MYTH:
ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.
“Unchecked by external truth, the mind of man has a fatal facility for
ensnaring, entrapping, and entangling itself. But, happily, happily for
the human race, some fragment of physical speculation has been built into
every false system. Here is the weak point. Its inevitable destruction
leaves a breach in the whole fabric, and through that breach the armies of
truth march in.”
Sir H. S. Maine.
MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.
ITS PRIMITIVE MEANING.
It is barely thirty years ago since the world was startled by the
publication of Buckle’s History of Civilisation, with its theory that
human actions are the effect of causes as fixed and regular as those which
operate in the universe; climate, soil, food, and scenery being the chief
conditions determining progress.
That book was a tour de force, not a lasting contribution to the
question of man’s mental development. The publication of Darwin’s
epoch-making Origin of Species[1] showed wherein it fell short; how the
importance of the above-named causes was exaggerated and the existence of
equally potent causes overlooked. Buckle probably had not read Herbert
Spencer’s Social Statics, and he knew nothing of the profound revolution
in silent preparation in the quiet of Darwin’s home; otherwise, his book
must have been rewritten. This would have averted the oblivion from which
not even its charm of style can rescue it. Its brilliant but defective
theories are obscured in the fuller light of that doctrine of descent with
modifications by which we learn that external circumstances do not alone
account for the widely divergent types of men, so that a superior race, in
supplanting an inferior one, will change the face and destiny of a
country, “making the solitary place to be glad, and the desert to rejoice
and blossom as the rose.” Darwin has given us the clue to those subtle and
still obscure causes which bring about, stage by stage, the unseen
adaptations to requirements varying a type and securing its survival, and
which have resulted in the evolution of the manifold species of living
things. The notion of a constant relation between man and his surroundings
is therefore untenable.
But incomplete as is Buckle’s theory, and all-embracing as is Darwin’s, so
far as organic life is concerned, the larger issue is raised by both, and
for most men whose judgment is worth anything it is settled. Either man is
a part of nature or he is not. If he is not, there is an end of the
matter, since the materials lie beyond human grasp, and cannot be examined
and placed in order for comparative study. Let Christian, Brahman,
Bushman, and South Sea Islander each hold fast his “form of sound words”
about man’s origin. One is as good as another where all are irrational and
beyond proof. But if he is, then the inquiry concerning him may not stop
at the anatomy of his body and the assignment of his place in the
succession of life on the globe. His relation, materially, to the
simplest, shapeless specks of living matter; structurally, to the highest
and more complex organisms, is demonstrated; the natural history of him is
clear. This, however, is physical, and for us the larger question is
psychical. The theory of evolution must embrace the genesis and
development of mind, and therefore of ideas, beliefs, and speculations
about things seen and unseen.
In the correction of our old definitions a wider meaning must be given to
the word myth than that commonly found in the dictionaries. Opening any
of these at random we find myth explained as fable, as something
designedly fictitious, whether for amusement only, or to point a moral.
The larger meaning which it holds to-day includes much more than this—to
wit, the whole area of intellectual products which lie beyond the historic
horizon and overlap it, effacing on nearer view the lines of separation.
For the myth, as fable only, has no place for the crude fancies and
grotesque imaginings of barbarous races of the present day, and of races
at low levels of culture in the remote past. And so long as it was looked
upon as the vagrant of fancy, with no serious meaning at the heart of it,
and as corresponding to no yearning of man after the truth of things,
sober treatment of it was impossible. But now that myth, with its prolific
offspring, legend and tradition, is seen to be a necessary travailing
through which the mind of man passed in its slow progress towards
certitude, the study and comparison of its manifold, yet, at the centre,
allied forms, and of the conditions out of which they arose, takes rank
among the serious inquiries of our time.
Not that the inquiry is a new one. The limits of this book forbid detailed
references to the successive stages of that inquiry—in other words, to
the pre-Christian, patristic, and pseudo-scientific theories of myth which
remained unchallenged, or varied only in non-essential features, till the
rise of comparative mythology. But apology for such omission here is the
less needful, since the list of ancient and modern vagaries would have the
monotony of a catalogue. However unlike on the surface, they are
fundamentally the same, being the products of non-critical ages, and one
and all vitiated by assumptions concerning gods and men which are to us as
“old wives’ fables.”
In short, between these empirical theories and the scientific method of
inquiry into the meaning of myth there can be no relation. Because, for
the assigning of its due place in the order of man’s mental and spiritual
development to myth, there is needed that knowledge concerning his origin,
concerning the conditions out of which he has emerged, and concerning the
mythologies of lower races and their survival in unsuspected forms in the
higher races, which was not only beyond reach, but also beyond conception,
until this century.
Except, therefore, as curiosities of literature, we may dismiss the
Lemprière of our school-days, and with him “Causabon”-Bryant and his
symbolism of the ark and traces of the Flood in everything. Their keys,
Arkite and Ophite, fit no lock, and with them we must, in all respect be
it added, dismiss Mr. Gladstone, with his visions of the Messiah in
Apollo, and of the Logos in Athênê.
The main design of this book is to show that in what is for convenience
called myth lie the germs of philosophy, theology, and science, the
beginnings of all knowledge that man has attained or ever will attain, and
therefore that in myth we have his serious endeavour to interpret the
meaning of his surroundings and of his own actions and feelings. In its
unbroken sequence we have the explanation of his most cherished and now,
for the most part, discredited beliefs, the persistence of which makes it
essential and instructive not to deal with the primitive myth apart from
its later and more complex phases. Myth was the product of man’s emotion
and imagination, acted upon by his surroundings, and it carries the traces
of its origin in its more developed forms, as the ancestral history of the
higher organisms is embodied in their embryos. Man wondered before he
reasoned. Awe and fear are quick to express themselves in rudimentary
worship; hence the myth was at the outset a theology, and the gradations
from personifying to deifying are too faint to be traced. Thus blended,
the one as inevitable outcome of the other, they cannot well be treated
separately, as if the myth were earth-born and the theology heaven-sent.
And to treat them as one is to invade no province of religion, which is
quite other than speculation about gods. The awe and reverence which the
fathomless mystery of the universe awakens, which steal within us unbidden
as the morning light, and unbroken on the prism of analysis; the
conviction, deepening as we peer, that there is a Power beyond humanity,
and upon which humanity depends; the feeling that life is in harmony with
the Divine order when it moves in disinterested service of our kind—these
theology can neither create nor destroy, neither verify nor disprove. They
can be bound within no formula that man or church has invented, but
undefined
“Are yet the fountain life of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing.”
At what epoch in man’s history we are to place the development of the
myth-making faculty must remain undetermined. It is of course coincident
with the dawn of thought. We cannot credit the nameless savage of the
Ancient Stone Age with it. If he had brains and leisure enough to make
guesses about things, he has left us no witness of the fact. His relics,
and those of his successors to a period which is but as yesterday in the
history of our kind, are material only; and not until we possess the
symbols of his thought, whether in language or rude picture, do we get an
inkling of the meaning which the universe had for him, in the details of
his pitiless daily life, in the shapes and motions of surrounding
objects, and in the majesty of the heavens above him. Even then the
thought is more or less crystallised, and if we would watch it in the
fluent form we must have a keen eye for the like process going on among
savages yet untouched by the Time-spirit, although higher in the scale
than the Papuans and hill tribes of the Vindhya. Although we cannot so far
lull our faculty of thought as to realise the mental vacuity of the
savage, we may, from survivals nowadays, lead up to reasonable guesses of
savage ways of looking at things in bygone ages, and the more so when we
can detect relics of these among the ignorant and superstitious of modern
times.
What meaning, then, had man’s surroundings to him, when eye and ear could
be diverted from prior claims of the body, and he could repose from
watching for his prey, and from listening to the approach of wild beast or
enemy? He had the advantage, from greater demand for their exercise, in
keener senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, than we enjoy; nor did
he fail to take in facts in plenty. But there was this vital defect and
difference, that in his brains every fact was pigeon-holed, charged with
its own narrow meaning only, as in small minds among ourselves we find
place given to inane peddling details, and no advance made to general and
wide conception of things. In sharpest contrast to the poet’s utterance:
“Nothing in this world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle,”
every fact is unrelated to every other fact, and therefore interpreted
wrongly.
Man, in his first outlook upon nature, was altogether ignorant of the
character of the forces by which he was environed; ignorant of that
unvarying relation between effect and cause which it needed the experience
of ages and the generalisations therefrom to apprehend, and to express as
“laws of nature.” He had not even the intellectual resource of later times
in inventing miracle to explain where the necessary relation between
events seemed broken or absent.
His first attitude was that of wonder, mingled with fear—fear as
instinctive as the dread of the brute for him. The sole measure of things
was himself, consequently everything that moved or that had power of
movement did so because it was alive. A personal life and will was
attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall, ocean, and tree, and
the varying phenomena of the sky at dawn or noonday, at gray eve or
black-clouded night, were the manifestation of the controlling life that
dwelt in all. In a thousand different forms this conception was expressed.
The thunder was the roar of a mighty beast; the lightning a serpent
darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, the storm demon’s outshot
forked tongue; the rainbow a thirsty monster; the waterspout a long-tailed
dragon. This was not a pretty or powerful conceit, not imagery, but an
explanation. The men who thus spoke of these phenomena meant precisely
what they said. What does the savage know about heat, light, sound,
electricity, and the other modes of motion through which the
Proteus-force beyond our ken is manifest? How many persons who have
enjoyed a “liberal” education can give correct answers, if asked off-hand,
explaining how glaciers are born of the sunshine, and why two sounds,
travelling in opposite directions at equal velocities, interfere and cause
silence? The percentage of young men, hailing from schools of renown, who
give the most ludicrous replies when asked the cause of day and night, and
the distance of the earth from the sun, is by no means small.
Whilst the primary causes determining the production of myths are uniform,
the secondary causes, due in the main to different physical surroundings,
vary, bringing about unlikeness in subject and detail. Nevertheless, in
grouping the several classes of myths, those are obviously to be placed
prominently which embrace explanations of the origin of things, from sun
and star to man and insect, involving ideas about the powers to whom all
things are attributed. But in this book no exhaustive treatment is
possible, only some indication of the general lines along which the
myth-making faculty has advanced, and for this purpose a few illustrations
of barbaric mental confusion between the living and the not living are
chosen at the outset. They will, moreover, prepare us for the large
element of the irrational present in barbaric myth, and supply a key to
the survival of this in the mythologies of civilised races.
CONFUSION OF EARLY THOUGHT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE NOT LIVING.
In selecting from the literature of savage mythology the material
overburdens us by its richness. Much of it is old, and, like refuse-heaps
in our mining districts once cast aside as rubbish but now made to yield
products of value, has, after long neglect, been found to contain elements
of worth, which patience and insight have extracted from its travellers’
tales and quaint speculations. That for which it was most prized in the
days of our fathers is now of small account; that within it which they
passed by we secure as of lasting worth. Much of that literature is,
however, new, for the impetus which has in our time been given to the
rescue and preservation of archaic forms has reached this, and a host of
accomplished collectors have secured rich specimens of relics which, in
the lands of their discovery, have still the authority of the past,
unimpaired by the critical exposure of the present.
The subject itself is, moreover, so wide reaching, bringing the ancient
and the modern into hitherto unsuspected relation, showing how in customs
and beliefs, to us unmeaning and irrational, there lurk the degraded
representations of old philosophies, and in what seems to us burlesque,
the survivals of man’s most serious thought.
One feels this difficulty of choice and this temptation to digress in
treating of the confusion inherent in the savage mind between things
living and not living, arising from superficial analogies and its
attribution of life and power to lifeless things. The North American
Indians prefer a hook that has caught a big fish to the handful of hooks
that have never been tried, and they never lay two nets together lest they
should be jealous of each other. The Bushmen thought that the traveller
Chapman’s big waggon was the mother of his smaller ones; and the natives
of Tahiti sowed in the ground some iron nails given them by Captain Cook,
expecting to obtain young ones. When that ill-fated discoverer’s ship was
sighted by the New Zealanders they thought it was a whale with wings. The
king of the Coussa Kaffirs having broken off a piece of the anchor of a
stranded ship soon afterwards died, upon which all the Kaffirs made a
point of saluting the anchor very respectfully whenever they went near it,
regarding it as a vindictive being. But perhaps one of the most striking
and amusing illustrations is that quoted by Sir John Lubbock from the
Smithsonian Reports concerning an Indian who had been sent by a
missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accompanied by a
letter stating their number. The Indian ate some of the bread, and his
theft was, of course, found out. He was sent on a second errand with a
similar batch of bread and a letter, and repeated the theft, but took the
precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was eating the
loaves, so that it might not see him! As the individual is a type of the
race, so in the child’s nature we find analogy of the mental attitude of
the savage ready to hand. To the child everything is alive. With what
timidity and wonder he first touches a watch, with its moving hands and
clicking works; with what genuine anger he beats the door against which he
has knocked his head, whips the rocking-horse that has thrown him, then
kisses and strokes it the next moment in token of forgiveness and
affection.
“As children of weak age
Lend life to the dumb stones
Whereon to vent their rage,
And bend their little fists, and rate
the senseless ground.”[2]
Even among civilised adults, as Mr. Grote remarks, “the force of momentary
passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and an
intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of agonising pain to kick or
beat the lifeless object from which he has suffered.” The mental condition
which causes the wild native of Brazil to bite the stone he stumbled over
may, as Dr. Tylor has pointed out in his invaluable Primitive Culture,
be traced along the course of history not merely in impulsive habit, but
in formally enacted law. If among barbarous peoples we find, for example,
the relatives of a man killed by a fall from a tree taking their revenge
by cutting the tree down and scattering it in chips, we find a continuity
of idea in the action of the court of justice held at the Prytaneum in
Athens to try any inanimate object, such as an axe, or a piece of wood or
stone, which has caused the death of any one without proved human agency,
and which, if condemned, was cast in solemn form beyond the border. “The
spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law,
repealed only in the present reign, whereby not only a beast that kills a
man, but a cart-wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him and
kills him, is deodand or given to God, i.e. forfeited and sold for the
poor.” Among ancient legal proceedings at Laon we read of animals
condemned to the gallows for the crime of murder, and of swarms of
caterpillars which infected certain districts being admonished by the
Courts of Troyes in 1516 to take themselves off within a given number of
days, on pain of being declared accursed and excommunicated.[3]
Barbaric confusion in the existence of transferable qualities in things,
as when the New Zealander swallows his dead enemy’s eye that he may see
farther, or gives his child pebbles to make it stony and pitiless of
heart; and as when the Abipone eats tiger’s flesh to increase his courage,
has its survival in the old wives’ notion that the eye-bright flower,
which resembles the eye, is good for diseases of that organ, in the
mediæval remedy for curing a sword wound by nursing the weapon that caused
it, and in the old adage, “Take a hair of the dog that bit you.” As
illustrating this, Dr. Dennys[4] tells a story of a missionary in China
whose big dog would now and again slightly bite children as he passed
through the villages. In such a case the mother would run after him and
beg for a hair from the dog’s tail, which would be put to the part bitten,
or when the missionary would say jocosely, “Oh! take a hair from the dog
yourself,” the woman would decline, and ask him to spit in her hand, which
itself witnesses to the widespread belief in the mystical properties of
saliva.[5] Among ourselves this survives, degraded enough, in the cabmen’s
and boatmen’s habit of spitting on the fare paid them. Treacle (Greek
thēriake, from thērion, a name given to the viper) witnesses to
the old-world superstition that viper’s flesh is an antidote to the
viper’s bite. Philips, in his World of Words, defines treacle as a
“physical compound made of vipers and other ingredients,” and this
medicament was a favourite against all poisons. The word then became
applied to any confection or sweet syrup, and finally and solely to the
syrup of molasses.
The practice of burning or hanging in effigy, by which a crowd expresses
its feelings towards an unpopular person, is a relic of the old belief in
a real and sympathetic connection between a man and his image; a belief
extant among the unlettered in by-places of civilised countries. When we
hear of North American tribes making images of their foes, whose lives
they expect to shorten by piercing those images with their arrows, we
remember that these barbarous folk have their representatives among us in
the Devonshire peasant, who hangs in his chimney a pig’s heart stuck all
over with thorn-prickles, so that the heart of his enemy may likewise be
pierced. The custom among the Dyaks of Borneo of making a wax figure of
the foe, so that his body may waste away as the wax is melted, will remind
the admirers of Dante Rossetti how he finds in a kindred mediæval
superstition the subject of his poem “Sister Helen,” while they who prefer
the authority of sober prose may turn to that storehouse of the curious,
Brand’s Popular Antiquities. Brand quotes from King James, who, in his
Dæmonology, book ii. chap. 5, tells us that “the devil teacheth how to
make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof the persons that
they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual
sickness;” and also cites Andrews, the author of a Continuation of
Henry’s Great Britain, who, speaking of the death of Ferdinand, Earl of
Derby, by poison, in the reign of Elizabeth, says, “The credulity of the
age attributed his death to witchcraft. The disease was odd, and operated
as a perpetual emetic; and a waxen image, with hair like that of the
unfortunate earl, found in his chamber, reduced every suspicion to
certainty.” A century and half before this the Duchess of Gloucester did
penance for conspiring with certain necromancers against the life of Henry
VI. by melting a waxen image of him, while, as hinging the centuries
together, “only recently a corp cré, or clay image, stuck full of birds’
claws, bones, pins, and similar objects, was found in one of the
Inverness-shire rivers. It was a fetish which, as it dissolved away by the
action of the stream, was supposed to involve the ‘wearing away’ of the
person it was intended to represent.”[6] The passage from practices born
of such beliefs to the use of charms as protectives against the
evil-disposed and those in league with the devil, and as cures for divers
diseases, is obvious. Upon this it is not needful to dwell; the
superstitious man is on the same plane as the savage, but, save in rare
instances, without such excuse for remaining, as Bishop Hall puts it, with
“old wives and starres as his counsellors, charms as his physicians, and a
little hallowed wax as his antidote for all evils.”
But we have travelled in brief space a long way from our picture of man,
weaving out of streams and breezes and the sunshine his crude philosophy
of personal life and will controlling all, to the peasant of to-day, his
intellectual lineal descendant, with his belief in signs and wonders, his
forecast of fate and future by omens, by dreams, and by such pregnant
occurrences as the spilling of salt, the howling of dogs, and changes of
the moon; in short, by the great mass of superstitions which yet more or
less influence the intelligent, terrorise the ignorant, and delight the
student of human development.
PERSONIFICATION OF THE POWERS OF NATURE.
(a.) The Sun and Moon.
A good deal hinges upon the evidences in savage myth-making of the
personification of the powers of nature. Obviously, the richest and most
suggestive material would be supplied by the striking phenomena of the
heavens, chiefly in sunrise and sunset, in moon, star, star-group and
meteor, cloud and storm, and, next in importance, by the strange and
terrible among phenomena on earth, whether in the restless waters, the
unquiet trees, the grotesquely-shaped rocks, and the fear inspired in man
by creatures more powerful than himself. Through the whole range of the
lower culture, sun, moon, and constellations are spoken of as living
creatures, often as ancestors, heroes, and benefactors who have departed
to the country above, to heaven, the heaved, up-lifted land. The Tongans
of the South Pacific say that two ancestors quarrelled respecting the
parentage of the first-born of the woman Papa, each claiming the child as
his own. No King Solomon appears to have been concerned in the dispute,
although at last the infant was cut in two. Vatea, the husband of Papa,
took the upper part as his share, and forthwith squeezed it into a ball
and tossed it into the heavens, where it became the sun. Tonga-iti
sullenly allowed the lower half to remain a day or two on the ground,
but, seeing the brightness of Vatea’s half, he compressed his share into a
ball and tossed it into the dark sky, during the absence of the sun in the
nether world. Thus originated the moon, whose paleness is owing to the
blood having all drained out of Tonga-iti’s half as it lay upon the
ground. Mr. Gill, from whose valuable collection of southern myth this is
quoted, says that it seems to have its origin in the allegory of an
alternating embrace of the fair Earth by Day and Night. But despite the
explanations, more or less strained, which some schools of comparative
mythologists find for every myth, the savage is not a conscious weaver of
allegories, or an embryo Cabalist, and we shall find ourselves more in
accord with the laws of his intellectual growth if, instead of delving for
recondite and subtle meanings in his simple-sounding explanations of
things, we take the meaning to be that which lies on the surface. More on
this, however, anon. Among the Red races one tribe thought that sun, moon,
and stars were men and women who went into the sea every night and swam
out by the east. The Bushmen say that the sun was once a man who shed
light from his body, but only for a short distance, until some children
threw him into the sky while he slept, and thus he shines upon the wide
earth. The Australians say that all was darkness around them till one of
their many ancestors, who still shine from the stars, shedding good and
evil, threw, in pity for them, an emu’s egg into space, when it became the
sun. Among the Manacicas of Brazil, the sun was their culture-hero,
virgin-born, and their jugglers, who claimed power to fly through the air,
said that his luminous figure, as that of a man, could be seen by them,
although too dazzling for common mortals.
