James Anson Farrer

A comparison of some of the fancies of the rudest known tribes of the earth concerning the nature of the sun, the moon, and the stars, proves abundantly not only that the demand for a reason for things is a principle operative in every stage of human development, but that the primitive explanation of things is sought in the occurrences of daily experience and given in terms and figures originally applied to terrestrial objects. From a philosophy of nature of so rude a type and so humble an origin spring many of those marvellous traditions, which in after times rank as the mythology, or perhaps serve as the religion, of the people among whom they had birth.

To begin with some of the astro-mythological ideas of the Australians. Mr. Stanbridge mentions the astonishment with which, as he sat by his camp fire, he listened for the first time to the remarks of two Australian natives as they pointed to the beautiful constellations of Castor and Pollux, of the Pleiades and Orion. These men belonged to a race who had ‘the reputation of being lowest in the scale of mankind,’ who were ‘cannibals of the lowest description,’ and ‘who had no name for numerals above two;’ yet they could explain the wanderings of the moon, by the story that, being once discovered trying to persuade the wife of a certain star in Canis Major to elope with him, he was beaten and put to flight by the angry husband. As so frequently elsewhere, most of the stars were bound by the ties of human relationship, being wives, brothers, sisters, or mothers to one another. The stars in the belt of Orion were believed to be a group of young men dancing, whilst the Pleiades were girls who played to them as they danced. Two large stars in the fore legs of Centaurus were two brave brothers who speared Tchingal to death, and the east stars of Crux were the points of the spears that pierced his body.[357]

Few tribes of known savages appear to be without conceptions of a similar nature. The Tasmanians, according to Bonwick, were no exception to the connection of theology with astronomy. To them Capella was a kangaroo pursued by Castor and Pollux, whose smoke as it was roasted might be seen till the autumn. The Pleiades were maidens who courted the kangaroo hunters of Orion and dug up roots for their suppers. Two other stars were two black men who of old appeared suddenly on a hill and threw fire down to earth for the use of its inhabitants; whilst two other luminaries were two women whom a sting-ray had killed as they dived for cray-fish, but whom these same fire-bringers restored to life, by placing stinging ants on their breasts; then escorting them to heaven, after they had first killed the sting-ray.[358]

Bushman star-lore is framed in exactly the same way, the planets of distant solar systems sinking into the insignificance of daily African surroundings. What is the moon but a man who, having incurred the wrath of the sun, is pierced by his knife till he is nearly destroyed, and who, having implored mercy, grows from the small piece left him, till he is again large enough for the stabbing process to recommence? What is the Milky Way but some wood ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by a girl, that her people might be able to see their way home at night? Other stars are reduced to mortal origin, or identified with certain lions, tortoises, or clouds, that have place in Bushman mythology; nor does it lie beyond their limits of belief that the sun should once have been seen sitting by the wayside as he travelled on earth, and that the jackal’s back is black to this day because he carried that burning substance on his back.[359] This sun they believe was once a mortal on earth who radiated light from his body, but only for a short space round his house; till some children were sent to throw him as he slept into the sky, whence he has ever since shone over the earth.[360] These children belonged to an earlier race of Bushmen; and it is an odd coincidence that in Victoria as in South Africa the belief about the sun is associated with the tradition of a race that preceded both Bushmen and Australians in their present homes. In the Australian creed, the earth lay in darkness, till one of the former race threw an emu’s egg into space, where it became the sun. That former race was translated in various forms to the heavens, where they made all the celestial bodies, and where they continue to cause all the good and evil that happens on earth. Such traditions may point to a fact; for both Australians and Bushmen may be degenerate from a better social type than they now present; but the fact that, even if degenerate, they should preserve such tales and fictions, makes it not inconceivable that such tales should arise, as spontaneous products of the mind, among tribes that seem neither to have lapsed from a higher condition, nor ever to have emerged from their primeval state of barbarism.

Of the Esquimaux, Egede observes that ‘their notion about the stars is that some of them have been men and others different sorts of animals or fishes.’[361] Here two stars are two persons at a singing combat, or two rival women taking each other by the hair; those other three are certain Greenlanders who, when once out seal-catching, failed to find their way home again and were taken to heaven. It is true such fancies, taken primarily from Cranz, must be received with the reservation that he makes, namely, that they were only harboured by the weaker heads of Greenland, and that the natives had art enough to play off on the Europeans quite as marvellous stories as any they received.[362] But the possible reality of such belief is vouched for by other testimony from all parts of the globe, of which two instances, taken from the Hervey Islanders and the Thlinkeet Indians, will suffice to illustrate the general character. According to the former, a twin boy and girl were badly treated by their mother; so they left their home and leapt into the sky, whither they were also followed by their parents, and where all four may still be seen shining; ‘brother and dearly-loved sister, still linked together, pursue their never-ceasing flight, resolved never again to meet their justly-enraged parents.’[363] The Thlinkeet Indians ascribe to a being called Yehl the liberation of the world from its pristine darkness; for, amid the many conflicting stories told of him, it is agreed that he it was who obtained light for men at a time when ‘sun, moon, and stars were kept by a rich chief in separate boxes which he allowed no one to touch.’ Yehl, having become grandson to this chief, cried one day so much for these boxes that his grandfather let him have one. ‘He opened it, and lo! there were stars in the sky.’ The grandparent was next cheated out of the moon in the same way; but to get the sunbox Yehl had to refuse food and become really ill, and then its owner only parted with it on condition that it should not be opened. The prohibition, however, was unheeded. Yehl turned into a raven, flew off with the box, and blessed mankind with the light of the sun.[364]

