Jean Lang
A Book of Myths
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Table of contents
PREFACE
POSTSCRIPT
PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA
PYGMALION
PHAETON
ENDYMION
ORPHEUS
APOLLO AND DAPHNE
PSYCHE
THE CALYDONIAN HUNT
ATALANTA
ARACHNE
IDAS AND MARPESSA
ARETHUSA
PERSEUS THE HERO
NIOBE
HYACINTHUS
KING MIDAS OF THE GOLDEN TOUCH
CEYX AND HALCYONE
ARISTÆUS THE BEE-KEEPER
PROSERPINE
LATONA AND THE RUSTICS
ECHO AND NARCISSUS
ICARUS
CLYTIE
THE CRANES OF IBYCUS
SYRINX
THE DEATH OF ADONIS
PAN
LORELEI
FREYA, QUEEN OF THE NORTHERN GODS
THE DEATH OF BALDUR
BEOWULF
ROLAND THE PALADIN
THE CHILDREN OF LÎR
DEIRDRÊ
PREFACE
Just
as a little child holds out its hands to catch the sunbeams, to feel
and to grasp what, so its eyes tell it, is actually there, so, down
through the ages, men have stretched out their hands in eager
endeavour to know their God. And because only through the human was
the divine knowable, the old peoples of the earth made gods of their
heroes and not unfrequently endowed these gods with as many of the
vices as of the virtues of their worshippers. As we read the myths of
the East and the West we find ever the same story. That portion of
the ancient Aryan race which poured from the central plain of Asia,
through the rocky defiles of what we now call “The Frontier,” to
populate the fertile lowlands of India, had gods who must once have
been wholly heroic, but who came in time to be more degraded than the
most vicious of lustful criminals. And the Greeks, Latins, Teutons,
Celts, and Slavonians, who came of the same mighty Aryan stock, did
even as those with whom they owned a common ancestry. Originally they
gave to their gods of their best. All that was noblest in them, all
that was strongest and most selfless, all the higher instincts of
their natures were their endowment. And although their worship in
time became corrupt and lost its beauty, there yet remains for us, in
the old tales of the gods, a wonderful humanity that strikes a
vibrant chord in the hearts of those who are the descendants of their
worshippers. For though creeds and forms may change, human nature
never changes. We are less simple than our fathers: that is all. And,
as Professor York Powell[1]
most truly says: “It is not in a man’s creed, but in his deeds;
not in his knowledge, but in his sympathy, that there lies the
essence of what is good and of what will last in human life.”The
most usual habits of mind in our own day are the theoretical and
analytical habits. Dissection, vivisection, analysis—those are the
processes to which all things not conclusively historical and all
things spiritual are bound to pass. Thus we find the old myths
classified into Sun Myths and Dawn Myths, Earth Myths and Moon Myths,
Fire Myths and Wind Myths, until, as one of the most sane and
vigorous thinkers of the present day[2]
has justly observed: “If you take the rhyme of Mary and her little
lamb, and call Mary the sun and the lamb the moon, you will achieve
astonishing results, both in religion and astronomy, when you find
that the lamb followed Mary to school one day.”In
this little collection of Myths, the stories are not presented to the
student of folklore as a fresh contribution to his knowledge. Rather
is the book intended for those who, in the course of their reading,
frequently come across names which possess for them no meaning, and
who care to read some old stories, through which runs the same
humanity that their own hearts know. For although the old worship has
passed away, it is almost impossible for us to open a book that does
not contain some mention of the gods of long ago. In our childhood we
are given copies of Kingsley’s
Heroes and of
Hawthorne’s
Tanglewood Tales.
Later on, we find in Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Keats, Shelley,
Longfellow, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, and a host of other writers,
constant allusion to the stories of the gods. Scarcely a poet has
ever written but makes mention of them in one or other of his poems.
It would seem as if there were no get-away from them. We might expect
in this twentieth century that the old gods of Greece and of Rome,
the gods of our Northern forefathers, the gods of Egypt, the gods of
the British race, might be forgotten. But even when we read in a
newspaper of aeroplanes, someone is more than likely to quote the
story of Bellerophon and his winged steed, or of Icarus, the flyer,
and in our daily speech the names of gods and goddesses continually
crop up. We drive—or, at least, till lately we drove—in Phaetons.
Not only schoolboys swear by Jove or by Jupiter. The silvery
substance in our thermometers and barometers is named Mercury.
Blacksmiths are accustomed to being referred to as “sons of
Vulcan,” and beautiful youths to being called “young Adonises.”
