Chapter I: Preface (1)

AT the Congress held at Oxford in September, 1908, those who heard Count Goblet d’Alviella’s address on the “Method and Scope of the History of Religions” must have felt the thrill which announces the stirring of new ideas, when, in a memorable passage, the speaker asked “whether the psychology of animals has not equally some relation to the science of religions?” At any rate, these words came to me as a confirmation of the belief that the study which has engaged my attention for several years, is rapidly advancing towards recognition as a branch of the inquiry into what man is himself. The following chapters on the different answers given to this question when extended from man to animals, were intended, from the first, to form a whole, not complete, indeed, but perhaps fairly comprehensive. I offer them now to the public with my warmest acknowledgments to the scholars whose published works and, in some cases, private hints have made my task possible. I also wish to thank the Editor of the _Contemporary Review_ for his kindness in allowing me to reprint the part of this book which appeared first in that periodical.

Some chapters refer rather to practice than to psychology, and others to myths and fancies rather than to conscious speculation, but all these subjects are so closely connected that it would be difficult to divide their treatment by a hard-and-fast line.

With regard to the illustrations, I am glad to bear grateful testimony to the facilities afforded me by the Directors of the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Hague Gallery, the National Museum at Copenhagen, the Egypt Exploration Fund, and by the Secretary of State for India. H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrère, French Ambassador at Rome, has allowed me to include a photograph of his remarkably fine specimen of a bronze cat; and I have obtained the sanction of Monsieur Marcel Dieulafoy for the reproduction of one of Madame Dieulafoy’s photographs which appeared in his magnificent work on “L’Art Antique de la Perse.” Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Limited, and Messrs. Chapman and Hall, Limited, have permitted photographs to be taken of two plates in books published by them. Finally, Dr. C. Waldstein and Mr. E. B. Havell have been most kind in helping me to give the correct description of some of the plates.

SALÒ, LAGO DI GARDA.

_February 15, 1909._

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CONTENTS

I

PAGE
SOUL-WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS 11

II

THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 22

III

ANIMALS AT ROME 44

IV

PLUTARCH THE HUMANE 62

V

MAN AND HIS BROTHER 84

VI

THE FAITH OF IRAN 113

VII

ZOROASTRIAN ZOOLOGY 141

VIII

A RELIGION OF RUTH 166

IX

LINES FROM THE ADI GRANTH 201

X

THE HEBREW CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS 205

XI

“A PEOPLE LIKE UNTO YOU” 221

XII

THE FRIEND OF THE CREATURE 245

XIII

VERSIPELLES 265

XIV

THE HORSE AS HERO 281

XV

ANIMALS IN EASTERN FICTION 306

XVI

THE GROWTH OF MODERN IDEAS ABOUT ANIMALS 336

INDEX 367

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ILLUSTRATIONS

THE EMPEROR AKBAR PERSONALLY DIRECTING THE _Frontispiece_
TYING UP OF A WILD ELEPHANT. Tempera painting
in the “Akbar Namah,” by Abu’l Fazl (1597-98).
India Museum. _Photographed for this work._

DEER WORSHIPPING THE WHEEL OF THE LAW. Tope of Sanchi, drawn 11
by Lieut.-Col. Maisey
_From Fergusson’s “Tree and Serpent Worship.” By
permission of the India Office._

THE BUDDHISTIC TIGER 21
_From a painting on silk by Ko-Tō in the British Museum.
Photographed for this work.
In Japanese Buddhism the Tiger is the type of Wisdom._

ORPHEUS 32
_Fresco found at Pompeii._ (_Sommer._)

STELE WITH CAT AND BIRD 40
_Athens Museum._

CAPITOLINE SHE-WOLF 44
(_Bruckmann._) Bronze statue. Early Etruscan style.
The twins are modern.

LION BEING LED FROM THE ARENA BY A SLAVE 47
_From the mosaic pavement of a Roman villa at Nennig._

BACCHUS RIDING ON A PANTHER 74
_Mosaic found at Pompeii._ (_Sommer._)

BRONZE STATUE OF AN EGYPTIAN CAT 82
_From the Collection of H.E. Monsieur Camille Barrère,
French Ambassador at Rome_

REINDEER BROWSING. OLDER STONE AGE 86
_Found in a cave at Thayngen in Switzerland._

HORSE DRAWING DISC OF THE SUN. OLDER BRONZE AGE 86
_National Museum at Copenhagen._

HATHOR COW 102
_Found in 1906 by Dr. Édouard Naville at Deir-el-bahari.
By permission of the Egypt Exploration Fund._

WILD GOATS AND YOUNG 108
_Assyrian Relief. British Museum._ (_Mansell._)

ASSYRIAN GOD CARRYING ANTELOPE AND WHEAT-EAR 116
_British Museum._ (_Mansell._)

COUNTING CATTLE 128
_Egyptian Fresco. British Museum._ (_Mansell._)

KING FIGHTING GRIFFIN (“BAD ANIMAL”) 142
_Relief in Palace of Darius at Persepolis. Photographed
by Jane Dieulafoy. From “L’Art Antique de la Perse.” By
permission of M. Marcel Dieulafoy._

THE REAL DOG OF IRAN 152
_Bronze Statuette found at Susa. Louvre. From Perrot’s
“History of Art in Ancient Persia.” By permission of
Messrs. Chapman & Hall, Ltd._

