Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

§ V.

BELIEF IN METAMORPHOSIS INTO ANIMALS.

The belief that human beings could change themselves into animals has been already alluded to, but in view of its large place in the history of illusions, some further reference is needful.

Superstitions which now excite a smile, or which seem beneath notice, were no sudden phenomena, appearing now and again at the beck and call of wilful deceivers of their kind. That they survive at all, like organisms, atrophied or degenerate, which have seen “better days,” is evidence of remote antiquity and persistence. Every seeming vagary of the mind had serious importance, and answered to some real need of man as a sober attempt to read the riddle of the earth, and get at its inmost secret.

So with this belief. It is the outcome of that early thought of man which conceived a common nature and fellowship between himself and brutes, a conception based on rude analogies between his own and other forms of life, as also between himself and things without life, but having motion, be they waterspouts or rivers, trees or clouds, especially these last, when the wind, in violent surging and with howling voice, drove them across the sky. Where he blindly, timidly groped, we walk as in the light, and with love that casts out fear. Where rough resemblances suggested to him like mental states and actions in man and brute, the science of our time has, under the comparative method, converted the guess into a certainty; not to the confirmation of his conclusions, but to the proof of identity of structure and function, to the demonstrating of a common origin, however now impassable the chasm that separates us from the lower animals.

The belief in man’s power to change his form and nature is obviously nearly connected with the widespread doctrine of metempsychosis, or the passing of the soul at death into one or a series of animals, generally types of the dead man’s character, as where the timid enter the body of a hare, the gluttonous that of a swine or vulture.

“Fills with fresh energy another form,
And towers an elephant or glides a worm;
Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon,
Or wails a screech-owl to the deaf, cold moon,
Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare,
Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air.”

But while in transmigration the soul returns not to the body which it had left, transformation was only for a time, occurring at stated periods, and effected by the will of the transformed, or by the aid of sorcery or magic, or sometimes imposed by the gods as a punishment for impious defiance and sin.

Other causes, less remote, aided the spread of a belief to which the mind was already inclined. Among these were the hallucinations of men who believed themselves changed into beasts, and who, retreating to caves and forests, issued thence howling and foaming, ravening for blood and slaughter; hallucinations which afflicted not only single persons, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, whose milder monomania (he, himself, saying in the famous prize poem:—

“As he ate the unwonted food,
‘It may be wholesome, but it is not good’”),

rather resembled that of the daughters of Prætus, who believed themselves cows, but which also spread as virulent epidemic among whole classes. It is related that, in 1600, multitudes were attacked by the disease known as lycanthropy, or wolf-madness (from Greek, lukos, a wolf, and anthropos, a man), and that they herded and hunted in packs, destroying and eating children, and keeping in their mountain fastnesses a cannibal or devil’s sabbath, like the nocturnal meetings of witches and demons known as the Witches’ Sabbath. Hundreds of them were executed on their own confession, but some time elapsed before the frightful epidemic, and the panic which it caused, passed away. Besides such delusions, history down to our own time records instances where a morbid innate craving for blood, leading sometimes to cannibalism, has shown itself. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his Book of Werewolves, cites a case from Gall of a Dutch priest who had such a desire to kill and to see killed that he became chaplain to a regiment for the sake of witnessing the slaughter in battle. But still more ghastly are the notorious cases of Elizabeth, a Hungarian lady of title, who inveigled girls into her castle and murdered them, that she might bathe her body in human blood to enhance her beauty; and of the Maréchal de Retz who, cursed with the abnormal desire to murder children, allured them with promises of dainties into his kitchen, and killed them, inhaling the odour of their blood with delight, and then burned their bodies in the huge fireplace in the room devoted to these horrors. When the deed was done the Maréchal would lie prostrate with grief, “would toss weeping and praying on a bed, or recite fervent prayers and litanies on his knees, only to rise with irresistible craving to repeat the crime.”

