SCORPION

Tylor, Edward Burnett, Sir, 1832-1917

"Primitive culture : researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art, and custom"

CHAPTER VIII.

MYTHOLOGY. PAGE

Mythic fancy based, like other thought, on Experience Mythology
affords evidence for studying laws of Imagination Change in public
opinion as to credibility of Myths Myths rationalized into Allegory
and History Ethnological import and treatment of Myth Myth
to be studied in actual existence and growth among modern savages
and barbarians Original sources of Myth Early doctrines of
general animation of Nature Personification of Sun, Moon, and
Stars ; Water-spout, Sand-pillar, Rainbow, Waterfall, Pestilence
Analogy worked into Myth and Metaphor Myths of Rain,Thunder,
&c. Effect of Language in formation of Myth Material Personifi-
cation primary, Verbal Personification secondary Grammatical
Gender, male and female, animate and inanimate, in relation to
Myth Proper names of objects in relation to Myth Mental State
proper to promote mythic imagination Doctrine of Werewolves
Phantasy and Fancy . . ... . . 273 

 CHAPTER VIII.

MYTHOLOGY.

Mythic Fancy based, like other thought, on Experience Mythology affords
evidence for studying laws of Imagination Change in public opinion as
to credibility of Myths Myths rationalized into Allegory and History
Ethnological import and treatment of Myth Myth to be studied
in actual existence and growth among modern savages and barbarians
Original sources of Myth Early doctrine of general animation of
Nature Personification of Sun, Moon, and Stars ; Water-spout, Sand
pillar, Rainbow, Waterfall, Pestilence Analogy worked into Myth
and Metaphor Myths of Rain, Thunder, &c. Effect of Language in
formation of Myth Material Personification primary, Verbal Personi-
fication secondary Grammatical Gender, male and female, animate
and inanimate, in relation to Myth Proper Names of objects in relation
to Myth Mental State proper to promote mythic imagination Doctrine
of Werewolves Phantasy and Fancy.

AMONG those opinions which are produced by a little know-
ledge, to be dispelled by a little more, is the belief in an
almost boundless creative power of the human imagina-
tion. The superficial student, mazed in a crowd of seem-
ingly wild and lawless fancies, which he thinks to have no
reason in nature nor pattern in this material world, at first
concludes them to be new births from the imagination of
the poet, the tale-teller, and the seer. But little by little, in
what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, a more compre-
hensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins
to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led
up to each train of .thought, a store of inherited materials
from out of which each province of the poet's land has been
shaped, and built over, and peopled. Backward from our
own times, the course of mental history may be traced

273

274 MYTHOLOGY.

through the changes wrought by modern schools of thought
and fancy, upon an intellectual inheritance handed down
to them from earlier generations. And through remoter
periods, as we recede more nearly towards primitive condi-
tions of our race, the threads which connect new thought
with old do not always vanish from our sight. It is in
large measure possible to follow them as clues leading back
to that actual experience of nature and life, which is the
ultimate source of human fancy. What Matthew Arnold
has written of Man's thoughts as he floats along the River
of Time, is most true of his mythic imagination :

' As is the world on the banks
So is the mind of the man.

Only the tract where he sails

He wots of : only the thoughts,

Raised by the objects he passes, are his/

Impressions thus received the mind will modify and work
upon, transmitting the products to other minds in shapes
that often seem new, strange, and arbitrary, but which yet
result from processes familiar to our experience, and to be
found at work in our own individual consciousness. The
office of our thought is to develop, to combine, and to
4erive, rather than to create ; and the consistent laws it
works by are to be discerned even in the unsubstantial
structures of the imagination. Here, as elsewhere in the
universe, there is to be recognized a sequence from cause to
effect, a sequence intelligible, definite, and where knowledge
reaches the needful exactness, even calculable.

There is perhaps no better subject-matter through which
to study the processes of the imagination, than the well-
marked incidents of mythical story, ranging as they do
through every known period of civilization, and through all
the physically varied tribes of mankind. Here the divine
Maui of New Zealand, fishing up the island with his en-
chanted hook from the bottom of the sea, will take his place
in company with the Indian Vishnu, diving to the depth of the

