MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION
Volume One
By Andrew Lang
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO NEW IMPRESSION.
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION CHAPTER I. SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY
CHAPTER II. NEW
SYSTEM PROPOSEDCHAPTER III. THE
MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—CONFUSION WITH NATURE—TOTEMISMCHAPTER IV. THE
MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—MAGIC—METAMORPHOSIS—METAPHYSIC—PSYCHOLOGYCHAPTER V. NATURE
MYTHSCHAPTER VI. NON-ARYAN
MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MANCHAPTER VII. INDO-ARYAN MYTHS—SOURCES
OF EVIDENCECHAPTER VIII. INDIAN
MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MANCHAPTER IX. GREEK MYTHS OF THE
ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND MANCHAPTER
X. GREEK COSMOGONIC MYTHSCHAPTER XI. SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS
DETAILED CONTENTS
PREFACE TO NEW IMPRESSION.
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
CHAPTER
I.—SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY.
Definitions of religion—Contradictory
evidence—”Belief in
spiritual beings”—Objection to Mr.
Tylor’s definition—Definition
as regards this argument—Problem:
the contradiction between
religion and myth—Two human moods—Examples—Case
of Greece—
Ancient mythologists—Criticism by Eusebius—Modern
mythological
systems—Mr. Max Muller—Mannhardt.
CHAPTER II.—NEW SYSTEM PROPOSED.
Chapter I. recapitulated—Proposal
of a new method: Science of
comparative or historical study of man—Anticipated
in part by
Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C. C. C.,
Cambridge),
and Mannhardt—Science of Tylor—Object of
inquiry: to find
condition of human intellect in which marvels of
myth are parts of
practical everyday belief—This is the
savage state—Savages
described—The wild element of
myth a survival from the savage
state—Advantages of this
method—Partly accounts for wide
DIFFUSION as well as ORIGIN
of myths—Connected with general
theory of evolution—Puzzling
example of myth of the water-
swallower—Professor Tiele’s
criticism of the method—
Objections to method, and answer to
these—See Appendix B.
CHAPTER III.—THE MENTAL
CONDITION OF SAVAGES—CONFUSION WITH
NATURE—TOTEMISM.
The mental condition of savages the basis of the irrational
element
in myth—Characteristics of that condition: (1)
Confusion of all
things in an equality of presumed animation and
intelligence;
(2) Belief in sorcery; (3) Spiritualism; (4)
Curiosity; (5) Easy
credulity and mental indolence—The
curiosity is satisfied, thanks
to the credulity, by myths in
answer to all inquiries—Evidence for
this—Mr. Tylor’s
opinion—Mr. Im Thurn—Jesuit missionaries’
Relations—Examples
of confusion between men, plants, beasts and
other natural objects—Reports
of travellers—Evidence from
institution of totemism—Definition
of totemism—Totemism in
Australia, Africa, America, the
Oceanic Islands, India, North Asia—
Conclusions: Totemism
being found so widely distributed, is a proof
of the existence of
that savage mental condition in which no line
is drawn between men
and the other things in the world. This
confusion is one of the
characteristics of myth in all races.
CHAPTER IV.—THE MENTAL
CONDITION OF SAVAGES—MAGIC—
METAMORPHOSIS—METAPHYSIC—PSYCHOLOGY.
Claims of sorcerers—Savage scientific speculation—Theory
of
causation—Credulity, except as to new religious ideas—”Post
hoc,
ergo propter hoc”—Fundamental ideas of magic—Examples:
incantations, ghosts, spirits—Evidence of rank and other
institutions in proof of confusions of mind exhibited in magical
beliefs.
CHAPTER V.—NATURE MYTHS.
Savage fancy,
curiosity and credulity illustrated in nature myths—
In
these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general
animation of everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis—Sun
myths, Asian, Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian,
Californian,
Brazilian, Maori, Samoan—Moon myths,
Australian, Muysca, Mexican,
Zulu, Macassar, Greenland, Piute,
Malay—Thunder myths—Greek and
Aryan sun and moon myths—Star
myths—Myths, savage and civilised,
of animals, accounting
for their marks and habits—Examples of
custom of claiming
blood kinship with lower animals—Myths of
various plants and
trees—Myths of stones, and of metamorphosis
into stones,
Greek, Australian and American—The whole natural
philosophy
of savages expressed in myths, and survives in folk-lore
and
classical poetry; and legends of metamorphosis.
CHAPTER VI.—NON-ARYAN
MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
Confusions of myth—Various
origins of man and of things—Myths of
Australia, Andaman
Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus,
Hurons, Iroquois,
Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldaeans,
Thlinkeets, Pacific
Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians—
Similarity of ideas
pervading all those peoples in various
conditions of society and
culture.
CHAPTER VII.—INDO-ARYAN MYTHS—SOURCES OF
EVIDENCE.
Authorities—Vedas—Brahmanas—Social
condition of Vedic India—
Arts—Ranks—War—Vedic
fetishism—Ancestor worship—Date of Rig-
Veda Hymns
doubtful—Obscurity of the Hymns—Difficulty of
interpreting the real character of Veda—Not primitive but
sacerdotal—The moral purity not innocence but refinement.
CHAPTER VIII.—INDIAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
Comparison of Vedic and savage myths—The metaphysical Vedic
account of the beginning of things—Opposite and savage fable
of
world made out of fragments of a man—Discussion of this
hymn—
Absurdities of Brahmanas—Prajapati, a Vedic
Unkulunkulu or Qat—
Evolutionary myths—Marriage of
heaven and earth—Myths of Puranas,
their savage parallels—Most
savage myths are repeated in Brahmanas.
CHAPTER IX.—GREEK
MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND MAN.
The Greeks practically
civilised when we first meet them in Homer—
Their mythology,
however, is full of repulsive features—The
hypothesis that
many of these are savage survivals—Are there other
examples
of such survival in Greek life and institutions?—Greek
opinion was constant that the race had been savage—Illustrations
of savage survival from Greek law of homicide, from magic,
religion, human sacrifice, religious art, traces of totemism, and
from the mysteries—Conclusion: that savage survival may also be
expected in Greek myths.
CHAPTER X.—GREEK COSMOGONIC
MYTHS.
Nature of the evidence—Traditions of origin of the
world and man—
Homeric, Hesiodic and Orphic myths—Later
evidence of historians,
dramatists, commentators—The Homeric
story comparatively pure—The
story in Hesiod, and its savage
analogues—The explanations of the
myth of Cronus, modern and
ancient—The Orphic cosmogony—Phanes
and Prajapati—Greek
myths of the origin of man—Their savage
analogues.
CHAPTER XI.—SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS.
The origin of a belief in
GOD beyond the ken of history and of
speculation—Sketch of
conjectural theories—Two elements in all
beliefs, whether of
backward or civilised races—The Mythical and
the Religious—These
may be coeval, or either may be older than the
other—Difficulty
of study—The current anthropological theory—
Stated
objections to the theory—Gods and spirits—Suggestion that
savage religion is borrowed from Europeans—Reply to Mr.
Tylor’s
arguments on this head—The morality of savages.
PREFACE TO NEW IMPRESSION.
When this book first appeared (1886), the philological school of
interpretation of religion and myth, being then still powerful in England,
was criticised and opposed by the author. In Science, as on the Turkish
throne of old, “Amurath to Amurath succeeds”; the philological theories of
religion and myth have now yielded to anthropological methods. The centre
of the anthropological position was the “ghost theory” of Mr. Herbert
Spencer, the “Animistic” theory of Mr. E. R. Tylor, according to whom the
propitiation of ancestral and other spirits leads to polytheism, and
thence to monotheism. In the second edition (1901) of this work the author
argued that the belief in a “relatively supreme being,” anthropomorphic
was as old as, and might be even older, than animistic religion. This
theory he exhibited at greater length, and with a larger collection of
evidence, in his Making of Religion.
Since 1901, a great deal of fresh testimony as to what Mr. Howitt styles
the “All Father” in savage and barbaric religions has accrued. As regards
this being in Africa, the reader may consult the volumes of the New Series
of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, which are full of African
evidence, not, as yet, discussed, to my knowledge, by any writer on the
History of Religion. As late as Man, for July, 1906, No. 66, Mr. Parkinson
published interesting Yoruba legends about Oleron, the maker and father of
men, and Oro, the Master of the Bull Roarer.
From Australia, we have Mr. Howitt’s account of the All Father in his
Native Tribes of South-East Australia, with the account of the All Father
of the Central Australian tribe, the Kaitish, in North Central Tribes of
Australia, by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (1904), also The Euahlayi Tribe,
by Mrs. Langley Parker (1906). These masterly books are indispensable to
all students of the subject, while, in Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s work
cited, and in their earlier Native Tribes of Central Australia, we are
introduced to savages who offer an elaborate animistic theory, and are
said to show no traces of the All Father belief.
The books of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen also present much evidence as to a
previously unknown form of totemism, in which the totem is not hereditary,
and does not regulate marriage. This prevails among the Arunta “nation,”
and the Kaitish tribe. In the opinion of Mr. Spencer (Report Australian
Association for Advancement of Science, 1904) and of Mr. J. G. Frazer
(Fortnightly Review, September, 1905), this is the earliest surviving form
of totemism, and Mr. Frazer suggests an animistic origin for the
institution. I have criticised these views in The Secret of the Totem
(1905), and proposed a different solution of the problem. (See also
“Primitive and Advanced Totemism” in Journal of the Anthropological
Institute, July, 1906.) In the works mentioned will be found references to
other sources of information as to these questions, which are still sub
judice. Mrs. Bates, who has been studying the hitherto almost unknown
tribes of Western Australia, promises a book on their beliefs and
institutions, and Mr. N. W. Thomas is engaged on a volume on Australian
institutions. In this place the author can only direct attention to these
novel sources, and to the promised third edition of Mr. Frazer’s The
Golden Bough.
A. L.
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION.
The original edition of Myth, Ritual and Religion, published in 1887, has
long been out of print. In revising the book I have brought it into line
with the ideas expressed in the second part of my Making of Religion
(1898) and have excised certain passages which, as the book first
appeared, were inconsistent with its main thesis. In some cases the
original passages are retained in notes, to show the nature of the
development of the author’s opinions. A fragment or two of controversy has
been deleted, and chapters xi. and xii., on the religion of the lowest
races, have been entirely rewritten, on the strength of more recent or
earlier information lately acquired. The gist of the book as it stands now
and as it originally stood is contained in the following lines from the
preface of 1887: “While the attempt is made to show that the wilder
features of myth survive from, or were borrowed from, or were imitated
from the ideas of people in the savage condition of thought, the existence—even
among savages—of comparatively pure, if inarticulate, religious
beliefs is insisted on throughout”. To that opinion I adhere, and I trust
that it is now expressed with more consistency than in the first edition.
I have seen reason, more and more, to doubt the validity of the “ghost
theory,” or animistic hypothesis, as explanatory of the whole fabric of
religion; and I present arguments against Mr. Tylor’s contention that the
higher conceptions of savage faith are borrowed from missionaries.(1) It
is very possible, however, that Mr. Tylor has arguments more powerful than
those contained in his paper of 1892. For our information is not yet
adequate to a scientific theory of the Origin of Religion, and probably
never will be. Behind the races whom we must regard as “nearest the
beginning” are their unknown ancestors from a dateless past, men as human
as ourselves, but men concerning whose psychical, mental and moral
condition we can only form conjectures. Among them religion arose, in
circumstances of which we are necessarily ignorant. Thus I only venture on
a surmise as to the germ of a faith in a Maker (if I am not to say
“Creator”) and Judge of men. But, as to whether the higher religious
belief, or the lower mythical stories came first, we are at least certain
that the Christian conception of God, given pure, was presently entangled,
by the popular fancy of Europe, in new Marchen about the Deity, the
Madonna, her Son, and the Apostles. Here, beyond possibility of denial,
pure belief came first, fanciful legend was attached after. I am inclined
to surmise that this has always been the case, and, in the pages on the
legend of Zeus, I show the processes of degeneration, of mythical
accretions on a faith in a Heaven-God, in action. That “the feeling of
religious devotion” attests “high faculties” in early man (such as are
often denied to men who “cannot count up to seven”), and that “the same
high mental faculties… would infallibly lead him, as long as his
reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange
superstitions and customs,” was the belief of Mr. Darwin.(2) That is also
my view, and I note that the lowest savages are not yet guilty of the very
worst practices, “sacrifice of human beings to a blood-loving God,” and
ordeals by poison and fire, to which Mr. Darwin alludes. “The improvement
of our science” has freed us from misdeeds which are unknown to the
Andamanese or the Australians. Thus there was, as regards these points in
morals, degeneracy from savagery as society advanced, and I believe that
there was also degeneration in religion. To say this is not to hint at a
theory of supernatural revelation to the earliest men, a theory which I
must, in limine disclaim.
(1) Tylor, “Limits of Savage Religion.” Journal of the Anthropological
Institute, vol. xxi.
(2) Descent of Man, p. 68, 1871.
In vol. ii. p. 19 occurs a reference, in a note, to Mr. Hartland’s
criticism of my ideas about Australian gods as set forth in the Making of
Religion. Mr. Hartland, who kindly read the chapters on Australian
religion in this book, does not consider that my note on p. 19 meets the
point of his argument. As to the Australians, I mean no more than that,
AMONG endless low myths, some of them possess a belief in a “maker of
everything,” a primal being, still in existence, watching conduct,
punishing breaches of his laws, and, in some cases, rewarding the good in
a future life. Of course these are the germs of a sympathetic religion,
even if the being thus regarded is mixed up with immoral or humorous
contradictory myths. My position is not harmed by such myths, which occur
in all old religions, and, in the middle ages, new myths were attached to
the sacred figures of Christianity in poetry and popular tales.
Thus, if there is nothing “sacred” in a religion because wild or wicked
fables about the gods also occur, there is nothing “sacred” in almost any
religion on earth.
Mr. Hartland’s point, however, seems to be that, in the Making of
Religion, I had selected certain Australian beliefs as especially “sacred”
and to be distinguished from others, because they are inculcated at the
religious Mysteries of some tribes. His aim, then, is to discover low,
wild, immoral myths, inculcated at the Mysteries, and thus to destroy my
line drawn between religion on one hand and myth or mere folk-lore on the
other. Thus there is a being named Daramulun, of whose rites, among the
Coast Murring, I condensed the account of Mr. Howitt.(1) From a statement
by Mr. Greenway(2) Mr. Hartland learned that Daramulun’s name is said to
mean “leg on one side” or “lame”. He, therefore, with fine humour, speaks
of Daramulun as “a creator with a game leg,” though when “Baiame” is
derived by two excellent linguists, Mr. Ridley and Mr. Greenway, from
Kamilaroi baia, “to make,” Mr. Hartland is by no means so sure of the
sense of the name. It happens to be inconvenient to him! Let the names
mean what they may, Mr. Hartland finds, in an obiter dictum of Mr. Howitt
(before he was initiated), that Daramulun is said to have “died,” and that
his spirit is now aloft. Who says so, and where, we are not informed,(3)
and the question is important.
(1) J. A. I., xiii. pp. 440-459.
(2) Ibid., xxi. p. 294.
(3) Ibid., xiii. p. 194.
For the Wiraijuri, IN THEIR MYSTERIES, tell a myth of cannibal conduct of
Daramulun’s, and of deceit and failure of knowledge in Baiame.(1) Of this
I was unaware, or neglected it, for I explicitly said that I followed Mr.
Howitt’s account, where no such matter is mentioned. Mr. Howitt, in fact,
described the Mysteries of the Coast Murring, while the narrator of the
low myths, Mr. Matthews, described those of a remote tribe, the Wiraijuri,
with whom Daramulun is not the chief, but a subordinate person. How Mr.
Matthews’ friends can at once hold that Daramulun was “destroyed” by
Baiame (their chief deity), and also that Daramulun’s voice is heard at
their rites, I don’t know.(2) Nor do I know why Mr. Hartland takes the
myth of a tribe where Daramulun is “the evil spirit who rules the
night,”(3) and introduces it as an argument against the belief of a
distant tribe, where, by Mr. Howitt’s account, Daramulun is not an evil
spirit, but “the master” of all, whose abode is above the sky, and to whom
are attributed powers of omnipotence and omnipresence, or, at any rate,
the power “to do anything and to go anywhere…. To his direct ordinances
are attributed the social and moral laws of the community.”(4) This is not
“an evil spirit”! When Mr. Hartland goes for scandals to a remote tribe of
a different creed that he may discredit the creed of the Coast Murring, he
might as well attribute to the Free Kirk “the errors of Rome”. But Mr.
Hartland does it!(5) Being “cunning of fence” he may reply that I also
spoke loosely of Wiraijuri and Coast Murring as, indifferently,
Daramulunites. I did, and I was wrong, and my critic ought not to accept
but to expose my error. The Wiraijuri Daramulun, who was annihilated, yet
who is “an evil spirit that rules the night,” is not the Murring guardian
and founder of recognised ethics.
(1) J. A. I., xxv. p. 297.
(2) Ibid., May, 1895, p. 419.
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., xiii. pp. 458, 459.
(5) Folk-Lore, ix., No. iv., p. 299.
But, in the Wiraijuri mysteries, the master, Baiame, deceives the women as
to the Mysteries! Shocking to US, but to deceive the women as to these
arcana, is, to the Australian mind in general, necessary for the safety of
the world. Moreover, we have heard of a lying spirit sent to deceive
prophets in a much higher creed. Finally, in a myth of the Mystery of the
Wiraijuri, Baiame is not omniscient. Indeed, even civilised races cannot
keep on the level of these religious conceptions, and not to keep on that
level is—mythology. Apollo, in the hymn to Hermes, sung on a sacred
occasion, needs to ask an old vine-dresser for intelligence. Hyperion
“sees all and hears all,” but needs to be informed, by his daughters, of
the slaughter of his kine. The Lord, in the Book of Job, has to ask Satan,
“Whence comest thou?” Now for the sake of dramatic effect, now from pure
inability to live on the level of his highest thought, man mythologises
and anthropomorphises, in Greece or Israel, as in Australia.
It does not follow that there is “nothing sacred” in his religion. Mr.
Hartland offers me a case in point. In Mrs. Langloh Parker’s Australian
Legendary Tales (pp. 11, 94), are myths of low adventures of Baiame. In
her More Australian Legendary Tales (pp. 84-99), is a very poetical and
charming aspect of the Baiame belief. Mr. Hartland says that I will “seek
to put” the first set of stories out of court, as “a kind of joke with no
sacredness about it”. Not I, but the Noongahburrah tribe themselves make
this essential distinction. Mrs. Langloh Parker says:(1) “The former
series” (with the low Baiame myths) “were all such legends as are told to
the black picaninnies; among the present are some they would not be
allowed to hear, touching as they do on sacred things, taboo to the
young”. The blacks draw the line which I am said to seek to draw.
(1) More Legendary Tales, p. xv.
In yet another case(1) grotesque hunting adventures of Baiame are told in
the mysteries, and illustrated by the sacred temporary representations in
raised earth. I did not know it; I merely followed Mr. Howitt. But I do
not doubt it. My reply is, that there was “something sacred” in Greek
mysteries, something purifying, ennobling, consoling. For this Lobeck has
collected (and disparaged) the evidence of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero and
many others, while even Aristophanes, as Prof. Campbell remarks, says: “We
only have bright sun and cheerful life who have been initiated and lived
piously in regard to strangers and to private citizens”.(2) Security and
peace of mind, in this world and for the next, were, we know not how,
borne into the hearts of Pindar and Sophocles in the Mysteries. Yet, if we
may at all trust the Fathers, there were scenes of debauchery, as at the
Mysteries of the Fijians (Nanga) there was buffoonery (“to amuse the
boys,” Mr. Howitt says of some Australian rites), the story of Baubo is
only one example, and, in other mysteries than the Eleusinian, we know of
mummeries in which an absurd tale of Zeus is related in connection with an
oak log. Yet surely there was “something sacred” in the faith of Zeus! Let
us judge the Australians as we judge Greeks. The precepts as to “speaking
the straightforward truth,” as to unselfishness, avoidance of quarrels, of
wrongs to “unprotected women,” of unnatural vices, are certainly
communicated in the Mysteries of some tribes, with, in another, knowledge
of the name and nature of “Our Father,” Munganngaur. That a Totemistic
dance, or medicine-dance of Emu hunting, is also displayed(3) at certain
Mysteries of a given tribe, and that Baiame is spoken of as the hero of
this ballet, no more deprives the Australian moral and religious teaching
(at the Mysteries) of sacred value, than the stupid indecency whereby
Baubo made Demeter laugh destroys the sacredness of the Eleusinia, on
which Pindar, Sophocles and Cicero eloquently dwell. If the Australian
mystae, at the most solemn moment of their lives, are shown a dull or
dirty divine ballet d’action, what did Sophocles see, after taking a swim
with his pig? Many things far from edifying, yet the sacred element of
religious hope and faith was also represented. So it is in Australia.
(1) J. A. I., xxiv. p. 416.
(2) Religion in Greek Literature, p. 259. It is to be regretted that the
learned professor gives no references. The Greek Mysteries are treated
later in this volume.
(3) See A picture of Australia, 1829, p. 264.
These studies ought to be comparative, otherwise they are worthless. As
Mr. Hartland calls Daramulun “an eternal Creator with a game leg” who
“died,” he may call Zeus an “eternal father, who swallowed his wife, lay
with his mother and sister, made love as a swan, and died, nay, was
buried, in Crete”. I do not think that Mr. Hartland would call Zeus “a
ghost-god” (my own phrase), or think that he was scoring a point against
me, if I spoke of the sacred and ethical characteristics of the Zeus
adored by Eumaeus in the Odyssey. He would not be so humorous about Zeus,
nor fall into an ignoratio elenchi. For my point never was that any
Australian tribe had a pure theistic conception unsoiled and unobliterated
by myth and buffoonery. My argument was that AMONG their ideas is that of
a superhuman being, unceasing (if I may not say eternal), a maker (if I
may not say a Creator), a guardian of certain by no means despicable
ethics, which I never proclaimed as supernormally inspired! It is no reply
to me to say that, in or out of Mysteries, low fables about that being are
told, and buffooneries are enacted. For, though I say that certain high
ideas are taught in Mysteries, I do not think I say that in Mysteries no
low myths are told.
I take this opportunity, as the earliest, to apologise for an error in my
Making of Religion concerning a passage in the Primitive Culture of my
friend Mr. E. B. Tylor. Mr. Tylor quoted(1) a passage from Captain John
Smith’s History of Virginia, as given in Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13-39, 1632.
In this passage no mention occurs of a Virginian deity named Ahone but
“Okee,” another and more truculent god, is named. I observed that, if Mr.
Tylor had used Strachey’s Historie of Travaile (1612), he would have found
“a slightly varying copy” of Smith’s text of 1632, with Ahone as superior
to Okee. I added in a note (p. 253): “There is a description of Virginia,
by W. Strachey, including Smith’s remarks published in 1612. Strachey
interwove some of this work with his own MS. in the British Museum.” Here,
as presently will be shown, I erred, in company with Strachey’s editor of
1849, and with the writer on Strachey in the Dictionary of National
Biography. What Mr. Tylor quoted from an edition of Smith in 1632 had
already appeared, in 1612, in a book (Map of Virginia, with a description
of the Countrey) described on the title-page as “written by Captain
Smith,” though, in my opinion, Smith may have had a collaborator. There is
no evidence whatever that Strachey had anything to do with this book of
1612, in which there is no mention of Ahone. Mr. Arber dates Strachey’s
own MS. (in which Ahone occurs) as of 1610-1615.(2) I myself, for reasons
presently to be alleged, date the MS. mainly in 1611-1612. If Mr. Arber
and I are right, Strachey must have had access to Smith’s MS. before it
was published in 1612, and we shall see how he used it. My point here is
that Strachey mentioned Ahone (in MS.) before Smith’s book of 1612 was
published. This could not be gathered from the dedication to Bacon
prefixed to Strachey’s MS., for that dedication cannot be earlier that
1618.(3) I now ask leave to discuss the evidence for an early
pre-Christian belief in a primal Creator, held by the Indian tribes from
Plymouth, in New England, to Roanoke Island, off Southern Virginia.
(1) Prim. Cult. ii. p. 342.
(2) Arber’s Smith, p. cxxxiii.
(3) Hakluyt Society, Strachey, 1849, pp. xxi., xxii.
THE GOD AHONE.
An insertion by a manifest plagiary into the work of a detected liar is
not, usually, good evidence. Yet this is all the evidence, it may be
urged, which we have for the existence of a belief, in early Virginia, as
to a good Creator, named Ahone. The matter stands thus: In 1607-1609 the
famed Captain John Smith endured and achieved in Virginia sufferings and
adventures. In 1608 he sent to the Council at home a MS. map and
description of the colony. In 1609 he returned to England (October). In
May, 1610, William Strachey, gent., arrived in Virginia, where he was
“secretary of state” to Lord De la Warr. In 1612 Strachey and Smith were
both in England. In that year Barnes of Oxford published A Map of
Virginia, with a description, etc., “written by Captain Smith,” according
to the title-page. There was annexed a compilation from various sources,
edited by “W. S.,” that is, NOT William Strachey, but Dr. William Symonds.
In the same year, 1612, or in 1611, William Strachey wrote his Historie of
Travaile into Virginia Britannia, at least as far as page 124 of the
Hakluyt edition of 1849.(1)
(1) For proof see p. 24. third line from foot of page, where 1612 is
indicated. Again, see p. 98, line 5, where “last year” is dated as “1610,
about Christmas,” which would put Strachey’s work at this point as
actually of 1611; prior, that is, to Smith’s publication. Again, p. 124,
“this last year, myself being at the Falls” (of the James River), “I found
in an Indian house certain clawes… which I brought away and into
England”.
If Strachey, who went out with Lord De la Warr as secretary in 1610,
returned with him (as is likely), he sailed for England on 28th March,
1611. In that case, he was in England in 1611, and the passages cited
leave it dubious whether he wrote his book in 1611, 1612, or in both
years.(1)
(1) Mr. Arber dates the MS. “1610-1615,” and attributes to Strachey Laws
for Virginia, 1612.
Strachey embodies in his work considerable pieces of Smith’s Map of
Virginia and Description, written in 1608, and published in 1612. He
continually deserts Smith, however, adding more recent information,
reflections and references to the ancient classics, with allusions to his
own travels in the Levant. His glossary is much more extensive than
Smith’s, and he inserts a native song of triumph over the English in the
original.(1) Now, when Strachey comes to the religion of the natives(2) he
gives eighteen pages (much of it verbiage) to five of Smith’s.(3) What
Smith (1612) says of their chief god I quote, setting Strachey’s version
(1611-1612) beside it.
(1) Strachey, pp. 79-80. He may have got the song from Kemps or Machumps,
friendly natives.
(2) Pp. 82-100.
(3) Arber, pp. 74-79.
SMITH (Published, 1612).
But their chiefe God they worship is the Diuell. Him they call Oke, and
serue him more of feare than loue. They say they have conference with him,
and fashion themselues as near to his shape as they can imagine. In their
Temples, they have his image euile favouredly carved, and then painted,
and adorned with chaines, copper, and beades; and covered with a skin, in
such manner as the deformity may well suit with such a God. By him is
commonly the sepulcher of their Kings.
STRACHEY (Written, 1611-12).
But their chief god they worship is no other, indeed, then the divell,
whome they make presentments of, and shadow under the forme of an idoll,
which they entitle Okeus, and whome they worship as the Romans did their
hurtful god Vejovis, more for feare of harme then for hope of any good;
they saie they have conference with him, and fashion themselves in their
disguisments as neere to his shape as they can imagyn. In every territory
of a weroance is a temple and a priest, peradventure two or thrie; yet
happie doth that weroance accompt himself who can detayne with him a
Quiyough-quisock, of the best, grave, lucky, well instructed in their
misteryes, and beloved of their god; and such a one is noe lesse honoured
then was Dianae’s priest at Ephesus, for whome they have their more
private temples, with oratories and chauneells therein, according as is
the dignity and reverence of the Quiyough-quisock, which the weroance
wilbe at charge to build upon purpose, sometyme twenty foote broad and a
hundred in length, fashioned arbour wyse after their buylding, having
comonly the dore opening into the east, and at the west end a spence or
chauncell from the body of the temple, with hollow wyndings and pillers,
whereon stand divers black imagies, fashioned to the shoulders, with their
faces looking down the church, and where within their weroances, upon a
kind of biere of reedes, lye buryed; and under them, apart, in a vault low
in the ground (as a more secrett thing), vailed with a matt, sitts their
Okeus, an image ill-favouredly carved, all black dressed, with chaynes of
perle, the presentment and figure of that god (say the priests unto the
laity, and who religiously believe what the priests saie) which doth them
all the harme they suffer, be yt in their bodies or goods, within doores
or abroad; and true yt is many of them are divers tymes (especyally
offendors) shrewdly scratched as they walke alone in the woods, yt may
well be by the subtyle spirit, the malitious enemy to mankind, whome,
therefore, to pacefie and worke to doe them good (at least no harme) the
priests tell them they must do these and these sacrifices unto (them) of
these and these things, and thus and thus often, by which meanes not only
their owne children, but straungers, are sometimes sacrificed unto him:
whilst the great god (the priests tell them) who governes all the world,
and makes the sun to shine, creating the moone and stars his companyons,
great powers, and which dwell with him, and by whose virtues and
influences the under earth is tempered, and brings forth her fruiets
according to her seasons, they calling Ahone; the good and peaceable god
requires no such dutyes, nor needes be sacrificed unto, for he intendeth
all good unto them, and will doe noe harme, only the displeased Okeus,
looking into all men’s accions, and examining the same according to the
severe scale of justice, punisheth them with sicknesse, beats them, and
strikes their ripe corn with blastings, stormes, and thunder clapps,
stirrs up warre, and makes their women falce unto them. Such is the misery
and thraldome under which Sathan hath bound these wretched miscreants.
I began by calling Strachey a plagiary. The reader will now observe that
he gives far more than he takes. For example, his account of the temples
is much more full than that of Smith, and he adds to Smith’s version the
character and being of Ahone, as what “the priests tell them”. I submit,
therefore, that Strachey’s additions, if valid for temples, are not
discredited for Ahone, merely because they are inserted in the framework
of Smith. As far as I understand the matter, Smith’s Map of Virginia
(1612) is an amended copy, with additions, by Smith or another writer of
that description, which he sent home to the Council of Virginia, in
November, 1608.(1) To the book of 1612 was added a portion of “Relations”
by different hands, edited by W. S., namely, Dr. Symonds. Strachey’s
editor, in 1849, regarded W. S. as Strachey, and supposed that Strachey
was the real author of Smith’s Map of Virginia, so that, in his Historie
of Travaile, Strachey merely took back his own. He did not take back his
own; he made use of Smith’s MS., not yet published, if Mr. Arber and I
rightly date Strachey’s MS. at 1610-15, or 1611-12. Why Strachey acted
thus it is possible to conjecture. As a scholar well acquainted with
Virginia, and as Secretary for the Colony, he would have access to Smith’s
MS. of 1608 among the papers of the Council, before its publication. Smith
professes himself “no scholer”.(2) On the other hand, Strachey likes to
show off his Latin and Greek. He has a curious, if inaccurate, knowledge
of esoteric Greek and Roman religious antiquities, and in writing of
religion aims at a comparative method. Strachey, however, took the trouble
to copy bits of Smith into his own larger work, which he never gave to the
printers.
(1) Arber, p. 444.
(2) Arber, p. 442.
Now as to Ahone. It suits my argument to suppose that Strachey’s account
is no less genuine than his description of the temples (illustrated by a
picture by John White, who had been in Virginia in 1589), and the account
of the Great Hare of American mythology.(1) This view of a Virginian
Creator, “our chief god” “who takes upon him this shape of a hare,” was
got, says Strachey, “last year, 1610,” from a brother of the Potomac King,
by a boy named Spilman, who says that Smith “sold” him to Powhattan.(2) In
his own brief narrative Spelman (or Spilman) says nothing about the
Cosmogonic Legend of the Great Hare. The story came up when Captain Argoll
was telling Powhattan’s brother the account of creation in Genesis (1610).
(1) Strachey, p. 98-100.
(2) “Spilman’s Narrative,” Arber, cx.-cxiv.
Now Strachey’s Great Hare is accepted by mythologists, while Ahone is
regarded with suspicion. Ahone does not happen to suit anthropological
ideas, the Hare suits them rather better. Moreover, and more important,
there is abundant corroborative evidence for Oke and for the Hare,
Michabo, who, says Dr. Brinton, “was originally the highest divinity
recognised by them, powerful and beneficent beyond all others, maker of
the heavens and the world,” just like Ahone, in fact. And Dr. Brinton
instructs us that Michabo originally meant not Great Hare, but “the spirit
of light”.(1) Thus, originally, the Red Men adored “The Spirit of Light,
maker of the heavens and the world”. Strachey claims no more than this for
Ahone. Now, of course, Dr. Brinton may be right. But I have already
expressed my extreme distrust of the philological processes by which he
extracts “The Great Light; spirit of light,” from Michabo, “beyond a
doubt!” In my poor opinion, whatever claims Michabo may have as an unique
creator of earth and heaven—”God is Light,”—he owes his
mythical aspect as a Hare to something other than an unconscious pun. In
any case, according to Dr. Brinton, Michabo, regarded as a creator, is
equivalent to Strachey’s Ahone. This amount of corroboration, valeat
quantum, I may claim, from the Potomac Indians, for the belief in Ahone on
the James River. Dr. Brinton is notoriously not a believer in American
“monotheism”.(2)
(1) Myths of the New World, p. 178.
(2) Myths of the New World, p. 53.
The opponents of the authenticity of Ahone, however, will certainly argue:
“For Oke, or Oki, as a redoubted being or spirit, or general name for such
personages, we have plentiful evidence, corroborating that of Smith. But
what evidence as to Ahone corroborates that of Strachey?” I must confess
that I have no explicit corroborative evidence for Ahone, but then I have
no accessible library of early books on Virginia. Now it is clear that if
I found and produced evidence for Ahone as late as 1625, I would be met at
once with the retort that, between 1610 and 1625, Christian ideas had
contaminated the native beliefs. Thus if I find Ahone, or a deity of like
attributes, after a very early date, he is of no use for my purpose. Nor
do I much expect to find him. But do we find Winslow’s Massachusetts God,
Kiehtan, named AFTER 1622 (“I only ask for information”), and if we don’t,
does that prevent Mr. Tylor from citing Kiehtan, with apparent reliance on
the evidence?(1)
(1) Primitive Culture, ii. p. 342.
Again, Ahone, though primal and creative, is, by Strachey’s account, a
sleeping partner. He has no sacrifice, and no temple or idol is recorded.
Therefore the belief in Ahone could only be discovered as a result of
inquiry, whereas figures of Oke or Okeus, and his services, were common
and conspicuous.(1) As to Oke, I cannot quite understand Mr. Tylor’s
attitude. Summarising Lafitau, a late writer of 1724, Mr. Tylor writes:
“The whole class of spirits or demons, known to the Caribs by the name of
cemi, in Algonkin as manitu, in Huron as oki, Lafitau now spells with
capital letters, and converts them each into a supreme being”.(2) Yet in
Primitive Culture, ii., 342, 1891, Mr. Tylor had cited Smith’s Okee (with
a capital letter) as the “chief god” of the Virginians in 1612. How can
Lafitau be said to have elevated oki into Oki, and so to have made a god
out of “a class of spirits or demons,” in 1724, when Mr. Tylor had already
cited Smith’s Okee, with a capital letter and as a “chief god,” in 1612?
Smith, rebuked for the same by Mr. Tylor, had even identified Okee with
the devil. Lafitau certainly did not begin this erroneous view of Oki as a
“chief god” among the Virginians. If I cannot to-day produce corroboration
for a god named Ahone, I can at least show that, from the north of New
England to the south of Virginia, there is early evidence, cited by Mr.
Tylor, for a belief in a primal creative being, closely analogous to
Ahone. And this evidence, I think, distinctly proves that such a being as
Ahone was within the capacity of the Indians in these latitudes. Mr. Tylor
must have thought in 1891 that the natives were competent to a belief in a
supreme deity, for he said, “Another famous native American name for the
supreme deity is Oki”.(3) In the essay of 1892, however, Oki does not
appear to exist as a god’s name till 1724. We may now, for earlier
evidence, turn to Master Thomas Heriot, “that learned mathematician” “who
spoke the Indian language,” and was with the company which abandoned
Virginia on 18th June, 1586. They ranged 130 miles north and 130 miles
north-west of Roanoke Island, which brings them into the neighbourhood of
Smith’s and Strachey’s country. Heriot writes as to the native creeds:
“They believe that there are many gods which they call Mantoac, but of
different sorts and degrees. Also that there is one chiefe God that hath
beene from all eternitie, who, as they say, when he purposed first to make
the world, made first other gods of a principall order, to be as
instruments to be used in the Creation and Government to follow, and after
the Sunne, Moone and Starres as pettie gods, and the instruments of the
other order more principall…. They thinke that all the gods are of
humane shape,” and represent them by anthropomorphic idols. An idol, or
image, “Kewasa” (the plural is “Kewasowok”), is placed in the temples,
“where they worship, pray and make many offerings”. Good souls go to be
happy with the gods, the bad burn in Popogusso, a great pit, “where the
sun sets”. The evidence for this theory of a future life, as usual, is
that of men who died and revived again, a story found in a score of widely
separated regions, down to our day, when the death, revival and revelation
occurred to the founder of the Arapahoe new religion of the Ghost Dance.
The belief “works for righteousness”. “The common sort… have great care
to avoyde torment after death, and to enjoy blesse,” also they have “great
respect to their Governors”.
(1) Okee’s image, as early as 1607, was borne into battle against Smith,
who captured the god (Arber, p. 393). Ahone was not thus en evidence.
(2) Journal of Anthrop. Inst., Feb., 1892, pp. 285, 286.
(3) Prim. Cult,, ii. p. 342.
This belief in a chief god “from all eternitie” (that is, of unexplained
origin), may not be convenient to some speculators, but it exactly
corroborates Strachey’s account of Ahone as creator with subordinates. The
evidence is of 1586 (twenty-six years before Strachey), and, like
Strachey, Heriot attributes the whole scheme of belief to “the priestes”.
“This is the sum of their religion, which I learned by having speciall
familiaritie with some of their priests.”(1) I see no escape from the
conclusion that the Virginians believed as Heriot says they did, except
the device of alleging that they promptly borrowed some of Heriot’s ideas
and maintained that these ideas had ever been their own. Heriot certainly
did not recognise the identity. “Through conversing with us they were
brought into great doubts of their owne (religion), and no small
admiration of ours; of which many desired to learne more than we had the
meanes for want of utterance in their language to expresse.” So Heriot
could not be subtle in the native tongue. Heriot did what he could to
convert them: “I did my best to make His immortall glory knowne”. His
efforts were chiefly successful by virtue of the savage admiration of our
guns, mathematical instruments, and so forth. These sources of an awakened
interest in Christianity would vanish with the total destruction and
discomfiture of the colony, unless a few captives, later massacred, taught
our religion to the natives.(2)
(1) According to Strachey, Heriot could speak the native language.
(2) Heriot’s Narrative, pp. 37-39. Quaritch, London, 1893.
I shall cite another early example of a New England deity akin to Ahone,
with a deputy, a friend of sorcerers, like Okee. This account is in
Smith’s General History of New England, 1606-1624. We sent out a colony in
1607; “they all returned in the yeere 1608,” esteeming the country “a
cold, barren, mountainous rocky desart”. I am apt to believe that they did
not plant the fructifying seeds of grace among the natives in 1607-1608.
But the missionary efforts of French traders may, of course, have been
blessed; nor can I deny that a yellow-haired man, whose corpse was found
in 1620 with some objects of iron, may have converted the natives to such
beliefs as they possessed. We are told, however, that these tenets were of
ancestral antiquity. I cite E. Winslow, as edited by Smith (1623-24):—
“Those where in this Plantation (New Plymouth) say Kiehtan(1) made all the
other Gods: also one man and one woman, and with them all mankinde, but
how they became so dispersed they know not. They say that at first there
was no king but Kiehtan, that dwelleth far westerly above the heavens,
whither all good men go when they die, and have plentie of all things. The
bad go thither also and knock at the door, but (‘the door is shut’) he
bids them go wander in endless want and misery, for they shall not stay
there. They never saw Kiehtan,(2) but they hold it a great charge and
dutie that one race teach another; and to him they make feasts and cry and
sing for plenty and victory, or anything that is good.
(1) In 1873 Mr. Tylor regarded Dr. Brinton’s etymology of Kiehtan as =
Kittanitowit = “Great Living Spirit,” as “plausible”. In his edition of
1891 he omits this etymology. Personally I entirely distrust the
philological theories of the original sense of old divine names as a
general rule.
(2) “They never saw Kiehtan.” So, about 1854, “The common answer of
intelligent black fellows on the Barwon when asked if they know Baiame…
is this: ‘Kamil zaia zummi Baiame, zaia winuzgulda’; ‘I have not seen
Baiame, I have heard or perceived him’. If asked who made the sky, the
earth, the animals and man, they always answer ‘Baiame’.” Daramulun,
according to the same authority in Lang’s Queensland, was the familiar of
sorcerers, and appeared as a serpent. This answers, as I show, to Hobamock
the subordinate power to Kiehtan in New England and to Okee, the familiar
of sorcerers in Virginia. (Ridley, J. A. I., 1872, p. 277.)
“They have another Power they call Hobamock, which we conceive the Devill,
and upon him they call to cure their wounds and diseases; when they are
curable he persuades them he sent them, because they have displeased him;
but, if they be mortal, then he saith, ‘Kiehtan sent them’; which makes
them never call on him in their sickness. They say this Hobamock appears
to them sometimes like a man, a deer, or an eagle, but most commonly like
a snake; not to all but to their Powahs to cure diseases, and Undeses…
and these are such as conjure in Virginia, and cause the people to do what
they list.” Winslow (or rather Smith editing Winslow here), had already
said, “They believe, as do the Virginians, of many divine powers, yet of
one above all the rest, as the Southern Virginians call their chief god
Kewassa (an error), and that we now inhabit Oke…. The Massachusetts call
their great god Kiehtan.”(1)
(1) Arber, pp. 767, 768.
Here, then, in Heriot (1586), Strachey (1611-12) and Winslow (1622), we
find fairly harmonious accounts of a polydaemonism with a chief, primal,
creative being above and behind it; a being unnamed, and Ahone and
Kiehtan.
Is all this invention? Or was all this derived from Europeans before 1586,
and, if so, from what Europeans? Mr. Tylor, in 1873, wrote, “After due
allowance made for misrendering of savage answers, and importation of
white men’s thoughts, it can hardly be judged that a divine being, whose
characteristics are often so unlike what European intercourse would have
suggested, and who is heard of by such early explorers among such distant
tribes, could be a deity of foreign origin”. NOW, he “can HARDLY be
ALTOGETHER a deity of foreign origin”.(1) I agree with Mr. Tylor’s earlier
statement. In my opinion Ahone—Okeus, Kiehtan—Hobamock,
correspond, the first pair to the usually unseen Australian Baiame (a
crystal or hypnotic vision of Baiame scarcely counts), while the second
pair, Okeus and Hobamock, answer to the Australian familiars of sorcerers,
Koin and Brewin; the American “Powers” being those of peoples on a higher
level of culture. Like Tharramulun where Baiame is supreme, Hobamock
appears as a snake (Asclepius).
(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 340, 1873, 1892.
For all these reasons I am inclined to accept Strachey’s Ahone as a
veritable element in Virginian belief. Without temple or service, such a
being was not conspicuous, like Okee and other gods which had idols and
sacrifices.
As far as I see, Strachey has no theory to serve by inventing Ahone. He
asks how any races “if descended from the people of the first creation,
should maintain so general and gross a defection from the true knowledge
of God”. He is reduced to suppose that, as descendants of Ham, they
inherit “the ignorance of true godliness.” (p. 45). The children of Shem
and Japheth alone “retained, until the coming of the Messias, the only
knowledge of the eternal and never-changing Trinity”. The Virginians, on
the other hand, fell heir to the ignorance, and “fearful and superstitious
instinct of nature” of Ham (p. 40). Ahone, therefore, is not invented by
Strachey to bolster up a theory (held by Strachey), of an inherited
revelation, or of a sensus numinis which could not go wrong. Unless a
proof be given that Strachey had a theory, or any other purpose, to serve
by inventing Ahone, I cannot at present come into the opinion that he
gratuitously fabled, though he may have unconsciously exaggerated.
What were Strachey’s sources? He was for nine months, if not more, in the
colony: he had travelled at least 115 miles up the James River, he
occasionally suggests modifications of Smith’s map, he refers to Smith’s
adventures, and his glossary is very much larger than Smith’s; its
accuracy I leave to American linguists. Such a witness, despite his
admitted use of Smith’s text (if it is really all by Smith throughout) is
not to be despised, and he is not despised in America.(1) Strachey, it is
true, had not, like Smith, been captured by Indians and either treated
with perfect kindness and consideration (as Smith reported at the time),
or tied to a tree and threatened with arrows, and laid out to have his
head knocked in with a stone; as he alleged sixteen years later! Strachey,
not being captured, did not owe his release (1) to the magnanimity of
Powhattan, (2) to his own ingenious lies, (3) to the intercession of
Pocahontas, as Smith, and his friends for him, at various dates
inconsistently declared. Smith certainly saw more of the natives at home:
Strachey brought a more studious mind to what he could learn of their
customs and ideas; and is not a convicted braggart. I conjecture that one
of Strachey’s sources was a native named Kemps. Smith had seized Kemps and
Kinsock in 1609. Unknown authorities (Powell? and Todkill?) represent
these two savages as “the most exact villaines in the country”.(2) They
were made to labour in fetters, then were set at liberty, but “little
desired it”.(3) Some “souldiers” ran away to the liberated Kemps, who
brought them back to Smith.(4) Why Kemps and his friend are called “two of
the most exact villains in the country” does not appear. Kemps died “of
the surveye” (scurvey, probably) at Jamestown, in 1610-11. He was much
made of by Lord De la Warr, “could speak a pretty deal of our English, and
came orderly to church every day to prayers”. He gave Strachey the names
of Powhattan’s wives, and told him, truly or not, that Pocahontas was
married, about 1610, to an Indian named Kocoum.(5) I offer the guess that
Kemps and Machumps, who came and went from Pocahontas, and recited an
Indian prayer which Strachey neglected to copy out, may have been among
Strachey’s authorities. I shall, of course, be told that Kemps picked up
Ahone at church. This did not strike Strachey as being the fact; he had no
opinion of the creed in which Ahone was a factor, “the misery and
thraldome under which Sathan has bound these wretched miscreants”.
According to Strachey, the priests, far from borrowing any part of our
faith, “feare and tremble lest the knowledge of God, and of our Saviour
Jesus Christ be taught in these parts”.
(1) Arber, cxvii. Strachey mentions that (before his arrival in Virginia)
Pocahontas turned cart-wheels, naked, in Jamestown, being then under
twelve, and not yet wearing the apron. Smith says she was ten in 1608, but
does not mention the cart-wheels. Later, he found it convenient to put her
age at twelve or thirteen in 1608. Most American scholars, such as Mr.
Adams, entirely distrust the romantic later narratives of Smith.
(2) The Proeeedings, etc., by W. S. Arber, p. 151.
(3) Ibid., p. 155.
(4) Ibid., p. 157.
(5) Strachey, pp. 54, 55.
Strachey is therefore for putting down the priests, and, like Smith
(indeed here borrowing from Smith), accuses them of sacrificing children.
To Smith’s statement that such a rite was worked at Quiyough-cohanock,
Strachey adds that Sir George Percy (who was with Smith) “was at, and
observed” a similar mystery at Kecoughtan. It is plain that the rite was
not a sacrifice, but a Bora, or initiation, and the parallel of the
Spartan flogging of boys, with the retreat of the boys and their
instructors, is very close, and, of course, unnoted by classical scholars
except Mr. Frazer. Strachey ends with the critical remark that we shall
not know all the certainty of the religion and mysteries till we can
capture some of the priests, or Quiyough-quisocks.
Students who have access to a good library of Americana may do more to
elucidate Ahone. I regard him as in a line with Kiehtan and the God spoken
of by Heriot, and do not believe (1) that Strachey lied; (2) that natives
deceived Strachey; (3) that Ahone was borrowed from “the God of Captain
Smith”.
MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION.
CHAPTER I. SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY.
Definitions of religion—Contradictory evidence—”Belief in
spiritual beings”—Objection to Mr. Tylor’s definition—Definition
as regards this argument—Problem: the contradiction between religion
and myth—Two human moods—Examples—Case of Greece—Ancient
mythologists—Criticism by Eusebius—Modern mythological systems—Mr.
Max Muller—Mannhardt.
The word “Religion” may be, and has been, employed in many different
senses, and with a perplexing width of significance. No attempt to define
the word is likely to be quite satisfactory, but almost any definition may
serve the purpose of an argument, if the writer who employs it states his
meaning frankly and adheres to it steadily. An example of the confusions
which may arise from the use of the term “religion” is familiar to
students. Dr. J. D. Lang wrote concerning the native races of Australia:
“They have nothing whatever of the character of religion, or of religious
observances, to distinguish them from the beasts that perish”. Yet in the
same book Dr. Lang published evidence assigning to the natives belief in
“Turramullun, the chief of demons, who is the author of disease, mischief
and wisdom”.(1) The belief in a superhuman author of “disease, mischief
and wisdom” is certainly a religious belief not conspicuously held by “the
beasts”; yet all religion was denied to the Australians by the very author
who prints (in however erroneous a style) an account of part of their
creed. This writer merely inherited the old missionary habit of speaking
about the god of a non-Christian people as a “demon” or an “evil spirit”.
(1) See Primitive Culture, second edition, i. 419.
Dr. Lang’s negative opinion was contradicted in testimony published by
himself, an appendix by the Rev. Mr. Ridley, containing evidence of the
belief in Baiame. “Those who have learned that ‘God’ is the name by which
we speak of the Creator, say that Baiame is God.”(1)
(1) Lang’s Queensland, p. 445, 1861.
As “a minimum definition of religion,” Mr. Tylor has suggested “the belief
in spiritual beings”. Against this it may be urged that, while we have no
definite certainty that any race of men is destitute of belief in
spiritual beings, yet certain moral and creative deities of low races do
not seem to be envisaged as “spiritual” at all. They are regarded as
EXISTENCES, as BEINGS, unconditioned by Time, Space, or Death, and nobody
appears to have put the purely metaphysical question, “Are these beings
spiritual or material?”(1) Now, if a race were discovered which believed
in such beings, yet had no faith in spirits, that race could not be called
irreligious, as it would have to be called in Mr. Tylor’s “minimum
definition”. Almost certainly, no race in this stage of belief in nothing
but unconditioned but not expressly spiritual beings is extant. Yet such a
belief may conceivably have existed before men had developed the theory of
spirits at all, and such a belief, in creative and moral unconditioned
beings, not alleged to be spiritual, could not be excluded from a
definition of religion.(2)
(1) See The Making of Religion, pp. 201-210.
(2) “The history of the Jews, nay, the history of our own mind, proves to
demonstration that the thought of God is a far easier thought, and a far
earlier, than that of a spirit.” Father Tyrrell, S. J., The Month,
October, 1898. As to the Jews, the question is debated. As to our own
infancy, we are certainly taught about God before we are likely to be
capable of the metaphysical notion of spirit. But we can scarcely reason
from children in Christian houses to the infancy of the race.
For these reasons we propose (merely for the purpose of the present work)
to define religion as the belief in a primal being, a Maker, undying,
usually moral, without denying that the belief in spiritual beings, even
if immoral, may be styled religious. Our definition is expressly framed
for the purpose of the argument, because that argument endeavours to bring
into view the essential conflict between religion and myth. We intend to
show that this conflict between the religious and the mythical conception
is present, not only (where it has been universally recognised) in the
faiths of the ancient civilised peoples, as in Greece, Rome, India and
Egypt, but also in the ideas of the lowest known savages.
It may, of course, be argued that the belief in Creator is itself a myth.
However that may be, the attitude of awe, and of moral obedience, in face
of such a supposed being, is religious in the sense of the Christian
religion, whereas the fabrication of fanciful, humorous, and wildly
irrational fables about that being, or others, is essentially mythical in
the ordinary significance of that word, though not absent from popular
Christianity.
Now, the whole crux and puzzle of mythology is, “Why, having attained (in
whatever way) to a belief in an undying guardian, ‘Master of Life,’ did
mankind set to work to evolve a chronique scandaleuse about HIM? And why
is that chronique the elaborately absurd set of legends which we find in
all mythologies?”
In answering, or trying to answer, these questions, we cannot go behind
the beliefs of the races now most immersed in savage ignorance. About the
psychology of races yet more undeveloped we can have no historical
knowledge. Among the lowest known tribes we usually find, just as in
ancient Greece, the belief in a deathless “Father,” “Master,” “Maker,” and
also the crowd of humorous, obscene, fanciful myths which are in flagrant
contradiction with the religious character of that belief. That belief is
what we call rational, and even elevated. The myths, on the other hand,
are what we call irrational and debasing. We regard low savages as very
irrational and debased characters, consequently the nature of their myths
does not surprise us. Their religious conception, however, of a “Father”
or “Master of Life” seems out of keeping with the nature of the savage
mind as we understand it. Still, there the religious conception actually
is, and it seems to follow that we do not wholly understand the savage
mind, or its unknown antecedents. In any case, there the facts are, as
shall be demonstrated. However the ancestors of Australians, or
Andamanese, or Hurons arrived at their highest religious conception, they
decidedly possess it.(1) The development of their mythical conceptions is
accounted for by those qualities of their minds which we do understand,
and shall illustrate at length. For the present, we can only say that the
religious conception uprises from the human intellect in one mood, that of
earnest contemplation and submission: while the mythical ideas uprise from
another mood, that of playful and erratic fancy. These two moods are
conspicuous even in Christianity. The former, that of earnest and
submissive contemplation, declares itself in prayers, hymns, and “the dim
religious light” of cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and
erratic fancy, is conspicuous in the buffoonery of Miracle Plays, in
Marchen, these burlesque popular tales about our Lord and the Apostles,
and in the hideous and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two
moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole religious history of
the human race. They stand as near each other, and as far apart, as Love
and Lust.
(1) The hypothesis that the conception was borrowed from European creeds
will be discussed later. See, too, “Are Savage Gods borrowed from
Missionaries?” Nineteenth Century, January, 1899.
It will later be shown that even some of the most backward savages make a
perhaps half-conscious distinction between their mythology and their
religion. As to the former, they are communicative; as to the latter, they
jealously guard their secret in sacred mysteries. It is improbable that
reflective “black fellows” have been morally shocked by the flagrant
contradictions between their religious conceptions and their mythical
stories of the divine beings. But human thought could not come into
explicit clearness of consciousness without producing the sense of shock
and surprise at these contradictions between the Religion and the Myth of
the same god. Of this we proceed to give examples.
In Greece, as early as the sixth century B. C., we are all familiar with
Xenophanes’ poem(1) complaining that the gods were credited with the worst
crimes of mortals—in fact, with abominations only known in the
orgies of Nero and Elagabalus. We hear Pindar refusing to repeat the tale
which told him the blessed were cannibals.(2) In India we read the pious
Brahmanic attempts to expound decently the myths which made Indra the
slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable sin. In
Egypt, too, we study the priestly or philosophic systems by which the
clergy strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from their
own deities. From all these efforts of civilised and pious believers to
explain away the stories about their own gods we may infer one fact—the
most important to the student of mythology—the fact that myths were
not evolved in times of clear civilised thought. It is when Greece is just
beginning to free her thought from the bondage of too concrete language,
when she is striving to coin abstract terms, that her philosophers and
poets first find the myths of Greece a stumbling-block.
(1) Ritter and Preller, Hist. Philos., Gothae, 1869, p. 82.
(2) Olympic Odes, i., Myers’s translation: “To me it is impossible to call
one of the blessed gods a cannibal…. Meet it is for a man that
concerning the gods he speak honourably, for the reproach is less. Of
thee, son of Tantalus, I will speak contrariwise to them who have gone
before me.” In avoiding the story of the cannibal god, however, Pindar
tells a tale even more offensive to our morality.
All early attempts at an interpretation of mythology are so many efforts
to explain the myths on some principle which shall seem not unreasonable
to men living at the time of the explanation. Therefore the pious
remonstrances and the forced constructions of early thinkers like
Xenophanes, of poets like Pindar, of all ancient Homeric scholars and
Pagan apologists, from Theagenes of Rhegium (525 B. C.), the early Homeric
commentator, to Porphyry, almost the last of the heathen philosophers, are
so many proofs that to Greece, as soon as she had a reflective literature,
the myths of Greece seemed impious and IRRATIONAL. The essays of the
native commentators on the Veda, in the same way, are endeavours to put
into myths felt to be irrational and impious a meaning which does not
offend either piety or reason. We may therefore conclude that it was not
men in an early stage of philosophic thought (as philosophy is now
understood)—not men like Empedocles and Heraclitus, nor reasonably
devout men like Eumaeus, the pious swineherd of the Odyssey—who
evolved the blasphemous myths of Greece, of Egypt and of India. We must
look elsewhere for an explanation. We must try to discover some actual and
demonstrable and widely prevalent condition of the human mind, in which
tales that even to remote and rudimentary civilisations appeared
irrational and unnatural would seem natural and rational. To discover this
intellectual condition has been the aim of all mythologists who did not
believe that myth is a divine tradition depraved by human weakness, or a
distorted version of historical events.
Before going further, it is desirable to set forth what our aim is, and to
what extent we are seeking an interpretation of mythology. It is not our
purpose to explain every detail of every ancient legend, either as a
distorted historical fact or as the result of this or that confusion of
thought caused by forgetfulness of the meanings of language, or in any
other way; nay, we must constantly protest against the excursions of too
venturesome ingenuity. Myth is so ancient, so complex, so full of
elements, that it is vain labour to seek a cause for every phenomenon. We
are chiefly occupied with the quest for an historical condition of the
human intellect to which the element in myths, regarded by us as
irrational, shall seem rational enough. If we can prove that such a state
of mind widely exists among men, and has existed, that state of mind may
be provisionally considered as the fount and ORIGIN of the myths which
have always perplexed men in a reasonable modern mental condition. Again,
if it can be shown that this mental stage was one through which all
civilised races have passed, the universality of the mythopoeic mental
condition will to some extent explain the universal DIFFUSION of the
stories.
Now, in all mythologies, whether savage or civilised, and in all religions
where myths intrude, there exist two factors—the factor which we now
regard as rational, and that which we moderns regard as irrational. The
former element needs little explanation; the latter has demanded
explanation ever since human thought became comparatively instructed and
abstract.
To take an example; even in the myths of savages there is much that still
seems rational and transparent. If savages tell us that some wise being
taught them all the simple arts of life, the use of fire, of the bow and
arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we understand them at once.
Nothing can be more natural than that man should believe in an original
inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the imaginary
discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. So far all is plain sailing.
But when the savage goes on to say that he who taught the use of fire or
who gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit or a crow, or a dog, or a
beaver, or a spider, then we are at once face to face with the element in
myths which seems to us IRRATIONAL. Again, among civilised peoples we read
of the pure all-seeing Varuna in the Vedas, to whom sin is an offence. We
read of Indra, the Lord of Thunder, borne in his chariot, the giver of
victory, the giver of wealth to the pious; here once more all seems
natural and plain. The notion of a deity who guides the whirlwind and
directs the storm, a god of battles, a god who blesses righteousness, is
familiar to us and intelligible; but when we read how Indra drank himself
drunk and committed adulteries with Asura women, and got himself born from
the same womb as a bull, and changed himself into a quail or a ram, and
suffered from the most abject physical terror, and so forth, then we are
among myths no longer readily intelligible; here, we feel, are IRRATIONAL
stories, of which the original ideas, in their natural sense, can hardly
have been conceived by men in a pure and rational early civilisation.
Again, in the religions of even the lowest races, such myths as these are
in contradiction with the ethical elements of the faith.
If we look at Greek religious tradition, we observe the coexistence of the
RATIONAL and the apparently IRRATIONAL elements. The RATIONAL myths are
those which represent the gods as beautiful and wise beings. The Artemis
of the Odyssey “taking her pastime in the chase of boars and swift deer,
while with her the wild wood-nymphs disport them, and high over them all
she rears her brow, and is easily to be known where all are fair,”(1) is a
perfectly RATIONAL mythic representation of a divine being. We feel, even
now, that the conception of a “queen and goddess, chaste and fair,” the
abbess, as Paul de Saint-Victor calls her, of the woodlands, is a
beautiful and natural fancy, which requires no explanation. On the other
hand, the Artemis of Arcadia, who is confused with the nymph Callisto,
who, again, is said to have become a she-bear, and later a star; and the
Brauronian Artemis, whose maiden ministers danced a bear-dance,(2) are
goddesses whose legend seems unnatural, and needs to be made intelligible.
Or, again, there is nothing not explicable and natural in the conception
of the Olympian Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue
of Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god who
“turns everywhere his shining eyes, and beholds all things, and protects
the righteous, and deals good or evil fortune to men.” But the Zeus whose
grave was shown in Crete, or the Zeus who played Demeter an obscene trick
by the aid of a ram, or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the
father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a
feigned marriage with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of
Attes, or the Zeus who made love to women in the shape of an ant or a
cuckoo, is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and bewildering.(3)
It is this IRRATIONAL and unnatural element, as Mr. Max Muller says, “the
silly, senseless, and savage element,” that makes mythology the puzzle
which men have so long found it. For, observe, Greek myth does not
represent merely a humorous play of fancy, dealing with things religiously
sacred as if by way of relief from the strained reverential contemplation
of the majesty of Zeus. Many stories of Greek mythology are such as could
not cross, for the first time, the mind of a civilised Xenophanes or
Theagenes, even in a dream. THIS was the real puzzle.
(1) Odyssey, vi. 102.
(2) (Greek word omitted); compare Harpokration on this word.
(3) These are the features in myth which provoke, for example, the wonder
of Emeric-David. “The lizard, the wolf, the dog, the ass, the frog, and
all the other brutes so common on religious monuments everywhere, do they
not all imply a THOUGHT which we must divine?” He concludes that these
animals, plants, and monsters of myths are so many “enigmas” and “symbols”
veiling some deep, sacred idea, allegories of some esoteric religious
creed. Jupiter, Paris, 1832, p. lxxvii.
We have offered examples—Savage, Indian, and Greek—of that
element in mythology which, as all civilised races have felt, demands
explanation.
To be still more explicit, we may draw up a brief list of the chief
problems in the legendary stories attached to the old religions of the
world—the problems which it is our special purpose to notice. First
we have, in the myths of all races, the most grotesque conceptions of the
character of gods when mythically envisaged. Beings who, in religion,
leave little to be desired, and are spoken of as holy, immortal,
omniscient, and kindly, are, in myth, represented as fashioned in the
likeness not only of man, but of the beasts; as subject to death, as
ignorant and impious.
Most pre-Christian religions had their “zoomorphic” or partially
zoomorphic idols, gods in the shape of the lower animals, or with the
heads and necks of the lower animals. In the same way all mythologies
represent the gods as fond of appearing in animal forms. Under these
disguises they conduct many amours, even with the daughters of men, and
Greek houses were proud of their descent from Zeus in the shape of an
eagle or ant, a serpent or a swan; while Cronus and the Vedic Tvashtri and
Poseidon made love as horses, and Apollo as a dog. Not less wild are the
legends about the births of gods from the thigh, or the head, or feet, or
armpits of some parent; while tales describing and pictures representing
unspeakable divine obscenities were frequent in the mythology and in the
temples of Greece. Once more, the gods were said to possess and exercise
the power of turning men and women into birds, beasts, fishes, trees, and
stones, so that there was scarcely a familiar natural object in the Greek
world which had not once (according to legend) been a man or a woman. The
myths of the origin of the world and man, again, were in the last degree
childish and disgusting. The Bushmen and Australians have, perhaps, no
story of the origin of species quite so barbarous in style as the
anecdotes about Phanes and Prajapati which are preserved in the Orphic
hymns and in the Brahmanas. The conduct of the earlier dynasties of
classical gods towards each other was as notoriously cruel and loathsome
as their behaviour towards mortals was tricksy and capricious. The
classical gods, with all their immortal might, are, by a mythical
contradiction of the religious conception, regarded as capable of fear and
pain, and are led into scrapes as ludicrous as those of Brer Wolf or Brer
Terrapin in the tales of the Negroes of the Southern States of America.
The stars, again, in mythology, are mixed up with beasts, planets and men
in the same embroglio of fantastic opinion. The dead and the living, men,
beasts and gods, trees and stars, and rivers, and sun, and moon, dance
through the region of myths in a burlesque ballet of Priapus, where
everything may be anything, where nature has no laws and imagination no
limits.