From these samples of the fairy tales of savages, it is clear that, in addition to the myths which arise from forgotten etymologies, there are many others which are not formed at all by this process of gradual forgetfulness, but spring directly from the use of the intellect and the imagination, in obedience to the impulse to find a reason for everything. To observe peculiarities in nature is the beginning of science; to account for them in any way is science itself, true or false. The science of savages is not limited to the skies, but is directed to everything that calls for notice on earth; nor in the stories invented by them to answer the various problems of existence, are they a whit behind the traditions of European folk-lore on similar subjects, their explanations of natural peculiarities disclosing quite as vivid imaginative powers as the stories of the white race concerning birds or beasts.

Let us take, for instance, as a parallel to the German reason for the owl flying in solitude by night (namely, that when set to watch the wren, imprisoned in a mousehole, he fell asleep, and was so ashamed at letting him thus escape that he has never since dared show himself by day), the story of the rude Ahts, made to account for the melancholy note of the loon as it is heard flying about the wild lakes of Vancouver’s Island; and as a good instance of the resemblance in construction of plot often found in very distant regions, let us place side by side with it a story of the Basutos in the south of Africa:—

THE AHT STORY.

Two fishermen went one day in two canoes to catch halibut. But while one of them caught many, the other caught none. So the latter, angered by the taunts of his more fortunate but physically weaker companion, bethought himself how he might take all his fish from him by force, and cause him to return home fishless and ashamed. Suddenly, whilst his friend was pulling up a fish, he knocked him on the head with the wooden club he used for killing halibut, and, to prevent the tale ever being told, cut out his companion’s tongue, and took the fish home to his own wife. When the tongueless man arrived at the village, and his friends came to enquire of his sport, he could only answer by a noise resembling the note of the loon. ‘The great spirit, Quawteaht, was so angry at all this, that he changed the injured Indian into a loon, and the other into a crow; and the loon’s plaintive cry now is the voice of the fisherman trying to make himself understood.’[365]

THE BASUTO STORY.

Two brothers, having gone in different directions to make their fortunes, met again, after sundry adventures, the elder enriched by a pack of dogs, the younger by a large number of cows. The younger offered his brother as many of these cows as he pleased, with the exception of a certain white one. This he would not part with; so as they went home, and the younger brother was drinking from a pool, Macilo, the elder, seized his brother’s head and held it under the water till he was dead. Then he buried the body, and covered it with a stone, and proceeded to drive back the whole flock as his own. He had not, however, gone far, before a small bird perched itself on the horn of the white cow and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Twice did Macilo kill the bird with a stone, but each time it reappeared and uttered the same words. So the third time he killed it he burnt it, and threw its ashes to the winds. Then proudly he entered his village, and when they all enquired for his brother, he said that they had taken different roads, and that he was ignorant where he was. The white cow was greatly admired, but suddenly a small bird perched itself on its horns and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Thus, through a bird into which the heart of the murdered man had been transformed, did the truth become known, and everyone departed with horror from the presence of the murderer.[366]

European folk-lore accounts for the redness of the robin’s breast, either by the theory that he extracted a thorn from the thorn-crown of Christ, or by the theory that he daily bears a drop of water to quench the flames of hell. For either reason he might be justly called the friend of man; but for the bird’s friendliness the Chippewya Indians give a more poetical explanation than either of the above. There was once, they say, a hunter so ambitious that his only son should signalise himself by endurance, when he came to the time of life to undergo the fast preparatory to his choosing his guardian spirit, that after the lad had fasted for eight days, his father still pressed him to persevere. But next day, when the father entered the hut, his son had paid the penalty of violated nature, and in the form of a robin had just flown to the top of the lodge. There, before he flew away to the woods, he entreated his father not to mourn his transformation. ‘I shall be happier,’ he said, ‘in my present state than I could have been as a man. I shall always be the friend of men and keep near their dwellings; I could not gratify your pride as a warrior, but I will cheer you by my songs.... I am now free from cares and pains, my food is furnished by the fields and mountains, and my path is in the bright air.’[367]

