MYTHS AND DREAMS
MYTHS AND DREAMS
BY EDWARD CLODD
AUTHOR OF
‘THE CHILDHOOD OF THE WORLD,’
‘THE STORY OF CREATION,’ ETC.
_SECOND EDITION, REVISED_
London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1891
TO RICHARD A. PROCTOR, B.A.,
AUTHOR OF ‘THE SUN,’ ‘OTHER WORLDS,’ ETC., EDITOR OF ‘KNOWLEDGE.’
MY DEAR PROCTOR--The best gifts of life are its friendships, and to you,
with whom friendship has ripened into fellowship, and under whose
editorial wing some of the chapters of this book had temporary shelter, I
inscribe them in their enlarged and independent form.
Yours sincerely,
EDWARD CLODD.
PREFACE.
The object of this book is to present in compendious form the evidence
which myths and dreams supply as to primitive man’s interpretation of his
own nature and of the external world, and more especially to indicate how
such evidence carries within itself the history of the origin and growth
of beliefs in the supernatural.
The examples are selected chiefly from barbaric races, as furnishing the
nearest correspondences to the working of the mind in what may be called
its “eocene” stage, but examples are also cited from civilised races, as
witnessing to that continuity of ideas which is obscured by familiarity or
ignored by prejudice.
Had more illustrations been drawn from sources alike prolific, the
evidence would have been swollen to undue dimensions without increasing
its significance; as it is, repetition has been found needful here and
there, under the difficulty of entirely detaching the arguments advanced
in the two parts of this work.
Man’s development, physical and psychical, has been fully treated by Mr.
Herbert Spencer, Dr. Tylor, and other authorities, to whom students of the
subject are permanent debtors, but that subject is so many-sided, so
far-reaching, whether in retrospect or prospect, that its subdivision is
of advantage so long as we do not permit our sense of inter-relation to be
dulled thereby.
My own line of argument will be found to run for the most part parallel
with that of the above-named writers; there are divergences along the
route, but we reach a common terminus.
The footnotes indicate the principal works which have been consulted in
preparing this book, but I desire to express my special thanks to Mr.
Andrew Lang for his kindness in reading the proofs, and for suggestions
which, in the main, I have been glad to adopt.
E. C.
ROSEMONT, TUFNELL PARK,
LONDON, _March 1885_.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.
SECTION PAGE
I. ITS PRIMITIVE MEANING 3
II. CONFUSION OF EARLY THOUGHT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE
NOT LIVING 12
III. PERSONIFICATION OF THE POWERS OF NATURE 19
(_a._) The Sun and Moon 19
(_b._) The Stars 29
(_c._) The Earth and Sky 34
(_d._) Storm and Lightning, etc. 41
(_e._) Light and Darkness 48
(_f._) The Devil 53
IV. THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH 61
V. BELIEF IN METAMORPHOSIS INTO ANIMALS 81
VI. TOTEMISM: BELIEF IN DESCENT FROM ANIMAL OR PLANT 99
VII. SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORY 114
VIII. MYTH AMONG THE HEBREWS 131
IX. CONCLUSION 137
PART II.
DREAMS: THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.
SECTION PAGE
I. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAVAGE AND CIVILISED MAN 143
II. LIMITATIONS OF BARBARIC LANGUAGE 148
III. BARBARIC CONFUSION BETWEEN NAMES AND THINGS 154
IV. BARBARIC BELIEF IN VIRTUE IN INANIMATE THINGS 160
V. BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS 168
VI. BARBARIC THEORY OF DISEASE 174
VII. BARBARIC THEORY OF A SECOND SELF OR SOUL 182
VIII. BARBARIC PHILOSOPHY IN “PUNCHKIN” AND ALLIED STORIES 188
IX. BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS OF THE SOUL’S NATURE 198
X. BARBARIC BELIEF IN SOULS IN BRUTES AND PLANTS AND
LIFELESS THINGS 207
XI. BARBARIC AND CIVILISED NOTIONS ABOUT THE SOUL’S
DWELLING PLACE 215
XII. CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING 222
XIII. DREAMS AS OMENS AND MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN GODS
AND MEN 236
INDEX 245
I.
MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.
“Unchecked by external truth, the mind of man has a fatal facility for
ensnaring, entrapping, and entangling itself. But, happily, happily for
the human race, some fragment of physical speculation has been built into
every false system. Here is the weak point. Its inevitable destruction
leaves a breach in the whole fabric, and through that breach the armies of
truth march in.”
Sir H. S. MAINE.
MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.
§ I.
ITS PRIMITIVE MEANING.
It is barely thirty years ago since the world was startled by the
publication of Buckle’s _History of Civilisation_, with its theory that
human actions are the effect of causes as fixed and regular as those which
operate in the universe; climate, soil, food, and scenery being the chief
conditions determining progress.
