The Study of Imagination - Essays on Fairy Tales, Folk-Lore and Mythology

Various

• Publisher: Read & Co. Great Essays
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781528790833
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythologie

"The Study of Imagination" is a brand new collection of classic essays written by various authors on the subject of fairy tales, mythology, and folk-Lore. Contents include: "Fairy Tales, by G. K. Chesterton", "The Fantastic Imagination, by George Macdonald", "The Worth of Fairy Tales, by Laura F. Kready", "Storyology, by Benjamin Taylor", "A Harvest of Irish Folk-Lore, by John Fiske", "On the Philosophy of Mythology, by F. Max Müller", "Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties, by William Henderson", "The Science of Folk-Lore, by Edwin Sidney Hartland", "The Modern Origin of Fairy-Tales, by Moses Gaster", etc. These fascinating essays will appeal to all with a love of fantasy and folklore, and they are not to be missed by collectors of allied literature. Read & Co. Great Essays is publishing this brand new collection of classic essays now for the enjoyment of a new generation of readers.

ON THE
PHILOSOPHY
OF MYTHOLOGY

By F. Max Müller

A Lecture Delivered at
The Royal Institution in 1871

What can be in our days the interest of mythology? What is it to us that Kronos was the son of Uranos and Gaia, and that he swallowed his children, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Pluton, and Poseidon, as soon as they were born? What have we to do with the stories of Rhea, the wife of Kronos, who, in order to save her youngest son from being swallowed by his father, gave her husband a stone to swallow instead? And why should we be asked to admire the exploits of this youngest son, who, when he had grown up, made his father drink a draught, and thus helped to deliver the stone and his five brothers and sisters from their paternal prison? What shall we think if we read in the most admired of classic poets that these escaped prisoners became afterwards the great gods of Greece, gods believed in by Homer, worshipped by Sokrates, immortalized by Pheidias? Why should we listen to such horrors as that Tantalos killed his own son, boiled him, and placed him before the gods to eat? or that the gods collected his limbs, threw them into a cauldron, and thus restored Pelops to life, minus, however, his shoulder, which Demeter had eaten in a fit of absence, and which had therefore to be replaced by a shoulder made of ivory?

Can we imagine anything more silly, more savage, more senseless, anything more unworthy to engage our thoughts, even for a single moment? We may pity our children that, in order to know how to construe and understand the master-works of Homer and Virgil, they have to fill their memory with such idle tales; but we might justly suppose that men who have serious work to do in this world would banish such subjects forever from their thoughts.

And yet, how strange, from the very childhood of philosophy, from the first faintly-whispered Why? to our own time of matured thought and fearless inquiry, mythology has been the ever-recurrent subject of anxious wonder and careful study. The ancient philosophers, who could pass by the petrified shells on mountain-tops and the fossil trees buried in their quarries without ever asking the question how they came to be there, or what they signified, were ever ready with doubts and surmises when they came to listen to ancient stories of their gods and heroes. And, more curious still, even modern philosophers cannot resist the attraction of these ancient problems. That stream of philosophic thought which, springing from Descartes (1596-1650), rolled on through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in two beds—the idealistic, marked by the names of Malebranche (1638-1715), Spinoza (1632-1677), and Leibniz (1646-1716); and the sensualistic, marked by the names of Locke (1632-1704), David Hume (1711-1776), and Condillac (1715-1780), till the two arms united again in Kant (1724-1804), and the full stream was carried on by Schelling (1775-1854), and Hegel (1770-1831),—this stream of modern philosophic thought has ended where ancient philosophy began—in a Philosophy of Mythology, which, as you know, forms the most important part of Schelling's final system, of what he called himself his Positive Philosophy, given to the world after the death of that great thinker and poet, in the year 1854.

I do not mean to say that Schelling and Aristotle looked upon mythology in the same light, or that they found in it exactly the same problems; yet there is this common feature in all who have thought or written on mythology, that they look upon it as something which, whatever it may mean, does certainly not mean what it seems to mean; as something that requires an explanation, whether it be a system of religion, or a phase in the development of the human mind, or an inevitable catastrophe in the life of language.

According to some, mythology is history changed into fable; according to others, fable changed into history. Some discover in it the precepts of moral philosophy enunciated in the poetical language of antiquity; others see in it a picture of the great forms and forces of nature, particularly the sun, the moon, and the stars, the changes of day and night, the succession of the seasons, the return of the years—all this reflected by the vivid imagination of ancient poets and sages.

Epicharmos, for instance, the pupil of Pythagoras, declared that the gods of Greece were not what, from the poems of Homer, we might suppose them to be—personal beings, endowed with superhuman powers, but liable to many of the passions and frailties of human nature. He maintained that these gods were really the Wind, the Water, the Earth, the Sun, the Fire, and the Stars. Not long after his time, another philosopher, Empedokles, holding that the whole of nature consisted in the mixture and separation of the four elements, declared that Zeus was the element of Fire, Here the element of Air, Aidoneus or Pluton the element of Earth, and Nestis the element of Water. In fact, whatever the free thinkers of Greece discovered successively as the first principles of Being and Thought, whether the air of Anaximenes, or the fire of Herakleitos, or the Nous or Mind of Anaxagoras, was readily identified with Zeus and the other divine persons of Olympian mythology. Metrodoros, the contemporary of Anaxagoras, went even farther. While Anaxagoras would have been satisfied with looking upon Zeus as but another name of his Nous, the highest intellect, the mover, the disposer, the governor of all things, Metrodoros resolved not only the persons of Zeus, Here, and Athene, but likewise those of human kings and heroes—such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hektor—into various combinations and physical agencies, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as natural facts hidden under a thin veil of allegory.

