A new class of myths--Not explanatory--Popular tales--Heroic
and romantic myths--(1) Savage tales--(2) European Contes--
(3) Heroic myths--Their origin--Diffusion--History of their
study--Grimm's theory--Aryan theory--Benfey's theory--
Ancient Egyptian stories examined--Wanderung's theorie--
Conclusion.
The myths which have hitherto been examined possess, for the most
part, one common feature. All, or almost all of them, obviously aim at
satisfying curiosity about the causes of things, at supplying gaps in
human knowledge. The nature-myths account for various aspects of Nature,
from the reed by, the river-side that once was a fair maiden pursued by
Pan, to the remotest star that was a mistress of Zeus; from the reason
why the crow is black, to the reason why the sun is darkened in eclipse.
The divine myths, again, are for the more part essays in the same
direction. They try to answer these questions: "Who made things?" "How
did this world begin?" "What are the powers, felt to be greater than
ourselves, which regulate the order of events and control the destinies
of men?" Myths reply to all these questionings, and the answers are
always in accordance with that early nebulous condition of thought
and reason where observation lapses into superstition, religion into
science, science into fancy, knowledge into fable. In the same manner the
myths which we do not treat of here--the myths of the origin of death,
of man's first possession of fire, and of the nature of his home among
the dead--are all tentative contributions to knowledge. All seek to
satisfy the eternal human desire to _know_. "Whence came death?" man
asks, and the myths answer him with a story of Pandora, of Maui, of
the moon and the hare, or the bat and the tree. "How came fire to be a
servant of ours?" The myths tell of Prometheus the fire-stealer, or of
the fire-stealing wren, or frog, or coyote, or cuttlefish. "What manner
of life shall men live after death? in what manner of home?" The myth
answers with tales of Pohjola, of Hades, of Amenti, of all that, in the
Australian black fellow's phrase, "lies beyond the Rummut," beyond the
surf of the Pacific, beyond the "stream of Oceanus," beyond the horizon
of mortality. To these myths, and to the more mysterious legend of the
Flood, we may return some other day. For the present, it must suffice
to repeat that all these myths (except, perhaps, the traditions of the
Deluge) fill up gaps in early human knowledge, and convey information as
to matters outside of practical experience.
But there are classes of tales, or _maerchen_, or myths which, as far as
can be discovered, have but little of the explanatory element. Though
they have been interpreted as broken-down nature-myths, the variety of
the interpretations put upon them proves that, at least, their elemental
meaning is dim and uncertain, and makes it very dubious whether they
ever had any such significance at all. It is not denied here that
some of these myths and tales may have been suggested by elemental and
meteorological phenomena. For example, when we find almost everywhere
among European peasants, and among Samoyeds and Zulus, as in Greek
heroic-myths of the Jason cycle, the story of the children who run away
from a cannibal or murderous mother or step-mother, we are reminded of
certain nature-myths. The stars are often said* to be the children of
the sun, and to flee away at dawn, lest he or their mother, the moon,
should devour them. This early observation may have started the story of
flight from the cannibal parents, and the legend may have been brought
down from heaven to earth. Yet this were, perhaps, a far-fetched
hypothesis of the origin of a tale which may readily have been born
wherever human beings have a tendency (as in North America and South
Africa) to revert to cannibalism.
* Nature-Myths, vol. i p. 130. The story is "Asterinos und
Pulja" in Von Hahn's Griech. und Alban. Marchen. Compare
Samojedische Marchen, Castren, Varies, uber die Alt. Volk,
p. 164; Callaway, Uzembeni.
The peculiarity, then, of the myths which we propose to call "Heroic
and Romantic Tales" (_maerchen contes populaires_), is the absence, as a
rule, of any obvious explanatory purpose. They are romances or novels,
and if they do explain anything, it is rather the origin or sanction of
some human law or custom than the cause of any natural phenomenon that
they expound.
The kind of traditional fictions here described as heroic and romantic
may be divided into three main categories.
(1) First we have the popular tales of the lower and more backward
races, with whom may be reckoned, for our present purpose, the more
remote and obscure peoples of America. We find popular tales among the
Bushmen, Kaffirs, Zulus, Samoans, Maoris, Hurons, Samoyeds, Eskimos,
Crees, Blackfeet and other so-called savage races. We also find tales
practically identical in character, and often in plot and incident,
among such a people as the Huarochiris, a civilised race brought under
the Inca Empire some three generations before the Spanish conquest. The
characteristics of these tales are the presence of talking and magically
helpful beasts; the human powers and personal existence of even
inanimate objects; the miraculous accomplishments of the actors; the
introduction of beings of another race, usually hostile; the power of
going to and returning from Hades--always described in much the same
imaginative manner. The persons are sometimes anonymous, sometimes
are named while the name is not celebrated; more frequently the tribal
culture-hero, demiurge, or god is the leading character in these
stories. In accordance with the habits of savage fancy, the chief person
is often a beast, such as Ananzi, the West African spider; Cagn, the
Bushman grasshopper; or Michabo, the Algonkin white-hare. Animals
frequently take parts assigned to men and women in European _maerchen_.
(2) In the second place, we have the _maerchen_, or _contes_, or
household tales of the modern European, Asiatic and Indian peasantry,
the tales collected by the Grimms, by Afanasief, by Von Hahn, by Miss
Frere, by Miss Maive Stokes, by M. Sebillot, by Campbell of Islay, and
by so many others. Every reader of these delightful collections knows
that the characteristics, the machinery, all that excites wonder,
are the same as in the savage heroic tales just described But it is a
peculiarity of the popular tales of the peasantry that the _places_
are seldom named; the story is not localised, and the characters are
anonymous. Occasionally our Lord and his saints appear, and Satan is
pretty frequently present, always to be defeated and disgraced; but, as
a rule, the hero is "a boy," "a poor man" "a fiddler," "a soldier," and
so forth, no names being given.
(3) Thirdly, we have in epic poetry and legend the romantic and heroic
tales of the great civilised races, or races which have proved capable
of civilisation. These are the Indians, the Greeks, Romans, Celts,
Scandinavians and Germans. These have won their way into the national
literatures and the region of epic. We find them in the _Odyssey_, the
_Edda_ the Celtic poems, the _Ramayana_, and they even appear in the
_Veda_. They occur in the legends and pedigrees of the royal heroes
of Greece and Germany. They attach themselves to the dim beginnings
of actual history, and to real personages like Charlemagne. They even
invade the legends of the saints. The characters are national heroes,
such as Perseus, Jason, AEdipus and Olympian gods, and holy men and women
dear to the Church, and primal heroes of the North, Sigurd and Signy.
Their paths and places are not in dim fairyland, but in the fields
and on the shores we know--at Roland's Pass in the Pyrenees, on the
enchanted Colchian coast, or among the blameless Ethiopians, or in
Thessaly, or in Argos. Now, in all these three classes of romance, savage
fables, rural maerchen, Greek or German epics, the ideas and incidents
are analogous, and the very conduct of the plot is sometimes
recognisably the same. The moral ideas on which many of the maerchen,
sagas, or epic myths turn are often identical. Everywhere we find doors
or vessels which are not to be opened, regulations for the conduct of
husband and wife which are not to be broken; everywhere we find helpful
beasts, birds and fishes; everywhere we find legends proving that one
cannot outwit his fate or evade the destiny prophesied for him.
The chief problems raised by these sagas and stories are--(1) How do
they come to resemble each other so closely in all parts of the world?
(2) Were they invented once for all, and transmitted all across the
world from some centre? (3) What was that centre, and what was the
period and the process of transmission?
Before examining the solutions of those problems, certain considerations
may be advanced.
The supernatural _stuff_ of the stories, the threads of the texture, the
belief in the life and personality of all things--in talking beasts and
trees, in magical powers, in the possibility of visiting the diad--must,
on our theory as already set forth, be found wherever men have either
passed through savagery, and retained-survivals of that intellectual
condition, or wherever they have borrowed or imitated such survivals.
By this means, without further research, we may account for the
similarity of the stuff of heroic myths and marchen. The stuff is the
same as in nature myths and divine myths. But how is the similarity of
the arrangement of the incidents and ideas into _plots_ to be accounted
for? The sagas, epic myths, and marchen do not appear to resemble each
other everywhere (as the nature-myths do), because they are the same
ideas applied to the explanation of the same set of natural facts. The
sagas, epics and marchen seem to explain nothing, but to be told, in
the first instance, either to illustrate and enforce a moral, or for the
mere pleasure of imaginative narration.
We are thus left, provisionally, with the notion that occasionally the
resemblance of plot and arrangement may be _accidental_. In shaking
the mental kaleidoscope, which contains a given assortment of ideas,
analogous combinations may not impossibly be now and then produced
everywhere. Or the story may have been invented once for all in one
centre, but at a period so incalculably remote that it has filtered, in
the exchanges and contacts of prehistoric life, all over the world, even
to or from the Western Pacific and the lonely Oceanic Islands. Or, once
more, the story may have had a centre in the Old World, say, in India;
may have been carried to Europe by oral tradition or in literary
vehicles, like the _Pantschatantra_ or the _Hitopadesa_, or by gypsies;
may have reached the sailors, and trappers, and miners of civilisation,
and may have been communicated by them (in times subsequent to the
discovery of America by Columbus) to the backward races of the world.
These are preliminary statements of possibilities, and theories more or
less based on those ideas are now to be examined.
The best plan may be to trace briefly the history of the study of
popular tales. As early as Charles Perrault's time (1696), popular
traditional tales had attracted some curiosity, more or less scientific.
Mademoiselle L'Heritier, the Abbe Villiers, and even the writer of
the dedication of Perrault's _Contes_ to Mademoiselle, had expressed
opinions as to the purposes for which they were first told, and the time
and place where they probably arose. The Troubadours, the Arabs, and the
fanciful invention of peasant nurses were vaguely talked of as possible
first authors of the popular tales. About the same time, Huet, Bishop
of Avranches, had remarked that the Hurons in North America amused their
winter leisure with narratives in which beasts endowed with speech and
reason were the chief characters.
Little was done to secure the scientific satisfaction of curiosity
about traditional folk-tales, contes or marchen till the time when the
brothers Grimm collected the stories of Hesse. The Grimms became aware
that the stories were common to the peasant class in most European
lands, and that they were also known in India and the East. As they went
on collecting, they learned that African and North American tribes also
had their marchen, not differing greatly in character from the stories
familiar to German firesides.
Already Sir Walter Scott had observed, in a note to the Lady of the
Lake, that "a work of great interest might be compiled upon the origin
of popular fiction, and the transmission of similar tales from age to
age, and from country to country. The mythology of one period would then
appear to pass into the romance of the next, and that into the nursery
tales of subsequent ages." This opinion has long been almost universal.
Thus, if the story of Jason is found in Greek myths, and also, with
a difference, in popular modern marchen, the notion has been that the
marchen is the last and youngest form, the _detritus_ of the myth.
Now, as the myth is only known from literary sources (Homer, Mimnermus,
Apollonius Rhodius, Euripides, and so on), it must follow, on this
theory, that the people had borrowed from the literature of the more
cultivated classes. As a matter of fact, literature has borrowed far
more from the people than the people have borrowed from literature,
though both processes have been at work in the course of history.
But the question of the relations of marchen to myths, and of both to
romance, may be left unanswered for the moment. More pressing questions
are, what is the origin, and where the original home of the marchen or
popular tales, and how have they been so widely diffused all over the
world?
The answers given to these questions have naturally been modified by the
widening knowledge of the subject. One answer seemed plausible when only
the common character of European _contes_ was known; another was needed
when the Aryan peoples of the East were found to have the same stories;
another, or a modification of the second, was called for when marchen
like those of Europe were found among the Negroes, the Indians of
Brazil, the ancient Huarochiri of Peru, the people of Madagascar,
the Samoyeds, the Samoans, the Dene Hareskins of the extreme American
North-west, the Zulus and Kaffirs, the Bushmen, the Finns, the Japanese,
the Arabs, and the Swahilis.