MYTH BASED ON EXPERIENCE. 275

ocean in his avatar of the Boar, to bring up the submerged
earth on his monstrous tusks ; and here Baiame the creator,
whose voice the rude Australians hear in the rolling
thunder, will sit throned by the side of Olympian Zeus
himself. Starting with the bold rough nature-myths into
which the savage moulds the lessons he has learnt from his
childlike contemplation of the universe, the ethnographer
can follow these rude fictions up into times when they were
shaped and incorporated into complex mythologic systems,
gracefully artistic in Greece, stiff and monstrous in Mexico,
swelled into bombastic exaggeration in Buddhist Asia. He
can watch how the mythology of classic Europe, once so
true to nature and so quick with her ceaseless life, fell
among the commentators to be plastered with allegory or
euhemerized into dull sham history. At last, in the midst
of modern civilization, he finds the classic volumes studied
rather for their manner than for their matter, or mainly
valued for their antiquarian evidence of the thoughts of
former times ; while relics of structures reared with skill
and strength by the myth-makers of the past must now be
sought in scraps of nursery folk-lore, in vulgar superstitions
and old dying legends, in thoughts and allusions carried on
from ancient days by the perennial stream of poetry and
romance, in fragments of old opinion which still hold an in-
herited rank gained in past ages of intellectual history.
But this turning of mythology to account as a means of
tracing the history of laws of mind, is a branch of science
scarcely discovered till the nineteenth century. Before
entering here on some researches belonging to it, there will
be advantage in glancing at the views of older mythologists,
to show through what changes their study has at length
reached a condition in which it has a scientific value.

It is a momentous phase of the education of mankind,
when the regularity of nature has so imprinted itself upon
men's minds that they begin to wonder how it is that the
ancient legends which they were brought up to hear with
such reverent delight, should describe a world so strangely

276 , MYTHOLOGY.

different from their own. Why, they ask, are the gods and
giants and monsters no longer seen to lead their prodigious
lives on earth is it perchance that the course of things is
changed since the old days ? Thus it seemed to Pausanias
the historian, that the wide-grown wickedness of the world
had brought it to pass that times were no longer as of old,
when Lykaon was turned into a wolf, and Niobe into a
stone, when men still sat as guests at table with the gods,
or were raised like Herakles to become gods themselves.
Up to modern times, the hypothesis of a changed world has
more or less availed to remove the difficulty of belief in
ancient wonder-tales. Yet though always holding firmly a
partial ground, its application was soon limited for these
obvious reasons, that it justified falsehood and truth alike
with even-handed favour, and utterly broke down that
barrier of probability which in some measure has always
separated fact from fancy. The Greek mind found other
outlets to the problem. In the words of Mr. Grote, the
ancient legends were cast back into an undefined past, to
take rank among the hallowed traditions of divine or heroic
antiquity, gratifying to extol by rhetoric, but repulsive to
scrutinize in argument. Or they were transformed into
shapes more familiar to experience, as when Plutarch,
telling the tale of Theseus, begs for indulgent hearers to
accept mildly the archaic story, and assures them that he
has set himself to purify it by reason, that it may receive
the aspect of history. 1 This process of giving fable the
aspect of history, this profitless art of transforming untrue
impossibilities into untrue possibilities, has been carried on
by the ancients, and by the moderns after them, especially
according to the two following methods.

Men have for ages been more or less conscious of that
great mental district lying between disbelief and belief, where
room is found for all mythic interpretation, good or bad.
It being admitted that some legend is not the real narrative

1 Grote, ' History of Greece,' vol. i. chaps, ix. xi. ; Pausanias viii. 2 ;
Plutarch. Theseus i.

CREDIBILITY OF MYTHS. 277

whichit purports to be, they do not thereupon wipe it out
from book and memory as simply signifying nothing, but
they ask what original sense may be in it, out of what older
story it may be a second growth, or what actual event or
current notion may have suggested its development into
the state in which they find it ? Such questions, however,
prove almost as easy to answer plausibly as to set ; and
then, in the endeavour to obtain security that these off-hand
answers are the true ones, it becomes evident that the problem
admits of an indefinite number of apparent solutions, not
only different but incompatible. This radical uncertainty
in the speculative interpretation of myths is forcibly stated
by Lord Bacon, in the preface to his ' Wisdom of the
Ancients.' ' Neither am I ignorant,' he says, ' how fickle
and inconsistent a thing fiction is, as being subject to be
drawn and wrested any way, and how great the commodity
of wit and discourse is, that is able to apply things well, yet
so as never meant by the first authors.' The need of such
a caution may be judged of from the very treatise to which
Bacon prefaced it, for there he is to be seen plunging head-
long into the very pitfall of which he had so discreetly
warned his disciples. He undertakes, after the manner of
not a few philosophers before and after him, to interpret
the classic myths of Greece as mpral allegories. Thus the
story of Memnon depicts the destinies of rash young men
of promise ; while Perseus symbolizes war, and when of the
three Gorgons he attacks only the mortal one, this means
that only practicable wars are to be attempted. It would
not be easy to bring out into a stronger light the difference
between a fanciful application of a myth, and its analysis
into its real elements. For here, where the interpreter be-
lieved himself to be reversing the process of myth-making,
he was in fact only carrying it a stage further in the old
direction, and out of the suggestion of one train of thought
evolving another connected with it by some more or less
remote analogy. Any of us may practise this simple art,
each according to his own fancy. If, for instance, political

278 MYTHOLOGY.

economy happens for the moment to lie uppermost in our
mind, we may with due gravity expound the story of
Perseus as an allegory of trade : Perseus himself is Labour,
and he finds Andromeda, who is Profit, chained and ready
to be devoured by the monster Capital ; he rescues her
and carries her off in triumph. To know anything of
poetry or of mysticism is to know this reproductive growth
of fancy as an admitted and admired intellectual process.
But when it comes to sober investigation of the processes
of mythology, the attempt to penetrate to the foundation
of an old fancy will scarcely be helped by burying it yet
deeper underneath a new one.

