2. That the gods who were dreaded were, with the vulgar, who alone
dreaded them, merely impersonations of the powers of nature.
3. That it was physical injury which these gods were expected to
inflict.
But he himself agrees with this theory of mine; for he says shortly
after, that not only philosophers, but even the ancient Romans, had
separated superstition from religion; and that the word was first
applied to those who prayed all day ut liberi sui sibi superstites
essent, might survive them. On the etymology no one will depend who
knows the remarkable absence of any etymological instinct in the
ancients, in consequence of their weak grasp of that sound inductive
method which has created modern criticism. But if it be correct, it
is a natural and pathetic form for superstition to take in the minds
of men who saw their children fade and die; probably the greater
number of them beneath diseases which mankind could neither
comprehend nor cure.
The best exemplification of what the ancients meant by superstition
is to be found in the lively and dramatic words of Aristotle's great
pupil Theophrastus.
The superstitious man, according to him, after having washed his
hands with lustral water--that is, water in which a torch from the
altar had been quenched--goes about with a laurel-leaf in his mouth,
to keep off evil influences, as the pigs in Devonshire used, in my
youth, to go about with a withe of mountain ash round their necks to
keep off the evil eye. If a weasel crosses his path, he stops, and
either throws three pebbles into the road, or, with the innate
selfishness of fear, lets someone else go before him, and attract to
himself the harm which may ensue. He has a similar dread of a
screech-owl, whom he compliments in the name of its mistress, Pallas
Athene. If he finds a serpent in his house, he sets up an altar to
it. If he pass at a four-cross-way an anointed stone, he pours oil
on it, kneels down, and adores it. If a rat has nibbled one of his
sacks he takes it for a fearful portent--a superstition which Cicero
also mentions. He dare not sit on a tomb, because it would be
assisting at his own funeral. He purifies endlessly his house,
saying that Hecate--that is, the moon--has exercised some malign
influence on it; and many other purifications he observes, of which
I shall only say that they are by their nature plainly, like the
last, meant as preservatives against unseen malarias or contagions,
possible or impossible. He assists every month with his children at
the mysteries of the Orphic priests; and finally, whenever he sees
an epileptic patient, he spits in his own bosom to avert the evil
omen.
I have quoted, I believe, every fact given by Theophrastus; and you
will agree, I am sure, that the moving and inspiring element of such
a character is mere bodily fear of unknown evil. The only
superstition attributed to him which does not at first sight seem to
have its root in dread is that of the Orphic mysteries. But of them
Muller says that the Dionusos whom they worshipped "was an infernal
deity, connected with Hades, and was the personification, not merely
of rapturous pleasure, but of a deep sorrow for the miseries of
human life." The Orphic societies of Greece seem to have been
peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food save raw flesh from the
sacrificed ox of Dionusos. And Plato speaks of a lower grade of
Orphic priests, Orpheotelestai, "who used to come before the doors
of the rich, and promise, by sacrifices and expiatory songs, to
release them from their own sins, and those of their forefathers;"
and such would be but too likely to get a hearing from the man who
was afraid of a weasel or an owl.
Now, this same bodily fear, I verily believe, will be found at the
root of all superstition whatsoever.
But be it so. Fear is a natural passion, and a wholesome one.
Without the instinct of self-preservation, which causes the sea-
anemone to contract its tentacles, or the fish to dash into its
hover, species would be extermined wholesale by involuntary suicide.
Yes; fear is wholesome enough, like all other faculties, as long as
it is controlled by reason. But what if the fear be not rational,
but irrational? What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear;
fear of the unknown, simply because it is unknown? Is it not
likely, then, to be afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful,
ruinous to animals as well as to man? Any one will confess that,
who has ever seen, a horse inflict on himself mortal injuries, in
his frantic attempts to escape from a quite imaginary danger. I
have good reasons for believing that not only animals here and
there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are often destroyed,
even in the wild state, by mistaken fear; by such panics, for
instance, as cause a whole herd of buffaloes to rush over a bluff,
and be dashed to pieces. And remark that this capacity of panic,
fear--of superstition, as I should call it--is greatest in those
animals, the dog and the horse for instance, which have the most
rapid and vivid fancy. Does not the unlettered Highlander say all
that I want to say, when he attributes to his dog and his horse, on
the strength of these very manifestations of fear, the capacity of
seeing ghosts and fairies before he can see them himself?
