of the grave. The 
 Cyclopes do not display their character so nakedly as do 
 the giants of the North, but we easily admit that their 
 home also must lie by the Sea of Death and near the 
 borders of another world. 
 
 Or again, we may, merely looking upon the Cyclopes 
 as monsters, take them for symbols of the all-devouring 
 grave. We should then have to compare them with the 
 man-eating ogre of mediaeval European folk lore. 
 
 How Odysseus and his companions escaped from Poly- 
 phemus' cave does not need telling here. It is rather 
 with the imagery of the strange regions into which the 
 wanderers come, than with the details of their adventures, 
 that we have to do. Everyone knows too in what way 
 the wily Greek plotted revenge upon the giant, and his 
 
 1 Chapter VII. And very similar to Grendel is the giant tfushna of the 
 Rig Veda, ' who walks in darkness.' 
 * See Chap. VII. 
 
 x 2 
 
308 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 own and his comrades' escape ; how he produced his wine 
 skins with a beverage never before tasted by the Cyclops, 
 how Polyphemus became drunk with the wine, and how 
 Odysseus and his fellows, seizing an immense bar which 
 they had previously heated in the fire, bored with that 
 into the Cyclops' single eye and blinded him so ; and, 
 finally, how, tied beneath the bellies of the sheep, they 
 eluded his vigilance and made their way into the open air. 
 
 They have been to Sleep Home, and thence to Giant 
 Land ; their next stage is to Wind Home. I have said that 
 the details of the earlier adventures are often a faint fore- 
 shadowing of the later ones ; and in the -ZEolian island I 
 see a sort of prediction of the^earthly paradise which we 
 shall meet again in larger dimensions and brighter colours 
 when we come to the land of the Phseacians. On this 
 floating land dwelt .ZEolus, son of Hippotas, dear to the 
 immortals. All round the island was a brazen wall, irre- 
 fragible ; and a smooth rock rose up to meet the wall. 
 To jiEolus had been born in his palace twelve children, six 
 girls and six strong sons. And he gave his daughters for 
 wives to his sons. And these feasted together continually 
 about their dear father and honoured mother, and dainty 
 food they lacked not. And the sweet-scented hall echoed 
 to tBeir voices by day, and by night they slept beside 
 their chaste wives on napery and bedsteads ornamented. 
 
 Are we not now getting nearer to the homes of Para- 
 dise ? For, see, the charm of the land of sleep lay only in 
 the ' pleasant food ' of flowers, which made men forget all 
 that they had suffered and what they had still to endure. 
 Prom this calm we awoke to find ourselves in the devour- 
 ing cavern of death; and the place we come to now seems 
 certainly a kind of paradise beyond death. Dante, it is 
 true, placed his Wind Home at the outside of Hell. But 
 then he spoke the thoughts of mediaeval Catholicism, which 
 darkened all the pictures of the future life. Wind Home 
 might quite as well lie on the borders of Paradise. 
 
 Of course this picture of the JEoliaii land is but as a 
 
THE 7EOLIAN ISLAND. 30JJ 
 
 minor note anticipating the end of the piece. We have 
 by no means yet passed out of the mortal sea ; the giants 
 will appear again, and more images of death than any we 
 have yet encountered. Nevertheless it is true that in 
 these its first three scenes Sleep Home, Giant Home, and 
 Wind Home we get a faint picture of the whole drama 
 of Odysseus' voyage. But to continue the story. 
 
 In friendly wise JEolus entertained Odysseus for a 
 whole month, and enquired everything of him touching 
 Ilium and the Grecian ships and the Greeks' return ; ' and 
 all things I related as they were. And when at length 
 I asked for a journey and would have him send me away, 
 he did not refuse, but prepared my voyage. Of a niiie- 
 year-old ox's skin he made a bag. And in it he tied 
 the ways of blustering winds ; for Kronion made him the 
 keeper of the winds, to hush or raise whiche'er he would. 
 . . . With a bright silver chord he bound it in the hollow 
 ship, that not the smallest breath might escape. To me 
 he gave West Wind, to waft our ships and us. But he 
 was not fated to perform it : our own folly was our un- 
 doing. 5 
 
 The notion of a return home belongs not of right to 
 the drama of the Sea of Death. But in the Odyssey the 
 story has been rationalised ; and as it now stands we read 
 that Odysseus sailed for nine days, and was within one 
 more day's journey of Ithaca. 1 They could even see men 
 lighting fires upon the land. But unhappily upon 
 Odysseus, who had been steering the ship for all those 
 nine days, * sweet sleep on a sudden fell;' and, as he 
 slept, his comrades, deeming he bore away a treasure in 
 his bag, undid it, and all the storms burst on them at 
 
 1 The likeness between the place taken in this story respectively by the 
 2Eolian island and the land of the Phaeacians is conspicuous in this fact, 
 that the visit to each heralds a sail backwards to the east to Ithaca, in 
 fact. We can easily understand how, when various short myths were tacked 
 together to form one long story,, the episode of the journey to Ithaca from 
 JEolus' island was made to take a quite different termination from that 
 which it originally had. 
 
310 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 once, till they were driven back to the island from which 
 they had sailed. And we need not wonder that -ZEolus 
 refused again to favour such ill-starred beings. 
 
 c Away ! off from our island quickly, vilest of men ! 
 !N"ot for me is it to care for or speed on his way the man 
 who is abhorred of the blessed gods. Off ! for thou 
 comedst here a hateful one to the gods.' 
 
 For six days and nights they sailed continually, and on 
 the seventh came to Lamos' lofty city, Lsestrygonia. 
 This was only another land of giants. Perhaps this inci- 
 dent of the journey and the story of the Cyclops are two 
 legends which have been woven together. The descrip- 
 tions are slightly varied ; and on that account their points 
 of likeness are the more instructive ; for they must have 
 a distinct reason and intention. It is generally charac- 
 teristic of the giant to live in the earth ; especially so if 
 he be in a manner a representative of the grave itself. 
 The Cyclops lives in a cave. But the Lsestrygones are 
 much more civilised : they have cities and agorae. 
 
 6 Behind the high promontory where we lay,' says 
 Odysseus, continuing his narrative, ( I could see neither 
 the signs of cattle nor of men ; only smoke we saw issuing 
 as from the ground. So I sent forward three of my com- 
 panions to enquire what sort of men they were. And they 
 went along the smooth road whereby waggons carry wood 
 from the mountains to the city, and they met before the 
 town a damsel bearing water, the strong daughter of 
 Lsestrygonian Aiitiphates. Then they stood by and spake 
 to her, and asked her who was the king of these people 
 and who were those he ruled. And she straightway 
 showed to them her father's high-roofed house. When 
 they had entered the illustrious dwelling, they found the 
 mistress there lofty as a mountain-top ; and they were 
 afeared. And she called at once her husband, famous 
 Antiphates, from the assembly.' 
 
 There is much less of the true jotun nature about these 
 giants. They have houses and cities and assemblies. I 
 
NIVERSIT- 
 
 311 
 
 think it probable that in this part of the voyage we have 
 more to do with legend than with ni} T th. Granting that 
 the myth had asserted that a giant race lived somewhere 
 in mid-sea, this special account of the giants may have 
 been taken from the actual experience of travellers. The 
 Lsestrygones have, however, all the savageness of their 
 brethren the Cyclopes. Antiphates at once seized one of 
 the comrades to prepare his supper; the other two ran 
 back to the ship. And the giant raised a clamour through 
 all the town. The strong Lsestrygouians came flocking 
 from every side in thousands not men, but giants who 
 hurled at them with stones torn from the rocks. And an 
 evil cry arose among the ships as the Greeks perished and 
 navies sank. . . ' At length, drawing my sword from my 
 thigh, I severed the rope of the blue-prowed ship. I 
 called on my comrades and bade them to throw themselves 
 upon the oars, that we might escape the evil. . . .' 
 
 Here for a moment let us pause. Far more important 
 and significant than any of the previous adventures is the 
 next which befalls the seafarers that is to say, their 
 coming to the home of Circe. Circe and Calypso, I sup- 
 pose, are the same ; and each is very Death herself. Images 
 of mortality lie scattered throughout the history of the 
 voyage ; but in these two only do we see the true personifi- 
 cations of the dreadful goddess. After the visits to their 
 homes the story changes somewhat. The latter part in 
 either case presents a picture of the destiny of the soul 
 one future after the habitation with Circe, another 
 future after the habitation with Calypso ; from .ZEsea to 
 Hades, from Calypso's island, Ogygia, to the earthly 
 Paradise. 
 
 Circe is Death first presented in the image of a hawk 
 or wolf. She is the child, as it seems, of the night sun, as 
 the Egyptians would have said of the dead Osiris; in the 
 language of Grecian fable, she is the daughter of Helios 
 and Perse (the destroyer), Perse herself being the daughter 
 of Oceanos, into which the days disappear. The name of 
 
312 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 her island (it is also another name for Circe herself), 1 
 -ZEa3a, means a land of such wailing (alal) as men utter 
 by a grave. 2 Circe's palace is buried deep in forest gloom, 
 and over dense coppices of oak and underwood its smoke is 
 seen ascending. Around the enchantress are wild beasts, 
 mountain wolves and lions, which she herself has tamed. 
 But her attendant maidens are the personifications of the 
 simplest nature religion, the daughters of the fountains 
 and the groves and holy rivers, which flow into the sea ; 
 for she belongs to an old-world order of things ; before the 
 gods were she is. She is fate; and, like all the fates, she 
 weaves a thread, the thread of destiny. 3 It is a beautiful 
 image which is repeated in the case of Calypso, that when 
 this goddess of death is first discovered to us she is 
 weaving her immortal web and singing over it with a 
 lovely voice. 
 
 When the comrades of Odysseus have come to her 
 palace, they stand without the gates, shouting aloud, and 
 she comes forth and opens the shining doors and bids 
 them in. They do not keep men standing at that door. 4 
 
 1 Her son is JSanis, her brother JSetes. This ^Eetes is a kind of king 
 of death, for the labours of Jason and the Argonauts may be compared to 
 the labours of Heracles in the other world. (Sec ante, Chap. IV.) It is 
 noticeable, as witnessing to the likeness between Circe and Calypso, that 
 one is sister of 6\o6<t>povTos ^Eetes, the other of b\o6<ppovros Atlas. Atlas 
 is a being like lapetus, a King of the West, a King of Death. 
 
 2 Cf. what was said above concerning Cocytus and Gjoll. 
 
 3 I doubt if the metaphorical notion of weaving the thread of destiny 
 belongs to the earliest genesis of myth. It may be that the weaving or 
 sewing goddess (like the Frau Holda of the Germans) is originally only an 
 earth divinity ; hence a mother goddess, and so a patroness of all house- 
 wifery. Athene sometimes appears in this character. The earth goddess, 
 from being very old (uralt), becomes the goddess of prophecy, and so of 
 fate (see Chaps. II. and V.) With the notion of fate, again, may be connected 
 the quite physical one of the navel chord which unites the new-born child 
 to its mother. Man might be supposed in the same way united by an 
 invisible thread to the mother of all, to the Earth. This at death is cut. 
 
 4 See the fine lines of Christina Eossetti : 
 
 ' Shall I meet other wayfarers by night ? 
 
 Those who have gone before. 
 Then must I knock or call when first in sight? 
 They will not keep you standing at that door.* 
 
313 
 
 The lower road is not a hard one. Sed revocare gradus. 
 . . . She s.eats them upon thrones, and makes ready their 
 supper of cheese, and meal, and honey, and Pramnian 
 wine ; but with the food she mingles the fatal narcotic 
 drug which makes them forget their native land. And 
 last she strikes them with her rod, and they are trans- 
 formed into swine. ' They had the heads and voices and 
 hair and bodies of swine, but their understandings were 
 unshaken as before.' That turning the comrades into 
 swine is, however, a later addition ; the original Circe had 
 only to touch them with her wand which is one with the 
 sleepy rod of Hermes ' and they awoke no more. 
 
 By Odysseus, and through the council of Hermes, 
 the companions are freed from their enchantment. So 
 at least the story stands in Homer. But how freed? 
 Whither are they at liberty to go? To the house of 
 Hades, that is all. Odysseus is warned by Circe herself 
 that he must go thither, and in the dialogue between them 
 we are once again taught the lesson of the facilis descensus 
 Averno. 6 Who,' exclaims the hero, ( will guide me on 
 that way ? None has yet sailed to Hades' gate.' And she 
 answers, '0 wise Laertes' son, let the want of a pilot 
 on thy ship be cause of little care to thee. Eaise but 
 your mast and let your white sails fly, and Boreas' breath 
 will bring you there.' Then she describes the unknown 
 land. ' And when at length thou hast crossed the stream 
 of Ocean, where is the shore, and where are the groves of 
 Persephone, of towering poplars and fruitless willows, 
 there leave thy ship by Ocean's depths, and go thou thy- 
 self to Hades' drear halls. . . .' 
 
 Then they went down to the sea, and awful Circe sent 
 behind them a kindly breeze, which filled their sails. And 
 the sails, as they passed over the sea, were full- stretched 
 
 1 Him thought how that the winged god, Mercury, 
 Beforne him stood, and bad him to be mery. 
 His slepy yerdc, in bond he bare upright ; 
 An hat he wered upon his heres bright. . . . Knighfs Tale. 
 
314 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 all that day. Then the sun set, and the ways were over- 
 shadowed. And now they had come to the far limit of 
 the deep-flowing Ocean, to the home in which live the 
 Cimmerians, covered with darkness and mist. Them the 
 sun never visits when at morning he climbs the starry 
 heaven, or when he returns backwards towards the earth ; 
 but hateful night broods there. There they drew up the 
 ship ; and there they passed through the groves of Perse- 
 phone, with the towering poplars and fruitless willows, to 
 the house of Hades. There Phlegethon and Cocytus, 
 which is a stream of Styx, join the Acheron ; and where 
 a rock marks the meeting of the loud-sounding rivers 1 
 Odysseus dug a trench and filled it with the blood of 
 sheep, and made a sacrifice and a libation, and besought 
 the unsubstantial dead to draw near. 2 
 
 In the version of the story which has come down to 
 us no valid reason is given for the journey of Odysseus to 
 Hades. He goes there only to invoke the shade of a 
 prophet, who is to tell what further adventures lie ahead 
 for him and his comrades. But Circe was herself a pro- 
 phetess. And, besides, the best of auguries would have 
 been to send him home ; and Circe, who could give him a 
 breeze to carry him to the west, could, one would have sup- 
 posed, have given him one which would have borne him to 
 Ithaca. We should suppose this, I mean, if we looked 
 upon Odysseus as merely a common adventurer, and the 
 wonders which he meets with as only the wonders inci- 
 dental to distant travel. But when we strip from all the 
 story its later dress, and see it in its original intention, we 
 perceive that there is a meaning in each detail; we see 
 
 1 Cf . Gjoll. 
 
 2 This feeding with blood the unsubstantial shades (i.e. images of the dead 
 such as are seen in dreams), in order that they may obtain something like 
 human capabilities, is very remarkable, and is a test of the psychology of 
 the time. The object of it is purely material, and it produces immediate 
 material results : each one who has drunk of the blood gains a voice and 
 also understanding (as in the case of Anticleia). The object is not senti- 
 mental, as that of a sacrifice is. It is in no proper sense a sacrifice to the 
 dead which Odysseus is making. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF HADES. 315 
 
 too how many points have been retained in the later and 
 rationalised edition of the legend, when their full signifi- 
 cance is forgotten. Odysseus is not a common traveller. 
 He is either the soul escaped from life, or else he is the one 
 living man who has been permitted to visit the halls of 
 the dead, to sound the depths and shallows of the Sea of 
 Death, and has survived to tell the tale. Odysseus' going 
 to Hades is merely the legitimate bourn of his journey. 
 Circe can waft him there, but she cannot send him back 
 to the world. The importance, therefore, of the visit to 
 the Eealm of Shades does not lie in the alleged object of 
 Odysseus' coming, the prophecy which he hears from the 
 mouth of the seer Teiresias, but in the whole picture of 
 the dark land which he bears away with him. 
 
 Now, therefore, we behold the hero in the outer courts 
 of Hades' city : 
 
 ' Much I prayed to the empty figures of the dead for 
 my return, vowing them a young heifer the best I had; and 
 to Teiresias I promised a coal black sheep, excelling all 
 the flock. And when I had called upon the nations of the 
 dead, I cut the throats of the sheep over the ditch, and the 
 black blood flowed out. 
 
 ' And the souls of the dead came flocking forth from 
 Erebus brides and unmarried youths, and much-enduring 
 old men, and tender girls, new-sorrowing souls, and men 
 with many wounds, slain in battle and bearing their 
 bloody arras ; all these, with an immense clamour, were 
 wandering round the ditch. Then pale fear seized me. . . . 
 
 6 First came the soul of Elpenor, my comrade ; he was 
 yet unburied 1 beneath the broad earth, for we had left his 
 corse in Circe's house, unwept, unburied, for another task 
 was ours. . . .' 
 
 1 Or unburned, Ou . . eTeflaTrro. According to Grimm (IJeber das 
 Verbrennen der Leicheri) Q&irreiv means etymologically to ' burn.' It was 
 used for any funeral rites. As we see by a later passage (v. 74) it was 
 rather burning than burying that Elpenor wished for. Grimm's etymology 
 for Banreiv has been disputed. 
 
316 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 'Elpenor,' cried Odysseus, 'how is it that to this 
 murky darkness thou art come sooner on foot than I, who 
 sailed in my black ship?' Then Elpenor gave an 
 account of how he died, and asked for his funeral rites to 
 be duly performed on Odysseus' return to .ZEsea. . . . 
 All the while Odysseus kept guard over the blood. His 
 mother, Anticleia, ' daughter of the noble-minded Au- 
 tolycus,' passed by ; but her he would not suffer to drink 
 at first. ' At length the form of Theban Teiresias came by, 
 grasping a golden sceptre; and it knew me and spake. 
 " Why, unhappy one, hast thou left the sun's light, and 
 come hither to see the shades and their drear abode? 
 Go back from the ditch ; put up your bright sword, and 
 let me drink of the blood; then will I prophesy unto 
 thee." . . .' 
 
 How dim this region is ; how shadowy and unsubstan- 
 tial the figures which haunt it. It is like to that outer 
 circle of Dante's hell where the shades move for ever aim- 
 lessly and in a ' blind life devoid of hope.' There is no 
 speculation in their eyes. Anticleia, Odysseus' mother, 
 sits all the while silent by the trench of blood with looks 
 askance ; she dare not look straight at her son nor recog- 
 nise him. Teiresias alone is possessed of his heart and 
 mind as' on earth, for he had been a prophet and was 
 wiser than common men. 
 
 6 Tell me, king,' Odysseus, speaking of his mother, 
 says to him, ' how can she know me for what I am ? ' 
 
 And Teiresias answers 
 
 6 Whomsoever among the departed dead you suffer to 
 come to the blood, he will speak sensibly to you. But if 
 you disallow it, silent will he wander back.' 
 
 ' So spake he, and the soul of King Teiresias turned 
 back to Hades' house. And I remained steadfast until my 
 mother came forward and drank the black blood. At once 
 she knew me, and wailing spake with winged words. . . .' 
 They conversed for awhile, and now follows a wonderful 
 touch, showing the nature of these shades of the departed. 
 
THE KINGDOM OF HAD&3. 317 
 
 'I wished,' Odysseus goes on in his account of the scene, 
 ( I wished to take hold of my mother's spirit. Thrice 
 my thoughts urged me to embrace her ; but thrice from 
 my arms like a shadow, or even a dream, she flew away. 
 And sharper grief arose in my heart ; and to compel her 
 I spake with winged words. "Mother ! why stay you not 
 for me to lay hold on you? So might we two, folded in 
 each other's arms, have joy mid our sorrow even in Hades. 
 Has Persephone deluded me with a shadow only, that I 
 might grieve the more ? " 
 
 6 So I said, and my honoured mother straight answered. 
 
 c " Ah, woe, my son ! Persephone has not deceived you ; 
 this is but the state of mortals when they are dead. They 
 have no more flesh, nor bones, nor sinews ; ! for the strong 
 force of fire consumed these when first the spirit left the 
 whitened bones. Then the soul itself flits aimlessly away 
 like a dream." 
 
 This condition of the dead is exemplified in the case 
 of all the others whom Odysseus in turn encounters. 
 Agamemnon knows him not till he has drunk of the black 
 blood. Achilles would change his life below for that of a 
 mean hired labourer, but yet he can feel delight at hear- 
 ing of the fame of his son, and after the dialogue with 
 Odysseus he passes on making great joyful strides through 
 the asphodel meadows. In some of the inner courts of 
 Pluto's palace the punishments of the dead are positive. 
 There Odysseus sees Minos the judge; there is Tityus 
 stretched on the rocks while the vultures are dipping their 
 beaks in his liver; there Tantalus stands in the water 
 which flees from his touch ; there too is the shade of 
 Orion perpetually hunting through the meadows ; and the 
 shade of Heracles (Heracles himself being on Olympus 2 ), 
 which moves darkly, seeming ever ready to let fly a shaft. 
 
 1 Lit. ' Their sinews no longer hold the flesh and bones,' i.e. they no 
 longer have sinews holding the flesh and bones. 
 
 8 See what is said in Chap. IV. concerning the double nature of 
 Heracles, (1) as a mortal and (2) as a god. 
 
318 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 We have lingered somewhat over this picture of the 
 realm of Hades, the first vivid presentation of the under 
 world which meets us in the literature of the Aryan race. 
 And the beauty and solemnity of the picture may well 
 excuse this pause ; for it is a beauty and a power which 
 familiarity can scarcely lessen. We now retrace our steps, 
 and return with Odysseus once more to the portal of 
 Death, where he stood when he entered Circe's island. 
 But in this case Death is represented not by Circe, but by 
 Calypso. 
 
 First of all in the actual course of the poem we find 
 the hero upon the island of Calypso, called Ogygia. 
 Etymologists connect the word Ogygia with Oceanus, and 
 this connection shows us that the name was not originally 
 the name of an* island so much as the general one of the 
 sea. 1 Ogygia means, moreover, something primeval, so 
 that it is also the name of Egypt, the oldest land of the 
 world, and Ogyges is the name of the earliest Attic king ; 
 in this sense Osysria is likewise chosen to be the home of 
 
 &/ & 
 
 Time, Kronos. On this island Odysseus sleeps perforce 
 beside Calypso in her hollow cave ; and hither, when he 
 has been seven years in the embrace of the dreadful 
 goddess, Hermes comes, by command of Zeus, to set him 
 free. 
 
 It was, we remember, by the advice of the same 
 messenger that Odysseus overcame the spells of Circe. 
 Hermes in later times, partaking of the nature of Apollo 
 and advancing as Greek civilisation advanced, became the 
 god of merchandise and of the market as well as the 
 patron of agonistic contests. But in Homer he has his 
 primitive character ; he is the god of the wind. His name 
 is connected with those Yedic Sarameyas of whom we 
 have lately spoken ; it is also connected with the Greek 
 opfjudo), to rush. We have seen why the Sarameyas, as 
 winds, were the psychopomps or leaders of the soul over 
 
 was connected with the fabulous primeval deluges in Bceotia 
 and in Attica. 
 
CALYPSO. 319 
 
 the Bridge of Souls ; and how they might also be the 
 representatives of the morning and evening breezes. All 
 these functions are united in the Greek messenger god. 
 His rod has a twofold power : it closes the eyes of men in 
 sleep and awakens them from sleeping. Or in a wider 
 sense it either calls men from the sleep of death or drives 
 them to the under world. Hermes is (like the Sarameyas} 
 most present when we are near the other world. This last 
 reason, perhaps, explains why he is the messenger of the 
 Odyssey but not of the Iliad. 1 
 
 As the wind of morning, the awakeiier, Hermes comes 
 now over the sea to rouse Odysseus from his fatal slumber ; 
 he comes, in the beautiful language of the poet, like a gull 
 fishing over the wide brine, now (so we fancy him) dipping 
 down to the wave, now rising again. 
 
 Windlike beneath, the immortal golden sandals 
 Bare up his flight o'er the limitless earth and the sea ; 
 And in his hand that magic ^Cvand he carried 
 Wherewith the eyes of men he closes in slumber 
 Or wakens from sleeping. 
 
 The divine messenger finds Calypso within her cave, at 
 the mouth of which burns a fire (we often meet with this 
 fire at the entrance to the house of death), 2 a fire of cedar 
 and frankincense, which wafts its scent over the island. 
 She is singing, and as she sings she moves over the web a 
 golden shuttle, and in the wood behind the birds are 
 brooding. 
 
 Then Calypso, seeing that the commands of Zeus might 
 not be disobeyed, instructed Odysseus how to make a raft, 
 and sped him on his way. For seventeen days he sailed 
 
 1 Hermes is always the messenger of the gods in the Odyssey ; but in 
 the Iliad this part is played by Iris, the rainbow. There is a natural con- 
 nection between the rainbow, the Bridge of Souls (in the Vedas, &c.), and 
 the wind (Sarameyas, Hermes), who is the leader of souls. In the 
 Odyssey (xviii. beg.) we hear of an Irus, who may be the same as 
 Hermes. 
 
 2 Chaps. VII. VIII. 
 
320 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 upon that raft over the trackless sea, and sleepless watched 
 the constellations as they passed overhead, ' the Pleiads, 
 and late-setting Bootes, and the Bear, which they also 
 call the Wain.' l He was not fated yet to find his home. 
 On the eighteenth day, as the shadowy mountains of the 
 Phseacians began to appear, Poseidon, who still burned to 
 revenge the death of his son Polyphemus, raised a storm, 
 so that the raft was borne upon a rock and Odysseus was 
 all but destroyed. But a sea goddess, Ino Leucothea, 
 gave him her veil to buoy him up when he left the sink- 
 ing raft, and Athene stilled the waves. The appearance 
 of Ino in this scene is appropriate. For we are now close 
 to the Land of the Blessed, and she herself was once a 
 mortal who found a home in this heaven. 2 
 
 At length Odysseus, swimming, gained the shore. Be- 
 fore he reached this, his last haven, the troubles of 
 Odysseus had attained their climax. He had lost all his 
 comrades, his ships, his treasures, and now this last refuge, 
 the raft, brake beneath his feet. Nadus egressus, sic redibo, 
 'All come into this world alone; all leave it alone.' 
 Welcome, therefore (we may well believe), as is the father's 
 life to his children when he has lain long in suffering and 
 disease, and the Hateful Goddess has grazed close by him, 
 such to the wanderer was the sight of this new land. 
 
 The name of the land on which he was cast was 
 Scheria. The island of Ogygia means literally the ocean ; 
 this land with the same etymological exactness signifies 
 the shore -2%2/na, from o-^spds. 3 The contrast of mean- 
 
 1 We think of Dante's Ulysses. 
 
 ' Tutte le stelle gia dell' altro polo 
 Vedea la notte, e il nostro tanto basso 
 Che non suggeva fuor del marin suolo.' 
 
 2 See Pindar, 01. 2. 
 
 3 It is in keeping with the principles of mythopoesis that Calypso's land 
 embodying the notion of the Sea of Death, should be in the midst of the 
 sea that is to say, should be an island. Scheria means shore. There is 
 nothing said of its being an island. Nevertheless the Greek paradise was 
 generally thought to be one, e.g. the Islands of the Blessed of Pindar, &c. 
 
THE PH.EACIANS. 321 
 
 ing takes us back to a time when the mytji of the great 
 traveller was more simple than we find it in Homer, and 
 told only of his passing over the Sea of Death and arriving 
 at the coast beyond. This shore is the home of the god- 
 like Phseacians, and the king of it is Alcinoiis. In the 
 description of the people and of their country we easily 
 recognise a place such as is not in this world, and a race 
 not of mortal birth. Far away, says Alcinoiis 
 
 Far away do we live, at the end of the watery plain, 
 
 Nor before now have ever had dealings with other mortals ; 
 
 But now there comes this luckless wanderer hither. 
 
 Him it is right that we help, for all men fellows and strangers 
 
 Come from Zens ; in his sight the smallest gift is pleasing. 1 
 
 This place is the due antithesis of Hades. Like Hades 
 it lies at the extreme limit of the watery plain. But it is 
 a land of everlasting sunlight and happiness, instead of 
 one of darkness and death. Remote from, men, near to the 
 gods (dy%i0oi), as Zeus himself declares, 2 the Phseacians 
 live, like the blameless ^Ethiopians, somewhere on the 
 confines of earth. Hither it was that yellow-haired 
 Ehadamanthus fled when persecuted and driven from 
 Crete by his brother Minos the just Rhadamanthus, 
 who, by some legends, is placed as ruler in the land of 
 the blessed. Hither was come the fainting Odysseus. 
 
 How the wanderer hid himself at the river mouth, and, 
 having fallen asleep, was awakened by Nausicaa, the king's 
 daughter, when at play with her maidens, and how he dis- 
 covered himself to her, needs not to be retold. When 
 Odysseus had related his adventures to Nausicaii, she bade 
 him follow her to her father's house. This was a para- 
 disiacal palace, much like those which occur so often in 
 our Teutonic fairy tales. It is made as beautiful as the 
 Greek imagination of that time could paint it. 3 Built all 
 
 1 Od. vi. 204 sqq. 2 -Od. v. 35. 
 
 1 Mr. Pater, in his article on the ' Beginnings of Greek Art ' {Fortnightly 
 Review), has admirably followed out the exact artistic conceptions which 
 are implied in the descriptions by Homer of the palace of Alcinoiis. 
 
 T 
 
322 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of bronze, it had golden doors and silver pillars, and silver 
 lintels with a golden ring. On either side the entrance 
 were gold and silver dogs, f which cunning-minded He- 
 phsestus made to guard the house ; they were immortal, 
 and free from old age for ever.' We recognise in these 
 descriptions the dawn of the Hellenic love of art. But 
 the two dogs have, I fancy, a special meaning. I see in 
 them the descendants of the Sarameyas, or whatever in 
 early Aryan belief preceded those guardians of the house 
 of death, who are own brothers to the two dogs of the 
 Wild Huntsman, Hackelberg. The garden which sur- 
 rounds the palace of Alcinoiis distinctly presents the pic- 
 ture of a home of the blessed; it is just like the Gardens 
 of the Hesperides, and like all the pictures which before 
 and after have been drawn of an earthly paradise. Here 
 the trees and flowers do not grow old and disappear, 
 winter does not succeed to summer, but all is one con- 
 tinued round of blossoming and bearing fruit ; in one part 
 of the garden the trees are all abloom, in another they are 
 heavy with ripe clusters. 1 
 
 Nevertheless the Western Land, though a place of 
 Paradise, is also the land of sunset ; and by their name 
 the Phseacians appear as beings of the twilight (f>alaj; 
 strengthened from fyaibs, dusky, dim. Their most won- 
 drous possessions are their ships, which know the minds 
 of men and sail swifter than a bird or than thought. ( No 
 pilots have they, no rudders, no oarsmen, which other 
 ships have, for they themselves know the thoughts and 
 minds of men. The rich fields they know, and the cities 
 among all men, and swiftly pass over the crests of the sea 
 
 1 Compare Pindar's description of the Happy Isle : 
 
 * Where round the Island of the Blessed 
 Soft sea- winds blow continually ; 
 Where golden .flowers on sward and tree 
 Blossom, and on the water rest 
 
 There move the saints in garlands dressed 
 And intertwined wreaths of colours heavenly.' 
 
ODYSSEUS' RETURN. 323 
 
 shrouded in mist and gloom. 9 1 Yet the Phpeacians them- 
 selves live remote from human habitation, unused to 
 strangers. 2 It would seem, then, that the ships travel 
 alone on their dark voyages. For what purpose? It is 
 not difficult to guess. Their part is to carry the souls of 
 dead men over to the Land of Paradise. 
 
 We can imagine these ships of the Phseacians sailing 
 into every human sea, calling at every port, familiar with 
 every city, though in their shroud of darkness they are 
 unseen by men. . They know all the rich lands ; for every 
 land has its tribute to pay to the ships of Death. They 
 are the counterparts of the c grim ferryman which poets 
 write of ;' 3 only that the last plies his business in the an- 
 cient underground Hades, and that the Phseacian barks 
 have their harbours on the upper earth ; albeit they can 
 pass from this life to the other. 4 
 
 Their business with Odysseus is to bring him back to 
 the common world to beloved Ithaca. He has passed 
 to the cave of Hel and through the gates of Death; 
 he has emerged to visit the Land of Paradise. Now he 
 returns that his adventures may be sung in the homes of 
 Greece. 
 
 What reports 
 Yield those jealous courts unseen ? 
 
 How could men ever tell tales of that strange country if 
 it really were a bourn from which no traveller returned ? So 
 when the hero has told all his tale in the hall of Alcinoiis, 
 the latter orders the sailors to prepare his homeward 
 voyage. 
 
 1 Od. viii. 562. 2 See ante, p. 321. 
 
 3 Charon is not known to Homer. It is not impossible that he may have 
 been imported from Egypt. These Phseacian ferrymen are of true Aryan 
 birth, and have a native place in Greek belief. 
 
 4 It seems to me that there is no ground for endorsing "Welcker's theory 
 (RJieinisch.es Museum fur Phllologie, N.S. vol. i.) that the Phaeacians were 
 imported from a Teutonic home. That the Teutons had a parallel belief 
 concerning the soul's voyage is true enough (Ch. VIII.) ; but in this chapter 
 it has, I think, been made clear that the notion was an universal Aryan one. 
 
 Y 2 
 
324: OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Here intervenes Odysseus' narrative of previous travel 
 before he had ever conie to Calypso's cave whence we 
 have already drawn some pictures of the soul's journey; 
 and for the continuance of the action we have to pass 
 from the seventh book of the Odyssey to the thirteenth. 
 And now the long and multiform sea adventures come 
 to an end. 'O Odysseus,' says Alcinoiis, 'since now 
 thou art come to my bronze-built, high-roofed house, I 
 deem that thou wilt return home, not wandering hither- 
 ward again. Now thou hast suffered many things.' And 
 Odysseus rises, and takes leave of Queen Arete with these 
 words : c Farewell, O queen, for ever ; till old age come, 
 and death, which are the lot of men. Now I go; but 
 mayst thou have joy here in thy children and in thy 
 people, and in King Alcinoiis.' 
 
 So saying the godlike Odysseus crossed the threshold, 
 and with him Alcinoiis sent a herald, to lead him to the 
 swift ship and to the sea- shore. And Arete sent women 
 servants with him to bear, one a clean robe and a tunic, 
 another a heavy chest ; and a third bare bread and wine. 
 They came to the ship and to the sea ; and his renowned 
 guides received the things and stowed them in the hollow 
 ship. And they made ready for Odysseus linen and a 
 blanket, that he might sleep there at the stern, without 
 v/aking. Then he embarked, and silently lay down ; and 
 they sat each one upon his bench ; and they heaved the 
 cable, loosened from the bored stone. Then leaning back, 
 they threw up the sea with the oar ; and as Odysseus lay, 
 anon deep sleep weighed down his eyelids a sweet, un- 
 wakeful sleep, most like to death. . . . Then as arose the 
 one bright star, the messenger of dawn, the ship touched 
 the shore of Ithaca. 
 
 Mythology cannot show, out of all the imagery which 
 has grown up around the Sea of Death, a finer picture 
 than this one of the wanderer who has been dead and is 
 alive again awakening, along with the day-heralding 
 star, to find himself once more in the world of living men. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF HEATHEN GERMANY. 325 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE BELIEFS OF HEATHEN GERMANY. 
 
 1. The Gods of the MarJc. 
 
 WE have scattered notices of Gerin.an heathenism extend- 
 ing over many centuries. There are the few facts which 
 Tacitus collected, a passage here and there in other classic 
 authors, then the later histories of the Teutonic peoples 
 themselves Procopius, Jornandes, Paulus Diaconus, Gre- 
 gory of Tours, and lesser chroniclers which shed some 
 light upon the Germans' early belief ; the ' Danish History' 
 of Saxo, full of legendary history, which is but transformed 
 myth; the 'Historia Ecclesiastica ' of Adam of Bremen and 
 such like works of men, Christians themselves, but yet in 
 close proximity with the heathen ; and finally we have the 
 Eddas, the last voice of Teutonic paganism, rising up from 
 the land which was the latest to give admittance to the 
 creed of Christendom. These are as recent as the twelfth 
 and thirteenth centuries. They have been, it is probable, 
 handed down for many hundred years, but they speak 
 directly only of the heathenism of the Norsemen. Despite 
 all the diversities of time and place which these different 
 sources imply, we can see that the belief is in essentials 
 the belief of one people ; a race whose life through all the 
 centuries had little changed, which was united not by 
 language alone, but was one in its institutions, in its 
 civilisation, and in its barbarism, one even in the climatic 
 influences to which it was subjected. 
 
 And this last is a great matter. The foregoing 
 chapters must have made it plain that the creed of a 
 
326 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 people is always greatly dependent upon their position on 
 this earth, upon the scenery amid which their life is 
 passed and the natural phenomena to which they have 
 become habituated ; that the religion of men who live in 
 woods will not be the same as that of the dwellers in wide, 
 open plains ; nor the creed of those who live under an 
 inclement sky, the sport of storms and floods, the same as- 
 the religion of men who pass their lives in sunshine and 
 calm air. 
 
 The more sombre aspects of nature were revealed to 
 the German races from the Danube to the Baltic. Tacitus 
 has left us a picture of the Germans he knew, the dwellers 
 in Central Europe, and of the land they inhabited. He 
 describes their dark, lonely life under the perpetual gloom 
 of trees, and their country ' rugged with wood or dank 
 with marsh.' l The Norsemen had their homes amid 
 mighty pine forests and on rocky heights looking over the 
 main not such a sea as the ^gsean, but the sea of those 
 Northern regions, icy and threatening, not often tranquil. 
 Inland and sea-shore had their own beauties, but they 
 were of a wild kind. The Eddas tell us of the marriage 
 between a god of the sea and a daughter of the hills ; 
 each utters a complaint of the other's home. e Of moun- 
 tains I weary,' says one 2 
 
 Of mountains I weary. 
 Not long was I there 
 Nine nights only 
 But the howl of the wolf 
 To my ears sounded ill 
 By the song of the sea bird. 3 
 
 And the hill goddess answers 
 
 1 Tac. Germ. 5. And again, ' asperam coelo, tristem cultu aspectuque 
 (c. 2). 
 
 2 Edda Snorra, Gylfaginning, D. 23. 
 
 3 Lit. swan (svanr). Swan in Norse poetry seems constantly to be used 
 for a sea bird. Etymologically of course it would be merely a bird that 
 could swim. See also p. 341. 
 
THE VILLAGE AND THE NARK. 327 
 
 I conld not sleep 
 
 In my bed by the shore ; 
 
 For the scream of the wild birds, 
 
 The seamewF, who came 
 
 From the wood flying, 
 
 Awoke me each morning. 
 
 But the child of this union between the mountain and 
 the sea was the religion and the poetry of the Teutonic 
 race ; beside the howl of the wolf and the scream of the 
 seamew it struggled into life. 
 
 As for the social condition of the Germans when first 
 described to us, to credit the accounts of classic authors, 
 the people seems to have been scarcely raised above the 
 earliest stage of society, the hunting state. They sowed 
 but little ; when they were not engaged in war or in the 
 chase, the men sat idle ; ! usefuller occupations were 
 abandoned to the unwarlike classes to old men, to 
 women, and to slaves. The Germans made very little 
 practice of agriculture, says Csesar, or (in some places) 
 they did not use it at all. 2 They ' lived chiefly on meat,' 
 &c. 3 Tacitus says that the men in time of peace sat idle, 
 and gave over household management to the women 
 and to the infirm and old. 4 And from these descriptions 
 we learn how far apart had drifted the lives of the various 
 peoples of the Aryan race, who } r et, when they separated 
 to begin their migrations, started from the same point on 
 the road to civilisation. The earliest recollections of 
 Rome and Greece pointed back to a time when men sub- 
 sisted altogether by the labours of agriculture, ere com- 
 merce with its attendant refinements and luxuries had 
 been introduced. In Rome the praisers of past days re- 
 
 1 Nor were they much engaged even in the chase, according to Tacitus 
 (Germ. 15). 
 
 2 ' Minime omnes Germani agriculture student.' Cassar, B. G. vi. 29 ; 
 Agricultural non student,' 22. 
 
 8 'Neque multum frumento sed raaximam partem lacte atque pecore 
 vivunt ( Sue vi).' Caesar, B. G. iv. 1. 
 4 Germ. 16. 
 
328 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 called the glories of the Republic when a Cincinnatus had 
 to be dragged from the plough to become a leader of 
 armies. Yet even those pictures were partly imaginary, 
 for, as more recent historians have pointed out, Rome even 
 in prehistoric days must have been possessed of an import- 
 ant commerce. 1 By the Greeks in the time of Homer the 
 transition from a merely agricultural life to one which 
 knew commerce and art had already been made. Yet 
 hundreds of years after Homer or the early days of Rome 
 the Teutons and the Celts had not fully accustomed them- 
 selves to the condition of a settled agricultural people ; 
 and they preserved in an almost unchanged form some of 
 the institutions which characterised the life of the old 
 Aryas. 
 
 It has been already hinted that before the separation 
 of the nations the proto- Aryas had acquired a kind of 
 embryo states, miniature republics which afterwards 
 expanded into the states of Rome and Greece, of Germany 
 and France and England. The germ of the civitas and of 
 the TToXts is to be sought in the village community of the 
 Aryas, of which the representatives still existing are, 
 first, the village communities of India, and, at a farther 
 distance, the Russian mirs. The same institution dictated 
 the form of early German life with the division and the 
 disposal of property among the Teutonic races ; in a large 
 measure it lay at the foundation of feudalism and the 
 statecraft of mediseval Europe. 
 
 The village community consisted of a group of families 
 in the possession of a certain space of land ; and the prin- 
 ciple of property was based upon the division of this land 
 into three parts. First there was a tract immediately 
 around each house, and belonging to it ; there was another 
 portion of land set apart specially for agricultural purposes ; 
 
 1 See the fourth chapter of Mommsen's Rom. Gesck., wherein the historian 
 shows that Home must, even in prehistoric days, have been an emporium 
 for the productions of central Italy, and probably possessed a mercantile 
 navy. This was very likely afterwards destroyed by the growing power 
 on the sea of the Etruscans (Tyrrheni). 
 
THE VILLAGE AND THE MARK. 329 
 
 and lastly, there was the surrounding open country, which 
 was used for grazing. No one of any of these three divi- 
 sions was possessed as an absolutely personal property, but 
 over some parts the rights of individuals, over other parts 
 the rights of the state, were paramount. The latter was 
 the case with the agricultural portion ; whereas the land 
 immediately surrounding the homestead belonged to the 
 household there. 1 
 
 Of such a kind as this village must have been the vicus 
 of which Tacitus speaks in describing the Germans. But 
 though these people were thus joined together in a common 
 society, it does not appear that even then they lived near 
 one another. ' It is well known,' says our authority, 
 6 that the Germans do not inhabit towns. They do not 
 even suffer their dwellings to stand near together; but 
 live apart and scattered, each choosing his own home by 
 stream or grove or plot of open ground.' 2 
 
 ' By stream or grove or plot of open ground,' but most 
 of all by grove and tree. Life beneath trees was the great 
 feature of their existence, and tree worship the most im- 
 portant part of their primitive creed. The German's 
 house was built about a tree. That form of architecture, of 
 which we have some faint traces among more civilised 
 Aryas, as in the description of the chamber of Odysseus, 3 
 was in full use among the Teutons down to historic days. 
 The house of Yolsung was supported by the tree Bran- 
 stock, and the world itself was by imagination constructed 
 in imitation of a common dwelling, 4 and had its central 
 tree, YggdrasiH. The sacred trees and village trees long 
 survived the introduction of Christianity-; they survive in 
 our Christmas trees of the present day. In every raid 
 which the new faith made upon the old we read of the 
 
 1 Concerning the constitution of the village community among the 
 Germans see Von Maurer's Mark- u. Dorf- Verfassung ; see also Kemble 
 on the Mark (Saxons in England, i. ch. ii.) 
 
 2 Germ. c. 16. 
 See Chap. Ii. 
 
 4 The world from the house, the earth (Erd) from the hearth (Herd). 
 
330 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 felling of these sacred trees. Near Gudensberg in Hesse, 
 formerly Wuodenesberg, stood the oak dedicated toWuotan, 
 the greatest of the gods, and this Boniface cut down. 1 In 
 a deep forest recess stood the famous Irminsul, which 
 Charlemagne destroyed. 
 
 But, beside the village trees which were in the midst 
 of every clearing and the house trees which supported 
 every house, there was the denser growth of untraversed 
 forest land which lay around. This dreary and waste 
 region, in which men might sometimes go to pasture their 
 horses and cattle, or more often to hunt the wild animals 
 who inhabited there, was called the mark. In after years, 
 when these tiny embryos of commonwealths, the villages, 
 had expanded into states, the marks grew in proportion, 
 until they became great territorial divisions such as our 
 Mercia (Myrcna) ; the marches between England and Wales; 
 Denmark, the Danes' mark ; La Marque, which separated 
 that country from Germany ; the Wendisch-mark, which 
 divided Germany from the Slavonic lands. And the 
 guardians of the marks were turned into marquises, 
 marchios, markgrafs. But at the beginning these last 
 were only the chief warriors of the tribe ; they had their 
 home in the waste, and stood as watchmen between the 
 village and the outer world ; so that none might come into 
 the village if they came to do it hurt. We know that it 
 was a point of honour with each community to make this 
 encircling belt as wide as possible : the greater the mark 
 the greater was its power. 
 
 It would be scarcely safe for the stranger to venture 
 across the solitudes ; no doubt the peacefuler among the 
 villagers rarely did so. The men who undertook some 
 predatory excursion against a neighbouring community 
 were avowedly entering a region which lay outside their 
 customary life. The more primitive the state of any 
 people, the narrower commonly is the space of earth 
 
 1 Grimm, Deutsche Mytlwlogie, i. 126. At Geismar also there was an 
 oak which Boniface felled and used in making a Christian church. 
 
WORSHIP IN THE FOREST. 331 
 
 within which they are imbound ; their experiences are 
 more limited ; and their genius, as we should say, more 
 confined. For what we call the genius of a people is, in 
 truth (at least it is in early days), very near indeed to what 
 the ancients understood by that word ; it is, as the Greeks 
 would say, a daimon epichorios, a watcher of holy places, 
 which infuses into these places its spirit and partakes of 
 theirs. A genius of woods, that is forest-like ; a genius of 
 wells and streams, that is watery. 
 
 Kindly terrene guardians of mortal men, 
 
 Hesiod calls them. 
 
 So the genius of the German was narrowed within the 
 limits of his narrow world ; his primitive home with its 
 surrounding mark became, and long remained, for him the 
 type of all existence ; from this microcosm he painted his 
 cosmos ; and then, having made a picture of the world in 
 space, he used the same outlines to represent the world 
 in time, and upon one model constructed his history and 
 his prophecy. 
 
 The Germans are described as building no fanes, 
 making no images for worship, but in their forest recesses 
 calling upon the unseen presence (secretum illud), which 
 they honoured by the names of various gods. 1 The word 
 ' grove ' is with the German races a convertible term with 
 ' temple.' 2 ' Single gods may have had their dwellings in 
 mountain-tops, or in rocky caverns, or in streams; but 
 the universal worship of the people found its home in the 
 grove.' 3 Adam of Bremen has left us a description of a 
 holy grove, as it was to be seen in Sweden in the eleventh 
 century. It was at Upsala. ' Every ninth year,' he says, 
 'a festival is celebrated there by all the provinces of 
 Sweden, and from taking a part in this none is exempt. 
 King and people must all send their gifts ; even those who 
 
 1 Germ, 9. 
 
 2 O. H. G. ivih, grove ; O. S. n'ih, temple ; Norse ve, holy 
 8 Grimm, D. M. p. 56. 
 
332 OUTLINES OP PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 have embraced Christianity are not allowed to buy them- 
 selves free from attendance. The manner of the sacrifice 
 is this : Nine of each kind of living thing of the male sex 
 are offered ; and by their blood the gods are wont to be 
 appeased. Their bodies are hung in the grove which 
 surrounds the temple. The grove itself is accounted so 
 holy that single trees in it are considered as a kind of gods 
 to the extent of receiving sacrifices of victims. There hang 
 the bodies of dogs and men alike, to the number, some 
 Christians have told me, of seventy- two together.' ' 
 Whatever Tacitus may say, therefore, about the unseen 
 presence, there can be no question that the creed of the 
 Germans was largely founded upon a fetich worship of 
 the trees themselves. 
 
 And what is here said of the Germans applies, in 
 almost equal measure, to the Celts. Most classical writers, 
 who have spoken of these people, have borne testimony 
 to the large place which tree worship, or, at any rate, 
 which a worship in the forest, occupied in the Celtic 
 creed. Of one people, the Massilii, we know that, like the 
 men of Upsala, they offered human sacrifices to the trees; 2 
 and of other Celts the very name bestowed on their priests, 
 Druids (from Spvs, an 'oak'), is a proof of their addiction 
 to tree worship. The mistletoe gained its sacredness 
 from its being born in the bosom of the oak tree. Pliny 
 has left on record a description of the ceremonies which 
 accompanied the cutting of the sacred mistletoe from the 
 oak ; and this description is the best picture which 
 remains to us of the ritual of Druidisrn. It is probable, 
 therefore, that much of what we are about to unfold 
 concerning the nature of the Teutonic beliefs would 
 apply, with only some slight changes, to the creed of the 
 predecessors of the Germans in Northern and "Western 
 Europe. Undoubtedly, in prehistoric days, the Germans 
 
 1 Adam of Bremen, iv. 27. 
 
 2 Cf . Lucan, 13. C. iii. 405. 'Omnis . . . humardslustratacruoribusarbos.' 
 Maximus Tyrius (Dissert. 38) tells us that ' the Celtic Zeus is a high oak.' 
 
THE GODS OF THE MARK. 333 
 
 and Celts merged so much one into the other that 
 their histories cannot well be distinguished. But no sure 
 records of the Celtic religion have come down to us ; so 
 we must be content to draw our picture from the litera- 
 ture of the Teutonic folk alone. 
 
 The Germans of Tacitus' day had certainly got beyond 
 fetichism and the direct worship of trees. But the 
 influence of tree worship still remained with them ; all 
 that was most holy they associated with the forest, or, to 
 use their own term, with the mark. Their greatest gods 
 were the gods of the mark; these, therefore, are the 
 deities whom we must first take into account. 
 
 Now the word ' mark,' which at first meant ' forest,' ] 
 came, in after years, to signify boundary. The mark was 
 always the division between village and village. When 
 the beginnings of commerce are set in motion among any 
 nation, it is in the midst of neutral territories such as 
 these, half-way between one community and another, that 
 the exchange takes place. The market is held in the 
 mark. 2 The Greeks and Komans, who had once their 
 village communities, had once too, I suppose, their sur- 
 rounding marks. And when we think of the origin of 
 their markets their agorse, their fora we must let our 
 imaginations wander back to a time when these barter 
 places were not in the midst of the city, but in wild spots 
 far away. The god who among the Greeks presided over 
 the agora, and over all which was connected with it 
 over buying and selling, over assemblies and public games 
 was Hermes. But Hermes did this because he was by 
 rights a god of the wind. Far more true, therefore, 
 was he to his real nature when he guarded the forest 
 markets and haunted their solitudes, as the wind god 
 must always do. 
 
 With the Germans, in the times whereof I speak, the 
 mark had not lost its original character. It was the most 
 
 1 Grimm, D. M. p. 56 2 Cf . merx, Mercury. 
 
33-1 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 important because the least explored and most awe- 
 inspiring part of the German's world; wherefore the 
 god of the mark, the god of winds and storms, was the 
 greatest of his divinities. He was Odhinn (Wuotan). 
 Tacitus said of the Germans of his day that they worshipped 
 Mercury, Hercules, and Mars, and Mercury chief of all. 
 There can be no doubt that by Mercury Wuotan is meant ; 
 by Hercules and Mars, Thorr (Donar) and Tyr (Zio). 
 Wuotan stands in the centre, as Wodens-day stands 
 between Tewes-day (Tyr's-day) and Thors-day l in the 
 centre and far above the other two. His name is not 
 wanting from the pantheon of any Teutonic people. The 
 Germans of Germany called him Wuotan ; the Norsemen, 
 Odhinn ; the English, Woden (Yodan) ; the Lombards, 
 Gwodan. 2 The tree and the forest are the central points 
 of German life, and Odhinn is the spirit of the tree and 
 the breath of the forest ; for he is the wind. 
 
 We have followed out the process whereby the older 
 god of the sky, common alike to all the members of the 
 Indo-European family, gave place, in many cases, to a 
 more active god ; whereby Indra and Zeus, each in their 
 spheres, supplanted Dyaus. And when we were following 
 out that process something was said of how a similar 
 change could be traced in the Teutonic creed. The new 
 and active god is, in this case, Odhinn. The wind is a 
 far more physical and less abstract conception than the 
 sky or the heaven; it is also a more variable phenome- 
 non ; and by reason of both these recommendations the 
 wind god superseded the older Dyaus, who reappears, in 
 
 1 I shall, in future, use the Norse mode of spelling for the names of the 
 gods whenever these are such as are mentioned in the Eddas. The reason 
 for doing this is that the references to the Eddas are so much more frequent 
 than references to any other authority for German belief. 
 
 2 ' Wodan sane, quern adjecta liter;!, Gwodan dixerunt, et ab universis 
 gentibus ut deus adoratur ' (Paulus Diaconus, i. 8). This litera adjecta is 
 only in keeping with the Italian use in respect to German names as 
 Wilhelm, Guglelmo ; Wishart, Guiscardo, &c. Warnefrid is naturally speak- 
 ing of the Lombards after they were Italicised. Odhinn is from a verb 
 va'Sa, to go violently, to rush ; as "Epfirjs, from 
 
ODHINN, THOKK, AND TYR. 335 
 
 a changed form, as Tyr or Zio. Tyr is one of the three 
 great gods mentioned by Tacitus ; but, for all that, he 
 was always far inferior in importance to both Wuotan and 
 Donar. Among the Norsemen he was frequently sup- 
 planted by another god, Freyr, and the trilogy then stood 
 thus : Odhinn. Thorr, and Freyr. 
 
 German religion, like most creeds, had its energetic 
 and warlike and its placid and peaceful sides; the first 
 one was here, as elsewhere, represented by the gods of air 
 and heaven, the other by the gods (and goddesses) of 
 earth. But, as we might guess from, the character of 
 the German people, with them the warlike part by far 
 outweighed the peaceful. This side of their creed was 
 represented by the gods of the mark. It seems especially 
 to centre in Odhinn. Beside Odhinn stood Thorr, very 
 like him in character, yet with a distinct individuality, 
 bearing something the same relation to his father which 
 Apollo bore to Zeus. Odhinn became so much the repre- 
 sentative god of the Teutons that he could not remain 
 wedded always to one aspect of nature ; for he had to 
 accommodate himself to the various moods of men's 
 worship. Still we need never imagine him without some 
 reference in our thoughts to the wind, which may be 
 gentle, but in thes6 Northern lands is generally violent ; 
 whose home is naturally far up in the heavens, but which 
 loves too sometimes to wander over the earth. 
 
 Just as the chief god of Greece, having descended to 
 be a divinity of storm, was not content to remain only 
 that, but grew again to some likeness of the olden 
 Dyaus, 1 so Odhinn came to absorb almost all the qualities 
 which belong of right to a higher God. Yet he did this 
 without putting off his proper nature. He was the heaven 
 as well as the wind ; he was the All-Father, embracing 
 all the earth 2 and looking down upon mankind. His 
 
 1 See Ch. IV. 
 
 2 Alfoftr ; originally, no doubt, as Eangi in the Maori tale is the All- 
 Father, because the Heaven begets all living things. But in the Norsa 
 belief this idea has become moralised. 
 
336 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 seat was in heaven, and from heaven's window (hlid- 
 skialf J ) he could see not only the Gods' City (the .ZEsirs' 
 burg, Asgard) and Man's Home (Mannheimar), but far 
 away over the earth-girdling sea to icy Jotunheiniar, 
 where giants dwelt, and where was the Land of Death. 2 
 In this way Odhinn was a perpetual watchman, who kept 
 the dwellings of gods and men free from alarms. 
 
 For the giants, like the Greek Titan race, were the 
 enemies of the gods and of men, 3 and were for ever 
 trying to make their way against the city of the gods. 
 Fate had decreed that one day a great final battle between 
 the gods and giants was to ensue ; it was the Armaged- 
 don of the Norse religion ; but till that day s'hould come 
 Odhinn kept watch and ward, and kept the giants off. 
 Odhinn was the wisest of all the gods ('pa ert se visastr 
 vera OSinn Thou art the wisest ever, Odhinn ') ; he alone 
 could look into futurity; and mythology told a tale of 
 how Odhinn had won this priceless gift of prophecy by 
 coming to the Well of Wisdom, guarded by a certain 
 Mimir, 4 of the race of the giants, and by obtaining a drink 
 therefrom. But the god could only obtain the draught 
 at the price of one of his eyes, which he was compelled to 
 throw into the water. 5 The story was, no doubt, originally 
 
 1 ' Lid-shelf,' the window or seat of Odhinn. Grimnismal (prose) ; Hrafn. 
 O'S. 10 ; cf . with Gmml. I.e., Paulus Diac. i. 8. 
 
 2 See Chaps. VI. and VIII. 
 
 3 Much more so, in fact, than the Titans. 
 
 4 Or Mimr. 
 
 5 All know I, Odhinn. Where thou thine eye didst loose, 
 In wide- wondered Mimir's well, 
 
 *Each morn drinks Mimir, from Val- Father's pledge. 
 Know ye what that means or no ? Vb'luspd, 22. 
 
 This Mimir is a curious being. Etymologically he is connected with 
 /ju/j.vf)ffKa:, meminisco, memor, &c., and hence with Minos. Minos is the first 
 man (all these words from root md, to measure), and much the same as 
 Yama and Yima. (See Ch. IV., and Benfey's Hermes, Minos und Tar- 
 tarus.} Mimir seems also to be a personification of the sea, or earlier of 
 the earth-girding river, and therefore the same as Oceanus. (See Chs. II. 
 and VI. for Oceanus in character as parent of all root off, Ogyges, &c.) 
 The sons of Mimir who dance at the end of the world (Voluspa", 47) are 
 the waves. 
 
ODHINN. 337 
 
 a nature myth. Odhinn's eye is the sun ; ] the well of 
 Mimir is the river of rivers which runs round the earth, 
 the father of all fetiches and of all wells of wisdom. 2 And 
 as Odhinn's eye is here the sun, Odhinn must, in this his 
 character of the Wise One, be the heaven. 
 
