Aryan Religion
and Mythology
To treat of Greek religion, mythology, nay even of legal customs without a consideration of their Aryan antecedents, would be like treating of Italian without a knowledge of Latin. This is now a very old truth, though there are still, I believe, a few classical scholars left, who are shocked at the idea that the Greek Zeus could have anything to do with the Vedic Dyaus. You know that there are some people who occasionally publish a pamphlet to show that, after all, the earth is not round, and who even offer prizes and challenge astronomers to prove that it is round. It is the same in Comparative Philology and Religion. There are still some troglodytes left who say that Zeus may be derived from ζῃ̑ν, to live, that Varuna shows no similarity to Ouranos, that deva, bright and god, cannot be the Latin deus, that Sarvara is not Kerberos, and that Saranyu cannot be Erinys. To them Greek mythology is like a lotus swimming on the water without any stem, without any roots. I am old enough to remember the time when the world was startled for the first time by the discovery that the dark inhabitants of India should more than three thousand years ago have called their gods by the same names by which the Romans and the Romanic nations called God and still call Him to the present day. But the world has even been more startled of late at the recrudescence of this old classical prejudice, which looked upon an Aryan origin of Greek thought and Greek language as almost an insult to classical scholarship. One of the greatest discoveries of our century, a discovery in which men such as Humboldt, Bopp, Grimm and Kuhn have gained their never-fading laurels, was treated once more as schoolmasters would treat the blunders of schoolboys, and that by men, ignorant of the rudiments of Sanskrit, ignorant of the very elements of Comparative Philology. I call it one of the greatest discoveries of our age, for it has thrown light on one of the darkest chapters in the history of the world, it has helped us to understand some of the most perplexing riddles in the growth of the human mind, it has placed historical facts, where formerly we had nothing but guesses as to the history of the Aryan nations, previous to their appearance on the historical stage of Asia and Europe.
I should not venture to say that some mistakes have not been made in the reconstruction of the picture of the Aryan civilisation previous to their separation, or in identifying the names of certain Greek and Vedic gods; but such mistakes, as soon as they were discovered, have easily been corrected. Besides, we know that what were supposed to be mistakes, were often no mistakes at all. One of the strongest arguments against a comparison of Greek and Vedic deities has always been that the Greeks of Homer's time, for instance, bad no recollection that Zeus was originally a name of the bright sky or Erinys a name of the dawn. Nothing is so easy as to disprove what no one has ever wished to prove. No Frenchman is conscious that the name épicier has anything to do with species, and in the end, with Plato's ideas; and yet we know that an unbroken historical chain connects the two names. Mythological studies will never gain a safe scientific basis, unless they are built up on the same common Aryan foundation on which all linguistic studies are admitted to rest. It is now the fashion to explain the similarities between the religion, the mythology, the folklore of the Aryan nations, not by their common origin, but by our common humanity, not by historical evidence, but by psychological speculation. It is perfectly true that there are legends, stories, customs and proverbs to be found among the South Sea Islanders and the inhabitants of the Arctic regions which bear a striking likeness to those of the Aryan nations. Many such had been collected long ago by anthropologists such as Bastholm, Klemm, Waitz, and more recently by Bastian, Tylor and others. I have myself been one of the earliest labourers in this interesting field of Psychological Mythology. But the question is, What conclusions have we a right to draw from such coincidences? First of all, we know by sad experience how deceptive such apparent similarities have, often proved, for the simple reason that those who collected them misunderstood their real import. Secondly, we must never forget the old rule that if two people say or do the same thing, it is not always the same. But suppose the similarity is complete and well made out, all we have a right to say is that man, if placed under similar influences, will sometimes react in the same manner. We have no right as yet to speak of universal psychological instincts, of innate ideas and all the rest. Psychological Mythology is a field that requires much more careful cultivation than it has hitherto received. Hitherto its materials have mostly proved untrustworthy, and its conclusions, in consequence, fanciful and unstable.
We move in a totally different atmosphere when we examine the legends, stories, customs and proverbs of races who speak cognate languages. We have here an historical background, we stand on a firm historical foundation.
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