Confusions of myth--Various origins of man and of things--Myths of
Australia, Andaman Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus, Hurons,
Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldaeans, Thlinkeets,
Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians--Similarity of ideas
pervading all those peoples in various conditions of society and
culture.
The difficulties of classification which beset the study of mythology
have already been described. Nowhere are they more perplexing than when
we try to classify what may be styled Cosmogonic Myths. The very word
cosmogonic implies the pre-existence of the idea of a cosmos, an orderly
universe, and this was exactly the last idea that could enter the mind
of the myth-makers. There is no such thing as orderliness in their
mythical conceptions, and no such thing as an universe. The natural
question, "Who made the world, or how did the things in the world come
to be?" is the question which is answered by cosmogonic myths. But it is
answered piecemeal. To a Christian child the reply is given, "God made
all things". We have known this reply discussed by some little girls of
six (a Scotch minister's daughters, and naturally metaphysical), one of
whom solved all difficulties by the impromptu myth, "God first made a
little place to stand on, and then he made the rest". But savages and
the myth-makers, whose stories survive into the civilised religions,
could adhere firmly to no such account as this. Here occurs in the first
edition of this book the following passage: "They (savages) have not,
and had not, the conception of God as we understand what we mean by
the word. They have, and had at most, only the small-change of the idea
God,"--here the belief in a moral being who watches conduct; here
again the hypothesis of a pre-human race of magnified, non-natural
medicine-men, or of extra-natural beings with human and magical
attributes, but often wearing the fur, and fins, and feathers of the
lower animals. Mingled with these faiths (whether earlier, later, or
coeval in origin with these) are the dread and love of ancestral ghosts,
often transmuting themselves into worship of an imaginary and ideal
first parent of the tribe, who once more is often a beast or a bird.
Here is nothing like the notion of an omnipotent, invisible, spiritual
being, the creator of our religion; here is only la monnaie of the
conception."
It ought to have occurred to the author that he was here traversing the
main theory of his own book, which is that RELIGION is one thing, myth
quite another thing. That many low races of savages entertain, in hours
of RELIGIOUS thought, an elevated conception of a moral and undying
Maker of Things, and Master of Life, a Father in Heaven, has already
been stated, and knowledge of the facts has been considerably increased
since this work first appeared (1887). But the MYTHICAL conceptions
described in the last paragraph coexist with the religious conception in
the faiths of very low savages, such as the Australians and Andamanese,
just as the same contradictory coexistence is notorious in ancient
Greece, India, Egypt and Anahuac. In a sense, certain low savages HAVE
the "conception of God, as we understand what we mean by the word". But
that sense, when savages come to spinning fables about origins, is apt
to be overlaid and perplexed by the frivolity of their mythical fancy.
With such shifting, grotesque and inadequate fables, the cosmogonic
myths of the world are necessarily bewildered and perplexed. We have
already seen in the chapter on "Nature Myths" that many things, sun,
moon, the stars, "that have another birth," and various animals and
plants, are accounted for on the hypothesis that they are later than the
appearance of man--that they originally WERE men. To the European mind
it seems natural to rank myths of the gods before myths of the making or
the evolution of the world, because our religion, like that of the more
philosophic Greeks, makes the deity the fount of all existences, causa
causans, "what unmoved moves," the beginning and the end. But the
myth-makers, deserting any such ideas they may possess, find it
necessary, like the child of whom we spoke, to postulate a PLACE for the
divine energy to work from, and that place is the earth or the heavens.
Then, again, heaven and earth are themselves often regarded in the
usual mythical way, as animated, as persons with parts and passions, and
finally, among advancing races, as gods. Into this medley of incongruous
and inconsistent conceptions we must introduce what order we may, always
remembering that the order is not native to the subject, but is brought
in for the purpose of study.
The origin of the world and of man is naturally a problem which has
excited the curiosity of the least developed minds. Every savage race
has its own myths on this subject, most of them bearing the marks of the
childish and crude imagination, whose character we have investigated,
and all varying in amount of what may be called philosophical thought.
All the cosmogonic myths, as distinct from religious belief in a
Creator, waver between the theory of construction, or rather of
reconstruction, and the theory of evolution, very rudely conceived.
The earth, as a rule, is mythically averred to have grown out of some
original matter, perhaps an animal, perhaps an egg which floated on
the waters, perhaps a handful of mud from below the waters. But this
conception does not exclude the idea that many of the things in the
world, minerals, plants and what not, are fragments of the frame of a
semi-supernatural and gigantic being, human or bestial, belonging to
a race which preceded the advent of man.(1) Such were the Titans,
demi-gods, Nurrumbunguttias in Australia. Various members of this race
are found active in myths of the creation, or rather the construction,
of man and of the world. Among the lowest races it is to be noted that
mythical animals of supernatural power often take the place of
beings like the Finnish Wainamoinen, the Greek Prometheus, the Zulu
Unkulunkulu, the Red Indian Manabozho, himself usually a great hare.
(1) Macrobius, Saturnal., i. xx.
The ages before the development or creation of man are filled up, in the
myths, with the loves and wars of supernatural people. The appearance of
man is explained in three or four contradictory ways, each of which
is represented in the various myths of most mythologies. Often man is
fashioned out of clay, or stone, or other materials, by a Maker of all
things, sometimes half-human or bestial, but also half-divine. Sometimes
the first man rises out of the earth, and is himself confused with the
Creator, a theory perhaps illustrated by the Zulu myth of Unkulunkulu,
"The Old, Old One". Sometimes man arrives ready made, with most of the
animals, from his former home in a hole in the ground, and he furnishes
the world for himself with stars, sun, moon and everything else he
needs. Again, there are many myths which declare that man was evolved
out of one or other of the lower animals. This myth is usually employed
by tribesmen to explain the origin of their own peculiar stock of
kindred. Once more, man is taken to be the fruit of some tree or plant,
or not to have emerged ready-made, but to have grown out of the ground
like a plant or a tree. In some countries, as among the Bechuanas, the
Boeotians, and the Peruvians, the spot where men first came out on
earth is known to be some neighbouring marsh or cave. Lastly, man is
occasionally represented as having been framed out of a piece of the
body of the Creator, or made by some demiurgic potter out of clay. All
these legends are told by savages, with no sense of their inconsistency.
There is no single orthodoxy on the matter, and we shall see that all
these theories coexist pell-mell among the mythological traditions of
civilised races. In almost every mythology, too, the whole theory of
the origin of man is crossed by the tradition of a Deluge, or some other
great destruction, followed by revival or reconstruction of the species,
a tale by no means necessarily of Biblical origin.
In examining savage myths of the origin of man and of the world,
we shall begin by considering those current among the most backward
peoples, where no hereditary or endowed priesthood has elaborated and
improved the popular beliefs. The natives of Australia furnish us
with myths of a purely popular type, the property, not of professional
priests and poets, but of all the old men and full-grown warriors of
the country. Here, as everywhere else, the student must be on his
guard against accepting myths which are disguised forms of missionary
teaching.(1)
(1) Taplin, The Narrinyeri. "He must also beware of supposing that the
Australians believe in a creator in our sense, because the Narrinyeri,
for example, say that Nurundere 'made everything'. Nurundere is but an
idealised wizard and hunter, with a rival of his species." This occurs
in the first edition, but "making all things" is one idea, wizardry is
another.
In Southern Australia we learn that the Boonoorong, an Australian
coast tribe, ascribe the creation of things to a being named Bun-jel or
Pund-jel. He figures as the chief of an earlier supernatural class of
existence, with human relationships; thus he "has a wife, WHOSE FACE HE
HAS NEVER SEEN," brothers, a son, and so on. Now this name Bun-jel means
"eagle-hawk," and the eagle-hawk is a totem among certain stocks. Thus,
when we hear that Eagle-hawk is the maker of men and things we are
reminded of the Bushman creator, Cagn, who now receives prayers of
considerable beauty and pathos, but who is (in some theories) identified
with kaggen, the mantis insect, a creative grasshopper, and the chief
figure in Bushman mythology.(1) Bun-jel or Pund-jel also figures in
Australian belief, neither as the creator nor as the eagle-hawk, but
"as an old man who lives at the sources of the Yarra river, where he
possesses great multitudes of cattle".(2) The term Bun-jel is also
used, much like our "Mr.," to denote the older men of the Kurnai and
Briakolung, some of whom have magical powers. One of them, Krawra, or
"West Wind," can cause the wind to blow so violently as to prevent the
natives from climbing trees; this man has semi-divine attributes. From
these facts it appears that this Australian creator, in myth, partakes
of the character of the totem or worshipful beast, and of that of the
wizard or medicine-man. He carried a large knife, and, when he made
the earth, he went up and down slicing it into creeks and valleys. The
aborigines of the northern parts of Victoria seem to believe in Pund-jel
in what may perhaps be his most primitive mythical shape, that of an
eagle.(3) This eagle and a crow created everything, and separated the
Murray blacks into their two main divisions, which derive their names
from the crow and the eagle. The Melbourne blacks seem to make Pund-jel
more anthropomorphic. Men are his (Greek text omitted) figures kneaded
of clay, as Aristophanes says in the Birds. Pund-jel made two clay
images of men, and danced round them. "He made their hair--one had
straight, one curly hair--of bark. He danced round them. He lay on them,
and breathed his breath into their mouths, noses and navels, and danced
round them. Then they arose full-grown young men." Some blacks seeing a
brickmaker at work on a bridge over the Yarra exclaimed, "Like 'em that
Pund-jel make 'em Koolin". But other blacks prefer to believe that, as
Pindar puts the Phrygian legend, the sun saw men growing like trees.
