7.
VII.
THE PRIMEVAL GHOST-WORLD.
NO earnest student of human culture can as yet have
forgotten or wholly outlived the feeling of delight
awakened by the first perusal of Max Müller's brilliant
"Essay on Comparative Mythology,"—a work in which
the scientific principles of myth-interpretation, though
not newly announced, were at least brought home to the
reader with such an amount of fresh and striking concrete
illustration as they had not before received. Yet
it must have occurred to more than one reader that, while
the analyses of myths contained in this noble essay are
in the main sound in principle and correct in detail,
nevertheless the author's theory of the genesis of myth
is expressed, and most likely conceived, in a way that is
very suggestive of carelessness and fallacy. There are
obvious reasons for doubting whether the existence of
mythology can be due to any "disease," abnormity, or
hypertrophy of metaphor in language; and the criticism
at once arises, that with the myth-makers it was not so
much the character of the expression which originated the
thought, as it was the thought which gave character to the
expression. It is not that the early Aryans were myth-makers
because their language abounded in metaphor; it
is that the Aryan mother-tongue abounded in metaphor
because the men and women who spoke it were myth-makers.
And they were myth-makers because they had
nothing but the phenomena of human will and effort
with which to compare objective phenomena. Therefore
it was that they spoke of the sun as an unwearied voyager
or a matchless archer, and classified inanimate no
less than animate objects as masculine and feminine.
Max Müller's way of stating his theory, both in this Essay
and in his later Lectures, affords one among several
instances of the curious manner in which he combines a
marvellous penetration into the significance of details with
a certain looseness of general
conception.
[1] The principles
of philological interpretation are an indispensable
aid to us in detecting the hidden meaning of many a
legend in which the powers of nature are represented in
the guise of living and thinking persons; but before we can
get at the secret of the myth-making tendency itself, we
must leave philology and enter upon a psychological
study. We must inquire into the characteristics of that
primitive style of thinking to which it seemed quite
natural that the sun should be an unerring archer, and
the thunder-cloud a black demon or gigantic robber finding
his richly merited doom at the hands of the indignant
Lord of Light.
Among recent treatises which have dealt with this
interesting problem, we shall find it advantageous to
give especial attention to Mr. Tylor's "Primitive
Culture,"[2] one of the
few erudite works which are at once
truly great and thoroughly entertaining. The learning
displayed in it would do credit to a German specialist,
both for extent and for minuteness, while the orderly
arrangement of the arguments and the elegant lucidity of
the style are such as we are accustomed to expect from
French essay-writers. And what is still more admirable
is the way in which the enthusiasm characteristic of
a genial and original speculator is tempered by the
patience and caution of a cool-headed critic. Patience
and caution are nowhere more needed than in writers
who deal with mythology and with primitive religious
ideas; but these qualities are too seldom found in combination
with the speculative boldness which is required
when fresh theories are to be framed or new paths of
investigation opened. The state of mind in which the
explaining powers of a favourite theory are fondly contemplated
is, to some extent, antagonistic to the state of
mind in which facts are seen, with the eye of impartial
criticism, in all their obstinate and uncompromising reality.
To be able to preserve the balance between the two
opposing tendencies is to give evidence of the most consummate
scientific training. It is from the want of such
a balance that the recent great work of Mr. Cox is at
times so unsatisfactory. It may, I fear, seem ill-natured
to say so, but the eagerness with which Mr. Cox waylays
every available illustration of the physical theory of the
origin of myths has now and then the curious effect of
weakening the reader's conviction of the soundness of
the theory. For my own part, though by no means inclined
to waver in adherence to a doctrine once adopted
on good grounds, I never felt so much like rebelling
against the mythologic supremacy of the Sun and the
Dawn as when reading Mr. Cox's volumes. That Mr.
Tylor, while defending the same fundamental theory,
awakens no such rebellious feelings, is due to his clear
perception and realization of the fact that it is impossible
to generalize in a single formula such many-sided correspondences
as those which primitive poetry end philosophy
have discerned between the life of man and the life of
outward nature. Whoso goes roaming up and down the
elf-land of popular fancies, with sole intent to resolve
each episode of myth into some answering physical event,
his only criterion being outward resemblance, cannot be
trusted in his conclusions, since wherever he turns for
evidence he is sure to find something that can be made
to serve as such. As Mr. Tylor observes, no household
legend or nursery rhyme is safe from his hermeneutics.
"Should he, for instance, demand as his property the
nursery `Song of Sixpence,' his claim would be easily
established,—obviously the four-and-twenty blackbirds
are the four-and-twenty hours, and the pie that holds
them is the underlying earth covered with the overarching
sky,—how true a touch of nature it is that when the
pie is opened, that is, when day breaks, the birds begin
to sing; the King is the Sun, and his counting out his
money is pouring out the sunshine, the golden shower of
Danaë; the Queen is the Moon, and her transparent
honey the moonlight; the Maid is the `rosy-fingered'
Dawn, who rises before the Sun, her master, and hangs
out the clouds, his clothes, across the sky; the particular
blackbird, who so tragically ends the tale by snipping off
her nose, is the hour of sunrise." In all this interpretation
there is no
a priori improbability, save, perhaps, in
its unbroken symmetry and completeness. That some
points, at least, of the story are thus derived from antique
interpretations of physical events, is in harmony with all
that we know concerning nursery rhymes. In short, "the
time-honoured rhyme really wants but one thing to
prove it a sun-myth, that one thing being a proof by
some argument more valid than analogy." The character
of the argument which is lacking may be illustrated by
a reference to the rhyme about Jack and Jill, explained
some time since in the paper on "The Origins of Folk-Lore."
If the argument be thought valid which shows
these ill-fated children to be the spots on the moon, it is
because the proof consists, not in the analogy, which is
in this case not especially obvious, but in the fact that
in the Edda, and among ignorant Swedish peasants of
our own day, the story of Jack and Jill is actually given
as an explanation of the moon-spots. To the neglect of
this distinction between what is plausible and what is
supported by direct evidence, is due much of the crude
speculation which encumbers the study of myths.
