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Mysticism
1911
Encyclopædia Britannica
Volume 19
Mythology
by
Andrew Lang
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2541874
1911
Encyclopædia Britannica
Volume 19
— Mythology
Andrew Lang
MYTHOLOGY
(Gr.
μυθολογία
, the science which examines
μῦθα
myths or legends of cosmogony and of gods and
heroes. Mythology is also used as a term for these legends
themselves. Thus when we speak of “the mythology of Greece”
we mean the whole body of Greek divine and heroic and cosmogonic
legends. When we speak of the “science of mythology”
we refer to the various attempts which have been made to
explain these ancient narratives. Very early indeed in the
history of human thought men awoke to the consciousness
that their religious stories were much in want of explanation.
The myths of civilized peoples, as of Greeks and the Aryans of
India, contain two elements, the rational and what to modern
minds seems the irrational. The rational myths are those
which represent the gods as beautiful and wise beings. The
Artemis of the
Odyssey
“taking her pastime in the chase of
boars and swift deer, while with her the wild wood-nymphs
disport them, and high over them all she rears her brow, and
is easily to be known where all are fair,” is a perfectly rational
mythic representation of a divine being. We feel, even now,
that the conception of a “queen and huntress, chaste and fair,”
the lady warden of the woodlands, is a beautiful and natural
fancy which requires no explanation. On the other hand, the
Artemis of Arcadia, who is confused with the nymph Callisto,
who, again, is said to have become a she-bear, and later a star
and the Brauronian Artemis, whose maiden ministers danced
a bear-dance, are goddesses whose legend seems unnatural,
and is felt to need explanation. Or, again, there is nothing
not explicable and natural in the conception of the Olympian
Zeus as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of
Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus as a god
who “turns everywhere his shining eyes” and beholds all
things. But the Zeus whose grave was shown in Crete, or the
Zeus who played Demeter an obscene trick by the aid of a ram,
or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the father of
Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who was merely a rough stone,
or the Zeus who deceived Hera by means of a feigned marriage
with an inanimate object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes,
is a being whose myth is felt to be unnatural and in great need
of explanation. It is this irrational and unnatural element—as
Max Müller says, “the silly, savage and senseless element”—that
makes mythology the puzzle which men have so long
found it.
Early Explanations of Myths
.—The earliest attempts at a
crude science of mythology were efforts to reconcile the legends
of the gods and heroes with the religious sentiment which
recognized in these beings objects of worship and respect.
Closely as religion and myth are intertwined, it is necessary
to hold them apart for the purposes of this discussion. Religion
may here be defined as the conception of divine, or at least
supernatural powers entertained by men in moments of gratitude
or of need and distress, in hours of weakness, when, as Homer
says, “all folk yearn after the gods.” Now this conception
may be rude enough, and it is nearly related to, purely
magical ideas, to efforts to secure supernatural aid by
magical ceremonies. Still the roughest form of spiritual
prayer has for its basis the hypothesis of beneficent beings,
visible or invisible. The senseless stories or myths about
the gods are soon felt to be at variance with this hypothesis.
As an example we may take the instance of Qing, the
Bushman hunter. Qing, when first he met white men, was
asked about his religion. He began to explain, and mentioned
Cagn. Mr Orpen, the chief magistrate of St John’s Territory,
asked: “Is Cagn good or malicious? how do you pray
to him?” Answer (in a low imploring tone): “ ‘O Cagn!
O Cagn! are we not your children? do you not see our hunger?
give us food;’ and he gives us both hands full” (
Cape
Monthly Magazine
, July 1874). Here we see the
religious
view of Cagn, the Bushman god. But in the
mythological
account of Cagn given by Qing he appears as a kind of grasshopper,
supernaturally endowed, the hero of a most absurd
cycle of senseless adventures. Even religion is affected by these
irrational notions, and the gods of savages and of many civilized
peoples are worshipped with cruel, obscene, and irrational
rites. But, on the whole, the religious sentiment strives to
transcend the mythical conceptions of the gods, and is shocked
and puzzled by the mythical narratives. As soon as this sense
of perplexity is felt by poets, by priests, or by most men in an
age of nascent criticism, explanations of what is most crude and
absurd in the myths are put forward. Men ask themselves
why their gods are worshipped in the form of beasts, birds, and
fishes; why their gods are said to have prosecuted their amours
in bestial shapes; why they are represented as lustful and passionate—thieves,
robbers, murderers and adulterers. The answers
to these questions sometimes become myths themselves. Thus
both the Mangaians and the Egyptians have been puzzled by
their own gods in the form of beasts. The Egyptians invented an
explanation—itself a myth—that in some moment of danger
the gods concealed themselves from their foes in the shapes
of animals.
The Mangaians, according to W. W. Gill, hold
that “the heavenly family had taken up their abode in these
birds, fishes, and reptiles.”
A people so curious and refined as the Greeks were certain
to be greatly perplexed by even such comparatively pure
mythical narratives as they found in Homer, still more by
the coarser legends of Hesiod, and above all by the ancient
local myths preserved by local priesthoods. Thus, in the 6th
century before Christ, Xenophanes of Colophon severely blamed
the poets for their unbecoming legends, and boldly called certain
myths “the fables of men of old.”
Theagenes of Rhegium
(520
B.C.
?), according to the scholiast on
Iliad
, xx. 67,
was the
author of a very ancient system of mythology. Admitting
that the fable of the battle of the gods was “unbecoming,” if
literally understood, Theagenes represented it as an allegorical
account of the war of the elements. Apollo, Helios, and
Hephaestus were fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was water, Artemis
was the moon,
καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ ὁμοίως
. Or, by another system, the
names of the gods represented moral and intellectual qualities.
Heraclitus, too, disposed of the myth of the bondage of Hera
as allegorical philosophy. Socrates, in the
Cratylus
of Plato,
expounds “a philosophy which came to him all in an instant,”
an explanation of the divine beings based on crude philological
analyses of their names. Metrodorus, rivalling some recent
flights of conjecture, resolved not only the gods but even heroes
like Agamemnon, Hector and Achilles “into elemental combinations
and physical agencies.”
Euripides makes Pentheus
(but he was notoriously impious) advance a “rationalistic”
theory of the story that Dionysus was stitched up in the thigh
of Zeus.
When Christianity became powerful the heathen philosophers
evaded its satire by making more and more use of the allegorical
and non-natural system of explanation. That method has
two faults. First (as Arnobius and Eusebius reminded their
heathen opponents), the allegorical explanations are purely
arbitrary, depend upon the fancy of their author, and are
all equally plausible and equally unsupported by evidence.
Secondly, there is no proof at all that, in the distant age when
the myths were developed, men entertained the moral notions
and physical philosophies which are supposed to be “wrapped
up,” as Cicero says, “in impious fables.” Another system of
explanation is that associated with the name of Euemerus
(316
B.C.
). According to this author, the myths are history
in disguise. All the gods were once men, whose real feats have
been decorated and distorted by later fancy. This view suited
Lactantius, St Augustine and other early Christian writers
very well. They were pleased to believe that Euemerus “by
historical research had ascertained that the gods were once but
mortal men.” Precisely the same convenient line was taken
by Sahagun in his account of Mexican religious myths. As
there can be no doubt that the ghosts of dead men have been
worshipped in many lands, and as the gods of many faiths are
tricked out with attributes derived from ancestor-worship,
the system of Euemerus retains some measure of plausibility.
While we need not believe with Euemerus and with Herbert
Spencer that the god of Greece or the god of the Hottentots
was once a man, we cannot deny that the myths of both these
gods have passed through and been coloured by the imaginations
of men who practised the worship of real ancestors. For
example, the Cretans showed the tomb of Zeus, and the Phocians
(Pausanias x. 5) daily poured blood of victims into the tomb
of a hero, obviously by way of feeding his ghost. The
Hottentots show many tombs of their god, Tsui-Goab, and tell
tales about his death; they also pray regularly for aid at the
tombs of their own parents.
We may therefore say that,
while it is rather absurd to believe that Zeus and Tsui-Goab
were once real men, yet their myths are such as would be
developed by people accustomed, among other forms of religion,
to the worship of dead men. Very probably portions of the
legends of real men have been attracted into the mythic accounts
of gods of another character, and this is the element of truth
at the bottom of Euemerism.
Later Explanations of Mythology
.—The ancient systems of
explaining what needed explanation in myths were, then,
physical, ethical, religious and historical. One student, like
Theagenes, would see a physical philosophy underlying Homeric
legends. Another, like Porphyry, would imagine that the
meaning was partly moral, partly of a dark theosophic and
religious character. Another would detect moral allegory
alone, and Aristotle expresses the opinion that the myths were
the inventions of legislators “to persuade the many, and to
be used in support of law” (
Met.
xi. 8, 19). A fourth, like
Euemerus, would get rid of the supernatural element altogether,
and find only an imaginative rendering of actual history. When
Christians approached the problem of heathen mythology,
they sometimes held, with St Augustine, a form of the doctrine
of Euemerus.
In other words, they regarded Zeus, Aphrodite
and the rest as real persons, diabolical not divine. Some later
philosophers, especially of the 17th century, misled by the resemblance
between Biblical narratives and ancient myths, came to
the conclusion that the Bible contains a pure, the myths a
distorted, form of an original revelation. The abbé Banier
published a mythological compilation in which he systematically
resolved all the Greek myths into ordinary history.
Bryant
published (1774)
A New System
or an Analysis of Ancient
Mythology, wherein an Attempt is made to divest Tradition of Fable
in which he talked very learnedly of “that wonderful people, the
descendants of Cush,” and saw everywhere symbols of the ark
and traces of the Noachian deluge. Thomas Taylor, at the end
of the 18th century, indulged in much mystical allegorizing
of myths, as in the notes to his translation of Pausanias (1794).
At an earlier date (1760) De Brosses struck on the true line of
interpretation in his little work
Du Culte des dieux fétiches,
ou parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Égypte avec la religion
actuelle de Nigritie
. In this tract De Brosses explained the
animal-worship of the Egyptians as a survival among a
civilized people of ideas and practices springing from the
intellectual condition of savages, and actually existing among
negroes. A vast symbolical explanation of myths and mysteries
was attempted by Friedrich Creuzer.
10
The learning and sound
sense of Lobeck, in his
Aglaophamus
, exploded the idea that the
Eleusinian and other mysteries revealed or concealed matter
of momentous religious importance. It ought not to be forgotten
that Lafitau, a Jesuit missionary in North America, while
inclined to take a mystical view of the secrets concealed
by Iroquois myths, had also pointed out the savage element surviving in Greek mythology.
11
Recent Mythological Systems
.—Up to a very recent date
students of mythology were hampered by orthodox traditions,
and still more by ignorance of the ancient languages and of
the natural history of man. Only recently have Sanskrit and
the Egyptian and Babylonian languages become books not
absolutely sealed. Again, the study of the evolution of human
institutions from the lowest savagery to civilization is essentially
a novel branch of research, though ideas derived from an
unsystematic study of anthropology are at least as old as
Aristotle. The new theories of mythology are based on the
belief that “it is man, it is human thought and human
language combined, which naturally and necessarily produced
the strange conglomerate of ancient fable.”
12
But, while
there is now universal agreement so far, modern mythologists
differed essentially on one point. There was a school (with
internal divisions) which regarded ancient fable as almost
entirely “a disease of language,” that is, as the result of confusions
arising from misunderstood terms that have survived in
speech after their original significance was lost. Another school
(also somewhat divided against itself) believes that misunderstood
language
played but a very slight part in the evolution
of mythology, and that the irrational element in myths
is merely the survival from a condition of
thought
which was
once common, if not universal, but is now found chiefly among
savages, and to a certain extent among children. The former
school considered that the state of thought out of which myths
were developed was produced by decaying language; the latter
maintains that the corresponding phenomena of language were
the reflection of thought. For the sake of brevity we might
call the former the “philological” system, as it rests chiefly
on the study of language, while the latter might be styled the
“historical” or “anthropological” school, as it is based on
the study of man in the sum of his manners, ideas and institutions.
The System of Max Müller
.—The most distinguished and popular
advocate of the philological school was Max Müller, whose views
may be found in his
Selected Essays and Lectures on Language
. The
problem was to explain what he calls “the silly, savage and senseless
element” in mythology (
Sel. Ess.
i. 578). Max Müller says (speaking
of the Greeks), “their poets had an instinctive aversion to everything
excessive or monstrous, yet they would relate of their gods
what would make the most savage of Red Indians creep and
shudder”—stories, that is, of the cannibalism of Demeter, of the
mutilation of Uranus, the cannibalism of Cronus, who swallowed
his own children, and the like. “Among the lowest tribes of Africa
and America we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.”
Max Müller refers the beginning of his system of mythology to
the discovery of the connexion of the Indo-European or, as they
are called, “Aryan” languages. Celts, Germans, speakers of
Sanskrit and Zend, Latins and Greeks, all prove by their languages
that their tongues may be traced to one family of speech. The
comparison of the various words which, in different forms, are common
to all Indo-European languages must inevitably throw much
light on the original meaning of these words. Take, for example,
the name of a god, Zeus, or Athene, or any other. The word may
have no intelligible meaning in Greek, but its counterpart in the
allied tongues, especially in Sanskrit or Zend, may reveal the original
significance of the terms. “To understand the origin and meaning
of the names of the Greek gods,
and to enter into the original intention
of the fables told of each
, we must take into account the collateral
evidence supplied by Latin, German, Sanskrit and Zend philology”
Lect. on Lang.
, 2nd series, p. 406). A name may be intelligible in
Sanskrit which has no sense in Greek. Thus Athene is a divine name
without meaning in Greek, but Max Müller advances reasons for
supposing that it is identical with
ahana
, “the dawn,” in Sanskrit.
It is his opinion, apparently, that whatever story is told of Athene
must have originally been told of the dawn, and that we must keep
this before us in attempting to understand the legends of Athene.
Thus again (
op. cit.
p. 410), he says, “we have a right to explain
all that is told of him” (Agni, “fire”) “as originally meant for fire.”
The system is simply this: the original meaning of the names of gods
must be ascertained by comparative philology. The names, as a
rule, will be found to denote elemental phenomena. And the silly,
savage and senseless elements in the legends of the gods will be shown
to have a natural significance, as descriptions of sky, storms, sunset,
water, fire, dawn, twilight, the life of earth, and other celestial and
terrestrial existences. Stated in the barest form, these results do
not differ greatly from the conclusions of Theagenes of Rhegium,
who held that “Hephaestus was fire, Hera was air, Poseidon was
water, Artemis was the moon,
καὶ τὰ λοιπα ὁμοίως
.” But Max Müller’s
system is based on scientific philology, not on conjecture, and is
supported by a theory of the various processes in the evolution of
myths out of language.
It is no longer necessary to give an elaborate analysis of this theory,
because neither in its philological nor mythological side has it any
advocates who need be reckoned with. The attempt to disengage
the history of times forgotten and unknown, by means of analysis
of roots and words in Aryan languages, has been unsuccessful, or
has at best produced disputable results. Max Müller’s system was a
result of the philological theories that indicated the linguistic unity
of the Indo-European or “Aryan” peoples, and was founded on an
analysis of their language. But myths precisely similar in irrational
and repulsive character, even in minute details, to those of the
Aryan races, exist among Australians, South Sea Islanders, Eskimo,
Bushmen in Africa, among Solomon Islanders, Iroquois, and so
forth. The facts being identical, an identical explanation should
be sought, and, as the languages in which the myths exist are essentially
different, an explanation founded on the Aryan language is
likely to prove too narrow. Once more, even if we discover the
original meaning of a god’s name, it does not follow that we can
explain by aid of the significance of the name the myths about the
god. For nothing is more common than the attraction of a more
ancient story into the legend of a later god or hero. Myths of unknown
antiquity, for example, have been attracted into the legend
of Charlemagne, just as the
bons mots
of old wits are transferred
to living humorists. Therefore, though We may ascertain that Zeus
means “sky” and Agni “fire,” we cannot assert, with Max Müller,
that all the myths about Agni and Zeus were originally told of
fire and sky. When these gods became popular they would inevitably
inherit any current exploits of earlier heroes or gods. These
exploits would therefore be explained erroneously if regarded as
originally myths of sky or fire. We cannot convert Max Müller’s
proposition “there was nothing told of the sky that could not in
some form or other be ascribed to Zeus” into “there was nothing
ascribed to Zeus that had not at some time or other been told of the
sky.” This is also, perhaps, the proper place to observe that names
derived from natural phenomena—sky, clouds, dawn and sun—are
habitually assigned by Brazilians, Ojibways, Australians and
other savages to living men and women. Thus the story originally
told of a man or woman bearing the name “sun,” “dawn,” “cloud,”
may be mixed up later with myths about the real celestial dawn,
cloud or sun. For all these reasons the information obtained from
philological analysis of names is to be distrusted. We must also
bear in mind that early men when they conceived, and savage men
when they conceive, of the sun, moon, wind, earth, sky and so forth,
have no such ideas in their minds as we attach to these names.
They think of sun, moon, wind, earth and sky as of living human
beings with bodily parts and passions. Thus, even when we discover
an elemental meaning in a god’s name, that meaning may be
all unlike what the word suggests to civilized men. A final objection
is that philologists differ widely as to the true analysis and real
meaning of the divine names. Max Müller, for example, connects
Kronos (
Κρόνος
) with
χρόνος
, “time”; Preller with
κραἰνω
, “I fulfil,”
and so forth.
The civilized men of the Mythopoeic age were not obliged, as
Max Müller held, to believe that all phenomena were persons,
because the words which denoted the phenomena had gender-terminations.
On the other hand, the gender-terminations were
survivals from an early stage of thought in which personal characteristics,
including sex, had been attributed to all phenomena. This
condition of thought is demonstrated to be, and to have been,
universal among savages, and it may notoriously be observed among
children. Thus Max Müller’s theory that myths are “a disease of
language” seems destitute of evidence, and inconsistent with what
is historically known about the relations between the language and
the social, political and literary condition of men.
Theory of Herbert Spencer
.—The system of Herbert Spencer, as
explained in
Principles of Sociology
, has many points in common
with that of Max Müller. Spencer attempts to account for the state
of mind (the foundation of myths) in which man personifies and
animates all phenomena. According to his theory, too, this habit
of mind may be regarded as the result of degeneration, for in his
view, as in Max Müller’s, it is not primary, but the result of misconceptions.
But, while language is the chief cause of misconceptions
with Max Müller, with Spencer it is only one of several forces all
working to the same result. Statements which originally had a
different significance are misinterpreted, he thinks, and names of
human beings are also misinterpreted in such a manner that early
races are gradually led to believe in the personality of phenomena.
He too notes “the defect in early speech”—that is, the “lack of
words free from implications of vitality”—as one of the causes
which “favour personalization.” Here, of course, we have to ask
Spencer, with Max Müller,
why
words in early languages “imply
vitality.” These words must reflect the thought of the men who use
them before they react upon that thought and confirm it in its misconceptions.
So far Spencer seems at one with the philological
school of mythologists, but he warns us that the misconstructions
of language in his system are “different in kind, and the erroneous
course of thought is opposite in direction.” According to Spencer
(and his premises, at least, are correct), the names of human beings
in an early state of society are derived from incidents of the moment,
and often refer to the period of the day or the nature of the weather.
