There is a very elaborate savage nature-myth of the generation of the

Stars, which may unquestionably serve as a clue connecting the history

of two distant tribes. The rude Mintira of the Malayan Peninsula express

in plain terms the belief in a solid firmament, usual in the lower

grades of civilization; they say the sky is a great pot held over the

earth by a cord, and if this cord broke, everything on earth would be

crushed. The Moon is a woman, and the Sun also: the Stars are the Moon’s

children, and the Sun had in old times as many. Fearing, however, that

mankind could not bear so much brightness and heat, they agreed each to

devour her children; but the Moon, instead of eating up her stars, hid

them from the Sun’s sight, who believing them all devoured, ate up her

own; no sooner had she done it, than the Moon brought her family out of

their hiding-place. When the Sun saw them, filled with rage she chased

the Moon to kill her; the chase has lasted ever since, and sometimes the

Sun even comes near enough to bite the Moon, and that is an eclipse; the

Sun, as men may still see, devours his Stars at dawn, and the Moon hides

hers all day while the Sun is near, and only brings them out at night

when her pursuer is far away. Now among a tribe of North East India, the

Ho of Chota-Nagpore, the myth reappears, obviously from the same source,

but with a varied ending; the Sun cleft the Moon in twain for her

deceit, and thus cloven and growing whole again she remains, and her

daughters with her which are the Stars.[471]

From savagery up to civilization, there may be traced in the mythology

of the Stars a course of thought, changed indeed in application, yet

never broken in its evident connexion from first to last. The savage

sees individual stars as animate beings, or combines star-groups into

living celestial creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with

them; while at the other extremity of the scale of civilization, the

modern astronomer keeps up just such ancient fancies, turning them to

account in useful survival, as a means of mapping out the celestial

globe. The savage names and stories of stars and constellations may seem

at first but childish and purposeless fancies; but it always happens in

the study of the lower races, that the more means we have of

understanding their thoughts, the more sense and reason do we find in

them. The aborigines of Australia say that Yurree and Wanjel, who are

the stars we call Castor and Pollux, pursue Purra the Kangaroo (our

Capella), and kill him at the the beginning of the great heat and the

mirage is the smoke of the fire they roast him by. They say also that

Marpean-Kurrk and Neilloan (Arcturus and Lyra) were the discoverers of

the ant-pupas and the eggs of the loan-bird, and taught the aborigines

to find them for food. Translated into the language of fact, these

simple myths record the summer place of the stars in question, and the

seasons of ant-pupas and loan-eggs, which seasons are marked by the

stars who are called their discoverers.[472] Not less transparent is the

meaning in the beautiful Algonquin myth of the Summer-maker. In old days

eternal winter reigned upon the earth, till a sprightly little animal

called the Fisher, helped by other beasts his friends, broke an opening

through the sky into the lovely heaven-land beyond, let the warm winds

pour forth and the summer descend to earth, and opened the cages of the

prisoned birds: but when the dwellers in heaven saw their birds let

loose and their warm gales descending, they started in pursuit, and

shooting their arrows at the Fisher, hit him at last in his one

vulnerable spot at the tip of his tail; thus he died for the good of the

inhabitants of earth, and became the constellation that bears his name,

so that still at the proper season men see him lying as he fell toward

the north on the plains of heaven, with the fatal arrow still sticking

in his tail.[473] Compare these savage stories with Orion pursuing the

Pleiad sisters who take refuge from him in the sea, and the maidens who

wept themselves to death and became the starry cluster of the Hyades,

whose rising and setting betokened rain: such mythic creatures might for

simple significance have been invented by savages, even as the savage

constellation-myths might have been made by ancient Greeks. When we

consider that the Australians who can invent such myths, and invent them

with such fulness of meaning, are savages who put two and one together

to make their numeral for three, we may judge how deep in the history of

culture those conceptions lie, of which the relics are still represented

in our star-maps by Castor and Pollux, Arcturus and Sirius, Boötes and

Orion, the Argo and the Charles’s Wain, the Toucan and the Southern

Cross. Whether civilized or savage, whether ancient or new made after

the ancient manner, such names are so like in character that any tribe

of men might adopt them from any other, as American tribes are known to

receive European names into their own skies, and as our constellation of

the Royal Oak is said to have found its way, in new copies of the old

Hindu treatises, into the company of the Seven Sages and the other

ancient constellations of Brahmanic India.

Such fancies are so fanciful, that two peoples seldom fall on the same

name for a constellation, while, even within the limits of the same

race, terms may differ altogether. Thus the stars which we call Orion’s

Belt are in New Zealand either the Elbow of Maui, or they form the stem

of the Canoe of Tamarerete, whose anchor dropped from the prow is the

Southern Cross.[474] The Great Bear is equally like a Wain, Orion’s Belt

serves as well for Frigga’s or Mary’s Spindle, or Jacob’s Staff. Yet

sometimes natural correspondences occur. The seven sister Pleiades seem

to the Australians a group of girls playing to a corroboree; while the

North American Indians call them the Dancers; and the Lapps the Company

of Virgins.[475] Still more striking is the correspondence between

savages and cultured nations in fancies of the bright starry band that

lies like a road across the sky. The Basutos call it the ‘Way of the

Gods;’ the Ojis say it is the ‘Way of Spirits,’ which souls go up to

heaven by.[476] North American tribes know it as ‘the Path of the Master

of Life,’ the ‘Path of Spirits,’ ‘the Road of Souls,’ where they travel

to the land beyond the grave, and where their camp-fires may be seen

blazing as brighter stars.[477] Such savage imaginations of the Milky

Way fit with the Lithuanian myth of the ‘Road of the Birds,’ at whose

end the souls of the good, fancied as flitting away at death like birds,

dwell free and happy.[478] That souls dwell in the Galaxy was a thought

familiar to the Pythagoreans, who gave it on their master’s word that

the souls that crowd there descend, and appear to men as dreams,[479]

and to the Manichæans whose fancy transferred pure souls to this ‘column

of light,’ whence they could come down to earth and again return.[480]

It is a fall from such ideas of the Galaxy to the Siamese ‘Road of the

White Elephant,’ the Spaniards’ ‘Road of Santiago,’ or the Turkish

‘Pilgrims’ Road,’ and a still lower fall to the ‘Straw Road’ of the

Syrian, the Persian, and the Turk, who thus compare it with their lanes

littered with the morsels of straw that fall from the nets they carry it

in.[481] But of all the fancies which have attached themselves to the

celestial road, we at home have the quaintest. Passing along the short

and crooked way from St. Paul’s to Cannon Street, one thinks to how

small a remnant has shrunk the name of the great street of the

Wætlingas, which in old days ran from Dover through London into Wales.

But there is a Watling Street in heaven as well as on earth, once

familiar to Englishmen, though now almost forgotten even in local

dialect. Chaucer thus speaks of it in his ‘House of Fame:’ —

‘Lo there (quod he) cast up thine eye

Se yondir, lo, the Galaxie,

The whiche men clepe The Milky Way,

For it is white, and some parfay,

Ycallin it han Watlynge strete.’[482]

Turning from the mythology of the heavenly bodies, a glance over other

districts of nature-myth will afford fresh evidence that such legend has

its early home within the precincts of savage culture. It is thus with

the myths of the Winds. The New Zealanders tell how Maui can ride upon

the other Winds or imprison them in their caves, but he cannot catch the

West wind nor find its cave to roll a stone against the mouth, and

therefore it prevails, yet from time to time he all but overtakes it,

and hiding in its cave for shelter it dies away.[483] Such is the fancy

in classic poetry of Aeolus holding the prisoned winds in his dungeon

cave:—

‘Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro

Luctantes ventos, tempestatesque sonoras

Imperio premit, ac vinclis et carcere fraenat.’[484]

The myth of the Four Winds is developed among the native races of

America with a range and vigour and beauty scarcely rivalled elsewhere

in the mythology of the world. Episodes belonging to this branch of Red

Indian folklore are collected in Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ and

thence rendered with admirable taste and sympathy, though unfortunately

not with proper truth to the originals, in Longfellow’s masterpiece, the

‘Song of Hiawatha.’ The West Wind Mudjekeewis is Kabeyun, Father of the

Winds, Wabun is the East Wind, Shawondasee the South Wind, Kabibonokka

the North Wind. But there is another mighty wind not belonging to the

mystic quaternion, Manabozho the North-West Wind, therefore described

with mythic appropriateness as the unlawful child of Kabeyun. The fierce

North Wind, Kabibnokka, in vain strives to force Shingebis, the

lingering diver-bird, from his warm and happy winter-lodge; and the lazy

South Wind, Shawondasee, sighs for the maiden of the prairie with her

sunny hair, till it turns to silvery white, and as he breathes upon her,

the prairie dandelion has vanished.[485] Man naturally divides his

horizon into four quarters, before and behind, right and left, and thus

comes to fancy the world a square, and to refer the winds to its four

corners. Dr. Brinton, in his ‘Myths of the New World,’ has well traced

from these ideas the growth of legend after legend among the native

races of America, where four brother heroes, or mythic ancestors or

divine patrons of mankind, prove, on closer view, to be in personal

shape the Four Winds.[486]

The Vedic hymns to the Maruts, the Storm Winds, who tear asunder the

forest kings and make the rocks shiver, and assume again, after their

wont, the form of new-born babes, the mythic feats of the child Hermes

in the Homeric hymn, the legendary birth of Boreas from Astraios and

Eôs, Starry Heaven and Dawn, work out, on Aryan ground, mythic

conceptions that Red Indian tale-tellers could understand and

rival.[487] The peasant who keeps up in fireside talk the memory of the

Wild Huntsman, Wodejäger, the Grand Veneur of Fontainebleau, Herne the

Hunter of Windsor Forest, has almost lost the significance of this grand

old storm-myth. By mere force of tradition, the name of the ‘Wish’ or

‘Wush’ hounds of the Wild Huntsman has been preserved through the west

of England; the words must for ages past have lost their meaning among

the country folk, though we may plainly recognize in them Woden’s

ancient well-known name, old German ‘Wunsch.’ As of old, the Heaven-God

drives the clouds before him in raging tempest across the sky, while,

safe within the cottage walls, the tale-teller unwittingly describes in

personal legendary shape this same Wild Hunt of the Storm.[488]

It has many a time occurred to the savage poet or philosopher to realize

the thunder, or its cause, in myths of a Thunder-bird. Of this wondrous

creature North American legend has much to tell. He is the bird of the

great Manitu, as the eagle is of Zeus, or he is even the great Manitu

himself incarnate. The Assiniboins not only know of his existence, but

have even seen him, and in the far north the story is told how he

created the world. The Ahts of Vancouver’s Island talk of Tootooch, the

mighty bird dwelling aloft and far away, the flap of whose wings makes

the thunder (Tootah), and his tongue is the forked lightning. There were

once four of these birds in the land, and they fed on whales; but the

great deity Quawteaht, entering into a whale, enticed one thunder-bird

after another to swoop down and seize him with his talons, when plunging

to the bottom of the sea he drowned it. Thus three of them perished, but

the last one spread his wings and flew to the distant height where he

has since remained. The meaning of the story may probably be that

thunderstorms come especially from one of the four quarters of heaven.

Of such myths, perhaps that told among the Dacotas is the quaintest:

Thunder is a large bird, they say: hence its velocity. The old bird

begins the thunder; its rumbling noise is caused by an immense quantity

of young birds, or thunders, who continue it, hence the long duration of

the peals. The Indian says it is the young birds, or thunders, that do

the mischief; they are like the young mischievous men who will not

listen to good counsel. The old thunder or bird is wise and good, and

does not kill anybody, nor do any kind of mischief. Descending southward

to Central America, there is found mention of the bird Voc, the

messenger of Hurakan, the Tempest-god (whose name has been adopted in

European languages as _huracano_, _ouragan_, _hurricane_) of the

Lightning and of the Thunder. So among Caribs, Brazilians, Hervey

Islanders and Karens, Bechuanas and Basutos, we find legends of a

flapping or flashing Thunder-bird, which seem simply to translate into

myth the thought of thunder and lightning descending from the upper

regions of the air, the home of the eagle and the vulture.[489]

The Heaven-god dwells in the regions of the sky, and thus what form

could be fitter for him and for his messengers than the likeness of a

bird? But to cause the ground to quake beneath our feet, a being of

quite different nature is needed, and accordingly the office of

supporting the solid earth is given in various countries to various

monstrous creatures, human or animal in character, who make their office

manifest from time to time by a shake given in negligence or sport or

anger to their burden. Wherever earthquakes are felt, we are likely to

find a version of the great myth of the Earth-bearer. Thus in Polynesia

the Tongans say that Maui upholds the earth on his prostrate body, and

when he tries to turn over into an easier posture there is an

earthquake, and the people shout and beat the ground with sticks to make

him lie still. Another version forms part of the interesting myth lately

mentioned, which connects the under-world whither the sun descends at

night, with the region of subterranean volcanic fire and of earthquake.

The old Maui lay by his fire in the dead-land of Bulotu, when his

grandson Maui came down by the cavern entrance; the young Maui carried

off the fire, they wrestled, the old Maui was overcome, and has lain

there bruised and drowsy ever since, underneath the earth, which quakes

when he turns over in his sleep.[490] In Celebes we hear of the

world-supporting Hog, who rubs himself against a tree, and then there is

an earthquake.[491] Among the Indians of North America, it is said that

earthquakes come of the movement of the great world-bearing Tortoise.