(1) Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Mythology, p. 6; Cape Monthly
Magazine, July, 1874, pp. 1-13; Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 210, 324.
(2) Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 210.
(3) Brough Smyth, Natives of Victoria, vol. i. p. 423.
The first man was formed out of the gum of a wattle-tree, and came out
of the knot of a wattle-tree. He then entered into a young woman (though
he was the first man) and was born.(1) The Encounter Bay people have
another myth, which might have been attributed by Dean Swift to the
Yahoos, so foul an origin does it allot to mankind.
(1) Meyer, Aborigines of Encounter Bay. See, later, "Gods of the Lowest
Races".
Australian myths of creation are by no means exclusive of a hypothesis
of evolution. Thus the Dieyrie, whose notions Mr. Gason has recorded,
hold a very mixed view. They aver that "the good spirit" Moora-Moora
made a number of small black lizards, liked them, and promised them
dominion. He divided their feet into toes and fingers, gave them noses
and lips, and set them upright. Down they fell, and Moora-Moora cut off
their tails. Then they walked erect and were men.(1) The conclusion of
the adventures of one Australian creator is melancholy. He has ceased to
dwell among mortals whom he watches and inspires. The Jay possessed many
bags full of wind; he opened them, and Pund-jel was carried up by the
blast into the heavens. But this event did not occur before Pund-jel had
taught men and women the essential arts of life. He had shown the former
how to spear kangaroos, he still exists and inspires poets. From the
cosmogonic myths of Australia (the character of some of which is in
contradiction with the higher religious belief of the people to be
later described) we may turn, without reaching a race of much higher
civilisation, to the dwellers in the Andaman Islands and their opinions
about the origin of things.
(1) Gason's Dieyries, ap. Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 20.
The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are remote from any shores,
and are protected from foreign influences by dangerous coral reefs,
and by the reputed ferocity and cannibalism of the natives. These are
Negritos, and are commonly spoken of as most abject savages. They are
not, however, without distinctions of rank; they are clean, modest,
moral after marriage, and most strict in the observance of prohibited
degrees. Unlike the Australians, they use bows and arrows, but are
said to be incapable of striking a light, and, at all events, find the
process so difficult that, like the Australians and the farmer in the
Odyssey,(1) they are compelled "to hoard the seeds of fire". Their
mythology contains explanations of the origin of men and animals, and of
their own customs and language.
(1) Odyssey, v. 490.
The Andamanese, long spoken of as "godless," owe much to Mr. Man, an
English official, who has made a most careful study of their beliefs.(1)
So extraordinary is the contradiction between the relative purity
and morality of the RELIGION and the savagery of the myths of the
Andamanese, that, in the first edition of this work, I insisted that
the "spiritual god" of the faith must have been "borrowed from the same
quarter as the stone house" in which he is mythically said to live. But
later and wider study, and fresh information from various quarters, have
convinced me that the relative purity of Andamanese religion, with its
ethical sanction of conduct, may well be, and probably is, a natural
unborrowed development. It is easy for MYTH to borrow the notion of a
stone house from our recent settlement at Port Blair. But it would not
be easy for RELIGION to borrow many new ideas from an alien creed, in
a very few years, while the noted ferocity of the islanders towards
strangers, and the inaccessibility of their abode, makes earlier
borrowing, on a large scale at least, highly improbable. The Andamanese
god, Puluga, is "like fire" but invisible, unborn and immortal, knowing
and punishing or rewarding, men's deeds, even "the thoughts of their
hearts". But when once mythical fancy plays round him, and stories are
told about him, he is credited with a wife who is an eel or a shrimp,
just as Zeus made love as an ant or a cuckoo. Puluga was the maker of
men; no particular myth as to how he made them is given. They tried to
kill him, after the deluge (of which a grotesque myth is told), but
he replied that he was "as hard as wood". His legend is in the usual
mythical contradiction with the higher elements in his religion.
(1) Journ. Anthrop. Soc., vol. xii. p. 157 et seq.
Leaving the Andaman islanders, but still studying races in the lowest
degree of civilisation, we come to the Bushmen of South Africa. This
very curious and interesting people, far inferior in material equipment
to the Hottentots, is sometimes regarded as a branch of that race.(1)
The Hottentots call themselves "Khoi-khoi," the Bushmen they style "Sa".
The poor Sa lead the life of pariahs, and are hated and chased by all
other natives of South Africa. They are hunters and diggers for roots,
while the Hottentots, perhaps their kinsmen, are cattle-breeders.(2)
Being so ill-nourished, the Bushmen are very small, but sturdy. They
dwell in, or rather wander through, countries which have been touched
by some ancient civilisation, as is proved by the mysterious mines
and roads of Mashonaland. It is singular that the Bushmen possess a
tradition according to which they could once "make stone things that
flew over rivers". They have remarkable artistic powers, and their
drawings of men and animals on the walls of caves are often not inferior
to the designs on early Greek vases.(3)
(1) See "Divine Myths of the Lower Races".
(2) Hahu, Tsuni Goam, p. 4. See other accounts in Waitz, Anthropologie,
ii. 328.
(3) Custom and Myth, where illustrations of Bushman art are given, pp.
290-295.
Thus we must regard the Bushmen as possibly degenerated from a higher
status, though there is nothing (except perhaps the tradition about
bridge-making) to show that it was more exalted than that of their
more prosperous neighbours, the Hottentots. The myths of the Bushmen,
however, are almost on the lowest known level. A very good and authentic
example of Bushman cosmogonic myth was given to Mr. Orpen, chief
magistrate of St. John's territory, by Qing, King Nqusha's huntsman.
Qing "had never seen a white man, but in fighting," till he became
acquainted with Mr. Orpen.(1) The chief force in Bushmen myth is by Dr.
Bleek identified with the mantis, a sort of large grasshopper. Though he
seems at least as "chimerical a beast" as the Aryan creative boar, the
"mighty big hare" of the Algonkins, the large spider who made the
world in the opinion of the Gold Coast people, or the eagle of the
Australians, yet the insect (if insect he be), like the others, has
achieved moral qualities and is addressed in prayer. In his religious
aspect he is nothing less than a grasshopper. He is called Cagn. "Cagn
made all things and we pray to him," said Qing. "Coti is the wife of
Cagn." Qing did not know where they came from; "perhaps with the men who
brought the sun". The fact is, Qing "did not dance that dance," that is,
was not one of the Bushmen initiated into the more esoteric mysteries
of Cagn. Till we, too, are initiated, we can know very little of Cagn in
his religious aspect. Among the Bushmen, as among the Greeks, there is
"no religious mystery without dancing". Qing was not very consistent.
He said Cagn gave orders and caused all things to appear and to be made,
sun, moon, stars, wind, mountains, animals, and this, of course, is a
lofty theory of creation. Elsewhere myth avers that Cagn did not so
much create as manufacture the objects in nature. In his early day "the
snakes were also men". Cagn struck snakes with his staff and turned them
into men, as Zeus, in the Aeginetan myth, did with ants. He also turned
offending men into baboons. In Bushman myth, little as we really know
of it, we see the usual opposition of fable and faith, a kind creator in
religion is apparently a magician in myth.
(1) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.