 Having become thus learned, Odhinn proceeded to 
 impart his knowledge to mankind ; and in this aspect of 
 him he was the gentle breeze which visits men in their 
 homesteads and sees them at their daily toil. Odhinn 
 taught mankind the great art of runes, which means both 
 writing and magic, and many other .arts of life. He 
 is represented as continually wandering over the earth 
 and coming to visit human habitations. In most creeds 
 it is too much the fault of the heaven god that he lives 
 remote from human affairs ; this fault does not lie at the 
 door of Odhinn, who is the wind as well as the sky. 
 
 In this gentler aspect of his character the visitor to 
 human homes, the wise friend and counsellor of men 
 Odhinn was called Gagnrad, 3 which means ' the giver of 
 good counsel.' Indeed, the two chief by-names of Odhinn 
 seem to express the wind in its two aspects either when 
 coming to men as the storm in which whole navies sink, 
 or coming as the gentler wandering breeze. These two 
 names are Yggr and Gagnrad. Yggr is the ' Terrible.' 
 It is as Yggr that Odhinn is the overseer and ruler of the 
 world; for the world tree, Odhinn's ash, is called Ygg- 
 drasill. 4 As Gagnrad Odhinn comes in a simpler fashion 
 to teach arts and magic. 
 
 It is not generally as the gentle wind, nor as a 
 messenger of peace, that the Northern god appears to 
 us in myth and saga. His chief business with men was 
 
 1 The sun is, as we have seen, called the eye of Mitra and Varuwa in the 
 
 Vedas. See Ch. III. 2 See Ch. II. 
 
 8 Probably this god is also the Gangleri, ' the ganger,' of the Gylfaginning, 
 4 Odhinn appears under the name of Ygg on those occasions especially 
 
 when he undertakes to visit the other world and the realm of giants, c. 
 
 (cf. Vegtamskvifta, 8 ; Vaf J>rut>nismal, 5). Ygg has those who fall by the 
 
 sword (Grimnismal, 53). These facts, taken in connection with the name 
 
 of Yggdrasill, show Yggr as the lord of life and death. 
 
338 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 at tlie battle field ; and his duty there was to collect the 
 souls of all the brave who had fallen in battle, and to 
 transport these to the heaven prepared for them. This 
 home of dead heroes was called Valholl, the Hall of the 
 Chosen. In thus bearing souls away Odhinn was serving 
 the interests both of gods and men, for the more heroes 
 that were collected in heaven the stronger would be the 
 army of the gods when it sallied out to fight the great 
 last fight against the giant powers. f Odhinn, when he 
 came among men, was seen generally in the guise of an 
 old one-eyed man one-eyed because he sank his eye in 
 Mimr's well clad in a blue cloak (the mantle of the wind, 
 the air, or cloud), and wearing a broad-brimmed hat. 
 This last is the same as the cap of concealment, the 
 tarn-kappe, 1 known to the Nibelungen lay and to many 
 folk tales, and is in its physical aspect the v dark cloud or 
 the night. Odhinn's coming was rather to be dreaded 
 than longed for; seeing that, like the raven, he scented 
 slaughter from afar. He was, in this respect, like that 
 Norse king described in one of Fouque's tales, who, when- 
 ever he showed himself, was sure to be the forerunner of 
 misfortune, so that men got to dread above all things the 
 sight of his helmet with vulture wings. We have a pic- 
 ture of Odhinn coming to the house of Sigmund precisely 
 in this guise of an old one-eyed man. In the back of the 
 house-tree he left sticking the sword Gram as a prize to 
 whosoever should be able to pluck it out ; and that sword 
 was the cause of strife and of bloodshed to the Yolsungs 
 and Giukungs. 2 
 
 1 Tarn-Kappe, cap of concealment, from ternen. 
 
 " The scene has been admirably pictured by Mr. Morris : 
 
 Then into the Volsung dwelling a mighty man there strode, 
 One-eyed and seeming ancient, yet bright his visage glowed ; 
 Cloud blue was the hood upon him, and his kirtle gleaming-grey, 
 As the latter-morning sun dog when the storm is on the way. 
 
 So strode he to the branstock, nor greeted any lord, 
 
 But forth from his cloudy raiment he drew a gleaming sword 
 
 And smote it deep in the tree bole.' Sigurd the Volsung. 
 
ODHINN. 339 
 
 When the battle has actually begun, Odhinn goes to 
 it not in this disguised manner, but in true wind-wise. 
 The picture we have is of him riding through the air on 
 his eight-footed horse Sleipnir, the swiftest of steeds. 
 Over sea and land he rushes, through mountain gorges 
 and through endless pine forests. He breathes into men 
 the battle fury, for which the North folk had a special' 
 name the berserksgangr, berserk's way. 1 
 
 The greater part of the forests of Northern Europe are 
 black forests that is to say, composed of pine trees and in 
 such the coming of the storm is made the more wonderful 
 from the silence which has reigned there just before. Who 
 that has known it does not remember this strange stillness 
 of the pine forest? Anon the quiet is broken by a distant 
 sound, so like the sound of the sea that we can fancy 
 we distinctly hear the waves drawing backwards over a 
 pebbly beach. As it comes nearer the sound increases to a 
 roar : it is the rush of the wind among the boughs. Such 
 was the coming of Odhinn. And now see ! far overhead 
 with the wind are riding the clouds. These are the misty 
 beings, born of the river or the sea, whom we have already 
 encountered in so many different mythologies. In India 
 they were Apsaras 2 (formless ones) or Gandharvas; in 
 Greece they were nymphs, nereids, Muses, Aphrodites, 
 Tritogeneias. In the Teutonic creeds they are the warlike, 
 fierce Valkyriur. 3 
 
 The myth of the Valkyriur, as it was developed by the 
 Teutons, became one of the most beautiful, and likewise 
 
 1 Zeus also did something of the kind. See the description of Hector 
 in 11. xv. 605, &c. : 
 
 Maivero .... 
 
 'A<f>Aoio>bs 5e irepl (n6{j.a ytyvero, rfc 8e ot offfft 
 Aa^7reV07jj/ f}\oavprjffiv UTT' cxppvcrw .... 
 . . . aurbj yd-p ol OITT' aldepos %et> a^vvTvp 
 Zfvs. ... 
 
 2 On the nature of the Apsaras see Chap. II., and compare Weber's Ind 
 Stud. i. 398. 
 
 3 Icl. sing. Valkyria, plur. Valkyriur, Germ. Walchwriiw. 
 
 z 2 
 
340 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the most characteristic, in all their mythic lore. In 
 essential features, however, the Yalkyriur resemble other 
 beings of like birth in the Indo-European creeds ; where- 
 fore the germ of the Yalkyriur myth may be discovered in 
 the earlier creeds of India and of Greece. 
 
 In one of the later Vedas we are told a story concerning 
 certain fairy maidens, Gandharvas, who can at will change 
 themselves into the likeness of birds. One of these, who 
 was called Urvasi, fell in love with a mortal, Pururavas, 
 and for awhile they lived happily together ; but the kindred 
 of the fairy laid a plot against her joy, and contrived the 
 separation of Urvasi and Pururavas. The wife left her 
 husband, and he wandered about to all lands seeking her 
 in vain. At length he came to a lake on which Urvasi 
 was sitting with her kinsfolk ; but they were transformed 
 into birds, and he knew them not. . . , J The story, in its 
 essential meaning, is the myth of the loves of the sun and 
 of the dawn ; and the dawn (Ushas-Urvasi) is here bodied 
 forth to sense as a cloud. The Gandharvas are beings of 
 the same kind as the Valkyriur, and in this particular 
 tale they are the clouds of morning. The idea of such 
 bird fairies is to be found in the mythologies of most 
 races of the Indo-European family. Athene and Hera, as 
 heaven goddesses, sometimes were seen as birds that is 
 to say, they sometimes became visible as clouds. In the 
 Teuton myth of the Yalkyriur these maidens of Odhinn can 
 transform themselves into swans, and in this shape they 
 fly through the air with the god. They are thus called 
 * Odhinn's swan maidens,' and also ' Odhinn's shield 
 maidens ' and ' helm maidens.' 
 
 Here is one description of these maidens from the 
 Yoluspa. The wise woman who speaks in that poem 
 tells us that 
 
 1 The story has been published and explained by Prof. Max Miiller in 
 his Chips from, a German Workshop, vol. ii. It is from the Brahmana of 
 the Yajur Veda. 
 
THE VALKYEIUE. 341 
 
 She saw Valkyriur coming from afar, 
 Ready to ride to the gods' gathering. 
 Skuld held the shield ; Skogull was another. 
 Grran, Hild, Gondul, and Geirskogull 
 Now named are the Noras of Odhinn, 
 Who as Valkyriur ride the earth over. 1 
 
 And again 
 
 Three troops of maidens, though one maid foremost rode. 
 Their horses shook themselves, and from their manes there fell 
 Dew in the deep dales and on the high trees hail. 
 
 In which, their origin from the clouds is very clearly 
 shown. 
 
 Altogether we have a fine imaginative picture drawn 
 from the study of the wind and its accompanying sights 
 and sounds. By day, when the white clouds are sailing 
 overhead like white swans, these are the Valkyriur 
 shedding dew down into the dales. By night the scream 
 of wild birds mingles with the screaming of the storm ; 
 and this again is the sound of Odhinn and the Valkyriur 
 hurrying to the battle field, scenting the slaughter, hearing 
 from afar the din of arms. 
 
 The Valkyriur were called, it has been said, ' swan 
 maidens.' Swan is, etymologically, any bird that can 
 swim ; and though of course the word was never applied 
 so promiscuously as that, it may have been used for sea 
 fowl, which are like the swan in two particulars first, in 
 being white; secondly, in swimming. We find the sea 
 called the swan's road (swan-rad) in Beowulf. So in our 
 imaginary picture of the Valkyriur we may include sea 
 birds such as those who woke the hill goddess Skadi in 
 her bed upon the stormy Northern shore. 
 
 The Valkyriur were not always goddesses. They 
 might be mortal maidens; and in fact there are many 
 Northern tales in which they play the part of heroines. 
 The story of Urvasi and Pururavas finds its closest counter- 
 
 > Voluspa, 24. 
 
342 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 part among the Eddaic myths in the history of Voltmd 
 and his brothers and of the three Yalkyriur whom they 
 wedded. Volund is the Hephsestus of the North, the 
 great smith, a being well known to Saxon legend as 
 Weland or Wayland Smith. 1 ' There were,' says the Edda, 
 ' three brothers, sons of a Finn king. One was called 
 Slagfid, another Egil, and the third Volund. They went 
 on snow-shoes and hunted wild beasts. They came to the 
 Wolf Dale, and made themselves a house where there is a 
 water called Ulfsjar (Wolf Sea). One morning early they 
 found beside the water three women sitting and spinning 
 flax. Near them lay their swan robes, for they were 
 Valkyriur. Two of them, Hladgud Svanhvit 2 and Hervor 
 Alvit, 3 were daughters to King Hlodver ; the third, Olrun, 4 
 a daughter of Kiar of Valland. The men took them home 
 with them to their dwelling ; Egil had Olrun, Slagvid 
 Svaiihvit, and Volund Alvit. These Valkyriur lived with 
 their husbands seven years ; but at the end of that time 
 they flew away, seeking battles, and did not return. Egil 
 went off on his snow-shoes to seek for Olrun, and Slagfid 
 went in search of Svanhvit ; but Volund abode in Wolf 
 Dale.' 5 
 
 This story bears in one or two points a resemblance to 
 the tales of bird maidens in other mythologies. The find- 
 ing of the three by the water in the morning 6 is like the 
 meeting of Pururavas and the Gandharvas in the Vedic 
 tale. The marriage of Volund and Alvit is comparable to 
 the marriage of Hephsestus and Aphrodite or the attempted 
 
 1 See Beowulf, 914, &c. 
 
 2 Swan-white. 
 
 3 All-white. 
 
 4 Alrun (Aurinia, Tac.), the typical name of a prophetess. 
 6 Volundarkvifta, beginning. 
 
 6 These three Valkyriur have some relationship to the three Norns or 
 fates (see Voluspa, 24, just quoted, where the Valkyriur are called Norns), 
 who spin like them, and, like the Valkyriur, generally know the future. 
 All are essentially stream goddesses ; the connection between the Norns 
 and Urd's fount is unmistakable. The Valkyriur became clouds, having 
 been previously streams (see Chap. II.) 
 
BRYNIIILD A VALKYRIA. 343 
 
 enforcement of Athene. Both Aphrodite and Athene 
 belong to the order of cloud goddesses. 1 
 
 More interesting still and more beautiful were the 
 adventures of another Valkyr ia, the famous Brynhild. 
 Of these it would take too long to tell the whole. But the 
 beginning of her history is that in which she appears in 
 her character of swan maiden, and this part is thus 
 narrated in the Sigrdrifumal and in the Fafnismal. In 
 the former of these lays Brynhild appears under the name 
 of Sigrdrifa. 2 There were, it is said, two kings who had 
 made war. One was named Hjalmgunnar (War Helm), an 
 old warrior befriended by Odhinn. The other was Agnar, 
 whose cause no one had espoused. And we learn from 
 this story that the Yalkyriur were not always attached to 
 the train of Odhinn ; for Sigrdrifa ranged herself with 
 Agnar and caused him to gain the victory. In revenge 
 for this audacity Odhinn pricked the maiden with a sleep 
 thorn and sent her into a slumber on Hindarfjoll. The 
 sleep thorn, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a symbol 
 of death ; and therefore, as the myth was at first under- 
 stood, the meaning of this pricking doubtless was that 
 Odhinn had slain Brynhild. But in the form in which 
 we read the story this incident has been softened down. 
 Sigrdrifa only fell into a sound slumber. The ingenious 
 reader has perhaps already detected in this adventure the 
 germ of one of our most familiar nursery tales. Anon 
 came the prince to awake the maiden from her sleep. 
 He was the famous Sigurd, and it was the incident just 
 related which was the prelude to his first meeting with 
 Brynhild. 
 
 Sigurd had just returned from slaying the famous 
 serpent Fafnir, who guarded the treasure of gold. When 
 
 1 Aphrodite is not the wife of Hephaestus in the Iliad ; but that pro- 
 bably only shows that the poet followed another tradition, not that her 
 marriage with the* Smith was unknown then. 
 
 2 Victory-giver (lit. driver} = Gr. Nike. I hope at another time to have 
 an opportunity of tracing the relationship between the Greek Nike, the 
 Norse Valkyria, and the mediaeval conception of the Angel. 
 
344 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Fafnir had been killed, Sigurd took out his heart and 
 roasted and ate it. At once he became possessed of pro- 
 phetic gifts, and could understand the speech of birds. 
 Then where he sat he heard the eagles speaking overhead. 
 They told one another of his deeds, and they prophesied 
 his meeting with Brynhild, which was presently to come 
 about and cause his after dule. As he listened they told 
 one another of the green paths which the Fates were 
 making smooth to lead him to the house of Giuki, and of 
 the fair maiden who there awaited him. An eagle said l 
 
 A hall is on high, Hindarfjoll ; 
 With fire without 'tis all surrounded. 
 Mighty lords that palace builded 
 Of undimmed earth-flame. 
 
 And another eagle answered 
 
 I know that on the fell a war maiden sleeps. 
 Around her flickers the lindens' bane. 2 
 
 Thou mayst gaze at the helmed maiden. 
 
 She from the slaughter on Vingskomir rode. 
 
 Sigrdrifa's sleep none awaken may 
 
 Of the sons of princes, before the Norns appoint. 
 
 So Sigurd rode, as it was said, and found Brynhild 
 lying asleep on Hindarfjoll. He opened her corselet with 
 his sword Gram, and she awoke and raised herself, and 
 said 
 
 Who has slit my byrnie ? 
 
 How has my sleep been broken ? 
 
 Who has loosed from me the fallow bands ? 
 
 And he answered 
 
 Sigmund's son with Sigurd's sword 
 But now has severed thy war weeds. 
 
 Then Sigurd besought her to teach him wisdom, and 
 the rest of this poem is devoted to the runes and wise 
 1 Fafnismdl, 42-44. 2 I.e. fire. 
 
GLOOM OF THE TEUTON'S CKEED. 345 
 
 sayings which Sigrdrifa was supposed to hare repeated. 
 Whence we see how large a part the Valkyriur had in the 
 wisdom and magic power which belonged to the Fates and 
 prophetesses. 
 
 These cloudy beings, remote as they may seem from 
 the things of nature and from the experience of life, 
 filled a considerable space in Teutonic thought. They 
 represented the ideal of womanhood to the rude chivalry 
 of the North. Their functions were twofold; they pre- 
 sided over battles, and foretold future events. Tacitus 
 and Csesar have described how the German wives used to 
 urge their husbands forward in the day of the fight, and 
 how, on more than one occasion, an army which had 
 actually turned to fly had been driven back against the 
 spears of their opponents by the exhortations or the jibes 
 of their womankind. The same writers have told us of 
 the prophetic powers ascribed to women by the Teutons 
 of an Aurinia (a name which appears in the Olrun of the 
 VolundarkvrSa), who is taken for a single individual by 
 Tacitus. The name is probably that of a whole class of 
 wise women. These Valkyriur had some influence upon 
 the Middle Age conceptions of angels, and a greater 
 influence (as in a future chapter we shall show) upon the 
 conception of witches. 
 
 The German gods are if I may make such a com- 
 parative less immortal than those of Greece and Rome. 
 I do not know that the latter were really expected to live 
 for ever, seeing that there was a constant lurking expec- 
 tation that the reign of Zeus would end as it had begun, 
 and make way for the restoration of the milder Kronos. 
 In the myth of Prometheus the notion is very. clearly set 
 forth. Nevertheless to the Greek gods are constantly 
 applied such phrases as aOdvaroi, immortal, ol asl ovrss, the 
 ever-living. So it is evident that the idea of the Olympians 
 dying in a body, though it was not altogether extinguished, 
 was pushed quite into the background. In the Norse creed 
 
346 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 this was not the case. The gloomy outer world of the 
 Teuton was so large as contrasted with the narrow limits 
 of his home and homestead that for him life itself seemed 
 to be surrounded by a veil of darkness, and at the end of 
 every aveune of hope there seemed to stand an immovable 
 shadow. The general idea of life in its relation to death, 
 and of the known in its relation to the unknown, which 
 appears throughout the Teutonic beliefs, has never been 
 more beautifully expressed than by that saying of a thane 
 of the Saxon king Eadwine, at the time when Paulinus 
 came to preach the Gospel to the Northumbrians. ' This 
 life,' said he, 'is like the passage of a bird from the 
 darkness without into a lighted room, where you, King, 
 are seated at supper, while storms of rain and snow rage 
 abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and straight- 
 way out at another, is, while within, safe from the storm ; 
 but soon it vanishes into the darkness whence it came.' l 
 
 It was in the spirit of these words that the Norseman 
 saw gloom in the past and in the future ; the world had 
 sprung out of chaos, and into chaos and darkness it was 
 to sink again. There was to be an end of the .ZEsir and 
 of Asgard, a ' Gods' Doom ' (Ragnarok 2 ), when the ^Esir 
 and the giant race were to meet in mutually destructive 
 battle, and chaos should come again. We have seen how 
 Odhinn, who knew most about the future, was for ever on 
 the watch against the coming of the giants ; and how he 
 continually recruited his band of heroes. Of these more 
 than four hundred thousand would, it was said, go forth 
 to fight on the Last Day. 3 
 
 1 Beda, ii. 13. A saying often quoted, e.g., by Wordsworth in his Eccle- 
 siastical Sonnets. 
 
 2 The usual writing of this word in the Edda Snorra is Ragnarokr, i.e. 
 ' Twilight of the Gods.' This is evidently, however, a corruption from an 
 earlier form, Ragnarok, < Doom of the Gods.' See Vigf usson and Cleasby's 
 Icelandic Dictionary^ s.v. <R6kr.' This change of the word is, in my eyes, 
 a witness to the antiquity of the belief in Ragnarok. All modern writers 
 have (naturally enough) followed the corrupted form of the word made use 
 of in the Edda Snorra. 
 
 3 In exact numbers 432,000 that is to say, 800 out of each of the 540 
 gates of Valholl, as is said in Grimnismal, 23 
 
THE TEUTON'S WORLD. 347 
 
 Beside the duty of their keeping themselves armed and 
 exercised against the day of trial, it would seem that the 
 gods must ride every day to tbe Urdar fount beneath the 
 roots of Yggdrasill, to take counsel about the future, and 
 perhaps also about the present governance of the world. 
 They rode together along the rainbow Asbru, the JE sir's 
 bridge, as it is sometimes called, or otherwise Bifrost, the 
 trembling mile. 1 
 
 This, then, is the world of the Norseman. Asgard is 
 far away, hidden in the clouds, or to be caught sight of, 
 perhaps, between the clouds of sunset a city glittering 
 with bright gold, set upon a hill. Now and again, more- 
 over, men may see, bright-shining and trembling between 
 earth and heaven, the .ZEsir's bridge, the rainbow. This is 
 the Kinv&d or the Sirat 2 of the Northern world ; and, that 
 it may not be an easy ascent for mortals or for giants, fire 
 is mingled with the substance and burns along all its 
 length : and that is the red of the bow. 3 Bifrost is the 
 best of bridges, 4 and will remain until the Last Day ; but, 
 strong though it be, it will break in pieces what time the 
 sons of Muspell (the Fire), who have crossed the great river, 
 come riding over it. 5 At one end of the rainbow stands 
 Heimdal, the Memnon of Norse mythology, who, at the 
 approach of any danger, rouses the gods with his sounding 
 horn. 6 Bifrost at night may have been confounded with 
 the Milky Way ; 7 it was imagined almost conterminous 
 
 ' Five hundred gates and forty more, I ween, 
 In Valholl are ; 
 
 Eight hundred heroes shall from each gate together go, 
 When they go thence the wolf to fight.' 
 
 1 But on the meaning of these words see Chap. VI. 
 
 2 See Chap. VI. * Edda Snorra, D. 15. 4 Grimnismal, 44. 
 
 5 Edda Suorra, D. 13. Lit. ' who have crossed the great rivers.' What 
 is meant is the great earth-girding river of which I have spoken so often. 
 
 6 Gjallar-Jiorni. This horn must originally, I think, have sounded at 
 sunrise ; while the sound itself is the thunder. Heimdal lives at the hori- 
 zon of morning. He himself is the morning home of the sun (Home Dale). 
 Whether the Gjallar-horni be itself the sun (like Baldur's Hriny-horni} I 
 leave the reader to determine as he pleases. 
 
 7 See Chap. VI. 
 
348 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 with the span of heaven's arch, and must, like the other 
 Bridges of Death spoken of in the sixth chapter, have 
 been thought of as overbridging the Midgard Sea. 
 
 That mighty tide which was for the Greek a ' shadowy 
 sea,' a ' sea calamitous,' was not less terrible here in the 
 North. The Norseman was at home upon common seas, 
 but this was no earthly one. e Bold must he be,' says the 
 Edda, ( who strives to pass those waters.' l If anyone 
 should be journeying toward this Sea of Death, even while 
 he was still on Mannheimar (man's earth) he Would become 
 aware, I suppose, of entering a region which was misty and 
 ghost-like and dangerous. 
 
 The Teuton needed not suppose himself to have reached 
 the confines of the habitable world, even though he had 
 strayed far from his village community and the protection 
 of his friendly gods. If the more or less known recesses 
 of the forest had their terrors, fearf uller still to the fancy 
 must the region have been which lay quite out of ken, 
 farther than any band of explorers had ever reached. 
 Wherefore in the imaginary world of the Norseman the 
 scene even on this side the Sea of Death grew dim and 
 threatening ; a wintry land stretched before the wanderer's 
 steps. These regions of cold lay especially toward the east 
 and the north, the coldest quarters. To the eastward of 
 Midgard stood the Iron Wood (JarnviSr), a gloomy place 
 with leaves and trees of iron, where dullness reigned. 
 ' Here sitteth the old one ' a witch, called the Iron Witch, 
 emblematic of death ' and reareth the wolfs fell kindred.' 2 
 These wolf- kin are a race of witches and were-wolves. 
 
 And now suppose the Iron Wood passed and the sea- 
 shore reached. We might call the leafless wood an 
 emblem of approaching winter; that is, of late autumn. 
 Beyond the sea is full winter, a land of perpetual ice and 
 snow, and of frosty fog hanging over the ice, with all the 
 magic and all the sense illusions which could have their 
 
 1 Edda Snorra, D. 8. 2 Voluspd, 32. 
 
THE TEUTON'S WORLD. 349 
 
 birth in such a misty world. Here the sun never shone 
 when he was climbing heaven in the morning or at evening 
 returning earthward to rest, any more than he shone upon 
 the gloomy Cimmerians' land. If any light was here in 
 Jotunheim, it must come from Aurora Borealis, which shed 
 sometimes a fitful gleam. This northern light was in the 
 Eddaic stories imaged as a girdle of fire, a ' far-flickering 
 flame ' ! which surrounded Jotunheim, and served it as a 
 wall to keep men from venturing there. Jotunheim seems 
 sometimes as if it only existed in the night and could not 
 be visited by day ; it is as it were born and cradled in 
 gloom, having no part in the light of the sun. Wherefore 
 when a messenger is sent thither from Asgard we find him 
 speaking thus to the horse who is to carry him thither : 
 
 Dark it grows without. Time I deem it is 
 To fare over the misty ways. 
 We will both return, or that all-powerful Jo'tiin 
 Shall seize us both. 2 
 
 * Is it safe for us to venture further ? Scarcely, seeing we 
 are Ibut mortal. If we desire to journey into Jotunheimar 
 we must attach ourselves to the company of a god and go 
 with him thither. Thorr is the one who is continually 
 making these journeys, ( faring eastward,' as the Younger 
 Edda;has it, 'to fight trolls.' 3 While Odhiim stays in 
 Asgar'd and keeps guard against the giants, Thorr the 
 sort, like those children of adventure who sally forth on 
 . their viking- goings, carries the war into the enemies' 
 country. 
 
 The following is a history typical of these journeyings 
 \ of Thorr to Jotunheimar : 
 
 / The god upon this occasion set out with the intention 
 * of discovering a certain giant, tltgarSloki, who was 
 / especially powerful and especially the enemy of the gods. 
 
 In truth he was a sort of king of the under world, and 
 
 > 
 1 .Fiolsvinn^mal. 2 For Skirnis, 10. 3 Edda Snorra, D. 42. 
 
350 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Thorr's journey to his hall is comparable to the descent of 
 Heracles to the realm of Hades. 1 After some travel the 
 god arrived at the shore of a wide and deep sea. On the 
 sea stood the bark of the ferryman, the Northern Charon, 
 Harbarft by name. 
 
 Steer hitherward thy hark : I will show thee the strand. 
 But who owns the skiff that by the shore thou rowest ? 2 
 
 Thorr was, on this occasion, travelling with Loki and 
 two mortals, his servants, called Thialfi and Boska. They 
 crossed the wide deep sea, and entered a boundless forest. 
 No sooner had Thorr and his comrades thus got well into 
 Jotunheim than they began to fall victims to its spells 
 and enchantments ; and the glamour increased the farther 
 they went, till at last their adventure ended only in 
 disastrous defeat. They came to what they took for a 
 hall, with wide entrance, having one small chamber at the 
 side ; and while resting they were disturbed by a noise 
 like an earthquake, which made all but Thorr run into 
 the chamber to hide themselves. In the morning an 
 immense man, who had been sleeping on the ground hard 
 by, and whose snoring it was that had so frightened all, 
 arose, and presently lifted up that which they had fancied 
 was a hall, and which now proved to be his glove. Then 
 Thorr and his companions and the giant, who was named 
 Skrymir, continued their journey together. But in the 
 
 1 This, by the way, is the only one among Herakles' labours which finds 
 a prominent place in Homer. 
 
 2 HarbarSslioiS, 7. I have combined this incident with the story of the 
 Younger Edda, because I have no doubt that the Harbarft of the Har- 
 bar<ssfio'5 is really the ferryman across the wide and deep sea which Thorr 
 crossed on his way to tltgarSloki (Edda Snorra, D. 45). This ferryman 
 will not bear the weight of living men in his boat. This is why Harbarfc 
 refuses Thorr, and why the ferryman in the curious fragment the Sinfjotlalok 
 refuses to carry Sigmund. The two instances are exactly parallel. Thorr, 
 it is to be noticed, generally, in these matters of crossing the Sea of Death 
 or of going over the Bridge of Souls, shares the disabilities of mortals. 
 The twenty -ninth verse of the Gfrimniamdl is usually explained as meaning 1 
 that Thorr may not cross As-bru. 
 
THORR'S FARINGS TO JOTUNHEIM. 351 
 
 night Thorr, thinking to kill Skr^mir, hurled against the 
 giant's head his death-dealing hammer, Mjolnir, the force 
 of which none, it was thought, could resist. Yet, behold, 
 Skr^mir only asked if a leaf had fallen upon him as he 
 slept. A second time the god raised his hammer, and 
 smote the giant with such force that he could see the 
 weapon sticking in his forehead. Thereupon Skr^mir 
 awoke and said, ' What is it ? Did an acorn fall upon my 
 head? How is it with you, Thorr?' Thorr stept quickly 
 back and answered that he had just awoken, and added 
 that it was midnight and there were still many hours for 
 sleep. Presently he struck a third time, with such force 
 that the hammer sank into the giant's cheek up to the 
 handle. Then Skr^mir rose up and stroked his cheek, 
 saying, ' Are there birds in this tree ? It seems to me as 
 if one of them had sent some moss down on my face.' 
 
 Anon Thorr and his companions came to the city of 
 the giant t^tgar^loki, in whose hall, and among the 
 company of giants, feats of strength were performed, to 
 match the new comers against the men of that place. 
 First Loki vaunted his skill in eating, and was matched 
 against Logi (Fire). A trough was placed between them, 
 and, after each had seemed to eat voraciously, they met 
 just in the middle. But it was found that Loki had eaten 
 the flesh only ; whereas Logi had devoured the bones and 
 the wood of the trough as well. Then, again, Thialfi 
 stood to run a race with anyone, and was set to try 
 his speed against Hug (Thought), who, in three courses, 
 vanquished him utterly. And now the turn came to 
 Thorr. First he was challenged to drain a horn,, ' which,' 
 said tTtgaroloki, ( a strong man can finish in a draught, 
 but the weakest can empty in three.' Thorr made three 
 pulls at the beaker, but at the end of the third had 
 scarcely laid bare more than the brim. The next trial 
 was to raise a cat from the ground. ' We have a very 
 trifling game here,' said the giant, 'in which we exercise 
 none but children. It consists in merely lifting my cat 
 
352 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 from the ground ; nor should I have dared to mention it 
 to thee, Thorr, but that I have already seen thou art not 
 the man we took thee for.' As he finished speaking a 
 large grey cat leapt upon the floor. Thorr advanced and 
 laid his hand beneath the cat's belly, and did his best to 
 lift him from the ground; but he bent his back, and, 
 despite all Thorr 's exertions, had but one foot raised up ; 
 and when Thorr saw this he made no further trial. 
 
 ( The trial,' said the giant, ' has turned out as I ex- 
 pected. The cat is biggish, and Thorr is short and small 
 beside our men.' Then spake Thorr : ' Small as ye call 
 me, let anyone come near and wrestle with me now I am 
 in wrath.' tTtgardhloki looked round at the benches and 
 answered, f I see no man in here who would not esteem it 
 child's play to wrestle with thee. But I bethink me,' he 
 continued, there is the old woman now calling me, my 
 nurse Elli (Age). With her let Thorr wrestle if he will.' 
 Thereupon came an old dame into the hall, and to her 
 tTtgardhloki signified that she was to match herself against 
 Thorr. We will not lengthen out the tale. The result of 
 the contest was that the harder Thorr strove the firmer 
 she stood. And now the old crone began to make her set 
 at Thorr. He had one foot loosened, and a still harder 
 struggle followed ; but it did not last long, for Thorr was 
 brought down on one knee. . . . 
 
 The next morning, at daybreak, Thorr arose with his 
 following ; they dressed and prepared to go their ways. 
 Then came tTtgardhloki and had a meal set before them, 
 in which was no lack of good fare to eat and to drink. 
 And when they had done their meal they took their road 
 homewards. tTtgardhloki accompanied them to the outside 
 of the town ; and, at parting, he asked Thorr whether he 
 was satisfied with his journey, and if he had found any- 
 one more mighty than himself. Thorr could not deny 
 that the event had been little to his honour. ' And well I 
 know,' he said, 'that you will hold me for a very in- 
 significant fellow, at which I am ill pleased.' Then spoke 
 
THOKE'S TARINGS TO JOTUNHEIM. 353 
 
 frtgardhloki : ' I will tell thee the truth now that I have 
 got thee again outside our city, into which, so long as I 
 live and bear rule there, thou shalt never enter again ; 
 and I trow that thou never shouldst have entered it had I 
 known thee to be possessed of such great strength. I 
 deceived thee by my illusions ; for the first time I 
 saw thee was in the wood ; me it was thou mettest there. 
 Three blows thou struckest with thy hammer ; the first, 
 the lightest, would have been enough to bring death 
 had it reached me. Thou sawest by my hall a rocky 
 mountain, and in it three square valleys, of which one 
 was the deepest. These were the marks of thy hammer. 
 It was the mountain which I placed in the way of thy 
 blow; but thou didst not discover it. And it was the 
 same in the contests in which ye measured yourselves 
 against my people. The first was that in which Loki 
 had a share. He was right hungry, and ate well. But 
 he whom we called Logi was the fire itself, and he 
 devoured the flesh and bowl alike. When Thialfi ran 
 a race with another, that was my thought, and it was not 
 to be looked for that Thialfi should match him in speed. 
 When thou drankest out of the horn, and it seemed to 
 thee so difficult to empty, a wonder was seen which I 
 should not have deemed possible. The other end of the 
 horn stretched out to the sea: that thou didst not 
 perceive ; but when thou comest to the shore thou mayest 
 see what a drain thou hast made from ifc. And that shall 
 men call the ebb.' He continued, 'Not less wonderful 
 and mighty a feat didst thou when thou wast at lifting 
 of the cat ; and, to speak sooth, we were all in a fright 
 when we saw that thou hadst raised one paw from the 
 ground. For a cat it was not, as it seemed to thee. It 
 was the Midgard worm, who lies encircling all lands; 
 and when thou didst this he had scarce length enough 
 left to keep head and tail together on the earth; for 
 thou stretchedst him up so high that almost thou reachedst 
 heaven. A great wonder it was at the wrestling bout 
 
 A A 
 
354 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 which them hadst with Elli ; but no one was nor shall be 
 whom, how long soever he live, Elli will not reach and 
 Age not bring to earth. Now that we are at parting thou 
 hast the truth ; and for both of us it were better that thou 
 come not here again. For again I shall defend my castle 
 with my deceptions, and thy might will avail nothing 
 against me.' When Thorr heard these words he seized 
 his hammer and raised it on high ; but when he would 
 have struck he could see tJtgardhloki nowhere. He turned 
 toward the city, and was for destroying it ; but he saw a 
 wide and beautiful plain before him, and no city. 
 
 Thus is the veil lifted for us for a moment, so that we 
 may see into Giant Land. The picture held up before us 
 is not quite of the making of primitive belief. As we 
 shall see in another chapter, there was, in this story of 
 Thorr's visit to tTtgardhloki, once a serious meaning, which 
 has been here lost sight of; and the whole history is 
 converted into something like a fairy tale. The myths of 
 Scandinavia were beginning to seem like fairy tales in the 
 thirteenth century which was the time at which Snorri 
 Sturlason composed his Edda ; and while their old 
 substance is retained in this compilation of legends they 
 are dressed up in a new way and in a new spirit. Still 
 the picture of Giant Land which we have been looking at 
 is one which had been handed on from ancient days. 
 This essential characteristic still clings to the place ; it is 
 .a land of mystery and magic. 
 
 The full moon near its setting, gleaming through an 
 icy fog, this is the giant Skr^mir, 1 or the mountain which 
 Thorr took for him. In its face we still see the three deep 
 gashes which Mjolnir once made. How completely do all 
 
 1 I have little doubt that/the incident of the three gashes or valleys is 
 meant to refer to the face of the moon. Such a representation would be 
 quite in the spirit of mythology. It would be in the spirit of mythology 
 too that Skrymir should have been fir^t himself the moon, and that after- 
 wards in this story the moon should be the mountain which was mistaken 
 for him. Skrymir is thus as the full moon a relation of the Gorgon. The 
 name Skryndr means simply a monster (cf. skrimsl). 
 
THOKR'S FARINGS TO JOTUNHEIM. 355 
 
 Nature's forces seem upou the side of the giant race fire, 
 the sea, Jormungandr, who id a personification of the sea ! . 
 
 Thorr is not always so unsuccessful as he was in 
 this adventure. Indeed, we may fairly say that he can 
 conquer all giants save Iltgardliloki. And why lie cannot 
 overcome him will appear in the next chapter. Here is 
 a more successful expedition. 
 
 In revenge for that disastrous journey to tTtgardhloki, 
 so the Younger Edda tells us, 1 Thorr once more sallied 
 forth from Midgard, and came, at dusk, to the dwelling of 
 the giant H^mir, and persuaded that giant to go out a- 
 fishing with him. For bait he wrung off the head of a 
 gigantic bull, and this he fixed upon a string, and let 
 down the line. The object of- his fishing was the great 
 Earth Serpent. Jormungandr saw the bait and took it, 
 so that the hook became firmly fixed in his jaw. Thorr 
 began to draw up the prize, while Jormungandr struggled 
 so violently that he all but upset the boat. And now 
 Thorr exerted .all his divine strength, and pulled so hard 
 that his feet went through the boat and reached the 
 bottom of the sea. Then the Sea Serpent lifted up his 
 head out of the water and spouted venom at Thorr. 
 Thorr now raised his mallet to strike, and would, perhaps, 
 have slain the enemy, had not H^mir, who grew afeard, 
 cut the line and let the serpent sink again into the 
 water. 
 
 Or take this story a rather better one from the 
 Elder Edda. 2 The giant Thrymr once stole the hammer 
 of Thorr, and Loki was sent to find where he had hidden 
 it. It had been buried deep in the ground, and Thrymr 
 would restore it only on condition that the ^Esir should 
 give him the beautiful Freyja to wife. But at such a 
 
 1 D. 48. 
 
 2 prymskvifta, or Hamarsheimt. prymr is a being of the same nature 
 as Thorr, as his name means Thunder. Concerning the double character 
 frequently given to a natural object see p. 130. Thrymr may, perhaps, be 
 an older thunder god than Thorr. 
 
 A A 2 
 
356 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 proposal the goddess waxed wroth, and would in no wise 
 consent to it. So the gods took counsel, and, by the 
 advice of Heimdalr, one of the -ZEsir, they devised a plan 
 by which the giant could be cheated. The thunder god 
 dressed himself in Freyja's weeds, he adorned himself 
 with her necklace the famed Brisinga necklace- -he let 
 from his side keys rattle, and set a comely coif upon his 
 head. 1 Then he went to Jotunheim as though he were 
 the bride ; Loki went with him as his serving maid. The 
 god could scarcely avoid raising some suspicions by his 
 unwomanly behaviour; he alone devoured an ox, eight 
 salmon, and all the sweetmeats women love, and he drank 
 three salds of mead. Thrymr exclaimed with wonder 2 
 
 * Who ever a bride saw sup so greedily ? 
 Never a bride saw I sup so greedily, 
 
 Nor a maid drink such measures of mead.' 
 
 Sat the all-cunning serving maid by, 
 Ready her answer to the giant to give. 
 
 * Nought has Freyja eaten for eight nights, 
 So eager was she for Jotunheim.' 
 
 'Neath the linen hood he looked, a kiss craving ; 
 But sprang back in terror across the hall. 
 ' How fearfully flaming are Freyja's eyes ! 
 Their glance burneth like a brand ! ' 
 
 There sat the all-cunning serving maid by, 
 Beady with words the giant to answer. 
 1 For eight nights she did not of sleep enjoy, 
 So eager was she for Jotunheim.' 
 
 In stepped the giant's fearful sister ; 
 For a bridejp gift she dared to ask. 
 ' Give me from thy hand red rings, 
 If thou wilt gain my love, 
 My love and favour.' 
 
 i Then said Heimdalr, of jEsir the brightest, 
 
 ' Woman's weeds on Thorr let us lay ; 
 
 Let by his side keys rattle ; 
 
 And with a comely coif his head adorn.' prymskv. 16, 17. 
 * rymskv. 25 sqq. 
 
THE GIANT RACE. 357 
 
 Then spake Thrymr, the giants' prince : 
 * The hammer bear in, the bride to consecrate ; 
 Lay Mjolnir on the maiden's knee 
 And unite us mutually in marriage bonds/ 
 
 Laughed Hldrrifti's l heart in his breast 
 When the fierce-hearted his hammer knew. 
 Thrymr first slew be, the thursar's lord, 
 And the race of jotuns all destroyed. 
 
 He slew the ancient jotun sister, 
 Who for a bride gift had dared to ask ; 
 Hard blows she got instead of skillings, 
 And the hammer's weight in place of rings. 
 
 Finally, in another poem of the Elder Edda, we find 
 Thorr engaging Alvis (All- wise), of the race of the thursar, 2 
 in a conversation upon the names which different natural 
 objects bear among men, among gods (^Esir and Vanir), 
 among giants, and among elvos, so that he guilefully keeps 
 him above the earth until after sunrise, where it is not 
 possible for a dwarf or a jotun to be and live. So Alvis 
 bursts asunder. 3 
 
 These stories are somewhat childish, and do not bear 
 all the characteristics of early belief; but we can look 
 through the outer covering to something more serious 
 within. How clearly, for instance, in this last story are 
 Alvis and his fellows shown to be beings of darkness, and 
 therefore their land to be a land of gloom. This aspect of 
 Jotunheim and of the giant race would be more apparent 
 if we were further to take into consideration all the stories 
 which connect Jotunheim with the Land of Shades. But 
 this is the subject for another chapter. 
 
 Let it suffice us in this to have gained some picture 
 of the actual world of the Teuton. We will forbear, as 
 yet, to pry into his land of death ; and we will forbear, 
 
 1 Thorr's. 
 
 2 Giant does not translate thurs. Most of the thursar were giants, as 
 opposed to the dvergar, dwarfs ; but this Alvis is spoken of as a dwarf. 
 
 8 Alvissmal. 
 
358 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 likewise, to pry into the Future of the Teuton's world. 
 What we have been looking at hitherto has been the pre- 
 sent world, the actual living nature, in the light in which 
 the German saw it from beneath the dark shadow of his 
 forest. Is not this view likely to have had its influence 
 upon his future creed, even at a time when he had nomi- 
 nally put off Odhinn (put off the 6 old man,' one-eyed, 
 white-bearded, with his cap of concealment) and put on 
 Christ? In every feature of his belief, old or new, is 
 reflected the life of the mark its gloom, its wind, its 
 uncertainty concerning all beyond. In every tone which 
 speaks his creed we hear the echo of the words of the 
 thane comparing to the sparrow flying in for a moment 
 from the storm the brief life of man. Life was to the 
 Teuton in very truth the 'meeting-place between two 
 eternities,' l both unknown. 
 
 We have, fortunately for ourselves, the means of testing 
 further the creed of the Teuton race. We can set beside 
 the stories of the Edda, stories professedly heathen 
 indeed, but breathed upon and partly withered by the 
 breath of unbelief, born at a late time when the Christian 
 spirit had been too long familiar to the world to allow 
 the heathen doctrines to be any longer seriously held, 
 another story of a much earlier date, which, though pro- 
 fessedly Christian in tone, has about it far more of the 
 ancient spirit of Teutonism. The Eddas give us more of 
 the actual facts of Northern belief ; but Beowulf gives us 
 the spirit of the belief. This poem, in the form in which 
 it now exists, belongs to the eighth century. But the tale 
 was doubtless brought, in some shape or other, to our shores 
 by early invaders from Jutland or Denmark, or from the 
 south of Sweden. It has no direct connection with the 
 English race ; it recounts the deeds of a hero of Gothland, 
 in South Sweden, and of a King of Denmark. Doubtless 
 it is only one of many such poems, which may have been 
 
 1 Carlyle. 
 
BEOWULF. 359 
 
 sung by gleemen in the brilliant court of Offa, or even 
 have cheered the sad heart of Eadwine when he ate an 
 exile's food at the board of King Eedwald. Other poems 
 would tell of Hengist and" Horsa, or of .ZElli and Cissa, 
 and such-like heroes, more genuinely English. 
 
 Even in Beowulf, a Christian poem, written for men 
 who were not unacquainted with the Latin civilisation of 
 their times, we must make allowance for the changed 
 condition of men's lives between the old prehistoric 
 German days and these more modern Christian ones. 
 The fear of solitude,, or perhaps I had better say the sense 
 of solitude, which had become ingrained in the Teuton 
 inind by centuries of forest life, did not at once fade away 
 when the Germans had advanced a little in civilisation ; 
 probably at the first it increased somewhat. There was 
 in old days a holiness as well as a terror about the 
 woody groves, for Odhinn and his fellow gods inhabited 
 there ; only round the extreme outskirts of the mark (the 
 Teuton's world) hovered the giants and evil spirits. And 
 this notion was expressed in the Norse religion by placing 
 the jotuns far away beyond the Midgard Sea. But when 
 the Msir were expelled by Christianity and the sacred 
 groves cut down ; when the old village Enclosure was re- 
 placed by the walled Town ; l when men no longer dwelt 
 differ eti ac diver si, but congregated in strong places then 
 an added horror attached to the outlands, to the moors 
 and fells, to their drear expanses, their dark valleys and 
 their misty, stagnant pools. 
 
 The outland men, the dwellers on the heaths (heathens 2 ), 
 were henceforward regarded as the worshippers of fiends ; 
 Odhinn was driven forth and became the Wild Huntsman, 
 or else Satan himself, the Prince of the Air. 3 The giants 
 
 1 The different meanings of the German Zaun and English town, both 
 etymologically the same, are very expressive of the change from German to 
 Englishlife, as experienced by our forefathers. 
 
 2 The analogy is shown still more strongly in the German Heide. 
 
 8 See Chap. X. The 'Prince of the Air,' which is one of the Biblical 
 names for Satan, was that most often made use of in Middle Age descrip- 
 
360 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 were transformed into wild woodmen, 1 or became the man- 
 eating ogres of our nursery stories. This is the sort of 
 world described to us in the poem of Beowulf. For here 
 we have not to do with a mere nursery or popular tale, but 
 with a stern reality. One needs to read Beowulf through 
 to see how thoroughly realised is the horror which hangs 
 over the solitudes of the world. But, to give some idea of 
 this, let the following short summary of the earlier part of 
 the poem suffice us. 
 
 The poem of Beowulf after some genealogical stuff 
 such as these bards, but not we, delight in opens with 
 a certain Hrothgar, King of the Danes, who has built 
 him a house so famous a palace that the report of it has 
 gone into all lands. It is called Heort, which is Hart. 
 We hear of gold plates adorning it. These were days 
 when the plunder to be got from the Eomans of civilised 
 lands was almost unlimited, and we have proof that the 
 barbarians converted the wealth which they acquired to 
 the coarsest uses ; so the story of a house adorned with 
 gold plates may not be altogether fabulous. Hrothgar 
 had prepared Heort for himself and his thanes ; and at 
 night in the ' beer hall ' they held high revel, and listened 
 to the gleeman's song, which told the stories of the gods' 
 doings in ancient days, and ' how the All-powerful had 
 framed the earth plain in its beauty, which the water 
 girds round, and set in pride of victory the sun and moon 
 as beacons to light the dwellers on land.' But far away 
 from all this joy and revelry, deep in the stagnant pools, 
 or among the windy moors, dwelt a terrible and super- 
 natural being, named Grendel. He brooked not to hear 
 what was going on in the house of Hrothgar, for he was 
 the foe of men. 
 
 tions of the Devil. It is evidently very appropriate to a wind god who has 
 turned fiend. 
 
 1 The Waldmwnn or Wilde Mann was another popular character of 
 mediaeval popular lore. We see him upon the arms of Brunswick. 
 
GRENDEL. 361 
 
 Grueful and grim this stranger called Grendel, 
 This haunter of marshes, holder of moors. 
 In the Fifel-race' dwelling, the fen and the fastness, 
 The wretched one guarded his home for awhile ; 
 Since by the Creator his doom had been spoken. 
 
 Thence he departed at coming of nightfall 
 
 To visit the house-place and see how the Ring Danes 
 
 After their beer bout had ordered it. 
 
 On the floor found he of ethelings a throng 
 
 Full-feasted and sleeping. Care heeded they never, 
 
 No darkness of soul nor sorrow of men. 
 
 Grim now and greedy, the fiend was soon ready ; 
 
 Savage and fierce, from sleep up he snatched then 
 
 Of those thanes thirty, and thence eft departed. 
 
 From that time Grendel waged wicked war against 
 Hrothgar and all his house. It was the old war of dark- 
 ness against light the darkness of rnisty moors against 
 the civilisation of those who dwelt in houses ; of heathens 
 only that this word got afterwards a special significance 
 against town men. Or it was the war of the gods of 
 German mythology against the dwellers- in that savage 
 far-off land across the ocean, Jotunheim. Here the race 
 of monsters, the Fifel Brood, seemed like to gain the vic- 
 tory. Hrothgar himself indeed, as the Lord's anointed, 
 Grendel could not touch; but the king and his men were 
 driven, out of Heort, which, in place of its song and feast- 
 ing, was given up to darkness and to Grendel. Nor would 
 this monster accept any truce with the Danes : but still 
 like a death shadow he roamed over the fens, and plotted 
 against the lives of warriors and youths. 
 
 The report of this was brought to Beowulf, the brother 
 of Higelac, king of the Geatas, or Goths. The heroes of 
 these stories are rarely at the outset kings themselves, for 
 it was the recognised duty of kings to stay at home among 
 their own peoples ; but the hero, true precursor of the 
 knight errant, must first wander abroad in search of ad- 
 ventures ; and very often he won a kingdom by his sword. 
 
3C2 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 This was both the theory and practice of the Norsemen 
 and the more warlike among the Germans. They could 
 not all, it is true, find monsters and dragons to slay, but 
 as a substitute they contented themselves with going on 
 viking that is to say, upon a pirate voyage. Beowulf, 
 who had the fortune to live in quite prehistoric days, 
 when ' eotens, elves, orkens, and such giants ' (as Grendel) 
 were still on earth, needed only to sail from Gothland to 
 Denmark. So he made ready a good ship, and set out 
 upon the ' swan's path ' the sea to seek the good King 
 Hrothgar. The Scylding's (Hrothgar's) warder, who kept 
 the cliff, saw from the wall the gleam of arms upon the 
 vessel's bulwarks, and rode down to the sea to meet the 
 warriors ere they landed, brandishing his spear in his 
 hand. 'What armour-bearing men are ye, in byrnies 
 clad, who thus come with your foaming keel over the 
 water-ways, over the sea-deeps hither ? There at Land's 
 End have I ever held seaward, that no foes might come 
 with ship array to do us hurt/ he cried. And he was 
 answered, * We are of race Goths, Higelac's hearth friends. 
 We have come in friendship to seek thy lord and to de- 
 fend him. For soothly we have heard say that among the 
 Scyldings some wretch, I know not who, in the dark soweth 
 with terror unknown malice and harm and havoc. And 
 I may, in the depth of rny mind, give Hrothgar counsel 
 how he should in wisdom overcome the foe.' 
 
 Then Beowulf was allowed to proceed. He rode into 
 the town ; the men wondered at his kingly bearing, and 
 the greatness of his followers, and Hrothgar sent to ask 
 why he came, whether in peace or war. Great joy pre- 
 vailed in Hrothgar's house when Beowulf disclosed his 
 intention of himself meeting the foe face to face, and once 
 more the sound of feasting was heard in the deserted 
 palace ; the Queen Waltheow bare round the drinking cup 
 to the hero, and pledged him. At last night fell. 
 After that darkening night over all, 
 Men's shadow-covering, advancing came, 
 
BEOWULF'S FIGHT WITH GKENDEL. 363 
 
 and Hrothgar knew the signal for retiring from the 
 haunted place, which was thus left to the Goths and 
 their leader. As for Beowulf, he had determined that he 
 would trust only to his own strength of arm, not to byrnie 
 or falchion indeed, Grendel was impervious to weapons 
 and he prepared for the death struggle in a speech just in 
 the character of all the poetry of this epoch. ' I ween 
 that he intends, should he prevail, to devour in safety the 
 people of the Goths, as he has often done the Danes. 
 Thou wilt have no need to bury me, for if I get my death 
 he will have eaten me all dashed with blood : he will bear 
 away my gory corpse ; he will taste me, the night stalker 
 will devour me without mercy : he will place my burial 
 mound upon the heath : thou wilt have no thought of 
 burning my body. Send to Higelac, if I fall, that best 
 of mail shirts which guards my breast, the choicest of 
 doublets ; 'tis Hrsedla's bequest and Weland's work.' 
 
 The finest passages, those wherein the poet seems 
 touched by the strongest inspiration, are always they 
 which paint the gloom and horror resting over Grendel 
 and all his actions: showing how the darkness and 
 mystery of the world about them laid hold on the imagina- 
 tions of these Northern seers. The author of Beowulf 
 never tires of presenting and re-presenting the image of 
 this shadowy being and of the places wherein he dwells. 
 So here, so soon as night has come, the note of revelry is 
 changed to one of grim expectation or of horror. 
 
 Then from the moor came, the misty hills under, 
 
 Grendel stalking ; God's anger he bare ; 
 
 Meant the dread enemy some one of man's kin 
 
 Here to entangle within the high hall. 
 
 He went 'neath the welkin along, till the guest house, 
 
 Man's golden seat, he recognised well, 
 
 With the plates that adorned it. Not now for the first time 
 
 Sought the destroyer Hrothgar's homestead ; 
 
 Yet never in life save now, after nor earlier, 
 
 Hardier men among hall thanes he found. 
 
 To the house door then the monster came prowling, 
 
364 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 The house reft of joys ; soon flew the door wide 
 
 And wrought iron burst 'neath the strength of his hand. 
 
 Sleeping together full many a warrior, 
 
 Peacefully sleeping upon the hall floor, 
 
 Beheld he the kinsmen : his heart laughed within him, 
 
 For the foul fiend was minded before break of day 
 
 The soul from the body of each one to sever, 
 
 And hope of full feasting on his spirit there fell. 
 
 Then straightway asleep he seized one of the warriors, 
 
 Bit deep in his body and drank of his blood, 
 
 And the flesh tore in fragments, in small morsels swallowed, 
 
 Till all was devoured to the feet and the hands. 
 
 Then stepping up nearer, he took at his resting 
 The mighty-souled warrior, Beowulf, there : 
 But he stretching forward, on his elbow half rising, 
 Seized all on a sudden the ill-minded foe. 
 Full soon then discovered this keeper of crimes 
 He never had met in the mid-earth's wide regions 
 Among strangers a hero so strong in his hand-gripe. 
 And now he is minded to flee to his cavern 
 To seek out his devil's crew. . . . 
 
 .... But Higelac's kinsman 
 Remembered his evening speech : up he stood 
 And tightened his clutch. . . . 
 
 The liall echoed with the shrieks of the wretch. So 
 fiercely they strove that it was a wonder the house did 
 not fall, though it was held firm with iron bands. Over 
 the North Danes crept a ghastly horror when they heard 
 the cries of this hell's captive, and many of Beowulf's 
 earls drew their swords, but no steel had power over 
 Grendel's life. And still the Goth held his enemy by the 
 hand, tearing his arm : at last the sinews started in his 
 shoulder, which opened a gaping wound ; the flesh burst. 
 
 To Beowulf now was the fight's fury given. 
 Death-sick flies Grendel beneath the fen-banks, 
 Seeking his joyless home ; well must he know 
 That of his life's days the tale is o'ertold. 
 
GKENDEL'S DEATH. 365 
 
 What were the rejoicings among the Ring Danes and 
 in the house of Hrothgar we may partly picture. ' I have 
 been told/ says the bard, 'that on the morrow many a 
 warrior came from far and near to that gift hall. The 
 clan-heads came over wide ways to see that wonder the 
 traces which the enemy had left behind. GrendeFs death 
 seemed not doubtful to any who saw the track of the 
 miserable one, and how heavy-hearted, conquered, death- 
 doomed, banished, he bare his death traces to the Nicker's 
 Mere. There the water bubbled wtth blood, the waves 
 surged and mingled with the hot clotted gore after the 
 outcast had rendered up his life, his heathen soul, in the 
 fenny haunt. Joyfully and proudly old and young turned 
 back from the pool and rode home. They sang the 
 praises of Beowulf and of their good king Hrothgar. At 
 times the young men ran* races on their well-trained 
 steeds ; at another time some old bard would sing either 
 in Beowulf's honour, or of deeds of prowess done long ago, 
 of Sigmund the Wselsing, and how the ring hoard was 
 guarded by the wondrous worm. 
 
 6 Hrothgar went into the hall, and, standing on the dais, 
 surveyed the vaulted roof adorned with gold, where hung 
 Grendel's hand. Then he spake : " For this sight to the 
 Almighty thanks be given : ever can God, the Shield of 
 Honour, work wonder after wonder. Not long ago I 
 never guessed that though my best of houses stood stained 
 with gore any revenge would be mine. Now this hero 
 hath, through God's grace, done a deed which with all our 
 wisdom we could not contrive. Henceforward, Beowulf, 
 best of men, I will cherish thee in my heart like a son. 
 Nor shalt thou have any want which it is in my power to 
 satisfy. For to deeds of less prowess I have given great 
 rewards and honour at my hearth." Then was Heort 
 cleansed and adorned once more by human hands, and 
 many men and women set to work upon the guest hall. 
 For the bright place was shaken in the wall and door ; 
 only the roof had remained uninjured. Now wonders of 
 
366 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 gold-varied webs shone along the walls. And the son of 
 Healfdene gave to Beowulf a golden banner as a sign of 
 victory, and a sword of great price was borne to the hero, 
 .... a helmet, and eight steeds, on one of which lay a 
 saddle of cunning work. And beside, the lord of warriors 
 (Hrothgar) gave a token to each of those who had travelled 
 the sea road with Beowulf.' 
 
