After the heavy rain of a thunderstorm has washed the soil, it sometimes
happens that a child, or a rustic, finds a wedge-shaped piece of metal or
a few triangular flints in a field or near a road. There was no such
piece of metal, there were no such flints, lying there yesterday, and the
finder is puzzled about the origin of the objects on which he has
lighted. He carries them home, and the village wisdom determines that
the wedge-shaped piece of metal is a 'thunderbolt,' or that the bits of
flint are 'elf-shots,' the heads of fairy arrows. Such things are still
treasured in remote nooks of England, and the 'thunderbolt' is applied to
cure certain maladies by its touch.
As for the fairy arrows, we know that even in ancient Etruria they were
looked on as magical, for we sometimes see their points set, as amulets,
in the gold of Etruscan necklaces. In Perugia the arrowheads are still
sold as charms. All educated people, of course, have long been aware
that the metal wedge is a celt, or ancient bronze axe-head, and that it
was not fairies, but the forgotten peoples of this island who used the
arrows with the tips of flint. Thunder is only so far connected with
them that the heavy rains loosen the surface soil, and lay bare its long
hidden secrets.
There is a science, Archaeology, which collects and compares the material
relics of old races, the axes and arrow-heads. There is a form of study,
Folklore, which collects and compares the similar but immaterial relics
of old races, the surviving superstitions and stories, the ideas which
are in our time but not of it. Properly speaking, folklore is only
concerned with the legends, customs, beliefs, of the Folk, of the people,
of the classes which have least been altered by education, which have
shared least in progress. But the student of folklore soon finds that
these unprogressive classes retain many of the beliefs and ways of
savages, just as the Hebridean people use spindle-whorls of stone, and
bake clay pots without the aid of the wheel, like modern South Sea
Islanders, or like their own prehistoric ancestors. {11a} The student of
folklore is thus led to examine the usages, myths, and ideas of savages,
which are still retained, in rude enough shape, by the European
peasantry. Lastly, he observes that a few similar customs and ideas
survive in the most conservative elements of the life of educated
peoples, in ritual, ceremonial, and religious traditions and myths.
Though such remains are rare in England, we may note the custom of
leading the dead soldier's horse behind his master to the grave, a relic
of days when the horse would have been sacrificed. {11b} We may observe
the persistence of the ceremony by which the monarch, at his coronation,
takes his seat on the sacred stone of Scone, probably an ancient fetich
stone. Not to speak, here, of our own religious traditions, the old vein
of savage rite and belief is found very near the surface of ancient Greek
religion. It needs but some stress of circumstance, something answering
to the storm shower that reveals the flint arrow-heads, to bring savage
ritual to the surface of classical religion. In sore need, a human
victim was only too likely to be demanded; while a feast-day, or a
mystery, set the Greeks dancing serpent-dances or bear-dances like Red
Indians, or swimming with sacred pigs, or leaping about in imitation of
wolves, or holding a dog-feast, and offering dog's flesh to the gods.
{12} Thus the student of folklore soon finds that he must enlarge his
field, and examine, not only popular European story and practice, but
savage ways and ideas, and the myths and usages of the educated classes
in civilised races. In this extended sense the term 'folklore' will
frequently be used in the following essays. The idea of the writer is
that mythology cannot fruitfully be studied apart from folklore, while
some knowledge of anthropology is required in both sciences.
The science of Folklore, if we may call it a science, finds everywhere,
close to the surface of civilised life, the remains of ideas as old as
the stone elf-shots, older than the celt of bronze. In proverbs and
riddles, and nursery tales and superstitions, we detect the relics of a
stage of thought, which is dying out in Europe, but which still exists in
many parts of the world. Now, just as the flint arrow-heads are
scattered everywhere, in all the continents and isles, and everywhere are
much alike, and bear no very definite marks of the special influence of
race, so it is with the habits and legends investigated by the student of
folklore. The stone arrow-head buried in a Scottish cairn is like those
which were interred with Algonquin chiefs. The flints found in Egyptian
soil, or beside the tumulus on the plain of Marathon, nearly resemble the
stones which tip the reed arrow of the modern Samoyed. Perhaps only a
skilled experience could discern, in a heap of such arrow-heads, the
specimens which are found in America or Africa from those which are
unearthed in Europe. Even in the products of more advanced industry, we
see early pottery, for example, so closely alike everywhere that, in the
British Museum, Mexican vases have, ere now, been mixed up on the same
shelf with archaic vessels from Greece. In the same way, if a
superstition or a riddle were offered to a student of folklore, he would
have much difficulty in guessing its _provenance_, and naming the race
from which it was brought. Suppose you tell a folklorist that, in a
certain country, when anyone sneezes, people say 'Good luck to you,' the
student cannot say a priori what country you refer to, what race you have
in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first
discovered; it may be Zululand, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or
Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other regions, the
sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition is as
widely distributed as the flint arrow-heads. Just as the object and use
of the arrow-heads became intelligible when we found similar weapons in
actual use among savages, so the salutation to the sneezer becomes
intelligible when we learn that the savage has a good reason for it. He
thinks the sneeze expels an evil spirit. Proverbs, again, and riddles
are as universally scattered, and the Wolufs puzzle over the same
devinettes as the Scotch schoolboy or the Breton peasant. Thus, for
instance, the Wolufs of Senegal ask each other, 'What flies for ever, and
rests never?'--Answer, 'The Wind.' 'Who are the comrades that always
fight, and never hurt each other?'--'The Teeth.' In France, as we read
in the 'Recueil de Calembours,' the people ask, 'What runs faster than a
horse, crosses water, and is not wet?'--Answer, 'The Sun.' The Samoans
put the riddle, 'A man who stands between two ravenous fishes?'--Answer,
'The tongue between the teeth.' Again, 'There are twenty brothers, each
with a hat on his head?'--Answer, 'Fingers and toes, with nails for
hats.' This is like the French 'un pere a douze fils?'--'l'an.' A
comparison of M. Rolland's 'Devinettes' with the Woluf conundrums of
Boilat, the Samoan examples in Turner's' Samoa,' and the Scotch enigmas
collected by Chambers, will show the identity of peasant and savage
humour.
