Custom and Myth
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Title: Custom and Myth
Author: Andrew Lang
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Transcriber's Note
Transliterated Greek has been marked with tildes, e.g. ~Kronos~.
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it. They instead have a circumflex in this version of the e-book
(Krana and abib).
CUSTOM AND MYTH
BY
ANDREW LANG, M.A.
HON. FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE
OXFORD
_NEW EDITION_
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
1893
_All rights reserved_
TO
E. B. TYLOR
AUTHOR OF 'PRIMITIVE CULTURE'
THESE STUDIES OF THE OLDEST STORIES
Are Dedicated
PREFACE.
Since the first publication of _Custom and Myth_, many other works
have appeared, dealing on the same principles with matters of belief,
fable and ritual. Were the book to be re-written, numerous fresh
pieces of evidence might be adduced in support of its conclusions. In
Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_ (Macmillan) the student will find a
carefully conceived argument, and a large collection of testimonies,
bearing on the wide diffusion, among savages and civilised peoples, of
ancient rites and ancient ideas. The works of Mannhardt have
practically been introduced to the English reader by Mr. Frazer, with
much new matter of his own. The main topics are the worship of human
gods and the superstitions connected with vegetation. To push a theory
too far is the common temptation of mythologists, and perhaps Mr.
Frazer's cornstalk does rather threaten to overshadow the whole earth
and exclude the light of sun and sky. But the reader, whatever his
opinions, will find great pleasure and profit in Mr. Frazer's
remarkable studies, and in those of Mannhardt, which were unknown to
myself when I wrote _Custom and Myth_.
In Miss Harrison's volume on Athenian Myths the student will find the
aetiological theory (namely, that many myths were invented to explain
obscure points of ritual) applied in a number of classical instances.
A singularly ingenious study of Roman myths is presented in Mr.
Jevons's edition of Plutarch's _Romaine Questions_ (Nutt). These are
recent instances of the use of the 'anthropological' method, first
firmly established by Mr. Tylor's _Primitive Culture_, and now holding
its own as a recognised instrument in the study of the historical
development of the imagination. In Rosscher's _Ausfuehrliches Lexikon_
of Greek and Roman mythology, the earlier method of the philologists
is usually adopted, and the work, still in course of publication, is
most useful for its recondite learning.
These notes are meant for the guidance of any reader who may care to
push his studies further than the sketches of the present volume.
On one or two points some remarks may be necessary. The author has
been not unnaturally accused of seeing Totems everywhere. He would
therefore protest that he does not regard every beast and bird which
appears in myths or in religious art as necessarily a Totem. But he
inclines to think that where Celts or Greeks claim descent from a god
who pursued his amours in animal shape, or where a tribe bears the
name of an animal, regards that animal with religious respect, and
places its effigy beside that of a god, the Totemistic hypothesis
colligates the phenomena, and deserves consideration. These and other
early features of religion occur mainly in Greece after the Homeric
age. It has been suggested, for example, by Mr. Walter Leaf, that
Homer's people, the Achaeans, were free from all such ideas as
Totemism, worship of the dead, ritual of purification for homicide,
the mysteries, and so forth. These were notions held by the Pelasgi,
and revived or retained by the Ionians, an older and distinct stock of
Pelasgian origin. I am unable to convince myself in this matter, not
knowing how much of the refinement in the Homeric poems is due to the
genius of the poet, who might ignore practices with which he was
familiar. They may have been Pelasgo-Ionians, who derived Helen's
birth from the Swan, or Homer may have chosen to slur over an Achaean
legend, and so on in other cases; for example, as to the descent of
the Myrmidons from Zeus in the shape of an Ant. On another point a
word may be said. One has been accused of believing that identical
popular tales, the same incident in the same sequence of plot, might
arise simultaneously in savage imaginations in all parts of the world.
In _Custom and Myth_ it will be plain that I say nothing of the sort.
'The Far-Travelled Tale' is one instance chosen to show that such a
story must probably have drifted, somehow, round the world. On the
other hand, in 'Cupid and Psyche,' it is asserted that _the central
incident_ might be invented wherever the nuptial taboo on which it is
based was recognised. The exact sequence of incidents in the 'Cupid
and Psyche' of Apuleius, on the other hand, could probably only be
invented once for all. But we find the central incident where we do
not find the sequence of incidents which make up 'Cupid and Psyche.' A
full statement of my ideas is prefixed to Miss Roalfe Cox's
_Cinderella_ (Folklore Society). As a rule, the incidents in _Maerchen_
are common to all races; an artistic combination of many of these in a
plot must probably be due to a single imagination, and the plot must
have been diffused in the ways described in _Custom and Myth_.
Independently evolved myths may closely resemble each other when they
account for some natural phenomenon, or are based on some common
custom. Wherever a sequence of such incidents is found in a distinct
and artistic plot, we may provisionally assign diffusion from an
original centre as that cause. Singular as are the coincidences of
fancy, it is unlikely that they ever produced _exactly_ the same tale
in lands which have never been in communication with each other. I am
unable to conjecture why Mr. Jacobs, M. Cosquin, and probably other
critics, regard me as maintaining that all similar tales in all
countries have been independently evolved. I have always allowed for
the possibility both of diffusion and, to a certain extent, of
coincidence, as in the Red Indian forms of 'Cupid and Psyche' and of
'The Dead Bride,' a shape of the story of Eurydice. Discussion would
be simpler, if controversialists took the trouble to understand each
other.
In the Report of the Folklore Congress of 1891 (p. 65) I find that I
said 'the suggestion that exactly the same plot, in exactly the same
shape, and with exactly the same incidents, can have been invented by
several persons independently, seems to me inconceivable,' and on p.
74 I find M. Cosquin alleging that my opinion is the very reverse,
followed by Mr. Jacobs (p. 85). I have tried to explain that I believe
in no such exact coincidences of imagination, though how far precisely
coincidence may go is a delicate question.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE 10
THE BULL-ROARER 29
THE MYTH OF CRONUS 45
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE 'SUN-FROG' 64
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE 87
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE 103
STAR MYTHS 121
MOLY AND MANDRAGORA 143
THE 'KALEVALA' 156
THE DIVINING ROD 180
HOTTENTOT MYTHOLOGY 197
FETICHISM AND THE INFINITE 212
THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE FAMILY 245
THE ART OF SAVAGES 276
INDEX 305
CUSTOM AND MYTH.
_INTRODUCTION._
Though some of the essays in this volume have appeared in various
serials, the majority of them were written expressly for their present
purpose, and they are now arranged in a designed order. During some
years of study of Greek, Indian, and savage mythologies, I have become
more and more impressed with a sense of the inadequacy of the
prevalent method of comparative mythology. That method is based on the
belief that myths are the result of a disease of language, as the
pearl is the result of a disease of the oyster. It is argued that men
at some period, or periods, spoke in a singular style of coloured and
concrete language, and that their children retained the phrases of
this language after losing hold of the original meaning. The
consequence was the growth of myths about supposed persons, whose
names had originally been mere 'appellations.' In conformity with this
hypothesis the method of comparative mythology examines the proper
names which occur in myths. The notion is that these names contain a
key to the meaning of the story, and that, in fact, of the story the
names are the germs and the oldest surviving part.
The objections to this method are so numerous that it is difficult to
state them briefly. The attempt, however, must be made. To desert the
path opened by the most eminent scholars is in itself presumptuous;
the least that an innovator can do is to give his reasons for
advancing in a novel direction. If this were a question of scholarship
merely, it would be simply foolhardy to differ from men like Max
Mueller, Adalbert Kuhn, Breal, and many others. But a revolutionary
mythologist is encouraged by finding that these scholars frequently
differ from each other. Examples will be found chiefly in the essays
styled 'The Myth of Cronus,' 'A Far-Travelled Tale,' and 'Cupid and
Psyche.' Why, then, do distinguished scholars and mythologists reach
such different goals? Clearly because their method is so precarious.
They all analyse the names in myths;[1] but, where one scholar decides
that the name is originally Sanskrit, another holds that it is purely
Greek, and a third, perhaps, is all for an Accadian etymology, or a
Semitic derivation. Again, even when scholars agree as to the original
root from which a name springs, they differ as much as ever as to the
meaning of the name in its present place. The inference is that the
analysis of names, on which the whole edifice of philological
'comparative mythology' rests, is a foundation of shifting sand. The
method is called 'orthodox,' but, among those who practise it, there
is none of the beautiful unanimity of orthodoxy.
These objections are not made by the unscholarly anthropologist alone.
Curtius has especially remarked the difficulties which beset the
'etymological operations' in the case of proper names. 'Peculiarly
dubious and perilous is mythological etymology. Are we to look for the
sources of the divine names in aspects of nature, or in moral
conceptions; in special Greek geographical conditions, or in natural
circumstances which are everywhere the same: in dawn with her rays, or
in clouds with their floods; are we to seek the origin of the names of
heroes in things historical and human, or in physical phenomena?'[2]
Professor Tiele, of Leyden, says much the same thing: 'The
uncertainties are great, and there is a constant risk of taking mere
_jeux d'esprit_ for scientific results.'[3] Every name has, if we can
discover or conjecture it, a meaning. That meaning--be it 'large' or
'small,' 'loud' or 'bright,' 'wise' or 'dark,' 'swift' or 'slow'--is
always capable of being explained as an epithet of the sun, or the
cloud, or of both. Whatever, then, a name may signify, some scholars
will find that it originally denoted the cloud, if they belong to one
school, or the sun or dawn, if they belong to another faction.
Obviously this process is a mere _jeu d'esprit_. This logic would be
admitted in no other science, and, by similar arguments, any name
whatever might be shown to be appropriate to a solar hero.
The scholarly method has now been applied for many years, and what are
the results? The ideas attained by the method have been so popularised
that they are actually made to enter into the education of children,
and are published in primers and catechisms of mythology. But what has
a discreet scholar to say to the whole business? 'The difficult task
of interpreting mythical names has, so far, produced few certain
results'--so writes Otto Schrader.[4] Though Schrader still has hopes
of better things, it is admitted that the present results are highly
disputable. In England, where one set of these results has become an
article of faith, readers chiefly accept the opinions of a single
etymological school, and thus escape the difficulty of making up their
minds when scholars differ. But differ scholars do, so widely and so
often, that scarcely any solid advantages have been gained in
mythology from the philological method.
The method of philological mythology is thus discredited by the
disputes of its adherents. The system may be called orthodox, but it
is an orthodoxy which alters with every new scholar who enters the
sacred enclosure. Even were there more harmony, the analysis of names
could throw little light on myths. In stories the names may well be,
and often demonstrably are, the latest, not the original, feature.
Tales, at first told of 'Somebody,' get new names attached to them,
and obtain a new local habitation, wherever they wander. 'One of the
leading personages to be met in the traditions of the world is really
no more than--Somebody. There is nothing this wondrous creature cannot
achieve; one only restriction binds him at all--that the name he
assumes shall have some sort of congruity with the office he
undertakes, _and even from this he oftentimes breaks loose_.'[5] We
may be pretty sure that the adventures of Jason, Perseus, Oedipous,
were originally told only of 'Somebody.' The names are later
additions, and vary in various lands. A glance at the essay on 'Cupid
and Psyche' will show that a history like theirs is known, where
neither they nor their counterparts in the Veda, Urvasi and Pururavas
were ever heard of; while the incidents of the Jason legend are
familiar where no Greek word was ever spoken. Finally, the names in
common use among savages are usually derived from natural phenomena,
often from clouds, sky, sun, dawn. If, then, a name in a myth can be
proved to mean cloud, sky, sun, or what not (and usually one set of
scholars find clouds where others see the dawn), we must not instantly
infer that the myth is a nature-myth. Though, doubtless, the heroes in
it were never real people, the names are as much common names of real
people in the savage state, as Smith and Brown are names of civilised
men.
For all these reasons, but chiefly because of the fact that stories
are usually anonymous at first, that names are added later, and that
stories naturally crystallise round any famous name, heroic, divine,
or human, the process of analysis of names is most precarious and
untrustworthy. A story is told of Zeus: Zeus means sky, and the story
is interpreted by scholars as a sky myth. The modern interpreter
forgets, first, that to the myth-maker sky did not at all mean the
same thing as it means to him. Sky meant, not an airy, infinite,
radiant vault, but a person, and, most likely, a savage person.
Secondly, the interpreter forgets that the tale (say the tale of Zeus,
Demeter, and the mutilated Ram) may have been originally anonymous,
and only later attributed to Zeus, as unclaimed jests are attributed
to Sheridan or Talleyrand. Consequently no heavenly phenomena will be
the basis and explanation of the story. If one thing in mythology be
certain, it is that myths are always changing masters, that the old
tales are always being told with new names. Where, for example, is the
value of a philological analysis of the name of Jason? As will be seen
in the essay 'A Far-Travelled Tale,' the analysis of the name of Jason
is fanciful, precarious, disputed, while the essence of his myth is
current in Samoa, Finland, North America, Madagascar, and other lands,
where the name was never heard, and where the characters in the story
have other names or are anonymous.
For these reasons, and others too many to be adduced here, I have
ventured to differ from the current opinion that myths must be
interpreted chiefly by philological analysis of names. The system
adopted here is explained in the first essay, called 'The Method of
Folklore.' The name, Folklore, is not a good one, but 'comparative
mythology' is usually claimed exclusively by the philological
interpreters.
The second essay, 'The Bull-Roarer,' is intended to show that certain
peculiarities in the Greek mysteries occur also in the mysteries of
savages, and that on Greek soil they are survivals of savagery.
'The Myth of Cronus' tries to prove that the first part of the legend
is a savage nature-myth, surviving in Greek religion, while the sequel
is a set of ideas common to savages.
'Cupid and Psyche' traces another Aryan myth among savage races, and
attempts to show that the central incident of the tale may have had
its origin in a rule of barbarous etiquette.
'A Far-Travelled Tale' examines a part of the Jason myth. This myth
appears neither to be an explanation of natural phenomena (like part
of 'The Myth of Cronus'), nor based on a widespread custom (like
'Cupid and Psyche'). The question is asked whether the story may have
been diffused by slow filtration from race to race all over the globe,
as there seems no reason why it should have been invented separately
(as a myth explanatory of natural phenomena or of customs might be) in
many different places.
'Apollo and the Mouse' suggests hypothetically, as a possible
explanation of the tie between the God and the Beast, that
Apollo-worship superseded, but did not eradicate, Totemism. The
suggestion is little more than a conjecture.
'Star Myths' points out that Greek myths of stars are a survival from
the savage stage of fancy in which such stories are natural.
'Moly and Mandragora' is a study of the Greek, the modern, and the
Hottentot folklore of magical herbs, with a criticism of a scholarly
and philological hypothesis, according to which Moly is the dog-star
and Circe the moon.
'The Kalevala' is an account of the Finnish national poem; of all
poems that in which the popular, as opposed to the artistic, spirit is
strongest. The Kalevala is thus a link between _Maerchen_ and
_Volkslieder_ on one side, and epic poetry on the other.
'The Divining Rod' is a study of a European and civilised
superstition, which is singular in its comparative lack of copious
savage analogues.
'Hottentot Mythology' is a criticism of the philological method,
applied to savage myth.
'Fetichism and the Infinite' is a review of Mr. Max Mueller's theory
that a sense of the Infinite is the germ of religion, and that
Fetichism is secondary, and a corruption. This essay also contains a
defence of the _evidence_ on which the anthropological method relies.
The remaining essays are studies of the 'History of the Family,' and
of 'Savage Art.'
The essay on 'Savage Art' is reprinted, by the kind permission of
Messrs. Cassell & Co., from two numbers (April and May, 1882) of the
_Magazine of Art_. I have to thank the editors and publishers of the
_Contemporary Review_, the _Cornhill Magazine_, _Fraser's Magazine_,
and _Mind_, for leave to republish 'The Early History of the Family,'
'The Divining Rod,' and 'Star Myths,' 'The Kalevala,' and 'Fetichism.'
A few sentences in 'The Bull-Roarer,' and 'Hottentot Mythology,'
appeared in essays in the _Saturday Review_, and some lines of 'The
Method of Folklore' in the _Guardian_. To the editors of those
journals also I owe thanks for their courteous permission to make this
use of my old articles.
I must apologise for the controversial matter in the volume.
Controversy is always a thing to be avoided, but, in this particular
case, when a system opposed to the prevalent method has to be
advocated, controversy is unavoidable. My respect for the learning of
my distinguished adversaries is none the less great because I am not
convinced by their logic, and because my doubts are excited by their
differences.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Some of the names in Greek myths are Greek, and intelligible. A
few others (such as Zeus) can be interpreted by aid of Sanskrit. But
even when the meaning of the name is known, we are little advanced in
interpretation of the myth.
[2] Compare De Cara: _Essame Critico_.
[3] _Revue de l'Hist. des Rel._, ii. 136.
[4] _Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte_, p. 431.
[5] _Prim. Cult._, i. 394.
_THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE._
After the heavy rain of a thunderstorm has washed the soil, it
sometimes happens that a child, or a rustic, finds a wedge-shaped
piece of metal or a few triangular flints in a field or near a road.
There was no such piece of metal, there were no such flints, lying
there yesterday, and the finder is puzzled about the origin of the
objects on which he has lighted. He carries them home, and the village
wisdom determines that the wedge-shaped piece of metal is a
'thunder-bolt,' or that the bits of flint are 'elf-shots,' the heads
of fairy arrows. Such things are still treasured in remote nooks of
England, and the 'thunder-bolt' is applied to cure certain maladies by
its touch.
As for the fairy arrows, we know that even in ancient Etruria they
were looked on as magical, for we sometimes see their points set, as
amulets, in the gold of Etruscan necklaces. In Perugia the arrow-heads
are still sold as charms. All educated people, of course, have long
been aware that the metal wedge is a celt, or ancient bronze axe-head,
and that it was not fairies, but the forgotten peoples of this island,
who used the arrows with the tips of flint. Thunder is only so far
connected with them that the heavy rains loosen the surface soil, and
lay bare its long-hidden secrets.
There is a science, Archaeology, which collects and compares the
material relics of old races, the axes and arrow-heads. There is a
form of study, Folklore, which collects and compares the similar but
immaterial relics of old races, the surviving superstitions and
stories, the ideas which are in our time but not of it. Properly
speaking, folklore is only concerned with the legends, customs,
beliefs, of the Folk, of the people, of the classes which have least
been altered by education, which have shared least in progress. But
the student of folklore soon finds that these unprogressive classes
retain many of the beliefs and ways of savages, just as the Hebridean
people used spindle-whorls of stone, and bake clay pots without the
aid of the wheel, like modern South Sea Islanders, or like their own
prehistoric ancestors.[6] The student of folklore is thus led to
examine the usages, myths, and ideas of savages, which are still
retained, in rude enough shape, by the European peasantry. Lastly, he
observes that a few similar customs and ideas survive in the most
conservative elements of the life of educated peoples, in ritual,
ceremonial, and religious traditions and myths. Though such remains
are rare in England, we may note the custom of leading the dead
soldier's horse behind his master to the grave, a relic of days when
the horse would have been sacrificed.[7] We may observe the
persistence of the ceremony by which the monarch, at his coronation,
takes his seat on the sacred stone of Scone, probably an ancient
fetich stone. Not to speak, here, of our own religious traditions, the
old vein of savage rite and belief is found very near the surface of
ancient Greek religion. It wants but some stress of circumstance,
something answering to the storm shower that reveals the flint
arrow-heads, to bring savage ritual to the surface of classical
religion. In sore need, a human victim was only too likely to be
demanded; while a feast-day, or a mystery, set the Greeks dancing
serpent-dances or bear-dances like Red Indians, or swimming with
sacred pigs, or leaping about in imitation of wolves, or holding a
dog-feast, and offering dog's flesh to the gods.[8] Thus the student
of folklore soon finds that he must enlarge his field, and examine,
not only popular European story and practice, but savage ways and
ideas, and the myths and usages of the educated classes in civilised
races. In this extended sense the term 'folklore' will frequently be
used in the following essays. The idea of the writer is that mythology
cannot fruitfully be studied apart from folklore, while some knowledge
of anthropology is required in both sciences.