It is when Mr. Tylor merges the study of mythology
into the wider inquiry into the characteristic features of
the mode of thinking in which myths originated, that we
can best appreciate the practical value of that union of
speculative boldness and critical sobriety which everywhere
distinguishes him. It is pleasant to meet with a
writer who can treat of primitive religious ideas without
losing his head over allegory and symbolism, and who
duly realizes the fact that a savage is not a rabbinical
commentator, or a cabalist, or a Rosicrucian, but a plain
man who draws conclusions like ourselves, though with
feeble intelligence and scanty knowledge. The mystic
allegory with which such modern writers as Lord Bacon
have invested the myths of antiquity is no part of their
original clothing, but is rather the late product of a style
of reasoning from analogy quite similar to that which we
shall perceive to have guided the myth-makers in their
primitive constructions. The myths and customs and
beliefs which, in an advanced stage of culture, seem
meaningless save when characterized by some quaintly
wrought device of symbolic explanation, did not seem
meaningless in the lower culture which gave birth to
them. Myths, like words, survive their primitive meanings.
In the early stage the myth is part and parcel of
the current mode of philosophizing; the explanation
which it offers is, for the time, the natural one, the one
which would most readily occur to any one thinking on
the theme with which the myth is concerned. But by
and by the mode of philosophizing has changed; explanations
which formerly seemed quite obvious no longer
occur to any one, but the myth has acquired an independent
substantive existence, and continues to be handed
down from parents to children as something true, though
no one can tell why it is true: Lastly, the myth itself
gradually fades from remembrance, often leaving behind
it some utterly unintelligible custom or seemingly absurd
superstitious notion. For example,—to recur to an illustration
already cited in a previous paper,—it is still
believed here and there by some venerable granny that it
is wicked to kill robins; but he who should attribute
the belief to the old granny's refined sympathy with all
sentient existence, would be making one of the blunders
which are always committed by those who reason
a priori about historical matters without following the
historical method. At an earlier date the superstition
existed in the shape of a belief that the killing of a
robin portends some calamity; in a still earlier form the
calamity is specified as death; and again, still earlier, as
death by lightning. Another step backward reveals that
the dread sanctity of the robin is owing to the fact that
he is the bird of Thor, the lightning god; and finally we
reach that primitive stage of philosophizing in which the
lightning is explained as a red bird dropping from its
beak a worm which cleaveth the rocks. Again, the belief
that some harm is sure to come to him who saves the life
of a drowning man, is unintelligible until it is regarded
as a case of survival in culture. In the older form of the
superstition it is held that the rescuer will sooner or later
be drowned himself; and thus we pass to the fetichistic
interpretation of drowning as the seizing of the unfortunate
person by the water-spirit or nixy, who is naturally
angry at being deprived of his victim, and henceforth
bears a special grudge against the bold mortal who has
thus dared to frustrate him.
The interpretation of the lightning as a red bird, and
of drowning as the work of a smiling but treacherous
fiend, are parts of that primitive philosophy of nature in
which all forces objectively existing are conceived as
identical with the force subjectively known as volition.
It is this philosophy, currently known as fetichism, but
treated by Mr. Tylor under the somewhat more comprehensive
name of "animism," which we must now consider
in a few of its most conspicuous exemplifications. When
we have properly characterized some of the processes
which the untrained mind habitually goes through, we
shall have incidentally arrived at a fair solution of the
genesis of mythology.
Let us first note the ease with which the barbaric or
uncultivated mind reaches all manner of apparently fanciful
conclusions through reckless reasoning from analogy.
It is through the operation of certain laws of ideal association
that all human thinking, that of the highest as
well as that of the lowest minds, is conducted: the discovery
of the law of gravitation, as well as the invention
of such a superstition as the Hand of Glory, is at bottom
but a case of association of ideas. The difference between
the scientific and the mythologic inference consists solely
in the number of checks which in the former case combine
to prevent any other than the true conclusion from being
framed into a proposition to which the mind assents.
Countless accumulated experiences have taught the modern
that there are many associations of ideas which do not
correspond to any actual connection of cause and effect in
the world of phenomena; and he has learned accordingly
to apply to his newly framed notions the rigid test of verification.
Besides which the same accumulation of experiences
has built up an organized structure of ideal associations
into which only the less extravagant newly framed
notions have any chance of fitting. The primitive man, or
the modern savage who is to some extent his counterpart,
must reason without the aid of these multifarious checks.
That immense mass of associations which answer to what
are called physical laws, and which in the mind of the
civilized modern have become almost organic, have not
been formed in the mind of the savage; nor has he
learned the necessity of experimentally testing any of
his newly framed notions, save perhaps a few of the
commonest. Consequently there is nothing but superficial
analogy to guide the course of his thought hither
or thither, and the conclusions at which he arrives will
be determined by associations of ideas occurring apparently
at haphazard. Hence the quaint or grotesque fancies
with which European and barbaric folk-lore is filled,
in the framing of which the myth-maker was but reasoning
according to the best methods at his command. To
this simplest class, in which the association of ideas is
determined by mere analogy, belong such cases as that
of the Zulu, who chews a piece of wood in order to soften
the heart of the man with whom he is about to trade
for cows, or the Hessian lad who "thinks he may escape
the conscription by carrying a baby-girl's cap in his
pocket,—a symbolic way of repudiating
manhood."
[3]
A similar style of thinking underlies the mediæval
necromancer's practice of making a waxen image of his
enemy and shooting at it with arrows, in order to bring
about the enemy's death; as also the case of the magic
rod, mentioned in a previous paper, by means of which
a sound thrashing can be administered to an absent foe
through the medium of an old coat which is imagined to
cover him. The principle involved here is one which is
doubtless familiar to most children, and is closely akin to
that which Irving so amusingly illustrates in his doughty
general who struts through a field of cabbages or corn-stalks,
smiting them to earth with his cane, and
imagining himself a hero of chivalry conquering single-handed
a host of caitiff ruffians. Of like origin are the
fancies that the breaking of a mirror heralds a death in
the family,—probably because of the destruction of the
reflected human image; that the "hair of the dog that
bit you" will prevent hydrophobia if laid upon the
wound; or that the tears shed by human victims, sacrificed
to mother earth, will bring down showers upon the
land. Mr. Tylor cites Lord Chesterfield's remark, "that
the king had been ill, and that people generally expected
the illness to be fatal, because the oldest lion in the
Tower, about the king's age, had just died. `So wild
and capricious is the human mind,'" observes the elegant
letter-writer. But indeed, as Mr. Tylor justly remarks,
"the thought was neither wild nor capricious; it was
simply such an argument from analogy as the educated
world has at length painfully learned to be worthless, but
which, it is not too much to declare, would to this day
carry considerable weight to the minds of four fifths of the
human race." Upon such symbolism are based most of
the practices of divination and the great pseudo-science
of astrology. "It is an old story, that when two brothers
were once taken ill together, Hippokrates, the physician,
concluded from the coincidence that they were twins, but
Poseidonios, the astrologer, considered rather that they
were born under the same constellation; we may add
that either argument would be thought reasonable by a
savage." So when a Maori fortress is attacked, the
besiegers and besieged look to see if Venus is near the
moon. The moon represents the fortress; and if it
appears below the companion planet, the besiegers will
carry the day, otherwise they will be repulsed. Equally
primitive and childlike was Rousseau's train of thought
on the memorable day at Les Charmettes when, being
distressed with doubts as to the safety of his soul, he
sought to determine the point by throwing a stone at a
tree. "Hit, sign of salvation; miss, sign of damnation!"
