Rude and distant tribes agree in the conception of the Rainbow as a

living monster. New Zealand myth, describing the battle of the Tempest

against the Forest, tells how the Rainbow arose and placed his mouth

close to Tane-mahuta, the Father of Trees, and continued to assault him

till his trunk was snapt in two, and his broken branches strewed the

ground.[375] It is not only in mere nature-myth like this, but in actual

awe-struck belief and terror, that the idea of the live Rainbow is

worked out. The Karens of Burma say it is a spirit or demon. ‘The

Rainbow can devour men.... When it devours a person, he dies a sudden or

violent death. All persons that die badly, by falls, by drowning, or by

wild beasts, die because the Rainbow has devoured their ka-la, or

spirit. On devouring persons it becomes thirsty and comes down to drink,

when it is seen in the sky drinking water. Therefore when people see the

Rainbow, they say, “The Rainbow has come to drink water. Look out, some

one or other will die violently by an evil death.” If children are

playing, their parents will say to them, “The Rainbow has come down to

drink. Play no more, lest some accident should happen to you.” And after

the Rainbow has been seen, if any fatal accident happens to anyone, it

is said the Rainbow has devoured him.’[376] The Zulu ideas correspond in

a curious way with these. The Rainbow lives with a snake, that is, where

it is there is also a snake; or it is like a sheep, and dwells in a

pool. When it touches the earth, it is drinking at a pool. Men are

afraid to wash in a large pool; they say there is a Rainbow in it, and

if a man goes in, it catches and eats him. The Rainbow, coming out of a

river or pool and resting on the ground, poisons men whom it meets,

affecting them with eruptions. Men say, ‘The Rainbow is disease. If it

rests on a man, something will happen to him.’[377] Lastly in Dahome,

Danh the Heavenly Snake, which makes the Popo beads and confers wealth

on man, is the Rainbow.[378]

To the theory of Animism belong those endless tales which all nations

tell of the presiding genii of nature, the spirits of cliffs, wells,

waterfalls, volcanoes, the elves and wood nymphs seen at times by human

eyes when wandering by moonlight or assembled at their fairy festivals.

Such beings may personify the natural objects they belong to, as when,

in a North American tale, the guardian spirit of waterfalls rushes

through the lodge as a raging current, bearing rocks and trees along in

its tremendous course, and then the guardian spirit of the islands of

Lake Superior enters in the guise of rolling waves covered with

silver-sparkling foam.[379] Or they may be guiding and power-giving

spirits of nature, like the spirit Fugamu, whose work is the cataract of

the Nguyai, and who still wanders night and day around it, though the

negroes who tell of him can no longer see his bodily form.[380] The

belief prevailing through the lower culture that the diseases which vex

mankind are brought by individual personal spirits, is one which has

produced striking examples of mythic development. Thus in Burma the

Karen lives in terror of the mad ‘la,’ the epileptic ‘la,’ and the rest

of the seven evil demons who go about seeking his life; and it is with a

fancy not many degrees removed from this early stage of thought that the

Persian sees in bodily shape the apparition of Al, the scarlet fever:—

‘Would you know Al? she seems a blushing maid,

With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.’[381]

It is with this deep old spiritualistic belief clearly in view that the

ghastly tales are to be read where pestilence and death come on their

errand in weird human shape. To the mind of the Israelite, death and

pestilence took the personal form of the destroying angel who smote the

doomed.[382] When the great plague raged in Justinian’s time, men saw on

the sea brazen barks whose crews were black and headless men, and where

they landed, the pestilence broke out.[383] When the plague fell on Rome

in Gregory’s time, the saint rising from prayer saw Michael standing

with his bloody sword on Hadrian’s castle—the archangel stands there yet

in bronze, giving the old fort its newer name of the Castle of St.

Angelo. Among a whole group of stories of the pestilence seen in

personal shape travelling to and fro in the land, perhaps there is none

more vivid than this Slavonic one. ‘There sat a Russian under a

larch-tree, and the sunshine glared like fire. He saw something coming

from afar; he looked again—it was the Pest-maiden, huge of stature, all

shrouded in linen, striding towards him. He would have fled in terror,

but the form grasped him with her long outstretched hand. “Knowest thou

the Pest?” she said; “I am she. Take me on thy shoulders and carry me

through all Russia; miss no village, no town, for I must visit all. But

fear not for thyself, thou shalt be safe amid the dying.” Clinging with

her long hands, she clambered on the peasant’s back; he stepped onward,

saw the form above him as he went, but felt no burden. First he bore her

to the towns; they found there joyous dance and song; but the form waved

her linen shroud, and joy and mirth were gone. As the wretched man

looked round, he saw mourning, he heard the tolling of the bells, there

came funeral processions, the graves could not hold the dead. He passed

on, and coming near each village heard the shriek of the dying, saw all

faces white in the desolate houses. But high on the hill stands his own

hamlet: his wife, his little children are there, and the aged parents,

and his heart bleeds as he draws near. With strong gripe he holds the

maiden fast, and plunges with her beneath the waves. He sank: she rose

again, but she quailed before a heart so fearless, and fled far away to

the forest and the mountain.’[384]

Yet, if mythology be surveyed in a more comprehensive view, it is seen

that its animistic development falls within a broader generalization

still. The explanation of the course and change of nature, as caused by

life such as the life of the thinking man who gazes on it, is but a part

of a far wider mental process. It belongs to that great doctrine of

analogy, from which we have gained so much of our apprehension of the

world around us. Distrusted as it now is by severer science for its

misleading results, analogy is still to us a chief means of discovery

and illustration, while in earlier grades of education its influence was

all but paramount. Analogies which are but fancy to us were to men of

past ages reality. They could see the flame licking its yet undevoured

prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the waving sword

from hilt to point; they could feel a live creature gnawing within their

bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs

answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god rattling in

thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts

had no need of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his

injunctions to use metaphor cautiously, and to take continual care to

make all similes consistent. The similes of the old bards and orators

were consistent, because they seemed to see and hear and feel them: what

we call poetry was to them real life, not as to the modern versemaker a

masquerade of gods and heroes, shepherds and shepherdesses, stage

heroines and philosophic savages in paint and feathers. It was with a

far deeper consciousness that the circumstance of nature was worked out

in endless imaginative detail in ancient days and among uncultured

races.

Upon the sky above the hill-country of Orissa, Pidzu Pennu, the Rain-god

of the Khonds, rests as he pours down the showers through his

sieve.[385] Over Peru there stands a princess with a vase of rain, and

when her brother strikes the pitcher, men hear the shock in thunder and

see the flash in lightning.[386] To the old Greeks the rainbow seemed

stretched down by Jove from heaven, a purple sign of war and tempest, or

it was the personal Iris, messenger between gods and men.[387] To the

South Sea Islander it was the heaven-ladder where heroes of old climbed

up and down;[388] and so to the Scandinavian it was Bifröst, the

trembling bridge, timbered of three hues and stretched from sky to

earth; while in German folk-lore it is the bridge where the souls of the

just are led by their guardian angels across to paradise.[389] As the

Israelite called it the bow of Jehovah in the clouds, it is to the Hindu

the bow of Rama,[390] and to the Finn the bow of Tiermes the Thunderer,

who slays with it the sorcerers that hunt after men’s lives;[391] it is

imagined, moreover, as a gold-embroidered scarf, a head-dress of

feathers, St. Bernard’s crown, or the sickle of an Esthonian deity.[392]

And yet through all such endless varieties of mythic conception, there

runs one main principle, the evident suggestion and analogy of nature.

It has been said of the savages of North America, that ‘there is always

something actual and physical to ground an Indian fancy on.’[393] The

saying goes too far, but within limits it is emphatically true, not of

North American Indians alone, but of mankind.

Such resemblances as have just been displayed thrust themselves directly

on the mind, without any necessary intervention of words. Deep as

language lies in our mental life, the direct comparison of object with

object, and action with action, lies yet deeper. The myth-maker’s mind

shows forth even among the deaf-and-dumb, who work out just such

analogies of nature in their wordless thought. Again and again they have

been found to suppose themselves taught by their guardians to worship

and pray to sun, moon, and stars, as personal creatures. Others have

described their early thoughts of the heavenly bodies as analogous to

things within their reach, one fancying the moon made like a dumpling

and rolled over the tree-tops like a marble across a table, and the

stars cut out with great scissors and stuck against the sky, while

another supposed the moon a furnace and the stars fire-grates, which the

people above the firmament light up as we kindle fires.[394] Now the

mythology of mankind at large is full of conceptions of nature like

these, and to assume for them no deeper original source than

metaphorical phrases, would be to ignore one of the great transitions of

our intellectual history.

Language, there is no doubt, has had a great share in the formation of

myth. The mere fact of its individualizing in words such notions as

winter and summer, cold and heat, war and peace, vice and virtue, gives

the myth-maker the means of imagining these thoughts as personal beings.

Language not only acts in thorough unison with the imagination whose

product it expresses, but it goes on producing of itself, and thus, by

the side of the mythic conceptions in which language has followed

imagination, we have others in which language has led, and imagination

has followed in the track. These two actions coincide too closely for

their effects to be thoroughly separated, but they should be

distinguished as far as possible. For myself, I am disposed to think

(differing here in some measure from Professor Max Müller’s view of the

subject) that the mythology of the lower races rests especially on a

basis of real and sensible analogy, and that the great expansion of

verbal metaphor into myth belongs to more advanced periods of

civilization. In a word, I take material myth to be the primary, and

verbal myth to be the secondary formation. But whether this opinion be

historically sound or not, the difference in nature between myth founded

on fact and myth founded on word is sufficiently manifest. The want of

reality in verbal metaphor cannot be effectually hidden by the utmost

stretch of imagination. In spite of this essential weakness, however,

the habit of realizing everything that words can describe is one which

has grown and flourished in the world. Descriptive names become

personal, the notion of personality stretches to take in even the most

abstract notions to which a name may be applied, and realized name,

epithet, and metaphor pass into interminable mythic growths by the

process which Max Müller has so aptly characterized as ‘a disease of

language.’ It would be difficult indeed to define the exact thought

lying at the root of every mythic conception, but in easy cases the

course of formation can be quite well followed. North American tribes

have personified Nipinūkhe and Pipūnūkhe, the beings who bring the

spring (nipin) and the winter (pipūn); Nipinūkhe brings the heat and

birds and verdure, Pipūnūkhe ravages with his cold winds, his ice and

snow; one comes as the other goes, and between them they divide the

world.[395] Just such personification as this furnishes the staple of

endless nature-metaphor in our own European poetry. In the springtime it

comes to be said that May has conquered Winter, his gate is open, he has

sent letters before him to tell the fruit that he is coming, his tent is

pitched, he brings the woods their summer clothing. Thus, when Night is

personified, we see how it comes to pass that Day is her son, and how

each in a heavenly chariot drives round the world. To minds in this

mythologic stage, the Curse becomes a personal being, hovering in space

till it can light upon its victim; Time and Nature arise as real

entities; Fate and Fortune become personal arbiters of our lives. But at

last, as the change of meaning goes on, thoughts that once had a more

real sense fade into mere poetic forms of speech. We have but to compare

the effect of ancient and modern personification on our own minds, to

understand something of what has happened in the interval. Milton may be

consistent, classical, majestic, when he tells how Sin and Death sat

within the gates of hell, and how they built their bridge of length

prodigious across the deep abyss to earth. Yet such descriptions leave

but scant sense of meaning on modern minds, and we are apt to say, as we

might of some counterfeit bronze from Naples, ‘For a sham antique how

cleverly it is done.’ Entering into the mind of the old Norseman, we

guess how much more of meaning than the cleverest modern imitation can

carry, lay in his pictures of Hel, the death-goddess, stern and grim and

livid, dwelling in her high and strong-barred house, and keeping in her

nine worlds the souls of the departed; Hunger is her dish, Famine is her

knife, Care is her bed, and Misery her curtain. When such old material

descriptions are transferred to modern times, in spite of all the

accuracy of reproduction their spirit is quite changed. The story of the

monk who displayed among his relics the garments of St. Faith is to us

only a jest; and we call it quaint humour when Charles Lamb, falling old

and infirm, once wrote to a friend, ‘My bed-fellows are Cough and Cramp;

we sleep three in a bed.’ Perhaps we need not appreciate the drollery

any the less for seeing in it at once a consequence and a record of a

past intellectual life.