Neighbours of the Bushmen, but more fortunate in their wealth of sheep
and cattle, are the Ovaherero. The myths of the Ovaherero, a tribe
dwelling in a part of Hereraland "which had not yet been under the
influence of civilisation and Christianity," have been studied by the
Rev. H. Reiderbecke, missionary at Otyozondyupa. The Ovaherero, he says,
have a kind of tree Ygdrasil, a tree out of which men are born, and
this plays a great part in their myth of creation. The tree, which still
exists, though at a great age, is called the Omumborombonga tree. Out of
it came, in the beginning, the first man and woman. Oxen stepped
forth from it too, but baboons, as Caliban says of the stars, "came
otherwise," and sheep and goats sprang from a flat rock. Black people
are so coloured, according to the Ovaherero, because when the first
parents emerged from the tree and slew an ox, the ancestress of the
blacks appropriated the black liver of the victim. The Ovakuru Meyuru or
"OLD ONES in heaven," once let the skies down with a run, but drew them
up again (as the gods of the Satapatha Brahmana drew the sun) when most
of mankind had been drowned.(1) The remnant pacified the OLD ONES (as
Odysseus did the spirits of the dead) by the sacrifice of a BLACK ewe, a
practice still used to appease ghosts by the Ovaherero. The neighbouring
Omnambo ascribe the creation of man to Kalunga, who came out of the
earth, and made the first three sheep.(2)
(1) An example of a Deluge myth in Africa, where M. Lenormant found
none.
(2) South African Folk-Lore Journal, ii. pt. v. p. 95.
Among the Namaquas, an African people on the same level of nomadic
culture as the Ovaherero, a divine or heroic early being called Heitsi
Eibib had a good deal to do with the origin of things. If he did not
exactly make the animals, he impressed on them their characters, and
their habits (like those of the serpent in Genesis) are said to have
been conferred by a curse, the curse of Heitsi Eibib. A precisely
similar notion was found by Avila among the Indians of Huarochiri, whose
divine culture-hero imposed, by a curse or a blessing, their character
and habits on the beasts.(1) The lion used to live in a nest up a tree
till Heitsi Eibib cursed him and bade him walk on the ground. He also
cursed the hare, "and the hare ran away, and is still running".(2) The
name of the first man is given as Eichaknanabiseb (with a multitude of
"clicks"), and he is said to have met all the animals on a flat rock,
and played a game with them for copper beads. The rainbow was made by
Gaunab, who is generally a malevolent being, of whom more hereafter.
(1) Fables of Yncas (Hakluyt Society), p. 127.
(2) Tsuni Goam, pp. 66, 67.
Leaving these African races, which, whatever their relative degrees of
culture, are physically somewhat contemptible, we reach their northern
neighbours, the Zulus. They are among the finest, and certainly among
the least religious, of the undeveloped peoples. Their faith is mainly
in magic and ghosts, but there are traces of a fading and loftier
belief.
The social and political condition of the Zulu is well understood. They
are a pastoral, but not a nomadic people, possessing large kraals or
towns. They practise agriculture, and they had, till quite recently, a
centralised government and a large army, somewhat on the German system.
They appear to have no regular class of priests, and supernatural power
is owned by the chiefs and the king, and by diviners and sorcerers, who
conduct the sacrifices. Their myths are the more interesting because,
whether from their natural scepticism, which confuted Bishop Colenso in
his orthodox days, or from acquaintance with European ideas, they have
begun to doubt the truth of their own traditions.(1) The Zulu theory
of the origin of man and of the world commences with the feats of
Unkulunkulu, "the old, old one," who, in some legends, was the first
man, "and broke off in the beginning". Like Manabozho among the Indians
of North America, and like Wainamoinen among the Finns, Unkulunkulu
imparted to men a knowledge of the arts, of marriage, and so forth. His
exploits in this direction, however, must be considered in another part
of this work. Men in general "came out of a bed of reeds".(2) But there
is much confusion about this bed of reeds, named "Uthlanga". The younger
people ask where the bed of reeds was; the old men do not know, and
neither did their fathers know. But they stick to it that "that bed of
reeds still exists". Educated Zulus appear somewhat inclined to take the
expression in an allegorical sense, and to understand the reeds either
as a kind of protoplasm or as a creator who was mortal. "He exists no
longer. As my grandfather no longer exists, he too no longer exists;
he died." Chiefs who wish to claim high descent trace their pedigree to
Uthlanga, as the Homeric kings traced theirs to Zeus. The myths given by
Dr. Callaway are very contradictory.
(1) These legends have been carefully collected and published by Bishop
Callaway (Trubner & Co., 1868).
(2) Callaway, p. 9.
In addition to the legend that men came out of a bed of reeds, other and
perhaps even more puerile stories are current. "Some men say that they
were belched up by a cow;" others "that Unkulunkulu split them out of
a stone,"(1) which recalls the legend of Pyrrha and Deucalion. The myth
about the cow is still applied to great chiefs. "He was not born; he was
belched up by a cow." The myth of the stone origin corresponds to the
Homeric saying about men "born from the stone or the oak of the old
tale".(2)
(1) Without anticipating a later chapter, the resemblances of these
to Greek myths, as arrayed by M. Bouche Leclercq (De Origine Generis
Humani), is very striking.
(2) Odyssey, xix. 103.
In addition to the theory of the natal bed of reeds, the Zulus, like
the Navajoes of New Mexico, and the Bushmen, believe in the subterranean
origin of man. There was a succession of emigrations from below of
different tribes of men, each having its own Unkulunkulu. All accounts
agree that Unkulunkulu is not worshipped, and he does not seem to
be identified with "the lord who plays in heaven"--a kind of fading
Zeus--when there is thunder. Unkulunkulu is not worshipped, though
ancestral spirits are worshipped, because he lived so long ago that no
one can now trace his pedigree to the being who is at once the first man
and the creator. His "honour-giving name is lost in the lapse of years,
and the family rites have become obsolete."(1)
(1) See Zulu religion in The Making of Religion, pp. 225-229, where it
is argued that ghost worship has superseded a higher faith, of which
traces are discernible.
The native races of the North American continent (concerning whose
civilisation more will be said in the account of their divine myths)
occupy every stage of culture, from the truly bestial condition in
which some of the Digger Indians at present exist, living on insects and
unacquainted even with the use of the bow, to the civilisation which the
Spaniards destroyed among the Aztecs.
The original facts about religion in America are much disputed, and
will be more appropriately treated later. It is now very usual for
anthropologists to say, like Mr. Dorman, "no approach to monotheismn had
been made before the discovery of America by Europeans, and the
Great Spirit mentioned in these (their) books is an introduction by
Christianity".(1) "This view will not bear examination," says Mr. Tylor,
and we shall later demonstrate the accuracy of his remark.(2) But at
present we are concerned, not with what Indian religion had to say about
her Gods, but with what Indian myth had to tell about the beginnings of
things.
(1) Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 15.
(2) Primitive Culture, 1873, ii. p. 340.
The Hurons, for example (to choose a people in a state of middle
barbarism), start in myth from the usual conception of a powerful
non-natural race of men dwelling in the heavens, whence they descended,
and colonised, not to say constructed, the earth. In the Relation de la
Nouvelle France, written by Pere Paul le Jeune, of the Company of Jesus,
in 1636, there is a very full account of Huron opinion, which, with some
changes of names, exists among the other branches of the Algonkin family
of Indians.
They recognise as the founder of their kindred a woman named Ataentsic,
who, like Hephaestus in the Iliad, was banished from the sky. In the
upper world there are woods and plains, as on earth. Ataentsic fell down
a hole when she was hunting a bear, or she cut down a heaven-tree, and
fell with the fall of this Huron Ygdrasil, or she was seduced by an
adventurer from the under world, and was tossed out of heaven for her
fault. However it chanced, she dropped on the back of the turtle in the
midst of the waters. He consulted the other aquatic animals, and one of
them, generally said to have been the musk-rat, fished(1) up some soil
and fashioned the earth.(2) Here Ataentsic gave birth to twins, Ioskeha
and Tawiscara. These represent the usual dualism of myth; they answer
to Osiris and Set, to Ormuzd and Ahriman, and were bitter enemies.
According to one form of the myth, the woman of the sky had twins, and
what occurred may be quoted from Dr. Brinton. "Even before birth one of
them betrayed his restless and evil nature by refusing to be born in
the usual manner, but insisting on breaking through his parent's side
or arm-pit. He did so, but it cost his mother her life. Her body was
buried, and from it sprang the various vegetable productions," pumpkins,
maize, beans, and so forth.(3)
(1) Relations, 1633. In this myth one Messon, the Great Hare, is the
beginner of our race. He married a daughter of the Musk-rat.
(2) Here we first meet in this investigation a very widely distributed
myth. The myths already examined have taken the origin of earth for
granted. The Hurons account for its origin; a speck of earth was fished
out of the waters and grew. In M. H. de Charencey's tract Une Legende
Cosmogonique (Havre, 1884) this legend is traced. M. de Charencey
distinguishes (1) a continental version; (2) an insular version; (3) a
mixed and Hindoo version. Among continental variants he gives a Vogul
version (Revue de Philologie et d'Ethnographie, Paris, 1874, i. 10).
