Folklore as an Historical Science

by George Laurence Gomme

These points illustrate the unsatisfactory attitude of science and religion to myth. There is still to notice the unsatisfactory attitude of the folklorist. Wrong interpretation of special classes of myth is, of course, to be anticipated in the commencement of a great study such as folklore; but there are also wrong interpretations of the fundamental basis of myth. Thus even Mr. Frazer, with all his vast research into savage thought and action, doubts the possession of good logical faculty by mankind. If mankind, he says, had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.[191] But surely we cannot doubt man's logical powers. They have been too strong for his facts. He has applied mercilessly all the powers of his logical faculties upon isolated observations of phenomena, and it is this limited application which has produced the folly and crime. I venture to think that civilised man shares with the savage of to-day, and with the primitive ancestors of all mankind, the charge of applying perfectly good logic to an insufficiency of facts, and producing therefrom fresh chapters of folly and crime.

If myth is correctly defined as primitive science, as I have ventured to suggest, it is important to know how it assumes a place among the traditions of a people. Primitive science was also primitive belief. If it accounted for the origin of mankind, of the sun, moon, and stars, of the earth and the trees, it accounted for them as creations of a higher power than man, or, at all events, of a great and specially endowed man, and higher powers than man were of the unknown realm. The unknown was the awful. Primitive science and primitive belief were therefore on one and the same plane.[192] They were subjects to be treated with reverence and with awe. The story into which the myth was so frequently woven is not a story to those who believe in the truth of the myth. It assumes the personal shape, because the personal is the only machinery by which primitive man is capable of expressing himself. It was held only by tradition, because tradition was the only means of transmitting it, and it was of a sacred character, because sacred things and beliefs were the only forces which influenced primitive thought. When it was repeated to new generations of learners, it was not a case of story-telling—it was a matter of the profoundest importance. Everywhere among the lowest savagery we find the secrets of the group kept from all but the initiated, and these secrets are the traditions which have become sacred, traditions expressed sometimes in ceremonial, sometimes in rites, sometimes in narratives. Thus the mythological and religious knowledge of the Bushmen is imparted in dances, and when a man is ignorant of some myth, he will say, "I do not dance that dance," meaning that he does not belong to the group which preserves that particular sacred chapter.[193] The Ashantees have an interesting creation myth which is stated to be the foundation of all their religious opinions.[194] Mr. Howitt, in his important chapter on "Beliefs and Burial Practices,"[195] seems to me to exactly interpret the savage mind. The first thing he notes is the belief—a belief that "the earth is flat, surmounted by the solid vault of the sky," that "there is water all round the flat earth," that the sun is a woman, and that the moon was once a man who lived on earth, and so on. Then, secondly, he notes the manner in which these beliefs are translated to and held by the people, the myth in point of fact—unfortunately, Mr. Howitt calls it a legend—wherein it is perfectly obvious that the Australian is interpreting the facts of nature in the only language known to him to be applicable, namely, that of his own personality. Messrs. Spencer and Gillen produce much the same kind of evidence,[196] and describe a ceremony among the northern tribes connected with the myth of the sun, which ends in a newly initiated youth being brought up, "shown the decorations, and had everything explained to him."[197] Among the central tribes the same authorities describe minutely the initiation ceremonies, during which the initiate boy "is instructed for the first time in any of the sacred matters referring to totems, and it is by means of the performances which are concerned with certain animals, or rather, apparently with the animals, but in reality with Alcheringa individuals who were the direct transformations of such animals, that the traditions dealing with this subject, which is of the greatest importance in the eyes of the natives, are firmly impressed upon the mind of the novice, to whom everything which he sees and hears is new and surrounded with an air of mystery."[198] Sir George Grey, speaking of the traditions of the Maori which he collected, says his reader will be in "the position of one who listens to a heathen and savage high priest, explaining to him in his own words and in his own energetic manner, the traditions in which he earnestly believes, and unfolding the religious opinions upon which the faith and hopes of his race rest."[199] This "school of mythology and history," as it is significantly termed in John White's Ancient History of the Maori, was "Whare-Kura, the sacred school in which the sons of high priests were taught our mythology and history," and it "stood facing the east in the precincts of the sacred place of Mua." The school was opened by the priests in the autumn, and continued from sunset to midnight every night for four or five months in succession. The chief priest sat next to the door. It was his duty to commence the proceedings by repeating a portion of history; the other priests followed in succession, according to rank. On the south side sat the old and most accomplished priests, "whose duty it was to insist on a critical and verbatim rehearsal of all the ancient lore."[200] The American-Indian account, by the Iroquois, of how myths were told to an ancient chief and an assembly of the people on a circular open space in a deep forest, wherein was a large wheel-shaped stone, from beneath which came a voice which told the tale of the former world, and how the first people became what they are at present,[201] is in exact accord with this evidence. The priestly novice among the Indians of British Guiana is taught the traditions of the tribe, while the medicine man of the Bororó in Brazil has to learn certain ritual songs and the languages of birds, beasts, and trees.[202]

I do not want to press the point too far, because evidence is not easy to get on account of the incomplete fashion in which it has been collected and presented to the student. The records of native life are divided off into chapters arranged, not on the basis of native ideas, but on the basis of civilised ideas, and from this cause we get myth and belief in different chapters as if they had no connection with each other; we get myths treated as if they were but the fancy-begotten amusements of the individual, instead of the serious ideas of the collective people about the elements of nature to which they have directed their attention. Mr. J. A. Farrer comes practically to this correct conclusion,[203] while Mr. Jevons seems to me to have arrived at the same result in spite of some false intermediate steps, due to his failure to discriminate between myth and mythology.[204] Failures of this kind are of almost infinite loss to scientific research. They stop the results which might flow from the stages correctly reached, and hide the full significance which arises from the fact that man's aspirations are always so much in excess of his accomplished acts. Poetry, philosophy, prayer, worship, are all short of the ideal; and the question may surely arise whether the actual accomplishments of man in civilisation, as compared with those of man in savagery, afford any sort of indication of the distance between man's accomplishment and his aspiration at any age. If man has never travelled at one moment of time, or at one definite period of life, all this distance in thought, it may still be possible to use this distance between savage and cultured accomplishment as a standard of measurement between accomplishment and ideal, wherever the material for such a purpose is available. If folklorists will keep such a possibility in mind, whenever they are called upon to investigate myth, it will at all events save them from proceeding upon lines which cannot lead to progress in the investigation of human history.

