Chapter V: Part II (3)

When we turn to the great Aryan epics, the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_; the _Volsungs_; the _Nibelungs_; _King Arthur and his Round Table_; the _Ramâyanâ_ and the _Mahâ Bhâratâ_; the _Shah Nameh_, and so forth, we find similarities of incident and episode which point to a common derivation from old Aryan myth. That common synonyms occur in cognate languages is to be expected, but so far as the names and the characteristics of the heroes and heroines are concerned, the phonetic identity is proven in a far less number of cases than the solar mythologists, working on their too exclusive method, argue. The key which for them unlocks the meaning of every Aryan myth is Sanskrit. In tracing the history of the Indo-European family of speech, it served as the starting-point, because it has more than any other member preserved the roots and suffixes, if not in their oldest, still in their most accessible form. And in tracing the course of Indo-European mythology, it is in the Vedic texts, chiefly the most ancient, the _Rig-Veda_, that we find the materials for comparative study, since in these venerable hymns of a Bible older than our own are preserved the earliest recorded forms of that mythology. That is to say, we have not in any European branch of Aryan speech any documentary relic of the age of the _Rig-Veda_, otherwise we might find ourselves in possession of more ancient relics of that speech. So that although the value of Sanskrit as the guide without which knowledge of the Aryan mother-tongue would have remained vague, indeed have been beyond reach, cannot be over-estimated, we must not accept as of universal worth what is local and special in it.[36]

The phonetic kinship and actual identity which comparative philologists have sought to establish between the proper names of gods and heroes of the Greek and Vedic mythologies (for the inquiry has been chiefly restricted to these two), is based on the collection of rules by which we can at once tell what sounds in one language correspond to those of its kindred tongues, called, after its discoverer, “Grimm’s Law.” This law gave the quietus to theories of common origin and variation of words based on specious resemblances (theories satirised by Dean Swift in his derivation of _ostler_ from _oatstealer_), and introduced a scientific method into etymological study.

The varying pronunciation of certain words among the Aryan-speaking peoples which were common to them was discovered by Grimm to be constant; for example, a Greek _th_ answers to an English _d_, and, _vice versâ_, a German _s_ or _z_ to an English _t_, and so forth, so that by comparing these altered forms the common form from which they spring is reached.

At what fluent period in the history of the Aryan languages these changes of one sound into another were induced is unknown, nor are their precise causes easy of ascertainment, being referable to physical influences, climatal and local, which in the course of time brought about changes in the organs of speech, such, for example, as make our _th_ so difficult of pronunciation to a German, in whose language _d_ takes its place, as _drei_ for _three_, _durstig_ for _thirsty_, _dein_ for _thine_, etc. We may note tendencies to variation in children of the same household, their prattle often affording striking illustration of Grimm’s law, and it is easy to see that among semi-civilised and isolated tribes, where no check upon the variations is imposed, they would tend to become fixed and give rise to new dialects.

Tracing the operation of that law in the changes in proper names in Greek and Vedic mythology, their correlation is proved in a few important instances. The Greek _Zeus_, the Latin _Deus_ (whence French _Dieu_ and our _deity_, and also _deuce_), the Lithuanian _Diewas_, and the Sanskrit _Dyaus_ all come from an old Aryan root, _div_ or _dyu_, meaning “to shine.” The Sanskrit _dyu_, as a noun means “sky” or “day,” and in the _Veda Dyaus_ is the bright sky or heaven. _Varuna_, the noblest figure in the Vedic religion, the “enveloper” or all-surrounding heaven, is cognate with the Greek _Ouranos_ or _Uranus_, the common root being _var_, “to veil” or “cover.” Agni, the fire-god, to whom the larger number of hymns occur in the _Veda_, is related to the Latin _ignis_, fire, and so forth.

The heavens and the earth and all that in them is are the raw material on which man works, and the comparative philologists have established exactly what might have been predicated, the nature-origin of the Greek, Vedic, and other Aryan myths. They might well have rested content with this confirmation which their method gives to results arrived at by other methods, and not weakened or discredited it by applying it all round to every leading name in Aryan myth. For this has only revealed the fundamental differences among themselves as to the etymologies and meanings of such names. But not satisfied with the demonstration that the majestic epics have their germs in the phenomena of the natural world, and the course of the day and year, they strain the evidence by contending that “there is absolutely nothing left for further analysis in the stories;” that their “resemblances in detail defy the influences of climate and scenery;”[37] that every incident has its birth in the journey of the sun, the death of the dawn, the theft of the twilight by the powers of darkness, evidence which, in Sir George Cox’s words, “not long hence will probably be regarded as excessive.”

They are nature-myths; but, and in this is the secret of their enduring life, they are much more than that. The impetus that has shaped them as we now know them came from other forces than clouds and storms.