Such are the irrational characteristics of myths, classic or Indian,
European or American, African or Asiatic, Australian or Maori. Such is one
element we find all the world over among civilised and savage people, quod
semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. It is no wonder that pious and
reflective men have, in so many ages and in so many ways, tried to account
to themselves for their possession of beliefs closely connected with
religion which yet seemed ruinous to religion and morality.
The explanations which men have given of their own sacred stories, the
apologies for their own gods which they have been constrained to offer to
themselves, were the earliest babblings of a science of mythology. That
science was, in its dim beginnings, intended to satisfy a moral need. Man
found that his gods, when mythically envisaged, were not made in his own
moral image at its best, but in the image sometimes of the beasts,
sometimes of his own moral nature at its very worst: in the likeness of
robbers, wizards, sorcerers, and adulterers. Now, it is impossible here to
examine minutely all systems of mythological interpretation. Every key has
been tried in this difficult lock; every cause of confusion has been taken
up and tested, deemed adequate, and finally rejected or assigned a
subordinate place. Probably the first attempts to shake off the burden of
religious horror at mythical impiety were made by way of silent omission.
Thus most of the foulest myths of early India are absent, and presumably
were left out, in the Rig-Veda. “The religious sentiment of the hymns,
already so elevated, has discarded most of the tales which offended it,
but has not succeeded in discarding them all.”(1) Just as the poets of the
Rig-Veda prefer to avoid the more offensive traditions about Indra and
Tvashtri, so Homer succeeds in avoiding the more grotesque and puerile
tales about his own gods.(2) The period of actual apology comes later.
Pindar declines, as we have seen, to accuse a god of cannibalism. The
Satapatha Brahmana invents a new story about the slaying of Visvarupa. Not
Indra, but Trita, says the Brahmana apologetically, slew the three-headed
son of Tvashtri. “Indra assuredly was free from that sin, for he is a
god,” says the Indian apologist.(3) Yet sins which to us appear far more
monstrous than the peccadillo of killing a three-headed Brahman are
attributed freely to Indra.
(1) Les Religions de l’Inde, Barth, p. 14. See also postea, “Indian
Myths”.
(2) The reasons for Homer’s reticence are probably different in different
passages. Perhaps in some cases he had heard a purer version of myth than
what reached Hesiod; perhaps he sometimes purposely (like Pindar) purified
a myth; usually he must have selected, in conformity with the noble
humanity and purity of his taste, the tales that best conformed to his
ideal. He makes his deities reluctant to drag out in dispute old scandals
of their early unheroic adventures, some of which, however, he gives, as
the kicking of Hephaestus out of heaven, and the imprisonment of Ares in a
vessel of bronze. Compare Professor Jebb’s Homer, p. 83: “whatever the
instinct of the great artist has tolerated, at least it has purged these
things away.” that is, divine amours in bestial form.
(3) Satapatha Brahmana, Oxford, 1882, vol. i. p. 47.
While poets could but omit a blasphemous tale or sketch an apology in
passing, it became the business of philosophers and of antiquarian writers
deliberately to “whitewash” the gods of popular religion. Systematic
explanations of the sacred stories, whether as preserved in poetry or as
told by priests, had to be provided. India had her etymological and her
legendary school of mythology.(1) Thus, while the hymn SEEMED to tell how
the Maruts were gods, “born together with the spotted deer,” the
etymological interpreters explained that the word for deer only meant the
many-coloured lines of clouds.(2) In the armoury of apologetics etymology
has been the most serviceable weapon. It is easy to see that by aid of
etymology the most repulsive legend may be compelled to yield a pure or
harmless sense, and may be explained as an innocent blunder, caused by
mere verbal misunderstanding. Brahmans, Greeks, and Germans have equally
found comfort in this hypothesis. In the Cratylus of Plato, Socrates
speaks of the notion of explaining myths by etymological guesses at the
meaning of divine names as “a philosophy which came to him all in an
instant”. Thus we find Socrates shocked by the irreverence which styled
Zeus the son of Cronus, “who is a proverb for stupidity”. But on examining
philologically the name Kronos, Socrates decides that it must really mean
Koros, “not in the sense of a youth, but signifying the pure and garnished
mind”. Therefore, when people first called Zeus the son of Cronus, they
meant nothing irreverent, but only that Zeus is the child of the pure mind
or pure reason. Not only is this etymological system most pious and
consolatory, but it is, as Socrates adds, of universal application. “For
now I bethink me of a very new and ingenious notion,… that we may put in
and pull out letters at pleasure, and alter the accents.”(3)
(1) Rig-Veda Sanhita. Max Muller, p. 59.
(2) Postea, “Indian Divine Myths”.
(3) Jowett’s Plato, vol. i. pp. 632, 670.
Socrates, of course, speaks more than half in irony, but there is a
certain truth in his account of etymological analysis and its dependence
on individual tastes and preconceived theory.
The ancient classical schools of mythological interpretation, though
unscientific and unsuccessful, are not without interest. We find
philosophers and grammarians looking, just as we ourselves are looking,
for some condition of the human intellect out of which the absurd element
in myths might conceivably have sprung. Very naturally the philosophers
supposed that the human beings in whose brain and speech myths had their
origin must have been philosophers like themselves—intelligent,
educated persons. But such persons, they argued, could never have meant to
tell stories about the gods so full of nonsense and blasphemy.
Therefore the nonsense and blasphemy must originally have had some
harmless, or even praiseworthy, sense. What could that sense have been?
This question each ancient mythologist answered in accordance with his own
taste and prejudices, and above all, and like all other and later
speculators, in harmony with the general tendency of his own studies. If
he lived when physical speculation was coming into fashion, as in the age
of Empedocles, he thought that the Homeric poems must contain a veiled
account of physical philosophy. This was the opinion of Theagenes of
Rhegium, who wrote at a period when a crude physicism was disengaging
itself from the earlier religious and mythical cosmogonic systems of
Greece. Theagenes was shocked by the Homeric description of the battle in
which the gods fought as allies of the Achaeans and Trojans. He therefore
explained away the affair as a veiled account of the strife of the
elements. Such “strife” was familiar to readers of the physical
speculations of Empedocles and of Heraclitus, who blamed Homer for his
prayer against Strife.(1)
(1) Is. et Osir., 48.
It did not occur to Theagenes to ask whether any evidence existed to show
that the pre-Homeric Greeks were Empedoclean or Heraclitean philosophers.
He readily proved to himself that Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestus were
allegorical representations, like what such philosophers would feign,—of
fire, that Hera was air, Poseidon water, Artemis the moon, and the rest he
disposed of in the same fashion.(1)
(1) Scholia on Iliad, xx. 67. Dindorf (1877), vol. iv. p. 231. “This
manner of apologetics is as old as Theagenes of Rhegium. Homer offers
theological doctrine in the guise of physical allegory.”
Metrodorus, again, turned not only the gods, but the Homeric heroes into
“elemental combinations and physical agencies”; for there is nothing new
in the mythological philosophy recently popular, which saw the sun, and
the cloud, and the wind in Achilles, Athene, and Hermes.(1)
(1) Grote, Hist, of Greece, ed. 1869, i. p. 404.
In the Bacchae (291-297), Euripides puts another of the mythological
systems of his own time into the mouth of Cadmus, the Theban king, who
advances a philological explanation of the story that Dionysus was sewn up
in the thigh of Zeus. The most famous of the later theories was that of
Euhemerus (316 B.C.). In a kind of philosophical romance, Euhemerus
declared that he had sailed to some No-man’s-land, Panchaea, where he
found the verity about mythical times engraved on pillars of bronze. This
truth he published in the Sacra Historia, where he rationalised the
fables, averring that the gods had been men, and that the myths were
exaggerated and distorted records of facts. (See Eusebius, Praep. E., ii
55.) The Abbe Banier (La Mythologie expliquee par l’Histoire, Paris, 1738,
vol. ii. p. 218) attempts the defence of Euhemerus, whom most of the
ancients regarded as an atheist. There was an element of truth in his
romantic hypothesis.(1)
(1) See Block, Euhemere et sa Doctrine, Mons, 1876.
Sometimes the old stories were said to conceal a moral, sometimes a
physical, sometimes a mystical or Neo-platonic sort of meaning. As every
apologist interpreted the legends in his own fashion, the interpretations
usually disagreed and killed each other. Just as one modern mythologist
sees the wind in Aeetes and the dawn in Medea, while another of the same
school believes, on equally good evidence, that both Aeetes and Medea are
the moon, so writers like Porphyry (270 A. D.) and Plutarch (60 A. D.)
made the ancient deities types of their own favourite doctrines, whatever
these might happen to be.
When Christianity became powerful, the Christian writers naturally
attacked heathen religion where it was most vulnerable, on the side of the
myths, and of the mysteries which were dramatic representations of the
myths. “Pretty gods you worship,” said the Fathers, in effect, “homicides,
adulterers, bulls, bears, mice, ants, and what not.” The heathen
apologists for the old religion were thus driven in the early ages of
Christianity to various methods of explaining away the myths of their
discredited religion.
The early Christian writers very easily, and with considerable
argumentative power, disposed of the apologies for the myths advanced by
Porphyry and Plutarch. Thus Eusebius in the Praeparatio Evangelica first
attacks the Egyptian interpretations of their own bestial or semi-bestial
gods. He shows that the various interpretations destroy each other, and
goes on to point out that Greek myth is in essence only a veneered and
varnished version of the faith of Egypt. He ridicules, with a good deal of
humour, the old theories which resolved so many mythical heroes into the
sun; he shows that while one system is contented to regard Zeus as mere
fire and air, another system recognises in him the higher reason, while
Heracles, Dionysus, Apollo, and Asclepius, father and child, are all
indifferently the sun.
Granting that the myth-makers were only constructing physical allegories,
why did they wrap them up, asks Eusebius, in what WE consider abominable
fictions? In what state were the people who could not look at the pure
processes of Nature without being reminded of the most hideous and
unnatural offences? Once more: “The physical interpreters do not even
agree in their physical interpretations”. All these are equally facile,
equally plausible, and equally incapable of proof. Again, Eusebius argues,
the interpreters take for granted in the makers of the myths an amount of
physical knowledge which they certainly did not possess. For example, if
Leto were only another name for Hera, the character of Zeus would be
cleared as far as his amour with Leto is concerned. Now, the ancient
believers in the “physical phenomena theory” of myths made out that Hera,
the wife of Zeus, was really the same person under another name as Leto,
his mistress. “For Hera is the earth” (they said at other times that Hera
was the air), “and Leto is the night; but night is only the shadow of the
earth, and therefore Leto is only the shadow of Hera.” It was easy,
however, to prove that this scientific view of night as the shadow of
earth was not likely to be known to myth-makers, who regarded “swift
Night” as an actual person. Plutarch, too, had an abstruse theory to
explain the legend about the dummy wife,—a log of oak-wood, which
Zeus pretended to marry when at variance with Hera.(1)
(1) Pausanias, ix. 31.
This quarrel, he said, was merely the confusion and strife of elements.
Zeus was heat, Hera was cold (she had already been explained as earth and
air), the dummy wife of oak-wood was a tree that emerged after a flood,
and so forth. Of course, there was no evidence that mythopoeic men held
Plutarchian theories of heat and cold and the conflict of the elements;
besides, as Eusebius pointed out, Hera had already been defined once as an
allegory of wedded life, and once as the earth, and again as the air, and
it was rather too late to assert that she was also the cold and watery
element in the world. As for his own explanation of the myths, Eusebius
holds that they descend from a period when men in their lawless barbarism
knew no better than to tell such tales. “Ancient folk, in the exceeding
savagery of their lives, made no account of God, the universal Creator
(here Eusebius is probably wrong)… but betook them to all manner of
abominations. For the laws of decent existence were not yet established,
nor was any settled and peaceful state ordained among men, but only a
loose and savage fashion of wandering life, while, as beasts irrational,
they cared for no more than to fill their bellies, being in a manner
without God in the world.” Growing a little more civilised, men, according
to Eusebius, sought after something divine, which they found in the
heavenly bodies. Later, they fell to worshipping living persons,
especially “medicine men” and conjurors, and continued to worship them
even after their decease, so that Greek temples are really tombs of the
dead.(1) Finally, the civilised ancients, with a conservative reluctance
to abandon their old myths (Greek text omitted), invented for them moral
or physical explanations, like those of Plutarch and others, earlier and
later.(2)
(1) Praep. E., ii. 5.
(2) Ibid., 6,19.
As Eusebius, like Clemens of Alexandria, Arnobius, and the other early
Christian disputants, had no prejudice in favour of Hellenic mythology,
and no sentimental reason for wishing to suppose that the origin of its
impurities was pure, he found his way almost to the theory of the
irrational element in mythology which we propose to offer.
Even to sketch the history of mythological hypothesis in modern times
would require a book to itself. It must suffice here to indicate the
various lines which speculation as to mythology has pursued.
All interpretations of myth have been formed in accordance with the ideas
prevalent in the time of the interpreters. The early Greek physicists
thought that mythopoeic men had been physicists. Aristotle hints that they
were (like himself) political philosophers.(1) Neo-platonists sought in
the myths for Neo-platonism; most Christians (unlike Eusebius) either
sided with Euhemerus, or found in myth the inventions of devils, or a
tarnished and distorted memory of the Biblical revelation.
(1) Met., xi. 8,19.
This was the theory, for example, of good old Jacob Bryant, who saw
everywhere memories of the Noachian deluge and proofs of the correctness
of Old Testament ethnology.(1)
(1) Bryant, A New System, wherein an Attempt is made to Divest Tradition
of Fable, 1774.
Much the same attempt to find the Biblical truth at the bottom of savage
and ancient fable has been recently made by the late M. Lenormant, a
Catholic scholar.(1)
(1) Les Origines de l’Histoire d’apres le Bible, 1880-1884.
In the beginning of the present century Germany turned her attention to
mythology. As usual, men’s ideas were biassed by the general nature of
their opinions. In a pious kind of spirit, Friedrich Creuzer sought to
find SYMBOLS of some pure, early, and Oriental theosophy in the myths and
mysteries of Greece. Certainly the Greeks of the philosophical period
explained their own myths as symbols of higher things, but the explanation
was an after-thought.(1) The great Lobeck, in his Aglaophamus (1829),
brought back common sense, and made it the guide of his vast, his
unequalled learning. In a gentler and more genial spirit, C. Otfried
Muller laid the foundation of a truly scientific and historical
mythology.(2) Neither of these writers had, like Alfred Maury,(3) much
knowledge of the myths and faiths of the lower races, but they often seem
on the point of anticipating the ethnological method.
(1) Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, 2d edit., Leipzig, 1836-43.
(2) Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, English trans.,
London, 1844.
(3) Histoire des Religions de la Grece Antique, Paris, 1857.
When philological science in our own century came to maturity, in
philology, as of old in physics and later in symbols, was sought the key
of myths. While physical allegory, religious and esoteric symbolism,
verbal confusion, historical legend, and an original divine tradition,
perverted in ages of darkness, have been the most popular keys in other
ages, the scientific nineteenth century has had a philological key of its
own. The methods of Kuhn, Breal, Max Muller, and generally the
philological method, cannot be examined here at full length.(1) Briefly
speaking, the modern philological method is intended for a scientific
application of the old etymological interpretations. Cadmus in the Bacchae
of Euripides, Socrates in the Cratylus of Plato, dismiss unpalatable myths
as the results of verbal confusion. People had originally said something
quite sensible—so the hypothesis runs—but when their
descendants forgot the meaning of their remarks, a new and absurd meaning
followed from a series of unconscious puns.(2) This view was supported in
ancient times by purely conjectural and impossible etymologies. Thus the
myth that Dionysus was sewn up in the THIGH of Zeus (Greek text omitted)
was explained by Euripides as the result of a confusion of words. People
had originally said that Zeus gave a pledge (Greek text omitted) to Hera.
The modern philological school relies for explanations of untoward and
other myths on similar confusions. Thus Daphne is said to have been
originally not a girl of romance, but the dawn (Sanskirt, dahana: ahana)
pursued by the rising sun. But as the original Aryan sense of Dahana or
Ahana was lost, and as Daphne came to mean the laurel—the wood which
burns easily—the fable arose that the tree had been a girl called
Daphne.(3)
(1) See Mythology in Encyclop. Brit. and in La Mythologie (A. L.), Paris,
1886, where Mr. Max Muller’s system is criticised. See also Custom and
Myth and Modern Mythology.
(2) That a considerable number of myths, chiefly myths of place names,
arise from popular etymologies is certain: what is objected to is the vast
proportion given to this element in myths.
(3) Max Muller, Nineteenth Century, December, 1885; “Solar Myths,”
January, 1886; Myths and Mythologists (A. L). Whitney, Mannhardt,
Bergaigne, and others dispute the etymology. Or. and Ling. Studies, 1874,
p. 160; Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feld Kultus (Berlin, 1877), p. xx.;
Bergaigne, La Religion Vedique, iii. 293; nor does Curtius like it much,
Principles of Greek Etymology, English trans., ii. 92, 93; Modern
Mythology (A. L.), 1897.
This system chiefly rests on comparison between the Sanskrit names in the
Rig-Veda and the mythic names in Greek, German, Slavonic, and other Aryan
legends. The attempt is made to prove that, in the common speech of the
undivided Aryan race, many words for splendid or glowing natural phenomena
existed, and that natural processes were described in a figurative style.
As the various Aryan families separated, the sense of the old words and
names became dim, the nomina developed into numina, the names into gods,
the descriptions of elemental processes into myths. As this system has
already been criticised by us elsewhere with minute attention, a reference
to these reviews must suffice in this place. Briefly, it may be stated
that the various masters of the school—Kuhn, Max Muller, Roth,
Schwartz, and the rest—rarely agree where agreement is essential,
that is, in the philological foundations of their building. They differ in
very many of the etymological analyses of mythical names. They also differ
in the interpretations they put on the names, Kuhn almost invariably
seeing fire, storm, cloud, or lightning where Mr. Max Muller sees the
chaste Dawn. Thus Mannhardt, after having been a disciple, is obliged to
say that comparative Indo-Germanic mythology has not borne the fruit
expected, and that “the CERTAIN gains of the system reduce themselves to
the scantiest list of parallels, such as Dyaus = Zeus = Tius, Parjanya =
Perkunas, Bhaga = Bog, Varuna = Uranos” (a position much disputed), etc.
Mannhardt adds his belief that a number of other “equations”—such as
Sarameya = Hermeias, Saranyus = Demeter Erinnys, Kentauros = Gandharva,
and many others—will not stand criticism, and he fears that these
ingenious guesses will prove mere jeux d’esprit rather than actual
facts.(1) Many examples of the precarious and contradictory character of
the results of philological mythology, many instances of “dubious
etymologies,” false logic, leaps at foregone conclusions, and attempts to
make what is peculiarly Indian in thought into matter of universal
application, will meet us in the chapters on Indian and Greek divine
legends.(2) “The method in its practical working shows a fundamental lack
of the historical sense,” says Mannhardt. Examples are torn from their
contexts, he observes; historical evolution is neglected; passages of the
Veda, themselves totally obscure, are dragged forward to account for
obscure Greek mythical phenomena. Such are the accusations brought by the
regretted Mannhardt against the school to which he originally belonged,
and which was popular and all-powerful even in the maturity of his own
more clear-sighted genius. Proofs of the correctness of his criticism will
be offered abundantly in the course of this work. It will become evident
that, great as are the acquisitions of Philology, her least certain
discoveries have been too hastily applied in alien “matter,” that is, in
the region of myth. Not that philology is wholly without place or part in
the investigation of myth, when there is agreement among philologists as
to the meaning of a divine name. In that case a certain amount of light is
thrown on the legend of the bearer of the name, and on its origin and
first home, Aryan, Greek, Semitic, or the like. But how rare is agreement
among philologists!
(1) Baum und Feld Kultus, p. xvii. Kuhn’s “epoch-making” book is Die
Herabkunft des Feuers, Berlin, 1859. By way of example of the disputes as
to the original meaning of a name like Prometheus, compare Memoires de la
Societe de Linguistique de Paris, t. iv. p. 336.
(2) See especially Mannhardt’s note on Kuhn’s theories of Poseidon and
Hermes, B. u. F. K., pp. xviii., xix., note 1.
“The philological method,” says Professor Tiele,(1) “is inadequate and
misleading, when it is a question of discovering the ORIGIN of a myth, or
the physical explanation of the oldest myths, or of accounting for the
rude and obscene element in the divine legends of civilised races. But
these are not the only problems of mythology. There is, for example, the
question of the GENEALOGICAL relations of myths, where we have to
determine whether the myths of peoples whose speech is of the same family
are special modifications of a mythology once common to the race whence
these peoples have sprung. The philological method alone can answer here.”
But this will seem a very limited province when we find that almost all
races, however remote and unconnected in speech, have practically much the
same myths.
(1) Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel., xii. 3, 260, Nov., Dec., 1885.
CHAPTER II. NEW SYSTEM PROPOSED.
Chap. I. recapitulated—Proposal of a new method: Science of
comparative or historical study of man—Anticipated in part by
Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C. C. C., Cambridge), and
Mannhardt—Science of Tylor—Object of inquiry: to find
condition of human intellect in which marvels of myth are parts of
practical everyday belief—This is the savage state—Savages
described—The wild element of myth a survival from the savage state—Advantages
of this method—Partly accounts for wide DIFFUSION as well as ORIGIN
of myths—Connected with general theory of evolution—Puzzling
example of myth of the water-swallower—Professor Tiele’s criticism
of the method—Objections to method, and answer to these—See
Appendix B.
The past systems of mythological interpretation have been briefly
sketched. It has been shown that the practical need for a reconciliation
between RELIGION and MORALITY on one side, and the MYTHS about the gods on
the other, produced the hypotheses of Theagenes and Metrodorus, of
Socrates and Euemerus, of Aristotle and Plutarch. It has been shown that
in each case the reconcilers argued on the basis of their own ideas and of
the philosophies of their time. The early physicist thought that myth
concealed a physical philosophy; the early etymologist saw in it a
confusion of language; the early political speculator supposed that myth
was an invention of legislators; the literary Euhemerus found the secret
of myths in the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island. Then
came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan philosophers, touched
with Oriental pantheism, recognised in myths certain pantheistic symbols
and a cryptic revelation of their own Neo-platonism. When the gods were
dead and their altars fallen, then antiquaries brought their curiosity to
the problem of explaining myth. Christians recognised in it a depraved
version of the Jewish sacred writings, and found the ark on every
mountain-top of Greece. The critical nineteenth century brought in, with
Otfried Muller and Lobeck, a closer analysis; and finally, in the sudden
rise of comparative philology, it chanced that philologists annexed the
domain of myths. Each of these systems had its own amount of truth, but
each certainly failed to unravel the whole web of tradition and of foolish
faith.
Meantime a new science has come into existence, the science which studies
man in the sum of all his works and thoughts, as evolved through the whole
process of his development. This science, Comparative Anthropology,
examines the development of law out of custom; the development of weapons
from the stick or stone to the latest repeating rifle; the development of
society from the horde to the nation. It is a study which does not despise
the most backward nor degraded tribe, nor neglect the most civilised, and
it frequently finds in Australians or Nootkas the germ of ideas and
institutions which Greeks or Romans brought to perfection, or retained,
little altered from their early rudeness, in the midst of civilisation.
It is inevitable that this science should also try its hand on mythology.
Our purpose is to employ the anthropological method—the study of the
evolution of ideas, from the savage to the barbarous, and thence to the
civilised stage—in the province of myth, ritual, and religion. It
has been shown that the light of this method had dawned on Eusebius in his
polemic with the heathen apologists. Spencer, the head of Corpus,
Cambridge (1630-93), had really no other scheme in his mind in his erudite
work on Hebrew Ritual.(1) Spencer was a student of man’s religions
generally, and he came to the conclusion that Hebrew ritual was but an
expurgated, and, so to speak, divinely “licensed” adaptation of heathen
customs at large. We do but follow his guidance on less perilous ground
when we seek for the original forms of classical rite and myth in the
parallel usages and legends of the most backward races.
(1) De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus, Tubingae, 1782.
Fontenelle in the last century, stated, with all the clearness of the
French intellect, the system which is partially worked out in this essay—the
system which explains the irrational element in myth as inherited from
savagery. Fontenelle’s paper (Sur l’Origine des Fables) is brief,
sensible, and witty, and requires little but copious evidence to make it
adequate. But he merely threw out the idea, and left it to be
neglected.(1)
(1) See Appendix A., Fontenelle’s Origine des Fables.
Among other founders of the anthropological or historical school of
mythology, De Brosses should not be forgotten. In his Dieux Fetiches
(1760) he follows the path which Eusebius indicated—the path of
Spencer and Fontenelle—now the beaten road of Tylor and M’Lennan and
Mannhardt.
In anthropology, in the science of Waitz, Tylor, and M’Lennan, in the
examination of man’s faith in the light of his social, legal, and
historical conditions generally, we find, with Mannhardt, some of the keys
of myth. This science “makes it manifest that the different stages through
which humanity has passed in its intellectual evolution have still their
living representatives among various existing races. The study of these
lower races is an invaluable instrument for the interpretation of the
survivals from earlier stages, which we meet in the full civilisation of
cultivated peoples, but whose origins were in the remotest fetichism and
savagery.”(1)
(1) Mannhardt op. cit. p. xxiii.
It is by following this road, and by the aid of anthropology and of human
history, that we propose to seek for a demonstrably actual condition of
the human intellect, whereof the puzzling qualities of myth would be the
natural and inevitable fruit. In all the earlier theories which we have
sketched, inquirers took it for granted that the myth-makers were men with
philosophic and moral ideas like their own—ideas which, from some
reason of religion or state, they expressed in bizarre terms of allegory.
We shall attempt, on the other hand, to prove that the human mind has
passed through a condition quite unlike that of civilised men—a
condition in which things seemed natural and rational that now appear
unnatural and devoid of reason, and in which, therefore, if myths were
evolved, they would, if they survived into civilisation, be such as
civilised men find strange and perplexing.
Our first question will be, Is there a stage of human society and of the
human intellect in which facts that appear to us to be monstrous and
irrational—facts corresponding to the wilder incidents of myth—are
accepted as ordinary occurrences of everyday life? In the region of
romantic rather than of mythical invention we know that there is such a
state. Mr. Lane, in his preface to the Arabian Nights, says that the Arabs
have an advantage over us as story-tellers. They can introduce such
incidents as the change of a man into a horse, or of a woman into a dog,
or the intervention of an Afreet without any more scruple than our own
novelists feel in describing a duel or the concealment of a will. Among
the Arabs the agencies of magic and of spirits are regarded as at least as
probable and common as duels and concealments of wills seem to be thought
by European novelists. It is obvious that we need look no farther for the
explanation of the supernatural events in Arab romances. Now, let us apply
this system to mythology. It is admitted that Greeks, Romans, Aryans of
India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, and Egyptians of the
Ptolemaic and earlier ages, were as much puzzled as we are by the mythical
adventures of their gods. But is there any known stage of the human
intellect in which similar adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into
animals, trees, stars, and all else that puzzles us in the civilised
mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life? Our
answer is, that everything in the civilised mythologies which we regard as
irrational seems only part of the accepted and natural order of things to
contemporary savages, and in the past seemed equally rational and natural
to savages concerning whom we have historical information.(1) Our theory
is, therefore, that the savage and senseless element in mythology is, for
the most part, a legacy from the fancy of ancestors of the civilised races
who were once in an intellectual state not higher, but probably lower,
than that of Australians, Bush-men, Red Indians, the lower races of South
America, and other worse than barbaric peoples. As the ancestors of the
Greeks, Aryans of India, Egyptians and others advanced in civilisation,
their religious thought was shocked and surprised by myths (originally
dating from the period of savagery, and natural in that period, though
even then often in contradiction to morals and religion) which were
preserved down to the time of Pausanias by local priesthoods, or which
were stereotyped in the ancient poems of Hesiod and Homer, or in the
Brahmanas and Vedas of India, or were retained in the popular religion of
Egypt. This theory recommended itself to Lobeck. “We may believe that
ancient and early tribes framed gods like unto themselves in action and in
experience, and that the allegorical softening down of myths is the
explanation added later by descendants who had attained to purer ideas of
divinity, yet dared not reject the religion of their ancestors.”(2) The
senseless element in the myths would, by this theory, be for the most part
a “survival”; and the age and condition of human thought whence it
survived would be one in which our most ordinary ideas about the nature of
things and the limits of possibility did not yet exist, when all things
were conceived of in quite other fashion; the age, that is, of savagery.
(1) We have been asked to DEFINE a savage. He cannot be defined in an
epigram, but by way of choice of a type:—
1. In material equipment the perfect savage is he who employs tools of
stone and wood, not of metal; who is nomadic rather than settled; who is
acquainted (if at all) only with the rudest forms of the arts of potting,
weaving, fire-making, etc.; and who derives more of his food from the
chase and from wild roots and plants than from any kind of agriculture or
from the flesh of domesticated animals.
2. In psychology the savage is he who (extending unconsciously to the
universe his own implicit consciousness of personality) regards all
natural objects as animated and intelligent beings, and, drawing no hard
and fast line between himself and the things in the world, is readily
persuaded that men may be metamorphosed into plants, beasts and stars;
that winds and clouds, sun and dawn, are persons with human passions and
parts; and that the lower animals especially may be creatures more
powerful than himself, and, in a sense, divine and creative.
3. In religion the savage is he who (while often, in certain moods,
conscious of a far higher moral faith) believes also in ancestral ghosts
or spirits of woods and wells that were never ancestral; prays frequently
by dint of magic; and sometimes adores inanimate objects, or even appeals
to the beasts as supernatural protectors.
4. In society the savage is he who (as a rule) bases his laws on the
well-defined lines of totemism—that is, claims descent from or other
close relation to natural objects, and derives from the sacredness of
those objects the sanction of his marriage prohibitions and blood-feuds,
while he makes skill in magic a claim to distinguished rank.
Such, for our purpose, is the savage, and we propose to explain the more
“senseless” factors in civilised mythology as “survivals” of these ideas
and customs preserved by conservatism and local tradition, or, less
probably, borrowed from races which were, or had been, savage.
(2) Aglaoph., i. 153. Had Lobeck gone a step farther and examined the
mental condition of veteres et priscae gentes, this book would have been,
superfluous. Nor did he know that the purer ideas were also existing among
certain low savages.
It is universally admitted that “survivals” of this kind do account for
many anomalies in our institutions, in law, politics, society, even in
dress and manners. If isolated fragments of earlier ages abide in these,
it is still more probable that other fragments will survive in anything so
closely connected as is mythology with the conservative religious
sentiment and tradition. Our object, then, is to prove that the “silly,
savage, and irrational” element in the myths of civilised peoples is, as a
rule, either a survival from the period of savagery, or has been borrowed
from savage neighbours by a cultivated people, or, lastly, is an imitation
by later poets of old savage data.(1) For example, to explain the
constellations as metamorphosed men, animals, or other objects of
terrestrial life is the habit of savages,(2)—a natural habit among
people who regard all things as on one level of personal life and
intelligence. When the stars, among civilised Greeks or Aryans of India,
are also popularly regarded as transformed and transfigured men, animals
and the like, this belief may be either a survival from the age when the
ancestors of Greeks and Indians were in the intellectual condition of the
Australian Murri; or the star-name and star-myth may have been borrowed
from savages, or from cultivated peoples once savage or apt to copy
savages; or, as in the case of the Coma Berenices, a poet of a late age
may have invented a new artificial myth on the old lines of savage fancy.
(1) We may be asked why do savages entertain the irrational ideas which
survive in myth? One might as well ask why they eat each other, or use
stones instead of metal. Their intellectual powers are not fully
developed, and hasty analogy from their own unreasoned consciousness is
their chief guide. Myth, in Mr. Darwin’s phrase, is one of the “miserable
and indirect consequences of our highest faculties”. Descent of Man, p.
69.
(2) See Custom and Myth, “Star-Myths”.
This method of interpreting a certain element in mythology is, we must
repeat, no new thing, though, to judge from the protests of several
mythologists, it is new to many inquirers. We have seen that Eusebius
threw out proposals in this direction; that Spencer, De Brosses, and
Fontenelle unconsciously followed him; and we have quoted from Lobeck a
statement of a similar opinion. The whole matter has been stated as
clearly as possible by Mr. B. B. Tylor:—
“Savages have been for untold ages, and still are, living in the
myth-making stage of the human mind. It was through sheer ignorance and
neglect of this direct knowledge how and by what manner of men myths are
really made that their simple philosophy has come to be buried under
masses of commentator’s rubbish…”(1) Mr. Tylor goes on thus (and his
words contain the gist of our argument): “The general thesis maintained is
that myth arose in the savage condition prevalent in remote ages among the
whole human race; that it remains comparatively unchanged among the rude
modern tribes who have departed least from these primitive conditions,
while higher and later civilisations, partly by retaining its actual
principles, and partly by carrying on its inherited results in the form of
ancestral tradition, continued it not merely in toleration, but in
honour”.(2) Elsewhere Mr. Tylor points out that by this method of
interpretation we may study myths in various stages of evolution, from the
rude guess of the savage at an explanation of natural phenomena, through
the systems of the higher barbarisms, or lower civilisations (as in
ancient Mexico), and the sacerdotage of India, till myth reaches its most
human form in Greece. Yet even in Greek myth the beast is not wholly cast
out, and Hellas by no means “let the ape and tiger die”. That Mr. Tylor
does not exclude the Aryan race from his general theory is plain
enough.(3) “What is the Aryan conception of the Thunder-god but a poetic
elaboration of thoughts inherited from the savage stage through which the
primitive Aryans had passed?”(4)
(1) Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., i. p. 283.
(2) Op. cit., p. 275.
(3) Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., ii. 265.
(4) Pretty much the same view seems to be taken by Mr. Max Muller
(Nineteenth Century, January, 1882) when he calls Tsui Goab (whom the
Hottentots believe to be a defunct conjuror) “a Hottentot Indra or Zeus”.
The advantages of our hypothesis (if its legitimacy be admitted) are
obvious. In the first place, we have to deal with an actual demonstrable
condition of the human intellect. The existence of the savage state in all
its various degrees, and of the common intellectual habits and conditions
which are shared by the backward peoples, and again the survival of many
of these in civilisation, are indubitable facts. We are not obliged to
fall back upon some fanciful and unsupported theory of what “primitive
man” did, and said, and thought. Nay, more; we escape all the fallacies
connected with the terms “primitive man”. We are not compelled (as will be
shown later)(1) to prove that the first men of all were like modern
savages, nor that savages represent primitive man. It may be that the
lowest extant savages are the nearest of existing peoples to the type of
the first human beings. But on this point it is unnecessary for us to
dogmatise. If we can show that, whether men began their career as savages
or not, they have at least passed through the savage status or have
borrowed the ideas of races in the savage status, that is all we need. We
escape from all the snares of theories (incapable of historical proof)
about the really primeval and original condition of the human family.
(1) Appendix B.
Once more, our theory naturally attaches itself to the general system of
Evolution. We are enabled to examine mythology as a thing of gradual
development and of slow and manifold modifications, corresponding in some
degree to the various changes in the general progress of society. Thus we
shall watch the barbaric conditions of thought which produce barbaric
myths, while these in their turn are retained, or perhaps purified, or
perhaps explained away, by more advanced civilisations. Further, we shall
be able to detect the survival of the savage ideas with least
modification, and the persistence of the savage myths with least change,
among the classes of a civilised population which have shared least in the
general advance. These classes are, first, the rustic peoples, dwelling
far from cities and schools, on heaths or by the sea; second, the
conservative local priesthoods, who retain the more crude and ancient
myths of the local gods and heroes after these have been modified or
rejected by the purer sense of philosophers and national poets. Thus much
of ancient myth is a woven warp and woof of three threads: the savage
donnee, the civilised and poetic modification of the savage donnee, the
version of the original fable which survives in popular tales and in the
“sacred chapters” of local priesthoods. A critical study of these three
stages in myth is in accordance with the recognised practice of science.
Indeed, the whole system is only an application to this particular
province, mythology, of the method by which the development either of
organisms or of human institutions is traced. As the anomalies and
apparently useless and accidental features in the human or in other animal
organisms may be explained as stunted or rudimentary survivals of organs
useful in a previous stage of life, so the anomalous and irrational myths
of civilised races may be explained as survivals of stories which, in an
earlier state of thought and knowledge, seemed natural enough. The
persistence of the myths is accounted for by the well-known conservatism
of the religious sentiment—a conservatism noticed even by Eusebius.
“In later days, when they became ashamed of the religious beliefs of their
ancestors, they invented private and respectful interpretations, each to
suit himself. For no one dared to shake the ancestral beliefs, as they
honoured at a very high rate the sacredness and antiquity of old
associations, and of the teaching they had received in childhood.”(1)
(1) Praep. E., ii. 6, 19.
Thus the method which we propose to employ is in harmony both with modern
scientific procedure and with the views of a clear-sighted Father of the
Church. Consequently no system could well be less “heretical” and
“unorthodox”.
The last advantage of our hypothesis which need here be mentioned is that
it helps to explain the DIFFUSION no less than the ORIGIN of the wild and
crazy element in myth. We seek for the origin of the savage factor of myth
in one aspect of the intellectual condition of savages. We say “in one
aspect” expressly; to guard against the suggestion that the savage
intellect has no aspect but this, and no saner ideas than those of myth.
The DIFFUSION of stories practically identical in every quarter of the
globe may be (provisionally) regarded as the result of the prevalence in
every quarter, at one time or another, of similar mental habits and ideas.
This explanation must not be pressed too hard nor too far. If we find all
over the world a belief that men can change themselves and their
neighbours into beasts, that belief will account for the appearance of
metamorphosis in myth. If we find a belief that inanimate objects are
really much on a level with man, the opinion will account for incidents of
myth such as that in which the wooden figure-head of the Argo speaks with
a human voice. Again, a widespread belief in the separability of the soul
or the life from the body will account for the incident in nursery tales
and myths of the “giant who had no heart in his body,” but kept his heart
and life elsewhere. An ancient identity of mental status and the working
of similar mental forces at the attempt to explain the same phenomena will
account, without any theory of borrowing, or transmission of myth, or of
original unity of race, for the world-wide diffusion of many mythical
conceptions.
But this theory of the original similarity of the savage mind everywhere
and in all races will scarcely account for the world-wide distribution of
long and intricate mythical PLOTS, of consecutive series of adroitly
interwoven situations. In presence of these long romances, found among so
many widely severed peoples, conjecture is, at present, almost idle. We do
not know, in many instances, whether such stories were independently
developed, or carried from a common centre, or borrowed by one race from
another, and so handed on round the world.
This chapter may conclude with an example of a tale whose DIFFUSION may be
explained in divers ways, though its ORIGIN seems undoubtedly savage. If
we turn to the Algonkins, a stock of Red Indians, we come on a popular
tradition which really does give pause to the mythologist. Could this
story, he asks himself, have been separately invented in widely different
places, or could the Iroquois have borrowed from the Australian blacks or
the Andaman Islanders? It is a common thing in most mythologies to find
everything of value to man—fire, sun, water—in the keeping of
some hostile power. The fire, or the sun, or the water is then stolen, or
in other ways rescued from the enemy and restored to humanity. The Huron
story (as far as water is concerned) is told by Father Paul Le Jeune, a
Jesuit missionary, who lived among the Hurons about 1636. The myth begins
with the usual opposition between two brothers, the Cain and Abel of
savage legend. One of the brothers, named Ioskeha, slew the other, and
became the father of mankind (as known to the Red Indians) and the
guardian of the Iroquois. The earth was at first arid and sterile, but
Ioskeha destroyed the gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters,
and guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes.(1)
(1) Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, p. 103 (Paris, Cramoisy, 1637).
Now where, outside of North America, do we find this frog who swallowed
all the water? We find him in Australia.
“The aborigines of Lake Tyers,” remarks Mr. Brough Smyth, “say that at one
time there was no water anywhere on the face of the earth. All the waters
were contained in the body of a huge frog, and men and women could get
none of them. A council was held, and… it was agreed that the frog
should be made to laugh, when the waters would run out of his mouth, and
there would be plenty in all parts.”
To make a long story short, all the animals played the jester before the
gigantic solemn frog, who sat as grave as Louis XV. “I do not like
buffoons who don’t make me laugh,” said that majestical monarch. At last
the eel danced on the tip of his tail, and the gravity of the prodigious
Batrachian gave way. He laughed till he literally split his sides, and the
imprisoned waters came with a rush. Indeed, many persons were drowned,
though this is not the only Australian version of the Deluge.
The Andaman Islanders dwell at a very considerable distance from Australia
and from the Iroquois, and, in the present condition of the natives of
Australia and Andaman, neither could possibly visit the other. The frog in
the Andaman version is called a toad, and he came to swallow the waters in
the following way: One day a woodpecker was eating honey high up in the
boughs of a tree. Far below, the toad was a witness of the feast, and
asked for some honey. “Well, come up here, and you shall have some,” said
the woodpecker. “But how am I to climb?” “Take hold of that creeper, and I
will draw you up,” said the woodpecker; but all the while he was bent on a
practical joke. So the toad got into a bucket he happened to possess, and
fastened the bucket to the creeper. “Now, pull!” Then the woodpecker
raised the toad slowly to the level of the bough where the honey was, and
presently let him down with a run, not only disappointing the poor toad,
but shaking him severely. The toad went away in a rage and looked about
him for revenge. A happy thought occurred to him, and he drank up all the
water of the rivers and lakes. Birds and beasts were perishing,
woodpeckers among them, of thirst. The toad, overjoyed at his success,
wished to add insult to the injury, and, very thoughtlessly, began to
dance in an irritating manner at his foes. But then the stolen waters
gushed out of his mouth in full volume, and the drought soon ended. One of
the most curious points in this myth is the origin of the quarrel between
the woodpecker and the toad. The same beginning—the tale of an
insult put on an animal by hauling up and letting him down with a run—occurs
in an African Marchen.(1)
(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 429, 430; Brinton, American
Hero Myths, i. 55. Cf. also Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, 1640,
1671; (Sagard, Hist. du Canada, 1636, p. 451;) Journal Anthrop. Inst.,
1881.
Now this strangely diffused story of the slaying of the frog which had
swallowed all the water seems to be a savage myth of which the more heroic
conflict of Indra with Vrittra (the dragon which had swallowed all the
waters) is an epic and sublimer version.(1) “The heavenly water, which
Vrittra withholds from the world, is usually the prize of the contest.”
(1) Ludwig, Der Rig-Veda, iii. p. 337. See postea, “Divine Myths of
India”.
The serpent of Vedic myth is, perhaps, rather the robber-guardian than the
swallower of the waters, but Indra is still, like the Iroquois Ioskeha,
“he who wounds the full one”.(1) This example of the wide distribution of
a myth shows how the question of diffusion, though connected with, is yet
distinct from that of origin. The advantage of our method will prove to
be, that it discovers an historical and demonstrable state of mind as the
origin of the wild element in myth. Again, the wide prevalence in the
earliest times of this mental condition will, to a certain extent, explain
the DISTRIBUTION of myth. Room must be left, of course, for processes of
borrowing and transmission, but how Andamanese, Australians and Hurons
could borrow from each other is an unsolved problem.
(1) Gubernatis, Zoological Myth. ii. 395, note 2. “When Indra kills the
serpent he opens the torrent of the waters” (p. 393). See also Aitareya
Brahmana, translated by Haug, ii. 483.
Finally, our hypothesis is not involved in dubious theories of race. To
us, myths appear to be affected (in their origins) much less by the race
than by the stage of culture attained by the people who cherish them. A
fight for the waters between a monstrous dragon like Vrittra and a heroic
god like Indra is a nobler affair than a quarrel for the waters between a
woodpecker and a toad. But the improvement and transfiguration, so to
speak, of a myth at bottom the same is due to the superior culture, not to
the peculiar race, of the Vedic poets, except so far as culture itself
depends on race. How far the purer culture was attained to by the original
superiority of the Aryan over the Andaman breed, it is not necessary for
our purpose to inquire. Thus, on the whole, we may claim for our system a
certain demonstrable character, which helps to simplify the problems of
mythology, and to remove them from the realm of fanciful guesses and
conflicting etymological conjectures into that of sober science. That
these pretensions are not unacknowledged even by mythologists trained in
other schools is proved by the remarks of Dr. Tiele.(1)
(1) Rev. de l’Hist. des Rel., “Le Mythe de Cronos,” January, 1886. Dr.
Tiele is not, it must be noted, a thorough adherent of our theory. See
Modern Mythology: “The Question of Allies”.
Dr. Tiele writes: “If I were obliged to choose between this method” (the
system here advocated) “and that of comparative philology, it is the
former that I would adopt without the slightest hesitation. This method
alone enables us to explain the fact, which has so often provoked
amazement, that people so refined as the Greeks,… or so rude, but
morally pure, as the Germans,… managed to attribute to their gods all
manner of cowardly, cruel and disorderly conduct. This method alone
explains the why and wherefore of all those strange metamorphoses of gods
into beasts and plants, and even stones, which scandalised philosophers,
and which the witty Ovid played on for the diversion of his
contemporaries. In short, this method teaches us to recognise in all those
strange stories the survivals of a barbaric age, long passed away, but
enduring to later times in the form of religious traditions, of all
traditions the most persistent…. Finally, this method alone enables us
to explain the origin of myths, because it endeavours to study them in
their rudest and most primitive shape, thus allowing their true
significance to be much more clearly apparent than it can be in the myths
(so often touched, retouched, augmented and humanised) which are current
among races arrived at a certain degree of culture.”
The method is to this extent applauded by a most competent authority, and
it has been warmly accepted by a distinguished French school of students,
represented by M. Gaidoz. But it is obvious that the method rests on a
double hypothesis: first, that satisfactory evidence as to the mental
conditions of the lower and backward races is obtainable; second, that the
civilised races (however they began) either passed through the savage
state of thought and practice, or borrowed very freely from people in that
condition. These hypotheses have been attacked by opponents; the
trustworthiness of our evidence, especially, has been assailed. By way of
facilitating the course of the exposition and of lessening the disturbing
element of controversy, a reply to the objections and a defence of the
evidence has been relegated to an Appendix.(1) Meanwhile we go on to
examine the peculiar characteristics of the mental condition of savages
and of peoples in the lower and upper barbarisms.
(1) Appendix B.
CHAPTER III. THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—CONFUSION WITH
NATURE—TOTEMISM.
The mental condition of savages the basis of the irrational element in
myth—Characteristics of that condition: (1) Confusion of all things
in an equality of presumed animation and intelligence; (2) Belief in
sorcery; (3) Spiritualism; (4) Curiosity; (5) Easy credulity and mental
indolence—The curiosity is satisfied, thanks to the credulity, by
myths in answer to all inquiries—Evidence for this—Mr. Tylor’s
opinion—Mr. Im Thurn—Jesuit missionaries’ Relations—Examples
of confusion between men, plants, beasts and other natural objects—Reports
of travellers—Evidence from institution of totemism—Definition
of totemism—Totemism in Australia, Africa, America, the Oceanic
Islands, India, North Asia—Conclusions: Totemism being found so
widely distributed, is a proof of the existence of that savage mental
condition in which no line is drawn between men and the other things in
the world. This confusion is one of the characteristics of myth in all
races.
We set out to discover a stage of human intellectual development which
would necessarily produce the essential elements of myth. We think we have
found that stage in the condition of savagery. We now proceed to array the
evidence for the mental processes of savages. We intend to demonstrate the
existence in practical savage life of the ideas which most surprise us
when we find them in civilised sacred legends.
For the purposes of this inquiry, it is enough to select a few special
peculiarities of savage thought.
1. First we have that nebulous and confused frame of mind to which all
things, animate or inanimate, human, animal, vegetable, or inorganic, seem
on the same level of life, passion and reason. The savage, at all events
when myth-making, draws no hard and fast line between himself and the
things in the world. He regards himself as literally akin to animals and
plants and heavenly bodies; he attributes sex and procreative powers even
to stones and rocks, and he assigns human speech and human feelings to sun
and moon and stars and wind, no less than to beasts, birds and fishes.(1)
(1) “So fasst auch das Alterthum ihren Unterschied von den Menschen ganz
anders als die spatere Zeit.”—Grimm, quoted by Liebrecht, Zur
Volkskunde, p. 17.
2. The second point to note in savage opinion is the belief in magic and
sorcery. The world and all the things in it being vaguely conceived of as
sensible and rational, obey the commands of certain members of the tribe,
chiefs, jugglers, conjurors, or what you will. Rocks open at their order,
rivers dry up, animals are their servants and hold converse with them.
These magicians cause or heal diseases, and can command even the weather,
bringing rain or thunder or sunshine at their will.(1) There are few
supernatural attributes of “cloud-compelling Zeus” or of Apollo that are
not freely assigned to the tribal conjuror. By virtue, doubtless, of the
community of nature between man and the things in the world, the conjuror
(like Zeus or Indra) can assume at will the shape of any animal, or can
metamorphose his neighbours or enemies into animal forms.
(1) See Roth in North-West Central Queensland Aborigines, chapter xii.,
1897.
3. Another peculiarity of savage belief naturally connects itself with
that which has just been described. The savage has very strong ideas about
the persistent existence of the souls of the dead. They retain much of
their old nature, but are often more malignant after death than they had
been during life. They are frequently at the beck and call of the
conjuror, whom they aid with their advice and with their magical power. By
virtue of the close connection already spoken of between man and the
animals, the souls of the dead are not rarely supposed to migrate into the
bodies of beasts, or to revert to the condition of that species of
creatures with which each tribe supposes itself to be related by ties of
kinship or friendship. With the usual inconsistency of mythical belief,
the souls of the dead are spoken of, at other times, as if they inhabited
a spiritual world, sometimes a paradise of flowers, sometimes a gloomy
place, which mortal men may visit, but whence no one can escape who has
tasted of the food of the ghosts.
4. In connection with spirits a far-reaching savage philosophy prevails.
It is not unusual to assign a ghost to all objects, animate or inanimate,
and the spirit or strength of a man is frequently regarded as something
separable, capable of being located in an external object, or something
with a definite locality in the body. A man’s strength and spirit may
reside in his kidney fat, in his heart, in a lock of his hair, or may even
be stored by him in some separate receptacle. Very frequently a man is
held capable of detaching his soul from his body, and letting it roam
about on his business, sometimes in the form of a bird or other animal.
5. Many minor savage beliefs might be named, such as the common faith in
friendly or protecting animals, and the notion that “natural deaths” (as
we call them) are always UNNATURAL, that death is always caused by some
hostile spirit or conjuror. From this opinion comes the myth that man is
naturally not subject to death: that death was somehow introduced into the
world by a mistake or misdeed is a corollary. (See “Myths of the Origin of
Death” in Modern Mythology.)
6. One more mental peculiarity of the savage mind remains to be considered
in this brief summary. The savage, like the civilised man, is curious. The
first faint impulses of the scientific spirit are at work in his brain; he
is anxious to give himself an account of the world in which he finds
himself. But he is not more curious than he is, on occasion, credulous.
His intellect is eager to ask questions, as is the habit of children, but
his intellect is also lazy, and he is content with the first answer that
comes to hand. “Ils s’arretent aux premieres notions qu’ils en ont,” says
Pere Hierome Lalemant.(1) “Nothing,” says Schoolcraft, “is too capacious
(sic) for Indian belief.”(2) The replies to his questions he receives from
tradition or (when a new problem arises) evolves an answer for himself in
the shape of STORIES. Just as Socrates, in the Platonic dialogues, recalls
or invents a myth in the despair of reason, so the savage has a story for
answer to almost every question that he can ask himself. These stories are
in a sense scientific, because they attempt a solution of the riddles of
the world. They are in a sense religious, because there is usually a
supernatural power, a deus ex machina, of some sort to cut the knot of the
problem. Such stories, then, are the science, and to a certain extent the
religious tradition, of savages.(3)
(1) Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1648, p. 70.
(2) Algic Researches, i. 41.
(3) “The Indians (Algonkins) conveyed instruction—moral, mechanical
and religious—through traditionary fictions and tales.”—Schoolcraft,
Algic Researches, i. 12.
Now these tales are necessarily cast in the mould of the savage ideas of
which a sketch has been given. The changes of the heavenly bodies, the
processes of day and night, the existence of the stars, the invention of
the arts, the origin of the world (as far as known to the savage), of the
tribe, of the various animals and plants, the origin of death itself, the
origin of the perplexing traditional tribal customs, are all accounted for
in stories. At the same time, an actual divine Maker is sometimes
postulated. The stories, again, are fashioned in accordance with the
beliefs already named: the belief in human connection with and kinship
with beasts and plants; the belief in magic; the belief in the perpetual
possibility of metamorphosis or “shape shifting”; the belief in the
permanence and power of the ghosts of the dead; the belief in the personal
and animated character of all the things in the world, and so forth.
No more need be said to explain the wild and (as it seems to us moderns)
the irrational character of savage myth. It is a jungle of foolish
fancies, a walpurgis nacht of gods and beasts and men and stars and
ghosts, all moving madly on a level of common personality and animation,
and all changing shapes at random, as partners are changed in some
fantastic witches’ revel. Such is savage mythology, and how could it be
otherwise when we consider the elements of thought and belief out of which
it is mainly composed? We shall see that part of the mythology of the
Greeks or the Aryans of India is but a similar walpurgis nacht, in which
an incestuous or amorous god may become a beast, and the object of his
pursuit, once a woman, may also become a beast, and then shift shapes to a
tree or a bird or a star. But in the civilised races the genius of the
people tends to suppress, exclude and refine away the wild element, which,
however, is never wholly eliminated. The Erinyes soon stop the mouth of
the horse of Achilles when he begins, like the horse in Grimm’s Goose
Girl, to hold a sustained conversation.(1) But the ancient, cruel, and
grotesque savage element, nearly overcome by Homer and greatly reduced by
the Vedic poets, breaks out again in Hesiod, in temple legends and
Brahmanic glosses, and finally proves so strong that it can only be
subdued by Christianity, or rather by that break between the educated
classes and the traditional past of religion which has resulted from
Christianity. Even so, myth lingers in the folk-lore of the
non-progressive classes of Europe, and, as in Roumania, invades religion.
(1) Iliad, xix. 418.
We have now to demonstrate the existence in the savage intellect of the
various ideas and habits which we have described, and out of which
mythology springs. First, we have to show that “a nebulous and confused
state of mind, to which all things, animate or inanimate, human, animal,
vegetable or inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and
reason,” does really exist.(1) The existence of this condition of the
intellect will be demonstrated first on the evidence of the statements of
civilised observers, next on the evidence of the savage institutions in
which it is embodied.
(1) Creuzer and Guigniaut, vol. i. p. 111.
The opinion of Mr. Tylor is naturally of great value, as it is formed on
as wide an acquaintance with the views of the lower races as any inquirers
can hope to possess. Mr. Tylor observes: “We have to inform ourselves of
the savage man’s idea, which is very different from the civilised man’s,
of the nature of the lower animals…. The sense of an absolute psychical
distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilised world, is
hardly to be found among the lower races.”(1) The universal attribution of
“souls” to all things—the theory known as “Animism”—is another
proof that the savage draws no hard and fast line between man and the
other things in the world. The notion of the Italian country-people, that
cruelty to an animal does not matter because it is not a “Christian,” has
no parallel in the philosophy of the savage, to whom all objects seem to
have souls, just as men have. Mr. Im Thurn found the absence of any sense
of a difference between man and nature a characteristic of his native
companions in Guiana. “The very phrase, ‘Men and other animals,’ or even,
as it is often expressed, ‘Men and animals,’ based as it is on the
superiority which civilised man feels over other animals, expresses a
dichotomy which is in no way recognised by the Indian…. It is therefore
most important to realise how comparatively small really is the difference
between men in a state of savagery and other animals, and how completely
even such difference as exists escapes the notice of savage men… It is
not, therefore, too much to say that, according to the view of the
Indians, other animals differ from men only in bodily form and in their
various degrees of strength; in spirit they do not differ at all.”(2) The
Indian’s notion of the life of plants and stones is on the same level of
unreason, as we moderns reckon reason. He believes in the spirits of rocks
and stones, undeterred by the absence of motion in these objects. “Not
only many rocks, but also many waterfalls, streams, and indeed material
objects of every sort, are supposed each to consist of a body and a
spirit, as does man.”(3) It is not our business to ask here how men came
by the belief in universal animation. That belief is gradually withdrawn,
distinctions are gradually introduced, as civilisation and knowledge
advance. It is enough for us if the failure to draw a hard and fast line
between man and beasts, stones and plants, be practically universal among
savages, and if it gradually disappears before the fuller knowledge of
civilisation. The report which Mr. Im Thurn brings from the Indians of
Guiana is confirmed by what Schoolcraft says of the Algonkin races of the
northern part of the continent. “The belief of the narrators and listeners
in every wild and improbable thing told helps wonderfully in the original
stories, in joining all parts together. The Indian believes that the whole
visible and invisible creation is animated…. To make the matter worse,
these tribes believe that animals of the lowest as well as highest class
in the chain of creation are alike endowed with reasoning powers and
faculties. As a natural conclusion they endow birds, beasts and all other
animals with souls.”(4) As an example of the ease with which the savage
recognises consciousness and voluntary motion even in stones, may be cited
Kohl’s account of the beliefs of the Objibeways.(5) Nearly every Indian
has discovered, he says, an object in which he places special confidence,
and to which he sacrifices more zealously than to the Great Spirit. The
“hope” of Otamigan (a companion of the traveller) was a rock, which once
advanced to meet him, swayed, bowed and went back again. Another Indian
revered a Canadian larch, “because he once heard a very remarkable
rustling in its branches”. It thus appears that while the savage has a
general kind of sense that inanimate things are animated, he is a good
deal impressed by their conduct when he thinks that they actually display
their animation. In the same way a devout modern spiritualist probably
regards with more reverence a table which he has seen dancing and heard
rapping than a table at which he has only dined. Another general statement
of failure to draw the line between men and the irrational creation is
found in the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune’s Relations de la Nouvelle
France.(6) “Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les
autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees.”
Again: “Ils tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs”. In
the Solomon Islands, Mr. Romilly sailed with an old chief who used violent
language to the waves when they threatened to dash over the boat, and “old
Takki’s exhortations were successful”.(7) Waitz(8) discovers the same
attitude towards the animals among the negroes. Man, in their opinion, is
by no means a separate sort of person on the summit of nature and high
above the beasts; these he rather regards as dark and enigmatic beings,
whose life is full of mystery, and which he therefore considers now as his
inferiors, now as his superiors. A collection of evidence as to the savage
failure to discriminate between human and non-human, animate and
inanimate, has been brought together by Sir John Lubbock.(9)
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 167-169.
(2) Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), p. 350.
(3) Op. Cit., 355.
(4) Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. 41.
(5) Kohl, Wanderings Round Lake Superior, pp. 58, 59; Muller, Amerikan
Urrelig., pp. 62-67.
(6) 1636, p. 109.
(7) Western Pacific, p. 84.
(8) Anthropologie der Natur-Volker, ii. 177.
(9) Origin of Civilisation, p. 33. A number of examples of this mental
attitude among the Bushmen will be found in chap. v., postea.
To a race accustomed like ourselves to arrange and classify, to people
familiar from childhood and its games with “vegetable, animal and
mineral,” a condition of mind in which no such distinctions are drawn, any
more than they are drawn in Greek or Brahmanic myths, must naturally seem
like what Mr. Max Muller calls “temporary insanity”. The imagination of
the savage has been defined by Mr. Tylor as “midway between the conditions
of a healthy, prosaic, modern citizen, and of a raving fanatic, or of a
patient in a fever-ward”. If any relics of such imagination survive in
civilised mythology, they will very closely resemble the productions of a
once universal “temporary insanity”. Let it be granted, then, that “to the
lower tribes of man, sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds,
become personal, animate creatures, leading lives conformed to human or
animal analogies, and performing their special functions in the universe
with the aid of limbs like beasts, or of artificial instruments like men;
or that what men’s eyes behold is but the instrument to be used or the
material to be shaped, while behind it there stands some prodigious but
yet half-human creature, who grasps it with his hands or blows it with his
breath. The basis on which such ideas as these are built is not to be
narrowed down to poetic fancy and transformed metaphor. They rest upon a
broad philosophy of nature; early and crude, indeed, but thoughtful,
consistent, and quite really and seriously meant.”(1)
(1) Primtive Culture, i. 285.
For the sake of illustration, some minor examples must next be given of
this confusion between man and other things in the world, which will
presently be illustrated by the testimony of a powerful and long diffused
set of institutions.
The Christian Quiches of Guatemala believe that each of them has a beast
as his friend and protector, just as in the Highlands “the dog is the
friend of the Maclaines”. When the Finns, in their epic poem the Kalewala,
have killed a bear, they implore the animal to forgive them. “Oh, Ot-so,”
chant the singers, “be not angry that we come near thee. The bear, the
honey-footed bear, was born in lands between sun and moon, and he died,
not by men’s hands, but of his own will.”(1) The Red Men of North
America(2) have a tradition showing how it is that the bear does not die,
but, like Herodotus with the sacred stories of the Egyptian priests, Mr.
Schoolcraft “cannot induce himself to write it out”.(3) It is a most
curious fact that the natives of Australia tell a similar tale of THEIR
“native bear”. “He did not die” when attacked by men.(4) In parts of
Australia it is a great offence to skin the native bear, just as on a part
of the west coast of Ireland, where seals are superstitiously regarded,
the people cannot be bribed to skin them. In New Caledonia, when a child
tries to kill a lizard, the men warn him to “beware of killing his own
ancestor”.(5) The Zulus spare to destroy a certain species of serpents,
believed to be the spirits of kinsmen, as the great snake which appeared
when Aeneas did sacrifice was held to be the ghost of Anchises. Mexican
women(6) believed that children born during an eclipse turn into mice. In
Australia the natives believe that the wild dog has the power of speech;
whoever listens to him is petrified; and a certain spot is shown where
“the wild dog spoke and turned the men into stone”;(7) and the blacks run
for their lives as soon as the dog begins to speak. What it said was
“Bones”.
(1) Kalewala, in La Finlande, Leouzon Le Duc (1845), vol. ii. p. 100; cf.
also the Introduction.
(2) Schoolcraft, v. 420.
(3) See similar ceremonies propitiatory of the bear in Jewett’s Adventures
among the Nootkas, Edinburgh, 1824.
(4) Brough Smyth, i. 449.
(5) J. J. Atkinson’s MS.
(6) Sahagun, ii. viii. 250; Bancroft, iii. 111. Compare stories of women
who give birth to animals in Melusine, 1886, August-November. The
Batavians believe that women, when delivered of a child, are frequently
delivered at the same time of a young crocodile as a twin. Hawkesworth’s
Voyages, iii. 756. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 17 et seq.
(7) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 497.
These are minor examples of a form of opinion which is so strong that it
is actually the chief constituent in savage society. That society, whether
in Ashantee or Australia, in North America or South Africa, or North Asia
or India, or among the wilder tribes of ancient Peru, is based on an
institution generally called “totemism”. This very extraordinary
institution, whatever its origin, cannot have arisen except among men
capable of conceiving kinship and all human relationships as existing
between themselves and all animate and inanimate things. It is the rule,
and not the exception, that savage societies are founded upon this belief.
The political and social conduct of the backward races is regulated in
such matters as blood-feud and marriage by theories of the actual kindred
and connection by descent, or by old friendship, which men have in common
with beasts, plants, the sun and moon, the stars, and even the wind and
the rain. Now, in whatever way this belief in such relations to beasts and
plants may have arisen, it undoubtedly testifies to a condition of mind in
which no hard and fast line was drawn between man and animate and
inanimate nature. The discovery of the wide distribution of the social
arrangements based on this belief is entirely due to Mr. J. F. M’Lennan,
the author of Primitive Marriage. Mr. M’Lennan’s essays (“The Worship of
Plants and Animals,” “Totems and Totemism”) were published in the
Fortnightly Review, 1869-71. Any follower in the footsteps of Mr. M’Lennan
has it in his power to add a little evidence to that originally set forth,
and perhaps to sift the somewhat uncritical authorities adduced.(1)
(1) See also Mr. Frazer’s Totemism, and Golden Bough, with chapter on
Totemism in Modern Mythology.