The science of Folklore, if we may call it a science, finds
everywhere, close to the surface of civilised life, the remains of
ideas as old as the stone elf-shots, older than the celt of bronze. In
proverbs and riddles, and nursery tales and superstitions, we detect
the relics of a stage of thought, which is dying out in Europe, but
which still exists in many parts of the world. Now, just as the flint
arrow-heads are scattered everywhere, in all the continents and isles,
and everywhere are much alike, and bear no very definite marks of the
special influence of race, so it is with the habits and legends
investigated by the student of folklore. The stone arrow-head buried
in a Scottish cairn is like those which were interred with Algonquin
chiefs. The flints found in Egyptian soil, or beside the tumulus on
the plain of Marathon, nearly resemble the stones which tip the reed
arrow of the modern Samoyed. Perhaps only a skilled experience could
discern, in a heap of such arrow-heads, the specimens which are found
in America or Africa from those which are unearthed in Europe. Even in
the products of more advanced industry, we see early pottery, for
example, so closely alike everywhere that, in the British Museum,
Mexican vases have, ere now, been mixed up on the same shelf with
archaic vessels from Greece. In the same way, if a superstition or a
riddle were offered to a student of folklore, he would have much
difficulty in guessing its _provenance_, and naming the race from
which it was brought. Suppose you tell a folklorist that, in a certain
country, when any one sneezes, people say 'Good luck to you,' the
student cannot say _a priori_ what country you refer to, what race you
have in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first
discovered; it may be Zululand, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or
Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other regions,
the sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition
is as widely distributed as the flint arrow-heads. Just as the object
and use of the arrow-heads became intelligible when we found similar
weapons in actual use among savages, so the salutation to the sneezer
becomes intelligible when we learn that the savage has a good reason
for it. He thinks the sneeze expels an evil spirit. Proverbs, again,
and riddles are as universally scattered, and the Wolufs puzzle over
the same _devinettes_ as the Scotch schoolboy or the Breton peasant.
Thus, for instance, the Wolufs of Senegal ask each other, 'What flies
for ever, and rests never?'--Answer, 'The Wind.' 'Who are the comrades
that always fight, and never hurt each other?'--'The Teeth.' In
France, as we read in the 'Recueil de Calembours,' the people ask,
'What runs faster than a horse, crosses water, and is not
wet?'--Answer, 'The Sun.' The Samoans put the riddle, 'A man who
stands between two ravenous fishes?'--Answer, 'The tongue between the
teeth.' Again, 'There are twenty brothers, each with a hat on his
head?'--Answer, 'Fingers and toes, with nails for hats.' This is like
the French '_un pere a douze fils?_'--'_l'an_.'[9] A comparison of M.
Rolland's 'Devinettes' with the Woluf conundrums of Boilat, the Samoan
examples in Turner's 'Samoa,' and the Scotch enigmas collected by
Chambers, will show the identity of peasant and savage humour.
A few examples, less generally known, may be given to prove that the
beliefs of folklore are not peculiar to any one race or stock of men.
The first case is remarkable: it occurs in Mexico and Ceylon, and has
been found in other regions. In _Macmillan's Magazine_[10] is
published a paper by Mrs. Edwards, called 'The Mystery of the Pezazi.'
The events described in this narrative occurred on August 28, 1876, in
a bungalow some thirty miles from Badiella. The narrator occupied a
new house on an estate called Allagalla. Her native servants soon
asserted that the place was haunted by a Pezazi. The English visitors
saw and heard nothing extraordinary till a certain night: an abridged
account of what happened then may be given in the words of Mrs.
Edwards:--
Wrapped in dreams, I lay on the night in question tranquilly
sleeping, but gradually roused to a perception that
discordant sounds disturbed the serenity of my slumber. Loth
to stir, I still dosed on, the sounds, however, becoming, as
it seemed, more determined to make themselves heard! and I
awoke to the consciousness that they proceeded from a belt of
adjacent jungle, and resembled the noise that would be
produced by some person felling timber.
Shutting my ears to the disturbance, I made no sign, until,
with an expression of impatience, E---- suddenly started up,
when I laid a detaining grasp upon his arm, murmuring that
there was no need to think of rising at present--it must be
quite early, and the kitchen cooly was doubtless cutting
firewood in good time. E---- responded, in a tone of slight
contempt, that no one could be cutting firewood at that hour,
and the sounds were more suggestive of felling jungle; and he
then inquired how long I had been listening to them. Now
thoroughly aroused I replied that I had heard the sounds for
some time, at first confusing them with my dreams, but soon
sufficiently awakening to the fact that they were no mere
phantoms of my imagination, but a reality. During our
conversation the noises became more distinct and loud; blow
after blow resounded, as of the axe descending upon the tree,
followed by the crash of the falling timber. Renewed blows
announced the repetition of the operations on another tree,
and continued till several were devastated.
It is unnecessary to tell more of the tale. In spite of minute
examinations and close search, no solution of the mystery of the
noises, on this or any other occasion, was ever found. The natives, of
course, attributed the disturbance to the _Pezazi_ or goblin. No one
perhaps has asserted that the Aztecs were connected by ties of race
with the people of Ceylon. Yet when the Spaniards conquered Mexico,
and when Sahagun (one of the earliest missionaries) collected the
legends of the people, he found them, like the Cingalese, strong
believers in the mystic tree-felling. We translate Sahagun's account
of the 'midnight axe':--
When so any man heareth the sound of strokes in the night as
if one were felling trees, he reckons it an evil boding. And
this sound they call _youaltepuztli_ (_youalli_, night; and
_tepuztli_, copper), which signifies 'the midnight hatchet.'
This noise cometh about the time of the first sleep, when all
men slumber soundly, and the night is still. The sound of
strokes smitten was first noted by the temple-servants,
called _tlamacazque_, at the hour when they go in the night
to make their offering of reeds or of boughs of pine, for so
was their custom, and this penance they did on the
neighbouring hills, and that when the night was far spent.
Whenever they heard such a sound as one makes when he splits
wood with an axe (a noise that may be heard afar off), they
drew thence an omen of evil, and were afraid and said that
the sounds were part of the witchery of Tezcatlipoca, that
often thus dismayeth men who journey in the night. Now, when
tidings of these things came to a certain brave man, one
exercised in war, he drew near, being guided by the sound,
till he came to the very cause of the hubbub. And when he
came upon it, with difficulty he caught it, for the thing was
hard to catch; natheless at last he overtook that which ran
before him; and behold, it was a man without a heart, and, on
either side of the chest, two holes that opened and shut, and
so made the noise. Then the man put his hand within the
breast of the figure and grasped the breast and shook it
hard, demanding some grace or gift.
As a rule, the grace demanded was power to make captives in war. The
curious coincidence of the 'midnight axe,' occurring in lands so
remote as Ceylon and Mexico, and the singular attestation by an
English lady of the actual existence of the disturbance, makes this
_youaltepuztli_ one of the quaintest things in the province of the
folklorist. But, whatever the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs
connected with the noise, may be, no one would explain them as the
result of community of _race_ between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would
this explanation be offered to account for the Aztec and English
belief that the creaking of furniture is an omen of death in a house.
Obviously, these opinions are the expression of a common state of
superstitious fancy, not the signs of an original community of
origin.[11]
Let us take another piece of folklore. All North-country English folk
know the _Kernababy_. The custom of the 'Kernababy' is commonly
observed in England, or, at all events, in Scotland, where the writer
has seen many a kernababy. The last gleanings of the last field are
bound up in a rude imitation of the human shape, and dressed in some
tag-rags of finery. The usage has fallen into the conservative hands
of children, but of old 'the Maiden' was a regular image of the
harvest goddess, which, with a sickle and sheaves in her arms,
attended by a crowd of reapers, and accompanied with music, followed
the last carts home to the farm.[12] It is odd enough that 'the
Maiden' should exactly translate ~Kore~, the old Sicilian name of the
daughter of Demeter. 'The Maiden' has dwindled, then, among us to the
rudimentary kernababy; but ancient Peru had her own Maiden, her
Harvest Goddess. Here it is easy to trace the natural idea at the
basis of the superstitious practice which links the shores of the
Pacific with our own northern coast. Just as a portion of the yule-log
and of the Christmas bread were kept all the year through, a kind of
nest-egg of plenteous food and fire, so the kernababy, English or
Peruvian, is an earnest that corn will not fail all through the year,
till next harvest comes. For this reason the kernababy used to be
treasured from autumn's end to autumn's end, though now it commonly
disappears very soon after the harvest home. It is thus that Acosta
describes in Grimston's old translation (1604) the Peruvian kernababy
and the Peruvian harvest home:--
This feast is made comming from the chacra or farme unto the
house, saying certaine songs, and praying that the Mays
(maize) may long continue, the which they call _Mama cora_.
What a chance this word offers to etymologists of the old school: how
promptly they would recognise, in _mama_ mother--~meter~, and in
_cora_--~kore~, the Mother and the Maiden, the feast of Demeter and
Persephone! However, the days of that old school of antiquarianism are
numbered. To return to the Peruvian harvest home:--
They take a certaine portion of the most fruitefull of the
Mays that growes in their farmes, the which they put in a
certaine granary which they do calle Pirua, with certaine
ceremonies, watching three nightes; they put this Mays in the
richest garments they have, and, being thus wrapped and
dressed, they worship this Pirua, and hold it in great
veneration, saying it is the Mother of the Mays of their
inheritances, and that by this means the Mays augments and is
preserved. In this moneth they make a particular sacrifice,
and the witches demand of this Pirua, 'if it hath strength
sufficient to continue until the next yeare,' and if it
answers 'no,' then they carry this Mays to the farme to
burne, whence they brought it, according to every man's
power, then they make another Pirua, with the same
ceremonies, saying that they renue it, to the ende that the
seede of the Mays may not perish.
The idea that the maize can speak need not surprise us; the Mexican
held much the same belief, according to Sahagun:--
It was thought that if some grains of maize fell on the
ground he who saw them lying there was bound to lift them,
wherein, if he failed, he harmed the maize, which plained
itself of him to God, saying, 'Lord, punish this man, who saw
me fallen and raised me not again; punish him with famine,
that he may learn not to hold me in dishonour.'
Well, in all this affair of the Scotch kernababy, and the Peruvian
_Mama cora_, we need no explanation beyond the common simple ideas of
human nature. We are not obliged to hold, either that the Peruvians
and Scotch are akin by blood, nor that, at some forgotten time, they
met each other, and borrowed each other's superstitions.[13] Again,
when we find Odysseus sacrificing a black sheep to the dead,[14] and
when we read that the Ovahereroes in South Africa also appease with a
black sheep the spirits of the departed, we do not feel it necessary
to hint that the Ovahereroes are of Greek descent, or have borrowed
their ritual from the Greeks. The connection between the colour black,
and mourning for the dead, is natural and almost universal.
Examples like these might be adduced in any number. We might show how,
in magic, negroes of Barbadoes make clay effigies of their enemies,
and pierce them, just as Greeks did in Plato's time, or the men of
Accad in remotest antiquity. We might remark the Australian black
putting sharp bits of quartz in the tracks of an enemy who has gone
by, that the enemy may be lamed; and we might point to Boris Godunof
forbidding the same practice among the Russians. We might watch
Scotch, and Australians, and Jews, and French, and Aztecs spreading
dust round the body of a dead man, that the footprints of his ghost,
or of other ghosts, may be detected next morning. We might point to a
similar device in a modern novel, where the presence of a ghost is
suspected, as proof of the similar workings of the Australian mind and
of the mind of Mrs. Riddell. We shall later turn to ancient Greece,
and show how the serpent-dances, the habit of smearing the body with
clay, and other odd rites of the mysteries, were common to Hellenic
religion, and to the religion of African, Australian, and American
tribes.
Now, with regard to all these strange usages, what is the method of
folklore? The method is, when an apparently irrational and anomalous
custom is found in any country, to look for a country where a similar
practice is found, and where the practice is no longer irrational and
anomalous, but in harmony with the manners and ideas of the people
among whom it prevails. That Greeks should dance about in their
mysteries with harmless serpents in their hands looks quite
unintelligible. When a wild tribe of Red Indians does the same thing,
as a trial of courage, with real rattlesnakes, we understand the Red
Man's motives, and may conjecture that similar motives once existed
among the ancestors of the Greeks. Our method, then, is to compare the
seemingly meaningless customs or manners of civilised races with the
similar customs and manners which exist among the uncivilised and
still retain their meaning. It is not necessary for comparison of this
sort that the uncivilised and the civilised race should be of the same
stock, nor need we prove that they were ever in contact with each
other. Similar conditions of mind produce similar practices, apart
from identity of race, or borrowing of ideas and manners.
Let us return to the example of the flint arrow-heads. Everywhere
neolithic arrow-heads are pretty much alike. The cause of the
resemblance is no more than this, that men, with the same needs, the
same materials, and the same rude instruments, everywhere produced the
same kind of arrow-head. No hypothesis of interchange of ideas nor of
community of race is needed to explain the resemblance of form in the
missiles. Very early pottery in any region is, for the same causes,
like very early pottery in any other region. The same sort of
similarity was explained by the same resemblances in human nature,
when we touched on the identity of magical practices and of
superstitious beliefs. This method is fairly well established and
orthodox when we deal with usages and superstitious beliefs; but may
we apply the same method when we deal with myths?
Here a difficulty occurs. Mythologists, as a rule, are averse to the
method of folklore. They think it scientific to compare only the myths
of races which speak languages of the same family, and of races which
have, in historic times, been actually in proved contact with each
other. Thus, most mythologists hold it correct to compare Greek,
Slavonic, Celtic, and Indian stories, because Greeks, Slavs, Celts,
and Hindoos all speak languages of the same family. Again, they hold
it correct to compare Chaldaean and Greek myths, because the Greeks and
the Chaldaeans were brought into contact through the Phoenicians, and
by other intermediaries, such as the Hittites. But the same
mythologists will vow that it is unscientific to compare a Maori or a
Hottentot or an Eskimo myth with an Aryan story, because Maoris and
Eskimo and Hottentots do not speak languages akin to that of Greece,
nor can we show that the ancestors of Greeks, Maoris, Hottentots, and
Eskimo were ever in contact with each other in historical times.
Now the peculiarity of the method of folklore is that it will venture
to compare (with due caution and due examination of evidence) the
myths of the most widely severed races. Holding that myth is a product
of the early human fancy, working on the most rudimentary knowledge of
the outer world, the student of folklore thinks that differences of
race do not much affect the early mythopoeic faculty. He will not be
surprised if Greeks and Australian blacks are in the same tale.
In each case, he holds, all the circumstances of the case must be
examined and considered. For instance, when the Australians tell a
myth about the Pleiades very like the Greek myth of the Pleiades, we
must ask a number of questions. Is the Australian version authentic?
Can the people who told it have heard it from a European? If these
questions are answered so as to make it apparent that the Australian
Pleiad myth is of genuine native origin, we need not fly to the
conclusion that the Australians are a lost and forlorn branch of the
Aryan race. Two other hypotheses present themselves. First, the human
species is of unknown antiquity. In the moderate allowance of 250,000
years, there is time for stories to have wandered all round the
world, as the Aggry beads of Ashanti have probably crossed the
continent from Egypt, as the Asiatic jade (if Asiatic it be) has
arrived in Swiss lake-dwellings, as an African trade-cowry is said to
have been found in a Cornish barrow, as an Indian Ocean shell has been
discovered in a prehistoric bone-cave in Poland. This slow filtration
of tales is not absolutely out of the question. Two causes would
especially help to transmit myths. The first is slavery and
slave-stealing, the second is the habit of capturing brides from alien
stocks, and the law which forbids marriage with a woman of a man's own
family. Slaves and captured brides would bring their native legends
among alien peoples.
But there is another possible way of explaining the resemblance
(granting that it is proved) of the Greek and Australian Pleiad myth.
The object of both myths is to account for the grouping and other
phenomena of the constellations. May not similar explanatory stories
have occurred to the ancestors of the Australians, and to the
ancestors of the Greeks, however remote their home, while they were
still in the savage condition? The best way to investigate this point
is to collect all known savage and civilised stellar myths, and see
what points they have in common. If they all agree in character,
though the Greek tales are full of grace, while those of the
Australians or Brazilians are rude enough, we may plausibly account
for the similarity of myths, as we accounted for the similarity of
flint arrow-heads. The myths, like the arrow-heads, resemble each
other because they were originally framed to meet the same needs out
of the same material. In the case of the arrow-heads, the need was for
something hard, heavy, and sharp--the material was flint. In the case
of the myths, the need was to explain certain phenomena--the material
(so to speak) was an early state of the human mind, to which all
objects seemed equally endowed with human personality, and to which no
metamorphosis appeared impossible.
In the following essays, then, the myths and customs of various
peoples will be compared, even when these peoples talk languages of
alien families, and have never (so far as history shows us) been in
actual contact. Our method throughout will be to place the usage, or
myth, which is unintelligible when found among a civilised race,
beside the similar myth which is intelligible enough when it is found
among savages. A mean term will be found in the folklore preserved by
the non-progressive classes in a progressive people. This folklore
represents, in the midst of a civilised race, the savage ideas out of
which civilisation has been evolved. The conclusion will usually be
that the fact which puzzles us by its presence in civilisation is a
relic surviving from the time when the ancestors of a civilised race
were in the state of savagery. By this method it is not necessary that
'some sort of genealogy should be established' between the Australian
and the Greek narrators of a similar myth, nor between the Greek and
Australian possessors of a similar usage. The hypothesis will be that
the myth, or usage, is common to both races, not because of original
community of stock, not because of contact and borrowing, but because
the ancestors of the Greeks passed through the savage intellectual
condition in which we find the Australians.
The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth?
Do peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other? The answer
is, that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth, if
it be race which confers on a people its national genius, and its
capacity of becoming civilised. If race does this, then race affects,
in the most powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one
is likely to confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor
either with a myth from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the
substance, the original set of ideas, may be much the same. In all
three you have anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal
shapes, tricky, capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed
with magical powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda,
of any of the Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much
above the gods of savage mythology. This stuff of myth is _quod
semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_, and is the original gift of the
savage intellect. But the final treatment, the ultimate literary form
of the myth, varies in each race. Homeric gods, like Red Indian,
Thlinkeet, or Australian gods, can assume the shapes of birds. But
when we read, in Homer, of the arming of Athene, the hunting of
Artemis, the vision of golden Aphrodite, the apparition of Hermes,
like a young man when the flower of youth is loveliest, then we
recognise the effect of race upon myth, the effect of the Greek genius
at work on rude material. Between the Olympians and a Thlinkeet god
there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter of Cnidos
and an image from Easter Island. Again, the Scandinavian gods, when
their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape
of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit
of their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless
sacrifices, soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of
Vedic and Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into
its sacerdotage and priestly second childhood. Thus race declares
itself in the ultimate literary form and character of mythology, while
the common savage basis and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in
the horned, and cannibal, and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of
Greece, of India, of the North. They all show their common savage
origin, when the poet neglects Freya's command and tells of what the
gods did 'in the morning of Time.'
As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there
must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples,
the traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing
alien women into the families--all these things favoured the migration
of myth. But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it,
we can seldom trace a popular legend on its travels. In the case of
the cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed
they had borrowed their religions from each other. When the Greeks
first found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they
leaped to the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from
Egypt. We, who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points
in common with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians--people
quite unconnected with Egypt--feel less confident about the
hypothesis of borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus
Bagaeus, and Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later
times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free
hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder
Dionysiac revels, and so forth. But this habit of borrowing was
regarded with disfavour by pious conservatives, and was probably, in
the width of its hospitality at least, an innovation. As Tiele
remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from the Assyrian _Daian nisi_
'judge of men,' a name of the solar god Samas, without ascertaining
that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and was a god of the
sun. These derivations, 'shocking to common-sense,' are to be
distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning. Some Assyrian
scholars actually derive _Hades_ from _Bit Edi_ or _Bit Hadi_--'though
unluckily,' says Tiele, 'there is no such word in the Assyrian text.'
On the whole topic Tiele's essay[15] deserves to be consulted.
Granting, then, that elements in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite,
and other gods, may have been imported with the strange
AEgypto-Assyrian vases and jewels of the Sidonians, we still find the
same basis of rude savage ideas. We may push back a god from Greece to
Phoenicia, from Phoenicia to Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we
reach a legend full of myths like those which Bushmen tell by the camp
fire, Eskimo in their dark huts, and Australians in the shade of the
_gunyeh_--myths cruel, puerile, obscene, like the fancies of the
savage myth-makers from which they sprang.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] A study of the contemporary stone age in Scotland will be found in
Mitchell's _Past and Present_.
[7] About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry,
killed her deceased husband's horse. When remonstrated with by her
landlord, she said, 'Would you have my man go about on foot in the
next world?' She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.
[8] 'At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the
gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelp's
flesh' (Pliny, _H. N._, xxix. 4).
[9] Compare Cleobulus, Fr. 2: Bergk, _Lyr. Gr._, iii. 201. Ed. 4.
[10] Nov., 1880.