But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself: it makes
him a source of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human
states. It transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who,
when she is caught in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an
intellect to understand that you wish to release her: and, in the
madness of terror, bites and tears at the hand which tries to do her
good. Yes; very cruel is blind fear. When a man dreads he knows
not what, he will do he cares not what. When he dreads desperately,
he will act desperately. When he dreads beyond all reason, he will
behave beyond all reason. He has no law of guidance left, save the
lowest selfishness. No law of guidance: and yet his intellect,
left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him into
terrible follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest
animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more
foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can--what the lower
animals, happily for them, cannot--organise his folly; erect his
superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of
his blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that--Woe to
the weak! For when he has reduced his superstition to a science,
then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write
books like the "Malleus Maleficarum," and the rest of the witch
literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries;
of which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much, and told it
most faithfully and most fairly.
But, fear of the unknown? Is not that fear of the unseen world?
And is not that fear of the spiritual world? Pardon me: a great
deal of that fear--all of it, indeed, which is superstition--is
simply not fear of the spiritual, but of the material; and of
nothing else.
The spiritual world--I beg you to fix this in your minds--is not
merely an invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible
world which is by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of
right and wrong. And spiritual fear--which is one of the noblest of
all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest--is, if properly
defined, nothing less or more than the fear of doing wrong; of
becoming a worse man.
But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy
which conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for
yourselves. What difference is there between a savage's fear of a
demon, and a hunter's fear of a fall? The hunter sees a fence. He
does not know what is on the other side, but he has seen fences like
it with a great ditch on the other side, and suspects one here
likewise. He has seen horses fall at such, and men hurt thereby.
He pictures to himself his horse falling at that fence, himself
rolling in the ditch, with possibly a broken limb; and he recoils
from the picture he himself has made; and perhaps with very good
reason. His picture may have its counterpart in fact; and he may
break his leg. But his picture, like the previous pictures from
which it was compounded, is simply a physical impression on the
brain, just as much as those in dreams.
Now, does the fact of the ditch, the fall, and the broken leg, being
unseen and unknown, make them a spiritual ditch, a spiritual fall, a
spiritual broken leg? And does the fact of the demon and his
doings, being as yet unseen and unknown, make them spiritual, or the
harm that he may do, a spiritual harm? What does the savage fear?
Lest the demon should appear; that is, become obvious to his
physical senses, and produce an unpleasant physical effect on them.
He fears lest the fiend should entice him into the bog, break the
hand-bridge over the brook, turn into a horse and ride away with
him, or jump out from behind a tree and wring his neck--tolerably
hard physical facts, all of them; the children of physical fancy,
regarded with physical dread. Even if the superstition proved true;
even if the demon did appear; even if he wrung the traveller's neck
in sound earnest, there would be no more spiritual agency or
phenomenon in the whole tragedy than there is in the parlour-table,
when spiritual somethings make spiritual raps upon spiritual wood;
and human beings, who are really spirits--and would to heaven they
would remember that fact, and what it means--believe that anything
has happened beyond a clumsy juggler's trick.
You demur? Do you not see that the demon, by the mere fact of
having produced physical consequences, would have become himself a
physical agent, a member of physical Nature, and therefore to be
explained, he and his doings, by physical laws? If you do not see
that conclusion at first sight, think over it till you do.
It may seem to some that I have founded my theory on a very narrow
basis; that I am building up an inverted pyramid; or that,
considering the numberless, complex, fantastic shapes which
superstition has assumed, bodily fear is too simple to explain them
all.
But if those persons will think a second time, they must agree that
my base is as broad as the phenomena which it explains; for every
man is capable of fear. And they will see, too, that the cause of
superstition must be something like fear, which is common to all
men: for all, at least as children, are capable of superstition;
and that it must be something which, like fear, is of a most simple,
rudimentary, barbaric kind; for the lowest savage, of whatever he is
not capable, is still superstitious, often to a very ugly degree.
Superstition seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone-
weapons, the earliest method of asserting his superiority to the
brutes which has occurred to that utterly abnormal and fantastic
lusus naturae called man.
Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, in the place of
that same savage; and try whether my theory will not justify itself;
whether or not superstition, with all its vagaries, may have been,
indeed must have been, the result of that ignorance and fear which
he carried about with him, every time he prowled for food through
the primeval forest.
A savage's first division of nature would be, I should say, into
things which he can eat and things which can eat him: including, of
course, his most formidable enemy, and most savoury food--his
fellow-man. In finding out what he can eat, we must remember, he
will have gone through much experience which will have inspired him
with a serious respect for the hidden wrath of nature; like those
Himalayan folk, of whom Hooker says, that as they know every
poisonous plant, they must have tried them all--not always with
impunity.