The distinction of grammatical gender is a process intimately connected

with the formation of myths. Grammatical gender is of two kinds. What

may be called sexual gender is familiar to all classically-educated

Englishmen, though their mother tongue has mostly lost its traces. Thus

in Latin not only are such words as _homo_ and _femina_ classed

naturally as masculine and feminine, but such words as _pes_ and

_gladius_ are made masculine, and _biga_ and _navis_ feminine, and the

same distinction is actually drawn between such abstractions as _honos_

and _fides_. That sexless objects and ideas should thus be classed as

male and female, in spite of a new gender—the neuter or ‘neither’

gender—having been defined, seems in part explained by considering this

latter to have been of later formation, and the original Indo-European

genders to have been only masculine and feminine, as is actually the

case in Hebrew. Though the practice of attributing sex to objects that

have none is not easy to explain in detail, yet there seems nothing

mysterious in its principles, to judge from one at least of its main

ideas, which is still quite intelligible. Language makes an admirably

appropriate distinction between strong and weak, stern and gentle, rough

and delicate, when it contrasts them as male and female. It is possible

to understand even such fancies as those which Pietro della Valle

describes among the mediæval Persians, distinguishing between male and

female, that is to say, practically between robust and tender, even in

such things as food and cloth, air and water, and prescribing their

proper use accordingly.[396] And no phrase could be more plain and

forcible than that of the Dayaks of Borneo, who say of a heavy downpour

of rain, ‘ujatn arai, ‘sa!’—‘a _he_ rain this!’[397] Difficult as it may

be to decide how far objects and thoughts were classed in language as

male and female because they were personified, and how far they were

personified because they were classed as male and female, it is evident

at any rate that these two processes fit together and promote each

other.[398]

Moreover, in studying languages which lie beyond the range of common

European scholarship, it is found that the theory of grammatical gender

must be extended into a wider field. The Dravidian languages of South

India make the interesting distinction between a ‘high-caste or major

gender,’ which includes rational beings, i.e. deities and men, and a

‘caste-less or minor gender,’ which includes irrational objects, whether

living animals or lifeless things.[399] The distinction between an

animate and an inanimate gender appears with especial import in a family

of North American Indian languages, the Algonquin. Here not only do all

animals belong to the animate gender, but also the sun, moon, and stars,

thunder and lightning, as being personified creatures. The animate

gender, moreover, includes not only trees and fruits, but certain

exceptional lifeless objects which appear to owe this distinction to

their special sanctity or power; such are the stone which serves as the

altar of sacrifice to the manitus, the bow, the eagle’s feather, the

kettle, tobacco-pipe, drum, and wampum. Where the whole animal is

animate, parts of its body considered separately may be inanimate—hand

or foot, beak or wing. Yet even here, for special reasons, special

objects are treated as of animate gender; such are the eagle’s talons,

the bear’s claws, the beaver’s castor, the man’s nails, and other

objects for which there is claimed a peculiar or mystic power.[400] If

to anyone it seems surprising that savage thought should be steeped

through and through in mythology, let him consider the meaning that is

involved in a grammar of nature like this. Such a language is the very

reflexion of a mythic world.

There is yet another way in which language and mythology can act and

re-act on one another. Even we, with our blunted mythologic sense,

cannot give an individual name to a lifeless object, such as a boat or a

weapon, without in the very act imagining for it something of a personal

nature. Among nations whose mythic conceptions have remained in full

vigour, this action may be yet more vivid. Perhaps very low savages may

not be apt to name their implements or their canoes as though they were

live people, but races a few stages above them show the habit in

perfection. Among the Zulus we hear of names for clubs, Igumgehle or

Glutton, U-nothlola-mazibuko or He-who-watches-the-fords; among names

for assagais are Imbubuzi or Groan-causer, U-silo-si-lambile or Hungry

Leopard, and the weapon being also used as an implement, a certain

assagai bears the peaceful name of U-simbela-banta-bami,

He-digs-up-for-my-children.[401] A similar custom prevailed among the

New Zealanders. The traditions of their ancestral migrations tell how

Ngahue made from his jasper stone those two sharp axes whose names were

Tutauru and Hauhau-te-rangi; how with these axes were shaped the canoes

Arawa and Tainui; how the two stone anchors of Te Arawa were

called Toka-parore or Wrystone, and Tu-te-rangi-haruru or

Like-to-the-roaring-sky. These legends do not break off in a remote

past, but carry on a chronicle which reaches into modern times. It is

only lately, the Maoris say, that the famous axe Tutauru was lost, and

as for the ear-ornament named Kaukau-matua, which was made from a chip

of the same stone, they declare that it was not lost till 1846, when its

owner, Te Heuheu, perished in a landslip.[402] Up from this savage level

the same childlike habit of giving personal names to lifeless objects

may be traced, as we read of Thor’s hammer, Miölnir, whom the giants

know as he comes flying through the air, or of Arthur’s brand,

Excalibur, caught by the arm clothed in white samite when Sir Bedivere

flung him back into the lake, or of the Cid’s mighty sword Tizona, the

Firebrand, whom he vowed to bury in his own breast were she overcome

through cowardice of his.

The teachings of a childlike primæval philosophy ascribing personal life

to nature at large, and the early tyranny of speech over the human mind,

have thus been two great and, perhaps, greatest agents in mythologic

development. Other causes, too, have been at work, which will be noticed

in connexion with special legendary groups, and a full list, could it be

drawn up, might include as contributories many other intellectual

actions. It must be thoroughly understood, however, that such

investigation of the processes of myth-formation demands a lively sense

of the state of men’s minds in the mythologic period. When the Russians

in Siberia listened to the talk of the rude Kirgis, they stood amazed at

the barbarians’ ceaseless flow of poetic improvisation, and exclaimed,

‘Whatever these people see gives birth to fancies!’ Just so the

civilized European may contrast his own stiff orderly prosaic thought

with the wild shifting poetry and legend of the old myth-maker, and may

say of him that everything he saw gave birth to fancy. Wanting the power

of transporting himself into this imaginative atmosphere, the student

occupied with the analysis of the mythic world may fail so pitiably in

conceiving its depth and intensity of meaning, as to convert it into

stupid fiction. Those can see more justly who have the poet’s gift of

throwing their minds back into the world’s older life, like the actor

who for a moment can forget himself and become what he pretends to be.

Wordsworth, that ‘modern ancient,’ as Max Müller has so well called him,

could write of Storm and Winter, or of the naked Sun climbing the sky,

as though he were some Vedic poet at the head-spring of his race,

‘seeing’ with his mind’s eye a mythic hymn to Agni or Varuna. Fully to

understand an old-world myth needs not evidence and argument alone, but

deep poetic feeling.

Yet such of us as share but very little in this rare gift, may make

shift to let evidence in some measure stand in its stead. In the poetic

stage of thought we may see that ideal conceptions once shaped in the

mind must have assumed some such reality to grown-up men and women as

they still do to children. I have never forgotten the vividness with

which, as a child, I fancied I might look through a great telescope, and

see the constellations stand round the sky, red, green, and yellow, as I

had just been shown them on the celestial globe. The intensity of mythic

fancy may be brought even more nearly home to our minds by comparing it

with the morbid subjectivity of illness. Among the lower races, and high

above their level, morbid ecstasy brought on by meditation, fasting,

narcotics, excitement, or disease, is a state common and held in honour

among the very classes specially concerned with mythic idealism, and

under its influence the barriers between sensation and imagination break

utterly away. A North American Indian prophetess once related the story

of her first vision: At her solitary fast at womanhood she fell into an

ecstasy, and at the call of the spirits she went up to heaven by the

path that leads to the opening of the sky; there she heard a voice, and,

standing still, saw the figure of a man standing near the path, whose

head was surrounded by a brilliant halo, and his breast was covered with

squares; he said, ‘Look at me, my name is Oshauwauegeeghick, the Bright

Blue Sky!’ Recording her experience afterwards in the rude

picture-writing of her race, she painted this glorious spirit with the

hieroglyphic horns of power and the brilliant halo round his head.[403]

We know enough of the Indian pictographs to guess how a fancy with these

familiar details of the picture-language came into the poor excited

creature’s mind; but how far is our cold analysis from her utter belief

that in vision she had really seen this bright being, this Red Indian

Zeus. Far from being an isolated case, this is scarcely more than a fair

example of the rule that any idea shaped and made current by mythic

fancy, may at once acquire all the definiteness of fact. Even if to the

first shaper it be no more than lively imagination, yet when it comes to

be embodied in words and to pass from house to house, those who hear it

become capable of the most intense belief that it may be seen in

material shape, that it has been seen, that they themselves have seen

it. The South African who believes in a god with a crooked leg sees him

with a crooked leg in dreams and visions.[404] In the time of Tacitus it

was said, with a more poetic imagination, that in the far north of

Scandinavia men might see the very forms of the gods and the rays

streaming from their heads.[405] In the 6th century the famed Nile-god

might still be seen, in gigantic human form, rising waist-high from the

waters of his river.[406] Want of originality indeed seems one of the

most remarkable features in the visions of mystics. The stiff Madonnas

with their crowns and petticoats still transfer themselves from the

pictures on cottage walls to appear in spiritual personality to peasant

visionaries, as the saints who stood in vision before ecstatic monks of

old were to be known by their conventional pictorial attributes. When

the devil with horns, hoofs, and tail had once become a fixed image in

the popular mind, of course men saw him in this conventional shape. So

real had St. Anthony’s satyr-demon become to men’s opinion, that there

is a grave 13th century account of the mummy of such a devil being

exhibited at Alexandria; and it is not fifteen years back from the

present time that there was a story current at Teignmouth of a devil

walking up the walls of the houses, and leaving his fiendish backward

footprints in the snow. Nor is it vision alone that is concerned with

the delusive realization of the ideal; there is, as it were, a

conspiracy of all the senses to give it proof. To take a striking

instance: there is an irritating herpetic disease which gradually

encircles the body as with a girdle, whence its English name of the

_shingles_ (Latin, _cingulum_). By an imagination not difficult to

understand, this disease is attributed to a sort of coiling snake; and I

remember a case in Cornwall where a girl’s family waited in great fear

to see if the creature would stretch all round her, the belief being

that if the snake’s head and tail met, the patient would die. But a yet

fuller meaning of this fantastic notion is brought out in an account by

Dr. Bastian of a physician who suffered in a painful disease, as though

a snake were twined round him, and in whose mind this idea reached such

reality that in moments of excessive pain he could see the snake and

touch its rough scales with his hand.

The relation of morbid imagination to myth is peculiarly well instanced

in the history of a widespread belief, extending through savage,

barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediæval life, and surviving to this

day in European superstition. This belief, which may be conveniently

called the Doctrine of Werewolves, is that certain men, by natural gift

or magic art, can turn for a time into ravening wild beasts. The origin

of this idea is by no means sufficiently explained. What we are

especially concerned with is the fact of its prevalence in the world. It

may be noticed that such a notion is quite consistent with the animistic

theory that a man’s soul may go out of his body and enter that of a

beast or bird, and also with the opinion that men may be transformed

into animals; both these ideas having an important place in the belief

of mankind, from savagery onward. The doctrine of werewolves is

substantially that of a temporary metempsychosis or metamorphosis. Now

it really occurs that, in various forms of mental disease, patients

prowl shyly, long to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves

transformed into wild beasts. Belief in the possibility of such

transformation may have been the very suggesting cause which led the

patient to imagine it taking place in his own person. But at any rate

such insane delusions do occur, and physicians apply to them the

mythologic term of lycanthropy. The belief in men being werewolves,

man-tigers, and the like, may thus have the strong support of the very

witnesses who believe themselves to be such creatures. Moreover,

professional sorcerers have taken up the idea, as they do any morbid

delusion, and pretend to turn themselves and others into beasts by magic

art. Through the mass of ethnographic details relating to this subject,

there is manifest a remarkable uniformity of principle.

Among the non-Aryan indigenes of India, the tribes of the Garo Hills

describe as ‘transformation into a tiger’ a kind of temporary madness,

apparently of the nature of delirium tremens, in which the patient walks

like a tiger, shunning society.[407] The Khonds of Orissa say that some

among them have the art of ‘mleepa,’ and by the aid of a god become

‘mleepa’ tigers for the purpose of killing enemies, one of the man’s

four souls going out to animate the bestial form. Natural tigers, say

the Khonds, kill game to benefit men, who find it half devoured and

share it, whereas man-killing tigers are either incarnations of the

wrathful Earth-goddess, or they are transformed men.[408] Thus the

notion of man-tigers serves, as similar notions do elsewhere, to account

for the fact that certain individual wild beasts show a peculiar

hostility to man. Among the Ho of Singbhoom it is related, as an example

of similar belief, that a man named Mora saw his wife killed by a tiger,

and followed the beast till it led him to the house of a man named

Poosa. Telling Poosa’s relatives of what had occurred, they replied that

they were aware that he had the power of becoming a tiger, and

accordingly they brought him out bound, and Mora deliberately killed

him. Inquisition being made by the authorities, the family deposed, in

explanation of their belief, that Poosa had one night devoured an entire

goat, roaring like a tiger whilst eating it, and that on another

occasion he told his friends he had a longing to eat a particular

bullock, and that very night that very bullock was killed and devoured

by a tiger.[409] South-eastern Asia is not less familiar with the idea

of sorcerers turning into man-tigers and wandering after prey; thus the

Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula believe that when a man becomes a tiger to

revenge himself on his enemies, the transformation happens just before

he springs, and has been seen to take place.[410]

How vividly the imagination of an excited tribe, once inoculated with a

belief like this, can realize it into an event, is graphically told by

Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of South America. When a sorcerer, to

get the better of an enemy, threatens to change himself into a tiger and

tear his tribesmen to pieces, no sooner does he begin to roar, than all

the neighbours fly to a distance; but still they hear the feigned

sounds. ‘Alas!’ they cry, ‘his whole body is beginning to be covered

with tiger-spots!’ ‘Look, his nails are growing!’ the fear-struck women

exclaim, although they cannot see the rogue, who is concealed within his

tent, but distracted fear presents things to their eyes which have no

real existence. ‘You daily kill tigers in the plain without dread,’ said

the missionary; ‘why then should you weakly fear a false imaginary tiger

in the town?’ ‘You fathers don’t understand these matters,’ they reply

with a smile. ‘We never fear, but kill tigers in the plain, because we

can see them. Artificial tigers we do fear, because they can neither be

seen nor killed by us.’[411] The sorcerers who induced assemblies of

credulous savages to believe in this monstrous imposture, were also the

professional spiritualistic mediums of the tribes, whose business it was

to hold intercourse with the spirits of the dead, causing them to appear

visibly, or carrying on audible dialogues with them behind a curtain.