The tree being a large one and very near at hand, the
result of the experiment was reassuring, and the young
philosopher walked away without further misgivings concerning
this momentous question.
[4]
When the savage, whose highest intellectual efforts
result only in speculations of this childlike character, is
confronted with the phenomena of dreams, it is easy to
see what he will make of them. His practical knowledge
of psychology is too limited to admit of his distinguishing
between the solidity of waking experience and what
we may call the unsubstantialness of the dream. He
may, indeed, have learned that the dream is not to be
relied on for telling the truth; the Zulu, for example,
has even reached the perverse triumph of critical logic
achieved by our own Aryan ancestors in the saying that
"dreams go by contraries." But the Zulu has not learned,
nor had the primeval Aryan learned, to disregard the
utterances of the dream as being purely subjective phenomena.
To the mind as yet untouched by modern culture,
the visions seen and the voices heard in sleep possess
as much objective reality as the gestures and shouts of
waking hours. When the savage relates his dream, he
tells how he
saw certain dogs, dead warriors, or demons
last night, the implication being that the things seen
were objects external to himself. As Mr. Spencer observes,
"his rude language fails to state the difference
between seeing and dreaming that he saw, doing and
dreaming that he did. From this inadequacy of his
language it not only results that he cannot truly represent
this difference to others, but also that he cannot truly
represent it to himself. Hence in the absence of an
alternative interpretation, his belief, and that of those to
whom he tells his adventures, is that his
other self has
been away and came back when he awoke. And this
belief, which we find among various existing savage
tribes, we equally find in the traditions of the early
civilized races."
[5]
Let us consider, for a moment, this assumption of the
other self, for upon this is based the great mass of crude
inference which constitutes the primitive man's philosophy
of nature. The hypothesis of the
other self, which
serves to account for the savage's wanderings during
sleep in strange lands and among strange people, serves
also to account for the presence in his dreams of parents,
comrades, or enemies, known to be dead and buried. The
other self of the dreamer meets and converses with the
other selves of his dead brethren, joins with them in the
hunt, or sits down with them to the wild cannibal banquet.
Thus arises the belief in an ever-present world of
souls or ghosts, a belief which the entire experience of
uncivilized man goes to strengthen and expand. The
existence of some tribe or tribes of savages wholly destitute
of religious belief has often been hastily asserted
and as often called in question. But there is no question
that, while many savages are unable to frame a conception
so general as that of godhood, on the other hand no
tribe has ever been found so low in the scale of intelligence
as not to have framed the conception of ghosts or
spiritual personalities, capable of being angered, propitiated,
or conjured with. Indeed it is not improbable
a priori that the original inference involved in the notion
of the other self may be sufficiently simple and obvious
to fall within the capacity of animals even less intelligent
than uncivilized man. An authentic case is on
record of a Skye terrier who, being accustomed to obtain
favours from his master by sitting on his haunches, will
also sit before his pet india-rubber ball placed on the
chimney-piece, evidently beseeching it to jump down
and play with him.
[6]
Such a fact as this is quite in
harmony with Auguste Comte's suggestion that such
intelligent animals as dogs, apes, and elephants may be
capable of forming a few fetichistic notions. The behaviour
of the terrier here rests upon the assumption
that the ball is open to the same sort of entreaty which
prevails with the master; which implies, not that the
wistful brute accredits the ball with a soul, but that in
his mind the distinction between life and inanimate
existence has never been thoroughly established. Just
this confusion between things living and things not living
is present throughout the whole philosophy of fetichism;
and the confusion between things seen and things
dreamed, which suggests the notion of another self, belongs
to this same twilight stage of intelligence in which
primeval man has not yet clearly demonstrated his immeasurable
superiority to the brutes.
[7]
The conception of a soul or other self, capable of going
away from the body and returning to it, receives decisive
confirmation from the phenomena of fainting, trance,
catalepsy, and ecstasy,[8]
which occur less rarely among
savages, owing to their irregular mode of life, than
among civilized men. "Further verification," observes
Mr. Spencer, "is afforded by every epileptic subject, into
whose body, during the absence of the other self, some
enemy has entered; for how else does it happen that the
other self on returning denies all knowledge of what his
body has been doing? And this supposition, that the
body has been `possessed' by some other being, is confirmed
by the phenomena of somnambulism and insanity."
Still further, as Mr. Spencer points out, when we
recollect that savages are very generally unwilling to
have their portraits taken, lest a portion of themselves
should get carried off and be exposed to foul
play,
[9] we
must readily admit that the weird reflection of the person
and imitation of the gestures in rivers or still woodland
pools will go far to intensify the belief in the other self.
Less frequent but uniform confirmation is to be found in
echoes, which in Europe within two centuries have been
commonly interpreted as the voices of mocking fiends or
wood-nymphs, and which the savage might well regard
as the utterances of his other self.