Not less poetical is the Hervey Islanders’ account of the origin of some peculiarities among fishes, and notably of the well-known conformation of the head of the common sole. They relate how Ina, leaving the house of her rich parents because she had been beaten and scolded for suffering the arch-thief, Nyana, to steal certain treasures left in her charge, resolved to make her way to the sea beach, and from thence to the Sacred Isle that lay across the sea at the place where the sun set. Arrived at the shore, she first asked the small fish, the avini, to bear her across the sea; but the avini, unable to support her weight, soon let her fall into the water, for which Ina in her anger struck it repeatedly with her foot, thereby causing those beautiful stripes on its sides which are called to this day ‘Ina’s tattooing.’ Trying next the paoro, and meeting with the same mischance, she caused it in the same way to bear ever after those blue marks which are now its glory; and it is said to be historically true that tattooing on that island ‘was simply an imitation of the stripes on the avini and the paoro.’ Then the api, a white fish, incurring the same displeasure, became at once and for ever of an intensely black hue. The sole, indeed, carried Ina farther than the others, but no farther than the breakers by the reef; and Ina, now wild with rage, stamped with such fury on its head that its underneath eye was removed to the upper side, and thus it was condemned ever afterwards to swim flatwise, unlike other fish, because one side of its face had no eye. How Ina then caused a protuberance on the forehead of all sharks, known to this day as Ina’s bump, by cracking a cocoa-nut she wished to drink out of on the forehead of a shark that bore her, how the shark then left her, and how she finally reached the Sacred Isle on the back of the king of sharks, and became the wife of Timirau, the king of all fish, may be read in further detail in Mr. Gill’s interesting collection of Myths and Songs from the South Pacific.[368]

The necessity for a reason for everything, exemplified in these traditions, exercises its influence on mythology itself, reasons being invented for inexplicable customs or beliefs just as they are for strange phenomena in nature. The custom, for instance, of hunting a wren to death once a year, which has been observed in Ireland, the isle of Man, and the South of France, has for its general explanation a belief that the wren is a fairy who, after having decoyed many men to meet their deaths in the sea, took the form of a wren to escape the plot laid for her by a certain knight-errant. But the Irish have found quite another reason for the custom, having invented the story, that on the eve of the battle of the Boyne the Irish had stolen up to King William’s sleeping camp and were on the point of putting an end to the heretics, when a wren hopped upon the drum of a Protestant drummer, and by thus waking him caused their defeat; a defeat which they avenge on every anniversary of the day by the persecution of that unhappy bird.[369]

The story of the wren is well known; how, when the birds were competing for the kingship by the test of the greatest height attained in flying, the wren hid in the eagle’s feathers, and, when the eagle had flown far beyond the other birds, darted himself yet a little above it. It is said that the first appearance of this story is in a collection of beast-fables, composed by a rabbi in the 13th century.[370] But the resemblance between the wren-story as it is told in Germany or Ireland, and a story of a linnet as told by the Odjibwas of North America, is so striking a testimony of the way in which closely similar tales are framed independently, that the two stories are worth comparing.

THE ODJIBWA STORY.

‘The birds met together one day to try which could fly the highest. Some flew up very swift, but soon got tired, and were passed by others of stronger wing. But the eagle went up beyond them all, and was ready to claim the victory, when the grey linnet, a very small bird, flew from the eagle’s back, where it had perched unperceived, and being fresh and unexhausted, succeeded in going the highest. When the birds came down and met in council to award the prize, it was given to the eagle, because that bird had not only gone up nearer to the sun than any of the larger birds, but it had carried the linnet on its back.’

For this reason the eagle’s feathers became the most honourable marks of distinction a man could bear.[371]

THE IRISH STORY.

‘The birds all met together one day, and settled among themselves that whichever of them could fly highest was to be the king of all. Well, just as they were on the hinges of being off, what does the little rogue of a wren do, but hop up and perch himself unbeknown on the eagle’s tail. So they flew and flew ever so high, till the eagle was miles above all the rest, and could not fly another stroke, he was so tired. “Then,” says he, “I’m king of the birds....” “You lie,” says the wren, darting up a perch and a half above the big fellow. Well, the eagle was so mad to think how he was done, that when the wren was coming down, he gave him a stroke of his wing, and from that day to this the wren was never able to fly further than a hawthorn bush.’[372]