 All, however, was not ended with Grendel's race. It 
 was soon seen that an avenger had survived the foe 
 Grendel's mother. She came as her son had been wont to 
 come, when the thanes slumbered after their beer-drinking. 
 Wrathful and ravenous, she burst into Heort, where the 
 Ring Danes lay asleep. There was soon a terror among 
 them, but less than before. They seized their armour and 
 sharp swords, but she being discovered hastened to get 
 back. She hurried back to her pool one of the ethelings, 
 the best beloved of Hrothgar's warriors. Beowulf was not 
 there, for another dwelling had been assigned to him. 
 The witch took the well-known hand of Grendel, all bloody 
 as it was. Hrothgar was in a fierce mood when he heard 
 that his chief thane was slain, and quickly was Beowulf 
 sent for. Beowulf greeted the aged king, who spoke : 
 ' Ask not of my welfare. Sorrow is renewed for the Danes 
 people. j33schere is dead, who knew my secrets, my 
 counsellor, my close comrade when we guarded our heads 
 in battle, in the crush of hosts. A wandering fiend has 
 been his undoer here in Heort. I know not whether the 
 ghoul has returned again. She has avenged the quarrel 
 in which thou slewest Grendel the other night.' And 
 he, described the two fiends and the place where they 
 dwelt. 
 
 A father they know not. nor if among ghosts 
 Any spirit before was created. And secret 
 The land they inhabit, dark wolf-haunted ways 
 Of the windy hill-side by the treacherous tarn, 
 Or where covered up in its mist the hill stream 
 Downward flows. 
 
FIGHT WITH THE MOTHER OF GBENDEL. 367 
 
 To this pool Beowulf now went, and the king and 
 many warriors with him. The track of the destroyer was 
 soon found ; through forest glades and across the gloomy 
 moor they followed it ; into deep gorges, by steep head- 
 lands, led on the strait and lonely road, by the homes of 
 the nickers. Then Hrothgar went forward, accompanied 
 by a few, until they came to a joyless wood where trees 
 leaned over the hoar rock, and beneath stood water troubled 
 and bloody. Great was their grief when near it they 
 found the head of .ZEschere. The well bubbled red : their 
 horns sounded a funeral strain. Along this tank's edge 
 they saw many creatures of the worm kind, sea dragons 
 creeping along the deep, and nickers lying in the ness. 
 Beowulf did on him his warrior's weeds, a twisted mail- 
 shirt, and helmet begirt with many rings, and his biting 
 sword, which was named Hrunting. Then he plunged in, 
 and the whelming waters passed over his head. It was 
 some time ere he could discern what lay at the bottom, 
 but soon the old hag, who for fifty years had had her 
 home there, discovered that some one from the world 
 above was exploring the strange abode. She grappled 
 with Beowulf, seizing him in her devilish grip, but she did 
 not hurt him by that, for the mail shirt protected his body 
 against her hateful fingers ; next she dragged the Ring 
 Prince into her den, yet could he not, despite his rage, 
 wield his sword. At last he perceived he was in a hall, 
 where the water could not harm him nor the fatal embrace 
 of the witch, and by the light of a distant fire he saw the 
 old were- wolf. He struck a ringing blow upon her head, 
 but the steel would not hurt her. Then the warrior, the 
 Goths' lord, threw away his weapon and seized Grendel's 
 mother, and shook her so that she sank down. But she, 
 paying him back, griped his hand, and he, over-reaching 
 himself, likewise fell down. Grendel's mother leaped 
 upon him and drew a knife, seeking to find a way under 
 his corselet, but that held firm, or he would have perished. 
 
 At last Beowulf saw among the rubbish a victorious 
 
368 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 blade, an old sword of giant days, with, keenest edge. 
 The Scylding's champion seized the hilt, and despairing of 
 his life he drew the blade and struck fiercely at her neck. 
 It broke the bone-joints and passed through her body. 
 She sank upon the floor. And he, rejoicing in his deed, 
 sprang up ; a light stole down into the water as when the 
 lamp of heaven mildly shines, and he saw throughout the 
 house. Then he perceived Grendel's hated body lying there, 
 and swinging his sword around Beowulf cut off his head. 
 
 When the wise men, who with Hrothgar were watching 
 the pool from above, saw the water all dabbled and stained 
 with blood, they made no doubt but that the old she-wolf 
 had destroyed the noble earl. Then came on noon-day, and 
 the Scyldings grew sick of heart; the king of men turned 
 to go homeward ; but still they gazed upon the lake, 
 longing for their lord to appear. And down below, behold ! 
 in the hot blood of the giant all the sword had melted 
 away, like ice when the Father (He who hath power over 
 times and seasons the true God) looseneth the bond of 
 frost and unwindeth the ropes which bind the waves. 
 Then Beowulf dived up through the water : soon he was 
 at the surface. And when Grendel died, the turbid waves, 
 the vast and gloomy tracts, grew calm and bright. 
 
 So, too, after her centuries of gloom, the mild light of 
 Christianity shone down into the deep waters of German 
 thought, and in lime their tracts too grew calm and bright. 
 But this was not yet. We have still, in another chapter, 
 to try and see something of how the dark shadow which, 
 was an inheritance of so many ages hung over the creed 
 of mediaeval Christendom. By virtue of this inheritance 
 mediaeval Catholicism entered into the line of descent from, 
 the creeds of heathen Germany. 
 
 2. The Gods of the Homestead. 
 
 We have gained some insight into one side of Teutonic 
 belief; and that the most important side. We have been 
 
THE CEEED OF FAEM AND HOMESTEAD. 
 
 standing with the warrior, who had his home in the mark 
 and who spent his time in hunting there. His world and 
 his gods are those who lie beyond the familiar ground of 
 the village farm ; still farther away, as the half-known 
 changes into the wholly strange, awe and gloom merge 
 into horror and darkness, and we pass from the homes of 
 the warlike Odhinn, Thorr, and Tyr to hateful Jotun- 
 heim. The joys of Odhinn's heaven were for the war- 
 rior. He only who had died by the sword could gain 
 entrance there. Every morning the heroes of Valholl rode 
 out to the field and fought till they had hewn each 
 other in pieces ; but at even they were whole again, and 
 they spent the night over their cups of mead. This per- 
 petual fighting was, as we know, a preparation for 
 Kagnarok. 
 
 A paradise such as this would ill have suited quiet folk : 
 and even among the Germans there were some of these 
 There was a simpler sort of religion which belonged to 
 those who in after years became the peasantry. 1 They 
 were averse from war, but fond of rustic life and its quiet 
 pleasures. There must always be in the midst of a society, 
 however warlike, a large class of those who have no taste 
 for the favourite pursuit, who have no desire for adventure 
 nor for change of home. These are the true children of 
 the soil. We trace their influence in every creed ; and 
 their religion is the faith of worshippers to whom no mere 
 change of creed is of vital importance. They have their 
 poetry of nature, which asks no aid from anxious thought 
 and aspiration. Whatever others may discover of the 
 secrets of life, they can find out this at least, that there 
 are still cakes and ale to be met with there, and open 
 sunny meadows, and grasses and flowers, and silvery streams, 
 and soft shy wood creatures, and fishes and innumerable 
 
 1 The old Germans had not precisely slaves after the Roman fashion, 
 but they had serfs, who cultivated the soil for them (Tac. Germ. e. 25, 
 and Guizot, Cours, &c., Hist, de France, i. p. 265). These serfs may have 
 been originally Slavonic by blood (slav = slave), but they spoke German, 
 and made up the lower population of the Germans. 
 
 B B 
 
370 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 birds. For them, as the true bard of all this craft l in old 
 days said, < for them earth yields her increase ; for them 
 the oaks hold in their summits acorns and in their mid- 
 most branches bees. The flocks bear for them their fleecy 
 burdens, and their wives bring forth children like to their 
 fathers. They live in unchanged happiness, and need 
 not ply across the sea in impious ships.' There were such 
 men and women as these among our own forefathers ; and 
 the religion which the} 7 " made their own was of necessity 
 somewhat opposed to the creed of the Wodin-worshippers. 
 
 There are two gods who seein to belong to this faction : 
 both gods of summer and the sun. One is Balder, the 
 brightest and best beloved among the ^JEsir, who was the 
 very sun himself, the day star in his mild aspect, as he 
 would naturally appear in the North. Balder 's house was 
 called Breicablik, Wide-Glance that is to say, it was the 
 bright upper air which is the sun's home. This palace 
 was surrounded by a space called the peace-stead, in which 
 110 deed of violence could be done. 2 Balder appears to us 
 like the son of Leto in his most benignant mood. When 
 he died all things in heaven and earth, ' both living things 
 and trees and stones and all metals,' wept to bring him 
 back again : 3 as, indeed, all things must weep at the loss 
 of the sun, chief nourisher at life's feast. 
 
 The other sun god, or summer god, was Freyr, who was 
 connected with the spring and with all the growth of 
 plants and animals ; he was a patron of agriculture, and, 
 like Balder, a god of peace; 'to him must men pray for 
 good harvests and for peace ; ' 4 a beauteous and "mighty 
 god ' he was, like Apollo Chrysaor, girt with a sword ; 
 not so much for fight as because the sun's rays are ever 
 likened to a sword. Freyr can fight upon occasion ; and 
 he will engage in one of the three great combats of 
 Ragnarok. 5 
 
 1 Hesiod, Works and Days, 232 
 
 2 Edda Snorra, D. 49, and Frijnofssaga, beginning. 
 
 8 E. S. 1. c. 4 E. S. D. 24 See Chap. VIII. 
 
FKEYJA AND GEKD. 371 
 
 The gentler side of the religion was in the North, as it 
 always is, associated rather with the goddesses than with 
 gods. Here, as among Greeks and Romans, the great 
 patron of the peasant folk was the earth goddoss. 1 In 
 Tacitus the divinity appears under the name of Nerthus, 
 which is perhaps Hertha. 2 A similar goddess among the 
 Suevi is called by him Isis. Other German names which 
 seem to belong more or less to the same divinity are 
 Harke, Holda, Perchta, Bertha. We must class with 
 these beings the Norse Frigg (German Freka). Her I 
 have alreacty taken as an example of the way in which the 
 earth goddess may lose her distinctive character and put 
 on that of the heaven god through becoming his wife. 
 Hera, we saw, did this in the Greek pantheon, and Frigg 
 does the same in the Northern. She is not a conspicuous 
 character in the Scandinavian mythology. 
 
 To Frigg Freyja bears the same relationship that 
 Persephone bears to Demeter ; wherefore we may say 
 that Frigg, Freyr, and Freyja correspond to Demeter, 
 Dionysus, and Persephone, and more closely still to the 
 Ceres, Liber, and Libera of the Eomans. After what was 
 said in Chapter V. touching the relationship of these latter 
 gods, no further explanation is needed of the character of 
 Frigg, Freyr, and Freyja. 
 
 It is strange, however, to see how the tale of the 
 wanderings and sorrows of the earth goddess in search of 
 the spring reappears in the mythology of every land, and 
 ends in every case in some form of mystery. There are 
 two stories in the Eddas 3 which especially correspond to 
 the myths commemorated in the anodos (up-coming) of 
 Persephone and her marriage with Dionysus and in her 
 
 1 See Chap. V. 
 
 2 The identity of Nerthus and Hertha is assumed by most writers who 
 are not specialists upon the subject of German etymology ; but, as it is 
 not admitted by Grimm, I hesitate to assume it, probable as, at first sight, 
 it appears (see Grimm, D. M. chap, xiii.) Nerthus, says Meyer, corre- 
 sponds to the Skr. Nritus, terra (Nachtrag to Grimm's D. M. iii. 84). Nritua 
 or Nirrtis became the Queen of the Dead (see p. 289). 
 
 * From E. S. D. 37, and Skirnismal. 
 B B 2 
 
372 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Jcathodos (down-going) and the sorrows of Demeter for her 
 loss. The first is the history of the wooing of Gerd by 
 Freyr, and it is thus told : 
 
 There was a man named G^mir, 1 and his wife was 
 Orbotfa (Aurboca), of the mountain jotuns' race. Their 
 daughter was Gerd, fairest of all women. Once Freyr 
 mounted the seat of Odhinn, which was called Air Throne ; 
 and looking northward into far Giant Land, he saw a light 
 flash forth. Looking again, he saw that the light was 
 made by the maiden Gerd, who had just opened her father's 
 door, and that it was her beauty which thus shone over the 
 snow. Then Freyr was smitten with love sadness, and 
 determined to woe the fair one to be his wife ; and so he 
 sent his messenger, Skirnir, to whom he gave his horse and 
 magic sword. Skirnir went to Gerd, and he told her how 
 great Freyr was among the JEsir, and how noble and happy 
 a place was Asgard, the home of the gods ; but for all his 
 pleading Gerd would give no ear to his suit. At last the 
 messenger drew his sword, and threatened to take her 
 life, unless she would grant to Freyr his desire. So Gerd 
 promised to visit the god nine nights thence, in Barri's 
 wood. 
 
 Here a very simple nature myth is told us. The 
 earth will not respond to the wooing of the sun unless he 
 draw his snarp sword, the rays. Freyr himself it must 
 have been who in the original myth undertook the journey 
 into dark Jotunheim. 2 In very northern lands we know 
 that the sun himself does actually disappear in the cold 
 North, the death region. When he is there the earth con- 
 
 1 Gymir is a name of the sea god Oegir = Oceanus etymologically and 
 actually. See Oegisdrekka, beg. The relationship between such a being and 
 the earth is not quite plain, though the explanation may certainly be 
 suggested by what has been said of the nature of Oceanus in Chapter II. 
 and in various places. Gymir is by Simrock connected with Hymir, who 
 is the winter sea (EtymiskvrSa). (Handbuch der deutschen Mythologie, p. 
 61.) Simrock also says that Gymir is an under-world god (p. 398). 
 
 2 Skirnir is in fact only a by-name of Freyr (see Lex. Mythol. 70GJ). 
 The same authority says that Skirnir means the air, which somewhat com- 
 plicates the solution of the story. The Icl. sldrr is our slider. 
 
ISIS AND NEKTHUS. 373 
 
 sents to meet him again with love nine nights hence that 
 is to say, after the nine winter months are over. They meet 
 in Barri's wood, which is the wood in its first greenness. 1 
 
 We turn now to the Norse version of the /cdOoSos of 
 Persephone, which is shorter than the history of the 
 wooing of Gerd, and which, it will be seen, bears more 
 resemblance to the history of Isis, who lost her husband, 
 than to the history of Demeter, who lost her daughter. 
 The part of the earth is taken here by Freyja. Freyja, 
 we are told, had a husband, Odhur, 2 who left his wife to 
 travel in far countries and never returned. Freyja went 
 in search of him, and in that quest passed (like Demeter) 
 through many lands ; so that she has many names, ( for 
 each people called her by a different one/* 3 But all her 
 journeyings were vain ; e and since then she weeps continu- 
 ally, and her tears are drops of gold. 5 4 
 
 We know that one of the essential parts of the mystery 
 of the earth goddess was that part which celebrated her 
 ' coming ' in the form of spring, and how this advent was 
 represented to the sense as a journey of the image the 
 rude agalma or the statue of the goddess from place to 
 place. For this reason was Isis carried in a car or in a 
 boat, 5 and in a car was drawn the Ephesian Artemis, like 
 many another earth goddess of Asiatic birth; for this 
 reason once was dragged Demeter in that car harnessed 
 with panthers and lions to which the chorus of Euripides 
 makes allusion ; or the image of the spring god, lacchos, 
 
 1 Barri is ' green.' 
 
 2 Odhur is really identical with Odhinn, as Freyja is (this tale among 
 others, and her name too, showing her to be so) with Frigg. It is worth 
 noting that whereas Frigg has generally to conform her nature to 
 that of her husband, in this particular story Odhinn (Odhur) takes upon 
 himself a character foreign to the heaven god, in order to complete the 
 myth of the earth. 
 
 3 Edda Snorja, D. 35. See what was said on p. 49 and in Chap. V. 
 touching the different names of the earth goddess. 
 
 4 The rains of autumn, so rich for future gain, yet which are shed by 
 the Earth as she looks upon the decay of summer and searches in vain for 
 the verdure of spring. 
 
 5 Apuleius Met. xi. ; Lactantius, i. 27. 
 
374 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 was borne from Athens to Eleusis. In these forms of 
 mystery the mythic journey was translated into a real one. 
 We have the best reason for believing that as similar 
 ceremonies were observed in the case of the German earth 
 goddess, among the Germans also there existed a mystery. 
 This was not indeed a celebration of the highly developed 
 kind, such as the Eleusinia, but one of that primitive 
 rural order of mysteries such as are still traceable within 
 or behind the more elaborate ceremonial of the Greek 
 mysteria. 1 
 
 Tacitus appears to mention two German earth god- 
 desses, Nerfchus and Isis ; it is probable that the two names 
 really connote the same personality. When the historian 
 calls one of them, the divinity of the Suevi, Isis, he assuredly 
 bestows this name upon her on the same principle by 
 which he gives the names Mercury, Hercules, and Mars to 
 Wuotan, Donar, and Zio namely, because there was that 
 in the character of the German goddess which recalled to 
 his mind the Isis known to the Romans. In truth, one of 
 these points of likeness he immediately afterwards men- 
 tions the fact that the image of the German goddess was 
 carried from place to place in a boat. We may conclude 
 from these data that the Suevian goddess had her mys- 
 teries, which were not unlike those of the Roman Isis. 3 
 Again, concerning the other earth goddess, Nerthus, Tacitus 
 is still more explicit. In the first place we learn that she 
 was recognised as a personification of the earth Nerthus 
 id est Terra Mater. Some have thought that for Nerthus 
 in this passage we should read Hertha. 
 
 This Nerthus had, it seems, her home in an island of 
 the Northern Sea Riigen, as is supposed, or Heligoland. 3 
 Her secret shrine in the centre of the island was sur- 
 
 1 See Chap. V. 
 
 2 I use the term Roman Isis, because there can be no question that^the 
 Isis as worshipped in Home differed much from the goddess of the ancient 
 Egyptians. See Chap. V. 
 
 3 Heligoland = Heilige Land. Riigen, however, is the most probable 
 conjecture for the identification of the island in question. 
 
SURVIVALS OF RUSTIC WORSHIP. 375 
 
 rounded by a dense thicket, which none but priests might 
 enter. Thence every year she was taken to be shown for 
 a season to the people, and in order that her wanderings, 
 like those of Demeter, should be made the subject of 
 dramatic representation. When brought to the mainland, 
 she was dragged from place to place in a closed waggon 
 which was probably fashioned like a ship mounted on 
 wheels l and wherever she came she brought gladness 
 and peace. ( Happy is the place, joyful the day, which is 
 honoured by the entertainment of such a guest ; no war can 
 go on, no arms are borne, the sword rests in its scabbard. 
 This peace and rest continue till the priest takes back the 
 goddess, satiate of converse with mortals.' 2 
 
 Evidently we have here the trace of mystic celebrations 
 riot unlike the beginnings of the Greek Eleusinia ; rites 
 of a simple kind such as are suited to the feelings of a 
 primitive race. 
 
 Now ifc is to be expected that the rustic side of 
 heathenism, the woiship of the peasant class, should have 
 kept its observances more free from the destructive in- 
 fluence of Christianity than was possible to the fiercer part 
 of the creed, that side of it which was represented by the 
 great divinities Odhinn, Thorr, 3 and Tyr. The worship of 
 the gods of the mark might be called the Church militant 
 of heathenism. The votaries of these gods were the men 
 who first sallied forth to conquer in the territories of Rome, 
 and who, having been victorious in arms, were again them- 
 selves conquered by Christianity. Those who remained be- 
 hind, when they had to submit to the new religion, quietly 
 fashioned it to suit their own ideas. They strove to make 
 Christianity a creed fit for rustic folk concerned with few 
 cares, unless to secure good harvests, and with offerings to 
 
 1 The reasons for this supposition may be best studied in Grimm, D. M. 
 ch. xiii. 2 Tac. Germ. c. 40. 
 
 3 Thorr had a certain relationship to peasant life which Uhland has 
 brought prominently forward in his interesting and poetical Mythiis von 
 Tkorr. Nevertheless he belonged "originally to the fighting gods. As a 
 god of the peasant folk he appeared later. 
 
376 OUTLINES QF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 ward off the threat of hail and thunder. And the Christian, 
 priests, who sprang from the peasant class, could not find 
 it in their hearts altogether to condemn the ancient rites ; 
 rather they glossed them over as tributes to the honour of 
 the Virgin or of some saint. Wherefore it happens that 
 in one form or another, whether as a survival of heathenism 
 or as a heathen festival christianised, we have constant 
 proof of the great vitality of the cult of the old earth 
 deity, whether we call her Nerthus, or Frigg, or Berchta, or 
 Holda ; and we find her rites surviving in popular religion 
 from the Middle Ages down even to our own times. 
 
 One example, perhaps the most striking of which any 
 record remains, of the appearance in the Middle Ages of a 
 ritual observance allied to the ancient rites of Nerthus is 
 worth quoting. The record of it is to be found in the 
 chronicle of Rudolf, Abbot of St. Tron, a place between 
 Liege and Lou vain. 1 The ceremonial for such we must 
 call it which in this passage the chronicler describes, 
 arose out of the rivalry between the rustic population near 
 Aachen and the weavers of the' neighbourhood, and took 
 the form of a distinctly heathen revival. Weavers have 
 generally been noted for their piety, and not least so the 
 weavers of the country of the Lower Ehine, who have 
 counted among their ranks, on the one hand, some of the 
 devoutest spirits of Catholicism, as Thomas of Kempen, 
 and, on the other, some of the most zealous champions of 
 the Reformed Creed. It is conceivable that the weavers 
 of Abbot Rudolf's history combined with their attachment 
 to Christianity no small contempt for the uncultured and 
 half -heathen rustics who lived around. These last, who 
 were in a numerical majority, determined to have their 
 revenge. So in a neighbouring wood they constructed a 
 ship, which they placed on wheels, and carried in procession 
 from place to place. Multitudes joined the concourse, 
 both men and women, and they proceeded with heathen 
 
 1 The date of this chronicle is circa A.D. 1133. It is published by Perz, 
 xii. 309, and is quoted by Grimm, D. M. i. 214. 
 
EASTER AND MAY. DAY. 377 
 
 and licentious songs and unrestrained gestures, until the 
 whole celebration must have assumed the aspect of a Diony- 
 siac orgy. The weavers, willy nilly, were compelled to drag 
 the heathen thing about. 1 It was taken from the village 
 where it had first been made (Cornelimiinster, near Aachen) 
 to Maestricht. There it was furnished with a mast and 
 sail, and thence dragged to Tongres, and from Tongres to 
 Loos. Some of the nobility favoured the movement, 
 which grew to the proportion of a small tumult and 
 could not be put down without bloodshed. 
 
 There are many other examples of rustic festivals of 
 a soberer kind, such as were approved by the Church. One 
 of these was the festival or fast of the death of Balder, 
 which has been preserved down to modern days in the 
 St. John's Days' fires, Johannisfeuer, feux de St.-Jean. 
 But of these I shall speak again in another chapter ; for 
 the story of Balder 'a death has yet to be told. The 
 Midsummer fire of Balder, though the greatest among 
 Teutonic celebrations of this kind, is only one among 
 several which are preserved in the popular customs of 
 Teutonic and Celtic peoples. Three other seasons were 
 specially set apart for this sort of festivity. One was 
 Easter, now a Church festival and movable, originally a 
 stationary feast in honour of Ostara (Sox. Eastre), a goddess 
 of spring, who is scarcely distinguishable from Ereyja. 
 Another was the first of May, now SS. Phillip and James, 
 in German Walpurgistag ; the third was the festival of 
 
 1 Pauper quidam rusticus ex villa nomine Inda" hanc diabolicam ex- 
 cogitavit technam. Accepta" a judicibus fiducia" et a levibus hominibus 
 auxilio qui gaudent jocis et novitatibus, in proximo" silvd navem com- 
 posuit, et earn rotis suppositis affigens vehibilem super terrain effecit, 
 obtinuit quoque a potestatibus, ut injectis funibus textorum humeris ex 
 Inda Aquisgranam (Aix) traheretur. . . . 
 
 4 Textores interim occulto sed praecordiali gemitu deum justum judicem 
 super eos vindicem invocabant, qui ad hanc ignominiam eos detrudebant 
 .... Cumque hsec et eorum similia secum, ut dixi, lacrymabiliter con- 
 quererentur concrepabant ante illud nescio cujus potius dicam, Bacchi an 
 Veneris, Neptuni sive Martis, sed ut verius dicam ante omnium malignorum 
 spirituum execrabile domicilium genera dlversorum musicorum turpia 
 cantica et religwni Christiana concinentium, . . .' 
 
378 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the New Year, or of Yule. On each of these occasions 
 great bonfires were lighted, and kept burning all night 
 through. 
 
 Easter was specially the season of new birth ; whence 
 arose the custom of baptising at Easter, and also the 
 symbolism of the Easter egg. 1 These Easter eggs are 
 coloured red and yellow, in reference to the Easter fire, or 
 else to the sun. 2 The ceremonies which are appropriated 
 to any of these bonfires are generally the same. Girls 
 who wish to be married during the year must dance round 
 them three times (or nine times), or give three leaps over 
 the flame. 3 Youths must do the same. The Walpurgis- 
 feuer has a special mission in keeping off the witches, for 
 Walpurgisnacht is a great night for the witches' Sabbath. 
 On that night fires are kindled on all the hills ; and super- 
 stition holds that so far as the light of each fire extends, 
 to that distance the witches are banned. 4 This season, also, 
 is a time of new birth and of a sort of heathen baptism ; 
 to wash in May dew guards against bewitchment. 5 The 
 Nativity of the Virgin Mary is another festival of the 
 spring, of the anodos ; the Virgin here standing in popular 
 superstition for Persephone or for Ger<Sr. 
 
 The way in which the maypole is or was honoured in 
 our village festivals recalls to some extent the ancient tree 
 worship, which preceded even the cult of Odhinn or of 
 Nerthus ; but the ceremonies are also specially connected 
 with the worship of the earth goddess. 
 
 The author of the ' Anatomie of Abuses ' has drawn 
 for us a picture of the way in which Mayday Eve and 
 May Morning were spent in the villages of England in 
 
 1 It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that, until the change in the 
 style, the civil year began on the 25th of March. 
 
 2 So at least says Wuttke, Deutsclte Volfaaberglaube. 
 
 3 Called in Germany Freudenta/nz and Freudensprung . 
 
 4 Wuttke, 1. c. 
 
 5 May was also sacred to Thorr, and to the hammer, of Thorr, the symbol 
 of law. It was the time for Folk-things, the Cliamps de Mai, c., the fore- 
 runners of our May Meetings. 
 
OF THE 
 
 MAY DAY. 379 
 
 the sixteenth century ; drawn it, doubtless, with an un- 
 friendly pencil, 1 but, we may well believe, truly as to the 
 main details. 
 
 ' They goe some to the woods and groves, some to the 
 hills and mountaines, when they spend the night in plea- 
 saunt pastime, and in the morning they return, bringing 
 with them birche boughes and branches of trees to deck 
 their assemblies withal. But their chiefest jewel they 
 bring thence is the maypoale, which they bring home with 
 great veneration as thus : they have twentie or fourtie 
 yoake of oxen, and everie oxe hath a sweet nosegaie of 
 flowers tied to the top of his homes, and these oxen drawe 
 the maypoale, the stinking idol rather. ... I have heard 
 it crediblie reported that of fourtie, three score, or an 
 hundred maides going to the wood, there have scarcely 
 the third part returned as they went.' 
 
 By the severity of this picture of the stinking idol and 
 its licentious abuses we are perhaps brought all the nearer 
 to the ancient rites out of which the May dances had their 
 rise ; I mean to that primitive earth worship which begins 
 so far back and lasts so long. For orgiastic rites had no 
 small share in this primitive ritual. 
 
 In being present at such ceremonies nowadays, and in 
 watching the dance round the maypole which might 
 rather be called a sort of rhythmic walking of interlacing 
 figures than an actual dance I have had my thoughts 
 forcibly led to that mimic search for the lost Persephone, 
 a search from side to side with lighted torches, which was 
 part of the dramatic celebration of the Eleusinia. The 
 simple music which accompanied the dances might have 
 been given forth by a choir of the Eumolpidse, or by the 
 shepherd pipes which led the procession in the Eoman 
 Lupercalia. 
 
 But again, to turn the picture a little, although the 
 midnight festival which formed part of the old Teutonic 
 
 1 Stubbs, in his Anatomic of Abtises, 1595. 
 
380 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 earth worship was still kept up in the ' pleasant pastimes ' 
 of Mayday Eve, yet in it we may likewise detect the germ 
 out of which mediaeval superstition was to foster its belief 
 in the terrible Brocken dance of the Walpurgisnacht. 
 
 Another among the customs which belong to spring 
 time is that of dragging from place to place a plough upon 
 wheels. This plough is the changed form of the ship 
 which we have seen carrying the image of Nerthus, a 
 form suitable to settled folk and to agricultural lives. 1 In 
 some places where this festival of the plough takes place 
 the young men who drag about the car compel any girl 
 they meet (who has not previously furnished herself with 
 a lover) to join their band. And in this custom we detect 
 a faint shadow of ancient orgiastic rites. Shrove Tuesday 
 is the day generally set apart in Germany for the dragging 
 of the plough ; in England it is the previous Monday, 
 hence called Plough Monday. 2 
 
 The tradition of the Wandering Jew he is Odhinn 
 transformed is that he can rest one night in the year 
 only namely, on the night of Shrove Tuesday and that 
 then he rests upon a plough or upon a harrow. Shrove 
 Tuesday is of course the day when all sins should be 
 absolved (Shrive Tuesday) ; but, in addition to this notion, 
 I cannot but see in the resting of this sinner (who is also 
 the fierce war god) upon the plough a reminiscence, how- 
 ever faint, of the joyful and peaceful day when the earth 
 goddess came round drawn in her car. 
 
 Where the image of this earth deity would once have 
 been borne, that of the Virgin (the Marienbild) was in the 
 Middle Ages, and is now, carried about to bless the fields. 
 
 1 Our word plough, the German Pftug, is etymologically connected with 
 the Greek TT\OVS, a sailing, or irXolov, a ship. Therefore ploiujli probably 
 originally meant a ship. 
 
 2 ' They plough up the soil before any house whence they receive no 
 reward ' (Strutt, Sports and Pastimes, 260). This writer says that Plough 
 Monday was the first Monday after Epiphany. My own recollections of 
 the festival are associated with the day before Shrove Tuesday. We also 
 read of a Fool Plough (Yule Plough ?) dragged about at Christmas (p. 259). 
 
YULE-TIDE. 381 
 
 The days sot apart for this journey are the Bogation 
 Days, corresponding, no doubt, very closely to the time of 
 year in which Nerthus would have appeared, bringing 
 fruitfulness with her. During these Bogation Days, or 
 upon Ascension Day, takes place that charming relic of 
 old heathenism (Celtic, I should suppose, rather than 
 German) called in England ' well-dressing.' In Brittany 
 the choirs of the churches, headed by the priests, make 
 (or used to make) solemn procession with flowers and 
 chaunts to the fountain-head. 1 In England well-dressing 
 is common chiefly in the midland counties or toward the 
 west, in the districts which were once part of Mercia or 
 of Strathclyde. At , Lichfield well-dressing is celebrated 
 with choral processions as jn Brittany. 
 
 The task of tracing the remains of German heathenism 
 in popular lore and popular customs is fascinating, but it 
 is endless. We will therefore let our attention rest only 
 on one other season beside those which have been already 
 spoken of, the most important season of all. I mean the 
 twelve days (die Zwolfen). With us this phrase 'twelve 
 days' always means the days which follow Christmas. 
 In Germany that is likewise the usual reckoning; but 
 sometimes the days are all counted before Christmas, and 
 made to end on Christmas Day. Sometimes they are the 
 twelve days which precede the New Year (Yule) that is to 
 say, those extending from St. Thomas's Day till New Year's 
 Day. Sometimes, again, they are the twelve days which 
 follow New Year's Day. The Easter feast was in honour of 
 Freyja or of Ostara ; the Midsummer feast was in honour 
 of Balder ; but that of Midwinter, the Yule, was sacred to 
 Odhirin, as such a season might well be to a god of storms. 
 According to the most usual disposition of the days, there- 
 fore, this Odhinn festival of Yule fell in the very midst 
 of the twelve days, and the season took its character from 
 Odhinn. 2 Twelfth Day is, in Germany, dedicated to the 
 
 1 Cambry, Voyage dans le Finistere, Ed. Souvestre. 
 
 2 "Winter and wind ; an etymological significance which appears again 
 in 
 
382 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Three Kings of Cologne, and hence called DreiJconigetag. 
 The Three Kings are, it is well known, supposed to be 
 the three Magi, and their names Gaspar, Melchior, and 
 Balthasar. Frederick Barbarossa is said to have brought 
 their remains from Milan to Cologne. 1 
 
 This is oiily a tradition, however, which the Italian 
 historian has repeated. We have proof that the Three 
 Kings were worshipped long before the days of Frederick, 2 
 and I have myself little doubt that the original Three 
 Kings were Odhinn, Thorr, and Tyr, or, to give them 
 their proper German names, Wuotan, Donar, Zio. This 
 is why the Three Kings were so widely honoured in the 
 Middle Ages, and why the superstitions which still attach 
 to them are so many. They are still a great feature 
 in the observances of Yule. The initials of their names, 
 followed each by a cross (thus, G -f- M + B + ), are placed at 
 this season upon all the doors for a charm against evil 
 spirits. 3 Thus may the twelve days be regarded as a 
 season of contest between the Christian and the heathen 
 powers, between the new creed and the old. Of old we 
 know how Odhinn used sometimes to walk the earth, alone 
 or in company with his brothers Hoenir and Loki ; now it 
 is Christ who is said to revisit earth at this season of the 
 twelve days, alone or with one or more of His disciples, very 
 often accompanied by Peter and Paul. The man who on 
 Christmas Eve stands under an apple tree (but for this 
 apple let our memories of an earlier belief supply ash) 
 sees heaven open. At this time, too, witches dance and 
 hold Sabbath, and the Wild Huntsman 4 goes his round. 
 Then is all magic rife. The Wise Woman ( Weise Frau) is 
 seen at such times : she may be Frigg or Holda, for she 
 often brings men good luck ; or she may, in her evil aspect, 
 
 1 Villani. 
 
 2 They are mentioned in the Clianson de Roland, which is of the 
 eleventh century, a hundred years before Frederick Barbarossa (1152- 
 1190). 
 
 8 Wuttke, 1. c. 
 
 4 Hackelberg. See also Chap. X. 
 
YULE-TIDE. 383 
 
 be one of the witches. The beasts in the stall at this 
 time speak and foretell the future. Dreams and all other 
 signs of fate are more sought after, and they are more 
 frequent at this season than at any other of the year. 
 All that is dreamt in the twelve nights becomes true. 
 Arid it is also said that the whole twelve days are a sort 
 of epitome of the following twelve months ; so that, what- 
 ever be the character of any individual day, fair or stormy, 
 lucky or unlucky, of the same kind will be the correspond- 
 ing month of the ensuing year. Wherefore the proverb 
 says, ' The more fearfully the storm howls, so much the 
 worse for the young year.' The Yule-tide storm is the 
 last voice of Odhinn in men's ears. 
 
384 OUTLINES OF PEIMIT1VE BELIEF. 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII. 
 
 THE SHADOW OP DEATH. 
 
 1. Visits to the Under World. The Death of Balder. 
 
 THE shadow of death which we have seen in the German's 
 outward world, his world in space, so closely surrounding 
 all life, hemmed it in not less straitly in the world of time, 
 even the gods themselves not being able to escape final 
 destruction. There is a much closer relationship between 
 Asgard and the Scandinavian nether kingdom than there 
 is between Olympus and Hades ; so that, while among the 
 Greeks only some few among the gods visited the lower 
 world, and of those who went all came back victorious, 
 having overcome death, several among the ^Esir visited 
 HePs abode, and one conspicuous figure in their body went 
 there not to return. Though we have already said much 
 concerning the gloominess of the German mythology, 
 much more remains to be said ; for that mythology can- 
 not be understood until we have passed in review the 
 numerous images and myths of death which it contains. 
 But we must remember, on the other hand, that the 
 German could often win out of his saddest celebrations 
 occasion for mirth and merriment, as an Irishman will do 
 at a wake, and his very familiarity with sombre thoughts 
 and images gave him a kind of desperate cheerfulness in 
 the common affairs of life. 
 
 The very term funeral feast is, indeed, a kind of 
 paradox : yet funeral feasts hare existed among all nations 
 Among the Teutons not only were the private occasions 
 >f mourning turned into seasons of hilarity, but the very 
 
THE SHADOW OF DEATH. 385 
 
 funerals of the gods themselves for some of the gods 
 had funerals were so used. And this habit strikes 
 the key-note of much that is characteristic of Teutonic 
 heathenism. 
 
 In a former chapter we passed in review the principal 
 myths and figures whereby the Aryan races have repre- 
 sented to themselves the idea of death. Each one of 
 these is to be found in one or more shapes in the Teutonic 
 mythology. These people preserved all the legacy of 
 thought upon such matters which had been bequeathed 
 to them by their forefathers, and they further added 
 some which were their peculiar creation. The devouring 
 beast or dragon, the man-eating ogre, the pale Goddess of 
 Death with her Circe wand, the mortal river and the 
 mortal sea, the Bridge of Souls, the ghostly ferryman all 
 these are to be found in the belief of the Teutons ; all 
 these through the Teutons became afterwards part of the 
 mythology of the Middle Ages. 
 
 As the greater number of these creations are in a 
 certain degree familiar to us, it will not be necessary to 
 spend much time in pointing out their characteristics. 
 Rather we will let them appear in their proper places when, 
 in this or the other narrative, in company, as the case may 
 happen, of a human hero or of a god, we shall ourselves 
 make the journey to the Norseman's under world. But 
 there is a series of personifications of death which are 
 strange to other systems of belief beside the Teuton 
 system, and of which, therefore, we have had as yet no 
 occasion to speak. These we must first consider. 
 
 The images of mortality whereof I speak are those 
 which are personifications of the funeral fire, and which 
 therefore spring directly out of the custom of burning the 
 dead. We have seen how the rite of cremation very pro- 
 bably arose from the worship of the fire god and the 
 desire to commit the dead into his charge. It was, no 
 doubt, the sense of the special friendliness and human love 
 of this divinity the Agni of the early Aryas which 
 
 c c 
 
386 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 induced men to entrust him with, the care of the dead 
 body rather than commit it to the care of the universal 
 mother, the earth. But it is easy to understand that if the 
 rite of corpse-burning had become an ancient one, and if 
 its original meaning had become obscured by time, men's 
 feelings toward that same Fire Divinity might come to be 
 the, very reverse of what they had once been. He might 
 come to be for them a symbol of death, a genius of destruc- 
 tion, a hateful rather than a beneficent being. When the 
 ordinary uses' of fire had grown familiar through long 
 possession, this peculiar aspect of the fire, that it was used 
 for the consumption of the dead bodies, might still stand 
 out in clear relief. And when the worship of the ordinary 
 god of flame fell into abeyance, a sort of new being would 
 rise up, who symbolised only the funeral fire. This seems 
 to have happened among the German races, or at any rate 
 among the Teutons of the North. 
 
 The personification of the funeral fire was Loki. 1 His 
 name means simply fire (logi), and he was once doubtless 
 a kind and friendly deity. Even in the Eddas he some- 
 times shows in this character. We read in the second 
 chapter of the great creative trilogj r who came from among 
 the JLsir, and created man out of the stumps Ask and 
 Embla, of how 
 
 1 I have not thought it advisable, in speaking of the Norse mythology, 
 to enter into any discussion of the views put forward upon the subject of 
 the mythology of the Eddas by Prof. Bugge and by Dr. Bang. Anyone, 
 however, who has read Prof. Bugge's paper will at the mention of Loki 
 have his thoughts directed to the passage in that paper wherein the 
 learned writer endeavours to derive Loki from the Biblical Lucifer. I have 
 detailed elsewhere (Trans. l?,oy. Soc. Lit. vol. xii., ' The Mythology of 'the 
 Eddas ') some of the chief points in which I am compelled to dilfer from 
 Prof. Bugge's conclusions, and my reasons for these differences ; and I 
 hope, when the time comes, to continue the subject further. Altogether I 
 see nothing which has yet been brought forward by Bugge which tends 
 to shake materially the foundations of the Edclaic mythology. Nor, again, 
 can I give much weight to the arguments by which Dr. Bang has en- 
 deavoured to prove that the whole of the Voluspa is an importation into 
 the North from foreign sources. And in this opinion I am glad to have 
 the support of so learned a writer as Dr. C. P. Tiele in a recent> article in 
 the Revue de VHixt. des Rcl. vol. ii. 
 
LOKI. 387 
 
 From out of their assembly came there three 
 Mighty and merciful ^Esir to ma 's home. 
 They found on earth, almost lifeless, 
 Ask and Embla, futureless. 
 
 The names of these three were Odhinn, Hoenir, and 
 Lodr, and Lodr is generally identified with Loki. 1 Nay, 
 if Loki had not once been a friendly power he could not 
 have been classed among the ^Esir, as he generally is. 
 
 Nevertheless the more common appearances of this 
 being are in a precisely contrary character. In most of 
 his deeds he has quite forgotten his kindly office and 
 become an enemy to gods and men. The change which 
 the personification of fire underwent between the days of 
 Agni worship and the days of Loki worship is very remark- 
 able, and can only be explained by the fact that the Norse- 
 men looked with such gloomy thoughts upon the funeral 
 fire. Agni, the companion and friend of man, the 
 guardian of the house, the one who invited the gods 
 down to the feast, was the same who bore away the dead 
 man's soul from the pyre. But in this case his kindly 
 nature overrode his more terrible aspect. In the Norse 
 creed it was quite different. Loki was essentially a god of 
 death. 
 
 Loki is represented siding sometimes with the gods, 2 
 more often with the giants. 3 He has a house in Asgard and 
 yet he is called a jotun. 4 There are, therefore, in reality 
 two Lokis. One is the As-Loki, who must once have been 
 friendly to men, as all the .ZEsir were ; the other is the giant 
 Loki, who has a home in Giant Land. But in the account 
 which is preserved of Loki in the Eddas he appears almost 
 always as unfriendly to both gods and men. ' Loki,' says 
 the Younger Edda, * never- ceased to work evil among the 
 
 1 Simrock, Ifandbuck der dent. Myth. 31 ; Thorpe's Edda, Index, &c. ; 
 Grimm, D. M. i. 200. 
 
 2 prymskvrSa, Thorr's journey to Jotunheim, &c. 
 
 3 Voluspa, (Egisdrekka, &c., Death of Balder, Punishment of Loki, 
 Ragnarok, &c. 
 
 4 Voluspa, 48, 54 ; see also 50. 
 
 cc 2 
 
388 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. . 
 
 Therefore the giant nature has overborne the 
 Asa nature; but both exist in him. This duplicity of 
 being marks him on every occasion. He had two wives, 
 we are told. One was in Asgard, but the other was of 
 giant kind. The name of this last was AngrboSa (Angst- 
 lote, pain messenger), and by her Loki begat the Fenris 
 wolf (Fenrisulfr), the Midgard serpent, and Hel. 
 
 Now of this family of Loki each member is a personi- 
 fication of death in one or other of its forms. The Fen- 
 risulfr, or wolf Fenrir, is a familiar image enough ; he is 
 the Cerberus of Greek mythology, the Sarameyas of In- 
 dian mythology ; he is, in a word, the devouring tomb. 
 Jormungandr is his own brother, almost his counterpart. 
 The name of Jormungandr means the ravening monster; 
 his nature as the earth serpent shows him to be nearly 
 allied to the River of Death. 1 Angrboda is a personi- 
 fication of darkness and of death. We shall anon meet 
 with her sitting at the entrance to the House of the Shades. 
 Her daughter Hel, the very Queen of the Dead, asks the 
 help of no commentary to explain her nature. 
 
 There are other ways in which the funeral fire came 
 to take its place in the Teuton's eschatology, or belief 
 concerning the way to the Land of" Shades. Seeing that 
 the dead man had to pass through the funeral fire to get 
 there, it was natural that the place should be imagined 
 surrounded by a circle of flame, a kind of hedge of fire. 
 Indeed, a combination was effected between two ideas, the 
 idea of the world-encircling Sea of Death and the notion 
 of the hedge of fire through which men musL pass to win 
 
 1 Fenrir and Jormungandr, like the man and the serpent whom Dante 
 saw, seem to have joined their beings and then appeared apart clothed each 
 with the other's proper nature. For while the second is recognised as 
 the earth-girding river, the name of him is literally ' monstrous wolf.' On 
 the other hand, Fenrir is shown by his name to be a watery being (fen); 
 so that his name rather than Jormungandr's is connected with the earth- 
 girding river, which notwithstanding the other personifies. Fenrir ' 
 (Fenris) is, I believe, connected etymologically with the Sanskrit Pams. 
 The Parcis were water beings, perhaps originally not unlike Ahi and Vritra, 
 the great Vedic serpents. 
 
THE BELT OF FLAME. 389 
 
 their way into another world. The former image came to 
 be replaced by the latter ; and men now imagined a belt 
 of flame lying between them and Helheim. And as Jo'tun- 
 heim was in thought scarcely distinguishable from Hel- 
 heim, the girdle of fire was made to surround that land. 
 
 We may combine this scattered imagery into one 
 simple picture, and see thereby what an added gloom and 
 marvel is imparted to the Teuton's world so soon as we 
 have fully realised the shadow of death which lay upon 
 every side of it. 
 
 The cold region of Jotunheim was all around. But to 
 appreciate its horrors let us think of it as lying in the 
 North, on the other side of an icy sea. We travel on and 
 on ; the air grows colder and the scene more desolate at 
 every step. Anon, stretching its gaunt arms heavenward, 
 we see the iron wood, which starts out in blackness from 
 the surrounding snow. From its recesses come the dismal 
 howls of the witches and were-wolves who have their home 
 therein, the kindred of Fenrir and of Garni. Then on to 
 the borders of the wintry sea 'Bold wilfbe he who tries 
 to cross those waters.' Its waves are made the blacker by 
 the floes of ice which lie in it. 
 
 Somehow the region beyond, the true Land of Shades, 
 cannot be reached in the day-time for the same reason, 
 doubtless, that in the belief of every people the sun 
 himself had to travel through a twilight region before 
 he quite withdrew from earth ; for the same reason that 
 the kingdom of Amenti, through which the soul of the 
 Egyptian journeyed to Osiris' house, was a twilight land. 
 For so it is here. Skirnir, the messenger of Freyr, had 
 to journey to the Land of Shades, when he went to seek 
 out GerS (the winter earth), who had been carried thither. 1 
 
 1 Like Persephone. See last chapter. This myth is, as was there said, 
 the story of the anoclos of Persephone and of her marriage with Dionysus. 
 The story of Freyja and Odhur was in the same place compared with the 
 ItatJiodns of Persephone and the sorrows of Demeter for the loss of her 
 daughter. This last is, of course; far more like the companion history of Isis 
 and Osiris. There are also in classic mythology stories which in actual 
 
390 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 He waited till it was nightfall before he set out. First, 
 knowing that he had to ride through a hedge of flame, he 
 had required that Freyr, the god who sent him on his 
 message, should give him his own horse. 
 
 Give me thy swift steed then, that he may bear me through 
 The far flickering flame. 
 
 And afterwards in the beautiful passage before quoted 
 he addressed the horse 
 
 Dark it grows without ! Time I deem it is 
 To fare over the misty ways. 
 We will both return, or that all-powerful jotun 
 Shall seize us both. 
 
 To mortal eyes, perhaps, this flame surrounding Jotun- 
 heimar appeared as the Aurora Borealis lighting up the 
 wintry sky. Men gazed upon the shooting fires as they 
 shone upon the horizon, and shuddering they thought of 
 how their souls* might need l one day to pass that awful 
 barrier and wander into the dark, cheerless region beyond. 
 According to the fancy of the moment, this hedge of flame 
 could be pictured as surrounding all Jotunheimar, or only 
 some particular giant's house. This latter notion is the 
 one most commonly presented to us in the Eddas. But 
 when this is the case the giant's house becomes ipso facto 
 the House of Death, and the giant, whatever his name, is 
 himself transformed into King Death. The mythic fire 
 is recognised as the fire of the other world, or, as it is 
 
 form more nearly represent che myth of Freyja and Odhur than does the 
 tale of the parting of Demeter and Persephone for example, the history of 
 the loves and sorrows of Amor and Psyche, which again corresponds to the 
 Indian myth of Urvasi and Pururavas (see last chapter), and in a remoter 
 degree to that of Zeus and Semele (see Liebricht in- the Zeitsch, f. v. Sp. 
 xviii. 56). All these stories, however, are less intimately connected with 
 the chthonic divinities than are the histories of Demeter and Persephone" 
 or of Freyja and Odhur. 
 
 1 Might tieed. Whether they in reality would need to do this depended, 
 as they deemed, upon their being elected among the band of Einheriar 
 (heroes), who were after death translated to Valholl. 
 
SIGBUX AND HELGI. 391 
 
 generally called, the out- world or outward ( 
 
 fire. And when the flame is personified the proper name 
 
 for the personification must be tTtgar^loki, Out-world 
 
 Loki. 
 
 Still onward, and we come to the very House of Death, 
 guarded by the two dogs whom we know so well in Indian 
 mythology. At the entrance to Helheim, at the ' eastern 
 gate,' as it seems, sits in a cave Angrbodha, the wife of 
 Loki a.nd the mother of Hel ; she sits there in a cave or in 
 a tomb. Then past that gate we reach the court of Hel 
 herself. 
 
 In the Eddas many, both of gods and men, make their 
 way to these abodes of death. Some come back again; 
 but some, both of gods and men, never return. We will 
 take tlie chief among these in the order of their import- 
 ance that is, of the amount of knowledge which they 
 impart to us concerning the other world. 
 
 The first story which I shall take leaves us even at the 
 end still but at the entry of the tomb ; but, at all events, 
 it shows us one way by which the dead man went to 
 another world, and it shows us, too, how the ghost might 
 return to earth. The images which are presented to us 
 in this lay the Second Lay of Helgi Hundingsbane are 
 not those which have been dwelt upon just now, but 
 those connected with the Bridge of Souls and the passage 
 of the dead to Paradise by that road. Helgi, the hero of 
 the poem, was a great warrior of the race of the Yolsungs, 
 and his wife was named Sigruii. She was a Valkyria. She 
 had been first betrothed against her will to Hodbrodd, 
 prince of Svarinshaug ; but not liking the match, she flew 
 away to Helgi at Sevafjoll and married him. Helgi lived 
 not to be old, for Dag, the brother of Sigriin, slew him. 1 
 It happened that a woman slave passed one evening by 
 
 1 This is in effect the story of Sigurd and of Siegfrit in the Nibelungen. 
 Helgi seems to be the same as these two heroes. This poem proves, it 
 seems to me, that the one-eyed Hagan of Troneg is Odhinn ; for in this 
 poem Odhinn lends Dag his spear to slay Helgi. 
 
392 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Helgi's tomb, and she saw his ghost ride into the mound 
 with many men. Then she spake 
 
 Is it a delusion, that which I ween I see ? 
 Is it the Last Day ? Dead men ride. 
 Ye goad the horses with your spurs. 
 Is this the coming of heroes to earth ? 
 
 And Helgi's ghost answered 
 
 It is not a delusion, that which you deem you see, . 
 
 Nor the world's ending, 
 
 Although you see us our swift horses 
 
 Goad with spurs. 
 
 To the heroes is a home-going granted. 
 
 Then the woman went home and told Sigrun 
 
 Go hence, Sigrun, from Sevafjoll, 
 
 If thou wouldst see the people's prince. 
 
 The hill is open ; out has come Helgi : 
 
 Their spurs bleed. The prince prays for thee, 
 
 To stanch for him his bleeding wound. 
 
 Then Sigrun went to the hill to Helgi, and spake 
 
 Now am I fain to find thee again, 
 
 As Odhinn's hawks are to find their food, 
 
 When they scent the smell of corpses and warm blood, 
 
 Or, drenched with dew, the dawning day descry. 
 
 Now will I kiss the lifeless king, 
 
 Ere thou cast off thy bloody byrnie. 
 
 Thy hair is clotted, Helgi, with sweat of death ; 
 
 The chieftain is steeped in corpse dew. 
 
 Ice cold are the hands of Hogni's child ; 
 
 Who shall for thee, king, the blood fine pay ? 
 
 Helgi speaks 
 
 Thou, Sigrun of Sevafjoll, 
 
 Now becomest the bane of Helgi ; 
 
 Thou weepest, golden one, cruel tears, 
 
HELGI'S GHOST. 393 
 
 Sunny one, southern one, ere to sleep thou goest ; 
 Each one falls bloody on the hero's breast, 
 Ice cold, piercing, sorrow-laden. 1 
 
 Well shall we drink a precious draught ; 
 Together we have lost life-joy and lauds. 
 No one shall sing o'er me a funeral song, 
 Though on my bosom wounds he may behold. 
 Here are brides in the hill hidden ; 
 Kings' daughters beguile me, who am dead. 
 
 Sigrun prepared a bed on the mound, and spake 
 
 Here have I, Helgi, for thee a bed made, 
 A painless one, son of Ylfing ! 
 And I will sleep, prince, in thy arms, 
 As by my king while living I would lie. 
 
 Helgi 
 
 No one now shall deem us hopeless, 
 
 Early or late in Sevafjoll ; 
 
 For thou f-leepest in my arms, 
 
 Fair one, Hogni's daughter, 
 
 In the hill; 
 
 For thon art quick [I dead], king's daughter ! 
 
 Time it is for me to ride the ruddy road, 
 And my pale horse to tread the path of flight ; 
 I to the west must go, o'er Wind-helm's Bridge, 
 Before Salgofnir 2 the heroes awakens. 
 
 Helgi rode his way, and the women went home. 
 Another night Sigrun bade her maid keep watch by the 
 bill; and at sunset Sigrun came to the hill, and spake 
 
 Now would come, if he were minded, 
 
 Sigmund's son from Odhinn's hall ; 
 
 Of the hero's return the hope I deem dwindles. 
 
 On the ash's boughs the eagles sit, 
 
 And to the dreaming- stead 3 all men betake them. 
 
 1 That is to say, her tears were cruel because they pierced him like drops 
 of ice. A common belief this, that the tears of a wife give physical torture 
 to the beloved one in his grave. 
 
 8 ' Hall-gaper,' a mythic cock ; probably the cock who crows over Valholl 
 before Ragnarok. See infra. 8 The place of dreams. 
 
394 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 The maid 
 
 Be not so rash as to go, 
 
 king's daughter, to the dead men's honse 
 
 Stronger are at nightfall 
 
 The ghosts of heroes than by day. 
 
 ' Sigrun was short-lived, from hurt and grief. It was 
 believed by our fore-elders that men were born again, but 
 that they now call an. old wives' tale. He was Helgi, 
 Hading's hero, and she Kara, Halfdan's daughter, as is 
 sung in the lays of Kara. She was a Valkyria.' 
 
 
 
 We have already seen Skirnir start out upon his 
 mission to the flame-girt house in which the maiden GerS 
 lay imprisoned. The house was the house of Gymir. 
 When Skirnir arrived there he found fierce dogs at the 
 door within the hedge, 1 which protected Gerd's hall. He 
 rode to where a cowherd sat upon a hill, and spake to 
 him 
 
 Tell me, cowherd, who on this hill sittest 
 And watchest the ways, 
 
 How may I come to speak with the fair maiden, 
 Past these dogs of G^ mir ? 
 
 The cowherd's answer is noticeable as expressing the 
 nature of the place which Skirnir had come to- 
 Art thou at death's door, or dead already ? 
 Ever shalt thou remain lacking of speech 
 With Gymir 's godlike maiden. 
 
 Then GerS heard Skirnir's voice. She sent a maid 
 forth to bid him enter the hall. At first she refused to 
 grant the prayer of Freyr, but at last she yielded to the 
 instance of Skirnir. The earth at length grew green before 
 the heat of the sun's rays. 
 
 Another story which seems to enclose the same ger- 
 
 1 Notice for future use the fact that Gymir's house is surrounded by a 
 hedge as well as by a circle of flame. 
 
FIOLSVITH AND VINDKALD. 395 
 
 minal idea in fact, tlie same nature myth as the story of 
 Ger3 is that told in the Lay of Fiolsvith. Fiolsvith is 
 a devil's porter like G^mir. The maiden whom he wards 
 is called Menglod. 1 By Fiolsvith's side are two fierce dogs, 
 called Gifr and Geri. The lay tells how this giant porter, 
 looking out into the night, saw approaching the lover of 
 Menglod, who came disguised under the name of Vind- 
 kald. 2 
 
 From the outer ward he saw one ascending 
 To the seat of the giant race. 
 
 And so he cried out 
 
 On the moist ways hie thee off hence ; 
 
 Here, wretch, it is no place for thee. 
 
 
 
 What monster is it before the entrance standing, 
 And hovering round the dangerous flame ? 
 
 After awhile the wanderer and the warder fell into 
 talk, and the former asked of the latter many things 
 concerning the house before which he was standing. The 
 significance of some of the things is quite lost to us ; but 
 there is enough left to show that there was some mysterious 
 importance which attached to what they spoke of. Many 
 of the names mentioned have connection with Eagnarok, 
 the Gods' Doom ; 3 and I should not wonder if all the things 
 
 1 Menglod means ' glad in a necklace ' (men). It is evidently another 
 name for Freyja, who wears the famous Brising necklace (Brisinga men). 
 Freyja is GerS (Chapter VII.) Menglod may have been, like Persephone, 
 sometimes a Queen of Death. She is so, I think, in the Grougaldr, where 
 the son says to his mother (step-mother ?), Groa 
 
 ' A hateful snare thou, cunning one, didst lay 
 
 When thou badest me go Menglod to meet,' 
 
 which is to be interpreted that this witch step-mother had sent her son to 
 his death (to meet Menglod), and afterwards finds him at her own tomb. 
 See Grougaldr. 
 
 2 ' Wind cold.' I suppose as Vindkald he is the winter sun, which 
 cannot get sight of Freyja (the germ). As Svipdag, ' Swoop of Day,' he is 
 the summer sun. Originally this was a day myth. 
 
 8 The things chiefly spoken of are : 1. The world tree, and what is to be 
 
396 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 enumerated were associated with the under world. At last 
 it was made known that the wanderer was Svipdag, the 
 betrothed of Menglod. The iron doors flew open and let 
 him in. This is like the ' swoop of day ' after night has 
 passed. 
 