The Grimms, in the appendix to their _Household Tales_,* give a list
of the stories with which they were acquainted. Out of Europe they note
first the literary collections of the East, the Thousand and One
Nights and the Hitopadesa, which, with the Book of Sinda-bad, and the
Pantschatantra, and the Katharit Sagara, contain almost all of the
Oriental tales that filtered into Western literature through written
translations. The Grimms had not our store of folk-tales recently
collected from the lips of the Aryan and non-Aryan natives of Hindostan,
such as the works of Miss Maive Stokes, of Miss Frere, of Captain Steel,
of Mr. Lai Behar Day, and the few Santal stories. But the Grimms had
some Kalmuck stories.**
* Mrs. Hunt's translation, London, 1884.
** "The relations of Ssidi Kur," in Bergmann's _Nomadische
Stretfereien_, vol. i.
One or two Chinese and Japanese examples had fallen into their hands,
and all this as early as 1822. In later years they picked up a
Malay story, some Bechuana tales, Koelle's Kanuri or Bornu stories,
Schoolcraft's and James Athearn Jones's North American legends, Finnish,
Esthonian and Mongolian narratives, and an increasing store of European
_contes_. The Grimms were thus not unaware that the _maerchen_, with
their surprising resemblances of plot and incident, had a circulation
far beyond the limits of the Ayran peoples. They were specially struck,
as was natural, by the reappearance of incidents analogous to those of
the German _contes_ (such as _Machandelboom_ and the _Singing Bone_, 47,
28) among the remote Bechuanas of South Africa. They found, too, that in
Sierra Leone beasts and birds play the chief parts in _maerchen_. "They
have a much closer connection with humanity,... nay, they have even
priests," as the animals in Guiana have _peays_ or sorcerers of their
own. "Only the beasts of the country itself appear in the _maerchen_."
Among these Bornu legends they found several tales analogous to
_Faithful John_ (6), and to one in Stra-parola's _Piacevoli Notti_
(Venice, 1550), a story, by the way, which recurs among the Santals, an
"aboriginal" tribe of India. It is the tale of the man who knows the
language of animals, and is warned by them against telling secrets to
women. Among the Indians of North America Grimm found the analogue
of his tale (182) of the _Elves' Gifts_, which, by the way, also
illustrates a proverb in Japan. Finnish, Tartar and Indian analogues
were discovered in plenty.
Such were Grimm's materials; much less abundant than ours, indeed,
but sufficient to show him that "the resemblance existing between the
stories, not only of nations widely removed from each other by time
and distance, but also between those which lie near together, consists
partly in the underlying idea and the delineation of particular
characters, and partly in the weaving together and unravelling of
incidents". How are these resemblances to be explained? That is the
question. Grimm's answer was, as ours must still be, only a suggestion.
"There are situations so simple and natural that they reappear
everywhere, just like the isolated words which are produced in a nearly
or entirely identical form in languages which have no connection with
each other, by the mere imitation of natural sounds." Thus to a certain,
but in Grimm's opinion to a very limited extent, the existence of
similar situations in the marchen of the most widely separated peoples
is the result of the common facts of human thought and sentiment.
To repeat a convenient illustration, if we find talking and rational
beasts and inanimate objects, and the occurrence of metamorphosis and of
magic, and of cannibals and of ghosts (as we do), in the marchen as in
the higher myths of all the world, and if we also find certain curious
human customs in the contes, these resemblances may be explained as
born of the same early condition of human fancy, which regards all known
things as personal and animated, which believes in ghosts and magic,
while men also behave in accordance with customs now obsolete and
forgotten in civilisation. These common facts are the threads (as we
have said) in the cloth of myth and marchen. They were supplied by the
universal early conditions of the prescientific human intellect;
Thus the stuff of marchen is everywhere the same. But why are the
patterns--the situations, and the arrangements, and sequence of
incidents--also remarkably similar in the contes of unrelated and
unconnected tribes and races everywhere?
Here the difficulty begins in earnest.
It is clearly not enough to force the analogy, and reply that the
patterns of early fabrics and the decorations of early weapons, of
pottery, tattooing marks, and so forth, are also things universally
human.*
* See Custom and Myth, "The Art of Savages," p. 288.
The close resemblances of undeveloped Greek and Mexican and other early
artistic work are interesting, but may be accounted for by similarity of
materials, of instruments, of suggestions from natural objects, and
of inexperience in design. The selections of similar situations and
of similar patterns into which these are interwoven in _maerchen_,
by Greeks, Huarochiris of Peru, and Samoans or Eskimos, is much more
puzzling to account for.
Grimm gives some examples in which he thinks that the ideas, and their
collocations in the story, can only have originally occurred to one
mind, once for all. How is the wide distribution of such a story to be
accounted for? Grimm first admits "_as rare exceptions_ the probability
of a story's passing from one people to another, and firmly rooting
itself in foreign soil". But such cases, he says, are "one or two
solitary exceptions," whereas the diffusion of stories which, in his
opinion, could only have been invented once for all is an extensive
phenomenon. He goes on to say, "We shall be asked where the outermost
lines of common property in stories begin, and how the lines of affinity
are gradated". His answer was not satisfactory even to himself, and the
additions to our knowledge have deprived it of any value. "The outermost
lines are coterminous with those of the great race which is called
Indo-Germanic." Outside of the Indo-Germanic, or "Aryan" race, that is
to say, are found none of the _maerchen_ which are discovered within the
borders of that race. But Grimm knew very well himself that this was an
erroneous belief. "We see with amazement in such of the stories of the
Negroes of Bornu and the Bechuanas (a wandering tribe in South Africa)
as we have become acquainted with _an undeniable connection with
the German ones_, while at the same time their peculiar composition
distinguishes them from these." So Grimm, though he found "no decided
resemblance" in North American stories, admitted that the boundaries
of common property in marchen did include more than the "Indo-Germanic"
race. Bechuanas, and Negroes, and Finns, as he adds, and as Sir George
Dasent saw,* are certainly within the fold.
* _Popular Tales from the Norse_, 1859, pp. liv., lv.
There William Grimm left the question in 1856. His tendency apparently
was to explain the community of the marchen on the hypothesis that they
were the original common store of the undivided Aryan people, carried
abroad in the long wanderings of the race. But he felt that the presence
of the marchen among Bechuanas, Negroes and Finns was not thus to be
explained. At the same time he closed the doors against a theory of
borrowing, except in "solitary exceptions," and against the belief
in frequent, separate and independent evolution of the same story in
various unconnected regions. Thus Grimm states the question, but does
not pretend to have supplied its answer.
The solutions offered on the hypothesis that the marchen are exclusively
Aryan, and that they are the _detritus_ or youngest and latest forms of
myths, while these myths are concerned with the elemental phenomena of
Nature, and arose out of the decay of language, have been so frequently
criticised that they need not long detain us.* The most recent review
of the system is by M. Cosquin.** In place of repeating objections which
have been frequently urged by the present writer, an abstract of M.
Cosquin's reasons for differing from the "Aryan" theory of Von Hahn
may be given. Voh Hahn was the collector and editor of stories from the
modern Greek,*** and his work is scholarly and accomplished. He drew up
comparative tables showing the correspondence between Greek and German
_maerchen_ on the one side, and Greek and Teutonic epics and higher
legends or sagas on the other. He also attempted to classify the stories
in a certain number of recurring _formula_ or plots. Lin Von Hahn's
opinion, the stories were originally the myths of the undivided Aryan
people in its central Asian home. As the different branches scattered
and separated, they carried with them their common store of myths, which
were gradually worn down into the _detritus_ of popular stories, "the
youngest form of the myth". The same theory appeared (in 1859) in Mr.
Max Muller's _Chips from a German Workshop_**** The undivided Aryan
people possessed, in its mythological and proverbial phraseology, the
seeds or germs, more or less developed, which would nourish, under any
sky, into very similar plants--that is, the popular stories.
* See our Introduction to Mrs. Hunt's translation of Grimm's
Household Tales.
** Contes Populaire de Lorraine, Paris, 1886, pp. i., xv.
*** Grieschische und Albanesische Marchen, 1864.
**** Vol. ii. p. 226.
Against these ideas M. Cosquin argues that if the Aryan people before
its division preserved the myths only in their _earliest germinal form_,
it is incredible that, when the separated branches had lost touch of
each other, the final shape of their myths, the _maerchen_, should have
so closely resembled each other as they do. The Aryan theory (as it may
be called for the sake of brevity) rejects, as a rule, the idea that
tales can, as a rule, have been _borrowed_, even by one Aryan people
from another.* "Nursery tales are generally the last things to be
borrowed by one nation from another."** Then, says M. Cosquin, as the
undivided Aryan people had only the myths in their least developed
state, and as the existing peasantry have only the _detritus_ of these
myths--the _maerchen_--and as you say borrowing is out of the question,
how do you account for a coincidence like _this_? In the Punjaub, among
the Bretons, the Albanians, the modern Greeks and the Russians we find
a _conte_ in which a young man gets possession of a magical ring. This
ring is stolen from him, and recovered by the aid of certain grateful
beasts, whom the young man has benefited. His foe keeps the ring in his
mouth, but the grateful mouse, insinuating his tail into the nose of the
thief, makes him sneeze, and out comes the magical ring!
* Cox, Mythol. of Aryan Nations, i. 109.
** Max Mueller, Chips, ii. 216.
Common sense insists, says M. Cosquin, that this detail was invented
once for all. It must have first occurred, not in a myth, but in
a _conte_ or _maerchen_, from which all the others alike proceed.
Therefore, if you wish the idea of the mouse and the ring and the sneeze
to be a part of the store of the undivided Aryans, you must admit
that they had _contes, maerchen_, popular stories, what you call the
_detritus_ of myths, as well as myths themselves, before they left
their cradle in Central Asia. "Nos ancetres, les peres des nations
europeennes, auraient, de cette facon, emporte dans leurs fourgons la
collection complete de contes Ibleus actuels." In short, if there was
no borrowing, myths have been reduced (on the Aryan theory) to the
condition of _detritus_, to the diamond dust of mar-chen, before the
Aryan people divided. But this is contrary to the hypothesis.
M. Cosquin does not pause here. The _maerchen_--mouse, ring, sneeze and
all--is found among _non-Aryan_ tribes, "the inhabitants of Mardin
in Mesopotamia and the Kariaines of Birmanie".* Well, if there was no
borrowing, how did the non-Aryan peoples get the story?
* Cosquin, i, xi., xii., with his authorities in note 1.
M. Cosquin concludes that the theory he attacks is untenable, and
determines that, "after having been invented in this place or that,
which we must discover" [if we can], "the popular tales of the various
European nations (to mention these alone) have spread all over the world
from people to people by way of borrowing". In arriving at this opinion,
M. Cosquin admits, as is fair, that the Grimms, not having our
knowledge of non-Aryan _maerchen_ (Mongol, Syrian, Arab, Kabyle, Swahili,
Annamite--he might have added very many more), could not foresee all the
objections to the theory of a store common to Aryans alone.
Were we constructing an elaborate treatise on _maerchen_, it would be
well in this place to discuss the Aryan theory at greater length. That
theory turns on the belief that popular stories are the _detritus_ of
Aryan myths. It would be necessary then to discuss the philological
hypothesis of the origin and nature of these original Aryan myths
themselves; but to do so would lead us far from the study of mere
popular tales.*
Leaving the Aryan theory, we turn to that supported by M. Cosquin
himself--the theory, as he says, of Benfey.**
Inspired by Benfey, M. Cosquin says: "The method must be to take each
type of story successively, and to follow it, if we can, from age to
age, from people to; people, and see where this voyage of discovery will
lead us. Now, travelling thus from point to point, often by different
routes, we always arrive at the same centre, namely, at India, _not the
India of fabulous times_, but the India of actual history."
