بخش ۷: اسطوره و استعاره
Chapter Seven
MYTH AND METAPHOR
The world is a generalized form of the spirit, its symbolic picture.
Novatts
In the last two chapters we have frequently come up against mythical traditions, which not only occupy an essential position in the general culture of peoples, but constitute an important function for the artistic productions of each period of culture. The myth lays down over earlier tradition the particular cultural stratum of the present and is thus, at least in its higher forms, the best, at times the only, source for our knowledge of that present’s ideologies. The immortality-ideologies which have been discussed in previous chapters, and which lead to religious or artistic creation, find either their contemporary expression or their later interpretation in the many mythical traditions of the peoples, whether primitive or advanced to culture. These myths are all constructed on the “ micromacrocosmic ” scheme, within which, however, we can establish a development from the primitive macrocosmic pattern to the more advanced, microcosmic art-forms. The peculiarity of the myth in this is that — in varying degrees, it is true — it not only presents the ideology, so to say, in theoretical form, but simultaneously interprets it, so that it appears as a forerunner of the poetic art, to which it is in any case allied by its narrative form. In the myth, however, which a people tells of its heroes or saviours the hero’s creative activity appears as an activity of doing (or suffering), while the individual poet of later times finds his true creativity in the making of the story itself. But this profound difference cannot be explained only in the psychological passage from the hero to the poet, but springs from a simultaneous and parallel process which transforms the ideologically creative myth into the metaphor, and this survives into modern poetry as a decorative ornament.’ Let us start with a coarse macrocosmic myth of pretty high antiquity, which will lead us straight into the problem of its making. In the Edda we are told that the world was made from the parts of the body of the dismembered giant Ymir:
From Ymir’s flesh was the world made; From the legs the mountains, and the heavens from the skull Of the icy giant, and from his sweat the sea.
VAFTHRUDISMAL
Grimm in his Deutsche Mythologie (IV, 464 et seq.) gives a detailed description, made up from various versions, where we have mountains as bones, rocks as teeth, heaven as skull, clouds as sweat, trees as hair, etc., and in which, side by side with the view that the gods tore the giant to pieces in order to make the world from his limbs, another account is mentioned in which the giant himself makes the world from his own limbs. This motif, which runs all through the mythology of all peoples, of doubt whether the world was created by, or out of, the gods (by men), is apparently not at all an academic question, but an essential part: in fact, as we shall see, one of the chief motifs in the construction of myths. Another Indo-Germanic tradition of the same sort in the Vedas resolves the primary enigma by making Viraj, the firstcreated being, to be sacrificed by the gods, and all the parts of the world to be made from his various parts. Another Vedic tradition, preserved in a late hymn of the Rigveda, tells how the gods made the world from the dismembered body of the primitive giant Purushu: the heavens from his head, the earth from his feet, the sun from his eye, the moon from his spirit (mouth), animals and men from his fat or his legs; while the gods Indra and Agni spring from his mouth. In this story, however, as it seems to me, two different traditions are recognizable from the outset, and their separate study may perhaps carry us a first step beyond the contradictory versions.
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1 For the relation of the poet to the hero whose heir he is, see my book: Don Juan and the Double, and a later chapter of this book, ‘‘The Poetic Art and its Hero.”
The beginning of the story — the creation of earth and heaven with its constellations — does not presuppose any dismembering, but rather represents a cosmic extension of man into the universe: the foot which touches the earth is extended to be the earth itself, the head which stretches heavenward is raised and magnified to be the heaven itself —in a term of Schopenhauer’s (which incidentally contains his whole teaching), we are dealing with a “ makanthropos.” This interpretation, which I had deduced directly from the story, was confirmed by another version of the Creation in the Vedas themselves, in which the world grows out of the egg and the young contained within it, as a human being grows from conception till birth. When the prime being of the egg divided, the one half became the earth, the other the heavens; from that which contained the young came the mountains, from the thin membrane which held the moisture came the lightning and the clouds, from the veins the seas, from the moisture of the body the ocean. The embryo itself became the sun. This doctrine of the World-Egg, which plays so great a part* in the cosmology of civilized peoples, is certainly of later origin than that of violent dismemberment — which always concerns a giant, whom we have just identified as the Makanthropos. The latter therefore appears to be the original form, at least of this Indo-Germanic tradition of the Creation; and we must leave it undecided whether this breaking-up of the Makanthropos, who is already the world, into smaller microcosms reflects the fundamental growth-process of everything organic, division into smaller entities — which, for that matter, is the explanation of the creation of worlds which we ourselves adopt..
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1 Robert Eisler’s monumental work: Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, treats particularly of the Orphic doctrines of the World-Egg, from which Eros also comes (pp. 416 et seq. ). For the egg as cosmological idea, cf. Lukas in Zestschrift fur Volkskunde, IV, 227, and his Grundbegriffe in den Kosmogonitn. Castren (Finnische Mythen, transl. Schiefner, Pp. 287) says that the myth of the egg is found not only in Finland, but in Indian, Persian, Chinese, Phoenician, and Greek myths.
