The story of Taliessin, though only found in a manuscript of the seventeenth century, comes, it is generally conceded, within this category; for its coincidences with the older Celtic traditions are too striking to allow of any other explanation. Ceridwen, the wife of Tegid the Bald, had, among other children, a son of such extreme ugliness that she thought he was not likely to be admitted amongst men of noble birth unless he had some exalted merits or knowledge. So she undertook, with the aid of the books of Fferyll—that is to say, Vergil the Magician, a character which Vergil the poet is made to sustain in mediæval tradition—to boil a caldron of Inspiration and Science for his benefit. Now, this caldron required to be boiled for a year and a day; at the end of which time three precious drops would be obtained, the rest of its contents being poisonous, and indeed highly explosive. The caldron was placed in charge of Gwion the Little and a blind man named Mordav, while Ceridwen herself went to gather herbs of virtue. But before the expiration of the year and a day the three precious drops flew out of the caldron and fell upon Gwion’s finger, which he instinctively put to his mouth to allay the scalding. He at once became possessed of all knowledge, and foresaw his danger from Ceridwen’s rage when she found her preparations had been in vain. He, therefore, fled, hotly pursued by the witch. To elude her he changed into a hare, whereupon she took the shape of a greyhound. He ran towards the river, and became a fish, to chase which she assumed the form of an otter. Gwion then flew up as a bird. He soon found himself followed by a hawk, which was no other than his enemy; and just as she was about to stoop upon him he dropped among a heap of winnowed wheat on the floor of a barn, and turned himself into one of the grains. From a hawk to a black hen the transformation was easy; and Ceridwen thus pecked up the grain in question and swallowed it. She became by this means pregnant, and gave birth to a beautiful boy—a new manifestation of Gwion the Little; and when he was born she wrapped him up in a hide and cast him into the sea, by which he was ultimately thrown upon the weir of Gwyddno. From thence he was rescued to become the king of the bards, Taliessin.[213.1] Two poems attributed to Taliessin enumerate many more metamorphoses than are mentioned in the tale. The exact date of these poems is, in the present state of Welsh scholarship, unascertainable; but they are certainly not later than the fourteenth century. One of them speaks of the poet’s original country as the region of the summer stars, and identifies him with Merlin and other sages and bards. Confining our attention, however, to the narrative, we may lay aside the earlier changes as links of a chain of incidents common in fairy-tales, and known technically as the Transformation-fight. An example of it familiar to every reader is the contest between the princess and the Jinn in the story of the Second Calender in the Arabian Nights. These changes are not effected by death and birth as are the ones we are considering now. In the final change, on the other hand, Gwion is devoured by the witch and reproduced as her son, just as Bata is swallowed in the shape of a splinter of the persea-tree by the king’s Favourite, and born again of her, to become her destruction.
