birth, and grow back into adult size, when the revolution of the Cosmos is reversed. This would be in accordance with the belief, by no means confined to such primitive minds as those of the Australian aborigines, observed by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, that intercourse is after all not the real cause of the birth of a child: that the child-hardly distinguished as "soul" and "body"-is one who returns from the world of the departed and enters into the mother. The relationship between such a view of the nature of procreation and the custom of counting kinship through the mother, not through the father, is of course obvious. That the notion of Resurrection, then, recommends itself to the imagination in much the same way as the notion of Metempsychosis is what I wish to suggest to the student of the Politicus Myth. The two notions are closely allied and, indeed, tend to coalesce. The distinction between soul and body is a hard one for the imagination to maintain; thus it is very imperfectly maintained in the following instance: "The Jesuits relate that among the Hurons there were special ceremonies for little children who died at less than two months old; their bodies were not put in coffins in the cemeteries, but buried upon the pathway in order that they might enter into the body of some passing woman and so be born again;" and it is practically given up in the Christian Eschatology which insists on the ultimate union of the soul with its risen body. IV My remarks in this section will serve as introduction to the "Creation Myths," which we shall examine next. The Politicus Myth may be distinguished as Aetiological from the Eschatological Myths which we have examined in the Phaedo, Gorgias, and Republic. The Eschatological Myths are concerned immediately with the Ideas of Reason. They set forth the Idea of Soul as subject of God's govern 1 J. E. King on "Infant Burial," in Classical Review, Feb. 1903, p. 83. The souls of infants seem always to have caused difficulty; see Rohde, Psyche, ii. 411-413, on depot, and Adam's note on Rep. 615 c, тŵv dè evlùs yevoμévwv kal ὀλίγον χρόνον βιούντων πέρι ἄλλα ἔλεγεν οὐκ ἄξια μνήμης. ment in the Cosmos, by depicting the future vicissitudes of the vx, not, of course, without reference to its past out of which its future grows. The Aetiological Myth, on the other hand, may set forth either Ideas of Reason or Categories of the Understanding. Thus the Timaeus (which is one great Aetiological Myth) sets forth the Ideas of Soul and Cosmos, by tracing their imaginatively constructed objects back to causes which are unfolded in an account of the Creation of the yuxý and of the material world. The Phaedrus Myth, again, sets forth the Categories of the Understanding aetiologically, by showing that the a priori conditions of our knowledge of sensible phenomena are abiding mental impressions caused by a prenatal vision of the Eternal Forms in the vπeρovρávios τόπος. There are other myths which cannot be called either Aetiological or Eschatological, but are merely Expository either of Ideas of Reason or of Categories of the Understanding -thus Diotima's Myth is an imaginative exposition of the Idea of Soul as Love of Truth and Immortality, while the functions of the Understanding are described imaginatively in the Timaeus as revolutions like those of the Cosmos. The Politicus Myth, setting forth as it does the Idea of Soul as subject of God's government in the Cosmos, is Aetiological in supplying a cause for the Evil which exists in the world and man's life under God's government. How does Plato think that we are helped out of the profound difficulty about the existence of Evil by an Aetiological Myth of Changing World-periods? The answer, if we could give it, would be a complete theory of the influence which Aetiological Myths exercise over the mind of man. Here is the greatest difficulty of morals; and it is easily solved by a fantastic story of the origin of the thing which makes the difficulty! Let me try to explain how Plato comes to attach such. value to this Aetiological Myth. First, Plato thinks that the immensity of the difficulty is best illustrated in this way—as the tragic import of a great crisis on the stage or in real life is sometimes illustrated by the trifling comment or behaviour of some one present-it may be of a child. Plato thinks that his Myth, with its childish unconsciousness of difficulty, is valuable as enhancing our sense of the immensity of the difficulty, and so helping us to remove the difficulty-the very difficulty which it makes appear more immense. When we know the real cause of any particular difficulty of detail we have got a grip of it, as it were, and can generally overcome it. We can never get this sort of grip of the difficulty about the existence of Evil; for it is not a particular difficulty with a particular discoverable solution, but a universal difficultya contradiction inherent in the very nature of the system under which we live-it puzzles us, and paralyses us the more we try to remove it airías Xoyoμ-by particular explanations, more nostro. But Plato's Myth puts the difficulty once for all in its true place-exhibits it, in its immensity, as universal; and the moral is-You cannot solve it as you solve a particular difficulty. Do not try to do so. See how immense it is! "Put it by The cloud of mortal destiny, But who, like him, will put it by? This is the first part of the answer which I venture to offer to the question, How does Plato think that we are helped out of a profound