3 Philo, Moses ii.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 301
cent and unambiguous products of the imagination, but veil some inner and more significant meaning.
The legends of classic peoples, first among them the Greeks, also belong to folklore. As early as pre-Christian times these legends were subjected to interpretation, many interpreters recognizing the symbolic character of mythology.
With Macrobius in the fourth Christian century, there begins a tendency to see in many gods of Egyptian and Greek antiquity the personification of the sun. Macrobius compared Osiris to the sun, and Isis to the moon, disregarding the opinion of earlier authors. He also interpreted Jupiter as the sun.
As the role the planets played in the history of the world retreated ever further into oblivion, the interpretation of nature myths as referring to the sun or the moon became more and more widespread. In the nineteenth century it was the vogue to explain the old myths as inspired by the movement of the sun and the moon, during the day, night, month, and year. Not only Ra, Amon, Marduk, Phaethon, and even Zeus,1 but also king-heroes, like Oedipus, became solar symbols.2
This exclusive role of sun and moon in mythology is a reflection of their significance in nature.
However, in former times the planets played a decidedly more important role in the imagination of peoples, to which fact their religions give testimony. True, sun and moon (Shamash and Sin, Helios, Apollo, and Selene) were also numbered among the planet-gods, but usually they were not the most important ones. Their enumeration among the seven planets sometimes startles the modern scholar, because these two luminaries are so much more conspicuous than the other planets; the dominance of Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars must startle us even more as long as we do not know what was displayed on the celestial scene a few thousand years ago.
Modern folklorists occupy themselves mainly with the folklore of primitive peoples, material unspoiled by generations of copyists and
1 In the Phaethon story, Ovid makes it clear that Sun and Zeus are two separate deities.
2 In a separate work I intend to trace the historical prototype of the legend of Oedipus Rex.
302 WORLDS IN COLLISION
interpreters. Being received at its source, it is supposed to shed light not only on the mentality of these primitive peoples, but also on many problems of sociology and psychology in general.
The sociological method explores mythology for evidence of social usages. Folklorists like James Frazer expended their efforts on this aspect. Freud, the psychologist, centered his attention on the motif of father-murder (patricide), presenting it as though it had been a regular institution in ancient times. He makes it appear a general practice in the past and a subconscious urge in present-day man.
However, regular institutions and practices in the life of the family would not give rise to myths.
A writer on this subject has correctly pointed out this fact: "What is quite normal in nature and society rarely excites the myth-making imagination which is more likely to be kindled by the abnormal, some startling catastrophe, some terrible violation of the social code." 3
Even less than daily tribal life do the daily occurrences in nature give rise to legends. The sun rises every morning, it travels from east to west; the moon enters a new phase four times a month; the year has four seasons—such regular changes do not stir the imagination of peoples, because they contain nothing unexpected in themselves. Daily things do not evoke astonishment and influence but little a people's creative faculty. Sunrise and sunset, morning dew and evening mist, are common experiences, and if a single spectacle impresses itself upon us in the course of life, the many sunrises and the many sunsets in our memory pale and each looks like the other.
Seasonal snowstorms or thunderstorms do not leave indelible memories. Only striking, perturbing experiences of a social or physical order are designed to stir the imagination of peoples. Seneca says: "It is for this very reason that the assembly of stars that lends beauty to the robin-bobin
immense firmament does not compel the attention of the masses; but when a change occurs in the order of the universe, all looks are fixed on the sky." *
Even local catastrophes, regarded as very violent, do not serve for
» L. R. Famell, "The value and the methods of mythological study," Proceedings of the British Academy, 1919-1920, p. 47. 4 Naturales quaestiones vii.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 303
the creation of cosmic myths. First in power to impress the races of the earth are the cataclysms of the past, and on this we have dwelt at length. Comets, because of their causal relation to world catastrophes, and also because of their terrifying appearance, were the kind of phenomenon to kindle the imagination of peoples. But for some reason, the impression they must have made on the peoples of antiquity is not considered in explanation of myths and legends.
Since the invention of the printing press, the great agitation and mass hysteria caused by the more brilliant comets can be traced in contemporary books and pamphlets. Were the ancients immune to these feelings? If not, then why are the exegetes of the Bible and the commentators on the epic compositions of antiquity so remiss as not to think of phenomena that could not but impress the ancients? Or did no comets appear in the sky during ancient times? This, of course, is only a rhetorical question.
Keeping this in mind, we shall be able to answer the question about the striking similarity of certain concepts among peoples of different cultures, sometimes separated by oceans.
Of "Pre-existing Ideas" in the Souls of Peoples
The similarity of motifs in the folklore of various peoples on the five continents and on the islands of the oceans posed a difficult problem for the ethnologists and anthropologists. The migration of ideas may follow the migration of peoples, but how could unusual motifs of folklore reach isolated islands where the aborigines do not have any means of crossing the sea?
And why did not technical civilization travel together with spiritual? Peoples still living in the stone age possess the same, often strange, motifs as the cultured nations. The particular character of some of the contents of folklore makes it impossible to assume that it was only by mere chance that the same motifs were created in all corners of the world. The problem is so perplexing to the scientists that, for lack of a better proposition, an explanation was offered according to which the motifs of folklore are a pre-existing possession in the soul of peoples; peoples are born with these ideas just as an animal is born with an urge to propagate 304 WORLDS IN COLLISION
its kind, to nurse its offspring, to build a lair or a nest, and to travel in herds or migrate in flocks to far-away countries. But it is not so simple to explain in these terms why, for instance, the aborigines of America imagined a witch as a woman riding on a broom across the sky, exactly as the European peoples imagined her. "The Mexican witch, like her European sister, carried a broom on which she rode through the air, and was associated with the screech owl. Indeed, the queen of witches, Tlagoltiotl, is depicted as riding on a broom and as wearing the witch's peaked hat." ' As with the witch on her broom, so also with hundreds of other odd fantasies and beliefs.
The answer to the problem of the similarity of the motifs in the folklore of various peoples is, in my view, as follows: A great many ideas reflect real historical content. There is a legend, found all over the world, that a deluge swept over the earth and covered hills and even mountains. We have a poor opinion of the mental abilities of our ancestors if we think that merely an extraordinary overflow of the Euphrates so impressed the nomads of the desert that they thought the entire world was flooded, and that the legend so born wandered from people to people. At the same time, geological problems of the origin and distribution of till, or diluvial deposit, are awaiting explanation.