It is impossible to assign limits either to the vitality or to the range of a story. If the commerce which has ever prevailed between the different tribes of the world, as it prevails to this day, either by conquest or by barter, has caused so wide a dispersion of the races and products of the earth, the wonder would rather be if the products of men’s thoughts and fancies had not prevailed so widely, had not taken so deep root in man’s memory, seeing that they cost nothing either to carry or to keep. For many stories therefore of wide range, agreeing in such minute particulars as to render difficult the theory of their independent origin, the mystery of their resemblance is amply solved by the theory of their gradual dispersion, without their proving anything as to the common origin of those who tell them. The story, for instance, of Faithful John, the central idea of which is, that a friend can only apprise some one of a danger he will incur on his wedding night, by himself incurring suspicion and being turned into stone, is told with little variation in Bohemia, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and the discovery of the leading thought in a story in India makes it possible that it was there originated.[373] In Polynesia, again, the story of stopping the motion of the sun is widely spread; in New Zealand, Maui makes ropes of flax, goes with his brothers to the point where the sun rises, hides from it by day, and when it rises next day succeeds in his purpose before letting it go further. In Tahiti, Maui is a priest, or chief of olden time, who builds a marae which must be finished by the evening, and who therefore seizes the sun by its rays and binds him to a tree till his work is finished. In Hawaii Maui stops the sun till evening, because his wife has to finish a certain dress by twilight. In Samoa, Maui appears as Itu, a man who is anxious to build a house of great stones, but is unable to do so because the sun goes too fast; he therefore takes a boat and lays nets in the sun’s path, but as these are broken through, he makes a noose, catches the sun, and only lets it free when his house is finished.[374] Obviously, these stories are all related, but it is impossible to say whether they spread from any one place to the others, or whether they are remnants, retained in altered form, from the primitive mythology of a common Polynesian home. It is, however, worthy of notice that in Wallachian fairy lore also a cow pushes back the sun to the hour of mid-day, to enable a youth who had fallen asleep to accomplish his task,[375] and that the idea of catching the sun is not unknown to the mythology of America.

There is, however, a large class of stories which arise independently, and owe their remarkable family likeness neither to a common descent nor to importation, but to the natural promptings of the imagination. Thus, the idea of a tree so high that it reaches the heavens, and consequently of the heavens as thereby attainable, naturally produces such a story as Jack and the Beanstalk, a story which is said to be found all over the world, but the versions of which agree in no other single point than in the admission to the sky by dint of climbing.[376] In the same way many of the ideas common to the Indo-European nations, and so often explained as originally derived from the fanciful meteorology of the primitive Aryans, find startling analogues outside the Aryan family, where there is no reason to suppose them anything more than the direct offspring of the dreamer or the story-teller. If the constancy of Penelope to Ulysses, tormented by her suitors, is simply that of the evening light, assailed by the powers of darkness, till the return of her husband the sun in the morning,[377] shall we apply the same interpretation to the story of the wife of the Red Swan, of the Odjibwas, who, when he returns from the discovery of his magic arrows from the abode of the departed spirits, finds that his two brothers have been quarrelling for the possession of his wife, but been quarrelling in vain?[378] If the legend of Cadmus recovering Europa, after she has been carried away by the white bull, the spotless cloud, means that ‘the sun must journey westward until he sees again the beautiful tints which greeted his eyes in the morning,’[379] shall we say the same of a story current in North America, to the effect that a man once had a beautiful daughter whom he forbade to leave the lodge lest she should be carried off by the king of the buffaloes; and that as she sat, notwithstanding, outside the house, combing her hair, ‘all of a sudden the king of the buffaloes came dashing on, with his herd of followers, and taking her between his horns, away he cantered over plains, plunged into a river which bounded his land, and carried her safely to his lodge on the other side,’ whence she was finally recovered by her father?[380]

Again, in Hindu mythology, Urvasi came down from heaven and became the wife of the son of Budha, only on condition that two pet rams should never be taken from her bedside and that she should never behold her lord undressed. The immortals, however, wishing Urvasi back in heaven, contrived to steal the rams; and as the king pursued the robbers with his sword in the dark, the lightning revealed his person, the compact was broken, and Urvasi disappeared.[381] This same story is found in different forms among many people of Aryan and Turanian descent, the central idea being that of a man marrying someone of aerial or aquatic origin, and living happily with her till he breaks the condition on which her residence with him depends. Thus there is the story of Raymond of Toulouse, who chances in the hunt upon the beautiful Melusina at a fountain and lives with her happily till he discovers her fish-nature and she vanishes; but exactly parallel stories come no less from Borneo, the Celebes, or North America than from Ireland or Germany; for which reason it seems sufficient to receive them simply as they stand, as fairy tales natural to every tribe of mankind that has a fixed belief in supernatural beings, rather than to explain these wonderful wives as the ‘bright fleecy clouds of early morning, which vanish as the splendour of the sun is unveiled.’[382] Let us compare the story as it is told in America and Bornoese tradition.