[11] Mr. Leslie Stephen points out to me that De Quincey's brother
heard 'the midnight axe' in the Galapagos Islands (_Autobiographical
Sketches_, 'My Brother').
[12] 'Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while
she stands smiling by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves
and poppies in her hands' (Theocritus, vii. 155-157).
[13] In Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_ is a very large collection of
similar harvest rites.
[14] _Odyssey_, xi. 32.
[15] _Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel._, vol. ii.
_THE BULL-ROARER._
A STUDY OF THE MYSTERIES.
As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains
of Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of
grey-blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound. Beginning
low, with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it
grows louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy
roar. If the traveller be a new-comer, he is probably puzzled to the
last degree. If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says to himself,
'Why, that is the bull-roarer.' If he knows the colony and the ways of
the natives, he knows that the blacks are celebrating their tribal
mysteries. The roaring noise is made to warn all women to keep out of
the way. Just as Pentheus was killed (with the approval of Theocritus)
because he profaned the rites of the women-worshippers of Dionysus,
so, among the Australian blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out of
the way of female, and women out of the way of male, celebrations.
The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain
afar is a toy familiar to English country lads. They call it the
bull-roarer. The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which any
one can make. I do not, however, recommend it to families, for two
reasons. In the first place, it produces a most horrible and
unexampled din, which endears it to the very young, but renders it
detested by persons of mature age. In the second place, the character
of the toy is such that it will almost infallibly break all that is
fragile in the house where it is used, and will probably put out the
eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus, I trust, said enough to
prevent all good boys from inflicting bull-roarers on their parents,
pastors and masters, I proceed (in the interests of science) to show
how the toy is made. Nothing can be less elaborate. You take a piece
of the commonest wooden board, say the lid of a packing-case, about a
sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight inches long and three
broad, and you sharpen the ends. When finished, the toy may be about
the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a 'fish' used as a counter (that is
how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be left plain in the
centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities, as in an
Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor. Then tie a strong piece of
string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood, and
the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it _turndun_, and the
Greeks call it ~rhombos~) is complete. Now twist the end of the string
tightly about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and
round. For a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting
lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Taylor once exhibited
a bull-roarer. At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled
round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like
those chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country,
which contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the
populace. But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified
its name, producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing
noise, as if some supernatural being 'fluttered and buzzed his wings
with fearful roar.' Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a
very brief experience of this din, but boys have always known the
bull-roarer in England as one of the most efficient modes of making
the hideous and unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth
to delight.
The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most
extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in
folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed
peoples, savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of
savage and civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on
this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all
descend from the same stock. But the bull-roarer is introduced here
for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with
simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and
its mystic uses anywhere. There is no need for a hypothesis of common
origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred
object.
The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in
many and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred
instrument, employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in
Australia, in New Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as
we have seen, it is a peasant boy's plaything in England. A number of
questions are naturally suggested by the bull-roarer. Is it a thing
invented once for all, and carried abroad over the world by wandering
races, or handed on from one people and tribe to another? Or is the
bull-roarer a toy that might be accidentally hit on in any country
where men can sharpen wood and twist the sinews of animals into
string? Was the thing originally a toy, and is its religious and
mystical nature later; or was it originally one of the properties of
the priest, or medicine-man, which in England has dwindled to a
plaything? Lastly, was this mystical instrument at first employed in
the rites of a civilised people like the Greeks, and was it in some
way borrowed or inherited by South Africans, Australians, and New
Mexicans? Or is it a mere savage invention, surviving (like certain
other features of the Greek mysteries) from a distant state of
savagery? Our answer to all these questions is that in all probability
the presence of the ~rhombos~, or bull-roarer, in Greek mysteries was
a survival from the time when Greeks were in the social condition of
Australians.
In the first place the bull-roarer is associated with mysteries and
initiations. Now mysteries and initiations are things that tend to
dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation
advances. The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret and
hidden; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed,
and religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these
ceremonies. There are no other initiations or mysteries that
civilised modern man is expected necessarily to pass through. On the
other hand, looking widely at human history, we find mystic rites and
initiations numerous, stringent, severe, and magical in character, in
proportion to the lack of civilisation in those who practise them. The
less the civilisation, the more mysterious and the more cruel are the
rites. The more cruel the rites, the less is the civilisation. The red
hot poker with which Mr. Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the
sham masonic rites would have been quite in place, a natural
instrument of probationary torture, in the Freemasonry of Australians,
Mandans, or Hottentots. In the mysteries of Demeter or Bacchus, in the
mysteries of a civilised people, the red-hot poker, or any other
instrument of torture, would have been out of place. But in the Greek
mysteries, just as in those of South Africans, Red Indians, and
Australians, the disgusting practice of bedaubing the neophyte with
dirt and clay was preserved. We have nothing quite like that in modern
initiations. Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted
on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by the cruel
Artemis.[16] But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with mud and the
use of the bull-roarer. On the whole, then, and on a general view of
the subject, we prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece was a
survival from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New
Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa is a relic of
civilisation.
Let us next observe a remarkable peculiarity of the _turndun_, or
Australian bull-roarer. The bull-roarer in England is a toy. In
Australia, according to Howitt and Fison,[17] the bull-roarer is
regarded with religious awe. 'When, on lately meeting with two of the
surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked
cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then
answered me in undertones.' The chief peculiarity in connection with
the turndun is that women may never look upon it. The Chepara tribe,
who call it _bribbun_, have a custom that, 'if seen by a woman, or
shown by a man to a woman, the punishment to both is _death_.'
Among the Kurnai, the sacred mystery of the turndun is preserved by a
legend, which gives a supernatural sanction to secrecy. When boys go
through the mystic ceremony of initiation they are shown turnduns, or
bull-roarers, and made to listen to their hideous din. They are then
told that, if ever a woman is allowed to see a turndun, the earth will
open, and water will cover the globe. The old men point spears at the
boy's eyes, saying: 'If you tell this to any woman you will die, you
will see the ground broken up and like the sea; if you tell this to
any woman, or to any child, you will be killed!' As in Athens, in
Syria, and among the Mandans, the deluge-tradition of Australia is
connected with the mysteries. In Gippsland there is a tradition of
the deluge. 'Some children of the Kurnai in playing about found a
turndun, which they took home to the camp and showed the women.
Immediately the earth crumbled away, and it was all water, and the
Kurnai were drowned.'
In consequence of all this mummery the Australian women attach great
sacredness to the very name of the turndun. They are much less
instructed in their own theology than the men of the tribe. One woman
believed she had heard Pundjel, the chief supernatural being, descend
in a mighty rushing noise, that is, in the sound of the turndun, when
boys were being 'made men,' or initiated.[18] On turnduns the
Australian sorcerers can fly up to heaven. Turnduns carved with
imitations of water-flowers are used by medicine-men in rain-making.
New Zealand also has her bull-roarers; some of them, carved in relief,
are in the Christy Museum, and one is engraved here. I have no direct
evidence as to the use of these Maori bull-roarers in the Maori
mysteries. Their employment, however, may perhaps be provisionally
inferred.
[Illustration: {A New Zealand bull-roarer}]
One can readily believe that the New Zealand bull-roarer may be
whirled by any man who is repeating a _Karakia_, or 'charm to raise
the wind':--
Loud wind,
Lasting wind,
Violent whistling wind,
Dig up the calm reposing sky,
Come, come.
In New Zealand[19] 'the natives regarded the wind as an indication of
the presence of their god,' a superstition not peculiar to Maori
religion. The 'cold wind' felt blowing over the hands at
spiritualistic _seances_ is also regarded (by physical researchers) as
an indication of the presence of supernatural beings. The windy
roaring noise made by the bull-roarer might readily be considered by
savages, either as an invitation to a god who should present himself
in storm, or as a proof of his being at hand. We have seen that this
view was actually taken by an Australian woman. The hymn called
'breath' or _haha_, a hymn to the mystic wind, is pronounced by Maori
priests at the moment of the initiation of young men in the tribal
mysteries. It is a mere conjecture, and possibly enough capable of
disproof, but we have a suspicion that the use of the _mystica vannus
Iacchi_ was a mode of raising a sacred wind analogous to that employed
by whirlers of the turndun.[20]
Servius, the ancient commentator on Virgil, mentions, among other
opinions, this--that the _vannus_ was a sieve, and that it symbolised
the purifying effect of the mysteries. But it is clear that Servius
was only guessing; and he offers other explanations, among them that
the _vannus_ was a crate to hold offerings, _primitias frugum_.
We have studied the bull-roarer in Australia, we have caught a glimpse
of it in England. Its existence on the American continent is proved by
letters from New Mexico, and by the passage in Mr. Frank Cushing's
_Adventures in Zuni_.[21] In Zuni, too, among a semi-civilised Indian
tribe, or rather a tribe which has left the savage for the barbaric
condition, we find the bull-roarer.[22] Here, too, the instrument--a
'slat,' Mr. Cushing calls it--is used as a call to the ceremonial
observance of the tribal ritual. The Zunis have various 'orders of a
more or less sacred and sacerdotal character.' Mr. Cushing writes:--
These orders were engaged in their annual ceremonials, of
which little was told or shown me; but, at the end of four
days, I heard one morning a _deep whirring noise_. Running
out, I saw a procession of three priests of the bow, in
plumed helmets and closely-fitting cuirasses, both of thick
buckskin--gorgeous and solemn with sacred embroideries and
war-paint, begirt with bows, arrows, and war-clubs, and each
distinguished by his badge of degree--coming down one of the
narrow streets. The principal priest carried in his arms a
wooden idol, ferocious in aspect, yet beautiful with its
decorations of shell, turquoise, and brilliant paint. It was
nearly hidden by symbolic slats and prayer-sticks most
elaborately plumed. He was preceded by a guardian with drawn
bow and arrows, while another followed, _twirling the
sounding slat_, which had attracted alike my attention and
that of hundreds of the Indians, who hurriedly flocked to the
roofs of the adjacent houses, or lined the street, bowing
their heads in adoration, and scattering sacred prayer-meal
on the god and his attendant priests. Slowly they wound their
way down the hill, across the river, and off toward the
mountain of Thunder. Soon an identical procession followed
and took its way toward the western hills. I watched them
long until they disappeared, and a few hours afterward there
arose from the top of 'Thunder Mountain' a dense column of
smoke, simultaneously with another from the more distant
western mesa of 'U-ha-na-mi,' or 'Mount of the Beloved.'
Then they told me that for four days I must neither touch nor
eat flesh or oil of any kind, and for ten days neither throw
any refuse from my doors nor permit a spark to leave my
house, for 'This was the season of the year when the
"grandmother of men" (fire) was precious.'
Here then, in Zuni, we have the bull-roarer again, and once more we
find it employed as a summons to the mysteries. We do not learn,
however, that women in Zuni are forbidden to look upon the
bull-roarer. Finally, the South African evidence, which is supplied by
letters from a correspondent of Mr. Tylor's, proves that in South
Africa, too, the bull-roarer is employed to call the men to the
celebration of secret functions. A minute description of the
instrument, and of its magical power to raise a wind, is given in
Theal's _Kaffir Folklore_, p. 209. The bull-roarer has not been made a
subject of particular research; very probably later investigations
will find it in other parts of the modern world besides America,
Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. I have myself been fortunate
enough to encounter the bull-roarer on the soil of ancient Greece and
in connection with the Dionysiac mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria, and
Arnobius, an early Christian father who follows Clemens, describe
certain toys of the child Dionysus which were used in the mysteries.
Among these are _turbines_, ~konoi~ and ~rhomboi~. The ordinary
dictionaries interpret all these as whipping-tops, adding that
~rhombos~ is sometimes 'a magic wheel.' The ancient scholiast on
Clemens, however, writes: 'The ~konos~ is a little piece of wood, to
which a string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round
to make a roaring noise.'[23] Here, in short, we have a brief but
complete description of the bull-roarer of the Australian _turndun_.
No single point is omitted. The ~konos~, like the _turndun_, is a
small object of wood, it is tied to a string, when whirled round it
produces a roaring noise, and it is used at initiations. This is not
the end of the matter.
In the part of the Dionysiac mysteries at which the toys of the child
Dionysus were exhibited, and during which (as it seems) the ~konos~,
or bull-roarer, was whirred, the performers daubed themselves all over
with clay. This we learn from a passage in which Demosthenes describes
the youth of his hated adversary, AEschines. The mother of AEschines, he
says, was a kind of 'wise woman,' and dabbler in mysteries. AEschines
used to aid her by bedaubing the initiate over with clay and bran.[24]
The word ~hapomatton~, here used by Demosthenes, is explained by
Harpocration as the ritual term for daubing the initiated. A story was
told as usual, to explain this rite. It was said that, when the Titans
attacked Dionysus and tore him to pieces, they painted themselves
first with clay, or gypsum, that they might not be recognised. Nonnus
shows, in several places, that down to his time the celebrants of the
Bacchic mysteries retained this dirty trick. Precisely the same trick
prevails in the mysteries of savage peoples. Mr. Winwood Reade[25]
reports the evidence of Mongilomba. When initiated, Mongilomba was
'severely flogged in the Fetich House' (as young Spartans were flogged
before the animated image of Artemis), and then he was 'plastered over
with goat-dung.' Among the natives of Victoria,[26] the 'body of the
initiated is bedaubed with clay, mud, charcoal powder, and filth of
every kind.' The girls are plastered with charcoal powder and white
clay, answering to the Greek gypsum. Similar daubings were performed
at the mysteries by the Mandans, as described by Catlin: and the Zunis
made raids on Mr. Cushing's black paint and Chinese ink for like
purposes. On the Congo, Mr. Johnson found precisely the same ritual in
the initiations. Here, then, not to multiply examples, we discover
two singular features in common between Greek and savage mysteries.
Both Greeks and savages employ the bull-roarer, both bedaub the
initiated with dirt or with white paint or chalk. As to the meaning of
the latter very un-Aryan practice, one has no idea, unless it
represents the impure uninitiated condition, cleansed later by
ceremonies of initiation. It is only certain that war parties of
Australian blacks bedaub themselves with white clay to alarm their
enemies in night attacks. The Phocians, according to Herodotus (viii.
27), adopted the same 'aisy stratagem,' as Captain Costigan has it.
Tellies, the medicine-man (~mantis~), chalked some sixty Phocians,
whom he sent to make a night attack on the Thessalians. The sentinels
of the latter were seized with supernatural horror, and fled, 'and
after the sentinels went the army.' In the same way, in a night attack
among the Australian Kurnai,[27] 'they all rapidly painted themselves
with pipe-clay: red ochre is no use, it cannot frighten the enemy.'
If, then, Greeks in the historic period kept up Australian tactics, it
is probable that the ancient mysteries of Greece might retain the
habit of daubing the initiated which occurs in savage rites.
'Come now,' as Herodotus would say, 'I will show once more that the
mysteries of the Greeks resemble those of Bushmen.' In Lucian's
Treatise on Dancing,[28] we read, 'I pass over the fact that you
cannot find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing....
To prove this I will not mention the secret acts of worship, on
account of the uninitiated. But this much all men know, that most
people say of those who reveal the mysteries, that they "dance them
out."' Here Liddel and Scott write, rather weakly, 'to dance out, let
out, betray, probably of some dance which burlesqued these
ceremonies.' It is extremely improbable that, in an age when it was
still forbidden to reveal the ~orgia~, or secret rites, those rites
would be mocked in popular burlesques. Lucian obviously intends to say
that the matter of the mysteries was set forth in _ballets d'action_.
Now this is exactly the case in the surviving mysteries of the
Bushmen. Shortly after the rebellion of Langalibalele's tribe, Mr.
Orpen, the chief magistrate in St. John's Territory, made the
acquaintance of Qing, one of the last of an all but exterminated
tribe. Qing 'had never seen a white man, except fighting,' when he
became Mr. Orpen's guide. He gave a good deal of information about the
myths of his people, but refused to answer certain questions. 'You are
now asking the secrets that are not spoken of.' Mr. Orpen asked, 'Do
you know the secrets?' Qing replied, 'No, only the initiated men of
that dance know these things.' To 'dance' this or that means, 'to be
acquainted with this or that mystery;' the dances were originally
taught by Cagn, the mantis, or grasshopper god. In many mysteries,
Qing, as a young man, was not initiated. He could not 'dance them
out.'[29]
There are thus undeniably close resemblances between the Greek
mysteries and those of the lowest contemporary races.
As to the bull-roarer, its recurrence among Greeks, Zunis, Kamilaroi,
Maoris, and South African races, would be regarded by some students as
a proof that all these tribes had a common origin, or had borrowed the
instrument from each other. But this theory is quite unnecessary. The
bull-roarer is a very simple invention. Any one might find out that a
bit of sharpened wood, tied to a string, makes, when whirred, a
roaring noise. Supposing that discovery made, it is soon turned to
practical use. All tribes have their mysteries. All want a signal to
summon the right persons together, and warn the wrong persons to keep
out of the way. The church bell does as much for us, so did the shaken
_seistrum_ for the Egyptians. People with neither bells nor _seistra_
find the bull-roarer, with its mysterious sound, serve their turn. The
hiding of the instrument from women is natural enough. It merely makes
the alarm and absence of the curious sex doubly sure. The stories of
supernatural consequences to follow if a woman sees the turndun lend a
sanction. This is not a random theory, without basis. In Brazil the
natives have no bull-roarer, but they have mysteries, and the presence
of the women at the mysteries of the men is a terrible impiety. To
warn away the women the Brazilians make loud 'devil-music' on what are
called 'jurupari pipes.' Now, just as in Australia, _the women may not
see the jurupari pipes on pain of death_. When the sound of the
jurupari pipes is heard, as when the turndun is heard in Australia,
every woman flees and hides herself. The women are always executed if
they see the pipes. Mr. Alfred Wallace bought a pair of these pipes,
but he had to embark them at a distance from the village where they
were procured. The seller was afraid that some unknown misfortune
would occur if the women of his village set eyes on the juruparis.[30]
The conclusion from all these facts seems obvious. The bull-roarer is
an instrument easily invented by savages, and easily adopted into the
ritual of savage mysteries. If we find the bull-roarer used in the
mysteries of the most civilised of ancient peoples, the most probable
explanation is, that the Greeks retained both the mysteries, the
bull-roarer, the habit of bedaubing the initiate, the torturing of
boys, the sacred obscenities, the antics with serpents, the dances,
and the like, from the time when their ancestors were in the savage
condition. That more refined and religious ideas were afterwards
introduced into the mysteries seems certain, but the rites were in
many cases simply savage. Unintelligible (except as survivals) when
found among Hellenes, they become intelligible enough among savages,
because they correspond to the intellectual condition and magical
fancies of the lower barbarism. The same sort of comparison, the same
kind of explanation, will account, as we shall see, for the savage
myths as well as for the savage customs which survived among the
Greeks.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Pausanias, iii. 15. When the boys were being cruelly scourged,
the priestess of Artemis Orthia held an ancient barbaric wooden image
of the goddess in her hands. If the boys were spared, the image grew
heavy; the more they were tortured, the lighter grew the image. In
Samoa the image (shark's teeth) of the god Taema is consulted before
battle. 'If it felt heavy, that was a bad omen; if light, the sign was
good'--the god was pleased (Turner's _Samoa_, p. 55).
[17] _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 268.
[18] Fison, _Journal Anthrop. Soc._, Nov., 1883.
[19] Taylor's _New Zealand_, p. 181.
[20] This is not the view of le Pere Lafitau, a learned Jesuit
missionary in North America, who wrote (1724) a work on savage
manners, compared with the manners of heathen antiquity. Lafitau, who
was greatly struck with the resemblances between Greek and Iroquois or
Carib initiations, takes Servius's other explanation of the _mystica
vannus_, 'an osier vessel containing rural offerings of first fruits.'
This exactly answers, says Lafitau, to the Carib _Matoutou_, on which
they offer sacred cassava cakes.
[21] _The Century Magazine_, May, 1883.
[22] A minute account of the mysteries of Pueblo Indians, and their
use of the bull-roarer, will be found in Captain Bourke's _Snake Dance
of the Moquis_.
[23] ~Konos xylarion hou exeptai to spartion kai en tais teletais
edoneito hina rhoize.~ Lobeck, _Aglaophamus_ (i. p. 700).
[24] _De Corona_, p. 313.
[25] _Savage Africa._ Captain Smith, the friend of Pocahontas,
mentions the custom in his work on Virginia, pp. 245-248.
[26] Brough Smyth, i. 60, using evidence of Howitt, Taplin, Thomas and
Wilhelmi.
[27] _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 241.
[28] ~Peri orcheseos~, c. 15.