The sun has been stayed in his course in other places than Gibeon,
although by mechanical means of which Joshua appears to have been
independent. Among the many exploits of Maui, abounding in Polynesian
myth, are those of his capture of the sun. He had, like Prometheus,
snatched fire from heaven for mortals, and his next task was to cure Ra,
the sun-god, of his trick of setting before the day’s work was done. So
Maui plaited thick ropes of cocoa-nut fibre, and taking them to the
opening through which Ra climbed up from the nether world, he laid a
slip-noose for him, placing the other ropes at intervals along his path.
Lying in wait as Ra neared, he pulled the first rope, but the noose only
caught Ra’s feet. Nor could Maui stop him until he reached the sixth rope,
when he was caught round the neck and pulled so tightly by Maui that he
had to come to terms, and agree to slacken his pace for the future. Maui,
however, took the precaution to keep the ropes on him, and they may still
be seen hanging from the sun at dawn and eve. In Tahitian myth Maui is a
priest, who, in building a house which must be finished by daylight,
seizes the sun by its rays and binds it to a tree till the house is built.
In North American myth a boy had snared the sun, and there was no light on
the earth. So the beasts held council who should undertake the perilous
task of cutting the cord, when the dormouse, then the biggest among them,
volunteered. And it succeeded, but so scorched was it by the heat that it
was shrivelled to the smallest of creatures. Such a group of myths is not
easy of explanation; but when we find the sun regarded as an ancestor, and
as one bound, mill-horse like, to a certain course, the notion of his
control and check would arise, and the sun-catchers take their place in
tradition among those who have deserved well of their race. It is one
among numberless aspects under which the doings of the sun and of other
objects in nature are depicted as the doings of mortals, and the crude
conceptions of the Ojibwas and the Samoans find their parallel in the
mythologies of our Aryan ancestors. Only in the former we see the mighty
one shorn of his dignity, with noose round his neck or chains on either
side; whilst in the latter we see him as Herakles, with majesty
unimpaired, carrying out the twelve tasks imposed by Eurystheus, and thus
winning for himself a place among the immortals.
The names given to the sun in mythology are as manifold as his aspects and
influences, and as the moods of the untutored minds that endowed him with
the complex and contrary qualities which make up the nature of man. Him,
we say, not it, thus preserving in our common speech a relic not only of
the universal personification of things, but of their division into sex.
The origin of gender is most obscure, but its investment of both animate
and inanimate things with sexual qualities shows it to be a product of
the mythopœic stage of man’s progress, and demands some reference in
these pages. The languages of savages are in a constant state of flux,
even the most abiding terms, as numerals and personal pronouns, being
replaced by others in a few years. And the changes undergone by civilised
speech have so rubbed away and obscured its primitive forms that, look
where he may, the poverty of the old materials embarrasses the inquirer.
If the similar endings to such undoubtedly early words as father, mother,
brother, sister, in our own and other related languages, notably Sanskrit,
afford any clue, it goes rather to show that gender was a later feature
than one might think. But there is no uniformity in the matter. It seems
pretty clear that in the early forms of our Indo-European speech there
were two genders only, masculine and feminine. The assignment of certain
things conceived of as sexless to neither gender, neutrius generis, is
of later origin. Some of the languages derived from Latin, and, to name
one of a different family, the Hebrew, have no neuter gender, whilst
others, as the ancient Turkish and Finnish, have no grammatical gender. In
our own, under the organic changes incident to its absorption of Norman
and other foreign elements, gender has practically disappeared (although
ships and nations are still spoken of as feminine), the pronouns he,
she, it, being its representatives. Such a gain is apparent when we
take up the study of the ancestral Anglo-Saxon, with its masculine,
feminine, and neuter nouns, or of our allied German with its perplexities
of sex, as, e.g., its masculine spoon, its feminine fork, and its neuter
knife. Turning for a moment to such slight aid as barbaric speech gives,
we find in the languages of the hill tribes of South India a curious
distinction made; rational beings, as gods and men, being grouped in a
“high-caste or major gender,” and living animals and lifeless things in a
“casteless or minor gender.” The languages of some North American and
South African tribes make a distinction into animate and inanimate gender;
but as non-living things, the sun, the thunder, the lightning, are
regarded as persons, they are classed in the animate gender.
Further research into the radicals of so relatively fixed a language as
Chinese, and into more mobile languages related to it, may, perhaps,
enlighten the present ignorance; but one thing is certain, that language
was “once the scene of an immense personification,” and has thereby added
vitality to myth. Analogies and conceptions apparent to barbaric man, and
in no way occurring to us, caused him to attribute sexual qualities not
only to dead as to living things, but to their several parts, as well as,
in the course of time, to intellectual and abstract terms. Speaking
broadly, things in which were manifest size and qualities, as strength,
independence, governing or controlling power, usually attaching to the
male, were classed as masculine; whilst those in which the gentler and
more subordinate features were apparent were classed as feminine. Of
course marked exceptions to this will at once occur to us, as, e.g., in
certain savage and civilised languages, where the sun is feminine and the
moon is masculine, but in the main the division holds good. The big is
male and the small is female. The Dyaks of Borneo call a heavy downpour of
rain a he rain; and, if so strength-imparting a thing as bread is to be
classed as either masculine or feminine, we must agree with the negro who,
in answer to his master’s question, “Sambo, where’s the bread?” replied,
“De bread, massa? him lib in de pantry.” The mediæval Persians are said to
have distinguished between male and female even in such things as food and
cloth, air and water, and prescribed their proper use accordingly; while,
as Dr. Tylor, from whom the above is quoted, adds, “even we, with our
blunted mythologic sense, cannot give an individual name to a lifeless
object, such as a boat or a weapon, without in the very act imagining for
it something of a personal nature.”
But we must not stay longer in these attractive byways of philology,
however warranted the digression may be, and must return to the
many-titled sun.
Whilst in the more elaborate mythologies of classic peoples we find him
addressed in exalted terms which are still the metaphors of poetry, we are
nearer the rough material out of which all myth is shaped when among races
who speak of sun, moon, and stars as father, mother, and children, and who
mean exactly what they say. We may find similar relationships in the solar
and lunar deities of Egyptian and classic myth, but profound moral
elements have entered into these and dissolved the material. We are face
to face with the awful and abiding questions personified in Osiris and
Isis, in Œdipus and Jocaste, where for us the sunlight pales and the
storm clouds are dispersed before the dazzling mysteries of human life and
destiny.
No such matters confront us when in Indian myth we read that the moon is
the sun’s sister, an aged, pale-faced woman, who in kindness led to her
brother two of the tribe who had sprung through a chasm in the sky to the
pleasant moonlit land. Neither do they in Australian myth, which shows
that the dwellers on Olympus had no monopoly of conjugal faithlessness.
For in it Mityan, the moon, is a native cat, who fell in love with
somebody else’s wife, and has been driven to wander ever since. Among the
Bushmen, the moon has incurred the sun’s anger, and is hacked smaller and
smaller by him, till, begging for mercy, a respite is given. But as soon
as he grows larger the sun hacks him again. In Slavonic myth the sun
cleaves him through for loving the morning star. The Indians of the far
west say that, when the moon is full, evil spirits begin nibbling at it,
and eat a portion every night till it is all gone; then a great spirit
makes a new moon, and, weary with his toil, falls asleep, when the bad
spirits renew their attack. Another not uncommon group of myths is that
which speaks of sun and moon as borne across the heavens on the backs of
ancestors, as in Greek myth Atlas supports the world, or as in ceaseless
flight, dogged by some pursuer, moon-dog, or “sun-wolf,” as parhelion is
called in Swedish. The group of kindred myths to which eclipses gave rise,
when the cloud-dragon or serpent tries to swallow sun or moon, and for a
time succeeds, is too well known to need other than passing reference
here.
A widespread body of myth has its source in the patches on the moon’s
face. In the Samoan Islands these are said to be a woman, a child, and a
mallet. A woman was once hammering out paper-cloth, and seeing the moon
rise, looking like a great bread-fruit, she asked it to come down and let
her child eat a piece of it. But the moon was very angry at the idea of
being eaten, and gobbled up the woman, child, and mallet, and there they
are to this day. The Selish Indians of North-Western America say that the
little wolf was in love with the toad, and pursued her one moonlight
night, till, as a last chance, she made a desperate spring on to the face
of the moon, and there she is still. People in the East see the figure of
a hare in the patches, and both in Buddhist Jâtakas and Mongolian myth
that animal is carried by the moon. In Greenland myth the moon was in love
with his sister, and stole in the dark to caress her. She, wishing to find
out who her lover was, blackened her hands so that the marks might be left
on him, which accounts for the spots. The Khasias of the Himâlaya say that
the moon falls in love every month with his mother-in-law, who, like a
well-conducted matron, throws ashes in his face. Grimm quotes a mediæval
myth that the moon is Mary Magdalene, and the spots her tears of
repentance, whilst in Chaucer’s Testament of Cressida the moon is Lady
Cynthia.—
“On her brest a chorl paintid ful even,
Bering a bush of thornis on his bake,
Which for his theft might clime no ner the heven.”
Comparing these with more familiar myths, we have our own man in the moon,
who is said to be the culprit found by Moses gathering sticks on the
Sabbath, although his place of banishment is a popular addition to the
Scripture narrative. According to the German legend he was a scoffer who
did the same heinous offence on a Sunday, and was given the alternative of
being scorched in the sun or frozen in the moon. The Frisians say that he
stole cabbages, the load of which he bears on his back. He does not appear
as a member of the criminal classes in China, his function being that of
celestial matchmaker, who ties together future couples with an invisible
silken cord which breaks not during life. In Icelandic myth the two
children familiar to us as Jack and Jill were kidnapped by the moon, and
there they stand to this day with bucket on pole across their shoulders,
falling away one after the other as the moon wanes,—a phase described in
the couplet:—
“Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.”
Mr. Baring Gould, whose essay on this subject in his Curious Myths of the
Middle Ages gives a convenient summary of current legends, contends that
Jack and Jill are the Hjuki and Bil of the Edda, and signify the waxing
and waning of the moon, their bucket indicating the dependence of rainfall
on her phases—a superstition extant among us yet.
The group of customs observed amongst both barbaric and civilised peoples
at the changes of the moon, customs which are meaningless except as relics
of lunar worship, belong to the passage of mythology into religion, of
personifying into deifying.
(b.) The Stars.
In the great body of nature-myth the stars are prominent members. In their
multitude; their sublime repose in upper calms above the turmoil of the
elements; their varying brilliancy, “one star differing from another star
in glory”; their tremulous light; their scattered positions, which lend
themselves to every vagary of the constellation-maker; their slow
procession, varied only by sweeping comet and meteor, or falling showers
of shooting stars; they lead the imagination into gentler ways than do the
vaster bodies of the most ancient heavens. Nor, although we may compute
their number, weigh their volume, in a few instances reckon their
distance, and, capturing the light that has come beating through space for
unnumbered years, make it reveal the secret of their structure, is the
imagination less moved by the clear heavens at night, or the feeling of
awe and reverence blunted before that “mighty sum of things for ever
speaking.”
In barbaric myth the stars are spoken of as young suns, the children of
the sun and moon, but more often as men who have lived on the earth,
translated without seeing death. The single stars are individual chiefs or
heroes; the constellations are groups of men or animals. To the natives of
Australia the brilliant Jupiter is a chief among the others; and the stars
in Orion’s belt and scabbard are young men dancing a corroboree, the
Pleiades being girls playing to them. The Kasirs of Bengal say that the
stars are men who climbed to the top of a tree, and were left in the
branches by the trunk being cut away. To the Eskimos the stars in Orion
are seal-hunters who have missed their way home. And in German folk-lore
they are spoken of as the mowers, because, as Grimm says, “they stand in a
row like mowers in a meadow.” In North American myth two of the bright
stars are twins who have left a home where they were harshly treated, and
leapt into the sky, whither their parents followed them and ceaselessly
chase them. In Greek myth the faintest star of the seven Pleiades is
Merope, whose light was dimmed because she alone among her sisters married
a mortal. The New Zealanders say that those stars are seven chiefs who
fell in battle, and of whom only one eye of each is now visible. In Norse
myth Odin having slain a giant, plucks out his eyes and flings them up to
the sky, where they become two stars. In German star-lore the small star
just above the middle one in the shaft of Charles’s Wain, is a waggoner
who, having given our Saviour a lift, was offered the kingdom of heaven
for his reward, but who said he would sooner be driving from east to west
to all eternity, and whose desire was granted—a curious contrast to the
wandering Jew, cursed to move unresting over the earth until the day of
judgment, because he refused to let Jesus, weary with the weight of the
cross, rest for a moment on his doorstep. The Housatonic Indians say that
the stars in Charles’s Wain are men hunting a bear, and that the chase
lasts from spring to autumn, when the bear is wounded and its dripping
blood turns the leaves of the trees red. With this may be cited the myth
that the red clouds at morn and eve are the blood of the slain in battle.
In the Northern Lights the Greenlanders see the spirits of the departed
dancing, the brighter the flashes of the Aurora the greater the merriment,
whilst the Dacotas say of the meteors that they are spirits flying through
the air.
Of the Milky Way—so called because Hêrê, indignant at the bantling
Herakles being put to her breast, spilt her milk along the sky (the solar
mythologers say that the “red cow of evening passes during the night
across the sky scattering her milk”)—the Ottawas say that it was caused
by a turtle swimming along the bottom of the sky and stirring up the mud.
According to the Patagonians it is the track along which the departed
tribesmen hunt ostriches, the clouds being their feathers; in African myth
it is some wood-ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by a girl, that her
people might be able to see their way home at night; in Eastern myth it
is chaff dropped by a thief in his hurried flight.
The idea of a land beyond the sky—be it the happy hunting-ground of the
Indian, or the Paradise of Islam, or the new Jerusalem of the
Apocalypse—would not fail to arise, and in both the Milky Way and the
Rainbow barbaric fancy sees the ladders and bridges whereby the departed
pass from earth to heaven. So we find in the lower and higher culture
alike the beautiful conceptions of the chemin des ames, the Red man’s
road of the dead to their home in the sun; the ancient Roman path of, or
to, the gods; the road of the birds, in both Lithuanian and Finnish myth,
because the winged spirits flit thither to the free and happy land. In
prosaic contrast to all this, it is curious to find among ourselves the
Milky Way described as Watling Street! That famous road, which ran from
Richborough through Canterbury and London to Chester, now gives its name
to a narrow bustling street of Manchester warehousemen in the City. But
who the Wætlingas were—whether giants, gods, or men—and why their name
was transferred from Britain to the sky, we do not know,[7] although the
fact is plainly enough set down in old writers, foremost among whom is
Chaucer. In his House of Fame[8] he says:—
“Lo, there, quod he, cast up thine eye,
se yondir, to, the galaxie,
the whiche men clepe the Milky Way,
for it is white, and some parfay
ycallin it han Watlingestrete.”
To the savage the rainbow is a living monster, a serpent seeking whom it
may devour, coming to earth to slake its unquenchable thirst, and preying
on the unwary. But in more poetic myth, its mighty many-coloured arch
touching, as it seems to do, the earth itself, is a road to glory. In the
Edda it is the three-coloured bridge Bifröst, “the quivering track” over
which the gods walk, and of which the red is fire, so that the
Frost-giants may not cross it. In Persian myth it is Chinvad, the “bridge
of the gatherer,” flung across the gloomy depths between this world and
the home of the blessed; in Islam it is El-Sirat, the bridge thin as a
hair and sharp as a scimitar, stretching from this world to the next;
among the Greeks it was Iris, the messenger from Zeus to men, charged with
tidings of war and tempest; to the Finns it was the bow of Tiernes, the
god of thunder; whilst to the Jew it was the messenger of grace from the
Eternal, who did set “his bow in the clouds” as the promise that never
again should the world be destroyed by flood. Such belief in the heavens
as the field of activities profoundly affecting the fortunes of mankind,
and in the stars as influencing their destinies, has been persistent in
the human mind. The delusions of the astrologer are embalmed in language,
as when, forgetful of a belief shared not only by sober theologians, but
by Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we speak of “disaster,” and of our friends as
“jovial,” “saturnine,” or “mercurial.” But the illusions of the savage or
semi-civilised abide as an animating part of many a faith, undisturbed by
a science which has swept the skies and found no angels there, and whose
keen analysis separates for ever the ancient belief in a connection
between the planets and man’s fate. For convenience’ sake, we retain on
our celestial maps and globes the men and monsters pictured by barbaric
fancy in the star-positions and clusters, noting these as interesting
examples of survival. Yet we are the willing dupes of illusions nebulous
as these, and, charm he never so wisely, the Time-spirit fails to
disenchant us.
(c.) The Earth and Sky.
If the sun and moon are the parents of the stars, the heavens and the
earth are the parents of all living things. Of this widely-found myth, one
of the most striking specimens occurs among the Maoris. From Rangi, the
heaven, and Papa, the earth, sprang all living things; but earth and sky
clave together, and darkness rested on them and their children, who
debated whether they should rend them asunder or slay them. Then
Tane-mahuta, father of forests, reasoned that it was better to rend them,
so that the heaven might become a stranger, and the earth remain as their
nursing-mother. One after another they strove to do this, but in vain,
until Tane-mahuta, with giant strength and strain, pressed down the earth
and thrust upward the heaven. But one of his brothers, father of wind and
storm, who had not agreed to this parting of his parents, followed Rangi
into the sky, and thence sent forth his progeny, “the mighty winds, the
fierce squalls, the clouds dense and dark, wildly drifting, wildly
hunting,” himself rushing on his foe, snapping the huge trees that barred
his path, and strewing their trunks and branches on the ground, while the
sea was lashed into high-crested waves, and all the creatures therein
affrighted. The fish darted hither and thither, but the reptiles fled into
the forests, causing quarrel between Tangaroa, the ocean-god, and
Tane-mahuta for giving them shelter. So the brothers fought, the ocean-god
wrecking the canoes and sweeping houses and trees beneath the waters, and
had not Papa hidden the gods of the tilled food and the wild within her
bosom, they would have perished. Wars of revenge followed quickly one upon
the other; the storm-god’s anger was not soon appeased; so that the
devastation of the earth was well-nigh complete. But, at last, light arose
and quiet ensued, and the dry land appeared. Rangi and Papa, parted for
ever, quarrelled no more, but helped the one the other, and “man stood
erect and unbroken on his mother Earth.”
The myth of Cronus will at once occur to the reader. Heaven (Uranus) and
Earth (Gaea) were husband and wife, and their many children all hated
their father for concealing them between the hollows of their mother’s
breasts, so that they were shut out from light. Gaea sided with them and
provided Cronus, the youngest, with an iron sickle wherewith he unmanned
Uranus and separated him from Gaea. Cronus married his sister Rhea, and,
at the advice of his parents, swallowed his children one by one as they
were born, lest they grew up and usurped his place among the Immortals.
But when Zeus was born, and Cronus asked for the child, Rhea deceived him
by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling bands. When Zeus grew up he
gave his father an emetic, whereupon the children were all disgorged, and
with them the stone, which became a sacred object at Delphi. There is no
such being as Cronus in Sanskrit, but what may be called the Vedic variant
of the myth is that in which Dyaus (Heaven) and Prithivî (Earth), were
once joined and subsequently separated.
In China we find a legend of “a person called Puangku, who is said to have
separated the heaven and the earth, they formerly being pressed down close
together,” and, as one might expect, such a transparent nature-myth of the
rending asunder of the world and sky is widespread.
The solar mythologists were perplexed at its presence among the refined
and cultured Greeks. “How can we imagine that a few generations before the
time of Solon the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were
adequately expressed by the story of Uranus maimed by Cronus, of Cronus
eating his own children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive his
own progeny. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find
anything more hideous and revolting.” So the moral character of the Greeks
and the exclusive comparative method of Professor Max Müller and his
adherents were vindicated by the discovery that as Cronus means time, the
apparently repulsive myth simply means that time swallows up the days
which spring from it; “and,” remarks Sir G. W. Cox in his Manual of
Mythology, “the old phrase meant simply this and nothing more, although
before the people came to Greece they had forgotten its meaning.”[9]
Cronus is a more than usually troublesome crux to the etymologists.
