Prologue — Toward a Natural History of the Gods and Heroes
I. The Lineaments of a New Science
The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution — appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. Furthermore, whereas in tales told for entertainment such mythical themes are take lightly — in a spirit, obviously, of play — they appear also in religious contexts, where they are accepted not only as factually true but even as revelations of the verities to which the whole culture is a living witness and from which it derives both its spiritual authority and its temporal power. No human society has yet been found in which such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life-empowering visions. Indeed the chronicle of our species, from its earliest page, has been not simply an account of the progress of man the too-maker, but — more tragically — a history of the pouring of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants. Every people has received its own seal and sign of supernatural designation, communicated to its heroes and daily proved in the lives and experience of its folk. And though many who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinize and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison immediately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motifs — variously selected, organized, interpreted, and ritualized, according to local need, but revered by every people on earth.
A fascinating psychological, as well as historical, problem is thus presented. Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth. In fact, the fullness of his life would even seem to stand in a direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational thought but of his local mythology. Whence the force of these unsubstantial themes, by which they are empowered to galvanize populations, creating of them civilizations, each with a beauty and self-compelling destiny of its own? And why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination — preferring even to make like a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some violent god, to accepting gracefully the bounty the world affords?
Are the modern civilizations to remain spiritually locked from each other in their local notions of the sense of the general tradition; or can we not now break though to some more profoundly based point and counterpoint of human understanding? For it is a fact that the myths of our several cultures work upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, as energy-releasing, life-motivating and -directing agents; so that even though our rational minds may be in agreement, the myths by which we are living — or by which our fathers lived — can be driving us, at that very moment, diametrically apart.
No one, as far as I know, has yet tried to compose into a single picture the new perspectives that have been opened in the fields of comparative symbolism, religion, mythology, and philosophy by the scholarship of recent years. The richly rewarded archaeological researches of the past few decades; astonishing clarifications, simplifications, and coordinations achieved by intensive studies in the spheres of philology, ethnology, philosophy, art history, folklore, and religion; fresh insights in psychological research; and the many priceless contributions to our science by the scholars, monks, and literary men of Asia, have combined to suggest a new image of the fundamental unity of the spiritual history of mankind. Without straining beyond the treasuries of evidence already on hand in these widely scattered departments of our subject, therefore, but simply gathering from them the membra disjuncta of a unitary mythological science, I attempt in the following pages the first sketch of a natural history of the gods and heroes, such as in its final form should include in its purview all divine beings — as zoology includes all animals and botany all plants — not regarding any as sacrosanct or beyond its scientific domain. For, as in the visible world of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so also in the visionary world of the gods: there has been a history, an evolution, a series of mutations, governed by laws; and to show forth such laws is the proper aim of science
II. The Well of the Past
“Very deep,” wrote Thomas Mann at the opening of his mythologically conceived tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, “is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?” And he then observed: “The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable.” [Note 1]
Our initial task must be to ask if this be true. And to this end we shall explore first the psychological aspect of the question, to learn whether in the human psychosomatic system there have been found any structures or dynamic tendencies to which the origins of myth and ritual might be referred; and turn only then to the archaeological and ethnological evidences, to learn what the earliest discoverable patterns of mythological ideation may have been.*
However, as Mann has already warned, concerning the foundations for which we are seeking, “No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our line they still withdraw, again and further into the depths.” For beneath the first depth, namely that of the earliest civilizations — which are but the foreground of the long backward reach of the prehistory of our race — there rest the centuries, millenniums, indeed the centuries of millenniums of primitive man, the mighty hunter, the more primitive root-and-bug collector, back for more than half a million years. And there is a third depth, even deeper and darker, below that — below the ultimate horizon of humanity. For we shall find the ritual dance among the birds, the fish, the apes, and the bees. And it therefore has to be asked whether man, like those other members of the kingdom, does not possess any innate tendencies to respond, in strictly patterned racial ways, to certain signals flashed by his environment and his own kind.