[29] _Cape Monthly Magazine_, July, 1874.
[30] Wallace, _Travels on the Amazon_, p. 349.
_THE MYTH OF CRONUS._
In a Maori pah, when a little boy behaves rudely to his parents, he is
sometimes warned that he is 'as bad as cruel Tutenganahau.' If he asks
who Tutenganahau was, he is told the following story:--
'In the beginning, the Heaven, Rangi, and the Earth, Papa, were the
father and mother of all things. "In these days the Heaven lay upon
the Earth, and all was darkness. They had never been separated."
Heaven and Earth had children, who grew up and lived in this thick
night, and they were unhappy because they could not see. Between the
bodies of their parents they were imprisoned, and there was no light.
The names of the children were Tumatuenga, Tane Mahuta, Tutenganahau,
and some others. So they all consulted as to what should be done with
their parents, Rangi and Papa. "Shall we slay them, or shall we
separate them?" "Go to," said Tumatuenga, "let us slay them." "No,"
cried Tane Mahuta, "let us rather separate them. Let one go upwards,
and become a stranger to us; let the other remain below, and be a
parent to us." Only Tawhiri Matea (the wind) had pity on his own
father and mother. Then the fruit-gods, and the war-god, and the
sea-god (for all the children of Papa and Rangi were gods) tried to
rend their parents asunder. Last rose the forest-god, cruel
Tutenganahau. He severed the sinews which united Heaven and Earth,
Rangi and Papa. Then he pushed hard with his head and feet. Then
wailed Heaven and exclaimed Earth, "Wherefore this murder? Why this
great sin? Why destroy us? Why separate us?" But Tane pushed and
pushed: Rangi was driven far away into the air. "_They became visible,
who had hitherto been concealed between the hollows of their parents'
breasts._" Only the storm-god differed from his brethren: he arose and
followed his father, Rangi, and abode with him in the open spaces of
the sky.'
This is the Maori story of the severing of the wedded Heaven and
Earth. The cutting of them asunder was the work of Tutenganahau and
his brethren, and the conduct of Tutenganahau is still held up as an
example of filial impiety.[31] The story is preserved in sacred hymns
of very great antiquity, and many of the myths are common to the other
peoples of the Pacific.[32]
Now let us turn from New Zealand to Athens, as she was in the days of
Pericles. Socrates is sitting in the porch of the King Archon, when
Euthyphro comes up and enters into conversation with the philosopher.
After some talk, Euthyphro says, 'You will think me mad when I tell
you whom I am prosecuting and pursuing!' 'Why, has the fugitive
wings?' asks Socrates. 'Nay, he is not very volatile at his time of
life!' 'Who is he?' 'My father.' 'Good heavens! you don't mean that.
What is he accused of?' 'Murder, Socrates.' Then Euthyphro explains
the case, which quaintly illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro's
father had an agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a
drunken passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro's father seized the
labourer, bound him, threw him into a ditch, 'and then sent to Athens
to ask a diviner what should be done with him.' Before the answer of
the diviner arrived, the labourer literally 'died in a ditch' of
hunger and cold. For this offence, Euthyphro was prosecuting his own
father. Socrates shows that he disapproves, and Euthyphro thus defends
the piety of his own conduct: 'The impious, whoever he may be, ought
not to go unpunished. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most
righteous of gods? Yet even they admit that Zeus bound his own father
Cronus, because he wickedly devoured his sons; and that Cronus, too,
had punished his own father, Uranus, for a similar reason, in a
nameless manner. And yet when _I_ proceed against _my_ father, people
are angry with me. This is their inconsistent way of talking, when the
gods are concerned, and when I am concerned.'
Here Socrates breaks in. He 'cannot away with these stories about the
gods,' and so he has just been accused of impiety, the charge for
which he died. Socrates cannot believe that a god, Cronus, mutilated
his father Uranus, but Euthyphro believes the whole affair: 'I can
tell you many other things about the gods which would quite amaze
you.'[33]
* * * * *
We have here a typical example of the way in which mythology puzzled
the early philosophers of Greece. Socrates was anxious to be pious,
and to respect the most ancient traditions of the gods. Yet at the
very outset of sacred history he was met by tales of gods who
mutilated and bound their own parents. Not only were such tales
hateful to him, but they were of positively evil example to people
like Euthyphro. The problem remained, how did the fathers of the
Athenians ever come to tell such myths?
* * * * *
Let us now examine the myth of Cronus, and the explanations which have
been given by scholars. Near the beginning of things, according to
Hesiod (whose cosmogony was accepted in Greece), Earth gave birth to
Heaven. Later, Heaven, Uranus, became the husband of Gaea, Earth. Just
as Rangi and Papa, in New Zealand, had many children, so had Uranus
and Gaea. As in New Zealand, some of these children were gods of the
various elements. Among them were Oceanus, the deep, and Hyperion, the
sun--as among the children of Earth and Heaven, in New Zealand, were
the Wind and the Sea. The youngest child of the Greek Heaven and Earth
was 'Cronus of crooked counsel, who ever hated his mighty sire.' Now
even as the children of the Maori Heaven and Earth were 'concealed
between the hollows of their parents' breasts,' so the Greek Heaven
used to 'hide his children from the light in the hollows of Earth.'
Both Earth and her children resented this, and, as in New Zealand, the
children conspired against Heaven, taking Earth, however, into their
counsels. Thereupon Earth produced iron, and bade her children avenge
their wrongs.[34] Now fear fell on all of them, except Cronus, who,
like Tutenganahau, was all for action. Cronus determined to end the
embraces of Heaven and Earth. But, while the Maori myth conceives of
Heaven and Earth as of two beings which have never been separated
before, Hesiod makes Heaven amorously approach his wife from a
distance. Then Cronus stretched out his hand, armed with a sickle of
iron, or steel, and mutilated Uranus. Thus were Heaven and Earth
practically divorced. But as in the Maori myth one of the children of
Heaven clave to his sire, so, in Greek, Oceanus remained faithful to
his father.[35]
This is the first portion of the myth of Cronus. Can it be denied that
the story is well illustrated and explained by the New Zealand
parallel, the myth of the cruelty of Tutenganahau? By means of this
comparison, the meaning of the myth is made clear enough. Just as the
New Zealanders had conceived of Heaven and Earth as at one time
united, to the prejudice of their children, so the ancestors of the
Greeks had believed in an ancient union of Heaven and Earth. Both by
Greeks and Maoris, Heaven and Earth were thought of as living persons,
with human parts and passions. Their union was prejudicial to their
children, and so the children violently separated the parents. This
conduct is regarded as impious, and as an awful example to be avoided,
in Maori pahs. In Naxos, on the other hand, Euthyphro deemed that the
conduct of Cronus deserved imitation. If ever the Maoris had reached a
high civilisation, they would probably have been revolted, like
Socrates, by the myth which survived from their period of savagery.
Mr. Tylor well says,[36] 'Just as the adzes of polished jade, and the
cloaks of tied flax-fibre, which these New Zealanders were using but
yesterday, are older in their place in history than the bronze
battle-axes and linen mummy-cloths of ancient Egypt, so the Maori
poet's shaping of nature into nature-myth belongs to a stage of
intellectual history which was passing away in Greece five-and-twenty
centuries ago. The myth-maker's fancy of Heaven and Earth as father
and mother of all things naturally suggested the legend that they in
old days abode together, but have since been torn asunder.'
* * * * *
That this view of Heaven and Earth is natural to early minds, Mr.
Tylor proves by the presence of the myth of the union and violent
divorce of the pair in China.[37] Puang-ku is the Chinese Cronus, or
Tutenganahau. In India,[38] Dyaus and Prithivi, Heaven and Earth, were
once united, and were severed by Indra, their own child.
This, then, is our interpretation of the exploit of Cronus. It is an
old surviving nature-myth of the severance of Heaven and Earth, a myth
found in China, India, New Zealand, as well as in Greece. Of course it
is not pretended that Chinese and Maoris borrowed from Indians and
Greeks, or came originally of the same stock. Similar phenomena,
presenting themselves to be explained by human minds in a similar
stage of fancy and of ignorance, will account for the parallel myths.
The second part of the myth of Cronus was, like the first, a
stumbling-block to the orthodox in Greece. Of the second part we offer
no explanation beyond the fact that the incidents in the myth are
almost universally found among savages, and that, therefore, in Greece
they are probably survivals from savagery. The sequel of the myth
appears to account for nothing, as the first part accounts for the
severance of Heaven and Earth. In the sequel a world-wide _Maerchen_,
or tale, seems to have been attached to Cronus, or attracted into the
cycle of which he is centre, without any particular reason, beyond the
law which makes detached myths crystallise round any celebrated name.
To look further is, perhaps, _chercher raison ou il n'y en a pas_.
The conclusion of the story of Cronus runs thus: He wedded his sister,
Rhea, and begat children--Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and, lastly,
Zeus. 'And mighty Cronus swallowed down each of them, each that came
to their mother's knees from her holy womb, with this intent, that
none other of the proud children of Uranus should hold kingly sway
among the Immortals.' Cronus showed a ruling father's usual jealousy
of his heirs. It was a case of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich. But
Cronus (acting in a way natural in a story perhaps first invented by
cannibals) swallowed his children instead of merely imprisoning them.
Heaven and Earth had warned him to beware of his heirs, and he could
think of no safer plan than that which he adopted. When Rhea was about
to become the mother of Zeus, she fled to Crete. Here Zeus was born,
and when Cronus (in pursuit of his usual policy) asked for the baby,
he was presented with a stone wrapped up in swaddling bands. After
swallowing the stone, Cronus was easy in his mind; but Zeus grew up,
administered a dose to his father, and compelled him to disgorge. 'The
stone came forth first, as he had swallowed it last.'[39] The other
children also emerged, all alive and well. Zeus fixed the stone at
Delphi, where, long after the Christian era, Pausanias saw it.[40] It
was not a large stone, Pausanias tells us, and the Delphians used to
anoint it with oil and wrap it up in wool on feast-days. All Greek
temples had their fetich-stones, and each stone had its legend. This
was the story of the Delphian stone, and of the fetichism which
survived the early years of Christianity. A very pretty story it is.
Savages more frequently smear their fetich-stones with red paint than
daub them with oil, but the latter, as we learn from Theophrastus'
account of the 'superstitious man,' was the Greek ritual.
* * * * *
This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-block of the orthodox
Greek, the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian
controversialists. Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative
might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs
in the holy legends of Greece. Our explanation of its presence there
is simple enough. Like the erratic blocks in a modern plain, like the
flint-heads in a meadow, the story is a relic of a very distant past.
The glacial age left the boulders on the plain, the savage tribes of
long ago left the arrow-heads, the period of savage fancy left the
story of Cronus and the rites of the fetich-stone. Similar rites are
still notoriously practised in the South Sea Islands, in Siberia, in
India and Africa and Melanesia, by savages. And by savages similar
tales are still told.
* * * * *
We cannot go much lower than the Bushmen, and among Bushman divine
myths is room for the 'swallowing trick' attributed to Cronus by
Hesiod. The chief divine character in Bushman myth is the Mantis
insect. His adopted daughter is the child of Kwai Hemm, a supernatural
character, 'the all-devourer.' The Mantis gets his adopted daughter to
call the swallower to his aid; but Kwai Hemm swallows the Mantis, the
god-insect. As Zeus made his own wife change herself into an insect,
for the convenience of swallowing her, there is not much difference
between Bushman and early Greek mythology. Kwai Hemm is killed by a
stratagem, and all the animals whom he has got outside of, in a long
and voracious career, troop forth from him alive and well, like the
swallowed gods from the maw of Cronus.[41] Now, story for story, the
Bushman version is much less offensive than that of Hesiod. But the
Bushman story is just the sort of story we expect from Bushmen,
whereas the Hesiodic story is not at all the kind of tale we look for
from Greeks. The explanation is, that the Greeks had advanced out of a
savage state of mind and society, but had retained their old myths,
myths evolved in the savage stage, and in harmony with that condition
of fancy. Among the Kaffirs[42] we find the same 'swallow-myth.' The
Igongqongqo swallows all and sundry; a woman cuts the swallower with a
knife, and 'people came out, and cattle, and dogs.' In Australia, a
god is swallowed. As in the myth preserved by Aristophanes in the
'Birds,' the Australians believe that birds were the original gods,
and the eagle, especially, is a great creative power. The Moon was a
mischievous being, who walked about the world, doing what evil he
could. One day he swallowed the eagle-god. The wives of the eagle came
up, and the Moon asked them where he might find a well. They pointed
out a well, and, as he drank, they hit the Moon with a stone tomahawk,
and out flew the eagle.[43] This is oddly like Grimm's tale of 'The
Wolf and the Kids.' The wolf swallowed the kids, their mother cut a
hole in the wolf, let out the kids, stuffed the wolf with stones, and
sewed him up again. The wolf went to the well to drink, the weight of
the stones pulled him in, and he was drowned. Similar stories are
common among the Red Indians, and Mr. Im Thurn has found them in
Guiana. How savages all over the world got the idea that men and
beasts could be swallowed and disgorged alive, and why they fashioned
the idea into a divine myth, it is hard to say. Mr. Tylor, in
_Primitive Culture_,[44] adds many examples of the narrative. The
Basutos have it; it occurs some five times in Callaway's _Zula Nursery
Tales_. In Greenland the Eskimo have a shape of the incident, and we
have all heard of the escape of Jonah.
It has been suggested that night, covering up the world, gave the
first idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories the
night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all
things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in harmony with
savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator, all
things are men and animals. 'Ils se persuadent que non seulement les
hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses
sont animees,' says one of the old Jesuit missionaries in Canada.[45]
'The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird,' say the Bushmen.
_G' ooe ka! Kui_ (a very respectable Bushman, whose name seems a little
hard to pronounce) once saw the wind-person at Haarfontein.
Savages, then, are persuaded that night, sky, cloud, fire, and so
forth, are only the _schein_, or sensuous appearance, of things that,
in essence, are men or animals. A good example is the bringing of
Night to Vanua Lava, by Qat, the 'culture-hero' of Melanesia. At
first it was always day, and people tired of it. Qat heard that Night
was at the Torres Islands, and he set forth to get some. Qong (Night)
received Qat well, blackened his eyebrows, showed him Sleep, and sent
him off with fowls to bring Dawn after the arrival of Night should
make Dawn a necessity. Next day Qat's brothers saw the sun crawl away
west, and presently Night came creeping up from the sea. 'What is
this?' cried the brothers. 'It is Night,' said Qat; 'sit down, and
when you feel something in your eyes, lie down and keep quiet.' So
they went to sleep. 'When Night had lasted long enough, Qat took a
piece of red obsidian, and cut the darkness, and the Dawn came
out.'[46]
Night is more or less personal in this tale, and solid enough to be
cut, so as to let the Dawn out. This savage conception of Night, as
the swallower and disgorger, might start the notion of other
swallowing and disgorging beings. Again the Bushmen, and other savage
peoples, account for certain celestial phenomena by saying that 'a big
star has swallowed his daughter, and spit her out again.' While
natural phenomena, explained on savage principles, might give the data
of the swallow-myth, we must not conclude that all beings to whom the
story is attached are, therefore, the Night. On this principle Cronus
would be the Night, and so would the wolf in Grimm. For our purposes
it is enough that the feat of Cronus is a feat congenial to the savage
fancy and repugnant to the civilised Greeks who found themselves in
possession of the myth. Beyond this, and beyond the inference that the
Cronus myth was first evolved by people to whom it seemed quite
natural, that is, by savages, we do not pretend to go in our
interpretation.
* * * * *
To end our examination of the myth of Cronus, we may compare the
solutions offered by scholars. As a rule, these solutions are based on
the philological analysis of the names in the story. It will be seen
that very various and absolutely inconsistent etymologies and meanings
of Cronus are suggested by philologists of the highest authority.
These contradictions are, unfortunately, rather the rule than the
exception in the etymological interpretation of myths.
* * * * *
The opinion of Mr. Max Mueller has always a right to the first hearing
from English inquirers. Mr. Mueller, naturally, examines first the name
of the god whose legend he is investigating. He writes: 'There is no
such being as Kronos in Sanskrit. Kronos did not exist till long after
Zeus in Greece. Zeus was called by the Greeks the son of Time
(~Kronos~). This is a very simple and very common form of mythological
expression. It meant originally, not that time was the origin or
source of Zeus, but ~Kronion~ or ~Kronides~ was used in the sense of
"connected with time, representing time, existing through all time."
Derivatives in ~-ion~ and ~-ides~ took, in later times, the more
exclusive meaning of patronymics.... When this (the meaning of
~Kronides~ as equivalent to Ancient of Days) ceased to be understood,
... people asked themselves the question, Why is ~Zeus~ called
~Kronides~? And the natural and almost inevitable answer was, Because
he is the son, the offspring of a more ancient god, ~Kronos~. This may
be a very old myth in Greece; but the misunderstanding which gave rise
to it could have happened in Greece only. We cannot expect, therefore,
a god ~Kronos~ in the Veda.' To expect Greek in the Veda would
certainly be sanguine. 'When this myth of ~Kronos~ had once been
started, it would roll on irresistibly. If ~Zeus~ had once a father
called ~Kronos~, ~Kronos~ must have a wife.' It is added, as
confirmation, that 'the name of ~Kronides~ belongs originally to Zeus
only, and not to his later' (in Hesiod elder) 'brothers, Poseidon and
Hades.'[47]
Mr. Mueller says, in his famous essay on 'Comparative Mythology'[48]:
'How can we imagine that a few generations before that time' (the age
of Solon) 'the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were
adequately expressed by the story of Uranus maimed by Kronos,--of
Kronos eating his children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive
his whole progeny? Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America, we
hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.' We have found a good
deal of the sort in Africa and America, where it seems not out of
place.
One objection to Mr. Mueller's theory is, that it makes the mystery no
clearer. When Greeks were so advanced in Hellenism that their own
early language had become obsolete and obscure, they invented the god
~Kronos~, to account for the patronymic (as they deemed it)
~Kronides~, son of ~Kronos~. But why did they tell such savage and
revolting stories about the god they had invented? Mr. Mueller only
says the myth 'would roll on irresistibly.' But why did the rolling
myth gather such very strange moss? That is the problem; and while Mr.
Mueller's hypothesis accounts for the existence of a god called
~Kronos~, it does not even attempt to show how full-blown Greeks came
to believe such hideous stories about the god.
* * * * *
This theory, therefore, is of no practical service. The theory of
Adalbert Kuhn, one of the most famous of Sanskrit scholars, and author
of _Die Herabkunft des Feuers_, is directly opposed to the ideas of
Mr. Mueller. In Cronus, Mr. Mueller recognises a god who could only have
come into being among Greeks, when the Greeks had begun to forget the
original meaning of 'derivatives in ~-ion~ and ~-ides~.' Kuhn, on the
other hand, derives ~Kronos~ from the same root as the Sanskrit
_Krana_.[49] _Krana_ means, it appears, _der fuer sich schaffende_, he
who creates for himself, and Cronus is compared to the Indian
Pragapati, about whom even more abominable stories are told than the
myths which circulate to the prejudice of Cronus. According to Kuhn,
the 'swallow-myth' means that Cronus, the lord of light and dark
powers, swallows the divinities of light. But in place of Zeus (that
is, according to Kuhn, of the daylight sky) he swallows a stone, that
is the sun. When he disgorges the stone (the sun), he also disgorges
the gods of light whom he had swallowed.
I confess that I cannot understand these distinctions between the
father and lord of light and dark (Cronus) and the beings he
swallowed. Nor do I find it easy to believe that myth-making man took
all those distinctions, or held those views of the Creator. However,
the chief thing to note is that Mr. Mueller's etymology and Kuhn's
etymology of Cronus can hardly both be true, which, as their systems
both depend on etymological analysis, is somewhat discomfiting.
The next etymological theory is the daring speculation of Mr. Brown.
In _The Great Dionysiak Myth_[50] Mr. Brown writes: 'I regard Kronos
as the equivalent of Karnos, Karnaios, Karnaivis, the Horned God;
Assyrian, KaRNu; Hebrew, KeReN, horn; Hellenic, KRoNos, or KaRNos.'
Mr. Brown seems to think that Cronus is 'the ripening power of
harvest,' and also 'a wily savage god,' in which opinion one quite
agrees with him. Why the name of Cronus should mean 'horned,' when he
is never represented with horns, it is hard to say. But among the
various foreign gods in whom the Greeks recognised their own Cronus,
one Hea, 'regarded by Berosos as Kronos,' seems to have been
'horn-wearing.'[51] Horns are lacking in Seb and Il, if not in Baal
Hamon, though Mr. Brown would like to behorn them.