Africa is especially rich in myths of man-lions, man-leopards,

man-hyænas. In the Kanuri language of Bornu, there is grammatically

formed from the word ‘bultu,’ a hyæna, the verb ‘bultungin,’ meaning ‘I

transform myself into a hyæna;’ and the natives maintain that there is a

town called Kabutiloa, where every man possesses this faculty.[412] The

tribe of Budas in Abyssinia, iron-workers and potters, are believed to

combine with these civilized avocations the gift of the evil eye and the

power of turning into hyænas, wherefore they are excluded from society

and the Christian sacrament. In the ‘Life of Nathaniel Pearce,’ the

testimony of one Mr. Coffin is printed. A young Buda, his servant, came

for leave of absence, which was granted; but scarcely was Mr. Coffin’s

head turned to his other servants, when some of them called out,

pointing in the direction the Buda had taken, ‘Look, look, he is turning

himself into a hyæna.’ Mr. Coffin instantly looked round, the young man

had vanished, and a large hyæna was running off at about a hundred

paces’ distance, in full light on the open plain, without tree or bush

to intercept the view. The Buda came back next morning, and as usual

rather affected to countenance than deny the prodigy. Coffin says,

moreover, that the Budas wear a peculiar gold earring, and this he has

frequently seen in the ears of hyænas shot in traps, or speared by

himself and others; the Budas are dreaded for their magical arts, and

the editor of the book suggests that they put ear-rings in hyænas’ ears

to encourage a profitable superstition.[413] Mr. Mansfield Parkyns’ more

recent account shows how thoroughly this belief is part and parcel of

Abyssinian spiritualism. Hysterics, lethargy, morbid insensibility to

pain, and the ‘demoniacal possession,’ in which the patient speaks in

the name and language of an intruding spirit, are all ascribed to the

spiritual agency of the Budas. Among the cases described by Mr. Parkyns

was that of a servant-woman of his, whose illness was set down to the

influence of one of these blacksmith-hyænas, who wanted to get her out

into the forest and devour her. One night, a hyæna having been heard

howling and laughing near the village, the woman was bound hand and foot

and closely guarded in the hut, when suddenly, the hyæna calling close

by, her master, to his astonishment, saw her rise ‘without her bonds’

like a Davenport Brother, and try to escape.[414] In Ashango-land, M. Du

Chaillu tells the following suggestive story. He was informed that a

leopard had killed two men, and many palavers were held to settle the

affair; but this was no ordinary leopard, but a transformed man. Two of

Akondogo’s men had disappeared, and only their blood was found, so a

great doctor was sent for, who said it was Akondogo’s own nephew and

heir Akosho. The lad was sent for, and when asked by the chief, answered

that it was truly he who had committed the murders, that he could not

help it, for he had turned into a leopard, and his heart longed for

blood, and after each deed he had turned into a man again. Akondogo

loved the boy so much that he would not believe his confession, till

Akosho took him to a place in the forest, where lay the mangled bodies

of the two men, whom he had really murdered under the influence of this

morbid imagination. He was slowly burnt to death, all the people

standing by.[415]

Brief mention is enough for the comparatively well-known European

representatives of these beliefs. What with the mere continuance of old

tradition, what with the tricks of magicians, and what with cases of

patients under delusion believing themselves to have suffered

transformation, of which a number are on record, the European series of

details from ancient to modern ages is very complete. Virgil in the

Bucolics shows the popular opinion of his time that the arts of the

werewolf, the necromancer or ‘medium,’ and the witch, were different

branches of one craft, where he tells of Mœris as turning into a wolf by

the use of poisonous herbs, as calling up souls from the tombs, and as

bewitching away crops:—

‘Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venena

Ipse dedit Moeris; nascuntur plurima Ponto.

His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvis

Moerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,

Atque satas aliò vidi traducere messes.’[416]

Of the classic accounts, one of the most remarkable is Petronius

Arbiter’s story of the transformation of a ‘versipellis’ or ‘turnskin;’

this contains the episode of the wolf being wounded and the man who wore

its shape found with a similar wound, an idea not sufficiently proved to

belong originally to the lower races, but which becomes a familiar

feature in European stories of werewolves and witches. In Augustine’s

time magicians were persuading their dupes that by means of herbs they

could turn them to wolves, and the use of salve for this purpose is

mentioned at a comparatively modern date. Old Scandinavian sagas have

their werewolf warriors, and shape-changers (hamramr) raging in fits of

furious madness. The Danes still know a man who is a werewolf by his

eyebrows meeting, and thus resembling a butterfly, the familiar type of

the soul, ready to fly off and enter some other body. In the last year

of the Swedish war with Russia, the people of Kalmar said the wolves

which overran the land were transformed Swedish prisoners. From

Herodotus’ legend of the Neuri who turned every year for a few days to

wolves, we follow the idea on Slavonic ground to where Livonian

sorcerers bathe yearly in a river and turn for twelve days to wolves;

and widespread Slavonic superstition still declares that the wolves that

sometimes in bitter winters dare to attack men, are themselves

‘wilkolak,’ men bewitched into wolf’s shape. The modern Greeks instead

of the classic λυκάνθρωπος adopt the Slavonic term βρύκολακας (Bulgarian

‘vrkolak’); it is a man who falls into a cataleptic state, while his

soul enters a wolf and goes ravening for blood. Modern Germany,

especially in the north, still keeps up the stories of wolf-girdles, and

in December you must not ‘talk of the wolf’ by name, lest the werewolves

hear you. Our English word ‘werewolf,’ that is ‘man-wolf’ (the

‘verevulf’ of Cnut’s Laws), still reminds us of the old belief in our

own country, and if it has had for centuries but little place in English

folklore, this has been not so much for lack of superstition, as of

wolves. To instance the survival of the idea, transferred to another

animal, in the more modern witch-persecution, the following Scotch story

may serve. Certain witches at Thurso for a long time tormented an honest

fellow under the usual form of cats, till one night he put them to

flight with his broad-sword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than

the rest; taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman’s

leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner with but one

leg left. In France the creature has what is historically the same name

as our ‘werewolf;’ viz. in early forms ‘gerulphus,’ ‘garoul,’ and now

pleonastically ‘loup-garou.’ The parliament of Franche-Comté made a law

in 1573 to expel the werewolves; in 1598 the werewolf of Angers gave

evidence of his hands and feet turning to wolf’s claws; in 1603, in the

case of Jean Grenier, the judge declared lycanthropy to be an insane

delusion, not a crime. In 1658, a French satirical description of a

magician could still give the following perfect account of the

witch-werewolf: ‘I teach the witches to take the form of wolves and eat

children, and when anyone has cut off one of their legs (which proves to

be a man’s arm) I forsake them when they are discovered, and leave them

in the power of justice.’ Even in our own day the idea has by no means

died out of the French peasant’s mind. Not ten years ago in France, Mr.

Baring-Gould found it impossible to get a guide after dark across a wild

place haunted by a loup-garou, an incident which led him afterwards to

write his ‘Book of Werewolves,’ a monograph of this remarkable

combination of myth and madness.[417]

If we judged the myths of early ages by the unaided power of our modern

fancy, we might be left unable to account for their immense effect on

the life and belief of mankind. But by the study of such evidence as

this, it becomes possible to realize a usual state of the imagination

among ancient and savage peoples, intermediate between the conditions of

a healthy prosaic modern citizen and of a raving fanatic or a patient in

a fever-ward. A poet of our own day has still much in common with the

minds of uncultured tribes in the mythologic stage of thought. The rude

man’s imaginations may be narrow, crude, and repulsive, while the poet’s

more conscious fictions may be highly wrought into shapes of fresh

artistic beauty, but both share in that sense of the reality of ideas,

which fortunately or unfortunately modern education has proved so

powerful to destroy. The change of meaning of a single word will tell

the history of this transition, ranging from primæval to modern thought.

From first to last, the processes of _phantasy_ have been at work; but

where the savage could see _phantasms_, the civilized man has come to

amuse himself with _fancies_.

Footnote 345:

Grote, ‘History of Greece,’ vol. i. chaps. ix. xi.; Pausanias viii. 2;

Plutarch. Theseus 1.

Footnote 346:

See Banier, ‘La Mythologie et les Fables expliquées par l’Histoire,’

Paris, 1738; Lempriere, ‘Classical Dictionary,’ &c.

Footnote 347:

Hanusch, ‘Slav. Myth.’ p. 323; Grimm, D. M. p. 363; Latham, ‘Descr.

Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 448; I. J. Schmidt, ‘Forschungen,’ p. 13; J. G.

Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 268. See also Plutarch. Parallela xxxvi.;

Campbell, ‘Highland Tales,’ vol. i. p. 278; Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol.

ii. p. 169; Tylor, ‘Wild Men and Beast-children,’ in Anthropological

Review, May 1863.

Footnote 348:

Macrae in ‘As. Res.’ vol. vii. p. 189.

Footnote 349:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i. p. 51.

Footnote 350:

Grote, vol. iii. p. 104; vol. v. p. 22; Herodot. i. 189; vii. 34;

Porphyr. de Abstinentia, ii. 30; Pausan. i. 28; Pollux, ‘Onomasticon.’

Footnote 351:

Reid, ‘Essays,’ vol. iii. p. 113.

Footnote 352:

Wuttke, ‘Volksaberglaube,’ p. 210.

Footnote 353:

See chap. xi.

Footnote 354:

D’Orbigny, ‘L’Homme Américain,’ vol. ii. p. 102. See also De la Borde,

‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

Footnote 355:

Le Jeune in ‘Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p.

26. See Charlevoix, ‘Nouvelle France,’ vol. ii. p. 170.

Footnote 356:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Researches,’ vol. ii. p. 54; compare ‘Tanner’s

Narrative,’ p. 317; see also ‘Prose Edda,’ i. 11; ‘Early Hist. of

Mankind,’ p. 327.

Footnote 357:

Prescott, ‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 86; Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Comm. Real.’

i. c. 15; iii. c. 21.

Footnote 358:

Torquemada, ‘Monarquia Indiana,’ vi. 42; Clavigéro, vol. ii. p. 9;

Sahagun in Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico.’

Footnote 359:

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. p. 59.

Footnote 360:

Le Jeune, in ‘Relations des Jésuites dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1639,

p. 88.

Footnote 361:

Froebel, ‘Central America,’ p. 490.

Footnote 362:

Tac. Ann. xiii. 55.

Footnote 363:

Stanbridge, in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 301.

Footnote 364:

Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 295; Hayes, ‘Arctic Boat Journey,’ p. 254.

Footnote 365:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 276; see also De la Borde,

‘Caraibes,’ p. 525.

Footnote 366:

H. Yule in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. xiii. (1844), p. 628.

Footnote 367:

Origen, de Principiis, i. 7, 3; Pamphil. Apolog. pro Origine, ix. 84.

Footnote 368:

De Maistre, ‘Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg,’ vol. ii. p. 210, see 184.

Footnote 369:

Kaempfer, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684.

Footnote 370:

Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 265; see Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p.

140 (Indra’s elephants drinking).

Footnote 371:

Chron. Joh. Bromton, in ‘Hist. Angl. Scriptores,’ x. Ric. I. p. 1216.

Footnote 372:

Lane, ‘Thousand and one N.’ vol. i. p. 30, 7.

Footnote 373:

Krapf, ‘Travels,’ p. 198.

Footnote 374:

Lane, _ibid._ pp. 30, 42; Burton, ‘El Medinah and Meccah,’ vol. ii. p.

69; ‘Lake Regions,’ vol. i. p. 297; J. D. Hooker, ‘Himalayan

Journals,’ vol. i. p. 79; Tylor, ‘Mexico,’ p. 30; Tyerman and Bennet,

vol. ii. p. 362. (Hindu piçâcha = demon, whirlwind.)

Footnote 375:

Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 121.

Footnote 376:

Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 217.

Footnote 377:

Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. p. 294.

Footnote 378:

Burton, ‘Dahome,’ vol. ii. p. 148; see 242.

Footnote 379:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. p. 148.

Footnote 380:

Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 106.

Footnote 381:

Jas. Atkinson, ‘Customs of the Women of Persia,’ p. 49.

Footnote 382:

2 Sam. xxiv. 16; 2 Kings xix. 35.

Footnote 383:

G. S. Assemanni, ‘Bibliotheca Orientalis,’ ii. 86.

Footnote 384:

Hanusch, ‘Slav. Mythus,’ p. 322. Compare Torquemada, ‘Monarquia

Indiana,’ i. c. 14 (Mexico); Bastian, ‘Psychologie,’ p. 197.

Footnote 385:

Macpherson, ‘India,’ p. 357.

Footnote 386:

Markham, ‘Quichua Gr. and Dic.’ p. 9.

Footnote 387:

Welcker, ‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. i. p. 690.

Footnote 388:

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 231; Polack, ‘New Z.’ vol. i. p. 273.

Footnote 389:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 694-6.

Footnote 390:

Ward, ‘Hindoos,’ vol. i. p. 140.

Footnote 391:

Castren, ‘Finnische Mythologie,’ pp. 48, 49.

Footnote 392:

Delbrück in Lazarus and Steinthal’s Zeitschrift, vol. iii. p. 269.

Footnote 393:

Schoolcraft, part iii. p. 520.