Numi Tarom (a god who cooks fish in heaven) hangs a male and female
above the abyss of waters in a silver cradle. He gives them, later, just
earth enough to build a house on. Their son, in the guise of a
squirrel, climbs to Numi Tarom, and receives from him a duck-skin and
a goose-skin. Clad in these, like Yehl in his raven-skin or Odin in
his hawk-skin, he enjoys the powers of the animals, dives and brings up
three handfuls of mud, which grow into our earth. Elempi makes men
out of clay and snow. The American version M. de Charencey gives from
Nicholas Perrot (Mem. sur les Moers, etc., Paris, 1864, i. 3). Perrot
was a traveller of the seventeenth century. The Great Hare takes a hand
in the making of earth out of fished-up soil. After giving other North
American variants, and comparing the animals that, after three attempts,
fish up earth to the dove and raven of Noah, M. de Charencey reaches the
Bulgarians. God made Satan, in the skin of a diver, fish up earth out
of Lake Tiberias. Three doves fish up earth, in the beginning, in the
Galician popular legend (Chodzko, Contes des Paysans Slaves, p. 374). In
the INSULAR version, as in New Zealand, the island is usually fished up
with a hook by a heroic angler (Japan, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand). The
Hindoo version, in which the boar plays the part of musk-rat, or duck,
or diver, will be given in "Indian Cosmogonic Myths".
(3) Brinton, American Hero-Myths, p. 54. Nicholas Perrot and various
Jesuit Relations are the original authorities. See "Divine Myths of
America". Mr. Leland, in his Algonkin Tales, prints the same story, with
the names altered to Glooskap and Malsumis, from oral tradition. Compare
Schoolcraft, v. 155, and i. 317, and the versions of PP. Charlevoix
and Lafitau. In Charlevoix the good and bad brothers are Manabozho and
Chokanipok or Chakekanapok, and out of the bones and entrails of the
latter many plants and animals were fashioned, just as, according to a
Greek myth preserved by Clemens Alexandrinus, parsley and pomegranates
arose from the blood and scattered members of Dionysus Zagreus. The tale
of Tawiscara's violent birth is told of Set in Egypt, and of Indra in
the Veda, as will be shown later. This is a very common fable, and, as
Mr. Whitley Stokes tells me, it recurs in old Irish legends of the birth
of our Lord, Myth, as usual, invading religion, even Christian religion.
According to another version of the origin of things, the maker of them
was one Michabous, or Michabo, the Great Hare. His birthplace was shown
at an island called Michilimakinak, like the birthplace of Apollo at
Delos. The Great Hare made the earth, and, as will afterwards appear,
was the inventor of the arts of life. On the whole, the Iroquois and
Algonkin myths agree in finding the origin of life in an upper world
beyond the sky. The earth was either fished up (as by Brahma when he
dived in the shape of a boar) by some beast which descended to the
bottom of the waters, or grew out of the tortoise on whose back
Ataentsic fell. The first dwellers in the world were either beasts like
Manabozho or Michabo, the Great Hare, or the primeval wolves of the
Uinkarets,(1) or the creative musk-rat, or were more anthropomorphic
heroes, such as Ioskeha and Tawiscara. As for the things in the world,
some were made, some evolved, some are transformed parts of an early
non-natural man or animal. There is a tendency to identify Ataentsic,
the sky-woman, with the moon, and in the Two Great Brethren, hostile as
they are, to recognise moon and sun.(2)
(1) Powell, Bureau of Ethnology, i. 44.
(2) Dr. Brinton has endeavoured to demonstrate by arguments drawn from
etymology that Michabos, Messou, Missibizi or Manabozho, the Great Hare,
is originally a personification of Dawn (Myths of the New World, p.
178). I have examined his arguments in the Nineteenth Century, January,
1886, which may be consulted, and in Melusine, January, 1887. The hare
appears to be one out of the countless primeval beast-culture heroes. A
curious piece of magic in a tradition of the Dene Hareskins may seem to
aid Dr. Brinton's theory: "Pendant la nuit il entra, jeta au feu une
tete de lievre blanc et aussitot le jour se fit".--Petitot, Traditions
Indiennes, p. 173. But I take it that the sacrifice of a white hare's
head makes light magically, as sacrifice of black beasts and columns of
black smoke make rainclouds.
Some of the degraded Digger Indians of California have the following
myth of the origin of species. In this legend, it will be noticed, a
species of evolution takes the place of a theory of creation. The story
was told to Mr. Adam Johnston, who "drew" the narrator by communicating
to a chief the Biblical narrative of the creation.(1) The chief said it
was a strange story, and one that he had never heard when he lived at
the Mission of St. John under the care of a Padre. According to this
chief (he ruled over the Po-to-yan-te tribe or Coyotes), the first
Indians were coyotes. When one of their number died, his body became
full of little animals or spirits. They took various shapes, as of deer,
antelopes, and so forth; but as some exhibited a tendency to fly off to
the moon, the Po-to-yan-tes now usually bury the bodies of their dead,
to prevent the extinction of species. Then the Indians began to assume
the shape of man, but it was a slow transformation. At first they
walked on all fours, then they would begin to develop an isolated human
feature, one finger, one toe, one eye, like the ascidian, our first
parent in the view of modern science. Then they doubled their organs,
got into the habit of sitting up, and wore away their tails, which they
unaffectedly regret, "as they consider the tail quite an ornament".
Ideas of the immortality of the soul are said to be confined to the old
women of the tribe, and, in short, according to this version, the Digger
Indians occupy the modern scientific position.
(1) Schoolcraft, vol. v.
The Winnebagoes, who communicated their myths to Mr. Fletcher,(1) are
suspected of having been influenced by the Biblical narrative. They say
that the Great Spirit woke up as from a dream, and found himself sitting
in a chair. As he was all alone, he took a piece of his body and a piece
of earth, and made a man. He next made a woman, steadied the earth
by placing beasts beneath it at the corners, and created plants and
animals. Other men he made out of bears. "He created the white man
to make tools for the poor Indians"--a very pleasing example of
a teleological hypothesis and of the doctrine of final causes as
understood by the Winnebagoes. The Chaldean myth of the making of man is
recalled by the legend that the Great Spirit cut out a piece of
himself for the purpose; the Chaldean wisdom coincides, too, with the
philosophical acumen of the Po-to-yan-te or Coyote tribe of Digger
Indians. Though the Chaldean theory is only connected with that of the
Red Men by its savagery, we may briefly state it in this place.
(1) Ibid., iv. 228.
According to Berosus, as reported by Alexander Polyhistor, the universe
was originally (as before Manabozho's time) water and mud. Herein all
manner of mixed monsters, with human heads, goat's horns, four legs,
and tails, bred confusedly. In place of the Iroquois Ataentsic, a woman
called Omoroca presided over the mud and the menagerie. She, too, like
Ataentsic, is sometimes recognised as the moon. Affairs being in this
state, Bel-Maruduk arrived and cut Omoroca in two (Chokanipok destroyed
Ataentsic), and out of Omoroca Bel made the world and the things in it.
We have already seen that in savage myth many things are fashioned out
of a dead member of the extra-natural race. Lastly, Bel cut his own head
off, and with the blood the gods mixed clay and made men. The Chaldeans
inherited very savage fancies.(1)
(1) Cf. Syncellus, p. 29; Euseb., Chronic. Armen., ed. Mai, p. 10;
Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, i. 506.
One ought, perhaps, to apologise to the Chaldeans for inserting their
myths among the fables of the least cultivated peoples; but it will
scarcely be maintained that the Oriental myths differ in character from
the Digger Indian and Iroquois explanations of the origin of things. The
Ahts of Vancouver Island, whom Mr. Sproat knew intimately, and of whose
ideas he gives a cautious account (for he was well aware of the limits
of his knowledge), tell a story of the usual character.(1) They believe
in a member of the extra-natural race, named Quawteaht, of whom we shall
hear more in his heroic character. As a demiurge "he is undoubtedly
represented as the general framer, I do not say creator, of all things,
though some special things are excepted. He made the earth and water,
the trees and rocks, and all the animals. Some say that Quawteaht made
the sun and moon, but the majority of the Indians believe that he had
nothing to do with their formation, and that they are deities superior
to himself, though now distant and less active. He gave names to
everything; among the rest, to all the Indian houses which then existed,
although inhabited only by birds and animals. Quawteaht went away before
the apparent change of the birds and beasts into Indians, which took
place in the following manner:--
"The birds and beasts of old had the spirits of the Indians dwelling
in them, and occupied the various coast villages, as the Ahts do at
present. One day a canoe manned by two Indians from an unknown country
approached the shore. As they coasted along, at each house at which they
landed, the deer, bear, elk, and other brute inhabitants fled to the
mountains, and the geese and other birds flew to the woods and rivers.