difficulty by a childish Myth? The second part of the answer I venture to state as follows: It is very hard to "put it by "-impossible unless one fancies—it is enough merely to fancy-that one has somehow, at least partly, solved the difficulty which one is asked to "put by." An attempt to solve a fundamental or universal difficulty logically, by a thin process of reasoning, can only end in a sense of failure; but a childish Myth, touching, as it is apt to do, a vast complex of latent sensibilities, may awaken a feeling of vague satisfaction. A childish Myth may thus, after all, seem to solve a fundamental difficulty, so far as to warrant one in "putting it by "-the one important thing being that we should "put it by," and act, not think about it and hesitate. I suggest, then, that Plato's love of the Aetiological Myth is due to the instinctive sympathy of his many-sided genius with this-shall I call it weakness?of human nature, which finds, amid doubts and difficulties, some satisfaction in fantastic explanation. Let me illustrate this weakness, with which I suggest that Plato is in artistic sympathy, by an instance of the use of the Aetiological Myth in Finnish mythology-by the Story of the Birth of Iron in the Kalewala. But first let me say a few words about the Kalewala by way of introduction to this story. The great Finnish Epic, the Kalewala, was pieced together about seventy years ago by Lönnrot out of Runes or Cantos which had been, as they still are, sung separately by the popular Laujola, or Minstrels. The Rune, or Canto, is the unit of Finnish poetry, and may be fairly described as an Aetiological Myth growing out of the magician's charmformula. The chief personages in the Kalewala are not national kings and warriors, as in other epics, but great magicians; and the interest of the poem, or poems, is connected mainly with the manner in which these great magicians show their power over Nature, and Spirits, and Men. According to the Finnish belief, everything done in life, even the simplest thing done by the most ordinary person, has its appropriate charmformula—is successfully done in virtue of the accompaniment of the suitable word or words-e.g. there is a word for successfully laying the keel of a boat, and another for fixing the ribs, and so on. If ordinary acts depend on the utterance of the proper words, much more do the extraordinary acts of great magicians. Wäinämöinen, the chief magician-hero of the Kalewala Runes, when he was building his magic boat forgot three necessary words, and wandered over the whole Earth, and at last found his way into the World of the Dead, in his search for these lost words. Now these mighty words, which are the arms wielded by the magician-hero, are mighty in that they contain the cause of the thing on which he exercises his power. He is confronted with difficulties and dangers in his adventurous career, and it is by telling a difficult or dangerous thing its origin that he conquers it. If it is a wound to be cured it is the Birth of Iron that the magician must know and relate (Kal. ix. 29 ff.). If it is a monstrous bear that he has to overcome he must first tell the story of the Origin of the Bear (Kal. xlvi. 355). If it is a disease that he has to exorcise, he can only do that by telling the disease its hidden name, and the place from which it came, and the way by which it came (Kal. xlv. 23). If it is a snake-bite to be healed, he must know the Ancestry of Snakes (Kal. xxvi. 695). Thus, out of the charm-formula of the magician-hero the Aetiological Myth arises-especially when the singer of the Rune, identifying himself, as he often does, with his magician-hero, uses the first person. The Kalewala is a loosely connected collection of Cantos, in which magicians are the heroes, and charms the weapons, the charms being words which reveal the nature and origin of the things or persons overcome-magic words which the Finnish Rune-singers expanded into elaborate Aetiological Myths. Among other races it is the prayer at the sacrifice or offering, as Comparetti1 observes, which is developed into the Hymn, and then into the Myth; it is only among the Finns that the charm-formula is so developed. Sorcery, not as elsewhere ritual and custom, is here the germ of the Aetiological Myth. THE STORY OF THE BIRTH OF IRON 2 Wäinämöinen, with blood streaming from a wound in his knee made by his axe when he was building a boat, hurries from place to place in his sledge, asking if any one knows the mighty words which will heal the "Iron's outrage." No one knows them. At last he comes to a house in which there is a little grey-bearded old man by the fireside, who, in answer to Wäinämöinen's question, calls out to him as he sits in his sledge at the door : "Wilder streams, greater rivers than this have ere now been tamed by three words of the High Creator." Wäinämöinen rose out of his sledge and crossed the courtyard and entered the house. A silver cup and a golden tankard were brought and soon were full of blood, and overflowing. The little old man cried out from the fireside: "Speak, who art thou amongst men, of what people and nation, that already seven great basins and eight tubs are filled with thy blood? All magic words I know, 1 Der Kalewala, oder die traditionelle Poesie der Finnen, p. 169 (German edition, 1892). 2 I have translated this story (with considerable compression and omission) from the German version of the Kalewala by Hermann Paul, published at Helsingfors in 1885 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of the Finnish Epic. |