Photo: Mansell.
WILD GOATS AND YOUNG.
British Museum.
(Assyrian Relief.)
Other animals are sometimes human beings as well as snakes. The lizard is often the Itongo of an old woman. A boy killed some lizards in a cattle-pen with stones. Then he went and told his grandmother, who said he had done very wrong—those lizards were chiefs of the village and should have been worshipped. I think the grandmother was a humane old person; I even suspect that she said the lizards were chiefs and not old women to make the admonition more awful. The man who told this story to Canon Callaway (from whose valuable work on the Amazulu I take these notes) added that, looking back to the incident, he doubted if the lizards were Amatongo after all, because no harm came of their murder. He thought that they must have been merely wild animals which had become tame owing to people mistakenly thinking that they were Amatongo.
What can one say to boys who ill-treat lizards? I own that I have threatened them with ghostly treatment of the same sort. I even tried the supernatural argument with a little Arab boy, otherwise a nice intelligent child, who was throwing stones at a lizard which was moving at the bottom of the deep Roman well at El Djem: I did not know then that the persecution of lizards in Moslem lands is supposed (I hope erroneously) to have been ordered by Mohammed “because the lizard mimics the attitude of the Faithful at prayer.”
The lizard, one of the most winsome of God’s creatures, has suffered generally from the prejudice which made reptile a word of reproach. It is the more worthy of remark, therefore, that in a place where one would hardly expect it, protective superstition has done its work of rescue: Sicilian children catch lizards, but let them go unhurt to intercede for them before the Lord, as the lizard is held to be “in the presence of the Lord in heaven.” One wonders if this is some distant echo of the text about the angels of the children (their archetypes) who always see God.
Not always were reptiles scorned, but, possibly, they were always feared. Man’s first idea is to worship what he fears; his second idea, which may not come for many thousand years, is to throw a stone at it. The stone, besides representing physical fear, at a given moment also represents religious reprobation of what had been an object of worship in a forsaken faith. Primitive man took the interest of a wondering child in the great Saurian tribe. How did he know that they flew, that there were “dragons” on the earth? How did he know that the snake once had legs?—for if the snake of Eden was ordered to go on its belly, the inference seems to be that he was thought once to have moved in another way. The snake has lost his legs and the lizard his wings, and how the ancient popular imagination of the world made such accurate guesses about them must be left a riddle, unless we admit that it was guided by the fossil remains of extinct monsters.
The serpent of the Biblical story was, says Dr. H. P. Smith, “simply a jinnee—a fairy if you will—possessed of more knowledge than the other animals, but otherwise like them.” Here, again, we meet in the most venerable form, the belief that animals know more than men. Can we resist the conclusion that to people constantly inclined towards magic like the old-world Jews, it must have appeared that Eve was dabbling in magic—by every rule of ancient religion, the sin of sins?
The cult of the serpent in its many branches is the greatest of animal cults, and it is the one in which we see most clearly the process by which man from being an impressionist became a symbolist, and from being a symbolist became a votary. We have only to read the Indian statistics of the number of persons annually killed by snake-bite to be persuaded that fear must have been the original feeling with which man regarded the snake. Fear is a religious feeling in primitive man, but other religious feelings were added to it—admiration, for the snake, as all who have had the good luck to observe it in its wild state must agree, is a beautiful, graceful, and insinuating creature; a sense of mystery, a sense of fascination which comes from those keen eyes fixed fearlessly upon yours, the simple secret, perhaps, of the much discussed power of snakes to fascinate their prey. What wonder if man under the influence of these combined impressions, symbolised in the serpent a divine force which could be made propitious by worship!
In the forming of cults there has always been this unconscious passage from impressions to symbols, from symbols to “manifestations.” But there has been also the conscious use of symbols by the priests and sages of ancient religions, in imparting as much of divine knowledge to the uninitiated as they thought that the uninitiated could bear. The origin of serpent worship has a probable relationship with this conscious use of symbols as well as with their unconscious growth.
Besides the prejudice against reptiles, modern popular superstition has placed several animals under a ban, and especially the harmless bat and the useful barn owl. Traditional reasons exist, no doubt, in every case; but stronger than these are the associations of such creatures with the dark in which the sane man of a certain temperament becomes a partial lunatic; a prey to unreal terrors which the flap of a bat’s wing or the screech of an owl is enough to work up to the point of frenzy. It is a most unfortunate thing for an animal if it be the innocent cause of a frisson, a feeling of uncanny dread. The little Italian owl, notwithstanding that it too comes out at dusk, has escaped prejudice. This was the owl of Pallas Athene and of an earlier cult. As in the case of the serpent, its wiles to fascinate its prey were the groundwork of its reputation for wisdom. Of this there cannot be, I think, any doubt, though the droll bobs and curtesies which excite an irresistible and fatal curiosity in small birds, have suggested in the mind of the modern man a thing so exceedingly far from wisdom as civetteria, which word is derived from civetta—“the owl of Minerva” as Italian class-books say. The descent from the goddess of wisdom to the coquette is the cruellest decadence of all!