But in this flight, the Indians, who had hitherto been contained in the
bodies of the various creatures, were left behind, and from that time
they took possession of the deserted dwellings and assumed the condition
in which we now see them."
(1) Sproat, Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, pp. 210, 211.
Crossing the northern continent of America to the west, we are in the
domains of various animal culture-heroes, ancestors and teachers of the
human race and the makers, to some extent, of the things in the world.
As the eastern tribes have their Great Hare, so the western tribes have
their wolf hero and progenitor, or their coyote, or their raven, or
their dog. It is possible, and even certain in some cases, that the
animal which was the dominant totem of a race became heir to any
cosmogonic legends that were floating about.
The country of the Papagos, on the eastern side of the Gulf of
California, is the southern boundary of the province of the coyote or
prairie wolf. The realm of his influence as a kind of Prometheus, or
even as a demiurge, extends very far northwards. In the myth related by
Con Quien, the chief of the central Papagos,(1) the coyote acts the
part of the fish in the Sanskrit legend of the flood, while Montezuma
undertakes the role of Manu. This Montezuma was formed, like the Adams
of so many races, out of potter's clay in the hands of the Great Spirit.
In all this legend it seems plain enough that the name of Montezuma is
imported from Mexico, and has been arbitrarily given to the hero of the
Papagos. According to Mr. Powers, whose manuscript notes Mr. Bancroft
quotes (iii. 87), all the natives of California believe that their
first ancestors were created directly from the earth of their present
dwelling-places, and in very many cases these ancestors were coyotes.
(1) Davidson, Indian Affairs Report, 1865, p. 131; Bancroft, iii. 75.
The Pimas, a race who live near the Papagos on the eastern coast of
the Gulf of California, say that the earth was made by a being named
Earth-prophet. At first it appeared like a spider's web, reminding one
of the West African legend that a great spider created the world.
Man was made by the Earth-prophet out of clay kneaded with sweat. A
mysterious eagle and a deluge play a great part in the later mythical
adventures of war and the world, as known to the Pimas.(1)
(1) Communicated to Mr. Bancroft by Mr. Stout of the Pima Agency.
In Oregon the coyote appears as a somewhat tentative demiurge, and the
men of his creation, like the beings first formed by Prajapati in
the Sanskrit myth, needed to be reviewed, corrected and considerably
augmented. The Chinooks of Oregon believe in the usual race of magnified
non-natural men, who preceded humanity.
These semi-divine people were called Ulhaipa by the Chinooks, and
Sehuiab by the Lummies. But the coyote was the maker of men. As the
first of Nature's journeymen, he made men rather badly, with closed eyes
and motionless feet. A kind being, named Ikanam, touched up the coyote's
crude essays with a sharp stone, opening the eyes of men, and giving
their hands and feet the powers of movement. He also acted as a
"culture-hero," introducing the first arts. (1)
(1) (Frauchere's Narrative, 258; Gibb's Chinook Vocabulary; Parker's
exploring Tour, i. 139;) Bancroft, iii. 96.
Moving up the West Pacific coast we reach British Columbia, where the
coyote is not supposed to have been so active as our old friend the
musk-rat in the great work of the creation. According to the Tacullies,
nothing existed in the beginning but water and a musk-rat. As the animal
sought his food at the bottom of the water, his mouth was frequently
filled with mud. This he spat out, and so gradually formed by alluvial
deposit an island. This island was small at first, like earth in the
Sanskrit myth in the Satapatha Brahmana, but gradually increased in
bulk. The Tacullies have no new light to throw on the origin of man.(1)
(1) Bancroft, iii. 98; Harmon's Journey, pp. 302, 303.
The Thlinkeets, who are neighbours of the Tacullies on the north,
incline to give crow or raven the chief role in the task of creation,
just as some Australians allot the same part to the eagle-hawk, and the
Yakuts to a hawk, a crow and a teal-duck. We shall hear much of
Yehl later, as one of the mythical heroes of the introduction of
civilisation. North of the Thlinkeets, a bird and a dog take the
creative duties, the Aleuts and Koniagas being descended from a dog.
Among the more northern Tinnehs, the dog who was the progenitor of the
race had the power of assuming the shape of a handsome young man. He
supplied the protoplasm of the Tinnehs, as Purusha did that of the Aryan
world, out of his own body. A giant tore him to pieces, as the gods tore
Purusha, and out of the fragments thrown into the rivers came fish, the
fragments tossed into the air took life as birds, and so forth.(1) This
recalls the Australian myth of the origin of fish and the Ananzi stories
of the origin of whips.(2)
(1) Hearne, pp. 342, 343; Bancroft, iii. 106.
(2) See "Divine Myths of Lower Races". M. Cosquin, in Contes de
Lorraine, vol. i. p. 58, gives the Ananzi story.
Between the cosmogonic myths of the barbarous or savage American tribes
and those of the great cultivated American peoples, Aztecs, Peruvians
and Quiches, place should be found for the legends of certain races
in the South Pacific. Of these, the most important are the Maoris or
natives of New Zealand, the Mangaians and the Samoans. Beyond the usual
and world-wide correspondences of myth, the divine tales of the various
South Sea isles display resemblances so many and essential that they
must be supposed to spring from a common and probably not very distant
centre. As it is practically impossible to separate Maori myths of the
making of things from Maori myths of the gods and their origin, we must
pass over here the metaphysical hymns and stories of the original
divine beings, Rangi and Papa, Heaven and Earth, and of their cruel but
necessary divorce by their children, who then became the usual Titanic
race which constructs and "airs" the world for the reception of man.(1)
Among these beings, more fully described in our chapter on the gods
of the lower races, is Tiki, with his wife Marikoriko, twilight. Tane
(male) is another of the primordial race, children of earth and heaven,
and between him and Tiki lies the credit of having made or begotten
humanity. Tane adorned the body of his father, heaven (Rangi), by
sticking stars all over it, as disks of pearl-shells are stuck all
over images. He was the parent of trees and birds, but some trees are
original and divine beings. The first woman was not born, but formed out
of the sun and the echo, a pretty myth. Man was made by Tiki, who took
red clay, and kneaded it with his own blood, or with the red water of
swamps. The habits of animals, some of which are gods, while others are
descended from gods, follow from their conduct at the moment when heaven
and earth were violently divorced. New Zealand itself, or at least one
of the isles, was a huge fish caught by Maui (of whom more hereafter).
Just as Pund-jel, in Australia, cut out the gullies and vales with his
knife, so the mountains and dells of New Zealand were produced by the
knives of Maui's brothers when they crimped his big fish.(2) Quite apart
from those childish ideas are the astonishing metaphysical hymns about
the first stirrings of light in darkness, of "becoming" and "being,"
which remind us of Hegel and Heraclitus, or of the most purely
speculative ideas in the Rig-Veda.(3) Scarcely less metaphysical are the
myths of Mangaia, of which Mr. Gill(4) gives an elaborate account.
(1) See "Divine Myths of Lower Races".
(2) Taylor, New Zealand, pp. 115-121; Bastian, Heilige Sage der
Polynesier, pp. 36-50; Shortland, Traditions of New Zealanders.
(3) See chapter on "Divine Myths of the Lower Races," and on "Indian
Cosmogonic Myths"
(4) Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, pp. 1-22.
The Mangaian ideas of the world are complex, and of an early scientific
sort. The universe is like the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, divided
into many imaginary circles like those of mediaeval speculation. There
is a demon at the stem, as it were, of the cocoa-nut, and, where the
edges of the imaginary shell nearly meet, dwells a woman demon, whose
name means "the very beginning". In this system we observe efforts at
metaphysics and physical speculation. But it is very characteristic
of rude thought that such extremely abstract conceptions as "the very
beginning" are represented as possessing life and human form. The
woman at the bottom of the shell was anxious for progeny, and therefore
plucked a bit out of her own right side, as Eve was made out of the rib
of Adam. This piece of flesh became Vatea, the father of gods and men.
Vatea (like Oannes in the Chaldean legend) was half man, half fish. "The
Very Beginning" begat other children in the same manner, and some
of these became departmental gods of ocean, noon-day, and so forth.
Curiously enough, the Mangaians seem to be sticklers for primogeniture.