That book was a _tour de force_, not a lasting contribution to the
question of man’s mental development. The publication of Darwin’s
epoch-making _Origin of Species_[1] showed wherein it fell short; how the
importance of the above-named causes was exaggerated and the existence of
equally potent causes overlooked. Buckle probably had not read Herbert
Spencer’s _Social Statics_, and he knew nothing of the profound revolution
in silent preparation in the quiet of Darwin’s home; otherwise, his book
must have been rewritten. This would have averted the oblivion from which
not even its charm of style can rescue it. Its brilliant but defective
theories are obscured in the fuller light of that doctrine of descent with
modifications by which we learn that external circumstances do not alone
account for the widely divergent types of men, so that a superior race, in
supplanting an inferior one, will change the face and destiny of a
country, “making the solitary place to be glad, and the desert to rejoice
and blossom as the rose.” Darwin has given us the clue to those subtle and
still obscure causes which bring about, stage by stage, the unseen
adaptations to requirements varying a type and securing its survival, and
which have resulted in the evolution of the manifold species of living
things. The notion of a constant relation between man and his surroundings
is therefore untenable.
But incomplete as is Buckle’s theory, and all-embracing as is Darwin’s, so
far as organic life is concerned, the larger issue is raised by both, and
for most men whose judgment is worth anything it is settled. Either man is
a part of nature or he is not. If he is not, there is an end of the
matter, since the materials lie beyond human grasp, and cannot be examined
and placed in order for comparative study. Let Christian, Brahman,
Bushman, and South Sea Islander each hold fast his “form of sound words”
about man’s origin. One is as good as another where all are irrational and
beyond proof. But if he is, then the inquiry concerning him may not stop
at the anatomy of his body and the assignment of his place in the
succession of life on the globe. His relation, materially, to the
simplest, shapeless specks of living matter; structurally, to the highest
and more complex organisms, is demonstrated; the natural history of him is
clear. This, however, is physical, and for us the larger question is
psychical. The theory of evolution must embrace the genesis and
development of mind, and therefore of ideas, beliefs, and speculations
about things seen and unseen.
In the correction of our old definitions a wider meaning must be given to
the word _myth_ than that commonly found in the dictionaries. Opening any
of these at random we find myth explained as fable, as something
designedly fictitious, whether for amusement only, or to point a moral.
The larger meaning which it holds to-day includes much more than this--to
wit, the whole area of intellectual products which lie beyond the historic
horizon and overlap it, effacing on nearer view the lines of separation.
For the myth, as fable only, has no place for the crude fancies and
grotesque imaginings of barbarous races of the present day, and of races
at low levels of culture in the remote past. And so long as it was looked
upon as the vagrant of fancy, with no serious meaning at the heart of it,
and as corresponding to no yearning of man after the truth of things,
sober treatment of it was impossible. But now that myth, with its prolific
offspring, legend and tradition, is seen to be a necessary travailing
through which the mind of man passed in its slow progress towards
certitude, the study and comparison of its manifold, yet, at the centre,
allied forms, and of the conditions out of which they arose, takes rank
among the serious inquiries of our time.
Not that the inquiry is a new one. The limits of this book forbid detailed
references to the successive stages of that inquiry--in other words, to
the pre-Christian, patristic, and pseudo-scientific theories of myth which
remained unchallenged, or varied only in non-essential features, till the
rise of comparative mythology. But apology for such omission here is the
less needful, since the list of ancient and modern vagaries would have the
monotony of a catalogue. However unlike on the surface, they are
fundamentally the same, being the products of non-critical ages, and one
and all vitiated by assumptions concerning gods and men which are to us as
“old wives’ fables.”
In short, between these empirical theories and the scientific method of
inquiry into the meaning of myth there can be no relation. Because, for
the assigning of its due place in the order of man’s mental and spiritual
development to myth, there is needed that knowledge concerning his origin,
concerning the conditions out of which he has emerged, and concerning the
mythologies of lower races and their survival in unsuspected forms in the
higher races, which was not only beyond reach, but also beyond conception,
until this century.
Except, therefore, as curiosities of literature, we may dismiss the
Lemprière of our school-days, and with him “Causabon”-Bryant and his
symbolism of the ark and traces of the Flood in everything. Their keys,
Arkite and Ophite, fit no lock, and with them we must, in all respect be
it added, dismiss Mr. Gladstone, with his visions of the Messiah in
Apollo, and of the Logos in Athênê.
The main design of this book is to show that in what is for convenience
called _myth_ lie the germs of philosophy, theology, and science, the
beginnings of all knowledge that man has attained or ever will attain, and
therefore that in myth we have his serious endeavour to interpret the
meaning of his surroundings and of his own actions and feelings. In its
unbroken sequence we have the explanation of his most cherished and now,
for the most part, discredited beliefs, the persistence of which makes it
essential and instructive not to deal with the primitive myth apart from
its later and more complex phases. Myth was the product of man’s emotion
and imagination, acted upon by his surroundings, and it carries the traces
of its origin in its more developed forms, as the ancestral history of the
higher organisms is embodied in their embryos. Man wondered before he
reasoned. Awe and fear are quick to express themselves in rudimentary
worship; hence the myth was at the outset a theology, and the gradations
from personifying to deifying are too faint to be traced. Thus blended,
the one as inevitable outcome of the other, they cannot well be treated
separately, as if the myth were earth-born and the theology heaven-sent.