Without such caution as these remarks are designed to supply, any reader of the _Mythology of the Aryan Nations_ would conclude that the philological method had proved the meteorological origin of every epic and folk-tale among the Indo-European peoples. He would learn that, in a way rudely analogous to the supernatural guidance of the Christian Church, the several Aryan tribes had received from the fathers of the race an unvarying canon of interpretation of the primitive myths, a canon seemingly preserved with the jealous veneration with which the Jew regarded the _Thorah_, and the Brahman the _Veda_. He would also learn that the details of Norse and classic myth can be traced to the _Veda_, that these details, not of incident alone, but of thought and expression, survived unimpaired by time and untouched by circumstance, whilst, strange to say, the more prominent names and the leading characters became obscured in their meaning. Strange indeed, and not true. For what are the facts?

Long before the hymns of the _Rig-Veda_ existed as we know them (and they have remained an inviolate sacred text since 600 B.C., when every verse, word, and syllable were counted) the Aryan tribes had swarmed from their parent hive across boundless steppes and over winding mountain passes, some to the westward limits of Europe, others southward into Hindustan. Among the slender intellectual capital of which they stood possessed was the common mythology of their savage ancestors, in which, as we have seen, sun and moon, storm and thunder-cloud, and all other natural phenomena, were credited with personal life and will. But that mythology had certainly advanced beyond the crude primitive form and entered the heroic stage, wherein the powers of nature were half human, half divine. Their language had passed into the inflective or highest stage, and had undergone such changes that the relationship between its several groups and their origin from one mother-tongue was obscured, and remained so until laid bare in our day. In short, the Aryan tribes had attained no mean state of civilisation, some being more advanced than the others, according as external circumstances helped or hindered, and one by one they passed from the condition of semi-civilised nomads to become fathers and founders of nations that abide to this day.

These being the facts to which language itself bears witness, how was it possible for their mythologies, _i.e._ their stock of notions about things, to remain unaffected and secure of transmission without organic change? The myths, unfixed in literary form, yielded themselves with ease as vehicles of new ideas; their ancient meaning, already faded, paled before the all-absorbing significance of present facts. These were more potent realities than the kisses of the dawn; the human and the personal, in its struggles, of mightier interest than the battle of rosy morn or purple eve with the sons of thunder; and Homer’s music would long since have died away were Achilles’ “baneful wrath” but a passively-told tale of the sun’s grief for the loss of the morning.

In brief, the complex and varying influences which have transformed the primitive myth are the important factors which the solar theorists have omitted in their attempted solution of the problem. They have forgotten the part which, to borrow a term from astronomy, “personal equation” has played. They have not examined myth in the light of the long history of the race; and the new elements which it took into itself, while never wholly ridding itself of the old, have escaped them. They have secured a mechanical unity, whereas, by combination of the historical with their own method, they might have secured a vital unity.

To all which classic myth itself bears record. The Greeks were of Aryan stock, but the time of their settlement is unknown. The period between this and the Homeric age was, however, long enough to admit of their advance to the state of a nation rejoicing in the fulness of intellectual life. They remembered not from what rock they were hewn, from what pit they were digged. The nature-gods of their remote ancestors had long since changed their meteorological character, and appeared in the likeness of men, or, at least, played very human pranks on Olympus. In the _Veda_ the primitive nature-myth, although exalted and purified, is persistent; under one name or another it is still the ceaseless battle between the darkness and the light; Dyaus was still the bright sky, the cattle of Siva were still the clouds. But the Greek of Homer’s time, and his congener in the far north, had forgotten all that; the war in heaven was transferred to the strife of gods and men on the shores of the Hellespont and by the bleak seaboard of the Baltic. Their gods and goddesses, improved by age and experience, put off their physical and put on the ethical; the heaven-father became king of gods and men, source of order, law, and justice; the sun and the dawn, Apollo and Athênê, became wisdom, skill, and guardianship incarnate. And the story of human vicissitudes found in solar myth that “pattern of things in the heavens” which conformed to its design.

Thus Homer, in whose day the old nature-myth had become confused with the vague traditions of veritable deeds of kings and heroes but dimly remembered, touched it as with heavenly fire unquenchable. The siege of Troy, so say the solar mythologists, “is a repetition of the daily siege of the east by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their highest treasures in the west.” It is surely a truer instinct which, recognising the physical framework of the great epics, feels that the vitality which inheres in them is due to whatever of human experience, joy, and sorrow is the burden of their immortal song. As to the repulsive features of Greek myth, one can neither share the distress of the solar theorists nor feel their difficulties. Both are self-created, and are aggravated by suggestions, serious or otherwise, of “periods of temporary insanity through which the human mind had to pass,” as the rude health of childhood is checked by whooping-cough and measles. They are explained by the persistence with which the lower out of which man has emerged asserts itself, as primary rocks pierce through and overlap later strata.