Here, as elsewhere, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life;” and
we may turn to the fundamental idea resident in the myth. The savage, in
the presence of recurring light and darkness, of the clouds lifting and
dispersing before the sunrise, has his legend of a time when this was not
so, but when heaven and earth were closed-in one upon the other till some
hero thrust them apart. And, to his rude intelligence, the conception of
night as a devouring monster, might easily “start the notion of other
swallowing and disgorging beings.” In brief, to quote Mr. Andrew Lang,
“just as the New Zealander had conceived of heaven and earth as at one
time united, to the prejudice of their children, so the ancestors of the
Greeks had believed in an ancient union of heaven and earth. Both by
Greeks and Maoris, heaven and earth were thought of as living persons,
with human parts and passions. Their union was prejudicial to their
children, and so the children violently separated their parents.”[10]
The beliefs of the ancient Finns, as described in the Kalevala, in the
world as a divided egg, of which the white is the ocean, the yolk the sun,
the arched shell the sky, and the darker portions the clouds; and of the
Polynesians that the universe is the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, at
the tapering bottom of which is the root of all things, are to us so
grotesque that it is not easy to regard them as explanations seriously
invented by the human mind. Yet these, together with the notions of the
two halves of the shell of Brahma’s egg, and of the two calabashes which
form the heaven and the earth in African myth, find their correspondences
in the widespread conception of the over-arching firmament as a hard and
solid thing,[11] with holes (or windows[12]) to let the rain through, with
gates through which angels descend,[13] or through which prophets peer
into celestial mysteries;[14] a firmament outside which other people live,
as instanced by the Polynesian term for strangers, “papalangi,” or
“heaven-bursters.” In Esthonian myth Ilmarine hammers steel into a vault
which he strained like a tent over the earth, nailing thereon the silver
stars and moon, and suspending the sun from the roof of the tent with
machinery to lift it up and let it down. The like achievement is recorded
of Ilmarinen in the Kalevala, the cosmogony of which corresponds to that
of the Esthonian Kalevipöeg.
These are the less refined forms of myths which have held their ground
from pre-scientific times till now, and the rude analogies of which are
justified by the appearances of things as presented by the senses. Man’s
intellectual history is the history of his escape from the illusions of
the senses, it is the slow and often tardily accepted discovery that
nature is quite other than that which it seems to be. And this variance
between appearances and realities remained hidden until the intellect
challenged the report about phenomena which the sense-perceptions brought.
For in the ages when feeling was dominant, and the judgment scarce
awakened, the simple explanations in venerable legends sung by bard or
told by aged crone—legends to which age had given sanctity which finally
placed them among the world’s sacred literatures—were received without
doubt or question. But, as belief in causality spread, men were not
content to rest in the naïve explanations of an uncritical age. What man
had guessed about nature gave place to what nature had to say about
herself, and with the classifying of experience science had its birth.
Meanwhile, until this quite recent stage in man’s progress was reached,
the senses told their blundering tale of an earth flat and fixed, with
sun, moon, and stars as its ministering servants, while gods or beasts
upbore it, and mighty pillars supported the massive firmament In Hindu
myth the tortoise which upholds the earth rests upon an elephant, whose
legs reach all the way down! In Bogotà the culture-god Bochica punishes
a lesser and offending deity by compelling him to sustain the part of
Atlas, and it is in shifting his burden from shoulder to shoulder that
earthquakes are caused. The natives of Celebes say that these are due to
the world-supporting Hog as he rubs himself against a tree; the
Thascaltecs that they occur when the deities who hold up the world relieve
one another; the Japanese think that they are caused by huge dragons
wriggling underground, an idea probably confirmed by the discovery of
monster fossil bones. In Algonquin myth the mighty man Earthquake “can
pass along under the ground, and make all things shake and tremble by his
power.”
As the myths about earth-bearers prevail in the regions of earthquakes, so
do those about subterranean beings in the neighbourhood of volcanoes. The
superstitions which mountainous countries especially foster are
intensified when the mountains themselves cast forth their awful and
devastating progeny, “red ruin” and the other children born of them. Man
in his dread, “caring in no wise for the external world, except as it
influenced his own destiny; honouring the lightning because it could
strike him, the sea because it could drown him,”[15] could do naught else
than people them with maleficent beings, and conceive of their
sulphur-exhaling mouths as the jaws of a bottomless pit.
(d.) Storm and Lightning, etc.
If in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the “solar” theory we shackled
ourselves with some other, we should certainly prefer that which is known
as the “meteorological,” and which, in the person of Kuhn and other
supporters, finds a more rational and persistent source of myth in
phenomena which are fitful and startling, such as hurricane and tempest,
earthquake and volcanic outburst. Sunrises and sunsets happen with a
regularity which failed to excite any strong emotion or stimulate
curiosity, and the remotest ancestor of the primitive Aryan soon shook off
the habit—if, indeed, he ever acquired it—of going to bed in fear and
trembling lest the sun should not come back again. Nature, in her softer
aspects and her gracious bounties, in the spring-time with its promise,
the summer with its glory, the autumn with its gifts, has moved the heart
of man to song and festival and procession; as, by contrast, the frosts
that nipped the early buds and the fierce heat that withered the
approaching harvest gave occasion for plaintive ditty and sombre ceremony.
It is in the fierce play and passionate outbursts of the elements, in the
storm, the lightning, and the thunder, that the feelings are aroused and
that the terror-stricken fancy sees the strife of wrathful deities, or
depicts their dire work amongst men. Hence, all the world over, the
storm-god and the wind-god have played a mighty part.
To the savage, the wind, blowing as it listeth, its whence and whither
unknown, itself invisible, yet the sweep and force of its power manifest
and felt, must have ranked amongst the most striking phenomena. And, as
will be seen hereafter, the correspondences between wind and breath, and
the connection between breath and life, added their quota of mystery in
man’s effort to account for the impalpable element. Of this
personification of the elements the following Ojibway folk-tale, cited by
Dorman, gives poetic illustration:—“There were spirits from all parts of
the country. Some came with crashing steps and roaring voice, who directed
the whirlwinds which were in the habit of raging about the neighbouring
country. Then glided in gently a sweet little spirit, which blew the
summer gale. Then came in the old sand-spirit, who blew the sand-squalls
in the sand-buttes toward the west. He was a great speech-maker, and shook
the lodge with his deep-throated voice, as he addressed the spirits of the
cataracts and waterfalls, and those of the islands who wore beautiful
green blankets.”
In the legends of the Quiches, the mysterious creative power is Hurakan
(whence hurricane), among the Choctaws the original word for Deity is
Hushtoli, the storm-wind, and in Peru to kiss the air was the commonest
and simplest sign of adoration of the collective divinities. The
Guayacuans of South America, when a storm arose and there was much thunder
or wind, all went out in troops, as it were to battle, shaking their clubs
in the air, shooting flights of arrows in that direction whence the storm
came.[16]
The Araucanians thought that gales and thunderstorms were the battles
fought between the spirits of the dead and their foes.
Turning to the literatures of higher races, we find in the prose Edda,
when Gangler asks whence comes the wind, that Ha answers him: “Thou must
know that at the northernmost point in the heavens sits a giant,
“In the guise of an eagle;
And the winds, it is said,
Rush down on the earth
From his outspreading pinions.”
In Finnish myth the north wind Pulmri, father of the frost, is sometimes
imaged as an eagle.
“The Indians believe in a great bird called by them Wochowsen or
Wuchowsen, meaning Wind-Blow or the Wind-Blower, who lives far to the
north, and sits upon a great rock at the end of the sky. And it is because
whenever he moves his wings the wind blows they of old times called him
that.” And in another Algonquin myth: “Ga-oh is the Spirit of the Winds.
He moves the winds, but he is chained to a rock. The winds trouble him,
and he tries very hard to get free. When he struggles the winds are
forced away from him, and they blow upon the earth. Sometimes he suffers
terrible pain, and then his struggles are violent. This makes the winds
wild, and they do damage on the earth. Then he feels better and goes to
sleep, and the winds become quiet also.”[17]
In the Veda the Maruts or Storm-gods, to whom many of the hymns are
addressed, “make the rocks to tremble and tear asunder the kings of the
forest,” like Hermes in his violence and like Boreas in his rage. Whether
or no they become in Scandinavian legend the grim and fearful Ogres
swiftly sailing in their cloud-ships, we may see in them the “crushers”
and “grinders,”[18] as their name imports, the types of northern deities
like Odin, long degraded into the Wild Huntsman and his phantom crew,
whose uncouth yells the peasant hears in the midnight air.[19] Among the
Aztecs Cuculkan, the bird-serpent, was a personification of the wind,
especially of the east wind, as bringer of the rain. It was at one of his
shrines, to which pilgrimages were made from great distances, that the
Spaniards first saw to their surprise a cross surmounting the temple of
this god of the wind, whence arose a legend that the Apostle Thomas had
evangelised America. But, in fact, the pagan cross of Central America and
Mexico was the symbol of the four cardinal points.
In his valuable book on the Myths of the Red Race Dr. Brinton has
brought together a mass of evidence in support of a theory that the
sanctity in which the number four is held by the American races is due to
the adoration of the cardinal points, which are identified with the four
winds, who in hero-myths are the four ancestors of the human race. The
illustrations with which the argument is supported are numerous and
valuable, but the argument itself is made to rest too strongly on an
assumed primitive symbolism, whereas it suffices to show how the early
notion of the flat world, as also square, would lead to the myth of the
four winds blowing from the four corners, a myth often illustrated in
ancient maps with an angel at each corner from whose mouth the wind
issues. The official title of the Incas was “Lord of the four quarters of
the earth,” and the number appears in all sorts of combinations, but the
theory may be pushed to extremes in compelling every fact to square with
it.[20] As the illustrations given above show, we are some steps nearer to
the primitive myth when we find the wind conceived of as a mighty bird,
which indeed is in both old and new world mythology a common symbol of
thunder and lightning also. On this matter Dr. Brinton’s remarks bear
quoting.
Like the wind the bird sweeps through the aërial spaces, sings in the
forests, and rustles on its course; like the cloud it floats in
mid-air, and casts its shadow on the earth; like the lightning it
darts from heaven to earth to strike its unsuspecting prey. These
tropes were truths to savage nations, and led on by that law of
language which forced them to conceive everything as animate or
inanimate, itself the product of a deeper law of thought which urges
us to ascribe life to whatever has motion, they found no animal so
appropriate for their purpose here as the bird. Therefore the
Algonquins say that birds always make the winds, that they create the
waterspouts, and that the clouds are the spreading and agitation of
their wings; the Navajos that at each cardinal point stands a white
swan, who is the spirit of the blasts; so also the Dakotas frequently
explain the thunder as the sound of the cloud-bird flapping his wings;
the lightning as the fire that flashes from his tracks, like the
sparks which the buffalo scatters when he scours over a stony plain.
Estimates differ much as to the size of the Thunder-Bird. In one tradition
an Indian found its nest, and secured a feather which was above two
hundred feet long, while in another tradition the bird is said to be no
bigger than one’s little finger. But among the Western Indians he is an
immense eagle. “When this aërial monster flaps his wings loud peals of
thunder roll over the prairie; when he winks his eye it lightens; when he
wags his tail the waters of the lake which he carries on his back overflow
and produce rain.” Mixcoatl, the Mexican Cloud-Serpent, as well as Jove,
carries his bundle of arrows or thunderbolts, which in the hand of Thor
are represented by his mighty club or hammer. The old and universal belief
that stones were hurled by the Thunder-God is not so far-fetched as we, in
our pride of science, might think, for the flints which are mistaken for
thunderbolts, and which become objects of adoration as well as charms,
produce a flash when struck by the lightning. In the lightning flash man
would see the descent of fire from heaven for his needs. That he should
regard it, like water, as a living creature, with power to hurt or help
him, is in keeping with attribution of life to all that moved. Its
apparent connection with the great source of heat would foster the feeling
which expressed itself in fire-worship, with its curious survivals to
modern times. No element was more calculated to excite awe in its seeming
unrelation to the objects which produced it. Once secured, to guard it
from extinction or theft was a serious duty, and everything from which it
issued, trees as its hiding-place, since it came from the wood when
rubbed, stones also, since sparks shot from them when struck, were held
sacred. In the manifold myths about its origin one feature is common, that
its seed was stolen, the chief agents (probably as the messengers between
earth and sky) being birds, or men assuming the form of birds. The Sioux
Indians say that their first ancestor procured his fire from the sparks
which a panther struck from the rocks as he bounded up a hill. But of
examples from the lower culture, forerunners of the Zeus-defying
Prometheus, Mr. Gill’s Myths of the South Pacific supplies one which may
be taken as a sample of the rest. Maui, a famous South Sea hero, finding
some cooked food in a basket brought by Buataranga from the nether world,
and relishing it more than raw food, determines to steal the fire, and
flying to the Buataranga’s realm frightens the fire-god by threats and
blows into revealing the secret. Then wresting the fire-sticks from him he
sets the under-world in flames, and returns with his prize to the
upper-world; thenceforth “all the dwellers there used fire-sticks, and
enjoyed the luxuries of light and of cooked food.”
(e.) Light and Darkness.
As in the conflict raging in the sky during gale or tempest, when the
light and the darkness alternately prevail, the barbaric mind sees war
waged between the heroes of the spirit-land who have carried their
unsettled blood feuds thither, so in many myths the lightning is no
comrade of the thunder, but its foe, the battle of bird with serpent. The
resemblance of the lightning flash to the sharp, sudden, zigzag movements
of the serpent, a creature so mysterious to barbaric man in its unlikeness
to the beasts of the field, accounts for a myth the influence of which as
a terrorising agent on human conduct is in course of rapid decay. Its
importance in the history of belief in the supernatural is too
far-reaching to be passed over, and in tracing its course it is necessary
to show its connection with the group of storm-myths and sun-myths of the
Aryan race in the battles between Indra and Vritra, Ormuzd and Ahriman,
Thor and Midgard, Hercules and Cacus, Apollo and Pythôn, and St. George
and the Dragon.
All the Aryan nations have among their legends, often exalted into epic
themes, the story of a battle between a hero and a monster. In each case
the hero conquers, and releases treasures, or in some way renders succour
to man, through his victory. In Hindu myth this battle is fought between
Indra and Vritra.
Indra, one of the Vedic gods, comes, according to Professor Max Müller,
from the same root as the Sanskrit indu, drop, sap, but the etymology is
doubtful. What is not doubtful is that he is the god of the bright sky,
and although, like the other gods invoked in the hymns of the Rig-Veda,
a departmental or tribal deity, he is a sort of primus inter pares, of
whose many titles, Vritrahan or “Vritra-slayer” is the pre-eminent one.
The benefits showered by him upon mortals caused the attribution of moral
qualities to him, and he was adored as “lord of the virtues,” while the
juice of the sacred soma plant was offered in his honour, for which reason
he is also called Somapâ or “soma-drinker.” It is his struggle with Vritra
which is a constant theme of the Vedic hymns, the burden of which remind
us of the praises offered in the Psalms to Yahweh as a man of war, as
mighty in battle. “The gods do not reach thee, nor men, thou overcomest
all creatures in strength.... Thou thunderer, hast shattered with thy bolt
the broad and massive cloud into fragments, and has sent down the waters
that were confined in it to flow at will; verily thou alone possessest all
power.” The primitive physical meaning of the myth is clear. Indra is the
sun-god, armed with spears and arrows, for such did the solar rays
sometimes appear to barbaric fancy. The rain-clouds are imprisoned in
dungeons or caverns by Vritra, the “enveloper,” the thief, serpent, wolf,
wild boar, as he is severally styled in the Rig-Veda. Indra attacks him,
hurls his darts at him, they pierce the cloud-caverns, the waters are
released, and drop upon the earth as rain.
This explanation, which has many parallels in savage myth, is
self-consistent as fitting into crude philosophy of personal life and
volition in sun and cloud, and is fraught with deep truth of meaning in
regions like the Punjaub, where drought brought famine in its train.
The Aryans were a pastoral people, their wealth being in flocks and
herds.[21] The cow yielded milk for the household; her dung fertilised the
soil; her young multiplied the wealth of the family at an ever-increasing
rate, and she naturally became the symbol of fruitfulness and prosperity,
ultimately an object of veneration; while, for the functions which the
bull performed, he was the type of strength. The Aryan’s enemy was he who
stole or injured the cattle; the Aryan’s friend was he who saved them from
the robber’s clutch.
Intellectually, the Aryan tribes were, speaking broadly, in the
mythopœic stage, and the personification of phenomena was rife among
them. Their barbaric fancy, as kindred myths all the world over testify,
would find ample play in the fleeting and varied scenery of the
cloud-flecked heavens, suggestive, as this would be, of bodies celestial
and bodies terrestrial. To these children of the plain the heavens were a
vast, wide expanse, over which roamed supra-mundane beasts, the two most
prominent figures in their mythical zoology being the cow and the bull.
The sun, giver of blessed light, was the bull of majesty and strength; the
white clouds were cows, from whose swelling udders dropped the milk of
heaven—the blessed rain. But there were dark clouds also, clouds of night
and clouds of storm, and within these lurked the monster-robber; into them
he lured the herds, and withheld both light and rain from the children of
men. To the sun-god, therefore, who smote the thief-dragon, Vritra, with
his shaft, and set free the imprisoned cows, went up the shout of praise,
the song of gratitude. This myth survives in many legends of the Aryan
race, and their family likeness is unmistakable. In its Latin guise it
appears as Hercules[22] and Cacus, although the preciseness of detail
narrated by Virgil, Livy, and other writers, has given it quasi-historical
rank. Hercules, after his victory over Geryon, stops to rest by the Tiber,
and while he is sleeping the three-headed monster, Cacus, steals some of
his cattle, dragging them by their tails into his cavern in Mons
Avertinus. Their bellowing awakens Hercules, who attacks the cavern, from
the mouth of which Cacus vomits flames, and roars as in thunder. But the
hero slays him and frees the cattle, a victory which the earlier Romans
celebrated with solemn rites at the Ara Maxima. In Greek myth the most
familiar examples are the struggles between the sun-god, Apollo, and the
storm-dragon, Pythôn, and the deliverance of the Princess Andromeda by
Perseus from the sea-monster sent by Poseidôn to ravage the land. In the
northern group we have the battle of Siegfried with the Niflungs, or
Niblungs, and of Sigurd with the dragon Fafnir, who guards golden
treasures; while, in the Edda, Thor goes fishing with the giant Hymir,
and catches the demon Loki, whose foul brood are Hell, the wolf Fenri, and
the Earth-girdling Serpent. Amongst ourselves, Beowulf, hero of the poem
of that name, attacks the dragon or fire-drake Grendel, who, with his
troll-mother, haunts a gloomy marsh-land. Thence he stole forth at night
to seize sleeping champions, taking them to his dwelling-place to devour
them, and this in such numbers that scarce a man was left. One pale night,
Beowulf awaited the coming of the monster, and, gripping him tightly,
snapped his limbs asunder, so that he died.
These brief illustrations would hardly be complete without some reference
to our national saint. Opinions differ as to his merits, Gibbon
stigmatising him as a fraudulent army contractor,[23] while the researches
of M. Ganneau seek to establish his relation to the Egyptian Horus and
Typhon. Be this as it may, the stirring old legend tells how George of
Cappadocia delivered the city of Silene from a dragon dwelling in a lake
hard by. Nothing that the people could give him satisfied his insatiate
maw, and in their despair they cast lots who among their dearest ones
should be flung to the dread beast. The lot fell to the king’s daughter,
and she went unflinchingly, like Jephthah’s daughter, to her fate. But on
the road the hero learns her sad errand, and bidding her fear not, he,
making sign of the cross, brandishes his lance, attacks and transfixes the
dragon, and leading him into Silene, beheads him in sight of all the
people, who, with their king, are baptized to the glory of Him who made
St. George the victor.[24]
(f.) The Devil.
While, however, the myth of Indra and Vritra has in its western variants
remained for the most part a battle between heroes and dragons, the moral
element rarely obscuring the physical features, it gave rise among the
Iranians or ancient Persians to a definite theology, the strange fortunes
of which have, as remarked above, profoundly affected Christendom.
Although in the Vedic hymns the features of the primitive nature-myth
reappear again and again, Indra himself boasting, “I slew Vritra, O
Maruts, with might, having grown strong with my own vigour; I who hold the
thunderbolt in my arms, I have made these all-brilliant waters to flow
freely for man,” we find an approach in them to some conception of that
spiritual conflict of which the physical conflict was so complete a
symbol. Indra as victor, is an object of adoration and invested with
purity and goodness; Vritra, as the enemy of men, is an object of dread,
and invested with malice and evil.
