for “a word,” something spoken, and in this general sense it is used
by Homer. Later, its connotation became restricted to what was spoken
concerning the gods, the narratives of their doings, the descriptions of
their abodes and attributes.
Men began to frame such tales the moment they consciously recognised the
existence of such unseen agencies. They were founded on visions, dreams,
and those vague mental states which, as I have shown, fill up so large a
part of savage life. They were not intentional fictions, by any means,
for the criteria between the real and unreal fade away in those psychic
conditions, and the faintest hold on actuality is enough to guarantee an
indefinitely complex fancy.
It was a strange error by one of the most earnest students of primitive
religions, the Reverend W. Robertson Smith, when he advocated his theory
that the myth was derived from the ritual, not the ritual from the
myth.[134] Had he studied the actual religious condition of the rudest
tribes, he would have found them with scarcely any ritual but a most
abundant mythology; and he would have discovered that where the myth
was taken from the ritual, it is when the latter has lost its original
meaning, and some other is devised to explain it.
As examples of such notions, I may take the Bushmen of South Africa. They
enjoy the general reputation of being the lowest of the human race. They
have no temples, no altars, no ritual; yet the missionary Bleek collected
among them thousands of tales concerning their gods in their relations to
men and animals.[135]
The Andamanese are alleged to have no forms of worship whatever; but they
have many myths about the mighty Puluga, self-created and immortal, about
the origin of fire, and the transactions of the invisible spirits.
It would be easy to give many other examples, but it is enough to refute
such an opinion by referring to the vast body of myths in all religious
peoples which have no reference to ritual whatever.
The sources of mythology are psychic. They are not to be traced to the
external world, whether ritual or natural. Myths are not figurative
explanations of natural phenomena, they are not vague memories of
ancestors and departed heroes, they are not philosophic speculations
or poetic fancies. They are distinctly religious in origin, and, when
genuine, are the fruit of that insight into the divine, that “beatific
vision,” on which I have laid such emphasis as the real and only
foundation of all religions whatsoever.
They receive their form and expression through spoken language, and are,
therefore, intimately associated with, often dependent upon its sounds,
and laws. In how many ways this may influence them I may briefly mention.
Primitive language is predominantly concrete. The connotations of its
terms are mainly objective. By this necessity arose the materialisation
of the spiritual thought. It had to be expressed under external imagery.
Primitive languages are usually intensely individualising and specific.
There is scarcely a native tongue in America in which one could say
“hand”; one must always add a pronoun indicating whose hand is meant,
“my, thy, his,” hand.
The generic distinctions in such tongues are often far reaching and
real, not purely formal, as with us. A word in the masculine or feminine
gender is understood to mean that the object to which it refers is
positively male or female. Many other distinctions are thus conveyed, as
what is animate and inanimate, noble or vulgar, etc.
The result of these distinctions in such languages as the Aryan and
Semitic was that the gods perforce were arranged sexually as male and
female, and this persists to-day even in our English tongue.
Many myths arose directly from words, through casual similarities
between them which were attributed to some divine cause. This is the
theory so well known by the advocacy of Professor Max Müller, who is
charged, unfairly I believe, with having called mythology a “disease of
language.” He, Professor Kuhn, and others lay great and just stress on
the influence of “paronomy,” that is, similarity in the sound of words,
as the starting-point of myths. They have adduced endless examples from
the classical tongues, but I shall content myself with two from wholly
primitive sources.
I have just referred to the Andamanese as at the bottom of religious
growth, but with an abundant mythology. In their tongue it happens that
the word _garub_ means “night” and also a species of caterpillar. It is
probably a mere coincidence of sound. But they saw in it much more.
Night to them is a depressing period, and it would not have been created
by the supreme Puluga without just cause. Evidently the double meaning
of the word _garub_ indicated this. And as the wise men proceed on that
universally sound opinion that when there is a row there is a woman in
it, they perceive that some woman must have wantonly killed a _garub_, a
caterpillar, in order that Puluga should have sent _garub_, the night, as
a punishment. And this is the sum of a long mythical story.[136]
Another example is from a far distant area, from among the Carrier
Indians of British America. The arctic fox which they hunt has a sharp
yelp which sounds _khaih_. Their word for “light” is _yekkhaih_.