We accept the names of newspapers and debating societies as being the
“Argus,” without perhaps quite realising who was Argus, the
many-eyed. We talk of “a panic,” and forget that the great god
Pan is father of the word. Even in our religious services we go back
to heathenism. Not only are the crockets on our cathedral spires and
church pews remnants of fire-worship, but one of our own most
beautiful Christian blessings is probably of Assyrian origin. “The
Lord bless thee and keep thee.... The Lord make His face to shine
upon thee.... The Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon
thee....” So did the priests of the sun-gods invoke blessings upon
those who worshipped.We
make many discoveries as we study the myths of the North and of the
South. In the story of Baldur we find that the goddess Hel ultimately
gave her name to the place of punishment precious to the Calvinistic
mind. And because the Norseman very much disliked the bitter, cruel
cold of the long winter, his heaven was a warm, well-fired abode, and
his place of punishment one of terrible frigidity. Somewhere on the
other side of the Tweed and Cheviots was the spot selected by the
Celt of southern Britain. On the other hand, the eastern mind, which
knew the terrors of a sun-smitten land and of a heat that was
torture, had for a hell a fiery place of constantly burning flames.In
the space permitted, it has not been possible to deal with more than
a small number of myths, and the well-known stories of Herakles, of
Theseus, and of the Argonauts have been purposely omitted. These have
been so perfectly told by great writers that to retell them would
seem absurd. The same applies to the Odyssey and the Iliad, the
translations of which probably take rank amongst the finest
translations in any language.The
writer will feel that her object has been gained should any readers
of these stories feel that for a little while they have left the
toilful utilitarianism of the present day behind them, and, with it,
its hampering restrictions of sordid actualities that are so
murderous to imagination and to all romance.
“Great
God! I’d rather beA
Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;So
might I, standing on this pleasant lea,Have
glimpses that would make me less forlorn;Have
sight of Proteus rising from the sea;Or
hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.”
POSTSCRIPT
We
have come, in those last long months, to date our happenings as they
have never until now been dated by those of our own generation.We
speak of things that took place “Before
the War”; and
between that time and this stands a barrier immeasurable.This
book, with its Preface, was completed in 1914—“Before
the War.”Since
August 1914 the finest humanity of our race has been enduring
Promethean agonies. But even as Prometheus unflinchingly bore the
cruelties of pain, of heat and of cold, of hunger and of thirst, and
the tortures inflicted by an obscene bird of prey, so have endured
the men of our nation and of those nations with whom we are proud to
be allied. Much more remote than they seemed one little year ago, now
seem the old stories of sunny Greece. But if we have studied the
strange transmogrification of the ancient gods, we can look with
interest, if with horror, at the Teuton representation of the God in
whom we believe as a God of perfect purity, of honour, and of love.
According to their interpretation of Him, the God of the Huns would
seem to be as much a confederate of the vicious as the most degraded
god of ancient worship. And if we turn with shame from the Divinity
so often and so glibly referred to by blasphemous lips, and look on a
picture that tears our hearts, and yet makes our hearts big with
pride, we can understand how it was that those heroes who fought and
died in the Valley of the Scamander came in time to be regarded not
as men, but as gods.There
is no tale in all the world’s mythology finer than the tale that
began in August 1914. How future generations will tell the tale, who
can say?But
we, for whom Life can never be the same again, can say with all
earnestness: “It is the memory that the soldier leaves behind him,
like the long train of light that follows the sunken sun—that is
all which is worth caring for, which distinguishes the death of the
brave or the ignoble.”And,
surely, to all those who are fighting, and suffering, and dying for a
noble cause, the God of gods, the God of battles, who is also the God
of peace, and the God of Love, has become an ever near and eternally
living entity.
“Our
little systems have their day;They
have their day and cease to be,They
are but broken lights of Thee,And
Thou, oh Lord, art more than they.”[1]
Teutonic Heathendom.[2]
John Kelman, D.D.,
Among Famous Books.
PROMETHEUS AND PANDORA
Those
who are interested in watching the mental development of a child must
have noted that when the baby has learned to speak even a little, it
begins to show its growing intelligence by asking questions. “What
is this?” it would seem at first to ask with regard to simple
things that to it are still mysteries. Soon it arrives at the more
far-reaching inquiries—“Why is this so?” “How did this
happen?” And as the child’s mental growth continues, the
painstaking and conscientious parent or guardian is many times faced
by questions which lack of knowledge, or a sensitive honesty,
prevents him from answering either with assurance or with ingenuity.As
with the child, so it has ever been with the human race. Man has
always come into the world asking “How?” “Why?” “What?”
and so the Hebrew, the Greek, the Maori, the Australian blackfellow,
the Norseman—in a word, each race of mankind—has formed for
itself an explanation of existence, an answer to the questions of the
groping child-mind—“Who made the world?” “What is God?”
