FOOTNOTES:
[182] Mr. MacCulloch, in the title of his interesting book, the Childhood of Fiction, has emphasised this mischievous idea. I am not convinced to the contrary by the evidence he gives as to the popularity of the folk-tale among all peoples (p. 2). Indeed, the book itself is an emphatic testimony against its title. Mr. MacCulloch evidently began with the idea that the folk-tale belonged to the domain of fiction. Thus the opening words of his book are: "Folk-tales are the earliest form of romantic and imaginative literature—the unwritten fiction of early man and of primitive people in all parts of the world;" whereas as he nears the end of his study he observes: "Thus, in their origin, folk-tales may have had some other purpose than mere amusement; they may have embodied the traditions, histories, beliefs, ideas, and customs of men at an early stage of civilisation" (p. 451). Mr. MacCulloch himself proves this to be the case, and it is therefore all the more unfortunate that he should have stamped his very important study with the word "fiction."
[183] A folk-tale of the Veys, a North African people, explains this view most graphically in its opening sentences. The narrator begins his tale by saying: "I speak of the long time past; hear! It is written in our old-time-palaver-books—I do not say then; in old time the Vey people had no books, but the old men told it to their children and they kept it; afterwards it was written" (Journ. Ethnol. Soc., N.S., vi. 354). A parallel to this comes from Ireland: "What I have told your honour is true; and if it stands otherwise in books, it's the books which are wrong. Sure we've better authority than books, for we have it all handed down from generation to generation" (Kohl's Travels in Ireland, 140).
[184] I am the more willing to take this as my illustration of myth because, strangely enough, Mr. MacCulloch has omitted it from the examples he uses in his Childhood of Fiction.
[185] Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 166.
[186] Mr. Jeremiah Curtin has collected and published the Creation Myths of Primitive America (London, 1899), and his introduction is a specially valuable study of the subject. I printed the Fijian myth from Williams' Fiji and Fijians, i. 204, and the Kumis myth from Lewin's Wild Races of South-east India, 225-6, in my Handbook of Folklore, 137-139, and Mr. Lang, in cap. vi. of his Myth, Ritual, and Religion deals with a sufficient number of examples. Cf. also Tylor, Primitive Culture, cap. ix.
[187] Grey, Polynesian Mythology, 1-15. I have only summarised the full legend on the lines adopted by Dr. Tylor.
[188] On the Kronos myth consult Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, i. 23-31, who gives an admirable summary of the evidence as it at present stands; Harrison and Verrall, Mythology and Monuments of Anc. Athens, 192; Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 295-323.
[189] Mr. Crawley discovered this story in Mr. Bain's A Digit of the Moon, 13-15, and printed it in his Mystic Rose, 33-34.
[190] "The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature," and "Mr. Gladstone and Genesis," in Science and Hebrew Tradition, cap. iv. and v.
[191] Adonis, Attis and Osiris, 4, 25. Mr. Jevons, too, lays stress upon "the source of errors in religion" as human reason gone astray, Introd. to Hist. of Religion, 463.
[192] Mr. Jevons practically arrives at this conclusion from a different standpoint. "Beliefs," he says, "are about facts, are statements about facts, statements that certain facts will be found to occur in a certain way or be of a certain kind" (Introd. to Hist. of Religion, 402). Mr. Curtin, Creation Myths of Primitive America (p. xx), confirms the view I take.
[193] Orpen, Cape Monthly Magazine. Quoted in Lang's Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 71.
[194] This myth is, I think, worth giving, because of its obvious object to account for the difference between white and black races. It is as follows: "In the beginning of the world God created three white men and three white women, and three black men and three black women. In order that these twelve human souls might not thenceforth complain of Divine partiality and of their separate conditions, God elected that they should determine their own fates by their own choice of good and evil. A large calabash or gourd was placed by God upon the ground, and close to the side of the calabash was also placed a small folded piece of paper. God ruled that the black man should have the first choice. He chose the calabash, because he expected that the calabash, being so large, could not but contain everything needful for himself. He opened the calabash, and found a scrap of gold, a scrap of iron, and several other metals of which he did not understand the use. The white man had no option. He took, of course, the small folded piece of paper, and discovered that, on being unfolded, it revealed a boundless stock of knowledge. God then left the black men and women in the bush, and led the white men and women to the seashore. He did not forsake the white men and women, but communicated with them every night, and taught them how to construct a ship, and how to sail from Africa to another country. After a while they returned to Africa with various kinds of merchandise, which they bartered to the black men and women, who had the opportunity of being greater and wiser than the white men and women, but who, out of sheer avidity, had thrown away their chance."
[195] Native Tribes of South-east Australia, cap. viii.
[196] Northern Tribes of Central Australia, cap. xxii.; Native Tribes of Central Australia, cap. xviii.
[197] Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes, 624; cf. Native Tribes of Central Australia, 564.
[198] Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 229.
[199] Grey, Polynesian Mythology, p. xi. Cf. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, where myths told by the priests are given in cap. vi. and vii., and Trans. Ethnological Soc., new series, i. 45.
[200] White's Anc. Hist. of the Maori, i. 8-13.
[201] Curtin, Creation Myths of Primitive America, p. xxi.
[202] Im Thurn, Indians of Guiana, 335; Landtman, Origin of Priesthood, 117.
[203] Primitive Manners and Customs, cap. i. "Some Savage Myths and Beliefs," and cap. viii., "Fairy Lore of Savages."