The primitive myth does not include all that properly comes within the definition of myth. There must be included the myth formed to explain a rite or ceremony, which originating in most ancient times has been kept up at the instance of a particular religion or cult, but the meaning and intent of which has been forgotten amidst the progress of a later civilisation. Pausanias is the great storehouse of such myths as this, and Mr. Lang has, more than any other scholar, examined and explained the process which has gone on.

There is also included in this secondary class of myth, the myths upon which are founded the great systems of mythology. The Hindu mythology, in spite of all that has been done to place it on the pedestal of primitive original thought, is definitely relegated to the secondary position by its best exponents. The Vedic religion is tribal in form, and in the pre-mythological stage.[205] In the Rámáyaná and Mahábhárata, on the contrary, "we trace unequivocal indications of a departure from the elemental worship of the Vedas, and the origin or elaboration of legends which form the great body of the mythological religion of the Hindus."[206] The pre-mythological and the mythological stages of Hindu religion, therefore, are both discoverable from the traditional literature which has descended from both ages, and this fact is important in the classification of the various phases of tradition. When once it is admitted that the beginnings of mythology are to be traced in one section of the people who are supposed to derive a common system of mythology from a common home, future research will hesitate to interpret, as Kuhn and Max Müller and their school have done, the traditions of Celts, Teutons, and Scandinavians as the detritus of ancient mythologies instead of the beginnings of what, under favourable conditions, might have grown into mythologies. Mythological tradition is essentially a secondary not a primary stage. This fact is overlooked by many authorities, and I have noted some of the unfortunate results. It is not overlooked by those who study the principles of their subject as well as the details. Thus, as Robertson-Smith has so well explained, "mythology was no essential part of ancient religion, for it had no sacred sanction and no binding force on the worshippers.... Belief in a certain series of myths was neither obligatory as a part of true religion, nor was it supposed that by believing a man acquired religious merit and conciliated the favour of the gods. What was obligatory or meritorious was the exact performance of certain sacred acts prescribed by religious tradition. This being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths."[207] This is exactly the position, and all that I have advanced for the purpose of aiming at a classification of the various kinds of tradition is in accord with this view.

All that I am anxious to prove, all that it is possible to prove, from these considerations of the position occupied by myth, is that myths constitute a part of the serious life of the people. They belong to the men and women, perhaps some of them to the men only and others to the women only, but essentially to the life of the people.

I do not think that even Mr. Hartland in his special study of the subject has quite understood this. He begins at a later period in the history of tradition, the period of story-telling proper, when myths have become folk-tales,[208] and he treats this period as the earliest instead of the secondary stage of myth. In this stage something has happened to push myth back from the centre of the people's life to a lesser position—a new religious influence, a new civilisation, a new home, any one of the many influences, or any combination of influences, which have affected peoples and sent them along the paths of evolution and progress.

It is in this way that we come upon the folk-tale. The folk-tale is secondary to the myth. It is the primitive myth dislodged from its primitive place. It has become a part of the life of the people, independently of its primary form and object and in a different sense. The mythic or historic fact has been obscured, or has been displaced from the life of the people. But the myth lives on through the affections of the people for the traditions of their older life. They love to tell the story which their ancestors revered as myth even though it has lost its oldest and most impressive significance. The artistic setting of it, born of the years through which it has lived, fashioned by the minds which have handed it down and embellished it through the generations, has helped its life. It has become the fairy tale or the nursery tale. It is told to grown-up people, not as belief but as what was once believed; it is told to children, not to men; to lovers of romance, not to worshippers of the unknown; it is told by mothers and nurses, not by philosophers or priestesses; in the gathering ground of home life, or in the nursery, not in the hushed sanctity of a great wonder.[209]

The influence of changing conditions upon the position of mythic tradition is well illustrated by Dr. Rivers in his account of the Todas. This people, he says, "are rapidly forgetting their folk-tales and the legends of their gods [that is, their myths], while their ceremonial remains to a large extent intact and seems likely to continue so for some time." Dr. Rivers attributes this to the effect of intercourse with other people. This intercourse has had no missionary results and has not therefore affected their religious rites and ceremonies, but has shown itself largely in the form of loss of interest in the stories of the past.[210] In other words, and in accordance with the definitions I am suggesting, the primitive myths of the Todas have definitely assumed a secondary position as folk-tale, and not a strong position at that, while religion has clung to rite and formula.

Primitive myth dislodged in this fashion is sometimes preserved in a special manner and for religious purposes in its ancient setting as a belief, or as a tradition belonging to sacred places and appertaining to sacred things. This is what has happened to the Genesis myth of the Hebrews; it has also happened to some of the sacred myths of the Hindus, and perhaps to some of the sacred myths of the Greeks. In this position the myth may even be reduced to writing, and where this happens all the sacredness appertaining to tradition is transferred to the written instrument.