6. The Lower Animals.—The primitive mind did not recognise any deep distinction between the lower animals and man. The savage knew that the beast was his superior in many points, in craft and strength, in fleetness and intuition, and he regarded it with respect. To him, the brute had a soul not inferior to his own, and a language which the wise among men might on occasion learn. The strange powers and mysterious faculties they often possess were to him inexplicable by any other doctrine than that they were divine; therefore, with wide unanimity, he placed certain species of animals nearer to God than is man himself, or even identified them with the manifestations of the Highest.
None was in this respect a greater favourite than the bird. Its soaring flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues of its plumage, combined to render it a fit emblem of power and beauty.
The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to Singalang Burong, the god of birds; and birds as the ancestors of the totemic family are extremely common among the American Indians. The Eskimos say that they have the faculty of soul or life beyond all other creatures, and in most primitive tribes they have been regarded as the messengers of the divine and the special purveyors of the vital principle.
According to the myths of the Polynesians, the gods in the old times used to speak to man through the carols of the feathered songsters; and everywhere, to be able to understand the language of birds was equivalent to being able to converse with the gods.
The chief god of the Murray River Australians was Nourali. He was immortal, self-created, and the creator of all. The form under which they conceived him was that of a bird, a crow or eagle. Among nearly all the tribes of the North-west Coast and the adjacent interior of British America, the creation of the world is attributed to a raven, Yetl, who is personated in the dark thunder-cloud.
South of them, in the wide-spread Algonquin stock, this “thunder-bird” is a conspicuous figure in art and myth; and we could pursue our way quite to the extreme south of the continent, and everywhere among the aboriginal tribes we should discover similar sacred associations connected with the birds.
They are universal in religions, and those which we meet in Christian art, the eagle, the dove, etc., carry with them significations allied to those they bear in earlier and primitive symbolism.[195]
Closely connected with these ideas was the reverence of the egg as the symbol of the origin of life. Plutarch tells us that in the Bacchic mysteries the egg represented matter in its germinal condition, that is, the potentiality of life; and this meaning we have retained with the symbol in our customs relating to Easter eggs on the morning of the Resurrection.
The derivation from the observation of the bird brooding on its nest is obvious, and no wonder therefore that the symbol with allied myths and rites extends through all religions.
In the creation legend of the Yaros, a Dravida tribe of Northern India, the goddess Nustoo, who created the world, came into life from a self-evolved egg, and dwelt on the petals of a water-lily until she had formed and moulded the land for her abode. The Dyaks of Borneo relate that after the Supreme Being had created the world, the god Ranying descended to the new earth and formed there seven eggs, which contained the germs of man and woman, all animals and plants.[196]