Vatea, as the first-born son, originally had his domain next above
that of his mother. But she was pained by the thought that his younger
brothers each took a higher place than his; so she pushed his land
up, and it is now next below the solid crust on which mortals live in
Mangaia. Vatea married a woman from one of the under worlds named Papa,
and their children had the regular human form. One child was born either
from Papa's head, like Athene from the head of Zeus, or from her armpit,
like Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. Another child may be said, in the
language of dog-breeders, to have "thrown back," for he wears the form
of a white or black lizard. In the Mangaian system the sky is a solid
vault of blue stone. In the beginning of things the sky (like Ouranos in
Greece and Rangi in New Zealand) pressed hard on earth, and the god Ru
was obliged to thrust the two asunder, or rather he was engaged in this
task when Maui tossed both Ru and the sky so high up that they never
came down again. Ru is now the Atlas of Mangaia, "the sky-supporting
Ru".(1) His lower limbs fell to earth, and became pumice-stone. In these
Mangaian myths we discern resemblances to New Zealand fictions, as
is natural, and the tearing of the body of "the Very Beginning" has
numerous counterparts in European, American and Indian fable. But on the
whole, the Mangaian myths are more remarkable for their semi-scientific
philosophy than for their coincidences with the fancies of other early
peoples.
(1) Gill, p. 59.
The Samoans, like the Maoris and Greeks, hold that heaven at first fell
down and lay upon earth.(1) The arrowroot and another plant pushed up
heaven, and "the heaven-pushing place" is still known and pointed out.
Others say the god Ti-iti-i pushed up heaven, and his feet made holes
six feet deep in the rocks during this exertion. The other Samoan myths
chiefly explain the origin of fire, and the causes of the characteristic
forms and habits of animals and plants. The Samoans, too, possess
a semi-mythical, metaphysical cosmogony, starting from NOTHING, but
rapidly becoming the history of rocks, clouds, hills, dew and various
animals, who intermarried, and to whom the royal family of Samoa trace
their origin through twenty-three generations. So personal are Samoan
abstract conceptions, that "SPACE had a long-legged stool," on to which
a head fell, and grew into a companion for Space. Yet another myth says
that the god Tangaloa existed in space, and made heaven and earth, and
sent down his daughter, a snipe. Man he made out of the mussel-fish. So
confused are the doctrines of the Samoans.(2)
(1) Turner's Samoa, p. 198.
(2) Turner's Samoa, pp. 1-9.
Perhaps the cosmogonic myths of the less cultivated races have now been
stated in sufficient number. As an example of the ideas which prevailed
in an American race of higher culture, we may take the Quiche legend as
given in the Popol Vuh, a post-Christian collection of the sacred myths
of the nation, written down after the Spanish conquest, and published in
French by the Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg.(1)
(1) See Popol Vuh in Mr. Max Muller's Chips from a German Workshop, with
a discussion of its authenticity. In his Annals of the Cakchiquels, a
nation bordering on the Quiches, Dr. Brinton expresses his belief in the
genuine character of the text. Compare Bancroft, iii. p. 45. The
ancient and original Popol Vuh, the native book in native characters,
disappeared during the Spanish conquest.
The Quiches, like their neighbours the Cakchiquels, were a highly
civilised race, possessing well-built towns, roads and the arts of life,
and were great agriculturists. Maize, the staple of food among these
advanced Americans, was almost as great a god as Soma among the
Indo-Aryans. The Quiches were acquainted with a kind of picture-writing,
and possessed records in which myth glided into history. The Popol Vuh,
or book of the people, gives itself out as a post-Columbian copy of
these traditions, and may doubtless contain European ideas. As we see
in the Commentarias Reales of the half-blood Inca Garcilasso de la Vega,
the conquered people were anxious to prove that their beliefs were by
no means so irrational and so "devilish" as to Spanish critics they
appeared. According to the Popol Vuh, there was in the beginning nothing
but water and the feathered serpent, one of their chief divine beings;
but there also existed somehow, "they that gave life". Their names mean
"shooter of blow-pipe at coyote," "at opossum," and so forth. They
said "Earth," and there WAS earth, and plants growing thereon. Animals
followed, and the Givers of life said "Speak our names," but the animals
could only cluck and croak. Then said the Givers, "Inasmuch as ye cannot
praise us, ye shall be killed and eaten". They then made men out of
clay; these men were weak and watery, and by water they were destroyed.
Next they made men of wood and women of the pith of trees. These puppets
married and gave in marriage, and peopled earth with wooden mannikins.
This unsatisfactory race was destroyed by a rain of resin and by the
wild beasts. The survivors developed into apes. Next came a period
occupied by the wildest feats of the magnified non-natural race and
of animals. The record is like the description of a supernatural
pantomime--the nightmare of a god. The Titans upset hills, are turned
into stone, and behave like Heitsi Eibib in the Namaqua myths.
Last of all, men were made of yellow and white maize, and these gave
more satisfaction, but their sight was contracted. These, however,
survived, and became the parents of the present stock of humanity.
Here we have the conceptions of creation and of evolution combined. Men
are MADE, but only the fittest survive; the rest are either destroyed or
permitted to develop into lower species. A similar mixture of the same
ideas will be found in one of the Brahmanas among the Aryans of India.
It is to be observed that the Quiche myths, as recorded in Popol Vuh,
contain not only traces of belief in a creative word and power, but many
hymns of a lofty and beautifully devotional character.
"Hail! O Creator, O Former! Thou that hearest and understandest us,
abandon us not, forsake us not! O God, thou that art in heaven and on
the earth, O Heart of Heaven, O Heart of Earth, give us descendants and
posterity as long as the light endures."
This is an example of the prayers of the men made out of maize, made
especially that they might "call on the name" of the god or gods.
Whether we are to attribute this and similar passages to Christian
influence (for Popol Vuh, as we have it, is but an attempt to collect
the fragments of the lost book that remained in men's minds after the
conquest), or whether the purer portions of the myth be due to untaught
native reflection and piety, it is not possible to determine. It is
improbable that the ideas of a hostile race would be introduced into
religious hymns by their victims. Here, as elsewhere in the sacred
legends of civilised peoples, various strata of mythical and religious
thought coexist.
No American people reached such a pitch of civilisation as the Aztecs
of Anahuac, whose capital was the city of Mexico. It is needless here
to repeat the story of their grandeur and their fall. Obscure as their
history, previous to the Spanish invasion, may be, it is certain that
they possessed a highly organised society, fortified towns, established
colleges or priesthoods, magnificent temples, an elaborate calendar,
great wealth in the precious metals, the art of picture-writing in
considerable perfection, and a despotic central government. The higher
classes in a society like this could not but develop speculative
systems, and it is alleged that shortly before the reign of Montezuma
attempts had been made to introduce a pure monotheistic religion. But
the ritual of the Aztecs remained an example of the utmost barbarity.
Never was a more cruel faith, not even in Carthage. Nowhere did temples
reek with such pools of human blood; nowhere else, not in Dahomey and
Ashanti, were human sacrifice, cannibalism and torture so essential
to the cult that secured the favour of the gods. In these dark
fanes--reeking with gore, peopled by monstrous shapes of idols
bird-headed or beast-headed, and adorned with the hideous carvings in
which we still see the priest, under the mask of some less ravenous
forest beast, tormenting the victim--in these abominable temples the
Castilian conquerors might well believe that they saw the dwellings of
devils.
Yet Mexican religion had its moral and beautiful aspect, and the gods,
or certain of the gods, required from their worshippers not only bloody
hands, but clean hearts.
To the gods we return later. The myths of the origin of things may
be studied without a knowledge of the whole Aztec Pantheon. Our
authorities, though numerous, lack complete originality and are
occasionally confused. We have first the Aztec monuments and
hieroglyphic scrolls, for the most part undeciphered. These merely
attest the hideous and cruel character of the deities. Next we have the
reports of early missionaries, like Sahagun and Mendieta, of conquerors,
like Bernal Diaz, and of noble half-breeds, such as Ixtlilxochitl.(1)
(1) Bancroft's Native Races of Pacific Coast of North America, vol.
iii., contains an account of the sources, and, with Sahagun and Acosta,
is mainly followed here. See also J. G. Muller, Ur. Amerik. Rel., p.