A few examples, less generally known, may be given to prove that the
beliefs of folklore are not peculiar to any one race or stock of men. The
first case is remarkable: it occurs in Mexico and Ceylon--nor are we
aware that it is found elsewhere. In Macmillan's Magazine {15} is
published a paper by Mrs. Edwards, called 'The Mystery of the Pezazi.'
The events described in this narrative occurred on August 28, 1876, in a
bungalow some thirty miles from Badiella. The narrator occupied a new
house on an estate called Allagalla. Her native servants soon asserted
that the place was haunted by a Pezazi. The English visitors saw and
heard nothing extraordinary till a certain night: an abridged account of
what happened then may be given in the words of Mrs. Edwards:--
Wrapped in dreams, I lay on the night in question tranquilly sleeping,
but gradually roused to a perception that discordant sounds disturbed
the serenity of my slumber. Loth to stir, I still dozed on, the
sounds, however, becoming, as it seemed, more determined to make
themselves heard; and I awoke to the consciousness that they proceeded
from a belt of adjacent jungle, and resembled the noise that would be
produced by some person felling timber.
Shutting my ears to the disturbance, I made no sign, until, with an
expression of impatience, E--- suddenly started up, when I laid a
detaining grasp upon his arm, murmuring that there was no need to
think of rising at present--it must be quite early, and the kitchen
cooly was doubtless cutting fire-wood in good time. E--- responded,
in a tone of slight contempt, that no one could be cutting fire-wood
at that hour, and the sounds were more suggestive of felling jungle;
and he then inquired how long I had been listening to them. Now
thoroughly aroused, I replied that I had heard the sounds for some
time, at first confusing them with my dreams, but soon sufficiently
awakening to the fact that they were no mere phantoms of my
imagination, but a reality. During our conversation the noises became
more distinct and loud; blow after blow resounded, as of the axe
descending upon the tree, followed by the crash of the falling timber.
Renewed blows announced the repetition of the operations on another
tree, and continued till several were devastated.
It is unnecessary to tell more of the tale. In spite of minute
examinations and close search, no solution of the mystery of the noises,
on this or any other occasion, was ever found. The natives, of course,
attributed the disturbance to the Pezazi, or goblin. No one, perhaps,
has asserted that the Aztecs were connected by ties of race with the
people of Ceylon. Yet, when the Spaniards conquered Mexico, and when
Sahagun (one of the earliest missionaries) collected the legends of the
people, he found them, like the Cingalese, strong believers in the mystic
tree-felling. We translate Sahagun's account of the 'midnight axe':--
When so any man heareth the sound of strokes in the night, as if one
were felling trees, he reckons it an evil boding. And this sound they
call youaltepuztli (youalli, night; and tepuztli, copper), which
signifies 'the midnight hatchet.' This noise cometh about the time of
the first sleep, when all men slumber soundly, and the night is still.
The sound of strokes smitten was first noted by the temple-servants,
called tlamacazque, at the hour when they go in the night to make
their offering of reeds or of boughs of pine, for so was their custom,
and this penance they did on the neighbouring hills, and that when the
night was far spent. Whenever they heard such a sound as one makes
when he splits wood with an axe (a noise that may be heard afar off),
they drew thence an omen of evil, and were afraid, and said that the
sounds were part of the witchery of Tezeatlipoca, that often thus
dismayeth men who journey in the night. Now, when tidings of these
things came to a certain brave man, one exercised in war, he drew
near, being guided by the sound, till he came to the very cause of the
hubbub. And when he came upon it, with difficulty he caught it, for
the thing was hard to catch: natheless at last he overtook that which
ran before him; and behold, it was a man without a heart, and, on
either side of the chest, two holes that opened and shut, and so made
the noise. Then the man put his hand within the breast of the figure
and grasped the breast and shook it hard, demanding some grace or
gift.
As a rule, the grace demanded was power to make captives in war. The
curious coincidence of the 'midnight axe,' occurring in lands so remote
as Ceylon and Mexico, and the singular attestation by an English lady of
the actual existence of the disturbance, makes this youaltepuztli one of
the quaintest things in the province of the folklorist. But, whatever
the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs connected with the noise, may
be, no one would explain them as the result of community of _race_
between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered to
account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of furniture
is an omen of death in a house. Obviously, these opinions are the
expression of a common state of superstitious fancy, not the signs of an
original community of origin.