So he gets at a third class of objects--things which he cannot eat,
and which will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems
to him, out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents.
There are natural accidents, too, which fall into the same category,
stones, floods, fires, avalanches. They hurt him or kill him,
surely for ends of their own. If a rock falls from the cliff above
him, what more natural than to suppose that there is some giant up
there who threw it at him? If he had been up there, and strong
enough, and had seen a man walking underneath, he would certainly
have thrown the stone at him and killed him. For first, he might
have eaten the man after; and even if he were not hungry, the man
might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent to prevent that
by doing him a mischief first. Besides, the man might have a wife;
and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancient law
common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor. Such is
the natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the [Greek] of St.
Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five very
acute animal passions--hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear. It is with
the working of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has to do.
So the savage concludes that there must be a giant living in the
cliff, who threw stones at him, with evil intent; and he concludes
in like wise concerning most other natural phenomena. There is
something in them which will hurt him, and therefore likes to hurt
him; and if he cannot destroy them, and so deliver himself, his fear
of them grows quite boundless. There are hundreds of natural
objects on which he learns to look with the same eyes as the little
boys of Teneriffe look on the useless and poisonous Euphorbia
canariensis. It is to them--according to Mr. Piazzi Smyth--a demon
who would kill them, if it could only run after them; but as it
cannot, they shout Spanish curses at it, and pelt it with volleys of
stones, "screeching with elfin joy, and using worse names than ever,
when the poisonous milk spurts out from its bruised stalks."
And if such be the attitude of the uneducated man towards the
permanent terrors of nature, what will it be towards those which are
sudden and seemingly capricious?--towards storms, earthquakes,
floods, blights, pestilences? We know too well what it has been--
one of blind, and therefore often cruel, fear. How could it be
otherwise? Was Theophrastus's superstitious man so very foolish for
pouring oil on every round stone? I think there was a great deal to
be said for him. This worship of Baetyli was rational enough. They
were aerolites, fallen from heaven. Was it not as well to be civil
to such messengers from above?--to testify by homage to them due awe
of the being who had thrown them at men, and who though he had
missed his shot that time might not miss it the next? I think if
we, knowing nothing of either gunpowder, astronomy, or Christianity,
saw an Armstrong bolt fall within five miles of London, we should be
inclined to be very respectful to it indeed. So the aerolites, or
glacial boulders, or polished stone weapons of an extinct race,
which looked like aerolites, were the children of Ouranos the
heaven, and had souls in them. One, by one of those strange
transformations in which the logic of unreason indulges, the image
of Diana of the Ephesians, which fell down from Jupiter; another was
the Ancile, the holy shield which fell from the same place in the
days of Numa Pompilius, and was the guardian genius of Rome; and
several more became notable for ages.
Why not? The uneducated man of genius, unacquainted alike with
metaphysics and with biology, sees, like a child, a personality in
every strange and sharply-defined object. A cloud like an angel may
be an angel; a bit of crooked root like a man may be a man turned
into wood--perhaps to be turned back again at its own will. An
erratic block has arrived where it is by strange unknown means. Is
not that an evidence of its personality? Either it has flown hither
itself, or some one has thrown it. In the former case, it has life,
and is proportionally formidable; in the latter, he who had thrown
it is formidable.
I know two erratic blocks of porphyry--I believe there are three--in
Cornwall, lying one on serpentine, one, I think, on slate, which--so
I was always informed as a boy--were the stones which St. Kevern
threw after St. Just when the latter stole his host's chalice and
paten, and ran away with them to the Land's End. Why not? Before
we knew anything about the action of icebergs and glaciers, that is,
until the last eighty years, that was as good a story as any other;
while how lifelike these boulders are, let a great poet testify; for
the fact has not escaped the delicate eye of Wordsworth:
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bald top of an eminence;
Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it could thither come, and whence,
So that it seems a thing endued with sense;
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself.
To the civilised poet, the fancy becomes a beautiful simile; to a
savage poet, it would have become a material and a very formidable
fact. He stands in the valley, and looks up at the boulder on the
far-off fells. He is puzzled by it. He fears it. At last he makes
up his mind. It is alive. As the shadows move over it, he sees it
move. May it not sleep there all day, and prowl for prey all night?
He had been always afraid of going up those fells; now he will never
go. There is a monster there.