But while in the Zend-Avesta, the Scriptures of the old Iranian religion,
the struggle between Thraetaôna and the three-headed serpent Azhi-Dahâka
(in which names are recognisable the Traitana and Ahi of the Veda and
the Feridun and Zohak of Persian epic) is narrated, the moral idea is
dominant throughout. The theme is not the attack of the sun-god to recover
stolen milch cows from the dragon’s cave, but the battle between Ormuzd,
the Spirit of Light, and Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness. The one seeks to
mar the earth which the other has made. Into the fair paradise,
Airayana-Vaêjô, “a delightful spot,” as the Avesta calls it, “with good
waters and trees,” and into other smiling lands which Ormuzd has blessed,
Ahriman sends “a mighty serpent ... strong, deadly frost ... buzzing
insects, and poisonous plants ... toil and poverty,” and, worse than all,
“the curse of unbelief.”[25] Between these two spiritual powers and their
armies of good and bad angels the battle rages for supremacy in the
universe, for possession of the citadel of Mansoul.
Early in the history of the Asiatic Aryan tribes there had arisen a
quarrel between the Brahmanic and Iranian divisions. The latter had
become a quiet-loving, agricultural people, while the former remained
marauding nomads, attacking and harassing their neighbours. In their
plundering inroads they invoked the aid of spells and sacrifices, offering
the sacred soma-juice to their gods, and nerving themselves for the fray
by deep draughts of the intoxicating stuff. Not only they, but their gods
as well, thereby became objects of hatred to the peaceful Iranians, who
foreswore all worship of freebooter’s deities, and transformed these
devas of the old religion into demons. That religion, as common to the
Indo-European race, was polytheistic, a worship of deities each ruling
over some department of nature, but a worship exalting now one, now
another god, be it Indra, or Varuna, or Agni, according to the indications
of the deity’s supremacy, or according to the mood of the worshipper. As
remarked by Jacob Grimm, “the idea of the devil is foreign to all
primitive religions,” obviously because in all primitive thought evil and
good are alike regarded as the work of deities. In the Old Testament,
Yahweh is spoken of as the author of both;[26] the angels, whether charged
with weal or woe, are his messengers. In the Iliad Zeus dispenses
both:—
“Two urns by Jove’s high throne have ever stood,
The source of evil one, the other good;
From thence the cup of mortal man he fills,
Blessings to these, to those distribute ills,
To most, he mingles both,”[27]
and ’tis a far cry from this to the loftier conception of Euripides: “If
the gods do evil, then are they no gods.” So there was a monotheistic—or,
as Professor Max Müller terms it, a henotheistic—element in the Vedic
religion which in the Iranian religion, and this mainly through the
teaching of the great thinker and reformer Zarathushtra (Zoroaster), was
largely diffused. In his endeavour to solve the old problem of reconciling
sin and misery with omnipotent goodness, he supposes “two primeval
causes,” one of which produced the “reality,” or good mind; the other the
“non-reality,” or evil mind. Behind these was developed belief in a
philosophical abstraction, “uncreate time,” of which each was the product;
but such doctrines were too subtle for the popular grasp, and, wrapped in
the old mythological garb, they appeared in concrete form as dualism.
Vritra survived in Ahriman, who, like him, is represented as a serpent;
and in Ormuzd we have the phonetic descendant of Ahura-mazda.
Now, it was with this dualism, this transformed survival of the sun and
cloud myth, that the Jews came into association during their memorable
exile in Babylon. Prior to that time their theology, as hinted above, had
no devil in it. But in that belief in spirits which they held in common
with all semi-civilised races, as a heritage from barbarous ancestors,
there were the elements out of which such a personality might be readily
evolved. Their satan, or “accuser,” as that word means, is no prince of
the demons, like the Beelzebul of later times; no dragon or old serpent,
as of the Apocalypse, defying Omnipotence and deceiving the whole world;
but a kind of detective who, by direction of Yahweh, has his eye on
suspects, and who is sent to test their fidelity. In all his missions he
acts as the intelligent and loyal servant of Yahweh. But although
therefore not regarded as bad himself, the character and functions with
which he was credited made easy the transition from such theories about
him to theories of him as inherently evil, as the enemy of goodness, and,
therefore, of God. He who, like Vritra, was an object of dread, came to be
regarded as the incarnation of evil, the author and abettor of things
harmful to man. Persian dualism gave concrete form to this conception, and
from the time of the Exile we find Satan as the Jewish Ahriman, the
antagonist of God. Not he alone, for “the angels that kept not their first
estate” were the ministers of his evil designs, creatures so numerous that
every one has 10,000 at his right hand and 1000 at his left hand, and
because they rule chiefly at night no man should greet another lest he
salute a demon. They haunt lonely spots, often assume the shape of beasts,
and it is their presence in the bodies of men and women which is the cause
of madness and other diseases.[28]
From the period when the Apocryphal books, especially those having traces
of Persian influence, were written,[29] this doctrine of an arch-fiend
with his army of demons received increasing impetus. It passed on without
check into the Christian religion, and wherever this spread the heathen
gods, like the devas of Brahmanism among the Iranians, were degraded
into demons, and swelled the vast crowd of evil spirits let loose to
torment and ruin mankind.
This doctrine of demonology, it should be remembered, was but the
elaborated form of ancestral belief in spirits referred to above. In the
Christian system it was associated with that belief in magic which has its
roots in fetishism, and from the two arose belief in witchcraft. The
universal belief in demons in early and mediæval times supplied an easy
explanation of disasters and diseases; the sorcerers and charm-workers,
the wizards and enchanters, had passed into the service of the devil. For
power to work their spite and malevolence they had bartered their souls to
him, and sealed the bargain with their blood. It was enough for the
ignorant and frightened sufferers to accuse some poor, misshapen,
squinting old woman of casting on them the evil eye, or of appearing in
the form of a cat, to secure her trial by torture and her condemnation to
an unpitied death. The spread of popular terror led to the issue of Papal
bulls and to the passing of statutes in England and in other countries
against witchcraft, and it was not until late in the eighteenth century
that the laws against that imaginary crime were repealed.
There is no sadder chapter in the annals of this tearful world than this
ghastly story of witch-finding and witch-burning. Sprenger computes that
during the Christian epoch no less than nine millions of persons, mostly
women of the poorer classes, were burned; victims of the survival into
relatively civilised times of an illusion which had its source in
primitive thought. It was an illusion which had the authority of Scripture
on its side;[30] the Church had no hesitation concerning it; such men as
Luther, Sir Thomas Browne, and Wesley never doubted it; the evidence of
the bewitched was supported by honest witnesses; and judges disposed to
mercy and humanity had no qualms in passing the dread sentence of the law
on the condemned.[31]
And although it exists not to-day, save in by-places where gross darkness
lurks, it was not destroyed by argument, by disproof, by direct assault,
but only through the quiet growth and diffusion of the scientific spirit,
before which it has dispersed. It could not live in an atmosphere thus
purified, an atmosphere charged with belief in unchanging causation and in
a definite order unbroken by caprice or fitfulness, whether in the sweep
of a planet or the pulsations of a human heart.
Of course the antecedents of the arch-fiend himself could not fail to be
the subject of curious inquiry in the time when his existence was no
matter of doubt. The old theologians scraped together enough material
about him from the sacred books of the Jews and Christians to construct an
elaborate biography of him; but in this they would seem to have explained
too much in certain directions and not enough in others, thus provoking a
reaction which ultimately discredited their painful research. Their
genealogy of him was carried farther back than they intended or desired,
for the popular notions credited him with both a mother and grandmother.
Their theory of his fall from heaven gave rise to the droll conception of
his lameness and to the legends of which the “devil on two sticks” is a
type. Their infusion of foreign element into his nature aided his
pictorial presentment in motley form and garb, as seen in the old
miracle-plays. To Vedic descriptions of Vritra’s darkness may perchance be
traced his murkiness and blackness; to Greek satyr and German
forest-sprite his goat-like body, his horns, his cloven hoofs, his tail;
to Thor his red beard; to dwarfs and goblins his red cloak and nodding
plume; to theories of transformation of men and spirits into animals his
manifold metamorphoses, as black cat, wolf, hellhound, and the like.
But his description was his doom; it was by a natural sequence that the
legends of mediæval times present him, not, with the Scotch theologians,
as a scholar and a swindler, disguising himself as a parson, but as
gullible and stupid, as over-reaching himself and as befooled by mortals.
And, like the Trolls of Scandinavian folk-lore who burst at sunrise, it
needed only the full light thrown upon his origin and development by the
researches of comparative mythologists to dissipate this creation of man’s
fears and fancies into the vaporous atmosphere where he had his birth.
THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH.
The cogency of the evidence concerning the development of belief in Satan
out of light-and-darkness myths is generally admitted, but it is of a kind
that must not be pushed too far. For the phases of Nature are manifold;
manifold also is the life of man; and we must not lend a too willing ear
to theories which refer the crude explanations of an unscientific age,
when the whole universe is Wonderland, to one source. Cave hominem unius
libri, says the adage, and we may apply it, not only to the man of one
book, but also to the man of one idea, in whom the sense of proportion is
lacking, and who sees only that for which he looks. Here such caution is
introduced as needful of exercise against the comparative mythologists
who, not content with showing—as abundant evidence warrants—that myth
has its germs in the investment of the powers of nature with personal life
and consciousness, contend that the great epics of our own and kindred
races are, from their broadest features to minutest detail, but
nature-myths obscured and transformed.
Certain scholars, notably Professor Max Müller, Sir G. W. Cox, and
Professor de Gubernatis, as interpreters of the myths of the Indo-European
peoples, and Dr. Goldziher, as an interpreter of Hebrew myth and cognate
forms, maintain that the names given in the mythopœic age to the sun,
the moon, and the changing scenery of the heaven as the fleeting forms and
myriad shades passed over its face, lost their original signification
wholly or partially, and came to be regarded as the names of veritable
deities and men, whose actions and adventures are the disguised
descriptions of the sweep of the thunder-charged clouds and of the victory
of the hero-god over their light-engulfing forces. But it is better to
state the theory in the words of its exponents, and for that purpose a
couple of extracts from Sir George Cox’s Mythology of the Aryan Nations
will suffice.
In the spontaneous utterances of thoughts awakened by outward
phenomena, we have the source of myths which must be regarded as
primary. But it is obvious that such myths would be produced only so
long as the words employed were used in their original meaning. If
once the meaning of the word were either in part or wholly forgotten,
the creation of a new personality under this name would become
inevitable, and the change would be rendered both more certain and
more rapid by the very wealth of words which were lavished on the
sights and objects which most impressed their imagination. A thousand
phrases would be used to describe the action of a beneficent or
consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious
wind; and every word or phrase become the germ of a new story as soon
as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name. Thus, in
the polyonymy (by which term Sir George Cox means the giving of
several names to one object), which was the result of the earliest
form of human thought, we have the germ of the great epics of later
times, and of the countless legends which make up the rich stores of
mythical tradition ... and the legends so framed constitute the class
of secondary myths (p. 42).
Henceforth the words which had denoted the sun and moon would denote
not merely living things but living persons.... Every word would
become an attribute, and all ideas, once grouped round a single
object, would branch off into distinct personifications. The sun had
been the lord of light, the driver of the chariot of the day; he had
toiled and laboured for the sons of men, and sunk down to rest, after
a hard battle, in the evening. But now the lord of light would be
Phoibos Apollôn, while Helios would remain enthroned in his fiery
chariot, and his toils and labours and death-struggles would be
transferred to Heraklês. The violet clouds which greet his rising and
his setting would now be represented by herds of cows which feed in
earthly pastures. There would be other expressions which would still
remain as floating phrases, not attached to any definite deities.
These would gradually be converted into incidents in the life of
heroes, and be woven at length into systematic variations. Finally,
these gods and heroes, and the incidents of their mythical career,
would receive each “a local habitation and a name.” These would remain
as genuine history when the origin and meaning of the words had been
either wholly or in part forgotten (p. 51).
Such is the “solar myth” theory. “We can hardly,” as Mr. Matthew Arnold
says, “now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth,”
and if occasion has not been given to the adversary to blaspheme, he has
been supplied with ample material for banter and ridicule. Some of the
happiest illustrations of this are made by Mr. Foster in his amusing and
really informing essay on “Nature Myths in Nursery Rhymes,” reprinted in
Leisure Readings,[32] an essay which it seems the immaculate critics
took au sérieux! With a little exercise of one’s invention, given also
ability to parody, it will be found that many noted events, as well as the
lives of the chief actors in them, yield results comforting to the solar
mythologists. Not only the Volsungs and the Iliad, but the story of
the Crusades and of the conquest of Mexico; not only Arthur and Baldr, but
Cæsar and Bonaparte, may be readily resolved, as Professor Tyndall says we
all shall be, “like streaks of morning cloud, into the infinite azure of
the past.” Dupuis, in his researches into the connection between astronomy
and mythology, had suggested that Jesus was the sun, and the twelve
apostles the zodiacal signs; and Goldziher, analysing the records of a
remote period, maintains the same concerning Jacob and his twelve sons. M.
Senart has satisfied himself that Gotama, the Buddha, is a sun-myth.
Archbishop Whately, to confound the sceptics, ingeniously disproved the
existence of Bonaparte; and a French ecclesiastic has, by witty
etymological analogies, shown that Napoleon is cognate with Apollo, the
sun, and his mother Letitia identical with Leto, the mother of Apollo;
that his personnel of twelve marshals were the signs of the zodiac; that
his retreat from Moscow was a fiery setting, and that his emergence from
Elba, to rule for twelve months, and then be banished to St. Helena, is
the sun rising out of the eastern waters to set in the western ocean after
twelve hours’ reign in the sky. But upon this solar theory let us cite
what Dr. Tylor, whose soberness of judgment renders him a valuable guide
along the zigzag path of human progress, says: “The close and deep
analogies between the life of nature and the life of man have been for
ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who, in simile or in argument,
have told of light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth, growth,
change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no one-sided interpretation can
be permitted to absorb into a single theory such endless many-sided
correspondences as these. Rash inferences which, on the strength of mere
resemblance, derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature, must be
regarded with utter mistrust, for the student who has no more stringent
criterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn, will find them
wherever it pleases him to seek them.”
The investigations of comparative mythologists, more particularly in this
country and Germany, have thrown such valuable light on the history of
ideas, that it will be instructive to learn what excited the inquiry. The
researches of Niebuhr and his school into the credibility of early history
made manifest that the only authority on which the chroniclers relied was
tradition. To them—children of an uncritical age—that tradition was
venerable with the lapse of time, and binding as a revelation from the
gods. To us the charm and interest of it lie in detecting within it the
ancient deposit of a mythopœic period, and in deciphering from it what
manner of men they must have been among whom such explanation of the
beginnings had credence. And in such an inquiry nothing can be “common or
unclean,” nothing too trivial or puerile for analysis; for where the most
grotesque and impossible are found, there we are nearer to the conditions
of which we would know more.
The serious endeavour to get at the fact underlying the fabulous was
extended to the great body of mythology which had not been incorporated
into history, and the interpretations of which satisfied only those who
suggested them. As hinted already, the Greeks had sought out the meaning
of their myths, with here and there a glimpse of the truth gained; but
this was confined to the philosophers and poets. Euhêmeros degraded them
into dull chronicle, making Heraklês a thief who carried off a crop of
oranges; Jove a king crushing rebellion; Atlas an astronomer; Pythôn a
freebooter; Æolus a weather-wise seaman, and so on. Plutarch tried to
“restore” them, but only defaced them, and after centuries of neglect they
were discovered by Lord Bacon to be allegories with a moral. Then Banier
and Lemprière emptied out of them what little life Euhêmeros had left, and
the believers in Hebrew as the original speech of mankind saw in them the
fragments of a universal primitive revelation! Even Professor Max Müller
is so upset by the many loathsome and revolting stories in a mythology
current in the land of Lykurgos and Solon, such as the marriage of his
mother Jocasta by Œdipus, and the swallowing of his own children by
Cronus, that he inquires (as if he half believed it possible) whether
there was not “a period of temporary insanity through which the human mind
had to pass,” and a degradation from lovely metaphor to coarse fact which
only a “disease of language,” or the confusion arising from the forgotten
meanings of words, explains. There is no need, however, for assumptions of
this or of any other kind. This is best shown by a summary of facts which
led, more or less directly, to the formulation of the solar theory.
Some fifty years ago a good many idle speculations, products of a reverent
and uncurbed fancy concerning Hebrew as the primitive speech of mankind,
were laid to rest when the sober guess of Schlegel as to the connection of
the leading languages of Europe and those of India and Persia, was
converted into certainty by Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Schleicher, and later
scholars.
By the application of the comparative method to philology, i.e. the
interpretation of any set of facts by comparison with corresponding facts,
due allowance being made for differences which Grimm’s law (see infra)
explains, the relation of Greek, Latin, Slavonic, Teutonic, and Keltic to
one another and to Indian and Persian, and their consequent descent from a
common parent language, was proved. To this group the term Aryan (from a
Sanskrit word cognate with the root ar, our English word ear, to
plough), is given, a term which ancient records show was applied by the
Asiatic Aryans to themselves as the lords of the soil, the dominant race.
The names Indo-Germanic, and, more appropriately as roughly defining the
peoples included thereunder, Indo-European, have been suggested in its
stead, but Aryan, as the more convenient term, has come into general use.
The survival of grammatical forms common to the Aryan ancestors, and the
likeness between words necessary for daily use, evidenced to one parent
primitive speech, and, passing from words to the ideas and things which
they connoted, philologists were able to infer what manner of men these
Aryans were, and under what conditions they dwelt. In the enthusiasm
excited by so brilliant a discovery the soberest scholars were apt to
over-colour their accurately-outlined picture of old Aryan life; to read
modern meanings into the ancient words. But, making good allowance for
this, the sketch which was presented in Max Müller’s famous paper on
Comparative Mythology[33] remains a credit to scholarship in its vivid
generalisations from immaterial data.
Professor Max Müller, in agreement with Pictet and others, placed the
original settlement of the Aryans as probably in the region between the
Hindu Kush Mountains and the Caspian Sea. But the opinion of later
scholars of cooler judgment leans to Europe rather than to Asia as the
primitive home of the Aryan tribes. The scanty hints which survive point
to a larger acquaintance with European flora and fauna than with Asiatic;
to a southward course, whilst silent about westward migration; the
movement of races inclines from less genial to more genial zones; the
traditions of certain branches, as the Greeks, tell of them as
autochthones, or born on the soil where they are found; and the judgment
of experts is decisive as to the greater nearness of the European
languages to the original speech as contrasted with Sanskrit and Iranian.
These are the principal reasons adduced in support of the theory of a
European origin. Benfey places the old Aryan home in the neighbourhood of
the Black Sea, Schrader and Geiger in Middle Germany, Karl Penka in
Scandinavia. But in speculating on the exact habitation of congeries of
tribes requiring vast tracts of country for support, no rigid boundaries
can be fixed, and there is room for the play of both theories, the more so
as theories they must remain.[34]
At the back of this unsettled question lies the interesting subject of the
civilisation of pre-Aryan races on the European-Asiatic Continent. In the
Newer Stone Age this continent was inhabited by races of short stature,
with long and narrow skulls, and probably dark complexions, races whom the
Aryans, a tall, round-skulled, fair-complexioned race, conquered, and with
whom they so largely intermingled that the varieties of fair and dark
people in Europe at this day, speaking an Aryan language, are past finding
out. Indeed, there are probably no unmixed races throughout Europe and
Asia; the conquering race imposed its language on the conquered, and thus
is explained the community of speech without community of race which must
be recognised in the composite European peoples.