Sokrates, it is well known, looked upon such attempts at explaining all fables allegorically as too arduous and unprofitable: yet he, too, as well as Plato, pointed frequently to what they called the hypónoia, the under-current, or, if I may say so, the under-meaning of ancient mythology.

Aristotle speaks more explicitly:—

“It has been handed down,” he says, “by early and very ancient people, and left to those who came after, in the form of myths, that these (the first principles of the world) are the gods, and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The rest has been added mythically, in order to persuade the many, and in order to be used in support of laws and other interests. Thus they say that the gods have a human form, and that they are like to some of the other living beings, and other things consequent on this, and similar to what has been said. If one separated out of these fables, and took only that first point, namely, that they believed the first essences to be gods, one would think that it had been divinely said, and that while every art and every philosophy was probably invented ever so many times and lost again, these opinions had, like fragments of them, been preserved until now. So far only is the opinion of our fathers, and that received from our first ancestors, clear to us.”

I have quoted the opinions of these Greek philosophers, to which many more might have been added, partly in order to show how many of the most distinguished minds of ancient Greece agreed in demanding an interpretation, whether physical or metaphysical, of Greek mythology, partly in order to satisfy those classical scholars, who, forgetful of their own classics, forgetful of their own Plato and Aristotle, seem to imagine that the idea of seeing in the gods and heroes of Greece anything beyond what they appear to be in the songs of Homer, was a mere fancy and invention of the students of Comparative Mythology.

There were, no doubt, Greeks, and eminent Greeks too, who took the legends of their gods and heroes in their literal sense. But what do these say of Homer and Hesiod? Xenophanes, the contemporary of Pythagoras, holds Homer and Hesiod responsible for the popular superstitions of Greece. In this he agrees with Herodotus, when he declares that these two poets made the theogony for the Greeks, and gave to the gods their names, and assigned to them their honors and their arts, and described their appearances. But he then continues in a very different strain from the pious historian.“Homer,” he says, “and Hesiod ascribed to the gods whatever is disgraceful and scandalous among men, yea, they declared that the gods had committed nearly all unlawful acts, such as theft, adultery, and fraud.” “Men seem to have created their gods, and to have given to them their own mind, voice, and figure. The Ethiopians made their gods black and flat-nosed; the Thracians red-haired and blue-eyed.” This was spoken about 500 B. C. Herakleitos, about 460 B. C., one of the boldest thinkers of ancient Greece, declared that Homer deserved to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged; and a story is told that Pythagoras (about 540 B. C.) saw the soul of Homer in Hades, hanging on a tree and surrounded by serpents, as a punishment for what he had said of the gods. And what can be stronger than the condemnation passed on Homer by Plato? I shall read an extract from the “Republic,” from the excellent translation lately published by Professor Jowett:—

“But what fault do you find with Homer and Hesiod, and the other great story-tellers of mankind?”

“A fault which is most serious,” I said: “the fault of telling a lie, and a bad lie.”

“But when is this fault committed?”

“Whenever an erroneous representation is made of the nature of gods and heroes—like the drawing of a limner which has not the shadow of a likeness to the truth.”

“ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that sort of thing is certainly very blamable; but what are the stories which you mean?’ ”

“ ‘First of all,’ I said, ‘there was that greatest of all lies in high places, which the poet told about Uranos, and which was an immoral lie too—I mean what Hesiod says that Uranos did, and what Kronos did to him. The fact is that the doings of Kronos, and the sufferings which his son inflicted upon him, even if they were true, ought not to be lightly told to young and simple persons; if possible, they had better be buried in silence. But if there is an absolute necessity for their mention, a very few might hear them in a mystery, and then let them sacrifice not a common (Eleusinian) pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; this would have the effect of very greatly reducing the number of the hearers.’ ”

“ ‘Why, yes,’ said he, ‘these stories are certainly objectionable.’ ”

“ ‘Yes, Adeimantos, they are stories not to be narrated in our state; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous, and that he may chastise his father when he does wrong in any manner that he likes, and in this will only be following the example of the first and greatest of the gods.’ ”

“ ‘I quite agree with you,’ he said; ‘in my opinion those stories are not fit to be repeated.’ ‘Neither, if we mean our future guardians to regard the habit of quarrelling as dishonorable, should anything be said of the wars in heaven, and of the plots and fightings of the gods against one another, which are quite untrue. Far be it from us to tell them of the battles of the giants, and embroider them on garments; or of all the innumerable other quarrels of gods and heroes with their friends and relations. If they would only believe us, we would tell them that quarrelling is unholy, and that never up to this time has there been any quarrel between citizens; this is what old men and old women should begin by telling children, and the same when they grow up. And these are the sort of fictions which the poets should be required to compose. But the narrative of Hephaestos binding Here his mother, or how, on another occasion, Zeus sent him flying for taking her part when she was being beaten—such tales must not be admitted in our state, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For the young man cannot judge what is al...