The ancestors of the Aryans were savages in the remote past, and the “old Adam” was never entirely cast out; indeed it is with us still. There are superstitions and credulities in our midst, in drawing-rooms as well as gipsy camps, quite as gross in nature, if less coarse in guise, as those extant among the Greeks. The future historian of our time, as he turns over the piles of our newspapers, will find contrasts of ignorance and culture as startling as any existing in the land of Homer, of Archimedes, and Aristotle. Spirit-rapping and belief in the “evil eye” have their cult among us, although Professor Huxley’s _Hume_ can be bought for two shillings, and knowledge has free course. And it certainly accords best with all that we have learnt as to the mode of human progress to believe that the old lived into the new, than that the old had been cast out, but had gained re-entry, making the last state of the Greeks to be worse than the first.

In this matter the Vedic hymns do not help us much. The conditions under which they took the form that insured their transmission are _ipso facto_ as of yesterday, compared with the period during which man’s endeavour was made to get at that meaning of his surroundings wherein is found the germ of myth throughout the world. They are the products of a relatively highly-civilised time; the conception of sky and dawn as living persons has passed out of its primitive simplicity; these heavenly powers have become complex deities; there is much confounding of persons, the same god called by one or many names. The thought is that of an age when moral problems have presented themselves for solution, and the references to social matters indicate a settled state of things far removed from the fisher and the hunter stage. Nevertheless there lurk within these sacred writings survivals of the lower culture, traces of coarse rites, bloody sacrifices, of repulsive myths of the gods, and of cosmogonies familiar to the student of barbaric myth and legend.

Enough has been said to show that the extreme and one-sided interpretations of the solar mythologists are due to a one-sided method. The philological has yielded splendid results; this the solar theorists have done; the historical yields results equally rich and fertile; this they have left undone. Language has given us the key to the kinship between the several members of the great body of Aryan myths; the study of the historical evolution of myths, the comparison of these, without regard to affinity of speech, will give us the key to the kinship between savage interpretation of phenomena all the world over. The mythology of Greek and Bushman, of Kaffir and Scandinavian, of the Red man and the Hindu, springs from the like mental condition. It is the uniform and necessary product of the human mind in the childhood of the race.

§ V.

BELIEF IN METAMORPHOSIS INTO ANIMALS.

The belief that human beings could change themselves into animals has been already alluded to, but in view of its large place in the history of illusions, some further reference is needful.

Superstitions which now excite a smile, or which seem beneath notice, were no sudden phenomena, appearing now and again at the beck and call of wilful deceivers of their kind. That they survive at all, like organisms, atrophied or degenerate, which have seen “better days,” is evidence of remote antiquity and persistence. Every seeming vagary of the mind had serious importance, and answered to some real need of man as a sober attempt to read the riddle of the earth, and get at its inmost secret.

So with this belief. It is the outcome of that early thought of man which conceived a common nature and fellowship between himself and brutes, a conception based on rude analogies between his own and other forms of life, as also between himself and things without life, but having motion, be they waterspouts or rivers, trees or clouds, especially these last, when the wind, in violent surging and with howling voice, drove them across the sky. Where he blindly, timidly groped, we walk as in the light, and with love that casts out fear. Where rough resemblances suggested to him like mental states and actions in man and brute, the science of our time has, under the comparative method, converted the guess into a certainty; not to the confirmation of his conclusions, but to the proof of identity of structure and function, to the demonstrating of a common origin, however now impassable the chasm that separates us from the lower animals.

The belief in man’s power to change his form and nature is obviously nearly connected with the widespread doctrine of metempsychosis, or the passing of the soul at death into one or a series of animals, generally types of the dead man’s character, as where the timid enter the body of a hare, the gluttonous that of a swine or vulture.

“Fills with fresh energy another form,
And towers an elephant or glides a worm;
Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon,
Or wails a screech-owl to the deaf, cold moon,
Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss and glare,
Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air.”

But while in transmigration the soul returns not to the body which it had left, transformation was only for a time, occurring at stated periods, and effected by the will of the transformed, or by the aid of sorcery or magic, or sometimes imposed by the gods as a punishment for impious defiance and sin.

Other causes, less remote, aided the spread of a belief to which the mind was already inclined. Among these were the hallucinations of men who believed themselves changed into beasts, and who, retreating to caves and forests, issued thence howling and foaming, ravening for blood and slaughter; hallucinations which afflicted not only single persons, as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, whose milder monomania (he, himself, saying in the famous prize poem:--

“As he ate the unwonted food,
‘It may be wholesome, but it is not good’”),

rather resembled that of the daughters of Prætus, who believed themselves cows, but which also spread as virulent epidemic among whole classes. It is related that, in 1600, multitudes were attacked by the disease known as lycanthropy, or wolf-madness (from Greek, _lukos_, a wolf, and _anthropos_, a man), and that they herded and hunted in packs, destroying and eating children, and keeping in their mountain fastnesses a cannibal or devil’s sabbath, like the nocturnal meetings of witches and demons known as the Witches’ Sabbath. Hundreds of them were executed on their own confession, but some time elapsed before the frightful epidemic, and the panic which it caused, passed away. Besides such delusions, history down to our own time records instances where a morbid innate craving for blood, leading sometimes to cannibalism, has shown itself. Mr. Baring-Gould, in his _Book of Werewolves_, cites a case from Gall of a Dutch priest who had such a desire to kill and to see killed that he became chaplain to a regiment for the sake of witnessing the slaughter in battle. But still more ghastly are the notorious cases of Elizabeth, a Hungarian lady of title, who inveigled girls into her castle and murdered them, that she might bathe her body in human blood to enhance her beauty; and of the Maréchal de Retz who, cursed with the abnormal desire to murder children, allured them with promises of dainties into his kitchen, and killed them, inhaling the odour of their blood with delight, and then burned their bodies in the huge fireplace in the room devoted to these horrors. When the deed was done the Maréchal would lie prostrate with grief, “would toss weeping and praying on a bed, or recite fervent prayers and litanies on his knees, only to rise with irresistible craving to repeat the crime.”

