HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY.
Tradition, 373—Poetry, 375—Fact in Fiction, 377—Earliest Poems
and Writings, 381—Ancient Chronicle and History, 383—Myths,
387—Interpretation of Myths, 396—Diffusion of Myths, 397.
History is no longer looked to for a record of the earliest ages of
man. As the first chapter of this volume shows, we moderns know what
was hidden from the ancients themselves about the still more ancient
ancients. Yet it does not at all follow that ancient history has lost its
value. On the contrary, there are better means than ever of confirming
what is really sound in it by such evidence as that of antiquities and
language, while masses of very early writings are now newly opened to
the historian. It was never more necessary to have clear ideas of what
tradition, poetry, and written records can teach as to the times when
history begins.
The early history of nations consists more or less of traditions handed
down by memory from ages before writing. Our own experience does not
tell us much as to what such oral tradition may be worth, for it has
so fallen out of use in the civilised world, that now one knows little
of what happened beyond one’s great-grandfather’s time, unless it has
been written down. But writing has not yet quite overspread the globe,
and there are still peoples left whose whole history is the tradition
of their ancestors. Thus the South Sea Islanders, who till quite lately
had no writing, were intelligent barbarians, much given to handing down
recollections of bygone days, and in one or two cases which it has been
possible to test among them, it seems as though memory may really keep
a historical record long and correctly. It is related by Mr. Whitmee
the missionary that in the island of Rotuma there was a very old tree,
under which according to tradition, the stone seat of a famous chief had
been buried; this tree was lately blown down, and, sure enough, there
was a stone seat under its roots, which must have been out of sight for
centuries. In the Ellice group, the natives declared that their ancestors
came from a valley in the distant island of Samoa generations before, and
they preserved an old worm-eaten staff, pieced to hold it together, which
in their assemblies the orator held in his hand as the sign of having the
right to speak; this staff was lately taken to Samoa, and proved to be
made of wood that grew there, while the people of the valley in question
had a tradition of a great party going out to sea exploring, who never
came back. Among these Polynesian traditions the best known are those
handed down by the Maoris as to the peopling of New Zealand by their
ancestors. They tell how, after a civil war, their forefathers migrated
in canoes from Hawaiki in the far north-east; they give the names of
the builders and crews of these vessels and show the places where they
landed; they repeat, generation by generation, the names of the chiefs
descended from those who came in the canoes, by which they reckon
about eighteen generations, or 400 to 500 years, since their taking
possession of the islands. Notwithstanding that, as might be expected,
the traditions of various districts disagree a good deal, they are
admitted as the title-deeds by which the natives hold land in the right
of their ancestors who landed in the canoes Shark (_Arawa_) and God’s-Eye
(_Mata-atua_), and it can hardly be doubted that such genealogies,
constantly repeated among people whose lands depended on them, are
founded on fact. Yet these Maori traditions are about half made up of the
wildest wonder-tales; when the builder of one of the canoes cuts down a
great tree to make the hull, on coming back to the forest next morning
he finds that the tree has got up again in the night; and when the canoe
is finished and puts to sea, a certain magician is left behind, but on
getting to New Zealand there he is before them on the shore, having come
across the ocean on the back of a sea-monster, like Arion on his dolphin.
These traditions of a modern barbarous people may give us not an unfair
idea of the mixture of real memory and mythic fancy in the early history
of Egypt or Greece, where it has come down by tradition from the distant
past when there was as yet no scribe to engrave on a stone tablet even
the names of kings.
Traditions are yet more lasting when handed down in fixed words, which
is especially when the poets have set them in verse. Even now in England
some notable event may be made into a ballad and sung through the length
and breadth of the land. In days before printing, the importance of
the poet as historian was far greater, and many an old European chant
has touches of true chronicle. The old songs of Brittany are often
very true to history, as where in one there is mention of Bertrand du
Guesclin’s hair being like a lion’s mane, and in another, Jeanne de
Montfort (Jeanne-la-Flamme) going forth from Hennebont with sword and
burning brand to fire the French camp, is described as putting on her
suit of armour, which history elsewhere records that she really wore.
But though the poet or minstrel preserves many picturesque incidents
like these, he has not the historian’s conscience about facts. Eager to
rouse and delight his audience, to flatter the national pride of his
people and the family pride of the chieftain in whose halls he sang, the
singer brought in real names and events, but he shifted them as would
best suit his dramatic scenery, or he even made his own history outright.
The great German epic, the Nibelungen Lied, begins in Burgundy, where
the three kings hold court at Worms on the Rhine, their sister is the
lovely Kriemhilt, whose husband Sîfrit is treacherously slain at the well
by Hagen’s spear; afterwards she marries Attila the Hun-king, and the
tale of blood, ending with her vengeance and death, leaves Attila and
Theodoric of Verona (Etzel and Dietrich von Bern) weeping together over
the slaughter of their men. Here are places and personages historical
enough to make a poem history, if history could be made by such means;
but the reader of Gibbon knows that Attila really died two years before
Theodoric was born. In fact the poem is a late version of a story
preserved in an earlier shape in Scandinavia as the saga of the Volsungs;
the court at Worms, and the tournament, and the rest of the historic
names and local circumstances, are worked in to give poetic substance and
colour. If poets ventured thus to falsify history in the middle ages,
when the chronicles were there to convict them, how are we to tell fact
from fiction in the poems of ages where the check of history is wanting?