And to treat them as one is to invade no province of religion, which is
quite other than speculation about gods. The awe and reverence which the
fathomless mystery of the universe awakens, which steal within us unbidden
as the morning light, and unbroken on the prism of analysis; the
conviction, deepening as we peer, that there is a Power beyond humanity,
and upon which humanity depends; the feeling that life is in harmony with
the Divine order when it moves in disinterested service of our kind--these
theology can neither create nor destroy, neither verify nor disprove. They
can be bound within no formula that man or church has invented, but
undefined
“Are yet the fountain life of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing.”
At what epoch in man’s history we are to place the development of the
myth-making faculty must remain undetermined. It is of course coincident
with the dawn of thought. We cannot credit the nameless savage of the
Ancient Stone Age with it. If he had brains and leisure enough to make
guesses about things, he has left us no witness of the fact. His relics,
and those of his successors to a period which is but as yesterday in the
history of our kind, are material only; and not until we possess the
symbols of his thought, whether in language or rude picture, do we get an
inkling of the meaning which the universe had for him, in the details of
his pitiless daily life, in the shapes and motions of surrounding
objects, and in the majesty of the heavens above him. Even then the
thought is more or less crystallised, and if we would watch it in the
fluent form we must have a keen eye for the like process going on among
savages yet untouched by the Time-spirit, although higher in the scale
than the Papuans and hill tribes of the Vindhya. Although we cannot so far
lull our faculty of thought as to realise the mental vacuity of the
savage, we may, from survivals nowadays, lead up to reasonable guesses of
savage ways of looking at things in bygone ages, and the more so when we
can detect relics of these among the ignorant and superstitious of modern
times.
What meaning, then, had man’s surroundings to him, when eye and ear could
be diverted from prior claims of the body, and he could repose from
watching for his prey, and from listening to the approach of wild beast or
enemy? He had the advantage, from greater demand for their exercise, in
keener senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, than we enjoy; nor did
he fail to take in facts in plenty. But there was this vital defect and
difference, that in his brains every fact was pigeon-holed, charged with
its own narrow meaning only, as in small minds among ourselves we find
place given to inane peddling details, and no advance made to general and
wide conception of things. In sharpest contrast to the poet’s utterance:
“Nothing in this world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle,”
every fact is unrelated to every other fact, and therefore interpreted
wrongly.
Man, in his first outlook upon nature, was altogether ignorant of the
character of the forces by which he was environed; ignorant of that
unvarying relation between effect and cause which it needed the experience
of ages and the generalisations therefrom to apprehend, and to express as
“laws of nature.” He had not even the intellectual resource of later times
in inventing miracle to explain where the necessary relation between
events seemed broken or absent.
His first attitude was that of wonder, mingled with fear--fear as
instinctive as the dread of the brute for him. The sole measure of things
was himself, consequently everything that moved or that had power of
movement did so because it was alive. A personal life and will was
attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall, ocean, and tree, and
the varying phenomena of the sky at dawn or noonday, at gray eve or
black-clouded night, were the manifestation of the controlling life that
dwelt in all. In a thousand different forms this conception was expressed.
The thunder was the roar of a mighty beast; the lightning a serpent
darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, the storm demon’s outshot
forked tongue; the rainbow a thirsty monster; the waterspout a long-tailed
dragon. This was not a pretty or powerful conceit, not imagery, but an
explanation. The men who thus spoke of these phenomena meant precisely
what they said. What does the savage know about heat, light, sound,
electricity, and the other modes of motion through which the
Proteus-force beyond our ken is manifest? How many persons who have
enjoyed a “liberal” education can give correct answers, if asked off-hand,
explaining how glaciers are born of the sunshine, and why two sounds,
travelling in opposite directions at equal velocities, interfere and cause
silence? The percentage of young men, hailing from schools of renown, who
give the most ludicrous replies when asked the cause of day and night, and
the distance of the earth from the sun, is by no means small.
Whilst the primary causes determining the production of myths are uniform,
the secondary causes, due in the main to different physical surroundings,
vary, bringing about unlikeness in subject and detail. Nevertheless, in
grouping the several classes of myths, those are obviously to be placed
prominently which embrace explanations of the origin of things, from sun
and star to man and insect, involving ideas about the powers to whom all
things are attributed. But in this book no exhaustive treatment is
possible, only some indication of the general lines along which the
myth-making faculty has advanced, and for this purpose a few illustrations
of barbaric mental confusion between the living and the not living are
chosen at the outset. They will, moreover, prepare us for the large
element of the irrational present in barbaric myth, and supply a key to
the survival of this in the mythologies of civilised races.
§ II.
CONFUSION OF EARLY THOUGHT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE NOT LIVING.
In selecting from the literature of savage mythology the material
overburdens us by its richness. Much of it is old, and, like refuse-heaps
in our mining districts once cast aside as rubbish but now made to yield
products of value, has, after long neglect, been found to contain elements
of worth, which patience and insight have extracted from its travellers’
tales and quaint speculations. That for which it was most prized in the
days of our fathers is now of small account; that within it which they
passed by we secure as of lasting worth. Much of that literature is,
however, new, for the impetus which has in our time been given to the
rescue and preservation of archaic forms has reached this, and a host of
accomplished collectors have secured rich specimens of relics which, in
the lands of their discovery, have still the authority of the past,
unimpaired by the critical exposure of the present.
