must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples,
the traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing
alien women into the families--all these things favoured the migration
of myth. But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it,
we can seldom trace a popular legend on its travels. In the case of
the cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed
they had borrowed their religions from each other. When the Greeks
first found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they
leaped to the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from
Egypt. We, who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points
in common with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians--people
quite unconnected with Egypt--feel less confident about the
hypothesis of borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus
Bagaeus, and Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later
times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free
hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder
Dionysiac revels, and so forth. But this habit of borrowing was
regarded with disfavour by pious conservatives, and was probably, in
the width of its hospitality at least, an innovation. As Tiele
remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from the Assyrian _Daian nisi_
'judge of men,' a name of the solar god Samas, without ascertaining
that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and was a god of the
sun. These derivations, 'shocking to common-sense,' are to be
distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning. Some Assyrian
scholars actually derive _Hades_ from _Bit Edi_ or _Bit Hadi_--'though
unluckily,' says Tiele, 'there is no such word in the Assyrian text.'
On the whole topic Tiele's essay[15] deserves to be consulted.
Granting, then, that elements in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite,
and other gods, may have been imported with the strange
AEgypto-Assyrian vases and jewels of the Sidonians, we still find the
same basis of rude savage ideas. We may push back a god from Greece to
Phoenicia, from Phoenicia to Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we
reach a legend full of myths like those which Bushmen tell by the camp
fire, Eskimo in their dark huts, and Australians in the shade of the
_gunyeh_--myths cruel, puerile, obscene, like the fancies of the
savage myth-makers from which they sprang.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] A study of the contemporary stone age in Scotland will be found in
Mitchell's _Past and Present_.
[7] About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry,
killed her deceased husband's horse. When remonstrated with by her
landlord, she said, 'Would you have my man go about on foot in the
next world?' She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.
[8] 'At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the
gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelp's
flesh' (Pliny, _H. N._, xxix. 4).
[9] Compare Cleobulus, Fr. 2: Bergk, _Lyr. Gr._, iii. 201. Ed. 4.
[10] Nov., 1880.
[11] Mr. Leslie Stephen points out to me that De Quincey's brother
heard 'the midnight axe' in the Galapagos Islands (_Autobiographical
Sketches_, 'My Brother').
[12] 'Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while
she stands smiling by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves
and poppies in her hands' (Theocritus, vii. 155-157).
[13] In Mr. Frazer's _Golden Bough_ is a very large collection of
similar harvest rites.
[14] _Odyssey_, xi. 32.
[15] _Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel._, vol. ii.
_THE BULL-ROARER._
A STUDY OF THE MYSTERIES.
As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains
of Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of
grey-blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound. Beginning
low, with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it
grows louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy
roar. If the traveller be a new-comer, he is probably puzzled to the
last degree. If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says to himself,
'Why, that is the bull-roarer.' If he knows the colony and the ways of
the natives, he knows that the blacks are celebrating their tribal
mysteries. The roaring noise is made to warn all women to keep out of
the way. Just as Pentheus was killed (with the approval of Theocritus)
because he profaned the rites of the women-worshippers of Dionysus,
so, among the Australian blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out of
the way of female, and women out of the way of male, celebrations.
The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain
afar is a toy familiar to English country lads. They call it the
bull-roarer. The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which any
one can make. I do not, however, recommend it to families, for two
reasons. In the first place, it produces a most horrible and
unexampled din, which endears it to the very young, but renders it
detested by persons of mature age. In the second place, the character
of the toy is such that it will almost infallibly break all that is
fragile in the house where it is used, and will probably put out the
eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus, I trust, said enough to
prevent all good boys from inflicting bull-roarers on their parents,
pastors and masters, I proceed (in the interests of science) to show
how the toy is made. Nothing can be less elaborate. You take a piece
of the commonest wooden board, say the lid of a packing-case, about a
sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight inches long and three
broad, and you sharpen the ends. When finished, the toy may be about
the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a 'fish' used as a counter (that is
how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be left plain in the
centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities, as in an
Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor. Then tie a strong piece of
string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood, and
the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it _turndun_, and the
Greeks call it ~rhombos~) is complete. Now twist the end of the string
tightly about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and
round. For a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting
lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Taylor once exhibited
a bull-roarer. At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled
round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like
those chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country,
which contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the
populace. But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified
its name, producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing
noise, as if some supernatural being 'fluttered and buzzed his wings
with fearful roar.' Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a
very brief experience of this din, but boys have always known the
bull-roarer in England as one of the most efficient modes of making
the hideous and unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth
to delight.
The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most
extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in
folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed
peoples, savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of
savage and civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on
this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all
descend from the same stock. But the bull-roarer is introduced here
for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with
simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and
its mystic uses anywhere. There is no need for a hypothesis of common
origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred
object.