The concept of a natural science of the gods, matching the compass of the materials already classified in the pertinent scientific files, must therefore include in its ken the primitive and pre-historic as well as recent strata of human experience; and not merely summarily and sketchily, as a kind of protasis to the main subject. For the roots of civilization are deep. Our cities do not rest, like stones, upon the surface. The first, rich, great, and terrible chapter in the textbook of this subject will have to be developed no less fully than the second, third, and fourth. And its range will be immensely greater than theirs; for it will extend into “the dark backward and abysm of time” that is the racial counterpart of that psychological unconscious which has been recently exposed — sensationally — within the individual. Fathoming the grottoes of the Cro-Magnon artist-wizards of the Great Hunt; deeper still, the dens of the crouching cannibals of the glacial ages, lapping the brains of their neighbors, raw, from cracked skulls; and still beyond, examining the enigmatic chalky, skeletal remains of what now would seem to have been chimpanzee-like hunter-pygmies on the open plains of the early Transvaal, we shall be finding clues to the deepest secrets not only of the high cultures of both the Orient and the Occident, but also of our own most inward expectations, spontaneous responses, and obsessive fears.
The present volume, therefore, explores with what light is available the deep, very deep well of the past. And, like the aim of Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, its intent is “to point out what part of knowledge has been already labored and perfected, and what portions left unfinished or entirely neglected.” Moreover, where the view is broad and certain distinctive, suggestive landmarks can be descried, occasional guesses are ventured as to indicated implications. But the whole review — rich and colorful though its materials — together with its ventured hypotheses, is necessarily in the way rather of a prospectus than of a definition; for these materials have never before been gathered to a single summation, pointing to a science of the roots of revelation.
Furthermore, after this study of the spiritual resources of pro-historic man, I shall in three subsequent volumes review the forms, successively, of Oriental mythology, Occidental mythology, and what I propose to call creative mythology, as representing the remaining natural divisions of this subject. For under the rubric “Oriental” can be readily comprised all the traditions of that broad and various, yet essentially unified, major province represented by the philosophical myths and mythological philosophies of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan — to which can be joined the earlier yet closely related mythological cosmologies of archaic Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well as the later, remoter, yet essentially comparable systems of pre-Columbian Middle America and Peru. And under the rubric “Occidental” the progressively, ethically oriented mythologies of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam naturally fall, in relationship and counterplay to the Greco-Roman pantheons and the Celto- Germanic. And finally, as “creative mythology,” will be considered that most important mythological tradition of the modern world, which can be said to have had its origin with the Greeks, to have come of age in the Renaissance, and to be flourishing today in continuous, healthy growth, in the works of those artists, poets, and philosophers of the West for whom the wonder of the world itself — as it is now being analyzed by science — is the ultimate revelation.
Moreover, since it is true, as Mann has said, that while in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive way of thought, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one, [Note 2] an impressive accord will be heard resounding through all the modulations of this subject, form the primitive to most mature.
III. The Dialogue of Scholarship and Romance
The quest for a scientific approach to mythology was hampered until the end of the last century by the magnitude of the field and scattered character of the evidence. The conflict of authorities, theories, and opinions that raged in the course, particularly, of the nineteenth century, when the ranges of knowledge were expanding in every field of research (classical and Oriental scholarship, comparative philology, folklore, Egyptology, Bible criticism, anthropology, etc.) resembled the mad tumult of the old Buddhist parable of “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” The blind men feeling the animal’s head declared, “An elephant is like a water pot”; but those at his ears, “He is like a winnowing basket”; those at his tusks, “No, indeed, he is like a plowshare”; and those at his trunk, “He is like a plow pole.” There were a number feeling his belly. “Why,” they cried, “he is like a storage bin!” Those feeling his legs argued that he was like pillars; those at his rectum, that he was like a mortar; those at his member, that he was like a pestle; while the remainder, at his tail, were shouting, “An elephant is like a fan.” And they fought furiously among themselves with their fists, shouting and crying, “This is what an elephant is like; that is not what an elephant is like”; “This is not what an elephant is like; that is what an elephant is like.”