Nevertheless, allegory has had a share in the development
of myths which no interpreter must overlook. The fault of
the rationalizer lay in taking allegory beyond its proper
action, and applying it as a universal solvent to reduce dark
stories to transparent sense. The same is true of the other
great rationalizing process, founded also, to some extent, on
fact. Nothing is more certain than that real personages
often have mythic incidents tacked on to their history, and
that they even figure in tales of which the very substance is
mythic. No one disbelieves in the existence of Solomon
because of his legendary adventure in the Valley of Apes,
nor of Attila because he figures in the Nibelungen Lied. Sir
Francis Drake is made not less but more real to us by the
cottage tales which tell how he still leads the Wild Hunt
over Dartmoor, and still rises to his revels when they beat
at Buckland Abbey the drum that he carried round the
world. The mixture of fact and fable in traditions of great
men shows that legends containing monstrous fancy may
yet have a basis in historic fact. But, on the strength of this,
the mythologists arranged systematic methods of reducing
legend to history, and thereby contrived at once to stultify
the mythology they professed to explain, and to ruin the
history they professed to develop. So far as the plan
consisted in mere suppression of the marvellous, a notion of
its trustworthiness may be obtained, as Sir G. W. Cox well

RATIONALIZATION OF MYTHS. 279

puts it, in rationalizing Jack the Giant- Killer by leaving
out the giants. So far as it treated legendary wonders as
being matter-of-fact disguised in metaphor, the mere naked
statement of the results of the method is to our minds its
most cruel criticism. Thus already in classic times men
were declaring that Atlas was a great astronomer who taught
the use of the sphere, and was therefore represented with
the world resting on his shoulders. To such a pass had
come the decay of myth into commonplace, that the great
Heaven-god of the Aryan race, the living personal Heaven
himself, Zeus the Almighty, was held to have been a king
of Krete, and the Kretans could show to wondering strangers
his sepulchre, with the very name of the great departed
inscribed upon it. The modern ' euhemerists ' (so called
from Euhemeros of Messenia, a great professor of the art
in the time of Alexander) in part adopted the old interpre-
tations, and sometimes fairly left their Greek and Roman
teachers behind in the race after prosaic possibility. They
inform us that Jove smiting the giants with his thunderbolts
was a king repressing a sedition ; Danae's golden shower
was the money with which her guards were bribed ; Pro-
metheus made clay images, whence it was hyperbolically
said that he created man and woman out of clay ; and when
Daidalos was related to have made figures which walked,
this meant that he improved the shapeless old statues, and
separated their legs. Old men still remember as the guides
of educated opinion in their youth the learned books in
which these fancies are solemnly put forth ; some of our
school manuals still go on quoting them with respect, and
a few straggling writers carry on a remnant of the once
famous system of which the Abbe Banier was so distin-
guished an exponent. 1 But it has of late fallen on evil days,
and mythologists in authority have treated it in so high-
handed a fashion as to bring it into general contempt. So
far has the feeling against the abuse of such argument gone,

1 See Banier, * La Mythologie et les Fables explique"es par PHistoire,'
Paris, 1738 j Lempriere, 4 Classical Dictionary,' &c.

280 MYTHOLOGY.

that it is now really desirable to warn students that it has a
reasonable as well as an unreasonable side, and to remind
them that some wild legends undoubtedly do, and therefore
that many others may, contain a kernel of historic truth.

Learned and ingenious as the old systems of rationalizing
myth have been, there is no doubt that they are in great
measure destined to be thrown aside. It is not that their
interpretations are proved impossible, but that mere possi-
bility in mythological speculation is now seen to be such
a worthless commodity, that every investigator devoutly
wishes there were not such plenty of it. In assigning
origins to myths, as in every other scientific enquiry, the
fact is that increased information, and the use of more
stringent canons of evidence, have raised far above the old
level the standard of probability required to produce con-
viction. There are many who describe our own time as an
unbelieving time, but it is by no means sure that posterity
will accept the verdict. No doubt it is a sceptical and a
critical time, but then scepticism and criticism are the very
conditions for the attainment of reasonable belief. Thus,
where the positive credence of ancient history has been
affected, it is not that the power of receiving evidence has
diminished, but that the consciousness of ignorance has
grown. We are being trained to the facts of physical
science, which we can test and test again, and we feel it a
fall from this high level of proof when we .turn our minds
to the old records which elude such testing, and are even
admitted on all hands to contain statements not to be
relied on. Historical criticism becomes hard and exacting,
even where the chronicle records events not improbable in
themselves ; and the moment that the story falls out of our
scheme of the world's habitual course, the ever repeated
question comes out to meet it Which is the more likely,
that so unusual an event should have really happened, or
that the record should be misunderstood or false ? Thus
we gladly seek for sources of history in antiquarian relics, in
undesigned and collateral proofs, in documents not written

