Savage fancy, curiosity and credulity illustrated in nature myths--In
these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general animation
of everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis--Sun myths, Asian,
Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, Californian, Brazilian,
Maori, Samoan--Moon myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican, Zulu, Macassar,
Greenland, Piute, Malay--Thunder myths--Greek and Aryan sun and moon
myths--Star myths--Myths, savage and civilised, of animals, accounting
for their marks and habits--Examples of custom of claiming blood kinship
with lower animals--Myths of various plants and trees--Myths of stones,
and of metamorphosis into stones, Greek, Australian and American--The
whole natural philosophy of savages expressed in myths, and survives in
folk-lore and classical poetry; and legends of metamorphosis.
The intellectual condition of savages which has been presented and
established by the evidence both of observers and of institutions, may
now be studied in savage myths. These myths, indeed, would of themselves
demonstrate that the ideas which the lower races entertain about the
world correspond with our statement. If any one were to ask himself,
from what mental conditions do the following savage stories arise? he
would naturally answer that the minds which conceived the tales were
curious, indolent, credulous of magic and witchcraft, capable of drawing
no line between things and persons, capable of crediting all things
with human passions and resolutions. But, as myths analogous to those
of savages, when found among civilised peoples, have been ascribed to a
psychological condition produced by a disease of language acting after
civilisation had made considerable advances, we cannot take the savage
myths as proof of what savages think, believe and practice in the course
of daily life. To do so would be, perhaps, to argue in a circle. We must
therefore study the myths of the undeveloped races in themselves.
These myths form a composite whole, so complex and so nebulous that it
is hard indeed to array them in classes and categories. For example,
if we look at myths concerning the origin of various phenomena, we find
that some introduce the action of gods or extra-natural beings, while
others rest on a rude theory of capricious evolution; others, again,
invoke the aid of the magic of mortals, and most regard the great
natural forces, the heavenly bodies, and the animals, as so many
personal characters capable of voluntarily modifying themselves or of
being modified by the most trivial accidents. Some sort of arrangement,
however, must be attempted, only the student is to understand that the
lines are never drawn with definite fixity, that any category may glide
into any other category of myth.
We shall begin by considering some nature myths--myths, that is to say,
which explain the facts of the visible universe. These range from tales
about heaven, day, night, the sun and the stars, to tales accounting
for the red breast of the ousel, the habits of the quail, the spots and
stripes of wild beasts, the formation of rocks and stones, the foliage
of trees, the shapes of plants. In a sense these myths are the science
of savages; in a sense they are their sacred history; in a sense they
are their fiction and romance. Beginning with the sun, we find, as Mr.
Tylor says, that "in early philosophy throughout the world the sun and
moon are alive, and, as it were, human in their nature".(1) The mass of
these solar myths is so enormous that only a few examples can be given,
chosen almost at random out of the heap. The sun is regarded as a
personal being, capable not only of being affected by charms and
incantations, but of being trapped and beaten, of appearing on earth, of
taking a wife of the daughters of men. Garcilasso de la Vega has a
story of an Inca prince, a speculative thinker, who was puzzled by the
sun-worship of his ancestors. If the sun be thus all-powerful, the Inca
inquired, why is he plainly subject to laws? why does he go his daily
round, instead of wandering at large up and down the fields of heaven?
The prince concluded that there was a will superior to the sun's will,
and he raised a temple to the Unknown Power. Now the phenomena which
put the Inca on the path of monotheistic religion, a path already
traditional, according to Garcilasso, have also struck the fancy of
savages. Why, they ask, does the sun run his course like a tamed beast?
A reply suited to a mind which holds that all things are personal is
given in myths. Some one caught and tamed the sun by physical force or
by art magic.
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 288.
In Australia the myth says that there was a time when the sun did not
set. "It was at all times day, and the blacks grew weary." Norralie
considered and decided that the sun should disappear at intervals. He
addressed the sun in an incantation (couched like the Finnish Kalewala
in the metre of Longfellow's Hiawatha); and the incantation is thus
interpreted: "Sun, sun, burn your wood, burn your internal substance,
and go down". The sun therefore now burns out his fuel in a day, and
goes below for fresh firewood.(1)
(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 430.
In New Zealand the taming of the sun is attributed to the great hero
Maui, the Prometheus of the Maoris. He set snares to catch the sun,
but in vain, for the sun's rays bit them through. According to another
account, while Norralie wished to hasten the sun's setting, Maui wanted
to delay it, for the sun used to speed through the heavens at a racing
pace. Maui therefore snared the sun, and beat him so unmercifully that
he has been lame ever since, and travels slowly, giving longer days.
"The sun, when beaten, cried out and revealed his second great name,
Taura-mis-te-ra."(1) It will be remembered that Indra, in his abject
terror when he fled after the slaying of Vrittra, also revealed his
mystic name. In North America the same story of the trapping and laming
of the sun is told, and attributed to a hero named Tcha-ka-betch. In
Samoa the sun had a child by a Samoan woman. He trapped the sun with a
rope made of a vine and extorted presents. Another Samoan lassoed
the sun and made him promise to move more slowly.(2) These Samoan and
Australian fancies are nearly as dignified as the tale in the Aitareya
Brahmana. The gods, afraid "that the sun would fall out of heaven,
pulled him up and tied him with five ropes". These ropes are recognised
as verses in the ritual, but probably the ritual is later than the
ropes. In Mexico we find that the sun himself (like the stars in most
myths) was once a human or pre-human devotee, Nanahuatzin, who leapt
into a fire to propitiate the gods.(3) Translated to heaven as the sun,
Nanahuatzin burned so very fiercely that he threatened to reduce
the world to a cinder. Arrows were therefore shot at him, and this
punishment had as happy an effect as the beatings administered by Maui
and Tcha-ka-betch. Among the Bushmen of South Africa the sun was once a
man, from whose armpit a limited amount of light was radiated round his
hut. Some children threw him up into the sky, and there he stuck, and
there he shines.(4) In the Homeric hymn to Helios, as Mr. Max Muller
observes, "the poet looks on Helios as a half god, almost a hero, who
had once lived on earth," which is precisely the view of the Bushmen.(5)
Among the Aztecs the sun is said to have been attacked by a hunter
and grievously wounded by his arrows.(6) The Gallinomeros, in Central
California, seem at least to know that the sun is material and
impersonal. They say that when all was dark in the beginning, the
animals were constantly jostling each other. After a painful encounter,
the hawk and the coyote collected two balls of inflammable substance;
the hawk (Indra was occasionally a hawk) flew up with them into heaven,
and lighted them with sparks from a flint. There they gave light as sun
and moon. This is an exception to the general rule that the heavenly
bodies are regarded as persons. The Melanesian tale of the bringing
of night is a curious contrast to the Mexican, Maori, Australian and
American Indian stories which we have quoted. In Melanesia, as in
Australia, the days were long, indeed endless, and people grew tired;
but instead of sending the sun down below by an incantation when night
would follow in course of nature, the Melanesian hero went to Night
(conceived of as a person) and begged his assistance. Night (Qong)
received Qat (the hero) kindly, darkened his eyes, gave him sleep,
and, in twelve hours or so, crept up from the horizon and sent the sun
crawling to the west.(7) In the same spirit Paracelsus is said to have
attributed night, not to the absence of the sun, but to the apparition
of certain stars which radiate darkness. It is extraordinary that a myth
like the Melanesian should occur in Brazil. There was endless day till
some one married a girl whose father "the great serpent," was the owner
of night. The father sent night bottled up in a gourd. The gourd was not
to be uncorked till the messengers reached the bride, but they, in their
curiosity, opened the gourd, and let night out prematurely.(8)
(1) Taylor, New Zealand, p. 131.