Childish enough, no doubt. But remember that the savage is always a
child. So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and
policed as ourselves--children from the cradle to the grave. But of
them I do not talk; because, happily for the world, their
childishness is so overlaid by the result of other men's manhood; by
an atmosphere of civilisation and Christianity which they have
accepted at second-hand as the conclusions of minds wiser than their
own, that they do all manner of reasonable things for bad reasons,
or for no reason at all, save the passion of imitation. Not in
them, but in the savage, can we see man as he is by nature, the
puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural slave of his own
fears.
But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and five
passions? I do not say that. I should be most unphilosophical if I
said it; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely
more in him than that. Yes: but in him that infinite more, which
is not only the noblest part of humanity, but, it may be, humanity
itself, is not to be counted as one of the roots of superstition.
For in the savage man, in whom superstition certainly originates,
that infinite more is still merely in him; inside him; a faculty:
but not yet a fact. It has not come out of him into consciousness,
purpose, and act; and is to be treated as non-existent: while what
has come out, his passions and senses, is enough to explain all the
vagaries of superstition; a vera causa for all its phenomena. And
if we seem to have found a sufficient explanation already, it is
unphilosophical to look farther, at least till we have tried whether
our explanation fits the facts.
Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I
have already alluded, common to him and to at least the higher
vertebrates--fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of
external objects, whether in its waking form of physical memory--if,
indeed, all memory be not physical--or in its sleeping form of
dreaming. Upon this last, which has played so very important a part
in superstition in all ages, I beg you to think a moment. Recollect
your own dreams during childhood; and recollect again that the
savage is always a child. Recollect how difficult it was for you in
childhood, how difficult it must be always for the savage, to decide
whether dreams are phantasms or realities. To the savage, I doubt
not, the food he eats, the foes he grapples with, in dreams, are as
real as any waking impressions. But, moreover, these dreams will be
very often, as children's dreams are wont to be, of a painful and
terrible kind. Perhaps they will be always painful; perhaps his
dull brain will never dream, save under the influence of
indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude. And so, in
addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he will
have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific
kind. He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a
shudder--Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it
jumped out upon me? He broods over the thought with the intensity
of a narrow and unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has
eaten--but let us draw a veil before the larder of a savage--his
chin is pinned down on his chest, a slight congestion of the brain
comes on; and behold he finds himself again at that cavern's mouth,
and something ugly does jump out upon him: and the cavern is a
haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe. It is in vain
that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at home all
the while. He has the evidence of his senses to prove the contrary.
He must have got out of himself, and gone into the woods. When we
remember that certain wise Greek philosophers could find no better
explanation of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and
wandered free, we cannot condemn the savage for his theory.
Now, I submit that in these simple facts we have a group of "true
causes" which are the roots of all the superstitions of the world.
And if any one shall complain that I am talking materialism: I
shall answer, that I am doing exactly the opposite. I am trying to
eliminate and get rid of that which is material, animal, and base;
in order that that which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct
and clear, in its divine and eternal beauty.
To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to verify my
hypothesis, let me give you an example--fictitious, it is true, but
probable fact nevertheless; because it is patched up of many
fragments of actual fact: and let us see how, in following it out,
we shall pass through almost every possible form of superstition.
Suppose a great hollow tree, in which the formidable wasps of the
tropics have built for ages. The average savage hurries past the
spot in mere bodily fear; for if they come out against him, they
will sting him to death; till at last there comes by a savage wiser
than the rest, with more observation, reflection, imagination,
independence of will--the genius of his tribe.
The awful shade of the great tree, added to his terror of the wasps,
weighs on him, and excites his brain. Perhaps, too, he has had a
wife or a child stung to death by these same wasps. These wasps, so
small, yet so wise, far wiser than he: they fly, and they sting.
Ah, if he could fly and sting; how he would kill and eat, and live
right merrily. They build great towns; they rob far and wide; they
never quarrel with each other: they must have some one to teach
them, to lead them--they must have a king. And so he gets the fancy
of a Wasp-King; as the western Irish still believe in the Master
Otter; as the Red Men believe in the King of the Buffaloes, and find
the bones of his ancestors in the Mammoth remains of Big-bone Lick;
as the Philistines of Ekron--to quote a notorious instance--actually
worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the flies.
If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of course. If he,
the savage, were a king, he would not work for his bread, but sit at
home and make others feed him; and so, no doubt, does the wasp-king.