The name “Totemism” or “Totamism” was first applied at the end of the last
century by Long(1) to the Red Indian custom which acknowledges human
kinship with animals. This institution had already been recognised among
the Iroquois by Lafitau,(2) and by other observers. As to the word
“totem,” Mr. Max Muller(3) quotes an opinion that the interpreters,
missionaries, Government inspectors, and others who apply the name totem
to the Indian “family mark” must have been ignorant of the Indian
languages, for there is in them no such word as totem. The right word, it
appears, is otem; but as “totemism” has the advantage of possessing the
ground, we prefer to say “totemism” rather than “otemism”. The facts are
the same, whatever name we give them. As Mr. Muller says himself,(4)
“every warrior has his crest, which is called his totem”;(5) and he goes
on to describe a totem of an Indian who died about 1793. We may now return
to the consideration of “otemism” or totemism. We approach it rather as a
fact in the science of mythology than as a stage in the evolution of the
modern family system. For us totemism is interesting because it proves the
existence of that savage mental attitude which assumes kindred and
alliance between man and the things in the world. As will afterwards be
seen, totemism has also left its mark on the mythologies of the civilised
races. We shall examine the institution first as it is found in Australia,
because the Australian form of totemism shows in the highest known degree
the savage habit of confusing in a community of kinship men, stars,
plants, beasts, the heavenly bodies, and the forces of Nature. When this
has once been elucidated, a shorter notice of other totemistic races will
serve our purpose.
(1) Voyages and Travels, 1791.
(2) Moeurs des Sauvages (1724), p. 461.
(3) Academy, December 15, 1883.
(4) Selected Essays (1881), ii. 376.
(5) Compare Mr. Max Muller’s Contributions to the Science of Mythology.
The society of the Murri or black fellows of Australia is divided into
local tribes, each of which possesses, or used to possess, and hunt over a
considerable tract of country. These local tribes are united by
contiguity, and by common local interests, but not necessarily by blood
kinship. For example, the Port Mackay tribe, the Mount Gambier tribe, the
Ballarat tribe, all take their names from their district. In the same way
we might speak of the people of Strathclyde or of Northumbria in early
English history. Now, all these local tribes contain an indefinite number
of stocks of kindred, of men believing themselves to be related by the
ties of blood and common descent. That descent the groups agree in
tracing, not from some real or idealised human parent, but from some
animal, plant, or other natural object, as the kangaroo, the emu, the
iguana, the pelican, and so forth. Persons of the pelican stock in the
north of Queensland regard themselves as relations of people of the same
stock in the most southern parts of Australia. The creature from which
each tribe claims descent is called “of the same flesh,” while persons of
another stock are “fresh flesh”. A native may not marry a woman of “his
own flesh”; it is only a woman of “fresh” or “strange” flesh he may marry.
A man may not eat an animal of “his own flesh”; he may only eat “strange
flesh”. Only under great stress of need will an Australian eat the animal
which is the flesh-and-blood cousin and protector of his stock.(1) (These
rules of marriage and blood, however, do not apply among the Arunta of
Central Australia, whose Totems (if Totems they should be called) have
been developed on very different lines.(2)) Clearer evidence of the
confusion between man and beast, of the claiming of kin between man and
beast, could hardly be.
(1) Dawson, Aborigines, pp. 26, 27; Howitt and Fison, Kamilaroi and
Kurnai, p. 169.
(2) Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia.
But the Australian philosophy of the intercommunion of Nature goes still
farther than this. Besides the local divisions and the kindred stocks
which trace their descent from animals, there exist among many Australian
tribes divisions of a kind still unexplained. For example, every man of
the Mount Gambier local tribe is by birth either a Kumite or a Kroki. This
classification applies to the whole of the sensible universe. Thus smoke
and honeysuckle trees belong to the division Kumite, and are akin to the
fishhawk stock of men. On the other hand, the kangaroo, summer, autumn,
the wind and the shevak tree belong to the division Kroki, and are akin to
the black cockatoo stock of men. Any human member of the Kroki division
has thus for his brothers the sun, the wind, the kangaroo, and the rest;
while any man of the Kumite division and the crow surname is the brother
of the rain, the thunder, and the winter. This extraordinary belief is not
a mere idle fancy—it influences conduct. “A man does not kill or use
as food any of the animals of the same subdivision (Kroki or Kumite) with
himself, excepting when hunger compels, and then they express sorrow for
having to eat their wingong (friends) or tumanang (their flesh). When
using the last word they touch their breasts, to indicate the close
relationship, meaning almost a portion of themselves. To illustrate: One
day one of the blacks killed a crow. Three or four days afterwards a
Boortwa (a man of the crow surname and stock), named Larry, died. He had
been ailing for some days, but the killing of his wingong (totem) hastened
his death.”(1) Commenting on this statement, Mr. Fison observes: “The
South Australian savage looks upon the universe as the Great Tribe, to one
of whose divisions he himself belongs; and all things, animate and
inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate
whereof he himself is part”. This account of the Australian beliefs and
customs is borne out, to a certain extent, by the evidence of Sir George
Grey,(2) and of the late Mr. Gideon Scott Lang.(3) These two writers take
no account of the singular “dichotomous” divisions, as of Kumite and
Kroki, but they draw attention to the groups of kindred which derive their
surnames from animals, plants, and the like. “The origin of these family
names,” says Sir George Grey, “is attributed by the natives to different
causes…. One origin frequently assigned by the natives is, that they
were derived from some vegetable or animal being very common in the
district which the family inhabited.” We have seen from the evidence of
Messrs. Fison and Howitt that a more common native explanation is based on
kinship with the vegetable or plant which bestows the family surname. Sir
George Gray mentions that the families use their plant or animal as a
crest or kobong (totem), and he adds that natives never willingly kill
animals of their kobong, holding that some one of that species is their
nearest friend. The consequences of eating forbidden animals vary
considerably. Sometimes the Boyl-yas (that is, ghosts) avenge the crime.
Thus when Sir George Grey ate some mussels (which, after all, are not the
crest of the Greys), a storm followed, and one of his black fellow
improvised this stave:—
(1) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 169.
(2) Travels, ii. 225.
(3) Lang, Lecture on Natives of Australia, p. 10.
There are two points in the arrangements of these stocks of kindred named
from plants and animals which we shall find to possess a high importance.
No member of any such kindred may marry a woman of the same name and
descended from the same object.(1) Thus no man of the Emu stock may marry
an Emu woman; no Blacksnake may marry a Blacksnake woman, and so forth.
This point is very strongly put by Mr. Dawson, who has had much experience
of the blacks. “So strictly are the laws of marriage carried out, that,
should any sign of courtship or affection be observed between those ‘of
one flesh,’ the brothers or male relatives of the woman beat her
severely.” If the incestuous pair (though not in the least related
according to our ideas) run away together, they are “half-killed”; and if
the woman dies in consequence of her punishment, her partner in iniquity
is beaten again. No “eric” or blood-fine of any kind is paid for her
death, which carries no blood-feud. “Her punishment is legal.”(2) This
account fully corroborates that of Sir George Grey.(3)
(1) Taplin, The Nerrinyeri. p. 2. “Every tribe, regarded by them as a
family, has its ngaitge, or tutelary genius or tribal symbol, in the shape
of some bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, or substance. Between
individuals of the same tribe no marriage can take place.” Among the
Narrinyeri kindred is reckoned (p. 10) on the father’s side. See also (p.
46) ngaitge = Samoan aitu. “No man or woman will kill their ngaitge,”
except with precautions, for food.
(2) Op. cit., p. 28.
(3) Ibid., ii. 220.
Our conclusion is that the belief in “one flesh” (a kinship shared with
the animals) must be a thoroughly binding idea, as the notion is
sanctioned by capital punishment.
Another important feature in Australian totemism strengthens our position.
The idea of the animal kinship must be an ancient one in the race, because
the family surname, Emu, Bandicoot, or what not, and the crest, kobong, or
protecting and kindred animal, are inherited through the mother’s side in
the majority of stocks. This custom, therefore, belongs to that early
period of human society in which the woman is the permanent and recognised
factor in the family while male parentage is uncertain.(1) One other
feature of Australian totemism must be mentioned before we leave the
subject. There is some evidence that in certain tribes the wingong or
totem of each man is indicated by a tattooed representation of it upon his
flesh. The natives are very licentious, but men would shrink from an amour
with a woman who neither belonged to their own district nor spoke their
language, but who, in spite of that, was of their totem. To avoid
mistakes, it seems that some tribes mark the totem on the flesh with
incised lines.(2) The natives frequently design figures of some kind on
the trees growing near the graves of deceased warriors. Some observers
have fancied that in these designs they recognised the totem of the dead
men; but on this subject evidence is by no means clear. We shall see that
this primitive sort of heraldry, this carving or painting of hereditary
blazons, is common among the Red Men of America.(3)
(1) Cf. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht; M’Lennan, Primitive Marriage, passim;
Encycl. Brit. s. v. Family.
(2) Fison, op. cit., p. 66.
(3) Among other recent sources see Howitt in “Organisation of Australian
Tribes” (Transactions of Royal Society of Victoria, 1889), and Spencer and
Gillen, Natives of Central Australia. In Central Australia there is a
marked difference in the form of Totemism.
Though a large amount of evidence might be added to that already put
forward, we may now sum up the inferences to be drawn from the study of
totemism in Australia. It has been shown (1) that the natives think
themselves actually akin to animals, plants, the sun, and the wind, and
things in general; (2) that those ideas influence their conduct, and even
regulate their social arrangements, because (3) men and women of the
kinship of the same animal or plant may not intermarry, while men are
obliged to defend, and in case of murder to avenge, persons of the stock
of the family or plant from which they themselves derive their family
name. Thus, on the evidence of institutions, it is plain that the
Australians are (or before the influence of the Europeans became prevalent
were) in a state of mind which draws no hard and fast line between man and
the things in the world. If, therefore, we find that in Australian myth,
men, gods, beasts, and things all shift shapes incessantly, and figure in
a coroboree dance of confusion, there will be nothing to astonish us in
the discovery. The myths of men in the Australian intellectual condition,
of men who hold long conversations with the little “native bear,” and ask
him for oracles, will naturally and inevitably be grotesque and
confused.(1)
(1) Brough Smyth, i. 447, on MS. authority of W. Thomas.
It is “a far cry” from Australia to the West Coast of Africa, and it is
scarcely to be supposed that the Australians have borrowed ideas and
institutions from Ashantee, or that the people of Ashantee have derived
their conceptions of the universe from the Murri of Australia. We find,
however, on the West African Coast, just as we do in Australia, that there
exist large local divisions of the natives. These divisions are spoken of
by Mr. Bowditch (who visited the country on a mission in 1817) as nations,
and they are much more populous and powerful (as the people are more
civilised) than the local tribes of Australia. Yet, just as among the
local tribes of Australia, the nations of the West African Coast are
divided into stocks of kindred, each STOCK having its representatives in
each NATION. Thus an Ashantee or a Fantee may belong to the same stock of
kindred as a member of the Assin or Akini nation. When an Ashantee of the
Annona stock of kindred meets a Warsaw man of the same stock they salute
and acknowledge each other as brothers. In the same way a Ballarat man of
the Kangaroo stock in Australia recognises a relative in a Mount Gambier
man who is also a Kangaroo. Now, with one exception, all the names of the
twelve stocks of West African kindreds, or at least all of them which Mr.
Bowditch could get the native interpreters to translate, are derived from
animals, plants and other natural objects, just as in Australia.(1) Thus
Quonna is a buffalo, Abrootoo is a cornstalk, Abbradi a plantain. Other
names are, in English, the parrot, the wild cat, red earth, panther and
dog. Thus all the natives of this part of Africa are parrots, dogs,
buffaloes, panthers, and so forth, just as the Australians are emus,
iguanas, black cockatoos, kangaroos, and the rest. It is remarkable that
there is an Incra stock, or clan of ants, in Ashantee, just as there was a
race of Myrmidons, believed to be descended from or otherwise connected
with ants, in ancient Greece. Though Bowditch’s account of these West
African family divisions is brief, the arrangement tallies closely with
that of Australia. It is no great stretch of imagination to infer that the
African tribes do, or once did, believe themselves to be of the kindred of
the animals whose names they bear.(2) It is more or less confirmatory of
this hypothesis that no family is permitted to use as food the animal from
which it derives its name. We have seen that a similar rule prevails, as
far as hunger and scarcity of victuals permit it to be obeyed, among the
natives of Australia. The Intchwa stock in Ashantee and Fantee is
particularly unlucky, because its members may not eat the dog, “much
relished by native epicures, and therefore a serious privation”. Equally
to be pitied were the ancient Egyptians, who, if they belonged to the
district of the sheep, might not eat mutton, which their neighbours, the
Lycopolitae, devoured at pleasure. These restrictions appear to be
connected with the almost universal dislike of cannibals to eat persons of
their own kindred except as a pious duty. This law of the game in
cannibalism has not yet been thoroughly examined, though we often hear of
wars waged expressly for the purpose of securing food (human meat), while
some South American tribes actually bred from captive women by way of
securing constant supplies of permitted flesh.(3) When we find stocks,
then, which derive their names from animals and decline to eat these
animals, we may at least SUSPECT that they once claimed kinship with the
name-giving beasts. The refusal to eat them raises a presumption of such
faith. Old Bosman(4) had noticed the same practices. “One eats no mutton,
another no goat’s flesh, another no beef, swine’s flesh, wild fowl, cocks
with white feathers, and they say their ancestors did so from the
beginning of the world.”
(1) The evidence of native interpreters may be viewed with suspicion. It
is improbable, however, that in 1817 the interpreters were acquainted with
the totemistic theory of mythologists, and deliberately mistranslated the
names of the stocks, so as to make them harmonise with Indian, Australian,
and Red Indian totem kindreds. This, indeed, is an example where the
criterion of “recurrence” or “coincidence” seems to be valuable.
Bowditch’s Mission to Ashantee (1873), p. 181.
(2) This view, however, does not prevail among the totemistic tribes of
British Columbia, for example.
(3) Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 50. This amazing tale is supported
by the statement that kinship went by the female side (p. 49); the father
was thus not of the kin of his child by the alien woman. Cieza was with
Validillo in 1538.
(4) In Pinkerton, xvi. 400.
While in the case of the Ashantee tribes, we can only infer the existence
of a belief in kinship with the animals from the presence of the other
features of fully developed totemism (especially from the refusal to eat
the name-giving animal), we have direct evidence for the opinion in
another part of Africa, among the Bechuanas.(1) Casalis, who passed
twenty-three years as a missionary in South Africa, thus describes the
institution: “While the united communities usually bear the name of their
chief or of the district which they inhabit” (local tribes, as in
Australia), “each stock (tribu) derives its title from an animal or a
vegetable. All the Bechuanas are subdivided thus into Bakuenas
(crocodile-men), Batlapis (men of the fish), Banarer (of the buffalo),
Banukus (porcupines), Bamoraras (wild vines), and so forth. The Bakuenas
call the crocodile their father, sing about him in their feasts, swear by
him, and mark the ears of their cattle with an incision which resembles
the open jaws of the creature.” This custom of marking the cattle with the
crest, as it were, of the stock, takes among some races the shape of
deforming themselves, so as the more to resemble the animal from which
they claim descent. “The chief of the family which holds the chief rank in
the stock is called ‘The Great Man of the Crocodile’. Precisely in the
same way the Duchess of Sutherland is styled in Gaelic ‘The Great Lady of
the Cat,'” though totemism is probably not the origin of this title.
(1) E. Casalis, Les Bassoutos, 1859.
Casalis proceeds: “No one would dare to eat the flesh or wear the skin of
the animal whose name he bears. If the animal be dangerous—the lion,
for example—people only kill him after offering every apology and
asking his pardon. Purification must follow such a sacrifice.” Casalis was
much struck with the resemblance between these practices and the similar
customs of North American races. Livingstone’s account(1) on the whole
corroborates that of Casalis, though he says the Batau (tribe of the lion)
no longer exists. “They use the word bina ‘to dance,’ in reference to the
custom of thus naming themselves, so that when you wish to ascertain what
tribe they belong to, you say, ‘What do you dance?’ It would seem as if
this had been part of the worship of old.” The mythological and religious
knowledge of the Bushmen is still imparted in dances; and when a man is
ignorant of some myth he will say, “I do not dance that dance,” meaning
that he does not belong to the guild which preserves that particular
“sacred chapter”.(2)
(1) Missionary Travels (1857), p. 13.
(2) Orpen, Cape Monthly Magazine, 1872.
Casalis noticed the similarity between South African and Red Indian
opinion about kinship with vegetables and beasts. The difficulty in
treating the Red Indian belief is chiefly found in the abundance of the
evidence. Perhaps the first person who ever used the word “totemism,” or,
as he spells it, “totamism,” was (as we said) Mr. Long, an interpreter
among the Chippeways, who published his Voyages in 1791. Long was not
wholly ignorant of the languages, as it was his business to speak them,
and he was an adopted Indian. The ceremony of adoption was painful,
beginning with a feast of dog’s flesh, followed by a Turkish bath and a
prolonged process of tattooing.(1) According to Long,(2) “The totam, they
conceive, assumes the form of some beast or other, and therefore they
never kill, hurt, or eat the animal whose form they think this totam
bears”. One man was filled with religious apprehensions, and gave himself
up to the gloomy belief of Bunyan and Cowper, that he had committed the
unpardonable sin, because he dreamed he had killed his totem, a bear.(3)
This is only one example, like the refusal of the Osages to kill the
beavers, with which they count cousins,(4) that the Red Man’s belief is an
actual creed, and does influence his conduct.
(1) Long, pp. 46-49.
(2) Ibid., p. 86.
(3) Ibid., p. 87.
(4) Schoolcraft, i. 319.
As in Australia, the belief in common kin with beasts is most clearly
proved by the construction of Red Indian society. The “totemistic” stage
of thought and manners prevails. Thus Charlevoix says,(1) “Plusieurs
nations ont chacune trois familles ou tribus principales, AUSSI ANCIENNES,
A CE QU’IL PAROIT, QUE LEUR ORIGINE. Chaque tribu porte le nom d’un
animal, et la nation entiere a aussi le sien, dont elle prend le nom, et
dont la figure est sa marque, ou, se l’on veut, ses armoiries, on ne signe
point autrement les traites qu’en traceant ces figures.” Among the animal
totems Charlevoix notices porcupine, bear, wolf and turtle. The armoiries,
the totemistic heraldry of the peoples of Virginia, greatly interested a
heraldic ancestor of Gibbon the historian,(2) who settled in the colony.
According to Schoolcraft,(3) the totem or family badge, of a dead warrior
is drawn in a reverse position on his grave-post. In the same way the
leopards of England are drawn reversed on the shield of an English king
opposite the mention of his death in old monkish chronicles. As a general
rule,(4) persons bearing the same totem in America cannot intermarry. “The
union must be between various totems.” Moreover, as in the case of the
Australians, “the descent of the chief is in the female line”. We thus
find among the Red Men precisely the same totemistic regulations as among
the Aborigines of Australia. Like the Australians, the Red Men “never”
(perhaps we should read “hardly ever”) eat their totems. Totemists, in
short, spare the beasts that are their own kith and kin. To avoid
multiplying details which all corroborate each other, it may suffice to
refer to Schoolcraft for totemism among the Iowas(5) and the Pueblos;(6)
for the Iroquois, to Lafitau, a missionary of the early part of the
eighteenth century. Lafitau was perhaps the first writer who ever
explained certain features in Greek and other ancient myths and practices
as survivals from totemism. The Chimera, a composite creature, lion, goat
and serpent, might represent, Lafitau thought, a league of three totem
tribes, just as wolf, bear and turtle represented the Iroquois League.
(1) Histoire de la France-Nouvelle, iii. 266.
(2) Introductio ad Latinam Blasoniam, by John Gibbon, Blue Mantle, London,
1682. “The dancers, were painted some party per pale, gul and sab, some
party per fesse of the same colours;” whence Gibbon concluded “that
heraldry was ingrafted naturally into the sense of the humane race”.
(3) Vol. i. p. 356.
(4) Schoolcraft, v. 73.
(5) Ibid., iii. 268.
(6) Ibid., iv. 86.
The martyred Pere Rasles, again, writing in 1723,(1) says that one stock
of the Outaonaks claims descent from a hare (“the great hare was a man of
prodigious size”), while another stock derive their lineage from the carp,
and a third descends from a bear; yet they do not scruple, after certain
expiatory rites, to eat bear’s flesh. Other North American examples are
the Kutchin, who have always possessed the system of totems.(2)
(1) Kip’s Jesuits in America i. 33.
(2) Dall’s Alaska, pp. 196-198.
It is to be noticed, as a peculiarity of Red Indian totemism which we have
not observed (though it may exist) in Africa, that certain stocks claim
relations with the sun. Thus Pere Le Petit, writing from New Orleans in
1730, mentions the Sun, or great chief of the Natchez Indians.(1) The
totem of the privileged class among the Natchez was the sun, and in all
myths the sun is regarded as a living being, who can have children, who
may be beaten, who bleeds when cut, and is simply on the same footing as
men and everything else in the world. Precisely similar evidence comes
from South America. In this case our best authority is almost beyond
suspicion. He knew the native languages well, being himself a half-caste.
He was learned in the European learning of his time; and as a son of the
Incas, he had access to all surviving Peruvian stores of knowledge, and
could collect without difficulty the testimonies of his countrymen. It
will be seen(2) that Don Garcilasso de la Vega could estimate evidence,
and ridiculed the rough methods and fallacious guesses of Spanish
inquirers. Garcilasso de la Vega was born about 1540, being the son of an
Inca princess and of a Spanish conqueror. His book, Commentarias
Reales,(3) was expressly intended to rectify the errors of such Spanish
writers as Acosta. In his account of Peruvian religion, Garcilasso
distinguishes between the beliefs of the tribes previous to the rise of
the Inca empire and the sun-worship of the Incas. But it is plain, from
Garcilasso’s own account and from other evidence, that under the Incas the
older faiths and fetichisms survived, in subordination to sun-worship,
just as Pagan superstitions survived in custom and folk-lore after the
official recognition of Christianity. Sun-worship, in Peru, and the belief
in a Supreme Creator there, seem even, like Catholicism in Mexico, China
and elsewhere, to have made a kind of compromise with the lower beliefs,
and to have been content to allow a certain amount of bowing down in the
temples of the elder faiths. According, then, to Garcilasso’s account of
Peruvian totemism, “An Indian was not looked upon as honourable unless he
was descended from a fountain, river,(4) or lake, or even from the sea, OR
FROM A WILD ANIMAL, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they
call cuntur (condor), or some other bird of prey “.(5) A certain amount of
worship was connected with this belief in kinship with beasts and natural
objects. Men offered up to their totems “what they usually saw them
eat”.(6) On the seacoasts “they worshipped sardines, skates, dog-fish,
and, for want of larger gods, crabs…. There was not an animal, how vile
and filthy soever, that they did not worship as a god,” including
“lizards, toads and frogs.” Garcilasso (who says they ate the fish they
worshipped) gives his own theory of the origin of totemism. In the
beginning men had only sought for badges whereby to discriminate one human
stock from another. “The one desired to have a god different from the
other…. They only thought of making one different from another.” When
the Inca emperors began to civilise the totemistic stocks, they pointed
out that their own father, the sun, possessed “splendour and beauty” as
contrasted with “the ugliness and filth of the frogs and other vermin they
looked upon as gods”.(7) Garcilasso, of course, does not use the North
American word totem (or ote or otem) for the family badge which
represented the family ancestors. He calls these things, as a general
rule, pacarissa. The sun was the pacarissa of the Incas, as it was of the
chief of the Natchez. The pacarissa of other stocks was the lion, bear,
frog, or what not. Garcilasso accounts for the belief accorded to the
Incas, when they claimed actual descent from the sun, by observing(8) that
“there were tribes among their subjects who professed similar fabulous
descents, though they did not comprehend how to select ancestors so well
as the Incas, but adored animals and other low and earthly objects”. As to
the fact of the Peruvian worship of beasts, if more evidence is wanted, it
is given, among others, by Cieza de Leon,(9) who contrasts the adoration
of the Roman gods with that offered in Peru to brutes. “In the important
temple of Pacha-camac (the spiritual deity of Peru) they worshipped a
she-fox or vixen and an emerald.” The devil also “appeared to them and
spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce”. Other examples of totemism in
South America may be studied in the tribes on the Amazon.(10) Mr. Wallace
found the Pineapple stock, the Mosquitoes, Woodpeckers, Herons, and other
totem kindreds. A curious example of similar ideas is discovered among the
Bonis of Guiana. These people were originally West Coast Africans imported
as slaves, who have won their freedom with the sword. While they retain a
rough belief in Gadou (God) and Didibi (the devil), they are divided into
totem stocks with animal names. The red ape, turtle and cayman are among
the chief totems.(11)
(1) Kip, ii. 288.
(2) Appendix B.
(3) See translation in Hakluyt Society’s Collection.
(4) Like many Greek heroes. Odyssey, iii. 489. “Orsilochus, the child
begotten of Alpheus.”
(5) Comm. Real., i. 75.
(6) Ibid., 53.
(7) Ibid., 102.
(8) Ibid., 83.
(9) Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 183.
(10) Acuna, p. 103; Wallace, Travels on Amazon (1853), pp. 481-506.
(11) Crevaux, Voyages dans l’Amerique du Sud, p. 59.
After this hasty examination of the confused belief in kinship with
animals and other natural objects which underlies institutions in
Australia, West and South Africa, North and South America, we may glance
at similar notions among the non-Aryan races of India. In Dalton’s
Ethnology of Bengal,(1) he tells us that the Garo clans are divided into
maharis or motherhoods. Children belong to the mahari of the mother, just
as (in general) they derive their stock name and totem from the mother’s
side in Australia and among the North American Indians. No man may marry
(as among the Red Indians and Australians) a woman belonging to his own
stock, motherhood or mahari. So far the maharis of Bengal exactly
correspond to the totem kindred. But do the Maharis also take their names
from plants and animals, and so forth? We know that the Killis, similar
communities among the Bengal Hos and Mundos, do this.(2) “The Mundaris,
like the Oraons, adopt as their tribal distinction the name of some
animal, and the flesh of that animal is tabooed to them as food; for
example, the eel, the tortoise.” This is exactly the state of things in
Ashanti. Dalton mentions also(3) a princely family in Nagpur which claims
descent from “a great hooded snake”. Among the Oraons he found(4) tribes
which might not eat young mice (considered a dainty) or tortoises, and a
stock which might not eat the oil of the tree which was their totem, nor
even sit in its shade. “The family or tribal names” (within which they may
not marry) “are usually those of animals or plants, and when this is the
case, the flesh of some part of the animal or the fruit of the tree is
tabooed to the tribe called after it.”
(1) Dalton, p. 63.
(2) Ibid., p. 189.
(3) Ibid., p. 166.
(4) Ibid., p. 254.
An excellent sketch of totemism in India is given by Mr. H. H. Risley of
the Bengal Civil Service:—(1)
(1) The Asiatic Quarterly, No. 3, Essay on “Primitive Marriage in Bengal.”
“At the bottom of the social system, as understood by the average Hindu,
stands a large body of non-Aryan castes and tribes, each of which is
broken up into a number of what may be called totemistic exogamous septs.
Each sept bears the name of an animal, a tree, a plant, or of some
material object, natural or artificial, which the members of that sept are
prohibited from killing, eating, cutting, burning, carrying, using,
etc.”(1)
(1) Here we may note that the origin of exogamy itself is merely part of a
strict totemistic prohibition. A man may not “use” an object within the
totem kin, nor a woman of the kin. Compare the Greek idiom (Greek text
omitted).
Mr. Risley finds that both Kolarians, as the Sonthals, and Dravidians, as
the Oraons, are in this state of totemism, like the Hos and Mundas. It is
most instructive to learn that, as one of these tribes rises in the social
scale, it sloughs off its totem, and, abandoning the common name derived
from bird, beast, or plant, adopts that of an eponymous ancestor. A
tendency in this direction has been observed by Messrs. Fison and Howitt
even in Australia. The Mahilis, Koras and Kurmis, who profess to be
members of the Hindu community, still retain the totemistic organisation,
with names derived from birds, beasts and plants. Even the Jagannathi
Kumhars of Orissa, taking rank immediately below the writer-caste, have
the totems tiger, snake, weasel, cow, frog, sparrow and tortoise. The
sub-castes of the Khatlya Kumhars explain away their totem-names “as names
of certain saints, who, being present at Daksha’s Horse-sacrifice,
transformed themselves into animals to escape the wrath of Siva,” like the
gods of Egypt when they fled in bestial form from the wrath of Set.
Among the non-Aryan tribes the marriage law has the totemistic sanction.
No man may marry a woman of his totem kin. When the totem-name is changed
for an eponym, the non-Aryan, rising in the social scale, is practically
in the same position as the Brahmans, “divided into exogamous sections
(gotras), the members of which profess to be descended from the mythical
rishi or inspired saint whose name the gotra bears”. There is thus nothing
to bar the conjecture that the exogamous gotras of the whole Brahmans were
once a form of totem-kindred, which (like aspiring non-Aryan stocks at the
present day) dropped the totem-name and renamed the septs from some
eponymous hero, medicine-man, or Rishi.
Constant repetition of the same set of facts becomes irksome, and yet is
made necessary by the legitimate demand for trustworthy and abundant
evidence. As the reader must already have reflected, this living mythical
belief in the common confused equality of men, gods, plants, beasts,
rivers, and what not, which still regulates savage society,(1) is one of
the most prominent features in mythology. Porphyry remarked and exactly
described it among the Egyptians—”common and akin to men and gods
they believed the beasts to be.”(2) The belief in such equality is alien
to modern civilisation. We have shown that it is common and fundamental in
savagery. For instance, in the Pacific, we might quote Turner,(3) and for
Melanesia, Codrington,(4) while for New Zealand we have Taylor.(5) For the
Jakuts, along the banks of the Lena in Northern Asia, we have the evidence
of Strahlenberg, who writes: “Each tribe of these people look upon some
particular creature as sacred, e.g., a swan, goose, raven, etc., and such
is not eaten by that tribe” though the others may eat it.(6) As the
majority of our witnesses were quite unaware that the facts they described
were common among races of whom many of them had never even heard, their
evidence may surely be accepted as valid, especially as the beliefs
testified to express themselves in marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in
abstinence from food, on pillars over graves, in rude heraldry, and in
other obvious and palpable shapes. If we have not made out, by the
evidence of institutions, that a confused credulity concerning the
equality and kinship of man and the objects in nature is actually a ruling
belief among savages, and even higher races, from the Lena to the Amazon,
from the Gold Coast to Queensland, we may despair of ever convincing an
opponent. The survival of the same beliefs and institutions among
civilised races, Aryan and others, will later be demonstrated.(7) If we
find that the mythology of civilised races here agrees with the actual
practical belief of savages, and if we also find that civilised races
retain survivals of the institutions in which the belief is expressed by
savages, then we may surely infer that the activity of beasts in the myths
of Greece springs from the same sources as the similar activity of beasts
in the myths of Iroquois or Kaffirs. That is to say, part of the
irrational element in Greek myth will be shown to be derived (whether by
inheritance or borrowing) from an ascertained condition of savage fancy.
(1) See some very curious and disgusting examples of this confusion in
Liebrecht’s Zur Volkskunde, pp. 395, 396 (Heilbronn, 1879).
(2) De Abst., ii. 26.
(3) Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 238, and Samoa by the same author.
Complete totemism is not asserted here, and is denied for Melanesia.
(4) Journ. Anthrop. Inst., “Religious Practices in Melanesia”.
(5) New Zealand, “Animal Intermarriage with Men”.
(6) Description of Asia (1783), p. 383.
(7) Professor Robertson Smith, Kinship in Arabia, attempts to show that
totemism existed in the Semitic races. The topic must be left to
Orientalists.
CHAPTER IV. THE MENTAL CONDITION OF
SAVAGES—MAGIC—METAMORPHOSIS—METAPHYSIC—PSYCHOLOGY.
Claims of sorcerers—Savage scientific speculation—Theory of
causation—Credulity, except as to new religious ideas—”Post
hoc, ergo propter hoc”—Fundamental ideas of magic—Examples:
incantations, ghosts, spirits—Evidence of rank and other
institutions in proof of confusions of mind exhibited in magical beliefs.
“I mean eftsoons to have a fling at magicians for their abominable lies
and monstrous vanities.”—PLINY, ap. Phil. Holland.
“Quoy de ceux qui naturellement se changent en loups, en juments, et puis
encores en hommes?”—MONTAIGNE, Apologie pour Raymond de Sebonde.
The second feature in the savage intellectual condition which we promised
to investigate was the belief in magic and sorcery. The world and all the
things in it being conceived of vaguely as sensible and rational, are
supposed to obey the commands of certain members of each tribe, such as
chiefs, jugglers, or conjurors. These conjurors, like Zeus or Indra, can
affect the weather, work miracles, assume what shapes, animal, vegetable,
or inorganic, they please, and can metamorphose other persons into similar
shapes. It has already been shown that savage man has regarded all THINGS
as PERSONS much on a level with himself. It has now to be shown WHAT KIND
OF PERSON HE CONCEIVES HIMSELF TO BE. He does not look on men as civilised
races regard them, that is, as beings with strict limitations. On the
other hand, he thinks of certain members of his tribe as exempt from most
of the limitations, and capable of working every miracle that tradition
has ever attributed to prophets or gods. Nor are such miraculous powers,
such practical omnipotence, supposed by savages to be at all rare among
themselves. Though highly valued, miraculous attainments are not believed
to be unusual. This must be kept steadily in mind. When myth-making man
regards the sky or sun or wind as a person, he does not mean merely a
person with the limitations recognised by modern races. He means a person
with the miraculous powers of the medicine-man. The sky, sun, wind or
other elemental personage can converse with the dead, and can turn himself
and his neighbours into animals, stones and trees.
To understand these functions and their exercise, it is necessary to
examine what may be called savage science, savage metaphysics, and the
savage theory of the state of the dead. The medicine-man’s supernatural
claims are rooted in the general savage view of the world, of what is
possible, and of what (if anything) is impossible. The savage, even more
than the civilised man, may be described as a creature “moving about in
worlds not realised”. He feels, no less than civilised man, the need of
making the world intelligible, and he is active in his search for causes
and effects. There is much “speculation in these eyes that he doth glare
withal”. This is a statement which has been denied by some persons who
have lived with savages. Thus Mr. Bates, in his Naturalist on the
Amazon,(1) writes: “Their want of curiosity is extreme…. Vicente (an
Indian companion) did not know the cause of thunder and lightning. I asked
him who made the sun, the stars, the trees. He didn’t know, and had never
heard the subject mentioned in his tribe.” But Mr. Bates admits that even
Vicente had a theory of the configuration of the world. “The necessity of
a theory of the earth and water had been felt, and a theory had been
suggested.” Again, Mr. Bates says about a certain Brazilian tribe, “Their
sluggish minds seem unable to conceive or feel the want of a theory of the
soul”; and he thinks the cause of this indolence is the lack “of a written
language or a leisured class”. Now savages, as a rule, are all in the
“leisured class,” all sportsmen. Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, has expressed
scepticism about the curiosity attributed to savages. The point is
important, because, in our view, the medicine-man’s powers are rooted in
the savage theory of things, and if the savage is too sluggish to invent
or half consciously evolve a theory of things, our hypothesis is baseless.
Again, we expect to find in savage myths the answer given by savages to
their own questions. But this view is impossible if savages do not ask
themselves, and never have asked themselves, any questions at all about
the world. On this topic Mr. Spencer writes: “Along with absence of
surprise there naturally goes absence of intelligent curiosity”.(2) Yet
Mr. Spencer admits that, according to some witnesses, “the Dyaks have an
insatiable curiosity,” the Samoans “are usually very inquisitive,” and
“the Tahitians are remarkably curious and inquisitive”. Nothing is more
common than to find travellers complaining that savages, in their ardently
inquiring curiosity, will not leave the European for a moment to his own
undisturbed devices. Mr. Spencer’s savages, who showed no curiosity,
displayed this impassiveness when Europeans were trying to make them
exhibit signs of surprise. Impassivity is a point of honour with many
uncivilised races, and we cannot infer that a savage has no curiosity
because he does not excite himself over a mirror, or when his European
visitors try to swagger with their mechanical appliances. Mr. Herbert
Spencer founds, on the statements of Mr. Bates already quoted, a notion
that “the savage, lacking ability to think and the accompanying desire to
know, is without tendency to speculate”. He backs Mr. Bates’s experience
with Mungo Park’s failure to “draw” the negroes about the causes of day
and night. They had never indulged a conjecture nor formed an hypothesis
on the matter. Yet Park avers that “the belief in one God is entire and
universal among them”. This he “pronounces without the smallest shadow of
doubt”. As to “primitive man,” according to Mr. Spencer, “the need for
explanations about surrounding appearances does not occur to him”. We have
disclaimed all knowledge about “primitive man,” but it is easy to show
that Mr. Spencer grounds his belief in the lack of speculation among
savages on a frail foundation of evidence.
(1) Vol. ii. p. 162.
(2) Sociology, p. 98.
Mr. Spencer has admitted speculation, or at least curiosity, among New
Caledonians, New Guinea people, Dyaks, Samoans and Tahitians. Even where
he denies its existence, as among the Amazon tribes mentioned by Mr.
Bates, we happen to be able to show that Mr. Bates was misinformed.
Another traveller, the American geologist, Professor Hartt of Cornell
University, lived long among the tribes of the Amazon. But Professor Hartt
did not, like Mr. Bates, find them at all destitute of theories of things—theories
expressed in myths, and testifying to the intellectual activity and
curiosity which demands an answer to its questions. Professor Hartt, when
he first became acquainted with the Indians of the Amazon, knew that they
were well supplied with myths, and he set to work to collect them. But he
found that neither by coaxing nor by offers of money could he persuade an
Indian to relate a myth. Only by accident, “while wearily paddling up the
Paranamirim of the Ituki,” did he hear the steersman telling stories to
the oarsmen to keep them awake. Professor Hartt furtively noted down the
tale, and he found that by “setting the ball rolling,” and narrating a
story himself, he could make the natives throw off reserve and add to his
stock of tales. “After one has obtained his first myth, and has learned to
recite it accurately and spiritedly, the rest is easy.” The tales
published by Professor Hartt are chiefly animal stories, like those
current in Africa and among the Red Indians, and Hartt even believed that
many of the legends had been imported by Negroes. But as the majority of
the Negro myths, like those of the Australians, give a “reason why” for
the existence of some phenomenon or other, the argument against early
man’s curiosity and vivacity of intellect is rather injured, even if the
Amazonian myths were imported from Africa. Mr. Spencer based his disbelief
in the intellectual curiosity of the Amazonian tribes and of Negroes on
the reports of Mr. Bates and of Mungo Park. But it turns out that both
Negroes and Amazonians have stories which do satisfy an unscientific
curiosity, and it is even held that the Negroes lent the Amazonians these
very stories.(1) The Kamschadals, according to Steller, “give themselves a
reason why for everything, according to their own lively fancy, and do not
leave the smallest matter uncriticised”.(2) As far, then, as Mr. Spencer’s
objections apply to existing savages, we may consider them overweighed by
the evidence, and we may believe in a naive savage curiosity about the
world and desire for explanations of the causes of things. Mr. Tylor’s
opinion corroborates our own: “Man’s craving to know the causes at work in
each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he surveys
is such as it is and no other, is no product of high civilisation, but a
characteristic of his race down to its lowest stages. Among rude savages
it is already an intellectual appetite, whose satisfaction claims many of
the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep. Even in the
Botocudo or the Australian, scientific speculation has its germ in actual
experience.”(3) It will be shown later that the food of the savage
intellectual appetite is offered and consumed in the shape of explanatory
myths.
(1) See Amazonian Tortoise-Myth., pp. 5, 37, 40; and compare Mr. Harris’s
Preface to Nights with Uncle Remus.
(2) Steller, p. 267. Cf. Farrer’s Primitive Manners, p. 274.
(3) Primitive Culture, i. 369.
But we must now observe that the “actual experience,” properly so called,
of the savage is so limited and so coloured by misconception and
superstition, that his knowledge of the world varies very much from the
conceptions of civilised races. He seeks an explanation, a theory of
things, based on his experience. But his knowledge of physical causes and
of natural laws is exceedingly scanty, and he is driven to fall back upon
what we may call metaphysical, or, in many cases “supernatural”
explanations. The narrower the range of man’s knowledge of physical
causes, the wider is the field which he has to fill up with hypothetical
causes of a metaphysical or “supernatural” character. These “supernatural”
causes themselves the savage believes to be matters of experience. It is
to his mind a matter of experience that all nature is personal and
animated; that men may change shapes with beasts; that incantations and
supernatural beings can cause sunshine and storm.
A good example of this is given in Charlevoix’s work on French Canada.(1)
Charlevoix was a Jesuit father and missionary among the Hurons and other
tribes of North America. He thus describes the philosophy of the Red Men:
“The Hurons attribute the most ordinary effects to supernatural
causes”.(2) In the same page the good father himself attributes the
welcome arrival of rainy weather and the cure of certain savage patients
to the prayers of Pere Brebeuf and to the exhibition of the sacraments.
Charlevoix had considerably extended the field in which natural effects
are known to be produced by natural causes. He was much more
scientifically minded than his savage flock, and was quite aware that an
ordinary clock with a pendulum cannot bring bad luck to a whole tribe, and
that a weather-cock is not a magical machine for securing unpleasant
weather. The Hurons, however, knowing less of natural causes and nothing
of modern machinery, were as convinced that his clock was ruining the luck
of the tribe and his weather-cock spoiling the weather, as Father
Charlevoix could be of the truth of his own inferences. One or two other
anecdotes in the good father’s history and letters help to explain the
difference between the philosophies of wild and of Christian men. The Pere
Brebeuf was once summoned at the instigation of a Huron wizard or
“medicine-man” before a council of the tribe. His judges told the father
that nothing had gone right since he appeared among them. To this Brebeuf
replied by “drawing the attention of the savages to the absurdity of their
principles”. He admitted(3) the premise that nothing had turned out well
in the tribe since his arrival. “But the reason,” said he, “plainly is
that God is angry with your hardness of heart.” No sooner had the good
father thus demonstrated the absurdity of savage principles of reasoning,
than the malignant Huron wizard fell down dead at his feet! This event
naturally added to the confusion of the savages.
(1) Histoire de la France-Nouvelle.
(2) Vol. i. p. 191.
(3) Vol. i. p. 192.
Coincidences of this sort have a great effect on savage minds. Catlin, the
friend of the Mandan tribe, mentions a chief who consolidated his power by
aid of a little arsenic, bought from the whites. The chief used to
prophesy the sudden death of his opponents, which always occurred at the
time indicated. The natural results of the administration of arsenic were
attributed by the barbarous people to supernatural powers in the
possession of the chief.(1) Thus the philosophy of savages seeks causas
cognoscere rerum, like the philosophy of civilised men, but it flies
hastily to a hypothesis of “supernatural” causes which are only guessed
at, and are incapable of demonstration. This frame of mind prevails still
in civilised countries, as the Bishop of Nantes showed when, in 1846, he
attributed the floods of the Loire to “the excesses of the press and the
general disregard of Sunday”. That “supernatural” causes exist and may
operate, it is not at all our intention to deny. But the habit of looking
everywhere for such causes, and of assuming their interference at will, is
the main characteristic of savage speculation. The peculiarity of the
savage is that he thinks human agents can work supernaturally, whereas
even the Bishop reserved his supernatural explanations for the Deity. On
this belief in man’s power to affect events beyond the limits of natural
possibility is based the whole theory of MAGIC, the whole power of
sorcerers. That theory, again, finds incessant expression in myth, and
therefore deserves our attention.
(1) Catlin, Letters, ii. 117.
The theory requires for its existence an almost boundless credulity. This
credulity appears to Europeans to prevail in full force among savages.
Bosman is amazed by the African belief that a spider created the world.
Moffat is astonished at the South African notion that the sea was
accidentally created by a girl. Charlevoix says, “Les sauvages sont d’une
facilite a croire ce qu’on leur dit, que les plus facheuse experiences
n’ont jamais pu guerir”.(1) But it is a curious fact that while savages
are, as a rule, so credulous, they often laugh at the religious doctrines
taught them by missionaries. Elsewhere they recognise certain essential
doctrines as familiar forms of old. Dr. Moffat remarks, “To speak of the
Creation, the Fall and the Resurrection, seemed more fabulous, extravagant
and ludicrous to them than their own vain stories of lions and hyaenas.”
Again, “The Gospel appeared too preposterous for the most foolish to
believe”.(2) While the Zulus declared that they used to accept their own
myths without inquiry,(3) it was a Zulu who suggested to Bishop Colenso
his doubts about the historical character of the Noachian Deluge.
Hearne(4) knew a Red Man, Matorabhee, who, “though a perfect bigot with
regard to the arts and tricks of the jugglers, could yet by no means be
impressed with a belief of any part of OUR religion”. Lieutenant Haggard,
R.N., tells the writer that during an eclipse at Lamoo he ridiculed the
native notion of driving away a beast which devours the moon, and
explained the real cause of the phenomenon. But his native friend
protested that “he could not be expected to believe such a story”. Yet
other savages aver an old agreement with the belief in a moral Creator.
(1) Vol. ii. p. 378.
(2) Missionary Labours, p. 245.
(3) Callaway, Religion of Amazulus, i. 35.
(4) Journey among the Indians, 1795, p. 350.
We have already seen sufficient examples of credulity in savage doctrines
about the equal relations of men and beasts, stars, clouds and plants. The
same readiness of belief, which would be surprising in a Christian child,
has been found to regulate the rudimentary political organisations of grey
barbarians. Add to this credulity a philosophy which takes resemblance, or
contiguity in space, or nearness in time as a sufficient reason for
predicating the relations of cause and effect, and we have the basis of
savage physical science. Yet the metaphysical theories of savages, as
expressed in Maori, Polynesian, and Zuni hymns, often amaze us by their
wealth of abstract ideas. Coincidence elsewhere stands for cause.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, is the motto of the savage philosophy of
causation. The untutored reasoner speculates on the principles of the
Egyptian clergy, as described by Herodotus.(1) “The Egyptians have
discovered more omens and prodigies than any other men; for when aught
prodigious occurs, they keep good watch, and write down what follows; and
then, if anything like the prodigy be repeated, they expect the same
events to follow as before.” This way of looking at things is the very
essence of superstition.
(1) II. p. 82.
Savages, as a rule, are not even so scientific as the Egyptians. When an
untoward event occurs, they look for its cause among all the less familiar
circumstances of the last few days, and select the determining cause very
much at random. Thus the arrival of the French missionaries among the
Hurons was coincident with certain unfortunate events; therefore it was
argued that the advent of the missionaries was the cause of the
misfortune. When the Bechuanas suffered from drought, they attributed the
lack of rain to the arrival of Dr. Moffat, and especially to his beard,
his church bell, and a bag of salt in his possession. Here there was not
even the pretence of analogy between cause and effect. Some savages might
have argued (it is quite in their style), that as salt causes thirst, a
bag of salt causes drought; but no such case could be made out against Dr.
Moffat’s bell and beard. To give an example from the beliefs of English
peasants. When a cottage was buried by a little avalanche in 1772, the
accident was attributed to the carelessness of the cottagers, who had
allowed a light to be taken out of their dwelling in Christmas-tide.(1) We
see the same confusion between antecedence and consequence in time on one
side, and cause and effect on the other, when the Red Indians aver that
birds actually bring winds and storms or fair weather. They take literally
the sense of the Rhodian swallow-song:—
(1) Shropshire Folk-Lore, by Miss Burne, iii. 401.
(2) Brinton, Myths of New World, p. 107.
Again, in the Pacific the people of one island always attribute hurricanes
to the machinations of the people of the nearest island to windward. The
wind comes from them; therefore (as their medicine-men can notoriously
influence the weather), they must have sent the wind. This unneighbourly
act is a casus belli, and through the whole of a group of islands the
banner of war, like the flag of freedom in Byron, flies against the wind.
The chief principle, then, of savage science is that antecedence and
consequence in time are the same as effect and cause.(1) Again, savage
science holds that LIKE AFFECTS LIKE, that you can injure a man, for
example, by injuring his effigy. On these principles the savage explains
the world to himself, and on these principles he tries to subdue to
himself the world. Now the putting of these principles into practice is
simply the exercise of art magic, an art to which nothing seems
impossible. The belief that his Shamans or medicine-men practise this art
is universal among savages. It seriously affects their conduct, and is
reflected in their myths.
(1) See account of Zuni metaphysics in chapter on American Divine Myths.
The one general rule which governs all magical reasoning is, that casual
connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact. Like
suggests like to human thought by association of ideas; wherefore like
influences like, or produces analogous effects in practice. Any object
once in a man’s possession, especially his hair or his nails, is supposed
to be capable of being used against him by a sorcerer. The part suggests
the whole. A lock of a man’s hair was part of the man; to destroy the hair
is to destroy its former owner. Again, whatever event follows another in
time suggests it, and may have been caused by it. Accompanying these ideas
is the belief that nature is peopled by invisible spiritual powers, over
which magicians and sorcerers possess influence. The magic of the lower
races chiefly turns on these two beliefs. First, “man having come to
associate in thought those things which he found by experience to be
connected in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert their action, and to
conclude that association in thought must involve similar connection in
reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events,
by means of processes which we now see to have only an ideal
significance.”(1) Secondly, man endeavoured to make disembodied spirits of
the dead, or any other spirits, obedient to his will. Savage philosophy
presumes that the beliefs are correct, and that their practical
application is successful. Examples of the first of the two chief magical
ideas are as common in unscientific modern times or among unscientific
modern people as in the savage world.
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 14.
The physicians of the age of Charles II. were wont to give their patients
“mummy powder,” that is, pulverised mummy. They argued that the mummy had
lasted for a very long time, and that the patients ought to do so
likewise. Pliny imagined that diamonds must be found in company with gold,
because these are the most perfect substances in the world, and like
should draw to like. Aurum potabile, or drinkable gold, was a favourite
medical nostrum of the Middle Ages, because gold, being perfect, should
produce perfect health. Among savages the belief that like is caused by
like is exemplified in very many practices. The New Caledonians, when they
wish their yam plots to be fertile, bury in them with mystic ceremonies
certain stones which are naturally shaped like yams. The Melanesians have
reduced this kind of magic to a system. Among them certain stones have a
magical efficacy, which is determined in each case by the shape of the
stone. “A stone in the shape of a pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a
most valuable find. No garden was planted without the stones which were to
increase the crop.”(1) Stones with a rude resemblance to beasts bring the
Zuni luck in the chase.
(1) Rev. R. H. Codrington, Journ. Anth. Inst., February, 1881.
The spiritual theory in some places is mixed up with the “like to like”
theory, and the magical stones are found where the spirits have been heard
twittering and whistling. “A large stone lying with a number of small ones
under it, like a sow among her sucklings, was good for a childless
woman.”(1) It is the savage belief that stones reproduce their species, a
belief consonant with the general theory of universal animation and
personality. The ancient belief that diamonds gendered diamonds is a
survival from these ideas. “A stone with little disks upon it was good to
bring in money; any fanciful interpretation of a mark was enough to give a
character to the stone and its associated Vui” or spirit in Melanesia. In
Scotland, stones shaped like various parts of the human body are expected
to cure the diseases with which these members may be afflicted. “These
stones were called by the names of the limbs which they represented, as
‘eye-stone,’ ‘head-stone’.” The patient washed the affected part of the
body, and rubbed it well with the stone corresponding.(2)
(1) Codrington, Journ. Anth. Soc., x. iii. 276.
(2) Gregor, Folk-Lore of North-East Counties, p. 40.
To return from European peasant-magic to that of savages, we find that
when the Bushmen want wet weather they light fires, believing that the
black smoke clouds will attract black rain clouds; while the Zulus
sacrifice black cattle to attract black clouds of rain.(1) Though this
magic has its origin in savage ignorance, it survives into civilisation.
Thus the sacrifices of the Vedic age were imitations of the natural
phenomena which the priests desired to produce.(2) “C’etait un moyen de
faire tombre la pluie en realisant, par les representations terrestres des
eaux du nuage et de l’eclair, les conditions dans lesquelles celui-ci
determine dans le ciel l’epanchement de celles-la.” A good example of
magical science is afforded by the medical practice of the Dacotahs of
North America.(3) When any one is ill, an image of his disease, a boil or
what not, is carved in wood. This little image is then placed in a bowl of
water and shot at with a gun. The image of the disease being destroyed,
the disease itself is expected to disappear. Compare the magic of the
Philistines, who made golden images of the sores which plagued them and
stowed them away in the ark.(4) The custom of making a wax statuette of an
enemy, and piercing it with pins or melting it before the fire, so that
the detested person might waste as his semblance melted, was common in
mediaeval Europe, was known to Plato, and is practised by Negroes. Some
Australians take some of the hair of an enemy, mix it with grease and the
feathers of the eagle, and burn it in the fire. This is “bar” or black
magic. The boarding under the chair of a magistrate in Barbadoes was
lifted not long ago, and the ground beneath was found covered with wax
images of litigants stuck full of pins.
(1) Callaway, i. 92.
(2) Bergaigne, Religion Vedique, i. 126-138, i., vii., viii.
(3) Schoolcraft, iv. 491.
(4) 1 Samuel vi. 4, 5.
The war-magic of the Dacotahs works in a similar manner. Before a party
starts on the war-trail, the chief, with various ceremonies, takes his
club and stands before his tent. An old witch bowls hoops at him; each
hoop represents an enemy, and for each he strikes a foeman is expected to
fall. A bowl of sweetened water is also set out to entice the spirits of
the enemy.(1) The war-magic of the Aryans in India does not differ much in
character from that of the Dacotahs. “If any one wishes his army to be
victorious, he should go beyond the battle-line, cut a stalk of grass at
the top and end, and throw it against the hostile army with the words,
Prasahe kas trapasyati?—O Prasaha, who sees thee? If one who has
such knowledge cuts a stalk of grass and throws the parts at the hostile
army, it becomes split and dissolved, just as a daughter-in-law becomes
abashed and faints when seeing her father-in-law,”—an allusion,
apparently, to the widespread tabu which makes fathers-in-law,
daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, and mothers-in-law avoid each other.(2)
(1) Schoolcraft, iv. 496.
(2) Aitareya Brahmana, iii. 22.
The hunt-dances of the Red Indians and Australians are arranged like their
war-magic. Effigies of the bears, deer, or kangaroos are made, or some of
the hunters imitate the motions of these animals. The rest of the dancers
pretend to spear them, and it is hoped that this will ensure success among
the real bears and kangaroos.
Here is a singular piece of magic in which Europeans and Australian blacks
agree. Boris Godunoff made his servants swear never to injure him by
casting spells with the dust on which his feet or his carriage wheels had
left traces.(1) Mr. Howitt finds the same magic among the Kurnai.(2)
“Seeing a Tatungolung very lame, I asked him what was the matter. He said,
‘Some fellow has put BOTTLE in my foot’. I found he was probably suffering
from acute rheumatism. He explained that some enemy must have found his
foot-track and have buried in it a piece of broken bottle. The magic
influence, he believed, caused it to enter his foot.” On another occasion
a native told Mr. Howitt that he had seen black fellows putting poison in
his foot-tracks. Bosman mentions a similar practice among the people of
Guinea. In Scottish folk-lore a screw nail is fixed into the footprint of
the person who is to be injured.
(1) Rambaud’s History of Russia, English trans., i. 351.
(2) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 250.
Just as these magical efforts to influence like by like work their way
into Vedic and other religions, so they are introduced into the religion
of the savage. His prayers are addresses to some sort of superior being,
but the efficacy of the prayer is often eked out by a little magic, unless
indeed we prefer to suppose that the words of the supplication are
interpreted by gesture-speech. Sproat writes: “Set words and gestures are
used according to the thing desired. For instance, in praying for salmon,
the native rubs the backs of his hands, looks upwards, and mutters the
words, ‘Many salmon, many salmon’. If he wishes for deer, he carefully
rubs both eyes; or, if it is geese, he rubs the back of his shoulder,
uttering always in a sing-song way the accustomed formula…. All these
practices in praying no doubt have a meaning. We may see a steady hand is
needed in throwing the salmon-spear, and clear eyesight in finding deer in
the forest.”(1)
(1) Savage Life, p. 208.
In addition to these forms of symbolical magic (which might be multiplied
to any extent), we find among savages the belief in the power of songs of
INCANTATION. This is a feature of magic which specially deserves our
attention. In myths, and still more in marchen or household tales, we
shall constantly find that the most miraculous effects are caused when the
hero pronounces a few lines of rhyme. In Rome, as we have all read in the
Latin Delectus, it was thought that incantations could draw down the moon.
In the Odyssey the kinsfolk of Odysseus sing “a song of healing” over the
wound which was dealt him by the boar’s tusk. Jeanne d’Arc, wounded at
Orleans, refused a similar remedy. Sophocles speaks of the folly of
muttering incantations over wounds that need the surgeon’s knife. The song
that salved wounds occurs in the Kalewala, the epic poem of the Finns. In
many of Grimm’s marchen, miracles are wrought by the repetition of
snatches of rhyme. This belief is derived from the savage state of fancy.
According to Kohl,(1) “Every sorrowful or joyful emotion that opens the
Indian’s mouth is at once wrapped up in the garb of a wabanonagamowin
(chanson magicale). If you ask one of them to sing you a simple innocent
hymn in praise of Nature, a spring or jovial hunting stave, he never gives
you anything but a form of incantation, with which he says you will be
able to call to you all the birds from the sky, and all the foxes and
wolves from their caves and burrows.”(2) The giant’s daughter in the
Scotch marchen, Nicht, Nought, Nothing, is thus enabled to call to her aid
“all the birds of the sky”. In the same way, if you ask an Indian for a
love-song, he will say that a philtre is really much more efficacious. The
savage, in short, is extremely practical. His arts, music and drawing,
exist not pour l’art, but for a definite purpose, as methods of getting
something that the artist wants. The young lover whom Kohl knew, like the
lover of Bombyca in Theocritus, believed in having an image of himself and
an image of the beloved. Into the heart of the female image he thrust
magic powders, and he said that this was common, lovers adding songs,
“partly elegiac, partly malicious, and almost criminal forms of
incantation”.(3)
(1) Page 395.
(2) Cf. Comparetti’s Traditional Poetry of the Finns.
(3) Kitchi gami, pp. 395, 397.
Among the Indo-Aryans the masaminik or incantations of the Red Man are
known as mantras.(1) These are usually texts from the Veda, and are
chanted over the sick and in other circumstances where magic is believed
to be efficacious. Among the New Zealanders the incantations are called
karakias, and are employed in actual life. There is a special karakia to
raise the wind. In Maori myths the hero is very handy with his karakia.
Rocks split before him, as before girls who use incantations in Kaffir and
Bushman tales. He assumes the shape of any animal at will, or flies in the
air, all by virtue of the karakia or incantation.(2)
(1) Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v. 441, “Incantations from the Atharva Veda”.
(2) Taylor’s New Zealand; Theal’s Kaffir Folk-Lore, South-African
Folk-Lore Journal, passim; Shortland’s Traditions of the New Zealanders,
pp. 130-135.
Without multiplying examples in the savage belief that miracles can be
wrought by virtue of physical CORRESPONDANCES, by like acting on like, by
the part affecting the whole, and so forth, we may go on to the magical
results produced by the aid of spirits. These may be either spirits of the
dead or spiritual essences that never animated mortal men. Savage magic or
science rests partly on the belief that the world is peopled by a “choir
invisible,” or rather by a choir only occasionally visible to certain
gifted people, sorcerers and diviners. An enormous amount of evidence to
prove the existence of these tenets has been collected by Mr. Tylor, and
is accessible to all in the chapters on “Animism” in his Primitive
Culture. It is not our business here to account for the universality of
the belief in spirits. Mr. Tylor, following Lucretius and Homer, derives
the belief from the reasonings of early men on the phenomena of dreams,
fainting, shadows, visions caused by narcotics, hallucinations, and other
facts which suggest the hypothesis of a separable life apart from the
bodily organism. It would scarcely be fair not to add that the kind of
“facts” investigated by the Psychical Society—such “facts” as the
appearance of men at the moment of death in places remote from the scene
of their decease, with such real or delusive experiences as the noises and
visions in haunted houses—are familiar to savages. Without
discussing these obscure matters, it may be said that they influence the
thoughts even of some scientifically trained and civilised men. It is
natural, therefore, that they should strongly sway the credulous
imagination of backward races, in which they originate or confirm the
belief that life can exist and manifest itself after the death of the
body.(1)
(1) See the author’s Making of Religion, 1898.
Some examples of savage “ghost-stories,” precisely analogous to the
“facts” of the Psychical Society’s investigations, may be adduced. The
first is curious because it offers among the Kanekas an example of a
belief current in Breton folk-lore. The story is vouched for by Mr. J. J.
Atkinson, late of Noumea, New Caledonia. Mr. Atkinson, we have reason to
believe, was unacquainted with the Breton parallel. To him one day a
Kaneka of his acquaintance paid a visit, and seemed loth to go away. He
took leave, returned, and took leave again, till Mr. Atkinson asked him
the reason of his behaviour. He then explained that he was about to die,
and would never see his English friend again. As he seemed in perfect
health, Mr. Atkinson rallied him on his hypochondria; but the poor fellow
replied that his fate was sealed. He had lately met in the wood one whom
he took for the Kaneka girl of his heart; but he became aware too late
that she was no mortal woman, but a wood-spirit in the guise of the
beloved. The result would be his death within three days, and, as a matter
of fact, he died. This is the groundwork of the old Breton ballad of Le
Sieur Nan, who dies after his intrigue with the forest spectre.(1) A tale
more like a common modern ghost-story is vouched for by Mr. C. J. Du Ve,
in Australia. In the year 1860, a Maneroo black fellow died in the service
of Mr. Du Ve. “The day before he died, having been ill some time, he said
that in the night his father, his father’s friend, and a female spirit he
could not recognise, had come to him and said that he would die next day,
and that they would wait for him. Mr. Du Ye adds that, though previously
the Christian belief had been explained to this man, it had entirely
faded, and that he had gone back to the belief of his childhood.” Mr.
Fison, who prints this tale in his Kamilaroi and Kurnai,(2) adds, “I could
give many similar instances which have come within my own knowledge among
the Fijians, and, strange to say, the dying man in all these cases kept
his appointment with the ghosts to the very day”.
(1) It may, of course, be conjectured that the French introduced this
belief into New Caledonia.
(2) Page 247.
In the Cruise of the Beagle is a parallel anecdote of a Fuegian, Jimmy
Button, and his father’s ghost.
Without entering into a discussion of ghosts, it is plain that the kind of
evidence, whatever its value may be, which convinces many educated
Europeans of the existence of “veridical” apparitions has also played its
part in the philosophy of uncivilised races. On this belief in
apparitions, then, is based the power of the savage sorcerers and
necromants, of the men who converse with the dead and are aided by
disembodied spirits. These men have greatly influenced the beginnings of
mythology. Among certain Australian tribes the necromants are called
Birraark.(1) “The Kurnai tell me,” says Mr. Howitt, “that a Birraark was
supposed to be initiated by the ‘Mrarts (ghosts) when they met him
wandering in the bush…. It was from the ghosts that he obtained replies
to questions concerning events passing at a distance or yet to happen,
which might be of interest or moment to his tribe.” Mr. Howitt prints an
account of a spiritual seance in the bush.(2) “The fires were let go down.
The Birraark uttered a cry ‘coo-ee’ at intervals. At length a distant
reply was heard, and shortly afterwards the sound as of persons jumping on
the ground in succession. A voice was then heard in the gloom asking in a
strange intonation, ‘What is wanted?’ Questions were put by the Birraark
and replies given. At the termination of the seance, the spirit-voice
said, ‘We are going’. Finally, the Birraark was found in the top of an
almost inaccessible tree, apparently asleep.”(3) There was one Birraark at
least to every clan. The Kurnai gave the name of “Brewin” (a powerful evil
spirit) to a Birraark who was once carried away for several days by the
Mrarts or spirits.(4) It is a belief with the Australians, as, according
to Bosman, it was with the people of the Gold Coast, that a very powerful
wizard lives far inland, and the Negroes held that to this warlock the
spirits of the dead went to be judged according to the merit of their
actions in life. Here we have a doctrine answering to the Greek belief in
“the wizard Minos,” Aeacus, and Rhadamanthus, and to the Egyptian idea of
Osiris as judge of the departed.(5) The pretensions of the sorcerer to
converse with the dead are attested by Mr. Brough Smyth.(6) “A sorcerer
lying on his stomach spoke to the deceased, and the other sitting by his
side received the precious messages which the dead man told.” As a natural
result of these beliefs, the Australian necromant has great power in the
tribe. Mr. Howitt mentions a case in which a group of kindred, ceasing to
use their old totemistic surname, called themselves the children of a
famous dead Birraark, who thus became an eponymous hero, like Ion among
the Ionians.(7) Among the Scotch Highlanders the position and practice of
the seer were very like those of the Birraark. “A person,” says Scott,(8)
“was wrapped up in the skin of a newly slain bullock and deposited beside
a waterfall or at the bottom of a precipice, or in some other strange,
wild and unusual situation, where the scenery around him suggested nothing
but objects of horror. In this situation he revolved in his mind the
question proposed and whatever was impressed on him by his exalted
imagination PASSED FOR THE INSPIRATION OF THE DISEMBODIED SPIRITS who
haunt these desolate recesses.” A number of examples are given in Martin’s
Description of the Western Islands.(9) In the Century magazine (July,
1882) is a very full report of Thlinkeet medicine-men and metamorphoses.