(2) Turner, Samoa, p. 20.
(3) Sahagun, French trans., vii. ii.
(4) Bleck, Hottentot Fables, p. 67; Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 9, 11.
(5) Compare a Californian solar myth: Bancroft, iii. pp. 85, 86.
(6) Bancroft, iii. 73, quoting Burgoa, i. 128, 196.
(7) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.
(8) Contes Indiens du Bresil, pp. 1-9, by Couto de Magalhaes. Rio de
Janeiro, 1883. M. Henri Gaidoz kindly presented the author with this
work.
The myths which have been reported deal mainly with the sun as a person
who shines, and at fixed intervals disappears. His relations with the
moon are much more complicated, and are the subject of endless stories,
all explaining in a romantic fashion why the moon waxes and wanes,
whence come her spots, why she is eclipsed, all starting from the
premise that sun and moon are persons with human parts and passions.
Sometimes the moon is a man, sometimes a woman and the sex of the sun
varies according to the fancy of the narrators. Different tribes of the
same race, as among the Australians, have different views of the sex of
moon and sun. Among the aborigines of Victoria, the moon, like the sun
among the Bushmen, was a black fellow before he went up into the sky.
After an unusually savage career, he was killed with a stone hatchet
by the wives of the eagle, and now he shines in the heavens.(1) Another
myth explanatory of the moon's phases was found by Mr. Meyer in 1846
among the natives of Encounter Bay. According to them the moon is a
woman, and a bad woman to boot. She lives a life of dissipation among
men, which makes her consumptive, and she wastes away till they drive
her from their company. While she is in retreat, she lives on nourishing
roots, becomes quite plump, resumes her gay career, and again wastes
away. The same tribe, strangely enough, think that the sun also is a
woman. Every night she descends among the dead, who stand in double
lines to greet her and let her pass. She has a lover among the dead, who
has presented her with a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at
her rising. Such is the view of rosy-fingered Dawn entertained by the
blacks of Encounter Bay. In South America, among the Muyscas of Bogota,
the moon, Huythaca, is the malevolent wife of the child of the sun; she
was a woman before her husband banished her to the fields of space.(2)
The moon is a man among the Khasias of the Himalaya, and he was guilty
of the unpardonable offence of admiring his mother-in-law. As a general
rule, the mother-in-law is not even to be spoken to by the savage
son-in-law. The lady threw ashes in his face to discourage his passion,
hence the moon's spots. The waning of the moon suggested the most
beautiful and best known of savage myths, that in which the moon sends
a beast to tell mortals that, though they die like her, like her they
shall be born again.(3) Because the spots in the moon were thought to
resemble a hare they were accounted for in Mexico by the hypothesis
that a god smote the moon in the face with a rabbit;(4) in Zululand and
Thibet by a fancied translation of a good or bad hare to the moon.
(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 432.
(2) Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 353.
(3) Bleek, Reynard in South Africa, pp. 69-74.
(4) Sahagun, viii. 2.
The Eskimos have a peculiar myth to account for the moon's spots. Sun
and moon were human brother and sister. In the darkness the moon once
attempted the virtue of the sun. She smeared his face over with ashes,
that she might detect him when a light was brought. She did discover who
her assailant had been, fled to the sky, and became the sun. The moon
still pursues her, and his face is still blackened with the marks of
ashes.(1) Gervaise(2) says that in Macassar the moon was held to be with
child by the sun, and that when he pursued her and wished to beat her,
she was delivered of the earth. They are now reconciled. About the
alternate appearance of sun and moon a beautifully complete and adequate
tale is told by the Piute Indians of California. No more adequate
and scientific explanation could possibly be offered, granting the
hypothesis that sun and moon are human persons and savage persons. The
myth is printed as it was taken down by Mr. De Quille from the lips of
Tooroop Eenah (Desert Father), a chief of the Piutes, and published in a
San Francisco newspaper.
(1) Crantz's History of Greenland, i. 212.
(2) Royaume de Macacar, 1688.
"The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. He is the big chief.
The moon is his wife and the stars are their children. The sun eats his
children whenever he can catch them. They flee before him, and are all
the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their
father) appears in the morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly
out of sight--go away back into the blue of the above--and they do not
wake to be seen again until he, their father, is about going to his bed.
"Down deep under the ground--deep, deep, under all the ground--is a
great hole. At night, when he has passed over the world, looked down on
everything and finished his work, he, the sun, goes into his hole, and
he crawls and creeps along it till he comes to his bed in the middle
part of the earth. So then he, the sun, sleeps there in his bed all
night.
"This hole is so little, and he, the sun, is so big, that he cannot
turn round in it; and so he must, when he has had all his sleep, pass
on through, and in the morning we see him come out in the east. When he,
the sun, has so come out, he begins to hunt up through the sky to catch
and eat any that he can of the stars, his children, for if he does not
so catch and eat he cannot live. He, the sun, is not all seen. The shape
of him is like a snake or a lizard. It is not his head that we can see,
but his belly, filled up with the stars that times and times he has
swallowed.
"The moon is the mother of the heavens and is the wife of the sun. She,
the moon, goes into the same hole as her husband to sleep her naps. But
always she has great fear of the sun, her husband, and when he comes
through the hole to the nobee (tent) deep in the ground to sleep, she
gets out and comes away if he be cross.
"She, the moon, has great love for her children, the stars, and is happy
to travel among them in the above; and they, her children, feel safe,
and sing and dance as she passes along. But the mother, she cannot help
that some of her children must be swallowed by the father every month.