It has been imagined that all the fairy tales of the world may be reduced to certain fundamental story roots; but these story roots we should look for not in the clouds, but upon the earth, not in the various aspects of nature, but in the daily occurrences and surroundings of savage life. The uniformity which appears in so many of the myths or fairy tales of the world would thus simply arise from a uniformity of the experiences of existence. The evidence concerning savage astro-mythology is conclusive, that nothing is conceived of the heavenly bodies that has not its prototype on earth; that the skies do but mirror the events or objects of earth, where the memorable incidents of the chase or the battle are told of the stars: nor is it strange if in a few years such tales should have so gained in the telling, that it is often impossible to separate the fact from the fiction, or to distinguish a crude supposition from the creation of a fanciful myth.

For although it is difficult to lay down the boundaries between the language of metaphor and the language of fact, inasmuch as what is faith to one man is often but fancy to another, there is reason to believe that savages really do very often confuse celestial with terrestrial phenomena, that, for instance, the Zulus, when they speak of the stars as the children of the sky and of the sun as their father, are expressing rather a real belief than a poetical fancy, and that the conception of the sun and moon as physically related is an actual belief quite as much as a merely figurative explanation. If this be true, a large part of mythology must be regarded not as a poetical explanation of things, suggested by the grammatical form of words or by roots that lend similar names to the most diverse conceptions, but as the direct effect of primitive thought in its application to the phenomena of nature. It is more likely that the early thoughts of men should have framed their language than that the form of their language should have preceded their form of thought. And if it be shown (by those who hold that the personification of impersonal things is consequent on the grammatical structure of a language) that the Kafirs and other tribes of South Africa, whose language does not denote sex, are almost destitute of myths and fables, whilst tribes who employ a sex-denoting language have many,[385] it is noticeable that such personification has been shown to exist among the natives of Australia, between the different dialects of whose language it is said to have been one of the points of resemblance, that they recognised no distinctions of gender.[386]

A story of the Ottawa Indians (by internal evidence posterior in date to their acquaintance with guns and ships) may be taken as a sample of savage traditions, which prove that the convertibility of mankind with sun, moon, or stars, is as natural a belief to a savage, as that his next-door neighbour may turn at pleasure into a wolf or a snake. Six young men finding themselves on a hill-top in close proximity to the sun, resolved to travel to it. Two of them finally reached a beautiful plain, lighted by the moon, which, as they advanced, appeared as an aged woman with a white face, who spoke to them and promised to conduct them to her brother, then absent on his daily course through the sky. This woman ‘they knew from her first appearance’ to be the moon. When she introduced them to her brother, ‘the sun motioned them with his hand to follow him,’ and they accompanied him with some difficulty till they were restored safe and sound to the earth.[387] So Sir G. Grey, collecting native legends concerning a cave in Australia, found that the only point of agreement was ‘that originally the moon who was a man had lived there.’[388]

But, except on the assumption that savages are idiots, it is impossible that such legends should not only obtain currency, but enjoy the vitality of traditions, unless they conform to certain canons of belief, unless they contain nothing inherently incredible. A fairy tale pleases a child, not because it is known to be impossible, but because it carries the mind further afield than actual experience does into the realms of the possible; and a tale understood to be impossible would be as insipid to a savage as it would be to a child. Schoolcraft, in reference to Indian popular tales, speaks of the ‘belief of the narrators and listeners in every wild and improbable thing told;’ and says, ‘Nothing is too capacious for Indian belief.’[389] If, as their stories abundantly show, they feel no difficulty in conceiving the instantaneous transformation of men not merely into something living, but into stones or stumps, the fact ceases to be strange, that in Indian faith ‘many of the planets are transformed adventurers.’[390] What, then, more natural than that all over the world the deeds of great tribesmen should be transferred to the skies, and, under the action of uniform laws of fancy, should in time become so overgrown with fiction as to pass into the domain of the purest mythology, till at last they appear as mere figurative expressions of the daily life of nature, of the struggle between the day and the night, of the dispersion of the clouds by the sun?

The condition of things which makes such conceptions of the heavens the natural outcome of primitive speculation may perhaps, to a certain extent, be recovered by observation of the laws conditioning the actually existent thoughts of the savage world.

