The myths in their older form, as distinguished from the fanciful variations, are obviously in the closest relation to the ritual: they are simply descriptions of the drama as represented in the sacred rites.
At other times the union of the two Divine natures is pictured after the animal world: Demeter as the mare meets the horse Zeus, Pasiphae became the cow, and so on. Popular and poetic imagina- tion, which sported in the most licentious fashion with all those myths of the Divine unions, worked out this class of tales especially with the most diabolical and repulsive ingenuity ; and it is in the degraded conception of the Divine nature implied in these abominable fantastic develop- ments that the Christians who inveighed against the pagan religion found their most telling weapons. The mythology that grew around this subject would in itself make a large subject ; but, though it pos- sesses considerable interest as bearing on history and social customs, it has little value from a re- ligious point of view.
These exaggerated and really distorted myths did not remain mere tales. They reacted on the ritual, which grew and elaborated itself and took in new elements in the lapse of time. But in this process of elaboration there was no real religious development, but simply degradation.
(4) Lhe birth and death of the Divine nature.— The mystery of birth is matched by the mystery of death, and the one occupied the mind of the Pere Anatolian peoples as much as the other.
eath was regarded and imagined by them under similar illustrative forms drawn from external nature; and the Divine nature, which is the model and prototype of all the activity of man, was seen living and dying in the life of trees and plants, of grass and corn. The recurring death of nature, the bright and beautiful luxuriance of spring cut off in its prime by the sun of summer, the joy and warmth of the summer alternating with the cold- ness and darkness of the long severe winter on the Anatolian plateau, the light of day transformed into the deadness of night, furnished a series of expressions of the same principle; and mythology and cult are full of them. In numberless local varieties the same truth is expressed : the young hero is slain in the pride of life and the joy of his
* See above, § III (7f.).
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art: Marsyas the. sweet rustic musician vies with the god, and is by the god hung up on the plane tree and flayed: Hylas is drowned in the fountain by the nymph who longs for him and takes him away to herself from the earth: the twelve chil- dren of Niobe are all slain by the wrath and arrows of the god: Achilles must die young, and _his grave was shown at various seats of his worship, in Elis, in the Troad, on the south Russian coasts. The eternal contradiction repeats itself: the life of nature is slain, yet reappears: it is slain by the Divine power, yet it is in itself the embodiment of the Divine power: the god slays the god: on this, mythology plays in endless variations of the same tale.
With this obvious fact of the death of nature, its birth is equally obviously connected. The life of nature never ends: it dies only to be born, different and yet the same. Men mourn for the dead god, and immediately their mourning is turned to joy, for the god is reborn. The mourn- ing over Attis in the Phrygian worship of Cybele was succeeded by the Hilaria, as the lamentation for Adonis or ‘ Thammuz yearly wounded’ in Syria was followed by the rejoicing over his rejuvenation.
With this subject the largest and the most valu- able class of myths is connected; but the few examples which have been quoted above must suffice.
VII. RirvAL AND CEREMONIAL. — We have spoken of the growth of mythology before speak- ing of the ritual in which the Anatolian religious ideas sought to express themselves. This order must not be taken as implying the opinion that myth is, either logically or chronologically, prior to ritual. On the contrary, ritual comes first, and myth is secondary: myth grows around the rite, and explains it or justifies it or enlarges it to the popular mind. But myth begins from the very origin of ritual, and there was probably never a time when rite existed freefrom myth. The human mind must from the beginning describe and think about and imagine to itself the reason and nature of the religious rite; and its thought and fancy and description express themselves as myth. But the ritual has perished, while fragments of the mytho- logy have been preserved; and it is through the myths, compared with some rare pieces of evidence about the rites, that we penetrate back to the ritual.
(1) The origin of ritwal.—The ritual of the Anatolian religion is very imperfectly known. So far as we are able to discover, it is founded entirely on the idea that the Divine nature is the model according to which human life must be arranged. The god, or rather the Goddess- Mother, is. the teacher, protector, corrector, and guide for an obe- dient family of children. What they ought to do is to imitate the Divine life and practise the divinely revealed methods. The ritual is the whole body of Divine teaching. The sacrifice, as the method whereby man can approach and seek help from Divine power, has been revealed by God; so the god was at the beginning the first priest, and the ritual is the repetition before successive genera- tions of mankind of the original life of the Divine beings. The successive priests in the cultus were each of them representative for the time being of the god ; each wore the dress and insignia, and even bore the name of the god.