A later Brahminic doctrine, at any rate, shows this rude theory of creation transformed into a religious explanation of sacrifice, which strikes us as quite Christian. According to this, not only was the world originally created from the sacrifice of the creator, Prajapati, Lord of Creatures, but it is continually renewed to the present day by a repetition of the mystic sacrifice in the priestly ritual. Daily the body of the Creator is broken up, daily reconstituted for the renewal and maintenance of the universe, which would otherwise break up and fall in pieces. Thus the world is being ever created anew through the self-sacrifice of the God with whom the sacrificial priest identifies himself — at any rate in a symbolic ritual of animal sacrifice. The emphasis laid in this tradition on the creative selfsacrifice of the God brings us back to the original problem. The question may remain open whether the primal creation occurred as a result of self-sacrifice or of being sacrificed and dismembered; all we need now is to emphasize that idea which is common to all these versions of creation and which we met with in the building-sacrifice — namely, that the construction of the world also, apparently, demands a living sacrifice, and later traditions, which survive right into our nursery and drawing-room games, will show that not only mythical battles and games-contests but real wars have at bottom turned on the: question of who the sacrificial officiator is to be. At any rate these Indo-Germanic versions of the Creation show that we are dealing with a makanthropic phenomenon which makes man, actively or passively, into the creator of the world. These myths therefore show us not only the first, but the most gigantesque type of artist, who creates the world not so much in his own image as from out of himself. But having regard to the most primitive immortality-ideology already discussed, which makes the process of decay into one of (animal) rebirth, I should like to maintain that the sacrificing of man for the creation of the world has its origin in the same feeling of imperishableness, and that the becoming a victim, as it still survives in Christianity, is only a voluntary acceptance of this interconnexion of dying, decay, and resurrection. Naturally men try to divert this self-sacrifice on to others or to represent it as punishment; but the basic question is how men ever came to the idea, which rejects sexual generation in favour of the belief in metamorphosis and thus makes of death only a change of form. These myths too, therefore, contradict the superficial conclusion that there is immanent in man a biological creative urge that has its origin in sex. For the genital organs themselves, which are the essentials in human reproduction, have no part in the Creation; even where they are mentioned (chiefly in the cosmologies of highly developed Oriental civilizations), it is a negative happening: that is, the male reproductive organ is cut off, the god is robbed of his masculine reproductive power, he is castrated. The relation between the mythic motive of dismemberment and the ideas of castration and rebirth I have dealt with at length in Chapter ix of my Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage, where I have discussed the material bearing on this and on the myth of world-parents, from the standpoint of individual psychology. In this connexion, so far as it concerns us here, it is noticeable that all myths of Creation, both individual and cosmic, show the same development which we found in the origin of house-forms. The creation is originally maternal and then gradually becomes “ personal ”: that is, what is first produced by the mother, whether it is an individual or a world, is later built up by the individual ego, the hero himself; only relatively late, in the period of patriarchy and patriarchal rights, is it attributed to the male reproductive principle. This process, which I have described especially in Seelenglaube und Psychologie and particularly in the chapter on the “ Age of Sexuality,” is represented to us in a decisive transitional stage in the material which I dealt with in my Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909). There the hero is born of the mother, exposed by the father, and nourished and protected by the animal. These universal cultural myths thus represent the struggle of the rising father-ideology — which implies that of sexual immortality — not only with the older matrilinear organization of the family, but also with the self-creative tendencies of the individual, who, as hero, not only denies descent from the father, but attempts to make himself independent of the mother. Hence birth from the mother is replaced by birth from the water, and the mother’s nurture by animal suckling — this last has probably a bearing on the significance of the animal as mother-substitute, giving nurture, warmth, and protection. This birth of the hero from water, however, I even then was able to bring into relation with the myths which tell of the origin of the world from water. Whether or not this macrocosmic water-birth of the earth (Frobenius’s world-pole myths of the Oceanians) can be deduced from the human fcetal condition (in water) and its birth-processes, we have certainly in the myths an identification of human and cosmic birth, a tendency to deny individual descent from parents and to associate it with the eternal birth of the cosmos. Now, there is a set of myths, assembled by Frobenius in a class as “ world-parent myths,” * which seem to me to symbolize psychologically that stage of development in which the individual, the hero, rises from the réle of creature to that of creator and even self-creator. In these myths the young son forces asunder the united primal parents (not seldom when they are in sexual intercourse), so that the father moves upwards as the heavens, the mother remaining below as the earth.
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1 Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes, Vol. I (Berlin, 1904), pp. 268 et seq.
This conception of the heavens as father, and the earth as mother, is found all over Oceania, China, ancient India, among Semites, Greeks, and the Nordic peoples, and occurs even in America and Africa. In the last case, however, the world is represented as made not by, but out of, the parents, and as so made by the son, who thus annuls the fact of his own creation by those parents. This seems to me also to be the meaning of the incest with the mother which takes place in some of these “ world-parent ” myths, following on the separation of father and mother. The son thus begets himself from the mother as his own father, and he is thus assured in this rebirth of the heroic immortality. However that may be, these parent myths can in any case have only arisen at a comparatively late stage of culture, for they presuppose not merely knowledge of the father’s place in procreation, but the acceptance of this in the social immortalityideology (see Seelenglaube und Psychologie). Consequently, too, the earliest imaginings of the world-picture, as F. Borck * has collected them, are free of these incestuous family complications. The primal form of the world-picture is thought by Borck to be that which rises direct from the observation of the three kingdoms of earth, air, and water, as- we find them concretized in Mesopotamia in the divine Triad of the Sumerians. The second he takes to be that of the four points of the compass, according to which earth and heaven are divided into four, an idea which, in conjunction with that of the four phases of the moon, leads to the conception of the primal god. Finally, man’s earth comes more and more to take the form of a fifth part; in Borck’s view the idea of a mountain of God on earth also belongs with this type.