(1) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 253.
(2) Page 254.
(3) In the Jesuit Relations (1637), p. 51, we read that the Red Indian
sorcerer or Jossakeed was credited with power to vanish suddenly away out
of sight of the men standing around him. Of him, as of Homeric gods, it
might be said, “Who has power to see him come or go against his will?”
(4) Here, in the first edition, occurred the following passage: “The
conception of Brewin is about as near as the Kurnai get to the idea of a
God; their conferring of his name on a powerful sorcerer is therefore a
point of importance and interest”. Mr. Howitt’s later knowledge
demonstrates an error here.
(5) Bosman in Pinkerton, xvi. p. 401.
(6) Aborigines of Australia, i. 197.
(7) In Victoria, after dark the wizard goes up to the clouds and brings
down a good spirit. Dawkins, p. 57. For eponymous medicine-men see
Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231.
(8) Lady of the Lake, note 1 to Canto iv.
(9) P. 112.
The sorcerer among the Zulus is, apparently, of a naturally hysterical and
nervous constitution. “He hears the spirits who speak by whistlings
speaking to him.”(1) Whistling is also the language of the ghosts in New
Caledonia, where Mr. Atkinson informs us that he has occasionally put an
able-bodied Kaneka to ignominious flight by whistling softly in the dusk.
The ghosts in Homer make a similar sound, “and even as bats flit gibbering
in the secret place of a wondrous cavern,… even so the souls gibbered as
they fared together” (Odyssey, xxiv. 5). “The familiar spirits make him”
(that Zulu sorcerer) “acquainted with what is about to happen, and then he
divines for the people.” As the Birraarks learn songs and dance-music from
the Mrarts, so the Zulu Inyanga or diviners learn magical couplets from
the Itongo or spirits.(2)
(1) Callaway, Religious System of the Amazules, p. 265.
(2) On all this, see “Possession” in The Making of Religion.
The evidence of institutions confirms the reports about savage belief in
magic. The political power of the diviners is very great, as may be
observed from the fact that a hereditary chief needs their consecration to
make him a chief de jure.(1) In fact, the qualities of the diviner are
those which give his sacred authority to the chief. When he has obtained
from the diviners all their medicines and information as to the mode of
using the isitundu (a magical vessel), it is said that he often orders
them to be killed. Now, the chief is so far a medicine-man that he is lord
of the air. “The heaven is the chief’s,” say the Zulus; and when he calls
out his men, “though the heaven is clear, it becomes clouded by the great
wind that arises”. Other Zulus explain this as the mere hyperbole of
adulation. “The word of the chief gives confidence to his troops; they
say, ‘We are going; the chief has already seen all that will happen in his
vessel’. Such then are chiefs; they use a vessel for divination.”(2) The
makers of rain are known in Zululand as “heaven-herds” or “sky-herds,” who
herd the heaven that it may not break out and do its will on the property
of the people. These men are, in fact, (Greek text omitted),
“cloud-gatherers,” like the Homeric Zeus, the lord of the heavens. Their
name of “herds of the heavens” has a Vedic sound. “The herd that herds the
lightning,” say the Zulus, “does the same as the herder of the cattle; he
does as he does by whistling; he says, ‘Tshu-i-i-i. Depart and go yonder.
Do not come here.'” Here let it be observed that the Zulus conceive of the
thunder-clouds and lightning as actual creatures, capable of being herded
like sheep. There is no metaphor or allegory about the matter,(3) and no
forgetfulness of the original meaning of words. The cloud-herd is just
like the cowherd, except that not every man, but only sorcerers, and they
who have eaten the “lightning-bird” (a bird shot near the place where
lightning has struck the earth), can herd the clouds of heaven. The same
ideas prevail among the Bushmen, where the rainmaker is asked “to milk a
nice gentle female rain”; the rain-clouds are her hair. Among the Bushmen
Rain is a person. Among the Red Indians no metaphor seems to be intended
when it is said that “it is always birds who make the wind, except that of
the east”. The Dacotahs once killed a thunder-bird(4) behind Little Crow’s
village on the Missouri. It had a face like a man with a nose like an
eagle’s bill.(5)
(1) Callaway, p. 340.
(2) Callaway, Religions System of the Amazules, p. 343.
(3) Ibid., p. 385.
(4) Schoolcraft, iii. 486.
(5) Compare Callaway, p. 119.
The political and social powers which come into the hands of the sorcerers
are manifest, even in the case of the Australians. Tribes and individuals
can attempt few enterprises without the aid of the man who listens to the
ghosts. Only he can foretell the future, and, in the case of the natural
death of a member of the tribe, can direct the vengeance of the survivors
against the hostile magician who has committed a murder by “bar” or magic.
Among the Zulus we have seen that sorcery gives the sanction to the power
of the chief. “The winds and weather are at the command” of Bosman’s
“great fetisher”. Inland from the Gold Coast,(1) the king of Loango,
according to the Abbe Proyart, “has credit to make rain fall on earth”.
Similar beliefs, with like political results, will be found to follow from
the superstition of magic among the Red Indians of North America. The
difficulty of writing about sorcerers among the Red Indians is caused by
the abundance of the evidence. Charlevoix and the other early Jesuit
missionaries found that the jongleurs, as Charlevoix calls the Jossakeeds
or medicine-men, were their chief opponents. As among the Scotch
Highlanders, the Australians and the Zulus, the Red Indian jongleur is
visited by the spirits. He covers a hut with the skin of the animal which
he commonly wears, retires thither, and there converses with the bodiless
beings.(2) The good missionary like Mr. Moffat in Africa, was convinced
that the exercises of the Jossakeeds were verily supernatural. “Ces
seducteurs ont un veritable commerce avec le pere du mensonge.”(3) This
was denied by earlier and wiser Jesuit missionaries. Their political power
was naturally great. In time of war “ils avancent et retardent les marches
comme il leur plait”. In our own century it was a medicine-man, Ten Squa
Ta Way, who by his magical processes and superstitious rites stirred up a
formidable war against the United States.(4) According to Mr. Pond,(5) the
native name of the Dacotah medicine-men, “Wakan,” signifies “men
supernaturally gifted”. Medicine-men are believed to be “wakanised” by
mystic intercourse with supernatural beings. The business of the wakanised
man is to discern future events, to lead and direct parties on the
war-trail, “to raise the storm or calm the tempest, to converse with the
lightning or thunder as with familiar friends”.(6) The wakanised man, like
the Australian Birraark and the Zulu diviner, “dictates chants and
prayers”. In battle “every Dacotah warrior looks to the Wakan man as
almost his only resource”. Belief in Wakan men is, Mr. Pond says,
universal among the Dacotahs, except where Christianity has undermined it.
“Their influence is deeply felt by every individual of the tribe, and
controls all their affairs.” The Wakan man’s functions are absorbed by the
general or war-chief of the tribe, and in Schoolcraft (iv. 495), Captain
Eastman prints copies of native scrolls showing the war-chief at work as a
wizard. “The war-chief who leads the party to war is always one of these
medicine-men.” In another passage the medicine-men are described as
“having a voice in the sale of land”. It must be observed that the
Jossakeed, or medicine-man, pure and simple, exercises a power which is
not in itself hereditary. Chieftainship, when associated with inheritance
of property, is hereditary; and when the chief, as among the Zulus,
absorbs supernatural power, then the same man becomes diviner and chief,
and is a person of great and sacred influence. The liveliest account of
the performances of the Maori “tohunga” or sorcerer is to be found in Old
New Zealand,(7) by the Pakeha Maori, an English gentleman who had lived
with the natives like one of themselves. The tohunga, says this author,(8)
presided over “all those services and customs which had something
approaching to a religious character. They also pretended to power by
means of certain familiar spirits, to foretell future events, and even in
some cases to control them…. The spirit ‘entered into’ them, and, on
being questioned, gave a response in a sort of half whistling,
half-articulate voice, supposed to be the proper language of spirits.” In
New South Wales, Mrs. Langlot Parker has witnessed a similar exhibition.
The “spirits” told the truth in this case. The Pakeha Maori was present in
a darkened village-hall when the spirit of a young man, a great friend of
his own, was called up by a tohunga. “Suddenly, without the slightest
warning, a voice came out of the darkness…. The voice all through, it is
to be remembered, was not the voice of the tohunga, but a strange
melancholy sound, like the sound of a wind blowing into a hollow vessel.
‘It is well with me; my place is a good place.’ The spirit gave an answer
to a question which proved to be correct, and then ‘Farewell,’ cried the
spirit FROM DEEP BENEATH THE GROUND. ‘Farewell,’ again, FROM HIGH IN AIR.
‘Farewell,’ once more came moaning through the distant darkness of the
night.” As chiefs in New Zealand no less than tohungas can exercise the
mystical and magical power of tabu, that is, of imparting to any object or
person an inviolable character, and can prevent or remit the mysterious
punishment for infringement of tabu, it appears probable that in New
Zealand, as well as among the Zulus and Red Indians, chiefs have a
tendency to absorb the sacred character and powers of the tohungas. This
is natural enough, for a tohunga, if he plays his cards well, is sure to
acquire property and hereditary wealth, which, in combination with magical
influence, are the necessary qualifications for the office of the
chieftain.
(1) Pinkerton, xvi. 401.
(2) Charlevoix, i. 105. See “Savage Spiritualism” in Cock Lane and Common
Sense.
(3) Ibid., iii. 362.
(4) Catlin, ii. 17.
(5) In Schoolcraft, iv. 402.
(6) Pond, in Schoolcraft, iv. 647.
(7) Auckland, 1863.
(8) Page 148.
Here is the place to mention a fact which, though at first sight it may
appear to have only a social interest, yet bears on the development of
mythology. Property and rank seem to have been essential to each other in
the making of social rank, and where one is absent among contemporary
savages, there we do not find the other. As an example of this, we might
take the case of two peoples who, like the Homeric Ethiopians, are the
outermost of men, and dwell far apart at the ends of the world. The
Eskimos and the Fuegians, at the extreme north and south of the American
continent, agree in having little or no private property and no chiefs.
Yet magic is providing a kind of basis of rank. The bleak plains of ice
and rock are, like Attica, “the mother of men without master or lord”.
Among the “house-mates” of the smaller settlements there is no head-man,
and in the larger gatherings Dr. Rink says that “still less than among the
house-mates was any one belonging to such a place to be considered a
chief”. The songs and stories of the Eskimo contain the praises of men who
have risen up and killed any usurper who tried to be a ruler over his
“place-mates”. No one could possibly establish any authority on the basis
of property, because “superfluous property, implements, etc., rarely
existed”. If there are three boats in one household, one of the boats is
“borrowed” by the community, and reverts to the general fund. If we look
at the account of the Fuegians described in Admiral Fitzroy’s cruise, we
find a similar absence of rank produced by similar causes. “The perfect
equality among the individuals composing the tribes must for a long time
retard their civilisation…. At present even a piece of cloth is torn in
shreds and distributed, and no one individual becomes richer than another.
On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise
till there is property of some sort by which he might manifest and still
increase his authority.” In the same book, however, we get a glimpse of
one means by which authority can be exercised. “The doctor-wizard of each
party has much influence over his companions.” Among the Eskimos this
element in the growth of authority also exists. A class of wizards called
Angakut have power to cause fine weather, and, by the gift of second-sight
and magical practices, can detect crimes, so that they necessarily become
a kind of civil magistrates. These Angekkok or Angakut have familiar
spirits called Torngak, a word connected with the name of their chief
spiritual being, Torngarsak. The Torngak is commonly the ghost of a
deceased parent of the sorcerer. “These men,” says Egede, “are held in
great honour and esteem among this stupid and ignorant nation, insomuch
that nobody dare ever refuse the strictest obedience when they command him
in the name of Torngarsak.” The importance and actual existence of belief
in magic has thus been attested by the evidence of institutions, even
among Australians, Fuegians and Eskimos.
It is now necessary to pass from examples of tribes who have superstitious
respect for certain individuals, but who have no property and no chiefs,
to peoples who exhibit the phenomenon of superstitious reverence attached
to wealthy rulers or to judges. To take the example of Ireland, as
described in the Senchus Mor, we learn that the chiefs, just like the
Angakut of the Eskimos, had “power to make fair or foul weather” in the
literal sense of the words.(1) In Africa, in the same way, as Bosman, the
old traveller, says, “As to what difference there is between one negro and
another, the richest man is the most honoured,” yet the most honoured man
has the same magical power as the poor Angakuts of the Eskimos.
(1) Early History of Institutions, p. 195.
“In the Solomon Islands,” says Dr. Codrington, “there is nothing to
prevent a common man from becoming a chief, if he can show that he has the
mana (supernatural power) for it.”(1)
(1) Journ. Anth. Inst., x. iii. 287, 300, 309.
Though it is anticipating a later stage of this inquiry, we must here
observe that the sacredness, and even the magical virtues of barbarous
chiefs seem to have descended to the early leaders of European races. The
children of Odin and of Zeus were “sacred kings”. The Homeric chiefs, like
those of the Zulus and the Red Men, and of the early Irish and Swedes,
exercised an influence over the physical universe. Homer(1) speaks of “a
blameless king, one that fears the gods, and reigns among many men and
mighty, and the black earth bears wheat and barley, and the sheep bring
forth and fail not, and the sea gives store of fish, and all out of his
good sovereignty”.
(1) Od., xix. 109.
The attributes usually assigned by barbarous peoples to their medicine-men
have not yet been exhausted. We have found that they can foresee and
declare the future; that they control the weather and the sensible world;
that they can converse with, visit and employ about their own business the
souls of the dead. It would be easy to show at even greater length that
the medicine-man has everywhere the power of metamorphosis. He can assume
the shapes of all beasts, birds, fishes, insects and inorganic matters,
and he can subdue other people to the same enchantment. This belief
obviously rests on the lack of recognised distinction between man and the
rest of the world, which we have so frequently insisted on as a
characteristic of savage and barbarous thought. Examples of accredited
metamorphosis are so common everywhere, and so well known, that it would
be waste of space to give a long account of them. In Primitive Culture(1)
a cloud of witnesses to the belief in human tigers, hyaenas, leopards and
wolves is collected.(2) Mr. Lane(3) found metamorphosis by wizards as
accredited a working belief at Cairo as it is among Abipones, Eskimo, or
the people of Ashangoland. In various parts of Scotland there is a tale of
a witch who was shot at when in the guise of a hare. In this shape she was
wounded, and the same wound was found on her when she resumed her human
appearance. Lafitau, early in the last century, found precisely the same
tale, except that the wizards took the form of birds, not of hares, among
the Red Indians. The birds were wounded by the magical arrows of an old
medicine-man, Shonnoh Koui Eretsi, and these bolts were found in the
bodies of the human culprits. In Japan, as we learn from several stories
in Mr. Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan, people chiefly metamorphose
themselves into foxes and badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras(4) “possess
the power of transforming men into wild beasts, and were much feared
accordingly”. Among the Cakchiquels, a cultivated people of Guatemala, the
very name of the clergy, haleb, was derived from their power of assuming
animal shapes, which they took on as easily as the Homeric gods.(5)
Regnard, the French dramatist, who travelled among the Lapps at the end of
the seventeenth century (1681), says: “They believe witches can turn men
into cats;” and again, “Under the figures of swans, crows, falcons and
geese, they call up tempests and destroy ships”.(6) Among the Bushmen
“sorcerers assume the forms of beasts and jackals”.(7) Dobrizhoffer
(1717-91), a missionary in Paraguay, found that “sorcerers arrogate to
themselves the power of transforming themselves into tigers”.(8) He was
present when the Abipones believed that a conversion of this sort was
actually taking place: “Alas,” cried the people, “his whole body is
beginning to be covered with tiger-spots; his nails are growing”. Near
Loanda, Livingstone found that a “chief may metamorphose himself into a
lion, kill any one he choses, and then resume his proper form”.(9) Among
the Barotse and Balonda, “while persons are still alive they may enter
into lions and alligators”.(10) Among the Mayas of Central America
“sorcerers could transform themselves into dogs, pigs and other animals;
their glance was death to a victim”.(11) The Thlinkeets think that their
Shamans can metamorphose themselves into animals at pleasure; and a very
old raven was pointed out to Mr. C. E. S. Wood as an incarnation of the
soul of a Shaman.(12) Sir A. C. Lyall finds a similar belief in
flourishing existence in India. The European superstition of the were-wolf
is too well known to need description. Perhaps the most curious legend is
that told by Giraldus Cambrensis about a man and his wife metamorphosed
into wolves by an abbot. They retained human speech, made exemplary
professions of Christian faith, and sent for priests when they found their
last hours approaching. In an old Norman ballad a girl is transformed into
a white doe, and hunted and slain by her brother’s hounds. The
“aboriginal” peoples of India retain similar convictions. Among the
Hos,(13) an old sorcerer called Pusa was known to turn himself habitually
into a tiger, and to eat his neighbour’s goats, and even their wives.
Examples of the power of sorcerers to turn, as with the Gorgon’s head,
their enemies into stone, are peculiarly common in America.(14) Hearne
found that the Indians believed they descended from a dog, who could turn
himself into a handsome young man.(15)
(1) Vol. i. pp. 309-315.
(2) See also M’Lennan on Lykanthropy in Encyclopedia Britannica.
(3) Arabian Nights, i. 51.
(4) Bancroft, Races of Pacific Coast, i. 740.
(5) Brinton, Annals of the Cakchiquels, p. 46.
(6) Pinkerton, i. 471.
(7) Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 15, 40.
(8) English translation of Dobrizhoffer’s Abipones, i. 163.
(9) Missionary Travels, p. 615.
(10) Livingstone, p. 642.
(11) Bancroft, ii.
(12) Century Magazine, July, 1882.
(13) Dalton’s Ethnology of Bengal, p. 200.
(14) Dorman, pp. 130, 134; Report of Ethnological Bureau, Washington,
1880-81.
(15) A Journey, etc., p. 342.
Let us recapitulate the powers attributed all over the world, by the lower
people, to medicine-men. The medicine-man has all miracles at his command.
He rules the sky, he flies into the air, he becomes visible or invisible
at will, he can take or confer any form at pleasure, and resume his human
shape. He can control spirits, can converse with the dead, and can descend
to their abodes.
When we begin to examine the gods of MYTHOLOGY, savage or civilised, as
distinct from deities contemplated, in devotion, as moral and creative
guardians of ethics, we shall find that, with the general, though not
invariable addition of immortality, they possess the very same
accomplishments as the medicine-man, peay, tohunga, jossakeed, birraark,
or whatever name for sorcerer we may choose. Among the Greeks, Zeus,
mythically envisaged, enjoys in heaven all the attributes of the
medicine-man; among the Iroquois, as Pere le Jeune, the old Jesuit
missionary, observed,(1) the medicine-man enjoys on earth all the
attributes of Zeus. Briefly, the miraculous and supernatural endowments of
the gods of MYTH, whether these gods be zoomorphic or anthropomorphic, are
exactly the magical properties with which the medicine-man is credited by
his tribe. It does not at all follow, as Euemerus and Mr. Herbert Spencer
might argue, that the god was once a real living medicine-man. But
myth-making man confers on the deities of myth the magical powers which he
claims for himself.
(1) Relations (1636), p. 114.
CHAPTER V. NATURE MYTHS.
Savage fancy, curiosity and credulity illustrated in nature myths—In
these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general animation of
everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis—Sun myths, Asian,
Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, Californian, Brazilian, Maori,
Samoan—Moon myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican, Zulu, Macassar,
Greenland, Piute, Malay—Thunder myths—Greek and Aryan sun and
moon myths—Star myths—Myths, savage and civilised, of animals,
accounting for their marks and habits—Examples of custom of claiming
blood kinship with lower animals—Myths of various plants and trees—Myths
of stones, and of metamorphosis into stones, Greek, Australian and
American—The whole natural philosophy of savages expressed in myths,
and survives in folk-lore and classical poetry; and legends of
metamorphosis.
The intellectual condition of savages which has been presented and
established by the evidence both of observers and of institutions, may now
be studied in savage myths. These myths, indeed, would of themselves
demonstrate that the ideas which the lower races entertain about the world
correspond with our statement. If any one were to ask himself, from what
mental conditions do the following savage stories arise? he would
naturally answer that the minds which conceived the tales were curious,
indolent, credulous of magic and witchcraft, capable of drawing no line
between things and persons, capable of crediting all things with human
passions and resolutions. But, as myths analogous to those of savages,
when found among civilised peoples, have been ascribed to a psychological
condition produced by a disease of language acting after civilisation had
made considerable advances, we cannot take the savage myths as proof of
what savages think, believe and practice in the course of daily life. To
do so would be, perhaps, to argue in a circle. We must therefore study the
myths of the undeveloped races in themselves.
These myths form a composite whole, so complex and so nebulous that it is
hard indeed to array them in classes and categories. For example, if we
look at myths concerning the origin of various phenomena, we find that
some introduce the action of gods or extra-natural beings, while others
rest on a rude theory of capricious evolution; others, again, invoke the
aid of the magic of mortals, and most regard the great natural forces, the
heavenly bodies, and the animals, as so many personal characters capable
of voluntarily modifying themselves or of being modified by the most
trivial accidents. Some sort of arrangement, however, must be attempted,
only the student is to understand that the lines are never drawn with
definite fixity, that any category may glide into any other category of
myth.
We shall begin by considering some nature myths—myths, that is to
say, which explain the facts of the visible universe. These range from
tales about heaven, day, night, the sun and the stars, to tales accounting
for the red breast of the ousel, the habits of the quail, the spots and
stripes of wild beasts, the formation of rocks and stones, the foliage of
trees, the shapes of plants. In a sense these myths are the science of
savages; in a sense they are their sacred history; in a sense they are
their fiction and romance. Beginning with the sun, we find, as Mr. Tylor
says, that “in early philosophy throughout the world the sun and moon are
alive, and, as it were, human in their nature”.(1) The mass of these solar
myths is so enormous that only a few examples can be given, chosen almost
at random out of the heap. The sun is regarded as a personal being,
capable not only of being affected by charms and incantations, but of
being trapped and beaten, of appearing on earth, of taking a wife of the
daughters of men. Garcilasso de la Vega has a story of an Inca prince, a
speculative thinker, who was puzzled by the sun-worship of his ancestors.
If the sun be thus all-powerful, the Inca inquired, why is he plainly
subject to laws? why does he go his daily round, instead of wandering at
large up and down the fields of heaven? The prince concluded that there
was a will superior to the sun’s will, and he raised a temple to the
Unknown Power. Now the phenomena which put the Inca on the path of
monotheistic religion, a path already traditional, according to
Garcilasso, have also struck the fancy of savages. Why, they ask, does the
sun run his course like a tamed beast? A reply suited to a mind which
holds that all things are personal is given in myths. Some one caught and
tamed the sun by physical force or by art magic.
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 288.
In Australia the myth says that there was a time when the sun did not set.
“It was at all times day, and the blacks grew weary.” Norralie considered
and decided that the sun should disappear at intervals. He addressed the
sun in an incantation (couched like the Finnish Kalewala in the metre of
Longfellow’s Hiawatha); and the incantation is thus interpreted: “Sun,
sun, burn your wood, burn your internal substance, and go down”. The sun
therefore now burns out his fuel in a day, and goes below for fresh
firewood.(1)
(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 430.
In New Zealand the taming of the sun is attributed to the great hero Maui,
the Prometheus of the Maoris. He set snares to catch the sun, but in vain,
for the sun’s rays bit them through. According to another account, while
Norralie wished to hasten the sun’s setting, Maui wanted to delay it, for
the sun used to speed through the heavens at a racing pace. Maui therefore
snared the sun, and beat him so unmercifully that he has been lame ever
since, and travels slowly, giving longer days. “The sun, when beaten,
cried out and revealed his second great name, Taura-mis-te-ra.”(1) It will
be remembered that Indra, in his abject terror when he fled after the
slaying of Vrittra, also revealed his mystic name. In North America the
same story of the trapping and laming of the sun is told, and attributed
to a hero named Tcha-ka-betch. In Samoa the sun had a child by a Samoan
woman. He trapped the sun with a rope made of a vine and extorted
presents. Another Samoan lassoed the sun and made him promise to move more
slowly.(2) These Samoan and Australian fancies are nearly as dignified as
the tale in the Aitareya Brahmana. The gods, afraid “that the sun would
fall out of heaven, pulled him up and tied him with five ropes”. These
ropes are recognised as verses in the ritual, but probably the ritual is
later than the ropes. In Mexico we find that the sun himself (like the
stars in most myths) was once a human or pre-human devotee, Nanahuatzin,
who leapt into a fire to propitiate the gods.(3) Translated to heaven as
the sun, Nanahuatzin burned so very fiercely that he threatened to reduce
the world to a cinder. Arrows were therefore shot at him, and this
punishment had as happy an effect as the beatings administered by Maui and
Tcha-ka-betch. Among the Bushmen of South Africa the sun was once a man,
from whose armpit a limited amount of light was radiated round his hut.
Some children threw him up into the sky, and there he stuck, and there he
shines.(4) In the Homeric hymn to Helios, as Mr. Max Muller observes, “the
poet looks on Helios as a half god, almost a hero, who had once lived on
earth,” which is precisely the view of the Bushmen.(5) Among the Aztecs
the sun is said to have been attacked by a hunter and grievously wounded
by his arrows.(6) The Gallinomeros, in Central California, seem at least
to know that the sun is material and impersonal. They say that when all
was dark in the beginning, the animals were constantly jostling each
other. After a painful encounter, the hawk and the coyote collected two
balls of inflammable substance; the hawk (Indra was occasionally a hawk)
flew up with them into heaven, and lighted them with sparks from a flint.
There they gave light as sun and moon. This is an exception to the general
rule that the heavenly bodies are regarded as persons. The Melanesian tale
of the bringing of night is a curious contrast to the Mexican, Maori,
Australian and American Indian stories which we have quoted. In Melanesia,
as in Australia, the days were long, indeed endless, and people grew
tired; but instead of sending the sun down below by an incantation when
night would follow in course of nature, the Melanesian hero went to Night
(conceived of as a person) and begged his assistance. Night (Qong)
received Qat (the hero) kindly, darkened his eyes, gave him sleep, and, in
twelve hours or so, crept up from the horizon and sent the sun crawling to
the west.(7) In the same spirit Paracelsus is said to have attributed
night, not to the absence of the sun, but to the apparition of certain
stars which radiate darkness. It is extraordinary that a myth like the
Melanesian should occur in Brazil. There was endless day till some one
married a girl whose father “the great serpent,” was the owner of night.
The father sent night bottled up in a gourd. The gourd was not to be
uncorked till the messengers reached the bride, but they, in their
curiosity, opened the gourd, and let night out prematurely.(8)
(1) Taylor, New Zealand, p. 131.
(2) Turner, Samoa, p. 20.
(3) Sahagun, French trans., vii. ii.
(4) Bleck, Hottentot Fables, p. 67; Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 9, 11.
(5) Compare a Californian solar myth: Bancroft, iii. pp. 85, 86.
(6) Bancroft, iii. 73, quoting Burgoa, i. 128, 196.
(7) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.
(8) Contes Indiens du Bresil, pp. 1-9, by Couto de Magalhaes. Rio de
Janeiro, 1883. M. Henri Gaidoz kindly presented the author with this work.
The myths which have been reported deal mainly with the sun as a person
who shines, and at fixed intervals disappears. His relations with the moon
are much more complicated, and are the subject of endless stories, all
explaining in a romantic fashion why the moon waxes and wanes, whence come
her spots, why she is eclipsed, all starting from the premise that sun and
moon are persons with human parts and passions. Sometimes the moon is a
man, sometimes a woman and the sex of the sun varies according to the
fancy of the narrators. Different tribes of the same race, as among the
Australians, have different views of the sex of moon and sun. Among the
aborigines of Victoria, the moon, like the sun among the Bushmen, was a
black fellow before he went up into the sky. After an unusually savage
career, he was killed with a stone hatchet by the wives of the eagle, and
now he shines in the heavens.(1) Another myth explanatory of the moon’s
phases was found by Mr. Meyer in 1846 among the natives of Encounter Bay.
According to them the moon is a woman, and a bad woman to boot. She lives
a life of dissipation among men, which makes her consumptive, and she
wastes away till they drive her from their company. While she is in
retreat, she lives on nourishing roots, becomes quite plump, resumes her
gay career, and again wastes away. The same tribe, strangely enough, think
that the sun also is a woman. Every night she descends among the dead, who
stand in double lines to greet her and let her pass. She has a lover among
the dead, who has presented her with a red kangaroo skin, and in this she
appears at her rising. Such is the view of rosy-fingered Dawn entertained
by the blacks of Encounter Bay. In South America, among the Muyscas of
Bogota, the moon, Huythaca, is the malevolent wife of the child of the
sun; she was a woman before her husband banished her to the fields of
space.(2) The moon is a man among the Khasias of the Himalaya, and he was
guilty of the unpardonable offence of admiring his mother-in-law. As a
general rule, the mother-in-law is not even to be spoken to by the savage
son-in-law. The lady threw ashes in his face to discourage his passion,
hence the moon’s spots. The waning of the moon suggested the most
beautiful and best known of savage myths, that in which the moon sends a
beast to tell mortals that, though they die like her, like her they shall
be born again.(3) Because the spots in the moon were thought to resemble a
hare they were accounted for in Mexico by the hypothesis that a god smote
the moon in the face with a rabbit;(4) in Zululand and Thibet by a fancied
translation of a good or bad hare to the moon.
(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 432.
(2) Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 353.
(3) Bleek, Reynard in South Africa, pp. 69-74.
(4) Sahagun, viii. 2.
The Eskimos have a peculiar myth to account for the moon’s spots. Sun and
moon were human brother and sister. In the darkness the moon once
attempted the virtue of the sun. She smeared his face over with ashes,
that she might detect him when a light was brought. She did discover who
her assailant had been, fled to the sky, and became the sun. The moon
still pursues her, and his face is still blackened with the marks of
ashes.(1) Gervaise(2) says that in Macassar the moon was held to be with
child by the sun, and that when he pursued her and wished to beat her, she
was delivered of the earth. They are now reconciled. About the alternate
appearance of sun and moon a beautifully complete and adequate tale is
told by the Piute Indians of California. No more adequate and scientific
explanation could possibly be offered, granting the hypothesis that sun
and moon are human persons and savage persons. The myth is printed as it
was taken down by Mr. De Quille from the lips of Tooroop Eenah (Desert
Father), a chief of the Piutes, and published in a San Francisco
newspaper.
(1) Crantz’s History of Greenland, i. 212.
(2) Royaume de Macacar, 1688.
“The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief. The
moon is his wife and the stars are their children. The sun eats his
children whenever he can catch them. They flee before him, and are all the
time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their father)
appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of
sight—go away back into the blue of the above—and they do not
wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed.
“Down deep under the ground—deep, deep, under all the ground—is
a great hole. At night, when he has passed over the world, looked down on
everything and finished his work, he, the sun, goes into his hole, and he
crawls and creeps along it till he comes to his bed in the middle part of
the earth. So then he, the sun, sleeps there in his bed all night.
“This hole is so little, and he, the sun, is so big, that he cannot turn
round in it; and so he must, when he has had all his sleep, pass on
through, and in the morning we see him come out in the east. When he, the
sun, has so come out, he begins to hunt up through the sky to catch and
eat any that he can of the stars, his children, for if he does not so
catch and eat he cannot live. He, the sun, is not all seen. The shape of
him is like a snake or a lizard. It is not his head that we can see, but
his belly, filled up with the stars that times and times he has swallowed.
“The moon is the mother of the heavens and is the wife of the sun. She,
the moon, goes into the same hole as her husband to sleep her naps. But
always she has great fear of the sun, her husband, and when he comes
through the hole to the nobee (tent) deep in the ground to sleep, she gets
out and comes away if he be cross.
“She, the moon, has great love for her children, the stars, and is happy
to travel among them in the above; and they, her children, feel safe, and
sing and dance as she passes along. But the mother, she cannot help that
some of her children must be swallowed by the father every month. It is
ordered that way by the Pah-ah (Great Spirit), who lives above the place
of all.
“Every month that father, the sun, does swallow some of the stars, his
children, and then that mother, the moon, feels sorrow. She must mourn; so
she must put the black on her face for to mourn the dead. You see the
Piute women put black on their faces when a child is gone. But the dark
will wear away from the face of that mother, the moon, a little and a
little every day, and after a time again we see all bright the face of
her. But soon more of her children are gone, and again she must put on her
face the pitch and the black.”
Here all the phenomena are accounted for, and the explanation is as
advanced as the Egyptian doctrine of the hole under the earth where the
sun goes when he passes from our view. And still the Great Spirit is over
all: Religion comes athwart Myth.
Mr. Tylor quotes(1) a nature myth about sun, moon and stars which
remarkably corresponds to the speculation of the Piutes. The Mintira of
the Malayan Peninsula say that both sun and moon are women. The stars are
the moon’s children; once the sun had as many. They each agreed (like the
women of Jerusalem in the famine), to eat their own children; but the sun
swallowed her whole family, while the moon concealed hers. When the sun
saw this she was exceedingly angry, and pursued the moon to kill her.
Occasionally she gets a bite out of the moon, and that is an eclipse. The
Hos of North-East India tell the same tale, but say that the sun cleft the
moon in twain for her treachery, and that she continues to be cut in two
and grow again every month. With these sun and moon legends sometimes
coexists the RELIGIOUS belief in a Creator of these and of all things.
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 356.
In harmony with the general hypothesis that all objects in nature are
personal, and human or bestial, in real shape, and in passion and habits,
are the myths which account for eclipses. These have so frequently been
published and commented on(1) that a long statement would be tedious and
superfluous. To the savage mind, and even to the Chinese and the peasants
of some European countries, the need of an explanation is satisfied by the
myth that an evil beast is devouring the sun or the moon. The people even
try by firing off guns, shrieking, and clashing cymbals, to frighten the
beast (wolf, pig, dragon, or what not) from his prey. What the hungry
monster in the sky is doing when he is not biting the sun or moon we are
not informed. Probably he herds with the big bird whose wings, among the
Dacotahs of America and the Zulus of Africa, make thunder; or he may
associate with the dragons, serpents, cows and other aerial cattle which
supply the rain, and show themselves in the waterspout. Chinese,
Greenland, Hindoo, Finnish, Lithunian and Moorish examples of the myth
about the moon-devouring beasts are vouched for by Grimm.(2) A Mongolian
legend has it that the gods wished to punish the maleficent Arakho for his
misdeeds, but Arakho hid so cleverly that their limited omnipotence could
not find him. The sun, when asked to turn spy, gave an evasive answer. The
moon told the truth. Arakho was punished, and ever since he chases sun and
moon. When he nearly catches either of them, there is an eclipse, and the
people try to drive him off by making a hideous uproar with musical and
other instruments.(3) Captain Beeckman in 1704 was in Borneo, when the
natives declared that the devil “was eating the moon”.
(1) Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i.; Lefebure, Les Yeux d’Horus.
(2) Teutonic Mythology, English trans., ii. 706.
(3) Moon-Lore by Rev. T. Harley, p. 167.
Dr. Brinton in his Myths and Myth-Makers gives examples from Peruvians,
Tupis, Creeks, Iroquois and Algonkins. It would be easy, and is perhaps
superfluous, to go on multiplying proofs of the belief that sun and moon
are, or have been, persons. In the Hervey Isles these two luminaries are
thought to have been made out of the body of a child cut in twain by his
parents. The blood escaped from the half which is the moon, hence her
pallor.(1) This tale is an exception to the general rule, but reminds us
of the many myths which represent the things in the world as having been
made out of a mutilated man, like the Vedic Purusha. It is hardly
necessary, except by way of record, to point out that the Greek myths of
sun and moon, like the myths of savages, start from the conception of the
solar and lunar bodies as persons with parts and passions, human loves and
human sorrows. As in the Mongolian myth of Arakho, the sun “sees all and
hears all,” and, less honourable than the Mongolian sun, he plays the spy
for Hephaestus on the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. He has mistresses and
human children, such as Circe and Aeetes.(2)
(1) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 45.
(2) See chapter on Greek Divine Myths.
The sun is all-seeing and all-penetrating. In a Greek song of to-day a
mother sends a message to an absent daughter by the sun; it is but an
unconscious repetition of the request of the dying Ajax that the heavenly
body will tell his fate to his old father and his sorrowing spouse.(1)
(1) Sophocles, Ajax, 846.
Selene, the moon, like Helios, the sun, was a person, and amorous. Beloved
by Zeus, she gave birth to Pandia, and Pan gained her affection by the
simple rustic gift of a fleece.(1) The Australian Dawn, with her present
of a red kangaroo skin, was not more lightly won than the chaste Selene.
Her affection for Endymion is well known, and her cold white glance shines
through the crevices of his mountain grave, hewn in a rocky wall, like the
tombs of Phrygia.(2) She is the sister of the sun in Hesiod, the daughter
(by his sister) of Hyperion in the Homeric hymns to Helios.
(1) Virgil, Georgics, iii. 391.
(2) Preller, Griech. Myth., i. 163.
In Greece the aspects of sun and moon take the most ideal human forms, and
show themselves in the most gracious myths. But, after all, these retain
in their anthropomorphism the marks of the earliest fancy, the fancy of
Eskimos and Australians. It seems to be commonly thought that the
existence of solar myths is denied by anthropologists. This is a vulgar
error. There is an enormous mass of solar myths, but they are not caused
by “a disease of language,” and—all myths are not solar!
There is no occasion to dwell long on myths of the same character in which
the stars are accounted for as transformed human adventurers. It has often
been shown that this opinion is practically of world-wide distribution.(1)
We find it in Australia, Persia, Greece, among the Bushmen, in North and
South America, among the Eskimos, in ancient Egypt, in New Zealand, in
ancient India—briefly, wherever we look. The Sanskrit forms of these
myths have been said to arise from confusion as to the meaning of words.
But is it credible that, in all languages, however different, the same
kind of unconscious puns should have led to the same mistaken beliefs? As
the savage, barbarous and Greek star-myths (such as that of Callisto,
first changed into a bear and then into a constellation) are familiar to
most readers, a few examples of Sanskrit star-stories are offered here
from the Satapatha Brahmana.(2) Fires are not, according to the Brahmana
ritual, to be lighted under the stars called Krittikas, the Pleiades. The
reason is that the stars were the wives of the bears (Riksha), for the
group known in Brahmanic times as the Rishis (sages) were originally
called the Rikshas (bears). But the wives of the bears were excluded from
the society of their husbands, for the bears rise in the north and their
wives in the east. Therefore the worshipper should not set up his fires
under the Pleiades, lest he should thereby be separated from the company
of his wife. The Brahmanas(3) also tell us that Prajapati had an unholy
passion for his daughter, who was in the form of a doe. The gods made
Rudra fire an arrow at Prajapati to punish him; he was wounded, and leaped
into the sky, where he became one constellation and his daughter another,
and the arrow a third group of stars. In general, according to the
Brahmanas, “the stars are the lights of virtuous men who go to the
heavenly world”.(4)
(1) Custom and Myth, “Star-Myths”; Primitive Culture, i. 288, 291; J. G.
Muller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 52, 53.
(2) Sacred Books of the East, i. 283-286.
(3) Aitareya Bramana, iii. 33.
(4) Satapatha Brahmana, vi. 5, 4, 8. For Greek examples, Hesiod, Ovid, and
the Catasterismoi, attributed to Eratosthenes, are useful authorities.
Probably many of the tales in Eratosthenes are late fictions consciously
moulded on traditional data.
Passing from savage myths explanatory of the nature of celestial bodies to
myths accounting for the formation and colour and habits of beasts, birds
and fishes, we find ourselves, as an old Jesuit missionary says, in the
midst of a barbarous version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It has been shown
that the possibility of interchange of form between man and beast is part
of the working belief of everyday existence among the lower peoples. They
regard all things as on one level, or, to use an old political phrase,
they “level up” everything to equality with the human status. Thus Mr. Im
Thurn, a very good observer, found that to the Indians of Guiana “all
objects, animate or inaminate, seem exactly of the same nature, except
that they differ by the accident of bodily form”. Clearly to grasp this
entirely natural conception of primitive man, the civilised student must
make a great effort to forget for a time all that science has taught him
of the differences between the objects which fill the world.(1) “To the
ear of the savage, animals certainly seem to talk.” “As far as the Indians
of Guiana are concerned, I do not believe that they distinguish such
beings as sun and moon, or such other natural phenomena as winds and
storms, from men and other animals, from plants and other inanimate
objects, or from any other objects whatsoever.” Bancroft says about North
American myths, “Beasts and birds and fishes fetch and carry, talk and
act, in a way that leaves even Aesop’s heroes quite in the shade”.(2)
(1) Journ. Anthrop. Inst., xi. 366-369. A very large and rich collection
of testimonies as to metamorphosis will be found in J. G. Muller’s
Amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 62 et seq.; while, for European
superstitions, Bodin on La Demonomanie des Sorciers, Lyon, 1598, may be
consulted.
(2) Vol. iii. p. 127.
The savage tendency is to see in inanimate things animals, and in animals
disguised men. M. Reville quotes in his Religions des Peuples
Non-Civilise’s, i. 64, the story of some Negroes, who, the first time they
were shown a cornemuse, took the instrument for a beast, the two holes for
its eyes. The Highlander who looted a watch at Prestonpans, and observing,
“She’s teed,” sold it cheap when it ran down, was in the same
psychological condition. A queer bit of savage science is displayed on a
black stone tobacco-pipe from the Pacific Coast.(1) The savage artist has
carved the pipe in the likeness of a steamer, as a steamer is conceived by
him. “Unable to account for the motive power, he imagines the paddle to be
linked round the tongue of a coiled serpent, fastened to the tail of the
vessel,” and so he represents it on the black stone pipe. Nay, a savage’s
belief that beasts are on his own level is so literal, that he actually
makes blood-covenants with the lower animals, as he does with men,
mingling his gore with theirs, or smearing both together on a stone;(2)
while to bury dead animals with sacred rites is as usual among the
Bedouins and Malagasies to-day as in ancient Egypt or Attica. In the same
way the Ainos of Japan, who regard the bear as a kinsman, sacrifice a bear
once a year. But, to propitiate the animal and his connections, they
appoint him a “mother,” an Aino girl, who looks after his comforts, and
behaves in a way as maternal as possible. The bear is now a kinsman,
(Greek text omitted), and cannot avenge himself within the kin. This, at
least, seems to be the humour of it. In Lagarde’s Reliquiae Juris
Ecclesiastici Antiquissimae a similar Syrian covenant of kinship with
insects is described. About 700 A. D., when a Syrian garden was infested
by caterpillars, the maidens were assembled, and one caterpillar was
caught. Then one of the virgins was “made its mother,” and the creature
was buried with due lamentations. The “mother” was then brought to the
spot where the pests were, her companions bewailed her, and the
caterpillars perished like their chosen kinsman, but without extorting
revenge.(3) Revenge was out of their reach. They had been brought within
the kin of their foes, and there were no Erinnyes, “avengers of kindred
blood,” to help them. People in this condition of belief naturally tell
hundreds of tales, in which men, stones, trees, beasts, shift shapes, and
in which the modifications of animal forms are caused by accident, or by
human agency, or by magic, or by metamorphosis. Such tales survive in our
modern folk-lore. To make our meaning clear, we may give the European
nursery-myth of the origin of the donkey’s long ears, and, among other
illustrations, the Australian myth of the origin of the black and white
plumage of the pelican. Mr. Ralston has published the Russian version of
the myth of the donkey’s ears. The Spanish form, which is identical with
the Russian, is given by Fernan Caballero in La Gaviota.
(1) Magazine of Art, January, 1883.
(2) “Malagasy Folk-Tales,” Folk-Lore Journal, October, 1883.
(3) We are indebted to Professor Robertson Smith for this example, and to
Miss Bird’s Journal, pp. 90, 97, for the Aino parallel.
“Listen! do you know why your ears are so big?” (the story is told to a
stupid little boy with big ears). “When Father Adam found himself in
Paradise with the animals, he gave each its name; those of THY species, my
child, he named ‘donkeys’. One day, not long after, he called the beasts
together, and asked each to tell him its name. They all answered right
except the animals of THY sort, and they had forgotten their name! Then
Father Adam was very angry, and, taking that forgetful donkey by the ears,
he pulled them out, screaming ‘You are called DONKEY!’ And the donkey’s
ears have been long ever since.” This, to a child, is a credible
explanation. So, perhaps, is another survival of this form of science—the
Scotch explanation of the black marks on the haddock; they were impressed
by St. Peter’s finger and thumb when he took the piece of money for
Caesar’s tax out of the fish’s mouth.
Turning from folk-lore to savage beliefs, we learn that from one end of
Africa to another the honey-bird, schneter, is said to be an old woman
whose son was lost, and who pursued him till she was turned into a bird,
which still shrieks his name, “Schneter, Schneter”.(1) In the same way the
manners of most of the birds known to the Greeks were accounted for by the
myth that they had been men and women. Zeus, for example, turned Ceyx and
Halcyon into sea-fowls because they were too proud in their married
happiness.(2) To these myths of the origin of various animals we shall
return, but we must not forget the black and white Australian pelican. Why
is the pelican parti-coloured?(3) For this reason: After the Flood (the
origin of which is variously explained by the Murri), the pelican (who had
been a black fellow) made a canoe, and went about like a kind of Noah,
trying to save the drowning. In the course of his benevolent mission he
fell in love with a woman, but she and her friends played him a trick and
escaped from him. The pelican at once prepared to go on the war-path. The
first thing to do was to daub himself white, as is the custom of the
blacks before a battle. They think the white pipe-clay strikes terror and
inspires respect among the enemy. But when the pelican was only half
pipe-clayed, another pelican came past, and, “not knowing what such a
queer black and white thing was, struck the first pelican with his beak
and killed him. Before that pelicans were all black; now they are black
and white. That is the reason.”(4)
(1) Barth, iii. 358.
(2) Apollodorus, i. 7 (13, 12).
(3) Sahagun, viii. 2, accounts for colours of eagle and tiger. A number of
races explain the habits and marks of animals as the result of a curse or
blessing of a god or hero. The Hottentots, the Huarochiri of Peru, the New
Zealanders (Shortland, Traditions, p. 57), are among the peoples which use
this myth.
(4) Brough Symth, Aborigines of Australia, i. 477, 478.
“That is the reason.” Therewith native philosopy is satisfied, and does
not examine in Mr. Darwin’s laborious manner the slow evolution of the
colour of the pelican’s plumage. The mythological stories about animals
are rather difficult to treat, because they are so much mixed up with the
topic of totemism. Here we only examine myths which account by means of a
legend for certain peculiarities in the habits, cries, or colours and
shapes of animals. The Ojibbeways told Kohl they had a story for every
creature, accounting for its ways and appearance. Among the Greeks, as
among Australians and Bushmen, we find that nearly every notable bird or
beast had its tradition. The nightingale and the swallow have a story of
the most savage description, a story reported by Apollodorus, though
Homer(1) refers to another, and, as usual, to a gentler and more refined
form of the myth. Here is the version of Apollodorus. “Pandion” (an early
king of Athens) “married Zeuxippe, his mother’s sister, by whom he had two
daughters, Procne and Philomela, and two sons, Erechtheus and Butes. A war
broke out with Labdas about some debatable land, and Erechtheus invited
the alliance of Tereus of Thrace, the son of Ares. Having brought the war,
with the aid of Tereus, to a happy end, he gave him his daughter Procne to
wife. By Procne, Tereus had a son, Itys, and thereafter fell in love with
Philomela, whom he seduced, pretending that Procne was dead, whereas he
had really concealed her somewhere in his lands. Thereon he married
Philomela, and cut out her tongue. But she wove into a robe characters
that told the whole story, and by means of these acquainted Procne with
her sufferings. Thereon Procne found her sister, and slew Itys, her own
son, whose body she cooked, and served up to Tereus in a banquet.
Thereafter Procne and her sister fled together, and Tereus seized an axe
and followed after them. They were overtaken at Daulia in Phocis, and
prayed to the gods that they might be turned into birds. So Procne became
the nightingale, and Philomela the swallow, while Tereus was changed into
a hoopoe.”(2) Pausanias has a different legend; Procne and Philomela died
of excessive grief.
(1) Odyssey, xix. 523.
(2) A Red Indian nightingale-myth is alluded to by J. G. Muller, Amerik.
Urrel., p. 175. Some one was turned into a nightingale by the sun, and
still wails for a lost lover.
These ancient men and women metamorphosed into birds were HONOURED AS
ANCESTORS by the Athenians.(1) Thus the unceasing musical wail of the
nightingale and the shrill cry of the swallow were explained by a Greek
story. The birds were lamenting their old human sorrow, as the honey-bird
in Africa still repeats the name of her lost son.
(1) Pausanias, i. v. Pausanias thinks such things no longer occur.
Why does the red-robin live near the dwellings of men, a bold and friendly
bird? The Chippeway Indians say he was once a young brave whose father set
him a task too cruel for his strength, and made him starve too long when
he reached man’s estate. He turned into a robin, and said to his father,
“I shall always be the friend of man, and keep near their dwellings. I
could not gratify your pride as a warrior, but I will cheer you by my
songs.”(1) The converse of this legend is the Greek myth of the hawk. Why
is the hawk so hated by birds? Hierax was a benevolent person who
succoured a race hated by Poseidon. The god therefore changed him into a
hawk, and made him as much detested by birds, and as fatal to them, as he
had been beloved by and gentle to men.(2) The Hervey Islanders explain the
peculiarities of several fishes by the share they took in the adventures
of Ina, who stamped, for example, on the sole, and so flattened him for
ever.(3) In Greece the dolphins were, according to the Homeric hymn to
Dionysus, metamorphosed pirates who had insulted the god. But because the
dolphin found the hidden sea-goddess whom Poseidon loved, the dolphin,
too, was raised by the grateful sea-god to the stars.(4) The vulture and
the heron, according to Boeo (said to have been a priestess in Delphi and
the author of a Greek treatise on the traditions about birds), were once a
man named Aigupios (vulture) and his mother, Boulis. They sinned
inadvertently, like Oedipus and Jocasta; wherefore Boulis, becoming aware
of the guilt, was about to put out the eyes of her son and slay herself.
Then they were changed, Boulis into the heron, “which tears out and feeds
on the eyes of snakes, birds and fishes, and Aigupios into the vulture
which bears his name”. This story, of which the more repulsive details are
suppressed, is much less pleasing and more savage than the Hervey
Islanders’ myth of the origin of pigs. Maaru was an old blind man who
lived with his son Kationgia. There came a year of famine, and Kationgia
had great difficulty in finding food for himself and his father. He gave
the blind old man puddings of banana roots and fishes, while he lived
himself on sea-slugs and shellfish, like the people of Terra del Fuego.
But blind old Maaru suspected his son of giving him the worst share and
keeping what was best for himself. At last he discovered that Kationgia
was really being starved; he felt his body, and found that he was a mere
living skeleton. The two wept together, and the father made a feast of
some cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit, which he had reserved against the last
extremity. When all was finished, he said he had eaten his last meal and
was about to die. He ordered his son to cover him with leaves and grass,
and return to the spot in four days. If worms were crawling about, he was
to throw leaves and grass over them and come back four days later.
Kationgia did as he was instructed, and, on his second visit to the grave,
found the whole mass of leaves in commotion. A brood of pigs, black, white
and speckled, had sprung up from the soil; famine was a thing of the past,
and Kationgia became a great chief in the island.(5)
(1) Schoolcraft, ii. 229, 230.
(1) Boeo, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis.
(3) Gill, South Sea Myths, pp. 88-95.
(4) Artemidorus in his Love Elegies, quoted by the Pseud-Eratosthenes.
(5) Gill, Myths and Songs from South Pacific, pp. 135-138.
“The owl was a baker’s daughter” is the fragment of Christian mythology
preserved by Ophelia. The baker’s daughter behaved rudely to our Lord, and
was changed into the bird that looks not on the sun. The Greeks had a
similar legend of feminine impiety by which they mythically explained the
origin of the owl, the bat and the eagle-owl. Minyas of Orchomenos had
three daughters, Leucippe, Arsippe and Alcathoe, most industrious women,
who declined to join the wild mysteries of Dionysus. The god took the
shape of a maiden, and tried to win them to his worship. They refused, and
he assumed the form of a bull, a lion, and a leopard as easily as the
chiefs of the Abipones become tigers, or as the chiefs among the African
Barotse and Balonda metamorphose themselves into lions and alligators.(1)
The daughters of Minyas, in alarm, drew lots to determine which of them
should sacrifice a victim to the god. Leucippe drew the lot and offered up
her own son. They then rushed to join the sacred rites of Dionysus, when
Hermes transformed them into the bat, the owl and the eagle-owl, and these
three hide from the light of the sun.(2)
(1) Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 615, 642.
(2) Nicander, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis.
A few examples of Bushman and Australian myths explanatory of the colours
and habits of animals will probably suffice to establish the resemblance
between savage and Hellenic legends of this character. The Bushman myth
about the origin of the eland (a large antelope) is not printed in full by
Dr. Bleek, but he observes that it “gives an account of the reasons for
the colours of the gemsbok, hartebeest, eland, quagga and springbok”.(1)
Speculative Bushmen seem to have been puzzled to account for the wildness
of the eland. It would be much more convenient if the eland were tame and
could be easily captured. They explain its wildness by saying that the
eland was “spoiled” before Cagn, the creator, or rather maker of most
things, had quite finished it. Cagn’s relations came and hunted the first
eland too soon, after which all other elands grew wild. Cagn then said,
“Go and hunt them and try to kill one; that is now your work, for it was
you who spoilt them”.(2) The Bushmen have another myth explanatory of the
white patches on the breasts of crows in their country. Some men tarried
long at their hunting, and their wives sent out crows in search of their
husbands. Round each crow’s neck was hung a piece of fat to serve as food
on the journey. Hence the crows have white patches on breast and neck.
(1) Brief Account of Bushmen Folk-Lore, p. 7.
(2) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.
In Australia the origins of nearly all animals appear to be explained in
myths, of which a fair collection is printed in Mr. Brough Symth’s
Aborigines of Victoria.(1) Still better examples occur in Mrs. Langloh
Parker’s Australian Legends. Why is the crane so thin? Once he was a man
named Kar-ween, the second man fashioned out of clay by Pund-jel, a
singular creative being, whose chequered career is traced elsewhere in our
chapter on “Savage Myths of the Origin of the World and of Man”. Kar-ween
and Pund-jel had a quarrel about the wives of the former, whom Pund-jel
was inclined to admire. The crafty Kar-ween gave a dance (jugargiull,
corobboree), at which the creator Pund-jel was disporting himself gaily
(like the Great Panjandrum), when Kar-ween pinned him with a spear.
Pund-jel threw another which took Kar-ween in the knee-joint, so that he
could not walk, but soon pined away and became a mere skeleton. “Thereupon
Pund-jel made Kar-ween a crane,” and that is why the crane has such
attenuated legs. The Kortume, Munkari and Waingilhe, now birds, were once
men. The two latter behaved unkindly to their friend Kortume, who shot
them out of his hut in a storm of rain, singing at the same time an
incantation. The three then turned into birds, and when the Kortume sings
it is a token that rain may be expected.
(1) Vol. i. p. 426 et seq.
Let us now compare with these Australian myths of the origin of certain
species of birds the Greek story of the origin of frogs, as told by
Menecrates and Nicander.(1) The frogs were herdsmen metamorphosed by Leto,
the mother of Apollo. But, by way of showing how closely akin are the
fancies of Greeks and Australian black fellows, we shall tell the legend
without the proper names, which gave it a fictitious dignity.
(1) Antoninus Liberalis, xxxv.
THE ORIGIN OF FROGS.
“A woman bore two children, and sought for a water-spring wherein to bathe
them. She found a well, but herdsmen drove her away from it that their
cattle might drink. Then some wolves met her and led her to a river, of
which she drank, and in its waters she bathed her children. Then she went
back to the well where the herdsmen were now bathing, and she turned them
all into frogs. She struck their backs and shoulders with a rough stone
and drove them into the waters, and ever since that day frogs live in
marshes and beside rivers.”
A volume might be filled with such examples of the kindred fancies of
Greeks and savages. Enough has probably been said to illustrate our point,
which is that Greek myths of this character were inherited from the period
of savagery, when ideas of metamorphosis and of the kinship of men and
beasts were real practical beliefs. Events conceived to be common in real
life were introduced into myths, and these myths were savage science, and
were intended to account for the Origin of Species. But when once this
train of imagination has been fired, it burns on both in literature and in
the legends of the peasantry. Every one who writes a Christmas tale for
children now employs the machinery of metamorphosis, and in European
folk-lore, as Fontenelle remarked, stories persist which are precisely
similar in kind to the minor myths of savages.
Reasoning in this wise, the Mundas of Bengal thus account for
peculiarities of certain animals. Sing Bonga, the chief god, cast certain
people out of heaven; they fell to earth, found iron ore, and began
smelting it. The black smoke displeased Sing Bonga, who sent two king
crows and an owl to bid people cease to pollute the atmosphere. But the
iron smelters spoiled these birds’ tails, and blackened the previously
white crow, scorched its beak red, and flattened its head. Sing Bonga
burned man, and turned woman into hills and waterspouts.(1)
(1) Dalton, pp. 186, 187.
Examples of this class of myth in Indo-Aryan literature are not hard to
find. Why is dawn red? Why are donkeys slow? Why have mules no young ones?
Mules have no foals because they were severely burned when Agni (fire)
drove them in a chariot race. Dawn is red, not because (as in Australia)
she wears a red kangaroo cloak, but because she competed in this race with
red cows for her coursers. Donkeys are slow because they never recovered
from their exertions in the same race, when the Asvins called on their
asses and landed themselves the winners.(1) And cows are accommodated with
horns for a reason no less probable and satisfactory.(2)
(1) Aitareya Brahmana, ii. 272, iv. 9.
(2) iv. 17.
Though in the legends of the less developed peoples men and women are more
frequently metamorphosed into birds and beasts than into stones and
plants, yet such changes of form are by no means unknown. To the
north-east of Western Point there lies a range of hills, inhabited,
according to the natives of Victoria, by a creature whose body is made of
stone, and weapons make no wound in so sturdy a constitution. The blacks
refuse to visit the range haunted by the mythic stone beast. “Some black
fellows were once camped at the lakes near Shaving Point. They were
cooking their fish when a native dog came up. They did not give him
anything to eat. He became cross and said, ‘You black fellows have lots of
fish, but you give me none’. So he changed them all into a big rock. This
is quite true, for the big rock is there to this day, and I have seen it
with my own eyes.”(1) Another native, Toolabar, says that the women of the
fishing party cried out yacka torn, “very good”. A dog replied yacka torn,
and they were all changed into rocks. This very man, Toolabar, once heard
a dog begin to talk, whereupon he and his father fled. Had they waited
they would have become stones. “We should have been like it, wallung,”
that is, stones.
(1) Native narrator, ap. Brough Smyth, i. 479.
Among the North American Indians any stone which has a resemblance to the
human or animal figure is explained as an example of metamorphosis. Three
stones among the Aricaras were a girl, her lover and her dog, who fled
from home because the course of true love did not run smooth, and who were
petrified. Certain stones near Chinook Point were sea-giants who swallowed
a man. His brother, by aid of fire, dried up the bay and released the man,
still alive, from the body of the giant. Then the giants were turned into
rocks.(1) The rising sun in Popol Vuh (if the evidence of Popol Vuh, the
Quichua sacred book, is to be accepted) changed into stone the lion,
serpent and tiger gods. The Standing Rock on the Upper Missouri is adored
by the Indians, and decorated with coloured ribbons and skins of animals.
This stone was a woman, who, like Niobe, became literally petrified with
grief when her husband took a second wife. Another stone-woman in a cave
on the banks of the Kickapoo was wont to kill people who came near her,
and is even now approached with great respect. The Oneidas and Dacotahs
claim descent from stones to which they ascribe animation.(2) Montesinos
speaks of a sacred stone which was removed from a mountain by one of the
Incas. A parrot flew out of it and lodged in another stone, which the
natives still worship.(3) The Breton myth about one of the great stone
circles (the stones were peasants who danced on a Sunday) is a well-known
example of this kind of myth surviving in folk-lore. There is a kind of
stone Actaeon(4) near Little Muniton Creek, “resembling the bust of a man
whose head is decorated with the horns of a stag”.(5) A crowd of myths of
metamorphosis into stone will be found among the Iroquois legends in
Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1880-81. If men may become stones, on the
other hand, in Samoa (as in the Greek myth of Deucalion), stones may
become men.(6) Gods, too, especially when these gods happen to be
cuttlefish, might be petrified. They were chased in Samoa by an Upolu
hero, who caught them in a great net and killed them. “They were changed
into stones, and now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the north
side of Upolu.”(7) Mauke, the first man, came out of a stone. In short,(8)
men and stones and beasts and gods and thunder have interchangeable forms.
In Mangaia(9) the god Ra was tossed up into the sky by Maui and became
pumice-stone. Many samples of this petrified deity are found in Mangaia.
In Melanesia matters are so mixed that it is not easy to decide whether a
worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead man’s soul or is of spiritual
merit in itself, or whether “the stone is the spirit’s outward part or
organ”. The Vui, or spirit, has much the same relations with snakes, owls
and sharks.(10) Qasavara, the mythical opponent of Qat, the Melanesian
Prometheus, “fell dead from heaven” (like Ra in Mangia), and was turned
into a stone, on which sacrifices are made by those who desire strength in
fighting.
(1) See authorities ap. Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, pp. 130-138.
(2) Dorman, p. 133.
(3) Many examples are collected by J. G. Muller, Amerikanischen
Urreligionen, pp. 97, 110, 125, especially when the stones have a likeness
to human form, p. 17a. “Im der That werden auch einige in Steine, oder in
Thiere and Pflanzen verwandelt.” Cf. p. 220. Instances (from Balboa) of
men turned into stone by wizards, p. 309.
(4) Preller thinks that Actaeon, devoured by his hounds after being
changed into a stag, is a symbol of the vernal year. Palaephatus (De Fab.
Narrat.) holds that the story is a moral fable.
(5) Dorman, p. 137.
(6) Turner’s Samoa, p. 299.
(7) Samoa, p. 31.
(8) Op. cit., p. 34.
(9) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 60.
(10) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.
Without delaying longer among savage myths of metamorphosis into stones,
it may be briefly shown that the Greeks retained this with all the other
vagaries of early fancy. Every one remembers the use which Perseus made of
the Gorgon’s head, and the stones on the coast of Seriphus, which, like
the stones near Western Point in Victoria, had once been men, the enemies
of the hero. “Also he slew the Gorgon,” sings Pindar, “and bare home her
head, with serpent tresses decked, to the island folk a stony death.”
Observe Pindar’s explanatory remark: “I ween there is no marvel impossible
if gods have wrought thereto”. In the same pious spirit a Turk in an isle
of the Levant once told Mr. Newton a story of how a man hunted a stag, and
the stag spoke to him. “The stag spoke?” said Mr. Newton. “Yes, by Allah’s
will,” replied the Turk. Like Pindar, he was repeating an incident quite
natural to the minds of Australians, or Bushmen, or Samoans, or Red Men,
but, like the religious Pindar, he felt that the affair was rather
marvellous, and accounted for it by the exercise of omnipotent power.(1)
The Greek example of Niobe and her children may best be quoted in Mr.
Bridges’ translation from the Iliad:—
In the Iliad it is added that Cronion made the people into stones. The
attitude of the later Greek mind towards these myths may be observed in a
fragment of Philemon, the comic poet. “Never, by the gods, have I
believed, nor will believe, that Niobe the stone was once a woman. Nay, by
reason of her calamities she became speechless, and so, from her silence,
was called a stone.”(3)
(1) Pindar, Pyth. x., Myers’s translation.
(2) xxiv. 611.
(3) The Scholiast on Iliad, xxiv. 6, 7.
There is another famous petrification in the Iliad. When the prodigy of
the snake and the sparrows had appeared to the assembled Achaeans at
Aulis, Zeus displayed a great marvel, and changed into a stone the serpent
which swallowed the young of the sparrow. Changes into stone, though less
common than changes into fishes, birds and beasts, were thus obviously not
too strange for the credulity of Greek mythology, which could also believe
that a stone became the mother of Agdestis by Zeus.
