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MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION 
 
a et 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 CUSTOM AND MYTH: Studies of Early Usage and 
 Belief. With rs Illustrations. Crown 8vo, 35. 6d. 
 
 MODERN MYTHOLOGY: a Reply to Professor 
 Max Miiller. 8vo, 9s. 
 
 MAGIC AND RELIGION. 8vo, tos. 6d. net. 
 
 THE MAKING OF RELIGION. Crown 8vo, 5s. 
 net. 
 
 THE SECRET OF THE TOTEM. 8vo, fos. 6d. 
 net. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., 
 
 LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA. 
 
MYTH, RITUAL AND 
 RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 
 ANDREW LANG 
 
 NEW IMPRESSION 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 NEW YORK, BOMBAY AND CALCUTTA 
 1913 
 
 All vights reserved. . 
 
° 
 9 
 
 printed, August, 1887 
 1 i 
 
 February 
 July, 1913. 
 
 st 
 
$n Memoriam. 
 
 W. Y. SELLAR. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACH + 4 - » A ‘ - “ - - xi 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Systems or MyrHotoay - - “ . . . F 1 
 
 Definitions of religion—Contradictory evidence—‘ Belief in spirit- 
 ual beings”—Objection to Mr. Tylor’s definition—Definition 
 as regards this argument—Problem: the contradiction between 
 religion and myth—Two human moods—Examples—Case of 
 Greece—Ancient mythologists—Criticism by Eusebius—Modern 
 mythological systems—Mr. Max Miiller—Mannhardt. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 New System PROPOSED - . . . : i . - 99 
 
 Chapter I. recapitulated—Proposal of a new method: Science of 
 comparative or historical study of man—Anticipated in part by 
 Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C.C.C., Cam- 
 bridge), and Mannhardt—Science of Tylor—Object of inquiry : 
 to find condition of human intellect in which marvels of myth 
 are parts of practical everyday belief—This is the savage state 
 —Savages described—The wild element of myth a survival from 
 the savage state—Advantages of this method—Partly’ accounts 
 for wide diffusion as well as origin of myths—Connected with 
 general theory of evolution—Puzzling example of myth of the 
 water-swallower—Professor Tiele’s criticism of the method— 
 Objections to method, and answer to these—See Appendix B. 
 
Vill CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PAGE 
 Tse Mentat CoNpITION OF SAVAGES—CONFUSION WITH 
 
 NaTURE—TOTEMISM - - : - - - . 2) he 
 
 The mental condition of savages the basis of the irrational element 
 in myth—Characteristics of that condition : (1) Confusion of all 
 things in an equality of presumed animation and intelligence ; 
 (2) Belief in sorcery ; (3) Spiritualism ; (4) Curiosity ; (5) Easy 
 credulity and mental indolence—The curiosity is satisfied, thanks 
 to the credulity, by myths in answer to all inquiries—Evidence 
 for this—Mr. Tylor’s opinion—Mr. Im Thurn—Jesuit mission-" 
 aries’ Relations—Examples of confusion between men, plants, 
 beasts and other natural objects—Reports of travellers—Evi- 
 dence from institution of totemism—Definition of totemism— 
 Totemism in Australia, Africa, America, the Oceanic Islands, 
 India, North Asia—Conclusions : Totemism being found so widely 
 distributed, is a proof of the existence of that savage mental con- 
 dition in which no line is drawn between men and the other 
 things in the world. This confusion is one of the characteristics 
 of myth in all races, 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THe Merntat ConpitTion oF SavaGEs—Maaic—MeEramor- 
 PHOSIS—METAPHYSIC—PSYCHOLOGY - : = od 
 
 Claims of sorcerers—Savage scientific speculation—Theory of 
 Causation—Credulity, except as to new religious ideas—‘* Post 
 hoc, ergo propter hoc”—Fundamental ideas of magic—Exam- 
 ples: incantations, ghosts, spirits—Evidence of rank and other 
 institutions in proof of confusions of mind exhibited in magical 
 beliefs, 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Naturs Myrus : : - - - . : - - 123 
 
 Savage fancy, curiosity and credulity illustrated in nature myths 
 —In these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general 
 animation of everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis 
 —Sun myths, Asian, Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, 
 Californian, Brazilian, Maori, Samoan—Moon myths, Australian, 
 Muysea, Mexican, Zulu, Macassar, Greenland, Piute, Malay— 
 
CONTENTS. 1X 
 
 PAGE 
 Thunder myths—Greek and Aryan sun and moon myths—Star 
 myths—Myths, savage and civilised, of animals, accounting for 
 their marks and habits—Examples of custom of claiming blood 
 kinship with lower animals—Myths of various plants and trees— 
 Myths of stones, and of metamorphosis into stones, Greek, Aus- 
 tralian and American—The whole natural philosophy of savages 
 expressed in myths, and survives in folk-lore and classical poetry ; 
 
 and legends of metamorphosis. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Non-ARYAN MyTHs OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF 
 MAN - - : - - ~ - ° - P «169 
 
 Confusions of myth—Various origins of man and of things—Myths 
 of Australia, Andaman-Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, 
 Zulus, Hurons, Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chal- 
 deans, Thlinkeets, Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians 
 —Similarity of ideas pervading all those peoples in various con- 
 ditions of society and culture. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 Inpo-ARYAN MytruHs—Sourcts OF EVIDENCE - ° : - 206 
 
 Authorities—Vedas—Brahmanas—Social condition of Vedic India 
 — Arts — Ranks — War — Vedic fetishism — Ancestor worship — 
 Date of Rig-Veda Hymns doubtful—Obscurity of the Hymns— 
 Difficulty of interpreting the real character of Veda—Not primi- 
 tive but sacerdotal—The moral purity not innocence but: re- 
 finement. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 InpIAN Mytas OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF 
 MaN - - - : . . : - - - « - 280 
 
 Comparison of Vedic and savage myths—The metaphysical Vedic 
 account of the beginning of things—Opposite and savage fable 
 of world made out of fragments of a man—Discussion of this 
 hymn—Absurdities of Brahmanas—Prajapati, a Vedic Unku- 
 lunkulu or Qat—Evolutionary myths—Marriage of heaven and 
 earth—Myths of Puranas, their savage parallels—Most savage 
 myths are repeated in Brahmanas. 
 
x CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 PAGE 
 GreEeK MytTHs OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD aND Man - 246 
 
 The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet}them in Homer 
 —Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features—The 
 hypothesis that many of these are savage survivals—Are there 
 other examples of such survival in Greek life and institutions? 
 —Greek opinion was constant that the race had been savage— 
 Illustrations of savage survival from Greek law of homicide, 
 from magic, religion, human sacrifice, religious art, traces of 
 totemism, and from the mysteries—Conclusion: that savage 
 survival may also be expected in Greek myths, 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 GREEK Cosmoconic Myrus - - - 4 ie - 280 
 
 Nature of the evidence—Traditions of origin of the world and man 
 —Homeric, Hesiodic and Orphic myths—Later evidence of 
 historians, dramatists, commentators—The Homeric story com- 
 paratively pure—The story in Hesiod, and its savage analogues 
 —The explanations of the myth of Cronus, modern and ancient 
 —The Orphic cosmogony—Phanes-and Prajapati—Greek myths 
 of the origin of man—Their savage ¢ nalogues. 
 
 CHAPTER XI, 
 
 SavacGE Divine Myrus - - : - - - : - 805 
 
 The origin of a belief in Gop beyond the ken of history and of 
 speculation—Sketch of conjectural theories—Two elements in 
 all beliefs, whether of backward or civilised races—The Mythical 
 and the eligious—These may be coeval, or either may be older 
 than the other—Difficulty of study—The current anthropological 
 theory—Stated objections to the theory—Gods and spirits— 
 Suggestion that savage religion is borrowed from Europeans— 
 Reply to Mr. Tylor’s arguments on this head—The morality of 
 savages, 
 
PREFACE TO NEW IMPRESSION. 
 
 WHEN this book first appeared (1886), the philological 
 school of interpretation of religion and myth, being 
 then still powerful in England, was criticised and 
 opposed by the author. In Science, as on the 
 Turkish throne of old, ‘‘ Amurath to Amurath suc- 
 ceeds’”’; the philological theories of religion and 
 myth have now yielded to anthropological methods. 
 The centre of the anthropological position was the 
 “ ghost theory’ of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the “‘ Ani- 
 mistic ’’ theory of Mr. E. R. Tylor, according to whom 
 the propitiation of ancestral and other spirits leads 
 to polytheism, and thence to monotheism. In the 
 second edition (1901) of this work the author argued 
 that the belief in a “‘ relatively supreme being,” an- 
 thropomorphic was as old as, and might be even 
 older, than animistic religion. This theory he ex- 
 hibited at greater length, and with a larger collection 
 of evidence, in his Making of Religion. 
 
 Since 1901, a great deal of fresh testimony as to 
 what Mr. Howitt styles the ‘‘ All Father ” in savage 
 and barbaric religions has accrued. As regards this 
 being in Africa, the reader may consult the volumes 
 
Xll PREFACE. 
 
 of the New Series of the Journal of the Anthropo- 
 logical Institute, which are full of African evidence, 
 not, as yet, discussed, to my knowledge, by any writer 
 on the History of Religion. As late as Man, for July, 
 1906, No. 66, Mr. Parkinson published interesting 
 Yoruba legends about Oleron, the maker and father 
 of men, and Oro, the Master of the Bull Roarer. 
 
 From Australia, we have Mr. Howitt’s account of 
 the All Father in his Native Tribes of South-East 
 Australia, with the account of the All Father of 
 the Central Australian tribe, the Kaitish, in North 
 Central Tribes of Australia, by Messrs. Spencer and 
 Gillen (1904), also The Huahlayr Tribe, by Mrs. 
 Langley Parker (1906). These masterly books are 
 indispensable to all students of the subject, while, in 
 Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s work cited, and in 
 their earlier Native Tribes of Central Australia, we 
 - are introduced to savages who offer an elaborate 
 animistic theory, and are said to show no traces of 
 the All Father belief. 
 
 The books of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen also pre- 
 sent much evidence as to a previously unknown form 
 of totemism, in which the totem is not hereditary, 
 and does not regulate marriage. This prevails 
 among the Arunta “nation,” and the Kaitish tribe. 
 In the opinion of Mr. Spencer (Report Australian 
 Association for Advancement of Sevence, 1904) and 
 of Mr. J. G. Frazer (Fortnightly Review, Septem- 
 ber, 1905), this is the earliest surviving form of 
 totemism, and Mr. Frazer suggests an animistic 
 origin for the institution. I have criticised these 
 views in The Secret of the Totem (1905), and pro-» 
 
PREFACE. xii 
 
 posed a different solution of the problem. (See also 
 ‘“‘ Primitive and Advanced Totemism ” in Journal of 
 the Anthropological Institute, July, 1906.) In the 
 works mentioned will be found references to other 
 sources of information as to these questions, which 
 are still sub judice. Mrs. Bates, who has been 
 studying the hitherto almost unknown tribes of 
 Western Australia, promises a book on their beliefs 
 and institutions, and Mr. N. W. Thomas is engaged 
 on a volume on Australian institutions. In this 
 place the author can only direct attention to these 
 novel sources, and to the promised third edition of 
 Mr. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. 
 
 ACL 
 
PREFACE TO NEW EDITION. 
 
 THE original edition of Myth, Ritual and Religion, 
 published in 1887, has long been out of print. In 
 revising the book I have brought it into line with 
 the ideas expressed in the second part of my Making 
 of Religion (1898) and have excised certain passages 
 which, as the book first appeared, were inconsistent 
 with its main thesis. In some cases the original 
 passages are retained in notes, to show the nature 
 of the development of the authors opinions. A 
 fragment or two of controversy has been deleted, and 
 chapters xi. and xii., on the religion of the lowest 
 races, have been entirely rewritten, on the strength 
 of more recent or earlier information lately acquired. 
 The gist of the book as it stands now and as it origin- 
 ally stood is contained in the following lines from the 
 preface of 1887: ‘‘ While the attempt is made to 
 show that the wilder features of myth survive from, 
 9r were borrowed from, or were imitated from the 
 ideas of people in the savage condition of thought, 
 the existence—even among savages—of comparatively 
 pure, if inarticulate, religious beliefs is insisted on 
 
XVI PREFACE. : 
 
 throughout”. To that opinion I adhere, and 1 trust 
 that it is now expressed with more consistency than 
 in the first edition. I have seen reason, more and 
 more, to doubt the validity of the “ ghost theory,” 
 or animistic hypothesis, as explanatory of the whole 
 fabric of religion ; and I present arguments against 
 Mr. Tylor’s contention that the higher conceptions 
 of savage faith are borrowed from missionaries.’ 
 It is very possible, however, that Mr. Tylor has 
 arguments more powerful than those contained in 
 his paper of 1892. For our information is not yet 
 adequate to a scientific theory of the Origin of 
 Religion, and probably never will be. Behind the 
 races whom we must regard as ‘ nearest the be- 
 ginning” are their unknown ancestors from a dateless 
 past, men as human as ourselves, but men concerning 
 whose psychical, mental and moral condition we can 
 only form conjectures. Among them religion arose, 
 -n circumstances of which we are necessarily ignorant. 
 Thus I only venture on a surmise as to the germ of 
 a faith ina Maker (if I am not to say “Creator Se 
 and Judge of men. But, as to whether the higher 
 religious belief, or the lower mythical stories came 
 first, we are at least certain that the Christian 
 conception of God, given pure, was presently en- 
 tangled, by the popular fancy of Europe, in new Mdar- 
 chen about the Deity, the Madonna, her Son, and 
 
 3 
 1 Tylor, ‘ Limits of Savage Religion.” Jowrnal of the Anthropological 
 Institute, vol. xxi. 
 
PREFACE. xvi 
 
 the Apostles. Here, beyond possibility of denial, 
 pure belief came first. fanciful legend was attached 
 after. Iam inclined to surmise that this has always 
 been the case, and, in the pages on the legend of 
 Zeus, I show the processes of degeneration, of 
 mythical accretions on a faith in a Heaven-God, in 
 action. That ‘‘the feeling of religious devotion’ 
 attests ‘high faculties”? in early man (such as are 
 often denied to men who ‘‘cannot count up to seven’’), 
 and that ‘‘ the same high mental faculties . . . would 
 infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers 
 remained poorly developed, to various strange supersti- 
 tions and customs,’ was the belief of Mr. Darwin.! 
 That is also my view, and I note that the lowest 
 pavages are not yet guilty of the very worst practices, 
 “sacrifice of human beings to a blood-loving God,” 
 and ordeals by poison and fire, to which Mr. Darwin 
 alludes. ‘‘The improvement of our science’ has 
 freed us from misdeeds which are unknown to the 
 Andamanese or the Australians. Thus there was, 
 as regards these points in morals, degeneracy from 
 savagery as society advanced, and I believe that there 
 was also degeneration in religion. ‘To say this is not 
 to hint at a theory of supernatural revelation to the 
 earliest men, a theory which I must, in lamine 
 disclaim. 
 
 In vol. ii. p. 19 occurs a reference, in a note, to 
 Mr. Hartland’s criticism of my ideas about Australian 
 
 1 Descent of Man, p. 68, 1871. 
 b 
 
XViil PREFACE. 
 
 gods as set forth in the Making of Religion. Mr. 
 Hartland, who kindly read the chapters on Australian 
 religion in this book, does not consider that my note 
 on p. 19 meets the point of his argument. As to the 
 Australians, I mean no more than that, among 
 endless low myths, some of them possess a belief in 
 a ‘maker of everything,” a primal being, still in 
 existence, watching conduct, punishing breaches of 
 his laws, and, in some cases, rewarding the good in 
 a future life. Of course these are the germs of a 
 sympathetic. religion, even if the being thus regarded 
 is mixed up with immoral or humorous contradictory 
 myths. My position is not harmed by such myths, 
 which occur in all old religions, and, in the middle 
 ages, new myths were attached to the sacred = 
 of Christianity in poetry and popular tales. 
 
 Thus, if there is nothing ‘‘ sacred” in a religion 
 because wild or wicked fables about the gods also 
 occur, there is nothing ‘‘sacred” in almost any 
 religion on earth. 
 
 Mr. Hartland’s point, however, seems to be that, 
 in the Making of Religion, I had selected certain 
 Australian beliefs as especially ‘“‘ sacred” and to be 
 distinguished from others, because they are inculcated 
 at the religious Mysteries of some tribes. His aim, 
 then, is to discover low, wild, immoral myths, incul- 
 cated at the Mysteries, and thus to destroy my line 
 drawn between religion on one hand and myth or 
 mere folk-lore on the other. Thus there is a being 
 named Daramulun, of whose rites, among the Coast 
 
PREFACE. xix 
 
 Murring, I condensed the account of Mr. Howitt.! 
 From a statement by Mr. Greenway? Mr. Hartland 
 learned that Daramulun’s name is said to mean “ leg 
 on one side” or “lame”. He, therefore, with fine 
 humour, speaks of Daramulun as “a creator with a — 
 game leg,” though when “ Baiame ” is derived by two 
 excellent linguists, Mr. Ridley and Mr. Greenway, 
 from Kamilaroi baza, “to make,” Mr. Hartland is by 
 no means so sure of the sense of the name. It 
 happens to be inconvenient to him! Let the names 
 mean what they may, Mr. Hartland finds, in an 
 obiter dictum of Mr. Howitt (before he was initiated), 
 that Daramulun is said to have “ died,” and that his 
 spirit is now aloft. Who says so, and where, we are 
 not informed,® and the question is important. 
 
 For the Wiraijuri, 1n thevr mysteries, tell a myth 
 of cannibal conduct of Daramulun’s, and of deceit and 
 failure of knowledge in Baiame.* Of this I was 
 unaware, or neglected it, for I explicitly said that I 
 followed Mr. Howitt’s account, where no such matter: 
 is mentioned. Mr. Howitt, in fact, described the 
 Mysteries of the Coast Murring, while the narrator 
 of the low myths, Mr. Matthews, described those of a 
 remote tribe, the Wiraijuri, with whom Daramulun 
 is not the chief, but a subordinate person. How Mr. 
 Matthews’ friends can at once hold that Daramulun 
 was ‘‘ destroyed” by Baiame (their chief deity), and 
 also that Daramulun’s voice is heard at their rites, I 
 
 lJ, A, t Ps xiii. pp. 440-459. 2 Thid., xx1; p. 294, 
 8 Ibid., xiii, p. 194. 4 Ibid., xxv. p. 297. 
 
XX PREFACE. 
 
 don’t know.!. Nor do I know why Mr. Hartland 
 takes the myth of a tribe where Daramulun is “the 
 evil spirit who rules the night,” ® and introduces it as 
 an argument against the belief of a distant tribe, 
 where, by Mr. Howitt’s account, Daramulun is not 
 an evil spirit, but “the master” of all, whose abode 
 is above the sky, and to whom are attributed powers 
 of omnipotence and omnipresence, or, at any rate, 
 the power ‘‘ to do anything and to go anywhere. . 
 To his direct ordinances are attributed the social and 
 moral laws of the community.”* This is not “an 
 evil spirit”! When Mr. Hartland goes for scandals 
 to a remote tribe of a different creed that he may 
 discredit the creed of the Coast Murring, he might as 
 well attribute to the Free Kirk “‘ the errors of Rome” 
 But Mr. Hartland does it!* Being “cunning of 
 fence”? he may reply that I also spoke loosely 
 of Wiraijuri and Coast Murring as, indifferently, 
 Daramulunites. I did, and I was wrong, and my 
 critic ought not to accept but to expose my error. 
 The Wiraijuri Daramulun, who was annihilated, yet 
 who is “an evil spirit that rules the night,” is not the 
 Murring guardian and founder of recognised ethics. — 
 But, in the Wiraijuri mysteries, the master, 
 Baiame, deceives the women as to the Mysteries! 
 Shocking to ws, but to deceive the women as to these 
 arcana, is, to the Australian mind in general, neces- 
 sary for the safety of the world. Moreover, we have 
 
 1J. A. I., May, 1895, p. 419. 2 Ibid. 
 8 Jbid., xiii. pp. 458, 459. 4 Folk-Lore, ix., No. iv., p. 299. 
 
PREFACE. XX] 
 
 heard of a lying spirit sent to deceive prophets in a 
 much higher creed. Finally, in a myth of the 
 Mystery of the Wiraijuri, Baiame is not omniscient. 
 Indeed, even civilised races cannot keep on the level 
 of these religious conceptions, and not to keep on that 
 level is—mythology. Apollo, in the hymn to Hermes, 
 sung on a sacred occasion, needs to ask an old vine- 
 dresser for intelligence. Hyperion “ sees all and hears 
 all,’ but needs to be informed, by his daughters, of 
 the slaughter of his kine. The Lord, in the Book of 
 Job, has to ask Satan, “ Whence comest thou?” 
 Now for the sake of dramatic effect, now from pure 
 inability to live on the level of his highest thought, 
 man mythologises and anthropomorphises, in Greece 
 or Israel, as in Australia. 
 
 It does not follow that there is ‘‘ nothing sacred”’ 
 in his religion. Mr.. Hartland offers me a case in 
 point. In Mrs. Langloh Parker's Australian Legend- 
 ary Tales (pp. 11, 94), are myths of low adventures 
 of Baiame. In her More Australian Legendary 
 Tales (pp® 84-99), is a very poetical and charming 
 aspect of the Baiame belief. Mr. Hartland says that 
 I will ‘‘seek to put” the first set of stories out of 
 court, as ‘‘a kind of joke with no sacredness about 
 it”. Not I, but the Noongahburrah tribe themselves 
 make this essential distinction. Mrs. Langloh Parker 
 says:' “The former series” (with the low Baiame 
 myths) ‘‘ were all such legends as are told to the black 
 
 1 More Legendary Tales, p. xv. 
 
XX1i PREFACE. 
 
 picaninnies ; among the present are some they would 
 not be allowed to hear, towching as they do on sacred 
 things, taboo to the young”. The blacks draw the 
 line which I am said to seek to draw. 
 
 In yet another case’ grotesque hunting adventures 
 of Baiame are told in the mysteries, and illustrated 
 by the sacred temporary representations in raised 
 earth. I did not know it; I merely followed Mr. 
 Howitt. ButI do not doubt it. My reply is, that 
 there was “something sacred” in Greek mysteries, 
 something purifying, ennobling, consoling. For this . 
 Lobeck has collected (and disparaged) the evidence 
 of Pindar, Sophocles, Cicero and many others, while 
 even Aristophanes, as Prof. Campbell remarks, says : 
 “We only have bright sun and cheerful life who have 
 been initiated and lived piously in regard to strangers 
 and to private citizens”. Security and peace of 
 mind, in this world and for the next, were, we know 
 not how, borne into the hearts of Pindar and 
 Sophocles in the Mysteries. Yet, if we may at all 
 trust the Fathers, there were scenes of debauchery, 
 as at the Mysteries of the Fijians (Wanga) there was 
 buffoonery (‘to amuse the boys,” Mr. Howitt says 
 of some Australian rites), the story of Baubo is 
 only one example, and, in other mysteries than the 
 Eleusinian, we know of mummeries in which an 
 
 LJ. A. J, EV; p. ALG. 
 
 2 Religion in Greek Literature, p. 259. It is to be regretted that the 
 learned professor gives no references, The Greek Mysteries are treated 
 later in this volume. 
 
PREFACE. XX1l1 
 
 absurd tale of Zeus is related in connection with an 
 oak log. Yet surely there was ‘‘something sacred” 
 in the faith of Zeus! Let us judge the Australians 
 as we judge Greeks. The precepts as to “speaking 
 the straightforward truth,” as to unselfishness, avoid- 
 ance of quarrels, of wrongs to ‘‘ unprotected women,” 
 of unnatural vices, are certainly communicated in the 
 Mysteries of some tribes, with, in another, know- 
 ledge of the name and nature of “Our Father,” 
 Munganngaur. That a Totemistic dance, or 
 medicine-dance of Emu hunting, is also displayed’ 
 at certain Mysteries of a given tribe, and that Baiame 
 is spoken of as the hero of this ballet, no more 
 deprives the Australian moral and religious teaching 
 (at the Mysteries) of sacred value, than the stupid 
 indecency whereby Baubo made Demeter laugh 
 destroys the sacredness of the Eleusinia, on which 
 Pindar, Sophocles and Cicero eloquently dwell. If 
 the Australian myste, at the most solemn moment 
 of their lives, are shown a dull or dirty divine ballet 
 action, what did Sophocles see, after taking a swim 
 with his pig? Many things far from edifying, yet 
 the sacred element of religious hope and faith was 
 also represented. So it is in Australia. 
 
 These studies ought to be comparative, otherwise 
 they are worthless. As Mr. Hartland calls Daramulun 
 “an eternal Creator with a game leg,” who “died,” 
 he may call Zeus an “eternal father, who swallowed 
 
 1See A Picture of Australia, 1829, p. 264. 
 
XX1V PREFACE. 
 
 his wife, lay with his mother and sister, made love as 
 a swan, and died, nay, was buried, in Crete”. I 
 do not think that Mr. Hartland would call Zeus 
 ‘a, ghost-god”” (my own phrase), or think that he 
 was scoring a point against me, if I spoke of the 
 sacred and ethical characteristics of the Zeus adored 
 by Eumeus in the Odyssey. He would not be so 
 humorous about Zeus, nor fall into an «gnoratio 
 elenchi. For my point never was that any Australian 
 tribe had a pure theistic conception unsoiled and un- 
 obliterated by myth and buffoonery. My argument 
 was that among their ideas is that of a superhuman 
 being, unceasing (if I may not say eternal), a maker 
 (if I may not say a Creator), a guardian of certain by 
 no means despicable ethics, which I never proclaimed 
 as supernormally inspired! Itis no reply to me to say 
 that, in or out of Mysteries, low fables about that 
 being are told, and buffooneries are enacted. For, 
 though I say that certain high ideas are taught in 
 Mysteries, I do not think I say that in Mysteries no 
 low myths are told. | 
 
 I take this opportunity, as the earliest, to apolo- 
 gise for an error in my Making of Religion concern- 
 ing a passage in the Primitiwe Culture of my friend 
 Mr. E. B. Tylor. Mr. Tylor quoted ' a passage from 
 Captain John Smith’s History of Virginia, as given 
 in Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 18-39, 1632. In this passage 
 no mention occurs of a Virginian deity named Ahone 
 
 1 Prim, Cult,, ii. p. 842, 
 
PREFACE. XXV 
 
 but ‘“‘Okee,” another and more truculent god, is 
 named. I observed that, if Mr. Tylor had used 
 Strachey’s Historie of Travaile (1612), he would 
 have found ‘“‘a slightly varying copy” of Smith’s 
 text of 1632, with Ahone as superior to Okee. I 
 added in a note (p. 253): ‘‘ There is a description of 
 Virginia, by W. Strachey, including Smith’s remarks 
 published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this 
 work with his own MS. in the British Museum.” 
 Here, as presently will be shown, I erred, in company 
 with Strachey’s editor of 1849, and with the writer 
 ‘ on Strachey in the Dictionary of National Bro- 
 graphy. What Mr. Tylor quoted from an edition 
 of Smith in 1632 had already appeared, in 1612, 
 in a book (Map of Virginia, with a description of 
 the Cowntrey) described on the title-page as ‘‘ written — 
 by Captain Smith,” though, in my opinion, Smith 
 may have had a collaborator. There is no evidence 
 whatever that Strachey had anything to do with 
 this book of 1612, in which there is no mention of 
 Ahone. Mr. Arber dates Strachey’s own MS. (in 
 which Ahone occurs) as of 1610-1615.1 I myself, 
 for reasons presently to be alleged, date the MS. 
 mainly in 1611-1612. If Mr. Arber and I are right, 
 Strachey must have had access to Smith’s MS. 
 before it was published vn 1612, and we shall see 
 how he used it. My point here is that Strachey 
 mentioned Ahone (in MS.) before Smith’s book of 
 
 1 Arber’s Smith, p. exxxiii, 
 
XXV1 PREFACE. 
 
 1612 was published. This could not be gathered 
 from the dedication to Bacon prefixed to Strachey’s 
 MS., for that dedication cannot be earlier that 1618.1 
 I now ask leave to discuss the evidence for an early 
 pre-Christian belief in a primal Creator, held by the 
 Indian tribes from Plymouth, in New England, to 
 Roanoke Island, off Southern Virginia. 
 
 THE Gop AHONE. 
 
 An insertion by a manifest plagiary into the work 
 of a detected liar is not, usually, good evidence. 
 Yet this is all the evidence, it may be urged, which 
 we have for the existence of a belief, in early Virginia, 
 as to a good Creator, named Ahone. The matter 
 stands thus: In 1607-1609 the famed Captain John 
 Smith endured and achieved in Virginia sufferings 
 and adventures. In 1608 he sent to the Council at 
 home a MS. map and description of the colony. In 
 1609 he returned to England (October). In May, 
 1610, William Strachey, gent., arrived in Virginia, 
 where he was ‘‘ secretary of state’’ to Lord De la 
 Warr. In 1612 Strachey and Smith were both in 
 England. In that year Barnes of Oxford published 
 A Map of Virginia, with a deseruption, etc., 
 “written by Captain Smith,”’ according to the title- 
 page. There was annexed a compilation from various 
 sources, edited by ‘‘ W. S.,” that is, not William 
 Strachey, but Dr. William Symonds. In the same 
 year, 1612, or in 1611, William Strachey wrote his 
 
 1 Hakluyt Society, Strachey, 1849, pp. xxi., xxii 
 
 eT 
 
PREFACE. XXV11 
 
 Historie of Travarle into Virginia Britannia, at least 
 as far as page 124 of the Hakluyt edition of 1849." 
 
 If Strachey, who went out with Lord De la Warr 
 as secretary in 1610, returned with him (as is likely), 
 he sailed for England on 28th March, 1611. In that 
 case, he was in England in 1611, and the passages 
 cited leave it dubious whether he wrote his book in 
 1611, 1612, or in both years.” 
 
 Strachey embodies in his work considerable pieces 
 of Smith’s Map of Virginia and Description, 
 written in 1608, and published in 1612. He 
 continually deserts Smith, however, adding more 
 recent information, reflections and references to the 
 ancient classics, with allusions to his own travels in 
 the Levant. His glossary is much more extensive 
 than Smith’s, and he inserts a native song of triumph 
 over the English in the original? Now, when 
 Strachey comes to the religion of the natives* he 
 gives eighteen pages (much of it verbiage) to five 
 of Smith’s.5 What Smith (1612) says of their chief 
 
 1For proof see p. 24, third line from foot of page, where 1612 is indi 
 cated. Again, see p. 98, line 5, where ‘last year” is dated as ‘‘1610, 
 about Christmas,” which would put Strachey’s work at this point as 
 actually of 1611; prior, that is, to Smith’s publication. Again, p. 124, 
 ‘‘this last year, myself being at the Falls” (of the James River), ‘‘I found 
 in an Indian house certain clawes . . . which I brought away and intc 
 England ’’. 
 
 2Mr. Arber dates the MS. ‘‘ 1610-1615,” and attributes to Strachey 
 Laws for Virginia, 1612. 
 
 3Strachey, pp. 79-80. He may have got the song from Kemps or 
 Machumps, friendly natives. 
 
 4Pp. 82-100. 5 Arber, pp. 74-79 
 
XXVIll 
 god I quote, setting 
 beside it. 
 
 SmitH (Published, 1612). 
 
 But their chiefe God 
 they worship is the Diuell. 
 Him they call Oke, and 
 serue him more of feare 
 than loue. They say they 
 haue conference with him, 
 and fashion themselues 
 as neare to his shape as 
 they can imagine. In 
 their Temples, they have 
 his image euile favouredly 
 carved, and then painted, 
 and adorned with chaines, 
 copper, and beades; and 
 couered with a skin, in 
 such manner as the de- 
 formity may well suit with 
 such a God. By him is 
 commonly the sepulcher 
 of their Kings. 
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Strachey’s version (1611-1612) 
 
 SrracHEy (Written, 1611-12). 
 
 But their chief god they worship is 
 no other, indeed, then the divell, 
 whome they make presentments of, 
 and shadow under the forme of an 
 idoll, which they entitle Okeus, and 
 whome they worship as the Romans 
 did their hurtful god Vejovis, more for 
 feare of harme then for hope of any 
 good; they saie they have conference 
 with him, and fashion themselves in 
 their disguisments as neere to his shape 
 as they can imagyn. In every territory 
 of a weroance is a temple and a priest, 
 peradventure two or thrie; yet happie 
 doth that weroance accompt himself 
 who can detayne with him a Quiyough- 
 quisock, of the best, grave, lucky, well 
 instructed in their misteryes, and be- 
 loved of their god; and such a one is 
 noe lesse honoured then was Dianae’s 
 priest at Ephesus, for whome they 
 have their more private temples, 
 
 with oratories and chauncells therein, according as is the dignity 
 and reverence of the Quiyough-quisock, which the weroance wilbe 
 at charge to build upon purpose, sometyme twenty foote broad and 
 a hundred in length, fashioned arbour wyse after their buylding, 
 having comonly the dore opening into the east, and at the west end 
 a spence or chauncell from the body of the temple, with hollow 
 wyndings and pillers, whereon stand divers black imagies, fashioned 
 to the shoulders, with their faces looking down the church, and where 
 within their weroances, upon a kind of biere of reedes, lye buryed; 
 and under them, apart, in a vault low in the ground (as a more 
 secrett thing), vailed with a matt, sitts their Okeus, an image ill- 
 favouredly carved, all black dressed, with chaynes of perle, the 
 presentment and figure of that god (say the priests unto the laity, and 
 who religiously believe what the priests saie) which doth them all the 
 
 a 
 
PREFACE. XX1x 
 
 harme they suffer, be yt in their bodies or goods, within doores or 
 abroad ; and true’ yt is many of them are dwers tymes (especyally 
 offendors) shrewdly scratched as they walke alone im the woods, yt 
 may well be by the subtyle spirit, the malitious enemy to mankind, 
 whome, therefore, to pacefie and worke to doe them good (at least no 
 harme) the priests tell them they must do these and these sacrifices 
 unto (them] of these and these things, and thus and thus often, by 
 which meanes not only their owne children, but strawngers, are some- 
 times sacrificed unto him: whilst the great god (the priests tell them) 
 who governes all the world, and makes the sun to shine, creating the 
 moone and stars his companyons, great powers, and which dwell with 
 him, and by whose virtues and influences the under earth is tempered, 
 and brings forth her frwiets according to her seasons, they calling 
 Ahone; the good and peaceable god requires no such dutyes, nor 
 needes be sacrificed unto, for he intendeth all good unto them, and 
 will doe noe harme, only the displeased Okeus, looking into all men’s 
 accions, and examining the same according to the severe scale of 
 justice, punisheth them with sicknesse, beats them,.and strikes their 
 ripe corn with blastings, stormes, and thunder clapps, sturrs up warre, 
 and makes their women falce unto them. Such is the misery and 
 thraldome under which Sathan hath bound these wretched mis- 
 creanis. 
 
 I began by calling Strachey a plagiary. The 
 reader will now observe that he gives far more than 
 he takes. For example, his account of the temples 
 is much more full than that of Smith, and he adds 
 to Smith’s version the character and being of Ahone, 
 as what ‘‘the priests tell them”. I submit, there- 
 fore, that Strachey’s additions, if valid for temples, 
 are not discredited for Ahone, merely because they 
 are inserted in the framework of Smith. As far as 
 I understand the matter, Smith’s Map of Virginia 
 (1612) is an amended copy, with additions, by Smith 
 or another writer of that description, which he sent 
 home to the Council of Virginia, in November, 1608." 
 
 1 Arber, p. 444. 
 
XXX PREFACE. 
 
 To the book of 1612 was added a portion of ‘‘ Rela- 
 tions” by different hands, edited by W. S., namely, 
 Dr. Symonds. Strachey’s editor, in 1849, regarded 
 W. 5S. as Strachey, and supposed that Strachey was 
 the real author of Smith’s Map of Virginia, so that, 
 in his Historie of Travaile, Strachey merely took 
 back his own. He did not take back his own; he 
 made use of Smith’s MS., not yet published, if Mr. 
 Arber and I rightly date Strachey’s MS. at 1610-15, 
 or 1611-12. Why Strachey acted thus it is possible 
 to conjecture. As a scholar well acquainted with 
 Virginia, and as Secretary for the Colony, he would 
 have access to Smith’s MS. of 1608 among the 
 papers of the Council, before its publication. 
 Smith professes himself ‘‘no scholer’’.! On the 
 other hand, Strachey likes to show off his Latin and 
 Greek. He has a curious, if inaccurate, knowledge 
 of esoteric Greek and Roman religious antiquities, 
 and in writing of religion aims at a comparative 
 method. Strachey, however, took the trouble to 
 copy bits of Smith into his own larger work, which 
 he never gave to the printers. 
 
 Now as to Ahone. Itsuits my argument to suppose 
 that Strachey’s account is no less genuine than his 
 description of the temples (illustrated by a picture 
 by John White, who had been in Virginia in 1589), 
 and the account of the Great Hare of American 
 mythology.? This view of a Virginian Creator, ‘‘ our 
 
 4 Arber, p. 442, 28trachey, p. 98-100, 
 
PREFACE. : XXxXi 
 
 chief god” “‘ who takes upon him this shape of a 
 hare,’ was got, says Strachey, ‘‘last year, 1610,” 
 from a brother of the Potomac King, by a boy named 
 Spilman, who says that Smith ‘‘sold” him to 
 Powhattan.1 In his own brief narrative Spelman 
 (or Spilman) says nothing about the Cosmogonic 
 Legend of the Great Hare. The story came up when 
 Captain Argoll was telling Powhattan’s brother the 
 account of creation in Genesis (1610). 
 
 Now Strachey’s Great Hare is accepted by myth- 
 ologists, while Ahone is regarded with suspicion. 
 Ahone does not happen to suit anthropological ideas, 
 the Hare suits them rather better. Moreover, and 
 more important, there is abundant corroborative evi- 
 dence for Oke and for the Hare, Michabo, who, says 
 Dr. Brinton, ‘‘ was originally the highest divinity 
 recognised by them, powerful and beneficent beyond 
 all others, maker of the heavens and the world,”’ just: 
 like Ahone, in fact. And Dr. Brinton instructs us that 
 Michabo originally meant.not Great Hare, but ‘“‘ the 
 spirit of light”. Thus, originally, the Red Men adored 
 “The Spirit of Light, maker of the heavens and the 
 world”. Strachey claims no more than this for 
 Ahone. Now, of course, Dr. Brinton may be right. 
 But I have already expressed my extreme distrust of 
 the philological processes by which he extracts ‘‘ The 
 Great Light, spirit of light,” from Michabo, ‘‘beyond 
 a doubt!” In my poor opinion, whatever claims 
 
 1 ‘* Spilman’s Narrative,’’ Arber, cx.-exiv. 
 2 Myths of the New World, p. 178. 
 
XXXxli PREFACE. 
 
 Michabo may have as an unique creator of earth and 
 heaven—‘‘God is Light,”’—he owes his mythical 
 aspect as a Hare to something other than an uncon- 
 scious pun. In any case, according to Dr. Brinton, 
 
 Michabo, regarded as a creator, is equivalent to — 
 
 Strachey’s Ahone. This amount of corroboration, 
 
 valeat quantum, I may claim, from the Potomac 
 
 Indians, for the belief in Ahone on the James River. 
 Dr. Brinton is notoriously not a believer in American 
 ** monotheism ”’. 
 
 The opponents of the authenticity of Ahone, 
 however, will certainly argue: ‘‘ For Oke, or Oki, as a 
 redoubted being or spirit, or general name for such 
 personages, we have plentiful evidence, corroborating 
 that of Smith. But what evidence as to Ahone 
 corroborates that of Strachey ?”’ I must confess that 
 I have no explicit corroborative evidence for Ahone, 
 but then I have no accessible library of early books on 
 Virginia. Now it is clear that if I found and pro- 
 duced evidence for Ahone as late as 1625, I would be 
 met at once with the retort that, between 1610 and 
 1625, Christian ideas had contaminated the native 
 beliefs. Thus if I find Ahone, or a deity of like 
 attributes, after a very early date, he is of no use for 
 my purpose. Nor do I much expect to find him. 
 But do we find Winslow’s Massachusetts God, 
 Kiehtan, named after 1622 (‘‘I only ask for informa- 
 tion ’’), and if we don’t, does that prevent Mr. Tylor 
 
 1 Myths of the New World, p. 53. 
 
 a eS ee ee ee tee on ce 
 
PREFACE. XXXII 
 
 from citing Kiehtan, with apparent reliance on the 
 evidence ?? 
 
 Again, Ahone, though primal and creative, is, by 
 Strachey’s account, a sleeping partner. He has no 
 sacrifice, and no temple or idol is recorded. There- 
 fore the belief in Ahone could only be discovered as 
 a result of inquiry, whereas figures of Oke or Okeus, 
 and his services, were common and conspicuous.” 
 _ As to Oke, I cannot quite understand Mr. Tylor’s 
 attitude. Summarising Lafitau, a late writer of 
 1724, Mr. Tylor writes: ‘“‘ The whole class of spirits 
 or demons, known to the Caribs by the name of 
 cemi, in Algonkin as manitu, in Huron as oki, 
 Lafitau now spells with capital letters, and converts 
 them each into a supreme being’’.® Yet in Primitive 
 Culture, i1., 342, 1891, Mr. Tylor had cited Smith’s 
 Okee (with a capital letter) as the “‘ chief god” of 
 the Virginians in 1612. How can Lafitau be said 
 to have elevated oki into Oki, and so to have made 
 a god out of ‘‘a class of spirits or demons,’ in 1724, 
 when Mr. Tylor had already cited Smith’s Okee, 
 with a capital letter and as a ‘“‘ chief god,” in 1612? 
 Smith, rebuked for the same by Mr. Tylor, had even 
 identified Okee with the devil. Lafitau certainly 
 did not begin this erroneous view of Oki as a ‘‘ chief 
 god” among the Virginians. If I cannot to-day 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, ii. p. 342. 
 2 Okee’s image, as early as 1607, was borne into battle against Smith, 
 who captured the god (Arber, p. 393). Ahone was not thus en évidence. 
 3 Journal of Anthrop. Inst., Feb., 1892, pp. 285, 286. 
 G 
 
XXXIV PREFACE. 
 
 produce corroboration for a god named Ahone, I can 
 at least show that, from the north of New England 
 to the south of Virginia, there is early evidence, 
 cited by Mr. Tylor, for a belief in a primal creative 
 being, closely analogous to Ahone. And this evi- 
 dence, I think, distinctly proves that such a being as 
 Ahone was within the capacity of the Indians in 
 these latitudes. Mr. Tylor must have thought in 
 1891 that the natives were competent to a belief in a 
 supreme deity, for he said, ‘‘ Another famous native 
 American name for the supreme deity is Oki”’.!_ In the 
 essay of 1892, however, Oki does not appear to exist 
 as a god’s name till 1724. We may now, for earlier 
 evidence, turn to Master Thomas Heriot, ‘‘ that 
 learned mathematician” “‘ who spoke the Indian lan- 
 guage,’ and was with the company which abandoned 
 Virginia on 18th June, 1586. They ranged 130 miles 
 north and 1380 miles north-west of Roanoke Island, 
 which brings them into the neighbourhood of Smith’s 
 and Strachey’s country. Heriot writes as to the 
 native creeds: ‘‘ They believe that there are many 
 gods which they call Mantoac, but of different sorts 
 and degrees. Also that there is one chiefe God that 
 hath beene from all eternitie, who, as they say, when 
 - he purposed first to make the world, made first other 
 gods of a principall order, to be as instruments to be 
 used in the Creation and Government to follow, and 
 after the Sunne, Moone and Starres as pettie gods, 
 
 1 Prim, Cult., ii. p. 342, 
 
PREFACE. XXXV 
 
 and the instruments of the other order more prin- 
 cipall. . . . They thinke that all the gods are of 
 humane shape,” and represent them by anthropo- 
 morphic idols. An idol, or image, ‘‘ Kewasa’”’ (the 
 plural is ‘‘ Kewasowok”’), is placed in the temples, 
 “‘ where they worship, pray and make many offerings”. 
 Good souls go to be happy with the gods, the bad 
 burn in Popogusso, a great pit, ‘‘ where the sun 
 sets’. The evidence for this theory of a future 
 life, as usual, is that of men who died and revived 
 again, a story found in a score of widely separated 
 regions, down to our day, when the death, revival 
 and revelation occurred to the founder of the Ara- 
 pahoe new religion of the Ghost Dance. The belief 
 ‘‘works for righteousness’’. ‘‘ The common sort 
 . . . have great care to avoyde torment after death, 
 and to enjoy blesse,” also they have ‘‘ great respect 
 to their Governors ”’. | 
 This belief in a chief god ‘‘ from all eternitie ”’ 
 (that is, of unexplained origin), may not be con- 
 venient to some speculators, but it exactly corro- 
 borates Strachey’s account of Ahone as creator with 
 subordinates. The evidence is of 1586 (twenty-six 
 years before Strachey), and, like Strachey, Heriot 
 attributes the whole scheme of belief to ‘ the 
 priestes’’. ‘‘ This is the sum of their religion, which 
 I learned by having speciall familiaritie with some of 
 their priests.’”’ I see no escape from the conclusion 
 
 1 According to Strachey, Heriot could speak the native language, 
 
XXXVI PREFACE. 
 
 that the Virginians believed as Heriot says they did, 
 except the device of alleging that they promptly 
 borrowed some of Heriot’s ideas and maintained 
 that these ideas had ever been their own. Heriot 
 certainly did not recognise the identity. ‘‘ Through 
 conversing with us they were brought into great 
 doubts of their owne [religion], and no small ad- 
 miration of ours; of which many desired to learne 
 more than we had the meanes for want of utterance 
 in their language to expresse.’”’ So Heriot could not 
 be subtle in the native tongue. Heriot did what he 
 could to convert them: ‘‘I did my best to make His 
 immortall glory knowne”’. His efforts were chiefly 
 successful by virtue of the savage admiration of our 
 guns, mathematical instruments, and so forth. These 
 sources of an awakened interest in Christianity would 
 vanish with the total destruction and discomfiture of 
 the colony, unless a few captives, later massacred, 
 taught our religion to the natives.? 
 
 I shall cite another early example of a New Eng- 
 land deity akin to Ahone, with a deputy, a friend of 
 sorcerers, like Okee. This account is in Smith’s 
 General History of New England, 1606-1624. We 
 
 sent out a colony in 1607; ‘‘ they all returned in 
 the yeere 1608,” esteeming the country “a cold, 
 barren, mountainous rocky desart’’. I am apt to 
 
 believe that they did not plant the fructifying seeds 
 of grace among the natives in 1607-1608. But the 
 
 1 Heriot's Narrative, pp. 37-89. Quaritch, London, 1898. 
 
PREFACE. XXXVI 
 
 missionary efforts of French traders may, of course, 
 have been blessed; nor can I deny that a yellow- 
 haired man, whose corpse was found in 1620 with 
 some objects of iron, may have converted the natives 
 to such beliefs as they possessed. We are told, 
 however, that these tenets were of ancestral an- 
 tiquity. I cite E. Winslow, as edited by Smith 
 (1623-24) :— 
 
 ‘“‘ Those where is this Plantation [New Plymouth] 
 say Kiehtan* made all the other Gods: also one 
 man and one woman, and with them all mankinde, 
 but how they became so dispersed they know not. 
 They say that at first there was no king but Kiehtan, 
 that dwelleth far westerly above the heavens, whither 
 all good men go when they die, and have plentie of 
 all things. ‘The bad go thither also and knock at 
 the door, but [‘the door is shut’] he bids them go 
 wander in endless want and misery, for they shall 
 not stay there. They never saw Kiehtan,? but they 
 hold it a great charge and dutie that one race teach 
 
 1JIn 1873 Mr. Tylor regarded Dr. Brinton’s etymology of Kiehtan as 
 = Kittanitowit = “Great Living Spirit,’’ as “ plausible”. In his edition 
 of 1891 he omits this etymology. Personally I entirely distrust the philo- 
 logical theories of the original sense of old divine names as a general rule. 
 
 2««They never saw Kiehtan.” So, about 1854, “‘The common answer 
 of intelligent black fellows on the Barwon when asked if they know Baiame 
 
 . is this: ‘Kamil zaia zammi Baiame, zaia winuzgulda’; ‘I have not 
 seen Baiame, I have heard or perceived him’. If asked who made the sky, 
 the earth, the animals and man, they always answer ‘ Baiame’.” Dara- 
 mulun, according to the same authority in Lang’s Queensland, was the 
 familiar of sorcerers, and appeared as a serpent. This answers, as I show, 
 to Hobamock, the subordinate power to Kiehtan in New England, and to 
 Okee, the familiar of sorcerers in Virginia, (Ridley, J. A. J., 1872, p. 277.) 
 
 e 
 
XXXVIil PREFACE, 
 
 another ; and to him they make feasts and cry and 
 sing for plenty and victory, or anything that is good. 
 
 “They have another Power they call Hobamock, 
 which we conceive the Devill, and upon him they call 
 to cure their wounds and diseases; when they are 
 curable he persuades them he sent them, because 
 they have displeased him; but, if they be mortal, 
 then he saith, ‘ Kiehtan sent them’; which makes 
 them never call on him in their sickness. They say 
 this Hobamock appears to them sometimes like a 
 man, a deer, or an eagle, but most commonly like a 
 snake ; not to all but to their Powahs to cure diseases, 
 and Undeses . . . and these are such as conjure in 
 Virginia, and cause the people to do what they list.” 
 Winslow (or rather Smith editing Winslow here), 
 had already said, “‘ They believe, as do the Virginians, 
 of many divine powers, yet of one above all the rest, as 
 the Southern Virginians call their chief god Kewassa 
 [an error], and that we now inhabit Oke. . . . The 
 Massachusetts call their great god Kiehtan.”? 
 
 Here, then, in Heriot (1586), Strachey (1611-12) 
 and Winslow (1622), we find fairly harmonious 
 accounts of a polydemonism with a chief, primal, 
 creative being above and behind it; a being unnamed, 
 and Ahone and Kiehtan. 
 
 Is all this invention? Or was all this derived 
 from Europeans before 1586, and, if so, from what 
 Kuropeans? Mr. Tylor, in 1873, wrote, ‘“ After due 
 
 1 Arber, pp. 767, 768, 
 
PREFACE. XXX1X 
 
 allowance made for misrendering of savage answers, 
 and importation of white men’s thoughts, it can 
 hardly be judged that a divine being, whose charac- 
 teristics are often so unlike what European intercourse 
 would have suggested, and who is heard of by such 
 early explorers among such distant tribes, could be a 
 deity of foreign origin’. Now, he ‘‘can hardly be 
 altogether a deity of foreign origin’’.1 I agree with 
 Mr. Tylor’s earlier statement. In my opinion Ahone 
 —Okeus, Kiehtan—Hobamock, correspond, the first 
 pair to the usually unseen Australian Baiame (a 
 crystal or hypnotic vision of Baiame scarcely counts), 
 while the second pair, Okeus and Hobamock, answer 
 to the Australian familiars of sorcerers, Koin and 
 Brewin; the American ‘‘ Powers” being those of 
 peoples on a higher level of culture. Like Tharra- 
 mulun where Baiame is supreme, Hobamock appears 
 as a snake (Asclepius). | 
 
 For all these reasons I am inclined to accept 
 Strachey’s Ahone as a veritable element in Virginian 
 belief. Without temple or service, such a being was 
 not conspicuous, like Okee and other gods which had 
 idols and sacrifices. 
 
 As far as I see, Strachey has no theory to serve by 
 inventing Ahone. He asks how any races ‘‘if de- 
 scended from the people of the first creation, should 
 maintain so general and gross a defection from the 
 true knowledge of God”’. He is reduced to suppose 
 
 ' Prim, Cult., ii. 340, 1873, 1892, 
 
x] PREFACE. 
 
 that, as descendants of Ham, they inherit ‘ the 
 ignorance of true godliness” (p. 45). The children 
 of Shem and Japheth alone ‘‘retained, until the coming 
 of the Messias, the only knowledge of the eternal and 
 never-changing Trinity”. The Virginians, on the 
 other hand, fell heir to the ignorance, and “ fearful 
 and superstitious instinct of nature” of Ham (p. 40). 
 Ahone, therefore, is not invented by Strachey to 
 bolster up a theory (held by Strachey), of an inherited 
 revelation, or of a sensus numinis which could not 
 go wrong. Unless a proof be given that Strachey 
 had a theory, or any other purpose, to serve by 
 inventing Ahone, I cannot at present come into 
 the opinion that he gratuitously fabled, though he 
 ‘may have unconsciously exaggerated. 
 
 What were Strachey’s sources? He was for nine 
 months, if not more, in the colony: he had travelled 
 at least 115 miles up the James River, he occasionally 
 suggests modifications of Smith’s map, he refers to 
 Smith’s adventures, and his glossary is very much 
 larger than Smith’s; its accuracy I leave to American 
 linguists. Such a witness, despite his admitted 
 use of Smith’s text (f it is really all by Smith 
 throughout) is not to be despised, and he is not 
 despised in America.’ Strachey, it is true, had not, 
 
 1 Arber, cxvii. Strachey mentions that (before his arrival in Virginia) 
 Pocahontas turned cart-wheels, naked, in Jamestown, being then under 
 twelve, and not yet wearing theapron. Smith says she was ten in 1608, but 
 does not mention the cart-wheels. Later, he found it convenient to put her 
 
 age at twelve or thirteen in 1608. Most American scholars, such as Mr 
 Adams, entirely distrust the romantic later narratives of Smith, 
 
PREFACE. xli 
 
 like Smith, been captured by Indians and either 
 treated with perfect kindness and consideration (as 
 Smith reported at the time), or tied to a tree and 
 threatened with arrows, and laid out to have his head 
 knocked in with a stone ; as he alleged sixteen years 
 later! Strachey, not being captured, did not owe 
 his release (1) to the magnanimity of Powhattan, (2) 
 to his own ingenious lies, (8) to the intercession of 
 Pocahontas, as Smith, and his friends for him, at 
 various dates inconsistently declared. Smith cer- 
 tainly saw more of the natives at home: Strachey 
 brought a more studious mind to what he could learn 
 of their customs and ideas; and is not a convicted 
 braggart. I conjecture that one of Strachey’s sources 
 was a native named Kemps. Smith had seized 
 Kemps and Kinsock in 1609. Unknown authorities 
 (Powell? and Todkill?) represent these two savages’ 
 as ‘‘the most exact villaines in the country’’.' They 
 were made to labour in fetters, then were set at liberty, 
 but ‘‘ little desired it”. Some “ souldiers’’ ran away 
 to the liberated Kemps, who brought them back to 
 Smith. Why Kemps and his friend are called ‘‘ two 
 of the most exact villains in the country ’”’ does not 
 appear. Kemps died ‘‘of the surveye”’ (scurvey, 
 probably) at Jamestown, in 1610-11. He was much 
 made of by Lord De la Warr, ‘‘ could speak a pretty 
 deal of our English, and came orderly to church 
 every day to prayers”. He gave Strachey the names 
 
 1 The Proceedings, ete., by W. S. Arber, p. 151. 
 2 Thid., p. 155, 3 Ibid., p. 157. 
 
xl PREFACE. 
 
 of Powhattan’s wives, and told him, truly or not, that 
 Pocahontas was married, about 1610, to an Indian 
 named Kocoum.’ I offer the guess that Kemps and 
 Machumps, who came and went from Pocahontas, 
 and recited an Indian prayer which Strachey neglected 
 to copy out, may have been among Strachey’s 
 authorities. I shall, of course, be told that Kemps 
 picked up Ahone at church. This did not strike 
 Strachey as being the fact; he had no opinion of the 
 creed in which Ahone was a factor, ‘‘ the misery and 
 thraldome under which Sathan has bound these 
 wretched miscreants’’. According to Strachey, the 
 priests, far from borrowing any part of our faith, 
 ‘‘feare and tremble lest the knowledge of God, and 
 of our Saviour Jesus Christ be taught in these 
 parts’. 
 
 Strachey is therefore for putting down the priests, 
 and, like Smith (indeed here borrowing from Smith), 
 accuses them of sacrificing children. 'To Smith’s 
 statement that such a rite was worked at Quiyough- 
 cohanock, Strachey adds that Sir George Percy (who 
 was with Smith) ‘‘ was at, and observed ”’ a similar 
 mystery at Kecoughtan. It is plain that the rite was 
 not a sacrifice, but a Bora, or initiation, and the 
 parallel of the Spartan flogging of boys, with the 
 retreat of the boys and their instructors, is very close, 
 and, of course, unnoted by classical scholars except 
 Mr. Frazer. Strachey ends with the critical remark 
 
 ‘Strachey, pp. 54, 55, 
 
PREFACE. x] 
 
 that we shall not know all the certainty of the religion 
 and mysteries till we can capture some of the priests, 
 or Quiyough-quisocks. 
 
 Students who have access to a good library of 
 Americana may do more to elucidate Ahone. I regard 
 him as in a line with Kiehtan and the God spoken 
 of by Heriot, and do not believe (1) that Strachey 
 lied; (2) that natives deceived Strachey; (8) that 
 Ahone was borrowed from “the God of Captain 
 Smith ”’, 
 
MYTH, RITUAL, AND RELIGION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SYSTEMS OF MYTHOLOGY. 
 
 Definitions of religion—Contradictory evidence—‘ Belief in spiritual 
 beings ”—Objection to Mr. Tylor’s definition—Definition as regards 
 this argument—Problem: the contradiction between religion and 
 myth—Two human moods—Examples—Case of Greece—Ancient 
 mythologists—Criticism by Eusebius—Modern mythological systems— 
 Mr. Max Miiller—Mannhardt. 
 
 TuE word “ Religion” may be, and has been, employed 
 in many different senses, and with a perplexing width 
 of significance. No attempt to define the word is 
 likely to be quite satisfactory, but almost any defini- 
 tion may serve the purpose of an argument, if the 
 writer who employs it states his meaning frankly and 
 adheres to it steadily. An example of the confusions 
 which may arise from the use of the term “ religion” 
 is familiar to students. Dr. J. D. Lang wrote con- 
 cerning the native races of Australia: “They have 
 nothing whatever of the character of religion, or of 
 religious observances, to distinguish them from the 
 beasts that perish”. Yet in the same book Dr. Lang 
 published evidence assigning to the natives belief 
 VOL. I. 1 
 
2 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 in “Turramullun, the chief of demons, who is the 
 author of disease, mischief and wisdom”! The be- 
 lief in a superhuman author of “ disease, mischief 
 and wisdom” is certainly a religious belief not con- 
 spicuously held by “the beasts”; yet all religion was 
 denied to the Australians by the very author who 
 prints (in however erroneous a style) an account of 
 part of their creed. This writer merely inherited the 
 old missionary habit of speaking abott the god of a 
 non-Christian people as a “demon” or an “evil spirit”. 
 
 Dr. Lang’s negative opinion was contradicted in 
 testimony published by himself, an appendix by the 
 Rev. Mr. Ridley, containing evidence of the belief 
 in Baiame. “Those who have learned that ‘God’ 
 is the name by which we speak of the Creator, say 
 that Baiame is God.” ? 
 
 As “a minimum definition of religion,” Mr. Tylor 
 has suggested “the belief in spiritual beings”. Against 
 this it may be urged that, while we have no definite 
 certainty that any race of men is destitute of belief in 
 spiritual beings, yet certain moral and creative deities 
 of low races do not seem to be envisaged as “‘spiritual” 
 at all. They are regarded as existences, as beings, 
 unconditioned by Time, Space, or Death, and nobody 
 appears to have put the purely metaphysical question, 
 “‘ Are these beings spiritual or material?” Now, if 
 a race were discovered which believed in such beings, 
 yet had no faith in spirits, that race could ‘not be called 
 irreligious, as it would have to be called in Mr, 
 
 1S8ee Primitive Culture, second edition, i. 419. 
 2 Lang’s Queensland, p. 445, 1861. 
 3 See The Making of Religion, pp. 201-210, 
 
RELIGION AND MYTH. 8 
 
 Tylor’s “minimum definition”. Almost certainly, no 
 race in this stage of belief in nothing but unconditioned 
 but not expressly spiritual beings is extant. Yet such 
 a belief may conceivably have existed before men had 
 developed’ the theory of spirits at all, and such a 
 belief, in creative and moral unconditioned beings, 
 not alleged to be spiritual, could not be excluded from 
 a definition of religion.! 
 
 For these reasons we propose (merely for the 
 purpose of the present work) to define religion as 
 the belief in a primal being, a Maker, undying, 
 usually moral, without denying that the belief in 
 spiritual beings, even if immoral, may be styled 
 religious. Our definition is expressly framed for 
 the purpose of the argument, because that argu- 
 ment endeavours to bring into view the essential 
 conflict between religion and myth. We intend to 
 show that this conflict between the religious and the 
 mythical conception is present, not only (where it 
 has been universally recognised) in the faiths of the 
 ancient civilised peoples, as in Greece, Rome, India 
 and Egypt, but also in the ideas of the lowest known 
 savages. 
 
 It may, of course, be argued that the belief in a 
 Creator is itself a myth. However that may be, the 
 attitude of awe, and of moral obedience, in face of 
 
 1‘ The history of the Jews, nay, the history of our own mind, proves to 
 demonstration that the thought of God is a far easier thought, and a far 
 earlier, than that of a spirit.’? Father Tyrrell, 8.J., The Month, October, 
 1898. As tothe Jews, the question is debated. As to our own infancy, 
 we are certainly taught about God before we are likely to be capable of the 
 metaphysical notion of spirit. But we can scarcely reason from children 
 in Christian houses to the infancy of the race, 
 
4 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 such a supposed being, is religious in the sense of the 
 Christian religion, whereas the fabrication of fanciful, 
 humorous, and wildly irrational fables about that 
 being, or others, is essentially mythical in the ordinary 
 significance of that word, though not absent from 
 popular Christianity. 
 
 Now, the whole crue and puzzle of mythology i is, 
 “Why, having attained (in whatever way) to a belief 
 in an undying guardian, ‘Master of Life,’ did mankind 
 set to work to evolve a chronique scandaleuse about 
 Him? And why is that chronique the elaborately 
 absurd set of legends which we find in all myth- 
 ologies ?” 
 
 In answering, or trying to answer, these questions, 
 we cannot go behind the beliefs of the races now most 
 immersed in savage ignorance. About the psychology 
 of races yet more undeveloped we can have no his- 
 torical knowledge. Among the lowest known tribes 
 we usually find, just as in ancient Greece, the belief in 
 a deathless ‘‘ Father,” ‘‘ Master,” “ Maker,” and also the 
 crowd of humorous, obscene, fanciful myths which are 
 in flagrant contradiction with the religious character 
 of that belief. That belief is what we call rational, 
 and even elevated. The myths, on the other hand, 
 are what we call irrational and debasing. We re- 
 gard low savages as very irrational and debased 
 characters, consequently the nature of their myths 
 does not surprise us. ‘Their religious conception, 
 however, of a “Father” or “Master of Life” seems 
 out of keeping with the nature of the savage mind as 
 we understand it. Still, there the religious conception 
 actually is, and it seems to.follow that we do not 
 
TWO MOODS. 5 
 
 wholly understand the savage mind, or its unknown 
 antecedents. In any case, there the facts are, as shall be 
 demonstrated. However the ancestors of Australians, 
 or Andamanese, or Hurons arrived at their highest 
 religious conception, they decidedly possess it! The 
 development of their mythical conceptions is accounted 
 for by those qualities of their minds which we do 
 understand, and shall illustrate at length. For the 
 present, we can only say that the religious conception 
 uprises from the human intellect in one mood, that 
 of earnest contemplation and submission: while the 
 mythical ideas uprise from another mood, that of 
 playful and erratic fancy. These two moods are 
 conspicuous even in Christianity. The former, that of 
 earnest and submissive contemplation, declares itself 
 in prayers, hymns, and “the dim religious light” of 
 cathedrals. The second mood, that of playful and 
 erratic fancy, 18 conspicuous in the buffoonery of 
 Miracle Plays,in Mdrchen,these burlesque popular tales 
 about our Lord and the Apostles, and in the hideous 
 and grotesque sculptures on sacred edifices. The two 
 moods are present, and in conflict, through the whole 
 religious history of the human race. They stand as 
 near each other, and as far apart, as Love and Lust. 
 It will later be shown that even some of the most 
 backward savages make a perhaps half-conscious dis- 
 tinction between their mythology and their religion, 
 As to the former, they are communicative; as to the 
 latter, they jealously guard their secret in sacred 
 1 The hypothesis that the conception was borrowed from European creeds 
 
 will be discussed later. See, too, ‘‘ Are Savage Gods borrowed from 
 Missionaries?” Nineteenth Century, January, 1899. 
 
6 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 mysteries. It is improbable that reflective “black 
 fellows” have been morally shocked by the flagrant 
 contradictions between their religious conceptions and 
 their mythical stories of the divine beings. But human 
 thought could not come into explicit clearness of con- 
 sciousness without producing the sense of shock and 
 surprise at these contradictions between the Religion 
 and the Myth of the same god. Of this we proceed 
 to give examples. 
 In Greece, as early as the sixth century B.C., we are 
 all familiar with Xenophanes’ poem ? complaining that 
 _ the gods were credited with the worst crimes of 
 mortals—in fact, with abominations only known in 
 the orgies of Nero and Elagabalus. We hear Pindar 
 refusing to repeat the tale which told him the blessed 
 were cannibals.?, In India we read the pious Brah- 
 manic attempts to expound decently the myths which 
 made Indra the slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that 
 is, of the unpardonable sin. In Egypt, too, we study 
 the priestly or philosophic systems by which the clergy 
 strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege 
 from their own deities. From all these efforts of 
 civilised and pious believers to explain away the 
 stories about their own gods we may infer one fact— 
 the most important to the student of mythology—the 
 fact that myths were not evolved in times of clear 
 
 1 Ritter and Preller, Hist. Philos., Gothe, 1869, p. 82. 
 
 2 Olympic Odes, i., Myers’s translation: ‘‘ To me it is impossible to call 
 one of the blessed gods a cannibal. . . . Meet it is for a man that concern- 
 ing the gods he speak honourably, for the reproach is less. Of thee, son of 
 Tantalus, I will speak contrariwise to them who have gone before me.” 
 In avoiding the story of the cannibal god, however, Pindar tells a tale even 
 more offensive to our morality. 
 
BARLY GREEK MYTHOLOGISTS. 7 
 
 civilised thought. It is when Greece is just beginning 
 to free her thought from the bondage of too concrete 
 language, when she is striving to coin abstract terms, 
 that her philosophers and poets first find the myths of 
 Greece a stumbling-block. 
 
 All early attempts at an interpretation of myth- 
 ology are so many efforts to explain the myths on 
 some principle which shall seem not unreasonable to 
 men living at the time of the explanation. Therefore 
 the pious remonstrances and the forced constructions 
 of early thinkers like Xenophanes, of poets like Pindar, 
 of all ancient Homeric scholars and Pagan apologists, 
 from Theagenes of Rhegium (525 B.c.), the early 
 Homeric commentator, to Porphyry, almost the last 
 of the heathen philosophers, are so many proofs that 
 to Greece, as soon as she had a reflective literature, 
 the myths of Greece seemed impious and wrrational. 
 The essays of the native commentators on the Veda, 
 in the same way, are endeavours to put into myths 
 felt to be irrational and impious a meaning which 
 does not offend either piety or reason. We may 
 therefore conclude that it was not men in an early 
 stage of philosophic thought (as philosophy is now 
 understood)—not men like Empedocles and Heraclitus, 
 nor reasonably devout men like EKumezus, the pious 
 swineherd of the Odyssey—who evolved the blas- 
 phemous myths of Greece, of Egypt and of India. 
 We must look elsewhere for an explanation. We 
 must try to discover some actual and demonstrable 
 and widely prevalent condition of the human mind, 
 in which tales that even to remote and rudimentary 
 civilisations appeared irrational and unnatural would 
 
Ba MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 seem natural and rational. To discover this intellec- 
 tual condition has been the aim of all mythologists 
 who did not believe that myth is a divine tradition 
 depraved by human weakness, or a distorted version 
 of historical events. 
 
 Before going further, it is desirable to set forth 
 what our aim is, and to what extent we are seeking 
 an interpretation of mythology. It is not our purpose 
 to explain every detail of every ancient legend, either as 
 a distorted historical fact or as the result of this or that 
 confusion of thought caused by forgetfulness of the 
 meanings of language, or in any other way; nay, we 
 must constantly protest against the excursions of too 
 venturesome ingenuity. Myth is so ancient, so com- 
 plex, so full of elements, that it is vain labour to seek 
 a cause for every phenomenon. We are chiefly occu- 
 pied with the quest for an historical condition of the 
 human intellect to which the element in myths, re- 
 garded by us as irrational, shall seem rational enough. 
 If we can prove that such a state of mind widely exists 
 among men, and has existed, that state of mind may 
 be provisionally considered as the fount and origin of 
 the myths which have always perplexed men in a 
 reasonable modern mental condition. Again, if it can 
 be shown that this mental stage was one through 
 which all civilised races have passed, the universality 
 of the mythopceic mental condition will to some extent 
 explain the universal diffusion of the stories. 
 
 Now, in all mythologies, whether savage or civil- 
 ised, and in all religions where myths intrude, there 
 exist two factors—the factor which we now regard 
 as rational, and that which we. moderns regard as 
 
RATIONAL AND IRRATIONAT. 9 
 
 irrational, The former element needs little explana- 
 tion ; the latter has demanded explanation ever since 
 human thought became comparatively instructed and 
 abstract. 
 
 To take an example; even in the myths of savages 
 there is much that still seems rational and transparent. 
 If savages tell us that some wise being taught them 
 all the simple arts of life, the use of fire, of the bow 
 and arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we 
 understand them at once. Nothing can be more 
 natural than that man should believe in an original 
 inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the 
 imaginary discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. 
 So far all is plain sailing. But when the savage goes 
 on to say that he who taught the use of fire or who 
 gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit or a crow, 
 or a dog, or a beaver, or a spider, then we are at once 
 face to face with the element in myths which seems 
 to us irrational. Again, among civilised peoples we 
 read of the pure all-seeing Varuna in the Vedas, to 
 whom sin is an offence. We read of Indra, the Lord 
 of Thunder, borne in his chariot, the giver of victory, 
 the giver of wealth to the pious; here once more all 
 seems natural and plain. The notion of a deity who 
 guides the whirlwind and directs the storm, a god of 
 battles, a god who blesses righteousness, is familiar to 
 us and intelligible; but when we read how Indra 
 drank himself drunk and committed adulteries with 
 Asura women, and got himself born from the same 
 womb as a bull, and changed himself into a quail or 
 a ram, and suffered from the most abject physical 
 terror, and so forth, then we are among myths no 
 
10 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 longer readily intelligible; here, we feel, are wrra- 
 tional stories, of which the original ideas, in their 
 natural sense, can hardly have been conceived by men 
 in a pure and rational early civilisation. Again, in 
 the religions of even the lowest races, such myths as 
 these are in contradiction with the ethical elements 
 of the faith. 
 
 If we look at Greek religious tradition, we observe 
 the coexistence of the rational and the apparently 
 arrational elements. The rational myths are those 
 which represent the gods as beautiful and wise beings. 
 The Artemis of the Odyssey “taking her pastime in 
 the chase of boars and swift deer, while with her the 
 wild wood-nymphs disport them, and high over them 
 all she rears her brow, and is easily to be known where 
 all are fair,”! is a perfectly ratvonal mythic represen- 
 tation of a divine being. We feel, even now, that the 
 conception of a“ queen and goddess, chaste and fair,” 
 the abbess, as Paul de Saint-Victor calls her, of the 
 woodlands, is a beautiful and natural fancy, which 
 requires no explanation. On the other hand, the 
 Artemis of Arcadia, who is confused with the nymph 
 Callisto, who, again, is said to have become a she-bear, 
 and later a star; and the Brauronian Artemis, whose 
 maiden ministers danced a bear-dance,? are goddesses 
 whose legend seems unnatural, and needs to be made 
 intelligible. Or, again, there is nothing not explicable 
 and natural in the conception of the Olympian Zeus 
 as represented by the great chryselephantine statue of 
 Zeus at Olympia, or in the Homeric conception of Zeus 
 
 1 Odyssey, vi. 102. 
 2doxreve ; compare Harpokration on this word. 
 
“THR SAVAGE ELEMENT.” 11 
 
 as a god who “turns everywhere his shining eyes,” 
 and beholds all things, and protects the righteous, and 
 deals good or evil fortune to men. But the Zeus 
 whose grave was shown in Crete, or the Zeus who 
 played Demeter an obscene trick by the aid of a ram, 
 or the Zeus who, in the shape of a swan, became the 
 father of Castor and Pollux, or the Zeus who deceived 
 Hera by means of a feigned marriage with an inanimate 
 object, or the Zeus who was afraid of Attes, or the 
 Zeus who made love to women in the shape of an ant 
 or a cuckoo, is a being whose myth is felt to be un- 
 natural and bewildering.! It is this irrational and 
 unnatural element, as Mr. Max Miiller says, “the silly, 
 senseless, and savage element,’ that makes mythology 
 the puzzle which men have so long found it. For, 
 observe, Greek myth does not represent merely a 
 humorous play of fancy, dealing with things religiously 
 sacred as if by way of relief from the strained rever- 
 ential contemplation of the majesty of Zeus. Many 
 stories of Greek mythology are such as could not cross, 
 for the first time, the mind of a civilised Xenophanes 
 or Theagenes, even in a dream. This was the real 
 puzzle. | 
 
 We have offered examples—Savage, Indian, and 
 Greek—of that element in mythology which, as all 
 civilised races have felt, demands explanation. 
 
 1 These are the features in myth which provoke, for example, the wonder 
 of Eméric-David. ‘‘ The lizard, the wolf, the dog, the ass, the frog, and all 
 the other brutes so common on religious monuments everywhere, do they 
 not all imply a thought which we must divine?” He concludes that these 
 animals, plants, and monsters of myths are so many “‘enigmas’’ and 
 ‘‘symbols” veiling some deep, sacred idea, allegories of some esoteric 
 religious creed. Jupiter, Paris, 1832, p. Ixxvii. 
 
12 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 To be still more explicit, we may draw up a brief 
 list of the chief problems in the legendary stories 
 attached to the old religions of the world—the problems 
 which it is our special purpose to notice. First we 
 have, in the myths of all races, the most grotesque 
 conceptions of the character of gods when mythically 
 envisaged. Beings who, in religion, leave little to be de- 
 sired, and are spoken of as holy, immortal, omniscient, 
 and kindly, are, in myth, represented as fashioned in 
 the likeness not only of man, but of the beasts; as 
 subject to death, as ignorant and impious. 
 
 Most pre-Christian religions had their “ otitis " 
 or partially zoomorphic idols, gods in the shape of the 
 lower animals, or with the heads and necks of the 
 lower animals. In the same way all mythologies re- 
 present the gods as fond of appearing in animal forms. 
 Under these disguises they conduct many amours, 
 even with the daughters of men, and Greek houses 
 were proud of their descent from Zeus in the shape of 
 an eagle or ant, a serpent or a swan; while Cronus 
 and the Vedic Tvashtri and Poseidon made love as 
 horses, and Apollo as a dog. Not less wild are the 
 legends about the births of gods from the thigh, or the 
 head, or feet, or armpits of some parent; while tales 
 describing and pictures representing unspeakable divine 
 obscenities were frequent in the mythology and in the 
 temples of Greece. Once more, the gods were said to 
 possess and exercise the power of turning men and 
 women into birds, beasts, fishes, trees, and stones, so 
 that there was scarcely a familiar natural object in the 
 Greek world which had not once (according to legend) 
 been a man or a woman. The myths of the origin of 
 
—— ee mee” eS 
 
 BALLET OF PRIAPUS. 13 
 
 the world and man, again, were in the last degree 
 childish and disgusting. The Bushmen and Australians 
 have, perhaps, no story of the origin of species quite 
 so barbarous in style as the anecdotes about Phanes 
 and Prajapati which are preserved in the Orphic hymns 
 and in the Brahmanas. The conduct of the earlier 
 dynasties of classical gods towards each other was as 
 notoriously cruel and loathsome as their behaviour 
 
 ‘towards mortals was tricksy and capricious. The 
 
 classical gods, with all their immortal might, are, by 
 a mythical contradiction of the religious conception, 
 regarded as capable of fear and pain, and are led into 
 scrapes as ludicrous as those of Brer Wolf or Brer 
 Terrapin in the tales of the Negroes of the Southern 
 States of America. The stars, again, in mythology, 
 are mixed up with beasts, planets and men in the 
 same embroglio of fantastic opinion. The dead and 
 the living, men, beasts and gods, trees and stars, and 
 rivers, and sun, and moon, dance through the region 
 of myths in a burlesque ballet of Priapus, where 
 everything may be anything, where nature has no 
 laws and imagination no limits. 
 