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1 Die Geschichte des Weltbildes (Ex Oriente Lux, Ul, Heft 2-5), Leipzig, 1930.
The increasing importance of the earth as the dwelling-place of man, he considers, explains the origin of the air as sixth and that of the underworld as seventh world, though he admits that “the formal system of the Sumerian world-picture, with its insistence on the seven—the idea of the seven worlds — had much to do with it” (op. cit., p. 5). On the other hand, we have seen that the sevenfold division of the Oriental picture of the heavens is closely connected with, if not directly dependent on, the spinal column of man (and of the higher animals, for that matter). In any case, whatever may have been the original picture, we are only concerned, in this account of the genesis of human creative impulse, with the connexion of the microcosmic and human elements that Borck does not touch upon. The liberation of the creative individual, of the hero, from
the paternal relation, as we saw it expressed in the myths of the world-parents, has perhaps its original, and certainly its clear, antithesis in a series of myths which have as their subject the liberation of the hero from his maternal origins. The classical example of these is the “whale myths,” which Frobenius collected, chiefly in Oceania, but which have also penetrated from the old Oriental cultures into Greek mythology, the latter being here as in general the point of assembly and junction of all mythological ideas, and for a good reason, since Greek culture fulfils the process of the heroic liberation of the individual in the climax of self-creation, from which subsequently Christianity was to be the reaction. The swallowing myths themselves, of which we may take the biblical story of Jonah as the type, have in outline the following form: The hero, whether as boy or as adult, is swallowed (often along with his mother, brothers, etc.) by a vast monster. Within its belly he floats for some time on the sea; then (in many versions) he cuts off the heart of the fish to still his hunger, lights a fire in its inside, until he is finally spewed up on land by the monster or makes his own way out by ripping open its belly. Against the solar interpretation of Frobenius — the rising and setting of the sun—I adduced at the time the obvious birth-symbolism, which for every impartial student is beyond challenge.’ But in the present connexion I wish rather to indicate the motive which led men to put, whether it be the birthprocess or the course of the sun, into mythical symbols. Now, one of the motives disclosed by the tradition we recognize clearly as the self-creative tendency of the individual, which expresses itself in the ripping-up of the mother’s womb and the heroic form of birth. This tendency would also then explain the fusion of microcosmic and macrocosmic symbols, whereby. the individual would be raised above the ordinary course of biological birth and assimilated to the ever-recurring heavenly bodies. In this sense the period in the whale’s belly represents also the period in the underworld, whither the sun descends every day, to be reborn again the next morning. Here, then, as everywhere in the self-creative tendency of the individual, we find the immortality-ideology which appears in mythic form as rebirth of the self (incest) and artistically as eternalization of the self (in the work). In the “swallowing” myths of civilized peoples which have been studied by Hans Schmidt (Jona, 1907) we find the victory over the monster as a typically heroic action, and the first and essential deed of the hero is just this liberation from the parents that constitutes the birth of the self. It is true that, in the fashion typical of legend, the deed is set in relation with the wooing of a maiden, which at this stage replaces the primal wooing of the mother. Thus Heracles, according to the older tradition in Lycophron, wins Hesione by leaping down the throat of a shark, and remains three days in the inside of the monster until he cuts off its liver from within.’ Perseus also, according to Lycophron, is swallowed by a sea-monster and kills it by way of the liver, which is regarded as the seat of life.
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1 Myth of the Birth of the Hero, English translation, New York, 1914. 2 In the still older version of Hellanicus of Mytilene (second half of the fifth century,
B.c.) Heracles descended into the bowels of the monster and destroyed its entrails (cf. Welcker: Alte Denkmaler, Il, 378).
A link between this tradition and the cosmic dismembermentmyths from which we started is found in the Babylonian Creation myth, the Story of the Seven Tablets (Enuma elis, ¢. 2000 B.c.), which tells of the creation of the world by the youngest god, Marduk, out of Tiamat, who is conceived as the primal sea. Tiamat, who had risen against the gods, could only be overcome by the youngest god, who was to cut and destroy her inner being, the heart, with his spear — that is, he had to destroy her life, whereas her body, under the orders of the gods, he cut in two, making the one part thereof into the heavens, and the other into the ocean. In this old tradition the universe arises from the body of the primal mother, not, as in the world-parent myths, from the primal pair, nor, as in the mutilation myths, from the parts of the body of the individual, either as giant or as god. There is a further difference in the emphasis on the preliminary death which is prerequisite for the creation of the world out of the (dead) body. Now, whether we regard Tiamat macrocosmically as primal matter (Tia-mat, primal water) or microcosmically as mother (-body), the Babylonian myth certainly tells of the conquest of this prime-symbol by the creative god, who later, in the Bible, brings the earth, and all that therein is, to being by his mere word. Perhaps the only biblical exception to this creation by the word — which appeals to us as the first poet would appeal —is the Genesis story of the creation of man by God according to his own image; but we are not at once told how, for the origin of man from the earth is only affirmed later on his expulsion from Paradise under a curse. Now, the latter has obviously a death-significance, and it is only secondarily that it seems to be transferred back to man’s origin. The creation of woman from the rib of man is, however, as I have shown elsewhere, so barefaced an attempt to remodel the genuine content in the sense of the masculine world-picture that it can hardly be called creative; the less so as God still appears as the creator, and man is condemned to be mortal creature.