The theory of M. Cosquin is, then, that the popular stories of the
world, or rather the vast majority of them, were _invented_ in India,
and that they were carried from India, during the historical period, by
various routes, till they were scattered over all the races among whom
they are found.
This is a venturesome theory, and is admitted, apparently, to have
its exceptions. For example, we possess ancient Egyptian popular tales
corresponding to those of the rest of the world, but older by far than
historical India, from which, according to M. Cosquin, the stories set
forth on their travels.***
* It has already been attempted in our Custom and Myth;
Introduction to Mrs. Hunt's Grimm; La Mythologie, and
elsewhere.
** For M. Benfey's notions, see Bulletin de I' Academie de
Saint Petersburg, September 4-16, 1859, and Pantschatantra,
Leipzig, 1859.
*** See M. Maspero's collection, _Contes Populaires de
l'Egypte Ancienne_, Paris, 1882.
One of these Egyptian tales, The Two Brothers, was actually written down
on the existing manuscript in the time of Rameses II., some 1400 years
before our era, and many centuries before India had any known history.
No man can tell, moreover, how long it had existed before it was
copied out by the scribe Ennana. Now this tale, according to M. Cosquin
himself, has points in common with _maerchen_ from Hesse, Hungary,
Russia, modern Greece, France, Norway, Lithuania, Hungary, Servia,
Annam, modern India, and, we may add, with Samoyed _maerchen_, with
Hottentot _marchen_, and with _maerchen_ from an "aboriginal" people of
India, the Santals.
We ask no more than this one _maerchen_ of ancient Egypt to upset the
whole theory that India was the original home of the contes, and that
from historic India they have been carried by oral transmission, and
in literary vehicles, all over the world. First let us tell the story
briefly, and then examine its incidents each separately, and set forth
the consequences of that examination.
According to the story of _The Two Brothers_--
Once upon a time there were two brothers; Anapou was the elder, the
younger was called Bitiou. Anapou was married, and Bitiou lived with
him as his servant. When he drove the cattle to feed, he heard what they
said to each other, and drove them where they told him the pasture was
best. One day his brother's wife saw him carrying a very heavy burden of
grain, and she fell in love with his force, and said, "Come and lie with
me, and I will make thee goodly raiment".
But he answered, "Art thou not as my mother, and my brother as a father
to me? Speak to me thus no more, and never will I tell any man what a
word thou hast said."
Then she cast dust on her head, and went to her husband, saying, "Thy
brother would have lain with me; slay him or I die".
Then the elder brother was like a panther of the south, and he sharpened
his knife, and lay in wait behind the door. And when the sun set, Bitiou
came driving his cattle; but the cow that walked before them all said
to him, "There stands thine elder brother with his knife drawn to slay
thee".
Then he saw the feet of his brother under the door, and he fled, his
brother following him; and he cried to Ra, and Ra heard him, and between
him and his brother made a great water flow full of crocodiles.
Now in the morning the younger brother told the elder all the truth, and
he mutilated himself, and cast it into the water, and the _calmar_ fish
devoured it. And he said, "I go to the Valley of Acacias" (possibly a
mystic name for the next world), "and in an acacia tree I shall place my
heart; and if men cut the tree, and my heart falls, thou shalt seek
it for seven years, and lay it in a vessel of water. Then shall I live
again and requite the evil that hath been done unto me. And the sign
that evil hath befallen me shall be when the cup of beer in thy hand is
suddenly turbid and troubled."
Then the elder brother cast dust on his head and besmeared his face, and
went home and slew his wicked wife.
Now the younger brother dwelt in the Valley of Acacias, and all the gods
came by that way, and they pitied his loneliness, and Chnum made for him
a wife.* And the seven Hathors came and prophesied, saying, "_She shall
die an ill death and a violent_". And Bitiou loved her, and told her the
secret of his life, and that he should die when his heart fell from the
acacia tree.
* Chnum is the artificer among the gods.
Now, a lock of the woman's hair fell into the river, and it floated to
the place where Pharaoh's washermen were at work. And the sweet
lock perfumed all the raiment of Pharaoh, and the washermen knew not
wherefore, and they were rebuked. Then Pharaoh's chief washerman went
to the water and found the hair of the wife of Bitiou; and Pharaoh's
magicians went to him and said, "Our lord, thou must marry the woman
from whose head this tress of hair hath floated hither". And Pharaoh
hearkened unto them, and he sent messengers even to the Valley of
Acacias, and they came unto the wife of Bitiou. And she said, "First you
must slay my husband"; and she showed them the acacia tree, and they out
the flower that held the heart of Bitiou, and he died.
Then it so befel that the brother of Bitiou held in his hand a cup of
beer, and, lo! the beer was troubled. And he said, "Alas, my brother!"
and he sought his brother's heart, and he found it in the berry of the
acacia. Then he laid it in a cup of fresh water, and Bitiou drank of it,
and his heart went into his own place, and lived again.
Then said Bitiou, "Lo! I shall become the bull, even Apis" (Hapi); and
they led him to the king, and all men rejoiced that Apis was found. But
the bull went into the chamber of the king's women, and he spake to the
woman that had been the wife of Bitiou. And she was afraid, and said to
Pharaoh, "Wilt thou swear to give me my heart's desire?" and he swore it
with an oath. And she said, "Slay that bull that I may eat his liver".
Then felt Pharaoh sick for sorrow, yet for his oath's sake he let slay
the bull. And there fell of his blood two quarts on either side of the
son of Pharaoh, and thence grew two persea trees, great and fair, and
offerings were made to the trees, as they had been gods.
Then the wife of Pharaoh went forth in her chariot, and the tree spake
to her, saying, "I am Bitiou". And she let cut down that tree, and a
chip leaped into her mouth, and she conceived and bare a son. And that
child was Bitiou; and when he came to full age and was prince of that
land, he called together the councillors of the king, and accused the
woman, and they slew her. And he sent for his elder brother, and made
him a prince in the land of Egypt.
We now propose to show, not only that the incidents of this tale--far
more ancient than historic India as it is--are common in the _maerchen_
of many countries, but that they are inextricably entangled and
intertwisted with the chief plots of popular tales. There are few of the
main cycles of popular tales which do not contain, as essential parts of
their machinery, one or more of the ideas and situations of this legend.
There is thus at least a presumption that these cycles of story may have
been in existence in the reign of Rameses II., and for an indefinite
period earlier; while, if they were not, and if they are made of
borrowed materials, it may have been from the Egypt of an unknown
antiquity, not from much later Indian sources, that they were adapted.
The incidents will now be analysed and compared with those of _maerchen_
in general.
To this end let us examine the incidents in the ancient Egyptian tale of
_The Two Brothers_. These incidents are:--
(1) The _spretae injuria formae_ of the wedded woman, who, having offered
herself in vain to a man, her brother-in-law, accuses him of being her
assailant. This incident, of course, occurs in Homer, in the tale of
Bellerophon, before we know anything of historic India. This, moreover,
seems one of the notions (M. Cosquin admits, with Benfey, that there
are such notions) which are "universally human," and _might_ be invented
anywhere.
(2) The Egyptian Hippolytus is warned of his danger by his cow, which
speaks with human voice. Every one will recognise the ram which warns
Phrixus and Helle in the Jason legend.* In the Albanian _maerchen_,**
a _dog_, not a cow nor a ram, gives warning of the danger. Animals, in
short, often warn of danger by spoken messages, as the fish does in the
Brahmanic deluge-myth, and the dog in a deluge-myth from North America.
* The authority cited by the scholiast (Apoll. Rhod.,
Argon., i. 256) is Hecatseus. Scholiast on Iliad, vii. 86,
quotes Philostephanus.
** Von Hahn, i. 65.
(3) The accused brother is pursued by his kinsman, and about to be
slain, when Ra, at his prayer, casts between him and the avenger a
stream full of crocodiles. This incident is at least not very unlike one
of the most widely diffused of all incidents of story--the _flight_ in
which the runaways cause magical rivers or lakes suddenly to cut off
the pursuer. This narrative of the flight and the obstacles is found in
Scotch, Gaelic, Japanese (no water obstacle), Zulu, Russian, Samoan, and
in "The Red Horse of the Delawares," a story from Dacotah, as well as in
India and elsewhere.* The difference is, that in the Egyptian _conte_,
as it has reached us in literary form, the fugitive appeals to Ra to
help him, instead of magically making a river by throwing water or
a bottle behind him, as is customary. It may be conjectured that the
substitution of divine intervention in response to prayer for magical
self-help is the change made by a priestly scribe in the traditional
version.**
* See Folk-Lore Journal, April, 1886, review of _Houston's
Popular Stories_, for examples of the magic used in the
flight.
** Maspero, Contes, p. 13, note 1.
(4) Next morning the brothers parley across the stream. The younger
first mutilates himself (_Atys_) then says he is going to the vale of
the acacia, according to M. Maspero probably a name for the other world.
Meanwhile the younger brother will put his _heart_ in a high acacia
tree. If the tree is cut down, the elder brother must search for the
_heart_, and place it in a jar of water, when the younger brother will
revive. Here we have the idea which recurs in the Samoyed marchen where
the men lay aside their hearts, in which are their separable lives. As
Mr.
Ralston says,* "This heart-breaking episode occurs in the tales of
many lands". In the Russian the story is Koschchei the deathless, whose
"death" (or life) lies in an egg, in a duck, on a log, in the ice.** As
Mr. Ralston well remarks, a very singular parallel to the revival of the
Egyptian brothers heart in water is the Hottentot tale of a girl eaten
by a lion. Her heart is extracted from the lion, is placed in a calabash
of milk, and the girl comes to life again.***
(5) The younger brother gives the elder a sign magical, whereby he shall
know how it fares with the heart. When a cup of beer suddenly grows
turbid, then evil has befallen the heart. This is merely one of the
old _sympathetic signs_ of story--the opal that darkens; the comb of
Lemminkainen in the _Kalewala_ that drops blood when its owner is in
danger; the stick that the hero erects as he leaves home, and which will
fall when he is imperilled. In Australia the natives practise this magic
with a stick, round which they bind the hair of the distant person about
whose condition they want to be informed.**** This incident, turning on
the belief in _sympathies_, might perhaps be regarded as "universally
human" and capable of being invented anywhere.
* Russian Folk-Tales, 109.
** In Norse, Asbjornsen and Moe, 36; Dasent, 9. Gaelic,
Campbell, i. 4, p. 81. Indian, "Punchkin," Old Deccan Days,
pp. 13-16. Samoyed, Castren, Ethnol. Varies liber die
Altaischen Volker., p. 174.
*** Bleek, Reynard the Fox of South Africa, p. 57.
**** Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 36, 1881. The stick
used is the "throwing stick" wherewith the spear is
hurled,(6) The elder brother goes home and kills his wife.
The gods pity the younger Bitiou in the Valley of Acacias,
and make him a wife.
M. Cosquin has found in France the trait of the blood that boils in the
glass when the person concerned is in danger.
(7) The three Hathors come to her creation, and prophesy for her a
violent death. For this incident compare Perrault's _The Sleeping
Beauty_ and Maury's work on _Les Fees_. The spiritual midwives and
prophetesses at the hour of birth are familiar in _maerchen_ as Fairies,
and Fates, and Maerae.
(8) The river carries a tress of the hair of Bitiou's wife to the feet
of Pharaoh's washermen; the scent perfumes all the king's linen. Pharaoh
falls in love with the woman from whose locks this tress has come. For
this incident compare _Cinderella_. In Santal and Indian _maerchen_ a
tress of hair takes the place of the glass-slipper, and the amorous
prince or princess will only marry the person from whose head the lock
has come. Here M. Cosquin himself gives Siamese, Mongol, Bengali (Lai
Behar Day, p. 86), and other examples of the lock of hair doing duty for
the slipper with which the lover is smitten, and by which he recognises
his true love.