So far the Welsh mythology: a parallel instance is afforded by the Erse. Both have suffered from the Euhemerism of the Middle Ages that has preserved them for us; but the true lines of the tales are not too far obliterated for our present purpose. The story of Tuan mac Cairill, then, as we find it embalmed in the Irish chronicles, makes him the sole survivor of the band of Partholon, who first colonised the island after the Deluge. Fallen into decrepitude after many years, he saw a new immigration led by Nemed, flying from which he fasted three days, lay down to sleep and was changed into a stag. Again he fell into old age, fasted, and was metamorphosed into a wild boar. Meanwhile, the descendants of Nemed had all died out. Semion, then, the ancestor of the three tribes of the Fir Domnann, the Fir Bolg and the Galiûin, established himself in the land. After a time the process was repeated, and Tuan became a great sea-eagle. Beothach, from whom descended the Tuatha De Danann, seized the island, and afterwards the sons of Mile, whose descendants are the living race. The sea-eagle found himself in the hole of a tree on the bank of a river. There he fasted nine days, and, sleeping, awoke as a salmon in the stream. For a long time he escaped the fishermen’s nets; at last he was caught and carried to the wife of Carell, king of that district. She saw the fish, longed for it, cooked it, and ate it up. But this was far from being the end of Tuan. From her he was born again, wise man and prophet, and was called Tuan, son of Carell. He lived not only to be baptized at the coming of Saint Patrick, but to converse with Saint Columba, and to narrate the whole history of Ireland, as he remembered it during his various transformations, to Saint Finnen in the middle of the sixth century. All the ancient history, all the old genealogies rest upon his authority.[215.1]
Etain, another mythological figure of Ireland, had a somewhat similar adventure. She was one of the two wives of Mider, who belonged to the Tuatha De Danann. Oengus, son of the Dagde, and foster-son of Mider, carried her off, and she became his wife. Her first husband, however, had not ceased to remember her, and he sought if by any means he might recover her. His other wife, bent on frustrating him, and watching her opportunity, sent a wind that blew Etain out of the bower built for her by Oengus, and deposited her on the roof of a house where the lords of Ulster and their wives were engaged in a drinking-bout. Upon the table beneath stood a golden cup of beer beside one of the ladies. From the roof, by the opening which did duty for a chimney, Etain fell into the cup. The lady swallowed her unperceived in the next draught, and gave birth to her again after nine months. Thus Etain began a new life. She became the loveliest of Irish maidens, and wedded the supreme king Eochaid Airem, who reigned at Tara. But Mider had not yet ceased to love her. Disguised as a warrior, he sought the king and challenged him to a game of chess. When the board was set: “Play,” said he to the king. “I do not play without stakes,” replied the monarch. Mider, on his side, bet fifty brown horses, large-breasted, with limbs slender and agile. “For my part,” said the king, sure of success, “if I lose, I will pay what you like.” They played; the king lost, and Mider demanded his wife. The king objected that he was entitled to his revenge; and his adversary, with a bad grace, yielded. A year passed, during which the king saw nothing of Mider; though he often appeared to Etain and wooed her, but without success; for she proved faithful to her husband. At the end of the year Mider came and claimed the second game. They played; again Eochaid lost, and Mider demanded to put his arms around Etain and give her a kiss. “Come back in a month,” replied the king, “and it shall be granted you.” When the fatal day arrived, his rival found Eochaid surrounded by his warriors, the fortress closed and guarded on every side. The day passed, and no antagonist presented himself. But at night Mider stood all at once in the midst of the hall, the beautiful Mider, more beautiful than ever. No one had seen him enter. The lady blushed when he boldly named his errand. “Do not blush,” quoth Mider; “thou hast no reason to reproach thyself. For a whole year I have not ceased to woo thee with jewels and wealth—thee, the fairest of the women of Ireland; and thou hast refused to listen to me so long as thy husband gave thee no permission.” “I have told thee,” replied she, “that I will not follow thee, unless my husband yield me. I will only be taken if Eochaid give me to thee.” “I will not give thee,” cried the king. “I only consent that he put his arms around thee here in this hall, as has been agreed.” “It shall be done,” said Mider. Laying his lance in his left hand, he seized Etain with his right; and, rising in the air, he disappeared with her through the smoke-hole in the palace-roof. The warriors that surrounded the king, ashamed at their own impotence, rushed from the hall to pursue the fugitives. They only saw, high above Tara, two swans whose long white necks were encircled and bound together by a yoke of gold. The story adds that afterwards, by the magical might of his Druids, Eochaid forced an entrance to the mysterious subterranean palace of Mider and took possession once more of his wife, so lovely, so beloved. But Mider’s hate was one day revenged on the posterity of Eochaid and Etain by the tragic death of Conaire, their grandson.[217.1] The Druidical doctrine of metempsychosis would appear, alike from these ancient mythological tales and from modern folklore, to have been nothing more than Transformation as we find it among savages in all parts of the world.