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1 Volkerpsychologische Parallelen xu den infantilen Sexualtheorien (1912); republished in Psychoanalytische Beitrage zur Mythenforschung, second edition (2922).
For in the making of the human being (the man) from earth there persists still, it seems, the original descent from the mother; * only, we have before us the antithesis to the mythic creation of the earth from man. Later traditions, arising under Christian influence, then carried this parallelism all through and made the first man appear as a complete inversion of the first creation of the world. In medieval legends Adam, the first man, is formed of seven substances: the body from the earth, the bones of stone, the blood of water, the hair of grass, the eyes from the sun, the breath from the wind, the thoughts from the clouds.’ This path which man has trodden — passing from the world made out of the body, via man made from the earth (Adam), to the Christ born of the spirit — includes the birth of the artist as well. He appears first as sculptor of the world, making the universe macrocosmically from himself; then in due course from this actual “making” on the basis of partition and magnifying, there springs a symbolic creation of form on the basis of the killing of what is living (Tiamat); and this leads finally to the pure poetic form in which a world is born from nothingness by the Word. But the biblical creative force of the word has its origin, as we know today, in the magical significance of the Word, which has preserved for us along with the creative also the dangerous aspect of word-magic, as it survives even today in our curses. Thus the name of God may not be taken in vain by the Jews; in fact he has no real name at all, being called the Almighty, the Lord. But he reveals himself to his people in a far higher degree through the Word than ever did his Oriental predecessors, who still spoke in symbolic signs which the priest had to interpret.
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1 The creation of man is also brought into relation with the earth by many primitive peoples, probably because of the same principle of inversion, according to which man must rise again thence whither he goes in death. (The material is in Chantepie: Lebrbuch der Religions-geschichte,. I, third edition, pp. 36 et seq., and in Ehrenreich: Mythen und Legenden der stidamerikanischen Volker, p. 33.)
2 See R. Kohler: Kleine Schriften, 1, pp. 1 et seq.; also a text published by E. Barsov (1886) of a sixteenth-century manuscript. (V. Jagi¢: '' Slavische Beitrage zu den biblischen Apokty phen, 1: Die altkirchenslavischen Texte des Adambuchs.”’ Denkschriften der haiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna, 1893). In Hastings's Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. I, p. 86, there is among other things a reference to the Book of the Secrets of Enoch (xxx, 8, et seq.), according to which Adam is made of seven substances.
The Word of the Semitic god admits of no doubt; it is revealed not as a hint from heaven which may be interpreted anyhow, but as a law, all interpretation of which was originally forbidden, and the knowledge of which was kept secret like primitive word-magic. The Jews, however, were not only forbidden to take the name of God in vain, but also to make any images of him, which explains the absence of all pictorial art as well as their unalterable faith in the spoken word of the Law. They have, moreover, no cultural material, as other peoples have, and this not so much because they had no land or home — for, after all, they had one, ‘and lost it, in Canaan — but because the creative word is incapable of direct cultural development otherwise than in the direction of spiritualization with its climax in Christianity. If we add to the biblical significance of creative word-magic the doctrine of the Pneuma and the Logos as worked out by later Hellenistic philosophers, we obtain the spirit of Christianity; though its greatness lies not so much in this spiritualization (which really brings it back close to the animistic idea of the soul) as in its humanization, from which, indeed, even rebirth is possible for the modern individual. Only, in the struggles of the Middle Ages the Church, which had already won its temporal power, ranges itself on the side of the spiritual, while at the same time in its myth and legend it lays the emphasis on the human. If in the Old Testament it is still the breath which gives man life, in Christianity the spirit of man is already a soul; the Logos, which in the Bible only creates the rest of the world, here creates the soul also. In the Old Testament God becomes: mouth —in the New, spirit. The reason why man also is spiritualized in the New Testament lies in the fact that the Word not merely possesses a stronger creative force—the Lord makes macro- and microcosmos by it alone —but the spirit manifested in the Word makes something that is permanent, as the Word itself is permanent. The world, made of organic material, may one day die, just as its mythical creator, the hero, dies; while what the spirit forms through the Word, or the Logos, is permanent and immortal. Hence Christianity extends the Logos-creation to man, who in the Old Testament is the one and only created thing that is mortal. The rude artisan’s making of the world, whether from the body of the mother or from his own body of the divinized (magnified) ego, represents indeed only the primitive stage preceding generation by the Word or creation from the spirit. At the root of both, however, the fashioning out of material and the creating from the spirit, is the primal creative urge of the individual to raise himself from creature to creator. The course of development from action to speech and thence to pure thinking includes always, even though the magical character adheres still to its method, an ever-increasing emphasis on the purely intellectual. This development is paralleled in the bodily symbols by the rise from the inner being, the entrails, via the neck and throat *— the voice — to the head, in the same way as we have seen in the growth of architecture.” Hence the inner parts, together with the sex-organs, which are internal, at least in woman, and in any case belong to the lower body, play no part in the creation of the world: in fact, in the Tiamat myth and the corresponding hero-stories the inner organs, the liver, the entrails, etc., are violently removed before the creation can begin or the hero can make the maiden his own. The reason might be (and probably in later times the actual interpretation was) an esthetic one; but in my belief this differentiation of kernel and envelope (which may possibly have its influence even on fashions) is one more link with the immortality-belief. The original seat of life, and consequently that of the later soul, was originally localized in the lower body — the liver, the midriff, kidneys, and only later on in the heart.