It is ordered that way by the Pah-ah (Great Spirit), who lives above the
place of all.
"Every month that father, the sun, does swallow some of the stars, his
children, and then that mother, the moon, feels sorrow. She must mourn;
so she must put the black on her face for to mourn the dead. You see the
Piute women put black on their faces when a child is gone. But the dark
will wear away from the face of that mother, the moon, a little and a
little every day, and after a time again we see all bright the face of
her. But soon more of her children are gone, and again she must put on
her face the pitch and the black."
Here all the phenomena are accounted for, and the explanation is as
advanced as the Egyptian doctrine of the hole under the earth where the
sun goes when he passes from our view. And still the Great Spirit is
over all: Religion comes athwart Myth.
Mr. Tylor quotes(1) a nature myth about sun, moon and stars which
remarkably corresponds to the speculation of the Piutes. The Mintira of
the Malayan Peninsula say that both sun and moon are women. The stars
are the moon's children; once the sun had as many. They each agreed
(like the women of Jerusalem in the famine), to eat their own children;
but the sun swallowed her whole family, while the moon concealed hers.
When the sun saw this she was exceedingly angry, and pursued the moon to
kill her. Occasionally she gets a bite out of the moon, and that is an
eclipse. The Hos of North-East India tell the same tale, but say
that the sun cleft the moon in twain for her treachery, and that she
continues to be cut in two and grow again every month. With these sun
and moon legends sometimes coexists the RELIGIOUS belief in a Creator of
these and of all things.
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 356.
In harmony with the general hypothesis that all objects in nature
are personal, and human or bestial, in real shape, and in passion
and habits, are the myths which account for eclipses. These have so
frequently been published and commented on(1) that a long statement
would be tedious and superfluous. To the savage mind, and even to the
Chinese and the peasants of some European countries, the need of an
explanation is satisfied by the myth that an evil beast is devouring the
sun or the moon. The people even try by firing off guns, shrieking, and
clashing cymbals, to frighten the beast (wolf, pig, dragon, or what not)
from his prey. What the hungry monster in the sky is doing when he is
not biting the sun or moon we are not informed. Probably he herds with
the big bird whose wings, among the Dacotahs of America and the Zulus
of Africa, make thunder; or he may associate with the dragons, serpents,
cows and other aerial cattle which supply the rain, and show themselves
in the waterspout. Chinese, Greenland, Hindoo, Finnish, Lithunian and
Moorish examples of the myth about the moon-devouring beasts are vouched
for by Grimm.(2) A Mongolian legend has it that the gods wished to
punish the maleficent Arakho for his misdeeds, but Arakho hid so
cleverly that their limited omnipotence could not find him. The sun,
when asked to turn spy, gave an evasive answer. The moon told the truth.
Arakho was punished, and ever since he chases sun and moon. When he
nearly catches either of them, there is an eclipse, and the people
try to drive him off by making a hideous uproar with musical and other
instruments.(3) Captain Beeckman in 1704 was in Borneo, when the natives
declared that the devil "was eating the moon".
(1) Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i.; Lefebure, Les Yeux d'Horus.
(2) Teutonic Mythology, English trans., ii. 706.
(3) Moon-Lore by Rev. T. Harley, p. 167.
Dr. Brinton in his Myths and Myth-Makers gives examples from Peruvians,
Tupis, Creeks, Iroquois and Algonkins. It would be easy, and is perhaps
superfluous, to go on multiplying proofs of the belief that sun and moon
are, or have been, persons. In the Hervey Isles these two luminaries are
thought to have been made out of the body of a child cut in twain by his
parents. The blood escaped from the half which is the moon, hence her
pallor.(1) This tale is an exception to the general rule, but reminds us
of the many myths which represent the things in the world as having
been made out of a mutilated man, like the Vedic Purusha. It is hardly
necessary, except by way of record, to point out that the Greek myths
of sun and moon, like the myths of savages, start from the conception
of the solar and lunar bodies as persons with parts and passions, human
loves and human sorrows. As in the Mongolian myth of Arakho, the sun
"sees all and hears all," and, less honourable than the Mongolian sun,
he plays the spy for Hephaestus on the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. He
has mistresses and human children, such as Circe and Aeetes.(2)
(1) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 45.
(2) See chapter on Greek Divine Myths.
The sun is all-seeing and all-penetrating. In a Greek song of to-day a
mother sends a message to an absent daughter by the sun; it is but
an unconscious repetition of the request of the dying Ajax that the
heavenly body will tell his fate to his old father and his sorrowing
spouse.(1)
(1) Sophocles, Ajax, 846.
Selene, the moon, like Helios, the sun, was a person, and amorous.
Beloved by Zeus, she gave birth to Pandia, and Pan gained her affection
by the simple rustic gift of a fleece.(1) The Australian Dawn, with her
present of a red kangaroo skin, was not more lightly won than the chaste
Selene. Her affection for Endymion is well known, and her cold white
glance shines through the crevices of his mountain grave, hewn in a
rocky wall, like the tombs of Phrygia.(2) She is the sister of the sun
in Hesiod, the daughter (by his sister) of Hyperion in the Homeric hymns
to Helios.
(1) Virgil, Georgics, iii. 391.
(2) Preller, Griech. Myth., i. 163.
In Greece the aspects of sun and moon take the most ideal human forms,
and show themselves in the most gracious myths. But, after all, these
retain in their anthropomorphism the marks of the earliest fancy, the
fancy of Eskimos and Australians. It seems to be commonly thought that
the existence of solar myths is denied by anthropologists. This is a
vulgar error. There is an enormous mass of solar myths, but they are not
caused by "a disease of language," and--all myths are not solar!
There is no occasion to dwell long on myths of the same character in
which the stars are accounted for as transformed human adventurers.