Such instances as the foregoing, whether of delusion or morbid desire to destroy, are among secondary causes; they may contribute, but they do not create, being inadequate to account for the world-wide existence of transformation myths. The animals which are the supposed subject of these vary with the habitat, but are always those which have inspired most dread from their ferocity. In Abyssinia we find the man-hyæna; in South Africa, the man-lion; in India, the man-tiger; in Northern Europe, the man-bear; and in other parts of Europe the man-wolf, or werewolf (from A.-S. wer, a man).

Among the many survivals of primitive thought in the Greek mythology, which are the only key to its coarser features, this of belief in transformation occurs, and, indeed, along the whole line of human development it appears and re-appears in forms more or less vivid and tragic. The gods of the south, as of the north, came down in the likeness of beasts and birds, as well as of men, and among the references to these myths in classic writers, Ovid, in the Metamorphoses, tells the story of Zeus visiting Lykaon, king of Arcadia, who placed a dish of human flesh before the god to test thereby his omniscience. Zeus detected the trick, and punished the king by changing him into a wolf, so that his desire might be towards the food which he had impiously offered to his god.

“In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant
His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted
For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter.
His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked.
A wolf—he retains yet large traces of his ancient expression,
Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid,
His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury.”

But we may pass from this and such-like tales of the ancients to the grim realities of the belief in mediæval times.

If wolves abounded, much more did the werewolf abound. According to Olaus Magnus, the sufferings which the inhabitants of Prussia and neighbouring nations endured from wolves were trivial compared with the ravages wrought by men turned into wolves. On the feast of the Nativity, these monsters were said to assemble and then disperse in companies to kill and plunder. Attacking lonely houses, they devoured all the human beings and every other animal found therein. “They burst into the beer-cellars and there they empty the tuns of beer or mead, and pile up the empty casks one above another in the middle of the cellar, thus showing their difference from natural wolves.” In Scandinavia it was believed that some men had a second skin out of which they could slip and appear in the shape of a beast. Perhaps the phrase “to jump out of one’s skin” is a relic of this notion. The Romans believed that the werewolf simply effected the change by turning his skin inside out, hence the term “versipellis,” or “skin-changer.” So in mediæval times it was said that the wolf’s skin was under the human, and the unhappy suspects were hacked and tortured for signs of such hairy growth. Sometimes the change was induced, it is said, by putting on a girdle of human skin round the waist; sometimes by the use of magical ointment. Whatever the animal whose shape a man took could do, that he could do, plus such power as he possessed in virtue of his manhood or acquired by sorcery, his eyes remaining as the only features by which he could be recognised. If he was not changed himself, some charm was wrought on the eyes of onlookers whereby they could see him only in the shape which he was supposed to assume. The genuine monomaniacs aided such an illusion. The poor demented one who conceived himself a dog or a wolf, who barked, and snapped, and foamed at the mouth, and bit savagely at the flesh of others, was soon clothed by a terror-stricken fancy in the skin of either brute, and believed to have the canine or lupine appetite in addition to his human cunning. The imagination thus projects in visible form the spectres of its creation; the eye in this, as in so much else, sees the thing for which it looks. Some solid foundation for the belief would, however, exist in the custom among warriors of dressing themselves in the skins of beasts to add to their ferocious appearance. And it was amidst such that the remarkable form of mania in Northern Europe known as the Berserkr rage (“bear-sark” or “bear-skin” wearer) arose. Working themselves by the aid of strong drink or drugs and contagious excitement into a frenzy, these freebooters of the Northland sallied forth to break the backbones and cleave the skulls of quiet folk and unwary travellers. As with flashing eyes and foaming mouth they yelled and danced, seemingly endowed with magic power to resist assault by sword or club, they aroused in the hysterically disposed a like madness, which led to terrible crimes, and which died away only as the killing of one’s fellows became less the business of life. History supplies many examples of strange mental epidemics which sped through towns and provinces in mediæval times. They were induced by religious enthusiasm and other extreme and harmful forms of mental stimulation, the most notorious being the great St. Vitus’ dance, and the procession of Flagellants, to which in their mad orgies the hysterical ceremonies of barbarous tribes correspond. Of that tendency towards imitation which these freaks of erratic and unbalanced minds foster Dr. Carpenter[38] quotes an illustration from Zimmerman. A nun in a large convent in France began to mew like a cat, and shortly afterwards other nuns also mewed. At last all the nuns mewed every day at a given time and for several hours together. And this cat’s concert was only stopped by the military arriving and threatening to whip the nuns.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the belief in men-beasts reached its maximum, and met with no tender treatment at the hands of a church whose founder had manifested such soothing pity towards the “possessed” of Galilee and Judæa. That church had a cut-and-dried explanation of the whole thing, and applied a sharp and pitiless remedy. If the devil, with countless myrmidons at his command, was “going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,” what limit could be put to his ingenuity and arts? Could he not as easily change a man into a wolf or a bear as a woman into a cat? and had not each secured this by a compact with him, the foe of God and His Church? The evidence in support of the one was as clear and cogent as in support of the other; hence werewolf hunting and burning became as Christian a duty and as paying a profession as witch-smelling and torturing. Any cruelty was justified by its perpetrators when the object in view was the vindication of the majesty of God; and not until the advancing intelligence of men recoiled against the popular explanations of witchcraft and lycanthropy were the laws against both repealed.