Let us take another piece of folklore. All North-country English folk
know the Kernababy. The custom of the 'Kernababy' is commonly observed
in England, or, at all events, in Scotland, where the writer has seen
many a kernababy. The last gleanings of the last field are bound up in a
rude imitation of the human shape, and dressed in some tag-rags of
finery. The usage has fallen into the conservative hands of children,
but of old 'the Maiden' was a regular image of the harvest goddess,
which, with a sickle and sheaves in her arms, attended by a crowd of
reapers, and accompanied with music, followed the last carts home to the
farm. {18} It is odd enough that the 'Maiden' should exactly translate
[Greek], the old Sicilian name of the daughter of Demeter. 'The Maiden'
has dwindled, then, among us to the rudimentary kernababy; but ancient
Peru had her own Maiden, her Harvest Goddess. Here it is easy to trace
the natural idea at the basis of the superstitious practice which links
the shores of the Pacific with our own northern coast. Just as a portion
of the yule-log and of the Christmas bread were kept all the year
through, a kind of nest-egg of plenteous food and fire, so the kernababy,
English or Peruvian, is an earnest that corn will not fail all through
the year, till next harvest comes. For this reason the kernababy used to
be treasured from autumn's end to autumn's end, though now it commonly
disappears very soon after the harvest home. It is thus that Acosta
describes, in Grimston's old translation (1604), the Peruvian kernababy
and the Peruvian harvest home:--
This feast is made comming from the chacra or farme unto the house,
saying certaine songs, and praying that the Mays (maize) may long
continue, the which they call Mama cora.
What a chance this word offers to etymologists of the old school: how
promptly they would recognise, in mama mother--[Greek], and in
cora--[Greek], the Mother and the Maiden, the feast of Demeter and
Persephone! However, the days of that old school of antiquarianism are
numbered. To return to the Peruvian harvest home:--
They take a certaine portion of the most fruitefull of the Mays that
growes in their farmes, the which they put in a certaine granary which
they do calle Pirua, with certaine ceremonies, watching three nightes;
they put this Mays in the richest garments they have, and, being thus
wrapped and dressed, they worship this Pirua, and hold it in great
veneration, saying it is the Mother of the Mays of their inheritances,
and that by this means the Mays augments and is preserved. In this
moneth they make a particular sacrifice, and the witches demand of
this Pirua, 'if it hath strength sufficient to continue until the next
yeare,' and if it answers 'no,' then they carry this Mays to the farme
to burne, whence they brought it, according to every man's power, then
they make another Pirua, with the same ceremonies, saying that they
renue it, to the ende that the seede of the Mays may not perish.
The idea that the maize can speak need not surprise us; the Mexican held
much the same belief, according to Sahagun:--
It was thought that if some grains of maize fell on the ground, he who
saw them lying there was bound to lift them, wherein, if he failed, he
harmed the maize, which plained itself of him to God, saying, 'Lord,
punish this man, who saw me fallen and raised me not again; punish him
with famine, that he may learn not to hold me in dishonour.'
Well, in all this affair of the Scotch kernababy, and the Peruvian Mama
cora, we need no explanation beyond the common simple ideas of human
nature. We are not obliged to hold, either that the Peruvians and Scotch
are akin by blood, nor that, at some forgotten time, they met each other,
and borrowed each other's superstitions. Again, when we find Odysseus
sacrificing a black sheep to the dead, {20} and when we read that the
Ovahereroes in South Africa also appease with a black sheep the spirits
of the departed, we do not feel it necessary to hint that the Ovahereroes
are of Greek descent, or have borrowed their ritual from the Greeks. The
connection between the colour black, and mourning for the dead, is
natural and almost universal.
Examples like these might be adduced in any number. We might show how,
in magic, negroes of Barbadoes make clay effigies of their enemies, and
pierce them, just as Greeks did in Plato's time, or the men of Accad in
remotest antiquity. We might remark the Australian black putting sharp
bits of quartz in the tracks of an enemy who has gone by, that the enemy
may be lamed; and we might point to Boris Godunof forbidding the same
practice among the Russians. We might watch Scotch, and Australians, and
Jews, and French, and Aztecs spreading dust round the body of a dead man,
that the footprints of his ghost, or of other ghosts, may be detected
next morning. We might point to a similar device in a modern novel,
where the presence of a ghost is suspected, as proof of the similar
workings of the Australian mind and of the mind of Mrs. Riddell. We
shall later turn to ancient Greece, and show how the serpent-dances, the
habit of smearing the body with clay, and other odd rites of the
mysteries, were common to Hellenic religion, and to the religion of
African, Australian, and American tribes.
Now, with regard to all these strange usages, what is the method of
folklore? The method is, when an apparently irrational and anomalous
custom is found in any country, to look for a country where a similar
practice is found, and where the practice is no longer irrational and
anomalous, but in harmony with the manners and ideas of the people among
whom it prevails. That Greeks should dance about in their mysteries with
harmless serpents in their hands looks quite unintelligible. When a wild
tribe of Red Indians does the same thing, as a trial of courage, with
real rattlesnakes, we understand the Red Man's motives, and may
conjecture that similar motives once existed among the ancestors of the
Greeks. Our method, then, is to compare the seemingly meaningless
customs or manners of civilised races with the similar customs and
manners which exist among the uncivilised and still retain their meaning.