Chamisso's well-known tale of Peter Schlemihl belongs
to a widely diffused family of legends, which show that a
man's shadow has been generally regarded not only as an
entity, but as a sort of spiritual attendant of the body,
which under certain circumstances it may permanently
forsake. It is in strict accordance with this idea that
not only in the classic languages, but in various barbaric
tongues, the word for "shadow" expresses also the soul
or other self. Tasmanians, Algonquins, Central-Americans,
Abipones, Basutos, and Zulus are cited by Mr. Tylor
as thus implicitly asserting the identity of the shadow
with the ghost or phantasm seen in dreams; the Basutos
going so far as to think "that if a man walks on the
river-bank, a crocodile may seize his shadow in the water
and draw him in." Among the Algonquins a sick person
is supposed to have his shadow or other self temporarily
detached from his body, and the convalescent is at times
"reproached for exposing himself before his shadow was
safely settled down in him." If the sick man has been
plunged into stupor, it is because his other self has
travelled away as far as the brink of the river of death,
but not being allowed to cross has come back and re-entered
him. And acting upon a similar notion the ailing
Fiji will sometimes lie down and raise a hue and cry
for his soul to be brought back. Thus, continues Mr.
Tylor, "in various countries the bringing back of lost
souls becomes a regular part of the sorcerer's or priest's
profession."
[10]
On Aryan soil we find the notion of a
temporary departure of the soul surviving to a late date
in the theory that the witch may attend the infernal Sabbath
while her earthly tabernacle is quietly sleeping at
home. The primeval conception reappears, clothed in
bitterest sarcasm, in Dante's reference to his living
contemporaries whose souls he met with in the vaults of
hell, while their bodies were still walking about on the
earth, inhabited by devils.
The theory which identifies the soul with the shadow,
and supposes the shadow to depart with the sickness and
death of the body, would seem liable to be attended with
some difficulties in the way of verification, even to the
dim intelligence of the savage. But the propriety of
identifying soul and breath is borne out by all primeval
experience. The breath, which really quits the body at
its decease, has furnished the chief name for the soul,
not only to the Hebrew, the Sanskrit, and the classic
tongues; not only to German and English, where
geist,
and ghost, according to Max Müller, have the meaning of
"breath," and are akin to such words as gas, gust, and
geyser; but also to numerous barbaric languages. Among
the natives of Nicaragua and California, in Java and in
West Australia, the soul is described as the air or breeze
which passes in and out through the nostrils and mouth;
and the Greenlanders, according to Cranz, reckon two
separate souls, the breath and the shadow. "Among the
Seminoles of Florida, when a woman died in childbirth,
the infant was held over her face to receive her parting
spirit, and thus acquire strength and knowledge for its
future use..... Their state of mind is kept up to this
day among Tyrolese peasants, who can still fancy a good
man's soul to issue from his mouth at death like a little
white cloud."
[11]
It is kept up, too, in Lancashire, where a
well-known witch died a few years since; "but before she
could `shuffle off this mortal coil' she must needs
transfer her familiar spirit to some trusty successor. An intimate
acquaintance from a neighbouring township was
consequently sent for in all haste, and on her arrival was
immediately closeted with her dying friend. What
passed between them has never fully transpired, but it is
confidently affirmed that at the close of the interview
this associate
received the witch's last breath into her mouth
and with it her familiar spirit. The dreaded woman
thus ceased to exist, but her powers for good or evil were
transferred to her companion; and on passing along the
road from Burnley to Blackburn we can point out a farmhouse
at no great distance with whose thrifty matron no
neighbouring farmer will yet dare to
quarrel."
[12]
Of the theory of embodiment there will be occasion to
speak further on. At present let us not pass over the
fact that the other self is not only conceived as shadow
or breath, which can at times quit the body during life,
but is also supposed to become temporarily embodied in
the visible form of some bird or beast. In discussing
elsewhere the myth of Bishop Hatto, we saw that the
soul is sometimes represented in the form of a rat or
mouse; and in treating of werewolves we noticed the
belief that the spirits of dead ancestors, borne along in
the night-wind, have taken on the semblance of howling
dogs or wolves. "Consistent with these quaint ideas are
ceremonies in vogue in China of bringing home in a
cock (live or artificial) the spirit of a man deceased in a
distant place, and of enticing into a sick man's coat the
departing spirit which has already left his body and so
conveying it back."
[13]
In Castrén's great work on Finnish
mythology, we find the story of the giant who could
not be killed because he kept his soul hidden in a twelve-headed
snake which he carried in a bag as he rode on
horseback; only when the secret was discovered and the
snake carefully killed, did the giant yield up his life. In
this Finnish legend we have one of the thousand phases of
the story of the "Giant who had no Heart in his Body," but
whose heart was concealed, for safe keeping, in a duck's
egg, or in a pigeon, carefully disposed in some belfry at the
world's end a million miles away, or encased in a wellnigh
infinite series of Chinese boxes.
[14]
Since, in spite
of all these precautions, the poor giant's heart invariably
came to grief, we need not wonder at the Karen superstition
that the soul is in danger when it quits the body
on its excursions, as exemplified in countless Indo-European
stories of the accidental killing of the weird mouse
or pigeon which embodies the wandering spirit. Conversely
it is held that the detachment of the other self
is fraught with danger to the self which remains. In the
philosophy of "wraiths" and "fetches," the appearance
of a double, like that which troubled Mistress Affery in
her waking dreams of Mr. Flintwinch, has been from
time out of mind a signal of alarm. "In New Zealand
it is ominous to see the figure of an absent person, for if
it be shadowy and the face not visible, his death may
erelong be expected, but if the face be seen he is dead
already. A party of Maoris (one of whom told the
story) were seated round a fire in the open air, when
there appeared, seen only by two of them, the figure of a
relative, left ill at home; they exclaimed, the figure vanished,
and on the return of the party it appeared that the
sick man had died about the time of the
vision."
[15] The
belief in wraiths has survived into modern times, and now
and then appears in the records of that remnant of primeval
philosophy known as "spiritualism," as, for example,
in the case of the lady who "thought she saw her
own father look in at the church-window at the moment
he was dying in his own house."
The belief in the "death-fetch," like the doctrine
which identifies soul with shadow, is instructive as showing
that in barbaric thought the other self is supposed to
resemble the material self with which it has customarily
been associated. In various savage superstitions the minute
resemblance of soul to body is forcibly stated. The
Australian, for instance, not content with slaying his enemy,
cuts off the right thumb of the corpse, so that the departed
soul may be incapacitated from throwing a spear.
Even the half-civilized Chinese prefer crucifixion to
decapitation, that their souls may not wander headless
about the spirit-world.