 These are but slight notices of the under world. More 
 vivid and more detailed is the history of Odhinn's descent 
 to Hel, to enquire of the wise Vala, whose tomb stood at 
 Hel's gate, touching the impending fate of Balder. 1 The 
 Msir and the Asyniur (goddesses) were in council how 
 they might avert the evil which seemed to hang over the 
 beloved Balder, and which was forewarned to him in dreams. 
 So Odhinn determined to make "this journey to the house 
 of Hel. 2 
 
 Then the Allfather saddled his horse Sleipnir and rode 
 down to Niflhel (Mist-hell). 
 
 He met a qjog from Hel coming ; 
 Blood-stained it was upon its breast. 
 Slaughter-seeking seemed its gullet and its lower jaw. 
 It bayed and gaped wide ; 
 At the sire of magic song 
 Long it howled. 
 
 Onward he rode the earth echoed 
 Till to the high Hel's house he came. 
 Then rode the god to the eastern gate, 
 Where he knew there was a Vala's grave. 
 To the wise one began he his charms to chaunt, 
 Till she uprose perforce, and death- like words she spake. 
 ' Say, what man of men, to me unknown, 
 Trouble has made for me, and my rest destroyed : 
 Snow has snowed o'er me ! rain has rained upon me ! 
 Dew has bedewed me ! I have long been dead.' 
 
 its en<L This will only happen at Ragnarok. 2. The golden cock Vidofnir, 
 which is, I imagine, the cock which crows at Ragnarok (Voluspd). 3. A 
 heavenly mountain, Hyfjaberg. 4. The maidens (Norns ?) who sit by 
 Menglod's knees. i VegtamskviSa. 
 
 This poem, the Vegtamskvi-Sa, is probably familiar to most readers in 
 the form m which it has been rendered by Grey under the title of the 
 Descent of Odin.' 
 
THE DESCENT OF ODHINN. 397 
 
 He answered 
 
 I am named Yegtam, and am Yaltam's son : 
 Tell thou me of Hel ; I am from Mannheim. 
 For whom are the benches with rings bedecked, 
 And the glittering beds with gold adorned ? 
 
 She spake again 
 
 Here is for Balder the mead-cup brewed, 
 Over the bright beaker the cover is laid ; 
 But all the ^Bsir are bereft of hope. 
 Perforce have I spoken ; I will now be silent. 
 
 The dialogue continues upon matters relating to the 
 approaching death of Balder, and ends thus. She said 
 
 Not Yegtam art thon, as once I weened, , 
 But rather Odhinn, the all- creator. 
 
 And he answered 
 
 Thou art no Yala nor wise woman, 
 The mother rather of three thursar. 
 
 Who are these three thursar (giants) P Who else can 
 they be than that mighty trinity Fenrir, Jormungandr, 
 and Hel? This supposed Yala must be Angrbodha, the 
 wife of Loki. 
 
 We have now passed through all the stages which were 
 necessary to show us the way to the Norseman's under 
 world. We have seen the ghost come from out of the 
 mouth of the grave, and then enter it again. We have 
 ridden down the dark valley which leads from that grave- 
 mouth to the nether kingdom ; we have met the fierce 
 hell-hound coming towards us, blood-stained on mouth 
 and breast. Farther on we have ridden, and have found 
 at the eastern gate of Mist-hell a Yala's grave, and in this 
 Yala we have recognised the very mother of the Queen of 
 the Dead. We shall have anon to penetrate Hel's own 
 house. 
 
 But before we do this we will turn to a story of a 
 
398 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 descent to the nether world, in which the characteristic 
 features of that place are represented in rather a different 
 guise from the ordinary one, and of which, on account of 
 this variation, the true meaning has been obscured by time. 
 
 We have already told the incidents of this story ; for 
 it is the history of Thorr's journey to the house of tJt- 
 gardhloki. But because we were not then concerned with 
 the myths of death I did not stay to point out its full 
 significance. It requires, however, no greafc penetration to 
 discover that this tTtgardhloki is nothing else than one of 
 the forms of the god Loki, who we know generally per- 
 sonifies the funeral fire. The Utgardhloki of this myth is 
 simply that fire expanded into a hedge of flame surrounding 
 the world of death, and that again personified as a being, 
 a King of Death. IJtgardhloki is the personification of 
 the fire which the porter in the Fiolsvinnsmal had around 
 him in his outer ward, or that f far flickering flame ' through 
 which Skirnir rode. 
 
 It is for this reason that the journey of Thorr to 
 tTtgardhloki's hall is so much like the descent of Herakles 
 to the house of Pluto ; though there is this great difference 
 between the two myths, that the Greek hero is always 
 victorious, while the Norse god is by no means victorious. 
 Each one among the feats which Thorr performs in 
 iTtgardhloki's palace is appropriate to the place and the 
 occasion ; each is in reality a contest with death in one of 
 its forms, death represented by one among the children 
 of Loki. The first attempt of Thorr was to drain a horn ; 
 but in doing that he was really draining the sea, and in 
 fact the Sea or Eiver of Death. Wherefore this wa,s in 
 reality a contest with Jormungandr, who is the Sea or 
 Eiver of Death. The second was the endeavour to lift up 
 tTtgardhloki's cat, which turned out to be really Jormun- 
 gandr, the Midgard worm, himself. This scene reminds 
 us of Heracles bringing Cerberus from the under world. 1 
 
 ^ * It should be remembered that this among the twelve labours ' of 
 Heracles is the only one known to Homer. It is evident that the descent 
 
THE DESCENT OF THORK. 399 
 
 Cerberus corresponds most nearly to Fenrir ; so we may 
 imagine Thorr's struggle with this cat to have been ori- 
 ginally a struggle with Fenrir. Fenrir and Jormungandr 
 are continually exchanging their natures. 1 Each one of 
 these accounts has, as I imagine, been perverted from its 
 original form by the fancy of an age to which all the deeper 
 meaning of the myths had become obscured. But of all the 
 three the story of the third contest has suffered the most 
 vital change. In the story, as we now read it, a wrestling 
 bout takes place between Thorr and an old woman called 
 Elli-*-fchat is to say, Eld. But this is a fanciful idea ; the 
 personification of Old Age is not a notion characteristic of 
 a period of genuine mythic creation. It is most probable 
 that the old dame was at first Hel, the daughter "of Loki 
 (i.e. of Otgardhloki). So that the three battles of the god 
 were with the three children of the death giant, to whose 
 house he came. The wrestle of Thorr and Hel is exactly 
 parallel to the fight of Heracles and Thanatos, of which 
 Euripides speaks. 2 This, it has been shown, is one form 
 .of an ancient legend. 
 
 The journey of Thorr to tTtgardhloki is therefore the 
 second story of the descent of one among the j3Esir to the 
 lower world, the first being the descent of Odhinn, 
 commemorated in the Vegtamskvra. 
 
 The third history is far more interesting and important 
 than the other two, being the descent of Balder to Hel- 
 heim. In this the gloom deepens gr^itly. The o.ther two 
 gods only went down for a time. Odhinn came back with 
 a certain measure of success ; for he had, at any rate, 
 gained the information which he went to seek. Thorr 
 
 of the hero into the nether world was the incident in his history which 
 was most essential to his character. We know too that Heracles fought 
 with Hades himself, and 'brought grief into the realm of shades.' The 
 struggle of Heracles and Thanatos, which will be presently compared with 
 one of the ' labours ' of Thorr, is only another form of the same idea. 
 Lastly, Homer knows of a fight between Heracles and a sea monster. 
 Therefore the three labours of the Norse god are represented by three of 
 the oldest labours of the Greek hero. 
 
 1 Supra, p. 388, note. 2 Alkestis. 
 
400 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 returned back defeated; but these two both did return* 
 Balder went to Helheim and returned not. 
 
 The whole story is told in Snorri's Edda (Dsemisaga 49), 
 and is briefly this. It happened that Balder the Good 
 dreamt a heavy dream, which was told to the JEsir, 
 whereon when they had taken the auguries the responses 
 were that Balder was destined for death. Then went all 
 the gods (^Esir) and goddesses (Asynior) to counsel how 
 they might avert this calamity from gods and men. And 
 Frigg took an oath from fire and water, from iron and all 
 metals, from stones, from earths, and from diseases, from 
 beasts, birds, poisons, and creeping things, that none of 
 them would do any harm to Balder. And, when they had 
 all given oath, it became a common pastime with the 
 j*Esir that Balder should stand in the midst of them, to 
 serve as a mark, at whom they were wont some to hurl 
 darts, some stones, whilst others hewed at him with swords 
 or axes. Yet, do what they would, not one of them could 
 harm him. And this was looked upon among the -ZEsir 
 as a great honour shown to Balder. 
 
 But when Loki the son of Laufey saw this, it vexed 
 him sore that Balder got no hurt. Wherefore he took the 
 form of a woman and came to Fensalir, the house of 
 Frigg. Then Frigg, when she saw the old dame, asked of 
 her what the JEsir were doing at their meeting. And she 
 said that they were throwing darts and stones at Balder, 
 yet were unable to hurt him. ' Aye,' quoth Frigg, ' neither 
 metal nor wood can hurt Balder, for I have taken an 
 oath from all of them.' 
 
 6 What,' said the dame, ( have then all things sworn to 
 spare Balder?' 'All things,' answered Frigg, 'save a 
 little tree which grows on the eastern side of Valholl and 
 is called mistletoe, which I thought too young and weak to 
 ask an oath of it.' 
 
 When Loki heard this he went away, and, taking his 
 own shape again, he cut off the mistletoe and repaired to 
 
THE DEATH OF BALDER. 401 
 
 the place where the gods were. There he found Hotter 
 standing apart, not sharing in the sports on account of his 
 blindness ; and he went up to him and said, ' Why dost 
 thou not also throw something at Balder ?' 'Because Ii 
 am blind,' said HoSer, 'and see not where Balder is, and 
 have beside nothing to cast with.' ' Come then,' said Loki, 
 'do thou like the rest, and show honour to Balder by 
 throwing this twig at him, and I will direct thine arm 
 toward the place where he stands.' 
 
 Then HoSer took the mistletoe, and, under the guidance 
 of Loki, darted it> at Balder ; and he, pierced through and 
 through, dropped down dead. And never was seen among 
 gods or men so fell a deed as that. 
 
 When Balder fell the JEsir were struck dumb with 
 horror, and they were minded to lay hands on him who 
 had done the deed, but they were obliged to stay their 
 vengeance from respect to the Peace-stead where the deed 
 was done. . . . 
 
 .... Then the Msir took the body of Balder and bore 
 it to the shore. There stood Balder 's ship Hringhorni 
 (the Disk of the Sun), which passed for the largest in the 
 world. But when they would have launched it to set 
 Balder's funeral pile thereon, they could not. Where- 
 fore they called out of Jotunheim a giantess named Hyr- 
 rokkin (Fire Smoke), 1 who came riding upon a wolf, with 
 serpents for reins. And as soon as she had alighted Odhinn 
 ordered four berserkir to hold her steed fast, but this they 
 could not do till they had thrown the animal upon the 
 ground. Hyrrokkin then went to the prow of the ship, and 
 with one push set it afloat, and with such force that fire 
 sparkled from the rollers and the earth shook all around. 
 Thorr, enraged at this sight, grasped his mallet, and, save 
 for the jiEsir, would have broken the woman's skull. 
 
 Then was Balder's body borne to the funeral pile, and 
 when his wife Nanna, the daughter of Nep, saw it, her 
 
 1 She is another embodiment of the funeral nre. 
 D D 
 
402 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 heart brake with grief, and she too was laid upon the pyre. 
 Thorr then stood up and hallowed the pile, and therewith 
 he kicked a dwarf named Litr, who ran before his feet, into 
 the fire. And many people from all parts came to the 
 burning of Balder. First to name is Odhinn, with Frigg 
 and the Yalkyriur and his ravens. And Freyr came in 
 his car yoked to the boar Gullinbursti or SlrSrugtanni. 
 Heimdalr rode on his horse Gulltoppr, and Freyja came 
 drawn by her cats. And many folk of the rime giants 
 and hill giants came too. Odhinn laid on the pile the 
 gold ring named Draupnir, which since that time has 
 acquired the property of producing every ninth night 
 eight rings of equal weight. Balder's horse was led to the 
 pyre and burnt with all its trappings. 
 
 Meanwhile Odhinn had determined to send his mes- 
 senger HermoSr to pray Hel to set Balder free from 
 Helheim. For nine days and nine nights Hermo'Sr rode 
 through valleys dark and deep, where he could see nought 
 until he came to the river Gjoll, over which he rode by 
 Gjoll's bridge, which was roofed with gold. 1 A maiden, 
 called Modgudr, 2 kept that path. She enquired of him his 
 name and kin, for she said that yestereve five bands of dead 
 men rid over the bridge, yet did they not shake it so much 
 as he had done. 'But/ said she, ' thou hast not death's 
 hue on thee. Why then ridest thou here on Hel's way ? ' 
 
 6 1 ride to Hel,' answered Hermo^r, * to seek Balder. 
 Hast thou perchance seen him on this road of Death ? ' 
 
 6 Balder,' answered she, ' hath ridden over Gjoll's bridge. 
 But yonder northward lieth the way to He!.' . . . 
 
 Hermodhr then rode on to the palace, where he found 
 his brother Balder filling the highest place in the hall, and 
 in his company he passed the night. The next morning 
 he besought Hel that she would let Balder ride home with 
 
 1 Treasures of metal belong to the under world. So the Persian Yama 
 is a god of treasure, and so is Plouton, who is not to be distinguished 
 essentially from Ploutos (see Chap. V., also Preller, G. M., Demeter, &c.) 
 
 2 Soul's Fight. 
 
THE DEATH OF BALDER. 403 
 
 him, assuring her how great the grief was among the gods, 
 Hel answered, ' It shall now be proved whether Balder be 
 so much loved as thou sayest. If therefore all things', 
 both living and lifeless, mourn for him, then shall he fare 
 back to the ^Esir. But if one thing only refuse to weep, 
 lie shall remain in Helheim.' 
 
 Then Hermodhr rose, and Balder led him from the 
 hall and gave him the ring Draupnir, to give it as a 
 keepsake to Odhinn. Nanna sent Frigg a linen veil and 
 other gifts, and to Fulla a gold finger ring. HermoSr 
 then rode back to Asgard and gave an account of all he 
 had seen and heard. And when Hermodhr had delivered 
 Hel's answer, the gods sent off messengers throughout the 
 world to beg everything to weep, in order that Balder 
 might be delivered out of Helheim. All things freely 
 complied with this request, both men and every other 
 living being, and earths and stones and trees and metals, 
 c just as thou hast no doubt seen these things weep when 
 they are brought from a cold place into a hot one.' As 
 the messengers were returning, and deemed that their 
 mission had been successful, they found an old hag named 
 Thokk sitting in a cavern, and her they prayed to weep 
 Balder out of Helheim. But she said 
 
 Thokk will weep with dry tears 
 
 Over Balder's bale. 
 
 Nor quick nor dead for the carl's son care I ; 
 
 Let Hel hold her own. 
 
 The nature myth out of which this story has grown is 
 very easily traced. Balder is the sun ; his ship Hring- 
 horni is the sun's disk, and as it 'floats out into the west 
 it shows the picture of a burning sunset. After awhile 
 out of the day myth sprang the myth of the year. 
 Balder's Bale commemorates the death of the summer, or 
 the actual descent of the sun for some weeks' or months' 
 duration into the realm of darkness; a phenomenon 
 known only in Northern lands. The witch Thokk sitting 
 
404 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 there in her cave is undoubtedly the same whom we have 
 met many times at the eastward entry of hell. She was 
 originally simply the darkness the same as Dokkr, dark. 1 
 So Shelley sings 
 
 Swiftly walk over the western wave, 
 
 Spirit of night, 
 
 Oat of the misty eastern cave. 
 
 Being originally no more than a nature myth, the story 
 of Balder's death came in time to exercise a most import- 
 ant influence upon men's beliefs concerning death and the 
 future. 
 
 In the story as it has just been related the hope which 
 was for a little while held out of Balder's again returning 
 to earth was defeated through the machinations of Loki. 
 But I do not fancy that it was by most people thought 
 that Balder stayed in Helheim for ever. In the Voluspa, 
 as we shall presently see, there is the prophecy of a new 
 world which is to follow the destruction of the old world 
 at Ragnarok ; and to that new world it is said Balder shall 
 return, to reign supreme in it. True, it is likely that 
 these concluding verses of the Volupsa have been written 
 under the influence of Christian ideas ; but even so they 
 point to some early foundation for the belief that Balder 
 would reign as the king of paradise. 2 There must have 
 been some legend which made Balder, like others, sail 
 away to a land of the blessed beyond the western horizon 
 and the kingdom of shades. It was, we may well sup- 
 pose, in virtue of some such belief that there arose the 
 custom of burning the. hero in a ship, in the same way 
 that Balder was burned in Hrinofhorni. Before historic 
 
 O 
 
 times, however, the meaning of this rite had 'been generally 
 forgotten, and scattered remains of it only survived. 
 
 1 That is to say, the name has probably /been changed from Do'kkr to 
 pokk.t/umfo, in obedience to an allegorising spirit like that which changed 
 Hel into Elli. 
 
 2 See also next chapter. 
 
NORSE FUNERAL RITES. 405 
 
 Yet the very fragmentariness of these remains is the 
 best witness we could wish for to the importance once 
 attaching to rituals which commemorated the burial of 
 Balder. For example, we find in historic times that men 
 were often buried in a ship that is to say, in a coffin 
 made in the shape of a ship. Not many years ago was 
 unearthed from a Norwegian burial ground a large vessel 
 which had served as a resting-place for the dead. Of 
 course to use the vessel in this way was to defeat the very 
 purpose for which the ship had been at first called into 
 requisition ; for the body, when buried, could not sail away 
 in the track which Balder had made. But the use of this 
 form of coffin shows that men had once understood the 
 meaning of laying the dead man in his ship. It shows 
 incidentally this also : that the belief commemorated in 
 the story of Balder's bale belongs to a date earlier than 
 the date of this use of the ship as a coffin. 
 
 It is highly interesting to find, in the accounts of a 
 traveller among certain Northern Teutons in .the t^nth 
 century, the description of a funeral which is evidently a 
 close copy of the funeral of Balder, with just such an 
 omission or change of one or two features in it as may 
 serve to show that the funeral rites in question had been 
 long in use, and had had time to degenerate here and there 
 into empty forms. 
 
 The account to which I refer is in the ' Kitab el Meshalik 
 wa-1 Memalik' ('Book of Roads and Kingdoms') of the Arab 
 traveller Ibn Haukal. The book was written during the 
 tenth century : the Arab's travels, I believe, extend from 
 A.D. 942 to 976. The people whom Ibn Haukal visited 
 were the Russ or Varings, dwelling in the centre of Russia 
 (near Kief), to which country they have bequeathed their 
 name. For all that they were a Gothic and not a Slavonic 
 race. 
 
 In his description of the funerals of these Russ, Ibn 
 .Haukal has first to tell us that the bodies even of the poor 
 were Iturmd in a ship made for that purpose; those of 
 
406 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the slaves were abandoned to dogs and birds of prey ; that 
 the Russ were wont to burn their dead with the horses, 
 arms, and precious metals which belonged to them; and 
 that ( if the dead was married they burned alive with him 
 his wives. 1 The women themselves desired to follow their 
 husbands onto the pyre, thinking that they went with 
 them to Paradise.' 
 
 The narrative then proceeds, c As I had heard that at 
 the deaths of their chiefs the Russ did even more than to 
 burn them, I was anxious to see their funeral rites. I soon 
 heard that they were going to render the last duties to a 
 rich merchant, who had died not long before. The body 
 of the defunct was first placed in a ditch, where it was left 
 ten days. This interval was employed in making him new 
 robes. His property was divided into- three parts : one 
 part passed to his family ; the second was spent on his 
 robes, and the third in the purchase of drink to be con- 
 sumed at the funeral ; for the Russ are very much given 
 to strong drink, and some die with a flask in their hands. 
 Then the family asked of the slaves of both sexes, " Which 
 among you will die with him ? " Whoever answers " I " 
 cannot go back from his word. Generally the female 
 slaves are those who thus devote themselves to death. In 
 this case they asked the female slaves of the dead man 
 which of them chose to follow him. One answered, "I." 
 She was given into the charge of two females, who were 
 bidden to follow her about everywhere and serve her, and 
 who even washed her feet. This girl passed her days in 
 pleasure, singing and drinking, while they were getting 
 ready the garments destined for the dead and were making 
 the other preparations for his obsequies. 
 
 ' The day fixed for the funeral was Friday. I went to 
 the bank of the stream on which was the vessel of the 
 dead. I saw that they had drawn the ship to land, and 
 men were engaged in fixing it upon four stakes, and had 
 placed round it wooden statues. Onto the vessel they, 
 
 1 This statement is only partially confirmed by what follows. 
 
NOKSE FUNEEAL KITES. 407 
 
 bore a wooden platform, a mattress and cushions, covered 
 with a Roman material of golden cloth. Then appeared 
 an old woman called the Angel of Death, who put all this 
 array in order. She has the charge of getting made the 
 funeral garments and of the other preparations. She, too, 
 kills the girl slaves who are devoted to death. She had the 
 mien of a fury. 
 
 4 When all was ready they went and took the dead from 
 his sepulchre ; whence too they drew a vase of spirituous 
 drink, some fruits, and a lute, which had been placed beside 
 him. He was clad in the robe which he had on at the 
 moment of his death. I noticed that his skin was already 
 livid, owing to the cold of this place ; otherwise he was not 
 at all changed. They clad him now in drawers, trowsers, 
 boots and tunic, and a coat of cloth of gold ; his head they 
 covered .with a brocaded cap furred with sable, and then 
 they carried him to a tent which had been erected on the 
 ship. He was seated on the couch and surrounded with 
 cushions. Before him they placed some drink, some fruit 
 and odorous herbs, some bread, meat, and garlic ; around 
 him were ranged all his weapons. Then they brought a 
 dog, cut it in two, and threw the portions into the ship. 
 They made two horses gallop till they were covered, with 
 sweat ; then they cut them into pieces with their sabres, 
 and they threw the fragments onto the vessel ; two oxen 
 were cut up, and their fragments thrown on in the same 
 manner. Lastly they killed a cock and hen, which they 
 threw on in the same way. Meanwhile the female slave 
 went and came. I saw her enter a tent, where a man 
 said to her these words : " Say to thy master, I have done 
 this for love of thee." Towards evening she was led to a 
 sort of pedestal, newly erected. Onto this she climbed, 
 placing her feet in the hands of various men who stood 
 round, and said certain words. Then they helped her 
 down: They made her ascend a second time : she spoke 
 some more words, and came down again. She mounted 
 a third time, and when she had said some more words 
 
103 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 they made her descend once again. Then they gave her 
 a fowl, whose head she cut off, and this she threw down. 
 The men about cast the body into the ship. I asked my 
 interpreter for an explanation of what had passed. He 
 said, " The first time that she climbs up the pedestal she 
 speaks these words, 'I see my father and mother;' the 
 second time, 'I see all my dead re]ations seated;' and 
 the third time, ' I see my master in Paradise, who is most 
 fair and crowned with green, and beside him I see men 
 and slaves. He calls me ; I will go and join him/ " Then 
 they brought her to the ship. She drew off two bracelets 
 and gave them to the woman called the Angel of Death. 
 She undid the two rings which she wore on her limbs and 
 gave them to the two slaves who attended her. Then they 
 made her ascend the ship, and thither she was followed by 
 men armed with shields and staves, who gave her a vase 
 of spirituous liquor. She began to sing and drink. 
 The interpreter said that she was bidding adieu to 
 those dear to her. They gave her a second cup; she 
 took it and began intoning a long chaunt; but the old 
 woman pressed her to drink and enter the tent where 
 her master was, and, as she hesitated, the old one 
 seized her by the hair and dragged her in. Thereupon 
 the men began to strike their staves upon their shields, to 
 drown the cries of the victim, fearing lest other women 
 slaves should be terrified thereat, which would prevent 
 them some day from asking to die with their masters. 
 At the same moment six men entered the tent, surrounded 
 the victim, and placed her Iving beside the dead. Two 
 held her by the feet, two by the head; 'the old woman 
 passed a cord round her neck, and gave it to the two 
 remaining men who stood near, and these strangled her. 
 At the same moment the old woman, drawing a large 
 knife, struck it into the wretch's side. 
 
 'Then the nearest relative of the dead man came 
 forward quite naked, set fire to a fragment of wood, and 
 walking backwards towards the vessel, holding in one of 
 
NOESE FUNERAL RITES. 409 
 
 his hands the kindled wood and having the other hand 
 placed behind him, set fire to the pile under the ship; 
 then other Euss advanced, holding each a kindled staff, 
 which they cast upon the pile. It took fire, and the ship 
 was soon consumed with the tent, the dead man, and his 
 woman slave. A terrible wind which had arisen stirred 
 the fire and increased the flame.' 
 
 Not the least interesting part in Ibn HaukaPs account 
 of the Russ funeral is the incident with which it concludes. 
 'Hearing,' says the Arab, 'a Russ speaking to my in- 
 terpreter, I asked what he said. "He says," was the 
 answer, " that as for you Arabs, you are mad, for those 
 who are the most dear to you and whom you honour most 
 you place in the ground, where they will become a prey to 
 worms; whereas with us they are burnt in an instant, 
 and go straight to Paradise." He added, with laughter, 
 " It is in favour to the dead that God has raised this great 
 wind : He wished to see him come to Him the sooner." 
 And in truth an hour hud not passed before the ship was 
 reduced to ashes.' 
 
 Observe that in the creed of these people burning is 
 the necessary gate from earth to heaven; if a man is 
 buried he falls a prey to worms and perishes utterly. 
 
 We see in this ritual all the concomitants of the great 
 drama of Balder's death. The old woman who is called 
 by Ibn Haukal the Angel of Death is certainly either Hel 
 herself or else she is the witch Thokk (or Angrbodha), who 
 sits at the entrance of the nether kingdom. In the death 
 of the slave we have a poor substitute (no doubt the best 
 attainable) for the beautiful incident of the death of 
 Nanna, the wife of Balder. ' And when Nanna the 
 daughter of Nep saw it ' (i.e. the funeral pile prepared) ' her 
 heart brake with grief and she too was placed upon the 
 pyre.' 1 The theory doubtless was that the slave wife's 
 heart too brake just when she saw her husband placed 
 
 1 Edda Snorra, D. 49. 
 
410 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 upon his bier ; but, as the fact could not be made to hold 
 pace with the theory, the girl had to be strangled before 
 she was burned. 
 
 But there are some points in which the ritual has 
 decayed. The funeral fire lighted in the ship has here 
 sunk to be an unmeaning rite ; for not only were these 
 Russ not settled by the sea no longer by the sea, we may 
 say, for they had migrated inland from the Baltic shores 
 so that there could be no drifting westward to the 
 setting sun, but the ship was not even launched in a river. 
 It was dragged up upon the bank and then made firm with 
 stakes before lighting. We may believe that the Russ 
 had carried their old custom inland when they left the 
 coast. The very senselessness of the rite in this its later 
 form bears witness to the potency of the associations which 
 had given it birth and of the myth out of which it sprang. 
 
 The relics of Balder's bale are not to be looked for 
 only in funeral rites. We have said that with the Teutons 
 more than with any other people the saddest occasions 
 seemed to exchange places with times of festivity and 
 joy. In festivals .which lingered long after the worship 
 of Balder had been forgotten we can recognise the remains 
 of this great funeral feast of the sun god. The later 
 commemorations were the St. John's fires, of which some- 
 thing has already been said. 
 
 The celebration of Balder's bale was to some extent 
 confounded with a feast of a different origin, a feast held 
 in honour of the sun ; but that the two should have thus 
 mingled shows that Balder's bale fires must very early 
 have been made occasions of festivity. These bale fires 
 were lighted at Midsummer, taking the moment at which 
 the sun began his decline to commemorate the story of the 
 sun's death. 1 On the same principle the Teutons chose 
 the time of the year's shortest days to announce the advent 
 of the new spring, -Wherefore the same season was fixed 
 upon by the Church to celebrate the advent of Christ. 
 1 See p. 227. 
 
ST. JOHN'S FIKES. 411 
 
 Though Balder's bale fires were at first occasions of mourn- 
 ing, they very early took an opposite character. The 
 festival still survives ; it has lived on all through the 
 Middle Ages to our own times ; only, after Christianity 
 supplanted heathenism, the fires, instead of being Balder's 
 fires, changed their name into the St. John's fires, feux 
 de St. Jean, Johannisfeuer, which are known in the 
 principal countries of Europe. 
 
 ' On this day,' says a writer of the twelfth century, 1 
 describing the St. John's fires, ' they carry brands and 
 torches for the lighting of great fires, which typify the 
 Saint John, who was a light and a burning fire and the 
 forerunner of the True Light. In some places they roll 
 wheels, which signifieth that, as the sun riseth to the 
 height of his arc and can then rise no higher, so the fame 
 of St. John, who was at first thought to be the Christ, 
 lessened ; according to the testimony of his own words 
 when he said, " He shall increase, but I shall decrease." 
 Rather a strained analogy, as one must allow ; and yet if 
 we were to put Balder back again in the place that had 
 been usurped by St. John, these words would express, not 
 inaccurately, the place which their ancient sun-god held 
 in the hearts of men who were Christians but who still 
 kept a kindly memory for their old creed. ' Balder,' they 
 might have said, f seemed to us like a Christ before we 
 knew Christ ; but as the other increased so his fame de- 
 creased.' The rolling of the wheel which did really, as 
 this twelfth-century writer sees, typify the rolling of the 
 sun up to its highest arc, and its descent through heaven, 
 was far more appropriate to Balder than to the Scriptural 
 St. John the Baptist. 
 
 Not very different from this description of the twelfth 
 century is one of the nineteenth. It is of the St. John's 
 fire at Konz, 2 on the Mosel, in the year 1823. Here the 
 
 1 Johannes Beleth, Summa de Divinis Offitiis (circ. 1162), cap. 137, 
 quoted by Grimm, D. M. 516. 
 
 2 Not far from Thionville, and then in French Lorraine; but a German- 
 speaking place then as now. 
 
4.12 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 custom was that every house should furnish, a bundle of 
 straw, which was carried to the summit of a neighbouring 
 hill, the Stromberg, where in the evening the men, old 
 and young, assembled, while the women and girls stayed 
 below by a stream called Burbach. With the straw an 
 immense wheel was made, with a strong stake running 
 through the axle and standing out three feet on either 
 side. What remained of the straw was twisted into brands. 
 The mayor of Sierck gave the signal, and the wheel was 
 lighted, and with much shouting was then set rolling. 
 All threw their brands into the air. Some of the men 
 remained on the top ; some followed the burning wheel 
 down the hill to the Mosel. The wheel might go out before 
 it reached the river ; if it did not, then men augured a 
 good year for the vines. 
 
 Tn accounts such as these we are naturally brought to 
 think of the Eleusinian and Dionysiac festivals, or of the 
 mystery of Isis accompanied by a ' throwing of brands.' 
 Unquestionably, in the ceremony above described, there 
 does lurk some element of earth worship and of Dionysus 
 or wine-god worship, as the prediction about the vintage 
 testifies. Interesting, too, is it to see in this case, as in 
 so many others, the magical element of the myth lingering 
 when the meaning of it has been forgotten. Though men 
 have quite, or almost altogether, lost sight of the connection 
 between their fiery wheel and the sun, they still keep hold 
 on the notion that the length of time during which the 
 former burns will affect their vine harvest. The length of 
 time during which the sun continues to give out his heat, 
 before he sinks into his winter sleep, of course is a matter 
 of importance. 
 
 In Finistere the feux de St. Jean present, or did pre- 
 sent for the writer from whom I quote * complains that, 
 even at that time, 1835, the old customs of Brittany were 
 rapidly on the wane a unique sight. 6 Cries of joy are 
 
 1 Souvestre in his edition of Cambry's Voyage dans le Finistere. 
 
ST. JOHN'S FIEES. 413 
 
 heard from every side. Every promontory, every rock, 
 every mountain, is alight. A thousand fires are burning 
 in the open air, and from afar off you may descry the 
 shadow-like figures moving round the fire in their dance : 
 one might fancy it a dance of courils. 1 The fires are often 
 lighted by the priests, who make processions through the 
 villages with consecrated tapers. At St.-Jean du Doigt 
 an angel is made to descend from the church tower, 
 bearing a torch in his hand. He sets alight the principal 
 fire, which burns in the churchyard. On every road you 
 meet companies of maidens coming out to dance round the 
 fires. They must not return until they have danced round 
 nine of these, if they wish to be married within the twelve- 
 month.' At Brest, again, as at the Johanhisfeuer at Konz, 
 'people whirled round torches, to look like wheels. . . .' 
 
 ' On the vigil of St. John the Baptist, commonly called 
 Midsummer Eve,' says Strutt, 2 'it was usual in most country 
 places for the inhabitants, both old and young, to meet 
 together and make merry by the side of a large fire, made 
 in the middle of the street or in some open and convenient 
 place, over which the younger men frequently leapt by way 
 of frolic, and also exercised themselves with various sports 
 and pastimes.' And he quotes from a rhymed English 
 version, made in the sixteenth century, of the ' Pope's 
 Kingdom,' by Tho. Neogeorgius, wherein the same fes- 
 tivities are described. 
 
 Then doth the joyful feast of John the Baptist take his turne ; 
 When bonfires great, with lofty flame, in every street do burne, 
 And younge men round about with maides doe daunce in everie 
 
 street, 
 With garlands wrought of mother wort, or else of vervaine sweet. 
 
 The leaping over the flame recalls the leap of Skirnir 
 (or of Sigurd, as we shall presently see) through the death 
 fire. It is a sort of vaunt on the part of the youth that 
 
 1 A race of fairies native in Brittany. 
 
 2 Sports and Pastimes. 
 
414 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Loki has not yet gotten them. At Burford, in Oxfordshire, 
 they used in these ceremonies of Midsummer's Day to carry 
 a dragon through the town, to which was added the image 
 of a giant. 1 In these we see Loki and Jormungandr. 
 
 On popular tales, from the great epics of the German 
 race, the tales of Sigurd and Siegfrid downwards, the 
 imagery of death, drawn from the funeral fire, has left a 
 peculiarly vivid impress ; and in these stories, as in many 
 of the rites above described, the true meaning of the myth 
 has been forgotten, and therefore the incidents which 
 should have expressed that meaning exist in garbled forms, 
 as survivals only. This is markedly the case with the 
 Volsung. saga. The story must once have been in part 
 at least a nature myth, being, as it is in parts, almost 
 identical with the story of Freyr's (or Skirnir's) ride to 
 Jotunheim to seek out GerS. In its present shape there 
 is this difference between it and the Ger5 myth, that in the 
 latter the meaning of each element of the tale is brought 
 very plainly forward, whereas in the Volsung legend a 
 great portion of the meaning has been obscured by time, 
 so that the narrator only records incidents without under- 
 standing their special significance. By comparison of the 
 two myths not forgetting the story of the Fiolsvinnsmal, 
 which we spoke of above, and which furnishes, in some 
 matters, a link between the legends of Skirnir and Sigurd 
 we can recast the history of Sigurd and Brynhild in its 
 original form. We have seen how Freyr or Skirnir had 
 to ride through the flickering flame into the courtyard of 
 G^mir, in whose house GerS was for the time imprisoned ; 
 and how in the Fiolsvinnsmal Svipdag had to pass through 
 the same circle of flame to come to Menglod; and we 
 know that without question this fiery barrier is symbolical 
 of the funeral fire that is, of death. 2 
 
 Now read the description of Sigrdrifa asleep on the 
 hill : 
 
 1 Strutt, 270. 8 Fafnismal, 42-4. 
 
SIGURD AND BKYNHILD. 415 
 
 A hall is on high Hindarfjoll ; 
 With fire ivithout 'tis all surrounded. 
 Mighty lords that palace builded 
 Of dire undimmed flame. 
 
 I know that on the fell a war maiden sleeps ; 
 
 Around her flickers the linden's bane, 1 
 
 With his thorn-thrust Odhinn through her weeds has 
 
 pierced her, 
 The weed of the maid who for heroes contended. 
 
 The pricking by Odhinn with a sleep thorn is really a 
 sending into mortal sleep ; for the thorn had become an 
 image of death from its connection with the funeral pyre. 
 Therefore the death of Brynhild is doubly expressed in the 
 above passage. Sigurd eventually found Brynhild as he 
 had been directed. He rode up the Hindarfjoll and thence 
 into Frankland. On the fells he saw a great light, as if a 
 fire were burning and casting its light high up into the 
 sky. He found there a ' shield-burg ' 2 and entered it, and 
 there he saw one whom he took for a warrior lying asleep 
 in complete armour. It was Brynhild or Sigrdrifa. Her 
 corselet had grown quite tight upon her body. 3 Sigurd 
 ripped it open, and so awoke her. After Sigurd had 
 plighted his faith to Brynhild he went to the court of 
 King Griuki, whose wife was Grimhild and his daughter 
 Godrun. Grimhild gave Sigurd a draught which made 
 him forget his love and all his promises. He then married 
 Godrun, the daughter of Giuki and Grimhild. Grimhild 
 now counselled her son Gunnar to woo Brynhild. Brynhild 
 had vowed to wed him only who could ride over the blazing 
 fire which lay around her hall. Gunnar could not make 
 his way through the fire ; so Sigurd changed forms with 
 him and then rode through. The description of this flame 
 might stand for a description of the great Muspilli, the 
 
 Fire 
 
 2 SJijaldborg, which generally means an array of battle ; here, perhaps, 
 used for some palisaded place full of slain, among which lay Brynhild. 
 
 3 Sigrdrifumal, Introd. See also Sigur>akv. Ffnb. I., 16. 
 
416 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 earth-consuming fire. 1 ' Sigurd rode, having in his hand 
 his sword Gram ; his horse Grani plunged forward, feeling 
 the spur. Now was there a great noise, as it says 
 
 The fire began to rage, the earth to shake ; 
 The flame rose high as heaven itself ; 
 Few of the people's princes ventured forth 
 The fire to ride through or to overleap. 
 
 Sigurd with his sword compelled Grani, 
 And the fire quenched before the hero ; 
 The flame was dimmed before the glory-lover, 
 On the bright saddle that Rok 2 had known.' 
 
 Brynhild was compelled to receive him, but Sigurd 
 gave himself the name of Gunnar. When the marriage 
 bed was prepared, he laid his sword between himself and 
 the bride, and when Brynhild nsked why he did this he 
 answered that he had been enjoined so to do. But they 
 exchanged rings. Then Sigurd rode back through the 
 fire, and he and Gunnar took their right forms again. 
 
 Notable are the likenesses and the points of difference 
 between this story and the Ni.belun gen-Lied. In the latter 
 Siegfried, who has made himself Gunther's man for love 
 of Criemhild, sister to Gunther, performs an office for the 
 bridegroom almost the same as that which Sigurd did for 
 Gunnar. That is to say, he overcomes the unwillingness 
 of Brunhild to receive the embraces of her husband, and 
 then he gives place to Gunther without dishonouring his 
 bed. But there is nothing said of the feat of riding through 
 the flame. For at the time at which the Nibelungen was 
 composed all shadow of meaning had been taken away 
 from this incident. 
 
 Yet the same incident still lingers on in popular lore, 
 though in a form different from that which it wears in the 
 Norse poems, and in one which without some previous 
 explanation would be scarcely recognisable. 
 
 1 See infra. 
 
 2 Rok is Doom. The meaning of this passage is not, however, quite 
 clear to me. 
 
SIEGFRIED AND BRUNHILD. 417 
 
 We owe to the researches of Grimm the proof that 
 some among the common thorn trees were by the Teuton 
 races so intimately associated with their use for lighting 
 fires that they received names from this use. 1 They were 
 sufficiently identified as 'burning plants.' The Gothic 
 word aihvatundi, which, generally means simply white- 
 thorn, has etymologically the signification of the * burner.' 
 If, then, the ideas of thorn and fire were so . intimately 
 associated in the German's mind, it is not wonderful that 
 a hedge of fire should sometimes have been replaced by a 
 hedge of thorn. This we find has happened in many 
 myths. The circle of flame which in earlier legends was 
 seen surrounding the house of death becomes converted, 
 in later German marchen, into a thorn hedge. When this 
 transformation has taken place the true meaning of the 
 hedge has, however, been forgotten. It is by this process 
 of change that even in the Brynhild myth the thorn makes 
 its. appearance. The maiden was pricked by Odhinn with 
 a sleep thorn. This means that she was sent to the house 
 of death. Accordingly, when we next see her on the 
 Hindarfjoll, she is lying on a mound surrounded by a 
 circle of fire. 
 
 This story, reappears in a household guise which is 
 familiar enough to us. The maiden whom we call the 
 Sleeping Beauty, 2 and the Germans Dornroschen, Thorn- 
 rose Bud, harmless and childlike as she seems, is in reality 
 no other than the Valkyria of the North, Brynhild herself. 
 This we easily see by examining the details of her history. 
 
 1 Veber das Verbrenncn der Leichcn. 
 
 2 Grimm, Kinder- u. Haus-Mahrchen. In the same mediaeval poem, Notre 
 Dame Ste. Marie, from which, in Chap. II., I quoted a passage which 
 showed the vitality of the belief in the parent tree and in descent from a 
 tree, we find another incident which seems to have arisen in the same way 
 as the hedge of briar in Dornroschen. Part of this history relates how the 
 mother of St. Anne, while a visgin, became with child only by smelling the 
 fruit of the life-giving tree (see Chap. II. p. 64). She was accused of 
 immorality by the Jews, and to prove her innocence she consented to walk 
 through the fire. As she passed, the flames turned into roses. 
 
 E E 
 
418 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF, 
 
 The angry fairy, who had not been invited to the chris- 
 tening, foretold that when the Eose Maiden had reached 
 her fifteenth birthday she would be pricked with a spindle 
 and fall down dead ; but this terrible sentence the other 
 fairies were able to commute to a sleep of one hundred 
 years. All happened as it was foretold, although, to 
 escape from fate, the king had, after the decree of the 
 fairies, ordered every spinning-wheel throughout the land 
 to be destroyed. The king and queen chanced to go out 
 upon the very day on which the maiden attained her 
 fifteenth year, and she, wandering about alone, came to an 
 unused tower of the castle, and there found an old dame 
 sitting alone and spinning. This dame is Fate. 1 'What 
 are you doing there ? ' said the king's daughter. ' Spinning,' 
 said the old crone, and nodded her head. ' How prettily 
 the wheel turns round.' Then the princess took the 
 wheel and began to spin; but scarcely had she done so 
 than the prophecy was fulfilled. She pricked her hand 
 and fell down in a deep sleep. And all the court fell 
 asleep too, and at last a thick thorn hedge grew up about 
 the palace and quite hid it from view. But still the tale 
 lived on in the neighbourhood of how there was a beautiful 
 maiden sleeping behind the hedge. At last, when her fate 
 was accomplished, came the prince, the Sigurd of this 
 fairy story, and broke through the hedge of thorn and 
 kissed the maiden back into life. 
 
 So much for the visits of gods and men to the world of 
 death. We have now to look on a still more awful picture, 
 which we might call the visit of the World of Death to 
 Mannheimar and Asgard. This is, in fact, the long- 
 foreseen, long vainly guarded against Last Day, when the 
 powers of darkness and chaos are to rise agakist order and 
 light, and bring destruction on the whole earth. 
 
 1 But she is also the same as Angrbodha. See what was said in Chap. 
 VI. of the spinning of Circe and of Calypso. 
 
RAaNAROK. 419 
 
 2. RagnaroJc. 
 
 A. gaping gap and nowhere grass. This is the primal 
 condition of things whereof the Edda speaks ; or of no- 
 things, for the gaping gap (Ginnungagap) is a translation 
 almost exactly of the Greek chaos, 1 and means but void 
 space. But imagination cannot dwell with mere negation, 
 so that the picture of Ginnungagap actually given us is of 
 a deep pit in the midst of which welled up, * at once and 
 ever,' a mighty spring called Hvergelrnir. From Hver- 
 gelmir flowed many streams, which rolled venom in their 
 course, and anon these hardened into ice, and the vapour 
 which rose^rom them hardened into rime. Thus on one 
 side of Hvergelmir were peaks of snow and ice ; but on 
 the other side was a fiery region called Muspell's-heim, 
 old as the great gap itself, and old as Niflhel (Mist-hell), 
 which lay beneath the earth. This MuspeH's-heim was a 
 land too glowing to be entered by any save those who 
 were native there. 'He who sits on the land's end to 
 guard Muspell's-heim is called Surtr (Swart). He bears 
 a flaming sword in his hand, and one day he shall come 
 forth to fight and vanquish all the gods, and consume the 
 world with fire.' 2 
 
 Fire and ice, which are thus shown as earlier than the 
 ordered world, were destined to outlive that world, and be 
 the chief agents in its destruction. Fire and cold were to 
 the Norseman the two great symbols of cleath one the 
 funeral fire through which men passed to the other world, 
 and the other the chill of the tomb. It was from the 
 meeting of the heated air from Muspell's-heim with the 
 icy vapour from Hvergelmir that the giant race came into 
 being ; and that swart god Surtr, who was the leader of 
 the sons of Muspell, was himself a king of death. In the 
 account of Ragnarok we see ranged under the leadership 
 
 1 xw, aor. exaSoz/, to gape. Thus Simrock derives ginnung.' Vig- 
 fusson, however, prefers to connect it with the A. S. beginnan, Eng. begin. 
 Vigfusson and Cleasby's Id. Diet. s. v. ginn. 
 
 2 Edda Snorra, 4. 
 
 B E 2 
 
420 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE SELIEF. 
 
 of the giants of cold and fire all minor images of destruc- 
 tion, the sun- and moon- devouring wolves, the sea mon- 
 ster, the Fenrisulfr, and Gar in the hell hound. 
 
 The forewarning of the end of the world was to be the 
 great winter, three years in duration, which the Eddas 
 call Fimbul winter. 1 ' Every man's hand shall be turned 
 against his brother, and sisters' children shall their kin- 
 ship rend asunder ; no man shall another spare.' 2 
 
 An axe age, a brand age ; shields shall be sundered ; 
 A wind age, a wolf age, ere the world welters. 
 
 Three cocks, it is said, are to proclaim to^ the world 
 the dawning of the Last Day : over the ^Esir shall crow the 
 gold-bright Gullinkambi ; 3 in the bird wood over Mann- 
 heimr, a bright red cock ; and beneath the earth, to rouse 
 the troops of ghosts, a cock of sooty red. When he hears 
 these, the giantesses' watch, the eagle, makes reply. 4 
 
 There on a hill sat, and his harp struck, 
 The giantesses' watch, glad Egdir. 5 
 Before him crowed, in the bird wood, 
 The blood red cock, Fiallar called. 
 
 The giant race rejoices and the central tree takes fire. 
 Heimdal, who had been set to guard the rainbow, now 
 blows loud his gjallar-horn 6 to warn the gods that danger 
 is near; for in truth Surtr is hastening with his fiery 
 bands from Muspell's home towards the fairs' bridge. 
 Then the gods take counsel together, and ride down to 
 meet the foe on Vigrid's plain. Odhinn consults Mini's 
 head. Can the danger yet be averted ? Time is drawing 
 to an end. 
 
 1 Curiously enough, the same tradition of the awful winter which was 
 to herald the Last Day existed among the Persians. 
 
 2 Voluspa, 46 (Liming). s Gold-combed. 
 
 < Voluspa-, 34. 5 The storm eagle. 
 
 Loud-sounding horn. Heimdal is a kind of Memnon. 
 
KAGNABOK. 421 
 
 Yggdrasill trembles ; though the ash still stands, 
 Yet groans that ancient tree. The jotun ! is loosened ; 
 Loud howls Garm 2 from the Gnupa cave ; 
 The fetter breaks and the wolf 3 runs free. 4 
 
 Now from the east comes sailing a ship; Hrym (Rime) 
 steers it, and all the frost giants are within. Another 
 ship, Naglfar, made of the nails of dead men, brings the 
 troops of ghosts, and that Loki steers. 5 Surtr rides over 
 Asbru, which takes fire beneath his tread and is burnt up ; 
 men tread hell's way, and heaven itself is cloven in twain. 
 
 Surt from the south fares, the giant with the sword ; 
 The gods' sun shines, reflected from his shield. 
 Rocks are shaken, and giantesses totter. 
 Heroes fare to hell, and heaven is cleft atwain. 6 
 
 The opposing powers meet in middle earth. On the 
 one side are Odhinn with the other JEsir and the Ein- 
 heriar that is to say, the heroes who have been taken to 
 Valholl on the other side are the giants and the ghosts 
 with Loki and his progeny, and with Surtr and his band 
 of fire. The field of battle is Vigrid's.plain. 
 
 How fares it with the ^sir ? how with the Alfar ? 
 Jotunheim roars ; the JEsir come to council ; 
 And the dwarfs are moaning before their stony doors, 
 Know ye what that betokens ? 7 
 
 The three great combats of Ragnarok are between 
 Odhinn and the wolf Fenrir, between Thorr and the Mid- 
 gard serpent, and between Freyr and Surtr. 
 
 1 Loki. 
 
 2 Garm, a hound who will devour the moon, and who is in nature com- 
 parable to Fenrir. 
 
 8 Fenrir. * Vol. 48 (Liming). 
 
 5 The two Eddas give different accounts of the sailing of Naglfar. The 
 Younger Edda confuses this ship with the one steered by Hrim, the King 
 of Frost Giants, the power of cold. 
 
 Vol. 51 ' Ibid. 52. 
 
422 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Now arises Hlin's second grief, 
 When Odhinn goes with the wolf to fight 
 And the bright slayer of Beli with Sort. 
 Then shall Frigg's beloved one fall. 1 
 
 Hlin is Frigg ; the bright slayer of Beli is Freyr. In 
 each of these battles there is a fitness. Fenrir is the type 
 not so much of destruction as of emptiness and the wide 
 mouth of the tomb, and so he is the natural antagonist of 
 Odhinn, the fount of all existence. Thorr is a kind of 
 sun god, analogous to Apollo or Heracles, and like them 
 ha combats the great sea or river serpent. Still more 
 appropriate is it that Freyr, god of the spring-time and of 
 the newness of life, should be opposed to Surt, the god 
 of death. 2 ' Freyr,' says the Younger Edda, ' would have 
 been victorious had he not given away his sword to Skirnir 
 what time he was a- wooing GerS ; ' and the nature myth 
 underlying this saying is not difficult to interpret. To 
 these three combats recorded in the Yoluspa the Younger 
 Edda adds a fourth namely, of Tyr with Garni and iii 
 this instance, as in so many others, Tyr is but a pale shadow 
 of Odhinn, for Garm cannot be essentially different from 
 Fenrir. 
 
 When Odhinn has been killed by Fenrir he is revenged 
 by Yidar, who strikes his sword into the heart of the wolf. 
 Thorr kills Jorinungandr ; but, suffocated by the dragon's 
 poisonous breath, he recoils nine paces and falls dead. Tyr 
 and Garm slay one another. Last of all Loki and Heimdall 
 fight ; each kills the other. And now Death (Surtr) stalks 
 unhindered over earth and, spreading flame on every side, 
 consumes it all. 
 
 The sun darkens ; the earth sinks in the sea. 
 From heaven fall the bright stars. 
 The tire-wind storms round the all-nourishing tree ; 
 The flame assails high heaven itself. 3 
 
 > Vol. 53. 
 
 8 Surtr is scarcely to be distinguished from Loki ; each of them conducts 
 the sons of Muspell (Vol. 50 ; Edda Snorra, 4). Vol. 56. 
 
RAGNAEOK. 423 
 
 The original myth of Bagnarok perhaps ended here, 
 drawing a veil over all things, plunging the earth again 
 into darkness, as out of darkness it had emerged. As the 
 old proverb said, 'Few can see farther forth than when 
 Odhinn meets the wolf.' But the Ecldas do pass beyond 
 this picture, and, influenced thereto perhaps by Chris- 
 tianity, they lift the veil again upon a new world, which 
 rises out of the ocean of chaos, peopled by a new race of 
 mankind and a younger generation of ^Esir. In a passage 
 of the Voluspa, of unrivalled beauty, we are told how the 
 prophetess, with an eye which pierces beyond Eagnarok, 1 
 
 Sees arise, a second time, 
 
 Earth, from ocean, green again ; 
 
 Waters fall once more ; the eagle flies over, 
 
 And from the fell fishes for his prey. 
 
 The ^Esir come together on Ida's plain ; 
 Of the earth-encircler, the mighty one, they speak. 
 Then to the mind are brought ancient words a 
 And the runes by Fimbultyr 3 found. 
 
 Then will once more the wondrous 
 Golden tablets in the grass be found, 
 Which in the ancient days the ^Esir had, 
 The folk-ruling gods, and Fiolnir's race. 
 
 Unsown shall the fields bear fruit- 
 Evil shall depart, Balder come back again; 
 In Hropt's 4 high hall dwell Balder and Hoder, 
 The happy gods. 
 
 A hall I see brighter than the sun, 
 With gold adorned, on Gimil ; 
 There shall noble princes dwell, 
 And without end the earth possess. 
 
 Then rides the Mighty One, to the gods' doom going, 
 The Strong One from above who all things governs. 
 He strifes shall stay and dooms shall utter, 
 Holiness establish which shall ever be. 
 
 1 Vol. 57 sqq. 2 Or perhaps ' deeds of might.' 
 
 * The great Tyr, i.e. the great god. 4 Odhinn's. 
 
424 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Yet even now all is not well ! 
 
 Then comes the dark Dragon 2 flying, 
 The serpent from below, from Niflhel. 
 Nidhogg bears fipon his wings that fly 
 Earth's fields over, 
 A corpse. . . . 
 
 Nidhhog, serpent of death, is still not dead. Is, then, 
 the old course of life and death to be repeated for ever ? 
 We cannot say. 
 
 The impression of this great myth remained in Ger- 
 many, but it was in Christian times overshadowed by other 
 more distinctly Biblical pictures of the Day of Judgment. 
 Nevertheless some of the names and incidents were pre- 
 served. Ragnarok was by the Germans called Muspilli. 
 This word, in the sense of the fire of doom, has been pre- 
 served in many different dialects of the German language, 
 notably in Saxon and in Bavarian. 
 
 We have a long poem in Bavarian bearing the name 
 Muspilli. The personages of the poem have undergone 
 the same kind of transformation which turned Balder 
 into St. John the Baptist ; but the character of the old 
 battle and the combats recorded in it are to a great extent 
 the same as those of the Eddaic Ragnarok. The place of 
 Loki is taken by the old fiend ; that of Surtr is taken by 
 Antichrist, with whom fights Elias, a veritable sun god, 
 though not a Northern one. 3 
 
 * This have I heard the wise ones declare. Elias shall 
 
 1 Vol. 64. 
 
 2 Drcld, an unusual word, the presence of which affords one reason for 
 supposing this passage of late insertion. 
 
 8 In Greek popular tradition the deeds of the sun god (Apollo, Helios) 
 are transferred to Elias. The chief motive for the choice of this Old 
 Testament prophet lies in the likeness of his name to that of Helios. 
 Besides that Elias drives in a chariot up to heaven. I take Elias here to 
 be Freyr; Simrock, however, says he must be Thorr (1. c. p. 130; see also 
 Grimm, s. v. Mias). Elias is undoubtedly the thunderer, and has a chariot. 
 Still Antichrist must be Surtr, the antagonist of Freyr. 
 
MUSPILLI. 425 
 
 strive with Antichrist. The wolf is prepared ; a battle 
 there shall be. Mighty the combat; mighty the reward. 
 Elias strives for everlasting life ; of the righteous will he 
 the kingdom establish ; wherefore all heavenly powers to 
 his help shall come. Antichrist upholds the old fiend, 
 Satan. . . .' Both Antichrist and Elias will fall. The 
 blood of the latter is to set the world afire. t The hills 
 burn ; no tree in all the world remains. The seas dry up ; 
 the heaven is consumed in flame. The moon falls from 
 heaven ; Mittelgard burns. No rock stands firm ; the day 
 of vengeance is at hand. . . .' 
 
 We might fairly say that the old heathen hell or 
 Helheim lived on in men's belief in the form of purga- 
 tory; while the gloomy thought of Catholicism added a 
 hell which was infinitely more terrible than Helheim. 
 Purgatory formed a middle term, which helped men to 
 measure the horrors of eternal punishment. But, as a 
 fact, it happened that the gloomy teaching of the Church 
 overreached itself ; the most terrible picture was beyond 
 the capacity of imagination, and men recoiled from it 
 and kept their eyes fixed upon purgatory. I doubt if the 
 notion of eternal punishment was really very often present 
 to men's thoughts in the Middle Ages; for we find that 
 the indulgences were always offered in the profession of 
 saving men from a longer durance in purgatory; they 
 were offered even to the living on that plea ; whereas it 
 might have been supposed that men's first thought would 
 have been how to escape the place of eternal pain. We 
 find too a thing most significant that mediaeval legend 
 is full of visions of purgatory ; but that, before the time of 
 Dante, we hear little of visions of hell. 
 
 It is in the purgatory legends, therefore, that we must 
 search, if we wish to discover traces of the beliefs of 
 heathenism touching the nether world in the Middle Ages. 
 And it may be added that it is in visions of journeys to 
 the earthly Paradise that we must look for like information 
 
426 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 concerning the survival of the old heathen Paradise. We 
 do find many traces of both these orders of belief. It is 
 certain that the essential features of the heathen under- 
 world reappear in the Christian purgatory legends ; but it 
 is not so easy to say that these have been handed down 
 directly from the beliefs of German heathenism. Many 
 images taken from classic antiquity, and many drawn from 
 the Bible, are to be found mingled in the picture. Never- 
 theless there are some elements which are especially charac- 
 teristic of German thought, as we shall presently see. 
 
 At first the visions are meagre in details, because, as I 
 suppose, the marriage between Christian and heathen belief 
 was not yet completed ; gradually they expand in variety, 
 until they reach their perfect form in the vision of the 
 Florentine. 
 
 The heathen belief in hell cannot be kept altogether 
 apart from the belief in heaven ; and no more can the 
 purgatory legends be kept quite apart from those of the 
 Earthly Paradise. Nevertheless we must leave to speak 
 of the latter, in any detail until the next chapter. We 
 shall in that chapter see more fully the reasons which 
 made Ireland (the most western island known to mediaeval 
 Europe) a home for all myths connected with the future 
 of the soul. We shall see how that the great Middle Age 
 legend of the Earthly Paradise was the legend of the voyage 
 of St. Brandan, an Irish monk. The great Middle Age 
 legend of purgatory was that of the purgatory of St. 
 Patrick ; and of the lesser visions which prepared the way 
 for the myth of St. Patrick's purgatory, or for the still 
 more awful vision of Dante, a very large number indeed 
 had their origin in Ireland. 
 
