Chapter VII: Conclusion (1)

The multitude of subjects traversed in the foregoing sections has compelled presentment in so concise a form that any attempt to gather into a few sentences the sum of things said would be as a digest of a digest, and it is, therefore, better to briefly emphasise the conclusions to which the gathered evidence points. It was remarked at the outset, when insisting on the serious meaning which lies at the heart of myths, that they have their origin in the endeavour of barbaric man to explain his surroundings. The mass of fact brought together illustrates and confirms this view, and has thereby tended to raise what was once looked upon as fantastic, curious, and lawless, to the level of a subject demanding sober treatment and examination on strictly scientific methods.

Archbishop Trench, in his _Study of Words_, quotes Emerson’s happy characterisation of language as fossil poetry and fossil history: “Just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern, or the finely-vertebrated lizard, such as have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone, so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, preserved and made safe for ever.” In like manner we may speak of myths as fossil ethics and fossil theology, but, with more appositeness, as embryonic ethics and theology, since they contain potentially all the philosophies and theologies “that man did ever find.”

And to the student of the history of humanity who rejoices in the sure foundation on which, tested in manifold ways, the convictions of the highest and noblest of the race rest, the value of myth is increased in its being a natural outgrowth of the mind when, having advanced to the point at which curiosity concerning the causes of surrounding things arises, it frames its crude explanations. For not that which man claims to have received as a message from the gods, as a revelation from heaven, but that which he has learned by experience often painful and bitter, and which succeeding generations have either verified or improved upon, or disproved altogether, is, in the long run, of any worth. Through it alone, as we follow the changes wrought in the process from guess to certainty, can we determine what was the intellectual stage of man in his mental infancy, and how far it finds correspondences in the intellectual stage of existing barbaric races.

Thus, the study of myth is nothing less than the study of the mental and spiritual history of mankind. It is a branch of that larger, vaster science of evolution which so occupies our thoughts to-day, and with it the philosopher and the theologian must reckon. The evidence which it brings from the living and dead mythologies of every race is in accord with that furnished by their more tangible relics, that the history of mankind is a history of slow but sure advance from a lower to a higher; of ascent, although with oft backslidings. It confirms a momentous canon of modern science, that the laws of evolution in the spiritual world are as determinable as they are in the physical. To this we, for the enrichment of our life and helpful service of our kind, do well to give heed. Wherever we now turn eye or ear the unity of things is manifest, and their unbroken harmony heard. With the theory of evolution in our hands as the master-key, the immense array of facts that seemed to lie unrelated and discrete are seen to be interrelated and in necessary dependence--“a mighty sum of things for ever speaking.” That undisturbed relation of cause and effect which science has revealed and confirmed extends backwards as well as reaches forwards; its continuity involves the inclusion of man as a part of nature, and the study of his development as one in which both the biologist and the mythologist engage towards a common end.

II.

DREAMS: THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.

“The physical world is made up of atoms and ether, and there is no room for ghosts.”

W. K. CLIFFORD.

“If ghos’es want me to believe in ’em, let ’em leave off skulking i’ the dark and i’ lone places--let ’em come where there’s company and candles.”

GEORGE ELIOT.

DREAMS: THEIR PLACE IN THE GROWTH OF BELIEFS IN THE SUPERNATURAL.

§ I.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SAVAGE AND CIVILISED MAN.

The evidence as to pre-historic man’s material furniture and surroundings, which was first gathered from and restricted to ancient river valleys and bone caverns of Great Britain, France, and Belgium, is no longer isolated. It is supported by evidence which has been collected from every part of the globe inhabited in past or present times, and its uniform character has enabled us to determine what lies beyond an horizon which within the last half century was bounded by the hazy line of myth and tradition. So rigid seemed the limit defining man’s knowledge of his past that some forty years ago even the Geological Society of London recorded with barest reference the unearthing of relics witnessing to his presence in Britain hundreds of thousands of years ago. The canon was closed, and no one ventured to add to the sayings of the book. But the discoveries which had disproved belief in the earth’s supremacy in the universe, and in its creation in six days, led the way to researches into the history of the life upon its surface, and especially of that which, in the language of ancient writ, was “made in the image of God.” When the long-forbidding line, imaginary as the equator and lacking its convenience, was crossed, there was found the evidence of the conditions under which man emerged from a state quite other than that which had formed the burden of legends sacred with the hoariness of time. Those conditions, it is well-nigh needless to remind the reader, accord with that theory which holds man to be no specially-created being, started on this earth, fully equipped, Minerva-like, with all ripeness of wisdom and loftiness of soul, but the last and long result of an ever-ascending series of organisms ranging from the lowest, shapeless, nerveless specks to _homo sapiens_, “the foremost in the files of time.” Evolution is advance from the simple to the complex. The most primitive forms reach maturity in a shorter time than the higher forms, and fulfil their purpose quicker, and this doctrine applies not only in relation to man and the inferior creatures, but as between the several races of man himself. Herein the differences, which are determined by size, still more by increase in complexity, of brain-stuff, are greater than between the lowest man and the highest animals--that is to say, the savage and civilised man are farther apart than the savage and the anthropoid ape. The cranial capacity of the modern Englishman surpasses that of the non-Aryan inhabitant of India by a difference of sixty-eight cubic inches, while between this non-Aryan skull and the skull of the gorilla the difference in capacity is but eleven inches,[60] and if we were to take into account the differences in structural complexity, as indicated by the creasing and furrowing of the brain surface, the contrast would be still more striking.