MYTH AS ETHNOLOGICAL EVIDENCE. 281

to be chronicles. But can any reader of geology say we are
too incredulous to believe wonders, if the evidence carry
any fair warrant of their truth ? Was there ever a time
when lost history was being reconstructed, and existing
history rectified, more zealously than they are now by a
whole army of travellers, excavators, searchers of old
charters, and explorers of forgotten dialects ? The very
myths that were discarded as lying fables, prove to be
sources of history in ways that their makers and transmitters
little dreamed of. Their meaning has been misunderstood,
but they have a meaning. Every tale that was ever told
has a meaning for the times it belongs to ; even a lie, as
the Spanish proverb says, is a lady of birth (* la mentira es
hija de algo '). Thus, as evidence of the development of
thought, as records of long past belief and usage, even in
some measure as materials for the history of the nations
owning them, the old myths have fairly taken their place
among historic facts; and with such the modern historian,
so able and willing to pull down, is also able and willing
to rebuild.

Of all things, what mythologic work needs is breadth of
knowledge and of handling. Interpretations made to suit a
narrow view reveal their weakness when exposed to a wide
one. See Herodotus rationalizing the story of the infant
Cyrus, exposed and suckled by a bitch ; he simply relates
that the child was brought up by a herdsman's wife named
Spako (in Greek Kyno), whence arose the fable that a real
bitch rescued and fed him. So far so good for a single
case. But does the story of Romulus and Remus likewise
record a real event, mystified in the self-same manner by
a pun on a nurse's name, which happened to be a she-
beast's ? Did the Roman twins also really happen to be
exposed, and brought up by a foster-mother who happened
to be called Lupa ? Positively, the ' Lempriere's Diction-
ary ' of our youth (I quote the i6th edition of 1831) gravely
gives this as the origin of the famous legend. Yet, if we
look properly into the matter, we find that these two stories

282 MYTHOLOGY.

are but specimens of a widespread mythic group, itself only
a section of that far larger body of traditions in which
exposed infants are saved to become national heroes. For
other examples, Slavonic folk-lore tells of the she- wolf and
she-bear that suckled those superhuman twins, Waligora
the mountain-roller and Wyrwidab the oak-uprooter ;
Germany has its legend of Dieterich, called Wolfdieterich
from his foster-mother the she-wolf ; in India, the episode
recurs in the tales of Satavahana and the lioness, and Sing-
Baba and the tigress ; legend tells of Burta-Chino, the boy
who was cast into a lake, and preserved by a she-wolf to
become founder of the Turkish kingdom ; and even the
savage Yuracare*s of Brazil tell of their divine hero Tin,
who was suckled by a jaguar. 1

Scientific myth-interpretation, on the contrary, is actually
strengthened by such comparison of similar cases. Where
the effect of new knowledge has been to construct rather
than to destroy, it is found that there are groups of myth-
interpretations for which wider and deeper evidence makes
a wider and deeper foundation. The principles which
underlie a solid system of interpretation are really few and
simple. The treatment of similar myths from different
regions, by arranging them in large compared groups, makes
it possible to trace in mythology the operation of imagina-
tive processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental
law ; and thus stories of which a single instance would have
been a mere isolated curiosity, take their place among
well-marked and consistent structures of the human mind.
Evidence like this will again and again drive us to admit
that even as ' truth is stranger than fiction,' so myth may
be more uniform than history.

There lies within our reach, moreover, the evidence of

1 Hanusch, ' Slav. Myth.' p. 323 ; Grimm, D. M. p. 363 ; Latham,
* Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 448 ; I. J. Schmidt, * Forschungen,' p. 13 ; J. G.
Muller, ' Amer. Urrelig.' p. 268. See also Plutarch. Parallela xxxvi. ;
Campbell, ' Highland Tales,' vol. i. p. 278 ; Max Muller, ' Chips,' vol. ii.
p. 169 ; Tylor, ' Wild Men and Beast-children,' in Anthropological Review,
May 1863.

