Anthropology

by Edward B. Tylor

By the aid of such contemporary writings, historians are now able to check the recorded lists of ancient kings, and to piece together something like a continuous line of dynasties in Egypt and Babylonia since the foundation of the great cities Memphis and Ur. We may notice where the records and traditions of the Israelites, written down in later ages in the historical books of the Old Testament, come in contact with ancient history from the monuments. Israelite tradition records (Gen. xi., xii.) that their ancestors had been in the Chaldæan district of Ur, and in Egypt, which is evidence of their intercourse with the two great nations of the ancient world. The mention in Exodus (i. 11) of the Israelites being set to build for Pharaoh a city called Rameses, points to their oppression in Egypt having been under the Great Rameses II. of the XIX. dynasty, apparently about 1400 B.C., which makes a point of contact between Egyptian and Hebrew chronology. In the books of Kings there come into view later persons and events, well known in the contemporary records of other countries, as in the mention of Shishak, king of Egypt, who fought against Rehoboam and plundered the temple (1 K. xiv. 25). It seems likely, when Herodotus (ii. 141) describes the army of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, being put to flight from the mice gnawing the soldiers’ bows, that this is a version of the great disaster of Sennacherib, of which the Bible gives a different account (2 K. xix.).

With Herodotus the student comes in view of the Old World as it was known to a Greek traveller and geographer of the 5th century B.C. The Father of History, as he has been called, wrote not as a chronicler of his own nation, but with the larger view of an anthropologist to whom all knowledge of mankind was interesting. The way in which modern discoveries have come in to confirm his statements, justifies us in relying on ancient historians when, like him, they are careful to distinguish mere legend or hearsay from what they have themselves enquired into. Thus Herodotus tells the strange story of the impostor who passed himself off as Smerdis, and sat on the throne of Persia till he was detected by his cropped ears, and Darius slew him. When, a few years ago, the cuneiform characters of the inscription sculptured in a high wall of rock near Behistan in Persia were deciphered, it proved to be the very record set up by Darius the king in the three languages of the land, and it matches the account given by Herodotus closely enough to show what a real grasp he had of the course of events in Persia a century before his time. Yet more remarkable is the test which can be put to what Herodotus says he learnt from the priests in Egypt about their kings who reigned 2000 years before. From their dictation he wrote down the names of the pyramid-kings Cheops, Chephren, Mykerinos. In later ages critics had sometimes come to doubt whether these kings belonged to fact or fable, but when the lost meaning of the Egyptian hieroglyphics was anew interpreted by modern scholars, there stood the names recognisable as the Greek historian heard them. The best ancient history is apt to receive such confirmation from long-lost monuments. Thucydides relates (vi. 54) that Peisistratos (the younger) dedicated two altars, from one of which the Athenians erased the inscription, but the other (the historian says) may still be read, though in faint letters: “this monument of his archonship Peisistratos son of Hippias set up in the enclosure of Pythian Apollo.” Professor Newton reports that this very stone with its inscription is declared to have been found in 1878 in a courtyard near the Ilissos. How lively a sense of reality such monuments give to history may be understood by the student who, fresh from his books, goes to the British Museum and sees among the ancient coins the grand head of Alexander the Great with the ram’s horns, commemorating that curious episode of his life when he was declared to be son of Zeus Ammon; or who notices with surprise the gold coins that prove Cymbeline, now best known in Shakspere, to have been a real British king who coined money with his name.

Having thus looked at the sources of early history as belonging to the study of mankind, we need not go over the well-trodden ground of later history. It remains to notice myth, the stumbling-block which historians have so often fallen over. Myth is not to be looked on as mere error and folly, but as an interesting product of the human mind. It is sham history, the fictitious narrative of events that never happened. Historians, especially in writing of early ages, have copied down the traditions of real events so mixed up with myths, that it is one of the hardest tasks of the student to judge what to believe and what to reject. He is fortunate when he can apply the test of possibility, and declare an event did not happen because he knows enough of the course of nature to be sure it could not. For instance, cultured nations have learnt from science that what appears to be a blue dome or firmament above our heads, the sky or heaven, is not really the solid vault the ancients thought it was, but only thin air and watery vapour. The consequence of knowing this is that people have had to strike out of their history the old myths of gods dwelling in palaces and holding courts in the skies, of men climbing or flying up from earth into heaven, of giants heaping mountain Ossa on Pelion, to scale the cloudy heights and wage battle with the gods above. Besides this way of detecting myth by its relating what could not have taken place, there are other means of judging it. It is often possible to satisfy oneself that some story is not really history, by knowing the causes which led to its being invented.