With this qualification the kinship of the Aryan-language-speaking peoples
is demonstrated, and the like kind of evidence by which this is proved has
been applied to establish the identity of their mythologies, legends, and
folk-tales. The meaning of the proper names of these once determined, the
key to the meaning of the myth or tale was clear; because, it is
contended, the names contain the germs or oldest surviving part. This is
to make the last first; but the result, as already shown in the Aryan
light-and-darkness myths, has been to bring out a few striking
correspondences in Greek and Vedic names, although by no means so intimate
and frequent as the solar mythologists assume. The uniform behaviour of
the untutored mind before like phenomena to which barbaric myth witnesses
prepares us for general correspondences, but not in such details as we
find in the Aryan group. On what theory these, notably in the case of the
folk-tales, are to be accounted for, it is not easy to say, for the mode
of their diffusion from India to Iceland is obscure. But the fact abides
that nursery stories told in Norway and Tyrol, in Scotland and the Deccan,
are identical. After allowing for local colouring and for changes incident
to the lapse of time, they are the variants of stories presumably related
in the Aryan fatherland at a period historically remote, and, moreover,
are told in words which are phonetically akin. Their resemblances in
minor incident and detail are not easily explained by theories of
borrowing, for apparently no trace of intercourse between the Asiatic
Aryans and the Aryans of extreme Western Europe occurs until after the
domiciling of the stories where we find them. Nor did they with such close
resemblances as appear between the German Faithful John and the Hindu Rama
and Luxman; between our own Cinderella, the German Aschenpüttel and the
Hindu Sodewa Bai, spring native from their respective soils.[35] And there
is just that unlikeness in certain details which might be expected from
the different positions and products of the several Aryan lands. They
explain, for example, the absence from Scandinavian folk-tale of creatures
like the elephant, the giant, ape, and turtle, which figure in the
Brahmanic.
When we turn to the great Aryan epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey; the
Volsungs; the Nibelungs; King Arthur and his Round Table; the
Ramâyanâ and the Mahâ Bhâratâ; the Shah Nameh, and so forth, we find
similarities of incident and episode which point to a common derivation
from old Aryan myth. That common synonyms occur in cognate languages is to
be expected, but so far as the names and the characteristics of the heroes
and heroines are concerned, the phonetic identity is proven in a far less
number of cases than the solar mythologists, working on their too
exclusive method, argue. The key which for them unlocks the meaning of
every Aryan myth is Sanskrit. In tracing the history of the Indo-European
family of speech, it served as the starting-point, because it has more
than any other member preserved the roots and suffixes, if not in their
oldest, still in their most accessible form. And in tracing the course of
Indo-European mythology, it is in the Vedic texts, chiefly the most
ancient, the Rig-Veda, that we find the materials for comparative study,
since in these venerable hymns of a Bible older than our own are preserved
the earliest recorded forms of that mythology. That is to say, we have not
in any European branch of Aryan speech any documentary relic of the age of
the Rig-Veda, otherwise we might find ourselves in possession of more
ancient relics of that speech. So that although the value of Sanskrit as
the guide without which knowledge of the Aryan mother-tongue would have
remained vague, indeed have been beyond reach, cannot be over-estimated,
we must not accept as of universal worth what is local and special in
it.[36]
The phonetic kinship and actual identity which comparative philologists
have sought to establish between the proper names of gods and heroes of
the Greek and Vedic mythologies (for the inquiry has been chiefly
restricted to these two), is based on the collection of rules by which we
can at once tell what sounds in one language correspond to those of its
kindred tongues, called, after its discoverer, “Grimm’s Law.” This law
gave the quietus to theories of common origin and variation of words based
on specious resemblances (theories satirised by Dean Swift in his
derivation of ostler from oatstealer), and introduced a scientific
method into etymological study.
The varying pronunciation of certain words among the Aryan-speaking
peoples which were common to them was discovered by Grimm to be constant;
for example, a Greek th answers to an English d, and, vice versâ, a
German s or z to an English t, and so forth, so that by comparing
these altered forms the common form from which they spring is reached.
At what fluent period in the history of the Aryan languages these changes
of one sound into another were induced is unknown, nor are their precise
causes easy of ascertainment, being referable to physical influences,
climatal and local, which in the course of time brought about changes in
the organs of speech, such, for example, as make our th so difficult of
pronunciation to a German, in whose language d takes its place, as
drei for three, durstig for thirsty, dein for thine, etc. We
may note tendencies to variation in children of the same household, their
prattle often affording striking illustration of Grimm’s law, and it is
easy to see that among semi-civilised and isolated tribes, where no check
upon the variations is imposed, they would tend to become fixed and give
rise to new dialects.
Tracing the operation of that law in the changes in proper names in Greek
and Vedic mythology, their correlation is proved in a few important
instances. The Greek Zeus, the Latin Deus (whence French Dieu and
our deity, and also deuce), the Lithuanian Diewas, and the Sanskrit
Dyaus all come from an old Aryan root, div or dyu, meaning “to
shine.” The Sanskrit dyu, as a noun means “sky” or “day,” and in the
Veda Dyaus is the bright sky or heaven. Varuna, the noblest figure in
the Vedic religion, the “enveloper” or all-surrounding heaven, is cognate
with the Greek Ouranos or Uranus, the common root being var, “to
veil” or “cover.” Agni, the fire-god, to whom the larger number of hymns
occur in the Veda, is related to the Latin ignis, fire, and so forth.
The heavens and the earth and all that in them is are the raw material on
which man works, and the comparative philologists have established exactly
what might have been predicated, the nature-origin of the Greek, Vedic,
and other Aryan myths. They might well have rested content with this
confirmation which their method gives to results arrived at by other
methods, and not weakened or discredited it by applying it all round to
every leading name in Aryan myth. For this has only revealed the
fundamental differences among themselves as to the etymologies and
meanings of such names. But not satisfied with the demonstration that the
majestic epics have their germs in the phenomena of the natural world, and
the course of the day and year, they strain the evidence by contending
that “there is absolutely nothing left for further analysis in the
stories;” that their “resemblances in detail defy the influences of
climate and scenery;”[37] that every incident has its birth in the journey
of the sun, the death of the dawn, the theft of the twilight by the powers
of darkness, evidence which, in Sir George Cox’s words, “not long hence
will probably be regarded as excessive.”
They are nature-myths; but, and in this is the secret of their enduring
life, they are much more than that. The impetus that has shaped them as we
now know them came from other forces than clouds and storms.
Without such caution as these remarks are designed to supply, any reader
of the Mythology of the Aryan Nations would conclude that the
philological method had proved the meteorological origin of every epic and
folk-tale among the Indo-European peoples. He would learn that, in a way
rudely analogous to the supernatural guidance of the Christian Church, the
several Aryan tribes had received from the fathers of the race an
unvarying canon of interpretation of the primitive myths, a canon
seemingly preserved with the jealous veneration with which the Jew
regarded the Thorah, and the Brahman the Veda. He would also learn
that the details of Norse and classic myth can be traced to the Veda,
that these details, not of incident alone, but of thought and expression,
survived unimpaired by time and untouched by circumstance, whilst, strange
to say, the more prominent names and the leading characters became
obscured in their meaning. Strange indeed, and not true. For what are the
facts?
Long before the hymns of the Rig-Veda existed as we know them (and they
have remained an inviolate sacred text since 600 B.C., when every verse,
word, and syllable were counted) the Aryan tribes had swarmed from their
parent hive across boundless steppes and over winding mountain passes,
some to the westward limits of Europe, others southward into Hindustan.
Among the slender intellectual capital of which they stood possessed was
the common mythology of their savage ancestors, in which, as we have seen,
sun and moon, storm and thunder-cloud, and all other natural phenomena,
were credited with personal life and will. But that mythology had
certainly advanced beyond the crude primitive form and entered the heroic
stage, wherein the powers of nature were half human, half divine. Their
language had passed into the inflective or highest stage, and had
undergone such changes that the relationship between its several groups
and their origin from one mother-tongue was obscured, and remained so
until laid bare in our day. In short, the Aryan tribes had attained no
mean state of civilisation, some being more advanced than the others,
according as external circumstances helped or hindered, and one by one
they passed from the condition of semi-civilised nomads to become fathers
and founders of nations that abide to this day.
These being the facts to which language itself bears witness, how was it
possible for their mythologies, i.e. their stock of notions about
things, to remain unaffected and secure of transmission without organic
change? The myths, unfixed in literary form, yielded themselves with ease
as vehicles of new ideas; their ancient meaning, already faded, paled
before the all-absorbing significance of present facts. These were more
potent realities than the kisses of the dawn; the human and the personal,
in its struggles, of mightier interest than the battle of rosy morn or
purple eve with the sons of thunder; and Homer’s music would long since
have died away were Achilles’ “baneful wrath” but a passively-told tale of
the sun’s grief for the loss of the morning.
In brief, the complex and varying influences which have transformed the
primitive myth are the important factors which the solar theorists have
omitted in their attempted solution of the problem. They have forgotten
the part which, to borrow a term from astronomy, “personal equation” has
played. They have not examined myth in the light of the long history of
the race; and the new elements which it took into itself, while never
wholly ridding itself of the old, have escaped them. They have secured a
mechanical unity, whereas, by combination of the historical with their own
method, they might have secured a vital unity.
To all which classic myth itself bears record. The Greeks were of Aryan
stock, but the time of their settlement is unknown. The period between
this and the Homeric age was, however, long enough to admit of their
advance to the state of a nation rejoicing in the fulness of intellectual
life. They remembered not from what rock they were hewn, from what pit
they were digged. The nature-gods of their remote ancestors had long since
changed their meteorological character, and appeared in the likeness of
men, or, at least, played very human pranks on Olympus. In the Veda the
primitive nature-myth, although exalted and purified, is persistent; under
one name or another it is still the ceaseless battle between the darkness
and the light; Dyaus was still the bright sky, the cattle of Siva were
still the clouds. But the Greek of Homer’s time, and his congener in the
far north, had forgotten all that; the war in heaven was transferred to
the strife of gods and men on the shores of the Hellespont and by the
bleak seaboard of the Baltic. Their gods and goddesses, improved by age
and experience, put off their physical and put on the ethical; the
heaven-father became king of gods and men, source of order, law, and
justice; the sun and the dawn, Apollo and Athênê, became wisdom, skill,
and guardianship incarnate. And the story of human vicissitudes found in
solar myth that “pattern of things in the heavens” which conformed to its
design.
Thus Homer, in whose day the old nature-myth had become confused with the
vague traditions of veritable deeds of kings and heroes but dimly
remembered, touched it as with heavenly fire unquenchable. The siege of
Troy, so say the solar mythologists, “is a repetition of the daily siege
of the east by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their
highest treasures in the west.” It is surely a truer instinct which,
recognising the physical framework of the great epics, feels that the
vitality which inheres in them is due to whatever of human experience,
joy, and sorrow is the burden of their immortal song. As to the repulsive
features of Greek myth, one can neither share the distress of the solar
theorists nor feel their difficulties. Both are self-created, and are
aggravated by suggestions, serious or otherwise, of “periods of temporary
insanity through which the human mind had to pass,” as the rude health of
childhood is checked by whooping-cough and measles. They are explained by
the persistence with which the lower out of which man has emerged asserts
itself, as primary rocks pierce through and overlap later strata.
The ancestors of the Aryans were savages in the remote past, and the “old
Adam” was never entirely cast out; indeed it is with us still. There are
superstitions and credulities in our midst, in drawing-rooms as well as
gipsy camps, quite as gross in nature, if less coarse in guise, as those
extant among the Greeks. The future historian of our time, as he turns
over the piles of our newspapers, will find contrasts of ignorance and
culture as startling as any existing in the land of Homer, of Archimedes,
and Aristotle. Spirit-rapping and belief in the “evil eye” have their cult
among us, although Professor Huxley’s Hume can be bought for two
shillings, and knowledge has free course. And it certainly accords best
with all that we have learnt as to the mode of human progress to believe
that the old lived into the new, than that the old had been cast out, but
had gained re-entry, making the last state of the Greeks to be worse than
the first.
In this matter the Vedic hymns do not help us much. The conditions under
which they took the form that insured their transmission are ipso facto
as of yesterday, compared with the period during which man’s endeavour was
made to get at that meaning of his surroundings wherein is found the germ
of myth throughout the world. They are the products of a relatively
highly-civilised time; the conception of sky and dawn as living persons
has passed out of its primitive simplicity; these heavenly powers have
become complex deities; there is much confounding of persons, the same god
called by one or many names. The thought is that of an age when moral
problems have presented themselves for solution, and the references to
social matters indicate a settled state of things far removed from the
fisher and the hunter stage. Nevertheless there lurk within these sacred
writings survivals of the lower culture, traces of coarse rites, bloody
sacrifices, of repulsive myths of the gods, and of cosmogonies familiar to
the student of barbaric myth and legend.
Enough has been said to show that the extreme and one-sided
interpretations of the solar mythologists are due to a one-sided method.
The philological has yielded splendid results; this the solar theorists
have done; the historical yields results equally rich and fertile; this
they have left undone. Language has given us the key to the kinship
between the several members of the great body of Aryan myths; the study of
the historical evolution of myths, the comparison of these, without regard
to affinity of speech, will give us the key to the kinship between savage
interpretation of phenomena all the world over. The mythology of Greek and
Bushman, of Kaffir and Scandinavian, of the Red man and the Hindu, springs
from the like mental condition. It is the uniform and necessary product of
the human mind in the childhood of the race.
BELIEF IN METAMORPHOSIS INTO ANIMALS.
The belief that human beings could change themselves into animals has been
already alluded to, but in view of its large place in the history of
illusions, some further reference is needful.
Superstitions which now excite a smile, or which seem beneath notice, were
no sudden phenomena, appearing now and again at the beck and call of
wilful deceivers of their kind. That they survive at all, like organisms,
atrophied or degenerate, which have seen “better days,” is evidence of
remote antiquity and persistence. Every seeming vagary of the mind had
serious importance, and answered to some real need of man as a sober
attempt to read the riddle of the earth, and get at its inmost secret.
So with this belief. It is the outcome of that early thought of man which
conceived a common nature and fellowship between himself and brutes, a
conception based on rude analogies between his own and other forms of
life, as also between himself and things without life, but having motion,
be they waterspouts or rivers, trees or clouds, especially these last,
when the wind, in violent surging and with howling voice, drove them
across the sky. Where he blindly, timidly groped, we walk as in the light,
and with love that casts out fear. Where rough resemblances suggested to
him like mental states and actions in man and brute, the science of our
time has, under the comparative method, converted the guess into a
certainty; not to the confirmation of his conclusions, but to the proof of
identity of structure and function, to the demonstrating of a common
origin, however now impassable the chasm that separates us from the lower
animals.
The belief in man’s power to change his form and nature is obviously
nearly connected with the widespread doctrine of metempsychosis, or the
passing of the soul at death into one or a series of animals, generally
types of the dead man’s character, as where the timid enter the body of a
hare, the gluttonous that of a swine or vulture.
“Fills with fresh energy another form,
And towers an elephant or glides a worm;
Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon,
Or wails a screech-owl to the deaf, cold moon,
Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare,
Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air.”
But while in transmigration the soul returns not to the body which it had
left, transformation was only for a time, occurring at stated periods, and
effected by the will of the transformed, or by the aid of sorcery or
magic, or sometimes imposed by the gods as a punishment for impious
defiance and sin.
Other causes, less remote, aided the spread of a belief to which the mind
was already inclined. Among these were the hallucinations of men who
believed themselves changed into beasts, and who, retreating to caves and
forests, issued thence howling and foaming, ravening for blood and
slaughter; hallucinations which afflicted not only single persons, as in
the case of Nebuchadnezzar, whose milder monomania (he, himself, saying in
the famous prize poem:—
“As he ate the unwonted food,
‘It may be wholesome, but it is not good’”),
rather resembled that of the daughters of Prætus, who believed themselves
cows, but which also spread as virulent epidemic among whole classes. It
is related that, in 1600, multitudes were attacked by the disease known as
lycanthropy, or wolf-madness (from Greek, lukos, a wolf, and
anthropos, a man), and that they herded and hunted in packs, destroying
and eating children, and keeping in their mountain fastnesses a cannibal
or devil’s sabbath, like the nocturnal meetings of witches and demons
known as the Witches’ Sabbath. Hundreds of them were executed on their own
confession, but some time elapsed before the frightful epidemic, and the
panic which it caused, passed away. Besides such delusions, history down
to our own time records instances where a morbid innate craving for blood,
leading sometimes to cannibalism, has shown itself. Mr. Baring-Gould, in
his Book of Werewolves, cites a case from Gall of a Dutch priest who had
such a desire to kill and to see killed that he became chaplain to a
regiment for the sake of witnessing the slaughter in battle. But still
more ghastly are the notorious cases of Elizabeth, a Hungarian lady of
title, who inveigled girls into her castle and murdered them, that she
might bathe her body in human blood to enhance her beauty; and of the
Maréchal de Retz who, cursed with the abnormal desire to murder children,
allured them with promises of dainties into his kitchen, and killed them,
inhaling the odour of their blood with delight, and then burned their
bodies in the huge fireplace in the room devoted to these horrors. When
the deed was done the Maréchal would lie prostrate with grief, “would toss
weeping and praying on a bed, or recite fervent prayers and litanies on
his knees, only to rise with irresistible craving to repeat the crime.”
Such instances as the foregoing, whether of delusion or morbid desire to
destroy, are among secondary causes; they may contribute, but they do not
create, being inadequate to account for the world-wide existence of
transformation myths. The animals which are the supposed subject of these
vary with the habitat, but are always those which have inspired most
dread from their ferocity. In Abyssinia we find the man-hyæna; in South
Africa, the man-lion; in India, the man-tiger; in Northern Europe, the
man-bear; and in other parts of Europe the man-wolf, or werewolf (from
A.-S. wer, a man).
Among the many survivals of primitive thought in the Greek mythology,
which are the only key to its coarser features, this of belief in
transformation occurs, and, indeed, along the whole line of human
development it appears and re-appears in forms more or less vivid and
tragic. The gods of the south, as of the north, came down in the likeness
of beasts and birds, as well as of men, and among the references to these
myths in classic writers, Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, tells the story of
Zeus visiting Lykaon, king of Arcadia, who placed a dish of human flesh
before the god to test thereby his omniscience. Zeus detected the trick,
and punished the king by changing him into a wolf, so that his desire
might be towards the food which he had impiously offered to his god.
“In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant
His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted
For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter.
His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked.
A wolf—he retains yet large traces of his ancient expression,
Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid,
His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury.”
But we may pass from this and such-like tales of the ancients to the grim
realities of the belief in mediæval times.
If wolves abounded, much more did the werewolf abound. According to Olaus
Magnus, the sufferings which the inhabitants of Prussia and neighbouring
nations endured from wolves were trivial compared with the ravages wrought
by men turned into wolves. On the feast of the Nativity, these monsters
were said to assemble and then disperse in companies to kill and plunder.
Attacking lonely houses, they devoured all the human beings and every
other animal found therein. “They burst into the beer-cellars and there
they empty the tuns of beer or mead, and pile up the empty casks one above
another in the middle of the cellar, thus showing their difference from
natural wolves.” In Scandinavia it was believed that some men had a second
skin out of which they could slip and appear in the shape of a beast.
Perhaps the phrase “to jump out of one’s skin” is a relic of this notion.
The Romans believed that the werewolf simply effected the change by
turning his skin inside out, hence the term “versipellis,” or
“skin-changer.” So in mediæval times it was said that the wolf’s skin was
under the human, and the unhappy suspects were hacked and tortured for
signs of such hairy growth. Sometimes the change was induced, it is said,
by putting on a girdle of human skin round the waist; sometimes by the use
of magical ointment. Whatever the animal whose shape a man took could do,
that he could do, plus such power as he possessed in virtue of his
manhood or acquired by sorcery, his eyes remaining as the only features by
which he could be recognised. If he was not changed himself, some charm
was wrought on the eyes of onlookers whereby they could see him only in
the shape which he was supposed to assume. The genuine monomaniacs aided
such an illusion. The poor demented one who conceived himself a dog or a
wolf, who barked, and snapped, and foamed at the mouth, and bit savagely
at the flesh of others, was soon clothed by a terror-stricken fancy in the
skin of either brute, and believed to have the canine or lupine appetite
in addition to his human cunning. The imagination thus projects in visible
form the spectres of its creation; the eye in this, as in so much else,
sees the thing for which it looks. Some solid foundation for the belief
would, however, exist in the custom among warriors of dressing themselves
in the skins of beasts to add to their ferocious appearance. And it was
amidst such that the remarkable form of mania in Northern Europe known as
the Berserkr rage (“bear-sark” or “bear-skin” wearer) arose. Working
themselves by the aid of strong drink or drugs and contagious excitement
into a frenzy, these freebooters of the Northland sallied forth to break
the backbones and cleave the skulls of quiet folk and unwary travellers.
