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BUNSEN ON SEMITIC MYTHOLOGY.

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through and through with aversion to mythology,'' and concentrates his thoughts on this theme in the sixth, seventh, and eighth of the theses in which he exhibits the relation of the Egyptian mythology to the Asiatic. According to these, 'the Bible has no Mythology; it is the grand, momentous, and fortunate self-denial of Judaism to possess none.' As if a myth-which Bunsen himself had called 'pure popular poetry of the feeling for nature' -were an abomination, a defilement of the human mind, a sinful act voluntarily performed, which the Elect can deny themselves! On the other hand, the national sentiment mirrored in Abraham, Moses, and the primeval history generally from the Creation to the Deluge, and the expression of it, are rooted in the mythological life of the East in the earliest times,' and 'in the long period from Joseph to Moses, there have been interwoven with the life and actions of this greatest and most influential of all the men of the first age [Abraham] and the history of his son and grandson, many ancient traditions from the mythology of those tribes from whose savage natural life the Hebrews were extracted, to their own good and that of mankind and for higher ends." According to this there are Myths belonging to the Hebrews, but not Hebrew Myths -only borrowed ones, obtained from 'Primeval Asia.'

I have exhibited Bunsen's position at some length, because, with all his advanced ideas on the essence and significance of Mythology, he still to this day dominates the minds of those who, while admitting the possibility of Semitic Mythology, are up in arms against the existence of Hebrew myths.

§ 5. Nevertheless, I hope it is clear from the above that Hebrew mythology is a priori possible. The following

1 Gott in der Geschichte, I. 353; a passage which, with a large part of the volume, is omitted in the greatly abridged English translation.

2 Aegyptens Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, V. ii. 18-19 (English tr. IV. 28–

chapters will give occasion to prove in what this existence. consists. It will then appear that the Hebrew myths, necessarily owing their existence to the same psychological operation as the Aryan or the so-called Turanian, must consequently have the same original signification as these. Hence the figures of Hebrew mythology denote the very natural phenomena whose appellations lie before us in those figures' names. These names, however, are not symbolic,1 but are antiquated appellatives of the natural phenomena denoted by them, just as the words, Sun, Moon, Rain, &c. This must be distinctly proclaimed, as some who misunderstand the modern method of Mythology pervert it in a false and antiquated way by the introduction of symbolism.

We must also beware of confounding the original Myth with Religion or, still worse, with the Consciousness of God. This confusion is the source of most of the erroneous estimates and notions of Mythology, which even the latest methods of investigating myths has not entirely removed. The very earliest activity of the human intellect can only work upon what falls immediately under the cognisance of the senses, and upon what through its frequency and the regularity of its return prompts men most readily to speech. Such things are the daily natural phenomena, the change of light and darkness, of rain and sunshine, and all that accompanies these changes. What primitive man spoke on these things, is the Myth. It is psychologically impossible that the earliest activity of the human mind should have been anything else but this. We cannot speak of a consciousness of God, a sensus numinis, as existing in the earliest Mythological period. Not till later, when some process in the history of language

Even old Plutarch observed in reference to the then favourite explanation of the myths er ratione physica: Δεῖ δὲ μὴ νομίζειν ἁπλῶς εἰκόνας ἐκείνων (i.e. of the sun and moon) τούτους (Zeus and Hera), ἀλλ' αὐτὸν ἐν ὕλῃ Δία τὸν ἥλιον καὶ αὐτὴν τὴν Ηραν ἐν ὕλῃ τὴν σελήνην (Quaestiones Romanae, 77). See Cicero, De Nat. Deorum, III. 24: Longe aliter rem se habere, atque hominum opinio sit eos enim, qui dii appellantur, rerum naturas esse, non figuras deorum.

MYTHOLOGY Precedes reliGION.

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gives the ancient myths a new direction, do they turn into either History or Religion. The latter always arises out of the materials of Mythology, and then finds its historical task to be to work itself upwards into independence. Then, while the mythology out of which it sprang is growing less and less intelligible, and therefore also less and less expressive, Religion must in the progress of its development sever its connexion with Mythology, and unite itself with the scientific consciousness, which now occupies the place of the mythological.