“And precisely so,” then runs the moral of the Buddha, “the company of heretics, monks, Brahmans, and wandering ascetics, patient of heresy, delighting in heresy, relying upon the reliance of heretical views, are blind, without eyes: knowing not good, knowing not evil, knowing not right, knowing not wrong, they quarrel and brawl and wrangle and strike one another with the daggers of their tongues, saying, ‘This is right, that is not right’; ‘This is not right, that is right.’” [Note 3]
The two learned disciplines from which the lineaments of a sound comparative science might first have emerged were those of the classics and the Bible. However, a fundamental tenet of the Christian tradition made it appear to be an act of blasphemy to compare the two on the same plane of thought; for, while the myths of the Greeks were recognized to be of the natural order, those of the Bible were supposed to be supernatural. Hence, while the prodigies of the classical heroes (Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, etc.) were studied as literature, those of the Hebrews (Noah, Moses, Joshua, Jesus, Peter, etc.), had to be argued as objective history; whereas, actually, the fabulous elements common to the two precisely contemporary, Eastern Mediterranean traditions were derived equally from the preceding, bronze-age civilization of Mesopotamia — as no one before the development of the modern science of archaeology could have guessed.
A third, and ultimately the most disturbing, discipline contributing to the tumult of the scene was the rapidly developing science of Aryan, Indo- Germanic, or Indo-European Philology. As early as 1767 a French Jesuit in India, Father Coeurdoux, had observed that Sanskrit and Latin were remarkably alike. [Note 4] Sir William Jones (1746-1794) — the West’s first considerable Sanskritist, judge of the supreme court of judicature at Calcutta, and founder of the Bengal Asiatic Society — was the next to observe the relationship, and from a comparative study of the grammatical structures of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit concluded that all three had “sprung,” as he phrased it, “from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” [Note 5] Franz Bopp (1791-1867), published in 1816 a comparative study of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic systems of conjugation. [Note 6] And finally, by the middle of the century it was perfectly clear that a prodigious distribution of closely related tongues could be identified over the greater part of the civilized world: a single, broadly scattered family of languages that must have sprung from a single source, and which includes, besides Sanskrit and Pali (the language of the Buddhist scriptures), most of the tongues of northern India as well as Singhalese (the language of Ceylon), Persian, Armenian, Albanian, and Bulgarian; Polish, Russian, and the other Slavic tongues; Greek, Latin and all the languages of Europe except Esthonian, Finnish, Lapp, Magyar, and Basque. Thus a continuum from Ireland to India had been revealed. And not only the languages, but also the civilizations and religious, mythologies, literary forms, and modes of thought for the peoples involved could be readily compared: for example, the Vedic pantheon of ancient India, the Eddic of medieval Iceland, and the Olympian of the Greeks. No wonder the leading scholars and philosophers of the century were impressed!
The discovery appeared to indicate that the most productive, as well as philosophically mature, constellation of peoples in the history of civilization had been associated with this prodigious ethnic diffusion; for it seemed that even in the Orient, the homeland of many darker races, it had been the lighter-skinned Indo-Aryans who had given the chief impulse to the paramount cultural trend — namely that represented in its earliest recorded phase by the Sanskrit Vedas and the Vedic pantheon (so close in form and spirit to the Homeric hymns and Olympic pantheon of the Greeks that the Alexandrians had had no difficulty in recognizing analogies), and in its later, more highly developed phase, by the gospel of Gautama Buddha, whose princely mind, inspired by what many scholars throughout Europe took to be characteristically Aryan type of spirituality, had touched with the whole of the Orient, lifting temples and pagodas not to any God but to Buddhahood: that is to say, the purified, perfected, fully flowered, and fully illuminated consciousness of man himself.
It was a fateful, potentially very dangerous discovery; for, even though announced in the terminology of tranquil scholarship, it coincided with a certain emotional tendency of the time. In the light of the numerous discoveries then being made in every quarter of the broadly opening fields of the physical, biological, and geographical sciences, the mythological Creation story of the Old Testament could no longer be accepted as literally true. Already in the early seventeenth century the heliocentric universe had been condemned as contrary to Holy Scripture, both by Luther and by the Roman Catholic Inquisition: in the nineteenth century the tendency of the learned world was rather to reject Holy Scripture as contrary to fact. And with the Hebrew Scripture went the Hebrew God, and the Christian claim to divine authority as well. The Renaissance had opposed to the Judeo-Christian ideal of obedience to a supposed revelation of God’s law, the humanism of the Greeks. And with the discovery, now, of this impressive ethnic continuity, uniting that humanism, on the one hand, with the profound, non-theological religiosity of the Indian Upaniṣads and Buddhist Sūtras, and on the other hand, with the primitive vitality of the pagan Germans, who had shattered Christianized Rome only to be subdued and Christianized themselves in turn, the cause of the pagan against the Judeo- Christian portion of the European cultural inheritance seemed to be greatly enhanced. Moreover, since the evidence appeared to point to Europe itself as the homeland from which this profoundly inspired and vigorously creative spiritual tradition sprung — and, specifically, the area of the Germanies — a shock of romantic European elation quivered through the scientific world. The Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm (1785-1863 and 1786-1859), gathered the fairy tales of their collection with the belief that there might be discovered in them the broken remains of a nuclear Indo-European mythology.* Schopenhauer greeted the Sanskrit Upaniṣads as “the most rewarding and elevating reading possible in the world.” [Note 7] And Wagner found in the old Germanic mythologies of Wotan, Loki, Siegfried, and the Rhine-maidens the proper vehicle of his German genius.