Those explanations were survivals of savage mental philosophy blended with a crude theology. To the savage, all diseases are the work of evil spirits. If a man hurts himself against a stone, the demon in the stone is the cause. If the man falls suddenly ill, writhes or shrieks in his pain, the spirit which has smuggled itself in with the food or the drink or the breath is twisting or tearing him; if he has a fit, the spirit has flung him; if he is in the frenzy of hysteria, the spirit within him is laughing in fiendish glee. And when the man suddenly loses his reason, goes, as people say, “out of his mind,” acts and looks no longer like his former self, still more does this seem the work of an evil agent within him. It is kindred with the old belief that the sickly and ugly infant had been left in the cradle by the witch in place of the child stolen by her before its baptism.[39] And the thing to do is to find some mode of conjuring or frightening or forcing the demon out of the man, just as it became a sacred duty to watch over the newly-born until the sign of the cross had been made on its forehead, and the regenerating water sprinkled over it.

“Presbyter is but old priest writ large.” And the theory of demoniacal agency was but the savage theory in a more elaborate guise. To theologians and jurists it was a sufficing explanation; it fitted in with the current notions of the government of the universe, and there was no need to frame any other. Body and mind were to them as separate entities as they are to the savage and the ignorant. Each regarded the soul as independent of the body, and framed his theories of occasional absence therefrom accordingly. But science has taught us to know ourselves not as dual, but as one. She lays her finger on the subtle, intricate framework of man’s nervous system, and finds in the derangement of this the secret of those delusions and illusions which have been so prolific in agony and suffering. She makes clear how the yielding to morbid tendencies can still foster delusions, which, if no longer the subject of pains and penalties in the body politic, are themselves ministers of vengeance in the body where they arise. And in the recognition of a fundamental unity between the physical and the mental, in the healthy working of the one as dependent on the wholesome care of the other, she finds not only the remedy against mental derangement and all forms of harmful excitement, but also the prevention which is better than cure.

Traditions of transformation of men into beasts are not confined to the Old world.[40] In Dr. Rink’s Tales of the Eskimo there are numerous stories both of men and women who have assumed animal form at will, as also incidental references to the belief in stories such as that telling how an Eskimo got inside a walrus skin, so that he might lead the life of that creature. And among the Red races, that rough analogy which led to the animal being credited with life and consciousness akin to the human, still expresses itself in thought and act. If even now it is matter of popular belief in the wilds of Norway that Finns and Lapps, who from remote times have passed as skilful witches and wizards, can at pleasure assume the shape of bears, the common saying, according to Sir George Dasent, about an unusually daring and savage beast being, “that can be no Christian bear,” we may not be surprised that lower races still ascribe power of interchange to man and brute. The werewolf superstition is extant among the North-Western Indians, but free from those diabolical features which characterised it in mediæval times among ourselves. It takes its place in barbaric myth generally, and although it may have repellent or cruel elements, it was never blended with belief in the demoniacal. The Ahts say that men go into the mountains to seek their manitou (that is, the personal deity, generally the first animal seen by a native in the dream produced by his fasting on reaching manhood), and, mixing with wolves, are after a time changed into these creatures. Although the illustration bears more upon what has to be said concerning the barbaric belief in animal-ancestors, it has some reference to the matter in hand to cite the custom among the Tonkanays, a wild and unruly tribe in Texas, of celebrating their origin by a grand annual dance. One of them, naked as he was born, is buried in the earth, then the others, clothed in wolf-skins, walk over him, sniff around him, howl in wolfish style, and then dig him up with their nails.[41] The leading wolf solemnly places a bow and arrow in his hands, and, to his inquiry as to what he must do for a living, advises him “to do as the wolves do—rob, kill, and rove from place to place, never cultivating the soil.” Dr. Brinton, in quoting the above from Schoolcraft, refers to a similar custom among the ancient dwellers on Mount Soracte.