 One of the earliest visions of the other world vouch- 
 safed to a Christian monk was that of St. Fursey, an Irish 
 monk, said to have been the nephew of St. Brandan ; his 
 story is mentioned by Bseda, and reported at length in the 
 ' Acta Sanctorum.' l 
 
 1 Acta SS. Jan. ii. 36. 
 
VISIONS OF PURGATORY. 427 
 
 Once it happened that Fursey was sick nigh to death. 
 He was being borne back to his monastery, wishing to die 
 there. Upon the journey they began to sing a vesper 
 hymn, and suddenly while he was singing a darkness 
 seemed to surround him ; he felt four hands placed beneath 
 him to lift up his body, and he could discern that four 
 white wings bore him along. As he grew more accustomed 
 to the darkness he saw that two angels were carrying him, 
 and that before them went a third, armed with a white 
 shield and flaming sword. The angels, as they flew, 
 sweetly chaunted ' Ibunt sancti de virtute in virtutem ; 
 videbitur Deus deorum in Sion ; ' l and he heard the choir 
 of angels answering in song from above. This was all he 
 knew. Another time the same two angels bare him to 
 the mouth of hell, where he saw nothing but heard the 
 howling of demons. Afterwards he saw the four fires of 
 purgatory, at the four corners of the earth. 
 
 There is scarcely any link, saving the fact that the 
 vision was seen in Ireland, which connects this story with 
 the older notions of heathen mythology. It is pure 
 Christian throughout, and of great beauty in its simplicity. 
 Yet may we not say that the two white-winged angels of 
 this vision are not greatly different from those other two, 
 Hypnos and Thanatos, who bore Sarpedon to his tomb in 
 Lycia ? 2 who in their turn only present in a fairer form 
 the belief in the two dogs, ' the four-eyed guardians of the 
 path, guardians of men.' 
 
 Another vision recorded by Bseda is the vision of 
 Drihthelm, a Northumbrian monk. This story too came 
 from Ireland. 3 First we have the appearance of the dark 
 valley which we know so well in all visions of the under 
 
 1 Ps. Ixxxii. 8, Vulg. 
 
 2 //. xvi. 681, &c. ; see also Chap. VI. 
 
 3 bee Wright, St. Patricks Purgatory, p. 18. The story was said to 
 have been told by Drihthelm to Ilsemgils, a monk of Ireland, and by him 
 to Bffida. Wright says, ' The vision of Drihthelm, like that of Furseus, was 
 the subject, of ji homily in the Saxon Church, of which a copy is preserved 
 in a MS. of the public library ' (University Library) 'of Cambridge, Ti, 133.' 
 
428 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 world. Then a curious touch follows. Passing along 
 this valley, they found that one side was filled with roar- 
 ing flames ; the other side was not less intensely cold, and 
 was swept by storms of hail and rain. Here is that com- 
 bination of frost and heat to form a complete picture of 
 the horrors of the place of torments which we afterwards 
 meet with in so many visions of hell and purgatory. For 
 we find the ancient Sea of Death transformed in the 
 Catholic legends either into a lake of fire or into a lake of 
 ice. This combination of heat and cold is in accord with 
 Norse belief, which placed hell in the North, which made 
 Loki, the god of fire, come from icy Jofcunheim, and Surtr, 
 the swart King of Death, fare from Muspelheim. The 
 jotuns themselves were born of the mingling of fire and 
 ice. 1 St. Brandan found hell in the North. Drihthelm 
 for his sight of purgatory travelled north-east. This too 
 is in accord with the tradition of Norse mythology. At 
 the end of the valley of heat and cold Drihthelm came to 
 the mouth of a pit from which arose an intolerable stench, 
 and thence came a wailing and a laughter ; and he saw 
 devils dragging souls into the pit. In both these visions, 
 as in almost all which follow, purgatory is imagined on the 
 earth, but hell beneath it. The latter is in a pit, reaching 
 far down, of which the visionary sees the mouth only. 
 Purgatory we might liken to Jotunheimar, hell to Hel- 
 heiinar. 
 
 In the vision of Charles the Fat, King of France, 
 which is a couple of centuries at least later than that of 
 Drihthelm, 2 more details have grown into the picture of 
 the other world, as, for instance, a labyrinthine valley of 
 death, along which the soul, like Theseus in the Cnossiaii 
 labyrinth, must guide itself by a thread. In his vision the 
 Emperor saw giants, serpents, rivers of molten metal, and 
 
 1 Edda Snorra, 5. 
 
 2 It was first published by William of Malmesbury (114:3), and may 
 be no earlier than the twelfth century. Charles ascended the throne in 
 884. 
 
\ 
 
 ST. PATEICK'S PURGATORY. 429 
 
 many pits in which the wicked were punished ; but there 
 is nothing very distinctive in the picture. 
 
 The great era for the record of journeys to the land of 
 shades was the twelfth century, and in these all the be- 
 longings of purgatory and of hell which we have become 
 familiar with from studying mediseval art or from reading 
 Dante begin to appear. There are at least half a dozen 
 accounts, more or less detailed, of visions of purgatory ; 
 and these culminate in the legend of Henry of Saltrey 
 touching the visit of a certain knight to St. Patrick's 
 Purgatory in Lough Derg, Ireland. From the tenth to 
 the fourteenth century constitutes an important era in 
 the history of Catholicism ; for during that time the con- 
 ceptions both of this world and of the next grow steadily 
 darker, until the mythology of that age is consummated 
 in the ' Divine Comedy.' Prom the time of Henry of 
 Saltrey to the time of Dante (1153-1300) the ruling in- 
 fluence which moulded the popular conception of the nether 
 world is to be looked for in the legend of St. Patrick's 
 Purgatory. There is moreover one point of marked differ- 
 ence between this narrative and the purgatory legends 
 which preceded it. The earlier stories were founded on 
 mere visions ; the spirit was believed to have been snatched 
 away during an illness of the visionary or in his sleep. 
 But the legend of Henry of Saltrey relates the descent of a 
 living man. This man was Sir Owayne, who went down 
 in the body, remained, like Dante, in the nether kingdom 
 during one night, and returned unscathed the following 
 day. There can be no question that the ground ideas 
 which went to the shaping of the s Comedy ' are to be 
 traced to the legend of Owayne Miles. 
 
 The idea of the descent of the living man is a very 
 important element in the belief, because this descent itself 
 is recognised as a sort of expiatory act. Wherefore Sir 
 Owayne is not in the place so much of one who (as in a 
 vision) sees the punishments of others, as of one who shares 
 in those punishments. He has, in fact, actually been to 
 
430 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the nether world in every sense just as Odysseus in the 
 earlier legend concerning him must have been imagined 
 actually undergoing death and not merely visiting Hades' 
 kingdom. Such is the idea which lies concealed in the 
 notion of St. Patrick's purgatory a.nd in the promise 
 which Jesus made to the saint that this purgatory should 
 be for anyone to go down into who would, and whosoever 
 dared to go there it should be for him as if he had passed 
 through purgatory after death. 
 
 * What mon,' he sayde, ' that wylle hereyn wende, 
 And dwelle theryn a day and a nygth 
 And holde his byleve and rygth, 
 
 Whether he be sqwyer or knave, 
 Other purgatorye shalle he non have. 1 
 
 The journey of Owayne, therefore, may fairly be com- 
 pared with journeys of the old Norse heroes and gods to 
 the nether world, such as those which we traced in the 
 earlier part of this chapter. 
 
 The purgatory of St. Patrick received its name because 
 the entrance to it had been revealed by Christ to St. Patrick, 
 with that promise attached which I have just quoted. The 
 saint built a monastery about the entrance, and secured 
 the way with a strong iron gate. One day came the knight 
 Owayne and obtained leave for penance' sake to make the 
 journey into that purgatory. The door which the prior 
 opened for him led to the long dark Valley of Death, and 
 at ' the deep ditch's end ' Owayne emerged from pitch 
 darkness to a sort of twilight. This dim region, which we 
 might call the land of the setting sun, was the fore- court 
 to the place of punishment. It corresponds well enough 
 to the limbo in which Dante met the poets and philosophers 
 of Greece and Rome ; as these lived in a ' blind life ' bereft 
 of hope, so was the first place to which Owayne came a 
 
 1 Owayne Miles, Cotton MS. Calig. A. ii. f . 89. See St. Patrick's Purga- 
 tory, p. 66. This is a metrical version of the legend of Henry of Saltrey. 
 
ST. PATRICK'S PUEGATORY. 431 
 
 desert, a ' wildernesse, for ther grewe nother tre ner gresse.' 
 And, somewhat as Dante met in limbo the comrades of 
 Virgil, did Owayne meet in this place fifteen men in white 
 garments, who warned him of all that he would have to 
 undergo. After that there broke upon the knight's ears 
 the din of hell, which, hinted at long before in the names 
 of the infernal rivers Cocytus and Gjoll, became from this 
 time forth a very conspicuous feature in the mediaeval 
 visions of the under world. We know how that din broke 
 upon the ears of the Florentine. 
 
 Diverse lingue, orribili favelle, 
 
 Parole di dolore, accenti d' ira, 
 
 Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle, 
 
 Facevano un tumulto, il qnal s' aggira 
 
 Senipre in quell' aria, senza tempo tinta, 
 
 Come la rena quando il turbo spira. 
 
 In Owayne's case it is 
 
 As alle tlie layte l and alle the thonder 
 That ever was herde.heven under, 
 And as alle the tres and alle the stones 
 Shulde smyte togedyr rygth at oones. 
 
 And now farther on into the region of Jotunheim ; for 
 it became presently * derke and wonther colde,' where a 
 man 
 
 Hadde he never so mony clothes on 
 * But he wolde be colde as ony stone. 
 
 Anon the fiends led him into another field of punishment, 
 where the pains were all from burning fire and where were 
 many pits full of molten metal, in which men stood. Some 
 were in up to the chin, some to the paps, some to the 
 middle, some only to the knees. This imagery too has 
 been of service to Dante. 2 The journey still continued 
 till the knight reached the mouth of hell. He came, says 
 the narrative, to a great water, broad and black as pitch. 
 
 1 Lightning. 
 
 2 As in his description of the Eiver of Blood, Inferno, canto xii. 
 
 ^ 
 
 OF THK 
 
 DIVERSITY 
 
432 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Over the water a "brygge there vras, 
 Forsoothe kenere than ony glasse: 
 Hjt was narrowe and hit was hyge. 
 
 And that made the bourne of his journey in that direction. 
 Afterwards he had a sight of Paradise. 
 
 Contemporary with this history of Sir Owayne is the 
 vision of Tundale, also an Irishman and a monk. This is 
 not a journey, but a vision. The same concomitants to the 
 orthodox under-world appear here a dark valley, a stink- 
 ing river, and a lake, and over these a bridge. One side 
 of the valley was burning, the other side frozen. In this 
 case, moreover, there was a windy place which was a kind 
 of fore-court to purgatory, and which in a certain sense 
 corresponds to the second circle of Dante's hell, where 
 the souls of carnal sinners are whirled round in a perpetual 
 storm of wind and hail. 1 
 
 Dante once more brought hell, and with it the notion 
 of eternal punishment, prominently before men's eyes. 
 But in doing this he had considerably to lighten the 
 colours in which purgatory had been depicted by other 
 hands. For all the purposes which concern our enquiry 
 that is, for everything which concerns the picture of the 
 under- world presented to the thoughts of men the train 
 of association runs as we have traced it, from the heathen 
 Helheim to the mediaeval purgatory and from that to the 
 hell of Dante. I have said that in this matter the con- 
 nection between German heathenism and Christianity is 
 not very close; but yet in certain points it has been 
 clearly traceable. 
 
THE EAETHLY PARADISE. 433 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE EARTHLY PARADISE. 
 
 WHEN Christianity drew a curtain in front of the past 
 creeds of heathen Europe, a veil through which many an 
 old belief was left still faintly visible, she succeeded more 
 than with most things in blotting out the images which 
 in former days had gathered round the idea of a future 
 state. It is as if the new religion were content to leave 
 this world under much the same governance as before, 
 provided only she were secured the undisputed possession 
 of the world beyond the grave. So the heathen gods were 
 not altogether ousted from their seats. The cloak of 
 Odhinn that blue mantle, the air, of which the sagas tell 
 us fell upon the shoulders of St. Martin ; his sword 
 descended to St. Michael or St. George : Elias or Nicholas 
 drove the chariot of Helios or wielded the thunders of 
 Thorr. 1 They changed their names, but not their characters, 
 passing for awhile behind the scene to be refurnished for 
 fresh parts : just as when the breath of the new creed 
 blew over the fields, the old familiar plants and flowers 
 died down Apollo's narcissus, Aphrodite's lilies, Njord's 
 glove, or Freyja's fern to grow up again as the flowers 
 of Mary, Our Lady's hand, the Virgin's hair. 2 But it was 
 different with the beliefs which passed beyond this life. 
 The whole doctrine of a future state, which for the 
 European races had formerly belonged to the region of 
 languid half-belief, 3 now suddenly became a stern reality. 
 
 1 Wuttke, Deutsche Volksaberglaube, p. 19, and Grimm, Deut. Myth. pp. 
 127, 946, and 68 n., 371, 4th ed. Elias, id. p. 144. 
 
 2 Cf. Johannis Bauhini, De plantis a di-cis sanctisve nomina habentibus, 
 Basiliae, 1521. Cf. also Grimm, D. M. 4th ed. p. 184 (Balders hrar). 
 
 3 European races. Among the Indo-European nationalities the Persians 
 
 P F 
 
434 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 This doctrine grew greater while earthly things grew 
 less, until at last it seemed to take a complete hold upon 
 the imagination, and to gather round itself all that was 
 greatest in the poetical conception of the time. Then, 
 from having been so impressive, the idea of eternity 
 became familiar by constant use. At last it took, in the 
 hands of dull unimaginative men, a ghastly prosaic 
 character, whereby we see the infinities of pleasure and 
 pain, of happiness or woe, mapped oat and measured in 
 the scales. 
 
 It is on this account not easy to trace back the belief 
 of Northern and Western Europe on such matters to that 
 state in which it was while yet untouched by the doctrines 
 of Christianity. Beside the dreadful earnestness of the 
 two great pictures of Catholic mythology, the mediseval 
 heaven, and the mediaeval hell, the less obtrusive notions 
 of earlier days fell into the background. The older idea 
 of a future state was not of a place for rewards or punish- 
 ments so much as for a quiet resting after the toils of life, 
 as the sun rests at the end of day. If such a creed were to 
 live on at all in the Middle Ages, it must do so in defiance 
 of the dominant religion. It must survive in virtue of 
 the Old Adam of pagan days, not yet rooted out. It must 
 find its home in the breasts of those who had not really 
 been won over to the dominant creed ; who resented as 
 something new and intrusive the presence of a restraining 
 moral code, or who would fain believe that the neglected 
 gods were not really dead ; that they were, peradventure, 
 asleep, or upon a journey and had not for ever given up 
 their rule. It was through such influences as these that 
 the pagan notions concerning a future state survived in the 
 mediaeval pictures of an Earthly Paradise. This was a 
 home of sensuous ease, unblessed perhaps with the keenest 
 enjoyments of life, but untouched also with the fear by 
 which these pleasures are always attended that they will 
 
 raised the doctrine of heaven and hell to supreme importance, and in so 
 doing greatly, though indirectly, affected the creed of Christendom. 
 
THE EARTHLY PARADISE. 435 
 
 soon be snatched away. The saints and confessors might 
 have their heaven and welcome. Their rapturous holy 
 joys were not suited to the heroes of chivalry. There 
 must therefore be, men thought, another home set apart 
 for them, for Arthur and his knights, for Charlemagne 
 and his paladins ; where, untroubled by turbulent emo- 
 tions, they should enjoy the fruit of their labours in a 
 perpetual calm. 
 
 Catholicism of course made some concession to this 
 spirit. A way for doing this was opened by the Biblical 
 account of the garden of Eden ; for though the Mosaic 
 record says that man was turned out of the garden, it says 
 nothing about the destruction of Paradise. And accord- 
 ingly we find lay and clerical writers alike speculating 
 upon the nature of this place and the road by which it 
 was to be reached : and presently we find accounts of both 
 real and mythical voyages to the east in search of the 
 desired land. But there still remained a question in dis- 
 pute between orthodoxy and ancient heathenism. The 
 former naturally insisted upon the fact that Eden was in 
 the east, but heathenism had an obstinate prejudice that 
 its Paradise lay westward ; so on this point there was a 
 battle between the two faiths. 
 
 In truth, we find that, like the needle when a neigh- 
 bouring magnet has been withdrawn, popular belief on the 
 matter of the Earthly Paradise, when not subject to the 
 influence of ecclesiastical teaching, tends constantly to veer 
 round from the orthodox tradition. And this fact would 
 alone be enough to convince us that the myth which we 
 traced in the story of the voyage of Odysseus has had its 
 echo in other lands. But we are not left to this inferential 
 proof. We have seen how the notion of the earth-girding 
 Sea of Death permeated the beliefs of heathen Germany; 
 and though, because of the gloomy character of that creed, 
 the darker side of the conception seems always to lie 
 uppermost, we have no reason to question that there was 
 another and a brighter side. 
 
 F F 2 
 
436 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Whether even in the case of the storj of the death of 
 Balder some picture of a paradise did not follow after the 
 scene of death I am much inclined to doubt. We know 
 how universal among the Norse people was the desire 
 for a funeral which should imitate as closely as possible 
 the funeral of Balder ; and I cannot but believe that the 
 Norsemen fancied that in this way they went to join the 
 sun god in a far-off happy land. And the vision which 
 succeeds the Yala's account of the destruction of all things 
 at Ragnarok, the vision of a new and better earth arising 
 once more from the sea, and Balder coming again from 
 Helheim to rule there, seems to express the hope in which 
 men went to death. 1 
 
 But, as we well know, the belief in an earth- encircling 
 Sea of Death was not confined to the Teutons of the North, 
 nor even to the German race. There are visible traces of 
 it among all the nations of Europe ; it and the belief in 
 the soul's passage over that sea have been the property of 
 all the Aryas. With some among the races of our stock 
 these myths existed only as parts of a vague and general 
 belief. But among all those who lived near the Western 
 Sea that is, beside the Atlantic or the Mediterranean 
 the belief grew to be a precise one. Most of these peoples 
 could have pointed out some spot in their country whence 
 the ghostly cargo set out upon its voyage, and most had 
 some special tradition of the locus of their home for the 
 departed spirits. One among such resting-places for the 
 shades was the little island of Heligoland. This was the 
 belief current. among Germans of the north of Continental 
 Germany. To the Germans of the Rhine mouth, the 
 Ripuarians or the Frisians, our own island at one time 
 occupied the same place in popular mythology, and from 
 being Angel-land became Engel-land, wherein no living 
 man dwelt. It was this, too, to still nearer neighbours of 
 
 1 Though the colours of this picture have been much deepened through 
 the influence of Christianity, I doubt not but that the belief was grounded 
 upon heathen tradition. 
 
 
ENGLAND THE HOME OF SOULS. 437 
 
 ourselves, Procopius gives us a picture of the belief which 
 by the sixth century had grown up among the peasants 
 of northern Gaul concerning Britain. Britain in his nar- 
 rative has become changed into a fabulous island, Brittia ; 
 one half of which was thought to be habitable by living 
 men, while the other half was set apart to be the home of 
 ghosts. Between the two regions stretched a wall, which 
 none could pass and live ; whoever did cross it instantly 
 fell dead upon the other side, so pestilential was the air. 
 But serpents and all venomous things dwelt on that other 
 side, and there the air was dark and spirit-haunted. It 
 was said that the fishermen upon the northern coast of 
 Gaul were made the ferrymen of the dead. To them was 
 assigned the office of carrying the souls across the Channel 
 to the opposite island of Brittia, and on account of this 
 strange duty Procopius declares they were excused from 
 the ordinary incidence of taxation. Their task fell upon 
 them by rotation, and those villagers whose turn had come 
 round were awakened at dead of night by a gentle tap 
 upon the door and a whispering breath calling them to 
 the beach. There lay vessels to all appearance empty and 
 yet weighed down as if by a heavy freight. Pushing off, 
 the fishermen performed in one night the voyage which 
 else they could hardly accomplish, rowing and sailing, in 
 six days and nights. When they had arrived at the strange 
 coast, they heard names called over and voices answering 
 as if by rota, while they felt their vessels gradually growing 
 light ; at last, when all the ghosts had landed, "they were 
 wafted back to the habitable world. 1 
 
 Claudian makes allusion to the same myth, referring 
 it to the same locality and connecting it with the journey 
 of Odysseus to Hades. 
 
 Est locus extremum pandit qua Gallia littus 
 Oceani praetentus aquis, ubi fertur Ulixes 
 Sanguine libato populum movisse silentem. 
 
 1 Procopius, Bell. Goth. iv. c. 20, pp. 620-5, ed. Paris ; ii. p. 659 sqq. 
 ed. Bonn. 
 
438 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Illic Timbrarum tenui stridore volantTim, 
 Flebilis auditur questus. Simulacra colon! 
 Pallida, defunctasque vident migrare figuras. 1 
 
 And I cannot heln associating with the same super- 
 stition a story which we find in Paulus Diaconus. 2 When 
 Pertaric, the dethroned King of the Lombards, was fleeing 
 from the power of Grimvald the Usurper, he went first to 
 France; but finding that Dagobert II., the Merovingian 
 king, was friendly to Grimvald, and fearing lest he should 
 be delivered over to his enemy, he took ship to pass over 
 to Britain. He had been but a little while upon the sea, 
 when a voice came from the hither shore, asking whether 
 Pertaric were in that ship ; and the answer was given, 
 * Pertaric is here.' Then the voice cried, ' Tell him he may 
 return to his own land, for Grimvald departed from this 
 life three days ago.' Surely this must have been the 
 ghost of Grimvald himself, arrived at the point of his sea 
 transit. Perhaps he could not pass over until he had 
 made this reparation for the injury done. 
 
 It must, one would suppose, be in memory of these 
 legends of the dead crossing the Channel that the men of 
 Cape Raz in Finistere still call the bay below this point, 
 the most westerly in France, ' la Baie des Trepasses,' the 
 Bay of the Dead. 3 
 
 Here again is a variation upon the same myth, taken 
 from the mouth of a peasant of modern Brittany. The 
 difference is that a certain river in Brittany has replaced 
 the British Channel, and that the shores of the departed 
 now lie along that river's banks. Saving that change we 
 have the essential parts of the older legend ; we have the 
 souls snatched away in a boat by the grim ferryman, just 
 such an one as he who .plied across the Styx or across the 
 Northern Midgard Sea. I reproduce the story here not 
 because it is considered as a story specially curious for 
 
 1 In Rufin, i. 123. 2 Gest. Long. v. 32, 33. 
 
 8 Cambry, Voyage dans le Finistere, ii. 240. 
 
THE FERRY OF CARNOET. 439 
 
 there are similar legends of the Rhine ; and the Erl Konig 
 himself is a kind of King of Death but because of the 
 interest which belongs to the locality where the legend is 
 found lingering. All sorts of people have had their myths 
 of the Mortal River ; but those Bretons who live upon the 
 borders of what was once deemed the Sea of Death have 
 a special right to treasure this myth in their familiar folk 
 lore. 1 
 
 6 Many years ago there lived in the village of Clohars 
 a young couple called Guern and Maharit; they were 
 betrothed, and were to be married two days after the 
 " Pardon of the Birds," which, as everyone knows, happens 
 every year in the month of June at the forest of Carnoet. 
 
 6 One evening after sunset the lovers came home from 
 a visit to some relatives in the parish of Guidel. When 
 they reached the ferry of Carnoet, Guern shouted for the 
 ferryman. 
 
 '"Wait for me, Maharit," he said, "while I go and 
 light my pipe at my godfather's cottage : it is close by." 
 
 ' The boatman of the ferry was a mysterious being, 
 who lived alone in a hut beside the river. . . . He soon 
 appeared. He was tall and wild-looking, and long grey 
 hair floated over his shoulders. 
 
 6 " Who wants me ? " he growled. " It is too late. Are 
 you alone, maiden ? " 
 
 4 " Loik Guern is coming ; he has only gone to light 
 his pipe." 
 
 ' " He must be quick, then. Get into the boat," said 
 the ferryman impatiently. 
 
 6 The girl obeyed mechanically. But she was surprised 
 and frightened to see the ferryman jump and push the 
 boat off from the bank without a moment's delay. 
 
 ' " What are you doing, my friend?" she cried. "We 
 must wait for Loik Guern, I tell you." 
 
 1 Pictures and Legends from Normandy and Brittany, by Thomas and 
 Katherine Macquoid, p. 19 sqq. For a similar German legend see Kuhn, 
 tinge //, Geb. u. Marclien, i. 9. 
 
440 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 c There was no answer, and now the boat reached the 
 current, and, instead of passing across to the opposite 
 shore, they shot rapidly down the river. 
 
 ' " Stop, stop, my friend, for pity's sake ! " cried Maharit 
 in an agonised voice. . . . She clasped her hands im- 
 ploringly; but the ferryman neither spoke nor looked at 
 her, and the boat, still impelled forward, descended the 
 river more and more rapidly. 
 
 ' Maharit bent towards the shore. " Loik ! Loik ! " she 
 cried. The words died away on her lips, for she saw 
 shadowy forms standing on the gloomy banks ; they 
 stretched their arms towards her with menacing gestures, 
 and she drew back shuddering. She knew they were the 
 spirits of the murdered wives of Commore. . . . 
 
 6 Lo'ik Guern lit his pipe, said a few words to his god- 
 father, and hastened back to the ferry. But Maharit was 
 gone, and the boat was gone too ! He gazed anxiously 
 across the river and up and down its banks, now cold and 
 sombre in the gathering darkness. There was no sound 
 or sight of living thing. 
 
 < "Maharit! Maharit! "he cried, "where art thou?" 
 From far away a cry came to him on the night 
 breeze. . . . 
 
 ' Suddenly, from amidst the tall weeds and rushes, rose 
 up the gaunt figure of an old beggar woman. 1 
 
 ' " You waste your breath, young man," she said. 
 "The boat and those in it are already far from here;" 
 and she pointed down the river. 
 
 ' " What do you mean, mother P What has happened 
 to Maharit?" 
 
 ' " The young girl has gone to the shores of the departed. 
 She forgot to make the sign of the cross when she got 
 into the boat, and she also looked behind her. . . ." 
 
 'He set off running like a madman along the river 
 banks in the direction the old woman had pointed out, 
 
 1 The counterpart of the Norse Thokk, &c. 
 
ST. BKANDAN'S ISLE. 441 
 
 waking the silence of the night with cries for his beloved 
 Maharit. 
 
 ' " Come back to me ! " he cried, " come back ! " but all 
 in vain.' l 
 
 Ireland, more westerly still, inherited in still larger 
 measure the glamour which popular superstition in the 
 dark ages shed over Britain. Ireland was thought to be the 
 very Earthly Paradise itself, and was therefore christened 
 with a name the exact counterpart of Pindar's /jba/cdpayv 
 vfjcroi, ; it was the ' Island of Saints.' But then, according 
 to other legends, it was likewise the home of the damned. 
 Here was the entry to St. Patrick's purgatory, the most 
 famous mouth of hell known in the Middle Ages ; and in 
 this island it was that Bridget saw in a vision a place 
 where souls were falling down into hell as thick as hail. 
 
 But the Irish themselves supposed the Island of the 
 Blessed lay to the west of their land ; and they told how 
 a monk of their own country, a descendant of St. Patrick, 
 having set out to make the voyage to Paradise, had lighted 
 upon this happy island, which henceforward went by 
 the name of St. Brandan's isle. Though the legend 
 itself the priestly version of it at least, which has alone 
 come down to us represents the saint as sailing eastward, 
 tradition insisted upon believing his land lay in the west. 
 Sometimes it was to the west of Ireland ; it could be seen 
 in certain weathers from the coast, but when an expedition 
 was fitted out to go and land there, the island somehow 
 seemed to disappear. Or it was localised in the Canaries. 
 It was, as the Spanish and Portuguese declared, an island 
 which had been sometimes lighted upon by accident, but 
 when sought for could not be found (quando se busca no 
 se halla}. A king of Portugal is said to have made a 
 conditional surrender of it to another when it should be 
 found ; and when the kingdom of Portugal ceded to the 
 Castilian crown its rights over the Canaries, the treaty 
 
 1 For the rest of the story I refer the reader to the delightful book from 
 which I have made this extract. 
 
442 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 included the island of St. Brandan, described as c the island 
 which had not yet been found.' 1 
 
 Dante, we know, did not accept the Greek story of 
 Odysseus' return from the Phseacians. In the eighth 
 chasm of Malebolge it is that the poet meets Ulysses, and 
 learns from him the narrative of his death. The same 
 motive influenced this Ulysses and this is the fact of 
 supreme importance to us to venture into the Atlantic 
 which doubtless Dante knew had influenced many sailors 
 of his time the hope to find a new land away in the 
 west. 
 
 'When I left Circe,' the much-enduring Greek says, 
 ' when I left Circe, who held me a year or more near 
 Gaeta before ^Eneas had given that place its name 
 neither my fondness for my son, nor piety towards my aged 
 father, nor the love with which I should have lightened the 
 heart of Penelope, could conquer the strong desire which 
 swayed me to gain knowledge of the world and of human 
 wickedness and worth. So 1 set forth upon the open sea 
 with one ship and with that small band by whom I had 
 never been deserted. One shore and the other I saw, as 
 far as Spain and Morocco, and the Island of Sardinia, and 
 other islands which that sea washes round. I and my com- 
 panions were old and slow when we gained the narrow 
 strait where Hercules has set up his sign-posts, that 
 men should not venture beyond. On the right I passed 
 Seville ; I had already passed Ceuta on the left. " Oh ! 
 my brothers," I cried, " who through a hundred thousand 
 dangers have reached the West, refuse not to this brief 
 vigil of your senses which is left the knowledge of the un- 
 peopled world beyond the sun. Consider your descent; ye 
 were not made to live the life of brutes, but to follow virtue 
 and knowledge." I made my comrades with this short 
 speech so eager for the voyage, that had I wished it I 
 could scarce have held them back ; and turning our backs 
 upon the morning and bearing always towards the left we 
 
 1 Wright, The Voyage of St. Brandan. Percy Soc. Pub., vol. xiv. 
 
DANTE'S ACCOUNT OF ULYSSES' VOYAGE. 443 
 
 made our oars wings for our foolish flight. Night saw 
 already the other pole and all its stars, and our pole so 
 low that it did not rise above the ocean floor. Five times 
 relit and quenched as often had been the light which the 
 moon sheds below, since we entered on the steep way, 
 when there appeared before us a mountain, dim with 
 distance, which seemed so high as I had never seen 
 mountain before. We rejoiced ; but our joy was soon 
 turned to grieving ; for from the land came a tempest 
 which struck the fore part of our vessel. Thrice it whirled 
 her round with all its waters, and the fourth time the poop 
 rose up and the prow turned downwards such was the 
 will of God and the sea closed over us.' 
 
 Dante, we see, had no sympathy with the hopes of those 
 who thought to win by mortal means to the Earthly Para- 
 dise. He calls the west ' the unpeopled land beyond the 
 sun ; ' for he was upon the side of orthodoxy, and in his 
 confession of Ulysses doubtless meant to cast reproach upon 
 those obstinate ones who, against the teaching of Scripture, 
 still hoped to find a place where they could avoid death. 
 The mountain which he places in the Atlantic, the high 
 mountain, bruna per la distanza, which Ulysses sees, is the 
 Mountain of Purgatory ; and only by ascending that could 
 men reach the Earthly Paradise. Other land he recog- 
 nises none there. But he bears witness to the belief that 
 the west was not unpeopled. How without such a belief 
 could the traveller have been urged to seek the west by a 
 desire of knowing more of human wickedness and worth ? 
 
 Columbus, it is well known, was not uninfluenced by 
 the purely mythic stories of a western world. These tales 
 had in his day been so long repeated and so much changed 
 that they often wore the face of commonplace fact; and 
 numerous were the successors as well as the predecessors of 
 Columbus who fancied they were going to find an Atlantis 
 or other fabulous place more wonderful than any they 
 really lighted upon. Fancy and superstition here, as in 
 the researches of astrologers and alchemists, commanded 
 
444 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the aid of more exertion and of greater enthusiasm than 
 would have been at the service of sober truth. Thousands 
 of voyagers perished before any end was reached. But the 
 journeys did at last end happily in the discovery, if not of 
 a deathless land, at any rate of a new world. 
 
 Another story of a voyage over the Sea of Death is the 
 one recorded by Saxo Grammaticus to have been made by 
 Gorm the Wise, King of Denmark. In many particulars 
 the legend as it has come to us in the pages of Saxo and 
 in its Latin dress is clearly copied from the great Greek 
 epic. But there are other incidents for which no originals 
 could be discovered in the Odyssey ; and the picture of 
 the other world which it presents is on the whole quite in 
 accordance with that which from other Northern sources 
 we traced in the last chapter. It might, perhaps, be said 
 that the history of the voyage of Gorm belongs rather to 
 descriptions of hell than to accounts of the earthly Para- 
 dise. It records a journey undertaken rather to the Land 
 of Death than to any heaven. But because we have had 
 so much to say here concerning the passage of the soul 
 over seas, and had so much less to say on this head in the 
 last chapter, and because the feature of the sea voyage is 
 put forward very distinctly in the Gorm legend it cannot 
 be amiss if we give one glance at this history. 1 
 
 One of Gorrn's subjects, a certain Jarl Thorkill, was 
 reported to have previously made a voyage of the same kind 
 as that which on this occasion Gorm proposed to himself 
 that is to say, a voyage to farther Biarmia, beyond any 
 known region of land, to one where many giants dwelt, 
 and as king of these giants Utgarthilocus. Thorkill, 
 then, we may take to be in reality the god Thorr, and it 
 is interesting to see that in changing the god into a man 
 the name should have been changed into a not unusual 
 proper name. 2 Gorm set sail with three ships, holding 
 
 1 Saxo Grammaticus, Historia Danica, ed. Miiller and Velschow, 1 839- 
 58, p. 420. 
 
 2 Thorkill is a very common Norse name for men. What the etymology 
 
VOYAGE OF GOKM THE WISE. 445 
 
 three hundred men, under the command of Thorkill. Their 
 first adventure is evidently a plagiarism from the Odyssey. 
 They landed on a certain island covered with flocks and 
 herds, but, as these last were under the protection of the 
 gods, Thorkill forbade the men to take more than was 
 needful to satisfy their immediate wants. They were not 
 to store away in the ships. This order the sailors dis- 
 obeyed ; and, in consequence, when night came on, a band 
 of fearful monsters came flying round the ships, and the 
 terrified sailors had to expiate their crime by sacrificing 
 three men, one for each ship. When this had been done 
 the expedition sailed away. 
 
 And now with favourable breezes they reached the 
 coasts of farther Biarmia, 1 a land where constant cold 
 reigned and where the ground was buried deep in ancient 
 snow. It had thick untraversable woods, not abounding 
 in fruit, bat in wild beasts of strange kinds. Ther& they 
 drew up their boats ashore 2 and went forward afoot. 
 As evening came on, a man of huge stature suddenly 
 appeared before them. He was Gunthmund, the brother 
 of Geruth, to whose palace they were faring. Anon they 
 reached a river which was traversed by a golden bridge. 3 
 But when they would have gone over, Gunthmund showed 
 them that this river separated the world of men from the 
 world of monsters, a,nd that no living man might traverse 
 it. ... It is curious to trace in these descriptions the 
 admixture of ancient Norse belief and classical myth. 
 The bridge is the Gjallar-bru, and could not have been 
 borrowed from the Odyssey. But soon we get back again 
 to the Odyssean legend. If they partook of food at the 
 table of King Gunthmund the same fate would overtake 
 
 of it is I do not know possibly Thor-ketill. It is curious that one of the 
 monkish visions of purgatory current in the twelfth century was the visit 
 of Thurcill. 
 
 1 A sort of Utgard, as we shall see. 
 
 2 Like Odysseus when he came to the shore of Ocean and to the groves 
 of Persephone. 
 
 Gjallar-bru (see Chap. VIII.) 
 
446 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 them which fell upon the feasters in Circe's hall. They 
 would, as Thorkill told them, become as brutes, losing all 
 memory. Thorkill was not wanting in excuses when the 
 giant complained of the discourtesy of him and his com- 
 rades in not partaking of the meal. The food is strange 
 to them ; they cannot eat,' c. Some, however, could not 
 resist the delights offered, and fell victims to the enchant- 
 ment. The rest journeyed further still to the dwelling of 
 King Geruth, 1 and came to a black, barbarous-looking 
 town, which seemed to them ' like a vaporous cloud.' Two 
 dogs exceeding fierce guarded the entrance. Within the 
 gates were horrible black spectres, and they were oppressed 
 with the putrid stench with which the air was heavy. 
 Thorkill made for a stone fortress, which was the palace 
 of Geruth, but ere they reached it he warned his com- 
 rades to keep from their minds all avaricious longings ; 
 for if 'they took aught away they would fall into the 
 power of the king. Then is reference made to the visit 
 of the god Thorr to the same place, and to some of the 
 feats which he performed while there. . . . 
 
 This picture is almost the same as that given us of 
 the ancient Jotunheim, but it is re-dressed in a later form 
 and furnished with some images borrowed from Homer. 
 There is no need to follow further the adventures of Gorm 
 and his comrades, many of whom, of course, perished as 
 the comrades of Odysseus did, while the leader of the ex- 
 pedition and Thorkill got back home. 
 
 The story which was up to the end of the thirteenth 
 century the most influential in sending men upon Odyssean 
 voyages was probably that to which allusion has been 
 already made the legend of St. Brandan. 2 The account 
 must be classed among the legends of the saints ; it was 
 told by priests, and has been committed to writing by a 
 
 1 The Geirrod of the Edda Geirrod is a sort of giant and an enemy of 
 Odhinn. Grinmismdl. 
 
 2 The name Brandan is probably allied to Bran, the Celtic hero and 
 sun god ? For him see Matthew Arnold, Celt. Lit. The word means chief 
 or head : it is the same as Brennus. 
 
VOYAGE OF ST. BRANDAN. 447 
 
 priest. It offers, in fact, a happy mixture of heathen fable 
 and Biblical legend. It should be remembered that the 
 cycle of the legends of the saints made up a literature more 
 distinctly popular than even the stories of the legendary 
 heroes of early chivalry, such as the paladins of Charle- 
 magne and the knights of the Round Table. 
 
 These last were the theme of minstrels ; they were told 
 in the castle hall and bower to knights and ladies. The 
 lives of the saints were repeated by the priests, who were 
 of the peasant class, and by them spread abroad among the 
 peasantry. They formed the great popular literature of 
 the Middle Ages. In them many of the old gods came to 
 life again, and walked more easily in the garb of peasant 
 saints than in the armour of knights and paladins. There- 
 fore it is no exaggeration to say that the great legend of 
 the Earthly Paradise from the eighth century to the four- 
 teenth is the story of the voyage of St. Brandan. This 
 is true, as that before the time of Dante the locus classicus 
 among the purgatory myths was the story of St. Patrick's 
 purgatory. Both these legends arose, as we have noticed, 
 in Ireland, the legitimate ' Home of Souls.' 
 
 We have already seen how in the case of the story of 
 St. Brandan's voyage popular prejudice was more powerful 
 than the ecclesiastical tradition; and how even after it 
 had become the accepted history of the journey to Para- 
 dise the same popular belief quietly garbled the text and 
 modified the legend to suit its theories. The myth did 
 not originally speak of a journey to the west, but of one to 
 the east ; yet common tradition succeeded in making the 
 island of St. Brandan veer round from its eastern site to 
 lie off the west coast of Ireland or off Portugal. It is evi- 
 dent that there will be some portions of the legend which 
 express better than do others the popular belief concern-, 
 ing the Western Paradise. To find these, we must, there- 
 fore, read a little between the lines of the ecclesiastical 
 story. It is not the eastern land to which St. Brandan 
 finally attained which could have represented to men's 
 
448 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 imaginations their western i St.. Brandan's Isle,' but some 
 one among the islands which the saint met with in the 
 course of his long voyage. There were many of these 
 islands : each one, no doubt, possessed some features which 
 were thought to distinguish the home of the blessed. 
 
 One was the ' Ylonde of Sbepe ' we think of Odysseus 
 on Thrinakia e where is never cold weder, but ever sommer, 
 and that causeth the shepe to be so grete and whyte.' 
 Another island contained an abbey of twenty-four monks, 
 4 and in this londe,' the monks told St. Brandan, * was ever 
 fayre weder, and none of us hath been seke syth we came 
 hyther.' But I take the following to be one of the best 
 descriptions of an earthly Paradise to be found in Middle 
 Age romance. It is the Paradise of Birds : l 
 
 c But soone after, as Giod wold, they saw a fayre yloiide, 
 full of floures and herbes and trees, whereof they thanked 
 God of His good grace, and anone they went on londe. 
 And when they had gone longe in this, they founde a full 
 fayre well, and thereby stode a tree full of bowes, and on 
 every bow sate a fayre byrde; and they sate so thycke 
 on the tree that unneath ony lefe of the tree nayght be 
 seen, the nornbre of them was so grete ; and they sange so 
 meryly that it was an heavenly noyse to here. . . . And 
 than anone one of the byrdes fledde fro the tree to Saynt 
 Brandan, and he with flyckerynge of his wynges made a 
 full merye noyse lyke a fydle, that hym. semed he herde 
 never so joyfull a melodye. And than Saynt Brandan 
 commaunded the byrde to tell him the cause why they 
 sate so thycke on the tree and sange so meryly. And than 
 the byrde sayd, " Sometyme we were aungels in heven, but 
 whan our mayster Lucyfer fell down into hell for his high 
 
 1 The notion of the soul entering into the shape of a bird is of course 
 one among the most common in mythology. The wings of the bird naturally 
 express the freedom and spiritual condition of the soul (see Chap. II.) In 
 Lithuanian tradition the soul escapes along the Milky Way in the form of 
 a bird. Hence the Milky Way is by the Lithuanians called ' the Way of 
 Birds.' 
 
VOYAGE OF ST. BRANDAN. 449 
 
 pryde, we fell with hym for our offences, some hyther and 
 some lower, after the qualite of theyr trespace." ' l 
 
 This might be a fall from heaven, but it was a rise 
 from earth. A place suited to the character of any who 
 were, like these angels, of a temporising nature. For 
 such the Earthly Paradise existed, for it was the creation 
 of their own brains. They did not judge themselves so 
 severely as Dante judges them. He, too, shows us the 
 same angels who fell f for no great trespace,' but he calls 
 them 
 
 II cattivo coro 
 Degli angeli,- 
 
 'the caitiff choir of angels, who were neither rebellious 
 nor faithful to God, but were for themselves ' 
 
 A Dio spiacenti et a nemici sui, 
 
 'hateful to God and to His enemies.' ... As the 
 mediaeval purgatory was nothing else than a survival of 
 the Greek Hades or Norse Helheim into the creed of 
 Christendom, to the thought of which the terrors of the 
 heathen place of punishment seemed to offer but an in- 
 adequate representation of hell, so this probationary 
 Paradise of Birds is the truer survival of the heathen 
 heaven than is the Eastern Paradise to which St. Brandan 
 at last attained. 
 
 This legend I take to be one of the lingering foot- 
 prints of a past Celtic mythology ; other traces of it in 
 this matter of the Earthly Paradise and of the Sea of 
 Death are those stories which we gathered from Procopius 
 and Claudian of a journey made by the souls from the west 
 of Prance over sea, to our island. It is fortunate that 
 though the Celtic mythology as a whole is lost to us, some 
 gleanings can still be had therefrom. 
 
 One other relic of Celtic belief survives in the account 
 of the death of Arthur in the Arthurian Romance ; for 
 
 1 The Legend of St. Brandan, by T. Wright. Percy Soc. Trs., vol. xiv. 
 
 G G 
 
450 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 herein appears the name of the old Celtic Paradise, 
 Avalon, which means the 'Isle of Apples.' 1 There is a 
 shade of sadness thrown over the story ; the loss of the 
 hero from earth is too great to allow the poet much thought 
 of Arthur's joys in the future state. Still he is going to 
 Avalon, and Avalon is certainly the Celtic Paradise. It 
 is the island of Hesperides, or the land of Phseaceans, 
 under another name, distinguished not less specially than 
 the Greek Paradises were by its wealth in fruits. For this 
 is implied by the term ' Isle of Apples.' The battle in 
 which Arthur was mortally wounded was Camelot, which 
 Malory describes as ' on the downs by Salisbury, not far 
 from the sea-shore.' Sir Bedivere bore Arthur from the 
 field, and laid him in a chapel by the sea. Then Arthur 
 sent his knight to give a signal to the fairy powers that 
 they were to take him away to Avalon. 
 
 6 My time hieth fast,' said the king. ' Therefore take 
 thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to yonder 
 water-side, and when thou cornest there I charge thee 
 throw my sword in that water, and come again and tell 
 me what thou there hast seen. . . .' When Excalibur 
 was thrown into the sea, ' there came an arm and a hand 
 above the water and met it and caught it, and so shook it 
 thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand 
 with the sword in the water. . . . Then Sir Bedivere 
 took the king upon his back, and so went with him to 
 that water-side. And when they were at the water-side, 
 even fast by the bank hoved a little barge, with many faire 
 ladies in it, and among them all a queene, and all they had 
 black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they 
 saw the King Arthur. "Now put me into the barge," 
 said the king; and so did he softly. And there received 
 him three queenes 2 with great mourning, and so these 
 three queenes set him down, and in one of their laps King 
 Arthur laid his head, and then that queene said, " Ah, dear 
 
 Therefore it corresponds to the Garden of Hesperides. 
 2 The Nornir ( = Valkyriur) ? 
 
AVALON. 451 
 
 brother, why have ye tarried so long from me ? Alas ! this 
 wound on your head hath caught over much cold." And 
 so they rowed from the land ; and Sir Bedivere beheld all 
 those ladies go from him. . . . And he then said, " I will 
 to the vale of Avalion to be healed of my grievous wound. 
 And if thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul." 
 But ever the queens and ladies wept and shrieked that it 
 was pity to hear.' l 
 
 Afterwards Malory says 
 
 ' Thus of Arthur I find never more written in books 
 that be authorised, nor more of the certainty of his death 
 herd I never tell, but thus was he led away in a ship 
 wherein were three queenes : that one was King Arthur's 
 sister, Queen Morgan le Fay; the other was Queen of 
 North Gales ; 2 the third was the Queen of the Waste 
 Lands. . . . But some men yet say in many parts of 
 England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the 
 will of oar Lord Jesus Christ into another place. And 
 men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the 
 holy cross.' 
 
 The story of Arthur's going to Avalon is told here in 
 no high key of triumph ; but a little hope lingers about it. 
 The circumstances in which arose the Arthur legend were 
 not suitable to notes of exultation. The story is the epic 
 of a defeated race ; it was the inheritance of the Britons 
 after the Saxon conquest. But if every myth is beautiful 
 which tells of the dying hero going to the Happy Land of 
 the Sunset, and which promises his return when his people 
 a.re at its sorest need, twice as touching is the form which 
 the legend takes in the mouth of a people whose hopes 
 are dying aut, and whose sun itself is sinking towards its 
 western eclipse. 
 
 Much more full is the account of the visit of Oger le 
 Dannois (Holger Danske) to the same Paradise of Avalon. 
 The account which I here translate is only a sixteenth- 
 
 1 Sir T. Malory, Morte d'Arthwe, c. 168. 2 North Wales, 
 
 a o 2 
 
452 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 century version of the tale, but it is copied directly from 
 the poetic version of the well-known troubadour Adenez, 
 chief minstrel at the court of Henry III. of Bavaria (1248 
 1261), and for his excellence in his art called Le Roy or 
 king of all. 1 There can be no doubt that in its chief par- 
 ticulars the story is far older than the days of Adenez. 
 It is thus that the prose version from which 1 have trans- 
 lated tells the history of the adventure of Oger at Avalon : 
 
 Caraheu and Gloriande were in a boat with a fair com- 
 pany, and Oger had with him a thousand men-at-arms. 
 When they were a certain way on, there arose so mighty 
 a tempest that they knew not what to do, only to commit 
 their souls to God. So great was the storm that the mast 
 of Oger's ship brake, and he was constrained to embark in 
 a little vessel with a few of his comrades ; and the wind 
 struck them with such fury that they lost sight of Caraheu. 
 Caraheu was so sore troubled that he was like to die, and 
 he began to mourn the noble Oger ; for he wist not what 
 was become of the boat. And Oger in like manner la- 
 mented Caraheu. Thus grieved Caraheu and the Christians 
 in his company, saying, ( Alas ! Oger, what is become of 
 thee ? This is, I ween, the most sudden departure that I 
 heard of ever.' 'Nay, but cease, my beloved,' said Glo- 
 riande ; ' he will not fail to come again when God wills, 
 for he cannot be far away.' 'Ah, lady,' said Caraheu, 
 ' you know not the dangers of the sea ; and I pray God to 
 take him into His keeping. . . .' 
 
 Now I will leave speaking of Caraheu, and return to 
 Oger, who was in peril, yet was ever grieving for his 
 friend and saying, ' Ah, Caraheu, hope of the* remaining 
 days of my life, thou whom I loved next to God ! How 
 has God allowed me to loose so soon you and your lady ? ' 
 At that moment the great ship, in which Oger had left his 
 men-at-arms, struck against a rock,, and he saw them all 
 
 1 He is likewise the author of the Cleomenes, which is by some supposed 
 to be the original of Chaucer's incomplete Squire's Tale. 
 
OGER THE DANE. 453 
 
 perish, at which sight he was like to die of grief. And 
 presently a loadstone rock began to draw towards it 
 the boat in which Oger was. Oger, seeing himself thus 
 taken, recommended his soul to God, saying, ' My God, 
 my Father and Creator, who hast made me in Thine image 
 and semblance, have pity on me now, and leave me not 
 here to die ; for that I have used my power as was best to 
 the increase of the Catholic faith. But if it must be that 
 Thou take me, I commit to Thy care my brother Guyon, 
 and all my relatives and friends, especially my nephew 
 Gautier, who is minded to serve Thee and bring the pay- 
 nim within Holy Church. . . . Ah, iny God ! had I known 
 the peril of this adventure, I should never have abandoned 
 the beauty, sense, and honour of Clarice, Queen of Eng- 
 land. Had I but gone back to her I should have seen too 
 my redoubted sovereign, Charlemagne, with all the princes 
 who surround him.' 
 
 Meanwhile the boat continued to float upon the water 
 till it reached the loadstone castle, which they call the 
 Chateau d'Avalon, which is but a little way from the 
 Earthly Paradise whither were snatched in a beam of fire 
 Elias and Enoch, and where was Morgue la Fee, who at 
 his birth had given him such great gifts. Then the mari- 
 ners saw well that they were drawing near to the load- 
 stone rock, and they said to Oger, 'My lord, commend 
 thyself to God, for it is certain that at this moment we 
 are come to our voyage's end ; ' and as they spake the bark 
 with a swing attached itself to the rock, as though it were 
 cemented there. 
 
 That night Oger thought over the case in which he 
 was, but he scarce could tell of what sort it might be. 
 And the sailors came and said to Oger, ' My lord, we are 
 held here without remedy ; wherefore let us look to our 
 having, for we are here for the remainder of our lives.' 
 To which Oger made answer, ' If this be so, then will I 
 make consideration of our case, for I would assign to 
 each one his share, to the least as to the greatest.' For 
 
454 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 liimself Oger kept a double portion, for it is the law of the 
 sea that the master of the ship has as much as two 
 others. But if that rule had not been he would still have 
 needed a double quantity, for he ate as much as two 
 common men. 
 
 When Oger had apportioned his share to each he said, 
 'Masters, be sparing, I pray you, of your food as much as you 
 may ; for so soon as ye have no more be sure that I myself 
 will throw you into the sea.' The skipper answered him, 
 'My lord, thou wilt escape no better than we.' Their 
 food failed them all, one after another, and Oger cast them 
 into the sea, and he remained alone. Then he was so 
 troubled that he knew not what to do. ' Alas ! my God, 
 my Creator,' said he, ( hast Thou at this hour forsaken 
 me ? I have now no one to comfort me in my misfortune.' 
 Thereupon, whether it were his fantasy or no, it seemed 
 to him that a voice replied, f God orders that so soon as it 
 be night thou go to a castle after thou hast come to an 
 island which thou wilt presently find. And when thou art 
 on the island thou wilt find a small path leading to the 
 castle. And whatsoever thing thou seest there, let not 
 that affray thee.' And Oger looked, but wist not who had 
 spoken. 
 
 Oger waited the return of night to learn the truth of 
 that which the voice foretold, and he was so amazed that 
 he wist not what to do, but set himself to the trial. And 
 when night came he committed himself to God, praying 
 Him for mercy; and straightway he looked and beheld the 
 Castle of Avalon, which shone wondrously. Many nights 
 before he had seen it, but by day it was not visible. 
 Howbeit, so soon as Oger saw the castle he set about to 
 get there. He saw before him the ships that were 
 fastened to the loadstone rock, and now he walked from 
 ship to ship, and so gained the island ; and when there h(f 
 at once set himself to scale the hill by a path which he 
 found. When he reached the gate of the castle, and 
 sought to enter, there came before him two great lions, 
 
OGEK THE DANE. 455 
 
 who stopped him and cast him to the ground. But Oger 
 sprang up and drew his sword Curtain, and straightway 
 cleft one of them in twain ; then the other sprang and 
 seized Oger by the neck, and Oger turned round and 
 struck off his head. 
 
 When Oger had performed this deed he gave thanks 
 to our Lord, and then he entered the hall of the castle, 
 where he found many viands, and a table set as if one 
 should dine there ; but no prince nor lord could he see. 
 Now he was amazed to find no one, save only a horse 
 which sat at the table as if it had been a human being. 
 
 We need not follow the adventure in full detail. This 
 horse, which was called Papillon (Psyche?), waited upon 
 Oger, gave him to drink from a golden goblet, and at 
 length conducted him to his chamber, and to a bed whose 
 fairy-made coverlet of cloth of gold and ermine was la 
 plus mignonne chose qui fut jama is vue. 
 
 When Oger awoke he thought to see Papillon again, 
 but could see neither him, nor man, nor woman, to show 
 him the way from the room. He saw a door, and, having 
 made the sign of the cross, sought to pass out that way ; 
 but as he tried to do this he encountered a serpent, so 
 hideous that the like has scarce been seen. It would 
 have thrown itself upon Oger, but that the knight drew 
 his sword and made the creature recoil more than ten feet; 
 but it returned with a bound, for it was very mighty, and 
 the twain fell to fight. And now, as Oger saw that the 
 serpent pressed hard upon him, he struck at it so doughtily 
 with his sword that he severed it in twain. After that 
 Oger went along a path which led him to a garden, so 
 beauteous that it was in truth a little paradise, and within 
 were fair trees, bearing fruit of every kind, of tastes divers, 
 and of such sweet odours that never smelt trees like them 
 before. 
 
 Oger, seeing these fruits so fine, desired to eat some, 
 and presently he lighted upon a fine apple tree, whose fruit 
 was like gold, and of these apples he took one and ate. 
 
456 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 But no sooner had he thus eaten than he became so sick 
 and weak that he had no power nor manhood left. And 
 now again he commended his soul to God and prepared to 
 die. . . . But at this moment turning round, he was aware 
 of a fair dame, clothed in white, and so richly adorned 
 that she was a glory to behold. Now as Oger looked 
 upon the lady without moving from his place, he deemed 
 that she was Mary the Virgin, and said * Ave Maria ' and 
 saluted her. But she said, 'Oger, think not that I am 
 she whom you fancy ; I am she who was at your birth, 1 
 and my name is Morgue la Fee, and I allotted you a gift 
 which was destined to increase your fame eternally through 
 all lands. But now you have left your deeds of war to 
 take with ladies your solace ; for as soon as I have taken 
 you from here I will bring you to Avalon, where you will 
 see the fairest noblesse in the world.' 
 
 And anon she gave him a ring, which had such virtue 
 that Oger, who was near a hundred years old, returned to 
 the age of thirty. Then said Oger, ' Lady, I am more 
 beholden to thee than to any other in the world. Blessed 
 be the hour of thy birth ; for, without having done aught 
 to deserve at your hands, you have given me countless gifts, 
 and this gift of new life above them all. Ah, lady, that 
 I were before Charlemagne, that he might see the con- 
 dition in which I now stand ; for I feel in me greater 
 strength than I have ever known. Dearest, how can I 
 make return for the honour and great good you have done 
 me ? But I swear that I am at your service all the days 
 of my life.' Then Morgue took him by the hand and 
 said, c My loyal friend, the goal of all my happiness, I 
 will now lead you to my palace in Avalon, where you will 
 see of noblesse the greatest and of damosels the fairest.' 
 
 1 The fairies were, like the Parcae or Moerae, especially frequent attend- 
 ants at births. This fact our fairy tales have made sufficiently familiar to 
 all. Among the instances of the attendance of the classic fates at birth 
 we have the births of lamos (Pindar, Olym. vi.) and of Meleagros (Ovid, 
 Met. viii. 454), &c. 
 
OGEE THE DANE. 457 
 
 And she took Oger by the hand and led him to the Castle 
 of Avalon, where was King Artus, and Auberon, and 
 Malambron, who was a sea fairy. 
 
 As Oger approached the castle the fairies came to meet 
 him, dancing and singing marvellous sweetly. And he saw 
 many fairy dames, richly crowned and apparelled. And 
 presently came Arthur, and Morgue called to him and said, 
 ' Come hither, my lord and brother, and salute the fail- 
 flower of chivalry, the honour of the French noblesse, him 
 in whom all generosity and honour and every virtue are 
 lodged, Oger le Dannois, my loyal love, my only pleasure, 
 in whom lies for me all hope of happiness.' Then Morgue 
 gave Oger a crown to wear, which was so rich that none 
 here could count its value ; and it had beside a wondrous 
 virtue, for every man who bore it on his brow forgot all 
 sorrow and sadness and melancholy, and he thought no 
 more of his country nor of his kin that he had left behind 
 him in the world. 
 
 We leave Oger thus 'bien assis et entretenu des 
 dames que c'etait merveilles,' and return to the earth, 
 where things were not going so well ; for while Oger was 
 in Fairie the paynim assembled all their forces and took 
 Jerusalem and proceeded to lay siege to Babylon (i.e. 
 Cairo). Then the most valiant knights who were left on 
 earth Moysant, and Florian, and Caraheu, and Gautier 
 (Oger's nephew) assembled all their powers to defend this 
 place. But they lamented greatly because Oger was no 
 more. And a great battle took place without the walls 
 of Babylon, in which the Saracens, assisted by a renegade, 
 the Admiral Gandice, gained the victory. 
 
