MYTH AND EARLY SCIENCE
Enough has been said to illustrate the existence of the savage element in primitive myth. Not only do later myths account for the religious element in the more primitive examples, but they explain, or attempt to explain, primitive scientific notions as well.[18]
The desire to know the 'reason why' early creates a thirst for knowledge, an intellectual appetite. "When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it."[19] The character of most primitive myths amply justifies this statement. They are mostly explanations of intellectual difficulties, answers to such questions as, What is the origin of or reason for this or that phenomenon or custom? How came the world and man to be formed as they are? In what manner were the heavenly bodies so placed and directed in their courses? Why is the lily white, the robin's breast splashed with red? How came into force this sacrificial custom, this especial ritualistic attitude, the detail of this rite? The early replies to these questions partake not only of the nature of myth, but of science—primitive science, but science nevertheless—for one of the first functions of science is to enlighten man concerning the nature of the objects and forces by which he finds himself surrounded, and their causes and effects. These replies are none the less scientific because they take the shape of stones. Their very existence proves that the above questions, to clear up which they were invented, were asked. They cannot be accounted for without the previous existence of these questions. Mythology is the savage's science, his manner of explaining the universe in which he lives and moves. Says Lang: "They frame their stories generally in harmony with their general theory of things, by what may be called 'savage metaphysics.'" Of course they did not think on the lines of a well-informed modern scholar. Müller remarks in an illuminating passage:
"Early man not only did not think as we think, but did not think as we suppose he ought to have thought."
One of the chief differences between the outlook of the primitive savage and that of civilized man is the great extension in the mind of the former of the theory of personality, an outlook we have already called 'animism,' Everything possesses a 'soul,' or at any rate will-power, in the judgment of the savage. But not only are sun, sky, river, lightning, beast, tree, persons among primitive or backward peoples; they are savage persons.
ANIMISM: A FOSSIL FAITH
Research and travel combine to prove that earliest man and the lowest savages cannot be found without myths, which, as we have seen, are both religion and science. The first recognized stage in man's mental experience is animism, so that the earliest myths must have been 'animistic.'[20] Roughly, animism is the belief that everything has a soul or at least a personality, but no race has yet been discovered possessing purely animistic beliefs. Even the lowest races we know have developed these considerably, and so we are only acquainted with animism in its pure form theoretically,[21] as a phase of religious experience through which man must at one time have passed. It is, in fact, a fossil faith. But just as fossil animals and plants have their living representatives to-day, so do ideas and conceptions representing this petrified form of religion and science still flourish in our present-day superstitions and our present-day faiths.
Animistic myths naturally show primitive ideas regarding the soul. Animism will be dealt with more fully hereafter, but in this introductory sketch we will cite one or two examples of animistic myth to illustrate what was, so far as we know, the earliest type of myth. Stories are found telling of journeys to the spirit land, of talking animals, of men metamorphosed into animals and trees, and these are all animistic or originate in animistic belief.[22] Modern folk-tales containing such stories possess a very great antiquity, or are merely very old myths partly obscured by a veneer of modernity. Spirit stories which have obviously a primitive setting or atmosphere are almost certainly animistic. Thus tales which describe the soul as a bird or a bee, flitting about when the body is asleep, are either direct relics of an animistic age, or have been inspired by earlier animistic stories handed down from that age. The tales of spirit journeys to the Otherworld, the provision of implements, weapons, shoes, and so forth, placed in the grave to assist the soul in its progress to the Land of Shadows, invariably point to an animistic stage of belief—the belief in a separable 'soul,' in an entity entirely different and apart from the 'tenement of clay' that has perished.
PRE-ANIMISTIC RELIGION