The Iliad and the Odyssey may contain many memories of real men and their
deeds, an Agamemnon may have reigned in Mykēnai, there may have been a
real siege of Troy, perhaps round the very mound where Schliemann has dug
out the golden cups and necklace. But it is too hard a task to sift out
historic truth in Homer, where natural events are as hopelessly mixed
up with miracles as in the Maori legends. It is too hard to judge how
far chronicles of old nations are impartially preserved by a bard whose
rule it is (as Mr. Gladstone points out in his _Primer of Homer_) that
no considerable Greek chieftain is ever slain in fair fight by a Trojan.
Were nothing to be had out of ancient poetry except distorted memories
of historical events, the anthropologist might be wise to set it aside
altogether. Yet, looked at from another point of view, it is one of his
most perfect and exact sources of knowledge.
Although what the poet relates may be fiction, what he mentions is apt
to be history. In the names of nations and countries and cities, he is
unconsciously pourtraying for us the world and its inhabitants as they
were in his time. The catalogue of ships and men in the second book
of the Iliad is a chart and census of the Mediterranean. Homer knows
of the Ægyptians, their irrigated fields and their skill in medicine,
and of the ship-famed Phœnicians and their purple stuffs. The name of
Kadmos belongs to the Phœnician tongue, and signifies the “Eastern,”
while the “seven-gated” Thebes built by his people shows that they had
that reverence for the mystic number seven, which has its origin in
the worship of the seven planets in Babylon. The poet can hardly have
thought, when he told his wonder-tales with the circumstances of the
actual world around him, how future ages would prize for itself that
record of real life. Odysseus, clinging under the belly of the great
ram, or sailing to the land of Hades to the weak shades of the dead, is
mere myth. Yet the description of Polyphēmos is one of the few ancient
pictures of the manners of low barbarians, and the visit to Hades is a
chapter of old Greek religion, recording what men thought of the dull
ghost-life beyond the tomb. So it is with the descriptions of life and
manners. Nausikaa, the king’s daughter, drives the wain with the pair
of mules down to the river’s mouth to carry the clothes to be washed.
Odysseus walks through the streets of the seafaring Phaiakians, wondering
at the haven and the mighty walls and bastions, till he crosses the
bronze threshold of the palace of Alkinoos, and entering, clasps the
knees of Queen Arētē; then he crouches on the hearthstone in the ashes,
till the king, mindful of Zeus the Thunderer standing near to care for
the suppliant, takes the guest by the hand, and makes him sit by him on
his own son’s glittering seat. Thus following the romantic fortunes of
the many-wiled Odysseus, we see as in the scenes of a dissolving-view
how the heroes of old days went spear in hand with their swift dogs at
their heel, how at the house-door they threw aside their garments to go
into the bath-chamber, and came forth anointed with oil to the feast
where with no such refinements as plates or knives they ate their fill
of roast meat and cakes of bread; how they diverted themselves with
throwing quoits on the smooth turf, or lounged on outspread hides in the
sunshine playing merells; how in solemn rites they poured the libations
of dark wine and burned the meat in sacrifice, with prayers for what
their hearts desired, yet knowing all the while that the gods would, as
they listed, this grant and that deny. All this is not only history, but
history of the finest kind. Looked at by the student of culture, even
the wild mixture of the natural and supernatural, so bewildering to the
modern mind, is the record of an early stage of religious thought. The
gods meet in council in the halls of cloud-gathering Zeus, to settle
what shall be done with their contending armies of worshippers on the
plains below. In the very fray of mortal warriors divine beings take
part; Poseidōn plucks out the bronze-tipped spear from the shield of
Aineias, lifts up the Trojan hero and bears him away unharmed over the
heads of the warriors; even the goddesses set on one another like mortal
shrews, when Hērē tears away the bow and quiver of Artemis, and with
scornful laughter boxes her ears with them till the virgin huntress goes
off in tears, leaving her bow behind. It would be wrong to think that all
this seemed mere make-believe and poetic ornament to the men who first
listened to the wondrous rhapsodies. They were in the changing state of
religion described in the last chapter (see p. 362) when the spiritual
beings, which to their ruder forefathers had served as personal causes of
nature and events, were passing away from their first clearness, yet were
still regarded as divinities presiding over nature and interfering with
men’s lives. Contrasting such a state of thought with that of the present
day will help us to realize one of the greatest events in all history,
the change of men’s minds from the mythological temper to the historical
temper. This change did not happen all at once, but has for many ages
been gradually coming about. There is hardly a more instructive chapter
in Grote’s _History of Greece_, than that in which he describes the
philosophic age, when the Greeks were beginning to notice with perplexity
and pain that the Homeric poems, become to them a sacred book, agreed but
ill with their own experience of life, so that they asked themselves, can
the world have really so changed since the days when men sat at table
with the gods?
Much of what is called ancient history has to be looked at in this way.
Historical criticism, that is, judgment, is practised not for the purpose
of disbelieving but of believing. Its object is not to find fault with
the author, but to ascertain how much of what he says may be reasonably
taken as true. Thus a modern reader may have a sounder opinion about
early Roman history than the Romans themselves had in the time of Livy
and Cicero. We see more plainly than they, that the name of Rome is less
likely to have been given from a man called Romulus, than that the name
of Romulus was invented to account for the city being called Rome. To
modern minds, the whole famous story of the wolf-fostermother of Romulus
and Remus collapses when it is known to be only a version of the same
old wonder-tale told by Herodotus as the story of the birth of Cyrus.