BUDDHA PACIFYING AN INTOXICATED ELEPHANT WHICH HAD BEEN SENT 188
TO DESTROY HIM. THE ELEPHANT STOOPS IN ADORATION
Græco-Buddhist sculpture from a ruined monastery at
Takt-i-Bahi. _India Museum. Photographed for this work._

RECLINING BULL 192
_Ancient Southern Indian sculpture. From a photograph in
the India Museum._

WILD BULLS AND TAMED BULLS 201
_Reliefs on two gold cups found in a tomb at Vapheio near
Amyclae. Fifteenth century B.C. (possibly earlier). From
Schuckhardt’s “Schliemann’s Excavations.” By permission of
Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd._

THE GARDEN OF EDEN 208
_By Rubens. Hague Gallery._ (_Bruckmann._)

GENESIS VIII. 212
_Loggie di Raffaello. In the Vatican. Drawn by N.
Consoni._

DANIEL AND THE LIONS 216
_From an early Christian Sarcophagus in S. Vitale,
Ravenna._ (_Alinari._)

“AN INDIAN ORPHEUS” 222
_Inlaid marble work panel originally surmounting a doorway
in the Great Hall of Audience in the Mogul Palace at Delhi
(about 1650). Photographed for this work from a painting
by a native artist in the India Museum. Imitated from a
painting by Raphael._

MOSLEM BEGGAR FEEDING DOGS AT CONSTANTINOPLE 226
_From life._

ST. JEROME EXTRACTING A THORN FROM THE PAW OF A LION 253
_By Hubert van Eyck. Naples Museum._ (_Anderson._)

ST. EUSTACE (OR ST. HUBERT) AND THE STAG 256
_By Vittore Pisano. National Gallery._ (_Hanfstängl._)

“LE MENEUR DES LOUPS” 276
_Designed and drawn by Maurice Sand._

THE ASSYRIAN HORSE 284
_From a relief in the British Museum._ (_Mansell._)

ARABIAN HORSE OF THE SAHARA 288
_From life._

THE BANYAN DEER 328
_From “Stûpa of Bharhut.” By General Cunningham. By
permission of the India Office._ (_Griggs._)

EGYPTIAN OFFICIAL, WITH HIS WIFE, ENGAGED IN FOWLING IN THE 330
PAPYRUS SWAMP. HIS HUNTING CAT HAS SEIZED THREE BIRDS.
_Mural painting in British Museum._ (_Mansell._)

ASSYRIAN LION AND LIONESS IN PARADISE PARK 336
_British Museum._ (_Mansell._) The King’s reservations
for big game were called “paradises.”

LAMBS 338
_Relief on a fifth century tomb at Ravenna._ (_Alinari._)

“IL BUON PASTORE” 346
_Mosaic in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna._

------------------------------------------------------------------------

LT COL. MAISEY DEL. W. BRIGGS, LITH.
DEER WORSHIPPING THE WHEEL OF THE LAW.
Tope of Sanchi.]

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The Place of Animals in Human Thought

I

SOUL-WANDERING AS IT CONCERNS ANIMALS

IN one of these enigmatic sayings which launch the mind on boundless seas, Cardinal Newman remarked that we know less of animals than of angels. A large part of the human race explains the mystery by what is called transmigration, metempsychosis, _Samsara_, _Seelenwanderung_; the last a word so compact and picturesque that it is a pity not to imitate it in English. The intelligibility of ideas depends much on whether words touch the spring of the picture-making wheel of the brain; “Soul-wandering” does this.

Ancient as the theory is, we ought to remember what is commonly forgotten—that somewhere in the distance we catch sight of a time when it was unknown, at least in the sense of a procession of the soul from death to life through animal forms. Traces of it are to be found in the Sutras and it is thoroughly developed in the Upanishads, but if the Sutras belong to the thirteenth century and the Upanishads to about the year 700 before Christ, a long road still remains to the Vedas with their fabulous antiquity.

In the Vedas it is stated that the soul may wander, even during sleep, and that it will surely have a further existence after death, but there is nothing to show that in this further existence it will take the form of an animal. Man will be substantially man, able to feel the same pleasures as his prototype on earth; but if he goes to a good place, exempt from the same pains. What, then, was the Vedic opinion of animals? On the whole, it is safe to assume that the authors of the Vedic chants believed that animals, like men, entered a soul-world in which they preserved their identity. The idea of funeral sacrifices, as exemplified in these earliest records, was that of sending some one before. The horse and the goat that were immolated at a Vedic funeral were intended to go and announce the coming of the man’s soul. Wherever victims were sacrificed at funerals, they were originally meant to do something in the after-life; hence they must have had souls. The origin of the Suttee was the wish that the wife should accompany her husband, and among primitive peoples animals were sacrificed because the dead man might have need of them. Not very long ago an old Irish woman, on being remonstrated with for having killed her dead husband’s horse, replied with the words, “Do you think I would let my man go on foot in the next world?” On visiting that wonderfully emotion-awakening relic, the Viking ship at Christiania, I was interested to see the bones of the Chief’s horses and dogs as well as his own. Did the Norsemen, passionately devoted to the sea as they were, suppose, that not only the animals, but also the vessel in which they buried their leader, would have a ghostly second existence? I have no doubt that they did. Apart from what hints may be gleaned from the Vedas, there is an inherent probability against the early Aryans, any more than the modern Hindu, believing that the soul of man or beast comes suddenly to a full stop. To destroy spirit seems to the Asiatic mind as impossible as to destroy matter seems to the biologist.

