It thus appears that early ethnology is habitually expressed in a metaphorical language, in which lands and nations are personified, and their relations indicated by terms of personal kinship. This description applies to that important document of ancient ethnology, the table of nations in the 10th chapter of Genesis. In some cases it is a problem of minute and difficult criticism to distinguish among its ancestral names those which are simply local or national designations in personal form. But to critics conversant with the ethnic genealogies of other peoples, such as have here been quoted, simple inspection of this national list may suffice to show that part of its names are not names of real men, but of personified cities, lands, and races. The city Zidon (צידן) is brother to Heth (חת) the father of the Hittites, and next follow in person the Jebusite and the Amorite. Among plain names of countries, Cush or Æthiopia (כוש) begets Nimrod, Asshur or Assyria (אשור) builds Nineveh, and even the dual Mizraim (מצרים), the ‘two Egypts,’ usually regarded as signifying Upper and Lower Egypt, appears in the line of generations as a personal son and brother of other countries, and ancestor of populations. The Aryan stock is clearly recognized in personifications of at least two of its members, Madai (מדי) the Mede, and Javan (יון) the Ionian. And as regards the family to which the Israelites themselves belong, if Canaan (כנען), the father of Zidon (צידן), be transferred to it to represent the Phœnicians, by the side of Asshur (אשור), Aram (ארם), Eber (עבר), and the other descendants of Shem, the result will be mainly to arrange the Semitic stock according to the ordinary classification of modern comparative philology.
Turning now from cases where mythologic phrase serves as a medium for expressing philosophic opinion, let us quickly cross the district where fancy assumes the semblance of explanatory legend. The mediæval schoolmen have been justly laughed at for their habit of translating plain facts into the terms of metaphysics, and then solemnly offering them in this scientific guise as explanations of themselves—accounting for opium making people sleep, by its possession of a dormitive virtue. The myth-maker’s proceedings may in one respect be illustrated by comparing them with this. Half mythology is occupied, as many a legend cited in these chapters has shown, in shaping the familiar facts of daily life into imaginary histories of their own cause and origin, childlike answers to those world-old questions of whence and why, which the savage asks as readily as the sage. So familiar is the nature of such description in the dress of history, that its easier examples translate off-hand. When the Samoans say that ever since the great battle among the plantains and bananas, the vanquished have hung down their heads, while the victor stands proudly erect,[[587]] who can mistake the simple metaphor which compares the upright and the drooping plants to a conqueror standing among his beaten foes? In simile just as obvious lies the origin of another Polynesian legend, which relates the creation of the coco-nut from a man’s head, the chestnuts from his kidneys, and the yams from his legs.[[588]] To draw one more example from the mythology of plants, how transparent is the Ojibwa fancy of that heavenly youth with green robe and waving feathers, whom for the good of men the Indian overcame and buried, and who sprang again from his grave as the Indian corn, Mondamin, the ‘Spirit’s grain.’[[589]] The New Forest peasant deems that the marl he digs is still red with the blood of his ancient foes the Danes; the Maori sees on the red cliffs of Cook’s Straits the blood-stains that Kupe made when, mourning for the death of his daughter, he cut his forehead with pieces of obsidian; in the spot where Buddha offered his own body to feed the starved tigress’s cubs, his blood for ever reddened the soil and the trees and flowers. The modern Albanian still sees the stain of slaughter in streams running red with earth, as to the ancient Greek the river that flowed by Byblos bore down in its summer floods the red blood of Adonis. The Cornishman knows from the red filmy growth on the brook pebbles that murder has been done there; John the Baptist’s blood still grows in Germany on his day, and peasants still go out to search for it; the red meal fungus is blood dropped by the flying Huns when they hurt their feet against the high tower-roofs. The traveller in India might see on the ruined walls of Ganga Raja the traces of the blood of the citizens spilt in the siege, and yet more marvellous to relate, at St. Denis’s church in Cornwall, the blood-stains on the stones fell there when the saint’s head was cut off somewhere else.[[590]] Of such translations of descriptive metaphor under thin pretence of history, every collection of myth is crowded with examples, but it strengthens our judgment of the combined consistency and variety of what may be called the mythic language, to extract from its dictionary such a group as this, which in variously imaginative fashion describes the appearance of a blood-red stain.
