Do grow beneath their shoulders.’
If, however, we look in dictionaries for the Acephali, we may find not actual headless monsters, but heretics so called because their original head or founder was not known; and when the kingless Turkoman hordes say of themselves ‘We are a people without a head,’ the metaphor is even more plain and natural.[[556]] Moslem legend tells of the Shikk and the Nesnas, creatures like one half of a split man, with one arm, leg, and eye. Possibly it was thence that the Zulus got their idea of a tribe of half-men, who in one of their stories found a Zulu maiden in a cave and thought she was two people, but on closer inspection of her admitted, ‘The thing is pretty! But oh the two legs!’ These realistic fancies coincide with the simple metaphor which describes a savage as only ‘half a man,’ semihomo, as Virgil calls the ferocious Cacus.[[557]] Again, when the Chinese compared themselves to the outer barbarians, they said ‘We see with two eyes, the Latins with one, and all other nations are blind.’ Such metaphors, proverbial among ourselves, verbally correspond with legends of one-eyed tribes, such as the savage cave-dwelling Kyklopes.[[558]] Verbal coincidence of this kind, untrustworthy enough in these latter instances, passes at last into the vaguest fancy. The negroes called Europeans ‘long-headed,’ using the phrase in our familiar metaphorical sense; but translate it into Greek, and at once Hesiod’s Makrokephaloi come into being.[[559]] And, to conclude the list, one of the commonest of the monster-tribes of the Old and New World is that distinguished by having feet turned backward. Now there is really a people whose name, memorable in scientific controversy, describes them as ‘having feet the opposite way,’ and they still retain that ancient name of Antipodes.[[560]]
Returning from this digression to the region of philosophic myth, we may examine new groups of explanatory stories, produced from that craving to know causes and reasons which ever besets mankind. When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it, and even if he does not persuade himself that this is a real legend of his forefathers, the story-teller who hears it from him and repeats it is troubled with no such difficulty. Our task in dealing with such stories is made easy when the criterion of possibility can be brought to bear upon them. It has become a mere certainty to moderns that asbestos is not really salamander’s wool; that morbid hunger is not really caused by a lizard or a bird in a man’s stomach; that a Chinese philosopher cannot really have invented the fire-drill by seeing a bird peck at the branches of a tree till sparks came. The African Wakuafi account for their cattle-lifting proclivities by the calm assertion that Engai, that is, Heaven, gave all cattle to them, and so wherever there is any it is their call to go and seize it.[[561]] So in South America the fierce Mbayas declare they received from the Caracara a divine command to make war on all other tribes, killing the men and adopting the women and children.[[562]] But though it may be consistent with the notions of these savages to relate such explanatory legends, it is not consistent with our notions to believe them. Fortunately, too, the ex post facto legends are apt to come into collision with more authentic sources of information, or to encroach on the domain of valid history. It is of no use for the Chinese to tell their stupid story of written characters having been invented from the markings on a tortoise’s shell, for the early forms of such characters, plain and simple pictures of objects, have been preserved in China to this day. Nor can we praise anything but ingenuity in the West Highland legend that the Pope once laid an interdict on the land, but forgot to curse the hills, so the people tilled them, this story being told to account for those ancient traces of tillage still to be seen on the wild hill-sides, the so-called ‘elf-furrows.’[[563]] The most embarrassing cases of explanatory tradition are those which are neither impossible enough to condemn, nor probable enough to receive. Ethnographers who know how world-wide is the practice of defacing the teeth among the lower races, and how it only dies gradually out in higher civilization, naturally ascribe the habit to some general reason in human nature, at a particular stage of development. But the mutilating tribes themselves have local legends to account for local customs; thus the Penongs of Burmah and the Batoka of East Africa both break their front teeth, but the one tribe says its reason is not to look like apes, the other that it is to be like oxen and not like zebras.[[564]] Of the legends of tattooing, one of the oldest is that told to account for the fact that while the Fijians tattoo only the women, their neighbours, the Tongans, tattoo only the men. It is related that a Tongan, on his way from Fiji to report to his countrymen the proper custom for them to observe, went on his way repeating the rule he had carefully learnt by heart, ‘Tattoo the women, but not the men,’ but unluckily he tripped over a stump, got his lesson wrong, and reached Tonga repeating ‘Tattoo the men, but not the women,’ an ordinance which they observed ever after. How reasonable such an explanation seemed to the Polynesian mind, may be judged from the Samoans having a version with different details, and applied to their own instead of the Tongan islands.[[565]]