(9) The wife of Bitiou reveals the secret of his heart. The people of
Pharaoh cut down the acacia tree.
(10) His brother reads in the turbid beer the death of Bitiou. He
discovers the heart and life in a berry of the acacia.
It is superfluous to give modern parallels to the various
transformations of the life of Bitiou. He becomes an Apis bull, and his
faithless wife desires his death, and wishes to eat his liver, but his
life goes on in other forms. This is merely the familiar situation of
the ass in _Peau d'Ane_ (the ass who clearly, before Perrault's time,
had been human).
_Demandez lui la peau de ce rare animal!_
In most traditional versions of _Cinderella_ will be found examples of
the beast, once human, slain by an enemy, yet potent after death. This
beast takes the part given by Perrault to the fairy godmother. The
idea is also familiar in Grimm's _Machandelboom_ (47), and was found by
Casalis among the Bechuanas.
(11) The wicked wife obtains the bull Apis's death by virtue of a _hasty
oath_ of Pharaoh's (_Jephtha, Herodias_).
(12) The blood of the bull grows into two persea trees.
Here M. Cosquin himself supplies parallels of blood turning into trees
from Hesse (Wolf, p. 394) and from Russian. We may add the ancient
Lydian myth. When the gods slew Agdistis, a drop of his blood became an
almond tree, the fruit of which made women pregnant.*
* Pausanias, vii. 17.
(13) The persea tree is also cut down by the wicked wife of Bitiou. A
chip from its boughs is swallowed by the wicked wife, who conceives,
like Margata in the _Kalewala_, and bears a son.
The story of Agdistis, just quoted, is in point, but the topic is of
enormous range, and the curious may consult _Le Fils de Vierge_ by M. H.
De Charencey. Compare also Surya Bay in _Old Deccan Days_ (6). The final
resurrection of Surya Bay is exactly like that in the Hottentot tale
already quoted. Surya is drowned by a jealous rival, becomes a golden
flower, is burned, becomes a mango; one of the fruits falls into a
calabash of milk, and out of the calabash, like the Hottentot girl,
comes Surya!
(14) The son of the persea tree was Bitiou, born of his own faithless
wife; and when he grew up he had her put to death.
Even a hasty examination of these incidents from old Egypt proves
that before India was heard of in history the people of the Pharaohs
possessed a large store of incidents perfectly familiar in modern
marchen. Now, if one single Egyptian tale yields this rich supply, it is
an obvious presumption that the collection of an Egyptian Grimm
might, and probably would, have furnished us with the majority of the
situations common in popular tales. M. Cosquin himself remarks that
these ideas cannot be invented more than once (I. lxvii.). The other
Egyptian contes, as that of _Le Prince Predestine_ (twentieth dynasty),
and the noted _Master Thief_ of Herodotus (ii. 121), are merely familiar
marchen of the common type, and have numerous well-known analogues.
From all these facts M. Cosquin draws no certain conclusions. He asks:
Did Egypt borrow these tales from India, or India from Egypt? _And were
there Aryans in India in the time of Rameses II.?_
These questions are beyond conjecture. We know nothing of Egyptian
relations with prehistoric India. We know not how many aeons the tale
of _The Two Brothers_ may have existed in Egypt before Ennana, the head
librarian, wrote it out for Pharaoh's treasurer, Qagabou.
What we do know is, that if we find a large share of the whole stock of
incident of popular tale fully developed in one single story long before
India was historic, it is perfectly vain to argue that all stories were
imported from historic India. It is impossible to maintain that the
single centre whence the stories spread was not the India of fable, but
the India of history, when we discover such abundance of story material
in Egypt before, as far as is known, India \ had even become the India
of fable.
The topic is altogether too obscure for satisfactory argument. Certainly
the _maerchen_ were at home in Egypt before we have even reason to
believe that Egypt and India were conscious of each other's existence.
The antiquity of _maerchen_ by the Nile-side touches geological time, if
we agree with M. Maspero that Bitiou is a form of Osiris, that is, that
the Osiris myth may have been developed out of the Bitiou _maerchen_.*
* Maspero, op. cit., p. 17, note 1.
The Osiris myth is as old as the Egypt we know, and the story of Bitiou
may be either the _detritus_ or the germ of the myth. This gives it
a dateless antiquity; and with this _maerchen_ the kindred and allied
_maerchen_ establish a claim to enormous age. But it is quite impossible
to say when these tales were first invented. We cannot argue that the
cradle of a story is the place where it first received literary form.
We know not whence the Egyptians came to Nile-side; we know not whether
they brought the story with them, or found it among some nameless
earlier people, fugitives from Kor, perhaps, or anywhere else. We
know not whether the remote ancestors of modern peoples, African, or
European, or Asiatic, who now possess forms of the tale, borrowed it
from a people more ancient than Egypt, or from Egypt herself. These
questions are at present insoluble. We only know for certain that, when
we find anywhere any one of the numerous incidents of the story of _The
Two Brothers_, we can be certain that their original home was _not_
historic India. There is also the presumption that, if we knew more
of the tales of ancient Egypt, we could as definitely refuse to regard
historic India as the cradle of many other _maerchen_.
Thus, in opposition to the hypothesis of borrowing from India, we reach
some distinct and assured, though negative, truths.
1. So far as the ideas in _The Two Brothers_ are representative of
_maerchen_ (and these ideas are inextricably interwoven with some of the
most typical legends), _historic_ India is certainly and demonstrably
_not_ the cradle of popular tales. These are found far earlier already
in the written literature of Egypt.
2. As far as these ideas are representative of _maerchen_, there is
absolutely no evidence to show that _maerchen_ sprang from India, whether
historical or prehistoric; nor is any connection proved between ancient
Egypt and prehistoric India.
3. As far as _maerchen_ are represented by the ideas in _The Two
Brothers_ and the _Predestined Prince_, there is absolutely no evidence
to show in what region or where they were originally invented.
The Bellerophon story rests on a _donnee_ in _The Two Brothers_; the
_Flight_ rests on another; _Cinderella_ reposes on a third; the giant
with no heart in his body depends on a fourth; the _Milk-White Dove_ on
the same; and these incidents occur in Hottentot, Bechuana, Samoyed,
Samoan, as well as in Greek, Scotch, German, Gaelia Now, as all these
incidents existed in Egyptian _marchen_ fourteen hundred years before
Christ, they _may_ have been dispersed without Indian intervention. One
of the white raiders from the Northern Sea may have been made captive,
like the pseud-Odysseus, in Egypt; may have heard the tales; may have
been ransomed, and carried the story to Greece or Libya, whence a Greek
got it. Southwards it may have passed up the Nile to the Great Lakes,
and down the Congo and Zambesi, and southward ever with the hordes of
T'Chaka's ancestors. All these processes are possible and even probable,
but absolutely nothing is known for certain on the subject. It is only
as manifest as facts can be that all this might have occurred if the
Indian peninsula _did not exist._ Another objection to the hypothesis
of distribution from historic India is the existence of sagas or epic
legends corresponding to marchen in pre-Homeric Greece. The story of
Jason, for example, is in its essential features, perhaps, the most
widely diffused of all.* The story of the return of the husband, and
of his difficult recognition by his wife, the central idea of the
_Odyssey_, is of wide distribution, and the _Odyssey_ (as Fenelon makes
the ghost of Achilles tell Homer in Hades) is _un amas de contes de
vieilles_. The Cyclops, the Siren, Scylla, and the rest,** these tales
did not reach Greece from historic India at least, and we have no reason
for supposing that India before the dawn of history was their source.
* Custom and Myth, "A Far-Travelled Tale ".
** Gerland, Alt Griechische Marchen in der Odyssee.
The reasons for which India has been regarded as a great centre and
fountain-head of popular stories are, on the other hand, excellent, if
the theory is sufficiently limited. The cause is _vera causa_. Marchen
certainly did set out from mediaeval India, and reached mediaeval Europe
and Asia in abundance. Not to speak of oral communications in the great
movements, missions and migrations, Tartar, crusading, Gypsy, commercial
and Buddhistic--in all of which there must have been "swopping of
stories"--it is certain that Western literature was actually invaded by
the _contes_ which had won away into the literature of India.* These are
facts beyond doubt, but these facts must not be made the basis of
too wide an inference. Though so many stories have demonstrably been
borrowed from India in the historical period, it is no less certain that
many existed in Europe before their introduction. Again, as has been
ably argued by a writer in the _Athenaeum_ (April 23, 1887), the
literary versions of the tales probably had but a limited influence on
the popular narrators, the village gossips and grandmothers. Thus no
collection of published tales has ever been more popular than that of
Charles Perrault, which for many years has been published not only in
cheap books, but in cheaper broadsheets.
* Cosquin, op. cit., i. xv., xxiv.; Max Mueller, "The
Migrations of Fables," Selected Essays, vol. ii., Appendix;
Benfey, Pantschatantra; Comparetti, Introduction to Book of
Sindibad, English translation of the Folk-Lore Society.
Yet M. Sebillot and other French collectors gather from the lips of
peasants versions of _Cinderella_, for example, quite unaffected by
Perrault's version, and rich in archaic features, such as the presence
of a miracle-working beast instead of a fairy godmother. That detail
is found in Kaffir, and Santhal, and Finnish, as well as in Celtic, and
Portuguese, and Scottish variants, and has been preserved in popular
French traditions, despite the influence of Perrault. In the same
way, M. Carnoy finds only the faintest traces of the influence of a
collection so popular as the _Arabian Nights_. The peasantry regard
tales which they read in books as quite apart from their inherited store
of legend.*
* Sebillot's popular Cendrillon is Le Taureau Bleu in Contes
de la Haute Bretagne. See also M. Carnoy's Contes
Francais, 1885, p. 9.
If printed literature has still so little power over popular tradition,
the manuscript literature of the Middle Ages must have had much less,
though sometimes _contes_ from India were used as parables by preachers.
Thus we must beware of over-estimating the effect of importation from
India, even where it distinctly existed. Even the versions that were
brought in the Middle Ages by oral tradition must have encountered
versions long settled in Europe--versions which may have been current
before any scribe of Egypt perpetuated a legend on papyrus.
Once more, the Indian theory has to account for the presence of tales in
Africa and America among populations which are not known to have had any
contact with India at all. Where such examples are urged, it is usual to
say that the stories either do not really resemble our _maerchen_, or
are quite recent importations by Europeans, Dutch, French, English
and others.* Here we are on ground where proof is difficult, if not
impossible. Assuredly French influence declares itself in certain
narratives collected from the native tribes of North America. On
the other hand, when the _maerchen_ is interwoven with the national
traditions and poetry of a remote people, and with the myths by which
they account to themselves for the natural features of their own
country, the hypothesis of recent borrowing from Europeans appears
insufficient. A striking example is the song of Siati (a form of the
Jason myth) among the people of Samoa.** Even more remarkable is the
presence of a crowd of familiar _maerchen_ in the national traditions of
the Huarochiri, a pre-Inca civilised race of Southern Peru. These were
published, or at least collected and written down, by Francisco de
Avila, a Spanish priest, about 1608. He remarks that "these traditions
are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people of this province".***
These traditions refer to certain prehistoric works of engineering
or accidents of soil, whereby the country was drained. The Huarochiri
explained them by a series of _maerchen_ about Huthiacuri, Pariaca
(culture-heroes), and about friendly animals which aided them in the
familiar way. In the same manner exactly the people of the Marais of
Poitou have to account for the drainage of the country, a work of the
twelfth century.
* Cosquin, op. cit, 1, xix.