The merest shadowy fancy or broken-down metaphor, when once it gains a sense of reality, may begin to be spoken of as an actual event. The Moslems have heard the very stones praise Allah, not in simile only but in fact, and among them the saying that a man’s fate is written on his forehead has been materialized into a belief that it can be deciphered from the letter-like markings of the sutures of his skull. One of the miraculous passages in the life of Mohammed himself is traced plausibly by Sprenger to such a pragmatized metaphor. The angel Gabriel, legend declares, opened the prophet’s breast, and took a black clot from his heart, which he washed with Zemzem water and replaced; details are given of the angel’s dress and golden basin, and Anas ibn Malik declared he had seen the very mark where the wound was sewn up. We may venture with the historian to ascribe this marvellous incident to the familiar metaphor that Mohammed’s heart was divinely opened and cleansed, and indeed he does say in the Koran that God opened his heart.[[591]] A single instance is enough to represent the same habit in Christian legend. Marco Polo relates how in 1225 the Khalif of Bagdad commanded the Christians of his dominions, under penalty of death or Islam, to justify their Scriptural text by removing a certain mountain. Now there was among them a shoemaker, who, having been tempted to excess of admiration for a woman, had plucked out his offending eye. This man commanded the mountain to remove, which it did to the terror of the Khalif and all his people, and since then the anniversary of the miracle has been kept holy. The Venetian traveller, after the manner of mediæval writers, records the story without a symptom of suspicion;[[592]] yet to our minds its whole origin so obviously lies in three verses of St. Matthew’s gospel, that it is needless to quote them. To modern taste such wooden fictions as these are far from attractive. In fact the pragmatizer is a stupid creature; nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull and vulgar by his touch, for it is through the very incapacity of his mind to hold an abstract idea that he is forced to embody it in a material incident. Yet wearisome as he may be, it is none the less needful to understand him, to acknowledge the vast influence he has had on the belief of mankind, and to appreciate him as representing in its extreme abuse that tendency to clothe every thought in a concrete shape, which has in all ages been a mainspring of mythology.
Though allegory cannot maintain the large place often claimed for it in mythology, it has yet had too much influence to be passed over in this survey. It is true that the search for allegorical explanation is a pursuit that has led many a zealous explorer into the quagmires of mysticism. Yet there are cases in which allegory is certainly used with historical intent, as for instance in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, with its cows and sheep which stand for Israelites, and asses and wolves for Midianites and Egyptians, these creatures figuring in a pseudo-prophetic sketch of Old Testament chronicles. As for moral allegory, it is immensely plentiful in the world, although its limits are narrower than mythologists of past centuries have supposed. It is now reasonably thought preposterous to interpret the Greek legends as moral apologues, after the manner of Herakleides the philosopher, who could discern a parable of repentant prudence in Athene seizing Achilles when just about to draw his sword on Agamemnon.[[593]] Still, such a mode of interpretation has thus much to justify it, that numbers of the fanciful myths of the world are really allegories. There is allegory in the Hesiodic myth of Pandora, whom Zeus sent down to men, decked with golden band and garland of spring flowers, fit cause of longing and the pangs of love, but using with a dog-like mind her gifts of lies and treachery and pleasant speech. Heedless of his wiser brother’s words, the foolish Epimetheus took her; she raised the lid of the great cask and shook out the evils that wander among mankind, and the diseases that by day and night come silently bringing ill; she set on the lid again and shut hope in, that evil might be ever hopeless to mankind. Shifted to fit a different moral, the allegory remained in the later version of the tale, that the cask held not curses but blessings; these were let go and lost to men when the vessel was too curiously opened, while Hope alone was left behind for comfort to the luckless human race.[[594]] Yet the primitive nature of such legends underlies the moral shape upon them. Zeus is no allegoric fiction, and Prometheus, unless modern mythologists judge him very wrongly, has a meaning far deeper than parable. Xenophon tells after Prodikos the story of Herakles choosing between the short and easy path of pleasure and the long and toilsome path of virtue,[[595]] but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the reader’s mind.