Leaving the Vedas and coming down to the Sutras and Upanishads, we discover the transmigration of souls at first suggested and then clearly defined. Whence came it? Was it the belief of those less civilised nations whom the Aryans conquered, and did they, in accepting it from them, give it a moral complexion by investing it with the highly ethical significance of an upward or downward progress occasioned by the merits or demerits of the soul in a previous state of being?

A large portion of mankind finds it as difficult to conceive a sudden beginning as a sudden end of spirit. We forget difficulties which we are not in the habit of facing; those who have tried to face this one have generally stumbled over it. Even Dante with his subtle psychophysiological reasoning hardly persuades. The ramifications of a life before stretched far: “Whosoever believes in the fabled prior existence of souls, let him be anathema,” thundered the Council of Constantinople, A.D. 543. Which shows that many Christians shared Origen’s views on this subject.

From the moment that soul-wandering became, in India, a well-established doctrine, some three thousand years ago, the conception of the status of animals was perfectly clear. “Wise people,” says the Bhagavad Gita, “see the same soul (Atman) in the Brahman, in worms and insects, in the outcasts, in the dog and the elephant, in beasts, cows, gadflies, and gnats.” Here we have the doctrine succinctly expounded, and in spite of subtleties introduced by later philosophers (such as that of the outstanding self) the exposition holds good to this day as a statement of the faith of India. It also described the doctrine of Pythagoras, which ancient traditions asserted that he brought from Egypt, where no such doctrine ever existed. Pythagoras is still commonly supposed to have borrowed from Egypt; but it is strange that a single person should continue to hold an opinion against which so much evidence has been produced; especially as it is surely very easy to explain the tradition by interpreting Egypt to have stood for “the East” in common parlance, exactly as in Europe a tribe of low caste Indians came to be called gypsies or Egyptians. Pythagoras believed that he had been one of the Trojan heroes, whose shield he knew at a glance in the Temple of Juno where it was hung up. After him, Empedocles thought that he had passed through many forms, amongst others those of a bird and a fish. Pythagoras and his fire-spent disciple belong to times which seem almost near if judged by Indian computations: yet they are nebulous figures; they seem to us, and perhaps they seemed to men who lived soon after them, more like mysterious, half Divine bearers of a word than men of flesh and blood. But Plato, who is real to us and who has influenced so profoundly modern thought, Plato took their theory and displayed it to the Western world as the most logical explanation of the mystery of being.

The theory of transmigration did not commend itself to Roman thinkers, though it was admirably stated by a Roman poet:—

“Omnia mutantur: nihil interit. Errat, et illinc
Huc venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus
Spiritus, eque feris, humana in corpora transit,
Inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo.
Utque novis facilis signatur cera figuris,
Nec manet ut fuerat, nec formas servat easdem,
Sed tamen ipsa eadem est: animam sic semper eandem
Esse.”

This description is as accurate as it is elegant; but it remains a question whether Ovid had anything deeper than a folk-lorist’s interest in transmigration joined to a certain sympathy which it often inspires in those who are fond of animals. The enthusiastic folk-lorist finds himself believing in all sorts of things at odd times. Lucian’s admirers at Rome doubtless enjoyed his ridiculous story of a Pythagorean cock which had been a man, a woman, a prince, a subject, a fish, a horse and a frog, and which summed up its varied experience in the judgment that man was the most wretched and deplorable of all creatures, all others patiently grazing within the enclosures of Nature while man alone breaks out and strays beyond those safe limits. This story was retold with great gusto by Erasmus. The Romans were a people with inclusive prejudices, and they were not likely to welcome a narrowing of the gulf between themselves and the beasts of the field. Cicero’s dictum that, while man looks before and after, analysing the past and forecasting the future, animals have only the perception of the present, does not go to the excess of those later theorists who, like Descartes, reduced animals to automata, but it goes farther than scientific writers on the subject would now allow to be justified.

It is worth while asking, what was it that so powerfully attracted Plato in the theory of transmigration? I think that Plato, who made a science of the moral training of the mind, was attracted by soul-wandering as a scheme of soul-evolution. Instead of looking at it as a matter of fact which presupposed an ethical root (which is the Indian view), he looked upon it as an ethical root which presupposed a matter of fact. He was influenced a little, no doubt, by the desire to get rid of Hades, “an unpleasant place,” as he says, “and not true,” for which he felt a peculiar antipathy, but he was influenced far more by seeing in soul-wandering a rational theory of the ascent of the soul, a Darwinism of the spirit. “We are plants,” he said, “not of earth but of heaven,” but it takes the plants of heaven a long time to grow.

We ought to admire the Indian mind, which first seized the idea of time in relation to development and soared out of the cage of history (veritable or imaginary) into liberal æons to account for one perfect soul, one plant that had accomplished its heavenly destiny. But though the Indian seer argues with Plato that virtue has its own reward (not so much an outward reward of improved environment as an inward reward of approximation to perfection), he disagrees with the Greek philosopher with regard to the practical result of all this as it affects any of us personally. Plato found the theory of transmigration entirely consoling; the Indian finds it entirely the reverse. Can the reason be that Plato took the theory as a beautiful symbol while the Indian takes it as a dire reality?

The Hindu is as much convinced that the soul is re-born in different animals as we are that children are born of women. He is convinced of it, but he is not consoled by it. Let us reflect a little: does not one life give us time to get somewhat tired of it; how should we feel after fifteen hundred lives? The wandering Jew has never been thought an object of envy, but the wandering soul has a wearier lot; it knows the sorrows of all creation.