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1 From the seven-graded tower of the neck, according to an old physiological Logos doctrine (found also in the Old Testament) emerges the Pneuma of the Logos, the voice, which, according to Hebrew and Greek ideas, is organized into the seven stages of the vowels and the seven tones of the diatonic scale (E. Hommel).
2 The same development is found in the vase, which is differently formed (or artistically adorned) according to the stage of culture; at first a symbol for the womb (as I showed in The Trauma of Birth on the basis of the material collected by Fuhrmann), it finally becomes a vase (the head) with neck, ears, mouth, etc.
In the creation of the world from the external parts of thebody, the intention was perhaps to make it participate in the immortality of the internal by its assimilation to, or extension into, the cosmic. Here we meet with the same uncertainty as to the real seat of the immortal in man: the same underlying reason for the changes in burial customs also determines the changes in the localization of the soul. Thus, gradually, the seat of life in the lower part of the body was dissociated from the seat of the soul, which had once been united with it in a single organ of the lower body,’ but finally became established in the head. The lower “mouth” of the woman, which “makes” man materially, becomes finally identified with the upper mouth of man from which streams his speech, the Logos, taking artistic form in the word. The word, then, is also artistic material out of which intellectual man can create freely, and consequently the art of words is the culmination of artistic creation. The power of the Bible’s language shows itself, both in point of monumental content (absorbing into itself the whole of the higher Oriental cultures) and in point of formal significance, to be its very essence. I mean, the Bible does not merely depict the creation of the world and birth of man, but, through its expressive power, actually represents it: that is to say it 7s a world-creation in words, and in this fact lies its incomparable literary glory. If we pass from this primal poetic creation to another mighty artist in language, the singer of the Homeric poems, we notice the difference at once: the Bible actually creates the world in words, Homer merely depicts that world; I say “ merely ” in regard to the spirit of the poetry, and not to the quality of the language, for Homer’s language is in its way unique, like that of the Bible. Before commenting on Homer’s language, let us note the essential character of his poetry, which finds its natural expression in its language.
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1 Seelenglaube und Psychologie, last chapter, ‘‘ Natur und Geist,"’ p. 188.
The Bible is wholly dominated by the creative God, who effects all doing and happening in the universe and on earth by his word, but in the Homeric world, which is neither created by the gods nor even really governed by them, it is human passions which control events on earth: the “wrath of Achilles,” which the Iliad’s first word —pijvis —sets up as its motive, and Odysseus’ delight in adventure, which keeps him all those years from home, although he must needs make the ill will of the gods responsible for this. It is well known that the peculiar mark of Homeric language is the simile, whose diminutive we still recognize in the “ornamental” adjective.’ In explaining this, even so deep a study as that of Karl Meister* gets no further than showing that these adjectives do not represent drawled phrases or poetic padding, but are evidence of the archaistic quality of epic poetry, which often writes itself on the poet’s behalf. “ Something of the splendour and glory of early days lay even in the form of language, just as the bronze shields and chariots were retained by the poetry of an age of iron and riding” (p. 244). But this penetration of earlier language and cultural properties into the Homeric world, which the poet expresses with this antiquated language, has remained characteristic of this stage of poetry, and is thus not part of the epic form as such. “ How far,” says Meister, “do the typical adjectives in the Mahabharata, the ineid, the Nibelungenlied fall short of the vividness of Homer!” But the true quality of Homeric language is to be found in the famous similes, which are not only picturesque but at times literally plastic. I should therefore like to call them, in contrast to other forms of metaphor to be discussed later, spatial metaphors, since they rise above the merely visual to the solid. In other words, in the epic artlanguage of Homer the original creative power of the word survives not so much in the contriving of an artistic actuality as in the revitalization of a lost reality, which finds expression even in the content, in that it clings to superseded cultural forms.
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1 For the nature of these epithets, of which the commonest (in European poetry at any rate) is the adjective, see E. Elster: Literaturformen, II (Halle, 1911), pp. 160 et seq.