[16]
Thus we see how far removed
from the Christian doctrine of souls is the primeval theory
of the soul or other self that figures in dreamland. So
grossly materialistic is the primitive conception that the
savage who cherishes it will bore holes in the coffin of
his dead friend, so that the soul may again have a chance,
if it likes, to revisit the body. To this day, among the
peasants in some parts of Northern Europe, when Odin,
the spectral hunter, rides by attended by his furious host,
the windows in every sick-room are opened, in order
that the soul, if it chooses to depart, may not be hindered
from joining in the headlong chase. And so, adds Mr.
Tylor, after the Indians of North America had spent a
riotous night in singeing an unfortunate captive to death
with firebrands, they would howl like the fiends they
were, and beat the air with brushwood, to drive away the
distressed and revengeful ghost. "With a kindlier feeling,
the Congo negroes abstained for a whole year after a death
from sweeping the house, lest the dust should injure the
delicate substance of the ghost"; and even now, "it remains
a German peasant saying that it is wrong to slam
a door, lest one should pinch a soul
in it."
[17]
Dante's experience with the ghosts in hell and purgatory, who were
astonished at his weighing down the boat in which they
were carried, is belied by the sweet German notion "that
the dead mother's coming back in the night to suckle the
baby she has left on earth may be known by the hollow
pressed down in the bed where she lay." Almost universally
ghosts, however impervious to thrust of sword or
shot of pistol, can eat and drink like Squire Westerns.
And lastly, we have the grotesque conception of souls
sufficiently material to be killed over again, as in the
case of the negro widows who, wishing to marry a second
time, will go and duck themselves in the pond, in order
to drown the souls of their departed husbands, which are
supposed to cling about their necks; while, according to
the Fiji theory, the ghost of every dead warrior must go
through a terrible fight with Samu and his brethren, in
which, if he succeeds, he will enter Paradise, but if he
fails he will be killed over again and finally eaten by the
dreaded Samu and his unearthly company.
From the conception of souls embodied in beast-forms,
as above illustrated, it is not a wide step to the conception
of beast-souls which, like human souls, survive the
death of the tangible body. The wide-spread superstitions
concerning werewolves and swan-maidens, and the
hardly less general belief in metempsychosis, show that
primitive culture has not arrived at the distinction
attained by modern philosophy between the immortal man
and the soulless brute. Still more direct evidence is
furnished by sundry savage customs. The Kafir who has
killed an elephant will cry that he did n't mean to do it,
and, lest the elephant's soul should still seek vengeance,
he will cut off and bury the trunk, so that the mighty
beast may go crippled to the spirit-land. In like manner,
the Samoyeds, after shooting a bear, will gather about
the body offering excuses and laying the blame on the
Russians; and the American redskin will even put the
pipe of peace into the dead animal's mouth, and beseech
him to forgive the deed. In Assam it is believed that
the ghosts of slain animals will become in the next world
the property of the hunter who kills them; and the
Kamtchadales expressly declare that all animals, even
flies and bugs, will live after death,—a belief, which, in
our own day, has been indorsed on philosophical grounds
by an eminent living naturalist.
[18]
The Greenlanders, too,
give evidence of the same belief by supposing that when
after an exhausting fever the patient comes up in unprecedented
health and vigour, it is because he has lost his
former soul and had it replaced by that of a young child
or a
reindeer. In a recent work in which the crudest
fancies of primeval savagery are thinly disguised in a
jargon learned from the superficial reading of modern
books of science, M. Figuier maintains that human souls
are for the most part the surviving souls of deceased animals;
in general, the souls of precocious musical children
like Mozart come from nightingales, while the souls of
great architects have passed into them from beavers, etc.,
etc.
[19]
The practice of begging pardon of the animal one has
just slain is in some parts of the world extended to the
case of plants. When the Talein offers a prayer to the
tree which he is about to cut down, it is obviously because
he regards the tree as endowed with a soul or ghost
which in the next life may need to be propitiated. And
the doctrine of transmigration distinctly includes plants
along with animals among the future existences into
which the human soul may pass.
As plants, like animals, manifest phenomena of life,
though to a much less conspicuous degree, it is not
incomprehensible that the savage should attribute souls to
them. But the primitive process of anthropomorphisation
does not end here. Not only the horse and dog, the
bamboo, and the oak-tree, but even lifeless objects, such
as the hatchet, or bow and arrows, or food and drink of
the dead man, possess other selves which pass into the
world of ghosts. Fijis and other contemporary savages,
when questioned, expressly declare that this is their belief.
"If an axe or a chisel is worn out or broken up,
away flies its soul for the service of the gods." The
Algonquins told Charlevoix that since hatchets and kettles
have shadows, no less than men and women, it follows,
of course, that these shadows (or souls) must pass
along with human shadows (or souls) into the spirit-land.
In this we see how simple and consistent is the logic
which guides the savage, and how inevitable is the genesis
of the great mass of beliefs, to our minds so arbitrary
and grotesque, which prevail throughout the barbaric
world. However absurd the belief that pots and kettles
have souls may seem to us, it is nevertheless the only
belief which can be held consistently by the savage to
whom pots and kettles, no less than human friends or
enemies, may appear in his dreams; who sees them followed
by shadows as they are moved about; who hears
their voices, dull or ringing, when they are struck; and
who watches their doubles fantastically dancing in the
water as they are carried across the
stream.
[20] To minds,
even in civilized countries, which are unused to the
severe training of science, no stronger evidence can be
alleged than what is called "the evidence of the senses";
for it is only long familiarity with science which teaches
us that the evidence of the senses is trustworthy only in
so far as it is correctly interpreted by reason. For the
truth of his belief in the ghosts of men and beasts, trees
and axes, the savage has undeniably the evidence of his
senses which have so often seen, heard, and handled
these
other selves.
The funeral ceremonies of uncultured races freshly
illustrate this crude philosophy, and receive fresh illustration
from it. On the primitive belief in the ghostly
survival of persons and objects rests the almost universal
custom of sacrificing the wives, servants, horses, and dogs
of the departed chief of the tribe, as well as of presenting
at his shrine sacred offerings of food, ornaments, weapons,
and money. Among the Kayans the slaves who are killed
at their master's tomb are enjoined to take great care of
their master's ghost, to wash and shampoo it, and to nurse
it when sick. Other savages think that "all whom they
kill in this world shall attend them as slaves after death,"
and for this reason the thrifty Dayaks of Borneo until
lately would not allow their young men to marry until
they had acquired some post mortem property by procuring
at least one human head. It is hardly necessary to
do more than allude to the Fiji custom of strangling all
the wives of the deceased at his funeral, or to the equally
well-known Hindu rite of suttee. Though, as Wilson
has shown, the latter rite is not supported by any genuine
Vedic authority, but only by a shameless Brahmanic corruption
of the sacred text, Mr. Tylor is nevertheless quite
right in arguing that unless the horrible custom had received
the sanction of a public opinion bequeathed from
pre-Vedic times, the Brahmans would have had no motive
for fraudulently reviving it; and this opinion is virtually
established by the fact of the prevalence of widow sacrifice
among Gauls, Scandinavians, Slaves, and other European
Aryans.