Evidently the fox was the animal who first called for the light and, by
the magical power of the word, obtained it. Through what difficulties he
accomplished this is told in a long and curious myth obtained from them
by Father Morice.[137]
In the development of myths it was, indeed, often the case that those
concerning one deity could be told of another—singularly incongruous as
it often was,—or that the divine attributes primarily assigned to a
deity and drawn from its character could be transferred to a human type,
as when those of a flower were placed on the god.[138]
It is equally an error to suppose that myths were at first mere stories
and received their religious character later. The true myth has a
religious aim from the outset, and is not the product of an idle fancy.
Those who have taught otherwise have been misled by a superficial
acquaintance with the psychology of savage tribes. Mythology comes from
religion, not religion from mythology.
The savage understands perfectly the difference between a sacred and a
secular story, between a narrative of the doings of the gods handed down
from his ancestors, and the creation of the idle fancy brought forth to
amuse a circle of listeners.
I have already referred to the strange similarity in the myths of savage
nations far asunder in space and kinship. The explanation of this is
not to be found in borrowing or in recollections from a common, remote
unity; but in the laws of the human mind. The same myths are found all
over the world, with the same symbolism and imagery, woven into cycles
dealing with the same great questions of human thought. This is because
they arise from identical psychic sources, and find expression under
obligatory forms, depending on the relations of man to his environment,
and on the unity of mental process throughout the race.
It is not possible for me at the present time to enter far into the vast
temple of mythology. I must content myself with selecting a few of the
most prominent mythical cycles, aiming by these to show how they form the
ground-plan and substructure of the whole edifice of mythical narrative.
I will select seven which are the most prominent, those relating to:
1. the Cosmical Concepts; 2. the Sacred Numbers; 3. the Drama of the
Universe; 4. the Earthly Paradise; 5. the Conflict of Nature; 6. the
Returning Saviour; and 7. the Journey of the Soul.
_1._ _The Cosmical Concepts._—Wherever man is placed on the earth, he
is guided in his movements by space and direction. These are among the
earliest notions he derives from the impressions on his senses. His
anatomical conformation, the anterior and posterior planes of his body
and his right and left sides, lead him to a fourfold division of space,
as before him and behind him, to one side or the other. He conceives the
earth, therefore, as a plain with four quarters, the chief directions
as four, to wit, the cardinal points, and the winds as four principal
currents from these points. The sky is to him a solid covering, supported
at each of its four corners by a tree, a pillar, or a giant, and is
itself divided into four courts or regions like the earth.
These were his cosmical concepts, his primal ideas of the universe, and
they entered deeply into his life, his acts, and his beliefs. He founded
his social organisation on them, he pitched his tents or built his cities
on their model, he oriented his edifices to simulate them, and framed his
myths to explain and perpetuate them.
We find these concepts practically universal. The symbolic figures which
represent them are scratched in the soil at the _Bora_, or initiation
ceremonies of the Australians; they are etched into the pots and jars
we dig up in the mounds of the Mississippi valley; they are painted
in strange figures on the manuscripts of the Mayas and Mexicans; they
reappear in the mysterious symbols of the svastika and the Chinese Ta-Ki;
they underlie the foundation stones of Egyptian pyramids, and recur in
the lowest strata of Babylonian ziggarats.[139]
_2. The Sacred Numbers._—The cosmical concepts were closely connected
with the sacred numbers. Wherever we turn in myth and rite, in symbolism
or sacred art, we find certain numbers which have a hallowed priority
in religious thought. These numbers are pre-eminently the three and
the four, and those derived from them. They are distinctly antithetic
in character, arising from contrasting psychical sources, which I will
briefly explain.