We find, among Australian natives, among Abipones in South
America, and among Ojibways in the North, actual people named
Dawn, Gold Flower of Day, Dark Cloud, Sun, and so forth. Spencer’s
argument is that, given a story about real people so named, in process
of time and forgetfulness the anecdote which was once current
about a man named Storm and a woman named Sunshine will be
transferred to the meteorological phenomena of sun and tempest.
Thus these purely natural agents will come to be “personalized”
Prin. Soc.
392), and to be credited with purely human origin and
human adventures. Another misconception would arise when men
had a tradition that they came to their actual seats from this mountain,
or that lake or river, or from lands across the sea. They will
mistake this tradition of local origin for one of actual parentage,
and will come to believe that, like certain Homeric heroes, they are
the sons of a river (now personified), or of a mountain, or, like a
tribe mentioned by Garcilasso de la Vega, that they are descended
from the sea. Once more, if their old legend told them that they
came from the rising sun, they will hold, like many races, that they
are actually the children of the sun. By this process of forgetfulness
and misinterpretation, mountains, rivers, lakes, sun and sea would
receive human attributes, while men would degenerate from a more
sensible condition into a belief in the personality and vitality of
inanimate objects. As Spencer thinks ancestor-worship the first
form of religion, and as he holds that persons with such names as
sun, moon and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory
results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural
phenomena—dawn, wind, sky, night and the rest—are a kind of
transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real
men and women. “Partly by confounding the parentage of the
race with a conspicuous object marking the natal region of the race,
partly by literal interpretation of birth names, and partly by literal
interpretation of names given in eulogy” (such as Sun and Bull,
among the Egyptian kings), and also through “implicit belief in
the statements of forefathers,” there has been produced belief in
descent from mountains, sea, dawn, from animals which have become
constellations, and from persons once on earth who now appear
as sun and moon. A very common class of myths (see
Totemism
assures us that certain stocks of men are descended from beasts,
or from gods in the shape of beasts. Spencer explains these by the
theory that the remembered ancestor of a stock had, as savages
often have, an animal name, as Bear, Wolf, Coyote, or what not.
In time his descendants came to forget that the name was a mere
name, and were misled into the opinion that they were children of a
real coyote, wolf or bear. This idea, once current, would naturally
stimulate and diffuse the belief that such descents were possible,
and that the animals are closely akin to men.
The chief objection to these processes is that they require, as a
necessary condition, a singular amount of memory on the one hand
and of forgetfulness on the other. The lowest contemporary savages
remember little or nothing of any ancestor farther back than the
grandfather. But men in Spencer’s Mythopoeic age had much
longer memories. On the other hand, the most ordinary savage
does not misunderstand so universal a custom as the imposition of
names peculiar to animals or derived from atmospheric phenomena.
He calls his own child Dawn or Cloud, his own name is Sitting Bull
or Running Wolf, and he is not tempted to explain his great-grandfather’s
name of Bright Sun or Lively Raccoon on the hypothesis
that the ancestor really was a raccoon or the sun. Moreover,
savages do not worship ancestresses or retain lively memories of
their great-grandmothers, yet it is through the female line in the
majority of cases that the animal or other ancestral name is derived.
The son of an Australian male, whose kin or totem name is Crane,
takes, in many tribes, his mother’s kin-name, Swan or Cockatoo,
or whatever it may be, and the same is a common rule in Africa and
America among races who rarely remember their great-grandfathers.
On the whole, then (though degeneracy, as well as progress, is a
force in human evolution), we are not tempted to believe in so strange
a combination of forgetfulness with long memory, nor so excessive
a degeneration from common sense into a belief in the personality
of phenomena, as are required no less by Spencer’s system than by
that of Max Müller.
Preliminary Problems
.—We have stated and criticized the
more prominent modern theories of mythology. It is now
necessary first to recapitulate the chief points in the problem,
and then to attempt to explain them by a comparison of the
myths of various races. The difficulty of mythology is to
account for the following among other apparently irrational
elements in myths: the wild and senseless stories of the
beginnings of things, of the origin of men, sun, stars, animals,
death, and the world in general; the infamous and absurd adventures
of the gods; why divine beings are regarded as incestuous
adulterous, murderous, thievish, cruel, cannibals, and addicted to
wearing the shapes of animals, and subject to death in some
stories; the myths of metamorphosis into plants, beasts and
stars; the repulsive stories of the state of the dead; the descents
of the gods into the place of the dead, and their return thence. It
is extremely difficult to keep these different categories of myths
separate from each other. If we investigate myths of the origin
of the world, we often find gods in animal form active in the
work of world-making. If we examine myths of human descent
from animals, we find gods busy there, and if we try to investigate
the myths of the origin of the gods, the subject gets mixed up
with the mythical origins of things in general.
Our first question will be, Is there any stage of human society,
and of the human intellect, in which facts that appear to us
to be monstrous and irrational are accepted as ordinary occurrences
of every day life? E. W. Lane, in his preface to the
Arabian Nights
, says that the Arabs have an advantage over
us as story-tellers. They can introduce such incidents as the
change of a man into a horse, or of a woman into a dog, or the
intervention of an
afreet
, without any more scruple than our
own novelists feel in describing a duel or the concealment of
a will. Among the Arabs the actions of magic and of spirits
are regarded as at least as probable and common as duels and
concealments of wills in European society. It is obvious that
we need look no farther for the explanation of the supernatural
events in Arab romances. Now let us apply this system to
mythology. It is admitted that Greeks, Romans, Aryans of
India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, Egyptians of
the Ptolemaic and earlier ages, were as much puzzled as we are
by the mythical adventures of their gods. But is there any
known stage of the human intellect in which these divine
adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees,
stars, and converse with the dead, and all else that puzzles us
in the civilized mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents
of daily human life? Our answer is that everything in the
civilized mythologies which we regard as irrational seems only
part of the accepted and rational order of things (at least in
the case of “medicine-men” or magicians) to contemporary
savages, and in the past seemed equally rational and natural
to savages concerning whom we have historical information.
Our theory is, therefore, that the savage and senseless element in
mythology is, for the most part, a legacy from ancestors of
the civilized races who were in an intellectual state not higher
than that of Australians, Bushmen, Red Indians, the lower races
of South America, Mincopies, and other worse than barbaric
peoples. As the ancestors of the Greeks, with the Aryans of
India, the Egyptians, and others advanced in civilization,
their religious thought was shocked and surprised by myths
(originally dating from the period of savagery, and natural
in that period) which were preserved down to the time of
Pausanias by local priesthoods, or which were stereotyped in
the ancient poems of Hesiod and Homer, or in the
Brahmanas
and
Vedas
of India, or were retained in the popular religion
of Egypt. This theory recommended itself to Lobeck. “We
may believe that ancient and early tribes framed gods like
themselves in action and in experience, and that the allegorical
element in myths is the addition of later peoples who had
attained to purer ideas of divinity, yet dared not reject the
religion of their ancestors” (
Aglaoph.
i. 153). The senseless
element in the myths would by this theory be for the most part
a “survival.” And the age and condition of human thought
from which it survived would be one in which our most ordinary
ideas about the nature of things and the limits of possibility
did not yet exist, when all things were conceived of in quite
other fashion—the age, that is, of savagery. It is universally
admitted that “survivals” of this kind do account for many
anomalies in out institutions, in law, politics, society, even in
dress and manners. If isolated fragments of an earlier age
abide in these, it is still more probable that other fragments
will survive in anything so closely connected as mythology
with the conservative religious sentiment.
If this view of mythology can be proved, much will have been
done to explain a problem which we have not yet touched, namely,
the distribution of myths
. The science of mythology has to account,
if it can, not only for the existence of certain stories in the legends
of certain races, but also for the presence of stories practically
the same among almost all races. In the long history of mankind
it is impossible to deny that stories may conceivably have
spread from a single centre, and been handed on from races like
the Indo-European and the Semitic to races as far removed
from them in every way as the Zulus, the Australians, the
Eskimo, the natives of the South Sea Islands. But, while the
possibility of the diffusion of myths by borrowing and
transmission must be allowed for, the hypothesis of the
origin of myths in the savage state of the intellect supplies
a ready explanation of their wide diffusion. Archaeologists
are acquainted with objects of early art and craftsmanship,
rude clay pipkins and stone weapons, which can only be classed
as “human,” and which do not bear much impress of any one
national taste and skill. Many myths may be called “human”
in this sense. They are the rough products of the early human
mind, and are not yet characterized by the differentiations
of race and culture. Such myths might spring up anywhere
among untutored men, and anywhere might survive into civilized
literature. Therefore where similar myths are found among
Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, Mangaians and others, it is
unnecessary to account for their wide diffusion by any hypothesis
of borrowing, early or late. The Greek “key” pattern found
on objects in Peruvian graves was not necessarily borrowed
from Greece, nor did Greeks necessarily borrow from Aztecs
the “wave” pattern which is common to both. The same
explanation may be applied to Greek and Aztec myths of the
deluge, to Australian and Greek myths of the original theft
of fire. Borrowed they may have been, but they may as probably
have been independent inventions.
It is true that some philologists deprecate as unscientific the
comparison of myths which are found in languages not connected with
each other. The objection rests on the theory that myths are a
disease of language, a morbid offshoot of language, and that the
legends in unconnected languages must therefore be kept apart.
But, as the theory which we are explaining does not admit that
language
is more than a subordinate cause in the development of
myths, as it seeks for the origin of myths in a given condition of
thought
through which all races have passed, we need do no more
than record the objection.
The Intellectual Condition of Savages
.—Our next step must
be briefly to examine the intellectual condition of savages,
that is, of races varying from the condition of the Andaman
Islanders to that of the Solomon Islanders and the ruder Red
Men of the American continent. In a developed treatise on the
subject of mythology it would be necessary to criticize, with
a minuteness which is impossible here, our evidence for the
very peculiar mental condition of the lower races. Max Müller
asked (when speaking of the mental condition of men when
myths were developed), “was there a period of temporary
madness through which the human mind had to pass, and was
it a madness identically the same in the south of India and the
north of Iceland?” To this we may answer that the human
mind had to pass through the savage stage of thought, that this
stage was for all practical purposes “identically the same”
everywhere, and that to civilized observers it does resemble
“a temporary madness.” Many races are still abandoned to
that temporary madness; many others which have escaped
from it were observed and described while still labouring under
its delusions. Our evidence for the intellectual ideas of man
in the period of savagery we derive partly from the reports of
voyagers, historians, missionaries, partly from an examination
of the customs, institutions, and laws in which the lower races
gave expression to their notions.
As to the first kind of evidence, we must be on our guard against
several sources of error. Where religion is concerned, travellers
in general and missionaries in particular are biased in several distinct
ways. The missionary is sometimes anxious to prove that religion
can only come by revelation, and that certain tribes, having received
no revelation, have no religion or religious myths at all. Sometimes
the missionary, on the other hand, is anxious to demonstrate that
the myths of his heathen flock are a corrupted version of the Biblical
narrative. In the former case he neglects the study of savage
myths; in the latter he unconsciously accommodates what he hears
to what he calls “the truth.” The traveller who is not a missionary
may either have the same prejudices, or he may be a sceptic about
revealed religion. In the latter case he is perhaps unconsciously
moved to put burlesque versions of Biblical stories into the mouths
of his native informants, or to represent the savages as ridiculing
the Scriptural traditions which he communicates to them. Yet
again we must remember that the leading questions of a European
inquirer may furnish a savage with a thread on which to string
answers which the questions themselves have suggested. “Have
you ever had a great flood?” “Yes” “Was any one saved?”
The question starts the invention of the savage on a deluge-myth,
of which, perhaps, the idea has never before entered his mind. There
still remain the difficulties of all conversation between civilized
men and unsophisticated savages, the tendency to hoax, and other
sources of error and confusion. By this time, too, almost every
explorer of savage life is a theorist. He is a Spencerian, or a believer
in the universal prevalence of the faith in an “All-Father,” or he
looks everywhere for gods who are “spirits of vegetation.” In
receiving this kind of evidence, then, we need to know the character
of our informant, his means of communicating with the heathen,
his power of testing evidence, and his good faith. His testimony
will have additional weight if supported by the “undesigned
coincidences” of other evidence, ancient and modern. If Strabo and
Herodotus and Pomponius Mela, for example, describe a custom,
rite or strange notion in the Old World, and if mariners and missionaries
find the same notion or custom or rite in Polynesia or Australia
or Kamchatka, we can scarcely doubt the truth of the reports.
The evidence is best when given by ignorant men, who are astonished
at meeting with an institution which ethnologists are familiar with
in other parts of the world.
Another method of obtaining evidence is by the comparative
study of savage laws and institutions. Thus we find in Asia, Africa,
America and Australia that the marriage laws of the lower races
are connected with a belief in kinship or other relationship with
animals. The evidence for this belief is thus entirely beyond
suspicion. We find, too, that political power, sway and social influence
are based on the ideas of magic, of metamorphosis, and of the power
which certain men possess to talk with the dead and to visit the
abodes of death. All these ideas are the stuff of which myths are
made, and the evidence of savage institutions, in every part of the
world, proves that these ideas are the universal inheritance of
savages.
Savage men are like ourselves in curiosity and anxiety
causas
cognoscere rerum
, but with our curiosity they do not possess
our powers of attention. They are as easily satisfied
with an explanation of phenomena as they are eager
to possess an explanation. Inevitably they furnish
themselves with their philosophy out of their scanty stock
Savage Ideas about the World.
of acquired ideas, and these ideas and general conceptions
seem almost imbecile to civilized men. Curiosity and
credulity, then, are the characteristics of the savage intellect.
When a phenomenon presents itself the savage requires an
explanation, and that explanation he makes for himself, or
receives from tradition, in the shape of a
myth
. The basis of
these myths, which are just as much a part of early conjectural
science as of early religion, is naturally the experience of the
savage
as construed by himself
. Man's craving to know “the
reason why” is already “among rude savages an intellectual
appetite,” and “even to the Australian scientific speculation
has its germ in actual experience.”
13
How does he try to satisfy
this craving? E. B. Tylor replies, “When the attention of
a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any
phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason,
he invents and tells a story to account for it.” Against this
statement it has been urged that men in the lower stages of
culture are not curious, but take all phenomena for granted. If
there were no direct evidence in favour of Tylor’s opinion, it
would be enough to point to the nature of savage myths
themselves. It is not arguing in a circle to point out that almost
all of them are nothing more than explanations of intellectual
difficulties, answers to the question, How came this or that
phenomenon to be what it is? Thus savage myths answer
the questions—What was the origin of the world, and of men,
and of beasts? How came the stars by their arrangement
and movements? How are the motions of sun and moon to
be accounted for? Why has this tree a red flower, and this
bird a black mark on the tail? What was the origin of the
tribal dances, or of this or that law of custom or etiquette?
Savage mythology, which is also savage science, has a reply
to all these and all similar questions, and that reply is always
found in the shape of a story. The answers cannot be accounted
for without the previous existence of the questions.
We have now shown how savages come to have a mythology.
It is their way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity,
their way of realizing the world in which they move. But they
frame their stories, necessarily and naturally, in harmony with
their general theory of things, with what we may call “savage
metaphysics.” Now early man, as Max Müller says, “not only
did not think as we think, but did not think as we suppose he
ought to have thought.” The chief distinction between his
mode of conceiving the world and ours is his vast extension of
the theory of personality. To the savage, and apparently to men
more backward than the most backward peoples we know, all
nature was a congeries of animated personalities. The savage’s
notion of personality is more a universally diffused feeling than
a reasoned conception, and this feeling of a personal self he
impartially distributes all over the world as known to him.
One of the Jesuit missionaries in North America thus describes
the Red Man’s philosophy:
14
“Les sauvages se persuadent que
non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi
que toutes les autres choses sont animées.” Crevaux, in the
Andes, found that the Indians believed that the beasts have
piays
(sorcerers and doctors) like themselves.
15
This opinion
we may name
personalism
, and it is the necessary condition
of savage (and, as will be seen, of civilized) mythology. The
Jesuits could not understand how spherical bodies like sun
and moon could be mistaken for human beings. Their catechumens
put them off with the answer that the drawn bows of the
heavenly bodies gave them their round appearance. “The
wind was formerly a person; he became a bird,” say the Bushmen,
and
ōō ka! kai
, a respectable Bushman once saw the personal
wind at Haarfontein.
16
The Egyptians, according to Herodotus
(iii. 16), believed fire to be
θηρίον ἔμψυχον
, a live beast. The
Bushman who saw the Wind meant to throw a stone at it, but
it ran into a hill. From the wind as a person the Bhinyas in
India (Dalton, p. 140) claim descent, and in Indian epic tradition
the leader of the ape army was the son of the wind. The
Wind, by certain mares, became the father of wind-swift steeds
mentioned in the
Iliad
. The loves of Boreas are well known.
These are examples of the animistic theory applied to what, in
our minds, seems one of the least personal of natural phenomena.
The sky (which appears to us even less personal) has been regarded
as a personal being by Samoyeds, Red Indians, Zulus,
17
and traces of this belief survive in Chinese, Greek and Roman
religion.
We must remember, however, that to the savage, Sky, Sun,
Sea, Wind, are not only persons, but they are savage persons.
Their conduct is not what civilized men would attribute to
characters so august; it is what uncivilized men think probable
and befitting among beings like themselves.
The savage regards all animals as endowed with personality.
“Ils tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs,”
says a Jesuit father about the North-American
Indians (
Relations
loc. cit.
). In Australia the
natives believe that the wild dog has the power
of speech, like the cat of the Coverley witch in the
Savage Theory of Man’s Rela-tions with the World.
Spectator
. The Breton peasants, according to P.
Sébillot, credit all birds with language, which they even attempt
to interpret. The old English and the Arab superstitions
about the language of beasts are examples of this opinion surviving
among civilized races. The bear in Norway is regarded
as almost a man, and his dead body is addressed and his wrath
deprecated by Samoyeds and Red Indians. “The native bear
Kur
bo
roo
is the sage counsellor of the aborigines in all their
difficulties. When bent on a dangerous expedition, the men
will seek help from this clumsy creature, but in what way his
opinions are made known is nowhere recorded.”
18
H. R. Schoolcraft
mentions a Red Indian story explaining how “the bear
does not die,” but this tale Schoolcraft (like Herodotus in Egypt)
“cannot bring himself to relate.” He also gives examples of
Iowas conversing with serpents. These may serve as examples
of the savage belief in the human intelligence of animals. Man
is on an even footing with them, and with them can interchange
his ideas. But savages carry this opinion much further. Man
in their view is actually, and in no figurative sense, akin to the
beasts. Certain tribes in Java “believe that women when
delivered of a child are frequently delivered at the same time
of a young crocodile.”
19
The common European story of a
queen accused of giving birth to puppies shows the survival of
the belief in the possibility of such births among civilized races,
while the Aztecs had the idea that women who saw the moon
in certain circumstances would produce mice. But the chief
evidence for the savage theory of man’s close kinship with the
lower animals is found in the institution called
totemism
q.v.