[21]
Though under English rule the rite has
been forcibly suppressed, yet the archaic sentiments
which so long maintained it are not yet extinct. Within
the present year there has appeared in the newspapers a
not improbable story of a beautiful and accomplished
Hindu lady who, having become the wife of a wealthy
Englishman, and after living several years in England
amid the influences of modern society, nevertheless went
off and privately burned herself to death soon after her
husband's decease.
The reader who thinks it far-fetched to interpret funeral
offerings of food, weapons, ornaments, or money, on the
theory of object-souls, will probably suggest that such
offerings may be mere memorials of affection or esteem
for the dead man. Such, indeed, they have come to be
in many countries after surviving the phase of culture in
which they originated; but there is ample evidence to
show that at the outset they were presented in the belief
that their ghosts would be eaten or otherwise employed
by the ghost of the dead man. The stout club which is
buried with the dead Fiji sends its soul along with him
that he may be able to defend himself against the hostile
ghosts which will lie in ambush for him on the road to
Mbulu, seeking to kill and eat him. Sometimes the club
is afterwards removed from the grave as of no further use,
since its ghost is all that the dead man needs. In like
manner, "as the Greeks gave the dead man the obolus
for Charon's toll, and the old Prussians furnished him
with spending money, to buy refreshment on his weary
journey, so to this day German peasants bury a corpse
with money in his mouth or hand," and this is also said
to be one of the regular ceremonies of an Irish wake.
Of similar purport were the funeral feasts and oblations
of food in Greece and Italy, the "rice-cakes made with
ghee" destined for the Hindu sojourning in Yama's kingdom,
and the meat and gruel offered by the Chinaman to
the manes of his ancestors. "Many travellers have
described the imagination with which the Chinese make
such offerings. It is that the spirits of the dead consume
the impalpable essence of the food, leaving behind its
coarse material substance, wherefore the dutiful sacrificers,
having set out sumptuous feasts for ancestral souls, allow
them a proper time to satisfy their appetite, and then
fall to themselves."
[22]
So in the Homeric sacrifice to the
gods, after the deity has smelled the sweet savour and
consumed the curling steam that rises ghost-like from
the roasting viands, the assembled warriors devour the
remains."
[23]
Thus far the course of fetichistic thought which we
have traced out, with Mr. Tylor's aid, is such as is not
always obvious to the modern inquirer without considerable
concrete illustration. The remainder of the process,
resulting in that systematic and complete anthropomorphisation
of nature which has given rise to mythology,
may be more succinctly described. Gathering together
the conclusions already obtained, we find that daily or
frequent experience of the phenomena of shadows and
dreams has combined with less frequent experience of the
phenomena of trance, ecstasy, and insanity, to generate
in the mind of uncultured man the notion of a twofold
existence appertaining alike to all animate or inanimate
objects: as all alike possess material bodies, so all alike
possess ghosts or souls. Now when the theory of object-souls
is expanded into a general doctrine of spirits, the
philosophic scheme of animism is completed. Once habituated
to the conception of souls of knives and tobacco-pipes
passing to the land of ghosts, the savage cannot avoid
carrying the interpretation still further, so that wind and
water, fire and storm, are accredited with indwelling
spirits akin by nature to the soul which inhabits the
human frame. That the mighty spirit or demon by whose
impelling will the trees are rooted up and tile storm-clouds
driven across the sky should resemble a freed
human soul, is a natural inference, since uncultured man
has not attained to the conception of physical force acting
in accordance with uniform methods, and hence all
events are to his mind the manifestations of capricious
volition. If the fire burns down his hut, it is because the
fire is a person with a soul, and is angry with him, and
needs to be coaxed into a kindlier mood by means of
prayer or sacrifice. Thus the savage has
a priori no
alternative but to regard fire-soul as something akin to
human-soul; and in point of fact we find that savage
philosophy makes no distinction between the human
ghost and the elemental demon or deity. This is sufficiently
proved by the universal prevalence of the worship
of ancestors. The essential principle of manes-worship
is that the tribal chief or patriarch, who has governed the
community during life, continues also to govern it after
death, assisting it in its warfare with hostile tribes,
rewarding brave warriors, and punishing traitors and
cowards. Thus from the conception of the living king
we pass to the notion of what Mr. Spencer calls "the
god-king," and thence to the rudimentary notion of deity.
Among such higher savages as the Zulus, the doctrine of
divine ancestors has been developed to the extent of recognizing
a first ancestor, the Great Father, Unkulunkulu,
who made the world. But in the stratum of savage
thought in which barbaric or Aryan folk-lore is for the
most part based, we find no such exalted speculation.
The ancestors of the rude Veddas and of the Guinea
negroes, the Hindu
pitris (
patres, "fathers"), and the
Roman
manes have become elemental deities which send
rain or sunshine, health or sickness, plenty or famine, arid
to which their living offspring appeal for guidance amid
the vicissitudes of life.
[24]
The theory of embodiment,
already alluded to, shows how thoroughly the demons
which cause disease are identified with human and object
souls. In Australasia it is a dead man's ghost which
creeps up into the liver of the impious wretch who has
ventured to pronounce his name; while conversely in the
well-known European theory of demoniacal possession,
it is a fairy from elf-land, or an imp from hell, which has
entered the body of the sufferer. In the close kinship,
moreover, between disease-possession and oracle-possession,
where the body of tile Pythia, or the medicine-man,
is placed under the direct control of some great
deity,
[25]
we may see how by insensible transitions the conception
of the human ghost passes into the conception of the
spiritual numen, or divinity.