As to interchange of shape between men and women and PLANTS, our
information, so far as the lower races are concerned, is less copious. It
has already been shown that the totems of many stocks in all parts of the
world are plants, and this belief in connection with a plant by itself
demonstrates that the confused belief in all things being on one level has
thus introduced vegetables into the dominion of myth. As far as possessing
souls is concerned, Mr. Tylor has proved that plants are as well equipped
as men or beasts or minerals.(1) In India the doctrine of transmigration
widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being
animated by human souls. In the well-known ancient Egyptian story of “The
Two Brothers,”(2) the life of the younger is practically merged in that of
the acacia tree where he has hidden his heart; and when he becomes a bull
and is sacrificed, his spiritual part passes into a pair of Persea trees.
The Yarucaris of Bolivia say that a girl once bewailed in the forest her
loverless estate. She happened to notice a beautiful tree, which she
adorned with ornaments as well as she might. The tree assumed the shape of
a handsome young man—
J. G. Muller, who quotes this tale from Andree, says it has “many
analogies with the tales of metamorphosis of human beings into trees among
the ancients, as reported by Ovid”. The worship of plants and trees is a
well-known feature in religion, and probably implies (at least in many
cases) a recognition of personality. In Samoa, metamorphosis into
vegetables is not uncommon. For example, the king of Fiji was a cannibal,
and (very naturally) “the people were melting away under him”. The
brothers Toa and Pale, wishing to escape the royal oven, adopted various
changes of shape. They knew that straight timber was being sought for to
make a canoe for the king, so Pale, when he assumed a vegetable form,
became a crooked stick overgrown with creepers, but Toa “preferred
standing erect as a handsome straight tree”. Poor Toa was therefore cut
down by the king’s shipwrights, though, thanks to his brother’s magic
wiles, they did not make a canoe out of him after all.(4) In Samoa the
trees are so far human that they not only go to war with each other, but
actually embark in canoes to seek out distant enemies.(5) The Ottawa
Indians account for the origin of maize by a myth in which a wizard fought
with and conquered a little man who had a little crown of feathers. From
his ashes arose the maize with its crown of leaves and heavy ears of
corn.(6)
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 145; examples of Society Islanders, Dyaks,
Karens, Buddhists.
(2) Maspero, Contes Egyptiens, p. 25.
(3) J. G. Muller, Amerik. Urrel., p. 264.
(4) Turner’s Samoa, p. 219.
(5) Ibid.. p. 213.
(6) Amerik. Urrel., p. 60.
In Mangaia the myth of the origin of the cocoa-nut tree is a series of
transformation scenes, in which the persons shift shapes with the alacrity
of medicine-men. Ina used to bathe in a pool where an eel became quite
familiar with her. At last the fish took courage and made his declaration.
He was Tuna, the chief of all eels. “Be mine,” he cried, and Ina was his.
For some mystical reason he was obliged to leave her, but (like the White
Cat in the fairy tale) he requested her to cut off his eel’s head and bury
it. Regretfully but firmly did Ina comply with his request, and from the
buried eel’s head sprang two cocoa trees, one from each half of the brain
of Tuna. As a proof of this be it remarked, that when the nut is husked we
always find on it “the two eyes and mouth of the lover of Ina”.(1) All
over the world, from ancient Egypt to the wigwams of the Algonkins, plants
and other matters are said to have sprung from a dismembered god or hero,
while men are said to have sprung from plants.(2) We may therefore perhaps
look on it as a proved point that the general savage habit of “levelling
up” prevails even in their view of the vegetable world, and has left
traces (as we have seen) in their myths.
(1) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 79.
(2) Myths of the Beginning of Things.
Turning now to the mythology of Greece, we see that the same rule holds
good. Metamorphosis into plants and flowers is extremely common; the
instances of Daphne, Myrrha, Hyacinth, Narcissus and the sisters of
Phaethon at once occur to the memory.
Most of those myths in which everything in Nature becomes personal and
human, while all persons may become anything in Nature, we explain, then,
as survivals or imitations of tales conceived when men were in the savage
intellectual condition. In that stage, as we demonstrated, no line is
drawn between things animate and inanimate, dumb or “articulate speaking,”
organic or inorganic, personal or impersonal. Such a mental stage, again,
is reflected in the nature-myths, many of which are merely “aetiological,”—assign
a cause, that is, for phenomena, and satisfy an indolent and credulous
curiosity.
We may be asked again, “But how did this intellectual condition come to
exist?” To answer that is no part of our business; for us it is enough to
trace myth, or a certain element in myth, to a demonstrable and actual
stage of thought. But this stage, which is constantly found to survive in
the minds of children, is thus explained or described by Hume in his Essay
on Natural Religion: “There is an universal tendency in mankind to
conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those
qualities… of which they are intimately conscious”.(1) Now they believe
themselves to be conscious of magical and supernatural powers, which they
do not, of course, possess. These powers of effecting metamorphosis, of
“shape-shifting,” of flying, of becoming invisible at will, of conversing
with the dead, of miraculously healing the sick, savages pass on to their
gods (as will be shown in a later chapter), and the gods of myth survive
and retain the miraculous gifts after their worshippers (become more
reasonable) have quite forgotten that they themselves once claimed similar
endowments. So far, then, it has been shown that savage fancy, wherever
studied, is wild; that savage curiosity is keen; that savage credulity is
practically boundless. These considerations explain the existence of
savage myths of sun, stars, beasts, plants and stones; similar myths fill
Greek legend and the Sanskrit Brahmanes. We conclude that, in Greek and
Sanskrit, the myths are relics (whether borrowed or inherited) of the
savage mental STATUS.
(1) See Appendix B.
CHAPTER VI. NON-ARYAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
Confusions of myth—Various origins of man and of things—Myths
of Australia, Andaman Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus,
Hurons, Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldaeans, Thlinkeets,
Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians—Similarity of ideas
pervading all those peoples in various conditions of society and culture.
The difficulties of classification which beset the study of mythology have
already been described. Nowhere are they more perplexing than when we try
to classify what may be styled Cosmogonic Myths. The very word cosmogonic
implies the pre-existence of the idea of a cosmos, an orderly universe,
and this was exactly the last idea that could enter the mind of the
myth-makers. There is no such thing as orderliness in their mythical
conceptions, and no such thing as an universe. The natural question, “Who
made the world, or how did the things in the world come to be?” is the
question which is answered by cosmogonic myths. But it is answered
piecemeal. To a Christian child the reply is given, “God made all things”.
We have known this reply discussed by some little girls of six (a Scotch
minister’s daughters, and naturally metaphysical), one of whom solved all
difficulties by the impromptu myth, “God first made a little place to
stand on, and then he made the rest”. But savages and the myth-makers,
whose stories survive into the civilised religions, could adhere firmly to
no such account as this. Here occurs in the first edition of this book the
following passage: “They (savages) have not, and had not, the conception
of God as we understand what we mean by the word. They have, and had at
most, only the small-change of the idea God,”—here the belief in a
moral being who watches conduct; here again the hypothesis of a pre-human
race of magnified, non-natural medicine-men, or of extra-natural beings
with human and magical attributes, but often wearing the fur, and fins,
and feathers of the lower animals. Mingled with these faiths (whether
earlier, later, or coeval in origin with these) are the dread and love of
ancestral ghosts, often transmuting themselves into worship of an
imaginary and ideal first parent of the tribe, who once more is often a
beast or a bird. Here is nothing like the notion of an omnipotent,
invisible, spiritual being, the creator of our religion; here is only la
monnaie of the conception.”
It ought to have occurred to the author that he was here traversing the
main theory of his own book, which is that RELIGION is one thing, myth
quite another thing. That many low races of savages entertain, in hours of
RELIGIOUS thought, an elevated conception of a moral and undying Maker of
Things, and Master of Life, a Father in Heaven, has already been stated,
and knowledge of the facts has been considerably increased since this work
first appeared (1887). But the MYTHICAL conceptions described in the last
paragraph coexist with the religious conception in the faiths of very low
savages, such as the Australians and Andamanese, just as the same
contradictory coexistence is notorious in ancient Greece, India, Egypt and
Anahuac. In a sense, certain low savages HAVE the “conception of God, as
we understand what we mean by the word”. But that sense, when savages come
to spinning fables about origins, is apt to be overlaid and perplexed by
the frivolity of their mythical fancy.
With such shifting, grotesque and inadequate fables, the cosmogonic myths
of the world are necessarily bewildered and perplexed. We have already
seen in the chapter on “Nature Myths” that many things, sun, moon, the
stars, “that have another birth,” and various animals and plants, are
accounted for on the hypothesis that they are later than the appearance of
man—that they originally WERE men. To the European mind it seems
natural to rank myths of the gods before myths of the making or the
evolution of the world, because our religion, like that of the more
philosophic Greeks, makes the deity the fount of all existences, causa
causans, “what unmoved moves,” the beginning and the end. But the
myth-makers, deserting any such ideas they may possess, find it necessary,
like the child of whom we spoke, to postulate a PLACE for the divine
energy to work from, and that place is the earth or the heavens. Then,
again, heaven and earth are themselves often regarded in the usual
mythical way, as animated, as persons with parts and passions, and
finally, among advancing races, as gods. Into this medley of incongruous
and inconsistent conceptions we must introduce what order we may, always
remembering that the order is not native to the subject, but is brought in
for the purpose of study.
The origin of the world and of man is naturally a problem which has
excited the curiosity of the least developed minds. Every savage race has
its own myths on this subject, most of them bearing the marks of the
childish and crude imagination, whose character we have investigated, and
all varying in amount of what may be called philosophical thought.
All the cosmogonic myths, as distinct from religious belief in a Creator,
waver between the theory of construction, or rather of reconstruction, and
the theory of evolution, very rudely conceived. The earth, as a rule, is
mythically averred to have grown out of some original matter, perhaps an
animal, perhaps an egg which floated on the waters, perhaps a handful of
mud from below the waters. But this conception does not exclude the idea
that many of the things in the world, minerals, plants and what not, are
fragments of the frame of a semi-supernatural and gigantic being, human or
bestial, belonging to a race which preceded the advent of man.(1) Such
were the Titans, demi-gods, Nurrumbunguttias in Australia. Various members
of this race are found active in myths of the creation, or rather the
construction, of man and of the world. Among the lowest races it is to be
noted that mythical animals of supernatural power often take the place of
beings like the Finnish Wainamoinen, the Greek Prometheus, the Zulu
Unkulunkulu, the Red Indian Manabozho, himself usually a great hare.
(1) Macrobius, Saturnal., i. xx.
The ages before the development or creation of man are filled up, in the
myths, with the loves and wars of supernatural people. The appearance of
man is explained in three or four contradictory ways, each of which is
represented in the various myths of most mythologies. Often man is
fashioned out of clay, or stone, or other materials, by a Maker of all
things, sometimes half-human or bestial, but also half-divine. Sometimes
the first man rises out of the earth, and is himself confused with the
Creator, a theory perhaps illustrated by the Zulu myth of Unkulunkulu,
“The Old, Old One”. Sometimes man arrives ready made, with most of the
animals, from his former home in a hole in the ground, and he furnishes
the world for himself with stars, sun, moon and everything else he needs.
Again, there are many myths which declare that man was evolved out of one
or other of the lower animals. This myth is usually employed by tribesmen
to explain the origin of their own peculiar stock of kindred. Once more,
man is taken to be the fruit of some tree or plant, or not to have emerged
ready-made, but to have grown out of the ground like a plant or a tree. In
some countries, as among the Bechuanas, the Boeotians, and the Peruvians,
the spot where men first came out on earth is known to be some
neighbouring marsh or cave. Lastly, man is occasionally represented as
having been framed out of a piece of the body of the Creator, or made by
some demiurgic potter out of clay. All these legends are told by savages,
with no sense of their inconsistency. There is no single orthodoxy on the
matter, and we shall see that all these theories coexist pell-mell among
the mythological traditions of civilised races. In almost every mythology,
too, the whole theory of the origin of man is crossed by the tradition of
a Deluge, or some other great destruction, followed by revival or
reconstruction of the species, a tale by no means necessarily of Biblical
origin.
In examining savage myths of the origin of man and of the world, we shall
begin by considering those current among the most backward peoples, where
no hereditary or endowed priesthood has elaborated and improved the
popular beliefs. The natives of Australia furnish us with myths of a
purely popular type, the property, not of professional priests and poets,
but of all the old men and full-grown warriors of the country. Here, as
everywhere else, the student must be on his guard against accepting myths
which are disguised forms of missionary teaching.(1)
(1) Taplin, The Narrinyeri. “He must also beware of supposing that the
Australians believe in a creator in our sense, because the Narrinyeri, for
example, say that Nurundere ‘made everything’. Nurundere is but an
idealised wizard and hunter, with a rival of his species.” This occurs in
the first edition, but “making all things” is one idea, wizardry is
another.
In Southern Australia we learn that the Boonoorong, an Australian coast
tribe, ascribe the creation of things to a being named Bun-jel or
Pund-jel. He figures as the chief of an earlier supernatural class of
existence, with human relationships; thus he “has a wife, WHOSE FACE HE
HAS NEVER SEEN,” brothers, a son, and so on. Now this name Bun-jel means
“eagle-hawk,” and the eagle-hawk is a totem among certain stocks. Thus,
when we hear that Eagle-hawk is the maker of men and things we are
reminded of the Bushman creator, Cagn, who now receives prayers of
considerable beauty and pathos, but who is (in some theories) identified
with kaggen, the mantis insect, a creative grasshopper, and the chief
figure in Bushman mythology.(1) Bun-jel or Pund-jel also figures in
Australian belief, neither as the creator nor as the eagle-hawk, but “as
an old man who lives at the sources of the Yarra river, where he possesses
great multitudes of cattle”.(2) The term Bun-jel is also used, much like
our “Mr.,” to denote the older men of the Kurnai and Briakolung, some of
whom have magical powers. One of them, Krawra, or “West Wind,” can cause
the wind to blow so violently as to prevent the natives from climbing
trees; this man has semi-divine attributes. From these facts it appears
that this Australian creator, in myth, partakes of the character of the
totem or worshipful beast, and of that of the wizard or medicine-man. He
carried a large knife, and, when he made the earth, he went up and down
slicing it into creeks and valleys. The aborigines of the northern parts
of Victoria seem to believe in Pund-jel in what may perhaps be his most
primitive mythical shape, that of an eagle.(3) This eagle and a crow
created everything, and separated the Murray blacks into their two main
divisions, which derive their names from the crow and the eagle. The
Melbourne blacks seem to make Pund-jel more anthropomorphic. Men are his
(Greek text omitted) figures kneaded of clay, as Aristophanes says in the
Birds. Pund-jel made two clay images of men, and danced round them. “He
made their hair—one had straight, one curly hair—of bark. He
danced round them. He lay on them, and breathed his breath into their
mouths, noses and navels, and danced round them. Then they arose
full-grown young men.” Some blacks seeing a brickmaker at work on a bridge
over the Yarra exclaimed, “Like ’em that Pund-jel make ’em Koolin”. But
other blacks prefer to believe that, as Pindar puts the Phrygian legend,
the sun saw men growing like trees.
(1) Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Mythology, p. 6; Cape Monthly
Magazine, July, 1874, pp. 1-13; Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 210, 324.
(2) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 210.
(3) Brough Smyth, Natives of Victoria, vol. i. p. 423.
The first man was formed out of the gum of a wattle-tree, and came out of
the knot of a wattle-tree. He then entered into a young woman (though he
was the first man) and was born.(1) The Encounter Bay people have another
myth, which might have been attributed by Dean Swift to the Yahoos, so
foul an origin does it allot to mankind.
(1) Meyer, Aborigines of Encounter Bay. See, later, “Gods of the Lowest
Races”.
Australian myths of creation are by no means exclusive of a hypothesis of
evolution. Thus the Dieyrie, whose notions Mr. Gason has recorded, hold a
very mixed view. They aver that “the good spirit” Moora-Moora made a
number of small black lizards, liked them, and promised them dominion. He
divided their feet into toes and fingers, gave them noses and lips, and
set them upright. Down they fell, and Moora-Moora cut off their tails.
Then they walked erect and were men.(1) The conclusion of the adventures
of one Australian creator is melancholy. He has ceased to dwell among
mortals whom he watches and inspires. The Jay possessed many bags full of
wind; he opened them, and Pund-jel was carried up by the blast into the
heavens. But this event did not occur before Pund-jel had taught men and
women the essential arts of life. He had shown the former how to spear
kangaroos, he still exists and inspires poets. From the cosmogonic myths
of Australia (the character of some of which is in contradiction with the
higher religious belief of the people to be later described) we may turn,
without reaching a race of much higher civilisation, to the dwellers in
the Andaman Islands and their opinions about the origin of things.
(1) Gason’s Dieyries, ap. Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 20.
The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are remote from any shores, and
are protected from foreign influences by dangerous coral reefs, and by the
reputed ferocity and cannibalism of the natives. These are Negritos, and
are commonly spoken of as most abject savages. They are not, however,
without distinctions of rank; they are clean, modest, moral after
marriage, and most strict in the observance of prohibited degrees. Unlike
the Australians, they use bows and arrows, but are said to be incapable of
striking a light, and, at all events, find the process so difficult that,
like the Australians and the farmer in the Odyssey,(1) they are compelled
“to hoard the seeds of fire”. Their mythology contains explanations of the
origin of men and animals, and of their own customs and language.
(1) Odyssey, v. 490.
The Andamanese, long spoken of as “godless,” owe much to Mr. Man, an
English official, who has made a most careful study of their beliefs.(1)
So extraordinary is the contradiction between the relative purity and
morality of the RELIGION and the savagery of the myths of the Andamanese,
that, in the first edition of this work, I insisted that the “spiritual
god” of the faith must have been “borrowed from the same quarter as the
stone house” in which he is mythically said to live. But later and wider
study, and fresh information from various quarters, have convinced me that
the relative purity of Andamanese religion, with its ethical sanction of
conduct, may well be, and probably is, a natural unborrowed development.
It is easy for MYTH to borrow the notion of a stone house from our recent
settlement at Port Blair. But it would not be easy for RELIGION to borrow
many new ideas from an alien creed, in a very few years, while the noted
ferocity of the islanders towards strangers, and the inaccessibility of
their abode, makes earlier borrowing, on a large scale at least, highly
improbable. The Andamanese god, Puluga, is “like fire” but invisible,
unborn and immortal, knowing and punishing or rewarding, men’s deeds, even
“the thoughts of their hearts”. But when once mythical fancy plays round
him, and stories are told about him, he is credited with a wife who is an
eel or a shrimp, just as Zeus made love as an ant or a cuckoo. Puluga was
the maker of men; no particular myth as to how he made them is given. They
tried to kill him, after the deluge (of which a grotesque myth is told),
but he replied that he was “as hard as wood”. His legend is in the usual
mythical contradiction with the higher elements in his religion.
(1) Journ. Anthrop. Soc., vol. xii. p. 157 et seq.
Leaving the Andaman islanders, but still studying races in the lowest
degree of civilisation, we come to the Bushmen of South Africa. This very
curious and interesting people, far inferior in material equipment to the
Hottentots, is sometimes regarded as a branch of that race.(1) The
Hottentots call themselves “Khoi-khoi,” the Bushmen they style “Sa”. The
poor Sa lead the life of pariahs, and are hated and chased by all other
natives of South Africa. They are hunters and diggers for roots, while the
Hottentots, perhaps their kinsmen, are cattle-breeders.(2) Being so
ill-nourished, the Bushmen are very small, but sturdy. They dwell in, or
rather wander through, countries which have been touched by some ancient
civilisation, as is proved by the mysterious mines and roads of
Mashonaland. It is singular that the Bushmen possess a tradition according
to which they could once “make stone things that flew over rivers”. They
have remarkable artistic powers, and their drawings of men and animals on
the walls of caves are often not inferior to the designs on early Greek
vases.(3)
(1) See “Divine Myths of the Lower Races”.
(2) Hahu, Tsuni Goam, p. 4. See other accounts in Waitz, Anthropologie,
ii. 328.
(3) Custom and Myth, where illustrations of Bushman art are given, pp.
290-295.
Thus we must regard the Bushmen as possibly degenerated from a higher
status, though there is nothing (except perhaps the tradition about
bridge-making) to show that it was more exalted than that of their more
prosperous neighbours, the Hottentots. The myths of the Bushmen, however,
are almost on the lowest known level. A very good and authentic example of
Bushman cosmogonic myth was given to Mr. Orpen, chief magistrate of St.
John’s territory, by Qing, King Nqusha’s huntsman. Qing “had never seen a
white man, but in fighting,” till he became acquainted with Mr. Orpen.(1)
The chief force in Bushmen myth is by Dr. Bleek identified with the
mantis, a sort of large grasshopper. Though he seems at least as
“chimerical a beast” as the Aryan creative boar, the “mighty big hare” of
the Algonkins, the large spider who made the world in the opinion of the
Gold Coast people, or the eagle of the Australians, yet the insect (if
insect he be), like the others, has achieved moral qualities and is
addressed in prayer. In his religious aspect he is nothing less than a
grasshopper. He is called Cagn. “Cagn made all things and we pray to him,”
said Qing. “Coti is the wife of Cagn.” Qing did not know where they came
from; “perhaps with the men who brought the sun”. The fact is, Qing “did
not dance that dance,” that is, was not one of the Bushmen initiated into
the more esoteric mysteries of Cagn. Till we, too, are initiated, we can
know very little of Cagn in his religious aspect. Among the Bushmen, as
among the Greeks, there is “no religious mystery without dancing”. Qing
was not very consistent. He said Cagn gave orders and caused all things to
appear and to be made, sun, moon, stars, wind, mountains, animals, and
this, of course, is a lofty theory of creation. Elsewhere myth avers that
Cagn did not so much create as manufacture the objects in nature. In his
early day “the snakes were also men”. Cagn struck snakes with his staff
and turned them into men, as Zeus, in the Aeginetan myth, did with ants.
He also turned offending men into baboons. In Bushman myth, little as we
really know of it, we see the usual opposition of fable and faith, a kind
creator in religion is apparently a magician in myth.
(1) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.
Neighbours of the Bushmen, but more fortunate in their wealth of sheep and
cattle, are the Ovaherero. The myths of the Ovaherero, a tribe dwelling in
a part of Hereraland “which had not yet been under the influence of
civilisation and Christianity,” have been studied by the Rev. H.
Reiderbecke, missionary at Otyozondyupa. The Ovaherero, he says, have a
kind of tree Ygdrasil, a tree out of which men are born, and this plays a
great part in their myth of creation. The tree, which still exists, though
at a great age, is called the Omumborombonga tree. Out of it came, in the
beginning, the first man and woman. Oxen stepped forth from it too, but
baboons, as Caliban says of the stars, “came otherwise,” and sheep and
goats sprang from a flat rock. Black people are so coloured, according to
the Ovaherero, because when the first parents emerged from the tree and
slew an ox, the ancestress of the blacks appropriated the black liver of
the victim. The Ovakuru Meyuru or “OLD ONES in heaven,” once let the skies
down with a run, but drew them up again (as the gods of the Satapatha
Brahmana drew the sun) when most of mankind had been drowned.(1) The
remnant pacified the OLD ONES (as Odysseus did the spirits of the dead) by
the sacrifice of a BLACK ewe, a practice still used to appease ghosts by
the Ovaherero. The neighbouring Omnambo ascribe the creation of man to
Kalunga, who came out of the earth, and made the first three sheep.(2)
(1) An example of a Deluge myth in Africa, where M. Lenormant found none.
(2) South African Folk-Lore Journal, ii. pt. v. p. 95.
Among the Namaquas, an African people on the same level of nomadic culture
as the Ovaherero, a divine or heroic early being called Heitsi Eibib had a
good deal to do with the origin of things. If he did not exactly make the
animals, he impressed on them their characters, and their habits (like
those of the serpent in Genesis) are said to have been conferred by a
curse, the curse of Heitsi Eibib. A precisely similar notion was found by
Avila among the Indians of Huarochiri, whose divine culture-hero imposed,
by a curse or a blessing, their character and habits on the beasts.(1) The
lion used to live in a nest up a tree till Heitsi Eibib cursed him and
bade him walk on the ground. He also cursed the hare, “and the hare ran
away, and is still running”.(2) The name of the first man is given as
Eichaknanabiseb (with a multitude of “clicks”), and he is said to have met
all the animals on a flat rock, and played a game with them for copper
beads. The rainbow was made by Gaunab, who is generally a malevolent
being, of whom more hereafter.
(1) Fables of Yncas (Hakluyt Society), p. 127.
(2) Tsuni Goam, pp. 66, 67.
Leaving these African races, which, whatever their relative degrees of
culture, are physically somewhat contemptible, we reach their northern
neighbours, the Zulus. They are among the finest, and certainly among the
least religious, of the undeveloped peoples. Their faith is mainly in
magic and ghosts, but there are traces of a fading and loftier belief.
The social and political condition of the Zulu is well understood. They
are a pastoral, but not a nomadic people, possessing large kraals or
towns. They practise agriculture, and they had, till quite recently, a
centralised government and a large army, somewhat on the German system.
They appear to have no regular class of priests, and supernatural power is
owned by the chiefs and the king, and by diviners and sorcerers, who
conduct the sacrifices. Their myths are the more interesting because,
whether from their natural scepticism, which confuted Bishop Colenso in
his orthodox days, or from acquaintance with European ideas, they have
begun to doubt the truth of their own traditions.(1) The Zulu theory of
the origin of man and of the world commences with the feats of
Unkulunkulu, “the old, old one,” who, in some legends, was the first man,
“and broke off in the beginning”. Like Manabozho among the Indians of
North America, and like Wainamoinen among the Finns, Unkulunkulu imparted
to men a knowledge of the arts, of marriage, and so forth. His exploits in
this direction, however, must be considered in another part of this work.
Men in general “came out of a bed of reeds”.(2) But there is much
confusion about this bed of reeds, named “Uthlanga”. The younger people
ask where the bed of reeds was; the old men do not know, and neither did
their fathers know. But they stick to it that “that bed of reeds still
exists”. Educated Zulus appear somewhat inclined to take the expression in
an allegorical sense, and to understand the reeds either as a kind of
protoplasm or as a creator who was mortal. “He exists no longer. As my
grandfather no longer exists, he too no longer exists; he died.” Chiefs
who wish to claim high descent trace their pedigree to Uthlanga, as the
Homeric kings traced theirs to Zeus. The myths given by Dr. Callaway are
very contradictory.
(1) These legends have been carefully collected and published by Bishop
Callaway (Trubner & Co., 1868).
(2) Callaway, p. 9.
In addition to the legend that men came out of a bed of reeds, other and
perhaps even more puerile stories are current. “Some men say that they
were belched up by a cow;” others “that Unkulunkulu split them out of a
stone,”(1) which recalls the legend of Pyrrha and Deucalion. The myth
about the cow is still applied to great chiefs. “He was not born; he was
belched up by a cow.” The myth of the stone origin corresponds to the
Homeric saying about men “born from the stone or the oak of the old
tale”.(2)
(1) Without anticipating a later chapter, the resemblances of these to
Greek myths, as arrayed by M. Bouche Leclercq (De Origine Generis Humani),
is very striking.
(2) Odyssey, xix. 103.
In addition to the theory of the natal bed of reeds, the Zulus, like the
Navajoes of New Mexico, and the Bushmen, believe in the subterranean
origin of man. There was a succession of emigrations from below of
different tribes of men, each having its own Unkulunkulu. All accounts
agree that Unkulunkulu is not worshipped, and he does not seem to be
identified with “the lord who plays in heaven”—a kind of fading Zeus—when
there is thunder. Unkulunkulu is not worshipped, though ancestral spirits
are worshipped, because he lived so long ago that no one can now trace his
pedigree to the being who is at once the first man and the creator. His
“honour-giving name is lost in the lapse of years, and the family rites
have become obsolete.”(1)
(1) See Zulu religion in The Making of Religion, pp. 225-229, where it is
argued that ghost worship has superseded a higher faith, of which traces
are discernible.
The native races of the North American continent (concerning whose
civilisation more will be said in the account of their divine myths)
occupy every stage of culture, from the truly bestial condition in which
some of the Digger Indians at present exist, living on insects and
unacquainted even with the use of the bow, to the civilisation which the
Spaniards destroyed among the Aztecs.
The original facts about religion in America are much disputed, and will
be more appropriately treated later. It is now very usual for
anthropologists to say, like Mr. Dorman, “no approach to monotheismn had
been made before the discovery of America by Europeans, and the Great
Spirit mentioned in these (their) books is an introduction by
Christianity”.(1) “This view will not bear examination,” says Mr. Tylor,
and we shall later demonstrate the accuracy of his remark.(2) But at
present we are concerned, not with what Indian religion had to say about
her Gods, but with what Indian myth had to tell about the beginnings of
things.
(1) Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 15.
(2) Primitive Culture, 1873, ii. p. 340.
The Hurons, for example (to choose a people in a state of middle
barbarism), start in myth from the usual conception of a powerful
non-natural race of men dwelling in the heavens, whence they descended,
and colonised, not to say constructed, the earth. In the Relation de la
Nouvelle France, written by Pere Paul le Jeune, of the Company of Jesus,
in 1636, there is a very full account of Huron opinion, which, with some
changes of names, exists among the other branches of the Algonkin family
of Indians.
They recognise as the founder of their kindred a woman named Ataentsic,
who, like Hephaestus in the Iliad, was banished from the sky. In the upper
world there are woods and plains, as on earth. Ataentsic fell down a hole
when she was hunting a bear, or she cut down a heaven-tree, and fell with
the fall of this Huron Ygdrasil, or she was seduced by an adventurer from
the under world, and was tossed out of heaven for her fault. However it
chanced, she dropped on the back of the turtle in the midst of the waters.
He consulted the other aquatic animals, and one of them, generally said to
have been the musk-rat, fished(1) up some soil and fashioned the earth.(2)
Here Ataentsic gave birth to twins, Ioskeha and Tawiscara. These represent
the usual dualism of myth; they answer to Osiris and Set, to Ormuzd and
Ahriman, and were bitter enemies. According to one form of the myth, the
woman of the sky had twins, and what occurred may be quoted from Dr.
Brinton. “Even before birth one of them betrayed his restless and evil
nature by refusing to be born in the usual manner, but insisting on
breaking through his parent’s side or arm-pit. He did so, but it cost his
mother her life. Her body was buried, and from it sprang the various
vegetable productions,” pumpkins, maize, beans, and so forth.(3)
(1) Relations, 1633. In this myth one Messon, the Great Hare, is the
beginner of our race. He married a daughter of the Musk-rat.
(2) Here we first meet in this investigation a very widely distributed
myth. The myths already examined have taken the origin of earth for
granted. The Hurons account for its origin; a speck of earth was fished
out of the waters and grew. In M. H. de Charencey’s tract Une Legende
Cosmogonique (Havre, 1884) this legend is traced. M. de Charencey
distinguishes (1) a continental version; (2) an insular version; (3) a
mixed and Hindoo version. Among continental variants he gives a Vogul
version (Revue de Philologie et d’Ethnographie, Paris, 1874, i. 10). Numi
Tarom (a god who cooks fish in heaven) hangs a male and female above the
abyss of waters in a silver cradle. He gives them, later, just earth
enough to build a house on. Their son, in the guise of a squirrel, climbs
to Numi Tarom, and receives from him a duck-skin and a goose-skin. Clad in
these, like Yehl in his raven-skin or Odin in his hawk-skin, he enjoys the
powers of the animals, dives and brings up three handfuls of mud, which
grow into our earth. Elempi makes men out of clay and snow. The American
version M. de Charencey gives from Nicholas Perrot (Mem. sur les Moers,
etc., Paris, 1864, i. 3). Perrot was a traveller of the seventeenth
century. The Great Hare takes a hand in the making of earth out of
fished-up soil. After giving other North American variants, and comparing
the animals that, after three attempts, fish up earth to the dove and
raven of Noah, M. de Charencey reaches the Bulgarians. God made Satan, in
the skin of a diver, fish up earth out of Lake Tiberias. Three doves fish
up earth, in the beginning, in the Galician popular legend (Chodzko,
Contes des Paysans Slaves, p. 374). In the INSULAR version, as in New
Zealand, the island is usually fished up with a hook by a heroic angler
(Japan, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand). The Hindoo version, in which the boar
plays the part of musk-rat, or duck, or diver, will be given in “Indian
Cosmogonic Myths”.
(3) Brinton, American Hero-Myths, p. 54. Nicholas Perrot and various
Jesuit Relations are the original authorities. See “Divine Myths of
America”. Mr. Leland, in his Algonkin Tales, prints the same story, with
the names altered to Glooskap and Malsumis, from oral tradition. Compare
Schoolcraft, v. 155, and i. 317, and the versions of PP. Charlevoix and
Lafitau. In Charlevoix the good and bad brothers are Manabozho and
Chokanipok or Chakekanapok, and out of the bones and entrails of the
latter many plants and animals were fashioned, just as, according to a
Greek myth preserved by Clemens Alexandrinus, parsley and pomegranates
arose from the blood and scattered members of Dionysus Zagreus. The tale
of Tawiscara’s violent birth is told of Set in Egypt, and of Indra in the
Veda, as will be shown later. This is a very common fable, and, as Mr.
Whitley Stokes tells me, it recurs in old Irish legends of the birth of
our Lord, Myth, as usual, invading religion, even Christian religion.
According to another version of the origin of things, the maker of them
was one Michabous, or Michabo, the Great Hare. His birthplace was shown at
an island called Michilimakinak, like the birthplace of Apollo at Delos.
The Great Hare made the earth, and, as will afterwards appear, was the
inventor of the arts of life. On the whole, the Iroquois and Algonkin
myths agree in finding the origin of life in an upper world beyond the
sky. The earth was either fished up (as by Brahma when he dived in the
shape of a boar) by some beast which descended to the bottom of the
waters, or grew out of the tortoise on whose back Ataentsic fell. The
first dwellers in the world were either beasts like Manabozho or Michabo,
the Great Hare, or the primeval wolves of the Uinkarets,(1) or the
creative musk-rat, or were more anthropomorphic heroes, such as Ioskeha
and Tawiscara. As for the things in the world, some were made, some
evolved, some are transformed parts of an early non-natural man or animal.
There is a tendency to identify Ataentsic, the sky-woman, with the moon,
and in the Two Great Brethren, hostile as they are, to recognise moon and
sun.(2)
(1) Powell, Bureau of Ethnology, i. 44.
(2) Dr. Brinton has endeavoured to demonstrate by arguments drawn from
etymology that Michabos, Messou, Missibizi or Manabozho, the Great Hare,
is originally a personification of Dawn (Myths of the New World, p. 178).
I have examined his arguments in the Nineteenth Century, January, 1886,
which may be consulted, and in Melusine, January, 1887. The hare appears
to be one out of the countless primeval beast-culture heroes. A curious
piece of magic in a tradition of the Dene Hareskins may seem to aid Dr.
Brinton’s theory: “Pendant la nuit il entra, jeta au feu une tete de
lievre blanc et aussitot le jour se fit”.—Petitot, Traditions
Indiennes, p. 173. But I take it that the sacrifice of a white hare’s head
makes light magically, as sacrifice of black beasts and columns of black
smoke make rainclouds.
Some of the degraded Digger Indians of California have the following myth
of the origin of species. In this legend, it will be noticed, a species of
evolution takes the place of a theory of creation. The story was told to
Mr. Adam Johnston, who “drew” the narrator by communicating to a chief the
Biblical narrative of the creation.(1) The chief said it was a strange
story, and one that he had never heard when he lived at the Mission of St.
John under the care of a Padre. According to this chief (he ruled over the
Po-to-yan-te tribe or Coyotes), the first Indians were coyotes. When one
of their number died, his body became full of little animals or spirits.
They took various shapes, as of deer, antelopes, and so forth; but as some
exhibited a tendency to fly off to the moon, the Po-to-yan-tes now usually
bury the bodies of their dead, to prevent the extinction of species. Then
the Indians began to assume the shape of man, but it was a slow
transformation. At first they walked on all fours, then they would begin
to develop an isolated human feature, one finger, one toe, one eye, like
the ascidian, our first parent in the view of modern science. Then they
doubled their organs, got into the habit of sitting up, and wore away
their tails, which they unaffectedly regret, “as they consider the tail
quite an ornament”. Ideas of the immortality of the soul are said to be
confined to the old women of the tribe, and, in short, according to this
version, the Digger Indians occupy the modern scientific position.
(1) Schoolcraft, vol. v.
The Winnebagoes, who communicated their myths to Mr. Fletcher,(1) are
suspected of having been influenced by the Biblical narrative. They say
that the Great Spirit woke up as from a dream, and found himself sitting
in a chair. As he was all alone, he took a piece of his body and a piece
of earth, and made a man. He next made a woman, steadied the earth by
placing beasts beneath it at the corners, and created plants and animals.
Other men he made out of bears. “He created the white man to make tools
for the poor Indians”—a very pleasing example of a teleological
hypothesis and of the doctrine of final causes as understood by the
Winnebagoes. The Chaldean myth of the making of man is recalled by the
legend that the Great Spirit cut out a piece of himself for the purpose;
the Chaldean wisdom coincides, too, with the philosophical acumen of the
Po-to-yan-te or Coyote tribe of Digger Indians. Though the Chaldean theory
is only connected with that of the Red Men by its savagery, we may briefly
state it in this place.
(1) Ibid., iv. 228.
According to Berosus, as reported by Alexander Polyhistor, the universe
was originally (as before Manabozho’s time) water and mud. Herein all
manner of mixed monsters, with human heads, goat’s horns, four legs, and
tails, bred confusedly. In place of the Iroquois Ataentsic, a woman called
Omoroca presided over the mud and the menagerie. She, too, like Ataentsic,
is sometimes recognised as the moon. Affairs being in this state,
Bel-Maruduk arrived and cut Omoroca in two (Chokanipok destroyed
Ataentsic), and out of Omoroca Bel made the world and the things in it. We
have already seen that in savage myth many things are fashioned out of a
dead member of the extra-natural race. Lastly, Bel cut his own head off,
and with the blood the gods mixed clay and made men. The Chaldeans
inherited very savage fancies.(1)
(1) Cf. Syncellus, p. 29; Euseb., Chronic. Armen., ed. Mai, p. 10;
Lenormant, Origines de l’Histoire, i. 506.
One ought, perhaps, to apologise to the Chaldeans for inserting their
myths among the fables of the least cultivated peoples; but it will
scarcely be maintained that the Oriental myths differ in character from
the Digger Indian and Iroquois explanations of the origin of things. The
Ahts of Vancouver Island, whom Mr. Sproat knew intimately, and of whose
ideas he gives a cautious account (for he was well aware of the limits of
his knowledge), tell a story of the usual character.(1) They believe in a
member of the extra-natural race, named Quawteaht, of whom we shall hear
more in his heroic character. As a demiurge “he is undoubtedly represented
as the general framer, I do not say creator, of all things, though some
special things are excepted. He made the earth and water, the trees and
rocks, and all the animals. Some say that Quawteaht made the sun and moon,
but the majority of the Indians believe that he had nothing to do with
their formation, and that they are deities superior to himself, though now
distant and less active. He gave names to everything; among the rest, to
all the Indian houses which then existed, although inhabited only by birds
and animals. Quawteaht went away before the apparent change of the birds
and beasts into Indians, which took place in the following manner:—
“The birds and beasts of old had the spirits of the Indians dwelling in
them, and occupied the various coast villages, as the Ahts do at present.
One day a canoe manned by two Indians from an unknown country approached
the shore. As they coasted along, at each house at which they landed, the
deer, bear, elk, and other brute inhabitants fled to the mountains, and
the geese and other birds flew to the woods and rivers. But in this
flight, the Indians, who had hitherto been contained in the bodies of the
various creatures, were left behind, and from that time they took
possession of the deserted dwellings and assumed the condition in which we
now see them.”
(1) Sproat, Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, pp. 210, 211.
Crossing the northern continent of America to the west, we are in the
domains of various animal culture-heroes, ancestors and teachers of the
human race and the makers, to some extent, of the things in the world. As
the eastern tribes have their Great Hare, so the western tribes have their
wolf hero and progenitor, or their coyote, or their raven, or their dog.
It is possible, and even certain in some cases, that the animal which was
the dominant totem of a race became heir to any cosmogonic legends that
were floating about.
The country of the Papagos, on the eastern side of the Gulf of California,
is the southern boundary of the province of the coyote or prairie wolf.
The realm of his influence as a kind of Prometheus, or even as a demiurge,
extends very far northwards. In the myth related by Con Quien, the chief
of the central Papagos,(1) the coyote acts the part of the fish in the
Sanskrit legend of the flood, while Montezuma undertakes the role of Manu.
This Montezuma was formed, like the Adams of so many races, out of
potter’s clay in the hands of the Great Spirit. In all this legend it
seems plain enough that the name of Montezuma is imported from Mexico, and
has been arbitrarily given to the hero of the Papagos. According to Mr.
Powers, whose manuscript notes Mr. Bancroft quotes (iii. 87), all the
natives of California believe that their first ancestors were created
directly from the earth of their present dwelling-places, and in very many
cases these ancestors were coyotes.
(1) Davidson, Indian Affairs Report, 1865, p. 131; Bancroft, iii. 75.
The Pimas, a race who live near the Papagos on the eastern coast of the
Gulf of California, say that the earth was made by a being named
Earth-prophet. At first it appeared like a spider’s web, reminding one of
the West African legend that a great spider created the world. Man was
made by the Earth-prophet out of clay kneaded with sweat. A mysterious
eagle and a deluge play a great part in the later mythical adventures of
war and the world, as known to the Pimas.(1)
(1) Communicated to Mr. Bancroft by Mr. Stout of the Pima Agency.
In Oregon the coyote appears as a somewhat tentative demiurge, and the men
of his creation, like the beings first formed by Prajapati in the Sanskrit
myth, needed to be reviewed, corrected and considerably augmented. The
Chinooks of Oregon believe in the usual race of magnified non-natural men,
who preceded humanity.
These semi-divine people were called Ulhaipa by the Chinooks, and Sehuiab
by the Lummies. But the coyote was the maker of men. As the first of
Nature’s journeymen, he made men rather badly, with closed eyes and
motionless feet. A kind being, named Ikanam, touched up the coyote’s crude
essays with a sharp stone, opening the eyes of men, and giving their hands
and feet the powers of movement. He also acted as a “culture-hero,”
introducing the first arts. (1)
(1) (Frauchere’s Narrative, 258; Gibb’s Chinook Vocabulary; Parker’s
exploring Tour, i. 139;) Bancroft, iii. 96.
Moving up the West Pacific coast we reach British Columbia, where the
coyote is not supposed to have been so active as our old friend the
musk-rat in the great work of the creation. According to the Tacullies,
nothing existed in the beginning but water and a musk-rat. As the animal
sought his food at the bottom of the water, his mouth was frequently
filled with mud. This he spat out, and so gradually formed by alluvial
deposit an island. This island was small at first, like earth in the
Sanskrit myth in the Satapatha Brahmana, but gradually increased in bulk.
The Tacullies have no new light to throw on the origin of man.(1)
(1) Bancroft, iii. 98; Harmon’s Journey, pp. 302, 303.
The Thlinkeets, who are neighbours of the Tacullies on the north, incline
to give crow or raven the chief role in the task of creation, just as some
Australians allot the same part to the eagle-hawk, and the Yakuts to a
hawk, a crow and a teal-duck. We shall hear much of Yehl later, as one of
the mythical heroes of the introduction of civilisation. North of the
Thlinkeets, a bird and a dog take the creative duties, the Aleuts and
Koniagas being descended from a dog. Among the more northern Tinnehs, the
dog who was the progenitor of the race had the power of assuming the shape
of a handsome young man. He supplied the protoplasm of the Tinnehs, as
Purusha did that of the Aryan world, out of his own body. A giant tore him
to pieces, as the gods tore Purusha, and out of the fragments thrown into
the rivers came fish, the fragments tossed into the air took life as
birds, and so forth.(1) This recalls the Australian myth of the origin of
fish and the Ananzi stories of the origin of whips.(2)
(1) Hearne, pp. 342, 343; Bancroft, iii. 106.
(2) See “Divine Myths of Lower Races”. M. Cosquin, in Contes de Lorraine,
vol. i. p. 58, gives the Ananzi story.
Between the cosmogonic myths of the barbarous or savage American tribes
and those of the great cultivated American peoples, Aztecs, Peruvians and
Quiches, place should be found for the legends of certain races in the
South Pacific. Of these, the most important are the Maoris or natives of
New Zealand, the Mangaians and the Samoans. Beyond the usual and
world-wide correspondences of myth, the divine tales of the various South
Sea isles display resemblances so many and essential that they must be
supposed to spring from a common and probably not very distant centre. As
it is practically impossible to separate Maori myths of the making of
things from Maori myths of the gods and their origin, we must pass over
here the metaphysical hymns and stories of the original divine beings,
Rangi and Papa, Heaven and Earth, and of their cruel but necessary divorce
by their children, who then became the usual Titanic race which constructs
and “airs” the world for the reception of man.(1) Among these beings, more
fully described in our chapter on the gods of the lower races, is Tiki,
with his wife Marikoriko, twilight. Tane (male) is another of the
primordial race, children of earth and heaven, and between him and Tiki
lies the credit of having made or begotten humanity. Tane adorned the body
of his father, heaven (Rangi), by sticking stars all over it, as disks of
pearl-shells are stuck all over images. He was the parent of trees and
birds, but some trees are original and divine beings. The first woman was
not born, but formed out of the sun and the echo, a pretty myth. Man was
made by Tiki, who took red clay, and kneaded it with his own blood, or
with the red water of swamps. The habits of animals, some of which are
gods, while others are descended from gods, follow from their conduct at
the moment when heaven and earth were violently divorced. New Zealand
itself, or at least one of the isles, was a huge fish caught by Maui (of
whom more hereafter). Just as Pund-jel, in Australia, cut out the gullies
and vales with his knife, so the mountains and dells of New Zealand were
produced by the knives of Maui’s brothers when they crimped his big
fish.(2) Quite apart from those childish ideas are the astonishing
metaphysical hymns about the first stirrings of light in darkness, of
“becoming” and “being,” which remind us of Hegel and Heraclitus, or of the
most purely speculative ideas in the Rig-Veda.(3) Scarcely less
metaphysical are the myths of Mangaia, of which Mr. Gill(4) gives an
elaborate account.
(1) See “Divine Myths of Lower Races”.
(2) Taylor, New Zealand, pp. 115-121; Bastian, Heilige Sage der
Polynesier, pp. 36-50; Shortland, Traditions of New Zealanders.
(3) See chapter on “Divine Myths of the Lower Races,” and on “Indian
Cosmogonic Myths”
(4) Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, pp. 1-22.
The Mangaian ideas of the world are complex, and of an early scientific
sort. The universe is like the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, divided
into many imaginary circles like those of mediaeval speculation. There is
a demon at the stem, as it were, of the cocoa-nut, and, where the edges of
the imaginary shell nearly meet, dwells a woman demon, whose name means
“the very beginning”. In this system we observe efforts at metaphysics and
physical speculation. But it is very characteristic of rude thought that
such extremely abstract conceptions as “the very beginning” are
represented as possessing life and human form. The woman at the bottom of
the shell was anxious for progeny, and therefore plucked a bit out of her
own right side, as Eve was made out of the rib of Adam. This piece of
flesh became Vatea, the father of gods and men. Vatea (like Oannes in the
Chaldean legend) was half man, half fish. “The Very Beginning” begat other
children in the same manner, and some of these became departmental gods of
ocean, noon-day, and so forth. Curiously enough, the Mangaians seem to be
sticklers for primogeniture. Vatea, as the first-born son, originally had
his domain next above that of his mother. But she was pained by the
thought that his younger brothers each took a higher place than his; so
she pushed his land up, and it is now next below the solid crust on which
mortals live in Mangaia. Vatea married a woman from one of the under
worlds named Papa, and their children had the regular human form. One
child was born either from Papa’s head, like Athene from the head of Zeus,
or from her armpit, like Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. Another child
may be said, in the language of dog-breeders, to have “thrown back,” for
he wears the form of a white or black lizard. In the Mangaian system the
sky is a solid vault of blue stone. In the beginning of things the sky
(like Ouranos in Greece and Rangi in New Zealand) pressed hard on earth,
and the god Ru was obliged to thrust the two asunder, or rather he was
engaged in this task when Maui tossed both Ru and the sky so high up that
they never came down again. Ru is now the Atlas of Mangaia, “the
sky-supporting Ru”.(1) His lower limbs fell to earth, and became
pumice-stone. In these Mangaian myths we discern resemblances to New
Zealand fictions, as is natural, and the tearing of the body of “the Very
Beginning” has numerous counterparts in European, American and Indian
fable. But on the whole, the Mangaian myths are more remarkable for their
semi-scientific philosophy than for their coincidences with the fancies of
other early peoples.
(1) Gill, p. 59.
The Samoans, like the Maoris and Greeks, hold that heaven at first fell
down and lay upon earth.(1) The arrowroot and another plant pushed up
heaven, and “the heaven-pushing place” is still known and pointed out.
Others say the god Ti-iti-i pushed up heaven, and his feet made holes six
feet deep in the rocks during this exertion. The other Samoan myths
chiefly explain the origin of fire, and the causes of the characteristic
forms and habits of animals and plants. The Samoans, too, possess a
semi-mythical, metaphysical cosmogony, starting from NOTHING, but rapidly
becoming the history of rocks, clouds, hills, dew and various animals, who
intermarried, and to whom the royal family of Samoa trace their origin
through twenty-three generations. So personal are Samoan abstract
conceptions, that “SPACE had a long-legged stool,” on to which a head
fell, and grew into a companion for Space. Yet another myth says that the
god Tangaloa existed in space, and made heaven and earth, and sent down
his daughter, a snipe. Man he made out of the mussel-fish. So confused are
the doctrines of the Samoans.(2)
(1) Turner’s Samoa, p. 198.
(2) Turner’s Samoa, pp. 1-9.
Perhaps the cosmogonic myths of the less cultivated races have now been
stated in sufficient number. As an example of the ideas which prevailed in
an American race of higher culture, we may take the Quiche legend as given
in the Popol Vuh, a post-Christian collection of the sacred myths of the
nation, written down after the Spanish conquest, and published in French
by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg.(1)
(1) See Popol Vuh in Mr. Max Muller’s Chips from a German Workshop, with a
discussion of its authenticity. In his Annals of the Cakchiquels, a nation
bordering on the Quiches, Dr. Brinton expresses his belief in the genuine
character of the text. Compare Bancroft, iii. p. 45. The ancient and
original Popol Vuh, the native book in native characters, disappeared
during the Spanish conquest.
The Quiches, like their neighbours the Cakchiquels, were a highly
civilised race, possessing well-built towns, roads and the arts of life,
and were great agriculturists. Maize, the staple of food among these
advanced Americans, was almost as great a god as Soma among the
Indo-Aryans. The Quiches were acquainted with a kind of picture-writing,
and possessed records in which myth glided into history. The Popol Vuh, or
book of the people, gives itself out as a post-Columbian copy of these
traditions, and may doubtless contain European ideas. As we see in the
Commentarias Reales of the half-blood Inca Garcilasso de la Vega, the
conquered people were anxious to prove that their beliefs were by no means
so irrational and so “devilish” as to Spanish critics they appeared.
According to the Popol Vuh, there was in the beginning nothing but water
and the feathered serpent, one of their chief divine beings; but there
also existed somehow, “they that gave life”. Their names mean “shooter of
blow-pipe at coyote,” “at opossum,” and so forth. They said “Earth,” and
there WAS earth, and plants growing thereon. Animals followed, and the
Givers of life said “Speak our names,” but the animals could only cluck
and croak. Then said the Givers, “Inasmuch as ye cannot praise us, ye
shall be killed and eaten”. They then made men out of clay; these men were
weak and watery, and by water they were destroyed. Next they made men of
wood and women of the pith of trees. These puppets married and gave in
marriage, and peopled earth with wooden mannikins. This unsatisfactory
race was destroyed by a rain of resin and by the wild beasts. The
survivors developed into apes. Next came a period occupied by the wildest
feats of the magnified non-natural race and of animals. The record is like
the description of a supernatural pantomime—the nightmare of a god.
The Titans upset hills, are turned into stone, and behave like Heitsi
Eibib in the Namaqua myths.
Last of all, men were made of yellow and white maize, and these gave more
satisfaction, but their sight was contracted. These, however, survived,
and became the parents of the present stock of humanity.
Here we have the conceptions of creation and of evolution combined. Men
are MADE, but only the fittest survive; the rest are either destroyed or
permitted to develop into lower species. A similar mixture of the same
ideas will be found in one of the Brahmanas among the Aryans of India. It
is to be observed that the Quiche myths, as recorded in Popol Vuh, contain
not only traces of belief in a creative word and power, but many hymns of
a lofty and beautifully devotional character.
“Hail! O Creator, O Former! Thou that hearest and understandest us,
abandon us not, forsake us not! O God, thou that art in heaven and on the
earth, O Heart of Heaven, O Heart of Earth, give us descendants and
posterity as long as the light endures.”
This is an example of the prayers of the men made out of maize, made
especially that they might “call on the name” of the god or gods. Whether
we are to attribute this and similar passages to Christian influence (for
Popol Vuh, as we have it, is but an attempt to collect the fragments of
the lost book that remained in men’s minds after the conquest), or whether
the purer portions of the myth be due to untaught native reflection and
piety, it is not possible to determine. It is improbable that the ideas of
a hostile race would be introduced into religious hymns by their victims.
Here, as elsewhere in the sacred legends of civilised peoples, various
strata of mythical and religious thought coexist.
No American people reached such a pitch of civilisation as the Aztecs of
Anahuac, whose capital was the city of Mexico. It is needless here to
repeat the story of their grandeur and their fall. Obscure as their
history, previous to the Spanish invasion, may be, it is certain that they
possessed a highly organised society, fortified towns, established
colleges or priesthoods, magnificent temples, an elaborate calendar, great
wealth in the precious metals, the art of picture-writing in considerable
perfection, and a despotic central government. The higher classes in a
society like this could not but develop speculative systems, and it is
alleged that shortly before the reign of Montezuma attempts had been made
to introduce a pure monotheistic religion. But the ritual of the Aztecs
remained an example of the utmost barbarity. Never was a more cruel faith,
not even in Carthage. Nowhere did temples reek with such pools of human
blood; nowhere else, not in Dahomey and Ashanti, were human sacrifice,
cannibalism and torture so essential to the cult that secured the favour
of the gods. In these dark fanes—reeking with gore, peopled by
monstrous shapes of idols bird-headed or beast-headed, and adorned with
the hideous carvings in which we still see the priest, under the mask of
some less ravenous forest beast, tormenting the victim—in these
abominable temples the Castilian conquerors might well believe that they
saw the dwellings of devils.
Yet Mexican religion had its moral and beautiful aspect, and the gods, or
certain of the gods, required from their worshippers not only bloody
hands, but clean hearts.
To the gods we return later. The myths of the origin of things may be
studied without a knowledge of the whole Aztec Pantheon. Our authorities,
though numerous, lack complete originality and are occasionally confused.
We have first the Aztec monuments and hieroglyphic scrolls, for the most
part undeciphered. These merely attest the hideous and cruel character of
the deities. Next we have the reports of early missionaries, like Sahagun
and Mendieta, of conquerors, like Bernal Diaz, and of noble half-breeds,
such as Ixtlilxochitl.(1)
(1) Bancroft’s Native Races of Pacific Coast of North America, vol. iii.,
contains an account of the sources, and, with Sahagun and Acosta, is
mainly followed here. See also J. G. Muller, Ur. Amerik. Rel., p. 507. See
chapter on the “Divine Myths of Mexico”.
There are two elements in Mexican, as in Quiche, and Indo-Aryan, and
Maori, and even Andaman cosmogonic myth. We find the purer religion and
the really philosophic speculation concurrent with such crude and childish
stories as usually satisfy the intellectual demands of Ahts, Cahrocs and
Bushmen; but of the purer and more speculative opinions we know little.
Many of the noble, learned and priestly classes of Aztecs perished at the
conquest. The survivors were more or less converted to Catholicism, and in
their writings probably put the best face possible on the native religion.
Like the Spanish clergy, their instructors, they were inclined to explain
away their national gods by a system of euhemerism, by taking it for
granted that the gods and culture-heroes had originally been ordinary men,
worshipped after their decease. This is almost invariably the view adopted
by Sahagun. Side by side with the confessions, as it were, of the clergy
and cultivated classes coexisted the popular beliefs, the myths of the
people, partaking of the nature of folk-lore, but not rejected by the
priesthood.
Both strata of belief are represented in the surviving cosmogonic myths of
the Aztecs. Probably we may reckon in the first or learned and speculative
class of tales the account of a series of constructions and
reconstructions of the world. This idea is not peculiar to the higher
mythologies, the notion of a deluge and recreation or renewal of things is
almost universal, and even among the untutored Australians there are
memories of a flood and of an age of ruinous winds. But the theory of
definite epochs, calculated in accordance with the Mexican calendar, of
epochs in which things were made and re-made, answers closely to the
Indo-Aryan conception of successive kalpas, and can only have been
developed after the method of reckoning time had been carried to some
perfection. “When heaven and earth were fashioned, they had already been
four times created and destroyed,” say the fragments of what is called the
Chimalpopoca manuscript. Probably this theory of a series of kalpas is
only one of the devices by which the human mind has tried to cheat itself
into the belief that it can conceive a beginning of things. The earth
stands on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and it is going too far
to ask what the tortoise stands on. In the same way the world’s beginning
seems to become more intelligible or less puzzling when it is thrown back
into a series of beginnings and endings. This method also was in harmony
with those vague ideas of evolution and of the survival of the fittest
which we have detected in myth. The various tentative human races of the
Popol Vuh degenerated or were destroyed because they did not fulfil the
purposes for which they were made. In Brahmanic myth we shall see that
type after type was condemned and perished because it was inadequate, or
inadequately equipped—because it did not harmonise with its
environment.(1) For these series of experimental creations and inefficient
evolutions vast spaces of time were required, according to the Aztec and
Indo-Aryan philosophies. It is not impossible that actual floods and great
convulsions of nature may have been remembered in tradition, and may have
lent colour and form to these somewhat philosophic myths of origins. From
such sources probably comes the Mexican hypothesis of a water-age (ending
in a deluge), an earth-age (ending in an earthquake), a wind-age (ending
in hurricanes), and the present dispensation, to be destroyed by fire.
(1) As an example of a dim evolutionary idea, note the myths of the
various ages as reported by Mendieta, according to which there were five
earlier ages “or suns” of bad quality, so that the contemporary human
beings were unable to live on the fruits of the earth.
The less philosophic and more popular Aztec legend of the commencement of
the world is mainly remarkable for the importance given in it to objects
of stone. For some reason, stones play a much greater part in American
than in other mythologies. An emerald was worshipped in the temple of
Pachacamac, who was, according to Garcilasso, the supreme and spiritual
deity of the Incas. The creation legend of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala(1)
makes much of a mysterious, primeval and animated obsidian stone. In the
Iroquois myths(2) stones are the leading characters. Nor did Aztec myth
escape this influence.
(1) Brinton, Annals of the Cakchiquels.
(2) Erminie Smith, Bureau of Ethnol. Report, ii.
There was a god in heaven named Citlalatonac, and a goddess, Citlalicue.
When we speak of “heaven” we must probably think of some such world of
ordinary terrestrial nature above the sky as that from which Ataentsic
fell in the Huron story. The goddess gave birth to a flint-knife, and
flung the flint down to earth. This abnormal birth partly answers to that
of the youngest of the Adityas, the rejected abortion in the Veda, and to
the similar birth and rejection of Maui in New Zealand. From the fallen
flint-knife sprang our old friends the magnified non-natural beings with
human characteristics, “the gods,” to the number of 1600. The gods sent up
the hawk (who in India and Australia generally comes to the front on these
occasions), and asked their mother, or rather grandmother, to help them to
make men, to be their servants. Citlalicue rather jeered at her
unconsidered offspring. She advised them to go to the lord of the homes of
the departed, Mictlanteuctli, and borrow a bone or some ashes of the dead
who are with him. We must never ask for consistency from myths. This
statement implies that men had already been in existence, though they were
not yet created. Perhaps they had perished in one of the four great
destructions. With difficulty and danger the gods stole a bone from Hades,
placed it in a bowl, and smeared it with their own blood, as in Chaldea
and elsewhere. Finally, a boy and a girl were born out of the bowl. From
this pair sprang men, and certain of the gods, jumping into a furnace,
became sun and moon. To the sun they then, in Aztec fashion, sacrificed
themselves, and there, one might think, was an end of them. But they
afterwards appeared in wondrous fashions to their worshippers, and
ordained the ritual of religion. According to another legend, man and
woman (as in African myths) struggled out of a hole in the ground.(1)
(1) Authorities: Ixtlil.; Kingsborough, ix. pp. 205, 206; Sahagun, Hist.
Gen., i. 3, vii. 2; J. G. Muller, p. 510, where Muller compares the
Delphic conception of ages of the world; Bancroft, iii. pp. 60, 65.
The myths of the peoples under the empire of the Incas in Peru are
extremely interesting, because almost all mythical formations are found
existing together, while we have historical evidence as to the order and
manner of their development. The Peru of the Incas covered the modern
state of the same name, and included Ecuador, with parts of Chili and
Bolivia. M. Reville calculates that the empire was about 2500 miles in
length, four times as long as France, and that its breadth was from 250 to
500 miles. The country, contained three different climatic regions, and
was peopled by races of many different degrees of culture, all more or
less subject to the dominion of the Children of the Sun. The three regions
were the dry strip along the coast, the fertile and cultivated land about
the spurs of the Cordilleras, and the inland mountain regions, inhabited
by the wildest races. Near Cuzco, the Inca capital, was the Lake of
Titicaca, the Mediterranean, as it were, of Peru, for on the shores of
this inland sea was developed the chief civilisation of the new world.
As to the institutions, myths and religion of the empire, we have copious
if contradictory information. There are the narratives of the Spanish
conquerors, especially of Pizarro’s chaplain, Valverde, an ignorant
bigoted fanatic. Then we have somewhat later travellers and missionaries,
of whom Cieza de Leon (his book was published thirty years after the
conquest, in 1553) is one of the most trustworthy. The “Royal
Commentaries” of Garcilasso de la Vega, son of an Inca lady and a Spanish
conqueror, have often already been quoted. The critical spirit and sound
sense of Garcilasso are in remarkable contrast to the stupid orthodoxy of
the Spaniards, but some allowance must be made for his fervent Peruvian
patriotism. He had heard the Inca traditions repeated in boyhood, and very
early in life collected all the information which his mother and maternal
uncle had to give him, or which could be extracted from the quipus (the
records of knotted cord), and from the commemorative pictures of his
ancestors. Garcilasso had access, moreover, to the “torn papers” of Blas
Valera, an early Spanish missionary of unusual sense and acuteness.
Christoval de Moluna is also an excellent authority, and much may be
learned from the volume of Rites and Laws of the Yncas.(1)
(1) A more complete list of authorities, including the garrulous Acosta,
is published by M. Reville in his Hibbert Lectures, pp. 136, 137.
Garcilasso, Cieza de Leon, Christoval de Moluna, Acosta and the Rites and
Laws have all been translated by Mr. Clements Markham, and are published,
with the editor’s learned and ingenious notes, in the collection of the
Hakluyt Society. Care must be taken to discriminate between what is
reported about the Indians of the various provinces, who were in very
different grades of culture, and what is told about the Incas themselves.
The political and religious condition of the Peruvian empire is very
clearly conceived and stated by Garcilasso. Without making due allowance
for that mysterious earlier civilisation, older than the Incas, whose
cyclopean buildings are the wonder of travellers, Garcilasso attributes
the introduction of civilisation to his own ancestors. Allowing for what
is confessedly mythical in his narrative, it must be admitted that he has
a firm grasp of what the actual history must have been. He recognises a
period of savagery before the Incas, a condition of the rudest barbarism,
which still existed on the fringes and mountain recesses of the empire.
The religion of that period was mere magic and totemism. From all manner
of natural objects, but chiefly from beasts and birds, the various savage
stocks of Peru claimed descent, and they revered and offered sacrifice to
their totemic ancestors.(1) Garcilasso adds, what is almost incredible,
that the Indians tamely permitted themselves to be eaten by their totems,
when these were carnivorous animals. They did this with the less
reluctance as they were cannibals, and accustomed to breed children for
the purposes of the cuisine from captive women taken in war.(2) Among the
huacas or idols, totems, fetishes and other adorable objects of the
Indians, worshipped before and retained after the introduction of the Inca
sun-totem and solar cult, Garcilasso names trees, hills, rocks, caves,
fountains, emeralds, pieces of jasper, tigers, lions, bears, foxes,
monkeys, condors, owls, lizards, toads, frogs, sheep, maize, the sea, “for
want of larger gods, crabs” and bats. The bat was also the totem of the
Zotzil, the chief family of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala, and the most
high god of the Cakchiquels was worshipped in the shape of a bat. We are
reminded of religion as it exists in Samoa. The explanation of Blas Valera
was that in each totem (pacarissa) the Indians adored the devil.