Thus it was that when a couple of dilettantes with creative imagination brought this sensational product of philological research out of the studies of the scholars, where thought leads to further thought, into the field of political life, where thought leads to action and one thought is enough, a potentially very dangerous situation was created. The first step in this direction was taken in 1839, when a French aristocrat, Courtet de l’Isle, proposed a theory of politics on the basis of what he conceived to be the new science, in a work entitled La Science politique fondee sur la science de l’homme; ou, Etude des races humaines (Paris: 1839). The tendency was developed in Count Arthur de Gobineau’s four-volume Essai sur l’inegalite des races humaines 1853-1855), and Count Vacher de Lapouge’s L’Aryen et son role social (1899), and required, finally, only the celebrated work of Wagner’s English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1890-1891), to supply the background for Alfred Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20.Jahrhunderts (1930) and break the planet into flames.
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared. For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse! And the world in now far too small, and men’s stake in sanity too great, for any more of those old games of Chosen Folk (whether of Jehovah, Allah, Wotan, Manu, or the Devil) by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk.
The ghostly, anachronistic sound of Aryan battle cries faded rapidly from the nineteenth-century theaters of learning as a broader realization of the community of man developed — due primarily to a mass of completely unforeseen information from the pioneers of archaeology and anthropology. For example, it soon appeared not only that the earliest Indo-European tribes must already have been mixed of a number of races, but also that the greater part of what had been taken to be of their invention actually had been derived from the earlier, very much more highly developed cultures of ancient Egypt, Crete, and Mesopotamia. Moreover, the worldwide diffusion of the major themes of classical as well as biblical mythology and religious lore — far beyond any possible influence either of Aryan or of Semite — so greatly magnified the frame of the prehistory of civilization that the old problems, prides, and prejudices were rendered out of date.
A sense of the import of these new discoveries for the nineteenth-century image of man can be gained from a summary schedule of a number of representative moments; for example:
1822
Jean Francois Champollion derived from the Rosetta Stone the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics, thus unveiling a civilized religious literature earlier that the Greek and Hebrew by about two thousand years.
1833
William Ellis, Polynesian Researches (4 vols.), opened to view the myths and customs of the South Sea Islands.
1839
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Algic Researches (2 vols.), offered the first considerable collection of North American Indian myths.
1847–1851
Sir Austen Henry Layard excavated ancient Nineveh and Babylon, opening the treasuries of the Mesopotamian civilization.
1847-64
Jacques Boucher de Crevecoeur de Perthes, Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (3 vols.), established the existence of man in Europe in the Pleistocene Period (that is to say, more than a hundred thousand years ago) and, on the basis of his classification of flint tools, identified three Old Stone Age periods, which he termed: (1) “the Cave Bear Age,” (2) “the Mammoth and Woolly Rhinoceros Age,” and (3) “the Reindeer Age.”
1856
Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered in a cave in eastern Germany the bones of Neanderthal Man (Homo neanderthalensis), mighty hunter of the Cave Bear and Mammoth Ages.
1859
Charles Darwin’s great work, On the Origin of Species, appeared.
1860-65
Edouard Lartet, in southern France, unearthed the remains of Cro-Magnon Man, by whom Neanderthal Man had been displaced in Europe during the Reindeer Age, at the end of the Pleistocene.
1861
The Popol Vuh, an ancient Central American mythological text, was introduced to the learned world by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg.