To pursue this line of inquiry through the countless
nymphs and dryads and nixies of the higher nature-worship
up to the Olympian divinities of classic polytheism,
would be to enter upon the history of religious belief, and
in so doing to lose sight of our present purpose, which has
merely been to show by what mental process the myth-maker
can speak of natural objects in language which
implies that they are animated persons. Brief as our
account of this process has been, I believe that enough has
been said, not only to reveal the inadequacy of purely
philological solutions (like those contained in Max Müller's
famous Essay) to explain the growth of myths, but
also to exhibit the vast importance for this purpose of
the kind of psychological inquiry into the mental habits
of savages which Mr. Tylor has so ably conducted.
Indeed, however lacking we may still be in points of detail,
I think we have already reached a very satisfactory
explanation of the genesis of mythology. Since the essential
characteristic of a myth is that it is an attempt to
explain some natural phenomenon by endowing with
human feelings and capacities the senseless factors in the
phenomenon, and since it has here been shown how uncultured
man, by the best use he can make of his rude
common sense, must inevitably come, and has invariably
come, to regard all objects as endowed with souls, and all
nature as peopled with supra-human entities shaped after
the general pattern of the human soul, I am inclined to
suspect that we have got very near to the root of the
whole matter. We can certainly find no difficulty in
seeing why a water-spout should be described in the
"Arabian Nights" as a living demon: "The sea became
troubled before them, and there arose from it a black
pillar, ascending towards the sky, and approaching the
meadow,.... and behold it was a Jinni, of gigantic stature."
We can see why the Moslem camel-driver should
find it most natural to regard the whirling simoom as a
malignant Jinni; we may understand how it is that the
Persian sees in bodily shape the scarlet fever as "a
blushing maid with locks of flame and cheeks all rosy
red"; and we need not consider it strange that the primeval
Aryan should have regarded the sun as a voyager, a
climber, or an archer, and the clouds as cows driven by
the wind-god Hermes to their milking. The identification
of William Tell with the sun becomes thoroughly
intelligible; nor can we be longer surprised at the
conception of the howling night-wind as a ravenous wolf.
When pots and kettles are thought to have souls that
live hereafter, there is no difficulty in understanding how
the blue sky can have been regarded as the sire of gods
and men. And thus, as the elves and bogarts of popular
lore are in many cases descended from ancient divinities
of Olympos and Valhalla, so these in turn must acknowledge
their ancestors in the shadowy denizens of the primeval
ghost-world.
[_]
[1] "The expression that the Erinys, Saranyu, the Dawn, finds out the
criminal, was originally quite free from mythology; it meant no more
than that crime would be brought to light some day or other. It became
mythological, however, as soon as the etymological meaning of Erinys
was forgotten, and as soon as the Dawn, a portion of time, assumed the
rank of a personal being."—Science of Language, 6th edition, II. 615.
This paragraph, in which the italicizing is mine, contains Max Müller's
theory in a nutshell. It seems to me wholly at variance with the facts
of history. The facts concerning primitive culture which are to be cited
in this paper will show that the case is just the other way. Instead of
the expression "Erinys finds the criminal" being originally a metaphor,
it was originally a literal statement of what was believed to be fact.
The Dawn (not "a portion of time,"(!) but the rosy flush of the morning
sky) was originally regarded as a real person. Primitive men, strictly
speaking, do not talk in metaphors; they believe in the literal truth of
their similes and personifications, from which, by survival in culture, our
poetic metaphors are lineally descended. Homer's allusion to a rolling stone as
εσσύμενοσ
or "yearning" (to keep on rolling), is to us a mere
figurative expression; but to the savage it is the description of a
fact.
[_]
[2] Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,
Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom By Edward B. Tylor. 2 vols.
8vo. London. 1871.
[[3]]
Tylor, op. cit. I. 107.
[_]
[4] Rousseau, Confessions, I. vi. For further illustration, see especially
the note on the "doctrine of signatures," supra, p. 55.
[_]
[5] Spencer, Recent Discussions in Science, etc., p. 36, "The Origin of
Animal Worship."
[_]
[6] See Nature, Vol. VI. p. 262, August 1, 1872. The circumstances
narrated are such as to exclude the supposition that the sitting up is
intended to attract the master's attention. The dog has frequently been
seen trying to soften the heart of the ball, while observed unawares by
his master.
[_]
[7] "We would, however, commend to Mr. Fiske's attention Mr. Mark
Twain's dog, who `could n't be depended on for a special providence,'
as being nearer to the actual dog of every-day life than is the Skye terrier
mentioned by a certain correspondent of Nature, to whose letter
Mr. Fiske refers. The terrier is held to have had `a few fetichistic
notions,' because he was found standing up on his hind legs in front of a
mantel-piece, upon which lay an india-rubber ball with which he wished
to play, but which he could not reach, and which, says the letter-writer,
he was evidently beseeching to come down and play with him. We
consider it more reasonable to suppose that a dog who had been drilled
into a belief that standing upon his hind legs was very pleasing to his
master, and who, therefore, had accustomed himself to stand on his
hind legs whenever he desired anything, and whose usual way of getting
what he desired was to induce somebody to get it for him, may
have stood up in front of the mantel-piece rather from force of habit and
eagerness of desire than because he had any fetichistic notions, or expected
the india-rubber ball to listen to his supplications. We admit,
however, to avoid polemical controversy, that in matter of religion the
dog is capable of anything." The Nation, Vol. XV. p. 284, October
1, 1872. To be sure, I do not know for certain what was going on in
the dog's mind; and so, letting both explanations stand, I will only add
another fact of similar import. "The tendency in savages to imagine
that natural objects and agencies are animated by spiritual or living
essences is perhaps illustrated by a little fact which I once noticed:
my dog, a full-grown and very sensible animal, was lying on the lawn
during a hot and still day; but at a little distance a slight breeze
occasionally moved an open parasol, which would have been wholly
disregarded by the dog, had any one stood near it. As it was, every time
that the parasol slightly moved, the dog growled fiercely and barked.
He must, I think, have reasoned to himself, in a rapid and unconscious
manner, that movement without any apparent cause indicated the presence
of some strange living agent, and no stranger had a right to be on
his territory." Darwin, Descent of Man, Vol. 1. p. 64. Without insisting
upon all the details of this explanation, one may readily grant, I
think, that in the dog, as in the savage, there is an undisturbed
association between motion and a living motor agency; and that out of a
multitude of just such associations common to both, the savage, with his
greater generalizing power, frames a truly fetichistic
conception.