The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in
many and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred
instrument, employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in
Australia, in New Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as
we have seen, it is a peasant boy's plaything in England. A number of
questions are naturally suggested by the bull-roarer. Is it a thing
invented once for all, and carried abroad over the world by wandering
races, or handed on from one people and tribe to another? Or is the
bull-roarer a toy that might be accidentally hit on in any country
where men can sharpen wood and twist the sinews of animals into
string? Was the thing originally a toy, and is its religious and
mystical nature later; or was it originally one of the properties of
the priest, or medicine-man, which in England has dwindled to a
plaything? Lastly, was this mystical instrument at first employed in
the rites of a civilised people like the Greeks, and was it in some
way borrowed or inherited by South Africans, Australians, and New
Mexicans? Or is it a mere savage invention, surviving (like certain
other features of the Greek mysteries) from a distant state of
savagery? Our answer to all these questions is that in all probability
the presence of the ~rhombos~, or bull-roarer, in Greek mysteries was
a survival from the time when Greeks were in the social condition of
Australians.
In the first place the bull-roarer is associated with mysteries and
initiations. Now mysteries and initiations are things that tend to
dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation
advances. The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret and
hidden; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed,
and religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these
ceremonies. There are no other initiations or mysteries that
civilised modern man is expected necessarily to pass through. On the
other hand, looking widely at human history, we find mystic rites and
initiations numerous, stringent, severe, and magical in character, in
proportion to the lack of civilisation in those who practise them. The
less the civilisation, the more mysterious and the more cruel are the
rites. The more cruel the rites, the less is the civilisation. The red
hot poker with which Mr. Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the
sham masonic rites would have been quite in place, a natural
instrument of probationary torture, in the Freemasonry of Australians,
Mandans, or Hottentots. In the mysteries of Demeter or Bacchus, in the
mysteries of a civilised people, the red-hot poker, or any other
instrument of torture, would have been out of place. But in the Greek
mysteries, just as in those of South Africans, Red Indians, and
Australians, the disgusting practice of bedaubing the neophyte with
dirt and clay was preserved. We have nothing quite like that in modern
initiations. Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted
on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by the cruel
Artemis.[16] But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with mud and the
use of the bull-roarer. On the whole, then, and on a general view of
the subject, we prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece was a
survival from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New
Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa is a relic of
civilisation.
Let us next observe a remarkable peculiarity of the _turndun_, or
Australian bull-roarer. The bull-roarer in England is a toy. In
Australia, according to Howitt and Fison,[17] the bull-roarer is
regarded with religious awe. 'When, on lately meeting with two of the
surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked
cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then
answered me in undertones.' The chief peculiarity in connection with
the turndun is that women may never look upon it. The Chepara tribe,
who call it _bribbun_, have a custom that, 'if seen by a woman, or
shown by a man to a woman, the punishment to both is _death_.'
Among the Kurnai, the sacred mystery of the turndun is preserved by a
legend, which gives a supernatural sanction to secrecy. When boys go
through the mystic ceremony of initiation they are shown turnduns, or
bull-roarers, and made to listen to their hideous din. They are then
told that, if ever a woman is allowed to see a turndun, the earth will
open, and water will cover the globe. The old men point spears at the
boy's eyes, saying: 'If you tell this to any woman you will die, you
will see the ground broken up and like the sea; if you tell this to
any woman, or to any child, you will be killed!' As in Athens, in
Syria, and among the Mandans, the deluge-tradition of Australia is
connected with the mysteries. In Gippsland there is a tradition of
the deluge. 'Some children of the Kurnai in playing about found a
turndun, which they took home to the camp and showed the women.
Immediately the earth crumbled away, and it was all water, and the
Kurnai were drowned.'
In consequence of all this mummery the Australian women attach great
sacredness to the very name of the turndun. They are much less
instructed in their own theology than the men of the tribe. One woman
believed she had heard Pundjel, the chief supernatural being, descend
in a mighty rushing noise, that is, in the sound of the turndun, when
boys were being 'made men,' or initiated.[18] On turnduns the
Australian sorcerers can fly up to heaven. Turnduns carved with
imitations of water-flowers are used by medicine-men in rain-making.
New Zealand also has her bull-roarers; some of them, carved in relief,
are in the Christy Museum, and one is engraved here. I have no direct
evidence as to the use of these Maori bull-roarers in the Maori
mysteries. Their employment, however, may perhaps be provisionally
inferred.
[Illustration: {A New Zealand bull-roarer}]
One can readily believe that the New Zealand bull-roarer may be
whirled by any man who is repeating a _Karakia_, or 'charm to raise
the wind':--
Loud wind,
Lasting wind,
Violent whistling wind,
Dig up the calm reposing sky,
Come, come.