Footnote 394:

Sicard, ‘Théorie des Signes, &c.’ Paris 1808, vol. ii. p. 634;

‘Personal Recollections’ by Charlotte Elizabeth, London, 1841, p. 182;

Dr. Orpen, ‘The Contrast,’ p. 25. Compare Meiners, vol. i. p. 42.

Footnote 395:

Le Jeune, in ‘Rel. des Jés. dans la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 13.

Footnote 396:

Pietro della Valle, ‘Viaggi,’ letter xvi.

Footnote 397:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. xxvii.

Footnote 398:

See remarks on the tendency of sex-denoting language to produce myth

in Africa, in W. H. Bleek, ‘Reynard the Fox in S. Afr.’ p. xx.;

‘Origin of Lang.’ p. xxiii.

Footnote 399:

Caldwell, ‘Comp. Gr. of Dravidian Langs.’ p. 172.

Footnote 400:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part ii. p. 366. For other cases see

especially Pott in Ersch and Gruber’s ‘Allg. Encyclop.’ art.

‘Geschlecht;’ also D. Forbes, ‘Persian Gr.’ p. 26; Latham, ‘Descr.

Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 60.

Footnote 401:

Callaway, ‘Relig. of Amazulu,’ p. 166.

Footnote 402:

Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ pp. 132, &c., 211; Shortland, ‘Traditions of N.

Z.’ p. 15.

Footnote 403:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part i. p. 391 and pl. 55.

Footnote 404:

Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ p. 124.

Footnote 405:

Tac. Germania, 45.

Footnote 406:

Maury, ‘Magie, &c.’ p. 175.

Footnote 407:

Eliot in ‘As. Res.’ vol. iii. p. 32.

Footnote 408:

Macpherson, ‘India,’ pp. 92, 99, 108.

Footnote 409:

Dalton, ‘Kols of Chota-Nagpore’ in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p. 32.

Footnote 410:

J. Cameron, ‘Malayan India,’ p. 393; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. i.

p. 119; vol. iii. pp. 261, 273; ‘As. Res.’ vol. vi. p. 173.

Footnote 411:

Dobrizhoffer, ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 77. See J. G. Müller, ‘Amer.

Urrelig.’ p. 63; Martius, ‘Ethn. Amer.’ vol. i. p. 652; Oviedo,

‘Nicaragua,’ p. 229; Piedrahita, ‘Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’ part i.

lib. c. 3.

Footnote 412:

Kölle, ‘Afr. Lit. and Kanuri Vocab.’ p. 275.

Footnote 413:

‘Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce’ (1810-9), ed. by J. J.

Halls, London, 1831, vol. i. p. 286; also ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. vi. p.

288; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 504.

Footnote 414:

Parkyns, ‘Life in Abyssinia’ (1853), vol. ii. p. 146.

Footnote 415:

Du Chaillu, ‘Ashango-land,’ p. 52. For other African details, see

Waitz, vol. ii. p. 343; J. L. Wilson, ‘W. Afr.’ pp. 222, 365, 398;

Burton, ‘E. Afr.’ p. 57; Livingstone, ‘S. Afr.’ pp. 615, 642; Magyar,

‘S. Afr.’ p. 136.

Footnote 416:

Virg. Bucol. ecl. viii. 95.

Footnote 417:

For collections of European evidence, see W. Hertz, ‘Der Werwolf;’

Baring-Gould, ‘Book of Werewolves;’ Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 1047; Dasent,

‘Norse Tales,’ Introd. p. cxix.; Bastian, ‘Mensch.’ vol. ii. pp. 32,

566; Brand, ‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. i. p. 312, vol. iii. p. 32; Lecky, ‘Hist.

of Rationalism,’ vol. i. p. 82. Particular details in Petron. Arbiter,

Satir. lxii.; Virgil. Eclog. viii. 97; Plin. viii. 34; Herodot. iv.

105; Mela ii. 1; Augustin. De Civ. Dei, xviii. 17; Hanusch, ‘Slav.

Myth.’ pp. 286, 320; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ p. 118.

CHAPTER IX.

MYTHOLOGY (_continued_).

Nature-myths, their origin, canon of interpretation, preservation of

original sense and significant names—Nature-myths of upper savage

races compared with related forms among barbaric and civilized

nations—Heaven and Earth as Universal Parents—Sun and Moon: Eclipse

and Sunset, as Hero or Maiden swallowed by Monster; Rising of Sun

from Sea and Descent to Under-World; Jaws of Night and Death,

Symplegades; Eye of Heaven, Eye of Odin and the Graiæ—Sun and Moon

as mythic civilizers—Moon, her inconstancy, periodical death and

revival—Stars, their generation—Constellations, their place in

Mythology and Astronomy—Wind and Tempest—Thunder—Earthquake.

From laying down general principles of myth-development, we may now

proceed to survey the class of Nature-myths, such especially as seem to

have their earliest source and truest meaning among the lower races of

mankind.

Science, investigating nature, discusses its facts and announces its

laws in technical language which is clear and accurate to trained

students, but which falls only as a mystic jargon on the ears of

barbarians, or peasants, or children. It is to the comprehension of just

these simple unschooled minds that the language of poetic myth is

spoken, so far at least as it is true poetry, and not its quaint

affected imitation. The poet contemplates the same natural world as the

man of science, but in his so different craft strives to render

difficult thought easy by making it visible and tangible, above all by

referring the being and movement of the world to such personal life as

his hearers feel within themselves, and thus working out in

far-stretched fancy the maxim that ‘Man is the measure of all things.’

Let but the key be recovered to this mythic dialect, and its complex and

shifting terms will translate themselves into reality, and show how far

legend, in its sympathetic fictions of war, love, crime, adventure,

fate, is only telling the perennial story of the world’s daily life. The

myths shaped out of those endless analogies between man and nature which

are the soul of all poetry, into those half-human stories still so full

to us of unfading life and beauty, are the masterpieces of an art

belonging rather to the past than to the present. The growth of myth has

been checked by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of

proportions and specimens—it is not only dying, but half dead, and

students are anatomising it. In this world one must do what one can, and

if the moderns cannot feel myth as their forefathers did, at least they

can analyse it. There is a kind of intellectual frontier within which he

must be who will sympathise with myth, while he must be without who will

investigate it, and it is our fortune that we live near this

frontier-line, and can go in and out. European scholars can still in a

measure understand the belief of Greeks or Aztecs or Maoris in their

native myths, and at the same time can compare and interpret them

without the scruples of men to whom such tales are history, and even

sacred history. Moreover, were the whole human race at a uniform level

of culture with ourselves, it would be hard to bring our minds to

conceive of tribes in the mental state to which the early growth of

nature-myth belongs, even as it is now hard to picture to ourselves a

condition of mankind lower than any that has been actually found. But

the various grades of existing civilization preserve the landmarks of a

long course of history, and there survive by millions savages and

barbarians whose minds still produce, in rude archaic forms, man’s early

mythic representations of nature.

Those who read for the first time the dissertations of the modern school

of mythologists, and sometimes even those who have been familiar with

them for years, are prone to ask, with half-incredulous appreciation of

the beauty and simplicity of their interpretations, can they be really

true? Can so great a part of the legendary lore of classic, barbarian,

and mediæval Europe be taken up with the everlasting depiction of Sun

and Sky, Dawn and Gloaming, Day and Night, Summer and Winter, Cloud and

Tempest; can so many of the personages of tradition, for all their

heroic human aspect, have their real origin in anthropomorphic myths of

nature? Without any attempt to discuss these opinions at large, it will

be seen that inspection of nature-mythology from the present point of

view tells in their favour, at least as to principle. The general theory

that such direct conceptions of nature as are so naïvely and even baldly

uttered in the Veda, are among the primary sources of myth, is enforced

by evidence gained elsewhere in the world. Especially the traditions of

savage races display mythic conceptions of the outer world, primitive

like those of the ancient Indian hymns, agreeing with them in their

general character, and often remarkably corresponding in their very

episodes. At the same time it must be clearly understood that the truth

of such a general principle is no warrant for all the particular

interpretations which mythologists claim to base upon it, for of these

in fact many are wildly speculative, and many hopelessly unsound.

Nature-myth demands indeed a recognition of its vast importance in the

legendary lore of mankind, but only so far as its claim is backed by

strong and legitimate evidence.

The close and deep analogies between the life of nature and the life of

man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who in

simile or in argument have told of light and darkness, of calm and

tempest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no

one-sided interpretation can be permitted to absorb into a single theory

such endless many-sided correspondences as these. Rash inferences which

on the strength of mere resemblance derive episodes of myth from

episodes of nature must be regarded with utter mistrust, for the student

who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of sun and

sky and dawn, will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them. It

may be judged by simple trial what such a method may lead to; no legend,

no allegory, no nursery rhyme, is safe from the hermeneutics of a

thorough-going mythologic theorist. Should he, for instance, demand as

his property the nursery ‘Song of Sixpence,’ his claim would be easily

established: obviously the four-and-twenty blackbirds are the

four-and-twenty hours, and the pie that holds them is the underlying

earth covered with the overarching sky; how true a touch of nature it is

that when the pie is opened, that is, when day breaks, the birds begin

to sing; the King is the Sun, and his counting out his money is pouring

out the sunshine, the golden shower of Danae; the Queen is the Moon, and

her transparent honey the moonlight; the Maid is the ‘rosy-fingered’

Dawn who rises before the Sun her master, and hangs out the clouds, his

clothes, across the sky; the particular blackbird who so tragically ends

the tale by snipping off her nose, is the hour of sunrise. The

time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing to prove it a Sun-myth,

that one thing being a proof by some argument more valid than analogy.

Or if historical characters be selected with any discretion, it is easy

to point out the solar episodes embodied in their lives. See Cortès

landing in Mexico, and seeming to the Aztecs their very Sun-priest

Quetzalcoatl, come back from the East to renew his reign of light and

glory; mark him deserting the wife of his youth, even as the Sun leaves

the Dawn, and again in later life abandoning Marina for a new bride;

watch his sun-like career of brilliant conquest, checkered with

intervals of storm, and declining to a death clouded with sorrow and

disgrace. The life of Julius Cæsar would fit as plausibly into a scheme

of solar myth; his splendid course as in each new land he came, and saw,

and conquered; his desertion of Cleopatra; his ordinance of the solar

year for men; his death at the hand of Brutus, like Sîfrit’s death at

the hand of Hagen in the Nibelungen Lied; his falling pierced with many

bleeding wounds, and shrouding himself in his cloak to die in darkness.

Of Cæsar, better than of Cassius his slayer, it might have been said in

the language of sun-myth:

‘... O setting sun,

As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night,

So in his red blood Cassius’ day is set;

The sun of Rome is set!’

Thus, in interpreting heroic legend as based on nature-myth,

circumstantial analogy must be very cautiously appealed to, and at any

rate there is need of evidence more cogent than vague likenesses between

human and cosmic life. Now such evidence is forthcoming at its strongest

in a crowd of myths, whose open meaning it would be wanton incredulity

to doubt, so little do they disguise, in name or sense, the familiar

aspects of nature which they figure as scenes of personal life. Even

where the tellers of legend may have altered or forgotten its earlier

mythic meaning, there are often sufficient grounds for an attempt to

restore it. In spite of change and corruption, myths are slow to lose

all consciousness of their first origin; as for instance, classical

literature retained enough of meaning in the great Greek sun-myth, to

compel even Lempriere of the Classical Dictionary to admit that Apollo

or Phœbus ‘is often confounded with the sun.’ For another instance, the

Greeks had still present to their thoughts the meaning of Argos

Panoptes, Io’s hundred-eyed, all-seeing guard who was slain by Hermes

and changed into the Peacock, for Macrobius writes as recognizing in him

the star-eyed heaven itself;[418] even as Indra, the Sky, is in Sanskrit

the ‘thousand-eyed’ (_sahasrâksha_, _sahasranayana_). In modern times

the thought is found surviving or reviving in a strange region of

language: whoever it was that brought argo as a word for ‘heaven’ into

the Lingua Furbesca or Robbers’ Jargon of Italy,[419] must have been

thinking of the starry sky watching him like Argus with his hundred

eyes. The etymology of names, moreover, is at once the guide and

safeguard of the mythologist. The obvious meaning of words did much to

preserve vestiges of plain sense in classic legend, in spite of all the

efforts of the commentators. There was no disputing the obvious facts

that Hēlios was the Sun, and Selēnē the Moon; and as for Jove, all the

nonsense of pseudo-history could not quite do away the idea that he was

really Heaven, for language continued to declare this in such

expressions as ‘sub Jove frigido.’ The explanation of the rape of

Persephone, as a nature-myth of the seasons and the fruits of the earth,

does not depend alone on analogy of incident, but has the very names to

prove its reality, Zeus, Hēlios, Dēmētēr—Heaven, and Sun, and Mother

Earth. Lastly, in stories of mythic beings who are the presiding genii

of star or mountain, tree or river, or heroes and heroines actually

metamorphosed into such objects, personification of nature is still

plainly evident; the poet may still as of old see Atlas bear the heavens

on his mighty shoulders, and Alpheus in impetuous course pursue the

maiden Arethusa.

In a study of the nature-myths of the world, it is hardly practicable to

start from the conceptions of the very lowest human tribes, and to work

upwards from thence to fictions of higher growth; partly because our

information is but meagre as to the beliefs of these shy and seldom

quite intelligible folk, and partly because the legends they possess

have not reached that artistic and systematic shape which they attain to

among races next higher in the scale. It therefore answers better to

take as a foundation the mythology of the North American Indians, the

South Sea Islanders, and other low-cultured tribes who best represent in

modern times the early mythologic period of human history. The survey

may be fitly commenced by a singularly perfect and purposeful cosmic

myth from New Zealand.