)—the
belief that certain stocks of men in the various tribes are
descended by blood descent from, or are developed out of, or
otherwise connected with, certain objects animate or inanimate,
but especially with beasts. The strength of the opinion is
proved by its connexion with very stringent marriage laws.
No man (according to the rigour of the custom) may marry a
woman who bears the same kin name as himself, that is, who is
descended from the same inanimate object or animal. Nor may
people (if they can possibly avoid it) eat the flesh of animals who
are their kindred. Savage man also believes that many of his
own tribe-fellows have the power of assuming the shapes of
animals, and that the souls of his dead kinsfolk revert to animal
forms.
E. W. Lane, in his introduction to the
Arabian Nights
(i. 58),
says he found the belief in these transmigrations accepted seriously
in Cairo. H. H. Bancroft brings evidence to prove that the Mexicans
supposed pregnant women would turn into beasts, and sleeping
children into mice, if things went wrong in the ritual of a certain
solemn sacrifice. There is a well-known Scottish legend to the effect
that a certain old witch was once fired at in her shape as a hare,
and that where the hare was hit there the old woman was found to
be wounded. J. F. Lafitau tells the same story as current among
his Red Indian flock, except that the old witch and her son took the
form of birds, not of hares. A Scandinavian witch does the same in
the Egil saga. In Lafitau’s tale the birds were wounded by the
magic arrows of a medicine man, and the arrow-heads were found
in the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan
20
people chiefly
transform themselves into badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras
(Bancroft, i. 740) “possessed the power of transforming men into
wild beasts.” J. F. Regnard, the French dramatist, found in
Lapland (1681) that witches could turn men into cats, and could
themselves assume the forms of swans, crows, falcons and geese. Among
the Bushmen
21
“sorcerers assume the form of beasts and jackals.”
M. Dobrizhofer, a missionary in Paraguay (1717–1791), learned that
“sorcerers arrogate to themselves the power of changing men into
tigers” (Eng. trans., i. 63). He was present at a conversion of this
sort, though the miracle beheld by the people was invisible to the
missionary. Near Loanda Livingstone noted that “a chief may
metamorphose himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and resume
his proper form.” The same accomplishments distinguish the Barotse
and Balonda.
22
Among the Mayas of Central America sorcerers
could transform themselves “into dogs, pigs and other animals;
their glance was death to a victim” (Bancroft, ii. 797). The
Thlinkeets hold that their shamans have the same powers.
23
bamboo in Sarawak is known to have been a man. Metamorphoses
into stones are as common among Red Indians and Australians
as in Greek mythology. Compare the cases of Niobe and the victims
of the Gorgon’s head.
24
Zulus, Red Indians, Aztecs,
25
Andaman
Islanders and other races believe that their dead assume the shapes
of serpents and of other creatures, often reverting to the form of the
animal from which they originally descended. In ancient Egypt
“the usual prayers demand for the deceased the power of going and
coming from and to everywhere
under any form they like
.”
26
trace of this opinion may be noticed in the
Aeneid
. The serpent
that appeared at the sacrifice of Aeneas was regarded as possibly
a “manifestation” of the soul of Anchises (
Aeneid
v. 84)—
Dixerat haec, adytis quum lubricus anguis ab imis
Septem ingens gyros, septena volumma, traxit,”
and Aeneas is
Incertus, geniumne loci, famulumne parentis
Esse putet.”
On the death of Plotinus, as he gave up the ghost, a snake glided from
under his bed into a hole in the wall.
27
Compare Pliny
28
on the cave
“in quo manes Scipionis Africani majoris custodire draco dicitur.”
The last peculiarity in savage philosophy to which we need call
attention here is the belief in spirits and in human intercourse
with the shades of the dead. With the savage natural death
is not a universal and inevitable ordinance. “All men must
die” is a generalization which he has scarcely reached; in his
philosophy the proposition is more like this—“all men who die
die by violence.” A natural death is explained as the result of
a sorcerer’s spiritual violence, and the disease is attributed to
magic or to the action of hostile spirits. After death the man
survives as a spirit, sometimes taking an animal form, sometimes
invisible, sometimes to be observed “in his habit as he lived”
(see
Apparitions
). The philosophy of the subject is shortly
put in the speech of Achilles (
Iliad
, xxiii. 103) after he has beheld
the dead Patroclus in a dream: “Ay me, there remaineth then
even in the house of Hades a spirit and phantom of the dead,
for
all night long hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me,
wailing and making moan.” It is almost superfluous to quote
here the voluminous evidence for the intercourse with spirits
which savage chiefs and medicine men are believed to maintain.
They can call up ghosts, or can go to the ghosts, in Australia,
New Caledonia, New Zealand, North America, Zululand, among
the Eskimo, and generally in every quarter of the globe. The
men who enjoy this power are the same as they who can change
themselves and others into animals. They too command the
weather, and, says an old French missionary, “are regarded as
very jupiters, having in their hands the lightning and the
thunder” (
Relations
loc. cit.
). They make good or bad seasons,
and control the vast animals who, among ancient Persians and
Aryans of India, as among Zulus and Iroquois, are supposed to
grant or withhold the rain, and to thunder with their enormous
wings in the region of the clouds.
Another fertile source of myth is magic, especially the magic
designed to produce fertility, vegetable and animal. From the
natives of northern and central Australia to the actors in the
ritual of Adonis, or the folk among whom arose the customs of
crowning the May king or the king of the May, all peoples have
done magic to encourage the breeding of animals as part of the
food supply, and to stimulate the growth of plants, wild or
cultivated. In the opinion of J. G. Frazer, the human representatives
or animal representatives, in the rites, of the spirit
of vegetation; of the corn spirit; of the changing seasons, winter
or summer, have been developed into many forms of gods,
with appropriate myths, explanatory of the magic, and of the
sacrifice of the chief performer. In the same way the adoration
of living human beings, the deification of living kings—whose
title survives in our king or queen of the May, and in the
rex
nemorensis
, the priest of Diana in the grove of Aricia—has been
most fruitful in myths of divine beings. These human beings
are often sacrificed, for various reasons, actual or hypothetical,
and gods and heroes are almost as likely to be explained as
spirits of vegetation now, as they were likely to become solar
mythological figures in the system of Max Müller. It is certainly
true that divine beings in most mythologies are apt to acquire
solar with other elemental attributes, including vegetable
attributes. But that the origins of such mythical beings were,
ab initio
, either solar or vegetable, or, for that matter, animal,
it would often be hard to prove.
Frazer’s ideas are to be found in a work of immense erudition,
The Golden Bough
(London, 1900). Two studies by him, pursuing
the same set of ideas in more detail, are
Adonis
Attis
Osiris
(1906)
and
Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship
(1905). See A.
Lang,
Magic and Religion
(London, 1901), for a criticism in detail
of the general theory as set forth in
The Golden Bough
. Whatever
may be said, Frazer has certainly made the most important of recent
contributions to the study of mythology. He has fixed the attention
of students on a mass of early ideas, previously much neglected save
by W. Mannhardt, and on the facts of ritual, which preserve these
ideas and represent them in a kind of mystery plays.
We are now in a position to sum up the ideas of savages about
man’s relations to the world. We started on this inquiry
because we found that savages regarded sky, wind, sun, earth
and so forth as practically men, and we had then to ask, what
sort of men, men with what powers? The result of our examination,
so far, is that in savage opinion sky, wind, sun, sea and
many other phenomena have, being personal, all the powers
attributed to real human persons. These powers and qualities
are: (1) relationship to animals and ability to be transformed
and to transform others into animals and other objects; (2) magical
accomplishments, as—(
) power to visit or to procure
the visits of the dead; (
) other magical powers, such as control
over the weather and over the fertility of nature in all departments.
Once more, the great forces of nature, considered as
persons, are involved in that inextricable confusion in which
men, beasts, plants, stones, stars, are all on one level of personality
and animated existence. This is the philosophy of savage
life, and it is on these principles that the savage constructs his
myths, while these, again, are all the scientific explanations of
the universe with which he has been able to supply himself.
Examples of Mythology
.—Myths of the origin of the world
and man are naturally most widely diffused. Man has everywhere
asked himself whence things came and how, and his
myths are his earliest extant form of answer to this question.
So confused and inconsistent are the mythical answers that it
is very difficult to classify them according to any system. If
we try beginning with myths of creative gods, we find that the
world is sometimes represented as pre-existent to the divine
race. If we try beginning with myths of the origin of the world,
we frequently find that it owes its origin to the activity of
pre-existent supernatural beings. According to all modern views
of creation, the creative mind is prior to the universe which it
created. There is no such consistency of opinion in myths,
whether of civilized or savage races. Perhaps the plan least open
to objection is to begin with myths of the gods. But when we
speak of gods, we must not give to the word a modern significance.
As used here, gods merely mean non-natural and
powerful beings, sometimes “magnified non-natural men,”
sometimes beasts, birds or insects, sometimes the larger forces
and phenomena of the universe conceived of as endowed with
human personality and passions. When Plutarch examined
the Osirian myth (
De Isid.
xxv.) he saw that the “gods” in
the tale were really “demons,” “stronger than men, but
having the divine part not wholly unalloyed”—“magnified
non-natural men,” in short. And such are the gods of mythology.
In examining the myths of the gods we shall begin with the
conceptions of the most backward tribes, and advance to the
divine legends of the ancient civilized races. It will appear that,
while the non-civilized gods are often theriomorphic, made in
accordance with the ideas of non-civilized men, the civilized
gods retain many characteristics of the savage gods, and these
characteristics are the “irrational element” in the divine myths.
Myths of Gods: Savage Ideas
.—It is not easy to separate the
discussion of savage myths of gods from the problem, Whence and how
arose the savage belief in gods? The orthodox anthropological
explanation has been that of E. B. Tylor, which closely resembles
Herbert Spencer’s “ghost theory.” By reflection on dreams, in
which the self, or “spirit,” of the savage seems to wander free from
the bounds of time and space, to see things remote, and to meet
and recognize dead friends or foes; by speculation on the experiences
of trance and of phantasms of the dead or living, beheld with waking
eyes; by pondering on the phenomena of shadows, of breath, of
death and life, the savage evolved the idea of a separable soul or
spirit capable of surviving bodily death. The spirit of the dead may
tenant a material object, a “fetish,” or may roam hungry and
comfortless and need propitiation by food, for unpropitiated it is
dangerous, or may be reincarnated, or may “go to its own herd”
in another world. Again, it is naturally kind to its living kinsfolk,
and so may be addressed in prayer. These are the doctrines of
animism
q.v.
), and, according to the usual anthropological theory,
these spirits come to thrive to god’s estate in favourable
circumstances, as where the dead man, when alive, had great
mana
or
wakan
a great share of the ether, so to speak, which, in savage metaphysics,
is the viewless vehicle of magical influences. Thus the ghost of the
hero or medicine man of a kin or tribe may be raised to divine rank,
while again—the doctrine of spirits once developed, and spirits once
allotted to the great elemental forces and phenomena of nature, sky,
thunder, the sea, the forests—we have the beginnings of departmental
deities, such as Agni, god of fire; Poseidon, god of the sea;
Zeus, god of the sky—though in recent theories Zeus appears to be
regarded as primarily the god of the oak tree, a spirit of vegetation.
On this theory animism, the doctrine of spirits, is the source of
all belief in gods. But it is found that among the lowest or least
cultured races, such as the south-eastern tribes of Australia, who
do not propitiate ancestral spirits by offerings of food, or address
them in prayer, there often exists a belief in an “All-Father,” to
use Howitt’s convenient expression. This being cannot have been
evolved out of the cult of ancestors, where ancestors are not
worshipped; and he is not even regarded as a spirit, but, in Matthew
Arnold’s phrase, as “a magnified non-natural man.” He existed
before death came into the world, and he still exists. His home is in
or above the sky, but there was a time when he walked the earth, a
potent magic-worker; endowed mankind with such arts and institutions
as they possess; and left to them certain rules of life, ethics
and ritual. Often he is regarded as the maker of things, or of most
things, and of mankind; or mankind are his children, descended
from disobedient sons of his, whom he cast out of heaven. Very
frequently he is the judge of souls, and sends the good and bad to
their own places of reward and punishment. He is usually supposed
to watch over human conduct, but this is by no means invariably
the case. Sometimes he, like the Atnatu of the Kaitish tribe of
central Australia, is only vigilant in matters of ritual, such as
circumcision, subincision and the use of the sacred bull-roarer, the
Greek
ῥόμβος
. As an almost universal rule, in the lowest culture,
no prayers are addressed to this being; he has no sacrifices, no dwelling
made with hands; and the images of him, in clay, that are made
and danced round with invocations of his name at the tribal
ceremonies of initiation, are destroyed at the close of the performances.
If the name of “god” is denied to such beings because they receive
little cult, it may still be admitted that the belief might easily develop
into a form of theism, independent of and underived from animism,
or the ghost theory.
The best account of this All-Father belief in the lowest culture is
to be read in R. Howitt’s
Native Races of South-East Australia
. Under
the names of Baiame, Pundjel, Mulkari, Daramulun
and many others, the south-eastern tribes (both those
who reckon descent in the female and those who reckon
by the male line) have this faith in an All-Father, the
Australian Savages.
attributes varying in various communities. The most highly
developed All-Father is the Baiame or Byamee of the Euahlayi
tribe of north-western New South Wales, to whom prayers for the
welfare of the souls of the dead are, or recently were, addressed—the
tribe dwelling a hundred miles away from the nearest missionary
station (Protestant).
29
In the centre of Australia, Atnatu, self-created, is known, as has
been said, to the Kaitish tribe, next neighbours of the Arunta of the
Macdonnell Hills. Among the Arunta, Mr Strehlow (
Globus
, May
1907) finds such a being as Atnatu, and also among some other
adjacent tribes, as the Luritja. See, too, Strehlow and von
Leonhardi, in
Veröffentlichungen aus dem städtischen Völker-Museum
(Frankfurt-am-Main, 1907, vol. i.). But Messrs B. Spencer and
F. J. Gillen, who discovered Atnatu, did not find any trace of an
All-Father among the Arunta, or any other of the tribes to the north
and north-east of the centre. Mr Strehlow’s branch of the Arunta
they did not examine.
It is plain that the All-Father belief, in favourable circumstances,
especially if ghost worship remained undeveloped, might be evolved
into theism. But all over the savage world, especially in Africa,
spirit worship has sprung up and choked the All-Father, who, however,
in most savage regions, abides as a name, receiving no sacrifice,
and, save among the Masai, seldom being addressed in prayer.
A list of such otiose great beings in the background of religion is
given in Lang’s
The Making of Religion
(1898). Since the publication
of that book much additional evidence has accrued from Africa
and Melanesia, where the belief occurs in a few islands, but, in the
majority, is absent or unrecorded. Most of the fresh evidence is
given in
La Notion de l’être suprême chez les peuples non-civilisés
by René Hoffmann (Geneva, 1907). See also the
Journal of the
Anthropological Institute
(1899–1907), vols. xxix., xxxii., xxxiv.,
xxxv., and the works of Miss Mary Kingsley, and Spieth,
Die
Ewe-Stämme
, Reimer (Berlin, 1906), and Sundermann in Warneck’s
Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift
, vol. xi. An excellent statement is that
of Père Schmidt, S.V.D., in
Anthropos
, Bd. III., Hft. 3 (1908), pp.
559–611. Tylor’s efforts to show that these All-Fathers were
derived from missionary or other European influences (
Nineteenth
Century
, 1892) have not been successful (see Lang,
Magic and Religion
“The Theory of Loan Gods”) and N. W. Thomas in
Man
(1905), v. 49
et seq. The All-Father belief is most potent among the lowest
races, and always tends to become obsolete under the competition
of serviceable ancestral spirits, or gods made in the image of such
spirits, who can be bribed by sacrifices or induced by prayers to help
man in his various needs.
The belief in the All-Father in south-eastern Australia is concealed
from the women and children who, at most, know his exoteric
name, often meaning “Our Father,” and is revealed only to the
initiate, among whom are a very few white men, like Howitt. Mrs
Langloh Parker, of course, was not initiated (indeed, no white man
has gone through the actual and very painful rites), but confidences
were made to her with great secrecy. The All-Father, even at his
best, among the Kurnai, Kamilaroi and Euahlayi, is the centre of
many grotesque and sportive myths. He usually has a wife and
children, not in all cases born, but rather they are emanations.
One of these children is often his mediator with men, and has the
charge of the rites and the mystic bull-roarer. The relation is that
of Apollo to Zeus in Greek myth.
Many of the wilder myths are the expressions of the sportive and
humorous faculties. Some arise naturally thus: Baiame, say,
originated everything, therefore he originated the grotesque
mummeries and dances of the mysteries. To explain these, myths
have been developed to show that they arose in some grotesque
incident of Baiame’s personal existence on earth. Many Greek
myths, most derogatory to the dignity of Demeter, Dionysus, Zeus
or Hera, arose in the same way, as explanations of buffooneries in
the Eleusinian or other mysteries. In medieval literature the most
sacred persons of our religion have grotesque associations attached
to them in the same manner.
While the All-Father belief is common in the tribes of south-eastern
Australia, the tribes round Lake Eyre, the Arunta (as
known to Messrs Spencer and Gillen), and the other central and
northern tribes, are credited with no germs of belief in what is called
supreme
, and may truly be styled a
superior
being. That being,
in many cases, but not so commonly in Australia, has a malevolent
opposite who thwarts his work, an Ahriman to his Ormuzd. In
one district, where the superior being is a crow, his opposite is an
eagle-hawk. These two birds in many tribes give names to the two
great exogamous and intermarrying divisions; in their case there is a
va et vient
of divine, human and theriomorphic elements, just as in
the Greek myths of Zeus. As a rule, however, the Australian All-Father
is anthropomorphic, and fairly well described in the native
term when they speak English as “the Big Man,” powerful, deathless,
friendly, “able to go everywhere and do everything,” “to see
whatever you do.” The existence of the belief in this being was
accepted by T. Waitz, and, though disputed by many squatters and
most anthropologists, is now admitted on the strength of the evidence
of Howitt, Cameron, Mrs Langloh Parker, Dawson, W. E. Roth in
Ethnological Studies
, and many other close observers. The belief
being esoteric, a secret of the initiated, necessarily escaped casual
inquirers.
Meanwhile, among some of the Arunta of the centre, among the
Dieri and Urabunna tribes near Lake Eyre and their congeners,
and among the tribes north by east of the Arunta, no such belief
has been discovered by Messrs Spencer and Gillen, from whom the
tribes kept no secrets, or by Mr Siebert, a missionary among the now
all but extinct Dieri. There is just a trace of a dim sky-dwelling
being, Arawotja, possibly an all but obliterated survival of an
All-Father. Howitt speaks too of the Dieri Kutchi, who inspires
medicine-men with ideas, but about him our information is scanty.