Such instances as the foregoing, whether of delusion or morbid desire to destroy, are among secondary causes; they may contribute, but they do not create, being inadequate to account for the world-wide existence of transformation myths. The animals which are the supposed subject of these vary with the habitat, but are always those which have inspired most dread from their ferocity. In Abyssinia we find the man-hyæna; in South Africa, the man-lion; in India, the man-tiger; in Northern Europe, the man-bear; and in other parts of Europe the man-wolf, or werewolf (from A.-S. _wer_, a man).

Among the many survivals of primitive thought in the Greek mythology, which are the only key to its coarser features, this of belief in transformation occurs, and, indeed, along the whole line of human development it appears and re-appears in forms more or less vivid and tragic. The gods of the south, as of the north, came down in the likeness of beasts and birds, as well as of men, and among the references to these myths in classic writers, Ovid, in the _Metamorphoses_, tells the story of Zeus visiting Lykaon, king of Arcadia, who placed a dish of human flesh before the god to test thereby his omniscience. Zeus detected the trick, and punished the king by changing him into a wolf, so that his desire might be towards the food which he had impiously offered to his god.

“In vain he attempted to speak; from that very instant
His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and only he thirsted
For blood, as he raged amongst flocks and panted for slaughter.
His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs became crooked.
A wolf--he retains yet large traces of his ancient expression,
Hoary he is as afore, his countenance rabid,
His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of fury.”

But we may pass from this and such-like tales of the ancients to the grim realities of the belief in mediæval times.

If wolves abounded, much more did the werewolf abound. According to Olaus Magnus, the sufferings which the inhabitants of Prussia and neighbouring nations endured from wolves were trivial compared with the ravages wrought by men turned into wolves. On the feast of the Nativity, these monsters were said to assemble and then disperse in companies to kill and plunder. Attacking lonely houses, they devoured all the human beings and every other animal found therein. “They burst into the beer-cellars and there they empty the tuns of beer or mead, and pile up the empty casks one above another in the middle of the cellar, thus showing their difference from natural wolves.” In Scandinavia it was believed that some men had a second skin out of which they could slip and appear in the shape of a beast. Perhaps the phrase “to jump out of one’s skin” is a relic of this notion. The Romans believed that the werewolf simply effected the change by turning his skin inside out, hence the term “versipellis,” or “skin-changer.” So in mediæval times it was said that the wolf’s skin was under the human, and the unhappy suspects were hacked and tortured for signs of such hairy growth. Sometimes the change was induced, it is said, by putting on a girdle of human skin round the waist; sometimes by the use of magical ointment. Whatever the animal whose shape a man took could do, that he could do, plus such power as he possessed in virtue of his manhood or acquired by sorcery, his eyes remaining as the only features by which he could be recognised. If he was not changed himself, some charm was wrought on the eyes of onlookers whereby they could see him only in the shape which he was supposed to assume. The genuine monomaniacs aided such an illusion. The poor demented one who conceived himself a dog or a wolf, who barked, and snapped, and foamed at the mouth, and bit savagely at the flesh of others, was soon clothed by a terror-stricken fancy in the skin of either brute, and believed to have the canine or lupine appetite in addition to his human cunning. The imagination thus projects in visible form the spectres of its creation; the eye in this, as in so much else, sees the thing for which it looks. Some solid foundation for the belief would, however, exist in the custom among warriors of dressing themselves in the skins of beasts to add to their ferocious appearance. And it was amidst such that the remarkable form of mania in Northern Europe known as the Berserkr rage (“bear-sark” or “bear-skin” wearer) arose. Working themselves by the aid of strong drink or drugs and contagious excitement into a frenzy, these freebooters of the Northland sallied forth to break the backbones and cleave the skulls of quiet folk and unwary travellers. As with flashing eyes and foaming mouth they yelled and danced, seemingly endowed with magic power to resist assault by sword or club, they aroused in the hysterically disposed a like madness, which led to terrible crimes, and which died away only as the killing of one’s fellows became less the business of life. History supplies many examples of strange mental epidemics which sped through towns and provinces in mediæval times. They were induced by religious enthusiasm and other extreme and harmful forms of mental stimulation, the most notorious being the great St. Vitus’ dance, and the procession of Flagellants, to which in their mad orgies the hysterical ceremonies of barbarous tribes correspond. Of that tendency towards imitation which these freaks of erratic and unbalanced minds foster Dr. Carpenter[38] quotes an illustration from Zimmerman. A nun in a large convent in France began to mew like a cat, and shortly afterwards other nuns also mewed. At last all the nuns mewed every day at a given time and for several hours together. And this cat’s concert was only stopped by the military arriving and threatening to whip the nuns.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the belief in men-beasts reached its maximum, and met with no tender treatment at the hands of a church whose founder had manifested such soothing pity towards the “possessed” of Galilee and Judæa. That church had a cut-and-dried explanation of the whole thing, and applied a sharp and pitiless remedy. If the devil, with countless myrmidons at his command, was “going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it,” what limit could be put to his ingenuity and arts? Could he not as easily change a man into a wolf or a bear as a woman into a cat? and had not each secured this by a compact with him, the foe of God and His Church? The evidence in support of the one was as clear and cogent as in support of the other; hence werewolf hunting and burning became as Christian a duty and as paying a profession as witch-smelling and torturing. Any cruelty was justified by its perpetrators when the object in view was the vindication of the majesty of God; and not until the advancing intelligence of men recoiled against the popular explanations of witchcraft and lycanthropy were the laws against both repealed.