It seems long ago and often to have come into men’s minds, that the

overarching Heaven and the all-producing Earth are, as it were, a Father

and a Mother of the world, whose offspring are the living creatures,

men, and beasts, and plants. Nowhere, in the telling of this oft-told

tale, is present nature veiled in more transparent personification,

nowhere is the world’s familiar daily life repeated with more childlike

simplicity as a story of long past ages, than in the legend of ‘The

Children of Heaven and Earth’ written down by Sir George Grey among the

Maoris about the year 1850. From Rangi, the Heaven, and Papa, the Earth,

it is said, sprang all men and things, but sky and earth clave together,

and darkness rested upon them and the beings they had begotten, till at

last their children took counsel whether they should rend apart their

parents, or slay them. Then Tane-mahuta, father of forests, said to his

five great brethren, ‘It is better to rend them apart, and to let the

heaven stand far above us, and the earth lie under our feet. Let the sky

become as a stranger to us, but the earth remain close to us as our

nursing mother.’ So Rongo-ma-tane, god and father of the cultivated food

of man, arose and strove to separate the heaven and the earth; he

struggled, but in vain, and vain too were the efforts of Tangaroa,

father of fish and reptiles, and of Haumia-tikitiki, father of

wild-growing food, and of Tu-matauenga, god and father of fierce men.

Then slow uprises Tane-mahuta, god and father of forests, and wrestles

with his parents, striving to part them with his hands and arms. ‘Lo, he

pauses; his head is now firmly planted on his mother the earth, his feet

he raises up and rests against his father the skies, he strains his back

and limbs with mighty effort. Now are rent apart Rangi and Papa, and

with cries and groans of woe they shriek aloud.... But Tane-mahuta

pauses not; far, far beneath him he presses down the earth; far, far

above him he thrusts up the sky.’ But Tawhiri-ma-tea, father of winds

and storms, had never consented that his mother should be torn from her

lord, and now there arose in his breast a fierce desire to war against

his brethren. So the Storm-god rose and followed his father to the

realms above, hurrying to the sheltered hollows of the boundless skies,

to hide and cling and nestle there. Then came forth his progeny, the

mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds, dense, dark, fiery, wildly

drifting, wildly bursting; and in their midst their father rushed upon

his foe. Tane-mahuta and his giant forests stood unconscious and

unsuspecting when the raging hurricane burst on them, snapping the

mighty trees across, leaving trunks and branches rent and torn upon the

ground for the insect and the grub to prey on. Then the father of storms

swooped down to lash the waters into billows whose summits rose like

cliffs, till Tangaroa, god of ocean and father of all that dwell

therein, fled affrighted through his seas. His children, Ika-tere, the

father of fish, and Tu-te-wehiwehi, the father of reptiles, sought where

they might escape for safety; the father of fish cried, ‘Ho, ho, let us

all escape to the sea,’ but the father of reptiles shouted in answer,

‘Nay, nay, let us rather fly inland,’ and so these creatures separated,

for while the fish fled into the sea, the reptiles sought safety in the

forests and scrubs. But the sea-god Tangaroa, furious that his children

the reptiles should have deserted him, has ever since waged war on his

brother Tane who gave them shelter in his woods, Tane attacks him in

return, supplying the offspring of his brother Tu-matauenga, father of

fierce men, with canoes and spears and fish-hooks made from his trees,

and with nets woven from his fibrous plants, that they may destroy

withal the fish, the Sea-god’s children; and the Sea-god turns in wrath

upon the Forest-god, overwhelms his canoes with the surges of the sea,

sweeps with floods his trees and houses into the boundless ocean. Next

the god of storms pushed on to attack his brothers the gods and

progenitors of the tilled food and the wild, but Papa, the Earth, caught

them up and hid them, and so safely were these her children concealed by

their mother, that the Storm-god sought for them in vain. So he fell

upon the last of his brothers, the father of fierce men, but him he

could not even shake, though he put forth all his strength. What cared

Tu-matauenga for his brother’s wrath? He it was who has planned the

destruction of their parents, and had shown himself brave and fierce in

war; his brethren had yielded before the tremendous onset of the

Storm-god and his progeny; the Forest-god and his offspring had been

broken and torn in pieces; the Sea-god and his children had fled to the

depths of the ocean or the recesses of the shore; the gods of food had

been safe in hiding; but man still stood erect and unshaken upon the

bosom of his mother Earth, and at last the hearts of the Heaven and the

Storm became tranquil, and their passion was assuaged.

But now Tu-matauenga, father of fierce men, took thought how he might be

avenged upon his brethren who had left him unaided to stand against the

god of storms. He twisted nooses of the leaves of the whanake tree, and

the birds and beasts, children of Tane the Forest-god, fell before him;

he netted nets from the flax-plant, and dragged ashore the fish, the

children of Tangaroa the Sea-god; he found in the hiding-place

underground the children of Rongo-ma-tane, the sweet potato and all

cultivated food, and the children of Haumia-tikitiki, the fern-root and

all wild-growing food, he dug them up and let them wither in the sun.

Yet, though he overcame his four brothers, and they became his food,

over the fifth he could not prevail, and Tawhiri-ma-tea, the Storm-god,

still ever attacks him in tempest and hurricane, striving to destroy him

both by sea and land. It was the bursting forth of the Storm-god’s wrath

against his brethren that caused the dry land to disappear beneath the

waters: the beings of ancient days who thus submerged the land were

Terrible-rain, Long-continued-rain, Fierce-hailstorms; and their progeny

were Mist, and Heavy-dew, and Light-dew, and thus but little of the dry

land was left standing above the sea. Then clear light increased in the

world, and the beings who had been hidden between Rangi and Papa before

they were parted, now multiplied upon the earth. ‘Up to this time the

vast Heaven has still ever remained separated from his spouse the Earth.

Yet their mutual love still continues; the soft warm sighs of her loving

bosom still ever rise up to him, ascending from the woody mountains and

valleys, and men call these mists; and the vast Heaven, as he mourns

through the long nights his separation from his beloved, drops frequent

tears upon her bosom, and men seeing these term them dew-drops.’[420]

The rending asunder of heaven and earth is a far-spread Polynesian

legend, well known in the island groups that lie away to the

north-east.[421] Its elaboration, however, into the myth here sketched

out was probably native New Zealand work. Nor need it be supposed that

the particular form in which the English governor took it down among the

Maori priests and tale-tellers, is of ancient date. The story carries in

itself evidence of an antiquity of character which does not necessarily

belong to mere lapse of centuries. Just as the adzes of polished jade

and the cloaks of tied flax-fibre, which these New Zealanders were using

but yesterday, are older in their place in history than the bronze

battle-axes and linen mummy cloths of ancient Egypt, so the Maori poet’s

shaping of nature into nature-myth belongs to a stage of intellectual

history which was passing away in Greece five-and-twenty centuries ago.

The myth-maker’s fancy of Heaven and Earth as father and mother of all

things naturally suggested the legend that they in old days abode

together, but have since been torn asunder. In China the same idea of

the universal parentage is accompanied by a similar legend of the

separation. Whether or not there is historical connexion here between

the mythology of Polynesia and China, I will not guess, but certainly

the ancient Chinese legend of the separation of heaven and earth in the

primæval days of Puang-Ku seems to have taken the very shape of the

Polynesian myth: ‘Some say a person called Puang-Ku opened or separated

the heavens and the earth, they previously being pressed down close

together.’[422] As to the mythic details in the whole story of ‘The

Children of Heaven and Earth,’ there is scarcely a thought that is not

still transparent, scarcely even a word that has lost its meaning to us.

The broken and stiffened traditions which our fathers fancied relics of

ancient history, are, as has been truly said, records of a past which

was never present; but the simple nature-myth, as we find it in its

actual growth, or reconstruct it from its legendary remnants, may be

rather called the record of a present which is never past. The battle of

the storm against the forest and the ocean is still waged before our

eyes; we still look upon the victory of man over the creatures of the

land and sea; the food-plants still hide in their mother earth, and the

fish and reptiles find shelter in the ocean and the thicket; but the

mighty forest-trees stand with their roots firm planted in the ground,

while with their branches they push up and up against the sky. And if we

have learnt the secret of man’s thought in the childhood of his race, we

may still realize with the savage the personal being of the ancestral

Heaven and Earth.

The idea of the Earth as a mother is more simple and obvious, and no

doubt for that reason more common in the world, than the idea of the

Heaven as a father. Among the native races of America the Earth-mother

is one of the great personages of mythology. The Peruvians worshipped

her as Mama-Pacha or ‘Mother-Earth,’ and the Caribs, when there was an

earthquake, said that it was their mother Earth dancing, and signifying

to them to dance and make merry likewise, which accordingly they did.

Among the North-American Indians the Comanches call on the Earth as

their mother, and the Great Spirit as their father. A story told by

Gregg shows a somewhat different thought of mythic parentage. General

Harrison once called the Shawnee chief Tecumseh for a talk:—‘Come here,

Tecumseh, and sit by your father!’ he said. ‘You my father!’ replied the

chief, with a stern air. ‘No! yonder sun (pointing towards it) is my

father, and the earth is my mother, so I will rest on her bosom,’ and he

sat down on the ground. Like this was the Aztec fancy, as it seems from

this passage in a Mexican prayer to Tezcatlipoca, offered in time of

war: ‘Be pleased, O our Lord, that the nobles who shall die in the war

be peacefully and joyously received by the Sun and the Earth, who are

the loving father and mother of all.’[423] In the mythology of Finns,

Lapps, and Esths, Earth-Mother is a divinely honoured personage.[424]

Through the mythology of our own country the same thought may be traced,

from the days when the Anglo-Saxon called upon the Earth, ‘Hâl wes thu

folde, fira modor,’ ‘Hail thou Earth, men’s mother,’ to the time when

mediæval Englishmen made a riddle of her, asking ‘Who is Adam’s mother?’

and poetry continued what mythology was letting fall, when Milton’s

archangel promised Adam a life to last

‘... till like ripe fruit, thou drop

Into thy mother’s lap.’[425]

Among the Aryan race, indeed, there stands, wide and firm, the double

myth of the ‘two great parents,’ as the Rig-Veda calls them. They are

_Dyaushpitar_, Ζεὺς πατήρ, _Jupiter_, the ‘Heaven-father,’ and _Prthivî

mâtar_, the ‘Earth-mother;’ and their relation is still kept in mind in

the ordinance of Brahman marriage according to the Yajur-Veda, where the

bridegroom says to the bride, ‘I am the sky, thou art the earth, come

let us marry.’ When Greek poets called Ouranos and Gaia, or Zeus and

Dēmētēr, husband and wife, what they meant was the union of Heaven and

Earth; and when Plato said that the earth brought forth men, but God was

their shaper, the same old mythic thought must have been present to his

mind.[426] It reappears in ancient Scythia;[427] and again in China,

where Heaven and Earth are called in the Shu-King ‘Father and Mother of

all things.’ Chinese philosophy naturally worked this idea into the

scheme of the two great principles of nature, the Yin and Yang, male and

female, heavenly and earthly, and from this disposition of nature they

drew a practical moral lesson: Heaven, said the philosophers of the Sung

dynasty, made man, and earth made woman and therefore woman is to be

subject to man as Earth to Heaven.[428]

Entering next upon the world-wide myths of Sun, Moon, and Stars, the

regularity and consistency of human imagination may be first displayed

in the beliefs connected with eclipses. It is well known that these

phenomena, to us now crucial instances of the exactness of natural laws,

are, throughout the lower stages of civilization, the very embodiment of

miraculous disaster. Among the native races of America it is possible to

select a typical series of myths describing and explaining, according to

the rules of savage philosophy, these portents of dismay. The Chiquitos

of the southern continent thought the Moon was hunted across the sky by

huge dogs, who caught and tore her till her light was reddened and

quenched by the blood flowing from her wounds, and then the Indians,

raising a frightful howl and lamentation, would shoot across into the

sky to drive the monsters off. The Caribs, thinking that the demon

Maboya, hater of all light, was seeking to devour the Sun and Moon,

would dance and howl in concert all night long to scare him away. The

Peruvians, imagining such an evil spirit in the shape of a monstrous

beast, raised the like frightful din when the Moon was eclipsed,

shouting, sounding musical instruments, and beating the dogs to join

their howls to the hideous chorus. Nor are such ideas extinct in our own

days. In the Tupi language, the proper description of a solar eclipse is

‘oarasu jaguaretê vü,’ that is, ‘Jaguar has eaten Sun;’ and the full

meaning of this phrase is displayed by tribes who still shout and let

fly burning arrows to drive the devouring beast from his prey. On the

northern continent, again, some savages believed in a great

sun-swallowing dog, while others would shoot up arrows to defend their

luminaries against the enemies they fancied attacking them. By the side

of these prevalent notions there occur, however, various others; thus

the Caribs could imagine the eclipsed Moon hungry, sick, or dying; the

Peruvians could fancy the Sun angry and hiding his face, and the sick

Moon likely to fall in total darkness, and bring on the end of the

world; the Hurons thought the Moon sick, and explained their customary

charivari of shouting men and howling dogs as performed to recover her

from her complaint. Passing on from these most primitive conceptions, it

appears that natives of both South and North America fell upon

philosophic myths somewhat nearer the real facts of the case, insomuch

as they admit that the Sun and Moon cause eclipses of one another. In

Cumana, men thought that the wedded Sun and Moon quarrelled, and that

one of them was wounded; and the Ojibwas endeavoured by tumultuous noise

to distract the two from such a conflict. The course of progressive

science went far beyond this among the Aztecs, who, as part of their

remarkable astronomical knowledge, seem to have had an idea of the real

cause of eclipses, but who kept up a relic of the old belief by

continuing to speak in mythologic phrase of the Sun and Moon being

eaten.[429] Elsewhere in the lower culture, there prevailed similar

mythic conceptions. In the South Sea Islands some supposed the Sun and

Moon to be swallowed by an offended deity, whom they therefore induced,

by liberal offerings, to eject the luminaries from his stomach.[430] In

Sumatra we have the comparatively scientific notion that an eclipse has

to do with the action of the Sun and Moon on one another, and,

accordingly, they make a loud noise with sounding instruments to prevent

the one from devouring the other.[431] So, in Africa, there may be found

both the rudest theory of the Eclipse-monster, and the more advanced

conception that a solar eclipse is ‘the Moon catching the Sun.’[432]