Among all these tribes religion now takes another line, the belief
in a supernormal race of Titanic beings, with no superior, who were
the first dwellers on earth; who possessed powers far exceeding those
of the medicine-men of to-day; and who, in one way or another,
were connected with, or developed from, the totem animals, vegetables
and other objects. These beings modified the face of the
country; in Arunta belief rocks and trees arose to mark the places
where they finally “went into the ground” (
Oknanikilla
), and their
spirits still haunt certain places such as these; and are reincarnated
in native women who pass by. These beings, in Arunta called
“the people of the
Alcheringa
, or dream time” (but cf. Strehlow
in
Globus
ut supra
), originated the tribal rites of initiation. In
Dieri they are called
Mura-Mura
, and to them prayers are made for
rain, accompanied by rain-making magic ceremonies, which in this
case may be a symbolical expression of the prayers. There is a
large body of myths about the
Alcheringa
folk, or
Mura
Mura
(see Spencer and Gillen,
Native Tribes of Central Australia
Native
Tribes of Northern Australia
, and Howitt,
Native Tribes of South
Eastern
Australia
), and the myths of their wanderings, prodigies
and institution of rites and magic are represented in the dances of
the mysteries. Most of the magic is worked (
Intichiuma
in Arunta)
by the members of each totem kin or group for the behoof of the
totem as an article of food supply. These rites are common in
North America, but are worked by members of gilds or societies,
not by totem kins.
The belief in these
Mura-Mura
or
Alcheringa
folk may obviously
develop, in favourable circumstances, into a polytheism like that of
Greece, or of Egypt, or of the Maoris. The old Irish gods in the
poetic romances appear to have the same origin and shade away
into the fairies. The baser Greek myths of the wanderings,
amours and adventures of the gods, myths ignored by Homer, are
parallel to the adventures of the
Alcheringa
people, and the fable of
the mutilation of Osiris and the search for the lost organ by Isis,
actually occurs among the Alcheringa tales of Messrs Spencer and
Gillen. Among the Arunta, the Alcheringa folk are part of a
strangely elaborate theory of evolution and of animism, which leaves
no room for a creative being, or for a future life of the spirit, which
is merely reincarnated at intervals.
Thus the doctrines of evolution and of creation, or the making of
things, stand apart, or blend, in the metaphysics and religion of the
lowest and least progressive of known peoples. The question as to
which theory came first, whether Alcheringaism is a scientific
effort that swept away All-Fatherism, or whether All-Fatherism is
a religious reaction in despair of science and of the evolutionary
doctrine, is settled by each inquirer in accordance with his personal
bias. It has been argued that All-Fatherism is an advance, conditioned
by coastal influences—more rain and more food—concomitant
with a social advance to individual marriage, and reckoning
of kin in the male line. But tribes far from the sea, as in northern
New South Wales and Queensland, have the All-Father belief, with
individual marriage and female descent, while tribes of the north
coast, with male descent, are credited with no All-Father; and the
Arunta, as far as possible from the sea, have no All-Father (save in
Strehlow’s district), and have individual marriage and male reckoning
of descent in matters of inheritance; while the Urabunna and
Dieri, with female descent and the custom of
pirrauru
(called “group
marriage” by Howitt), are not credited with the All-Father belief.
Thus coastal conditions have clearly no causal influence on the
development of the All-Father belief. If they had, the natives of
central Queensland, remote from the sea, should not have their
All-Father (Mulkari), and the natives of the northern and north-eastern
coasts should have an All-Father, who is still to seek. The
Arunta of Messrs Spencer and Gillen may have possessed and deposed
the Altjira superior being of the Arunta known to Mr Strehlow,
like the Atnatu of the adjacent Kaitish, or the All-Father of the
neighbouring Luritja; or these beings may be more recent
divergences of doctrine, departures from pure Alcheringaism with no
All-Father. At present, at least, it is premature to dogmatize on these
problems.
30
The chief being among the supernatural characters of Bushman
mythology is the insect called the Mantis.
31
Cagn or Ikaggen, the
Mantis, is sometimes regarded with religious respect as
a benevolent god. But his adventures are the merest
nightmares of puerile fancy. He has a wife, an adopted
daughter, whose real father is the “swallower” in Bushman swallowing
African Savages.
myths, and the daughter has a son, who is the Ichneumon.
The Mantis made an eland out of the shoe of his son-in-law. The
moon was also created by the Mantis out of his shoe, and it is red,
because the shoe was covered with the red dust of Bushman-land.
The Mantis is defeated in an encounter with a cat which happened
to be singing a song about a lynx. The Mantis (like Poseidon,
Hades, Metis and other Greek gods) was once swallowed, but disgorged
alive. The swallower was the monster Ilkhwāi-hemm.
Like Heracles when he leaped into the belly of the monster which
was about to swallow Hesione, the Mantis once jumped down the
throat of a hostile elephant, and so destroyed him. The heavenly
bodies are gods among the Bushmen, but their nature and adventures
must be discussed among other myths of sun, moon and stars. As
a creator Cagn is sometimes said to have “given orders, and caused
all things to appear to be made.” He struck snakes with his staff
and turned them into men, as Zeus did with the ants in Aegina.
But the Bushmen’s mythical theory of the origin of things must,
as far as possible, be kept apart from the fables of the Mantis, the
Ichneumon and other divine beings. Though animals, these gods
have human passions and character, and possess the usual magical
powers attributed to sorcerers.
Concerning the mythology of the Hottentots and Namas, we have
a great deal of information in a book named
Tsuni
Goam
the Supreme
Being of the Khoi-Khoi
(1881), by Dr T. Hahn. This author collected
the old notices of Hottentot myths, and added material from his
own researches. The chief god of the Hottentots is a being named
Tsuni-Goam, who is universally regarded by his worshippers as a
deceased sorcerer. According to one old believer, “Tsui-Goab”
(an alternative reading of the god’s name) “was a great powerful
chief of the Khoi-Khoi—in fact, he was the first Khoi-Khoib from
whom all the Khoi-Khoi tribes took their name.” He is always
represented as at war (in the usual crude dualism of savages) with
“another chief” named Gaunab. The prayers addressed to Tsui-Goab
are simple and natural in character, the “private ejaculations”
of men in moments of need or distress. As usual, religion is more
advanced than mythology. It appears that, by some accounts,
Tsui-Goab lives in the red sky and Gaunab in the dark sky. The
neighbouring race of Namas have another old chief for god, a being
called Heitsi Eibib. His graves are shown in many places, like those
of Osiris, which, says Plutarch, abounded in Egypt. He is
propitiated by passers-by at his sepulchres. He has intimate relations
in peace and war with a variety of animals whose habits are sometimes
explained (like those of the serpent in Genesis) as the result
of the curse of Heitsi Eibib. Heitsi Eibib was born in a mysterious
way from a cow, as Indra in the
Black Yajur-Veda
entered into and
was born from the womb of a being who also bore a cow. The
Rig-Veda
(iv. 18, 1) remarks, “His mother, a cow, bore Indra, an
unlicked calf”—probably a metaphorical way of speaking. Heitsi
Eibib, like countless other gods and heroes, is also said to have been
the son of a virgin who tasted a particular plant, and so became
pregnant, as in the German and Gallophrygian märchen of the
almond tree, given by Grimm and Pausanias. Incest is one of the
feats of Heitsi Eibib. Tsui-Goab, in the opinion of his worshippers,
as we have seen, is a deified dead sorcerer, whose name means
Wounded Knee, the sorcerer having been injured in the knee by an
enemy. Dr Hahn tries to prove (by philology’s “artful aid”)
that the name really means “red dawn,” and is a Hottentot way of
speaking of the infinite. The philological arguments advanced
are extremely weak, and by no means convincing. If we grant,
however, for the sake of argument, that the early Hottentots
worshipped the infinite under the figure of the dawn, and that, by
forgetting their own meaning, they came to believe that the words
which really meant “red dawn” meant “wounded knee” we must
still admit that the devout have assigned to their deity all the attributes
of an ancestral sorcerer. In short, “their Red Dawn,” if
red dawn he be, is a person, and a savage person, adored exactly as
the actual fathers and grandfathers of the Hottentots are adored.
We must explain this legend, then, on these principles, and not as an
allegory of the dawn as the dawn appears to civilized people. About
Gaunab (the Ahriman to Tsui-Goab’s Ormuzd) Dr Hahn gives two
distinct opinions. “Gaunab was at first a ghost, a mischief-maker
and evil-doer” (
op. cit.
p. 85). But Gaunab he declares to be
“the night-sky” (p. 126). Whether we regard Gaunab, Heitsi
Eibib and Tsui-Goab as originally mythological representations of
natural phenomena, or as deified dead men, it is plain that they are
now venerated as non-natural human beings, possessing the customary
attributes of sorcerers. Thus of Tsui-Goab it is said, “He could
do wonderful things which no other man could do, because he was
very wise. He could tell what would happen in future times.
He died several times, and several times he rose again” (statement
of old K
arab in Hahn, p. 61).
The mythology of the Zulus as reported by H. Callaway (
Unkūlunkūlu
1868–1870) is very thin and uninteresting. The Zulus are
great worshippers of ancestors (who appear to men in the form of
snakes), and they regard a being called Unkūlunkūlu as their first
ancestor, and sometimes as the creator, or at least as the maker of
men. It does not appear they identify Unkūlunkūlu, as a rule,
with “the lord of heaven,” who, like Indra, causes the thunder.
The word answering to our lord is also applied, “even to beasts
as the lion and the boa.” The Zulus, like many distant races,
sometimes attribute thunder to the “thunder-bird,” which, as in
North America, is occasionally seen and even killed by men. “It
is said to have a red bill, red legs and a short red tail like fire. The
bird is boiled for the sake of the fat, which is used by the heaven-doctors
to puff on their bodies, and to anoint their lightning-rods.”
The Zulus are so absorbed in propitiating the shades of their dead
(who, though in serpentine bodies, have human dispositions) that
they appear to take little pleasure in mythological narratives. At
the same time, the Zulus have many “nursery tales,” the plots and
incidents of which often bear the closest resemblance to the heroic
myths of Greece, and to the märchen of European peoples.
32
These
indications will give a general idea of African divine myths. On
the west coast the “ananzi” or spider takes the place of the mantis
insect among the Bushmen. For some of his exploits Dasent’s
Tales
from the Norse
(2nd ed., Appendix) may be consulted. For South
African religion see Lang,
Magic and Religion
; Dennett,
At the
Back of the Black Man’s Mind
; Junod,
Les Barotsa
; Spieth,
Die
Ewe-Stämme
; Frazer,
The Golden Bough
Turning from the natives of Australia, and from African races
of various degrees of culture, to the Papuan inhabitants of Melanesia,
we find that mythological ideas are scarcely on a higher
level. An excellent account of the myths of the Banks
Islanders and Solomon Islanders was given in
Journ.
Anthropol. Inst.
(Feb. 1881) by the Rev. R. H. Codrington. The
Melanesian Savages.
article contains a critical description of the difficulty with which
missionaries obtain information about the prior creeds. The people of the
Banks Islands are chiefly ancestor-worshippers, but they also believe
in, and occasionally pray to, a being named I Qat, one of the prehuman
race endowed with supernatural powers who here, as elsewhere, do
duty as gods. Here is an example of a prayer to Qat—the devotee
is supposed to be in danger with his canoe: “Qate! Marawa! look
down on me, smooth the sea for us two that I may go safely on the sea.
Beat down for me the crests of the tide-rip; let the tide-rip settle
down away from me, beat it down level that it may sink and roll
away, and I may come to a quiet landing-place.” Compare the
prayer of Odysseus to the river, whose mouth he had reached after
three days’ swimming on the tempestuous sea. “ ‘Hear me,
O king, whosoever thou art, unto thee I am come as to one to whom
prayer is made
. . .
nay, pity me, O king, for I avow myself thy
suppliant.’ So spake he, and the god stayed his stream, and withheld
his waves, and made the water smooth before him” (
Odyssey
v. 450). The prayer of the Melanesian is on rather a higher religious
level than that of the Homeric hero. The myths of Qat’s adventures,
however, are very crude, though not so wild as some of the
Scandinavian myths about Odin and Loki, while they are less immoral
than the adventures of Indra and Zeus. Qat was born in the isle
of Vanua Levu; his mother was either a stone at the time of his
birth, or was turned into a stone afterwards, like Niobe. The mother
of Apollo, according to Aelian, had the misfortune to be changed
into a wolf. Qat had eleven brothers, not much more reputable
than the Osbaldistones in
Rob Roy
. The youngest brother was
“Tangaro Loloqong
the Fool.” His pastime was to make wrong
all that Qat made right, and he is sometimes the Ahriman to Qat’s
Ormuzd. The creative achievements of Qat must be treated of in
the next section. Here it may be mentioned that, like the hero
in the Breton märchen, Qat “brought the dawn” by introducing
birds whose notes proclaimed the coming of morning. Before
Qat’s time there had been no night, but he purchased a sufficient
allowance of darkness from I Qong, that is, night considered as a
person in accordance with the law of savage thought already
explained. Night is a person in Greek mythology, and in the
fourteenth book of the
Iliad
we read that Zeus abstained from punishing
Sleep “because he feared to offend swift Night.” Qat produced
dawn, for the first time, by cutting the darkness with a knife of red
obsidian. Afterwards “the fowls and birds showed the morning.”
On one occasion an evil power (Vui) slew all Qat’s brothers, and
hid them in a food-chest. As in the common “swallowing-myths”
which we have met among bushmen and Australians, and will find
among the Greeks, Qat restored his brethren to life. Qat is always
accompanied by a powerful supernatural spider named Marawa.
He first made Marawa’s acquaintance when he was cutting down
a tree for a canoe. Every night (as in the common European story
about bridge-building and church-building) the work was all undone
by Marawa, whom Qat found means to conciliate. In all his future
adventures the spider was as serviceable as the cat in
Puss in Boots
or the other grateful animals in European legend. Qat’s great
enemy, Qasavara, was dashed against the hard sky, and was turned
into stone, like the foes of Perseus. The stone is still shown in Vanua
Levu, like the stone which was Zeus in Laconia. Qat, like so many
other “culture-heroes,” disappeared mysteriously, and white men
arriving in the island have been mistaken for Qat. His departure
is sometimes connected with the myth of the deluge. In the New
Hebrides, Tagar takes the rôle of Qat, and Suqe of the bad principle,
Loki, Ahriman, Tangaro Loloqong, the Australian Crow and so
forth. These are the best known divine myths of the Melanesians.
For their All-Fathers see Holmes,
J. A. I.
, vol. xxxv., and O'Farrell,
J. A. I.
, vol. xxxiv., with Sundermann in Warneck’s
Allgemeine
Missionszeitschrift
, vol. xi. 1884.
It is “a far cry” from Vanua Levu to Vancouver Island, and,
ethnologically, the Ahts of the latter region are extremely remote
from the Papuans with their mixture of Malay and
Polynesian blood. The Ahts, however, differ but little
in their mythological beliefs from the races of the Banks
Islands or of the New Hebrides. In Sproat’s
Scenes from Savage
American Savages.
Life
(1868) there is a good account of Aht opinions by a settler who
had won the confidence of the natives between 1860 and 1868.
“There is no end to the stories which an old Indian will relate,” says
Mr Sproat, when “one quite possesses his confidence.” “The first
Indian who ever lived” is a divine being, something of a creator,
something of a first father, like Unkūlunkūlu among the Zulus.
His name is Quawteaht. He married a pre-existent bird, the thunder-bird
Tootah (we have met him among the Zulus), and by the
bird he became the father of Indians. Wispohahp is the Aht
Noah, who, with his wife, his two brothers and their wives escaped
from the deluge in a canoe. Quawteaht is inferior as a deity to the
Sun and Moon. He is the Yama of an Aht paradise, or home of the
dead, where “everything is beautiful and abundant.” From all
that is told of Quawteaht he seems to be an ideal and powerful Aht,
imaginatively placed at the beginning of things, and quite capable
of intermarriage with a bird. His creative exploits must be
considered later. Quawteaht is the Aht Prometheus Purphoros, or
fire-stealer.
Passing down the American continent from the north-west, we
find Yehl the chief hero-god and mythical personage among the
Tlingits. Like many other heroes or gods, Yehl had a miraculous
birth. His mother, a Tlingit woman, whose sons had all been
slain, met a friendly dolphin, which advised her to swallow a pebble
and a little sea-water. The birth of Yehl was the result. In his
youth he shot a supernatural crane, and can always fly about in its
feathers, like Odin and Loki in Scandinavian myth. He is usually,
however, regarded as a raven, and holds the same relation to men
and the world as the eagle-hawk Pund-jel does in Australia. His
great opponent (for the eternal dualism comes in) is Khanukh, who
is a wolf, and the ancestor or totem of the wolf-race of men as Yehl
is of the raven. The opposition between the Crow and Eagle-hawk
in Australia will be remembered. Both animals or men or gods
take part in creation. Yehl is the Prometheus Purphoros of the
Tlingits, but myths of the fire-stealer would form matter for a
separate section. Yehl also stole water, in his bird-shape, exactly
as Odin stole “Suttung’s mead” when in the shape of an eagle.
33
Yehl’s powers of metamorphosis and of flying into the air are the
common accomplishments of sorcerers, and he is a rather crude form
of first father, “culture-hero” and creator.
34
Among the Karok Indians we find the great hero and divine
benefactor in the shape of, not a raven, nor an eagle-hawk, nor a
mantis insect, nor a spider, but a coyote. Among both Karok
and Navaho the coyote is the Prometheus Purphoros, or, as the
Aryans of India call him, Matarisvan the fire-stealer. Among the
Papagos, on the eastern side of the Gulf of California, the coyote or
prairie wolf is the creative hero and chief supernatural being. In
Oregon the coyote is also the “demiurge,” but most of the myths
about him refer to his creative exploits, and will be more appropriately
treated in the next section.
Moving up the Pacific coast to British Columbia, we find the
musk-rat taking the part played by Vishnu, when in his avatar as a
boar he fished up the earth from the waters. Among the Tinneh a
miraculous dog, who, like an enchanted fairy prince, could assume
the form of a handsome young man, is the chief divine being of the
myths. He too is chiefly a creative or demiurgic being, answering
to Purusha in the
Rig Veda
. So far the peculiar mark of the wilder
American tribe legends is the bestial character of the divine beings,
which is also illustrated in Australia and Africa, while the bestial
clothing, feathers or fur, drops but slowly off Indra, Zeus and the
Egyptian Ammon, and the Scandinavian Odin. All these are more
or less anthropomorphic, but retain, as will be seen, numerous relics
of a theriomorphic condition.
See C. Hill-Tout and F. Boas in various publications, and, generally,
the volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington,
U.S.A. For Ti-ra-wa, “the Ruler of the Universe,” also styled
A-ti-us, “father,” among the Pawnees, see G. B. Grinnell,
Pawnee
Hero Stories
(1893).
Maori and Polynesian Beliefs
.—Passing from the lower savage
myths, of which space does not permit us to offer a larger selection,
we turn to races in the upper strata of barbarism. Among these
the Maoris of New Zealand, and the Polynesian people generally,
are remarkable for a mythology largely intermixed with early
attempts at more philosophical speculation. The Maoris and
Mangaians, and other peoples, have had speculators among them
not very far removed from the mental condition of the earliest Greek
philosophers, Empedocles, Anaximander, and the rest. In fact the
process from the view of nature which we call personalism to the
crudest theories of the physicists was apparently begun in New
Zealand before the arrival of Europeans. In Maori mythology it
is more than usually difficult to keep apart the origin of the world
and the origin and nature of the gods. Long traditional hymns give
an account of the “becoming out of nothing” which resulted in
the evolution of the gods and the world. In the beginning (as in the
Greek myths of Uranus and Gaea), Heaven (Rangi, conceived of as
a person) was indissolubly united to his wife Earth (Papa), and
between them they begat gods which necessarily dwelt in darkness.