The first entrance into Wonderland lies through Dreamland. Schoolcraft’s testimony that ‘a dream or a fact is alike potent in the Indian mind’ accords with much other evidence to the effect that, with savages, the sensations of the sleeping or waking life are equally real or but vaguely distinguished. A native of Zululand will leave his work and travel to his home, perhaps a hundred miles away, to test the truth of a dream,[391] and so great is the importance the Zulus attach to such monitions, that ‘he who dreams is the great man of the village;’ whilst the gift to them of ‘sight by night in dreams’ is ascribed to their first ancestor, the great Unkulunkulu.[392] But how far surpassing even the normal experiences of sleep must be the dreams of men in the hunting or nomad state, the law of whose lives is either a want or an excess of food! What richer fund for story-material can be imagined than the dreams of a savage, or what more likely to introduce him to the mysteries of romance than recollections of those sudden transformations or those weird images, which have haunted the repose of his slumbering hours? And into what strange lands of beauty and plenty, into what secrets of the skies, would not the flights of his sleep give him an insight! In all fairy tales and all mythology a remarkable conformity to the deranged ideas of sleep does thus occur; and especially do the stories of the lower races, as for instance those of Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ read far more like the recollections of bad dreams than like the worn ideas of a once pure religion, or of a poetical interpretation of nature. The most beautiful of the Indian legends, that of the origin of Indian corn, was in native tradition actually referred to a dream, and to a dream purposely resorted to, to gain a clearer insight into the mysteries of nature.[393] And as dreams do but deal with the incidents of the waking life, exaggerating them and contorting them, but never passing beyond them, may not the somewhat uniform incidents of savage life, whether of hunting, fishing, fighting, or travelling, offer some explanation of that general similarity, which is so conspicuous an element in the comparative mythology or the fairy-lore of the world?

Then the fact that the dead reappear in dreams at that season of the night in which also the stars are seen, would tend to confirm the idea of some community of nature between the dead and the stars, such community as is indeed not unfrequently found, as where the Aurora Borealis or the Milky Way are identified with the souls of the departed. So, too, a Californian tribe is mentioned as having believed that chiefs and medicine-men became heavenly bodies after their death,[394] and even Tasmanians could point to the stars they would go to at death.[395]

But there is another reason which would still further create a mental confusion between the deeds of a mortal on earth and the motions of some luminary in heaven, and that is the language of adulation, which, from ascribing the possession of the sky to a chief, in order to gratify him, becomes imperceptibly the language of belief. It is common for the Zulus to say of a chief, ‘That man is the owner of heaven and everything is his,’ and a native once expressed his gratitude to a missionary by pointing to the heaven and saying, ‘Sir, the sun is yours.’ ‘It does not suffice them to honour a great man unless they place the heaven on his shoulders; they do not believe what they say, they merely wish to ascribe all greatness to him.’ If when a chief goes to war the sky becomes overcast, they say, ‘The heaven of the chief feels that the chief is suffering.’ Nor was any chief known to deprecate the use of such language; he ‘expected to have it said always that the heaven was his.’[396]

Obviously, however, there is no fast line between the language of flattery and the language of fact. From the Tahitians, who would speak of their kings’ houses as the clouds of heaven, or the Kafirs of Ethiopia, who called their kings lords of the sun and moon, it is easy to trace the progress of thought which actually led the latter people to pray to their kings for rain, fine weather, or the cessation of storms.[397] The Zulus, like many other savages, think of the sky as at no great distance from the earth, and thus as the roof of their king’s palace in the same way that the earth is its floor. ‘Utshaka claimed to be king of heaven as well as earth, and ordered the rain-doctors to be killed, because in assuming power to control the weather they were interfering with his royal prerogative.’[398] But if such confusion between royalty and divinity can exist in the savage mind whilst the king is on earth, how natural is it that a man, associated for so long in his lifetime with power over the elements, should, after his removal from earth and from sight, become still more mixed up with elemental forces, or perhaps even localised in some point of space! The word Zulu actually means the Heavens, and in Zululand King of the Zulus means king of the heavens,[399] so that when the king is drawn in his waggon to the centre of the kraal, it is not surprising that, among the other acclamations, such as ‘Lion, King of the World,’ with which his creeping subjects salute him, they should actually salute him as Zulu, Heaven.[400] It can only be from the use of such language that among the Zulus ‘rain, storm, sunshine, earthquakes, and all else which we ascribe to natural causes are brought about or retarded by various people to whom this power is ascribed. Every rain that comes is spoken of as belonging to somebody, and in a drought they say that the owners of rain are at variance among themselves.’[401]

That in aftertime, from these modes of thinking and speaking, the attributes of a Zulu or Tahitian chief might become those of a heaven-supporter, such as Atlas, or of a cloud-gatherer, such as Zeus, or that, according as his body was consigned to the earth or the sea, such a chief might become the earth-shaker or the ocean-ruler, is not only what might be expected À priori, but what is to some extent justified by facts. In South Africa the word which the missionaries have adopted for both Hottentots and Kafirs as the name for the Deity, from its being the nearest approach to the Christian conception, is believed to be derived from two words signifying Wounded Knee, a term applied generations back to a Hottentot sorcerer of great fame and skill, who happened to have sustained some injury to his knees. ‘Having been held in high repute for extraordinary powers during life, he (Utixo) continued to be invoked even after death as one who could still relieve and protect; and hence in process of time he became nearest to their first conceptions of God.’[402] And the legend of Mannan Mac Lear, mythical first inhabitant and first legislator of the Isle of Man, discloses a germ of similar origin underlying the myth of a culture-hero, as his story preserved in the following lines will show:

In other words, he was a great sorcerer and a great warrior, whose deeds lived after him in story, and whose name lent itself as a nucleus, like that of Charlemagne or of Alfred, for every adventure that was strange, for every imagination that was wonderful.