The general relation of allegory to pure myth can hardly be brought more clearly into view than in a class of stories familiar to every child, the Beast-fables. From the ordinary civilized point of view the allegory in such fictions seems fundamental, the notion of a moral lesson seems bound up with their very nature, yet a broader examination tends to prove the allegorical growth as it were parasitic on an older trunk of myth without moral. It is only by an effort of intellectual reaction that a modern writer can imitate in parable the beast of the old Beast-fable. No wonder, for the creature has become to his mind a monster, only conceivable as a caricature of man made to carry a moral lesson or a satire. But among savages it is not so. To their minds the semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, invented to preach or sneer, he is all but a reality. Beast-fables are not nonsense to men who ascribe to the lower animals a power of speech, and look on them as partaking of moral human nature; to men in whose eyes any hyæna or wolf may probably be a man-hyæna or a werewolf; to men who so utterly believe ‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’ that they will really regulate their own diet so as to avoid eating an ancestor; to men an integral part of whose religion may actually be the worship of beasts. Such beliefs belong even now to half mankind, and among such the beast-stories had their first home. Even the Australians tell their quaint beast-tales, of the Rat, the Owl, and the fat Blackfellow, or of Pussy-brother who singed his friends’ noses while they were asleep.[[596]] The Kamchadals have an elaborate myth of the adventures of their stupid deity Kutka with the Mice who played tricks upon him, such as painting his face like a woman’s, so that when he looked in the water he fell in love with himself.[[597]] Beast-tales abound among such races as the Polynesians and the North American Indians, who value in them ingenuity of incident and neat adaptation of the habits and characters of the creatures. Thus in a legend of the Flathead Indians, the Little Wolf found in Cloudland his grandsires the Spiders with their grizzled hair and long crooked nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to earth; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled Duck, whom the Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in confusion, and that is why she lives and dives alone to this very day.[[598]] In Guinea, where beast-fable is one of the great staples of native conversation, the following story is told as a type of the tales which in this way account for peculiarities of animals. The great Engena-monkey offered his daughter to be bride of the champion who should perform the feat of drinking a whole barrel of rum. The dignified Elephant, the graceful Leopard, the surly Boar, tried the first mouthful of the fire-water, and retreated. Then the tiny Telinga-monkey came, who had cunningly hidden in the long grass thousands of his fellows; he took his first glass and went away, but instead of his coming back, another just like him came for the second, and so on till the barrel was emptied and Telinga walked off with the Monkey-king’s daughter. But in the narrow path the Elephant and Leopard attacked him and drove him off and he took refuge in the highest boughs of the trees, vowing never more to live on the ground and suffer such violence and injustice. This is why to this day the little telingas are only found in the highest tree-tops.[[599]] Such stories have been collected by scores from savage tradition in their original state, while as yet no moral lesson has entered into them. Yet the easy and natural transition from the story into the parable is made among savages, perhaps without help from higher races. In the Hottentot Tales, side by side with the myth of the cunning Jackal tricking the Lion out of the best of the carcase, and getting the black stripe burnt on his own back by carrying off the Sun, there occurs the moral apologue of the Lion who thought himself wiser than his Mother, and perished by the Hunter’s spear, for want of heed to her warning against the deadly creature whose head is in a line with his breast and shoulders.[[600]] So the Zulus have a thorough moral apologue in the story of the hyrax, who did not go to fetch his tail on the day when tails were given out, because he did not like to be out in the rain; he only asked the other animals to bring it for him, and so he never got it.[[601]] Among the North American legends of Manabozho, there is a fable quite Æsopian in its humour. Manabozho, transformed into a Wolf, killed a fat moose, and being very hungry sat down to eat. But he fell into great doubts as to where to begin, for, said he, if I begin at the head, people will laugh and say, he ate him backwards, but if I begin at the side they will say, he ate him sideways. At last he made up his mind, and was just putting a delicate piece into his mouth, when a tree close by creaked. Stop, stop! said he to the tree, I cannot eat with such a noise, and in spite of his hunger he left the meat and climbed up to quiet the creaking, but was caught between two branches and held fast, and presently he saw a pack of wolves coming. Go that way! Go that way! he cried out, whereupon the wolves said, he must have something there, or he would not tell us to go another way. So they came on, and found the moose, and ate it to the bones while Manabozho looked wistfully on. The next heavy blast of wind opened the branches and let him out, and he went home thinking to himself, ‘See the effect of meddling with frivolous things when I had certain good in my possession.’[[602]]
