Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

For although it is difficult to lay down the boundaries between the language of metaphor and the language of fact, inasmuch as what is faith to one man is often but fancy to another, there is reason to believe that savages really do very often confuse celestial with terrestrial phenomena, that, for instance, the Zulus, when they speak of the stars as the children of the sky and of the sun as their father, are expressing rather a real belief than a poetical fancy, and that the conception of the sun and moon as physically related is an actual belief quite as much as a merely figurative explanation. If this be true, a large part of mythology must be regarded not as a poetical explanation of things, suggested by the grammatical form of words or by roots that lend similar names to the most diverse conceptions, but as the direct effect of primitive thought in its application to the phenomena of nature. It is more likely that the early thoughts of men should have framed their language than that the form of their language should have preceded their form of thought. And if it be shown (by those who hold that the personification of impersonal things is consequent on the grammatical structure of a language) that the Kafirs and other tribes of South Africa, whose language does not denote sex, are almost destitute of myths and fables, whilst tribes who employ a sex-denoting language have many,[385] it is noticeable that such personification has been shown to exist among the natives of Australia, between the different dialects of whose language it is said to have been one of the points of resemblance, that they recognised no distinctions of gender.[386]

A story of the Ottawa Indians (by internal evidence posterior in date to their acquaintance with guns and ships) may be taken as a sample of savage traditions, which prove that the convertibility of mankind with sun, moon, or stars, is as natural a belief to a savage, as that his next-door neighbour may turn at pleasure into a wolf or a snake. Six young men finding themselves on a hill-top in close proximity to the sun, resolved to travel to it. Two of them finally reached a beautiful plain, lighted by the moon, which, as they advanced, appeared as an aged woman with a white face, who spoke to them and promised to conduct them to her brother, then absent on his daily course through the sky. This woman ‘they knew from her first appearance’ to be the moon. When she introduced them to her brother, ‘the sun motioned them with his hand to follow him,’ and they accompanied him with some difficulty till they were restored safe and sound to the earth.[387] So Sir G. Grey, collecting native legends concerning a cave in Australia, found that the only point of agreement was ‘that originally the moon who was a man had lived there.’[388]

But, except on the assumption that savages are idiots, it is impossible that such legends should not only obtain currency, but enjoy the vitality of traditions, unless they conform to certain canons of belief, unless they contain nothing inherently incredible. A fairy tale pleases a child, not because it is known to be impossible, but because it carries the mind further afield than actual experience does into the realms of the possible; and a tale understood to be impossible would be as insipid to a savage as it would be to a child. Schoolcraft, in reference to Indian popular tales, speaks of the ‘belief of the narrators and listeners in every wild and improbable thing told;’ and says, ‘Nothing is too capacious for Indian belief.’[389] If, as their stories abundantly show, they feel no difficulty in conceiving the instantaneous transformation of men not merely into something living, but into stones or stumps, the fact ceases to be strange, that in Indian faith ‘many of the planets are transformed adventurers.’[390] What, then, more natural than that all over the world the deeds of great tribesmen should be transferred to the skies, and, under the action of uniform laws of fancy, should in time become so overgrown with fiction as to pass into the domain of the purest mythology, till at last they appear as mere figurative expressions of the daily life of nature, of the struggle between the day and the night, of the dispersion of the clouds by the sun?

The condition of things which makes such conceptions of the heavens the natural outcome of primitive speculation may perhaps, to a certain extent, be recovered by observation of the laws conditioning the actually existent thoughts of the savage world.

The first entrance into Wonderland lies through Dreamland. Schoolcraft’s testimony that ‘a dream or a fact is alike potent in the Indian mind’ accords with much other evidence to the effect that, with savages, the sensations of the sleeping or waking life are equally real or but vaguely distinguished. A native of Zululand will leave his work and travel to his home, perhaps a hundred miles away, to test the truth of a dream,[391] and so great is the importance the Zulus attach to such monitions, that ‘he who dreams is the great man of the village;’ whilst the gift to them of ‘sight by night in dreams’ is ascribed to their first ancestor, the great Unkulunkulu.[392] But how far surpassing even the normal experiences of sleep must be the dreams of men in the hunting or nomad state, the law of whose lives is either a want or an excess of food! What richer fund for story-material can be imagined than the dreams of a savage, or what more likely to introduce him to the mysteries of romance than recollections of those sudden transformations or those weird images, which have haunted the repose of his slumbering hours? And into what strange lands of beauty and plenty, into what secrets of the skies, would not the flights of his sleep give him an insight! In all fairy tales and all mythology a remarkable conformity to the deranged ideas of sleep does thus occur; and especially do the stories of the lower races, as for instance those of Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ read far more like the recollections of bad dreams than like the worn ideas of a once pure religion, or of a poetical interpretation of nature. The most beautiful of the Indian legends, that of the origin of Indian corn, was in native tradition actually referred to a dream, and to a dream purposely resorted to, to gain a clearer insight into the mysteries of nature.[393] And as dreams do but deal with the incidents of the waking life, exaggerating them and contorting them, but never passing beyond them, may not the somewhat uniform incidents of savage life, whether of hunting, fishing, fighting, or travelling, offer some explanation of that general similarity, which is so conspicuous an element in the comparative mythology or the fairy-lore of the world?