These gods were some in vegetable, some in animal form; some
traditions place among these gods Tiki the demiurge, who (like
Prometheus) made men out of clay. The offspring of Rangi and
Papa (kept in the dark as they were) held a council to determine
how they should treat their parents, “Shall we slay them, or shall
we separate them?” In the Hesiodic fable, Cronus separates
the heavenly pair by mutilating his oppressive father Uranus.
Among the Maoris the god Tutenganahan cut the sinews which
united Earth and Heaven, and Tane Mahuta wrenched them apart,
and kept them eternally asunder. The new dynasty now had
earth to themselves, but Tawhiramatea, the wind, abode aloft with
his father. Some of the gods were in the forms of lizards and fishes;
some went to the land, some to the water. As among the gods
and Asuras of the
Vedas
, there were many wars in the divine race,
and as the incantations of the Indian
Brahmanas
are derived from
those old experiences of the Vedic gods, so are the incantations of
the Maoris. The gods of New Zealand, the greater gods at least,
may be called “departmental”; each person who is an elementary
force is also the god of that force. As Te Heu, a powerful chief,
said, there is division of labour among men, and so there is among
gods. “One made this, another that; Tane made trees, Ru
mountains, Tanga-roa fish, and so forth.”
35
The “departmental”
arrangement prevails among the polytheism of civilized peoples,
and is familiar to all from the Greek examples. Leaving the high
gods whose functions are so large, while their forms (as of lizard,
fish and tree) are often so mean, we come to Maui, the great divine
hero of the supernatural race in Polynesia. Maui in some respects
answers to the chief of the Adityas in Vedic mythology; in others he
answers to Qat, Quawteaht, and other savage divine personages.
Like the son of the Vedic Aditi,
36
Maui is a rejected and abortive
child of his mother, but afterwards attains to the highest reputation.
As Qat brought the hitherto unknown night, so Maui settled the sun
and moon in their proper courses. He induced the sun to move
orderly by giving him a violent beating. A similar feat was performed
by the Sun-trapper, a famous Red Indian chief. These
tales belong properly to the department of solar myths. Maui
himself is thought by
E. B. Tylor
to be a myth of the sun, but the sun
could hardly give the sun a drubbing. Maui slew monsters, invented
barbs for fish-hooks, frequently adopted the form of various birds,
acted as Prometheus Purphoros the fire-stealer, drew a whole island
up from the bottom of the deep; he was a great sorcerer and magician.
Had Maui succeeded in his attempt to pass through the body of
Night (considered as a woman) men would have been immortal.
But a little bird which sings at sunset wakened Night, she snapped up
Maui, and men die. This has been called a myth of sunset, but the
sun does what Maui failed to do, he passes through the body of Night
unharmed. The adventure is one of the myths of the origin of
death, which are almost universally diffused. Maui, though regarded
as a god, is not often addressed in prayer.
37
The whole system, as far as it can be called a system, of Maori
mythology is obviously based on the savage conceptions of the
world which have already been explained. The Polynesian system
differs mainly in detail; we have the separation of heaven and earth,
the animal-shaped gods, the fire-stealing, the exploits of Maui, and
scores of minor myths in W. W. Gill’s
Myths and Songs of the South
Pacific
, in the researches of W. Ellis, of Williams, in G. Turner’s
Polynesia
, and in many other accessible works.
Mexican and Peruvian Beliefs
.—The Maoris and other Polynesian
peoples are perhaps the best examples of a race which has risen far
above the savagery of Bushmen and Australians, but has not yet
arrived at the stage in which great centralized monarchies appear.
The Mexican and Peruvian civilizations were far ahead of Maori
culture, in so far as they possessed the elements of a much more
settled and highly-organized society. Their religion had its fine
lucid intervals, but their mythology and ritual were little better
than savage ideas, elaborately worked up by the imagination of a
cruel and superstitious priesthood. In cruelty the Aztecs surpassed
perhaps all peoples of the Old World, except certain Semitic stocks,
and their gods, of course, surpassed almost all other gods in
blood-thirstiness. But in grotesque and savage points of faith the ancient
Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Vedic Indians ran even the Aztecs
pretty close.
Bernal Diaz, the old “conquistador,” has described the hideous
aspect of the idols which Cortes destroyed, “idols in the shape of
hideous dragons as big as calves,” idols half in the form of men,
half of dogs, and serpents which were worshipped as divine. The
old contemporary missionary Sahagun has left one of the earliest
detailed accounts of the natures and myths of these gods, but, though
Sahagun took great pains in collecting facts, his speculations must
be accepted with caution. He was convinced (like Caxton in his
Destruction of Troy
, and like St Augustine) that the heathen gods
were only dead men worshipped. Ancestor-worship is a great force
in early religion, and the qualities of dead chiefs and sorcerers are
freely attributed to gods, but it does not follow that each god was
once a real man, as Sahagun supposes. Euemerism cannot be
judiciously carried so far as this. Of Huitzilopochtli, the famed
god, Sahagun says that he was a necromancer, loved
“shape-shifting,” like Odin, metamorphosed himself into animal forms, was
miraculously conceived, and, among animals, is confused with the
humming-bird, whose feathers adorned his statues.
38
This humming-bird
god should be compared with the Roman Picus (Servius,
189). That the humming-bird (Nuitziton), which was the god’s
old shape, should become merely his attendant (like the owl of Pallas,
the mouse of Apollo, the goose of Priapus, the cuckoo of Hera), when
the god received anthropomorphic form, is an example of a process
common in all mythologies. Plutarch observes that the Greeks,
though accustomed to the conceptions of the animal attendants
of their own gods, were amazed when they found animals worshipped
as gods by the Egyptians. Müller
39
mentions the view that the
humming-bird, as the most beautiful flying thing, is a proper symbol
of the heaven, and so of the heaven-god, Huitzilopochtli. This
vein of symbolism is so easy to work that it must be regarded with
distrust. Perhaps it is safer to attribute theriomorphic shapes of
gods, not to symbolism (Zeus was a cuckoo), but to survivals from
that quality of early thought which draws no line between man and
god and beast and bird and fish. If spiders may be great gods, why
not the more attractive humming-birds? Like many other gods,
Huitzilopochtli slew his foes at his birth, and hence received names
analogous to
Δειμός
and
Φόβος
: Tylor (
Primitive Culture
, ii.
307) calls Huitzilopochtli an “inextricable compound parthenogenetic
god.” His sacrament, when paste idols of him were eaten
by the communicants, was at the winter solstice, whence it may,
perhaps, be inferred that Huitzilopochtli was not only a war-god
but a nature-god—in both respects anthropomorphic, and in both
bearing traces of the time when he was but a humming-bird, as Yehl
was a raven (Müller,
op. cit.
p. 595). As a humming-bird, Huitzilopochtli
led the Aztecs to a new home, as a wolf led the Hirpini, and
as a woodpecker led the Sabines. Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec deity,
is as much a sparrow (or similar small bird) as Huitzilopochtli is a
humming-bird. Acosta says he retained the sparrow’s head in his
statue. For the composite character of Quetzalcoatl as a “culture-hero”
(a more polished version of Qat), as a “nature-god,” and
as a theriomorphic god see Müller (
op. cit.
pp. 583–584). Müller
frankly recognizes that not only are animals symbols of deity and
its attributes, not only are they companions and messengers of deity
(as in the period of anthropomorphic religion), but they have been
divine beings in and for themselves during the earlier stages of
thought. The Mexican “departmental” gods answer to those of
other polytheisms; there is an Aztec Ceres, an Aztec Lucina, an
Aztec Vulcan, an Aztec Flora, an Aztec Venus. The creative myths
and sun myths are crude and very early in character.
Egyptian Myths
.—On a much larger and more magnificent scale,
and on a much more permanent basis, the society of ancient Egypt
somewhat resembled that of ancient Mexico. The divine myths of
the two nations had points in common, but there are few topics
more obscure than Egyptian mythology. Writers are apt to speak
of Egyptian religion as if it were a single phenomenon of which all
the aspects could be observed at a given time. In point of fact
Egyptian religion (conservative though it was) lasted through perhaps
five thousand years, was subject to innumerable influences,
historical, ethnological, philosophical, and was variously represented
by various schools of priests. We cannot take the Platonic speculations
of Iamblichus about the nature and manifestations of Egyptian
godhead as evidence for the belief of the peoples who first worshipped
the Egyptian gods an innumerable series of ages before Iamblichus
and Plutarch. Nor can the esoteric and pantheistic theories of
priests (according to which the various beast-gods were symbolic
manifestations of the divine essence) be received as an historical
account of the origin of the local animal-worships. It has already
been shown that the lowest and least intellectual races indulge in
local animal-worship, each stock having its parent bird, beast, fish,
or even plant, or inanimate object. It has also been shown that
these backward peoples recognize a non-natural race of men or
animals, or both, as the first fathers, heroes, and, in a sense, gods.
Such ideas are consonant with, and may be traced to the confused
and nebulous condition of, savage thought. Precisely the same
ideas are found at various periods among the ancient Egyptians.
If we are to regard the Egyptian myths about the gods in animal
shape, and about the non-natural superhuman heroes, and their
wars and loves, as esoteric allegories devised by civilized priests,
perhaps we should also explain Pund-jel, Qat, Quawteaht, the Mantis
god, the Spider creator, the Coyote and Raven gods as priestly
inventions, put forth in a civilized age, and retained by Australians,
Bushmen, Hottentots, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Papuans, who preserve
no other vestiges of high civilization. Or we may take the opposite
view, and regard the story of Osiris and his war with Seth (who shut
him up in a box and mutilated him) as a dualistic myth, originally
on the level of the battle between Gaunab and Tsui-Goab, or between
Tagar and Suqe. We may regard the local beast- and plant-gods
of Egypt as survivals of totems and totem-gods like those of Australia,
India, America, Africa, Siberia and other countries. In this article
the latter view is adopted. The beast-gods and dualistic and creative
myths of savages are looked on as the natural product of the savage
reason and fancy. The same beast-gods and myths in civilized
Egypt are looked on as survivals from the rude and early condition
of thought to which such conceptions are natural.
In the most ancient Egyptian records the gods are not pictorially
represented, and we have not obtained from these records any
descriptions of adoration and sacrifice. There is a prayer to the
Sky on the coffin of the king of Dynasty IV., known as Mycerinus
to the Greeks. The king describes himself as the child of Sky and
Earth. He also somewhat obscurely identifies himself with Osiris.
We thus find Osiris very near the beginning of what is known
about Egyptian religion. This being is rather a culture-hero, a
member of a non-natural race of men like Qat or Manabozho, than a
god. His myth, to be afterwards narrated, is found pictorially
represented in a tomb and in the late temple of Philae, is frequently
alluded to in the litanies of the dead about 1400
B.C.
, is indicated
with reverent awe by Herodotus, and after the Christian era is
described at full length by Plutarch. Whether the same myth was
current in the far more distant days of Mycerinus, it is, of course,
impossible to say with dogmatic certainty. The religious history
of Egypt, from perhaps Dynasty X. to Dynasty XX., is interrupted
by an invasion of Semitic conquerors and Semitic ideas. Prior to
that invasion the gods, when mentioned in monuments, are always
represented by animals, and these animals are the object of strictly
local worship. The name of each god is spelled in hieroglyphs beside
the beast or bird. The jackal stands for Anup, the hawk for Har,
the frog for Hekt, the baboon for Tahuti, and Ptah, Asiri, Hesi,
Nebhat, Hat-hor, Neit, Khnum and Amun-hor are all written out
phonetically, but never represented in pictures. Different cities
had their different beast-gods. Pasht, the cat, was the god of
Bubastis; Apis, the bull, of Memphis; Hapi, the wolf, of Sioot; Ba,
the goat, of Mendes. The evidence of Herodotus, Plutarch and the
other writers shows that the Egyptians of each district refused to
eat the flesh of the animal they held sacred. So far the identity of
custom with savage totemism is absolute. Of all the explanations,
then, of Egyptian animal-worship, that which regards the practice
as a survival of totemism and of savagery seems the most
satisfactory. So far Egyptian religion only represented her gods in
theriomorphic shape. Beasts also appeared in the royal genealogies,
as if the early Egyptians had filled up the measure of totemism by
regarding themselves as actually descended from animals.
With one or two exceptions, “the first (semi-anthropomorphic)
figures of gods known in the civilized parts of Egypt are on the granite
Obelisk of Bezig in the Fayyúm, erected by Usertesen I. of Dynasty XII.,
and here we find the forms all full-blown at once. The first
group of deities belongs to a period and a district in which Semitic
influences had undoubtedly begun to work” (Petrie). From this
period the mixed and monstrous figures, semi-theriomorphic,
semi-anthropomorphic, hawk-headed and ram-headed and jackal-headed
gods become common. This may be attributed to Semitic influence,
or we may suppose that the process of anthropomorphizing
theriomorphic gods was naturally developing itself; for Mexico has shown
us and Greece can show us abundant examples of these mixed
figures, in which the anthropomorphic god retains traces of his
theriomorphic past. The heretical worship of the solar disk
interrupted the course of Egyptian religion under some reforming kings,
but the great and glorious Ramesside Dynasty (XIX.) restored
“Orus and Isis and the dog Anubis” with the rest of the
semi-theriomorphic deities. These survived even their defeat by the
splendid human gods of Rome, and only “fled from the folding
star of Bethlehem.”
Though Egypt was rich in gods, her literature is not fertile in
myths. The religious compositions which have survived are, as a
rule, hymns and litanies, the funereal service, the “Book of the
Dead.” In these works the myths are taken for granted, are
alluded to in the course of addresses to the divine beings, but,
naturally, are not told in full. As in the case of the
Vedas
, hymns
are poor sources for the study of mythology, just as the hymns of
the Church would throw little light on the incidents of the gospel
story or of the Old Testament. The “sacred legends” which the
priests or temple servants freely communicated to Herodotus
are lost through the pious reserve of the traveller. Herodotus
constantly alludes to the most famous Egyptian myth, that of Osiris,
and he recognizes the analogies between the Osirian myth and
mysteries and those of Dionysus. But we have to turn to the very late
authority of Plutarch (
De Iside et Osiride
) for an account, confessedly
incomplete and expurgated, of what mythology had to tell about
the great Egyptian “culture-hero,” “daemon,” and god. Osiris,
Horus, Typhon (Seth), Isis and Nephthys were the children of Seb
(whom the Greeks identified with Cronus); the myths of their birth
were peculiarly savage and obscene. Osiris introduced civilization
into Egypt, and then wandered over the world, making men
acquainted with agriculture and the arts, as Pund-jel in his humbler
way did in Australia. On his return Typhon laid a plot for him.
He had a beautiful carved chest made which exactly fitted Osiris,
and at an entertainment offered to give it to any one who could lie
down in it. As soon as Osiris tried, Typhon had the box nailed up,
and threw it into the Tanaite branch of the Nile. Isis wandered,
mourning, in search of the body, as Demeter sought Persephone,
and perhaps in Plutarch’s late version some incidents may be
borrowed from the Eleusinian legend. At length she found the
chest, which in her absence was again discovered by Typhon. He
mangled the body of Osiris (as so many gods of all races were mangled),
and tossed the fragments about. Wherever Isis found a portion
of Osiris she buried it; hence Egypt was as rich in graves of Osiris as
Namaqualand in graves of Heitsi Eibib. The phallus alone she did
not find, but she consecrated a model thereof; hence (says the myth)
came the phallus-worship of Egypt. Afterwards Osiris returned
from the shades, and (in the form of a wolf) urged his son Horus to
revenge him on Typhon. The gods fought in animal shape (Birch, in
Wilkinson, iii. 144). Plutarch purposely omits as “too blasphemous”
the legend of the mangling of Horus. Though the graves
of these non-natural beings are shown, the priests (
De Is. et Os.
xxi.)
also show the stars into which they were metamorphosed, as the
Eskimo and Australians and Aryans of India and Greeks have recognized
in the constellations their ancient heroes. Plutarch remarked
the fact that the Greek myths of Cronus, of Dionysus, of Apollo and
the Python, and of Demeter, “all the things that are shrouded in
mystic ceremonies and are presented in rites,” “do not fall short in
absurdity of the legends about Osiris and Typhon.” Plutarch
naturally presumed that the myths which seem absurd shrouded
some great moral or physical mystery. But we apply no such
explanation to similar savage legends, and our theory is that the
Osirian myth is only one of these retained to the time of Plutarch by
the religious conservatism of a race which, to the time of Plutarch,
preserved in full vigour most of the practices of totemism. As a
slight confirmation of the possibility of this theory we may mention
that Greek mysteries retained two of the features of savage mysteries.
The first was the rite of daubing the initiated with clay.
40
This
custom prevails in African mysteries, in Guiana, among Australians,
Papuans, and Andaman Islanders. The other custom is the use of
the
turndun
, as the Australians call a little fish-shaped piece of
wood tied to a string, and waved so as to produce a loud booming
and whirring noise and keep away the profane, especially women.
It is employed in New Mexico, South Africa, New Zealand and
Australia. This instrument, the
κῶνος
, was also used in Greek
mysteries.
41
Neither the use of the
κῶνος
nor of the clay can very
well be regarded as a civilized practice retained by savages. The
hypothesis that the rites and the stories are savage inventions
surviving into civilized religion seems better to meet the difficulty.
That the Osirian myth (much as it was elaborated and allegorized)
originated in the same sort of fancy as the Tacullie story of the
dismembered beaver out of whose body things were made is a
conclusion not devoid of plausibility. Typhon’s later career, “committing
dreadful crimes out of envy and spite, and throwing all things
into confusion,” was parallel to the proceedings of most of the divine
beings who put everything wrong, in opposition to the being who
makes everything right. This is perhaps an early “dualistic”
myth.
Among other mythic Egyptian figures we have Ra, who once
destroyed men in his wrath with circumstances suggestive of the
Deluge; Khnum, a demiurge, is represented at Philae as making man
out of clay on a potter’s wheel. Here the wheel is added to the
Maori conception of the making of man. Khnum is said to have
reconstructed the limbs of the dismembered Osiris. Ptah is the
Egyptian Hephaestus; he is represented as a dwarf; men are said
to have come out of his eye, gods out of his mouth—a story like that
of Purusha in the
Rig Veda
. As creator of man, Ptah is a frog.
Bubastis became a cat to avoid the wrath of Typhon. Ra, the sun,
fought the big serpent Apap, as Indra fought Vrittra. Seb is a
goose, called “the great cackler”; he laid the creative egg.
42
Divine Myths of the Aryans of India. Indra.
—The gods of the
Vedas
and
Brahmanas
(the ancient hymns and canonized ritual-books
of Aryan India) are, on the whole, of the usual polytheistic type.