Now this Tortoise seems but a mythic picture of the Earth itself, and

thus the story only expresses in mythic phrase the very fact that the

earth quakes; the meaning is but one degree less distinct than among the

Caribs, who say when there is an earthquake that their Mother Earth is

dancing.[492] Among the higher races of the continent, such ideas remain

little changed in nature; the Tlascalans said that the tired

world-supporting deities shifting their burden to a new relay caused the

earthquake;[493] the Chibchas said it was their god Chibchacum moving

the earth from shoulder to shoulder.[494] The myth ranges in Asia

through as wide a stretch of culture. The Kamchadals tell of Tuil the

Earthquake-god, who sledges below ground, and when his dog shakes off

fleas or snow there is an earthquake;[495] Ta Ywa, the solar hero of the

Karens, set Shie-oo beneath the earth to carry it, and there is an

earthquake when he moves.[496] The world-bearing elephants of the

Hindus, the world-supporting frog of the Mongol Lamas, the world-bull of

the Moslems, the gigantic Omophore of the Manichæan cosmology, are all

creatures who carry the earth on their backs or heads, and shake it when

they stretch or shift.[497] Thus in European mythology the Scandinavian

Loki, strapped down with thongs of iron in his subterranean cavern,

writhes when the overhanging serpent drops venom on him; or Prometheus

struggles beneath the earth to break his bonds; or the Lettish Drebkuls

or Poseidon the Earth-shaker makes the ground rock beneath men’s

feet.[498] From thorough myths of imagination such as most of these, it

may be sometimes possible to distinguish philosophic myths like them in

form, but which appear to be attempts at serious explanation without

even a metaphor. The Japanese think that earthquakes are caused by huge

whales creeping underground, having been probably led to this idea by

finding the fossil bones which seem the remains of such subterranean

monsters, just as we know that the Siberians who find in the ground the

mammoth-bones and tusks account for them as belonging to huge burrowing

beasts, and by force of this belief, have brought themselves to think

they can sometimes see the earth heave and sink as the monsters crawl

below. Thus, in investigating the earthquake myths of the world, it

appears that two processes, the translation into mythic language of the

phenomenon itself, and the crude scientific theory to account for it by

a real moving animal underground, may result in legends of very striking

similarity.[499]

In thus surveying the mythic wonders of heaven and earth, sun, moon, and

stars, wind, thunder, and earthquake, it is possible to set out in

investigation under conditions of actual certainty. So long as such

beings as Heaven or Sun are consciously talked of in mythic language,

the meaning of their legends is open to no question, and the actions

ascribed to them will as a rule be natural and apposite. But when the

phenomena of nature take a more anthropomorphic form, and become

identified with personal gods and heroes, and when in after times these

beings, losing their first consciousness of origin, become centres round

which floating fancies cluster, then their sense becomes obscure and

corrupt, and the consistency of their earlier character must no longer

be demanded. In fact, the unreasonable expectation of such consistency

in nature-myths, after they have passed into what may be called their

heroic stage, is one of the mythologist’s most damaging errors. The

present examination of nature-myths has mostly taken them in their

primitive and unmistakable condition, and has only been in some degree

extended to include closely-corresponding legends in a less easily

interpretable state. It has lain beyond my scope to enter into any

systematic discussion of the views of Grimm, Grote, Max Müller, Kuhn,

Schirren, Cox, Bréal, Dasent, Kelly, and other mythologists. Even the

outlines here sketched out have been purposely left without filling in

surrounding detail which might confuse their shape, although this

strictness has caused the neglect of many a tempting hint to work out

episode after episode, by tracing their relation to the myths of far-off

times and lands. It has rather been my object to bring prominently into

view the nature-mythology of the lower races, that their clear and fresh

mythic conceptions may serve as a basis in studying the nature-myths of

the world at large. The evidence and interpretation here brought

forward, imperfect as they are, seem to countenance a strong opinion as

to the historical development of legends which describe in personal

shape the life of nature. The state of mind to which such imaginative

fictions belong is found in full vigour in the savage condition of

mankind, its growth and inheritance continue into the higher culture of

barbarous or half-civilized nations, and at last in the civilized world

its effects pass more and more from realized belief into fanciful,

affected, and even artificial poetry.

Footnote 418:

Macrob. ‘Saturn.’ i. 19, 12. See Eurip. Phœn. 1116, &c. and Schol.;

Welcker, vol. i. p. 336; Max Müller, ‘Lectures,’ vol. ii. p. 380.

Footnote 419:

Francisque-Michel, ‘Argot,’ p. 425.

Footnote 420:

Sir G. Grey, ‘Polynesian Mythology,’ p. i. &c., translated from the

original Maori text published by him under the title of ‘Ko nga

Mahinga a nga Tupuna Maori, &c.’ London, 1854. Compare with Shortland,

‘Trads. of N. Z.’ p. 55, &c.; R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 114, &c.

Footnote 421:

Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer, &c.’ p. 42; Ellis, ‘Polyn.

Res.’ vol. i. p. 116; Tyerman and Bennet, p. 526; Turner, ‘Polynesia,’

p. 245.

Footnote 422:

Premare in Pauthier, ‘Livres Sacrés de l’Orient,’ p. 19; Doolittle,

‘Chinese,’ vol. ii. p. 396.

Footnote 423:

J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 108, 110, 117, 221, 369, 494, 620;

Rivero and Tschudi, ‘Ant. of Peru,’ p. 161; Gregg, ‘Journal of a Santa

Fé Trader,’ vol. ii. p. 237; Sahagun, ‘Retorica, &c., Mexicana,’ cap.

3, in Kingsborough, ‘Ant. of Mexico,’ vol. v.

Footnote 424:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth.’ p. 86.

Footnote 425:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. xix. 229-33, 608; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes,’ p. 153;

Milton, ‘Paradise Lost,’ ix. 273, i. 535; see Lucretius, i. 250.

Footnote 426:

Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. pp. 663-7; Colebrooke,

‘Essays,’ vol. i. p. 220. Plato, Repub. iii. 414-5; ‘ἡ γὴ αὐτοὺς μήτηρ

οὖσα ἀνῆκε—ἁλλ’ ὸ θεὸς πλάττων.’

Footnote 427:

Herod. iv. 59.

Footnote 428:

Plath, ‘Religion der alten Chinesen’ part i. p. 37; Davis, ‘Chinese,’

vol. ii. p. 64; Legge, ‘Confucius,’ p. 106; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol.

ii. p. 437, vol. iii. p. 302.

Footnote 429:

J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 53, 219, 231, 255, 395, 420;

Martius ‘Ethnog. Amer.’ vol. i. pp. 329, 467, 585, vol. ii. p. 109;

Southey, ‘Brazil,’ vol. i. p. 352, vol. ii. p. 371; De la Borde,

‘Caraibes,’ p. 525; Dobrizhoffer ‘Abipones,’ vol. ii. p. 84; Smith and

Lowe, ‘Journey from Lima to Para,’ p. 230; Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes

of N. A.’ part i. p. 271; Charlevoix, ‘Nouv. France,’ vol. vi. p. 149;

Cranz, ‘Grönland,’ p. 295; Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 191; ‘Early

Hist, of Mankind,’ p. 163.

Footnote 430:

Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. i. p. 331.

Footnote 431:

Marsden, ‘Sumatra,’ p. 194.

Footnote 432:

Grant in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. iii. p. 90; Kölle, ‘Kanuri Proverbs,

&c.’ p. 207.

Footnote 433:

H. H. Wilson, ‘Vishnupurana,’ pp. 78, 140; Skr. Dic. s.v. râhu; Sir W.

Jones in ‘As. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 290; S. Davis, _ibid._, p. 258;

Pictet, ‘Origines Indo-Europ.’ part ii. p. 584; Roberts, ‘Oriental

Illustrations,’ p. 7; Hardy, ‘Manual of Buddhism.’

Footnote 434:

Castrén, ‘Finn. Myth,’ p. 63; Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p.

344.

Footnote 435:

Klemm, ‘C. G.’ vol. vi. p. 449; Doolittle, ‘Chinese,’ vol. i. p. 308;

Turpin, Richard, and Borri in Pinkerton, vol. iv. pp. 579, 725, 815;

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 109, vol. iii. p. 242. See

Eisenmenger, ‘Entdecktes Judenthum,’ vol. i. p. 398 (Talmudic myth).

Footnote 436:

Plutarch, de Facie in Orbe Lunae; Juvenal, Sat. vi. 441; Plin. ii. 9;

Tacit. Annal. i. 28.

Footnote 437:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 668-78, 224; Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth,’ p. 268; Brand,

‘Pop. Ant.’ vol. iii. p. 152; Horst, ‘Zauber-Bibliothek,’ vol. iv. p.

350; D. Monnier, ‘Traditions populaires comparées,’ p. 138; see Migne,

‘Dic. des Superstitions,’ art. ‘Eclipse’; Cornelius Agrippa, ‘De

Occulta Philosophia,’ ii. c. 45, gives a picture of the lunar

eclipse-dragon.

Footnote 438:

Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ pp. 54-58; in his Maori texts, Ko nga Mahinga,

pp. 28-30, Ko nga Mateatea, pp. xlviii.-ix. I have to thank Sir G.

Grey for a more explicit and mythologically more consistent

translation of the story of Maui’s entrance into the womb of

Hine-nui-te-po and her crushing him to death between her thighs, than

is given in his English version. Compare R. Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p.

132; Schirren, ‘Wandersagen der Neuseel.’ p. 33; Shortland, ‘Trads. of

N. Z.’ p. 63 (a version of the myth of Maui’s death); see also pp.

171, 180, and Baker in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. p. 53.

Footnote 439:

John White, ‘Ancient History of the Maori,’ vol. i. p. 146. In former

editions a statement received from New Zealand was inserted, that the

cry or laugh of the tiwakawaka or pied fantail is only heard at

sunset. This, however does not agree with the accounts of Sir W. Lawry

Buller, who, in his ‘Birds of New Zealand,’ vol. i. p. 69,

supplemented by his answer to my enquiry, makes it clear that the bird

sings in the daytime. Thus the argument connecting the sunset-song

with the story as a sunset-myth falls away. In another version of

Maui’s death, in White, vol. ii. p. 112, the laughing bird is the

patatai or little swamp-rail, which cries at and after nightfall and

in the early morning (Buller, vol. ii. p. 98). Note to 3rd ed.

Footnote 440:

Mason, ‘Karens,’ in ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ 1865, part ii. p. 178,

&c.

Footnote 441:

Schoolcraft, ‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 318; ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i.

p. 135, &c., 144; John Tanner, ‘Narrative,’ p. 357; see Brinton,

‘Myths of New World,’ p. 166. For legends of Sun-Catcher, see ‘Early

Hist. of Mankind,’ ch. xii.

Footnote 442:

Casalis, ‘Basutos,’ p. 347; Callaway, ‘Zulu Tales,’ vol. i. pp. 56,

69, 84, 334 (see also the story, p. 241, of the frog who swallowed the

princess and carried her safe home). See Cranz, p. 271 (Greenland

angekok swallowed by bear and walrus and thrown up again), and

Bastian, ‘Mensch,’ vol. ii. pp. 506-7; J. M. Harris in ‘Mem. Anthrop.

Soc.’ vol. ii. p. 31 (similar notions in Africa and New Guinea).

Footnote 443:

Tzetzes ap. Lycophron, Cassandra, 33. As to connexion with Joppa and

Phœnicia, see Plin. v. 14; ix. 4; Mela, i. 11; Strabo, xvi. 2, 28;

Movers, Phönizier, vol. i. pp. 422-3. The expression in Jonah, ii. 2,

‘out of the belly of Hades’ (mibten sheol, ἐκ κοιλίας ᾄδου) seems a

relic of the original meaning of the myth.

Footnote 444:

‘Apocr. Gosp.’ Nicodemus, ch. xx.; Mrs. Jameson, ‘History of our Lord

in Art,’ vol. ii. p. 258.

Footnote 445:

Eireks Saga, 3, 4, in ‘Flateyjarbok,’ vol. i., Christiania, 1859;

Baring-Gould, ‘Myths of the Middle Ages,’ p. 238.

Footnote 446:

Mrs. Jameson, ‘Sacred and Legendary Art,’ vol. ii. p. 138.

Footnote 447:

J. and W. Grimm, ‘Kinder und Hausmärchen,’ vol. i. pp. 26, 140; vol.

iii. p. 15. (See ref. to these two stories, ‘Early Hist, of M.’ 1st

ed. (1865) p. 338.) I find that Sir G. W. Cox, ‘Mythology’ (1870),

vol. i. p. 358, had noticed the Wolf and Seven Kids as a myth of the

days of the week (Note to 2nd ed.). For mentions of the wolf of

darkness, see Hanusch, p. 192; Edda, ‘Gylfaginning,’ 12; Grimm, ‘D.

M.’ pp. 224, 668. With the episode of the stones substituted compare

the myth of Zeus and Kronos. For various other stories belonging to

the group of the Man swallowed by the Monster, see Lucian, Historiæ

Veræ I.; Hardy, ‘Manual of Buddhism,’ p. 501; Lane, ‘Thousand and One

Nights,’ vol. iii. p. 104; Halliwell, ‘Pop. Rhymes,’ p. 98; ‘Nursery

Rhymes,’ p. 48; ‘Early Hist. of Mankind,’ p. 337.

Footnote 448:

Grey, ‘Polyn. Myth.’ p. 16, &c., see 144; Jas. White, ‘Ancient History

of the Maori,’ vol. ii. pp. 76, 115. Other details in Schirren,

‘Wandersagen der Neuseeländer,’ pp. 32-7, 143-51; R. Taylor, ‘New

Zealand,’ p. 124, &c.; compare 116, 141, &c., and volcano-myth, p.

248; Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 142; Polack, ‘M. and C. of New Z.’ vol.

i. p. 15; S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga Is.’ p. 134. See also Turner,

‘Polynesia,’ pp. 252, 527 (Samoan version). In comparing the group of

Maui-legends it is to be observed that New Zealand Mahuika and

Maui-Tikitiki correspond to Tongan Mafuike and Kijikiji, Samoan Mafuie

and Tiitii.

Footnote 449:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. pp. 1-33. The three arrows recur in

Manabozho’s slaying the Shining Manitu, vol. i. p. 153. See the

remarkably corresponding three magic arrows in Orvar Odd’s Saga;

Nilsson, ‘Stone Age,’ p. 197. The Red-Swan myth of sunset is

introduced in George Eliot’s ‘Spanish Gypsy,’ p. 63; Longfellow,

‘Hiawatha,’ xii.