The brains of the earliest known races, the men of the Ancient Stone Age, ape-like savages who fought with woolly-haired elephants, cave-lions, and cave-bears, amidst the forests and on the slopes of the valleys and hills where London now stands, and who in the dawn of human intelligence, applying means to ends, came off victorious, were doubtless much nearer to the chimpanzee with his thirty-five cubic inches than to the Papuan with his fifty-five cubic inches. Indeed, we need not travel beyond this age or island; it suffices to compare the brain quality of the rustic, thinking of “maistly nowt,” with that of the highest minds amongst us, as evidence of the enormous diversity between wild and cultivated stocks of mankind.

Unless we are so enchained to fond delusions as to place man in a kingdom by himself, and deny in the sympathetic, moral, and intellectual faculties in brutes the germs of those capacities which, existing in a pre-human ancestry, have flowered in the noblest and wisest of our race, we may find in such differences as are shown to occur between civilised and primitive man further evidence of the enormous time since the latter appeared. For unnumbered ages man--then physically hardly distinguishable from apes--may have remained stationary. Certainly the relics from the Drift show no advance: given no change in the conditions, the species do not vary, and man, once adapted to his surroundings, changed only as these changed. But, obscure as are the causes, there came a period when conditions arose inducing some variation, no matter how slight, in brain development, which was of more need than any variation in the rest of the body, and when an impetus was given which, leaving the latter but slightly affected, quickened the former, so that man passed from the highest animality to the lowest humanity. Slowly, in the course of a struggle not yet ended, “the ape and tiger” were subdued within him, and those social conditions induced to which are due that progress which ever draws him nearer to the angels.

The discussion of this in detail lies outside the limits of these pages. Here, after briefly noting on what lines it must run, we are concerned with man at that far later stage in his development when the physical and material evidence respecting his bodily development gives place to the psychical and immaterial evidence respecting his mental development. Chipped flints, flakes, and scrapers of the Drift are indispensable witnesses to his primitive state, but during the long ages that he was making shift with them he remains within the boundaries of the zoological; he is more geological than human. Gleams of the soul within that will one day be responsive to grace of form and harmony of colour appear in the rude portraits of mammoth, reindeer, urus, whale, and man himself, scratched on ivory and horn. Indications of germinal ideas about an after-life are present in the contents of tumuli with the skeletons in defined positions, and with weapons presumably for the use of the departed in the happy hunting-grounds. In these last we are nearing the historic period, for a vast interval exists between the tomb-building races and the men of the Reindeer Period, yet even then the ages are many before man had so advanced as to bequeath the intangible relics of his thought, disclosing what answer he had beat out for himself to the riddle of the earth and the mysteries of life and death. Although the story of his intellectual and spiritual development is a broken one, of the earlier chapters of which we have no record, enough survives to induce and strengthen the conviction that in this, as in aught else, there is no real disconnection. In the shaping of the rudest pointed flint-tool and weapon there are the germs of the highest mechanical art; in the discordant war-whoop of the savage the latent strains of the “Marseillaise,” as, quoting Tennyson, in the eggs of the nightingale sleeps the music of the moon. If we cannot get so near to the elemental forms of thought as we could wish, we must lay hold of the lowest extant, and trace in these the connection to be sought between the barbaric and civilised mind. We must have understanding of the mental condition of races, still on low levels of culture, and if the result is to show that many highly-elaborated beliefs among advanced peoples are but barbaric philosophies “writ large,” the conception of an underlying unity between all nations of men that do dwell, or have dwelt, on the face of the earth, will receive additional proof.

§ II.

LIMITATIONS OF BARBARIC LANGUAGE.

Illustrations of the low intellectual stage of some extant races not quite at the bottom of the scale, drawn from simple matters, will make clearer how they will interpret matters of a more complex order, and interpret them only in one way.

Of the beginning of thought we can know nothing. For numberless ages man was marked out from the animals most nearly allied to him by that power of more readily adapting means to ends which gave him mastery over nature. Through that dim and dateless time he thought without knowing that he thought. “His senses made him conversant only with things externally existing and with his own body, and he transcended his senses only far enough to draw concrete inferences respecting the action of these things.”[61] He is human only when the thought reaches us through articulate speech. Language, as a means of communication between him and his fellows, denotes the existence of the social state, the play of the social evolution which gives the impetus to ideas. Language is the outcome of man’s social needs and nature; he speaks not so much because he thinks and feels as because he must perforce tell his thoughts and feelings to others. And by the richness or poverty of his speech we may assess the richness or poverty of his ideas, since language cannot transcend the thought of which it is the vehicle.

