Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

§ IV.

BARBARIC BELIEF IN VIRTUE IN INANIMATE THINGS.

The artificial divisions which man in his pride of birth made between the several classes of phenomena in the inorganic world, and also between the inorganic and the organic, are being swept away before the larger knowledge and insight of our time. Indeed, it would seem that the surest test we can apply to the worth of any kind of knowledge is whether it adds to or takes from our growing conception of unity. If it does the former, we cannot overthrow it; if it does the latter, then is it science “falsely so called.”

That notable doctrine known as the correlation of physical forces, or the convertibility into one another of heat, light, electricity, chemical affinity, etc., each being a mode of manifestation of an unknown energy which “lives through all life, extends through all extent,” has its counterpart in the correlation of spiritual forces. Varied as are the modes of expression of these, that variety is on the surface only. Deep down lies the one source that feeds them, the one heart to whose existence their pulsations witness. All primitive philosophies, all religions “that man did ever find,” are but as the refractions of the same light dispersed through different media; are the result of the speculations of the same subject, allowances being made for local and non-essential differences upon like objects. And, therefore, in treating of the nature and limitations of man’s early thought concerning his surroundings, whether these be the broad earth bathed in the sunshine or swathed in the darkness, or the sounds that come from unseen agents, the sight of spectral visitants of whom he cannot have touch, and out of which are built up his theories of the invisible world, the reader may find reference to the same conditions which were shown in former pages to give birth and sustenance to primitive myth. The same fantastic conclusions, drawn from rude analyses and associations, and from seeming connections of cause and effect, the same bewildering entanglement between things which we know can have nothing in common, meet us; and the same scientific method by which we determine the necessary place of each in the advance of man to truth through illusion is applied.

The illustrations of the vital connection which the savage assumes between himself and his name show how easy is the passage from belief in life inhering in everything to belief in it as capable of power for good or evil. This can be shown by illustrations from more tangible things than names. The savage who is afraid to utter these also shrinks from having his likeness taken, in the feeling that some part of him is transferred, and at the mercy of the sorcerer and enemy. The Malemutes of North America refused to risk their lives before a photographic apparatus. They said that those who had their likenesses had their spirit, and they would not let these pass into the keeping of those who might use them as instruments of torment. Catlin relates that he caused great commotion among the Sioux by drawing one of their chiefs in profile. “Why was half his face left out?” they asked; “Mahtocheega was never ashamed to look a white man in the face.” The chief himself did not take offence, but Shouka the Dog taunted him, saying: “The Englishman knows that you are but half a man; he has painted but one-half of your face, and knows that the rest is good for nothing.” This led to a quarrel, and in the end Mahtocheega was shot, the fatal bullet tearing away just that part of the face which Catlin had not drawn! He had to make his escape, and the matter was not settled till both Shouka and his brother had been killed in revenge for Mahtocheega’s death. The Yanktons accused Catlin of causing a scarcity of buffaloes by putting a great many of them in his book, and refused to let him take their portraits. So with the Araucanians, who ran away if any attempt was made to sketch them. Among such races we find great care exercised lest cuttings of hair, parings of nails, saliva, refuse of food, water in which they had washed, etc., should fall into unfriendly or mistrusted hands. The South Sea Island chiefs had servants following them with spittoons, that the saliva might be buried in some hidden place. Among the Polynesians any one who fell ill attributed it to some sorcerer, who had got hold of refuse from the sick and was burning it, and the quiet of the night was often broken by the blowing of shell-trumpets, as signals for the sorcerer to stop until the gifts on their way to appease him could arrive. The idea is common both to Eskimo and Indian that so long as a fragment of a body remains unburnt, the being, man or beast, may, by magic, be revived from it. As with the name or the portrait, whoever possessed a part of the material substance possessed a part of the spiritual, and in this world-wide belief in a sympathetic connection between things living and not living lies the whole philosophy of sorcery, of charms, amulets, spells, and the general doctrine of luck surviving through the successive stages of culture to this day. And he who would prevent anything from his person getting into hostile hands, naturally sought after things in which coveted qualities were believed to dwell, and avoided those of a reverse nature. So we find tiger’s flesh eaten to give courage, and the eyes of owls swallowed to give good sight in the dark. The Kaffirs prepare a powder made of the dried flesh of various wild beasts, the leopard, tiger, elephant, snake, etc., so as to absorb the several virtues of these creatures. The Tyrolese hunter wears his tuft of eagle’s down to gain long sight and daring, and the Red Indian strings bears claws round his neck to get Bruin’s savage courage. The customs of scalping and, in some measure, of cannibalism, may be referred to the same notion, for the Red man will risk his life to prevent a tribesman’s scalp being captured by the foe, and the New Zealander will swallow the eyes of his slain enemy to improve his sight. In Greenland “a slain man is said to have power to avenge himself upon the murderer by rushing into him, which can only be prevented by eating a piece of his liver.”[63] When a whaler died the Eskimos distributed portions of his dried body among his friends, and rubbed the points of their lances with them, it being held that a weapon thus charmed would pierce a vital part in a whale, where another would fail. Sometimes the body was laid in a cave, and, before starting for the chase, the whalers would assemble, and, carrying it to a stream, plunge it in, and then drink the water. When the heroic Jesuit Brébeuf was tortured by the Iroquois, they were so astonished at his endurance that they laid open his breast and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant a foe, thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage, while a chief tore out his heart and devoured it.