** Turner's Samoa, p. 102.
*** Rites of the Incas. Hakluyt Society. The third document
in the book. The _maerchen_ have been examined by me in _The
Marriage of Cupid and Psyche_, p. lxxii.
They attribute the old works to the local hero, Gargantua, who "drank
up all the water".* No one supposes that this legend is borrowed from
Rabelais, and it seems even more improbable that the Huarochiri hastily
borrowed _maerchen_ from the Spaniards, and converted them before 1600
into national myths.
* _Revue des Traditions Populaires_, April 25,1887, p. 186.
We have few opportunities of finding examples of remote American
_maerchen_ recorded so early as this, and generally the hypothesis
of recent borrowing from Europeans, or from Negroes influenced by
Europeans, is at least possible, and it would be hard to prove a
negative. But the case of the Huarochiri throws doubt on the hypothesis
of recent borrowing as the invariable cause of the diffusion of
_maerchen_ in places beyond the reach of historic India.
The only way (outside of direct evidence) to prove borrowing would be to
show that ideas and customs peculiarly Indian (for example) occur in the
_maerchen_ of people destitute of these ideas. But it would be hard to
ask believers in the Indian theory to exhibit such survivals. In the
first place, if _contes_ have been borrowed, it seems that a new "local
colour" was given to them almost at the moment of transference. The Zulu
and Kaffir _maerchen_ are steeped in Zulu and Kaffir colour, and the life
they describe is rich in examples of rather peculiar native rites and
ceremonies, seldom if ever essential to the conduct of the tale. Thus,
if stories are "adapted" (like French plays) in the moment of borrowing,
it will be cruel to ask supporters of the Indian theory for traces of
Indian traits and ideas in European _maerchen_. Again, apart from special
yet non-essential matters of etiquette (such as the ceremonies with
which certain kinsfolk are treated, or the initiation of girls at
the marriageable age), the ideas and customs found in marchen
are practically universal As has been shown, the super-natural
stuff--metamorphosis, equality of man, beasts and things, magic and
the like--_is_ universal. Thus little remains that could be fixed on as
especially the custom or idea of any one given people. For instance,
in certain variants of _Puss in Boots_, Swahili, Avar, Neapolitan,
the beast-hero makes it a great point that, when he dies, he is to be
_honourably buried_. Now what peoples give beasts honourable burial? We
know the cases of ancient Egyptians, Samoans, Arabs and Athenians (in
the case, at least, of the wolf), and probably there are many more. Thus
even so peculiar an idea or incident as this cannot be proved to belong
to a definite region, or to come from any one original centre.*
* See Deulin, Gontes de ma Mire l'Oye, and Reinhold Kohler
in Gonzenbach's Siclianische Marchen, No. 65.
By the very nature of the case, therefore, it is difficult for M.
Cosquin and other supporters of the Indian theory to prove the existence
of Indian ideas in European marchen. Nor do they establish this point.
They urge that _charity to beasts_ and the _gratitude of beasts_,
as contrasted with human lack of gratitude, are Indian, and perhaps
Buddhist ideas. Thus the Buddha gave his own living body to a famished
tigress. But so, according to Garcilasso, were the subjects of the Incas
wont to do, and they were not Buddhists. The beasts in marchen, again,
are just as often, or even more frequently, helpful to men without any
motive of gratitude; nor would it be fair to argue that the notion of
gratitude has dropped out, because we find friendly beasts all the world
over, totems and manitous, who have never been benefited by man. The
favours are all on the side of the totems. It is needless to adduce
again the evidence on this topic. M. Cosquin adds that the belief in the
equality and interchangeability of attributes and aspect between man
and beast is "une idee bien indienne," and derived from the doctrine of
metempsychosis, "qui efface la distinction entre l'homme et l'animal,
et qui en tout vivant voit un frere". But it has been demonstrated that
this belief in the equality and kinship not only of all animate, but all
inanimate nature, is the very basis of Australian, Zuni and all other
philosophies of the backward races. No idea can be less peculiar to
India; it is universal. Once more, the belief that shape-shifting
(metamorphosis) can be achieved by skin-shifting, by donning or doffing
the hide of a beast, is no more "peculiarly Indian" than the other
conceptions. Benfey, to be sure, laid stress on this point;* but it is
easy to produce examples of skin-shifting and consequent metamorphosis
from Roman, North American, Old Scandinavian, Thlinkeet, Slav and Vogul
ritual and myths.** There remains only a trace of polygamy in European
marchen to speak of specially Indian influence.*** But polygamy is not
peculiar to India, nor is monogamy a recent institution in Europe.
* Pantschatantra, I 265.
** Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, pp. lx., lxiv., where
examples and authorities are given.
*** Cosquin, op. cit, i., xxx.
Thus each "peculiarly Indian" idea supposed to be found in marchen
proves to be practically universal. So the whole Indian hypothesis is
attacked on every side. _Contes_ are far older than _historic_ India.
Nothing raises even a presumption that they first arose in _prehistoric_
India. They are found in places where they could hardly have travelled
from historic India. Their ideas are not peculiarly Indian, and though
many reached Europe and Asia in literary form derived from India during
the Middle Ages, and were even used as parables in sermons, yet the
majority of European folk-tales have few traces of Indian influence.
Some examples of this influence, as when the "frame-work" of an Oriental
collection has acquired popular circulation, will be found in Professor
Crane's interesting book, _Italian Popular Tales_, pp. 168, 359. But to
admit this is very different from asserting that German _Hausmarchen_
are all derived from "Indian and Arabian originals, with necessary
changes of costume and manners," which is, apparently, the opinion of
some students.
What remains to do is to confess ignorance of the original centre of the
_maerchen_, and inability to decide dogmatically which stories must have
been invented only once for all, and which may have come together by
the mere blending of the universal elements of imagination. It is only
certain that no limit can be put to a story's power of flight _per ora
virum_. It may wander wherever merchants wander, wherever captives
are dragged, wherever slaves are sold, wherever the custom of exogamy
commands the choice of alien wives. Thus the story flits through the
who let race and over the whole world. Wherever human communication is or
has been possible, there the story may go, and the space of time during
which the courses of the sea and the paths of the land have been open to
story is dateless and unknown. Here the story may dwindle to a fireside
tale; there it may become an epic in the mouth of Homer or a novel in
the hands of Madame D'Aulnoy or Miss Thackeray. The savage makes the
characters beasts or birds; the epic \ poet or saga-man made them heroic
kings, or lovely, baleful sorceresses, daughters of the Sun; the French
Countess makes them princesses and countesses. Like its own heroes, the
popular story can assume every shape; like some of them, it has drunk
the waters of immortality.*
* A curious essay by Mr. H. E. Warner, on "The Magical
Flight," urges that there is no plot, but only a fortuitous
congeries of story-atoms (Scribner's Magazine, June, 1887).
There is a good deal to be said, in this case, for Mr.
Warner's conclusions.
APPENDIX A. Fontenelle's forgotten common sense
In the opinion of Aristotle, most discoveries and inventions have been
made time after time and forgotten again. Aristotle may not have been
quite correct in this view; and his remarks, perhaps, chiefly applied
to politics, in which every conceivable and inconceivable experiment has
doubtless been attempted. In a field of less general interest--namely,
the explanation of the absurdities of mythology--the true cause was
discovered more than a hundred years ago by a man of great reputation,
and then was quietly forgotten. Why did the ancient peoples--above all,
the Greeks--tell such extremely gross and irrational stories about their
Gods and heroes? That is the riddle of the mythological Sphinx. It was
answered briefly, wittily and correctly by Fontenelle; and the answer
was neglected, and half a dozen learned but impossible theories have
since come in and out of fashion. Only within the last ten years
has Fontenelle's idea been, not resuscitated, but rediscovered. The
followers of Mr. E. B. Taylor, Mannhardt, Gaidoz, and the rest, do not
seem to be aware that they are only repeating the notions of the nephew
of Corneille.
The Academician's theory is stated in a short essay, De l'Origine
des Fables (OEuvres: Paris, 1758, vol. iii. p.270). We have been so
accustomed from childhood, he says, to the absurdities of Greek myth,
that we have ceased to be aware that they are absurd. Why are the
legends of men and beasts and Gods so incredible and revolting? Why have
we ceased to tell such tales? The answer is, that early men were in
"a state of almost inconceivable savagery and ignorance," and that the
Greek myths are inherited from people in that condition. "Look at the
Kaffirs and Iroquois," says Fontenelle, "if you wish to know what early
men were like; and remember that even the Iroquois and Kaffirs are
people with a long past, with knowledge and culture (_politesse_) which
the first men did not enjoy." Now the more ignorant a man is, the more
prodigies he supposes himself to behold. Thus the first narratives of
the earliest men were full of monstrous things, "parce qu'ils etoient
faits par des gens sujets a voir bien des choses qui n'etaient pas".
This condition answers, in Mr. Tylor's system, to the confusion the
savage makes between dreams and facts, and to the hallucinations which
beset him when he does not get his regular meals. Here, then, we have a
groundwork of irresponsible fancy.
The next step is this: even the rudest men are curious, and ask "the
reason why" of phenomena. "II y a eu de la philosophie meme dans ces
siecles grossiers;" and this rude philosophy "greatly contributed to the
origin of myths ". Men looked for causes of things. "'Whence comes this
river?' asked the reflective man of those ages--a queer philosopher,
yet one who might have been a Descartes did he live to-day. After long
meditation, he concluded that some one had always to keep filling
the source whence the stream springs. And whence came the water? Our
philosopher did not consider so curiously. He had evolved the myth of a
water-nymph or naiad, and there he stopped. The characteristic of these
mythical explanations--as of all philosophies, past, present and to
come--was that they were limited by human experience. Early man's
experience showed him that effects were produced by conscious, sentient,
personal causes like himself. He sprang to the conclusion that all
hidden causes were also persons. These persons are the _dramatis
personae_ of myth. It was a person who caused thunder, with a hammer or a
mace; or it was a bird whose wings produced the din.
"From this rough philosophy which prevailed in the early ages were born
the gods and goddesses"--deities made not only in the likeness of man,
but of savage man as he, in his ignorance and superstition, conceived
himself to be. Fontenelle might have added that those fancied personal
causes who became gods were also fashioned in the likeness of the
beasts, whom early man regarded as his equals or superiors. But he
neglects this point. He correctly remarks that the gods of myth appear
immoral to us because they were devised by men whose morality was all
unlike ours--who prized justice less than power, especially (he might
have added) magical power. As morality ripened into self-consciousness,
the gods improved with the improvement of men; and "the gods known
to Cicero are much better than those known to Homer, because better
philosophers have had a hand at their making". Moreover, in the earliest
speculations an imaginative and hair-brained philosophy explained all
that seemed extraordinary in nature; while the sphere of philosophy was
filled by fanciful narratives about facts. The constellations called the
Bears were accounted for as metamorphosed men and women. Indeed, "all
the metamorphoses are the physical philosophy of these early times,"
which accounted for every fact by what we now calletiological
nature-myths. Even the peculiarities of birds and beasts were thus
explained. The partridge flies low because Daedalus (who had seen his
son Icarus perish through a lofty flight) was changed into a partridge.
This habit of mind, which finds a story for the solution of
every problem, survives, Fontenelle remarks, in what we now call
folk-lore--popular tradition. Thus, the elder tree is said to have borne
as good berries as the vine does till Judas Iscariot hanged himself
from its branches. This story must be later than Christianity; but it is
precisely identical in character with those ancient metamorphoses
which Ovid collected. The kind of fancy that produced these and other
prodigious myths is not peculiar, Fontenelle maintains, to Eastern
peoples. "It is common to all men," at a certain mental stage--"in
the tropics or in the regions of eternal ice." Thus the world-wide
similarities of myths are, on the whole, the consequence of a worldwide
uniformity of intellectual development.