The subject itself is, moreover, so wide reaching, bringing the ancient
and the modern into hitherto unsuspected relation, showing how in customs
and beliefs, to us unmeaning and irrational, there lurk the degraded
representations of old philosophies, and in what seems to us burlesque,
the survivals of man’s most serious thought.
One feels this difficulty of choice and this temptation to digress in
treating of the confusion inherent in the savage mind between things
living and not living, arising from superficial analogies and its
attribution of life and power to lifeless things. The North American
Indians prefer a hook that has caught a big fish to the handful of hooks
that have never been tried, and they never lay two nets together lest they
should be jealous of each other. The Bushmen thought that the traveller
Chapman’s big waggon was the mother of his smaller ones; and the natives
of Tahiti sowed in the ground some iron nails given them by Captain Cook,
expecting to obtain young ones. When that ill-fated discoverer’s ship was
sighted by the New Zealanders they thought it was a whale with wings. The
king of the Coussa Kaffirs having broken off a piece of the anchor of a
stranded ship soon afterwards died, upon which all the Kaffirs made a
point of saluting the anchor very respectfully whenever they went near it,
regarding it as a vindictive being. But perhaps one of the most striking
and amusing illustrations is that quoted by Sir John Lubbock from the
_Smithsonian Reports_ concerning an Indian who had been sent by a
missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accompanied by a
letter stating their number. The Indian ate some of the bread, and his
theft was, of course, found out. He was sent on a second errand with a
similar batch of bread and a letter, and repeated the theft, but took the
precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was eating the
loaves, so that it might not see him! As the individual is a type of the
race, so in the child’s nature we find analogy of the mental attitude of
the savage ready to hand. To the child everything is alive. With what
timidity and wonder he first touches a watch, with its moving hands and
clicking works; with what genuine anger he beats the door against which he
has knocked his head, whips the rocking-horse that has thrown him, then
kisses and strokes it the next moment in token of forgiveness and
affection.
“As children of weak age
Lend life to the dumb stones
Whereon to vent their rage,
And bend their little fists, and rate
the senseless ground.”[2]
Even among civilised adults, as Mr. Grote remarks, “the force of momentary
passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and an
intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of agonising pain to kick or
beat the lifeless object from which he has suffered.” The mental condition
which causes the wild native of Brazil to bite the stone he stumbled over
may, as Dr. Tylor has pointed out in his invaluable _Primitive Culture_,
be traced along the course of history not merely in impulsive habit, but
in formally enacted law. If among barbarous peoples we find, for example,
the relatives of a man killed by a fall from a tree taking their revenge
by cutting the tree down and scattering it in chips, we find a continuity
of idea in the action of the court of justice held at the Prytaneum in
Athens to try any inanimate object, such as an axe, or a piece of wood or
stone, which has caused the death of any one without proved human agency,
and which, if condemned, was cast in solemn form beyond the border. “The
spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law,
repealed only in the present reign, whereby not only a beast that kills a
man, but a cart-wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him and
kills him, is deodand or given to God, _i.e._ forfeited and sold for the
poor.” Among ancient legal proceedings at Laon we read of animals
condemned to the gallows for the crime of murder, and of swarms of
caterpillars which infected certain districts being admonished by the
Courts of Troyes in 1516 to take themselves off within a given number of
days, on pain of being declared accursed and excommunicated.[3]
Barbaric confusion in the existence of transferable qualities in things,
as when the New Zealander swallows his dead enemy’s eye that he may see
farther, or gives his child pebbles to make it stony and pitiless of
heart; and as when the Abipone eats tiger’s flesh to increase his courage,
has its survival in the old wives’ notion that the eye-bright flower,
which resembles the eye, is good for diseases of that organ, in the
mediæval remedy for curing a sword wound by nursing the weapon that caused
it, and in the old adage, “Take a hair of the dog that bit you.” As
illustrating this, Dr. Dennys[4] tells a story of a missionary in China
whose big dog would now and again slightly bite children as he passed
through the villages. In such a case the mother would run after him and
beg for a hair from the dog’s tail, which would be put to the part bitten,
or when the missionary would say jocosely, “Oh! take a hair from the dog
yourself,” the woman would decline, and ask him to spit in her hand, which
itself witnesses to the widespread belief in the mystical properties of
saliva.[5] Among ourselves this survives, degraded enough, in the cabmen’s
and boatmen’s habit of spitting on the fare paid them. _Treacle_ (Greek
_thēriake_, from _thērion_, a name given to the viper) witnesses to the
old-world superstition that viper’s flesh is an antidote to the viper’s
bite. Philips, in his _World of Words_, defines treacle as a “physical
compound made of vipers and other ingredients,” and this medicament was a
favourite against all poisons. The word then became applied to any
confection or sweet syrup, and finally and solely to the syrup of
molasses.