Footnote 450:

See Kuhn’s ‘Zeitschrift,’ 1860, vol. ix. p. 212; Max Müller, ‘Chips,’

vol. ii. p. 127; Cox, ‘Mythology,’ vol. i. p. 256, vol. ii. p. 239.

Footnote 451:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 291, 767.

Footnote 452:

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

233-4. Prof. Liebrecht, in his notice of the 1st ed. of the present

work, in ‘Gött. Gel. Anz.’ 1872, p. 1290, refers to a Burmese legend

in Bastian, O. A. vol. ii. p. 515, and a Mongol legend, Gesser Chan,

book iv.

Footnote 453:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Researches,’ vol. ii. p. 40, &c.; Loskiel, ‘Gesch.

der Mission,’ Barby, 1789, p. 47 (the English edition, part i. p. 35,

is incorrect). See also Brinton, ‘Myths of New World,’ p. 63. In an

Esquimaux tale, Giviok comes to the two mountains which shut and open;

paddling swiftly between, he gets through, but the mountains clashing

together crush the stern of his kayak: Rink, ‘Eskimoische Eventyr og

Sagn,’ p. 98, referred to by Liebrecht, l.c.

Footnote 454:

Kingsborough, ‘Antiquities of Mexico,’ vol. i.; Torquemanda,

‘Monarquia Indiana,’ xiii. 47; ‘Con estos has de pasar por medio de

dos Sierras, que se estan batiendo, y encontrando la una con la otra.’

Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 94.

Footnote 455:

Apollodor. i. 9, 22; Appollon. Rhod. Argonautica, ii. 310-616; Pindar,

‘Pythia Carm.’ iv. 370.

Footnote 456:

Polack, ‘Manners of N. Z.’ vol. i. p. 16; ‘New Zealand,’ vol. i. p.

358; Yate, p. 142; Schirren, pp. 88, 165.

Footnote 457:

Euseb. Præp. Evang. iii. 9.

Footnote 458:

Rig-Veda, i. 115; Böhtlingk and Roth, s.v. ‘mitra.’

Footnote 459:

Avesta, tr. Spiegel, ‘Yaçna,’ i. 35; iii., lxvii., 61-2; compare

Burnouf, ‘Yaçna.’

Footnote 460:

Macrob. Saturnal. i. 21, 13. See Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p. 85.

Footnote 461:

Grimm, ‘Deutsche Myth.’ p. 665. See also Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p.

213.

Footnote 462:

Edda, ‘Völuspa,’ 22; ‘Gylfaginning,’ 15. See Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 133;

‘Reinhart Fuchs.’

Footnote 463:

As to the identification of the Norns and the Fates, see Grimm, ‘D.

M.’ pp. 376-86; Max Müller, ‘Chips,’ vol. ii. p. 154. It is to be

observed in connexion with the Perseus-myth, that another of its

obscure episodes, the Gorgon’s head turning those who look on it into

stone, corresponds with myths of the sun itself. In Hispaniola, men

came out of two caves (thus being born of their mother Earth); the

giant who guarded these caves strayed one night, and the rising sun

turned him into a great rock called Kauta, just as the Gorgon’s head

turned Atlas the Earth-bearer into the mountain that bears his name;

after this, others of the early cave-men were surprised by the

sunlight, and turned into stones, trees, plants or beasts (Friar Roman

Pane in ‘Life of Columbus’ in Pinkerton, vol. xii. p. 80; J. G.

Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ p. 179). In Central America a Quiché legend

relates how the ancient animals were petrified by the Sun (Brasseur,

‘Popol Vuh,’ p. 245). Thus the Americans have the analogue of the

Scandinavian myths of giants and dwarfs surprised by daylight outside

their hiding-places, and turned to stones. Such fancies appear

connected with the fancied human shapes of rocks or ‘standing stones’

which peasants still account for as transformed creatures. Thus in

Fiji, two rocks are a male and female deity turned to stone at

daylight, Seemann, ‘Viti,’ p. 66; see Liebrecht in ‘Heidelberg.

Jahrb.’ 1864, p. 216. This idea is brought also into the Perseus-myth,

for the rocks abounding in Seriphos are the islanders thus petrified

by the Gorgon’s head.

Footnote 464:

Piedrahita, ‘Hist. Gen. de las Conquistas del Nuevo Reyno de Granada,’

Antwerp, 1688, part i. lib. i. c. 3; Humboldt, ‘Monumens,’ pl. vi.; J.

G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 423-30.

Footnote 465:

Garcilaso de la Vega, ‘Commentarios Reales,’ i. c. 15; Prescott,

‘Peru,’ vol. i. p. 7; J. G. Müller, pp. 303-8, 328-39. Other Peruvian

versions show the fundamental solar idea in different mythic shapes

(Tr. of Cieza de Leon, tr. and ed. by C. R. Markham, Hakluyt Soc.

1864, pp. xlix. 298, 316, 372). W. B. Stevenson (‘Residence in S.

America,’ vol. i. p. 394) and Bastian (‘Mensch,’ vol. iii. p. 347) met

with a curious perversion of the myth, in which _Inca Manco Ccapac_,

corrupted into _Ingasman Cocapac_, gave rise to a story of an

_Englishman_ figuring in the midst of Peruvian mythology.

Footnote 466:

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

Footnote 467:

H. Yule, ‘Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,’ vol. xiii. p. 628.

Footnote 468:

Hanusch, ‘Slaw. Myth.’ p. 269.

Footnote 469:

Bleek, ‘Reynard in S. Africa,’ pp. 69-74; C. J. Andersson, ‘Lake

Ngami,’ p. 328; see Grout, ‘Zulu-land,’ p. 148; Arbousset and Daumas,

p. 471. As to connexion of the moon with the hare, cf. Skr. ‘çaçanka;’

and in Mexico, Sahagun, book vii. c. 2, in Kingsborough, vol. vii.

Footnote 470:

Williams, ‘Fiji,’ vol. i. p. 205. Compare the Caroline Island myth

that in the beginning men only quitted life on the last day of the

waning moon, and resuscitated as from a peaceful sleep when she

reappeared; but the evil spirit Erigirers inflicted a death from which

there is no revival: De Brosses, ‘Hist. des Navig. aux Terres

Australes,’ vol. ii. p. 479. Also in a song of the Indians of

California it is said, that even as the moon dies and returns to life,

so they shall be re-born after death; Duflot de Mofras in Bastian,

‘Rechtsverhältnisse,’ p. 385, see ‘Psychologie,’ p. 54.

Footnote 471:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. i. p. 284; vol. iv. p. 333; Tickell in

‘Journ. As. Soc.’ Bengal, vol. ix. part ii. p. 797; Latham, ‘Descr.

Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 422.

Footnote 472:

Stanbridge in ‘Tr. Eth. Soc.’ vol. i. pp. 301-3.

Footnote 473:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. pp. 57-66. The story of the hero or

deity invulnerable like Achilles save in one weak spot, recurs in the

tales of the slaying of the Shining Manitu, whose scalp alone was

vulnerable, and of the mighty Kwasind, who could be killed only by the

cone of the white pine wounding the vulnerable place on the crown of

his head (vol. i. p. 153; vol. ii. p. 163).

Footnote 474:

Taylor, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 363.

Footnote 475:

Stanbridge, l.c.; Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 148; Leems, ‘Lapland,’ in

Pinkerton, vol. i. p. 411. The name of the Bear occurring in North

America in connexion with the stars of the Great and Little Bear

(Charlevoix, l.c.; Cotton Mather in Schoolcraft, ‘Tribes,’ vol. i. p.

284) has long been remarked on (Goguet, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p.

366, but with reference to Greenland, see Cranz, p. 294). See

observations on the history of the Aryan name in Max Müller,

‘Lectures,’ 2nd series, p. 361.

Footnote 476:

Casalis, p. 196; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 191.

Footnote 477:

Long’s Exp. vol. i. p. 288; Schoolcraft, part i. p. 272; Le Jeune in

‘Rel. des Jés. de la Nouvelle France,’ 1634, p. 18; Loskiel, part i.

p. 35; J. G. Müller, p. 63.

Footnote 478:

Hanusch, pp. 272, 407, 415.

Footnote 479:

Porphyr. de Antro Nympharum, 28; Macrob. de Somn. Scip. 1. 12.

Footnote 480:

Beausobre, ‘Hist. de Manichée,’ vol. ii. p. 513.

Footnote 481:

Bastian, ‘Oestl. Asien,’ vol. iii. p. 341; ‘Chronique de Tabari,’ tr.

Dubeux, p. 24; Grimm, ‘D.M.’ p. 330, &c.

Footnote 482:

Chaucer, ‘House of Fame,’ ii. 427. With reference to questions of

Aryan mythology illustrated by the savage galaxy-myths, see Pictet,

‘Origines,’ part ii. p. 582, &c. Mr. J. Jeremiah informs me that

‘Watling Street’ is still (1871) a name for the Milky Way in Scotland;

see also his paper on ‘Welsh names of the Milky Way,’ Philological

Soc., Nov. 17, 1871. The corresponding name ‘London Road’ is used in

Suffolk.

Footnote 483:

Yate, ‘New Zealand,’ p. 144, see Ellis, ‘Polyn. Res.’ vol. ii. p. 417.

Footnote 484:

Virg. Aeneid, i. 56; Homer, Odyss. x. 1.

Footnote 485:

Schoolcraft, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. i. p. 200; vol. ii. pp. 122, 214;

‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 324.

Footnote 486:

Brinton, ‘Myths of the New World,’ ch. iii.

Footnote 487:

‘Rig-Veda,’ tr. by Max Müller, vol. i. (Hymns to Maruts); Welcker,

‘Griech. Götterl.’ vol. iii. p. 67; Cox, ‘Mythology of Aryan Nations,’

vol. ii. ch. v.

Footnote 488:

Grimm, ‘D. M.’ pp. 126, 599, 894; Hunt, ‘Pop. Rom.’ 1st ser. p. xix.;

Baring-Gould, ‘Book of Werewolves,’ p. 101; see ‘Myths of the Middle

Ages,’ p. 25; Wuttke, ‘Deutsche Volksaberglaube,’ pp. 13, 236;

Monnier, ‘Traditions,’ pp. 75, &c., 741, 747.

Footnote 489:

Pr. Max v. Wied, ‘Reise in N. A.’ vol. i. pp. 446, 455; vol. ii. pp.

152, 223; Sir Alex. Mackenzie, ‘Voyages,’ p. cxvii.; Sproat, ‘Scenes

of Savage Life’ (Vancouver’s I.), pp. 177, 213; Irving, ‘Astoria,’

vol. ii. ch. xxii.; Le Jeune, op. cit. 1634, p. 26; Schoolcraft,

‘Indian Tribes,’ part iii. p. 233, ‘Algic Res.’ vol. ii. pp. 114-6,

199; Catlin, vol. ii. p. 164; Brasseur, ‘Popol Vuh,’ p. 71 and Index,

‘Hurakan;’ J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrel.’ pp. 222, 271; Ellis, ‘Polyn.

Res.’ vol. ii. p. 417; Jno. Williams, ‘Missionary Enterprise,’ p. 93;

Mason, l.c. p. 217; Moffat, ‘South Africa,’ p. 338; Casalis,

‘Basutos,’ p. 266; Callaway, ‘Religion of Amazulu,’ p. 119.

Footnote 490:

Mariner, ‘Tonga Is.’ vol. ii. p. 120; S. S. Farmer, ‘Tonga,’ p. 135;

Schirren, pp. 35-7.

Footnote 491:

‘Journ. Ind. Archip.’ vol. ii. p. 837.

Footnote 492:

J. G. Müller, ‘Amer. Urrelig.’ pp. 61, 122.

Footnote 493:

Brasseur, ‘Mexique,’ vol. iii. p. 482.

Footnote 494:

Pouchet, ‘Plurality of Races,’ p. 2.

Footnote 495:

Steller, ‘Kamtschatka,’ p. 267.

Footnote 496:

Mason, ‘Karens,’ l.c. p. 182.

Footnote 497:

Bell, ‘Tr. in Asia,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 369; Bastian, ‘Oestl.

Asien,’ vol. ii. p. 168; Lane, ‘Thousand and one Nights,’ vol. i. p.

21; see Latham, ‘Descr. Eth.’ vol. ii. p. 171; Beausobre, ‘Manichée,’

vol. i. p. 243.

Footnote 498:

Edda, ‘Gylfaginning,’ 50; Grimm, ‘D. M.’ p. 777, &c.

Footnote 499:

Kaempfer, ‘Japan,’ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684; see mammoth-myths

in ‘Early Hist, of Mankind,’ p. 315.

CHAPTER X.

MYTHOLOGY (_continued_).

Philosophical Myths: inferences become pseudo-history—Geological

Myths—Effect of doctrine of Miracles on Mythology—Magnetic

Mountain—Myths of relation of Apes to Men by development or

degeneration—Ethnological import of myths of Ape-men, Men with

tails, Men of the woods—Myths of Error, Perversion, and

Exaggeration: stories of Giants, Dwarfs, and Monstrous Tribes of

men—Fanciful explanatory Myths—Myths attached to legendary or

historical Personages—Etymological Myths on names of places and

persons—Eponymic Myths on names of tribes, nations, countries, &c.;

their ethnological import—Pragmatic Myths by realization of

metaphors and ideas—Allegory—Beast-Fable—Conclusion.

Although the attempt to reduce to rule and system the whole domain of

mythology would as yet be rash and premature, yet the piecemeal invasion

of one mythic province after another proves feasible and profitable.

Having discussed the theory of nature-myths, it is worth while to gain

in other directions glimpses of the crude and child-like thought of

mankind, not arranged in abstract doctrines, but embodied by mythic

fancy. We shall find the result in masses of legends, full of interest

as bearing on the early history of opinion, and which may be roughly

classified under the following headings: myths philosophical or

explanatory; myths based on real descriptions misunderstood,

exaggerated, or perverted; myths attributing inferred events to

legendary or historical personages; myths based on realization of

fanciful metaphor; and myths made or adapted to convey moral or social

or political instruction.