Fontenelle hints at his proof of this theory. He compares the myths
of America with those of Greece, and shows that distance in space and
difference of race do not hinder Peruvians and Athenians from being "in
the same tale". "For the Greeks, with all their intelligence, did not,
in their beginnings, think more rationally than the savages of America,
who were also, apparently, a rather primitive people (_assez nouveau_)."
He concludes that the Americans might have become as sensible as the
Greeks if they had been allowed the leisure.
With an exception in the Israelites, Fontenelle decides that all nations
made the astounding part of their myths while they were savages, and
retained them from custom and religious conservatism. But myths were also
borrowed and interchanged between Phoenicia, Egypt and Greece. Further,
Greek misunderstandings of the meanings of Phoenician and other foreign
words gave rise to myths. Finally, myths were supposed to contain
treasures of antique mysterious wisdom; and mythology was explained by
systems which themselves are only myths, stories told by the learned to
themselves and to the public.
"It is not science to fill one's head with the follies of Phoenicians
and Greeks, but it is science to understand what led Greeks and
Phoenicians to imagine these follies." A better and briefer system of
mythology could not be devised; but the Mr. Casaubons of this world have
neglected it, and even now it is beyond their comprehension.
APPENDIX B. Reply to Objections
In a work which perhaps inevitably contains much controversial matter,
it has seemed best to consign to an Appendix the answers to objections
against the method advocated. By this means the attention is less
directed from the matter in hand, the exposition of the method itself.
We have announced our belief that a certain element in mythology is
derived from the mental condition of savages. To this it is replied,
with perfect truth, that there are savages and savages; that a vast
number of shades of culture and of nascent or retrograding civilisation
exist among the races to whom the term "savage" is commonly applied.
This is not only true, but its truth is part of the very gist of our
theory. It is our contention that myth is sensibly affected by the
varieties of culture which prevail among so-called savage tribes, as
they approach to or decline from the higher state of barbarism. The
anthropologist is, or ought to be, the last man to lump all savages
together, as if they were all on the same level of culture.
When we speak of "the savage mental condition," we mean the mental
condition of all uncultivated races who still fail to draw any marked
line between man and the animate or inanimate things in the world,
and who explain physical phenomena on a vague theory, more or less
consciously held, that all nature is animated and endowed with human
attributes. This state of mind is nowhere absolutely extinct; it
prevails, to a limited extent, among untutored European peasantry,
and among the children of the educated classes. But this intellectual
condition is most marked and most powerful among the races which ascend
from the condition of the Australian Murri and the Bushmen, up to the
comparatively advanced Maoris of New Zealand and Algonkins or Zunis
of North America. These are the sorts of people who, for our present
purpose, must be succinctly described as still in the savage condition
of the imagination.
Again, it is constantly objected to our method that we have no knowledge
of the past of races at present in the savage status. "The savage are
as old as the civilised races, and can as little be named primitive,"
writes Dr. Fairbairn.* Mr. Max Mueller complains with justice of authors
who "speak of the savage of to-day as if he had only just been sent into
the world, forgetting that, as a living species, he is probably not a
day younger than ourselves".** But Mr. Max Mueller has himself admitted
all we want, namely, _that savages or nomads represent an earlier stage
of culture than even the ancient Sanskrit-speaking Aryans_, This follows
from the learned writer's assertion that savage tongues, Kaffir and
so forth, are still in the childhood which Hebrew and the most ancient
Sanskrit had long left behind them.*** "We see in them" (savage
languages) "what we can no longer expect to see even in the most ancient
Sanskrit or Hebrew. We watch the childhood of language with all its
childish pranks." These "pranks" are the result of the very habits
of savage thought which we regard as earlier than "the most ancient
Sanskrit".
* Academy, 20th July, 1878. a
** Hibb. Lect., p. 66.
*** Lectures on Science of Language, 2nd series, p. 41.
Thus Mr. Max Mueller has admitted all that we need--admitted that savage
language (and therefore, in his view, savage thought) is of an earlier
stratum than, for example, the language of the Vedas. No more valuable
concession could be made by a learned opponent.
Objections of an opposite character, however, are pushed, along with the
statement that we have no knowledge of the past of savages. Savages were
not always what they are now; they may have degenerated from a higher
condition; their present myths may be the corruption of something purer
and better; above all, savages are not _primitive_.
All this contention, whatever its weight, does not affect the thesis of
the present argument. It is quite true that we know nothing directly of
the condition, let us say, of the Australian tribes a thousand years ago
except that it has left absolutely no material traces of higher culture.
But neither do we know anything directly about the condition of the
Indo-European peoples five hundred years before Philology fancies that
she gets her earliest glimpse of them. We must take people as we find
them, and must not place too much trust in our attempts to reconstruct
their "dark backward". As to the past of savages, it is admitted by most
anthropologists that certain tribes have probably seen better days. The
Fuegians and the Bushmen and the Digger Indians were probably driven by
stronger races out of seats comparatively happy and habits comparatively
settled into their present homes and their present makeshift
wretchedness.*
* The Fuegiaus are not (morally and socially) so black as
they have occasionally been painted. But it is probable that
they "have seen better days". If the possession of a
language with, apparently, a very superfluous number of
words is a proof of high civilisation in the past, then the
Fuegians are degraded indeed. But the finding of one piece
of native pottery in an Australian burial-mound would prove
more than a wilderness of irregular verbs.
But while degeneration is admitted as an element in history, there seems
no tangible reason for believing that the highest state which Bushmen,
Fuegians, or Diggers ever attained, and from which they can be thought
to have fallen, was higher than a rather more comfortable savagery.
There are ups and downs in savage as in civilised life, and perhaps
"crowned races may degrade," but we have no evidence to show that the
ancestors of the Diggers or the Fuegians were a "crowned race". Their
descent has not been comparatively a very deep one; their presumed
former height was not very high. As Mr. Tylor observes, "So far as
history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation
secondary; culture must be gained before it can be lost". One thing
about the past of savages we do know: it must have been a long past,
and there must have been a period in it when the savage had even less of
what Aristotle calls (------) even less of the equipment and provision
necessary for a noble life than he possesses at present. His past
must have been long, because great length of time is required for the
evolution of his exceedingly complex customs, such as his marriage
laws and his minute etiquette. Mr. Herbert Spencer has deduced from the
multiplicity, elaborateness and wide diffusion of Australian marriage
laws the inference that the Australians were once more civilised than
they are now, and had once a kind of central government and police. But
to reason thus is to fail back on the old Greek theory which for every
traditional custom imagined an early legislative hero, with a genius
for devising laws, and with power to secure their being obeyed. The more
generally accepted view of modern science is that law and custom are
things slowly evolved under stress of human circumstances. It is certain
that the usual process is from the extreme complexity of savage to the
clear simplicity of civilised rules of forbidden degrees. Wherever
we see an advancing civilisation, we see that it does not put on new,
complex and incomprehensible regulations, but that it rather sloughs off
the old, complex and incomprehensible regulations bequeathed to it by
savagery.
This process is especially manifest in the laws of forbidden degrees in
marriage--laws whose complexity among the Australians or North American
Indians "might puzzle a mathematician," and whose simplicity in a
civilised country seems transparent even to a child. But while the
elaborateness and stringency of savage customary law point to a more,
and not a less barbarous past, they also indicate a past of untold
duration. Somewhere in that past also it is evident that the savage must
have been even worse off materially than he is at present. Even now he
can light a fire; he has a bow, or a boomerang, or a blowpipe, and has
attained very considerable skill in using his own rough tools of flint
and his weapons tipped with quartz. Now man was certainly not born in
the possession of fire; he did not come into the world with a bow or a
boomerang in his hand, nor with an instinct which taught him to barb
his fishing-hooks. These implements he had to learn to make and use,
and till he had learned to use them and make them his condition must
necessarily have been more destitute of material equipment than that of
any races known to us historically. Thus all that can be inferred about
the past of savages is that it was of vast duration, and that at one
period man was more materially destitute, and so far more struggling
and forlorn, than the Murri of Australia were when first discovered by
Europeans. Even then certain races _may_ have had intellectual powers
and potentialities beyond those of other races. Perhaps the first
fathers of the white peoples of the North started with better brains
and bodies than the first fathers of the Veddahs of Ceylon; but they
all started naked, tool-less, fire-less. The only way of avoiding these
conclusions is to hold-that men, or some favoured races of man, were
created with civilised instincts and habits of thought, and were
miraculously provided with the first necessaries of life, or were
miraculously instructed to produce them without passing through slow
stages of experiment, invention and modification. But we might as well
assume, with some early Biblical commentators, that the naked Adam
in Paradise was miraculously clothed in a vesture of refulgent light.
Against such beliefs we have only to say that they are without direct
historical confirmation of any kind.
But if, for the sake of argument, we admit the belief that primitive man
was miraculously endowed, and was placed at once in a stage of simple
and happy civilisation, our thesis still remains unaffected. Dr.
Fairbairn's saying has been quoted, "The savage are as old as the
civilised races, and can as little be called primitive". But we do not
wish to call savages primitive. We have already said that savages have
a far-stretching unknown history behind them, and that (except on the
supposition of miraculous enlightenment followed by degradation) their
past must have been engaged in slowly evolving their rude arts, their
strange beliefs and their elaborate customs. Undeniably there is nothing
"primitive" in a man who can use a boomerang, and who must assign each
separate joint of the kangaroo he kills to a separate member of his
family circle, while to some of those members he is forbidden by law
to speak. Men were not born into the world with all these notions. The
lowest savage has sought out or inherited many inventions, and cannot be
called "primitive". But it never was part of our argument that savages
_are_ primitive. Our argument does not find it necessary to claim
savagery as the state from which all men set forth. About what was
"primitive," as we have no historical information on the topic, we
express no opinion at all. Man may, if any one likes to think so, have
appeared on earth in a state of perfection, and may have degenerated
from that condition. Some such opinion, that purity and reasonableness
are "nearer the beginning" than absurdity and unreasonableness, appears
to be held by Mr. Max Mueller, who remarks, "I simply say that in the
Veda we have a nearer approach to a beginning, and an intelligible
beginning, than in the wild invocations of Hottentots or Bushmen".*
* Lectures on India.
Would Mr. Mueller add, "I simply say that in the arts and political
society of the Vedic age we have a nearer approach to a beginning
than in the arts and society of Hottentots and Bushmen"? Is the use of
chariots, horses, ships--are kings, walled cities, agriculture, the art
of weaving, and so forth, all familiar to the Vedic poets, nearer the
beginning of man's civilisation than the life of the naked or skin-clad
hunter who has not yet learned to work the metals, who acknowledges no
king, and has no certain abiding-place? If not, why is the religion of
the civilised man nearer the beginning than that of the man who is not
civilised? We have already seen that, in Mr. Max Muller's opinion, his
language is much farther from the beginning.
Whatever the primitive condition of man may have been, it is certain
that savagery was a stage through which he and his institutions have
passed, or from which he has copiously borrowed. He may have degenerated
from perfection, or from a humble kind of harmless simplicity,
into savagery. He may have risen into savagery from a purely animal
condition. But however this may have been, modern savages are at present
in the savage condition, and the ancestors of the civilised races passed
through or borrowed from a similar savage condition. As Mr. Tylor says,
"It is not necessary to inquire how the savage state first came to
be upon the earth. It is enough that, by some means or other, it
has actually come into existence."* It is a stage through which all
societies have passed, or (if that be contested) a condition of things
from which all societies have borrowed. This view of the case has been
well put by M. Darmesteter.**
* Prim. Cult., i 37.
** Revue Critique, January, 1884.
He is speaking of the history of religion. "If savages do not represent
religion in its germ, if they do not exemplify that vague and indefinite
thing conventionally styled 'primitive religion,' at least they
represent a stage through which all religions have passed. The proof is
that a very little research into civilised religions discovers a most
striking similarity between the most essential elements of the civilised
and the non-historic creeds." Proofs of this have been given when we
examined the myths of Greece.