2 Die homerische Kunstsprache (Leipzig, 1921).
To make this peculiar quality of Homer’s metaphor still clearer, let us mark the quality of his most direct modern antithesis, as found in the master of modern metaphor, Marcel Proust. In contrast to Homer’s spatial metaphor Proust's is temporal; that is, it attempts, by the temporal association of the present with the past, to restore the latter to life, just as Homer puts it in living form before us by means of plastic presentation. The two kinds of metaphor are, however, distinct from each other in the same way as space and time are conceptually and factually distinct. Space is a concrete idea, time an abstract, and thus Homer’s metaphor is plastic, Proust's intellectualist. In fact, the temporal quality of Proust’s metaphor is typical not only of his famous similes but of his whole work, which one might take as a single gigantic metaphor (Le Temps retrouvé).* But in Proust the intellectualist outlook — which is almost a self-evident necessity in the modern poet — proves that at bottom it is a matter of ideas of death and the fear of death, of will to maintain the actual life-process in himself, rather than of a will to reconquer the past, which could only come out as a neurotic expression thereof. This fact, characteristic of Proust’s metaphors, that they dominate not only his language but his whole work, is probably true of Homer too, and quite emphatically so of Shakspere, whose metaphors, in contrast to those of the others, I would call dynamic. And this is not a consequence of his dramatic form; on the contrary, it was probably the dynamic quality of his metaphor which forced him to the drama. Shakspere’s metaphors are distinguished from the other two by the fact that they do not associate the past and the present, either spatially or temporally, but pile them up, tumbling over each other, to such an extent that there is at times an impression almost of bombast.
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1 Arnaud Dandieu's admirable work, Marcel Proust, sa révélation psychologique (Paris, 1930), has given me valuable suggestions for this discussion of metaphor, -though it had already been influenced by Heinz Werner's comprehensive study: Urspriinge der Metapher (Leipzig, 1919); the latter established, indeed, a change of meaning from primitive to modern metaphor, but only a change in point of content.
More than this, his whole work reflects a dynamic metaphor both in its dramatic form and even in the individual characters, which appear frequently as personified metaphors: thus Othello is unrestrainedly jealous like a primitive; Shylock inhumanly avaricious /ike the devil of gold himself. As I was able to show by the example of the Shylock figure alone, this simile method of representation corresponds to an original identity: Shylock really does incorporate the devil of gold as Hamlet does the old immortality-belief. And so dynamic metaphor, too, though in yet another way, achieves the representation of an old lost ideology, which survives (as it were, incognito) under the cover of the metaphor, but lives with its old creative vigour entire. As the Word, then, in its original magical significance (which, even in the Bible, still leads to actual creation) is capable of working miracles, so the genuine poetic art, as we find it in epic, dramatic, and lyric form, has replaced the old power of creation through its capacity to revivify in metaphor the lost past of the individual or of the people, by associating it with the present by means of the art of language and of metaphor. Thus the primal creation by the word is replaced by a re-engendering of the past not only as to content but also as to form—namely, in metaphor. Looking at the unconscious creativity in the poet, Carl du Prel has proved this point notably for lyric poetry; and he finds under the individual unconscious a palzontological stage, of the nature-observation and nature-quickening, which he pursues to the threshold of the mythic.’ In this process, which du Prel, particularly in lyric, follows out from primitive contemplation through Classical art to modern poetry, the chief part is played by the transference of bodily attitudes, gestures, and affections to other subjects, animate or inanimate. The poet not only may speak of the “ backbone” of mountains, the “bosom” of the sea, the “ tongue” of a glacier, the “ head ” of a rock, the “jaws” of hell, but may compare the boughs of a tree to arms, a summit to the crown of the head. All these metaphors depend on the micro- macrocosmic relation which leads at one time to the humanizing of the world, and at another to the enlarging of man to the proportions of the world.
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1 Psychologie der Lyrik. Beitrage zur Analyse der dichterischen Phantasie (Leipzig, 1880).
This process of creative heightening which underlies all metaphor we find preserved in the old anatomical terms, some of which have survived into our own medical language. E. Hommel has devoted a very instructive article* to this, in which he studies the history of anatomy as from the standpoint of the ancient East and its premisses. He finds that our own anatomical nomenclature is built up on the Eastern system of anatomical cosmology or topography, which mythologically interprets the various points or organs of man (and of animals) as those of a microcosm. We have already mentioned Atlas, who holds up the vault of the skull, and the gums regarded as the roof of heaven (palatum), and the seven vertebre of the neck-column as the seven heavens. We have dealt in detail with the navel as mid point of the earth, and with the liver as the centre of human life and therefore as the macrocosmic mirror of world-happenings. We will add the example, already incidentally mentioned, of the Greek meaning of “zon” as the spinal marrow, on the silver thread of which, according to ancient Jewish exegesis, the life of man, his zon, depends; and we may allude also to the conception of the dark courses of the os Petrosum as a labyrinth. The description of the external elevation of the female pudenda as “mons Veneris” is part of the same idea, as is the name of the “ Adam’s apple ” of the throat.’ Hommel’s exposition limits itself to the names of the organs of mouth and neck and refers only incidentally to the wider relationships which force themselves on our attention and with which we have already dealt in relation to the artist’s creative impulse, In the anatomical section of Plato’s Timeus, the head with its organs is compared to a royal castle, the breast with the heart and other organs to the retainers’ quarters, which are separated by the midriff from the belly—from which, as symbol of the earth, the water springs, as in Babylonian stories.”
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1 Archiv fiir Geschichte der Medizin, Bd. IL (ag19).
2 The solar plexus, the nerve-system called the “ web of the sun,’’ to which already Greek intuition removed the seat of the soul, has recently celebrated a resurrection in Carl Ludwig Schleich’s theory of the Sympathetic.