By what tones and gestures, by what signs and grimaces, the beginnings of speech were made, we know not. Countless processions of races appeared and vanished before language had reached a stage when the elements of which words are built up could be separated, and the reason which governed the choice of this and that sound or symbol discovered. Now and again, when a correspondence is found between the roots of terms in use amongst the higher races and the names given by lower races to the same thing, we get nearer primitive thought, the correspondence being not always in sound or spelling, which may be delusive, but in physical or sensible meaning. It would be a wholesome corrective of theories concerning the origin of languages to which many are yet wedded to show that terms not only for things material and concrete, but also for things immaterial and abstract, are of purely physical origin, _i.e._ have been chosen from their analogy to something real. But the consideration of such matters lies outside the purpose of this work.

Language proves the limited range of ideas among barbaric peoples in the absence of their capacity to generalise. They have a word for every familiar thing, sound, and colour, but no word for animal, plant, sound, or colour as abstract terms. It is the concrete, the special shape and feature and action of a thing, which strike the senses at the outset; to strip it of these accidents, as we call them, and merge it in the general, and realise its relation to what is common to the class to which it belongs, is an effort of which the untutored mind is incapable. Many of the northern non-Aryan tribes, as among the Mongols, have names for the smallest rivulet, but no word for river; names for each finger, but no word for finger. The Society Islanders have a separate name for the tails of various animals, but no name for tail. The Mohicans have verbs for every kind of cutting, but no verb “to cut.” The Australians and other southern aborigines have no generic term for tree, neither have the Malays, yet they have words for the several parts, the root, stem, twig, etc. When the Tasmanians wished to express qualities of things, as hard, soft, warm, long, round, they would say for hard, “like a stone”; for tall, “long legs”; for round, “like the moon,” and so on. Certain hill-tribes of India give names to sunshine, candle, and flames of fire, but “light” is a high abstraction which they are unable to grasp. Some of the Red Race languages have separate verbs for “I wish to eat meat,” or “I wish to eat soup,” but no verb for “I wish.” Of course, the verb “to be,” which, as Adam Smith remarked long ago, is the most abstract and metaphysical of all words, and therefore of no early coinage, is absent from a large number of barbaric languages. Abstract though it be, it is, as Professor Whitney points out, made up of the relics of several verbs which once had, like all elements and parts of speech, a distinct physical meaning. As in “be” and “been” the idea of “growing” is contained, so in “am,” “art,” “is,” and “are,” the idea of “sitting” (or, as some think, of “breathing”) is embodied. As an example of its absence, the Abipones cannot say “I am an Abipone,” only “I Abipone.” Turning to another class of illustration, we have proof what a far cry it is from the savage to the Senior Wrangler in the powerlessness of the former to count beyond his fingers; indeed, he cannot always count as far as that, any number beyond two bewildering him. One of the best stories to the point is given in Mr. Galton’s _Tropical South Africa_.

“When the Dammaras wish to express four they take to their fingers, which are to them as formidable instruments of calculation as a sliding rule is to an English schoolboy. They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for units. Yet they seldom lose oxen; the way in which they discover the loss of one is not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face they know. When bartering is going on, each sheep must be paid for separately. Thus, suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Dammara to take two sheep and give him four sticks. I have done so, and seen a man put two of the sticks apart, and take a sight over them at one of the sheep he was about to sell. Having satisfied himself that that one was honestly paid for, and finding to his surprise that exactly two sticks remained in hand to settle the account for the other sheep, he would be afflicted with doubts; the transaction seemed to come out too “pat” to be correct, and he would refer back to the first couple of sticks; and then his mind got hazy and confused, and wandered from one sheep to the other, and he broke off the transaction until two sticks were put into his hand and one sheep driven away, and then the other two sticks given him and the second sheep driven away. Once while I watched a Dammara floundering hopelessly in a calculation on one side of me, I observed Dinah, my spaniel, equally embarrassed on the other. She was overlooking half a dozen of her new-born puppies, which had been removed two or three times from her, and her anxiety was excessive, as she tried to find out if they were all present, or if any were still missing. She kept puzzling and running her eyes over them, backwards and forwards, but could not satisfy herself. She evidently had a vague notion of counting, but the figure was too large for her brain. Taking the two as they stood, dog and Dammara, the comparison reflected no great honour on the man.”