In New Zealand[19] 'the natives regarded the wind as an indication of
the presence of their god,' a superstition not peculiar to Maori
religion. The 'cold wind' felt blowing over the hands at
spiritualistic _seances_ is also regarded (by physical researchers) as
an indication of the presence of supernatural beings. The windy
roaring noise made by the bull-roarer might readily be considered by
savages, either as an invitation to a god who should present himself
in storm, or as a proof of his being at hand. We have seen that this
view was actually taken by an Australian woman. The hymn called
'breath' or _haha_, a hymn to the mystic wind, is pronounced by Maori
priests at the moment of the initiation of young men in the tribal
mysteries. It is a mere conjecture, and possibly enough capable of
disproof, but we have a suspicion that the use of the _mystica vannus
Iacchi_ was a mode of raising a sacred wind analogous to that employed
by whirlers of the turndun.[20]
Servius, the ancient commentator on Virgil, mentions, among other
opinions, this--that the _vannus_ was a sieve, and that it symbolised
the purifying effect of the mysteries. But it is clear that Servius
was only guessing; and he offers other explanations, among them that
the _vannus_ was a crate to hold offerings, _primitias frugum_.
We have studied the bull-roarer in Australia, we have caught a glimpse
of it in England. Its existence on the American continent is proved by
letters from New Mexico, and by the passage in Mr. Frank Cushing's
_Adventures in Zuni_.[21] In Zuni, too, among a semi-civilised Indian
tribe, or rather a tribe which has left the savage for the barbaric
condition, we find the bull-roarer.[22] Here, too, the instrument--a
'slat,' Mr. Cushing calls it--is used as a call to the ceremonial
observance of the tribal ritual. The Zunis have various 'orders of a
more or less sacred and sacerdotal character.' Mr. Cushing writes:--
These orders were engaged in their annual ceremonials, of
which little was told or shown me; but, at the end of four
days, I heard one morning a _deep whirring noise_. Running
out, I saw a procession of three priests of the bow, in
plumed helmets and closely-fitting cuirasses, both of thick
buckskin--gorgeous and solemn with sacred embroideries and
war-paint, begirt with bows, arrows, and war-clubs, and each
distinguished by his badge of degree--coming down one of the
narrow streets. The principal priest carried in his arms a
wooden idol, ferocious in aspect, yet beautiful with its
decorations of shell, turquoise, and brilliant paint. It was
nearly hidden by symbolic slats and prayer-sticks most
elaborately plumed. He was preceded by a guardian with drawn
bow and arrows, while another followed, _twirling the
sounding slat_, which had attracted alike my attention and
that of hundreds of the Indians, who hurriedly flocked to the
roofs of the adjacent houses, or lined the street, bowing
their heads in adoration, and scattering sacred prayer-meal
on the god and his attendant priests. Slowly they wound their
way down the hill, across the river, and off toward the
mountain of Thunder. Soon an identical procession followed
and took its way toward the western hills. I watched them
long until they disappeared, and a few hours afterward there
arose from the top of 'Thunder Mountain' a dense column of
smoke, simultaneously with another from the more distant
western mesa of 'U-ha-na-mi,' or 'Mount of the Beloved.'
Then they told me that for four days I must neither touch nor
eat flesh or oil of any kind, and for ten days neither throw
any refuse from my doors nor permit a spark to leave my
house, for 'This was the season of the year when the
"grandmother of men" (fire) was precious.'
Here then, in Zuni, we have the bull-roarer again, and once more we
find it employed as a summons to the mysteries. We do not learn,
however, that women in Zuni are forbidden to look upon the
bull-roarer. Finally, the South African evidence, which is supplied by
letters from a correspondent of Mr. Tylor's, proves that in South
Africa, too, the bull-roarer is employed to call the men to the
celebration of secret functions. A minute description of the
instrument, and of its magical power to raise a wind, is given in
Theal's _Kaffir Folklore_, p. 209. The bull-roarer has not been made a
subject of particular research; very probably later investigations
will find it in other parts of the modern world besides America,
Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. I have myself been fortunate
enough to encounter the bull-roarer on the soil of ancient Greece and
in connection with the Dionysiac mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria, and
Arnobius, an early Christian father who follows Clemens, describe
certain toys of the child Dionysus which were used in the mysteries.
Among these are _turbines_, ~konoi~ and ~rhomboi~. The ordinary
dictionaries interpret all these as whipping-tops, adding that
~rhombos~ is sometimes 'a magic wheel.' The ancient scholiast on
Clemens, however, writes: 'The ~konos~ is a little piece of wood, to
which a string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round
to make a roaring noise.'[23] Here, in short, we have a brief but
complete description of the bull-roarer of the Australian _turndun_.