In the Old World, the moral Beast-fable was of no mean antiquity, but it did not at once supplant the animal-myths pure and simple. For ages the European mind was capable at once of receiving lessons of wisdom from the Æsopian crows and foxes, and of enjoying artistic but by no means edifying beast-stories of more primitive type. In fact the Babrius and Phædrus collections were over a thousand years old, when the genuine Beast-Epic reached its fullest growth in the incomparable ‘Reynard the Fox,’ traceable in Jakob Grimm’s view to an original Frankish composition of the 12th century, itself containing materials of far earlier date.[[603]] Reynard is not a didactic poem, at least if a moral hangs on to it here and there it is oftenest a Macchiavellian one; nor is it essentially a satire, sharply as it lashes men in general and the clergy in particular. Its creatures are incarnate qualities, the Fox of cunning, the Bear of strength, the Ass of dull content, the Sheep of guilelessness. The charm of the narrative, which every class in mediæval Europe delighted in, but which we have allowed to drop out of all but scholars’ knowledge, lies in great measure in he cleverly sustained combination of the beast’s nature and the man’s. How great the influence of the Reynard Epic was in the middle ages, may be judged from Reynard, Bruin, Chanticleer, being still names familiar to people who have no idea of their having been originally names of the characters in the great beast-fable. Even more remarkable are its traces in modern French. The donkey has its name of baudet from Baudoin, Baldwin the Ass. Common French dictionaries do not even contain the word goupil (vulpes), so effectually has the Latin name of the fox been driven out of use by his Frankish title in the Beast-Epic, Raginhard the Counsellor, Reinhart, Reynard, Renart, renard. The moralized apologues like Æsop’s which Grimm contemptuously calls ‘fables thinned down to mere moral and allegory,’ ‘a fourth watering of the old grapes into an insipid moral infusion,’ are low in æsthetic quality as compared with the genuine beast-myths. Mythological critics will be apt to judge them after the manner of the child who said how convenient it was to have ‘Moral’ printed in Æsop’s fables, that everybody might know what to skip.
The want of power of abstraction which has ever had such disastrous effect on the beliefs of mankind, confounding myth and chronicle, and crushing the spirit of history under the rubbish of literalized tradition, comes very clearly into view in the study of parable. The state of mind of the deaf, dumb, and blind Laura Bridgman, so instructive in illustrating the mental habits of uneducated though full-sensed men, displays in an extreme form the difficulty such men have in comprehending the unreality of any story. She could not be made to see that arithmetical problems were anything but statements of concrete fact, and when her teacher asked her, ‘If you can buy a barrel of cider for four dollars, how much can you buy for one dollar?’ she replied quite simply, ‘I cannot give much for cider, because it is very sour.’[[604]] It is a surprising instance of this tendency to concretism, that among people so civilized as the Buddhists, the most obviously moral beast-fables have become literal incidents of sacred history. Gautama, during his 550 jatakas or births, took the form of a frog, a fish, a crow, an ape, and various other animals, and so far were the legends of these transformations from mere myth to his followers, that there have been preserved as relics in Buddhist temples the hair, feathers, and bones of the creatures whose bodies the great teacher inhabited. Now among the incidents which happened to Buddha during his series of animal births, he appeared as an actor in the familiar fable of the Fox and the Stork, and it was he who, when he was a Squirrel, set an example of parental virtue by trying to dry up the ocean with his tail, to save his young ones whose nest had drifted out to sea, till his persevering courage was rewarded by a miracle.[[605]] To our modern minds, a moral which seems the very purpose of a story is evidence unfavourable to its truth as fact. But if even apologues of talking birds and beasts have not been safe from literal belief, it is clear that the most evident moral can have been but slight protection to parables told of possible and life-like men. It was not a needless precaution to state explicitly of the New Testament parables that they were parables, and even this guard has not availed entirely. Mrs. Jameson relates some curious experience in the following passage:—‘I know that I was not very young when I entertained no more doubt of the substantial existence of Lazarus and Dives than of John the Baptist and Herod; when the Good Samaritan was as real a personage as any of the Apostles; when I was full of sincerest pity for those poor foolish Virgins who had forgotten to trim their lamps, and thought them—in my secret soul—rather hardly treated. This impression of the literal actual truth of the parables I have since met with in many children, and in the uneducated but devout hearers and readers of the Bible; and I remember that when I once tried to explain to a good old woman the proper meaning of the word parable, and that the story of the Prodigal Son was not a fact, she was scandalized—she was quite sure that Jesus would never have told anything to his disciples that was not true. Thus she settled the matter in her own mind, and I thought it best to leave it there undisturbed.’[[606]] Nor, it may be added, has such realization been confined to the minds of the poor and ignorant. St. Lazarus, patron saint of lepers and their hospitals, and from whom the lazzarone and the lazzaretto take their name, obviously derives these qualities from the Lazarus of the parable.
