Upon the sky above the hill-country of Orissa, Pidzu Pennu, the Rain-god of the Khonds, rests as he pours down the showers through his sieve.[[385]] Over Peru there stands a princess with a vase of rain, and when her brother strikes the pitcher, men hear the shock in thunder and see the flash in lightning.[[386]] To the old Greeks the rainbow seemed stretched down by Jove from heaven, a purple sign of war and tempest, or it was the personal Iris, messenger between gods and men.[[387]] To the South Sea Islander it was the heaven-ladder where heroes of old climbed up and down;[[388]] and so to the Scandinavian it was Bifröst, the trembling bridge, timbered of three hues and stretched from sky to earth; while in German folk-lore it is the bridge where the souls of the just are led by their guardian angels across to paradise.[[389]] As the Israelite called it the bow of Jehovah in the clouds, it is to the Hindu the bow of Rama,[[390]] and to the Finn the bow of Tiermes the Thunderer, who slays with it the sorcerers that hunt after men’s lives;[[391]] it is imagined, moreover, as a gold-embroidered scarf, a head-dress of feathers, St. Bernard’s crown, or the sickle of an Esthonian deity.[[392]] And yet through all such endless varieties of mythic conception, there runs one main principle, the evident suggestion and analogy of nature. It has been said of the savages of North America, that ‘there is always something actual and physical to ground an Indian fancy on.’[[393]] The saying goes too far, but within limits it is emphatically true, not of North American Indians alone, but of mankind.
Such resemblances as have just been displayed thrust themselves directly on the mind, without any necessary intervention of words. Deep as language lies in our mental life, the direct comparison of object with object, and action with action, lies yet deeper. The myth-maker’s mind shows forth even among the deaf-and-dumb, who work out just such analogies of nature in their wordless thought. Again and again they have been found to suppose themselves taught by their guardians to worship and pray to sun, moon, and stars, as personal creatures. Others have described their early thoughts of the heavenly bodies as analogous to things within their reach, one fancying the moon made like a dumpling and rolled over the tree-tops like a marble across a table, and the stars cut out with great scissors and stuck against the sky, while another supposed the moon a furnace and the stars fire-grates, which the people above the firmament light up as we kindle fires.[[394]] Now the mythology of mankind at large is full of conceptions of nature like these, and to assume for them no deeper original source than metaphorical phrases, would be to ignore one of the great transitions of our intellectual history.
Language, there is no doubt, has had a great share in the formation of myth. The mere fact of its individualizing in words such notions as winter and summer, cold and heat, war and peace, vice and virtue, gives the myth-maker the means of imagining these thoughts as personal beings. Language not only acts in thorough unison with the imagination whose product it expresses, but it goes on producing of itself, and thus, by the side of the mythic conceptions in which language has followed imagination, we have others in which language has led, and imagination has followed in the track. These two actions coincide too closely for their effects to be thoroughly separated, but they should be distinguished as far as possible. For myself, I am disposed to think (differing here in some measure from Professor Max Müller’s view of the subject) that the mythology of the lower races rests especially on a basis of real and sensible analogy, and that the great expansion of verbal metaphor into myth belongs to more advanced periods of civilization. In a word, I take material myth to be the primary, and verbal myth to be the secondary formation. But whether this opinion be historically sound or not, the difference in nature between myth founded on fact and myth founded on word is sufficiently manifest. The want of reality in verbal metaphor cannot be effectually hidden by the utmost stretch of imagination. In spite of this essential weakness, however, the habit of realizing everything that words can describe is one which has grown and flourished in the world. Descriptive names become personal, the notion of personality stretches to take in even the most abstract notions to which a name may be applied, and realized name, epithet, and metaphor pass into interminable mythic growths by the process which Max Müller has so aptly characterized as ‘a disease of language.’ It would be difficult indeed to define the exact thought lying at the root of every mythic conception, but in easy cases the course of formation can be quite well followed. North American tribes have personified Nipinūkhe and Pipūnūkhe, the beings who bring the spring (nipin) and the winter (pipūn); Nipinūkhe brings the heat and birds and verdure, Pipūnūkhe ravages with his cold winds, his ice and snow; one comes as the other goes, and between them they divide the world.[[395]] Just such personification as this furnishes the staple of endless nature-metaphor in our own European poetry. In the springtime it comes to be said that May has conquered Winter, his gate is open, he has sent letters before him to tell the fruit that he is coming, his tent is pitched, he brings the woods their summer clothing. Thus, when Night is personified, we see how it comes to pass that Day is her son, and how each in a heavenly chariot drives round the world. To minds in this mythologic stage, the Curse becomes a personal being, hovering in space till it can light upon its victim; Time and Nature arise as real entities; Fate and Fortune become personal arbiters of our lives. But at last, as the change of meaning goes on, thoughts that once had a more real sense fade into mere poetic forms of speech. We have but to compare the effect of ancient and modern personification on our own minds, to understand something of what has happened in the interval. Milton may be consistent, classical, majestic, when he tells how Sin and Death sat within the gates of hell, and how they built their bridge of length prodigious across the deep abyss to earth. Yet such descriptions leave but scant sense of meaning on modern minds, and we are apt to say, as we might of some counterfeit bronze from Naples, ‘For a sham antique how cleverly it is done.’ Entering into the mind of the old Norseman, we guess how much more of meaning than the cleverest modern imitation can carry, lay in his pictures of Hel, the death-goddess, stern and grim and livid, dwelling in her high and strong-barred house, and keeping in her nine worlds the souls of the departed; Hunger is her dish, Famine is her knife, Care is her bed, and Misery her curtain. When such old material descriptions are transferred to modern times, in spite of all the accuracy of reproduction their spirit is quite changed. The story of the monk who displayed among his relics the garments of St. Faith is to us only a jest; and we call it quaint humour when Charles Lamb, falling old and infirm, once wrote to a friend, ‘My bed-fellows are Cough and Cramp; we sleep three in a bed.’ Perhaps we need not appreciate the drollery any the less for seeing in it at once a consequence and a record of a past intellectual life.