And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of
the wasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else. He
will go to the tree, and watch for him to come out. The wasps will
get accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till
the new fancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this
wasp-king: and at last he will find himself grovelling before the
tree, saying--"Oh great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children
not to sting me, and I will bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers
to eat, and I will flatter you, and worship you, and you shall be my
king."
And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new
mysterious bond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would
believe him, and fear him; and fear him still more when he began to
say, as he surely would, not merely--"I can ask the wasp-king, and
he will tell his children not to sting you:" but--"I can ask the
wasp-king, and he will send his children, and sting you all to
death." Vanity and ambition will have prompted the threat: but it
will not be altogether a lie. The man will more than half believe
his own words; he will quite believe them when he has repeated them
a dozen times.
And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection
of the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his
children after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their
fetish, and the fetish of their tribe.
And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king. The
wasp will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy.
The new chief will preach to them wild eloquent words. They must
sting like wasps, revenge like wasps, hold altogether like wasps,
build like wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like
the wasps, they will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat
all their enemies. Soon they will call themselves The Wasps. They
will boast that their king's father or grandfather, and soon that
the ancestor of the whole tribe was an actual wasp; and the wasp
will become at once their eponym hero, their deity, their ideal,
their civiliser; who has taught them to build a kraal of huts, as he
taught his children to build a hive.
Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at this
epoch, the new thought--Who made the world? he will be sorely
puzzled. The conception of a world has never crossed his mind
before. He never pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest
ridge of mountains; and as for a Maker, that will be a greater
puzzle still. What makers or builders more cunning than those wasps
of whom his foolish head is full? Of course, he sees it now. A
Wasp made the world; which to him entirely new guess might become an
integral part of his tribe's creed. That would be their cosmogony.
And if, a generation or two after, another savage genius should
guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he would,
if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it
to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and
conceptions. It would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the
skies with the world in his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly;
and that would be the astronomy of his tribe henceforth. Absurd
enough: but--as every man who is acquainted with old mythical
cosmogonies must know--no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on
record. Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the
Egyptian scarabaeus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world
stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on
that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it,
underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they not have
arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?
This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship,
which had sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung.
But times might come for it in which it would go through various
changes, through which every superstition in the world, I suppose,
has passed or is doomed to pass.
The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger
tribe than themselves. What would be the result? They would fight
valiantly at first, like wasps. But what if they began to fail?
Was not the wasp-king angry with them? Had not he deserted them?
He must be appeased; he must have his revenge. They would take a
captive, and offer him to the wasps. So did a North American tribe,
in their need, some forty years ago; when, because their maize-crops
failed, they roasted alive a captive girl, cut her to pieces, and
sowed her with their corn. I would not tell the story, for the
horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful force on my
argument. What were those Red Men thinking of? What chain of
misreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a
device for making the crops grow? Who can tell? Who can make the
crooked straight, or number that which is wanting? As said Solomon
of old, so must we--"The foolishness of fools is folly." One thing
only we can say of them, that they were horribly afraid of famine,
and took that means of ridding themselves of their fear.
But what if the wasp tribe had no captives? They would offer
slaves. What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the
wasps? They would offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons
and their daughters, to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like
strait, offered in one day 200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-
god, whose worship they had brought out of Syria; whose original
meaning they had probably forgotten; of whom they only knew that he
was a dark and devouring being, who must be appeased with the
burning bodies of their sons and daughters. And so the veil of
fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition stand forth
revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.
But more: the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and
carry their wasp-fetish into a new land. But if they became poor
and weakly, their brains and imagination, degenerating with their
bodies, would degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it
meant. Away from the sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which
were not so large or formidable, they would require a remembrancer
of the wasp-king; and they would make one--a wasp of wood, or what
not. After a while, according to that strange law of fancy, the
root of all idolatry, which you may see at work in every child who
plays with a doll, the symbol would become identified with the thing
symbolised; they would invest the wooden wasp with all the terrible
attributes which had belonged to the live wasps of the tree; and
after a few centuries, when all remembrance of the tree, the wasp-
prophet and chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp--ay,
even of their defeat and flight--had vanished from their songs and
legends, they would be found bowing down in fear and trembling to a
little ancient wooden wasp, which came from they knew not whence,
and meant they knew not what, save that it was a very "old fetish,"
a "great medicine," or some such other formula for expressing their
own ignorance and dread. Just so do the half-savage natives of
Thibet, and the Irishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence--
unless the ancient Irish were Buddhists, like the Himalayans--tie
just the same scraps of rag on the bushes round just the same holy
wells, as do the Negros of Central Africa upon their "Devil's
Trees;" they know not why, save that their ancestors did it, and it
is a charm against ill-luck and danger.