Dr. Rae says that if an Eskimo is asked the number of his children he is generally puzzled. After counting some time on his fingers he will probably consult his wife, and the two often differ, even though they may not have more than four or five in family. Of the languages of the Australian savages, who are the lowest extant, examined by Mr. Crawfurd, thirty were found to have no number beyond four, all beyond this being spoken of as “many,” whilst the Brazilian Indians got confused in trying to reckon beyond three. The list of such cases might be largely extended, and although exceptions occur where savages are found with a fairly wide range of numbers, notably where barter prevails, the larger proportion of uncivilised people are bewildered at any effort to count beyond three or five. The fingers have, in most cases, determined the limits, for men counted on these before they gave words to the numbers, the words being at last borrowed from the fingers, as in our “five,” which is cognate with the Greek “pente,” and the Persian “pendji” (said to be derived from the word for “hand”), and “digits,” from Latin “digitus,” a finger. This limited power of numeration thus shown to be possessed by the savage justifies the statement that he is nearer to the ape than to the average civilised man, nearer, as the extract from Mr. Galton shows, to the spaniel than to the mathematician. What conception of the succession of time, still less of it as a confluence of the eternities, can he have whose feeble brain cannot grasp a to-morrow! And yet the difference is not one of kind, but of degree, which separates the aborigines of Victoria or Papua from the astronomer who is led by certain irregularities in the motion of a planet to calculate the position of the disturbing cause, and thereby to discover it nearly a thousand million miles beyond in the planet Neptune.

§ III.

BARBARIC CONFUSION BETWEEN NAMES AND THINGS.

Races which have names for different kinds of oaks, but none for an oak, still less for a tree, and who cannot count beyond their fingers, may be expected to have hazy notions concerning the objective and subjective; or, to put these in terms less technical, concerning that which belongs to the object of thought, and that which is to be referred to the thinking subject. Although primitive religion and philosophy are too nearly allied to admit of sharp definitions, the former may be said, if the slang is allowed, to be one of funk, and the latter one of fog. There are those amongst us who say that the terrorism which lies at the base of the one and the mist which is an element of the other, linger yet in extant belief and metaphysics. What man cannot understand he fears; and in all primary beliefs the powers around which seem to him so wayward are baleful, to be appeased by sacrifice or foiled by sorcery. And the confusion which reigns in his cosmos extends to his notion of what is in the mind and what is out of it. He cannot distinguish between an illusion and a reality, between a substance and its image or shadow; and it needs only some bodily ailment, as indigestion through gorging, or delirium through starving, to give to spectres of diseased or morbid origin, airy nothings, a substantive existence, a local habitation, and a name.

The tangle between things and their symbols is well illustrated in the barbaric notion that the name of a man is an integral part of himself, and that to reveal it is to put the owner in the power of another. An Indian asked Kane whether his wish to know his name arose from a desire to steal it; the Araucanians would not allow their names to be told to strangers, lest these should be used in sorcery. So with the Indians of British Columbia; and among the Ojibways husbands and wives never told each other’s names, the children being warned against repeating their own names lest they stop growing. Dobrizhoffer says that the Abipones of Paraguay had the like superstition. They would knock at his door at night, and when asked who was there, no answer would come, through dread of uttering their names. Mr. im Thurn tells us that, although the Indians of British Guiana have an intricate system of names, it is “of little use, in that owners have a very strong objection to telling or using them, apparently on the ground that the name is part of the man, and that he who knows it has part of the owner of that name in his power.” In Borneo the name of a sickly child is changed, to deceive the evil spirits that have tormented it; the Lapps change the baptismal name of a child for the same reason; and among the Abipones, the Fuegians, the Lenguas of Brazil, the North-West Indians, and other tribes at corresponding low levels, when any member died the relatives would change their names to elude Death when he should come to look for them, as well as give their children horrid names to frighten the bad spirits away. All over the barbaric world we find a great horror of naming the dead, lest the ghost appear. An aged Indian of Lake Michigan explained why tales of the spirits were told only in winter, by saying that when the deep snow is on the ground the voices of those repeating their names are muffled; but that in summer the slightest mention of them must be avoided, lest the spirits be offended. Among the Californian tribes the name of the departed spoken inadvertently caused a shudder to pass over all those present. Among the Iroquois the name of a dead man could not be used again in the lifetime of his oldest surviving son without the consent of the latter, and the Australians believe that a dead man’s ghost creeps into the liver of the impious wretch who has dared to utter his name. Dr. Lang tried to get the name of a relative who had been killed from an Australian. “He told me who the lad’s father was, who was his brother, what he was like, how he walked, how he held his tomahawk in his left hand instead of his right, and who were his companions; but the dreaded name never escaped his lips, and I believe no promises or threats could have induced him to utter it.” Dorman gives a pathetic illustration of this superstition in the Shawnee myth of Yellow Sky. “She was a daughter of the tribe, and had dreams which told her she was created for an unheard-of mission. There was a mystery about her being, and none could comprehend the meaning of her evening songs. The paths leading to her father’s lodge were more beaten than those to any other. On one condition alone at last she consented to become a wife, namely, that he who wedded her should never mention her name. If he did, she warned him that a sad calamity would befall him, and he would for ever thereafter regret his thoughtlessness. After a time Yellow Sky sickened and died, and her last words were that her husband might never breathe her name. For five summers he lived in solitude, but, alas, one day as he was by the grave of his dead wife, an Indian asked him whose it was, and in forgetfulness he uttered the forbidden name. He fell to the earth in great pain, and as darkness settled round about him a change came over him. Next morning, near the grave of Yellow Sky a large buck was quietly feeding. It was the unhappy husband.”