SOURCES OF MYTH. 283

races both ancient and modern, who so faithfully represent
the state of thought to which myth-development belongs,
: as still to keep up both the consciousness of meaning in
their old myths, and the unstrained unaffected habit of
creating new ones. Savages have been for untold ages, and ""
still are, living in the myth-making stage of the human
mind. It was through sheer ignorance and neglect of this
direct knowledge how and by what manner of men myths
are really made, that their simple philosophy has come to
be buried under masses of commentators' rubbish. Though
never wholly lost, the secret of mythic interpretation was
all but forgotten. Its recovery has been mainly due to
modern students who have with vast labour and skill
searched the ancient language, poetry, and folk-lore of our
own race, from the cottage tales collected by the brothers
Grimm to the Rig- Veda edited by Max Miiller. Aryan
language and literature now open out with wonderful
range and clearness a view of the early stages of mythology,
displaying those primitive germs of the poetry of nature,
which later ages swelled and distorted till childlike fancy
sank into superstitious mystery. It is not proposed here
to enquire specially into this Aryan mythology, of which so
many eminent students have treated, but to compare some of
the most important developments of mythology among the
various races of mankind, especially in order to determine
the general relation of the myths of savage tribes to the
myths of civilized nations. The argument does not aim at a
general discussion of the mythology of the world, numbers
of important topics being left untouched which would have
to be considered in a general treatise. The topics chosen
are mostly such as are fitted, by the strictness of evidence
and argument applying to them, to make a sound basis for
the treatment of myth as bearing on the general ethno-
logical problem of the development of civilization. The
general thesis maintained is that Myth arose in the savage
-condition prevalent in remote ages among the whole human
race, that it remains comparatively unchanged among the

284 MYTHOLOGY.

modern rude tribes who have departed least from these
primitive conditions, while even higher and later grades of
civilization, partly by retaining its actual principles, and
partly by carrying on its inherited results in the form of
ancestral tradition, have continued it not merely in tolera-
tion but in honour.

To the human intellect in its early childlike state may be
assigned the origin and first development of myth. It is
true that learned critics, taking up the study of mythology
at the wrong end, have almost habitually failed to appre-
ciate its childlike ideas, conventionalized in poetry or
disguised as chronicle. Yet the more we compare the
mythic fancies of different nations, in order to discern the
common thoughts which underlie their resemblances, the
more ready we shall be to admit that in our childhood we
dwelt at the very gates of the realm of myth. In mythology,
the child is, in a deeper sense than we are apt to use the
phrase in, father of the man. Thus, when in surveying
the quaint fancies and wild legends of the lower tribes, we
find the mythology of the world at once in its most distinct
and most rudimentary form, we may here again claim the
savage as a representative of the childhood of the human
race. Here Ethnology and Comparative Mythology go
hand in hand, and the development of Myth forms a con-
sistent part of the development of Culture. If savage
races, as the nearest modern representatives of primaeval
culture, show in the most distinct and unchanged state
the rudimentary mythic conceptions thence to be traced
onward in the course of civilization, then it is reasonable
for students to begin, so far as may be, at the beginning.
Savage mythology may be taken as a basis, and then the
myths of more civilized races may be displayed as com-
positions sprung from like origin, though more advanced
in art. This mode of treatment proves satisfactory through
almost all the branches of the enquiry, and eminently so in
investigating those most beautiful of poetic fictions, to-
which may be given the title of Nature-Myths.

ANIMATION OF NATURE. 285

First and foremost among the causes which transfigure
into myths the facts of daily experience, is the belief in the
animation of all nature, rising at its highest pitch to per-
sonification. This, no occasional or hypothetical action of
the mind, is inextricably bound in with that primitive
mental state where man recognizes in every detail of his
world the operation of personal life and will. This doctrine
of Animism will be considered elsewhere as affecting
philosophy and religion, but here we have only to do with its
bearing on mythology. To the lower tribes of man, sun
and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become
personal animate creatures, leading lives conformed to-
human or animal analogies, and performing their special
functions in the universe with the aid of limbs like beasts
or of artificial instruments like men ; or what men's eyes
behold is but the instrument to be used or the material to
be shaped, while behind it there stands some prodigious but
yet half -human creature, who grasps it with his hands or
blows it with his breath. The basis on which such ideas
as these are built is not to be narrowed down to poetic
fancy and transformed metaphor. They rest upon a broad
philosophy of nature, early and crude indeed, but thought-
ful, consistent, and quite really and seriously meant.

Let us put this doctrine of universal vitality to a test of
direct evidence, lest readers new to the subject should
suppose it a modern philosophical fiction, or think that if
the lower races really express such a notion, they may do
so only as a poetical way of talking. Even in civilized
countries, it makes its appearance as the child's early
theory of the outer world, nor can we fail to see how this
comes to pass. The first beings that children learn to under -
stand something of are human beings, and especially their
own selves ; and the first explanation of all events will be
the human explanation, as though chairs and sticks and
wooden horses were actuated by the same sort of personal
will as nurses and children and kittens. Thus infants take
their first step in mythology by contriving, like Cosette