It has often been shown that this opinion is practically of world-wide
distribution.(1) We find it in Australia, Persia, Greece, among the
Bushmen, in North and South America, among the Eskimos, in ancient
Egypt, in New Zealand, in ancient India--briefly, wherever we look. The
Sanskrit forms of these myths have been said to arise from confusion
as to the meaning of words. But is it credible that, in all languages,
however different, the same kind of unconscious puns should have led to
the same mistaken beliefs? As the savage, barbarous and Greek star-myths
(such as that of Callisto, first changed into a bear and then into a
constellation) are familiar to most readers, a few examples of Sanskrit
star-stories are offered here from the Satapatha Brahmana.(2) Fires are
not, according to the Brahmana ritual, to be lighted under the stars
called Krittikas, the Pleiades. The reason is that the stars were the
wives of the bears (Riksha), for the group known in Brahmanic times as
the Rishis (sages) were originally called the Rikshas (bears). But the
wives of the bears were excluded from the society of their husbands, for
the bears rise in the north and their wives in the east. Therefore
the worshipper should not set up his fires under the Pleiades, lest
he should thereby be separated from the company of his wife. The
Brahmanas(3) also tell us that Prajapati had an unholy passion for his
daughter, who was in the form of a doe. The gods made Rudra fire an
arrow at Prajapati to punish him; he was wounded, and leaped into the
sky, where he became one constellation and his daughter another, and the
arrow a third group of stars. In general, according to the Brahmanas,
"the stars are the lights of virtuous men who go to the heavenly
world".(4)
(1) Custom and Myth, "Star-Myths"; Primitive Culture, i. 288, 291; J. G.
Muller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 52, 53.
(2) Sacred Books of the East, i. 283-286.
(3) Aitareya Bramana, iii. 33.
(4) Satapatha Brahmana, vi. 5, 4, 8. For Greek examples, Hesiod,
Ovid, and the Catasterismoi, attributed to Eratosthenes, are useful
authorities. Probably many of the tales in Eratosthenes are late
fictions consciously moulded on traditional data.
Passing from savage myths explanatory of the nature of celestial bodies
to myths accounting for the formation and colour and habits of beasts,
birds and fishes, we find ourselves, as an old Jesuit missionary says,
in the midst of a barbarous version of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It has been
shown that the possibility of interchange of form between man and beast
is part of the working belief of everyday existence among the lower
peoples. They regard all things as on one level, or, to use an old
political phrase, they "level up" everything to equality with the human
status. Thus Mr. Im Thurn, a very good observer, found that to the
Indians of Guiana "all objects, animate or inaminate, seem exactly
of the same nature, except that they differ by the accident of bodily
form". Clearly to grasp this entirely natural conception of primitive
man, the civilised student must make a great effort to forget for a time
all that science has taught him of the differences between the objects
which fill the world.(1) "To the ear of the savage, animals certainly
seem to talk." "As far as the Indians of Guiana are concerned, I do not
believe that they distinguish such beings as sun and moon, or such other
natural phenomena as winds and storms, from men and other animals,
from plants and other inanimate objects, or from any other objects
whatsoever." Bancroft says about North American myths, "Beasts and birds
and fishes fetch and carry, talk and act, in a way that leaves even
Aesop's heroes quite in the shade".(2)
(1) Journ. Anthrop. Inst., xi. 366-369. A very large and rich collection
of testimonies as to metamorphosis will be found in J. G. Muller's
Amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 62 et seq.; while, for European
superstitions, Bodin on La Demonomanie des Sorciers, Lyon, 1598, may be
consulted.
(2) Vol. iii. p. 127.
The savage tendency is to see in inanimate things animals, and in
animals disguised men. M. Reville quotes in his Religions des Peuples
Non-Civilise's, i. 64, the story of some Negroes, who, the first time
they were shown a cornemuse, took the instrument for a beast, the two
holes for its eyes. The Highlander who looted a watch at Prestonpans,
and observing, "She's teed," sold it cheap when it ran down, was in the
same psychological condition. A queer bit of savage science is displayed
on a black stone tobacco-pipe from the Pacific Coast.(1) The savage
artist has carved the pipe in the likeness of a steamer, as a steamer is
conceived by him. "Unable to account for the motive power, he imagines
the paddle to be linked round the tongue of a coiled serpent, fastened
to the tail of the vessel," and so he represents it on the black stone
pipe. Nay, a savage's belief that beasts are on his own level is so
literal, that he actually makes blood-covenants with the lower animals,
as he does with men, mingling his gore with theirs, or smearing both
together on a stone;(2) while to bury dead animals with sacred rites is
as usual among the Bedouins and Malagasies to-day as in ancient Egypt
or Attica. In the same way the Ainos of Japan, who regard the bear as a
kinsman, sacrifice a bear once a year. But, to propitiate the animal and
his connections, they appoint him a "mother," an Aino girl, who looks
after his comforts, and behaves in a way as maternal as possible. The
bear is now a kinsman, (Greek text omitted), and cannot avenge himself
within the kin. This, at least, seems to be the humour of it. In
Lagarde's Reliquiae Juris Ecclesiastici Antiquissimae a similar Syrian
covenant of kinship with insects is described. About 700 A. D., when a
Syrian garden was infested by caterpillars, the maidens were assembled,
and one caterpillar was caught. Then one of the virgins was "made its
mother," and the creature was buried with due lamentations. The "mother"
was then brought to the spot where the pests were, her companions
bewailed her, and the caterpillars perished like their chosen kinsman,
but without extorting revenge.(3) Revenge was out of their reach.
They had been brought within the kin of their foes, and there were no
Erinnyes, "avengers of kindred blood," to help them. People in this
condition of belief naturally tell hundreds of tales, in which men,
stones, trees, beasts, shift shapes, and in which the modifications of
animal forms are caused by accident, or by human agency, or by magic,
or by metamorphosis. Such tales survive in our modern folk-lore. To make
our meaning clear, we may give the European nursery-myth of the
origin of the donkey's long ears, and, among other illustrations, the
Australian myth of the origin of the black and white plumage of the
pelican. Mr. Ralston has published the Russian version of the myth
of the donkey's ears. The Spanish form, which is identical with the
Russian, is given by Fernan Caballero in La Gaviota.
(1) Magazine of Art, January, 1883.
(2) "Malagasy Folk-Tales," Folk-Lore Journal, October, 1883.
(3) We are indebted to Professor Robertson Smith for this example, and
to Miss Bird's Journal, pp. 90, 97, for the Aino parallel.
"Listen! do you know why your ears are so big?" (the story is told to
a stupid little boy with big ears). "When Father Adam found himself in
Paradise with the animals, he gave each its name; those of THY species,
my child, he named 'donkeys'. One day, not long after, he called the
beasts together, and asked each to tell him its name. They all answered
right except the animals of THY sort, and they had forgotten their name!
Then Father Adam was very angry, and, taking that forgetful donkey by
the ears, he pulled them out, screaming 'You are called DONKEY!' And
the donkey's ears have been long ever since." This, to a child, is a
credible explanation. So, perhaps, is another survival of this form of
science--the Scotch explanation of the black marks on the haddock; they
were impressed by St. Peter's finger and thumb when he took the piece of
money for Caesar's tax out of the fish's mouth.