The distinction of grammatical gender is a process intimately connected with the formation of myths. Grammatical gender is of two kinds. What may be called sexual gender is familiar to all classically-educated Englishmen, though their mother tongue has mostly lost its traces. Thus in Latin not only are such words as homo and femina classed naturally as masculine and feminine, but such words as pes and gladius are made masculine, and biga and navis feminine, and the same distinction is actually drawn between such abstractions as honos and fides. That sexless objects and ideas should thus be classed as male and female, in spite of a new gender—the neuter or ‘neither’ gender—having been defined, seems in part explained by considering this latter to have been of later formation, and the original Indo-European genders to have been only masculine and feminine, as is actually the case in Hebrew. Though the practice of attributing sex to objects that have none is not easy to explain in detail, yet there seems nothing mysterious in its principles, to judge from one at least of its main ideas, which is still quite intelligible. Language makes an admirably appropriate distinction between strong and weak, stern and gentle, rough and delicate, when it contrasts them as male and female. It is possible to understand even such fancies as those which Pietro della Valle describes among the mediæval Persians, distinguishing between male and female, that is to say, practically between robust and tender, even in such things as food and cloth, air and water, and prescribing their proper use accordingly.[[396]] And no phrase could be more plain and forcible than that of the Dayaks of Borneo, who say of a heavy downpour of rain, ‘ujatn arai, ‘sa!’—‘a he rain this!’[[397]] Difficult as it may be to decide how far objects and thoughts were classed in language as male and female because they were personified, and how far they were personified because they were classed as male and female, it is evident at any rate that these two processes fit together and promote each other.[[398]]
Moreover, in studying languages which lie beyond the range of common European scholarship, it is found that the theory of grammatical gender must be extended into a wider field. The Dravidian languages of South India make the interesting distinction between a ‘high-caste or major gender,’ which includes rational beings, i.e. deities and men, and a ‘caste-less or minor gender,’ which includes irrational objects, whether living animals or lifeless things.[[399]] The distinction between an animate and an inanimate gender appears with especial import in a family of North American Indian languages, the Algonquin. Here not only do all animals belong to the animate gender, but also the sun, moon, and stars, thunder and lightning, as being personified creatures. The animate gender, moreover, includes not only trees and fruits, but certain exceptional lifeless objects which appear to owe this distinction to their special sanctity or power; such are the stone which serves as the altar of sacrifice to the manitus, the bow, the eagle’s feather, the kettle, tobacco-pipe, drum, and wampum. Where the whole animal is animate, parts of its body considered separately may be inanimate—hand or foot, beak or wing. Yet even here, for special reasons, special objects are treated as of animate gender; such are the eagle’s talons, the bear’s claws, the beaver’s castor, the man’s nails, and other objects for which there is claimed a peculiar or mystic power.[[400]] If to anyone it seems surprising that savage thought should be steeped through and through in mythology, let him consider the meaning that is involved in a grammar of nature like this. Such a language is the very reflexion of a mythic world.