Those explanations were survivals of savage mental philosophy blended with a crude theology. To the savage, all diseases are the work of evil spirits. If a man hurts himself against a stone, the demon in the stone is the cause. If the man falls suddenly ill, writhes or shrieks in his pain, the spirit which has smuggled itself in with the food or the drink or the breath is twisting or tearing him; if he has a fit, the spirit has flung him; if he is in the frenzy of hysteria, the spirit within him is laughing in fiendish glee. And when the man suddenly loses his reason, goes, as people say, “out of his mind,” acts and looks no longer like his former self, still more does this seem the work of an evil agent within him. It is kindred with the old belief that the sickly and ugly infant had been left in the cradle by the witch in place of the child stolen by her before its baptism.[39] And the thing to do is to find some mode of conjuring or frightening or forcing the demon out of the man, just as it became a sacred duty to watch over the newly-born until the sign of the cross had been made on its forehead, and the regenerating water sprinkled over it.

“Presbyter is but old priest writ large.” And the theory of demoniacal agency was but the savage theory in a more elaborate guise. To theologians and jurists it was a sufficing explanation; it fitted in with the current notions of the government of the universe, and there was no need to frame any other. Body and mind were to them as separate entities as they are to the savage and the ignorant. Each regarded the soul as independent of the body, and framed his theories of occasional absence therefrom accordingly. But science has taught us to know ourselves not as dual, but as one. She lays her finger on the subtle, intricate framework of man’s nervous system, and finds in the derangement of this the secret of those delusions and illusions which have been so prolific in agony and suffering. She makes clear how the yielding to morbid tendencies can still foster delusions, which, if no longer the subject of pains and penalties in the body politic, are themselves ministers of vengeance in the body where they arise. And in the recognition of a fundamental unity between the physical and the mental, in the healthy working of the one as dependent on the wholesome care of the other, she finds not only the remedy against mental derangement and all forms of harmful excitement, but also the prevention which is better than cure.

Traditions of transformation of men into beasts are not confined to the Old world.[40] In Dr. Rink’s _Tales of the Eskimo_ there are numerous stories both of men and women who have assumed animal form at will, as also incidental references to the belief in stories such as that telling how an Eskimo got inside a walrus skin, so that he might lead the life of that creature. And among the Red races, that rough analogy which led to the animal being credited with life and consciousness akin to the human, still expresses itself in thought and act. If even now it is matter of popular belief in the wilds of Norway that Finns and Lapps, who from remote times have passed as skilful witches and wizards, can at pleasure assume the shape of bears, the common saying, according to Sir George Dasent, about an unusually daring and savage beast being, “that can be no Christian bear,” we may not be surprised that lower races still ascribe power of interchange to man and brute. The werewolf superstition is extant among the North-Western Indians, but free from those diabolical features which characterised it in mediæval times among ourselves. It takes its place in barbaric myth generally, and although it may have repellent or cruel elements, it was never blended with belief in the demoniacal. The Ahts say that men go into the mountains to seek their manitou (that is, the personal deity, generally the first animal seen by a native in the dream produced by his fasting on reaching manhood), and, mixing with wolves, are after a time changed into these creatures. Although the illustration bears more upon what has to be said concerning the barbaric belief in animal-ancestors, it has some reference to the matter in hand to cite the custom among the Tonkanays, a wild and unruly tribe in Texas, of celebrating their origin by a grand annual dance. One of them, naked as he was born, is buried in the earth, then the others, clothed in wolf-skins, walk over him, sniff around him, howl in wolfish style, and then dig him up with their nails.[41] The leading wolf solemnly places a bow and arrow in his hands, and, to his inquiry as to what he must do for a living, advises him “to do as the wolves do--rob, kill, and rove from place to place, never cultivating the soil.” Dr. Brinton, in quoting the above from Schoolcraft, refers to a similar custom among the ancient dwellers on Mount Soracte.