We know how strong our own desire is to account for everything. This desire is as strong among barbarians, and accordingly they devise such explanations as satisfy their minds. But they are apt to go a stage further, and their explanations turn into the form of stories with names of places and persons, thus becoming full-made myths. Educated men do not now consider it honest to make fictitious history in this way, but people of untrained mind, in what is called the myth-making stage, which has lasted on from the savage period and has not quite disappeared among ourselves, have no such scruples about converting their guesses at what may have happened, into the most lifelike stories of what they say did happen. Thus, when comparative anatomy was hardly known, the finding of huge fossil bones in the ground led people to think they were the remains of huge beasts, and enormous men, or giants, who formerly lived on the earth. Modern science decides that they were right as to the beasts, which were ancient species of elephant, rhinoceros, &c., but wrong as to the giants, none of the great bones really belonging to any creature like man. But while the belief lasted that they were bones of giants, men’s imagination worked in making stories about these giants and their terrific doings, stories which are told still in all quarters of the globe as though they were traditions of real events. Thus the Sioux of the western prairies of North America say their land was once inhabited by great animals, bits of whose bones they still keep for magic, and also, they tell of the giant Ha-o-kah, who could stride over the largest rivers and the tallest pines, and to whom they sing and dance at their festivals. It appears that fossil bones, very likely of the mastodon, had to do with this native belief in old monstrous beasts, nor need we be surprised at the giants coming into the story, considering that so lately as the last century Dr. Cotton Mather, the Puritan divine, sent to our Royal Society an account of the discovery of such bones in New England, which he argued were remains of antediluvian giants.

Another thing which in all parts of the world has set the imagination of myth-makers to work, is the fact that people live in tribes or nations, each known by a particular name, such as Ojibwa, Afghan, Frank. The easiest and favourite way of accounting for this is to suppose each tribe or nation to have had an ancestor or chief of the like name, so that his descendants or followers inherited their tribe-name from him. It really happens so sometimes, but in most cases a pretended tradition of such an eponymic or name-ancestor arises from the makers of genealogies first inventing him out of the name of the tribe, and then treating him as a historical personage. They may now and then be caught in the act of doing this. Thus among the native race of Brazil and Paraguay, some tribes are called Tupi and others Guarani, so to account for this division, a tradition is related that two brothers named Tupi and Guarani came over the sea to Brazil, and with their children peopled the country, but a talking parrot made strife between the wives of the two brothers, and this grew into a quarrel and separation, Tupi staying in the land, and Guarani going off with his family into the region of La Plata. Now there happens to be a means of checking this story, for Martius says that the name guarani (meaning warrior) was first given by the Jesuits to the southern Indians whom they collected in their missions, so that the tale of the two ancestor-brothers must be a myth of modern manufacture. Such eponymic myths of national ancestors were not only made in ancient times, but are mixed up in the chronicles of Old World nations as though they were real history. The classical student knows the legends of the twin brothers Danaos and Aigyptos, ancestors of the Danaoi (Greeks) and Ægyptians; and of Hellēn, father of the Hellēnes, whose three sons Aiōlos, Dōros, Xouthos, were fathers of the Æolians, Dorians, &c.