Yet here again may be seen the indirect value of history even where its
events are most questionable. Though there may never have been any such
person as Romulus, the legend of the tracing of the city walls by his
bronze ploughshare is a true record of the ceremony with which cities
were anciently founded. Even later history, where the historian had
written records to go upon, must often be sifted in this way. Suppose a
class reading the 35th book of Livy. Such matters as Hannibal’s oath,
and the preparations for war with Antiochus, are taken without question
as good history. But when it comes to the story that about this time
an ox belonging to one of the consuls uttered the awful words “Roma,
cave tibi!” there is a laugh. Here it is not enough for the form-master
simply to pass the story by as Livy’s nonsense. He has to admit that the
historian probably took it from the official record of prodigies, so
that at any rate it is good historical evidence that in ancient Rome men
not only believed that an ox might speak, but that its so doing would
be a divine portent, and notions of this kind had so become part of the
national religion and government, that the augurs took care a regular
supply of such omens should be forthcoming to guide the rulers of the
state, or at least to enable them to impose upon the multitude. Thus the
passages of history which seem at first sight most silly and false, may
be solid facts in the history of civilisation.
It is plain that the compositions which serve as records of old-world
life need not have been intended as history. If only the genuine words
and thoughts of the ancients about anything have been handed down, it is
for the moderns to extract history from them. Thus the Sanskrit hymns
collected in the Veda serve as a record of the daily life of the early
Aryans who chanted them. For when a hymn to the wind gods brings them
in as driving in chariots with strong felloes and well-fashioned reins
and cracking whips, then it is plain to the modern reader that the Aryan
people among whom the hymn was made drove themselves in such chariots.
Where the bright gods have gold chains on their breasts for beauty, carry
spears on their shoulders and daggers at their sides, this mythical fancy
gives a real picture of the accoutrement of the Aryan warrior. Thus,
piece by piece, this præhistoric hymn-book shows the old patriarchal
Aryan life, with the herds of cattle roaming over wide pastures or shut
in the winter cow-stall, the ploughing of the fields and the reaping of
the corn, the family ties and legal rights, the worship of the great
nature-gods of sky and earth, sun and dawn, fire and water and winds, the
intense belief in the shining regions of the immortal dead, the honour
to the almsgiver and praise to the just man. In the sacred books of the
old Persians, collected in the Avesta, have come down the long-remembered
traditions of another branch of the Aryan race, who, dividing off from
their Brahman kinsfolk, followed the faith of Zarathustra. The deep
schism between the two religions is seen in the Zarathustrians having
degraded the bright gods (_deva_) of the Brahmans into evil demons
(_daeva_). Their horror of defiling the sacred fire by burning corpses as
the Brahmans do had already led them to expose the dead to be devoured
by wild beasts and carrion birds, as the Parsis still do in their “towers
of silence.” In the beginning of the Avesta, there is mentioned as first
and best of the good regions created by the good deity, the country
called _Airyana vaejo_, the “Aryan seed,” which afterwards the evil deity
cursed with ten months’ winter; this description of the climate looks as
though the old Persians believed their early Aryan home was on the bleak
slopes of Central Asia toward the sources of the Oxus and Yaxartes. Here
and there among the sacred verses comes a touch of the life of these
proud fierce herdsmen and tillers of the soil, little like the corrupt
Persian and the thrifty Parsi of modern times. Their enthusiasm for the
rough work of making the earth fit for man’s abode is quaintly shown
where they sing of the delight the earth feels when the husbandman drains
the wet soil and waters the dry, how she brings wealth to him who tills
her with the right arm and the left, with the left arm and the right:
“When the corn grows, then the demons hiss;
When the shoots sprout, then the demons cough;
When the stalks rise, then the demons weep;
When the thick ears come, then the demons fly.”
So necessary were the fierce dogs which kept the wolf from the fold and
the thief from the village, that there are solemn ordinances about them,
how the dog who does not bark and is not right in his mind is to be
muzzled and tied up, and what punishment is to be inflicted on the man
who gives a dog bad food; it is as sinful (they say) as if he had done it
to a well-to-do householder. One forms a lifelike picture of the sturdy
farmers who made these laws to be repeated to their children’s children
and carried on to future ages.