(1) Com. Real., vol. i., chap. ix., x. xi. pp. 47-53.
(2) Cieza de Leon, xii., xv., xix., xxi., xxiii., xxvi., xxviii., xxxii.
Cieza is speaking of people in the valley of Cauca, in New Granada.
Athwart this early religion of totems and fetishes came, in Garcilasso’s
narrative, the purer religion of the Incas, with what he regards as a
philosophic development of a belief in a Supreme Being. According to him,
the Inca sun-worship was really a totemism of a loftier character. The
Incas “knew how to choose gods better than the Indians”. Garcilasso’s
theory is that the earlier totems were selected chiefly as distinguishing
marks by the various stocks, though, of course, this does not explain why
the animals or other objects of each family were worshipped or were
regarded as ancestors, and the blood-connections of the men who adored
them. The Incas, disdaining crabs, lizards, bats and even serpents and
lions, “chose” the sun. Then, just like the other totemic tribes, they
feigned to be of the blood and lineage of the sun.
This fable is, in brief, the Inca myth of the origin of civilisation and
of man, or at least of their breed of men. As M. Reville well remarks, it
is obvious that the Inca claim is an adaptation of the local myth of Lake
Titicaca, the inland sea of Peru. According to that myth, the Children of
the Sun, the ancestors of the Incas, came out of the earth (as in Greek
and African legends) at Lake Titicaca, or reached its shores after
wandering from the hole or cave whence they first emerged. The myth, as
adapted by the Incas, takes for granted the previous existence of mankind,
and, in some of its forms, the Inca period is preceded by the deluge.
Of the Peruvian myth concerning the origin of things, the following
account is given by a Spanish priest, Christoval de Moluna, in a report to
the Bishop of Cuzco in 1570.(1) The story was collected from the lips of
ancient Peruvians and old native priests, who again drew their information
in part from the painted records reserved in the temple of the sun near
Cuzco. The legend begins with a deluge myth; a cataclysm ended a period of
human existence. All mankind perished except a man and woman, who floated
in a box to a distance of several hundred miles from Cuzco. There the
creator commanded them to settle, and there, like Pund-jel in Australia,
he made clay images of men of all races, attired in their national dress,
and then animated them. They were all fashioned and painted as correct
models, and were provided with their national songs and with seed-corn.
They then were put into the earth, and emerged all over the world at the
proper places, some (as in Africa and Greece) coming out of fountains,
some out of trees, some out of caves. For this reason they made huacas
(worshipful objects or fetishes) of the trees, caves and fountains. Some
of the earliest men were changed into stones, others into falcons, condors
and other creatures which we know were totems in Peru. Probably this myth
of metamorphosis was invented to account for the reverence paid to totems
or pacarissas as the Peruvians called them. In Tiahuanaco, where the
creation, or rather manufacture of men took place, the creator turned many
sinners into stones. The sun was made in the shape of a man, and, as he
soared into heaven, he called out in a friendly fashion to Manco Ccapac,
the Ideal first Inca, “Look upon me as thy father, and worship me as thy
father”. In these fables the creator is called Pachyachachi, “Teacher of
the world”. According to Christoval, the creator and his sons were
“eternal and unchangeable”. Among the Canaris men descend from the
survivor of the deluge, and a beautiful bird with the face of a woman, a
siren in fact, but known better to ornithologists as a macaw. “The chief
cause,” says the good Christoval, “of these fables was ignorance of God.”
(1) Rites and Laws of the Yncas, p. 4, Hakluyt Society, 1873.
The story, as told by Cieza de Leon, runs thus:(1) A white man of great
stature (in fact, “a magnified non-natural man”) came into the world, and
gave life to beasts and human beings. His name was Ticiviracocha, and he
was called the Father of the Sun.(2) There are likenesses of him in the
temple, and he was regarded as a moral teacher. It was owing apparently to
this benevolent being that four mysterious brothers and sisters emerged
from a cave—Children of the Sun, fathers of the Incas, teachers of
savage men. Their own conduct, however, was not exemplary, and they shut
up in a hole in the earth the brother of whom they were jealous. This
incident is even more common in the marchen or household tales than in the
regular tribal or national myths of the world.(3) The buried brother
emerged again with wings, and “without doubt he must have been some
devil,” says honest Cieza de Leon. This brother was Manco Ccapac, the
heroic ancestor of the Incas, and he turned his jealous brethren into
stones. The whole tale is in the spirit illustrated by the wilder romances
of the Popol Vuh.
(1) Second Part of the Chronicles of Peru, p 5.
(2) See Making of Religion, pp. 265-270. Name and God are much disputed.
(3) The story of Joseph and the marchen of Jean de l’Ours are well-known
examples.
Garcilasso gives three forms of this myth. According to “the old Inca,”
his maternal uncle, it was the sun which sent down two of his children,
giving them a golden staff, which would sink into the ground at the place
where they were to rest from wandering. It sank at Lake Titicaca. About
the current myths Garcilasso says generally that they were “more like
dreams” than straightforward stories; but, as he adds, the Greeks and
Romans also “invented fables worthy to be laughed at, and in greater
number than the Indians. The stories of one age of heathenism may be
compared with those of the other, and in many points they will be found to
agree.” This critical position of Garcilasso’s will be proved correct when
we reach the myths of Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The myth as narrated
north-east of Cuzco speaks of the four brothers and four sisters who came
out of caves, and the caves in Inca times were panelled with gold and
silver.
Athwart all these lower myths, survivals from the savage stage, comes what
Garcilasso regards as the philosophical Inca belief in Pachacamac. This
deity, to Garcilasso’s mind, was purely spiritual: he had no image and
dwelt in no temple; in fact, he is that very God whom the Spanish
missionaries proclaimed. This view, though the fact has been doubted, was
very probably held by the Amautas, or philosophical class in Peru.(1)
Cieza de Leon says “the name of this devil, Pachacamac, means creator of
the world”. Garcilasso urges that Pachacamac was the animus mundi; that he
did not “make the world,” as Pund-jel and other savage demiurges made it,
but that he was to the universe what the soul is to the body.
(1) Com. Real., vol. i. p. 106.
Here we find ourselves, if among myths at all, among the myths of
metaphysics—rational myths; that is, myths corresponding to our
present stage of thought, and therefore intelligible to us. Pachacamac
“made the sun, and lightning, and thunder, and of these the sun was
worshipped by the Incas”. Garcilasso denies that the moon was worshipped.
The reflections of the sceptical or monotheistic Inca, who declared that
the sun, far from being a free agent, “seems like a thing held to its
task,” are reported by Garcilasso, and appear to prove that solar worship
was giving way, in the minds of educated Peruvians, a hundred years before
the arrival of Pizarro and Valverde with his missal.(1)
(1) Garcilasso, viii. 8, quoting Blas Valera.
From this summary it appears that the higher Peruvian religion had wrested
to its service, and to the dynastic purposes of the Incas, a native myth
of the familiar class, in which men come ready made out of holes in the
ground. But in Peru we do not find nearly such abundance of other savage
origin myths as will be proved to exist in the legends of Greeks and
Indo-Aryans. The reason probably is that Peru left no native literature;
the missionaries disdained stories of “devils,” and Garcilasso’s common
sense and patriotism were alike revolted by the incidents of stories “more
like dreams” than truthful records. He therefore was silent about them. In
Greece and India, on the other hand, the native religious literature
preserved myths of the making of man out of clay, of his birth from trees
and stones, of the fashioning of things out of the fragments of mutilated
gods and Titans, of the cosmic egg, of the rending and wounding of a
personal heaven and a personal earth, of the fishing up from the waters of
a tiny earth which grew greater, of the development of men out of beasts,
with a dozen other such notions as are familiar to contemporary Bushmen,
Australians, Digger Indians, and Cahrocs. But in Greece and India these
ideas coexist with myths and religious beliefs as purely spiritual and
metaphysical as the belief in the Pachacamac of Garcilasso and the Amautas
of Peru.
CHAPTER VII. INDO-ARYAN MYTHS—SOURCES OF EVIDENCE.
Authorities—Vedas—Brahmanas—Social condition of Vedic
India—Arts—Ranks—War—Vedic fetishism—Ancestor
worship—Date of Rig-Veda Hymns doubtful—Obscurity of the Hymns—Difficulty
of interpreting the real character of Veda—Not primitive but
sacerdotal—The moral purity not innocence but refinement.
Before examining the myths of the Aryans of India, it is necessary to have
a clear notion of the nature of the evidence from which we derive our
knowledge of the subject. That evidence is found in a large and
incongruous mass of literary documents, the heritage of the Indian people.
In this mass are extremely ancient texts (the Rig-Veda, and the
Atharva-Veda), expository comments of a date so much later that the
original meaning of the older documents was sometimes lost (the
Brahmanas), and poems and legendary collections of a period later still, a
period when the whole character of religious thought had sensibly altered.
In this literature there is indeed a certain continuity; the names of
several gods of the earliest time are preserved in the legends of the
latest. But the influences of many centuries of change, of contending
philosophies, of periods of national growth and advance, and of national
decadence and decay, have been at work on the mythology of India. Here we
have myths that were perhaps originally popular tales, and are probably
old; here again, we have later legends that certainly were conceived in
the narrow minds of a pedantic and ceremonious priesthood. It is not
possible, of course, to analyse in this place all the myths of all the
periods; we must be content to point out some which seem to be typical
examples of the working of the human intellect in its earlier or its later
childhood, in its distant hours of barbaric beginnings, or in the senility
of its sacerdotage.
The documents which contain Indian mythology may be divided, broadly
speaking, into four classes. First, and most ancient in date of
composition, are the collections of hymns known as the Vedas. Next, and
(as far as date of collection goes) far less ancient, are the expository
texts called the Brahmanas. Later still, come other manuals of devotion
and of sacred learning, called Sutras and Upanishads; and last are the
epic poems (Itihasas), and the books of legends called Puranas. We are
chiefly concerned here with the Vedas and Brahmanas. A gulf of time, a
period of social and literary change, separates the Brahmanas from the
Vedas. But the epics and Puranas differ perhaps even still more from the
Brahmanas, on account of vast religious changes which brought new gods
into the Indian Olympus, or elevated to the highest place old gods
formerly of low degree. From the composition of the first Vedic hymn to
the compilation of the latest Purana, religious and mythopoeic fancy was
never at rest.
Various motives induced various poets to assign, on various occasions the
highest powers to this or the other god. The most antique legends were
probably omitted or softened by some early Vedic bard (Rishi) of noble
genius, or again impure myths were brought from the obscurity of oral
circulation and foisted into literature by some poet less divinely
inspired. Old deities were half-forgotten, and forgotten deities were
resuscitated. Sages shook off superstitious bonds, priests forged new
fetters on ancient patterns for themselves and their flocks. Philosophy
explained away the more degrading myths; myths as degrading were suggested
to dark and servile hearts by unscientific etymologies. Over the whole
mass of ancient mythology the new mythology of a debased Brahmanic
ritualism grew like some luxurious and baneful parasite. It is enough for
our purpose if we can show that even in the purest and most antique
mythology of India the element of traditional savagery survived and played
its part, and that the irrational legends of the Vedas and Brahmanas can
often be explained as relics of savage philosophy or faith, or as
novelties planned on the ancient savage model, whether borrowed or native
to the race.
The oldest documents of Indian mythology are the Vedas, usually reckoned
as four in number. The oldest, again, of the four, is the Sanhita
(“collection”) of the Rig-Veda. It is a purely lyrical assortment of the
songs “which the Hindus brought with them from their ancient homes on the
banks of the Indus”. In the manuscripts, the hymns are classified
according to the families of poets to whom they are ascribed. Though
composed on the banks of the Indus by sacred bards, the hymns were
compiled and arranged in India proper. At what date the oldest hymns of
which this collection is made up were first chanted it is impossible to
say with even approximate certainty. Opinions differ, or have differed,
between 2400 B.C. and 1400 B.C. as the period when the earliest sacred
lyrics of the Veda may first have been listened by gods and men. In
addition to the Rig-Veda we have the Sanhita of the Sama-Veda, “an
anthology taken from the Rik-Samhita, comprising those of its verses which
were intended to be chanted at the ceremonies of the soma sacrifice”.(1)
It is conjectured that the hymns of the Sama-Veda were borrowed from the
Rig-Veda before the latter had been edited and stereotyped into its
present form. Next comes the Yajur-Veda, “which contains the formulas for
the entire sacrificial ceremonial, and indeed forms its proper
foundations,” the other Vedas being devoted to the soma sacrifice.(2) The
Yajur-Veda has two divisions, known as the Black and the White Yajur,
which have common matter, but differ in arrangement. The Black Yajur-Veda
is also called the Taittirya, and it is described as “a motley undigested
jumble of different pieces”.(3) Last comes Atharva-Veda, not always
regarded as a Veda properly speaking. It derives its name from an old
semi-mythical priestly family, the Atharvans, and is full of magical
formulae, imprecations, folk-lore and spells. There are good reasons for
thinking this late as a collection, however early may be the magical ideas
expressed in its contents.(4)
(1) Weber, History of Indian Literature, Eng. transl., p. 63.
(2) Ibid., p. 86.
(3) Ibid, p. 87. The name Taittirya is derived from a partridge, or from a
Rishi named Partridge in Sanskrit. There is a story that the pupils of a
sage were turned into partridges, to pick up sacred texts.
(4) Barth (Les Religions de l’Inde, p. 6) thinks that the existence of
such a collection as the Atharva-Veda is implied, perhaps, in a text of
the Rig-Veda, x. 90, 9.
Between the Vedas, or, at all events, between the oldest of the Vedas, and
the compilation of the Brahmanas, these “canonised explanations of a
canonised text,”(1) it is probable that some centuries and many social
changes intervened.(2)
(1) Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic studies, First Series, p. 4.
(2) Max Muller, Biographical Essays, p. 20. “The prose portions presuppose
the hymns, and, to judge from the utter inability of the authors of the
Brahmanas to understand the antiquated language of the hymns, these
Brahmanas must be ascribed to a much later period than that which gave
birth to the hymns.”
If we would criticise the documents for Indian mythology in a scientific
manner, it is now necessary that we should try to discover, as far as
possible, the social and religious condition of the people among whom the
Vedas took shape. Were they in any sense “primitive,” or were they
civilised? Was their religion in its obscure beginnings or was it already
a special and peculiar development, the fruit of many ages of thought? Now
it is an unfortunate thing that scholars have constantly, and as it were
involuntarily, drifted into the error of regarding the Vedas as if they
were “primitive,” as if they exhibited to us the “germs” and “genesis” of
religion and mythology, as if they contained the simple though strange
utterances of PRIMITIVE thought.(1) Thus Mr. Whitney declares, in his
Oriental and Linguistic Studies, “that the Vedas exhibit to us the very
earliest germs of the Hindu culture”. Mr. Max Muller avers that “no
country can be compared to India as offering opportunities for a real
study of the genesis and growth of religion”.(2) Yet the same scholar
observes that “even the earliest specimens of Vedic poetry belong to the
modern history of the race, and that the early period of the historical
growth of religion had passed away before the Rishis (bards) could have
worshipped their Devas or bright beings with sacred hymns and
invocations”. Though this is manifestly true, the sacred hymns and
invocations of the Rishis are constantly used as testimony bearing on the
beginning of the historical growth of religion. Nay, more; these remains
of “the modern history of the race” are supposed to exhibit mythology in
the process of making, as if the race had possessed no mythology before it
reached a comparatively modern period, the Vedic age. In the same spirit,
Dr. Muir, the learned editor of Sanskrit Texts, speaks in one place as if
the Vedic hymns “illustrated the natural workings of the human mind in the
period of its infancy”.(3) A brief examination of the social and political
and religious condition of man, as described by the poets of the Vedas,
will prove that his infancy had long been left behind him when the first
Vedic hymns were chanted.
(1) Ibid., Rig-Veda Sanhita, p. vii.
(2) Hibbert Lectures, p. 131.
(3) Nothing can prove more absolutely and more briefly the late character
of Vedic faith than the fact that the faith had already to be defended
against the attacks of sceptics. The impious denied the existence of Indra
because he was invisible. Rig-Veda, ii. 12, 5; viii. 89, 3; v. 30, 1-2;
vi. 27, 3. Bergaigne, ii. 167. “Es gibt keinen Indra, so hat der eine und
der ander gesagt” (Ludwig’s version).
As Barth observes, the very ideas which permeate the Veda, the idea of the
mystic efficacy of sacrifice, of brahma, prove that the poems are
profoundly sacerdotal; and this should have given pause to the writers who
have persisted in representing the hymns as the work of primitive
shepherds praising their gods as they feed their flocks.(1) In the Vedic
age the ranks of society are already at least as clearly defined as in
Homeric Greece. “We men,” says a poet of the Rig-Veda,(2) “have all our
different imaginations and designs. The carpenter seeks something that is
broken, the doctor a patient, the priest some one who will offer
libations…. The artisan continually seeks after a man with plenty of
gold…. I am a poet, my father is a doctor, and my mother is a grinder of
corn.” Chariots and the art of the chariot-builder are as frequently
spoken of as in the Iliad. Spears, swords, axes and coats of mail were in
common use. The art of boat-building or of ship-building was well known.
Kine and horses, sheep and dogs, had long been domesticated. The bow was a
favourite weapon, and warriors fought in chariots, like the Homeric Greeks
and the Egyptians. Weaving was commonly practised. The people probably
lived, as a rule, in village settlements, but cities or fortified places
were by no means unknown.(3) As for political society, “kings are
frequently mentioned in the hymns,” and “it was regarded as eminently
beneficial for a king to entertain a family priest,” on whom he was
expected to confer thousands of kine, lovely slaves and lumps of gold. In
the family polygamy existed, probably as the exception. There is reason to
suppose that the brother-in-law was permitted, if not expected, to “raise
up seed” to his dead brother, as among the Hebrews.(4) As to literature,
the very structure of the hymns proves that it was elaborate and
consciously artistic. M. Barth writes: “It would be a great mistake to
speak of the primitive naivete of the Vedic poetry and religion”.(5) Both
the poetry and the religion, on the other hand, display in the highest
degree the mark of the sacerdotal spirit. The myths, though originally
derived from nature-worship, in an infinite majority of cases only reflect
natural phenomena through a veil of ritualistic corruptions.(6) The rigid
division of castes is seldom recognised in the Rig-Veda. We seem to see
caste in the making.(7) The Rishis and priests of the princely families
were on their way to becoming the all-powerful Brahmans. The kings and
princes were on their way to becoming the caste of Kshatriyas or warriors.
The mass of the people was soon to sink into the caste of Vaisyas and
broken men. Non-Aryan aborigines and others were possibly developing into
the caste of Sudras. Thus the spirit of division and of ceremonialism had
still some of its conquests to achieve. But the extraordinary attention
given and the immense importance assigned to the details of sacrifice, and
the supernatural efficacy constantly attributed to a sort of magical
asceticism (tapas, austere fervour), prove that the worst and most foolish
elements of later Indian society and thought were in the Vedic age already
in powerful existence.
(1) Les Religions de l’Inde, p. 27.
(2) ix. 112.
(3) Ludwig, Rig-Veda, iii. 203. The burgs were fortified with wooden
palisades, capable of being destroyed by fire. “Cities” may be too
magnificent a word for what perhaps were more like pahs. But compare
Kaegi, The Rig-Veda, note 42, Engl. transl. Kaegi’s book (translated by
Dr. Arrowsmith, Boston, U.S., 1886) is probably the best short manual of
the subject.
(4) Deut. xxv. 5; Matt. xxii. 24.
(5) Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, i. 245.
(6) Ludwig, iii. 262.
(7) On this subject see Muir, i. 192, with the remarks of Haug. “From all
we know, the real origin of caste seems to go back to a time anterior to
the composition of the Vedic hymns, though its development into a regular
system with insurmountable barriers can be referred only to the later
period of the Vedic times.” Roth approaches the subject from the word
brahm, that is, prayer with a mystical efficacy, as his starting-point.
From brahm, prayer, came brahma, he who pronounces the prayers and
performs the rite. This celebrant developed into a priest, whom to
entertain brought blessings on kings. This domestic chaplaincy (conferring
peculiar and even supernatural benefits) became hereditary in families,
and these, united by common interests, exalted themselves into the Brahman
caste. But in the Vedic age gifts of prayer and poetry alone marked out
the purohitas, or men put forward to mediate between gods and mortals.
Compare Ludwig, iii. 221.
Thus it is self-evident that the society in which the Vedic poets lived
was so far from being PRIMITIVE that it was even superior to the higher
barbarisms (such as that of the Scythians of Herodotus and Germans of
Tacitus), and might be regarded as safely arrived at the threshold of
civilisation. Society possessed kings, though they may have been kings of
small communities, like those who warred with Joshua or fought under the
walls of Thebes or Troy. Poets were better paid than they seem to have
been at the courts of Homer or are at the present time. For the tribal
festivals special priests were appointed, “who distinguished themselves by
their comprehensive knowledge of the requisite rites and by their
learning, and amongst whom a sort of rivalry is gradually developed,
according as one tribe or another is supposed to have more or less
prospered by its sacrifices”.(1) In the family marriage is sacred, and
traces of polyandry and of the levirate, surviving as late as the epic
poems, were regarded as things that need to be explained away. Perhaps the
most barbaric feature in Vedic society, the most singular relic of a
distant past, is the survival, even in a modified and symbolic form, of
human sacrifice.(2)
(1) Weber, p. 37.
(2) Wilson, Rig-Veda, i. p. 59-63; Muir, i. ii.; Wilson, Rig-Veda i. p.
xxiv., ii. 8 (ii. 90); Aitareya Brahmana, Haug’s version, vol. ii. pp.
462, 469.
As to the religious condition of the Vedic Aryans, we must steadily
remember that in the Vedas we have the views of the Rishis only, that is,
of sacred poets on their way to becoming a sacred caste. Necessarily they
no more represent the POPULAR creeds than the psalmists and prophets, with
their lofty monotheistic morality, represent the popular creeds of Israel.
The faith of the Rishis, as will be shown later, like that of the
psalmists, has a noble moral aspect. Yet certain elements of this higher
creed are already found in the faiths of the lowest savages. The Rishis
probably did not actually INVENT them. Consciousness of sin, of
imperfection in the sight of divine beings, has been developed (as it has
even in Australia) and is often confessed. But on the whole the religion
of the Rishis is practical—it might almost be said, is magical. They
desire temporal blessings, rain, sunshine, long life, power, wealth in
flocks and herds. The whole purpose of the sacrifices which occupy so much
of their time and thought is to obtain these good things. The sacrifice
and the sacrificer come between gods and men. On the man’s side is faith,
munificence, a compelling force of prayer and of intentness of will. The
sacrifice invigorates the gods to do the will of the sacrificer; it is
supposed to be mystically celebrated in heaven as well as on earth—the
gods are always sacrificing. Often (as when rain is wanted) the sacrifice
imitates the end which it is desirable to gain.(1) In all these matters a
minute ritual is already observed. The mystic word brahma, in the sense of
hymn or prayer of a compelling and magical efficacy, has already come into
use. The brahma answers almost to the Maori karakia or incantation and
charm. “This brahma of Visvamitra protects the tribe of Bharata.” “Atri
with the fourth prayer discovered the sun concealed by unholy
darkness.”(2) The complicated ritual, in which prayer and sacrifice were
supposed to exert a constraining influence on the supernatural powers,
already existed, Haug thinks, in the time of the chief Rishis or hymnists
of the Rig-Veda.(3)
(1) Compare “The Prayers of Savages” in J. A. Farrer’s Primitive Manners,
and Ludwig, iii. 262-296, and see Bergaigne, La Religion Vedique, vol. i.
p. 121.
(2) See texts in Muir, i. 242.
(3) Preface to translation of Aitareya Brahmana, p. 36.
In many respects the nature of the idea of the divine, as entertained by
the Rishis of the Rig-Veda, is still matter for discussion. In the chapter
on Vedic gods such particulars as can be ascertained will be given.
Roughly speaking, the religion is mainly, though not wholly, a cult of
departmental gods, originally, in certain cases, forces of Nature, but
endowed with moral earnestness. As to fetishism in the Vedas the opinions
of the learned are divided. M. Bergaigne(1) looks on the whole ritual as,
practically, an organised fetishism, employed to influence gods of a far
higher and purer character. Mr. Max Muller remarks, “that stones, bones,
shells, herbs and all the other so-called fetishes, are simply absent in
the old hymns, though they appear in more modern hymns, particularly those
of the Atharva-Veda. When artificial objects are mentioned and celebrated
in the Rig-Veda, they are only such as might be praised even by Wordsworth
or Tennyson—chariots, bows, quivers, axes, drums, sacrificial
vessels and similar objects. They never assume any individual character;
they are simply mentioned as useful or precious, it may be as sacred.”(2)
(1) La Religion Vedique, vol. i. p. 123. “Le culte est assimilable dans
une certaine mesure aux incantations, aux pratiques magiques.”
(2) Hibbert Lectures, p. 198.
When the existence of fetish “herbs” is denied by Mr. Max Muller, he does
not, of course, forget Soma, that divine juice. It is also to be noted
that in modern India, as Mr. Max Muller himself observes, Sir Alfred Lyall
finds that “the husbandman prays to his plough and the fisher to his net,”
these objects being, at present, fetishes. In opposition to Mr. Max
Muller, Barth avers that the same kind of fetishism which flourishes
to-day flourishes in the Rig-Veda. “Mountains, rivers, springs, trees,
herbs are invoked as so many powers. The beasts which live with man—the
horse, the cow, the dog, the bird and the animals which imperil his
existence—receive a cult of praise and prayer. Among the instruments
of ritual, some objects are more than things consecrated—they are
divinities; and the war-chariot, the weapons of defence and offence, the
plough, are the objects not only of benedictions but of prayers.”(1) These
absolute contradictions on matters of fact add, of course, to the
difficulty of understanding the early Indo-Aryan religion. One authority
says that the Vedic people were fetish-worshippers; another authority
denies it.
(1) Barth, Les Religions de l’Inde, p. 7, with the Vedic texts.
Were the Rishis ancestor-worshippers? Barth has no doubt whatever that
they were. In the pitris or fathers he recognises ancestral spirits, now
“companions of the gods, and gods themselves. At their head appear the
earliest celebrants of the sacrifice, Atharvan, the Angiras, the Kavis
(the pitris, par excellence) equals of the greatest gods, spirits who, BY
DINT OF SACRIFICE, drew forth the world from chaos, gave birth to the sun
and lighted the stars,”—cosmical feats which, as we have seen, are
sometimes attributed by the lower races to their idealised mythic
ancestors, the “old, old ones” of Australians and Ovahereroes.
A few examples of invocations of the ancestral spirits may not be out of
place.(1) “May the Fathers protect me in my invocation of the gods.” Here
is a curious case, especially when we remember how the wolf, in the North
American myth, scattered the stars like spangles over the sky: “The
fathers have adorned the sky with stars”.(2)
(1) Rig-Veda, vi. 52,4.
(2) Ibid., x. 68, xi.
Mr. Whitney (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, First Series, p. 59) gives
examples of the ceremony of feeding the Aryan ghosts. “The fathers are
supposed to assemble, upon due invocation, about the altar of him who
would pay them homage, to seat themselves upon the straw or matting spread
for each of the guests invited, and to partake of the offerings set before
them.” The food seems chiefly to consist of rice, sesame and honey.
Important as is the element of ancestor-worship in the evolution of
religion, Mr. Max Muller, in his Hibbert Lectures, merely remarks that
thoughts and feelings about the dead “supplied some of the earliest and
most important elements of religion”; but how these earliest elements
affect his system does not appear. On a general view, then, the religion
of the Vedic poets contained a vast number of elements in solution—elements
such as meet us in every quarter of the globe. The belief in ancestral
ghosts, the adoration of fetishes, the devotion to a moral ideal,
contemplated in the persons of various deities, some of whom at least have
been, and partly remain, personal natural forces, are all mingled, and all
are drifting towards a kind of pantheism, in which, while everything is
divine, and gods are reckoned by millions, the worshipper has glimpses of
one single divine essence. The ritual, as we have seen, is more or less
magical in character. The general elements of the beliefs are found, in
various proportions, everywhere; the pantheistic mysticism is almost
peculiar to India. It is, perhaps, needless to repeat that a faith so very
composite, and already so strongly differentiated, cannot possibly be
“primitive,” and that the beliefs and practices of a race so highly
organised in society and so well equipped in material civilisation as the
Vedic Aryans cannot possibly be “near the beginning”. Far from expecting
to find in the Veda the primitive myths of the Aryans, we must remember
that myth had already, when these hymns were sung, become obnoxious to the
religious sentiment. “Thus,” writes Barth, “the authors of the hymns have
expurgated, or at least left in the shade, a vast number of legends older
than their time; such, for example, as the identity of soma with the moon,
as the account of the divine families, of the parricide of Indra, and a
long list might be made of the reticences of the Veda…. It would be
difficult to extract from the hymns a chapter on the loves of the gods.
The goddesses are veiled, the adventures of the gods are scarcely touched
on in passing…. We must allow for the moral delicacy of the singers, and
for their dislike of speaking too precisely about the gods. Sometimes it
seems as if their chief object was to avoid plain speaking…. But often
there is nothing save jargon and indolence of mind in this voluntary
obscurity, for already in the Veda the Indian intellect is deeply smitten
with its inveterate malady of affecting mystery the more, the more it has
nothing to conceal; the mania for scattering symbols which symbolise no
reality, and for sporting with riddles which it is not worth while to
divine.”(1) Barth, however, also recognises amidst these confusions, “the
inquietude of a heart deeply stirred, which seeks truth and redemption in
prayer”. Such is the natural judgment of the clear French intellect on the
wilfully obscure, tormented and evasive intellect of India.
(1) Les Religions de l’Inde, p. 21.
It would be interesting were it possible to illuminate the criticism of
Vedic religion by ascertaining which hymns in the Rig-Veda are the most
ancient, and which are later. Could we do this, we might draw inferences
as to the comparative antiquity of the religious ideas in the poems. But
no such discrimination of relative antiquity seems to be within the reach
of critics. M. Bergaigne thinks it impossible at present to determine the
relative age of the hymns by any philological test. The ideas expressed
are not more easily arrayed in order of date. We might think that the
poems which contain most ceremonial allusions were the latest. But Mr. Max
Muller says that “even the earliest hymns have sentiments worthy of the
most advanced ceremonialists”.(1)
(1) History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 556.
The first and oldest source of our knowledge of Indo-Aryan myths is the
Rig-Veda, whose nature and character have been described. The second
source is the Atharva-Veda with the Brahmanas. The peculiarity of the
Atharva is its collection of magical incantations spells and fragments of
folklore. These are often, doubtless, of the highest antiquity. Sorcery
and the arts of medicine-men are earlier in the course of evolution than
priesthood. We meet them everywhere among races who have not developed the
institution of an order of priests serving national gods. As a collection,
the Atharva-Veda is later than the Rig-Veda, but we need not therefore
conclude that the IDEAS of the Atharva are “a later development of the
more primitive ideas of the Rig-Veda”. Magic is quod semper, quod ubique,
quod ab omnibus; the ideas of the Atharva-Veda are everywhere; the
peculiar notions of the Rig-Veda are the special property of an advanced
and highly differentiated people. Even in the present collected shape, M.
Barth thinks that many hymns of the Atharva are not much later than those
of the Rig-Veda. Mr. Whitney, admitting the lateness of the Atharva as a
collection, says, “This would not necessarily imply that the main body of
the Atharva hymns were not already in existence when the compilation of
the Rig-Veda took place”.(1) The Atharva refers to some poets of the Rig
(as certain hymnists in the Rig also do) as earlier men. If in the Rig (as
Weber says) “there breathes a lively natural feeling, a warm love of
nature, while in the Atharva, on the contrary, there predominates an
anxious apprehension of evil spirits and their magical powers,” it by no
means follows that this apprehension is of later origin than the lively
feeling for Nature. Rather the reverse. There appears to be no doubt(2)
that the style and language of the Atharva are later than those of the
Rig. Roth, who recognises the change, in language and style, yet considers
the Atharva “part of the old literature”.(3) He concludes that the Atharva
contains many pieces which, “both by their style and ideas, are shown to
be contemporary with the older hymns of the Rig-Veda”. In religion,
according to Muir,(4) the Atharva shows progress in the direction of
monotheism in its celebration of Brahman, but it also introduces
serpent-worship.
(1) Journal of the American Oriental Society. iv. 253.
(2) Muir, ii. 446.
(3) Ibid., ii. 448.
(4) Ibid., ii. 451.
As to the Atharva, then, we are free to suppose, if we like, that the dark
magic, the evil spirits, the incantations, are old parts of Indian, as of
all other popular beliefs, though they come later into literature than the
poetry about Ushas and the morality of Varuna. The same remarks apply to
our third source of information, the Brahmanas. These are indubitably
comments on the sacred texts very much more modern in form than the texts
themselves. But it does not follow, and this is most important for our
purpose, that the myths in the Brahmanas are all later than the Vedic
myths or corruptions of the Veda. Muir remarks,(1) “The Rig-Veda, though
the oldest collection, does not necessarily contain everything that is of
the greatest age in Indian thought or tradition. We know, for example,
that certain legends, bearing the impress of the highest antiquity, such
as that of the deluge, appear first in the Brahmanas.” We are especially
interested in this criticism, because most of the myths which we profess
to explain as survivals of savagery are narrated in the Brahmanas. If
these are necessarily late corruptions of Vedic ideas, because the
collection of the Brahmanas is far more modern than that of the Veda, our
argument is instantly disproved. But if ideas of an earlier stratum of
thought than the Vedic stratum may appear in a later collection, as ideas
of an earlier stratum of thought than the Homeric appear in poetry and
prose far later than Homer, then our contention is legitimate. It will be
shown in effect that a number of myths of the Brahmanas correspond in
character and incident with the myths of savages, such as Cahrocs and
Ahts. Our explanation is, that these tales partly survived, in the minds
perhaps of conservative local priesthoods, from the savage stage of
thought, or were borrowed from aborigines in that stage, or were moulded
in more recent times on surviving examples of that wild early fancy.
(1) Muir, iv. 450.
In the age of the Brahmanas the people have spread southwards from the
basin of the Indus to that of the Ganges. The old sacred texts have begun
to be scarcely comprehensible. The priesthood has become much more
strictly defined and more rigorously constituted. Absurd as it may seem,
the Vedic metres, like the Gayatri, have been personified, and appear as
active heroines of stories presumably older than this personification. The
Asuras have descended from the rank of gods to that of the heavenly
opposition to Indra’s government; they are now a kind of fiends, and the
Brahmanas are occupied with long stories about the war in heaven, itself a
very ancient conception. Varuna becomes cruel on occasion, and hostile.
Prajapati becomes the great mythical hero, and inherits the wildest myths
of the savage heroic beasts and birds.
The priests are now Brahmans, a hereditary divine caste, who possess all
the vast and puerile knowledge of ritual and sacrificial minutiae. As life
in the opera is a series of songs, so life in the Brahmanas is a sequence
of sacrifices. Sacrifice makes the sun rise and set, and the rivers run
this way or that.
The study of Indian myth is obstructed, as has been shown, by the
difficulty of determining the relative dates of the various legends, but
there are a myriad of other obstacles to the study of Indian mythology. A
poet of the Vedas says, “The chanters of hymns go about enveloped in mist,
and unsatisfied with idle talk”.(1) The ancient hymns are still “enveloped
in mist,” owing to the difficulty of their language and the variety of
modern renderings and interpretations. The heretics of Vedic religion, the
opponents of the orthodox commentators in ages comparatively recent, used
to complain that the Vedas were simply nonsense, and their authors “knaves
and buffoons”. There are moments when the modern student of Vedic myths is
inclined to echo this petulant complaint. For example, it is difficult
enough to find in the Rig-Veda anything like a categoric account of the
gods, and a description of their personal appearance. But in Rig-Veda,
viii. 29, 1, we read of one god, “a youth, brown, now hostile, now
friendly; a golden lustre invests him”. Who is this youth? “Soma as the
moon,” according to the commentators. M. Langlois thinks the sun is meant.
Dr. Aufrecht thinks the troop of Maruts (spirits of the storm), to whom,
he remarks, the epithet “dark-brown, tawny” is as applicable as it is to
their master, Rudra. This is rather confusing, and a mythological inquirer
would like to know for certain whether he is reading about the sun or
soma, the moon, or the winds.
(1) Rig-Veda, x. 82, 7, but compare Bergaigne, op. cit., iii. 72,
“enveloppes de nuees et de murmures”.
To take another example; we open Mr. Max Muller’s translation of the
Rig-Veda at random, say at page 49. In the second verse of the hymn to the
Maruts, Mr. Muller translates, “They who were born together,
self-luminous, with the spotted deer (the clouds), the spears, the
daggers, the glittering ornaments. I hear their whips almost close by, as
they crack them in their hands; they gain splendour on their way.” Now
Wilson translates this passage, “Who, borne by spotted deer, were born
self-luminous, with weapons, war-cries and decorations. I hear the
cracking of their whips in their hands, wonderfully inspiring courage in
the fight.” Benfey has, “Who with stags and spears, and with thunder and
lightning, self-luminous, were born. Hard by rings the crack of their whip
as it sounds in their hands; bright fare they down in storm.” Langlois
translates, “Just born are they, self-luminous. Mark ye their arms, their
decorations, their car drawn by deer? Hear ye their clamour? Listen! ’tis
the noise of the whip they hold in their hands, the sound that stirs up
courage in the battle.” This is an ordinary example of the diversities of
Vedic translation. It is sufficiently puzzling, nor is the matter made
more transparent by the variety of opinion as to the meaning of the “deer”
along with which the Maruts are said (by some of the translators) to have
been born. This is just the sort of passage on which a controversy
affecting the whole nature of Vedic mythological ideas might be raised.
According to a text in the Yajur Veda, gods, and men, and beasts, and
other matters were created from various portions of the frame of a divine
being named Prajapati.(1) The god Agni, Brahmans and the goat were born
from the mouth of Prajapati. From his breast and arms came the god Indra
(sometimes spoken of as a ram), the sheep, and of men the Rajanya. Cows
and gods called Visvadevas were born together from his middle. Are we to
understand the words “they who were born together with the spotted deer”
to refer to a myth of this kind—a myth representing the Maruts and
deer as having been born at the same birth, as Agni came with the goat,
and Indra with the sheep? This is just the point on which the Indian
commentators were divided.(2) Sayana, the old commentator, says, “The
legendary school takes them for deer with white spots; the etymological
school, for the many-coloured lines of clouds”. The modern legendary (or
anthropological) and etymological (or philological) students of mythology
are often as much at variance in their attempts to interpret the
traditions of India.
(1) Muir, Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., i. 16.
(2) Max Muller, Rig-Veda Sanhita, trans., vol. i. p. 59.
Another famous, and almost comic, example of the difficulty of Vedic
interpretation is well known. In Rig-Veda, x. 16, 4, there is a funeral
hymn. Agni, the fire-god, is supplicated either to roast a goat or to warm
the soul of the dead and convey it to paradise. Whether the soul is to be
thus comforted or the goat is to be grilled, is a question that has
mightily puzzled Vedic doctors.(1) Professor Muller and M. Langlois are
all for “the immortal soul”, the goat has advocates, or had advocates, in
Aufrecht, Ludwig and Roth. More important difficulties of interpretation
are illustrated by the attitude of M. Bergaigne in La Religion Vedique,
and his controversy with the great German lexicographers. The study of
mythology at one time made the Vedas its starting-point. But perhaps it
would be wise to begin from something more intelligible, something less
perplexed by difficulties of language and diversities of interpretation.
(1) Muir, v. 217.
In attempting to criticise the various Aryan myths, we shall be guided, on
the whole, by the character of the myths themselves. Pure and elevated
conceptions we shall be inclined to assign to a pure and elevated
condition of thought (though such conceptions do, recognisably, occur in
the lowest known religious strata), and we shall make no difficulty about
believing that Rishis and singers capable of noble conceptions existed in
an age very remote in time, in a society which had many of the features of
a lofty and simple civilisation. But we shall not, therefore, assume that
the hymns of these Rishis are in any sense “primitive,” or throw much
light on the infancy of the human mind, or on the “origin” of religious
and heroic myths. Impure, childish and barbaric conceptions, on the other
hand, we shall be inclined to attribute to an impure, childish, and
barbaric condition of thought; and we shall again make no difficulty about
believing that ideas originally conceived when that stage of thought was
general have been retained and handed down to a far later period. This
view of the possible, or rather probable, antiquity of many of the myths
preserved in the Brahmanas is strengthened, if it needed strengthening, by
the opinion of Dr. Weber.(1) “We must indeed assume generally with regard
to many of those legends (in the Brahmanas of the Rig-Veda) that they had
already gained a rounded independent shape in tradition before they were
incorporated into the Brahmanas; and of this we have frequent evidence in
the DISTINCTLY ARCHAIC CHARACTER OF THEIR LANGUAGE, compared with that of
the rest of the text.”
(1) History of Indian Literature, English trans., p. 47.
We have now briefly stated the nature and probable relative antiquity of
the evidence which is at the disposal of Vedic mythologists. The chief
lesson we would enforce is the necessity of suspending the judgment when
the Vedas are represented as examples of primitive and comparatively pure
and simple natural religion. They are not primitive; they are highly
differentiated, highly complex, extremely enigmatic expressions of fairly
advanced and very peculiar religious thought. They are not morally so very
pure as has been maintained, and their purity, such as it is, seems the
result of conscious reticence and wary selection rather than of primeval
innocence. Yet the bards or editors have by no means wholly excluded very
ancient myths of a thoroughly savage character. These will be chiefly
exposed in the chapter on “Indo-Aryan Myths of the Beginnings of Things,”
which follows.
CHAPTER VIII. INDIAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
Comparison of Vedic and savage myths—The metaphysical Vedic account
of the beginning of things—Opposite and savage fable of world made
out of fragments of a man—Discussion of this hymn—Absurdities
of Brahmanas—Prajapati, a Vedic Unkulunkulu or Qat—Evolutionary
myths—Marriage of heaven and earth—Myths of Puranas, their
savage parallels—Most savage myths are repeated in Brahmanas.
In discussing the savage myths of the origin of the world and of man, we
observed that they were as inconsistent as they were fanciful. Among the
fancies embodied in the myths was noted the theory that the world, or
various parts of it, had been formed out of the body of some huge
non-natural being, a god, or giant, or a member of some ancient mysterious
race. We also noted the myths of the original union of heaven and earth,
and their violent separation as displayed in the tales of Greeks and
Maoris, to which may be added the Acagchemem nation in California.(1)
Another feature of savage cosmogonies, illustrated especially in some
early Slavonic myths, in Australian legends, and in the faith of the
American races, was the creation of the world, or the recovery of a
drowned world by animals, as the raven, the dove and the coyote. The
hatching of all things out of an egg was another rude conception, chiefly
noted among the Finns. The Indian form occurs in the Satapatha
Brahmana.(2) The preservation of the human race in the Deluge, or the
creation of the race after the Deluge, was yet another detail of savage
mythology; and for many of these fancies we seemed to find a satisfactory
origin in the exceedingly credulous and confused state of savage
philosophy and savage imagination.
(1) Bancroft, v. 162.
(2) Sacred Books of the East, i. 216.
The question now to be asked is, do the traditions of the Aryans of India
supply us with myths so closely resembling the myths of Nootkas, Maoris
and Australians that we may provisionally explain them as stories
originally due to the invention of savages? This question may be answered
in the affirmative. The Vedas, the Epics and the Puranas contain a large
store of various cosmogonic traditions as inconsistent as the parallel
myths of savages. We have an Aryan Ilmarinen, Tvashtri, who, like the
Finnish smith, forged “the iron vault of hollow heaven” and the ball of
earth.(1) Again, the earth is said to have sprung, as in some Mangaian
fables, “from a being called Uttanapad”.(2) Again, Brahmanaspati, “blew
the gods forth like a blacksmith,” and the gods had a hand in the making
of things. In contrast with these childish pieces of anthropomorphism, we
have the famous and sublime speculations of an often-quoted hymn.(3) It is
thus that the poet dreams of the days before being and non-being began:—
(1) Muir, v. 354.
(2) Rig-Veda, x. 72, 4.
(3) Ibid., x. 126.
“There was then neither non-entity nor entity; there was no atmosphere nor
sky above. What enveloped (all)?… Was it water, the profound abyss?
Death was not then, nor immortality: there was no distinction of day or
night. That One breathed calmly, self-supported; then was nothing
different from it, or above it. In the beginning darkness existed,
enveloped in darkness. All this was undistinguishable water. That One
which lay void and wrapped in nothingness was developed by the power of
fervour. Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind (and
which) sages, searching with their intellect, have discovered to be the
bond which connects entity with non-entity. The ray (or cord) which
stretched across these (worlds), was it below or was it above? There were
there impregnating powers and mighty forces, a self-supporting principle
beneath and energy aloft. Who knows? who here can declare whence has
sprung, whence this creation? The gods are subsequent to the development
of this (universe); who then knows whence it arose? From what this
creation arose, and whether (any one) made it or not, he who in the
highest heaven is its ruler, he verily knows, or (even) he does not
know.”(1)
(1) Muir, Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., v. 357.
Here there is a Vedic hymn of the origin of things, from a book, it is
true, supposed to be late, which is almost, if not absolutely, free from
mythological ideas. The “self-supporting principle beneath and energy
aloft” may refer, as Dr. Muir suggests, to the father, heaven above, and
the mother, earth beneath. The “bond between entity and non-entity” is
sought in a favourite idea of the Indian philosophers, that of tapas or
“fervour”. The other speculations remind us, though they are much more
restrained and temperate in character, of the metaphysical chants of the
New Zealand priests, of the Zunis, of Popol Vuh, and so on. These belong
to very early culture.
What is the relative age of this hymn? If it could be proved to be the
oldest in the Veda, it would demonstrate no more than this, that in time
exceedingly remote the Aryans of India possessed a philosopher, perhaps a
school of philosophers, who applied the minds to abstract speculations on
the origin of things. It could not prove that mythological speculations
had not preceded the attempts of a purer philosophy. But the date cannot
be ascertained. Mr. Max Muller cannot go farther than the suggestion that
the hymn is an expression of the perennis quaedam philosophia of Leibnitz.
We are also warned that a hymn is not necessarily modern because it is
philosophical.(1) Certainly that is true; the Zunis, Maoris, and Mangaians
exhibit amazing powers of abstract thought. We are not concerned to show
that this hymn is late; but it seems almost superfluous to remark that
ideas like those which it contains can scarcely be accepted as expressing
man’s earliest theory of the origin of all things. We turn from such ideas
to those which the Aryans of India have in common with black men and red
men, with far-off Finns and Scandinavians, Chaldaeans, Haidahs, Cherokees,
Murri and Maori, Mangaians and Egyptians.
(1) History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 568.
The next Vedic account of creation which we propose to consider is as
remote as possible in character from the sublime philosophic poem. In the
Purusha Sukta, the ninetieth hymn of the tenth book of the Rig-Veda
Sanhita, we have a description of the creation of all things out of the
severed limbs of a magnified non-natural man, Purusha. This conception is
of course that which occurs in the Norse myths of the rent body of Ymir.
Borr’s sons took the body of the Giant Ymir and of his flesh formed the
earth, of his blood seas and waters, of his bones mountains, of his teeth
rocks and stones, of his hair all manner of plants, of his skull the
firmament, of his brains the clouds, and so forth. In Chaldean story, Bel
cuts in twain the magnified non-natural woman Omorca, and converts the
halves of her body into heaven and earth. Among the Iroquois in North
America, Chokanipok was the giant whose limbs, bones and blood furnished
the raw material of many natural objects; while in Mangaia portions of Ru,
in Egypt of Set and Osiris, in Greece of Dionysus Zagreus were used in
creating various things, such as stones, plants and metals. The same ideas
precisely are found in the ninetieth hymn of the tenth book of the
Rig-Veda. Yet it is a singular thing that, in all the discussions as to
the antiquity and significance of this hymn which have come under our
notice, there has not been one single reference made to parallel legends
among Aryan or non-Aryan peoples. In accordance with the general
principles which guide us in this work, we are inclined to regard any
ideas which are at once rude in character and widely distributed, both
among civilised and uncivilised races, as extremely old, whatever may be
the age of the literary form in which they are presented. But the current
of learned opinions as to the date of the Purusha Sukta, the Vedic hymn
about the sacrifice of Purusha and the creation of the world out of
fragments of his body, runs in the opposite direction. The hymn is not
regarded as very ancient by most Sanskrit scholars. We shall now quote the
hymn, which contains the data on which any theory as to its age must be
founded:—(1)
(1) Rig-Veda, x. 90; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., i. 9.
“Purusha has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. On every
side enveloping the earth, he overpassed (it) by a space of ten fingers.
Purusha himself is this whole (universe), whatever is and whatever shall
be…. When the gods performed a sacrifice with Purusha as the oblation,
the spring was its butter, the summer its fuel, and the autumn its
(accompanying) offering. This victim, Purusha, born in the beginning, they
immolated on the sacrificial grass. With him the gods, the Sadhyas, and
the Rishis sacrificed. From that universal sacrifice were provided curds
and butter. It formed those aerial (creatures) and animals both wild and
tame. From that universal sacrifice sprang the Ric and Saman verses, the
metres and Yajush. From it sprang horses, and all animals with two rows of
teeth; kine sprang from it; from it goats and sheep. When (the gods)
divided Purusha, into how many parts did they cut him up? What was his
mouth? What arms (had he)? What (two objects) are said (to have been) his
thighs and feet? The Brahman was his mouth; the Rajanya was made his arms;
the being (called) the Vaisya, he was his thighs; the Sudra sprang from
his feet. The moon sprang from his soul (Mahas), the sun from his eye,
Indra and Agni from his mouth, and Yaiyu from his breath. From his navel
arose the air, from his head the sky, from his feet the earth, from his
ear the (four) quarters; in this manner (the gods) formed the world. When
the gods, performing sacrifice, bound Purusha as a victim, there were
seven sticks (stuck up) for it (around the fire), and thrice seven pieces
of fuel were made. With sacrifice the gods performed the sacrifice. These
were the earliest rites. These great powers have sought the sky, where are
the former Sadhyas, gods.”
The myth here stated is plain enough in its essential facts. The gods
performed a sacrifice with a gigantic anthropomorphic being (Purusha =
Man) as the victim. Sacrifice is not found, as a rule, in the religious of
the most backward races of all; it is, relatively, an innovation, as shall
be shown later. His head, like the head of Ymir, formed the sky, his eye
the sun, animals sprang from his body. The four castes are connected with,
and it appears to be implied that they sprang from, his mouth, arms,
thighs and feet. It is obvious that this last part of the myth is
subsequent to the formation of castes. This is one of the chief arguments
for the late date of the hymn, as castes are not distinctly recognised
elsewhere in the Rig-Veda. Mr. Max Muller(1) believes the hymn to be
“modern both in its character and in its diction,” and this opinion he
supports by philological arguments. Dr. Muir(2) says that the hymn “has
every character of modernness both in its diction and ideas”. Dr Haug, on
the other hand,(3) in a paper read in 1871, admits that the present form
of the hymn is not older than the greater part of the hymns of the tenth
book, and than those of the Atharva Veda; but he adds, “The ideas which
the hymn contains are certainly of a primeval antiquity…. In fact, the
hymn is found in the Yajur-Veda among the formulas connected with human
sacrifices, which were formerly practised in India.” We have expressly
declined to speak about “primeval antiquity,” as we have scarcely any
evidence as to the myths and mental condition for example, even of
palaeolithic man; but we may so far agree with Dr. Haug as to affirm that
the fundamental idea of the Purusha Sukta, namely, the creation of the
world or portions of the world out of the fragments of a fabulous
anthropomorphic being is common to Chaldeans, Iroquois, Egyptians, Greeks,
Tinnehs, Mangaians and Aryan Indians. This is presumptive proof of the
antiquity of the ideas which Dr. Muir and Mr. Max Muller think relatively
modern. The savage and brutal character of the invention needs no
demonstration. Among very low savages, for example, the Tinnehs of British
North America, not a man, not a god, but a DOG, is torn up, and the
fragments are made into animals.(4) On the Paloure River a beaver suffers
in the manner of Purusha. We may, for these reasons, regard the chief idea
of the myth as extremely ancient—infinitely more ancient than the
diction of the hymn.
(1) Ancient Sanskrit Literature, 570.
(2) Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., i. 12.
(3) Sanskrit Text, 2nd edit., ii. 463.
(4) Hearne’s Journey, pp. 342-343.
As to the mention of the castes, supposed to be a comparatively modern
institution, that is not an essential part of the legend. When the idea of
creation out of a living being was once received it was easy to extend the
conception to any institution, of which the origin was forgotten. The
Teutonic race had a myth which explained the origin of the classes eorl,
ceorl and thrall (earl, churl and slave). A South American people, to
explain the different ranks in society, hit on the very myth of Plato, the
legend of golden, silver and copper races, from which the ranks of society
have descended. The Vedic poet, in our opinion, merely extended to the
institution of caste a myth which had already explained the origin of the
sun, the firmament, animals, and so forth, on the usual lines of savage
thought. The Purusha Sukta is the type of many other Indian myths of
creation, of which the following(1) one is extremely noteworthy.
“Prajapati desired to propagate. He formed the Trivrit (stoma) from his
mouth. After it were produced the deity Agni, the metre Gayatri,… of men
the Brahman, of beasts the goat;… from his breast, and from his arms he
formed the Panchadasa (stoma). After it were created the God Indra, the
Trishtubh metre,… of men the Rajanya, of beasts the sheep. Hence they
are vigorous, because they were created from vigour. From his middle he
formed the Saptadasa (stoma). After it were created the gods called the
Yisvadevas, the Jagati metre,… of men the Vaisya, of beasts kine. Hence
they are to be eaten, because they were created from the receptacle of
food.” The form in which we receive this myth is obviously later than the
institution of caste and the technical names for metres. Yet surely any
statement that kine “are to be eaten” must be older than the universal
prohibition to eat that sacred animal the cow. Possibly we might argue
that when this theory of creation was first promulgated, goats and sheep
were forbidden food.(2)
(1) Taittirya Sanhita, or Yajur-Veda, vii. i. 1-4; Muir, 2nd edit., i. 15.
(2) Mr. M’Lennan has drawn some singular inferences from this passage,
connecting, as it does, certain gods and certain classes of men with
certain animals, in a manner somewhat suggestive of totemism (Fornightly
Review), February, 1870.
Turning from the Vedas to the Brahmanas, we find a curiously savage myth
of the origin of species.(1) According to this passage of the Brahmana,
“this universe was formerly soul only, in the form of Purusha”. He caused
himself to fall asunder into two parts. Thence arose a husband and a wife.
“He cohabited with her; from them men were born. She reflected, ‘How does
he, after having produced me from himself, cohabit with me? Ah, let me
disappear.’ She became a cow, and the other a bull, and he cohabited with
her. From them kine were produced.” After a series of similar
metamorphoses of the female into all animal shapes, and a similar series
of pursuits by the male in appropriate form, “in this manner pairs of all
sorts of creatures down to ants were created”. This myth is a parallel to
the various Greek legends about the amours in bestial form of Zeus,
Nemesis, Cronus, Demeter and other gods and goddesses. In the Brahmanas
this myth is an explanation of the origin of species, and such an
explanation as could scarcely have occurred to a civilised mind. In other
myths in the Brahmanas, Prajapati creates men from his body, or rather the
fluid of his body becomes a tortoise, the tortoise becomes a man
(purusha), with similar examples of speculation.(2)
(1) Satapatha Brahmana, xiv. 4, 2; Muir, 2nd edit., i. 25.
(2) Similar tales are found among the Khonds.
Among all these Brahmana myths of the part taken by Prajapati in the
creation or evoking of things, the question arises who WAS Prajapati? His
role is that of the great Hare in American myth; he is a kind of demiurge,
and his name means “The Master of Things Created,” like the Australian
Biamban, “Master,” and the American title of the chief Manitou, “Master of
Life”,(1) Dr. Muir remarks that, as the Vedic mind advances from mere
divine beings who “reside and operate in fire” (Agni), “dwell and shine in
the sun” (Surya), or “in the atmosphere” (Indra), towards a conception of
deity, “the farther step would be taken of speaking of the deity under
such new names as Visvakarman and Prajapati”. These are “appellatives
which do not designate any limited functions connected with any single
department of Nature, but the more general and abstract notions of divine
power operating in the production and government of the universe”. Now the
interesting point is that round this new and abstract NAME gravitate the
most savage and crudest myths, exactly the myths we meet among Hottentots
and Nootkas. For example, among the Hottentots it is Heitsi Eibib, among
the Huarochiri Indians it is Uiracocha, who confers, by curse or blessing,
on the animals their proper attributes and characteristics.(2) In the
Satapatha Brahmana it is Prajapati who takes this part, that falls to rude
culture-heroes of Hottentots and Huarochiris.(3) How Prajapati made
experiments in a kind of state-aided evolution, so to speak, or evolution
superintended and assisted from above, will presently be set forth.
(1) Bergaigne, iii. 40.
(2) Avila, Fables of the Yncas, p. 127.
(3) English translation, ii. 361.
In the Puranas creation is a process renewed after each kalpa, or vast
mundane period. Brahma awakes from his slumber, and finds the world a
waste of water. Then, just as in the American myths of the coyote, and the
Slavonic myths of the devil and the doves, a boar or a fish or a tortoise
fishes up the world out of the waters. That boar, fish, tortoise, or what
not, is Brahma or Vishnu. This savage conception of the beginnings of
creation in the act of a tortoise, fish, or boar is not first found in the
Puranas, as Mr. Muir points out, but is indicated in the Black Yajur Veda
and in the Satapatha Brahmana.(1) In the Satapatha Brahmana, xiv. 1, 2,
11, we discover the idea, so common in savage myths—for example, in
that of the Navajoes—that the earth was at first very small, a mere
patch, and grew bigger after the animal fished it up. “Formerly this earth
was only so large, of the size of a span. A boar called Emusha raised her
up.” Here the boar makes no pretence of being the incarnation of a god,
but is a mere boar sans phrase, like the creative coyote of the Papogas
and Chinooks, or the musk-rat of the Tacullies. This is a good example of
the development of myths. Savages begin, as we saw, by mythically
regarding various animals, spiders, grasshoppers, ravens, eagles,
cockatoos, as the creators or recoverers of the world. As civilisation
advances, those animals still perform their beneficent functions, but are
looked on as gods in disguise. In time the animals are often dropped
altogether, though they hold their place with great tenacity in the
cosmogonic traditions of the Aryans in India. When we find the Satapatha
Brahmana alleging(2) “that all creatures are descended from a tortoise,”
we seem to be among the rude Indians of the Pacific Coast. But when the
tortoise is identified with Aditya, and when Adityas prove to be solar
deities, sons of Aditi, and when Aditi is recognised by Mr. Muller as the
Dawn, we see that the Aryan mind has not been idle, but has added a good
deal to the savage idea of the descent of men and beasts from a
tortoise.(3)
(1) Muir, 2nd edit., vol. i. p. 52.
(2) Muir, 2nd edit., vol. i. p. 54.
(3) See Ternaux Compans’ Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, lxxxvi. p. 5. For
Mexican traditions, “Mexican and Australian Hurricane World’s End,”
Bancroft, v. 64.
Another feature of savage myths of creation we found to be the
introduction of a crude theory of evolution. We saw that among the
Potoyante tribe of the Digger Indians, and among certain Australian
tribes, men and beasts were supposed to have been slowly evolved and
improved out of the forms first of reptiles and then of quadrupeds. In the
mythologies of the more civilised South American races, the idea of the
survival of the fittest was otherwise expressed. The gods made several
attempts at creation, and each set of created beings proving in one way or
other unsuited to its environment, was permitted to die out or degenerated
into apes, and was succeeded by a set better adapted for survival.(1) In
much the same way the Satapatha Brahmana(2) represents mammals as the last
result of a series of creative experiments. “Prajapati created living
beings, which perished for want of food. Birds and serpents perished thus.
Prajapati reflected, ‘How is it that my creatures perish after having been
formed?’ He perceived this: ‘They perish from want of food’. In his own
presence he caused milk to be supplied to breasts. He created living
beings, which, resorting to the breasts, were thus preserved. These are
the creatures which did not perish.”
(1) This myth is found in Popol Vuh. A Chinook myth of the same sort,
Bancroft, v. 95.
(2) ii. 5, 11; Muir, 2nd edit., i. 70.
The common myth which derives the world from a great egg—the myth
perhaps most familiar in its Finnish shape—is found in the Satapatha
Brahmana.(1) “In the beginning this universe was waters, nothing but
waters. The waters desired: ‘How can we be reproduced?’ So saying, they
toiled, they performed austerity. While they were performing austerity, a
golden egg came into existence. It then became a year…. From it in a
year a man came into existence, who was Prajapati…. He conceived progeny
in himself; with his mouth he created the gods.” According to another
text,(2) “Prajapati took the form of a tortoise”. The tortoise is the same
as Aditya.(3)
(1) xi. 1, 6, 1; Muir, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 1863.
(2) Satapatha Brahmana, vii. 4, 3, 5.
(3) Aitareya Brahmana, iii. 34 (11, 219), a very discreditable origin of
species.
It is now time to examine the Aryan shape of the widely spread myth about
the marriage of heaven and earth, and the fortunes of their children. We
have already seen that in New Zealand heaven and earth were regarded as
real persons, of bodily parts and passions, united in a secular embrace.
We shall apply the same explanation to the Greek myth of Gaea and of the
mutilation of Cronus. In India, Dyaus (heaven) answers to the Greek Uranus
and the Maori Rangi, while Prithivi (earth) is the Greek Gaea, the Maori
Papa. In the Veda, heaven and earth are constantly styled “parents”;(1)
but this we might regard as a mere metaphorical expression, still common
in poetry. A passage of the Aitareya Brahmana, however, retains the old
conception, in which there was nothing metaphorical at all.(2) These two
worlds, heaven and earth, were once joined. Subsequently they were
separated (according to one account, by Indra, who thus plays the part of
Cronus and of Tane Mahuta). “Heaven and earth,” says Dr. Muir, “are
regarded as the parents not only of men, but of the gods also, as appears
from the various texts where they are designated by the epithet Devapatre,
‘having gods for their children’.” By men in an early stage of thought
this myth was accepted along with others in which heaven and earth were
regarded as objects created by one of their own children, as by Indra,(3)
who “stretched them out like a hide,” who, like Atlas, “sustains and
upholds them”(4) or, again, Tvashtri, the divine smith, wrought them by
his craft; or, once more, heaven and earth sprung from the head and feet
of Purusha. In short, if any one wished to give an example of that
recklessness of orthodoxy or consistency which is the mark of early myth,
he could find no better example than the Indian legends of the origin of
things. Perhaps there is not one of the myths current among the lower
races which has not its counterpart in the Indian Brahmanas. It has been
enough for us to give a selection of examples.
(1) Muir, v. 22.
(2) iv. 27; Haug, ii. 308.
(3) Rig-Veda, viii. 6, 5.
(4) Ibid., iii. 32, 8.
CHAPTER IX. GREEK MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND MAN.
The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer—Their
mythology, however, is full of repulsive features—The hypothesis
that many of these are savage survivals—Are there other examples of
such survival in Greek life and institutions?—Greek opinion was
constant that the race had been savage—Illustrations of savage
survival from Greek law of homicide, from magic, religion, human
sacrifice, religious art, traces of totemism, and from the mysteries—Conclusion:
that savage survival may also be expected in Greek myths.
The Greeks, when we first make their acquaintance in the Homeric poems,
were a cultivated people, dwelling, under the government of royal
families, in small city states. This social condition they must have
attained by 1000 B.C., and probably much earlier. They had already a long
settled past behind them, and had no recollection of any national
migration from the “cradle of the Aryan race”. On the other hand, many
tribes thought themselves earth-born from the soil of the place where they
were settled. The Maori traditions prove that memories of a national
migration may persist for several hundred years among men ignorant of
writing. Greek legend, among a far more civilised race, only spoke of
occasional foreign settlers from Sidon, Lydia, or Egypt. The Homeric
Greeks were well acquainted with almost all the arts of life, though it is
not absolutely certain that they could write, and certainly they were not
addicted to reading. In war they fought from chariots, like the Egyptians
and Assyrians; they were bold seafarers, being accustomed to harry the
shores even of Egypt, and they had large commercial dealings with the
people of Tyre and Sidon. In the matter of religion they were
comparatively free and unrestrained. Their deities, though, in myth,
capricious in character, might be regarded in many ways as “making for
righteousness”. They protected the stranger and the suppliant; they
sanctioned the oath, they frowned on the use of poisoned arrows; marriage
and domestic life were guarded by their good-will; they dispensed good and
evil fortune, to be accepted with humility and resignation among mortals.