The practice of burning or hanging in effigy, by which a crowd expresses
its feelings towards an unpopular person, is a relic of the old belief in
a real and sympathetic connection between a man and his image; a belief
extant among the unlettered in by-places of civilised countries. When we
hear of North American tribes making images of their foes, whose lives
they expect to shorten by piercing those images with their arrows, we
remember that these barbarous folk have their representatives among us in
the Devonshire peasant, who hangs in his chimney a pig’s heart stuck all
over with thorn-prickles, so that the heart of his enemy may likewise be
pierced. The custom among the Dyaks of Borneo of making a wax figure of
the foe, so that his body may waste away as the wax is melted, will remind
the admirers of Dante Rossetti how he finds in a kindred mediæval
superstition the subject of his poem “Sister Helen,” while they who prefer
the authority of sober prose may turn to that storehouse of the curious,
Brand’s _Popular Antiquities_. Brand quotes from King James, who, in his
_Dæmonology_, book ii. chap. 5, tells us that “the devil teacheth how to
make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof the persons that
they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual
sickness;” and also cites Andrews, the author of a _Continuation of
Henry’s Great Britain_, who, speaking of the death of Ferdinand, Earl of
Derby, by poison, in the reign of Elizabeth, says, “The credulity of the
age attributed his death to witchcraft. The disease was odd, and operated
as a perpetual emetic; and a waxen image, with hair like that of the
unfortunate earl, found in his chamber, reduced every suspicion to
certainty.” A century and half before this the Duchess of Gloucester did
penance for conspiring with certain necromancers against the life of Henry
VI. by melting a waxen image of him, while, as hinging the centuries
together, “only recently a _corp cré_, or clay image, stuck full of birds’
claws, bones, pins, and similar objects, was found in one of the
Inverness-shire rivers. It was a fetish which, as it dissolved away by the
action of the stream, was supposed to involve the ‘wearing away’ of the
person it was intended to represent.”[6] The passage from practices born
of such beliefs to the use of charms as protectives against the
evil-disposed and those in league with the devil, and as cures for divers
diseases, is obvious. Upon this it is not needful to dwell; the
superstitious man is on the same plane as the savage, but, save in rare
instances, without such excuse for remaining, as Bishop Hall puts it, with
“old wives and starres as his counsellors, charms as his physicians, and a
little hallowed wax as his antidote for all evils.”
But we have travelled in brief space a long way from our picture of man,
weaving out of streams and breezes and the sunshine his crude philosophy
of personal life and will controlling all, to the peasant of to-day, his
intellectual lineal descendant, with his belief in signs and wonders, his
forecast of fate and future by omens, by dreams, and by such pregnant
occurrences as the spilling of salt, the howling of dogs, and changes of
the moon; in short, by the great mass of superstitions which yet more or
less influence the intelligent, terrorise the ignorant, and delight the
student of human development.
§ III.
PERSONIFICATION OF THE POWERS OF NATURE.
(_a._) _The Sun and Moon._
A good deal hinges upon the evidences in savage myth-making of the
personification of the powers of nature. Obviously, the richest and most
suggestive material would be supplied by the striking phenomena of the
heavens, chiefly in sunrise and sunset, in moon, star, star-group and
meteor, cloud and storm, and, next in importance, by the strange and
terrible among phenomena on earth, whether in the restless waters, the
unquiet trees, the grotesquely-shaped rocks, and the fear inspired in man
by creatures more powerful than himself. Through the whole range of the
lower culture, sun, moon, and constellations are spoken of as living
creatures, often as ancestors, heroes, and benefactors who have departed
to the country above, to heaven, the _heaved_, up-lifted land. The Tongans
of the South Pacific say that two ancestors quarrelled respecting the
parentage of the first-born of the woman Papa, each claiming the child as
his own. No King Solomon appears to have been concerned in the dispute,
although at last the infant was cut in two. Vatea, the husband of Papa,
took the upper part as his share, and forthwith squeezed it into a ball
and tossed it into the heavens, where it became the sun. Tonga-iti
sullenly allowed the lower half to remain a day or two on the ground,
but, seeing the brightness of Vatea’s half, he compressed his share into a
ball and tossed it into the dark sky, during the absence of the sun in the
nether world. Thus originated the moon, whose paleness is owing to the
blood having all drained out of Tonga-iti’s half as it lay upon the
ground. Mr. Gill, from whose valuable collection of southern myth this is
quoted, says that it seems to have its origin in the allegory of an
alternating embrace of the fair Earth by Day and Night. But despite the
explanations, more or less strained, which some schools of comparative
mythologists find for every myth, the savage is not a conscious weaver of
allegories, or an embryo Cabalist, and we shall find ourselves more in
accord with the laws of his intellectual growth if, instead of delving for
recondite and subtle meanings in his simple-sounding explanations of
things, we take the meaning to be that which lies on the surface. More on
this, however, anon. Among the Red races one tribe thought that sun, moon,
and stars were men and women who went into the sea every night and swam
out by the east. The Bushmen say that the sun was once a man who shed
light from his body, but only for a short distance, until some children
threw him into the sky while he slept, and thus he shines upon the wide
earth. The Australians say that all was darkness around them till one of
their many ancestors, who still shine from the stars, shedding good and
evil, threw, in pity for them, an emu’s egg into space, when it became the
sun. Among the Manacicas of Brazil, the sun was their culture-hero,
virgin-born, and their jugglers, who claimed power to fly through the air,
said that his luminous figure, as that of a man, could be seen by them,
although too dazzling for common mortals.