We have next to criticise the attempts which have been made to discredit
the _evidence_ on which we rely for our knowledge of the intellectual
constitution of the savage, and of his religious ideas and his myths and
legends. If that evidence be valueless, our whole theory is founded on
the sand.
The difficulties in the way of obtaining trustworthy information about
the ideas, myths and mental processes of savages are not only proclaimed
by opponents of the anthropological method, but are frankly acknowledged
by anthropologists themselves. The task is laborious and delicate,
but not impossible. Anthropology has, at all events, the advantage of
studying an actual undeniably existing state of things, to sift the
evidence as to that state of things, to examine the opportunities, the
discretion, and the honesty of the witnesses, is part of the business of
anthropology. A science which was founded on an uncritical acceptance
of all the reports of missionaries, travellers, traders, and
"beach-combers," would be worth nothing. But, as will be shown,
anthropology is fortunate in the possession of a touchstone, "like
that," as Theocritus says, "wherewith the money-changers try gold, lest
perchance base metal pass for true".
The "difficulties which beset travellers and missionaries in their
description of the religious and intellectual life of savages" have
been catalogued by Mr. Max Muller. As he is not likely to have
omitted anything which tells against the evidence of missionaries
and travellers, we may adopt his statement in an abridged shape, with
criticisms, and with additional illustrations of our own.*
* Hibbert Lectures, p. 9
First, "Few men are quite proof against the fluctuations of public
opinion". Thus, in Rousseau's time, many travellers saw savages with the
eyes Rousseau--that is, as models of a simple "state of nature". In the
same way, we may add, modern educated travellers are apt to see savages
in the light cast on them by Mr. Tylor or Sir John Lubbock. Mr. Im
Thurn, in Guiana, sees with Mr. Tylor's eyes; Messrs. Fison and Howitt,
among the Kamilaroi in Australia, see with the eyes of Mr. Lewis Morgan,
author of _Systems of Consanguinity_. Very well; we must allow for the
bias in each case. But what are we to say when the travellers who lived
long before Begnard report precisely the same facts of savage life as
the witty Frenchman who wrote that "next to the ape, the Laplander is
the animal nearest to man"? What are we to say when the mariner, or
beach-comber, or Indian interpreter, who never heard of Rousseau, brings
from Canada or the Marquesas Islands a report of ideas or customs which
the trained anthropologist finds in New Guinea or the Admiralty Islands,
and with which the Inca, Garcilasso de la Vega, was familiar in Peru?
If the Wesleyan missionary in South Africa is in the same tale with the
Jesuit in Paraguay or in China, while the Lutheran in Kamtschatka brings
the same intelligence as that which they contribute, and all three are
supported by the shipwrecked mariner in Tonga and by the squatter in
Queensland, as well as by the evidence, from ancient times and lands, of
Strabo, Diodorus and Pausanias, what then? Is it not clear that if pagan
Greeks, Jesuits and Wesleyans, squatters and anthropologists, Indian
interpreters and the fathers of the Christian Church, are all agreed
in finding this idea or that practice in their own times and countries,
their evidence is at least unaffected by "the fluctuations of public
opinion"? This criterion of undesigned coincidence in evidence drawn
from Protestants, Catholics, pagans, sceptics, from times classical,
mediaeval and modern, from men learned and unlearned, is the touchstone
of anthropology. It will be admitted that the consentient testimony
of persons in every stage of belief and prejudice, of ignorance and
learning, cannot agree, as it does agree, by virtue of some "fluctuation
of public opinion". It is to be regretted that, in Mr. Max Muller's
description of the difficulties which beset the study of savage
religious ideas, he entirely omits to mention, on the other side, the
corroboration which is derived from the undesigned coincidence of
independent testimony. This point is so important that it may be well
to quote Mr. Tylor's statement of the value of the anthropological
criterion:--
It is a matter worthy of consideration that the accounts of similar
phenomena of culture, recurring in different parts of the world,
actually supply incidental proof of their own authenticity. Some years
since a question which brings out this point was put to me by a great
historian, "How can a statement as to customs, myths, beliefs, etc., of
a savage tribe be treated as evidence where it depends on the testimony
of some traveller or missionary who may be a superficial observer, more
or less ignorant of the native language, a careless retailer of unsifted
talk, a man prejudiced, or even wilfully deceitful?" This question
is, indeed, one which every ethnographer ought to keep clearly and
constantly before his mind. Of course he is bound to use his best
judgment as to the trustworthiness of all authors he quotes, and if
possible to obtain several accounts to certify each point in each
locality. But it is over and above these measures of precaution that the
test of recurrence comes in. If two independent visitors to different
countries, say a mediaeval Mohammedan in Tartary and a modern Englishman
in Dahomey, or a Jesuit missionary in Brazil and a Wesleyan in the Fiji
Islands, agree in describing some analogous art, or rite, or myth among
the people they have visited, it becomes difficult or impossible to
set down such correspondence to accident or wilful fraud. A story by a
bushranger in Australia may perhaps be objected to as a mistake or an
invention; but did a Methodist minister in Guinea conspire with him to
cheat the public by telling the same story there? The possibility of
intentional or unintentional mystification is often barred by such a
state of things as that a similar statement is made in two remote lands
by two witnesses, of whom A lived a century before B, and B appears
never to have heard of A. How distant are the countries, how wide apart
the dates, how different the creeds and characters of the observers in
the catalogue of facts of civilisation, needs no farther showing to any
one who will even glance at the footnotes of the present work. And the
more odd the statement, the less likely that several people in several
places should have made it wrongly. This being so, it seems reasonable
to judge that the statements are in the main truly given, and that their
close and regular coincidence is due to the cropping up of similar
facts in various districts of culture. Now the most important facts of
ethnography are vouched for in this way. Experience leads the student
after a while to expect and find that the phenomena of culture, as
resulting from widely-acting similar causes, should recur again and
again in the world. He even mistrusts isolated statements to which he
knows of no parallel elsewhere, and waits for their genuineness to be
shown by corresponding accounts from the other side of the earth or the
other end of history. So strong indeed is the means of authentication,
that the ethnographer in his library may sometimes presume to decide not
only whether a particular explorer is a shrewd and honest observer,
but also whether what he reports is conformable to the general rules of
civilisation. _Non quia, sed quid._
It must be added, as a rider to Mr. Tylo^s remarks, that anthropology is
rapidly making the accumulation of fresh and trustworthy evidence more
difficult than ever. Travellers and missionaries have begun to read
anthropological books, and their evidence is therefore much more likely
to be biassed now by anthropological theories than it was of old. When
Mr. M'Lennan wrote on "totems" in 1869,* he was able to say, "It is some
compensation for the completeness of the accounts that we can thoroughly
trust them, as the totem has not till now got itself mixed up with
speculations, and accordingly the observers have been unbiassed. But
as anthropology is now more widely studied, the _naif_ evidence of
ignorance and of surprise grows more and more difficult to obtain."
* Fortnightly Review, October 1869.
We may now assert that, though the evidence of each separate witness
may be influenced by fluctuations of opinion, yet the consensus of their
testimony, when they are unanimous, remains unshaken. The same argument
applies to the private inclination, and prejudice, and method of inquiry
of each individual observer.
Travellers in general, and missionaries in particular, are biassed in
several distinct ways. The missionary is sometimes anxious to prove that
religion can only come by revelation, and that certain tribes, having
received no revelation, have no religion or religious myths at all.
Sometimes the missionary, on the other hand, is anxious to demonstrate
that the myths of his heathen flock are a corrupted version of the
Biblical narrative. In the former case he neglects the study of savage
myths; in the latter he unconsciously accommodates what he hears to what
he calls "the truth". In modern days the missionary often sees with the
eyes of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The traveller who is not a missionary may
either have the same prejudices, or he may be a sceptic about revealed
religion. In the latter case he is perhaps unconsciously moved to put
burlesque versions of Biblical stories into the mouths of his native
informants, or to represent the savages as ridiculing (Dr. Moffat found
that they did ridicule) the Scriptural traditions which he communicates
to them. Yet again we must remember that the leading questions of a
European inquirer may furnish a savage with a thread on which to string
answers which the questions themselves have suggested. "Have you ever
had a great flood?" "Yes." "Was any one saved?" The leading question
starts the invention of the savage on a Deluge-myth, of which, perhaps,
the idea has never before entered his mind.
The last is a source of error pointed out by Mr. Codrington:*
* Journal of Anthrop. Inst, February 1881.
"The questions of the European are a thread on which the ideas of the
native precipitate themselves". Now, as European inquirers are prone
to ask much the same questions, a people which, like some Celts and
savages, "always answers yes," will everywhere give much the same
answers. Mr. Romilly, in his book on the Western Pacific,* remarks, "In
some parts of New Britain, if a stranger were to ask, 'Are there men
with tails in the mountains?' he would probably be answered 'Yes,' that
being the answer which the new Briton" (and the North Briton, too, very
often) "would imagine was expected of him, and would be most likely to
give satisfaction. The train of thought in his mind would be something
like this, 'He must know that there are no such men, but he cannot have
asked so foolish a question without an object, and therefore he wishes
me to say 'Yes!' Of course the first 'Yes' leads to many others, and in
a very short time everything is known about these tailed men, and a full
account of them is sent home."
What is true of tailed men applies to native answers about myths and
customs when the questions are asked by persons who have not won the
confidence of the people nor discovered their real beliefs by long and
patient observation. This must be borne in mind when missionaries tell
us that savages believe in one supreme deity, in a mediator, and the
like, and it must be borne in mind when they tell us that savages have
no supreme being at all. Always we must be wary! A very pleasing example
of inconsistency in reports about the same race may be found in a
comparison of the account of the Khonds in the thirteenth volume of the
Royal Asiatic Society with the account given by General Campbell in his
_Personal Narrative_, The inquirer in the former case did not know the
Khond language, and trusted to interpreters, who were later expelled
from the public service. General Campbell, on the other hand, believed
himself to possess "the confidence of the priests and chiefs," and his
description is quite different. In cases of contradictions like these,
the anthropologist will do well to leave the subject alone, unless he
has very strong reasons for believing one or other of the contending
witnesses.
* _The Western Pacific and New Guinea_, London, 1886, pp. 3-6.
** Hibbert Lectures, p. 92.
We have now considered the objections that may be urged against the bias
of witnesses.
Mr. Max Mueller founds another objection on "the absence of recognised
authorities among savages".* This absence of authority is not always
complete; the Maoris, for example, have traditional hymns of great
authority and antiquity. There are often sacred songs and customs
(preserved by the Red Indians in chants recorded by picture-writing on
birch bark), and there always is some teaching from the mothers to their
children, or in the Mysteries. All these, but, above all, the almost
immutable sacredness of _custom_, are sources of evidence. But, of
course, the story of one savage informant may differ widely from that of
his neighbour. The first may be the black sheep of the tribe, the next
may be the saint of the district. "Both would be considered by European
travellers as unimpeachable authorities with regard to their religion."
This is too strongly stated. Even the inquiring squatter will repose
more confidence in the reports about his religion of a black with a
decent character, or of a black who has only recently mixed with white
men, than in those of a rum-bibbing loafer about up-country stations
or a black professional bowler on a colonial cricket-ground. Our best
evidence is from linguists who have been initiated into the secret
Mysteries. Still more will missionaries and scholars like Bleek, Hahn,
Codrington, Castren, Gill, Callaway, Theal, and the rest, sift and
compare the evidence of the most trustworthy native informants. The
merits of the travellers we have named as observers and scholars are
freely acknowledged by Mr. Max Mueller himself. To their statements,
also, we can apply the criterion: Does Bleek's report from the Bushmen
and Hottentots confirm Castren's from the Finns? Does Codrington in
Melanesia tell the same tale as Gill in Mangia or Theal among the
Kaffirs? Are all confirmed by Charlevoix, and Lafitau, and Brebeuf, the
old Catholic apostles of the North American Indians? If this be so, then
we may presume that the inquirers have managed to extract true accounts
from some of their native informants. The object of the inquiry, of
course, is to find out, not what a few more educated and noble members
of a tribe may think, nor what some original speculative thinker among a
lower race may have worked out for himself, but to ascertain the general
character of the ideas most popular and most widely prevalent among
backward peoples.