 Such are the irrational characteristics of myths, 
 classic or Indian, European or American, African or 
 Asiatic, Australian or Maori. Such is one element we 
 find all the world over among civilised and savage 
 people, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. 
 It is no wonder that pious and reflective men have, 
 in so many ages and in so many ways, tried to account 
 to themselves for their possession of beliefs closely 
 connected with religion which yet seemed ruinous to 
 religion and morality. 
 
14 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 The explanations which men have given of their own 
 sacred stories, the apologies for their own gods which 
 they have been constrained to offer to themselves, were 
 the earliest babblings of a science of mythology. That 
 science was, in its dim beginnings, intended to satisfy 
 a moral need. Man found that his gods, when mythi- 
 cally envisaged, were not made in his own moral image 
 at its best, but in the image sometimes of the beasts, 
 sometimes of his own moral nature at its very worst: 
 in the likeness of robbers, wizards, sorcerers, and 
 adulterers. Now, it is impossible here to examine 
 minutely all systems of mythological interpretation. 
 Every key has been tried in this difficult lock ; every 
 cause of confusion has been taken up and tested, deemed 
 adequate, and finally rejected or assigned a subordinate 
 place. Probably the first attempts to shake off the 
 burden of religious horror at mythical impiety were 
 made by way of silent omission. Thus most of the 
 foulest myths of early India are absent, and presum- 
 ably were left out, in the Rig-Veda. ‘The religious 
 sentiment of the hymns, already so elevated, has 
 discarded most of the tales which offended it, but 
 has not succeeded in discarding them all.”! Just as 
 the poets of the Rig-Veda prefer to avoid the more 
 offensive traditions about Indra and Tvashtri, so 
 Homer succeeds in avoiding the more grotesque and 
 puerile tales about his own gods.?_ The period of actual 
 
 1 Les Religions de UInde, Barth, p. 14. See also postea, ‘Indian 
 apy es reasons for Homer’s reticence are probably different in different 
 passages. Perhaps in some cases he had heard a purer version of myth 
 
 than what reached Hesiod ; gerhaps he sometimes purposely (like Pindar) 
 purified a myth; usually he must have selected, in conformity with the 
 
APOLOGISTS. 15 
 
 apology comes later. Pindar declines, as we have 
 seen, to accuse a god of cannibalism. The Satapatha 
 Brahmana invents a new story about the slaying of 
 Visvarupa. Not Indra, but Trita, says the Brahmana 
 apologetically, slew the three-headed son of Tvashtri. 
 “Indra assuredly was free from that sin, for he is a 
 god,” says the Indian apologist.1 Yet sins which to 
 us appear far more monstrous than the peceadillo of 
 killing a three-headed Brahman are attributed freely 
 to Indra. ; 
 
 While poets could but omit a blasphemous tale or 
 sketch an apology in passing, it became the business 
 of philosophers and of antiquarian writers deliberately 
 to “ whitewash ” the gods of popular religion. Syste- 
 matic explanations of the sacred stories, whether as 
 preserved in poetry or as told by priests, had to 
 be provided. India had her etymological and her 
 legendary school of mythology.? Thus, while the 
 hymn seemed to tell how the Maruts were gods, 
 “born together with the spotted deer,’ the etymo- 
 logical interpreters explained that the word for deer 
 only meant the many-coloured lines of clouds. In 
 the armoury of apologetics etymology has been the 
 most serviceable weapon. It is easy to see that by 
 
 noble humanity and purity of his taste, the tales that best conformed to his 
 ideal. He makes his deities reluctant to drag out in dispute old scandals of 
 their early unheroic adventures, some of which, however, he gives, as the 
 kicking of Hephestus out of heaven, and the imprisonment of Ares in a 
 vessel of bronze. Compare Professor Jebb’s Homer, p. 83: ‘‘ Whatever the 
 instinct of the great artist has tolerated, at least it has purged these things 
 away,’’ thatis, divine amours in bestial form. 
 
 1 Satapatha Brahmana, Oxford, 1882, vol. i. p. 47. 
 
 2 Rig-Veda Sanhita, Max Miller, p. 59. 
 
 3 Postea, ‘‘ Indian Divine Myths”. 
 
16 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 aid of etymology the most repulsive legend may be 
 compelled to yield a pure or harmless sense, and may 
 be explained as an innocent blunder, caused by mere 
 verbal misunderstanding. Brahmans, Greeks, and 
 Germans have equally found comfort in this hypo- 
 thesis. In the Cratylus of Plato, Socrates speaks of 
 the notion of explaining myths by etymological 
 guesses at the meaning of divine names as “a philo- 
 sophy which came to him all in an instant”. Thus 
 we find Socrates shocked by the irreverence which 
 styled Zeus the son of Cronus, “who is a proverb 
 for stupidity ”. But on examining philologically the 
 name Kronos, Socrates decides that it must really 
 mean Koros, “not in the sense of a youth, but 
 signifying the pure and garnished mind”. Therefore, 
 when people first called Zeus the son of Cronus, they 
 meant nothing irreverent, but only that Zeus is the 
 child of the pure mind or pure reason. Not only is 
 this etymological system most pious and consolatory, 
 but it is, as Socrates adds, of universal application. 
 “For now I bethink me of a very new and ingenious 
 notion, ... that we may put in and pull out letters 
 at pleasure, and alter the accents.’’ } 
 
 Socrates, of course, speaks more than half in irony, 
 but there is a certain truth in his account of etymo- 
 logical analysis and its dependence on individual 
 tastes and preconceived theory. 
 
 The ancient classical schools of mythological in- 
 terpretation, though unscientific and unsuccessful, 
 are not without interest. We find philosophers 
 and grammdrians looking, just as we ourselves are 
 
 1 Jowett’s Plato, vol. i. pp. 682, 670, 
 
EXPLAINING AWAY. 17 
 
 looking, for some condition of the human intellect out 
 of which the absurd element in myths might conceiv- 
 ably have sprung. Very naturally the philosophers 
 supposed that the human beings in whose brain and 
 speech myths had their origin must have been philo- 
 sophers like themselves—intelligent, educated persons. 
 But such persons, they argued, could never have 
 meant to tell stories about the gods so full of nonsense 
 and blasphemy. 
 
 Therefore the nonsense and blasphemy must origin- — 
 ally have had some harmless, or even praiseworthy, 
 sense. What could that sense have been? This ques- 
 tion each ancient mythologist answered in accordance 
 with his own taste and prejudices, and above all, 
 and like all other and later speculators, in harmony 
 with the general tendency of his own studies. If 
 he lived when physical speculation was coming into 
 fashion, as in the age of Empedocles, he thought that 
 the Homeric poems must contain a veiled account 
 of physical philosophy. This was the opinion of 
 Theagenes of RKhegium, who wrote at a period when 
 a crude physicism was disengaging itself from the 
 earlier religious and mythical cosmogonic systems of 
 Greece. Theagenes was shocked by the Homeric 
 description of the battle in which the gods fought 
 as allies of the Achezans and Trojans. He therefore 
 explained away the affair as a veiled account of the 
 strife of the elements. Such “strife” was familiar 
 to readers of the physical speculations of Empedocles 
 and of Heraclitus, who blamed Homer for his prayer 
 against Strife.’ 
 
 1 Js. et Osir., 48. 
 VOL. I, 2 
 
18 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 It did not occur to Theagenes to ask whether any 
 evidence existed to show that the pre-Homeric Greeks 
 were Empedoclean or Heraclitean philosophers. He 
 readily proved to himself that Apollo, Helios, and 
 Hephestus were allegorical representations, like what 
 such philosophers would feign,—of fire, that Hera 
 was air, Poseidon water, Artemis the moon, and the 
 rest he disposed of in the same fashion.! 
 
 Metrodorus, again, turned not only the gods, but 
 the Homeric heroes into ‘‘ elemental combinations and 
 physical agencies” ; for there is nothing new in the 
 mythological philosophy recently popular, which saw 
 the sun, and the cloud, and the wind in Achilles, 
 Athene, and Hermes.? 
 
 In the Bacche (291-297), Euripides puts another of 
 the mythological systems of his own time into the 
 mouth of Cadmus, the Theban king, who advances a 
 philological explanation of the story that Dionysus 
 was sewn up in the thigh of Zeus. The most famous of 
 the later theories was that of Euhemerus (816 B.c.). 
 In a kind of philosophical romance, Euhemerus declared 
 that he had sailed to some No-man’s-land, Panchea, 
 where he found the verity about mythical times en- 
 graved on pillars of bronze. This truth he published 
 in the Sacra Historia, where he rationalised the fables, 
 averring that the gods had been men, and that the 
 myths were exaggerated and distorted records of facts. 
 (See Eusebius, Prep. E., ii. 55.) The Abbé Banier 
 
 1Scholia on J/iad, xx. 67. Dindorf (1877), vol. iv. p. 231, ‘This 
 manner of apologetics is as old as Theagenes of Rhegium. Homer offers 
 theological doctrine in the guise of physical allegory.” 
 
 2 Grote, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1869, i. p. 404. 
 
EUSEBIUS. 19 
 
 (La Mythologie eapliquée par V Histoire, Paris, 1738, 
 vol. ii. p. 218) attempts the defence of Euhemerus, whom 
 most of the ancients regarded as an atheist. There 
 was an element of truth in his romantic hypothesis! 
 Sometimes the old stories were said to conceal a 
 moral, sometimes a physical, sometimes a mystical or 
 _Neo-platonic sort of meaning. As every apologist 
 interpreted the legends in his own fashion, the inter- 
 pretations usually disagreed and killed each other. 
 Just as one modern mythologist sees the wind in Aetes 
 and the dawn in Medea, while another of the same 
 school believes, on equally good evidence, that both 
 fetes and Medea are the moon, so writers like Por- 
 phyry (270 a.) and Plutarch (60 A.D.) made the 
 ancient deities types of their own favourite doctrines, 
 whatever these might happen to be. 
 
 When Christianity became powerful, the Christian 
 writers naturally attacked heathen religion where it 
 was most vulnerable, on the side of the myths, and of 
 the mysteries which were dramatic representations 
 of the myths. ‘‘Pretty gods you worship,” said the 
 Fathers, in effect, “ homicides, adulterers, bulls, bears, 
 mice, ants, and what not.” The heathen apologists for 
 the old religion were thus driven in the early ages of 
 Christianity to various methods of explaining away 
 the myths of their discredited religion. 
 
 The early Christian writers very easily, and with 
 considerable argumentative power, disposed of the 
 apologies for the myths advanced by Porphyry and 
 Plutarch. Thus Eusebius in the Preparatio Evan- 
 gelica first attacks the Egyptian interpretations of 
 
 1See Block, Huhémére et sa Doctrine, Mons, 1876, 
 
20 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 their own bestial or semi-bestial gods. He shows that 
 the various interpretations destroy each other, and 
 goes on to point out that Greek myth is in essence 
 only a veneered and varnished version of the faith of 
 Egypt. He ridicules, with a good deal of humour, 
 the old theories which resolved so many mythical 
 heroes into the sun; he shows that while one system 
 is contented to regard Zeus as mere fire and air, 
 another system recognises in him the higher reason, 
 while Heracles, Dionysus, Apollo, and Asclepius, 
 father and child, are all indifferently the sun. — 
 Granting that the myth-makers were only con- 
 structing physical allegories, why did they wrap them 
 up, asks Eusebius, in what we consider abominable 
 fictions? In what state were the people who could 
 not look at the pure processes of Nature without being 
 reminded of the most hideous and unnatural offences ? 
 Once more: ‘‘The physical interpreters do not even 
 agree in their physical interpretations”. All these 
 are equally facile, equally plausible, and equally 
 incapable of proof. Again, Eusebius argues, the inter- 
 preters take for granted in the makers of the myths 
 an amount of physical knowledge which they certainly 
 did not possess. For example, if Leto were only 
 another name for Hera, the character of Zeus would 
 be cleared as far as his amour with Leto is concerned. 
 Now, the ancient believers in the “physical pheno- 
 mena theory ” of myths made out that Hera, the wife 
 of Zeus, was really the same person under another 
 name as Leto, his mistress. ‘‘ For Hera is the earth” 
 (they said at other times that Hera was the air), “and 
 Leto is the night; but night is only the shadow of the 
 
THEORY OF EUSEBIUS. 21 
 
 earth, and therefore Leto is only the shadow of Hera.” 
 It was easy, however, to prove that this scientific view 
 of night as the shadow of earth was not likely to be 
 known to myth-makers, who regarded ‘“‘ swift Night” 
 as an actual person. Plutarch, too, had an abstruse 
 theory to explain the legend about the dummy wife, 
 —a log of oak-wood, which Zeus pretended to marry 
 when at variance with Hera.! 
 
 This quarrel, he said, was merely the confusion and 
 strife of elements. Zeus was heat, Hera was cold (she 
 had already been explained as earth and air), the 
 dummy wife of oak-wood was a tree that emerged 
 after a flood, and so forth. Of course, there was no 
 evidence that mythopceic men held Plutarchian 
 theories of heat and cold and the conflict of the ele- 
 ments ; besides, as Eusebius pointed out, Hera had 
 already been defined once as an allegory of wedded 
 life, and once as the earth, and again as the air, and 
 it was rather too late to assert that she was also the 
 cold and watery element in the world. As for his own 
 explanation of the myths, Eusebius holds that they 
 descend from a period when men in their lawless 
 barbarism knew no better than to tell such tales. 
 “Ancient folk, in the exceeding savagery of their 
 lives, made no account of God, the universal Creator 
 [here Eusebius is probably wrong]... but betook 
 them to all manner of abominations. For the laws of 
 decent existence were not yet established, nor was any 
 settled and peaceful state ordained among men, but 
 only a loose and savage fashion of wandering life, 
 while, as beasts irrational, they cared for no more 
 
 1 Pausanias, ix. 31, 
 
22 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 than to fill their bellies, being in a manner without 
 God in the world.” Growing a little more civilised 
 men, according to Eusebius, sought after something 
 divine, which they found in the heavenly bodies. 
 Later, they fell to worshipping living persons, especi- 
 ally “medicine men” and conjurors, and continued to 
 worship them even after their decease, so that Greek 
 temples are really tombs of the dead.’ Finally, the 
 civilised ancients, with a conservative reluctance to 
 abandon their old myths («weiy ra watpia ToApavTos 
 ovdevos), invented for them moral or physical explana- 
 tions, like those of Plutarch and others, earlier and 
 later.? 
 
 As Eusebius, like Clemens of Alexandria, Arnobius, 
 and the other early Christian disputants, had no pre- 
 judice in favour of Hellenic mythology, and no senti- 
 mental reason for wishing to suppose that the origin 
 of its impurities was pure, he found his way almost 
 to the theory of the irrational element in mythology 
 which we propose to offer. 
 
 Even to sketch the history of mythological hypothesis 
 in modern times would require a book to itself. It 
 must suffice here to indicate the various lines which 
 speculation as to mythology has pursued. 
 
 All interpretations of myth have been formed in 
 accordance with the ideas prevalent in the time of the 
 interpreters. The early Greek physicists thought that 
 mythopceic men had been physicists. Aristotle hints 
 that they were (like himself) political philosophers.® 
 Neo-platonists sought in the myths for Neo-platonism ; 
 most Christians (unlike Eusebius) either sided with 
 
 1 Prop. E., ii. 5. 2 Ibid., 6, 19, 8 Met., xi. 8, 19, 
 
MODERN THEORIES. 23 
 
 Kuhemerus, or found in myth the inventions of devils, 
 or a tarnished and distorted memory of the Biblical 
 revelation. 
 
 This was the theory, for example, of good old Jacob 
 Bryant, who saw everywhere memories of the Noachian 
 deluge and proofs of the correctness of Old Testament 
 ethnology.? 
 
 Much the same attempt to find the Biblical truth 
 at the bottom of savage and ancient fable has been 
 recently made by the late M. Lenormant, a Catholic 
 scholar.” 
 
 In the beginning of the present century Germany 
 turned her attention to mythology. As usual, men’s 
 ideas were biassed by the general nature of their 
 opinions. In a pious kind of spirit, Friedrich Creuzer 
 sought to find symbols of some pure, early, and Oriental 
 theosophy in the myths and mysteries of Greece. Cer- 
 tainly the Greeks of the philosophical period explained 
 their own myths as symbols of higher things, but the 
 explanation was an after-thought.? The great Lobeck, 
 in his Aglaophamus (1829), brought back common 
 sense, and made it the guide of his vast, his unequalled 
 learning. In a gentler and more genial spirit, C 
 Otfried Miller laid the foundation of a truly scientific 
 and historical mythology. Neither of these writers 
 had, like Alfred Maury,° much knowledge of the 
 
 1 Bryant, A New System, wherein an Attempt is made to Divest Tradition 
 of Fable, 1774. 
 
 2 Les Origines de l’ Histoire @apreés le Bible, 1880-1884. 
 
 3Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, 2d edit., Leipzig, 1836-48. 
 
 4 Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, English trans., London, 
 1844. 
 5 Histoire des Religions de la Gréce Antique, Paris, 1857. 
 
24 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 myths and faiths of the lower races, but they often 
 seem on the point of anticipating the ethnological 
 method. | 
 
 When philological science in our own century came 
 to maturity, in philology, as of old in physics and 
 later in symbols, was sought the key of myths. While 
 physical allegory, religious and esoteric symbolism, — 
 verbal confusion, historical legend, and an original 
 divine tradition, perverted in ages of darkness, have 
 been the most popular keys in other ages, the scientific 
 nineteenth century has had a philological key of its 
 own. The methods of Kuhn, Bréal, Max Miiller, and 
 generally the philological method, cannot be examined 
 here at full length! Briefly speaking, the modern 
 philological method is intended for a scientific applica- 
 tion of the old etymological interpretations. Cadmus 
 in the Bacche of Euripides, Socrates in the Cratylus 
 of Plato, dismiss unpalatable myths as the results of 
 verbal confusion. People had originally said something 
 quite sensible—so the hypothesis rans—but when their 
 descendants forgot the meaning of their remarks, a 
 new and absurd meaning followed from a series of 
 unconscious puns.? This view was supported in ancient 
 times by purely conjectural and impossible etymologies, 
 Thus the myth that Dionysus was sewn up in the 
 thigh of Zeus (o unpos) was explained by Euripides as 
 the result of a confusion of words. People had origin- 
 
 1See Mythology in Encyclop. Brit. and in La Mythologie (A.L.), Paris, 
 1886, where Mr. Max Miiller’s system is criticised. See also Custom and 
 Myth and Modern Mythology. 
 
 2That a considerable number of myths, chiefly myths of place names, 
 
 arise from popular etymologies is certain; what is objected to is the vast 
 vroportion given to this element in myths. 
 
MR. MAX MULLER. 25 
 
 ally said that Zeus gave a pledge (éunpos) to Hera. 
 The modern philological school relies for explanations 
 of untoward and other myths on similar confusions, 
 Thus Daphne is said to have been originally not a girl 
 of romance, but the dawn (Sanskirt, dahand : ahand) 
 pursued by therising sun. But as the original Aryan 
 sense of Dahand or Ahand was lost, and as Daphne 
 came to mean the laurel—the wood which burns easily 
 —the fable arose that the tree had been a girl called 
 Daphne.? 
 
 This system chiefly rests on comparison between 
 _ the Sanskrit names in the Rig-Veda and the mythic 
 names in Greek, German, Slavonic, and other Aryan 
 legends. The attempt is made to prove that, in the 
 common speech of the undivided Aryan race, many 
 words for splendid or glowing natural phenomena 
 existed, and that natural processes were described in 
 a figurative style. As the various Aryan families 
 separated, the sense of the old words and names 
 became dim, the nomina developed into numina, the 
 names into gods, the descriptions of elemental pro- 
 cesses into myths. As this system has already been 
 criticised by us elsewhere with minute attention, a 
 reference to these reviews must suffice in this place. 
 Briefly, it may be stated that the various masters of 
 the school—Kuhn, Max Miiller, Roth, Schwartz, and 
 
 1Max Miiller, Nineteenth Century, December, 1885; ‘‘Solar Myths,” 
 January, 1886; Myths and Mythologists (A. L.). Whitney, Mannhardt, 
 Bergaigne, and others dispute the etymology. Or. and Ling. Studies, 
 1874, p. 160; Mannhardt, Antike Wald und Feld Kultus (Berlin, 1877), 
 p. xx.; Bergaigne, La Religion Védique, iii. 293; nor does Curtius like it 
 much, Principles of Greek Etymology, English trans., ii. 92, 93; Modern 
 Mythology (A. L.), 1897. 
 
26 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 the rest—rarely agree where agreement is essential, 
 that is, in the philological foundations of their building. 
 They differ in very many of the etymological analyses 
 of mythical names. They also differ in the interpre- 
 tations they put on the names, Kuhn almost invariably 
 seeing fire, storm, cloud, or lightning where Mr. Max 
 Miiller sees the chaste Dawn. Thus Mannhardt, after 
 having been a disciple, is obliged to say that compara- 
 tive Indo-Germanic mythology has not borne the fruit 
 expected, and that “the certain gains of the system 
 reduce themselves to the scantiest list of parallels, 
 such as Dyaus = Zeus = Tius, Parjanya = Perkunas, 
 Bhaga = Bog, Varuna = Uranos” (a position much 
 disputed), etc. Mannhardt adds his belief that a 
 number of other “ equations ”»—such as Saraméya = 
 Hermeias, Saranyus = Demeter Erinnys, Kentauros 
 =Gandharva, and many others—will not stand criti- 
 cism, and he fears that these ingenious guesses will 
 prove mere jeux d’esprit rather than actual facts.2 
 Many examples of the precarious and contradictory 
 character of the results of philological mythology, 
 many instances of “dubious etymologies,” false logic, 
 leaps at foregone conclusions, and attempts to make 
 what is peculiarly Indian in thought into matter of 
 universal application, will meet us in the chapters on 
 Indian and Greek divine legends? ‘The method in 
 its practical working shows a fundamental lack of the 
 
 1Baum und Feld Kultus, p. xvii. Kuhn’s ‘*epoch-making” book 
 is Die Herabkunft des Feuers, Berlin, 1859. By way of example of the 
 disputes as to the original meaning of a name like Prometheus, compare 
 Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, t. iv. p. 336. 
 
 ?See especially Mannhardt’s note on Kuhn’s theories of Poseidon and 
 Hermes, B, u. F. X., pp. xviii., xix., note 1, 
 
MANNHARDT, 27 
 
 historical sense,” says Mannhardt. Examples are torn 
 from their contexts, he observes; historical evolution 
 is neglected; passages of the Veda, themselves totally 
 obscure, are dragged forward to account for obscure 
 Greek mythical phenomena. Such are the accusations 
 brought by the regretted Mannhardt against the 
 school to which he originally belonged, and which was 
 popular and all-powerful even in the maturity of his 
 own more clear-sighted genius. Proofs of the correct- 
 ness of his criticism will be offered abundantly in the 
 course of this work. It will become evident that, 
 great as are the acquisitions of Philology, her least 
 certain discoveries have been too hastily applied in 
 alien “matter,” that is, in the region of myth. Not 
 that philology is wholly without place or part in the 
 investigation of myth, when there is agreement among 
 philologists as to the meaning of a divine name. In 
 that case a certain amount of light is thrown on the 
 legend of the bearer of the name, and on its origin 
 and first home, Aryan, Greek, Semitic, or the like. 
 But how rare is agreement among philologists ! 
 ‘‘The philological method,” says Professor Tiele,} 
 ‘is inadequate and misleading, when it is a question 
 of discovering the origin of a myth, or the physical 
 explanation of the oldest myths, or of accounting for 
 the rude and obscene element in the divine legends of 
 civilised races. But these are not the only problems 
 of mythology. There is, for example, the question of 
 the genealogical relations of myths, where we have 
 to determine whether the myths of peoples whose 
 speech is of the same family are special modifications 
 1 Rev, del’ Hist. des Rel,, xii. 3, 260, Nov., Dec., 1885, 
 
28 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 of a mythology once common to the race whence these 
 peoples have sprung. The philological method alone 
 can answer here.” But this will seem a very limited 
 province when we find that almost all races, however 
 remote and unconnected in speech, have practically 
 much the same myths, 
 
CHAPTER IL 
 
 NEW SYSTEM PROPOSED. 
 
 Chapter I. recapitulated—Proposal ot a new method: Science of com- 
 parative or historical study of man—Anticipated in part by Eusebius, 
 Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C.C.C., Cambridge), and Mann- 
 hardt—Science of Tylor—Object of inquiry: to find condition of 
 human intellect in which marvels of myth are parts of practical every- 
 day belief—This is the savage state—Savages described—The wild 
 element of myth a survival from the savage state—Advantages of this 
 method—Partly accounts for wide diffusion as well as origin of myths 
 —Connected with general theory of evolution—Puzzling example of 
 myth of the water-swallower—Professor Tiele’s criticism of the method 
 —Objections to method, and answer to these—See Appendix B. 
 
 THE past systems of mythological interpretation have 
 been briefly sketched. It has been shown that the 
 practical need for a reconciliation between religion and 
 morality on one side, and the myths about the gods 
 on the other, produced the hypotheses of Theagenes 
 and Metrodorus, of Socrates and Euemerus, of Aristotle 
 and Plutarch. It has been shown that in each case 
 the reconcilers argued on the basis of their own ideas 
 and of the philosophies of their time. The early 
 physicist thought that myth concealed a physical 
 philosophy ; the early etymologist saw in it a con- 
 fusion of language; the early political speculator 
 supposed that myth was an invention of legislators ; 
 the literary Euhemerus found the secret of myths in 
 the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island, 
 
30 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and 
 Pagan philosophers, touched with Oriental pantheism, 
 recognised in myths certain pantheistic symbols and 
 a cryptic revelation of their own Neo-platonism. 
 When the gods were dead and their altars fallen, 
 then antiquaries brought their curiosity to the problem 
 of explaining myth. Christians recognised in it a 
 depraved version of the Jewish sacred writings, and 
 found the ark on every mountain-top of Greece. 
 The critical nineteenth century brought in, with 
 Otfried Miller and Lobeck, a closer analysis; and 
 finally, in the sudden rise of comparative philology, 
 it chanced that philologists annexed the domain of 
 myths. Each of these systems had its own amount 
 of truth, but each certainly failed to unravel the 
 whole web of tradition and of foolish faith. 
 
 Meantime a new science has come into existence, 
 the science which studies man in the sum of all his 
 works and thoughts, as evolved through the whole 
 process of his development. This science, Compara- 
 tive Anthropology, examines the development of law 
 out of custom ; the development of weapons from the 
 stick or stone to the latest repeating rifle; the de- 
 velopment of society from the horde to the nation, 
 It is a study which does not despise the most back- 
 ward nor degraded tribe, nor neglect the most civilised, 
 and it frequently finds in Australians or Nootkas 
 the germ of ideas and institutions which Greeks 
 or Romans brought to perfection, or retained, little 
 altered from their early rudeness, in the midst of 
 civilisation. 
 
 It is inevitable that this science should also try its 
 
ANTHROPOLOGY. 31 
 
 hand on mythology. Our purpose is to employ the 
 anthropoiogical method—the study of the evolution 
 of ideas, from the savage to the barbarous, and thence 
 to the civilised stage—in the province of myth, ritual, 
 and religion. It has been shown that the light of 
 this method had dawned on Eusebius in his polemic 
 with the heathen apologists. Spencer, the head of 
 Corpus, Cambridge (1630-93), had really no other 
 scheme in his mind in his erudite work on Hebrew 
 Ritual.! Spencer was a student of man’s religions 
 generally, and he came to the conclusion that Hebrew 
 ritual was but an expurgated, and, so to speak, 
 divinely “licensed ” adaptation of heathen customs at 
 large. We do but follow his guidance on less perilous 
 ground when we seek for the original forms of 
 classical rite and myth in the parallel usages and 
 legends of the most backward races. 
 
 Fontenelle, in the last century, stated, with all the 
 clearness of the French intellect, the system which is 
 partially worked out in this essay—the system which 
 explains the irrational element in myth as inherited 
 from savagery. Fontenelle’s paper (Sur Origine 
 des Fables) is brief, sensible, and witty, and requires 
 little but copious evidence to make it adequate. But 
 he merely threw out the idea, and left it to be 
 neglected.? 
 
 Among other founders of the anthropological or 
 historical school of mythology, De Brosses should 
 not be forgotten. In his Dieww Fétiches (1760) he 
 follows the path which Eusebius indicated—the path 
 
 ' De Legibus Hebreorwm Ritualibus, Tubinge, 1732, 
 *See Appendix A., Fontenelle’s Origine des Fables. 
 
32 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 of Spencer and Fontenelle-——now the beaten road of 
 Tylor and M‘Lennan and Mannhardt. 
 
 In anthropology, in the science of Waitz, Tylor, 
 and M‘Lennan, in the examination of man’s faith in 
 the light of his social, legal, and historical conditions 
 generally, we find, with Mannhardt, some of the keys 
 of myth. This science ‘‘ makes it manifest that the 
 different stages through which humanity has passed 
 in its intellectual evolution have still their living 
 representatives among various existing races. The 
 study of these lower races isan invaluable instrument 
 for the interpretation of the survivals from earlier 
 stages, which we meet in the full civilisation of culti- 
 vated peoples, but whose origins were in the remotest 
 fetichism and savagery.” } 
 
 It is by following this road, and by the aid of 
 anthropology and of human history, that we propose 
 to seek for a demonstrably actual condition of the 
 human intellect, whereof the puzzling qualities of 
 myth would be the natural and inevitable fruit. In 
 all the earlier theories which we have sketched, 
 inquirers took it for granted that the myth-makers 
 were men with philosophic and moral ideas like their 
 own—ideas which, from some reason of religion or 
 state, they expressed in bizarre terms of allegory. 
 We shall attempt, on the other hand, to prove that 
 the human mind has passed through a condition 
 quite unlike that of civilised men—a condition in 
 which things seemed natural and rational that now 
 appear unnatural and devoid of reason, and in which, 
 therefore, if myths were evolved, they would, if they 
 
 1 Mannhardt, op. cit.. p. xxiii. 
 
ARAB ROMANCE. 33 
 
 survived into civilisation, be such as civilised men find 
 strange and perplexing. 
 
 Our first question will be, Is there a stage of Ne 
 society and of the human intellect in which facts that 
 appear to us to be monstrous and irrational—facts 
 corresponding to the wilder incidents of myth—are 
 accepted as ordinary occurrences of everyday life? In 
 the region of romantic rather than of mythical inven- 
 tion we know that there is such a state. Mr. Lane, in 
 his preface to the Arabian Nights, says that the Arabs 
 ‘have an advantage over us as story-tellers. They can 
 introduce such incidents as the change of a man into a 
 horse, or of a woman into a dog, or the intervention 
 of an Afreet without any more scruple than our own 
 novelists feel in describing a duel or the concealment 
 of a will. Among the Arabs the agencies of magic 
 and of spirits are regarded as at least as probable and 
 common as duels and concealments of wills seem to 
 be thought by European novelists. It is obvious that 
 we need look no farther for the explanation of the 
 supernatural events in Arab romances. Now, let us 
 apply this system to mythology. It is admitted that 
 Greeks, Romans, Aryans of India in the age of the 
 Sanskrit commentators, and Egyptians of the Ptole- 
 maic and earlier ages, were as much puzzled as we 
 are by the mythical adventures of their gods. But 
 is there any known stage of the human intellect in 
 which similar adventures, and the metamorphoses of 
 men into animals, trees, stars, and all else that puzzles 
 us in the civilised mythologies, are regarded as possible 
 incidents of daily human life? Our answer is, that 
 everything in the civilised mythologies which we 
 
 VOL. I. 3 
 
34 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 regard as irrational seems only part of the accepted 
 and natural order of things to contemporary savages, 
 and in the past seemed equally rational and natural to 
 savages concerning whom we have historical informa- 
 tion.! Our theory is, therefore, that the savage and 
 senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, 
 a legacy from the fancy of ancestors of the civilised 
 races who were once in an intellectual state not higher, 
 but probably lower, than that of Australians, Bush- 
 
 1 We have been asked to define a savage. He cannot be defined in an 
 epigram, but by way of choice of a type :— 
 
 1. In material equipment the perfect savage is he who employs tools of 
 stone and wood, not of metal; who is nomadic rather than settled ; who is 
 acquainted (if at all) only with the rudest forms of the arts of potting, 
 weaving, fire-making, etc. ; and who derives more of his food from the 
 chase and from wild roots and plants than from any kind of agriculture or 
 from the flesh of domesticated animals. 
 
 2. In psychology the savage is he who (extending unconsciously to the 
 universe his own implicit consciousness of personality) regards all natural 
 objects as animated and intelligent beings, and, drawing no hard and fast 
 line between himself and the things in the world, is readily persuaded that 
 men may be metamorphosed into plants, beasts and stars; that winds and 
 clouds, sun and dawn, are persons with |human passions and parts; and 
 that the lower animals especially may be creatures more powerful than 
 himself, and, in a sense, divine and creative. 
 
 8. In religion the savage is he who (while often, in certain moods, con- 
 scious of a far higher moral faith) believes also in ancestral ghosts or spirits 
 of woods and wells that were never ancestral; prays frequently by dint of 
 magic; and sometimes adores inanimate objects, or even appeals to the 
 beasts as supernatural protectors. 
 
 4. In society the savage is he who (as a rule) bases his laws on the well- 
 defined lines of totemism—that is, claims descent from or other close 
 relation to natural objects, and derives from the sacredness of those objects 
 the sanction of his marriage prohibitions and blood-feuds, while he makes 
 skill in magic a claim to distinguished rank. 
 
 Such, for our purpose, is the savage, and we propose to explain the more 
 ‘¢senseless’’ factors in civilised mythology as ‘‘survivals” of these ideas 
 and customs preserved by conservatism and local tradition, or, less probably, 
 borrowed from races which were, or had been, savage. 
 
LOBECK ON SURVIVALS. 35 
 
 men, Red Indians, the lower races of South America, 
 and other worse than barbaric peoples. As the an- 
 cestors of the Greeks, Aryans of India, Egyptians and 
 others advanced in civilisation, their religious thought 
 was shocked and surprised by myths (originally dating 
 from the period of savagery, and natural in that 
 period, though even then often in contradiction to 
 morals and religion) which were preserved down to 
 the time of Pausanias by local priesthoods, or which 
 were stereotyped in the ancient poems of Hesiod and 
 Homer, or in the Brahmanas and Vedas of India, or 
 were retained in the popular religion of Egypt. This 
 theory recommended itself to Lobeck. ‘‘ We may 
 believe that ancient and early tribes framed gods like 
 unto themselves in action and in experience, and that 
 the allegorical softening down of myths is the ex- 
 planation added later by descendants who had attained 
 to purer ideas of divinity, yet dared not reject the 
 religion of their ancestors.”1_ The senseless element 
 in the myths would, by this theory, be for the most 
 part a “survival”; and the age and condition of 
 human thought whence it survived would be one in 
 which our most ordinary ideas about the nature of 
 things and the limits of possibility did not. yet exist, 
 when all things were conceived of in quite other 
 fashion ; the age, that is, of savagery. 
 
 It is universally admitted that “ survivals” of this 
 kind do account for many anomalies in our institu- 
 
 1 Aglaoph., i. 153. Had Lobeck gone a step farther and examined the 
 mental condition of veteres et prisce gentes, this book would have been 
 superfluous. Nor did he know that the purer ideas were also existing 
 among certain low savages. 
 
36 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 tions, in law, politics, society, even in dress and 
 manners. If isolated fragments of earlier ages abide 
 in these, it is still more probable that other fragments 
 will survive in anything so closely connected as is 
 mythology with the conservative religious sentiment 
 and tradition. Our object, then, is to prove that the 
 “silly, savage, and irrational” element in the myths 
 of civilised peoples is, as a rule, either a survival from 
 the period of savagery, or has been borrowed from 
 savage neighbours by a cultivated people, or, lastly, 
 is an imitation by later poets of old savage data.! 
 For example, to explain the constellations as meta- 
 morphosed men, animals, or other objects of terrestrial 
 life is the habit of savages,?—a natural habit among 
 people who regard all things as on one level of per- 
 sonal life and intelligence. When the stars, among 
 civilised Greeks or Aryans of India, are also popularly 
 regarded as transformed and transfigured men, animals 
 and the like, this belief may be either a survival from 
 the age when the ancestors of Greeks and Indians 
 were in the intellectual condition of the Australian 
 Murri ; or the star-name and star-myth may have been © 
 borrowed from savages, or from cultivated peoples 
 once savage or apt to copy savages; or, as in the case 
 of the Coma Berenices, a poet of a late age may have 
 invented a new artificial myth on the old lines of 
 savage fancy. 
 
 1 We may be asked why do savages entertain the irrational ideas which 
 survive in myth? One might as well ask why they eat each other, or use 
 stones instead of metal. Their intellectual powers are not fully developed, 
 and hasty analogy from their own unreasoned consciousness is their chief 
 guide. Myth, in Mr. Darwin’s phrase, is one of the ‘miserable and in- 
 direct consequences of our highest faculties”. Descent of Man, p. 69. 
 
 2See Custom and Myth, ‘‘ Star-Myths ”, 
 
MR. TYLOR. 87 
 
 This method of interpreting a certain element in 
 mythology is, we must repeat, no new thing, though, 
 to judge from the protests of several mythologists, it is 
 new to many inquirers. We have seen that Eusebius 
 threw out proposals in this direction; that Spencer, 
 De Brosses, and Fontenelle unconsciously followed 
 him; and we have quoted from Lobeck a statement 
 of a similar opinion. The whole matter has been 
 stated as clearly as possible by Mr. E. B. Tylor :— 
 
 ‘Savages have been for untold ages, and still are, 
 living in the myth-making stage of the human mind. 
 It was through sheer ignorance and neglect of this 
 direct knowledge how and by what manner of men 
 myths are really made that their simple philosophy 
 has come to be buried under masses of commentator’s 
 rubbish. . . .””?_ Mr. Tylor goes on thus (and his words 
 contain the gist of our argument): “The general thesis 
 maintained is that myth arose in the savage condition 
 prevalent in remote ages among the whole human 
 race; that it remains comparatively unchanged among 
 the rude modern tribes who have departed least from 
 these primitive conditions, while higher and later 
 civilisations, partly by retaining its actual principles, 
 and partly by carrying on its inherited results in the 
 form of ancestral tradition, continued it not merely in 
 toleration, but in honour”? Elsewhere Mr. Tylor 
 points out that by this method of interpretation we 
 may study myths in various stages of evolution, from 
 the rude guess of the savage at an explanation of 
 natural phenomena, through the systems of the higher 
 barbarisms, or lower civilisations (as in ancient Mexico), 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., i. p. 288. 2 Op. cit., p. 275. 
 
38 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 and the sacerdotage of India, till myth reaches its 
 most human form in Greece. Yet even in Greek myth 
 the beast is not wholly cast out, and Hellas by no 
 means ‘‘let the ape and tiger die”, That Mr. Tylor 
 does not exclude the Aryan race from his general 
 theory is plain enough. ‘‘ What is the Aryan concep- 
 tion of the Thunder-god but a poetie elaboration of 
 thoughts inherited from the savage stage through 
 which the primitive Aryans had passed ?”? 
 
 The advantages of our hypothesis (if its legitimacy 
 be admitted) are obvious. In the first place, we have 
 to deal with an actual demonstrable condition of the 
 human intellect. The existence of the savage state in 
 all its various degrees, and of the common intellectual 
 habits and conditions which are shared by the back- 
 ward peoples, and again the survival of many of these 
 in civilisation, are indubitable facts. We are not 
 obliged to fall back upon some fanciful and unsup- 
 ported theory of what “ primitive man ” did, and said, 
 and thought. Nay, more ; we escape all the fallacies 
 connected with the terms “primitive man”. We are 
 not compelled (as will be shown later)? to prove that 
 the first men of all were like modern savages, nor that 
 savages represent primitive man, It may be that the 
 lowest extant savages are the nearest of existing 
 peoples to the type of the first human beings. But 
 on this point it is unnecessary for us to dogmatise. 
 If we can show that, whether men began their career 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., ii. 265. 
 
 2Pretty much the same view seems to be taken by Mr. Max Miiller 
 (Nineteenth Century, January, 1882) when he calls Tsui Goab (whom the 
 Hottentots believe to be a defunct conjuror) ‘‘a Hottentot Indra or Zeus”, 
 
 3 Appendix B. 
 
STAGES OF MYTH. 89 
 
 as savages or not, they have at least passed through 
 the savage status or have borrowed the ideas of races 
 in the savage status, that is all we need. We escape 
 from all the snares of theories (incapable of historical 
 proof) about the really primeval and original condition 
 of the human family. 
 
 Once more, our theory naturally attaches itself to 
 the general system of Evolution. We are enabled to 
 examine mythology as a thing of gradual development 
 and of slow and manifold modifications, corresponding 
 in some degree to the various changes in the general 
 progress of society. Thus we shall watch the barbaric 
 conditions of thought which produce barbaric myths, 
 while these in their turn are retained, or perhaps 
 purified, or perhaps explained away, by more advanced 
 civilisations. Further, we shall be able to detect the 
 survival of the savage ideas with least modification, 
 and the persistence of the savage myths with least 
 change, among the classes of a civilised population 
 which have shared least in the general advance. 
 These classes are, first, the rustic peoples, dwelling 
 far from cities and schools, on heaths or by the sea; 
 second, the conservative local priesthoods, who retain 
 the more crude and ancient myths of the local gods 
 and heroes after these have been modified or rejected 
 by the purer sense of philosophers and national poets. 
 Thus much of ancient myth is a woven warp and woof 
 of three threads: the savage donnée, the civilised and 
 poetic modification of the savage donnée, the version 
 of the original fable which survives in popular tales 
 and in the “sacred chapters” of local priesthoods. A 
 critical study of these three stages in myth is in 
 
40 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 accordance with the recognised practice of science, 
 Indeed, the whole system is only an application to 
 this particular province, mythology, of the method by 
 which the development either of organisms or of 
 human institutions is traced. As the anomalies and 
 apparently useless and accidental features in the 
 human or in other animal organisms may be explained 
 as stunted or rudimentary survivals of organs useful 
 in a previous stage of life, so the anomalous and 
 irrational myths of civilised races may be explained 
 as survivals of stories which, in an earlier state of 
 thought and knowledge, seemed natural enough. The 
 persistence of the myths is accounted for by the well- 
 known conservatism of the religious sentiment—a 
 conservatism noticed even by Eusebius. “In later 
 days, when they became ashamed of the religious 
 beliefs of their ancestors, they invented private and 
 respectful interpretations, each to suit himself. For 
 no one dared to shake the ancestral beliefs, as they 
 honoured at a very high rate the sacredness and 
 antiquity of old associations, and of the teaching 
 they had received in childhood.” } 
 
 Thus the method which we propose to employ is in 
 harmony both with modern scientific procedure and 
 with the views of a clear-sighted Father of the Church. 
 Consequently no system could well be less “‘ heretical ” 
 and “ unorthodox ”. 
 
 The last advantage of our hypothesis which need 
 here be mentioned is that it helps to explain the 
 diffusion no less than the origin of the wild and 
 crazy element in myth. We seek for the origin of 
 
 1 Prep. E., ii. 6, 19. 
 
DIFFUSION OF uyYTH. 41 
 
 the savage factor of myth in one aspect of the intel- 
 lectual condition of savages. We say “in one aspect” 
 expressly; to guard against the suggestion that the 
 savage intellect has no aspect but this, and no saner 
 ideas than those of myth. The diffusion of stories 
 practically identical in every quarter of the globe 
 may be (provisionally) regarded as the result of the 
 prevalence in every quarter, at one time or another, 
 of similar mental habits and ideas. This explanation 
 must not be pressed too hard nor too far. If we find 
 all over the world a belief that men can change them- 
 selves and their neighbours into beasts, that belief 
 will account for the appearance of metamorphosis in 
 myth. If we find a belief that inanimate objects are 
 really much on a level with man, the opinion will 
 account for incidents of myth such as that in which 
 the wooden figure-head of the Argo speaks with a 
 human voice. Again, a widespread belief in the 
 separability of the soul or the life from the body 
 will account for the incident in nursery tales and 
 myths of the “giant who had no heart in his body,” 
 but kept his heart and life elsewhere. An ancient 
 identity of mental status and the working of similar 
 mental forces at the attempt to explain the same 
 phenomena will account, without any theory of bor- 
 rowing, or transmission of myth, or of original unity 
 of race, for the world-wide diffusion of many mythical 
 conceptions. 
 
 But this theory of the original similarity of the 
 savage mind everywhere and in all races will scarcely 
 account for the world-wide distribution of long and 
 intricate mythical plots, of consecutive series of adroitly 
 
49 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 interwoven situations, In presence of these long 
 romances, found among so many widely severed 
 peoples, conjecture is, at present, almost idle. We do 
 not know, in many instances, whether such stories 
 were independently developed, or carried from a 
 common centre, or borrowed by one race from another, 
 and so handed on round the world. 
 
 This chapter may conclude with an example of a 
 tale whose diffusion may be explained in divers ways, 
 though its origin seems undoubtedly savage. If we 
 turn to the Algonkins, a stock of Red Indians, we come 
 on a popular tradition which really does give pause 
 to the mythologist. Could this story, he asks himself, 
 have been separately invented in widely different 
 places, or could the Iroquois have borrowed from the 
 Australian blacks or the Andaman Islanders? It is 
 a common thing in most mythologies to find everything 
 of value to man—fire, sun, water—in the keeping of 
 some hostile power. The fire, or the sun, or the water 
 is then stolen, or in other ways rescued from the enemy 
 and restored to humanity. The Huron story (as far 
 as water is concerned) is told by Father Paul Le Jeune, 
 a Jesuit missionary, who lived among the Hurons about 
 1636. The myth begins with the usual opposition be- 
 tween two brothers, the Cain and Abel of savage legend, 
 One of the brothers, named Ioskeha, slew the other, and 
 became the father of mankind (as known to the Red 
 Indians) and the guardian of the Iroquois. The earth 
 was at first arid and sterile, but Ioskeha destroyed the 
 gigantic frog which had swallowed all the waters, and 
 guided the torrents into smooth streams and lakes.1 
 
 1 Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, p. 103 (Paris, Cramoisy, 1637), 
 
THE FROG. 43 
 
 Now where, outside of North America, do we find 
 this frog who swallowed all the water? We find him 
 in Australia, 
 
 “The aborigines of Lake Tyers,’ remarks Mr. 
 Brough Smyth, “say that at one time there was no 
 water anywhere on the face of the earth. All the 
 waters were contained in the body of a huge frog, and 
 men and women could get none of them. A council 
 was held, and . . . it was agreed that the frog should 
 be made to Jaugh, when the waters would run out of 
 his mouth, and there would be plenty in all parts.” 
 
 To make a long story short, all the animals played 
 the jester before the gigantic solemn frog, who sat as. 
 grave as Louis XV. “I do not like buffoons who 
 don’t make me laugh,” said that majestical monarch. 
 At last the eel danced on the tip of his tail, and the 
 gravity of the prodigious Batrachian gave way. He 
 laughed till he literally split his sides, and the 
 imprisoned waters came with a rush. Indeed, many 
 persons were drowned, though this is not the only 
 Australian version of the Deluge. 
 
 The Andaman Islanders dwell at a very considerable 
 distance from Australia and from the Iroquois, and, 
 in the present condition of the natives of Australia 
 and Andaman, neither could possibly visit the other. 
 The frog in the Andaman version is called a toad, and 
 he came to swallow the waters in the following way: 
 One day a woodpecker was eating honey high up in the 
 boughs of atree. Far below, the toad was a witness of 
 the feast, and asked for some honey. “ Well, come up 
 here, and you shall have some,” said the woodpecker. 
 “But how am I to climb?” ‘Take hold of that 
 
44 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 creeper, and I will draw you up,” said the woodpecker ; 
 but all the while he was bent on a practical joke. So 
 the toad got into a bucket he happened to possess, and 
 fastened the bucket to the creeper. ‘Now, pull!” 
 Then the woodpecker raised the toad slowly to the 
 level of the bough where the honey was, and presently 
 let him down with a run, not only disappointing the 
 poor toad, but shaking him severely. The toad went 
 away in a rage and looked about him for revenge. A 
 happy thought occurred to him, and he drank up all 
 the water of the rivers and lakes, Birds and beasts 
 were perishing, woodpeckers among them, of thirst. 
 The toad, overjoyed at his success, wished to add insult 
 to the injury, and, very thoughtlessly, began to dance 
 in an irritating manner at his foes. But then the 
 stolen waters gushed out of his mouth in full volume, 
 and the drought soon ended. One of the most curious 
 points in this myth is the origin of the quarrel between 
 the woodpecker and the toad. The same beginning— 
 the tale of an insult put on an animal by hauling up 
 and letting him down with a run—occurs in an African 
 Marchen.? 
 
 Now this strangely diffused story of the slaying of 
 the frog which had swallowed all the water seems to 
 be a savage myth of which the more heroic conflict of 
 Indra with Vrittra (the dragon which had swallowed all 
 the waters) is an epic and sublimer version? “The 
 
 * 1Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i, 429, 480; Brinton, American 
 Hero Myths, i. 55. Of. also Relations de la Nowvelle France, 1636, 1640, 
 1671 ; [Sagard, Hist. du Canada, 1636, p. 451 3] Journal Anthrop. Inst., 
 1881, 
 
 * Ludwig, Der Rig-Veda, iii. p. 387. See postea, “Divine Myths ot 
 India”, 
 
VEDIC PARALLEL. 45 
 
 heavenly water, which Vrittra withholds from the 
 world, is usually the prize of the contest.” 
 
 The serpent of Vedic myth is, perhaps, rather the 
 robber-guardian than the swallower of the waters, but 
 Indra is still, like the Iroquois Ioskeha, “he who 
 wounds the full one”! This example of the wide 
 distribution of a myth shows how the question of 
 diffusion, though connected with, is yet distinct from 
 that of origin. The advantage of our method will 
 prove to be, that it discovers an historical and demon- 
 strable state of mind as the origin of the wild element 
 inmyth. Again, the wide prevalence in the earliest 
 times of this mental condition will, to a certain extent, 
 explain the distribution of myth. Room must be left, 
 of course, for processes of borrowing and transmission, 
 but how Andamanese, Australians and Hurons could 
 borrow from each other is an unsolved problem. 
 
 Finally, our hypothesis is not involved in dubious 
 theories of race. To us, myths appear to be affected 
 (in their origins) much less by the race than by the 
 stage of culture attained by the people who cherish 
 them. A fight for the waters between a monstrous 
 dragon like Vrittra and a heroic god like Indra is a 
 nobler affair than a quarrel for the waters between a 
 woodpecker and a toad. But the improvement and 
 transfiguration, so to speak, of a myth at bottom 
 the same is due to the superior culture, not to the 
 peculiar race, of the Vedic poets, except so far as 
 culture itself depends on race. How far the purer 
 
 1Gubernatis, Zoological Myth, ii. 395, note 2. ‘‘ When Indra kills the 
 serpent he opens the torrent of the waters” (p. 393). See also Aitareya 
 Brakmana, translated by Haug, ii. 483, 
 
46 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 culture was attained to by the original superiority of 
 the Aryan over the Andaman breed, it is not necessary 
 for our purpose to inquire. Thus, on the whole, we 
 may claim for our system a certain demonstrable 
 character, which helps to simplify the problems of 
 mythology, and to remove them from the realm of 
 fanciful guesses and conflicting etymological con- 
 jectures into that of sober science. That these 
 pretensions are not unacknowledged even by myth- 
 ologists trained in other schools is proved by the 
 remarks of Dr. Tiele.! 
 
 Dr. Tiele writes: “If I were obliged to choose 
 between this method” (the system here advocated) 
 ‘“‘and that of comparative philology, it is the former 
 that I would adopt without the slightest hesitation. 
 This method alone enables us to explain the fact, 
 which has so often provoked amazement, that people 
 so refined as the Greeks, . . . or so rude, but morally 
 pure, as the Germans, . . . managed to attribute to 
 their gods all manner of cowardly, cruel and disorderly 
 conduct. This method alone explains the why and 
 wherefore of all those strange metamorphoses of gods 
 into beasts and plants, and even stones, which scanda- 
 lised philosophers, and which the witty Ovid played 
 on for the diversion of his contemporaries, In short, 
 this method teaches us to recognise in all those strange 
 stories the survivals of a barbaric age, long passed 
 away, but enduring to later times in the form of 
 religious traditions, of all traditions the most per- 
 
 1 Rev. del’ Hist. des Rel., ‘‘ Le Mythe de Cronos,” January, 1886, Dr, 
 Tiele is not, it must be noted, a thorough adherent of our theory. See 
 Modern Mythology : ‘‘The Question of Allies”, 
 
TIELE. 47 
 
 sistent. . . . Finally, this method alone enables us to 
 explain the origin of myths, because it endeavours to 
 study them in their rudest and most primitive shape, 
 thus allowing their true significance to be much more 
 clearly apparent than it can be in the myths (so often 
 touched, retouched, augmented and humanised) which 
 are current among races arrived at a certain degree 
 of culture.” 
 
 The method is to this extent applauded by a most 
 competent authority, and it has been warmly accepted 
 by a distinguished French school of students, repre- 
 sented by M. Gaidoz. But it is obvious that the 
 method rests on a double hypothesis: first, that 
 satisfactory evidence as to the mental conditions of 
 the lower and backward races is obtainable ; second, 
 that the civilised races (however they began) either 
 passed through the savage state of thought and 
 practice, or borrowed very freely from people in that 
 condition. These hypotheses have been attacked by 
 opponents; the trustworthiness of our evidence, 
 especially, has been assailed. By way of facilitating 
 the course of the exposition and of lessening the 
 disturbing element of controversy, a reply to the 
 objections and a defence of the evidence has been 
 relegated to an Appendix. Meanwhile we go on tc 
 examine the peculiar characteristics of the mental 
 condition of savages and of peoples in the lower and 
 upper barbarisms. 
 
 1 Appendix B. 
 
48 
 
 ‘CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—CON- 
 FUSION WITH NATURE—TOTEMISM. 
 
 The mental condition of savages the basis of the irrational element in myth 
 —Characteristics of that condition : (1) Confusion of all things in an 
 equality of presumed animation and intelligence; (2) Belief in sorcery ; 
 (8) Spiritualism ; (4) Curiosity; (5) Easy credulity and mental in- 
 dolence—The curiosity is satisfied, thanks to the credulity, by myths 
 in answer to all inquiries—Evidence for this—Mr. Tylor’s opinion— 
 Mr. Im Thurn—Jesuit missionaries’ Relations—Examples of confusion 
 between men, plants, beasts and other natural objects—Reports of 
 travellers— Evidence from institution of totemism—Definition of 
 totemism—Totemism in Australia, Africa, America, the Oceanic 
 Islands, India, North Asia—Conclusions: Totemism being found so 
 widely distributed, is a proof of the existence of that savage mental 
 condition in which no line is drawn between men and the other things 
 in the world, This confusion is one of the characteristics of myth in 
 all races, 
 
 WE set out to discover a stage of human intellectual 
 development which would necessarily produce the 
 essential elements of myth. We think we have found 
 that stage in the condition of savagery. We now 
 proceed to array the evidence for the mental processes 
 of savages. We intend to demonstrate the existence 
 in practical savage life of the ideas which most surprise 
 us when we find them in civilised sacred legends. - 
 
 For the purposes of this inquiry, it is enough to 
 select a few special peculiarities of savage thought. 
 
 1, First we have that nebulous and confused frame 
 
SAVAGE IDEAS. 49 
 
 of mind to which all things, animate or inanimate, 
 human, animal, vegetable, or inorganic, seem on the 
 same level of life, passion and reason, The savage, 
 at all events when myth-making, draws no hard and 
 fast line between himself and the things in the world. 
 He regards himself as literally akin to animals and 
 plants and heavenly bodies; he attributes sex and 
 procreative powers even to stones and rocks, and he 
 assigns human speech and human feelings to sun and 
 moon and stars and wind, no less than to beasts, birds 
 and fishes. 
 
 2. The second point to note in savage opinion is the 
 belief in magic and sorcery. The world and all the 
 things in it being vaguely conceived of as sensible 
 and rational, obey the commands of certain members 
 of the tribe, chiefs, jugglers, conjurors, or what you 
 will. Rocks open at their order, rivers dry up, animals 
 are their servants and hold converse with them. 
 These magicians cause or heal diseases, and can com- 
 mand even the weather, bringing rain or thunder or 
 sunshine at their will? There are few supernatural 
 attributes of ‘‘ cloud-compelling Zeus” or of Apollo 
 that are not freely assigned to the tribal conjuror. 
 By virtue, doubtless, of the community of nature 
 between man and the things in the world, the conjuror 
 (like Zeus or Indra) can assume at will the shape of 
 any animal, or can metamorphose his neighbours or 
 enemies into animal forms. 
 
 1**So fasst auch das Alterthum ihren Unterschied von den Menschen 
 ganz anders als die spitere Zeit.’’—Grimm, quoted by Liebrecht, Zur 
 Volkskunde, p. 17. 
 2See Roth in North-West Central Queensland Aborigines, chapter xii., 
 1897. 
 VOL. I. 4 
 
50 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 3. Another peculiarity of savage belief naturally 
 connects itself with that which has just been described. 
 The savage has very strong ideas about the persistent 
 existence of the souls of the dead. They retain much 
 of their old nature, but are often more malignant 
 after death than they had been during life. They are 
 frequently at the beck and call of the conjuror, whom 
 they aid with their advice and with their magical 
 power. By virtue of the close connection already 
 spoken of between man and the animals, the souls 
 of the dead are not rarely supposed to migrate into 
 the ‘bodies of beasts, or to revert to the condition of 
 that species of creatures with which each tribe 
 supposes itself to be related by ties of kinship or 
 friendship. With the usual inconsistency of mythical 
 belief, the souls of the dead are spoken of, at other 
 times, as if they inhabited a spiritual world, some- 
 times a paradise of flowers, sometimes a gloomy 
 place, which mortal men may visit, but whence no 
 one can escape who has tasted of the food of the 
 ghosts. 
 
 4. In connection with spirits a far-reaching savage 
 philosophy prevails. It is not unusual to assign a 
 ghost to all objects, animate or inanimate, and the 
 spirit or strength of a man is frequently regarded 
 as something separable, capable of being located in 
 an external object, or something with a definite 
 locality in the body. A man’s strength and spirit 
 may reside in his kidney fat, in his heart, in a lock 
 of his hair, or may even be stored by him in some 
 separate receptacle. Very frequently a man is held 
 capable of detaching his soul from his body, and 
 
SAVAGE PSYCHOLOGY. 51 
 
 letting it roam about on his business, sometimes in 
 the form of a bird or other animal. 
 
 5. Many minor savage beliefs might be named, 
 such as the common faith in friendly or protecting 
 animals, and the notion that “natural deaths ’’ (as we 
 call them) are always unnatural, that death is always 
 caused by some hostile spirit or conjuror. From this 
 opinion comes the myth that man is naturally not 
 subject to death : that death was somehow introduced 
 into the world by a mistake or misdeed is a corollary. 
 (See ‘“‘ Myths of the Origin of Death” in Modern . 
 Mythology.) 
 
 6. One more mental peculiarity of the savage mind 
 remains to be considered in this brief summary. The 
 savage, like the civilised man, is curious. The first 
 faint impulses of the scientific spirit are at work in 
 his brain; he is anxious to give himself an account of 
 the world in which he finds himself. But he is not 
 more curious than he is, on occasion, credulous. His 
 intellect is eager to ask questions, as is the habit of 
 children, but his intellect is also lazy, and he is content 
 with the first answer that comes to hand. “Ils 
 s’arrétent aux premiéres notions qu ils en ont,’ says 
 Pére Hierome Lalemant.! “ Nothing,” says School- 
 craft, “is too capacious (sic) for Indian belief.”? The 
 replies to his questions he receives from tradition or 
 (when a new problem arises) evolves an answer for 
 himself in the shape of stories. Just as Socrates, in 
 the Platonic dialogues, recalls or invents a myth in 
 the despair of reason, so the savage has a story for 
 
 1 Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1648, p. 70. 
 2 Algic Researches, i, 41. 
 
52 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 answer to almost every question that he can ask 
 himself. These stories are in a sense scientific, be- 
 cause they attempt a solution of the riddles of the 
 world. They are in a sense religious, because there 
 is usually a supernatural power, a deus ex machina, 
 of some sort to cut the knot of the problem. Such 
 stories, then, are the science, and to a certain extent 
 the religious tradition, of savages.! 
 
 Now these tales are necessarily cast in the mould 
 of the savage ideas of which a sketch has been given. 
 The changes of the heavenly bodies, the processes of 
 day and night, the existence of the stars, the invention 
 of the arts, the origin of the world (as far as known 
 to the savage), of the tribe, of the various animals 
 and plants, the origin of death itself, the origin of the 
 perplexing traditional tribal customs, are all accounted 
 for in stories. At the same time, an actual divine 
 Maker is sometimes postulated. The stories, again, 
 are fashioned in accordance with the beliefs already 
 named : the belief in human connection with and kin- 
 ship with beasts and plants; the belief in magic; the 
 belief in the perpetual possibility of metamorphosis or 
 ‘““shape shifting” ; the belief in the permanence and 
 power of the ghosts of the dead; the belief in the 
 personal and animated character of all the things in 
 the world, and so forth. | 
 
 No more need be said to explain the wild and (as 
 it seems to us moderns) the irrational character of 
 savage myth. It is a jungle of foolish fancies, a 
 
 1*«*'The Indians (Algonkins) conveyed instruction—moral, mechanical 
 
 and religious—through traditionary fictions and tales,”—Schooleraft, Algic 
 Researches, i. 12. . 
 
CONFUSION. ‘53 
 
 walpurgis nacht ot gods and beasts and men and 
 stars and ghosts, all moving madly on a level of 
 common personality and animation, and all changing 
 shapes at random, as partners are changed in some 
 fantastic witches’ revel. Such is savage mythology, 
 and how could it be otherwise when we consider the 
 elements of thought and belief out of which it is 
 mainly composed? We shall see that part of the 
 mythology of the Greeks or the Aryans of India is 
 but a similar walpurgis nacht, in which an incestuous 
 or amorous god may become a beast, and the object of 
 his pursuit, once a woman, may also become a beast, 
 and then shift shapes to a tree or a bird or a star. 
 But in the civilised races the genius of the people 
 tends to suppress, exclude and refine away the wild 
 element, which, however, is never wholly eliminated. 
 The Erinyes soon stop the mouth of the horse of 
 Achilles when he begins, like the horse in Grimm’s 
 Goose Girl, to hold a sustained conversation.) But 
 the ancient, cruel, and grotesque savage element, nearly 
 overcome by Homer and greatly reduced by the Vedic 
 poets, breaks out again in Hesiod, in temple legends 
 and Brahmanic glosses, and finally proves so strong 
 that it can only be subdued by Christianity, or rather 
 by that break between the educated classes and the 
 traditional past of religion which has resulted from 
 Christianity. Even so, myth lingers in the folk-lore 
 of the non-progressive classes of Europe, and, as in 
 Roumania, invades religion. 
 
 We have now to demonstrate the existence in the 
 savage intellect of the various ideas and habits which 
 
 1 Jliad, xix. 418, 
 
54 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 we have described, and out of which mythology 
 springs. First, we have to show that “a nebulous 
 and confused state of mind, to which all things, 
 animate or inanimate, human, animal, vegetable or 
 inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and 
 reason,” does really exist.! The existence of this 
 condition of the intellect will be demonstrated first on 
 the evidence of the statements of civilised observers, 
 next on the evidence of the savage institutions in 
 which it is embodied. 
 
 The opinion of Mr. Tylor is naturally of great 
 value, as it is formed on as wide an acquaintance 
 with the views of the lower races as any inquirers can 
 hope to possess. Mr. Tylor observes: ‘‘We have to 
 inform ourselves of the savage man’s idea, which is 
 very different from the civilised man’s, of the nature 
 of the lower animals... . The sense of an absolute 
 psychical distinction between man and beast, so pre- 
 valent in the civilised world, is hardly to be found 
 among the lower races.”? The universal attribution of 
 “souls ” to all things—the theory known as “Animism” 
 —is another proof that the savage draws no hard 
 and fast line between man and the other things 
 in the world. The notion of the Italian country- 
 people, that cruelty to an animal does not matter 
 because it is not a “ Christian,” has no parallel in the 
 philosophy of the savage, to whom all objects seem to 
 have souls, just as men have. Mr. Im Thurn found 
 the absence of any sense of a difference between man 
 and nature a characteristic of his native companions 
 
 1 Creuzer and Guigniaut, vol. i. p. 111. 
 2 Primitive Culture, i. 167-169, 
 
MAN AND BEAST. 55 
 
 in Guiana. “The very phrase, ‘Men and other 
 animals,’ or even, as it is often expressed, ‘ Men 
 and animals,’ based as it is on the superiority which 
 civilised man feels over other animals, expresses a 
 dichotomy which is in no way recognised by the 
 Indian. . . . It is therefore most important to realise 
 how comparatively small really is the difference be- 
 tween men in a state of savagery and other animals, 
 and how completely even such difference as exists 
 escapes the notice of savage men. . . . It is not, 
 therefore, too much to say that, according to the 
 view of the Indians, other animals differ from men 
 only in bodily form and in their various degrees of 
 strength ; in spirit they do not differ at all.”* The 
 Indian’s notion of the life of plants and stones is on 
 the same level of unreason, as we moderns reckon 
 reason. He believes in the spirits of rocks and stones, 
 undeterred by the absence of motion in these objects. 
 “Not only many rocks, but also many waterfalls, 
 streams, and indeed material objects of every sort, are 
 supposed each to consist of a body and a spirit, as 
 does man.”? It is not our business to ask here how 
 men came by the belief in universal animation, That 
 belief is gradually withdrawn, distinctions are gradu- 
 ally introduced, as civilisation and knowledge advance. 
 It is enough for us if the failure to draw a hard and 
 fast line between man and beasts, stones and plants, 
 qe practically universal among savages, and if it 
 gradually disappears before the fuller knowledge of 
 civilisation. The report which Mr. Im Thurn brings 
 
 1 Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), p. 350, 
 2 Op. cit., 355, 
 
 e 
 
56 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 from the Indians of Guiana is confirmed by what 
 Schoolcraft says of the Algonkin races of the northern 
 part of the continent. “The belief of the narrators 
 and listeners in every wild and improbable thing told 
 helps wonderfully, in the original stories, in joining 
 all parts together. The Indian believes that the whole 
 visible and invisible creation is animated. ... To 
 make the matter worse, these tribes believe that 
 animals of the lowest as well as highest class in the 
 chain of creation are alike endowed with reasoning 
 powers and faculties. As a natural conclusion they 
 endow birds, beasts and all other animals with souls,” } 
 As an example of the ease with which the savage 
 recognises consciousness and voluntary motion even 
 in stones, may be cited Kohl’s account of the beliefs 
 of the Objibeways. Nearly every Indian has dis- 
 covered, he says, an object in which he places special 
 confidence, and to which he sacrifices more zealously 
 than to the Great Spirit. The “hope” of Otamigan 
 (a companion of the traveller) was a rock, which once 
 advanced to meet him, swayed, bowed and went back 
 again. Another Indian revered a Canadian larch, 
 ‘because he once heard a very remarkable rustling 
 in its branches”. It thus appears that while the 
 savage has a general kind of sense that inanimate 
 things are animated, he is a good deal impressed by 
 their conduct when he thinks that they actually 
 display their animation. In the same way a devout 
 modern spiritualist probably regards with more rever- 
 
 1Schooleraft, Algic Researches, i. 41. 
 2Kohl, Wanderings Rownd Lake Superior, pp. 58, 59; Miller, Ameré 
 kan Urrelig., pp. 62-67. 
 
 = 
 “4 
 
MAN AND THINGS. a7 
 
 ence a table which he has seen dancing and heard 
 rapping than a table at which he has only dined. 
 Another general statement of failure to draw the line 
 between men and the irrational creation is found in 
 the old Jesuit missionary Le Jeune’s Relations de la 
 Nouvelle France.’ “ Les sauvages se persuadent que 
 non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, 
 mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animées.” 
 Again: “IIs tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme 
 aussi les cerfs”. In the Solomon Islands, Mr. Romilly 
 sailed with an old chief who used violent language to 
 the waves when they threatened to dash over the 
 boat, and “old Takki’s exhortations were successful ”2 
 Waitz* discovers the same attitude towards the 
 animals among the negroes. Man, in their opinion, is 
 by no means a separate sort of person on the summit 
 of nature and high above the beasts; these he rather 
 regards as dark and enigmatic beings, whose life is 
 full of mystery, and which he therefore considers now 
 as his inferiors, now as his superiors. A. collection 
 of evidence as to the savage failure to discriminate 
 between human and non-human, animate and inani- 
 mate, has been brought together by Sir John Lubbock. 
 
 To a race accustomed like ourselves to arrange and 
 classify, to people familiar from childhood and its 
 games with “vegetable, animal and mineral,” a 
 condition of mind in which no such distinctions are 
 drawn, any more than they are drawn in Greek or 
 
 11636, p. 109. 2 Western Pacijic, p. 84, 
 
 3 Anthropologie der Natur-Volker, ii. 177. 
 
 4 Origin of Civilisation, p. 88. A number of examples of this mental 
 attitude among the Bushmen will be found in chap. v., poustea, 
 
58 ; MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Brahmanic myths, must naturally seem like what 
 Mr. Max Miller calls “‘temporary insanity”. The 
 imagination of the savage has been defined by Mr. 
 Tylor as “midway between the conditions of a healthy, 
 prosaic, modern citizen, and of a raving fanatic, or of 
 a patient in. a fever-ward”’. If any relics of such 
 imagination survive in civilised mythology, they will 
 very closely resemble the productions of a once uni- 
 versal “temporary insanity”. Let it be granted, then, 
 that “to the lower tribes of man, sun and stars, trees 
 and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal, animate 
 creatures, leading lives conformed to human or animal 
 analogies, and performing their special functions in 
 the universe with the aid of limbs like beasts, or of 
 artificial instruments like men; or that what men’s 
 eyes behold is but the instrument to be used or the 
 material to be shaped, while behind it there stands 
 some prodigious but yet half-human creature, who 
 grasps it with his hands or blows it with his breath. 
 The basis on which such ideas as these are built is not 
 to be narrowed down to poetic fancy and transformed 
 metaphor. They rest upon a broad philosophy of 
 nature; early and crude, indeed, but thoughtful, 
 consistent, and quite really and seriously meant,” ! 
 
 For the sake of illustration, some minor examples 
 must next be given of this confusion between man 
 and other things in the world, which will presently 
 be illustrated by the testimony of a powerful and 
 long diffused set of institutions. 
 
 The Christian Quiches of Guatemala believe that 
 each of them has a beast as his friend and protector, 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, i, 285, 
 
KINSHIP WITH BEASTS, 59 
 
 just as in the Highlands “the dog is the friend of the 
 Maclaines”. When the Finns, in their epic poem the 
 Kalewala, have killed a bear, they implore the animal 
 to forgive them. “Oh, Ot-so,” chant the singers, “ be 
 not angry that we come near thee. The bear, the 
 honey-footed bear, was born in lands between sun and 
 moon, and he died, not by men’s hands, but of his 
 own will”! The Red Men of North America? have a 
 tradition showing how it is that the bear does not 
 die, but, like Herodotus with the sacred stories of the 
 Egyptian priests, Mr. Schooleraft “cannot induce 
 himself to write it out”.® It is a most curious fact 
 that the natives of Australia tell a similar tale of their 
 “native bear”. ‘‘He did not die” when attacked by 
 men.* In parts of Australia it is a great offence to skin 
 the native bear, just as on a part of the west coast of 
 Ireland, where seals are superstitiously regarded, the 
 people cannot be bribed to skin them. In New 
 Caledonia, when a child tries to kill a lizard, the men 
 warn him to “beware of killing his own ancestor ”.5 
 The Zulus spare to destroy a certain species of serpents, 
 believed to be the spirits of kinsmen, as the great 
 snake which appeared when Eneas did sacrifice was 
 held to be the ghost of Anchises. Mexican women ® 
 
 1 Kalewala, in La Finlande, Leouzon Le Duc (1845), vol. ii, p. 100; 
 ¢f. also the Introduction. 
 
 2Schoolcraft, v. 420. 
 
 3 See similar ceremonies propitiatory of the bear in Jewett’s Adventures 
 among the Nootkas, Edinburgh, 1824. 
 
 4 Brough Smyth, i. 449, 5J. J. Atkinson’s MS, 
 
 6Sahagun, ii. viii. 250; Bancroft, iii. 111. Compare stories of women 
 who give birth to animals in Mélusine, 1886, August-November. The 
 Batavians believe that women, when delivered of a child, are frequently 
 
 delivered at the same time of a young crocodile as a*twin. Hawkesworth’s 
 Voyages, iii. 756. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 17 et seg. 
 
60 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 believed that children born during an eclipse turn into 
 mice. In Australia the natives believe that the wild 
 dog has the power of speech; whoever listens to him 
 is petrified ; and a certain spot is shown where “the 
 wild dog spoke and turned the men into stone”;} 
 and the blacks run for their lives as soon as the dog 
 begins to speak. What it said was “ Bones”. 
 
 These are minor examples of a form of opinion which 
 is so strong that it 1s actually the chief constituent in 
 savage society. ‘That society, whether in Ashantee or 
 Australia, in North America or South Africa, or North 
 Asia or India, or among the wilder tribes of ancient 
 Peru, is based on an institution generally called 
 ‘“‘totemism”. This very extraordinary institution, 
 whatever its origin, cannot have arisen except among 
 men capable of conceiving kinship and all human 
 relationships as existing between themselves and all 
 animate and inanimate things. It is the rule, and 
 not the exception, that savage societies are founded 
 upon this belief. The political and social conduct of 
 the backward races is regulated in such matters as 
 blood-feud and marriage by theories of the actual 
 kindred and connection by descent, or by old friend- 
 ship, which men have in common with beasts, plants, 
 the sun and moon, the stars, and even the wind and 
 the rain. Now, in whatever way this belief in such 
 relations to beasts and plants may have arisen, it 
 undoubtedly testifies to a condition of mind in which 
 no hard and fast line was drawn between man and 
 animate and inanimate nature. The discovery of the 
 wide distribution of the social arrangements based on 
 
 1 Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 497. 
 
TOTEMISM. 61 
 
 this belief is entirely due to Mr. J. F. M‘Lennan, the 
 author of Primitive Marriage. Mr. M‘Lennan’s essays 
 (“The Worship of Plants and Animals,” ‘‘ Totems 
 and Totemism”) were published in the Fortnightly 
 Review, 1869-71. Any follower in the footsteps of 
 Mr. M‘Lennan has it in his power to add a little evi- 
 dence to that originally set forth, and perhaps to sift 
 the somewhat uncritical authorities adduced. 
 