As with flashing eyes and foaming mouth they yelled and danced, seemingly
endowed with magic power to resist assault by sword or club, they aroused
in the hysterically disposed a like madness, which led to terrible crimes,
and which died away only as the killing of one’s fellows became less the
business of life. History supplies many examples of strange mental
epidemics which sped through towns and provinces in mediæval times. They
were induced by religious enthusiasm and other extreme and harmful forms
of mental stimulation, the most notorious being the great St. Vitus’
dance, and the procession of Flagellants, to which in their mad orgies the
hysterical ceremonies of barbarous tribes correspond. Of that tendency
towards imitation which these freaks of erratic and unbalanced minds
foster Dr. Carpenter[38] quotes an illustration from Zimmerman. A nun in a
large convent in France began to mew like a cat, and shortly afterwards
other nuns also mewed. At last all the nuns mewed every day at a given
time and for several hours together. And this cat’s concert was only
stopped by the military arriving and threatening to whip the nuns.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the belief in men-beasts
reached its maximum, and met with no tender treatment at the hands of a
church whose founder had manifested such soothing pity towards the
“possessed” of Galilee and Judæa. That church had a cut-and-dried
explanation of the whole thing, and applied a sharp and pitiless remedy.
If the devil, with countless myrmidons at his command, was “going to and
fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,” what limit could be put
to his ingenuity and arts? Could he not as easily change a man into a wolf
or a bear as a woman into a cat? and had not each secured this by a
compact with him, the foe of God and His Church? The evidence in support
of the one was as clear and cogent as in support of the other; hence
werewolf hunting and burning became as Christian a duty and as paying a
profession as witch-smelling and torturing. Any cruelty was justified by
its perpetrators when the object in view was the vindication of the
majesty of God; and not until the advancing intelligence of men recoiled
against the popular explanations of witchcraft and lycanthropy were the
laws against both repealed.
Those explanations were survivals of savage mental philosophy blended with
a crude theology. To the savage, all diseases are the work of evil
spirits. If a man hurts himself against a stone, the demon in the stone is
the cause. If the man falls suddenly ill, writhes or shrieks in his pain,
the spirit which has smuggled itself in with the food or the drink or the
breath is twisting or tearing him; if he has a fit, the spirit has flung
him; if he is in the frenzy of hysteria, the spirit within him is laughing
in fiendish glee. And when the man suddenly loses his reason, goes, as
people say, “out of his mind,” acts and looks no longer like his former
self, still more does this seem the work of an evil agent within him. It
is kindred with the old belief that the sickly and ugly infant had been
left in the cradle by the witch in place of the child stolen by her before
its baptism.[39] And the thing to do is to find some mode of conjuring or
frightening or forcing the demon out of the man, just as it became a
sacred duty to watch over the newly-born until the sign of the cross had
been made on its forehead, and the regenerating water sprinkled over it.
“Presbyter is but old priest writ large.” And the theory of demoniacal
agency was but the savage theory in a more elaborate guise. To theologians
and jurists it was a sufficing explanation; it fitted in with the current
notions of the government of the universe, and there was no need to frame
any other. Body and mind were to them as separate entities as they are to
the savage and the ignorant. Each regarded the soul as independent of the
body, and framed his theories of occasional absence therefrom accordingly.
But science has taught us to know ourselves not as dual, but as one. She
lays her finger on the subtle, intricate framework of man’s nervous
system, and finds in the derangement of this the secret of those delusions
and illusions which have been so prolific in agony and suffering. She
makes clear how the yielding to morbid tendencies can still foster
delusions, which, if no longer the subject of pains and penalties in the
body politic, are themselves ministers of vengeance in the body where they
arise. And in the recognition of a fundamental unity between the physical
and the mental, in the healthy working of the one as dependent on the
wholesome care of the other, she finds not only the remedy against mental
derangement and all forms of harmful excitement, but also the prevention
which is better than cure.
Traditions of transformation of men into beasts are not confined to the
Old world.[40] In Dr. Rink’s Tales of the Eskimo there are numerous
stories both of men and women who have assumed animal form at will, as
also incidental references to the belief in stories such as that telling
how an Eskimo got inside a walrus skin, so that he might lead the life of
that creature. And among the Red races, that rough analogy which led to
the animal being credited with life and consciousness akin to the human,
still expresses itself in thought and act. If even now it is matter of
popular belief in the wilds of Norway that Finns and Lapps, who from
remote times have passed as skilful witches and wizards, can at pleasure
assume the shape of bears, the common saying, according to Sir George
Dasent, about an unusually daring and savage beast being, “that can be no
Christian bear,” we may not be surprised that lower races still ascribe
power of interchange to man and brute. The werewolf superstition is extant
among the North-Western Indians, but free from those diabolical features
which characterised it in mediæval times among ourselves. It takes its
place in barbaric myth generally, and although it may have repellent or
cruel elements, it was never blended with belief in the demoniacal. The
Ahts say that men go into the mountains to seek their manitou (that is,
the personal deity, generally the first animal seen by a native in the
dream produced by his fasting on reaching manhood), and, mixing with
wolves, are after a time changed into these creatures. Although the
illustration bears more upon what has to be said concerning the barbaric
belief in animal-ancestors, it has some reference to the matter in hand to
cite the custom among the Tonkanays, a wild and unruly tribe in Texas, of
celebrating their origin by a grand annual dance. One of them, naked as he
was born, is buried in the earth, then the others, clothed in wolf-skins,
walk over him, sniff around him, howl in wolfish style, and then dig him
up with their nails.[41] The leading wolf solemnly places a bow and arrow
in his hands, and, to his inquiry as to what he must do for a living,
advises him “to do as the wolves do—rob, kill, and rove from place to
place, never cultivating the soil.” Dr. Brinton, in quoting the above from
Schoolcraft, refers to a similar custom among the ancient dwellers on
Mount Soracte.
As in past times among ourselves, so in times present among races such as
the foregoing, their wizards and shamans are believed to have power to
turn themselves as they choose into beasts, birds, or reptiles. By
whatever name these professional impostors are known, whether as
medicine-men, or, as in Cherokee, by the high-sounding title of
“possessors of the divine fire,” they have traded, and wherever credulity
or darkest ignorance abide, still trade on the fears and fancies of their
fellows by disguising themselves in voice and gait and covering of the
animal which they pretend to be. Among races believing in transformation
such tricks have free course, and the more dexterous the sorcerer who
could play bear’s antics in a bear’s skin proved himself in throwing off
the disguise and appearing suddenly as a man, the greater his success, and
the more firmly grounded the belief.
The whole subject, although presented here only in the barest outline,
would not be fitly dismissed without some reference to the survival of the
primitive belief in men-animals in the world-wide stories known as
beast-fables, in which animals act and talk like human beings. When to us
all nature was Wonderland, and the four-footed, the birds, and the fishes,
among our play-fellows; when in fireside tale and rhyme they spoke our
language and lived that free life which we then shared and can never share
again, the feeling of kinship to which the old fables gave expression may
have checked many a wanton act, and, if we learned it not fully then, we
may have taken the lesson to heart since—
“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives.”
And then those Fables of Æsop, even with the tedious drawback of the
“moral,” as powder beneath the jam, did they not lighten for us in
school-days the dark passages through our Valpy (for the omniscient Dr.
William Smith was not then the tyro’s dread), and again give us communion
with the fowl of the air and the beast of the field? Now our mature
thought may interest itself in following the beast-myths to the source
whence Babrius and Phædrus, knowing not its springhead and antiquity, drew
their vivid presentments of the living world, and find in the storied East
the well-spring that fed the imagination of youngsters thousands of years
ago. Such tales have not fallen in the East to the low level which they
have reached here, because they yet accord in some degree with extant
superstitions in India, whereas in Europe they find little or nothing to
which they correspond. With some authorities the Egyptians have the credit
of first inventing the beast-fable, but among them, as among every other
advanced race, such stories are the remains of an earlier deposit; relics
of a primitive philosophy in which wisdom and skill and cunning are no
monopoly of man’s. The fondness of the negro races, whose traditions are
not limited to South and Central Africa, for such fables is well known, as
witness the tales of which “Uncle Remus” is a type, and it is strikingly
illustrated in the history of the Vai tribe, who having, partly through
contact with whites, elaborated a system of writing, made the beast-fable
their earliest essay in composition.[42]
The evidence in support of the common ancestry of the languages spoken by
the leading peoples in Europe, and by such important historical races in
Asia as the Hindu and the Persian, has been already summarised. That
evidence, it was remarked, is considered corroborative not only of the
common origin of the myths on which the framework of the great
Indo-European epics rests, but also of the possession by the several clans
of a common stock of folk-lore and folk-tale, in which, of course, the
beast-fables are included, these being the relics in didactic or humorous
guise of that serious philosophy concerning the community of life in man
and brute amongst the barbaric ancestors of the Indo-Europeans, upon which
stress enough has been laid.
Even if the common origin be disproved, the evidence would be shifted
merely from local to general foundations, because the uniform attitude of
mind before the same phenomena would have further confirmation; but the
resemblances are too minute in detail to be explained by a theory of
independent creation of the tales where we now find them. The likenesses
are many, the unlikenesses are few, being the result of local colouring,
historical fact blended with the fiction, popular belief, and
superstition, all affected by the skill of the professional story-teller.
As in the numerous variants of the familiar Cinderella, Beauty and the
Beast, Punchkin, and the like, the same fairy prince or princess, the same
wicked magician and clever versatile Boots, peep through, disclosing the
near relationship of Hindu nursery tales to the folk-tales of Norway and
the Highlands, of Iceland and Ceylon, of Persia and Serbia, of Russia and
the lands washed by the Mediterranean.
In the venerable collection of Buddhist Birth Stories, now in course of
translation by Dr. Rhys Davids,[43] and to which is prefaced an
interesting introduction on the source and migration of folk-tales, we are
face to face with many a fable familiar to us in the Æsop of our
school-days. There is the story of the Ass in the Lion’s Skin, not in
which, as Æsop has it, the beast dressed himself, but which the hawker put
on him to frighten the thieves who would steal his goods. Left one day to
browse in a field whilst his master refreshed himself at an inn, some
watchmen saw him, and, raising hue and cry, brought out the villagers,
armed with their rude implements. The ass, fearing death, made a noise
like an ass, and was killed. Long might he, adds the ancient moral—
“Clad in a lion’s skin
Have fed on the barley green;
But he brayed!
And that moment he came to ruin.”
The variants of this old fable are found in mediæval, in French, German,
Indian, and Turkish folk-lore, as are also those of the tortoise who lost
his life through “much speaking.” Desiring to emigrate, two ducks agreed
to carry him, he seizing hold of a stick which they held between their
beaks. As they passed over a village the people shouted and jeered,
whereupon the irate tortoise called out: “What business is it of yours?”
and, of course, thereby let go the stick and, falling down, split in two.
Therefore—
“Speak wise words not out of season;
You see how, by talking overmuch,
The tortoise fell.”
In Æsop the tortoise asks an eagle to teach him to fly; in Chinese
folk-lore he is carried by geese.
Jacob Grimm’s researches concerning the famous mediæval fable of “Reynard
the Fox” revealed the ancient and scattered materials out of which that
wonderful satire was woven, and there is no feature of the story which
reappears more often in Eastern and Western folk-lore than that cunning of
the animal which has been for the lampooner and the satirist the type of
self-seeking monk and ecclesiastic. When Chanticleer proudly takes an
airing with his family, he meets master Reynard, who tells him he has
become a “religious,” and shows him his beads, and his missal, and his
hair shirt, adding, in a voice “that was childlike and bland,” that he had
vowed never to eat flesh. Then he went off singing his Credo, and slunk
behind a hawthorn. Chanticleer, thus thrown off his guard, continues his
airing, and the astute hypocrite, darting from his ambush, seizes the
plump hen Coppel. So in Indian folk-tale a wolf living near the Ganges is
cut off from food by the surrounding water. He decides to keep holy day,
and the god Sakka, knowing his lupine weakness, resolves to have some fun
with him, and turns himself into a wild goat “Aha!” says the wolf, “I’ll
keep the fast another day,” and springing up he tried to seize the goat,
who skipped about so that he could not be taken. So Lupus gives it up, and
says as his solatium: “After all, I’ve not broken my vow.”
The Chinese have a story of a tiger who desired to eat a fox, but the
latter claimed exemption as being superior to the other animals, adding
that if the tiger doubted his word he could easily judge for himself. So
the two set forth, and, of course, every animal fled at sight of the
tiger, who, too stupid to see how he had been gulled, conceived high
respect for the fox, and spared his life.
Sometimes the tables are turned. Chanticleer gets his head out of
Reynard’s mouth by making him answer the farmer, and in the valuable
collection of Hottentot tales which the late Dr. Bleek, with some warrant,
called Reynard in South Africa, the cock makes the jackal say his
prayers, and flies off while the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts
his eyes.
But further quotations must be resisted; enough if it is made clearer that
the beast-fable is the lineal descendant of barbaric conceptions of a life
shared in common by man and brute, and another link thus added to the
lengthening chain of the continuity of human history.
TOTEMISM: BELIEF IN DESCENT FROM ANIMAL OR PLANT.
In addition to the beliefs in the transformation of men into animals and
in the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, we find among
barbarous peoples a belief which is probably the parent of one and
certainly nearly related to both, namely, in descent from the animal or
plant, more often the former, whose name they bear. Its connection with
transmigration is seen in the belief of the Moquis of Arizona, that after
death they live in the form of their totemic animal, those of the deer
family becoming deer, and so on through the several gentes. The belief
survives in its most primitive and vivid forms among two races, the
aborigines of Australia and the North American Indians. The word
“totemism,” given to it both in its religious and social aspects, is
derived from the Algonquin “dodaim” or “dodhaim,” meaning “clanmark.”
Among the Australians the word “kobong,” meaning “friend” or “protector,”
is the generic term for the animal or plant by which they are known. It is
somewhat akin in significance to the Indian words “manitou,” “oki,” etc.,
comprehending “the manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no
sense of personal unity,” which are commonly translated by the misleading
word “medicine;” hence “medicine-men.”
The family name, or second name borne by all the tribes in lineal descent,
and which corresponds to our surname, i.e. super nomen, or
“over-name,” is derived from names of beasts, birds, plants, etc., around
which traditions of their transformation into men linger. Sir George
Grey[44] says that there is a mysterious connection between a native and
his kobong. It is his protecting angel, like the “daimôn” of Socrates,
like the “genius” of the early Italian. “If it is an animal, he will not
kill one of the species to which it belongs, should he find it asleep, and
he always kills it reluctantly and never without affording it a chance of
escape. The family belief is that some one individual of the species is
their dearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime,” as, in Hindu
belief, when a Rajah was said to have entered at death into the body of a
fish, a “close time” was at once decreed. Among the Indian tribes we find
well-nigh the whole fauna and flora represented, their totems being the
Bear, Turtle, Deer, Snake, Eagle, Pike, Corn, Tobacco, etc. Like the
Australians, these tribes regarded themselves as being of the breed of
their particular animal-totem, and avoided hunting, slaying, and eating
(of which more presently) the creature under whose form the ancestor was
thought to be manifest. The Chippeways carried their respect even farther.
Deriving their origin from the dog, they at one time refrained from
employing their supposed canine ancestors in dragging their sledges. The
Bechuana and other people of South Africa will avoid eating their
tribe-animal or wearing its skin. The same prohibitions are found among
tribes in Northern Asia, and the Vogulitzi of Siberia, when they have
killed a bear, address it formally, maintaining “that the blame is to be
laid on the arrows and iron, which were made and forged by the Russians!”
Among the Delawares the Tortoise gens claimed supremacy over the others,
because their ancestor, who had become a fabled monster in their
mythology, bore their world on his back. The California Indians are in
interesting agreement with Lord Monboddo when, in claiming descent from
the prairie wolf, they account for the loss of their tails by the habit of
sitting, which, in course of time, wore them down to the stump! The
Kickapoos say their ancestors had tails, and that when they lost them the
“impudent fox sent every morning to ask how their tails were, and the bear
shook his fat sides at the joke.” The Patagonians are said to have a
number of animal deities, creators of the several tribes, some being of
the caste of the guanaco and others of the ostrich. In short, the group of
beliefs and practices found among races in the lower stages of culture
point to a widespread common attitude towards the mystery of life around
them. In speaking of totemism among the Red races Dr. Brinton thinks that
the free use of animate symbols to express abstract ideas, which he finds
so frequent, is the source of a confusion which has led to their claiming
literal descent from wild beasts. But the barbaric mind bristles with
contradictions and mutually destructive conceptions; nothing is too
wonderful, too bizarre, for its acceptance, and the belief in actual
animal descent is not the most remarkable or far-fetched among the
articles of its creed.
The subject of totemism is full of interest both on its religious and
social side:—
On its religious side it has given rise, or, if this be not conceded,
impetus, to that worship of animals which assuredly had its source in the
attribution of mysterious power through some spirit within them, making
them deity incarnate.
On its social side it has led to prohibitions which are inwoven among the
customs and prejudices of civilised communities. But, before speaking of
these prohibitions, the barbaric mode of reckoning descent should be
noticed.
The family name borne by most Australian tribes is perpetuated by the
children, whether boys or girls, taking their mother’s name. Precisely the
same custom is found among some American Indians, the children of both
sexes being of the mother’s clan. Among the Moquis of Arizona all the
members of each gens trace descent from a common ancestor; they are
regarded as brothers and sisters.[45] Now, the family, as we define it,
does not exist in savage communities, nor, as Mr. McLennan says in his
very remarkable work on Primitive Marriage, had “the earliest human
groups any idea of kinship, ... the physical root of which could be
discerned only through observation and reflection.” Where the relations
of the sexes were confused and promiscuous, the oldest system in which the
idea of blood-ties was expressed was a system of kinship through the
mother. The habits of the “much-married” primitive men made mistake about
any one’s mother less likely than mistake about his father; and, if in
civilised times it is, as the saying goes, a wise child that knows its own
father, he was, in barbarous times, a wise father who knew his own child.
Examples tracing the kinship through females, father and offspring being
never of the same clan, abound in both ancient and modern authorities, and
perhaps the most amusing one that can be given is found in Dr. Morgan’s
Systems of Consanguinity. He says that the “natives of the province of
Keang-se are celebrated among the natives of the other Chinese provinces
for the mode or form used by them in address, namely, ‘Laon peaon,’ which,
freely translated, means, ‘Oh, you old fellow, brother mine by some of the
ramifications of female relationship!’”[46]
The prohibitions arising out of or confirmed by totemism are two: 1.
Against intermarriage between those of the same name or crest. 2. Against
the eating of the totem by any member of the tribe called after it.
1. Among both Australians and Indians a man is forbidden to marry in his
own clan, i.e. any woman of his own surname or badge, no matter where
she was born or however distantly related to him. The Navajoes of Arizona
say that if they married in their own clan “their bones would dry up and
they would die.”
Were this practice of “Exogamy,” as marriage outside the totem-kin is
called, limited to one or two places, it might be classed among
exceptional local customs based on a tradition, say, of some heated
blood-feud between the tribes. But its prevalence among savage or
semi-savage races all the world over points to reasons the nature of which
is still a crux to the anthropologists. The late Mr. McLennan, whose
opinion on such a matter is entitled to the most weight, connects it with
the custom of female infanticide, which, rendering women scarce, led at
once to polyandry, or one female to several males, within the tribe, and
to the capturing of women from other tribes. This last-named practice
strengthens Mr. McLennan’s theory. He cites numerous instances from past
and present barbarous races, and traces its embodiment in formal code
until we come to the mock relics of the custom in modern times, as, for
example, the harmless “survival” in bride-lifting, that is, stealing, as
in the word “cattle-lifting.”
Connected with this custom is the equally prevailing one which forbids
intercourse between relations, as especially between a couple and their
fathers and mothers-in-law, and which also forbids mentioning their names.
So far as the aversion which the savage has to telling his own name, or
uttering that of any person (especially of the dead) or thing feared by
him is concerned, the reason is not far to seek. It lies in that
confusion between names and things which marks all primitive thinking. The
savage, who shrinks from having his likeness taken in the fear that a part
of himself is being carried away thereby, regards his name as something
through which he may be harmed. So he will use all sorts of roundabout
phrases to avoid saying it, and even change it that he may elude his foes,
and puzzle or cheat Death when he comes to look for him. But why a
son-in-law should not see the face of his mother-in-law, for so it is
among the Navajoes, (where the offender would, they say, go blind), the
Aranaks of South America, the Caribs and other tribes of more northern
regions, the Fijians, Sumatrans, Dyaks, the natives of Australia, the
Zulus, in brief, along the range of the lower culture, is a question to
which no satisfactory answer has been given, and to which reference is
here made because of its connection with totemism.