From this momentous decade of the sixties onward, the universality of the basic themes and motifs of mythology was generally conceded, the usual assumption being that some sort of psychological explanation would presently be found; and so it was that from two remote quarters of the learned world the following comparative studies appeared simultaneously: in Philadelphia, Daniel G. Brinton’s The Myths of the New World, comparing the primitive and high-culture mythologies of the Old World and the New; and in Berlin, Adolf Bastian’s Das Beständige in den Menschenrassen und die Spielweite ihrer Veränderlichkeit, applying the point of view of comparative psychology and biology to the problems, first, of the “constants” and then of the “variables” in the mythologies of mankind.
1871
Edward B. Tylor, in his Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, directed a psychological explanation of the concept of “animism” to a systematic interpretation of the whole range of primitive thought.
1872-85
Heinrich Schliemann, excavating Troy (Hissarlik) and Mycenae, probed the pre-Homeric, pre-classical levels of Greek civilization.
1879
Don Marcelino de Sautuola discovered on his property in northern Spain (Altamira) the magnificent cave-painting art of the Mammoth and Reindeer Ages.
1890
Sir James George Frazer published the culminating work of this whole period of anthropological research, The Golden Bough.
1891-92
In Central Java, on the Solo River, near Trinil, Eugene Dubois unearthed the bones and teeth of the “the Missing Link,” Pithecanthropus erectus (“the Ape-man who walks erect”) — with a brain capacity halfway between that of the largest-brained gorilla (about 600 cc.) and that of the average modern man (about 1400 cc.).
1894
Sir Arthur Evans commenced his Cretan excavations.
1898
Leo Frobenius announced a new approach to the study of primitive cultures (the Kulturkreislehre, “culture area theory”), wherein he identified a primitive cultural continuum, extending from equatorial West Africa eastward, through India and Indonesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, across the Pacific to equatorial America and the northwest coast. [Note 8] This was a radical challenge to the older “parallel development” or “psychological” schools of interpretation, such as Brinton, Bastian, Tylor, and Frazer had represented, inasmuch as it brought the broad and bold theory of a primitive trans-oceanic “diffusion” to bear upon the question of the distribution of so-called “universal” themes.
And so it was that, during that epochal century of almost unbelievable spiritual and technological transformations, the old horizons were dissolved and the center of gravity of all learning shifted from the little areas of local pride to a broad science of man himself in his new and single world. The older, eighteenth-century disciplines, which formerly had seemed to fill sufficiently the field of humanistic concern, had become but provinces of a much larger subject. And whereas formerly the prime question seemed to have been that of man’s supernatural as against merely natural endowment, now, with the recognition of the universality of those mythological themes that formerly had been taken as evidence of the divine source of the higher religions, “surpassing man’s natural knowledge,” as St Thomas Aquinas argued, and therefore proving that “God is far above all that man can possibly think of God”; [Note 9] with the realization that these supernatural motifs were not peculiar to any single tradition but common to the religious lore of mankind, the tension between “orthodox” and “gentile,” “high” and “primitive,” simply dissolved. And the major questions, the problems of man’s highest concern, now became, first, whether such mythological themes as death-and-resurrection, the virgin birth, and creation from nothing should be rationally dismissed as mere vestiges of primitive ignorance (superstitions), or, on the contrary, interpreted as rendering values beyond the faculty of reason (transcendent symbols); and, second, whether, as products of the spontaneous operations of the psyche, they can have appeared independently in various quarters of the world (theories of parallel development), or rather, as the inventions of particular times and persons, must have been spread about either by early migrations or by later commerce (theories of diffusion).
Few in the nineteenth century were competent to face either of these questions without prejudice or to control the necessary evidence for their analysis; for the psychology of the time had simply not come into possession either of the information or of the hypotheses necessary for a probing of the psyche in depth. The eminent physiologist, psychologist, and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), who in 1857 began lecturing at Heidelberg and in 1875 at the University of Leipzig, masterfully reviewed the whole ethnological field from a psychological point of view in his numerous works on ethnological psychology (Volkerpsychologie); but he realized and frankly averred that the breadth and depth of this richly promising subject had not yet been adequately measured. [Note 10] A scientific probing of the psyche in depth, however, had already been initiated at the neurological clinic of Salpetriere, in Paris, where Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893), professor of pathological anatomy in the medical faculty of the university, was opening new horizons in his studies of hysteria, paralysis, brain disease, senility, and hypnosis. [Note 11] The young Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) were among his pupils; and something of the force and direction of his researches may be judged from their distinguished careers in exploration of the dark, inaccessible reaches of the psyche. However, the application of the new realizations concerning the phenomenology of the “unconscious” of the neurotic individual to a systematic interpretation of ethnological materials and to wait for the twentieth-century movement initiated by Jung’s Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), [Note 12] and Freuds’s Totem und Tabu (1913). [Note 13] The orientations and researches of Wundt and Charcot prepared the way, but the full-scale application of the laws and hypotheses of the science of the unconscious to the fields of religion, prehistory, mythology and folklore, literature and the history of art, which has been one of the outstanding factors in the development of twentieth-century thought, we find only suggested as a richly promising possibility in the science of their day.