Man’s craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the

reasons why each state of things he surveys is such as it is and no

other, is no product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his

race down to its lowest stages. Among rude savages it is already an

intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not

engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep. Even to the Botocudo or

Australian, scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience: he

has learnt to do definite acts that definite results may follow, to see

other acts done and their results following in course, to make inference

from the result back to the previous action, and to find his inference

verified in fact. When one day he has seen a deer or a kangaroo leave

footprints in the soft ground, and the next day he has found new

footprints and inferred that such an animal made them, and has followed

up the track and killed the game, then he knows that he has

reconstructed a history of past events by inference from their results.

But in the early stages of knowledge the confusion is extreme between

actual tradition of events, and ideal reconstruction of them. To this

day there go about the world endless stories told as matter of known

reality, but which a critical examination shows to be mere inferences,

often utterly illusory ones, from facts which have stimulated the

invention of some curious enquirer. Thus a writer in the Asiatick

Researches at the end of the 18th century relates the following account

of the Andaman islanders, as a historical fact of which he had been

informed: ‘Shortly after the Portuguese had discovered the passage to

India round the Cape of Good Hope, one of their ships, on board of which

were a number of Mozambique negroes, was lost on the Andaman islands,

which were till then uninhabited. The blacks remained in the island and

settled it: the Europeans made a small shallop in which they sailed to

Pegu.’ Many readers must have had their interest excited by this curious

story, but at the first touch of fact it dissolves into a philosophic

myth, made by the easy transition from what might have been to what was.

So far from the islands having been uninhabited at the time of Vasco de

Gama’s voyage, their population of naked blacks with frizzled hair had

been described six hundred years earlier, and the story, which sounded

reasonable to people puzzled by the appearance of a black population in

the Andaman islands, is of course repudiated by ethnologists aware of

the wide distribution of the negroid Papuans, really so distinct from

any race of African negroes.[500] Not long since, I met with a very

perfect myth of this kind. In a brickfield near London, there had been

found a number of fossil elephant bones, and soon afterwards a story was

in circulation in the neighbourhood somewhat in this shape: ‘A few years

ago, one of Wombwell’s caravans was here, an elephant died, and they

buried him in the field, and now the scientific gentlemen have found his

bones, and think they have got a præ-Adamite elephant.’ It seemed almost

cruel to spoil this ingenious myth by pointing out that such a prize as

a living mammoth was beyond the resources even of Wombwell’s menagerie.

But so exactly does such a story explain the facts to minds not troubled

with nice distinctions between existing and extinct species of

elephants, that it was on another occasion invented elsewhere under

similar circumstances. This was at Oxford, where Mr. Buckland found the

story of the Wombwell’s caravan and dead elephant current to explain a

similar find of fossil bones.[501] Such explanations of the finding of

fossils are easily devised and used to be freely made, as when fossil

bones found in the Alps were set down to Hannibal’s elephants, or when a

petrified oyster-shell found near Mont Cenis set Voltaire reflecting on

the crowd of pilgrims on their way to Rome, or when theologians supposed

such shells on mountains to have been left on their slopes and summits

by a rising deluge. Such theoretical explanations are unimpeachable in

their philosophic spirit, until further observation may prove them to be

unsound. Their disastrous effect on the historic conscience of mankind

only begins when the inference is turned upside down, to be told as a

recorded fact.

In this connexion brief notice may be taken of the doctrine of miracles

in its special bearing on mythology. The mythic wonder-episodes related

by a savage tale-teller, the amazing superhuman feats of his gods and

heroes, are often to his mind miracles in the original popular sense of

the word, that is, they are strange and marvellous events; but they are

not to his mind miracles in a frequent modern sense of the word, that

is, they are not violations or supersessions of recognized laws of

nature. Exceptio probat regulam; to acknowledge anything as an exception

is to imply the rule it departs from; but the savage recognizes neither

rule nor exception. Yet a European hearer, brought up to use a different

canon of evidence, will calmly reject this savage’s most revered

ancestral traditions, simply on the ground that they relate events which

are impossible. The ordinary standards of possibility, as applied to the

credibility of tradition, have indeed changed vastly in the course of

culture through its savage, barbaric, and civilized stages. What

concerns us here is that there is an important department of legend

which this change in public opinion, generally so resistless, left to a

great extent unaltered. In the middle ages the long-accepted practice

rose to its height, of allowing the mere assertion of supernatural

influence by angels or devils, saints or sorcerers, to override the

rules of evidence and the results of experience. The consequence was

that the doctrine of miracles became as it were a bridge along which

mythology travelled from the lower into the higher culture. Principles

of myth-formation belonging properly to the mental state of the savage,

were by its aid continued in strong action in the civilized world.

Mythic episodes which Europeans would have rejected contemptuously if

told of savage deities or heroes, only required to be adapted to

appropriate local details, and to be set forth as miracles in the life

of some superhuman personage, to obtain as of old a place of credit and

honour in history.

From the enormous mass of available instances in proof of this let us

take two cases belonging to the class of geological myths. The first is

the well-known legend of St. Patrick and the serpents. It is thus given

by Dr. Andrew Boorde in his description of Ireland and the Irish in

Henry VIII.’s time. ‘Yet in Ierland is stupendyous thynges; for there is

neyther Pyes nor venymus wormes. There is no Adder, nor Snake, nor

Toode, nor Lyzerd, nor no Euyt, nor none such lyke. I haue sene stones

the whiche haue had the forme and shap of a snake and other venimus

wormes. And the people of the countre sayth that suche stones were

wormes, and they were turned into stones by the power of God and the

prayers of saynt Patryk. And Englysh marchauntes of England do fetch of

the erth of Irlonde to caste in their gardens, to kepe out and to kyll

venimus wormes.’[502] In treating this passage, the first step is to

separate pieces of imported foreign myth, belonging properly not to

Ireland, but to islands of the Mediterranean; the story of the earth of

the island of Krete being fatal to venomous serpents is to be found in

Ælian,[503] and St. Honoratus clearing the snakes from his island (one

of the Lerins opposite Cannes)[504] seems to take precedence of the

Irish saint. What is left after these deductions is a philosophic myth

accounting for the existence of fossil ammonites as being petrified

snakes, to which myth a historical position is given by claiming it as a

miracle, and ascribing it to St. Patrick. The second myth is valuable

for the historical and geological evidence which it incidentally

preserves. At the celebrated ruins of the temple of Jupiter Serapis at

Pozzuoli, the ancient Puteoli, the marble columns, encircled half-way up

by borings of lithodomi, stand to prove that the ground of the temple

must have been formerly submerged many feet below the sea, and

afterwards upheaved to become again dry land. History is remarkably

silent as to the events demonstrated by this conclusive geological

evidence; between the recorded adornment of the temple by Roman emperors

from the second to the third century, and the mention of its existence

in ruins in the 16th century, no documentary information was till lately

recognized. It has now been pointed out by Mr. Tuckett that a passage in

the Apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, dating apparently more or less

before the end of the 9th century, mentions the subsidence of the

temple, ascribing it to a miracle of St. Paul. The legend is as follows:

‘And when he (Paul) came out of Messina he sailed to Didymus, and

remained there one night. And having sailed thence, he came to Pontiole

(Puteoli) on the second day. And Dioscorus the shipmaster, who brought

him to Syracuse, sympathizing with Paul because he had delivered his son

from death, having left his own ship in Syracuse, accompanied him to

Pontiole. And some of Peter’s disciples having been found there, and

having received Paul, exhorted him to stay with them. And he stayed a

week in hiding, because of the command of Cæsar (that he should be put

to death). And all the toparchs were waiting to seize and kill him. But

Dioscorus the shipmaster, being himself also bald, wearing his

shipmaster’s dress, and speaking boldly, on the first day went out into

the city of Pontiole. Thinking therefore that he was Paul, they seized

him and beheaded him, and sent his head to Cæsar.... And Paul, being in

Pontiole, and having heard that Dioscorus had been beheaded, being

grieved with great grief, gazing into the height of the heaven, said: “O

Lord Almighty in Heaven, who hast appeared to me in every place whither

I have gone on account of Thine only-begotten Word, our Lord Jesus

Christ, punish this city, and bring out all who have believed in God and

followed His word.” He said to them, therefore, “Follow me.” And going

forth from Pontiole with those who had believed in the word of God, they

came to a place called Baias (Baiæ), and looking up with their eyes,

they all see that city called Pontiole sunk into the sea-shore about one

fathom; and there it is until this day, for a remembrance, under the

sea.... And those who had been saved out of the city of Pontiole, that

had been swallowed up, reported to Cæsar in Rome that Pontiole had been

swallowed up with all its multitude.’[505]

Episodes of popular myth, which are often items of the serious belief of

the times they belong to, may serve as important records of intellectual

history. As an example belonging to the class of philosophical or

explanatory myths, let us glance at an Arabian Nights’ story, which at

first sight may seem an effort of the wildest imagination, but which is

nevertheless traceable to a scientific origin; this is the story of the

Magnetic Mountain. The Third Kalenter relates in his tale how a contrary

wind drove his ships into a strange sea, and there, by the attraction of

their nails and other ironwork, they were violently drawn towards a

mountain of black loadstone, till at last the iron flew out to the

mountain, and the ships went to pieces in the surf. The episode is older

than the date when the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ were edited. When, in

Henry of Veldeck’s 12th century poem, Duke Ernest and his companions

sail into the Klebermeer, they see the rock that is called Magnes, and

are themselves dragged in below it among ‘many a work of keels,’ whose

masts stand like a forest.[506] Turning from tale-tellers to grave

geographers and travellers who talk of the loadstone mountain, we find

El Kazwini, like Serapion before him, believing such boats as may be

still seen in Ceylon, pegged and sewn without metal nails, to be so

built lest the magnetic rock should attract them from their course at

sea. This quaint notion is to be found in ‘Sir John Mandeville’: ‘In an

isle clept Crues, ben schippes with-outen nayles of iren, or bonds, for

the rockes of the adamandes; for they ben alle fulle there aboute in

that see, that it is marveyle to spaken of. And gif a schipp passed by

the marches, and hadde either iren bandes or iren nayles, anon he sholde

ben perishet. For the adamande of this kinde draws the iren to him; and

so wolde it draw to him the schipp, because of the iren; that he sholde

never departen fro it, ne never go thens.’[507] Now it seems that

accounts of the magnetic mountain have been given not only as belonging

to the southern seas, but also to the north, and that men have connected

with such notions the pointing of the magnetic needle, as Sir Thomas

Browne says, ‘ascribing thereto the cause of the needle’s direction, and

conceeving the effluxions from these mountains and rocks invite the

lilly toward the north.’[508] On this evidence we have, I think, fair

ground for supposing that hypotheses of polar magnetic mountains were

first devised to explain the action of the compass, and that these gave

rise to stories of such mountains exerting what would be considered

their proper effect on the iron of passing ships. The argument is

clenched by the consideration that Europeans, who colloquially say the

needle points to the north, naturally required their loadstone mountain

in high northern latitudes while on the other hand it was as natural

that Orientals should place this wondrous rock in the south, for they

say it is to the south that the needle points. The conception of

magnetism among peoples who had not reached the idea of double polarity

may be gathered from the following quaint remarks in the 17th century

cyclopædia of the Chinese emperor Kang-hi. ‘I now hear the Europeans say

it is towards the North pole that the compass turns; the ancients said

it was toward the South; which have judged most rightly? Since neither

give any reason why, we come to no more with the one side than with the

other. But the ancients are the earlier in date, and the farther I go

the more I perceive that they understood the mechanism of nature. All

movement languishes and dies in proportion as it approaches the north;

it is hard to believe it to be from thence that the movement of the

magnetic needle comes.’[509]

To suppose that theories of a relation between man and the lower

mammalia are only a product of advanced science, would be an extreme

mistake. Even at low levels of culture, men addicted to speculative

philosophy have been led to account for the resemblance between apes and

themselves by solutions satisfactory to their own minds, but which we

must class as philosophic myths. Among these, stories which embody the

thought of an upward change from ape to man, more or less approaching

the last-century theory of development, are to be found side by side

with others which in the converse way account for apes as degenerate

from a previous human state.

Central American mythology works out the idea that monkeys were once a

human race.[510] In South-East Africa, Father Dos Santos remarked long

since that ‘they hold that the apes were anciently men and women, and

thus they call them in their tongue the first people.’ The Zulus still

tell the tale of an Amafeme tribe who became baboons. They were an idle

race who did not like to dig, but wished to eat at other people’s

houses, saying, ‘We shall live, although we do not dig, if we eat the

food of those who cultivate the soil.’ So the chief of that place, of

the house of Tusi, assembled the tribe, and they prepared food and went

out into the wilderness. They fastened on behind them the handles of

their now useless digging picks, these grew and became tails, hair made

its appearance on their bodies, their foreheads became overhanging, and

so they became baboons, who are still called ‘Tusi’s men.’[511] Mr.