Let us now turn to Preller.[52] According to Preller, ~Kronos~ is
connected with ~kraino~, to fulfil, to bring to completion. The
harvest month, the month of ripening and fulfilment, was called
~kronion~ in some parts of Greece, and the jolly harvest-feast, with
its memory of Saturn's golden days, was named ~kronia~. The sickle of
Cronus, the sickle of harvest-time, works in well with this
explanation, and we have a kind of pun in Homer which points in the
direction of Preller's derivation from ~kraino~:--
~oud' ara po hoi epekraiaine Kronion~,
and in Sophocles ('Tr.' 126):--
~ho panta krainon Basileus Kronidas~.
Preller illustrates the mutilation of Uranus by the Maori tale of
Tutenganahau. The child-swallowing he connects with Punic and
Phoenician influence, and Semitic sacrifices of men and children.
Porphyry[53] speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the
Greeks recognised Cronus in the Carthaginian god to whom children were
offered up.
Hartung[54] takes Cronus, when he mutilates Uranus, to be the fire of
the sun, scorching the sky of spring. This, again, is somewhat out of
accord with Schwartz's idea, that Cronus is the storm-god, the
cloud-swallowing deity, his sickle the rainbow, and the blood of
Uranus the lightning.[55] According to Prof. Sayce, again,[56] the
blood-drops of Uranus are rain-drops. Cronus is the sun-god, piercing
the dark cloud, which is just the reverse of Schwartz's idea. Prof.
Sayce sees points in common between the legend of Moloch, or of Baal
under the name of Moloch, and the myth of Cronus. But Moloch, he
thinks, is not a god of Phoenician origin, but a deity borrowed from
'the primitive Accadian population of Babylonia.' Mr. Isaac Taylor,
again, explains Cronus as the sky which swallows and reproduces the
stars. The story of the sickle may be derived from the crescent moon,
the 'silver sickle,' or from a crescent-shaped piece of meteoric
iron--for, in this theory, the fetich-stone of Delphi is a piece of
that substance.
* * * * *
It will be observed that any one of these theories, if accepted, is
much more 'minute in detail' than our humble suggestion. He who adopts
any one of them, knows all about it. He knows that Cronus is a purely
Greek god, or that he is connected with the Sanskrit _Krana_, which
Tiele,[57] unhappily, says is 'a very dubious word.' Or the
mythologist may be quite confident that Cronus is neither Greek nor,
in any sense, Sanskrit, but Phoenician. A not less adequate
interpretation assigns him ultimately to Accadia. While the inquirer
who can choose a system and stick to it knows the exact nationality of
Cronus, he is also well acquainted with his character as a nature-god.
He may be Time, or perhaps he is the Summer Heat, and a horned god; or
he is the harvest-god, or the god of storm and darkness, or the
midnight sky,--the choice is wide; or he is the lord of dark and
light, and his children are the stars, the clouds, the summer months,
the light-powers, or what you will. The mythologist has only to make
his selection.
The system according to which we tried to interpret the myth is less
_ondoyant et divers_. We do not even pretend to explain everything. We
do not guess at the meaning and root of the word Cronus. We only find
parallels to the myth among savages, whose mental condition is fertile
in such legends. And we only infer that the myth of Cronus was
originally evolved by persons also in the savage intellectual
condition. The survival we explain as, in a previous essay, we
explained the survival of the bull-roarer, by the conservatism of the
religious instinct.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] _New Zealand_, Taylor, pp. 119-121. _Die heilige Sage der
Polynesier_, Bastian, pp. 36-39.
[32] A crowd of similar myths, in one of which a serpent severs Heaven
and Earth, are printed in Turner's _Samoa_.
[33] The translation used is Jowett's.
[34] _Theog._, 166.
[35] Apollodorus, i. 15.
[36] _Primitive Culture_, i. 325.
[37] Pauthier, _Livres sacres de l'Orient_, p. 19.
[38] Muir's _Sanskrit Texts_, v. 23. Aitareya Brahmana.
[39] Hesiod, _Theog._, 497.
[40] Paus., x. 24.
[41] Bleek, _Bushman Folklore_, pp. 6-8.
[42] Theal, _Kaffir Folklore_, pp. 161-167.
[43] Brough Smyth, i. 432-433.
[44] i. 338.
[45] _Rel. de la Nouvelle-France_ (1636), p. 114.
[46] Codrington, in _Journal Anthrop. Inst._, Feb., 1881. There is a
Breton _Maerchen_ of a land where people had to 'bring the Dawn' daily
with carts and horses. A boy, whose sole property was a cock, sold it
to the people of this country for a large sum, and now the cock brings
the Dawn, with a great saving of trouble and expense. The _Maerchen_ is
a survival of the state of mind of the Solomon Islanders.
[47] _Selected Essays_, i. 460.
[48] _Ibid._, i. 311.
[49] _Ueber Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung_ (1874), l. 148.
[50] ii. 127.
[51] _G. D. M._, ii. 127, 129.
[52] _Gr. My._, i. 144.
[53] _De Abst._, ii. 202, 197.
[54] _Rel. und Myth._, ii. 3.
[55] _Ursprung der Myth._, pp. 133, 1, 5, 139, 149.
[56] _Contemporary Review_, Sept., 1883.
[57] _Rev. de l'Hist. Rel._, i. 179.
_CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE 'SUN-FROG.'_
'Once upon a time there lived a king and a queen,' says the old woman
in Apuleius, beginning the tale of Cupid and Psyche with that ancient
formula which has been dear to so many generations of children. In one
shape or other the tale of Cupid and Psyche, of the woman who is
forbidden to see or to name her husband, of the man with the vanished
fairy bride, is known in most lands, 'even among barbarians.'
According to the story the mystic prohibition is always broken: the
hidden face is beheld; light is brought into the darkness; the
forbidden name is uttered; the bride is touched with the tabooed
metal, iron, and the union is ended. Sometimes the pair are re-united,
after long searchings and wanderings; sometimes they are severed for
ever. Such are the central situations in tales like that of Cupid and
Psyche.
In the attempt to discover how the ideas on which this myth is based
came into existence, we may choose one of two methods. We may confine
our investigations to the Aryan peoples, among whom the story occurs
both in the form of myth and of household tale. Again, we may look for
the shapes of the legend which hide, like Peau d'Ane in disguise,
among the rude kraals and wigwams, and in the strange and scanty garb
of savages. If among savages we find both narratives like Cupid and
Psyche, and also customs and laws out of which the myth might have
arisen, we may provisionally conclude that similar customs once
existed among the civilised races who possess the tale, and that from
these sprang the early forms of the myth.
In accordance with the method hitherto adopted, we shall prefer the
second plan, and pursue our quest beyond the limits of the Aryan
peoples.
The oldest literary shape of the tale of Psyche and her lover is found
in the Rig Veda (x. 95). The characters of a singular and cynical
dialogue in that poem are named Urvasi and Pururavas. The former is an
Apsaras, a kind of fairy or sylph, the mistress (and a _folle
maitresse_, too) of Pururavas, a mortal man.[58] In the poem Urvasi
remarks that when she dwelt among men she 'ate once a day a small
piece of butter, and therewith well satisfied went away.' This
slightly reminds one of the common idea that the living may not eat in
the land of the dead, and of Persephone's tasting the pomegranate in
Hades.
Of the dialogue in the Rig Veda it may be said, in the words of Mr.
Toots, that 'the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure.' We
only gather that Urvasi, though she admits her sensual content in the
society of Pururavas, is leaving him 'like the first of the dawns';
that she 'goes home again, hard to be caught, like the winds.' She
gives her lover some hope, however--that the gods promise immortality
even to him, 'the kinsman of Death' as he is. 'Let thine offspring
worship the gods with an oblation; in Heaven shalt thou too have joy
of the festival.'
In the Rig Veda, then, we dimly discern a parting between a mortal man
and an immortal bride, and a promise of reconciliation.
The story, of which this Vedic poem is a partial dramatisation, is
given in the Brahmana of the Yajur Veda. Mr. Max Mueller has translated
the passage.[59] According to the Brahmana, 'Urvasi, a kind of fairy,
fell in love with Pururavas, and when she met him she said: Embrace me
three times a day, but never against my will, and let me never see you
without your royal garments, _for this is the manner of women_.'[60]
The Gandharvas, a spiritual race, kinsmen of Urvasi, thought she had
lingered too long among men. They therefore plotted some way of
parting her from Pururavas. Her covenant with her lord declared that
she was never to see him naked. If that compact were broken she would
be compelled to leave him. To make Pururavas break this compact the
Gandharvas stole a lamb from beside Urvasi's bed: Pururavas sprang up
to rescue the lamb, and, in a flash of lightning, Urvasi saw him
naked, contrary to the _manner of women_. She vanished. He sought her
long, and at last came to a lake where she and her fairy friends were
playing _in the shape of birds_. Urvasi saw Pururavas, revealed
herself to him, and, according to the Brahmana, part of the strange
Vedic dialogue was now spoken. Urvasi promised to meet him on the last
night of the year: a son was to be the result of the interview. Next
day, her kinsfolk, the Gandharvas, offered Pururavas the wish of his
heart. He wished to be one of them. They then initiated him into the
mode of kindling a certain sacred fire, after which he became immortal
and dwelt among the Gandharvas.
It is highly characteristic of the Indian mind that the story should
be thus worked into connection with ritual. In the same way the
Bhagavata Purana has a long, silly, and rather obscene narrative about
the sacrifice offered by Pururavas, and the new kind of sacred fire.
Much the same ritual tale is found in the Vishnu Purana (iv. 6, 19).
Before attempting to offer our own theory of the legend, we must
examine the explanations presented by scholars. The philological
method of dealing with myths is well known. The hypothesis is that the
names in a myth are 'stubborn things,' and that, as the whole
narrative has probably arisen from forgetfulness of the meaning of
language, the secret of a myth must be sought in analysis of the
proper names of the persons. On this principle Mr. Max Mueller
interprets the myth of Urvasi and Pururavas, their loves, separation,
and reunion. Mr. Mueller says that the story 'expresses the identity
of the morning dawn and the evening twilight.'[61] To prove this, the
names are analysed. It is Mr. Mueller's object to show that though,
even in the Veda, Urvasi and Pururavas are names of persons, they were
originally 'appellations'; and that Urvasi meant 'dawn,' and Pururavas
'sun.' Mr. Mueller's opinion as to the etymological sense of the name
would be thought decisive, naturally, by lay readers, if an opposite
opinion were not held by that other great philologist and comparative
mythologist, Adalbert Kuhn. Admitting that 'the etymology of Urvasi is
difficult,' Mr. Mueller derives it from '_uru_, wide (~eury~), and a
root _as_ = to pervade.' Now the dawn is 'widely pervading,' and has,
in Sanskrit, the epithet uruki, 'far-going.' Mr. Mueller next assumes
that 'Eurykyde,' 'Eurynome,' 'Eurydike,' and other heroic Greek female
names, are 'names of the dawn'; but this, it must be said, is merely
an assumption of his school. The main point of the argument is that
Urvasi means 'far-going,' and that 'the far and wide splendour of
dawn' is often spoken of in the Veda. 'However, the best proof that
Urvasi was the dawn is the legend told of her and of her love to
Pururavas, a story that is true only of the sun and the dawn' (i.
407).
We shall presently see that a similar story is told of persons in whom
the dawn can scarcely be recognised, so that 'the best proof' is not
very good.
The name of Pururavas, again, is 'an appropriate name for a solar
hero.' ... Pururavas meant the same as ~Polydeukes~, 'endowed with
much light,' for though _rava_ is generally used of sound, yet the
root _ru_, which means originally 'to cry,' is also applied to colour,
in the sense of a loud or crying colour, that is, red.[62] It is
interesting to learn that our Aryan fathers spoke of 'loud colours,'
and were so sensitive as to think violet 'loud.' Besides, Pururavas
calls himself Vasistha, which, as we know, is a name of the sun; and
if he is called Aido, the son of Ida, the same name is elsewhere
given[63] to Agni, the fire. 'The conclusion of the argument is that
antiquity spoke of the naked sun, and of the chaste dawn hiding her
face when she had seen her husband. Yet she says she will come again.
And after the sun has travelled through the world in search of his
beloved, when he comes to the threshold of Death and is going to end
his solitary life, she appears again, in the gloaming, the same as the
dawn, as Eos in Homer, begins and ends the day, and she carries him
away to the golden seats of the Immortals.'[64]
Kuhn objects to all this explanation, partly on what we think the
inadequate ground that there is no necessary connection between the
story of Urvasi (thus interpreted) and the ritual of sacred
fire-lighting. Connections of that sort were easily invented at random
by the compilers of the Brahmanas in their existing form. Coming to
the analysis of names, Kuhn finds in Urvasi 'a weakening of Urvanki
(_uru_ + _anc_), like _yuvaca_ from _yuvanka_, Latin _juvencus_; ...
the accent is of no decisive weight.' Kuhn will not be convinced that
Pururavas is the sun, and is unmoved by the ingenious theory of 'a
crying colour,' denoted by his name, and the inference, supported by
such words as _rufus_, that crying colours are red, and therefore
appropriate names of the red sun. The connection between Pururavas and
Agni, fire, is what appeals to Kuhn--and, in short, where Mr. Mueller
sees a myth of sun and dawn, Kuhn recognises a fire-myth. Roth, again
(whose own name means _red_), far from thinking that Urvasi is 'the
chaste dawn,' interprets her name as _die geile_, that is, 'lecherous,
lascivious, lewd, wanton, obscene'; while Pururavas, as 'the Roarer,'
suggests 'the Bull in rut.' In accordance with these views Roth
explains the myth in a fashion of his own.[65]
Here, then, as Kuhn says, 'we have three essentially different modes
of interpreting the myth,'[66] all three founded on philological
analysis of the names in the story. No better example could be given
to illustrate the weakness of the philological method. In the first
place, that method relies on names as the primitive relics and germs
of the tale, although the tale may occur where the names have never
been heard, and though the names are, presumably, late additions to a
story in which the characters were originally anonymous. Again, the
most illustrious etymologists differ absolutely about the true sense
of the names. Kuhn is disposed to see fire everywhere, and
fire-myths; Mr. Mueller to see dawn and dawn-myths; Schwartz to see
storm and storm-myths, and so on. As the orthodox teachers are thus at
variance, so that there is no safety in orthodoxy, we may attempt to
use our heterodox method.
None of the three scholars whose views we have glanced at--neither
Roth, Kuhn, nor Mr. Mueller--lays stress on the saying of Urvasi,
'never let me see you without your royal garments, _for this is the
custom of women_.'[67] To our mind, these words contain the gist of
the myth. There must have been, at some time, a custom which forbade
women to see their husbands without their garments, or the words have
no meaning. If any custom of this kind existed, a story might well be
evolved to give a sanction to the law. 'You must never see your
husband naked: think what happened to Urvasi--she vanished clean
away!' This is the kind of warning which might be given. If the
customary prohibition had grown obsolete, the punishment might well be
assigned to a being of another, a spiritual race, in which old human
ideas lingered, as the neolithic dread of iron lingers in the Welsh
fairies.
Our method will be, to prove the existence of singular rules of
etiquette, corresponding to the etiquette accidentally infringed by
Pururavas. We shall then investigate stories of the same character as
that of Urvasi and Pururavas, in which the infringement of the
etiquette is chastised. It will be seen that, in most cases, the bride
is of a peculiar and perhaps supernatural race. Finally, the tale of
Urvasi will be taken up again, will be shown to conform in character
to the other stories examined, and will be explained as a myth told to
illustrate, or sanction, a nuptial etiquette.
The lives of savages are bound by the most closely-woven fetters of
custom. The simplest acts are 'tabooed,' a strict code regulates all
intercourse. Married life, especially, moves in the strangest fetters.
There will be nothing remarkable in the wide distribution of the myth
turning on nuptial etiquette, if this law of nuptial etiquette proves
to be also widely distributed. That it is widely distributed we now
propose to demonstrate by examples.
The custom of the African people of the kingdom of Futa is, or was,
even stricter than the Vedic _custom of women_--'wives never permit
their husbands to see them unveiled for three years after their
marriage.'[68]
In his _Travels to Timbuctoo_ (i. 94), Caillie says that the
bridegroom 'is not allowed to see his intended during the day.' He has
a tabooed hut apart, and 'if he is obliged to come out he covers his
face.' He 'remains with his wife only till daybreak'--like Cupid--and
flees, like Cupid, before the light. Among the Australians the chief
deity, if deity such a being can be called, Pundjel, 'has a wife
whose face he has never seen,' probably in compliance with some
primaeval etiquette or taboo.[69]
Among the Yorubas 'conventional modesty forbids a woman to speak to
her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided.'[70] Of the
Iroquois Lafitau says: 'Ils n'oscent aller dans les cabanes
particulieres ou habitent leurs epouses que durant l'obscurite de la
nuit.'[71] The Circassian women live on distant terms with their lords
till they become mothers.[72] Similar examples of reserve are reported
to be customary among the Fijians.
In backward parts of Europe a strange custom forbids the bride to
speak to her lord, as if in memory of a time when husband and wife
were always of alien tribes, and, as among the Caribs, spoke different
languages.
In the Bulgarian 'Volkslied,' the Sun marries Grozdanka, a mortal
girl. Her mother addresses her thus:--
Grozdanka, mother's treasure mine,
For nine long years I nourished thee,
For nine months see thou do not speak
To thy first love that marries thee.
M. Dozon, who has collected the Bulgarian songs, says that this custom
of prolonged silence on the part of the bride is very common in
Bulgaria, though it is beginning to yield to a sense of the
ludicrous.[73] In Sparta and in Crete, as is well known, the
bridegroom was long the victim of a somewhat similar taboo, and was
only permitted to seek the company of his wife secretly, and in the
dark, like the Iroquois described by Lafitau.
Herodotus tells us (i. 146) that some of the old Ionian colonists
'brought no women with them, but took wives of the women of the
Carians, whose fathers they had slain. Therefore the women made a law
for themselves, and handed it down to their daughters, that they
should never sit at meat with their husbands, and _that none should
ever call her husband by his name_.' In precisely the same way, in
Zululand the wife may not mention her husband's name, just as in the
Welsh fairy tale the husband may not even know the name of his fairy
bride, on pain of losing her for ever. These ideas about names, and
freakish ways of avoiding the use of names, mark the childhood of
languages, according to Mr. Max Mueller,[74] and, therefore, the
childhood of Society. The Kaffirs call this etiquette 'Hlonipa.' It
applies to women as well as men. A Kaffir bride is not called by her
own name in her husband's village, but is spoken of as 'mother of so
and so,' even before she has born a child. The universal superstition
about names is at the bottom of this custom. The Aleutian Islanders,
according to Dall, are quite distressed when obliged to speak to their
wives in the presence of others. The Fijians did not know where to
look when missionaries hinted that a man might live under the same
roof as his wife.[75] Among the Turkomans, for six months, a year, or
two years, a husband is only allowed to visit his wife by stealth.
The number of these instances could probably be increased by a little
research. Our argument is that the widely distributed myths in which a
husband or a wife transgresses some 'custom'--sees the other's face or
body, or utters the forbidden name--might well have arisen as tales
illustrating the punishment of breaking the rule. By a very curious
coincidence, a Breton sailor's tale of the 'Cupid and Psyche' class is
confessedly founded on the existence of the rule of nuptial
etiquette.[76]
In this story the son of a Boulogne pilot marries the daughter of the
King of Naz--wherever that may be. In Naz a man is never allowed to
see the face of his wife till she has born him a child--a modification
of the Futa rule. The inquisitive French husband unveils his wife,
and, like Psyche in Apuleius, drops wax from a candle on her cheek.
When the pair return to Naz, the king of that country discovers the
offence of the husband, and, by the aid of his magicians, transforms
the Frenchman into a monster. Here we have the old formula--the
infringement of a 'taboo,' and the magical punishment--adapted to the
ideas of Breton peasantry. The essential point of the story, for our
purpose, is that the veiling of the bride is 'the custom of women,' in
the mysterious land of Naz. 'C'est l'usage du pays: les maris ne
voient leurs femmes sans voile que lorsqu'elles sont devenues meres.'
Now our theory of the myth of Urvasi is simply this: 'the custom of
women,' which Pururavas transgresses, is probably a traditional Aryan
law of nuptial etiquette, _l'usage du pays_, once prevalent among the
people of India.