All men feel how wanting in sense of reality is a story with no personal name to hang it to. This want is thus graphically expressed by Sprenger the historian in his life of Mohammed: ‘It makes, on me at least, quite a different impression when it is related that “the Prophet said to Alkama,” even if I knew nothing whatever else of this Alkama, than if it were merely stated that “he said to somebody.”’ The feeling which this acute and learned critic thus candidly confesses, has from the earliest times, and in the minds of men troubled with no such nice historic conscience, germinated to the production of much mythic fruit. Thus it has come to pass that one of the leading personages to be met with in the tradition of the world is really no more than—Somebody. There is nothing this wondrous creature cannot achieve, no shape he cannot put on; one only restriction binds him at all, that the name he assumes shall have some sort of congruity with the office he undertakes, and even from this he oftentimes breaks loose. So rife in our own day is this manufacture of personal history, often fitted up with details of place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle, that it may be guessed how vast its working must have been in days of old. Thus the ruins of ancient buildings, of whose real history and use no trustworthy tradition survives in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth with a builder and a purpose. In Mexico the great Somebody assumes the name of Montezuma, and builds the aqueduct of Tezcuco; to the Persian any huge and antique ruin is the work of the heroic Antar; in Russia, says Dr. Bastian, buildings of the most various ages are set down to Peter the Great, as in Spain to Boabdil or Charles V.; and European folklore may attribute to the Devil any old building of unusual massiveness, and especially those stone structures which antiquaries now class as præ-historic monuments. With a more graceful thought, the Indians of North America declare that the imitative tumuli of Ohio, great mounds laid out in rude imitation of animals, were shaped in old days by the great Manitu himself, in promise of a plentiful supply of game in the world of spirits. The New Zealanders tell how the hero Kupe separated the North and South Islands, and formed Cook’s Straits. Greek myth placed at the gate of the Mediterranean the twin pillars of Herakles; in more recent times the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar became one of the many feats of Alexander of Macedon.[[566]] Such a group of stories as this is no unfair test of the value of mere traditions of personal names which simply answer the questions that mankind have been asking for ages about the origin of their rites, laws, customs, arts. Some such traditions are of course genuine, and we may be able, especially in the more modern cases, to separate the real from the imaginary. But it must be distinctly laid down that, in the absence of corroborative evidence, every tradition stands suspect of mythology, if it can be made by the simple device of fitting some personal name to the purely theoretical assertion that somebody must have introduced into the world fire-making, or weapons, or ornaments, or games, or agriculture, or marriage, or any other of the elements of civilization.
Among the various matters which have excited curiosity, and led to its satisfaction by explanatory myths, are local names. These, when the popular ear has lost their primitive significance, become in barbaric times an apt subject for the myth-maker to explain in his peculiar fashion. Thus the Tibetans declare that their lake Chomoriri was named from a woman (chomo) who was carried into it by the yak she was riding, and cried in terror ri-ri! The Arabs say the founders of the city of Sennaar saw on the river bank a beautiful woman with teeth glittering like fire, whence they called the place Sinnâr, i.e., ‘tooth of fire.’ The Arkadians derived the name of their town Trapezus from the table (trapeza), which Zeus overturned when the wolfish Lykaon served a child on it for a banquet to him.[[567]] Such crude fancies in no way differ in nature from English local legends current up to recent times, such as that which relates how the Romans, coming in sight of where Exeter now stands, exclaimed in delight, ‘Ecce terra!’ and thus the city had its name. Not long ago, a curious enquirer wished to know from the inhabitants of Fordingbridge, or as the country people call it, Fardenbridge, what the origin of this name might be, and heard in reply that the bridge was thought to have been built when wages were so cheap that masons worked for a ‘farden’ a day. The Falmouth folks’ story of Squire Pendarvis and his ale is well known, how his servant excused herself for selling it to the sailors, because, as she said, ‘The penny come so quick,’ whence the place came to be called Pennycomequick; this nonsense being invented to account for an ancient Cornish name, probably Penycumgwic, ‘head of the creek valley.’ Mythic fancy had fallen to a low estate when it dwindled to such remnants as this.