 The name “Totemism” or “Totamism” was first 
 applied at the end of the last century by Long? to the 
 Red Indian custom which acknowledges human kin- 
 ship with animals. This institution had already been 
 recognised among the Iroquois by Lafitau,? and by 
 other observers. As to the word “totem,” Mr. Max 
 Miiller* quotes an opinion that the interpreters, 
 missionaries, Government inspectors, and others who 
 apply the name totem to the Indian “family mark” 
 must have been ignorant of the Indian languages, for 
 there isin them no such word as totem. The right 
 word, it appears, is otem ; but as “‘ totemism ” has the 
 advantage of possessing the ground, we prefer to say 
 ‘‘totemism” rather than ‘‘otemism”. The facts are 
 the same, whatever name we give them. As Mr. 
 Miller says himself,® “every warrior has his crest, 
 which is called his totem” ;® and he goes on to describe 
 a totem of an Indian who died about 1793. We may 
 now return to the consideration of “otemism” or 
 
 1See also Mr. Frazer's Totemism, and Golden Bough, with chapter on 
 Totemism in Modern Mythology. 
 2 Voyages and Travels, 1791. 3 Meurs des Sauvages (1724), p. 461. 
 4 Academy, December 15, 1883. ° Selected Essays (1881), ii. 376. 
 6 Compare Mr. Max Miiller’s Contributions to the Science of Mythology. 
 
62 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 totemism. We approach it rather as a fact in the 
 science of mythology than as a stage in the evolution 
 of the modern family system. For us totemism is 
 interesting because it proves the existence of that 
 savage mental attitude which assumes kindred and 
 alliance between man and the things in the world, 
 As will afterwards be seen, totemism has also left 
 its mark on the mythologies of the civilised races. 
 We shall examine the institution first as it is found in 
 Australia, because the Australian form of totemism 
 shows in the highest known degree the savage habit 
 of confusing in a community of kinship men, stars, 
 plants, beasts, the heavenly bodies, and the forces of 
 Nature. When this has once been elucidated, a shorter 
 notice of other totemistic races will serve our purpose. 
 
 The society of the Murri or black fellows of 
 Australia is divided into local tribes, each of which 
 possesses, or used to possess, and hunt over a consider- 
 able tract of country. These local tribes are united 
 by contiguity, and by common local interests, but not 
 necessarily by blood kinship. For example, the Port 
 Mackay tribe, the Mount Gambier tribe, the Ballarat 
 tribe, all take their names from their district. In the 
 same way we might speak of the people of Strathclyde 
 or of Northumbria in early English history. Now, all — 
 these local tribes contain an indefinite number of 
 stocks of kindred, of men believing themselves to be . 
 related by the ties of blood and common descent. That 
 descent the groups agree in tracing, not from some 
 real or idealised human parent, but from some animal, 
 plant, or other natural object, as the kangaroo, the 
 emu, the iguana, the pelican, and_so forth. Persons 
 
AUSTRALIAN TOTEMS. 63 
 
 of the pelican stock in the north of Queensland regard 
 themselves as relations of people of the same stock in 
 the most southern parts of Australia. The creature 
 from which each tribe claims descent is called ‘‘ of the 
 same flesh,” while persons of another stock are ‘‘ fresh 
 flesh”. A native may not marry a woman of ‘“‘his 
 own flesh”; it is only a woman of ‘“‘fresh’’ or 
 “strange” flesh he may marry. A man may not eat an 
 animal of ‘‘ his own flesh”; he may only eat “strange 
 flesh”. Only under great stress of need will an 
 Australian eat the animal which is the flesh-and-blood 
 cousin and protector of his stock. (These rules of 
 marriage and blood, however, do not apply among 
 the Arunta of Central Australia, whose Totems (if 
 Totems they should be called) have been developed 
 on very different lines.”) Clearer evidence of the 
 confusion between man and beast, of the claiming 
 of kin between man and beast, could hardly be. 
 But the Australian philosophy of the intercom- 
 munion of Nature goes still farther than this. Besides 
 the local divisions and the kindred stocks which trace 
 their descent from animals, there exist among many 
 Australian tribes divisions of a kind still unexplained. 
 For example, every man of the Mount Gambier local 
 tribe is by birth either a Kumite or a Kroki. This 
 classification applies to the whole of the sensible uni- 
 verse. Thus smoke and honeysuckle trees belong to 
 the division Kumite, and are akin to the fishhawk 
 stock of men. On the other hand, the kangaroo, 
 1Dawson, Aborigines, pp. 26, 27; Howitt and Fison, Kamilaroi and 
 
 Kurnai, p. 169. 
 2 Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 
 
64 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 summer, autumn, the wind and the shevak tree belong 
 to the division Kroki, and are akin to the black 
 cockatoo stock of men. Any human member of the 
 Kroki division has thus for his brothers the sun, the 
 wind, the kangaroo, and the rest; while any man of 
 the Kumite division and the crow surname is the 
 brother of the rain, the thunder, arid the winter. 
 This extraordinary belief is not a mere idle fancy— 
 it influences conduct. “A man does not kill or use 
 as food any of the animals of the same subdivision 
 (Kroki or Kumite) with himself, excepting when 
 hunger compels, and then they express sorrow for 
 having to eat their wingong (friends) or twmanang 
 (their flesh), When using the last word they touch 
 their breasts, to indicate the close relationship, mean- 
 ing almost a portion of themselves. To illustrate : 
 One day one of the blacks killed a crow. Three or 
 four days afterwards a Boortwa (a man of the crow 
 suriiame and stock), named Larry, died. He had 
 been ailing for some days, but the killing of his 
 wingong (totem) hastened his death.” Commenting 
 on this statement, Mr. Fison observes: ‘The South 
 Australian savage looks upon the universe as the 
 Great Tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself 
 belongs; and all things, animate and inanimate, which 
 belong to his class are parts of the body corporate 
 whereof he himself is part’. This account of the 
 Australian beliefs and customs is borne out, to a 
 certain extent, by the evidence of Sir George Grey,’ 
 and of the late Mr. Gideon Scott Lang.* These two 
 
 1 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 169. 2 Travels, ii, 225, 
 3 Lang, Lecture on Natives of Australia, p, 10. 
 
KOBONGS. 65 
 
 writers take no account of the singular “ dichotomous” 
 divisions, as of Kumite and Kroki, but they draw 
 attention to the groups of kindred which derive their 
 surnames from animals, plants, and the like. “The 
 origin of these family names,” says Sir George Grey, 
 “is attributed by the natives to different causes... . 
 One origin frequently assigned by the natives is, that 
 they were derived from some vegetable or animal 
 being very common in the district which the family 
 inhabited.” We have seen from the evidence of 
 Messrs. Fison and Howitt that a more common native 
 explanation is based on kinship with the vegetable 
 or plant which bestows the family surname. Sir 
 George Gray mentions that the families use their 
 plant or animal as a crest or kobong (totem), and 
 he adds that natives never willingly kill animals of 
 their kobong, holding that some one of that species 
 is their nearest friend. The consequences of eating 
 forbidden animals vary considerably. Sometimes the 
 Loyl-yas (that is, ghosts) avenge the crime. Thus 
 when Sir George Grey ate some mussels (which, 
 after all, are not the crest of the Greys), a storm 
 followed, and one of his black fellow improvised this 
 stave :— 
 
 Oh, wherefore did he eat the mussels ? 
 
 Now the Boyl-yas storms and thunders make : 
 
 Oh, wherefore would he eat the mussels ? 
 
 There are two points in the arrangements of these 
 stocks of kindred named from plants and animals 
 which we shall find to possess a high importance. 
 No member of any such kindred may marry a woman 
 
 of the same name and descended from the same 
 VOL. I. 5 
 
66 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 object.1 Thus no man of the Emu stock may marry an 
 Emu woman; no Blacksnake may marry a Blacksnake 
 woman, and so forth. This point is very strongly put 
 by Mr. Dawson, who has had much experience of the 
 blacks. ‘So strictly are the laws of marriage carried 
 out, that, should any sign of courtship or affection be 
 observed between those ‘of one flesh,’ the brothers or 
 male relatives of the woman beat her severely.” If 
 the incestuous pair (though not in the least related 
 according to our ideas) run away together, they are 
 ‘‘half-killed”; and if the woman dies in consequence 
 of her punishment, her partner in iniquity is beaten 
 again. No “eric” or blood-fine of any kind is paid 
 for her death, which carries no blood-feud. ‘‘ Her 
 punishment is legal.”? This account fully corroborates 
 that of Sir George Grey.® 
 
 Our conclusion is that the belief in ‘‘ one flesh ” (a 
 kinship shared with the animals) must be a thoroughly 
 binding idea, as the notion is sanctioned by capital 
 punishment. 
 
 Another important feature in Australian totemism 
 strengthens our position. The idea of the animal 
 kinship must be an ancient one in the race, because 
 the family surname, Emu, Bandicoot, or what not, and 
 the crest, kobong, or protecting and kindred animal, 
 are inherited through the mother's side in the majority 
 
 1Taplin, The Narrinyeri, p. 2.  ‘‘ Every tribe, regarded by them as a 
 family, has its ngaitge, or tutelary genius or tribal symbol, in the shape of 
 some bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, or substance. Between individuals 
 of the same tribe no marriage can take place.” Among the Narrinyeri 
 kindred is reckoned (p. 10) on the father’s side. See also (p. 46) ngaitge = 
 Samoan aitu. ‘*No man or woman will kill their ngaitge,” except with 
 
 precautions, for food. 
 2 Op. cit., p. 28. 3 Tbid., ti. 220. 
 
INCEST IN TOTEMISM. 67 
 
 of stocks. This custom, therefore, belongs to that 
 early period of human society in which the woman is 
 the permanent and recognised factor in the family 
 while male parentage is uncertain! One other feature 
 of Australian totemism must be mentioned before we 
 leave the subject. There is some evidence that in 
 certain tribes the wingong or totem of each man is 
 indicated by a tattooed representation of it upon his 
 flesh. The natives are very licentious, but men would 
 shrink from an amour with a woman who neither be- 
 longed to their own district nor spoke their language, 
 but who, in spite of that, was of their totem. To 
 avoid mistakes, it seems that some tribes mark the 
 totem on the flesh with incised lines? The natives 
 frequently design figures of some kind on the trees 
 growing near the graves of deceased warriors. Some 
 observers have fancied that in these designs they 
 recognised the totem of the dead men; but on this, 
 subject evidence is by no means clear. We shall see 
 that this primitive sort of heraldry, this carving or 
 painting of hereditary blazons, is common among the 
 Red Men of America.’ 
 
 Though a large amount of evidence might be added 
 to that already put forward, we may now sum up the 
 inferences to be drawn from the study of totemism in 
 Australia. It has been shown (1) that the natives 
 
 10f. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht; M’Lennan, Primitive Marriage, 
 passim ; Encycl. Brit. s. v. Family. 
 
 2 Fison, op. cit., p. 66. 
 
 3 Among other recent sources see Howitt in ‘‘ Organisation of Australian 
 Tribes’’ (Transactions of Royal Society of Victoria, 1889), and Spencer 
 
 and Gillen, Natives of Central Australia. In Central Australia there 
 is a marked difference in the form of Totemism, 
 
68 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 think themselves actually akin to animals, plants, the 
 sun, and the wind, and things in general; (2) that 
 those ideas influence their conduct, and even regulate 
 their social arrangements, because (8) men and women 
 of the kinship of the same animal or plant may not 
 intermarry, while men are obliged to defend, and in 
 case of murder to avenge, persons of the stock of the 
 family or plant from which they themselves derive 
 their family name. Thus, on the evidence of institu- 
 tions, it is plain that the Australians are (or before 
 the influence of the Europeans became prevalent were) 
 in a state of mind which draws no hard and fast line 
 between man and the things in the world. If, there- 
 fore, we find that in Australian myth, men, gods, beasts, 
 and things all shift shapes incessantly, and figure in a 
 coroboree dance of confusion, there will be nothing to 
 astonish us in the discovery. The myths of men in 
 the Australian intellectual condition, of men who hold 
 long conversations with the little “native bear,” and 
 ask him for oracles, will naturally and inevitably be 
 grotesque and confused.’ 
 
 It is “a far cry” from Australia to the West Coast 
 of Africa, and it is scarcely to be supposed that the 
 Australians have borrowed ideas and institutions from 
 Ashantee, or that the people of Ashantee have derived 
 their conceptions of the universe from the Murri of 
 Australia. We find, however, on the West African 
 Coast, just as we do in Australia, that there exist large 
 local divisions of the natives. These divisions are 
 spoken of by Mr. Bowditch (who visited the country 
 on a mission in 1817) as nations, and they are much 
 
 1 Brough Smyth, i. 447,.on MS. authority of W. Thomas. 
 
ASHANTEE. 69 
 
 more populous and powerful (as the people are more 
 civilised) than the local tribes of Australia. Yet, just 
 as.among the local tribes of Australia, the nations of 
 the West African Coast are divided into stocks of 
 kindred, each stock having its representatives in each 
 nation. ‘Thus an Ashantee or a Fantee may belong 
 to the same stock of kindred as a member of the 
 Assin or Akini nation. When an Ashantee of the 
 Annona stock of kindred meets a Warsaw man of the 
 same stock they salute and acknowledge each other 
 as brothers. In the same way a Ballarat man of the 
 Kangaroo stock in Australia recognises a relative in a 
 Mount Gambier man who is alsoa Kangaroo. Now, 
 with one exception, all the names of the twelve stocks 
 of West African kindreds, or at least all of them which 
 Mr. Bowditch could get the native interpreters to 
 translate, are derived from animais, plants and other 
 natural objects, just as in Australia.1_ Thus Quonna is 
 a buffalo, Abrootoo is a cornstalk, Abbradi a plantain. 
 Other names are, in English, the parrot, the wild cat, 
 red earth, panther and dog. Thus all the natives of 
 this part of Africa are parrots, dogs, buffaloes, panthers, 
 and so forth, just as the Australians are emus, iguanas, 
 black cockatoos, kangaroos, and the rest. It is remark- 
 able that there is an Incra stock, or clan of ants, in 
 Ashantee, just as there was a race of Myrmidons, 
 believed to be descended from or otherwise connected 
 
 1 The evidence of native interpreters may be viewed with suspicion. Tt 
 is improbable, however, that in 1817 the interpreters were acquainted with 
 the totemistic theory of mythologists, and deliberately mistranslated the 
 names of the stocks, so as to make them harmonise with Indian, Australian, 
 and Red Indian totem kindreds. This, indeed, is an example where the 
 
 criterion of ‘“‘recurrence’’ or ‘‘coincidence’’ seems to be valuable. Bow 
 ditch’s Mission to Ashantee (1873), p. 181. 
 
70 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 with ants, in ancient Greece. Though Bowditch’s 
 account of these West African family divisions is brief, 
 the arrangement tallies closely with that of Australia. 
 It is no great stretch of imagination to infer that the 
 African tribes do, or once did, believe themselves to be 
 of the kindred of the animals whose names they bear, 
 It is more or less confirmatory of this hypothesis that — 
 no family is permitted to use as food the animal from 
 which it derives its name. We have seen that a similar 
 rule prevails, as far as hunger and scarcity of victuals 
 permit it to be obeyed, among the natives of Australia. 
 The Intchwa stock in Ashantee and Fantee is particu- 
 larly unlucky, because its members may not eat the 
 dog, ‘‘ much relished by native epicures, and therefore 
 a serious privation”’. Equally to be pitied were the 
 ancient Egyptians, who, if they belonged to the district 
 of the sheep, might not eat mutton, which their neigh- 
 bours, the Lycopolite, devoured at pleasure. These 
 restrictions appear to be connected with the almost 
 universal dislike of cannibals to eat persons of their 
 own kindred except as a pious duty. This law of the 
 game in cannibalism has not yet been thoroughly ex- 
 amined, though we often hear of wars waged expressly 
 for the purpose of securing food (human meat), while 
 some South American tribes actually bred from cap- 
 tive women by way of securing constant supplies of 
 permitted flesh.2 When we find stocks, then, which 
 
 1This view, however, does not prevail among the totemistic tribes of 
 British Columbia, for example. 
 
 2 Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 50. This amazing tale is supported 
 by the statement that kinship went by the female side (p. 49); the father 
 was thus not of the kin of his child by the alien woman, Cieza was with 
 Validillo in 1538. 
 
BECHUANAS. 71 
 
 derive their names from animals and decline to eat 
 these animals, we may at least suspect that they once 
 claimed kinship with the name-giving beasts. The 
 refusal to eat them raises a presumption of such faith. 
 Old Bosman? had noticed the same practices. ‘‘ One 
 eats no mutton, another no goat’s flesh, another no 
 beef, swine’s flesh, wild fowl, cocks with white feathers, 
 and they say their ancestors did so from the beginning 
 of the world.” 
 
 While in the case of the Ashantee tribes, we can 
 only infer the existence of a belief in kinship with the 
 animals from the presence of the other features of 
 fully developed totemism (especially from the refusal 
 to eat the name-giving animal), we have direct evidence 
 for the opinion in another part of Africa, among the 
 Bechuanas.? Casalis, who passed twenty-three years 
 as a missionary in South Africa, thus describes the 
 institution : “While the united communities usually 
 bear the name of their chief or of the district which 
 they inhabit ” (local tribes, as in Australia), ‘‘ each stock 
 (tribwu) derives its title from an animal or a vegetable. 
 All the Bechuanas are subdivided thus into Bakuenas 
 (crocodile-men), Batlapis (men of the fish), Banarer 
 (of the buffalo), Banukus (porcupines), Bamoraras 
 (wild vines), and so forth. The Bakuenas call the 
 crocodile their father, sing about him in their feasts, 
 swear by him, and mark the ears of their cattle with 
 an incision which resembles the open jaws of the 
 creature.” This custom of marking the cattle with 
 the crest, as it were, of the stock, takes among some 
 races the shape of deforming themselves, so as the 
 
 1Jn Pinkerton, xvi, 400. 2K. Casalis, Les Bassoutos, 1859, 
 
72 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 more to resemble the animal from which they claim 
 descent. “The chief of the family which holds the 
 chief rank in the stock is called ‘The Great Man 
 of the Crocodile’. Precisely in the same way the 
 Duchess of Sutherland is styled in Gaelic ‘The Great 
 Lady of the Cat,” though totemism is probably not 
 the origin of this title. 
 
 Casalis proceeds: ‘“‘ No one would dare to eat the 
 flesh or wear the skin of the animal whose name he 
 bears. If the animal be dangerous—the lion, for 
 example—people only kill him after offering every 
 apology and asking his pardon. Purification must 
 follow such a sacrifice.” Casalis was much struck 
 with the resemblance between these practices and the 
 similar customs of North American races. Living- 
 stone’s account! on the whole corroborates that of 
 Casalis, though he says the Batau (tribe of the lion) 
 no longer exists. “They use the word bina ‘to dance,’ 
 in reference to the custom of thus naming themselves, 
 so that when you wish to ascertain what tribe they 
 belong to, you say, ‘What do you dance?’ It would 
 seem as if this had been part of the worship of old.” 
 The mythological and religious knowledge of the 
 Bushmen is still imparted in dances; and when a 
 man is ignorant of some myth he will say, “I do not 
 dance that dance,” meaning that he does not belong to 
 the guild which preserves that particular “sacred 
 chapter ”.? 
 
 Casalis noticed the similarity between South African 
 and Red Indian opinion about kinship with vegetables 
 
 1 Missionary Travels (1857), p. 18. ° 
 2Orpen, Cape Monthly Magazine, 1872. 
 
RED INDIANS. 73 
 
 and beasts. The difficulty in treating the Red Indian 
 belief is chiefly found in the abundance of the evidence. 
 Perhaps the first person who ever used the word 
 “totemism,”’ or, as he spells it, “ totamism,” was (as we 
 said) Mr. Long, an interpreter among the Chippeways, 
 who published his Voyages in 1791. Long was not 
 wholly ignorant of the languages, as it was his business 
 to speak them, and he was an adopted Indian. The 
 ceremony of adoption was painful, beginning with a 
 feast of dog’s flesh, followed by a Turkish bath and a 
 prolonged process of tattooing. According to Long, 
 ‘‘The totam, they conceive, assumes the form of some 
 beast or other, and therefore they never kill, hurt, 
 or eat the animal whose form they think this totam 
 bears”. One man was filled with religious apprehen- 
 sions, and gave himself up to the gloomy belief of 
 Bunyan and Cowper, that he had committed the 
 unpardonable sin, because he dreamed he had killed 
 his totem, a bear.2 This is only one example, like the 
 refusal of the Osages to kill the beavers, with which 
 they count cousins,‘ that the Red Man’s belief is an 
 actual creed, and does influence his conduct. 
 
 As in Australia, the belief in common kin with 
 beasts is most clearly proved by the construction of 
 Red Indian society. The ‘‘ totemistic’’ stage of thought 
 and manners prevails. Thus Charlevoix says,’ “ Plu- 
 sieurs nations ont chacune trois familles ou tribus 
 principales, aussi anciennes, & ce quil paroit, que 
 lewr origine. Chaque tribu porte le nom d’un animal, 
 et la nation entiére a aussi le sien, dont elle prend le 
 
 1 Long, pp. 46-49. 2 Ibid., p. 86. 8 Ibid., p. 87. 
 4Schooleraft, i. 319. 5 Histoire de la France-Nowvelle, iii. 266. 
 
74 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 nom, et dont la figure est sa marque, ou, se l’on veut, ses 
 armoiries, on ne signe point autrement les traités qu’en 
 traceant ces figures.” Among the animal totems Charle- 
 voix notices porcupine, bear, wolf and turtle. The 
 armovries, the totemistic heraldry of the peoples of 
 Virginia, greatly interested a heraldic ancestor of 
 Gibbon the historian,’ who settled in the colony. 
 According to Schooleraft,? the totem or family badge 
 of a dead warrior is drawn in a reverse position on 
 his grave-post. In the same way the leopards of 
 England are drawn reversed on the shield of an English 
 king opposite the mention of his death in old monkish 
 chronicles. As a general rule,® persons bearing the 
 same totem in America cannot intermarry. “The 
 union must be between various totems.” Moreover, as 
 in the case of the Australians, “the descent of the chief 
 is in the female line”. We thus find among the Red 
 Men precisely the same totemistic regulations as among 
 the Aborigines of Australia. Like the Australians, 
 the Red Men “ never ” (perhaps we should read “ hardly 
 ever”) eat their totems. Totemists, in short, spare the 
 beasts that are their own kith and kin. To avoid 
 multiplying details which all corroborate each other, 
 it may suffice to refer to Schoolcraft for totemism 
 among the Iowas ‘ and the Pueblos ; ° for the Iroquois, to 
 Lafitau, a missionary of the early part of the eighteenth 
 century. .Lafitau was perhaps the first writer who ever 
 
 1Introductio ad Latinam Blasoniam, by John Gibbon, Blue Mantle, 
 London, 1682. ‘‘ The dancers, were painted some party per pale, gul and 
 sab, some party per fesse of the same colours;’’ whence Gibbon concluded 
 ‘‘that heraldry was ingrafted naturally into the sense of the humane race’’, 
 
 2Vol. i. p. 356, 3 Schoolcraft, v. 73, 
 4 Jbid., iii. 268. 5 Tbid., iv. 86. 
 
 Fok 
 = ahs 
 — —.. 
 
RED INDIANS. 15 
 
 explained certain features in Greek and other ancient 
 myths and practices as survivals from. totemism. The 
 Chimera, a composite creature, lion, goat: and serpent, 
 might represent, Lafitau thought, a league of three 
 totem tribes, just as wolf, bear and turtle represented 
 the Iroquois League. 
 
 The martyred Pére Rasles, again, writing in 1723,' 
 says that one stock of the Outaonaks claims descent 
 from a hare (‘‘ the great hare was a man of prodigious 
 size’’), while another stock derive their lineage from 
 the carp, and a third descends from a bear ; yet they 
 do not scruple, after certain expiatory rites, to eat 
 bear’s flesh. Other North American examples are 
 the Kutchin, who have always possessed the system 
 of totems.” 
 
 It is to be noticed, as a peculiarity of Red Indian 
 totemism which we have not observed (though it may 
 exist) in Africa, that certain stocks claim relations 
 with the sun. Thus Pére Le Petit, writing from New 
 Orleans in 1730, mentions the Sun, or great chief of 
 the Natchez Indians. The totem of the privileged 
 class among the Natchez was the sun, and in all 
 myths the sun is regarded as a living being, who can 
 have children, who may be beaten, who bleeds when 
 cut, and is simply on the same footing as men and 
 everything else in the world. Precisely similar 
 evidence comes from South America. In this case our 
 best authority is almost beyond suspicion. He knew 
 the native languages well, being himself a half-caste. 
 He was learned in the European learning of his time ; 
 
 1Kip’s Jesuits in America i. 33. 
 2Dall’s Alaska, pp. 196-198, 3 Kip, ii, 288, 
 
76 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION, 
 
 and as a son of the Incas, he had access to all surviving 
 Peruvian stores of knowledge, and could collect with- 
 out difficulty the testimonies of his countrymen. It 
 will be seen! that Don Garcilasso de la Vega could 
 estimate evidence, and ridiculed the rough methods 
 and fallacious guesses of Spanish inquirers. Garci- 
 lasso de la Vega was born about 1540, being the son 
 of an Inca princess and of a Spanish conqueror. His 
 book, Commentarias Reales,? was expressly intended 
 to rectify the errors of such Spanish writers as 
 Acosta. In his account of Peruvian religion, Garci- 
 lasso distinguishes between the beliefs of the tribes 
 previous to the rise of the Inca empire and the sun- 
 worship of the Incas. But it is plain, from Garci- 
 lasso’s own account and from other evidence, that 
 under the Incas the older faiths and fetichisms 
 survived, in subordination to sun-worship, just as 
 Pagan superstitions survived in custom and folk-lore 
 after the official recognition of Christianity. Sun- 
 worship, in Peru, and the belief in a Supreme Creator 
 there, seem even, like Catholicism in Mexico, China 
 and elsewhere, to have made a kind of compromise 
 with the lower beliefs, and to have been content to 
 allow a certain amount of bowing down in the temples 
 of the elder faiths. According, then, to Garcilasso’s 
 account of Peruvian totemism, “ An Indian was not 
 looked upon as honourable unless he was descended 
 from a fountain, river,® or lake, or even from the sea, 
 
 1 Appendix B. 
 
 2See translation in Hakluyt Society’s Collection. 
 
 3 Like many Greek heroes. Odyssey, iii. 489. ‘* Orsilochus, the child 
 begotten of Alpheus.” 
 
PERU. 77 
 
 or from a wild animal, such as a bear, lion, tiger, 
 eagle, or the bird they call cuntur (condor), or some 
 other bird of prey’’1 A certain amount of worship 
 was connected with this belief in kinship with beasts 
 and natural objects. Men offered up to their totems 
 “what they usually saw them eat”? On the sea- 
 coasts ‘‘ they worshipped sardines, skates, dog-fish, 
 and, for want of larger gods, crabs... . There was 
 not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they 
 did not worship as a god,” including “lizards, toads 
 and frogs.” Garcilasso (who says they ate the fish 
 they worshipped) gives his own theory of the origin 
 of totemism. In the beginning men had only sought 
 for badges whereby to discriminate one human stock 
 from another. “The one desired to have a god dif- 
 ferent from the other. ... They only thought of 
 making one different from another.” When the Inca 
 emperors began to civilise the totemistic stocks, they 
 pointed out that their own father, the sun, possessed 
 “splendour and beauty” as contrasted with “the 
 ugliness and filth of the frogs and other vermin they 
 looked upon as gods”.* Garcilasso, of course, does 
 not use the North American word totem (or ote or 
 otem) for the family badge which represented the 
 family ancestors. He calls these things, as a general 
 rule, pacarissa, The sun was the pacarissa of the 
 Incas, as it was of the chief of the Natchez. The 
 pacarissa of other stocks was the lion, bear, frog, or 
 what not. Garcilasso accounts for the belief accorded 
 to the Incas, when they claimed actual descent from 
 the sun, by observing ‘ that “‘ there were tribes among 
 
 1 Comm. Real., i. 75. 2Tbid., 58. Ibid. 102, 4 Ibid, 83. 
 
78 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 their subjects who professed similar fabulous descents, 
 though they did not comprehend how to select an- 
 cestors so well as the Incas, but adored animals and 
 other low and earthly objects”. As to the fact of 
 the Peruvian worship of beasts, if more evidence is 
 wanted, it is given, among others, by Cieza de Leon,} 
 who contrasts the adoration of the Roman gods with 
 that offered in Peru to brutes, “In the important 
 temple of Pacha-camac (the spiritual deity of Peru) 
 they worshipped a'she-fox or vixen and an emerald.” 
 The devil also “appeared to them and spoke in the 
 form of a tiger, very fierce”. Other examples of 
 totemism in South America may be studied in the 
 tribes on the Amazon.?. Mr. Wallace found the Pine- 
 apple stock, the Mosquitoes, Woodpeckers, Herons, 
 and other totem kindreds. A curious example of 
 similar ideas is discovered among the Bonis of Guiana. 
 These people were originally West Coast Africans 
 imported as slaves, who have won their freedom with 
 the sword. While they retain a rough belief in 
 Gadow (God) and Didibi (the devil), they are divided 
 into totem stocks with animal names. The red ape, 
 turtle and cayman are among the chief totems.’ 
 
 After this hasty examination of the confused belief 
 in kinship with animals and other natural objects 
 which underlies institutions in Australia, West and 
 South Africa, North and South America, we may 
 glance at similar notions among the non-Aryan races 
 of India. In Dalton’s Ethnology of Bengal,‘ he tells 
 
 1 Cieza de Leon (Hakluyt Society), p. 183. 
 ? Acuna, p. 103; Wallace, Travels on Amazon (1858), pp. 481-506, 
 ®Crevaux, Voyages dans l’ Amerique du Sud, p. 59. 4 Dalton, p. 68. 
 
INDIAN TOTEMS. 79 
 
 us that the Garo clans are divided into maharis or 
 motherhoods. Children belong to the mahari of the 
 mother, just as (in general) they derive their stock 
 name and totem from the mother’s side in Australia 
 and among the North American Indians, No man 
 may marry (as among the Red Indians and Australians) 
 a woman belonging to his own stock, motherhood or 
 maharz. So far the maharis of Bengal exactly cor- 
 respond to the totem kindred. But do the Maharis 
 also take their names from plants and animals, and so 
 forth? We know that the Killis, similar communities 
 among the Bengal Hos and Mundos, do this.1 “The 
 Mundaris, like the Oraons, adopt as their tribal dis- 
 tinction the name of some animal, and the flesh of 
 that animal is tabooed to them as food; for example, 
 the eel, the tortoise.” This is exactly the state of 
 things in Ashanti. Dalton mentions also? a princely 
 family in Nagpur which claims descent from “a great 
 hooded snake”. Among the Oraons he found ® tribes 
 which might not eat young mice (considered a dainty) 
 or tortoises, and a stock which might not eat the oil 
 of the tree which was their totem, nor even sit in its 
 shade, “The family or tribal names” (within which 
 they may not marry) “are usually those of animals or 
 plants, and when this is the case, the flesh of some 
 part of the animal or the fruit of the tree is tabooed 
 to the tribe called after it.” 
 
 An excellent sketch of totemism in India is given 
 by Mr. H. H. Risley of the Bengal Civil Service :— 
 
 1 Dalton, p. 189. 2 Ibid., p. 166. 3 Ibid., p. 254. 
 4The Asiatic Quarterly, No, 3, Essay on ‘‘ Primitive Marriage in 
 Bengal ”’, 
 
80 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 “ At the bottom of the social system, as understood 
 by the average Hindu, stands a large body of non- 
 Aryan castes and tribes, each of which is broken up 
 into a number of what may be called totemistic 
 exogamous septs. Each sept bears the name of an 
 animal, a tree, a plant, or of some material object, 
 natural or artificial, which the members of that sept 
 are prohibited from killing, eating, cutting, burning, 
 carrying, using, ete.” } 
 
 Mr. Risley finds that both Kolarians, as the Sonthals, 
 and Dravidians, as the Oraons, are in this state of 
 totemism, like the Hos and Mundas. It is most instruc- 
 tive to learn that, as one of these tribes rises in the 
 social scale, it sloughs off its totem, and, abandoning 
 the common name derived from bird, beast, or plant, 
 adopts that of an eponymous ancestor. A tendency 
 in this direction has been observed by Messrs. Fison 
 and Howitt even in Australia. The Mahilis, Koras 
 and Kurmis, who profess to be members of the Hindu 
 community, still retain the totemistic organisation, 
 with names derived from birds, beasts and plants. 
 Even the Jagannathi Kumhars of Orissa, taking rank 
 immediately below the writer-caste, have the totems 
 tiger, snake, weasel, cow, frog, sparrow and tortoise. 
 The sub-castes of the Khatlya Kumhars explain away 
 their totem-names “as names of certain saints, who, 
 being present at Daksha’s Horse-sacrifice, transformed 
 themselves into animals to escape the wrath of Siva,” 
 
 1 Here we may note that the origin of exogamy itself is merely part of a 
 strict totemistic prohibition. A man may not ‘‘use’’ an object within the 
 totem kin, nor a woman of the kin. Compare the Greek idiom xpjaba 
 ryuvaurl, 
 
INDIA. 81 
 
 like the gods of Egypt when they fled in bestial form 
 from the wrath of Set. 
 
 Among the non-Aryan tribes the marriage law has 
 the totemistic sanction. Noman may marry a woman 
 of his totem kin. When the totem-name is changed for 
 an eponym, the non-Aryan, rising in the social scale, 
 is practically in the same position as the Brahmans, 
 ‘divided into exogamous sections (gotras), the mem- 
 bers of which profess to be descended from the 
 mythical 72sh2 or inspired saint whose name the gotra 
 bears”. There is thus nothing to bar the conjecture 
 that the exogamous gotras of the whole Brahmans were 
 once a form of totem-kindred, which (like aspiring non- 
 _ Aryan stocks at the present day) dropped the totem- 
 name and renamed the septs from some eponymous 
 hero, medicine-man, or Rashz. 
 
 Constant repetition of the same set of facts becomes 
 irksome, and yet is made necessary by the legitimate 
 demand for trustworthy and abundant evidence. As 
 the reader must already have reflected, this living 
 mythical belief in the common confused equality of 
 men, gods, plants, beasts, rivers, and what not, which 
 still regulates savage society, is one of the most promi- 
 nent features in mythology. Porphyry remarked and 
 exactly described it among the Egyptians—‘‘ common 
 and akin to men and gods they believed the beasts to 
 be”.? The belief in such equality is alien to modern 
 civilisation. We have shown that it is common and 
 fundamental in savagery. For instance, in the Pacific, 
 
 1See, some very curious and disgusting examples of this confusion in 
 Liebrecht’s Zur Volkskunde, pp. 395, 396 (Heilbronn, 1879). 
 
 2 De Abst., ii. 26. 
 VOL, L 6 
 
82 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 we might quote Turner, and for Melanesia, Codring- 
 ton,? while for New Zealand we have Taylor.? For the 
 Jakuts, along the banks of the Lena in Northern Asia, 
 we have the evidence of Strahlenberg, who writes: 
 “Each tribe of these people look upon some particular 
 creature as sacred, ¢.g., a Swan, goose, raven, etc., and 
 such is not eaten by that tribe” though the others may 
 eat itt As the majority of our witnesses were quite 
 unaware that the facts they described were common 
 among races of whom many of them had never even 
 heard, their evidence may surely be accepted as valid, 
 especially as the beliefs testified to express themselves 
 in marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in abstinence from 
 food, on pillars over graves, in rude heraldry, and in 
 other obvious and palpable shapes. If we have not 
 made out, by the evidence of institutions, that a con- 
 fused credulity concerning the equality and kinship of 
 man and the objects in nature is actually a ruling belief 
 among savages, and even higher races, from the Lena 
 to the Amazon, from the Gold Coast to Queensland, 
 we may despair of ever convincing an opponent. 
 The survival of the same beliefs and institutions 
 among civilised races, Aryan and others, will later 
 be demonstrated.> If we find that the mythology of 
 civilised races here agrees with the actual practical 
 
 1 Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 238, and Samoa by the same author. 
 Complete totemism is not asserted here, and is denied for Melanesia, 
 
 2 Journ. Anthrop. Inst., ‘‘ Religious Practices in Melanesia ’’. 
 
 3 New Zealand, ‘‘ Animal Intermarriage with Men”. 
 
 4 Description of Asia (1783), p. 383. 
 
 5 Professor Robertson Smith, Kinship in Arabia, attemptsto show 
 that totemism existed in the Semitic races. The topic must be left to 
 Orientalists. 
 
GREECE. 83 
 
 belief of savages, and if we also find that civilised 
 races retain survivals of the institutions in which the 
 belief is expressed by Savages, then we may surely 
 infer that the activity of beasts in the myths of Greece 
 springs from the same sources as the similar activity 
 of beasts in the myths of Iroquois or Kaffirs. That is 
 to say, part of the irrational element in Greek myth 
 will be shown to be derived (whether by inheritance 
 or borrowing) from an ascertained condition of Savage 
 fancy. 
 
84 
 
 CHAPTER IV, 
 
 THE MENTAL CONDITION OF SAVAGES—MAGIC— 
 METAMORPHOSIS—METAPH YSIC—PSYCHOLOGY. 
 
 Claims of sorcerers—Savage scientific speculation—Theory of causation— 
 Credulity, except as to new religious ideas—'‘ Post hoc, ergo propter 
 hoc ’—Fundamental ideas of magic—Examples: incantations, ghosts, 
 spirits—Evidence of rank and other institutions in proof of confusions 
 of mind exhibited in magical beliefs. 
 
 ‘*¢T mean eftsoons to have a fling at magicians for their abominable lies and 
 monstrous vanities.” —Puiny, ap. Phil. Holland, 
 
 ‘*Quoy de ceux qui naturellement se changent en loups, en juments, et puis 
 encores en hommes?’’—MONTAIGNE, Apologie pour Raymond de 
 Sebonde. ; 
 
 THE second feature in the savage intellectual condition 
 which we promised to investigate was the belief in 
 magic and sorcery. The world and all the things in it 
 being conceived of vaguely as sensible and rational, are 
 supposed to obey the commands of certain members 
 of each tribe, such as chiefs, jugglers, or conjurors. 
 These conjurors, like Zeus or Indra, can affect the 
 weather, work miracles, assume what shapes, animal, 
 vegetable, or inorganic, they please, and can meta- 
 morphose other persons into similar shapes. It has 
 already been shown that savage man has regarded 
 all things as persons much on a level with himself. 
 It has now to be shown what kind of person he 
 conceives himself to be. He does not look on men 
 
SAVAGE SPECULATION. 85 
 
 as Civilised races regard them, that is, as beings with 
 strict, limitations. On the other hand, he thinks of 
 certain members of his tribe as exempt from most of 
 the limitations, and capable of working every miracle 
 that tradition has ever attributed to prophets or gods. 
 Nor are such miraculous powers, such practical 
 omnipotence, supposed by savages to be at all rare 
 among themselves, Though highly valued, miraculous 
 attainments are not believed to be unusual. This 
 must be kept steadily in mind. When myth-making 
 man regards the sky or sun or wind as a person, he 
 does not mean merely a person with the limitations 
 recognised by modern races. He means a person 
 with the miraculous powers of the medicine-man, 
 The sky, sun, wind or other elemental personage 
 can converse with the dead, and can turn himself 
 and his neighbours into animals, stones and trees. 
 To understand these functions and their exercise, 
 it is necessary to examine what may be called savage 
 science, savage metaphysics, and the savage theory 
 of the state of the dead. The medicine-man’s super- 
 natural claims are rooted in the general savage view 
 of the world, of what is possible, and of what (if 
 anything) is impossible. The savage, even more than 
 the civilised man, may be described as a creature 
 “moving about in worlds not realised”, He feels, no 
 less than civilised man, the need of making the world 
 intelligible, and he is active in his search for causes 
 and effects. There is much ‘speculation in these 
 eyes that he doth glare withal”. This is a statement 
 which has been denied by some persons who have 
 lived with savages. Thus Mr. Bates, in his Naturalist 
 
86 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 on the Amazon} writes: “Their want of curiosity 
 is extreme. ... Vicente (an Indian companion) did 
 not know the cause of thunder and lightning. I 
 asked him who made the sun, the stars, the trees. 
 He didn’t know, and had never heard the subject 
 mentioned in his tribe.” But Mr. Bates admits that 
 even Vicente had a theory of the configuration of 
 the world. ‘‘The necessity of a theory of the earth 
 and water had been felt, and a theory had been 
 suggested.” Again, Mr. Bates says about a certain 
 Brazilian tribe, “ Their sluggish minds seem unable 
 to conceive or feel the want of a theory of the soul” ; 
 and he thinks the cause of this indolence is the lack 
 “of a written language or a leisured class”. Now 
 savages, as a rule, are all in the “leisured class,” all 
 
 sportsmen. Mr. Herbert Spencer, too, has expressed 
 scepticism about the curiosity attributed to savages. 
 The point is important, because, in our view, the 
 medicine-man’s powers are rooted in the savage theory 
 of things, and if the savage is too sluggish to invent 
 or half consciously evolve a theory of things, our 
 hypothesis is baseless. Again, we expect to find in 
 savage myths the answer given by savages to their 
 own questions. But this view is impossible if savages 
 do not ask themselves, and never have asked them- 
 selves, any questions at all about the world. On this 
 topic Mr. Spencer writes: “ Along with absence of 
 surprise there naturally goes absence of intelligent 
 curiosity ”.2 Yet Mr. Spencer admits that, according 
 to some witnesses, “the Dyaks have an insatiable 
 curiosity,” the Samoans “are usually very inquisitive, 
 
 1 Vol. ii. p. 162. 2 Sociology, Pp. 98. 
 
SAVAGE CURIOSITY. 87 
 
 and “the Tahitians are remarkably curious and in- 
 quisitive”, Nothing is more common than to find 
 travellers complaining that savages, in their ardently 
 inquiring curiosity, will not leave the European for 
 a moment to his own undisturbed devices. Mr. 
 Spencer's savages, who showed no curiosity, displayed 
 this impassiveness when Europeans were trying to 
 make them exhibit signs of surprise. Impassivity is 
 a point of honour with many uncivilised races, and 
 we cannot infer that a savage has no curiosity because 
 he does not excite himself over a mirror, or when his 
 Kuropean visitors try to swagger with their mechani- 
 cal appliances. Mr. Herbert Spencer founds, on the 
 statements of Mr. Bates already quoted, a notion that 
 “the savage, lacking ability to think and the accom- 
 panying desire to know, is without tendency to 
 speculate’’. He backs Mr. Bates’s experience with 
 Mungo Park’s failure to “draw” the negroes about 
 the causes of day and night. They had never indulged 
 @ conjecture nor formed an hypothesis on the matter. 
 Yet Park avers that “the belief in one God is entire 
 and universal among them”. This he “pronounces 
 without the smallest shadow of doubt”. As to “primi- 
 tive man,” according to Mr. Spencer, ‘‘the need 
 for explanations about surrounding appearances does 
 not occur to him”. We have disclaimed all knowledge 
 about ‘‘ primitive man,” but it is easy to show that 
 Mr. Spencer grounds his belief in the lack of specula- 
 tion among savages on a frail foundation of evidence. 
 
 Mr. Spencer has admitted speculation, or at least 
 curiosity, among New Caledonians, New Guinea 
 people, Dyaks, Samoans and Tahitians, Even 
 
88 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 where he denies its existence, as among the Amazon 
 tribes mentioned by Mr. Bates, we happen to 
 be able to show that Mr. Bates was misinformed. 
 Another traveller, the American geologist, Professor 
 Hartt of Cornell University, lived long among the 
 tribes of the Amazon. But Professor Hartt did not, 
 like Mr. Bates, find them at all destitute of theories 
 of things—theories expressed in myths, and testifying 
 to the intellectual activity and curiosity which de- 
 mands an answer to its questions. Professor Hartt, 
 when he first became acquainted with the Indians of 
 the Amazon, knew that they were well supplied with 
 myths, and he set to work to collect them. But he 
 found that neither by coaxing nor by offers of money 
 could he persuade an Indian to relate a myth. Only 
 by accident, ‘‘ while wearily paddling up the Parana- 
 mirim of the Ituki,” did he hear the steersman telling 
 stories to the oarsmen to keep them awake, Professor 
 Hartt furtively noted down the tale, and he found 
 that by ‘‘ setting the ball rolling,” and narrating a 
 story himself, he could make the natives throw off 
 reserve and add to his stock of tales. “After one 
 has obtained his first myth, and has learned to recite 
 it accurately and spiritedly, the rest is easy.” The 
 tales published by Professor Hartt are chiefly animal 
 stories, like those current in Africa and among the 
 Red Indians, and Hartt even believed that many of 
 the legends had been imported by Negroes. But as 
 the majority of the Negro myths, like those of the 
 Australians, give a ‘‘reason why” for the existence 
 of some phenomenon or other, the argument against 
 early man’s curiosity and vivacity of intellect is rather 
 
MR. HERBERT SPENCER. 89 
 
 injured, even if the Amazonian myths were imported 
 from Africa, Mr. Spencer based his disbelief in the 
 intellectual curiosity of the Amazonian tribes and of 
 Negroes on the reports of Mr. Bates and of Mungo 
 Park. But it turns out that both Negroes and 
 Amazonians have stories which do satisfy an un- 
 scientifie curiosity, and it is even held that the 
 Negroes lent the Amazonians these very stories! 
 The Kamschadals, according to Steller, ‘‘ give them- 
 selves a reason why for everything, according to their 
 own lively fancy, and do not leave the smallest matter 
 uncriticised’’.2 As far, then, as Mr. Spencer’s ob- 
 jections apply to existing savages, we may consider 
 them overweighed by the evidence, and we may 
 believe in a naive savage curiosity about the world 
 and desire for explanations of the causes of things. 
 Mr. Tylor’s opinion corroborates our own: ‘ Man’s 
 craving to know the causes at work in each event he 
 witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he 
 surveys is such as it is and no other, is no product of 
 high civilisation, but a characteristic of his race down 
 to its lowest stages. Among rude savages it is already 
 an intellectual appetite, whose satisfaction claims many 
 of the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or 
 sleep. Even in the Botocudo or the Australian, scien- 
 tific speculation has its germ in actual experience.” ® 
 It will be shown later that the food of the savage 
 intellectual appetite is offered and consumed in the 
 shape of explanatory myths, 
 
 1See Amazonian Tortoise-Myths, pp. 5, 37, 40; and compare Mr. 
 Harris’s Preface to Nights with Uncle Remus. 
 
 2 Steller, p. 267. Cf. Farrer’s Primitive Manners, p, 274. 
 
 3 Primitive Culture, i. 869. 
 
90 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 But we must now observe that the “actual ex- 
 perience,” properly so called, of the savage is so 
 limited and so coloured by misconception and supersti- 
 tion, that his knowledge of the world varies very 
 much from the conceptions of civilised races. He 
 seeks an explanation, a theory of things, based on his 
 experience. But his knowledge of physical causes 
 and of natural laws is exceedingly scanty, and he is 
 driven to fall back upon what we may call meta- 
 physical, or, in many cases “supernatural” explana- 
 tions. The narrower the range of man’s knowledge of 
 physical causes, the wider is the field which he has 
 to fill up with hypothetical causes of a metaphysical 
 or ‘‘supernatural” character. These “supernatural ”’ 
 causes themselves the savage believes to be matters of 
 experience. It is to his mind a matter of experience 
 that all nature is personal and animated; that men 
 may change shapes with beasts; that incantations and 
 supernatural beings can cause sunshine and storm. 
 
 A good example of this is given in Charlevoix’s 
 work on French Canada Charlevoix was a Jesuit 
 father and missionary among the Hurons and other 
 tribes of North America. He thus describes the 
 philosophy of the Red Men: “The Hurons attribute 
 the most ordinary effects to supernatural causes”.2 In 
 the same page the good father himself attributes the 
 welcome arrival of rainy weather and the cure of 
 certain savage patients to the prayers of Pére Brébeuf 
 and to the exhibition of the sacraments. Charlevoix 
 had considerably extended the field in which natural 
 efiects are known to be produced by natural causes. 
 
 1 Histoire de la France-Nouvelle, 2 Vol. i, p- 191, 
 
SAVAGE AND JESUIT. 91 
 
 He was much more scientifically minded than his 
 savage flock, and was quite aware that an ordinary 
 clock with a pendulum cannot bring bad luck to a 
 whole tribe, and that a weather-cock is not a magical 
 machine for securing unpleasant weather. The Hurons, 
 however, knowing less of natural causes and nothing 
 of modern machinery, were as convinced that his 
 clock was ruining the luck of the tribe and his 
 weather-cock spoiling the weather, as Father Charle- 
 voix could be of the truth of his own inferences. One 
 or two other anecdotes in the good father’s history and 
 letters help to explain the difference between the 
 philosophies of wild and of Christian men. The Pere 
 Brébeuf was once summoned at the instigation of a 
 Huron wizard or ‘‘ medicine-man”’ before a council of 
 the tribe. His judges told the father that nothing 
 had gone right since he appeared among them. To 
 this Brébeuf replied by “drawing the attention of the 
 savages to the absurdity of their principles”. He 
 admitted! the premise that nothing had turned out 
 well in the tribe since his arrival. “ But the reason,” 
 said he, ‘‘ plainly is that God is angry with your 
 hardness of heart.’”’ No sooner had the good father 
 thus demonstrated the absurdity of savage principles 
 of reasoning, than the malignant Huron wizard fell 
 down dead at his feet! This event naturally added 
 to the confusion of the savages. 
 
 Coincidences of this sort have a great effect on 
 savage minds. Catlin, the friend of the Mandan tribe, 
 mentions a chief who consolidated his power by aid of 
 a little arsenic, bought from the whites. The chief 
 
 1 Vol. i. p. 192, 
 
92 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 used to prophesy the sudden death of his opponents, 
 which always occurred at the time indicated. The 
 natural results of the administration of arsenic were 
 attributed by the barbarous people to supernatural 
 powers in the possession of the chief} Thus the 
 philosophy of savages seeks cawsas cognoscere rerum, 
 like the philosophy of civilised men, but it flies hastily 
 to a hypothesis of “supernatural” causes which are 
 only guessed at, and are incapable of demonstration. 
 This frame of mind prevails still in civilised countries, 
 as the Bishop of Nantes showed when, in 1846, he 
 attributed the floods of the Loire to “the excesses of 
 the press and the general disregard of Sunday”. That 
 “supernatural” causes exist and may operate, it is not 
 at all our intention to deny. But the habit of looking 
 everywhere for such causes, and of assuming their 
 interference at will, is the main characteristic of 
 savage speculation. The peculiarity of the savage is 
 that he thinks human agents can work supernaturally, 
 whereas even the Bishop reserved his supernatural 
 explanations for the Deity. On this belief in man’s 
 power to affect events beyond the limits of natura] 
 possibility is based the whole theory of magic, the 
 whole power of sorcerers. That theory, again, finds 
 incessant expression in myth, and therefore deserves 
 our attention. 
 
 The theory requires for its existence an almost 
 boundless credulity. This credulity appears to Euro- 
 peans to prevail in full force among savages. Bosman 
 is amazed by the African belief that a spider created 
 the world. Moffat is astonished at the South African 
 
 1Catlin, Letters, ii. 117. 
 
CREDULITY AND SCEPTICISM. 93 
 
 notion that the sea was accidentally created by a girl. 
 Charlevoix says, ‘‘ Les sauvages sont d’une facilité 
 a croire ce qu’on leur dit, que les plus facheuse 
 expériences n’ont jamais pu guérir”.' But it is a 
 curious fact that while savages are, as a rule, so 
 credulous, they often laugh at the religious doctrines 
 taught them by missionaries. Elsewhere they recog- 
 nise certain essential doctrines as familiar forms of 
 old. Dr. Moffat remarks, “To speak of the Creation, 
 the Fall and the Resurrection, seemed more fabulous, 
 extravagant and ludicrous to them than their own 
 vain stories of lions and hyenas” Again, ‘The 
 Gospel appeared too preposterous for the most foolish 
 to believe”.2. While the Zulus declared that they used 
 to accept their own myths without inquiry,’ it was a 
 Zulu who suggested to Bishop Colenso his doubts 
 about the historical character of the Noachian Deluge. 
 Hearne * knew a Red Man, Matorabhee, who, “though 
 a perfect bigot with regard to the arts and tricks of 
 the jugglers, could yet by no means be impressed 
 with a belief of any part of owr religion”. Lieutenant — 
 Haggard, R.N., tells the writer that during an eclipse 
 at Lamoo he ridiculed the native notion of driving 
 away a beast which devours the moon, and explained 
 the real cause of the phenomenon. But his native 
 friend protested that “he could not be expected to 
 believe such a story”. Yet other savages aver an old 
 agreement with the belief in a moral Creator. 
 
 We have already seen sufficient examples of credu- 
 
 1Vol. ii.f¥p. 378. 2 Missionary Labours, p. 245. 
 3 Callaway, Religion of Amazulus, i. 35. 
 4 Journey among the Indians, 1795, p. 350. 
 
94 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 lity in savage doctrines about the equal relations of 
 men and beasts, stars, clouds and plants. The same 
 readiness of belief, which would be surprising in a 
 Christian child, has been found to regulate the rudi- 
 mentary political organisations of grey barbarians. 
 Add to this credulity a philosophy which takes resem- 
 blance, or contiguity in space, or nearness in time as 
 a sufficient reason for predicating the relations of cause 
 and ettect, and we have the basis of savage physical 
 science. Yet the metaphysical theories of savages, 
 as expressed in Maori, Polynesian, and Zufii hymns, 
 often amaze us by their wealth of abstract ideas. 
 Coincidence elsewhere stands for cause. 
 
 Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, is the motto of the savage 
 philosophy of causation. The untutored reasoner 
 speculates on the principles of the Egyptian clergy, 
 as described by Herodotus! ‘The Egyptians have 
 discovered more omens and prodigies than any other 
 men; for when aught prodigious occurs, they keep 
 good watch, and write down what follows; and then, 
 if anything like the prodigy be repeated, they expect 
 the same events to follow as before.” This way of 
 looking at things is the very essence of superstition. 
 
 Savages, as a rule, are not even so scientific as the 
 Egyptians. When an untoward event occurs, they 
 look for its cause among all the less familiar circum- 
 stances of the last few days, and select the determining 
 cause very much at random. Thus the arrival of the 
 French missionaries among the Hurons was coincident 
 with certain unfortunate events; therefore it was 
 argued that the advent of the missionaries was the 
 
 MII. p. 82, 
 
POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC. 95 
 
 cause of the misfortune. When the Bechuanas suffered 
 from drought, they attributed the lack of rain to the 
 arrival of Dr. Moffat, and especially to his beard, his 
 church bell, and a bag of salt in his possession. Here 
 there was not even the pretence of analogy between 
 cause and effect. Some savages might have argued 
 (it is quite in their style), that as salt causes thirst, a 
 bag of salt causes drought; but no such case could be 
 made out against Dr. Moffat’s bell and beard. To 
 give an example from the beliefs of English peasants. 
 When a cottage was buried by a little avalanche in 
 1772, the accident was attributed to the carelessness 
 of the cottagers, who had allowed a light to be taken 
 out of their dwelling in Christmas-tide We see the 
 same confusion between antecedence and consequence 
 in time on one side, and cause and effect on the other, 
 when the Red Indians aver that birds actually bring 
 winds and storms or fair weather. They take literally 
 the sense of the Rhodian swallow-song :— 
 
 The swallow hath come, 
 
 Bringing fair hours, 
 
 Bringing fair seasons, 
 
 On black back and white breast.? 
 
 Again, in the Pacific the people of one island always 
 attribute hurricanes to the machinations of the people 
 of the nearest island to windward. The wind comes 
 from them; therefore (as their medicine-men can 
 notoriously influence the weather), they must have 
 sent the wind. This unneighbourly act is a casus 
 - belli, and through the whole of a group of islands the 
 
 1 Shropshire Folk-Lore, by Miss Burne, iii. 401. 
 2Brinton, Myths of New World, p. 107. 
 
96 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 banner of war, like the flag of freedom in Byron, flies 
 against the wind. The chief principle, then, of savage 
 science is that antecedence and consequence in time 
 are the same as effect and cause. Again, savage 
 science holds that like affects like, that you can injure 
 a man, for example, by injuring his effigy. On these 
 principles the savage explains the world to himself, 
 and on these principles he tries to subdue to himself 
 the world. Now the putting of these principles into 
 practice is simply the exercise of art magic, an art to 
 which nothing seems impossible. The belief that his 
 Shamans or medicine-men practise this art is universal 
 among savages. It seriously affects their conduct, and 
 is reflected in their myths. 
 
 The one general rule which governs all magical 
 reasoning is, that casual connection in thought is 
 equivalent to causative connection in fact. Like sug- 
 gests like to human thought by association of ideas); 
 wherefore like influences like, or produces analogous 
 effects in practice. Any object once in a man’s posses- 
 sion, especially his hair or his nails, is supposed to be 
 capable of being used against him by a sorcerer The 
 part suggests the whole. A lock of a man’s hair was 
 part of the man; to destroy the hair is to destroy its 
 former owner. Again, whatever event follows another 
 in time suggests it, and may have been caused by it. 
 Accompanying these ideas is the belief that nature 
 is peopled by invisible spiritual powers, over which 
 magicians and sorcerers possess influence. The magic 
 of the lower races chiefly turns on these two beliefs, 
 First, “man having come to associate in thought those 
 
 1See account of Zuii metaphysics in chapteron American Divine Myths. 
 
MAGIC. 97 
 
 things which he found by experience to be connected 
 in fact, proceeded erroneously to invert their action, 
 and to conclude that association in thought must in- 
 volve similar connection in reality. He thus attempted 
 to discover, to foretell, and to cause events, by means 
 of processes which we now see to have only an ideal 
 significance.”1 Secondly, man endeavoured to make 
 disembodied spirits of the dead, or any other spirits, 
 obedient to his will. Savage philosophy presumes 
 that the beliefs are correct, and that their practical 
 application is successful. Examples of the first of 
 the two chief magical ideas are as common in un- 
 scientific modern times or among unscientific modern 
 people as in the savage world. 
 
 The physicians of the age of Charles II. were wont 
 to give their patients ‘““‘mummy powder,” that is, 
 pulverised mummy. They argued that the mummy 
 had lasted for a very long time, and that the patients 
 ought to doso likewise. Pliny imagined that diamonds 
 must be found in company with gold, because these 
 are the most perfect substances in the world, and like 
 should draw to like. Aurwm potabile, or drinkable 
 gold, was a favourite medical nostrum of the Middle 
 Ages, because gold, being perfect, should produce per- 
 fect health. Among savages the belief that like is 
 caused by like is exemplified in very many practices. 
 The New Caledonians, when they wish their yam 
 plots to be fertile, bury in them with mystic cere- 
 monies certain stones which are naturally shaped like 
 yams. The Melanesians have reduced this kind of 
 magic to a system, Among them certain stones have 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, i. 14. 
 vol. I. 
 
98 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 a magical efficacy, which is determined in each case 
 by the shape of the stone. “A stone in the shape of 
 a pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable 
 find. No garden was planted without the stones which 
 were to increase the crop.”! Stones with a rude 
 resemblance to beasts bring the Zufii luck in the chase. 
 The spiritual theory in some places is mixed up 
 with the “ like to like” theory, and the magical stones 
 are found where the spirits have been heard twittering 
 and whistling. “A large stone lying with a number 
 of small ones under it, like a sow among her sucklings, 
 was good for a childless woman.”? It is the savage 
 belief that stones reproduce their species, a belief con- 
 sonant with the general theory of universal animation 
 and personality. The ancient belief that diamonds 
 gendered diamonds is a survival from these ideas. 
 “ A stone with little disks upon it was good to bring 
 in money; any fanciful interpretation of a mark was 
 enough to give a character to the stone and its asso- 
 ciated Vui” or ‘spirit in Melanesia. In Scotland, 
 stones shaped like various parts of the human body 
 are expected to cure the diseases with which these 
 members may be afflicted. ‘‘ These stones were called 
 by the names of the limbs which they represented, as 
 “eye-stone,’ ‘head-stone’.” The patient washed the 
 affected part of the body, and rubbed it well with 
 the stone corresponding.* 
 _ To return from European peasant-magic to that of 
 savages, we find that when the Bushmen want wet 
 
 1 Rev. R. H. Codrington, Journ. Anth. Inst., February, 1881. 
 2Codrington, Journ. Anth. Soc., x. ili. 276. 
 3 Gregor, Folk-Lore of North-East Counties, p. 40. 
 
~ 
 
 MAGIO. 99 
 
 weather they light fires, believing that the black smoke 
 clouds will attract black rain clouds; while the Zulus 
 sacrifice black cattle to attract black clouds of rain. 
 Though this magic has its origin in savage ignorance, 
 it survives into civilisation. Thus the sacrifices of 
 the Vedic age were imitations of the natural pheno- 
 mena which the priests desired to produce? “C’était 
 un moyen de faire tombre la pluie en réalisant, par les 
 répresentations terrestres des eaux du nuage et de 
 l’éclair, les conditions dans lesquelles celui-ci détermine 
 dans le ciel l’épanchement de celles-li.” A good example 
 of magical science is afforded by the medical practice 
 of the Dacotahs of North America. When any one 
 is ill, an image of his disease, a boil or what not, is 
 carved in wood. ‘This little image is then placed in 
 a bowl of water and shot at with a gun. The image 
 of the disease being destroyed, the disease itself is 
 expected to disappear. Compare the magic af the 
 Philistines, who made golden images of the sores 
 which plagued them and stowed them away in the 
 ark. The custom of making a wax statuette of an 
 enemy, and piercing it with pins or melting it before 
 the fire, so that the detested person might waste as 
 his semblance melted, was common in medieval Europe, 
 was known to Plato, and is practised by Negroes. 
 Some Australians take some of the hair of an enemy, 
 mix it with grease and the feathers of the eagle, and 
 burn it in the fire. This is “bar” or black magic. 
 The boarding under the chair of a magistrate in 
 
 1 Callaway, i. 92. 
 2 Bergaigne, Religion Védique, i. 126-138, i., vii., viii. 
 3 Schoolcraft, iv. 491. 41 Samuel vi. 4, 5. 
 
100 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Barbadoes was lifted not long ago, and the ground 
 beneath was found covered with wax images of 
 litigants stuck full of pins. 
 
 The war-magic of the Dacotahs works in a similar 
 manner. Before a party starts on the war-trail, the 
 chief, with various ceremonies, takes his club and 
 stands before his tent. An old witch bowls hoops at 
 him; each hoop represents an enemy, and for each 
 he strikes a foeman is expected to fall. A bowl of 
 sweetened water is also set out to entice the spirits 
 of the enemy.! The war-magic of the Aryans in India 
 does not differ much in character from that of the 
 Dacotahs. “If any one wishes his army to be vic- 
 toriousp he should go beyond the battle-line, cut a 
 stalk of grass at the top and end, and throw it against 
 the hostile army with the words, Prasahe kas trapas- 
 yatr ?—O Prasaha, who sees thee? If one who has 
 such knowledge cuts a stalk of grass and throws the 
 parts at the hostile army, it becomes split and dis- 
 solved, just as a daughter-in-law becomes abashed 
 and faints when seeing her father-in-law,’’—an 
 allusion, apparently, to the widespread tabw. which 
 makes fathers-in-law, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, 
 and mothers-in-law avoid each other.? 
 
 The hunt-dances of the Red Indians and Australians 
 are arranged like their war-magic. Effigies of the 
 bears, deer, or kangaroos are made, or some of the 
 hunters imitate the motions of these animals. The 
 rest of the dancers pretend to spear them, and it is 
 hoped that this will ensure success among the real 
 bears and kangaroos, 
 
 1 Schoolcraft, iv. 496. 2 Aitareya Brahmana, iii. 22. 
 
MAGICAL WORDS. 101 
 
 Here is a singular piece of magic in which Europeans 
 and Australian blacks agree. Boris Godunoff made 
 his servants swear never to injure him by casting 
 spells with the dust on which his feet or his carriage 
 wheels had left traces.1 Mr. Howitt finds the same 
 magic among the Kurnai.? “Seeing a Tatungolung 
 very lame, I asked him what was the matter. He 
 said, ‘Some fellow has put bottle in my foot’. I found 
 he was probably suffering from acute rheumatism. 
 He explained that some enemy must have found his 
 foot-track and have buried in it a piece of broken bottle. 
 The magic influence, he believed, caused it to enter his 
 foot.” On another occasion a native told Mr. Howitt 
 that he had seen black fellows putting poison in his 
 foot-tracks. Bosman mentions a similar practice among 
 the people of Guinea. In Scottish folk-lore a screw 
 nail is fixed into the footprint of the person who is 
 to be injured. 
 
 Just as these magical efforts to influence like by 
 like work their way, into Vedic and other religions, so 
 they are introduced into the religion of the savage. 
 His prayers are addresses to some sort of superior being, 
 but the efficacy of the prayer is often eked out by a 
 little magic, unless indeed we prefer to suppose that 
 the words of the supplication are interpreted by 
 gesture-speech. Sproat writes: “Set words and 
 gestures are used according to the thing desired. For 
 instance, in praying for salmon, the native rubs the 
 backs of his hands, looks upwards, and mutters the 
 words, ‘Many salmon, many salmon’. If he wishes 
 
 1 Rambaud’s History of Russia, English trans., i, 351. 
 2 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 250. 
 
102 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 for deer, he carefully rubs both eyes ; or, if it 1s geese, 
 he rubs the back of his shoulder, uttering always in a 
 sing-song way the accustomed formula. . . . All these 
 practices in praying no doubt have a meaning. We 
 may see a steady hand is needed in throwing the 
 salmon-spear, and clear eyesight in finding deer in the 
 forest.” } 
 
 In addition to these forms of symbolical magic (which 
 might be multiplied to any extent), we find among 
 savages the belief in the power of songs of incantation. 
 This is a feature of magic which specially deserves our 
 attention. In myths, and still more in mérchen or 
 household tales, we shall constantly find that the most 
 miraculous effects are caused when the hero pronounces 
 a few lines of rhyme. In Rome, as we have all read 
 in the Latin Delectus, it was thought that incantations 
 could draw down the moon. In the Odyssey the 
 kinsfolk of Odysseus sing “a song of healing” over 
 the wound which was dealt him by the boar’s tusk. 
 Jeanne d’Arc, wounded at Orleans, refused a similar 
 remedy. Sophocles speaks of the folly of muttering 
 incantations over wounds that need the surgeon’s knife, 
 The song that salved wounds occurs in the Kalewala, 
 the ‘epic poem of the Finns. In many of Grimm’s 
 mérchen, miracles are wrought by the repetition of 
 snatches of rhyme. ‘This belief is derived from the 
 savage state of fancy. According to Kohl, “ Every 
 sorrowful or joyful emotion that opens the Indian’s 
 mouth is at once wrapped up in the garb of a wabano- 
 nagamowin (chanson magicale). If you ask one of 
 them to sing you a simple innocent hymn in praise of 
 
 1 Savage Life, p. 208. 2 Page 395. 
 
 INCANTATIONS. eae 103 
 
 Nature, a spring or jovial hunting stave, he never 
 gives you anything but a form of incantation, with 
 which he says you will be able to call to you all the 
 birds from the sky, and all the foxes and wolves from 
 their caves and burrows.”! The giant’s daughter in 
 the Scotch mdarchen, Nicht, Nowght, Nothing, is thus 
 enabled to call to her aid “all the birds of the 
 sky”. In the same way, if you ask an Indian for a 
 love-song, he will say that a philtre is really much 
 more efficacious. The savage, in short, is extremely 
 practical. His arts, music and drawing, exist not pour 
 l'art, but for a definite purpose, as methods of getting 
 something that the artist wants. The young lover 
 whom Kohl knew, like the lover of Bombyca in 
 Theocritus, believed in having an image of himself 
 and an image of the beloved. Into the heart of the 
 female image he thrust magic powders, and he said 
 that this was common, lovers adding songs, “ partly 
 elegiac, partly malicious, and almost criminal forms 
 of incantation ”. 
 
 Among the Indo-Aryans the masaminik or Incanta- 
 tions of the Red Man are known as mantras.’ These 
 are usually texts from the Veda, and are chanted over 
 the sick and in other circumstances where magic is 
 believed to be efficacious. Among the New Zealanders 
 the incantations are called karakias, and are employed 
 in actual life. ‘There is a special karakia to raise the 
 wind, In Maori myths the hero is very handy with 
 his karakia. Rocks split before him, as before girls 
 
 1 Qf. Comparetti’s Traditional Poetry of the Finns. 
 2 Kitchi Gami, pp. 395, 397. 
 8Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v. 441, ‘‘Incantations from the Atharva Veda”, 
 
104 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 who use incantations in Kaffir and Bushman tales. 
 He assumes the shape of any animal at will, or flies 
 in the air, all by virtue of the karakia or incantation. 
 
 Without multiplying examples in the savage belief 
 that miracles can be wrought by virtue of physical 
 correspondances, by like acting on like, by the part 
 affecting the whole, and so forth, we may go on to the 
 magical results produced by the aid of spirits. These 
 may be either spirits of the dead or spiritual essences 
 that never animated mortal men. Savage magic or 
 science rests partly on the belief that the world is 
 peopled by a “‘choir invisible,” or rather by a choir 
 only occasionally visible to certain gifted people, 
 sorcerers and diviners. An enormous amount of 
 evidence to prove the existence of these tenets has been 
 collected by Mr. Tylor, and is accessible to all in the 
 chapters on “Animism” in his Primitive Culture. 
 It isnot our business here to account for the univer- 
 sality of the belief in spirits. Mr. Tylor, following 
 Lucretius and Homer, derives the belief from the 
 reasonings of early men on the phenomena of dreams, 
 fainting, shadows, visions caused by narcotics, halluci- 
 nations, and other facts which suggest the hypothesis 
 of a separable life apart from the bodily organism, It 
 would scarcely be fair not to add that the kind of 
 “facts” investigated by the Psychical Society—such 
 “facts” as the appearance of men at the moment of 
 death in places remote from the scene of their decease, 
 with such real or delusive experiences as the noises 
 
 1Taylor’s New Zealand ; Theal’s Kaffir Folk-Lore, South-African Folk- 
 Lore Journal, passim ; Shortland’s Traditions of the New Zealanders, pp. 
 180-135, 
 
GHOSTS. | 105 
 
 and visions in haunted houses—are familiar to savages. 
 Without discussing these obscure matters, it may be 
 said that they influence the thoughts even of some 
 scientifically trained and civilised men. It is natural, 
 therefore, that they should strongly sway the credulous 
 imagination of backward races, in which they originate 
 or confirm the belief that life can exist. and manifest 
 itself after the death of the body.! 
 
 _ Some examples of savage “ ghost-stories,’’ precisely 
 analogous to the “facts” of the Psychical Society’s 
 investigations, may be adduced. The first is curious 
 because it offers among the Kanekas an example of 
 a belief current in Breton folk-lore. The story is 
 vouched for by Mr. J. J. Atkinson, late of Noumea, 
 New Caledonia. Mr. Atkinson, we have reason to 
 believe, was unacquainted with the Breton parallel. 
 To him one day a Kaneka of his acquaintance paid a 
 visit, and seemed loth to go away. He took leave, 
 returned, and took leave again, till Mr. Atkinson 
 asked him the reason of his behaviour. He then ex- 
 plained that he was about to die, and would never see 
 his English friend again. As he seemed in perfect 
 health, Mr. Atkinson rallied him on his hypochondria ; 
 but the poor fellow replied that his fate was sealed. 
 He had lately met in the wood one whom he took for 
 the Kaneka girl of his heart; but he became aware 
 too late that she was no mortal woman, but a wood- 
 spirit in the guise of the beloved. The result would 
 be his death within three days, and, as a matter of 
 fact, he died. This is the groundwork of the old 
 Breton ballad of Le Siewr Nan, who dies after his 
 
 1 See the author’s Making of Religion, 1898. 
 
106 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 intrigue with the forest spectre A tale more like a 
 common modern ghost-story is vouched for by Mr. 
 C. J. Du Ve, in Australia. In the year 1860, a 
 Maneroo black fellow died in the service of Mr. Du 
 Ve. “The day before he died, having been ill some 
 time, he said that in the night his father, his father’s 
 friend, and a female spirit he could not recognise, had 
 come to him and said that he would die next day, and 
 that they would wait for him. Mr. Du Ve adds 
 that, though previously the Christian belief had been 
 explained to this man, it had entirely faded, and that 
 he had gone back to the belief of his childhood.” Mr. 
 Fison, who prints this tale in his Kamilaroi and 
 Kurnai,? adds, “I could give many similar instances 
 which have come within my own knowledge among 
 the Fijians, and, strange to say, the dying man in all 
 these cases kept his appointment with the ghosts to 
 the very day”’. 
 
 In the Cruise of the Beagle is a parallel anecdote of 
 a Fuegian, Jimmy Button, and his father’s ghost. 
 
 Without entering into a discussion of ghosts, it is 
 plain that the kind of evidence, whatever its value 
 may be, which convinces many educated Europeans 
 of the existence of “veridical’’ apparitions has also 
 played its part in the philosophy of uncivilised races. 
 On this belief in apparitions, then, is based the power 
 of the savage sorcerers and necromants, of the men 
 who converse with the dead and are aided by dis- 
 embodied spirits. These men have greatly influenced 
 
 1It may, of course, be conjectured that the French introduced this 
 belief into New Caledonia. 
 
 2 Page 247. 
 
SAVAGE MEDIUMS. =” 107 
 
 the beginnings of mythology. Among certain Aus- 
 tralian tribes the necromants are called Birraark.' “The 
 Kurnai tell me,” says Mr. Howitt, “that a Birraark 
 was supposed to be initiated by the ‘Mrarts (ghosts) 
 when they met him wandering in the bush... . It 
 was from the ghosts that he obtained replies to 
 questions concerning events passing at a distance or 
 yet to happen, which might be of interest or moment 
 to his tribe.” Mr. Howitt prints an account of a 
 spiritual séance in the bush.? ‘“‘ The fires were let go 
 down. The Birraark uttered a cry ‘coo-ee’ at inter- 
 vals. At length a distant reply was heard, and 
 shortly afterwards the sound as of persons jumping on 
 the ground in succession. A voice was then heard in 
 the gloom asking in a strange intonation, ‘ What is 
 wanted?’ Questions were put by the Birraark and 
 replies given. At the termination of the séance, the 
 spirit-voice said, ‘We are going’. Finally, the Bir- 
 raark was found in the top of an almost inaccessible 
 tree, apparently asleep.””* There was one Birraark at 
 least to every clan. The Kurnai gave the name of 
 “Brewin” (a powerful evil spirit) to a Birraark who 
 was once carried away for several days by the Mrarts 
 or spirits. It is a belief with the Australians, as, 
 
 1 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 253.  §Page 254. 
 
 3in the Jesuit Relations (1637), p. 51, we read that the Red Indian 
 sorcerer dr: Jossakeed was credited with power to vanish suddenly away 
 out of sight of the men standing around him. Of him, as of Homeric gods, 
 it might be said, “‘ Who has power to see him come or go against his will?” 
 