It is not necessary for comparison of this sort that the uncivilised and
the civilised race should be of the same stock, nor need we prove that
they were ever in contact with each other. Similar conditions of mind
produce similar practices, apart from identity of race, or borrowing of
ideas and manners.
Let us return to the example of the flint arrowheads. Everywhere
neolithic arrow-heads are pretty much alike. The cause of the
resemblance is no more than this, that men, with the same needs, the same
materials, and the same rude instruments, everywhere produced the same
kind of arrow-head. No hypothesis of interchange of ideas nor of
community of race is needed to explain the resemblance of form in the
missiles. Very early pottery in any region is, for the same causes, like
very early pottery in any other region. The same sort of similarity was
explained by the same resemblances in human nature, when we touched on
the identity of magical practices and of superstitious beliefs. This
method is fairly well established and orthodox when we deal with usages
and superstitious beliefs; but may we apply the same method when we deal
with myths?
Here a difficulty occurs. Mythologists, as a rule, are averse to the
method of folklore. They think it scientific to compare only the myths
of races which speak languages of the same family, and of races which
have, in historic times, been actually in proved contact with each other.
Thus, most mythologists hold it correct to compare Greek, Slavonic,
Celtic, and Indian stories, because Greeks, Slavs, Celts, and Hindoos all
speak languages of the same family. Again, they hold it correct to
compare Chaldaean and Greek myths, because the Greeks and the Chaldaeans
were brought into contact through the Phoenicians, and by other
intermediaries, such as the Hittites. But the same mythologists will vow
that it is unscientific to compare a Maori or a Hottentot or an Eskimo
myth with an Aryan story, because Maoris and Eskimo and Hottentots do not
speak languages akin to that of Greece, nor can we show that the
ancestors of Greeks, Maoris, Hottentots, and Eskimo were ever in contact
with each other in historical times.
Now the peculiarity of the method of folklore is that it will venture to
compare (with due caution and due examination of evidence) the myths of
the most widely severed races. Holding that myth is a product of the
early human fancy, working on the most rudimentary knowledge of the outer
world, the student of folklore thinks that differences of race do not
much affect the early mythopoeic faculty. He will not be surprised if
Greeks and Australian blacks are in the same tale.
In each case, he holds, all the circumstances of the case must be
examined and considered. For instance, when the Australians tell a myth
about the Pleiades very like the Greek myth of the Pleiades, we must ask
a number of questions. Is the Australian version authentic? Can the
people who told it have heard it from a European? If these questions are
answered so as to make it apparent that the Australian Pleiad myth is of
genuine native origin, we need not fly to the conclusion that the
Australians are a lost and forlorn branch of the Aryan race. Two other
hypotheses present themselves. First, the human species is of unknown
antiquity. In the moderate allowance of 250,000 years, there is time for
stories to have wandered all round the world, as the Aggry beads of
Ashanti have probably crossed the continent from Egypt, as the Asiatic
jade (if Asiatic it be) has arrived in Swiss lake-dwellings, as an
African trade-cowry is said to have been found in a Cornish barrow, as an
Indian Ocean shell has been discovered in a prehistoric bone-cave in
Poland. This slow filtration of tales is not absolutely out of the
question. Two causes would especially help to transmit myths. The first
is slavery and slave-stealing, the second is the habit of capturing
brides from alien stocks, and the law which forbids marriage with a woman
of a man's own family. Slaves and captured brides would bring their
native legends among alien peoples.
But there is another possible way of explaining the resemblance (granting
that it is proved) of the Greek and Australian Pleiad myth. The object
of both myths is to account for the grouping and other phenomena of the
constellations. May not similar explanatory stories have occurred to the
ancestors of the Australians, and to the ancestors of the Greeks, however
remote their home, while they were still in the savage condition? The
best way to investigate this point is to collect all known savage and
civilised stellar myths, and see what points they have in common. If
they all agree in character, though the Greek tales are full of grace,
while those of the Australians or Brazilians are rude enough, we may
plausibly account for the similarity of myths, as we accounted for the
similarity of flint arrow-heads. The myths, like the arrow-heads,
resemble each other because they were originally framed to meet the same
needs out of the same material. In the case of the arrow-heads, the need
was for something hard, heavy, and sharp--the material was flint. In the
case of the myths, the need was to explain certain phenomena--the
material (so to speak) was an early state of the human mind, to which all
objects seemed equally endowed with human personality, and to which no
metamorphosis appeared impossible.
In the following essays, then, the myths and customs of various peoples
will be compared, even when these peoples talk languages of alien
families, and have never (as far as history shows us) been in actual
contact. Our method throughout will be to place the usage, or myth,
which is unintelligible when found among a civilised race, beside the
similar myth which is intelligible enough when it is found among savages.
A mean term will be found in the folklore preserved by the
non-progressive classes in a progressive people. This folklore
represents, in the midst of a civilised race, the savage ideas out of
which civilisation has been evolved. The conclusion will usually be that
the fact which puzzles us by its presence in civilisation is a relic
surviving from the time when the ancestors of a civilised race were in
the state of savagery. By this method it is not necessary that 'some
sort of genealogy should be established' between the Australian and the
Greek narrators of a similar myth, nor between the Greek and Australian
possessors of a similar usage. The hypothesis will be that the myth, or
usage, is common to both races, not because of original community of
stock, not because of contact and borrowing, but because the ancestors of
the Greeks passed through the savage intellectual condition in which we
find the Australians.