[204] Introd. to Hist. of Religion, 263. Of course I do not accept Mr. J. A. Stewart's "general remarks on the μυθολογία or story-telling myth" in his Myths of Plato, 4-17. All Mr. Stewart's research is literary in object and result, though he uses the materials of anthropology.
[205] H. H. Wilson, Rig Veda Sanhita, i. p. xvii.
[206] H. H. Wilson, Vishnu Purana, i. p. iv; Rig Veda Sanhita, i. p. xlv.
[207] Religion of the Semites, 19.
[208] Mr. Hartland passes rapidly in his opening chapter from the myth as primitive science to the myth as fairy tale, from the savage to the Celt (Science of Fairy Tales, pp. 1-5), and I do not think it is possible to make this leap without using the bridge which is to be constructed out of the differing positions occupied by the myth and the fairy tale.
[209] It will be interesting, I think, to preserve here one or two instances of the actual practice of telling traditional tales in our own country. Mr. Hartland has referred to the subject in his Science of Fairy Tales, but the following instances are additional to those he has noted, and they refer directly back to the living custom. They are all from Scotland, and refer to the early part of last century. "In former times, when families, owing to distance and other circumstances, held little intercourse with each other through the day, numbers were in the habit of assembling together in the evening in one house, and spending the time in relating the tales of wonder which had been handed down to them by tradition" (Kiltearn in Ross and Cromarty; Sinclair, Statistical Account of Scotland, xiv. 323). "In the last generation every farm and hamlet possessed its oral recorder of tale and song. The pastoral habits of the people led them to seek recreation in listening to, and in rehearsing the tales of other times; and the senachie and the bard were held in high esteem" (Inverness-shire, ibid., xiv. 168). "In the winter months, many of them are in the habit of visiting and spending the evenings in each other's houses in the different hamlets, repeating the songs of their native bard or listening to the legendary tales of some venerable senachie" (Durness in Sutherlandshire, ibid., xv. 95).
[210] W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 3-4.
[211] Pausanias, viii. cap. xv. § 1.
[212] Journ. Roy. Asiatic Soc., ii. p. 218.
[213] Hist. of Rome, i. pp. 177-179. Cf. Gunnar Landtman, Origin of Priesthood, p. 77.
[214] Perhaps Mr. Lang's study of "Cinderella and the Diffusion of Tales" in Folklore, iv. 413 et seq., contains the best summary of the position.
[215] Crawley, Tree of Life, 5, 144.
[216] Train, Hist. of Isle of Man, ii. 115.
[217] The ceremony is fully described in Relics for the Curious, i. 31; Gentleman's Magazine, 1784 (see Gent. Mag. Library, xxiii. 209), quoting from a tract first published in 1634; and see Proc. Soc. Antiq. Scot., x. 669.
[218] See Folklore, iii. 253-264; Rhys, Celtic Folklore, i. 337-341.
[219] Couch, Hist. of Polperro, 168.
[220] I have investigated the bee cult at some length, and it will form part of my study on Tribal Custom which I am now preparing for publication.
[221] Carleton, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry.
[222] Mr. Eden Phillpotts mentions in one of his Cornish stories exactly this conception. Rags were offered. "Just a rag tored off a petticoat or some such thing. They hanged 'em up around about on the thorn bushes, to shaw as they'd 'a' done more for the good saint if they'd had the power."—Lying Prophets, 60.
[223] I gave an example of this false classification of folklore in accord with its apparent modern association in my preface to Denham Tracts, ii. p. ix. The left-leg stocking divination is not associated with dress, but with the left-hand as opposed to the right-hand augury, and I pointed out that the district of the Roman wall, the locus of the Denham tracts, thus preserves the luck of the left, believed in by the Romans, in opposition to the luck of the right believed in by the Teutons. See Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, 253-7.
[224] I elaborated this plan of comparative analysis in a report to the British Association at Liverpool, in 1896 (see pp. 626-656), illustrating it from the fire customs of Britain.
[225] Archæological Review, ii. 163-166; cf. the Rev. J. Macdonald in Folklore, iii. 338.
[226] Athenæum, 29th December, 1883; Archæologia, vol. l. p. 213.
[227] See MacCulloch's Childhood of Fiction, chap. xiii., where this distinction is noted, though its significance is not pointed out.
[228] Dr. Rivers has dealt with a very similar case of dual origin in connection with bride capture, see Journ. Roy. Asiatic Soc., 1907, p. 624.
[229] Schrader's Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, 422.
[230] Robertson Smith's Religion of the Semites, 397.
[231] Monier Williams, Indian Wisdom, pp. 29-31. The word-equations for sacrifice are given by Schrader, op. cit., 130, 415.
[232] Journ. Asiatic Soc. Bengal, xxxiv. p. 7. On the influence of the aboriginal races cf. Monier Williams, Indian Wisdom, 312-313; Steel and Temple's Wide Awake Stories, 395; Campbell, Tales of West Highlands, l. p. xcviii.
[233] Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. p. 271.
[234] H. H. Wilson, Religion of the Hindus, ii. 289. I compare this with the custom of the cow following the coffin mentioned by Mannhardt, Die Gotterwelt, 320, and the soul shot or gift of a cow at death recorded by Brand, ii. 248.
[235] Cf. Olaus Magnus, pp. 168, 169, for the significant Norse ceremony.
[236] Spenser, View of the State of Ireland, 1595 (Morley reprint), 73.