2. That the animal which is the totem of the tribe should not be eaten,
even where men did not hesitate to eat men of another totem, is a custom
for which it is less hard to account. The division of flesh into two
classes of forbidden and permitted, of clean and unclean, with the
resulting artificial liking or repulsion for food which custom arising out
of that division has brought about, is probably referable to old beliefs
in the inherent sacredness of certain animals. The Indians of Charlotte
Island never eat crows, because they believe in crow-ancestors, and they
smear themselves with black paint in memory of that tradition; the
Dacotahs would neither kill nor eat their totems, and if necessity compels
these and like barbarians to break the law, the meal is preceded by
profuse apologies and religious ceremonies over the slain. Although the
aborigines of Victoria, who are to be ranked among the lowest savages
extant, devour the most loathsome things, worms, slugs, and vermin, they
have a classification of meats to be eaten or avoided. A Kumite is deeply
grieved when hunger compels him to eat anything which bears his name, but
he may satisfy his hunger with anything that is Krokee. The abstention of
the Brahmans from meat, the pseudo-revealed injunction to the Hebrews
against certain flesh-foods (has that against pork its origin in the
forgotten tradition of descent from a boar?), need no detailing here. But,
as parallels, some restrictions amongst the ancient dwellers in these
islands are of value. It was, according to Cæsar,[47] a crime to eat the
domestic fowl, or goose, or hare, and to this day the last-named is an
object of disgust in certain parts of Russia and Brittany. The oldest
Welsh laws contain several allusions to the magical character of the hare,
which was thought to change its sex every month or year, and to be the
companion of the witches, who often assumed its shape.[48] The revulsion
against horse-flesh as food may have its origin in the sacredness of the
white horses, which, as Tacitus remarks,[49] were kept by the Germans at
the public cost in groves holy to the gods, whose secrets they knew, and
whose decrees regarding mortals their neighings interpreted. That this
animal was a clan-totem among our forefathers there can be no doubt, and
the proofs are with us in the white horses carved in outline on the chalk
hills of Berkshire and the west, as in the names and crests of clan
descendants.
The totem is not only the clan-name indicating descent from a common
ancestor. It is also the clan-symbol, badge, or crest. Where the tribes
among whom it is found are still in the picture-writing stage, i.e. when
the idea is expressed by a portrait of the thing itself instead of by some
sound-sign—a stage in writing corresponding to the primitive stage in
language, when words were imitative—there we find the rude hieroglyphic
of the totem a means of intercourse between different tribes, as well as
with whites. A striking example of the use of such totemic symbols occurs
in a petition sent by some Western Indian tribes to the United States
Congress for the right to fish in certain small lakes near Lake Superior.
The leading clan is represented by a picture of the crane; then follow
three martens, as totems of three tribes; then the bear, the man-fish, and
the cat-fish, also totems. From the eye and heart of each of the animals
runs a line connecting them with the eye and heart of the crane, to show
that they are all of one mind, and the eye of the crane has also a line
connecting it with the lakes on which the tribes have their eyes, and
another line running towards Congress.
In the barbaric custom of painting or carving the totem on oars, on the
bows and sides of canoes, on weapons, on pillars in the front of houses,
and on the houses themselves; in tattooing it on various parts of the body
(in the latter case, in some instances, together with pictures of
exploits; so that the man carries on his person an illustrated history of
his own life) we have the remote and forgotten origin of heraldic emblems.
The symbols of civilised nations, as, e.g. the Imperial eagle, which so
many states of ancient and modern renown have chosen; the crests of
families of rank, with their fabulous monsters, as the cherub, the Greek
gryps, surviving in the griffin, the dragon, the unicorn, which, born of
rude fancy or terrified imagination, are now carved on the entrance-gates
to the houses of the great; the armorial bearings on carriages; the crest
engraven on ring or embossed on writing-paper, these are the lineal
descendants of the totem; and the Indians, who could see no difference
between their system of manitous and those of the white people, with their
spread-eagle or their lion-rampant, made a shrewd guess that would not
occur to many a parvenu applying at the Heralds’ College for a crest.
The continuity is traceable in the custom of the Mexicans and other
civilised nations of painting the totemic animals on their banners, flags,
crests, and other insignia; and it would seem that we have in the totem
the key to the mystery of those huge animal-shaped mounds which abound on
the North American continent.
The arbitrary selection in the “ages of chivalry” of such arms as pleased
the knightly fancy or ministered to its pride, or, as was often the case,
resembled the name in sound, together with the ignorance then and till
recently existing as to the origin of crests, and also the discredit into
which a seemingly meaningless vanity had fallen, have made it difficult to
trace the survival of the totem in the crests even of that numerous
company of the Upper Ten who claim descent from warriors who came over
with the Conqueror. But there is no doubt that an inquiry conducted on the
lines suggested above, and not led into by-paths by false analogies, would
yield matter of interest and value. It would add to the evidence of that
common semi-civilised stage out of which we have risen. Such names as the
Horsings, the Wylfings, the Derings, the Ravens, the Griffins, perhaps
hold within themselves traces of the totem name of the horse, wolf, deer,
raven, and that “animal fantasticall,” the griffin. In Scotland we find
the clan Chattan, or the wild cat; in Ireland “the men of Osory were
called by a name signifying the wild red deer.” On the other hand such
names may have been given merely as nicknames (i.e. ekename or the
added name, from eke, “also,” or “to augment”), suggested by the
physical or mental likeness to the thing after which they are called.
But it is time to turn to the religious significance of the totem, as
shown among races worshipping the animal which is their supposed ancestor.
At first glance this seems strong argument in support of Mr. Herbert
Spencer’s theory that all forms of religion, and all myth, have their
origin in ancestor worship. The mysterious power of stimulation, of
excitation to frenzy, or of healing and soothing, or of poisoning, which
certain plants possess, has been attributed to indwelling spirits, which,
as Mr. Spencer contends, are regarded as human and ancestral. Very many
illustrations of this occur, as, e.g. the worship of the Soma plant, and
its promotion as a deity among the Aryans; the use of tobacco in religious
ceremonies among the tribes of both Americas; whilst now and again we find
trees and plants as totems. The Moquis have a totem-kin called the
tobacco-plant, and also one called the seed-grass. One of the Peruvian
Incas was called after the native name of the tobacco-plant; and among the
Ojibways the buffalo grass was carried as a charm, and its god said to
cause madness.
In Algonquin myth “there is a spirit for the corn, another for beans,
another for squashes. They are sisters, and are very kind to each other.
There are spirits in the water, in fire, in all the trees and berries, in
herbs and in tobacco, in the grass.”
The worship of animals is on Mr. Spencer’s theory explained as due to the
giving of a nickname of some beast or bird to a remote ancestor, the
belief arising in course of time that such animal was the actual
progenitor, hence its worship. We call a man a bear, a pig, or a vampire,
in symbolic phrase, and the figure of speech remains a figure of speech
with us. But the savage loses the metaphor, and it crystallises into hard
matter-of-fact. So the traditions have grown, and Black Eagle, Strong
Buffalo, Big Owl, Tortoise, etc., take the shape of actual forefathers of
the tribe bearing their name and crest. According to the same theory the
adoration of sun, moon, and mountains, etc., is due to a like source. Some
famous chief was called the Sun; the metaphor was forgotten; the personal
and concrete, as the more easily apprehended, remained; hence worship of
the powers of nature “is a form of ancestor-worship, which has lost in a
still greater degree the character of the original.”[50]
The objection raised in these pages to the extreme application of the
solar theory applies with equal force to Mr. Spencer’s limitation of the
origin of myth and religion to one source. Having cleared Scylla, we must
not dash against Charybdis. Religion has its origin neither in fear of
ghosts, as Mr. Spencer’s theory assumes, nor in a perception of the
Infinite inherent in man, as Professor Max Müller holds. Rather does it
lie in man’s sense of vague wonder in the presence of powers whose force
he cannot measure, and his expressions towards which are manifold. There
is underlying unity, but there are, to quote St. Paul, “diversities of
operation.” There is just that surface unlikeness which one might expect
from the different physical conditions and their resulting variety of
subtle influences surrounding various races; influences shaping for them
their gods, their upper and nether worlds; influences of climate and soil
which made the hell of volcanic countries an abyss of sulphurous stifling
smoke and everlasting fire, and the hell of cold climates a place of
deathly frost; which gave to the giant-gods of northern zones their rugged
awfulness, and to the goddesses of the sunny south their soft and stately
grace. The theory of ancestor-worship as the basis of every form of
religion does not allow sufficient play for the vagaries in which the same
thing will be dressed by the barbaric fear and fancy, nor for the
imagination as a creative force in the primitive mind even at the lowest
at which we know it. And, of course, beneath that lowest lies a lower
never to be fathomed. We are apt to talk of primitive man as if his
representatives were with us in the black fellows who are at the bottom of
the scale, forgetting that during unnumbered ages he was a brute in
everything but the capacity by which at last the ape and tiger were
subdued within him. Of the beginnings of his thought we can know
nothing, but the fantastic forms in which it is first manifest compel us
to regard him as a being whose feelings were uncurbed by reason. That
ancestor-worship is one mode among others of man’s attitude towards the
awe-begetting, mystery-inspiring universe, none can deny. That his
earliest temples, as defined sacred spots, were tombs; that he prayed to
his dead dear ones, or his dead feared ones, as the case may be, is
admitted. From its strong personal character, ancestor-worship was,
without doubt, one of the earliest expressions of man’s attitude before
the world which his fancy filled with spirits. It flourishes among
barbarous races to-day; it was the prominent feature of the old Aryan
religion; it has entered into Christian practice in the worship of saints,
and perhaps the only feature of religion which the modern Frenchman has
retained is the culte des morts. That it was a part of the belief of the
Emperor Napoleon III. the following extract from his will shows:—“We must
remember that those we love look down upon us from heaven and protect us.
It is the soul of my great Uncle which has always guided and supported me.
Thus will it be with my son also if he proves worthy of his name.”
But the worship of ancestors is not primal. The comparatively late
recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion
existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship. Moreover,
Nature is bigger than man, and this he was not slow to feel. Even if it be
conceded that sun-myth and sun-worship once arose through the nicknaming
of an ancestor as the Sun, we must take into account the force of that
imagination which enabled the unconscious myth-maker, or creed-maker, to
credit the moving orbs of heaven with personal life and will. The faculty
which could do that might well express itself in awe-struck forms without
intruding the ancestral ghost. Further, the records of the classic
religions, themselves preserving many traces of a primitive
nature-worship, point to an adoration of the great and bountiful, as well
as to a sense of the maleficent and fateful, in earth and heaven which
seem prior to the more concrete worship of forefathers and chieftains.
If for the worship of these last we substitute a general worship of
spirits, there seems little left on which to differ. As aids to the
explanation of the belief in animal ancestors and their subsequent
deification and worship, as of the lion, the bull, the serpent, etc., we
have always present in the barbaric mind the tendency to credit living
things, and indeed lifeless, but moving ones, with a passion, a will, and
a power to help or harm immeasurably greater than man’s. This is part and
parcel of that belief in spirits everywhere which is the key to savage
philosophy, and the growth of which is fostered by such secondary causes
as the worship of ancestors.
SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY.
For proofs of the emergence of the higher out of the lower in philosophy
and religion, to say nothing of less exalted matters, whether the
beast-fable or the nursery rhyme, as holding barbaric thought in solution,
examples have necessarily been drawn from the mythology of past and
present savage races. But these are too remote in time or standpoint to
stir other than a languid interest in the reader’s mind; their purpose is
served when they are cited and classified as specimens. Not thus is it
with examples drawn nearer home from sources at which our young thirst for
the stirring and romantic was slaked. When we learn that famous names and
striking episodes are in some rare instances only transformed and
personified natural phenomena, or, as occurring everywhere, possibly
variants of a common legend, the far-reaching influence of primitive
thought comes to us in more vivid and exciting form. And although one
takes in hand this work of disenchantment in no eager fashion, the loss is
more seeming than real. Whether the particular tale of bravery, of
selflessness, of faithfulness, has truth of detail, matters little
compared with the fact that its reception the wide world over witnesses to
human belief, even at low levels, in the qualities which have given man
empire over himself and ever raised the moral standard of the race.
Moreover, in times like these, when criticism is testing without fear or
favour the trustworthiness of records of the past, whether of Jew or
Gentile, the knowledge of the legendary origin of events woven into sober
history prepares us to recognise how the imagination has fed the stream of
tradition, itself no mean tributary of that larger stream of history, the
purity of which is now subject of analysis. As a familiar and interesting
example let us take the story of William Tell.
Everybody has heard how, in the year 1307 (or, as some say, 1296) Gessler,
Vogt (or Governor) of the Emperor Albert of Hapsburg, set a hat on a pole
as symbol of the Imperial power, and ordered every one who passed by to do
obeisance to it; and how a mountaineer named Wilhelm Tell, who hated
Gessler and the tyranny which the symbol expressed, passed by without
saluting the hat, and was at once seized and brought before Gessler, who
ordered that as punishment Tell should shoot an apple off the head of his
own son. As resistance was vain, the apple was placed on the boy’s head,
when Tell bent his bow, and the arrow, piercing the apple, fell with it to
the ground. Gessler saw that Tell, before shooting, had stuck a second
arrow in his belt, and, asking the reason, received this for answer: “It
was for you; had I shot my child, know that this would have pierced your
heart.”
Now, this story first occurs in the chronicle of Melchior Russ, who wrote
at the end of the fifteenth century, i.e. about one hundred and seventy
years after its reputed occurrence. The absence of any reference to it in
contemporary records caused doubt to be thrown upon it three centuries
ago. Guillimann, the author of a work on Swiss antiquities, published in
1598, calls it a fable, but subscribes to the current belief in it because
the tale is so popular! The race to which he belonged is not yet extinct.
A century and a half later a more fearless sceptic, who said that the
story was of Danish origin, was condemned by the Canton of Uri to be burnt
alive, and in the well-timed absence of the offender his book was ordered
to be burnt by the common hangman. But the truth is great, and prevails.
G. von Wyss, the Swiss historian, has pointed out that the name of Wilhelm
Tell does not occur even once in the history of the three cantons, neither
is there any trace that a Vogt named Gessler ever served the house of
Hapsburg there. Moreover, the legend does not correspond to any fact of a
period of oppression of the Swiss at the hands of their Austrian rulers.
“There exist in contemporary records no instances of wanton outrage and
insolence on the Hapsburg side. It was the object of that power to obtain
political ascendancy, not to indulge its representatives in lust or wanton
insult,” and, where records of disputes between particular persons occur,
“the symptoms of violence, as is natural enough, appear rather on the side
of the Swiss than on that of the aggrandising Imperial house.”[51]
Candour, however, requires that the “evidence” in support of the legend
should be stated. There is the fountain on the supposed site of the
lime-tree in the market-place at Altdorf by which young Tell stood, as
well as the colossal plaster statue of the hero himself which confronts us
as we enter the quaint village. But more than this, the veritable
cross-bow itself is preserved in the arsenal at Zurich!
However, although the little Tell’s chapel, as restored, was opened with
a national fête, in the presence of two members of the Federal Council,
in June 1883,[52] the Swiss now admit in their school-teaching that the
story of the Apfelschusz is legendary.
Freudenberger, who earned his death-sentence for affirming that the story
came from Denmark, was on the right track, for the following variant of it
is given by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish writer of the twelfth century, who
puts it as happening in the year 950:—
Nor ought what follows to be enveloped in silence. Palnatoki, for some
time in the body-guard of King Harold (Harold Gormson, or Bluetooth),
had made his bravery odious to many of his fellow-soldiers by the zeal
with which he surpassed them. One day, when he had drunk too much, he
boasted that he was so skilled a bowman that he could hit the smallest
apple, set on the top of a stick some way off, at the first shot,
which boast reached the ears of the king. This monarch’s wickedness
soon turned the confidence of the father to the peril of the son, for
he commanded that this dearest pledge of his life should stand in
place of the stick, adding a threat that if Palnatoki did not at his
first shot strike off the apple, he should with his head pay the
penalty of making an empty boast. This command forced him to attempt
more than he had promised, and what he had said, reported by
slanderous tongues, bound him to accomplish what he had not said.
Yet did not his sterling courage, though caught in the snare of
slander, suffer him to lay aside his firmness of heart. As soon as the
boy was led forth Palnatoki warned him to await the speeding of the
arrow with calm ears and unbent head, lest by any slight movement of
the body he should frustrate the archer’s well-tried skill. He then
made him stand with his back towards him, lest he should be scared at
the sight of the arrow. Then he drew three arrows from his quiver, and
with the first that he fitted to the string he struck the apple. When
the king asked him why he had taken more than one arrow from his
quiver, when he was to be allowed to make but one trial with his bow,
he made answer, “That I might avenge on thee the swerving of the first
by the points of the others, lest perchance my innocence might have
been punished, while your violence escaped scot-free.”[53]
Going farther northward we find tales corresponding in their main features
to the above, in the Icelandic Saga, the Vilkina; in the Norse Saga of
Saint Olaf or Thidrik; and in the story of Harold, son of Sigurd. In the
Olaf Saga it is said that the saint or king, desiring the conversion of
a brave heathen named Eindridi, competed with him in various athletic
sports, swam with him, wrestled with him, and then shot with him. Olaf
then dared Eindridi to strike a writing-tablet from off his son’s head
with an arrow, and bade two men bind the eyes of the child and hold the
napkin so that the boy might not move when he heard the whizz of the
arrow. Olaf aimed first, and the arrow grazed the lad’s head. Eindridi
then prepared to shoot, but the mother of the boy interfered and persuaded
the king to abandon this dangerous test of skill. The story adds that had
the boy been injured Eindridi would have revenged himself on the king.[54]
Somewhat like this, as from the locality might be expected, is the Faröe
Isles variant. King Harold challenges Geyti, son of Aslak, and, vexed at
being beaten in a swimming match, bids Geyti shoot a hazel-nut from off
his brother’s head. He consents, and the king witnesses the feat, when
Geyti
“Shot the little nut away,
Nor hurt the lad a hair.”
Next day Harold sends for the archer, and says:—
“List thee, Geyti, Aslak’s son,
And truly tell to me,
Wherefore hadst thou arrows twain
In the wood yestreen with thee?”
To which Geyti answers:—
“Therefore had I arrows twain
Yestreen in the wood with me,
Had I but hurt my brother dear
The other had pierced thee.”
With ourselves it is the burden of the ballad of William of Cloudeslee,
where the brave archer says:—
“I have a sonne seven years old;
Hee is to me full deere;
I will tye him to a stake—
All shall see him that bee here—
And lay an apple upon his head,
And goe six paces him froe;
And I myself with a broad arroe
Shall cleave the apple in towe.”
In the Malleus Maleficarum Puncher, a magician on the Upper Rhine, is
required to shoot a coin from off a lad’s head; while, travelling
eastwards as far as Persia, we find the Tell myth as an incident in the
poem Mantic Ultraïr, a work of the twelfth century.
Thus far the variants of the legend found among Aryan peoples have been
summarised, and it is tempting to base upon this diffusion of a common
incident a theory of its origin among the ancestors of the Swiss and the
Norseman, the Persian and the Icelander. But it is found among non-Aryans
also. The ethnologist, Castrén, whose researches in Finland have secured a
valuable mass of fast-perishing materials, obtained this tale in the
village of Ultuwa. “A fight took place between some freebooters and the
inhabitants of the village of Alajärai. The robbers plundered every house,
and carried off amongst their captives an old man. As they proceeded with
their spoils along the strand of the lake a lad of twelve years old
appeared from among the reeds on the opposite bank, armed with a bow and
amply provided with arrows; he threatened to shoot down the captors unless
the old man, his father, was restored to him. The robbers mockingly
replied that the aged man would be given to him if he could shoot an apple
off his head. The boy accepted the challenge, pierced the apple and freed
his father.” Among a people in close contact with an Aryan race as the
Finns are in contact with both Swedes and Russians, the main incident of
the Tell story may easily have been woven into their native tales. But in
reference to other non-Aryan races Sir George Dasent, who has treated of
the diffusion of the Tell story very fully in the Introduction to his
Popular Tales from the Norse (a reprint of which would be a boon to
students of folk-lore), says that it is common to the Turks and
Mongolians, and a legend of the wild Samoyedes, who never heard of Tell or
saw a book in their lives, relates it, chapter and verse, of one of their
marksmen. What shall we say, then, but that the story of this bold
mastershot was prominent amongst many tribes and races, and that it only
crystallised itself round the great name of Tell by that process of
attraction which invariably leads a grateful people to throw such mythic
wreaths, such garlands of bold deeds of precious memory, around the brow
of its darling champion. Of course the solar mythologists see in Tell the
sun or cloud deity; in his bow the storm-cloud or the iris; and in his
arrows the sun-rays or lightning darts.