If our view be correct, then several rules of etiquette, and not one
alone, will be illustrated in the stories which we suppose the rules
to have suggested. In the case of Urvasi and Pururavas, the rule was,
not to see the husband naked. In 'Cupid and Psyche,' the husband was
not to be looked upon at all. In the well-known myth of Melusine, the
bride is not to be seen naked. Melusine tells her lover that she will
only abide with him _dum ipsam nudam non viderit_.[77] The same taboo
occurs in a Dutch _Maerchen_.[78]
We have now to examine a singular form of the myth, in which the
strange bride is not a fairy, or spiritual being, but an animal. In
this class of story the husband is usually forbidden to perform some
act which will recall to the bride the associations of her old animal
existence. The converse of the tale is the well-known legend of the
Forsaken Merman. The king of the sea permits his human wife to go to
church. The ancient sacred associations are revived, and the woman
returns no more.
She will not come though you call all day
Come away, come away.
Now, in the tales of the animal bride, it is her associations with her
former life among the beasts that are not to be revived, and when they
are re-awakened by the commission of some act which she has
forbidden, or the neglect of some precaution which she has enjoined,
she, like Urvasi, disappears.
* * * * *
The best known example of this variant of the tale is the story of
Bheki, in Sanskrit. Mr. Max Mueller has interpreted the myth in
accordance with his own method.[79] His difficulty is to account for
the belief that a king might marry a frog. Our ancestors, he remarks,
'were not idiots,' how then could they tell such a story? We might
reply that our ancestors, if we go far enough back, were savages, and
that such stories are the staple of savage myth. Mr. Mueller, however,
holds that an accidental corruption of language reduced Aryan fancy to
the savage level. He explains the corruption thus: 'We find, in
Sanskrit, that Bheki, the frog, was a beautiful girl, and that one
day, when sitting near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked
her to be his wife. She consented, _on condition that he should never
show her a drop of water_. One day, being tired, she asked the king
for water; the king forgot his promise, brought water, and Bheki
disappeared.' This myth, Mr. Mueller holds, 'began with a short saying,
such as that "Bheki, the sun, will die at the sight of water," as we
should say that the sun will set, when it approaches the water from
which it rose in the morning.' But how did the sun come to be called
Bheki, 'the frog'? Mr. Mueller supposes that this name was given to the
sun by some poet or fisherman. He gives no evidence for the following
statement: 'It can be shown that "frog" was used as a name for the
sun. Now at sunrise and sunset, when the sun was squatting on the
water, it was called the "frog."' At what historical period the
Sanskrit-speaking race was settled in seats where the sun rose and set
in water, we do not know, and 'chapter and verse' are needed for the
statement that 'frog' was actually a name of the sun. Mr. Mueller's
argument, however, is that the sun was called 'the frog,' that people
forgot that the frog and sun were identical, and that Frog, or Bheki,
was mistaken for the name of a girl to whom was applied the old saw
about dying at sight of water. 'And so,' says Mr. Mueller, 'the change
from sun to frog, and from frog to man, which was at first due to the
mere spell of language, would in our nursery tales be ascribed to
miraculous charms more familiar to a later age.' As a matter of fact,
magical metamorphoses are infinitely more familiar to the lowest
savages than to people in a 'later age.' Magic, as Castren observes,
'belongs to the lowest known stages of civilisation.' Mr. Mueller's
theory, however, is this--that a Sanskrit-speaking people, living
where the sun rose out of and set in some ocean, called the sun, as he
touched the water, Bheki, the frog, and said he would die at the sight
of water. They ceased to call the sun the frog, or Bheki, but kept the
saying, 'Bheki will die at sight of water.' Not knowing who or what
Bheki might be, they took her for a frog, who also was a pretty wench.
Lastly, they made the story of Bheki's distinguished wedding and
mysterious disappearance. For this interpretation, historical and
linguistic evidence is not offered. When did a Sanskrit-speaking race
live beside a great sea? How do we know that 'frog' was used as a name
for 'sun'?
* * * * *
We have already given our explanation. To the savage intellect, man
and beast are on a level, and all savage myth makes men descended from
beasts; while stories of the loves of gods in bestial shape, or the
unions of men and animals, incessantly occur. 'Unnatural' as these
notions seem to us, no ideas are more familiar to savages, and none
recur more frequently in Indo-Aryan, Scandinavian, and Greek
mythology. An extant tribe in North-West America still claims descent
from a frog. The wedding of Bheki and the king is a survival, in
Sanskrit, of a tale of this kind. Lastly, Bheki disappears, when her
associations with her old amphibious life are revived in the manner
she had expressly forbidden.
* * * * *
Our interpretation may be supported by an Ojibway parallel. A hunter
named Otter-heart, camping near a beaver lodge, found a pretty girl
loitering round his fire. She keeps his wigwam in order, and 'lays his
blanket near the deerskin she had laid for herself. "Good," he
muttered, "this is my wife."' She refuses to eat the beavers he has
shot, but at night he hears a noise, '_krch, krch_, as if beavers were
gnawing wood.' He sees, by the glimmer of the fire, his wife nibbling
birch twigs. In fact, the good little wife is a beaver, as the pretty
Indian girl was a frog. The pair lived happily till spring came and
the snow melted and the streams ran full. Then his wife implored the
hunter to build her a bridge over every stream and river, that she
might cross dry-footed. 'For,' she said, 'if my feet touch water, this
would at once cause thee great sorrow.' The hunter did as she bade
him, but left unbridged one tidy runnel. The wife stumbled into the
water, and, as soon as her foot was wet, she immediately resumed her
old shape as a beaver, her son became a beaverling, and the brooklet,
changing to a roaring river, bore them to the lake. Once the hunter
saw his wife again among her beast kin. 'To thee I sacrificed all,'
she said, 'and I only asked thee to help me dry-footed over the
waters. Thou didst cruelly neglect this. Now I must remain for ever
with my people.'
* * * * *
This tale was told to Kohl by 'an old insignificant squaw among the
Ojibways.'[80] Here we have a precise parallel to the tale of Bheki,
the frog-bride, and here the reason of the prohibition to touch water
is made perfectly unmistakable. The touch magically revived the
bride's old animal life with the beavers. Or was the Indian name for
beaver (_temakse_) once a name for the sun?
A curious variant of this widely distributed _Maerchen_ of the animal
bride is found in the mythical genealogy of the Raja of Chutia Nagpur,
a chief of the Naga, or snake race. It is said that Raja Janameja
prepared a _yajnya_, or great malevolently magical incantation, to
destroy all the people of the serpent race. To prevent this
annihilation, the supernatural being, Pundarika Nag, took a human
form, and became the husband of the beautiful Parvati, daughter of a
Brahman. But Pundarika Nag, being a serpent by nature, could not
divest himself, even in human shape, of his forked tongue and venomed
breath. And, just as Urvasi could not abide with her mortal lover,
after he transgressed the prohibition to appear before her naked, so
Pundarika Nag was compelled by fate to leave his bride, if she asked
him any questions about his disagreeable peculiarities. She did, at
last, ask questions, in circumstances which made Pundarika believe
that he was bound to answer her. Now the curse came upon him, he
plunged into a pool, like the beaver, and vanished. His wife became
the mother of the serpent Rajas of Chutia Nagpur. Pundarika Nag, in
his proper form as a great hooded snake, guarded his first-born child.
The crest of the house is a hooded snake with human face.[81]
Here, then, we have many examples of the disappearance of the bride or
bridegroom in consequence of infringement of various mystic rules.
Sometimes the beloved one is seen when he or she should not be seen.
Sometimes, as in a Maori story, the bride vanishes merely because she
is in a bad temper.[82] Among the Red Men, as in Sanskrit, the taboo
on water is broken, with the usual results. Now for an example in
which the rule against using _names_ is infringed.[83]
This formula constantly occurs in the Welsh fairy tales published by
Professor Rhys.[84] Thus the heir of Corwrion fell in love with a
fairy: 'They were married on the distinct understanding that the
husband was not to know her name, ... and was not to strike her with
iron, on pain of her leaving him at once.' Unluckily the man once
tossed her a bridle, the iron bit touched the wife, and 'she at once
flew through the air, and plunged headlong into Corwrion Lake.'
A number of tales turning on the same incident are published in
_Cymmrodor_, v. i. In these we have either the taboo on the name, or
the taboo on the touch of iron. In a widely diffused superstition iron
'drives away devils and ghosts,' according to the Scholiast on the
eleventh book of the _Odyssey_, and the Oriental Djinn also flee from
iron.[85] Just as water is fatal to the Aryan frog-bride and to the
Red Indian beaver-wife, restoring them to their old animal forms, so
the magic touch of iron breaks love between the Welshman and his fairy
mistress, the representative of the stone age.
In many tales of fairy-brides, they are won by a kind of force. The
lover in the familiar Welsh and German _Maerchen_ sees the swan-maidens
throw off their swan plumage and dance naked. He steals the
feather-garb of one of them, and so compels her to his love. Finally,
she leaves him, in anger, or because he has broken some taboo. Far
from being peculiar to Aryan mythology, this legend occurs, as Mr.
Farrer has shown,[86] in Algonquin and Bornoese tradition. The Red
Indian story told by Schoolcraft in his _Algic Researches_ is most
like the Aryan version, but has some native peculiarities. Wampee was
a great hunter, who, on the lonely prairie, once heard strains of
music. Looking up he saw a speck in the sky: the speck drew nearer and
nearer, and proved to be a basket containing twelve heavenly maidens.
They reached the earth and began to dance, inflaming the heart of
Wampee with love. But Wampee could not draw near the fairy girls in
his proper form without alarming them. Like Zeus in his love
adventures, Wampee exercised the medicine-man's power of
metamorphosing himself. He assumed the form of a mouse, approached
unobserved, and caught one of the dancing maidens. After living with
Wampee for some time she wearied of earth, and, by virtue of a 'mystic
chain of verse,' she ascended again to her heavenly home.
Now is there any reason to believe that this incident was once part of
the myth of Pururavas and Urvasi? Was the fairy-love, Urvasi,
originally caught and held by Pururavas among her naked and struggling
companions? Though this does not appear to have been much noticed, it
seems to follow from a speech of Pururavas in the Vedic dialogue[87]
(x. 95, 8, 9). Mr. Max Mueller translates thus: 'When I, the mortal,
threw my arms round those flighty immortals, they trembled away from
me like a trembling doe, like horses that kick against the cart.'[88]
Ludwig's rendering suits our view--that Pururavas is telling how he
first caught Urvasi--still better: 'When I, the mortal, held converse
with the immortals who had laid aside their raiment, like slippery
serpents they glided from me, like horses yoked to the car.' These
words would well express the adventure of a lover among the naked
flying swan-maidens, an adventure familiar to the Red Men as to
Persian legends of the Peris.
To end our comparison of myths like the tale of 'Cupid and Psyche,' we
find an example among the Zulus. Here[89] the mystic lover came in
when all was dark, and felt the damsel's face. After certain rites,
'in the morning he went away, he speaking continually, the girl not
seeing him. During all those days he would not allow the girl (_sic_),
when she said she would light a fire. Finally, after a magical
ceremony, he said, "Light the fire!" and stood before her revealed, a
shining shape.' This has a curious resemblance to the myth of Cupid
and Psyche; but a more curious detail remains. In the Zulu story of
Ukcombekcansini, the friends of a bride break a taboo and kill a
tabooed animal. Instantly, like Urvasi and her companions in the Yajur
Veda, the bride and her maidens disappear _and are turned into
birds_![90] They are afterwards surprised in human shape, and the
bride is restored to her lover.
Here we conclude, having traced parallels to Cupid and Psyche in many
non-Aryan lands. Our theory of the myth does not rest on etymology. We
have seen that the most renowned scholars, Max Mueller, Kuhn, Roth, all
analyse the names Urvasi and Pururavas in different ways, and extract
different interpretations. We have found the story where these names
were probably never heard of. We interpret it as a tale of the
intercourse between mortal men and immortal maids, or between men and
metamorphosed animals, as in India and North America. We explain the
separation of the lovers as the result of breaking a taboo, or law of
etiquette, binding among men and women, as well as between men and
fairies.
* * * * *
The taboos are, to see the beloved unveiled, to utter his or her name,
to touch her with a metal 'terrible to ghosts and spirits,' or to do
some action which will revive the associations of a former life. We
have shown that rules of nuptial etiquette resembling these in
character do exist, and have existed, even among Greeks--as where the
Milesian, like the Zulu, women made a law not to utter their husbands'
names. Finally, we think it a reasonable hypothesis that tales on the
pattern of 'Cupid and Psyche' might have been evolved wherever a
curious nuptial taboo required to be sanctioned, or explained, by a
myth. On this hypothesis, the stories may have been separately
invented in different lands; but there is also a chance that they have
been transmitted from people to people in the unknown past of our
scattered and wandering race. This theory seems at least as probable
as the hypothesis that the meaning of an Aryan proverbial statement
about sun and dawn was forgotten, and was altered unconsciously into a
tale which is found among various non-Aryan tribes. That hypothesis
again, learned and ingenious as it is, has the misfortune to be
opposed by other scholarly hypotheses not less ingenious and learned.
* * * * *
As for the sun-frog, we may hope that he has sunk for ever beneath the
western wave.
FOOTNOTES:
[58] That Pururavas is regarded as a mortal man, in relations with
some sort of spiritual mistress, appears from the poem itself (v. 8,
9, 18). The human character of Pururavas also appears in R. V., i. 31,
4.
[59] _Selected Essays_, i. 408.
[60] The Apsaras is an ideally beautiful fairy woman, something
'between the high gods and the lower grotesque beings,' with 'lotus
eyes' and other agreeable characteristics. A list of Apsaras known by
name is given in Meyer's _Gandharven-Kentauren_, p. 28. They are often
regarded as cloud-maidens by mythologists.
[61] _Selected Essays_, i. 405.
[62] Cf. _ruber_, _rufus_, O.H.G. _rot_, _rudhira_, ~erythros~; also
Sanskrit, _ravi_, sun.
[63] R. V., iii. 29, 3.
[64] The passage alluded to in Homer does not mean that dawn 'ends'
the day, but 'when the fair-tressed Dawn brought the full light of the
third day' (_Od._, v. 390).
[65] Liebrecht (_Zur Volkskunde_, 241) is reminded by Pururavas (in
Roth's sense of _der Brueller_) of loud-thundering Zeus, ~erigdoupos~.
[66] _Herabkunft des Feuers_, pp. 86-89.
[67] Liebrecht (_Zur Volkskunde_, p. 241) notices the reference to the
'custom of women.' But he thinks the clause a mere makeshift,
introduced late to account for a prohibition of which the real meaning
had been forgotten. The improbability of this view is indicated by the
frequency of similar prohibitions in actual custom.
[68] Astley, _Collection of Voyages_, ii. 24. This is given by Bluet
and Moore on the evidence of one Job Ben Solomon, a native of Bunda in
Futa. 'Though Job had a daughter by his last wife, yet he never saw
her without her veil, as having been married to her only two years.'
Excellently as this prohibition suits my theory, yet I confess I do
not like Job's security.
[69] Brough Smyth, i. 423.
[70] Bowen, _Central Africa_, p. 303.
[71] Lafitau, i. 576.
[72] Lubbock, _Origin of Civilisation_ (1875), p. 75.
[73] _Chansons Pop. Bulg._, p. 172.
[74] _Lectures on Language_, Second Series, p. 41.
[75] J. A. Farrer, _Primitive Manners_, p. 202, quoting Seeman.
[76] Sebillot, _Contes Pop. de la Haute-Bretagne_, p. 183.
[77] Gervase of Tilbury.
[78] Kuhn, _Herabkunft_, p. 92. See also _South African Journal of
Folklore_, May, 1879, p. 46: 'As a rule, the bridegroom never sees his
bride.'
[79] _Chips_, ii. 251.
[80] _Kitchi Gami_, p. 105.
[81] Dalton's _Ethnol. of Bengal_, pp. 165, 166.
[82] Taylor, _New Zealand_, p. 143.
[83] Liebrecht gives a Hindoo example, _Zur Volkskunde_, p. 239.
[84] _Cymmrodor_, iv. pt. ii.
[85] _Prim. Cult._, i. 140.
[86] _Primitive Manners_, p. 256.
[87] See Meyer, _Gandharven-Kentauren_, Benfey, _Pantsch._, i. 263.
[88] _Selected Essays_, i. 411.
[89] _Callaway_, p. 63.
[90] _Ibid._, p. 119.
_A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE._
A modern novelist has boasted that her books are read 'from Tobolsk to
Tangiers.' This is a wide circulation, but the widest circulation in
the world has probably been achieved by a story whose author, unlike
Ouida, will never be known to fame. The tale which we are about to
examine is, perhaps, of all myths the most widely diffused, yet there
is no ready way of accounting for its extraordinary popularity. Any
true 'nature-myth,' any myth which accounts for the processes of
nature or the aspects of natural phenomena, may conceivably have been
invented separately, wherever men in an early state of thought
observed the same facts, and attempted to explain them by telling a
story. Thus we have seen that the earlier part of the myth of Cronus
is a nature-myth, setting forth the cause of the separation of Heaven
and Earth. Star-myths, again, are everywhere similar, because men who
believed all nature to be animated and personal, accounted for the
grouping of constellations in accordance with these crude beliefs.[91]
Once more, if a story like that of 'Cupid and Psyche' be found among
the most diverse races, the distribution becomes intelligible if the
myth was invented to illustrate or enforce a widely prevalent custom.
But in the following story no such explanation is even provisionally
acceptable.
The gist of the tale (which has many different 'openings,' and
conclusions in different places) may be stated thus: A young man is
brought to the home of a hostile animal, a giant, cannibal, wizard, or
a malevolent king. He is put by his unfriendly host to various severe
trials, in which it is hoped that he will perish. In each trial he is
assisted by the daughter of his host. After achieving the adventures,
he elopes with the girl, and is pursued by her father. The runaway
pair throw various common objects behind them, which are changed into
magical obstacles and check the pursuit of the father. The myth has
various endings, usually happy, in various places. Another form of the
narrative is known, in which the visitors to the home of the hostile
being are, not wooers of his daughter, but brothers of his wife.[92]
The incidents of the flight, in this variant, are still of the same
character. Finally, when the flight is that of a brother from his
sister's malevolent ghost, in Hades (Japan), or of two sisters from a
cannibal mother or step-mother (Zulu and Samoyed), the events of the
flight and the magical aids to escape remain little altered. We shall
afterwards see that attempts have been made to interpret one of these
narratives as a nature-myth; but the attempts seem unsuccessful. We
are therefore at a loss to account for the wide diffusion of this
tale, unless it has been transmitted slowly from people to people, in
the immense unknown prehistoric past of the human race.
* * * * *
Before comparing the various forms of the myth in its first
shape--that which tells of the mortal lover and the giant's or
wizard's daughter--let us give the Scottish version of the story. This
version was written down for me, many years ago, by an aged lady in
Morayshire. I published it in the _Revue Celtique_; but it is probably
new to story-comparers, in its broad Scotch variant.
NICHT NOUGHT NOTHING.
There once lived a king and a queen. They were long married
and had no bairns: but at last the queen had a bairn, when
the king was away in far countries. The queen would not
christen the bairn till the king came back, and she said, 'We
will just call him _Nicht Nought Nothing_ until his father
comes home.' But it was long before he came home, and the boy
had grown a nice little laddie. At length the king was on his
way back; but he had a big river to cross, and there was a
spate, and he could not get over the water. But a giant came
up to him, and said, 'If you will give me Nicht Nought
Nothing, I will carry you over the water on my back.' The
king had never heard that his son was called Nicht Nought
Nothing, and so he promised him. When the king got home
again, he was very happy to see his wife again, and his young
son. She told him that she had not given the child any name
but Nicht Nought Nothing, until he should come home again
himself. The poor king was in a terrible case. He said, 'What
have I done? I promised to give the giant who carried me over
the river on his back, Nicht Nought Nothing.' The king and
the queen were sad and sorry, but they said, 'When the giant
comes we will give him the hen-wife's bairn; he will never
know the difference.' The next day the giant came to claim
the king's promise, and he sent for the hen-wife's bairn; and
the giant went away with the bairn on his back. He travelled
till he came to a big stone, and there he sat down to rest.
He said,
'Hidge Hodge, on my back, what time of day is it?'
The poor little bairn said, 'It is the time that my mother,
the hen-wife, takes up the eggs for the queen's breakfast.'
The giant was very angry, and dashed the bairn on the stone
and killed it.
* * * * *
The same adventure is repeated with the gardener's son.
* * * * *
Then the giant went back to the king's house, and said he
would destroy them all if they did not give him Nicht Nought
Nothing this time. They had to do it; and when he came to the
big stone, the giant said, 'What time of day is it?' Nicht
Nought Nothing said, 'It is the time that my father the king
will be sitting down to supper.' The giant said, 'I've got
the right ane noo;' and took Nicht Nought Nothing to his own
house and brought him up till he was a man.
