Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

VIII.
THE FAIRY-LORE OF SAVAGES.

A comparison of some of the fancies of the rudest known tribes of the earth concerning the nature of the sun, the moon, and the stars, proves abundantly not only that the demand for a reason for things is a principle operative in every stage of human development, but that the primitive explanation of things is sought in the occurrences of daily experience and given in terms and figures originally applied to terrestrial objects. From a philosophy of nature of so rude a type and so humble an origin spring many of those marvellous traditions, which in after times rank as the mythology, or perhaps serve as the religion, of the people among whom they had birth.

To begin with some of the astro-mythological ideas of the Australians. Mr. Stanbridge mentions the astonishment with which, as he sat by his camp fire, he listened for the first time to the remarks of two Australian natives as they pointed to the beautiful constellations of Castor and Pollux, of the Pleiades and Orion. These men belonged to a race who had ‘the reputation of being lowest in the scale of mankind,’ who were ‘cannibals of the lowest description,’ and ‘who had no name for numerals above two;’ yet they could explain the wanderings of the moon, by the story that, being once discovered trying to persuade the wife of a certain star in Canis Major to elope with him, he was beaten and put to flight by the angry husband. As so frequently elsewhere, most of the stars were bound by the ties of human relationship, being wives, brothers, sisters, or mothers to one another. The stars in the belt of Orion were believed to be a group of young men dancing, whilst the Pleiades were girls who played to them as they danced. Two large stars in the fore legs of Centaurus were two brave brothers who speared Tchingal to death, and the east stars of Crux were the points of the spears that pierced his body.[357]

Few tribes of known savages appear to be without conceptions of a similar nature. The Tasmanians, according to Bonwick, were no exception to the connection of theology with astronomy. To them Capella was a kangaroo pursued by Castor and Pollux, whose smoke as it was roasted might be seen till the autumn. The Pleiades were maidens who courted the kangaroo hunters of Orion and dug up roots for their suppers. Two other stars were two black men who of old appeared suddenly on a hill and threw fire down to earth for the use of its inhabitants; whilst two other luminaries were two women whom a sting-ray had killed as they dived for cray-fish, but whom these same fire-bringers restored to life, by placing stinging ants on their breasts; then escorting them to heaven, after they had first killed the sting-ray.[358]

Bushman star-lore is framed in exactly the same way, the planets of distant solar systems sinking into the insignificance of daily African surroundings. What is the moon but a man who, having incurred the wrath of the sun, is pierced by his knife till he is nearly destroyed, and who, having implored mercy, grows from the small piece left him, till he is again large enough for the stabbing process to recommence? What is the Milky Way but some wood ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by a girl, that her people might be able to see their way home at night? Other stars are reduced to mortal origin, or identified with certain lions, tortoises, or clouds, that have place in Bushman mythology; nor does it lie beyond their limits of belief that the sun should once have been seen sitting by the wayside as he travelled on earth, and that the jackal’s back is black to this day because he carried that burning substance on his back.[359] This sun they believe was once a mortal on earth who radiated light from his body, but only for a short space round his house; till some children were sent to throw him as he slept into the sky, whence he has ever since shone over the earth.[360] These children belonged to an earlier race of Bushmen; and it is an odd coincidence that in Victoria as in South Africa the belief about the sun is associated with the tradition of a race that preceded both Bushmen and Australians in their present homes. In the Australian creed, the earth lay in darkness, till one of the former race threw an emu’s egg into space, where it became the sun. That former race was translated in various forms to the heavens, where they made all the celestial bodies, and where they continue to cause all the good and evil that happens on earth. Such traditions may point to a fact; for both Australians and Bushmen may be degenerate from a better social type than they now present; but the fact that, even if degenerate, they should preserve such tales and fictions, makes it not inconceivable that such tales should arise, as spontaneous products of the mind, among tribes that seem neither to have lapsed from a higher condition, nor ever to have emerged from their primeval state of barbarism.

Of the Esquimaux, Egede observes that ‘their notion about the stars is that some of them have been men and others different sorts of animals or fishes.’[361] Here two stars are two persons at a singing combat, or two rival women taking each other by the hair; those other three are certain Greenlanders who, when once out seal-catching, failed to find their way home again and were taken to heaven. It is true such fancies, taken primarily from Cranz, must be received with the reservation that he makes, namely, that they were only harboured by the weaker heads of Greenland, and that the natives had art enough to play off on the Europeans quite as marvellous stories as any they received.[362] But the possible reality of such belief is vouched for by other testimony from all parts of the globe, of which two instances, taken from the Hervey Islanders and the Thlinkeet Indians, will suffice to illustrate the general character. According to the former, a twin boy and girl were badly treated by their mother; so they left their home and leapt into the sky, whither they were also followed by their parents, and where all four may still be seen shining; ‘brother and dearly-loved sister, still linked together, pursue their never-ceasing flight, resolved never again to meet their justly-enraged parents.’[363] The Thlinkeet Indians ascribe to a being called Yehl the liberation of the world from its pristine darkness; for, amid the many conflicting stories told of him, it is agreed that he it was who obtained light for men at a time when ‘sun, moon, and stars were kept by a rich chief in separate boxes which he allowed no one to touch.’ Yehl, having become grandson to this chief, cried one day so much for these boxes that his grandfather let him have one. ‘He opened it, and lo! there were stars in the sky.’ The grandparent was next cheated out of the moon in the same way; but to get the sunbox Yehl had to refuse food and become really ill, and then its owner only parted with it on condition that it should not be opened. The prohibition, however, was unheeded. Yehl turned into a raven, flew off with the box, and blessed mankind with the light of the sun.[364]

From these samples of the fairy tales of savages, it is clear that, in addition to the myths which arise from forgotten etymologies, there are many others which are not formed at all by this process of gradual forgetfulness, but spring directly from the use of the intellect and the imagination, in obedience to the impulse to find a reason for everything. To observe peculiarities in nature is the beginning of science; to account for them in any way is science itself, true or false. The science of savages is not limited to the skies, but is directed to everything that calls for notice on earth; nor in the stories invented by them to answer the various problems of existence, are they a whit behind the traditions of European folk-lore on similar subjects, their explanations of natural peculiarities disclosing quite as vivid imaginative powers as the stories of the white race concerning birds or beasts.

Let us take, for instance, as a parallel to the German reason for the owl flying in solitude by night (namely, that when set to watch the wren, imprisoned in a mousehole, he fell asleep, and was so ashamed at letting him thus escape that he has never since dared show himself by day), the story of the rude Ahts, made to account for the melancholy note of the loon as it is heard flying about the wild lakes of Vancouver’s Island; and as a good instance of the resemblance in construction of plot often found in very distant regions, let us place side by side with it a story of the Basutos in the south of Africa:—

THE AHT STORY.

Two fishermen went one day in two canoes to catch halibut. But while one of them caught many, the other caught none. So the latter, angered by the taunts of his more fortunate but physically weaker companion, bethought himself how he might take all his fish from him by force, and cause him to return home fishless and ashamed. Suddenly, whilst his friend was pulling up a fish, he knocked him on the head with the wooden club he used for killing halibut, and, to prevent the tale ever being told, cut out his companion’s tongue, and took the fish home to his own wife. When the tongueless man arrived at the village, and his friends came to enquire of his sport, he could only answer by a noise resembling the note of the loon. ‘The great spirit, Quawteaht, was so angry at all this, that he changed the injured Indian into a loon, and the other into a crow; and the loon’s plaintive cry now is the voice of the fisherman trying to make himself understood.’[365]