286 MYTHOLOGY.

with her doll, ' se figurer que quelque chose est quelqu'un ; '
and the way in which this childlike theory has to be
unlearnt in the course of education shows how primitive
it is. Even among full-grown civilized Europeans, as
Mr. Grote appositely remarks, ' The force of momentary
passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit,
and even an intelligent man may be impelled in a moment
of agonizing pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from
which he has suffered.' In such matters the savage mind
well represents the childish stage. The wild native of
Brazil would bite the stone he stumbled over, or the arrow
that had wounded him. Such a mental condition may be
traced along the course of history, not merely in impulsive
habit, but in formally enacted law. The rude Kukis of
Southern Asia were very scrupulous in carrying out their
simple law of vengeance, life for life ; if a tiger killed a
Kuki, his family were in disgrace till they had retaliated by
killing and eating this tiger, or another ; but further, if a
man was killed by a fall from a tree, his relatives would
take their revenge by cutting the tree down, and scattering
it in chips. 1 A modern king of Cochin-China, when one of
his ships sailed badly, used to put it in the pillory as he
would any other criminal. 2 In classical times, the stories
of Xerxes flogging the Hellespont and Cyrus draining the
Gyndes occur as cases in point, but one of the regular
Athenian legal proceedings is a yet more striking relic.
A court of justice was held at the Prytaneum, to try -any
inanimate object, such as an axe or a piece of wood or
stone, which had caused the death of anyone without
proved human agency, and this wood or stone, if con-
demned, was in solemn form cast beyond the border.*
The spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the
old English law (repealed within the last reign), whereby not

1 Macrae in ' As. Res.' vol. vii. p. 189.

2 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 51.

8 Grote, vol. iii. p. 104 ; vol. v. p. ^^ ; Herodot. i. 189 5 vii. 34 ; Porphyr.
^le Abstinentia, ii. 30 ; Pausan. i. 28 ; Pollux, ' Onomasticon.'

MYTHIC PERSONIFICATION. 287

only a beast that kills a man, but a cart-wheel that runs over
him, or a tree that falls on him and kills him, is deodand, or
given to God, i.e. forfeited and sold for the poor : as Brae-
ton says, ' Omnia quae movent ad mortem sunt Deodanda.'
Dr. Reid comments on this law, declaring that its intention
was not to punish the ox or the cart as criminal, but ' to
inspire the people with a sacred regard to the life of man.' 1
But his argument rather serves to show the worthlessness
of off-hand speculations on the origin of law, like his own
in this matter, unaided by the indispensable evidence of
history and ethnography. An example from modern folk-
lore shows still at its utmost stretch this primitive fancy
that inert things are alive and conscious. The pathetic
custom of ' telling the bees ' when the master or mistress
of a house dies, is not unknown in our own country. But
in Germany the idea is more fully worked out ; and not
only is the sad message given to every bee-hive in the
garden and every beast in the stall, but every sack of corn
must be touched and everything in the house shaken, that
they may know the master is gone.*

It will be seen presently how Animism, the doctrine of
spiritual beings, at once develops with and reacts upon
mythic personification, in that early state of the human
mind which gives consistent individual life to phenomena
that our utmost stretch of fancy only avails to personify in
conscious metaphor. An idea of pervading life and will in
nature far outside modern limits, a belief in personal souls
animating even what we call inanimate bodies, a theory of
transmigration of souls as well in life as after death; a sense
of crowds of spiritual beings sometimes flitting through the
air, but sometimes also inhabiting trees and rocks and
waterfalls, and so lending their own personality to such
material objects all these thoughts work in mythology
with such manifold coincidence, as to make it hard indeed
to unravel their separate action. 8

1 Reid, ' Essays,' vol. iii. p. 1 13.

1 Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' p. 2 10. Sec chap. xi.

288 MYTHOLOGY.

Such animistic origin of nature-myths shows out very
clearly in the great cosmic group of Sun, Moon, and Stars.
In early philosophy throughout the world, the Sun and
Moon are alive and as it were human in their nature.
Usually contrasted as male and female, they nevertheless
differ in the sex assigned to each, as well as in their
relations to one another. Among the Mbocobis of South
America, the Moon is a man and the Sun his wife, and the
story is told how she once fell down and an Indian put her
up again, but she fell a_ second time and set the forest
blazing in a deluge of fire. 1 / To display the opposite of this
idea, and at the same time to illustrate the vivid fancy
with which savages can personify the heavenly bodies, we
may read the following discussion concerning eclipses,
between certain Algonquin Indians and one of the early
Jesuit missionaries to Canada in the iyth century, Father
Le June : ' Je leur ay demande d'ou venoit 1'Eclipse de
Lune et de Soleil ; ils m'ont respondu que la Lune s'e"clip-
soit ou paroissoit noire, a cause qu'elle tenoit son fils entre
ses bras, qui empeschoit que Ton ne vist sa clarte. Si la
Lune a un fils, elle est mariee, ou 1'a e*te, leur dis-je. Ouy
dea, me dirent-ils, le Soleil est son mary, qui hiarche tout
le jour, et elle toute la nuict ; et s'il s'eclipse, ou s'il
s'obscurcit, c'est qu'il prend aussi par fois le fils qu'il a eu
de la Lune entre ses bras. Oiiy, mais ny la Lune ny le
Soleil n'ont point de bras, leur disois-je. Tu n'as point
d'esprit ; ils tiennent tousiours leurs arcs bandes deuant
eux, voila pourquoy leurs bras ne paroissent point. Et sur
qui veulent-ils tirer ? He qu'en scauons nous ? f ^ A
mythologically important legend of the same race, the
Ottawa story of losco, describes Sun and Moon as brother
and sister. Two Indians, it is said, sprang through a
chasm in the sky, and found themselves in a pleasant

1 D'Orbigny, * L'Homme Ame'ricain,' vol. ii. p. 102. See also De la
Borde, ' Caraibes,' p. 525.

*Le Jeune in 'Relations des J&uites dans la Nouvelle France,' 1634,
p. 26. See Charlevoix, ' Nouvelle France,' vol. ii. p. 170.