While these rough Aryans were handing on memories of the past by word
of mouth in their sacred verses, more cultured nations had long since
begun to write down memorials of their own times. The best way to bring
to our minds what this earliest contemporary history was like, is to
look at the translations of Egyptian and Assyrian documents in _Records
of the Past_, published under the directions of the _Society of Biblical
Archæology_. Here is to be found, for instance, Dr. Birch’s translation
of the inscription recording the expeditions of Una, crown-bearer to
king Teta, before 2,000 B.C. (see page 3), and of the account on the
sanctuary walls of Karnak, of the battle of Megiddo, where Thothmes
III., about 1,500 B.C., overcame the armies of Syria and Mesopotamia and
opened the way into the interior of Asia. It is related how the king,
marching from Gaza, reached the south of Megiddo on the shore of the
waters of Kaner, where he pitched his tent and made a speech before his
whole army: “Hasten ye, put on your helmets, for I shall rush to fight
with the vile enemy in the morning!” The watchword was passed, “Firm,
firm, watch, watch, watch actively at the king’s pavilion!” It was on the
morning of the festival of the new moon that the king went forth in his
golden decorated chariot in the midst of his army, the god Amun being the
protection in his active limbs, and he prevailed over his enemies; they
fell prostrate before him, left their horses and chariots, and fled to
the fort, where the garrison shut up inside pulled off their clothes to
haul them up over the walls. The Egyptians slaughtered their enemies till
they lay in rows like fish, and conquering entered the fort of Megiddo,
where the chiefs of the land came bearing tribute, silver and gold, lapis
lazuli and alabaster, vessels of wine and flocks. The lists of spoil,
made with curious minuteness, include living captives 240, hands (cut off
the dead) 83, mares 2,041, fillies 191, an ark of gold of the enemy, 892
chariots of the vile army, and so on. A later part of the inscription
commemorates the liberal endowments bestowed by the victorious king on
the god Amen Ra, the fields and gardens to supply his temple, the pairs
of geese to fill his lakes, to supply him with the two trussed geese
daily at sunset, a charge to remain for ever, and so on with the loaves
of bread and pots of beer for daily rations. As the king says in his
inscription, he does not boast of what he has done, saying that he has
done more when he has not, and so causing men to contradict him. Here we
see the check of public opinion beginning to act in history. It does not
really compel exact truth, it allows national victories to be exaggerated
and defeats kept out of sight, but even the vainglorious scribes of Egypt
would hardly venture to record events without a foundation of fact.
Turning now to the inscriptions of the Babylonian-Assyrian district,
we may take as an example a temple-brick of the famous city Ur of the
Chaldees, now called Mugheir, which bears these words in cuneiform
writing:
“To (the god) Ur, eldest son of Bel his king,
Urukh, the powerful man, the fierce warrior,
King of (the city) Ur, king of Sumir and Akkad,
Bit-timgal the house of his delight built.”
Sumir and Akkad, here mentioned, were the seats of the old Chaldæan
civilisation. As early as the 16th century B.C., Hammurabi overcame these
nations, a great event in the change that absorbed their ancient culture
and religion into the conquering Assyrian empire. In an inscription of
this king of Babylon, he says, “the favour of Bel gave into my government
the people of Sumir and Akkad, for them I dug out afresh the canal called
by my name, the joy of men, a stream of abundant waters for the people,
all its banks I restored to newness, new supporting walls I heaped up,
perennial waters I provided for the people of Sumir and Akkad.”
By the aid of such contemporary writings, historians are now able
to check the recorded lists of ancient kings, and to piece together
something like a continuous line of dynasties in Egypt and Babylonia
since the foundation of the great cities Memphis and Ur. We may notice
where the records and traditions of the Israelites, written down in later
ages in the historical books of the Old Testament, come in contact with
ancient history from the monuments. Israelite tradition records (Gen.
xi., xii.) that their ancestors had been in the Chaldæan district of
Ur, and in Egypt, which is evidence of their intercourse with the two
great nations of the ancient world. The mention in Exodus (i. 11) of the
Israelites being set to build for Pharaoh a city called Rameses, points
to their oppression in Egypt having been under the Great Rameses II.
of the XIX. dynasty, apparently about 1400 B.C., which makes a point
of contact between Egyptian and Hebrew chronology. In the books of
Kings there come into view later persons and events, well known in the
contemporary records of other countries, as in the mention of Shishak,
king of Egypt, who fought against Rehoboam and plundered the temple (1
K. xiv. 25). It seems likely, when Herodotus (ii. 141) describes the
army of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, being put to flight from the mice
gnawing the soldiers’ bows, that this is a version of the great disaster
of Sennacherib, of which the Bible gives a different account (2 K. xix.).
With Herodotus the student comes in view of the Old World as it was known
to a Greek traveller and geographer of the 5th century B.C. The Father
of History, as he has been called, wrote not as a chronicler of his
own nation, but with the larger view of an anthropologist to whom all
knowledge of mankind was interesting. The way in which modern discoveries
have come in to confirm his statements, justifies us in relying on
ancient historians when, like him, they are careful to distinguish mere
legend or hearsay from what they have themselves enquired into. Thus
Herodotus tells the strange story of the impostor who passed himself off
as Smerdis, and sat on the throne of Persia till he was detected by his
cropped ears, and Darius slew him. When, a few years ago, the cuneiform
characters of the inscription sculptured in a high wall of rock near
Behistan in Persia were deciphered, it proved to be the very record set
up by Darius the king in the three languages of the land, and it matches
the account given by Herodotus closely enough to show what a real grasp
he had of the course of events in Persia a century before his time. Yet
more remarkable is the test which can be put to what Herodotus says he
learnt from the priests in Egypt about their kings who reigned 2000 years
before. From their dictation he wrote down the names of the pyramid-kings
Cheops, Chephren, Mykerinos. In later ages critics had sometimes come to
doubt whether these kings belonged to fact or fable, but when the lost
meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was anew interpreted by modern
scholars, there stood the names recognisable as the Greek historian heard
them. The best ancient history is apt to receive such confirmation from
long-lost monuments. Thucydides relates (vi. 54) that Peisistratos (the
younger) dedicated two altars, from one of which the Athenians erased the
inscription, but the other (the historian says) may still be read, though
in faint letters: “this monument of his archonship Peisistratos son of
Hippias set up in the enclosure of Pythian Apollo.” Professor Newton
reports that this very stone with its inscription is declared to have
been found in 1878 in a courtyard near the Ilissos. How lively a sense of
reality such monuments give to history may be understood by the student
who, fresh from his books, goes to the British Museum and sees among the
ancient coins the grand head of Alexander the Great with the ram’s horns,
commemorating that curious episode of his life when he was declared to be
son of Zeus Ammon; or who notices with surprise the gold coins that prove
Cymbeline, now best known in Shakspere, to have been a real British king
who coined money with his name.