The giant had a bonny dochter, and she and the lad grew very
fond of each other. The giant said one day to Nicht Nought
Nothing, 'I've work for you to-morrow. There is a stable
seven miles long and seven miles broad, and it has not been
cleaned for seven years, and you must clean it to-morrow, or
I will have you for my supper.'
The giant's dochter went out next morning with the lad's
breakfast, and found him in a terrible state, for aye as he
cleaned out a bit, it aye fell in again. The giant's dochter
said she would help him, and she cried a' the beasts o' the
field, and a' the fowls o' the air, and in a minute they a'
came, and carried awa' everything that was in the stable and
made a' clean before the giant came home. He said, 'Shame for
the wit that helped you; but I have a worse job for you
to-morrow.' Then he told Nicht Nought Nothing that there was
a loch seven miles long, and seven miles deep, and seven
miles broad, and he must drain it the next day, or else he
would have him for his supper. Nicht Nought Nothing began
early next morning and tried to lave the water with his pail,
but the loch was never getting any less, and he did no ken
what to do; but the giant's dochter called on all the fish in
the sea to come and drink the water, and very soon they drank
it dry. When the giant saw the work done he was in a rage,
and said, 'I've a worse job for you to-morrow; there is a
tree seven miles high, and no branch on it, till you get to
the top, and there is a nest, and you must bring down the
eggs without breaking one, or else I will have you for my
supper.' At first the giant's dochter did not know how to
help Nicht Nought Nothing; but she cut off first her fingers
and then her toes, and made steps of them, and he clamb the
tree, and got all the eggs safe till he came to the bottom,
and then one was broken. The giant's dochter advised him to
run away, and she would follow him. So he travelled until he
came to a king's palace, and the king and queen took him in
and were very kind to him. The giant's dochter left her
father's house, and he pursued her and was drowned. Then she
came to the king's palace where Nicht Nought Nothing was. And
she went up into a tree to watch for him. The gardener's
dochter, going to draw water in the well, saw the shadow of
the lady in the water, and thought it was herself, and said,
'If I'm so bonny, if I'm so brave, do you send me to draw
water?' The gardener's wife went out, and she said the same
thing. Then the gardener went himself, and brought the lady
from the tree, and led her in. And he told her that a
stranger was to marry the king's dochter, and showed her the
man: and it was Nicht Nought Nothing asleep in a chair. And
she saw him, and cried to him, 'Waken, waken, and speak to
me!' But he would not waken, and syne she cried,
'I cleaned the stable, I laved the loch, and I clamb
the tree,
And all for the love of thee,
And thou wilt not waken and speak to me.'
The king and the queen heard this, and came to the bonny
young lady, and she said,
'I canna get Nicht Nought Nothing to speak to me for all that
I can do.'
Then were they greatly astonished when she spoke of Nicht
Nought Nothing, and asked where he was, and she said, 'He
that sits there in the chair.' Then they ran to him and
kissed him and called him their own dear son, and he wakened,
and told them all that the giant's dochter had done for him,
and of all her kindness. Then they took her in their arms and
kissed her, and said she should now be their dochter, for
their son should marry her.
And they lived happy all their days.
In this variant of the story, which we may use as our text, it is to
be noticed that a _lacuna_ exists. The narrative of the flight omits
to mention that the runaways threw things behind them which became
obstacles in the giant's way. One of these objects probably turned
into a lake, in which the giant was drowned.[93] A common incident is
the throwing behind of a comb, which changes into a thicket. The
formula of leaving obstacles behind occurs in the Indian collection,
the 'Kathasarit sagara' (vii. xxxix.). 'The Battle of the Birds,' in
Campbell's _Tales of the West Highlands_, is a very copious Gaelic
variant. Russian parallels are 'Vasilissa the Wise and the Water
King,' and 'The King Bear.'[94] The incident of the flight and the
magical obstacles is found in Japanese mythology.[95] The 'ugly woman
of Hades' is sent to pursue the hero. He casts down his black
head-dress, and it is instantly turned into grapes; he fled while she
was eating them. Again, 'he cast down his multitudinous and
close-toothed comb, and it instantly turned into bamboo sprouts.' In
the Gaelic version, the pursuer is detained by talkative objects which
the pursued leave at home, and this marvel recurs in Zululand, and is
found among the Bushmen. The Zulu versions are numerous.[96] Oddly
enough, in the last variant, the girl performs no magic feat, but
merely throws sesamum on the ground to delay the cannibals, for
cannibals are very fond of sesamum.[97]
* * * * *
Here, then, we have the remarkable details of the flight, in Zulu,
Gaelic, Norse, Malagasy,[98] Russian, Italian, Japanese. Of all
incidents in the myth, the incidents of the flight are most widely
known. But the whole connected series of events--the coming of the
wooer; the love of the hostile being's daughter; the tasks imposed on
the wooer; the aid rendered by the daughter; the flight of the pair;
the defeat or destruction of the hostile being--all these, or most of
these, are extant, in due sequence, among the following races. The
Greeks have the tale, the people of Madagascar have it, the Lowland
Scotch, the Celts, the Russians, the Italians, the Algonquins, the
Finns, and the Samoans have it. Now if the story were confined to the
Aryan race, we might account for its diffusion, by supposing it to be
the common heritage of the Indo-European peoples, carried everywhere
with them in their wanderings. But when the tale is found in
Madagascar, North America, Samoa, and among the Finns, while many
scattered incidents occur in even more widely severed races, such as
Zulus, Bushmen, Japanese, Eskimo, Samoyeds, the Aryan hypothesis
becomes inadequate.
To show how closely, all things considered, the Aryan and non-Aryan
possessors of the tale agree, let us first examine the myth of Jason.
* * * * *
The earliest literary reference to the myth of Jason is in the _Iliad_
(vii. 467, xxiii. 747). Here we read of Euneos, a son whom Hypsipyle
bore to Jason in Lemnos. Already, even in the _Iliad_, the legend of
Argo's voyage has been fitted into certain well-known geographical
localities. A reference in the _Odyssey_ (xii. 72) has a more antique
ring: we are told that of all barques Argo alone escaped the jaws of
the Rocks Wandering, which clashed together and destroyed ships. Argo
escaped, it is said, 'because Jason was dear to Hera.' It is plain,
from various fragmentary notices, that Hesiod was familiar with
several of the adventures in the legend of Jason. In the _Theogony_
(993-998) Hesiod mentions the essential facts of the legend: how Jason
carried off from AEetes his daughter, 'after achieving the adventures,
many and grievous, which were laid upon him.' At what period the home
of AEetes was placed in Colchis, it is not easy to determine.
Mimnermus, a contemporary of Solon, makes the home of AEetes lie 'on
the brink of ocean,' a very vague description.[99] Pindar, on the
other hand, in the splendid Fourth Pythian Ode, already knows Colchis
as the scene of the loves and flight of Jason and Medea.
* * * * *
'Long were it for me to go by the beaten track,' says Pindar, 'and I
know a certain short path.' Like Pindar, we may abridge the tale of
Jason. He seeks the golden fleece in Colchis: AEetes offers it to him
as a prize for success in certain labours. By the aid of Medea, the
daughter of AEetes, the wizard king, Jason tames the fire-breathing
oxen, yokes them to the plough, and drives a furrow. By Medea's help
he conquers the children of the teeth of the dragon, subdues the snake
that guards the fleece of gold, and escapes, but is pursued by AEetes.
To detain AEetes, Medea throws behind the mangled remains of her own
brother, Apsyrtos, and the Colchians pursue no further than the scene
of this bloody deed. The savagery as this act survives even in the
work of a poet so late as Apollonius Rhodius (iv. 477), where we read
how Jason performed a rite of savage magic, mutilating the body of
Apsyrtos in a manner which was believed to appease the avenging ghost
of the slain. 'Thrice he tasted the blood, thrice spat it out between
his teeth,' a passage which the Scholiast says contains the
description of an archaic custom popular among murderers.
Beyond Tomi, where a popular etymology fixed the 'cutting up' of
Apsyrtos, we need not follow the fortunes of Jason and Medea. We have
already seen the wooer come to the hostile being, win his daughter's
love, achieve the adventures by her aid, and flee in her company,
delaying, by a horrible device, the advance of her pursuers. To these
incidents in the tale we confine our attention.
Many explanations of the Jason myth have been given by Scholars who
thought they recognised elemental phenomena in the characters. As
usual these explanations differ widely. Whenever a myth has to be
interpreted, it is certain that one set of Scholars will discover the
sun and the dawn, where another set will see the thunder-cloud and
lightning. The moon is thrown in at pleasure.
Preller[100] is a learned Scholar, with his own set of etymologies.
Jason is derived, he thinks, from ~iaomai~, to heal, because Jason
studied medicine under the Centaur Chiron. This is the view of the
Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius (i. 554). Jason, to Preller's mind, is
a form of Asclepius, 'a spirit of the spring with its soft suns and
fertile rains.' Medea is the moon. Medea, on the other hand, is a
lightning goddess, in the opinion of Schwartz.[101] No philological
reason is offered. Mr. Brown writes: 'The moon, as the night-light,
linked with Idyia-Daeira, is itself knowing, and so appears as Medeia
("the Wise").'
We must suppose, it seems, that either the soft spring rains and the
moon, or the dawn and the sun, or the lightning and the thunder-cloud,
in one arrangement or another, irresistibly suggested, to early Aryan
minds, the picture of a wooer, arriving in a hostile home, winning a
maiden's love, achieving adventures by her aid, fleeing with her from
her angry father and delaying his pursuit by various devices. Why the
spring, the moon, the lightning, the dawn--any of them or all of
them--should have suggested such a tale, let Scholars determine when
they have reconciled their own differences. It is more to our purpose
to follow the myth among Samoans, Algonquins, and Finns. None of these
races speak an Aryan language, and none can have been beguiled into
telling the same sort of tale by a disease of Aryan speech.
Samoa, where we find our story, is the name of a group of volcanic
islands in Central Polynesia. They are about 3000 miles from Sydney,
were first observed by Europeans in 1722, and are as far removed as
most spots from direct Aryan influences. Our position is, however,
that in the shiftings and migrations of peoples, the Jason tale has
somehow been swept, like a piece of drift-wood, on to the coasts of
Samoa. In the islands, the tale has an epical form, and is chanted in
a poem of twenty-six stanzas. There is something Greek, in the free
and happy life of the Samoans--something Greek, too, in this myth of
theirs. There was once a youth, Siati, famous for his singing, a young
Thamyris of Samoa. But as, according to Homer, 'the Muses met Thamyris
the Thracian, and made an end of his singing, for he boasted and said
that he would vanquish even the Muses if he sang against them,' so did
the Samoan god of song envy Siati. The god and the mortal sang a
match: the daughter of the god was to be the mortal's prize if he
proved victorious. Siati won, and he set off, riding on a shark, as
Arion rode the dolphin, to seek the home of the defeated deity. At
length he reached the shores divine, and thither strayed Puapae,
daughter of the god, looking for her comb which she had lost. 'Siati,'
said she, 'how camest thou hither?' 'I am come to seek the song-god,
and to wed his daughter.' 'My father,' said the maiden, 'is more a god
than a man; eat nothing he hands you, never sit on a high seat, lest
death follow.' So they were united in marriage. But the god, like
AEetes, was wroth, and began to set Siati upon perilous tasks: 'Build
me a house, and let it be finished this very day, else death and the
oven await thee.'[102]
Siati wept, but the god's daughter had the house built by the evening.
The other adventures were to fight a fierce dog, and to find a ring
lost at sea. Just as the Scotch giant's daughter cut off her fingers
to help her lover, so the Samoan god's daughter bade Siati cut her
body into pieces and cast her into the sea. There she became a fish,
and recovered the ring. They set off to the god's house, but met him
pursuing them, with the help of his other daughter. 'Puapae and Siati
threw down the comb; and it became a bush of thorns in the way to
intercept the god and Puanli,' the other daughter. Next they threw
down a bottle of earth, which became a mountain; 'and then followed
their bottle of water, and that became a sea, and drowned the god and
Puanli.'[103]
This old Samoan song contains nearly the closest savage parallel to
the various household tales which find their heroic and artistic shape
in the Jason saga. Still more surprising in its resemblances is the
Malagasy version of the narrative. In the Malagasy story, the
conclusion is almost identical with the winding up of the Scotch fairy
tale. The girl hides in a tree; her face, seen reflected in a well, is
mistaken by women for their own faces, and the recognition follows in
due course.[104]
Like most Red Indian versions of popular tales, the Algonquin form of
the Jason saga is strongly marked with the peculiarities of the race.
The story is recognisable, and that is all.
The opening, as usual, differs from other openings. Two children are
deserted in the wilderness, and grow up to manhood. One of them loses
an arrow in the water; the elder brother, Panigwun, wades after it. A
magical canoe flies past: an old magician, who is alone in the canoe,
seizes Panigwun and carries him off. The canoe fleets along, like the
barques of the Phaeacians, at the will of the magician, and reaches the
isle where, like the Samoan god of song, he dwells with his two
daughters. 'Here, my daughter,' said he, 'is a young man for your
husband.' But the daughter knew that the proposed husband was but
another victim of the old man's magic arts. By the daughter's advice,
Panigwun escaped in the magic barque, consoled his brother, and
returned to the island. Next day the magician, Mishosha, set the young
man to hard tasks and perilous adventures. He was to gather gulls'
eggs; but the gulls attacked him in dense crowds. By an incantation he
subdued the birds, and made them carry him home to the island. Next
day he was sent to gather pebbles, that he might be attacked and eaten
by the king of the fishes. Once more the young man, like the Finnish
Ilmarinen in Pohjola, subdued the mighty fish, and went back
triumphant. The third adventure, as in 'Nicht Nought Nothing,' was to
climb a tree of extraordinary height in search of a bird's nest. Here,
again, the youth succeeded, and finally conspired with the daughters
to slay the old magician. Lastly the boy turned the magician into a
sycamore tree, and won his daughter. The other daughter was given to
the brother who had no share in the perils.[105] Here we miss the
incident of the flight;[106] and the magician's daughter, though in
love with the hero, does not aid him to perform the feats. Perhaps an
Algonquin brave would scorn the assistance of a girl. In the
'Kalevala,' the old hero, Waeinaemoeinen, and his friend Ilmarinen, set
off to the mysterious and hostile land of Pohjola to win a bride. The
maiden of Pohjola loses her heart to Ilmarinen, and, by her aid, he
bridles the wolf and bear, ploughs a field of adders with a plough of
gold, and conquers the gigantic pike that swims in the Styx of Finnish
mythology. After this point the story is interrupted by a long sequel
of popular bridal songs, and, in the wandering course of the rather
aimless epic, the flight and its incidents have been forgotten, or are
neglected. These incidents recur, however, in the thread of somewhat
different plots. We have seen that they are found in Japan, among the
Eskimo, among the Bushmen, the Samoyeds, and the Zulus, as well as in
Hungarian, Magyar, Celtic, and other European household tales.
The conclusion appears to be that the central part of the Jason myth
is incapable of being explained, either as a nature-myth, or as a myth
founded on a disease of language. So many languages could not take the
same malady in the same way; nor can we imagine any series of natural
phenomena that would inevitably suggest this tale to so many diverse
races. We must suppose, therefore, either that all wits jumped and
invented the same romantic series of situations by accident, or that
all men spread from one centre, where the story was known, or that the
story, once invented, has drifted all round the world. If the last
theory be approved of, the tale will be like the Indian Ocean shell
found lately in the Polish bone-cave,[107] or like the Egyptian beads
discovered in the soil of Dahomey. The story will have been carried
hither and thither, in the remotest times, to the remotest shores, by
traders, by slaves, by captives in war, or by women torn from their
own tribe and forcibly settled as wives among alien peoples.
Stories of this kind are everywhere the natural property of mothers
and grandmothers. When we remember how widely diffused is the law of
exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the same
stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must
have been introduced with alien wives. Where husband and wife, as
often happened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably
bring the hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange
speech. By all these agencies, working through dateless time, we may
account for the diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of tales
like the central arrangement of incidents in the career of Jason.
FOOTNOTES:
[91] _Primitive Culture_, i. 357: 'The savage sees individual stars as
animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial
creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with them.'
[92] This formula occurs among Bushmen and Eskimo (Bleek and Rink).
[93] The events of the flight are recorded correctly in the Gaelic
variant 'The Battle of the Birds.' (Campbell, _Tales of the West
Highlands_, vol. i. p. 25.)
[94] Ralston, _Russian Folk Tales_, 132; Koehler, _Orient und
Occident_, ii. 107, 114.
[95] _Ko ti ki_, p. 36.
[96] _Callaway_, pp. 51, 53, 64, 145, 228.
[97] See also 'Petrosinella' in the _Pentamerone_, and 'The
Master-maid' in Dasent's _Tales from the Norse_.
[98] _Folklore Journal_, August, 1883.
[99] _Poetae Minores Gr._, ii.
[100] _Gr. My._, ii. 318.
[101] _Sonne, Mond und Sterne_, pp. 213, 229.
[102] This proves that the tale belongs to the pre-Christian cannibal
age.
[103] Turner's _Samoa_, p. 102. In this tale only the names of the
daughters are translated; they mean 'white fish' and 'dark fish.'
[104] _Folklore Journal_, August, 1883.
[105] Schoolcraft, _Algic Researches_, ii. 94-104.
[106] The Red Indian version of the flight is given in 'The Red Horse
of the Dacotahs,' _Century Magazine_, 1884.
[107] _Nature_, March 14, 1884.
_APOLLO AND THE MOUSE._
Why is Apollo, especially the Apollo of the Troad, he who showered the
darts of pestilence among the Greeks, so constantly associated with a
mouse? The very name, Smintheus, by which his favourite priest calls
on him in the _Iliad_ (i. 39), might be rendered 'Mouse Apollo,' or
'Apollo, Lord of Mice.' As we shall see later, mice lived beneath the
altar, and were fed in the holy of holies of the god, and an image of
a mouse was placed beside or upon his sacred tripod. The ancients were
puzzled by these things, and, as will be shown, accounted for them by
'mouse-stories,' ~Sminthiakoi logoi~, so styled by Eustathius, the
mediaeval interpreter of Homer. Following our usual method, let us ask
whether similar phenomena occur elsewhere, in countries where they are
intelligible. Did insignificant animals elsewhere receive worship:
were their effigies elsewhere placed in the temples of a purer creed?
We find answers in the history of Peruvian religion.
After the Spanish conquest of Peru, one of the European adventurers,
Don Garcilasso de la Vega, married an Inca princess. Their son, also
named Garcilasso, was born about 1540. His famous book, _Commentarias
Reales_, contains the most authentic account of the old Peruvian
beliefs. Garcilasso was learned in all the learning of the Europeans,
and, as an Inca on the mother's side, had claims on the loyalty of the
defeated race. He set himself diligently to collect both their
priestly and popular traditions, and his account of them is the more
trustworthy as it coincides with what we know to have been true in
lands with which Garcilasso had little acquaintance.
* * * * *
To Garcilasso's mind, Peruvian religion seems to be divided into two
periods--the age before, and the age which followed the accession of
the Incas, and their establishment of sun-worship as the creed of the
State. In the earlier period, the pre-Inca period, he tells us 'an
Indian was not accounted honourable unless he was descended from a
fountain, river, 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.'[108] To these
worshipful creatures 'men offered what they usually saw them eat' (i.
53). But men were not content to adore large and dangerous animals.
'There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did
not worship as a god,' including 'lizards, toads, and frogs.' In the
midst of these superstitions the Incas appeared. Just as the tribes
claimed descent from animals, great or small, so the Incas drew
_their_ pedigree from the sun, which they adored like the _gens_ of
the Aurelii in Rome.[109] Thus every Indian had his _pacarissa_, or,
as the North American Indians say, _totem_,[110] a natural object
from which he claimed descent, and which, in a certain degree, he
worshipped. Though sun-worship became the established religion,
worship of the animal _pacarissas_ was still tolerated. The
sun-temples also contained _huacas_, or images, of the beasts which
the Indians had venerated.[111] In the great temple of Pachacamac,
the most spiritual and abstract god of Peruvian faith, 'they
worshipped a she-fox and an emerald. The devil also appeared to them,
and spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce.'[112] This toleration
of an older and cruder, in subordination to a purer, faith is a very
common feature in religious evolution. In Catholic countries, to this
day, we may watch, in Holy Week, the Adonis feast described by
Theocritus,[113] and the procession and entombment of the old god of
spring.