More than many other gods they retain in their titles and attributes
the character of elemental phenomena personified. That personification
is, as a rule, anthropomorphic, but traces of theriomorphic
personification are still very apparent. The ideas which may be
gathered about the gods from the hymns are (as is usual in heathen
religions) without consistency. There is no strict orthodoxy. As
each bard of each bardic family celebrates his favourite god he is apt
to make him for the moment the pre-eminent deity of all. This way
of thinking about the gods leads naturally in the direction of a
pantheistic monotheism in which each divine being may be regarded
as a manifestation of the one divine essence. No doubt this point
of view was attained in centuries extremely remote by sages of the
civilized Vedic world. It is easy, however, to detect certain peculiar
characteristics of each god. As among races much less advanced
in civilization than the Vedic Indians, each of the greater powers
has his own separate department, however much his worshippers
may be inclined to regard him as an absolute premier with undisputed
latitude of personal government. Thus Indra is mainly concerned
with thunder and other atmospheric phenomena; but Vayu is the
wind, the Maruts are wind-gods, Agni is fire or the god of fire, and
so connected with lightning. Powerful as Indra is in the celestial
world, Mitra and Varuna preside over night and day. Ushas is
the dawn, and Tvashtri is the mechanic among the gods, corresponding
to the Egyptian Ptah and the Greek Hephaestus. Though
lofty moral qualities and deep concern about the conduct of men
are attributed to the gods in the Vedic hymns, yet the hymns contain
traces (and these are amplified in the ritual books) of a divine
chronique scandaleuse
. In this
chronique
the gods, like other gods,
are adventurous warriors, adulterers, incestuous, homicidal, given
to animal transformations, cowardly, and in fact charged with all
human vices, and credited with magical powers.
43
It would be
difficult to speak too highly of the ethical nobility of many Vedic
hymns. The “hunger and thirst after righteousness” of the sacred
poet recalls the noblest aspirations and regrets of the Hebrew
psalmist. But this aspect of the Vedic deities is essentially matter
for the science of religion rather than of mythology, which is
concerned with the stories told about the gods. Religion is always
forgetting, or explaining away, or apologizing for these stories.
Now the Vedic deities, so imposing when regarded as vast natural
forces (as such forces seem to us), so benignant when appealed to
as forgivers of sins, have also their mythological aspect. In this
aspect they are natural phenomena still, but phenomena as originally
conceived of by the personifying imagination of the savage, and
credited, like the gods of the Maori or the Australian, with all
manner of freaks, adventures and disguises. The
Veda
, it is true,
does not usually dilate much on the worst of these adventures.
The
Veda
contains devotional hymns; we can no more expect much
narrative here than in the Psalms of David. Again, the religious
sentiment of the
Veda
is half-consciously hostile to the stories. As
M. A. Barth says, “Le sentiment religieux a écarté la plupart de
ces mythes, mais il ne les a écartés tous.” The
Brahmanas
, on the
other hand, later compilations, canonized books for the direction
of ritual and sacrifice, are rich in senseless and irrational myths.
Sometimes these myths are probably later than the
Veda
, mere
explanations of ritual incidents devised by the priests. Sometimes
a myth probably older than the
Vedas
, and maintained in popular
tradition, is reported in the
Brahmanas
. The gods in the
Veda
are
by no means always regarded as equal in supremacy. There were
great and small, young and old gods (
R. V.
i. 27, 13). Elsewhere
this is flatly contradicted: “None of you, oh gods, is small or young,
ye are all great” (
R. V.
viii. 30, 1). As to the immortality and the
origin of the gods, there is no orthodox opinion in the
Veda
. Many
of the myths of the origin of the divine beings are on a level with the
Maori theory that Heaven and Earth begat them in the ordinary way.
Again, the gods were represented as the children of Aditi. This may
be taken either in a refined sense, as if Aditi were the “infinite”
region from which the solar deities rise,
44
or we may hold with the
Taittirya-Brahmana
45
that Aditi was a female who, being desirous
of offspring, cooked a
brahmandana
offering for the Sadhyas.
Various other fathers and mothers of the gods are mentioned.
Some gods, particularly Indra, are said to have won divine rank by
“austere fervour” and asceticism, which is one of the processes
that makes gods out of mortals even now in India.
46
The gods are
not always even credited with inherent immortality. Like men,
they were subject to death, which they overcame in various ways.
Like most gods, they had struggles for pre-eminence with Titanic
opponents, the Asuras, who partly answer to the Greek Titans and
the Hawaiian foes of the divine race, or to the Scandinavian giants
and the enemies who beset the savage creative beings. Early man,
living in a state of endless warfare, naturally believes that his gods
also have their battles. The chief foes of Indra are Vrittra and Ahi,
serpents which swallow up the waters, precisely as frogs do in Australian
and Californian and Andaman myths. It has already been
shown that such creatures, thunder-birds, snakes, dragons, and what
not, people the sky in the imagination of Zulus, Red Men, Chinese,
Peruvians, and all the races who believe that beasts hunt the sun
and moon and cause eclipses.
47
Though hostile to Asuras, Indra
was once entangled in an intrigue with a woman of that race, according
to the
Atharva-Veda
(Muir,
S. T.
v. 82). The gods were less
numerous than the Asuras, but by a magical stratagem turned some
bricks into gods (like a creation of new peers to carry a vote)—so says
the
Black Yajur-Veda
48
Turning to separate gods, Indra first claims attention, for stories
of Heaven and Earth are better studied under the heading of myths
of the origin of things. Indra has this zoomorphic feature in common
with Heitsi Eibib, the Namaqua god,
49
that his mother, or one of
his mothers, was a cow (
R. V.
iv. 18, 1). This statement may be
a mere way of speaking in the
Veda
, but it is a rather Hottentot way.
50
Indra is also referred to as a ram in the
Veda
, and in one myth this
ram could fly, like the Greek ram of the fleece of gold. He was
certainly so far connected with sheep that he and sheep and the
Kshatriya caste sprang from the breast and arms of Prajapati, a
kind of creative being. Indra was a great drinker of soma juice;
a drinking-song by Indra, much bemused with soma, is in
R. V.
x.
119. On one occasion Indra got at the soma by assuming the shape
of a quail. In the
Taitt. Samh.
(ii. 5; i. 1) Indra is said to “have been
guilty of that most hideous crime, the killing of a Brāhmana.”
51
Once, though uninvited, Indra drank some soma that had been
prepared for another being. The soma disagreed with Indra; part
of it which was not drunk up became Vrittra the serpent, Indra’s
enemy. Indra cut him in two, and made the moon out of half of
his body. This serpent was a universal devourer of everything and
everybody, like Kwai Hemm, the all-devourer in Bushman mythology.
If this invention is a late priestly one, the person who introduced
it into the
Satapatha-Brahmana
must have reverted to the
intellectual condition of Bushmen. In the fight with Vrittra, Indra
lost his energy, which fell to the earth and produced plants and
shrubs. In the same way plants, among the Iroquois, were made of
pieces knocked off Chokanipok in his fight with Manabozho. Vines,
in particular, are the entrails of Chokanipok. In Egypt, wine was
the blood of the enemies of the gods. The Aryan versions of this
sensible legend will be found in
Satapatha-Brahmana
52
The civilized
mind soon wearies of this stuff, and perhaps enough has been said
to prove that, in the traditions of Vedic devotees, Indra was not a
god without an irrational element in his myth. Our argument is,
that all these legends about Indra, of which only a sample is given,
have no necessary connexion with the worship of a pure nature-god
as a nature-god would now be constructed by men. The legends
are survivals of a time in which natural phenomena were regarded,
not as we regard them, but as persons, and savage persons,
Alcheringa
folk, in fact, and became the centres of legends in the savage manner.
Space does not permit us to recount the equally puerile and barbarous
legends of Vishnu, Agni, the loves of Vivasvat in the form of a horse,
the adventures of Soma, nor the Vedic amours (paralleled in several
savage mythologies) of Pururavas and Urvasi.
53
Divine Myths of Greece
.—If any ancient people was thoroughly
civilized the Greeks were that people. Yet in the mythology and
religion of Greece we find abundant survivals of savage manners and
of savage myths. As to the religion, it is enough to point to the
traces of human sacrifice and to the worship of rude fetish stones.
The human sacrifices at Salamis in Cyprus and at Alos in Achaia
Phthiotis may be said to have continued almost to the conversion
of the empire (Grote i. 125, ed. 1869). Pausanias seems to have
found human sacrifices to Zeus still lingering in Arcadia in the 2nd
century of our era. “On this altar on the Lycaean hill they sacrifice
to Zeus in a manner that may not be spoken, and little liking had I
to pry far into that sacrifice. But let it be as it is, and as it hath
been from the beginning.” Now “from the beginning” the sacrifice,
according to Arcadian tradition, had been a human sacrifice. In
other places there were manifest commutations of human sacrifice,
as at the altar of Artemis the Implacable at Patrae, where Pausanias
saw the wild beasts being driven into the flames.
54
Many other examples
of human sacrifice are mentioned in Greek legend. Pausanias
gives full and interesting details of the worship of rude stones,
the oldest worship, he says, among the Greeks. Almost every
temple had its fetish stone on a level with the pumice stone, which is
the Poseidon of the Mangaians.
55
The Argives had a large stone
called Zeus Cappotas. The oldest idol of the Thespians was a rude
stone. Another has been found beneath the pedestal of Apollo
in Delos. In Achaean Pharae were thirty squared stones, each
named by the name of a god. Among monstrous images of the gods
which Pausanias, who saw them, regarded as the oldest idols, were
the three-headed Artemis, each head being that of an animal, the
Demeter with the horse’s head, the Artemis with the fish’s tail, the
Zeus with three eyes, the ithyphallic Hermes, represented after the
fashion of the Priapic figures in paintings on the walls of caves
among the Bushmen. We also hear of the bull and the bull-footed
Dionysus. Phallic and other obscene emblems were carried abroad
in processions in Attica both by women and men. The Greek
custom of daubing people all over with clay in the mysteries
results as we saw in the mysteries of negroes, Australians and
American races, while the Australian
turndun
was exhibited
among the toys at the mysteries of Dionysus. The survivals
of rites, objects of worship, and sacrifices like these prove that
religious conservatism in Greece retained much of savage practice,
and the Greek mythology is not less full of ideas familiar to the
lowest races. The authorities for Greek mythology are numerous
and various in character. The oldest sources as literary documents
are the Homeric and Hesiodic poems. In the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
the gods and goddesses are beautiful, powerful and immortal
anthropomorphic beings. The name of Zeus (Skr.
Dyaus
) clearly
indicates his connexion with the sky. But in Homer he has long
ceased to be merely the sky conceived of as a person; he is the
chief personage in a society of immortals, organized on the type of
contemporary human society. “There is a great deal of human
nature” in his wife Hera (Skr.
Svar
, Heaven).
56
It is to be remembered
that philologists differ widely as to the origin and meaning of
the names of almost all the Greek gods. Thus the light which the
science of language throws on Greek myths is extremely uncertain.
Hera is explained as “the feminine side of heaven” by some authorities.
The quarrels of Hera with Zeus (which are a humorous
anthropomorphic study in Homer) are represented as a way of speaking
about winter and rough weather. The other chief Homeric
deities are Apollo and Artemis, children of Zeus by Leto, a mortal
mother raised to divinity. Apollo is clearly connected in some way
with light, as his name
φοῖβος
seems to indicate, and with purity.
57
Homer knows the legend that a giant sought to lay violent hands on
Leto (
Od.
xi. 580). Smintheus, one of Apollo’s titles in Homer, is
connected with the field-mouse (
σμίνθος
), one of his many sacred
animals. His names,
Λύκιος
Λυκηγενής
, were connected by
antiquity with the wolf, by most modern writers with the light.
According to some legends Leto had been a were-wolf.
58
The whole
subject of the relations of Greek gods to animals is best set forth in
the words of Plutarch (
De Is. et Os.
lxxi.), where he says that the
Egyptians worship actual beasts, “whereas the Greeks both speak
and believe correctly, saying that the dove is the sacred animal of
Aphrodite, the raven of Apollo, the dog of Artemis,” and so forth.
Each Greek god had a small menagerie of sacred animals, and it
may be conjectured that these animals were originally the totems
of various stocks, subsumed into the worship of the anthropomorphic
god. For the new theory of vegetation spirits and corn spirits see
The Golden Bough
. Apollo, in any case, is the young and beautiful
archer-god of Homer; Artemis, his sister, is the goddess of archery,
who takes her pastime in the chase. She holds no considerable place
in the
Iliad
; in the
Odyssey
, Nausicaa is compared to her, as to the
pure and lovely lady of maidenhood. Her name is commonly
connected with
ἀρτεμής
—pure, unpolluted. Her close relations
(un-Homeric) with the bear and bear-worship have suggested a
derivation from
ἄρκτος
Ἄρκτεμις
. In Homer her “gentle shafts”
deal sudden and painless death; she is a beautiful Azrael. A much
more important daughter of Zeus in Homer is Athene, the “grey-eyed”
or (as some take
γλαυκῶπις
, rather improbably) the “owl-headed”
goddess. Her birth from the head of Zeus is not explicitly
alluded to in Homer.
59
In Homer, Athene is a warlike maiden, the
patron-goddess of wisdom and manly resolution. In the twenty-second
book of the
Odyssey
she assumes the form of a swallow, and
she can put on the shape of any man. She bears the aegis, the awful
shield of Zeus. Another Homeric child of Zeus, or, according to
Hesiod (
Th.
927), of Hera alone, is Hephaestus, the lame craftsman
and artificer. In the
Iliad
60
will be found some of the crudest
Homeric myths. Zeus or Hera throws Hephaestus or Ate out of
heaven, as in the Iroquois myth of the tossing from heaven of
Ataentsic. There is, as usual, no agreement as to the etymology of
the name of Hephaestus. Preller inclines to a connexion with
ἧφθαι
, to kindle fire, but Max Müller differs from this theory.
About the close relations of Hephaestus with fire there can be no
doubt. He is a rough, kind, good-humoured being in the
Iliad
In the
Odyssey
he is naturally annoyed by the adultery of his wife,
Aphrodite, with Ares. Ares is a god with whom Homer has no
sympathy. He is a son of Hera, and detested by Zeus (
Iliad
, v. 890).
He is cowardly in war, and on one occasion was shut up for years
in a huge brazen pot. This adventure was even more ignominious
than that of Poseidon and Apollo when they were compelled to serve
Laomedon for hire. The payment he refused, and threatened to
“cut off their ears with the sword” (
Iliad
, xxi. 455). Poseidon is to
the sea what Zeus is to the air, and Hades to the underworld in
Homer.
61
His own view of his social position may be stated in his
own words (
Iliad
, xv. 183, 211). “Three brethren are we, and sons
of Cronus, sons whom Rhea bare, even Zeus and myself, and Hades
is the third, the ruler of the people in the underworld. And in
three lots were all things divided, and each drew a lot of his own,
62
and
to me fell the hoary sea, and Hades drew the mirky darkness, and
Zeus the wide heaven in clear air and clouds, but the earth and high
Olympus are yet common to all.”
Zeus, however, is, as Poseidon admits, the elder-born, and therefore
the revered head of the family. Thus Homer adopts the system
of primogeniture, while Hesiod is all for the opposite and probably
earlier custom of
Jüngsten-recht
, and makes supreme Zeus the
youngest of the sons of Cronus. Among the other gods Dionysus
is but slightly alluded to in Homer as the son of Zeus and Semele,
as the object of persecution, and as connected with the myth of
Ariadne. The name of Hermes is derived from various sources, as
from
ὁρμᾶν
and
ὁρμή
, or, by Max Müller, the name is connected
with Sarameya (Sky). If he had originally an elemental character,
it is now difficult to distinguish, though interpreters connect him
with the wind. He is the messenger of the gods, the bringer of good
luck, and the conductor of men’s souls down the dark ways of death.
In addition to the great Homeric gods, the poet knows a whole
“Olympian consistory” of deities, nymphs, nereids, sea-gods and
goddesses, river-gods, Iris the rainbow goddess, Sleep, Demeter
who lay with a mortal, Aphrodite the goddess of love, wife of Hephaestus
and leman of Ares, and so forth. As to the origin of the gods,
Homer is not very explicit. He is acquainted with the existence
of an older dynasty now deposed, the dynasty of Cronus and the
Titans. In the
Iliad
(viii. 478) Zeus says to Hera, “For thine anger
reck I not, not even though thou go to the nethermost bounds of
earth and sea, where sit Iapetus and Cronus
. . .
and deep Tartarus
is round about them.” “The gods below that are with Cronus” are
mentioned (
Il.
xiv. 274; xv. 225). Rumours of old divine wars
echo in the
Iliad
, as (i. 400) where it is said that when the other
immortals revolted against and bound Zeus, Thetis brought to his
aid Aegaeon of the hundred arms. The streams of Oceanus (
Il.
xiv.
246) are spoken of as the source of all the gods, and in the same book
(290) “Oceanus and mother Tethys” are regarded as the parents
of the immortals. Zeus is usually called Cronion and Cronides,
which Homer certainly understood to mean “son of Cronus,” yet it
is expressly stated that Zeus “imprisoned Cronus beneath the earth
and the unvintaged sea.” The whole subject is only alluded to
incidentally. On the whole it may be said that the Homeric deities
are powerful anthropomorphic beings, departmental rulers, united
by the ordinary social and family ties of the Homeric age, capable
of pain and pleasure, living on heavenly food, but refreshed by the
sacrifices of men (
Od.
v. 100, 102), able to assume all forms at will,
and to intermarry and propagate the species with mortal men and
women. Their past has been stormy, and their ruler has attained
power after defeating and mediatizing a more ancient dynasty of his
own kindred.
From Hesiod we receive a much more elaborate—probably a
more ancient, certainly a more barbarous—story of the gods and
their origin. In the beginning the gods (here used in a wide sense
to denote an early non-natural race) were begotten by Earth and
Heaven, conceived of as beings with human parts and passions
(Hesiod,
Theog.
45). This idea recurs in Maori, Vedic and Chinese
mythology. Heaven and Earth, united in an endless embrace,
produced children which never saw the light. In New Zealand,
Chinese, Vedic, Indian and Greek myths the pair had to be sundered.
63
Hesiod enumerates the children whom Earth bore “when couched
in love with Heaven.” They are Ocean, Coeus, Crius, Hyperion,
Iapetus, Theia, Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoebe, Tethys and the
youngest, Cronus, “and he hated his glorious father.” Others of
this early race were the Cyclopes, Bronte, Sterope and Arge, and
three children of enormous strength, Cottus, Briareus (Aegaeon)
and Gyes, each with one hundred hands and fifty heads. Uranus
detested his offspring, and hid them in crannies of Earth. Earth
excited Cronus to attack the father, whom he castrated with a
sickle. From the blood of Uranus (this feature is common in Red
Indian and Egyptian myths) were born furies, giants, ash-nymphs
and Aphrodite. A number of monsters, as Echidna, Geryon and
the hound of hell, were born of the loves of various elemental
powers. The chief stock of the divine species was continued by
the marriage of Rhea (probably another form of the Earth) with
Cronus. Their children were Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and
Poseidon. All these Cronus swallowed; and this “swallow-myth”
occurs in Australia, among the Bushmen, in Guiana, in Brittany
(where Gargantua did the swallow-trick) and elsewhere. At last
Rhea bore Zeus, and gave Cronus a stone in swaddling bands,
which he disposed of in the usual way. Zeus grew up, administered
an emetic to Cronus (some say Metis did this), and had the
satisfaction of seeing all his brothers and sisters disgorged alive. The
stone came forth first, and Pausanias saw it at Delphi (Paus. x. 24).