 4 Here, in the first edition, occurred the following passage: ‘‘ The con- 
 ception of Brewin is about as near as the Kurnai get to the idea of a God; 
 their conferring of his name on a powerful sorcerer is therefore a point of 
 
 importance and interest”. Mr. Howitt’s later knowledge demonstrates an 
 error here. si | 
 
108 MYTH, RITUAL AND. RELIGION. 
 
 according to Bosman, it was with the people of the 
 Gold Coast, that a very powerful wizard lives far 
 inland, and the Negroes held that to this warlock the 
 spirits of the dead went to be judged according to the 
 merit of their actions in life. Here we have a doctrine 
 answering to the Greek belief in “the wizard Minos,” 
 /Eacus, and Rhadamanthus, and to the Egyptian idea 
 of Osiris as judge of the departed.! The pretensions 
 of the sorcerer to converse with the dead are attested 
 by Mr. Brough Smyth.? “A sorcerer lying on his 
 stomach spoke to the deceased, and the other sitting 
 by his side received the precious messages which the 
 dead man told.’ As a natural result of these beliefs, 
 the Australian necromant has great power in the 
 tribe. Mr. Howitt mentions a case in whicha group 
 of kindred, ceasing to use their old totemistic surname, 
 called themselves the children of a famous dead Bir- 
 raark, who thus became an eponymous hero, like Ion 
 among the Ionians.* Among the Scotch Highlanders 
 the position and practice of the seer were very like 
 those of the Birraark. “A person,” says Scott,‘ “was 
 wrapped up in the skin of a newly slain bullock and 
 deposited beside a waterfall or at the bottom of a 
 precipice, or in some other strange, wild and unusual 
 situation, where the scenery around him suggested 
 nothing but objects of horror. In this situation he 
 revolved in his mind the question proposed and what- 
 
 1 Bosman in Pinkerton, xvi. p. 401. 
 
 2 Aborigines of Australia, i. 197. 
 
 3In Victoria, after dark the wizard goes up to the clouds and brings 
 down a good spirit. Dawkins, p. 57. For eponymous medicine-men see 
 
 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231. 
 4 Lady of the Lake, note 1 to Canto iv. 
 
ZULU SEERS. 109 
 
 ever was impressed on him by his exalted imagination 
 passed for the inspiration of the disembodied spirits 
 who haunt these desolate recesses.” A number of 
 examples are given in Martin’s Description of the 
 Western Islands. In the Century magazine (July, 
 1882) is a very full report of Thlinkeet medicine-men 
 and metamorphoses. 
 
 The sorcerer among the Zulus is, apparently, of a 
 naturally hysterical and nervous constitution. ‘He 
 hears the spirits who speak by whistlings speaking to 
 him.”? Whistling is also the language of the ghosts in 
 New Caledonia, where Mr. Atkinson informs us that 
 he has occasionally put an able-bodied Kaneka to 
 ignominious flight by whistling softly in the dusk. 
 The ghosts in Homer make a similar sound, ‘“ and 
 even as bats flit gibbering in the secret place of a won- 
 drous cavern, .. . even so the souls gibbered as they 
 fared together” (Odyssey, xxiv. 5). “The familiar 
 spirits make him” (that Zulu sorcerer) “acquainted 
 with what is about to happen, and then he divines for 
 the people.” As the Birraarks learn songs and dance- 
 music from the Mrarts, so the Zulu Inyanga or diviners 
 learn magical couplets from the Itongo or spirits.® 
 
 The evidence of institutions confirms the reports 
 about savage belief in magic. The political power of 
 the diviners is very great, as may be observed from the 
 fact that a hereditary chief needs their consecration to 
 make him a chief de jwre.t In fact, the qualities of the 
 diviner are those which give his sacred authority to 
 
 1p, 112. 2Callaway, Religious System of the Amazules, p. 265- 
 30Qn all this, see ‘‘ Possession” in Zhe Making of Religion. 
 4Callaway, p. 340. 
 
110 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 the chief. When he has obtained from the diviners all 
 their medicines and information as to the mode of using 
 the isitundu (a magical vessel), it is said that he often 
 orders them to be killed. Now, the chief is so far a 
 medicine-man that he is lord of the air. ‘‘ The heaven 
 is the chief’s,” say the Zulus; and when he calls out 
 his men, ‘‘though the heaven is clear, it becomes 
 clouded by the great wind that arises”, Other Zulus 
 explain this as the mere hyperbole of adulation. 
 “The word of the chief gives confidence to his troops ; 
 they say, ‘We are going; the chief has already seen 
 all that will happen in his vessel’. Such then are 
 chiefs ; they use a vessel for divination.”! The makers 
 of rain are known in Zululand as “heaven-herds” or 
 “sky-herds,” who herd the heaven that it may not 
 break out and do its will on the property of the people. 
 These menare,in fact, vepednyepéran, “ cloud-gatherers,” 
 like the Homeric Zeus, the lord of the heavens. Their 
 name of “herds of the heavens” has a Vedic sound. 
 “The herd that herds the lightning,” say the Zulus, 
 “does the same as the herder of the cattle; he does as 
 he does by whistling; he says, ‘Tshu-i-i-i. Depart 
 and go yonder. Do not come here.’” Here let it be 
 observed that the Zulus conceive of the thunder-clouds 
 and lightning as actual creatures, capable of being 
 herded like sheep. There is no metaphor or allegory: 
 about the matter,” and no forgetfulness of the original 
 meaning of words. The cloud-herd is just like the cow- 
 herd, except that not every man, but only: sorcerers, 
 and they who have eaten the “ lightning-bird ” (a bird 
 
 1 Callaway, Religious System of the Amazules, p. 843, 
 2 Tbid., p. 385. 
 
SORCERERS. aT 111 
 
 shot, near the place where lightning has struck the 
 earth), can herd the clouds of heaven. The same 
 ideas prevail among the Bushmen, where the rain- 
 maker is asked ‘‘to milk a nice gentle female rain ”’ ; 
 the rain-clouds are her hair. Among the Bushmen 
 Rain isa person, Among the Red Indians no metaphor 
 seems to be intended when it is said that “it is always 
 birds who make the wind, except that of the east”. 
 The Dacotahs once killed a thunder-bird! behind 
 Little Crow’s village on the Missouri. It had a face 
 like a man with a nose like an eagle’s bill.? 
 
 The political and social powers which come into the 
 hands of the sorcerers are manifest, even in the case of 
 the Australians. Tribes and individuals can attempt 
 few enterprises without the aid of the man who 
 listens to the ghosts. Only he can foretell the future, 
 and, in the case of the natural death of a member of 
 the tribe, can direct the vengeance of the survivors 
 against the hostile magician who has committed a 
 murder by “bar” or magic. Among the Zulus we 
 have seen that sorcery gives the sanction to the power 
 of the chief “The winds and weather are at the 
 command” of Bosman’s “ great fetisher”. Inland from 
 the Gold Coast,* the king of Loango, according to the 
 Abbé Proyart, “has credit to make rain fall on earth”. © 
 Similar beliefs, with like political results, will be 
 found to follow from the superstition of magic among 
 the Red Indians of North America. The difficulty of 
 writing about sorcerers among the Red Indians is 
 caused by the abundance of the evidence. Charlevoix 
 
 1 Schoolcraft, iii. 486. 2 Compare Japan, p. 119. 
 3 Pinkerton; xvi. 401. ; A el* 
 
112 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 and the other early Jesuit missionaries found that 
 the jongleurs, as Charlevoix calls the Jossakeeds or 
 medicine-men, were their chief opponents. As among 
 the Scotch Highlanders, the Australians and the 
 Zulus, the Red Indian jongleur is visited by the 
 spirits. He covers a hut with the skin of the animal 
 which he commonly wears, retires thither, and there 
 converses with the bodiless beings.!_ The good mission- 
 ary like Mr. Moffat in Africa, was convinced that the 
 exercises of the Jossakeeds were verily supernatural. 
 “Ces seducteurs ont un véritable commerce avec le pére 
 du mensonge.”* This was denied by earlier and 
 wiser Jesuit missionaries. Their political power was 
 naturally great. In time of war ‘‘ils avancent et 
 retardent les marches comme il leur plait”. In our 
 own century it was a medicine-man, Ten Squa Ta 
 Way, who by his magical processes and superstitious 
 rites stirred up a formidable war against the United 
 States. According to Mr. Pond,‘ the native name of 
 the Dacotah medicine-men, “ Wakan,” signifies ‘‘ men 
 supernaturally gifted’”’. Medicine-men are believed to 
 be ‘‘wakanised”’ by mystic intercourse with super- 
 natural beings. The business of the wakanised man 
 is to discern future events, to lead and direct parties 
 on the war-trail, ‘‘to raise the storm or calm the 
 tempest, to converse with the lightning or thunder as 
 with familiar friends’”.° The wakanised man, like 
 the Australian Birraark and the Zulu diviner, “ dictates 
 
 1Charlevoix, i. 105. See “Savage Spiritualism” in Cock Lane and 
 Common Sense. 
 
 2 Tbid., iii. 362. 3 Catlin, ii, 17. 
 
 4In Schoolcraft, iv. 402. 5 Pond, in Schoolcraft, iv. 647. 
 
SORCERERS. 113 
 
 chants and prayers”. In battle “every Dacotah warrior 
 looks to the Wakan man as almost his only resource”. 
 Belief in Wakan men is, Mr. Pond says, universal among 
 the Dacotahs, except where Christianity has under- 
 mined it. “Their influence is deeply felt by every indi- 
 vidual of the tribe, and controls all their affairs.” The 
 Wakan man’s functions are absorbed by the general 
 or war-chief of the tribe, and in Schooleraft (iv. 495), 
 Captain Eastman prints copies of native scrolls show- 
 ing the war-chief at work as a wizard, ‘“ The war- 
 chief who leads the party to war is always one of these 
 medicvne-men.” In another passage the medicine-men 
 are described as “ having a voice in the sale of land”’. 
 It must be observed that the Jossakeed, or medicine- 
 man, pure and simple, exercises a power which is not 
 in itself hereditary. Chieftainship, when associated 
 with inheritance of property, is hereditary ; and when 
 the chief, as among the Zulus, absorbs supernatural 
 power, then the same man becomes diviner and chief, 
 and is a person of great and sacred influence. The 
 liveliest account of the performances of the Maori 
 “tohunga” or sorcerer is to be found in Old New 
 Zealand,’ by the Pakeha Maori, an English gentleman 
 who had lived with the natives like one of themselves. 
 The tohwnga, says this author,? presided over “all 
 those services and customs which had something 
 approaching to a religious character. They also pre- 
 tended to power by means of certain familiar spirits, 
 to foretell future events, and even in some cases to 
 control them. . . . The spirit ‘entered into’ them, and, 
 on being questioned, gave a response in a sort of half- 
 
 1 Auckland, 1863. 2 Page 148, 
 VOL. I. 8 
 
114 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 whistling, half-articulate voice, supposed to be the proper 
 language of spirits.” In New South Wales, Mrs, Lang- 
 lot Parker has witnessed a similar exhibition. The 
 “spirits” told the truth in this case. The Pakeha Maori 
 was present in a darkened village-hall when the spirit 
 of a young man, a great friend of his own, was called 
 up by a tohunga. “Suddenly, without the slightest 
 warning, a voice came out of the darkness... . The 
 voice all through, it is to be remembered, was not the 
 voice of the tohwnga, but a strange melancholy sound, 
 like the sound of a wind blowing into a hollow vessel. 
 ‘It is well with me; my place is a good place.’ The 
 spirit gave an answer to a question which proved 
 to be correct, and then ‘ Farewell,’ cried the spirit 
 from deep beneath the ground. ‘Farewell, again, 
 from high in air. ‘Farewell, once more came moan- 
 ing through the distant darkness of the night.” As 
 chiefs in New Zealand no less than tohungas can 
 exercise the mystical and magical power of tabu, that 
 is, of imparting to any object or person an inviolable 
 character, and can prevent or remit the mysterious 
 punishment for infringement of tabu, it appears 
 probable that in New Zealand, as well as among 
 the Zulus and Red Indians, chiefs have a tendency 
 to absorb the sacred character and powers of the 
 tohungas. This is natural enough, for a tohwnga, if 
 ' he plays his cards well, is sure to acquire property 
 ‘and hereditary wealth, which, in combination with 
 magical influence, are the necessary qualifications for 
 the office of the chieftain. 
 
 Here is the place to mention a fact which, though 
 at first sight it may appear to have only a social 
 
 aad 
 
RANK AND MAGIC. 115 
 
 interest, yet bears on the development of mythology. 
 Property and rank seem to have been essential to each 
 other in the making of social rank, and where one is 
 absent among contemporary savages, there we do not 
 find the other. As an example of this, we might take 
 the case of two peoples who, like the Homeric Ethio- 
 pians, are the outermost of men, and dwell far apart 
 at the ends of the world. The Eskimos and the 
 Fuegians, at the extreme north and south of the 
 American continent, agree in having little or no 
 private property and no chiefs. Yet magic is provid- 
 ing a kind of basis of rank. The bleak plains of ice 
 and rock are, like Attica, “the mother of men without 
 master or lord”. Among the ‘‘ house-mates”’ of the 
 smaller settlements there is no head-man, and in the 
 larger gatherings Dr. Rink says that ‘still less than 
 among the house-mates was any one belonging to such 
 a place to be considered a chief’. The songs and 
 stories of the Eskimo contain the praises of men who 
 have risen up and killed any usurper who tried to be 
 a ruler over his “place-mates”. No one could possibly 
 establish any authority on the basis of property, be- 
 cause ‘‘ superfluous property, implements, etc, rarely 
 existed’. If there are three boats in one household, 
 one of the boats is ‘‘ borrowed” by the community, 
 and reverts to the general fund. If we look at the 
 account of the Fuegians described in Admiral Fitzroy’s 
 cruise, we find a similar absence of rank produced by 
 similar causes. “The perfect equality among’ the indi- 
 viduals composing the tribes must for a long time retard 
 their civilisation. . . . At present even a piece of cloth 
 is torn in shreds and distributed, and no one individual 
 
116 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is 
 difficult to understand how a chief can arise till there 
 is property of some sort by which he might manifest 
 and ‘still increase his authority.” In the same book, 
 however, we get a glimpse of one means by which 
 authority can be exercised. ‘The doctor-wizard of 
 each party has much influence over his companions.”’ 
 Among the Eskimos this element in the growth of 
 authority also exists. A class of wizards called 
 Angakut have power to cause fine weather, and, by 
 the gift of second-sight and magical practices, can 
 detect crimes, so that they necessarily become a kind 
 of civil magistrates. These Angekkok or Angakut have 
 familiar spirits called Torngak, a word connected with 
 the name of their chief spiritual being, Torngarsak. 
 The Torngak is commonly the ghost of a deceased 
 parent of the sorcerer. ‘‘ These men,” says Egede, “ are 
 held in great honour and esteem among this stupid 
 and ignorant nation, insomuch that nobody dare ever 
 refuse the strictest obedience when they command 
 him in the name of Torngarsak.” The importance 
 and actual existence of belief in magic has thus been 
 attested by the evidence of institutions, even among 
 Australians, Fuegians and Eskimos. 
 
 It is now necessary to pass from examples of tribes 
 who have superstitious respect for certain individuals, 
 but who have no property and no chiefs, to peoples 
 who exhibit the phenomenon of superstitious reverence 
 attached to wealthy rulers or to judges. To take the 
 example of Ireland, as described in the Senchus Mor, 
 we learn that the chiefs, just like the Angakut of the 
 Eskimos, had ‘‘ power to make fair or foul weather” 
 
MAGIC AND RANK. 117 
 
 in the literal sense of the words.! In Africa, in the 
 same way, aS Bosman, the old traveller, says, ‘‘ As 
 to what difference there is between one negro and 
 another, the richest man is the most honoured,” yet 
 the most honoured man has the same magical power 
 as the poor Angakuts of the Eskimos. 
 
 “In the Solomon Islands,” says Dr. Codrington, 
 “there is nothing to prevent a common man from 
 becoming a chief, if he can show that he has the 
 mana (supernatural power) for it.” ? 
 
 Though it is anticipating a later stage of this in- 
 quiry, we must here observe that the sacredness, and 
 even the magical virtues of barbarous chiefs seem to 
 have descended to the early leaders of European races. 
 The children of Odin and of Zeus were ‘sacred 
 kings”. The Homeric chiefs, like those of the Zulus 
 and the Red Men, and of the early Irish and Swedes, 
 exercised an influence over the physical universe. 
 Homer ® speaks of “a blameless king, one that fears 
 the gods, and reigns among many men and mighty, 
 and the black earth bears wheat and barley, and the 
 sheep bring forth and fail not, and the sea gives store 
 of fish, and all out of his good sovereignty ”. 
 
 The attributes usually assigned by barbarous peoples 
 to their medicine-men have not yet been exhausted. 
 We have found that they can foresee and declare the 
 future; that they control the weather and the sensible 
 world; that they can converse with, visit and employ 
 about their own business the souls of the dead. It 
 would be easy to show at even greater length that the 
 
 1 Karly History of Institutions, p.'195. 
 3Journ, Anth, Inst., x. iii. 287, 300, 309. 3 Od., xix. 109, 
 
118 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 medicine-man has everywhere the power of metamor- 
 phosis. He can assume the shapes of all beasts, birds, 
 fishes, insects and inorganic matters, and he can 
 subdue other people to the same enchantment. This 
 belief obviously rests on the lack of recognised distinc- 
 tion between man and the rest of the world, which 
 we have so frequently insisted on as a characteristic 
 of savage and barbarous thought. Examples of ac- 
 credited metamorphosis are so common everywhere, 
 and so well known, that it would be waste of space to 
 give a long account of them. In Primitive Culture} 
 a cloud of witnesses to the belief in human tigers, 
 hyenas, leopards and wolves is collected.2 Mr. 
 Lane*® found metamorphosis by wizards as accredited 
 a working belief at Cairo as it is among Abipones, 
 Eskimo, or the people of Ashangoland. In various 
 parts of Scotland there is a tale of a witch who was shot 
 at when in the guise of a hare. In this shape she was 
 wounded, and the same wound was found on her 
 when she resumed her human appearance. Lafitau, 
 early in the last century, found precisely the same 
 tale, except that the wizards took the form of birds, 
 not of hares, among the Red Indians. The birds were 
 wounded by the magical arrows of an old medicine-man, 
 Shonnoh Koui Eretsi, and these bolts were found in 
 the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan, as we 
 learn from several stories in Mr. Mitford’s Tales of 
 Old Japan, people chiefly metamorphose themselves 
 into foxes and badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras 4 
 
 1Vol. i. pp. 809-315. 
 2See also M‘Lennan on Lykanthropy in Lncyclopedia Britannica. 
 3 Arabian Nights, i, 51. 4 Bancroft, Races of Pacific Coast, i. 740, 
 
SHAPE-SHIFTING. 119 
 
 ‘possess the power of transforming men into wild 
 beasts, and were much feared accordingly”. Among 
 the Cakchiquels, a cultivated people of Guatemala, 
 the very name of the clergy, haleb, was derived from 
 their power of assuming animal shapes, which they 
 took on as easily as the Homeric gods! Regnard, 
 the French dramatist, who travelled among the Lapps 
 at the end of the seventeenth century (1681), says: 
 ‘They believe witches can turn men into cats;” 
 and again, ‘‘ Under the figures of swans, crows, 
 falcons and geese, they call up tempests and destroy 
 ships ”.2. Among the Bushmen “ sorcerers assume the 
 forms of beasts and jackals”.? Dobrizhoffer (1717-91), a 
 missionary in Paraguay, found that “sorcerers arrogate 
 to themselves the power of transforming themselves into 
 tigers”. He was present when the Abipones believed 
 that a conversion of this sort was actually taking 
 place: “ Alas,” cried the people, “his whole body is 
 beginning to be covered with tiger-spots ; his nails are 
 growing”. Near Loanda, Livingstone found that 
 a ‘chief may metamorphose himself into a lion, kill 
 any one he choses, and then resume his proper form ”.° 
 Among the Barotse and Balonda, ‘‘ while persons are 
 still alive they may enter into lions and alligators ”.° 
 Among the Mayas of Central America “ sorcerers 
 could transform themselves into dogs, pigs and other 
 animals; their glance was death to a victim”.’ The 
 Thlinkeets think that their Shamans can metamor- 
 
 1Brinton, Annals of the Cakchiquels, p. 46. 2 Pinkerton, i. 471. 
 3Bleek, Brief Account of Bushinan Folk-Lore, pp. 15, 40. 
 
 4 English translation of Dobrizhoffer’s Abipones, i. 163, 
 
 5 Missionary Travels, p. 615. 6 Livingstone, p. 642, 
 
 7 Bancroft, ii. 
 
120 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 phose themselves into animals at pleasure; and a 
 very old raven was pointed out to Mr. C. E. S. Wood 
 as an incarnation of the soul of a Shaman.? Sir A. 
 C. Lyall finds a similar belief in flourishing existence 
 in India. The European superstition of the were-wolf 
 is too well known to need description. Perhaps the 
 most curious legend is that told by Giraldus Cam- 
 brensis about a man and his wife metamorphosed into 
 wolves by an abbot. They retained human speech, . 
 made exemplary professions of Christian faith, and 
 sent for priests when they found their last hours 
 approaching. In an old Norman ballad a girl is 
 transformed into a white doe, and hunted and slain 
 by her brother’s hounds. The “aboriginal” peoples 
 of India retain similar convictions. Among the Hos? 
 an old sorcerer called Pusa was known to turn himself 
 habitually into a tiger, and to eat his neighbour’s goats, 
 and even their wives. Examples of the power of 
 sorcerers to turn, as with the Gorgon’s head, their 
 enemies into stone, are peculiarly common in America.? 
 Hearne found that the Indians believed they de- 
 scended from a dog, who could turn himself into a 
 handsome young man.‘ 
 
 Let us recapitulate the powers attributed all over 
 the world, by the lower people, to medicine-men. 
 The medicine-man has all miracles at his command. 
 He rules the sky, he flies into the air, he becomes 
 visible or invisible at will, he can take or confer any 
 
 1 Century Magazine, July, 1882. 
 
 2Dalton’s Ethnology of Bengal, p. 200. 
 
 3 Dorman, pp. 130, 184; Report of Hihnological Bureau, Washington, 
 
 1880-81. 
 4A Journey, etc., p. 342. 
 
a 
 3 
 
 GODS AND SORCERERS. 121 
 
 form at pleasure, and resume his human shape. He 
 can control spirits, can converse with the dead, and 
 can descend to their abodes. 
 
 When we begin to examine the gods of mythology, 
 savage or civilised, as distinct from deities contem- 
 plated, in devotion, as moral and creative guardians 
 of ethics, we shall find that, with the general, though 
 not invariable addition of immortality, they possess 
 the very same accomplishments as the medicine-man, 
 peay, tohunga, jossakeed, birraark, or whatever name 
 for sorcerer we may choose. Among the Greeks, Zeus, 
 mythically envisaged, enjoys in heaven all the attri- 
 butes of the medicine-man ; among the Iroquois, as 
 Pére le Jeune, the old Jesuit missionary, observed,} 
 the medicine-man enjoys on earth all the attributes 
 of Zeus. Briefly, the miraculous and supernatural 
 endowments of the gods of myth, whether these gods 
 be zoomorphic or anthropomorphic, are exactly the 
 magical properties with which the medicine-man is 
 credited by his tribe. It does not at all follow, as 
 Euemerus and Mr. Herbert Spencer might argue, 
 that the god was once a real living medicine-man. 
 But myth-making man confers on the deities of myth 
 the magical powers which he claims for himself. 
 
 1 Relations (1636), p. 114, 
 
122 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 NATURE MYTHS. 
 
 Savage fancy, curiosity and credulity illustrated in nature myths—In 
 these all phenomena are explained by belief in the general animation 
 of everything, combined with belief in metamorphosis—Sun myths, 
 Asian, Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, Californian, Brazilian, 
 Maori, Samoan—Moon myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican, Zulu, 
 Macassar, Greenland, Piute, Malay—Thunder myths—Greek and 
 Aryan sun and moon myths—Star myths—Myths, savage and civilised, 
 of animals, accounting for their marks and habits—Examples of custom - 
 of claiming blood kinship with lower animals—Myths of various plants 
 and trees—Myths of stones, and of metamorphosis into stones, Greek, 
 Australian and American—The whole natural philosophy of savages 
 expressed in myths, and survives in folk-lore and classical poetry; and 
 legends of metamorphosis. 
 
 Tax intellectual condition of savages which has been 
 presented and established by the evidence both of 
 observers and of institutions, may now be studied 
 in savage myths. These myths, indeed, would of 
 themselves demonstrate that the ideas which the lower 
 races entertain about the world correspond with our 
 statement. If any one were to ask himself, from 
 what mental conditions do the following savage stories 
 arise? he would naturally answer that the minds 
 which conceived the tales were curious, indolent, 
 credulous of magic and witchcraft, capable of draw- 
 ing no line between things and persons, capable of 
 crediting all things with human passions and resolu- 
 
NATURE MYTHS. 123 
 
 tions. But, as myths analogous to those of savages, 
 when found among civilised peoples, have been ascribed 
 to a psychological condition produced by a disease of 
 language acting after civilisation had made consider- 
 able advances, we cannot take the savage myths as 
 proof of what savages think, believe and practice in 
 the course of daily life. To do so would be, perhaps, 
 to argue in a circle. We must therefore study the 
 myths of the undeveloped races in themselves, 
 
 These myths form a composite whole, so complex 
 and so nebulous that it is hard indeed to array them 
 in classes and categories. For example, if we look at 
 myths concerning the origin of various phenomena, 
 we find that some introduce the action of gods or 
 extra-natural beings, while others rest on a rude 
 theory of capricious evolution ; others, again, invoke 
 the aid of the magic of mortals, and most regard the 
 great natural forces, the heavenly bodies, and the 
 animals, as so many personal characters capable of 
 voluntarily modifying themselves or of being modified 
 by the most trivial accidents. Some sort of arrange- 
 ment, however, must be attempted, only the student 
 is to understand that the lines are never drawn with 
 definite fixity, that any category may glide into any 
 other category of myth. 
 
 We shall begin by considering some nature myths 
 —myths, that is to say, which explain the facts of the 
 visible universe. These range from tales about heaven, 
 day, night, the sun and the stars, to tales accounting 
 for the red breast of the ousel, the habits of the quail, 
 the spots and stripes of wild beasts, the formation of 
 rocks and stones, the foliage of trees, the shapes of 
 
124 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 plants. In a sense these myths are the science of 
 savages ; in a sense they are their sacred history ; in 
 a sense they are their fiction and romance. Beginning 
 with the sun, we find, as Mr. Tylor says, that ‘‘ in 
 early philosophy throughout the world the ‘sun and 
 moon are alive, and, as it were, human in their 
 nature’’.. The mass of these solar myths is so 
 enormous that only a few examples can be given, 
 chosen almost at random out of the heap. The sun is 
 regarded as a personal being, capable not only of being 
 affected by charms and incantations, but of being 
 trapped and beaten, of appearing on earth, of taking 
 a wife of the daughters of men. Garcilasso de la 
 Vega has a story of an Inca prince, a speculative 
 thinker, who was puzzled by the sun-worship of his 
 ancestors. If the sun be thus all-powerful, the Inca 
 inquired, why is he plainly subject to laws? why 
 does he go his daily round, instead of wandering at 
 large up and down the fields of heaven? The prince 
 concluded that there was a will superior to the sun’s 
 will, and he raised a temple to the Unknown Power. 
 Now the phenomena which put the Inca on the path 
 of monotheistic religion, a path already traditional, 
 according to Garcilasso, have also struck the fancy of 
 savages. Why, they ask, does the sun run his course 
 like a tamed beast ? A reply suited to a mind which 
 holds that all things are personal is given in myths. 
 Some one caught and tamed the sun by physical force 
 or by art magic. 
 
 In Australia the myth says that there was a time 
 when the sun did not set. ‘It was at all times day, 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, i. 288. 
 
wari 
 Dei 
 
 CSR 
 
 SOLAR MYTHS. 125 
 
 and the blacks grew weary. Norralie considered and 
 
 decided that the sun should disappear at intervals. 
 He addressed the sun in an incantation (couched like 
 the Finnish Kalewala in the metre of Longfellow’s 
 Hiawatha); and the incantation is thus interpreted : 
 “Sun, sun, burn your wood, burn your internal 
 substance, and go down”. The sun therefore now 
 burns out his fuel in a day, and goes below for fresh 
 firewood.’ 
 
 In New Zealand the taming of the sun is attributed 
 to the great hero Maui, the Prometheus of the Maoris. 
 He set snares to catch the sun, but in vain, for the 
 sun’s rays bit them through. According to another 
 account, while Norralie wished to hasten the sun's 
 setting, Maui wanted to delay it, for the sun used to 
 speed through the heavens at a racing pace. Maui 
 therefore snared the sun, and beat him so unmercifully 
 that he has been lame ever since, and travels slowly, 
 giving longer days. ‘The sun, when beaten, cried 
 out and revealed his second great name, T’aura-mis- 
 te-ra.”2 It will be remembered that Indra, in his 
 abject terror when he fled after the slaying of Vrittra, 
 also revealed his mystic name. In North America the 
 same story of the trapping and laming of the sun is 
 told, and attributed to a hero named Tcha-ka-betch. 
 In Samoa the sun had a child by a Samoan woman. 
 He trapped the sun with a rope made of a vine and 
 extorted presents. Another Samoan lassoed the sun 
 and made him promise to move more slowly.* These 
 Samoan and Australian fancies are nearly as dignified 
 
 1 Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 430. 
 2Taylor, New Zealand, p. 131. 3’Turner, Samoa, p. 20. 
 
126 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 as the tale in the Attareya Brahmana. The gods, 
 afraid “that the sun would fall out of heaven, pulled 
 him up and tied him with five ropes”. These ropes 
 are recognised as verses in the ritual, but probably 
 the ritual is later than the ropes. In Mexico we find 
 that the sun himself (like the stars in most myths) 
 was once a human or pre-human devotee, Nanahuatzin, 
 who leapt into a fire to propitiate the gods! Trans- 
 lated to heaven as the sun, Nanahuatzin burned so 
 very fiercely that he threatened to reduce the world 
 to a cinder. Arrows were therefore shot at him, and 
 this punishment had as happy an effect as the beatings 
 administered by Maui and Tcha-ka-betch. Among 
 the Bushmen of South Africa the sun was once a man, 
 from whose armpit a limited amount of light was 
 radiated round his hut. Some children threw him up 
 into the sky, and there he stuck, and there he shines.” 
 In the Homeric hymn to Helios, as Mr. Max Miiller 
 observes, ‘“‘the poet looks on Helios as a half god, 
 almost a hero, who had once lived on earth,”’ which is 
 precisely the view of the Bushmen. Among the 
 Aztecs the sun is said to have been attacked by a 
 hunter and grievously wounded by his arrows. The 
 Gallinomeros, in Central California, seem at least to 
 know that the sun is material and impersonal. They 
 say that when all was dark in the beginning, the animals 
 were constantly jostling each other. After a painful 
 encounter, the hawk and the coyote collected two 
 balls of inflammable substance ; the hawk (Indra was 
 1§ahagun, French trans., vii. ii. 
 2Bleek, Hottentot Fables, p. 67; Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 9, 11. 
 
 3 Compare a Californian solar myth: Bancroft, iii. pp. 85, 86. 
 4 Bancroft, iii. 78, quoting Burgoa, i. 128, 196, 
 
SOLAR MYTHS. 127 
 
 occasionally a hawk) flew up with them into heaven, 
 and lighted them with sparks from a flint. There they 
 gave light as sun and moon. This is an exception to 
 the general rule that the heavenly bodies are regarded 
 as persons. The Melanesian tale of the bringing of 
 night is a curious contrast to the Mexican, Maori, 
 Australian and American Indian stories which we 
 have quoted. In Melanesia, as in Australia, the days 
 were long, indeed endless, and people grew tired; but 
 instead of sending the sun down below by an incan- 
 tation when night would follow in course of nature, 
 the Melanesian hero went to Night (conceived of as 
 a person) and begged his assistance. Night (Qong) 
 received Qat (the hero) kindly, darkened his eyes, gave 
 him sleep, and, in twelve hours or so, crept up from 
 the horizon and sent the sun crawling to the west. 
 In the same spirit Paracelsus is said to have attributed 
 night, not to the absence of the sun, but to the 
 apparition of certain stars which radiate darkness. 
 It is extraordinary that a myth like the Melanesian 
 should occur in Brazil. There was endless day till 
 some one married a girl whose father ‘the great 
 serpent,” was the owner of night. The father sent 
 night bottled up in a gourd. The gourd was not to 
 be uncorked till the messengers reached the bride, 
 but they, in their curiosity, opened the gourd, and let 
 night out prematurely.” | 
 
 The myths which have been reported deal mainly 
 with the sun as a person who shines, and at fixed 
 
 1Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881. 
 
 2Contes Indiens du Bresil, pp. 1-9, by Couto de Magalhaes. Rio de 
 
 Janeiro, 1883. M. Henri Gaidoz kindly presented the author with this 
 work, 
 
128 . MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 intervals disappears. His relations with the moon are 
 much more complicated, and are the subject of endless 
 stories, all explaining in a romantic fashion why the 
 moon waxes and wanes, whence come her spots, why 
 she is eclipsed, all starting from the premise that sun 
 and moon are persons with human parts and passions. 
 Sometimes the moon is a man, sometimes a woman 
 and the sex of the sun varies according to the fancy 
 of the narrators. Different tribes of the same race, as 
 among the Australians, have different views of the sex 
 of moon and sun. Among the aborigines of Victoria, 
 the moon, like the sun among the Bushmen, was a 
 black fellow before he went up into the sky. After 
 an unusually savage career, he was killed with a stone 
 hatchet by the wives of the eagle, and now he shines 
 in the heavens! Another myth explanatory of the 
 moon’s phases was found by Mr. Meyer in 1846 among 
 the natives of Encounter Bay. According to them the 
 moon is @ woman, and a bad woman to boot. She 
 lives a life of dissipation among men, which makes 
 her consumptive, and she wastes away till they drive 
 her from their company. While she is in retreat, she 
 lives on nourishing roots, becomes quite plump, re- 
 sumes her gay career, and again wastes away. ‘The 
 same tribe, strangely enough, think that the sun also 
 is a woman. Every night she descends among the 
 dead, who stand in double lines to greet her and let 
 her pass. She has a lover among the dead, who has 
 presented her with a red kangaroo skin, and in this she 
 appears at her rising. Such is the view of rosy- 
 fingered Dawn entertained by the blacks of Encounter 
 1 Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 432. 
 
s 
 
 MOON MYTHS. 129 
 
 Bay. In South America, among the Muyscas of 
 Bogota, the moon, Huythaca, is the malevolent wife of 
 the child of the sun; she was a woman before her 
 husband banished her to the fields of space.! The 
 moon is a man among the Khasias of the Himalaya. 
 and he was guilty of the unpardonable offence of 
 admiring his mother-in-law. As a general rule, the 
 mother-in-law is not even to be spoken to by the 
 savage son-in-law. The lady threw ashes in his face 
 to discourage his passion, hence the moon’s spots. The 
 waning of the moon suggested the most beautiful and 
 best known of savage myths, that in which the moon 
 sends a beast to tell mortals that, though they die 
 like her, like her they shall be born again.? Because 
 the spots in the moon were thought to resemble a hare 
 they were accounted for in Mexico by the hypothesis 
 that a god smote the moon in the face with a rabbit ;? 
 in Zululand and Thibet by a fancied translation of a 
 good or bad hare to the moon. 
 
 The Eskimos have a peculiar myth to account for the 
 moon’s spots. Sun and moon were human brother 
 and sister. In the darkness the moon once attempted 
 the virtue of the sun. She smeared his face over 
 with ashes, that she might detect him when a light 
 was brought. She did discover who her assailant 
 had been, fled to the sky, and became the sun. The 
 moon still pursues her, and his face is still blackened 
 with the marks of ashes.* Gervaise® says that in 
 
 1Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 353. 
 
 2Bleek, Reynard in South Africa, pp. 69-74. 
 
 3Sahagun, viii. 2. 4Crantz’s History of Greenland, i. 212. 
 5 Royaume de Macacar, 1688. 
 
 VOL. I. 9 
 
130 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Macassar the moon was held to be with child by the 
 sun, and that when he pursued her and wished to beat 
 her, she was delivered of the earth, They are now 
 reconciled. About the alternate appearance of sun 
 and moon a beautifully complete and adequate tale 
 is told by the Piute Indians of California. No more 
 adequate and scientific explanation could possibly be 
 offered, granting the hypothesis that sun and moon 
 are human persons and savage persons. The myth is 
 printed as it was taken down by Mr. De Quille from 
 the lips of Tooroop Eenah (Desert Father), a chief of 
 the Piutes, and published in a San Francisco news- 
 paper. ° 
 
 ‘The sun is the father and ruler of the heavens. 
 He is the big chief. The moon is his wife and the stars 
 are their children. The sun eats his children whenever 
 he can catch them. They flee before him, and are 
 all the time afraid when he is passing through the 
 heavens. When he (their father) appears in the 
 morning, you see all the stars, his children, fly out of 
 sight—go away back into the blue of the above—and 
 they do not wake to be seen again until he, their 
 father, is about going to his bed. 
 
 “Down deep under the ground—deep, deep, under 
 all the ground—is a great hole. At night, when he 
 has passed over the world, looked down on everything 
 and finished his work, he, the sun, goes into his hole, 
 and he crawls and creeps along it till he comes to his 
 bed in the middle part of the earth. So then he, the 
 sun, sleeps there in his bed all night. 
 
 ‘This hole is so little, and he, the sun, is so big, 
 that he cannot turn round in it; and so he must, when 
 
A PIUTE MYTH. 181 
 
 he has had all his sleep, pass on through, and in the 
 morning we see him come out in the east. When he, 
 the sun, has so come out, he begins to hunt up through 
 the sky to catch and eat any that he can of the stars, 
 his children, for if he does not so catch and eat he 
 cannot live. He, the sun, is not all seen. The shape 
 of him 1s like a snake ora lizard. It is not his head 
 that we can see, but his belly, filled up with the stars 
 that times and times he has swallowed. 
 
 ‘The moon is the mother of the heavens and is the 
 wife of the sun. She, the moon, goes into the same 
 hole as her husband to sleep her naps. But always 
 she has great fear of the sun, her husband, and when 
 he comes through the hole to the nobee (tent) deep in 
 the ground to sleep, she gets out and comes away if 
 he be cross. 
 
 “She, the moon, has great love for her children, the 
 stars, and is happy to travel among them in the 
 above; and they, her children, feel safe, and sing and 
 dance as she passes along. But the mother, she cannot 
 help that some of her children must be swallowed by 
 the father every month. Jt is ordered that way by 
 the Pah-ah (Great Spirit), who lives above the place 
 of all. 
 
 “Every month that father, the sun, does swallow 
 some of the stars, his children, and then that mother, 
 the moon, feels sorrow. She must mourn; so she 
 must put the black on her face for to mourn the dead. 
 You see the Piute women put black on their faces 
 when a child is gone. But the dark will wear away 
 from the face of that mother, the moon, a little and a 
 little every day, and after a time again we see all 
 
132 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 bright the face of her. But soon more of her children 
 are gone, and again she must put on her face the pitch 
 and the black.” 
 
 Here all the phenomena are accounted for, and the 
 explanation is as advanced as the Egyptian doctrine of 
 the hole under the earth where the sun goes when he 
 passes from our view. And still the Great Spirit is 
 over all: Religion comes athwart Myth. 
 
 Mr. Tylor quotes! a nature myth about sun, moon 
 and stars which remarkably corresponds to the specu- 
 lation of the Piutes. The Mintira of the Malayan 
 Peninsula say that both sun and moon are women. The 
 stars are the moon’s children; once the sun had as 
 many. They each agreed (like the women of Jerusalem 
 in the famine), to eat their own children; but the sun 
 swallowed her whole family, while the moon concealed 
 hers. When the sun saw this she was exceedingly 
 angry, and pursued the moon to kill her. Occasionally 
 she gets a bite out of the moon, and that is an eclipse. 
 The Hos of North-East India tell the same tale, but 
 say that the sun cleft the moon in twain for her 
 treachery, and that she continues to be cut in two and 
 grow again every month. With these sun and moon 
 legends sometimes coexists the religious belief in a 
 Creator of these and of all things. 
 
 In harmony with the general hypothesis that all 
 objects in nature are personal, and human or bestial, 
 in real shape, and in passion and habits, are the 
 myths which account for eclipses. These have so 
 frequently been published and commented on? that a 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, i. 356. 
 2Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. i. ; Lefébure, Les Yeux d’ Horus. 
 
SOLAR MYTHS. 133 
 
 long statement would be tedious and superfluous. 
 To the savage mind, and even to the Chinese and the 
 peasants of some European countries, the need of an 
 explanation is satisfied by the myth that an evil beast 
 is devouring the sun or the moon. The people even 
 try by firing off guns, shrieking, and clashing cymbals, 
 to frighten the beast (wolf, pig, dragon, or what not) 
 from his prey. What the hungry monster in the sky 
 is doing when he is not biting the sun or moon we 
 are not informed. Probably he herds with the big 
 bird whose wings, among the Dacotahs of America 
 and the Zulus of Africa, make thunder; or he may 
 associate with the dragons, serpents, cows and other 
 aerial cattle which supply the rain, and show them- 
 selves in the waterspout. Chinese, Greenland, Hindoo, 
 Finnish, Lithunian and Moorish examples of the myth 
 about the moon-devouring beasts are vouched for by 
 Grimm. A Mongolian legend has it that the gods 
 wished to punish the maleficent Arakho for his 
 misdeeds, but Arakho hid so cleverly that their 
 limited omnipotence could not find him. The sun, 
 when asked to turn spy, gave an evasive answer. 
 The moon told the truth. Arakho was punished, and 
 ever since he chases sun and moon. When he nearly 
 catches either of them, there is an eclipse, and the 
 people try to drive him off by making a hideous 
 uproar with musical and other instruments.? Captain 
 Beeckman in 1704 was in Borneo, when the natives 
 declared that the devil ‘‘ was eating the moon’”’, 
 
 Dr. Brinton in his Myths and Myth-Makers gives 
 
 1 Teutonic Mythology, English trans., ii. 706. 
 2 Moon-Lore, by Rev. T. Harley, p. 167, 
 
134 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 examples from Peruvians, Tupis, Creeks, Iroquois 
 and Algonkins. It would be easy, and is perhaps 
 superfluous, to go on multiplying proofs of the belief 
 that sun and moon are, or have been, persons. In the 
 Hervey Isles these two luminaries are thought to have 
 been made out of the body of a child cut in twain by 
 his parents. The blood escaped from the half which 
 is the moon, hence her pallor.’ This tale is an ex- 
 ception to the general rule, but reminds us of the 
 many myths which represent the things in the world 
 as having been made out of a mutilated man, like the 
 Vedic Purusha. It is hardly necessary, except by 
 way of record, to point out that the Greek myths of 
 sun and moon, like the myths of savages, start from 
 the conception of the solar and lunar bodies as 
 persons with parts and passions, human loves and 
 human sorrows. As in the Mongolian myth of 
 Arakho, the sun “sees all and hears all,” and, less 
 honourable than the Mongolian sun, he plays the spy 
 for Hephestus on the loves of Ares and Aphrodite. 
 He has mistresses and human children, such as Circe 
 and Atetes.? 
 
 The sun is all-seeing and all-penetrating. In a 
 Greek song of to-day a mother sends a message to an 
 absent daughter by the sun; it is but an unconscious 
 repetition of the request of the dying Ajax that the 
 heavenly body will tell his fate to his old father and 
 his sorrowing spouse.® 
 
 Selene, the moon, like Helios, the sun, was a person, 
 and amorous. Beloved by Zeus, she gave birth to 
 
 1Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 45. 3 Sophocles, Ajax, 846. 
 2See chapter on Greek Divine Myths. 
 
ALL MYTHS NOT SOLAR. 135 
 
 Pandia, and Pan gained her affection by the simple 
 rustic gift of a fleece! The Australian Dawn, with 
 her present of a red kangaroo skin, was not more 
 lightly ‘won than the chaste Selene. Her affection for 
 Endymion is well known, and her cold white glance 
 shines through the crevices of his mountain grave, 
 _ hewn in a rocky wall, like the tombs of Phrygia.” She 
 is the sister of the sun in Hesiod, the daughter (by his 
 sister) of Hyperion in the Homeric hymns to Helios. 
 
 In Greece the aspects of sun and moon take the most 
 ideal human forms, and show themselves in the most 
 gracious myths. But, after all, these retain in their 
 anthropomorphism the marks of the earliest fancy, the 
 fancy of Eskimos and Australians. It seems to be 
 commonly thought that the existence of solar myths 
 is denied by anthropologists. This is a vulgar error. 
 There is an enormous mass of solar myths, but they 
 are not caused by ‘‘a disease of language,” and—all 
 myths are not solar! 
 
 There is no occasion to dwell long on myths of the 
 same character in which the stars are accounted for as 
 transformed human adventurers. It has often been 
 shown that this opinion is practically of world-wide 
 distribution.2 We find it in Australia, Persia, Greece, 
 among the Bushmen, in North and South America, 
 among the Eskimos, in ancient Egypt, in New Zealand, 
 in ancient India—briefly, wherever we look. The 
 Sanskrit forms of these myths have been said to arise 
 from confusion as to the meaning of words. But is it 
 
 1 Virgil, Georgics, iii. 391. 2Preller, Griech. Myth., i. 163 
 
 3Qustom and Myth, ‘“‘Star-Myths”; Primitive Culture, i. 288, 291; 
 J. G. Miiller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 52, 53. 
 
136 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 credible that, in all languages, however different, the 
 same kind of unconscious puns should have led to the 
 same mistaken beliefs? As the savage, barbarous and 
 Greek star-myths (such as that of Callisto, first dhanged 
 into a bear and then into a constellation) are familiar 
 to most readers, a few examples of Sanskrit star-stories 
 are offered here from the Satapatha Brahmana. 
 Fires are not, according to the Brahmana ritual, to be 
 lighted under the stars called Krittik4s, the Pleiades, 
 The reason is that the stars were the wives of the bears 
 (Riksha), for the group known in Brahmanic times as 
 the Rishis (sages) were originally called the Rikshas 
 (bears). But the wives of the bears were excluded 
 from the society of their husbands, for the bears rise 
 in the north and their wives in the east, Therefore 
 the worshipper should not set up his fires under the 
 Pleiades, lest he should thereby be separated from the 
 company of his wife. The Brahmanas? also tell us 
 that Prajapati had an unholy passion for his daughter, 
 who was in the form of a doe. The gods made Rudra 
 fire an arrow at Prajapati to punish him; he was 
 wounded, and leaped into the sky, where he became 
 one constellation and his daughter another, and the 
 arrow a third group of stars. In general, according to 
 the Brahmanas, “the stars are the lights of virtuous 
 men who go to the heavenly world ”. 
 Passing from savage myths explanatory of the 
 nature of celestial bodies to myths accounting for the 
 1 Sacred Books of the East, i. 283-286. 2 Aitareya Bramana, iii. 33. 
 3 Satapatha Brahmana, vi. 5,4, 8. For Greek examples, Hesiod, Ovid, 
 and the Catasterismoi, attributed to Eratosthenes, are useful authorities, 
 
 Probably many of the tales in Eratosthenes are late fictions consciously 
 moulded on traditional data, 
 
COMMON LEVEL OF THINGS. 137 
 
 formation and colour and habits of beasts, birds and 
 
 fishes, we find ourselves, as an old Jesuit missionary 
 says, in the midst of a barbarous version of Ovid’s 
 Metamorphoses. It has been shown that the possi- 
 bility of interchange of form between man and beast 
 is part of the working belief of everyday existence 
 among the lower peoples. They regard all things as 
 on one level, or, to use an old political phrase, they 
 “level up” everything to equality with the human 
 status. Thus Mr. Im Thurn, a very good observer, 
 found that to the Indians of Guiana ‘all objects, 
 animate or inaminate, seem exactly of the same nature, 
 except that they differ by the accident of bodily form ”. 
 Clearly to grasp this entirely natural conception of 
 primitive man, the civilised student must make a 
 great effort to forget fora time all that science has 
 taught him of the differences between the objects 
 which fill the world.’ “To the ear of the savage 
 animals certainly seem to talk.” “As far as the 
 Indians of Guiana are concerned, I do not believe that 
 they distinguish such beings as sun and moon, or such 
 other natufal phenomena as winds and storms, from 
 men and other animals, from plants and other inani- 
 mate objects, or from any other objects whatsoever.” 
 Bancroft says about North American myths, “Beasts 
 and birds and fishes fetch and carry, talk and act, in a 
 
 S 
 
 way that leaves even Aisop’s heroes quite in the shade”? 
 
 1 Journ. Anthrop. Inst., xi. 366-369. A very large and rich collec- 
 tion of testimonies as to metamorphosis will be found in J. G. Miiller’s 
 Amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 62 et seg. ; while, for European super- 
 stitions, Bodin on La Démonomanie des Sorciers, Lyon, 1598, may be 
 consulted. 
 
 2 Vol. iii. p. 127. 
 
138 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 The savage tendency is to see in inanimate things 
 animals, and in animals disguised men. M. Réville 
 quotes in his Religions des Peuples Non-Civilises, i. 
 64, the story of some Negroes, who, the first time they 
 were shown a cornemuse, took the instrument for a 
 beast, the two holes for its eyes. The Highlander 
 who looted a watch at Prestonpans, and observing, 
 ‘She's teed,”’ sold it cheap when it ran down, was in 
 the same psychological condition. A queer bit of 
 savage science is displayed on a black stone tobacco- 
 pipe from the Pacific Coast. The savage artist has 
 carved the pipe in the likeness of a steamer, as a steamer 
 is conceived by him. ‘‘ Unable to account for the 
 motive power, he imagines the paddle to be linked 
 round the tongue of a coiled serpent, fastened to the 
 tail of the vessel,” and so he represents it on the black 
 stone pipe. Nay, a savage's belief that beasts are on 
 his own level is so literal, that he actually makes 
 blood-covenants with the lower animals, as he does 
 with men, mingling his gore with theirs, or smearing 
 both together on a stone ;* while to bury dead animals 
 with sacred rites is as usual among the Bedouins and 
 Malagasies to-day as in ancient Egypt or Attica. In 
 the same way the Ainos of Japan, who regard the 
 bear as a kinsman, sacrifice a bear once a year. But, 
 to propitiate the animal and his connections, they 
 appoint him a ‘‘ mother,’ an Aino girl, who looks 
 after his comforts, and behaves in a way as maternal 
 as possible. The bear is now a kinsman, opopntpros, 
 and cannot avenge himself within the kin. This, at 
 
 1 Magazine of Art, January, 1883, 
 2** Malagasy Folk-Tales,” Folk-Lore Journal, October, 1883. 
 
a 
 KINSHIP OF MAN AND BEAST. 139 
 
 least, seems to be the humour of it. In Lagarde’s 
 Reiquie Juris Ecclesiastict Antiquissime a similar 
 Syrian covenant of kinship with insects is described. 
 About 700 a.D., when a Syrian garden was infested 
 by caterpillars, the maidens were assembled, and one 
 caterpillar was caught. ‘Then one of the virgins was 
 ‘‘made its mother,” and the creature was buried with 
 due lamentations. The “mother” was then brought 
 to the spot where the pests were, her companions 
 bewailed her, and the caterpillars perished like their 
 chosen kinsman, but without extorting revenge.! Re- 
 venge was out of their reach. They had been brought 
 within the kin of their foes, and there were no 
 Erinnyes, ‘‘ avengers of kindred blood,” to help them. 
 People in this condition of belief naturally tell hun- 
 _ dreds of tales, in which men, stones, trees, beasts, shift 
 shapes, and in which the modifications of animal 
 forms are caused by accident, or by human agency, or 
 by magic, or by metamorphosis. Such tales survive 
 in our modern folk-lore. To make our meaning clear, 
 we may give the Kuropean nursery-myth of the origin 
 of the donkey’s long ears, and, among other illustra- 
 tions, the Australian myth of the origin of the black 
 and white plumage of the pelican. Mr. Ralston has 
 published the Russian version of the myth of the 
 donkey’s ears. The Spanish form, which is identical 
 with the Russian, is given by Fernan Caballero in La 
 Gaviota. 
 
 ‘Listen! do you know why your ears are so big ?”’ 
 (the story is told to a stupid little boy with big ears). 
 
 1 We are indebted to Professor Robertson Smith for this example, and 
 to Miss Bird’s Jowrnal, pp. 90, 97, for the Aino parallel. 
 
8 
 
 140 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 ‘“When Father Adam found himself in Paradise with 
 the animals, he gave each its name; those of thy 
 species, my child, he named ‘donkeys’. One day, 
 not long after, he called the beasts together, and 
 asked each to tell him its name. They all answered 
 right except the animals of thy sort, and they had 
 forgotten their name! Then Father Adam was very 
 angry, and, taking that forgetful donkey by the ears, 
 he pulled them out, screaming ‘ You are called donkey !’ 
 And the donkey’s ears have been long ever since.” 
 This, to a child, is a credible explanation. So, per- 
 haps, is another survival of this form of science—the 
 Scotch explanation of the black marks on the had- 
 dock; they were impressed by St. Peter’s finger and 
 thumb when he took the piece of money for Cexsar’s 
 tax out of the fish’s mouth, 
 
 Turning from folk-lore to savage beliefs, we learn 
 that from one end of Africa to another the honey-bird, 
 schneter, is said to be an old woman whose son was 
 lost, and who pursued him till she was turned into a 
 bird, which still shrieks his name, “Schneter, Schneter”! 
 In the same way the manners of most of the birds 
 known to the Greeks were accounted for by the myth 
 that they had been men and women. Zeus, for 
 example, turned Ceyx and Haleyon into sea-fowls 
 because they were too proud in their married happi- 
 ness.2 To these myths of the origin of various animals 
 we shall return, but we must not forget the black and 
 white Australian pelican. Why is the pelican parti- 
 coloured?* For this reason: After the Flood (the 
 
 1 Barth, iii. 358. 2 Apollodorus, i. 7 (18, 12). 
 
 ’Sahagun, viii. 2, accounts for colours of eagle and tiger. A number 
 of races explain the habits and marks of animals as the result of a curse or 
 
wr 
 
 PELICAN MYTH. 141 
 
 origin of which is variously explained by the Murri), 
 the pelican (who had been a black fellow) made a 
 canoe, and went about like a kind of Noah, trying to 
 save the drowning. In the course of his benevolent 
 mission he fell in love with a woman, but she and her 
 friends played him a trick and escaped from him. 
 The pelican at once prepared to go on the war-path. 
 The first thing to do was to daub himself white, as is 
 the custom of the blacks before a battle. They think 
 the white pipe-clay strikes terror and inspires respect 
 among the enemy. But when the pelican was only 
 half pipe-clayed, another pelican came past, and, “not 
 knowing what such a queer black and white thing 
 was, struck the first pelican with his beak and killed 
 him. Before that pelicans were all black; now they 
 are black and white. That is the reason.” ? 
 
 “That is the reason.” Therewith native philosopy 
 is satisfied, and does not examine in Mr. Darwin’s 
 laborious manner the slow evolution of the colour of 
 the pelican’s plumage. The mythological stories about 
 animals are rather difficult to treat, because they are 
 so much mixed up with the topic of totemism. Here 
 we only examine myths which account by means of a 
 legend for certain peculiarities in the habits, cries, or 
 colours and shapes of animals. The Ojibbeways told 
 Kohl they had a story for every creature, accounting 
 for its ways and appearance. Among the Greeks, as 
 among Australians and Bushmen, we find that nearly 
 every notable bird or beast had its tradition. The 
 blessing of a god or hero, The Hottentots, the Huarochiri of Peru, the 
 
 New Zealanders (Shortland, 7'raditions, p. 57), are among the peoples which 
 use this myth. 1Brough Symth, Aborigines of Australia, i, 477, 478. 
 
142 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION, 
 
 nightingale and the swallow have a story of the most 
 savage description, a story reported by Apollodorus, 
 though Homer? refers to another, and, as usual, to a 
 gentler and more refined form of the myth. Here is 
 the version of Apollodorus. “Pandion ” (an early king 
 of Athens) “married Zeuxippe, his mother’s sister, by 
 whom he had two daughters, Proene and Philomela, 
 and two sons, Erechtheus and Butes. A war broke 
 out with Labdas about some debatable land, and 
 Krechtheus invited the alliance of Tereus of Thrace, 
 the son of Ares. Having brought the war, with the 
 aid of Tereus, to a happy end, he gave him his daughter 
 Procne to wife. By Procne, Tereus had a son, Itys, 
 and thereafter fell in love with Philomela, whom he 
 seduced, pretending that Proene was dead, whereas 
 he had really concealed her somewhere in his lands. 
 Thereon he married Philomela, and cut out her tongue, 
 But she wove into a robe characters that told the 
 whole story, and by means of these acquainted Procne 
 with her sufferings. hereon Proene found her sister, 
 and slew Itys, her own son, whose body she cooked, 
 and served up to Tereus in a banquet. Thereafter 
 Procne and her sister fled together, and Tereus seized 
 an axe and followed after them. They were overtaken 
 at Daulia in Phocis, and prayed to the gods that they 
 might be turned into birds. So Proene became the 
 nightingale, and Philomela the swallow, while Tereus 
 was changed into a hoopoe.”? Pausanias has a different 
 legend ; Proene and Philomela died of excessive grief, 
 
 1 Odyssey, xix. 528. 
 
 2A Red Indian nightingale-myth is alluded to by J. G, Miiller, Amerik. 
 
 Urrel., p. 175. Some one was turned into a nightingale by the sun, and stil] 
 wails for a lost lover, 
 
RED ROBIN MYTH. 1438 
 
 These ancient men and women metamorphosed into 
 birds were honoured as ancestors by the Athenians. 
 Thus the unceasing musical wail of the nightingale 
 and the shrill ery of the swallow were explained by 
 a Greek story. The birds were lamenting their old 
 human sorrow, as the honey-bird in Africa still repeats 
 the name of her lost son. 
 
 Why does the red-robin live near the dwellings of 
 men, a bold and friendly bird? The Chippeway 
 Indians say he was once a young brave whose father 
 set him a task too cruel for his strength, and made 
 him starve too long when he reached man’s estate. 
 He turned into a robin, and said to his father, “I 
 shall always be the friend of man, and keep near their 
 dwellings. I could not gratify your pride as a warrior, 
 but I will cheer you by my songs.”? The converse of 
 this legend is the Greek myth of the hawk. Why is 
 the hawk so hated by birds? Hierax was a benevolent 
 person who succoured a race hated by Poseidon. The 
 god therefore changed him into a hawk, and made 
 him as much detested by birds, and as fatal to them, 
 as he had been beloved by and gentle to men. The 
 Hervey Islanders explain the peculiarities of several 
 fishes by the share they took in the adventures of Ina, 
 who stamped, for example, on the sole, and so flattened 
 him for ever.* In Greece the dolphins were, accord- 
 ing to the Homeric hymn to Dionysus, metamorphosed 
 pirates who had insulted the god. But because the 
 
 1 Pausanias, i. v. Pausanias thinks such things no longer oceur, 
 2Schooleraft, ii. 229, 230. 
 
 Boo, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis, 
 
 #Gill, South Sea Myths, pp. 88-95, 
 
144 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 dolphin found the hidden sea-goddess whom Poseidon 
 loved, the dolphin, too, was raised by the grateful sea- 
 god to the stars! The vulture and the heron, according 
 to Boeo (said to have been a priestess in Delphi and 
 the author of a Greek treatise on the traditions about 
 birds), were once a man named Aigupios (vulture) and 
 his mother, Boulis. They sinned inadvertently, like 
 (Edipus and Jocasta; wherefore Boulis, becoming 
 aware of the guilt, was about to put out the eyes of 
 her son and slay herself. Then they were changed, 
 Boulis into the heron, “‘ which tears out and feeds on 
 the eyes of snakes, birds and fishes, and Aigupios 
 into the vulture which bears his name”. This story, 
 of which the more repulsive details are suppressed, is 
 much less pleasing and more savage than the Hervey 
 Islanders’ myth of the origin of pigs. Maaru was an 
 old blind man who lived with his son Kationgia. 
 There came a year of famine, and Kationgia had great 
 dithculty in finding food for himself and his father. 
 He gave the blind old man puddings of banana roots 
 and fishes, while he lived himself on sea-slugs and shell- 
 fish, like the people of Terra del Fuego. But blind 
 old Maaru suspected his son of giving him the worst 
 share and keeping what was best for himself. At last 
 he discovered that Kationgia was really being starved ; 
 he felt his body, and found that he was a mere living 
 skeleton. The two wept together, and the father 
 made a feast of some cocoa-nuts and bread-fruit, which 
 he had reserved against the last extremity. When all 
 was finished, he said he had eaten his last meal and 
 was about to die. He ordered his son to cover him 
 1 Artemidorus in his Love Hlegies, quoted by the Pseud-Eratosthenes, 
 
- METAMORPHOSES. 145 
 
 with leaves and grass, and return to the spot in four 
 days. If worms were crawling about, he was to 
 throw leaves and grass over them and come back 
 four days later. Kationgia did as he was instructed, 
 and, on his second visit to the grave, found the whole 
 mass of leaves in commotion. A brood of pigs, black, 
 white and speckled, had sprung up from the soil ; 
 famine was a thing of the past, and Kationgia became 
 a great chief in the island.! 
 
 ‘The owl was a baker’s daughter ” is the fragment 
 of Christian mythology preserved by Ophelia. The 
 baker’s daughter behaved rudely to our Lord, and was 
 changed into the bird that looks not on the sun. The 
 Greeks had a similar legend of feminine impiety by 
 which they mythically explained the origin of the 
 owl, the bat and the eagle-owl. Minyas of Orcho- 
 menos had three daughters, Leucippe, Arsippe and 
 Alcathoe, most industrious women, who declined to 
 join the wild mysteries of Dionysus. The god took 
 the shape of a maiden, and tried to win them to his 
 worship. They refused, and he assumed the form of 
 a bull, a lion, and a leopard as easily as the chiefs of 
 the Abipones become tigers, or as the chiefs among 
 the African Barotse and Balonda metamorphose them- 
 selves into lions and alligators.2 The daughters of 
 Minyas, in alarm, drew lots to determine which of 
 them should sacrifice a victim to the god. Leucippe 
 drew the lot and offered up her own son. They then 
 rushed to join the sacred rites of Dionysus, when 
 Hermes transformed them into the bat, the owl and the 
 
 1Gill, Myths and Songs from South Pacific, pp. 135-138, 
 * Livingstone, Missionary Travels, pp. 615, 642, 
 WO. I. 10 
 
146 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 eagle-owl, and these three hide from the light of the 
 sun.! 
 
 A few examples of Bushman and Australian myths 
 explanatory of the colours and habits of animals 
 will probably suffice to establish the resemblance be- 
 tween savage and Hellenic legends of this character. 
 The Bushman myth about the origin of the eland (a 
 large antelope) is not printed in full by Dr. Bleek, but 
 he observes that it “gives an account of the reasons 
 for the colours of the gemsbok, hartebeest, eland, 
 quagga and springbok”’.? Speculative Bushmen seem 
 to have been puzzled to account for the wildness of 
 the eland, It would be much more convenient if the 
 eland were tame and could be easily captured. They 
 explain its wildness by saying that the eland was 
 “spoiled” before Cagn, the creator, or rather maker 
 of most things, had quite finished it. Oagn’s 
 relations came and hunted the first eland too soon, 
 after which all other elands grew wild. Cagn then 
 said, “Go and hunt them and try to kill one; that 
 is now your work, for it was you who spoilt them i 
 The Bushmen have another myth explanatory of the 
 white patches on the breasts of crows in their country. 
 Some men tarried long at their hunting, and their 
 wives sent out crows in search of their husbands. 
 Round each crow’s neck was hung a piece of fat to 
 serve as food on the journey. Hence the crows have 
 white patches on breast and neck. 
 
 In Australia the origins of nearly all animals appear 
 
 1 Nicander, quoted by Antoninus Liberalis. 
 2 Brief Account of Bushmen Folk-Lore, p. 7. 
 8 Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874. 
 
AUSTRALIAN MY'THs. 147 
 
 to be explained in myths, of which a fair collection 
 is printed in Mr. Brough Symth’s Aborigines of 
 Victoria.’ Still better examples occur in Mrs. Langloh 
 Parker's Australian Legends. Why is the crane 
 so thin? Once he was a man named Kar-ween, the 
 second man fashioned out of clay by Pund-jel, a 
 singular creative being, whose chequered career is 
 traced elsewhere in our chapter on “Savage Myths 
 of the Origin of the World and of Man”. Kar-ween 
 and Pund-jel had a quarrel about the wives of the 
 former, whom Pund-jel was inclined to admire. The 
 crafty Kar-ween gave a dance Gugargiull, corobboree), 
 at which the creator Pund-jel was disporting himself 
 gaily (like the Great Panjandrum), when Kar-ween 
 pinned him with a spear. Pund-jel threw another 
 which took Kar-ween in the knee-joint, so that he 
 could not walk, but soon pined away and became a 
 mere skeleton. “Thereupon Pund-jel made Kar-ween 
 @ crane,” and that is why the crane has such attenuated 
 legs. The Kortume, Munkari and Waingilhe, now 
 birds, were once men. The two latter behaved un- 
 kindly to their friend Kortume, who shot them out of 
 his hut in a storm of rain, singing at the same time 
 an incantation. The three then turned into birds, and 
 when the Kortume sings it is a token that rain may 
 be expected, 
 
 Let us now compare with these Australian myths 
 of the origin of certain species of birds the Greek story 
 of the origin of frogs, as told by Menecrates and 
 Nicander.2. The frogs were herdsmen metamorphosed 
 by Leto, the mother of Apollo. But, by way of 
 
 Vol. i. p. 426 et seq. , ? Antoninus Liberalis, xxv, 
 
148 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 showing how closely akin are the fancies of Greeks 
 and Australian black fellows, we shall tell the legend 
 without the proper names, which gave it a fictitious 
 dignity. 
 
 THE ORIGIN OF FROGS. 
 
 «© A woman bore two children, and sought for a 
 water-spring wherein to bathe them. She found a 
 well, but herdsmen drove her away from it that their 
 cattle might drink. Then some wolves met her and 
 led her to a river, of which she drank, and in its waters 
 she bathed her children. Then she went back to the 
 well where the herdsmen were now bathing, and she 
 turned them all into frogs. She struck their backs 
 and shoulders with a rough stone’ and drove them 
 ‘nto the waters, and ever since that day frogs live 
 in marshes and beside rivers.” 
 
 A volume might be filled with such examples of the 
 kindred fancies of Greeks and savages. Enough has 
 probably been said to illustrate our point, which is 
 that Greek myths of this character were inherited 
 from the period of savagery, when ideas of metamor- 
 phosis and of the kinship of men and beasts were real 
 practical beliefs. Events conceived to be common in 
 real life were introduced into myths, and these myths ~ 
 were savage science, and were intended to account for 
 the Origin of Species. But when once this train of 
 imagination has been fired, it burns on both in litera- _ 
 ture and in the legends of the peasantry. Every one 
 who writes a Christmas tale for children now employs 
 the machinery of metamorphosis, and in European — 
 folk-lore, as Fontenelle remarked, stories persist which : 
 
VEDIC BEAST MYTHS. 149 
 
 are precisely similar in kind to the minor myths of 
 savages. 
 
 Reasoning in this wise, the Mundas of Bengal thus 
 account for peculiarities of certain animals. Sing 
 Bonga, the chief god, cast certain people out of heaven ; 
 they fell to earth, found iron ore, and began smelting 
 it. The black smoke displeased Sing Bonga, who sent 
 two king crows and an owl to bid people cease to 
 pollute the atmosphere. But the iron smelters spoiled 
 these birds’ tails, and blackened the previously white 
 crow, scorched its beak red, and flattened its head. 
 Sing Bonga burned man, and turned woman into hills 
 and waterspouts.? 
 
 Examples of this class of myth in Indo-Aryan 
 literature are not hard to find. Why is dawn red ? 
 Why are donkeys slow? Why have mules no young 
 ones? Mules have no foals because they were severely 
 burned when Agni (fire) drove them in a chariot race. 
 Dawn is red, not because (as in Australia) she wears a 
 red kangaroo cloak, but because she competed in this 
 race with red cows for her coursers. Donkeys are 
 slow because they never recovered from their exertions 
 in the same race, when the Asvins called on their asses 
 and landed themselves the winners.? And cows are 
 accommodated with horns for a reason no less probable 
 and satisfactory.® 
 
 Though in the legends of the less developed peoples 
 men and women are more frequently metamorphosed 
 into birds and beasts than into stones and plants, yet 
 such changes of form are by no means unknown. ‘To 
 the north-east of Western Point there lies a range of 
 
 ‘Dalton, pp. 186, 187, 2 Aitareya Brahmana, ii, 272, iv. 9. iy. 17 
 
150 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 hills, inhabited, according to the natives of Victoria, 
 by a creature whose body is made of stone, and 
 weapons make no wound in so sturdy a constitution. 
 The blacks refuse to visit the range haunted by the 
 mythic stone beast. ‘‘ Some black fellows were once 
 camped at the lakes near Shaving Point. They were 
 cooking their fish when a native dog came up. They 
 did not give him anything to eat. He became cross 
 and said, ‘ You black fellows have lots of fish, but you 
 give me none’. So he changed them all into a big 
 rock. This is quite true, for the big rock is there to 
 this day, and I have seen it with my own eyes.” * 
 Another native, Toolabar, says that the women of the 
 fishing party cried out yacka torn, “very good”. A 
 dog replied yacka torn, and they were all changed into 
 rocks. This very man, Toolabar, once heard a dog 
 begin to talk, whereupon he and his father fled. Had 
 they waited they would have become stones. “‘ We 
 should have been like it, wallung,” that is, stones. 
 
 Among the North American Indians any stone 
 which has a resemblance to the human or animal figure 
 is explained as an example of metamorphosis. Three 
 stones among the Aricaras were a girl, her lover and 
 her dog, who fied from home because the course of 
 true love did not run smooth, and who were petrified. 
 Certain stones near Chinook Point were sea-giants 
 who swallowed a man. His brother, by aid of fire, 
 dried up the bay and released the man, still alive, 
 from the body of the giant. Then the giants were 
 turned into rocks. The rising sun in Popol Vuh (if 
 
 1 Native narrator, ap. Brough Smyth, i. 479. 
 2See authorities ap. Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, pp. 180-138. 
 
NIOBE. 151 
 
 the evidence of Popol Vwh, the Quichua sacred book, 
 is to be accepted) changed into stone the lion, serpent 
 and tiger gods. The Standing Rock on the Upper 
 Missouri is adored by the Indians, and decorated with 
 coloured ribbons and skins of animals. This stone was 
 a woman, who, like Niobe, became literally petrified 
 with grief when her husband took a second wife. 
 Another stone-woman in a cave on the banks of the 
 Kickapoo was wont to kill people who came near her, 
 and is even now approached with great respect. The 
 Oneidas and Dacotahs claim descent from stones to 
 which they ascribe animation! Montesinos speaks of 
 a sacred stone which was removed from a mountain by 
 one of the Incas, A parrot flew out of it and lodged 
 in another stone, which the natives still worship? The 
 Breton myth about one of the great stone circles (the 
 stones were peasants who danced on a Sunday) is a 
 well-known example of this kind of myth surviving 
 in folk-lore. There is a kind of stone Acteon# near 
 Little Muniton Creek, ‘‘resembling the bust of a man 
 whose head is decorated with the horns of astag”.t A 
 crowd of myths of metamorphosis into stone will be 
 
 found among the Iroquois legends in Report of Bureaw 
 
 of Ethnology, 1880-81. If men may become stones, 
 
 1Dorman, p. 133. 
 
 *Many examples are collected by J. G. Miiller, Amerikanischen Ur- 
 religionen, pp. 97, 110, 125, especially when the stones have a likeness to 
 human form, p. 17a. ‘‘Im der That werden auch einige in Steine, oder in 
 Thiere and Pflanzen verwandelt.” Gf. p. 220. Instances (from Balboa) of 
 men turned into stone by wizards, p. 309. 
 
 * Preller thinks that Acton, devoured by his hounds after being changed 
 into a stag, is a symbol of the vernal year. Palephatus (De Fab. Narrat.) 
 holds that the story is a moral fable, 
 
 *Dorman, p. 187. 
 
152 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION, 
 
 on the other hand, in Samoa (as in the Greek myth of 
 Deucalion), stones may become men.! Gods, too, 
 especially when these gods happen to be cuttlefish, 
 might be petrified. They were chased in Samoa by 
 an Upolu hero, who caught them in a great net and 
 killed them. ‘‘They were changed into stones, and 
 now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the 
 north side of Upolu.”? Mauke, the first man, came 
 out of a stone. In short,? men and stones and beasts 
 and gods and thunder have interchangeable forms. 
 In Mangaia‘ the god Ra was tossed up into the sky 
 by Maui and became pumice-stone. Many samples 
 of this petrified deity are found in Mangaia. In 
 Melanesia matters are so mixed that it is not easy 
 to decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of 
 a dead man’s soul or is of spiritual merit in itself, or 
 whether “the stone is the spirit’s outward part or 
 organ”. The Vui, or spirit, has much the same rela- 
 tions with snakes, owls and sharks.’ Qasavara, the 
 mythical opponent of Qat, the Melanesian Prometheus, 
 ‘fell dead from heaven” (like Ra in Mangia), and 
 was turned into a stone, on which sacrifices are made 
 by those who desire strength in fighting. 
 
 Without delaying longer among savage myths of 
 metamorphosis into stones, it may be briefly shown 
 that the Greeks retained this with all the other 
 vagaries of early fancy. Every one remembers the 
 use which Perseus made of the Gorgon’s head, and 
 the stones on the coast of Seriphus, which, like the 
 
 1Turner’s Samoa, p. 299. 2 Samoa, p. 31. 3 Op. cit., p, 34. 
 4Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 60. 
 ® Codrington, Journ, An throp. Inst., February, 1881, 
 
¥ are: 
 
 re - 
 _ 
 
 STONE MYTHS. 153 
 
 stones near Western Point in Victoria, had once been 
 men, the enemies of the hero. ‘‘ Also he slew the 
 Gorgon,” sings Pindar, ‘“‘and bare home her head, 
 with serpent tresses decked, to the island folk a stony 
 death.” Observe Pindar’s explanatory remark : “I ween’ 
 there is no marvel impossible if gods have wrought 
 thereto”. In the same pious spirit a Turk in an isle 
 of the Levant once told Mr. Newton a story of how a 
 man hunted a stag, and the stag spoke to him. ‘‘ The 
 stag spoke?” said Mr. Newton. ‘‘ Yes, by Allah’s 
 will,” replied the Turk. Like Pindar, he was repeating 
 an incident quite natural to the minds of Australians, 
 or Bushmen, or Samoans, or Red Men, but, like the 
 religious Pindar, he felt that the affair was rather 
 marvellous, and accounted for it by the exercise of 
 omnipotent power. The Greek example of Niobe 
 and her children may best be quoted in Mr. Bridges’ 
 translation from the Iliad :— 
 
 And somewhere now, among lone mountain rocks 
 
 On Sipylus, where couch the nymphs at night 
 
 Who dance all day by Achelous’ stream, 
 
 The once proud mother lies, herself a rock, 
 
 And in cold breast broods o’er the goddess’ wrong. 
 —Prometheus the Fire-bringer.” 
 
 In the Jliad it is added that Cronion made the people 
 into stones. The attitude of the later Greek mind 
 towards these myths may be observed in a fragment 
 of Philemon, the comic poet. ‘‘ Never, by the gods, 
 have I believed, nor will believe, that Niobe the stone 
 was once a woman. Nay, by reason of her calamities 
 she became speechless, and so, from her silence, was 
 called a stone.” ® 
 
 1 Pindar, Pyth. x., Myers’s translation. 2xxiv, 611, 
 ? The Scholiast on /liad, xxiv. 6, 7. 
 
154 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 There is another famous petrification in the Jliad. 
 When the prodigy of the snake and the sparrows had 
 appeared to the assembled Achewans at Aulis, Zeus 
 displayed a great marvel, and changed into a stone the 
 serpent which swallowed the young of the sparrow. 
 Changes into stone, though less common than changes 
 into fishes, birds and beasts, were thus obviously not 
 too strange for the credulity of Greek mythology, 
 
 which could also believe that a stone became the 
 
 mother of Agdestis by Zeus. 
 