As in past times among ourselves, so in times present among races such as the foregoing, their wizards and shamans are believed to have power to turn themselves as they choose into beasts, birds, or reptiles. By whatever name these professional impostors are known, whether as medicine-men, or, as in Cherokee, by the high-sounding title of “possessors of the divine fire,” they have traded, and wherever credulity or darkest ignorance abide, still trade on the fears and fancies of their fellows by disguising themselves in voice and gait and covering of the animal which they pretend to be. Among races believing in transformation such tricks have free course, and the more dexterous the sorcerer who could play bear’s antics in a bear’s skin proved himself in throwing off the disguise and appearing suddenly as a man, the greater his success, and the more firmly grounded the belief.

The whole subject, although presented here only in the barest outline, would not be fitly dismissed without some reference to the survival of the primitive belief in men-animals in the world-wide stories known as beast-fables, in which animals act and talk like human beings. When to us all nature was Wonderland, and the four-footed, the birds, and the fishes, among our play-fellows; when in fireside tale and rhyme they spoke our language and lived that free life which we then shared and can never share again, the feeling of kinship to which the old fables gave expression may have checked many a wanton act, and, if we learned it not fully then, we may have taken the lesson to heart since--

“Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives.”

And then those _Fables_ of Æsop, even with the tedious drawback of the “moral,” as powder beneath the jam, did they not lighten for us in school-days the dark passages through our Valpy (for the omniscient Dr. William Smith was not then the tyro’s dread), and again give us communion with the fowl of the air and the beast of the field? Now our mature thought may interest itself in following the beast-myths to the source whence Babrius and Phædrus, knowing not its springhead and antiquity, drew their vivid presentments of the living world, and find in the storied East the well-spring that fed the imagination of youngsters thousands of years ago. Such tales have not fallen in the East to the low level which they have reached here, because they yet accord in some degree with extant superstitions in India, whereas in Europe they find little or nothing to which they correspond. With some authorities the Egyptians have the credit of first inventing the beast-fable, but among them, as among every other advanced race, such stories are the remains of an earlier deposit; relics of a primitive philosophy in which wisdom and skill and cunning are no monopoly of man’s. The fondness of the negro races, whose traditions are not limited to South and Central Africa, for such fables is well known, as witness the tales of which “Uncle Remus” is a type, and it is strikingly illustrated in the history of the Vai tribe, who having, partly through contact with whites, elaborated a system of writing, made the beast-fable their earliest essay in composition.[42]

The evidence in support of the common ancestry of the languages spoken by the leading peoples in Europe, and by such important historical races in Asia as the Hindu and the Persian, has been already summarised. That evidence, it was remarked, is considered corroborative not only of the common origin of the myths on which the framework of the great Indo-European epics rests, but also of the possession by the several clans of a common stock of folk-lore and folk-tale, in which, of course, the beast-fables are included, these being the relics in didactic or humorous guise of that serious philosophy concerning the community of life in man and brute amongst the barbaric ancestors of the Indo-Europeans, upon which stress enough has been laid.

Even if the common origin be disproved, the evidence would be shifted merely from local to general foundations, because the uniform attitude of mind before the same phenomena would have further confirmation; but the resemblances are too minute in detail to be explained by a theory of independent creation of the tales where we now find them. The likenesses are many, the unlikenesses are few, being the result of local colouring, historical fact blended with the fiction, popular belief, and superstition, all affected by the skill of the professional story-teller. As in the numerous variants of the familiar Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Punchkin, and the like, the same fairy prince or princess, the same wicked magician and clever versatile Boots, peep through, disclosing the near relationship of Hindu nursery tales to the folk-tales of Norway and the Highlands, of Iceland and Ceylon, of Persia and Serbia, of Russia and the lands washed by the Mediterranean.

In the venerable collection of _Buddhist Birth Stories_, now in course of translation by Dr. Rhys Davids,[43] and to which is prefaced an interesting introduction on the source and migration of folk-tales, we are face to face with many a fable familiar to us in the _Æsop_ of our school-days. There is the story of the Ass in the Lion’s Skin, not in which, as Æsop has it, the beast dressed himself, but which the hawker put on him to frighten the thieves who would steal his goods. Left one day to browse in a field whilst his master refreshed himself at an inn, some watchmen saw him, and, raising hue and cry, brought out the villagers, armed with their rude implements. The ass, fearing death, made a noise like an ass, and was killed. Long might he, adds the ancient moral--

“Clad in a lion’s skin
Have fed on the barley green;
But he brayed!
And that moment he came to ruin.”

The variants of this old fable are found in mediæval, in French, German, Indian, and Turkish folk-lore, as are also those of the tortoise who lost his life through “much speaking.” Desiring to emigrate, two ducks agreed to carry him, he seizing hold of a stick which they held between their beaks. As they passed over a village the people shouted and jeered, whereupon the irate tortoise called out: “What business is it of yours?” and, of course, thereby let go the stick and, falling down, split in two. Therefore--

“Speak wise words not out of season;
You see how, by talking overmuch,
The tortoise fell.”