The patriarchal head of each family performed the sacrifices for his
household, the king for the state, the ruler of Mycenae, Agamemnon, for
the whole Achaean host encamped before the walls of Troy. At the same
time, prophets, like Calchas, possessed considerable influence, due partly
to an hereditary gift of second-sight, as in the case of Theoclymenus,(1)
partly to acquired professional skill in observing omens, partly to the
direct inspiration of the gods. The oracle at Delphi, or, as it is called
by Homer, Pytho, was already famous, and religion recognised, in various
degrees, all the gods familiar to the later cult of Hellas. In a people so
advanced, so much in contact with foreign races and foreign ideas, and so
wonderfully gifted by nature with keen intellect and perfect taste, it is
natural to expect, if anywhere, a mythology almost free from repulsive
elements, and almost purged of all that we regard as survivals from the
condition of savagery. But while Greek mythology is richer far than any
other in beautiful legend, and is thronged with lovely and majestic forms
of gods and goddesses, nymphs and oreads ideally fair, none the less a
very large proportion of its legends is practically on a level with the
myths of Maoris, Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and Bushmen.
(1) Odyssey, xx. 354.
This is the part of Greek mythology which has at all times excited most
curiosity, and has been made the subject of many systems of
interpretation. The Greeks themselves, from almost the earliest historical
ages, were deeply concerned either to veil or explain away the blasphemous
horrors of their own “sacred chapters,” poetic traditions and temple
legends. We endeavour to account for these as relics of an age of
barbarism lying very far behind the time of Homer—an age when the
ancestors of the Greeks either borrowed, or more probably developed for
themselves, the kind of myths by which savage peoples endeavour to explain
the nature and origin of the world and all phenomena.
The correctness of this explanation, resting as it does on the belief that
the Greeks were at one time in the savage status, might be demonstrated
from the fact that not only myths, but Greek life in general, and
especially Greek ritual, teemed with surviving examples of institutions
and of manners which are found everywhere among the most backward and
barbarous races. It is not as if only the myths of Greece retained this
rudeness, or as if the Greeks supposed themselves to have been always
civilised. The whole of Greek life yields relics of savagery when the
surface is excavated ever so slightly. Moreover, that the Greeks, as soon
as they came to reflect on these matters at all, believed themselves to
have emerged from a condition of savagery is undeniable. The poets are
entirely at one on this subject with Moschion, a writer of the school of
Euripides. “The time hath been, yea, it HATH been,” he says, “when men
lived like the beasts, dwelling in mountain caves, and clefts unvisited of
the sun…. Then they broke not the soil with ploughs nor by aid of iron,
but the weaker man was slain to make the supper of the stronger,” and so
on.(1) This view of the savage origin of mankind was also held by
Aristotle:(2) “It is probable that the first men, whether they were
produced by the earth (earth-born) or survived from some deluge, were on a
level of ignorance and darkness”.(3) This opinion, consciously held and
stated by philosophers and poets, reveals itself also in the universal
popular Greek traditions that men were originally ignorant of fire,
agriculture, metallurgy and all the other arts and conveniences of life,
till they were instructed by ideal culture-heroes, like Prometheus,
members of a race divine or half divine. A still more curious Athenian
tradition (preserved by Varro) maintained, not only that marriage was
originally unknown, but that, as among Australians and some Red Indians,
the family name, descended through the mother, and kinship was reckoned on
the female side before the time of Cecrops.(4)
(1) Moschion; cf. Preller, Ausgewahlte Aufsatze, p. 206.
(2) Politics, ii. 8-21; Plato, Laws, 667-680.
(3) Compare Horace, Satires, i. 3, 99; Lucretius, v. 923.
(4) Suidas, s.v. “Prometheus”; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xviii. 9.
While Greek opinion, both popular and philosophical, admitted, or rather
asserted, that savagery lay in the background of the historical prospect,
Greek institutions retained a thousand birth-marks of savagery. It is
manifest and undeniable that the Greek criminal law, as far as it effected
murder, sprang directly from the old savage blood-feud.(1) The Athenian
law was a civilised modification of the savage rule that the kindred of a
slain man take up his blood-feud. Where homicide was committed WITHIN the
circle of blood relationship, as by Orestes, Greek religion provided the
Erinnyes to punish an offence which had, as it were, no human avenger. The
precautions taken by murderers to lay the ghost of the slain man were much
like those in favour among the Australians. The Greek cut off the
extremities of his victim, the tips of the hands and feet, and disposed
them neatly beneath the arm-pits of the slain man.(2) In the same spirit,
and for the same purpose, the Australian black cuts off the thumbs of his
dead enemy, that the ghost too may be mutilated and prevented from
throwing at him with a ghostly spear. We learn also from Apollonius
Rhodius and his scholiast that Greek murderers used thrice to suck in and
spit out the gore of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby
partaking of their blood, and so, by becoming members of their kin,
putting it beyond the power of the ghosts to avenge themselves. Similar
ideas inspire the worldwide savage custom of making an artificial “blood
brotherhood” by mingling the blood of the contracting parties. As to the
ceremonies of cleansing from blood-guiltiness among the Greeks, we may
conjecture that these too had their primitive side; for Orestes, in the
Eumenides, maintains that he has been purified of his mother’s slaughter
by sufficient blood of swine. But this point will be illustrated
presently, when we touch on the mysteries.
(1) Duncker, History of Greece, Engl. transl., vol. ii. p. 129.
(2) See “Arm-pitting in Ancient Greece,” in the American Journal of
Philology, October, 1885, where a discussion of the familiar texts in
Aeschylus and Apollonius Rhodius will be found.
Ritual and myth, as might be expected, retained vast masses of savage
rites and superstitious habits and customs. To be “in all things too
superstitious,” too full of deisidaimonia, was even in St. Paul’s time the
characteristic of the Athenians. Now superstition, or deisidaimonia, is
defined by Theophrastus,(1) as “cowardice in regard to the supernatural”
((Greek text omitted)). This “cowardice” has in all ages and countries
secured the permanence of ritual and religious traditions. Men have always
argued, like one of the persons in M. Renan’s play, Le Pretre de Nemi,
that “l’ordre du monde depend de l’ordre des rites qu’on observe”. The
familiar endurable sequence of the seasons of spring, and seed-sowing, and
harvest depend upon the due performance of immemorial religious acts. “In
the mystic deposits,” says Dinarchus, “lies the safety of the city.”(2)
What the “mystic deposits” were nobody knows for certain, but they must
have been of very archaic sanctity, and occur among the Arunta and the
Pawnees.
(1) Characters.
(2) Ap. Hermann, Lehrbuch, p. 41; Aglaophamus, 965.
Ritual is preserved because it preserves LUCK. Not only among the Romans
and the Brahmans, with their endless minute ritual actions, but among such
lower races as the Kanekas of New Caledonia, the efficacy of religious
functions is destroyed by the slightest accidental infraction of
established rules.(1) The same timid conservatism presides over myth, and
in each locality the mystery-plays, with their accompanying narratives,
preserved inviolate the early forms of legend. Myth and ritual do not
admit of being argued about. “C’etait le rite etabli. Ce n’etait pas plus
absurde qu’autre chose,” says the conservative in M. Renan’s piece,
defending the mode of appointment of
(1) Thus the watchers of the dead in New Caledonia are fed by the sorcerer
with a mess at the end of a very long spoon, and should the food miss the
mouth, all the ceremonies have to be repeated. This detail is from Mr. J.
J. Atkinson.
Now, if the rites and myths preserved by the timorousness of this same
“cowardice towards the supernatural” were originally evolved in the stage
of savagery, savage they would remain, as it is impious and dangerous to
reform them till the religion which they serve perishes with them. These
relics in Greek ritual and faith are very commonly explained as due to
Oriental influences, as things borrowed from the dark and bloody
superstitions of Asia. But this attempt to save the native Greek character
for “blitheness” and humanity must not be pushed too far.(1) It must be
remembered that the cruder and wilder sacrifices and legends of Greece
were strictly LOCAL; that they were attached to these ancient temples, old
altars, barbarous xoana, or wooden idols, and rough fetish stones, in
which Pausanias found the most ancient relics of Hellenic theology. This
is a proof of their antiquity and a presumption in favour of their freedom
from foreign influence. Most of these things were survivals from that
dimly remembered prehistoric age in which the Greeks, not yet gathered
into city states, lived in villages or kraals, or pueblos, as we should
translate (Greek text omitted), if we were speaking of African or American
tribes. In that stage the early Greeks must have lacked both the civic and
the national or Panhellenic sentiment; their political unit was the clan,
which, again, answered in part to the totem kindred of America, or Africa,
or Australia.(2) In this stagnant condition they could not have made
acquaintance with the many creeds of Semitic and other alien peoples on
the shores of the Levant.(3) It was later, when Greece had developed the
city life of the heroic age, that her adventurous sons came into close
contact with Egypt and Phoenicia.
(1) Claus, De Antiq. Form. Dianae, 6,7,16.
(2) As C. O. Muller judiciously remarks: “The scenes of nine-tenths of the
Greek myths are laid in PARTICULAR DISTRICTS OF GREECE, and they speak of
the primeval inhabitants, of the lineage and adventures of native heroes.
They manifest an accurate acquaintance with individual localities, which,
at a time when Greece was neither explored by antiquaries, nor did
geographical handbooks exist, could be possessed only by the inhabitants
of these localities.” Muller gives, as examples, myths of bears more or
less divine. Scientific Mythology, pp. 14, 15.
(3) Compare Claus, De Dianae Antiquissima Natura, p. 3.
In the colonising time, still later—perhaps from 900 B.C. downwards—the
Greeks, settled on sites whence they had expelled Sidonians or Sicanians,
very naturally continued, with modifications, the worship of such gods as
they found already in possession. Like the Romans, the Greeks easily
recognised their own deities in the analogous members of foreign
polytheistic systems. Thus we can allow for alien elements in such gods
and goddesses as Zeus Asterios, as Aphrodite of Cyprus or Eryx, or the
many-breasted Ephesian Artemis, whose monstrous form had its exact
analogue among the Aztecs in that many-breasted goddess of the maguey
plant whence beer was made. To discern and disengage the borrowed factors
in the Hellenic Olympus by analysis of divine names is a task to which
comparative philology may lawfully devote herself; but we cannot so
readily explain by presumed borrowing from without the rude xoana of the
ancient local temples, the wild myths of the local legends, the sacra
which were the exclusive property of old-world families, Butadae or
Eumolpidae. These are clearly survivals from a stage of Greek culture
earlier than the city state, earlier than the heroic age of the roving
Greek Vikings, and far earlier than the Greek colonies. They belong to
that conservative and immobile period when the tribe or clan, settled in
its scattered kraals, lived a life of agriculture, hunting and
cattle-breeding, engaged in no larger or more adventurous wars than border
feuds about women or cattle. Such wars were on a humbler scale than even
Nestor’s old fights with the Epeians; such adventures did not bring the
tribe into contact with alien religions. If Sidonian merchantmen chanced
to establish a factory near a tribe in this condition, their religion was
not likely to make many proselytes.
These reasons for believing that most of the wilder element in Greek
ritual and myth was native may be briefly recapitulated, as they are often
overlooked. The more strange and savage features meet us in LOCAL tales
and practices, often in remote upland temples and chapels. There they had
survived from the society of the VILLAGE status, before villages were
gathered into CITIES, before Greeks had taken to a roving life, or made
much acquaintance with distant and maritime peoples.
For these historical reasons, it may be assumed that the LOCAL religious
antiquities of Greece, especially in upland districts like Arcadia and
Elis, are as old, and as purely national, as free from foreign influences
as any Greek institutions can be. In these rites and myths of true
folk-lore and Volksleben, developed before Hellas won its way to the pure
Hellenic stage, before Egypt and Phoenicia were familiar, should be found
that common rude element which Greeks share with the other races of the
world, and which was, to some extent, purged away by the genius of Homer
and Pindar, pii vates et Phaebo digna locuti.
In proof of this local conservatism, some passages collected by K. F.
Hermann in his Lehrbuch der Griechischen Antiquitaten(1) may be cited.
Thus Isocrates writes,(2) “This was all their care, neither to destroy any
of the ancestral rites, nor to add aught beyond what was ordained”.
Clemens Alexandrinus reports that certain Thessalians worshipped storks,
“IN ACCORDANCE WITH USE AND WONT”.(3) Plato lays down the very “law of
least change” which has been described. “Whether the legislator is
establishing a new state or restoring an old and decayed one, in respect
of gods and temples,… if he be a man of sense, he will MAKE NO CHANGE IN
ANYTHING which the oracle of Delphi, or Dodona, or Ammon has sanctioned,
in whatever manner.” In this very passage Plato(4) speaks of rites
“derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus” as falling within the later period of
the Greek Wanderjahre. On the high religious value of things antique,
Porphyry wrote in a late age, and when the new religion of Christ was
victorious, “Comparing the new sacred images with the old, we see that the
old are more simply fashioned, yet are held divine, but the new, admired
for their elaborate execution, have less persuasion of divinity,”—a
remark anticipated by Pausanias, “The statues Daedalus wrought are
quainter to the outward view, yet there shows forth in them somewhat
supernatural”.(5) So Athenaeus(6) reports of a visitor to the shrine of
Leto in Delos, that he expected the ancient statue of the mother of Apollo
to be something remarkable, but, unlike the pious Porphyry, burst out
laughing when he found it a shapeless wooden idol. These idols were
dressed out, fed and adorned as if they had life.(7) It is natural that
myths dating from an age when Greek gods resembled Polynesian idols should
be as rude as Polynesian myths. The tenacity of LOCAL myth is demonstrated
by Pausanias, who declares that even in the highly civilised Attica the
Demes retained legends different from those of the central city—the
legends, probably, which were current before the villages were
“Synoecised” into Athens.(8)
(1) Zweiter Theil, 1858.
(2) Areop., 30.
(3) Clem. Alex., Oxford, 1715, i. 34.
(4) Laws, v. 738.
(5) De. Abst., ii. 18; Paus., ii. 4, 5.
(6) xiv. 2.
(7) Hermann, op. cit., p. 94, note 10.
(8) Pausanias, i. 14, 6.
It appears, then, that Greek ritual necessarily preserves matter of the
highest antiquity, and that the oldest rites and myths will probably be
found, not in the Panhellenic temples, like that in Olympia, not in the
NATIONAL poets, like Homer and Sophocles, but in the LOCAL fanes of early
tribal gods, and in the LOCAL mysteries, and the myths which came late, if
they came at all, into literary circulation. This opinion is strengthened
and illustrated by that invaluable guide-book of the artistic and
religious pilgrim written in the second century after our era by
Pausanias. If we follow him, we shall find that many of the ceremonies,
stories and idols which he regarded as oldest are analogous to the idols
and myths of the contemporary backward races. Let us then, for the sake of
illustrating the local and savage survivals in Greek religion, accompany
Pausanias in his tour through Hellas.
In Christian countries, especially in modern times, the contents of one
church are very like the furniture of another church; the functions in one
resemble those in all, though on the Continent some shrines still retain
relics and customs of the period when local saints had their peculiar
rites. But it was a very different thing in Greece. The pilgrim who
arrived at a temple never could guess what oddity or horror in the way of
statues, sacrifices, or stories might be prepared for his edification. In
the first place, there were HUMAN SACRIFICES. These are not familiar to
low savages, if known to them at all. Probably they were first offered to
barbaric royal ghosts, and thence transferred to gods. In the town of
Salamis, in Cyprus, about the date of Hadrian, the devout might have found
the priest slaying a human victim to Zeus,—an interesting custom,
instituted, according to Lactantius, by Teucer, and continued till the age
of the Roman Empire.(1)
(1) Euseb., Praep. Ev., iv. 17, mentions, among peoples practising human
sacrifices, Rhodes, Salamis, Heliopolis, Chios, Tenedos, Lacedaemon,
Arcadia and Athens; and, among gods thus honoured, Hera, Athene, Cronus,
Ares, Dionysus, Zeus and Apollo. For Dionysus the Cannibal, Plutarch,
Themist., 13; Porphyr., Abst., ii. 55. For the sacrifice to Zeus
Laphystius, see Grote, i. c. vi., and his array of authorities, especially
Herodotus, vii. 197. Clemens Alexandrinus (i. 36) mentions the Messenians,
to Zeus; the Taurians, to Artemis, the folk of Pella, to Peleus and
Chiron; the Cretans, to Zeus; the Lesbians, to Dionysus. Geusius de
Victimis Humanis (1699) may be consulted.
At Alos in Achaia Phthiotis, the stranger MIGHT have seen an extraordinary
spectacle, though we admit that the odds would have been highly against
his chance of witnessing the following events. As the stranger approaches
the town-hall, he observes an elderly and most respectable citizen
strolling in the same direction. The citizen is so lost in thought that
apparently he does not notice where he is going. Behind him comes a crowd
of excited but silent people, who watch him with intense interest. The
citizen reaches the steps of the town-hall, while the excitement of his
friends behind increases visibly. Without thinking, the elderly person
enters the building. With a wild and un-Aryan howl, the other people of
Alos are down on him, pinion him, wreathe him with flowery garlands, and,
lead him to the temple of Zeus Laphystius, or “The Glutton,” where he is
solemnly sacrificed on the altar. This was the custom of the good Greeks
of Alos whenever a descendant of the house of Athamas entered the
Prytaneion. Of course the family were very careful, as a rule, to keep at
a safe distance from the forbidden place. “What a sacrifice for Greeks!”
as the author of the Minos(1) says in that dialogue which is incorrectly
attributed to Plato. “He cannot get out except to be sacrificed,” says
Herodotus, speaking of the unlucky descendant of Athamas. The custom
appears to have existed as late as the time of the scholiast on Apollonius
Rhodius.(2)
(1) 315, c.; Plato, Laws, vi. 782, c.
(2) Argonautica, vii. 197.
Even in the second century, when Pausanias visited Arcadia, he found what
seem to have been human sacrifices to Zeus. The passage is so very strange
and romantic that we quote a part of it.(1) “The Lycaean hill hath other
marvels to show, and chiefly this: thereon there is a grove of Zeus
Lycaeus, wherein may men in nowise enter; but if any transgresses the law
and goes within, he must die within the space of one year. This tale,
moreover, they tell, namely, that whatsoever man or beast cometh within
the grove casts no shadow, and the hunter pursues not the deer into that
wood, but, waiting till the beast comes forth again, sees that it has left
its shadow behind. And on the highest crest of the whole mountain there is
a mound of heaped-up earth, the altar of Zeus Lycaeus, and the more part
of Peloponnesus can be seen from that place. And before the altar stand
two pillars facing the rising sun, and thereon golden eagles of yet more
ancient workmanship. And on this altar they sacrifice to Zeus in a manner
that may not be spoken, and little liking had I to make much search into
this matter. BUT LET IT BE AS IT IS, AND AS IT HATH BEEN FROM THE
BEGINNING.” The words “as it hath been from the beginning” are ominous and
significant, for the traditional myths of Arcadia tell of the human
sacrifices of Lycaon, and of men who, tasting the meat of a mixed
sacrifice, put human flesh between their lips unawares.(2) This aspect of
Greek religion, then, is almost on a level with the mysterious cannibal
horrors of “Voodoo,” as practised by the secret societies of negroes in
Hayti. But concerning these things, as Pausanias might say, it is little
pleasure to inquire.
(1) Pausanias, viii. 2.
(2) Plato, Rep., viii. 565, d. This rite occurs in some African coronation
ceremonies.
Even where men were not sacrificed to the gods, the tourist among the
temples would learn that these bloody rites had once been customary, and
ceremonies existed by way of commutation. This is precisely what we find
in Vedic religion, in which the empty form of sacrificing a man was gone
through, and the origin of the world was traced to the fragments of a god
sacrificed by gods.(1) In Sparta was an altar of Artemis Orthia, and a
wooden image of great rudeness and antiquity—so rude indeed, that
Pausanias, though accustomed to Greek fetish-stones, thought it must be of
barbaric origin. The story was that certain people of different towns,
when sacrificing at the altar, were seized with frenzy and slew each
other. The oracle commanded that the altar should be sprinkled with human
blood. Men were therefore chosen by lot to be sacrificed till Lycurgus
commuted the offering, and sprinkled the altar with the blood of boys who
were flogged before the goddess. The priestess holds the statue of the
goddess during the flogging, and if any of the boys are but lightly
scourged, the image becomes too heavy for her to bear.
(1) The Purusha Sukhta, in Rig-Veda, x. 90.
The Ionians near Anthea had a temple of Artemis Triclaria, and to her it
had been customary to sacrifice yearly a youth and maiden of transcendent
beauty. In Pausanias’s time the human sacrifice was commuted. He himself
beheld the strange spectacle of living beasts and birds being driven into
the fire to Artemis Laphria, a Calydonian goddess, and he had seen bears
rush back among the ministrants; but there was no record that any one had
ever been hurt by these wild beasts.(1) The bear was a beast closely
connected with Artemis, and there is some reason to suppose that the
goddess had herself been a she-bear or succeeded to the cult of a she-bear
in the morning of time.(2)
(1) Paus., vii. 18, 19.
(2) See “Artemis”, postea.
It may be believed that where symbolic human sacrifices are offered, that
is, where some other victim is slain or a dummy of a man is destroyed, and
where legend maintains that the sacrifice was once human, there men and
women were originally the victims. Greek ritual and Greek myth were full
of such tales and such commutations.(1) In Rome, as is well known,
effigies of men called Argives were sacrificed.(2) As an example of a
beast-victim given in commutation, Pausanias mentions(3) the case of the
folk of Potniae, who were compelled once a year to offer to Dionysus a
boy, in the bloom of youth. But the sacrifice was commuted for a goat.
(1) See Hermann, Alterthumer., ii. 159-161, for abundant examples.
(2) Plutarch, Quest. Rom. 32.
(3) ix. 8, 1.
These commutations are familiar all over the world. Even in Mexico, where
human sacrifices and ritual cannibalism were daily events, Quetzalcoatl
was credited with commuting human sacrifices for blood drawn from the
bodies of the religious. In this one matter even the most conservative
creeds and the faiths most opposed to change sometimes say with Tartuffe:—
Though the fact has been denied (doubtless without reflection), the fact
remains that the Greeks offered human sacrifices. Now what does this
imply? Must it be taken as a survival from barbarism, as one of the proofs
that the Greeks had passed through the barbaric status?
The answer is less obvious than might be supposed. Sacrifice has two
origins. First, there are HONORIFIC sacrifices, in which the ghost or god
(or divine beast, if a divine beast be worshipped) is offered the food he
is believed to prefer. This does not occur among the lowest savages. To
carnivorous totems, Garcilasso says, the Indians of Peru offered
themselves. The feeding of sacred mice in the temples of Apollo Smintheus
is well known. Secondly, there are expiatory or PIACULAR sacrifices, in
which the worshipper, as it were, fines himself in a child, an ox, or
something else that he treasures. The latter kind of sacrifice (most
common in cases of crime done or suspected within the circle of kindred)
is not necessarily barbaric, except in its cruelty. An example is the
Attic Thargelia, in which two human scape-goats annually bore “the sins of
the congregation,” and were flogged, driven to the sea with figs tied
round their necks, and burned.(1)
(1) Compare the Marseilles human sacrifice, Petron., 141; and for the
Thargelia, Tsetzes, Chiliads, v. 736; Hellad. in Photius, p. 1590 f. and
Harpoc. s. v.
The institution of human sacrifice, then, whether the offering be regarded
as food, or as a gift to the god of what is dearest to man (as in the case
of Jephtha’s daughter), or whether the victim be supposed to carry on his
head the sins of the people, does not necessarily date from the period of
savagery. Indeed, sacrifice flourishes most, not among savages, but among
advancing barbarians. It would probably be impossible to find any examples
of human sacrifices of an expiatory or piacular character, any sacrifices
at all, among Australians, or Andamanese, or Fuegians. The notion of
presenting food to the supernatural powers, whether ghosts or gods, is
relatively rare among savages.(1) The terrible Aztec banquets of which the
gods were partakers are the most noted examples of human sacrifices with a
purely cannibal origin. Now there is good reason to guess that human
sacrifices with no other origin than cannibalism survived even in ancient
Greece. “It may be conjectured,” writes Professor Robertson Smith,(2)
“that the human sacrifices offered to the Wolf Zeus (Lycaeus) in Arcadia
were originally cannibal feasts of a Wolf tribe. The first participants in
the rite were, according to later legend, changed into wolves; and in
later times(3) at least one fragment of the human flesh was placed among
the sacrificial portions derived from other victims, and the man who ate
it was believed to become a were-wolf.”(4) It is the almost universal rule
with cannibals not to eat members of their own stock, just as they do not
eat their own totem. Thus, as Professor Robertson Smith says, when the
human victim is a captive or other foreigner, the human sacrifice may be
regarded as a survival of cannibalism. Where, on the other hand, the
victim is a fellow tribesman, the sacrifice is expiatory or piacular.
(1) Jevons, Introduction to the Science of Religion, pp. 161, 199.
(2) Encyc. Brit., s. v. “Sacrifice”.
(3) Plato, Rep., viii. 565, D.
(4) Paus., viii. 2.
Among Greek cannibal gods we cannot fail to reckon the so-called “Cannibal
Dionysus,” and probably the Zeus of Orchomenos, Zeus Laphystius, who is
explained by Suidas as “the Glutton Zeus”. The cognate verb ((Greek text
omitted)) means “to eat with mangling and rending,” “to devour
gluttonously”. By Zeus Laphystius, then, men’s flesh was gorged in this
distressing fashion.
The evidence of human sacrifice (especially when it seems not piacular,
but a relic of cannibalism) raises a presumption that Greeks had once been
barbarians. The presumption is confirmed by the evidence of early Greek
religious art.
When his curiosity about human sacrifices was satisfied, the pilgrim in
Greece might turn his attention to the statues and other representations
of the gods. He would find that the modern statues by famous artists were
beautiful anthropomorphic works in marble or in gold and ivory. It is true
that the faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth were smudged all
over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or Africa.(1) As a rule,
however, the statues of historic times were beautiful representations of
kindly and gracious beings. The older works were stiff and rigid images,
with the lips screwed into an unmeaning smile. Older yet were the bronze
gods, made before the art of soldering was invented, and formed of beaten
plates joined by small nails. Still more ancient were the wooden images,
which probably bore but a slight resemblance to the human frame, and which
were often mere “stocks”.(2) Perhaps once a year were shown the very early
gods, the Demeter with the horse’s head, the Artemis with the fish’s
tails, the cuckoo Hera, whose image was of pear-wood, the Zeus with three
eyes, the Hermes, made after the fashion of the pictures on the walls of
sacred caves among the Bushmen. But the oldest gods of all, says Pausanias
repeatedly, were rude stones in the temple or the temple precinct. In
Achaean Pharae he found some thirty squared stones, named each after a
god. “Among all the Greeks in the oldest times rude stones were worshipped
in place of statues.” The superstitious man in Theophrastus’s Characters
used to anoint the sacred stones with oil. The stone which Cronus
swallowed in mistake for Zeus was honoured at Delphi, and kept warm with
wool wrappings. There was another sacred stone among the Troezenians, and
the Megarians worshipped as Apollo a stone cut roughly into a pyramidal
form. The Argives had a big stone called Zeus Kappotas. The Thespians
worshipped a stone which they called Eros; “their oldest idol is a rude
stone”.(3) It is well known that the original fetish-stone has been found
in situ below the feet of the statue of Apollo in Delos. On this showing,
then, the religion of very early Greeks in Greece was not unlike that of
modern Negroes. The artistic evolution of the gods, a remarkably rapid one
after a certain point, could be traced in every temple. It began with the
rude stone, and rose to the wooden idol, in which, as we have seen,
Pausanias and Porphyry found such sanctity. Next it reached the hammered
bronze image, passed through the archaic marbles, and culminated in the
finer marbles and the chryselephantine statues of Zeus and Athena. But
none of the ancient sacred objects lost their sacredness. The oldest were
always the holiest idols; the oldest of all were stumps and stones, like
savage fetish-stones.
(1) Pausanias, ii. 2.
(2) Clemens Alex., Protrept. (Oxford, 1715). p. 41.
(3) Gill, Myths of South Pacific, p. 60. Compare a god, which proved to be
merely pumice-stone, and was regarded as the god of winds and waves,
having been drifted to Puka-Puka. Offerings of food were made to it during
hurricanes.
Another argument in favour of the general thesis that savagery left deep
marks on Greek life in general, and on myth in particular, may be derived
from survivals of totemism in ritual and legend. The following instances
need not necessarily be accepted, but it may be admitted that they are
precisely the traces which totemism would leave had it once existed, and
then waned away on the advance of civilisation.(1)
(1) The argument to be derived from the character of the Greek (Greek text
omitted) as a modified form of the totem-kindred is too long and complex
to be put forward here. It is stated in Custom and Myth, “The history of
the Family,” in M’Lennan’s Studies in Early history, and is assumed, if
not proved, in Ancient Society by the late Mr. Lewis Morgan.
That Greeks in certain districts regarded with religious reverence certain
plants and animals is beyond dispute. That some stocks even traced their
lineage to beasts will be shown in the chapter on Greek Divine Myths, and
the presumption is that these creatures, though explained as incarnations
and disguises of various gods, were once totems sans phrase, as will be
inferred from various examples. Clemens Alexandrinus, again, after
describing the animal-worship of the Egyptians, mentions cases of zoolatry
in Greece.(1) The Thessalians revered storks, the Thebans weasels, and the
myth ran that the weasel had in some way aided Alcmena when in labour with
Heracles. In another form of the myth the weasel was the foster-mother of
the hero.(2) Other Thessalians, the Myrmidons, claimed descent from the
ant and revered ants. The religious respect paid to mice in the temple of
Apollo Smintheus, in the Troad, Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos and Crete is well
known, and a local tribe were alluded to as Mice by an oracle. The god
himself, like the Japanese harvest-god, was represented in art with a
mouse at his foot, and mice, as has been said, were fed at his shrine.(3)
The Syrians, says Clemens Alexandrinus, worship doves and fishes, as the
Elians worship Zeus.(4) The people of Delphi adored the wolf,(5) and the
Samians the sheep. The Athenians had a hero whom they worshipped in the
shape of a wolf.(6) A remarkable testimony is that of the scholiast on
Apollonius Rhodius, ii. 124. “The wolf,” he says, “was a beast held in
honour by the Athenians, and whosoever slays a wolf collects what is
needful for its burial.” The burial of sacred animals in Egypt is
familiar. An Arab tribe mourns over and solemnly buries all dead
gazelles.(7) Nay, flies were adored with the sacrifice of an ox near the
temple of Apollo in Leucas.(8) Pausanias (iii. 22) mentions certain
colonists who were guided by a hare to a site where the animal hid in a
myrtle-bush. They therefore adore the myrtle, (Greek text omitted). In the
same way a Carian stock, the Ioxidae, revered the asparagus.(9) A
remarkable example of descent mythically claimed from one of the lower
animals is noted by Otfried Muller.(10) Speaking of the swan of Apollo, he
says, “That deity was worshipped, according to the testimony of the Iliad,
in the Trojan island of Tenedos. There, too, was Tennes honoured as the
(Greek text omitted) of the island. Now his father was called Cycnus (the
swan) in an oft-told and romantic legend.(11)… The swan, therefore, as
father to the chief hero on the Apolline island, stands in distinct
relation to the god, who is made to come forward still more prominently
from the fact that Apollo himself is also called father of Tennes. I think
we can scarcely fail to recognise a mythus which was local at Tenedos….
The fact, too, of calling the swan, instead of Apollo, the father of a
hero, demands altogether a simplicity and boldness of fancy which are far
more ancient than the poems of Homer.”
(1) Op. cit., i. 34.
(2) Scholiast on Iliad, xix. 119.
(3) Aelian, H. A., xii. 5; Strabo, xiii. 604. Compare “Apollo and the
Mouse, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120.
(4) Lucian, De Dea Syria.
(5) Aelian, H. A., xii. 40.
(6) Harpocration, (Greek text omitted). Compare an address to the
wolf-hero, “who delights in the flight and tears of men,” in Aristophanes,
Vespae, 389.
(7) Robertson Smith, Kinship in Early Arabia, pp. 195-204.
(8) Aelian, xi. 8.
(9) Plutarch, Theseus, 14.
(10) Proleg., Engl. trans., p. 204.
(11) (Canne on Conon, 28.)
Had Muller known that this “simplicity and boldness of fancy” exist
to-day, for example, among the Swan tribe of Australia, he would probably
have recognised in Cycnus a survival from totemism. The fancy survives
again in Virgil’s Cupavo, “with swan’s plumes rising from his crest, the
mark of his father’s form”.(1) Descent was claimed, not only from a swan
Apollo, but from a dog Apollo.
(1) Aeneid, x. 187.
In connection with the same set of ideas, it is pointed out that several
(Greek text omitted), or stocks, had eponymous heroes, in whose names the
names of the ancestral beast apparently survived. In Attica the Crioeis
have their hero (Crio, “Ram”), the Butadae have Butas (“Bullman”), the
Aegidae have Aegeus (“Goat”), and the Cynadae, Cynus (“Dog”). Lycus,
according to Harpocration (s. v.) has his statue in the shape of a wolf in
the Lyceum. “The general facts that certain animals might not be
sacrificed to certain gods” (at Athens the Aegidae introduced Athena, to
whom no goat might be offered on the Acropolis, while she herself wore the
goat skin, aegis), “while, on the other hand, each deity demanded
particular victims, explained by the ancients themselves in certain cases
to be hostile animals, find their natural explanation” in totemism.(1) Mr.
Evelyn Abbott points out, however, that the names Aegeus, Aegae, Aegina,
and others, may be connected with the goat only by an old
volks-etymologie, as on coins of Aegina in Achaea. The real meaning of the
words may be different. Compare (Greek text omitted), the sea-shore. Mr.
J. G. Frazer does not, at present, regard totemism as proved in the case
of Greece.(2)
(1) Some apparent survivals of totemism in ritual will be found in the
chapter on Greek gods, especially Zeus, Dionysus, and Apollo.
(2) See his Golden Bough, an alternative explanation of these animals in
connection with “The Corn Spirit”.
As final examples of survivals from the age of barbarism in the religion
of Greece, certain features in the Mysteries may be noted. Plutarch speaks
of “the eating of raw flesh, and tearing to pieces of victims, as also
fastings and beatings of the breast, and again in many places abusive
language at the sacrifices, and other mad doings”. The mysteries of
Demeter, as will appear when her legend is criticised, contained one
element all unlike these “mad doings”; and the evidence of Sophocles,
Pindar, Plutarch and others demonstrate that religious consolations were
somehow conveyed in the Eleusinia. But Greece had many other local
mysteries, and in several of these it is undeniable the Greeks acted much
as contemporary Australians, Zunis and Negroes act in their secret
initiations which, however, also inculcate moral ideas of considerable
excellence. Important as these analogies are, they appear to have escaped
the notice of most mythologists. M. Alfred Maury, however, in Les
Religions de la Grece, published in 1857, offers several instances of
hidden rites, common to Hellas and to barbarism.
There seem in the mysteries of savage races to be two chief purposes.
There is the intention of giving to the initiated a certain sacred
character, which puts them in close relation with gods or demons, and
there is the introduction of the young to complete or advancing manhood,
and to full participation in the savage Church with its ethical ideas. The
latter ceremonies correspond, in short, to confirmation, and they are
usually of a severe character, being meant to test by fasting (as Plutarch
says) and by torture (as in the familiar Spartan rite) the courage and
constancy of the young braves. The Greek mysteries best known to us are
the Thesmophoria and the Eleusinia. In the former the rites (as will
appear later) partook of the nature of savage “medicine” or magic, and
were mainly intended to secure fertility in husbandry and in the family.
In the Eleusinia the purpose was the purification of the initiated,
secured by ablutions and by standing on the “ram’s-skin of Zeus,” and
after purifications the mystae engaged in sacred dances, and were
permitted to view a miracle play representing the sorrows and consolations
of Demeter. There was a higher element, necessarily obscure in nature. The
chief features in the whole were purifications, dancing, sacrifice and the
representation of the miracle play. It would be tedious to offer an
exhaustive account of savage rites analogous to these mysteries of Hellas.
Let it suffice to display the points where Greek found itself in harmony
with Australian, and American, and African practice. These points are: (1)
mystic dances; (2) the use of a little instrument, called turndun in
Australia, whereby a roaring noise is made, and the profane are warned
off; (3) the habit of daubing persons about to be initiated with clay or
anything else that is sordid, and of washing this off; apparently by way
of showing that old guilt is removed and a new life entered upon; (4) the
performances with serpents may be noticed, while the “mad doings” and
“howlings” mentioned by Plutarch are familiar to every reader of travels
in uncivilised countries; (5) ethical instruction is communicated.
First, as to the mystic dances, Lucian observes:(1) “You cannot find a
single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing…. This much all men
know, that most people say of the revealers of the mysteries that they
‘dance them out'” ((Greek text omitted)). Clemens of Alexandria uses the
same term when speaking of his own “appalling revelations”.(2) So closely
connected are mysteries with dancing among savages, that when Mr. Orpen
asked Qing, the Bushman hunter, about some doctrines in which Qing was not
initiated, he said: “Only the initiated men of that dance know these
things”. To “dance” this or that means to be acquainted with this or that
myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d’action(3) ((Greek text
omitted)). So widely distributed is the practice, that Acosta, in an
interesting passage, mentions it as familiar to the people of Peru before
and after the Spanish conquest. The text is a valuable instance of
survival in religion. When they were converted to Christianity the
Peruvians detected the analogy between our sacrament and their mysteries,
and they kept up as much as possible of the old rite in the new ritual.
Just as the mystae of Eleusis practised chastity, abstaining from certain
food, and above all from beans, before the great Pagan sacrament, so did
the Indians. “To prepare themselves all the people fasted two days, during
which they did neyther company with their wives, nor eate any meate with
salt or garlicke, nor drink any chic…. And although the Indians now
forbeare to sacrifice beasts or other things publikely, which cannot be
hidden from the Spaniardes, yet doe they still use many ceremonies that
have their beginnings from these feasts and auntient superstitions, for at
this day do they covertly make their feast of Ytu at the daunces of the
feast of the Sacrament. Another feast falleth almost at the same time,
whereas the Christians observe the solempnitie of the holy Sacrament,
which DOTH RESEMBLE IT IN SOME SORT, AS IN DAUNCING, SINGING AND
REPRESENTATIONS.”(4) The holy “daunces” at Seville are under Papal
disapproval, but are to be kept up, it is said, till the peculiar dresses
used in them are worn out. Acosta’s Indians also had “garments which
served only for this feast”. It is superfluous to multiply examples of the
dancing, which is an invariable feature of savage as of Greek mysteries.
(1) (Greek text omitted), chap. xv. 277.
(2) Ap. Euseb., Praep. Ev., ii, 3, 6.
(3) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.
(4) Acosta, Historie of the Indies, book v. chap. xxviii. London, 1604.
2. The Greek and savage use of the turndun, or bribbun of Australia in the
mysteries is familiar to students. This fish-shaped flat board of wood is
tied to a string, and whirled round, so as to cause a peculiar muffled
roar. Lobeck quotes from the old scholia on Clemens Alexandrinus,
published by Bastius in annotations on St. Gregory, the following Greek
description of the turndun, the “bull-roarer” of English country lads, the
Gaelic srannam:(1) (Greek text omitted)”. “The conus was a little slab of
wood, tied to a string, and whirled round in the mysteries to make a
whirring noise. As the mystic uses of the turndun in Australia, New
Zealand, New Mexico and Zululand have elsewhere been described at some
length (Custom and Myth, pp. 28-44), it may be enough to refer the reader
to the passage. Mr. Taylor has since found the instrument used in
religious mysteries in West Africa, so it has now been tracked almost
round the world. That an instrument so rude should be employed by Greek
and Australians on mystic occasions is in itself a remarkable coincidence.
Unfortunately, Lobeck, who published the Greek description of the turndun
(Aglaophamus, 700), was unacquainted with the modern ethnological
evidence.
(1) Pronounced strantham. For this information I am indebted to my friend
Mr. M’Allister, schoolmaster at St. Mary’s Loch.
3. The custom of plastering the initiated over with clay or filth was
common in Greek as in barbaric mysteries. Greek examples may be given
first. Demosthenes accuses Aeschines of helping his mother in certain
mystic rites, aiding her, especially, by bedaubing the initiate with clay
and bran.(1) Harpocration explains the term used ((Greek text omitted))
thus: “Daubing the clay and bran on the initiate, to explain which they
say that the Titans when they attacked Dionysus daubed themselves over
with chalk, but afterwards, for ritual purposes, clay was used”. It may be
urged with some force that the mother of Aeschines introduced foreign,
novel and possibly savage rites. But Sophocles, in a fragment of his lost
play, the Captives, uses the term in the same ritual sense—
(1) De Corona, 313.
The idea clearly was that by cleansing away the filth plastered over the
body was symbolised the pure and free condition of the initiate. He might
now cry in the mystic chant—
That this was the significance of the daubing with clay in Greek mysteries
and the subsequent cleansing seems quite certain. We are led straight to
this conclusion by similar rites, in which the purpose of mystically
cleansing was openly put forward. Thus Plutarch, in his essay on
superstition, represents the guilty man who would be purified actually
rolling in clay, confessing his misdeeds, and then sitting at home
purified by the cleansing process ((Greek text omitted)).(1) In another
rite, the cleansing of blood-guiltiness, a similar process was practised.
Orestes, after killing his mother, complains that the Eumenides do not
cease to persecute him, though he has been “purified by blood of
swine”.(2) Apollonius says that the red hand of the murderer was dipped in
the blood of swine and then washed.(3) Athenaeus describes a similar
unpleasant ceremony.(4) The blood of whelps was apparently used also, men
being first daubed with it and then washed clean.(5) The word (Greek text
omitted) is again the appropriate ritual term. Such rites Plutarch calls
(Greek text omitted), “filthy purifications”.(6) If daubing with dirt is
known to have been a feature of Greek mysteries, it meets us everywhere
among savages. In O-Kee-Pa, that curiously minute account of the Mandan
mysteries, Catlin writes that a portion of the frame of the initiate was
“covered with clay, which the operator took from a wooden bowl, and with
his hand plastered unsparingly over”. The fifty young men waiting for
initiation “were naked and entirely covered with clay of various
colours”.(7) The custom is mentioned by Captain John Smith in Virginia.
Mr. Winwood Reade found it in Africa, where, as among the Mandans and
Spartans, cruel torture and flogging accompanied the initiation of young
men.(8) In Australia the evidence for daubing the initiate is very
abundant.(9) In New Mexico, the Zunis stole Mr. Cushing’s black paint, as
considering it even better than clay for religious daubing.(10)
(1) So Hermann, op. cit., 133.
(2) Eumenides, 273.
(3) Argonautica, iv. 693.
(4) ix. 78. Hermann, from whom the latter passages are borrowed, also
quotes the evidence of a vase published by Feuerbach, Lehrbuch, p. 131,
with other authorities.
(5) Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 68.
(6) De Superstitione, chap. xii.
(7) O-Kee-Pa, London, 1867, p. 21.
(8) Savage Africa, case of Mongilomba; Pausanias, iii. 15.
(9) Brough Smyth, i. 60.
(10) Custma and Myth, p. 40.
4. Another savage rite, the use of serpents in Greek mysteries, is
attested by Clemens Alexandrinus and by Demosthenes (loc. cit.). Clemens
says the snakes were caressed in representations of the loves of Zeus in
serpentine form. The great savage example is that of “the snake-dance of
the Moquis,” who handle rattle-snakes in the mysteries without being
harmed.(1) The dance is partly totemistic, partly meant, like the
Thesmophoria, to secure the fertility of the lands of the Moquis of
Arizonas. The turndum or (Greek text omitted) is employed. Masks are worn,
as in the rites of Demeter Cidiria in Arcadia.(2)
(1) The Snake-Dance of the Moquis. By Captain John G. Bourke, London,
1884.
(2) Pausanias, viii. 16.
5. This last point of contact between certain Greek and certain savage
mysteries is highly important. The argument of Lobeck, in his celebrated
work Aglaophamus, is that the Mysteries were of no great moment in
religion. Had he known the evidence as to savage initiations, he would
have been confirmed in his opinion, for many of the singular Greek rites
are clearly survivals from savagery. But was there no more truly religious
survival? Pindar is a very ancient witness that things of divine import
were revealed. “Happy is he who having seen these things goes under the
hollow earth. He knows the end of life, and the god-given beginning.”(1)
Sophocles “chimes in,” as Lobeck says, declaring that the initiate alone
LIVE in Hades, while other souls endure all evils. Crinagoras avers that
even in life the initiate live secure, and in death are the happier.
Isagoras declares that about the end of life and all eternity they have
sweet hopes.
(1) Fragm., cxvi., 128 H. p. 265.
Splendida testimonia, cries Lobeck. He tries to minimise the evidence,
remarking that Isocrates promises the very same rewards to all who live
justly and righteously. But why not, if to live justly and righteously was
part of the teaching of the mysteries of Eleusis? Cicero’s evidence,
almost a translation of the Greek passages already cited, Lobeck dismisses
as purely rhetorical.(1) Lobeck’s method is rather cavalier. Pindar and
Sophocles meant something of great significance.
(1) De Legibus ii. 14; Aglaophamus, pp. 69-74.
Now we have acknowledged savage survivals of ugly rites in the Greek
mysteries. But it is only fair to remember that, in certain of the few
savage mysteries of which we know the secret, righteousness of life and a
knowledge of good are inculcated. This is the case in Australia, and in
Central Africa, where to be “uninitiated” is equivalent to being
selfish.(1) Thus it seems not improbable that consolatory doctrines were
expounded in the Eleusinia, and that this kind of sermon or exhortation
was no less a survival from savagery than the daubing with clay, and the
(Greek text omitted), and other wild rites.
(1) Making of Religion, pp. 193-197, 235.
We have now attempted to establish that in Greek law and ritual many
savage customs and usages did undeniably survive. We have seen that both
philosophical and popular opinion in Greece believed in a past age of
savagery. In law, in religion, in religious art, in custom, in human
sacrifice, in relics of totemism, and in the mysteries, we have seen that
the Greeks retained plenty of the usages now found among the remotest and
most backward races. We have urged against the suggestion of borrowing
from Egypt or Asia that these survivals are constantly found in local and
tribal religion and rituals, and that consequently they probably date from
that remote prehistoric past when the Greeks lived in village settlements.
It may still doubtless be urged that all these things are Pelasgic, and
were the customs of a race settled in Hellas before the arrival of the
Homeric Achaeans, and Dorians, and Argives, who, on this hypothesis,
adopted and kept up the old savage Pelasgian ways and superstitions. It is
impossible to prove or disprove this belief, nor does it affect our
argument. We allege that all Greek life below the surface was rich in
institutions now found among the most barbaric peoples. These
institutions, whether borrowed or inherited, would still be part of the
legacy left by savages to cultivated peoples. As this legacy is so large
in custom and ritual, it is not unfair to argue that portions of it will
also be found in myths. It is now time to discuss Greek myths of the
origin of things, and decide whether they are or are not analogous in
ideas to the myths which spring from the wild and ignorant fancy of
Australians, Cahrocs, Nootkas and Bushmen.
CHAPTER X. GREEK COSMOGONIC MYTHS.
Nature of the evidence—Traditions of origin of the world and man—Homeric,
Hesiodic and Orphic myths—Later evidence of historians, dramatists,
commentators—The Homeric story comparatively pure—The story in
Hesiod, and its savage analogues—The explanations of the myth of
Cronus, modern and ancient—The Orphic cosmogony—Phanes and
Prajapati—Greek myths of the origin of man—Their savage
analogues.
The authorities for Greek cosmogonic myth are extremely various in date,
character and value. The most ancient texts are the Iliad and the poems
attributed to Hesiod. The Iliad, whatever its date, whatever the place of
its composition, was intended to please a noble class of warriors. The
Hesiodic poems, at least the Theogony, have clearly a didactic aim, and
the intention of presenting a systematic and orderly account of the divine
genealogies. To neither would we willingly attribute a date much later
than the ninth century of our era, but the question of the dates of all
the epic and Hesiodic poems, and even of their various parts, is greatly
disputed among scholars. Yet it is nowhere denied that, however late the
present form of some of the poems may be, they contain ideas of extreme
antiquity. Although the Homeric poems are usually considered, on the
whole, more ancient than those attributed to Hesiod,(1) it is a fact worth
remembering that the notions of the origin of things in Hesiod are much
more savage and (as we hold) much more archaic than the opinions of Homer.
(1) Grote assigns his Theogony to circ. 750 A.D. The Thegony was taught to
boys in Greece, much as the Church Catechism and Bible are taught in
England; Aeschines in Ctesiph., 135, p. 73. Libanius, 400 years after
Christ (i. 502-509, iv. 874).
While Hesiod offers a complete theogony or genealogy of deities and
heroes, Homer gives no more than hints and allusions to the stormy past of
the gods. It is clear, however, that his conception of that past differed
considerably from the traditions of Hesiod. However we explain it, the
Homeric mythology (though itself repugnant to the philosophers from
Xenophanes downwards) is much more mild, pure and humane than the
mythology either of Hesiod or of our other Greek authorities. Some may
imagine that Homer retains a clearer and less corrupted memory than Hesiod
possessed of an original and authentic “divine tradition”. Others may find
in Homer’s comparative purity a proof of the later date of his epics in
their present form, or may even proclaim that Homer was a kind of
Cervantes, who wished to laugh the gods away. There is no conceivable or
inconceivable theory about Homer that has not its advocates. For
ourselves, we hold that the divine genius of Homer, though working in an
age distant rather than “early,” selected instinctively the purer mythical
materials, and burned away the coarser dross of antique legend, leaving
little but the gold which is comparatively refined.
We must remember that it does not follow that any mythical ideas are later
than the age of Homer because we first meet them in poems of a later date.
We have already seen that though the Brahmanas are much later in date of
compilation than the Veda, yet a tradition which we first find in the
Brahmanas may be older than the time at which the Veda was compiled. In
the same way, as Mr. Max Muller observes, “we know that certain ideas
which we find in later writers do not occur in Homer. But it does not
follow at all that such ideas are all of later growth or possess a
secondary character. One myth may have belonged to one tribe; one god may
have had his chief worship in one locality; and our becoming acquainted
with these through a later poet does not in the least prove their later
origin.”(1)
(1) Hibbert Lectures, pp. 130, 131.
After Homer and Hesiod, our most ancient authorities for Greek cosmogonic
myths are probably the so-called Orphic fragments. Concerning the dates
and the manner of growth of these poems volumes of erudition have been
compiled. As Homer is silent about Orpheus (in spite of the position which
the mythical Thracian bard acquired as the inventor of letters and magic
and the father of the mysteries), it has been usual to regard the Orphic
ideas as of late introduction. We may agree with Grote and Lobeck that
these ideas and the ascetic “Orphic mode of life” first acquired
importance in Greece about the time of Epimenides, or, roughly speaking,
between 620 and 500 B.C.(1) That age certainly witnessed a curious growth
of superstitious fears and of mystic ceremonies intended to mitigate
spiritual terrors. Greece was becoming more intimately acquainted with
Egypt and with Asia, and was comparing her own religion with the beliefs
and rites of other peoples. The times and the minds of men were being
prepared for the clear philosophies that soon “on Argive heights divinely
sang”. Just as, when the old world was about to accept Christianity, a
deluge of Oriental and barbaric superstitions swept across men’s minds, so
immediately before the dawn of Greek philosophy there came an irruption of
mysticism and of spiritual fears. We may suppose that the Orphic poems
were collected, edited and probably interpolated, in this dark hour of
Greece. “To me,” says Lobeck, “it appears that the verses may be referred
to the age of Onomacritus, an age curious in the writings of ancient
poets, and attracted by the allurements of mystic religions.” The style of
the surviving fragments is sufficiently pure and epic; the strange unheard
of myths are unlike those which the Alexandrian poets drew from fountains
long lost.(2) But how much in the Orphic myths is imported from Asia or
Egypt, how much is the invention of literary forgers like Onomacritus, how
much should be regarded as the first guesses of the physical
poet-philosophers, and how much is truly ancient popular legend recast in
literary form, it is impossible with certainty to determine.
(1) Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 317; Grote, iii. 86.
(2) Aglaophamus, i. 611.
We must not regard a myth as necessarily late or necessarily foreign
because we first meet it in an “Orphic composition”. If the myth be one of
the sort which encounter us in every quarter, nay, in every obscure nook
of the globe, we may plausibly regard it as ancient. If it bear the
distinct marks of being a Neo-platonic pastiche, we may reject it without
hesitation. On the whole, however, our Orphic authorities can never be
quoted with much satisfaction. The later sources of evidence for Greek
myths are not of great use to the student of cosmogonic legend, though
invaluable when we come to treat of the established dynasty of gods, the
heroes and the “culture-heroes”. For these the authorities are the whole
range of Greek literature, poets, dramatists, philosophers, critics,
historians and travellers. We have also the notes and comments of the
scholiasts or commentators on the poets and dramatists. Sometimes these
annotators only darken counsel by their guesses. Sometimes perhaps,
especially in the scholia on the Iliad and Odyssey, they furnish us with a
precious myth or popular marchen not otherwise recorded. The regular
professional mythographi, again, of whom Apollodorus (150 B.C.) is the
type, compiled manuals explanatory of the myths which were alluded to by
the poets. The scholiasts and mythographi often retain myths from lost
poems and lost plays. Finally, from the travellers and historians we
occasionally glean examples of the tales (“holy chapters,” as Mr. Grote
calls them) which were narrated by priests and temple officials to the
pilgrims who visited the sacred shrines.
These “chapters” are almost invariably puerile, savage and obscene. They
bear the stamp of extreme antiquity, because they never, as a rule, passed
through the purifying medium of literature. There were many myths too
crude and archaic for the purposes of poetry and of the drama. These were
handed down from local priest to local priest, with the inviolability of
sacred and immutable tradition. We have already given a reason for
assigning a high antiquity to the local temple myths. Just as Greeks lived
in villages before they gathered into towns, so their gods were gods of
villages or tribes before they were national deities. The local myths are
those of the archaic village state of “culture,” more ancient, more
savage, than literary narrative. Very frequently the local legends were
subjected to the process of allegorical interpretation, as men became
alive to the monstrosity of their unsophisticated meaning. Often they
proved too savage for our authorities, who merely remark, “Concerning this
a certain holy chapter is told,” but decline to record the legend. In the
same way missionaries, with mistaken delicacy, often refuse to repeat some
savage legend with which they are acquainted.
The latest sort of testimony as to Greek myths must be sought in the
writings of the heathen apologists or learned Pagan defenders of Paganism
in the first centuries during Christianity, and in the works of their
opponents, the fathers of the Church. Though the fathers certainly do not
understate the abominations of Paganism, and though the heathen apologists
make free use of allegorical (and impossible) interpretations, the
evidence of both is often useful and important. The testimony of ancient
art, vases, statues, pictures and the descriptions of these where they no
longer survive, are also of service and interest.
After this brief examination of the sources of our knowledge of Greek
myth, we may approach the Homeric legends of the origin of things and the
world’s beginning. In Homer these matters are only referred to
incidentally. He more than once calls Oceanus (that is, the fabled stream
which flows all round the world, here regarded as a PERSON) “the origin of
the gods,” “the origin of all things”.(1) That Ocean is considered a
person, and that he is not an allegory for water or the aqueous element,
appears from the speech of Hera to Aphrodite: “I am going to visit the
limits of the bountiful earth, and Oceanus, father of the gods, and mother
Tethys, who reared me duly and nurtured me in their halls, when far-seeing
Zeus imprisoned Cronus beneath the earth and the unvintaged sea”.(2) Homer
does not appear to know Uranus as the father of Cronus, and thus the myth
of the mutilation of Uranus necessarily does not occur in Homer. Cronus,
the head of the dynasty which preceded that of Zeus, is described(3) as
the son of Rhea, but nothing is said of his father. The passage contains
the account which Poseidon himself chose to give of the war in heaven:
“Three brethren are we, and sons of Cronus whom Rhea bare—Zeus and
myself, and Hades is the third, the ruler of the folk in the underworld.
And in three lots were all things divided, and each drew a domain of his
own.” Here Zeus is the ELDEST son of Cronus. Though lots are drawn at
hazard for the property of the father (which we know to have been
customary in Homer’s time), yet throughout the Iliad Zeus constantly
claims the respect and obedience due to him by right of primogeniture.(4)
We shall see that Hesiod adopts exactly the opposite view. Zeus is the
YOUNGEST child of Cronus. His supremacy is an example of jungsten recht,
the wide-spread custom which makes the youngest child the heir in
chief.(5) But how did the sons of Cronus come to have his property in
their hands to divide? By right of successful rebellion, when “Zeus
imprisoned Cronus beneath the earth and the unvintaged sea”. With Cronus
in his imprisonment are the Titans. That is all that Homer cares to tell
about the absolute beginning of things and the first dynasty of rulers of
Olympus. His interest is all in the actual reigning family, that of the
Cronidae, nor is he fond of reporting their youthful excesses.
(1) Iliad, xiv. 201, 302, 246.
(2) In reading what Homer and Hesiod report about these matters, we must
remember that all the forces and phenomena are conceived of by them as
PERSONS. In this regard the archaic and savage view of all things as
personal and human is preserved. “I maintain,” says Grote, “moreover,
fully the character of these great divine agents as persons, which is the
light in which they presented themselves to the Homeric or Hesiodic
audience. Uranus, Nyx, Hypnos and Oneiros (heaven, night, sleep and dream)
are persons just as much as Zeus or Apollo. To resolve them into mere
allegories is unsafe and unprofitable. We then depart from the point of
view of the original hearers without acquiring any consistent or
philosophical point of view of our own.” This holds good though portions
of the Hesiodic genealogies are distinctly poetic allegories cast in the
mould or the ancient personal theory of things.
(3) Iliad, xv. 187.
(4) The custom by which sons drew lots for equal shares of their dead
father’s property is described in Odyssey, xiv. 199-212. Here Odysseus,
giving a false account of himself, says that he was a Cretan, a bastard,
and that his half-brothers, born in wedlock, drew lots for their father’s
inheritance, and did not admit him to the drawing, but gave him a small
portion apart.
(5) See Elton, Origins of English History, pp. 185-207.
We now turn from Homer’s incidental allusions to the ample and systematic
narrative of Hesiod. As Mr. Grote says, “Men habitually took their
information respecting their theogonic antiquities from the Hesiodic
poems.” Hesiod was accepted as an authority both by the pious Pausanias in
the second century of our era—who protested against any attempt to
alter stories about the gods—and by moral reformers like Plato and
Xenophanes, who were revolted by the ancient legends,(1) and, indeed,
denied their truth. Yet, though Hesiod represents Greek orthodoxy, we have
observed that Homer (whose epics are probably still more ancient) steadily
ignores the more barbarous portions of Hesiod’s narrative. Thus the
question arises: Are the stories of Hesiod’s invention, and later than
Homer, or does Homer’s genius half-unconsciously purify materials like
those which Hesiod presents in the crudest form? Mr. Grote says: “How far
these stories are the invention of Hesiod himself it is impossible to
determine. They bring us down to a cast of fancy more coarse and
indelicate than the Homeric, and more nearly resemble some of the holy
chapters ((Greek text omitted)) of the more recent mysteries, such, for
example, as the tale of Dionysus Zagreus. There is evidence in the
Theogony itself that the author was acquainted with local legends current
both at Krete and at Delphi, for he mentions both the mountain-cave in
Krete wherein the newly-born Zeus was hidden, and the stone near the
Delphian temple—the identical stone which Kronos had swallowed—placed
by Zeus himself as a sign and marvel to mortal men. Both these monuments,
which the poet expressly refers to, and had probably seen, imply a whole
train of accessory and explanatory local legends, current probably among
the priests of Krete and Delphi.”
(1) Timaeeus, 41; Republic, 377.
All these circumstances appear to be good evidence of the great antiquity
of the legends recorded by Hesiod. In the first place, arguing merely a
priori, it is extremely improbable that in the brief interval between the
date of the comparatively pure and noble mythology of the Iliad and the
much ruder Theogony of Hesiod men INVENTED stories like the mutilation of
Uranus, and the swallowing of his offspring by Cronus. The former legend
is almost exactly parallel, as has already been shown, to the myth of Papa
and Rangi in New Zealand. The later has its parallels among the savage
Bushmen and Australians. It is highly improbable that men in an age so
civilised as that of Homer invented myths as hideous as those of the
lowest savages. But if we take these myths to be, not new inventions, but
the sacred stories of local priesthoods, their antiquity is probably
incalculable. The sacred stories, as we know from Pausanias, Herodotus and
from all the writers who touch on the subject of the mysteries, were myths
communicated by the priests to the initiated. Plato speaks of such myths
in the Republic, 378: “If there is an absolute necessity for their
mention, a very few might hear them in a mystery, and then let them
sacrifice, not a common pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim; this
would have the effect of very greatly diminishing the number of the
hearers”. This is an amusing example of a plan for veiling the horrors of
myth. The pig was the animal usually offered to Demeter, the goddess of
the Eleusinian mysteries. Plato proposes to substitute some “unprocurable”
beast, perhaps a giraffe or an elephant.
To Hesiod, then, we must turn for what is the earliest complete literary
form of the Greek cosmogonic myth. Hesiod begins, like the New Zealanders,
with “the august race of gods, by earth and wide heaven begotten”.(1) So
the New Zealanders, as we have seen, say, “The heaven which is above us,
and the earth which is beneath us, are the progenitors of men and the
origin of all things”. Hesiod(2) somewhat differs from this view by making
Chaos absolutely first of all things, followed by “wide-bosomed Earth,”
Tartarus and Eros (love). Chaos unaided produced Erebus and Night; the
children of Night and Erebus are Aether and Day. Earth produced Heaven,
who then became her own lover, and to Heaven she bore Oceanus, and the
Titans, Coeeus and Crius, Hyperion and Iapetus, Thea and Rhea, Themis,
Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys, “and youngest after these was born Cronus of
crooked counsel, the most dreadful of her children, who ever detested his
puissant sire,” Heaven. There were other sons of Earth and Heaven
peculiarly hateful to their father,(3) and these Uranus used to hide from
the light in a hollow of Gaea. Both they and Gaea resented this treatment,
and the Titans, like “the children of Heaven and Earth,” in the New
Zealand poem, “sought to discern the difference between light and
darkness”. Gaea (unlike Earth in the New Zealand myth, for there she is
purely passive), conspired with her children, produced iron, and asked her
sons to avenge their wrongs.(4) Fear fell upon all of them save Cronus,
who (like Tane Mahuta in the Maori poem) determined to end the embraces of
Earth and Heaven. But while the New Zealand, like the Indo-Aryan myth,(5)
conceives of Earth and Heaven as two beings who have never previously been
sundered at all, Hesiod makes Heaven amorously approach his spouse from a
distance. This was the moment for Cronus,(6) who stretched out his hand
armed with the sickle of iron, and mutilated Uranus. As in so many savage
myths, the blood of the wounded god fallen on the ground produced strange
creatures, nymphs of the ash-tree, giants and furies. As in the Maori
myth, one of the children of Heaven stood apart and did not consent to the
deed. This was Oceanus in Greece,(7) and in New Zealand it was Tawhiri
Matea, the wind, “who arose and followed his father, Heaven, and remained
with him in the open spaces of the sky”. Uranus now predicted(8) that
there would come a day of vengeance for the evil deed of Cronus, and so
ends the dynasty of Uranus.
(1) Theog., 45.
(2) Ibid., 116.
(3) Ibid., 155.
(4) Ibid., 166.
(5) Muir, v. 23, quoting Aitareya Brahmana, iv. 27: “These two worlds were
once joined; subsequently they separated”.
(6) Theog., 175-185.
(7) Apollod., i, 15.
(8) Theog., 209.
This story was one of the great stumbling-blocks of orthodox Greece. It
was the tale that Plato said should be told, if at all, only to a few in a
mystery, after the sacrifice of some rare and scarcely obtainable animal.