“How many births are past I cannot tell,
How many yet may be no man may say,
But this alone I know and know full well,
That pain and grief embitter all the way.”[1]

Footnote 1:

“Folk-Songs of Southern India,” by Charles E. Gover, a fascinating but
little-known work.

Rather than this—death. How far deeper the gloom revealed by these lines from the folk-songs of an obscure Dravidian tribe living in the Nilgiri Hills, than any which cultured Western pessimism can show! Compared with them, the despairing cry of Baudelaire seems almost a hymn of joy:—

“’Tis death that cheers and gives us strength to live,
’Tis life’s chief aim, sole hope that can abide,
Our wine, elixir, glad restorative
Whence we gain heart to walk till eventide.

Through snow, through frost, through tempests it can give
Light that pervades th’ horizon dark and wide;
The inn which makes secure when we arrive
Our food and sleep, all labour laid aside.

It is an Angel whose magnetic hand
Gives quiet sleep and dreams of extasy,
And strews a bed for naked folk and poor.

’Tis the god’s prize, the mystic granary,
The poor man’s purse and his old native land,
And of the unknown skies the opening door.”

Folk-songs are more valuable aids than the higher literature of nations in an inquiry as to what they really believe. The religion of the Dravidian mountaineers is purely Aryan (though their race is not); their songs may be taken, therefore, as Aryan documents. They are particularly characteristic of the dual belief as to a future state which is, to this day, widely diffused. How firmly these people believe in transmigration the quatrain quoted above bears witness; yet they also believe that souls are liable to immediate judgment. This contradiction is explained by the theory that a long interval may elapse between death and re-incarnation and that during this interval the soul meets with a reward or punishment. To say the truth, the explanation sounds a rather lame one. Is it not more likely that the idea of immediate judgment, wherever it appears, is a relic of Vedic belief which has to be reconciled, as best it can, with the later idea of transmigration? The Dravidian songs are remarkable for their strong inculcation of regard for animals. In their impressive funeral dirge which is a public confession of the dead man’s sins, it is owned that he killed a snake, a lizard and a harmless frog. And that not mere lifetaking was the point condemned, is clearly proved by the further admission that the delinquent put the young ox to the plough before it was strong enough to work. In a Dravidian vision of Heaven and Hell certain of the Blest are perceived milking their happy kine, and it is explained that these are they who, when they saw the lost kine of neighbour or stranger in the hills, drove them home nor left them to perish from tiger or wolf. Surely in this, as in the Jewish command which it so closely resembles, we may read mercy to beast as well as to man.

It is sometimes said that there is as much cruelty to animals in India as anywhere. Some of this cruelty (as it seems to us) is caused directly by reluctance to take life; of the other sort, caused by callousness, it can be only said that the human brute grows under every sky. One great fact is admitted: children are not cruel in India: Victor Hugo could not have written his terrible poem about the tormented toad in India. I think it a mistake to attribute the Indian sentiment towards animals wholly to transmigration; nevertheless, it may be granted that such a belief fosters such a sentiment. Indeed, if it were allowable to look upon the religion of the many as the morality of the one, it would seem natural to suppose that the theory of transmigration was invented by some creature-loving sage on purpose to give men a fellow-feeling for their humbler relations. Even so, many a bit of innocent folk-fable has served as “protective colouration” to beast or bird: the legend of the robin who covered up the Babes in the Wood; the legend of the swallow who did some little service to the crucified Saviour, and how many other such tender fancies. Who invented them, and why?

If Plato had wished simply to find a happy substitute for Hades, he might have found it—had he looked far enough—in the Vedic kingdom of the sun, radiant and eternal, where sorrow is not, where the crooked are made straight, ruled over by Yama the first man to die and the first to live again, death’s bright angel, lord of the holy departed—how far from Pluto and the “Tartarean grey.” It would not have provided a solution to the mystery of being, but it might have made many converts, for after a happy heaven all antiquity thirsted.

THE BUDDHISTIC TIGER.
British Museum.
(_From a painting on silk by Ko-Tō._)]

It is not sure if the scheme of existence mapped out in soul-wandering is really more consoling for beast than for man. It is a poor compliment to some dogs to say that they have been some men. Then again, it is recognised as easier for a dog to be good than for a man to be good, but after a dog has passed his little life in well-doing he dies with the prospect that his spirit, which by his merits becomes again a man, will be sent down, by that man’s transgressions, to the society of jackals. According to the doctrine of soul-wandering, animals are, in brief, the Purgatory of men. Just as prayers for the dead (which means, prayers for the remission to them of a merited period of probation) represent an important branch of Catholic observances, so prayers for the remission of a part of the time which souls would otherwise spend in animal forms constitute the most vital and essential feature in Brahmanical worship.

Of course, this is also true of Buddhism, to which many people think that the theory of soul-wandering belongs exclusively, unmindful that the older faith has it as well. The following hymn, used in Thibet, shows how accurately the name of Purgatory applies to the animal incarnations of the soul:—

“If we [human beings] have amassed any merit
In the three states,
We rejoice in this good fortune when we consider
The unfortunate lot of the poor [lower] animals,
Piteously engulphed in the ocean of misery;
On their behalf, we now turn the Wheel of Religion.”

There are grounds for thinking that the purgatorial view of animals was part of the religious beliefs of the highly civilised native races of South America. The Christianised Indians are very gentle in their ways towards animals, while among the savage tribes in Central Peru (which are probably degraded off-shoots from the people of the Incas) the belief still survives that good men become monkeys or jaguars, and bad men parrots or reptiles. For the rest, soul-wandering has an enduring fascination for the human mind.