The cabbalistic work Zohar carries this further and compares parts of the temple with parts of the body —a system originating in Babylon (where it was used for augural and later for astrological purposes) ; even in distant Mexico or New Zealand, to take another example, we find the relation of the parts of the body to the signs of the day employed for similar purposes (Fuhrmann: Mexiko, I, 25). All these originally very real and vital relations, which decisively influenced the fortunes, not only of men, but of whole lands and peoples, we find later reduced to the level of metaphors —as, for instance, in Shakspere’s famous comparisons of the state to a human organism in Coriolanus, I, i, and also Julius Cesar, Il, i. This, taken from tradition,’ as the poet himself indicates (“it may be you have heard it”), may stand for almost the whole development, as we have described it from the cultural-historical point of view. In Shakspere the various parts of the body begin to rebel against the belly, reproaching it with its idleness, since it calmly occupies the centre of the body and obtains plentiful nourishment. Sight and hearing, intellect and feelings, particularly — that is, the higher faculties (of the head) — complain of the work they have to perform for it:
The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye, The counsellor heart, the arm our soldier, Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter, With other muniments and petty helps In this our fabric, if that they —
What then? ...
Should by the cormorant belly be restrain’d,
Who is the sink o’ the body.?
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1 Kuchler: Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Assyrisch-Babylonischen Medizin Leipzig, 1904). 2 Already in the language of Paul, early Christianity spiritualizes this old picture of the body of the state; the saints united in the kingdom of God form a body whose members are the individual believers and whose head is Christ.
And the answer of the belly, which asserts with emphasis its value as the centre that supplies the whole bodily economy with its nourishment—while it retains for itself only the crumbs — is here for good reasons opposed to the demands of the higher self. But the further application of the comparison introduces a further element in macrocosmically symbolizing the Roman state, the Senate being compared to the belly, and Menenius Agrippa, together with the citizens to whom he tells the story, to the mute parts of the body dependent on the belly (Menenius apostrophizes one of the citizens as the big toe). This primeval microcosmic symbolism, sunk here to the level of a simile, was once in the ancient world-view truly alive, and it not only contributed to the forming of myths but (as we shall show in the next chapter) decisively influenced the formation of language. Between that and its highest artistic development in metaphor lies the period of the myth, which itself developed as one gigantic metaphor from language. Therefore, before we pass to speech-creation and its artistic significance, let us cast a glance at speech-formation, as we find it anthropomorphized and reflected in the myth. The tendency to transfer particular parts of the body to surrounding nature is found richly evidenced in all languages, even in those of highly civilized peoples.* Thus, the Assyrians spoke of the nose or crown of a tree, the mouth of a door, a tongue of fire, the rib of a ship, the arm of a river (its edge or bank) and its head —caput aque = source. But the characteristic development among higher languages beyond the primitive seems to me to lie not only in the formation of independent abstract ideas out of these anthropomorphic comparisons, but also in the micro- macrocosmic world-picture which is peculiar to them.
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1 Morel: De vocalibus 1875), and, generally, partium corporis in lingua graca metaphorice dictis (diss., Geneva, Knortz: Der menschliche Korper in Sage und Sprichwort (Wirzburg,1909).
2 This does not apply to animals. In plants the transference of animal names seems preferred: stork’s bill, dog’s tongue, etc. See Hunger: Pp: 150), and Dragendorff: Heilpfanzen (Stuttgart, 1898; p. 1). é 226 ieeGs ger: Babyl. Tieromina (Berlin, ieromi
It is only by the macrocosmization of the human body through the naming of its parts that myth came out of language. In other words, the myths which deal with the creation of the world out of the human body are really speechmyths which represent man’s conquest (that is, his creation) of the world by naming the objects (that is, by metaphorically expressing them through speech). This creative power of language, which does not merely “tell” the myths, but forms them physioplastically, will be dealt with in the next chapter. Let us return now to the basis of the whole process in the formation of language. This is the fact, established by philologists, that the “ names of parts of the body are, along with the numbers, the bestpreserved branch of a vocabulary.” * The names of the most important parts of the body, inner as well as outer, go back in most cases to the oldest times; they seem, according to Dietrich,” to belong to the time of undifferentiation. Harri Holma in his fundamental work on the names of the parts of the body in Assyrian and Babylonian (Leipzig, 1911) explains this primeval phenomenon of language as follows: “ After all, his own body is man’s first field of experiment in his efforts to solve the problem of the ego and to discover its relation to the surrounding world.” In any case the “ anatomical ” articulation of the external bodily parts occurred very early; and the Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions leave no doubt that they “were possessed of a relatively abundant though in many respects incomplete anatomical knowledge.” We are astonished at the extent of their knowledge, especially when we remember that dissection was forbidden on religious grounds and was first introduced only by the Greek doctors, and that until then all knowledge of the internal organs depended on observations on the battle-field, or those made during sacrifices and over certain burial rites. Yet it is significant that there was originally no distinction between the nomenclature of the body in man and in the animals."
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1 Hirt: Indogermanen, I, p. 304.