The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth? Do
peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other? The answer is,
that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth, if it be
race which confers on a people its national genius, and its capacity of
becoming civilised. If race does this, then race affects, in the most
powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one is likely to
confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor either with a myth
from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the substance, the original
set of ideas, may be much the same. In all three you have
anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal shapes, tricky,
capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed with magical
powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda, of any of the
Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much above the gods of
savage mythology. This stuff of myth is quod semper, quod ubique, quod
ab omnibus, and is the original gift of the savage intellect. But the
final treatment, the ultimate literary form of the myth, varies in each
race. Homeric gods, like Red Indian, Thlinkeet, or Australian gods, can
assume the shapes of birds. But when we read, in Homer, of the arming of
Athene, the hunting of Artemis, the vision of golden Aphrodite, the
apparition of Hermes, like a young man when the flower of youth is
loveliest, then we recognise the effect of race upon myth, the effect of
the Greek genius at work on rude material. Between the Olympians and a
Thlinkeet god there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter
of Cnidos and an image from Easter Island. Again, the Scandinavian gods,
when their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape
of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of
their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless sacrifices,
soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of Vedic and
Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into its sacerdotage
and priestly second childhood. Thus race declares itself in the ultimate
literary form and character of mythology, while the common savage basis
and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in the horned, and cannibal,
and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of Greece, of India, of the
North. They all show their common savage origin, when the poet neglects
Freya's command and tells of what the gods did 'in the morning of Time.'
As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there
must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples, the
traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing alien
women into the families--all these things favoured the migration of myth.
But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it, we can
seldom trace a popular legend on its travels. In the case of the
cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed they
had borrowed their religions from each other. When the Greeks first
found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they leaped to
the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from Egypt. We,
who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points in common
with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians--people quite
unconnected with Egypt--feel less confident about the hypothesis of
borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and
Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later times, too, the
Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien
gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so
forth. But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious
conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at
least, an innovation. As Tiele remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from
the Assyrian Daian nisi, 'judge of men,' a name of the solar god Samas,
without ascertaining that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and
was a god of the sun. These derivations, 'shocking to common sense,' are
to be distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning. Some
Assyrian scholars actually derive Hades from Bit Edi or Bit Hadi--'though,
unluckily,' says Tiele, 'there is no such word in the Assyrian text.' On
the whole topic Tiele's essay {28} deserves to be consulted. Granting,
then, that elements in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite, and other
gods, may have been imported with the strange AEgypto-Assyrian vases and
jewels of the Sidonians, we still find the same basis of rude savage
ideas. We may push back a god from Greece to Phoenicia, from Phoenicia
to Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we reach a legend full of myths
like those which Bushmen tell by the camp-fire, Eskimo in their dark
huts, and Australians in the shade of the gunyeh--myths cruel, puerile,
obscene, like the fancies of the savage myth-makers from which they
sprang.
THE BULL-ROARER.
A Study of the Mysteries.
As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains of
Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of grey-
blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound. Beginning low,
with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it grows
louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy roar. If
the traveller be a new comer, he is probably puzzled to the last degree.
If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says to himself, 'Why, that is
the bull-roarer.' If he knows the colony and the ways of the natives, he
knows that the blacks are celebrating their tribal mysteries. The
roaring noise is made to warn all women to keep out of the way. Just as
Pentheus was killed (with the approval of Theocritus) because he profaned
the rites of the women-worshippers of Dionysus, so, among the Australian
blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out of the way of female, and
women out of the way of male, celebrations.
The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain afar
is a toy familiar to English country lads. They call it the bull-roarer.
The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which anyone can make. I do
not, however, recommend it to families, for two reasons. In the first
place, it produces a most horrible and unexampled din, which endears it
to the very young, but renders it detested by persons of mature age. In
the second place, the character of the toy is such that it will almost
infallibly break all that is fragile in the house where it is used, and
will probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus,
I trust, said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting
bull-roarers on their parents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the
interests of science) to show how the toy is made. Nothing can be less
elaborate. You take a piece of the commonest wooden board, say the lid
of a packing-case, about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight
inches long and three broad, and you sharpen the ends. When finished,
the toy may be about the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a 'fish' used as a
counter (that is how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be
left plain in the centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities, as
in an Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor. Then tie a strong piece
of string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood and
the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it turndun, and the Greeks
called it [Greek]) is complete. Now twist the end of the string tightly
about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round. For
a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting lecture
delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a
bull-roarer. At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled
round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like those
chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country, which
contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace.
But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name,
producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if
some supernatural being 'fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful
roar.' Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief
experience of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in
England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and
unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.
The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most
extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in
folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed peoples,
savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage and
civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on this a
hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend
from the same stock. But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very
purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards
similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere.
There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to
account for this widely diffused sacred object.