A third objection is that the priests of savage tribes are not
unimpeachable authorities. It is pointed out that even Christian clergy
have their differences of opinion. Naturally we expect most shades of
opinion where there is most knowledge and most liberty, but the liberty
of savage heterodoxy is very wide indeed. We might almost say that (as
in the mythology of Greece) there is _no_ orthodox mythical doctrine
among savages. But, amidst minor diversities, we have found many ideas
which are universal both in savage and civilised myths. _Quod semper,
quod ubique, quod ab omnibus_. It is on this universal element of
faith, not on the discrepancies of local priests, that we must fix our
attention. Many a different town in Greece showed the birthplace or
tomb of this or that deity. The essential point is that all agreed in
declaring that the god was born or died.
Once more--and this is a point of some importance when we are told that
priests differ from each other in their statements--we must remember
that these very differences are practically universal in all mythology,
even in that of civilised races. Thus, if one savage authority declares
that men came originally out of trees, while his fellow-tribesman
avers that the human race was created out of clay, and a third witness
maintains that his first ancestors emerged from a hole in the ground,
and a fourth stands to it that his stock is descended from a swan or a
serpent, and a fifth holds that humanity was evolved from other animal
forms, these savage statements appear contradictory. But when we
find (as we do) precisely the same sort of contradictions everywhere
recurring among civilised peoples, in Greece, India, Egypt, as well as
in Africa, America and Australia, there seems no longer any reason to
distrust the various versions of the myth which are given by various
priests or chiefs. Each witness is only telling the legend which he
has heard and prefers, and it is precisely the coexistence of all these
separate monstrous beliefs which makes the enigma and the attraction
of mythology. In short, the discrepancies of savage myths are not an
argument against the authenticity of our information on the topic,
because the discrepancies themselves are repeated in civilised myth.
_Semper et ubique, et ab omnibus_. To object to the presence of
discrepant accounts is to object to mythology for being mythological.
Another objection is derived from the "unwillingness of savages to talk
about religion," and from the difficulty of understanding them when they
do talk of it. This hardly applies when Europeans are initiated into
savage Mysteries. We may add a fair example of the difficulty of
learning about alien religions. It is given by Garcilasso de la Vega,
son of an Inca princess, and a companion of Pizarro.*"
* Garcilaaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries, vol, i. 123.
The method that our Spaniards adopted in writing their histories was to
ask the Indians in Spanish touching the things they wanted to find out
from them. These, from not having a clear knowledge of ancient things,
or from bad memories, told them wrong, or mixed up poetical fables with
their replies. And the worst of it was that neither party had more
than a very imperfect knowledge of the language of the other, so as to
understand the inquiry and to reply to it.... In this great confusion,
the priest or layman who asked the questions placed the meaning to them
which was nearest to the desired answer, or which was most like what the
Indian was understood to have said. Thus they interpreted according to
their pleasure or prejudice, and wrote things down as truths which the
Indians never dreamt of. As an example of these comparisons, Garcilasso
gives the discovery of the doctrine of the Trinity among the people
of Peru. A so-called _Icona_ was found answering to the Father, a Son
(_Racab_) and a Holy Spirit (_Estrua_); nor was the Virgin lacking, nor
even St. Anne. "All these things are fictions of the Spaniards." But no
sooner has Garcilasso rebuked the Spaniards and their method, than he
hastens to illustrate by his own example another difficulty that besets
us in our search for evidence of myths. He says, as if it were a matter
of certain fact, that Tlasolteute, a kind of Priapus, god of lust, and
Ometoctilti, god of drunkenness, and the god of murder, and the others,
"were the names of _men and women_ whom the natives of that land
worshipped as gods and goddesses". Thus Garcilasso euhemerises
audaciously, as also does Sahagun in his account of Mexican religion. We
have no right to assume that gods of natural departments (any more than
Dionysus and Priapus and Ares) had once been real men and were
deified, on evidence like the statement of Garcilassp. He is giving his
own euhemeristic guess as if it were matter of fact, and this is a common
custom with even the more intelligent of the early missionaries.
Another example of the natural difficulty in studying the myths of
savages may be taken from Mr. Sproat's _Scenes of Savage Life_ (1868).
There is an honesty and candour in Mr. Sproat's work which by itself
seems to clear this witness, at least, of charges of haste or prejudice.
The religion of savages, says this inquirer, "is a subject as to which
a traveller might easily form erroneous opinions, owing to the practical
difficulty, even to one skilled in the language, of ascertaining the
true nature of their superstitions. This short chapter is the result
of more than four years' inquiry, made unremittingly, under favourable
circumstances. There is a constant temptation, from which the unbiassed
observer cannot be quite free, to fill up in one's mind, without proper
material, the gap between what is known of the religion of the natives
for certain, and the larger less-known portion, which can only be
guessed at; and I frequently found that, under this temptation, I was
led on to form, in my own mind, a connected whole, designed to coincide
with some ingenious theory which I might wish to be true. Generally
speaking, it is necessary, I think, to view with suspicion _any very
regular account_ given by travellers of the religion of savages." (Yet
we have seen the absence of "regularity," the differences of opinion
among priests, objected to by Mr. Max Mueller as a proof of the
untrustworthy nature of our evidence.) "The real religious notions of
savages cannot be separated from the vague and unformed, as well as
bestial and grotesque, mythology with which they are intermixed.
The faint struggling efforts of our natures in so early or so little
advanced a stage of moral and intellectual cultivation can produce only
a medley of opinions and beliefs, not to be dignified by the epithet
religious, which are held loosely by the people themselves, and are
neither very easily discovered nor explained." When we came to civilised
mythologies, we found that they also are "bestial and grotesque,"
"loosely held," and a "medley of opinions and beliefs ".
Mr. Sproat was "two years among the Ahts, with his mind constantly
directed to the subject of their religious beliefs," before he could
discover that they had any such beliefs at all. Traders assured him that
they had none. He found that the Ahts were "fond of mystification" and
of "sells"; and, in short, this inquirer, living with the Ahts like an
Aht, discounted every sort of circumstance which could invalidate his
statement of their myths.*
* Pp. 203-205.
Now, when we find Mr. Codrington taking the same precautions in
Melanesia, and when his account of Melanesian myths reads like a
close copy of Mr. Sproat's account of Aht legends, and when both are
corroborated by the collections of Bleek, and Hahn, and Gill, and
Castren, and Eink, in far distant corners of the world, while the modern
testimony of these scholarly men is in harmony with that of the old
Jesuit missionaries, and of untaught adventurers who have lived for many
years with savages, surely it will be admitted that the difficulty of
ascertaining savage opinion has been, to a great extent, overcome. If
all the evidence be wrong, the coincidences of the witnesses with each
other and of the savage myths they report with the myths of Greeks and
Aryans of India will be no less than a miracle.
We have now examined the objections urged against a system founded on
the comparative study of savage myths. It cannot be said of us (as it
has been said of De Brosses), that "whatever we find in the voyages of
sailors and traders is welcome to us; that we have a theory to defend,
and whatever seems to support it is sure to be true". Our evidence is
based, to a very great extent, on the communications of missionaries who
are acknowledged to be scholarly and sober men. It is confirmed by other
evidence, Catholic, Dissenting, pagan, scientific, and by the reports of
illiterate men, unbiassed by science, and little biassed by religion.
But we have not yet exhausted our evidence, nor had recourse to our
ultimate criterion. That evidence, that criterion, is derived from the
study of comparative institutions, of comparative ritual, of comparative
law, and of comparative customs. In the widely diffused rites and
institutions which express themselves in actual practice we have sure
evidence for the ideas on which the customs are founded. For example,
if a man pays away his wampum, or his yams, or his arrow-heads to a
magician for professional services, it follows that he _does_ believe in
magic. If he puts to death a tribesman for the sin of marrying a woman
to whom he was only akin by virtue of common descent from the same beast
or plant, it seems to follow that he _does_ believe in descent from and
kinship with plants and beasts. If he buries food and valuable weapons
with his dead, it follows that he _does_, or that his fathers did,
believe in the continued life of the dead. At the very least, in
all three cases the man is acting on what must once have been actual
beliefs, even if the consequent practices be still in force only through
custom, after the real faith has dwindled away. Thus the belief, past or
present, in certain opinions can be deduced from actual practices, just
as we may deduce from our own Coronation Service the fact that oil,
anointed on a man's head by a priest, was once believed to have a
mysterious efficacy, or the fact that a certain rough block of red
sand-stone was once supposed to have some kind of sacredness. Of all
these sources of evidence, none is more valuable than the testimony of
ritual. A moment's reflection will show that ritual, among any people,
wild or civilised, is not a thing easily altered. If we take the savage,
_his_ ritual consists mainly of the magical rites by which he hopes to
constrain his gods to answer his prayers, though he may also "reveal"
to the neophyte "Our Father". If we examine the Greeks, we discover the
same element in such rites as the Attic Thesmophoria, the torch-dance
of Demeter, the rainmaking on the Arcadian Mount Lycaeus, with many other
examples. Meanwhile the old heathen ritual survives in Europe as rural
folklore, and we can thus display a chain of evidence, from savage
magic to Greek ritual, with the folklore of Germany, France, Eussia and
Scotland for the link between these and our own time. This is almost our
best evidence for the ancient idea about gods and their service. From
the evidence of institutions, then, the evidence of reports may
be supplemented. "The direct testimony," as M. Darmesteter says,
"heureusement peut-etre supplee par le temoignage indirect, celui
qui porte sur les usages, les coutumes, l'ordre exterieur de la vie,"
everything that shows us religious faith embodied in action. Now
these actions, also, are only attested by the reports of travellers,
missionaries and historians. But it is comparatively easy to describe
correctly what is _done_, much more easy than to discover what is
_thought_. Yet it will be found that the direct evidence of institutions
corroborates the less direct evidence as to thought and opinion. Thus
an uncommonly strong texture of testimony is woven by the coincidence
of evidence, direct and indirect, ancient and modern, of learned and
unlearned men, of Catholics, Protestants, pagans and sceptics. What
can be said against that evidence we have heard. We have examined the
objections based on "the influence of public opinion on travellers,"
on "the absence of recognised authorities among savages," on
the discrepancies of the authorities who are recognised, on the
"unwillingness of savages to talk of their religion," and on the
difficulty of understanding them when they do talk of it.
But after allowing for all these drawbacks (as every anthropologist
worthy of the name will, in each case, allow), we have shown that there
does remain a body of coincident evidence, of authority, now learned
and critical, now uncritical and unlearned, which cannot be set aside
as "extremely untrustworthy". This authority is accepted in questions
of the evolution of art, politics, handicraft; why not in questions
of religion? It is usually evidence given by men who did not see its
tendency or know its value. A chance word in the Veda shows us that a
savage point of marriage etiquette was known to the poet. A sneer of
Theophrastus, a denunciation of Ezekiel, an anecdote of Herodotus,
reveal to us the practices of contemporary savages as they existed
thousands of years ago among races savage or civilised. A traveller's
tale of Melville or Mandeville proves to be no mere "yarn," but
completes the evidence for the existence in Asia or the Marquesas
Islands of belief and rites proved to occur in Europe or India.
Such is the nature of the evidence for savage ideas, and for their
survivals in civilisation; and the amount of the evidence is best known
to him who has to plod through tracts, histories and missionary reports.