Cannibalism, it may be remarked, en passant, is also found to have a religious significance, on the supposition, which has unsuspected survival among advanced races, that eating the body and drinking the blood communicates the spirit of the victim to the consumer. It is not always the most savage races who practise it; for example, the Australians, despite the scarcity of large animals for food supply, rarely ate the flesh of man, whilst the New Zealanders, who rank far above them, and had not the like excuse, were systematic feeders on human flesh.

As examples of a reverse kind, but witnessing to the play of like beliefs in qualities passing from brutes and lifeless things, we find some races avoiding oil, lest the game slip through their fingers, abstaining from the flesh of deer, lest it engenders timidity, and from that of pigs and of tortoises lest the eater has very small eyes. Dr. Tylor gives an apposite illustration of a kindred superstition in the Hessian lad who thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby-girl’s cap in his pocket as a symbolical way of repudiating manhood. So the thief of our London slums hopes to evade the police by carrying a piece of coal or slate in his pocket for luck. Among ourselves there was an old medical saw, “Hare-flesh engendereth melancholy bloude,” and in Swift’s Polite Conversation we have this reason assigned by Lady Answerall when asked to eat it; whilst faith is not yet extinct in the “Doctrine of Signatures,” or the notion that the appearance of a plant indicates the disease for which it is a remedy, as the “eye-bright,” the black purple spot on the corolla of which was said to show that it was good for weak eyes. In referring to the mandrake superstition (a plant whose roots are said to rudely resemble the human form) as illustration of the “recognised principles in magic that things like each other, however superficially, affect each other in a mystic way and possess identical properties,” Mr. Andrew Lang quotes a Melanesian belief that a stone in the shape of a pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find, because it made pigs prolific and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots.[64]

Brand remarks[65] that the custom of giving infants coral to help in cutting the teeth is said to be a survival of an old belief in it as an amulet; and in English, Sicilian, and West Indian folk-lore, we find the belief that it changes colour in sympathy with the pale or healthy look of the wearer. An old Latin author says,[66] “It putteth of lightenynge, whirle-wynde, tempeste, and storms fro shyppes and houses that it is in.”

We are each of us hundreds of thousands of years old, and although our customs and beliefs have a far less venerable antiquity, their sources lie not less in primitive thought. Like the survival of the ancient Roman workman’s “casula” or “little house” or “shelter” in the chasuble of the priest; like the use of stone knives in circumcision long after the discovery of metals; the general tends to become special; the common, its primitive need or service forgotten, to become sacred. Sometimes the early idea abides; the Crees, who carry about the bones of the dead carefully wrapped up as a fetish; the Caribs, who think such relics can answer questions; the Xomanes, who drink the powdered bones in water, that they may receive the spirit; the Algonquins, whose god Manobozho turned bits of his own flesh or his wife’s into raccoons for food; the Iroquois cited above; represent the barbarous ancestry of higher races, whether of the Bacchanalians described by Arnobius,[67] who thought that the fulness of the divine majesty was imparted to them when they tore and ate the struggling rams with mouths dripping with gore, or of the faithful who receive nutriment through the symbols of the Cross. And the prayers of savage and civilised have this in common, that some advantage is thereby sought by the utterer; their sacrifices are alike the giving up of one’s goods or one’s self to a deity who may be appeased or bribed thereby; their fastings are cultivated as inducing the abnormal states in which their old men dream dreams and their young men see visions of spirits appearing as angels ascending and descending between earth and the abode of the blest. Baptisms are the ancient lustrations, which water, as the cleansing element, suggested; and the eastward position, over which priests and ecclesiastics have fought, is the undoubted relic of worship of the rising sun.

In short, there is no rite or ceremony yet practised and revered amongst us which is not the lineal descendant of barbaric thought and usage, expressing a need which, were men less the slaves of custom and indolence, would long since have found loftier form than in genuflexion before shrine and reliquary. By an exercise of imagination not possible but for these being a felicitous “gesture language” of the cries of human souls, a mass of heathen and pagan rites have been transformed into those of the Christian faith. That they have come to be mistaken for the ideas symbolised, that with the loftiest spiritual teaching there should remain commingled belief in miraculous power in fragments (mostly spurious) of dead men and their clothes; only shows the persistency of that notion of a vital connection between the lifeless and the living which this section has sought to illustrate.