In January, 1907, Leandro Improta, a young man well furnished with worldly goods, shot himself in a café at Naples. His pocket was found to contain a letter in which he said that the act was prompted by a desire to study metempsychosis; much had been written on the subject, but it pleased him better to discover than to talk: “so I determined to die and see whether I shall be re-born in the form of some animal. It would be delightful to return to this world as a lion or a rat.” It might not prove delightful after all!

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II

THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS

“THE heralds brought a sacred hecatomb to the gods through the city and the long-haired Grecians were assembled under the shady grove of far-darting Apollo, but when they had tasted the upper flesh and had drawn it out, having divided the shares, they made a delightful feast.” In this description the poet of the Odyssey not only calls up a wonderfully vivid picture of an ancient fête-day, but also shows the habit of mind of the Homeric Greeks in regard to animal food. They were voracious eaters—although the frequent reference to feasts ought not to make us suppose that meat was their constant diet; rather the reverse, for then it would not have been so highly rated. But when they had the chance, they certainly did eat with unfastidious copiousness and unashamed enjoyment. It is not pleasant to read about, for it sets one thinking of things by no means far away or old; for instance, of the disappearance of half-cooked beef at some Continental _tables d’hôte_. We find that Homer is painfully near us. But in Homeric times the ghost of a scruple had to be laid before the feast could be enjoyed. Animal food was still closely connected with the idea of sacrifice. Sacrifice lends distinction to subject as well as object; it was some atonement to the animal to dedicate him to the gods. He was covered with garlands and attended by long-robed priests; his doom was his triumph. The devoted heifer or firstling of the flock was glorified beyond all its kind. Some late sceptic of the _Anthology_ asked what possible difference it could make to the sheep whether it were devoured by a wolf or sacrificed to Herakles so that he might protect the sheepfold from wolves? But scepticism is a poor thing. From immolation to apotheosis there is but a step; how many human victims willingly bowed their heads to the knife!

The sacrificial aspect of the slaughter of domestic animals took a strong hold of the popular imagination. It is still suggested by the procession of garlanded beasts which traverses the Italian village on the approach of Easter: the only time of year when the Italian peasant touches meat. In the tawdry travesty of the _Bœuf gras_, though the origin is the same, every shred of the old significance is lost, but among simple folk south of the Alps, unformed thoughts which know not whence they come still contribute a sort of religious glamour to that last pageant. Far back, indeed, stretches the procession of the victims, human and animal—for wherever there was animal sacrifice, at some remote epoch, “the goat without horns” was also offered up.

The Homeric Greeks had no butchers; they did the slaying of beasts themselves or their priests did it for them. Agamemnon kills the boar sacrificed to Zeus with his own hands, which are first uplifted in prayer. The commonest meat was the flesh of swine, as may be seen by the pig of Æsop which replied, on being asked by the sheep why he cried out when caught, “They take you for your wool or milk, but me for my life.” In Homer, however, there is much talk of fatted sheep, kids and oxen, and there is even mention of killing a cow. The Athenians had qualms about slaughtering the ox, the animal essential to agriculture—though they did it—but the Homeric Greek was not troubled by such thoughts. He was not over nice about anything; he was his own cook, and he did not lose his appetite while he roasted his bit of meat on the spit. A Greek repast of that age would have shocked the abstemious Indian as much as the Hindu reformer, Keshub Chunder Sen, confessed to have been shocked by the huge joints on English sideboards.

Putting aside his meat-eating proclivities, for which we cannot throw stones at him, the Greek of the Iliad and of the Odyssey is the friend of his beast. He does not regard it as his long-lost brother, but he sees in it a devoted servant; sometimes more than human in love if less than human in wit. His point of view, though detached, was appreciative. Practically it was the point of view of the twentieth century. Homer belongs to the Western world, and in a great measure to the modern Western world. He had no racial fellow-feeling with animals; yet he could feel for the sparrow that flutters round its murdered young ones and for the vulture that rends the air with cries when the countryman takes its fledglings from the nest. He could shed one immortal tear over the faithful hound that recognises his master and dies. “There lay the dog Argus, full of vermin.” If it had not been a living creature, what sight could have more repelled human eyes? But with dog as with man, the miserable body is as naught beside—what in the man we call the soul. “He fawned with his tail and laid down both his ears, but he could no more come nearer his master.” All the sense of disgust is gone and there is something moist, perhaps, in our eyes too, though it is not the ichor of immortality.

Giving names to animals is the first instinctive confession that they are not _things_. What sensible man ever called his table Carlo or his inkpot Trilby? Homer gives his horses the usual names of horses in his day; this is shown by the fact that he calls more than one horse by the same name. Hector’s steeds were Xanthus, Æthon and noble Lampus; often would Andromache mix wine for them even before she attended to the wants of her husband, or offer them the sweet barley with her own white hands. Æthe is the name of Agamemnon’s graceful and fleet-footed mare. Xanthus and Balius, offspring of Podarges, are the horses which Achilles received from his father. He bids them bring their charioteer back in safety to the body of the Greeks—and then follows the impressive incident of the warning given to him of his impending fate. The horse Xanthus bends low his head: his long mane, which is collected in a ring, droops till it touches the ground. Hera gives him power of speech and he tells how, though the steeds of Achilles will do their part right well, not all their swiftness, not all their faithful service can save their master from the doom that even now is drawing near. “The furies restrain the voice”: the laws which govern the natural order of things must not be violated. “O Xanthus,” cries Achilles, “O Xanthus, why dost thou predict my death?... Well do I know myself that it is my fate to perish here, far away from my dear father and mother!” It is the passionate cry of the Greek, the lover of life as none has loved it, the lover of the sweet air gladdened by the sun.

