← catalogue

Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)

by Andrew Lang · English · Gutenberg #2832 · 626,591 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Myth, Ritual and Religion, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Author: Andrew Lang


        
Release date: September 1, 2001 [eBook #2832]
                Most recently updated: November 12, 2009

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2832

Credits: Produced by Donald Lainson, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION, VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***




Produced by Donald Lainson





MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION

Volume One


By Andrew Lang


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:--


     Oh, wherefore did he eat the mussels?
     Now the Boyl-yas storms and thunders make;
     Oh, wherefore would he eat the mussels?


(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 expe

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2832