Then followed the wars between Zeus and the gods he had rescued
from the maw of Cronus against the gods of the elder branch, the
children of Uranus and Gaea—Heaven and Earth. The victory
remained with the younger branch, the immortal Olympians of
Homer. The system of Hesiod is a medley of later physical
speculation and of poetic allegory, with matter which we, at least,
regard as savage survivals, like the mutilation of Heaven and the
swallow-myth.
64
In Homer and in Hesiod myths enter the region of literature,
and become, as it were, national. But it is probable that the local
myths of various cities and temples, of the “sacred chapters”
which were told by the priests to travellers and in the mysteries to
the initiated, were older in form than the epic and national myths.
Of these “sacred chapters” we have fragments and hints in Herodotus,
Pausanias, in the mythographers, like Apollodorus, in the
tragic poets, and in the ancient
scholia
or notes on the classics.
From these sources come almost all the more inhuman, bestial
and discreditable myths of the gods. In these we more distinctly
perceive the savage element. The gods assume animal forms:
Cronus becomes a horse, Rhea a mare; Zeus begets separate families
of men in the shape of a bull, an ant, a serpent, a swan. His mistress
from whom the Arcadians claim descent becomes a she-bear. It
is usual with mythologists to say that Zeus is the “All-Father,” and
that his amours are only a poetic way of stating that he is the parent
of men. But why does he assume so many animal shapes? Why
did various royal houses claim descent from the ant, the swan, the
she-bear, the serpent, the horse and so forth? We have already
seen that this is the ordinary pedigree of savage stocks in Asia,
Africa, Australia and America, while animals appear among Irish
tribes and in Egyptian and ancient English genealogies.
65
It is a
plausible hypothesis that stocks which once claimed descent from
animals,
sans phrase
, afterwards regarded the animals as avatars
of Zeus. In the same way “the Minas, a non-Aryan tribe of Rajputana,
used to worship the pig; when the Brahmans got a turn at
them, the pig became an avatar of Vishnu” (Lyall,
Asiatic Studies
).
The tales of divine cannibalism to which Pindar refers with awe,
the mutilation of Dionysus Zagreus, the unspeakable abominations
of Dionysus, the loves of Hera in the shape of a cuckoo, the divine
powers of metamorphosing men and women into beasts and stars—these
tales come to us as echoes of the period of savage thought.
Further evidence on this point will be given below in a classification
of the principal mythic legends. The general conclusion is that
many of the Greek deities were originally elemental, the elements
being personified in accordance with the laws of savage imaginations.
But we cannot explain each detail in the legends as a myth
of this or that natural phenomenon or process as understood by
ourselves. Various stages of late and early fancy have contributed
to the legends. Zeus is the sky, but not our sky; he had originally
a personal character, and that a savage or barbarous character.
He probably attracted into his legend stories that did not originally
belong to him. He became anthropomorphic, and his myth
was handled by local priests, by family bards, by national poets,
by early philosophers. His legend is a complex embroidery on a
very ancient tissue. The other divine myths are equally complex.
See L. R. Farnell,
Cults of the Greek States
; Miss Jane Harrison,
Prolegomena to Greek Religion
; and Frazer,
The Golden Bough
especially as regards the vegetable or “probably arboreal” aspect
of Zeus.
Scandinavian Divine Myths
.—The Scandinavian myths of the
gods are numerous and interesting, but the evidence on which they
have reached us demands criticism for which we lack space. That
there are in the
Eddas
and
Sagas
early ideas and later ideas tinged
by Christian legend seems indubitable, but philological and historical
learning has by no means settled the questions of relative purity
and antiquity in the myths. The Eddic songs, according to F. Y.
Powell, one of the editors of the
Corpus poeticum septentrionale
(the best work on the subject), “cannot date earlier” in their
present form “than the 9th century,” and may be vaguely placed
between
A.D.
800–1100. The collector of the
Edda
probably
had the old poems recited to him in the 13th century, and where
there was a break in the memory of the reciters the lacuna was
filled up in prose. “As one goes through the poems, one is ever
and anon face to face with a myth of the most childish and barbaric
type,” which “carries one back to prae-Aryan days.” Side by
side with these old stories come fragments of a different stratum
of thought, Christian ideas, the belief in a supreme God. the notion
of Doomsday. The Scandinavian cosmogonic myth (with its
parallels among races savage and civilized) is given elsewhere.
The most important god is Odin, the son of Bestla and Bor, the
husband of Frigg, the father of Balder and many other sons, the
head of the Aesir stock of gods. Odin’s name is connected with
that of Wuotan, and referred to the Old High-German verb
watan
wuot
meare
cum impetu ferri
(Grimm,
Teut. Myth.
, Eng. transl.,
i. 131). Odin would thus (if we admit the etymology) be the
swift goer, the “ganger,” and it seems superfluous to make him
(with Grimm) “the all-powerful, all-permeating being,” a very
abstract and scarcely an early conception. Odin’s brethren (in
Gylfi’s Mocking
) are Vile and Ve, who with him slew Ymir the
giant, and made all things out of the fragments of his body. They
also made man out of two stocks. In the
Hava-Mal
Odin claims
for himself most of the attributes of the medicine-man. In
Loka
Senna
, Loki, the evil god, says that “Odin dealt in magic in
Samsey.” The goddess Frigg remarks, “Ye should never talk of
your old doings before men, of what ye two Aesir went through in
old times.” But many relics of these “old times,” many traces
of the medicine-man and the “skin-shifter,” survive in the myth of
Odin. When he stole Suttung’s mead (which answers somewhat
to nectar and the Indian soma), he flew away in the shape of an
eagle.
66
The hawk is sacred to Odin; one of his names is “the
Raven-god.” He was usually represented as one-eyed, having
left an eye in pawn that he might purchase a draught from Mimir’s
well. This one eye is often explained as the sun. Odin’s wife
was Frigg; their sons were Thor (the thunder-god) and Balder,
whose myth is well known in English poetry. The gods were
divided into two—not always friendly—stocks, the Aesir and Vanir.
Their relations are, on the whole, much more amicable than those
of the Asuras and Devas in Indian mythology. Not necessarily
immortal, the gods restored their vigour by eating the apples of
Iduna. Asa Loki was a being of mixed race, half god, half giant,
and wholly mischievous and evil. His legend includes animal
metamorphoses of the most obscene character. In the shape of
a mare he became the mother of the eight-legged horse of Odin.
He borrowed the hawk-dress of Freya, when he recovered the
apples of Iduna. Another Eddic god, Hoene, is described in
phrases from lost poems as “the long-legged one,” “lord of the
ooze,” and his name is connected with that of the crane. The constant
enemies of the gods, the giants, could also assume animal
forms. Thus in Thiodolf’s
Haust-long
(composed after the settlement
of Iceland) we read about a shield on which events from mythology
were painted; among these was the flight of “giant Thiazzi
in an ancient eagle’s feathers.” The god Herindal and Loki once
fought a battle in the shapes of seals. On the whole, the Scandinavian
gods are a society on an early human model, of beings
indifferently human, animal and divine—some of them derived
from elemental forces personified, holding sway over the elements,
and skilled in sorcery. Probably after the viking days came in the
conceptions of the last war of gods, and the end of all, and the theory
of Odin All-Father as a kind of emperor in the heavenly world.
The famous tree that lives through all the world is regarded as
“foreign, Christian, and confined to few poems.” There is, almost
undoubtedly, a touch of the Christian dawn on the figure and
myth of the pure and beloved and ill-fated god Balder, and his
descent into hell. The whole subject is beset with critical difficulties,
and we have chiefly noted features which can hardly be
regarded as late, and which correspond with widely distributed
mythical ideas.
Dasent’s
Prose or Younger Edda
(Stockholm, 1842); the
Corpus
Septentrionale
already referred to; C. F. Keary’s
Mythology of the
Eddas
(1882); Pigott’s
Manual of Scandinavian Mythology
(1838);
and Laing’s
Early Kings of Norway
may be consulted by English
students.
Classification of Myths
.—It is now necessary to cast a hasty
glance over the chief divisions of myths. These correspond to
the chief problems which the world presents to the curiosity of
untutored men. They ask themselves (and the answers are
given in myths) the following questions: What is the Origin
of the World? The Origin of Man? Whence came the Arts
of Life? Whence the Stars? Whence the Sun and Moon?
What is the Origin of Death? How was Fire procured by Man?
The question of the origin of the marks and characteristics of
various animals and plants has also produced a class of myths
in which the marks are said to survive from some memorable
adventure, or the plants and animals to be metamorphosed
human beings. Examples of all these myths are found among
savages and in the legends of the ancient civilizations. A few
such examples may now be given.
Myths of the Origin of the World
.—We have found it difficult to
keep myths of the gods apart from myths of the origin of the world
and of man, because gods are frequently regarded as creative
powers. The origin of things is a problem which has everywhere
exercised thought, and been rudely solved in myths. These vary
in quality with the civilization of the races in which they are current,
but the same ideas which we proceed to state pervade all cosmogonical
myths, savage and civilized. All these legends waver
between the theory of creation, or rather of manufacture, and the
theory of evolution. The earth, as a rule, is supposed to have
grown out of some original matter, perhaps an animal, perhaps an
egg which floated on the waters, perhaps a fragment of soil fished
up out of the floods by a beast or a god. But this conception does
not exclude the idea that many of the things in the world—minerals,
plants, people, and what not—are fragments of the frame of an
animal or non-natural magnified man, or are excretions from the
body of a god. We proceed to state briefly the various forms of
these ideas. The most backward races usually assume the prior
existence of the earth.
The aborigines of the northern parts of Victoria (Australia)
believe that the earth was made by Pund-jel, the bird-creator,
who sliced the valleys with a knife. Another Australian theory is
that the men of a previous race, the Nooralie (very old ones), made
the earth.
The problem of the origin of the world seems scarcely to have
troubled the Bushmen. They know about “men who brought
the sun,” but their doctrines are revealed in mysteries, and Qing,
the informant of Mr Orpen (
Cape Monthly Magazine
, July 1874),
“did not dance that dance”—that is, had not been initiated into
all the secret doctrines of his tribe. According to Qing, creation
was the work of Cagn (the mantis insect), “he gave orders and
caused all things to appear.” Elsewhere in the myth Cagn made
or manufactured things by his skill.
As a rule the most backward races, while rich in myths of the
origin of men, animals, plants, stones and stars, do not say much
about the making of the world. Among people a little more
advanced, the earth is presumed to have grown out of the waters. In
the Iroquois myth (Lafitau,
Mœurs des sauvages
, 1724), a heavenly
woman was tossed out of heaven, and fell on a turtle, which
developed into the world. Another North-American myth assumes
a single island in the midst of the waters, and this island grew into
the world. The Navaho and the Digger Indians take earth for
granted as a starting-point in their myths. The Winnebagos, not
untouched by Christian doctrine, do not go farther back. The
Great Manitou awoke and found himself alone. He took a piece of
his body and a piece of earth and made a man. Here the existence
of earth is assumed (Bancroft iv. 228). Even in Guatemala,
though the younger sons of a divine race succeed in making the
earth where the elder son (as usual) failed, they all had a supply of
clay as first material. The Pima, a Central-American tribe, say
the earth was made by a powerful being, and at first appeared
“like a spider’s web.” This reminds one of the Ananzi or spider
creator of West Africa. The more metaphysical Tacullies of
British Columbia say that in the beginning nought existed but
water and a musk-rat. The musk-rat sought his food at the
bottom of the water, and his mouth was frequently filled with mud.
This he kept spitting out, and so formed an island, which developed
into the world. Among the Tinneh, the frame of a dog (which
could assume the form of a handsome young man) became the first
material of most things. The dog, like Osiris, Dionysus, Purusha
and other gods, was torn to pieces by giants; the fragments became
many of the things in the world (Bancroft i. 106). Even here the
existence of earth for the dog to live in is assumed.
Coming to races more advanced in civilization, we find the New
Zealanders in possession of ancient hymns in which the origin of
things is traced back to nothing, to darkness, and to a metaphysical
process from nothing to something, from being to becoming. The
hymns may be read in Sir George Grey’s
Polynesian Mythology
, and
in Taylor’s
New Zealand
. It has been suggested that these hymns
bear traces of Buddhist and Indian influence; in any case, they are
rather metaphysical than mystical. Myth comes in when the
Maoris represent Rangi and Papa, Heaven and Earth, as two vast
beings, male and female, united in a secular embrace, and finally
severed by their children, among whom Tane Mahuta takes the
part of Cronus in the Greek myth. The gods were partly elemental,
partly animal in character; the lists of their titles show that every
human crime was freely attributed to them. In the South Sea
Islands, generally, the fable of the union and separation of Heaven
and Earth is current; other forms will be found in Gill’s
Myths and
Songs from the South Pacific
The cosmogonic myths of the Aryans of India are peculiarly
interesting, as we find in the
Vedas
and
Brahmanas
and
Puranas
almost every fiction familiar to savages side by side with the most
abstract metaphysical speculations. We have the theory that
earth grew, as in the Iroquois story of the turtle, from a being
named Uttanapad (Muir v. 335). We find that Brahmanaspati
“blew the gods forth from his mouth,” and one of the gods,
Tvashtri, the mechanic among the deities, is credited with having
fashioned the earth and the heaven (Muir v. 354). The “Purusha
Sukta,” the 90th hymn of the tenth book of the
Rig Veda
, gives us
the Indian version of the theory that all things were made out of
the mangled limbs of Purusha, a magnified non-natural man, who
was sacrificed by the gods. As this hymn gives an account of the
origin of the castes (which elsewhere are scarcely recognized in the
Rig Veda
), it is sometimes regarded as a late addition. But we can
scarcely think the main conception late, as it is so widely scattered
that it meets us in most mythologies, including those of Chaldaea
and Egypt, and various North-American tribes. Not satisfied
with this myth, the Aryans of India accounted for the origin of
species in the following barbaric style. A being named Purusha
was alone in the world. He differentiated himself into two beings,
husband and wife. The wife, regarding union with her producer
as incest, fled from his embraces as Nemesis did from those of
Zeus, and Rhea from Cronus, assuming various animal disguises.
The husband pursued in the form of the male of each animal, and
from these unions sprang the various species of beasts (
Satapatha-Brahmana
xiv. 4, 2; Muir i. 25). The myth of the cosmic egg
from which all things were produced is also current in the
Brahmanas
. In the
Puranas
we find the legend of many successive
creations and destructions of the world a myth of world-wide
distribution.
As a rule, destruction by a deluge is the most favourite myth,
but destructions by fire and wind and by the wrath of a god are
common in Australian, Peruvian and Egyptian tradition. The
idea that a boar, or a god in the shape of a boar, fished up a bit of
earth, which subsequently became the world, out of the waters, is
very well known to the Aryans of India, and recalls the feats of
American musk-rats and Coyotes already described.
67
The tortoise
from which all things sprang, in a myth of the
Satapatha-Brahmana
reminds us of the Iroquois turtle. The Greek and Mangaian myth
of the marriage of Heaven and Earth and its dissolution is found
in the
Aitareya-Brahmana
(Haug’s trans. ii. 308;
Rig Veda
, i. lxii.).
So much for the Indian cosmogonic myths, which are a collection
of ideas familiar to savages, blended with sacerdotal theories and
ritual mummeries. The philosophical theory of the origin of things,
a hymn of remarkable stateliness, is in
Rig Veda
, x. 129. The
Scandinavian cosmogonic myth starts from the abyss, Ginnungagap,
a chaos of ice, from which, as it thawed, was produced the giant
Ymir. Ymir is the Scandinavian Purusha. A man and woman
sprang from his armpit, like Athene from the head of Zeus. A
cow licked the hoar-frost, whence rose Bur, whose children, Odin,
Vile and Ve, slew the giant Ymir. “Of his flesh they formed the
earth, of his blood seas and waters, of his bones mountains, of his
teeth rocks and stones, of his hair all manner of plants.” This is
the story in the
Prose Edda
, derived from older songs, such as the
Grimnersmal
. However the distribution of this singular myth may
be explained, its origin can scarcely be sought in the imagination
of races higher in culture than the Tinneh and Tacullies, among
whom dogs and beavers are the theriomorphic form of Purusha or
Ymir.
Myths of the Origin of Man
.—These partake of the conceptions
of evolution and of creation. Man was made out of clay by a supernatural
being.
Australia
: man was made by Pund-jel.
New
Zealand
: man was made by Tiki; “he took red clay, and kneaded
it with his own blood.”
Mangaia
: the woman of the abyss made
a child from a piece of flesh plucked out of her own side.
Melanesia
“man was made of clay, red from the marshy side of Vanua Levu”;
woman was made by Qat of willow twigs.
Greece
: men were
πλάσματα πηλοῦ
, figures baked in clay by Prometheus.
68
India
men were made after many efforts, in which the experimental
beings did not harmonize with their environment, by Prajapati.
In another class of myths, man was evolved out of the lower animals—lizards
in Australia; coyotes, beavers, apes and other beasts in
America. The Greek myths of the descent of the Arcadians,
Myrmidons, children of the swan, the cow, and so forth, may be
compared. Yet again, men came out of trees or plants or rocks:
as from the Australian wattle-gum, the Zulu bed of reeds, the great
tree of the Ovahereros, the rock of the tribes in Central Africa, the
cave of Bushman and North-American and Peruvian myth, “from
tree or stone” (
Odyssey
, xix. 163). This view was common among
the Greeks, who boasted of being autochthonous. The Cephisian
marsh was one scene of man’s birth according to a fragment of
Pindar, who mentions Egyptian and Libyan legends of the same
description.
Myths of the Arts of Life
.—These are almost unanimously
attributed to “culture-heroes,” beings theriomorphic or anthropomorphic,
who, like Pund-jel, Qat, Quawteaht, Prometheus,
Manabozho, Quetzalcoatl, Cagn and the rest, taught men the use
of the bow, the processes (where known) of pottery, agriculture
(as Demeter), the due course of the mysteries, divination, and
everything else they knew. Commonly the teacher disappears
mysteriously. He is often regarded by modern mythologists as
the sun.
Star Myths
.—“The stars came otherwise,” says Browning’s
Caliban. In savage and civilized myths they are usually
metamorphosed men, women and beasts. In Australia, the Pleiades,
as in Greece, were girls. Castor and Pollux in Greece, as in Australia,
were young men. Our Bear was a bear, according to Charlevoix
and Lafitau, among the North-American Indians; the Eskimo,
according to Egede, who settled the Danish colony in Greenland,
regarded the stars “very nonsensically,” as “so many of their
ancestors”; the Egyptian priests showed Plutarch the stars that
had been Isis and Osiris. Aristophanes, in the
Pax
, shows us that
the belief in the change of men into stars survived in his own day
in Greece. The Bushmen (Bleek) have the same opinion. The
Satapatha-Brahmana
Sacred Books of the East
, xii. 284) shows
how Prajapati, in his incestuous love, turned himself into a
roebuck, his daughter into a doe, and how both became constellations.