Having looked at these two frequent kinds of myths derived from fossil bones and national names, it is worth while to notice how both come together in our own country. The History of the Britons, compiled in the 12th century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, relates that our island was in old time called Albion, and was only inhabited by a few giants; but Brutus, a banished Trojan prince, landed with his followers and called the land Britain, after his own name, and his companions Britons. With him came a leader called Gorineus, and he called the part of the country which fell to him Corinea and his people Corineans, that is, Cornish. In that part the giants were most numerous, and one especially, named Goemagot (elsewhere called Gogmagog) was twelve cubits high, and could pull up an oak like a hazel wand. On a certain day, when there had been a battle and the Britons had overcome a party of giants and slain all except this hugest monster, he and Corineus had a wrestling-match, when Corineus caught the giant up in his arms, and running with him to the top of the cliff now called the Hoe at Plymouth, cast him over, wherefore (says the chronicler) the place is called “Goemagot’s leap” to this day. Quaint as this legend is, it is not hard to find the sense of it. It was the fashion to trace the origin of nations from Troy; Brutus and Corineus were invented to account for the names of Britain and Cornwall; Goemagot or Gogmagog is the Biblical Gog and Magog rolled into one, these personages being recognised in tradition as giants. But why the story of his having been thrown over the Hoe at Plymouth? The answer seems to be that this is a place where the bones of fossil animals are actually dug up, such as were looked upon as remains of giants. Even in modern times, when excavations were being made on the Hoe for the fortifications, huge jaws and teeth were found, which were at once settled by public opinion to be the remains of Gogmagog.

These are examples of the myths easiest for modern civilised minds to enter into, for they are little more than inferences or guesses as to what may have actually happened, worked up with picturesque details which give them an air of reality. But to understand another kind of myths we must get our minds into a mood which is not that of scientific reasoning in the class-room, but of telling nursery tales in the twilight, or reading poetry in the woods on a summer afternoon. Former chapters have shown how, in old times and among uncultured people, notions of the kind which still remain among us as poetic fancy were seriously believed. When to the rude philosopher the action of the world around him was best explained by supposing in it nature-life like human life, and divine nature-souls like human souls, then the sun seemed a personal lord climbing proudly up the sky, and descending dim and weary into the under-world at night; the stormy sea was a fearful god ready to swallow up the rash sailor; the beasts of the forest were half-human in thought and speech; even the forest-trees were the bodily habitations of spirits, and the woodman, to whom the rustling of their leaves seemed voices, and their waving branches beckoning arms, hewed at their trunks with a half-guilty sense of doing murder. The world then seemed to be “such stuff as dreams are made on;” transformation of body and transmigration of spirit were ever going on; a man or god might turn into a beast, a river, or a tree; rocks might be people transformed into stones, and sticks transformed snakes. Such a state of thought is fast disappearing, but there are still tribes living in it, and they show what the men’s minds are like who make nature-myths. When a story-teller lives in this dreamland, any poetic fancy becomes a hint for a wonder-tale, and though (one would think) he must be aware that he is romancing, and that the adventures he relates are not quite history, yet when he is dead, and his story has been repeated by bards and priests for a few generations, then it would be disrespectful, or even sacrilegious, to question its truth. This has happened all over the world, and the Greek myths of the great nature-gods which Xenophanes and Anaxagoras ventured to disbelieve with such ill consequences to themselves, were of much the same fabric as those of modern barbarians like the South Sea Islanders. Let us look at a few nature-myths, choosing such as most transparently show how they came to be made.

The Tahitians tell tales of their sea-god Hiro, whose followers were sailing on the ocean while he was lulled to sleep in a cavern in the depths below; then the wind-god raised a furious storm to destroy the canoe, but the sailors cried to Hiro, till, rising to the surface, he quelled the storm, and his votaries came safe to port. So in Homer, Poseidōn the sea-god, dweller in caves of ocean, sets on the winds to toss the frail bark of Odysseus among the thundering waves, till Ino comes to his rescue and bids him strip and swim for the Phaiakian shore. Both tales are word-pictures of the stormy sea told in the language of nature-myth, only with different turns. The New Zealanders have a story of Maui imprisoning the winds, all but the wild west-wind, whom he cannot catch to shut into its cavern by a great stone rolled against its mouth; all he can do is to chase it home sometimes, and then it hides in the cavern, and for a while dies away. All this is a mythic description of the weather, meaning that other winds are occasional, but the west wind prevalent and strong. These New Zealanders had never heard of the classic myth of Æolus and the cave of the winds, yet how nearly they had come to the same mythic fancy, that it is from such blow-holes in the hill-sides that the winds come forth. The negroes of the West Indies tell a tale of the great quarrel between Fire and Water, how the Fire came on slowly, stopped by the stream, till he called the Wind to his aid, who carried him across everything, and the great fight came off, the Bon Dieu looking on from behind a curtain of clouds. It is not likely that these negro slaves had ever heard of the twenty-first Iliad, to know how the same world-old contest of the elements is told in the great battle between the Fire-god and the Rivers, when the Winds were sent to help, and carried the fierce flames onward, and the eels and fish scuttled hither and thither as the hot breath of the blast came upon them.