Many a soldier may have spoken to his horse, half in jest, as Achilles spoke to Xanthus and Balius: “bring me safely out of the fray.” The supernatural and terrible reply comes with the shock of the unforeseen, like a clap of thunder on a calm day. This incident is a departure from the usual Homeric conventionality, for it takes us into the domain of real magic. The belief that animals know things that we know not, and see things that we see not, is scattered over all the earth. Are there not still good people who feel an “eerie” sensation when a cat stares fixedly into vacancy in the twilight? “Eerie” sensations count for much in early beliefs, but what counts for more is the observation of actual facts which are not and, perhaps, cannot be explained. The uneasiness of animals before an earthquake, or the refusal of some animals to go to sea on ships which afterwards come to grief—to refer to only two instances of a class of phenomena the existence of which cannot be gainsaid—would be sufficient to convince any savage or any primitive man that animals have foreknowledge. If they know the future on one point, why should they not know it on others? The primitive man generally starts from something which he deems _certain_; he deals in “certainties” far more than in hypotheses, and when he has seized a “certainty” in his own fashion he draws logical deductions from it. Savages and children have a ruthless logic of their own.

The prophetic power of animals has important bearings on the subject of divination. In cases of animal portents the later theory may have been that the animal was the passive instrument or medium of a superior power; but it is not likely that this was the earliest theory. The goddess did not use Xanthus as a mouthpiece: she simply gave him the faculty of speech so that he could say what he already knew. The second sight of animals was believed to be communicable to man through their flesh, and especially through their blood. Porphyry says plainly that diviners fed on the hearts of crows, vultures, and moles (the heart being the fountain of the blood), because in this manner they partook of the souls of these animals, and received the influence of the gods who accompanied these souls. The blood conveyed the qualities of the spirit. In my opinion the Hebrew ordinance against partaking of the blood was connected with this idea; the soul was not to be meddled with. I do not know if attention has been paid to the remarkable juxtaposition of the blood prohibition with enchantment in Leviticus xix. 26. The Institutes of Manu clearly indicate that the blood was not to be swallowed because, by doing so, could be procured an illicit mixing up of personality: the most awful of sins, more awful because so much more mysterious than our mediæval “pact,” or selling the soul to the devil. A knowledge of magic is essential to the true comprehension of all sacred writings.

That animals formerly talked with human voices was the genuine belief of most early races, but there are few traces of it in Greek literature. A hint of a real folk-belief is to be found, perhaps, in the remark of Clytemnestra, who says of Cassandra, when she will not descend from the car that has brought her, a prisoner, to Agamemnon’s palace:—

“I wot—unless like swallows she doth use
_Some strange barbarian tongue from over sea_,
My words must bring persuasion to her soul.”

But such hints are not frequent. The stories of “talking beasts” which enjoyed an immense popularity in Greece were founded on as conscious “make-believe” as the Beast tales of the Middle Ages. From the “Battle of the Frogs and Mice” to Æsop’s fables, and from these to the comedies of Aristophanes, the animals are meant to hold up human follies to ridicule or human virtues to admiration. The object was to instruct while amusing when it was not to amuse without instructing. Æsop hardly asks the most guileless to believe that his stories are of the “all true” category—which is why children rarely quite take them to their hearts. At the same time, he shows a close study of the idiosyncrasies of animals, so close that there is little to alter in his characterisation. Out of the mass of stories in the collection attributed to him, one or two only seem to carry us back to a more ingenuous age. The following beautiful little tale of the “Lion’s Kingdom” is vaguely reminiscent of the world-tradition of a “Peace in Nature.”

“The beasts of the field and forest had a lion as their king. He was neither wrathful, cruel, nor tyrannical, but just and gentle as a king could be. He made during his reign a proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and drew up conditions for an universal league in which the Wolf and the Lamb, the Panther and the Kid, the Tiger and the Stag, the Dog and the Hare, should live together in perfect peace and amity. The Hare said, ‘Oh, how I have longed to see this day, in which the weak shall take their place with impunity by the side of the strong.’”

The temper of a people towards animals can be judged from its sports. It has been well said, Who could imagine Pericles presiding over a “Roman holiday”? Wanton cruelty to animals seemed to the Greeks an outrage to the gods. The Athenians inflicted a fine on a vivisector of the name of Xenocrates (he called himself a “philosopher”) who had skinned a goat alive. In Greece, from Homeric times downwards, the most favourite sport was the chariot-race which, at first, possessed the importance of a religious event, and always had a dignity above that of a mere pastime. The horses received their full share of honour and glory; for many centuries the graves of Cimon’s mares, with which he had thrice conquered at the Olympian games, were pointed out to the stranger, near his own tomb.