The original meaning has dropped out of the current saying, “Talk of the devil and you’ll see his horns,” but savage philosophy recovers it for us. And the shrinking from naming persons is still more marked as we ascend the scale of principalities and powers. In the South Sea Islands not only are the names of chiefs tabooed, but also words and syllables resembling those names in sound. The Tahitians have a custom called _Te pi_, which consists in avoiding in daily language those words which form a part or the whole of the names of the king and royal family, and in inventing new terms in their place. The king’s name being _Tu fetu_, “star,” had to be changed into _fetia_, and _tui_, “to strike,” became _tiai_. In New Zealand knives were called _nekra_, because a chief’s name was _Maripi_, or “knife.” It is, Professor Max Müller aptly remarks, as if with the accession of Queen Victoria either the word _victory_ had been tabooed altogether, or only part of it, as _tori_, so as to make it high treason to speak of _Tories_ during her reign. The secret name of Pocahontas was Matokas, which was concealed from the English through superstitious fear; and in the mythical story of “Hiawatha” the same metonymic practice occurs, his real name being Tarenyawagon. A survival of the dislike to calling exalted temporal, and also spiritual, beings by their names, probably lies at the root of the Jews’ unwillingness to use the name of Yahweh (commonly and incorrectly spelt Jehovah[62]), and in the name “Allah,” which is an epithet or title of the Mohammadan deity, and not the “great name”; whilst the concealment by the Romans of the name of the tutelary deity of their city was fostered by their practice, when besieging any place, to invoke the treacherous aid of its protecting god by offering him a high place in their Pantheon. And in the title of Eumenidês, or the “gracious ones,” given to the Furies by the Greeks, may be noted a survival of the verbal bribes by which the thing feared was “squared.” For example, the Finnish hunters called the bear “the apple of the forest,” “the beautiful honey-claw,” “the pride of the thicket”; the Laplander speaks of it as “the old man with the fur coat”; in Annam the natives call the tiger “grandfather,” or “lord”; and the Dyaks of Borneo speak of the small-pox as “the chief,” or “jungle leaves.”

The confusion between ideas and objects which these examples illustrate is shared by us, although in a remote degree. If the initials of any well-known name are transposed, for example, let W. E. Gladstone be printed E. W. Gladstone; or if some familiar name is altered, for example, let John Bright be misprinted James Bright, it is curious to note how for a moment the identity is obscured in one’s mind. Another personality, indistinct and bewildering, rises before us, showing how we have come to link together a man and his name even to the details of his initials. That which we feel momentarily the uncivilised feels constantly. He cannot think of himself, of his squaw, of his children, or of his fellow-tribesmen, apart from names which are more significant to him than ours are to us. With us the reason which governed selection is forgotten or obscured, the physical features and conditions no longer correspond to ancestral names; but with barbarous peoples those features and conditions are more apparent. Besides which, children are often named by the medicine-man, and the name is thus endowed with a charm which may roughly be analogous to the halo round a name confirmed by baptism to one simply recorded in the office of a Registrar of Births.

§ IV.

BARBARIC BELIEF IN VIRTUE IN INANIMATE THINGS.

The artificial divisions which man in his pride of birth made between the several classes of phenomena in the inorganic world, and also between the inorganic and the organic, are being swept away before the larger knowledge and insight of our time. Indeed, it would seem that the surest test we can apply to the worth of any kind of knowledge is whether it adds to or takes from our growing conception of unity. If it does the former, we cannot overthrow it; if it does the latter, then is it science “falsely so called.”

That notable doctrine known as the correlation of physical forces, or the convertibility into one another of heat, light, electricity, chemical affinity, etc., each being a mode of manifestation of an unknown energy which “lives through all life, extends through all extent,” has its counterpart in the correlation of spiritual forces. Varied as are the modes of expression of these, that variety is on the surface only. Deep down lies the one source that feeds them, the one heart to whose existence their pulsations witness. All primitive philosophies, all religions “that man did ever find,” are but as the refractions of the same light dispersed through different media; are the result of the speculations of the same subject, allowances being made for local and non-essential differences upon like objects. And, therefore, in treating of the nature and limitations of man’s early thought concerning his surroundings, whether these be the broad earth bathed in the sunshine or swathed in the darkness, or the sounds that come from unseen agents, the sight of spectral visitants of whom he cannot have touch, and out of which are built up his theories of the invisible world, the reader may find reference to the same conditions which were shown in former pages to give birth and sustenance to primitive myth. The same fantastic conclusions, drawn from rude analyses and associations, and from seeming connections of cause and effect, the same bewildering entanglement between things which we know can have nothing in common, meet us; and the same scientific method by which we determine the necessary place of each in the advance of man to truth through illusion is applied.