And the sacred tree? That, too, might undergo a metamorphosis in
the minds of men. The conquerors would see their aboriginal slaves
of the old race still haunting the tree, making stealthy offerings
to it by night: and they would ask the reason. But they would not
be told. The secret would be guarded; such secrets were guarded, in
Greece, in Italy, in medieval France, by the superstitious awe, the
cunning, even the hidden self-conceit, of the conquered race. Then
the conquerors would wish to imitate their own slaves. They might
be in the right. There might be something magical, uncanny, in the
hollow tree, which might hurt them; might be jealous of them as
intruders. They, too, would invest the place with sacred awe. If
they were gloomy, like the Teutonic conquerors of Europe and the
Arabian conquerors of the East, they would invest it with unseen
terrors. They would say, like them, a devil lives in the tree. If
they were of a sunny temper, like the Hellenes, they would invest it
with unseen graces. What a noble tree! What a fair fountain hard
by its roots! Surely some fair and graceful being must dwell
therein, and come out to bathe by night in that clear wave. What
meant the fruit, the flowers, the honey, which the slaves left there
by night? Pure food for some pure nymph. The wasp-gods would be
forgotten; probably smoked out as sacrilegious intruders. The lucky
seer or poet who struck out the fancy would soon find imitators; and
it would become, after a while, a common and popular superstition
that Hamadryads haunted the hollow forest trees, Naiads the wells,
and Oreads the lawns. Somewhat thus, I presume, did the more
cheerful Hellenic myths displace the darker superstitions of the
Pelasgis and those rude Arcadian tribes who offered, even as late as
the Roman Empire, human sacrifices to gods whose original names were
forgotten.
But even the cultus of nymphs would be defiled after awhile by a
darker element. However fair, they might be capricious and
revengeful, like other women. Why not? And soon, men going out
into the forest would be missed for awhile. They had eaten narcotic
berries, got sun-strokes, wandered till they lost their wits. At
all events, their wits were gone. Who had done it? Who but the
nymphs? The men had seen something they should not have seen; done
something they would not have done; and the nymphs had punished the
unconscious rudeness by that frenzy. Fear, everywhere fear, of
Nature--the spotted panther as some one calls her, as fair as cruel,
as playful as treacherous. Always fear of Nature, till a Divine
light arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature,
but her lords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else.
And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree. No, it need not end
there; it may develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of
superstition, which Europe has often seen; which is common now among
the Negros; {223} which we may hope, will soon be exterminated.
This might happen. For it, or something like it, has happened too
many times already.
That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant
of the wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might
resort; not merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but
from jealousy and revenge. Oppressed, as woman has always been
under the reign of brute force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best
married against her will, she has too often gone for comfort and
help--and those of the very darkest kind--to the works of darkness;
and there never were wanting--there are not wanting, even now, in
remote parts of these isles--wicked old women who would, by help of
the old superstitions, do for her what she wished. Soon would
follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes; then
rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison,
with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled
with truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were
misinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of
those witch-manias, which are too common still among the African
Negros, which were too common of old among the men of our race.
I say, among the men. To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at
it as--what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be--
man's dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of
woman.
She is to the barbarous man--she should be more and more to the
civilised man--not only the most beautiful and precious, but the
most wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only
as the author of his physical being. She is to the savage a miracle
to be alternately adored and dreaded. He dreads her more delicate
nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and
miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to
him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which
entangled him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will.
He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than his heaviest club,
more keen than his poisoned arrows. He dreads those habits of
secrecy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage and
degraded woman always has recourse. He dreads the very medicinal
skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and
slave. He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious
initiations which no man may witness, which he has permitted to her
in all ages, in so many--if not all--barbarous and semi-barbarous
races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage
to the mysterious importance of her who brings him into the world.
If she turns against him--she, with all her unknown powers, she who
is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very food day
by day--what harm can she not, may she not, do? And that she has
good reason to turn against him, he knows too well. What
deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute
force? Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day.
Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.
I shall say no more. I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame,
over the most important and most significant facts of this, the most
hideous of all human follies. I have, I think, given you hints
enough to show that it, like all other superstitions, is the child--
the last born and the ugliest child--of blind dread of the unknown.