The number _four_ derives its sacredness in mythology from the cosmical
concepts just mentioned. It was, therefore, connected with the objective
and phenomenal world, and had a material and concrete origin and
applications.
The number _three_, on the other hand, was surrounded with the halo of
sanctity from the operations of the mind itself. These, the processes
of thinking, are carried on by a triple or rather triune action of the
intelligence, which logicians express in the three fundamental “laws of
thought,” and in the trilogy of the syllogism. These ever-present laws of
thinking impress themselves on the mind and mental acts whether they are
recognised or not, and all the more absolutely in that involuntary action
in which, as “sub-limital consciousness” or “psychic automatism,” I have
revealed to you the true source of the conception of the Divine.[140]
How natural, then, that we should find in so many primitive faiths the
belief in the triplicate nature of divinity, should find myths, idols,
rites, so devised as to reflect and inculcate this! Such is the case,
and it is easy to quote examples, whether we turn to the Indians of
America or the Indians of Hindostan, whether we touch on the triads of
ancient Egypt or those of the Druids, whether we recall the three Norns
of Teutonic myth or the three Fates of the Hellenes. As a writer, who
has made the subject his special branch, observes: “It is impossible to
study any single system of worship throughout the world, without being
struck with the peculiar persistence of the triple number in regard to
Divinity.”[141]
The exception to this would naturally be where the concept of the number
itself was too feeble to impress itself upon the myth. There are tribes
who cannot count four, whose languages have no word for any number
beyond two, and yet who are by no means deficient either in mythologies
or practical arts.[142] Among these, we should look in vain for the
sacredness of numbers.
_3. The Drama of the Universe._—I have already quoted the saying of the
wise men of ancient India, “There is no limit to the knowing of the Self
that knows.” He who through meditation and prayer has become one with
God, knows what God knows. Thus it is that in the rudest tribes we find
the story of the beginning of things clearly told as coming from the
inspired knowledge of the seers.
This story has many points of similarity, wherever we find it, not
owing, I hasten again to say, to any unity of origin in place, but due
to the higher unity of the mind of man, and the necessary results of its
activity.
Look in what continent we please, we shall find the myth of a Creation
or of a primeval construction, of a Deluge or a destruction, and of an
expected Restoration. We shall find that man has ever looked on this
present world as a passing scene in the shifting panorama of time, to be
ended by some cataclysm and to be followed by some period of millennial
glory.
Whenever we have a fairly complete body of the mythology of a primitive
stock, we discover the same scenario of the vast drama of the universe,
varying abundantly in detail and local colour, but true to the grandiose
lines of its composition.
It is instructive to analyse its various elements and trace them to their
psychic sources. Let us begin with the modes of action of the creative
power itself.
This mysterious power is known to man under three forms.
The simplest is that of the moulder or manufacturer, as the potter makes
his pots, the shoemaker his shoes. This is the conception which underlies
many myths of the Creator, as is shown by the names he bears. Thus the
Australians called him Baiame, “the cutter-out,” as one cuts out a sandal
from a skin, or a figure from bark. The Maya Indians used the term Patol,
from the verb _pat_, to mould, as a potter his clay, Bitol, which has
the same meaning, and Tzacol, the builder, as of a house.[143] With
the Dyaks of Borneo, the Creator is Tupa, the forger, as one forges a
spear-blade[144]; and so on.
The second form is that of creation in the sense of generation, and this
is a constant simile in the myths, with reference to the process both in
the vegetable and animal kingdoms.
The Creator is often referred to as the Father, the parent, more or
less literally, of all that is. He has many such titles in the myths of
America and Polynesia. In bi-sexual myths he is associated with some
universal mother as the genetrix.
The third form is more recondite and loftier. In an earlier lecture I
have emphasised how man is conscious within himself of the Will as an
ultimate source of power. This he clearly recognised in his primitive
conditions, and to its exertion repeatedly in his myths did he attribute
the origin of things. They were self-evolved in the thought of the primal
Being, or, as the native American expression is, they were “created by
thought.”