No single point is omitted. The ~konos~, like the _turndun_, is a
small object of wood, it is tied to a string, when whirled round it
produces a roaring noise, and it is used at initiations. This is not
the end of the matter.
In the part of the Dionysiac mysteries at which the toys of the child
Dionysus were exhibited, and during which (as it seems) the ~konos~,
or bull-roarer, was whirred, the performers daubed themselves all over
with clay. This we learn from a passage in which Demosthenes describes
the youth of his hated adversary, AEschines. The mother of AEschines, he
says, was a kind of 'wise woman,' and dabbler in mysteries. AEschines
used to aid her by bedaubing the initiate over with clay and bran.[24]
The word ~hapomatton~, here used by Demosthenes, is explained by
Harpocration as the ritual term for daubing the initiated. A story was
told as usual, to explain this rite. It was said that, when the Titans
attacked Dionysus and tore him to pieces, they painted themselves
first with clay, or gypsum, that they might not be recognised. Nonnus
shows, in several places, that down to his time the celebrants of the
Bacchic mysteries retained this dirty trick. Precisely the same trick
prevails in the mysteries of savage peoples. Mr. Winwood Reade[25]
reports the evidence of Mongilomba. When initiated, Mongilomba was
'severely flogged in the Fetich House' (as young Spartans were flogged
before the animated image of Artemis), and then he was 'plastered over
with goat-dung.' Among the natives of Victoria,[26] the 'body of the
initiated is bedaubed with clay, mud, charcoal powder, and filth of
every kind.' The girls are plastered with charcoal powder and white
clay, answering to the Greek gypsum. Similar daubings were performed
at the mysteries by the Mandans, as described by Catlin: and the Zunis
made raids on Mr. Cushing's black paint and Chinese ink for like
purposes. On the Congo, Mr. Johnson found precisely the same ritual in
the initiations. Here, then, not to multiply examples, we discover
two singular features in common between Greek and savage mysteries.
Both Greeks and savages employ the bull-roarer, both bedaub the
initiated with dirt or with white paint or chalk. As to the meaning of
the latter very un-Aryan practice, one has no idea, unless it
represents the impure uninitiated condition, cleansed later by
ceremonies of initiation. It is only certain that war parties of
Australian blacks bedaub themselves with white clay to alarm their
enemies in night attacks. The Phocians, according to Herodotus (viii.
27), adopted the same 'aisy stratagem,' as Captain Costigan has it.
Tellies, the medicine-man (~mantis~), chalked some sixty Phocians,
whom he sent to make a night attack on the Thessalians. The sentinels
of the latter were seized with supernatural horror, and fled, 'and
after the sentinels went the army.' In the same way, in a night attack
among the Australian Kurnai,[27] 'they all rapidly painted themselves
with pipe-clay: red ochre is no use, it cannot frighten the enemy.'
If, then, Greeks in the historic period kept up Australian tactics, it
is probable that the ancient mysteries of Greece might retain the
habit of daubing the initiated which occurs in savage rites.
'Come now,' as Herodotus would say, 'I will show once more that the
mysteries of the Greeks resemble those of Bushmen.' In Lucian's
Treatise on Dancing,[28] we read, 'I pass over the fact that you
cannot find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing....
To prove this I will not mention the secret acts of worship, on
account of the uninitiated. But this much all men know, that most
people say of those who reveal the mysteries, that they "dance them
out."' Here Liddel and Scott write, rather weakly, 'to dance out, let
out, betray, probably of some dance which burlesqued these
ceremonies.' It is extremely improbable that, in an age when it was
still forbidden to reveal the ~orgia~, or secret rites, those rites
would be mocked in popular burlesques. Lucian obviously intends to say
that the matter of the mysteries was set forth in _ballets d'action_.
Now this is exactly the case in the surviving mysteries of the
Bushmen. Shortly after the rebellion of Langalibalele's tribe, Mr.
Orpen, the chief magistrate in St. John's Territory, made the
acquaintance of Qing, one of the last of an all but exterminated
tribe. Qing 'had never seen a white man, except fighting,' when he
became Mr. Orpen's guide. He gave a good deal of information about the
myths of his people, but refused to answer certain questions. 'You are
now asking the secrets that are not spoken of.' Mr. Orpen asked, 'Do
you know the secrets?' Qing replied, 'No, only the initiated men of
that dance know these things.' To 'dance' this or that means, 'to be
acquainted with this or that mystery;' the dances were originally
taught by Cagn, the mantis, or grasshopper god. In many mysteries,
Qing, as a young man, was not initiated. He could not 'dance them
out.'[29]
There are thus undeniably close resemblances between the Greek
mysteries and those of the lowest contemporary races.