As in past times among ourselves, so in times present among races such as the foregoing, their wizards and shamans are believed to have power to turn themselves as they choose into beasts, birds, or reptiles. By whatever name these professional impostors are known, whether as medicine-men, or, as in Cherokee, by the high-sounding title of “possessors of the divine fire,” they have traded, and wherever credulity or darkest ignorance abide, still trade on the fears and fancies of their fellows by disguising themselves in voice and gait and covering of the animal which they pretend to be. Among races believing in transformation such tricks have free course, and the more dexterous the sorcerer who could play bear’s antics in a bear’s skin proved himself in throwing off the disguise and appearing suddenly as a man, the greater his success, and the more firmly grounded the belief.

The whole subject, although presented here only in the barest outline, would not be fitly dismissed without some reference to the survival of the primitive belief in men-animals in the world-wide stories known as beast-fables, in which animals act and talk like human beings. When to us all nature was Wonderland, and the four-footed, the birds, and the fishes, among our play-fellows; when in fireside tale and rhyme they spoke our language and lived that free life which we then shared and can never share again, the feeling of kinship to which the old fables gave expression may have checked many a wanton act, and, if we learned it not fully then, we may have taken the lesson to heart since—

“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives.”

And then those Fables of Æsop, even with the tedious drawback of the “moral,” as powder beneath the jam, did they not lighten for us in school-days the dark passages through our Valpy (for the omniscient Dr. William Smith was not then the tyro’s dread), and again give us communion with the fowl of the air and the beast of the field? Now our mature thought may interest itself in following the beast-myths to the source whence Babrius and Phædrus, knowing not its springhead and antiquity, drew their vivid presentments of the living world, and find in the storied East the well-spring that fed the imagination of youngsters thousands of years ago. Such tales have not fallen in the East to the low level which they have reached here, because they yet accord in some degree with extant superstitions in India, whereas in Europe they find little or nothing to which they correspond. With some authorities the Egyptians have the credit of first inventing the beast-fable, but among them, as among every other advanced race, such stories are the remains of an earlier deposit; relics of a primitive philosophy in which wisdom and skill and cunning are no monopoly of man’s. The fondness of the negro races, whose traditions are not limited to South and Central Africa, for such fables is well known, as witness the tales of which “Uncle Remus” is a type, and it is strikingly illustrated in the history of the Vai tribe, who having, partly through contact with whites, elaborated a system of writing, made the beast-fable their earliest essay in composition.[42]

The evidence in support of the common ancestry of the languages spoken by the leading peoples in Europe, and by such important historical races in Asia as the Hindu and the Persian, has been already summarised. That evidence, it was remarked, is considered corroborative not only of the common origin of the myths on which the framework of the great Indo-European epics rests, but also of the possession by the several clans of a common stock of folk-lore and folk-tale, in which, of course, the beast-fables are included, these being the relics in didactic or humorous guise of that serious philosophy concerning the community of life in man and brute amongst the barbaric ancestors of the Indo-Europeans, upon which stress enough has been laid.