 As to interchange of shape between men ania women 
 and plants, our information, so far as the lower races 
 are concerned, is less copious. It has already been 
 shown that the totems of many stocks in all parts of 
 the world are plants, and this belief in connection with 
 a plant by itself demonstrates that the confused belief 
 in all things being on one level has thus introduced 
 vegetables into the dominion of myth. As far as 
 possessing souls is concerned, Mr. Tylor has proved 
 
 that plants are as well equipped as men or beasts or. 
 
 minerals. In India the doctrine of transmigration 
 “widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or 
 smaller plants being animated by human souls”. In 
 the well-known ancient Egyptian story of ‘‘ The Two 
 Brothers,” * the life of the younger is practically 
 merged in that of the acacia tree where he has hidden 
 his heart ; and when he becomes a bull and is sacri- 
 ficed, his spiritual part passes into a pair of Persea 
 trees. The Yarucaris of Bolivia say that a girl 
 
 1 Primitive Culture, i, 145; examples of Society Islanders, Dyaks, 
 Karens, Buddhists. 
 * Maspero, Contes Lgyptiens, p. 25, 
 
PLANT MYTHS. 155 
 
 once bewailed in the forest her loverless estate. She 
 happened to notice a beautiful tree, which she adorned 
 with ornaments as well as she might. The tree as- 
 sumed the shape of a handsome young man— 
 She did not find him so remiss, 
 But, lightly issuing through, 
 He did repay her kiss for kiss, 
 With usury thereto.! 
 J. G. Miller, who quotes this tale from Andrée, says 
 it has ‘‘many analogies with the tales of metamor- 
 phosis of human beings into trees among the ancients, 
 as reported by Ovid”. The worship of plants and 
 trees is a well-known feature in religion, and probably 
 implies (at least in many cases) a recognition of 
 personality. In Samoa, metamorphosis into vegetables 
 is not uncommon. For example, the king of Fiji was 
 a cannibal, and (very naturally) ‘‘the people were 
 melting away under him”. The brothers Toa and 
 Pale, wishing to escape the royal oven, adopted various 
 changes of shape. They knew that straight timber 
 was being sought for to make a canoe for the king, 
 so Pale, when he assumed a vegetable form, became 
 a crooked stick overgrown with creepers, but Toa 
 
 “preferred standing erect as a handsome straight 
 
 tree’. Poor Toa was therefore cut down by the 
 king’s shipwrights, though, thanks to his brother’s 
 magic wiles, they did not make a canoe out of him 
 after all? In Samoa the trees are so far human 
 that they not only go to war with each other, but 
 actually embark in canoes to seek out distant enemies. 
 
 1J. G. Miiller, Amerik. Urrel., p. 264. 
 2Turner’s Samoa, p. 219, 3 [bid., p. 213, 
 
156 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 The Ottawa Indians account for the origin of maize 
 by a myth in which a wizard fought with and con- 
 quered a little man who had a little crown of feathers. 
 From his ashes arose the maize with its crown of 
 leaves and heavy ears of.corn.! 
 
 In Mangaia the myth of the origin of the cocoa-nut 
 tree is a series of transformation scenes, in which the 
 persons shift shapes with the alacrity of medicine- 
 
 men. Ina used to bathe in a pool where an eel: 
 
 became quite familiar with her. At last the fish 
 took courage and made his declaration. He was Tuna, 
 the chief of all eels. “Be mine,’ he eried, and Ina 
 was his. For some mystical reason he was obliged to 
 leave her, but (like the White Cat in the fairy tale) 
 he requested her to cut off his eel’s head and bury it. 
 Regretfully but firmly did Ina comply with his re- 
 quest, and from the buried eel’s head sprang two 
 cocoa trees, one from each half of the brain of Tuna. 
 As a proof of this be it remarked, that when the nut 
 is husked we always find on it “the two eyes and 
 mouth of the lover of Ina”.? All over the world, 
 from ancient Egypt to the wigwams of the Algonkins, 
 plants and other matters are said to have sprung from 
 a dismembered god or hero, while men are said to 
 have sprung from plants.* We may therefore perhaps 
 look on it as a proved point that the general savage 
 habit of “levelling up”’ prevails even in their view of 
 the vegetable world, and has left traces (as we have 
 seen) in their myths. 
 
 Turning now to the mythology of Greece, we see 
 
 1 Amerik. Urrel., p. 60. 2Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 79. 
 3 Myths of the Beginning of Things. 
 
 = 
 
ORIGINAL MENTAL STATE. 157 
 
 that the same rule holds good. Metamorphosis into 
 plants and flowers is extremely common ; the instances 
 of Daphne,. Myrrha, Hyacinth, Narcissus and the 
 sisters of Pheethon at once occur to the memory. 
 Most of those myths in which everything in Nature 
 becomes personal and human, while all persons may 
 become anything in Nature, we explain, then, as survi- 
 vals or imitations of tales conceived when men were in 
 the savage intellectual condition. In that stage, as we 
 demonstrated, no line is drawn between things animate 
 and inanimate, dumb or “ articulate speaking,” organic 
 or inorganic, personal or impersonal. Such a mental 
 stage, again, is reflected in the nature-myths, many of 
 which are merely “ ztiological,’—assign a cause, that 
 is, for phenomena, and satisfy an indolent and credulous 
 curiosity. 
 We may be asked again, “But how did this intel- 
 lectual condition come to exist?’’ To answer that 1s 
 no part of our business; for us it is enough to trace 
 myth, or a certain element in myth, to a demon- 
 strable and actual stage of thought. But this stage, 
 which is constantly found to survive in the minds of 
 children, is thus explained or described by Hume in 
 his Essay on Natural Religion: “There is an universal 
 tendency in mankind to conceive all beings like them- 
 selves, and to transfer to every object those qualities 
 _ of which they are intimately conscious”.’ Now 
 they believe themselves to be conscious of magical and - 
 supernatural powers, which they do not, of course, 
 possess. These powers of effecting metamorphosis, of 
 “shape-shifting,” of flying, of becoming invisible at 
 1§ee Appendix B. 
 
158 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 will, of conversing with the dead, of miraculously — 
 healing the sick, savages pass on to their gods (as will — 
 be shown in a later chapter), and the gods of myth © 
 survive and retain the miraculous gifts after their | 
 worshippers (become more reasonable) have quite — 
 forgotten that they themselves once claimed similar 
 endowments. So far, then, it has been shown that 
 savage fancy, wherever studied, is wild; that savage 
 curiosity is keen ; that savage credulity is practically 
 boundless. These considerations explain the existence 
 of. savage myths of sun, stars, beasts, plants and 
 stones; similar myths fill Greek legend and the 
 Sanskrit Brahmanes. We conclude that, in Greek 
 and Sanskrit, the myths are relies (whether borrowed 
 or inherited) of the savage mental status, 
 
159 
 
 CHAPTER. VI. 
 
 NON-ARYAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE 
 WORLD AND OF MAN. 
 
 Confusions of myth—Various origins of man and of things—Myths of 
 Australia, Andaman Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus, 
 Hurons, Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldeans, Thlin- 
 keets, Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians—Similarity of ideas 
 pervading all those peoples in various conditions of society and culture. 
 
 THE difficulties of classification which beset the study 
 of mythology have already been described. Nowhere 
 are they more perplexing than when we try to classify 
 what may be styled Cosmogonic Myths. The very 
 word cosmogonic implies the pre-existence of the 
 idea of a cosmos, an orderly universe, and this was 
 exactly the last idea that could enter the mind of the 
 myth-makers. There is no such thing as orderliness 
 in their mythical conceptions, and no such thing as 
 an universe. ‘The natural question, ‘‘ Who made the 
 world, or how did the things in the world come to 
 be?” is the question which is answered by cosmogonic 
 myths. Butitis answered piecemeal. Toa Christian 
 child the reply is given, ‘‘God made all things”. We 
 have known this reply discussed by some little girls 
 of six (a Scotch minister's daughters, and naturally 
 metaphysical), one of whom solved all difficulties by 
 the impromptu myth, ‘God first made a little place 
 
160 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 to stand on, and then he made the rest”. But savages 
 and the myth-makers, whose stories survive into the 
 civilised religions, could adhere firmly to no such 
 account as this. Here occurs in the first edition of this 
 book the following passage : ‘‘ They (savages) have not, 
 and had not, the conception of God as we understand 
 what we mean by the word. They have, and had at 
 most, only the small-change of the idea ‘‘ God,”—here 
 the belief in a moral being who watches conduct ; here 
 again the hypothesis of a pre-human race of magnified, 
 non-natural medicine-men, or of extra-natural beings 
 with human and magical attributes, but often wearing 
 the fur, and fins, and feathers of the lower animals. 
 Mingled with these faiths (whether earlier, later, or 
 
 coeval in origin with these) are the dread and love of 
 
 ancestral ghosts, often transmuting themselves into 
 worship of an imaginary and ideal first parent of the 
 tribe, who once more is often a beast or a bird. Here 
 is nothing like the notion of an omnipotent, invisible, 
 spiritual being, the creator of our religion; here is 
 only la monnme of the conception.” 
 
 It ought to have occurred to the author that he was 
 here traversing the main theory of his own book, 
 which is that religion is one thing, myth quite 
 another thing. That many low races of savages en- 
 tertain, in hours of religious thought, an elevated 
 conception of a moral and undying Maker of Things, 
 and Master of Life, a Father in Heaven, has already 
 been stated, and knowledge of the facts has been 
 considerably increased since this work first appeared 
 (1887). But the mythical conceptions described 
 in the last paragraph coexist with the religious 
 
COSMOGONIC MYTHS. 161 
 
 conception in the faiths of very low savages, such as 
 the Australians and Andamanese, just as the same 
 contradictory coexistence is notorious in ancient 
 Greece, India, Egypt and Anahuac. In a sense, 
 certain low savages have the ‘conception of God, 
 as we understand what we mean by the word ” 
 But that sense, when savages come to spinning 
 fables about origins, is apt to be overlaid and per- 
 plexed by the frivolity of their mythical fancy. 
 
 With such shifting, grotesque and inadequate fables, 
 the cosmogonic myths of the world are necessarily 
 bewildered and perplexed. We have already seen in 
 the chapter on “ Nature Myths” that many things, 
 gun, moon, the stars, ‘‘ that have another birth,” and 
 various animals and plants, are accounted for on the 
 hypothesis that they are later than the appearance of 
 man—that they originally were men. To the European 
 mind it seems natural to rank myths of the gods before 
 myths of the making or the evolution of the world, 
 because our religion, like that of the more philosophic 
 Greeks, makes the deity the fount of all existences, 
 causa causans, “ what unmoved moves,” the beginning 
 and the end. But the myth-makers, deserting any 
 such ideas they may possess, find it necessary, 
 like the child of whom we spoke, to postulate a place 
 for the divine energy to work from, and that place is 
 the earth or the heavens. Then, again, heaven and 
 earth are themselves often regarded in the usual 
 mythical way, as animated, as persons with parts and 
 passions, and finally, among advancing races, as gods, 
 Into this medley of incongruous and inconsistent con- 
 ceptions we must introduce what order we may, always 
 
 cot. 1. 11 
 
162 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 remembering that the order is not native to the subject, 
 but is brought in for the purpose of study. 
 
 The origin of the world and of man is naturally a 
 problem which has excited the curiosity of the least 
 developed minds. Every savage race has its own 
 myths on this subject, most of them bearing the marks 
 of the childish and crude imagination, whose character 
 we have investigated, and all varying in amount of 
 what may be called philosophical thought. 
 
 All the cosmogonic myths, as distinct from religious 
 belief in a Creator, waver between the theory of 
 construction, or rather of reconstruction, and the theory 
 of evolution, very rudely conceived. ‘The earth, as a 
 rule, is mythically averred to have grown out of some 
 original matter, perhaps an animal, perhaps an egg 
 which floated on the waters, perhaps a handful of mud 
 from below the waters. But this conception does not 
 exclude the idea that many of the things in the world, 
 minerals, plants and what not, are fragments of the 
 frame of a semi-supernatural and gigantic being, 
 human or bestial, belonging to a race which preceded’ 
 the advent of man.! Such were the Titans, demi-gods, 
 Nurrumbunguttias in Australia. Various members of 
 this race are found active in myths of the creation, 
 or rather the construction, of man and of the world. 
 Among the lowest races it is to be noted that mythical — 
 animals of supernatural power often take the place of — 
 beings like the Finnish Wainamoinen, the Greek 
 Prometheus, the Zulu Unkulunkulu, the Red Indian 
 Manabozho, himself usually a great hare. 
 
 The ages before the development or creation of man 
 
 1 Macrobius, Saturnad., i. xx. 
 : 
 
sad 
 
 THE FIRST MAN. 163 
 
 are filled up, in the myths, with the loves and wars of 
 supernatural people. The appearance of man is ex- 
 plained in three or four contradictory ways, each of 
 which is represented in the various myths of most 
 mythologies. Often man is fashioned out of clay, 
 or stone, or other materials, by a Maker of all things, 
 sometimes half-human or bestial, but also halt- 
 divine. Sometimes the first man rises out of the 
 earth, and is himself confused with the Creator, a 
 theory perhaps illustrated by the Zulu myth of Un- 
 kulunkulu, ‘The Old, Old One”. Sometimes man 
 arrives ready made, with most of the animals, from 
 his former home in a hole in the ground, and he 
 furnishes the world for himself with stars, sun, moon 
 and everything else he needs. Again, there are many 
 myths which declare that man was evolved out of one 
 or other of the lower animals. This myth is usually 
 employed by tribesmen to explain the origin of their 
 own peculiar stock of kindred, Once more, man is 
 taken to be the fruit of some tree or plant, or not to 
 have emerged ready-made, but to have grown out of 
 the ground like a plant or a tree. In some countries, 
 as among the Bechuanas, the Boeotians, and the Peru- 
 vians, the spot where men first came out on earth is 
 known to be some neighbouring marsh or cave. Lastly, 
 man is occasionally represented as having been framed 
 out of a piece of the body of the Creator, or made by 
 some demiurgic potter out of clay. All these legends 
 are told by savages, with no sense of their inconsistency. 
 There is no single orthodoxy on the matter, and we 
 Shall see that all these theories coexist pell-mell 
 among the mythological traditions of civilised races, 
 
164 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 In almost every mythology, too, the whole theory of 
 the origin of man is crossed by the tradition of a 
 Deluge, or some other great destruction, followed by 
 revival or reconstruction of the species, a tale by no 
 means necessarily of Biblical origin. 
 
 In examining savage myths of the origin of man 
 and of the world, we shall begin by considering those 
 current among the most backward peoples, where no 
 hereditary or endowed priesthood has elaborated and 
 improved the popular beliefs. The natives of Aus- 
 tralia furnish us with myths of a purely popular type, 
 the property, not of professional priests and poets, but 
 of all the old men and full-grown warriors of the 
 country. Here, as everywhere else, the student must 
 be on his guard against accepting myths which are 
 disguised forms of missionary teaching.! 
 
 In Southern Australia we learn that the Boon- 
 oorong, an Australian coast tribe, ascribe the creation 
 of things to a being named Bun-jel or Pund-jel. He 
 figures as the chief of an earlier supernatural class of 
 existence, with human relationships ; thus he “has a 
 wife, whose face he has never seen,” brothers, a son, 
 and so on. Now this name Bun-jel means “eagle- 
 hawk,” and the eagle-hawk is a totem among certain 
 stocks. Thus, when we hear that Eagle-hawk is the 
 maker of men and things we are reminded of the 
 Bushman creator, Cagn, who now receives prayers of 
 considerable beauty and pathos, but who is (in some 
 
 1Taplin, The Narrinyeri. ‘He must also beware of supposing that 
 the Australians believe in a creator in our sense, because the Narrinyeri, 
 for example, say that Nurundere ‘made everything’. Nurundere is but 
 an idealised wizard and hunter, with a rival of his species.” This occurs in 
 the first edition, but ‘‘ making all things ’’ is one idea, wizardry is another. 
 
AUSTRALIAN COSMOGONY. 165 
 
 theories) identified with kaggen, the mantis insect, a 
 creative grasshopper, and the chief figure in Bushman 
 mythology! Bun-jel or Pund-jel also figures in Aus- 
 tralian belief, neither as the creator nor as the eagle- 
 hawk, but “as an old man who lives at the sources of 
 the Yarra river, where he possesses great multitudes 
 of cattle”.2 The term Bun-jel is also used, much like 
 our “ Mr.,” to denote the older men of the Kurnai and 
 Briakolung, some of whom have magical powers. One 
 of them, Krawra,or “ West Wind,” can cause the wind to 
 blow so violently as to prevent the natives from climb- 
 ing trees; this man has semi-divine attributes. From 
 these facts it appears that this Australian creator, in 
 myth, partakes of the character of the totem or worship- 
 ful beast, and of that of the wizard or medicine-man. 
 He carried a large knife, and, when he made the earth, 
 he went up and down slicing it into creeks and valleys. 
 The aborigines of the northern parts of Victoria seem 
 to believe in Pund-jel in what may perhaps be his 
 most primitive mythical shape, that of an eagle.* This 
 eagle and a crow created everything, and separated 
 the Murray blacks into their two main divisions, which 
 derive their names from the crow and the eagle. The 
 Melbourne blacks seem to make Pund-jel more anthro- 
 pomorphic. Men are his rAdcpata wydod, figures 
 kneaded of clay, as Aristophanes says in the Birds. 
 Pund-jel made two clay images of men, and danced 
 round them. ‘He made their hair—one had straight, 
 
 1Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Mythology, p. 6; Cape Monthly 
 Magazine, July, 1874, pp. 1-18; Kamilaroi and Kurnat, pp. 210, 324. 
 
 2 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 210. 
 
 ’ Brough Smyth, Natives of Victoria, vol. i. p. 423, 
 
166 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 one curly hair—of bark. He danced round them. 
 He lay on them, and breathed his breath into their 
 mouths, noses and navels, and danced round them. 
 Then they arose full-grown young men.” Some blacks 
 seeing a brickmaker at work on a bridge over the 
 Yarra exclaimed, “Like ’em that Pund-jel make ’em 
 Koolin”. But other blacks prefer to believe that, as 
 Pindar puts the Phrygian legend, the sun saw men 
 growing like trees. 
 
 The first man was formed out of the gum of a wattle- 
 tree, and came out of the knot of a wattle-tree. He 
 then entered into a young woman (though he was the 
 first man) and was born. The Encounter Bay people 
 have another myth, which might have been attributed 
 by Dean Swift to the Yahoos, so foul an origin does 
 it allot to mankind. 
 
 Australian myths of creation are by no means ex- 
 clusive of a hypothesis of evolution. Thus the Dieyrie, 
 whose notions Mr. Gason has recorded, hold a very 
 mixed view. They aver that “the good spirit” Moora- 
 Moora made a number of small black lizards, liked 
 them, and promised them dominion. He divided their 
 feet into toes and fingers, gave them noses and lips, 
 and set them upright. Down they fell, and Moora- 
 Moora cut off their tails. Then they walked erect and 
 were men.? The conclusion of the adventures of one 
 Australian creator is melancholy. He has ceased to 
 dwell among mortals whom he watches and inspires. 
 The Jay possessed many bags full of wind; he 
 opened them, and Pund-jel was carried up by the blast 
 
 1Meyer, Aborigines of Encounter Bay. See, later, ‘‘Gods of the 
 Lowest Races”. 
 2Gason’s Dteyries, ap. Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 20. 
 
ANDAMAN MYTHS. 167 
 
 into the heavens. But this event did not occur before 
 Pund-jel had taught men and women the essential arts 
 of life. He had shown the former how to spear 
 kangaroos, he still exists and inspires poets. From the 
 cosmogonic myths of Australia (the character of some 
 of which is in contradiction with the higher religious 
 belief of the people to be later described) we may turn, 
 without reaching a race of much higher civilisation, to 
 the dwellers in the Andaman Islands and their opinions 
 about the origin of things. 
 
 The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are 
 remote from any shores, and are protected from 
 foreign influences by dangerous coral reefs, and by 
 the reputed ferocity and cannibalism of the natives. 
 These are Negritos, and are commonly spoken of as 
 most abject savages. They are not, however, without 
 distinctions of rank; they are clean, modest, moral 
 after marriage, and most strict in the observance of 
 prohibited degrees. Unlike the Australians, they use 
 bows and arrows, but are said to be incapable of 
 striking a light, and, at all events, find the process so 
 difficult that, like the Australians and the farmer in 
 the Odyssey,’ they are compelled ‘‘ to hoard the seeds 
 of fire”. Their mythology contains explanations of 
 the origin of men and animals, and of their own 
 customs and language. 
 
 The Andamanese, long spoken of as ‘‘ godless,’’ owe 
 much to Mr. Man, an English official, who has made 
 a most careful study of their beliefs.? So extraordinary 
 is the contradiction between the relative purity and 
 morality of the religion and the savagery of the 
 
 1 Odyssey, v. 490. 2Jowrn. Anthrop. Soc., vol. xii. p. 157 et seg. 
 
168 “MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 myths of the Andamanese, that, in the first edition 
 of this work, I insisted that the “‘ spiritual god ”’ of 
 the faith must have been ‘‘ borrowed from the same 
 quarter as the stone house ” in which he is mythically 
 said to live. But later and wider study, and fresh 
 information from various quarters, have convinced 
 me that the relative purity of Andamanese religion, 
 with its ethical sanction of conduct, may well be, and 
 probably is, a natural unborrowed development. It 
 is easy for myth to borrow the notion of a stone 
 house from our recent settlement at Port Blair. But 
 it would not be easy for religion to borrow many 
 new ideas from an alien creed, in a very few years, 
 while the noted ferocity of the islanders towards 
 strangers, and the inaccessibility of their abode, 
 makes earlier borrowing, on a large scale at least, 
 highly improbable. The Andamanese god, Puluga, 
 is “like fire” but invisible, unborn and immortal, 
 knowing and punishing or rewarding, men’s deeds, 
 even ‘the thoughts of their hearts”. But when 
 once mythical fancy plays round him, and stories are 
 told about him, he is credited with a wife who is an 
 eel or a shrimp, just as Zeus made love as an ant or a 
 cuckoo. Puluga was the maker of men ; no particular 
 myth as to how he made them is given. They tried 
 to kill him, after the deluge (of which a grotesque 
 myth is told), but he replied that he was “as hard as 
 wood’’. His legend is in the usual mythical contra- 
 diction with the higher elements in his religion. 
 Leaving the Andaman islanders, but still studying 
 races in the lowest degree of civilisation, we come to 
 the Bushmen of South Africa. This very curious and 
 
eee 
 
 BUSHMEN. 169 
 
 interesting people, far inferior in material equipment 
 to the Hottentots, is sometimes regarded as a branch 
 of that race! The Hottentots call themselves “ Khoi- 
 khoi,” the Bushmen they style “Sa”. The poor Sa 
 lead the life of pariahs, and are hated and chased by 
 all other natives of South Africa. They are hunters 
 and diggers for roots, while the Hottentots, perhaps 
 their kinsmen, are cattle-breeders.? Being so ill- 
 nourished, the Bushmen are very small, but sturdy. 
 They dwell in, or rather wander through, countries 
 which have been touched by some ancient civilisation, 
 as is proved by the mysterious mines and roads of 
 Mashonaland. It is singular that the Bushmen possess 
 a tradition according to which they could once ‘‘ make 
 stone things that flew over rivers’. They have 
 remarkable artistic powers, and their drawings of men 
 and animals on the walls of caves are often not inferior 
 to the designs on early Greek vases.’ 
 
 Thus we must regard the Bushmen as possibly 
 degenerated from a higher status, though there is 
 nothing (except perhaps the tradition about bridge- 
 making) to show that it was more exalted than that 
 of their more prosperous neighbours, the Hottentots. 
 The myths of the Bushmen, however, are almost on 
 the lowest known level. A very good and authentic 
 example of Bushman cosmogonic myth was given to 
 Mr. Orpen, chief magistrate of St. John’s territory, by 
 
 Qing, King Nqusha’s huntsman. Qing “had never 
 
 1 See “ Divine Myths of the Lower Races”. 
 
 2Hahu, Tsuni Goam, p. 4. See other accounts in Waitz, Anthropologie, 
 ii, 328. | 
 
 3 Oustom and Myth, where illustrations of Bushman art are given, pp 
 290-295. 
 
170 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 seen a white man, but in fighting,” till he became 
 acquainted with Mr. Orpen. The chief force in Bush- 
 men myth is by Dr. Bleek identified with the mantis, 
 a sort of large grasshopper. Though he seems at least 
 as “chimerical a beast” as the Aryan creative boar, the 
 “mighty big hare” of the Algonkins, the large spider 
 who made the world in the opinion of the Gold Coast. 
 people, or the eagle of the Australians, yet the insect (if in- 
 sect he be), like the others, has achieved moral qualities 
 and is addressed in prayer. In his religious aspect he is 
 nothing less than a grasshopper. He is called Cagn. 
 “Cagn made all things and we pray to him,” said Qing. 
 “Coti is the wife of Cagn.” Qing did not know where 
 they came from ; “ perhaps with the men who brought 
 thesun”. The fact is, Qing “did not dance that dance,” 
 that is, was not one of the Bushmen initiated into the 
 more esoteric mysteries of Cagn. Till we, too, are 
 initiated, we can know very little of Cagnin his religious 
 aspect. Among the Bushmen, as among the Greeks, 
 there is “no religious mystery without dancing”. Qing 
 was not very consistent. Hesaid Cagn gave orders and 
 caused all things to appear and to be made, sun, moon, 
 stars, wind, mountains, animals, and this, of course, is a 
 lofty theory of creation. Elsewhere myth avers that 
 Cagn did not so much create as manufacture the objects 
 in nature. In his early day “the snakes were also 
 men”. Cagn struck snakes with his staff and turned 
 them into men, as Zeus, in the Mginetan myth, did 
 with ants. He also turned offending men into baboons, 
 In Bushman myth, little as we really know of it, 
 we see the usual opposition of fable and faith, a 
 1Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874. 
 
OVAHEREROS. 171 
 
 kind creator in religion is apparently a magician in 
 myth. 
 
 Neighbours of the Bushmen, but more fortunate in 
 their wealth of sheep and cattle, are the Ovaherero. 
 The myths of the Ovaherero, a tribe dwelling in a part 
 of Hereraland ‘‘ which had not yet been under the 
 influence of civilisation and Christianity,” have been 
 studied by the Rev. H. Reiderbecke, missionary at 
 Otyozondyupa. The Ovaherero, he says, have a kind 
 of tree Ygdrasil, a tree out of which men are born, 
 and this plays a great part in their myth of creation. 
 The tree, which still exists, though at a great age, is 
 called the Omumborombonga tree. Out of it came, 
 in the beginning, the first man and woman. Oxen 
 stepped forth from it too, but baboons, as Caliban says 
 of the stars, ‘‘ came otherwise,’ and sheep and goats 
 sprang from a flat rock. Black people are so coloured, 
 according to the Ovaherero, because when the first 
 parents emerged from the tree and slew an ox, the 
 ancestress of the blacks appropriated the black liver 
 of the victim. The Ovakurwu Meyurw or “old ones in 
 heaven,” once let the skies down with a run, but drew 
 them up again (as the gods of the Satapatha Brah- 
 mana drew the sun) when most of mankind had been 
 drowned.! The remnant pacified the old ones (as 
 Odysseus did the spirits of the dead) by the sacrifice 
 of a black ewe, a practice still used to appease ghosts 
 by the Ovaherero. The neighbouring Omnambo 
 ascribe the creation of man to Kalunga, who came 
 out of the earth, and made the first three sheep.” 
 
 1 An example of a Deluge myth in Africa, where M. Lenormant found 
 none. 
 2 South African Folk-Lore Journal, ii. pt. v. p. 95. 
 
172 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Among the Namaquas, an African people on the 
 
 same level of nomadic culture as the Ovaherero, a 
 
 divine or heroic early being called Heitsi EKibib had 
 
 a good deal to do with the origin of things. If he 
 
 did not exactly make the animals, he impressed on 
 them their characters, and their habits (like those of 
 the serpent in Genesis) are said to have been conferred 
 by a curse, the curse of Heitsi EKibib. A precisely 
 similar notion was found by Avila among the Indians 
 of Huarochiri, whose divine culture-hero imposed, by a 
 curse or a blessing, their character and*habits on the 
 beasts.!. The lion used to live in a nest up a tree till 
 Heitsi Eibib cursed him and bade him walk on the 
 ground. He also cursed the hare, “‘ and the hare ran 
 away, and is still running”.? The name of the first 
 man is given as Hichaknanabiseb (with a multitude 
 of ‘‘ clicks”), and he is said to have met all the animals 
 on a flat rock, and played a game with them for 
 copper beads. The rainbow was made by Gaunab, 
 who is generally a malevolent being, of whom more 
 hereafter. 
 
 Leaving these African races, which, whatever their 
 relative degrees of culture, are physically somewhat 
 contemptible, we reach their northern neighbours, the 
 Zulus. They are among the finest, and certainly 
 among the least religious, of the undeveloped peoples. 
 Their faith is mainly in magic and ghosts, but there 
 are traces of a fading and voftier belief. 
 
 The social and political condition of the Zulu is 
 well understood. They are a pastoral, but not a 
 
 1 Fables of Yneas (Hakluyt Society), p. 127. 
 2Tsuni Goam, pp. 66, 67. 
 
- 
 
 ZULUS. tis. 
 
 nomadic people, possessing large kraals or towns. They 
 practise agriculture, and they had, till quite recently, 
 a centralised government and a large army, somewhat 
 on the German system. ‘They appear to have no 
 regular class of priests, and supernatural power 1s 
 owned by the chiefs and the king, and by diviners 
 and sorcerers, who conduct the sacrifices. Their myths 
 are the more interesting because, whether from their 
 natural scepticism, which confuted Bishop Colenso in 
 his orthodox days, or from acquaintance with European 
 ideas, they have begun to doubt the truth of their own 
 traditions. The Zulu theory of the origin of man 
 and of the world commences with the feats of Unku- 
 lunkulu, ‘‘ the old, old one,” who, in some legends, was 
 the first man, ‘‘and broke off in the beginning”’. 
 Like Manabozho among the Indians of North America, 
 and like Wainamoinen among the Finns, Unkulunkulu 
 imparted to men a knowledge of the arts, of marriage, 
 and so forth. His exploits in this direction, however, 
 must be considered in another part of this work. 
 Men in general ‘“‘ came out of a bed of reeds”? But 
 there is much confusion about this bed of reeds, named 
 “Uthlanga”. The younger people ask where the bed 
 of reeds was; the old men do not know, and neither 
 did their fathers know. But they stick to it that 
 “that bed of reeds still exists”. Educated Zulus 
 appear somewhat inclined to take the expression in 
 an allegorical sense, and to understand the reeds either 
 as a kind of protoplasm or as a creator who was mortal. 
 
 1 These legends have been carefully collected and published by Bishop 
 Callaway (Triibner & Co., 1868). 
 2 Callaway, p. 9. 
 
174 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 ‘‘He exists no longer. As my grandfather no longer 
 exists, he too no longer exists; he died.” Chiefs who 
 wish to claim high descent trace their pedigree to 
 Uthlanga, as the Homeric kings traced theirs to Zeus. 
 The myths given by Dr. Callaway are very contra- 
 dictory. | 
 
 In addition to the legend that men came out of a 
 bed of reeds, other and perhaps even more puerile 
 stories are current. ‘‘Some men say that they were 
 belched up by a cow;” others “‘ that Unkulunkulu 
 split them out of a stone,”! which recalls the legend 
 of Pyrrha and Deucalion. The myth about the cow is 
 still applied to great chiefs. “He was not born; he 
 was belched up by a cow.” The myth of the stone 
 origin corresponds to the Homeric saying about men 
 “born from the stone or the oak of the old tale ”.2 
 
 In addition to the theory of the natal bed of reeds, 
 the Zulus, like the Navajoes of New Mexico, and the 
 Bushmen, believe in the subterranean origin of man. 
 There was a succession of emigrations from below of 
 different tribes of men, each having its own Unku- 
 lunkulu. All accounts agree that Unkulunkulu is 
 not worshipped, and he does not seem to be identified 
 with ‘‘the lord who plays in heaven ”—a kind of 
 fading Zeus—when there is thunder. Unkulunkulu 
 is not worshipped, though ancestral spirits are wor- 
 shipped, because he lived so long ago that no one can 
 now trace his pedigree to the being who is at once the 
 
 1 Without anticipating a later chapter, the resemblances of these to 
 Greek myths, as arrayed by M. Bouché Leclercq (De Origine Generis 
 Human), is very striking. 
 
 2 Odyssey, xix. 103. 
 
NORTH AMERICA. 175 
 
 first man and the creator. His ‘‘ honour-giving name ” 
 is lost in the lapse of years, and the family rites have 
 become obsolete.! 
 
 The native races of the North American continent 
 (concerning whose civilisation more will be said in the 
 account of their divine myths) occupy every stage of 
 culture, from the truly bestial condition in which 
 some of the Digger Indians at present exist, living on 
 insects and unacquainted even with the use of the 
 bow, to the civilisation which the Spaniards destroyed 
 among the Aztecs. 
 
 The original facts about religion in America are 
 much disputed, and will be more appropriately treated 
 later. It is now very usual for anthropologists to say, 
 like Mr. Dorman, ‘‘no approach to monotheism had 
 been made before the discovery of America by Euro- 
 peans, and the Great Spirit mentioned in these (their) 
 books is an introduction by Christianity”? ‘This 
 view will not bear examination,’ says Mr. Tylor, 
 and we shall later demonstrate the accuracy of his 
 remark.’ But at present we are concerned, not with 
 what Indian religion had to say about her Gods, but 
 with what Indian myth had to tell about the begin- 
 nings of things. 
 
 The Hurons, for example (to choose a people in a 
 state of middle barbarism), start in myth from the 
 usual conception of a powerful non-natural race of 
 men dwelling in the heavens, whence they descended, 
 
 1 See Zulu religion in The Making of Religion, pp. 225-229, where it is 
 argued that ghost worship has superseded a higher faith, of which traces 
 are discernible. 
 
 2 Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 15. 
 ® Primitive Culture, 1873, ii. p. 340, 
 
176 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 and colonised, not to say constructed, the earth. In 
 the Relation de la Nouvelle France, written by 
 Pére Paul le Jeune, of the Company of Jesus, in 
 1636, there is a very full account of Huron opinion, 
 which, with some changes of names, exists among the 
 other branches of the Algonkin family of Indians. 
 They recognise as the founder of their kindred a 
 woman named Ataentsic, who, like Hephestus in the 
 Iliad, was banished from the sky. In the upper 
 world there are woods and plains, as on earth. 
 Ataentsic fell down a hole when she was hunting 
 a bear, or she cut down a heaven-tree, and fell with 
 the fall of this Huron Ygdrasil, or she was seduced 
 by an adventurer from the under world, and was 
 tossed out of heaven for her fault. However it 
 chanced, she dropped on the back of the turtle in the 
 midst of the waters. He consulted the other aquatic 
 animals, and one of them, generally said to have been 
 the musk-rat, fished! up some soil and fashioned the 
 earth. Here Ataentsic gave birth to twins, Ioskeha 
 
 1 Relations, 1633. In this myth one Messou, the Great Hare, is the 
 beginner of our race. He married a daughter of the Musk-rat. 
 
 2 Here we first meet in this investigation a very widely distributed myth. 
 The myths already examined have taken the origin of earth for granted. 
 The Hurons account for its origin; a speck of earth was fished out of the 
 waters and grew. In M. H. de Charencey’s tract Une Legende Cosmogo- 
 nique (Havre, 1884) this legend is traced. M. de Charencey distinguishes (1) 
 a continental version ; (2) an insular version ; (3) a mixed and Hindoo version 
 Among continental variants he gives a Vogul version (Revwe de Philologie 
 et d’ Ethnographie, Paris, 1874, i. 10). Numi Tarom (a god who cooks fish 
 in heaven) hangs a male and female above the abyss of waters in a silver 
 cradle. He gives them, later, just earth enough to buildahouse on. Their 
 son, in the guise of a squirrel, climbs to Numi Tarom, and receives from 
 him a duck-skin and a goose-skin. Clad in these, like Yehl in his raven- 
 skin or Odin in his hawk-skin, he enjoys the powers of the animals, dives 
 and brings up three handfuls of mud, which grow into our earth. Elempi 
 
 ; aia 
 — | 
 
-DUALISM. 177 
 
 and Tawiscara. These represent the usual dualism of 
 myth ; they answer to Osiris and Set, to Ormuzd and 
 Ahriman, and were bitter enemies. According to one 
 form of the myth, the woman of the sky had twins, 
 and what occurred may be quoted from Dr. Brinton. 
 “Even before birth one of them betrayed his restless 
 and evil nature by refusing to be born in the usual 
 manner, but insisting on breaking through his parent’s 
 side or arm-pit. He did so, but it cost his mother her 
 life. Her body was buried, and from it sprang the 
 various vegetable productions,” pumpkins, maize, 
 seans, and so forth.) 
 
 nakes men out of clay and snow. The American version M. de Charencey 
 sives from Nicholas Perrot (Mem. sur les Meurs, etc., Paris, 1864, i. 3). 
 Perrot was a traveller of the seventeenth century. The Great Hare takes 
 s hand in the making of earth out of fished-up soil. After giving other 
 North American variants, and comparing the animals that, after three 
 attempts, fish up earth to the dove and raven of Noah, M. de Charencey 
 reaches the Bulgarians. God made Satan, in the skin of a diver, fish up 
 earth out of Lake Tiberias. Three doves fish up earth, in the beginning, 
 in the Galician popular legend (Chodzko, Contes des Paysans Slaves, p. 374). 
 In the insular version, as in New Zealand, the island is usually fished up 
 with a hook by a heroic angler (Japan, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand). 
 The Hindoo version, in which the boar plays the part of musk-rat, or duck, 
 or diver, will be given in ‘‘ Indian Cosmogonic Myths”. 
 
 1 Brinton, American Hero-Myths, p. 54. Nicholas Perrot and various 
 Jesuit Relations are the original authorities. See ‘‘ Divine Myths of 
 America”. Mr, Leland, in his Algonkin Tales, prints the same story, 
 with the names altered to Glooskap and Malsumis, from oral tradition. 
 Compare Schoolcraft, v. 155, and i. 317, and the versions of PP. Charlevoix 
 and Lafitau. In Charlevoix the good and bad brothers are Manabozho and 
 Chokanipok or Chakekanapok, and out of the bones and entrails of the 
 latter many plants and animals were fashioned, just as, according to a 
 Greek myth preserved by Clemens Alexandrinus, parsley and pomegranates 
 arose from the blood and scattered members of Dionysus Zagreus. The 
 tale of Tawiscara’s violent birth is told of Set in Egypt, and of Indra in the 
 Veda, as will be shown later. This is a very common fable, and, as Mr. 
 Whitley Stokes tells me, it recurs in old Irish legends of the birth of our 
 Lord, Myth, as usual, invading religion, even Christian religion. 
 
 VOL. I. 
 
178 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Accurding to another version of the origin of things, 
 the maker of them was one Michabous, or Michabo, 
 the Great Hare. His birthplace was shown at an 
 island called Michilimakinak, like the birthplace of 
 Apollo at Delos. The Great Hare made the earth, 
 and, as will afterwards appear, was the inventor of 
 the arts of life. On the whole, the Iroquois and 
 Algonkin myths agree in finding the origin of life in 
 an upper world ‘beyond the sky. The earth was either 
 fished up (as by Brahma when he dived in the shape 
 of a boar) by some beast which descended to the bottom 
 of the waters, or grew out of the tortoise on whose 
 back Ataentsic fell. The first dwellers in the world were 
 either beasts like Manabozho or Michabo, the Great 
 Hare, or the primeval wolves of the Uinkarets,’ or 
 the creative musk-rat, or were more anthropomorphic 
 heroes, such as Ioskeha and Tawiscara. As for the 
 things in the world, some were made, some evolved, 
 some are transformed parts of an early non-natural 
 man or animal. There is a tendency to identify 
 Ataentsic, the sky-woman, with the moon, and in the 
 Two Great Brethren, hostile as they are, to recognise 
 moon and sun.” 
 
 1 Powell, Bureau of Ethnology, i. 44. 
 
 2 Dr. Brinton has endeavoured to demonstrate by arguments drawn from 
 etymology that Michabos, Messou, Missibizi or Manabozho, the Great Hare, 
 is originally a personification of Dawn (Myths of the New World, p. 178). 
 I have examined his arguments in the Nineteenth Century, January, 1886, 
 which may be consulted, and in Mélusine, January, 1887. The hare appears 
 
 to be one out of the countless primeval beast-culture heroes. A curious — 
 
 piece of magic in a tradition of the Déné Hareskins may seem to aid Dr. 
 Brinton’s theory : ‘‘ Pendant la nuit il entra, jeta au feu une téte de liévre 
 blanc et aussitét le jour se fit”. —Petitot, Traditions Indiennes, p. 173. But 
 I take it that the sacrifice of a white hare’s head makes light magically, as 
 sacrifice of black beasts and columns of black smoke make rainclouds. 
 
DIGGER EVOLUTIONIST MYTH. 179 
 
 Some of the degraded Digger Indians of California 
 have the following myth of the origin of species.. In 
 this legend, it will be noticed, a species of evolution 
 takes the place of a theory of creation. The story 
 was told to Mr. Adam Johnston, who “drew” the 
 narrator by communicating to a chief the Biblical 
 narrative of the creation! The chief said it was a 
 strange story, and one that he had never heard when 
 he lived at the Mission of St. John under the care 
 of a Padre. According to this chief (he ruled over the 
 Po-to-yan-te tribe or Coyotes), the first Indians were 
 coyotes. When one of their number died, his body 
 became full of little animals or spirits. They took 
 various shapes, as of deer, antelopes, and so forth : 
 but as some exhibited a tendency to fly off to the 
 moon, the Po-to-yan-tes now usually bury the bodies 
 of their dead, to prevent the extinction of species. 
 Then the Indians began to assume the shape of man, but 
 it was a slow transformation. At first they walked on 
 all fours, then they would begin to develop an isolated 
 human feature, one finger, one toe, one eye, like the 
 ascidian, our first parent in the view of modern science. 
 Then they doubled their organs, got into the habit of 
 sitting up, and wore away their tails, which they 
 unafiectedly regret, “as they consider the tail quite an 
 ornament”. Ideas of the immortality of the soul are 
 said to be confined to the old women of the tribe, and, 
 in short, according to this version, the Digger Indians 
 occupy the modern scientific position. 
 
 The Winnebagoes, who communicated their myths 
 to Mr. Fletcher,? are suspected of having been in- 
 
 1$choolcraft, vol, v. 2 Lbid., iv. 228, 
 
180 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 fluenced by the Biblical narrative. They say that the 
 Great Spirit woke up as from a dream, and found 
 himself sitting in a chair. As he was all alone, he 
 took a piece of his body and a piece of earth, and made 
 aman. He next madea woman, steadied the earth by 
 placing beasts beneath it at the corners, and created 
 plants and animals. Other men he made out of bears. 
 “He created the white man to make tools for the poor 
 Indians”—a very pleasing example of a teleological 
 hypothesis and of the doctrine of final causes as 
 understood by the Winnebagoes. The Chaldean 
 myth of the making of man is recalled by the legend 
 that the Great Spirit cut out a piece of himself for the 
 purpose; the Chaldean wisdom coincides, too, with 
 the philosophical acumen of the Po-to-yan-te or Coyote 
 tribe of Digger Indians. Though the Chaldean theory, 
 is only connected with that of the Red Men by its 
 savagery, we may briefly state it in this place. . 
 According to Berosus, as reported by Alexander 
 Polyhistor, the universe was originally (as before 
 Manabozho’s time) water and mud. Herein all manner 
 of mixed monsters, with human heads, goat’s horns, 
 four legs, and tails, bred confusedly. In place of the 
 Iroquois Ataentsic, a woman called Omoroca presided 
 over the mud and the menagerie. She, too, like 
 Ataentsic, is sometimes recognised as the moon. 
 Affairs being in this state, Bel-Maruduk arrived and 
 cut Omoroca in two (Chokanipok destroyed Ataentsic), 
 and out of Omoroca Bel made the world and the things 
 ‘nit. We have already seen that in savage myth many 
 things are fashioned out of a dead member of the 
 extra-natural race. Lastly, Bel cut his own head off, 
 
AHT MYTHS. 181 
 
 and with the blood the gods mixed clay and made 
 men. The Chaldeans inherited very savage fancies.! 
 
 One ought, perhaps, to apologise to the Chaldeans 
 for inserting their myths among the fables of the least 
 cultivated peoples ; but it will scarcely be maintained 
 that the Oriental myths differ in character from the 
 Digger Indian and Iroquois explanations of the origin 
 of things. The Ahts of Vancouver Island, whom Mr. 
 Sproat knew intimately; and of whose ideas he gives a 
 cautious account (for he was well aware of the limits 
 of his knowledge), tell a story of the usual character.? 
 They believe in a member of the extra-natural race, 
 named Quawteaht, of whom we shall hear more in 
 his heroic character. As a demiurge ‘“‘he is un- 
 doubtedly represented as the general framer, I do not 
 say creator, of all things, though some special things 
 are excepted. He made the earth and water, the 
 trees and rocks, and all the animals. Some say that 
 Quawteaht made the sun and moon, but the majority 
 of the Indians believe that he had nothing to do with 
 their formation, and that they are deities superior to 
 himself, though now distant and less active. He 
 gave names to everything; among the rest, to all the 
 Indian houses which then existed, although inhabited 
 only by birds and animals. Quawteaht went away 
 before the apparent change of the birds and beasts into 
 Indians, which took place in the following manner :— 
 
 “The birds and beasts of old had the spirits of the 
 Indians dwelling in them, and occupied the various 
 
 10f. Syncellus, p. 29; Euseb., Chronic. Armen., ed. Mai, p. 10; Lenor- 
 mant, Origines de l’ Histoire, i. 506. 
 2Sproat, Scenes and Studies of Savage Iife, pp. 210, 211, 
 
182 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 coast villages, as the Ahts do at present. One day a 
 canoe manned by two Indians from an unknown 
 country approached the shore. As they coasted along, 
 at each house at which they landed, the deer, bear, 
 elk, and other brute inhabitants fled to the mountains, 
 and the geese and other birds flew to the woods and 
 rivers. But in this flight, the Indians, who had 
 hitherto been contained in the bodies of the various 
 creatures, were left behind, and from that time they 
 took possession of the deserted dwellings and assumed 
 the condition in which we now see them.”’ 
 
 Crossing the northern continent of America to the 
 west, we are in the domains of various animal culture- 
 heroes, ancestors and teachers of the human race, and 
 the makers, to some extent, of the things in the world. 
 As the eastern tribes have their Great Hare, so the 
 western tribes have their wolf hero and progenitor, or 
 their coyote, or their raven, or their dog. It is pos- 
 sible, and even certain in some cases, that the animal 
 which was the dominant totem of a race became heir 
 to any cosmogonic legends that were floating about. 
 
 The country of the Papagos, on the eastern side of 
 the Gulf of California, is the southern boundary of the 
 province of the coyote or prairie wolf. The realm of 
 his influence as a kind of Prometheus, or even as a 
 demiurge, extends very far northwards. Inthe myth 
 related by Con Quien, the chief of the central Papagos,' 
 the coyote acts the part of the fish in the Sanskrit 
 legend of the flood, while Montezuma undertakes the 
 role of Manu. This Montezuma was formed, like the 
 - Adams of so many races, out of potter’s clay in the 
 1 Davidson, Indian Affairs Report, 1865, p. 181; Bancroft, iii, 75. 
 
COYOTE DEMIURGE. 183 
 
 hands of the Great Spirit. In all this legend it seems 
 plain enough that the name of Montezuma is imported 
 from Mexico, and has been arbitrarily given to the hero 
 of the Papagos. According to Mr. Powers, whose 
 manuscript notes Mr. Bancroft quotes (iii. 87), all the 
 natives of California believe that their first ancestors 
 were created directly from the earth of their present 
 dwelling-places, and in very many cases these ancestors 
 were coyotes. 
 
 The Pimas, a race who live near the Papagos on the 
 eastern coast of the Gulf of California, say that the 
 earth was made by a being named Earth-prophet. At 
 first it appeared like a spider’s web, reminding one of 
 the West African legend that a great spider created 
 the world. Man was made by the Earth-prophet out 
 of clay kneaded with sweat. A mysterious eagle and 
 a deluge play a great part in the later mythical adven- 
 tures of war and the world, as known to the Pimas! 
 
 In Oregon the coyote appears as a somewhat 
 tentative demiurge, and the men of his creation, like 
 the beings first formed by Prajapati in the Sanskrit 
 myth, needed to be reviewed, corrected and consider- 
 ably augmented. The Chinooks of Oregon believe in 
 the usual race of magnified non-natural men, who 
 preceded humanity. 
 
 These semi-divine people were called Ulhaipa by 
 the Chinooks, and Sehuiab by the Lummies. But 
 the coyote was the maker of men. As the first of 
 Nature’s journeymen, he made men rather badly, with 
 closed eyes and motionless feet. A kind being, named 
 Ikanam, touched up the coyote’s crude essays with 
 
 ‘ Communicated to Mr. Bancroft by Mr. Stout of the Pima Agency. 
 
eee ee Se ee ee a ~ 
 
 184 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 a sharp stone, opening the eyes of men, and giving 
 their hands and feet the powers of movement. He 
 also acted as a “culture-hero,” introducing the first 
 arts. 
 
 Moving up the West Pacific coast we reach British 
 Columbia, where the coyote is not supposed to have 
 been so active as our old friend the musk-rat in the 
 great work of the creation. According to the Tacullies, 
 nothing existed in the beginning but water and a 
 musk-rat. As the animal sought his food at the 
 bottom of the water, his mouth was frequently filled 
 with mud. This he spat out, and so gradually formed 
 by alluvial deposit an island. This island was small at 
 first, like earth in the Sanskrit myth in the Satapatha 
 Brahmana, but gradually increased in bulk. The 
 Tacullies have no new light to throw on the origin of 
 man.” 
 
 The Thlinkeets, who are neighbours of the Tacullies 
 on the north, incline to give crow or raven the chief 
 réle in the task of creation, just as some Australians 
 allot the same part to the eagle-hawk, and the Yakuts 
 to a hawk, a crow and a teal-duck. We shall hear 
 much of Yehl later, as one of the mythical heroes of 
 the introduction of civilisation. North of the Thlin- 
 keets, a bird and a dog take the creative duties, the 
 Aleuts and Koniagas being descended from a dog. — 
 Among the more northern Tinnehs, the dog who was 
 the progenitor of the race had the power of assuming 
 the shape of a handsome young man. He supplied 
 
 1[(Franchere’s Narrative, 258; Gibb’s Chinook Vocabulary ; Parker’s 
 Exploring Tour, i. 189 ;] Baneroft, iii. 96. 
 2 Bancroft, iii. 98 ; Harmon’s Journey, pp. 302, 308, 
 
MAORI MYTHS. 185 
 
 the protoplasm of the Tinnehs, as Purusha did that 
 of the Aryan world, out of his own body. A giant 
 tore him to pieces, as the gods tore Purusha, and out 
 of the fragments thrown into the rivers came fish, the 
 fragments tossed into the air took life as birds, and 
 so forth. This recalls the Australian myth of the 
 origin of fish and the Ananzi stories of the origin of 
 whips.’ 
 
 Between the cosmogonic myths of the barbarous 
 or savage American tribes and those of the great 
 cultivated American peoples, Aztecs, Peruvians and 
 Quiches, place should be found for the legends of 
 certain races in the South Pacific. Of these, the most 
 important are the Maoris or natives of New Zealand, 
 the Mangaians and the Samoans. Beyond the 
 usual and world-wide correspondences of myth, 
 the divine tales of the various South Sea isles display 
 resemblances so many and essential that they must 
 be supposed to spring from a common and probably 
 not very distant centre. As it is practically impossible 
 to separate Maori myths of the making of things 
 from Maori myths of the gods and their origin, we 
 must pass over here the metaphysical hymns and 
 stories of the original divine beings, Rangi and Papa, 
 Heaven and Earth, and of their cruel but necessary 
 divorce by their children, who then became the usual 
 Titanic race which constructs and “airs” the world 
 for the reception of man.* Among these beings, more 
 
 1 Hearne, pp. 342, 343; Bancroft, iii. 106. 
 
 2See “Divine Myths of Lower Races’. M. Cosquin, in Contes de 
 Lorraine, vol. i. p. 58, gives the Ananzi story. 
 
 3 See ‘‘ Divine Myths of Lower Races i 
 
186 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 fully described in our chapter on the gods of the lower 
 races, is Tiki, with his wife Marikoriko, twilight. 
 Tane (male) is another of the primordial race, children 
 of earth and heaven, and between him and Tiki lies 
 the credit of having made or begotten humanity. 
 Tane adorned the body of his father, heaven (Rang7), 
 by sticking stars all over it, as disks of pearl-shells 
 are stuck all over images. He was the parent of trees 
 and birds, but some trees are original and divine 
 beings. The first woman was not born, but formed 
 - out of the sun and the echo, a pretty myth. Man 
 was made by Tiki, who took red clay, and kneaded 
 it with his own blood, or with the red water of 
 swamps. ‘The habits of animals, some of which are 
 gods, while others are descended from gods, follow 
 from their conduct at the moment when heaven and 
 earth were violently divorced. New Zealand itself, 
 or at least one of the isles, was a huge fish caught by 
 Maui (of whom more hereafter). Just as Pund-jel, in 
 Australia, cut out the gullies and vales with his knife, 
 so the mountains and dells of New Zealand were 
 produced by the knives of Maui’s brothers when they 
 crimped his big fish.1_ Quite apart from those childish 
 ideas are the astonishing metaphysical hymns about 
 the first stirrings of light in darkness, of ‘‘ becoming ” 
 and “ being,’ which remind us of Hegel and Heraclitus, 
 or of the most purely speculative ideas in the Rig- 
 Veda.” Scarcely less metaphysical are the myths 
 
 1Taylor, New Zealand, pp. 115-121; Bastian, Heilige Sage der Polynesier, 
 pp. 36-50; Shortland, 7'raditions of New Zealanders. 
 
 2See chapter on ‘‘ Divine Myths of the Lower Races,” and on ‘‘ Indian 
 Cosmogonic Myths’’, 
 
MANGAIAN METAPHYSICS. 187 
 
 of Mangaia, of which Mr. Gill! gives an elaborate 
 account. 
 
 The Mangaian ideas of the world are complex, and 
 of an early scientific sort. The universe is like the 
 hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, divided into many 
 imaginary circles like those of medieval speculation. 
 There is a demon at the stem, as it were, of the cocoa- 
 nut, and, where the edges of the imaginary shell 
 nearly meet, dwells a woman demon, whose name means 
 “the very beginning”. In this system we observe 
 efforts at metaphysics and physical speculation. But 
 it is very characteristic of rude thought that such 
 extremely abstract conceptions as “ the very beginning ” 
 are represented as possessing life and human form. 
 The woman at the bottom of the shell was anxious for 
 progeny, and therefore plucked a bit out of her own 
 right side, as Eve was made out of the rib of Adam. 
 This piece of flesh became Vatea, the father of gods 
 and men. Vatea (like Oannes in the Chaldean legend) 
 was half man, half fish. “The Very Beginning” begat 
 other children in the same manner, and some of these 
 became departmental gods of ocean, noon-day, and so 
 forth. Curiously enough, the Mangaians seem to be 
 sticklers for primogeniture. Vatea, as the first-born 
 son, originally had his domain next above that of his 
 mother. But she was pained by the thought that his 
 younger brothers each took a higher place than his; 
 so she pushed his land up, and it is now next below 
 the solid crust on which mortals live in Mangaia. 
 Vatea married a woman from one of the under worlds 
 _ named Papa, and their children had the regular human 
 1 Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, pp. 1-22, 
 
form. One child was born either from Papa’s head, 
 like Athene from the head of Zeus, or from her arm- 
 pit, like Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus. Another 
 child may be said, in the language of dog-breeders, to 
 have “thrown back,” for he wears the form of a white 
 or black lizard. In the Mangaian system the sky is a 
 solid vault of blue stone. In the beginning of things 
 the sky (like Ouranos in Greece and Rangi in New 
 Zealand) pressed hard on earth, and the god Ru was 
 obliged to thrust the two asunder, or rather he was 
 engaged in this task when Maui tossed both Ru and 
 the sky so high up that they never came down again. 
 Ru is now the Atlas of Mangaia, “the sky-supporting 
 Ru”.! His lower limbs fell to earth, and became 
 pumice-stone. In these Mangaian myths we discern 
 resemblances to New Zealand fictions, as is natural, 
 and the tearing of the body of “the Very Beginning ”’ 
 has numerous counterparts in Kuropean, American 
 and Indian fable. But on the whole, the Mangaian 
 myths are more remarkable for their semi-scientific 
 philosophy than for their coincidences with the fancies 
 of other early peoples. 
 
 The Samoans, like the Maoris and Greeks, hold that 
 heaven at first fell down and lay upon earth. The 
 arrowroot and another plant pushed up heaven, and 
 ‘the heaven-pushing place” is still known and pointed 
 out. Others say the god Ti-iti-i pushed up heaven, 
 and his feet made holes six feet deep in the rocks 
 during this exertion. The other Samoan myths chiefly 
 explain the origin of fire, and the causes of the charac- _ 
 teristic forms and habits of animals and plants. The 
 
 188 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 1Gill, p. 59. 2 Turner’s Samoa, p. 198. 
 
‘4 gTOOL TO BE SAD UPON.” 189 
 
 Samoans, too, possess a semi-mythical, metaphysical 
 cosmogony, starting from nothing, but rapidly becom- 
 ing the history of rocks, clouds, hills, dew and various 
 animals, who intermarried, and to whom the royal 
 family of Samoa trace their origin through twenty- 
 three generations. So personal are Samoan abstract 
 conceptions, that ‘‘ Space had a long-legged stool,’ on 
 to which a head fell, and grew into a companion for 
 Space. Yet.another myth says that the god Tangaloa 
 existed in space, and made heaven and earth, and sent 
 down his daughter, a snipe. Man he made out of the 
 mussel-fish. So confused are the doctrines of the 
 Samoans.’ 
 
 Perhaps the cosmogonic myths of the less cultivated 
 races have now been stated in sufficient number. As 
 an example of the ideas which prevailed in an Ameri- 
 can race of higher culture, we may take the Quiche 
 legend as given in the Popol Vuh, a post-Christian 
 collection of the sacred myths of the nation, written 
 down after the Spanish conquest, and published in 
 French by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg.” 
 
 The Quiches, like their neighbours the Cakchiquels, 
 were a highly civilised race, possessing well-built 
 towns, roads and the arts of life, and were great agri- 
 culturists. Maize, the staple of food among these 
 advanced Americans, was almost as great a god as 
 
 1Turner’s Samoa, pp. 1-9. 
 
 2See Popol Vuh in Mr. Max Miiller’s Chips from a German Workshop, 
 with a discussion of its authenticity. In his Annals of the Cakchiquels, a 
 nation bordering on the Quiches, Dr. Brinton expresses his belief in the 
 genuine character of the text. Compare Bancroft, iii. p. 45. ‘The ancient 
 and original Popol Vuh, the native book in native characters, disappeared 
 during the Spanish conquest 
 
190 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Soma among the Indo-Aryans. The Quiches were ac- 
 quainted with a kind of picture-writing, and possessed 
 records in which myth glided into history. The Popol 
 Vuh, or book of the people, gives itself out as a post- 
 Columbian copy of these traditions, and may doubtless 
 contain Kuropean ideas. As we see in the Commen- 
 tarvas Reales of the half-blood Inea Garcilasso de la 
 Vega, the conquered people were anxious to prove 
 that their beliefs were by no means so irrational and 
 so “devilish ” as to Spanish critics they appeared. * Ac- 
 cording to the Popol Vuh, there was in the beginning 
 nothing but water and the feathered serpent, one of 
 their chief divine beings; but there also existed some- 
 how, ‘‘they that gave life’. Their names mean 
 “shooter of blow-pipe at coyote,” “at opossum,” and 
 so forth. They said “Earth,” and there was earth, 
 and plants growing thereon, Animals followed, and 
 the Givers of life said “Speak our names,” but the 
 animals could only cluck and croak. Then said the 
 Givers, ‘‘ Inasmuch as ye cannot praise us, ye shall 
 be killed and eaten”. They then made men out of 
 clay ; these men were weak and watery, and by water 
 they were destroyed. Next they made men of wood 
 and women of the pith of trees. These puppets married 
 and gave in marriage, and peopled earth with wooden 
 mannikins. This unsatisfactory race was destroyed 
 by a rain of resin and by the wild beasts. The sur- 
 vivors developed into apes. Next came a period 
 occupied by the wildest feats of the magnified non- 
 natural race and of animals. The record is like the 
 description of a supernatural pantomime—the night- 
 mare of a god. The Titans upset hills, are turned into 
 
~- 
 
 MAYA CREATOR. 191 
 
 stone, and behave like Heitsi Eibib in the Namaqua 
 myths. 
 
 Last of all, men were made of yellow and white 
 maize, and these gave more satisfaction, but their 
 sight was contracted. These, however, survived, and 
 became the parents of the present stock of humanity. 
 
 Here we have the conceptions of creation and of 
 evolution combined. Men are made, but only the 
 fittest survive ; the rest are either destroyed or per- 
 mitted to develop into lower species. A similar mix- 
 ture of the same ideas will be found in one of the 
 Brahmanas among the Aryans of India. It is to be 
 observed that the Quiche myths, as recorded in Popol 
 Vuh, contain not only traces of belief in a creative 
 word and power, but many hymns of a lofty and 
 beautifully devotional character. 
 
 “ Hail! O Creator,O Former! Thou that hearest 
 and understandest us, abandon us not, forsake us not! 
 O God, thou that art in heaven and on the earth, O 
 Heart of Heaven, O Heart of Earth, give us descendants 
 and posterity as long as the light endures.’’ 
 
 This is an example of the prayers of the men made 
 out of maize, made especially that they might “call on 
 the name” of the god or gods. Whether we are to 
 attribute this and similar passages to Christian influ- 
 ence (for Popol Vuh, as we have it, is but an attempt 
 to collect the fragments of the lost book that remained 
 in men’s minds after the conquest), or whether the 
 purer portions of the myth be due to untaught native 
 reflection and piety, it is not possible to determine. It 
 is improbable that the ideas of a hostile race would be 
 introduced into religious hymns by their victims. 
 
192 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere in the sacred legends of civilised 
 peoples, various strata of mythical and religious thought 
 coexist. 
 
 No American people reached such a pitch of civili- 
 sation as the Aztecs of Anahuac, whose capital was 
 the city of Mexico. It is needless here to repeat the 
 story of their grandeur and their fall. Obscure as 
 their history, previous to the Spanish invasion, may 
 be, it is certain that they possessed a highly organised 
 society, fortified towns, established colleges or priest- 
 hoods, magnificent temples, an elaborate calendar, 
 great wealth in the precious metals, the art of picture- 
 writing in considerable perfection, and a despotic central 
 government. The higher classes in a society like this 
 
 could not but develop speculative systems, and it is © 
 
 alleged that shortly before the reign of Montezuma 
 attempts had been made to introduce a pure mono- 
 theistic religion. But the ritual of the Aztecs remained 
 an example of the utmost barbarity. Never was a 
 more cruel faith, not even in Carthage. Nowhere 
 did temples reek with such pools of human blood; 
 nowhere else, not in Dahomey and Ashanti, were 
 human sacrifice, cannibalism and torture so essential 
 to the cult that secured the favour of the gods. In 
 these dark fanes—reeking with gore, peopled by 
 monstrous shapes of idols bird-headed or beast-headed, 
 and adorned with the hideous carvings in which we 
 still see the priest, under the mask of some less raven- 
 ous forest beast, tormenting the victim—in these 
 abominable temples the Castilian conquerors might 
 well believe that they saw the dwellings of devils. 
 
 Yet Mexican religion had its moral and beautiful 
 
 Ye 
 
 \ 
 
AZTECS. 198 
 
 aspect, and the gods, or certain of the gods, required 
 from their worshippers not only bloody hands, but 
 clean hearts. 
 
 To the gods we return later. The myths of the 
 origin of things may be studied without a knowledge 
 of the whole Aztec Pantheon. Our authorities, though 
 numerous, lack complete originality and are occasion- 
 ally confused. We have first the Aztec monuments 
 and hieroglyphic scrolls, for the most part unde- 
 ciphered. ‘These merely attest the hideous and cruel 
 character of the deities. Next we have the reports of 
 early missionaries, like Sahagun and Mendieta, of 
 conquerors, like Bernal Diaz, and of noble half-breeds, 
 such as Ixtlilxochitl. 
 
 There are two elements in Mexican, as in Quiche, and 
 Indo-Aryan, and Maori, and even Andaman cosmogonic 
 myth. We find the purer religion and the really 
 philosophic speculation concurrent with such crude and 
 childish stories as usually satisfy the intellectual 
 demands of Ahts, Cahrocs and Bushmen; but of the 
 purer and more speculative opinions we know little. 
 Many of the noble, learned and priestly classes of 
 Aztecs perished at the conquest. The survivors were 
 more or less converted to Catholicism, and in their 
 writings probably put the best face possible on the 
 native religion. Like the Spanish clergy, their in- 
 structors, they were inclined to explain away their 
 national gods by a system of euhemerism, by taking 
 
 1Bancroft’s Native Races of Pacific Coast of North America, vol. iii., 
 contains an account of the sources, and, with Sahagun and Acosta, is 
 mainly followed here. See also J. G. Miller, Ur. Amerik. Rel., p. 507, 
 See chapter on the ‘‘ Divine Myths of Mexico”, 
 
 VOL. I. 13 
 
er el eal ane nd 
 
 194 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 it for granted that the gods and culture-heroes had 
 originally been ordinary men, worshipped after their 
 decease. This is almost invariably the view adopted 
 by Sahagun. Side by side with the confessions, as it 
 were, of the clergy and cultivated classes coexisted 
 the popular beliefs, the myths of the people, partaking 
 of the nature of folk-lore, but not rejected by the 
 priesthood. 
 
 Both strata of belief are represented in the surviving 
 cosmogonic myths of the Aztecs. Probably we may 
 reckon in the first or learned and speculative class 
 of tales the account of a series of constructions and 
 reconstructions of the world, This idea is not peculiar 
 to the higher mythologies, the notion of a deluge and 
 recreation or renewal of things is almost universal, 
 and even among the untutored Australians there are 
 memories of a flood and of an age of ruinous winds. 
 But the theory of definite epochs, calculated in accord- 
 ance with the Mexican calendar, of epochs in which 
 things were made and re-made, answers closely to the 
 Indo-Aryan conception of successive kalpas, and can 
 only have been developed after the method of reckoning 
 time had been carried to some perfection. ‘‘ When 
 heaven and earth were fashioned, they had already 
 been four times created and destroyed,” say the frag- 
 ments of what is called the Chimalpopoca manuscript. 
 Probably this theory of a series of kalpas is only one 
 of the devices by which the human mind has tried to 
 cheat itself into the belief that it can conceive a 
 beginning of things. The earth stands on an elephant, 
 the elephant on a tortoise, and it is going too far to 
 ask what the tortoise stands on, In the same way the 
 
** KALPAS.”’ 195 
 
 world’s beginning seems to become more intelligible 
 or less puzzling when it is thrown back into a series 
 of beginnings and endings. This method also was in 
 harmony with those vague ideas of evolution and of 
 the survival of the fittest which we have detected in 
 myth. The various tentative human races of the Popol 
 Vuh degenerated or were destroyed because they did 
 not fulfil the purposes for which they were made. In 
 Brahmanic myth we shall see that type after type was 
 condemned and perished because it was inadequate, or 
 inadequately equipped—because it did not harmonise 
 with its environment.' For these series of experi- 
 mental creations and inefficient evolutions vast spaces 
 of time were required, according to the Aztec and 
 Indo-Aryan philosophies. It is not impossible that 
 actual floods and great convulsions of nature may have 
 been remembered in tradition, and may have lent 
 colour and form to these somewhat philosophic myths 
 of origins. From such sources probably comes the 
 Mexican hypothesis of a water-age (ending in a deluge), 
 an earth-age (ending in an earthquake), a wind-age 
 (ending in hurricanes), and the present dispensation, 
 to be destroyed by fire. 
 
 The less philosophic and more popular Aztec legend 
 of the commencement of the world is mainly remark- 
 able for the importance given in it to objects of stone. 
 For some reason, stones play a much greater part in 
 American than in other mythologies. An emerald was 
 
 1As an example of a dim evolutionary idea, note the myths of the 
 various ages as reported by Mendieta, according to which there were five 
 earlier ages ‘“‘or suns’’ of bad quality, so that the contemporary human 
 beings were unable to live on the fruits of the earth. 
 
196 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 worshipped in the temple of Pachacamac, who was, 
 according to Garcilasso, the supreme and spiritual deity 
 of the Incas. The creation legend of the Cakchiquels 
 of Guatemala! makes much of a mysterious, primeval 
 and animated obsidian stone. In the Iroquois myths? 
 stones are the leading characters. Nor did Aztec myth 
 escape this influence. 
 
 There was a yod in heaven named Citlalatonac, and 
 a goddess, Citlalicue. When we speak of “heaven” we 
 must probably think of some such world of ordinary 
 terrestrial nature above the sky as that from which 
 Ataentsic fell in the Huron story. The goddess gave 
 birth to a flint-knife, and flung the flint down to earth. 
 This abnormal birth partly answers to that of the 
 youngest of the Adityas, the rejected abortion in the 
 Veda, and to the similar birth and rejection of Maui 
 in New Zealand. From the fallen flint-knife sprang 
 our old friends the magnified non-natural beings with 
 human characteristics, ‘the gods,” to the number of 
 1600. The gods sent up the hawk (who in India and 
 Australia generally comes to the front on these occa- 
 sions), and asked their mother, or rather grandmother, 
 to help them to make men, to be their servants. 
 Citlalicue rather jeered at her unconsidered offspring. 
 She advised them to go to the lord of the homes of the 
 departed, Mictlanteuctli, and borrow a bone or some 
 ashes of the dead who are with him. We must never 
 ask for consistency from myths. This statement 
 implies that men had already been in existence, though 
 they were not yet created. Perhaps they had perished 
 
 1 Brinton, Annals of the Cakchiquels. 
 3Erminie Smith, Bureau of Ethnol. Report, ii, 
 
INCAS, 197 
 
 in one of the four great destructions. With difficulty 
 and danger the gods stole a bone from Hades, placed 
 it in a bowl, and smeared it with their own blood, as 
 in Chaldea and elsewhere. Finally, a boy and a girl 
 were born out of the bowl. From this pair sprang 
 men, and certain of the gods, jumping into a furnace, 
 became sun and moon. To the sun they then, in Aztec 
 fashion, sacrificed themselves, and there, one might 
 think, was an end of them. But they afterwards 
 appeared in wondrous fashions to their worshippers, 
 and ordained the ritual of religion. According to 
 another legend, man and woman (as in African myths) 
 struggled out of a hole in the ground 
 
 The myths of the peoples under the empire of the 
 Incas in Peru are extremely interesting, because 
 almost all mythical formations are found existing 
 together, while we have historical evidence as to the 
 order and manner of their development. The Peru of 
 the Incas covered the modern state of the same name, 
 and included Ecuador, with parts of Chili and Bolivia. 
 M. Réville calculates that the empire was about 2500 
 miles in length, four times as long as France, and that 
 its breadth was from 250 to 500 miles. The country, 
 contained three different climatic regions, and was 
 peopled by races of many different degrees of culture, 
 all more or less subject to the dominion of the Children 
 of the Sun. The three regions were the dry strip 
 along the coast, the fertile and cultivated land about 
 the spurs of the Cordilleras, and the inland mountain 
 
 1 Authorities : Ixtlil.; Kingsborough, ix. pp. 205, 206; Sahagun, Hist. 
 
 Gen, i. 3, vii. 2; J. G. Miiller, p. 510, where Miiller compares the Delphic 
 conception of ages of the world; Bancroft, iii. pp. 60, 65. 
 
198 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 regions, inhabited by the wildest races. Near Cuzco, 
 the Inca capital, was the Lake of Titicaca, the Medi- 
 terranean, as it were, of Peru, for on the shores of this 
 inland sea was developed the chief civilisation of the 
 new world. ! 
 
 As to the institutions, myths and religion of the 
 empire, we have copious if contradictory information. 
 There are the narratives of the Spanish conquerors. 
 especially of Pizarro’s chaplain, Valverde, an igno- 
 rant bigoted fanatic. Then we have somewhat later 
 travellers and missionaries, of whom Cieza de Leon 
 (his book was published thirty years after the conquest, 
 in 1553) is one of the most trustworthy. The “ Royal 
 Commentaries” of Garcilasso de la Vega, son of an 
 Inca lady and a Spanish conqueror, have often already 
 been quoted. The critical spirit and sound sense of 
 Garcilasso are in remarkable contrast to the stupid 
 orthodoxy of the Spaniards, but some allowance must 
 be made for his fervent Peruvian patriotism. He had 
 heard the Inca traditions repeated in boyhood, and 
 very early in life collectedvall the information which 
 his mother and maternal uncle had to give him, or 
 which could be extracted from the quipus (the records 
 of knotted cord), and from the commemorative pictures 
 of his ancestors. Garcilasso had access, moreover, to 
 the ‘‘torn papers” of Blas Valera, an early Spanish 
 missionary of unusual sense and acuteness. Christoval 
 de Moluna is also an excellent authority, and much 
 may be learned from the volume of Rites and Laws 
 of the Yncas.} 
 
 1 A more complete list of authorities, including the garrulous Acosta, is 
 published by M. Réville in his Hibbert Lectures, pp. 136, 137. Garcilasso, 
 
GARCILASSO. 199 
 
 The political and religious condition of the Peruvian 
 empire is very clearly conceived and stated by 
 Garcilasso. Without making due allowance for that 
 mysterious earlier civilisation, older than the Incas, | 
 whose cyclopean buildings are the wonder of travellers, 
 Garcilasso attributes the introduction of civilisation to 
 his own ancestors. Allowing for what is confessedly 
 mythical in his narrative, it must be admitted that he 
 has a firm grasp of what the actual history must have 
 been. He recognises a period of savagery before the 
 Incas, a condition of the rudest barbarism, which still 
 existed on the fringes and mountain recesses of the 
 empire. The religion of that period was. mere magic 
 and totemism. From all manner of natural objects, 
 but chiefly from beasts and birds, the various savage 
 stocks of Peru claimed descent, and they revered and 
 offered sacrifice to their totemic ancestors.! Garcilasso 
 adds, what is almost incredible, that the Indians 
 tamely permitted themselves to be eaten by their 
 totems, when these were carnivorous animals. They 
 did this with the less reluctance as they were cannibals, 
 and accustomed to breed children for the purposes of the 
 cuisine from captive women taken in war.?, Among 
 the hwacas or idols, totems, fetishes and other adorable 
 objects of the Indians, worshipped before and retained 
 
 Cieza de Leon, Christoval de Moluna, Acosta and the Rites and Laws 
 have all been translated by Mr. Clements Markham, and are published, 
 with the editor’s learned and ingenious notes, in the collection of the 
 Hakluyt Society. Care must be taken to discriminate between what is 
 reported about the Indians of the various provinces, who were in very 
 different grades of culture, and what is told about the Incas themselves. 
 
 1Qom. Real., vol. i., chap. ix., x., xi. pp. 47-53. 
 
 2 Cieza de Leon, xii., xv., xix., xxi., xxiii., xxvi., xxvili,, xxxii, Cieza 
 is speaking of people in the valley of Cauca, in New Granada. 
 
200 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION, 
 
 after the introduction of the Inca sun-totem and solar — 
 cult, Garcilasso names trees, hills, rocks, caves, foun- 
 tains, emeralds, pieces of jasper, tigers, lions, bears, 
 foxes, monkeys, condors, owls, lizards, toads, frogs, 
 sheep, maize, the sea, “for want of larger gods, crabs” 
 and bats. The bat was also the totem of the Zotzil, 
 
 the chief family of the Cakchiquels of Guatemala, and. — 
 
 the most high god of the Cakchiquels was worshipped 
 in the shape of a bat. We are reminded of religion 
 as it existsin Samoa. The explanation of Blas Valera 
 was that in each totem (pacarissa) the Indians adored 
 the devil. 
 