There is yet another way in which language and mythology can act and re-act on one another. Even we, with our blunted mythologic sense, cannot give an individual name to a lifeless object, such as a boat or a weapon, without in the very act imagining for it something of a personal nature. Among nations whose mythic conceptions have remained in full vigour, this action may be yet more vivid. Perhaps very low savages may not be apt to name their implements or their canoes as though they were live people, but races a few stages above them show the habit in perfection. Among the Zulus we hear of names for clubs, Igumgehle or Glutton, U-nothlola-mazibuko or He-who-watches-the-fords; among names for assagais are Imbubuzi or Groan-causer, U-silo-si-lambile or Hungry Leopard, and the weapon being also used as an implement, a certain assagai bears the peaceful name of U-simbela-banta-bami, He-digs-up-for-my-children.[[401]] A similar custom prevailed among the New Zealanders. The traditions of their ancestral migrations tell how Ngahue made from his jasper stone those two sharp axes whose names were Tutauru and Hauhau-te-rangi; how with these axes were shaped the canoes Arawa and Tainui; how the two stone anchors of Te Arawa were called Toka-parore or Wrystone, and Tu-te-rangi-haruru or Like-to-the-roaring-sky. These legends do not break off in a remote past, but carry on a chronicle which reaches into modern times. It is only lately, the Maoris say, that the famous axe Tutauru was lost, and as for the ear-ornament named Kaukau-matua, which was made from a chip of the same stone, they declare that it was not lost till 1846, when its owner, Te Heuheu, perished in a landslip.[[402]] Up from this savage level the same childlike habit of giving personal names to lifeless objects may be traced, as we read of Thor’s hammer, Miölnir, whom the giants know as he comes flying through the air, or of Arthur’s brand, Excalibur, caught by the arm clothed in white samite when Sir Bedivere flung him back into the lake, or of the Cid’s mighty sword Tizona, the Firebrand, whom he vowed to bury in his own breast were she overcome through cowardice of his.
The teachings of a childlike primæval philosophy ascribing personal life to nature at large, and the early tyranny of speech over the human mind, have thus been two great and, perhaps, greatest agents in mythologic development. Other causes, too, have been at work, which will be noticed in connexion with special legendary groups, and a full list, could it be drawn up, might include as contributories many other intellectual actions. It must be thoroughly understood, however, that such investigation of the processes of myth-formation demands a lively sense of the state of men’s minds in the mythologic period. When the Russians in Siberia listened to the talk of the rude Kirgis, they stood amazed at the barbarians’ ceaseless flow of poetic improvisation, and exclaimed, ‘Whatever these people see gives birth to fancies!’ Just so the civilized European may contrast his own stiff orderly prosaic thought with the wild shifting poetry and legend of the old myth-maker, and may say of him that everything he saw gave birth to fancy. Wanting the power of transporting himself into this imaginative atmosphere, the student occupied with the analysis of the mythic world may fail so pitiably in conceiving its depth and intensity of meaning, as to convert it into stupid fiction. Those can see more justly who have the poet’s gift of throwing their minds back into the world’s older life, like the actor who for a moment can forget himself and become what he pretends to be. Wordsworth, that ‘modern ancient,’ as Max Müller has so well called him, could write of Storm and Winter, or of the naked Sun climbing the sky, as though he were some Vedic poet at the head-spring of his race, ‘seeing’ with his mind’s eye a mythic hymn to Agni or Varuna. Fully to understand an old-world myth needs not evidence and argument alone, but deep poetic feeling.
Yet such of us as share but very little in this rare gift, may make shift to let evidence in some measure stand in its stead. In the poetic stage of thought we may see that ideal conceptions once shaped in the mind must have assumed some such reality to grown-up men and women as they still do to children. I have never forgotten the vividness with which, as a child, I fancied I might look through a great telescope, and see the constellations stand round the sky, red, green, and yellow, as I had just been shown them on the celestial globe. The intensity of mythic fancy may be brought even more nearly home to our minds by comparing it with the morbid subjectivity of illness. Among the lower races, and high above their level, morbid ecstasy brought on by meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease, is a state common and held in honour among the very classes specially concerned with mythic idealism, and under its influence the barriers between sensation and imagination break utterly away. A North American Indian prophetess once related the story of her first vision: At her solitary fast at womanhood she fell into an ecstasy, and at the call of the spirits she went up to heaven by the path that leads to the opening of the sky; there she heard a voice, and, standing still, saw the figure of a man standing near the path, whose head was surrounded by a brilliant halo, and his breast was covered with squares; he said, ‘Look at me, my name is Oshauwauegeeghick, the Bright Blue Sky!’ Recording her experience afterwards in the rude picture-writing of her race, she painted this glorious spirit with the hieroglyphic horns of power and the brilliant halo round his head.[[403]] We know enough of the Indian pictographs to guess how a fancy with these familiar details of the picture-language came into the poor excited creature’s mind; but how far is our cold analysis from her utter belief that in vision she had really seen this bright being, this Red Indian Zeus. Far from being an isolated case, this is scarcely more than a fair example of the rule that any idea shaped and made current by mythic fancy, may at once acquire all the definiteness of fact. Even if to the first shaper it be no more than lively imagination, yet when it comes to be embodied in words and to pass from house to house, those who hear it become capable of the most intense belief that it may be seen in material shape, that it has been seen, that they themselves have seen it. The South African who believes in a god with a crooked leg sees him with a crooked leg in dreams and visions.