Kingsley’s story of the great and famous nation of the Doasyoulikes, who

degenerated by natural selection into gorillas, is the civilized

counterpart of this savage myth. Or monkeys may be transformed

aborigines, as the Mbocobis relate in South America: in the great

conflagration of their forests a man and woman climbed a tree for refuge

from the fiery deluge, but the flames singed their faces and they became

apes.[512] Among more civilized nations these fancies have graphic

representatives in Moslem legends, of which one is as follows:—There was

a Jewish city which stood by a river full of fish, but the cunning

creatures, noticing the habits of the citizens, ventured freely in sight

on the Sabbath, though they carefully kept away on working-days. At last

the temptation was too strong for the Jewish fishermen, but they paid

dearly for a few days’ fine sport by being miraculously turned into apes

as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking. In after times, when Solomon

passed through the Valley of Apes, between Jerusalem and Mareb, he

received from their descendants, monkeys living in houses and dressed

like men, an account of their strange history.[513] So, in classic

times, Jove had chastised the treacherous race of the Cercopes; he took

from them the use of tongues born but to perjure, leaving them to bewail

in hoarse cries their fate, transformed into the hairy apes of the

Pithecusæ, like and yet unlike the men they had been:—

‘In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idem

Dissimiles homini possent similesque videri.’[514]

Turning from degeneration to development, it is found that legends of

the descent of human tribes from apes are especially applied to races

despised as low and beast-like by some higher neighbouring people, and

the low race may even acknowledge the humiliating explanation. Thus the

aboriginal features of the robber-caste of the Marawars of South India

are the justification for their alleged descent from Rama’s monkeys, as

for the like genealogy of the Kathkuri, or catechu-gatherers, which

these small, dark, low-browed, curly-haired tribes actually themselves

believe in. The Jaitwas of Rajputana, a tribe reckoned politically as

Rajputs, nevertheless trace their descent from the monkey-god Hanuman,

and confirm it by alleging that their princes still bear its evidence in

a tail-like prolongation of the spine; a tradition which has probably a

real ethnological meaning, pointing out the Jaitwas as of non-Aryan

race.[515] Wild tribes of the Malay peninsula, looked down on as lower

animals by the more warlike and civilized Malays, have among them

traditions of their own descent from a pair of the ‘unka puteh,’ or

‘white monkeys,’ who reared their young ones and sent them into the

plains, and there they perfected so well that they and their descendants

became men, but those who returned to the mountains still remained

apes.[516] Thus Buddhist legend relates the origin of the flat-nosed,

uncouth tribes of Tibet, offspring of two miraculous apes, transformed

to people the snow-kingdom. Taught to till the ground, when they had

grown corn and eaten it their tails and hair gradually disappeared, they

began to speak, became men, and clothed themselves with leaves. The

population grew closer, the land was more and more cultivated, and at

last a prince of the race of Sakya, driven from his home in India,

united their isolated tribes into a single kingdom.[517] In these

traditions the development from ape to man is considered to have come in

successive generations, but the negroes are said to attain the result in

the individual, by way of metempsychosis. Froebel speaks of negro slaves

in the United States believing that in the next world they shall be

white men and free, nor is there anything strange in their cherishing a

hope so prevalent among their kindred in West Africa. But from this the

traveller goes on to quote another story, which, if not too good to be

true, is a theory of upward and downward development, almost thorough

enough for a Buddhist philosopher. He says, ‘A German whom I met here

told me that the blacks believe the damned among the negroes to become

monkeys; but if in this state they behave well, they are advanced to the

state of a negro again, and bliss is eventually possible to them,

consisting in their turning white, becoming winged, and so on.’[518]

To understand these stories (and they are worth some attention for the

ethnological hints they contain), it is necessary that we should discard

the results of modern scientific zoology, and bring our minds back to a

ruder condition of knowledge. The myths of human degeneration and

development have much more in common with the speculations of Lord

Monboddo than with the anatomical arguments of Professor Huxley. On the

one hand, uncivilized men deliberately assign to apes an amount of human

quality which to modern naturalists is simply ridiculous. Everyone has

heard the story of the negroes declaring that apes really can speak, but

judiciously hold their tongues lest they should be made to work; but it

is not so generally known that this is found as serious matter of belief

in several distant regions—West Africa, Madagascar, South America,

&c.—where monkeys or apes are found.[519] With this goes another

widely-spread anthropoid story, which relates how great apes like the

gorilla and the orang-utan carry off women to their homes in the woods,

much as the Apaches and Comanches of our own time carry off to their

prairies the women of North Mexico.[520] And on the other hand, popular

opinion has under-estimated the man as much as it has over-estimated the

monkey. We know how sailors and emigrants can look on savages as

senseless, ape-like brutes, and how some writers on anthropology have

contrived to make out of the moderate intellectual difference between an

Englishman and a negro something equivalent to the immense interval

between a negro and a gorilla. Thus we can have no difficulty in

understanding how savages may seem mere apes to the eyes of men who hunt

them like wild beasts in the forests, who can only hear in their

language a sort of irrational gurgling and barking, and who fail totally

to appreciate the real culture which better acquaintance always shows

among the rudest tribes of man. It is well known that when Sanskrit

legend tells of the apes who fought in the army of King Hanuman, it

really refers to those aborigines of the land who were driven by the

Aryan invaders to the hills and jungles, and whose descendants are known

to us as Bhils, Kols, Sonthals, and the like, rude tribes such as the

Hindu still speaks of as ‘monkey-people.’[521] One of the most perfect

identifications of the savage and the monkey in Hindustan is the

following description of the _bunmanus_, or ‘man of the woods’ (Sanskr.

_vana_ = wood, _manusha_ = man). ‘The _bunmanus_ is an animal of the

monkey kind. His face has a near resemblance to the human; he has no

tail, and walks erect. The skin of his body is black, and slightly

covered with hair.’ That this description really applies not to apes,

but to the dark-skinned, non-Aryan aborigines of the land, appears

further in the enumeration of the local dialects of Hindustan, to which,

it is said, ‘may be added the jargon of the bunmanus, or wild men of the

woods.’[522] In the islands of the Indian Archipelago, whose tropical

forests swarm both with high apes and low savages, the confusion between

the two in the minds of the half-civilized inhabitants becomes almost

inextricable. There is a well-known Hindu fable in the Hitopadesa, which

relates as a warning to stupid imitators the fate of the ape who

imitated the carpenter, and was caught in the cleft when he pulled out

the wedge; this fable has come to be told in Sumatra as a real story of

one of the indigenous savages of the island.[523] It is to rude

forest-men that the Malays habitually give the name of _orang-utan_,

i.e., ‘man of the woods.’ But in Borneo this term is applied to the

miyas ape, whence we have learnt to call this creature the orang-utan,

and the Malays themselves are known to give the name in one and the same

district to both the savage and the ape.[524] This term ‘man of the

woods’ extends far beyond Hindu and Malay limits. The Siamese talk of

the _khon pa_, ‘men of the wood,’ meaning apes;[525] the Brazilians of

_cauiari_, or ‘wood-men,’ meaning a certain savage tribe.[526] The name

of the _Bosjesman_, so amusingly mispronounced by Englishmen, as though

it were some outlandish native word, is merely the Dutch equivalent for

_Bush-man_, ‘man of the woods or bush.’[527] In our own language the

‘homo _silvaticus_’ or ‘forest-man’ has become the ‘_salvage_ man’ or

_savage_. European opinion of the native tribes of the New World may be

judged of by the fact that, in 1537, Pope Paul III. had to make express

statement that these Indians were really men (attendentes Indos ipsos

utpote veros homines).[528] Thus there is little cause to wonder at the

circulation of stories of ape-men in South America, and at there being

some indefiniteness in the local accounts of the _selvage_ or ‘savage,’

that hairy wild man of the woods who, it is said, lives in the trees,

and sometimes carries off the native women.[529] The most perfect of

these mystifications is to be found in a Portuguese manuscript quoted in

the account of Castelnau’s expedition, and giving, in all seriousness,

the following account of the people called _Cuatas_: ‘This populous

nation dwells east of the Juruena, in the neighbourhood of the rivers

San Joâo and San Thome, advancing even to the confluence of the Juruena,

and the Arinos. It is a very remarkable fact that the Indians composing

it walk naturally like the quadrupeds, with their hands on the ground;

they have the belly, breast, arms, and legs covered with hair, and are

of small stature; they are fierce, and use their teeth as weapons; they

sleep on the ground, or among the branches of trees; they have no

industry, nor agriculture, and live only on fruits, wild roots, and

fish.’[530] The writer of this record shows no symptom of being aware

that _cuata_ or _coata_ is the name of the large black Simia Paniscus,

and that he has been really describing, not a tribe of Indians, but a

species of apes.

Various reasons may have led to the growth of another quaint group of

legends, describing human tribes with tails like beasts. To people who

at once believe monkeys a kind of savages, and savages a kind of

monkeys, men with tails are creatures coming under both definitions.

Thus the Homo caudatus, or satyr, often appears in popular belief as a

half-human creature, while even in old-fashioned works on natural

history he may be found depicted on the evident model of an anthropoid

ape. In East Africa, the imagined tribe of long-tailed men are also

monkey-faced,[531] while in South America the _coata tapuya_, or

‘monkey-men,’ are as naturally described as men with tails.[532]

European travellers have tried to rationalize the stories of tailed men

which they meet with in Africa and the East. Thus Dr. Krapf points to a

leather appendage worn behind from the girdle by the Wakamba, and

remarks, ‘It is no wonder that people say there are men with tails in

the interior of Africa,’ and other writers have called attention to

hanging mats or waist-cloths, fly-flappers or artificial tails worn for

ornament, as having made their wearers liable to be mistaken at a

distance for tailed men.[533] But these apparently silly myths have

often a real ethnological significance, deeper at any rate than such a

trivial blunder. When an ethnologist meets in any district with the

story of tailed men, he ought to look for a despised tribe of

aborigines, outcasts, or heretics, living near or among a dominant

population, who look upon them as beasts, and furnish them with tails

accordingly. Although the aboriginal Miau-tsze, or ‘children of the

soil,’ come down from time to time into Canton to trade, the Chinese

still firmly believe them to have short tails like monkeys;[534] the

half-civilized Malays describe the ruder forest tribes as tailed

men;[535] the Moslem nations of Africa tell the same story of the

Niam-Nam of the interior.[536] The outcast race of Cagots, about the

Pyrenees, were said to be born with tails; and in Spain the mediæval

superstition still survives that the Jews have tails, like the devil, as

they say.[537] In England the notion was turned to theological profit by

being claimed as a judgment on wretches who insulted St. Augustine and

St. Thomas of Canterbury. Horne Tooke quotes thus from that zealous and

somewhat foul-mouthed reformer, Bishop Bale: ‘Johan Capgrave and

Alexander of Esseby sayth, that for castynge of fyshe tayles at thys

Augustyne, Dorsett Shyre menne hadde tayles ever after. But Polydorus

applieth it unto Kentish men at Stroud by Rochester, for cuttinge of

Thomas Becket’s horse’s tail. Thus hath England in all other land a

perpetuall infamy of tayles by theyr wrytten legendes of lyes, yet can

they not well tell where to bestowe them truely ... an Englyshman now

cannot travayle in an other land, by way of marchandyse or any other

honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his tethe,

that al Englishmen have tailes.’[538] The story at last sank into a

commonplace of local slander between shire and shire, and the Devonshire

belief that Cornishmen had tails lingered at least till a few years

ago.[539] Not less curious is the tradition among savage tribes, that

the tailed state was an early or original condition of man. In the Fiji

Islands there is a legend of a tribe of men with tails like dogs, who

perished in the great deluge, while the Tasmanians declared that men

originally had tails and no knee-joints. Among the natives of Brazil, it

is related by a Portuguese writer of about 1600, after a couple have

been married, the father or father-in-law cuts a wooden stick with a

sharp flint, imagining that by this ceremony he cuts off the tails of

any future grandchildren, so that they will be born tailless.[540] There

seems no evidence to connect the occasional occurrence of tail-like

projections by malformation with the stories of tailed human

tribes.[541]

Anthropology, until modern times, classified among its facts the

particulars of monstrous human tribes, gigantic or dwarfish, mouthless

or headless, one-eyed or one-legged, and so forth. The works of ancient

geographers and naturalists abound in descriptions of these strange

creatures; writers such as Isidore of Seville and Roger Bacon collected

them, and sent them into fresh and wider circulation in the middle ages,

and the popular belief of uncivilized nations retains them still. It was

not till the real world had been so thoroughly explored as to leave

little room in it for the monsters, that about the beginning of the

present century science banished them to the ideal world of mythology.

Having had to glance here at two of the principal species in this

amazing semi-human menagerie, it may be worth while to look among the

rest for more hints as to the sources of mythic fancy.[542]

That some of the myths of giants and dwarfs are connected with

traditions of real indigenous or hostile tribes is settled beyond

question by the evidence brought forward by Grimm, Nilsson, and Hanusch.