Even if the common origin be disproved, the evidence would be shifted merely from local to general foundations, because the uniform attitude of mind before the same phenomena would have further confirmation; but the resemblances are too minute in detail to be explained by a theory of independent creation of the tales where we now find them. The likenesses are many, the unlikenesses are few, being the result of local colouring, historical fact blended with the fiction, popular belief, and superstition, all affected by the skill of the professional story-teller. As in the numerous variants of the familiar Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Punchkin, and the like, the same fairy prince or princess, the same wicked magician and clever versatile Boots, peep through, disclosing the near relationship of Hindu nursery tales to the folk-tales of Norway and the Highlands, of Iceland and Ceylon, of Persia and Serbia, of Russia and the lands washed by the Mediterranean.

In the venerable collection of Buddhist Birth Stories, now in course of translation by Dr. Rhys Davids,[43] and to which is prefaced an interesting introduction on the source and migration of folk-tales, we are face to face with many a fable familiar to us in the Æsop of our school-days. There is the story of the Ass in the Lion’s Skin, not in which, as Æsop has it, the beast dressed himself, but which the hawker put on him to frighten the thieves who would steal his goods. Left one day to browse in a field whilst his master refreshed himself at an inn, some watchmen saw him, and, raising hue and cry, brought out the villagers, armed with their rude implements. The ass, fearing death, made a noise like an ass, and was killed. Long might he, adds the ancient moral—

“Clad in a lion’s skin
Have fed on the barley green;
But he brayed!
And that moment he came to ruin.”

The variants of this old fable are found in mediæval, in French, German, Indian, and Turkish folk-lore, as are also those of the tortoise who lost his life through “much speaking.” Desiring to emigrate, two ducks agreed to carry him, he seizing hold of a stick which they held between their beaks. As they passed over a village the people shouted and jeered, whereupon the irate tortoise called out: “What business is it of yours?” and, of course, thereby let go the stick and, falling down, split in two. Therefore—

“Speak wise words not out of season;
You see how, by talking overmuch,
The tortoise fell.”

In Æsop the tortoise asks an eagle to teach him to fly; in Chinese folk-lore he is carried by geese.

Jacob Grimm’s researches concerning the famous mediæval fable of “Reynard the Fox” revealed the ancient and scattered materials out of which that wonderful satire was woven, and there is no feature of the story which reappears more often in Eastern and Western folk-lore than that cunning of the animal which has been for the lampooner and the satirist the type of self-seeking monk and ecclesiastic. When Chanticleer proudly takes an airing with his family, he meets master Reynard, who tells him he has become a “religious,” and shows him his beads, and his missal, and his hair shirt, adding, in a voice “that was childlike and bland,” that he had vowed never to eat flesh. Then he went off singing his Credo, and slunk behind a hawthorn. Chanticleer, thus thrown off his guard, continues his airing, and the astute hypocrite, darting from his ambush, seizes the plump hen Coppel. So in Indian folk-tale a wolf living near the Ganges is cut off from food by the surrounding water. He decides to keep holy day, and the god Sakka, knowing his lupine weakness, resolves to have some fun with him, and turns himself into a wild goat “Aha!” says the wolf, “I’ll keep the fast another day,” and springing up he tried to seize the goat, who skipped about so that he could not be taken. So Lupus gives it up, and says as his solatium: “After all, I’ve not broken my vow.”

The Chinese have a story of a tiger who desired to eat a fox, but the latter claimed exemption as being superior to the other animals, adding that if the tiger doubted his word he could easily judge for himself. So the two set forth, and, of course, every animal fled at sight of the tiger, who, too stupid to see how he had been gulled, conceived high respect for the fox, and spared his life.

Sometimes the tables are turned. Chanticleer gets his head out of Reynard’s mouth by making him answer the farmer, and in the valuable collection of Hottentot tales which the late Dr. Bleek, with some warrant, called Reynard in South Africa, the cock makes the jackal say his prayers, and flies off while the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes.

But further quotations must be resisted; enough if it is made clearer that the beast-fable is the lineal descendant of barbaric conceptions of a life shared in common by man and brute, and another link thus added to the lengthening chain of the continuity of human history.