The illustrations of the vital connection which the savage assumes between himself and his name show how easy is the passage from belief in life inhering in everything to belief in it as capable of power for good or evil. This can be shown by illustrations from more tangible things than names. The savage who is afraid to utter these also shrinks from having his likeness taken, in the feeling that some part of him is transferred, and at the mercy of the sorcerer and enemy. The Malemutes of North America refused to risk their lives before a photographic apparatus. They said that those who had their likenesses had their spirit, and they would not let these pass into the keeping of those who might use them as instruments of torment. Catlin relates that he caused great commotion among the Sioux by drawing one of their chiefs in profile. “Why was half his face left out?” they asked; “Mahtocheega was never ashamed to look a white man in the face.” The chief himself did not take offence, but Shouka the Dog taunted him, saying: “The Englishman knows that you are but half a man; he has painted but one-half of your face, and knows that the rest is good for nothing.” This led to a quarrel, and in the end Mahtocheega was shot, the fatal bullet tearing away just that part of the face which Catlin had not drawn! He had to make his escape, and the matter was not settled till both Shouka and his brother had been killed in revenge for Mahtocheega’s death. The Yanktons accused Catlin of causing a scarcity of buffaloes by putting a great many of them in his book, and refused to let him take their portraits. So with the Araucanians, who ran away if any attempt was made to sketch them. Among such races we find great care exercised lest cuttings of hair, parings of nails, saliva, refuse of food, water in which they had washed, etc., should fall into unfriendly or mistrusted hands. The South Sea Island chiefs had servants following them with spittoons, that the saliva might be buried in some hidden place. Among the Polynesians any one who fell ill attributed it to some sorcerer, who had got hold of refuse from the sick and was burning it, and the quiet of the night was often broken by the blowing of shell-trumpets, as signals for the sorcerer to stop until the gifts on their way to appease him could arrive. The idea is common both to Eskimo and Indian that so long as a fragment of a body remains unburnt, the being, man or beast, may, by magic, be revived from it. As with the name or the portrait, whoever possessed a part of the material substance possessed a part of the spiritual, and in this world-wide belief in a sympathetic connection between things living and not living lies the whole philosophy of sorcery, of charms, amulets, spells, and the general doctrine of luck surviving through the successive stages of culture to this day. And he who would prevent anything from his person getting into hostile hands, naturally sought after things in which coveted qualities were believed to dwell, and avoided those of a reverse nature. So we find tiger’s flesh eaten to give courage, and the eyes of owls swallowed to give good sight in the dark. The Kaffirs prepare a powder made of the dried flesh of various wild beasts, the leopard, tiger, elephant, snake, etc., so as to absorb the several virtues of these creatures. The Tyrolese hunter wears his tuft of eagle’s down to gain long sight and daring, and the Red Indian strings bears claws round his neck to get Bruin’s savage courage. The customs of scalping and, in some measure, of cannibalism, may be referred to the same notion, for the Red man will risk his life to prevent a tribesman’s scalp being captured by the foe, and the New Zealander will swallow the eyes of his slain enemy to improve his sight. In Greenland “a slain man is said to have power to avenge himself upon the murderer by _rushing into him_, which can only be prevented by eating a piece of his liver.”[63] When a whaler died the Eskimos distributed portions of his dried body among his friends, and rubbed the points of their lances with them, it being held that a weapon thus charmed would pierce a vital part in a whale, where another would fail. Sometimes the body was laid in a cave, and, before starting for the chase, the whalers would assemble, and, carrying it to a stream, plunge it in, and then drink the water. When the heroic Jesuit Brébeuf was tortured by the Iroquois, they were so astonished at his endurance that they laid open his breast and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant a foe, thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage, while a chief tore out his heart and devoured it.

Cannibalism, it may be remarked, _en passant_, is also found to have a religious significance, on the supposition, which has unsuspected survival among advanced races, that eating the body and drinking the blood communicates the spirit of the victim to the consumer. It is not always the most savage races who practise it; for example, the Australians, despite the scarcity of large animals for food supply, rarely ate the flesh of man, whilst the New Zealanders, who rank far above them, and had not the like excuse, were systematic feeders on human flesh.

As examples of a reverse kind, but witnessing to the play of like beliefs in qualities passing from brutes and lifeless things, we find some races avoiding oil, lest the game slip through their fingers, abstaining from the flesh of deer, lest it engenders timidity, and from that of pigs and of tortoises lest the eater has very small eyes. Dr. Tylor gives an apposite illustration of a kindred superstition in the Hessian lad who thinks that he may escape the conscription by carrying a baby-girl’s cap in his pocket as a symbolical way of repudiating manhood. So the thief of our London slums hopes to evade the police by carrying a piece of coal or slate in his pocket for luck. Among ourselves there was an old medical saw, “Hare-flesh engendereth melancholy bloude,” and in Swift’s _Polite Conversation_ we have this reason assigned by Lady Answerall when asked to eat it; whilst faith is not yet extinct in the “Doctrine of Signatures,” or the notion that the appearance of a plant indicates the disease for which it is a remedy, as the “eye-bright,” the black purple spot on the corolla of which was said to show that it was good for weak eyes. In referring to the mandrake superstition (a plant whose roots are said to rudely resemble the human form) as illustration of the “recognised principles in magic that things like each other, however superficially, affect each other in a mystic way and possess identical properties,” Mr. Andrew Lang quotes a Melanesian belief that a stone in the shape of a pig, of a bread-fruit, of a yam, was a most valuable find, because it made pigs prolific and fertilised bread-fruit trees and yam-plots.[64]