That personal names may pass into nouns, we, who talk of broughams and bluchers, cannot deny. But any such etymology ought to have contemporary document or some equally forcible proof in its favour, for this is a form of explanation taken by the most flagrant myths. David the painter, it is related, had a promising pupil named Chicque, the son of a fruiterer; the lad died at eighteen, but his master continued to hold him up to later students as a model of artistic cleverness, and hence arose the now familiar term of chic. Etymologists, a race not wanting in effrontery, have hardly ever surpassed this circumstantial canard; the word chic dates at anyrate from the seventeenth century.[[568]] Another word with which similar liberty has been taken, is cant. Steele, in the ‘Spectator,’ says that some people derive it from the name of one Andrew Cant, a Scotch minister, who had the gift of preaching in such a dialect that he was understood by none but his own congregation, and not by all of them. This is, perhaps, not a very accurate delineation of the real Andrew Cant, who is mentioned in ‘Whitelock’s Memorials,’ and seems to have known how to speak out in very plain terms indeed. But at any rate he flourished about 1650, whereas the verb to cant was then already an old word. To cante, meaning to speak, is mentioned in Harman’s ‘List of Rogues’ Words,’ in 1566, and in 1587 Harrison says of the beggars and gypsies that they have devised a language among themselves, which they name canting, but others ‘Pedlars’ Frenche.’[[569]] Of all etymologies ascribed to personal names, one of the most curious is that of the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, so well known from Holbein’s pictures. Its supposed author is thus mentioned in the ‘Biographie Universelle:’ ‘Macaber, poëte allemand, serait tout-à-fait inconnu sans l’ouvrage qu’on a sous son nom.’ This, it may be added, is true enough, for there never was such a person at all, the Danse Macabre being really Chorea Machabæorum, the Dance of the Maccabees, a kind of pious pantomime of death performed in churches in the fifteenth century. Why the performance received this name, is that the rite of Mass for the dead is distinguished by the reading of that passage from the twelfth chapter of Book II. of the Maccabees, which relates how the people betook themselves to prayer, and besought the Lord that the sin of those who had been slain among them might be wholly blotted out; for if Judas had not expected that the slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.[[570]] Traced to its origin, it is thus seen that the Danse Macabre is neither more nor less than the Dance of the Dead.
It is not an unusual thing for tribes and nations to be known by the name of their chief, as in books of African travel we read of ‘Eyo’s people,’ or ‘Kamrazi’s people.’ Such terms may become permanent, like the name of the Osmanli Turks taken from the great Othman, or Osman. The notions of kinship and chieftainship may easily be combined, as where some individual Brian or Alpine may have given his name to a clan of O’Briens or Mac Alpines. How far the tribal names of the lower races may have been derived from individual names of chiefs or forefathers, is a question on which distinct evidence is difficult to obtain. In Patagonia bands or subdivisions of tribes are designated by the names of temporary chiefs, every roving party having such a leader, who is sometimes even styled ‘yank,’ i.e. ‘father.’[[571]] The Zulus and Maoris were races who paid great attention to the traditional genealogies of their clan-ancestors, who were, indeed, not only their kinsfolk but their gods; and they distinctly recognize the possibility of tribes being named from a deceased ancestor or chief. The Kafir tribe of Ama-Xosa derives its name from a chief, U-Xosa;[[572]] and the Maori tribes of Ngate-Wakaue and Nga-Puhi claim descent from chiefs called Wakaue and Puhi.[[573]] Around this nucleus of actuality, however, there gathers an enormous mass of fiction simulating its effects. The myth-maker, curious to know how many people or country gained its name, had only to conclude that it came from a great ancestor or ruler, and then the simple process of turning a national or local title into a personal name at once added a new genealogy to historical tradition. In some cases, the name of the imagined ancestor is invented in such form that the local or gentile name may stand as grammatically derived from it, as usually happens in real cases, like the derivation of Cæsarea from Cæsar, or of the Benedictines from Benedict. But in the fictitious genealogy or history of the myth-maker, the mere unaltered name of the nation, tribe, country, or city often becomes without more ado the name of the eponymic hero. It has to be remembered, moreover, that countries and nations can be personified by an imaginative process which has not quite lost its sense in modern speech. France is talked of by politicians as an individual being, with particular opinions and habits, and may even be embodied as a statue or picture with suitable attributes. And if one were to say that Britannia has two daughters, Canada and Australia, or that she has gone to keep house for a decrepit old aunt called India, this would be admitted as plain fact expressed in fantastic language. The invention of ancestries from eponymic heroes or name-ancestors has, however, often had a serious effect in corrupting historic truth, by helping to fill ancient annals with swarms of fictitious genealogies. Yet, when surveyed in a large view, the nature of the eponymic fictions is patent and indisputable, and so regular are their forms, that we could scarcely choose more telling examples of the consistent processes of imagination, as shown in the development of myths.