“What made a God think of fire and air and water?” “Why am I,
I?”Into
the explanation of creation and existence given by the Greeks come
the stories of Prometheus and of Pandora. The world, as first it was,
to the Greeks was such a world as the one of which we read in the
Book of Genesis—“without form, and void.” It was a sunless
world in which land, air, and sea were mixed up together, and over
which reigned a deity called Chaos. With him ruled the goddess of
Night and their son was Erebus, god of Darkness. When the two
beautiful children of Erebus, Light and Day, had flooded formless
space with their radiance, Eros, the god of Love, was born, and Light
and Day and Love, working together, turned discord into harmony and
made the earth, the sea, and the sky into one perfect whole. A giant
race, a race of Titans, in time populated this newly-made earth, and
of these one of the mightiest was Prometheus. To him, and to his
brother Epimethus, was entrusted by Eros the distribution of the
gifts of faculties and of instincts to all the living creatures in
the world, and the task of making a creature lower than the gods,
something less great than the Titans, yet in knowledge and in
understanding infinitely higher than the beasts and birds and fishes.
At the hands of the Titan brothers, birds, beasts, and fishes had
fared handsomely. They were Titanic in their generosity, and so
prodigal had they been in their gifts that when they would fain have
carried out the commands of Eros they found that nothing was left for
the equipment of this being, to be called Man. Yet, nothing daunted,
Prometheus took some clay from the ground at his feet, moistened it
with water, and fashioned it into an image, in form like the gods.
Into its nostrils Eros breathed the spirit of life, Pallas Athené
endowed it with a soul, and the first man looked wonderingly round on
the earth that was to be his heritage. Prometheus, proud of the
beautiful thing of his own creation, would fain have given Man a
worthy gift, but no gift remained for him. He was naked, unprotected,
more helpless than any of the beasts of the field, more to be pitied
than any of them in that he had a soul to suffer.Surely
Zeus, the All Powerful, ruler of Olympus, would have compassion on
Man? But Prometheus looked to Zeus in vain; compassion he had none.
Then, in infinite pity, Prometheus bethought himself of a power
belonging to the gods alone and unshared by any living creature on
the earth.
“We
shall give Fire to the Man whom we have made,” he said to
Epimethus. To Epimethus this seemed an impossibility, but to
Prometheus nothing was impossible. He bided his time and, unseen by
the gods, he made his way into Olympus, lighted a hollow torch with a
spark from the chariot of the Sun and hastened back to earth with
this royal gift to Man. Assuredly no other gift could have brought
him more completely the empire that has since been his. No longer did
he tremble and cower in the darkness of caves when Zeus hurled his
lightnings across the sky. No more did he dread the animals that
hunted him and drove him in terror before them.Armed
with fire, the beasts became his vassals. With fire he forged
weapons, defied the frost and cold, coined money, made implements for
tillage, introduced the arts, and was able to destroy as well as to
create.From
his throne on Olympus, Zeus looked down on the earth and saw, with
wonder, airy columns of blue-grey smoke that curled upwards to the
sky. He watched more closely, and realised with terrible wrath that
the moving flowers of red and gold that he saw in that land that the
Titans shared with men, came from fire, that had hitherto been the
gods’ own sacred power. Speedily he assembled a council of the gods
to mete out to Prometheus a punishment fit for the blasphemous daring
of his crime. This council decided at length to create a thing that
should for evermore charm the souls and hearts of men, and yet, for
evermore, be man’s undoing.To
Vulcan, god of fire, whose province Prometheus had insulted, was
given the work of fashioning out of clay and water the creature by
which the honour of the gods was to be avenged. “The lame Vulcan,”
says Hesiod, poet of Greek mythology, “formed out of the earth an
image resembling a chaste virgin. Pallas Athené, of the blue eyes,
hastened to ornament her and to robe her in a white tunic. She
dressed on the crown of her head a long veil, skilfully fashioned and
admirable to see; she crowned her forehead with graceful garlands of
newly-opened flowers and a golden diadem that the lame Vulcan, the
illustrious god, had made with his own hands to please the puissant
Jove. On this crown Vulcan had chiselled the innumerable animals that
the continents and the sea nourish in their bosoms, all endowed with
a marvellous grace and apparently alive. When he had finally
completed, instead of some useful work, this illustrious masterpiece,
he brought into the assembly this virgin, proud of the ornaments with
which she had been decked by the blue-eyed goddess, daughter of a
powerful sire.” To this beautiful creature, destined by the gods to
be man’s destroyer, each of them gave a gift. From Aphrodite she
got beauty, from Apollo music, from Hermes the gift of a winning
tongue. And when all that great company in Olympus had bestowed their
gifts, they named the woman Pandora—“Gifted by all the Gods.”