Before turning to rites and superstitious beliefs, we may notice the legend of Oankoitupeh, son of the Red Cloud, the hero of the North American Maidus. A maiden sees a beautiful red cloud, and hears sweet music. The next day, while picking grass-seed pinole, she finds an arrow trimmed with yellow-hammer feathers; and suddenly a man is standing beside her, who is none other than the red cloud she had seen the day before. The bright and resplendent stranger declares his love; and the maiden replies: “If you love me, take and eat this basket of grass-seed pinole.” He touches the basket, and its contents vanish. Thereupon the girl swoons. When she returns to consciousness, behold! she has given birth to a son. The Red Cloud tells her: “You love me now; that is my boy, but he is not of this world.… He shall be greater than all men; he shall have power over all, and not fear any that live. Therefore shall his name be Oan-koi-tu-peh (the Invincible). Whenever you see him, think of me. This boy has no life apart from me; he is myself.”[218.1] Compare with this the statement concerning Cuchulainn, one of the epic heroes of Ireland. It will be recollected that he was a new birth of the god Lug. The great epic cycles took final shape after the wars with the Danes in the eleventh century. One of the manuscripts of that period relates that the men of Ulster took counsel about Cuchulainn, because they were troubled and afraid that he would perish early, “so for that reason they wished to give him a wife that he might leave an heir; for they knew that his re-birth would be of himself.”[218.2]
These passages, though related of more than common men, point to a belief shared by the ancient Irish with the ancient Californians, that the son is in some sense identical with his father—a new birth, a new manifestation of the same person. This curious belief finds categorical expression in the great Brahman compilation known as the Laws of Manu. There we are told: “The husband, after conception by his wife, becomes an embryo and is born again of her; for that is the wifehood of a wife, that he is born again by her.”[218.3] Corresponding with this declaration, the ritual prescribes, among other ceremonies when a boy is born, that the husband should address the babe thus: “From limb by limb thou art produced; and of the heart thou art born. Thou indeed art the self (atman) called son; so live a hundred autumns.” In the same words he addresses the boy every time he himself returns from a journey, embracing his head and kissing him thrice.[219.1]
Traces of the notion that a child is neither more nor less than the reappearance of an ancestor are found almost all over the world. It seems to be a general opinion among the Negroes of the western coasts of Africa that the ghostly self of a dead man enters the body of a newborn babe belonging to the same family. In Guinea, and among the Wanika, the resemblance, physical or mental, borne by a child to its father is attributed to this cause. The Yorubas inquire of their family god which of the deceased ancestors has returned, in order to name the child accordingly; and they greet its birth with the words “Thou art come!” as if addressing some one who has returned.[219.2] On the Gold Coast, parents who have lost several children sometimes cast into the bush the body of the infant who has last died. They believe the next born to be the same child returned; and if it have any congenital deformity or defect, that is attributed to injuries received from wild beasts or other evil influences in the jungle.[219.3] Caution, however, is required in dealing with some of these cases, for the subtlety of savage metaphysics is marvellous. An acute observer points out that among the Tshi-speaking peoples of the Gold Coast and the Ewe-speaking tribes of the Slave Coast, a distinction is drawn between the ghostly self that continues the man’s existence after death in the spirit-world, and his kra or ñoli, which is capable of being born again in a new human body. In the eastern Ewe districts and in Dahome the soul is, by either an inconsistency or a subtlety, believed to remain in the land of the dead and to animate some new child of the family at one and the same time; but it never animates an embryo in a strange family.[220.1] Not very different seems to be the opinion of the Khonds of Orissa. Anthropologists have often quoted Macpherson’s description of the divination for determining a child’s name. The priest drops grains of rice into a cup of water, naming with each grain a deceased ancestor. From the movements of the seed in the fluid, and from observations made on the infant’s person, he pronounces which of the progenitors has reappeared in it; and the babe is usually named accordingly. Khond psychology endows every one with four souls. Out of such a company there is no difficulty in arranging that one of them shall be attached to some tribe and perpetually born again into it. This, in fact, is what is believed to happen.[220.2]
In New Zealand the priest, after certain ceremonies, first recited to the child the following stave:
“Wait till I pronounce your name.