2 Abhandlungen fur semit. Wortforschung (Leipzig, 1884).
Thus the resemblance of the human and animal structures must have been noticed very early — after all, the seven vertebre are the same in all domestic animals as in man — though, on the other hand, motives derived from the world-outlook — for example, the notion of the identity of man and animal — may have played the decisive part.” Apart from this, the Assyrian language shows, according to Holma, essentially the same character of striving after concreteness as Lévy-Bruhl has established in the primitive. Most Assyrian and, in general, Semitic prepositions are really names of concrete things in the genitive case, particularly of parts of the body: for example, Assyrian for “relax” is “let (the arm) down,” and “ frightened” is “weak in the knee.” ® It is this tendency towards the concrete and objective, moreover, that accounts in art for the localizing of psychological emotions and feclings in various parts of the body. Thus the ear was the seat of the will and of attention (also wisdom), the heart the seat of understanding; the liver, the central organ of life, was the seat of feeling and anger, the stomach the seat of wisdom, and the nose of pride (cf. “ turning up your nose”).* From the egocentric application of words, originally expressing parts of the body, to describe a prepositional relation, there later developed separate concepts for that purpose. Thus Assyrian gablu, the waist, the middle of the body, developed into a preposition “ gadal,” “in the midst of,” and finally to the idea of “ middle”; “isdu,” which is the leg, became the preposition “7di,” next to (the side of the body), and the notion of “ basis” is expressed in “ root” (compare our “foot” of the mountain).
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1 Schrader: Reallexicon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde (1901), p. 469.
2 Another peculiarity — of primitive languages as well—is that originally the parts of Particular animals had special names according to the context (sacrifice, hunting, domestic), and that these have survived in the anatomical language of the hunt (Hirt: Indogermantn; Strassburg, 1905). The same thing is to be seen at the ethical level of Persian dualism, which looks at all being and happening under the aspect of the struggle of Ormuzd and Ahriman and gives different names to the same things according as they are good or bad in a religious sense. The head and hand of the good have a different name from the skull and the claw of the bad. See E. Cassierer: Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken (1922), p. 52.
4 We shall discuss later similar ideas in Homer.
There is a further cultural function of language in the wellknown fact that the oldest measures which still survive are not only named after parts of the body but taken from them. Already in Assyrian we have the ell (ammatu), the handbreadth (qgatu), and the inch or finger (ubanu).' Very early, therefore, man became the measure of all things; but it was only through the macrocosmization of the idea, which made man a reflection of the cosmos, that the units of measure in a man’s body came to be supposed to exist in the heavens also, as in Babylonia.’ Counting as well as measuring originated in the parts of the body, but since counting presupposes the notion of plurality, we must begin by familiarizing ourselves with its expression in language. Another peculiarity of primitive language, also due to the urge for concrete specification, has been seen in the fact that these languages do not possess our general plural, but always try to express a definite plural. Hence the use of the dual and “trial” or even “quatrial,” which are less grammatical numbers than plurals with definite numbers attached to each. I think it not improbable that this definite statement of plurality is connected with the parts of the body, especially of the pairs, which absolutely demand the dual. At least this is so in the stages of more advanced differentiation, for originally similar pairs were not distinguished, as the sole of the foot and the flat of the hand, or the cheeks from the buttocks.* In any case the dual, trial, and plural formation is closely related to numerical counting, which, according to the usual idea, begins, like measurement, with the human body.
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1R. Lepsius: Die Langenmasse der Alten (Berlin, 1884).
2 The measurement of time likewise arose out of counting in human terms (Fuhrmann: New Guinea, p. 15), and to this day we have kept to such names of clock-parts as **face,”’ ““hands.”’
3 Holma says this dates from a time when no distinction was made between fourfooted animals and men.
Since most primitive peoples still count with the parts of their body, it is clear that these must first have had a name themselves. It is universally assumed that the first system of counting was that of the five fingers—to which the toes were later added in the case of larger numbers; and, as a matter of fact, the five or ten or twenty system is still widespread among old culture-peoples. But by its side the two or four system plays an important part, especially among the Indians; and this Lévy-Bruhl is disposed to relate to the four directions of the wind. I myself should be disposed to believe that here, too, the significance of the pairs of organs — their upper and lower or front and rear duplication — was the decisive influence.* In fact, I should think it possible that the whole orientation of man in the world is connected with the two sides of the body (front and back), which still have an important place in all cosmologies: for instance, the earth-goddess on her back, and the god of heaven bowed over her. My purpose here, at any rate, is to emphasize the fact that higher cultural development goes pari passu with the higher development of language, and, more, that the self-creative development of language seems to be a precondition of higher culture. One of the first and most essential steps of this higher development of language is the macrocosmization of the (already named) parts of the body — that is, cheir transference not only to the surrounding objects of nature among which man lives and with which he comes in contact, but also to the heavens and the universe, the linguistic identification being accompanied by a psychic one, tending to assimilate man to the cosmic immortality. Primitive man, as totemism in particular teaches us, remained at a materialistic level of personal immortality, which was symbolized, as our earlier study has shown, in the animal. In the higher cultures men have to use their growing knowledge of anatomy, etc., to get away from this now intolerable idea and seek a new, super-terrestrial, macrocosmic immortality. But for this language was the precondition — since the names of the parts of the body were to be transferred to the world — and this macrocosmic extension of language was subsequently justified, proved, and, so to say, made true by the creation of myths. In this sense the creation-myths we have discussed, especially the rise of the world from the members of a giant or demigod, are only grand linguistic metaphors for this projection of the parts of the body on to the whole universe.
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1 For the meaning of the “mystic” numbers, see below.