Thus equipped for victory, Pandora was led by Hermes to the world
that was thenceforward to be her home. As a gift from the gods she
was presented to Prometheus.But
Prometheus, gazing in wonder at the violet blue eyes bestowed by
Aphrodite, that looked wonderingly back into his own as if they were
indeed as innocent as two violets wet with the morning dew, hardened
his great heart, and would have none of her. As a hero—a worthy
descendant of Titans—said in later years, “Timeo Danaos et dona
ferentes,”—“I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.”
And Prometheus, the greatly-daring, knowing that he merited the anger
of the gods, saw treachery in a gift outwardly so perfect. Not only
would he not accept this exquisite creature for his own, but he
hastened to caution his brother also to refuse her.But
well were they named Prometheus (Forethought) and Epimethus
(Afterthought). For Epimethus it was enough to look at this peerless
woman, sent from the gods, for him to love her and to believe in her
utterly. She was the fairest thing on earth, worthy indeed of the
deathless gods who had created her. Perfect, too, was the happiness
that she brought with her to Epimethus. Before her coming, as he well
knew now, the fair world had been incomplete. Since she came the
fragrant flowers had grown more sweet for him, the song of the birds
more full of melody. He found new life in Pandora and marvelled how
his brother could ever have fancied that she could bring to the world
aught but peace and joyousness.Now
when the gods had entrusted to the Titan brothers the endowment of
all living things upon the earth, they had been careful to withhold
everything that might bring into the world pain, sickness, anxiety,
bitterness of heart, remorse, or soul-crushing sorrow. All these
hurtful things were imprisoned in a coffer which was given into the
care of the trusty Epimethus.To
Pandora the world into which she came was all fresh, all new, quite
full of unexpected joys and delightful surprises. It was a world of
mystery, but mystery of which her great, adoring, simple Titan held
the golden key. When she saw the coffer which never was opened, what
then more natural than that she should ask Epimethus what it
contained? But the contents were known only to the gods. Epimethus
was unable to answer. Day by day, the curiosity of Pandora increased.
To her the gods had never given anything but good. Surely there must
be here gifts more precious still. What if the Olympians had destined
her to be the one to open the casket, and had sent her to earth in
order that she might bestow on this dear world, on the men who lived
on it, and on her own magnificent Titan, happiness and blessings
which only the minds of gods could have conceived? Thus did there
come a day when Pandora, unconscious instrument in the hands of a
vengeful Olympian, in all faith, and with the courage that is born of
faith and of love, opened the lid of the prison-house of evil. And as
from coffers in the old Egyptian tombs, the live plague can still
rush forth and slay, the long-imprisoned evils rushed forth upon the
fair earth and on the human beings who lived on it—malignant,
ruthless, fierce, treacherous, and cruel—poisoning, slaying,
devouring. Plague and pestilence and murder, envy and malice and
revenge and all viciousness—an ugly wolf-pack indeed was that one
let loose by Pandora. Terror, doubt, misery, had all rushed
straightway to attack her heart, while the evils of which she had
never dreamed stung mind and soul into dismay and horror, when, by
hastily shutting the lid of the coffer, she tried to undo the evil
she had done.And
lo, she found that the gods had imprisoned one good gift only in this
Inferno of horrors and of ugliness. In the world there had never been
any need of Hope. What work was there for Hope to do where all was
perfect, and where each creature possessed the desire of body and of
heart? Therefore Hope was thrust into the chest that held the evils,
a star in a black night, a lily growing on a dung-heap. And as
Pandora, white-lipped and trembling, looked into the otherwise empty
box, courage came back to her heart, and Epimethus let fall to his
side the arm that would have slain the woman of his love because
there came to him, like a draught of wine to a warrior spent in
battle, an imperial vision of the sons of men through all the aeons
to come, combatting all evils of body and of soul, going on
conquering and to conquer. Thus, saved by Hope, the Titan and the
woman faced the future, and for them the vengeance of the gods was
stayed.