Brand remarks[65] that the custom of giving infants coral to help in cutting the teeth is said to be a survival of an old belief in it as an amulet; and in English, Sicilian, and West Indian folk-lore, we find the belief that it changes colour in sympathy with the pale or healthy look of the wearer. An old Latin author says,[66] “It putteth of lightenynge, whirle-wynde, tempeste, and storms fro shyppes and houses that it is in.”

We are each of us hundreds of thousands of years old, and although our customs and beliefs have a far less venerable antiquity, their sources lie not less in primitive thought. Like the survival of the ancient Roman workman’s “casula” or “little house” or “shelter” in the chasuble of the priest; like the use of stone knives in circumcision long after the discovery of metals; the general tends to become special; the common, its primitive need or service forgotten, to become sacred. Sometimes the early idea abides; the Crees, who carry about the bones of the dead carefully wrapped up as a fetish; the Caribs, who think such relics can answer questions; the Xomanes, who drink the powdered bones in water, that they may receive the spirit; the Algonquins, whose god Manobozho turned bits of his own flesh or his wife’s into raccoons for food; the Iroquois cited above; represent the barbarous ancestry of higher races, whether of the Bacchanalians described by Arnobius,[67] who thought that the fulness of the divine majesty was imparted to them when they tore and ate the struggling rams with mouths dripping with gore, or of the faithful who receive nutriment through the symbols of the Cross. And the prayers of savage and civilised have this in common, that some advantage is thereby sought by the utterer; their sacrifices are alike the giving up of one’s goods or one’s self to a deity who may be appeased or bribed thereby; their fastings are cultivated as inducing the abnormal states in which their old men dream dreams and their young men see visions of spirits appearing as angels ascending and descending between earth and the abode of the blest. Baptisms are the ancient lustrations, which water, as the cleansing element, suggested; and the eastward position, over which priests and ecclesiastics have fought, is the undoubted relic of worship of the rising sun.

In short, there is no rite or ceremony yet practised and revered amongst us which is not the lineal descendant of barbaric thought and usage, expressing a need which, were men less the slaves of custom and indolence, would long since have found loftier form than in genuflexion before shrine and reliquary. By an exercise of imagination not possible but for these being a felicitous “gesture language” of the cries of human souls, a mass of heathen and pagan rites have been transformed into those of the Christian faith. That they have come to be mistaken for the ideas symbolised, that with the loftiest spiritual teaching there should remain commingled belief in miraculous power in fragments (mostly spurious) of dead men and their clothes; only shows the persistency of that notion of a vital connection between the lifeless and the living which this section has sought to illustrate.

§ V.

BARBARIC BELIEF IN THE REALITY OF DREAMS.

The confusion in the barbaric mind between the objective and the subjective, and between the name and the person or thing, which has been illustrated in the foregoing pages, will enable us to see more clearly how the like confusion must enter into the interpretation of such occult and compound phenomena as dreams, and all their kind.

They supply the conditions for exciting and sustaining that feeling of mystery which attends man’s endeavour to get at the meaning of his surroundings. The phantasies which have defiled through the brain in coherent order, or danced in mazy whirl about its sinuous passages when complete sleep was lacking, leave their footprints on the memory, and they are strong of head and heart, true pepticians, like the countryman cited by Carlyle, who, “for his part, had no system,” whose composure on awaking is not affected by the harmonious or discordant, the pleasant or disagreeable, illusions which have made up their dreams. In the felicitous words of Lucretius, “When sleep has chained down our limbs in sweet slumber, and the whole body is sunk in profound repose, yet then we seem to ourselves to be awake and to be moving our limbs, and amid the thick darkness of night we think we see the sun and the daylight; and though in a confined room, we seem to be passing to new climates, seas, rivers, mountains, and to be crossing plains on foot, and to hear voices, though the austere silence of night prevails all round, and to be uttering speech, though quite silent. Many are the other things of this marvellous sort we see, which all seek to shake, as it were, the credit of the senses: quite in vain, since the greatest part of these cases cheat us on account of the mental suppositions which we add of ourselves, taking those things as seen which have not been seen by the senses. For nothing is harder than to separate manifest facts from doubtful, which the mind without hesitation adds on of itself.”[68]