What is your name?
Listen to your name,
This is your name——”
Then followed strings of ancestral names, until the babe sneezed. The name being uttered at the moment of the sneeze was the one chosen.[221.1] We are not expressly told that the object of this rite was to identify the child with one of his forefathers. But, as Dr. Tylor remarks, we may always suspect it in such a case; and the verses seem to point to some such purpose. It was difficult to distinguish between gods and ancestors among the Maori,[221.2] as, in truth, it often is, if we may not use a stronger expression, among savage peoples. The worship of the kindred inhabitants of Samoa was totemistic. During the mother’s labour, first the family god of the father, and then that of the mother was invoked. The god being invoked at the instant of birth was looked upon as the child’s special aitu (Maori, atua) or god; and during infancy the child was called and actually named “merda of Tongo” or “of Satiā,” or whatever other deity it might be.[221.3] This would seem to go a step beyond the Maori creed, and to indicate that at one time the child was identified with the totem-god. In the island of Aurora, New Hebrides, where the people are Melanesians, women often speak of a child as the nunu, or echo, of some dead person. Dr. Codrington says: “It is not a notion of metempsychosis, as if the soul of the dead person returned in the newborn child; but it is thought that there is so close a connection that the infant takes the place of the deceased.”[222.1] We may set this explanation beside the statement quoted by Dr. Tylor from Charlevoix that “some North American Indians were observed to set the child in place of the last owner of its name, so that a man would treat as his grandfather a child who might have been his grandson.”[222.2] Whatever may be the fact as regards the Melanesians, it is certain that North American tribes, like the Mengwe and the Thlinkits, believed in the new birth of the dead. Among the latter, if a pregnant woman dreamed of a dead man, it was said that the ghost had taken up its abode in her body; and if a newborn child had the least resemblance to a deceased relative, the latter was believed to have returned, and the child was called by his name.[222.3] Even in Norway, if a pregnant woman dream of one who is dead, the child must be named after him. If the dream be of a man, and a girl be born, the man’s name must be feminised, and vice versâ. If she dream of more than one person, the names of all must be given.[222.4] The last practice perhaps resulted from the uncertainty as to which of the dead who appeared was to be identified with the coming stranger. Returning to America, we find that the Tacullies and Sicamies, tribes allied to the Thlinkits, inquire of the dead if they will return to life or not. The shaman inspects the naked breast of the body, and if satisfied on the point he blows the soul into the air, that it may seek a new body or puts his hands on the head of one of the mourners, thereby conveying the spirit into him, to be embodied in his next offspring. The relation thus favoured, we are told, added the name of the deceased to his own.[223.1] It is said that the Dakotas believed that their medicine-men and women ran their career four times in human shape.[223.2] In the Amazons Valley the Ticunas, and yet further to the south the Bakaïrí and their allied tribes, name a child from one of its forefathers. In Southern India the same practice is followed by the Yenadies;[223.3] and, indeed, it may be said, whatever be its motive, to be a common practice in many parts of the globe. An Esthonian babe is baptized by the name of one of its grandfathers.[223.4] In the Romagna it is usual to give the names of grandfathers, uncles and other relatives, to children, but not the names of relatives who are living, lest their death be accelerated—a vague reminiscence probably of the real reason.[223.5] Elsewhere in Italy the superstition that a baby is a dead relative returned appears to be extant.[224.1] Among the Andaman islanders, “if a woman who has lost a baby be about to become a mother, the name borne by the deceased is bestowed on the fœtus, in the expectation that it will prove to be the same child born again. Should the infant at birth prove to be of the same sex as the one who had died, the identity would be considered sufficiently established.”[224.2] The same belief was current among the people of Old Calabar.[224.3] Huron philosophy posited the existence of two souls in a man. One was changed into a turtle-dove, or went to the village of souls. The other remained attached to the body, never to leave it “unless some one gave birth to it again.” The Hurons, moreover, as we have seen, buried in the road their little children who died, in order that they might secretly enter into the wombs of passing women, and be born again.