With all the difficulty of analyzing the mixed nature of the dwarfs of

European folklore, and judging how far they are elves, or gnomes, or

such like nature-spirits, and how far human beings in mythic aspect, it

is impossible not to recognize the element derived from the kindly or

mischievous aborigines of the land, with their special language, and

religion, and costume. The giants appear in European folklore as

Stone-Age heathen, shy of the conquering tribes of men, loathing their

agriculture and the sound of their church-bells. The rude native’s fear

of the more civilized intruder in his land is well depicted in the tale

of the giant’s daughter, who found the boor ploughing his field and

carried him home in her apron for a plaything—plough, and oxen, and all;

but her mother bade her carry them back to where she found them, for,

said she, they are of a people that can do the Huns much ill. The fact

of the giant tribes bearing such historic names as Hun or Chud is

significant, and Slavonic men have, perhaps, not yet forgotten that the

dwarfs talked of in their legends were descended from the aborigines

whom the Old-Prussians found in the land. Beyond a doubt the old

Scandinavians are describing the ancient and ill-used Lapp population,

once so widely spread over Northern Europe, when their sagas tell of the

dwarfs, stunted and ugly, dressed in reindeer kirtle and coloured cap,

cunning and cowardly, shy of intercourse even with friendly Norsemen,

dwelling in caves or in the mound-like Lapland ‘gamm,’ armed only with

arrows tipped with stone and bone, yet feared and hated by their

conquerors for their fancied powers of witchcraft.[543] Moslem legend

relates that the race of Gog and Magog (Yajuj and Majuj) are of tiny

stature, but with ears like elephants; they are a numerous people, and

ravaged the world; they dwell in the East, separated from Persia by a

high mountain, with but one pass; and the nations their neighbours, when

they heard of Alexander the Great (Dhû ’l-Karnain) traversing the world,

paid tribute to him, and he made them a wall of bronze and iron, to keep

in the nation of Gog and Magog.[544] Who can fail to recognize in this a

mystified description of the Tatars of High Asia? Professor Nilsson

tries to account in a general way for the huge or tiny stature of

legendary tribes, as being mere exaggeration of their actual largeness

or smallness. We must admit that this sometimes really happens. The

accounts which European eye-witnesses brought home of the colossal

stature of the Patagonians, to whose waists they declared their own

heads reached, are enough to settle once for all the fact that myths of

giants may arise from the sight of really tall men,[545] and it is so,

too, with the dwarf-legends of the same region, as where Knivet, the old

traveller, remarks of the little people of Rio de la Plata, that they

are ‘not so very little as described.’[546]

Nevertheless, this same group of giant and dwarf myths may serve as a

warning not to stretch too widely a partial explanation, however sound

within its proper limits. There is plenty of evidence that giant-legends

are sometimes philosophic myths, made to account for the finding of

great fossil bones. To give but a single instance of such connexion,

certain huge jaws and teeth, found in excavating on the Hoe at Plymouth,

were recognized as belonging to the giant Gogmagog, who in old times

fought his last fight there against Corineus, the eponymic hero of

Cornwall.[547] As to the dwarfs, again, stories of them are curiously

associated with those long-enduring monuments of departed races—their

burial-cysts and dolmens. Thus, in the United States, ranges of rude

stone cysts, often only two or three feet long, are connected with the

idea of a pygmy race buried in them. In Brittany, the dolmens are the

abodes and treasuries of the dwarfs who built them, and likewise in

India it is a usual legend of such prehistoric burial-places, that they

were dwarfs’ houses—the dwellings of the ancient pygmies, who here again

appear as representatives of prehistoric tribes.[548] But a very

different meaning is obvious in a mediæval traveller’s account of the

hairy, man-like creatures of Cathay, one cubit high, and that do not

bend their knees as they walk, or in an Arab geographer’s description of

an island people in the Indian seas, four spans high, naked, with red

downy hair on their faces, and who climb up trees and shun mankind. If

any one could possibly doubt the real nature of these dwarfs, his doubt

may be resolved by Marco Polo’s statement that in his time monkeys were

regularly embalmed in the East Indies, and sold in boxes to be exhibited

over the world as pygmies.[549] Thus various different facts have given

rise to stories of giants and dwarfs, more than one mythic element

perhaps combining to form a single legend—a result perplexing in the

extreme to the mythological interpreter.

Descriptions of strange tribes made in entire good faith may come to be

understood in new extravagant senses, when carried among people not

aware of the original facts. The following are some interpretations of

this kind, among which some far-fetched cases are given, to show that

the method must not be trusted too much. The term ‘nose-less’ is apt to

be misunderstood, yet it was fairly enough applied to flat-nosed tribes,

such as Turks of the steppes, whom Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela thus depicts

in the twelfth century:—‘They have no noses, but draw breath through two

small holes.’[550] Again, among the common ornamental mutilations of

savages is that of stretching the ears to an enormous size by weights or

coils, and it is thus verbally quite true that there are men whose ears

hang down upon their shoulders. Yet without explanation such a phrase

would be understood to describe, not the appearance of a real savage

with his ear-lobes stretched into pendant fleshy loops, but rather that

of Pliny’s _Panotii_, or of the Indian _Karnaprâvarana_, ‘whose ears

serve them for cloaks,’ or of the African dwarfs, said to use their ears

one for mattress and the other for coverlet when they lie down. One of

the most extravagant of these stories is told by Fray Pedro Simon in

California, where in fact the territory of _Oregon_ has its name from

the Spanish term of _Orejones_, or ‘Big-Ears,’ given to the inhabitants

from their practice of stretching their ears with ornaments.[551] Even

purely metaphorical descriptions, if taken in a literal sense, are

capable of turning into catches, like the story of the horse with its

head where its tail should be. I have been told by a French Protestant

from the Nismes district that the epithet of _gorgeo negro_, or

‘black-throat,’ by which Catholics describe a Huguenot, was taken so

literally that heretic children were sometimes forced to open their

mouths to satisfy the orthodox of their being of the usual colour

within. On examining the description of savage tribes by higher races,

it appears that several of the epithets usually applied only need

literalizing to turn into the wildest of the legendary monster-stories.

Thus the Burmese speak of the rude Karens as ‘dog-men;’[552] Marco Polo

describes the Angaman (Andaman) islanders as brutish and savage

cannibals, with heads like dogs.[553] Ælian’s account of the dog-headed

people of India is on the face of it an account of a savage race. The

Kynokephali, he says, are so called from their bodily appearance, but

otherwise they are human, and they go dressed in the skins of beasts;

they are just, and harm not men; they cannot speak, but roar, yet they

understand the language of the Indians; they live by hunting, being

swift of foot, and they cook their game not by fire, but by tearing it

into fragments and drying it in the sun; they keep goats and sheep, and

drink the milk. The naturalist concludes by saying that he mentions

these fitly among the irrational animals, because they have not

articulate, distinct, and human language.[554] This last suggestive

remark well states the old prevalent notion that barbarians have no real

language, but are ‘speechless,’ ‘tongueless,’ or even mouthless.[555]

Another monstrous people of wide celebrity are Pliny’s Blemmyæ, said to

be headless, and accordingly to have their mouths and eyes in their

breasts creatures over whom Prester John reigned in Asia, who dwelt far

and wide in South American forests, and who to our mediæval ancestors

were as real as the cannibals with whom Othello couples them:—

‘The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders.’

If, however, we look in dictionaries for the _Acephali_, we may find not

actual headless monsters, but heretics so called because their original

head or founder was not known; and when the kingless Turkoman hordes say

of themselves ‘We are a people without a head,’ the metaphor is even

more plain and natural.[556] Moslem legend tells of the Shikk and the

Nesnas, creatures like one half of a split man, with one arm, leg, and

eye. Possibly it was thence that the Zulus got their idea of a tribe of

half-men, who in one of their stories found a Zulu maiden in a cave and

thought she was two people, but on closer inspection of her admitted,

‘The thing is pretty! But oh the two legs!’ These realistic fancies

coincide with the simple metaphor which describes a savage as only ‘half

a man,’ _semihomo_, as Virgil calls the ferocious Cacus.[557] Again,

when the Chinese compared themselves to the outer barbarians, they said

‘We see with two eyes, the Latins with one, and all other nations are

blind.’ Such metaphors, proverbial among ourselves, verbally correspond

with legends of one-eyed tribes, such as the savage cave-dwelling

Kyklopes.[558] Verbal coincidence of this kind, untrustworthy enough in

these latter instances, passes at last into the vaguest fancy. The

negroes called Europeans ‘long-headed,’ using the phrase in our familiar

metaphorical sense; but translate it into Greek, and at once Hesiod’s

_Makrokephaloi_ come into being.[559] And, to conclude the list, one of

the commonest of the monster-tribes of the Old and New World is that

distinguished by having feet turned backward. Now there is really a

people whose name, memorable in scientific controversy, describes them

as ‘having feet the opposite way,’ and they still retain that ancient

name of _Antipodes_.[560]

Returning from this digression to the region of philosophic myth, we may

examine new groups of explanatory stories, produced from that craving to

know causes and reasons which ever besets mankind. When the attention of

a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon

or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a

story to account for it, and even if he does not persuade himself that

this is a real legend of his forefathers, the story-teller who hears it

from him and repeats it is troubled with no such difficulty. Our task in

dealing with such stories is made easy when the criterion of possibility

can be brought to bear upon them. It has become a mere certainty to

moderns that asbestos is not really salamander’s wool; that morbid

hunger is not really caused by a lizard or a bird in a man’s stomach;

that a Chinese philosopher cannot really have invented the fire-drill by

seeing a bird peck at the branches of a tree till sparks came. The

African Wakuafi account for their cattle-lifting proclivities by the

calm assertion that Engai, that is, Heaven, gave all cattle to them, and

so wherever there is any it is their call to go and seize it.[561] So in

South America the fierce Mbayas declare they received from the Caracara

a divine command to make war on all other tribes, killing the men and

adopting the women and children.[562] But though it may be consistent

with the notions of these savages to relate such explanatory legends, it

is not consistent with our notions to believe them. Fortunately, too,

the ex post facto legends are apt to come into collision with more

authentic sources of information, or to encroach on the domain of valid

history. It is of no use for the Chinese to tell their stupid story of

written characters having been invented from the markings on a

tortoise’s shell, for the early forms of such characters, plain and

simple pictures of objects, have been preserved in China to this day.

Nor can we praise anything but ingenuity in the West Highland legend

that the Pope once laid an interdict on the land, but forgot to curse

the hills, so the people tilled them, this story being told to account

for those ancient traces of tillage still to be seen on the wild

hill-sides, the so-called ‘elf-furrows.’[563] The most embarrassing

cases of explanatory tradition are those which are neither impossible

enough to condemn, nor probable enough to receive. Ethnographers who

know how world-wide is the practice of defacing the teeth among the

lower races, and how it only dies gradually out in higher civilization,

naturally ascribe the habit to some general reason in human nature, at a

particular stage of development. But the mutilating tribes themselves

have local legends to account for local customs; thus the Penongs of

Burmah and the Batoka of East Africa both break their front teeth, but

the one tribe says its reason is not to look like apes, the other that

it is to be like oxen and not like zebras.[564] Of the legends of

tattooing, one of the oldest is that told to account for the fact that

while the Fijians tattoo only the women, their neighbours, the Tongans,

tattoo only the men. It is related that a Tongan, on his way from Fiji

to report to his countrymen the proper custom for them to observe, went

on his way repeating the rule he had carefully learnt by heart, ‘Tattoo

the women, but not the men,’ but unluckily he tripped over a stump, got

his lesson wrong, and reached Tonga repeating ‘Tattoo the men, but not

the women,’ an ordinance which they observed ever after. How reasonable

such an explanation seemed to the Polynesian mind, may be judged from

the Samoans having a version with different details, and applied to

their own instead of the Tongan islands.[565]

All men feel how wanting in sense of reality is a story with no personal

name to hang it to. This want is thus graphically expressed by Sprenger

the historian in his life of Mohammed: ‘It makes, on me at least, quite

a different impression when it is related that “the Prophet said to

Alkama,” even if I knew nothing whatever else of this Alkama, than if it

were merely stated that “he said to somebody.”’ The feeling which this

acute and learned critic thus candidly confesses, has from the earliest

times, and in the minds of men troubled with no such nice historic

conscience, germinated to the production of much mythic fruit. Thus it

has come to pass that one of the leading personages to be met with in

the tradition of the world is really no more than—Somebody. There is

nothing this wondrous creature cannot achieve, no shape he cannot put

on; one only restriction binds him at all, that the name he assumes

shall have some sort of congruity with the office he undertakes, and

even from this he oftentimes breaks loose. So rife in our own day is

this manufacture of personal history, often fitted up with details of

place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle, that it may be

guessed how vast its working must have been in days of old. Thus the

ruins of ancient buildings, of whose real history and use no trustworthy

tradition survives in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth

with a builder and a purpose. In Mexico the great Somebody assumes the

name of Montezuma, and builds the aqueduct of Tezcuco; to the Persian

any huge and antique ruin is the work of the heroic Antar; in Russia,

says Dr. Bastian, buildings of the most various ages are set down to

Peter the Great, as in Spain to Boabdil or Charles V.; and European

folklore may attribute to the Devil any old building of unusual

massiveness, and especially those stone structures which antiquaries now

class as præ-historic monuments. With a more graceful thought, the

Indians of North America declare that the imitative tumuli of Ohio,

great mounds laid out in rude imitation of animals, were shaped in old

days by the great Manitu himself, in promise of a plentiful supply of

game in the world of spirits. The New Zealanders tell how the hero Kupe

separated the North and South Islands, and formed Cook’s Straits. Greek

myth placed at the gate of the Mediterranean the twin pillars of

Herakles; in more recent times the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar

became one of the many feats of Alexander of Macedon.[566] Such a group

of stories as this is no unfair test of the value of mere traditions of

personal names which simply answer the questions that mankind have been

asking for ages about the origin of their rites, laws, customs, arts.

Some such traditions are of course genuine, and we may be able,

especially in the more modern cases, to separate the real from the

imaginary. But it must be distinctly laid down that, in the absence of

corroborative evidence, every tradition stands suspect of mythology, if

it can be made by the simple device of fitting some personal name to the

purely theoretical assertion that somebody must have introduced into the

world fire-making, or weapons, or ornaments, or games, or agriculture,

or marriage, or any other of the elements of civilization.

Among the various matters which have excited curiosity, and led to its

satisfaction by explanatory myths, are local names. These, when the

popular ear has lost their primitive significance, become in barbaric

times an apt subject for the myth-maker to explain in his peculiar

fashion. Thus the Tibetans declare that their lake _Chomoriri_ was named

from a woman (_chomo_) who was carried into it by the yak she was

riding, and cried in terror _ri-ri!_ The Arabs say the founders of the

city of _Sennaar_ saw on the river bank a beautiful woman with teeth

glittering like fire, whence they called the place _Sinnâr_, i.e.,

‘tooth of fire.’ The Arkadians derived the name of their town _Trapezus_

from the table (_trapeza_), which Zeus overturned when the wolfish

Lykaon served a child on it for a banquet to him.[567] Such crude

fancies in no way differ in nature from English local legends current up

to recent times, such as that which relates how the Romans, coming in

sight of where _Exeter_ now stands, exclaimed in delight, ‘_Ecce

terra!_’ and thus the city had its name. Not long ago, a curious

enquirer wished to know from the inhabitants of _Fordingbridge_, or as

the country people call it, _Fardenbridge_, what the origin of this name

might be, and heard in reply that the bridge was thought to have been

built when wages were so cheap that masons worked for a ‘farden’ a day.

The Falmouth folks’ story of Squire Pendarvis and his ale is well known,

how his servant excused herself for selling it to the sailors, because,

as she said, ‘The _penny come_ so _quick_,’ whence the place came to be

called _Pennycomequick_; this nonsense being invented to account for an

ancient Cornish name, probably _Penycumgwic_, ‘head of the creek

valley.’ Mythic fancy had fallen to a low estate when it dwindled to

such remnants as this.