Turning from folk-lore to savage beliefs, we learn that from one end of
Africa to another the honey-bird, schneter, is said to be an old woman
whose son was lost, and who pursued him till she was turned into a bird,
which still shrieks his name, "Schneter, Schneter".(1) In the same way
the manners of most of the birds known to the Greeks were accounted for
by the myth that they had been men and women. Zeus, for example, turned
Ceyx and Halcyon into sea-fowls because they were too proud in their
married happiness.(2) To these myths of the origin of various animals
we shall return, but we must not forget the black and white Australian
pelican. Why is the pelican parti-coloured?(3) For this reason: After
the Flood (the origin of which is variously explained by the Murri), the
pelican (who had been a black fellow) made a canoe, and went about
like a kind of Noah, trying to save the drowning. In the course of his
benevolent mission he fell in love with a woman, but she and her friends
played him a trick and escaped from him. The pelican at once prepared to
go on the war-path. The first thing to do was to daub himself white,
as is the custom of the blacks before a battle. They think the white
pipe-clay strikes terror and inspires respect among the enemy. But when
the pelican was only half pipe-clayed, another pelican came past, and,
"not knowing what such a queer black and white thing was, struck the
first pelican with his beak and killed him. Before that pelicans were
all black; now they are black and white. That is the reason."(4)
(1) Barth, iii. 358.
(2) Apollodorus, i. 7 (13, 12).
(3) Sahagun, viii. 2, accounts for colours of eagle and tiger. A number
of races explain the habits and marks of animals as the result of a
curse or blessing of a god or hero. The Hottentots, the Huarochiri of
Peru, the New Zealanders (Shortland, Traditions, p. 57), are among the
peoples which use this myth.
(4) Brough Symth, Aborigines of Australia, i. 477, 478.
"That is the reason." Therewith native philosopy is satisfied, and does
not examine in Mr. Darwin's laborious manner the slow evolution of the
colour of the pelican's plumage. The mythological stories about animals
are rather difficult to treat, because they are so much mixed up with
the topic of totemism. Here we only examine myths which account by means
of a legend for certain peculiarities in the habits, cries, or colours
and shapes of animals. The Ojibbeways told Kohl they had a story for
every creature, accounting for its ways and appearance. Among the
Greeks, as among Australians and Bushmen, we find that nearly every
notable bird or beast had its tradition. The nightingale and the
swallow have a story of the most savage description, a story reported
by Apollodorus, though Homer(1) refers to another, and, as usual, to
a gentler and more refined form of the myth. Here is the version of
Apollodorus. "Pandion" (an early king of Athens) "married Zeuxippe, his
mother's sister, by whom he had two daughters, Procne and Philomela, and
two sons, Erechtheus and Butes. A war broke out with Labdas about some
debatable land, and Erechtheus invited the alliance of Tereus of Thrace,
the son of Ares. Having brought the war, with the aid of Tereus, to a
happy end, he gave him his daughter Procne to wife. By Procne, Tereus
had a son, Itys, and thereafter fell in love with Philomela, whom
he seduced, pretending that Procne was dead, whereas he had really
concealed her somewhere in his lands. Thereon he married Philomela, and
cut out her tongue. But she wove into a robe characters that told
the whole story, and by means of these acquainted Procne with her
sufferings. Thereon Procne found her sister, and slew Itys, her own son,
whose body she cooked, and served up to Tereus in a banquet. Thereafter
Procne and her sister fled together, and Tereus seized an axe and
followed after them. They were overtaken at Daulia in Phocis, and prayed
to the gods that they might be turned into birds. So Procne became the
nightingale, and Philomela the swallow, while Tereus was changed into a
hoopoe."(2) Pausanias has a different legend; Procne and Philomela died
of excessive grief.
(1) Odyssey, xix. 523.
(2) A Red Indian nightingale-myth is alluded to by J. G. Muller, Amerik.
Urrel., p. 175. Some one was turned into a nightingale by the sun, and
still wails for a lost lover.
These ancient men and women metamorphosed into birds were HONOURED AS
ANCESTORS by the Athenians.(1) Thus the unceasing musical wail of the
nightingale and the shrill cry of the swallow were explained by a
Greek story. The birds were lamenting their old human sorrow, as the
honey-bird in Africa still repeats the name of her lost son.
(1) Pausanias, i. v. Pausanias thinks such things no longer occur.
Why does the red-robin live near the dwellings of men, a bold and
friendly bird? The Chippeway Indians say he was once a young brave whose
father set him a task too cruel for his strength, and made him starve
too long when he reached man's estate. He turned into a robin, and said
to his father, "I shall always be the friend of man, and keep near their
dwellings. I could not gratify your pride as a warrior, but I will cheer
you by my songs."(1) The converse of this legend is the Greek myth of
the hawk. Why is the hawk so hated by birds? Hierax was a benevolent
person who succoured a race hated by Poseidon. The god therefore changed
him into a hawk, and made him as much detested by birds, and as fatal
to them, as he had been beloved by and gentle to men.(2) The Hervey
Islanders explain the peculiarities of several fishes by the share they
took in the adventures of Ina, who stamped, for example, on the sole,
and so flattened him for ever.(3) In Greece the dolphins were, according
to the Homeric hymn to Dionysus, metamorphosed pirates who had insulted
the god. But because the dolphin found the hidden sea-goddess whom
Poseidon loved, the dolphin, too, was raised by the grateful sea-god to
the stars.(4) The vulture and the heron, according to Boeo (said to have
been a priestess in Delphi and the author of a Greek treatise on the
traditions about birds), were once a man named Aigupios (vulture) and
his mother, Boulis. They sinned inadvertently, like Oedipus and Jocasta;
wherefore Boulis, becoming aware of the guilt, was about to put out the
eyes of her son and slay herself. Then they were changed, Boulis into
the heron, "which tears out and feeds on the eyes of snakes, birds and
fishes, and Aigupios into the vulture which bears his name". This
story, of which the more repulsive details are suppressed, is much less
pleasing and more savage than the Hervey Islanders' myth of the origin
of pigs. Maaru was an old blind man who lived with his son Kationgia.
There came a year of famine, and Kationgia had great difficulty in
finding food for himself and his father. He gave the blind old man
puddings of banana roots and fishes, while he lived himself on sea-slugs
and shellfish, like the people of Terra del Fuego. But blind old Maaru
suspected his son of giving him the worst share and keeping what was
best for himself. At last he discovered that Kationgia was really being
starved; he felt his body, and found that he was a mere living skeleton.