The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in many
and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred instrument,
employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in Australia, in New
Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as we have seen, it is
a peasant-boy's plaything in England. A number of questions are
naturally suggested by the bull-roarer. Is it a thing invented once for
all, and carried abroad over the world by wandering races, or handed on
from one people and tribe to another? Or is the bull-roarer a toy that
might be accidentally hit on in any country where men can sharpen wood
and twist the sinews of animals into string? Was the thing originally a
toy, and is its religious and mystical nature later; or was it originally
one of the properties of the priest, or medicine-man, which in England
has dwindled to a plaything? Lastly, was this mystical instrument at
first employed in the rites of a civilised people like the Greeks, and
was it in some way borrowed or inherited by South Africans, Australians,
and New Mexicans? Or is it a mere savage invention, surviving (like
certain other features of the Greek mysteries) from a distant stage of
savagery? Our answer to all these questions is that in all probability
the presence of the [Greek], or bull-roarer, in Greek mysteries was a
survival from the time when Greeks were in the social condition of
Australians.
In the first place, the bull-roarer is associated with mysteries and
initiations. Now mysteries and initiations are things that tend to
dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation
advances. The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret and
hidden; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed, and
religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these ceremonies. There
are no other initiations or mysteries that civilised modern man is
expected necessarily to pass through. On the other hand, looking widely
at human history, we find mystic rites and initiations numerous,
stringent, severe, and magical in character, in proportion to the lack of
civilisation in those who practise them. The less the civilisation, the
more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites. The more cruel the
rites, the less is the civilisation. The red-hot poker with which Mr.
Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the sham masonic rites would have
been quite in place, a natural instrument of probationary torture, in the
Freemasonry of Australians, Mandans, or Hottentots. In the mysteries of
Demeter or Bacchus, in the mysteries of a civilised people, the red-hot
poker, or any other instrument of torture, would have been out of place.
But in the Greek mysteries, just as in those of South Africans, Red
Indians, and Australians, the disgusting practice of bedaubing the
neophyte with dirt and clay was preserved. We have nothing quite like
that in modern initiations. Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the
tortures inflicted on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by
the cruel Artemis. {33} But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with
mud and the use of the bull-roarer. On the whole, then, and on a general
view of the subject, we prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece
was a survival from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New
Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa is a relic of
civilisation.
Let us next observe a remarkable peculiarity of the turndun, or
Australian bull-roarer. The bull-roarer in England is a toy. In
Australia, according to Howitt and Fison, {34} the bull-roarer is
regarded with religious awe. 'When, on lately meeting with two of the
surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked
cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then
answered me in undertones.' The chief peculiarity in connection with the
turndun is that women may never look upon it. The Chepara tribe, who
call it bribbun, have a custom that, 'if seen by a woman, or shown by a
man to a woman, the punishment to both is _death_.'
Among the Kurnai, the sacred mystery of the turndun is preserved by a
legend, which gives a supernatural sanction to secrecy. When boys go
through the mystic ceremony of initiation they are shown turnduns, or
bull-roarers, and made to listen to their hideous din. They are then
told that, if ever a woman is allowed to see a turndun, the earth will
open, and water will cover the globe. The old men point spears at the
boy's eyes, saying: 'If you tell this to any woman you will die, you will
see the ground broken up and like the sea; if you tell this to any woman,
or to any child, you will be killed!' As in Athens, in Syria, and among
the Mandans, the deluge-tradition of Australia is connected with the
mysteries. In Gippsland there is a tradition of the deluge. 'Some
children of the Kurnai in playing about found a turndun, which they took
home to the camp and showed the women. Immediately the earth crumbled
away, and it was all water, and the Kurnai were drowned.'
In consequence of all this mummery the Australian women attach great
sacredness to the very name of the turndun. They are much less
instructed in their own theology than the men of the tribe. One woman
believed she had heard Pundjel, the chief supernatural being, descend in
a mighty rushing noise, that is, in the sound of the turndun, when boys
were being 'made men,' or initiated. {35} On turnduns the Australian
sorcerers can fly up to heaven. Turnduns carved with imitations of water-
flowers are used by medicine-men in rain-making. New Zealand also has
her bull-roarers; some of them, carved in relief, are in the Christy
Museum, and one is engraved here. I have no direct evidence as to the
use of these Maori bull-roarers in the Maori mysteries. Their
employment, however, may perhaps be provisionally inferred.
One can readily believe that the New Zealand bull-roarer may be whirled
by any man who is repeating a Karakia, or 'charm to raise the wind':--
Loud wind,
Lasting wind,
Violent whistling wind,
Dig up the calm reposing sky,
Come, come.
In New Zealand {36a} 'the natives regarded the wind as an indication of
the presence of their god,' a superstition not peculiar to Maori
religion. The 'cold wind' felt blowing over the hands at spiritualistic
seances is also regarded (by psychical researchers) as an indication of
the presence of supernatural beings. The windy roaring noise made by the
bull-roarer might readily be considered by savages, either as an
invitation to a god who should present himself in storm, or as a proof of
his being at hand. We have seen that this view was actually taken by an
Australian woman. The hymn called 'breath,' or haha, a hymn to the
mystic wind, is pronounced by Maori priests at the moment of the
initiation of young men in the tribal mysteries. It is a mere
conjecture, and possibly enough capable of disproof, but we have a
suspicion that the use of the mystica vannus Iacchi was a mode of raising
a sacred wind analogous to that employed by whirlers of the turndun.
{36b}
Servius, the ancient commentator on Virgil, mentions, among other
opinions, this--that the vannus was a sieve, and that it symbolised the
purifying effect of the mysteries. But it is clear that Servius was only
guessing; and he offers other explanations, among them that the vannus
was a crate to hold offerings, primitias frugum.