The sun has been stayed in his course in other places than Gibeon,
although by mechanical means of which Joshua appears to have been
independent. Among the many exploits of Maui, abounding in Polynesian
myth, are those of his capture of the sun. He had, like Prometheus,
snatched fire from heaven for mortals, and his next task was to cure Ra,
the sun-god, of his trick of setting before the day’s work was done. So
Maui plaited thick ropes of cocoa-nut fibre, and taking them to the
opening through which Ra climbed up from the nether world, he laid a
slip-noose for him, placing the other ropes at intervals along his path.
Lying in wait as Ra neared, he pulled the first rope, but the noose only
caught Ra’s feet. Nor could Maui stop him until he reached the sixth rope,
when he was caught round the neck and pulled so tightly by Maui that he
had to come to terms, and agree to slacken his pace for the future. Maui,
however, took the precaution to keep the ropes on him, and they may still
be seen hanging from the sun at dawn and eve. In Tahitian myth Maui is a
priest, who, in building a house which must be finished by daylight,
seizes the sun by its rays and binds it to a tree till the house is built.
In North American myth a boy had snared the sun, and there was no light on
the earth. So the beasts held council who should undertake the perilous
task of cutting the cord, when the dormouse, then the biggest among them,
volunteered. And it succeeded, but so scorched was it by the heat that it
was shrivelled to the smallest of creatures. Such a group of myths is not
easy of explanation; but when we find the sun regarded as an ancestor, and
as one bound, mill-horse like, to a certain course, the notion of his
control and check would arise, and the sun-catchers take their place in
tradition among those who have deserved well of their race. It is one
among numberless aspects under which the doings of the sun and of other
objects in nature are depicted as the doings of mortals, and the crude
conceptions of the Ojibwas and the Samoans find their parallel in the
mythologies of our Aryan ancestors. Only in the former we see the mighty
one shorn of his dignity, with noose round his neck or chains on either
side; whilst in the latter we see him as Herakles, with majesty
unimpaired, carrying out the twelve tasks imposed by Eurystheus, and thus
winning for himself a place among the immortals.
The names given to the sun in mythology are as manifold as his aspects and
influences, and as the moods of the untutored minds that endowed him with
the complex and contrary qualities which make up the nature of man. _Him_,
we say, not _it_, thus preserving in our common speech a relic not only of
the universal personification of things, but of their division into sex.
The origin of gender is most obscure, but its investment of both animate
and inanimate things with sexual qualities shows it to be a product of
the mythopœic stage of man’s progress, and demands some reference in these
pages. The languages of savages are in a constant state of flux, even the
most abiding terms, as numerals and personal pronouns, being replaced by
others in a few years. And the changes undergone by civilised speech have
so rubbed away and obscured its primitive forms that, look where he may,
the poverty of the old materials embarrasses the inquirer. If the similar
endings to such undoubtedly early words as father, mother, brother,
sister, in our own and other related languages, notably Sanskrit, afford
any clue, it goes rather to show that gender was a later feature than one
might think. But there is no uniformity in the matter. It seems pretty
clear that in the early forms of our Indo-European speech there were two
genders only, masculine and feminine. The assignment of certain things
conceived of as sexless to neither gender, _neutrius generis_, is of later
origin. Some of the languages derived from Latin, and, to name one of a
different family, the Hebrew, have no neuter gender, whilst others, as the
ancient Turkish and Finnish, have no grammatical gender. In our own, under
the organic changes incident to its absorption of Norman and other foreign
elements, gender has practically disappeared (although ships and nations
are still spoken of as feminine), the pronouns _he_, _she_, _it_, being
its representatives. Such a gain is apparent when we take up the study of
the ancestral Anglo-Saxon, with its masculine, feminine, and neuter
nouns, or of our allied German with its perplexities of sex, as, _e.g._,
its masculine spoon, its feminine fork, and its neuter knife. Turning for
a moment to such slight aid as barbaric speech gives, we find in the
languages of the hill tribes of South India a curious distinction made;
rational beings, as gods and men, being grouped in a “high-caste or major
gender,” and living animals and lifeless things in a “casteless or minor
gender.” The languages of some North American and South African tribes
make a distinction into animate and inanimate gender; but as non-living
things, the sun, the thunder, the lightning, are regarded as persons, they
are classed in the animate gender.