The two wept together, and the father made a feast of some cocoa-nuts
and bread-fruit, which he had reserved against the last extremity. When
all was finished, he said he had eaten his last meal and was about to
die. He ordered his son to cover him with leaves and grass, and return
to the spot in four days. If worms were crawling about, he was to throw
leaves and grass over them and come back four days later. Kationgia did
as he was instructed, and, on his second visit to the grave, found the
whole mass of leaves in commotion. A brood of pigs, black, white and
speckled, had sprung up from the soil; famine was a thing of the past,
and Kationgia became a great chief in the island.(5)
(1) Schoolcraft, ii. 229, 230.
(1) Boeo, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis.
(3) Gill, South Sea Myths, pp. 88-95.
(4) Artemidorus in his Love Elegies, quoted by the Pseud-Eratosthenes.
(5) Gill, Myths and Songs from South Pacific, pp. 135-138.
"The owl was a baker's daughter" is the fragment of Christian mythology
preserved by Ophelia. The baker's daughter behaved rudely to our Lord,
and was changed into the bird that looks not on the sun. The Greeks had
a similar legend of feminine impiety by which they mythically explained
the origin of the owl, the bat and the eagle-owl. Minyas of Orchomenos
had three daughters, Leucippe, Arsippe and Alcathoe, most industrious
women, who declined to join the wild mysteries of Dionysus. The god
took the shape of a maiden, and tried to win them to his worship. They
refused, and he assumed the form of a bull, a lion, and a leopard as
easily as the chiefs of the Abipones become tigers, or as the chiefs
among the African Barotse and Balonda metamorphose themselves into
lions and alligators.(1) The daughters of Minyas, in alarm, drew lots to
determine which of them should sacrifice a victim to the god. Leucippe
drew the lot and offered up her own son. They then rushed to join the
sacred rites of Dionysus, when Hermes transformed them into the bat,
the owl and the eagle-owl, and these three hide from the light of the
sun.(2)
(1) Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 615, 642.
(2) Nicander, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis.
A few examples of Bushman and Australian myths explanatory of the
colours and habits of animals will probably suffice to establish the
resemblance between savage and Hellenic legends of this character. The
Bushman myth about the origin of the eland (a large antelope) is not
printed in full by Dr. Bleek, but he observes that it "gives an account
of the reasons for the colours of the gemsbok, hartebeest, eland, quagga
and springbok".(1) Speculative Bushmen seem to have been puzzled to
account for the wildness of the eland. It would be much more convenient
if the eland were tame and could be easily captured. They explain
its wildness by saying that the eland was "spoiled" before Cagn, the
creator, or rather maker of most things, had quite finished it. Cagn's
relations came and hunted the first eland too soon, after which all
other elands grew wild. Cagn then said, "Go and hunt them and try to
kill one; that is now your work, for it was you who spoilt them".(2)
The Bushmen have another myth explanatory of the white patches on
the breasts of crows in their country. Some men tarried long at their
hunting, and their wives sent out crows in search of their husbands.
Round each crow's neck was hung a piece of fat to serve as food on the
journey. Hence the crows have white patches on breast and neck.
(1) Brief Account of Bushmen Folk-Lore, p. 7.
(2) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.
In Australia the origins of nearly all animals appear to be explained
in myths, of which a fair collection is printed in Mr. Brough Symth's
Aborigines of Victoria.(1) Still better examples occur in Mrs. Langloh
Parker's Australian Legends. Why is the crane so thin? Once he was a
man named Kar-ween, the second man fashioned out of clay by Pund-jel, a
singular creative being, whose chequered career is traced elsewhere in
our chapter on "Savage Myths of the Origin of the World and of Man".
Kar-ween and Pund-jel had a quarrel about the wives of the former,
whom Pund-jel was inclined to admire. The crafty Kar-ween gave a dance
(jugargiull, corobboree), at which the creator Pund-jel was disporting
himself gaily (like the Great Panjandrum), when Kar-ween pinned him with
a spear. Pund-jel threw another which took Kar-ween in the knee-joint,
so that he could not walk, but soon pined away and became a mere
skeleton. "Thereupon Pund-jel made Kar-ween a crane," and that is why
the crane has such attenuated legs. The Kortume, Munkari and Waingilhe,
now birds, were once men. The two latter behaved unkindly to their
friend Kortume, who shot them out of his hut in a storm of rain, singing
at the same time an incantation. The three then turned into birds, and
when the Kortume sings it is a token that rain may be expected.
(1) Vol. i. p. 426 et seq.
Let us now compare with these Australian myths of the origin of certain
species of birds the Greek story of the origin of frogs, as told by
Menecrates and Nicander.(1) The frogs were herdsmen metamorphosed by
Leto, the mother of Apollo. But, by way of showing how closely akin are
the fancies of Greeks and Australian black fellows, we shall tell the
legend without the proper names, which gave it a fictitious dignity.
(1) Antoninus Liberalis, xxxv.
THE ORIGIN OF FROGS.
"A woman bore two children, and sought for a water-spring wherein to
bathe them. She found a well, but herdsmen drove her away from it that
their cattle might drink. Then some wolves met her and led her to a
river, of which she drank, and in its waters she bathed her children.
Then she went back to the well where the herdsmen were now bathing, and
she turned them all into frogs. She struck their backs and shoulders
with a rough stone and drove them into the waters, and ever since that
day frogs live in marshes and beside rivers."
A volume might be filled with such examples of the kindred fancies of
Greeks and savages. Enough has probably been said to illustrate our
point, which is that Greek myths of this character were inherited from
the period of savagery, when ideas of metamorphosis and of the kinship
of men and beasts were real practical beliefs. Events conceived to be
common in real life were introduced into myths, and these myths were
savage science, and were intended to account for the Origin of Species.
But when once this train of imagination has been fired, it burns on both
in literature and in the legends of the peasantry. Every one who
writes a Christmas tale for children now employs the machinery of
metamorphosis, and in European folk-lore, as Fontenelle remarked,
stories persist which are precisely similar in kind to the minor myths
of savages.
Reasoning in this wise, the Mundas of Bengal thus account for
peculiarities of certain animals. Sing Bonga, the chief god, cast
certain people out of heaven; they fell to earth, found iron ore, and
began smelting it. The black smoke displeased Sing Bonga, who sent two
king crows and an owl to bid people cease to pollute the atmosphere.
But the iron smelters spoiled these birds' tails, and blackened the
previously white crow, scorched its beak red, and flattened its head.
Sing Bonga burned man, and turned woman into hills and waterspouts.(1)
(1) Dalton, pp. 186, 187.