We have studied the bull-roarer in Australia, we have caught a glimpse of
it in England. Its existence on the American continent is proved by
letters from New Mexico, and by a passage in Mr. Frank Cushing's
'Adventures in Zuni.' {37} In Zuni, too, among a semi-civilised Indian
tribe, or rather a tribe which has left the savage for the barbaric
condition, we find the bull-roarer. Here, too, the instrument--a 'slat,'
Mr. Gushing calls it--is used as a call to the ceremonial observance of
the tribal ritual. The Zunis have various 'orders of a more or less
sacred and sacerdotal character.' Mr. Cushing writes:--
These orders were engaged in their annual ceremonials, of which little
was told or shown me; but, at the end of four days, I heard one
morning a _deep whirring noise_. Running out, I saw a procession of
three priests of the bow, in plumed helmets and closely-fitting
cuirasses, both of thick buckskin--gorgeous and solemn with sacred
embroideries and war-paint, begirt with bows, arrows, and war-clubs,
and each distinguished by his badge of degree--coming down one of the
narrow streets. The principal priest carried in his arms a wooden
idol, ferocious in aspect, yet beautiful with its decorations of
shell, turquoise, and brilliant paint. It was nearly hidden by
symbolic slats and prayer-sticks most elaborately plumed. He was
preceded by a guardian with drawn bow and arrows, while another
followed, _twirling the sounding slat_, which had attracted alike my
attention and that of hundreds of the Indians, who hurriedly flocked
to the roofs of the adjacent houses, or lined the street, bowing their
heads in adoration, and scattering sacred prayer-meal on the god and
his attendant priests. Slowly they wound their way down the hill,
across the river, and off toward the mountain of Thunder. Soon an
identical procession followed and took its way toward the western
hills. I watched them long until they disappeared, and a few hours
afterward there arose from the top of 'Thunder Mountain' a dense
column of smoke, simultaneously with another from the more distant
western mesa of 'U-ha-na-mi,' or 'Mount of the Beloved.'
Then they told me that for four days I must neither touch nor eat
flesh or oil of any kind, and for ten days neither throw any refuse
from my doors, nor permit a spark to leave my house, for 'This was the
season of the year when the "grandmother of men" (fire) was precious.'
Here then, in Zuni, we have the bull-roarer again, and once more we find
it employed as a summons to the mysteries. We do not learn, however,
that women in Zuni are forbidden to look upon the bull-roarer. Finally,
the South African evidence, which is supplied by letters from a
correspondent of Mr. Tylor's, proves that in South Africa, too, the bull-
roarer is employed to call the men to the celebration of secret
functions. A minute description of the instrument, and of its magical
power to raise a wind, is given in Theal's 'Kaffir Folklore,' p. 209. The
bull-roarer has not been made a subject of particular research; very
probably later investigations will find it in other parts of the modern
world besides America, Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. I have myself
been fortunate enough to encounter the bull-roarer on the soil of ancient
Greece and in connection with the Dionysiac mysteries. Clemens of
Alexandria, and Arnobius, an early Christian father who follows Clemens,
describe certain toys of the child Dionysus which were used in the
mysteries. Among these are _turbines_, [Greek], and [Greek]. The
ordinary dictionaries interpret all these as whipping-tops, adding that
[Greek] is sometimes 'a magic wheel.' The ancient scholiast on Clemens,
however, writes: 'The [Greek] is a little piece of wood, to which a
string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round to make a
roaring noise.' {39} Here, in short, we have a brief but complete
description of the bull-roarer of the Australian turndun. No single
point is omitted. The [Greek], like the turndun, is a small object of
wood, it is tied to a string, when whirled round it produces a roaring
noise, and it is used at initiations. This is not the end of the matter.
In the part of the Dionysiac mysteries at which the toys of the child
Dionysus were exhibited, and during which (as it seems) the [Greek], or
bull-roarer, was whirred, the performers daubed themselves all over with
clay. This we learn from a passage in which Demosthenes describes the
youth of his hated adversary, AEschines. The mother of AEschines, he
says, was a kind of 'wise woman,' and dabbler in mysteries. AEschines
used to aid her by bedaubing the initiate over with clay and bran. {40a}
The word [Greek], here used by Demosthenes, is explained by Harpocration
as the ritual term for daubing the initiated. A story was told, as
usual, to explain this rite. It was said that, when the Titans attacked
Dionysus and tore him to pieces, they painted themselves first with clay,
or gypsum, that they might not be recognised. Nonnus shows, in several
places, that down to his time the celebrants of the Bacchic mysteries
retained this dirty trick. Precisely the same trick prevails in the
mysteries of savage peoples. Mr. Winwood Reade {40b} reports the
evidence of Mongilomba. When initiated, Mongilomba was 'severely flogged
in the Fetich House' (as young Spartans were flogged before the animated
image of Artemis), and then he was 'plastered over with goat-dung.' Among
the natives of Victoria, {40c} the 'body of the initiated is bedaubed
with clay, mud, charcoal powder, and filth of every kind.' The girls are
plastered with charcoal powder and white clay, answering to the Greek
gypsum. Similar daubings were performed at the mysteries by the Mandans,
as described by Catlin; and the Zunis made raids on Mr. Cushing's black
paint and Chinese ink for like purposes. On the Congo, Mr. Johnson found
precisely the same ritual in the initiations. Here, then, not to
multiply examples, we discover two singular features in common between
Greek and savage mysteries. Both Greeks and savages employ the
bull-roarer, both bedaub the initiated with dirt or with white paint or
chalk. As to the meaning of the latter very un-Aryan practice, one has
no idea. It is only certain that war parties of Australian blacks bedaub
themselves with white clay to alarm their enemies in night attacks. The
Phocians, according to Herodotus (viii. 27), adopted the same 'aisy
stratagem,' as Captain Costigan has it. Tellies, the medicine-man
([Greek]), chalked some sixty Phocians, whom he sent to make a night
attack on the Thessalians. The sentinels of the latter were seized with
supernatural horror, and fled, 'and after the sentinels went the army.'