Further research into the radicals of so relatively fixed a language as
Chinese, and into more mobile languages related to it, may, perhaps,
enlighten the present ignorance; but one thing is certain, that language
was “once the scene of an immense personification,” and has thereby added
vitality to myth. Analogies and conceptions apparent to barbaric man, and
in no way occurring to us, caused him to attribute sexual qualities not
only to dead as to living things, but to their several parts, as well as,
in the course of time, to intellectual and abstract terms. Speaking
broadly, things in which were manifest size and qualities, as strength,
independence, governing or controlling power, usually attaching to the
male, were classed as masculine; whilst those in which the gentler and
more subordinate features were apparent were classed as feminine. Of
course marked exceptions to this will at once occur to us, as, _e.g._, in
certain savage and civilised languages, where the sun is feminine and the
moon is masculine, but in the main the division holds good. The big is
male and the small is female. The Dyaks of Borneo call a heavy downpour of
rain a _he_ rain; and, if so strength-imparting a thing as bread is to be
classed as either masculine or feminine, we must agree with the negro who,
in answer to his master’s question, “Sambo, where’s the bread?” replied,
“De bread, massa? him lib in de pantry.” The mediæval Persians are said to
have distinguished between male and female even in such things as food and
cloth, air and water, and prescribed their proper use accordingly; while,
as Dr. Tylor, from whom the above is quoted, adds, “even we, with our
blunted mythologic sense, cannot give an individual name to a lifeless
object, such as a boat or a weapon, without in the very act imagining for
it something of a personal nature.”
But we must not stay longer in these attractive byways of philology,
however warranted the digression may be, and must return to the
many-titled sun.
Whilst in the more elaborate mythologies of classic peoples we find him
addressed in exalted terms which are still the metaphors of poetry, we are
nearer the rough material out of which all myth is shaped when among races
who speak of sun, moon, and stars as father, mother, and children, and who
mean exactly what they say. We may find similar relationships in the solar
and lunar deities of Egyptian and classic myth, but profound moral
elements have entered into these and dissolved the material. We are face
to face with the awful and abiding questions personified in Osiris and
Isis, in Œdipus and Jocaste, where for us the sunlight pales and the storm
clouds are dispersed before the dazzling mysteries of human life and
destiny.
No such matters confront us when in Indian myth we read that the moon is
the sun’s sister, an aged, pale-faced woman, who in kindness led to her
brother two of the tribe who had sprung through a chasm in the sky to the
pleasant moonlit land. Neither do they in Australian myth, which shows
that the dwellers on Olympus had no monopoly of conjugal faithlessness.
For in it Mityan, the moon, is a native cat, who fell in love with
somebody else’s wife, and has been driven to wander ever since. Among the
Bushmen, the moon has incurred the sun’s anger, and is hacked smaller and
smaller by him, till, begging for mercy, a respite is given. But as soon
as he grows larger the sun hacks him again. In Slavonic myth the sun
cleaves him through for loving the morning star. The Indians of the far
west say that, when the moon is full, evil spirits begin nibbling at it,
and eat a portion every night till it is all gone; then a great spirit
makes a new moon, and, weary with his toil, falls asleep, when the bad
spirits renew their attack. Another not uncommon group of myths is that
which speaks of sun and moon as borne across the heavens on the backs of
ancestors, as in Greek myth Atlas supports the world, or as in ceaseless
flight, dogged by some pursuer, moon-dog, or “sun-wolf,” as parhelion is
called in Swedish. The group of kindred myths to which eclipses gave rise,
when the cloud-dragon or serpent tries to swallow sun or moon, and for a
time succeeds, is too well known to need other than passing reference
here.
A widespread body of myth has its source in the patches on the moon’s
face. In the Samoan Islands these are said to be a woman, a child, and a
mallet. A woman was once hammering out paper-cloth, and seeing the moon
rise, looking like a great bread-fruit, she asked it to come down and let
her child eat a piece of it. But the moon was very angry at the idea of
being eaten, and gobbled up the woman, child, and mallet, and there they
are to this day. The Selish Indians of North-Western America say that the
little wolf was in love with the toad, and pursued her one moonlight
night, till, as a last chance, she made a desperate spring on to the face
of the moon, and there she is still. People in the East see the figure of
a hare in the patches, and both in Buddhist Jâtakas and Mongolian myth
that animal is carried by the moon. In Greenland myth the moon was in love
with his sister, and stole in the dark to caress her. She, wishing to find
out who her lover was, blackened her hands so that the marks might be left
on him, which accounts for the spots. The Khasias of the Himâlaya say that
the moon falls in love every month with his mother-in-law, who, like a
well-conducted matron, throws ashes in his face. Grimm quotes a mediæval
myth that the moon is Mary Magdalene, and the spots her tears of
repentance, whilst in Chaucer’s _Testament of Cressida_ the moon is Lady
Cynthia.--
“On her brest a chorl paintid ful even,
_Bering a bush of thornis on his bake_,
Which for his _theft_ might clime no ner the heven.”
Comparing these with more familiar myths, we have our own man in the moon,
who is said to be the culprit found by Moses gathering sticks on the
Sabbath, although his place of banishment is a popular addition to the
Scripture narrative. According to the German legend he was a scoffer who
did the same heinous offence on a Sunday, and was given the alternative of
being scorched in the sun or frozen in the moon. The Frisians say that he
stole cabbages, the load of which he bears on his back. He does not appear
as a member of the criminal classes in China, his function being that of
celestial matchmaker, who ties together future couples with an invisible
silken cord which breaks not during life. In Icelandic myth the two
children familiar to us as Jack and Jill were kidnapped by the moon, and
there they stand to this day with bucket on pole across their shoulders,
falling away one after the other as the moon wanes,--a phase described in
the couplet:--
“Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.”