How Mythology becomes Religion is shown most clearly by Dualism. Nothing can be less correct than the belief that the dualistic system of religion had from its very origin an ethical meaning. This, as well as the limitation of Dualism to Irân and Babylon,' is refuted by the frequent occurrence of the dualistic conception of the world among the most various savage peoples.2 The ethical significance of Dualism is decidedly secondary; it is the form of development of the main theme of all mythology, the relation of light to darkness, proper to a higher stage of culture. Many mythological fancies, and especially the Sun's voyage by ship in the nether world, became religious eschatological ideas when the mythical meaning itself was lost from the mind, and gave rise to new ideas of life in the nether world, resurrection, ascent to heaven, &c.; this was first established in reference to the old Egyptian mythology.3 So also Dualism as it appears in Irân is a myth that has taken an ethical sense. This is best seen in the facts that the northern Algonquins, with whom Dualism is almost as fixed a principle as in Irân, call the good and evil principles respectively Sun and Moon,

1 Spiegel still does this up to a recent date in his Eranische Alterthumskunde, II. 19.

2 See Tylor, Primitive Culture, II. 287 et seq.

The story of Osiris and Typhon e.g. originally personified the vegetative life of nature and the struggles incident to it, but was afterwards transferred to the destinies of the human soul. See Ebers, Durch Gosen zum Sinai, Leipzig 1872, p. 477.

and that among the Hurons the Evil principle is the grandmother of the Good: the Night is the mother or grandmother, or, in general, the ancestress of the Day. Here religious dualism has not quite put off the character of its origin in Mythology. On the other hand, the Iranic system at a very early age (that of the Avesta) elevated Dualism into the region of pure morals, and yet at a later (the epic period) formed out of the original myth the localised story of the war of Zohak against Ferîdûn.2

That Dualism as a religious conception is a further development of the myth, and not first excited by the moral problem of the strife of the good against the evil, becomes evident also from the consideration of a peculiar form of dualistic religion which we find in many Semitic nations. We here frequently find a deity regarded as male, who has a corresponding female to represent, as it were, the reverse side of the same natural force, and then the two forces unite to produce a natural phenomenon. So, for instance, Sun and Earth, Baal and Mylitta, the factors of procreation. This likewise is a dualistic tendency, in which however the two deities are not represented as mutually hostile. We are justified in placing this phenomenon in the chapter on Dualism, because two such deities in the course of history are often joined together into one.3 Now this side of dualistic religion can be traced back only to Mythology as its source and point of departure. The Hebrew myth of Judah and Tamar, which we shall consider further on (Chap. V., § 14), exhibits a mythical prototype of such dualistic views of religion.

Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, III. 183.

2 See Roth in the Zeitschrift der deutschen mergenländischen Gesellschaft, 1848, II. 217; Albrecht Weber, Akademische Vorlesungen über indische Literaturgeschichte, Berlin 1852, p. 35.

See Kuenen, The Religion of Israel, London 1874, I. 226.

CHAPTER II.

SOURCES OF HEBREW MYTHOLOGY.

§ 1. IF it is now established that we are justified in speaking of a Hebrew Mythology, in the same sense as of the mythologies of Indians, Hellenes, Germans, &c., then the question naturally arises, Can we come upon the track of those forms of expression and those figures which generally make up the elements of the Hebrew Myth; and Are these elements when found recognisable as elements of myths, i.e. Are they expressions and stories in which the ancient Hebrew, standing on the myth-creating stage of his intellectual development, spoke of the operations and changes of Nature? That in the abstract he was as capable as the Aryan on the same stage of development of speaking myths, we have admitted in assuming the universality of the formation of myths; and of what those expressions exactly consist, and what are the mythical figures which he formed, it will the business of a subsequent chapter to exhibit.

In this chapter our task will be limited to the discovery of the sources which we have to estimate by the method of Comparative Mythology, in order to discern the various expressions and figures of the Hebrew myth. Now both the incitement to the formation of myths and the course of development through which they pass before they are noted down in a literary age and then stiffen and undergo no further change, are based on psychological operations, the laws of which are not governed by categories of race and ethnology. It is therefore obvious, that for the under

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