Then the fact that the dead reappear in dreams at that season of the night in which also the stars are seen, would tend to confirm the idea of some community of nature between the dead and the stars, such community as is indeed not unfrequently found, as where the Aurora Borealis or the Milky Way are identified with the souls of the departed. So, too, a Californian tribe is mentioned as having believed that chiefs and medicine-men became heavenly bodies after their death,[394] and even Tasmanians could point to the stars they would go to at death.[395]

But there is another reason which would still further create a mental confusion between the deeds of a mortal on earth and the motions of some luminary in heaven, and that is the language of adulation, which, from ascribing the possession of the sky to a chief, in order to gratify him, becomes imperceptibly the language of belief. It is common for the Zulus to say of a chief, ‘That man is the owner of heaven and everything is his,’ and a native once expressed his gratitude to a missionary by pointing to the heaven and saying, ‘Sir, the sun is yours.’ ‘It does not suffice them to honour a great man unless they place the heaven on his shoulders; they do not believe what they say, they merely wish to ascribe all greatness to him.’ If when a chief goes to war the sky becomes overcast, they say, ‘The heaven of the chief feels that the chief is suffering.’ Nor was any chief known to deprecate the use of such language; he ‘expected to have it said always that the heaven was his.’[396]

Obviously, however, there is no fast line between the language of flattery and the language of fact. From the Tahitians, who would speak of their kings’ houses as the clouds of heaven, or the Kafirs of Ethiopia, who called their kings lords of the sun and moon, it is easy to trace the progress of thought which actually led the latter people to pray to their kings for rain, fine weather, or the cessation of storms.[397] The Zulus, like many other savages, think of the sky as at no great distance from the earth, and thus as the roof of their king’s palace in the same way that the earth is its floor. ‘Utshaka claimed to be king of heaven as well as earth, and ordered the rain-doctors to be killed, because in assuming power to control the weather they were interfering with his royal prerogative.’[398] But if such confusion between royalty and divinity can exist in the savage mind whilst the king is on earth, how natural is it that a man, associated for so long in his lifetime with power over the elements, should, after his removal from earth and from sight, become still more mixed up with elemental forces, or perhaps even localised in some point of space! The word Zulu actually means the Heavens, and in Zululand King of the Zulus means king of the heavens,[399] so that when the king is drawn in his waggon to the centre of the kraal, it is not surprising that, among the other acclamations, such as ‘Lion, King of the World,’ with which his creeping subjects salute him, they should actually salute him as Zulu, Heaven.[400] It can only be from the use of such language that among the Zulus ‘rain, storm, sunshine, earthquakes, and all else which we ascribe to natural causes are brought about or retarded by various people to whom this power is ascribed. Every rain that comes is spoken of as belonging to somebody, and in a drought they say that the owners of rain are at variance among themselves.’[401]

That in aftertime, from these modes of thinking and speaking, the attributes of a Zulu or Tahitian chief might become those of a heaven-supporter, such as Atlas, or of a cloud-gatherer, such as Zeus, or that, according as his body was consigned to the earth or the sea, such a chief might become the earth-shaker or the ocean-ruler, is not only what might be expected à priori, but what is to some extent justified by facts. In South Africa the word which the missionaries have adopted for both Hottentots and Kafirs as the name for the Deity, from its being the nearest approach to the Christian conception, is believed to be derived from two words signifying Wounded Knee, a term applied generations back to a Hottentot sorcerer of great fame and skill, who happened to have sustained some injury to his knees. ‘Having been held in high repute for extraordinary powers during life, he (Utixo) continued to be invoked even after death as one who could still relieve and protect; and hence in process of time he became nearest to their first conceptions of God.’[402] And the legend of Mannan Mac Lear, mythical first inhabitant and first legislator of the Isle of Man, discloses a germ of similar origin underlying the myth of a culture-hero, as his story preserved in the following lines will show:

‘This merchant Manxman of the solemn smile,