Having thus looked at the sources of early history as belonging to the
study of mankind, we need not go over the well-trodden ground of later
history. It remains to notice myth, the stumbling-block which historians
have so often fallen over. Myth is not to be looked on as mere error
and folly, but as an interesting product of the human mind. It is
sham history, the fictitious narrative of events that never happened.
Historians, especially in writing of early ages, have copied down the
traditions of real events so mixed up with myths, that it is one of the
hardest tasks of the student to judge what to believe and what to reject.
He is fortunate when he can apply the test of possibility, and declare
an event did not happen because he knows enough of the course of nature
to be sure it could not. For instance, cultured nations have learnt from
science that what appears to be a blue dome or firmament above our heads,
the sky or heaven, is not really the solid vault the ancients thought
it was, but only thin air and watery vapour. The consequence of knowing
this is that people have had to strike out of their history the old myths
of gods dwelling in palaces and holding courts in the skies, of men
climbing or flying up from earth into heaven, of giants heaping mountain
Ossa on Pelion, to scale the cloudy heights and wage battle with the gods
above. Besides this way of detecting myth by its relating what could
not have taken place, there are other means of judging it. It is often
possible to satisfy oneself that some story is not really history, by
knowing the causes which led to its being invented.
We know how strong our own desire is to account for everything. This
desire is as strong among barbarians, and accordingly they devise such
explanations as satisfy their minds. But they are apt to go a stage
further, and their explanations turn into the form of stories with names
of places and persons, thus becoming full-made myths. Educated men do
not now consider it honest to make fictitious history in this way, but
people of untrained mind, in what is called the myth-making stage, which
has lasted on from the savage period and has not quite disappeared among
ourselves, have no such scruples about converting their guesses at what
may have happened, into the most lifelike stories of what they say did
happen. Thus, when comparative anatomy was hardly known, the finding of
huge fossil bones in the ground led people to think they were the remains
of huge beasts, and enormous men, or giants, who formerly lived on the
earth. Modern science decides that they were right as to the beasts,
which were ancient species of elephant, rhinoceros, &c., but wrong as
to the giants, none of the great bones really belonging to any creature
like man. But while the belief lasted that they were bones of giants,
men’s imagination worked in making stories about these giants and their
terrific doings, stories which are told still in all quarters of the
globe as though they were traditions of real events. Thus the Sioux of
the western prairies of North America say their land was once inhabited
by great animals, bits of whose bones they still keep for magic, and
also, they tell of the giant Ha-o-kah, who could stride over the largest
rivers and the tallest pines, and to whom they sing and dance at their
festivals. It appears that fossil bones, very likely of the mastodon, had
to do with this native belief in old monstrous beasts, nor need we be
surprised at the giants coming into the story, considering that so lately
as the last century Dr. Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine, sent to our
Royal Society an account of the discovery of such bones in New England,
which he argued were remains of antediluvian giants.
Another thing which in all parts of the world has set the imagination of
myth-makers to work, is the fact that people live in tribes or nations,
each known by a particular name, such as Ojibwa, Afghan, Frank. The
easiest and favourite way of accounting for this is to suppose each tribe
or nation to have had an ancestor or chief of the like name, so that his
descendants or followers inherited their tribe-name from him. It really
happens so sometimes, but in most cases a pretended tradition of such an
eponymic or name-ancestor arises from the makers of genealogies first
inventing him out of the name of the tribe, and then treating him as a
historical personage. They may now and then be caught in the act of doing
this. Thus among the native race of Brazil and Paraguay, some tribes are
called _Tupi_ and others _Guarani_, so to account for this division, a
tradition is related that two brothers named _Tupi_ and _Guarani_ came
over the sea to Brazil, and with their children peopled the country, but
a talking parrot made strife between the wives of the two brothers, and
this grew into a quarrel and separation, Tupi staying in the land, and
Guarani going off with his family into the region of La Plata. Now there
happens to be a means of checking this story, for Martius says that the
name guarani (meaning warrior) was first given by the Jesuits to the
southern Indians whom they collected in their missions, so that the tale
of the two ancestor-brothers must be a myth of modern manufacture. Such
eponymic myths of national ancestors were not only made in ancient times,
but are mixed up in the chronicles of Old World nations as though they
were real history. The classical student knows the legends of the twin
brothers _Danaos_ and _Aigyptos_, ancestors of the _Danaoi_ (Greeks) and
_Ægyptians_; and of _Hellēn_, father of the _Hellēnes_, whose three sons
_Aiōlos_, _Dōros_, _Xouthos_, were fathers of the _Æolians_, _Dorians_,
&c.