Even among the Maoris, the conduct of the children who severed their
father and mother is regarded as a singular instance of iniquity, and is
told to children as a moral warning, an example to be condemned. In
Greece, on the other hand, unless we are to take the Euthyphro as wholly
ironical, some of the pious justified their conduct by the example of
Zeus. Euthyphro quotes this example when he is about to prosecute his own
father, for which act, he says, “Men are angry with ME; so inconsistently
do they talk when I am concerned and when the gods are concerned”.(1) But
in Greek THE TALE HAS NO MEANING. It has been allegorised in various ways,
and Lafitau fancied that it was a distorted form of the Biblical account
of the origin of sin. In Maori the legend is perfectly intelligible.
Heaven and earth were conceived of (like everything else), as beings with
human parts and passions, linked in an endless embrace which crushed and
darkened their children. It became necessary to separate them, and this
feat was achieved not without pain. “Then wailed the Heaven, and exclaimed
the Earth, ‘Wherefore this murder? Why this great sin? Why separate us?’
But what cared Tane? Upwards he sent one and downwards the other. He
cruelly severed the sinews which united Heaven and Earth.”(2) The Greek
myth too, contemplated earth and heaven as beings corporeally united, and
heaven as a malignant power that concealed his children in darkness.
(1) Euthyphro, 6.
(2) Taylor, New Zealand, 119.
But while the conception of heaven and earth as parents of living things
remains perfectly intelligible in one sense, the vivid personification
which regarded them as creatures with human parts and passions had ceased
to be intelligible in Greece before the times of the earliest
philosophers. The old physical conception of the pair became a metaphor,
and the account of their rending asunder by their children lost all
significance, and seemed to be an abominable and unintelligible myth. When
examined in the light of the New Zealand story, and of the fact that early
peoples do regard all phenomena as human beings, with physical attributes
like those of men, the legend of Cronus, and Uranus, and Gaea ceases to be
a mystery. It is, at bottom, a savage explanation (as in the Samoan story)
of the separation of earth and heaven, an explanation which could only
have occurred to people in a state of mind which civilisation has
forgotten.
The next generation of Hesiodic gods (if gods we are to call the members
of this race of non-natural men) was not more fortunate than the first in
its family relations.
Cronus wedded his sister, Rhea, and begat Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon,
and the youngest, Zeus. “And mighty Cronus swallowed down each of them,
each that came to their mother’s knees from her holy womb, with this
intent that none other of the proud sons of heaven should hold his kingly
sway among the immortals. Heaven and Earth had warned him that he too
should fall through his children. Wherefore he kept no vain watch, but
spied and swallowed down each of his offspring, while grief immitigable
took possession of Rhea.”(1) Rhea, being about to become the mother of
Zeus, took counsel with Uranus and Gaea. By their advice she went to
Crete, where Zeus was born, and, in place of the child, she presented to
Cronus a huge stone swathed in swaddling bands. This he swallowed, and was
easy in his mind. Zeus grew up, and by some means, suggested by Gaea,
compelled Zeus to disgorge all his offspring. “And he vomited out the
stone first, as he had swallowed it last.”(2) The swallowed children
emerged alive, and Zeus fixed the stone at Pytho (Delphi), where
Pausanias(3) had the privilege of seeing it, and where, as it did not
tempt the cupidity of barbarous invaders, it probably still exists. It was
not a large stone, Pausanias says, and the Delphians used to pour oil over
it, as Jacob did(4) to the stone at Bethel, and on feast-days they covered
it with wraps of wool. The custom of smearing fetish-stones (which
Theophrastus mentions as one of the practices of the superstitious man) is
clearly a survival from the savage stage of religion. As a rule, however,
among savages, fetish-stones are daubed with red paint (like the face of
the wooden ancient Dionysi in Greece, and of Tsui Goab among the
Hottentots), not smeared with oil.(5)
(1) Theog., 460, 465.
(2) Theog., 498.
(3) x. 245.
(4) Gen. xxviii. 18.
(5) Pausanias, ii. 2, 5. “Churinga” in Australia are greased with the
natural moisture of the palm of the hand, and rubbed with red ochre.—Spencer
and Gillen. They are “sacred things,” but not exactly fetishes.
The myth of the swallowing and disgorging of his own children by Cronus
was another of the stumbling-blocks of Greek orthodoxy. The common
explanation, that Time ((Greek text omitted)) does swallow his children,
the days, is not quite satisfactory. Time brings never the past back
again, as Cronus did. Besides, the myth of the swallowing is not confined
to Cronus. Modern philology has given, as usual, different analyses of the
meaning of the name of the god. Hermann, with Preller, derives it from
(Greek text omitted), to fulfil. The harvest-month, says Preller, was
named Cronion in Greece, and Cronia was the title of the harvest-festival.
The sickle of Cronus is thus brought into connection with the sickle of
the harvester.(1)
(1) Preller, Gr. Myth., i. 44; Hartung, ii. 48; Porphyry, Abst., ii. 54.
Welcker will not hear of this etymology, Gr. gott., i. 145, note 9.
The second myth, in which Cronus swallows his children, has numerous
parallels in savage legend. Bushmen tell of Kwai Hemm, the devourer, who
swallows that great god, the mantis insect, and disgorges him alive with
all the other persons and animals whom he has engulphed in the course of a
long and voracious career.(1) The moon in Australia, while he lived on
earth, was very greedy, and swallowed the eagle-god, whom he had to
disgorge. Mr. Im Thurn found similar tales among the Indians of Guiana.
The swallowing and disgorging of Heracles by the monster that was to slay
Hesione is well known. Scotch peasants tell of the same feats, but
localise the myth on the banks of the Ken in Galloway. Basutos, Eskimos,
Zulus and European fairy tales all possess this incident, the swallowing
of many persons by a being from whose maw they return alive and in good
case.
(1) Bleek, Bushman Folk-lore, pp. 6, 8.
A mythical conception which prevails from Greenland to South Africa, from
Delphi to the Solomon Islands, from Brittany to the shores of Lake
Superior, must have some foundation in the common elements of human
nature.(1) Now it seems highly probable that this curious idea may have
been originally invented in an attempt to explain natural phenomena by a
nature-myth. It has already been shown (chapter v.) that eclipses are
interpreted, even by the peasantry of advanced races, as the swallowing of
the moon by a beast or a monster. The Piutes account for the disappearance
of the stars in the daytime by the hypothesis that the “sun swallows his
children”. In the Melanesian myth, dawn is cut out of the body of night by
Qat, armed with a knife of red obsidian. Here are examples(2) of
transparent nature-myths in which this idea occurs for obvious explanatory
purposes, and in accordance with the laws of the savage imagination. Thus
the conception of the swallowing and disgorging being may very well have
arisen out of a nature-myth. But why is the notion attached to the legend
of Cronus?
(1) The myth of Cronus and the swallowed children and the stone is
transferred to Gargantua. See Sebillot, Gargantua dans les Traditions
Populaires. But it is impossible to be certain that this is not an example
of direct borrowing by Madame De Cerny in her Saint Suliac, p. 69.
(2) Compare Tylor, Prim. Cult., i. 338.
That is precisely the question about which mythologists differ, as has
been shown, and perhaps it is better to offer no explanation. However
stories arise—and this story probably arose from a nature-myth—it
is certain that they wander about the world, that they change masters, and
thus a legend which is told of a princess with an impossible name in
Zululand is told of the mother of Charlemagne in France. The tale of the
swallowing may have been attributed to Cronus, as a great truculent deity,
though it has no particular elemental signification in connection with his
legend.
This peculiarly savage trick of swallowing each other became an inherited
habit in the family of Cronus. When Zeus reached years of discretion, he
married Metis, and this lady, according to the scholiast on Hesiod, had
the power of transforming herself into any shape she pleased. When she was
about to be a mother, Zeus induced her to assume the shape of a fly and
instantly swallowed her.(1) In behaving thus, Zeus acted on the advice of
Uranus and Gaea. It was feared that Metis would produce a child more
powerful than his father. Zeus avoided this peril by swallowing his wife,
and himself gave birth to Athene. The notion of swallowing a hostile
person, who has been changed by magic into a conveniently small bulk, is
very common. It occurs in the story of Taliesin.(2) Caridwen, in the shape
of a hen, swallows Gwion Bach, in the form of a grain of wheat. In the
same manner the princess in the Arabian Nights swallowed the Geni. Here
then we have in the Hesiodic myth an old marchen pressed into the service
of the higher mythology. The apprehension which Zeus (like Herod and King
Arthur) always felt lest an unborn child should overthrow him, was also
familiar to Indra; but, instead of swallowing the mother and concealing
her in his own body, like Zeus, Indra entered the mother’s body, and
himself was born instead of the dreaded child.(3) A cow on this occasion
was born along with Indra. This adventure of the (Greek text omitted) or
swallowing of Metis was explained by the late Platonists as a Platonic
allegory. Probably the people who originated the tale were not Platonists,
any more than Pandarus was all Aristotelian.
(1) Hesiod, Theogonia, 886. See Scholiast and note in Aglaophamus, i. 613.
Compare Puss in Boots and the Ogre.
(2) Mabinogion, p. 473.
(3) Black Yajur Veda, quoted by Sayana.
After Homer and Hesiod, the oldest literary authorities for Greek
cosmogonic myths are the poems attributed to Orpheus. About their probable
date, as has been said, little is known. They have reached us only in
fragments, but seem to contain the first guesses of a philosophy not yet
disengaged from mythical conditions. The poet preserves, indeed, some
extremely rude touches of early imagination, while at the same time one of
the noblest and boldest expressions of pantheistic thought is attributed
to him. From the same source are drawn ideas as pure as those of the
philosophical Vedic hymn,(1) and as wild as those of the Vedic Purusha
Sukta, or legend of the fashioning of the world out of the mangled limbs
of Purusha. The authors of the Orphic cosmogony appear to have begun with
some remarks on Time ((Greek text omitted)). “Time was when as yet this
world was not.”(2) Time, regarded in the mythical fashion as a person,
generated Chaos and Aether. The Orphic poet styles Chaos (Greek text
omitted), “the monstrous gulph,” or “gap”. This term curiously reminds one
of Ginnunga-gap in the Scandinavian cosmogonic legends. “Ginnunga-gap was
light as windless air,” and therein the blast of heat met the cold rime,
whence Ymir was generated, the Purusha of Northern fable.(3) These ideas
correspond well with the Orphic conception of primitive space.(4)
(1) Rig-Veda, x. 90.
(2) Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 470. See also the quotations from Proclus.
(3) Gylfi’s Mocking.
(4) Aglaophamus, p. 473.
In process of time Chaos produced an egg, shining and silver white. It is
absurd to inquire, according to Lobeck, whether the poet borrowed this
widely spread notion of a cosmic egg from Phoenicia, Babylon, Egypt (where
the goose-god Seb laid the egg), or whether the Orphic singer originated
so obvious an idea. Quaerere ludicrum est. The conception may have been
borrowed, but manifestly it is one of the earliest hypotheses that occur
to the rude imagination. We have now three primitive generations, time,
chaos, the egg, and in the fourth generation the egg gave birth to Phanes,
the great hero of the Orphic cosmogony.(1) The earliest and rudest
thinkers were puzzled, as many savage cosmogonic myths have demonstrated,
to account for the origin of life. The myths frequently hit on the theory
of a hermaphroditic being, both male and female, who produces another
being out of himself. Prajapati in the Indian stories, and Hrimthursar in
Scandinavian legend—”one of his feet got a son on the other”—with
Lox in the Algonquin tale are examples of these double-sexed personages.
In the Orphic poem, Phanes is both male and female. This Phanes held
within him “the seed of all the gods,”(2) and his name is confused with
the names of Metis and Ericapaeus in a kind of trinity. All this part of
the Orphic doctrine is greatly obscured by the allegorical and
theosophistic interpretations of the late Platonists long after our era,
who, as usual, insisted on finding their own trinitarian ideas, commenta
frigidissima, concealed under the mythical narrative.(3)
(1) Clemens Alexan., p. 672.
(2) Damascius, ap. Lobeck, i. 481.
(3) Aglaoph., i. 483.
Another description by Hieronymus of the first being, the Orphic Phanes,
“as a serpent with bull’s and lion’s heads, with a human face in the
middle and wings on the shoulders,” is sufficiently rude and senseless.
But these physical attributes could easily be explained away as types of
anything the Platonist pleased.(1) The Orphic Phanes, too, was almost as
many-headed as a giant in a fairy tale, or as Purusha in the Rig-Veda. He
had a ram’s head, a bull’s head, a snake’s head and a lion’s head, and
glanced around with four eyes, presumably human.(2) This remarkable being
was also provided with golden wings. The nature of the physical
arrangements by which Phanes became capable of originating life in the
world is described in a style so savage and crude that the reader must be
referred to Suidas for the original text.(3) The tale is worthy of the
Swift-like fancy of the Australian Narrinyeri.
(1) Damascius, 381, ap. Lobeck, i. 484.
(2) Hermias in Phaedr. ap. Lobeck, i. 493.
(3) Suidas s. v. Phanes.
Nothing can be easier or more delusive than to explain all this wild part
of the Orphic cosmogony as an allegorical veil of any modern ideas we
choose to select. But why the “allegory” should closely imitate the rough
guesses of uncivilised peoples, Ahts, Diggers, Zunis, Cahrocs, it is less
easy to explain. We can readily imagine African or American tribes who
were accustomed to revere bulls, rams, snakes, and so forth, ascribing the
heads of all their various animal patrons to the deity of their
confederation. We can easily see how such races as practise the savage
rites of puberty should attribute to the first being the special organs of
Phanes. But on the Neo-Platonic hypothesis that Orpheus was a seer of
Neo-Platonic opinions, we do not see why he should have veiled his ideas
under so savage an allegory. This part of the Orphic speculation is left
in judicious silence by some modern commentators, such as M. Darmesteter
in Les Cosmogonies Aryennes.(1) Indeed, if we choose to regard Apollonius
Rhodius, an Alexandrine poet writing in a highly civilised age, as the
representative of Orphicism, it is easy to mask and pass by the more stern
and characteristic fortresses of the Orphic divine. The theriomorphic
Phanes is a much less “Aryan” and agreeable object than the glorious
golden-winged Eros, the love-god of Apollonius Rhodius and
Aristophanes.(2)
(1) Essais Orientaux, p. 166.
(2) Argonautica, 1-12; Aves, 693.
On the whole, the Orphic fragments appear to contain survivals of savage
myths of the origin of things blended with purer speculations. The savage
ideas are finally explained by late philosophers as allegorical veils and
vestments of philosophy; but the interpretation is arbitrary, and varies
with the taste and fancy of each interpreter. Meanwhile the coincidence of
the wilder elements with the speculations native to races in the lowest
grades of civilisation is undeniable. This opinion is confirmed by the
Greek myths of the origin of Man. These, too, coincide with the various
absurd conjectures of savages.
In studying the various Greek local legends of the origin of Man, we
encounter the difficulty of separating them from the myths of heroes,
which it will be more convenient to treat separately. This difficulty we
have already met in our treatment of savage traditions of the beginnings
of the race. Thus we saw that among the Melanesians, Qat, and among the
Ahts, Quawteaht, were heroic persons, who made men and most other things.
But it was desirable to keep their performances of this sort separate from
their other feats, their introduction of fire, for example, and of various
arts. In the same way it will be well, in reviewing Greek legends, to keep
Prometheus’ share in the making of men apart from the other stories of his
exploits as a benefactor of the men whom he made. In Hesiod, Prometheus is
the son of the Titan Iapetus, and perhaps his chief exploit is to play
upon Zeus a trick of which we find the parallel in various savage myths.
It seems, however, from Ovid(1) and other texts, that Hesiod somewhere
spoke of Prometheus as having made men out of clay, like Pund-jel in the
Australian, Qat in the Melanesian and Tiki in the Maori myths. The same
story is preserved in Servius’s commentary on Virgil.(2) A different
legend is preserved in the Etymologicum Magnum (voc. Ikonion). According
to this story, after the deluge of Deucalion, “Zeus bade Prometheus and
Athene make images of men out of clay, and the winds blew into them the
breath of life”. In confirmation of this legend, Pausanias was shown in
Phocis certain stones of the colour of clay, and “smelling very like human
flesh”; and these, according to the Phocians, were “the remains of the
clay from which the whole human race was fashioned by Prometheus”.(3)
(1) Ovid. Metam. i. 82.
(2) Eclogue, vi. 42.
(3) Pausanias, x. 4, 3.
Aristophanes, too, in the Birds (686) talks of men as (Greek text
omitted), figures kneaded of clay. Thus there are sufficient traces in
Greek tradition of the savage myth that man was made of clay by some
superior being, like Pund-jel in the quaint Australian story.
We saw that among various rude races other theories of the origin of man
were current. Men were thought to have come out of a hole in the ground or
a bed of reeds, and sometimes the very scene of their first appearance was
still known and pointed out to the curious. This myth was current among
races who regarded themselves as the only people whose origin needed
explanation. Other stories represented man as the fruit of a tree, or the
child of a rock or stone, or as the descendant of one of the lower
animals. Examples of these opinions in Greek legend are now to be given.
In the first place, we have a fragment of Pindar, in which the poet
enumerates several of the centres from which different Greek tribes
believed men to have sprung. “Hard it is to find out whether Alalkomeneus,
first of men, arose on the marsh of Cephissus, or whether the Curetes of
Ida first, a stock divine, arose, or if it was the Phrygian Corybantes
that the sun earliest saw—men like trees walking;” and Pindar
mentions Egyptian and Libyan legends of the same description.(1) The
Thebans and the Arcadians held themselves to be “earth-born”. “The black
earth bore Pelasgus on the high wooded hills,” says an ancient line of
Asius. The Dryopians were an example of a race of men born from ash-trees.
The myth of gens virum truncis et duro robore nata, “born of tree-trunk
and the heart of oak,” had passed into a proverb even in Homer’s time.(2)
Lucian mentions(3) the Athenian myth “that men grew like cabbages out of
the earth”. As to Greek myths of the descent of families from animals,
these will be examined in the discussion of the legend of Zeus.
(1) Preller, Aus. Auf., p. 158.
(2) Virgil Aen., viii. 315; Odyssey, xix. 163; Iliad, ii. xxii. 120;
Juvenal, vi. 11. Cf. also Bouche Leclerq, De Origine Generis Humani.
(3) Philops. iii.
CHAPTER XI. SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS.
The origin of a belief in GOD beyond the ken of history and of speculation—Sketch
of conjectural theories—Two elements in all beliefs, whether of
backward or civilised races—The Mythical and the Religious—These
may be coeval, or either may be older than the other—Difficulty of
study—The current anthropological theory—Stated objections to
the theory—Gods and spirits—Suggestion that savage religion is
borrowed from Europeans—Reply to Mr. Tylor’s arguments on this head—The
morality of savages.
“The question of the origin of a belief in Deity does not come within the
scope of a strictly historical inquiry. No man can watch the idea of GOD
in the making or in the beginning. We are acquainted with no race whose
beginning does not lie far back in the unpenetrated past. Even on the
hypothesis that the natives of Australia, for example, were discovered in
a state of culture more backward than that of other known races, yet the
institutions and ideas of the Australians must have required for their
development an incalculable series of centuries. The notions of man about
the Deity, man’s religious sentiments and his mythical narratives, must be
taken as we find them. There have been, and are, many theories as to the
origin of the conception of a supernatural being or beings, concerned with
the fortunes of mankind, and once active in the making of the earth and
its inhabitants. There is the hypothesis of an original divine tradition,
darkened by the smoke of foolish mortal fancies. There is the hypothesis
of an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the opinion that the
notion of Deity was introduced to man by the very nature of his knowledge
and perceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise a finite and
an infinite. There is the hypothesis that gods were originally ghosts, the
magnified shapes of ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man,
seeking in his early speculations for the causes of things, and conscious
of his own powers as an active cause, projected his own shadow on the
mists of the unknown, and peopled the void with figures of magnified
non-natural men, his own parents and protectors, and the makers of many of
the things in the world.
“Since the actual truth cannot be determined by observation and
experiment, the question as to the first germs of the divine conception
must here be left unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and examine
apart the two chief elements in the earliest as in the latest ideas of
Godhead. Among the lowest and most backward, as among the most advanced
races, there coexist the MYTHICAL and the RELIGIOUS elements in belief.
The rational factor (or what approves itself to us as the rational factor)
is visible in religion; the irrational is prominent in myth. The
Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in hours of danger and
necessity ‘yearns after the gods,’ and has present in his heart the idea
of a father and friend. This is the religious element. The same man, when
he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual
friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero
of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational
element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always traces back to the belief
in a power that is benign and works for righteousness. Myth, even in Homer
or the Rig-Veda, perpetually falls back on the old stock of absurd and
immoral divine adventures.(1)
(1) M. Knappert here, in a note to the Dutch translation, denies the
lowest mythical element to the Hebrews, as their documents have reached
us.
“It would be rash, in the present state of knowledge, to pronounce that
the germ of the serious Homeric sense of the justice and power of the
Divinity is earlier or later than the germ of the Homeric stories of gods
disguised as animals, or imprisoned by mortals, or kicked out of Olympus.
The rational and irrational aspects of mythology and religion may be of
coeval antiquity for all that is certainly known, or either of them, in
the dark backward of mortal experience, may have preceded the other. There
is probably no religion nor mythology which does not offer both aspects to
the student. But it is the part of advancing civilisation to adorn and
purify the rational element, and to subordinate and supersede the
irrational element, as far as religious conservatism, ritual and priestly
dogma will permit.”
Such were the general remarks with which this chapter opened in the
original edition of the present work. But reading, reflection and certain
additions to the author’s knowledge of facts, have made it seem advisable
to state, more fully and forcibly than before, that, in his opinion, not
only the puzzling element of myth, but the purer element of a religious
belief sanctioning morality is derived by civilised people from a remote
past of savagery. It is also necessary to draw attention to a singular
religious phenomena, a break, or “fault,” as geologists call it, in the
religious strata. While the most backward savages, in certain cases,
present the conception of a Being who sanctions ethics, and while that
conception recurs at a given stage of civilisation, it appears to fade, or
even to disappear in some conditions of barbarism. Among some barbaric
peoples, such as the Zulus, and the Red Indians of French Canada when
first observed, as among some Polynesians and some tribes of Western and
Central Africa little trace of a supreme being is found, except a name,
and that name is even occasionally a matter of ridicule. The highest
religious conception has been reached, and is generally known, yet the
Being conceived of as creative is utterly neglected, while ghosts, or
minor gods, are served and adored. To this religious phenomenon (if
correctly observed) we must attempt to assign a cause. For this purpose it
is necessary to state again what may be called the current or popular
anthropological theory of the evolution of Gods.
That theory takes varying shapes. In the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer
we find a pure Euhemerism. Gods are but ghosts of dead men, raised to a
higher and finally to the highest power. In the somewhat analogous but not
identical system of Mr. Tylor, man first attains to the idea of spirit by
reflection on various physical, psychological and psychical experiences,
such as sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, hallucinations, breath and death,
and he gradually extends the conception of soul or ghost till all nature
is peopled with spirits. Of these spirits one is finally promoted to
supremacy, where the conception of a supreme being occurs. In the lowest
faiths there is said, on this theory, to be no connection, or very little
connection, between religion and morality. To supply a religious sanction
of morals is the work of advancing thought.(1)
(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 381. Huxley’s Science and Hebrew Tradition, pp.
346,372.
This current hypothesis is, confessedly, “animistic,” in Mr. Tylor’s
phrase, or, in Mr. Spencer’s terminology, it is “the ghost theory”. The
human soul, says Mr. Tylor, has been the model on which all man’s ideas of
spiritual beings, from “the tiniest elf” to “the heavenly Creator and
ruler of the world, the Great Spirit,” have been framed.(1) Thus it has
been necessary for Mr. Tylor and for Mr. Spencer to discover first an
origin of man’s idea of his own soul, and that supposed origin in
psychological, physical and psychical experiences is no doubt adequate. By
reflection on these facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached,
though the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor may contain
points as yet unexplained by Materialism. From these sources are derived
all really “animistic” gods, all that from the first partake of the nature
of hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though in certain cases
that hunger may have been transferred, we surmise, by worshippers to gods
not ORIGINALLY animistic.
(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 109
In answer to this theory of an animistic or ghostly origin of all gods, it
must first be observed that all gods are not necessarily, it would seem,
of animistic origin. Among certain of the lowest savages, although they
believe in ghosts, the animistic conception, the spiritual idea, is not
attached to the relatively supreme being of their faith. He is merely a
powerful BEING, unborn, and not subject to death. The purely metaphysical
question “was he a ghost?” does not seem always to have been asked.
Consequently there is no logical reason why man’s idea of a Maker should
not be prior to man’s idea that there are such things as souls, ghosts and
spirits. Therefore the animistic theory is not necessary as material for
the “god-idea”. We cannot, of course, prove that the “god-idea” was
historically prior to the “ghost-idea,” for we know no savages who have a
god and yet are ignorant of ghosts. But we can show that the idea of God
may exist, in germ, without explicitly involving the idea of spirit. Thus
gods MAY be prior in evolution to ghosts, and therefore the animistic
theory of the origin of gods in ghosts need not necessarily be accepted.
In the first place, the original evolution of a god out of a ghost need
not be conceded, because in perhaps all known savage theological
philosophy the God, the Maker and Master, is regarded as a being who
existed before death entered the world. Everywhere, practically speaking,
death is looked on as a comparatively late intruder. He came not only
after God was active, but after men and beasts had populated the world.
Scores of myths accounting for this invasion of death have been collected
all over the world.(1) Thus the relatively supreme being, or beings, of
religion are looked on as prior to Death, therefore, not as ghosts. They
are sometimes expressly distinguished as “original gods” from other gods
who are secondary, being souls of chiefs. Thus all Tongan gods are Atua,
but all Atua are not “original gods”.(2) The word Atua, according to Mr.
White, is “A-tu-a”. “A” was the name given to the author of the universe,
and signifies: “Am the unlimited in power,” “The Conception,” “the
Leader,” “the Beyond All”. “Tua” means “Beyond that which is most
distant,” “Behind all matter,” and “Behind every action”. Clearly these
conceptions are not more mythical (indeed A does not seem to occur in the
myths), nor are they more involved in ghosts, than the unknown absolute of
Mr. Herbert Spencer. Yet the word Atua denotes gods who are recognised as
ghosts of chiefs, no less than it denotes the supreme existence.(3) These
ideas are the metaphysical theology of a race considerably above the
lowest level. They lend no assistance to a theory that A was, or was
evolved out of, a human ghost, and he is not found in Maori MYTHOLOGY as
far as our knowledge goes. But, among the lowest known savages, the
Australians, we read that “the Creator was a gigantic black, once on
earth, now among the stars”. This is in Gippsland; the deities of the
Fuegians and the Blackfoot Indians are also Beings, anthropomorphic,
unborn and undying, like Mangarrah, the creative being of the Larrakeah
tribe in Australia. “A very good man called Mangarrah lives in the sky….
He made everything” (blacks excepted). He never dies.(4) The Melanesian
Vui “never were men,” were “something different,” and “were NOT ghosts”.
It is as a Being, not as a Spirit, that the Kurnai deity Munganngaur (Our
Father) is described.(5) In short, though Europeans often speak of these
divine beings of low savages as “spirits,” it does not appear that the
natives themselves advance here the metaphysical idea of spirit. These
gods are just BEINGS, anthropomorphic, or (in myth and fable), very often
bestial, “theriomorphic”.(6) It is manifest that a divine being envisaged
thus need not have been evolved out of the theory of spirits or ghosts,
and may even have been prior to the rise of the belief in ghosts.
(1) See Modern Mythology, “Myths of Origin of Death”.
(2) Mariner, ii. 127.
(3) White, Ancient History of the Maoris, vol. i. p. 4; other views in
Gill’s Myths of the Pacific. I am not committed to Mr. White’s opinion.
(4) Journal Anthrop. Inst., Nov., 1894, p. 191.
(5) Ibid., 1886, p. 313.
(6) See Making of Religion, pp. 201-210, for a more copious statement.
Again, these powerful, or omnipotent divine beings are looked on as
guardians of morality, punishers of sin, rewarders of righteousness, both
in this world and in a future life, in places where ghosts, though
believed in, ARE NOT WORSHIPPED, NOR IN RECEIPT OF SACRIFICE, and where,
great grandfathers being forgotten, ancestral ghosts can scarcely swell
into gods. This occurs among Andamanese, Fuegians and Australians,
therefore, among non-ghost-worshipping races, ghosts cannot have developed
into deities who are not even necessarily spirits. These gods, again, do
not receive sacrifice, and thus lack the note of descent from hungry
food-craving ghosts. In Australia, indeed, while ghosts are not known to
receive any offerings, “the recent custom of providing food for it”—the
dead body of a friend—”is derided by the intelligent old aborigines
as ‘white fellow’s gammon'”.(1)
(1) Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 51, 1881.
The Australians possess no chiefs like “Vich Ian Vohr or Chingachgook”
whose ghosts might be said to swell into supreme moral deities. “Headmen”
they have, leaders of various degrees of authority, but no Vich Ian Vohr,
no semi-sacred representative of the tribe.(1) Nor are the ghosts of the
Headmen known to receive any particular posthumous attention or worship.
Thus it really seems impossible to show proof that Australian gods grew
out of Australian ghosts, a subject to which we shall return.
(1) Howitt, Organisation of Australian Tribes, pp. 101-113. “Transactions
of Royal Society of Victoria,” 1889.
Some supporters of the current theory therefore fall back on the
hypothesis that the Australians are sadly degenerate.(1) Chiefs, it is
argued, or kings, they once had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of
these wholly forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know not the
very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. Sir John Lubbock and Mr.
Tylor have correctly argued that the soil of Australia has not yet yielded
so much as a fragment of native pottery, nor any trace of native metal
work, not a vestige of stone buildings occurs, nor of any work beyond the
present native level of culture, unless we reckon weirs for fish-catching.
“The Australian boomerang,” writes Mr. Tylor, “has been claimed as derived
from some hypothetical high culture, whereas the transition-stages through
which it is connected with the club are to be observed in its own country,
while no civilised race possesses the weapon.”(2)
(1) See Prof. Menzie’s History of Religion, pp. 16, 17, where a singular
inconsistency has escaped the author.
(2) Prim. Cult., i. 57, 67.
Therefore the Australian, with his boomerang, represents no degeneration
but advance on his ancestors, who had not yet developed the boomerang out
of the club. If the excessively complex nature of Australian rules of
prohibited degrees be appealed to as proof of degeneration from the stage
in which they were evolved, we reply that civilisation everywhere tends
not to complicate but to simplify such rules, as it also notoriously
simplifies the forms of language.
The Australian people, when discovered, were only emerging from
palaeolithic culture, while the neighbouring Tasmanians were frankly
palaeolithic.(1) Far from degenerating, the Australians show advance when
they supersede their beast or other totem by an eponymous human hero.(2)
The eponymous hero, however, changed with each generation, so that no one
name was fixed as that of tribal father, later perhaps to become a tribal
god. We find several tribes in which the children now follow the FATHER’S
class, and thus paternal kin takes the place of the usual early savage
method of reckoning kinship by the mother’s side, elsewhere prevalent in
Australia. In one of these tribes, dwelling between the Glenelg and Mount
Napier, headmanship is hereditary, but nothing is said of any worship of
the ghosts of chiefs. All this social improvement denotes advance on the
usual Australian standard.(3) Of degeneration (except when produced
recently by European vices and diseases) I know no trace in Australia.
Their highest religious conceptions, therefore, are not to be disposed of
as survivals of a religion of the ghosts of such chiefs as the Australians
are not shown ever to have recognised. The “God idea” in Australia, or
among the Andamanese, must have some other source than the Ghost-Theory.
This is all the more obvious because not only are ghosts not worshipped by
the Australians, but also the divine beings who are alleged to form links
between the ghost and the moral god are absent. There are no departmental
gods, as of war, peace, the chase, love, and so forth. Sun, sky and earth
are equally unworshipped. There is nothing in religion between a Being, on
one hand (with a son or sons), and vague mischievous spirits, boilyas or
mrarts, and ghosts (who are not worshipped), on the other hand. The
friends of the idea that the God is an ancient evolution from the ghost of
such a chief as is not proved to have existed, must apparently believe
that the intermediate stages in religious evolution, departmental gods,
nature gods and gods of polytheism in general once existed in Australia,
and have all been swept away in a deluge of degeneration. That deluge left
in religion a moral, potently active Father and Judge. Now that conception
is considerably above the obsolescent belief in an otiose god which is
usually found among barbaric races of the type from which the Australians
are said to have degenerated. There is no proof of degeneracy, and, if
degeneration has occurred, why has it left just the kind of deity who, in
the higher barbaric culture, is not commonly found? Clearly this attempt
to explain the highest aspect of Australian religion by an undemonstrated
degeneration is an effort of despair.
(1) Tylor, preface to Ling Roth’s Aborigines of Tasmania, pp. v.-viii.
(2) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231.
(3) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 277, 278.
While the current theory thus appears to break down over the deities of
certain Australian tribes and of other low savages to be more particularly
described later, it is not more successful in dealing with what we have
called the “fault” or break in the religious strata of higher races. The
nature of that “fault” may thus be described: While the deities of several
low savage peoples are religiously regarded as guardians and judges of
conduct both in this life and in the next, among higher barbarians they
are often little, or not at all, interested in conduct. Again, while among
Australians, and Andamanese, and Fuegians, there is hardly a verifiable
trace, if any trace there be, of sacrifice to any divine being, among
barbarians the gods beneath the very highest are in receipt even of human
sacrifice. Even among barbarians the highest deity is very rarely
worshipped with sacrifice. Through various degrees he is found to lose all
claim on worship, and even to become a mere name, and finally a jest and a
mockery. Meanwhile ancestral ghosts, and gods framed on the same lines as
ghosts, receive sacrifice of food and of human victims. Once more, the
high gods of low savages are not localised, not confined to any temple or
region. But the gods of higher barbarians (the gods beneath the highest),
are localised in this way, as occasionally even the highest god also is.
All this shows that, among advancing barbarians, the gods, if they started
from the estate of gods among savages on the lowest level, become
demoralised, limited, conditioned, relegated to an otiose condition, and
finally deposed, till progressive civilisation, as in Greece, reinstates
or invents purer and more philosophic conceptions, without being able to
abolish popular and priestly myth and ritual.
Here, then, is a flaw or break in the strata of religion. What was the
cause of this flaw? We answer, the evolution, through ghosts, of
“animistic” gods who retained the hunger and selfishness of these
ancestral spirits whom the lowest savages are not known to worship.
The moral divine beings of these lowest races, beings (when religiously
regarded) unconditioned, in need of no gift that man can give, are not to
be won by offerings of food and blood. Of such offerings ghosts, and gods
modelled on ghosts, are notoriously in need. Strengthened and propitiated
by blood and sacrifice (not offered to the gods of low savages), the
animistic deities will become partisans of their adorers, and will either
pay no regard to the morals of their worshippers, or will be easily bribed
to forgive sins. Here then is, ethically speaking, a flaw in the strata of
religion, a flaw found in the creeds of ghost-worshipping barbarians, but
not of non-ghost-worshipping savages. A crowd of venal, easy-going,
serviceable deities has now been evolved out of ghosts, and Animism is on
its way to supplant or overlay a rude early form of theism. Granting the
facts, we fail to see how they are explained by the current theory which
makes the highest god the latest in evolution from a ghost. That theory
wrecks itself again on the circumstance that, whereas the tribal or
national highest divine being, as latest in evolution, ought to be the
most potent, he is, in fact, among barbaric races, usually the most
disregarded. A new idea, of course, is not necessarily a powerful or
fashionable idea. It may be regarded as a “fad,” or a heresy, or a low
form of dissent. But, when universally known to and accepted by a tribe or
people, then it must be deemed likely to possess great influence. But that
is not the case; and among barbaric tribes the most advanced conception of
deity is the least regarded, the most obsolete.
An excellent instance of the difference between the theory here advocated,
and that generally held by anthropologists, may be found in Mr.
Abercromby’s valuable work, Pre-and Proto-Historic Finns, i. 150-154. The
gods, and other early ideas, says Mr. Abercromby, “could in no sense be
considered as supernatural”. We shall give examples of gods among the
races “nearest the beginning,” whose attributes of power and knowledge can
not, by us at least, be considered other than “supernatural”. “The gods”
(in this hypothesis) “were so human that they could be forced to act in
accordance with the wishes of their worshippers, and could likewise be
punished.” These ideas, to an Australian black, or an Andamanese, would
seem dangerously blasphemous. These older gods “resided chiefly in trees,
wells, rivers and animals”. But many gods of our lowest known savages live
“beyond the sky”. Mr. Abercromby supposes the sky god to be of later
evolution, and to be worshipped after man had exhausted “the helpers that
seemed nearest at hand… in the trees and waters at his very door”. Now
the Australian black has not a door, nor has he gods of any service to him
in the “trees and waters,” though sprites may lurk in such places for
mischief. But in Mr. Abercromby’s view, some men turned at last to the
sky-god, “who in time would gain a large circle of worshippers”. He would
come to be thought omnipotent, omniscient, the Creator. This notion, says
Mr. Abercromby, “must, if this view is correct, be of late origin”. But
the view is not correct. The far-seeing powerful Maker beyond the sky is
found among the very backward races who have not developed helpers nearer
man, dwelling round what would be his door, if door he was civilised
enough to possess. Such near neighbouring gods, of human needs, capable of
being bullied, or propitiated by sacrifice, are found in races higher than
the lowest, who, for their easily procurable aid, have allowed the Maker
to sink into an otiose god, or a mere name. Mr. Abercromby unconsciously
proves our case by quoting the example of a Samoyede. This man knew a
Sky-god, Num; that conception was familiar to him. He also knew a familiar
spirit. On Mr. Abercromby’s theory he should have resorted for help to the
Sky-god, not to the sprite. But he did the reverse: he said, “I cannot
approach Num, he is too far away; if I could reach him I should not
beseech thee (the familiar spirit), but should go myself; but I cannot”.
For this precise reason, people who have developed the belief in
accessible affable spirits go to them, with a spell to constrain, or a
gift to bribe, and neglect, in some cases almost forget, their Maker. But
He is worshipped by low savages, who do not propitiate ghosts and who have
no gods in wells and trees, close at hand. It seems an obvious inference
that the greater God is the earlier evolved.
These are among the difficulties of the current anthropological theory.
There is, however, a solution by which the weakness of the divine
conception, its neglected, disused aspect among barbaric races, might be
explained by anthropologists, without regarding it as an obsolescent form
of a very early idea. This solution is therefore in common use. It is
applied to the deity revealed in the ancient mysteries of the Australians,
and it is employed in American and African instances.
The custom is to say that the highest divine being of American or African
native peoples has been borrowed from Europeans, and is, especially, a
savage refraction from the God of missionaries. If this can be proved, the
shadowy, practically powerless “Master of Life” of certain barbaric
peoples, will have degenerated from the Christian conception, because of
that conception he will be only a faint unsuccessful refraction. He has
been introduced by Europeans, it is argued, but is not in harmony with his
new environment, and so is “half-remembered and half forgot”.
The hypothesis of borrowing admits of only one answer, but that answer
should be conclusive. If we can discover, say in North America, a single
instance in which the supreme being occurs, while yet he cannot possibly
be accounted for by any traceable or verifiable foreign influence, then
the burden of proof, in other cases, falls on the opponent. When he urges
that other North American supreme beings were borrowed, we can reply that
our crucial example shows that this need not be the fact. To prove that it
is the fact, in his instances, is then his business. It is obvious that
for information on this subject we must go to the reports of the earliest
travellers who knew the Red Indians well. We must try to get at gods
behind any known missionary efforts. Mr. Tylor offers us the testimony of
Heriot, about 1586, that the natives of Virginia believed in many gods,
also in one chief god, “who first made other principal gods, and then the
sun, moon and stars as petty gods”.(1) Whence could the natives of
Virginia have borrowed this notion of a Creator before 1586? If it is
replied, in the usual way, that they developed him upwards out of sun,
moon and star gods, other principal gods, and finally reached the idea of
the Creator, we answer that the idea of the Maker is found where these
alleged intermediate stages are NOT found, as in Australia. In Virginia
then, as in Victoria, a Creator may have been evolved in some other way
than that of gradual ascent from ghosts, and may have been, as in
Australia and elsewhere, prior to verifiable ghost-worship. Again, in
Virginia at our first settlement, the native priests strenuously resisted
the introduction of Christianity. They were content with their deity,
Ahone, “the great God who governs all the world, and makes the sun to
shine, creating the moon and stars his companions…. The good and
peaceable God… needs not to be sacrificed unto, for he intendeth all
good unto them.” This good Creator, without sacrifice, among a settled
agricultural barbaric race sacrificing to other gods and ghosts,
manifestly cannot be borrowed from the newly arrived religion of
Christianity, which his priests, according to the observer, vigorously
resisted. Ahone had a subordinate deity, magisterial in functions,
“looking into all men’s actions” and punishing the same, when evil. To
THIS god sacrifices WERE made, and if his name, Okeus, is derived from Oki
= “spirit,” he was, of course, an animistic ghost-evolved deity.
Anthropological writers, by an oversight, have dwelt on Oki, but have not
mentioned Ahone.(2) Manifestly it is not possible to insist that these
Virginian high deities were borrowed, without saying whence and when they
were borrowed by a barbaric race which was, at the same time, rejecting
Christian teaching.
(1) Prim. Cult., ii. 341.
(2) History of Travaile into Virginia, by William Strachey, 1612.
Mr. Tylor writes, with his habitual perspicacity: “It is the widespread
belief in the Great Spirit, whatever his precise nature and origin, that
has long and deservedly drawn the attention of European thinkers to the
native religions of the North American tribes”. Now while, in recent
times, Christian ideas may undeniably have crystallised round “the Great
Spirit,” it has come to be thought “that THE WHOLE DOCTRINE of the Great
Spirit was borrowed by the savages from missionaries and colonists. But
this view will not bear examination,” says Mr. Tylor.(1)
(1) Prim. Cult, ii. pp. 339, 340 (1873). For some reason, Mr. Tylor
modifies this passage in 1891.
Mr. Tylor proceeds to prove this by examples from Greenland, and the
Algonkins. He instances the Massachusett God, Kiehtan, who created the
other gods, and receives the just into heaven. This was recorded in 1622,
but the belief, says Winslow, our authority, goes back into the unknown
past. “They never saw Kiehtan, but THEY HOLD IT A GREAT CHARGE AND DUTY
THAT ONE AGE TEACH ANOTHER.” How could a deity thus rooted in a
traditional past be borrowed from recent English settlers?
In these cases the hypothesis of borrowing breaks down, and still more
does it break down over the Algonkin deity Atahocan.
Father Le Jeune, S.J., went first among the Algonkins, a missionary
pioneer, in 1633, and suffered unspeakable things in his courageous
endeavour to win souls in a most recalcitrant flock. He writes (1633): “As
this savage has given me occasion to speak of their god, I will remark
that it is a great error to think that the savages have no knowledge of
any deity. I was surprised to hear this in France. I do not know their
secrets, but, from the little which I am about to tell, it will be seen
that they have such knowledge.
“They say that one exists whom they call Atahocan, who made the whole.
Speaking of God in a wigwam one day, they asked me ‘what is God?’ I told
them that it was He who made all things, Heaven and Earth. They then began
to cry out to each other, ‘Atahocan! Atahocan! it is Atahocan!'”
There could be no better evidence that Atahocan was NOT (as is often said)
“borrowed from the Jesuits”. The Jesuits had only just arrived.
Later (1634) Le Jeune interrogated an old man and a partly Europeanised
sorcerer. They replied that nothing was certain; that Atahocan was only
spoken of as “of a thing so remote,” that assurance was impossible. “In
fact, their word Nitatohokan means, ‘I fable, I tell an old story’.”
Thus Atahocan, though at once recognised as identical with the Creator of
the missionary, was so far from being the latest thing in religious
evolution that he had passed into a proverb for the ancient and the
fabulous. This, of course, is inconsistent with RECENT borrowing. He was
neglected for Khichikouai, spirits which inspire seers, and are of some
practical use, receiving rewards in offerings of grease, says Le Jeune.(1)
(1) Relations, 1633, 1634.
The obsolescent Atahocan seems to have had no moral activity. But, in
America, this indolence of God is not universal. Mr. Parkman indeed
writes: “In the primitive Indian’s conception of a God, the idea of moral
good has no part”.(1) But this is definitely contradicted by Heriot,
Strachey, Winslow, already cited, and by Pere Le Jeune. The good
attributes of Kiehtan and Ahone were not borrowed from Christianity, were
matter of Indian belief before the English arrived. Mr. Parkman writes:
“The moment the Indians began to contemplate the object of his faith, and
sought to clothe it with attributes, it became finite, and commonly
ridiculous”. It did so, as usual, in MYTHOLOGY, but not in RELIGION. There
is nothing ridiculous in what is known of Ahone and Kiehtan. If they had a
mythology, and if we knew the myths, doubtless they would be ridiculous
enough. The savage mind, turned from belief and awe into the spinning of
yarns, instantly yields to humorous fancy. As we know, mediaeval popular
Christianity, in imagery, marchen or tales, and art, copiously illustrates
the same mental phenomenon. Saints, God, our Lord, and the Virgin, all
play ludicrous and immoral parts in Christian folk-tales. This is
Mythology, and here is, beyond all cavil, a late corruption of Religion.
Here, where we know the history of a creed, Religion is early, and these
myths are late. Other examples of American divine ideas might be given,
such as the extraordinary hymns in which the Zunis address the Eternal,
Ahonawilona. But as the Zuni religion has only been studied in recent
years, the hymns would be dismissed as “borrowed,” though there is nothing
Catholic or Christian about them. We have preferred to select examples
where borrowing from Christianity is out of the question. The current
anthropological theory is thus confronted with American examples of ideas
of the divine which cannot have been borrowed, while, if the gods are said
to have been evolved out of ghosts, we reply that, in some cases, they
receive no sacrifice, sacrifice being usually a note of ghostly descent.
Again, similar gods, as we show, exist where ghosts of chiefs are not
worshipped, and as far as evidence goes never were worshipped, because
there is no evidence of the existence at any time of such chiefs. The
American highest gods may then be equally free from the taint of ghostly
descent.
(1) Parkman, The Jesuits in North America. p. lxxviii.
There is another more or less moral North American deity whose evolution
is rather questionable. Pere Brebeuf (1636), speaking of the Hurons, says
that “they have recourse to Heaven in almost all their necessities,… and
I may say that it is, in fact, God whom they blindly adore, for they
imagine that there is an Oki, that is, a demon, in heaven, who regulates
the seasons, bridles the winds and the waves of the sea, and helps them in
every need. They dread his wrath, and appeal to him as witness to the
inviolability of their faith, when they make a promise or treaty of peace
with enemies. ‘Heaven hear us to-day’ is their form of adjuration.”(1)
(1) Relations, 1636, pp. 106, 107.
A spiritual being, whose home is heaven, who rides on the winds, whose
wrath is dreaded, who sanctions the oath, is only called “a demon” by the
prejudice of the worthy father who, at the same time, admits that the
savages have a conception of God—and that God, so conceived, is this
demon!
The debatable question is, was the “demon,” or the actual expanse of sky,
first in evolution? That cannot precisely be settled, but in the analogous
Chinese case of China we find heaven (Tien) and “Shang-ti, the personal
ruling Deity,” corresponding to the Huron “demon”. Shang-ti, the personal
deity, occurs most in the oldest, pre-Confucian sacred documents, and, so
far, appears to be the earlier conception. The “demon” in Huron faith may
also be earlier than the religious regard paid to his home, the sky.(1)
The unborrowed antiquity of a belief in a divine being, creative and
sometimes moral, in North America, is thus demonstrated. So far I had
written when I accidentally fell in with Mr. Tylor’s essay on “The Limits
of Savage Religion”.(2) In that essay, rather to my surprise, Mr. Tylor
argues for the borrowing of “The Great Spirit,” “The Great Manitou,” from
the Jesuits. Now, as to the phrase, “Great Spirit,” the Jesuits doubtless
caused its promulgation, and, where their teaching penetrated, shreds of
their doctrine may have adhered to the Indian conception of that divine
being. But Mr. Tylor in his essay does not allude to the early evidence,
his own, for Oki, Atahocan, Kiehtan, and Torngursak, all undeniably prior
to Jesuit influence, and found where Jesuits, later, did not go. As Mr.
Tylor offers no reason for disregarding evidence in 1892 which he had
republished in a new edition of Primitive Culture in 1891, it is
impossible to argue against him in this place. He went on, in the essay
cited (1892) to contend that the Australian god of the Kamilaroi of
Victoria, Baiame, is, in name and attributes, of missionary introduction.
Happily this hypothesis can be refuted, as we show in the following
chapter on Australian gods.
(1) See Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. 362, and Making of Religion, p. 318; also
Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 108,109, and Dr. Legge’s Chinese
Classics, in Sacred Books of the East, vols. iii., xxvii., xxviii.
(2) Journ. of Anthrop. Inst., vol. xxi., 1892.
It would be easy enough to meet the hypothesis of borrowing in the case of
the many African tribes who possess something approaching to a rude
monotheistic conception. Among these are the Dinkas of the Upper Nile,
with their neighbours, whose creed Russegger compares to that of modern
Deists in Europe. The Dinka god, Dendid, is omnipotent, but so benevolent
that he is not addressed in prayer, nor propitiated by sacrifice. Compare
the supreme being of the Caribs, beneficent, otiose, unadored.(1) A
similar deity, veiled in the instruction of the as yet unpenetrated
Mysteries, exists among the Yao of Central Africa.(2) Of the negro race,
Waitz says, “even if we do not call them monotheists, we may still think
of them as standing on the boundary of monotheism despite their
innumerable rude superstitions”.(3) The Tshi speaking people of the Gold
Coast have their unworshipped Nyankupon, a now otiose unadored being, with
a magisterial deputy, worshipped with many sacrifices. The case is almost
an exact parallel to that of Ahone and Oki in America. THESE were not
borrowed, and the author has argued at length against Major Ellis’s theory
of the borrowing from Christians of Nyankupon.(4)
(1) Rochefort, Les Isles Antilles, p. 415. Tylor, ii. 337.
(2) Macdonald, Africana, 1, 71, 72, 130, 279-301. Scott, Dictionary of the
Manganja Language, Making of Religion, pp. 230-238. A contradictory view
in Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 681.
(3) Anthropologie, ii. 167.
(4) Making of Religion, pp. 243-250.
To conclude this chapter, the study of savage and barbaric religions seems
to yield the following facts:—
1. Low savages. No regular chiefs. Great beings, not in receipt of
sacrifice, sanctioning morality. Ghosts are not worshipped, though
believed in. Polytheism, departmental gods and gods of heaven, earth, sky
and so forth, have not been developed or are not found.
2. Barbaric races. Aristocratic or monarchic. Ghosts are worshipped and
receive sacrifice. Polytheistic gods are in renown and receive sacrifice.
There is usually a supreme Maker who is, in some cases, moral, in others
otiose. In only one or two known cases (as in that of the Polynesian
Taaroa) is he in receipt of sacrifice.
3. Barbaric races. (Zulus, monarchic with Unkulunkulu; some Algonquins
(feebly aristocratic) with Atahocan). Religion is mainly ancestor worship
or vague spirit worship; ghosts are propitiated with food. There are
traces of an original divine being whose name is becoming obsolescent and
a matter of jest.
4. Early civilisations. Monarchic or aristocratic. (Greece, Egypt, India,
Peru, Mexico.) Polytheism. One god tends to be supreme. Religiously
regarded, gods are moral; in myth are the reverse. Gods are in receipt of
sacrifice. Heavenly society is modelled on that of men, monarchic or
aristocratic. Philosophic thought tends towards belief in one pure god,
who may be named Zeus, in Greece.
5. The religion of Israel. Probably a revival and purification of the old
conception of a moral, beneficent creator, whose creed had been involved
in sacrifice and anthropomorphic myth.
In all the stages thus roughly sketched, myths of the lowest sort prevail,
except in the records of the last stage, where the documents have been
edited by earnest monotheists.
If this theory be approximately correct, man’s earliest religious ideas
may very well have consisted, in a sense, of dependence on a supreme moral
being who, when attempts were made by savages to describe the modus of his
working, became involved in the fancies of mythology. How this belief in
such a being arose we have no evidence to prove. We make no hint at a
sensus numinis, or direct revelation.
While offering no hypothesis of the origin of belief in a moral creator we
may present a suggestion. Mr. Darwin says about early man: “The same high
mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual
agencies, then in fetichism, polytheism and ultimately monotheism, would
infallibly lead him, so long as his reasoning powers remained poorly
developed, to various strange superstitions and customs”.(1) Now,
accepting Mr. Darwin’s theory that early man had “high mental faculties,”
the conception of a Maker of things does not seem beyond his grasp. Man
himself made plenty of things, and could probably conceive of a being who
made the world and the objects in it. “Certainly there must be some Being
who made all these things. He must be very good too,” said an Eskimo to a
missionary.(2) The goodness is inferred by the Eskimo from his own
contentment with “the things which are made”.(3)
(1) Darwin, Descent of Man, i. p. 66.
(2) Cranz, i. 199.
(3) Romans, i. 19.
Another example of barbaric man “seeking after God” may be adduced.
What the Greenlander said is corroborated by what a Kaffir said. Kaffir
religion is mainly animistic, ancestral spirits receive food and sacrifice—there
is but an evanescent tradition of a “Lord in Heaven”. Thus a very
respectable Kaffir said to M. Arbrousset, “your tidings (Christianity) are
what I want; and I was seeking before I knew you…. I asked myself
sorrowful questions. ‘Who has touched the stars with his hands?… Who
makes the waters flow?… Who can have given earth the wisdom and power to
produce corn?’ Then I buried my face in my hands.”
“This,” says Sir John Lubbock, “was, however, an exceptional case. As a
general rule savages do not set themselves to think out such
questions.”(1)
(1) Origin of Civilisation, p. 201.
As a common fact, if savages never ask the question, at all events,
somehow, they have the answer ready made. “Mangarrah, or Baiame, Puluga,
or Dendid, or Ahone, or Ahonawilona, or Atahocan, or Taaroa, or Tui Laga,
was the maker.” Therefore savages who know that leave the question alone,
or add mythical accretions. But their ancestors must have asked the
question, like the “very respectable Kaffir” before they answered it.
Having reached the idea of a Creator, it was not difficult to add that he
was “good,” or beneficent, and was deathless.
A notion of a good powerful Maker, not subject to death because
necessarily prior to Death (who only invaded the world late), seems easier
of attainment than the notion of Spirit which, ex hypothesi, demands much
delicate psychological study and hard thought. The idea of a Good Maker,
once reached, becomes, perhaps, the germ of future theism, but, as Mr.
Darwin says, the human mind was “infallibly led to various strange
superstitions”. As St. Paul says, in perfect agreement with Mr. Darwin on
this point, “they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish
heart was darkened”.
Among other imaginations (right or wrong) was the belief in spirits, with
all that followed in the way of instituting sacrifices, even of human
beings, and of dropping morality, about which the ghost of a deceased
medicine-man was not likely to be much interested. The supposed nearness
to man, and the venal and partial character of worshipped gods and
ghost-gods, would inevitably win for them more service and attention than
would be paid to a Maker remote, unbought and impartial. Hence the
conception of such a Being would tend to obsolescence, as we see that it
does, and would be most obscured where ghosts were most propitiated, as
among the Zulus. Later philosophy would attach the spiritual conception to
the revived or newly discovered idea of the supreme God.
In all this speculation there is nothing mystical; no supernatural or
supernormal interference is postulated. Supernormal experiences may have
helped to originate or support the belief in spirits, that, however, is
another question. But this hypothesis of the origin of belief in a good
unceasing Maker of things is, of course, confessedly a conjecture, for
which historical evidence cannot be given, in the nature of the case. All
our attempts to discover origins far behind history must be conjectural.
Their value must be estimated by the extent to which this or that
hypothesis colligates the facts. Now our hypothesis does colligate the
facts. It shows how belief in a moral supreme being might arise before
ghosts were worshipped, and it accounts for the flaw in the religious
strata, for the mythical accretions, for the otiose Creator in the
background of many barbaric religions, and for the almost universal
absence of sacrifice to the God relatively supreme. He was, from his
earliest conception, in no need of gifts from men.
On this matter of otiose supreme gods, Professor Menzies writes, “It is
very common to find in savage beliefs a vague far-off god, who is at the
back of all the others, takes little part in the management of things, and
receives little worship. But it is impossible to judge what that being was
at an earlier time; he may have been a nature god, or a spirit who has by
degrees grown faint, and come to occupy this position.”
Now the position which he occupies is usually, if not universally, that of
the Creator. He could not arrive at this rank by “becoming faint,” nor
could “a nature-god” be the Maker of Nature. The only way by which we can
discover “what that being was at an earlier time” is to see what he IS at
an earlier time, that is to say, what the conception of him is, among men
in an earlier state of culture. Among them, as we show, he is very much
more near, potent and moral, than among races more advanced in social
evolution and material culture. We can form no opinion as to the nature of
such “vague, far-off gods, at the back of all the others,” till we collect
and compare examples, and endeavour to ascertain what points they have in
common, and in what points they differ from each other. It then becomes
plain that they are least far away, and most potent, where there is least
ghostly and polytheistic competition, that is, among the most backward
races. The more animism the less theism, is the general rule. Manifestly
the current hypothesis—that all religion is animistic in origin—does
not account for these facts, and is obliged to fly to an undemonstrated
theory of degradation, or to an undemonstrated theory of borrowing. That
our theory is inconsistent with the general doctrine of evolution we
cannot admit, if we are allowed to agree with Mr. Darwin’s statement about
the high mental faculties which first led man to sympathetic, and then to
wild beliefs. We do not pretend to be more Darwinian than Mr. Darwin, who
compares “these miserable and indirect results of our higher faculties” to
“the occasional mistakes of the instincts of the lower animals”.
The opinion here maintained, namely, that a germ of pure belief may be
detected amidst the confusion of low savage faith, and that in a still
earlier stage it may have been less overlaid with fable, is in direct
contradiction to current theories. It is also in contradiction with the
opinions entertained by myself before I made an independent examination of
the evidence. Like others, I was inclined to regard reports of a moral
Creator, who observes conduct, and judges it even in the next life, as
rumours due either to Christian influence, or to mistake. I well know,
however, and could, and did, discount the sources of error. I was on my
guard against the twin fallacies of describing all savage religion as
“devil worship,” and of expecting to find a primitive “divine tradition”.
I was also on my guard against the modern bias derived from the
“ghost-theory,” and Mr. Spencer’s works, and I kept an eye on
opportunities of “borrowing”.(1) I had, in fact, classified all known
idola in the first edition of this work, such as the fallacy of leading
questions and the chance of deliberate deception. I sought the earliest
evidence, prior to any missionary teaching, and the evidence of what the
first missionaries found, in the way of belief, on their arrival. I
preferred the testimony of the best educated observers, and of those most
familiar with native languages. I sought for evidence in native hymns
(Maori, Zuni, Dinka, Red Indian) and in native ceremonial and mystery, as
these sources were least likely to be contaminated.
(1) Making of Religion, p. 187.
On the other side, I found a vast body of testimony that savages had no
religion at all. But that testimony, en masse, was refuted by Roskoff, and
also, in places, by Tylor. When three witnesses were brought to swear that
they saw the Irishman commit a crime, he offered to bring a dozen
witnesses who did NOT see him. Negative evidence of squatters, sailors and
colonists, who did NOT see any religion among this or that race, is not
worth much against evidence of trained observers and linguists who DID
find what the others missed, and who found more the more they knew the
tribe in question. Again, like others, I thought savages incapable of such
relatively pure ideas as I now believe some of them to possess. But I
could not resist the evidence, and I abandoned my a priori notions. The
evidence forcibly attests gradations in the central belief. It is found in
various shades, from relative potency down to a vanishing trace, and it is
found in significant proportion to the prevalence of animistic ideas,
being weakest where they are most developed, strongest where they are
least developed. There must be a reason for these phenomena, and that
reason, as it seems to me, is the overlaying and supersession of a rudely
Theistic by an animistic creed. That one cause would explain, and does
colligate, all the facts.
There remains a point on which misconception proves to be possible. It
will be shown, contrary to the current hypothesis, that the religion of
the lowest races, in its highest form, sanctions morality. That morality,
again, in certain instances, demands unselfishness. Of course we are not
claiming for that doctrine any supernatural origin. Religion, if it
sanctions ethics at all, will sanction those which the conscience accepts,
and those ethics, in one way or other, must have been evolved. That the
“cosmical” law is “the weakest must go to the wall” is generally conceded.
Man, however, is found trying to reverse the law, by equal and friendly
dealing (at least within what is vaguely called “the tribe”). His
religion, as in Australia, will be shown to insist on this unselfishness.
How did he evolve his ethics?
“Be it little or be it much they get,” says Dampier about the Australians
in 1688, “every one has his part, as well the young and tender as the old
and feeble, who are not able to get abroad as the strong and lusty.” This
conduct reverses the cosmical process, and notoriously civilised society,
Christian society, does not act on these principles. Neither do the
savages, who knock the old and feeble on the head, or deliberately leave
them to starve, act on these principles, sanctioned by Australian
religion, but (according to Mr. Dawson) NOT carried out in Australian
practice. “When old people become infirm… it is lawful and customary to
kill them.”(1)
(1) Australian Aborigines, p. 62.
As to the point of unselfishness, evolutionists are apt to account for it
by common interest. A tribe in which the strongest monopolise what is best
will not survive so well as an unselfish tribe in the struggle for
existence. But precisely the opposite is true, aristocracy marks the more
successful barbaric races, and an aristocratic slave-holding tribe could
have swept Australia as the Zulus swept South Africa. That aristocracy and
acquisition of separate property are steps in advance on communistic
savagery all history declares. Therefore a tribe which in Australia
developed private property, and reduced its neighbours to slavery, would
have been better fitted to survive than such a tribe as Dampier describes.
This is so evident that probably, or possibly, the Dampier state of
society was not developed in obedience to a recognised tribal interest,
but in obedience to an affectionate instinct. “Ils s’entr’ aiment les une
les autres,” says Brebeuf of the Hurons.(1) “I never heard the women
complain of being left out of feasts, or that the men ate the best
portions… every one does his business sweetly, peaceably, without
dispute. You never see disputes, quarrels, hatred, or reproach among
them.” Brebeuf then tells how a young Indian stranger, in a time of want,
stole the best part of a moose. “They did not rage or curse, they only
bantered him, and yet to take our meat was almost to take our lives.”
Brebeuf wanted to lecture the lad; his Indian host bade him hold his
peace, and the stranger was given hospitality, with his wife and children.
“They are very generous, and make it a point not to attach themselves to
the goods of this world.” “Their greatest reproach is ‘that man wants
everything, he is greedy’. They support, with never a murmur, widows,
orphans and old men, yet they kill hopeless or troublesome invalids, and
their whole conduct to Europeans was the reverse of their domestic
behaviour.”
(1) Relations, 1634, p. 29.
Another example of savage unselfish ethics may be found in Mr. Mann’s
account of the Andaman Islanders, a nomad race, very low in culture. “It
is a noteworthy trait, and one which deserves high commendation, that
every care and consideration are paid by all classes to the very young,
the weak, the aged, and the helpless, and these being made special objects
of interest and attention, invariably fare better in regard to the
comforts and necessaries of daily life than any of the otherwise more
fortunate members of the community.”(1)
(1) J. A. I., xii. p. 93.
Mr. Huxley, in his celebrated Romanes Lecture on “Evolution and Morality,”
laid stress on man’s contravention of the cosmic law, “the weakest must go
to the wall”. He did not explain the evolution of man’s opposition to this
law. The ordinary evolutionist hypothesis, that the tribe would prosper
most whose members were least self-seeking, is contradicted by all
history. The overbearing, “grabbing,” aristocratic, individualistic,
unscrupulous races beat the others out of the field. Mr. Huxley, indeed,
alleged that the “influence of the cosmic process in the evolution of
society is the greater the more rudimentary its civilisation. Social
progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the
substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical
process…. As civilisation has advanced, so has the extent of this
interference increased….”(1) But where, in Europe, is the interference
so marked as among the Andamanese? We have still to face the problem of
the generosity of low savages.
(1) Ethics of Evolution, pp. 81-84.
It is conceivable that the higher ethics of low savages rather reflect
their emotional instincts than arise from tribal legislation which is
supposed to enable a “tribe” to prosper in the struggle for existence. As
Brebeuf and Dampier, among others, prove, savages often set a good example
to Christians, and their ethics are, in certain cases, as among the
Andamanese and Fuegians, and, probably among the Yao, sanctioned by their
religion. But, as Mr. Tylor says, “the better savage social life seems but
in unstable equilibrium, liable to be easily upset by a touch of distress,
temptation, or violence”.(1) Still, religion does its best, in certain
cases, to lend equilibrium; though all the world over, religion often
fails in practice.
(1) Prim. Cult., i. 51.