There seems, indeed, no reason to seek for any higher genesis than this for any of the culture-heroes of any mythology, notwithstanding that they have with so much unanimity been forced into identification with the sun. Zeus himself means but the same thing as Zulu, namely, the Sky or Heaven, so that it is only natural that nothing that could be told of the sky ‘was not in some form or other ascribed to Zeus,’[404] just as we see that modern Zulus ascribe to their chiefs all atmospheric phenomena, and actually confer on them the appellation, Zulu. There is indeed nothing in which Zeus differs essentially from Manabozho of North American mythology, from Krishna of the Hindus, from Maui of the Polynesians, from Quawteaht of the rude Ahts, or from Kutka of the still ruder Kamschadals. The stories told of one may be more refined than those told of another, but in no case are these divinities more than names, which serve as convenient centres for the grouping of memorable feats or fictions. Such names serve also, when once men have begun to reflect on the arts or customs of their lives, as sufficient explanations of their origin; and just as we find the institution of marriage attributed in China, or Greece, or India to some mythical hero, so we find the discovery of fire and light, or the invention of remarkable arts, duly ascribed to some hypothetical originator. In Polynesian mythology, Maui, in Thlinkeet Indian mythology, Yehl, played the part of Prometheus in procuring fire for the use of men. From seeing a spider make its web, Manabozho invented the art of making fishing nets; and Kutka (who, like Manabozho, is also in some sense the maker of all things) taught the Kamschadals how to build huts, how to catch birds, and beasts, and fish.[405] The supreme deity of Finnish mythology not only brought fire for men from heaven but was the inventor of music; yet like the other gods he was but a magician, able to destroy the world at pleasure, to hold the sun captive in a box, to conquer all monsters and heal all diseases.[406]

American mythology abounds in culture-heroes, mythical personages who taught men useful arts and laws, and left, in the reverence attached to their memory, a quasi-religious system for their posterity.[407] These too have been resolved into observation of the phenomena of the sun or the dawn. Manabozho or Michabo, the ancestor of the Algonquins, whose name literally means the Great Hare, and conferred peculiar respect on the clan who bore it as their totem, means in reality (according to this theory) the Great Light, the Spirit of Dawn, or under another aspect the North-west Wind; the confusion between the hare and the dawn being supposed to have arisen from a root wab, which gave two words, one meaning white and the other hare, so that what was originally told of the White Light came to be told of a Hare, and what was at first but a personification of natural phenomena became a tissue of inconsistent absurdities.[408] Ingenious, however, as such a solution undoubtedly is, it is easier to believe that the stories of the Great Hare have grown round a man, called, in complete accordance with American custom, after the hare, and once a famous sorcerer or warrior like Mannan Mac Lear; for in all the more recent traditions of him, there is much more of the magician or shaman than of the wind or the dawn. He turns at will into a wolf or an oak stump, he converses with all creation, he outwits serpents by his cunning, he has a lodge from which he utters oracles; as brother of the winds, by reason of his swiftness, there is no incongruity in the idea that since his death he is the director of storms, and resides in the region of his brother, the North Wind. It is curious that he is swallowed up by the king of the fish, in this resembling in Aryan mythology Pradyumna, the son of Vishnu, who after being swallowed by a fish is ultimately restored to life,[409] or in Polynesian mythology Maui, who is rescued by the sky from the embrace of the jelly fish. Maui, like Tell, Sigurd, Hercules, and others, has recently been discovered to be the sun, the fish which swallows him signifying really the earth; for does not the earth swallow the sun every night, and is not the sun only freed by the eastern sky in the morning?[410] Doubtless, on such a reading of his life, Manabozho has as just a claim as Mani to a place in the solar system; but then—who that has ever lived and died but has the same?

SamÉ, the great name of Brazilian legend, came across the ocean from the rising sun; he had power over the elements and tempests; the trees of the forests would recede to make room for him, the animals used to crouch before him; lakes and rivers became solid for him; and he taught the use of agriculture and magic. Like him, Bochica, the great lawgiver of the Muyscas and son of the sun, he who invented for them their calendar and regulated their festivals, had a white beard, a detail in which all the American culture-heroes agree.[411] It is not, however, on this particular feature, so much as on their whiteness in general that stress has been laid to identify them with the great White Light of Dawn. Of the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, Dr. Brinton says, ‘Like all the dawn heroes he, too, was represented of white complexion, clothed in long white robes.’ The white is the emphatic thing about them. So the name Viracocha of the Peruvians, translated by Oviedo, ‘the foam of the sea,’ is, we are to believe, a metaphor: ‘the dawn rises above the horizon as the snowy foam on the surface of the lake.’[412] But Peruvian tradition was confused as to whether Viracocha was the highest god and creator of the world, or only the first Inca; and such confusion between humanity and divinity, which is everywhere the normal result of the deification of the dead, is at least a more natural account of the origin of his worship than a fancied resemblance between the sea-foam and the dawn.[413] Heitsi Eibip, whom the Namaqua Hottentots call their Great Father, and on whose graves they throw stones for luck, so far resembles a solar hero that he is believed to have come like SamÉ from the East; yet, though much that is wonderful already attaches to his memory, he has not yet thrown off his human personality, but is known to have been merely a sorcerer of great fame;[414] so that in his deification we have almost living evidence of the process here assumed to have operated widely in the formation of the world’s mythology.