LSUN, MOON, AND STARS. 289

t land ; there they saw the Moon approaching as
from behind a hill, they knew her at the first sight, she was
an aged woman with white face and pleasing air; speaking
kindly to them, she led them to her brother the Sun, and
he carried them with him in his course and sent them home
with promises of happy life. 1 As the Egyptian Osiris and
Isis were at once brother and sister, and husband and wife, so
it was with the Peruvian Sun and Moon, Ynti and Quilla,
father and mother of the Incas, whose sister-marriage thus
had in their religion at once a meaning and a justification. 2
The myths of other countries, where such relations of sex
may not appear, carry on the same lifelike personification in
telling the ever-reiterated, never tedious tale of day and
night. Thus to the Mexicans it was an ancient hero who,
when the old sun was burnt out, and had left the world in
darkness, sprang into a huge fire, descended into the shades
below, and arose deified and glorious in the east as Tonatiuh
the Sun. After him there leapt in another hero, but now
the fire had grown dim, and he arose only in milder radiance
as Metztli the Moon. 3

If it be objected that all this may be mere expressive
form of speech, like a modern poet's fanciful metaphor,
there is evidence which no such objection can stand against.
When the Aleutians thought that if anyone gave offence
to the moon, he would fling down stones on the offender
and kill him, 4 or when the moon came down to an Indian
squaw, appearing in the form of a beautiful woman with a
child in her arms, and demanding an offering of tobacco
and fur robes, 6 what conceptions of personal life could be

1 Schoolcraft, ' Algic Researches,' vol. ii. p. 54 ; compare ' Tanner's
Narrative,' p. 317 ; see also ' Prose Edda,' i. 1 1 ; ' Early Hist, of Mankind,'

P- 327.

2 Prescott, 4 Peru,' vol. i. p. 86 ; Garcilaso de la Vega, ' Comm. Real.' i.
c. 15. iii. c. 21.

8 Torquemada, ' Monarquia Indiana,' vi. 42 ; Clavigero, vol. ii. p. 9 ;
Sahagun in Kingsborough, ' Antiquities of Mexico.'

4 Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 59.

*Le Jeune, in 'Relations des Je"suites dans la Nouvelle France,' 1639,
p. 88.

MYTHOLOGY.

more distinct than these? When the Apache Indian!
pointed to the sky and asked the white man, ' Do you]
not believe that God, this Sun (que Dios, este Sol), sees
what we do and punishes us when it is evil ? ' it is im-
possible to say that this savage was talking in rhetorical
simile. 1 There was something in the Homeric contemplation
of the living personal Helios, that was more and deeper
than metaphor. Even in far later ages, we may read of the
outcry that arose in Greece against the astronomers, those
blasphemous materialists who denied, not the divinity only,
but the very personality of the sun, and declared him a
huge hot ball. Later again, how vividly Tacitus brings to
view the old personification dying into simile among the
Romans, in contrast with its still enduring religious vigour
among the German nations, in the record of Boiocalcus
pleading before the Roman legate that his tribe should
not be driven from their lands. Looking toward the sun,
and calling on the other heavenly bodies as though, says
the historian, they had been there present, the German
chief demanded of them if it were their will to look down
upon a vacant soil? (Solem deinde respiciens, et caetera
sidera vocans, quasi coram interrogabat, vellentne contueri
inane solum ?) 2

So it is with the stars. Savage mythology contains
many a story of them, agreeing through all other difference
in attributing to them animate life. They are not merely
talked of in fancied personality, but personal action is attri-
buted to them, or they are even declared once to have lived
on earth. The natives of Australia not only say the stars
in Orion's belt and scabbard are young men dancing a
corroboree ; they declare that Jupiter, whom they call
' Foot of Day ' (Ginabong-Bearp), was a chief among the
Old Spirits, that ancient race who were translated to heaven
before man came on earth. 3 The Esquimaux did not stop
short at calling the stars of Orion's belt the Lost Ones, and

1 Froebel, ' Central America,' p. 490. * Tac. Ann. xiii. 55.

3 Stanbridge, in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 301.

SUN, MOON, AND STARS.