Examples of this class of myth in Indo-Aryan literature are not hard
to find. Why is dawn red? Why are donkeys slow? Why have mules no young
ones? Mules have no foals because they were severely burned when Agni
(fire) drove them in a chariot race. Dawn is red, not because (as in
Australia) she wears a red kangaroo cloak, but because she competed in
this race with red cows for her coursers. Donkeys are slow because they
never recovered from their exertions in the same race, when the Asvins
called on their asses and landed themselves the winners.(1) And cows
are accommodated with horns for a reason no less probable and
satisfactory.(2)
(1) Aitareya Brahmana, ii. 272, iv. 9.
(2) iv. 17.
Though in the legends of the less developed peoples men and women are
more frequently metamorphosed into birds and beasts than into stones
and plants, yet such changes of form are by no means unknown. To the
north-east of Western Point there lies a range of hills, inhabited,
according to the natives of Victoria, by a creature whose body is made
of stone, and weapons make no wound in so sturdy a constitution. The
blacks refuse to visit the range haunted by the mythic stone beast.
"Some black fellows were once camped at the lakes near Shaving Point.
They were cooking their fish when a native dog came up. They did not
give him anything to eat. He became cross and said, 'You black fellows
have lots of fish, but you give me none'. So he changed them all into a
big rock. This is quite true, for the big rock is there to this day, and
I have seen it with my own eyes."(1) Another native, Toolabar, says that
the women of the fishing party cried out yacka torn, "very good". A dog
replied yacka torn, and they were all changed into rocks. This very man,
Toolabar, once heard a dog begin to talk, whereupon he and his father
fled. Had they waited they would have become stones. "We should have
been like it, wallung," that is, stones.
(1) Native narrator, ap. Brough Smyth, i. 479.
Among the North American Indians any stone which has a resemblance to
the human or animal figure is explained as an example of metamorphosis.
Three stones among the Aricaras were a girl, her lover and her dog, who
fled from home because the course of true love did not run smooth, and
who were petrified. Certain stones near Chinook Point were sea-giants
who swallowed a man. His brother, by aid of fire, dried up the bay and
released the man, still alive, from the body of the giant. Then the
giants were turned into rocks.(1) The rising sun in Popol Vuh (if the
evidence of Popol Vuh, the Quichua sacred book, is to be accepted)
changed into stone the lion, serpent and tiger gods. The Standing Rock
on the Upper Missouri is adored by the Indians, and decorated with
coloured ribbons and skins of animals. This stone was a woman, who, like
Niobe, became literally petrified with grief when her husband took a
second wife. Another stone-woman in a cave on the banks of the Kickapoo
was wont to kill people who came near her, and is even now approached
with great respect. The Oneidas and Dacotahs claim descent from stones
to which they ascribe animation.(2) Montesinos speaks of a sacred stone
which was removed from a mountain by one of the Incas. A parrot flew out
of it and lodged in another stone, which the natives still worship.(3)
The Breton myth about one of the great stone circles (the stones were
peasants who danced on a Sunday) is a well-known example of this kind
of myth surviving in folk-lore. There is a kind of stone Actaeon(4)
near Little Muniton Creek, "resembling the bust of a man whose head
is decorated with the horns of a stag".(5) A crowd of myths of
metamorphosis into stone will be found among the Iroquois legends in
Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1880-81. If men may become stones, on
the other hand, in Samoa (as in the Greek myth of Deucalion), stones
may become men.(6) Gods, too, especially when these gods happen to be
cuttlefish, might be petrified. They were chased in Samoa by an Upolu
hero, who caught them in a great net and killed them. "They were changed
into stones, and now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the
north side of Upolu."(7) Mauke, the first man, came out of a stone.
In short,(8) men and stones and beasts and gods and thunder have
interchangeable forms. In Mangaia(9) the god Ra was tossed up into the
sky by Maui and became pumice-stone. Many samples of this petrified
deity are found in Mangaia. In Melanesia matters are so mixed that it is
not easy to decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead
man's soul or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether "the stone is
the spirit's outward part or organ". The Vui, or spirit, has much the
same relations with snakes, owls and sharks.(10) Qasavara, the mythical
opponent of Qat, the Melanesian Prometheus, "fell dead from heaven"
(like Ra in Mangia), and was turned into a stone, on which sacrifices
are made by those who desire strength in fighting.
(1) See authorities ap. Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, pp. 130-138.
(2) Dorman, p. 133.
(3) Many examples are collected by J. G. Muller, Amerikanischen
Urreligionen, pp. 97, 110, 125, especially when the stones have a
likeness to human form, p. 17a. "Im der That werden auch einige in
Steine, oder in Thiere and Pflanzen verwandelt." Cf. p. 220. Instances
(from Balboa) of men turned into stone by wizards, p. 309.
(4) Preller thinks that Actaeon, devoured by his hounds after being
changed into a stag, is a symbol of the vernal year. Palaephatus (De
Fab. Narrat.) holds that the story is a moral fable.
(5) Dorman, p. 137.
(6) Turner's Samoa, p. 299.
(7) Samoa, p. 31.
(8) Op. cit., p. 34.
(9) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 60.
(10) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.
Without delaying longer among savage myths of metamorphosis into stones,
it may be briefly shown that the Greeks retained this with all the other
vagaries of early fancy. Every one remembers the use which Perseus made
of the Gorgon's head, and the stones on the coast of Seriphus, which,
like the stones near Western Point in Victoria, had once been men, the
enemies of the hero. "Also he slew the Gorgon," sings Pindar, "and bare
home her head, with serpent tresses decked, to the island folk a stony
death." Observe Pindar's explanatory remark: "I ween there is no marvel
impossible if gods have wrought thereto". In the same pious spirit a
Turk in an isle of the Levant once told Mr. Newton a story of how a man
hunted a stag, and the stag spoke to him. "The stag spoke?" said Mr.
Newton. "Yes, by Allah's will," replied the Turk. Like Pindar, he was
repeating an incident quite natural to the minds of Australians, or
Bushmen, or Samoans, or Red Men, but, like the religious Pindar, he
felt that the affair was rather marvellous, and accounted for it by
the exercise of omnipotent power.(1) The Greek example of Niobe and
her children may best be quoted in Mr. Bridges' translation from the
Iliad:--
And somewhere now, among lone mountain rocks
On Sipylus, where couch the nymphs at night
Who dance all day by Achelous' stream,
The once proud mother lies, herself a rook,
And in cold breast broods o'er the goddess' wrong.