The proof of the force and obstinacy of the mythic faculty, thus given by the relapse of parable into pseudo-history, may conclude this dissertation on mythology. In its course there have been examined the processes of animating and personifying nature, the formation of legend by exaggeration and perversion of fact, the stiffening of metaphor by mistaken realization of words, the conversion of speculative theories and still less substantial fictions into pretended traditional events, the passage of myth into miracle-legend, the definition by name and place given to any floating imagination, the adaptation of mythic incident as moral example, and the incessant crystallization of story into history. The investigation of these intricate and devious operations has brought ever more and more broadly into view two principles of mythologic science. The first is that legend, when classified on a sufficient scale, displays a regularity of development which the notion of motiveless fancy quite fails to account for, and which must be attributed to laws of formation whereby every story, old and new, has arisen from its definite origin and sufficient cause. So uniform indeed is such development, that it becomes possible to treat myth as an organic product of mankind at large, in which individual, national, and even racial distinctions stand subordinate to universal qualities of the human mind. The second principle concerns the relation of myth to history. It is true that the search for mutilated and mystified traditions of real events, which formed so main a part of old mythological researches, seems to grow more hopeless the farther the study of legend extends. Even the fragments of real chronicle found embedded in the mythic structure are mostly in so corrupt a state, that, far from their elucidating history, they need history to elucidate them. Yet unconsciously, and as it were in spite of themselves, the shapers and transmitters of poetic legend have preserved for us masses of sound historical evidence. They moulded into mythic lives of gods and heroes their own ancestral heirlooms of thought and word, they displayed in the structure of their legends the operations of their own minds, they placed on record the arts and manners, the philosophy and religion of their own times, times of which formal history has often lost the very memory. Myth is the history of its authors, not of its subjects; it records the lives, not of superhuman heroes, but of poetic nations.
CHAPTER XI.
ANIMISM.
Religious ideas generally appear among low races of Mankind—Negative statements on this subject frequently misleading and mistaken: many cases uncertain—Minimum definition of Religion—Doctrine of Spiritual Beings, here termed Animism—Animism treated as belonging to Natural Religion—Animism divided into two sections, the philosophy of Souls, and of other Spirits—Doctrine of Souls, its prevalence and definition among the lower races—Definition of Apparitional Soul or Ghost-Soul—It is a theoretical conception of primitive Philosophy, designed to account for phenomena now classed under Biology, especially Life and Death, Health and Disease, Sleep and Dreams, Trance and Visions—Relation of Soul in name and nature to Shadow, Blood, Breath—Division of Plurality of Souls—Soul cause of Life; its restoration to body when supposed absent—Exit of Soul in Trances—Dreams and Visions: theory of exit of dreamer’s or seer’s own soul; theory of visits received by them from other souls—Ghost-Soul seen in Apparitions—Wraiths and Doubles—Soul has form of body; suffers mutilation with it—Voice of Ghost—Soul treated and defined as of Material Substance; this appears to be the original doctrine—Transmission of Souls to service in future life by Funeral Sacrifice of wives, attendants, &c.—Souls of Animals—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Souls of Plants—Souls of Objects—Their transmission by Funeral Sacrifice—Relation of doctrine of Object-Souls to Epicurean theory of Ideas—Historical development of Doctrine of Souls, from the Ethereal Soul of primitive Biology to the Immaterial Soul of modern Theology.