 Oger had been long in the Castle of Avalon, and had 
 begotten a son by Morgue, when she, having heard of 
 these doings and of the danger to Christendom, deemed it 
 needful to awake Oger from his blissful forgetfulness of all 
 earthly things and tell him that his presence was needed 
 in this world once more. Thereupon follows an account of 
 Oger's returning to earth, where no one knew him, and 
 
458 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 all were astonished at his strange garb and bearing. He 
 enquired for Charlemagne, who had been long since dead; 
 the generation below Oger had grown to be old men, yet 
 he still had the habit of a man of thirty. We need not 
 wonder that his talk excited suspicion. But at length he 
 made himself known to the King of France, joined his 
 army, and put the paynim to flight. He had now forgotten 
 his life in Fairie, he was beloved by the Queen of France 
 (the King having been killed) and was about to marry 
 her, when Morgue again appeared and carried him off to . 
 Avalon. 
 
 It need not bo said that this story of the return of the 
 hero to earth is an essential in the legend of the Earthly 
 Paradise. In this way among others found expression 
 that favourite myth of the Middle Age of the sleeping hero 
 who, though withdrawn for awhile from the world and its 
 combats, was yet to come back again some day, and at the 
 hour of his country's supreme need stand in irresistible 
 might at the side of her warriors, ready to strike a final 
 blow for her deliverance. This myth, I say, was universal 
 and fondly cherished. Probably the sleeping hero was at 
 first the old national god, still dear to peasants' hearts. 
 That old god might serve for a symbol of the time when 
 these peasants themselves were freer and more warlike 
 than they had become. For gradually arms were taken 
 from the hands of the freemen and the bonders, and they 
 sank to the condition of serfs. They were buried, like 
 Thorr and Wuotan, beneath a mountain of new laws which 
 they could not shake off. 
 
 When the national god was forgotten a national hero 
 became the symbol of the sleeping past. Where Wuotan 
 had once slumbered there now lay Charlemagne or Frede- 
 rick Eedbeard ; and on his heart weighed the mass of an 
 immense mountain, which yet moved with his breathing. 
 Or otherwise it was said that the hero had gone, like 
 Oger, to the far-off Earthly Paradise, and would return 
 again when most needed, as Oger did. 
 
THE PARADISE KNIGHT. 459 
 
 From tne legends of this class are to be derived some 
 of those bright but misty figures the Paradise Knights, 
 who move across the field of popular lore, coming no one 
 knows from whence and when their work is done going 
 away no one knows whither. But there is another order of 
 these half- celestial beings the knights who are born in 
 Paradise. Of Oger himself it is recorded that he became 
 by Morgue the father of Mervain, and that this Mervain 
 was a valiant knight in the days of Hugh Capet. 
 
 Indeed, as human beings, knights and dames, may be 
 transported to the deathless land without undergoing death 
 or changing their earthly nature, taking their soidas arid 
 all the enjoyments of our world, children, it is clear, may 
 be born in that place ; and these Paradise children, though 
 they have powers above the range of common mortality, 
 yet are in no way separated in interests from their fellow 
 men. They may long to come to the common earth and 
 perform here deeds of knight-errantry, and then to go 
 back again if their work is over or they themselves un- 
 thankfully treated, as such celestial messengers often are. 
 Hence we have that beautiful and universal German myth 
 of the child who comes earthward from the immortal land. 
 As the hero goes away to Avalon in a boat, so this child 
 comes wafted in a boat to some shore, or down some 
 river. The child is sleeping; no one knows whence it has 
 fared. 1 
 
 In the introduction to Beowulf it is said that his 
 father, Scyld, was after his death borne to a ship and 
 placed in it with no less gifts provided than they gave 
 him who at the beginning sent him forth over the wave, 
 being a child.' The legend here alluded to is that this 
 child had bee a borne in a boat without sail or oar to the 
 
 ' In certain legends of saints a ship floats against stream, bearing 
 their remains to a fit resting-place. The remains of St. Marternus were in 
 this way carried up the Rhine in a rudderless boat and deposited at 
 Rodenkirchen. The remains of St. Emmeranus were carried from the Iser 
 to the Danube, and thence up stream to Ratisbon. See Simrock, Handbuch 
 der D. M., 285 
 
460 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 shore of Scandinavia, 1 and that he was afterwards chosen 
 to be king of that land. There is a mistake made by the 
 author of Beowulf when he attributes this history to Scyld, 
 for the name should be Sceaf, the father of Scyld ; but this 
 is of no consequence. The outlines of the legend stand 
 clear ; and this legend gives the normal form of the myth. 
 The child born in Paradise is wafted by an unknown bark 
 from that unknown shore ; he becomes king of the people 
 of his adoption. After death (or before it, when his work 
 is done) he is again carried away in a boat to Paradise. 
 Among the many mediseval forms of this myth one is 
 the legend of the Swan Knight, of which one special form 
 is the story of Lohengrin of Brabant. 2 
 
 Lohengrin was son of Sir Percival, who, having been 
 while in the world long in search for the Holy Grail, had 
 been snatched up to a Fellowship of the Holy Grail in 
 another world. In this Paradise Lohengrin was born.. 
 Then, at the prayer of Else of Brabant, he was sent into 
 the world to be her champion and to prove her innocence. 
 He married her and became Duke of Brabant. But the 
 condition of his staying by her side was that she should 
 never ask his name, and this condition she disregarded. 
 So once again the mystic boat came sailing down the 
 Rhine ; and Lohengrin entered it once more, and was then 
 lost, for ever to the world of men. But there is no need to 
 retell this tale to-day. Since this swan knight left the 
 world of popular lore he had slept in men's remembrance 
 till yesterday, when the wand of the magician again called 
 him back from the Paradise or Limbo of forgotten legends. 
 And now he has been reborn for us ' with no less gifts pro- 
 vided,' surrounded with a no less splendid halo of poetry 
 and beauty than they gave him who first sent him to 
 wander through the seas of human thought. 
 
 1 ' Insula oceani quae dicito Scania.' Chron. EtMltv. in. 3. 
 
 'In quamdam iiisulam Scanzam, de qua Jornandes historiographus 
 Gothorum loquitur.' Wm, of Malmesbury. 
 
 2 See Grimm's Deutsche Sagen, ii. 256 sqq., for this legend, and several 
 others of the same kind. 
 
SURVIVAL OF HEATHENISM. 461 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 HEATHENISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 
 
 THE heathenism of Northern Europe cannot fully be 
 studied if we confine ourselves to heathen literature and 
 to heathen times alone ; for its beliefs are to be detected 
 lurking in many secret places of the Catholicism of the 
 Middle Ages ; na} r , for that matter, they are to be dis- 
 covered in contemporary creeds. We have already seen 
 this in part, for while tracing out some special phases of 
 belief those, namely, which were concerned with the 
 future state we found ourselves insensibly being carried 
 on from the mythology of the ancient Germans and Celts 
 and of the Norsemen to similar myths which were cur- 
 rent during the Middle Ages. We found ourselves pass- 
 ing, almost without intermission, from Helheim to the 
 mediaeval purgatory, and from the heathen notions touching 
 the Earthly Paradise to the notions concerning the same 
 place which were in vogue in the tenth and twelfth cen- 
 turies. 
 
 What we have thus done in part and for particular 
 elements of belief we ought to try and do for the whole. 
 In a rough way we ought to try and discover what strain 
 of heathenism still lingered in the Christianity of the 
 Middle Ages, and how far the life and thought of the 
 men of those days was a legacy from the past life and 
 thought of the heathen days which had been before them. 
 But this subject is an immense one, and cannot possibly be 
 duly dealt with in one chapter. It can, at the very best, 
 only be sketched in merest outline, and presented in a 
 most fragmentary form. Wherefore what is set down in 
 
462 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the concluding pages of this volume is meant as a help to 
 the reader to recover for himself the threads of heathen 
 beliefs which run through mediseval Catholicism rather 
 than an attempt .to draw out these threads in due order or 
 to trace their various interlacings. Be it remembered, 
 too, that it is not into the ethical parts of Catholicism 
 that we are going to make enquiry. It were far too great 
 a task to attempt to decide what elements in the moral 
 creed of the Middle Ages can be traced back to heathen- 
 ism, and truly affiliated to the beliefs of heathen Europe, 
 and what elements are really Christian. Moreover, though 
 our space were unlimited, that enquiry would always lie 
 beyond the sphere of this work. At the very outset of 
 this volume all intention was disclaimed of wandering 
 into the domain of morals. The kind of belief which has 
 throughout been our study is that which is in its essen- 
 tials independent of the moral code. If ethics have en- 
 tered here and there, they have come in, as we said they 
 would do, only by the way. 
 
 But another thing which was laid down at the outset 
 of the volume was this : that very early phases of belief 
 may subsist side by side with phases of much higher 
 development ; and that we are quite at liberty, if we 
 choose, to stray into these later fields in search of the 
 early ' formations ' and nothing more. Much, no doubt, 
 of mediseval Catholicism nay, by far the greater part of 
 it shows an advanced stage of religious growth. As a 
 whole the creed lies far beyond that initial phase of mono- 
 theism which elsewhere we posed as the limits of our 
 special field of enquiry ; but there is yet something left in 
 Catholicism as a legacy from early days. It is in quest 
 of thes*e elements only that we turn to the study of it 
 now. 
 
 To say that we abandon the ethical parts of the creed 
 is the same thing as to say that we turn to search in 
 mediaeval Christianity for those parts of it which spring 
 most directly from the contact of man with outward 
 
MYTHOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 4Go 
 
 nature. For it is by contact with outward nature that 
 primitive phases of belief are formed. It is essential to 
 the existence of these early strata of creeds that man 
 should be still in a direct communion with external things, 
 just as it is necessary to the growth of the later and 
 ethical strata that man should be, to some extent at least, 
 withdrawn from outside nature into himself; that he 
 should have become, in a certain degree, self-conscious 
 and introspective. Wherefore we must look to the outer 
 regions of belief only. We must neglect all the higher 
 aspects of Catholicism in neglecting all its ethical and 
 reflective side. But this is the only way to bring the 
 creed within the sphere of our present enquiry. 
 
 It is a thing to be remembered that the Middle, or, as 
 we call them, the dark, Ages are essentially ages of 
 mythology and not of history. To this they owe their 
 character of darkness. They are dim to the historian, 
 or, at any rate, to that historian who goes to them in the 
 quest of naked fact. In the chronicles of these times we 
 search in vain for anything which will help to form a 
 complete or a true picture of the Catholic world of 
 society in those days, of its life and thought and aspira- 
 tions. Each separate chronicle has been written in a 
 corner by one who had no conception of the world beyond 
 his own horizon. His outlook was generally that of a 
 priest confined to a narrow cell. Few as are the actual 
 facts which have come down to us, even these are robbed 
 of the best part of their significance from appearing so 
 disjointed as they do and without perspective. For we 
 need- to see not single objects but a succession of things 
 before we can form a conception of the size or the distance 
 of any one thing among them. In the histories of this 
 time isolated occurrences loom for a moment out of the 
 mist and then disappear into it again. There is no 
 grand panorama of events. And all the characters who 
 figure in these dramas are dim and shadowy, like the 
 creations of a dream. 
 
464 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 In place, however, of what we can fairly call history, 
 there was, during all the dark ages, a copious growth of 
 myth ; and mythology is itself a kind of history. In the 
 mythology of the Middle Ages we are allowed to see much 
 ,of what the chroniclers keep from us. The myths hold 
 up before us the world picture of the time. It is certainly 
 an ideal and not an . actual world which they present, but 
 then the most ideal creations have somewhere a foundation 
 in actuality and fact. The legend and the belief of this 
 age is of more value than its naked history, for legend and 
 belief then formed almost the greater part of men's lives ; 
 out of legend and myth their world was constructed. The 
 dark ages of medieval history are, in reality, pre- 
 historic ages, though it may seem paradoxical to say so 
 much. And the time before history begins, the time 
 when men are less engaged in noting what does happen 
 than in fancying what might happen, this is the golden 
 age for myth and legend. 
 
 German folk tales delight above all things in that 
 portrait of the youngest son of the house he is the youngest 
 of three who is left behind despised and neglected when 
 his brothers go forth to seek their fortunes. He is too 
 childish or too lazy to be trusted with the magic wallet or 
 staff which the father has bequeathed as their sole fortune 
 among his sons. So the other two go forth. Each in turn 
 tries his luck, and each returns with failure. Then it 
 comes to the turn of the youngest. He tries and does not 
 fail. In English stories we call this hero Boots. ' There 
 he sits, idle whilst all work ; there he lies, with that deep 
 irony of conscious power which knows that its time must 
 one day come and till then can afford to wait. When 
 that day comes he girds himself to the fight amidst the 
 scoff and scorn of his flesh and blood ; but even then, after 
 he has done some great deed, he conceals it, and again 
 sits idly by the kitchen fire, dirty, lazy, despised, until 
 the time for final recognition comes, and then his dirt and 
 
THE HEARTH CHILD. 465 
 
 rags fall off lie stands out in all the majesty of his royal 
 robes, and is acknowledged once for all a king.' l 
 
 The Germans of Germany, who, in their folk tales, 
 have made this character so especially their own, might 
 well have been led to do this by a lingering memory of 
 their own history. They are the ' Boots ' of Teutonic his- 
 tory during the era of the fall of Rome and of the barbarian 
 invasions of Roman territory. The elder brothers that is 
 to say, the grown-up sons of the tribe first went forth. 
 Behind, in the ancestral village, beneath the immemorial 
 shade of the village trees, they left the old and the very 
 young, the father of the family and the ' hearth child,' as 
 the youngest son is still described in our law of Borough 
 English. That youngest son was to have a destiny of his own, 
 different from theirs. From his loins were to spring the 
 modern Germans of Germany. But this Boots and his 
 doings we will, as the stories do, for the present leave, and 
 go forth with the elder brothers upon their travels. The 
 stalwart sons of the house collect under their leaders 
 (heretogas), throw up into the air a lance or a feather, 
 and let Fate, in directing its fall or flight, show them the 
 way they are to go. 
 
 At the time when the era of invasion first dawned the 
 German people had so long led a settled life that their 
 gods must have seemed to grow settled too, and even 
 Odhinn, the wandering wind, must have been by each 
 tribe narrowed into the wind which haunted its special 
 corner of the forest. It must, therefore, have been that 
 the Germans who quitted their homes and made their 
 way southward or westward into Italy, or Gaul, or Spain, 
 felt that they were leaving their ancient deities behind, 
 and were migrating into the territory of new gods. 2 
 They fared forth much as Thorr had fared into Jotunheim, 
 unknowing what magic spells might be weaving for them 
 there. 
 
 1 Dasent, Norse Tales, introd. p. cliv. 
 
 2 See Milrnan, Hist. Lat. Christ, i. 338. 
 
 H H 
 
466 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 It happened ill with their ancient gods, as it had 
 happened with Thorr ; for though the German invaders 
 overthrew the power of the Roman Empire, they were in 
 their turn overthrown by the God of the country into 
 which they came ; they all, one after another, abjured 
 the faith of Odhinn and adopted that of Christ. More 
 than that, they were, to a certain extent, subdued by the 
 nations whom they conquered ; they became denationalised 
 and ceased to be Germans, exchanging their rough Teu- 
 tonic speech for the softer language of the Latins. It 
 was by these conversions that the foundations of mediseval 
 history were laid. 
 
 Between the beginning of the Teutonic invasions of 
 Roman territory and the actual dawn of mediaeval history 
 occurred a long dark period of transition, which was 
 occupied in the gradual and complete destruction of the 
 Roman Empire by the barbarian hordes. At one time in 
 many simultaneous streams from different quarters, and 
 anon in successive waves of invasion from one direction, 
 the sea of barbarism submerged the ancient fabric of the 
 Roman Empire. From Msesia came the Visigoths und&r 
 Alaric, who thrice invaded Italy and laid siege to Rome, 
 and who at last took the imperial city and sacked it. To 
 their invasion, which did eventually flow away in a side 
 stream without completing the destruction of the Western 
 Empire, succeeded the more permanent conquests of the 
 Ostrogoths, to be in their turn succeeded by those of the 
 Lombards. And in the meantime to the north of the Alps 
 there first came, from beyond the Rhine into Gaul, the 
 miscellaneous army of the Suevi, Alani, Burgundians, and 
 Vandals. Some (the Burgundians) settled in Gaul; the 
 others passed on into Spain, and some from Spain to 
 Africa. Then followed the stronger power of the Franks, 
 who eventually overcame all their kindred German peoples, 
 arid wrested from them the whole of Gaul, with the excep- 
 tion of a small district in the south. 1 
 
 1 Narbonne, which long remained in the possession of the Visigoths. 
 
THE NIBELUNGEtf. 467 
 
 The details of the contemporary conquest of our own 
 island by the Angles and Saxons do not need to be 
 recalled. The history of this era must needs seem to 
 the student little less than a shifting of scenes or a 
 pageant of players. By most writers it has been passed 
 over as if it were no more than this. It is not an attractive 
 epoch of history. It would be difficult, as Hallam says, 1 
 to find anywhere more vice or less virtue than in the 
 records of this time. Along with the tragic dramas of 
 these days there mingles sometimes a ghastly air of 
 comedy, which suggests the idea of beings with the intel- 
 lects of children inflamed by the fury of fiends. 2 But, 
 despite the meanness and the horror which meet together 
 in the history of this age, it was an epoch of great im- 
 portance in the development of the German race. Out of 
 it was born at least one great thing namely, the greatest 
 surviving epic in the German tongue. 3 
 
 For I hold that the foundations of the Mbelungen 
 poem were undoubtedly laid at this time. Nor, if we con- 
 sider what a time of stir and excitement it was for the 
 invading nations, will it appear strange that anything so 
 considerable as a national epic should have been the 
 result. Myths arise at many periods of a nation's life, 
 and these myths weave themselves into the nation's early 
 history and belief. But an epic springs up only occa- 
 sionally, and in times which, whatever else they may be, 
 are not ordinary ones. 
 
 We can hardly assign any period which seems so 
 
 1 Echoing the words of Gibbon. 
 
 2 Take for an example the account which Gregory of Tours gives us 
 of how Theodoric, the son of Clovis, sought to compass the death of his 
 brother Clotaire. He invited Clotaire to a conference in a room wherein 
 he had meant to conceal behind a curtain a band of assassins. But the 
 curtain was too short, and the men's legs were visible ; so Clotaire got 
 wind of the matter and came armed with a great company of his own 
 people. Greg. Tiir. iii. 7. 
 
 3 The conversion of the Germans to Christianity might be deemed the 
 great event of this era. So in one sense it was. But no fruits of it were 
 visible until the succeeding age. 
 
 H H 2 
 
168 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 appropriate to the growth of the Mbelungen epic or 
 let me say the Nibelungen cycle of epics, for there are 
 many poems which belong to this class as the era of the 
 Teutonic conquests. Some relics of the traditions of that 
 day may be traced in the events and the characters of the 
 drama. And we must confess that while, on the one hand, 
 no time was so likely to give birth to a great German epic 
 as the time I speak of, so also there is no other creation of 
 the German genius which can with reasonable probability 
 be held to have sprung up at that time. When a national 
 epic has begun to take shape, it inevitably follows that 
 many ancient myths, which were when alone comparatively 
 commonplace, group themselves about the hero or the 
 circumstance which the epic commemorates ; like common 
 people wanting a leader, who range themselves under the 
 standard of a renowned chieftain. I do not say that no 
 songs and no stories like the Nibelungen had been sung in. 
 earlier days than these great days of invasion and conquest ; 
 but I say that it needed some mighty and sudden move- 
 ment of society before these fragments could crystallise 
 into a single epic poem. Tacitus has left on record the 
 Germans' inveterate habit of composing war songs to 
 celebrate the deeds of ancient days. Some of these stories 
 may have gone to form a part of the Nibelungen. But 
 we may fairly suppose that at the time of which we are 
 speaking the era of the barbarian invasions the greater 
 number of the old legends gave place to new ones, suggested 
 by the fresh life into which the Germans entered. 
 
 The actual poem which has come down to us with the 
 name of the Nibelungen- Lied, or Nibelunge-Not (Slaughter 
 of the Nibelungs), is of quite a late period in mediaeval 
 history. It belongs almost to the era of the Revival of 
 Paganism in the Renaissance. It is of the time of the 
 Hohenstaufen Emperors of Germany. The main object of 
 the story seems to have been to a great extent lost sight 
 of in the more modern extant poem, and subsidiary events 
 to have been enlarged so as to occupy the chief space in 
 
THE NIBELUNGEN. 409 
 
 the canvas. It is only by comparing this poem with 
 others which contain similar actions that we can recognise 
 the features of the original story. The incidents common 
 to all are of course the most antique. The other poems 
 beside which I place the Nibelungen are those of the 
 Volsung Saga in the North, including lays which ha,ve 
 found a place in the Edda, and the English poem Beowulf. 
 These together we may call the Nibelungen cycle of epic 
 poems. 1 
 
 Of these three the earliest in date is Beowulf. The 
 portion of this poem which is akin to the stories of the 
 Volsungs and of the Nibelungs is not that of which a 
 sketch was given in the Seventh Chapter, but the con- 
 cluding part which tells of the fight between Beowulf 
 and a great dragon which infested his land. The dragon 
 was the guardian of an ancient ' heathen hoard ' of gold, 
 
 1 It has been maintained by some writers that the Volsung Saga is 
 nothing else than a plagiarism from the Nibelungen. But the arguments 
 in controversion of this view are of overwhelming force. In the first place 
 a story of the Volsungs was knowa to the author of Beowulf. 
 
 .... Hwylc gecwae'S >aet he fram Sigemunde 
 Secgan hyrde ; ellen-d^edum ; 
 Uncu>es fela, Waslsinges gewin. 
 
 Sigemonde gesprong, aefter dea"S-daege 
 
 Dom unlytel ; syftan wiges heard 
 
 Wyrm acwealde. ... ... 1. 1758, &c. 
 
 He told all that of Sigmund 
 
 He had heard say ; of deeds reaounded ; 
 
 Of strange things many ; the Wselsing's victories. 
 
 To Sigmond ensued after his death-day 
 No little glory, when the fierce in fight 
 The worm had slain. 
 
 The hero of the adventure was at first Sigmund at least this was so in 
 the North. It is possible that the name of Sigurd is taken from Siegfried. 
 This evidence is alone, I should have supposed, tolerably decisive. But 
 even without the aid of the passage just quoted the elements of the 
 Volsung tale in Beowulf, the intermediate condition of the Volsun^a Saga 
 between Beowulf and the Nibelungen, the remains of ancient heathen 
 belief in it which have been entirely forgotten in the Nibelungen- Lied 
 (see Chaps. VII. and VIII.), are tolerably decisive evidence of the antiquity 
 and originality of the Northern epic. 
 
470 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 and Beowulf in killing the worm set free that treasure. 
 But he could not himself enjoy it or could for a brief 
 moment only for he had received a mortal hurt in the 
 combat, and almost immediately after it was over he died. 
 This is a very short and a very simple incident. But it 
 contains what is, I suspect, the most germain matter of 
 the original epic of this cycle. In the Volsung lays 1 the 
 story is considerably expanded. We have first the history 
 of Sigurd's fight with the worm Fafnir, which reproduces 
 the distinctive characteristics of Beowulf's fight with his 
 dragon, only with this difference, that Sigurd was not 
 killed in the encounter. 2 He died from a different 
 immediate cause. But still the slaying of Fafnir was the 
 final cause of his death ; for it seems to have been through 
 greed of the gold of Fafnir, as much as from any otber 
 motive, that Sigurd was treacherously slain by Gunnar and 
 Hogni. 3 In these Volsung poems many fresh elements 
 are introduced into the story. As the tale now goes we 
 have first the finding of Brynhild by Sigurd and the vows 
 which these exchange; then the oblivious potion admi- 
 nistered to Sigurd and his marriage with Godrun ; then 
 Brynhild's revenge, the death of Sigurd, and Brynhild's 
 own suicide ; and last of all Godrun's vengeance on the 
 murderers of Sigurd and the ensuing slaughter of the 
 Mflungs. 
 
 In the actual ISTibelungen-Lied, which I take to be the 
 latest of all the forms of the epic, the finding of the 
 
 1 It is hardly necessary to say that the lays of the Volsunga Saga are 
 the oldest portions of it. 
 
 2 Not at least in the story in its present form. But I have little doubt 
 that in an earlier account Sigurd, after the fight with Fafnir, did descend 
 into the House of Death ; for the next thing which he did was to go 
 through the fire at Hindarfjoll to wake Brynhild from her sleep of death. 
 This fire, as was shown in Chap. VIII., is a symbol ot death. Thus the myth 
 has been obscured by time in the same way in which came to be obscured 
 Apollo's descent to Admetus-Hades after his serpent fight. 
 
 3 According to one account Sigurd was actually done to death by 
 Guthorm, the younger brother of these two. But (as is said in the Drop 
 Niflwiga) Gunnar and Hogni divided between them Fafnir's gold. 
 
THE NIBELUNGEN. 471 
 
 treasure has been almost left out of account, and now 
 the whole history is of the jealousies of Brynhild and 
 Godrun and of the murders which ensue therefrom. Yet 
 even in this latest poem the possession by Sigurd of the 
 treasure of the Nibelungs, otherwise called the Rhine gold, 
 is alluded to again and again in a way which shows 
 that this must once have constituted an integral portion 
 of the story. 
 
 Taking, then, the two essential features in the history 
 of Sigurd to be his slaying the worm Fafnir and his own 
 death by treachery, the first thing we notice is that the 
 hero combines in himself the characteristics of two among 
 the old Teuton divinities of those two, in fact, whose 
 characters have received most from the epic spirit of the 
 Norsemen. These divinities are Thorr and Balder. The 
 longest stories which the Younger Edda tells us are those 
 which relate to these two gods, who were, moreover, each 
 of them originally sun gods. The most important among 
 the deeds of Thorr are his contests with the mid-earth 
 serpent, combats which are, as I have said, reproduced in 
 most of the mediaeval dragon fights of Europe. The 
 essential part of the myth of Balder is his premature 
 death at the hand of his blind brother Hoftr. These two 
 elements have been united to form the story of Sigurd 
 or Siegfried ; and here the worm Fafnir has replaced 
 Jormungandr, while in the place of H6$r we have Hogni 
 or Hagen. 1 
 
 This is enough to show us that Sigurd and Siegfried 
 are true descendants from the heroes of ancient heathen 
 days, a.nd that the tradition of the heroic character had 
 not been essentially changed from one epoch to another. 
 Other remnants of heathen belief are visible in the Yolsung 
 
 1 Odhinn has come to be confounded with Hoftr in this later epic ; for 
 there can be no question that Hagen is meant for Odhinn. (See supra 
 p. 391, note.) In the Volsung epic Odhinn has altogether sunk from the 
 high position which he holds in the poems of the religious part of the Edda. 
 He has ceased to be so much the frieLd of man and he has ceased also to 
 be so powerful as he once was. See what is said in the next paragraph. 
 
472 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 lays- -whereof in former chapters we have already noted 
 the most conspicuous and in Beowulf. But in the latest 
 poem of the cycle, the Nibelungen, these minor traces 
 are not to be found. Perhaps the most noticeable thing 
 in the poem (and this applies in no small degree to the 
 Volsung Saga also) is the absence of religious feeling 
 from it. It is little affected by the beliefs of heathen 
 Germany, but still less is it affected by the creed of 
 Christendom. Yet this very absence of religious feeling 
 is expressive of the time during which the Nibelungen 
 epic sprang into existence. It belongs precisely to that 
 era of transition when a great part of the German nation 
 had left behind them their old gods and had, as yet, found 
 no new divinity. 
 
 In the Nibelungen the names of some few among the 
 actors of the drama are historical, as, for example, Etzel, 
 who is Attila, and Dietrich of Bern, who is the Ostrogothic 
 king Theodoric. 1 These names are enough to suggest the 
 time at which the Nibelungen epic had its birth. And 
 though the motive of the poem has insensibly shifted from 
 what it was at first, and has been presented in a form more 
 intelligible to the readers of the thirteenth century than it 
 would have had if it told only of disputes for the posses- 
 sion of a treasure, still the epic has preserved in a wonder- 
 ful degree the spirit of the time which gave it birth. 
 
 I am insensibly led to speak of the ethic characteristics 
 of the Nibelungen, contrary to the principle which I laid 
 down anon that the ethics of the Middle Ages were not a 
 part of our concern, because the spirit and morale of this 
 great poem are so peculiar and so typical of the time in 
 which the Nibelungen legend first sprang up. It is the 
 spirit of that special period of transition from heathenism 
 to Christianity and from the total barbarism of the old 
 Teutonic life to the semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages. In 
 tone and in ethic the poem must be called heathen, in that 
 
 1 Dietrich of Bern = Theodoric of Verona 
 
THE NIBELUNGEN. 473 
 
 there is nothing in it at all suggestive of Christianity. 
 But it does not suggest either the heathenism of the old 
 days. It belongs only to that epoch during which the 
 German invaders Tiad abandoned Odhinn, for they had 
 left him behind in their ancestral villages, but had not yet 
 adopted Christ. The picture which the lay holds up be- 
 fore us is a horrible one, a tissue of aimless slaughter, a 
 history almost altogether foul and bloody, in which if 
 some noble figures for a time appear they are sure to be 
 the first to perish. 1 It is not to be supposed that the pic- 
 ture here drawn, so different from those drawn by Tacitus 
 and from those presented in more Christian epics, is true 
 for all time ; but it is undoubtedly true for the exact era 
 to which it refers. The people were caught with the de- 
 lirium of conquest and by the fatal enchantment of wealth. 
 All their thought was now concentrated on heaps of gold, 
 such as those for which their heroes are described as fight- 
 ing. This desire for the possession of a hoard of buried 
 treasure is the one motive force of the whole drama. 
 While from the fiercer Volsung and Nibelungen poems 
 the cruelty and greed look out in all their native horror, 
 even in the milder Beowulf the importance attaching to the 
 gaining of such a hoard is shown as conspicuously, though 
 less repulsively. The killing of the dragon was the crown- 
 ing act of the hero's glorious career. All his adventures 
 were consummated in the gaining of the e heathen hoard,' 
 and a heroic life was thought to reach its due ending in 
 such a deed. As Beowulf was dying he bade his comrade 
 bring forth the treasure, to feast his eyes therewith. Then 
 he gave thanks. 
 
 Ic Sara frsetwa For this treasure I 
 
 Frean ealles ]>anc, Thanks to the Lord of all, 
 
 Wuldur cyninge, To the King of Renown, 
 
 Wordum secge. Do now express. 
 
 1 Siegfried, though he is the hero of the Nibelungen, and is besides 
 the only fine character in the piece, is slain in the sixteenth Aventiure, 
 and the poem contains thirty-nine of these cantos. 
 
474 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 ses Se ic moste That these I might 
 
 iinum leodum, For my people, 
 
 jEiv swylt deege, Ere my death day, 
 
 Swylc gestrynan. 1 Such acquire. 
 
 That this fever should have seized upon the German 
 races during the era of their first conquests in Roman 
 territory will not seem strange to us when we think of all 
 the enchantments which were woven for them in the 
 lands to which they came. Little did they guess what 
 powers lay in ambush there, powers not less intoxicating 
 to the sense, and not less deceitful to the mind, than were 
 the spells of those giants who, to Teutonic fancy, held all 
 regions remote from the German's native home. 
 
 The enchantment which first fell upon the invaders 
 came from that wonder of Roman civilisation of which 
 they had before only heard. The Goths in Maesia, to 
 whom the apostle Ulfilas preached in the fourth century, 2 
 were living a life not greatly different from the life of 
 their Aryan forefathers two thousand years before. Like 
 the Aryas, who counted everything by their herds, these 
 Goths had no wealth but in their cattle, and when Ulfilas 
 desired to translate into their tongue any of the words for 
 money in the New Testament he could find no equivalent 
 but the Gothic faihu, which means cattle. Yet, before a 
 generation had passed away, the same Goths had been 
 transplanted into the midst of the teeming luxury of Italy 
 and Southern Gaul. All the stored wealth of these coun- 
 tries lay before them to make their own. It is true that to 
 them money, for the uses to which it is now put, had little 
 value ; and they probably never understood how coined 
 metal could be made subservient to the gratification of 
 civilised tastes and appetites. They had no need of and no 
 care for the real beauties which adorned the life of a rich 
 Roman citizen his stately villas, his statues, his gardens 
 but his more portable wealth they could seize upon and 
 
 1 Beowulf, 1. 5580 sqq. 2 Circ. 340-388. 
 
GEEED OF GOLD. 475 
 
 cherish, as though it held some charm which might con- 
 vert their rough lives into lives capable of the enjoyments 
 which they saw and envied and could not reach. We 
 know what kind of useless use they did make of the 
 treasures which they gained. One picture of their method 
 of employing the precious metals is given to us in the inven- 
 tory of the marriage presents which were brought to the 
 Visigoth Ataulf when he espoused the sister of Honorius. 
 Gibbon l tells of the hundred bowls full of gold and jewels 
 which were brought by the Goths as a present to the bride 
 Placidia ; of the fifty cups and sixteen patens of gold ; of 
 the immense missorium or dish of the same metal, in 
 weight 500 pounds, which was discovered in the treasure- 
 house of Narbonne when that city was taken by the 
 Franks. But a better notion of the rude use of treasure 
 among the Teuton peoples is given by the roughly-made 
 utensils bowls, jars, and platters all in solid gold, which, 
 under the name of viking treasures, are preserved in the 
 Museum of Copenhagen. Such witnesses as these from 
 the historic past take away their utterly fabulous character 
 from accounts of treasure contained in the ballad poetry of 
 the same age ; as, for example, the description in Beowulf of 
 the palace of Hrothgar, King of the King Danes, which 
 was roofed with pure gold. We may gather from these 
 examples how the Germans actually employed the hoards 
 that they won ; but we can never learn the full effect 
 which the vision of this wealth had upon their imagina- 
 tions. Why the sight of treasure in the precious metals 
 begets in men a wolfish craving and more than wolfish 
 cruelty it were hard to say. It was so with the Spaniards 
 of the sixteenth century, as with these Germans of the 
 sixth. The whole nation had now, like their national 
 hero, Sigurd, eaten of the serpent's heart a dreadful 
 sacrament of cruelty and desire. They had grown wiser, 
 but they had grown to have, like Athene, ' untender hearts.' 
 
 1 Chap. xxxi. 
 
476 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 We shall the better appreciate this characteristic of 
 the Nibelungen epics when we have been able to compare 
 them with another cycle of poems which are as essentially 
 Christian as the Nibelungen are un-Christian. To find a 
 true antithesis to the great epic of conquest and spoliation, 
 such an antithesis as may show the change in men's 
 thoughts and lives after the Middle Ages had really 
 dawned, we shall have to pass on to that series of poems 
 which are called the ( Chansons de Geste,' the great Karling 
 epic of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. These poems 
 are as completely informed by the spirit of mediae val 
 Catholicism as the Nibelungen is informed by the spirit 
 of the Teutonic conquests. But before we look at the 
 ' Chansons de Geste ' let us turn aside for a moment to trace 
 some of the lower currents of popular mythology, which 
 existed during these ages from the time of the Teutonic 
 conquests to the time of the rise of the Karling poems. 
 
 Epics, it has been said, belong to an age in which 
 some great emotion is stirring the hearts of the people, 
 giving a unity to their national life and making them 
 march together in a rhythmic motion as to the tune of a 
 war song. Of this order of creations were, whatever their 
 faults, the Nibelungen-Lied and the other poems of that 
 cycle ; of such an order was the Carlo vingian epic, of 
 which we shall have occasion to speak presently, and 
 which arose when men's thoughts were being turned 
 toward the great contest between the East and the West, 
 between Mohammadanism and Christianity. But in 
 quieter times or in places remote from the stir of excite- 
 ment and adventure the stream of popular mythology 
 keeps almost unchanged its tranquil, languid course. 
 
 The literature of the kind which the Nibelungen 
 represents belongs to the warlike classes. Those who 
 first chaunted the stanzas of the German epic were they 
 who had been the votaries of Odhinn, the Wind, who had 
 kept the mark and guarded the village. They went forth 
 
FOLK TALES. 477 
 
 to become the ruling races in the countries which they 
 conquered. In these lands they found the older inhabit- 
 ants more civilised than themselves, but without national 
 spirit or national coherence, who were destined soon to 
 sink to the class of serfs and peasants. Thus for awhile 
 these conquering Germans stood apart, forming a nation- 
 ality of their own, belonging neither to their native 
 country, which they abandoned, nor to the land into which 
 they came. They lived still a life of camps ; they were 
 ever on the move and had no sense of property nor of^a 
 settled home. 1 Therefore the national epic which repre- 
 sents their deeds and thoughts is in many ways peculiar 
 and can scarcely be taken for an episode in the regular 
 development of belief. But with the peaceful brethren 
 whom they left behind, and among the peasant folk whom 
 they conquered, the old creeds, the religion of the 
 Germans by the one and the beliefs of the Celts by the 
 other, were cherished more persistently. But as the 
 common people in both regions were for the present 
 deprived of their natural leaders and of the more eager 
 and adventurous minds among them, their creeds threw 
 off the finer portions of them and sank down to be essen- 
 tially the beliefs of peasants. 
 
 There is in every religious system a popular mythology 
 which lies like a soft alluvial bed all round the more 
 striking elevations of religious thought ; and which, easily 
 as it seems to take impressions, is sometimes found to form 
 the most immutable portion of the creed. The earth- 
 quakes, the sudden cataclasms which overwhelm the 
 heights, leave these parts uninjured. They become most 
 noticeable when the striking features of the religion have 
 been for a time annihilated ; but they have pre-existed in 
 days long anterior to these changes, and are not by such 
 revolutions called into being. We have seen how, while 
 
 1 This character attaching to the Merovingian Franks has been very 
 well pointed out by Guizot (Cours da VHistoire de France, 8 me lecon) and 
 after him by Michelet (Hist, de France, livre ii.) 
 
478 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 those elements of a creed which may be called national 
 are always the grander ones, there may remain among 
 separate fragments of the people many beliefs which are 
 little removed from a primitive fetich worship. If the 
 nation is for awhile denationalised, and transformed into 
 a congeries of units, these primitive elements of belief will 
 again come to the front. It was through this kind of 
 separation between the different elements of society that 
 opportunity was given for the mythology of the lower 
 people to rise to the surface, and to take its place as it 
 eventually did in the literary history of the Middle Ages. 
 
 There are, it seems to me, three distinctly traceable 
 streams of folk belief which must be taken to have flowed 
 side by side with the more important epics of the Middle 
 Ages side by side with the Nibelungen and side by side 
 with the Karling poems. Each stream bears the cha- 
 racter of a mythology sprung up among a conquered race 
 or at any rate among the inferior orders of society. 
 
 First of all, there was among the Celts in England 
 itself, and probably in other lands, a large body of ancient 
 heroic myth which celebrated the deeds of the gods or 
 heroes of the Celtic creed, and out of which the portion 
 which has survived for us eventually took the shape of the 
 legend of Arthur. This legend only became generally 
 popular toward the veiy end of the Middle Ages. Having 
 for centuries lived on in neglect, and passed from mouth 
 to mouth among the peasantry, it suddenly grew into favour 
 just at the time at which the more famous 'Chansons de 
 Geste ' were falling out of notice. This legend of Arthur 
 contained in it many elements peculiar to the Celtic mytho- 
 logy, elements of that mythology which are also noticeable 
 in another popular tradition of which we shall presently 
 speak. In a former chapter we saw how this legend pre- 
 served the true Celtic form of the myth of the Earthly 
 Paradise. But the Arthur legend could not have been in 
 any wide sense a popular mythology. It was cherished 
 by the Britons, but the Celts of Continental Europe 
 
THE LEGEND OF THE SAINTS. 479 
 
 had been too long Romanised, and were too thoroughly 
 Christian, to remember the histories of their fabulous 
 heroes. Therefore the legend belongs of right only to a 
 small section of this race, and takes no important place 
 in the mythology of mediaeval Europe. 1 
 
 Much more truly popular among the mass of the Celtic 
 people the inhabitants of Gaul, for example, in the days 
 of Merovingian rule must have been a parallel series 
 of legends those of the saints. These were to some ex- 
 tent examples of pre-Christian mythology, though clothed 
 in the garb of Christianity. 
 
 The time at which these legends began to circulate 
 was the century which followed the epoch of Merovingian 
 conquest; it was after the beginning of the seventh 
 century that men first began to collect the legends and 
 write them down. The age of persecution had now ceased, 
 and time was beginning to grow its moss and lichen over 
 the memories of the martyrs of the preceding age, men 
 who had been dear in every way to the subjugated people, 
 as fellow-countrymen and as champions of Christianity. 
 Then there arose a race of pious priests, who went about 
 collecting the oral traditions and graving again, like Old 
 Mortality at the tombs of the Covenanters, 2 the inscriptions 
 which had once been written in men's hearts, but were 
 now in too much danger of becoming effaced. 
 
 In morality the stories of the saints are as complete a 
 contrast as could be looked for to the morality of the ruling 
 races as that was portrayed to and by themselves in 
 their epic poems, or as it is portrayed to us by the 
 contemporary chroniclers. The saint legend is childish in 
 that innocent and simple fashion which bespeaks the 
 mythology of peasant folk in every age. Where we are 
 not face to face with the Christian element of the story, 
 
 1 At the date when the Arthur legend became widely known the true 
 mythic age of Europe had come to an end. 
 
 2 This simile is Guizot's. See his fine essay, Coiirs cTHist. Mod. Hut. 
 de France, leQon 17. 
 
480 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 its morality, we have got back to the very primitive ground- 
 work of mythology, the folk tale. These stories must 
 have grown up side by side with the fairy legends which 
 are so common in old France, tales of the courils, the 
 corrigans 1 and lutins of Brittany and of the fays and 
 dracs of the South. Such beings as these and the tales 
 that are devoted to them are earlier than the great 
 creations of mythology and the more serious parts of 
 belief; and they are also much longer lived than these 
 are. 
 
 Perch' una fata non puo mai morire 
 
 Fin al di del giudicio universale. 2 
 
 
 In days when the German races, despite their pretended 
 conversion, would have little to do with Christianity, and 
 it was ' a thing unheard of for a Merovingian to become 
 a clerk,' 3 Christianity must needs have been in every way 
 a religion for the peasantry. Even the rulers of the 
 Church were in those days chosen from among the con- 
 quered race, from among such Romans 4 as had gained 
 influence over the barbarians ; the lower orders of the 
 priesthood and the monks were drawn from the peasant 
 and the slavish classes. 5 It was for this reason that the 
 legends of the saints were so deeply imbued with the 
 thoughts and beliefs of rustic life ; the same kind of ad- 
 
 1 The corrigans were probably, like the faj^s, originally women. The 
 name comes from corny, little, and grvynn, woman, or else grvemn, genie. 
 Perhaps these two were originally the same word. See Leroux de Lincy, 
 Introduction au Livre das Legendes. The presence of the fairy element 
 in the Arthurian legend is also very noticeable, and makes a strong con- 
 trast between these myths and those of the Oarlovingian era. The last 
 were much more German than Celtic. 
 
 2 Bojardo, Orlando Inamorato, ii. 26, 15. 
 
 8 See the story of St. Columba and Theodebert II. ; also the story of 
 Clotilda, who said that she would rather see her grandchildren dead than 
 tonsured. Greg. Tur. iii. 
 
 4 Romanised Gauls or Goths. 
 
 5 It was quite otherwise in the days of Charlemagne ; for in the capitu- 
 laries of that king slaves are expressly forbidden to become monks ; this 
 contrast is typical of the change which passed over Christendom during the 
 eighth century. 
 
THE LEGEND OF THE SAINTS. 481 
 
 venture runs through, the saint legend and the popular 
 tale. The intervention in one case is that of Provi- 
 dence or of some saint ; in the other case it is that of 
 the little familiar, the corrigan or fairy. The deeds of 
 the two orders of heroes are different in detail, but they 
 are the same in spirit and intention. In one set of stories 
 the hero conquers his enemies by his fairy gifts, and gains 
 the princess at the end ; in the other he works the same 
 wonders by his miraculous powers, overcoming all his 
 foes, avowed and secret, and becoming the confidant of 
 kings. That he afterwards falls into trouble and ends by 
 suffering martyrdom is the result due as much to a canon 
 of fitness external to the storyteller as to any predilection 
 of his own. 
 
 The third current was, originally, a pure stream of 
 popular mythology. It was unmixed either with religion 
 or with any legends of that higher kind, such as are ne- 
 cessary to complete a religious system. The stream of 
 which I speak was the great Beast Epic of mediaeval 
 Europe, of which we have some scattered remnants in the 
 histories of Reineke the Fox and Isengrim the Wolf. Yet 
 these tales are doubtless but fragments of an ancient apo- 
 logue, which was current throughout Northern Europe. 
 
 The traces of the Reinhart legend in many different 
 lands prove the wide distribution and the early origin of 
 the story. Among extant editions of the fable, however, 
 the greater number belong to the borderland between 
 Northern France and Germany ; they have generally come 
 from Upper or Lower Flanders. All these extant forms of 
 the Beast Epic are of too modern a date to give us a trust- 
 worthy clue to the nature of this epic at the time at w r hich 
 it sprang up among the peasantry of Northern Europe. 1 
 
 1 Grimm (Reinhart Fvchs) has published a number of the earliest 
 extant forms of the fable of Reinhart and Isengrim. The first of these is 
 a Latin poem of 688 lines, called Isengrimus. It belongs to the first half 
 of the twelfth century, Of nearly the same date are the Reinardus, 
 another Latin poem of 6,596 lines : the Reinhart (Old High German), of 
 
 I I 
 
482 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 It is difficult to settle the claim to its authorship of the 
 two nationalities French and German. For while, on the 
 one hand, the French has so completely adopted the story 
 that the name of the hero, Eenard, has come in that lan- 
 guage to stand for the generic name for fox, to the total 
 exclusion of the older word, vulpe, this name itself, as well 
 as those of the other chief actors in the story, Isengrim 
 and Bruin, are apparently words of German and not of 
 French origin. 1 That which we can distinguish in the 
 epic is that it was the possession of the lower strata of 
 society. The hero, Eenard, is the representative of a sub- 
 ject race, while Isengrim, the wolf, represents the con- 
 querors ; and the whole history of the poem is of the 
 wiles by which Eenard gets the better of his stronger 
 cousin. 
 
 But though Eenard represented the peasant class 
 wherever the legend was current, I am on the whole dis- 
 posed to look upon him as standing rather for the lower 
 orders of the German race than for the subject Celtic 
 population. There is a close relationship between Eenard 
 and Isengrim ; they are not of alien blood, though their 
 interests are ever opposed. 2 In truth, the character of 
 Eenard is precisely the character of the men of the 
 
 2,266 lines ; and the Reinaert de Vos, of 2,350 lines. The third of these 
 four poemg comes from Alsace, the other three from Flanders. 
 
 The three great poems of the epic cycle are Rcinardus (twelfth cen- 
 tury), Roman de Renart (thirteenth or fourteenth century), Reincke Fuchs 
 (end of fifteenth century). 
 
 1 ' Noble ' (the Lion) is, on the other hand, a distinctly French gloss. 
 Otherwise the name would have been Adel. But, as Grimm says, the 
 Bear probably originally performed the office of king (Reinkart Fucks, 
 Introd. xlvii. liii.) This office was, in course of time, transferred to the 
 Lion. 
 
 The essential characters of the drama are, says Grimm, the conqueror, 
 the conquered, and the judge Wolf, Fox, and Bear or Lion. For 'con- 
 queror' and 'conquered' we may perhaps substitute 'ruling ' and 'subject ' 
 races. 
 
 2 Throughout the poems they constantly call each other cousin, or uncle 
 and nephew. The nearness of kinship between the fox and the wolf in 
 popular belief is well shown by the etymology of the names for them, wolf 
 being etymologically allied to vulpes. 
 
EEINEKE FUCHS. 483 
 
 country to which ' Reinhart Fuchs ' seeins especially to 
 belong, the inhabitants of the almost independent but 
 yet physically weak trading cities of Flanders. These 
 men were still essentially German, but their sympathies 
 were not with German conquerors, with the nobility of 
 France or Germany, but with the peasant class. 1 
 
 The Thorr of Scandinavian or the Doriar of Teuton 
 belief became in time the patron god of the peasantry, 
 and instead of being a warrior he grew to be a promoter 
 of agriculture, and of that kind of war only which agri- 
 culture wages against the rude waste tracts of a country. 2 
 As Odhinn (Wuotan) remained the warlike god, and so the 
 god of the ruling classes, there would naturally grow up 
 some rivalry between the two chief Teuton divinities. A 
 trace of this enmity is shown in one of the Eddaic poems, 
 the * HarbarSsljoft,' at least in the latest acceptation of its 
 intention ; for though HarbarS began by being a giant, 
 there can be no question that he was eventually confounded 
 with Odhinn. Without meaning it to be supposed that 
 the original story of the * Reineke Fuchs ' was in any way 
 founded upon the myth system of Asgard and the Teuton 
 divinities, I can imagine that in its actual shape it does 
 bear some traces of this mythology as it appeared during 
 its latter years. It may well be that the red Reineke has 
 inherited something from the red Thorr and the grey 
 Isengrim, something from the grey Odhinn. 3 In Iceland 
 the fox is still sometimes called holtaporr (wood-Thorr), 4 
 Odhinn was generally the grey-headed and grey-bearded 
 
 1 It is only in the later forms of the Reineke legend that the hero is 
 converted into a knight possessing a castle Malepertus. 
 
 2 See Simrock, Handbuch passim, and Uhland, Der Mythus von TJtor. 
 
 3 Thorr, as the Thunderer, was always the red God. He was imagined 
 to have a red beard (Forn. Sog. ii. 182, x. 329). Odhinn is sometimes a red 
 god, though more generally a grey. Reinhart is constantly addressed as 
 the ' red,' as is indeed natural. See Keinardus, 284, 1463 ; Reinaert, 4394 ; 
 Horn, de Renart, 463, 502, 4557, 6088, 6674, 6689, 8251, 8815, 9683. 
 Isengrim is almost as often styled the ' grey,' canus, canu, &c. 
 
 4 Grimm, D. M. i. 148. 
 
 i i 2 
 
484 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 god ; and the wolf was especially sacred to him. Where- 
 fore Isengrim would be an appropriate representative of 
 Odhinn. And it is very probable that beside the element 
 of primitive belief in this Beast Epic, a species of mytho- 
 logy which is probably earlier than the construction of any 
 Asgard or ordered pantheon of gods, and which may have 
 belonged as much to Celts as to Germans, there is like- 
 wise some reminiscence of the peculiar religious system 
 of the Teutonic people. 
 
 Such fragments of pristine belief as these which we 
 have enumerated I place about the period during which 
 the German conquerors were settling into their new 
 homes, and Europe was entering upon its mediaeval life. 
 I do this not because this kind of popular belief does in 
 itself belong to any peculiar age, but because it is 
 especially in times of transition, and we may say of 
 denationalisation, that primitive myths take an important 
 place in the world's creed. It is only under such cir- 
 cumstances that they rise to the surface and assume some- 
 thing of the dignity of national epics. 
 
 But the German race was not destined to remain for 
 ever so little like a nation, so much like a house divided 
 against itself, as it was during the age which immediately 
 succeeded its conquests of Eoman territory, during the 
 rule of the Merovingian kings in France, of the Lombards 
 in Italy, during the days of the Suevi and Visigoths in 
 Spain and of our Heptarchy in England. A new influence 
 of German thought began to make itself felt when the 
 Karling dynasty supplanted the Merovingian dynasty in 
 France, and when through the strength of the eastern 
 Franks that d} 7 nasty became in the person of Charles the 
 supreme ruler in Europe. 
 
 Though a thousand unrecorded Christmas Days have 
 passed away since then, history will not soon lose sight of 
 that Christmas Day of the } r ear 800, when, as Charlemagne 
 was kneeling before the altar of St. Peter's in Rome, 
 
THE 'CHANSONS DE GESTE.' 485 
 
 Leo III. (so Eginhard tells the story 1 ) came behind him 
 unperceived, and placing a diadem upon his head cried 
 out, ' Hail to Charles the Augustus, the great and peace- 
 ful Emperor of the Romans ! ' The vision which floated 
 before the minds of the statesmen of those days was the 
 revival of the old effete Western Empire under better 
 conditions, with a strong orthodox Emperor at its head, 
 and of a renewal with all its ancient glories of the Roman 
 civilisation. But it was not this that the ceremony of 
 that Christmas Day did really solemnise. The Roman 
 nation was not galvanised into new life ; in place thereof 
 the power of the barbarians was established and the era 
 of their influence on European history was inaugurated. 
 In the person of their king the crown was placed upon the 
 head of the Germans. 
 
 Now for the first time for many hundred years some 
 order and fixed law began to appear in the governance of 
 society; for now all the nations, save those in the far 
 North and in the East, had been converted to Christianity. 
 Now, too, all the conquests of the Germans over the 
 Romans and Celts had come to an end. 2 No longer a 
 thought remained of migration or of further change. 
 The life of camps was abandoned, and that complete 
 settlement of the Germans in their new lands took place 
 which directly led to the institution of feudalism, and 
 hence to the petrified, unvarying life of the Middle Ages. 
 
 The literature which speaks most eloquently of the 
 beliefs and feelings of the age which followed this establish- 
 ment of the Carlovingian dynasty is that immense cycle 
 of epic poems which has gathered round the name of the 
 great emperor, and which is hence called the Karling epic. 
 But the name by which they were distinguished in their 
 own day was ' Chansons de Geste.' The stories which are 
 told in these songs, almost without exception, revolve 
 round the traditional figure of Charlemagne. But this 
 
 1 Vita Ear. Magni, 100 ; Annal. 215. 
 
 8 Save in the far West Wales, Ireland, Scotland. 
 
486 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 Charlemagne is not the historical king of the Franks ; he is 
 the mythic being which a couple of centuries of legendary 
 hero worship have made him. The motive of the poems 
 the spirit, that is to say, which moves and animates them 
 is the spirit of the crusader, for they arose at the beginning 
 of the great contest between the East and the West ; they 
 faded away when the enthusiasm of the crusades died 
 down. In these poems Charlemagne is transformed into 
 the ideal crusader. His deeds of arms are wrought for the 
 discomfiture of the Saracen, and nearly all the actions of 
 the other heroes of the songs have the same intent. 
 
 Though Christian in tone, the 'Chansons ' are not Celtic; 
 on the contrary, they are essentially Germanic. They are 
 Teutonic in the spirit that animates them, in the tramp 
 of battle to which they seem to keep time, in the forms of 
 love and hate which they chronicle; they are Teutonic 
 even in lesser details, as in the actual method of fighting 
 which they describe and the mode of arranging an army, 
 or in the system of administering justice. 1 There can be 
 no doubt that the ' Chansons de Geste ' are, not less than the 
 Nibelungen, the offspring of the chaunts by which from 
 time immemorial the German line of battle used to go 
 encouraged into action, and in which, when the battle 
 was over, the soldiers used to find their voice again by the 
 fireside. Tradition, therefore, was never quite broken 
 through between the days of the old heathen war songs 
 and those of the birth of the newer Christian epic. And it 
 could hardly be but that many of the legends of heathenism 
 were handed on from one era to the other. 
 
 True the religion of the people had been utterly 
 changed between the two epochs; and, so far as regards 
 either the formal belief or the morality of the ' Chansons,' 
 these afford as great a contrast as could be imagined to 
 the thoughts of heathenism upon the same subjects. The 
 Qhristian theory of morals, in the form in which that was 
 
 I 8ee Leon Gautier, Epopee franqaise, vol. i. p. 28. 
 
THE MYTHIC CHARLEMAGNE. 487 
 
 understood in the tenth and eleventh centuries, shines 
 brightly in these poems, and at once divides them by an 
 impassable gulf from the poems of the Nibelungen cycle. 
 But as regards the outer region of belief, that part which 
 does not touch closely upon morality, and does not come 
 in contact with the Biblical teaching concerning this 
 world or the next, the barrier between the Christian epic 
 and the older literature of heathen times is far less 
 conspicuous. It was to a great extent upon the pattern 
 of Odhinn, of Thorr, or of other gods and heroes of Asgard 
 and Walhalla that the legendary characters of Charle- 
 magne and his paladins were formed. 
 
 The emperor himself is in many ways the counterpart 
 of Odhinri (Wuotan), and seems to perform the same 
 duties in the midst of his twelve peers which Odhinn 
 exercised among the twelve gods of Asgard. The part 
 which Odhinn played in Valholl the same part did 
 Charles play at Aix. The former was, as we saw, 
 essentially the counsellor and the wise one among the 
 gods. Though he was a god of battle and mighty in the 
 combat, he was less distinctively a fighter than a deliberator. 
 Thorr and Tyr could do battle as well as he ; but none 
 possessed the wisdom of Odhinn. Now this is just the 
 character which attaches to Charles. Roland or Oliver 
 can do the fighting, but Charles is always the one who 
 takes and gives counsel, who settles upon the occasion and 
 the place of war. In the f Chanson de Roland ' there is a 
 fine picture of Charles seated to receive the ambassadors 
 from a certain Saracen king. We see him on a golden 
 throne, with hair and long beard all white 
 
 Blanche ad la barbe e tut flurit le chief 
 
 with head bent down, eyes cast upon the ground, long 
 pondering before he gave his answer; 'for,' says the 
 poet, ' Charles never spake in haste.' 
 
 IV ^reover the likeness between Odhinn and Charles 
 appt r? peculiarly strong in one respect, viz. in the 
 
488 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 aspect of great age which each wears. It is as strange to 
 endow a chief god as to endow a popular hero with the 
 appearance of eld. Although the former might be sup- 
 posed to have existed through all time, one could not 
 have expected that men would have fancied him bearing 
 011 his person any impress of the flight of years ; and one 
 would have expected it least of all with a people who set 
 so much value upon physical strength as did the Germans. 
 Yet it is a fact that wherever Odhinn makes his appear- 
 ance in later German tradition it is as a quite old, grey- 
 headed, grey-bearded man. He is, in the language of Mr. 
 Morris's ' Sigurd the Volsung,' 'one-eyed, and seeming 
 ancient.' I do not know whether this had always been 
 the conception of Odhinn, but it certainly was the image of 
 him which existed in the latter days of paganism. And 
 now in the dawning of the Christian epic we see the same 
 conception embodied in Charles. There are some ( Chansons ' 
 which tell of Charlemagne's boyhood and early youth, 
 though these are not among the earliest of the collection. 
 In any case the minute this early youth is passed Charle- 
 magne seems to have become suddenly a very old man. 
 There is no intermediate stage between twenty and sixty 
 or more. Charlemagne is nearly always called, as in the 
 passage just quoted, him 'of the white beard.' In the 
 'Chanson de Koland,' the oldest and the most truly epic of 
 all the collection, Charlemagne is made to be two hundred 
 years old and more mien escient douz cenz anz ad passet. 
 