Having looked at these two frequent kinds of myths derived from fossil
bones and national names, it is worth while to notice how both come
together in our own country. The History of the Britons, compiled in
the 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, relates that our island was
in old time called Albion, and was only inhabited by a few giants; but
_Brutus_, a banished Trojan prince, landed with his followers and called
the land _Britain_, after his own name, and his companions _Britons_.
With him came a leader called _Gorineus_, and he called the part of
the country which fell to him _Corinea_ and his people _Corineans_,
that is, _Cornish_. In that part the giants were most numerous, and one
especially, named _Goemagot_ (elsewhere called _Gogmagog_) was twelve
cubits high, and could pull up an oak like a hazel wand. On a certain
day, when there had been a battle and the Britons had overcome a party
of giants and slain all except this hugest monster, he and Corineus
had a wrestling-match, when Corineus caught the giant up in his arms,
and running with him to the top of the cliff now called the Hoe at
Plymouth, cast him over, wherefore (says the chronicler) the place is
called “Goemagot’s leap” to this day. Quaint as this legend is, it is
not hard to find the sense of it. It was the fashion to trace the origin
of nations from Troy; _Brutus_ and _Corineus_ were invented to account
for the names of _Britain_ and _Cornwall_; _Goemagot_ or _Gogmagog_ is
the Biblical _Gog_ and _Magog_ rolled into one, these personages being
recognised in tradition as giants. But why the story of his having been
thrown over the Hoe at Plymouth? The answer seems to be that this is a
place where the bones of fossil animals are actually dug up, such as were
looked upon as remains of giants. Even in modern times, when excavations
were being made on the Hoe for the fortifications, huge jaws and teeth
were found, which were at once settled by public opinion to be the
remains of Gogmagog.
These are examples of the myths easiest for modern civilised minds to
enter into, for they are little more than inferences or guesses as to
what may have actually happened, worked up with picturesque details which
give them an air of reality. But to understand another kind of myths we
must get our minds into a mood which is not that of scientific reasoning
in the class-room, but of telling nursery tales in the twilight, or
reading poetry in the woods on a summer afternoon. Former chapters
have shown how, in old times and among uncultured people, notions of
the kind which still remain among us as poetic fancy were seriously
believed. When to the rude philosopher the action of the world around
him was best explained by supposing in it nature-life like human life,
and divine nature-souls like human souls, then the sun seemed a personal
lord climbing proudly up the sky, and descending dim and weary into
the under-world at night; the stormy sea was a fearful god ready to
swallow up the rash sailor; the beasts of the forest were half-human in
thought and speech; even the forest-trees were the bodily habitations
of spirits, and the woodman, to whom the rustling of their leaves
seemed voices, and their waving branches beckoning arms, hewed at their
trunks with a half-guilty sense of doing murder. The world then seemed
to be “such stuff as dreams are made on;” transformation of body and
transmigration of spirit were ever going on; a man or god might turn
into a beast, a river, or a tree; rocks might be people transformed into
stones, and sticks transformed snakes. Such a state of thought is fast
disappearing, but there are still tribes living in it, and they show what
the men’s minds are like who make nature-myths. When a story-teller lives
in this dreamland, any poetic fancy becomes a hint for a wonder-tale, and
though (one would think) he must be aware that he is romancing, and that
the adventures he relates are not quite history, yet when he is dead, and
his story has been repeated by bards and priests for a few generations,
then it would be disrespectful, or even sacrilegious, to question its
truth. This has happened all over the world, and the Greek myths of the
great nature-gods which Xenophanes and Anaxagoras ventured to disbelieve
with such ill consequences to themselves, were of much the same fabric as
those of modern barbarians like the South Sea Islanders. Let us look at a
few nature-myths, choosing such as most transparently show how they came
to be made.
The Tahitians tell tales of their sea-god Hiro, whose followers were
sailing on the ocean while he was lulled to sleep in a cavern in the
depths below; then the wind-god raised a furious storm to destroy the
canoe, but the sailors cried to Hiro, till, rising to the surface, he
quelled the storm, and his votaries came safe to port. So in Homer,
Poseidōn the sea-god, dweller in caves of ocean, sets on the winds to
toss the frail bark of Odysseus among the thundering waves, till Ino
comes to his rescue and bids him strip and swim for the Phaiakian shore.
Both tales are word-pictures of the stormy sea told in the language of
nature-myth, only with different turns. The New Zealanders have a story
of Maui imprisoning the winds, all but the wild west-wind, whom he cannot
catch to shut into its cavern by a great stone rolled against its mouth;
all he can do is to chase it home sometimes, and then it hides in the
cavern, and for a while dies away. All this is a mythic description of
the weather, meaning that other winds are occasional, but the west wind
prevalent and strong. These New Zealanders had never heard of the classic
myth of Æolus and the cave of the winds, yet how nearly they had come to
the same mythic fancy, that it is from such blow-holes in the hill-sides
that the winds come forth. The negroes of the West Indies tell a tale of
the great quarrel between Fire and Water, how the Fire came on slowly,
stopped by the stream, till he called the Wind to his aid, who carried
him across everything, and the great fight came off, the Bon Dieu looking
on from behind a curtain of clouds. It is not likely that these negro
slaves had ever heard of the twenty-first Iliad, to know how the same
world-old contest of the elements is told in the great battle between the
Fire-god and the Rivers, when the Winds were sent to help, and carried
the fierce flames onward, and the eels and fish scuttled hither and
thither as the hot breath of the blast came upon them.