This is a thoroughly good example of the savage myths (as in Peru,
according to Acosta) by which beasts and anthropomorphic gods
and stars are all jumbled together.
69
The
Rig Veda
contains
examples of the idea that the good become stars.
Solar and Lunar Myths
.—These are universally found, and are
too numerous to be examined here. The sun and moon, as in the
Bulgarian ballad of the
Sun’s Bride
(a mortal girl), are looked on
as living beings. In Mexico they were two men, or gods of a human
character who were burned. The Eskimo know the moon as a
man who visits earth, and, again, as a girl who had her face spotted
by ashes which the Sun threw at her. The Khasias make the sun
a woman, who daubs the face of the moon, a man. The Homeric
hymn to Helios, as Max Müller observes, “looks on the sun as a
half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth.” This is
precisely the Bushman view; the sun was a man who irradiated
light from his armpit. In New Zealand and in North America
the sun is a beast, whom adventurers have trapped and beaten.
Medicine has been made with his blood. In the Andaman Islands
the Sun is the wife of the Moon (
Jour. of Anth. Soc.
, 1882). Among
aboriginal tribes in India (Dalton, p. 186) the Moon is the Sun’s
bride; she was faithless and he cut her in two, but occasionally
lets her shine in full beauty. The Andaman Islanders account for
the white brilliance of the moon by saying that he is daubing
himself with white clay, a custom common in savage and Greek
mysteries. The Red Men accounted to the Jesuits for the spherical
forms of sun and moon by saying that their appearance was caused
by their bended bows. The Moon in Greek myths loved Endymion,
and was bribed to be the mistress of Pan by the present of a
fleece, like the Dawn in Australia, whose unchastity was rewarded
by a gift of a red cloak of opossum skin. Solar and lunar myths
usually account for the observed phenomena of eclipse, waning
and waxing, sunset, spots on the moon, and so forth by various
mythical adventures of the animated heavenly beings. In modern
folk-lore the moon is a place to which bad people are sent, rather
than a woman or a man. The mark of the hare in the moon has
struck the imagination of Germans, Mexicans, Hottentots, Sinhalese,
and produced myths among all these races.
70
Myths of Death
.—Few savage races regard death as a natural
event. All natural deaths are supernatural with them. Men are
assumed to be naturally immortal, hence a series of myths to
account for the origin of death. Usually some custom or “taboo”
is represented as having been broken, when death has followed.
In New Zealand, Maui was not properly baptized. In Australia,
a woman was told not to go near a certain tree where a bat lived;
she infringed the prohibition, the bat fluttered out, and men died.
The Ningphoos were dismissed from Paradise and became mortal,
because one of them bathed in water which had been tabooed
(Dalton, p. 13). In the
Atharva Veda
, Yama, like Maui in New
Zealand, first “spied out the path to the other world,” which all
men after him have taken. In the
Rig Veda
(x. 14), Yama “sought
out a road for many.” In the Solomon Islands (
Jour. Anth. Inst.
Feb. 1881), “Koevari was the author of death, by resuming her
cast-off skin.” The same story is told in the Banks Islands. In
the Greek myth (Hesiod,
Works and Days
, 90), men lived without
“ill diseases that give death to men” till the cover was lifted
from the forbidden box of Pandora. As to the myths of Hades,
the place of the dead, they are far too many to be mentioned in
detail. In almost all the gates of hell are guarded by fierce beasts,
and in Ojibway, Finnish, Greek, Papuan and japanese myths no
mortal visitor may escape from Hades who has once tasted the
food of the dead.
Myths of Fire-stealing
.—Those current in North America (where
an animal is commonly the thief) will be found in Bancroft, vol. iv.
The Australian version, singularly like one Greek legend, is given
by Brough Smyth. Stories of the theft of Prometheus are recorded
by Hesiod, Aeschylus, and their commentators. Muir and Kuhn
may be consulted for Vedic fire-stealing.
Heroic and Romantic Myths
.—In addition to myths which are
clearly intended to explain facts of the universe, most nations have
their heroic and romantic myths. Familiar examples are the
stories of Perseus, Odysseus, Sigurd, the Indian epic stories, the
adventures of Ilmarinen and Wainamoinen in the
Kalewala
, and
so forth. To discuss these myths as far as they can be considered
apart from divine and explanatory tales would demand more space
than we have at our disposal. It will become evident to any
student of the romantic myths that they consist of different
arrangements of a rather limited set of incidents. These incidents have
been roughly classified by Von Hahn.
71
We may modify his arrangement
as follows.
There is (1) the story of a bride or bridegroom who transgresses
a commandment of a mystic nature, and disappears as a result of
the sin. The bride sins as in Eros and Psyche, Freja and Oddur,
Pururavas and Urvasi.
72
The sin of Urvasi and Psyche was seeing
their husbands—naked in the latter case. The sin was against
“the manner of women.” Now the rule of etiquette which forbids
seeing or naming the husband (especially the latter) is of the widest
distribution. The offence in the Welsh form of the story is naming
the partner—a thing forbidden among early Greeks and modern
Zulus. Presumably the tale (with its example of the sanction)
survives the rule in many cases. (2) “Penelope formula.” The man
leaves the wife and returns after many years. A good example
occurs in Chinese legend. (3) Formula of the attempt to avoid
fate or the prophecy of an oracle. This incident takes numerous
shapes, as in the story of the fatal birth of Perseus, Paris, the
Egyptian prince shut up in a tower, the birth of Oedipus. (4) Slaughter
of a monster. This is best known in the case of Andromeda
and Perseus. (5) Flight, by aid of an animal usually, from
cannibalism, human sacrifice, or incest. The Greek example is
Phrixus, Helle, and the ram of the golden fleece. (6) Flight of a
lady and her lover from a giant father or wizard father. Jason
and Medea furnish the Greek example. (7) The youngest brother
the successful adventurer, and the head of the family. We have
seen the example of Greek mythic illustrations of “Jüngsten-recht,”
or supremacy of the youngest, in the Hesiodic myth of
Zeus, the youngest child of Cronus. (8) Bride given to whoever
will accomplish difficult adventures or vanquish girl in race. The
custom of giving a bride without demanding bride-price, in reward
for a great exploit, is several times alluded to in the
Iliad
. In
Greek heroic myth Jason thus wins Medea, and (in the race) Milanion
wins Atalanta. In the
Kalewala
much of the Jason cycle, including
this part, recurs. The rider through the fire wins Brunhild but
this may belong to another cycle of ideas. (9) The grateful beasts,
who, having been aided by the hero, aid him in his adventures.
Melampus and the snakes is a Greek example. This story is but
one specimen of the personal human character of animals in myths,
already referred to the intellectual condition of savages. (10) Story
of the strong man and his adventures, and stories of the
comrades Keen-eye, Quick-ear, and the rest. Jason has comrades
like these, as had Ilmarinen and Heracles, the Greek “strong man.”
(11) Adventure with an ogre, who is blinded and deceived by a
pun of the hero’s. Odysseus and Polyphemus is the Greek example.
(12) Descent into Hades of the hero. Heracles, Odysseus,
Wainamoinen in the
Kalewala
, are the best-known examples in
epic literature. These are twelve specimens of the incidents, to
which we may add (13) “the false bride,” as in the poem of
Berte
aux grans Piés
, and (14) the legend of the bride said to produce
beast-children. The belief in the latter phenomenon is very common
in Africa, and in the
Arabian Nights
, and we have seen it in America.
Of these formulae (chosen because illustrated by Greek heroic
legends)—(1) is a sanction of barbarous nuptial etiquette; (2) is an
obvious ordinary incident; (3) is moral, and both (3) and (1) may
pair off with all the myths of the origin of death from the infringement
of a taboo or sacred command; (4) would naturally occur
wherever, as on the West Coast of Africa, human victims have
been offered to sharks or other beasts; (5) the story of flight from
a horrible crime, occurs in some stellar myths, and is an easy and
natural invention; (6) flight from wizard father or husband, is
found in Bushman and Namaqua myth, where the husband is an
elephant; (7) success of youngest brother, may have been an
explanation and sanction of “Jüngsten-recht”—Maui in New Zealand
is an example, and Herodotus found the story among the Scythians;
(8) the bride given to successful adventurer, is consonant with
heroic manners as late as Homer; (9) is no less consonant with the
belief that beasts have human sentiments and supernatural powers;
(10) the “strong man,” is found among Eskimo and Zulus, and was
an obvious invention when strength was the most admired of
qualities; (11) the baffled ogre, is found among Basques and Irish,
and turns on a form of punning which inspires an “ananzi” story
in West Africa; (12) descent into Hades, is the natural result of
the savage conception of Hades, and the tale is told of actual living
people in the Solomon Islands and in New Caledonia; Eskimo
Angekoks can and do descend into Hades—it is the prerogative of
the necromantic magician; (13) “the false bride,” found among
the Zulus, does not permit of such easy explanation—naturally,
in Zululand, the false bride is an animal; (14) the bride accused of
bearing beast-children, has already been disposed of; the belief is
inevitable where no distinction worth mentioning is taken between
men and animals. English folk-lore has its woman who bore
rabbits.
The formulae here summarized, with others, are familiar in the
märchen of Samoyeds, Zulus, Bushmen, Hottentots and Red
Indians. For an argument intended to show that Greek heroic
myths may be adorned and classified märchen, in themselves
survivals of savage fancy, see
Fortnightly Review
, May 1872, “Myths
and Fairy Tales.” The old explanation was that märchen are
degenerate heroic myths. This does not explain the märchen of
African, and perhaps not of Siberian races.
In this sketch of mythology that of Rome is not included, because
its most picturesque parts are borrowed from or adapted into
harmony with the mythology of Greece. Greece, India and Scandinavia
will supply a fair example of Aryan mythology (without
entering on the difficult Slavonic and Celtic fields).
A. L.
Plutarch,
De Iside et Osiride
Myths and Songs from the South Pacific
, p. 35 (1876).
Xenoph.
Fr.
i. 42.
Dindorf’s ed., iv. 231.
Grote,
Hist. of Greece
, (ed. 1869) i. 404.
Cf. Lobeck,
Aglaophamus
, i. 151-152, on allegorical interpretation
of myths in the mysteries.
Hahn,
Tsuni-Goam
the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi
, p. 113.
De civ. dei.
, vii. 18; viii. 26.
La Mythologie et les fables expliquées par l’histoire
(Paris, 1738;
3 vols. 4to).
Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker
(Leipzig and Darmstadt,
1836-1843).
Mœurs des sauvages
(Paris, 1724).
Max Müller,
Lectures on Language
(1864), 2nd series, p. 410.
E. B. Tylor,
Primitive Culture
, i. 369 (1871).
Relations
(1636), p. 114.
Voyages
, p. 159.
South African Folk-Lore Journal
(May 1880).
E. B. Tylor,
op. cit.
ii. 256.
R. Brough Smyth,
Aborigines of Victoria
, i. 446 (1878).
J. Hawkesworth,
Voyages
, iii. 756.
Lord Redesdale
Tales of Old Japan
(1871).
Bleek,
Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore
, pp. 15, 40.
Missionary Travels
, pp. 615, 642.
W. H. Dall,
Alaska
, p. 423 (1870).
Dorman,
Origin of Primitive Superstitions
, pp. 130, 134.
Sahagun, French trans., p. 226.
Records of the Past
, x. 10.
Plotini vita
, pp. 2, 95.
H. N.
xv. 44, 85.
See Mrs Langloh Parker’s
The Euahlayi Tribe
The drawback to knowledge is the rarity of full acquaintance
with native languages. Strehlow, Roth and Ridley seem best
equipped on the linguistic side. Spencer and Gillen do not tell us
that they have a colloquial knowledge of any Australian language.
Gason, author of a work on the Dieri tribe, knew their language
well, but several of his statements appear to be inaccurate. Mrs
Langloh Parker describes her methods of checking and controlling
native statements made in English.
Accounts of the Mantis and of his performances will be found
in the
Cape Monthly Magazine
(July 1874), and in Dr Bleek’s
Brief
Account of Bushman Folk-Lore
These are collected by Callaway,
Zulu Nursery Tales
(1868).
Similar Kafir stories, also closely resembling the popular fictions of
European races, have been published by Theal. Many other examples
are published in the
South African Folk-Lore Journal
(1879, 1880).
Dasent,
Bragi’s Telling: Younger Edda
, p. 94.
Bancroft, vol. iv.
Taylor,
New Zealand
, p. 108.
Rig Veda
, x. 72, 1, 8; Muir,
Sanskrit Texts
, iv. 13, where the fable
from the
Satapatha-Brahmana
is given.
The best authorities for the New Zealand myths are the old
traditional priestly hymns, collected and translated in the works of
Sir George Grey, in Taylor’s
New Zealand
, in Shortland’s
Traditions
of New Zealand
(1857), in Bastian’s
Heilige Sage der Polynesier
, and
in White’s
Ancient History of the Maori
, i. 8–13.
See also Bancroft, iii. 288-290, and Acosta, pp. 352-361.
Geschichte der amerikanischen Urreligionen
, p. 592.
Demosthenes, De corona, p. 313,
καὶ καθαίρων τοὺς τελουμένους καὶ ἀπομάττων τῷ πηλῷ καὶ τοῖς πιτύροις
Κῶνος ξυλάριον οὗ ἐξῆπται τὸ σπαρτίον, καὶ ἐν ταῖς τελεταῖς ἐδονεῖτο
ἵνα ῥοιζῇ
. Quoted by Lobeck,
Aglaophamus
, i. 700, from Bastius
ad Gregor., 241, and from other sources; cf. Arnobius, v. c. 19,
where the word
turbines
is the Latin term.
Wilkinson, iii. 62, see note by Dr Birch. A more detailed
account of Egyptian religion is given under
Egypt
. Unfortunately
Egyptologists have rarely a wide knowledge of the myths of the lower
races, while anthropologists are seldom or never Egyptologists.
For examples of the lofty morality sometimes attributed to the
gods, see Max Müller,
Hibbert Lectures
, p. 284;
Rig-Veda
, ii. 28;
iv. 12, 4; viii. 93 seq.; Muir,
Sanskrit Texts
, v. 218.
Müller,
Hibbert Lectures
, p. 230.
Muir,
S. T.
, v. 55; i. 27.
See Sir A. Lyall,
Asiatic Studies
. For Vedic examples, see
R.-V.
x. 167, 1; x. 159, 4; Muir,
S. T.
v. 15.
See Tylor,
Primitive Culture
, i. 288, 329, 356.
The chief authority for the constant strife between gods and
Asuras is the
Satapatha-Brahmama
, of which one volume is translated
in
Sacred Books of the East
(vol. xii.).
Hahn,
Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Hottentots
, p. 68.
See Muir,
S. T.
, v. 16, 17, for Indra’s peculiar achievements
with a cow.
Sacred Books of the East
, xii. 1, 48.
Sacred Books of the East
, xii. 176, 177.
On the whole subject, Dr Muir’s
Ancient Sanskrit Texts
, with
translations, Ludwig's translation of the
Rig Veda
, the version
of the
Satapatha-Brahmana
already referred to, and the translation
of the
Aitareya-Brahmana
by Haug, are the sources most open to
English readers. Max Müller’s translation of the
Rig Veda
unfortunately only deals with the hymns to the Maruts. The Indian
epics and the
Puranas
belong to a much later date, and are full of
deities either unknown to or undeveloped in the
Rig Veda
and the
Brahmanas
. It is much to be regretted that the
Atharva-Veda
which contains the magical formulae and incantations of the Vedic
Indians, is still untranslated, though, by the very nature of its theme,
it must contain matter of extreme antiquity and interest.
Pausanias iii. 16; vii. 18. Human sacrifice to Dionysus, Paus.
vii. 21; Plutarch,
De Is. et Os.
35; Porphyry,
De Abst.
ii. 55.
Gill,
Myths and Songs from the South Pacific
, p. 60.
Cf. Preller,
Griechische Mythologie
, i. 128, note 1, for this and
other philological conjectures.
The derivation of
Ἀπόλλων
remains obscure. The derivation
of Leto from
λαθεῖν
, and the conclusion that her name means “the
concealer”—that is, the night, whence the sun is born—is disputed
by Curtius (Preller i. 190, 191, note 4), but appears to be accepted
by Max Müller (
Selected Essays
, i. 386) Latmos being derived from
the same root as Leto, Latona, the night.
Aristotle,
H. An.
6; Aelian,
N. A.
iv. 4.
Her name, as usual, is variously interpreted by various
etymologists.
xiv, 257; xviii. 395; xix. 91, 132.
The root of his name is sought in such words as
πότος
and
ποταμός
We learn from the
Odyssey
(xiv. 209) that this was the custom
of sons on the death of their father.
See Tylor,
Prim. Cult.
i. 326.
Bleek,
Bushman Folk-Lore
, pp. 6–8. Max Müller suggests
another theory (
Selected Essays
, i. 460): “
Κρόνος
did not exist
till long after
Ζεύς
in Greece.” The name
Κρονίων
, or
Κρονίδης
looks like a patronymic. Müller, however, thinks it originally
meant only “connected with time, existing through all time.”
Very much later the name was mistaken for a genuine patronymic,
and “Zeus the ancient of days” became “Zeus the son of Cronus.”
Having thus got a Cronus, the Greeks—and “the misunderstanding
could have happened in Greece only”—needed a myth of Cronus.
They therefore invented or adapted the “swallow-myth” so
familiar to Bushmen and Australians. This singular reversion to
savagery itself needs some explanation. But the hypothesis that
Cronus is a late derivation from
Κρονίδης
and
Κρονίων
is by no
means universally accepted. Others derive
Κρόνος
from
κραίνω
and connect it with
κρόνια
, a kind of harvest-home festival.
Schwartz (
Prähistorisch-anthropologische Studien
) readily proves
Cronus to be the storm, swallowing the clouds. Perhaps we may
say of Schwartz’s view, as he says of Preller’s—“das ist Gedankenspiel,
aber nimmermehr Mythologie.”
Elton,
Origins of English History
, pp. 298–301.
Indra was a hawk when, “being well-winged, he carried to
men the food tasted by the gods” (
R. V.
iv. 26, 4). Yehl, the
Tlingit god-hero, was a raven or a crane when he stole the water
(Bancroft iii. 100–102). The prevalence of animals, or of
god-animals, in myths of the stealing of water, soma and fire, is very
remarkable. Among the Andaman Islanders, a kingfisher steals
fire for men from the god Puluga (
Anthrop. Journal
, November
1882.
Black Yajur-Veda
and
Satapatha-Brahmana
; Muir, i. 52.
Aristophanes,
Aves
, 686;
Etym. Magn.
s.v.
Ἰκόνιον
. Pausanias
saw the clay (Paus. x. iv.). The story is also quoted by Lactantius
from Hesiod.
See also
Vishnu Purana
, i. 131.
See
Cornhill Magazine
, “How the Stars got their Names”
(1882, p. 35), and “Some Solar and Lunar Myths” (1882, p. 440);
Max Müller,
Selected Essays
, i. 609–611.
Griechische und albanesische Märchen
, i. 45.
Tenth Book of
Rig Veda
and “Brahmana” of
Yajur-Veda
Müller
Selected Essays
, i. 410.
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