 Again, Charles has still somewhat the character of the 
 tempest god ; he seems to wield, like Odhinn, the powers 
 of the storm, and the thunder like Zeus or Thorr ; the 
 glance of his eyes can strike men to the ground as if they 
 had been struck by the bolt. Odhinn had for ever flying 
 round his head two ravens, Hugin and Munin (Thought 
 and Memory), who were his counsellors. In place of these 
 Charles has two heavenly guides namely, two angels 
 who never leave him. 
 
 Another thing which draws close the link between 
 
THE MYTHIC CHARLEMAGNE. 489 
 
 the god and the epic hero is that in popular German tra- 
 dition Charles the Great is made to lie asleep beneath a 
 mountain, where, without question, Odhinii had once slept 
 before. 1 In other traditions a still later national hero, 
 Frederick Eedbeard (Barbarossa), takes the place of the 
 god. He sleeps at Kaiserlautern or at Kiffhauser. Every- 
 one knows the story of the shepherd youth who, by an 
 underground passage, found his way into the midst of the 
 hill, and there saw Frederick with his head upon a table, 
 through which the beard of the king had grown, Frederick 
 awoke at the sound of the strange footsteps, and demanded 
 of the shepherd, ' Are the ravens still flying round the 
 hill ? ' ' Yes,' he answered. ' Then must I sleep another 
 hundred years.' In this tale the birds of Odhinn still 
 linger to mark the place where he sleeps and the true 
 individuality of the sleeper. 
 
 The Valkyriur too are not wanting from the legend of 
 Charlemagne, for they are represented by the daughters 
 of the emperor. These women are ever described as vira- 
 goes. They were said to ride with their father to battle ; 
 one of them, Emma, actually carried off by force a hesi- 
 tating lover. 2 
 
 One antique Teuton goddess, reappearing in these 
 tales, does so while keeping her proper name. This is 
 Berchta (Perchta), whom in a former chapter we spoke of 
 as the counterpart in Germany proper of the Norse god- 
 dess Frigg, the wife of Odhinn. Berchta seems, in fact, 
 to have been one of the names of this consort of Wuotan, 
 and the goddess herself to have been a sort of Queen of 
 Heaven. 3 The same name recurs continually in the 
 * Chansons de Geste.' There is Berte aus grans pies (Bertha 
 Broadfoot), the mother of Charles; and another Bertha, 
 
 * In one instance, at all events, the mountain is called Wodansberg. 
 
 2 Grimm, Deutsche Sag en, ii. 115, &c. 
 
 3 See Grimm, D. M. i. 226 sqq. ; Simrock, Handb. der deut. Myth. 293 
 357, 364, 409, 548; also Wuttke, Deutscli. Volksab. ch. i. ; Kuhn, S. G. 
 M. &c. Berchta is something of an earth goddess, as is Frigg. 
 
490 OUTLINES OP PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the sister of Charles and the mother of Roland. The first 
 of these two partook of the Yalkyria nature. The name 
 of Broadfoot came to her from her having one foot webbed 
 like the foot of a swan. This was all that remained of the 
 power which once belonged to the Valkyriur of changing 
 themselves into birds. To such mean dimensions had 
 shrunk the beautiful myth of Odhinn's swan maidens. 
 
 As Charles was the due representative of Allfather 
 Odhinn, so was Roland, the great hero of this epic, a 
 representative of his son Thorr. We may perhaps say 
 that, like Siegfried of the Nibelungen, he combines in 
 himself traits taken from the two principal divinities of 
 the second generation among the j3Esir. He, quite con- 
 trariwise to his uncle, is always young. He is evidently 
 meant to be in the glow of youth at the very day of his 
 death. 
 
 Amis Rollanz, prozdom, juvente bele ! l 
 
 exclaimed Charles in his lament over him after Ron- 
 cesvaux. Roland was at the end still unmarried, though 
 affianced to the lovely Aude. Yet he was own nephew to 
 Charlemagne, who at the same time was two hundred 
 years old. 
 
 Roland was the bearer of the great horn or olifant of 
 Charlemagne's army. At Roncesvalles, when the rear- 
 guard of the French under Roland had been surprised and 
 nearly cut to pieces by the army of the Saracen, Roland 
 put the horn to his lips and blew a blast, in the hope of 
 recalling the main body of the army. He blew with such 
 force that the sound was heard thirty leagues away, and 
 reached the ears of Charles and of his army, who had 
 already returned to France. All the host of Charles stood 
 listening, and three times this distant echo came to their 
 ears. ( That horn had a long breath,' said the king. But ere 
 the main body of the French could get back to the battle 
 field the rear-guard had almost all been slain, and Roland 
 
 1 Ami Roland, vaillant homme, belle jeunesse 1 
 
EOLAND. 491 
 
 himself was wounded to death. Then he sounded the olifant 
 once more this time, alas ! but faintly and when Charles 
 heard it, in sorrow he turned to his barons and said, ( It 
 is going ill. We shall lose my nephew Roland. I know 
 by the sound of his horn that he hath not long to live.' 
 This description is very suggestive of the thunder, first 
 loud and presently spent and faintly rumbling. It should 
 be remembered that, at the very time when this horn of 
 Roland reached the ears of Charlemagne from far away, 
 a tempest of thunder and lightning was raging over 
 France. Roland may well have inherited his olifant from 
 Thorr. 
 
 The history of Roncesvalles ma-y have about it some 
 lingering echoes of the prophecy of Ragnarok. We know 
 that one of the tokens of the coining of the giants was to 
 be the sound of the Gjallar-horn, blown by the god Heimdal, 
 he who had been posted to hold the bridge Bifrost against 
 the coming of Surtr. When the overwhelming host of 
 the fire king comes upon him Heimdal is to sound that 
 Gjallar-horn. Now this horn is undoubtedly the thunder. 
 The peal belongs both to Heimdal and to Thorr ; therefore 
 the olifant of Roland may be the thunder too. 
 
 Literature of the kind represented by the Carlovingian 
 epic's belonged chiefly to the upper classes. These songs 
 were sung by wandering minstrels not so often in the 
 market-place as in the castle hall or bower. Half the 
 barons of France traced descent in one way or another 
 from the paladins, much as the petty Ionian kings to 
 whom Homer sang deemed themselves the representatives 
 of the chieftains who had joined in the conquest of Troy. 
 The earlier songs from which the { Chansons de Geste ' 
 were a compilation were probably of a more popular 
 character, but they are lost to us. 
 
 While these stories were being repeated in the lord's 
 castle what sort of tales were passing current in the farm- 
 house and the village, among vassals and serfs ? what 
 
492 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 kind especially in those German lands where Wuotan and 
 Donar had once swayed the popular creed ? 
 
 There is in Germany a certain range of highlands 
 which, standing upon Switzerland as upon a base, stretches 
 up diagonally by the Black Forest and the Palatinate to 
 the Harz and Saxon Switzerland. It corresponds to that 
 other series of elevations in eastern France or in Alsace 
 and Lorraine from the Vosges to the Ardennes. Between 
 these ranges the broad Rhine wanders through fruitful 
 plains down to the Northern Sea. The hills are two 
 opposing camps : the plain is the battle ground between 
 them. Here has often been fought out the issue between 
 different nationalities and different creeds. The eastern- 
 most of these two camps was once the stronghold of 
 German heathenism ; it is now the favourite home of 
 popular lore. From this eastern range the Saxon or the 
 Thuringian once looked out upon his great river his free 
 German Rhine and national god and he saw it gradually 
 passing over to the new faith. Cathedrals were rising all 
 along its banks : the great archbishoprics founded by 
 Charles at Cologne and Mainz and Worms Mainz, the 
 see of St. Boniface; Cologne, the most sacred and most 
 influential of the Middle Age towns of Germany; 1 and 
 then beyond the Rhine, like the outposts of the advancing 
 army of Christendom, he saw other foundations spring up ; 
 first among these the seven lesser sees established by 
 Charlemagne Osnabriick, Minden, Paderborn, Werden, 
 Halberstadt, and Hildersheim, and the famous abbey of 
 Fulda. As he beheld these churches rise, the heathen 
 German fled and hid himself in his mountain fastnesses. 
 How long his creed lingered there we cannot say, but when 
 it had finally departed it left the recollection of its presence 
 in the popular tradition. 
 
 The transformations which the German deities under- 
 went when the people became Christianised took place 
 
 1 The laws of the hanse were founded by the merchants of Cologne who 
 were resident in foreign lands. 
 
GEEMAN FOLK LOKE. . 493 
 
 more recently here than elsewhere, and therefore the re- 
 collection of the old gods is the clearer. It is here that 
 we must enquire if we wish to discover what became of 
 Wuotan and Donar, Freka and Holda. It is not in this 
 case as it is with the folk tales of the type of the ' Reineke 
 Fuchs,' or even with that popular mythology which peeps 
 from behind the legends of the saints. Both these kinds of 
 popular lore are chiefly of the universal folk-tale type, and 
 the beings which they introduce are such as would find 
 their counterparts in any land ; as likely in the popular 
 tales of the Arabs or the Persians as in those of Europe. 
 A great proportion of the German folk tales are also of 
 this universal character ; but there is another series which 
 contains certain tokens of the special German belief, and 
 which has much to tell us of the lingering effects of that 
 belief upon popular fancy. 
 
 First to notice is the legend of Hackelbarend, or 
 Hackelberg, or Herod, as he is variously called, the Wild 
 Huntsman, who is known to us in England as Herne the 
 Hunter. He is found all over North Germany and in 
 Denmark ; he is well known in the Jura, and in the 
 Vosges, and in Switzerland; better known still in the 
 Harz. Hackelberg, the legend saith, was a wicked noble 
 who was wont to hunt upon Sundays as upon week days, 
 without distinction. One particular Easter Sunday he 
 had not only gone hunting himself, but had forced all his 
 peasantry to take a part in beating up the game. Presently 
 he was met by two horsemen : one was mild of aspect and 
 rode a white horse ; the other was grim and fierce, seated 
 upon a coal-black steed, which from its mouth and nostrils 
 seemed to breathe fire. The one sought to dissuade him 
 from his enterprise, the other urged him on ; but Hackel- 
 berg turned from his good angel and continued his wild 
 chase. So now, in company with the fiend, he hunts, and 
 will hunt to the Judgment Day. Men call him Hel-j tiger, 1 
 
 1 In Ix>w German also Dammjager (Kuhn, Sagen, Sec. ii. No. 9), 
 Bodenjiiger ( = Woden jager), Buddejager, Woenjager, Ewiger Jagex, &c. 
 (id. ii. 24-28). 
 
494 , OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 hunter of hell. According to one tradition he seduced a 
 nun, and she now rides bj his side : some say she is 
 transformed into the white owl Totosel; others call her 
 Ursula l a significant name. 
 
 Woe to the peasant who hears the wild chase sweeping 
 towards him through some lonely mountain pass, and amid 
 the din the cry of the Hel-jager, 'Hoto! hutu!' The 
 barking of dogs may be distinguished from mid air, and 
 yet nothing seen; or a rain of bloody drops may come 
 down from above with a limb of one of the victims. One 
 peasant boldly jeered at the Huntsman as he went by, and 
 Hackelberg threw him down the arm of a man ; ' for the 
 Wild Huntsman,' says this legend, c hunts only men.' 2 
 
 There can be no doubt that the awful apparition is 
 Odhinn himself transformed. Hakelbarend seems to have 
 been the earliest name of the Huntsman ; it means simply 
 cloak-bearer, and we know how constantly Odhinn is 
 represented travelling abroad clad in a- long blue cloak, 
 which is in fact the air or the cloud. 3 She who rides with 
 the Wild Huntsman is the German goddess Horsel (hence 
 called Ursula), probably the same as Freyja, 4 and more 
 remotely the same as Frigg. Odhinn and Freyja rode 
 together to the field of battle to share in the division of 
 the slain ; in other words, they were the two psychopomps, 
 or leaders of ghosts to the nether kingdom. Hackelberg 
 performed a similar office ; he was a hunter of men. 
 
 Hackelberg is, again, connected with some of the notions 
 concerning the other world which in a former chapter we 
 traced in Yedic mythology. We saw that in the Vedas 
 the Milky Way was fancied to be the Bridge of Souls. 
 
 1 Kuhn, ii. p. 10. 
 
 2 Kuhn, ii. No. 21. 
 
 8 Though of course the names given above render such testimony un- 
 necessary. 
 
 4 Horsel, who seems sometimes to have represented the moon (hence 
 Ursula and her ten thousand virgins, the stars), was also a goddess of love, 
 as Freyja was. Thus in the various versions of the Tannhiiuser legend we 
 ha\e sometimes a Horselberg, sometimes a Venusberg, beneath which the 
 enchantress is supposed to dwell. 
 
THE WILD HUNTSMAN. 495 
 
 Now Hackelberg is said to hunt all the year round along 
 the Milky Way, save during the twelve nights 1 those 
 which intervene between Christmas and Twelfth Night 
 during this period he hunts on earth. He is accompanied 
 by two dogs, who must be identical with the Sarameyas, 
 the dogs of Yama. 2 All doors and windows should be kept 
 shut when Hackelberg goes by ; for if they are not, one 
 of the dog fiends will rush into the house and will lie down 
 on the hearth, whence no power will be able to make him 
 move. There he will stay for a year, and during all that 
 time there will be trouble in the house; but when the 
 hunt comes round again he will rush wildly forth and 
 join it. 
 
 Let us compare with this universal legend of Hackel- 
 berg another one which we find in Kuhn's collection. 3 
 Between the inhabitants of Epe and those of Engter there 
 had existed for many years a dispute concerning their 
 common boundary, or mark. Then came a man from Epe 
 and swore that the boundary was so and so. But the 
 oath was a false one; wherefore to this day that man 
 forsworn comes at dusk to the boundary stone and sits upon 
 it, crying f Hoho ! hoho ! ' and this he must do for ever. 
 He is called Stretmann (Streitmann, man of war?) This 
 being is also, I suppose, the transformed Odhinn, who was 
 once, we know, the arbiter of the mark, inasmuch as he 
 was the impersonation of the storm. 4 The punishment 
 here recorded was inflicted on him when he was dismissed 
 from Asgard to hell, and from a god was changed into a 
 fiend. Afterwards the crime was invented to account for 
 the punishment. The same course was, no doubt, followed 
 in the case of the Wild Huntsman, as well as in that more 
 modern counterpart of him (evidently also a being of the 
 
 1 On some of the beliefs concerning the ' twelve days ' see Chap. VII. 
 end. 
 
 a The ' wish hounds ' that are heard in some parts of England are clearly 
 these same dogs. 'Wish' is one of the names of Odhinn. Grimm, 2). M 
 
 3 No. 34, p. 40. The story was orally communicated to Kuhn. 
 
 See Chap. VII. 
 
496 OUTLINES OF PKBIITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 storm) Van der Dekken (the Man of the Cloak 1 ), the Flying 
 Dutchman. Herod, Hackelberg, Herne, Van der Dekken, 
 Stretmann these are all the counterparts of the great 
 German god. 
 
 Two other stories must also be noticed. One is the 
 ' Pied Piper of Hamelin,' which a great contemporary poet 
 has rewritten with so much beauty, and has at the same 
 time made so familiar to us, that the details need not be 
 repeated here. The rats are symbolical of human souls. 
 The Piper is the wind that is, Odhinn and the wind, 
 again, in its character as the soul leader, like Hermes Psy- 
 ch opompos. The Piper's lute is the same as the lyre of 
 Hermes ; both have a music which none can disobey, for 
 it is the whisper of death. First the Piper piped away 
 the rats from the houses ; but the townsfolk, freed from 
 their burden, refused him his promised reward, and scorn- 
 fully chased him from the town. On June 26 he was 
 seen again, but this time (Mr. Browning has not incor- 
 porated this little fact) fierce of mien and dressed like a 
 huntsman, yet still blowing upon the magic pipe. Now it 
 was not the rats that followed, but the children. . . . 
 
 The symbolism of the soul by a mouse or rat, what- 
 ever may have been its origin and original meaning, seems 
 to be a Slavonic idea. 2 Wherefore in this particular 
 Hameln myth we can almost trace a history of the meet- 
 ing of the two peoples German and Slavonic, and the 
 uniting of their legends into one story. Let us suppose 
 there had been some great and long-remembered epidemic 
 which had proved particularly fatal to the children of 
 Hameln and the country round about. The Slavonic 
 dwellers there and in early days Slavonians were to be 
 found as far west as the Weser would speak of these 
 deaths mythically as the departure of the mice or rats 
 
 1 Dutch deh, deken, is a ' cloak ' as well as a ' deck ; ' dekken, ' to cover.' 
 
 2 Kalston, Songs of the Russian People. Much has been said, and by many 
 writers, of the connection between this story and the name of Apollo 
 Smintheus (see Cox, Aryan Myth. &c.), but nothing which sheds any real 
 light upon the place of rats or mice in either legend. 
 
THE PIED PIPER. 497 
 
 (i.e. the souls), and perhaps, keeping the tradition which 
 we know to be universally Aryan l of a water-crossing, 
 might tell of the souls having gone to the river ; further, 
 they might deem that the souls had been led thither 
 by a piping wind god, for he is the property of Slavs 
 and Germans alike. Then the German inhabitants, wish- 
 ing to express the legend in their mythical form, would 
 tell how the same Piper had piped away all the children 
 from, the town ; so a double story grew up about the 
 same event. The Weser represents the Biver of Death, 
 and might have served for the children as well as for the 
 rats ; to make the legend fuller, another image of death 
 was chosen for the former, the mound or tomb. That 
 same mountain within which Charlemagne and Frederick 
 Redbeard sit, waiting for the Last Day, opened to let the 
 children pass, 2 
 
 And when all were in to the very last, 
 The door in the mountain- side shut fast ; 
 
 not to unclose again, we may believe, till the trumpets 
 shall sound at the Day of Doom. Gne more story one of 
 universal extension which bears a special relation to the 
 old idea of Odhinn is the story of the Wandering Jew. 
 This wretched man, as the legend goes, had mocked at Jesus 
 on His way to the Cross, and his doom was never to die 
 and never to rest, but to wander from land to land until 
 the Day of Judgment. His fate and the fate of Hackel- 
 berg and of Yan der Dekken are therefore essentially the 
 same. In this case, and in that of Hackelberg or the 
 Flying Dutchman, nay, in the case of nearly all the heroes 
 of folk tales, the idea of sin and punishment is either 
 invented later than the original legend or introduced by a 
 side-wind of reflection into a pure nature myth. In every 
 instance cited the criminal is really none other than the 
 wind, who must perforce be the wanderer, who must be 
 
 1 See Chap. VI. 2 Ibid. 
 
 K K 
 
498 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 the Streitmann or blusterous battle-goer, who must sit 
 for ever in the mark and whistle ' Hoho ! hoto ! ' 
 
 The Wandering Jew, says the legend, may rest for one 
 night in the year, and that is the night of Shrove 
 Tuesday, or of Plough Monday, the day before. Tradition 
 varies on this point. Then, if anyone will leave a harrow 
 in the field, he will sit upon it and (this is not said in 
 every version) bring the man good luck. Others say that 
 he sits upon the plough. 1 This part of the myth makes 
 some confusion between the wind god and the earth 
 goddess ; for it is Frigg or Nerthus who is connected with 
 the plough and whose rites (dragging her from place to 
 place upon a car) are still preserved on Shrove Tuesday 
 or on our Plough Monday. 2 
 
 The stories which I have here cited are such as are 
 preserved in the present day ; they are doubtless but in- 
 considerable fragments out of the great mass of Middle 
 Age legendary lore. Yet, such as they are, they will 
 serve, like chippings from a rock, to help us to guess at the 
 formations of thought which we cannot actually see. The 
 story of Hackelberg is by far the most important. It is, 
 in the first place, purely Teutonic ; it is spread wherever a 
 German race has dwelt, 3 and it approaches most nearly 
 to the representation of Odhinn in the genuinely heathen 
 mythology. We have seen the Wild Huntsman riding 
 through the air, accompanied by Ursula, just as Odhinn 
 rode to battle accompanied by IVeyja or by his Valkyriur. 
 Yet there is a difference between the two characters a 
 vast one. Hackelberg is. no god, but more than half a 
 fiend. There are some stories of benefits wrought by the 
 Wild Huntsman, but in most tales he and his dogs work 
 only ill. Wuotan was still remembered when this story 
 grew current, remembered by all the German- speaking 
 
 1 Sometimes the En-ige Jude rests under two oaks grown across, i.e. the 
 oaks of Wuotan Christianised. Xuhn, ii. No. 89. 
 
 2 Chap. VII. 2. 
 
 3 Not always under the same name ; but that fact makes the. wide 'ex- 
 tension of the story more significant. 
 
CHANGES IN SOCIAL LIFE. 499 
 
 races, but lie was remembered with fear and abhorrence. 
 This change will prepare us for the completer change 
 which we shall have to note anon when Odhinn became the 
 Prince of Darkness, and his swan maidens, the Valkyriur, 
 were transformed into witches. 
 
 From the two standpoints of the knightly epic and 
 the popular tale, we may form our estimate of the imagi- 
 native world of mediaeval Europe. If we choose to raise 
 our eyes and study the actual world, we shall see how 
 well it fitted into the ideal creation which clothed it round. 
 From the time of Charlemagne onwards, during all those 
 ages in which the Karling epic and the mediaeval popular 
 tale were growing to their maturity, society had been 
 visibly settling down into a single fixed condition ; it was 
 stiffening into that unchangeable though beautiful shape 
 of which the words Feudalism and Catholicism convey 
 some faint picture, and which is shown in a sort of allegory 
 by the architecture of the Gothic cathedral. 
 
 No sooner had the conquests of the Teuton races been 
 secured and their external enemies been put to silence, 
 than the people began again to turn their arms against 
 one another. Once each lesser leader had been like the 
 subordinate officer of an army, in strict dependence upon 
 the chief of the whole ; but no sooner did they begin to 
 establish themselves permanently in the new lands than 
 they set up claims of independence, and erected their own 
 tribes or followings into miniature principalities. Then 
 arose the same rivalry and the same slumbering or active 
 war between barony and barony which had in old Teutonic 
 days existed between village and village. We see this 
 state of feeling plainly reflected in the ' Chansons de 
 Geste; ' for even in the earliest among them, the ( Chanson 
 de Roland,' Ganelon and Roland make no scruple of defy- 
 ing one another while in the presence of Charles, in whose 
 army they are both officers. Ganelon's great act of 
 treachery, whereby the whole of Charles's rear-guard, 
 
 X K 2 
 
500 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 with Eoland at the head, perished in the pass of Ron- 
 cesvalles, was chiefly brought about by his desire tc 
 revenge himself for the insult which he had received from 
 Roland. The incident shows us how much stronger might 
 be the influence of a private feud than of public duty. 
 In other ' Chansons' the same feelings are expressed much 
 more openly. In very many of them we see a powerful 
 baron bidding defiance to Charles and to all his army ; 
 as, for example, did Girard de Viane, one of the great 
 heroes of these lays. One poem, ' Garin le Loherin,' is 
 entirely devoted to the description of feudal wars, and 
 contains nothing else but the history of a long vendetta 
 feud between two houses. 
 
 The growth of such a feeling must have made men 
 look to the security of their homes. Wherefore the result 
 was that in the age of Charlemagne and in the ages which 
 succeeded him we see the gradual rise of more and more 
 castles and the steady abandonment of the open villas in 
 which the chief notables had before lived. The Teutons, 
 when they came into new lands, took away the villas from 
 their possessors and adopted them for their own homes. 
 As these Tell into decay, in their place strongholds began 
 t"o rise on every side. The villas had stood in open sunny 
 plains by river banks ; but the castles perched themselves 
 on barren rocks or in steep mountain passes, and, like the 
 spirit of medieval Christianity itself, they became at once 
 dark and aspiring. 
 
 The convents followed the example of the castles. 
 They too had once stood unenclosed, unguarded, in the 
 plain and by the river. A type of that earlier convent 
 was the one built by St. Eligius l (Eloi) near Liege, of 
 which St. Ouen, the biographer of Eligius, gives us a 
 delightful picture. It was merely a country villa con- 
 verted by the saint to his pious purpose. It stood in the 
 midst of beautiful woods and bounded on one side by a 
 
 1 A contemporary of the Merovingian king Dagobert I. 
 
CASTLES AND CONVENTS. 501 
 
 stream. The convent grounds were enclosed by no wall, 
 only by a bank of earth surmounted by a hedge. An 
 orchard immediately surrounded the monastery. ( And in 
 the midst of this delightful retreat,' exclaims St. Ouen, 
 ' the saddest mind is invigorated and enjoys its share of 
 the blessings of a terrestrial paradise.' * 
 
 In the Carlovingian age the religious houses gradually 
 changed their appearance and their sites. They, like the 
 castles, sought to place themselves upon elevated spots, 
 6 to be nearer heaven/ and they too became gloomy and 
 armed. This change involved a change in the internal 
 life of the convents. Constant work in the fields and in 
 the open air had been one of the rules of St. Benedict. This 
 was first set aside by the great founder of Western monas- 
 tic institutions, St. Columba. It fell more and more 
 into disuse. Instead of such healthy exercise the monks 
 gave themselves up to sedentary pursuits ; and when not 
 engaged in religious exercises they were copying and illu- 
 minating MSS., writing down the ' Lives of the Saints,' or 
 what not. It is easy to guess what effect the change of 
 occupation had upon the thoughts of the cenobites and 
 upon the development of the monastic system of theology. 
 . The church architecture was affected by this new 
 taste for building. Violet-le-Duc says that the seeds of 
 that architecture which afterwards grew into the Gothic 
 were implanted in the days of Charlemagne, 2 although men 
 were yet many centuries ahead of the perfecting of that 
 wondrous growth. While the church remained still in 
 the basilica form, the first change was introduced at this 
 time by the adding of the apse, the roof of which apse 
 was generally a.rched. In this way men first passed from 
 the flat roof to the round one. A more important novelty 
 still was the building of church towers, which likewise 
 began in the days of Charlemagne. The towers were not 
 attached to the churches, but stood beside them, as we still 
 
 1 Vita S. Miff. c. xvi. 
 
 2 Diet, de VArcli., art. ' Architecture.' 
 
502 OUTLINES OF PEIJVIITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 commonly see them standing beside the churches of North 
 Italy ; and from these heights the bells now sent out their 
 new music over the plain. 1 To us they are the voices from 
 a bygone world. 
 
 The symbolism of Christianity its white robes of 
 baptism, its curtains, its bell tones, its lighted candles 
 and incense must have told more upon the imaginative 
 spirit of heathenism than any mere preaching could have 
 done. Take the picture which Bseda draws for us of the 
 first landing of St. Augustine on the shores of Kent of the 
 procession which the Apostle and his brother missionaries 
 formed with their crosses and tapers ; of their white robes, 
 their chaunting. 2 More wondrous even than the church 
 bells was the church organ. Organs were said to have 
 been first introduced in the West by Charles, and to have 
 been brought to him by an embassy from the Byzantine 
 Emperor ; and tradition tells us of a woman who, in the 
 reign of Charlemagne's successor, Louis, entered the 
 cathedral at Metz, and there suddenly heard an organ for 
 the first time. She was so overcome with emotion at the 
 sound that she fell down and died there. Is the event an 
 impossibility ? I scarcely think so. 
 
 From this time forth mediaeval life and society began 
 to take their permanent shapes. And mediaeval life and 
 society rested, as we know, upon two pillars,* each mighty 
 but not of equal strength. The weaker of the two pillars 
 was feudalism, the stronger and the more durable was 
 Catholicism. Now, as regards feudalism ; modern research 
 and our more accurate knowledge concerning the growth 
 of human institutions has tended greatly to modify the 
 views which were once held concerning it. Feudalism was 
 once thought to have been an entirely new birth in the 
 Middle Ages, a pure invention of those times ; but this 
 theory is not now generally maintained. On the contrary, 
 
 1 New mii-si c. Bells are not mentioned in any legends of the Ada Sane- 
 toruin, which are of an earlier date than the seventh century. 
 
 2 See also Grimm, D. M. i. 4 ; Greg. Tur. ii. 31. 
 
CATHOLICISM AND FEUDALISM. 503 
 
 it is recognised that feudalism is a descendant in a re- 
 mote degree indeed, and with many features unknown to 
 the parent of the German society of prehistoric times, 
 of that ancient constitution of the village community con- 
 cerning which in a former chapter something was said. 
 Feudalism is a return to as near an imitation of the 
 village community as the changed conditions of surround- 
 ing things would allow. During their era of invasion the 
 German races had exchanged their primaeval social or- 
 ganisation for the constitution of an army. In place 
 of their old tribal headmen or petty kings they had 
 ranged themselves under elected military leaders, duces, 
 heretogas. 1 This camp life lasted very many years, and 
 during their revolution some of the invading nations forgot 
 altogether their past, and when they came to settle down 
 adopted or imitated the civilisation of the Gauls and 
 Romans. This was the case with the Goths of Italy, of 
 Southern Gaul, and of Spain ; in a less degree it was the 
 case with the Lombards. With the Franks and the other 
 invaders of the North and these were the races who gave 
 the tone to the civilisation on this side of the Alps and 
 Pyrenees it was not so. When they settled down they 
 fell back upon a social state which does recall the Teutonic 
 society of prehistoric days. They did this not in conscious 
 
 1 The rex (i.e. riks or kimunc) is distinguished from the dux (i.e. 
 heretoga, herzog) by Tacitus (Germ. c. 7). We must for historic Germany 
 (i.e. the Teuton race after the era, of invasion began) distinguish two kinds 
 of society (1) the peaceful, which implies the village community and the 
 king, (2) the warlike, which implies the camp and the herzog. Of course 
 this is not a fixed rule, and applies only to those places where part of the 
 nation remained behind as a kind of depot. When a whole nation took to 
 conquest or migration the king was general also and leader. The two 
 types of society are reflected in the legends of this time of invasion : the 
 typical hero, Beowulf or Siegfried, who 
 
 ' Durch seines Leibes Stiirke ritt in manche Land' 
 
 (Nibelungen, 87, Busching), 
 
 being the representative of the young blood, is the herzog ; Higelac, Sieg- 
 mund, Gunther, are the kings. See also some remarks of M. Guizot on the 
 camp life and comparatively small numbers of the invaders, Cours de 
 VHistoire de France, i. 279 ; and Michelet, Hist, de France, i. 309. 
 
504 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 imitation or even in recollection of their past, but because 
 the national character tends always to form around itself 
 the same social atmosphere. Feudalism was the nearest 
 compromise they could make with the new sort of civilisa- 
 tion into which they had been forced. The English on 
 the one side, and the Christianised Germans beyond the 
 Rhine upon the other side, accepted in time this compact 
 and adopted feudalism. 
 
 This, then, was in matters of social governance the 
 compromise effected between ancient German prejudices 
 and a changed outer world. Not less was mediaeval 
 Christianity also, and in an especial sense the Christianity 
 north of the Alps, a compromise in matters of belief and 
 of thought with bygone times. Mediseval Christianity 
 likewise had its roots in prehistoric German heathenism. 
 Some of these roots at least were there ; for, like the 
 tree Yggdrasill, Catholicism had many different roots in 
 many different places; some were in heaven, but some 
 were, we cannot question it, on earth, and some perchance 
 in hell. 
 
 Religion may extend its sway over many regions of 
 man's thought, It may chiefly affect his political feelings, 
 or his social morality, or his artistic sense. It may give 
 new dignity to man, and impart to him added pleasure in 
 life and in the works of life. These were not the aims of 
 mediseval Christianity. The essential lesson which it 
 strove to teach was a profound sense of the supernatural, 
 of a spiritual world enclosing this sensible world, as our 
 earth is surrounded by its atmosphere, and of the little 
 span of our life bounded by two eternities. This sense of 
 mystery and of spiritual dominion found its nourishment 
 in the thoughts which through centuries of gloomy forest 
 life had grown familiar to the Teutonic mind, and which 
 we know had left a deep impression on Teutonic belief. 
 And although the creed of heathen Germany was in itself 
 sensuous and material and concerned only in questioning 
 the aspects of external nature, yet it had in it the germs 
 
THE GOTHIC CATHEDKAL. 505 
 
 of that immaterial perception of the Infinite which, so 
 characterises mediaeval Catholicism. It gave a training to 
 the imagination such as was destined afterwards to bear 
 abundant fruit. Awe and mystery were as the nourishing 
 rain and dew to the belief of the heathen German. Where- 
 fore this belief developed afterwards into Catholicism 
 almost as necessarily as the society of the village commune 
 grew into the system of feudalism. But in the case of 
 feudalism and Catholicism alike, although there is a 
 resemblance to the earlier life and thought of pre-Christian 
 days, there is also a strange difference. It seems as if in* 
 either case a living organism had been suddenly petrified 
 by some gorgon glance. The thing is fixed in its highest 
 development truly, a growth of wondrous dimensions and 
 of multiform delicate interlacing?, but it has not the power 
 of further growth. Though made up of the fairest shapes, 
 it is of stone. 
 
 By gentle stages the Gothic cathedral grew to its 
 perfect form, and became the best expression of the 
 thought, the belief, the whole world-philosophy of the 
 Middle Ages. Gradually the Roman basilica changed into 
 the Eomanesque church ; slowly the Romanesque church 
 raised its roof and narrowed its aisles and multiplied 
 its pillars, until what had once been a house four-square, 
 visible frpm one end to the other, grew into a very forest 
 of stony trees, with glades and by-paths and dark recesses 
 as numerous and as bewildering as in the forest itself. 
 What had once been a common dwelling-house became 
 the seat of a mysterious, unseen, and awful Presence. 
 But we cannot say that this cathedral was altogether a 
 new creation of mankind, or that it had no relationship 
 to those forest fastnesses in which through so many ages 
 the ancestors of all the nations of Northern Europe the 
 Teutons and the Celts alike ] had paid their vows to the 
 Wind God. And if the Gothic cathedral do own some 
 
 1 See p. 332. 
 
506 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 distant cousinhood to the forest temple of prehistoric 
 days, then certainly mediseval Christianity cannot refuse 
 to acknowledge a relationship to ancient Northern hea- 
 thenism. 
 
 It was a belief of the Middle Ages that cunning Satan, 
 in order to gain sway over men's souls, would sometimes 
 enter the grass of the field, which in this way, when eaten 
 by the ox, transferred his devilish nature to the flesh of 
 that animal ; then when the ox beef was consumed by man 
 .his being became thereby corrupted and an entry was made 
 for sin.^ It was a sort of sacrament reversed. We might 
 suppose some such transfer of spirit to have taken place 
 when the shrines of German heathendom were made the 
 sites of temples to the new faith. Boniface and Willibrod 
 went forth cutting down the sacred trees of Odhinn and 
 Thorr, and making out of them timber for Christian 
 churches. They might well have taken warning from the 
 story of Satan in the grass. For in very truth there was 
 a spirit lurking in those old shrines who refused to be 
 exorcised and driven away ; the ancients would have called 
 him the ^aifjbwv sTri^ptos, the genius loci, the genius of the 
 place ; what we more prosaically name the association of 
 ideas. Christianity found nothing so hard to drive away 
 as these genii of the soil; indeed, she never succeeded in 
 driving them away utterly, but had to make compromises 
 with them and to allow some at least (some formal changes 
 made in outward guise) to retain their homes. 
 
 In the German tongues we find that a word which in 
 one dialect means holy or temple means in another forest. 
 And this is as much as to say that the forest was ever 
 holy to the Teutons, and their sacred places were ever 
 their forest glades. When Catholicism had attained its 
 full growth, and had by successive changes moulded its 
 holy place to express in the fullest way its hidden thought, 
 it once more worshipped in a grove a grove of stone. 
 In place of the trunks and branching boughs men looked 
 along endless aisles of pillars and up into a dark fretted 
 
THE GOTHIC CATHEDRAL. 507 
 
 roof. This expresses in sum the difference between the 
 old life and the new. The village community of ancient 
 days had been stiffened into the immutable society of 
 feudalism, and the old creed with its ancient shrine had 
 been petrified into Catholicism and its cathedral. The 
 trees were in a fashion still there. But they no longer 
 put on fresh forms with the changing seasons. The 
 branches no longer moved, swayed by the wind. No 
 glimpses of a higher heaven could be seen above them ; 
 no stars shone down through their interstices. Yet here 
 the old associations of solemnity and gloom remained. 
 Here now dwelt secretum illud the Sacred Presence which 
 the Teutons had so long worshipped. 
 
 Let us enter this temple of Catholicism. In the centre 
 we see a lighted altar, the rays from which are soon lost 
 among the clusters of pillars and in the vaulted roof. 
 Where this light reaches it shines upon beatified saints 
 or angels, who spread their protecting wings and look 
 down upon the worshipper. Here we are safe, within the 
 charmed circle, close to the sacred relics or to the Body 
 of Christ ; but wherever pillar or groin throws a shadow, 
 there may be detected, flying from the light and cherish- 
 ing the darkness, images of the damned in hideous pain, 
 or it may be devils in wait for the erring soul. And now 
 those bat-like creatures which had once flitted about the 
 outer trees of the grove, uttering mournful cries, are within 
 the sacred aisles, themselves turned to stone. The organ 
 sends forth its solemn, appealing sounds, the host is lifted 
 up, the chaunt arises, and the powers of darkness are for 
 awhile defeated. Yet this organ tone is but the wind of 
 the forest made melodious ; it is Qdhinn himself trans- 
 formed and brought into obedience to the new faith. The 
 organ's music puts to flight the powers of darkness ; but 
 they are still there. Even if they are driven from the 
 church they are still without the walls. 1 What if the 
 
 1 Throughout the France of the Middle Ages, and in Germany and 
 England likewise, it was the custom on certain days to make procession 
 
508 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 worshipper, passing alone in the night, forget to cross 
 himself, to bow before the altar or to dip his hand into 
 the holy water ? 
 
 For all around the Christian, nearer than he could tell, 
 lay that dreadful world of spirits. Jotunheimar had 
 drawn its coasts closer than they had been in heathen 
 times. This was the case even in the days when the poem 
 of Beowulf was written. Only the heathen might venture 
 to live far away from human habitations. And it was this 
 dread of the outer world which kept men fixed to one spot, 
 and made them bear the burden of that feudal system 
 which pressed with terrible weight on lord and tenant 
 alike. The vassal was attached to the soil, and the lord 
 too was rooted to the rock from which his castle sprang. 
 * No land without its lord, also no lord without his land 
 Man belongs to a single place. He is judged according 
 as men can say he is of high and low place. There he is 
 localised, immovable, held down under the weight of his 
 heavy castle and his heavy armour.' * 
 
 This is the picture which is held up to us when we try 
 and look into the Europe of the Middle Ages. The baron 
 in his castle alone, unneighboured save for purposes of 
 war. Ail without his own domain was strange, and in 
 great measure under the governance of spirits. The 
 distant sounds he heard, like those bells which ( from 
 Langdale Pike and Witches' Lair ' gave answer to the bells 
 of Sir Leoline, 2 were the sound of sinful spirits compelled 
 by the Prince of Darkness. These tales of fear grew from 
 age to age since the castle first rose upon the rock. The 
 
 through the town, carrying the image of Satan portrayed as a dragon. The 
 procession knocked down everyone who crossed its path, and came at last 
 to the church door, where the evil one was exercised. The image, we see, 
 though it cannot enter the church, triumphs everywhere else. In the South 
 they called the image drac or tarasque ; in the North he was called gar- 
 gouille, and under this latter name we still see him outside our churches. 
 
 1 Michelet, Hist, de France, ii. 392. 
 
 2 Chrixtabel. 
 
TRANSFORMATION OF ODHINN. 509 
 
 intense gloom which follows in the track of ennui deepened 
 the natural sombreness of all men's thoughts. The gloom 
 crept round them like a fog, around the baron and his 
 men-at-arms in the castle, around the villagers beneath 
 the castle hill, and thence it infected those men growing 
 fewer from year to year who lived away in the outlands. 
 This "was the time when the old popular mythology of 
 Wuotan and the gods of Walhalla changed its guise, 
 when, passing through the characters of the Wild Hunts- 
 man and the Wandering Jew. the god was gradually trans- 
 formed into the likeness of a fiend. Then grew up that 
 new system of mythology, or we may say that new worship, 
 which we call witchcraft. 
 
 The splendour of the Gothic cathedral shows us one 
 side of the belief of the Middle Ages. But there is 
 another side very different from that. The true anti- 
 thesis, and yet in a manner the counterpart, to mediseval 
 Catholicism is the mediseval belief concerning witch- 
 craft. 
 
 The partial transformation, which we noted just now, 
 of the chief god of ancient heathenism into Hackelberg 
 must prepare us for his total change into the Prince of 
 Darkness, the f Prince of the Powers of the Air ; ' for this 
 last, out of all the Biblical names for Satan, was the one 
 most commonly used in the Middle Ages, and the one 
 which suited him best in his Odinic character. The most 
 striking and' characteristic of all the Odhinn myths was 
 that which told of the god and the Yalkyriur riding 
 together to the battle field ; this in its transformed con- 
 dition became the great Satan myth of the Sabbath. Hence 
 it is that we find the metropolis of mediseval Satan worship 
 to have been the last stronghold of Odinism. This lay in 
 the mountainous land of Saxony, the Harz. 
 
 We can in some instances trace the process which has 
 transformed lovely shield maidens, the companions of a 
 god, once the ideal of womanhood to the rude chivalry of 
 the North, into wretched hags, riding upon broomsticks, 
 
510 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF, 
 
 upon trusses of hay, or upon sieves, 1 to join the Prince 
 of Darkness in his midnight orgies. 
 
 In the story of Balderus and Hotherus in Saxo 
 Grammaticus, which tells in a form more nearly resembling 
 the form of mediaeval legends the history of the death of 
 Balder, we meet with some wood-women in a transition 
 state between Yalkyriur and witches. It was the part of 
 the Valkyria to chaunt runes over her Liebliny, her chosen 
 warrior, and to bless his arms against hurt ; she, as much 
 as her later representative, was a professor of magic. But 
 the Yalkyriur had no need to conceal their powers ; they 
 were beings of the air and sunlight, not of caves arid 
 darkness. The wood- women to whom Hotherus goes do 
 for him just what the Yalkyriur always did for their heroes, 
 just what, for example, Sigrdrifa (Brynhild) had done for 
 Agnar; but they are only to be found in darkness; they 
 have to be sought out in the thickest parts of the forest 
 or in caves. 
 
 Balderus and Hotherus are in the story rivals for the 
 love of Nanna, and are at war. And Saxo relates how, 
 when Hotherus was hard pressed by his enemy, it fell out 
 that one day, when hunting, having lost his way in a fog ; 
 he came unawares upon a conclave of young maidens, who 
 saluted him and of whom he enquired their name. ' They 
 affirmed that it was under their guidance and countenance 
 that the fortune of a battle was determined, for they were 
 often present at battles, when no one beheld them, and 
 brought a wished for victory by their friendly aid.' They 
 promised help to Hotherus, but good fortune did not 
 always attend him, and afterwards we find him again in 
 Denmark, beaten and hard pressed by Balderus. In this 
 condition he was one day wandering in a vast and trackless 
 
 ' In a sieve I'll hither sail ' (i.e. corn sieve). Macbeth. 
 The use of this means of locomotion is common among witches in folk 
 tales. Moreover tradition says that a witch can be detected by any 
 person who looks through a corn sieve (Kuhn, ii. No. 77, and Castren, 
 F. M. p. 68). Is this because the witches are sometimes earth goddesses 
 transformed ? 
 
TRANSFORMATION OF THE VALKYRIUR. 511 
 
 wood, when he found by chance the cave inhabited by his 
 friends the maidens, whom he knew for those who had 
 formerly presented him with an invulnerable garment. 
 They enquired of him the cause of his coming, and 'he 
 narrated to them the unlucky course which events had 
 taken, and, complaining of the misfortune -which had 
 attended his endeavour and of the non-fulfilment of their 
 promises, he declared that he would give up his designs. 
 But the nymphs assured him that he had also inflicted 
 great damage upon his opponent; moreover that the for- 
 tune of war would be his, if he could obtain possession 
 of some magic food which was effective in renewing the 
 strength of Balderus. Hotherus obtained this food, which 
 was made of the spittle of serpents, and on his way back 
 met Balderus, whom he wounded so severely that he died 
 in the next day's battle. 1 
 
 I have kept the names which Saxo employs ; he calls 
 these Valkyriur nymphs. But, recalling first what we 
 remember of the nature of the shield maidens of Odhinn, 
 and turning from them to contemplate the mediaeval 
 witch, do not these nymphs of Saxo seem to be in the 
 actual course of change from one t"o the other? They 
 preside over all battles and determine the issue of them ; 
 but they have their dwellings in caves of the wood, and 
 their magic food made with the spittle of serpents. 
 This last reminds us forcibly of the witches' cauldron in 
 < Macbeth ' or in * Faust.' 
 
 We have seen that witchcraft was not only a form of 
 belief, but likewise, to some extent, a form of worship. 
 
 Some suppose the sieve to typify the whirlwind, which is, of course, 
 a very suitable accompaniment to Odhinn- Satan and to his bar.d, and 
 which also constitutes a recognised form of punishment in hell (see Inferno, 
 canto 5). 
 
 1 This part of the narrative, the climax, as one would have thought, is 
 told with a brevity which reminds us of some passages in the idylls of a 
 great contemporary poet. ' Qui cum pristinum iter rernetiendo calle quo 
 venerat re'pedaret, obvii sibi Balderi latus hausit eumque seminecem pros- 
 travit.'- Historia Danica, lib. iii. 
 
512 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 We should be wrong if we imagined that it was the mere 
 horror of magic which, made up the dread and the detes- 
 tation with which witchcraft came to be regarded in the 
 Middle Ages. Magic was an idea so familiar to the 
 minds of men at that time that it had scarce the power 
 of alone exciting any very strong feeling. Magic was 
 practised as much in causes accounted good as in bad 
 ones. Did the witch cut off the hair from a corpse, and 
 use that to raise the wind; why then Christianity too 
 used the hair of a corpse (of a saint *), the paring of his 
 nails, as talismans against shipwreck. The magic wand 
 or the dead man's hand could make bolts fly back and 
 locks open, and point to treasure hidden deep in the 
 ground. So could the bones of a martyr, the nail or arrow, 
 or spear, which had pierced him and drunk his blood, his 
 dress, or even a fragment of any of these relics. We have 
 in the Kalewala, and more sparsely in the Sagas, wonder- 
 ful descriptions of the way in which the steel sword or 
 axe was gifted with its power to hurt. Had Roland 
 been a Norse hero instead of a champion of Christianity, 
 we should have had the account of the runes said over his 
 sword Durendal by some Valkyria maid. As it is we find 
 it owed its indestructibility to more material, and there- 
 fore lower, kinds of magic. There was in the guard of 
 Durendal a tooth of St. Peter, some of the blood of St. 
 Basil, of the hair of St. Denis, of the weeds of the 
 Virgin ; 2 and, as a further example of the pure mate- 
 rialism that appears in the conception of magic at this 
 time, we find that the power which the relics bestowed 
 would be as useful to a Saracen if he gained possession of 
 the sword as they were to Roland. 
 
 The Church therefore did not condemn witchcraft on 
 
 1 A hair of St. Peter was sent to Norman William by the Pope to aid 
 him in his invasio'n of England. 
 
 2 Chanson de Roland, 1. 2346 sqq. On this account, becaiise Durendal 
 would be as effective in the hands of a Saracen as in that of a Christian, 
 Eoland just before his death makes every effort to break the steel, but 
 cannot. See also what was said in Chap. JI. p. 89. 
 
WITCHCRAFT. 513 
 
 account of its material and superstitious character. In 
 earlier and more enlightened days that had been the 
 accusation brought against it. ' Our miracles,' Augustine 
 had said, ' are worked by simple faith and the assurance 
 which comes of trust in God, not by auguries or sacri- 
 legious enchantments.' l But this was not the feeling 
 of a later age. The real distinction between the witch 
 and the priest was that the one was the practiser of a 
 black art, the other of a white one ; one was the votary of 
 Satan, the other of Christ. This was quite well under- 
 stood on both sides ; the sorcerer introduced into his cult 
 of Satan 2 a ritual the distinct antithesis of the Catholic 
 ritual ; a black mass was opposed to the white mass. In 
 this way witchcraft grew to be distinctly a craft. It be- 
 came, that is to say, a social body, and had a mystery (of 
 the religious sort) uniting its members. This cult was, 
 in all probability, originally a mere survival of heathenism, 
 and the mystery, like all other mysteries, at first of a 
 simple kind, developing afterwards into more elaborate 
 rites. 
 
 This mystery is known to us as the Witches' Sabbath. 
 It would be a mistake to think of the celebration as a 
 purely imaginary one created by popular superstition, and 
 existing only in the minds of brain-sick old women who 
 fancied they had attended it. The Walpurgis-nacht meet- 
 ing on the Brocken may have been fancy, but, if so, it was 
 only the imaginary consummation of a hundred, a 
 thousand, a hundred thousand Sabbaths which were really 
 celebrated in different parts of Europe. They were not 
 confined to a few, nor were they everywhere regarded with 
 the horror which priestly chroniclers feel and would have 
 
 1 De Civ. Dei, viii. 9. 
 
 2 Some popular tales witness in a curious way to the affection which 
 the peasantry felt for Satan, i.e. for Satan- Odhinn. They try to save him 
 by making him turn Christian. Compare, for example, the stories in Kuhn's 
 collection (No. 220), The Devil's Longing for God, WeUng becomes a 
 Christian, Weking's Baptism, &c. (294, &c.) 
 
 L L 
 
514 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 us feel. In some places they were openly practised and 
 commonly recognised. In the Basque province, for in- 
 stance, all went, nobles included. 6 Once none but the 
 insensate were seen there ; now people of position openly 
 attend,' exclaims an inquisitor. 1 Priests even went, cele- 
 brating the white mass in the morning and the black mass 
 at night. No doubt but that the celebration of the Sabbath 
 whatever name it might first have received had at 
 one time a more innocent guise than under the pressure of 
 persecution it afterwards wore. But there was always in 
 it a certain protest in favour of the old times, a protest 
 both against Catholicism and against the twin brother 
 of Catholicism, the social system of feudalism. It .ex- 
 pressed a kind of communism ; nobles, burghers, peasants, 
 shepherds, were mingled in the feast with which the 
 evening began ; contributions were exacted by force, and 
 fines were imposed for non-attendance. Such a strange 
 inverted system of Catholicism would be especially likely 
 to arise among a people who were in a degree alienated 
 from their neighbours, the dwellers in some corner of a 
 country, such as the inhabitants of the Jura, the Bretons, 
 the men of the Basque Provinces. I imagine this initia- 
 tory feast to have been the earliest and most essential 
 part of the Sabbath celebrations ; afterwards followed 
 other ceremonials, copied from the ritual of the Church 
 that ritual which in the tenth and eleventh centuries, 
 from the final disappearance of spoken Latin, had become 
 unmeaning to all ; and in darker days of persecution the 
 Sabbath ended in blasphemous defiance of the Head and 
 Founder of Christianity. 2 
 
 In the darkness which hides from our eyes the mediaeval 
 practice of witchcraft the last remains of the cult of the 
 
 1 Lancre, quoted by Michelet, Sorciere. 
 
 2 For a detailed description of the rites of the Sabbath see Michelet's 
 Sorciere, ch. x. 
 
BR 
 
 CTNIVE1 
 
 THE CEUSADES. 
 
 heathen gods disappear. Long before witchcraft had reached 
 its culminating point 1 a rumour of change made itself heard. 
 In the midst of the intense stillness of the Middle Ages a 
 faint movement began, a gentle rustling which betokened 
 rather a coming than an actual wind. The first apostle of 
 change was Peter the Hermit, who, in preaching the 
 deliverance of Jerusalem, preached too the deliverance of 
 many from the ennui which stifled them, and in pointing 
 the way to the Holy Land showed men likewise a way to 
 escape from the monotony of life. Immense must have 
 been the relief to thousands. A road was opened to them 
 to the unknown East ; an impulse was imparted to them 
 strong enough to break through the stifling laws of cus- 
 tom, and to give play again to the nomadic instincts which 
 can never be killed in human nature. All the better that 
 this new expedition was blessed by the Pope and approved 
 of Holy Church. In thousands and tens of thousands 
 men joined the standard of Walter the Penniless, careless 
 many of them about the differences between Saracen and 
 Christian, but longing only for some relief from the ennui 
 of their dreary existence. 
 
 It was this mere transition from stillness to movement 
 which awoke the world and heralded the Renaissance. 
 In the train of this one great motive power followed other 
 lesser ones, which are more easily distinguishable as the 
 immediate forerunners of the Eenaissance era. One of 
 these was the growth of the burgher spirit, incidental 
 partly to the absence of the seigneurs. The nobles flocked 
 to the Holy Land ; some few settled and many more died 
 there. At home there' followed an age of regencies or of 
 weak younger princes sitting in a brother's seat, such as 
 was our John. To obtain the means to emigrate the king 
 and the nobleman alike needed money, and for the first time 
 since the fall of the Roman Empire the want of a medium 
 
 1 This we must take to have been at the beginning of the fourteenth 
 century. See Lecky, nationalism, p. 47. 
 
 L L 2 
 
516 OUTLINES OF PKIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 of exchange came to be strongly felt. Now money is a kind 
 of demon of change, inherently and for ever opposed to a 
 slow, fixed, conservative life, such as was that of feudalism. 
 Money, like writing, brings far things near and suggests 
 thoughts of another kind of life from that which at the 
 moment we are leading. It was easier to raise the subtle 
 demon than to lay it again. Literature has up to this 
 time little to tell us of the burgher class, to which money 
 was the very arms and armour, or was like the familiar 
 who in the peasant tale puts into the hands of a low- 
 born swain the means to conquer all the champions of 
 Christendom. Still less has it to tell us of those elf 
 forgers underground, the very miners and diggers-up of 
 the treasure, who were hidden beneath the surface of 
 knightly and literary society, but who now set them- 
 selves to their old task of throwing discord into the 
 world in the shape of coined gold. The hoards of Fafnir, 
 the Ehine gold of the Nibelungen, were now replaced by 
 the Hardi d'or. 1 
 
 With money the burghers bought their charters and 
 the cities arose to rival the seigneurs. And presently 
 another novelty appeared, the very child of the new 
 currency, of portentous significance to these same feudal 
 knights I mean the mercenary soldier. With him came 
 a new sort of military science, a new kind of military 
 honour and courage, born of a new discipline which is the 
 instinct of communalism. 
 
 Perhaps ib was during this time that the old peasant 
 legend of the f Eeiiieke Fuchs ' took a form which better 
 expressed the feelings of the burgher class. The satire 
 became more pointed and more conspicuous, and Reinhart, 
 
 1 Struck by Philip le Hardi, son of St. Louis and father of Philip the 
 Fair. The issue of this coin may be reckoned the beginning of a gold 
 currency in Europe north of the Alps. St. Louis did indeed himself mint 
 gold coins, but probably very few only, as they are of great rarity (Hoff- 
 mann, Monnaies royales de France, p. 19). The reigns of Philip the Fair 
 and of our Edward III. are the eras of a large gold currency. 
 
MENDICANT OEDERS. 517 
 
 instead of being a representative of the lower people, 
 became a knight, and as such a living satire upon the 
 knightly class. At this time too sprang up the form of 
 literature which was especially created for the burgher 
 class. That was the fabliau. What the * Chansons de 
 Geste ' at first, and later on the romances of chivalry or 
 the love songs of the troubadours, were for the highest 
 class, what the 'original forms of the Beast Epic and the 
 Legend of the Saints were for the lowest, such were the 
 fabliaux for the burgher middle class. 
 
 It was in deference to the same spirit of change, the 
 love of movement which was passing over Europe, that 
 Francis and Dominic instituted in the thirteenth century 
 their orders of begging friars. The rule of this new class 
 of monk was the exact converse of the rule of Benedict of 
 Nursia, the organiser and almost the founder of western 
 monasticism, and of the great revivers of that monasticism, 
 Columba and Bernard. In the ordinances of all these 
 strictest measures were taken to prevent the monk from 
 wandering from his home. He was absolutely forbidden 
 to partake of food outside the walls of the monastery ; 
 and if a brother were obliged to be absent from it for a 
 whole day he was enjoined to fast. The Dominicans and 
 Franciscans, on the contrary, were to have no fixed home 
 and were never to rest for long in one place. 1 One cannot 
 but see that the rise of the begging friars was a direct 
 outcome of the spirit of the age, and unconsciously one 
 of the death blows to that very Catholicism which it 
 sought to revive. This is perhaps why these orders 
 degenerated sooner than did any other. What they had 
 become in the course of a century and a half from the 
 time of their institution we may judge from the pages of 
 Chaucer. 
 
 It is not our business here to trace the decline of the 
 
 1 This at least was the original institution. It was not long observed. 
 
518 OUTLINES OF PRIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 mediaeval spirit. The period at -which we have now 
 arrived is important to the subject in hand for this reason 
 only, that Medievalism did at this hour of death put forth 
 her greatest fruits. It was at this time that is to say, 
 during the thirteenth century that the Gothic architecture 
 attained the perfection of its form. And it was the end 
 of this century or the early years of the succeeding one 
 which gave birth to the second great product of the 
 Middle Ages, the ' Divine Comedy ' of Dante. Of the first 
 of these and of its gradual development something has 
 been said. Unlike the Gothic architecture, the poem of 
 Dante was a sudden growth. Nothing foretells it in the 
 literature of the preceding age. That from which Dante 
 drew his inspiration was the legend of the cloister, and 
 the thoughts concerning the other world with which the 
 men of the cloister were chiefly concerned. These notions 
 and the heathen elements in them we have partly traced 
 in a former chapter. They were couched in prose, and for 
 the greater part were prose of the dreariest character ; but 
 their dull literalness helped Dante to weave his splendid 
 tissue of imaginative creation. Just as in its grand and 
 harmonious metre the ' Comedy' is allied not to the rude 
 alliterative Northern lay, nor to the uncertain cadence of 
 the ballad, nor the faint assonance of the ' Chanson de 
 Geste,' but to the measured music of the cathedral choir 
 and the rhyming Latin hymn, so in matter the vision has 
 been born of the musings and dreams of the cloister, not 
 of the experience of the outer world. To the men who 
 lived in such reveries the history of Europe remained un- 
 changed. The world had passed from the piety of the 
 Karling epic to the license of the troubadours, and from 
 the simplicity of the saint legends to the coarseness of 
 the fabliaux or the pungent satire of the ' Reinaert de 
 Vos.' But they remarked it not. The hymns and the 
 music which had been invented by Pope Gregory I. were 
 still suitable to the worship of the thirteenth century, 
 
DANTE. 519 
 
 and they and the thoughts which they uttered were still 
 suitable to Dante. The 'Divine Comedy' is little else 
 than an expanded Dies irw expanded truly and purified, 
 and with a Dies beatitudinis added. It is becanse he is 
 imbued with the beliefs of an era that had passed that 
 Dante is so perfect a mirror of the highest thought of the 
 Middle Ages. 
 