 Athwart this early religion of totems and fetishes 
 came, in Garcilasso’s narrative, the purer religion of 
 the Incas, with what he regards as a philosophic 
 development of a belief in a Supreme Being, <Ac- 
 cording to him, the Inca sun-worship was really a 
 totemism of a loftier character. The Incas “‘ knew 
 how to choose gods better than the Indians”. Gar- 
 cilasso’s theory is that the earlier totems were selected 
 chiefly as distinguishing marks by the various stocks, 
 though, of course, this does not explain why the 
 animals or other objects of each family were worshipped 
 or were regarded as ancestors, and the blood-connections 
 of the men who adored them. The Incas, disdaining 
 crabs, lizards, bats and even serpents and lions, “ chose” 
 the sun. Then, just like the other totemic tribes, 
 they feigned to be of the blood and lineage of the sun. 
 
 This fable is, in brief, the Inca myth of the origin 
 of civilisation and of man, or at least of their breed of 
 _men. As M. Réville well remarks, it is obvious that 
 the Inca claim is an adaptation of the local myth of 
 
PERUVIAN MYTHS. 201 
 
 Lake Titicaca, the inland sea of Peru. According to 
 that myth, the Children of the Sun, the ancestors of 
 the Incas, came out of the earth (as in Greek and 
 African legends) at Lake Titicaca, or reached its shores 
 after wandering from the hole or cave whence they 
 first emerged. The myth, as adapted by the Incas, 
 takes for granted the previous existence of mankind, 
 and, in some of its forms, the Inca period is preceded 
 by the deluge. 
 
 Of the Peruvian myth concerning the origin of 
 things, the following account is given by a Spanish 
 priest, Christoval de Moluna, in a report to the Bishop 
 of Cuzco in 1570.1 The story was collected from the 
 lips of ancient Peruvians and old native priests, who 
 again drew their information in part from the painted 
 records reserved in the temple of the sun near Cuzco. 
 The legend begins with a deluge myth; a cataclysm 
 ended a period of human existence. All mankind 
 perished except a man and woman, who floated in a 
 box to a distance of several hundred miles from Cuzco. 
 ‘There the creator commanded them to settle, and there, 
 like Pund-jel in Australia, he made clay images of 
 men of all races, attired in their national dress, and 
 then animated them. They were all fashioned and 
 painted as correct models, and were provided with their 
 national songs and with seed-corn. They then were 
 put into the earth, and emerged all over the world at 
 the proper places, some (as in Africa and Greece) coming 
 out of fountains, some out of trees, some out of caves. 
 For this reason they made hwacas (worshipful objects 
 or fetishes) of the trees, caves and fountains. Some 
 
 1 Rites and Laws of the Ynceas, p. 4, Hakluyt Society, 1873. 
 
202 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 of the earliest men were changed into stones, others 
 into falcons, condors and other creatures which we 
 know were totems in Peru. Probably this myth of 
 metamorphosis was invented to account for the rever- 
 ence paid to totems or pacarissas asthe Peruvians called 
 them. In Tiahuanaco, where the creation, or rather 
 manufacture of men took place, the creator turned many: 
 sinners into stones. The sun was made in the shape 
 of a man, and, as he soared into heaven, he called out 
 in a friendly fashion to Manco Ceapac, the Ideal first 
 Inca, ‘‘ Look upon me as thy father, and worship me 
 as thy father”. In these fables the creator is called 
 Pachyachachi, ‘‘ Teacher of the world”. According to 
 Christoval, the creator and his sons were ‘‘ eternal and 
 unchangeable”. Among the Canaris men descend 
 from the survivor of the deluge, and a beautiful bird 
 with the face of a woman, a siren in fact, but known 
 better to ornithologists as a macaw. ‘‘'The chief cause,” 
 says the good Christoval, “ of these fables was ignorance 
 of God.” — 
 
 The story, as told by Cieza de Leon, runs thus:! 
 A white man of great stature (in fact, ‘‘a magnified 
 non-natural man’’) came into the world, and gave 
 life to beasts and human beings. His name was 
 Ticiviracocha, and he was called the Father of the 
 Sun.? There are likenesses of him in the temple, and 
 he was regarded as a moral teacher. It was owing 
 apparently to this benevolent being that four mys- 
 terious brothers and sisters emerged from a cave— 
 
 1 Second Part of the Chronicles of Peru, p 5. 
 2See Making of Religion, pp. 265-270. Name and God are much dis- 
 
 puted. 
 
PERUVIAN MYTHS. 2038 
 
 Children of the Sun, fathers of the Incas, teachers of 
 savage men. Their own conduct, however, was not 
 exemplary, and they shut up in a hole in the earth the 
 brother of whom they were jealous. This incident is 
 even more common in the mdrchen or household tales 
 than in the regular tribal or national myths of the 
 world. The buried brother emerged again with wings, 
 and “‘ without doubt he must have been some devil,” 
 says honest Cieza de Leon. This brother was Manco 
 Ceapace, the heroic ancestor of the Incas, and he turned 
 his jealous brethren into stones. The whole tale is in 
 the spirit illustrated by the wilder romances of the 
 Popol Vuh. 
 
 Garcilasso gives three forms of thismyth. Accord- 
 ing to “the old Inca,’”’ his maternal uncle, it was the 
 sun which sent down two of his children, giving them 
 a golden staff, which would sink into the ground at 
 the place where they were to rest from wandering. 
 It sank at Lake Titicaca. About the current myths 
 Garcilasso says generally that they were “more like 
 dreams” than straightforward stories; but, as he adds, 
 the Greeks and Romans also “invented fables worthy 
 to be laughed at, and in greater number than the 
 Indians. The stories of one age of heathenism may 
 be compared with those of the other, and in many 
 points they will be found to agree.’’ This critical 
 position of Garcilasso’s will be proved correct when 
 we reach the myths of Greeks and Indo-Aryans. The 
 myth as narrated north-east of Cuzco speaks of the 
 four brothers and four sisters who came out of caves, 
 
 1 The story of Joseph and the mdrchen of Jean de l’ Ours are well-known 
 examples. 
 
204. MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 and the caves in Inca times were panelled with gold 
 and silver. 
 
 Athwart all these lower myths, survivals from the 
 Savage stage, comes what Garcilasso regards as the 
 philosophical Inca belief in Pachacamac. This deity, 
 to Garcilasso’s mind, was purely spiritual: he had no 
 image and dwelt in no temple; in fact, he is that very 
 God whom the Spanish missionaries proclaimed. his 
 view, though the fact has been doubted, was very 
 probably held by the Amautas, or philosophical class 
 in Peru.’ Cieza de Leon says “the name of this devil, 
 Pachacamac, means creator of the world”. Garcilasso 
 urges that Pachacamac was the animus mundi ; that 
 he did not “make the world,” as Pund-jel and other 
 savage demiurges made it, but that he was to the 
 universe what the soul is to the body. 
 
 Here we find ourselves, if among myths at all, among 
 the myths of metaphysics—rational myths; that. is, 
 myths corresponding to our present stage of thought, 
 and therefore intelligible to us. Pachacamac “made 
 the sun, and lightning, and thunder, and of these the 
 sun was worshipped by the Incas’’, Garcilasso denies 
 that the moon was worshipped. The reflections of 
 the sceptical or monotheistic Inca, who declared that 
 the sun, far from being a free agent, ‘seems like a 
 thing held to its task,” are reported by Garcilasso, and 
 appear to prove that solar worship was giving way, in 
 the minds of educated Peruvians, a hundred years 
 before the arrival of Pizarro and Valverde with his 
 missal,? 
 
 1Com. Real., vol..i. p. 106. 
 2 Garcilasso, viii. 8, quoting Blas Valera, 
 
GREECE AND PERU. 205 
 
 From this summary it appears that the higher 
 Peruvian religion had wrested to its service, and to 
 the dynastic purposes of the Incas, a native myth of 
 the familiar class, in which men come ready made out 
 of holes in the ground. But in Peru we do not find 
 nearly such abundance of other savage origin myths 
 as will be proved to exist in the legends of Greeks and 
 Indo-Aryans. The reason probably is that Peru left 
 no native literature ; the missionaries disdained stories 
 of ‘‘ devils,’ and Garcilasso’s common sense and 
 patriotism were alike revolted by the incidents of 
 stories “more like dreams” than truthfulrecords. He 
 therefore was silent about them. In Greece and India, 
 on the other hand, the native religious literature pre- 
 served myths of the making of man out of clay, of his 
 birth from trees and stones, of the fashioning of things 
 out of the fragments of mutilated gods and Titans, of 
 the cosmic egg, of the rending and wounding of a 
 personal heaven and a personal earth, of the fishing up 
 from the waters of a tiny earth which grew greater, 
 of the development of men out of beasts, with a dozen 
 other such notions as are familiar to contemporary 
 Bushmen, Australians, Digger Indians, and Cahrocs. 
 But in Greece and India these ideas coexist with 
 myths and religious beliefs as purely spiritual and 
 metaphysical as the belief in the Pachacamac of Garci- 
 lasso and the Amautas of Peru. 
 
206 
 
 CLIAPTER VII. 
 
 INDO-ARYAN MYTHS—SOURCES OF EVIDENCE. 
 
 Authorities—Vedas—Brahmanas—Social condition of Vedic India—Arts— 
 Ranks—War—Vedic fetishism—Ancestor worship—Date of Rig-Veda 
 Hymns doubtful—Obscurity of the Hymns—Difficulty of interpreting 
 the real character of Veda—Not primitive but sacerdotal—The moral 
 purity not innocence but refinement. 
 
 BEFORE examining the myths of the Aryans of India, 
 it is necessary to have a clear notion of the nature of 
 the evidence from which we derive our knowledge of 
 the subject. That evidence is found in a large and 
 incongruous mass of literary documents, the heritage 
 of the Indian people. In this mass are extremely 
 ancient texts (the Rig-Veda, and the Atharva-Veda), 
 expository comments of a date so much later that the 
 original meaning of the older documents was sometimes 
 lost (the Brahmanas), and poems and legendary collec- 
 tions of a period later still, a period when the whole 
 character of religious thought had sensibly altered. In 
 this literature there is indeed a certain continuity ; the 
 names of several gods of the earliest time are preserved 
 in the legends of the latest. But the influences of 
 many centuries of change, of contending philosophies, 
 of periods of national growth and advance, and of 
 national decadence and decay, have been at work on 
 the mythology of India. Here we have myths that 
 
INDIAN TEXTS. 207 
 
 were perhaps originally popular tales, and are probably 
 old; here again, we have later legends that certainly 
 were conceived in the narrow minds of a pedantic and 
 ceremonious priesthood. It is not possible, of course, 
 to analyse in this place all the myths of all the 
 periods; we must be content to point out some which 
 seem to be typical examples of the working of the 
 human intellect in its earlier or its later childhood, in 
 its distant hours of barbaric beginnings, or in the | 
 senility of its sacerdotage. 
 
 The documents which contain Indian mythology 
 may be divided, broadly speaking, into four classes. 
 First, and most ancient in date of composition, are the 
 collections of hymns known as the Vedas. Next, and 
 (as far as date of collection goes) far less ancient, are 
 the expository texts called the Brahmanas. Later 
 still, come other manuals of devotion and of sacred 
 learning, called Sutras and Upanishads ; and last are 
 the epic poems (Jtihasas), and the books of legends 
 called Puranas. We are chiefly concerned here with 
 the Vedas and Brahmanas. A gulf of time, a period of 
 social and literary change, separates the Brahmanas 
 from the Vedas. But the epics and Puranas differ per- 
 haps even still more from the Brahmanas, on account of 
 vast religious changes which brought new gods into 
 the Indian Olympus, or elevated to the highest place 
 old gods formerly of low degree. From the composi- 
 tion of the first Vedic hymn to the compilation of the 
 
 _latest Purana, religious and mythopceic fancy was 
 
 never at rest. 
 Various motives induced various poets to assign, on 
 various occasions, the highest powers to this or the 
 
208 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 other god. The most antique legends were probably 
 omitted or softened by some early Vedic bard (Rishi) of 
 noble genius, or again impure myths were brought 
 from the obscurity of oral circulation and foisted into 
 literature by some poet less divinely inspired. Old 
 deities were half-forgotten, and forgotten deities were 
 resuscitated. Sages shook off superstitious bonds, 
 priests forged new fetters on ancient patterns for 
 themselves and their flocks. Philosophy explained 
 away the more degrading myths; myths as degrading 
 were suggested to dark and servile hearts by un- 
 scientific etymologies. Over the whole mass of ancient 
 mythology the new mythology of a debased Brahmanic 
 ritualism grew like some luxurious and baneful parasite, 
 It is enough for our purpose if we can show that even 
 in the purest and most antique mythology of India 
 the element of traditional savagery survived and played 
 its part, and that the irrational legends of the Vedas and 
 Brahmanas can often be explained as relics of savage 
 philosophy or faith, or as novelties planned on the 
 ancient savage model, whether borrowed or native 
 to the race. 
 
 The oldest documents of Indian mythology are the 
 Vedas, usually reckoned as four in number. The 
 oldest, again, of the four, is the Sanita (“ collection ”) 
 of the Rig-Veda. It is a purely lyrical assortment of 
 the songs “ which the Hindus brought with them from 
 their ancient homes on the banks of the Indus”. In 
 the manuscripts, the hymns are classified according 
 to the families of poets to whom they are ascribed. 
 Though composed on the banks of the Indus by sacred 
 bards, the hymns were compiled and arranged in India 
 
TEXTS. 209 
 
 proper. At what date the oldest hymns of which this 
 collection is made up were first chanted it is impossible 
 to say with even approximate certainty. Opinions 
 differ, or have differed, between 2400 B.c. and 1400 B.c. 
 as the period when the earliest sacred lyrics of the 
 Veda may first have been listened by gods and men. 
 In addition to the Rig-Veda we have the Sanhita of 
 the Sama-Veda, “an anthology taken from the Rek- 
 Samhita, comprising those of its verses which were 
 intended to be chanted at the ceremonies of the soma 
 sacrifice”! It is conjectured that the hymns of the 
 Sama-Veda were borrowed from the Rig- Veda before 
 the latter had been edited and stereotyped into its 
 present form. Next comes the Yajur-Veda, “which 
 contains the formulas for the entire sacrificial cere- 
 monial, and indeed forms its proper foundations,” the 
 other Vedas being devoted to the soma sacrifice.” The 
 Yajur-Veda has two divisions, known as the Black 
 and the White Yajur, which have common matter, but 
 differ in arrangement. The Black Yajur-Veda is also 
 called the Taittirya, and it is described as “a motley 
 undigested jumble of different pieces”.* Last comes 
 Atharva- Veda, not always regarded as a Veda properly 
 speaking. It derives its name from an old semi- 
 mythical priestly family, the Atharvans, and is full of 
 magical formule, imprecations, folk-lore and spells. 
 There are good reasons for thinking this late as a 
 
 1 Weber, History of Indian Literature, Eng. transl., p. 63. 
 
 2 Tbid., p. 86. 
 
 8 Ibid., p.87. The name Taittirya is derived from a partridge, or from 
 a Rishi named Partridge in Sanskrit. There is a story that the pupils of a 
 sage were turned into partridges, to pick up sacred texts. 
 
 VOL. I. 14 
 
210 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 collection, however early may be the magical ideas 
 expressed in its contents.} 
 
 Between the Vedas, or, at all events, between the 
 ‘oldest of the Vedas, and the compilation of the Brah- 
 manas, these “canonised explanations of a canonised 
 text,’ it is probable that some centuries and many 
 social changes intervened.’ 
 
 If we would criticise the documents for Indian 
 mythology in a scientific manner, it is now necessary 
 that we should try to discover, as far as possible, the 
 social and religious condition of the people among 
 whom the Vedas took shape. Were they in any sense 
 “primitive,” or were they civilised? Was their re- 
 ligion in its obscure beginnings or was it already a 
 special and peculiar development, the fruit of many 
 ages of thought? Now it is an unfortunate thing 
 that scholars have constantly, and as it were involun- 
 tarily, drifted into the error of regarding the Vedas as 
 if they were “ primitive,” as if they exhibited to us the 
 “germs ” and “ genesis ” of religion and mythology, as if 
 they contained the simple though strange utterances 
 of primitive thought.*| Thus Mr. Whitney declares, 
 in his Oriental and LInnguistie Studies, “that the 
 Vedas exhibit to us the very earliest germs of the 
 
 1 Barth (Les Religions de l' Inde, p. 6) thinks that the existence of such 
 a collection as the Atharva- Veda is implied, perhaps, in a text of the Rig- 
 Veda, x. 90, 9. 
 
 2 Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic Studies, First Series, p. 4. 
 
 3Max Miiller, Biographical Essays, p. 20. ‘‘The prose portions pre- 
 suppose the hymns, and, to judge from the utter inability of the authors of 
 the Brahmanas to understand the antiquated language of the hymns, these 
 Brahmanas must be ascribed to a much later period than that which gave 
 birth to the hymns.” 
 
 4 Ibid., Rig-Veda Sanhita, p. vii. 
 
Be eae ee ee ee ee 
 
 SE Ee eee eT eee 
 
 a ee 
 
 3 
 i 
 - 
 
 n 
 > 
 
 DATES OF TEXTS. 211 
 
 Hindu culture”. Mr. Max Miiller avers that “no 
 country can be compared to India as offering oppor- 
 tunities for a real study of the genesis and growth of 
 religion’. Yet the same scholar observes that “ even 
 the earliest specimens of Vedic poetry belong to the 
 modern history of the race, and that the early period 
 of the historical growth of religion had passed away 
 before the Rishis (bards) could have worshipped their 
 Devas or bright beings with sacred hymns and invoca- 
 tions”. Though this is manifestly true, the sacred 
 hymns and invocations of the Rishis are constantly 
 used as testimony bearing on the beginning of the 
 historical growth of religion Nay, more; these 
 remains of “the modern history of the race” are 
 supposed to exhibit mythology in the process of mak- 
 ing, as if the race had possessed no mythology before 
 it reached a comparatively modern period, the Vedic 
 age. In the same spirit, Dr. Muir, the learned editor 
 of Sanskrit Texts, speaks in one place as if the Vedic 
 hymns “ illustrated the natural workings of the human 
 mind in the period of its infancy”.? A brief examina- 
 tion of the social and political and religious condition 
 of man, as described by the poets of the Vedas, will 
 prove that his infancy had long been left behind him 
 when the first Vedic hymns were chanted 
 
 As Barth observes, the very ideas which permeate 
 
 1 Hibbert Lectures, p. 131. 
 
 2 Nothing can prove more absolutely and more briefly the late character 
 of Vedic faith than the fact that the faith had already to be defended against 
 the attacks of sceptics. The impious denied the existence of Indra because 
 he was invisible. Rig-Veda, ii. 12, 5; viii. 89,3; v. 30, 1-2; vi. 27, 8 
 Bergaigne, ii. 167. ‘‘ Es gibt keinen Indra, so hat der eine und der ander 
 gesagt ’’ (Ludwig’s version). 
 
912 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 the Veda, the idea of the mystic efficacy of sacrifice, 
 of brahma, prove that the poems are profoundly 
 sacerdotal; and this should have given pause to the 
 writers who have persisted in representing the hymns 
 as the work of primitive shepherds praising their gods 
 as they feed their flocks In the Vedic age the ranks 
 of society are already at least as clearly defined as in 
 Homeric Greece. ‘‘ We men,” says a poet of the Rig- 
 Veda,? “have all our different imaginations and designs. 
 The carpenter seeks something that is broken, the 
 doctor a patient, the priest some one who will offer 
 libations. . . . The artisan continually seeks after 
 a man with plenty of gold....I am a poet, my 
 father is a doctor, and my mother is a grinder of corn.” 
 Chariots and the art of the chariot-builder are as 
 frequently spoken of as in the Jliad. Spears, swords, 
 axes and coats of mail were in common use. The art 
 of boat-building or of ship-building was well known. 
 Kine and horses, sheep and dogs, had long been 
 domesticated. The bow was a favourite weapon, and 
 warriors fought in chariots, like the Homeric Greeks 
 and the Egyptians. Weaving was commonly practised. 
 The people probably lived, as a rule, in village settle- 
 ments, but cities or fortified places were by no means 
 unknown.? As for political society, ‘“‘kings are 
 frequently mentioned in the hymns,” and “it was 
 
 1 Les Religions de I’ Inde, p. 27. 2ix. 112. 
 
 8 Ludwig, Rig-Veda, iii. 203. The burgs were fortified with wooden 
 palisades, capable of being destroyed by fire. ‘‘Cities” may be too 
 magnificent a word for what perhaps were more like pahs. But compare 
 Kaegi, The Rig-Veda, note 42, Engl. transl. Kaegi’s book (translated by 
 Dr. Arrowsmith, Boston, U.S., 1886) is probably the best short manual of 
 the subject. 
 
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 7 
 
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 4 
 rd 
 = 
 P 
 
 NOT PRIMITIVE. 213 
 
 regarded as eminently beneficial for a king to entertain 
 a family priest,” on whom he was expected to confer 
 thousands of kine, lovely slaves and lumps of gold. In 
 the family polygamy existed, probably as the exception. 
 There is reason to suppose that the brother-in-law 
 was permitted, if not expected, to ‘‘raise up seed” 
 to his dead brother, as among the Hebrews.! As to 
 literature, the very structure of the hymns proves that 
 it was elaborate and consciously artistic. M. Barth 
 writes: ‘‘ It would be a great mistake to speak of the 
 primitive naiveté of the Vedic poetry and religion”’. 
 Both the poetry and the religion, on the other hand, dis- 
 play in the highest degree the mark of the sacerdotal 
 spirit. The myths, though originally derived from 
 nature-worship, in an infinite majority of cases only 
 reflect natural phenomena through a veil of ritualistic 
 corruptions.’ The rigid division of castes is seldom 
 recognised in the fig-Veda. We seem to see caste 
 in the making.* The Rishis and priests of the princely 
 families were on their way to becoming the all- 
 
 1 Deut. xxv. 5; Matt. xxii. 24. 
 
 2 Revue de l Histoire des Religions, i. 245. 3 Ludwig, iii. 262. 
 
 4On this subject see Muir, i. 192, with the remarks of Haug. ‘‘ From 
 all we know, the real origin of caste seems to go back to a time anterior to 
 the composition of the Vedic hymns, though its development into a regular 
 system with insurmountable barriers can be referred only to the later period 
 of the Vedic times.’’ Roth approaches the subject from the word brahm, 
 that is, prayer with a mystical efficacy, as his starting-point. From brahm, 
 prayer, came brahma, he who pronounces the prayers and performs the rite. 
 This celebrant developed into a priest, whom to entertain brought blessings 
 on kings. This domestic chaplaincy (conferring peculiar and even super- 
 natural benefits) became hereditary in families, and these, united by com- 
 mon interests, exalted themselves into the Brahman caste: But in the 
 Vedic age gifts of prayer and poetry alone marked out the purohitas, 
 
 or men put forward to mediate between gods and mortals. Compare 
 Ludwig, iii, 221. 
 
214 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 powerful Brahmans. The kings and princes were on 
 their way to becoming the caste of Kshatriyas or 
 warriors. The mass of the people was soon to sink 
 into the caste of Vaisyas and broken men. Non-Aryan 
 aborigines and others were possibly developing into 
 the caste of Sudras. Thus the spirit of division and of 
 ceremonialism had still some of its conquests to achieve. 
 But the extraordinary attention given and the immense 
 importance assigned to the details of sacrifice, and the 
 supernatural efficacy constantly attributed to a sort of 
 magical asceticism (tapas, austere fervour), prove that 
 the worst and most foolish elements of later Indian 
 society and thought were in the Vedic age already in 
 powerful existence. 
 
 Thus it is self-evident that the society in which the 
 Vedic poets lived was so far from being primitive 
 that it was even superior to the higher barbarisms 
 (such as that of the Scythians of Herodotus and 
 Germans of Tacitus), and might be regarded as safely 
 arrived at the threshold of civilisation. Society 
 possessed kings, though they may have been kings of 
 small communities, like those who warred with Joshua 
 or fought under the walls of Thebes or Troy. Poets 
 were better paid than they seem to have been at the 
 courts of Homer or are at the present time. For the 
 tribal festivals special priests were appointed, ‘‘ who 
 distinguished themselves by their comprehensive know- 
 ledge of the requisite rites and by their learning, and 
 amongst whom a, sort of rivalry is gradually developed, 
 according as one tribe or another is supposed to have 
 more or less prospered by its sacrifices’) In the 
 
 1 Weber, p. 37. 
 
RISHIS. 215 
 
 family marriage is sacred, and traces of polyandry 
 and of the levirate, surviving as late as the epic 
 poems, were regarded as things that need to be 
 explained away. Perhaps the most barbaric feature 
 in Vedic society, the most singular relic of a distant 
 past, is the survival, even in a modified and symbolic 
 form, of human sacrifice.? 
 
 As to the religious condition of the Vedic Aryans, 
 we must steadily remember that in the Vedas we have 
 the views of the Rishis only, that is, of sacred poets 
 on their way to becoming a sacred caste. Necessarily 
 they no more represent the popular creeds than the 
 psalmists and prophets, with their lofty monotheistic 
 morality, represent the popular creeds of Israel. The 
 faith of the Rishis, as will be shown later, like that 
 of the psalmists, has a noble moral aspect. Yet certain 
 elements of this higher creed are already found in the 
 faiths of the lowest savages. The Rishis probably 
 did not actually invent them. Consciousness of sin, 
 of imperfection in the sight of divine beings, has been 
 developed (as it has even in Australia) and is often 
 confessed. But on the whole the religion of the 
 Rishis is practical—it might almost be said, is magical. 
 They desire temporal blessings, rain, sunshine, long 
 life, power, wealth in flocks and herds. The whole 
 purpose of the sacrifices which occupy 80 much of 
 their time and thought is to obtain these good things. 
 The sacrifice and the sacrificer come between gods and 
 men. On the man’s side is faith, munificence, a 
 
 1Wilson, Rig-Veda, i. p. 59-63; Muir, i. ii. ; Wilson, Rig-Veda i. p. 
 xxiv., ii. 8 (ii. 90); Aitareya Brahmana, Haug’s version, vol. ii. pp. 462, 
 469. 
 
216 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 compelling force of prayer and of intentness of will. 
 The sacrifice invigorates the gods to do the will of 
 the sacrificer ; it is supposed to be mystically cele- 
 brated in heaven as well as on earth—the gods are 
 always sacrificing. Often (as when rain is wanted) 
 the sacrifice imitates the end which it is desirable to 
 gain.' In all these matters a minute ritual is already 
 observed. The mystic word brahma, in the sense of 
 hymn or prayer of a compelling and magical efficacy, 
 has already come into use. The brahma answers 
 almost to the Maori karakia or incantation and charm. 
 “This brahma of Visvamitra protects the tribe of 
 Bharata.” ‘‘ Atri with the fourth prayer discovered 
 the sun concealed by unholy darkness.” The com- 
 plicated ritual, in which prayer and sacrifice were 
 supposed to exert a constraining influence on the 
 supernatural powers, already existed, Haug thinks, 
 in the time of the chief Rishis or hymnists of the 
 Rig-Veda.* 
 
 In many respects the nature of the idea of the divine, 
 as entertained by the Rishis of the Rig-Veda, is still 
 matter for discussion. In the chapter on Vedic gods 
 such particulars as can be ascertained will be given. 
 Roughly speaking, the religion is mainly, though not 
 wholly, a cult of departmental gods, originally, in 
 certain cases, forces of Nature, but endowed with 
 moral earnestness. As to fetishism in the Vedas the 
 
 1Compare ‘“‘The Prayers of Savages’? in J. A. Farrer’s Primitive 
 Manners, and Ludwig, iii. 262-296, and see Bergaigne, Za Religion 
 Védique, vol. i. p. 121. 
 
 2See texts in Muir, i. 242, 
 ’ Preface to translation of Aitareya Brahmana, p. 36, 
 
 ‘ 
 
y 
 
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 p 
 ; 
 mn 
 Y 
 A 
 fe 
 f 
 : 
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 i : 
 
 FETISHES. O17 
 
 opinions of the learned are divided. M. Bergaigne? 
 looks on the whole ritual as, practically, an organised 
 fetishism, employed to influence gods of a far higher 
 and purer character. Mr Max Miller remarks, “that 
 stones, bones, shells, herbs and all the other so-called 
 fetishes, are simply absent in the old hymns, though 
 they appear in more modern hymns, particularly those 
 of the Atharva-Veda. When artificial objects are 
 mentioned and celebrated in the Rig-Veda, they are 
 only such as might be praised even by Wordsworth or 
 Tennyson—chariots, bows, quivers, axes, drums, sacri- 
 ficial vessels and similar objects. They never assume 
 any individual character ; they are simply mentioned 
 as useful or precious, it may be as sacred.’’? 
 
 When the existence of fetish “herbs” is denied by 
 Mr. Max Miller, he does not, of course, forget Soma, 
 that divine juice. It is also to be noted that in modern 
 India, as Mr. Max Miiller himself observes, Sir Alfred 
 Lyall finds that ‘‘ the husbandman prays to his plough 
 and the fisher to his net,” these objects being, at 
 present, fetishes. In opposition to Mr. Max Miller, 
 Barth avers that the same kind of fetishism which 
 flourishes to-day flourishes in the kig-Veda. ‘‘ Moun- 
 tains, rivers, springs, trees, herbs are invoked as so 
 many powers. The beasts which live with man—the 
 horse, the cow, the dog, the bird and the animals 
 which imperil his existence—receive a cult of praise 
 and prayer. Among the instruments of ritual, some 
 objects are more than things consecrated—they are 
 
 1 Za Religion Védique, vol. i. p. 123. ‘* Le culte est assimilable dang 
 une certaine mesure aux incantations, aux pratiques magiques,” 
 2 Hibbert Lectures, p. 198, 
 
218 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 divinities ; and the war-chariot, the weapons of defence 
 and offence, the plough, are the objects not only 
 of benedictions but of prayers.”! These absolute 
 contradictions on matters of fact add, of course, to 
 the difficulty of understanding the early Indo-Aryan 
 religion. One authority says that the Vedic people 
 were fetish-worshippers; another authority denies it. 
 
 Were the Rishis ancestor-worshippers? Barth has 
 no doubt whatever that they were. In the prtris or 
 fathers he recognises ancestral spirits, now “ com- 
 panions of the gods, and gods themselves. At their 
 head appear the earliest celebrants of the sacrifice, 
 _Atharvan, the Angiras, the Kavis (the pitris, par 
 excellence) equals of the greatest gods, spirits who, by 
 dint of sacrifice, drew forth the world from chaos, gave 
 birth to the sun and lighted the stars,”—cosmical 
 feats which, as we have seen, are sometimes attributed 
 by the lower races to their idealised mythic ancestors, 
 the ‘old, old ones” of Australians and Ovahereroes. 
 
 A few examples of invocations of the ancestral 
 spirits may not be out of place.* ‘‘ May the Fathers 
 protect me in my invocation of the gods.” Here is a 
 curious case, especially when we remember how the 
 wolf, in the North American myth, scattered the stars 
 like spangles over the sky: ‘‘ The fathers have adorned 
 the sky with stars ”.® 
 
 1 Barth, Les Religions de V Inde, p. 7, with the Vedic texts, 
 
 2 Rig- Veda, vi. 52, 4. 
 
 3 Ibid., x. 68, xi. 
 
 Mr. Whitney (Oriental and Linguistic Studies, First Series, p. 59) gives 
 examples of the ceremony of feeding the Aryan ghosts. ‘‘ The fathers are 
 supposed to assemble, upon due invocation, about the altar of him who 
 would pay them homage, to seat themselves upon the straw or matting 
 
MIXTURE OF IDEAS. 219 
 
 Important as is the element of ancestor-worship 
 in the evolution of religion, Mr. Max Miiller, in his 
 Hibbert Lectures, merely remarks that thoughts and 
 feelings about the dead ‘‘ supplied some of the earliest 
 and most important elements of religion”; but how 
 these earliest elements affect his system does not 
 appear. On a general view, then, the religion of the 
 Vedic poets contained a vast number of elements in 
 solution—elements such as meet us in every quarter 
 of the globe. The belief in ancestral ghosts, the 
 adoration of fetishes, the devotion to a moral ideal, 
 contemplated in the persons of various deities, some 
 of whom at least have been, and partly remain, per- 
 sonal natural forces, are all mingled, and all are drifting 
 towards a kind of pantheism, in which, while every- 
 thing is divine, and gods are reckoned by millions, the 
 worshipper has glimpses of one single divine essence. 
 The ritual, as we have seen, is more or less magical 
 in character. The general elements of the beliefs are 
 found, in various proportions, everywhere; the pan- 
 theistic mysticism is almost peculiar to India. It is, 
 perhaps, needless to repeat that a faith so very com- 
 posite, and already so strongly differentiated, cannot 
 possibly be ‘‘ primitive,” and that the beliefs and 
 practices of a race so highly organised in society and 
 so well equipped in material civilisation as the Vedic 
 Aryans cannot possibly be “near the beginning”. 
 Far from expecting to find in the Veda the primitive 
 myths of the Aryans, we must remember that myth 
 had already, when these hymns were sung, become 
 
 spread for each of the guests invited, and to partake of the offerings set 
 before them.” The food seems chiefly to consist ofrice, sesame and honey. 
 
220 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 obnoxious to the religious sentiment. “Thus,” writes 
 Barth, “the authors of the hymns have expurgated, 
 or at least left in the shade, a vast number of legends 
 older than their time; such, for example, as the 
 identity of soma with the moon, as the account of the 
 divine families, of the parricide of Indra, and a long 
 list might be made of the reticences of the Veda. . . 
 It would be difficult to extract from the hymns a 
 chapter on the loves of the gods. The goddesses are 
 veiled, the adventures of the gods are scarcely touched 
 on in passing. ... We must allow for the moral 
 delicacy of the singers, and for their dislike of speak- 
 ing too precisely about the gods. Sometimes it seems 
 as if their chief object was to avoid plain speaking. 
 .. . But often there is nothing save jargon and in- 
 dolence of mind in this voluntary obscurity, for 
 already in the Veda the Indian intellect is deeply 
 smitten with its inveterate malady of affecting mys- 
 tery the more, the more it has nothing to conceal ; 
 the mania for scattering symbols which symbolise no 
 reality, and for sporting with riddles which it is not 
 worth while to divine.’’! Barth, however, also re- 
 cognises amidst these confusions, “the inquietude of a 
 heart deeply stirred, which seeks truth and redemp- 
 tion in prayer”. Such is the natural judgment of 
 the clear French intellect on the wilfully obscure, 
 tormented and evasive intellect of India. 
 
 It would be interesting were it possible to illuminate 
 the criticism of Vedic religion by ascertaining which 
 hymns in the Rig-Veda are the most ancient, and 
 which are later. Could we do this, we might draw 
 
 1 Les Religions de Inde, p. 21. 
 
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VEDAS. 221 
 
 inferences as to the comparative antiquity of the 
 religious ideas in the poems. But no such discrimina- 
 tion of relative antiquity seems to be within the reach 
 of critics. M. Bergaigne thinks it impossible at present 
 to determine the relative age of the hymns by any 
 philological test. The ideas expressed are not more 
 easily arrayed in order of date. We might think that 
 the poems which contain most ceremonial allusions were 
 the latest. But Mr. Max Miiller says that ‘‘ even the 
 earliest hymns have sentiments worthy of the most 
 advanced ceremorialists ”.! 
 
 The first and oldest source of our knowledge of 
 Indo-Aryan myths is the fag- Veda, whose nature 
 and character have been described. The second 
 source is the Atharva-Veda with the Brahmanas. 
 The peculiarity of the Atharva is its collection of 
 magical incantations spells and fragments of folk- 
 lore. These are often, doubtless, of the highest 
 antiquity. Sorcery and the arts of medicine-men are 
 earlier in the course of evolution than priesthood. 
 We meet them everywhere among races who have not 
 developed the institution of an order of priests serving 
 national gods. As a collection, the Atharva-Veda is 
 later than the Rig-Veda, but we need not therefore 
 conclude that the ideas of the Atharva are ‘a later 
 development of the more primitive ideas of the Rig- 
 Veda”. Magic is quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab 
 omnibus; the ideas of the Atharva-Veda are every- 
 where; the peculiar notions of the Rig-Veda are the 
 special property of an advanced and highly differen- 
 tiated people. Even in the present collected shape, 
 
 1 History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 556. 
 
222, MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 M. Barth thinks that many hymns of the Atharva 
 are not much later than those of the Rig-Veda. Mr. 
 Whitney, admitting the lateness of the Atharva as a 
 collection, says, “ This would not necessarily imply that 
 the main body of the Atharva hymns were not already 
 in existence when the compilation of the Rig-Veda 
 took place”. The Atharva refers to some poets of the 
 Rig (as certain hymnists in the Rig also do) as earlier 
 men. If in the Rig (as Weber says) ‘‘ there breathes 
 a lively natural feeling, a warm love of nature, while 
 in the Atharva, on the contrary, there predominates 
 an anxious apprehension of evil spirits and their 
 magical powers,” it by no means follows that this 
 apprehension is of later origin than the lively feeling 
 for Nature. Rather thereverse. There appears to be 
 no doubt ? that the style and language of the Atharva 
 are later than those of the Rig. Roth, who recognises 
 the change in language and style, yet considers the 
 Atharva ‘‘ part of the old literature”. He concludes 
 that the Atharva contains many pieces which, “‘ both 
 by their style and ideas, are shown to be contempor- 
 ary with the older hymns of the Rig-Veda”. In 
 religion, according to Muir,* the Atharva shows pro- 
 gress in the direction of monotheism in its celebration 
 of Brahman, but it also introduces serpent-worship. 
 As to the Atharva, then, we are free to suppose, if we 
 like, that the dark magic, the evil spirits, the incan- 
 tations, are old parts of Indian, as of all other popular 
 beliefs, though they come later into literature than 
 the poetry about Ushas and the morality of Varuna. 
 
 1 Journal of the American Oriental Society, iv. 253. 
 * Muir, ii. 446, 3 Ibid., ii, 448. 4 Ibid., ii. 451, 
 
BRAHMANAS. 293 
 
 The same remarks apply to our third source of infor- 
 mation, the Brahmanas. These are indubitably com- 
 ments on the sacred texts very much more modern in 
 form than the texts themselves. But it does not 
 follow, and this is most important for our purpose, 
 that the myths in the Brahmanas are all later than 
 the Vedic myths or corruptions of the Veda. Muir 
 remarks,’ “The Rig- Veda, though the oldest collection, 
 does not necessarily contain everything that is of the 
 greatest age in Indian thought or tradition. We 
 know, for example, that certain legends, bearing the 
 impress of the highest antiquity, such as that of the 
 deluge, appear first in the Brahmanas.” We are 
 especially interested in this criticism, because most of 
 the myths which we profess to explain as survivals of 
 Savagery are narrated in the Brahmanas. If these are 
 necessarily late corruptions of Vedic ideas, because 
 the collection of the Brahmanas is far more modern 
 than that of the Veda, our argument is instantly 
 disproved. But if ideas of an earlier stratum of 
 thought than the Vedic stratum may appear in a later 
 collection, as ideas of an earlier stratum of thought 
 than the Homeric appear in poetry and prose far later 
 than Homer, then our contention is legitimate. It 
 will be shown in effect that a number of myths of the 
 Brahmanas correspond in character and incident with 
 the myths of savages, such as Cahrocs and Ahts. Our 
 explanation is, that these tales partly survived, in the 
 minds perhaps of conservative local priesthoods, from 
 the savage stage of thought, or were borrowed from 
 aborigines in that stage, or were moulded in more 
 1 Muir, iv. 450, 
 
22.4 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 recent times on surviving examples of that wild early 
 fancy. 
 
 In the age of the Brahmanas the people have spread 
 southwards from the basin of the Indus to that of the 
 Ganges. The old sacred texts have begun to be scarcely 
 comprehensible. The priesthood has become much 
 more strictly defined and more rigorously constituted. 
 Absurd as it may seem, the Vedic metres, like the 
 Gayatri, have been personified, and appear as active 
 heroines of stories presumably older than this persgni- 
 fication. The Asuras have descended from the rank 
 of gods to that of the heavenly opposition to Indra’s 
 government; they are now a kind of fiends, and the 
 Brahmanas are occupied with long stories about the 
 war in heaven, itself a very ancient conception. Varuna 
 ‘ becomes cruel on occasion, and hostile. Prajapati 
 becomes the great mythical hero, and inherits the 
 wildest myths of the savage heroic beasts and birds. 
 
 The priests are now Brahmans, a hereditary divine 
 caste, who possess all the vast and puerile knowledge 
 of ritual and sacrificial minutie. As life in the opera 
 is a series of songs, so life in the Brahmanas is a 
 sequence of sacrifices. Sacrifice makes the sun rise 
 and set, and the rivers run this way or that. 
 
 The study of Indian myth is obstructed, as has been 
 shown, by the difficulty of determining the relative 
 dates of the various legends, but there are a myriad of 
 other obstacles to the study of Indian mythology. A 
 poet of the Vedas says, “ The chanters of hymns go 
 about enveloped in mist, and unsatisfied with idle talk~ + 
 
 1 Rig-Veda, x. 82, 7, but compare Bergaigne, op. ctt., iii, 72, ‘* envel- 
 oppés de nuées et de murmures”’. 
 
DIFFICULTIES. 22.5 
 
 The ancient hymns are still “ enveloped in mist,” owing 
 to the difficulty of their language and the variety of 
 modern renderings and interpretations. The heretics of 
 Vedic religion, the opponents of the orthodox commen- 
 tators in ages comparatively recent, used to complain 
 that the Vedas were simply nonsense, and their authors 
 “knaves and buffoons”. There are moments when the 
 modern student of Vedic myths is inclined to echo this 
 petulant complaint. For example, it is difficult enough 
 to find in the Rig-Veda anything like a categoric 
 account of the gods, and a description of their personal 
 appearance. But in Rig- Veda, vill. 29, 1, we read of 
 one god, “a youth, brown, now hostile, now friendly ; 
 a golden lustre invests him”. Who is this youth? 
 Soma as the moon,” according to the commentators. 
 M. Langlois thinks the sun is meant. Dr. Autrecht 
 thinks the troop of Maruts (spirits of the storm), to 
 whom, he remarks, the epithet “ dark-brown, tawny ” 
 is as applicable as it is to their master, Rudra. This 
 is rather confusing, and a mythological inquirer would 
 like to know for certain whether he is reading about 
 the sun or soma, the moon, or the winds. 
 
 To take another example ; we open Mr. Max Miiller’s 
 translation of the Rig-Veda at random, say at page 49, 
 In the second verse of the hymn to the Maruts, Mr, 
 Miiller translates, “They who were born together, 
 self-luminous, with the spotted deer (the clouds), the 
 spears, the daggers, the glittering ornaments. | hear 
 their whips almost close by, as they crack them in 
 their hands; they gain splendour on their way.” 
 Now Wilson translates this passage, ‘‘ Who, borne by 
 spotted deer, were born self-luminous, with weapons, 
 
 VOL. I. 15 
 
226 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 war-cries and decorations. I hear the cracking of 
 their whips in their hands, wonderfully inspiring 
 courage in the fight.’’ Benfey has, ‘‘ Who with stags 
 and spears, and with thunder and lightning, self- 
 luminous, were born. Hard by rings the crack of 
 their whip as it sounds in their hands; bright fare 
 they down in storm.” Langlois translates, “Just born 
 are they, self-luminous. Mark ye their arms, their 
 decorations, their car drawn by deer? Hear ye their 
 clamour ? Listen! ’tis the noise of the whip they hold 
 in their hands, the sound that stirs up courage in the 
 battle.’ This is an ordinary example of the diversities 
 of Vedic translation. It is sufficiently puzzling, nor is 
 the matter made more transparent by the variety of 
 opinion as to the meaning of the “deer” along with 
 which the Maruts are said (by some of the translators) 
 to have been born. This is just the sort of passage on 
 which a controversy affecting the whole nature of Vedic 
 mythological ideas might be raised. According to a 
 text in the Yajur Veda, gods, and men, and beasts, 
 and other matters were created from various portions 
 of the frame of a divine being named Prajapati.! The 
 god Agni, Brahmans and the goat were born from the 
 mouth of Prajapati. From his breast and arms came 
 the god Indra (sometimes spoken of as a ram), the 
 sheep, and of men the Rajanya. Cows and gods called 
 Visvadevas were born together from his middle. Are 
 we to understand the words “they who were born 
 together with the spotted deer” to refer to a myth of 
 this kind—a myth representing the Maruts and deer 
 as having been born at the same birth, as Agni came 
 1 Muir, Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., i. 16, 
 
SOUL OR GOAT? 997 
 
 with the goat, and Indra with the sheep? This is just 
 the point on which the Indian commentators were 
 divided. Sayana, the old commentator, says, “The 
 legendary school takes them for deer with white spots ; 
 the etymological school, for the many-coloured lines of 
 clouds”. The modern legendary (or anthropological) 
 and etymological (or philological) students of myth- 
 ology are often as much at variance in their attempts to 
 interpret the traditions of India. 
 
 Another famous, and almost comic, example of the 
 difficulty of Vedic interpretation is well known. In 
 Rig-Veda, x. 16, 4, there is a funeral hymn. Agni, 
 the fire-god, is supplicated either to roast a goat or to 
 warm the soul of the dead and convey it to paradise. 
 Whether the soul is to be thus comforted or the goat 
 is to be grilled, is a question that has mightily puzzled 
 Vedic doctors.2 Professor Miiller and M. Langlois are 
 all for ‘‘the immortal soul’”’; the goat has advocates, 
 or had advocates, in Aufrecht, Ludwig and Roth. More 
 important difficulties of interpretation are illustrated by 
 the attitude of M. Bergaigne in La Religion Véedique, 
 and his controversy with the great German lexico- 
 graphers. The study of mythology at one time made 
 the Vedas its starting-point. But perhaps it would be 
 wise to begin from something more intelligible, some- 
 thing less perplexed by difficulties of language and 
 diversities of interpretation. 
 
 In attempting to criticise the various Aryan myths, 
 we shall be guided, on the whole, by the character of 
 the myths themselves. Pure and elevated conceptions 
 
 1Max Miiller, Rig-Veda Sanhita, trans., vol. i. p. 59. 
 2 Muir, v. 217. 
 
228 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 we shall be inclined to assign to a pure and elevated 
 condition of thought (though such conceptions do, recog- 
 nisably, occur in the lowest known religious strata), and 
 we shall make no difficulty about believing that Rishis 
 and singers capable of noble conceptions existed in an 
 age very remote in time, in a society which had many 
 of the features of a lofty and simple civilisation. But 
 we shall not, therefore, assume that the hymns of 
 these Rishis are in any sense “ primitive,’ or throw 
 much light on the infancy of the human mind, or on 
 the “origin” of religious and heroic myths. Impure, 
 childish and barbaric conceptions, on the other 
 hand, we shall be inclined to attribute to an impure, 
 childish, and barbaric condition of thought; and we 
 shall again make no difficulty about believing that 
 ideas originally conceived when that stage of thought 
 was general have been retained and handed down to a 
 far later period. This view of the possible, or rather 
 probable, antiquity of many of the myths preserved 
 in the Brahmanas is strengthened, if it needed 
 strengthening, by the opinion of Dr. Weber! “We 
 must indeed assume generally with regard to many of 
 those legends (in the Brahmanas of the Rig-Veda) that 
 they had already gained a rounded independent shape 
 in tradition before they were incorporated into the 
 Brahmanas; and of this we have frequent evidence in 
 the distinctly archaic character of their language, 
 compared with that of the rest of the text.” 
 
 We have now briefly stated the nature and probable 
 relative antiquity of the evidence which is at the 
 disposal of Vedic mythologists. The chief lesson we 
 
 1 History of Indian Literature, English trans., p. 47. 
 
VEDAS. 229 
 
 would enforce is the necessity of suspending the 
 judgment when the Vedas are represented as examples 
 of primitive and comparatively pure and simple ‘natural 
 religion. They are not primitive; they are highly 
 differentiated, highly complex, extremely enigmatic 
 expressions of fairly advanced and very peculiar 
 religious thought. They are not morally so very pure 
 as has been maintained, and their purity, such as it 
 is, seems the result of conscious reticence and wary 
 selection rather than of primeval innocence. Yet the 
 bards or editors have by no means wholly excluded 
 very ancient myths of a thoroughly savage character. 
 These will be chiefly exposed in the chapter on “ Indo- 
 Aryan Myths of the Beginnings of Things,’ which 
 follows. 
 
230 
 
 CHAPTER VIIL 
 
 INDIAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD 
 AND OF MAN. 
 
 Comparison of Vedic and savage myths—The metaphysical Vedic account 
 of the beginning of things—Opposite and savage fable of world made 
 out of fragments of a man—Discussion of this hymn—Absurdities of 
 Brahmanas—Prajapati, a Vedic Unkulunkulu or Qat—Evolutionary 
 myths—Marriage of heaven and earth—Myths of Puranas, their 
 savage parallels—Most savage myths are repeated in Brahmanas, 
 
 In discussing the savage myths of the origin of the 
 world and of man, we observed that they were as 
 inconsistent as they were fanciful. Among the fancies 
 embodied in the myths was noted the theory that the 
 world, or various parts of it, had been formed out of 
 the body of some huge non-natural being, a god, or 
 giant, or a member of some ancient mysterious race. 
 We also noted the myths of the original union of 
 heaven and earth, and their violent separation as 
 displayed in the tales of Greeks and Maoris, to which 
 may be added the Acagchemem nation in California.’ 
 Another feature of savage cosmogonies, illustrated 
 especially in some early Slavonic myths, in Australian 
 legends, and in the faith of the American races, was 
 the creation of the world, or the recovery of a drowned 
 world by animals, as the raven, the dove and the 
 
 1 Bancroft, v. 162. 
 
SAVAGE SURVIVALS. 231 
 
 coyote. The hatching of all things out of an egg 
 was another rude conception, chiefly noted among the 
 Finns. The Indian form occurs in the Satapatha Brah- 
 mana.! The preservation of the human race in the 
 Deluge, or the creation of the race after the Deluge, 
 was yet another detail of savage mythology; and for 
 many of these fancies we seemed to find a satisfac- 
 tory origin in the exceedingly credulous and confused 
 state of savage philosophy and savage imagination. 
 
 The question now to be asked is, do the traditions 
 of the Aryans of India supply us with myths so 
 closely resembling the myths of Nootkas, Maoris 
 and Australians that we may provisionally explain 
 them as stories originally due to the invention of 
 savages? This question may be answered in the 
 affirmative. The Vedas, the Epics and the Puranas 
 contain a large store of various cosmogonic traditions 
 as inconsistent as the parallel myths of savages. We 
 have an Aryan Ilmarinen, Tvashtri, who, like the 
 Finnish smith, forged ‘the iron vault of hollow 
 heaven ” and the ball of earth. Again, the earth is 
 said to have sprung, as in some Mangaian fables, 
 “from a being called Uttanapad”’.® Again, Brah- 
 manaspati, ‘‘ blew the gods forth like a blacksmith,”’ 
 and the gods had a hand in the making of things. 
 In contrast with these childish pieces of anthropo- 
 morphism, we have the famous and sublime specula- 
 tions of an often-quoted hymn.‘ It is thus that the 
 poet dreams of the days before being and non-being 
 began :— 
 
 1 Sacred Books of the Hast, i. 216. 2 Muir, v. 354, 
 8 Rig-Veda, x. 72, 4. 4 Ibid., x. 126. 
 
232 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 “There was then neither non-entity nor entity; 
 there was no atmosphere nor sky above. What 
 enveloped [all]?... Was it water, the profound 
 abyss? Death was not then, nor immortality : there 
 was no distinction of day or night. That One breathed 
 calmly, self-supported; then was nothing different 
 from it, or above it. In the beginning darkness 
 existed, enveloped in darkness. All this was un- 
 distinguishable water. That One which lay void and 
 wrapped in nothingness was developed by the power 
 of fervour. Desire first arose in It, which was the 
 primal germ of mind [and which] sages, searching 
 with their intellect, have discovered to be the bond 
 which connects entity with non-entity. The ray [or 
 cord] which stretched across these [worlds], was it 
 below or was it above? There were there impreg- 
 nating powers and mighty forces, a self-supporting 
 principle beneath and energy aloft. Who knows? 
 who here can declare whence has sprung, whence 
 this creation? The gods are subsequent to the 
 development of this [universe]; who then knows 
 whence it arose? From what this creation arose, and 
 whether [any one] made it or not, he who in the 
 highest heaven is its ruler, he verily knows, or [even] 
 he does not know.” ? 
 
 Here there is a Vedic hymn of the origin of things, 
 from a book, it is true, supposed to be late, which is 
 almost, if not absolutely, free from mythological ideas. 
 The ‘‘ self-supporting principle beneath and energy 
 aloft ’’ may refer, as Dr. Muir suggests, to the father, 
 heaven above, and the mother, earth beneath. The 
 
 1 Muir, Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., v. 357. 
 
 Se —-' 
 
PHILOSOPHIC HYMN. 233 
 
 ’ 
 
 ‘‘hond between entity and non-entity ” is sought in 
 a favourite idea of the Indian philosophers, that of 
 tapas or “fervour”. The other speculations remind 
 us, though they are much more restrained and tem- 
 perate in character, of the metaphysical chants of the 
 New Zealand priests, of the Zufiis, of Popol Vuh, and 
 so on. These belong to very early culture. 
 
 What is the relative age of this hymn? If it could 
 be proved to be the oldest in the Veda, it would 
 demonstrate no more than this, that in time exceed- 
 ingly remote the Aryans of India possessed a philoso- 
 pher, perhaps a school of philosophers, who applied 
 the minds to abstract speculations on the origin of 
 things. It could not prove that mythological specula- 
 tions had not preceded the attempts of a purer 
 philosophy. But the date cannot be ascertained. 
 Mr. Max Miller cannot go farther than the suggestion 
 that the hymn is an expression of the perenmis que- 
 dam philosophia of Leibnitz. We are also warned 
 that a hymn is not necessarily modern because it is 
 philosophical! Certainly that is true; the Zuiiis, 
 Maoris, and Mangaians exhibit amazing powers of 
 abstract thought. Weare not concerned to show that 
 this hymn is late ; but it seems almost superfluous to 
 remark that ideas like those which it contains can 
 scarcely be accepted as expressing man’s earliest 
 theory of the origin of all things. We turn from such 
 ideas to those which the Aryans of India have in 
 common with black men and red men, with far-off 
 Finns and Scandinavians, Chaldeans, Haidahs, Chero- 
 kees, Murri and Maori, Mangaians and Egyptians. 
 
 1 History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 568. 
 
234 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 The next Vedic account of creation which we pro- 
 pose to consider is as remote as possible in character 
 from the sublime philosophic poem. In the Purusha 
 Sukta, the ninetieth hymn of the tenth book of the 
 kig-Veda Sanhita, we have a description of the 
 _ creation of all things out of the severed limbs of a 
 magnified non-natural man, Purusha. This conception 
 is of course that which occurs in the Norse myths of 
 the rent body of Ymir. Borr’s sons took the body 
 of the Giant Ymir and of his flesh formed the 
 earth, of his blood seas and waters, of his bones 
 mountains, of his teeth rocks and stones, of his hair 
 all manner of plants, of his skull the firmament, of 
 his brains the clouds, and so forth. In Chaldean 
 story, Bel cuts in twain the magnified non-natural 
 woman Omorca, and converts the halves of her body 
 into heaven and earth. Among the Iroquois in North 
 America, Chokanipok was the giant whose limbs, 
 bones and blood furnished the raw material of many 
 natural objects; while in Mangaia portions of Ru, 
 in Egypt of Set and Osiris, in Greece of Dionysus 
 Zagreus were used in creating various things, such as 
 stones, plants and metals. The same ideas precisely 
 are found in the ninetieth hymn of the tenth book 
 of the Rig-Veda. Yet it is a singular thing that, in 
 all the discussions as to the antiquity and significance 
 of this hymn which have come under our notice, there 
 has not been one single reference made to parallel 
 legends among Aryan or non-Aryan peoples. In 
 accordance with the general principles which guide 
 us in this work, we are inclined to regard any 
 ideas which are at once rude in character and widely 
 
SAVAGE HYMN. 935 
 
 distributed, both among civilised and uncivilised 
 races, as extremely old, whatever may be the age of 
 the literary form in which they are presented. But 
 the current of learned opinions as to the date of the 
 Purusha Sukta, the Vedic hymn about the sacrifice of 
 Purusha and the creation of the world out of frag- 
 ments of his body, runs in the opposite direction. 
 The hymn is not regarded as very ancient by most 
 Sanskrit scholars. We shall now quote the hymn, 
 which contains the data on which any theory as to its 
 age must be founded :— 
 
 “Purusha has a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a 
 thousand feet. On every side enveloping the earth, 
 he overpassed (it) by a space of ten fingers. Purusha 
 himself is this whole (universe), whatever is and what- 
 ever shall be. . . . When the gods performed a sacrifice 
 with Purusha as the oblation, the spring was its butter, 
 the summer its fuel, and the autumn its (accompanying) 
 offering. This victim, Purusha, born in the beginning, 
 they immolated on the sacrificial grass. With him the 
 gods, the Sadhyas, and the Rishis sacrificed. From that 
 universal sacrifice were provided curds and butter. It 
 formed those aerial (creatures) and animals both wild 
 and tame. From that universal sacrifice sprang the 
 the Ric and Saman verses, the metres and Yajush. 
 From it sprang horses, and all animals with two rows 
 of teeth ; kine sprang from it; from it goats and sheep. 
 When (the gods) divided Purusha, into how many parts 
 did they cut him up? What was his mouth? What 
 arms (had he)? What (two objects) are said (to have 
 been) his thighs and feet? The Brahman was his 
 
 1 Rig-Veda, x. 90; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., i. 9. 
 
236 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 mouth; the Rajanya was made his arms; the being 
 (called) the Vaisya, he was his thighs ; the Sudra sprang 
 from his feet. The moon sprang from his soul (Mahas), 
 the sun from his eye, Indra and Agni from his mouth, 
 and Vaiyu from his breath From his navel arose the 
 air, from his head the sky, from his feet the earth, 
 from his ear the (four) quarters ; in this manner (the 
 gods) formed the world. When the gods, performing 
 sacrifice, bound Purusha as a victim, there were seven 
 sticks (stuck up) for it (around the fire), and thrice 
 seven pieces of fuel were made. With sacrifice the 
 gods performed the sacrifice. These were the earliest 
 rites. These great powers have sought the sky, where 
 are the former Sadhyas, gods.” 
 
 The myth here stated is plain enough in its essential 
 facts. The gods performed a sacrifice with a gigantic 
 anthropomorphic being (Purusha = Man) as the victim, 
 Sacrifice is not found, as a rule, in the religions of the 
 most backward races of all; it is, relatively, an innova- 
 tion, as shall be shown later. His head, like the head 
 of Ymir, formed the sky, his eye the sun, animals 
 sprang from his body. The four castes are connected 
 with, and it appears to be implied that they sprang 
 from, his mouth, arms, thighs and feet. It is obvious 
 that this last part of the myth is subsequent to the 
 formation of castes, This is one of the chief arguments 
 for the late date of the hymn, as castes are not dis- 
 tinctly recognised elsewhere in the Rig-Veda. Mr. 
 Max Miiller’ believes the hymn to be ‘“ modern both 
 in its character and in its diction,” and this opinion he 
 supports by philological arguments. Dr. Muir? says 
 
 1 Ancient Sanskrit Literature, 570.  * Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., i, 12. 
 
 - 
 : 
 : 
 q 
 : 
 
Ae 
 
 DATES. 237 
 
 that the hymn “has every character of modernness 
 both in its diction and ideas”. Dr Haug, on the other 
 hand,! in a paper read in 1871, admits that the present 
 form of the hymn is not older than the greater part of 
 the hymns of the tenth book, and than those of the 
 Atharva Veda; but he adds, “The ideas which the 
 hymn contains are certainly of a primeval antiquity. 
 _. . In fact, the hymn is found in the Yajuwr-Veda 
 among the formulas connected with human sacrifices, 
 which were formerly practised in India.” We have 
 expressly declined to speak about “ primeval antiquity,” 
 as we have scarcely any evidence as to the myths and 
 mental condition for example, even of paleolithic 
 man; but we may so far agree with Dr. Haug as to 
 affirm that the fundamental idea of the Purusha Sukta, 
 namely, the creation of, the world or portions of the 
 world out of the fragments of a fabulous anthropo- 
 morphic being is common to Chaldeans, Troquois, 
 Egyptians, Greeks, Tinnehs, Mangaians and Aryan 
 Indians. This is presumptive proof of the antiquity 
 of the ideas which Dr. Muir and Mr. Max Miiller think 
 relatively modern. ‘The savage and brutal character 
 of the invention needs no demonstration. Among 
 very low savages, for example, the Tinnehs of British 
 North America, not a man, not a god, but a dog, is 
 torn up, and the fragments are made into animals.” 
 On the Paloure River a beaver suffers in the manner 
 of Purusha. We may, for these reasons, regard the 
 chief idea of the myth as extremely ancient—infinitely 
 more ancient than the diction of the hymn. 
 
 As to the mention of the castes, supposed to be a 
 
 1 Sanskrit Texts, 2nd edit., ii. 463, 2 Hearne’s Journey, pp. 342-343, 
 
238 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 comparatively modern institution, that is not an essen- 
 tial part of the legend. When the idea of creation 
 out of a living being was once received it was easy to 
 extend the conception to any institution, of which the 
 origin was forgotten. The Teutonic race had a myth 
 which explained the origin of the classes eorl, ceorl 
 and thrall (earl, churl and slave). A South American 
 people, to explain the different ranks in society, hit 
 on the very myth of Plato, the legend of golden, 
 silver and copper races, from which the ranks of 
 society have descended. The Vedic poet, in our opinion, 
 merely extended to the institution of caste a myth 
 which had already explained the origin of the sun, 
 the firmament, animals, and so forth, on the usual 
 lines of savage thought. The Purusha Sukta is the 
 type of many other Indian myths of creation, of 
 which the following! one is extremely noteworthy. 
 ‘‘ Prajapati desired to propagate. He formed the 
 Trivrit (stoma) from his mouth. After it were pro- 
 duced the deity Agni, the metre Gayatri, . . . of 
 
 men the Brahman, of beasts the goat; .. . from his 
 
 breast, and from his arms he formed the Panchadasa 
 (stoma). After it were created the God Indra, the 
 Trishtubh metre, .. of men the Rajanya, of beasts 
 the sheep. Hence they are vigorous, because they 
 were created from vigour. From his middle he formed 
 the Saptadasa (stoma). After it were created the 
 gods called the Visvadevas, the Jagati metre, . . . of 
 men the Vaisya, of beasts kine. Hence they are to 
 be eaten, because they were created from the receptacle 
 of food.” The form in which we receive this myth is 
 
 1 Taittirya Sanhita, or Yajur-Veda, vii, i. 1-4; Muir, 2nd edit., i. 15, 
 
 a 
 on 
 a a 
 
BRAHMANAS. 239 
 
 obviously later than the institution of caste and the 
 technical names for metres. Yet surely any state- 
 ment that kine ‘‘ are to be eaten ’’ must be older than 
 the universal prohibition to eat that sacred animal 
 the cow. Possibly we might argue that when this 
 theory of creation was first promulgated, goats and 
 sheep were forbidden food. 
 
 Turning from the Vedas to the Brahmanas, we find 
 a curiously savage myth of the origin of species.’ 
 According to this passage of the Brahmana, ‘“‘ this 
 universe was formerly soul only, in the form of Puru- 
 sha’’. He caused himself to fall asunder into two 
 parts. Thence arose a husband and a wife. ‘‘ He 
 cohabited with her; from them men were born. She 
 reflected, ‘How does he, after having produced me 
 from himself, cohabit with me? Ah, let me disappear.’ 
 She became a cow, and the other a bull, and he 
 cohabited with her. From them kine were produced.” 
 After a series of similar metamorphoses of the female 
 into all animal shapes, and a similar series of pursuits 
 by the male in appropriate form, “in this manner pairs 
 of all sorts of creatures down to ants were created ”. 
 This myth is a parallel to the various Greek legends 
 about the amours in bestial form of Zeus, Nemesis, 
 Cronus, Demeter and other gods and goddesses. In 
 the Brahmanas this myth is an explanation of the 
 origin of species, and such an explanation as could 
 scarcely have occurred to a civilised mind. In other 
 
 1Mr, M‘Lennan has drawn some singular inferences from this passage, 
 connecting, as it does, certain gods and certain classes of men with certain 
 animals, in a manner somewhat suggestive of totemism (Fornightly Review) 
 February, 1870. 
 
 3 Satapatha Brahmana, xiv. 4,2; Muir, 2nd edit., i. 25. 
 
240 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 myths in the Brahmanas, Prajapati creates men from 
 his body, or rather the fluid of his body becomes a 
 tortoise, the tortoise becomes a man (pwrusha), with 
 similar examples of speculation.’ 
 
 Among all these Brahmana myths of the part taken 
 by Prajapati in the creation or evoking of things, the 
 question arises who was Prajapati? His rdle is that 
 of the great Hare in American myth; he isa kind of 
 demiurge, and his name means “ The Master of Things 
 Created,” like the Australian Biamban, “ Master,” 
 and the American title of the chief Manitou, 
 ‘“ Master of Life”. Dr, Muir remarks that, as the 
 Vedic mind advances from mere divine beings who 
 “reside and operate in fire”’ (Agni), “ dwell and shine 
 in the sun” (Surya), or ‘‘in the atmosphere ” (Indra), 
 towards a conception of deity, “the farther step would 
 be taken of speaking of the deity under such new 
 names as Visvakarman and Prajapati”. These are 
 “appellatives which do not designate any limited 
 functions connected with any single department of 
 Nature, but the more general and abstract notions of 
 divine power operating in the production and govern- 
 ment of the universe”. Now the interesting point 
 is that round this new and abstract name gravitate 
 the most savage and crudest myths, exactly the myths 
 we meet among Hottentots and Nootkas. For example, 
 among the Hottentots it is Heitsi Eibib, among the 
 Huarochiri Indians it is Uiracocha, who confers, 
 by curse or blessing, on the animals their proper 
 attributes and characteristics. In the Satapatha 
 
 1 Similar tales are found among the Khonds, 
 2 Bergaigne, iii. 40, 8 Avila, Fables of the Yncas, p. 127. 
 
ix 
 % 
 
 BRAHMANAS. 241 
 
 Brahmana it is Prajapati who takes this part, that falls 
 to rude culture-heroes of Hottentots and Huarochiris.' 
 How Prajapati made experiments in a kind of state- 
 aided evolution, so to speak, or evolution superin- 
 tended and assisted from above, will presently be set 
 forth. 
 
 In the Puranas creation is a process renewed after 
 each kalpa, or vast mundane period Brahma awakes 
 from his slumber, and finds the world a waste of water. 
 Then, just as in the American myths of the coyote, 
 and the Slavonic myths of the devil and the doves, a 
 boar or a fish or a tortoise fishes up the world out of 
 the waters. That boar fish, tortoise, or what not, is 
 Brahma or Vishnu. This savage conception of the 
 beginnings of creation in the act of a tortoise, fish, or 
 boar is not first found in the Puranas, as Dr. Muir 
 points out, but is indicated in the Black Yajur Veda 
 andin the Satapatha Brahmana,? In the Satapatha 
 Brahmana, xiv 1, 2, 11, we discover the idea, so 
 common in savage myths—for example, in that of the 
 Navajoes—that the earth was at first very small, a 
 mere patch, and grew bigger after the animal fished it 
 up. “Formerly this earth was only so large, of the 
 size of a span. A boar called, Emusha raised her up.” 
 Here the boar makes no pretence of being the incar- 
 nation of a god, but is a mere boar sans phrase, like 
 the creative coyote of the Papogas and Chinooks, or 
 the musk-rat of the Tacullies. This is a good example 
 of the development of myths. Savages begin, as we 
 saw, by mythically regarding various animals, spiders 
 grasshoppers, ravens, eagles, cockatoos, as the creators 
 
 1 English translation, ii. 361. 2Muir, 2nd edit., vol. i. p. 52, 
 VOL, I. 16 
 
242 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 or recoverers of the world. As civilisation advances, 
 those animals still perform their beneficent functions, 
 but are looked on as gods in disguise In time the 
 animals are often dropped altogether, though they 
 hold their place with great tenacity in the cosmogonic 
 traditions of the Aryans in India. When we find the 
 Satapatha Brahmana alleging ! “ that all creatures are 
 descended from a tortoise,” we seem to be among the 
 rude Indians of the Pacific Coast. But when the 
 tortoise is identified with Aditya, and when Adityas 
 prove to be solar deities, sons of Aditi, and when 
 Aditi is recognised by Mr. Miller as the Dawn, we 
 see that the Aryan mind has not been idle, but has 
 added a good deal to the savage idea of the descent of 
 men and beasts from a tortoise.? 
 
 Another feature of savage myths of creation we 
 found to be the introduction of a crude theory of 
 evolution. We saw that among the Potoyante tribe 
 of the Digger Indians, and among certain Australian 
 tribes, men and beasts were supposed to have been 
 slowly evolved and improved out of the forms first of 
 reptiles and then of quadrupeds. Inthe mythologies of 
 the more civilised South American races, the idea of 
 the survival of the fittest was otherwise expressed. 
 The gods made several attempts at creation, and each 
 set of created beings proving in one way or other 
 unsuited to its environment, was permitted to die out 
 or degenerated into apes, and was succeeded by a set 
 
 1 Muir, 2nd edit., vol. i. p. 54. 
 
 2See Ternaux Compans’ Nowvelles Annales des Voyages, \xxxvi. p. 5. 
 For Mexican traditions, ‘‘ Mexican and Australian Hurricane World's End,” 
 Bancroft, v. 64. 
 
THE COSMIC EGG 2438 
 
 better adapted for survival.! In much the same way 
 the Satapatha Brahmana’? represents mammals as 
 the last result of a series of creative experiments. 
 ‘“‘Prajapati created living beings, which perished for 
 want of food. Birds and serpents perished thus. 
 Prajapati reflected, ‘ How is it that my creatures perish 
 after having been formed?’ He perceived this: ‘They 
 perish from want of food’. In his own presence he 
 caused milk to be supplied to breasts. He created 
 living beings, which, resorting to \the breasts, were 
 thus preserved. ‘These are the creatures which did not 
 perish.” 
 
 The common myth which derives the world from 
 a great ego—the myth perhaps most familiar in its 
 Finnish shape—is found in the Satapatha Brahmana.® 
 ‘In the beginning this universe was waters, nothing 
 but waters. The waters desired: ‘How can we be 
 reproduced?’ So saying, they toiled, they performed 
 austerity. While they were performing austerity, a 
 golden egg came into existence. It then became a 
 year... . From it in a year a man came into exist- 
 ence, who was Prajapati. . . . He conceived progeny 
 in himself; with his mouth he created the gods.”’ 
 According to another text,‘ ‘‘ Prajapati took the form 
 of a tortoise”. The tortoise is the same as Aditya.° 
 
 It is now time to examine the Aryan shape of the 
 
 1This myth is found in Popol Vuh, A Chinook myth of the same sort, 
 Bancroft, v. 95. 
 
 2ii. 5, 11; Muir, 2nd edit., i. 70. 
 
 3xi. 1, 6,1; Muir, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 1863. 
 
 4 Satapatha Brahmana, vii. 4, 3, 5. 
 
 5 Aitareya Brahmana, iii, 34 (11, 219), a very discreditable origin of 
 species, 
 
244 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 widely spread myth about the marriage of heaven and 
 earth, and the fortunes of their children We have 
 already seen that in New Zealand heaven and earth 
 were regarded as real persons, of bodily parts and 
 passions, united in a secular embrace. We shall apply 
 the same explanation to the Greek myth of Gaea and 
 of the mutilation of Cronus. In India, Dyaus (heaven) 
 answers to the Greek Uranus and the Maori Rangi, 
 while Prithivi (earth) is the Greek Gaea, the Maori 
 Papa. In the Veda, heaven and earth are constantly 
 styled “parents”;! but this we might regard as a 
 mere metaphorical expression, still common in poetry. 
 A passage of the <Artareya Brahmana, however, 
 retains the old conception, in which there was nothing 
 metaphorical at all.2 These two worlds, heaven and 
 earth, were once joined. Subsequently they were 
 separated (according to one account, by Indra, who 
 thus plays the part of Cronus and of Tane Mahuta). 
 “Heaven and earth,” says Dr. Muir, “are regarded as 
 the parents not only of men, but of the gods also, as 
 appears from the various texts where they are desig- 
 nated by the epithet Devapatre, ‘having gods for their 
 children’.” By men in an early stage of thought this 
 myth was accepted along with others in which heaven 
 and earth were regarded as objects created by one of 
 their own children, as by Indra,’ who “ stretched them 
 out like a hide,” who, like Atlas, “‘ sustains and up- 
 holds them” ;* or, again, Tvashtri, the divine smith, 
 wrought them by his craft ; or, once more, heaven and 
 earth sprung from the head and feet of Purusha. In 
 
 1 Muir, v. 22. 2iv, 27; Haug, ii, 808, 
 3 Rig- Veda, viii. 6, 5. 4 Jbid., iii, 32, 8, 
 
INDIAN AND SAVAGE MYTHS. 945 
 
 short, if any one wished to give an example of that 
 _ recklessness of orthodoxy or consistency which is the 
 mark of early myth, he could find no better example 
 than the Indian legends of the origin of things. 
 _ Perhaps there is not one of the myths current among 
 _ the lower races which has not its counterpart in the 
 _ Indian Brahmanas. It has been enough for us to give 
 a selection of examples, 
 
246 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 GREEK MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD 
 AND MAN. 
 
 The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer— 
 Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features—The hypo- 
 thesis*that many of these are savage survivals—Are there other examples 
 of such survival in Greek life and institutions ’—Greek opinion was 
 constant that the race had been savage—lIllustrations of savage survival 
 from Greek law of homicide, from magic, religion, human sacrifice, 
 religious art, traces of totemism, and from the mysteries—Conclusion : 
 that savage survival may also be expected in Greek myths. 
 
 Tur Greeks, when we first make their acquaintance 
 in the Homeric poems, were a cultivated people, dwell- 
 ing, under the government of royal families, in small 
 city states. This social condition they must have 
 attained by 1000 B.c., and probably much earlier. 
 They had already a long settled past behind them, and 
 had no recollection of any national migration from the 
 ‘‘ cradle of the Aryan race”. On the other hand, many 
 tribes thought themselves earth-born from the soil 
 of the place where they were settled. The Maori 
 traditions prove that memories of a national migration 
 may persist for several hundred years among men 
 ignorant of writing. Greek legend, among a far more 
 civilised race, only spoke of occasional foreign settlers 
 from Sidon, Lydia, or Egypt. The Homeric Greeks 
 were well acquainted with almost all the arts of life, 
 
s 
 ‘4 
 : 
 ‘ 
 a 
 ¥ 
 oa 
 4 
 : 
 a 
 ie 
 ? 
 s 
 : 
 Es 
 . 
 
 EARLY GREECE. DAT 
 
 though it is not absolutely certain that they could 
 write, and certainly they were not addicted to reading. 
 In war they fought from chariots, like the Egyptians 
 and Assyrians ; they were bold seafarers, being accus- 
 tomed to harry the shores even of Egypt, and they had 
 large commercial dealings with the people of Tyre and 
 Sidon. In the matter of religion they were compara- 
 tively free and unrestrained. Their deities, though, 
 in myth, capricious in character, might be regarded 
 in many ways as ‘“‘ making for righteousness’’. They 
 protected the stranger and the suppliant ; they sanc- 
 tioned the oath, they frowned on the use of poisoned 
 arrows; marriage and domestic life were guarded by 
 their good-will ; they dispensed good and evil fortune, 
 to be accepted with humility and resignation among 
 mortals. 
 
