A Guide to Mythology

by Helen A. Clarke

“So she lay down and went to sleep with one eye open. Then he quietly rose and cooked the half of the beaver, and taking a key unlocked a box, and took out a little red dwarf and fed him. Replacing the elf, he locked him up again, and lay down to sleep. And the small creature had eaten the whole half beaver. But ere he put him in his box he washed him and combed his hair, which seemed to delight him.

“The next morning, when her husband had gone for the day, the wife sought for the key, and having found it opened the box and called to the little fellow to come out. This he refused to do for a long time, though she promised to wash and comb him. Being at length persuaded, he peeped out, when she pulled him forth. But whenever she touched him her hands became red, though of this she took no heed, thinking she could wash it off at will. But lo! while combing him, there entered a hideous being, an awful devil, who caught the small elf from her and ran away.

“Then she was terribly frightened. And trying to wash her hands, the red stain remained. When her husband returned that night he had no game; when he saw the red stain he knew all that had happened; when he knew what had happened he seized his bow to beat her; when she saw him seize his bow to beat her she ran down to the river and jumped in to escape death at his hands, though it should be by drowning. But as she fell into the water she became a sheldrake duck. And to this day the marks of the red stain are to be seen on her feet and feathers.”

You will observe a very strange custom alluded to in this story, and that is the way in which the hunter is described as capturing the maiden for his wife instead of gently trying to persuade her to be his wife. This shows that it is a very far-back myth, for there are many other stories to prove that savages learned to be much more gentle in their ways toward women even before men became altogether civilized.

How primitive men came to have such peculiar beliefs we cannot say positively. Some people have thought that perhaps their dreams made them think that there was a spirit inside of them separate from their ordinary life, while the sounds and movements in nature, such as the singing of a waterfall, the rustling of leaves, or the sound which stones would give out when knocked together, would seem to the uneducated mind of early mankind, to be signs of life like his own.

Another very early belief is that in magic and sorcery. Primitive man used to imagine that he could make it rain by imitating the thunder, which he did by shaking dried seeds about in a gourd. Magic is really the producing of any desired effect or event by means which are quite outside of the laws of nature. As the primitive savage did not know any thing about the laws of nature, laws which have taken ages for men to discover and all of which are not even yet discovered, he revelled in the invention of means by which he thought he might accomplish the things he would like to do. Sometimes he asked spirits to help him, and if what he wanted to do was evil, he would ask aid of evil spirits. There are countless myths in which magic plays a part, examples of which you will see as you read the stories given in the following chapters.

Since in the time most remote men depended upon animals almost entirely for their food, it is probable that animals were the objects that made the most vivid impressions on them, and, therefore, that stories of animals belong to this most primitive stage.

At this time, too, it is likely that the worship of animals arose, for almost every tribe of savages had a sacred animal which, except in rare instances, it was never allowed to kill and from which it often imagined itself descended.

After many ages, mankind began to till the ground, and to raise grain and vegetables, then plants and trees were more especially observed by them, and the mythical stories have, in consequence, more about plants and trees in them; and, as they had sacred animals, they had also sacred trees or plants, and worshipped them or imagined themselves descended from them.

Then as men progressed in their powers of observation they saw natural phenomena more and more. The succession of night and day impressed itself upon them, they took note of the motions of the sun, the moon and the stars, clouds caught their attention, storms filled them with awe and fear as the lightning flashed and the thunder roared and rattled in its might. The wind laughed in summer breezes or howled in wintry blasts and they noticed it, and as soon as their attention was fully aroused to all these wonders of nature, they began to think of them, as not only endowed with powers like their own, but as living beings. First, they frequently personified nature as animals, then as human beings, and as they had worshipped sacred animals and sacred plants and sacred trees, now they worshipped these gods of nature; and as they invented tales about the animals and the trees, so they invented tales about these gods of nature. As one would expect, the stories about animals and trees would often be mingled with the new stories of the nature gods, and sometimes changed so that one would hardly recognize them. And then, again, a story told about a nature god in one part of the world would, on account of the early wanderings of the human race from one land to another, be added as an ornament to a story told in another part of the world, like the ornaments on the Christmas trees in the castle.