We find this in the rudest tribes of North America; and among the
sedentary Zuñis of New Mexico, it is said of their demiurge Awonawilona
that at the beginning “he conceived within himself and thought outward in
space,” in order to bring nature into existence. We see the connection in
the Vitian dialect of Polynesian, in which _mania_ is “to think”; _mana_,
a miracle, and the power to perform one. According to the myths of
Hawaii, it was “by an act of the will” that their triple-natured Creator
“broke up the night” (Po), and from its fragments evoked into being the
world of light and life.[145]
Whatever the mode of creation, it was felt that it did not tell the whole
story. The conceptions of time and space are in their essence limitless,
and any creation must have been within them. Thus in Polynesian myth,
Po represents not a dateless chaos but the debris of some former state
of things; and in Algonquin legend the primeval ocean had engulfed some
older world.[146]
This psychic molimen, ceaselessly acting, led in more developed
mythologies to some defined fancies of these earlier periods of cosmic
existence and thus to the myths of the Ages of the World or the Epochs of
Nature. These are clearly outlined among the Mexicans, Mayas, Peruvians,
and other tribes of the New World and among many on the Eastern
Hemisphere. The Aztecs count them as four, each followed by a formidable
catastrophe, nearly or quite destroying all that lived.
The last of these destructions was generally blended with the notion of
the emergence of the solid land from the primeval waters; and this is the
origin of the Deluge Myth, the story of the Universal Flood, which we
find in so many primitive peoples. It has excited especial attention, and
by writers has been explained as the remembrance of some local overflow,
or the recollection of the Hebrew tradition. Its real origin, purely
psychic and derived from the myth of the Epochs of Nature, I explained
thirty years ago in discussing its prevalence among American tribes.[147]
_4. The Earthly Paradise._—Associated with this cycle is the myth of
the terrestrial Paradise, watered by its four rivers, and enclosing the
tree of life,—the happy abode of early man. The four rivers are the
celestial streams from the four corners of the earth, watering the tree
as the emblem of life. Thus we find it among the American Indians, the
Sioux and the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Polynesians, the ancient Aryans and
Semites, etc.[148] Its origin is purely psychic, and though we can easily
understand how the writer of the Book of Genesis sought to identify these
mythical streams with some known to him, it is strangely out of date for
scholars of to-day to follow his footsteps in that vain quest.[149]
_5. The Conflict of Nature._—Another great cycle of psychic myths arose
from the conflict of nature as apprehended by the primitive mind.
Everywhere it seems to be raging around us. The hourly struggle of light
with darkness; of day with night; of sunshine with storm; of summer with
winter; of youth with age, of health with disease; of life with death; of
all that makes toward good with all that makes toward evil—this endless
battle of two principles underlies all movement and is forever stirring
the soul to throw itself into the fray.
In a thousand forms this eternal combat was portrayed in myths, all
pregnant with one meaning, bodying it forth in varied symbol and
expression. The world-wide stories of the conflict of the first two
brothers, of men with gods, of giants with heroes, of the deities among
themselves, arose from this perception of the unceasing interaction of
natural forces, imagined as a war between conscious existences.
_6. The Returning Saviour._—Out of this imagined turmoil and slaughter
grew the wonderful mythical cycles concerning the Deliverer and Saviour.
He would come from afar, out of the morning light or the distant sky,
or he would be born of a virgin and the son of a god. He would lead his
people to happiness and power, crushing by his might the enemies who
afflicted them, whether on earth or among the envious gods. Blond-bearded
and light-haired, even among Polynesians and Americans, we cannot
err in seeing in this majestic figure the personified idea of Light,
transferred from the plane of physical phenomena into that of psychical
anticipation.[150]
_7. The Journey of the Soul._—Lastly, I mention the cycle which describes
the journey of the soul after death. The extraordinary similarity which
I and others have pointed out between the opinions on this subject among
Egyptians, Greeks, ancient Celts, and North American Indians,[151] is not
to be explained by any theory of inter-communication, nor “by chance,”
as some have argued, but by fixed psychic laws, working over the same
material under similar conditions.