Mr. Baring Gould, whose essay on this subject in his _Curious Myths of the
Middle Ages_ gives a convenient summary of current legends, contends that
Jack and Jill are the Hjuki and Bil of the _Edda_, and signify the waxing
and waning of the moon, their bucket indicating the dependence of rainfall
on her phases--a superstition extant among us yet.
The group of customs observed amongst both barbaric and civilised peoples
at the changes of the moon, customs which are meaningless except as relics
of lunar worship, belong to the passage of mythology into religion, of
personifying into deifying.
(_b._) _The Stars._
In the great body of nature-myth the stars are prominent members. In their
multitude; their sublime repose in upper calms above the turmoil of the
elements; their varying brilliancy, “one star differing from another star
in glory”; their tremulous light; their scattered positions, which lend
themselves to every vagary of the constellation-maker; their slow
procession, varied only by sweeping comet and meteor, or falling showers
of shooting stars; they lead the imagination into gentler ways than do the
vaster bodies of the most ancient heavens. Nor, although we may compute
their number, weigh their volume, in a few instances reckon their
distance, and, capturing the light that has come beating through space for
unnumbered years, make it reveal the secret of their structure, is the
imagination less moved by the clear heavens at night, or the feeling of
awe and reverence blunted before that “mighty sum of things for ever
speaking.”
In barbaric myth the stars are spoken of as young suns, the children of
the sun and moon, but more often as men who have lived on the earth,
translated without seeing death. The single stars are individual chiefs or
heroes; the constellations are groups of men or animals. To the natives of
Australia the brilliant Jupiter is a chief among the others; and the stars
in Orion’s belt and scabbard are young men dancing a corroboree, the
Pleiades being girls playing to them. The Kasirs of Bengal say that the
stars are men who climbed to the top of a tree, and were left in the
branches by the trunk being cut away. To the Eskimos the stars in Orion
are seal-hunters who have missed their way home. And in German folk-lore
they are spoken of as the mowers, because, as Grimm says, “they stand in a
row like mowers in a meadow.” In North American myth two of the bright
stars are twins who have left a home where they were harshly treated, and
leapt into the sky, whither their parents followed them and ceaselessly
chase them. In Greek myth the faintest star of the seven Pleiades is
Merope, whose light was dimmed because she alone among her sisters married
a mortal. The New Zealanders say that those stars are seven chiefs who
fell in battle, and of whom only one eye of each is now visible. In Norse
myth Odin having slain a giant, plucks out his eyes and flings them up to
the sky, where they become two stars. In German star-lore the small star
just above the middle one in the shaft of Charles’s Wain, is a waggoner
who, having given our Saviour a lift, was offered the kingdom of heaven
for his reward, but who said he would sooner be driving from east to west
to all eternity, and whose desire was granted--a curious contrast to the
wandering Jew, cursed to move unresting over the earth until the day of
judgment, because he refused to let Jesus, weary with the weight of the
cross, rest for a moment on his doorstep. The Housatonic Indians say that
the stars in Charles’s Wain are men hunting a bear, and that the chase
lasts from spring to autumn, when the bear is wounded and its dripping
blood turns the leaves of the trees red. With this may be cited the myth
that the red clouds at morn and eve are the blood of the slain in battle.
In the Northern Lights the Greenlanders see the spirits of the departed
dancing, the brighter the flashes of the Aurora the greater the merriment,
whilst the Dacotas say of the meteors that they are spirits flying through
the air.
Of the Milky Way--so called because Hêrê, indignant at the bantling
Herakles being put to her breast, spilt her milk along the sky (the solar
mythologers say that the “red cow of evening passes during the night
across the sky scattering her milk”)--the Ottawas say that it was caused
by a turtle swimming along the bottom of the sky and stirring up the mud.
According to the Patagonians it is the track along which the departed
tribesmen hunt ostriches, the clouds being their feathers; in African myth
it is some wood-ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by a girl, that her
people might be able to see their way home at night; in Eastern myth it
is chaff dropped by a thief in his hurried flight.
The idea of a land beyond the sky--be it the happy hunting-ground of the
Indian, or the Paradise of Islam, or the new Jerusalem of the
Apocalypse--would not fail to arise, and in both the Milky Way and the
Rainbow barbaric fancy sees the ladders and bridges whereby the departed
pass from earth to heaven. So we find in the lower and higher culture
alike the beautiful conceptions of the _chemin des ames_, the Red man’s
road of the dead to their home in the sun; the ancient Roman path of, or
to, the gods; the road of the birds, in both Lithuanian and Finnish myth,
because the winged spirits flit thither to the free and happy land. In
prosaic contrast to all this, it is curious to find among ourselves the
Milky Way described as Watling Street! That famous road, which ran from
Richborough through Canterbury and London to Chester, now gives its name
to a narrow bustling street of Manchester warehousemen in the City. But
who the Wætlingas were--whether giants, gods, or men--and why their name
was transferred from Britain to the sky, we do not know,[7] although the
fact is plainly enough set down in old writers, foremost among whom is
Chaucer. In his _House of Fame_[8] he says:--