And yet, as Thomas Mann observed in his important speech on “Freud and the Future,” delivered in Vienna on the occasion of Dr. Sigmund Freud’s eightieth birthday, the profound and natural sympathy between the two spheres of literature and the science of the unconscious had for a long time existed unperceived. The romantic-biologic fantasies of Novalis (1772-1801); Schopenhauer’s dream psychology and philosophy of instinct (1788-1860); the Christian zeal of Kierkegaard (1813-1855), which had led him to extremes of penetrating psychological insight; Ibsen’s view of the lie as indispensable to life (1828-1906); and, above all Nietzche’s translation of the metaphysical pretensions of theology, mythology, and moral philosophy into the language of an empirical psychology (1844-1900) — these not only anticipated, but in scope and richness sometimes even surpassed, the wonderful insights that were now being coolly systematized in the formidable hypotheses and terminologies of scientific exactitude. In fact, as Mann suggested in his somewhat ironical praise of the eminent scientist whose scientific exactitude had not permitted him to regard philosophy very highly, it might with justice even be claimed that the modern science of the unconscious no more than writes the quod erat demonstrandum to the whole great tradition of metaphysical and psychological insights represented by the romantic poets, poet- philosophers, and artists, who, throughout the course of the nineteenth century, had walked step by step alongside the men of analytical knowledge and experience. [Note 14]
One thinks of Goethe, in every line of whose Faust there is evident a thoroughly seasoned comprehension of the force of the traditional symbolism of the psyche, in relation not only to individual biography but also to the psychological dynamics of civilization. One thinks of Wagner, whose masterworks were conceived in a realization of the import of symbolic forms so far in advance of the allegorical readings suggested by the Orientalists and ethnologists of his time that even with the dates before on (Wagner, 1813-1883); Max Muller, 1823-1900; Sir James George Frazer, 1854-1941) it is difficult to think of the artist’s work as having preceded the comparatively fumbling efforts of the men of science to interpret symbols. Or one thinks of Melville (1819-1891), captured by cannibals on the South Sea island of Nukahiva and even scheduled to become an item on the menu, in whose Moby Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) the profundity of the author’s psychological insight is rendered through an infallible use of the language of symbol.
“The myth,” as Thomas Mann has seen, and as many of the depth psychologists would agree, “is the foundation of life, the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life glows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.” [Note 15] But on the other hand — as any ethnologist, archaeologist, or historian would observe — the myths of the differing civilizations have sensibly varied throughout the centuries and broad reaches of mankind’s residence in the world, indeed to such a degree that the “virtue” of one mythology has often been the “vice” of another, and the heaven of one the other’s hell. Moreover, with the old horizons now gone that formerly separated and protected the various culture worlds and their pantheons, a veritable Götterdammerung has flung its flames across the universe. Communities that once were comfortable in the consciousness of their own mythologically guaranteed godliness find, abruptly, that they are devils in the eyes of their neighbors. Evidently some mythology of a broader, deeper kind than anything envisioned anywhere in the past is now required: some arcanum arcanorum far more fluid, more sophisticated, that the separate visions of the local traditions, wherein those mythologies themselves will be known to be but the masks of a larger — all their shining pantheons but the flickering modes of a “timeless schema” that is no schema.
But that, precisely, is the great mystery pageant only waiting to be noticed as it lies before us, so to say, in sections, in the halls and museums of the various sciences, yet already living, too, in the works of our greatest men of art. To make it serve the present hour, we have only to assemble — or reassemble — it in its full dimension, scientifically, and then bring it to life as our own, in the way of art: the way of wonder — sympathetic, instructive delight; not judging morally, but participating with our own awakened humanity in the festival of the passing forms.