CHAPTER V

MYTH

Panic. Tuesday. Money. Sorcery. Man.

ET us take two common English words, panic

LE

and cereal, and compare them etymologically; we owe both of them to the personages of classical mythology. Cereal comes to us from Ceres, the Roman goddess of corn and flowers, and panic is from Pan, a Greek Nature-god, who was regarded as the protector of flocks and herds. But here the resemblance ends; for not only is one Latin and the other Greek, but one is the name of an object which we can touch and see, while the other relates to that inner world of human consciousness which cannot be grasped with hands. Now it is important to notice that the word is very much more closely connected with the thing in the case of panic than in the case of cereal. Certainly, we are interested to know that one of our words for corn is derived from the name of a Roman goddess, but we do not feel that it has much effect on our own ideas about corn. We feel, in fact, that a study of the word cereal will tell us something about Rome, but very little either about corn or about ourselves. With panic it is different. In that intangible inner world words are themselves, as it were, the solid materials. Yet they are not solid as stones are, but rather as human faces, which sometimes change their

form as the inner man changes, and sometimes, remaining practically unaltered, express with the same configuration a developed personality. "Human speech and human thought," said the psychologist, Wundt, "are are everywhere coincident. ... The development of human consciousness includes in itself the development of modes of expression. Language is an essential element of the function of thinking.'

There was a time when no such word as panic existed, just as there was a time when no such word as electric existed, and in this case, as in the other, before the word first sprang into life in somebody's imagination, humanity's whole awareness of the phenomenon which we describe as 'panic' must have been a different thing. The word marks a discovery in the inner world of consciousness, just as electric 2 marks a discovery in the outer world of physical phenomena. Now it was said that the connection of the latter word, in its Greek form, with amber would be informative if we had no other means of determining the electrical properties of that substance. Words like panic are important, because we really have no other means of determining how the ancients, who lived before the days of literature and written records, thought and felt about such matters. The word enables us to realize that the early Greeks could become conscious of this phenomenon, and thus name it, because they felt the presence of an invisible being who swayed the emotions of flocks and herds. And

There is as yet no satisfactory word in English to express quite what is meant. The Germanweltanschauung' (world-outlook) is nearer to it. If, however, the word consciousness is taken not simply in its finite sense, as the opposite of unconsciousness', but rather as including a man's whole awareness of his environment, the sum total of his intellectual and emotional experiences as an individual, perhaps it may serve.

• See p. 3.

it also reveals how this kind of outlook changed slowly into the abstract idea which the modern individual strives to express when he uses the word panic. At last, as that idea grows more abstract still, the expression itself may change; yet, just as the power to think of the "quality "of an article was shown to be the gift of Plato, so it would be impossible for us to think, feel, or say such things as 'crowdpsychology' or 'herd-instinct' if the Greeks had not thought, felt, said 'Pan '-as impossible as it would be to have the leaf of a plant without first having a seed tucked into the warm earth. Hero, which originally meant a being who was half-human and half-divine, is a similar descendant from Greek religion which could not be extinguished from our vocabulary without restricting our outlook.

As to the number of words which are indirectly descended from prehistorical religious feeling, it is not possible to count them. We can only say that the farther back language as a whole is traced, the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence or malignance-what may be called the soul-qualities of natural phenomena, such as clouds or plants or animals, make a more vivid im

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Like consciousness, this word must be taken here in its very widest, metaphorical sense, as of a human ego "looking out" upon the world through the windows of memory, recognition, the senses, etc., and of the cosmos which it sees through those windows. It is obvious that the outlook of every individual will be slightly different from that of every other, also that there will be a great difference between the average outlook of broad contemporary classes, such, for instance, as learned and ignorant, artist and scientist, agnostic and Roman Catholic. The widest gulf of all is likely to be that between the average outlooks of different historical periods, and this will be increased if we are dealing with different races such as, for example, ancient Egyptians and modern Americans-for in this case the dissimilarity will extend over nearly every experience of which the human outlook is composed.

pression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances.1 Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical influènce. But, as the period which has elapsed since the beginning of the Aryan culture is only a tiny fragment of the whole epoch during which man has been able to speak, it is only in glimpses that we can perceive this; in a word here and a word there we trace but the final stages of a vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind of outlook which we loosely describe as 'mythological' to the kind which we may describe equally loosely as 'intellectual thought'. To comprehend the process fully, we must build up the rest of it in the imagination, just as, from seeing a foot of cliff crumble away at Dover, we may set wings to time and call up the immemorial formation of the English Channel.

The English words diurnal, diary, dial are derived from the Latin 'dies' (day), while journal comes to us, via the French language, from the same word. These syllables conceal among themselves the central religious conception common to the Aryan nations. As far back as we can trace them, the Sanskrit word dyaus', the Greek 'zeus' (accusative dia '), and 'dia'), the Teutonic 'tiu' were all used in contexts where we should use the word sky; but the same words were also used to mean God, the Supreme Being, the Father of all the other gods-Sanskrit 'Dyaus pitar', Greek 'Zeus pater', Illyrian Deipaturos', Latin 'Juppiter' (old form 'Diespiter'). We can best understand what this means if we consider how the English word heaven and the French 'ciel' are still used for a similar double purpose, and how

We may compare, unless we are enthusiastic naturalists, the enormously different impression made upon ourselves by two such outwardly similar creatures as a cockroach and a ladybird.