 In our ideal picture of the poet we. are wont to fancy 
 him marching ahead of his age, anticipating by his divine 
 prophetic insight thoughts which are but beginning to 
 stir faintly the rest of mankind, and discovering new 
 truths which the slow course of enquiry will reveal to 
 future generations. Is this theory justified by the history 
 of genius ? What shall we say of Shakespeare ? Is there 
 more of feudalism and of old aristocratic chivalry in him 
 than of modern love of freedom and free opinion ? Is it 
 not true what Carlyle says of Shakespeare, that in him 
 Catholicism was still alive, albeit it had been declared by 
 Act of Parliament to be defunct ? What, again, shall we 
 say of Carlyle himself, to whom the modern theory of 
 evolution is only another among many instances of the 
 whimsical folly of mankind? In the same way to Dante 
 the new outlook westward which was beginning to dawn 
 upon mariners was impious merely ; and the new outlook 
 which was dawning upon men's spirits was not less impious 
 and strange. When he wrote, for Italy at least, feudalism 
 was already a past thing, and everywhere Catholicism was 
 dying or in its death throes. But in statecraft Dante had 
 always before his imagination that vision of the Holy 
 Eoman Empire, the ultimate source of all earthly power, 
 which was of the very essence of feudalism. And he 
 alone among his contemporaries looked into the other 
 world with the eyes and in the spirit of Catholicism. 
 
 Thus outwardly his life was a failure. All things were 
 taking a bent different from the direction Dante would 
 have given them. But coming thus, as one born out of 
 
520 OUTLINES OF PEIMITIVE BELIEF. 
 
 time, to him it fell to accomplish a task which to no one 
 else in the world at that* time would have been possible. 
 Many were the heralds of morning celebrating the rise of 
 new beliefs and of new principles of life. To Dante it was 
 given only to sit and lament over a darkening world, to 
 assist at the obsequies of a dead creed, and for its en- 
 shrine ment to prepare a costly and splendid tomb. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 ABS 
 
 A BSTRACT ideas, origin of, in ideas 
 
 JLX of sensation, 11-13 ; process of 
 development from ideas of sensa- 
 tion, 13-16 
 
 Abstract terms, 11-13 
 
 Achajmenidaa, descent of, from a tree, 
 63 
 
 Achilles and Apollo, points of likeness 
 between, 192 
 
 Adam of Bremen, his description of a 
 holy grove at Upsala, 331 
 
 Aditi, 139, 142, 143 
 
 Adityas, 139, 142, 143 ; name bestowed 
 especially upon Mitra and Varurca, 
 139 
 
 Admetus, 187 ; true character of, 190 
 
 JEaea, Odysseus' coming to, 311 ; 
 meaning of the word, 312 
 
 JEgis, original nature of, 199 ; belongs 
 of right to Zeus and to Athene, 202 
 
 JEolus, 308 ; his island a kind of 
 paradise, 308 
 
 Agalmata, rude, worship of, among 
 the Greeks, 80 
 
 Agni, birth of, from the wood, 98 
 100 ; he devours his parents, 98 
 birth of, in the clouds, 100, 101 
 especially the friend of man, 101 
 the conductor of the soul to Para- 
 dise, 102, 288; incarnate after a 
 fashion, 103 ; the fosterer of strong 
 emotion, 103 ; hymn to, 103 ; his 
 relations with Indra, 130 ; in the 
 wood, 134 ; in the heaven, 134 ; he 
 with Indra represents the most re- 
 ligious side of the Vedic creed, 134 ; 
 as a hero, 135 ; associated with 
 Varuwa, 144 
 
 APO 
 
 Ahi, his contests with Indra, 129, 151 
 
 Alcinoiis, 321 ; description of his 
 palace, 321 ; and of his garden, 322 
 
 Alvls and Thorr, 357 
 
 Amenti, the region of, passed through 
 "by the soul, 272 
 
 Amphictyony, principle of the, and 
 its relation to fetich worship, 70 
 
 Angrbo-Sa, the wife of Loki, 388 ; her 
 meeting with O'Sinn, 397 
 
 Animal worship, obscurity which at 
 present surrounds, 71 ; its relation 
 to ancestor worship, 71 
 
 Animals, winged, 61 
 
 Antichrist will tight with Elias at the 
 end of the world, according to the 
 poem Muspilli, 424 
 
 Anticleia, her meeting with Odysseus 
 in Hades, 316 
 
 Apap, region of, passed through by 
 the soul, 272; meaning of the 
 name, 272 note 
 
 Aphrodite 1 of the race of water-born 
 goddesses, 94, 194 ; became subject 
 to Asiatic influence, and hence 
 changed intoKupris, 195 ; sometimes 
 represented armed, like Athene, 195 
 
 Apollo, associated with Zeus and 
 Athene in invocation, 155, 157 
 {see also Zeus, Apollo, and Athene) ; 
 representations of, in art, 161 ; his 
 contest with Marsyas, 96, 174; au- 
 thors of his worship as a Hellenic be- 
 lief were the Dorians, 181 ; his birth, 
 184 ; Homeric hymn to, 184 sqq. ; 
 his majesty, 185 ; his combat with 
 the Python, 185 ; his serving Lao- 
 medon and Admetus, 187 ; meaning 
 
522 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 APS 
 
 of this last myth, 190 ; the wander- 
 ing god, 187 ; takes the form of a 
 dolphin and leads the Dorians 
 from Crete to Crissa, 187 ; his rela- 
 tions with Heracles, 188 ; his supe- 
 riority to -Heracles, 189 ; myth of 
 his death, 190 ; grandeur of his 
 character in the Iliad, 191 ; points of 
 likeness between him and Achilles, 
 192 ; possible rivalry at one time 
 between him and Zeus, 193 ; his 
 character generally in Homer, 194 ; 
 he and Athene as the mediators 
 between God and man, 210 
 
 Apsaras, water nymphs, 93, 136 
 
 Ares, born of a tree, 63 ; the Pelasgian 
 sun god, 179 ; worshipped especially 
 in Northern Greece, 179 
 
 Argonauts, expedition of, 296 note 
 
 Arnold, Mr. Matthew, his definition 
 of religion, 5, 25-26 
 
 Artemis, of the race of water-born god- 
 desses, 194, 196 ; essentially identi- 
 cal in character with Athene, 196 ; 
 became a moon goddess, 198 
 
 Arthur, King, his voyage to Avalon, 
 450 ; his legend only survives as a 
 remnant, 478 sqq. 
 
 Aryaman, one of the three Adityas, 
 139 ; but little else than a ' third ' 
 to Varurca and Mitra, 139 and note ; 
 with Varuwa and Mitra worshipped 
 morning, noon, and evening, 141 ; 
 mentioned in hymns, 142, 154 
 
 Aryas, the first known home of the, 
 105, 273 ; their early social insti- 
 tutions, 108, 109 ; diversities of 
 creed among, 110 ; their migrations, 
 
 ^ 113 
 
 Asbru, the bridge of the gods, 292 ; 
 also bridge of souls, 292 ; the Urdar 
 fount at one end of, 293 ; along it 
 the gods ride to this fount, 347. 
 See also Bifrost 
 
 Asgard, the Gods' "Ward, midmost in 
 the earth, 277, 347 
 
 Ask and Embla (Ash and Elm), first 
 parents of the human race, 64 
 
 Astarte came to be confounded with 
 Aphrodite, 195 ; originally, perhaps, 
 an earth goddess, 198 ; became a 
 moon goddess, 198 
 
 Asvin, the, a degraded form of the 
 
 BAL 
 
 deities Mitra and Varuna, 145 ; 
 brothers of Ushas, the Dawn, whom 
 they carry in their chariot, 145; 
 meaning of the name, 145 note 
 
 Ataulf, 475 
 
 Athene, of the race of water-born 
 goddesses, 94, 194 ; associated with 
 Zeus and Apollo in invocation, 155, 
 157 (see also Zeus, Apollo, and 
 Athene) ; representation of, in art, 
 161 ; her virgin nature, 196 ; as 
 Pallas, Parthenos essentially iden- 
 tical in character with Artemis, 
 196 ; from being the mist became 
 the cloud, and at last the air, 199 ; 
 her two births, 199 ; Homeric hymn 
 to, 199 ; nature myth which shines 
 through, 200 ; as Polias, 201 ; like- 
 ness to Zeus, 201 ; has the same 
 power over atmospheric phenomena, 
 202 ; her epithets of Prornachos, 
 203 ; Polybulos, 203 ; Polymetis, 
 203 ; Tritogeneia, 194, 203 ; Pontia, 
 203 ; .Phalassia, 203 ; Euploea, 203 ; 
 Gorgopis, 205 ; Agelia, 208 ; her aid 
 to Perseus, 204 : perhaps once iden- 
 tical with the Gorgon, 205 ; pa- 
 troness of mariners, 206 ; her cha- 
 racter in the Odyssey, 209 ; her 
 rivalry with Poseidon, 209 ; she and 
 Apollo as the mediators between 
 God and man, 210 
 
 Attila, 472 
 
 Aude, 490 
 
 Augustine, landing of, on the shores 
 of Kent described by Baeda, 502 
 
 Aurora and Aura allied, as Ushas to 
 the Asvin, 146 
 
 Avalon, the Celtic Earthly Paradise, 
 450 ; Arthur's voyage thither, 450 ; 
 Oger's voyage thither, 453 
 
 BACTRIA, probable early home of 
 the Aryas, 106 ; description of, 
 106 sqq. 
 
 Balder, relation of his bale fire to 
 fire worship, 133 ; his bale fires com- 
 pared with the Eieusinian mysteries, 
 227 ; his funeral an image of the 
 setting sun, 283 ; he himself a sun 
 god, 370 ; his home, 370 ; death of, 
 and descent into Helheim, 400 sqq. j 
 
INDEX. 
 
 523 
 
 BAD 
 
 his bale fires came to be confounded 
 with Midsummer fires, and were 
 eventually known under the name 
 of St. John's tires, 410 -*qq. ; his 
 likeness to Sigurd and Siegfried, 
 471 sqq. ; Balderus in the history 
 of Saxo Grammaticus, 510 
 
 Baucis and Philemon turned into 
 trees, 66 
 
 Beast Epic of the Middle Ages, the, 
 481 sqq. 
 
 Beauty, the Sleeping, 417 
 
 Belief, necessity for a definition of, 
 5 ; development of, parallel to the 
 development of abstract ideas, as 
 displayed in the growth of lan- 
 guage, 16 sqq. ; defined as the capa- 
 city for worship, 17 ; the three 
 early phases of, 29 sqq., 53 ; the 
 anthropomorphic phase of, 46 ; at 
 what stage it becomes ethical, 48 ; 
 passionate or ecstatic expression of, 
 50 sqq. 
 
 Benedict. See St. Benedict 
 
 Beowulf, the poem, value of as a 
 testimony to the early beliefs of the 
 Teuton racea, 358 ; relationship of 
 the second part of the poem to the 
 Volsunga Saga and to the Nibelun- 
 gen-Lied, 469 sqq. 
 
 Beowulf, the hero, his arrival in Den- 
 mark and reception by Hrothgar, 
 362 ; his fight with Grendel, 363 
 sqq. ; and with the mother of Gren- 
 del, 367 
 
 Berchta, or Bertha, 371 
 
 Bifrost, a bridge of souls, 293. See 
 also Asbru 
 
 Birds, sacred, 59; gift of prophecy 
 ascribed to, 60 
 
 Bird, Paradise of, 448 
 
 ' Boots,' a character in popular tales, 
 464 ; typical of the German people, 
 465 
 
 Brandan. See St. Brandan 
 
 BreiSablik, the home of Balder, 370 
 
 Bridge of Souls, 287 sqq. ; identified 
 with the Milky Way, 288 ; with the 
 rainbow, 292 
 
 Britain, or Brittia, the home of souls, 
 Procopius' account of, 437 
 
 Bruin in Reineke Fuchs,' 482 and 
 note 
 
 CHA 
 
 Brunhild compelled by .Sigurd to re- 
 ceive the embraces of her husband, 
 416 
 
 Brynhild, a Valkyria, 343 ; pricked 
 by Odhinn with a sleep thorn, 343 ; 
 her first meeting with fc^gurd, 311 ; 
 Sigurd rides to her through the 
 Hume, 416 ; her revenge, 470. See 
 also Sigrdnt'a 
 
 Burgher class, rise of, gives rise also 
 to the fabliaux, 516 
 
 Burning of the dead, an Aryan rite, 
 282 ; effect of the rite upon beliefs 
 concerning the future state, 284 
 
 CADMUS, birth of, from a tree, 63 
 Calypso, her likeness to Circe in 
 character and in the part she plays 
 in the Odyssey, 301 ; a Goddess of 
 Death, 301 ; Hermes brings com- 
 mand to her to release Odysseus, 
 :; 1 9 ; she instructs Odysseus how to 
 make a raft and speeds him on his 
 way, 319 
 
 'Carnoet, the ferry of,' a Breton 
 legend, 439 
 
 Caspian Sea, formerly of greater ex- 
 tent than now, 273 ; the younger 
 tribes of the Aryas (i.e. the Yavanas) 
 lived upon its shore, 275 ; it became 
 for them the Sea of Death, 276 
 
 Castles, the building of, 500 
 
 Cathedral. See Gothic cathedral 
 
 Catholicism, mediaeval, remains of 
 heathenism in, 504 sqq. 
 
 ' Chansons de Geste,' the contrast be- 
 tween them and the Nibelungen, 
 476 ; completely informed by the 
 spirit of mediaeval Catholicism, 
 476 ; inspired by the crusades, 486 ; 
 Germanic and not Celtic in tone, 
 486 ; character in which they pour- 
 tray Charlemagne, 486, 487 sqq. ; 
 and Eoland, 490 ; they formed the 
 literature of the upper classes, 491 
 
 Charlemagne, crowning of, at St. 
 Peter's, on Christmas Day of the 
 year 800, 484 ; the mythic, of the 
 ' Chansons de Geste,' 486, 487 ; his 
 likeness to Odhinn, 487 
 
 Charles the Fat, his vision of purga< 
 tory, 428 
 
524 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 CHI 
 
 Chimaera, personification of the storm, 
 21 
 
 Cimmerian Land, the, was a land of 
 sunset, 273, 276 ; description of, in 
 the Odyssey, 276 
 
 Circe, her likeness to Calypso in cha- 
 racter and in the part she plays in 
 the Odyssey, 301 ; she is a Goddess of 
 Death, 302 ; etymology of her name, 
 302 note] her parentage, 311; her 
 island, 311 ; her reception of the 
 comrades of Odysseus, 312 ; she 
 speeds Odysseus on his way to 
 Hades, 313 
 
 Climatic influences, effect of, in de- 
 termining the nature of a creed, 
 104 
 
 ' Comedy, Divine.' See Dante 
 
 Community, village. See Village 
 community 
 
 Convents, the building of, 500 ; change 
 which passed over, in the ninth cen- 
 tury, 501 ; description of a convent 
 founded by St. Eloi, 501 
 
 Core, a name of Athene, 196 ; of Per- 
 sephone, 227 
 
 Cretan labyrinth compared with the 
 garden of Mylitta at Babylon, 182 
 
 Criemhild, Siegfried's love for, 416 
 
 Cyclopes, personifications of the 
 storm, 21 ; dwellers in the out- 
 world, 305 ; arrival of Odysseus at 
 their island, 305 ; Polyphemus com- 
 pared to Grendel, 307; Odysseus' 
 escape from Polyphemus, 307 
 
 DANTE, his indebtedness to the le- 
 gend of Owayne, 431 sq. ; his 
 account of Ulysses' last voyage, 442 ; 
 his ' Divine Comedy ' is, next to the 
 Gothic cathedral, the greatest pro- 
 duction of the Middle Ages, 518 ; 
 the sources from which he drew his 
 inspiration, 518 ; his want of sym- 
 pathy with the new thoughts of his 
 age, 519 
 
 Dawn, first represented by the wind 
 of dawn, 140 ; the white and the 
 red, 146. See also Ushas 
 
 Day, the mythic, described from the 
 Veda, 146 sqq. 
 
 Death, tho imagery of, Chapters V. 
 
 EAR 
 
 and VIII. ; images of, especially 
 frequent in the Norse creed, 385 ; 
 House of, surrounded by a belt of 
 flame, 390 sqq. 
 
 Death, angel of,' 407, 409 
 
 Death wake, 266 
 
 Dekken, Van der, 496 
 
 Delos, why chosen for the birth-place 
 of Apollo, 183 
 
 Demeter, worship and mysteries of, 
 Chapter V. ; an earth goddess, 175, 
 214 sqq. ; difficulty of distinguish- 
 ing the personalities of her and of 
 Persephone, 231 note ; processional 
 chaunt in honour of, 241 
 
 Demophoon nursed by Demeter, 225 
 
 Didron, his remarks on the relation- 
 ship of Christ to the Father in the 
 iconography of the Middle Ages, 
 192 
 
 Dietrich of Bern, 472 
 
 Dionysus, an earth god, 214 ; rites of, 
 introduced into the Eleusinia from 
 Thrace, 221 
 
 Dioscuri, their relationship to the 
 Asvin, 145, 152 ; often associated 
 by the Greek with dead ancestors, 
 152 
 
 ' Divine Comedy,' the. See Dante 
 
 Dodona, the grove of, 93. See also 
 Zeus 
 
 Dorians, the first worshippers of 
 Apollo, 181 ; their migrations, 181, 
 183 
 
 Dornroschen, 417 
 
 Durendal, Roland's sword, 512 
 
 Dyaus, the sky, 41 ; replaced by Zeus, 
 Jupiter, and Zio, 46 ; a pre-Vedic 
 god, 117 ; has fallen into neglect 
 in the Vedas and been superseded 
 by Indra, 119 ; the father of Indra, 
 119 ; compared with Ouranos and 
 with Kronos, 119 note 
 
 EARTH goddesses of the Greeks, 
 175 ; of the Teutons, 371 ; images 
 of , dragged from place to place, 236, 
 374 
 
 Earth gods of the Greeks, 178 ; of the 
 Teutons, 370 ; and goddesses, rela- 
 tionship of, 216, 370 
 Earth worship, antiquity and longe- 
 
INDEX. 
 
 525 
 
 EAR 
 
 vity of, 214, 260; characterises the 
 peasant class, 214 
 
 Eai ,ily Paradise, beliefs concerning, 
 Chapter IX. ; a survival of heathen 
 belief, 434 ; difference of opinion 
 touching its locality, 435 ; by some 
 placed in Ireland, 441 ; or in an 
 island to the west of Ireland, 441 ; 
 by Dante placed on the summit of 
 the Mountain of Purgatory, 443 ; 
 effect of the belief in, in sending 
 men on exploring expeditions, 443 
 
 Easter fires, 377 ; superstitions con- 
 cerning them, 378 
 
 Eastre. See Ostara 
 
 England, or Britain, imagined to be 
 the home of souls, 436 
 
 Eleusinia. See Mysteries 
 
 Eleusis originally meant the place of 
 the 'coming' of spring, 221, 227; 
 not the designation of one spot 
 only, 222 
 
 Elpenor, Odysseus' meet ing with, in 
 Hades, 268, 315 
 
 Embla and Ask (Elm and Ash), the 
 first parents of the human race, 64 
 
 Epics. See 'Chansons de Geste,' Nibe- 
 lungen, Odyssey 
 
 Erinys and Erinyes, original nature, 
 21 ; development of the moral ele- 
 ment in the conception of them, 28 
 
 Etzel, 472 
 
 FAFNIR, Sigurd's slaying of, 343, 
 470 
 
 Fenrir, one of the children of Loki, 
 388 ; his nature, 388 ; interchange 
 of nature between him and Jor- 
 mungandr, 388 note ; fights with 
 Odhinn at Pvagnarok, 422 
 
 ' Fetich ' and ' fetichism,' diverse 
 meanings given to the words, 31 
 sqq. ; the only meaning which can 
 serve to distinguish a, special phase 
 of belief, 36 ; the three principal 
 forms of fetich, 54 ; fetich, pro- 
 phetic powers of the, 61-62 ; the 
 carved, 81 
 
 Fetich worship (fetichism) distin- 
 guished from magic, 34 ; its rela- 
 tion to magic, 78 ; its influence 
 
 GAN 
 
 upon early art, 82-86; its decay, 
 86 sqq. ; survivals of fetichism, 87 
 
 Feudalism, society began to stiffen 
 into, after the age of Charlemagne, 
 499 ; this is shown in the ' Chansons 
 de Geste,' 499 ; one of two pillars 
 of mediaeval life, 502 ; but not 
 an entirely new birth, 502 ; rather 
 an adaptation to its new conditions 
 of the ancient society of the vil- 
 lage community, 503 ; the process 
 by which it reached its full de- 
 velopment, 503 sq. ; a petrifaction 
 of life, 505 
 
 Kiulsvith, the porter of hell, 395 
 
 Fire worship among the Indo-Euro- 
 pean races, 132 and note. See also 
 Agni 
 
 Folk tales, the great vitality of, 477 ; 
 become the most conspicuous \\licu 
 the higher parts of the creed lnv<; 
 been annihilated, 477; the piimi- 
 tive groundwork of mythology, 
 480 
 
 Folk tales of the Middle Ages, 477 
 sqq., 492 sqq. 
 
 Folk tales of Germany, 492 sqq. 
 
 Fontaine de Jouvence, origin of the, 
 282 
 
 Francis of Assisi. See St. Francis 
 
 Franciscans. See Mendicant orders 
 
 Freyja, associated with Frigg and 
 Freyr, 371 ; corresponds to Per- 
 sephone and Libera, 371 ; her wan- 
 derings in search of Odhur, 373 ; at 
 the funeral of Balder, 402 
 
 Freyr, a god of summer and of fruit- 
 
 fulness, 370 ; his wooing of Ger$, 
 
 222, 372 ; at the funeral of Balder, 
 
 402 ; his fight with Surtr at Kag- 
 
 narok, 422 
 
 Frigg and Freyja, 177 ; they corre- 
 spond to Demeter and Persephone, 
 371 
 
 'Frogs, the,' picture of the under 
 world presented in, 248 
 
 Fursey. Sec St. Fursey 
 
 p AGNRAD, a name of Odhinn, 337 ; 
 \JT meaning of the word, 337 
 Ganelon, 499 
 Ganges, became to the Indians the 
 
526 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 GAU 
 
 representative of the River of 
 Death, 281 
 
 Gau, the earth, 118 
 
 General terms, 37 
 
 GerS, the wooing of, 222, 372 
 
 German heathenism, general uni- 
 formity of, in whatever country 
 discovered, 325 ; climatic influences 
 under which it was matured, 326 
 
 Germans, low social condition of, 
 when they are first known to his- 
 tory, 327 
 
 Geruth, 446 ; the same as Geirrod, 446 
 note 
 
 1 Geste, Chansons de.' See ' Chansons 
 de Geste ' 
 
 Ghost, the, could not cross Styx until 
 funeral rites had been performed, 
 268 ; examples in the cases of El- 
 penor and Patroclus, 268 
 
 Giant race of Greeks and that of 
 Northmen, comparison between, 
 304, 307 
 
 Gjuki and Gjukungs, 338, 415 
 
 Gjallar-brii, the bridge of souls in the 
 under world, 402, 445 
 
 Gjallar horn, the horn of Heimdal, 347 
 and note ; blown at Ragnarok, 420 ; 
 Roland's horn compared to, 491 
 
 Godrun marries Sigurd, 415 ; her re- 
 venge for the murder of Sigurd, 
 470 
 
 Gods, active and passive, rivalry be- 
 tween, 120 sqq. 
 
 Gold currency, reintroduction of, in 
 the Middle Ages, 516 
 
 Gorgon slain by Perseus, 205 ; near 
 connection with Athene, 205, 209 
 
 Gorm the Wise, King of Denmark, 
 279 ; his journey to farther Biar- 
 mia, 444 sqq. 
 
 Gothic cathedral, the, an allegory of 
 the life and thought of the Middle 
 Ages, 499 ; the slow stages by which 
 it grew to its perfect form, 501, 
 505 ; is the holy grove turned into 
 stone, 506 ; description of, 507 
 
 Goths of MEesia, their ignorance of 
 money, 474 
 
 Gr&ci, etymology of the name, 168 
 
 Grave personified as a devouring ani- 
 mal OA man, 269 sqq. 
 
 Grave-mouth the one gate to the 
 
 HAU 
 
 under world, whether for going or 
 returning, 267 ; for this reason 
 strewn with sharp stones, 267 
 
 Graves of the Stone Age, traces of 
 funeral fest found in, 266 
 
 Greek divinities, want of individuality 
 in representation of, 158 ; what this 
 denotes, 159 
 
 Greek religion, complexity of, 155 ; 
 decay of nature worship in, 156 ; 
 necessity of comparing it with the 
 Vedic and Norse creeds, 156 
 
 Grendel, a giant, 307 ; his encounter 
 with Beowulf, 360 sqq. ; his mother, 
 366 sqq. 
 
 Grimhild gives magic potion to Si- 
 gurd, 415 
 
 Grimvald, the Lombard king, ghost 
 of, 438 
 
 ' Grove,' convertible term with 
 ' temple ' in Teutonic languages, 
 331, 506 
 
 Grove, holy, at Upsala, 331 
 
 Gubernatis, Prof, de, his distinction 
 between the mythological and re- 
 ligious periods of the Vedic creed, 
 26 
 
 Gullinkambi, a mythic cock which 
 crows at Ragnarok, 420 ; perhaps 
 the same as Salgofnir (393) and 
 Vidofnir (396) 
 
 Gullinbursti-, Freyr's boar, 402 
 
 Gunther, Siegfried's service to, 416 
 
 Gunthmund, 445 
 
 Gymir, the father of GerS, 372 
 
 TTACKELBERG, or Hackelbiirend, 
 
 11. the Wild Huntsman, another 
 form of Odhinn, 293, 494; hunts 
 along the Milky Way, 293 ; his 
 legend, 493 
 
 Hades, 162 ; at first the unseen place, 
 265; then personified and after- 
 wards once more a place, 270 ; 
 Odysseus' voyage to, 313 ; picture of 
 Hades' kingdom in the Odyssey, 314 
 
 Hades-Pluton, 178 
 
 Hardi d'or, the introduction of the, 
 516 and note 
 
 Harke, 371 
 
 Haukal, Ibn, his description of Norse 
 funeral rites, 405 sqq. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 527 
 
 HEA 
 
 Heaven and hell, ancient notions 
 corresponding to our, 273 
 
 Hector's clothes burnt as a substitute 
 for his body, 286 
 
 Heimdal, 317 ; his fight with Loki at 
 Ragnarok, 422 ; his horn compared 
 to that of Roland, 491 
 
 Hel, the concealed place, 265 ; then 
 personified and afterwards once 
 more a place, 270 ; one of the 
 children of Loki, 388 ; Balder in 
 her halls, 403 
 
 Helgi, the ghost of, 392 
 
 Hell, harrowing of, 191 
 
 Henotheistn, 44 sq. ; a name intro- 
 duced by Prof. Max Miiller, 44 
 note', conspicuous in the Vedic 
 creed, 115 
 
 Hephaestus, a degraded form of the 
 fire god, 133; compared with V6- 
 lund, 342 
 
 Hera, 175 ; her character different 
 from that of the other wives of 
 Zeus, 176 ; suggested etymology of 
 her name, 176 ; her nature subdued 
 by that of Athene, 198 
 
 Heracles, a Pelasgian sun god, 179 ; 
 worshipped in the centre and south 
 of Greece, 179 ; his likeness to 
 Thorr shows him \o be an Aryan 
 divinity, 179 note; his relations 
 with Apollo, 188 ; his death, 189 ; 
 he left his shade in Hades as a 
 kind of pledge, 190 
 
 Hermes, an earth god in Arcadia, 
 214; his intervention to release 
 Odysseus from Circe and from 
 Calypso, 301, 313, 318 ; meaning of 
 these incidents, 318 ; a wind god, 
 319 ; a god of the mark and the 
 market, 333 
 
 Hermo'Sr, his ride to Helheim, 403 
 
 Hestia, 132 
 
 Holda, 371 
 
 Homeric hymn to Apollo, 184 sqq. ; 
 to Athene, 199; to Demeter, 224 
 sqq. 
 
 Homestead, Teuton gods of the, 369 
 sqq. 
 
 Hotherus and Balderus, story of, as 
 told by Saxo Grammaticus, 510 
 
 Hringhorni, Balder's ship, 401 
 
 Hrothgar, King of the Danes, 360 
 
 JOT 
 
 sqq. ', his home roofed with gold, 
 475 
 Hymir, 355 
 
 INDRA supplants the older god 
 Dyaus, 119; why he does this, 
 120 ; rivalry between him and 
 Varuwa, 122 ; hymn addressed to 
 him and Varuwa together, 123 ; 
 becomes the supreme and universal 
 ruler, 126 ; his might, 127 ; hymn 
 to, 127 ; his enemies, 128 ; his re- 
 lations with Agni, 130; he with 
 Agni represents the most religious 
 side of Vedic belief, 134 ; his meet- 
 ing with the Maruts described in a 
 hymn, 151 
 
 Initiation into the Eleusinia, 240 
 
 ' Ionian,' widest meaning of the name, 
 163 ; part played by the lonians in 
 the civilisation of the Greeks, 164 
 sqq. 
 
 Ireland, why the ' Island of Saints,' 
 441 
 
 Iron Wood, the, 348 
 
 Isengrim of the * Keineke Fuchs,' his 
 cousinship to Reineke, 482 ; com- 
 pared to Odhinn, 483 
 
 JAVAN. See Yavanas, Ionian 
 Jean, St., feux de. See St. John's 
 fires 
 
 Jew, Wandering, the> 497 
 Johannisfeuer. See St. John's fires 
 John's, St., fires. See St. John's fires 
 Jormungandr, the Midgard worm, a 
 personification of the earth-girding 
 sea or river, 73 ; his likeness to 
 Oceanus, 73 ; his combats with 
 Thorr, 353, 355; a son of Loki, 
 388 ; his last fight with Thorr at 
 Ragnarok, 422 
 
 Jotuns (jotnar) compared with 
 Greek giants and Titans, 304, 307 ; 
 always at enmity with the ^Esir, 
 336 ; born of fire and ice, 419 ; 
 their invasion of Mannheim and 
 encounter with the ^Esir at 
 Ragnarok, 419 sqq. See also Gymir, 
 Hrym, Hymir, Loki, Skrymir, 
 Thrymr, tJtgarSloki 
 
528 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 JOT 
 
 Jotunheimar, the land of vvinter, 349, 
 389 ; surrounded by a girdle of fire, 
 349, 390 ; Thorr's tarings to, 349 
 sqq, 
 
 Jouvence, Fontaine de, origin of, 282 
 Jupiter, 41, 46, 124. See also Zeus 
 
 TTALEWALA, descriptions of magic 
 J\. in, 512 
 
 Keleos, Demeter's coming to the house 
 of, 225 
 
 Jfinvad, the bridge, description of, 
 from the Zend Avesta, 291 
 
 Kronos, his fatherhood to Zeus, 119 
 and note; he represents in many 
 ways the creed of the peasantry, 
 174 and note ; banished by the 
 warlike Zeus, 174 
 
 Kuhn, Adalbert, on Sarama, 140 
 
 T AOMED6N served by Apollo, 187 
 
 I J Ltito comes to Delos, and there 
 gives birth to Apollo, 184 
 
 Lohengrin, 460 
 
 Loki the personification of the f unerarl 
 fire, 386 ; his double nature, a god 
 and a giant, 387 , his progeny, 388 ; 
 he causes the death of Balder, 401 ; 
 he brings the troop of ghosts from 
 Niflhel in the ship ' Naglf ar ' to fight 
 at Ragnarok, 421 ; his combat with 
 Heimdal, 422 ; in the poem Muspilli 
 his place is taken by the Old 
 Fiend, 424 
 
 Lotophagi, Odysseus' visit to, 304 
 
 Lycseus, an epithet of Zeus, signifi- 
 cance of, 171 note 
 
 Lycaeon, Mount , sometimes confounded 
 with Zeus, 171 and note, 172 
 
 MAYDAY celebrations described, 
 378 ; May fires ban the witches, 
 378 
 
 Magic, vitality of the belief in, 88 
 Marsyas' skin, 96 ; Marsyas' contest 
 
 with Apollo, meaning of, 174 
 Mare and Meer, etymological con- 
 nection with morS) Mord, murder, 
 276 
 
 MIT 
 
 Mark, original meaning of, 330 ; the 
 gods of the, 334 sqq. 
 
 Maruts, the clouds, 129; the storm 
 winds, 149; they gain strength as 
 the day advances, 149 ; hymn to, 
 150 ; their meeting with Indra 
 celebrated in a hymn, 150; rather 
 heroes than gods, 152; often con- 
 founded with the dead ancestors, 152 
 
 Material character of primitive 
 thought displayed by primitive 
 language, 6 sqq. 
 
 Medusa, 204. See also Gorgon 
 
 Mendicant orders, rise of, 517 ; he- 
 ralded the decay of Catholicism, 517 
 
 Menglod, 395 ; the meaning of her 
 name shows her to be the same as 
 Freyja, 395 note 
 
 Metaneira, Deraeter's visit to her 
 house, 225 ; she discovers Demetgr 
 concealing Demophoon in the fire, 
 225 
 
 Metis, a river goddess, 204 
 
 Midgard Sea, the, 72, 348 gq. t 389 
 
 Migrations of the Aryas, 113 ; of the 
 Greeco-Italic race, 163 sqq. 
 
 Milky Way, the, identified with the 
 Bridge of Souls, 288 ; various 
 names of, 288 ; the Wild Huntsman 
 hunts along it, 293, 495; legend 
 concerning, under the name of the 
 Winter Street, 294 
 
 Mimir or Mim, his well of wisdom 
 visited by Odhinn, 336 ; his nature, 
 336 note 
 
 Minos, the tradition of, points to a 
 time when Crete was the ruling 
 state in the Greek world, 181 ; 
 originally stood for the first man, 
 afterwards for the first Idng among 
 the Greeks, 182 note 
 
 Minotaur, the, probably a sun god 
 after an Oriental pattern, 182 
 
 Mitra, when alone, was originally the 
 sun, 138 ; afterwards represented 
 .the sky by day, 139 ; when joined 
 to Varuwa the two represent the 
 meeting of the day and night skies, 
 i.e. the morning or evening, 139, 
 140 ; but more generally the morn- 
 ing, 141 ; hymn to Mitra and Varuwa, 
 142 ; hymn to Mitra alone, 144 ; M. 
 and V. represent the white dawn, 146 
 
INDEX. 
 
 529 
 
 MOB 
 
 Morgan le Fay(Morgue la Fee), b\sqq. 
 Monotheism, 48 sq. 
 Mountains, prophetic powers of, re- 
 sided in their caves, 62, 67; the 
 worship of, 67 ; Zeus worshipped 
 as, 67, 171 and note 
 Miiller, K. 0., on Heracles and the 
 Dorians, 188 ; on Apollo and Ad- 
 met us, 190 
 
 Miiller, Professer Max, his definition 
 of religion, 5 ; has called in question 
 the supposition of a primitive 
 fetich worship, 32 ; on Jmnotheixm, 
 44 ; on Sarama, 140 
 Muses, relationship of, to nymphs, 95 
 Music born of streams, 95-97; church, 
 its potent inlluence in converting 
 the hf-athen Germans, 502 % 
 
 Muspell's-heiin, description of, 419 
 Muspell's sons at Ragnarok, 1547, 420 
 Muspilli,the earth-consuming 1irc,415 
 Muspilli, a Bavarian poem of that 
 name describing the Last D 17, 24 
 Mylitta of Babylon, her garden 
 likened to the labyrinth at Cnossus, 
 182; an earth goddess, 195; sen- 
 suous character of, 195 
 Myrmidons, origin of, H3 
 Myrrha turned into a tree, 67 
 Mysteries, Chapter V.; the earliest 
 which we gain sight of are of the 
 nature of religious revivals, 218 ; 
 seciesy not originally an element in, 
 219; how it came to be so, 2 1 9 ; uni- 
 versality of, 220; the Eleusinian, 
 why not mentioned by Homer and 
 Hesiod, 222 ; originally dramas 
 enacting the return of spring, 223 ; 
 the Eleusinlan selected as types of 
 all, 224 ; story on which the Eleusinia 
 were founded, 224 sqq. ; mysteries 
 earlier than a knowledge of agri- 
 culture, 229 ; change in them which 
 the knowledge of agriculture intro- 
 duced, 229; place of the orgy in, 
 233 ; comparison between Eleusinia 
 and a Catholic mystery, 235 ; the 
 proceedings in the Eleusinia, 237 
 sqq. ; how the thought of death 
 came to mingle with, 243 ; Oriental 
 influences upon, 244 ; changes pro- 
 duced in, by the introduction of 
 ideas relating to death and the 
 
 ODH 
 
 future state, 245 sqq. ; effect of 
 Neoplatonism upon, 251 ; Rome 
 had originally only mysteries of the 
 primitive kind, 254 ; she adopted 
 those of Isis and Serapis- Osiris, 254 ; 
 sadness which characterised the 
 Egyptian, 257 ; final stage of, 259 ; 
 longevity of, 260 
 
 Mythologic and religious periods of 
 the Vedic creed, 26 
 
 NANNA, the wife of Balder, dies 
 with grief to see him on hia 
 pyre, 401 ; in Saxo's story of Bal- 
 derus and Hotherus, 510 
 
 Nature worship, 39 sqq. (nee also 
 Preface); its relation to henotheism, 
 44 ; and to polytheism, 45 ; it 
 forms the next clearly-marked stage 
 of belief after fetichism, 91 
 
 Nausicaa, Odysseus' meeting with, 321 
 
 Neoplatonism, its effect upon the de- 
 velopment of mysteries, 251 
 
 Nerthus, great German earth goddess, 
 371; probably not the same as 
 Hertha, 371 note ; her image dragged 
 from place to place in a car, 374 
 
 Nibelungen compared with the V61- 
 sunga Saga, 416, 470*^.; the pro- 
 bable date at which the epic first 
 arose, 467; earliest elements in the 
 story, 471 
 
 Nirrtis, queen of the under world, 
 288, 289, 371 note 
 
 Nymphs, relationship of, to Muses, 95 
 
 OAK, mystical, of Zeus at Dodona, 
 57,93 
 
 Ocean us, parent of all things and the 
 limit of all things, 68 
 
 Odhinn supplanted Dyaus-Tyr, 124, 
 334 ; the wind, 334 ; but also the 
 heaven, 335 ; continually keeps 
 watch against the giant race, 336 ; 
 purchases wisdom at Mlmir's well, 
 336 ; his appearance as the gentle 
 wind, 337 ; as the storm wind, 338 ; 
 rides forth with the Valkyriur, 339 ; 
 descends to Helheim, 396 ; his last 
 fight at Ragnarok, 422 ; his rivalry 
 
 M M 
 
530 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 ODH 
 
 with Thorr in a later mythology, 
 483 ; likeness to Isengrim of the 
 Reineke Fuchs, 483 ; likeness to 
 Charlemagne of the ' Chansons de 
 Geste,' 487 sqq. ; transformed into 
 Hackelberg, 493; into the Stret- 
 mann, 495 ; into Van der Dekken, 
 496 ; into the Pied Piper, 496 ; into 
 the Wandering Jew, 497; into 
 Satan, 509 
 
 Odhur, the husband of Freyja, left her 
 to wander in distant lands and never 
 returned, 373 ; really identical with 
 Odhinn, 373 note 
 
 Odysseus, his voyage to the Loto- 
 phagi, 304 ; to the island of the 
 Cyclopes, 304 ; to the island of 
 jEolus, 308; his attempted return 
 home, 309 ; voyage to the Laestry- 
 gones, 310 ; to Circe, 311 ; to Hades, 
 313 ; to Calypso, 318 ; to the Phsea- 
 cians, 320 ; his return, 323 
 Odyssey, the great epic of the Sea of 
 Death, 296 ; a poem written for 
 seafarers and merchants, 296 ; and 
 in praise of Athene, 297 ; mingling 
 of myth and reality in, 299 ; ele- 
 ments of the epos, 303 
 Oger the Dane (Holger Danske), his 
 last voyage, 452 ; reaches Avalon, 
 453 ; entertained by Morgue la 
 F6e, 456 ; returns for awhile to the 
 world, 457 ; and again to Avalou, 458 
 Ogygia, 318 
 Olrun, 342 ; the same as Alruna or 
 
 Aurinia, 342 noTe, 345 
 O"rboa, 372 . 
 
 Orgy, the, its place in the Eleusinian 
 mysteries, 233 ; connected with the 
 worship of Dionysus, 233 
 Osiris, introduction of his rites into 
 Greece and Rome, 254 ; confounded 
 with Serapis, 254 note ; the story of 
 Osiris and Isis as told by Plutarch, 
 256 sqq. 
 
 Ostara tires, 133, 377 
 Other world, Chapter VI.; alterna- 
 tions of belief and scepticism con- 
 cerning, 262 ; Greek and Hebrew 
 belief concerning, 268 ; Egyptian 
 belief concerning, 271 ; Icelandic 
 picture of, 277, 389 sqq. See also 
 Hades, Helheim, Earthly Paradise 
 
 PLU 
 
 Ouen, St. See St. Ouen 
 Owayne, his descent into St. Patrick's 
 purgatory, 429 sqq. 
 
 FN, worship of, 173; a sort of 
 earth god, 214 
 
 Papa and Rangi of the Maoris, 175 
 Paradise. See Earthly Paradise 
 Paradise of Birds, 448 
 Paradise Knight, the, 459" 
 Patriotic instincts fostered by fetich- 
 ism, 69 
 
 Pelasgians, 167 ggq. ; suggested deriva- 
 tion of the word, 167 note ; their 
 creed partly supplanted by that of 
 lonians, 180 
 Pelasgic Zeus, &c. See Zeus, Hera, 
 
 Demeter 
 
 Pelasgis a name of Demeter, 231 note 
 Pelopidae descended from a tree, 63 
 Perchta, 371. See also Bertha 
 Persephone and Demeter, the heads 
 and representatives of chthonian 
 worship, 21 7 ; story of the rape of 
 Persephone, 224 ; she was not 
 originally connected with thoughts 
 of death, 242 ; possibility of there 
 being two Persephones, 242 note. 
 See also Demeter 
 Perseus and the Gorgon, 205 
 Pertaric, King of the Lombards, 438 
 Phseacians, Odysseus' voyage to, 321 ; 
 meaning of their name, 322 ; ferry- 
 men of the dead, 323 
 Philology, the use of, in studying the 
 history of belief, 3 ; material cha- 
 racter of primitive thought demon- 
 strated by, 6 sqq. ; comparative, 
 its testimony to the existence of 
 nature worship, 39 sqq. ; its method 
 in recovering traces of the past 
 civilisation of the Aryan race, 40 
 Phrygians allied to the Hellenes, 164 
 Pied Piper is the wind, i.e. Odhinn as 
 the psychopomp, 496 ; probable 
 growth of the myth, 496 
 Placidia, wedding gifts to, 475 
 Plutarch, his account of the history 
 of Osiris and Isis, 256 sq.; his ex- 
 planation of the myth, 258 
 Pluton, sometimes the son of Dem- 
 ter, 217 and note. See also Hades 
 
INDEX. 
 
 531 
 
 POL 
 
 Polias, Athene, 201 
 Polieus, Zeus, 201 
 Polyphemus. See Cyclops 
 Poseidon, antiquity of his worship, 
 
 177 ; the meaning of his rivalry 
 ' with Athene, 177, 297 
 Prince of the Powers of the Air, a 
 
 favourite name for Satan in the 
 
 Middle Ages, 509 
 Prishni, the mother of the Maruts, 
 
 149 
 Prithivi, 117 ; united with Dy&us, 117; 
 
 fell into neglect, 119 
 Prometheus, the fire drill, 99 note, 135 
 Purgatory, its relation to Helheim, 
 
 425 ; visions of, 426 sqq. ; St. 
 
 Patrick's, 429 
 Pururavas and Urvasi, 340 
 Python, close connection between her 
 
 and a river, 74 ; slain by Apollo, 
 
 185 
 
 T)AGNAR()K, real meaning of the 
 
 JX name, by false etymology writ- 
 ten . Ragnarokr, 346 note ; the 
 fighting in Valholl a preparation 
 for, 369 ; description of, 419 sqq. 
 
 Rangi and Papa of the Maoris, 1 75 
 
 ' Reineke Fuchs,' a remnant of the 
 great Beast Epic of Northern 
 Europe, 481 ; the various forms of 
 the story, 481 note', a tale belong- 
 ing to the lower strata of society, 
 482 ; but rather to Teutons than 
 Celts, 482 ; some relic of the later 
 mythology of Odhinn and Thorr 
 has mingled with it, 483 
 
 Reineke the Fox, 481 ; his cousinship 
 to Isengrim, 482 ; in character first 
 represented the lower class of 
 Teutons, especially the Flemings, 
 483 ; to some extenta representative 
 of Thorr, 483 ; afterwards became 
 a knight and a satire on the 
 knightly class, 516 
 
 Religion, numerous and conflicting 
 definitions of, 4 ; Mr Herbert 
 Spencer's definition, 4, 22 sqq. ; Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold's definition, 5, 25 ; 
 Mr. Max Miiller's definition, 5 
 
 Rhea an earth goddess, 176 ; possibly 
 the same as Hera, 176 ; etymology 
 of hor name, 176 
 
 SAT 
 
 Rivers, prophetic powers of, 62 ; 
 worship of, 68 ; descent from, 69 ; 
 symbolised by serpents, 72 
 
 River of Death, 278 sqq. ; the Ganges 
 a river of death, 281; the Indian 
 mythic river of death, called Vi- 
 jaranadi and Vaitera/d, 281 
 
 Roland partakes of the nature of 
 Thorr and of Siegfried, 490; his 
 youth contrasted with Charle- 
 magne's great age, 490 ; his horn 
 compared to the Gjallarhorn of 
 Heimdal, 491 
 
 Romans, mysteries among the, 263 sqq. 
 
 Rudolf, Abbot of St. Tron, his account 
 of a curious heathen revival in the 
 twelfth century, 376 
 
 Rudra, 150, 154 
 
 Russ, a Gothic race dwelling in the 
 centre of Russia, description of their 
 funeral rites, 405 sqq. 
 
 SABBATH, the witches', 609; a 
 kind of mystery, 613 
 
 Sail, no word for, common to the 
 various members of the Indo- 
 European family, 165 
 
 Saints, Legends of the, 479 sqq. 
 
 St. Benedict of Nursia, his monastic 
 rule, 501, 517 
 
 St. Brandon, Isle of, 441 ; voyage 
 of, 446 
 
 St. Dominic, 617 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi, account of a 
 mystery inaugurated by, 234 ; his 
 order of mendicant friars, 517 
 
 St. Fursey, his vision of Purgatory, 
 427 
 
 St. Jean, feux de. See St. John's 
 fires 
 
 St. John's fires, 133, 377; descrip- 
 tion of, 411 sqq. 
 
 St. Patrick's purgatory, 426, 429 sqq. 
 
 Salgof nir, a mythic cock, 393. See also 
 Gullinkambi 
 
 tfarnbara, the mountains of, 129 
 
 Sarama, 140 
 
 Sarameyas, sons of Sarama", the two 
 dogs of Yam a, 145 : guardians of 
 the Bridge of Souls, '288 sq. 
 
 Sarawyfi, 21 
 
 Satan in the grass, 506 ; and Odhinn, 
 M 2 
 
532 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 SAV 
 
 609. See also Sabbath and Witch- 
 craft 
 
 Savitar as the evening sun, hymn to, 
 153 
 
 Sceaf, 460 
 
 Scheria, Odysseus' voyage to, 320; 
 meaning of the word, 320 note; 
 description of, 321 
 
 Scyld, 459 
 
 Sea of Death represented to the 
 Aryas first by the Caspian, 276 ; 
 became separated in thought from 
 the River of Death, 280; repre- 
 sented to the Greeks by the Medi- 
 terranean, 296 ; the Odyssey the 
 great epic of, 296 ; other legends 
 relating to it, 436 sqq. 
 
 Serapis, worship of, in Rome, 254 
 sqq. ; confounded with Osiris, 254 n 
 
 Serpent. See Jormungandr, Python 
 
 Serpent king, the, in Arcadia and in 
 Germany, 76 
 
 Serpent-worship, distinct in many 
 points from ordinary animal 
 worship, 71 ; its relationship to the 
 worship of rivers, 72 sqq. 
 
 Serpents represent the autochthones 
 of a land, 76 
 
 Sheep, Island of, visited by St. Bran- 
 dan, 448 
 
 Sheol, the under world of the 
 Hebrews, 268 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, his false notion 
 touching poe ic creation, 20 
 
 Siegfried, the deeds which he per- 
 forms for Gunther, 416; his ad- 
 ventures and death, 471 ; he 
 combines in his person the charac- 
 ters of Thorr and Balder, 471 ; his 
 likeness to Roland, 490 
 
 Sigrdrlfa espoused the cause of Agnar, 
 343 ; pricked by a sleep thorn, 343 ; 
 asleep on the Hindarfjoll, 343, 415. 
 See also Brynhild 
 
 Sigrfin and the ghost of Helgi, 392 
 
 Sigurd, his adventures, 343, 414, 470; 
 points of likeness between him and 
 Freyr, 414; between him and 
 Balder and between him and 
 Thorr, 471 
 
 Skirnir sent by Freyr to woo GerS, 
 372 ; his ride through the flame, 
 389, 394 
 
 THO 
 
 Skrymir, the giant, Thorr's meeting 
 
 with, 350 ; the same as tJtgarSloki, 
 
 353. See also UtgarSloki 
 Sleeping Beauty, 417 
 Sleipnir, Odhinn's horse, 339 
 Smoke, the embodiment of the soul, 
 
 285 
 Soul confounded with the breath, 265 ; 
 
 with smoke, 285 
 Souls imprisoned in trees, 67 
 Spencer, Mr. Herbert, his definition 
 
 of religion, 4, 22 sqq. 
 Stones, worship of, 79 
 Surtr,419 ; rides overBifrost toVlgrid's 
 
 plain, 420 ; his fight with Freyr, 422 
 Suryas, the sun god, 137 ; chases the 
 
 Dawn (Ushas), 146. See also Savitar 
 Svarga. See Swarga 
 Svastika. See Swastika 
 Svegder Fiolnersson, his attempt to 
 
 find Asgard, 279 
 Svipdag and Fiolsvith, 395 
 Swan maidens, a name of the Val- 
 
 kyriur, 340 
 
 Swarga, the bright world, 288 . 
 Swastika, the, or tire drill, 99 and note 
 Symbolism of Christianity, 502 
 
 rpANEMAHUTA,the father of trees, 
 JL in Maori legend, 58, 175 
 Teiresias, his meeting with Odvsseus 
 
 in Hades, 316 
 
 Terms, abstract, 11 sqq. ; general, 37 
 Themis, an earth goddess, 175, 214 
 Thokk, a witch, 403; the name has 
 been changed from dckkr, dark, 404 
 and note 
 
 Thorkill, the companion of Gorm the 
 Wise in his expedition to Utgarthi- 
 locus, 444 
 
 Thorr (or Donar), his fights with Jor- 
 mungandr, 186, 355 ; the second of 
 the three gre'at gods of the mark, 
 335; his faring into Jotunheim, 349 
 sqq. ; his contest with Thrymr, 
 355; and with Alvis, 357; si=;nifi- 
 cance of his journey to UtgarSloki 
 explained, 398 ; his last fight with 
 Jormungandr at Ragnarck, 422 ; 
 points of likeness between him and 
 Siegfried, 471, Reineke, 483, and 
 Roland, 490 
 
INDEX. 
 
 533 
 
 Three Kings of Cologne, the, 382 
 
 Thrymr, 355. See Thorr 
 
 Tree, the house, 56 ; the world, 57 
 
 Tree of Life, a Middle Age legend of 
 the, 64 
 
 Tree gods, 55 sqq. 
 
 Tree worship at the foundation of the 
 Teutonic creed, 332; and of the 
 Celtic, 332 
 
 Trees, life under, 55 ; prophetic power 
 of, 62 ; descent from, 63 sqq. ; tribal 
 or village, 65 ; the patrician and 
 plebeian at Rome, 65 ; men turned 
 into, 66 ; souls imprisoned in, 67 ; 
 carved, 81 
 
 Trilogy of the earth divinities, 218 ; 
 of the Teuton gods of the mark, 334 
 
 Twashtar, a name of Agni, 133 
 
 ' Twelve Days,' the, superstitions con- 
 nected with, 381 
 
 Tyr (or Zio) etymologically the same 
 as Dyuus, 41; the third of the 
 three great Teuton gods of the 
 mark, 334 ; not much more than a 
 pale -shadow of Odhinn, 335, 422 ; 
 his fight withGarmat Kagnarok, 422 
 
 TTLYSSES' last voyage, Dante's ac- 
 
 U count of, 442. See also Odysseus 
 
 Ulfilas, 474 
 
 Under world, Dionysus' visit to, in 
 the ' Frogs,' 248 ; the ' unseen 
 place,' 265; the grave the only 
 entrance to, for going and return- 
 ing, 266 ; Greek and Hebrew belief 
 concerning, 268 ; personified as a 
 monster, 269, 388. See also other 
 world 
 
 Urdar fount, by the roots of Yggdra- 
 sill, 57 ; the ^Esir ride thither every 
 day, 347 
 
 Urvasi and Pururavas, story of, 340 
 
 Ushas, the Dawn, 142, 145 ; hymn to, 
 146 ; less worship paid to her than 
 to most divinities, 147 
 
 Utgarftloki, Thorr's journey to, 349 ; 
 is a personification of the fire 
 surrounding the other world, 398 ; 
 explanation of Thorr's visit to, 398 
 
 VAITERA^I, a river of death, 281 
 Valholl, the hall of the heroes 
 (Einheriar), in Asgard, 369 
 
 WIT 
 
 Valkyriur ( ' choosers of the slain '), 
 the, Odhinn's swan maidens, 60, 
 94 ; the myth of, 339 ; relationship 
 of this myth to like stories in other 
 mythologies, 340 ; represented in 
 the legend of Charlemagne by his 
 daughters, 489 ; transformation of, 
 into witches, 509 sqq. See also Bryn- 
 hild or Siprdrifa and Sigrun 
 
 Van der Dekken really Odhinn, 496 
 
 Varuwa, his connection with Dytius, 
 47 ; the sky, 122, 138 ; afterwards 
 the night sky, 123 note, 138 
 
 Varuwa and Indra, rivalry between 
 122 ; hymn to, 123 
 
 Varuwa and Mitra, 138, 154; hymn 
 to, 142. See also Mitra and Varuwa 
 
 Vayu, the Wind, associated with Agni 
 and Surya, 148 ; hymn to the three, 
 148 
 
 Vedas, religious character of, and 
 consequent absence of mythology 
 from, 114 
 
 Veddah charmer, a, Tennent's de- 
 scription of, 50 
 
 Vesta, 132 
 
 Vijaranadi, a river of death, 281 
 
 Village community of the Aryas, 108 ; 
 of the Teutons, 328 ; connection of 
 the latter with the feudal system, 
 503 
 
 Vindkald or Svipdag and Fiolsvith, 395 
 
 Vish/iu inherits the thunders of 
 Indra, 125 
 
 Volund, the myth of, 342 
 
 Vritra, the serpent, the enemy of 
 Indra, 75, 129, 151 
 
 Vulcan, 133. See Hephaestus 
 
 WALACHURIUN. See Valkyriur 
 Walpurgisnacht fire, 133, 378 
 
 Walpurgistag and Walpurgisnacht, 
 377, 380 
 
 Wandering Jew, the, 380, 497 ; rests on 
 Shrove Tuesday upon a harrow or 
 plough, 380, 498; or beneath two 
 oaks grown across, 498 note 
 
 Wild Huntsman. See Hackelberg 
 
 Wise women change themselves into 
 birds, 60 
 
 Witches, transformation of the VaU 
 kyriur into, 609 sqq. 
 
534 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 WIT 
 
 Witchcraft, the true antithesis, and 
 yet in a manner the counterpart, 
 of Catholicism, 509 ; consists not 
 merely in the practice of magic, 
 but in a distinct cult of Satan, 511 
 
 Wood women met by Hotherus, 510 
 
 Wuotan. See Odhinn 
 
 TAMA, king of the under world, 288 ; 
 his two dogs, the Sarameyas, 289 
 Yavanas, 165. See also lonians 
 Yggdrasill, the world tree in the Ed- 
 das, 57, 347; takes fire at Ragnarok, 
 420 
 Yggr, a name of Odhinn, 337 
 
 F7EUS etymologically allied to Dyaus, 
 
 LL Jupiter, Zio, &c., 41 ; a proper 
 
 name, 46; Zeus supplants Dyaus, 
 
 ZIO 
 
 47, 124 ; his sonship to Kronos, 119 
 and note ; especially associated with 
 Apollo and Athene in invocations, 
 165, 157 ; these three have given its 
 character to Greek religion, 1 57 ; 
 distinctive type of, in art, 161 ; 
 Pheidias' statue of, 161 ; by what 
 idea it was inspired, 161 ; the Pe- 
 lasgic Zeus a god of storms, 171 
 sqq. ; Zeus worshipped in groves, 
 172 ; worshipped as a mountain, 
 
 172 ; his combat with the Titans, 
 
 173 ; his wives, 175; most of these 
 are earth goddesses, 175 ; Zeus 
 Chthonios a distinct individuality, 
 178; so also Zeus Areios, 179; 
 possible former rivalry between 
 Zeus and Apollo, 193 ; came to re- 
 present the highest Greek ideal of 
 God, 212 ; Zeus Chthonios, 217 
 
 Zio. See Tyr 
 
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