'The Incas had the good policy to collect all the tribal animal gods
into their temples in and round Cuzco, in which the two leading gods
were the Master of Life, and the Sun.' Did a process of this sort ever
occur in Greek religion, and were older animal gods ever collected
into the temples of such deities as Apollo?
* * * * *
While a great deal of scattered evidence about many animals
consecrated to Greek gods points in this direction, it will be enough,
for the present, to examine the case of the Sacred Mice. Among races
which are still in the totemistic stage, which still claim descent
from animals and from other objects, a peculiar marriage law generally
exists, or can be shown to have existed. No man may marry a woman who
is descended from the same ancestral animal, and who bears the same
totem-name, and carries the same badge or family crest, as himself. A
man descended from the Crane, and whose family name is Crane, cannot
marry a woman whose family name is Crane. He must marry a woman of the
Wolf, or Turtle, or Swan, or other name, and her children keep her
family title, not his. Thus, if a Crane man marries a Swan woman, the
children are Swans, and none of them may marry a Swan; they must marry
Turtles, Wolves, or what not, and _their_ children, again, are
Turtles, or Wolves. Thus there is necessarily an eternal come and go
of all the animal names known in a district. As civilisation advances
these rules grow obsolete. People take their names from the father, as
among ourselves. Finally the dwellers in a given district, having
become united into a local tribe, are apt to drop the various animal
titles and to adopt, as the name of the whole tribe, the name of the
chief, or of the predominating family. Let us imagine a district of
some twenty miles in which there are Crane, Wolf, Turtle, and Swan
families. Long residence together, and common interests, have welded
them into a local tribe. The chief is of the Wolf family, and the
tribe, sinking family differences and family names, calls itself 'the
Wolves.' Such tribes were probably, in the beginning, the inhabitants
of the various Egyptian towns which severally worshipped the wolf, or
the sheep, or the crocodile, and abstained religiously (except on
certain sacrificial occasions) from the flesh of the animal that gave
them its name.[114]
* * * * *
It has taken us long to reach the Sacred Mice of Greek religion, but
we are now in a position to approach their august divinity. We have
seen that the sun-worship superseded, without abolishing, the tribal
_pacarissas_ in Peru, and that the _huacas_, or images, of the sacred
animals were admitted under the roof of the temple of the Sun. Now it
is recognised that the temples of the Sminthian Apollo contained
images of sacred mice among other animals, and our argument is that
here, perhaps, we have another example of the Peruvian religious
evolution. Just as, in Peru, the tribes adored 'vile and filthy'
animals, just as the solar worship of the Incas subordinated these,
just as the _huacas_ of the beasts remained in the temples of the
Peruvian Sun; so, we believe, the tribes along the Mediterranean
coasts had, at some very remote prehistoric period, their animal
_pacarissas_; these were subordinated to the religion (to some extent
solar) of Apollo; and the _huacas_, or animal idols, survived in
Apollo's temples.
* * * * *
If this theory be correct, we shall probably find the mouse, for
example, revered as a sacred animal in many places. This would
necessarily follow, if the marriage customs which we have described
ever prevailed on Greek soil, and scattered the mouse-name far and
wide.[115] Traces of the Mouse families, and of adoration, if
adoration there was of the mouse, would linger on in the following
shapes: (1) Places would be named from mice, and mice would be
actually held sacred in themselves. (2) The mouse-name would be given
locally to the god who superseded the mouse. (3) The figure of the
mouse would be associated with the god, and used as a badge, or a kind
of crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has been a
venerated animal. (4) Finally, myths would be told to account for the
sacredness of a creature so undignified.
Let us take these considerations in their order:--
(1) If there were local mice tribes, deriving their name from the
worshipful mouse, certain towns settled by these tribes would retain a
reverence for mice.
In Chrysa, a town of the Troad, according to Heraclides Ponticus, mice
were held sacred, the local name for mouse being ~sminthos~. Many
places bore this mouse-name, according to Strabo.[116] This is
precisely what would have occurred had the Mouse totem, and the Mouse
stock, been widely distributed.[117] The Scholiast[118] mentions
Sminthus as a place in the Troad. Strabo speaks of two places deriving
their name from Sminthus, or mouse, near the Sminthian temple, and
others near Larissa. In Rhodes and Lindus, the mouse place-name
recurs, 'and in many other districts' (~Kai allothi de pollachothi~).
Strabo (x. 486) names Caressus, and Poeessa, in Ceos, among the other
places which has Sminthian temples, and, presumably, were once centres
of tribes named after the mouse.
Here, then, are a number of localities in which the Mouse Apollo was
adored, and where the old mouse-name lingered. That the mice were
actually held sacred in their proper persons we learn from AElian. 'The
dwellers in Hamaxitus of the Troad worship mice,' says AElian. 'In the
temple of Apollo Smintheus, mice are nourished, and food is offered to
them at the public expense, and white mice dwell beneath the
altar.'[119] In the same way we found that the Peruvians fed their
sacred beasts on what they usually saw them eat.
(2) The second point in our argument has already been sufficiently
demonstrated. The mouse-name 'Smintheus' was given to Apollo in all
the places mentioned by Strabo, 'and many others.'
(3) The figure of the mouse will be associated with the god, and used
as a badge, or crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has
been a venerated animal.
The passage already quoted from AElian informs us that there stood 'an
effigy of the mouse beside the tripod of Apollo.' In Chrysa,
according to Strabo (xiii. 604), the statue of Apollo Smintheus had a
mouse beneath his foot. The mouse on the tripod of Apollo is
represented on a bas-relief illustrating the plague, and the offerings
of the Greeks to Apollo Smintheus, as described in the first book of
the _Iliad_.[120]
* * * * *
The mouse is not an uncommon local badge or crest in Greece. The
animals whose figures are stamped on coins, like the Athenian owl, are
the most ancient marks of cities. It is plausible conjecture that,
just as the Iroquois when they signed treaties with the Europeans used
their totems--bear, wolf, and turtle--as seals,[121] so the animals on
archaic Greek city coins represented crests or badges which, at some
far more remote period, had been totems.
The Argives, according to Pollux,[122] stamped the mouse on their
coins.[123] As there was a temple of Apollo Smintheus in Tenedos, we
naturally hear of a mouse on the coins of the island.[124] Golzio has
published one of these mouse coins. The people of Metapontum stamped
their money with a mouse gnawing an ear of corn. The people of Cumae
employed a mouse dormant. Paoli fancied that certain mice on Roman
medals might be connected with the family of _Mus_, but this is rather
guesswork.[125]
We have now shown traces, at least, of various ways in which an early
tribal religion of the mouse--the mouse _pacarissa_, as the Peruvians
said--may have been perpetuated. When we consider that the superseding
of the mouse by Apollo must have occurred, if it did occur, long
before Homer, we may rather wonder that the mouse left his mark on
Greek religion so long. We have seen mice revered, a god with a
mouse-name, the mouse-name recurring in many places, the _huaca_, or
idol of the mouse, preserved in the temples of the god, and the
mouse-badge used in several widely severed localities. It remains (4)
to examine the myths about mice. These, in our opinion, were probably
told to account for the presence of the _huaca_ of the mouse in
temples, and for the occurrence of the animal in religion, and his
connection with Apollo.
A singular mouse-myth, narrated by Herodotus, is worth examining for
reasons which will appear later, though the events are said to have
happened on Egyptian soil.[126] According to Herodotus, one Sethos, a
priest of Hephaestus (Ptah), was king of Egypt. He had disgraced the
military class, and he found himself without an army when Sennacherib
invaded his country. Sethos fell asleep in the temple, and the god,
appearing to him in a vision, told him that divine succour would come
to the Egyptians.[127] In the night before the battle, field-mice
gnawed the quivers and shield-handles of the foe, who fled on finding
themselves thus disarmed. 'And now,' says Herodotus, 'there standeth a
stone image of this king in the temple of Hephaestus, and in the hand
of the image a mouse, and there is this inscription, "Let whoso
looketh on me be pious."'
Prof. Sayce[128] holds that there was no such person as Sethos, but
that the legend 'is evidently Egyptian, not Greek, and the name of
Sennacherib, as well as the fact of the Assyrian attack, is correct.'
The legend also, though Egyptian, is 'an echo of the biblical account
of the destruction of the Assyrian army,' an account which omits the
mice. 'As to the mice, here,' says Prof. Sayce, 'we have to do again
with the Greek dragomen (_sic_). The story of Sethos was attached to
the statue of some deity which was supposed to hold a mouse in its
hand.' It must have been easy to verify this supposition; but Mr.
Sayce adds, 'mice were not sacred in Egypt, nor were they used as
symbols, or found on the monuments.' To this remark we may suggest
some exceptions. Apparently this one mouse _was_ found on the
monuments. Wilkinson (iii. 264) says mice do occur in the sculptures,
but they were not sacred. Rats, however, were certainly sacred, and as
little distinction is taken, in myth, between rats and mice as between
rabbits and hares. The rat was sacred to Ra, the Sun-god, and (like
all totems) was not to be eaten.[129] This association of the rat and
the Sun cannot but remind us of Apollo and his mouse. According to
Strabo, a certain city of Egypt did worship the shrew-mouse. The
Athribitae, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis, are the people to whom he
attributes this cult, whom he mentions (xvii. 831) among the other
local animal-worships of Egypt.[130] Several porcelain examples of the
field-mouse sacred to Horus (commonly called Apollo by the Greeks) may
be seen in the British Museum.
That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on
the evidence of the Ritual of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian
art. Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue
'had a mouse on its hand.' Elsewhere, it is certain that the story of
the mice gnawing the bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation
of mouse-worship. One of the Trojan 'mouse-stories' ran--that
emigrants had set out in prehistoric times from Crete. The oracle
advised them to settle 'wherever they were attacked by the children of
the soil.' At Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night
by mice, which ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings.
The colonists made up their mind that these mice were 'the children of
the soil,' settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo.[131] A myth of
this sort may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name; or
a Mouse tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have
been settled on the spot, and may even have resisted invasion.[132]
Another myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse
Apollo on the hypothesis that he had once freed the land from mice,
like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose pipe (still serviceable) is said
to have been found in his grave by men who were digging a mine.[133]
Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the
mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally
spring up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god
or of the mouse. We have explained the religious character of mice as
the relics of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse
family names had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been,
mice totems and mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the
Mediterranean is proved by Prof. Robertson Smith:[134] 'Achbor, the
mouse, is an Edomite name, apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and
another mouse-name are among the Arabs. The same name occurs in
Judah.' Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not
eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial
occasions. The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult.
In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to refer to one or other of
these practices (lxvi.): 'They that sanctify themselves, and purify
themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's
flesh, and the abomination, and the _mouse_, shall be consumed
together, saith the Lord.' This is like the Egyptian prohibition to
eat 'the abominable' (that is, tabooed or forbidden) 'Rat of Ra.' If
the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan,
then the mouse was a totem,[135] for the chosen people were forbidden
to eat 'the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.'
That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally totems,
Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where 'we
find seventy of the elders of Israel--that is, the heads of
houses--worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures of
all manner of unclean' (tabooed) 'creeping things, and quadrupeds,
_even all the idols of the House of Israel_.' Some have too hastily
concluded that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring
Philistines. After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set it in
the house of Dagon, the people were smitten with disease. They
therefore, in accordance with a well-known savage magical practice,
made five golden representations of the diseased part, and five golden
mice, as 'a trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,' and so restored
the Ark.[136] Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic
countries, and the mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines
had ever worshipped mice.
* * * * *
Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic,
and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the
sacred animal of Rudra. 'The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast,' says the
Yajur Veda, as rendered by Grohmann in his _Apollo Smintheus_.
Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics
of Apollo. In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of
Ganeca, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is represented in art with his
foot upon a mouse.
Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion. If he
really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his
prevalence in connection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven
in Hellenism. Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at
home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own
Apollo-worship. In that case the mouse, while still originally a
totem, would not be an Aryan totem. But probably the myths and rites
of the mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our
theory than on that of De Gubernatis: 'The Pagan Sun-god crushes
under his foot the Mouse of Night. When the cat's away, the mice may
play; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.'[137] This
is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when
the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) _cannot_ play:
there is no light to produce a shadow. As usually chances, the
Scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical
phenomena do not agree among themselves about the mouse. While the
mouse is the night according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's
opinion the mouse is the lightning. He argues that the lightning was
originally regarded by the Aryan race as the 'flashing tooth of a
beast,' especially of a mouse. Afterwards men came to identify the
beast with his teeth, and, behold the lightning and the mouse are
convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that savages
regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the
result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent;[138]
thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in
Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a
heavenly cow--an idea recurring in the _Zend Avesta_. But it does not
follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all
the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a
serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on
earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite
unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a
mouse's teeth. The hypothesis is a _jeu d'esprit_, like the opposite
hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other
current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship
of ordinary mice, and such small deer, has been either wholly
neglected, or explained by the first theory of symbolism that occurred
to the conjecture of a civilised observer. The facts of savage
animal-worship, and their relations to totemism, seem still unknown to
or unappreciated by Scholars, with the exception of Mr. Sayce, who
recognises totemism as the origin of the zoomorphic element in
Egyptian religion.
Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an
isolated case. If Apollo superseded and absorbed the worship of the
mouse, he did no less for the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, and several
other animals whose images were associated with his own. The Greek
religion was more refined and anthropomorphic than that of Egypt. In
Egypt the animals were still adored, and the images of the gods had
bestial heads. In Greece only a few gods, and chiefly in very archaic
statues, had bestial heads; but besides the other deities the sculptor
set the owl, eagle, wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or whatever
creature was the local favourite of the deity.[139] Probably the deity
had, in the majority of cases, superseded the animal and succeeded to
his honours. But the conservative religious sentiment retained the
beast within the courts and in the suit and service of the
anthropomorphic god.[140]
The process by which the god ousted the beasts may perhaps be
observed in Samoa. There (as Dr. Turner tells us in his _Samoa_) each
family has its own sacred animal, which it may not eat. If this law be
transgressed, the malefactor is supernaturally punished in a variety
of ways. But, while each family has thus its totem, four or five
different families recognise, in owl, crab, lizard, and so on,
incarnations of the same god, say of Tongo. If Tongo had a temple
among these families, we can readily believe that images of the
various beasts in which he was incarnate would be kept within the
consecrated walls. Savage ideas like these, if they were ever
entertained in Greece, would account for the holy animals of the
different deities. But it is obvious that the phenomena which we have
been studying may be otherwise explained. It may be said that the
Sminthian Apollo was only revered as the enemy and opponent of mice.
St. Gertrude (whose heart was eaten by mice) has the same _role_ in
France.[141] The worship of Apollo, and the badge of the mouse, would,
on this principle, be diffused by colonies from some centre of the
faith. The images of mice in Apollo's temples would be nothing more
than votive offerings. Thus, in the church of a Saxon town, the verger
shows a silver mouse dedicated to Our Lady. 'This is the greatest of
our treasures,' says the verger. 'Our town was overrun with mice till
the ladies of the city offered this mouse of silver. Instantly all the
mice disappeared.' 'And are you such fools as to believe that the
creatures went away because a silver mouse was dedicated?' asked a
Prussian officer. 'No,' replied the verger, rather neatly; 'or long
ago we should have offered a silver Prussian.'
FOOTNOTES:
[108] _Comm. Real._, i. 75.
[109] See _Early History of the Family_, _infra_.
[110] The names _Totem_ and _Totemism_ have been in use at least since
1792, among writers on the North American tribes. Prof. Max Mueller
(_Academy_, Jan., 1884) says the word should be, not _Totem_, but
_Ote_ or _Otem_. Mr. Tylor's inquiries among the Red Men support this.
Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the word _Totamism_
in 1792; but Lafitau (1724) had already explained some classical myths
as survivals of Totemism.
[111] Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.
[112] Cieza de Leon, p. 183.
[113] _Idyll_ xv.
[114] Sayce, _Herodotos_, p. 344; Herodotus, ii. 42; Wilkinson's
_Ancient Egyptians_ (1878, ii. 475, note 2); Plutarch, _De Is. et
Os._, 71, 72; Athenaeus, vii. 299; Strabo, xvii. 813.
[115] The Mouse, according to Dalton, is still a totem among the
Oraons of Bengal. A man of the Mouse 'motherhood,' as the totem
kindred is locally styled, may not eat mice (esteemed a delicacy), nor
marry a girl who is a Mouse.
[116] xiii. 604. Casaub. 1620.
[117] There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete
(De Witte, _Revue Numismatique_, N.S. iii. 3-11).
[118] _Iliad_, i. 39.
[119] AElian, _H. A._, xii. 5.
[120] The bas-relief is published in Paoli's _Della Religi ne de'
Gentili_, Naples, 1771, p. 9; also by Fabretti, ad Cal. Oper. _de
Colum. Trajan._, p. 315. Paoli's book was written after the discovery
in Neapolitan territory of a small bronze image, hieratic in
character, representing a man with a mouse on his hand. Paoli's
engraving of this work of art, unluckily, does not enable us to
determine its date or _provenance_. The book is a mine of mouse-lore.
[121] Colden, _History of the Five Nations_, p. 15 (1727).
[122] _Onomast._, ix. segm. 84.
[123] De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here. In the _Revue
Numismatique_, N.S. iii., De Witte publishes coins of Alexandria, the
more ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad. The Sminthian Apollo is
represented with his bow, and the mouse on his hand. Other coins show
the god with the mouse at his foot, or show us the lyre of Apollo
supported by mice. A bronze coin in the British Museum gives Apollo
with the mouse beside his foot.
[124] _Spanheim_, ad Fl. Joseph., vi. 1, p. 312.
[125] _Della Rel._, p. 174.
[126] Herodotus, ii. 141.
[127] Liebrecht (_Zur Volkskunde_, p. 13, quoting _Journal Asiatique_,
1st series, 3, 307) finds the same myth in Chinese annals. It is not a
god, however, but the king of the rats who appears to the distressed
monarch in his dream. Rats then gnaw the bowstrings of his enemies.
The invaders were Turks, the rescued prince a king of Khotan. The king
raised a temple, and offered sacrifice--to the rats? The same story of
rats gnawing bowstrings recurs, of all places, in the _Migration
Legend of the Greeks_ (Brinton, Philadelphia. 1884).
[128] _Herodotos_, p. 204.
[129] Wilkinson, iii. 249, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: 'Thou devourest
the abominable rat of Ra, or the Sun.'
[130] Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the
throne-name of Thothmes III. The animals thus used as substitutes for
scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all
represented in Mr. Loftie's collection. See his _Essay of Scarabs_, p.
27. It may be admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the
religion of the Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed.
[Illustration: {Two examples of scarab substitutes}]
[131] Strabo, xiii. 604.
[132] Eustathius on _Iliad_, i. 39.
[133] _A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of
Mice_, 1670.
[134] _Journal of Philol._, xvii. p. 96.
[135] Leviticus xi. 29.
[136] Samuel i. 5, 6.
[137] _Zool. Myth._, ii. 68.
[138] _Melusine_, N.S. i.
[139] _De Iside et Osiride_, lxxvi.
[140] This hypothesis does not maintain that totemism prevailed in
Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions a Carian
~genos~, the Ioxidae, of Attic descent, which revered asparagus, it is
probable that genuine totemism had died out of Greece many hundreds of
years before even Homer's time. But this view is not inconsistent with
the existence of survivals in religion and ritual.
[141] Rolland, _Faune populaire_.
_STAR MYTHS._
Artemus Ward used to say that, while there were many things in the
science of astronomy hard to be understood, there was one fact which
entirely puzzled him. He could partly perceive how we 'weigh the sun,'
and ascertain the component elements of the heavenly bodies, by the
aid of _spectrum_ analysis. 'But what beats me about the stars,' he
observed plaintively, 'is how we come to know their names.' This
question, or rather the somewhat similar question, 'How did the
constellations come by their very peculiar names?' has puzzled
Professor Pritchard and other astronomers more serious than Artemus
Ward. Why is a group of stars called the _Bear_, or the _Swan_, or the
_Twins_, or named after the _Pleiades_, the fair daughters of the
Giant Atlas?[142] These are difficulties that meet even children when
they examine a 'celestial globe.' There they find the figure of a
bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between the stars of the
constellations, while a very imposing giant is so drawn that Orion's
belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the heavens,
the infant speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the
stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of
Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it
will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal
forms in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the
names of men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial
things, it is true, every one can behold in the heavens. _Corona_, for
example, is like a crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it
is like a boomerang, and we can understand why they give it the name
of that curious curved missile. The _Milky Way_,
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