In _Æsop_ the tortoise asks an eagle to teach him to fly; in Chinese folk-lore he is carried by geese.

Jacob Grimm’s researches concerning the famous mediæval fable of “Reynard the Fox” revealed the ancient and scattered materials out of which that wonderful satire was woven, and there is no feature of the story which reappears more often in Eastern and Western folk-lore than that cunning of the animal which has been for the lampooner and the satirist the type of self-seeking monk and ecclesiastic. When Chanticleer proudly takes an airing with his family, he meets master Reynard, who tells him he has become a “religious,” and shows him his beads, and his missal, and his hair shirt, adding, in a voice “that was childlike and bland,” that he had vowed never to eat flesh. Then he went off singing his Credo, and slunk behind a hawthorn. Chanticleer, thus thrown off his guard, continues his airing, and the astute hypocrite, darting from his ambush, seizes the plump hen Coppel. So in Indian folk-tale a wolf living near the Ganges is cut off from food by the surrounding water. He decides to keep holy day, and the god Sakka, knowing his lupine weakness, resolves to have some fun with him, and turns himself into a wild goat “Aha!” says the wolf, “I’ll keep the fast another day,” and springing up he tried to seize the goat, who skipped about so that he could not be taken. So Lupus gives it up, and says as his solatium: “After all, I’ve not broken my vow.”

The Chinese have a story of a tiger who desired to eat a fox, but the latter claimed exemption as being superior to the other animals, adding that if the tiger doubted his word he could easily judge for himself. So the two set forth, and, of course, every animal fled at sight of the tiger, who, too stupid to see how he had been gulled, conceived high respect for the fox, and spared his life.

Sometimes the tables are turned. Chanticleer gets his head out of Reynard’s mouth by making him answer the farmer, and in the valuable collection of Hottentot tales which the late Dr. Bleek, with some warrant, called _Reynard in South Africa_, the cock makes the jackal say his prayers, and flies off while the outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts his eyes.

But further quotations must be resisted; enough if it is made clearer that the beast-fable is the lineal descendant of barbaric conceptions of a life shared in common by man and brute, and another link thus added to the lengthening chain of the continuity of human history.

§ VI.

TOTEMISM: BELIEF IN DESCENT FROM ANIMAL OR PLANT.

In addition to the beliefs in the transformation of men into animals and in the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, we find among barbarous peoples a belief which is probably the parent of one and certainly nearly related to both, namely, in descent from the animal or plant, more often the former, whose name they bear. Its connection with transmigration is seen in the belief of the Moquis of Arizona, that after death they live in the form of their totemic animal, those of the deer family becoming deer, and so on through the several gentes. The belief survives in its most primitive and vivid forms among two races, the aborigines of Australia and the North American Indians. The word “totemism,” given to it both in its religious and social aspects, is derived from the Algonquin “dodaim” or “dodhaim,” meaning “clanmark.” Among the Australians the word “kobong,” meaning “friend” or “protector,” is the generic term for the animal or plant by which they are known. It is somewhat akin in significance to the Indian words “manitou,” “oki,” etc., comprehending “the manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity,” which are commonly translated by the misleading word “medicine;” hence “medicine-men.”

The family name, or second name borne by all the tribes in lineal descent, and which corresponds to our surname, _i.e._ _super nomen_, or “over-name,” is derived from names of beasts, birds, plants, etc., around which traditions of their transformation into men linger. Sir George Grey[44] says that there is a mysterious connection between a native and his kobong. It is his protecting angel, like the “daimôn” of Socrates, like the “genius” of the early Italian. “If it is an animal, he will not kill one of the species to which it belongs, should he find it asleep, and he always kills it reluctantly and never without affording it a chance of escape. The family belief is that some one individual of the species is their dearest friend, to kill whom would be a great crime,” as, in Hindu belief, when a Rajah was said to have entered at death into the body of a fish, a “close time” was at once decreed. Among the Indian tribes we find well-nigh the whole fauna and flora represented, their totems being the Bear, Turtle, Deer, Snake, Eagle, Pike, Corn, Tobacco, etc. Like the Australians, these tribes regarded themselves as being of the breed of their particular animal-totem, and avoided hunting, slaying, and eating (of which more presently) the creature under whose form the ancestor was thought to be manifest. The Chippeways carried their respect even farther. Deriving their origin from the dog, they at one time refrained from employing their supposed canine ancestors in dragging their sledges. The Bechuana and other people of South Africa will avoid eating their tribe-animal or wearing its skin. The same prohibitions are found among tribes in Northern Asia, and the Vogulitzi of Siberia, when they have killed a bear, address it formally, maintaining “that the blame is to be laid on the arrows and iron, which were made and forged by the Russians!” Among the Delawares the Tortoise gens claimed supremacy over the others, because their ancestor, who had become a fabled monster in their mythology, bore their world on his back. The California Indians are in interesting agreement with Lord Monboddo when, in claiming descent from the prairie wolf, they account for the loss of their tails by the habit of sitting, which, in course of time, wore them down to the stump! The Kickapoos say their ancestors had tails, and that when they lost them the “impudent fox sent every morning to ask how their tails were, and the bear shook his fat sides at the joke.” The Patagonians are said to have a number of animal deities, creators of the several tribes, some being of the caste of the guanaco and others of the ostrich. In short, the group of beliefs and practices found among races in the lower stages of culture point to a widespread common attitude towards the mystery of life around them. In speaking of totemism among the Red races Dr. Brinton thinks that the free use of animate symbols to express abstract ideas, which he finds so frequent, is the source of a confusion which has led to their claiming literal descent from wild beasts. But the barbaric mind bristles with contradictions and mutually destructive conceptions; nothing is too wonderful, too _bizarre_, for its acceptance, and the belief in actual animal descent is not the most remarkable or far-fetched among the articles of its creed.