[[404]] In the time of Tacitus it was said, with a more poetic imagination, that in the far north of Scandinavia men might see the very forms of the gods and the rays streaming from their heads.[[405]] In the 6th century the famed Nile-god might still be seen, in gigantic human form, rising waist-high from the waters of his river.[[406]] Want of originality indeed seems one of the most remarkable features in the visions of mystics. The stiff Madonnas with their crowns and petticoats still transfer themselves from the pictures on cottage walls to appear in spiritual personality to peasant visionaries, as the saints who stood in vision before ecstatic monks of old were to be known by their conventional pictorial attributes. When the devil with horns, hoofs, and tail had once become a fixed image in the popular mind, of course men saw him in this conventional shape. So real had St. Anthony’s satyr-demon become to men’s opinion, that there is a grave 13th century account of the mummy of such a devil being exhibited at Alexandria; and it is not fifteen years back from the present time that there was a story current at Teignmouth of a devil walking up the walls of the houses, and leaving his fiendish backward footprints in the snow. Nor is it vision alone that is concerned with the delusive realization of the ideal; there is, as it were, a conspiracy of all the senses to give it proof. To take a striking instance: there is an irritating herpetic disease which gradually encircles the body as with a girdle, whence its English name of the shingles (Latin, cingulum). By an imagination not difficult to understand, this disease is attributed to a sort of coiling snake; and I remember a case in Cornwall where a girl’s family waited in great fear to see if the creature would stretch all round her, the belief being that if the snake’s head and tail met, the patient would die. But a yet fuller meaning of this fantastic notion is brought out in an account by Dr. Bastian of a physician who suffered in a painful disease, as though a snake were twined round him, and in whose mind this idea reached such reality that in moments of excessive pain he could see the snake and touch its rough scales with his hand.
The relation of morbid imagination to myth is peculiarly well instanced in the history of a widespread belief, extending through savage, barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediæval life, and surviving to this day in European superstition. This belief, which may be conveniently called the Doctrine of Werewolves, is that certain men, by natural gift or magic art, can turn for a time into ravening wild beasts. The origin of this idea is by no means sufficiently explained. What we are especially concerned with is the fact of its prevalence in the world. It may be noticed that such a notion is quite consistent with the animistic theory that a man’s soul may go out of his body and enter that of a beast or bird, and also with the opinion that men may be transformed into animals; both these ideas having an important place in the belief of mankind, from savagery onward. The doctrine of werewolves is substantially that of a temporary metempsychosis or metamorphosis. Now it really occurs that, in various forms of mental disease, patients prowl shyly, long to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves transformed into wild beasts. Belief in the possibility of such transformation may have been the very suggesting cause which led the patient to imagine it taking place in his own person. But at any rate such insane delusions do occur, and physicians apply to them the mythologic term of lycanthropy. The belief in men being werewolves, man-tigers, and the like, may thus have the strong support of the very witnesses who believe themselves to be such creatures. Moreover, professional sorcerers have taken up the idea, as they do any morbid delusion, and pretend to turn themselves and others into beasts by magic art. Through the mass of ethnographic details relating to this subject, there is manifest a remarkable uniformity of principle.
Among the non-Aryan indigenes of India, the tribes of the Garo Hills describe as ‘transformation into a tiger’ a kind of temporary madness, apparently of the nature of delirium tremens, in which the patient walks like a tiger, shunning society.[[407]] The Khonds of Orissa say that some among them have the art of ‘mleepa,’ and by the aid of a god become ‘mleepa’ tigers for the purpose of killing enemies, one of the man’s four souls going out to animate the bestial form. Natural tigers, say the Khonds, kill game to benefit men, who find it half devoured and share it, whereas man-killing tigers are either incarnations of the wrathful Earth-goddess, or they are transformed men.[[408]] Thus the notion of man-tigers serves, as similar notions do elsewhere, to account for the fact that certain individual wild beasts show a peculiar hostility to man. Among the Ho of Singbhoom it is related, as an example of similar belief, that a man named Mora saw his wife killed by a tiger, and followed the beast till it led him to the house of a man named Poosa. Telling Poosa’s relatives of what had occurred, they replied that they were aware that he had the power of becoming a tiger, and accordingly they brought him out bound, and Mora deliberately killed him. Inquisition being made by the authorities, the family deposed, in explanation of their belief, that Poosa had one night devoured an entire goat, roaring like a tiger whilst eating it, and that on another occasion he told his friends he had a longing to eat a particular bullock, and that very night that very bullock was killed and devoured by a tiger.[[409]] South-eastern Asia is not less familiar with the idea of sorcerers turning into man-tigers and wandering after prey; thus the Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula believe that when a man becomes a tiger to revenge himself on his enemies, the transformation happens just before he springs, and has been seen to take place.[[410]]