It is no cause for wonder that an aspect of the heavens so awful as an

eclipse should in times of astronomic ignorance have filled men’s minds

with terror of a coming destruction of the world. It may help us still

to realize this thought if we consider how, as Calmet pointed out many

years ago, the prophet Joel adopted the plainest words of description of

the solar and lunar eclipse, ‘The sun shall be turned into darkness and

the moon into blood;’ nor could the thought of any catastrophe of nature

have brought his hearers face to face with a more lurid and awful

picture. But to our minds, now that the eclipse has long passed from the

realm of mythology into the realm of science, such words can carry but a

feeble glimmer of their early meaning. The ancient doctrine of the

eclipse has not indeed lost its whole interest. To trace it upward from

its early savage stages to the period when astronomy claimed it, and to

follow the course of the ensuing conflict over it between theology and

science—ended among ourselves but still being sluggishly fought out

among less cultured nations—this is to lay open a chapter of the history

of opinion, from which the student who looks forward as well as back may

learn grave lessons.

There is reason to consider most or all civilized nations to have

started from the myth of the Eclipse-monster in forms as savage as those

of the New World. It prevails still among the great Asiatic nations. The

Hindus say that the demon Râhu insinuated himself among the gods, and

obtained a portion of the amrita, the drink of immortality; Vishnu smote

off the now immortal head, which still pursues the Sun and Moon whose

watchful gaze detected his presence in the divine assembly. Another

version of the myth is that there are two demons, Râhu and Ketu, who

devour Sun and Moon respectively, and who are described in conformity

with the phenomena of eclipses, Râhu being black, and Ketu red; the

usual charivari is raised by the populace to drive them off, though

indeed, as their bodies have been cut off at the neck, their prey must

of natural course slip out as soon as swallowed. Or Râhu and Ketu are

the head and body of the dissevered demon, by which conception the

Eclipse-monster is most ingeniously adapted to advanced astronomy, the

head and tail being identified with the ascending and descending nodes.

The following remarks on the eclipse-controversy, made by Mr. Samuel

Davis a century ago in the Asiatick Researches, are still full of

interest. ‘It is evident, from what has been explained, that the

Pūndits, learned in the Jyotish shastrū, have truer notions of the form

of earth and the economy of the universe than are ascribed to the

Hindoos in general: and that they must reject the ridiculous belief of

the common Brahmūns, that eclipses are occasioned by the intervention of

the monster Rahoo, with many other particulars equally unscientific and

absurd. But as this belief is founded on explicit and positive

declarations contained in the védūs and pooranus, the divine authority

of which writings no devout Hindoo can dispute, the astronomers have

some of them cautiously explained such passages in those writings as

disagree with the principles of their own science: and where

reconciliation was impossible, have apologized, as well as they could,

for propositions necessarily established in the practice of it, by

observing, that certain things, as stated in other shastrūs, might have

been so formerly, and may be so still; but for astronomical purposes,

astronomical rules must be followed.’[433] It is not easy to give a more

salient example than this of the consequence of investing philosophy

with the mantle of religion, and allowing priests and scribes to convert

the childlike science of an early age into the sacred dogma of a late

one. Asiatic peoples under Buddhist influence show the eclipse-myth in

its different stages. The rude Mongols make a clamour of rough music to

drive the attacking Aracho (Râhu) from Sun or Moon. A Buddhist version

mentioned by Dr. Bastian describes Indra the Heaven-god pursuing Râhu

with his thunderbolt, and ripping open his belly, so that although he

can swallow the heavenly bodies, he lets them slip out again.[434] The

more civilized nations of South-East Asia, accepting the eclipse-demons

Râhu and Ketu, were not quite staggered in their belief by the

foreigners’ power of foretelling eclipses, nor even by learning roughly

to do the same themselves. The Chinese have official announcement of an

eclipse duly made beforehand, and then proceed to encounter the ominous

monster, when he comes, with gongs and bells and the regularly appointed

prayers. Travellers of a century or two ago relate curious details of

such combined belief in the dragon and the almanac, culminating in an

ingenious argument to account for the accuracy of the Europeans’

predictions. These clever people, the Siamese said, know the monster’s

mealtimes, and can tell how hungry he will be, that is, how large an

eclipse will be required to satisfy him.[435]

In Europe popular mythology kept up ideas, either of a fight of sun or

moon with celestial enemies, or of the moon’s fainting or sickness; and

especially remnants of such archaic belief are manifested in the

tumultuous clamour raised in defence or encouragement of the afflicted

luminary. The Romans flung firebrands into the air, and blew trumpets,

and clanged brazen pots and pans, ‘laboranti succurrere lunae.’ Tacitus,

relating the story of the soldiers’ mutiny against Tiberius, tells how

their plan was frustrated by the moon suddenly languishing in a clear

sky (luna claro repente coelo visa languescere): in vain by clang of

brass and blast of trumpet they strove to drive away the darkness, for

clouds came up and covered all, and the plotters saw, lamenting, that

the gods turned away from their crime.[436] In the period of the

conversion of Europe, Christian teachers began to attack the pagan

superstition, and to urge that men should no longer clamour and cry

‘vince luna!’ to aid the moon in her sore danger; and at last there came

a time when the picture of the sun or moon in the dragon’s mouth became

a mere old-fashioned symbol to represent eclipses in the calendar, and

the saying, ‘Dieu garde la lune des loups’ passed into a mocking proverb

against fear of remote danger. Yet the ceremonial charivari is mentioned

in our own country in the seventeenth century: ‘The Irish or Welsh

during eclipses run about beating kettles and pans, thinking their

clamour and vexations available to the assistance of the higher orbes.’

In 1654 Nuremberg went wild with terror of an impending solar eclipse;

the markets ceased, the churches were crowded with penitents, and a

record of the event remains in the printed thanksgiving which was issued

(Danckgebeth nach vergangener höchstbedrohlich und hochschädlicher

Sonnenfinstenuss), which gives thanks to the Almighty for granting to

poor terrified sinners the grace of covering the sky with clouds, and

sparing them the sight of the awful sign in heaven. In our own times, a

writer on French folklore was surprised during a lunar eclipse to hear

sighs and exclamations, ‘Mon Dieu, qu’elle est souffrante!’ and found on

enquiry that the poor moon was believed to be the prey of some invisible

monster seeking to devour her.[437] No doubt such late survivals have

belonged in great measure to the ignorant crowd, for the educated

classes of the West have never suffered in its extreme the fatal Chinese

union of scepticism and superstition. Yet if it is our mood to bewail

the slowness with which knowledge penetrates the mass of mankind, there

stand dismal proofs before us here. The eclipse remained an omen of fear

almost up to our own century, and could rout a horror-stricken army, and

fill Europe with dismay, a thousand years after Pliny had written in

memorable words his eulogy of the astronomers; those great men, he said,

and above ordinary mortals, who, by discovering the laws of the heavenly

bodies, had freed the miserable mind of men from terror at the portents

of eclipses.

Day is daily swallowed up by Night, to be set free again at dawn, and

from time to time suffers a like but shorter durance in the maw of the

Eclipse and the Storm-cloud; Summer is overcome and prisoned by dark

Winter, to be again set free. It is a plausible opinion that such scenes

from the great nature-drama of the conflict of light and darkness are,

generally speaking, the simple facts, which in many lands and ages have

been told in mythic shape, as legends of a Hero or maiden devoured by a

Monster, and hacked out again or disgorged. The myths just displayed

show with absolute distinctness, that myth can describe eclipse as the

devouring and setting free of the personal sun and moon by a monster.

The following Maori legend will supply proof as positive that the

episode of the Sun’s or the Day’s death in sunset may be dramatized into

a tale of a personal solar hero plunging into the body of the personal

Night.

Maui, the New Zealand cosmic hero, at the end of his glorious career

came back to his father’s country, and was told that here, perhaps, he

might be overcome, for here dwelt his mighty ancestress, Hine-nui-te-po,

Great-Daughter-of-Night, whom ‘you may see flashing, and as it were

opening and shutting there, where the horizon meets the sky; what you

see yonder shining so brightly-red, are her eyes, and her teeth are as

sharp and hard as pieces of volcanic glass; her body is like that of a

man; and as for the pupils of her eyes, they are jasper; and her hair is

like the tangles of long sea-weed, and her mouth is like that of a

barra-couta.’ Maui boasted of his former exploits, and said, ‘Let us

fearlessly seek whether men are to die or live for ever;’ but his father

called to mind an evil omen, that when he was baptizing Maui he had left

out part of the fitting prayers, and therefore he knew that his son must

perish. Yet he said, ‘O, my last-born, and the strength of my old age,

... be bold, go and visit your great ancestress, who flashes so fiercely

there where the edge of the horizon meets the sky.’ Then the birds came

to Maui to be his companions in the enterprise, and it was evening when

they went with him, and they came to the dwelling of Hine-nui-te-po, and

found her fast asleep. Maui charged the birds not to laugh when they saw

him creep into the old chieftainess, but when he had got altogether

inside her, and was coming out of her mouth, then they might laugh long

and loud. So Maui stripped off his clothes, and the skin on his hips,

tattooed by the chisel of Uetonga, looked mottled and beautiful, like a

mackerel’s, as he crept in. The birds kept silence, but when he was in

up to his waist, the little tiwakawaka could hold its laughter in no

longer, and burst out loud with its merry note; then Maui’s ancestress

awoke, closed on him and caught him tight, and he was killed. Thus died

Maui, and thus death came into the world, for Hine-nui-te-po is the

goddess both of night and death, and had Maui entered into her body and

passed safely through her, men would have died no more. The New

Zealanders hold that the Sun descends at night into his cavern, bathes

in the Wai Ora Tane, the Water of Life, and returns at dawn from the

under-world; hence we may interpret the thought that if Man could

likewise descend into Hades and return, his race would be immortal.[438]

Further evidence that Hine-nui-te-po is the deity of Night or Hades,

appears in another New Zealand myth. Tane, descending to the shades

below in pursuit of his wife, comes to the Night (Po) of Hine-a-te-po,

Daughter-of-Night, who says to him, ‘I have spoken thus to her “Return

from this place, as I, Hine-a-te-po, am here. I am the barrier between

night and day.”’[439] It is seldom that solar characteristics are more

distinctly marked in the several details of a myth than they are here.

In the list of myths of engulfing monsters, there are others which seem

to display, with a clearness almost approaching this, an origin

suggested by the familiar spectacle of Day and Night, or Light and

Darkness. The simple story of the Day may well be told in the Karen tale

of Ta Ywa, who was born a tiny child, and went to the Sun to make him

grow; the Sun tried in vain to destroy him by rain and heat, and then

blew him up large till his head touched the sky; then he went forth and

travelled from his home far over the earth; and among the adventures

which befell him was this—a snake swallowed him, but they ripped the

creature up, and Ta Ywa came back to life,[440] like the Sun from the

ripped up serpent-demon in the Buddhist eclipse-myth. In North American

Indian mythology, a principal personage is Manabozho, an Algonquin hero

or deity whose solar character is well brought into view in an Ottawa

myth which tells us that Manabozho (whom it calls Na-na-bou-jou) is the

elder brother of Ning-gah-be-ar-nong Manito, the Spirit of the West, god

of the country of the dead in the region of the setting sun. Manabozho’s

solar nature is again revealed in the story of his driving the West, his

father, across mountain and lake to the brink of the world, though he

cannot kill him. This sun-hero Manabozho, when he angled for the King of

Fishes, was swallowed, canoe and all; then he smote the monster’s heart

with his war-club till he would fain have cast him up into the lake

again, but the hero set his canoe fast across the fish’s throat inside,

and finished slaying him; when the dead monster drifted ashore, the

gulls pecked an opening for Manabozho to come out. This is a story

familiar to English readers from its introduction into the poem of

Hiawatha. In another version, the tale is told of the Little Monedo of

the Ojibwas, who also corresponds with the New Zealand Maui in being the

Sun-Catcher; among his various prodigies, he is swallowed by the great

fish, and cut out again by his sister.[441] South Africa is a region

where there prevail myths which seem to tell the story of the world

imprisoned in the monster Night, and delivered by the dawning Sun. The

Basutos have their myth of the hero Litaolane; he came to man’s stature

and wisdom at his birth; all mankind save his mother and he had been

devoured by a monster; he attacked the creature and was swallowed whole,

but cutting his way out he set free all the inhabitants of the world.

