Myth and Science / An Essay

by Tito Vignoli

The transmigration of the human soul was first believed to take place in the body of a new-born child, since at the moment of death the soul of the dying person entered into the f[oe]tus. The Algonquins buried the corpses of their children by the wayside, so that their souls might easily enter into the bodies of the pregnant women who passed that way. Some of the North American tribes believed that the mother saw in a dream the dead relation who was to imprint his likeness on her unborn child. At Calabar, when the mother who has lost a child gives birth to another, she believes that the dead child is restored to her. The natives of New Guinea believe that a son who greatly resembles his dead father has inherited his soul. Among the Yorubas the new-born child is greeted with the words: "Thou hast returned at last!" The same ideas prevail among the Lapps and Tartars, as well as among the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. Among the aborigines of Australia the belief is widely diffused that those who die as black return as white men.

Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise distinction between man and brutes, so that, as Tylor observes, they readily accept the belief of the transmigration of the human soul into an animal, and then into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in the incarnation of the true fetish. Among some of the North American tribes the spirits of the dead are supposed to pass into bears. An Eskimo widow refused to eat seal's flesh because she supposed that her husband's soul had migrated into that animal. Others have imagined that the souls of the dead passed into birds, beetles, and other insects, according to their social rank when still alive. Some African tribes believe that the dead migrate into certain species of apes.

By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently show more fully, the transition was easy to the incarnation of a spirit, whether that of a man or of some other being, into any object whatever, which was thereby invested with beneficent or malignant power. It is easy to show that in this second stage of fetishism, which some have believed to be the primitive form of myth, there would be no further progress in the mythical elaboration of spirits, their mode of life, their influence and possible transmigrations. This elaboration is indeed a product of the mythical faculty, but in a rational order; it is a logical process, mythical in substance, but purely reflective in form. For which reason it was impossible for animals to attain to this stage.

Some peoples remained in this phase of belief, while others advanced to the ulterior and polytheistic form. This may also be divided into two classes; those who classify and ultimately reduce fetishes into a more general conception, and those whose conception takes an anthropomorphic form. Let us examine the genesis of both classes.

When the popular belief in spirits had free development, the number of spirits and powers was countless, as many examples show. To give a single instance—the Australians hold that there is an innumerable multitude of spirits; the heavens, the earth, every nook, grove, bush, spring, crag, and stone are peopled with them. In the same way, some American tribes suppose the visible and invisible world to be filled with good and evil spirits; so do the Khonds, the Negroes of New Guinea, and, as Castren tells us, the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe. Consequently, fetishes, which are the incarnation of these spirits in some object, animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, are innumerable, since primitive man and modern savages have created such fetishes, either at their own pleasure or with the aid of their priests, magicians, and sorcerers.

Man's co-ordinating faculty, in those races which are capable of progressive evolution, does not stop short at this inorganic disintegration of things; he begins a process of classification and, at the same time, of reduction, by which the numerous fetishes are, by their natural points of likeness and unlikeness in character and form, reduced to types and classes, which, as we have already shown, comprise in themselves the qualities of all the particular objects of the same species which are diffused throughout nature.

By this spontaneous process of human thought, due to the innate power of reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise simplification. Let us try to trace in this historic fact the classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism succeeds to irregular and anarchical fetishism.

In the Samoan islands, a local god is wont to appear in the form of an owl, and the accidental discovery of a dead owl would be deplored, and its body would be buried with solemn rites. The death of this particular bird does not, however, imply the death of the god himself, since the people believe him to be incarnated in the whole species. In this fact we see that a special fetish is developed into a specific form; thus a permanent type is evolved from special appearances.

Acosta has handed down to us another belief of the comparatively civilized Peruvians, which recalls the primitive genesis of their mythical ideas. He says that the shepherds used to adore various stars, to which they assigned the names of animals; stars which protected men against the respective animals after whom they were called. They held the general belief that all animals whatever had a representative in heaven, which watched over their reproduction, and of which they were, so to speak, the essence. This affords another example of the more general extension and classification, and, at the same time, of the reduction of the original multitude of fetishes.

Some of the North American Indians asserted that every species of animal had an elder brother, who was the origin of all the individuals of the species. They said, for example, that the beaver, which was the elder brother of this species of rodents, was as large as one of their cabins. Others supposed that all kinds of animals had their type in the world of souls, a manitu, which kept guard over them. Ralston, in his "Songs of the Russian People," tells us that Buyan, the island paradise of Russian mythology, contains a serpent older than all others, a larger raven, a finer queen bee, and so of all other animals. Morgan, in his work upon the Iroquois, observes that they believe in a spirit or god of every species of trees and plants.