[_]
[8] Note the fetichism wrapped up in the
etymologies of these Greek words.
Catalepsy,
καταληψις,
a seizing of the body by some spirit or
demon, who holds it rigid. Ecstasy,
εκστασις,
a displacement or removal of the soul from the body, into which the demon enters and
causes strange laughing, crying, or contortions. It is not metaphor,
but the literal belief ill a ghost-world, which has given rise to such
words as these, and to such expressions as "a man beside himself or
transported."
[_]
[9] Something akin to the savage's belief in the animation of pictures
may be seen in young children. I have often been asked by my
three-year-old
boy, whether the dog in a certain picture would bite him if he
were to go near it; and I can remember that, in my own childhood,
when reading a book about insects, which had the formidable likeness
of a spider stamped on the centre of the cover, I was always uneasy lest
my finger should come in contact with the dreaded thing as I held the
book.
With the savage's unwillingness to have his portrait taken, lest it fall
into the hands of some enemy who may injure him by conjuring with
it, may be compared the reluctance which he often shows toward telling
his name, or mentioning the name of his friend, or king, or tutelar
ghost-deity. In fetichistic thought, the name is an entity mysteriously
associated with its owner, and it is not well to run the risk of its getting
into hostile hands. Along with this caution goes the similarly
originated fear that the person whose name is spoken may resent such
meddling with his personality. For the latter reason the Dayak will
not allude by name to the small pox, but will call it "the chief" or
"jungle-leaves"; the Laplander speaks of the bear as the "old man
with the fur coat"; in Annam the tiger is called "grandfather" or
"Lord"; while in more civilized communities such sayings are current
as "talk of the Devil, and he will appear," with which we may also
compare such expressions as "Eumenides" or "gracious ones" for the
Furies, and other like euphemisms. Indeed, the maxim
nil mortuis nisi bonum
had most likely at one time a fetichistic flavour.
In various islands of the Pacific, for both the reasons above specified, the
name of the reigning chief is so rigorously "tabu," that common words
and even syllables resembling that name in sound must be omitted from
the language. In New Zealand, where a chief's name was Maripi, or
"knife," it became necessary to call knives nekra; and in Tahiti,
fetu,
"star," had to be changed into fetia, and tui,
"to strike," became tiai,
etc., because the king's name was Tu. Curious freaks are played with
the languages of these islands by this ever-recurring necessity. Among
the Kafirs the women have come to speak a different dialect from the
men, because words resembling the names of their lords or male relatives
are in like manner "tabu." The student of human culture will
trace among such primeval notions the origin of the Jew's unwillingness
to pronounce the name of Jehovah; and hence we may perhaps have
before us the ultimate source of the horror with which the Hebraizing
Puritan regards such forms of light swearing—"Mon Dieu," etc.—as
are still tolerated on the continent of Europe, but have disappeared
from good society in Puritanic England and America. The reader interested
in this group of ideas and customs may consult Tylor, Early
History of Mankind, pp. 142, 363; Max Müller, Science of Language,
6th edition, Vol. II. p. 37; Mackay, Religious Development of the
Greeks and Hebrews, Vol. I. p. 146.
[_]
[10] Tylor, Primitive Culture, I. 394. "The Zulus hold that a dead
body can cast no shadow, because that appurtenance departed from it at
the close of life." Hardwick, Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore,
p. 123.
[[11]]
Tylor, op. cit. I. 391.
[_]
[12] Harland and Wilkinson, Lancashire Folk-Lore, 1867,
p. 210.
[[13]]
Tylor, op. cit. II. 139.
[_]
[14] In Russia the souls of the dead are supposed to be embodied in
pigeons or crows. "Thus when the Deacon Theodore and his three
schismatic brethren were burnt in 1681, the souls of the martyrs, as the
`Old Believers' affirm, appeared in the air as pigeons. In Volhynia
dead children are supposed to come back in the spring to their native
village under the semblance of swallows and other small birds, and to
seek by soft twittering or song to console their sorrowing parents."
Ralston, Songs of the Russian People, p. 118.
[[15]]
Tylor, op. cit. I. 404.
[[16]]
Tylor, op. cit. I. 407.
[_]
[17] Tylor, op. cit. I. 410. In the next stage of survival this belief
will take the shape that it is wrong to slam a door, no reason being assigned;
and in the succeeding stage, when the child asks why it is naughty
to slam a door, he will be told, because it is an evidence of bad temper.
Thus do old-world fancies disappear before the inroads of the practical
sense.
[_]
[18] Agassiz, Essay on Classification, pp.
97-99.
[[19]]
Figuier, The To-morrow of Death, p. 247.
[_]
[20] Here, as usually, the doctrine of metempsychosis comes in to complete
the proof. "Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling Island,
who had a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll; this spoon had
been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full
moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat
at a modern spirit-séance." Tylor, op. cit. II. 139.
[[21]]
Tylor, op. cit. I. 414-422.
[[22]]
Tylor, op. cit. I. 435, 446; II. 30, 36.
[_]
[23] According to the Karens, blindness occurs when the
soul of the eye
is eaten by demons. Id., II. 353.
[_]
[24] The following citation is interesting as an illustration of the
directness of descent from heathen manes-worship to Christian saint-worship:
"It is well known that Romulus, mindful of his own adventurous infancy,
became after death a Roman deity, propitious to the health and
safety of young children, so that nurses and mothers would carry sickly
infants to present them in his little round temple at the foot of the
Palatine. In after ages the temple was replaced by the church of St.
Theodorus, and there Dr. Conyers Middleton, who drew public attention to
its curious history, used to look in and see ten or a dozen women, each
with a sick child in her lap, sitting in silent reverence before the altar of
the saint. The ceremony of blessing children, especially after vaccination,
may still be seen there on Thursday mornings." Op. cit. II. 111.
[_]
[25] Want of space prevents me from remarking at length upon Mr.
Tylor's admirable treatment of the phenomena of oracular inspiration.
Attention should be called, however, to the brilliant explanation of the
importance accorded by all religions to the rite of fasting. Prolonged
abstinence from food tends to bring on a mental state which is favourable
to visions. The savage priest or medicine-man qualifies himself for
the performance of his duties by fasting, and where this is not sufficient,
often uses intoxicating drugs; whence the sacredness of the hasheesh, as
also of the Vedic soma-juice. The practice of fasting among civilized
peoples is an instance of survival.