The beams of light darting down from the sun through openings in the
clouds seem to have struck people’s fancy in Europe as being like the
rope over the pulley of an old-fashioned draw-well, for this appearance
is called in popular phrase, “the sun drawing water.” The Polynesians
also see the resemblance of the rays to cords, which they say are the
ropes the sun is fastened by, and they tell a myth how the sun once used
to go faster, till a god set a noose at the horizon and caught him as he
rose, so that he now travels bound and slowly along his daily appointed
path. In English such an expression as that the sun is “swallowed up
by night” is now a mere metaphor, but the idea is one which in ancient
and barbaric times people took more seriously. The Maoris have made out
of it the story of the death of their divine hero Maui. You may see,
they say, Maui’s ancestress, Great-Woman-Night, flashing and as it were
opening and shutting out on the horizon where sea and sky come together;
Maui crept into her body and would have got through unharmed, but just
at that moment the little flycatcher, the _tiwakawaka_, broke out with
its merry note and awoke the Night, and she crushed Maui. That this is
really a nature-myth of the setting sun dying as he plunges into the
darkness, is proved by the mention of the bird, which has the peculiarity
of singing at sunset. Of all the nature-myths of the world, few are so
widely spread as those on this theme of night and day, where with mythic
truth the devoured victims were afterwards disgorged or set free. The
Zulu story-tellers describe the maw of the monster as a country where
there are hills and houses and cattle and people living, and when the
monster is cut open, all the creatures come out from the darkness; with a
neat touch of nature which shows that the story-teller is thinking of the
dawn, the cock comes out first, crying, “_kukuluku!_ I see the world!”
Our English version of the old myth is the nursery tale of Little Red
Ridinghood, but it is spoilt by leaving out the proper end (which German
nurses have kept up with better memory), that when the hunter ripped up
the sleeping wolf, out came the little damsel in her red satin cloak,
safe and sound.
Such stories are fanciful, but the fancy of the myth-maker can take yet
further flights. The mythic persons as yet described have been visible
objects like the sun, or at least what can be perceived by the senses and
made real objects of, such as wind, or day. But when the poet is in the
vein of myth-making, whatever he can express by a noun and put a verb
to, becomes capable of being treated as a person. If he can say, summer
comes, sleep falls on men, hope rises, justice demands, then he can set
up summer and sleep, hope and justice, in human figures, dress them, and
make them walk and talk. Thus the formation of myth is helped by what
Professor Max Müller has called a “disease of language.” This, however,
is not the whole matter. We saw in the last chapter how the notion of
soul or spirit helped men on to the notion of cause. When the cause of
anything presents itself to the ancient mind as a kind of soul or spirit,
then the cause or spirit of summer, sleep, hope, justice, comes easily
to look like a person. No one can really understand old poetry without
knowing this. Homer could fancy on the field of battle the awful _Kēr_,
whose figure was shown on the shield of Achilles with blood-stained
garment flung over her shoulders, as she seized some warrior wounded to
the death, or dragged a corpse by the feet out of the fighting throng.
This being is not merely a word turned into a reality, she is a personal
cause, a spirit-reason, why one warrior is slain and not another. So far
is the idea of her spread in Aryan mythology, that it appears again among
the Northmen, when Odin sends to every battle the maidens who in Walhalla
serve the feast and fill the bowls with ale for the spirits of the
heroes; these maidens are the Valkyriur, who guide the event of victory,
and choose the warriors who shall fall. Another well-known mythic group
shows again how what to us moderns are but ideas expressed in words, took
personal form in the minds of the ancients. In the classic books of
Greece and Rome we read of the three fate-spinners, the Moirai or Parcæ,
and their Scandinavian counterparts appear in the Edda as the three wise
women whose dwelling is near the spring under the world-ash Ygdrasill,
the Norns who fix the lives of men. The explanation of these three mythic
beings is that they are in personal shape the Past, Present, and Future,
as is shown by the names they bear, _Was_, _Is_, _Shall_ (_Urdhr_,
_Verdhandi_, _Skuld_).
Stories are always changing and losing their meanings, and from age to
age new bards and tale-tellers shape the old myths into new forms to
suit new hearers. Considering how stories thus grow and change, one must
expect their origins to be as often as not lost beyond recovery. While,
as we have seen, it may be often possible to make out what they came
from, this must be done cautiously. Clever writers are too apt to sit
down and settle the mythic origin of any tale, as if this could be done
by ingenious guessing. Even if it is nonsense and never was intended for
anything else, the myth-interpreter can find a serious origin for it
all the same. Thus a learned but rash mythologist declares that in our
English nursery rhyme, “the cow jumped over the moon,” is a remnant of
an old nature-myth, describing as a cow a cloud passing over the moon.
What is really wanted in interpreting myths is something beyond simple
guessing; there must be reasons why one particular guess is more probable
than any other. It would have been rash to judge that _Promētheus_
the fire-bringer is a personification of the wooden fire-drill (p.