 The patriarchal head of each family performed the 
 sacrifices for his household, the king for the state, the 
 ruler of Mycenz, Agamemnon, for the whole Achwan 
 host encamped before the walls of Troy. At the same 
 time, prophets, like Calchas, possessed considerable 
 influence, due partly to an hereditary gift of second- 
 sight, as in the case of Theoclymenus,’ partly to acquired 
 professional skill in observing omens, partly to the 
 direct inspiration of the gods. The oracle at Delphi, 
 or, as it is called by Homer, Pytho, was already famous, 
 and religion recognised, in various degrees, all the gods 
 familiar to the later cult of Hellas. In a people so 
 advanced, so much in contact with foreign races and 
 foreign ideas, and so wonderfully gifted by nature with 
 keen intellect and perfect taste, it is natural to expect, 
 
 l Odyssey, xx. 354, 
 
248 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 if anywhere, a mythology almost free from repulsive 
 elements, and almost purged of all that we regard as 
 survivals from the condition of savagery. But while 
 Greek mythology is richer far than any other in 
 beautiful legend, and is thronged with lovely and 
 majestic forms of gods and goddesses, nymphs and 
 oreads ideally fair, none the less a very large proportion 
 of its legends is practically on a level with the myths 
 of Maoris, Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and Bushmen. 
 
 This is the part of Greek mythology which has at all 
 times excited most curiosity, and has been made the 
 subject of many systems of interpretation. The Greeks 
 themselves, from almost the earliest historical ages, 
 were deeply concerned either to veil or explain away 
 the blasphemous horrors of their own “sacred chapters,” 
 poetic traditions and temple legends. We endeavour 
 to account for these as relics of an age of barbarism 
 lying very far behind the time of Homer—an age 
 when the ancestors of the Greeks either borrowed, or 
 more probably developed for themselves, the kind of 
 myths by which savage peoples endeavour to explain 
 the nature and origin of the world and all phenomena, 
 
 The correctness of this explanation, resting as it 
 does on the belief that the Greeks were at one time 
 in the savage status, might be demonstrated. from the 
 fact that not only myths, but Greek life in general, 
 and especially Greek ritual, teemed with surviving 
 examples of institutions and of manners which are 
 found everywhere among the most backward and 
 barbarous races. It is not as:if only the myths of 
 Greece retained this rudeness, or as if the Greeks 
 supposed themselves to have been always civilised, 
 
i. 
 
 GREEK ORIGINS. 249 
 
 The whole of Greek life yields relics of savagery 
 when the surface is excavated ever so slightly. More- 
 over, that the Greeks, as soon as they came to reflect 
 on these matters at all, believed themselves to have 
 emerged from a condition of savagery is undeniable. 
 The poets are entirely at one on this subject with 
 Moschion, a writer of the school of Euripides. ‘‘ The 
 time hath been, yea, it hath been,” he says, “‘ when 
 men lived like the beasts, dwelling in mountain caves, 
 and clefts unvisited of the sun. . .. Then they 
 broke not the soil with ploughs nor by aid of iron, but 
 the weaker man was slain to make the supper of the 
 stronger,” and so on.’ This view of the savage origin 
 of mankind was also held by Aristotle :? ‘It is pro- 
 bable that the first men, whether they were produced 
 by the earth (earth-born) or survived from some deluge, 
 were on a level of ignorance and darkness”’.* This 
 opinion, consciously held and stated by philosophers 
 and poets, reveals itself also in the universal popular 
 Greek traditions that men were originally ignorant of 
 fire, agriculture, metallurgy and all the other arts and 
 conveniences of life, till they were instructed by ideal 
 culture-heroes, like Prometheus, members of a race 
 divine or half divine. A still more curious Athenian 
 tradition (preserved by Varro) maintained, not only 
 that marriage was originally unknown, but that, as 
 among Australians and some Red Indians, the family 
 name descended through the mother, and kinship was 
 reckoned on the female side before the time of Cecrops.‘ 
 
 1Moschion ; of. Preller, Ausgewdhlte Aufsdtze, p. 206. 
 
 2 Politics, ii. 8-21; Plato, Laws, 667-680. 
 
 ’ Compare Horace, Satires, i. 3, 99; Lucretius, v. 923, 
 
 4Snidas, s.v. “Prometheus”; Augustine, De Oivitate Dei, xviii. 9 
 
250 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 While Greek opinion, both popular and philosophical, 
 admitted, or rather asserted, that savagery lay in the 
 background of the historical prospect, Greek institu- 
 tions retained a thousand birth-marks of savagery It 
 is manifest and undeniable that the Greek criminal 
 law, as far as it effected murder, sprang directly from 
 the old savage blood-feud.! The Athenian law was 
 a civilised modification of the savage rule that the 
 kindred of a slain man take up his blood-feud. 
 Where homicide was committed within the circle of 
 blood relationship, as by Orestes, Greek religion pro- 
 vided the Erinnyes to punish an offence which had, 
 as it were, no human avenger. The precautions taken 
 by murderers to lay the ghost of the slain man were 
 much like those in favour among the Australians, 
 The Greek cut off the extremities of his victim, the 
 tips of the hands and feet, and disposed them neatly 
 beneath the arm-pits of the slain man.? In the same 
 spirit, and for the same purpose, the Australian black 
 cuts off the thumbs of his dead enemy, that the ghost 
 too may be mutilated and prevented from throwing — 
 at him with a ghostly spear. We learn also from 
 Apollonius Rhodius and his scholiast that Greek 
 murderers used thrice to suck in and spit out the gore 
 of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby 
 partaking of their blood, and so, by becoming members 
 of their kin, putting it beyond the power of the ghosts 
 to avenge themselves. Similar ideas inspire the world- 
 wide savage custom of making an artificial ‘“ blood 
 
 1 Duncker, History of Greece, Engl. transl., vol. ii. p. 129. 
 2See “Arm-pitting in Ancient Greece,” in the American Journal a 
 of Philology, October, 1885, where a discussion of the familiar texts in 
 Aischylus and Apollonius Rhodius will be found, ; 
 
RITUAL AND LUCK. 251 
 
 brotherhood ” by mingling the blood of the contracting 
 parties. As to the ceremonies of cleansing from blood- 
 guiltiness among the Greeks, we may conjecture that 
 these too had their primitive side; for Orestes, in the 
 Eumenides, maintains that he has been purified of his 
 mother’s slaughter by sufficient blood of swine. But 
 this point will be illustrated presently, when we touch 
 on the mysteries. 
 
 Ritual and myth, as might be expected, retained 
 vast masses of savage rites and superstitious habits 
 and customs. To be “in all things too superstitious,”’ 
 too full of deisidarmonia, was even in St. Paul’s time 
 the characteristic of the Athenians. Now superstition, 
 or deisidaimoma, is defined by Theophrastus,! as 
 “ cowardice in regard to the supernatural” (SevAia pos 
 To Saipoviov). ‘This “cowardice” has in all ages and 
 countries secured the permanence of ritual and religious 
 traditions. Men have always argued, like one of the 
 persons in M. Renan’s play, Le Prétre de Néme, that 
 “ordre du monde depend de l’ordre des rites qu’on 
 observe”. The familiar endurable sequence of the 
 seasons of spring, and seed-sowing, and harvest depend 
 upon the due performance of immemorial religious 
 acts. ‘‘In the mystic deposits,” says Dinarchus, “ lies 
 the safety of the city.”? What the “mystic deposits ” 
 were nobody knows for certain, but they must have 
 been of very archaic sanctity, and occur among the 
 Arunta and the Pawnees. 
 
 Ritual is preserved because it preserves luck. Not 
 only among the Romans and the Brahmans, with their 
 endless minute ritual actions, but among such lower 
 
 1 Characters. 2 Ap. Hermann, Lehrbuch, p. 41; Aglaophamus, 965, 
 
252 MYYH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 races as the Kanekas of New Caledonia, the efficacy 
 of religious functions is destroyed by the slightest 
 accidental infraction of established rules! The same 
 timid conservatism presides over myth, and in each 
 locality the mystery-plays, with their accompanying 
 narratives, preserved inviolate the early forms of 
 legend. Myth and ritual do not admit of being 
 argued about. ‘‘ C’était le rite établi. Ce n’était pas 
 plus absurde qu’autre chose,” says the conservative in 
 M. Renan’s piece, defending the mode of appointment 
 of 
 
 The priest who slew the slayer, 
 
 And shall himself be slain. 
 
 Now, if the rites and myths preserved by the 
 timorousness of this same ‘“‘ cowardice towards the 
 supernatural” were originally evolved in the stage of 
 savagery, savage they would remain, as it is impious 
 and dangerous to reform them till the religion which 
 they serve perishes with them These relics in Greek 
 ritual and faith are very commonly explained as due 
 to Oriental influences, as things borrowed from the 
 dark and bloody superstitions of Asia. But this 
 attempt to save the native Greek character for “blithe- 
 ness” and humanity must not be pushed too far.? It 
 must be remembered that the cruder and wilder sacri- 
 fices and legends of Greece were strictly local ; that 
 they were attached to these ancient temples, old altars, 
 barbarous goana, or wooden idols, and rough fetish 
 
 1Thus the watchers of the dead in New Caledonia are fed by the 
 sorcerer with a mess at the end of a very long spoon, and should the food 
 miss the mouth, all the ceremonies have to be repeated. This detail is 
 
 from Mr. J. J. Atkinson. 
 2Claus, De Antigq. Form. Diane, 6, 7, 16. 
 
es tee 2 
 
 VILLAGE LIFE. 953 
 
 stones, in which Pausanias found the most ancient 
 relics of Hellenic theology. This is a proof of their 
 antiquity and a presumption in favour of their freedom 
 from foreign influence. Most of these things were 
 survivals from that dimly remembered prehistoric age 
 in which the Greeks, not yet gathered into city states, 
 lived in villages or kraals, or pueblos, as we should 
 translate kata xeéuas, if we were speaking of African 
 or American tribes. In that stage the early Greeks 
 must have lacked both the civic and the national or 
 Panhellenic sentiment; their political unit was the 
 clan, which, again, answered in part to the totem 
 kindred of America, or Africa, or Australia.) In this 
 stagnant condition they could not have made acquaint- 
 ance with the many creeds of Semitic and other alien 
 peoples on the shores of the Levant.2 It was later, 
 when Greece had developed the city life of the heroic 
 age, that her adventurous sons came into close contact 
 with Egypt and Phoenicia. | 
 
 In the colonising time, still later—perhaps from 
 900 B.c. downwards—the Greeks, settled on sites 
 whence they had expelled Sidonians or Sicanians, 
 very naturally continued, with modifications, the 
 worship of such gods as they found already in posses- 
 sion. Like the Romans, the Greeks easily recognised 
 
 1As C. O. Miller judiciously remarks: ‘‘The scenes of nine-tenths of 
 the Greek myths are laid in particular districts of Greece, and they speak 
 of the primeval inhabitants, of the lineage and adventures of native heroes. 
 They manifest an accurate acquaintance with individual localities, which, 
 at a time when Greece was neither explored by antiquaries, nor did geographi- 
 cal handbooks exist, could be possessed only by the inhabitants of these 
 localities.’’ Miiller gives, as examples, myths of bears more or less divine. 
 
 Scientijic Mythology, pp. 14, 15. 
 2Compare Claus, De Dianw Antiquissima Natura, p. 8. 
 
254 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 their own deities in the analogous members of foreign 
 polytheistic systems. Thus we can allow for alien 
 elements in such gods and goddesses as Zeus Asterios, 
 as Aphrodite of Cyprus or Eryx, or the many-breasted 
 Ephesian Artemis, whose monstrous form had its exact 
 analogue among the Aztecs in that many-breasted 
 goddess of the maguey plant whence beer was made. 
 To discern and disengage the borrowed factors in the 
 Hellenic Olympus by analysis of divine names is a 
 task to which comparative philology may lawfully 
 devote herself; but we cannot so readily explain by 
 presumed borrowing from without the rude zoana of 
 the ancient local temples, the wild myths of the local 
 legends, the sacra which were the exclusive property 
 of old-world families, Butade or Eumolpide. These 
 are clearly survivals from a stage of Greek culture 
 earlier than the city state, earlier than the heroic age 
 of the roving Greek Vikings, and far earlier than the 
 Greek colonies. They belong’ to that conservative 
 and immobile period when the tribe or clan, settled in 
 its scattered kraals, lived a life of agriculture, hunting 
 and cattle-breeding, engaged in no larger or more 
 adventurous wars than border feuds about women or 
 cattle. Such wars were on a humbler scale than even 
 Nestor’s old fights with the Epeians; such adventures 
 did not bring the tribe into contact with alien religions. 
 If Sidonian merchantmen chanced to establish a factory 
 near a tribe in this condition, their religion was not 
 likely to make many proselytes. 
 
 These reasons for believing that most of the wilder 
 element. in Greek ritual and myth was native may be 
 briefly recapitulated, as they are often overlooked. 
 
LOCAL MYTHS. 255 
 
 The more strange and savage features meet us in local 
 tales and practices, often in remote upland temples 
 and chapels. There they had survived from the 
 society of the village status, before villages were 
 gathered into cities, before Greeks had taken to a 
 roving life, or made much acquaintance with distant 
 and maritime peoples. 
 
 For these historical reasons, it may be assumed that 
 the local religious antiquities of Greece, especially in 
 upland districts like Arcadia and Elis, are as old, and 
 as purely national, as free from foreign influences as 
 any Greek institutions can be. In these rites and 
 myths of true folk-lore and Volksleben, developed 
 before Hellas won its way to the pure Hellenic stage, 
 before Egypt and Phcenicia were familiar, should be 
 found that common rude element which Greeks share 
 with the other races of the world, and which was, to 
 some extent, purged away by the genius of Homer 
 and Pindar, p22 vates et Phebo digna locuts. 
 
 In proof of this local conservatism, some passages 
 collected by K. F. Hermann in his Lehrbuch der 
 Griechischen Antiquitdten’ may be cited. Thus 
 Isocrates writes,? ‘‘ This was all their care, neither to 
 destroy any of the ancestral rites, nor to add aught 
 beyond what was ordained”. Clemens Alexandrinus 
 reports that certain Thessalians worshipped storks, 
 “an accordance with use and wont”® Plato lays 
 down the very “law of least change” which has been 
 described. ‘“ Whether the legislator is establishing a 
 new state or restoring an old and decayed one, in 
 
 1 Zweiter Theil, 1858. 2 Areop., 30. 
 3Clem. Alex., Oxford, 1715, i. 34. 
 
256 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 respect of gods and temples, . . . if he be a man of sense, 
 he will make no change in anything which the oracle 
 of Delphi, or Dodona, or Ammon has sanctioned, in 
 whatever manner.” In this very passage Plato? 
 speaks of rites ‘‘ derived from Tyrrhenia or Cyprus ” 
 as falling within the later period of the Greek Wander- 
 jéhre. On the high religious value of things antique, 
 Porphyry wrote in a late age, and when the new 
 religion of Christ was victorious, “ Comparing the new 
 sacred images with the old, we see that the old are 
 more simply fashioned, yet are held divine, but the 
 new, admired for their elaborate execution, have less 
 persuasion of divinity,’—a remark anticipated by 
 Pausanias, “‘ The statues Dedalus wrought are quainter 
 to the outward view, yet there shows forth in them 
 somewhat supernatural ”.? So Atheneous® reports of a 
 visitor to the shrine of Leto in Delos, that he expected 
 the ancient statue of the mother of Apollo to be some- 
 thing remarkable, but, unlike the pious Porphyry, 
 burst out laughing when he found it a shapeless 
 wooden idol. These idols were dressed out, fed and 
 adorned as if they had life.t It is natural that myths 
 dating from an age when Greek gods resembled Poly- 
 nesian idols should be as rude as Polynesian myths. 
 The tenacity of local myth is demonstrated by 
 Pausanias, who declares that even in the highly 
 civilised Attica the Demes retained legends different 
 from those of the central city—the legends, probably, 
 which were current before the villages were ‘‘ synce- 
 cised” into Athens.° ¢ 
 
 1 Laws, v. 788. 2 De. Abst., ii. 18; Paus., ii. 4, 5. 3 xiv. 2, 
 4 Hermann, op. cit., p. 94, note 10. 5 Pausanias, i, 14, 6. 
 
~ HUMAN SACRIFICE. 257 
 
 It appears, then, that Greek ritual necessarily 
 preserves matter of the highest antiquity, and that 
 the oldest rites and myths will probably be found, not 
 in the Panhellenic temples, like that in Olympia, not 
 in the national poets, like Homer and Sophocles, but 
 in the local fanes of early tribal gods, and in the local 
 mysteries, and the myths which came late, if they 
 came at all, into literary circulation. This opinion 
 is strengthened and illustrated by that invaluable 
 guide-book of the artistic and religious pilgrim written 
 in the second century after our era by Pausanias. If. 
 we follow him, we shall find that many of the cere- 
 monies, stories and idols which he regarded as oldest 
 are analogous to the idols and myths of the con- 
 temporary backward races. Let us then, for the sake 
 of illustrating the local and savage survivals in Greek 
 religion, accompany Pausanias in his tour through 
 Hellas. 
 
 In Christian countries, especially in modern times, 
 the contents of one church are very like the furniture 
 of another church; the functions in one resemble 
 those in all, though on the Continent some shrines 
 still retain relics and customs of the period when local 
 saints had their peculiar rites. But it was a very 
 different thing in Greece. The pilgrim who arrived 
 at a temple never could guess what oddity or horror 
 in the way of statues, sacrifices, or stories might be 
 
 ’ prepared for his edification. In the first place, there 
 
 were human sacrifices. These are not familiar to 
 low savages, if known to them at all. Probably they 
 were first offered to barbaric royal ghosts, and thence 
 
 transferred to gods, In the town of Salamis, in 
 VOL. I, ; 17 
 
258 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Cyprus, about the date of Hadrian, the devout might — 
 have found the priest slaying a human victim to 
 Zeus,—an interesting custom, instituted, according to © 
 Lactantius, by Teucer, and continued till the age of 
 the Roman Empire.! | 
 
 At Alos in Achaia Phthiotis, the stranger might 
 have seen an extraordinary spectacle, though we — 
 admit that the odds would have been highly against — 
 his chance of witnessing the following events. As — 
 the stranger approaches the town-hall, he observes an 
 elderly and most respectable citizen strolling in the © 
 same direction. The citizen is so lost in thought that — 
 apparently he does not notice where he is going. — 
 Behind him comes a crowd of excited but silent © 
 people, who watch him with intense interest. The — 
 citizen reaches the steps of the town-hall, while the — 
 excitement of his friends behind increases visibly. — 
 Without thinking, the elderly person enters the — 
 building. With a wild and un-Aryan howl, the other — 
 people of Alos are down on him, pinion him, wreathe — 
 him with flowery garlands, and lead him to the 
 temple of Zeus Laphystius, or ‘‘ The Glutton,” where — 
 he is solemnly sacrificed on the altar. This was — 
 the custom of the good Greeks of Alos whenever — 
 
 1 Euseb., Prep. Hv., iv. 17, mentions, among peoples practising human f 
 sacrifices, Rhodes, Salamis, Heliopolis, Chios, Tenedos, Lacedemon, 
 Arcadia and Athens; and, among gods thus honoured, Hera, Athene, 
 Cronus, Ares, Dionysus, Zeus and Apollo. For Dionysus the Cannibal, . 
 Plutarch, Themist., 13; Porphyr., Adst., ii. 55. For the sacrifice to — 
 Zeus Laphystius, see Grote, i. c. vii, and his array of authorities, 
 especially Herodotus, vii. 197. Clemens Alexandrinus (i. 36) mentions the 
 Messenians, to Zeus; the Taurians, to Artemis, the folk of Pella, to Peleus — 
 and Chiron ; the Cretans, to Zeus ; the Lesbians, to Dionysus, Geusius de 
 Victimis Humamis (1699) may be consulted. 
 
HUMAN SACRIFICE. 259 
 
 a descendant of the house of Athamas entered the 
 Prytaneion. Of course the family were very care- 
 ful, as a rule, to keep at a safe distance from the 
 forbidden place. ‘‘ What a sacrifice for Greeks!” as 
 the author of the Minos! says in that dialogue which 
 is incorrectly attributed to Plato. “He cannot get 
 out except to be sacrificed,” says Herodotus, speaking 
 of the unlucky descendant of Athamas. The custom 
 appears to have existed as late as the time of the 
 scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius.’ 
 
 Even in the second century, when Pausanias visited 
 Arcadia, he found what seem to have been human 
 sacrifices to Zeus. The passage is so very strange and 
 romantic that we quote a part of it.2 ‘The Lycean 
 hill hath other marvels to show, and chiefly this: 
 thereon there is a grove of Zeus Lyceus, wherein may 
 men in nowise enter; but if any transgresses the law 
 and goes within, he must die within the space of one 
 year. This tale, moreover, they tell, namely, that 
 whatsoever man or beast cometh within the grove 
 casts no shadow, and the hunter pursues not the deer 
 into that wood, but, waiting till the beast comes forth 
 again, sees that it has left its shadow behind. And 
 on the highest crest of the whole mountain there is a 
 mound of heaped-up earth, the altar of Zeus Lyceus, 
 and the more part of Peloponnesus can be seen from 
 that place. And before the altar stand two pillars 
 facing the rising sun, and thereon golden eagles of yet 
 more ancient workmanship. And on this altar they 
 sacrifice to Zeus in a manner that may not be spoken, 
 
 1315, c. ; Plato, Laws, vi. 782, c. 
 2 Argonautica, vii. 197. 3 Pausanias, viii. 2. 
 
260 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 a 
 F 
 
 4 
 
 and little liking had I to make much search into this 
 matter, But let it be as it is, and as it hath been — 
 
 from the beginning.” The words “as it hath been 
 from the beginning” are ominous and significant, for 
 the traditional myths of Arcadia tell of the human 
 sacrifices of Lycaon, and of men who, tasting the meat 
 of a mixed sacrifice, put human flesh between their 
 lips unawares! This aspect of Greek religion, then, 
 is almost on a level with the mysterious cannibal 
 horrors of “ Voodoo,” as practised by the secret societies 
 of negroes in Hayti. But concerning these things, as 
 Pausanias might say, it is little pleasure to inquire. 
 Even where men were not sacrificed to the gods, 
 the tourist among the temples would learn that these 
 bloody rites had once been customary, and ceremonies 
 existed by way of commutation. This is precisely 
 what we find in Vedic religion, in which the empty 
 form of sacrificing a man was gone through, and the 
 origin of the world was traced to the fragments of a 
 god sacrificed by gods? In Sparta was an altar of 
 Artemis Orthia, and a wooden image of great rudeness 
 and antiquity—so rude indeed, that Pausanias, though 
 accustomed to Greek fetish-stones, thought it must be 
 of barbaric origin. The story was that certain people 
 of different towns, when sacrificing at the altar, 
 were seized with frenzy and slew each other. The 
 oracle commanded that the altar should be sprinkled 
 with human blood. Men were therefore chosen by 
 lot to be sacrificed, till Lycurgus commuted the offering, 
 
 1Plato, Rep., viii. 565, d. This rite occurs in some African coronation 
 
 ceremonies. 
 2The Purusha Sukhta, in Rig-Veda, x. 90. 
 
STRANGE RITES. 261 
 
 and sprinkled the altar with the blood of boys who 
 were flogged before the goddess. The priestess holds 
 the statue of the goddess during the flogging, and if 
 any of the boys are but lightly scourged, the image 
 becomes too heavy for her to bear. 
 
 The Ionians near Anthea had a temple of Artemis 
 Triclaria, and to her it had been customary to sacrifice 
 yearly a youth and maiden of transcendent beauty. In 
 Pausanias’s time the human sacrifice was commuted. 
 He himself beheld the strange spectacle of living beasts 
 and birds being driven into the fire to Artemis Laphria, 
 a Calydonian goddess, and he had seen bears rush back 
 among the ministrants ; but there was no record that 
 any one had ever been hurt by these wild beasts. 
 The bear was a beast closely connected with Artemis, 
 and there is some reason to suppose that the goddess 
 had herself been a she-bear or succeeded to the cult of 
 a she-bear in the morning of time.’ 
 
 It may be believed that where symbolic human 
 sacrifices are offered, that is, where some other victim 
 is slain or a dummy of a man is destroyed, and where 
 legend maintains that the sacrifice was once human, 
 there men and women were originally the victims. 
 Greek ritual and Greek myth were full of such tales 
 and such commutations.? In Rome, as is well known, 
 effigies of men called Argives were sacrificed* As an 
 example of a beast-victim given in commutation, 
 Pausanias mentions® the case of the folk of Potniz, 
 who were compelled once a year to offer to Dionysus 
 
 1 Paus., vii. 18, 19. 2See ‘‘ Artemis,’’ postea, 
 3See Hermann, Alterthiimer., ii. 159-161, for abundant examples. 
 4 Plutarch, Quest. Rom. 32. Six, 8, 1. 
 
262 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 a boy,in the bloom of youth. But the sacrifice was 
 commuted for a goat. 
 
 These commutations are familiar all over the world. 
 Even in Mexico, where human sacrifices and ritual 
 cannibalism were daily events, Quetzalcoatl was credited 
 with commuting human sacrifices for blood drawn 
 from the bodies of the religious. In this one matter 
 even the most conservative creeds and the faiths most 
 opposed to change sometimes say with Tartufte :— 
 
 Le ciel défend, de vrai, certains contentements, 
 Mais on trouve avec lui des accommodements. 
 
 Though the fact has been denied (doubtless without 
 reflection); the fact remains that the Greeks offered 
 human sacrifices. Now what does this imply? Must 
 it be taken as a survival from barbarism, as one of the 
 proofs that the Greeks had passed through the barbaric 
 status ? 
 
 The answer is less obvious than might be supposed. 
 
 Sacrifice has two origins. First, there are honorific | 
 
 sacrifices, in which the ghost or god (or divine beast, 
 if a divine beast be worshipped) is offered the food he 
 is believed to prefer. This does not occur among 
 the lowest savages. To carnivorous totems, Garci- 
 lasso says, the Indians of Peru offered themselves. 
 The feeding of sacred mice in the temples of Apollo 
 Smintheus is well known. Secondly, there are ex- 
 piatory or piacular sacrifices, in which the worshipper, 
 as it were, fines himself in a child, an ox, or something 
 else that he treasures. The latter kind of sacrifice 
 (most common in cases of crime done or suspected 
 within the circle of kindred) is not necessarily bar- 
 baric, except in its cruelty. An example is the Attic 
 
HUMAN SACRIFICE NOT SAVAGE. 263 
 
 Thargelia, in which two human scape-goats annu- 
 ally bore ‘‘the sins of the congregation,” and were 
 flogged, driven to the sea with figs tied round their 
 necks, and burned. 
 
 The institution of human sacrifice, then, whether the 
 offering be regarded as food, or as a gift to the god of 
 what is dearest to man (as in the case of Jephtha's 
 daughter), or whether the victim be supposed to carry 
 on his head the sins of the people, does not necessarily 
 date from the period of savagery. Indeed, sacrifice 
 flourishes most, not among savages, but among advanc- 
 ing barbarians. It would probably be impossible to 
 find any examples of human sacrifices of an expiatory 
 or piacular character, any sacrifices at all, among 
 Australians, or Andamanese, or Fuegians. ‘The notion 
 of presenting food to the supernatural powers, whether 
 ghosts or gods, is relatively irare among savages.” 
 The terrible Aztec banquets of which the gods were 
 partakers are the most noted examples of human 
 sacrifices with a purely cannibal origin. Now there 
 is good reason to guess that human sacrifices with no 
 other origin than cannibalism survived even in ancient 
 Greece. “It may be conjectured,” writes Professor 
 Robertson Smith? “that the human sacrifices offered 
 to the Wolf Zeus (Lyceus) in Arcadia were originally 
 cannibal feasts of a Wolf tribe. The first participants 
 in the rite were, according to later legend, changed 
 into wolves ; andin later times‘ at least one fragment 
 
 1Compare the Marseilles human sacrifice, Petron., 141; and for the 
 Thargelia, Tsetzes, Ohiliads, v. 736; Hellad. in Photius, p. 1590 f. and 
 Harpoc. s. v. r 
 
 2Jevons, Introduction to the Science of Religion, pp. 161, 199. 
 3 Hncyc. Brit., 8. v. “Sacrifice”. 4 Plato, Rep., viii. 565, D. 
 
264 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 of the human flesh was placed among the sacrificial 
 portions derived from other victims, and the man who 
 ate it was believed to become a were-wolf.”! It is 
 the almost universal rule with cannibals not to eat 
 members of their own stock, just as they do not eat 
 their own totem. Thus, as Professor Robertson Smith 
 says, when the human victim is a captive or other 
 foreigner, the human sacrifice may be regarded as a 
 survival of cannibalism. Where, on the other hand, 
 the victim is a fellow tribesman, the sacrifice is ex- 
 piatory or piacular, 
 
 Among Greek cannibal gods we cannot fail to 
 reckon the so-called “Cannibal Dionysus,’ and pro- 
 bably the Zeus of Orchomenos, Zeus Laphystius, who 
 is explained by Suidas as “the Glutton Zeus”. The 
 cognate verb (Aagvacewv) means “to eat with mangling 
 and rending,” ‘“‘todevour gluttonously”’. By Zeus 
 Laphystius, then, men’s flesh was gorged in this 
 distressing fashion. 
 
 The evidence of human sacrifice (especially when it 
 seems not piacular, but a relic of cannibalism) raises 
 a presumption that Greeks had once been barbarians. 
 The presumption is confirmed by the evidence of early 
 Greek religious art. 
 
 When his curiosity about human sacrifices was 
 satisfied, the pilgrim in Greece might turn his attention 
 to the statues and other representations of the gods. 
 He would find that the modern statues by famous 
 artists were beautiful anthropomorphic works in 
 marble or in gold and ivory. It is true that the faces 
 of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth were smudged 
 
 1 Paus., viii. 2, 
 
EARLY IDOLS. 265 
 
 all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or 
 Africa.1 As a rule, however, the statues of historic 
 times were beautiful representations of kindly and 
 gracious beings. The older works were stiff and rigid 
 images, with the lips screwed into an unmeaning smile. 
 Older yet were the bronze gods, made before the art 
 of soldering was invented, and formed of beaten 
 plates joined by small nails. Still more ancient were 
 the wooden images, which probably bore but a slight 
 resemblance to the human frame, and which were 
 often mere “stocks”.? Perhaps once a year were 
 shown the very early gods, the Demeter with the 
 horse’s head, the Artemis with the fish’s tails, the 
 cuckoo Hera, whose image was of pear-wood, the 
 Zeus with three eyes, the Hermes, made after the 
 fashion of the pictures on the walls of sacred caves 
 among the Bushmen. But the oldest gods of all, says 
 Pausanias repeatedly, were rude stones in the temple 
 or the temple precinct. In Achzan Phare he found 
 some thirty squared stones, named each after a god. 
 “ Among all the Greeks in the oldest times rude stones 
 were worshipped in place of statues.” The super- 
 stitious man in Theophrastus’s Characters used to 
 anoint the sacred stones with oil. The stone which 
 Cronus swallowed in mistake for Zeus was honoured 
 at Delphi, and kept warm with wool wrappings. 
 There was another sacred stone among the Troezenians, 
 and the Megarians worshipped as Apollo a stone cut 
 roughly into a pyramidal form. ‘The Argives had 
 a big stone called Zeus Kappotas. The Thespians 
 
 1 Pausanias, ii. 2. 
 2Clemens Alex., Protrept. (Oxford, 1715), p. 41. 
 
266 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 worshipped a stone which they called Eros; “their 
 oldest idol is a rude stone”.! It is well known that 
 the original fetish-stone has been found im situ below 
 the feet of the statue of Apollo in Delos. On this 
 showing, then, the religion of very early Greeks in 
 Greece was not unlike that of modern Negroes. The 
 artistic evolution of the gods, a remarkably rapid one 
 after a certain point, could be traced in every temple. 
 It began with the rude stone, and rose to the wooden 
 idol, in which, as we have seen, Pausanias and Por- 
 phyry found such sanctity. Next it reached the 
 hammered bronze image, passed through the archaic 
 marbles, and culminated in the finer marbles and 
 the chryselephantine statues of Zeus and Athena. But 
 none of the ancient sacred objects lost their sacredness. 
 The oldest were always the holiest idols; the oldest of 
 all were stumps and stones, like savage fetish-stones. 
 
 Another argument in favour of the general thesis 
 that savagery left deep marks on Greek life in general, 
 and on myth in particular, may be derived from sur- 
 vivals of totemism in ritual and legend. The following 
 instances need not necessarily be accepted, but it may 
 be admitted that they are precisely the traces which 
 totemism would leave had it once existed, and then 
 waned away on the advance of civilisation.’ 
 
 1Gill, Myths of South Pacific, p. 60. Compare a god, which proved to 
 be merely pumice-stone, and was regarded as the god of winds and. waves, 
 
 having been drifted to Puka-Puka. Offerings of food were made to it during 
 hurricanes. 
 
 2The argument to be derived from the character of the Greek yévos as a 
 modified form of the totem-kindred is too long and complex to be put forward 
 here. Itis stated in Custom and Myth, ‘‘ The History of the Family,” in 
 M‘Lennan’s Studies in Early History, and is assumed, if not proved, in 
 Ancient Society by the late Mr. Lewis Morgan. 
 
POSSIBLE TOTEMISM. 267 
 
 That Greeks in certain districts regarded with reli- 
 gious reverence certain plants and animals is beyond 
 dispute. That some stocks even traced their lineage 
 to beasts will be shown in the chapter on Greek Divine 
 Myths, and the presumption is that these creatures, 
 though explained as incarnations and disguises of 
 various gods, were once totems sans phrase, as will be 
 inferred from various examples. Clemens Alexan- 
 drinus, again, after describing the animal-worship of 
 the Egyptians, mentions cases of zoolatry in Greece.! 
 The Thessalians revered storks, the Thebans weasels, 
 and the myth ran that the weasel had in some way 
 aided Alemena when in labour with Heracles. In 
 another form of the myth the weasel was the foster- 
 mother of the hero.2 Other Thessalians, the Myrmidons, 
 claimed descent from the ant and revered ants. The 
 religious respect paid to mice in the temple of Apollo 
 Smintheus, in the Troad, Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos and 
 Crete is well known, and a local tribe were alluded 
 to as Mice by an oracle. The god himself, like the 
 Japanese harvest-god, was represented in art with a 
 mouse at his foot, and mice, as has been said, were fed 
 at hisshrine.? The Syrians,says Clemens Alexandrinus, 
 worship doves and fishes, as the Elians worship Zeus.* 
 The people of Delphi adored the wolf, and the Samians 
 the sheep. The Athenians had a hero whom they 
 worshipped in the shape of a wolf.6 A remarkable 
 
 1 Op. cit., i. 34. 2 Scholiast on Jliad, xix. 119. 
 
 3 Mlian, H. A., xii. 5; Strabo, xiii. 604. Compare ‘Apollo and the . 
 Mouse, Custom and Myth, pp. 103-120. 
 
 4 Lucian, De Ded Syrid. 5 Mlian, H. A., xii. 40. 
 
 6 Harpocration, dexd(ew. Compare an address to the wolf-hero, ‘‘ whc 
 delights in the flight and tears of men,” in Aristophanes, Vespe, 389. 
 
268 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 testimony is that of the scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, 
 i. 124, “The wolf,” he says, “was a beast held in 
 
 honour by the Athenians, and whosoever slays a wolf . 
 
 collects what is needful for its burial.” The burial of 
 sacred animals in Egypt is familiar. An Arab tribe 
 mourns over and solemnly buries all dead gazelles. 
 Nay, flies were adored with the sacrifice of an ox near 
 the temple of Apollo in Leucas.? Pausanias (iii. 22) men- 
 tions certain colonists who were guided by a hare to a 
 site where the animal hid in a myrtle-bush. They there- 
 fore adore the myrtle, cai 76 dévdpov ere éxeivnv céBover 
 Thy pupoivnv. In the same way a Carian stock, the 
 Toxide, revered the asparagus.* A remarkable example 
 of descent mythically claimed from one of the lower 
 animals is noted by Otfried Miuller.t Speaking of the 
 swan of Apollo, he says, “‘ That deity was worshipped, 
 according to the testimony of the Iliad, in the Trojan 
 island of Tenedos. There, too, was Tennes honoured as 
 the fpws éravupos of the island. Now his father was 
 called Cyenus (the swan) in an oft-told and romantic 
 legend.’ . . . The swan, therefore, as father to the 
 chief hero on the Apolline island, stands in distinct 
 relation to the god, who is made to come forward still 
 more prominently from the fact that Apollo himself 
 is' also called father of Tennes. I think we can 
 scarcely fail to recognise a mythus which was local 
 at Tenedos. . . . The fact, too, of calling the swan, 
 instead of Apollo, the father of a hero, demands 
 altogether a simplicity and boldness of fancy which 
 are far more ancient than the poems of Homer.” 
 
 1 Robertson Smith, Kinship in Karly Arabia, pp. 195-204, 
 2 Ailian, xi. 8. 3 Plutarch, Theseus, 14. 
 4 Proleg., Engl. trans., p, 204. >[Canne on Conon, 28, ] 
 
THE GENTES. 269 
 
 Had Miller known that this “simplicity and bold- 
 ness of fancy” exist to-day, for example, among the 
 Swan tribe of Australia, he would probably have 
 recognised in Cycnus a survival from totemism.” The 
 fancy survives again in Virgil’s Cupavo, “ with swan’s 
 plumes rising from his crest, the mark of his father’s 
 form’’.! Descent was claimed, not only from a swan 
 Apollo, but from a dog Apollo. 
 
 In connection with the same set of ideas, it is 
 pointed out that several yévy, or stocks, had epony- 
 mous heroes, in whose names the names of the ancestral 
 beast apparently survived. In Attica the Crioeis have 
 their hero (Crio, ‘‘Ram”), the Butadze have Butas 
 (“Bullman”), the Aigide have Ageus (“Goat”), and 
 the Cynads, Cynus (“Dog”). Lycus, according to 
 Harporcation (s. v.) has his statue in the shape of a 
 wolf in the Lyceum. “The general facts that certain 
 animals might not be sacrificed to certain gods” (at 
 Athens the Aigide introduced Athena, to whom no 
 goat might be offered on the Acropolis, while she her- 
 self wore the goat skin, wg7s), “ while, on ‘the other 
 hand, each deity demanded particular victims, ex- 
 plained by the ancients themselves in certain cases 
 to be hostile animals, find their natural explanation ” 
 in totemism.? Mr. Evelyn Abbott points out, however, 
 that the names Aigeus, Aegae, Aegina, and others, may 
 be connected with the goat only by an old volks- 
 etymologie, as on coins of Aegina in Achaea. The real 
 meaning of the words may be different. Compare 
 
 1 Aineid, x. 187. ’ 
 2Some apparent survivals of totemism in ritual will be found in the 
 ehapter on Greek gods, especially Zeus. Dionysus, and Apollo. 
 
270 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 aiylados, the sea-shore. Mr. J. G. Frazer does not, at 
 present, regard totemism as proved in the case of 
 Greece.! 
 
 As final examples of survivals from the age of 
 barbarism in the religion of Greece, certain features in 
 the Mysterves may be noted. Plutarch speaks of “the 
 eating of raw flesh, and tearing to pieces of victims, 
 as also fastings and beatings of the breast, and again 
 in many places abusive language at the sacrifices, and 
 other mad doings”. The mysteries of Demeter, as 
 will appear when her legend is criticised, contained 
 one element all unlike these “mad doings”; and the 
 evidence of Sophocles, Pindar, Plutarch and others 
 demonstrate that religious consolations were somehow 
 conveyed in the Eleusinia. But Greece had many 
 other local mysteries, and in several of these it is 
 undeniable the Greeks acted much as contemporary 
 Australians, Zufiis and Negroes act in their secret 
 initiations which, however, also inculcate moral ideas 
 of considerable excellence. Important as these analogies 
 are, they appear to have escaped the notice of most 
 mythologists. M. Alfred Maury, however, in Les 
 Religions dela Gréce, published in 1857, offers several 
 instances of hidden rites, common to Hellas and to 
 barbarism. 
 
 There seem in the mysteries of savage races to be 
 two chief purposes. There is the intention of giving 
 to the initiated a certain sacred character, which puts 
 them in close relation with gods or demons, and there is 
 the introduction of the young to complete or advancing 
 
 1See his Golden Bough, an alternative explanation. of these ayimals in 
 connection with ‘‘The Corn Spirit”. 
 
GREEK MYSTERIES. 271 
 
 manhood, and to full participation in the savage 
 Church with its ethical ideas. The latter ceremonies 
 correspond, in short, to confirmation, and they are 
 usually of a severe character, being meant to test by 
 fasting (as Plutarch says) and by torture (as in the 
 familiar Spartan rite) the courage and constancy of 
 the young braves. The Greek mysteries best known 
 to us are the Thesmophoria and the Eleusinia. In 
 the former the rites (as will appear later) partook of 
 the nature of savage ‘‘ medicine” or magic, and were 
 mainly intended to secure fertility in husbandry and 
 in the family. In the Eleusinia the purpose was the 
 purification of the initiated, secured by ablutions and 
 by standing on the ‘‘ ram’s-skin of Zeus,” and after 
 purifications the mystw engaged in sacred dances, and 
 were permitted to view a miracle play representing 
 the sorrows and consolations of Demeter. There was 
 a higher element, necessarily obscure in nature. The 
 chief features in the whole were purifications, dancing, 
 sacrifice and the representation of the miracle play. 
 It would be tedious to offer an exhaustive account of 
 savage rites analogous to these mysteries of Hellas. 
 Let it suffice to display the points where Greek found 
 itself in harmony with Australian, and American, and 
 African practice. These points are: (1) mystic dances; 
 (2) the use of a little instrument, called turndun in 
 Australia, whereby a roaring noise is made, and the 
 profane are warned off; (3) the habit of daubing 
 persons about to be initiated with clay or anything 
 else that is sordid, and of washing this off, apparently 
 by way of showing that old guilt is removed and a 
 new life entered upon; (4) the performances with 
 
272 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 serpents may be noticed, while the “mad doings” and 
 ‘“‘howlings’’ mentioned by Plutarch are familiar to 
 every reader of travels in uncivilised countries; (5) 
 ethical instruction is communicated. 
 
 First, as to the mystic dances, Lucian observes :! 
 “You cannot find a single ancient mystery in which 
 there is not dancing ... This much all men know, 
 that most people say of the revealers of the mysteries 
 that they ‘ dance them out’” (é£opyeto@ar). Clemens 
 of Alexandria uses the same term when speaking of 
 his own “appalling revelations”’.? So closely connected 
 are mysteries with dancing among savages, that when 
 Mr. Orpen asked Qing, the Bushman hunter, about 
 some doctrines in which Qing was not initiated, he 
 said: ‘“‘ Only the initiated men of that dance know 
 these things”. To “dance” this or that means to 
 be acquainted with this or that myth, which is re- 
 presented in a dance or ballet d’action® (ovv pudue 
 Kal opxynoe pvetcOar). So widely distributed is the 
 practice, that Acosta, in an interesting passage, men- 
 tions it as familiar to the people of Peru before and 
 after the Spanish conquest. The text is a valuable 
 instance of survival in religion. When they were 
 converted to Christianity the Peruvians detected the 
 analogy between our sacrament and their mysteries, 
 and they kept up as much as possible of the old rite 
 in the new ritual. Just as the myste of Eleusis prac- 
 tised chastity, abstaining from certain food, and above 
 all from beans, before the great Pagan sacrament, so 
 did the Indians. “To prepare themselves all the 
 
 Yep) Opxhoews, chap. xv. 277. 2 Ap. Euseb., Prep. Hv., ii. 8, 6. 
 3 Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874. 
 
a a ae 
 
 ‘ 
 : 
 3 
 4 
 y 
 | 
 a 
 } 
 ; 
 
 HOLY DANCES. 273 
 
 people fasted two days, during which they did neyther 
 company with their wives, nor eate any meate with 
 salt or garlicke, nor drink any chic. .. . And al- 
 though the Indians now forbeare to sacrifice beasts 
 or other things publikely, which cannot be hidden 
 from the Spaniardes, yet doe they still use many cere- 
 
 monies that have their beginnings from these feasts 
 
 and auntient superstitions, for at this day do they 
 covertly make their feast of Ytu at the daunces of the 
 feast of the Sacrament. Another feast falleth almost 
 at the same time, whereas the Christians observe the 
 solempnitie of the holy Sacrament, which doth re- 
 semble it in some sort, as in dauncing, singing and 
 representations.” 1 The holy “daunces” at Seville 
 are under Papal disapproval, but are to be kept up, 
 it is said, till the peculiar dresses used in them are 
 worn out. Acosta’s Indians also had “ garments which 
 served only for this feast’”’. It is superfluous to 
 multiply examples of the dancing, which is an invari- 
 able feature of savage as of Greek mysteries. 
 
 2. The Greek and savage use of the turndun, or 
 bribbun of Australia in the mysteries is familiar to 
 students. ‘This fish-shaped flat board of wood is tied 
 to a string, and whirled round, so as to cause a peculiar 
 muffied roar. Lobeck quotes from the old scholia on 
 Clemens Alexandrinus, published by Bastius in annota- 
 tions on St. Gregory, the following Greek description of 
 the turndun, the “ bull-roarer ” of English country lads, 
 the Gaelic srannam :2 “Kkavos Evrdpwov ob éE}jmrras To 
 
 1 Acosta, Historie of the Indies, book v. chap. xxviii. London, 1604. 
 2Pronounced strantham. For this information I am indebted to my 
 friend Mr. M‘Allister, schoolmaster at St. Mary’s Loch. 
 VOL. I. 18 
 
274 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 oTapTiov Kai év Tais TeXeTals edoveiTo va porth”. “The 
 conus was a little slab of wood, tied to a string, and 
 whirled round in the mysteries to make a whirring 
 noise.’’ As the mystic uses of the twrndwn in Aus- 
 tralia, New Zealand, New Mexico and Zululand have 
 elsewhere been described at some length (Custom and 
 Myth, pp. 28-44), it may be enough to refer the reader 
 to the passage. Mr. Taylor has since found the instru- 
 ment used in religious mysteries in West Africa, so 
 it has now been tracked almost round the world. That 
 an instrument so rude should be employed by Greek 
 and Australians on mystic occasions is in itself a re- 
 markable coincidence. Unfortunately, Lobeck, who 
 published the Greek description of the turndun 
 (Aglaophamus, 700), was unacquainted with the 
 modern ethnological evidence. 
 
 3. The custom of plastering the initiated over with 
 clay or filth was common in Greek as in barbaric 
 mysteries. Greek examples may be given first. 
 Demosthenes accuses Aischines of helping his mother 
 in certain mystic rites, aiding her, especially, by be- 
 daubing the initiate with clay and bran! Harpo- 
 eration explains the term used (da7rouatrwv) thus: 
 ‘‘ Daubing the clay and bran on the initiate, to explain 
 which they say that the Titans when they attacked 
 Dionysus daubed themselves over with chalk, but 
 afterwards, for ritual purposes, clay was used”. It 
 may be urged with some force that the mother of 
 Aischines introduced foreign, novel and possibly 
 savage rites. But Sophocles, in a fragment of his lost 
 
 1 De Corond, 318. 
 
DAUBING WITH CLAY. 275 
 
 play, the Captives, uses the term in the same ritual 
 sense— 
 oTpatov KabapTns KaTomaypaTov idpis. 
 
 The idea clearly was that by cleansing away the 
 filth plastered over the body was symbolised the pure 
 and free condition of the initiate. He might now cry 
 in the mystic chant— 
 
 épuyov KdKov, evpov apewvov. 
 Worst have I fled, better have I found. 
 
 That this was the significance of the daubing with 
 clay in Greek mysteries and the subsequent cleansing 
 seems quite certain. We are led straight to this 
 conclusion by similar rites, in which the purpose of 
 mystically cleansing was openly put forward. ‘Thus 
 Plutarch, in his essay on superstition, represents the 
 guilty man who would be purified actually rolling 
 in clay, confessing his misdeeds, and then sitting at 
 home purified by the cleansing process (7epcuat- 
 tomevos) In another rite, the cleansing of blood- 
 guiltiness, a similar process was practised. Orestes, 
 after killing his mother, complains that the Eumenides 
 do not cease to persecute him, though he has been 
 “purified by blood of swine”.* Apollonius says that 
 the red hand of the murderer was dipped in the blood 
 of swine and then washed.? Athenzus describes a 
 
 ‘similar unpleasant ceremony.* The blood of whelps 
 
 was apparently used also, men being first daubed 
 
 130 Hermann, op. cit., 133. 2 Humenides, 273. 
 
 8 Argonautica, iv. 693. 
 
 4ix, 78. Hermann, from whom the latter passages are borrowed, also 
 quotes the evidence of a vase published by Feuerbach, Lehrbuch, p. 131, 
 with other authorities. 
 
276 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. , 
 
 with it and then washed clean. The word epipar- 
 rove. is again the appropriate ritual term. Such 
 rites Plutarch calls purapai ayvetar, “filthy purifi- 
 cations’’.? If daubing with dirt is known to have 
 been a feature of Greek mysteries, it meets us every- 
 where among savages. In O-Kee-Pa, that curiously 
 minute account of the Mandan mysteries, Catlin writes 
 that a portion of the frame of the initiate was “covered 
 with clay, which the operator took from a wooden 
 bowl, and with his hand plastered unsparingly over”’. 
 The fifty young men waiting for initiation ‘“‘ were 
 naked and entirely covered with clay of various 
 _ eolours”’.® The custom is mentioned by Captain John 
 Smith in Virginia. Mr. Winwood Reade found it in 
 Africa, where, as among the Mandans and Spartans, 
 cruel torture and flogging accompanied the initiation 
 of young men.* In Australia the evidence for daub- 
 ing the initiate is very abundant.o In New Mexico, 
 the Zuiiis stole Mr. Cushing’s black paint, as consider- 
 ing it even better than clay for religious daubing.® 
 
 4. Another savage rite, the use of serpents in Greek 
 mysteries, is attested by Clemens Alexandrinus and 
 by Demosthenes (loc. cit.). Clemens says the snakes 
 were caressed in representations of the loves of Zeus 
 in serpentine form. The great savage example is 
 that of “ the snake-dance of the Moquis,” who handle 
 rattle-snakes in the mysteries without being harmed.’ 
 
 1 Plutarch, Quaest. Rom., 68.. 2 De Superstitione, chap. xii. 
 
 3 Q-Kee-Pa, London, 1867, p. 21. 
 
 4 Savage Africa, case of Mongilomba ; Pausanias, iii. 15. 
 
 5 Brough Smyth, i. 60. 6 Custom and Myth, p. 40. 
 
 7The Snake-Dance of the Moquis. By Captain John G. Bourke, 
 London, 1884, 
 
pe Sh ts Ee ae 
 
 ee ee ee 
 
 MORALS IN MYSTERIES. 277 
 
 The dance is partly totemistic, partly meant, like the 
 Thesmophoria, to secure the fertility of the lands of 
 the Moquis of Arizonas. The turndum or popuBos is 
 employed. Masks are worn, as in the rites of Demeter 
 Cidiria in Arcadia.! 
 
 5. This last point of contact between certain Greek 
 and certain savage mysteries is highly important. 
 The argument of Lobeck, in his celebrated work 
 Aglaophamus, is that the Mysteries were of no great 
 moment in religion. Had he known the evidence as 
 to savage initiations, he would have been confirmed 
 in his opinion, for many of the singular Greek rites 
 are clearly survivals from savagery. But was there 
 no more truly religious survival? Pindar is a very 
 ancient witness that things of divine import were 
 revealed. ‘‘ Happy is he who having seen these 
 things goes under the hollow earth. He knows the 
 end of life, and the god-given beginning.”? Sophocles 
 “ chimes in,” as Lobeck says, declaring that the initiate 
 alone live in Hades, while other souls endure all evils. 
 Crinagoras avers that even in life the initiate live 
 secure, and in death are the happier. Isagoras 
 declares that about the end of life and all eternity 
 they have sweet hopes. 
 
 Splendida, testimonia, cries Lobeck. He tries 
 to minimise the evidence, remarking that Isocrates 
 promises the very same rewards to all who live justly 
 and righteously. But why not, if to live justly and 
 righteously was part of the teaching of the mysteries 
 of Eleusis? Cicero’s evidence, almost a translation of 
 the Greek passages already cited, Lobeck dismisses as 
 
 1 Pausanias, viii. 16, 2 Fragm., exvi., 128 H. p. 265. 
 
278 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 purely rhetorical. Lobeck’s method is rather cavalier, 
 Pindar and Sophocles meant something of great 
 signiticance. 
 
 Now we have acknowledged savage survivals of 
 ugly rites in the Greek mysteries. But it is only 
 fair to remember that, in certain of the few savage 
 mysteries of which we know the secret, righteousness 
 of life and a knowledge of good are inculcated. This is 
 the case in Australia, and in Central Africa, where to be 
 “‘ uninitiated ” is equivalent to being selfish? Thus it 
 seems not improbable that consolatory doctrines were 
 expounded in the Eleusinia, and that this kind of 
 sermon or exhortation was no less a survival from 
 savagery than the daubing with clay, and the popuPos, 
 and other wild rites. . 
 
 We have now attempted to establish that in Greek 
 law and ritual many savage customs and usages did 
 undeniably survive. We have seen that both philoso- 
 phical and popular opinion in Greece believed in a past 
 age of savagery. In law, in religion, in religious art, 
 in custom, in human sacrifice, in relics of totemism, 
 and in the mysteries, we have seen that the Greeks 
 retained plenty of the usages now found among the 
 remotest and most backward races. We have urged 
 against the suggestion of borrowing from Egypt or 
 Asia that these survivals are constantly found in local 
 and tribal religion and rituals, and that consequently 
 they probably date from that remote prehistoric past 
 when the Greeks lived in village settlements. It may 
 still doubtless be urged that all these things are 
 
 1 De Legibus ii. 14; Aglaophamus, pp. 69-74, 
 2 Making of Religion, pp. 198-197, 235, 
 
SURVIVALS IN GREECE. 279 
 
 Pelasgic, and were the customs of a race settled in 
 Hellas before the arrival of the Homeric Achzans, 
 and Dorians, and Argives, who, on this hypothesis, 
 adopted and kept up the old savage Pelasgian ways 
 and superstitions. It is impossible to prove or disprove 
 this belief, nor does it affect our argument. We allege 
 that all Greek life below the surface was rich in insti- 
 tutions now found among the most barbaric peoples. 
 These institutions, whether borrowed or inherited, 
 would still be part of the legacy left by savages to 
 cultivated peoples. As this legacy is so large in 
 custom and ritual, it is not unfair to argue that 
 portions of it will also be found in myths. It is now 
 time to discuss Greek myths of the origin of things, 
 and decide whether they are or are not analogous in 
 ideas to the myths which spring from the wild and 
 ignorant fancy of Australians, Cahrocs, Nootkas and 
 Bushmen. 
 
280 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 GREEK COSMOGONIC MYTHS. 
 
 Nature of the evidence—Traditions of origin of the world and man— 
 Homeric, Hesiodic and Orphic myths—Later evidence of historians, 
 dramatists, commentators—The Homeric story comparatively pure— 
 The story in Hesiod, and its savage analogues—The explanations of 
 the myth of Cronus, modern and ancient—The Orphic cosmogony— 
 Phanes and Prajapati—Greek myths of the origin of man—Their 
 savage analogues. 
 
 THE authorities for Greek cosmogonic myth are ex- 
 tremely various in date, character and value. The 
 most ancient texts are the J/zad and the poems attri- 
 buted to Hesiod. The Jlaad, whatever its date, whatever 
 the place of its composition, was intended to please a 
 noble class of warriors. The Hesiodic poems, at least the 
 Theogony, have clearly a didactic aim, and the intention ~ 
 of presenting a systematic and orderly account of the 
 divine genealogies. To neither would we willingly 
 attribute a date much later than the ninth century of 
 our era, but the question of the dates of all the epic 
 and Hesiodic poems, and even of their various parts, is 
 greatly disputed among scholars. Yet it is nowhere 
 denied that, however late the present form of some of 
 the poems may be, they contain ideas of extreme 
 antiquity. Although the Homeric poems are usually 
 considered, on the whole, more ancient than those 
 
Lee we eee es Oe ee. 
 
 Tanto | eee. eee ee 
 
 HESIOD AND HOMER. 281 
 
 attributed to Hesiod} it is a fact worth remembering 
 that the notions of the origin of things in Hesiod are 
 much more savage and (as we hold) much more archaic 
 than the opinions of Homer. 
 
 While Hesiod offers a complete theogony or genea- 
 logy of deities and heroes, Homer gives no more than 
 hints and allusions to the stormy past of the gods. It 
 is clear, however, that his conception of that past 
 differed considerably from the traditions of Hesiod. 
 However we explain it,the Homeric mythology (though 
 itself repugnant to the philosophers from Xenophanes 
 downwards) is much more mild, pure and humane than 
 the mythology either of Hesiod or of our other Greek 
 authorities. Some may imagine that Homer retains a 
 clearer and less corrupted memory than Hesiod pos- 
 sessed of an original and authentic “ divine tradition ”. 
 Others may find in Homer’s comparative purity a 
 proof of the later date of his epics in their present 
 form, or may even proclaim that Homer was a kind 
 of Cervantes, who wished to laugh the gods away. 
 There is no conceivable or inconceivable theory about 
 Homer that has not its advocates. For ourselves, we 
 hold that the divine genius of Homer, though working 
 in an age distant rather than “ early,’ selected in- 
 stinctively the purer mythical materials, and burned 
 away the coarser dross of antique legend, leaving little 
 but the gold which is comparatively refined. 
 
 We must remember that it does not follow that 
 
 1Grote assigns his Theogony to circ. 750 a.D. The Theogony was 
 taught to boys in Greece, much as the Church Catechism and Bible are 
 taught in England ; Eschines in Ctesiph., 185, p. 78. Libanius, 400 years 
 after Christ (i. 502-509, iv, 874), 
 
282 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 any mythical ideas are later than the age of- Homer 
 because we first meet them in poems of a later date. 
 We have already seen that though the Brahmanas are 
 much later in date of compilation than the Veda, yet 
 
 a tradition which we first find in the Brahmanas may — 
 
 be older than the time at which the Veda was com- 
 piled. In the same way, as Mr. Max Miiller observes, 
 ‘“‘we know that certain ideas which we find in later 
 writers do not occur in Homer. But it does not 
 follow at all that such ideas are all of later growth or 
 possess a secondary character. One myth may have 
 belonged to one tribe; one god may have had his chief 
 worship in one locality ; and our becoming acquainted 
 with these through a later poet does not in the least 
 prove their later origin.” ! 
 
 After Homer and Hesiod, our most ancient autho- 
 rities for Greek cosmogonie myths are probably the 
 so-called Orphic fragments. Concerning the dates 
 and the manner of growth of these poems volumes of 
 erudition have been compiled. As Homer is silent 
 about Orpheus (in spite of the position which the 
 mythical Thracian bard acquired as the inventor of 
 
 letters and magic and the father of the mysteries), — 
 
 it has been usual to regard the Orphic ideas as of late 
 introduction. We may agree with Grote and Lobeck 
 that these ideas and the ascetic ‘“‘Orphic mode of 
 life’’ first acquired importance in Greece about the 
 time of Epimenides, or, roughly speaking, between 620 
 and 500 B.c.2, That age certainly witnessed a curious 
 growth of superstitious fears and of mystic ceremonies 
 
 1 Hibbert Lectures, pp. 180, 181. 
 2 Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 317 ; Grote, iii. 86, 
 
at 
 
 ORPHIC POEMS. 283 
 
 intended to mitigate spiritual terrors. Greece was 
 becoming more intimately acquainted with Egypt and 
 with Asia, and was comparing her own religion with 
 the beliefs and rites of other peoples. The times and 
 the minds of men were being prepared for the clear 
 philosophies that soon ‘‘on Argive heights divinely 
 sang”. Just as, when the old world was about to 
 accept Christianity, a deluge of Oriental and barbaric 
 superstitions swept across men’s minds, so immediately 
 before the dawn of Greek philosophy there came an 
 irruption of mysticism and of spiritual fears. We 
 may suppose that the Orphic poems were collected, 
 edited and probably interpolated, in this dark hour of 
 Greece. ‘To me,” says Lobeck, ‘it appears that the 
 verses may be referred to the age of Onomacritus, 
 an age curious in the writings of ancient poets, and 
 attracted by the allurements of mystic religions.” 
 The style of the surviving fragments is sufficiently 
 pure and epic; the strange unheard of myths are 
 unlike those which the Alexandrian poets drew from 
 fountains long lost! But how much in the Orphic 
 myths is imported from Asia or Egypt, how much is 
 the invention of literary forgers like Onomacritus, 
 how much should be regarded as the first guesses of 
 the physical poet-philosophers, and how much is truly 
 ancient popular legend recast in literary form, it is 
 impossible with certainty to determine. 
 
 We must not regard a myth as necessarily late or 
 necessarily foreign because we first meet it in an 
 “QOrphie composition”. If the myth be one of the 
 sort which encounter us in every quarter, nay, in 
 
 1 Aglaophamus, i. 611. 
 
284 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 every obscure nook of the globe, we may plausibly 
 regard it as ancient. If it bear the distinct marks of 
 being a Neo-platonic pastiche, we may reject it with- 
 out hesitation. On the whole, however, our Orphic 
 authorities can never be quoted with much satisfaction. 
 The later sources of evidence for Greek myths are not 
 of great use to the student of cosmogonic legend, 
 though invaluable when we come to treat of the 
 established dynasty of gods, the heroes and the 
 “culture-heroes”. For these the authorities are the 
 whole range of Greek literature, poets, dramatists, 
 philosophers, critics, historians and travellers. We 
 have also the notes and comments of the scholiasts or 
 commentators on the poets and dramatists. Some- 
 times these annotators only darken counsel by their 
 guesses. Sometimes perhaps, especially in the scholia 
 on the Iliad and Odyssey, they furnish us with a 
 precious myth or popular mdrchen not otherwise 
 recorded. The regular professional mythographa, 
 again, of whom Apollodorus (150 B.c.) is the type, 
 compiled manuals explanatory of the myths which 
 were alluded to by the poets. The scholiasts and 
 mythographi often retain myths from lost poems and 
 lost plays. Finally, from the travellers and historians 
 we occasionally glean examples of the tales (“holy 
 chapters,” as Mr. Grote calls them) which were narrated 
 by priests and temple officials to the pilgrims who 
 visited the sacred shrines. 
 
 These ‘‘chapters” are almost invariably puerile, 
 savage and obscene. They bear the stamp of extreme 
 antiquity, because they never, as a rule, passed through 
 the purifying medium of literature. There were 
 
 t 
 7 
 t 
 5 
 ; 
 | 
 % 
 | 
 h 
 | 
 
HEATHEN APOLOGISTS. 285 
 
 many myths too crude and archaic for the purposes 
 of poetry and of the drama. These were handed 
 down from local priest to local priest, with the i- 
 violability of sacred and immutable tradition. We 
 have already given a reason for assigning a high 
 antiquity to the local temple myths. Just as Greeks 
 lived in villages before they gathered into towns, so 
 their gods were gods of villages or tribes before they 
 were national deities. The local myths are those of 
 the archaic village state of “ culture,” more ancient, more 
 savage, than literary narrative. “ Very frequently the 
 local legends were subjected to the process of allegori- 
 cal interpretation, as men became alive to the mon- 
 strosity of their unsophisticated meaning. Often they 
 proved too savage for our authorities, who merely 
 remark, “Concerning this a certain holy chapter is 
 told,” but decline to record the legend. In the same 
 way missionaries, with mistaken delicacy, often refuse 
 to repeat some savage legend with which they are 
 acquainted. | 
 
 The latest sort of testimony as to Greek myths 
 must be sought in the writings of the heathen apolo- 
 gists or learned Pagan defenders of Paganism in the 
 first centuries during Christianity, and in the works of 
 their opponents, the fathers of the Church. Though the 
 fathers certainly do not understate the abominations 
 of Paganism, and though the ‘heathen apologists make 
 free use of allegorical (and impossible) interpretations, 
 the evidence of both is often useful and important. 
 The testimony of ancient art, vases, statues, pictures 
 and the descriptions of these where they no longer 
 survive, are also of service and interest. 
 
286 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 After this brief examination of the sources of our 
 knowledge of Greek myth, we may approach the 
 Homeric legends of the origin of things and the world’s 
 beginning. In Homer these matters are only referred 
 to incidentally. He more than once calls Oceanus 
 (that is, the fabled stream which flows all round the 
 world, here regarded as a person) “ the origin of the 
 gods,” “the origin of all things”. That Ocean is 
 considered a person, and that he is not an allegory for 
 water or the aqueous element, appears from the speech 
 of Hera to Aphrodite: “‘T-am going to visit the limits 
 of the bountiful earth, and Oceanus, father of the 
 gods, and mother Tethys, who reared me duly and 
 nurtured me in their halls, when far-seeing Zeus im- 
 prisoned Cronus beneath the earth and the unvintaged 
 sea’’.? Homer does not appear to know Uranus as 
 the father of Cronus, and thus the myth of the mutila- 
 tion of Uranus necessarily does not occur in. Homer. 
 ‘Cronus, the head of the dynasty which preceded that 
 of Zeus, is described * as the son of Rhea, but nothing 
 
 1 Jliad, xiv. 201, 302, 246. 
 
 2JIn reading what Homer and Hesiod report about these matters, we 
 must remember that all the forces and phenomena are conceived of by 
 them as persons. In this regard the archaic and savage view of all things 
 as personal and human is preserved. ‘‘I maintain,” says Grote, ‘‘ moreover, 
 fully the character of these great divine agents as persons, which is the light 
 in which they presented themselves to the Homeric or Hesiodic audience. 
 Uranus, Nyx, Hypnos and Oneiros (heaven, night, sleep and dream) are 
 persons just as much as Zeus or Apollo. To resolve them into mere allego- 
 ries is unsafe and unprofitable. We then depart from the point of view of 
 the original hearers without acquiring any consistent or philosophical point 
 of view of our own.” This holds good though portions of the Hesiodic 
 venealogies are distinctly poetic allegories cast in the mould of the ancient 
 personal theory of things. 
 
 3 Iliad, xv. 187. 
 
9 Ae 
 
 eer. 
 
 ee teks 
 
 ‘ 
 F 
 j 
 ; 
 : 
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 : 
 7 
 oi 
 d 
 p 
 
 ZEUS AND CRONUS. 287 
 
 is said of his father. The passage contains the account 
 which Poseidon himself chose to give of the war in 
 heaven: ‘‘ Three brethren are we, and sons of Cronus 
 whom Rhea bare—Zeus and myself, and Hades is the 
 third, the ruler of the folk in the under-world. And 
 in three lots were all things divided, and each drew a 
 domain of his own.”’ Here Zeus is the eldest son of 
 Cronus. Though lots are drawn at hazard for the 
 property of the father (which we know to have been 
 customary in Homer’s time), yet throughout the Jliad 
 Zeus constantly claims the respect and obedience due 
 to him by right of primogeniture.!. We shall see that 
 Hesiod adopts exactly the opposite view. Zeus is the 
 youngest child of Cronus. His supremacy is an 
 example of jiingsten recht, the wide-spread custom 
 which makes the youngest child the heir in chief.’ 
 But how did the sons of Cronus come to have his 
 property in their hands to divide? By right of sue- 
 cessful rebellion, when ‘‘ Zeus imprisoned Cronus 
 beneath the earth and the unvintaged sea’. With 
 Cronus in his imprisonment are the Titans. That is 
 all that Homer cares to tell about the absolute begin- 
 ning of things and the first dynasty of rulers of 
 Olympus. His interest is all in the actual reigning 
 family, that of the Cronid, nor is he fond of report- 
 ing their youthful excesses. 
 
 1The custom by which sons drew lots for equal shares of their dead 
 father’s property is described in Odyssey, xiv. 199-212. Here Odysseus, 
 giving a false account of himself, says that he was a Cretan, a bastard, 
 and that his half-brothers, born in wedlock, drew lots for their father’s 
 inheritance, and did not admit him to the drawing, but gave him a small 
 portion apart. 
 
 2See Elton, Origins of Hnglish History, pp. 185-207. 
 
288 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 We now turn from Homer’s incidental allusions to 
 the ample and systematic narrative of Hesiod. As 
 Mr. Grote says, ‘‘ Men habitually took their informa- 
 tion respecting their theogonic antiquities from the 
 Hesiodic poems’’ Hesiod was accepted as an authority 
 both by the pious Pausanias in the second century of 
 our era—who protested against any attempt to alter 
 stories about the gods—and by moral reformers like 
 Plato and Xenophanes, who were revolted by the 
 ancient legends,! and, indeed, denied their truth. 
 Yet, though Hesiod represents Greek orthodoxy, we 
 have observed that Homer (whose epics are probably 
 still more ancient) steadily ignores the more barbarous 
 portions of Hesiod’s narrative. Thus the question 
 arises: Are the stories of Hesiod’s invention, and 
 later than Homer, or does Homer’s genius half-un- 
 consciously purify materials like those which Hesiod 
 presents in the crudest form? Mr. Grote says: ‘‘ How 
 far these stories are the invention of Hesiod himself 
 it is impossible to determine. They bring us down 
 to a cast of fancy more coarse and indelicate than the 
 Homeric, and more nearly resemble some of the holy 
 chapters (fepot Aoyor) of the more recent mysteries, 
 such, for example, as the tale of Dionysus Zagreus. 
 There is evidence in the Theogony itself that the 
 author was acquainted with local legends current both 
 at Krete and at Delphi, for he mentions both the moun- 
 tain-cave in Krete wherein the newly-born Zeus was 
 hidden, and the stone near the Delphian temple—the 
 identical stone which Kronos had swallowed—placed 
 by Zeus himself as a sign and marvel to mortal men. 
 
 1 Timeeus, 41; Republic, 377. 
 
—_— = 
 
 WILD MYTHS. 989 
 
 Both these monuments, which the poet expressly refers 
 to, and had probably seen, imply a whole train of ac- 
 cessory and explanatory local legends, current probably 
 among the priests of Krete and Delphi.” 
 
 All these circumstances appear to be good evidence 
 of the great antiquity of the legends recorded by 
 Hesiod. In the first place, arguing merely a prior, 
 it is extremely improbable that in the brief interval 
 between the date of the comparatively pure and noble 
 mythology of the Zliad and the much ruder Theogony 
 of Hesiod men invented stories like the mutilation of 
 Uranus and the swallowing of his offspring by Cronus. 
 The former legend is almost exactly parallel, as has 
 already been shown, to the myth of Papa and Rangi 
 in New Zealand. The later has its parallels among 
 the savage Bushmen and Australians. It is highly 
 improbable that men in an age so civilised as that of 
 Homer invented myths as hideous as those of the 
 lowest savages. But if we take these myths to be, 
 not new inventions, but the sacred stories of local 
 
 ‘priesthoods, their antiquity is probably incalculable. 
 
 The sacred stories, as we know from Pausanias, 
 Herodotus and from all the writers who touch on the 
 subject of the mysteries, were myths communicated 
 by the priests to the initiated. Plato speaks of such 
 myths in the Republic, 378 : “If there is an absolute 
 necessity for their mention, a very few might hear 
 them in a mystery, and then let them sacrifice, not a 
 common pig, but some huge and unprocurable victim ; 
 this would have the effect of very greatly diminishing 
 
 the number of the hearers”. ‘This is an amusing 
 example of a plan for veiling the horrors of myth, 
 VOL. I, f 
 
290 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 The pig was the animal usually offered to Demeter, 
 the goddess of the Eleusinian mysteries. Plato pro- 
 poses to substitute some “unprocurable ” beast, perhaps 
 a giraffe or an elephant. . 
 
 To Hesiod, then, we must turn for what is the 
 earliest complete literary form of the Greek cosmo- 
 gonic myth. Hesiod begins, like the New Zealanders, 
 with “the august race of gods, by earth and wide 
 heaven begotten ”.! So the New Zealanders, as we 
 have seen, say, “The heaven which is above us, and 
 the earth which is beneath us, are the progenitors of 
 men and the origin of all things”. Hesiod * somewhat 
 differs from this view by making Chaos absolutely 
 first of all things, followed by “ wide-bosomed EHarth,” 
 Tartarus and Eros (love). Chaos unaided produced 
 Erebus and Night; the children of Night and Erebus 
 are Ether and Day. Earth produced Heaven, who 
 then became her own lover, and to Heaven she bore 
 Oceanus, and the Titans, Cceeus and Crius, Hyperion 
 and lapetus, Thea and Rhea, Themis, Mnemosyne, 
 Phoebe, Tethys, “and youngest after these was born 
 Cronus of crooked counsel, the most dreadful of her 
 children, who ever detested his puissant sire,” Heaven. 
 There were other sons of Earth and Heaven peculiarly 
 
 hateful to their father? and these Uranus used to | 
 hide from the light in a hollow of Gwa. Both they — 
 
 and Gea resented this treatment, and the Titans, like 
 
 “the children of Heaven and Earth,” in the New 
 
 Zealand poem, “sought to discern the difference 
 
 between light and darkness”. Gea (unlike Harth 
 
 in the New Zealand myth, for there she is purely 
 1 Theog., 45. 2 Ibid,, 116, 3 Ibid.. 155. 
 
CRONUS LEGEND. 291 
 
 passive), conspired with her children, produced iron, 
 and asked her sons to avenge their wrongs.’ Fear fell 
 
 upon all of them save Cronus, who (like Tane Mahuta 
 
 in the Maori poem) determined to end the embraces 
 of Earth and Heaven. But while the New Zealand, 
 like the Indo-Aryan myth,? conceives of Earth and 
 Heaven as two beings who have never previously 
 been sundered at all, Hesiod makes Heaven amorously 
 approach his spouse from a distance. This was the 
 moment for Cronus,? who stretched out his hand 
 armed with the sickle of iron, and mutilated Uranus. 
 As in so many savage myths, the blood of the wounded 
 god fallen on the ground produced strange creatures, 
 nymphs of the ash-tree, giants and furies. As in the 
 Maori myth, one of the children of Heaven stood apart 
 and did not consent to the deed. This was Oceanus 
 in Greece,‘ and in New Zealand it was Tawhiri Matea, 
 the wind, ‘‘ who arose and followed his father, Heaven, 
 and remained with him in the open spaces of the sky”. 
 Uranus now predicted * that there would come a day 
 of, vengeance for the evil deed of Cronus, and so ends 
 the dynasty of Uranus. 
 
 This story was one of the great stumbling-blocks 
 of orthodox Greece. It was the tale that Plato said 
 should be told, if at all, only to a few in a mystery. 
 after the sacrifice of some rare and scarcely obtainable 
 animal. Even among the Maoris, the conduct of the 
 children who severed their father and mother is 
 
 1 Theog., 166. 
 
 2 Muir, v. 23, quoting Aitareya Brahmana, iv. 27: “These two worlds 
 were once joined ; subsequently they separated ”’. 
 
 3 Theog., 175-185. 4 Apollod,, i. 15, 5 Theog., 209. 
 
/ 
 
 292 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 regarded as a singular instance of iniquity, and is told 
 
 to children as a moral warning, an example to be — | 
 condemned. In Greece, on the other hand, unless we © 
 
 are to take the Huthyphro as wholly ironical, some 
 of the pious justified their conduct by the example of 
 Zeus. Euthyphro quotes this example when he is 
 about to prosecute his own father, for which act, he 
 says, ‘‘Men are angry with me; so inconsistently do 
 they talk when I am concerned and when the gods 
 are concerned”.! But in Greek the tale has no mean- 
 ing. It has been allegorised in various ways, and 
 Lafitau fancied that it was a distorted form of the 
 Biblical account of the origin of sin. In Maori the 
 
 legend is perfectly intelligible. Heaven and earth. 
 
 were conceived of (like everything else), as beings with 
 human parts and passions, linked in an endless 
 embrace which crushed and darkened their children. 
 It became necessary to separate them, and this feat 
 was achieved not without pain. “Then wailed the 
 Heaven, and exclaimed the Earth, ‘ Wherefore this 
 murder? Why this great sin? Why separate us?’ 
 But what cared Tane? Upwards he sent one and 
 downwards the other. He cruelly severed the sinews 
 which united Heaven and Earth.”* The Greek myth, 
 too, contemplated earth and heaven as beings cor- 
 poreally united, and heaven as a malignant power 
 that concealed his children in darkness. 
 