The Zulus tell stories as pointedly suggestive. A mother follows her

children into the maw of the great elephant, and finds forests and

rivers and highlands, and dogs and cattle, and people who had built

their villages there; a description which is simply that of the Zulu

Hades. When the Princess Untombinde was carried off by the

Isikqukqumadevu, the ‘bloated, squatting, bearded monster,’ the King

gathered his army and attacked it, but it swallowed up men, and dogs,

and cattle, all but one warrior; he slew the monster, and there came out

cattle, and horses, and men, and last of all the princess herself. The

stories of these monsters being cut open imitate, in graphic savage

fashion, the cries of the imprisoned creatures as they came back from

darkness into daylight. ‘There came out first a fowl, it said,

“Kukuluku! I see the world!” For, for a long time it had been without

seeing it. After the fowl there came out a man, he said “Hau! I at

length see the world!”’ and so on with the rest.[442]

The well-known modern interpretation of the myth of Perseus and

Andromeda, or of Herakles and Hesione, as a description of the Sun

slaying the Darkness, has its connexion with this group of legends. It

is related in a remarkable version of this story, that when the Trojan

King Laomedon had bound his daughter Hesione to the rock, a sacrifice to

Poseidon’s destroying sea-monster, Herakles delivered the maiden,

springing full-armed into the fish’s gaping throat, and coming forth

hairless after three days’ hacking within. This singular story, probably

in part of Semitic origin, combines the ordinary myth of Hesione or

Andromeda with the story of Jonah’s fish, for which indeed the Greek

sculpture of Andromeda’s monster served as the model in early Christian

art, while Joppa was the place where vestiges of Andromeda’s chains on a

rock in front of the town were exhibited in Pliny’s time, and whence the

bones of a whale were carried to Rome as relics of Andromeda’s monster.

To recognize the place which the nature-myth of the Man swallowed by the

Monster occupies in mythology, among remote and savage races and onward

among the higher nations, affects the argument on a point of Biblical

criticism. It strengthens the position of the critics who, seeing that

the Book of Jonah consists of two wonder-episodes adapted to enforce two

great religious lessons, no longer suppose intention of literal

narrative in what they may fairly consider as the most elaborate parable

of the Old Testament. Had the Book of Jonah happened to be lost in old

times, and only recently recovered, it is indeed hardly likely that any

other opinion of it than this would find acceptance among scholars.[443]

The conception of Hades as a monster swallowing men in death, was

actually familiar to Christian thought. Thus, to take instances from

different periods, the account of the Descent into Hades in the

Apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus makes Hades speak in his proper

personality, complaining that his belly is in pain, when the Saviour is

to descend and set free the saints imprisoned in it from the beginning

of the world; and in mediæval representations of this deliverance, the

so-called ‘Harrowing of Hell,’ Christ is depicted standing before a huge

fish-like monster’s open jaws, whence Adam and Eve are coming forth

first of mankind.[444] With even more distinctness of mythical meaning,

the man-devouring monster is introduced in the Scandinavian Eireks-Saga.

Eirek, journeying toward Paradise, comes to a stone bridge guarded by a

dragon, and entering into its maw, finds that he has arrived in the

world of bliss.[445] But in another wonder-tale, belonging to that

legendary growth which formed round early Christian history, no such

distinguishable remnant of nature-myth survives. St. Margaret, daughter

of a priest of Antioch, had been cast into a dungeon, and there Satan

came upon her in the form of a dragon and swallowed her alive:

‘Maiden Mergrete tho Loked her beside,

And sees a loathly dragon, Out of an hirn glide:

His eyen were full griesly, His mouth opened wide,

And Margrete might no where flee There she must abide,

Maiden Margrete Stood still as any stone,

And that loathly worm, To her-ward gan gone

Took her in his foul mouth, And swallowed her flesh and bone.

Anon he brast—Damage hath she none!

Maiden Mergrete Upon the dragon stood;

Blyth was her harte, And joyful was her mood.’[446]

Stories belonging to the same group are not unknown to European

folk-lore. One is the story of Little Red Ridinghood, mutilated in the

English nursery version, but known more perfectly by old wives in

Germany, who can tell that the lovely little maid in her shining red

satin cloak was swallowed with her grandmother by the Wolf, but they

both came out safe and sound when the hunter cut open the sleeping

beast. Any one who can fancy with prince Hal, ‘the blessed sun himself a

fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta,’ and can then imagine her

swallowed up by Sköll, the Sun-devouring Wolf of Scandinavian mythology,

may be inclined to class the tale of Little Red Ridinghood as a myth of

sunset and sunrise. There is indeed another story in Grimm’s Märchen,

partly the same as this one, which we can hardly doubt to have a quaint

touch of sun-myth in it. It is called the Wolf and Seven Kids, and tells

of the Wolf swallowing the kids all but the youngest of the seven, who

was hidden in the clock-case. As in Little Red Ridinghood, they cut open

the Wolf and fill him with stones. This tale, which took its present

shape since the invention of clocks, looks as though the tale-teller was

thinking, not of real kids and wolf, but of days of the week swallowed

by night, or how should he have hit upon such a fancy as that the wolf

could not get at the youngest of the seven kids, because it was hidden

(like to-day) in the clock case?[447]

It may be worth while to raise the question apropos of this nursery

tale, does the peasant folk-lore of modern Europe really still display

episodes of nature-myth, not as mere broken-down and senseless

fragments, but in full shape and significance? In answer it will be

enough to quote the story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, brought forward by

Mr. W. Ralston in one of his lectures on Russian Folk-lore. Vasilissa’s

stepmother and two sisters, plotting against her life, send her to get a

light at the house of Bába Yagá, the witch, and her journey contains the

following history of the Day, told in truest mythic fashion. Vasilissa

goes and wanders, wanders in the forest. She goes, and she shudders.

Suddenly before her bounds a rider, he himself white, and clad in white,

the horse under him white, and the trappings white. And day began to

dawn. She goes farther, when a second rider bounds forth, himself red,

clad in red, and on a red horse. The sun began to rise. She goes on all

day, and towards evening arrives at the witch’s house. Suddenly there

comes again a rider, himself black, clad all in black, and on a black

horse; he bounded to the gates of the Bába Yagá and disappeared as if he

had sunk through the earth. Night fell. After this, when Vasilissa asks

the witch, who was the white rider, she answers, ‘That is my clear Day;’

who was the red rider, ‘That is my red Sun;’ who was the black rider,

‘That is my black Night; they are all my trusty friends.’ Now,

considering that the story of Little Red Ridinghood belongs to the same

class of folk-lore tales as this story of Vasilissa the Beautiful, we

need not be afraid to seek in the one for traces of the same archaic

type of nature-myth which the other not only keeps up, but keeps up with

the fullest consciousness of meaning.

The development of nature-myth into heroic legend seems to have taken

place among the barbaric tribes of the South Sea Islands and North

America much as it took place among the ancestors of the classic

nations of the Old World. We are not to expect accurate consistency or

proper sequence of episodes in the heroic cycles, but to judge from

the characteristics of the episodes themselves as to the ideas which

suggested them. As regards the less cultured races, a glance at two

legendary cycles, one from Polynesia and the other from North America,

will serve to give an idea of the varieties of treatment of phases of

sun-myth. The New Zealand myth of Maui, mixed as it may be with other

fancies, is in its most striking features the story of Day and Night.

The story of the Sun’s birth from the ocean is thus told. There were

five brothers, all called Maui, and it was the youngest Maui who had

been thrown into the sea by Taranga his mother, and rescued by his

ancestor Tama-nui-ki-te-Rangi, Great-Man-in-Heaven, who took him to

his house, and hung him in the roof. Then is given in fanciful

personality the tale of the vanishing of Night at dawn. One night,

when Taranga came home, she found little Maui with his brothers, and

when she knew her last-born, the child of her old age, she took him to

sleep with her, as she had been used to take the other Mauis his

brothers, before they were grown up. But the little Maui grew vexed

and suspicious, when he found that every morning his mother rose at

dawn and disappeared from the house in a moment, not to return till

nightfall. So one night he crept out and stopped every crevice in the

wooden window and the doorway, that the day might not shine into the

house; then broke the faint light of early dawn, and then the sun rose

and mounted into the heavens, but Taranga slept on, for she knew not

it was broad day outside. At last she sprang up, pulled out the

stopping of the chinks, and fled in dismay. Then Maui saw her plunge

into a hole in the ground and disappear, and thus he found the deep

cavern by which his mother went down below the earth as each night

departed. After this, follows the episode of Maui’s visit to his

ancestress Muri-ranga-whenua, at that western Land’s End where Maori

souls descend into the subterranean region of the dead. She sniffs as

he comes towards her, and distends herself to devour him, but when she

has sniffed round from south by east to north, she smells his coming

by the western breeze, and so knows that he is a descendant of hers.

He asks for her wondrous jawbone, she gives it to him, and it is his

weapon in his next exploit when he catches the sun, Tama-nui-te-Ra,

Great-Man-Sun, in the noose, and wounds him and makes him go slowly.

With a fishhook pointed with the miraculous jawbone, and smeared with

his own blood for bait, Maui next performs his most famous feat of

fishing up New Zealand, still called Te-Ika-a-Maui, the fish of Maui.

To understand this, we must compare the various versions of the story

in these and other Pacific Islands, which show that it is a general

myth of the rising of dry land from beneath the ocean. It is said

elsewhere that it was Maui’s grandfather, Rangi-Whenua, Heaven-Earth,

who gave the jawbone. More distinctly, it is also said that Maui had

two sons, whom he slew when young to take their jawbones; now these

two sons must be the Morning and Evening, for Maui made the morning

and evening stars from an eye of each; and it was with the jawbone of

the eldest that he drew up the land from the deep. It is related that

when Maui pulled up his fish, he found it was land, on which were

houses, and stages on which to put food, and dogs barking, and fires

burning, and people working. It appears, moreover, that the submarine

region out of which the land was lifted was the under-world of Night,

for Maui’s hook had caught the gable of the house of Hine-nui-te-po,

Great-Daughter-of-Night, and when the land came up her house was on

it, and she was standing near. Another Maori legend tells how Maui

takes fire in his hands, it burns him, and he springs with it into the

sea: ‘When he sank in the waters, the sun for the first time set, and

darkness covered the earth. When he found that all was night, he

immediately pursued the sun, and brought him back in the morning.’

When Maui carried or flung the fire into the sea, he set a volcano

burning. It is told, again, that when Maui had put out all fires on

earth, his mother sent him to get new fire from her ancestress

Mahuika. The Tongans, in their version of the myth, relate how the

youngest Maui discovers the cavern that leads to Bulotu, the west-land

of the dead, and how his father, another Maui, sends him to the yet

older Maui who sits by his great fire; the two wrestle, and Maui

brings away fire for men, leaving the old earthquake-god lying

crippled below. The legendary group thus dramatizes the birth of the

sun from the ocean and the departure of the night, the extinction of

the light at sunset and its return at dawn, and the descent of the sun

to the western Hades, the under-world of night and death, which is

incidentally identified with the region of subterranean fire and

earthquake. Here, indeed, the characteristics of true nature-myth are

not indistinctly marked, and Maui’s death by his ancestress the Night

fitly ends his solar career.[448]

It is a sunset-story, very differently conceived, that begins the

beautiful North American Indian myth of the Red Swan. The story belongs

to the Algonquin race. The hunter Ojibwa had just killed a bear and

begun to skin him, when suddenly something red tinged all the air

around. Reaching the shore of a lake, the Indian saw it was a beautiful

red swan, whose plumage glittered in the sun. In vain the hunter shot

his shafts, for the bird floated unharmed and unheeding, but at last he

remembered three magic arrows at home, which had been his father’s. The

first and second arrow flew near and nearer, the third struck the swan,

and flapping its wings, it flew off slowly towards the sinking of the

sun. With full sense of the poetic solar meaning of this episode

Longfellow has adapted it as a sunset picture, in one of his Indian

poems:

‘Can it be the sun descending

O’er the level plain of water?

Or the Red Swan floating, flying,

Wounded by the magic arrow,

Staining all the waves with crimson,

With the crimson of its life-blood,

Filling all the air with splendour,

With the splendour of its plumage?’

The story goes on to tell how the hunter speeds westward in pursuit of

the Red Swan. At lodges where he rests, they tell him she has often

passed there, but those who followed her have never returned. She is the

daughter of an old magician who has lost his scalp, which Ojibwa

succeeds in recovering for him and puts back on his head, and the old

man rises from the earth, no longer aged and decrepit, but splendid in

youthful glory. Ojibwa departs, and the magician calls forth the

beautiful maiden, now not his daughter but his sister, and gives her to

his victorious friend. It was in after days, when Ojibwa had gone home

with his bride, that he travelled forth, and coming to an opening in the

earth, descended and came to the abode of departed spirits; there he

could behold the bright western region of the good, and the dark cloud

of wickedness. But the spirits told him that his brethren at home were

quarrelling for the possession of his wife, and at last, after long

wandering, this Red Indian Odysseus returned to his mourning constant

Penelope, laid the magic arrows to his bow, and stretched the wicked

suitors dead at his feet.[449] Thus savage legends from Polynesia and

America, possibly indeed shaped under European influence, agree with the

theory[450] that Odysseus visiting the Elysian fields, or Orpheus

descending to the land of Hades to bring back the ‘wide-shining’

Eurydikê, are but the Sun himself descending to, and ascending from, the

world below.

