458 man. as it is unhistorical, to assume that a poetical and enigmatical conception of the sun and moon, of rain and winter, was the starting-point of any religious worship. On the contrary, the poetical phenomenology of nature, which we find as the first stratum in the basis of our mythologies, can be nothing but a symbol of the fundamental idea of all religion God-consciousness, faith in a moral government of the world, tending to the improvement and salvation of The apparent solution of the enigma lies in the natural phenomenon; but the real one is the fact that the mind does not understand the phenomenon itself otherwise than as the symbol of that which it contains, namely, the religious sentiment. may upon this head refer our readers to what has We been said in the introductory discussions of this Book, and elsewhere. The development of myths can no more be explained by the natural phenomena to which life is subject, than the formation of language can by the cries of animals around us, or the sounds of the wind. Here, however, it will not be enough to prove what was there intimated as an idea: we are now entitled to announce it as actual fact. Bearing in mind those vast convulsions of nature which caused a violent disturbance and interruption of a social development of man, already considerably advanced in primitive Asia, we may hope, after what has been said, that the following formula expresses in a manner strictly historical the consciousness of the Arian races which emigrated from their original home, after a convulsion, into modern Iran: The moral and natural government of the world is cottage, in the village or the tribe, any more than tempest, and rain, and cold will again destroy the blessing of the seasons, the gift of the serene God of Light, who has victoriously emerged from storms and earthquakes and upheavings of mountains. This is the thought on which all the religious feelings of the Arians are based: and this thought is analogous to the symbol of the rainbow after the Flood, appearing on the vault of heaven, which had again become serene, that beautiful picture of Semitic tradition. We find it at the bottom of the Edda as well as of the hymns of the Veda. But in several passages of these hymns it is explicitly stated. We cannot here enter into detailed exemplifications, but we would quote a single passage from the close of the celebrated thirtysecond hymn in the first book, where the victory of Indra over the dragon Ahi or Vrtra (winter) is celebrated: 127 "Indra, Lord of the free and of the fettered, Of the abundance of horned cattle, wielder of the thunderbolt! As the tire the spokes, so doth he encircle all." Hence the victory of the light warm ether over darkness and cold is the celestial and terrestrial image of the successful conflict between the good redeeming spirit and the evil principle, which man finds in and around him. It is a conflict, but a divine one, and one which leads to victory. This is the sense in which Creuzer, many years ago, understood the Song of Visvamitra to Helios (the SunGod) 128, which Rosen had then published: 127 Von Noorden, Symbolæ, &c. p. 84. seqq. Conf. Kuhn, in Haupt's Zeitschr. (See note 123.) 128 Symbolik, &c. p. 519. "Helios, who penetrateth and surveyeth all things, Be he our Rock! This glorious light of the beaming Helios let us contemplate, Our venerable friend, now departed, then compared the Orphic view (Hymn vIII. 16.), in which Helios is called "the teacher of righteousness;" and the whole cast of thought among the ancients in respect to law and government, regarded as light and day (Cic. De Legg. i. 7. seqq). But we will proceed to consider the historical development of these views. When the natural symbol eclipsed the ethical idea, and when the noble intellect of the Arians of Bactria threatened to degenerate into nature-worship and magic, "the divine bard" of Bactria sang of the highest of spirits, and a contest ensued, in process of which most of the old Gods of nature became evil demons in Iran. In India, on the contrary, nature-worship continued for a long time to develope itself in all its vigour, but subsequently took the form of Brahmanism, and, by means of Brahma, established the intellectual element, to the neglect of the ethical, in a pantheistic and mythical sense. Each tribe fought the divine battle according to its own fancy. The Germanic tribes threw off sacerdotal forms, or kept them at a distance. The Pelasgi treated them at once in an intellectual manner. But the pure Hellenes struggled on to intellectual freedom, and converted the old Gods of nature into the ideals of mankind. The great hero of German philosophy, to whom this Book is dedicated, was the first to recognise this truth. In spite of all the aberrations of German philosophy, this faith has always remained the leading thread in the development of the science of humanity, not the least of whose triumphs it has been to have combined together comparative philology and comparative mythology. It is such a combination of philology with history and philosophy which again, in the present day, is opening up in this holy ground a fresh, rich, and lasting mine of research for the earliest history of man, the history of thought in the most gifted race, that of our own progenitors. Nowhere but in the Vedas can the first threads of this divine web still be traced; but the grandeur of that marvellous tissue of poetry and art, in the mythological development of the common forms of speech into living ideals of mankind, is still the exclusive glory of the Greeks: a grandeur which no one who is acquainted with it is able fully to express, and which is destined eternally to remodel the life of the nations, and to raise it up to the standard of humanity in art and in science. E. THE ATLANTIC TALE, AND ITS BEARING ON THE ASIATIC REMINISCENCES OF THE EGYPTIANS, AND ON PRIMITIVE HISTORY AFTER THE DELUGE. IN analyzing Philo's accounts of the theogony and kosmogony of the Phoenicians, we have met with some passages about the origines of mankind. These, however, were always either theogonical ideas in disguise, or else purely local reminiscences. The case is still worse in regard to our knowledge of the corresponding traditions of the Egyptians themselves. No mention is made in any of them of historical anthropogony, everything connected with this subject occurs among the divine origines. It is barely possible that the Egyptians should have considered themselves as autokhthones, children of the soil, and yet that there should have been no trace of this belief either in what they say on their monuments when speaking of themselves as contrasted with the other races and nations, or in what the Greeks say when treating of the origines of this, to them, so remarkable a people. But the celebrated passage in the Timæus says the very reverse, and we take this opportunity of laying it before our readers in full. It has from early times given rise to the most opposite interpretations. Plato's residence in Egypt has been so fully confirmed by astronomy and his own account of the religious and political condition of the country that it is admitted to be historical 129, while the invention of later writers, that the Hellenic pupil of Sokrates learned his philosophy from the Egyptians, is generally repudiated. The communication made to Solon by the priests of Sais, in the introduction to the Timæus, may fairly be considered as only the vehicle for introducing the story. Some ancient sage must be mentioned, and Solon seemed to answer the purpose as well as any other. But in regard to the substance of the communication, it is assuredly not an invention of the philosopher, which would have been a pitiful piece of deceit, but a straightforward account of what he himself heard at Sais. It might however be mere vainglorious boasting on the part of the priests, as their assertion certainly was that they could show to Solon Athenian names of his "fellowcitizens" who lived 9000 years before that time and 1000 before the Egyptian origines. Let us hear the account itself. The remarkable passage is as follows (p. 21. E.): "There is in Egypt," said Solon, "in the Delta where the Nile branches off into two streams, the so-called 129 Brandis, Hist. of Phil. ii. 1. seq. 141. seqq. |