[224.4] As to the beliefs of the Eskimo there seems a little question. As to their practice of naming children after deceased persons (either relatives or intimate friends) there is no doubt. Dr. Tylor cites from Crantz the assertion that a helpless widow would seek to persuade some father that the soul of a dead child of his had passed into a living child of hers, or vice versâ, thus gaining to herself a new relative and protector. Dr. Rink, on the other hand, considers that the deceased person whose name a child bore was only looked upon as a kind of guardian spirit. His statement, however, that the child when grown up was bound to brave the influences that had caused his namesake’s death—for instance, if the namesake had perished at sea, his successor had all the greater inducement to become a skilful kayaker—points to identity; and so do the stories I have cited from Rink’s collection in previous pages.[225.1] It may be suggested that the discrepancy is to be accounted for by the gradual change in Eskimo ideas under contact with civilised travellers and missionaries.
We have now reviewed a large number of märchen wherein the hero or heroine is said to have suffered by death and new birth transfiguration into a variety of forms, both brute and human. We have, moreover, found the same plot in sagas in both hemispheres. And, advancing to savage theory and its correlative customs, I hope I have made it plain that stories of metamorphosis, whether märchen or sagas, have been founded upon the belief that at death men are not annihilated, but pass into fresh forms, sometimes appearing as plants and trees, sometimes as animals of the lower creation, and sometimes as men and women born again into their own kindred or among strangers. This is a creed held so widely that—though subject, perhaps, to varying stress, according to the degree and direction of the evolving civilisation, or, possibly yet more, to the different capacities and opportunities of travellers who report the characteristics of savage life and thought often far removed from their own—it may yet be regarded as practically universal. I have not attempted to distinguish between Transformation and Transmigration. When a man, either without passing through death and birth, or passing through death only, changes into a wolf or an ant, it is no more than Transformation. But if the metamorphosis be effected by death and growth into a tree, or a fresh birth from brute or human mother, it is obvious that there is more difficulty in affirming identity between the new substance and the old. In some cases, if we may trust our authorities, and if we rightly interpret the tales and ritual and beliefs they report, the savage sets this difficulty at defiance: the proofs of identity overcome it. Oftener, it may be, the identity established is of an inner and more elusive self. For want of a better word we call this kernel of a man his soul, or spirit, both of which words connote to us an immaterial object, with none of the attributes of physical existence. To the savage, however, as to our own forefathers, and to the folk of all civilised countries still, the idea of an incorporeal soul is incomprehensible. He may not be able to see it at all times; he may not be able to handle it when he will: but this kernel, this inner self, of friend or foe, comes to him in dreams; he beholds it in the snake or the toad, the insect or the dove, that haunts the tomb of one who was dear to him, or in the rose-bush or the lily growing upon the grave; or he fetches it back in the shape of a white stone to his beloved child, who has sickened at its absence, and is like to die. Thus it is everywhere in the lower culture conceived as material, though capable of changing its form and appearance without losing its identity. And this identity is the real identity of the man, suffusing and transfusing his entire being. Hence the dividing line between Transformation and Transmigration is frequently so thin and faint. Transmigration as popularly understood (for I am not speaking of the speculations of philosophers, whether Indian or Greek) is a natural and imperceptible development of Transformation. As regards the popular Buddhistic belief of ancient Hindustan I have already shown this from the Játakas; and what is true of that holds good of other popular forms of belief, at all events where Judaism and its daughter-faiths, Christianity and Mohammedanism, have not too deeply penetrated.