But before studying these widely different myths, let us first establish
the fact that death really is regarded as something non-natural and
intrusive. The modern savage readily believes in and accounts in a
scientific way for _violent_ deaths. The spear or club breaks or crushes
a hole in a man, and his soul flies out. But the deaths he disbelieves
in are _natural_ deaths. These he is obliged to explain as produced by
some supernatural cause, generally the action of malevolent spirits
impelled by witches. Thus the savage holds that, violence apart and the
action of witches apart, man would even now be immortal. 'There are rude
races of Australia and South America,' writes Dr. Tylor, {178} 'whose
intense belief in witchcraft has led them to declare that if men were
never bewitched, and never killed by violence, _they would never die at
all_. Like the Australians, the Africans will inquire of their dead
"what sorcerer slew them by his wicked arts."' 'The natives,' says Sir
George Grey, speaking of the Australians, 'do not believe that there is
such a thing as death from natural causes.' On the death of an
Australian native from disease, a kind of magical coroner's inquest is
held by the conjurers of the tribe, and the direction in which the wizard
lives who slew the dead man is ascertained by the movements of worms and
insects. The process is described at full length by Mr. Brough Smyth in
his Aborigines of Victoria (i. 98-102). Turning from Australia to
Hindustan, we find that the Puwarrees (according to Heber's narrative)
attribute all natural deaths to a supernatural cause--namely, witchcraft.
That is, the Puwarrees do not yet believe in the universality and
necessity of Death. He is an intruder brought by magic arts into our
living world. Again, in his Ethnology of Bengal (pp. 199, 200), Dalton
tells us that the Hos (an aboriginal non-Aryan race) are of the same
opinion as the Puwarrees. 'They hold that all disease in men or animals
is attributable to one of two causes: the wrath of some evil spirit or
the spell of some witch or sorcerer. These superstitions are common to
all classes of the population of this province.' In the New Hebrides
disease and death are caused, as Mr. Codrington found, by tamates, or
ghosts. {179} In New Caledonia, according to Erskine, death is the
result of witchcraft practised by members of a hostile tribe, for who
would be so wicked as to bewitch his fellow-tribesman? The Andaman
Islanders attribute all natural deaths to the supernatural influence of e
rem chaugala, or to jurn-win, two spirits of the jungle and the sea. The
death is avenged by the nearest relation of the deceased, who shoots
arrows at the invisible enemy. The negroes of Central Africa entertain
precisely similar ideas about the non-naturalness of death. Mr. Duff
Macdonald, in Africana, writes: 'Every man who dies what we call a
natural death is really killed by witches.' It is a far cry from the
Blantyre Mission in Africa to the Eskimo of the frozen North; but so
uniform is human nature in the lower races that the Eskimo precisely
agree, as far as theories of death go, with the Africans, the aborigines
of India, the Andaman Islanders, the Australians, and the rest. Dr. Rink
{180a} found that 'sickness or death coming about in an accidental manner
was always attributed to witchcraft, and it remains a question whether
death on the whole was not originally accounted for as resulting from
magic.' Pere Paul le Jeune, writing from Quebec in 1637, says of the Red
Men: 'Je n'en voy mourir quasi aucun, qui ne pense estre ensorcele.'
{180b} It is needless to show how these ideas survived into
civilisation. Bishop Jewell, denouncing witches before Queen Elizabeth,
was, so far, mentally on a level with the Eskimo and the Australian. The
familiar and voluminous records of trials for witchcraft, whether at
Salem or at Edinburgh, prove that all abnormal and unwonted deaths and
diseases, in animals or in men, were explained by our ancestors as the
results of supernatural mischief.
It has been made plain (and the proof might be enlarged to any extent)
that the savage does not regard death as 'God's great ordinance,'
universal and inevitable and natural. But, being curious and
inquisitive, he cannot help asking himself, 'How did this terrible
invader first enter a world where he now appears so often?' This is,
properly speaking, a scientific question; but the savage answers it, not
by collecting facts and generalising from them, but by inventing a myth.
That is his invariable habit. Does he want to know why this tree has red
berries, why that animal has brown stripes, why this bird utters its
peculiar cry, where fire came from, why a constellation is grouped in one
way or another, why his race of men differs from the whites--in all
these, and in all other intellectual perplexities, the savage invents a
story to solve the problem. Stories about the Origin of Death are,
therefore, among the commonest fruits of the savage imagination. As
those legends have been produced to meet the same want by persons in a
very similar mental condition, it inevitably follows that they all
resemble each other with considerable closeness. We need not conclude
that all the myths we are about to examine came from a single original
source, or were handed about--with flint arrow-heads, seeds, shells,
beads, and weapons--in the course of savage commerce. Borrowing of this
sort may--or, rather, must--explain many difficulties as to the diffusion
of some myths. But the myths with which we are concerned now, the myths
of the Origin of Death, might easily have been separately developed by
simple and ignorant men seeking to discover an answer to the same
problem.