“Yet
I argue notAgainst
Heav’n’s hand or will, nor bate a jotOf
heart or hope; but still bear up and steerRight
onward.”So
spoke Milton, the blind Titan of the seventeenth century; and
Shakespeare says:
“True
hope is swift, and flies with swallow’s wings;Kings
it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings.”Upon
the earth, and on the children of men who were as gods in their
knowledge and mastery of the force of fire, Jupiter had had his
revenge. For Prometheus he reserved another punishment. He, the
greatly-daring, once the dear friend and companion of Zeus himself,
was chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus by the vindictive deity.
There, on a dizzy height, his body thrust against the sun-baked rock,
Prometheus had to endure the torment of having a foul-beaked vulture
tear out his liver, as though he were a piece of carrion lying on the
mountain side. All day, while the sun mercilessly smote him and the
blue sky turned from red to black before his pain-racked eyes, the
torture went on. Each night, when the filthy bird of prey that worked
the will of the gods spread its dark wings and flew back to its
eyrie, the Titan endured the cruel mercy of having his body grow
whole once more. But with daybreak there came again the silent
shadow, the smell of the unclean thing, and again with fierce beak
and talons the vulture greedily began its work.Thirty
thousand years was the time of his sentence, and yet Prometheus knew
that at any moment he could have brought his torment to an end. A
secret was his—a mighty secret, the revelation of which would have
brought him the mercy of Zeus and have reinstated him in the favour
of the all-powerful god. Yet did he prefer to endure his agonies
rather than to free himself by bowing to the desires of a tyrant who
had caused Man to be made, yet denied to Man those gifts that made
him nobler than the beasts and raised him almost to the heights of
the Olympians. Thus for him the weary centuries dragged by—in
suffering that knew no respite—in endurance that the gods might
have ended. Prometheus had brought an imperial gift to the men that
he had made, and imperially he paid the penalty.
“Three
thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,And
moments aye divided by keen pangsTill
they seemed years, torture and solitude,Scorn
and despair,—these are mine empire.More
glorious far than that which thou surveyestFrom
thine unenvied throne, O, Mighty God!Almighty,
had I deigned to share the shameOf
thine ill tyranny, and hung not hereNailed
to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,Black,
wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,Insect,
or beast, or shape or sound of life.Ah
me! alas, pain, pain ever, for ever!”Shelley.
“Titan!
to whose immortal eyesThe
sufferings of mortalitySeen
in their sad reality,Were
not as things that gods despise;What
was thy pity’s recompense?A
silent suffering, and intense;The
rock, the vulture, and the chain,All
that the proud can feel of pain,The
agony they do not show,The
suffocating sense of woe,Which
speaks but in its loneliness,And
then is jealous lest the skyShould
have a listener, nor will sighUntil
its voice is echoless.”Byron.
“Yet,
I am still Prometheus, wiser grownBy
years of solitude,—that holds apartThe
past and future, giving the soul roomTo
search into itself,—and long communeWith
this eternal silence;—more a god,In
my long-suffering and strength to meetWith
equal front the direst shafts of fate,Than
thou in thy faint-hearted despotism ...Therefore,
great heart, bear up! thou art but typeOf
what all lofty spirits endure that fainWould
win men back to strength and peace through love:Each
hath his lonely peak, and on each heartEnvy,
or scorn or hatred tears lifelongWith
vulture beak; yet the high soul is left;And
faith, which is but hope grown wise, and loveAnd
patience, which at last shall overcome.”Lowell.
PYGMALION
In
days when the world was young and when the gods walked on the earth,
there reigned over the island of Cyprus a sculptor-king, and king of
sculptors, named Pygmalion. In the language of our own day, we should
call him “wedded to his art.” In woman he only saw the bane of
man. Women, he believed, lured men from the paths to which their
destiny called them. While man walked alone, he walked free—he had
given no “hostages to fortune.” Alone, man could live for his
art, could combat every danger that beset him, could escape,
unhampered, from every pitfall in life. But woman was the ivy that
clings to the oak, and throttles the oak in the end. No woman, vowed
Pygmalion, should ever hamper him. And so at length he came to hate
women, and, free of heart and mind, his genius wrought such great
things that he became a very perfect sculptor. He had one passion, a
passion for his art, and that sufficed him. Out of great rough blocks
of marble he would hew the most perfect semblance of men and of
women, and of everything that seemed to him most beautiful and the
most worth preserving.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
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