The great number of the eponymic ancestors of ancient Greek tribes and nations makes it easy to test them by comparison, and the test is a destructive one. Treat the heroic genealogies they belong to as traditions founded on real history, and they prove hopelessly independent and incompatible; but consider them as mostly local and tribal myths and such independence and incompatibility become their proper features. Mr. Grote, whose tendency is to treat all myths as fictions not only unexplained but unexplainable, here makes an exception, tracing the eponymic ancestors from whom Greek cities and tribes derived their legendary parentage to mere embodied local and gentile names. Thus, of the fifty sons of Lykaôn, a whole large group consists of personified cities of Arkadia, such as Mantinêus, Phigalos, Tegeatês, who, according to the simply inverting legend, are called founders of Mantinêa, Phigalia, Tegea. The father of King Æakos was Zeus, his mother his own personified land, Ægina; the city of Mykênai had not only an ancestress Mykênê, but an eponymic ancestor as well, Mykêneus. Long afterwards, mediæval Europe, stimulated by the splendid genealogies through which Rome had attached herself to Greece and the Greek gods and heroes, discovered the secret of rivalling them in the chronicles of Geoffry of Monmouth and others, by claiming as founders of Paris and Tours the Trojans Paris and Turnus, and connecting France and Britain with the Trojan war through Francus, son of Hector, and Brutus, great grandson of Æneas. A remarkably perfect eponymic historical myth accounting for the Gypsies or Egyptians, may be found cited seriously in ‘Blackstone’s Commentaries:’ when Sultan Selim conquered Egypt in 1517, several of the natives refused to submit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under one Zinganeus, whence the Turks called them Zinganees, but, being at length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in small parties over the world, &c., &c. It is curious to watch Milton’s mind emerging, but not wholly emerging, from the state of the mediæval chronicler. He mentions in the beginning of his ‘History of Britain,’ the ‘outlandish figment’ of the four kings, Magus, Saron, Druis, and Bardus; he has no approval for the giant Albion, son of Neptune, who subdued the island and called it after his own name; he scoffs at the four sons of Japhet, called Francus, Romanus, Alemannus, and Britto. But when he comes to Brutus and the Trojan legends of old English history, his sceptical courage fails him: ‘those old and inborn names of successive kings, never any to have bin real persons, or don in their lives at least som part of what so long hath bin remember’d, cannot be thought without too strict an incredulity.’[[574]]
Among ruder races of the world, asserted genealogies of this class may be instanced in South American tribes called the Amoipira and Potyuara,[[575]] Khond clans called Baska and Jakso,[[576]] Turkoman hordes called Yomut, Tekke, and Chaudor,[[577]] all of them professing to derive their designations from ancestors or chiefs who bore as individuals these very names. Where criticism can be brought to bear on these genealogies, its effect is often such as drove Brutus and his Trojans out of English history. When there appear in the genealogy of Haussa, in West Africa, plain names of towns like Kano and Katsena,[[578]] it is natural to consider these towns to have been personified into mythic ancestors. Mexican tradition assigns a whole set of eponymic ancestors or chiefs to the various races of the land, as Mexi the founder of Mexico, Chichimecatl the first king of the Chichimecs, and so forth, down to Otomitl the ancestor of the Otomis, whose very name by its termination betrays its Aztec invention.[[579]] The Brazilians account for the division of the Tupis and Guaranis, by the legend of two ancestral brothers, Tupi and Guarani, who quarrelled and separated, each with his followers: here an eponymic origin of the story is made likely by the word Guarani not being an old national name at all, but merely the designation of ‘warriors’ given by the missionaries to certain tribes.[[580]] And when such facts are considered as that North American clans named after animals, Beaver, Crayfish, and the like, account for these names by simply claiming the very creatures themselves as ancestors,[[581]] the tendency of general criticism will probably be not so much in favour of real forefathers and chiefs who left their names to their tribes, as of eponymic ancestors created by backwards imitation of such inheritance.
