Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

BARBARIC THEORY OF A SECOND SELF OR SOUL.

In thus far illustrating the confusion inherent in the barbaric mind between what is and what is not external to itself, the explanation given of matters still dividing philosophers into opposite camps has been hardly indicated. The uniformity of this confusion among the lower intelligence in every zone and age might surprise us, and we should be in bondage to the theory which explains it by assumption of primal intuitions of the race, were we not rejoicing in the freedom of the truth of the doctrine of the descent, or ascent, of man from an ape-like ancestry, and the resulting slow development of his psychical faculties, involving his accounting for motion in things around by the like personal life and will of which he is conscious in himself, and for his regarding the world of great and small alike as the home and haunt of spirits.

For the assumption underlying the savage explanation of such things as dreams and diseases involves a larger assumption—namely, that the spirit which acts thus arbitrarily, playing this game of hide-and-seek, now, as it were, caught up into Paradise, and now dodging its owner and worrying its enemy on earth—is, to quote Mr. Spencer’s appropriate term, a man’s other self. It is, at least, what the scientists call a working hypothesis; it is the only possible explanation which the uncultivated mind can give of what it has not the power to see is a subjective phenomenon. Odd and out-of-the-way events have happened to the dreamer; he has been to strange places and seen strange doings, but waking up, he knows that he is in the same wigwam where he laid down to sleep, and can be convinced by his squaw that he has not moved therefrom all night. Therefore it is the other self, this phantom-soul, which has been away for a time, seeing and taking part in things both new and old. We civilised folk, as Dr. Wendell Holmes remarks, not rarely find our personality doubled in our dreams, and do battle with ourselves, unconscious that we are our own antagonists. Dr. Johnson dreamed that he had a contest with an opponent and got the worst of it; of course, he found the argument for both! Tartini heard the devil play a wonderful sonata, and lay entranced by the arch-fiend’s execution. On waking he seized his violin, and although he could not reproduce the actual succession of notes, he recovered sufficient impressions to compose his celebrated “Devil’s Sonata.” Obviously the devil was no other than Tartini.

Thus the philosopher, to whom dreaming merely indicates a certain amount of uncontrolled mental activity, may satisfy himself; not thus can the savage, who cannot even think that he thinks, and to whom the phenomena of shadows, reflection, and echoes bring confirming evidence of the existence of his mysterious double. What else than a veritable entity can his shadow be to him? Its intangibility feeds his awe and wonder, and increases his bewilderment; its actions, ever corresponding with his own, make it, even more than its outline, a part of himself, the loss of which may be serious. Only when the light is withdrawn or intercepted does the shadow cease to accompany, precede, or follow him, and to lengthen, shorten, or distort itself; whilst not he alone, but all things above and around, have this phantom attendant. The Choctaws believed that each man has an outside shadow, shilombish, and an inside shadow, shilup, both of which survive his decease. Among the Fijians a man’s shadow is called the dark spirit, which goes to the unseen world, while the other spirit, which is his likeness reflected in water or a mirror, stays near the place where he dies. The Basutos are careful, when walking by a river, not to let their shadow fall on the water, lest a crocodile seize it, and harm the owner. Among the Algonquin Indians sickness is accounted for by the patient’s shadow being unsettled or detached from the body; the Zulus say that a corpse cannot cast a shadow, and in the barbaric belief that its loss is baleful, we have the germ of the mediæval legends of shadowless men and of tales of which Chamisso’s story of Peter Schlemihl is a type. The New England tribes called the soul chemung, the shadow, and in the Quiche and Eskimo languages, as also in the several dialects of Costa Rica, the same word expresses both ideas; while civilised speech indicates community of thought in the skia of the Greeks, the manes or umbra of the Romans, and the shade of our own tongue. Still more complete in the mimicry is the reflection of the body in water or mirror, the image repeating every gesture and adopting every colour, whilst in the echoes which forest and hillside fling back, the savage hears confirmation of his belief in the other self, as well as in the nearness of the spirits of the dead. The Sonora Indians say that departed souls dwell among the caves and nooks of the cliffs, and that the echoes are their voices, and in South Pacific myth echo is the first and parent fairy, to whom at Marquesas divine honours are still paid as the giver of food, and as she who “speaks to the worshippers out of the rocks.” In Greek myth she is punished by Juno for diverting her attention whilst Jupiter flirts with the nymphs, and at last, pining in grief at her unrequited love for Narcissus, there remains nothing but her voice.

But what, in primitive conception, is the more specific nature of the other self, and how does it make the passage from within to without, and vice versâ? Very early in man’s history he must have wondered at the difference between a waking and a sleeping person, a living and a dead one, and sought wherein this consisted. There lay the body in the repose, more or less broken, of sleep, or in the undisturbed repose of the unawakening sleep; in the latter case, with nothing tangible or visible gone, but that which was once “quick” and warm, which had spoken, moved, smiled, or frowned but a little while before, and which still came in dream or vision, was now cold and still.

It should here be remarked, in passing, that many savage races do not believe in death as a natural event, but regard it as differing from sleep only in the length of time that the spirit is absent from the body. No matter what any one’s age may be, if his death is not caused by wounds, it is attributed to magic, and the search for the sorcerer becomes a family duty, like the vendetta for other injuries. The widespread myths which account for death have as their underlying idea the infraction of some law or custom, for which the offender pays the extreme penalty. And that personification of it which pervades barbaric thought, whilst undergoing many changes of form, yet retains its hold in popular conception as well as in poetry. Pictured as the messenger of Deity, as the awful angel who sought the rebellious and impious, or who, in mission of tenderness, bore the soul to its home in the bosom of the Eternal, it was transformed and degraded by the grotesque fancy of a later time into a grim and dancing skeleton whetting his sickle for ingathering of the young and fair to their doom, or into the grinning skull and crossbones of Christian headstones. So when the maiden Proserpine is plucking the spring flowers, “crocuses and roses and fair violets,” in the Elysian fields, Hades, regent of hell, regardless of her cries, carries her off to his invisible realm.

But to resume. Whilst shadows, reflections, and echoes, one and all, seemed to satisfy the uncivilised mind as to the existence of the other self, they gave no key to its nature, to what it is like. Obviously the difference between death and life lay in some unsubstantial or semi-substantial thing. Perhaps, thought some races, it lies in the blood, with the unchecked outflow of which death ensues, and the idea of this connection has not been confined to barbaric peoples. Perhaps, thought other races, it lies in the heart, which, say the Basutos, has gone out of any one dead, but has returned when the sick have recovered. Among the Greeks some philosophers held that it was fire, which was extinct when the fuel of life was burnt out, or water, which would evaporate away. But, as language shows, it is with the breath that the other self of the savage and the vital principle of the philosopher has been most widely identified. For it is the cessation of breathing which would in the long-run be noted as the unfailing accompaniment of death; and the condensing vapour, as it was exhaled, would confirm the existing theories of a shadowy and gaseous-like soul. In this, as the illustrations to be adduced from various languages will evidence, the continuity of idea which travels along the whole line of barbaric and learned speculation is unbroken.

§ VIII.

BARBARIC PHILOSOPHY IN “PUNCHKIN” AND ALLIED STORIES.