--Prometheus the fire-bringer.(2)
In the Iliad it is added that Cronion made the people into stones. The
attitude of the later Greek mind towards these myths may be observed
in a fragment of Philemon, the comic poet. "Never, by the gods, have I
believed, nor will believe, that Niobe the stone was once a woman. Nay,
by reason of her calamities she became speechless, and so, from her
silence, was called a stone."(3)
(1) Pindar, Pyth. x., Myers's translation.
(2) xxiv. 611.
(3) The Scholiast on Iliad, xxiv. 6, 7.
There is another famous petrification in the Iliad. When the prodigy
of the snake and the sparrows had appeared to the assembled Achaeans
at Aulis, Zeus displayed a great marvel, and changed into a stone the
serpent which swallowed the young of the sparrow. Changes into stone,
though less common than changes into fishes, birds and beasts, were thus
obviously not too strange for the credulity of Greek mythology, which
could also believe that a stone became the mother of Agdestis by Zeus.
As to interchange of shape between men and women and PLANTS, our
information, so far as the lower races are concerned, is less copious.
It has already been shown that the totems of many stocks in all parts
of the world are plants, and this belief in connection with a plant by
itself demonstrates that the confused belief in all things being on one
level has thus introduced vegetables into the dominion of myth. As far
as possessing souls is concerned, Mr. Tylor has proved that plants are
as well equipped as men or beasts or minerals.(1) In India the doctrine
of transmigration widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or
smaller plants being animated by human souls. In the well-known ancient
Egyptian story of "The Two Brothers,"(2) the life of the younger is
practically merged in that of the acacia tree where he has hidden his
heart; and when he becomes a bull and is sacrificed, his spiritual part
passes into a pair of Persea trees. The Yarucaris of Bolivia say that a
girl once bewailed in the forest her loverless estate. She happened to
notice a beautiful tree, which she adorned with ornaments as well as she
might. The tree assumed the shape of a handsome young man--
She did not find him so remiss,
But, lightly issuing through,
He did repay her kiss for kiss,
With usury thereto.(3)
J. G. Muller, who quotes this tale from Andree, says it has "many
analogies with the tales of metamorphosis of human beings into trees
among the ancients, as reported by Ovid". The worship of plants and
trees is a well-known feature in religion, and probably implies
(at least in many cases) a recognition of personality. In Samoa,
metamorphosis into vegetables is not uncommon. For example, the king of
Fiji was a cannibal, and (very naturally) "the people were melting away
under him". The brothers Toa and Pale, wishing to escape the royal oven,
adopted various changes of shape. They knew that straight timber was
being sought for to make a canoe for the king, so Pale, when he assumed
a vegetable form, became a crooked stick overgrown with creepers, but
Toa "preferred standing erect as a handsome straight tree". Poor Toa
was therefore cut down by the king's shipwrights, though, thanks to
his brother's magic wiles, they did not make a canoe out of him after
all.(4) In Samoa the trees are so far human that they not only go to
war with each other, but actually embark in canoes to seek out distant
enemies.(5) The Ottawa Indians account for the origin of maize by a
myth in which a wizard fought with and conquered a little man who had a
little crown of feathers. From his ashes arose the maize with its crown
of leaves and heavy ears of corn.(6)
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 145; examples of Society Islanders, Dyaks,
Karens, Buddhists.
(2) Maspero, Contes Egyptiens, p. 25.
(3) J. G. Muller, Amerik. Urrel., p. 264.
(4) Turner's Samoa, p. 219.
(5) Ibid.. p. 213.
(6) Amerik. Urrel., p. 60.
In Mangaia the myth of the origin of the cocoa-nut tree is a series
of transformation scenes, in which the persons shift shapes with the
alacrity of medicine-men. Ina used to bathe in a pool where an eel
became quite familiar with her. At last the fish took courage and made
his declaration. He was Tuna, the chief of all eels. "Be mine," he
cried, and Ina was his. For some mystical reason he was obliged to leave
her, but (like the White Cat in the fairy tale) he requested her to cut
off his eel's head and bury it. Regretfully but firmly did Ina comply
with his request, and from the buried eel's head sprang two cocoa
trees, one from each half of the brain of Tuna. As a proof of this be it
remarked, that when the nut is husked we always find on it "the two
eyes and mouth of the lover of Ina".(1) All over the world, from ancient
Egypt to the wigwams of the Algonkins, plants and other matters are said
to have sprung from a dismembered god or hero, while men are said to
have sprung from plants.(2) We may therefore perhaps look on it as a
proved point that the general savage habit of "levelling up" prevails
even in their view of the vegetable world, and has left traces (as we
have seen) in their myths.
(1) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 79.
(2) Myths of the Beginning of Things.
Turning now to the mythology of Greece, we see that the same rule holds
good. Metamorphosis into plants and flowers is extremely common; the
instances of Daphne, Myrrha, Hyacinth, Narcissus and the sisters of
Phaethon at once occur to the memory.
Most of those myths in which everything in Nature becomes personal and
human, while all persons may become anything in Nature, we explain,
then, as survivals or imitations of tales conceived when men were in
the savage intellectual condition. In that stage, as we demonstrated, no
line is drawn between things animate and inanimate, dumb or "articulate
speaking," organic or inorganic, personal or impersonal. Such a mental
stage, again, is reflected in the nature-myths, many of which are merely
"aetiological,"--assign a cause, that is, for phenomena, and satisfy an
indolent and credulous curiosity.
We may be asked again, "But how did this intellectual condition come to
exist?" To answer that is no part of our business; for us it is enough
to trace myth, or a certain element in myth, to a demonstrable and
actual stage of thought. But this stage, which is constantly found to
survive in the minds of children, is thus explained or described by Hume
in his Essay on Natural Religion: "There is an universal tendency in
mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every
object those qualities... of which they are intimately conscious".(1)
Now they believe themselves to be conscious of magical and supernatural
powers, which they do not, of course, possess. These powers of effecting
metamorphosis, of "shape-shifting," of flying, of becoming invisible
at will, of conversing with the dead, of miraculously healing the sick,
savages pass on to their gods (as will be shown in a later chapter),
and the gods of myth survive and retain the miraculous gifts after their
worshippers (become more reasonable) have quite forgotten that they
themselves once claimed similar endowments. So far, then, it has
been shown that savage fancy, wherever studied, is wild; that savage
curiosity is keen; that savage credulity is practically boundless. These
considerations explain the existence of savage myths of sun, stars,
beasts, plants and stones; similar myths fill Greek legend and the
Sanskrit Brahmanes. We conclude that, in Greek and Sanskrit, the myths
are relics (whether borrowed or inherited) of the savage mental STATUS.
(1) See Appendix B.