In the ancient Greek as in the modern world, while the majority held the views about animals which I have briefly sketched, a small minority held views of quite a different kind. It may be that no outward agency is required to cause the periodical appearance of men who are driven from the common road by the nostalgia of a state in which the human creature had not learnt to shed blood. The earliest tradition agrees with the latest science in testifying that man did not always eat flesh. It seems as if sometimes, in every part of the earth, an irresistible impulse takes hold of him to resume his primal harmlessness. It is natural, however, that students should have sought some more definite explanation for the introduction of the Orphic sect into Greece, where it can be traced to about the time generally given to Buddha—the sixth century B.C. Some have conjectured that dark-skinned, white-robed missionaries from India penetrated into Europe as we know that they penetrated into China, bringing with them the gospel of the unity of all sentient things. Others agree with what seems to have been thought by Herodotus: that wandering pilgrims brought home treasured secrets from the temple of Ammon or some other of those Egyptian shrines with which the Greeks constantly kept up certain _rapports_. It may be, now, that these two theories will be abandoned in favour of a third which would refer the origin of the Orphists to Ægean times and suppose them to be the last followers of an earlier faith. When they do come into history, it is as poor and ignorant people—like the Doukhobors of to-day—whose obscurity might well account for their having remained long unobserved. But this is no reason for concluding that their beginnings were obscure.

What is best understood about them is that they abstained rigorously from flesh except during the rare performance of some rite of purification, in which they tasted the blood of a bull which was supposed to procure mystic union with the divine. As happened with the performers of other cruel or horrid rites, the transcendent significance they ascribed to the act paralysed their power of recognising its revolting nature. A diseased spiritualism which ignores matter altogether is the real key to such phenomena. It is too soon to say whether any link can be established between the Orphic practices and the so-called “bull-fights” of which traces have been found in Crete. Despised and tabooed though they were in historical Greece, the Orphists are still held to have exercised some sure though undefined influence on the development of the greatest spiritual fact of Hellenic civilisation, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

(_Photo:_ _Sommer_)
ORPHEUS.
(_Fresco at Pompeii._)]

The popular description of Orpheus as founder of the Orphists must be taken for what it is worth. The sect may have either evolved or borrowed the legend. Christianity itself appropriated the myth of Orpheus, pictorially, at least, in those rude tracings in the Roman catacombs showing the Good Shepherd in that character, which inspired Carlyle to write one of the most impassioned passages in English prose. The sweet lute-player who held entranced lion and lamb till the one forgot his wrath and the other his fear, was the natural symbol of the prototype of a humane religion.

Out of the nebulous patches of Greek enthusiasts who cherished tender feelings towards animals, emerges the intellectual sun of the Samian sage. It is difficult not to connect Pythagoras in some way with the Orphists, nor would such a connexion make it the less probable that he journeyed to the sacred East in search of fuller knowledge. Little, indeed, do we know about this moulder of minds. He passed across the world’s stage dark “with excess of light”—an influence rather than a personality. Yet he was as far as possible from being only a dreamer of dreams; he was the Newton, the Galileo, perhaps the Edison and Marconi of his epoch. And it was this double character of moral teacher and man of science which caused the extraordinary reverence with which he was regarded. Science and religion were not divorced then; the Prophet could present no credentials so valid as an understanding of the laws which govern the universe. Mathematics and astronomy were revelations of divine truth. It was the scientific insight of Pythagoras, the wonderful range and depth of which is borne out more and more by modern discoveries, that lent supreme importance to whatever theories he was known to have held. The doctrine of transmigration had not been treated seriously while it was only preached by the Orphists, but after it was adopted by Pythagoras it commanded a wide attention, though it never won a large acceptance. One expounder it had, who was too remarkable an original thinker to be called a mere disciple—the greatly-gifted Empedocles, who denounced the eaters of flesh as no better than cannibals, which was going further than Pythagoras himself had ever gone.

Even in antiquity, there were some who suspected that at the bottom of the Pythagorean propaganda was the wish to make men more humane. Without taking that view, it may be granted that a strong love of animals prepares the mind to think of them as not so very different from men. A thing that tends in the same direction is the unfavourable comparison of some men with some beasts: the sort of sentiment which made Madame de Staël say that the more she knew of men the more she liked dogs. Did not Darwin declare that he would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from various still extant races of mankind? Darwinism is really the theory of Pythagoras with the supernatural element left out. The homogeneity of living things is one of the very old beliefs from which we strayed and to which we are returning.

Among the Greeks, sensitive and meditative minds which did not place faith in the Pythagorean system of life were attracted, nevertheless, by its speculative possibilities which they bent to their own purposes. Thus Socrates borrowed from Pythagoras when he suggested that imperfect and earth-bound spirits might be re-incorporated in animals whose conventionally ascribed characteristics corresponded with their own moral natures. Unjust, tyrannical, and violent men would become wolves, hawks, and kites, while good commonplace people—virtuous Philistines—would take better forms, such as ants, bees, and wasps, all of which live harmoniously in communities. It is pleasant to find that Socrates did justice to that intelligent insect, the undeservedly aspersed wasp. Men who are good in all respects save the highest, may re-assume human forms. Socrates does not explain why it is that humanity progresses so slowly if it is always being recruited from such good material? He passes on from these righteous men to the super-excellent man to whom alone he allots translation into a divine and wholly immaterial sphere; he it is who departs from this world completely pure of earthly dross; who cannot be moved by ill-fortune, poverty, disgrace; who has “overcome the world” in the Pauline sense, who has died while living, in the Indian sense. Though Socrates does not say so, it is this super-excellent man who really convinces him of the immortality of the soul according to the meaning which we attach to these words.