That personal names may pass into nouns, we, who talk of _broughams_ and

_bluchers_, cannot deny. But any such etymology ought to have

contemporary document or some equally forcible proof in its favour, for

this is a form of explanation taken by the most flagrant myths. David

the painter, it is related, had a promising pupil named _Chicque_, the

son of a fruiterer; the lad died at eighteen, but his master continued

to hold him up to later students as a model of artistic cleverness, and

hence arose the now familiar term of _chic_. Etymologists, a race not

wanting in effrontery, have hardly ever surpassed this circumstantial

canard; the word _chic_ dates at anyrate from the seventeenth

century.[568] Another word with which similar liberty has been taken, is

_cant_. Steele, in the ‘Spectator,’ says that some people derive it from

the name of one Andrew _Cant_, a Scotch minister, who had the gift of

preaching in such a dialect that he was understood by none but his own

congregation, and not by all of them. This is, perhaps, not a very

accurate delineation of the real Andrew Cant, who is mentioned in

‘Whitelock’s Memorials,’ and seems to have known how to speak out in

very plain terms indeed. But at any rate he flourished about 1650,

whereas the verb to _cant_ was then already an old word. To _cante_,

meaning to speak, is mentioned in Harman’s ‘List of Rogues’ Words,’ in

1566, and in 1587 Harrison says of the beggars and gypsies that they

have devised a language among themselves, which they name _canting_, but

others ‘Pedlars’ Frenche.’[569] Of all etymologies ascribed to personal

names, one of the most curious is that of the Danse _Macabre_, or Dance

of Death, so well known from Holbein’s pictures. Its supposed author is

thus mentioned in the ‘Biographie Universelle:’ ‘Macaber, poëte

allemand, serait tout-à-fait inconnu sans l’ouvrage qu’on a sous son

nom.’ This, it may be added, is true enough, for there never was such a

person at all, the Danse _Macabre_ being really Chorea _Machabæorum_,

the Dance of the _Maccabees_, a kind of pious pantomime of death

performed in churches in the fifteenth century. Why the performance

received this name, is that the rite of Mass for the dead is

distinguished by the reading of that passage from the twelfth chapter of

Book II. of the _Maccabees_, which relates how the people betook

themselves to prayer, and besought the Lord that the sin of those who

had been slain among them might be wholly blotted out; for if Judas had

not expected that the slain should rise again, it had been superfluous

and vain to pray for the dead.[570] Traced to its origin, it is thus

seen that the Danse _Macabre_ is neither more nor less than the Dance of

the Dead.

It is not an unusual thing for tribes and nations to be known by the

name of their chief, as in books of African travel we read of ‘Eyo’s

people,’ or ‘Kamrazi’s people.’ Such terms may become permanent, like

the name of the _Osmanli_ Turks taken from the great _Othman_, or

_Osman_. The notions of kinship and chieftainship may easily be

combined, as where some individual Brian or Alpine may have given his

name to a clan of _O’Briens_ or _Mac Alpines_. How far the tribal names

of the lower races may have been derived from individual names of chiefs

or forefathers, is a question on which distinct evidence is difficult to

obtain. In Patagonia bands or subdivisions of tribes are designated by

the names of temporary chiefs, every roving party having such a leader,

who is sometimes even styled ‘yank,’ i.e. ‘father.’[571] The Zulus and

Maoris were races who paid great attention to the traditional

genealogies of their clan-ancestors, who were, indeed, not only their

kinsfolk but their gods; and they distinctly recognize the possibility

of tribes being named from a deceased ancestor or chief. The Kafir tribe

of _Ama-Xosa_ derives its name from a chief, _U-Xosa_;[572] and the

Maori tribes of _Ngate-Wakaue_ and _Nga-Puhi_ claim descent from chiefs

called _Wakaue_ and _Puhi_.[573] Around this nucleus of actuality,

however, there gathers an enormous mass of fiction simulating its

effects. The myth-maker, curious to know how many people or country

gained its name, had only to conclude that it came from a great ancestor

or ruler, and then the simple process of turning a national or local

title into a personal name at once added a new genealogy to historical

tradition. In some cases, the name of the imagined ancestor is invented

in such form that the local or gentile name may stand as grammatically

derived from it, as usually happens in real cases, like the derivation

of _Cæsarea_ from _Cæsar_, or of the _Benedictines_ from _Benedict_. But

in the fictitious genealogy or history of the myth-maker, the mere

unaltered name of the nation, tribe, country, or city often becomes

without more ado the name of the eponymic hero. It has to be remembered,

moreover, that countries and nations can be personified by an

imaginative process which has not quite lost its sense in modern speech.

_France_ is talked of by politicians as an individual being, with

particular opinions and habits, and may even be embodied as a statue or

picture with suitable attributes. And if one were to say that

_Britannia_ has two daughters, _Canada_ and _Australia_, or that she has

gone to keep house for a decrepit old aunt called _India_, this would be

admitted as plain fact expressed in fantastic language. The invention of

ancestries from eponymic heroes or name-ancestors has, however, often

had a serious effect in corrupting historic truth, by helping to fill

ancient annals with swarms of fictitious genealogies. Yet, when surveyed

in a large view, the nature of the eponymic fictions is patent and

indisputable, and so regular are their forms, that we could scarcely

choose more telling examples of the consistent processes of imagination,

as shown in the development of myths.

The great number of the eponymic ancestors of ancient Greek tribes and

nations makes it easy to test them by comparison, and the test is a

destructive one. Treat the heroic genealogies they belong to as

traditions founded on real history, and they prove hopelessly

independent and incompatible; but consider them as mostly local and

tribal myths and such independence and incompatibility become their

proper features. Mr. Grote, whose tendency is to treat all myths as

fictions not only unexplained but unexplainable, here makes an

exception, tracing the eponymic ancestors from whom Greek cities and

tribes derived their legendary parentage to mere embodied local and

gentile names. Thus, of the fifty sons of Lykaôn, a whole large group

consists of personified cities of Arkadia, such as _Mantinêus_,

_Phigalos_, _Tegeatês_, who, according to the simply inverting legend,

are called founders of _Mantinêa_, _Phigalia_, _Tegea_. The father of

King Æakos was Zeus, his mother his own personified land, _Ægina_; the

city of _Mykênai_ had not only an ancestress _Mykênê_, but an eponymic

ancestor as well, _Mykêneus_. Long afterwards, mediæval Europe,

stimulated by the splendid genealogies through which Rome had attached

herself to Greece and the Greek gods and heroes, discovered the secret

of rivalling them in the chronicles of Geoffry of Monmouth and others,

by claiming as founders of _Paris_ and _Tours_ the Trojans _Paris_ and

_Turnus_, and connecting _France_ and _Britain_ with the Trojan war

through _Francus_, son of Hector, and _Brutus_, great grandson of Æneas.

A remarkably perfect eponymic historical myth accounting for the Gypsies

or Egyptians, may be found cited seriously in ‘Blackstone’s

Commentaries:’ when Sultan Selim conquered Egypt in 1517, several of the

natives refused to submit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under one

_Zinganeus_, whence the Turks called them _Zinganees_, but, being at

length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in small parties

over the world, &c., &c. It is curious to watch Milton’s mind emerging,

but not wholly emerging, from the state of the mediæval chronicler. He

mentions in the beginning of his ‘History of Britain,’ the ‘outlandish

figment’ of the four kings, _Magus_, _Saron_, _Druis_, and _Bardus_; he

has no approval for the giant _Albion_, son of Neptune, who subdued the

island and called it after his own name; he scoffs at the four sons of

Japhet, called _Francus_, _Romanus_, _Alemannus_, and _Britto_. But when

he comes to _Brutus_ and the Trojan legends of old English history, his

sceptical courage fails him: ‘those old and inborn names of successive

kings, never any to have bin real persons, or don in their lives at

least som part of what so long hath bin remember’d, cannot be thought

without too strict an incredulity.’[574]

Among ruder races of the world, asserted genealogies of this class may

be instanced in South American tribes called the _Amoipira_ and

_Potyuara_,[575] Khond clans called _Baska_ and _Jakso_,[576] Turkoman

hordes called _Yomut_, _Tekke_, and _Chaudor_,[577] all of them

professing to derive their designations from ancestors or chiefs who

bore as individuals these very names. Where criticism can be brought to

bear on these genealogies, its effect is often such as drove Brutus and

his Trojans out of English history. When there appear in the genealogy

of Haussa, in West Africa, plain names of towns like _Kano_ and

_Katsena_,[578] it is natural to consider these towns to have been

personified into mythic ancestors. Mexican tradition assigns a whole set

of eponymic ancestors or chiefs to the various races of the land, as

_Mexi_ the founder of _Mexico_, _Chichimecatl_ the first king of the

_Chichimecs_, and so forth, down to _Otomitl_ the ancestor of the

_Otomis_, whose very name by its termination betrays its Aztec

invention.[579] The Brazilians account for the division of the _Tupis_

and _Guaranis_, by the legend of two ancestral brothers, _Tupi_ and

_Guarani_, who quarrelled and separated, each with his followers: here

an eponymic origin of the story is made likely by the word _Guarani_ not

being an old national name at all, but merely the designation of

‘warriors’ given by the missionaries to certain tribes.[580] And when

such facts are considered as that North American clans named after

animals, _Beaver_, _Crayfish_, and the like, account for these names by

simply claiming the very creatures themselves as ancestors,[581] the

tendency of general criticism will probably be not so much in favour of

real forefathers and chiefs who left their names to their tribes, as of

eponymic ancestors created by backwards imitation of such inheritance.

The examination of eponymic legend, however, must by no means stop short

at the destructive stage. In fact, when it has undergone the sharpest

criticism, it only displays the more clearly a real historic value, not

less perhaps than if all the names it records were real names of ancient

chiefs. With all their fancies, blunders, and shortcomings, the heroic

genealogies preserve early theories of nationality, traditions of

migration, invasion, connexion by kindred or intercourse. The

ethnologists of old days, borrowing the phraseology of myth, stated what

they looked on as the actual relations of races, in a personifying

language of which the meaning may still be readily interpreted. The

Greek legend of the twin brothers _Danaos_ and _Ægyptos_, founders of

the nations of the _Danaoi_ or Homeric Greeks and of the _Ægyptians_,

represents a distinct though weak ethnological theory. Their eponymic

myth of _Hellēn_, the personified race of the _Hellēnes_, is another and

more reasonable ethnological document stating kinship among four great

branches of the Greek race: the three sons of _Hellēn_, it relates, were

_Aiolos_, _Dōros_, and _Xouthos_; the first two gave their names to the

_Æolians_ and _Dorians_, the third had sons called _Achaios_ and _Iōn_,

whose names passed as a heritage to the _Achaioi_ and _Ionians_. The

belief of the _Lydians_, _Mysians_, and _Karians_ as to their national

kinship is well expressed in the genealogy in Herodotus, which traces

their descent from the three brothers _Lydos_, _Mysos_, and _Kar_.[582]

The Persian legend of Feridun (Thraetaona) and his three sons, _Irej_,

_Tur_, and _Selm_, distinguishes the two nationalities of _Iranian_ and

_Turanian_, i.e. Persian and Tatar.[583] The national genealogy of the

Afghans is worthy of remark. It runs thus: Melik Talut (King Saul) had

two sons, Berkia and Irmia (Berekiah and Jeremiah), who served David;

the son of Berkia was _Afghan_, and the son of Irmia was _Usbek_. Thanks

to the aquiline noses of the Afghans, and to their use of Biblical

personal names derived from Biblical sources, the idea of their being

descendants of the lost tribes of Israel found great credence among

European scholars up to the present century.[584] Yet the pedigree is

ethnologically absurd, for the whole source of the imagined cousinship

of the Aryan _Afghan_ and the Turanian _Usbek_, so distinct both in

feature and in language, appears to be in their union by common

Mohammedanism, while the reckless jumble of sham history, which derives

both from a Semitic source, is only too characteristic of Moslem

chronicle. Among the Tatars is found a much more reasonable national

pedigree; in the 13th century, William of Ruysbroek relates, as sober

circumstantial history, that they were originally called _Turks_ from

_Turk_ the eldest son of Japhet, but one of their princes left his

dominions to his twin sons, _Tatar_ and _Mongol_ which gave rise to the

distinction that has ever since prevailed between these two

nations.[585] Historically absurd, this legend states what appears the

unimpeachable ethnological fact, that the _Turks_, _Mongols_, and

_Tatars_ are closely-connected branches of one national stock, and we

can only dispute in it what seems an exorbitant claim on the part of the

_Turk_ to represent the head of the family, the ancestor of the _Mongol_

and the _Tatar_. Thus these eponymic national genealogies, mythological

in form but ethnological in substance, embody opinions of which we may

admit or deny the truth or value, but which we must recognize as

distinctly ethnological documents.[586]

It thus appears that early ethnology is habitually expressed in a

metaphorical language, in which lands and nations are personified, and

their relations indicated by terms of personal kinship. This description

applies to that important document of ancient ethnology, the table of

nations in the 10th chapter of Genesis. In some cases it is a problem of

minute and difficult criticism to distinguish among its ancestral names

those which are simply local or national designations in personal form.

But to critics conversant with the ethnic genealogies of other peoples,

such as have here been quoted, simple inspection of this national list

may suffice to show that part of its names are not names of real men,

but of personified cities, lands, and races. The city _Zidon_ (צידן) is

brother to Heth (חת) the father of the _Hittites_, and next follow in

person the Jebusite and the Amorite. Among plain names of countries,

_Cush_ or Æthiopia (כוש) begets Nimrod, _Asshur_ or _Assyria_ (אשור)

builds Nineveh, and even the dual _Mizraim_ (מצרים), the ‘two Egypts,’

usually regarded as signifying Upper and Lower Egypt, appears in the

line of generations as a personal son and brother of other countries,

and ancestor of populations. The Aryan stock is clearly recognized in

personifications of at least two of its members, _Madai_ (מדי) the

_Mede_, and _Javan_ (יון) the _Ionian_. And as regards the family to

which the Israelites themselves belong, if _Canaan_ (כנען), the father

of _Zidon_ (צידן), be transferred to it to represent the Phœnicians, by

the side of _Asshur_ (אשור), _Aram_ (ארם), _Eber_ (עבר), and the other

descendants of Shem, the result will be mainly to arrange the Semitic

stock according to the ordinary classification of modern comparative

philology.