262), were it not known that the Sanskrit name of this instrument is
_pramantha_; taken together, the correspondence of name and nature
amounts to a high probability that we have got back to the real origin of
the Prometheus-legend. We may choose another example from the mythology
of India, in the story of Vâmana, the tiny Brahman, who, to humble the
pride of King Bali, begs of him as much land as he can measure in three
steps, but when the boon is granted, the little dwarf expands into the
gigantic form of Vishnu, and, striding with one step across the earth,
another across the air, and a third across the sky, drives Bali down into
the infernal regions, where he still reigns. This most remarkable of all
the Tom Thumb stories seems really a myth of the sun, rising tiny above
the horizon, then swelling into majestic power and crossing the universe.
For Vâmana, the “dwarf,” is one of the incarnations of Vishnu, and Vishnu
was originally the Sun. In the hymns of the Veda the idea of his three
steps is to be found before it had become a story, when it was as yet
only a poetic metaphor of the Sun crossing the airy regions in his three
strides. “Vishnu traversed (the earth), thrice he put down his foot; it
was crushed under his dusty step. Three steps hence made Vishnu, unharmed
preserver, upholding sacred things.”
It remains to see how myths spread. Whenever a good story is told,
whether real or made-up does not matter, it becomes part of the
story-teller’s stock, who puts to it any new name that will suit, and
often succeeds in planting it not only in popular legend, but even in
history. There is a fragment by Demaratus preserved in the collection of
Stobæus, where there is related with Greek names, as an episode of the
history of Arkadia, the grand story which we were taught as an event of
Roman history, the legend of the Horatii and Curiatii. Roman history,
it seems, only borrowed it from an earlier tale, much as modern Swiss
history borrowed from older folklore the tale of the archer and the
apple, to adorn their national hero, Tell. To show how legend is put
together from many sources, historical and mythical, let us take to
pieces one of the famous children’s tales of Europe. Blue Beard was a
historical person. He was Gilles de Retz, Sieur de Laval, Marshal of
France, nicknamed Barbe Bleue from having a beard of blue-black shade.
Persuaded by an Italian alchemist that his strength could be restored
by bathing in the blood of infants, he had many children entrapped for
this hideous purpose into his castle of Champtocé on the Loire, the
ruins of which are still to be seen. At last the horrible suspicions of
the country folk as to what was going on were brought to proof, and the
monster was burnt at the stake at Nantes in 1440. In all this, however,
there is not a word about murdered wives. Indeed the historical Blue
Beard, in his character of murderous monster, seems to have inherited
an older tale belonging to the wife-murderer of Breton legend, Comor
the Cursed, Count of Poher, whose name and deeds are set down to near a
thousand years earlier, in the legendary chronicles which tell of him as
a usurper and tyrant who married and murdered one wife after another,
till at last when he had wedded and killed the beautiful Trifine,
vengeance overtook him, and he was defeated and slain by the rightful
prince. It is not easy to say whether this is a version of a yet older
story, or whether there is a historical foundation for it; if Henry VIII.
of England had lived in those times, such a legend might have gathered
round his name. Other points of the modern Blue Beard appear already
in the story of Trifine, her sending for aid to her kinsmen when she
knows her danger, and her discovery of the murder of the former wives.
This last, however, does not come to pass in the modern way; in the
legend, Trifine goes down into the chapel to pray in the hour of need,
and there the tombs of the four murdered wives open and their corpses
stand upright, each with the knife or cord or whatever she was murdered
with in her hand. Instead of this powerful and ghastly scene, the modern
version brings in the hackneyed episode of the forbidden chamber,
which had long been the property of story-tellers for use on suitable
occasions, and is to be found in the _Arabian Nights_. The old Trifine
legend has a characteristic ending. Her wicked husband pursues her into
the forest and cuts her head off, but St. Gildas makes her body carry
it back to Comor’s castle, which he overthrows by flinging a handful of
dust at it, then he puts Trifine’s head on for her again, and she retires
into a convent for the rest of her life. The story-tellers of later times
prefer a more cheerful if more commonplace finish.
The miracle-legend just quoted brings us back to the historical use of
myth, which was spoken of earlier in this chapter. The story of St.
Gildas bringing the fair Trifine back to her castle with her head in her
hand, and his afterwards putting it back on her shoulders, is history.
It records the intellectual state of the age when it was held edifying
to tell such wonders of holy men, for holy men were believed able to do
them. Old tales which seem extravagant to our minds are apt thus to have
historical value by pointing back to the times when, seeming possible,
they were made. This is true even of Æsop’s fables. In the stage of
thought when human souls are thought able to live in animals’ bodies,
when a wolf may have one’s enemy’s soul in him, or one’s grandfather may
be crawling on the hearth in the body of a snake, stories of rational
beasts themselves seem rational. Among the Buddhists, where beast-tales
early became moral apologues, they are told as incidents of the many
births or transmigrations of the great founder of the religion. It was
Buddha himself who, as a bird, took the bone out of the lion’s throat,
and was repaid by being told that he was lucky to be so well out of it.
It was Buddha who, born in the body of a peasant, listened to the ass
in the lion’s skin, and said he was but an ass. That millions of people
should have this as part of their sacred literature is a fact of interest
in the study of civilization, warning us not to cast aside a story as
worthless, because it is mythical. For understanding the thoughts of
old-world nations, their myths tell us much we should hardly learn from
their history.