To the influence of the language of adulation in the formation of mythology, may also be added that of the language of affection or of ridicule. Nicknames, taken at hazard from the animal world, or from any object of earth, air, or water, would be obvious sources of improbable stories, tending to the completest confusion between the doings of a man and the attributes of the thing after which he was named. Nicknames of affection would produce the same result; and if, as is likely, other people besides the Finns call their daughters Moon, Sunshine, or Water-glimmer, it is easy to see how, for instance, the departure of Sunshine as a bride might come afterwards to be explained as a myth of the dawn or of twilight, and in the same way anything else that happened to her.[415]

An elemental explanation has been applied with such uniform effect, first to Aryan and then to Polynesian and American mythology, that in the resort to a more natural, albeit less poetical hypothesis, there may be danger of carrying opposing theories too far. There are, however, certain obvious limits; nor, if we doubt whether man in a primitive state really had the poetical views of nature so generally claimed for him, need we deny to him all poetical origination in the construction of his mythology. Take, for instance, this typical Aryan passage, ‘By the early Aryan mind the howling wind was conceived as a great dog or wolf. As the fearful beast was heard speeding by the windows or over the house-top, the inmates trembled, for none knew but his own soul might forthwith be required of him. Hence to this day, among ignorant people, the howling of a dog is supposed to portend a death in the family.’[416] When we find that a dog’s howling portends the death of its master among the Nubians,[417] and is regarded as a dreaded omen by the Kamschadals,[418] as well as by the Fijians,[419] and that the Esquimaux lay a dog’s head by the grave of a child to show it the way to the land of souls, we may safely reject the Aryan pedigree of the superstition, nor go any farther for its explanation than the nature of the sound itself. But though Aryan mythology may be taken to have grown, like any other, round human personalities, and though popular superstitions are in many instances the primary products of the laws of psychology, ranking rather among the sources than the dÉbris of mythology, there is proof from the fairy-lore of savages that some of them have so far advanced in thought as to be not incapable of personifying abstract ideas. Dr. Rink alludes to the tendency of the Esquimaux to give figurative explanations of things, to personify, for instance, human qualities, just as they are personified in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’[420] The Chippewya Indians personified sleep as Weeng, a giant insect that was once seen on a tree in a wood, where it made a murmuring sound with its wings; and it was generally conceived to cause sleep by sending a number of little fairies to beat drowsy foreheads with their tiny clubs.[421] And the Odjibwas, with a fancy which has been so poetically preserved by Longfellow, identified Winter with an old hoary-headed man called Peboan, Spring with a young man of quick step and rosy face called Segwun.[422]

The testimony, therefore, afforded by the observation of modern savage races as to the growth of mythology discloses several ways in which, as it is being formed now, we may infer that it was formed thousands of years ago. The evidence of Steller that the Kamschadals explained everything to themselves according to the liveliness of their fancy, letting nothing escape their examination,[423] accords with evidence concerning other races to the effect that some intellectual curiosity enters as a constituent into the lowest human intelligence, giving birth to explanations which are as absurd to us as they are natural to their original framers. A ready capacity for invention is no rare trait of the savage character. Sir G. Grey found that the capability of Australian natives to invent marvels and wonders was proportioned to the quantity of food he offered them, and that rather than confess ignorance of a thing they would invent a tradition;[424] whilst in the fondness of the Koranna Hottentots, as they sit round their evening fires, of relating fictitious adventures, lies a source of legendary lore which is not likely to be limited to South Africa, and is probably aided elsewhere as it is there by the knowledge, common to so many savage tribes, of the preparation of intoxicating drinks.[425] If to these sources of mythology be added the help supplied by dreams to the elaboration of fiction; the misconceptions effected in traditions by the language of flattery, of affection, or of ridicule; and, lastly, the tendency, probably consequent on such confusion, to personify things or even abstract ideas; the wonder will no longer be that the mythology of the different races of the world displays so much uniformity, but that uniformity within limited ranges should ever have been taken as a proof of a common ethnological origin.