Turning now from cases where mythologic phrase serves as a medium for

expressing philosophic opinion, let us quickly cross the district where

fancy assumes the semblance of explanatory legend. The mediæval

schoolmen have been justly laughed at for their habit of translating

plain facts into the terms of metaphysics, and then solemnly offering

them in this scientific guise as explanations of themselves—accounting

for opium making people sleep, by its possession of a dormitive virtue.

The myth-maker’s proceedings may in one respect be illustrated by

comparing them with this. Half mythology is occupied, as many a legend

cited in these chapters has shown, in shaping the familiar facts of

daily life into imaginary histories of their own cause and origin,

childlike answers to those world-old questions of whence and why, which

the savage asks as readily as the sage. So familiar is the nature of

such description in the dress of history, that its easier examples

translate off-hand. When the Samoans say that ever since the great

battle among the plantains and bananas, the vanquished have hung down

their heads, while the victor stands proudly erect,[587] who can mistake

the simple metaphor which compares the upright and the drooping plants

to a conqueror standing among his beaten foes? In simile just as obvious

lies the origin of another Polynesian legend, which relates the creation

of the coco-nut from a man’s head, the chestnuts from his kidneys, and

the yams from his legs.[588] To draw one more example from the mythology

of plants, how transparent is the Ojibwa fancy of that heavenly youth

with green robe and waving feathers, whom for the good of men the Indian

overcame and buried, and who sprang again from his grave as the Indian

corn, Mondamin, the ‘Spirit’s grain.’[589] The New Forest peasant deems

that the marl he digs is still red with the blood of his ancient foes

the Danes; the Maori sees on the red cliffs of Cook’s Straits the

blood-stains that Kupe made when, mourning for the death of his

daughter, he cut his forehead with pieces of obsidian; in the spot where

Buddha offered his own body to feed the starved tigress’s cubs, his

blood for ever reddened the soil and the trees and flowers. The modern

Albanian still sees the stain of slaughter in streams running red with

earth, as to the ancient Greek the river that flowed by Byblos bore down

in its summer floods the red blood of Adonis. The Cornishman knows from

the red filmy growth on the brook pebbles that murder has been done

there; John the Baptist’s blood still grows in Germany on his day, and

peasants still go out to search for it; the red meal fungus is blood

dropped by the flying Huns when they hurt their feet against the high

tower-roofs. The traveller in India might see on the ruined walls of

Ganga Raja the traces of the blood of the citizens spilt in the siege,

and yet more marvellous to relate, at St. Denis’s church in Cornwall,

the blood-stains on the stones fell there when the saint’s head was cut

off somewhere else.[590] Of such translations of descriptive metaphor

under thin pretence of history, every collection of myth is crowded with

examples, but it strengthens our judgment of the combined consistency

and variety of what may be called the mythic language, to extract from

its dictionary such a group as this, which in variously imaginative

fashion describes the appearance of a blood-red stain.

The merest shadowy fancy or broken-down metaphor, when once it gains a

sense of reality, may begin to be spoken of as an actual event. The

Moslems have heard the very stones praise Allah, not in simile only but

in fact, and among them the saying that a man’s fate is written on his

forehead has been materialized into a belief that it can be deciphered

from the letter-like markings of the sutures of his skull. One of the

miraculous passages in the life of Mohammed himself is traced plausibly

by Sprenger to such a pragmatized metaphor. The angel Gabriel, legend

declares, opened the prophet’s breast, and took a black clot from his

heart, which he washed with Zemzem water and replaced; details are given

of the angel’s dress and golden basin, and Anas ibn Malik declared he

had seen the very mark where the wound was sewn up. We may venture with

the historian to ascribe this marvellous incident to the familiar

metaphor that Mohammed’s heart was divinely opened and cleansed, and

indeed he does say in the Koran that God opened his heart.[591] A single

instance is enough to represent the same habit in Christian legend.

Marco Polo relates how in 1225 the Khalif of Bagdad commanded the

Christians of his dominions, under penalty of death or Islam, to justify

their Scriptural text by removing a certain mountain. Now there was

among them a shoemaker, who, having been tempted to excess of admiration

for a woman, had plucked out his offending eye. This man commanded the

mountain to remove, which it did to the terror of the Khalif and all his

people, and since then the anniversary of the miracle has been kept

holy. The Venetian traveller, after the manner of mediæval writers,

records the story without a symptom of suspicion;[592] yet to our minds

its whole origin so obviously lies in three verses of St. Matthew’s

gospel, that it is needless to quote them. To modern taste such wooden

fictions as these are far from attractive. In fact the pragmatizer is a

stupid creature; nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull

and vulgar by his touch, for it is through the very incapacity of his

mind to hold an abstract idea that he is forced to embody it in a

material incident. Yet wearisome as he may be, it is none the less

needful to understand him, to acknowledge the vast influence he has had

on the belief of mankind, and to appreciate him as representing in its

extreme abuse that tendency to clothe every thought in a concrete shape,

which has in all ages been a mainspring of mythology.

Though allegory cannot maintain the large place often claimed for it in

mythology, it has yet had too much influence to be passed over in this

survey. It is true that the search for allegorical explanation is a

pursuit that has led many a zealous explorer into the quagmires of

mysticism. Yet there are cases in which allegory is certainly used with

historical intent, as for instance in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, with

its cows and sheep which stand for Israelites, and asses and wolves for

Midianites and Egyptians, these creatures figuring in a pseudo-prophetic

sketch of Old Testament chronicles. As for moral allegory, it is

immensely plentiful in the world, although its limits are narrower than

mythologists of past centuries have supposed. It is now reasonably

thought preposterous to interpret the Greek legends as moral apologues,

after the manner of Herakleides the philosopher, who could discern a

parable of repentant prudence in Athene seizing Achilles when just about

to draw his sword on Agamemnon.[593] Still, such a mode of

interpretation has thus much to justify it, that numbers of the fanciful

myths of the world are really allegories. There is allegory in the

Hesiodic myth of Pandora, whom Zeus sent down to men, decked with golden

band and garland of spring flowers, fit cause of longing and the pangs

of love, but using with a dog-like mind her gifts of lies and treachery

and pleasant speech. Heedless of his wiser brother’s words, the foolish

Epimetheus took her; she raised the lid of the great cask and shook out

the evils that wander among mankind, and the diseases that by day and

night come silently bringing ill; she set on the lid again and shut hope

in, that evil might be ever hopeless to mankind. Shifted to fit a

different moral, the allegory remained in the later version of the tale,

that the cask held not curses but blessings; these were let go and lost

to men when the vessel was too curiously opened, while Hope alone was

left behind for comfort to the luckless human race.[594] Yet the

primitive nature of such legends underlies the moral shape upon them.

Zeus is no allegoric fiction, and Prometheus, unless modern mythologists

judge him very wrongly, has a meaning far deeper than parable. Xenophon

tells after Prodikos the story of Herakles choosing between the short

and easy path of pleasure and the long and toilsome path of virtue,[595]

but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral

apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature

jars upon the reader’s mind.

The general relation of allegory to pure myth can hardly be brought more

clearly into view than in a class of stories familiar to every child,

the Beast-fables. From the ordinary civilized point of view the allegory

in such fictions seems fundamental, the notion of a moral lesson seems

bound up with their very nature, yet a broader examination tends to

prove the allegorical growth as it were parasitic on an older trunk of

myth without moral. It is only by an effort of intellectual reaction

that a modern writer can imitate in parable the beast of the old

Beast-fable. No wonder, for the creature has become to his mind a

monster, only conceivable as a caricature of man made to carry a moral

lesson or a satire. But among savages it is not so. To their minds the

semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, invented to preach or sneer,

he is all but a reality. Beast-fables are not nonsense to men who

ascribe to the lower animals a power of speech, and look on them as

partaking of moral human nature; to men in whose eyes any hyæna or wolf

may probably be a man-hyæna or a werewolf; to men who so utterly believe

‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’ that they will

really regulate their own diet so as to avoid eating an ancestor; to men

an integral part of whose religion may actually be the worship of

beasts. Such beliefs belong even now to half mankind, and among such the

beast-stories had their first home. Even the Australians tell their

quaint beast-tales, of the Rat, the Owl, and the fat Blackfellow, or of

Pussy-brother who singed his friends’ noses while they were asleep.[596]

The Kamchadals have an elaborate myth of the adventures of their stupid

deity Kutka with the Mice who played tricks upon him, such as painting

his face like a woman’s, so that when he looked in the water he fell in

love with himself.[597] Beast-tales abound among such races as the

Polynesians and the North American Indians, who value in them ingenuity

of incident and neat adaptation of the habits and characters of the

creatures. Thus in a legend of the Flathead Indians, the Little Wolf

found in Cloudland his grandsires the Spiders with their grizzled hair

and long crooked nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to

earth; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled Duck, whom the

Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in confusion, and that is why she

lives and dives alone to this very day.[598] In Guinea, where

beast-fable is one of the great staples of native conversation, the

following story is told as a type of the tales which in this way account

for peculiarities of animals. The great Engena-monkey offered his

daughter to be bride of the champion who should perform the feat of

drinking a whole barrel of rum. The dignified Elephant, the graceful

Leopard, the surly Boar, tried the first mouthful of the fire-water, and

retreated. Then the tiny Telinga-monkey came, who had cunningly hidden

in the long grass thousands of his fellows; he took his first glass and

went away, but instead of his coming back, another just like him came

for the second, and so on till the barrel was emptied and Telinga walked

off with the Monkey-king’s daughter. But in the narrow path the Elephant

and Leopard attacked him and drove him off and he took refuge in the

highest boughs of the trees, vowing never more to live on the ground and

suffer such violence and injustice. This is why to this day the little

telingas are only found in the highest tree-tops.[599] Such stories have

been collected by scores from savage tradition in their original state,

while as yet no moral lesson has entered into them. Yet the easy and

natural transition from the story into the parable is made among

savages, perhaps without help from higher races. In the Hottentot Tales,

side by side with the myth of the cunning Jackal tricking the Lion out

of the best of the carcase, and getting the black stripe burnt on his

own back by carrying off the Sun, there occurs the moral apologue of the

Lion who thought himself wiser than his Mother, and perished by the

Hunter’s spear, for want of heed to her warning against the deadly

creature whose head is in a line with his breast and shoulders.[600] So

the Zulus have a thorough moral apologue in the story of the hyrax, who

did not go to fetch his tail on the day when tails were given out,

because he did not like to be out in the rain; he only asked the other

animals to bring it for him, and so he never got it.[601] Among the

North American legends of Manabozho, there is a fable quite Æsopian in

its humour. Manabozho, transformed into a Wolf, killed a fat moose, and

being very hungry sat down to eat. But he fell into great doubts as to

where to begin, for, said he, if I begin at the head, people will laugh

and say, he ate him backwards, but if I begin at the side they will say,

he ate him sideways. At last he made up his mind, and was just putting a

delicate piece into his mouth, when a tree close by creaked. Stop, stop!

said he to the tree, I cannot eat with such a noise, and in spite of his

hunger he left the meat and climbed up to quiet the creaking, but was

caught between two branches and held fast, and presently he saw a pack

of wolves coming. Go that way! Go that way! he cried out, whereupon the

wolves said, he must have something there, or he would not tell us to go

another way. So they came on, and found the moose, and ate it to the

bones while Manabozho looked wistfully on. The next heavy blast of wind

opened the branches and let him out, and he went home thinking to

himself, ‘See the effect of meddling with frivolous things when I had

certain good in my possession.’[602]

In the Old World, the moral Beast-fable was of no mean antiquity, but it

did not at once supplant the animal-myths pure and simple. For ages the

European mind was capable at once of receiving lessons of wisdom from

the Æsopian crows and foxes, and of enjoying artistic but by no means

edifying beast-stories of more primitive type. In fact the Babrius and

Phædrus collections were over a thousand years old, when the genuine

Beast-Epic reached its fullest growth in the incomparable ‘Reynard the

Fox,’ traceable in Jakob Grimm’s view to an original Frankish

composition of the 12th century, itself containing materials of far

earlier date.[603] Reynard is not a didactic poem, at least if a moral

hangs on to it here and there it is oftenest a Macchiavellian one; nor

is it essentially a satire, sharply as it lashes men in general and the

clergy in particular. Its creatures are incarnate qualities, the Fox of

cunning, the Bear of strength, the Ass of dull content, the Sheep of

guilelessness. The charm of the narrative, which every class in mediæval

Europe delighted in, but which we have allowed to drop out of all but

scholars’ knowledge, lies in great measure in he cleverly sustained

combination of the beast’s nature and the man’s. How great the influence

of the Reynard Epic was in the middle ages, may be judged from

_Reynard_, _Bruin_, _Chanticleer_, being still names familiar to people

who have no idea of their having been originally names of the characters

in the great beast-fable. Even more remarkable are its traces in modern

French. The donkey has its name of _baudet_ from _Baudoin_, Baldwin the

Ass. Common French dictionaries do not even contain the word _goupil_

(_vulpes_), so effectually has the Latin name of the fox been driven out

of use by his Frankish title in the Beast-Epic, _Raginhard_ the

Counsellor, _Reinhart_, _Reynard_, _Renart_, _renard_. The moralized

apologues like Æsop’s which Grimm contemptuously calls ‘fables thinned

down to mere moral and allegory,’ ‘a fourth watering of the old grapes

into an insipid moral infusion,’ are low in æsthetic quality as compared

with the genuine beast-myths. Mythological critics will be apt to judge

them after the manner of the child who said how convenient it was to

have ‘Moral’ printed in Æsop’s fables, that everybody might know what to

skip.