The examination of eponymic legend, however, must by no means stop short at the destructive stage. In fact, when it has undergone the sharpest criticism, it only displays the more clearly a real historic value, not less perhaps than if all the names it records were real names of ancient chiefs. With all their fancies, blunders, and shortcomings, the heroic genealogies preserve early theories of nationality, traditions of migration, invasion, connexion by kindred or intercourse. The ethnologists of old days, borrowing the phraseology of myth, stated what they looked on as the actual relations of races, in a personifying language of which the meaning may still be readily interpreted. The Greek legend of the twin brothers Danaos and Ægyptos, founders of the nations of the Danaoi or Homeric Greeks and of the Ægyptians, represents a distinct though weak ethnological theory. Their eponymic myth of Hellēn, the personified race of the Hellēnes, is another and more reasonable ethnological document stating kinship among four great branches of the Greek race: the three sons of Hellēn, it relates, were Aiolos, Dōros, and Xouthos; the first two gave their names to the Æolians and Dorians, the third had sons called Achaios and Iōn, whose names passed as a heritage to the Achaioi and Ionians. The belief of the Lydians, Mysians, and Karians as to their national kinship is well expressed in the genealogy in Herodotus, which traces their descent from the three brothers Lydos, Mysos, and Kar.[[582]] The Persian legend of Feridun (Thraetaona) and his three sons, Irej, Tur, and Selm, distinguishes the two nationalities of Iranian and Turanian, i.e. Persian and Tatar.[[583]] The national genealogy of the Afghans is worthy of remark. It runs thus: Melik Talut (King Saul) had two sons, Berkia and Irmia (Berekiah and Jeremiah), who served David; the son of Berkia was Afghan, and the son of Irmia was Usbek. Thanks to the aquiline noses of the Afghans, and to their use of Biblical personal names derived from Biblical sources, the idea of their being descendants of the lost tribes of Israel found great credence among European scholars up to the present century.[[584]] Yet the pedigree is ethnologically absurd, for the whole source of the imagined cousinship of the Aryan Afghan and the Turanian Usbek, so distinct both in feature and in language, appears to be in their union by common Mohammedanism, while the reckless jumble of sham history, which derives both from a Semitic source, is only too characteristic of Moslem chronicle. Among the Tatars is found a much more reasonable national pedigree; in the 13th century, William of Ruysbroek relates, as sober circumstantial history, that they were originally called Turks from Turk the eldest son of Japhet, but one of their princes left his dominions to his twin sons, Tatar and Mongol which gave rise to the distinction that has ever since prevailed between these two nations.[[585]] Historically absurd, this legend states what appears the unimpeachable ethnological fact, that the Turks, Mongols, and Tatars are closely-connected branches of one national stock, and we can only dispute in it what seems an exorbitant claim on the part of the Turk to represent the head of the family, the ancestor of the Mongol and the Tatar. Thus these eponymic national genealogies, mythological in form but ethnological in substance, embody opinions of which we may admit or deny the truth or value, but which we must recognize as distinctly ethnological documents.[[586]]