Myths and Dreams

by Edward Clodd

BARBARIC BELIEF IN SOULS IN BRUTES AND PLANTS AND LIFELESS THINGS.

More graceful is the conception which makes the soul spring up as a flower or cleave the air as a bird. It is, of course, the purified survival of the primitive thought which did not limit its belief in an indwelling spirit to man, but extended it to brutes and plants, and even to lifeless things. For the lower creatures manifested the phenomena from which the belief in spirits in higher creatures was inferred. They moved and breathed, their life ceased with their breath; they cast shadows and reflections; their cries, which to the savage seemed so like human speech,[85] awakened echoes; and they appeared in dreams. Among the western tribes of North America the phantoms of all animals are supposed to go to the happy beasts’ grounds, and in Assam the ghosts of those slain become the property of the hunter who kills them; whilst the custom of begging pardon of the animal before or after despatching it, as among the Red Indians, who even put the pipe of peace in the dead creature’s mouth, further evidences to barbarian belief in beast-souls. Although the belief in the immortality of brutes has now no place in serious philosophy, it has been a favourite doctrine from the Kamchadales, who believe in the after-life of flies and bugs, to the eminent naturalist Agassiz, who advocates the doctrine in his Essay on Classification; and in a list of 4977 books on the nature and future of the soul given in Mr. Alger’s elaborate critical history of the subject, nearly 200 deal with the after-life of animals. The advocates have often felt the difficulty of granting this after-life to man and denying it to creatures to which he stands so closely related in ultimate community of origin; but science, while it finds links of sympathy with the ideas of rude races respecting the common life of all that moves, and presents evidence in support of the common destiny, lends no support to the doctrine of the immortality of oysters. The custom of apologising to doomed brutes is practised in regard to plants. If they exhibit the phenomena of life in a lesser degree, enough are shown to justify the accrediting of them with souls. Besides flinging wavy shadows and reflections (and it cannot be too often enforced that to the barbaric intelligence motion is a prime sign of life), they are not voiceless. Murmurs are heard in their leaves; sounds echo from their hollow trunks, or tremble, Æolian-like, through their branches; and in their juices are the sources of repose or frenzy.

“The Ojibways believed that trees had souls, and in pagan times they seldom cut down green or living trees, for they thought it put them to pain. They pretended to hear the wailing of the trees when they suffered in this way. On account of these noises, real or imaginary, trees have had spirits assigned them, and worship offered to them. A mountain-ash, in the vicinity of South Ste. Marie, which made a noise, had offerings piled up around it. If a tree should emit from its hollow trunk or branches a sound during a calm state of the atmosphere, or should any one fancy such sounds, the tree would be at once reported, and soon come to be regarded as the residence of some local god.”[86] As expressed in Greek myth, purified in this case from grosser elements, we have the Dryades, who were believed to die together with the trees in which their life had begun to be, and in which they had dwelt. As expressed in folk-lore and its poetic forms, it is in the growth or blossoming of flowers, or the intertwining of branches, that the idea survives. In the ballad of “Fair Margaret and Sweet William”—

“Out of her brest there sprang a rose,
And out of his a briar;
They grew till they grew unto the church-top,
And there they tyed in a true lover’s knot;”[87]

in the story of “Tristram and Ysonde,” “from his grave there grew an eglantine which twined about the statue, a marvel for all men to see; and, though three times they cut it down, it grew again, and ever wound its arms about the image of the fair Ysonde;”[88] while the conception often lends itself to the poet’s thoughts, from Laertes’ words over Ophelia:—

“Lay her i’ the earth,
And from her fair and unpolluted flesh
May violets spring,”

to Tennyson’s

“And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.”

In Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology a number of illustrations are supplied of the vagaries of popular imagination, which picture the soul as a bird flying out of a dead person’s mouth, and, as a cognate example from rude culture, we find a belief among the Powhatans that “a certain small wood bird received the souls of their princes at death, and they religiously refrained from doing it harm; while the Aztecs and various other nations thought that all good people, as a reward of merit, were metamorphosed at the close of life into feathered songsters of the grove, and in this form passed a certain term in the umbrageous bowers of Paradise.”[89] But many pages might be filled with examples of varying conceptions of the soul, the major number of which (for the idea of it as a mouse, snake, etc., must not be forgotten) have as their nucleus its ethereal nature and freedom from the limitations of solid earth, although round that nucleus gather some more concrete ideas for the mind, desiring something more substantial than symbols, to grasp. The belief that inanimate things as well as animals and plants have a dual being is not so obvious at first sight, and yet, given the reasons for the latter, there are as good grounds, because like in kind, for the former. The Algonquins told Father Charlevoix that “since hatchets and kettles have shadows, as well as men and women, it follows that these shadows must pass along with human shadows into the spirit-land.” When the tools or weapons are injured or done with, their souls must cross the water to the Great Village, where the sun sets. Besides, spears and pots and pans, as well as men and dogs, appear in dreams; they throw shadows and images in the water, they give forth a sound when struck, and, as the Fijians also argue, “if an animal or plant die, its soul goes to Bolotoo; if a stone or anything else is broken, it has its reward there; nay, has equal good luck with men and hogs and yams. If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up, away flies its soul for the service of the gods.” Logically, the savage who believes that in the other world

“The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade,”