 But while the conception of heaven and earth as 
 parents of living things remains perfectly intelligible 
 in one sense, the vivid personification which regarded 
 them as creatures with human parts and passions had 
 
 1 Huthyphro, 6. 2 Taylor, New Zealand, 119. 
 
 — ee ee 
 
 ee a. eee ee eee 
 
a eo eee 
 
 Segoe tee 
 
 4 
 : 
 ; 
 b 
 : 
 : 
 4 
 
 CRONUS. 298 
 
 ceased to be intelligible in Greece before the times of 
 the earliest philosophers. The old physical conception 
 of the pair became a metaphor, and the account of 
 their rending asunder by their children lost all signifi- 
 cance, and seemed to be an abominable and unintelli- 
 gible myth. When examined in the light of the New 
 Zealand story, and of the fact that early peoples do 
 regard all phenomena as human beings, with physical 
 
 attributes like those of men, the legend of Cronus, 
 
 and Uranus, and Gea ceases to be a mystery. It is, 
 at bottom, a savage explanation (as in the Samoan 
 story) of the separation of earth and heaven, an ex- 
 planation which could only have occurred to people 
 in a state of mind which civilisation has forgotten. 
 
 The next generation of Hesiodic gods (if gods we 
 are to call the members of this race of non-natural 
 men) was not more fortunate than the first in its 
 family relations. 
 
 Cronus wedded his sister, Rhea, and begat Demeter, 
 Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and the youngest, Zeus. 
 “ And mighty Cronus swallowed down each of them, 
 each that came to their mother’s knees from her holy 
 womb, with this intent that none other of the proud 
 sons of heaven should hold his kingly sway among the 
 smmortals, Heaven and Earth had warned him that 
 he too should fall through his children. Wherefore 
 he kept no vain watch, but spied and swallowed down 
 each of his offspring, while grief immitigable took 
 possession of Rhea.” Rhea, being about to become 
 the mother of Zeus, took counsel ‘with Uranus and 
 Gea. By their advice she went to Crete, where Zeus 
 
 1 Theog., 460, 465. 
 
294 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 was born, and, in place of the child, she presented to 
 Cronus a huge stone swathed in swaddling bands. 
 This he swallowed, and was easy in his mind. Zeus 
 grew up, and by some means, suggested by Gea, 
 compelled Zeus to disgorge all his offspring. “‘ And 
 he vomited out the stone first, as he had swallowed 
 it last.” The swallowed children emerged alive, 
 and Zeus fixed the stone at Pytho (Delphi), where 
 Pausanias? had the privilege of seeing it, and where, 
 as it did not tempt the cupidity of barbarous invaders, 
 it probably still exists. It was not a large stone, 
 Pausanias says, and the Delphians used to pour oil 
 over it, as Jacob did* to the stone at Bethel, and on 
 feast-days they covered it with wraps of wool. The 
 custom of smearing fetish-stones (which Theophrastus 
 mentions as one of the practices of the superstitious man) 
 is clearly a survival from the savage stage of religion. 
 As arule, however, among savages, fetish-stones are 
 daubed with red paint (like the face of the wooden 
 ancient Dionysi in Greece, and of Tsui Goab among 
 the Hottentots), not smeared with oil.* 
 
 The myth of the swallowing and disgorging of his 
 own children by Cronus was another of the stumbling- 
 blocks of Greek orthodoxy. The common explanation, 
 that Time (Kpovos) does swallow his children, the 
 days, is not quite satisfactory. Time brings never 
 the past back again, as Cronus did. Besides, the 
 myth of the swallowing is not confined to Cronus. 
 
 1 Theog., 498. 2x, 245, 8 Gen. xxviii. 18. 
 
 4 Pausanias, ii. 2, 5. ‘‘Churinga’’ in Australia are greased with the 
 natural moisture of the palm of the hand, and rubbed with red ochre. 
 —Spencer and Gillen. They are ‘‘sacred things,’ but not exactly fetishes 
 
GORGING MYTHS. 295 
 
 Modern philology has given, as usual, different analyses 
 of the meaning of the name of the god. Hermann, 
 with Preller, derives it from xpaivw, to fulfil. The 
 harvest-month, says Preller, was named Cronion in 
 Greece, and Cronia was the title of the harvest-festival. 
 The sickle of Cronus is thus brought into connection 
 with the sickle of the harvester.! 
 
 The second myth, in which Cronus swallows his 
 children, has numerous parallels in savage legend. 
 Bushmen tell of Kwai Hemm, the devourer, who 
 swallows that great god, the mantis insect, and dis- 
 gorges him alive with all the other persons and animals 
 whom he has engulphed in the course of a long and 
 voracious career.2 The moon in Australia, while he 
 lived on earth, was very greedy, and swallowed the 
 eagle-god, whom he had to disgorge. Mr. Im Thurn 
 found similar tales among the Indians of Guiana. ‘The 
 swallowing and disgorging of Heracles by the monster 
 that was to slay Hesione is well known. Scotch 
 peasants tell of the same feats, but localise the myth 
 on the banks of the Ken in Galloway. Basutos, 
 Eskimos, Zulus and European fairy tales all possess 
 this incident, the swallowing of many persons by a 
 being from whose maw they return alive and in good 
 case. 
 
 A mythical conception which prevails from Green- 
 land to South Africa, from Delphi to the Solomon 
 Islands, from Brittany to the shores of Lake Superior, 
 must have some foundation in the common elements 
 
 1Preller, Gr. Myth., i. 44; Hartung, ii. 48; Porphyry, Adst., ii, 54. 
 Welcker will not hear of this etymology, Gr. Gétt., i. 145, note 9. 
 2 Bleek, Bushman Folk-lore, pp. 6, 8. 
 
296 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 of human nature. Now it seems highly probable that 
 this curious idea may have been originally invented in 
 an attempt to explain natural phenomena by a nature- 
 myth. It has already been shown (chapter v.) that 
 eclipses are interpreted, even by the peasantry of 
 advanced races, as the swallowing of the moon by a 
 beast or a monster. The Piutes account for the dis- 
 appearance of the stars in the daytime by the hypo- 
 thesis that the “sun swallows his children”, In the 
 Melanesian myth, dawn is cut out of the body of night 
 by Qat, armed with a knife of red obsidian. Here are 
 examples? of transparent nature-myths in which this 
 idea occurs for obvious explanatory purposes, and in 
 accordance with the laws of the savage imagination. 
 Thus the conception of the swallowing and disgorging 
 being may very well have arisen out of a nature-myth. 
 But why is the notion attached to the legend of 
 Cronus ? 
 
 That is precisely the question about which myth- 
 ologists differ, as has been shown, and perhaps it is 
 better to offer no explanation. However stories arise 
 —and this story probably arose from a nature-myth— 
 it is certain that they wander about the world, that 
 they change masters, and thus a legend which is told 
 of a princess with an impossible name in Zululand is 
 told of the mother of Charlemagne in France. The 
 tale of the swallowing may have been attributed to 
 Cronus, as a great truculent deity, though it has no 
 
 1The myth of Cronus and the swallowed children and the stone is 
 transferred to Gargantua. See Sébillot, Gargantua dans les Traditions 
 Populaires. But it is impossible to be certain that this is not an example 
 
 of direct borrowing by Madame De Cerny in her Saint Suliac, p. 69. 
 2Compare Tylor, Prim. Cult., i. 338, 
 
 i —e ee ae 
 
ZEUS SWALLOWS HIS WIFE. 297 
 
 particular elemental signification in connection with 
 his legend. 
 
 This peculiarly savage trick of swallowing each 
 other became an inherited habit in the family of 
 Cronus. When Zeus reached years of discretion, he 
 married Metis, and this lady, according to the scholiast 
 on Hesiod, had the power of transforming herself into 
 any shape she pleased. When she was about to be a 
 mother, Zeus induced her to assume the shape of a fly 
 and instantly swallowed her.! In behaving thus, Zeus 
 acted on the advice of Uranus and Gea. It was feared 
 that Metis would produce a child more powerful than 
 his father. Zeus avoided this peril by swallowing his 
 wife, and himself gave birth to Athene. The notion 
 of swallowing a hostile person, who has been changed 
 by magic into a conveniently small bulk, is very com- 
 mon. Itoccursin the story of Taliesin.? Caridwen, in 
 the shape of a hen, swallows Gwiou Bach, in the form 
 of a grain of wheat. In the same manner the princess 
 in the Arabian Nights swallowed the Geni. Here 
 then we have in the Hesiodic myth an old marchen 
 pressed into the service of the higher mythology. 
 The apprehension which Zeus (like Herod and King 
 Arthur) always felt lest an unborn child should over- 
 throw him, was also familiar to Indra ; but, instead 
 of swallowing the mother and concealing her in his 
 own body, like Zeus, Indra entered the mother’s body, 
 and himself was born instead of the dreaded child.* 
 A cow on this occasion was born along with Indra. 
 
 1Hesiod, Theogonia, 886. See Scholiast and note in Aglaophamus, i. 
 613. Compare Puss in Boots and the Ogre. 
 2 Mabinogion, p. 473. 8 Black Yajur Veda, quoted by Sayana. 
 
298 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 This adventure of the catdzroous or swallowing of Metis 
 was explained by the late Platonists as a Platonic 
 allegory. Probably the people who originated the tale 
 were not Platonists, any more than Pandarus was an 
 Aristotelian. 
 
 After Homer and Hesiod, the oldest literary autho- 
 rities for Greek cosmogonic myths are the poems 
 attributed to Orpheus. About their probable date, 
 as has been said, little is known. They have reached 
 us only in fragments, but seem to contain the first 
 guesses of a philosophy not yet disengaged from 
 mythical conditions. The poet preserves, indeed, 
 some extremely rude touches of early imagination, 
 while at the same time one of the noblest and boldest 
 expressions of pantheistic thought is attributed to him. 
 From the same source are drawn ideas as pure as 
 those of the philosophical Vedic hymn,’ and as wild 
 as those of the Vedic Pwrusha Sukta, or legend of 
 the fashioning of the world out of the mangled limbs 
 of Purusha. The authors of the Orphic cosmogony 
 appear to have begun with some remarks on Time 
 (Kpovos). ‘‘Time was when as yet this world was 
 not.”2 Time, regarded in the mythical fashion as 
 a person, generated Chaos and Aither. The Orphie 
 poet styles Chaos ydoua wedwpiov, “the monstrous 
 gulph,” or “gap”. This term curiously reminds one 
 of Ginnunga-gap in the Scandinavian cosmogonic 
 legends. “Ginnunga-gap was light as windless air,” 
 and therein the blast of heat met the cold rime, whence 
 
 1 Rig-Veda, x. 90. 
 2Lobeck, Aglaophamus, i. 470. See also the quotations from 
 Proclus. 
 
ORPHIC MYTHS. 299 
 
 Ymir was generated, the Purusha of Northern fable. 
 These ideas correspond well with the Orphic conception 
 of primitive space.” 
 
 In process of time Chaos produced an egg, shining 
 and silver white. It is absurd to inquire, according 
 to Lobeck, whether the poet borrowed this widely 
 spread notion of a cosmic egg from Phoenicia, Baby- 
 lon, Egypt (where the goose-god Seb laid the egg), or 
 whether the Orphic singer originated so obvious an 
 idea. Qucrere ludicrum est. The conception may 
 have been borrowed, but manifestly it is one of the 
 earliest hypotheses that occur to the rude imagination. 
 We have now three primitive generations, time, chaos, 
 the egg, and in the fourth generation the egg gave 
 birth to Phanes, the great hero of the Orphic cos- 
 mogony.> ‘The earliest and rudest thinkers were 
 puzzled, as many savage cosmogonic myths have 
 demonstrated, to account for the origin of life. The 
 myths frequently hit on the theory of a hermaphro- 
 ditic being, both male and female, who produces 
 another being out of himself. Prajapati in the Indian 
 stories, and Hrimthursar in Scandinavian legend— 
 “one of his feet got a son on the other ’”—with Lox in 
 the Algonquin tale are examples of these double-sexed 
 personages. In the Orphic poem, Phanes is both male 
 and female. This Phanes held within him “the seed 
 of all the gods,‘ and his name is confused with the 
 names of Metis and Ericapzus in a kind of trinity. 
 All this part of the Orphic doctrine is greatly obscured 
 by the allegorical and theosophistic interpretations of 
 
 1 Gylfi's Mocking. 2 Aglaophamus, p. 473. 
 3 Clemens Alexan., p. 672. 4 Damascius, ap. Lobeck, i. 481. 
 
300 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 the late Platonists long after our era, who, as usual, 
 insisted on finding their own trinitarian ideas, com- 
 menta frigidissyma, concealed under the mythical 
 narrative.! 
 
 Another description by Hieronymus of the first 
 being, the Orphic Phanes, “as a serpent with bull’s 
 and lion’s heads, with a human face in the middle 
 and wings on the shoulders,” is sufficiently rude and 
 senseless. But these physical attributes could easily 
 be explained away as types of anything the Platonist 
 pleased.2- The Orphic Phanes, too, was almost as 
 many-headed as a giant in a fairy tale, or as Purusha 
 in the Rig-Veda. He had aram’s head, a bull’s head, 
 a Snake’s head and a lion’s head, and glanced around 
 with four eyes, presumably human.* This remarkable 
 being was also provided with golden wings. The 
 nature of the physical arrangements by which Phanes 
 became capable of originating life in the world is 
 described in a style so savage and crude that the 
 reader must be referred to Suidas for the original 
 text. The tale is worthy of the Swift-like fancy of 
 the Australian Narrinyeri. 
 
 Nothing can be easier or more delusive than to 
 explain all this wild part of the Orphic cosmogony 
 
 as an allegorical veil of any modern ideas we choose ~ 
 
 to select. But why the “allegory” should closely 
 imitate the rough guesses of uncivilised peoples, Ahts, 
 Diggers, Zufiis, Cahrocs, it is less easy to explain. 
 We can readily imagine African or American tribes 
 
 who were accustomed to revere bulls, rams, snakes, 
 
 1 Aglaoph., i. 483. 2 Damascius, 381, ap. Lobeck, i. 484. 
 3 Hermias in Phedr. ap. Lobeck, i. 493 4Suidas s. v, Phanes. 
 
 ‘ - 
 ‘ F a 
 ee ee ee eee ae ee eS 
 
 i et 
 
ORPHEUS. 801 
 
 and so forth, ascribing the heads of all their various 
 animal patrons to the deity of their confederation. 
 We can easily see how such races as practise the 
 savage rites of puberty should attribute to the first 
 being the special organs of Phanes. But on the Neo- 
 Platonic hypothesis that Orpheus was a seer of Neo- 
 Platonic opinions, we do not see why he should have 
 veiled his ideas under so savage an allegory. This 
 part of the Orphic speculation is left in judicious 
 silence by some modern commentators, such as M. 
 Darmesteter in Les Cosmogonies Aryennes.’ Indeed, 
 if we choose to regard Apollonius Rhodius, an Alex- 
 andrine poet writing in a highly civilised age, as the 
 representative of Orphicism, it is easy to mask and 
 pass by the more stern and characteristic fortresses 
 of the Orphic divine. The theriomorphic Phanes is 
 a much less “ Aryan” and agreeable object than the 
 glorious golden-winged Eros, the love-god of Apol- 
 lonius Rhodius and Aristophanes.’ 
 
 On the whole, the Orphic fragments appear to 
 contain survivals of savage myths of the origin of 
 things blended with purer speculations. The savage 
 ideas are finally explained by late philosophers as 
 allegorical veils and vestments of philosophy ; but 
 the interpretation is arbitrary, and varies with the 
 taste and fancy of each interpreter. Meanwhile the 
 coincidence of the wilder elements with the specula- 
 tions native to races in the lowest grades of civilisation 
 ‘s undeniable. This opinion is confirmed by the Greek 
 myths of the origin of Man. These, too, coincide with 
 the various absurd conjectures of savages. 
 
 1 Essais Orientaus, p. 166, 2 Argonautica, 1-12; Aves, 69% 
 
302 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 In studying the various Greek local legends of the 
 origin of Man, we encounter the difficulty of separat- 
 ing them from the myths of heroes, which it will be 
 more convenient to treat separately. This difficulty 
 we have already met in our treatment of savage 
 traditions of the beginnings of the race. Thus wesaw 
 that among the Melanesians, Qat, and among the Ahts, ~ 4 
 Quawteaht, were heroic persons, who made men and 
 most other things. But it was desirable to keep their 
 performances of this sort separate from their other 
 feats, their introduction of fire, for example, and of 
 various arts. In the same way it will be well, in 
 reviewing Greek legends, to keep Prometheus’ share 
 in the making of men apart from the other stories 
 of his exploits as a benefactor of the men whom he 
 made. In Hesiod, Prometheus is the son of the Titan 
 Iapetus, and perhaps his chief exploit is to play 
 upon Zeus a trick of which we find the parallel in 
 various savage myths. It seems, however, from 
 ‘Ovid and other texts, that Hesiod somewhere spoke 
 of Prometheus as having made men out of clay, like 
 Pund-jel in the Australian, Qat in the Melanesian 
 and Tiki in the Maori myths. The same story is 
 preserved in Servius’s commentary on Virgil? A 
 different legend is preserved in the Etymologicwm 
 Magnum (voc. Ikonion). According to this story, 
 after the deluge of Deucalion, “ Zeus bade Prometheus 
 and Athene make images of men out of clay, and 
 the winds blew into them the breath of life”. In 
 confirmation of this legend, Pausanias was shown 
 in Phocis certain stones of the colour of clay, and 
 
 1 Ovid, Metam,, i. 82. 2 Helogue, vi. 42. 
 
MAKING OF MAN. 3038 
 
 “smelling very like human flesh ” ; and these, accord- 
 ing to the Phocians, were ‘‘the remains of the clay 
 from which the whole human race was fashioned 
 by Prometheus ”. 
 
 Aristophanes, too, in the Bards (686) talks of men 
 as mAdopata mov, figures kneaded of clay Thus 
 
 - there are sufficient traces in Greek tradition of the 
 
 savage myth that man was made of clay by some 
 superior being, like Pund-jel in the quaint Australian 
 story. 
 
 We saw that among various rude races other 
 theories of the origin of man were current. Men were 
 thought to have come out of a hole in the ground 
 or a bed of reeds, and sometimes the very scene of 
 their first appearance was still known and pointed out 
 to the curious. This myth was current among races 
 who regarded themselves as the only people whose 
 origin needed explanation. Other stories represented 
 man as the fruit of a tree, or the child of a rock 
 or stone, or as the descendant of one of the lower 
 animals. Examples of these opinions in Greek legend 
 are now to be given. In the first place, we have a 
 fragment of Pindar, in which the poet enumerates 
 several of the centres from which different Greek 
 tribes believed men to have sprung. “Hard it is to 
 find out whether Alalkomeneus, first of men, arose on 
 the marsh of Cephissus, or whether the Curetes of Ida 
 first, a stock divine, arose, or if it was the Phrygian 
 Corybantes that the sun earliest saw—men like trees 
 walking ;” and Pindar mentions Egyptian and Libyan 
 legends of the same description.’ The Thebans and 
 
 1 Pausanias, x. 4, 3. 2 Preller, Aus. Auf., p. 158, 
 
3 eS ; 
 Sr4 re yore 
 
 304 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 the Arcadians held themselves to be “ pert a 
 “The black earth bore Pelasgus on the high woode 
 hills,’ says an ancient line of Asius. The Dryopian 
 were an example of a race of men born from ash-tree 
 The myth of gens virum truncis et duro robore nata, 
 “born of tree-trunk and the heart of oak,” had passed 
 into a proverb even in Homer's time.’ Lucian men- 
 tions? the Athenian myth “that men grew like 
 cabbages out of the earth”. As to Greek myths of © 
 the descent of families from animals, these will be 
 examined in the discussion of the legend of Zeus. — 
 
 1 Virgil Ain., viii. 315; Odyssey, xix. 163; Iliad, ii. xxii. 120; Juvenal, a 5 
 
 vi. 11. Qf. also Bouché Leclerq, De Origine Generis Humans. 
 2 Philops. iii, 
 
} 
 ; 
 ; 
 q 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SAVAGE DIVINE MYTHS. 
 
 The origin ofa belief in Gop beyond the ken of history and of speculation— 
 Sketch of conjectural theories—Two elements in all beliefs, whether of 
 backward or civilised races—The Mythical and the Religiows—These 
 may be coeval, or either may be older than the other—Difficulty of 
 study—The current anthropological theory—Stated objections to the 
 theory—Gods and spirits—Suggestion that savage religion is borrowed 
 from Europeans—Reply to Mr. Tylor’s arguments on this head—The 
 morality of savages. 
 
 “THE question of the origin of a belief in Deity does 
 not come within the scope of a strictly historical 
 inquiry. No man can watch the idea of Gop in the 
 making or in the beginning. We are acquainted 
 with no race whose beginning does not lie far back 
 in the unpenetrated past. Even on the hypothesis 
 that the natives of Australia, for example, were dis- 
 covered in a’state of culture more backward than that 
 of other known races, yet the institutions and ideas 
 of the Australians must have required for their de- 
 velopment an incalculable series of centuries. The 
 notions of man about the Deity, man’s religious 
 sentiments and his mythical narratives, must be taken 
 as we find them. There have been, and are, many 
 theories as to the origin of the conception of a super- 
 natural being or beings, concerned with the fortunes 
 of mankind, and once active in the making of the 
 VOL. I. 20 
 
306 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 earth and its inhabitants. There is the hypothesis 
 of an original divine tradition, darkened by the smoke 
 of foolish mortal fancies. There is the hypothesis of 
 an innate and intuitive sensus numinis. There is the 
 opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced to 
 man by the very nature of his knowledge and per- 
 ceptions, which compel him in all things to recognise 
 a finite and an infinite. There is the hypothesis that 
 gods were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of 
 ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, 
 seeking in his early speculations for the causes of 
 things, and conscious of his own powers as an active 
 cause, projected his own shadow on the mists of the 
 unknown, and peopled the void with figures of mag- 
 nified non-natural men, his own parents and protectors, 
 and the makers of many of the things in the world. 
 ‘‘Since the actual truth cannot be determined by 
 observation and experiment, the question as to the 
 first germs of the divine conception must here be left 
 unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and 
 examine apart the two chief elements in the earliest 
 as in the latest ideas of Godhead. Among the lowest 
 and most backward, as among the most advanced 
 races, there coexist the mythical and the religious 
 elements in belief. The rational factor (or what 
 approves itself to us as the rational factor) is visible 
 in religion; the irrational is prominent inmyth. The 
 Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in 
 hours of danger and necessity ‘ yearns after the gods,’ 
 and has present in his heart the idea of a father and 
 friend. This is the religious element. The same 
 man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, 
 
 = 
 
MYTH AND RELIGION. 307 
 
 will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level 
 of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or 
 repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irra- 
 tional element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always 
 traces back to the belief in a power that is benign and 
 works for righteousness. Myth, evenin Homer or the 
 Rig-Veda, perpetually falls back on the old stock of 
 absurd and immoral divine adventures.’ 
 
 “It would be rash, in the present state of knowledge, 
 to pronounce that the germ of the serious Homeric 
 sense of the justice and power of the Divinity is earlier 
 or later than the germ of the Homeric stories of gods 
 disguised as animals, or imprisoned by mortals, or 
 kicked out of Olympus. The rational and irrational 
 aspects of mythology and religion may be of coeval — 
 antiquity for all that is certainly known, or either of 
 them, in the dark backward of mortal experience, may 
 have preceded the other. There is probably no re- 
 ligion nor mythology which does not offer both aspects 
 to the student, But it is the part of advancing civilisa- 
 tion to adorn and purify the rational element, and. to 
 subordinate and supersede the irrational element, as 
 far as religious conservatism, ritual and priestly dogma 
 will permit.” 
 
 Such were the general remarks with which this 
 chapter opened in the original edition of the present 
 work. But reading, reflection and certain additions 
 to the author’s knowledge of facts, have made it seem 
 advisable to state, more fully and forcibly than before, 
 that, in his opinion, not only the puzzling element of 
 
 1M. Knappert here, in a note to the Dutch translation, denies the lowest 
 mythical element to the Hebrews, as their documents have reached us. 
 
308 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 myth, but the purer element of a religious belief 
 sanctioning morality is derived by civilised people 
 from a remote pastof savagery. It is also necessary 
 to draw attention to a singular religious phenomena, 
 a break, or “ fault,” as geologists call it, in the religious 
 strata. While the most backward savages, in certain 
 cases, present the conception of a Being who sanctions 
 ethics, and while that conception recurs at a given 
 stage of civilisation, it appears to fade, or even to 
 disappear in some conditions of barbarism. Among 
 some barbaric peoples, such as the Zulus, and the Red 
 Indians of French Canada when first observed, as 
 among some Polynesians and some tribes of Western 
 and Central Africa little trace of a supreme being 
 is found, except a name, and that name is even 
 occasionally a matter of ridicule. The highest re- 
 ligious conception has been reached, and is generally 
 known, yet the Being conceived of as creative is 
 utterly neglected, while ghosts, or minor gods, are 
 served and adored. To this religious phenomenon (if 
 correctly observed) we must attempt to assign a cause. 
 For this purpose it is necessary to state again what 
 may be called the current or popular anthropological 
 theory of the evolution of Gods. 
 
 That theory takes varying shapes. In the philosophy 
 of Mr. Herbert Spencer we find a pure Euhemerism. 
 Gods are but ghosts of dead men, raised to a higher 
 and finally to the highest power. In the somewhat 
 analogous but not identical system of Mr. Tylor, man 
 first attains to the idea of spirit by reflection on various 
 physical, psychological and psychical experiences, such 
 as sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, hallucinations, 
 
aa 7" eos ee ee . a 
 
 * Ree die ae sen afl ciao eal a ee 
 
 FAULT IN RELIGIOUS STRATA. 309 
 
 breath and death, and he gradually extends the con- 
 ception of soul or ghost till all nature is peopled with 
 spirits. Of these spirits one is finally promoted to 
 supremacy, where the conception of a supreme being 
 occurs. In the lowest faiths there is said, on this 
 theory, to be no connection, or very little connection, 
 between religion and morality. To supply a religious 
 sanction of morals is the work of advancing thought." 
 
 This current hypothesis is, confessedly, “animistic,” 
 in Mr. Tylor’s phrase, or, in Mr. Spencer’s terminology, 
 it is “the ghost theory”. The human soul, says Mr. 
 Tylor, has been the model on which all man’s ideas of 
 spiritual beings, from “the tiniest elf” to ‘‘the 
 heavenly Creator and ruler of the world, the Great 
 Spirit,” have been framed.’ Thus it has been necessary 
 for Mr. Tylor and for Mr. Spencer to discover first an 
 origin of man’s idea of his own soul, and that supposed 
 origin in psychological, physical and psychical experi- 
 ences is no doubt adequate. By reflection on these 
 facts, probably, the idea of spirit was reached, though 
 the psychical experiences enumerated by Mr. Tylor 
 may contain points as yet unexplained by Materialism. 
 From these sources are derived all really “ animistic” 
 gods, all that from the first partake of the nature of 
 hungry ghosts, placated by sacrifices of food, though 
 in certain cases that hunger may have been transferred, 
 we surmise, by worshippers to gods not originally 
 animistic. 
 
 In answer to this theory of an animistic or ghostly 
 
 1 Prim, Cult., ii. 881. Huxley's Science and Hebrew Tradition, pp 
 
 846, 372. 
 2 Prim. Oult., ii. 109. 
 
310 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 origin of all gods, it must first be observed that all 
 gods are not necessarily, it would seem, of animistic 
 origin. Among certain of the lowest savages, although 
 they believe in ghosts, the animistic conception, the 
 spiritual idea, is not attached to the relatively supreme 
 being of their faith. He is merely a powerful being, 
 unborn, and not subject to death. The purely meta- 
 physical question “was he a ghost?” does not seem 
 always to have been asked. Consequently there is 
 no logical reason why man’s idea of a Maker should 
 not be prior to man’s idea that there are such things 
 as souls, ghosts and spirits. Therefore the animistic 
 theory is not necessary as material for the “ god-idea ”. 
 We cannot, of course, prove that the “ god-idea” was 
 historically prior to the ‘‘ ghost-idea,” for we know no 
 savages who have a god and yet are ignorant of ghosts. 
 But we can show that the idea of God may exist, 
 in germ, without explicitly involving the idea of 
 spirit. Thus gods may be prior in evolution to ghosts, 
 and therefore the animistic theory of the origin of 
 gods in ghosts need not necessarily be accepted. 
 
 In the first place, the original evolution of a god 
 out of a ghost need not be conceded, because in perhaps 
 all known savage theological philosophy the God, the 
 Maker and Master, is regarded as a being who existed 
 before death entered the world. Everywhere, practi- 
 cally speaking, death is looked on as a comparatively 
 late intruder. He came not only after God was 
 active, but after men and beasts had populated the 
 world. Scores of myths accounting for this invasion 
 of death have been collected all over the world.’ 
 
 1 See Modern Mythology, ‘‘ Myths of Origin of Death” 
 
A. 811 
 
 Thus the relatively supreme being, or beings, of 
 religion are looked on as prior to Death, therefore, 
 not as ghosts. They are sometimes expressly dis- 
 tinguished as “original gods” from other gods who are 
 secondary, being souls of chiefs. Thus all Tongan 
 gods are Atua, but all Atwa are not ‘‘ original gods”. 
 The word Atua, according to Mr. White, is “ A-tu-a”. 
 « 4” was the name given to the author of the universe, 
 and signifies: “Am the unlimited in power,” “The 
 Conception,” “the Leader,” “the Beyond ALLY. 2 Sue 
 means “ Beyond that which is most distant,” “ Behind 
 all matter,’ and “Behind every action”. Clearly 
 these conceptions are not more mythical (indeed A does 
 not seem to occur in the myths), nor are they more 
 involved in ghosts, than the unknown absolute of Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer. Yet the word Atwa denotes gods 
 who are recognised as ghosts of chiefs, no less than it 
 denotes the supreme existence.? These ideas are the 
 metaphysical theology of a race considerably above 
 the lowest level. They lend no assistance to a theory 
 that A was, or was evolved out of, a human ghost, 
 and he is not found in Maori mythology as far as our 
 knowledge goes. But, among the lowest known 
 savages, the Australians, we read that “the Creator 
 was a gigantic black, once on earth, now among 
 the stars”. This is in Gippsland; the deities of 
 the Fuegians and the Blackfoot Indians are also 
 Beings, anthropomorphic, unborn and undying, like 
 Mangarrah, the creative being of the Larrakeah 
 1 Mariner, ii. 127. 
 
 2 White, Ancient History of the Maoris, vol. i. p. 4; other views in 
 Gill’s Myths of the Pacific. Iam not committed to Mr. White’s opinion. 
 
312 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 tribe in Australia. ‘‘ A very good man called Man- 
 garrah lives in the sky. ... He made everything” 
 (blacks excepted). He never dies.’ The Melanesian 
 Vui “never were men,” were “ something different,” 
 and “were not ghosts”. It is as a Being, not as a 
 Spirit, that the Kurnai deity Munganngaur (Our 
 Father) is described.? In short, though Europeans 
 often speak of these divine beings of low savages as 
 “spirits,” it does not appear that the natives them- 
 selves advance here the metaphysical idea of spirit. 
 These gods are just beings, anthropomorphic, or (in 
 myth and fable), very often bestial, “ theriomorphic”.* 
 It is manifest that a divine being envisaged thus need 
 not have been evolved out of the theory of spirits or 
 ghosts, and may even have been prior to the rise of 
 the belief in ghosts. 
 
 Again, these powerful, or omnipotent divine beings 
 are looked on as guardians of morality, punishers of 
 sin, rewarders of righteousness, both in this world and 
 in a future life, in places where ghosts, though believed 
 in, are not worshipped, nor in receipt of sacrifice, and 
 where, great grandfathers being forgotten, ancestral 
 ghosts can scarcely swell into gods. This occurs among 
 Andamanese, Fuegians and Australians, therefore, 
 ‘ among non-ghost-worshipping races, ghosts cannot 
 have developed into deities who are not even neces- 
 sarily spirits. These gods, again, do not receive sacrifice, 
 and thus lack the note of descent from hungry food- 
 craving ghosts. In Australia, indeed, while ghosts 
 are not known to receive any offerings, ‘‘the recent 
 
 1 Journal Anthrop. Inst., Nov., 1894, p. 191. 
 
 2 Tbid., 1885, p. 813. 
 
 3 See Making of Religion, pp. 201-210, for a more copious statement. 
 
GODS NOT GHOSTS. 318 
 
 custom of providing food for it’’—the dead body of a 
 friend—“‘is derided by the intelligent old aborigines 
 as ‘ white fellow’s gammon’’’.? 
 
 The Australians possess no chiefs like ‘‘ Vich Ian 
 Vohr or Chingachgook”’ whose ghosts might be said 
 to swell into supreme moral deities. “ Headmen” they 
 have, leaders of various degrees of authority, but no 
 Vich Ian Vohr, no semi-sacred representative of the 
 tribe.2 Nor are the ghosts of the Headmen known to 
 receive any particular posthumous attention or worship. 
 Thus it really seems impossible to show proof that 
 Australian gods grew out of Australian ghosts, a 
 subject to which we shall return. 
 
 Some supporters of the current theory therefore fall 
 back on the hypothesis that the Australians are sadly 
 degenerate.’ Chiefs, it is argued, or kings, they once 
 had, and the gods are surviving ghosts of these wholly 
 forgotten potentates. To this we reply that we know 
 not the very faintest trace of Australian degeneration. 
 Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Tylor have correctly 
 argued that the soil of Australia has not yet yielded so 
 much as a fragment of native pottery, nor any trace 
 of native metal work, not a vestige of stone buildings 
 occurs, nor of any work beyond the present native 
 level of culture, unless we reckon weirs for fish-catch- 
 ing. “The Australian boomerang,” writes Mr. Tylor, 
 ‘has been claimed as derived from some hypothetical 
 high culture, whereas the transition-stages through 
 
 ee a a oe seal ite te ot ian - a + - _— 
 
 y 
 ‘ 
 ‘a 
 
 1 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 51, 1881. 
 
 2 Howitt, Organisation of Australian Tribes, pp. 101-113. “ Transactions 
 of Royal Society of Victoria,” 1889. 
 
 3See Prof. Menzie’s History of Religion, pp. 16, 17, where a singular 
 inconsistency has escaped the author. 
 
314 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 which it is connected with’ the club are to be observed 
 in its own country, while no civilised race possesses 
 the weapon.” ? 
 
 Therefore the Australian, with his boomerang, repre- 
 sents no degeneration but advance on his ancestors, who 
 had not yet developed the boomerang out of the club. If 
 the excessively complex nature of Australian rules of 
 prohibited degrees be appealed to as proof of degenera- 
 tion from the stage in which they were evolved, we 
 reply that civilisation everywhere tends not to com- 
 plicate but to simplify such rules, as it also notoriously 
 simplifies the forms of language. 
 
 The Australian people, when discovered, were only 
 emerging from paleolithic culture, while the neighbour- 
 ing Tasmanians were frankly paleolithic.? Far from 
 degenerating, the Australians show advance when 
 they supersede their beast or other totem by an 
 eponymous human hero.* The eponymous hero, how- 
 ever, changed with each generation, so that no one 
 name was fixed as that of tribal father, later perhaps 
 to become a tribal god. We find several tribes in 
 which the children now follow the father’s class, and 
 thus paternal kin takes the place of the usual early 
 savage method of reckoning kinship by the mother’s 
 side, elsewhere prevalent in Australia. In one of these 
 tribes, dwelling between the Glenelg and Mount Napier, 
 headmanship is hereditary, but nothing is said of any 
 worship of the ghosts of chiefs. All this social im- 
 provement denotes advance on the usual Australian 
 
 1 Prim. Cult., i. 57, 67. 
 2Tylor, preface to Ling Roth’s Aborigines of Tasmania, pp. v.-viii. 
 3 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 231, 
 
 a oe a 
 
AUSTRALIANS NOT DEGENERATE. B15 
 
 standard Of degeneration (except when produced 
 recently by European vices and diseases) I know no 
 trace in Australia. Their highest religious concep- 
 tions, therefore, are not to be disposed of as survivals 
 of a religion of the ghosts of such chiefs as the 
 Australians are not shown ever to have recognised. 
 The “ God idea” in Australia, or among the Andaman- 
 ese, must have some other source than the Ghost- 
 Theory. This is all the more obvious because not only 
 are ghosts not worshipped by the Australians, but also 
 the divine beings who are alleged to form links between 
 the ghost and the moral god are absent. There are no 
 departmental gods, as of war, peace, the chase, love, 
 and so forth. Sun, sky and earth are equally un- 
 worshipped. There is nothing in religion between a 
 Being, on one hand (with a son or sons), and vague 
 mischievous spirits, boilyas or mrarts, and ghosts 
 (who are not worshipped), on the other hand. The 
 friends of the idea that the God is an ancient evolution 
 from the ghost of such a chief as is not proved to have 
 existed, must apparently believe that the intermediate 
 stages in religious evolution, departmental gods, nature 
 gods and gods of polytheism in general once existed 
 in Australia, and have all been swept away in a deluge 
 of degeneration. That deluge left in religion a moral, 
 potently active Father and Judge. Now that con- 
 ception is considerably above the obsolescent belief in 
 an otiose god which is usually found among barbaric 
 races of the type from which the Australians are said 
 to have degenerated. There is no proot of degeneracy, 
 and, if degeneration has occurred, why has it left 
 1 Kamilaroi and Kurnat pp. 277, 278. 
 
316 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 just the kind of deity who, in the higher bar- 
 barie culture, is not commonly found? Clearly this 
 attempt to explain the highest aspect of Australian 
 religion by an undemonstrated degeneration is an 
 effort of despair. 
 
 While the current theory thus appears to break 
 down over the deities of certain Australian tribes 
 and of other low savages to be more particularly 
 deseribed later, it is not more successful in dealing 
 with what we have called the “ fault”’ or break in the 
 religious strata of higher races. The nature of that 
 ‘fault’ may thus be described: While the deities of 
 several low savage peoples are religiously regarded 
 as guardians and judges of conduct both in this life 
 and in the next, among higher barbarians they are 
 often little, or not at all, interested in conduct, Again, 
 while among Australians, and Andamanese, and — 
 Fuegians, there is hardly a verifiable trace, if any trace 
 there be, of sacrifice to any divine being, among bar- 
 barians the gods beneath the very highest are in receipt 
 even of human sacrifice. Even among barbarians the 
 highest deity is very rarely worshipped with sacrifice. 
 Through various degrees he is found to lose all claim 
 on worship, and even to become a mere name, and 
 finally a jest and a mockery. Meanwhile ancestral ' 
 ghosts, and gods framed on the same lines as ghosts, 
 receive sacrifice of food and of human victims. Once 
 more, the high gods of low savages are not localised, 
 not confined to any temple or region. But the gods 
 of higher barbarians (the gods beneath the highest), 
 are localised in this way, as occasionally even the 
 highest god also is, 
 
! 
 F 
 ’ 
 | 
 
 ANIMISM INTERVENES. 317 
 
 All this shows that, among advancing barbarians, 
 the gods, if they started from the estate of gods 
 among savages on the lowest level, become demoralised, 
 limited, conditioned, relegated to an otiose condition, 
 and finally deposed, till progressive civilisation, as 
 in Greece, reinstates or invents purer and more 
 philosophic conceptions, without being able to abolish 
 popular and priestly myth and ritual. 
 
 Here, then, is a flaw or break in the strata of 
 religion. What was the cause of this flaw? We 
 answer, the evolution, through ghosts, of “animistic” 
 gods who retained the hunger and selfishness of these 
 ancestral spirits whom the lowest savages are not 
 known to worship. 
 
 The moral divine beings of these lowest races, beings 
 (when religiously regarded) unconditioned, in need of 
 no gift that man can give, are not to be won by 
 offerings of food and blood. Of such offerings ghosts, 
 and gods modelled on ghosts, are notoriously in need. 
 Strengthened and propitiated by blood and sacrifice 
 (not offered to the gods of low savages), the animistic 
 deities will become partisans of their adorers, and will 
 either pay no regard to the morals of their worship- 
 pers, or will be easily bribed to forgive sins. Here 
 then is, ethically speaking, a flaw in the strata of 
 religion, a flaw found in the creeds of ghost-worship- 
 ping barbarians, but not of non-ghost-worshipping 
 savages. A crowd of venal, easy-going, serviceable 
 deities has now been evolved out of ghosts, and 
 Animism is on its way to supplant or overlay a rude 
 early form of theism. Granting the facts, we fail 
 to see how they are explained by the current theory 
 
318 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 which makes the highest god the latest in evolution 
 from a ghost. That theory wrecks itself again on the 
 circumstance that, whereas the tribal or national 
 highest divine being, as latest in evolution, ought to 
 be the most potent, he is, in fact, among barbaric 
 races, usually the most disregarded. A new idea, of 
 course, is not necessarily a powerful or fashionable 
 idea. It may be regarded as a “‘ fad,” or a heresy, or 
 a low form of dissent. But, when universally known 
 to and accepted by a tribe or people, then it must be 
 deemed likely to possess great influence. But that is 
 not the case; and among barbaric tribes the most 
 advanced conception of deity is the least regarded, the 
 most obsolete. 
 
 An excellent instance of the difference between the 
 theory here advocated, and that generally held by 
 anthropologists, may be found in Mr. Aberecromby’s 
 valuable work, Pre- and Proto-Historic Finns, 1. 
 150-154. The gods, and other early ideas, says Mr. 
 Abercromby, ‘‘ could in no sense be considered as 
 supernatural”. We shall give examples of gods among 
 the races ‘‘nearest the beginning,” whose attributes 
 of power and knowledge can not, by us at least, 
 be considered other than “ supernatural”. “The 
 gods” (in this hypothesis) ‘‘ were so human that they 
 could be forced to act in accordance with the wishes 
 of their worshippers, and could likewise be punished.” 
 These ideas, to an Australian black, or an Andamanese, 
 would seem dangerously blasphemous. These older 
 gods ‘‘resided chiefly in trees, wells, rivers and 
 animals”. But many gods of our lowest known savages 
 live ‘“‘beyond the sky’’. Mr. Abercromby supposes 
 
ee, 
 
 GODS AND SPIRITS. 319 
 
 the sky god to be of later evolution, and to be wor- 
 shipped after man had exhausted “the helpers that 
 seemed nearest at hand ... in the trees and waters 
 at his very door”. Now the Australian black has not 
 a door, nor has he gods of any service to him in the 
 ‘trees and waters,” though sprites may lurk in such 
 places for mischief. But in Mr. Abercromby’s view, 
 some men turned at last to the sky-god, “ who in time 
 would gain a large circle of worshippers”. He would 
 come to be thought omnipotent, omniscient, the 
 Creator. This notion, says Mr. Abercromby, “ must, 
 if this view is correct, be of late origin’. But the 
 view is not correct. The far-seeing powerful 
 Maker beyond the sky is found among the very 
 backward races who have not developed helpers nearer 
 man, dwelling round what would be his door, if door 
 he was civilised enough to possess. Such near neigh- 
 bouring gods, of human needs, capable of being bullied, 
 or propitiated by sacrifice, are found in races higher 
 than the lowest, who, for their easily procurable aid, 
 have allowed the Maker to sink into an otiose god, or 
 a mere name. Mr. Abercromby unconsciously proves 
 our case by quoting the example of a Samoyede. 
 
 _ This man knew a Sky-god, Num ; that conception was 
 
 familiar to him. He also knew a familiar spirit. On 
 Mrs Abercromby’s theory he should have resorted for 
 help to the Sky-god, not to the sprite. But he did the 
 reverse: he said, “I cannot approach Num, he is too 
 far away; if I could reach him I should not beseech 
 thee (the familiar spirit), but should go myself; but I 
 cannot’. For this precise reason, people who have 
 developed the belief in accessible affable spirits go to 
 
320 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 them, with a spell to constrain, or a gift to bribe, and 
 neglect, in some cases almost forget, their Maker. But 
 He is worshipped by low savages, who do not pro- 
 pitiate ghosts and who have no gods in wells and trees, 
 close at hand. It seems an obvious inference that the 
 greater God is the earlier evolved. . 
 
 These are among the difficulties of the current 
 anthropological theory. There is, however, a solution 
 by which the weakness of the divine conception, its 
 neglected, disused aspect among barbaric races, might 
 be explained by anthropologists, without regarding it 
 as an obsolescent form of a very early idea. This 
 solution is therefore in common use. It is applied to 
 the deity revealed in the ancient mysteries of the 
 Australians, and it is employed in American and 
 African instances. 
 
 The custom is to say that the highest divine being 
 of American or African native peoples has been 
 borrowed from Europeans, and is, especially, a savage 
 refraction from the God of missionaries. If this can 
 be proved, the shadowy, practically powerless “ Master 
 of Life” of certain barbaric peoples, will have degener- 
 ated from the Christian conception, because of that 
 conception he will be only a faint unsuccessful refrac- 
 tion. He has been introduced by Europeans, it is 
 argued, but is not in harmony with his new environ- 
 ment, and so is “ half-remembered and half forgot”. 
 
 The hypothesis of borrowing admits of only one 
 answer, but that answer should be conclusive. If we 
 can discover, say in North America, a single instance 
 in which the supreme being occurs, while yet he cannot 
 possibly be accounted for by any traceable or verifiable 
 
THEORY OF BORROWING. 321 
 
 foreign influence, then the burden of proof, in other 
 cases, falls on the opponent. When he urges that 
 other North American supreme beings were borrowed, 
 we can reply that our crucial example shows that this 
 need not be the fact. To prove that it is the fact, in 
 his instances, is then his business. It is obvious that 
 for information on this subject we must go to the 
 reports of the earliest travellers who knew the Red 
 Indians well. We must try to get at gods behind any 
 known missionary efforts. Mr. Tylor offers us the 
 testimony of Heriot, about 1586, that the natives of 
 Virginia believed in many gods, also in one chief god, 
 ‘who first made other principal gods, and then the 
 sun, moon and stars as petty gods”.' Whence could 
 the natives of Virginia have borrowed this notion of a 
 Creator before 1586? If it is replied, in the usual 
 way, that they developed him upwards out of sun, 
 moon and star gods, other principal gods, and finally 
 reached the idea of the Creator, we answer that the 
 idea of the Maker is found where these alleged 
 intermediate stages are not found, as in Australia. In 
 Virginia then, as in Victoria, a Creator may have 
 been evolved in some other way than that of gradual 
 ascent from ghosts, and may have been, as in Australia 
 and elsewhere, prior to verifiable ghost-worship. Again, 
 in Virginia at our first settlement, the native priests 
 strenuously resisted the introduction of Christianity. 
 They were content with their deity, Ahone, ‘‘ the great 
 God who governs all the world, and makes the sun to 
 shine, creating the moon and stars his companions... . 
 The good and peaceable God... needs not to be 
 1 Prim. Oult., ii. 341, 
 VoL. I. 21 
 
322 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 sacrificed unto, for he intendeth all good unto them.” 
 This good Creator, without sacrifice, among a settled 
 agricultural barbaric race sacrificing to other gods and 
 ghosts, manifestly cannot be borrowed from the newly 
 arrived religion of Christianity, which his priests, 
 according to the observer, vigorously resisted. Ahone 
 had a subordinate deity, magisterial in functions, 
 ‘looking into all men’s actions” and punishing the 
 same, when evil. To this god sacrifices were made, and 
 if his name, Okeus, is derived from Oki =‘ spirit,” 
 he was, of course, an animistic ghost-evolved deity. 
 Anthropological writers, by an oversight, have dwelt 
 on Oki, but have not mentioned Ahone.! Manifestly 
 it is not possible’ to insist that these Virginian high 
 deities were borrowed, without saying whence and 
 when they were borrowed by a barbaric race which 
 was, at the same time, rejecting Christian teaching. 
 
 Mr. Tylor writes, with his habitual perspicacity : “ It 
 is the widespread belief in the Great Spirit, whatever 
 his precise nature and origin, that has long and de- 
 servedly drawn the attention of European thinkers 
 to the native religions of the North American tribes ”. 
 Now while, in recent times, Christian ideas may un- 
 deniably have crystallised round “the Great Spirit,” 
 it has come to be thought “ that the whole. doctrine 
 of the Great Spirit was borrowed by the savages from 
 missionaries and colonists. But this view will not 
 bear examination,” says Mr. Tylor.? 
 
 Mr. Tylor proceeds to prove this by examples from 
 
 1 History of Travatle into Virginia, by William Strachey, 1612. 
 2 Prim. Cult., ii. pp. 839, 340 (1873). For some reason, Mr. Tylor 
 modifies this passage in 1891. 
 
i) > 
 
 BARLY AMERICAN GODS. 323 
 
 Greenland, and the Algonkins. He instances the 
 Massachusett God, Kiehtan, who created the other 
 gods, and receives the just into heaven. This was 
 recorded in 1622, but the belief, says Winslow, our 
 authority, goes back into the unknown past. ‘‘ They 
 never saw Kiehtan, but they hold it a great charge 
 and duty that one age teach another.” How could 
 a deity thus rooted in a traditional past be borrowed 
 from recent English settlers ? 
 
 In these cases the hypothesis of borrowing breaks 
 down, and still more does it break down over the 
 Algonkin deity Atahocan. 
 
 Father Le Jeune, S.J., went first among the Algon- 
 kins, a missionary pioneer, in 1633, and suffered 
 unspeakable things in his courageous endeavour to win 
 souls in a most recalcitrant flock. He writes (1633) : 
 “As this savage has given me occasion to speak of 
 their god, I will remark that it is a great error to 
 think that the savages have no knowledge of any 
 deity. I was surprised to hear this in France. I do 
 not know their secrets, but, from the little which I 
 am about to tell, it will be seen that they have such 
 knowledge. 
 
 “They say that one exists whom they call Ata- 
 hocan, who made the whole. Speaking of God ina 
 wigwam one day, they asked me ‘what is God ?’ 
 I told them that it was He who made all things, 
 Heaven and Earth. They then began to cry out to 
 each other, “ Atahocan! Atahocan ! it is Atahocan !’ ” 
 
 There could be no better evidence that Atahocan was 
 not (as is often said) ‘‘ borrowed from the Jesuits”’. 
 The Jesuits had only just arrived, 
 
324 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Later (1634) Le Jeune interrogated an old man and 
 a partly Europeanised sorcerer. They replied that 
 nothing was certain; that Atahocan was only spoken 
 of as ‘‘of a thing so remote,” that assurance was 
 impossible. “In fact, their word Nitatohokan means, 
 ‘I fable, I tell an old story’.” 7 
 
 Thus Atahocan, though at once recognised as identical 
 with the Creator of the missionary, was so far from 
 being the latest thing in religious evolution that he 
 had passed into a proverb for the ancient and the 
 fabulous. This, of course, is inconsistent with recent 
 borrowing. He was neglected for Khichikouai, spirits 
 which inspire seers, and are of some practical use, re- 
 ceiving rewards in offerings of grease, says Le Jeune.} 
 
 The obsolescent Atahocan seems to have had no 
 moral activity. But, in America, this indolence of 
 God is not universal. Mr. Parkman indeed writes: 
 “In the primitive Indian’s conception of a God, the idea 
 of moral good has no part’”’.? But this is definitely 
 contradicted by Heriot, Strachey, Winslow, already 
 cited, and by Pére Le Jeune. The good attributes 
 of Kiehtan and Ahone were not borrowed from 
 Christianity, were matter of Indian belief before the 
 English arrived. Mr. Parkman writes: “The moment 
 the Indians began to contemplate the object of his 
 faith, and sought to clothe it with attributes, it 
 became finite, and commonly ridiculous”. It did so, 
 as usual, in mythology, but not in religion. There 
 is nothing ridiculous in what is known of Ahone and 
 Kiehtan. If they had a mythology, and if we knew 
 
 1 Relations, 1633, 1634. 
 ?Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, p. \xxviii, 
 
LATE CHRISTIAN MYTHS. 325 
 
 the myths, doubtless they would be ridiculous 
 enough. The savage mind, turned from belief and 
 awe into the spinning of yarns, instantly yields to 
 humorous fancy. As we know, medieval popular 
 Christianity, in imagery, mdrchen or tales, and art, 
 copiously illustrates the same mental phenomenon. 
 Saints, God, our Lord, and the Virgin, all play 
 ludicrous and immoral parts in Christian foll-tales. 
 This is Mythology, and here is, beyond all cavil, a late 
 ‘corruption of Religion. Here, where we know the 
 history of a creed, Religion is early, and these myths 
 are late. Other examples of American divine ideas 
 might be given, such as the extraordinary hymns 
 in which the Zufis address the Eternal, Ahona- 
 wilona. But as the Zumi religion has only been 
 studied in recent years, the hymns would be 
 dismissed as “borrowed,” though there is nothing 
 Catholic or Christian about them. We have pre- 
 ferred to select examples where borrowing from 
 Christianity is out of the question. The current 
 anthropological theory is thus confronted with 
 American examples of ideas of the divine which 
 cannot have been borrowed, while, if the gods are 
 said to have been evolved out of ghosts, we reply 
 that, in some cases, they receive no sacrifice, sacrifice 
 being usually a note of ghostly descent. Again, 
 similar gods, as we show, exist where ghosts of chiefs 
 are not worshipped, and as far as evidence goes never 
 were worshipped, because there is no evidence of the 
 existence at any time of such chiefs. The American 
 highest gods may then be equally free from the taint 
 of ghostly descent. 
 
326 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION, 
 
 There is another more or less moral North American 
 deity whose evolution is rather questionable. Pére 
 Brébeuf (1636), speaking of the Hurons, says that 
 “they have recourse to Heaven in almost all their 
 necessities, . . . and I may say that it is, in fact, God 
 whom they blindly adore, for they imagine that there 
 is an Oki, that is, a demon, in heaven, who regulates 
 the seasons, bridles the winds and the waves of the 
 sea, and helps them in every need. They dread his 
 wrath, and appeal to him as witness to the inviola- 
 bility of their faith, when they make a promise or 
 treaty of peace with enemies. ‘Heaven hear us to-day’ 
 is their form of adjuration.”! 
 
 A spiritual being, whose home is heaven, who rides 
 on the winds, whose wrath is dreaded, who sanctions 
 the oath, is only called “a demon” by the prejudice of 
 the worthy father who, at the same time, admits that 
 the savages have a conception of God—and that God, 
 so conceived, is this demon! 
 
 The debatable question is, was the “demon,” or the 
 actual expanse of sky, first in evolution? That can- 
 not precisely be settled, but in the analogous Chinese 
 case of China we find heaven (Tien) and “Shang-ti, the 
 personal ruling Deity,” corresponding to the Huron 
 “demon”. Shang-ti, the personal deity, occurs most in 
 the oldest, pre-Confucian sacred documents, and, so far, 
 appears to be the earlier conception. The ‘‘ demon”’ 
 in Huron faith may also be earlier than the religious 
 regard paid to his home, the sky.?, The unborrowed 
 
 1 Relations, 1636, pp. 106, 107. 
 
 2See Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. 352, and Making of Religion, p. 318; also 
 
 Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 108, 109, and Dr. Legge’s Chinese Classics, 
 in Sacred Books of the East, vols. iii., xxvii., xxviii. 
 
MR. TYLOR. 327 
 
 antiquity of a belief in a divine being, creative and 
 sometimes moral, in North America, is thus demon- 
 strated. So far I had written when I accidentally fell 
 in with Mr. Tylor’s essay on “The Limits of Savage 
 Religion”’.1_ In that essay, rather to my surprise, Mr. 
 Tylor argues for the borrowing of ‘‘ The Great Spirit,” 
 “The Great Manitou,” from the Jesuits. Now, as to 
 the phrase, “Great Spirit,” the Jesuits doubtless caused 
 its promulgation, and, where their teaching penetrated, 
 shreds of their doctrine may have adhered to the 
 Indian conception of that divine being. But Mr. 
 Tylor in his essay does not allude to the early 
 evidence, his own, for Oki, Atahocan, Kiehtan, and 
 Torngursak, all undeniably prior to Jesuit influence, 
 and found where Jesuits, later, did not go. As 
 Mr. Tylor offers no reason for disregarding evidence 
 in 1892 which he had republished in a new edition of 
 Promitive Culture in 1891, it is impossible to argue 
 against him in this place. He went on, in the essay 
 cited (1892) to contend that the Australian god of 
 the Kamilaroi of Victoria, Baiame, is, in name and 
 attributes, of missionary introduction. Happily this 
 hypothesis can be refuted, as we shew in the following 
 chapter on Australian gods. 
 
 It would be easy enough to meet the hypothesis 
 of borrowing in the case of the many African 
 tribes who possess something approaching to a 
 rude monotheistic conception. Among these are 
 the Dinkas of the. Upper Nile, with their neigh- 
 bours, whose creed Russegger compares to that of 
 modern Deists in Europe. The Dinka god, Dendid, 
 
 1 Journ. of Anthrop. Inst., vol, xxi., 1892, 
 
328 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 is omnipotent, but so benevolent that he is not ad- 
 dressed in prayer, nor propitiated by sacrifice. Com- 
 pare the supreme being of the Caribs, beneficent, otiose, 
 unadored.! A similar deity, veiled in the instruction 
 of the as yet unpenetrated Mysteries, exists among the 
 Yao of Central Africa.? Of the negro race, Waitz 
 says, ‘‘even if we do not call them monotheists, we 
 may still think of them as standing on the boundary 
 of monotheism despite their innumerable rude super- 
 stitions’’.2 The Tshi speaking people of the Gold 
 Coast have their unworshipped Nyankupon, a now 
 otiose unadored being, with a magisterial deputy, 
 worshipped with many sacrifices. The case is almost 
 an exact parallel to that of Ahone and Oki in America. 
 These were not borrowed, and the author has argued 
 at length against Major Ellis’s theory of the borrowing 
 from Christians of Nyankupon.* 
 
 To conclude this chapter, the study of savage and 
 barbaric religions seems to yield the following facts:— 
 
 1. Low savages. No regular chiefs. Great beings, 
 not in receipt of sacrifice, sanctioning morality. 
 Ghosts are not worshipped, though believed in. 
 Polytheism, departmental -gods and gods of heaven, 
 earth, sky and so forth, have not been developed or 
 are not found. : : 
 
 2. Barbaric races. Aristocratic or monarchic. Ghosts 
 are worshipped and receive sacrifice. Polytheistic 
 gods are in renown and receive sacrifice. There is 
 
 1 Rochefort, Les Isles Antilles, p. 415. Tylor, ii. 337. 
 
 2 Macdonald, Africana, 1, 71, 72, 180, 279-301. Scott, Dictionary of the 
 Manganja Language, Making of Religion, pp. 280-238, A contradictory 
 
 view in Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 681. 
 % Anthropologie, ii. 167. 4 Making of Religion, pp. 248-250, 
 
SKETCH OF STAGES OF BELIEF. 329 
 
 usually a supreme Maker who is, in some cases, moral, 
 in others otiose. In only one or two known cases (as 
 in that of the Polynesian Taaroa) is he in receipt of 
 sacrifice. 
 
 3. Barbaric races. (Zulus, monarchic with Unku- 
 lunkulu ; some Algonquins (feebly aristocratic) with 
 Atahocan). Religion is mainly ancestor worship or 
 vague spirit worship; ghosts are propitiated with food. 
 There are traces of an original divine being whose 
 name is becoming obsolescent and a matter of jest. 
 
 4. Early civilisations. Monarchic or aristocratic. 
 (Greece, Egypt, India, Peru, Mexico.) Polytheism. 
 One god tends to be supreme. Religiously regarded, 
 gods are moral ; inmyth are thereverse. Gods are in 
 receipt of sacrifice. Heavenly society is modelled on 
 that of men, monarchic or aristocratic. Philosophic 
 thought tends towards belief in one pure god, who 
 - may be named Zeus, in Greece. 
 
 5. The religion of Israel. Probably a revival and 
 purification of the old conception of a moral, bene- 
 ficent creator, whose creed had been involved in 
 sacrifice and anthropomorphic myth. 
 
 In all the stages thus roughly sketched, myths of 
 the lowest sort prevail, except in the records of the 
 last stage, where the documents have been edited by 
 earnest. monotheists. 
 
 If this theory be approximately correct, man’s 
 earliest religious ideas may very well have consisted, 
 in a sense, of dependence on a supreme moral being 
 who, when attempts were made by savages to describe 
 the modus of his working, became involved in the 
 fancies of mythology. How this belief in such a 
 
330 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 being arose we have no evidence to prove. We make 
 no hint at a sensus numinis, or direct revelation. 
 
 While offering no hypothesis of the origin of belief 
 in a moral creator we may present a suggestion. Mr. 
 Darwin says about early man: “ The same high mental 
 faculties which first led man to believe in unseen 
 spiritual agencies, then in fetichism, polytheism and 
 ultimately monotheism, would infallibly lead him, so 
 long as his reasoning powers remained poorly de- 
 veloped, to various strange superstitions and customs ”.1 
 Now, accepting Mr. Darwin’s theory that early man 
 had “high mental faculties,’ the conception of a 
 Maker of things does not seem beyond his grasp. Man 
 himself made plenty of things, and could probably 
 conceive of a being who made the world and the 
 objects in it. “Certainly there must be some Being 
 who made all these things. He must be very good 
 too,’ said an Eskimo to a missionary.? The goodness 
 is inferred by the Eskimo from his own contentment 
 with ‘‘ the things which are made ”.® 
 
 Another example of barbaric man “seeking after 
 God” may be adduced. 
 
 What the Greenlander said is corroborated by what 
 a Kaffir said. Kaffir religion is mainly animistic, 
 ancestral spirits receive food and sacrifice—there is 
 but an evanescent tradition of a ‘‘ Lord in Heaven”. 
 Thus a very respectable Kaffir said to M. Ar- 
 brousset, “your tidings (Christianity) are what I 
 want ; and I was seeking before I knew you... . 
 I asked myself sorrowful questions. ‘Who has 
 
 1 Darwin, Descent of Man, i. p. 66. 
 2 Cranz, i. 199, 3 Romans, i, 19, 
 
THE MAKER. 331 
 
 ‘touched the stars with his hands? ... Who makes 
 the waters flow? .. . Who can have given earth the 
 wisdom and power to produce corn?’ Then I buried 
 ‘my face in my hands.” 
 
 “This,” says Sir John Lubbock, “ was, however, 
 an exceptional case. Asa general rule savages do not 
 set themselves to think out such questions.” * 
 
 As a common fact, if savages never ask the question, 
 at all events, somehow, they have the answer ready 
 made. “Mangarrah, or Baiame, Puluga, or Dendid, 
 or Ahone, or Ahonawilona, or Atahocan, or Taaroa, 
 or Tui Laga, was the maker.” Therefore savages 
 . who know that leave the question alone, or add 
 mythical accretions. But their ancestors must have 
 asked the question, like the “ very respectable Kaffir ” 
 before they answered it. 
 
 Having reached the idea of a Creator, it was not 
 difficult to add that he was “good,” or beneficent, 
 and was deathless. 
 
 A notion of a good powerful Maker, not subject to 
 death because necessarily prior to Death (who only 
 invaded the world late), seems easier of attainment 
 than the notion of Spirit which, ex hypothest, demands 
 much delicate psychological study and hard thought. 
 The idea of a Good Maker, once reached, becomes, 
 perhaps, the germ of future theism, but, as Mr. Darwin 
 says, the human mind was “ infallibly led to various 
 strange superstitions”. As St. Paul says, in perfect 
 agreement with Mr. Darwin on this point, ‘“‘ they 
 became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish 
 heart was darkened ”. 
 
 1 Origin of Civilisation, p. 201. 
 
332 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 Among other imaginations (right or wrong) was‘ 
 the belief in spirits, with all that followed in the way 
 of instituting sacrifices, even of human beings, and 
 of dropping morality, about which the ghost of a 
 deceased medicine-man was not likely to be much 
 interested. The supposed nearness to man, and the 
 venal and partial character of worshipped gods and 
 ghost-gods, would inevitably win for them more 
 service and attention than would be paid to a 
 Maker remote, unbought and impartial. Hence the 
 conception of such a Being would tend to obsolescence, 
 as we see that it does, and would be most obscured 
 where ghosts were most propitiated, as among the . 
 Zulus. Later philosophy would attach the spiritual 
 conception to the revived or newly discovered idea of 
 the supreme God. 
 
 In all this speculation there is nothing mystical ; 
 no supernatural or supernormal interference is postu- 
 lated. Supernormal experiences may have helped to 
 originate or support the belief in spirits, that, however, 
 is another question. But this hypothesis of the origin 
 of belief in a good unceasing Maker of things is, of 
 course, confessedly a conjecture, for which historical 
 evidence cannot be given, in the nature of the case. 
 All our attempts to discover origins far behind 
 history must be conjectural. Their value must be 
 estimated by the extent to which this or that hypo- 
 thesis colligates the facts. Now our hypothesis 
 does colligate the facts. It shows how belief in a 
 moral supreme being might arise before ghosts were 
 worshipped, and it accounts for the flaw in the 
 religious strata, for the mythical accretions, for 
 
OTIOSE GODS. 333 
 
 the otiose Creator in the background of many bar- 
 baric religions, and for the almost universal absence 
 of sacrifice to the God relatively supreme. He was, 
 from his earliest conception, in no need of gifts from 
 men. 
 
 On this matter of otiose supreme gods, Professor 
 Menzies writes, “It is very common to find in savage 
 beliefs a vague far-off god, who is at the back of all 
 the others, takes little part in the management of 
 things, and receives little worship. But it is impossible 
 to judge what that being was at an earlier time ; he 
 may have been a nature god, or a spirit who has by 
 degrees grown faint, and come to occupy this position.” 
 
 Now the position which he occupies is usually, if not 
 universally, that of the Creator. He could not arrive 
 at this rank by “ becoming faint,” nor could “a nature- 
 god” be the Maker of Nature. The only way by 
 which we can discover ‘‘ what that being was at an 
 earlier time” is to see what he is at an earlier time, 
 that is to say, what the conception of him is, among 
 men in an earlier state of culture. Among them, 
 as we show, he is very much more near, potent and 
 moral, than among races more advanced in social 
 evolution and material culture. We can form no 
 opinion as to the nature of such “ vague, far-off gods, 
 at the back of all the others,” till we collect and com- 
 pare examples, and endeavour to ascertain what points 
 they have in common, and in what points they differ 
 from each other. It then becomes plain that they are 
 least far away, and most potent, where there is least 
 ghostly and polytheistic competition, that is, among 
 the most backward races. The more animism the less 
 
3384 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 theism, is the general rule. Manifestly the current 
 hypothesis—that all religion is animistic in origin— 
 does not account for these facts, and is obliged to fly 
 to an undemonstrated theory of degradation, or to an 
 undemonstrated theory of borrowing. That our theory 
 is inconsistent with the general doctrine of evolution 
 we cannot admit, if we are allowed to agree with Mr. 
 Darwin’s statement about the high mental faculties 
 which first led man to sympathetic, and then to wild 
 beliefs. We do not pretend to be more Darwinian than 
 Mr. Darwin, who compares “these miserable and in- 
 direct results of our higher faculties” to “the occasional 
 mistakes of the instincts of the lower animals ’’. 
 
 The opinion here maintained, namely, that a germ 
 of pure belief may be detected amidst the confusion 
 of low savage faith, and that in a still earlier stage 
 it may have been less overlaid with fable, is in direct 
 contradiction to current theories. It is also in contra- 
 diction with the opinions entertained by myself before 
 I made an independent examination of the evidence. 
 Like others, I was inclined to regard reports of a 
 moral Creator, who observes conduct, and judges it 
 even in the next life, as rumours due either to Christian 
 influence, or to mistake. I well knew, however, and 
 could, and did, discount the sources of error. I was 
 on my guard against the twin fallacies of describing 
 all savage religion as “devil worship,” and of expect- 
 ing to find a primitive “divine tradition”. 1 was also 
 on my guard against the modern bias derived from 
 the “ghost-theory,” and Mr. Spencer’s works, and I 
 kept an eye on opportunities of “borrowing”. I had, 
 
 1 Making of Religion, p. 187. 
 
SOURCES. 835 
 
 in fact, classified all known idola in the first edition 
 of this work, such as the fallacy of leading questions 
 and the chance of deliberate deception. I sought the 
 earliest evidence, prior to any missionary teaching, and 
 the evidence of what the first missionaries found, in 
 the way of belief, on their arrival. I preferred the 
 testimony of the best educated observers, and of those 
 most familiar with native languages. I sought for 
 evidence in native hymns (Maori, Zuiii, Dinka, Red 
 Indian) and in native ceremonial and mystery, as 
 these sources were least likely to be contaminated. 
 
 On the other side, I found a vast body of testimony 
 that savages had no religion at all. But that testi- 
 mony, en masse, Was refuted by Roskoff, and also, in 
 places, by Tylor. When three witnesses were brought 
 to swear that they saw the Irishman commit a crime, 
 he offered to bring a dozen witnesses who did not see 
 him, Negative evidence of squatters, sailors and 
 colonists, who did not see any religion among this 
 or that race, is not worth much against evidence of 
 trained observers and linguists who did find what the 
 others missed, and who found more the more they 
 knew the tribe in question. Again, like others, i" 
 thought savages incapable of such relatively pure 
 +deas as 1 now believe some of them to possess. But 
 - Teould not resist the evidence, and I abandoned my 
 a priori notions. The evidence forcibly attests grada- 
 tions in the central belief. It is found in various 
 shades, from relative potency down to a vanishing 
 trace, and it is found in significant proportion to the 
 prevalence of animistic ideas, being weakest where 
 they are most developed, strongest where they are 
 
336 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 least developed. There must be a reason for these 
 phenomena, and that reason, as it seems to me, is the 
 overlaying and supersession of a rudely Theistic by an 
 animistic creed. That one cause would explain, and 
 does colligate, all the facts. 
 
 There remains a point on which misconception proves 
 to be possible. It will be shown, contrary to the 
 current hypothesis, that the religion of the lowest races, 
 in its highest form, sanctions morality. That morality, 
 again, in certain instances, demands unselfishness. 
 Of course we are not claiming for that doctrine any 
 supernatural origin. Religion, if it sanctions ethics 
 at all, will sanction those which the conscience accepts, 
 and those ethics, in one way or other, must have been 
 evolved. That the ‘‘ cosmical”’ law is ‘‘ the weakest 
 must go to the wall” is generally conceded. Man, 
 however, is found trying to reverse the law, by equal 
 and friendly dealing (at least within what is vaguely 
 called ‘‘the tribe’). His religion, as in Australia, 
 will be shown to insist on this unselfishness. How 
 did he evolve his ethics ? 
 
 ‘‘ Be it little or be it much they get,” says Dampier 
 about the Australians in 1688, ‘‘ every one has his part, 
 as well the young and tender as the old and feeble, 
 who are not able to get abroad as the strong and 
 lusty.” This conduct reverses the cosmical process, and 
 notoriously civilised society, Christian society, does not 
 act on these principles. Neither do the savages, who 
 knock the old and feeble on the head, or deliberately 
 leave them to starve, act on these principles, sanctioned 
 by Australian religion, but (according to Mr. Dawson) 
 mot carried out in Australian practice. ‘‘ When old 
 
EVOLUTION OF MORALS. 337 
 
 people become infirm . . . it is lawful and customary 
 to kill them.” ? 
 
 As to the point of unselfishness, evolutionists are 
 apt to account for it by common interest. A tribe in 
 which the strongest monopolise what is best will not 
 survive so well as an unselfish tribe in the struggle for 
 existence. But precisely the opposite is true, aristo- 
 eracy marks the more successful barbaric races, and 
 an aristocratic slave-holding tribe could have swept 
 Australia as the Zulus swept South Africa. That 
 aristocracy and acquisition of separate property are 
 steps in advance on communistic savagery all history 
 declares. Therefore a tribe which in Australia 
 developed private property, and reduced its neighbours 
 to slavery, would have been better fitted to survive 
 than such a tribe as Dampier describes. 
 
 This is so evident that probably, or possibly, the 
 Dampier state of society was not developed in obedi- 
 ence to a recognised tribal interest, but in obedience 
 to an affectionate instinct. “Ils sentr’ aiment les une 
 les autres,” says Brébeuf of the Hurons.’ “ I never 
 heard the women complain of being left out of feasts, 
 or that the men ate the best portions . . . every one 
 does his business sweetly, peaceably, without dispute. 
 You never see disputes, quarrels, hatred, or reproach 
 among them.” Brébeuf then tells how a young 
 Indian stranger, in a time of want, stole the best part 
 of a moose. “They did not rage or curse, they only 
 bantered him, and yet to take our meat was almost to 
 take our lives.” Brébeuf wanted to lecture the lad; 
 his Indian host bade him hold his peace, and the 
 
 1 Australian Aborigines, p. 62. 2 Relations, 1634, p. 29, 
 
338 MYTH, RITUAL AND RELIGION. 
 
 stranger was given hospitality, with his wife and 
 children. “They are very generous, and make it a 
 point not to attach themselves to the goods of this 
 world.” “Their greatest reproach is ‘that man wants 
 everything, he is greedy’. They support, with never a 
 murmur, widows, orphans and old men, yet they kill 
 hopeless or troublesome invalids, and their whole 
 conduct to Europeans was the reverse of their 
 domestic behaviour. 
 
 Another example of savage unselfish ethics may be 
 found in Mr. Mann’s account of the Andaman Islanders, 
 a nomad race, very low in culture. “It is a note- 
 worthy trait, and one which deserves high commenda- 
 tion, that every care and consideration are paid by all 
 classes to the very young, the weak, the aged, and the 
 helpless, and these being made special objects of in- 
 terest and attention, invariably fare better in regard 
 to the comforts and necessaries of daily life than any 
 of the otherwise more fortunate members of the com- 
 munity.’’? 
 
 Mr. Huxley, in his celebrated Romanes Lecture on 
 ‘‘Evolution and Morality,” laid stress on man’s contra- 
 vention of the cosmic law, ‘‘ the weakest must go to 
 the wall”. He did not explain the evolution of man’s 
 opposition to this law. The ordinary evolutionist 
 hypothesis, that the tribe would prosper most whose 
 members were least self-seeking, is contradicted by all 
 history. The overbearing, ‘“ grabbing,” aristocratic, 
 individualistic, unscrupulous races beat the others out 
 of the field. Mr. Huxley, indeed, alleged that the 
 ‘influence of the cosmic process in the evolution of 
 
 1J, A. 1, xii. p. 98, 
 
RELIGION AND ETHICS, 8339 
 
 society is the greater the more rudimentary its 
 civilisation. Social progress means a checking of 
 the cosmic process at every step and the substitution 
 for it of another, which may be called the ethical 
 process. . . . As civilisation has advanced, so has the 
 extent of this interference increased... .”! But 
 where, in Europe, is the interference so marked as 
 among the Andamanese? We have still to face the 
 problem of the generosity of low savages. 
 
 It is conceivable that the higher ethics of low 
 savages rather reflect their emotional instincts than 
 arise from tribal legislation which is supposed to en- 
 able a “tribe” to prosper in the struggle for existence. 
 As Brébeuf and Dampier, among others, prove, 
 savages often set a good example to Christians, and 
 their ethics are, in certain cases, as among the Anda- 
 manese and Fuegians, and, probably among the Yao, 
 sanctioned by their religion. But, as Mr. Tylor says, 
 “the better savage social life seems but in unstable 
 equilibrium, liable to be easily upset by a touch of 
 distress, temptation, or violence”.’ Still, religion 
 does its best, in certain cases, to lend equilibrium ; 
 though all the world over, religion often fails in 
 practice. 
 
 1 Ethics of Evolution, pp. 81-84. 2 Prim. Cult., i, 51. 
 
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