[111] Compare Cicero, De Legibus, i. 8: “Est igitur homini cum deo similitudo;” and with Gen. ii. 26, 27: “and God created man in his own likeness.”
[112] “The Chinese cosmogony speaks as follows of the creation of man—‘God took some yellow earth, and He made man en deux sexes.’” This is the true origin of the human race. A Hebrew tradition says that it was of the red earth, which is the same idea. The Hebrew word “Adam” expresses this idea. This correspondence as to the manner in which the body of the first man was formed, between two people who have never had relations, is very remarkable. Indian and African cosmogonies relate that the name of the first man was ‘Adimo,’ that of his wife ‘Hava,’ and that they were the last work of the Creator.”—Gainet, La Bible sans la Bible, i. p. 74. I must note, too, the identity of the American Indian (supra and the Hebrew tradition, which is curious, as it might naturally be supposed that the tradition of the Red Indian took its colour from his own complexion.
Max Müller (“Lect. on the Science of Language,” 1st series, p. 367) says of “man”—“The Latin word homo, the French l’homme, ... is derived from the same root, which we have in humus, soil, humilis, humble. Homo, therefore, would express the idea of being made out of the dust of the earth.” Bunsen also (“Phil. Univ. Hist.” i. 78) says—“The common word for man in all German dialects is ‘manna,’ containing the same root as Sanscrit ‘manusha’ and ‘manueshya.’ The Latin ‘homo’ is intimately connected with ‘humus’ and χαμαί and means earth-born; ἀνθρώπων χαμαιγενεων, says Pindar. But what is ἄνθρωπος?”
[113] “Last Rambles,” p. 324.
[114] The following tradition of the Tartar tribes seems to supply a link. In their tradition of the Deluge (vide Gainet, i. 209) it is said, “that those who saved themselves from the Deluge shut themselves up with their provisions in the crevices of mountains, and that after the scourge had passed they came out of their caverns.”
And compare, again, with the tradition of Kronos (Noah, vide Bryant’s “Mythology,” iii. 503)—“He is said to have had three sons (Sanch. ap. Euseb. P. E., lib. i. c. 10, 37), and in a time of danger he formed a large cavern in the ocean, and in this he shut himself up, together with these sons, and thus escaped the danger.”—Porph. de Nymphar. Antro., p. 109.
Bryant (“Mythology,” iii. 405) says—“I have shown that Gaia, in its original sense, signified a sacred cavern, a hollow in the earth, which, from its gloom, was looked upon as an emblem of the ark. Hence Gaia, like Hasta Rhoia Cybele, is often represented as the mother of mankind.” The following is very important with reference to my argument above:—The Scholiast upon Euripides says—“Μετα τον κατακλυσμον εν ορεσιν οικουντων των Αργειων πρωτος αυτους συνωκισεν Ιναχος]. When the Argivi or Arkites, after the Deluge, lived dispersed on the mountains, Inachus first brought them together and formed them into communities.”—Comp. infra, p. 157, 158, 193, 332.
The instances adduced of myths connecting man with the monkey are, as a rule, traditions of degeneracy, i.e. of men turned into monkeys (vide Tylor’s “Primitive Culture,” i. 340), and to which I would add the rabbinical tradition of men turned into monkeys at the Tower of Babel (De Quincey, Works, xiii. 235), and the classical epic of the Ceropes, “founded on the transformation of a set of jugglers into monkeys.” But if compared with the above tradition, I think that the only two instances (Tylor, i. 341) which seem to bear out the opposite theory will wear a different aspect. I quote from Tylor as above—“Wild tribes of the Malay peninsula, looked down upon as lower animals by the more warlike and civilised Malays, have among them traditions of their own descent from a pair of the “unka-putch” or white monkeys, who reared their young ones and sent them into the plains, and there they perfected so well that they and their descendants became men, but those who returned to the mountains still remained apes. The Buddhist legend relates the origin of the flat-nosed uncouth tribes of Tibet, offspring of two miraculous apes, transformed to people the snow-kingdom. Taught to till the ground, when they had grown corn and eaten it, their tails and hair gradually disappeared, they began to speak, became men, and clothed themselves with leaves. The population grew closer, the land was more and more cultivated, and at last a prince of the race of Sakya, driven from his home in India, united their isolated tribes into a single kingdom.”—Comp. Cecrops, &c., p. 332, infra.
[115] It occurs to me as possible that these various traditions may have had their foundation in the recollection of hardship, at some early period of their subsequent migration, which were transferred back and connected with their tradition of the altered state of things after the Deluge, arising out of the substitution of animal for vegetable food—of which the notion that man once lived on acorns may have been only an extreme form of expression. The following tradition of Saturn (vide infra, Saturn, [p. 210]), seems to tend in this direction: “Diodorus Siculus gives the same history of Saturn as is by Plutarch above given of Janus—ἐξ ἀγριου δίαιτης εἰς ἡμερον Βιον μεταρησα ἀνθρωπους.—Diodorus, 1. 5, p. 334. He brought mankind from their foul and savage way of feeding to a more mild and rational diet.”—Bryant, ii. 261.
[116] This fable of the tortoise is also among the Mandans, whom, Catlin (supra, [135]) says, had no other tradition of the Creation than that they were created under the ground. Their tradition is confused with the Deluge, which dominates in their tradition.