In the same way, in a night attack among the Australian Kurnai, {41a}
'they all rapidly painted themselves with pipe-clay: red ochre is no use,
it cannot frighten an enemy.' If, then, Greeks in the historic period
kept up Australian tactics, it is probable that the ancient mysteries of
Greece might retain the habit of daubing the initiated which occurs in
savage rites.
'Come now,' as Herodotus would say, 'I will show once more that the
mysteries of the Greeks resemble those of Bushmen.' In Lucian's Treatise
on Dancing, {41b} we read, 'I pass over the fact that you cannot find a
single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing. . . . To prove this
I will not mention the secret acts of worship, on account of the
uninitiated. But this much all men know, that most people say of those
who reveal the mysteries, that they "dance them out."' Here Liddell and
Scott write, rather weakly, 'to dance out, let out, betray, probably of
some dance which burlesqued these ceremonies.' It is extremely
improbable that, in an age when it was still forbidden to reveal the
[Greek], or secret rites, those rites would be mocked in popular
burlesques. Lucian obviously intends to say that the matter of the
mysteries was set forth in ballets d'action. Now this is exactly the
case in the surviving mysteries of the Bushmen. Shortly after the
rebellion of Langalibalele's tribe, Mr. Orpen, the chief magistrate in
St. John's Territory, made the acquaintance of Qing, one of the last of
an all but exterminated tribe. Qing 'had never seen a white man, except
fighting,' when he became Mr. Orpen's guide. He gave a good deal of
information about the myths of his people, but refused to answer certain
questions. 'You are now asking the secrets that are not spoken of.' Mr.
Orpen asked, 'Do you know the secrets?' Qing replied, 'No, only the
initiated men of that dance know these things.' To 'dance' this or that
means, 'to be acquainted with this or that mystery;' the dances were
originally taught by Cagn, the mantis, or grasshopper god. In many
mysteries, Qing, as a young man, was not initiated. He could not 'dance
them out.' {42}
There are thus undeniably close resemblances between the Greek mysteries
and those of the lowest contemporary races.
As to the bull-roarer, its recurrence among Greeks, Zunis, Kamilaroi,
Maoris, and South African races, would be regarded, by some students, as
a proof that all these tribes had a common origin, or had borrowed the
instrument from each other. But this theory is quite unnecessary. The
bull-roarer is a very simple invention. Anyone might find out that a bit
of sharpened wood, tied to a string, makes, when whirred, a roaring
noise. Supposing that discovery made, it is soon turned to practical
use. All tribes have their mysteries. All want a signal to summon the
right persons together and warn the wrong persons to keep out of the way.
The church bell does as much for us, so did the shaken seistron for the
Egyptians. People with neither bells nor seistra find the bull-roarer,
with its mysterious sound, serve their turn. The hiding of the
instrument from women is natural enough. It merely makes the alarm and
absence of the curious sex doubly sure. The stories of supernatural
consequences to follow if a woman sees the turndun lend a sanction. This
is not a random theory, without basis. In Brazil, the natives have no
bull-roarer, but they have mysteries, and the presence of the women at
the mysteries of the men is a terrible impiety. To warn away the women,
the Brazilians make loud 'devil-music' on what are called 'jurupari
pipes.' Now, just as in Australia, _the women may not see the jurupari
pipes on pain of death_. When the sound of the jurupari pipes is heard,
as when the turndun is heard in Australia, every woman flees and hides
herself. The women are always executed if they see the pipes. Mr.
Alfred Wallace bought a pair of these pipes, but he had to embark them at
a distance from the village where they were procured. The seller was
afraid that some unknown misfortune would occur if the women of his
village set eyes on the juruparis. {44}
The conclusion from all these facts seems obvious. The bull-roarer is an
instrument easily invented by savages, and easily adopted into the ritual
of savage mysteries. If we find the bull-roarer used in the mysteries of
the most civilised of ancient peoples, the most probable explanation is,
that the Greeks retained both the mysteries, the bull-roarer, the habit
of bedaubing the initiate, the torturing of boys, the sacred obscenities,
the antics with serpents, the dances, and the like, from the time when
their ancestors were in the savage condition. That more refined and
religious ideas were afterwards introduced into the mysteries seems
certain, but the rites were, in many cases, simply savage. Unintelligible
(except as survivals) when found among Hellenes, they become intelligible
enough among savages, because they correspond to the intellectual
condition and magical fancies of the lower barbarism. The same sort of
comparison, the same kind of explanation, will account, as we shall see,
for the savage myths as well as for the savage customs which survived
among the Greeks.