Where Night and Hades take personal shape in myth, we may expect to find

conceptions like that simply shown in a Sanskrit word for evening,

‘rajanîmukha,’ i.e., ‘mouth of night.’ Thus the Scandinavians told of

Hel the death-goddess, with mouth gaping like the mouth of Fenrir her

brother, the moon-devouring wolf; and an old German poem describes

Hell’s abyss yawning from heaven to earth:

‘der was der Hellen gelîch

diu daz abgrunde

begenit mit ir munde

unde den himel zuo der erden.’[451]

The sculptures on cathedrals still display for the terror of the wicked

the awful jaws of Death, the mouth of Hell wide yawning to swallow its

victims. Again, where barbaric cosmology accepts the doctrine of a

firmament arching above the earth, and of an under world whither the sun

descends when he sets and man when he dies, here the conception of gates

or portals, whether really or metaphorically meant, has its place. Such

is the great gate which the Gold Coast negro describes the Heaven as

opening in the morning for the Sun; such were the ancient Greek’s gates

of Hades, and the ancient Jew’s gates of Sheol. There are three mythic

descriptions connected with these ideas found among the Karens, the

Algonquins, and the Aztecs, which are deserving of special notice. The

Karens of Burma, a race among whom ideas are in great measure borrowed

from the more cultured Buddhists they have been in contact with, have

precedence here for the distinctness of their statement. They say that

in the west there are two massive strata of rocks which are continually

opening and shutting, and between these strata the sun descends at

sunset, but how the upper stratum is supported, no one can describe. The

idea comes well into view in the description of a Bghai festival, where

sacrificed fowls are thus addressed,—‘The seven heavens, thou ascendest

to the top; the seven earths, thou descendest to the bottom. Thou

arrivest at Khu-the; thou goest unto Tha-ma [i.e., Yama, the Judge of

the Dead in Hades.] Thou goest through the crevices of rocks, thou goest

through the crevices of precipices. At the opening and shutting of the

western gates of rock, thou goest in between; thou goest below the earth

where the Sun travels. I employ thee, I exhort thee. I make thee a

messenger, I make thee an angel, &c.’[452] Passing from Burma to the

region of the North American lakes, we find a corresponding description

in the Ottawa tale of Iosco, already quoted here for its clearly marked

personification of Sun and Moon. This legend, though modern in some of

its description of the Europeans, their ships, and their far-off land

across the sea, is evidently founded on a myth of Day and Night. Iosco

seems to be Ioskeha, the White One, whose contest with his brother

Tawiscara, the Dark One, is an early and most genuine Huron nature-myth

of Day and Night. Iosco and his friends travel for years eastward and

eastward to reach the sun, and come at last to the dwelling of Manabozho

near the edge of the world, and then, a little beyond, to the chasm to

be passed on the way to the land of the Sun and Moon. They began to hear

the sound of the beating sky, and it seemed near at hand, but they had

far to travel before they reached the place. When the sky came down, its

pressure would force gusts of wind from the opening, so strong that the

travellers could hardly keep their feet, and the sun passed but a short

distance above their heads, The sky would come down with violence, but

it would rise slowly and gradually. Iosco and one of his friends stood

near the edge, and with a great effort leapt through and gained a

foothold on the other side; but the other two were fearful and

undecided, and when their companions called to them through the

darkness, ‘Leap! leap! the sky is on its way down,’ they looked up and

saw it descending, but paralyzed by fear they sprang so feebly that they

only reached the other side with their hands, and the sky at the same

moment striking violently on the earth with a terrible sound, forced

them into the dreadful black abyss.[453] Lastly, in the funeral ritual

of the Aztecs there is found a like description of the first peril that

the shade had to encounter on the road leading to that subterranean Land

of the Dead, which the sun lights when it is night on earth. Giving the

corpse the first of the passports that were to carry him safe to his

journey’s end, the survivors said to him, ‘With these you will pass

between the two mountains that smite one against the other.’[454] On the

suggestion of this group of solar conceptions and that of Maui’s death,

we may perhaps explain as derived from a broken-down fancy of solar myth

that famous episode of Greek legend, where the good ship Argo passed

between the Symplêgades, those two huge cliffs that opened and closed

again with swift and violent collision.[455] Can any effort of baseless

fancy have brought into the poet’s mind a thought so quaint in itself,

yet so fitting with the Karen and Aztec myths of the gates of Night and

Death? With the Maori legend, the Argonautic tale has a yet deeper

coincidence. In both the event is to determine the future; but this

thought is worked out in two converse ways. If Maui passed through the

entrance of Night and returned to Day, death should not hold mankind; if

the Argo passed the Clashers, the way should lie open between them for

ever. The Argo sped through in safety, and the Symplêgades can clash no

longer on the passing ship; Maui was crushed, and man comes not forth

again from Hades.

There is another solar metaphor which describes the sun, not as a

personal creature, but as a member of a yet greater being. He is called

in Java and Sumatra ‘Mata-ari,’ in Madagascar ‘Maso-andro,’ the ‘Eye of

Day.’ If we look for translation of this thought from metaphor into

myth, we may find it in the New Zealand stories of Maui setting his own

eye up in heaven as the Sun, and the eyes of his two children as the

Morning and the Evening Stars.[456] The nature-myth thus implicitly and

explicitly stated is one widely developed on Aryan ground. It forms part

of that macrocosmic description of the universe well known in Asiatic

myth, and in Europe expressed in that passage of the Orphic poem which

tells of Jove, at once the world’s ruler and the world itself: his

glorious head irradiates the sky where hangs his starry hair, the waters

of the sounding ocean are the belt that girds his sacred body the earth

omniparent, his eyes are sun and moon, his mind, moving and ruling by

counsel all things, is the royal æther that no voice nor sound escapes:

‘Sunt oculi Phœbus, Phœboque adversa recurrens

Cynthia. Mens verax nullique obnoxius æther

Regius interitu’, qui cuncta movetque regitque

Consilio. Vox nulla potest, sonitusve, nec ullus

Hancce Jovis sobolem strepitus, nec fama latere.

Sic animi sensum, et caput immortale beatus

Obtinet: illustre, immensum, immutabile pandens,

Atque lacertorum valido stans robore certus.’[457]

Where the Aryan myth-maker takes no thought of the lesser light, he can

in various terms describe the sun as the eye of heaven. In the Rig-Veda

it is the ‘eye of Mitra, Varuna, and Agni’—‘chakshuh Mitrasya Varunasyah

Agneh.’[458] In the Zend-Avesta it is ‘the shining sun with the swift

horses, the eye of Ahura-Mazda;’ elsewhere both eyes, apparently sun and

moon, are praised.[459] To Hesiod it is the ‘all-seeing eye of

Zeus’—‘πάντα ἰδὼν Διὸς ὀφθαλμός:’ Macrobius speaks of antiquity calling

the sun the eye of Jove—‘τί ἥλιος; οὐράνιος ὀφθαλμός.’[460] The old

Germans, in calling the sun ‘Wuotan’s eye,’[461] recognized Wuotan,

Woden Odhin, as being himself the divine Heaven. These mythic

expressions are of the most unequivocal type. By the hint they give,

conjectural interpretations may be here not indeed asserted, but

suggested, for two of the quaintest episodes of ancient European myth.

Odin, the All-father, say the old skalds of Scandinavia, sits among his

Æsir in the city Asgard, on his high throne Hlidskialf (Lid-shelf),

whence he can look down over the whole world discerning all the deeds of

men. He is an old man wrapped in his wide cloak, and clouding his face

with his wide hat, ‘os pileo ne cultu proderetur obnubens,’ as Saxo

Grammaticus has it. Odin is one-eyed; he desired to drink from Mimir’s

well, but he had to leave there one of his eyes in pledge, as it is said

in the Völuspa:

‘All know I, Odin! Where thou hiddest thine eye

In Mimir’s famous well.

Mead drinks Mimir every morning

From Wale-father’s pledge—Wit ye what this is?’

As Odin’s single eye seems certainly to be the sun in heaven, one may

guess what is the lost eye in the well—perhaps the sun’s own reflection

in any pool, or more likely that of the moon, which in popular myth is

told of as found in the well.[462] Possibly, too, some such solar fancy

may explain part of the myth of Perseus. There are three Scandinavian

Norns, whose names are Urdhr, Verdhandi, and Skuld—Was, and Is, and

Shall-be—and these three maidens are the ‘Weird sisters’ who fix the

lifetime of all men. So the Fates, the Parkai, daughters of the

inevitable Anágkē, divide among them the periods of time: Lachesis sings

the past, Klôthô the present, Atropos the future. Now is it allowable to

consider these fatal sisters as of common nature with two other mythic

sister-triads—the Graiai and their kinsfolk the Gorgons?[463] If it be

so, it is easy to understand why of the three Gorgons one alone was

mortal, whose life her two immortal sisters could not save, for the

deathless past and future cannot save the ever-dying present. Nor would

the riddle be hard to read, what is the one eye that the Graiai had

between them, and passed from one to another?—the eye of day—the sun,

that the past gives up to the present, and the present to the future.

Compared with the splendid Lord of Day, the pale Lady of Night takes, in

myth as in nature, a lower and lesser place. Among the wide legendary

group which associates together Sun and Moon, two striking examples are

to be seen in the traditions by which half-civilized races of South

America traced their rise from the condition of the savage tribes around

them. These legends have been appealed to even by modern writers as

gratefully remembered records of real human benefactors, who carried

long ago to America the culture of the Old World. But happily for

historic truth, mythic tradition tells its tales without expurgating the

episodes which betray its real character to more critical observation.

The Muyscas of the high plains of Bogota were once, they said, savages

without agriculture, religion, or law; but there came to them from the

East an old and bearded man, Bochica, the child of the Sun, and he

taught them to till the fields, to clothe themselves, to worship the

gods, to become a nation. But Bochica had a wicked, beautiful wife,

Huythaca, who loved to spite and spoil her husband’s work; and she it

was who made the river swell till the land was covered by a flood, and

but a few of mankind escaped to the mountain-tops. Then Bochica was

wroth, and he drove the wicked Huythaca from the earth, and made her the

Moon, for there had been no moon before; and he cleft the rocks and made

the mighty cataract of Tequendama, to let the deluge flow away. Then,

when the land was dry, he gave to the remnant of mankind the year and

its periodic sacrifices, and the worship of the Sun. Now the people who

told this myth had not forgotten, what indeed we might guess without

their help, that Bochica was himself Zuhé, the Sun, and Huythaca the

Sun’s wife, the Moon.[464]

Like to this in meaning, though different in fancy, is the

civilization-myth of the Incas. Men, said this Quichua legend, were

savages dwelling in caves like wild beasts devouring wild roots and

fruit and human flesh, covering themselves with leaves and bark or skins

of animals. But our father the Sun took pity on them, and sent two of

his children, Manco Ccapac and his sister-wife, Mama Occllo these rose

from the lake of Titicaca, and gave to the uncultured hordes law and

government, marriage and moral order, tillage and art and science. Thus

was founded the great Peruvian empire, where in after ages each Inca and

his sister-wife, continuing the mighty race of Manco Ccapac and Mama

Occllo, represented in rule and religion not only the first earthly

royal ancestors, but the heavenly father and mother of whom we can see

these to be personifications, namely, the Sun himself, and his

sister-wife the Moon.[465] Thus the nations of Bogota and Peru,

remembering their days of former savagery, and the association of their

culture with their national religion, embodied their traditions in myths

of an often-recurring type, ascribing to the gods themselves, in human

shape, the establishment of their own worship.

The ‘inconstant moon’ figures in a group of characteristic stories.

Australian legend says that Mityan, the Moon, was a native cat, who fell

in love with some one else’s wife, and was driven away to wander ever

since.[466] The Khasias of the Himalaya say that the Moon falls monthly

in love with his mother-in-law, who throws ashes in his face, whence his

spots.[467] Slavonic legend, following the same track, says that the

Moon, King of Night and husband of the Sun, faithlessly loved the

Morning Star, wherefore he was cloven through in punishment, as we see

him in the sky.[468] By a different train of thought, the Moon’s

periodic death and revival has suggested a painful contrast to the

destiny of man, in one of the most often-repeated and characteristic

myths of South Africa, which is thus told among the Namaqua. The Moon

once sent the Hare to Men to give this message, ‘Like as I die and rise

to life again, so you also shall die and rise to life again,’ but the

Hare went to the Men and said, ‘Like as I die and do not rise again, so

you shall also die and not rise to life again.’ Then the Hare returned

and told the Moon what he had done, and the Moon struck at him with a

hatchet and slit his lip, as it has remained ever since, and some say

the Hare fled and is still fleeing, but others say he clawed at the

Moon’s face and left the scars that are still to be seen on it, and they

also say that the reason why the Namaqua object to eating the hare (a

prejudice which in fact they share with very different races) is because

he brought to men this evil message.[469] It is remarkable that a story

so closely resembling this, that it is difficult not to suppose both to

be versions from a common original, is told in the distant Fiji Islands.

There was a dispute between two gods as to how man should die: ‘Ra Vula

(the Moon) contended that man should be like himself—disappear awhile

and then live again. Ra Kalavo (the Rat) would not listen to this kind

proposal, but said, “Let man die as a rat dies.” And he prevailed.’ The

dates of the versions seem to show that the presence of these myths

among the Hottentots and Fijians, at the two opposite sides of the

globe, is at any rate not due to transmission in modern times.[470]