That the more tender and poetic aspects of Pythagorean speculations had deeply impressed Socrates can be seen by the fact that they recurred to his mind in the most solemn hour of his life. From these he drew the lovely parable with which he gently reproved the friends who were come to take leave of him for their surprise at finding him no wise depressed. He asks if he appears to them inferior in divination to the swans, who, when they perceive that they must die, though given to song before, then sing the most of all, delighted at the prospect of their departure to the deity whose ministers they are. Mankind has said falsely of the swans that they sing through dread of death and from grief. Those who say this do not reflect that no bird sings when it is hungry or cold or afflicted with any other pain, not even the nightingale or swallow or hoopoe, which are said to sing a dirge-like strain, “but neither do they appear to me to sing for grief nor do the swans, but as pertaining to Apollo they are skilled in the divining art, and having a foreknowledge of the bliss in Hades, they express their joy in song on that day rather than at any previous time. But I believe myself to be a fellow-servant of the swans and consecrated to the same divinity, and that I am no less gifted by my master in the art of divination, nor am I departing with less good grace than they.”

Socrates would not have been “the wisest of men” if he had dogmatised about the unknowable; to insist, he says, that things were just as he described them, would not become an intelligent being; he only claimed an approximate approach to the truth. In appearance Plato went nearer to dogmatic acceptance of the theory of the transmigration of souls, but probably it was in appearance only. Like his master, he thought it reasonable to suppose that the human soul ascended if it had done well, and descended if it had done ill, and of this ascent and descent he took as symbol its attirement in higher or lower corporeal forms till, freed from the corruptible, it joined the incorruptible.

The Greeks were the first people to have an insatiable thirst for exact knowledge; they showed themselves true precursors of the modern world by their researches into scientific zoology, which were carried on with zeal long before Aristotle took the subject in hand. We cannot judge of these early researches because they are nearly all lost; but Aristotle’s “History of Animals,” even after the revival of learning, was still consulted as a text-book, and perhaps nothing that he wrote contributed more to win for him the fame of

“... maestro di color che sanno.”

The story goes that this work was written by desire of Alexander the Great or, as some say, Philip of Macedon, and that the writer was given a sum which sounds fabulous in order that he might obtain the best available information. What interest most the modern reader are the “sayings by the way” on the moral qualities or the intelligence of animals. “Man and the mule,” says Aristotle, “are always tame”—a classification not very complimentary to man. The ox is gentle, the wild boar is violent, crafty the serpent, noble and generous the lion. Except in the senses of touch and taste, man is far surpassed by the other animals—a remark that was endorsed by St. Thomas Aquinas, who inferred from the limitation of man’s senses that he would have made bad use of them if they had been more acute. Aristotle laid down the axiom that man alone can reason, though other animals can remember and learn, but he never pursued this theory as far as it was pushed by Descartes, much less by Malebranche. He believed that the soul of infants differed in no respect from that of animals. All animals present traces of their moral disposition, though these distinctions are more marked in man. Animals understand signs and sounds, and can be taught. The females are less ready to help the males in distress than the males are to help the females. Bears carry off their cubs with them if they are pursued. The dolphin is remarkable for the love of its young ones; two dolphins were seen supporting a small dead dolphin on their backs, that was about to sink, as if in pity for it, to keep it from being devoured by wild creatures. In herds of horses, if a mare dies, other mares will bring up the foal, and mares without foals have been known to entice foals to follow them and to show much affection to them, though they die for want of their natural sustenance.

Aristotle says that music attracts some animals; for instance, deer can be captured by singing and playing on the pipe. Animals sometimes show fore-thought, as the ichneumon, which does not attack the asp till it has called others to help it—which reminds one of the dog whose master took him to Exeter, where he was badly treated by the yard-dog of the inn; on this, he escaped and went to London, whence he returned with a powerful dog-friend who gave the yard-dog a lesson which he must have long remembered. Hedgehogs are said by Aristotle and other ancient authors to change the entrance of their burrows according as the wind blows from north or south; a man in Byzantium got no small fame as a weather prophet by observing this habit. He thinks that small animals are generally cleverer than larger ones. A tame woodpecker placed an almond in a crevice of wood so as to be able to break it, which it succeeded in doing with three blows. Aristotle does not mention the similar ingenuity of the thrush which I have noticed myself; it brings snails to a good flat stone on which it breaks the shell by knocking it up and down. He admired the skill of the swallow in making her nest. Although he knew of the migrations of birds, and declared that cranes go in winter to the sources of the Nile, “where there is a race of pigmies—no fable, but a fact,” he was not free from the erroneous idea (which is to be found in modern folk-lore) that some birds hybernate in caves, out of which they emerge, almost featherless, in the spring. Of the nightingale, he says that it sings ceaselessly for fifteen days and nights when the mountains are thick with leaves.

The spider’s art and graceful movements receive due praise, as do the cleanly habits of bees, which are said to sting people who use unguents because they dislike bad smells. “Bright and shiny bees” Aristotle asserts to be idle, “like women.”

Of all animals his favourites are the lion and the elephant. The lion is gentle when he is not hungry and he is not jealous or suspicious. He is fond of playing with animals that are brought up with him, and he gets to have a real affection for them. If a blow aimed at a lion fails, he only shakes and frightens his attacker, and then leaves him without hurting him. He never shows fear or turns his back on a foe. But old lions that are unable to hunt sometimes enter villages and attack mankind. This is the first observation of the “man-eating” lion or tiger, and the reason given for his perverse conduct is still believed to be the right one.

Aristotle assigned the palm of wisdom to the elephant, a creature abounding in intellect, tame, gentle, teachable, and one which can even learn how to “worship the king”—which is what many of us saw the elephants do at the Delhi Durbar.

STELE WITH CAT AND BIRD.
Athens Museum.]