507. See chapter on the "Divine Myths of Mexico".
There are two elements in Mexican, as in Quiche, and Indo-Aryan, and
Maori, and even Andaman cosmogonic myth. We find the purer religion
and the really philosophic speculation concurrent with such crude and
childish stories as usually satisfy the intellectual demands of Ahts,
Cahrocs and Bushmen; but of the purer and more speculative opinions we
know little. Many of the noble, learned and priestly classes of Aztecs
perished at the conquest. The survivors were more or less converted to
Catholicism, and in their writings probably put the best face possible
on the native religion. Like the Spanish clergy, their instructors,
they were inclined to explain away their national gods by a system of
euhemerism, by taking it for granted that the gods and culture-heroes
had originally been ordinary men, worshipped after their decease. This
is almost invariably the view adopted by Sahagun. Side by side with the
confessions, as it were, of the clergy and cultivated classes coexisted
the popular beliefs, the myths of the people, partaking of the nature of
folk-lore, but not rejected by the priesthood.
Both strata of belief are represented in the surviving cosmogonic
myths of the Aztecs. Probably we may reckon in the first or learned and
speculative class of tales the account of a series of constructions and
reconstructions of the world. This idea is not peculiar to the higher
mythologies, the notion of a deluge and recreation or renewal of things
is almost universal, and even among the untutored Australians there are
memories of a flood and of an age of ruinous winds. But the theory of
definite epochs, calculated in accordance with the Mexican calendar,
of epochs in which things were made and re-made, answers closely to
the Indo-Aryan conception of successive kalpas, and can only have been
developed after the method of reckoning time had been carried to some
perfection. "When heaven and earth were fashioned, they had already been
four times created and destroyed," say the fragments of what is called
the Chimalpopoca manuscript. Probably this theory of a series of kalpas
is only one of the devices by which the human mind has tried to cheat
itself into the belief that it can conceive a beginning of things. The
earth stands on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, and it is going
too far to ask what the tortoise stands on. In the same way the world's
beginning seems to become more intelligible or less puzzling when it is
thrown back into a series of beginnings and endings. This method also
was in harmony with those vague ideas of evolution and of the survival
of the fittest which we have detected in myth. The various tentative
human races of the Popol Vuh degenerated or were destroyed because they
did not fulfil the purposes for which they were made. In Brahmanic myth
we shall see that type after type was condemned and perished because it
was inadequate, or inadequately equipped--because it did not harmonise
with its environment.(1) For these series of experimental creations and
inefficient evolutions vast spaces of time were required, according to
the Aztec and Indo-Aryan philosophies. It is not impossible that actual
floods and great convulsions of nature may have been remembered
in tradition, and may have lent colour and form to these somewhat
philosophic myths of origins. From such sources probably comes the
Mexican hypothesis of a water-age (ending in a deluge), an earth-age
(ending in an earthquake), a wind-age (ending in hurricanes), and the
present dispensation, to be destroyed by fire.
(1) As an example of a dim evolutionary idea, note the myths of the
various ages as reported by Mendieta, according to which there were five
earlier ages "or suns" of bad quality, so that the contemporary human
beings were unable to live on the fruits of the earth.
The less philosophic and more popular Aztec legend of the commencement
of the world is mainly remarkable for the importance given in it to
objects of stone. For some reason, stones play a much greater part in
American than in other mythologies. An emerald was worshipped in the
temple of Pachacamac, who was, according to Garcilasso, the supreme and
spiritual deity of the Incas. The creation legend of the Cakchiquels of
Guatemala(1) makes much of a mysterious, primeval and animated obsidian
stone. In the Iroquois myths(2) stones are the leading characters. Nor
did Aztec myth escape this influence.
(1) Brinton, Annals of the Cakchiquels.
(2) Erminie Smith, Bureau of Ethnol. Report, ii.
There was a god in heaven named Citlalatonac, and a goddess, Citlalicue.
When we speak of "heaven" we must probably think of some such world of
ordinary terrestrial nature above the sky as that from which Ataentsic
fell in the Huron story. The goddess gave birth to a flint-knife, and
flung the flint down to earth. This abnormal birth partly answers to
that of the youngest of the Adityas, the rejected abortion in the Veda,
and to the similar birth and rejection of Maui in New Zealand. From
the fallen flint-knife sprang our old friends the magnified non-natural
beings with human characteristics, "the gods," to the number of 1600.
The gods sent up the hawk (who in India and Australia generally comes
to the front on these occasions), and asked their mother, or rather
grandmother, to help them to make men, to be their servants. Citlalicue
rather jeered at her unconsidered offspring. She advised them to go to
the lord of the homes of the departed, Mictlanteuctli, and borrow a
bone or some ashes of the dead who are with him. We must never ask for
consistency from myths. This statement implies that men had already
been in existence, though they were not yet created. Perhaps they had
perished in one of the four great destructions. With difficulty and
danger the gods stole a bone from Hades, placed it in a bowl, and
smeared it with their own blood, as in Chaldea and elsewhere. Finally, a
boy and a girl were born out of the bowl. From this pair sprang men, and
certain of the gods, jumping into a furnace, became sun and moon. To the
sun they then, in Aztec fashion, sacrificed themselves, and there,
one might think, was an end of them. But they afterwards appeared in
wondrous fashions to their worshippers, and ordained the ritual of
religion. According to another legend, man and woman (as in African
myths) struggled out of a hole in the ground.(1)
(1) Authorities: Ixtlil.; Kingsborough, ix. pp. 205, 206; Sahagun, Hist.
Gen., i. 3, vii. 2; J. G. Muller, p. 510, where Muller compares the
Delphic conception of ages of the world; Bancroft, iii. pp. 60, 65.
The myths of the peoples under the empire of the Incas in Peru are
extremely interesting, because almost all mythical formations are found
existing together, while we have historical evidence as to the order and
manner of their development. The Peru of the Incas covered the modern
state of the same name, and included Ecuador, with parts of Chili and
Bolivia. M. Reville calculates that the empire was about 2500 miles in
length, four times as long as France, and that its breadth was from 250
to 500 miles. The country, contained three different climatic regions,
and was peopled by races of many different degrees of culture, all more
or less subject to the dominion of the Children of the Sun. The three
regions were the dry strip along the coast, the fertile and cultivated
land about the spurs of the Cordilleras, and the inland mountain
regions, inhabited by the wildest races. Near Cuzco, the Inca capital,
was the Lake of Titicaca, the Mediterranean, as it were, of Peru, for
on the shores of this inland sea was developed the chief civilisation of
the new world.
As to the institutions, myths and religion of the empire, we have
copious if contradictory information. There are the narratives of the
Spanish conquerors, especially of Pizarro's chaplain, Valverde, an
ignorant bigoted fanatic. Then we have somewhat later travellers and
missionaries, of whom Cieza de Leon (his book was published thirty years
after the conquest, in 1553) is one of the most trustworthy. The "Royal
Commentaries" of Garcilasso de la Vega, son of an Inca lady and a
Spanish conqueror, have often already been quoted. The critical spirit
and sound sense of Garcilasso are in remarkable contrast to the stupid
orthodoxy of the Spaniards, but some allowance must be made for his
fervent Peruvian patriotism. He had heard the Inca traditions repeated
in boyhood, and very early in life collected all the information
which his mother and maternal uncle had to give him, or which could be
extracted from the quipus (the records of knotted cord), and from
the commemorative pictures of his ancestors. Garcilasso had access,
moreover, to the "torn papers" of Blas Valera, an early Spanish
missionary of unusual sense and acuteness. Christoval de Moluna is also
an excellent authority, and much may be learned from the volume of Rites
and Laws of the Yncas.(1)
(1) A more complete list of authorities, including the garrulous Acosta,
is published by M. Reville in his Hibbert Lectures, pp. 136, 137.
Garcilasso, Cieza de Leon, Christoval de Moluna, Acosta and the Rites
and Laws have all been translated by Mr. Clements Markham, and are
published, with the editor's learned and ingenious notes, in the
collection of the Hakluyt Society. Care must be taken to discriminate
between what is reported about the Indians of the various provinces,
who were in very different grades of culture, and what is told about the
Incas themselves.
The political and religious condition of the Peruvian empire is very
clearly conceived and stated by Garcilasso. Without making due allowance
for that mysterious earlier civilisation, older than the Incas, whose
cyclopean buildings are the wonder of travellers, Garcilasso attributes
the introduction of civilisation to his own ancestors. Allowing for what
is confessedly mythical in his narrative, it must be admitted that
he has a firm grasp of what the actual history must have been. He
recognises a period of savagery before the Incas, a condition of the
rudest barbarism, which still existed on the fringes and mountain
recesses of the empire. The religion of that period was mere magic and
totemism. From all manner of natural objects, but chiefly from beasts
and birds, the various savage stocks of Peru claimed descent, and they
revered and offered sacrifice to their totemic ancestors.(1) Garcilasso
adds, what is almost incredible, that the Indians tamely permitted
themselves to be eaten by their totems, when these were carnivorous
animals. They did this with the less reluctance as they were cannibals,
and accustomed to breed children for the purposes of the cuisine from
captive women taken in war.(2) Among the huacas or idols, totems,
fetishes and other adorable objects of the Indians, worshipped before
and retained after the introduction of the Inca sun-totem and solar
cult, Garcilasso names trees, hills, rocks, caves, fountains, emeralds,
pieces of jasper, tigers, lions, bears, foxes, monkeys, condors, owls,
lizards, toads, frogs, sheep, maize, the sea, "for want of larger gods,
crabs" and bats. The bat was also the totem of the Zotzil, the chief
family of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala, and the most high god of the
Cakchiquels was worshipped in the shape of a bat. We are reminded of
religion as it exists in Samoa. The explanation of Blas Valera was that
in each totem (pacarissa) the Indians adored the devil.