The soul passes toward the west, crosses a sea or river to the abode
of the departed, and meets everywhere nearly the same obstacles, to
be overcome by proper preparations and mortuary ceremonies. I need
not rehearse the details. They can be compared elsewhere. But their
substantial identity confirms in an emphatic manner the thesis I am
advocating, that in these universal mythical cycles we are dealing not
with fragments of some one set of fancies borrowed from a common source,
but with independent creations of the human intellect, framed under
laws common to it everywhere, and which tend always to produce fruits
generically everywhere the same.
LECTURE IV.
Primitive Religious Expression: In the Object.
CONTENTS:—Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship
only—Identical with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a
Stadium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Objects:
1. The Celestial Bodies—Sun and Moon Worship—Astrolatry;
2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the Winds), Water,
and the Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones and
Rocks—Thunderbolts—Memorial Stones—Divining Stones; 4. Trees
and Plants—The Tree of Life—The Sacred Pole and the Cross—The
Plant-Soul—The Tree of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—High
Places and Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird, the Serpent,
etc.; 7. Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Worship of Beauty;
8. Life and its Transmission—Examples—Genesiac Cults—The
Fatherhood of God—Love as Religion’s Crown.
If we analyse the concepts which occupy our minds, we shall find
that most of them are derived from the sense of sight; they are what
psychologists call “visual ideas.” To these alone we owe the notions of
space, size, form, colour, brightness, and motion.
By filling the brain with such images, sight becomes a mental stimulus
of the highest order, and as we find it exerting its influence in other
directions, so in the development of the religious sense it has always
held a conspicuous place. It has led to the objective expression of
that sense under visible forms, in images, pictures, sacred structures,
symbolic colours and shapes, and natural substances.
This expression, universal in primitive conditions, is called fetishism,
polytheism, and idolatry, the worship of stocks and stones. But I wish to
impress upon you that nowhere in the world did man ever worship a stock
or a stone, as such. Every fetish, be it a rag-baby or a pebble from the
road-side, is adored, not as itself, but as possessing some mysterious,
transcendental power, by which it can influence the future. In some
obscure way it is the medium or agent of that supernatural Will, the
recognition of which is at the basis of every religion.
The relation of the fetish to the spiritual power behind it, though
everywhere recognised, was not easy to define. The Melanesians believe
that the souls of the dead act through bones; while the independent
spirits (_vui_) choose stones as their mediums; and they say that
these objects are, as it were, limbs or members of these incorporeal
powers.[152]
That the fetish itself is something else than the mere object, and is
certainly not identified with it (as writers have often asserted), is
evident from the words and actions of fetish worshippers. A South African
negro offered food to a tree in the presence of an European traveller.
The latter observed that a tree cannot eat. “Oh,” replied the negro,
“tree not fetish. Fetish spirit; not seen; live in tree.”[153]
If a fetish does not bring good luck, it is thrown away, burned, or
broken, as having lost its virtue, ceased to be the abode of power. One
of efficacy, on the other hand, will bring a good price, and such are
often sold and bought. Among the Papuans of New Guinea the fetishes are
small wooden dolls dressed in coloured rags. They are believed to be the
media through which the ancestral spirits operate. But if a man has bad
luck, he will beat, or break, or cast away, as of no account, such an
impotent object.[154]
These and scores of other examples which could be adduced disprove the
assertion that man, even in his lowest phases of religious life, ever
worshipped an object as an object. Even then, his intellectual insight
penetrated to the recognition of something higher than phenomena in
the world about him. As has been well said by a German writer, what
is really worshipped in the object anywhere is not itself but “a
transcendental _x_,” within and beyond it.[155]
It has been abundantly shown that amid the tribes of the West Coast of
Africa, to whose gods the term fetish, _feitiço_, was first applied
by the Portuguese, the recognition and worship of tribal and national
divinities and even of a Supreme Being, ruler and creator of the world,
are clearly displayed.[156]