JACOB BRYANT was one of the most renowned English mythologists of the end of the eighteenth century-though perusal of his work may make the reason for his renown at first puzzling. He was born in 1715, and died at a ripe age in 1804. His career was spent as an antiquarian, librarian, and mythologist, mostly under the patronage of the Marlboroughs (who were his quite lavish financial supporters). His writings focussed on antiquities and religious history: he wrote on Josephus as a witness of Jesus, on the language of the Gypsies, on there never having been a Troy, on the plagues of Egypt. Bryant also edited and helped get Robert Wood's landmark essay on Homer expanded and republished in 1775. Bryant's reputation is however entirely tied to his A New System, or, an Analysts 0/ Ancient Mythology of 1774. This went into a second edition in 1775-76 (in three volumes) and a third edition in 1807 (in six volumes). John Wesley thought enough of the work to publish his own abridgment of it, while John Richardson (with Sir William Jones's help) saw fit to publish an attack.

William Blake was an apprentice to the engraver of the New System, James Basire, and Blake himself seems to have designed one or more of the plates in the hook. Moreover, Blake later incorporated much of Bryant into his own poetry and mythic system. Indeed, it is doubtless Blake's name that has kept Bryant from vanishing. To come on Bryant's mythic work of 1774 is to feel oneself not in 1774 but in 1674. For Bryant's real kin among the mythologists are those late seventeenthcentury polymaths like Bochart, Kircher, John Spencer, or Marsham. Like these, Bryant held the Bible jo be the single text and history needed to explain all pagan mytb. Bryant also thought etymologizing and scholastic collation of texts relating to rite and dogma an adequate method. The textually myopic methods and pious assumptions of Bochart and others were of course a chief target of the entire enlightenment revolution in myth, but Bryant writes as if the force of Fontenelle's or Freret's or Brosses's arguments and evidence had not decisively impugned the older approach to myth. The result is a late-blooming version of a dead era in mythic thought. The New System proposes itself a vast plan and vast scope. Bryant's subtitle shows his ambitions: he will try to divest tradition of all fable, reduce the truth to its original purity, and also give a history of the BabAonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Canaanites, Helladians, lonians, Leleges, Dorians, Pelasgi, Seythae, IndoScythae, Ethiopians, Phenicians. He intends to give a true account of the "first ages," from the Flood to the dispersion of all peoples. By correctly analyzing this history (as he claims none had done before him), Bryant proposes to deduce the true source and therefore the true meaning of pagan myth. Admittedly, it was a staple thesis of Christian mythology to see pagan myths and religious practices as only a degraded plagiarism of the true Mosaic account. In this familiar and narrow orthodox Christian framework, Bryant adds what is essentially a small correction. He too begins with the Flood as the epochal event, after which the ensuing world dispersion led men to misremember the revealed origins and earlier sacred history. Bryant concentrates now on the descendents of Ham, especially the Cuthites, who he sees as constituting the single although vastly dispersed "gentile" family. The Cuthites-or Amonians (from Ham) -are declared the real, chief founders of gentile-pagan cities, the institutors of pagan gods, heroes, and demons. All pagans thus hold to one religi on: Ham or Amon is identified with the Sun; Amon is worshipped as the Patriarch, the head of their line; the Sun is worshipped as the visible ancestor of life. In fact, Bryant's "new" thesis amounts to this insistence that pagan religion was simply sun worship, in turn only a degenerate form of the pure Israelite worship of the one God. With sun worship as his leading key, Bryant proceeds to muster proof. He dismisses all pagan myth as having no autonomous source or integral history. His method is overwhelmingly simple: he seeks to show by word-roots that all the sacred traditions of the heathens-the names of their gods, cities, sacred places, even their sacred plants or minerals-are but mistaken memorials of the Flood and before. Gentile religion thus results from "disease of lan~uage," and corrective etymology is the right approach. Further, since all pagan language and rites descend from the "original" Amonian language (developed after the Flood), these rites and dogmas will necessarily show a strong family relationship~in this way (though no such Amonian language was known before or found since his hook) Bryant undertakes a "comparative" mythology. Bryant sets down the "radicals," or basic elements, of this Amonian language, from which all the sacred pagan words have been constructed. These radicals include, for example, Ham or Cham (which give rise to such place-names as Cham Ar, Cham Ur, Choman, Comara, etc); Chus, Nimrod, Theuth or Thoth (from which comes the main Greek word for god, theos), Ab, El, On-Eon, Ait, Ad, Ees-Is, San-Son-Zan (or Sun), and so on. His method is self-proving: from Feronia, the name of a goddess, Bryant can deduce Fer-On, in accord with his key idea that all such sacred titles derive from sun or fire worship; having got this far, he can then proceed to explore ancient writers, such as Strabo or Pliny, for scholarly confirmation. Bryant is as rigidly Euhemerist in explaining myth as Isaac Newton or Samuel Shuckford, who forty years before Bryant were already thought to be too narrowly reductive. In accounting for Bryant, perhaps one ought to remember that though he published his mythic system in 1774, fifteen years after Hume, Bryant was educated before 1735. Perhaps, too, if Bryant's system had been published-like so many others it resembled-around 1740, it would have been buried or briefly remembered by the orthodox. Coming so late, however, Bryant's book reaped new opportunities. First, even if his out-of-date mythology might be wholly unimportant for serious mythic scholarship, it could find a response among certain poets and speculative religious minds sympathetic to his orthodox viewpoint-or, at least, among those profoundly dissatisfied with the triumph of skeptical rationalism and deism. The greatest of these minds with respect to Bryant is of course William Blake. For Blake, Bryant's cavalier disregard of the new rationalist mythology could seem not outmoded but rather a defense of the true and ancient faith against the corrosive disbelief perpetrated by that Blakean trio of Satanic arch-rationalists, "Bacon, Newton, and Locke" (for Blake, Newton was only a scientist) Not only Blake, but also John Wesley and that later eccentric orthodox Christian mythologist, 0. S. Faber, admired Bryant for some of these same reasons. Even though Bryant did not affirm ancient myth as spiritual truth, his rigid reduction of all pagan myth to one "gentile" idolatry did present myth as universally coherent. Blake made this clear when he said. "The antiquities of every Nation under Heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews. They are the same thing as Jacob Bryant . . . proved." As Blake also showed, with all ancient religion and history able to be related to one primal source, the way may be open to writing a new poetic system indeed.

THE KEYS TO ANCIENT HISTORY! FOR GENESIS-10 ETHNOLOGY STUDIES

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