The beams of light darting down from the sun through openings in the clouds seem to have struck people’s fancy in Europe as being like the rope over the pulley of an old-fashioned draw-well, for this appearance is called in popular phrase, “the sun drawing water.” The Polynesians also see the resemblance of the rays to cords, which they say are the ropes the sun is fastened by, and they tell a myth how the sun once used to go faster, till a god set a noose at the horizon and caught him as he rose, so that he now travels bound and slowly along his daily appointed path. In English such an expression as that the sun is “swallowed up by night” is now a mere metaphor, but the idea is one which in ancient and barbaric times people took more seriously. The Maoris have made out of it the story of the death of their divine hero Maui. You may see, they say, Maui’s ancestress, Great-Woman-Night, flashing and as it were opening and shutting out on the horizon where sea and sky come together; Maui crept into her body and would have got through unharmed, but just at that moment the little flycatcher, the tiwakawaka, broke out with its merry note and awoke the Night, and she crushed Maui. That this is really a nature-myth of the setting sun dying as he plunges into the darkness, is proved by the mention of the bird, which has the peculiarity of singing at sunset. Of all the nature-myths of the world, few are so widely spread as those on this theme of night and day, where with mythic truth the devoured victims were afterwards disgorged or set free. The Zulu story-tellers describe the maw of the monster as a country where there are hills and houses and cattle and people living, and when the monster is cut open, all the creatures come out from the darkness; with a neat touch of nature which shows that the story-teller is thinking of the dawn, the cock comes out first, crying, “kukuluku! I see the world!” Our English version of the old myth is the nursery tale of Little Red Ridinghood, but it is spoilt by leaving out the proper end (which German nurses have kept up with better memory), that when the hunter ripped up the sleeping wolf, out came the little damsel in her red satin cloak, safe and sound.

Such stories are fanciful, but the fancy of the myth-maker can take yet further flights. The mythic persons as yet described have been visible objects like the sun, or at least what can be perceived by the senses and made real objects of, such as wind, or day. But when the poet is in the vein of myth-making, whatever he can express by a noun and put a verb to, becomes capable of being treated as a person. If he can say, summer comes, sleep falls on men, hope rises, justice demands, then he can set up summer and sleep, hope and justice, in human figures, dress them, and make them walk and talk. Thus the formation of myth is helped by what Professor Max Müller has called a “disease of language.” This, however, is not the whole matter. We saw in the last chapter how the notion of soul or spirit helped men on to the notion of cause. When the cause of anything presents itself to the ancient mind as a kind of soul or spirit, then the cause or spirit of summer, sleep, hope, justice, comes easily to look like a person. No one can really understand old poetry without knowing this. Homer could fancy on the field of battle the awful Kēr, whose figure was shown on the shield of Achilles with blood-stained garment flung over her shoulders, as she seized some warrior wounded to the death, or dragged a corpse by the feet out of the fighting throng. This being is not merely a word turned into a reality, she is a personal cause, a spirit-reason, why one warrior is slain and not another. So far is the idea of her spread in Aryan mythology, that it appears again among the Northmen, when Odin sends to every battle the maidens who in Walhalla serve the feast and fill the bowls with ale for the spirits of the heroes; these maidens are the Valkyriur, who guide the event of victory, and choose the warriors who shall fall. Another well-known mythic group shows again how what to us moderns are but ideas expressed in words, took personal form in the minds of the ancients. In the classic books of Greece and Rome we read of the three fate-spinners, the Moirai or Parcæ, and their Scandinavian counterparts appear in the Edda as the three wise women whose dwelling is near the spring under the world-ash Ygdrasill, the Norns who fix the lives of men. The explanation of these three mythic beings is that they are in personal shape the Past, Present, and Future, as is shown by the names they bear, Was, Is, Shall (Urdhr, Verdhandi, Skuld).