The subject of totemism is full of interest both on its religious and social side:--

On its religious side it has given rise, or, if this be not conceded, impetus, to that worship of animals which assuredly had its source in the attribution of mysterious power through some spirit within them, making them deity incarnate.

On its social side it has led to prohibitions which are inwoven among the customs and prejudices of civilised communities. But, before speaking of these prohibitions, the barbaric mode of reckoning descent should be noticed.

The family name borne by most Australian tribes is perpetuated by the children, whether boys or girls, taking their mother’s name. Precisely the same custom is found among some American Indians, the children of both sexes being of the mother’s clan. Among the Moquis of Arizona all the members of each gens trace descent from a common ancestor; they are regarded as brothers and sisters.[45] Now, the family, as we define it, does not exist in savage communities, nor, as Mr. McLennan says in his very remarkable work on _Primitive Marriage_, had “the earliest human groups any idea of kinship, ... the physical root of which could be discerned only through observation and reflection.” Where the relations of the sexes were confused and promiscuous, the oldest system in which the idea of blood-ties was expressed was a system of kinship through the mother. The habits of the “much-married” primitive men made mistake about any one’s mother less likely than mistake about his father; and, if in civilised times it is, as the saying goes, a wise child that knows its own father, he was, in barbarous times, a wise father who knew his own child. Examples tracing the kinship through females, father and offspring being never of the same clan, abound in both ancient and modern authorities, and perhaps the most amusing one that can be given is found in Dr. Morgan’s _Systems of Consanguinity_. He says that the “natives of the province of Keang-se are celebrated among the natives of the other Chinese provinces for the mode or form used by them in address, namely, ‘Laon peaon,’ which, freely translated, means, ‘Oh, you old fellow, brother mine by some of the ramifications of female relationship!’”[46]

The prohibitions arising out of or confirmed by totemism are two: 1. Against intermarriage between those of the same name or crest. 2. Against the eating of the totem by any member of the tribe called after it.

1. Among both Australians and Indians a man is forbidden to marry in his own clan, _i.e._ any woman of his own surname or badge, no matter where she was born or however distantly related to him. The Navajoes of Arizona say that if they married in their own clan “their bones would dry up and they would die.”

Were this practice of “Exogamy,” as marriage outside the totem-kin is called, limited to one or two places, it might be classed among exceptional local customs based on a tradition, say, of some heated blood-feud between the tribes. But its prevalence among savage or semi-savage races all the world over points to reasons the nature of which is still a _crux_ to the anthropologists. The late Mr. McLennan, whose opinion on such a matter is entitled to the most weight, connects it with the custom of female infanticide, which, rendering women scarce, led at once to polyandry, or one female to several males, within the tribe, and to the capturing of women from other tribes. This last-named practice strengthens Mr. McLennan’s theory. He cites numerous instances from past and present barbarous races, and traces its embodiment in formal code until we come to the mock relics of the custom in modern times, as, for example, the harmless “survival” in bride-lifting, that is, stealing, as in the word “cattle-lifting.”

Connected with this custom is the equally prevailing one which forbids intercourse between relations, as especially between a couple and their fathers and mothers-in-law, and which also forbids mentioning their names. So far as the aversion which the savage has to telling his own name, or uttering that of any person (especially of the dead) or thing feared by him is concerned, the reason is not far to seek. It lies in that confusion between names and things which marks all primitive thinking. The savage, who shrinks from having his likeness taken in the fear that a part of himself is being carried away thereby, regards his name as something through which he may be harmed. So he will use all sorts of roundabout phrases to avoid saying it, and even change it that he may elude his foes, and puzzle or cheat Death when he comes to look for him. But why a son-in-law should not see the face of his mother-in-law, for so it is among the Navajoes, (where the offender would, they say, go blind), the Aranaks of South America, the Caribs and other tribes of more northern regions, the Fijians, Sumatrans, Dyaks, the natives of Australia, the Zulus, in brief, along the range of the lower culture, is a question to which no satisfactory answer has been given, and to which reference is here made because of its connection with totemism.