This is a question which we may leave to the champions concerned to
settle. Apart from the evidence of the survival of legend in history, and
the lesson of caution in accepting any ancient record as gospel which we
should learn therefrom, it is the human element in the venerable tale
which interests us most.
Remote in time, far away in place, as is its origin, it moves us yet. The
ennobling qualities incarnated in some hero (whether he be real or ideal
matters not) meet with admiring response in the primitive listeners to the
story, else it would have been speedily forgotten. Thus does it retain for
us witness to the underlying oneness of the human heart beneath all
surface differences.
Widespread as a myth may be, it takes depth of root according to the more
or less congenial soil where it is dropped. That about Tell found
favourable home in the uplands and the free air of Switzerland; with us S.
George, falling on times of chivalry, had abiding place, as also, less
rugged of type than the Swiss marksman, had Arthur, the “Blameless King,”
who, if he ever existed, is smothered in overgrowth of legends both native
and imported.
For such cycle of tales as gathered round the name of Arthur, and on which
our youthhood was nourished, is as mythical as the wolf that suckled
Romulus and Remus. Modern criticism and research have thoroughly sifted
the legendary from the true, and if the past remains vague and shadowy, we
at least know how far the horizon of certainty extends. The criticism has
made short work of the romancing chronicles which so long did duty for
sober history, and has shown that no accurate knowledge of the sequence of
events is obtainable until late in the period of the English invasions.
Save in scattered hints here and there, we are quite in the dark as to the
condition of this island during the Roman occupation, whilst for anything
that is known of times prior to this, called for convenience
“pre-historic,” we are dependent upon unwritten records preserved in tombs
and mounds. The information gathered from these has given us some clue to
what manner of men they were who confronted the first Aryan immigrants,
and, enriched by researches of the ethnologist and philologist, enabled us
to trace the movements of races westwards, until we find old and new
commingled as one English-speaking folk.
All or any of which could not be known to the earlier chroniclers. When
Geoffry of Monmouth set forth the glory and renown of Arthur and his Court
he recorded and embellished traditions six hundred years old, without
thought of weighing the evidence or questioning the credibility of the
transmitters. Whether there was a king of that name who ruled over the
Silures, and around whom the remnant of brave Kelts rallied in their final
struggle against the invading hordes, and who, wounded in battle, died at
Glastonbury, and was buried, or rather sleeps, as the legend has it, in
the Vale of Avilion, “hath been,” as Milton says, “doubted heretofore, and
may again, with good reason, for the Monk of Malmesbury and others, whose
credit hath swayed most with the learned sort, we may well perceive to
have known no more of this Arthur nor of his doings than we now
living.”[55]
In the group of legends both of the Old and New World, which, the solar
theorists tell us, symbolise the long sleep of winter before the sweet
awakening of the spring, Arthur of course has place. “Men said he was not
dead, but by the will of our Lord Jesus Christ was in another place, and
men say that he will come again ... that there is written on his tomb this
verse:
‘Hic jacet Arthurus rex quondam, Rexque futurus.’”
So Charlemagne reposes beneath the Untersberg, waiting for the appointed
time to rise and do battle with anti-Christ; Tell slumbers ready-panoplied
to save Switzerland when danger threatens; the hero-deity of the
Algonquins, when he left the earth, promised to return, but has not,
wherefore he is called Glooskap, or the Liar; St. John sleeps at Ephesus
till the last days are at hand; and the Church militant awaits the return
of her Lord at the Second Advent.
The comparative mythologists say that Arthur is a myth, pure and simple, a
variant of Sigurd and Perseus; the winning of his famous sword but a
repetition of the story of the Teutonic and Greek heroes; the gift of
Guinevere as fatal to him as Helen to Menelaus; his knights but
reproductions of the Achaian hosts—much of which may be true; but the
romance corresponded to some probable event; it fitted in with the
national traditions. There were struggles between the Kelts and subsequent
invaders—Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes. There were brave chieftains who
led forlorn hopes or fought to the death in their fastnesses. There were,
in the numerous tribal divisions, petty kings and queens ruling over mimic
courts, with retinues of knights bent on chivalrous, unselfish service.
These were the nuclei of stories which were the early annals of the tribe,
the glad theme of bards and minstrels, and from which a long line of poets
to the latest singer of the Idylls of the King have drawn the materials
of their epics. The fascination which such a cycle of tales had for the
people, especially in days when the ballad was history and poetry and all
literature rolled into one, was so strong, that the Church wisely imported
an element which gave loftier meaning to the knightly life, and infused
religious ardour into the camp and court. To the stories of Tristram and
Gawayne, already woven into the old romance, she added the half-Christian,
half-pagan, legend of the knights who left the feast at the Round Table to
travel across land and sea that they might free the enslaved, remove the
spell from the enchanted, and deliver fair women from the monsters of
tyranny and lust, setting forth on what in her eyes was a nobler quest—to
seek and look upon the San Graal, or Holy Vessel used by Jesus at the Last
Supper, and into which Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood and water
that streamed from the side of the crucified Jesus. This mystic cup, in
which we have probably a sacrificial relic of the old British religion
imported into the Christian incident with which it blended so well,
floated, according to Arthurian legend, suddenly into the presence of the
King and his Round Table knights at Camelot as they sat at supper, and was
as suddenly borne away, to be henceforth the coveted object of knightly
endeavour. Only the baptized could hope to behold it; to the unchaste it
was veiled: hence only they among the knights who were pure in heart and
life vowed to go in quest of the San Graal, and return not until they had
seen it. So to Sir Galahad, the “just and faithful,” Tennyson sings how
the sacred cup appeared—
“Sometimes on lonely mountain meres
I find a magic bark;
I leap on board: no helmsman steers:
I float till all is dark.
A gentle sound, an awful light!
Three angels bear the holy Grail:
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And, star-like, mingles with the stars.”
Whilst in such legends as the Arthurian group the grain of truth, if it
exists, is so embedded as to be out of reach, there are others concerning
actual personages, notably Cyrus and Charlemagne, not to quote other names
from both “profane” and sacred history, in which the fable can be
separated from the fact without difficulty. Enough is known of the life
and times of such men to detach the certain from the doubtful, as, e.g.,
when Charlemagne is spoken of as a Frenchman and as a Crusader before
there was a French nation, or the idea of Crusades had entered the heads
of most Christian kings; and as in the legends of the infancy of Cyrus,
which are of a type related to like legends of the wonderful round the
early years of the famous.
This, however, by the way. Leaving illustration of the fabulous in heroic
story, it will be interesting to trace it through such a tale of pathos
and domestic life as the well-known one of Llewellyn and his faithful
hound, Gellert.
Whose emotions have not been stirred by the story of Llewellyn the Great
going out hunting, and missing his favourite dog; of his return, to be
greeted by the creature with more than usual pleasure in his eye, but with
jaws besmeared with blood; of the anxiety with which Llewellyn rushed into
the house, to find the cradle where had lain his beautiful boy upset, and
the ground around it soaked with blood; of his thereupon killing the dog,
and then seeing the child lying unharmed beneath the cradle, and sleeping
by the side of a dead wolf, from whose ravenous maw the faithful Gellert
had delivered it? Most of us, in our visits to North Wales, have stood by
Gellert’s grave at Beddgelert, little suspecting that the affecting story
occurs in the folk-lore of nearly every Aryan people, and of several
non-Aryan races, as the Egyptians and Chinese.
Probably it comes to us as many other tales have come, through collections
like the well-known Gesta Romanorum, compiled by mediæval monks for
popular entertainment. In the version given in that book the knight who
corresponds to Llewellyn, after slaying his dog, discovers that it had
saved his child from a serpent, and thereupon breaks his sword and departs
on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. But the monks were no inventors of such
tales; they recorded those that came to them through the pilgrims,
students, traders, and warriors who travelled from west to east and from
east to west in the Middle Ages, and it is in the native home of fable and
imagery the storied Orient, that we must seek for the earliest forms of
the Gellert legend. In the Panchatantra, the oldest and most celebrated
Sanskrit fable-book, the story takes this form:—An infirm child is left
by its mother while she goes to fetch water, and she charges the father,
who is a Brahman, to watch over it. But he leaves the house to collect
alms, and soon after this a snake crawls towards the child. In the house
was an ichneumon, a creature often cherished as a house pet, who sprang at
the snake and throttled it. When the mother came back, the ichneumon went
gladly to meet her, his jaws and face smeared with the snake’s blood. The
horrified mother, thinking it had killed her child, threw her water-jar at
it, and killed it; then seeing the child safe beside the mangled body of
the snake, she beat her breast and face with grief, and scolded her
husband for leaving the house.
We find the same story, with the slight difference that the animal is an
otter, in a later Sanskrit collection, the Hitopadesa, but we can track
it to that fertile source of classic and mediæval fable, the Buddhist
Jâtakas, or Birth Stories, a very ancient collection of fables, which,
professing to have been told by the Buddha, narrates his exploits in the
550 births through which he passed before attaining Buddhahood. In the
Vinaya Pitaka of the Chinese Buddhist collection, which, according to
Mr. Beal, dates from the fifth century A.D., and is translated from
original scriptures supposed to have existed near the time of Asoka’s
council in the third century B.C., we have the earliest extant form of
the tale. That in the Panchatantra is obviously borrowed from it, the
differences being in unimportant detail, as, for example, the nakula, or
mongoose, is killed by the Brahman on his return home, the wife having
neglected to take the child with her as bidden by him. He is filled with
sorrow, and then a Deva continues the strain:—
“Let there be due thought and consideration,
Give not way to hasty impulse,
By forgetting the claims of true friendship
You may heedlessly injure a kind heart (person)
As the Brahman killed the nakula.”
The several versions of the story which could be cited from German,
Russian, Persian, and other Aryan folk-lore, would merely present certain
variations due to local colouring and to the inventiveness of the
narrators or transcribers; and, omitting these, it will suffice to give
the Egyptian variant or corresponding form, in which the tragical has
given place to the amusing, save, perhaps, in the opinion of the Wali.
This luckless person “once smashed a pot full of herbs which a cook had
prepared. The exasperated cook thrashed the well-intentioned but
unfortunate Wali within an inch of his life, and when he returned,
exhausted with his efforts at belabouring the man, he discovered among the
herbs a poisonous snake.”
In pointing to the venerable Buddhist Birth Stories as the earliest
extant source of Aryan fables, it should be added that these were with the
Buddha and his disciples the favourite vehicle of carrying to the hearts
of men those lessons of gentleness and tenderness towards all living
things which are a distinctive feature of that non-persecuting religion.
MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS.
With the important exception of reference to the change effected in the
Jewish doctrine of spirits, and its resulting influence on Christian
theology, by the transformation of the mythical Ahriman of the old Persian
religion into the archfiend Satan, but slight allusion has been made in
these pages to the myths and legends of the Semitic race. Under this term,
borrowed from the current belief in their descent from Shem, are included
extant and extinct people, the Assyrians, Chaldeans or Babylonians,
Phœnicians, Arabs, Syrians, Jews, and Ethiopians.
The mythology of the Aryan nations has had the advantage of the most
scholarly criticism, and the light which this has thrown upon the racial
connection of peoples between whom all superficial likeness had long
disappeared, as well as upon the early condition of their common
ancestors, is of the greatest value as aid to our knowledge of the mode of
man’s intellectual and spiritual growth. And the comparisons made between
the older and cruder forms underlying the elaborated myth and the myths of
semi-barbarous races have supported conclusions concerning man’s
primitive state identical with those deduced from the material relics of
the Ancient and Newer Stone Ages, namely, that the savage races of to-day
represent not a degradation to which man has sunk, but a condition out of
which all races above the savage have, through much tribulation, emerged.
An important exception to this has, however, been claimed on behalf of at
least one branch of the Semitic race—namely, the Hebrews or Jews. This
claim has rested on their assumed selection by the Deity for a definite
purpose in the ordering and directing of human affairs; but no assumption
of supernatural origin can screen the documents of disputed authorship and
uncertain meaning on which that claim is based from the investigation
applied to all ancient records; nor can the materials elude dissection
because hitherto regarded as organic parts of revelation. The real
difficulties are in the structure of the language and in the scantiness of
the material as contrasted with the flexile and copious mythology of the
Aryan race. And the investigation has been in some degree checked by the
mistaken dicta of authorities such as M. Renan and the late Baron Bunsen;
the former contending that “the Semites never had a mythology,” and the
latter (although any statement of his carries far less weight) that “it is
the grand, momentous, and fortunate self-denial of Judaism to possess
none.”
But, independently of the refusal of the student of history to admit that
exceptional place has been accorded of direct Divine purpose to any
particular race, the discoveries of literatures much older than the
Hebrew, and in which legends akin to those in the earlier books of the Old
Testament are found, together with the proofs of historical connection
between the peoples having these common legends, have given the refutation
to the distinctive character of the Semitic race claimed by M. Renan. That
a people dwelling for centuries, as the Hebrews did, in a land which was
the common highway between the great nations of antiquity; a people
subject to vicissitudes bringing them, as the pipkin between iron pots,
into collision and subject relations to Egyptians, Persians, and other
powerful folk, should remain uninfluenced in their intellectual
speculations and religious beliefs, would indeed be a greater miracle than
that which makes their literature inspired in every word and vowel-point.
The remarkable collection of cuneiform inscriptions (so called from their
wedge-like shape: Latin, cuneus, a wedge) on the baked clay cylinders
and tablets of the vast libraries of Babylon and Nineveh, has brought out
one striking fact, namely, that the Semitic civilisation, venerable as
that is, was the product of, or at least, greatly influenced by, the
culture of a non-Semitic people called the Akkadians, from a word meaning
“highlanders.” These more ancient dwellers in the Euphrates valley and
uplands were not only non-Semitic but non-Aryan, and probably racially
connected with the complex group of peoples embracing the
Tatar-Mongolians, the distinguishing features of whose religion are
Shamanistic, with belief in magic in its manifold forms. “In Babylonia,
under the non-Semitic Akkadian rule, the dominant creed was the fetish
worship, with all its ritual of magic and witchcraft; and when the Semites
conquered the country, the old learning of the land became the property of
the priests and astrologers, and the Akkadian language the Latin of the
Empire.”[56]
It was during the memorable period of the Exile that the historical
records of the Jews underwent revision, and from that time dates the
incorporation into them of legends and traditions which, invested with a
purity and majesty distinctively Hebrew, were borrowed from the
Babylonians, although primarily Akkadian. They are here, as elsewhere, the
product of the childhood of the race, when it speculates and invents,
framing its theory of the beginnings, their when and how; when it prattles
of the Golden Age, which seems to lie behind, in the fond and not extinct
delusion that “the old is better;” when it frames its fairy tales, weird
or winsome, in explanation of the uncommon, the unknown, and the
bewildering.
The Babylonian origin of the early biblical stories is now generally
admitted, although the dogmas based upon certain of them still retard the
acceptance of this result of modern inquiry in some quarters. That
reluctance is suggestively illustrated in Dr. Wm. Smith’s Dictionary of
the Bible, where, turning to the heading “Deluge,” the reader is referred
to “Flood” and thence to “Noah!”
So much for the legendary; but the analysis of the more strictly mythical,
the names of culture-ancestors and heroes, sons of Anak and of God,
scattered over the Pentateuch, is not so easy a matter. The most important
work in this direction has been attempted by Dr. Goldziher,[57] but even
his scholarship has failed to convince sympathetic readers that Abraham
and Isaac are sun-myths, and that the twelve sons of Jacob are the
zodiacal signs! Under the Professor’s etymological solvent the personality
of the patriarchs disappears, and the charming idylls and pastorals of old
Eastern life become but phases of the sun and the weather. The Hebrew,
like the Aryan myth-maker, speaks of the relations of day and night, of
gray morning and sunrise, of red sunset and the darkness of night, as of
love and union, or strife and pursuit, or gloomy desire and coy evasion.
Abh-râm is the High or Heaven-Father (from râm, “to be high”) with his
numberless host of descendants. Yis-châk, commonly called Isaac, denotes
“he who laughs,” and so the Laughing one, whom the High Father intends to
slay, is the smiling day or the smiling sunset, which gets the worst of
the contest with the night sky, and disappears. Sarah signifies princess,
or the moon, the queen who rules over the great army glittering amidst the
darkness. The expulsion of Hagar (derived from a root hajara, meaning
“to fly,” and yielding the word hijrâ or “flight,” whence the Mohammadan
Hegira) is the Semitic variant of that inexhaustible theme of all
mythology, the battle of Day and Night; Hagar flying before the inconstant
sun and the jealous moon. And so on through the whole range of leading
characters in Hebrew history; Cain and Abel, in which Dr. Goldziher, to
whom they are the sun and dark sky, overlooks the more likely explanation
of the story as a quarrel between nomads and tillers of the soil;
Jephthah, in which the sun-god kills at mid-day the dawn, his own
offspring; Samson, or more correctly Shimshôn, from the Hebrew word for
sun, the incidents of whose life, as expounded by Professor Steinthal,[58]
are more clearly typical of the labours of the sun; Jonah and the fish, a
story long ago connected with the myth of Herakles and Hêsionê; “as on
occasion of the storm the dragon or serpent swallows the sun, so when he
sets he is swallowed by a mighty fish, waiting for him at the bottom of
the sea. Then when he appears again on the horizon, he is spat out on the
shore by the sea-monster.”[59]
These bare references must suffice to show that there is in Hebrew
literature a large body of material which must undergo the sifting and the
criticism already applied with success to Indo-European and non-Aryan
myth. This done, the Semitic race will contribute its share of evidence in
support of those conditions under which it has been the main purpose of
this book to show that myth has its birth and growth.
CONCLUSION.
The multitude of subjects traversed in the foregoing sections has
compelled presentment in so concise a form that any attempt to gather into
a few sentences the sum of things said would be as a digest of a digest,
and it is, therefore, better to briefly emphasise the conclusions to which
the gathered evidence points. It was remarked at the outset, when
insisting on the serious meaning which lies at the heart of myths, that
they have their origin in the endeavour of barbaric man to explain his
surroundings. The mass of fact brought together illustrates and confirms
this view, and has thereby tended to raise what was once looked upon as
fantastic, curious, and lawless, to the level of a subject demanding sober
treatment and examination on strictly scientific methods.
Archbishop Trench, in his Study of Words, quotes Emerson’s happy
characterisation of language as fossil poetry and fossil history: “Just as
in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life,
the graceful fern, or the finely-vertebrated lizard, such as have been
extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone,
so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the
feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very
names have perished, preserved and made safe for ever.” In like manner we
may speak of myths as fossil ethics and fossil theology, but, with more
appositeness, as embryonic ethics and theology, since they contain
potentially all the philosophies and theologies “that man did ever find.”
And to the student of the history of humanity who rejoices in the sure
foundation on which, tested in manifold ways, the convictions of the
highest and noblest of the race rest, the value of myth is increased in
its being a natural outgrowth of the mind when, having advanced to the
point at which curiosity concerning the causes of surrounding things
arises, it frames its crude explanations. For not that which man claims to
have received as a message from the gods, as a revelation from heaven, but
that which he has learned by experience often painful and bitter, and
which succeeding generations have either verified or improved upon, or
disproved altogether, is, in the long run, of any worth. Through it alone,
as we follow the changes wrought in the process from guess to certainty,
can we determine what was the intellectual stage of man in his mental
infancy, and how far it finds correspondences in the intellectual stage of
existing barbaric races.
Thus, the study of myth is nothing less than the study of the mental and
spiritual history of mankind. It is a branch of that larger, vaster
science of evolution which so occupies our thoughts to-day, and with it
the philosopher and the theologian must reckon. The evidence which it
brings from the living and dead mythologies of every race is in accord
with that furnished by their more tangible relics, that the history of
mankind is a history of slow but sure advance from a lower to a higher; of
ascent, although with oft backslidings. It confirms a momentous canon of
modern science, that the laws of evolution in the spiritual world are as
determinable as they are in the physical. To this we, for the enrichment
of our life and helpful service of our kind, do well to give heed.
Wherever we now turn eye or ear the unity of things is manifest, and their
unbroken harmony heard. With the theory of evolution in our hands as the
master-key, the immense array of facts that seemed to lie unrelated and
discrete are seen to be interrelated and in necessary dependence—“a
mighty sum of things for ever speaking.” That undisturbed relation of
cause and effect which science has revealed and confirmed extends
backwards as well as reaches forwards; its continuity involves the
inclusion of man as a part of nature, and the study of his development as
one in which both the biologist and the mythologist engage towards a
common end.