(1) Com. Real., vol. i., chap. ix., x. xi. pp. 47-53.
(2) Cieza de Leon, xii., xv., xix., xxi., xxiii., xxvi., xxviii., xxxii.
Cieza is speaking of people in the valley of Cauca, in New Granada.
Athwart this early religion of totems and fetishes came, in Garcilasso's
narrative, the purer religion of the Incas, with what he regards as a
philosophic development of a belief in a Supreme Being. According to
him, the Inca sun-worship was really a totemism of a loftier
character. The Incas "knew how to choose gods better than the Indians".
Garcilasso's theory is that the earlier totems were selected chiefly as
distinguishing marks by the various stocks, though, of course, this
does not explain why the animals or other objects of each family were
worshipped or were regarded as ancestors, and the blood-connections of
the men who adored them. The Incas, disdaining crabs, lizards, bats
and even serpents and lions, "chose" the sun. Then, just like the other
totemic tribes, they feigned to be of the blood and lineage of the sun.
This fable is, in brief, the Inca myth of the origin of civilisation and
of man, or at least of their breed of men. As M. Reville well remarks,
it is obvious that the Inca claim is an adaptation of the local myth
of Lake Titicaca, the inland sea of Peru. According to that myth, the
Children of the Sun, the ancestors of the Incas, came out of the earth
(as in Greek and African legends) at Lake Titicaca, or reached its
shores after wandering from the hole or cave whence they first emerged.
The myth, as adapted by the Incas, takes for granted the previous
existence of mankind, and, in some of its forms, the Inca period is
preceded by the deluge.
Of the Peruvian myth concerning the origin of things, the following
account is given by a Spanish priest, Christoval de Moluna, in a report
to the Bishop of Cuzco in 1570.(1) The story was collected from the
lips of ancient Peruvians and old native priests, who again drew their
information in part from the painted records reserved in the temple of
the sun near Cuzco. The legend begins with a deluge myth; a cataclysm
ended a period of human existence. All mankind perished except a man and
woman, who floated in a box to a distance of several hundred miles
from Cuzco. There the creator commanded them to settle, and there, like
Pund-jel in Australia, he made clay images of men of all races, attired
in their national dress, and then animated them. They were all fashioned
and painted as correct models, and were provided with their national
songs and with seed-corn. They then were put into the earth, and emerged
all over the world at the proper places, some (as in Africa and Greece)
coming out of fountains, some out of trees, some out of caves. For this
reason they made huacas (worshipful objects or fetishes) of the trees,
caves and fountains. Some of the earliest men were changed into stones,
others into falcons, condors and other creatures which we know were
totems in Peru. Probably this myth of metamorphosis was invented to
account for the reverence paid to totems or pacarissas as the Peruvians
called them. In Tiahuanaco, where the creation, or rather manufacture of
men took place, the creator turned many sinners into stones. The sun was
made in the shape of a man, and, as he soared into heaven, he called out
in a friendly fashion to Manco Ccapac, the Ideal first Inca, "Look upon
me as thy father, and worship me as thy father". In these fables the
creator is called Pachyachachi, "Teacher of the world". According to
Christoval, the creator and his sons were "eternal and unchangeable".
Among the Canaris men descend from the survivor of the deluge, and a
beautiful bird with the face of a woman, a siren in fact, but known
better to ornithologists as a macaw. "The chief cause," says the good
Christoval, "of these fables was ignorance of God."
(1) Rites and Laws of the Yncas, p. 4, Hakluyt Society, 1873.
The story, as told by Cieza de Leon, runs thus:(1) A white man of great
stature (in fact, "a magnified non-natural man") came into the world,
and gave life to beasts and human beings. His name was Ticiviracocha,
and he was called the Father of the Sun.(2) There are likenesses of
him in the temple, and he was regarded as a moral teacher. It was owing
apparently to this benevolent being that four mysterious brothers and
sisters emerged from a cave--Children of the Sun, fathers of the Incas,
teachers of savage men. Their own conduct, however, was not exemplary,
and they shut up in a hole in the earth the brother of whom they were
jealous. This incident is even more common in the marchen or household
tales than in the regular tribal or national myths of the world.(3) The
buried brother emerged again with wings, and "without doubt he must
have been some devil," says honest Cieza de Leon. This brother was Manco
Ccapac, the heroic ancestor of the Incas, and he turned his jealous
brethren into stones. The whole tale is in the spirit illustrated by the
wilder romances of the Popol Vuh.
(1) Second Part of the Chronicles of Peru, p 5.
(2) See Making of Religion, pp. 265-270. Name and God are much disputed.
(3) The story of Joseph and the marchen of Jean de l'Ours are well-known
examples.
Garcilasso gives three forms of this myth. According to "the old Inca,"
his maternal uncle, it was the sun which sent down two of his children,
giving them a golden staff, which would sink into the ground at the
place where they were to rest from wandering. It sank at Lake Titicaca.
About the current myths Garcilasso says generally that they were "more
like dreams" than straightforward stories; but, as he adds, the Greeks
and Romans also "invented fables worthy to be laughed at, and in greater
number than the Indians. The stories of one age of heathenism may be
compared with those of the other, and in many points they will be found
to agree." This critical position of Garcilasso's will be proved correct
when we reach the myths of Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The myth as narrated
north-east of Cuzco speaks of the four brothers and four sisters who
came out of caves, and the caves in Inca times were panelled with gold
and silver.
Athwart all these lower myths, survivals from the savage stage, comes
what Garcilasso regards as the philosophical Inca belief in Pachacamac.
This deity, to Garcilasso's mind, was purely spiritual: he had no image
and dwelt in no temple; in fact, he is that very God whom the Spanish
missionaries proclaimed. This view, though the fact has been doubted,
was very probably held by the Amautas, or philosophical class in
Peru.(1) Cieza de Leon says "the name of this devil, Pachacamac, means
creator of the world". Garcilasso urges that Pachacamac was the animus
mundi; that he did not "make the world," as Pund-jel and other savage
demiurges made it, but that he was to the universe what the soul is to
the body.
(1) Com. Real., vol. i. p. 106.
Here we find ourselves, if among myths at all, among the myths of
metaphysics--rational myths; that is, myths corresponding to our present
stage of thought, and therefore intelligible to us. Pachacamac "made the
sun, and lightning, and thunder, and of these the sun was worshipped
by the Incas". Garcilasso denies that the moon was worshipped. The
reflections of the sceptical or monotheistic Inca, who declared that the
sun, far from being a free agent, "seems like a thing held to its task,"
are reported by Garcilasso, and appear to prove that solar worship was
giving way, in the minds of educated Peruvians, a hundred years before
the arrival of Pizarro and Valverde with his missal.(1)
(1) Garcilasso, viii. 8, quoting Blas Valera.
From this summary it appears that the higher Peruvian religion had
wrested to its service, and to the dynastic purposes of the Incas, a
native myth of the familiar class, in which men come ready made out of
holes in the ground. But in Peru we do not find nearly such abundance of
other savage origin myths as will be proved to exist in the legends of
Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The reason probably is that Peru left no
native literature; the missionaries disdained stories of "devils," and
Garcilasso's common sense and patriotism were alike revolted by the
incidents of stories "more like dreams" than truthful records. He
therefore was silent about them. In Greece and India, on the other hand,
the native religious literature preserved myths of the making of man out
of clay, of his birth from trees and stones, of the fashioning of things
out of the fragments of mutilated gods and Titans, of the cosmic egg, of
the rending and wounding of a personal heaven and a personal earth, of
the fishing up from the waters of a tiny earth which grew greater, of
the development of men out of beasts, with a dozen other such notions as
are familiar to contemporary Bushmen, Australians, Digger Indians, and
Cahrocs. But in Greece and India these ideas coexist with myths and
religious beliefs as purely spiritual and metaphysical as the belief in
the Pachacamac of Garcilasso and the Amautas of Peru.