While for us dreams fill an empty moment in the telling, albeit now and again nurturing such remains of superstition as cling to the majority of people, they are to the untrained intelligence, unable to distinguish fact from fiction, or to follow any sequence of ideas, as solid as the experiences of waking moments. As a Zulu, well expressing the limits of savage thought, said to Bishop Callaway, “Our knowledge does not urge us to search out the roots of it, we do not try to see them, if any one thinks ever so little, he soon gives it up, and passes on to what he sees with his eyes; and he does not understand the real state of even what he sees.” Nor does his language clear the confusion within when he tells what he has seen and heard and felt, where he has been and what he has done, for the speech cannot transcend the thought, and therefore can represent neither to himself nor to his hearers the difference between the illusions of the night and the realities of the day. The dead relatives and friends who appear in dreams and live their old life, with whom he joins in the battle, the chase, and the feast, the foes with whom he struggles, the wild beasts from whom he flees, or in whose clutches he feels himself, and with shrieks awakens his squaw, the long distances he travels to sunnier climes lit by a light that never was on land or sea, are all real, and no “baseless fabric of a vision.” That now and again he should have walked in his sleep would confirm the seeming reality; still more so would the intensified form of dreaming called “nightmare,”[69] when hideous spectres sit upon the breast, stopping breath and paralysing motion, and to which is largely due the creation of the vast army of nocturnal demons that fill the folk-lore of the world, and that, under infinite variety of repellent form, have had place in the hierarchy of religions.

Dreams are in the main referred by the savage either to the entrance into him of some outside spirit, as among the Fijians, who believe that the spirit of a living man will leave the body to trouble sleeping folk, or to the real doings of himself.

When the Greenlander dreams of hunting, or fishing, or courting, he believes that the soul quits the body; the Dyaks of Borneo think that during sleep the soul sometimes remains in the body or travels far away, being endowed, whether present or absent, with conditions which in waking moments are lacking. Wherever we find a low state of mental development the like belief exists. In Mr. im Thurn’s elaborate work on the _Indians of Guiana_ we have corroborative evidence, the more valuable because of its freshness. He tells us that the dreams which come to the Indian are to him as real as any of the events of his waking life. To him dream-acts and waking-acts differ only in one respect--namely, that the former are done only by the spirit, the latter are done by the spirit in its body. Seeing other men asleep, and afterwards hearing from them the things which they suppose themselves to have done when asleep, the Indian has no difficulty in reconciling that which he hears with the fact that the bodies of the sleepers were in his sight and motionless throughout the time of supposed action, because he never questions that the spirits, leaving the sleepers, played their part in dream-adventures. Mr. im Thurn illustrates the complete belief of the Indian in the unbroken continuity of his dream-life and waking-life by incidents which came under his own notice, and which are quoted as serving the present argument better than any theorising.

One morning when it was important to me to get away from a camp on the
Essequibo River, at which I had been detained for some days by the
illness of some of my Indian companions, I found that one of the
invalids, a young Macusi, though better in health, was so enraged
against me that he refused to stir, for he declared that, with great
want of consideration for his weak health, I had taken him out during
the night and had made him haul the canoe up a series of difficult
cataracts. Nothing could persuade him that this was but a dream, and
it was some time before he was so far pacified as to throw himself
sulkily into the bottom of the canoe. At that time we were all
suffering from a great scarcity of food, and, hunger having its usual
effect in producing vivid dreams, similar events frequently occurred.
More than once the men declared in the morning that some absent man,
whom they named, had come during the night, and had beaten, or
otherwise maltreated them; and they insisted on much rubbing of the
bruised parts of their bodies. Another instance was amusing. In the
middle of one night I was awakened by an Arawak named Sam, the captain
or head-man of the Indians who were with me, only to be told the
bewildering words, “George speak me very bad, boss; you cut his bits!”
It was some time before I could collect my senses sufficiently to
remember that “bits,” or fourpenny-pieces, are the units in which,
among Creoles and semi-civilised Indians, calculation of money, and
consequently of wages, is made; that to cut bits means to reduce the
number of bits or wages given; and to understand that Captain Sam,
having dreamed that his subordinate George had spoken insolently to
him, the former, with a fine sense of the dignity of his office, now
insisted that the culprit should be punished in real life. One more
incident, of which the same Sam was the hero, may be told for the sake
of the humour, though it did not happen within my personal experience,
but was told me by a friend. This friend, in whose employ Sam was at
the time, told his man, as they sat round the fire one night, of the
Zulu or some other African war which was then in progress, and in so
doing inadvertently made frequent use of the expression, “to punish
the niggers.” That night, after all in camp had been asleep for some
time, they were raised by loud cries for help. Sam, who was one of the
most powerful Indians I ever saw, was “punishing a nigger” who
happened to be one of the party; with one hand he had firmly grasped
the back of the breeches-band of the black man, and had twisted this
round so tightly that the poor wretch was almost cut in two. Sam
sturdily maintained that he had received orders from his master for
this outrageous conduct, and on inquiry it turned out that he had
dreamed this.[70]