telling a tale of their being seal-hunters who missed their
way home ; but they distinctly held that the stars were in
old times men and animals, before they went up into the
sky. 1 So the North American Indians had more than
superficial meaning in calling the Pleiades the Dancers, and
the morning-star the Day-bringer ; for among them stories
are told like that of the lowas, of the star that an Indian
had long gazed upon in childhood, and who came down and
talked with him when he was once out hunting, weary and
luckless, and led him to a place where there was much
game. 2 The Kasia of Bengal declare that the stars were once
men : they climbed to the top of a tree (of course the great
heaven-tree of the mythology of so many lands), but others
below cut the trunk and left them up there in the branches. 8
With such savage conceptions as guides, the original mean-
ing in the familiar classic personification of stars can
scarcely be doubted. The explicit doctrine of the anima-
tion of stars is to be traced ^through past centuries, and
down to our own. Origen declares that the stars are
animate and rational, moved with such order and reason as
it would be absurd to say irrational creatures could fulfil.
Pamphilius, in his apology for this Father, lays it down
that whereas some have held the luminaries of heaven to be
animate and rational creatures, while others have held them
mere spiritless and senseless bodies, no one may call
another a heretic for holding either view, for there is no
open tradition on the subject, and even ecclesiastics have
thought diversely of it. 4 It is enough to mention here the
well-known mediaeval doctrine of star-souls and star-angels,
so intimately mixed up with the delusions of astrology. In
our own time the theory of the animating souls of stars
finds still here and there an advocate, and De Maistre,

1 Cranz, ' Gronland,' p. 295 ; Hayes, * Arctic Boat Journey,' p. 254.

2 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 276 ; see also De la Borde,
4 Caraibes,' p. 525.

3 H. Yule in ' Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. xiii. (1844), p. 628.

4 Origen. de Principiis, i. 7, 3 ; Pamphil. Apolog. pro Origine, ix. 84.

292 t MYTHOLOGY.

prince and leader of reactionary philosophers, maintains
against modern astronomers the ancient doctrine of per-
sonal will in astronomic motion, and even the theory of
animated planets. 1

Poetry has so far kept alive in our minds the old anima-
tive theory of nature, that it is no great effort to us to fancy
the waterspout a huge giant or sea-monster, and to depict
in what we call appropriate metaphor its march across the
fields of ocean. But where such forms of speech are current
among less educated races, they are underlaid by a distinct
prosaic meaning of fact. Thus the waterspouts which the
Japanese see so often off their coasts are to them long-tailed
dragons, ' flying up into the air with a swift and violent
motion,' wherefore they call them ' tatsmaki,' ' spouting
dragons.' 2 Waterspouts are believed by some Chinese to
be occasioned by the ascent and descent of the dragon ;
although the monster is never seen head and tail at once for
clouds, fishermen and sea-side folk catch occasional glimpses
of him ascending from the water and descending to it.
In the mediaeval Chronicle of John of Bromton there is
mentioned a wonder which happens about once a month in
the Gulf of Sat alia, on the Pamphylian coast. A great
black dragon seems to come in the clouds, letting down his
head into the waves, while his tail seems fixed to the sky,
and this dragon draws up the waves to him with such avidity
that even a laden ship would be taken up on high, so that to
avoid this danger the crews ought to shout and beat boards
to drive the dragon off. However, concludes the chronicler,
some indeed say that this is not a dragon, but the sun draw-
ing up the water, which seems more true. 4 The Moslems still
account for waterspouts as caused by gigantic demons, such
as that one described in the ' Arabian Nights :' ' The sea

1 De Maistre, ' Soirees de Saint-Pe"tersbourg,' vol. ii. p. 210, see 184.

2 Kaempfer, ' Japan/ in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 684.

8 Doolittle, ' Chinese,' vol. ii. p. 265 ; see Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 140
(Indra's elephants drinking).

4 Chron. Joh. Bromton, in 4 Hist, Angl. Scriptores,' x. Ric. I. p. 1216.

WATERSPOUT, SAND-PILLAR. 293

I became troubled before them, and there arose from it a
F black pillar, ascending towards the sky, and approaching the
(meadow . . . and behold it was a Jinnee, of gigantic
| stature.' l The difficulty in interpreting language like this
is to know how far it is seriously and how far fancifully
i meant. But this doubt in no way goes against its original
; animistic meaning, of which there can be no question in the
H following story of a ' great sea-serpent ' current among a
barbarous East African tribe. A chief of the Wanika told
Dr. Krapf of a great serpent which is sometimes seen out
,at sea, reaching from the sea to the sky, and appearing
especially during heavy rain. ' I told them,' says the
missionary, ' that this was no serpent, but a waterspout.'*
Out of the similar phenomenon on land there has arisen a
similar group of myths. The Moslem fancies the whirling
sand-pillar of the desert to be caused by the flight of an evil
jinn, and the East African simply calls it a demon (p'hepo).
I To traveller after traveller who gazes on these monstrous
shapes gliding majestically across the desert, the thought
occurs that the well-remembered ' Arabian Nights' ' descrip-
tions rest upon personifications of the sand-pillars them-
, selves, as the gigantic demons into which fancy can even
now so naturally shape them. 3

Rude and distant tribes agree in the conception of the
Rainbow as a living monster. New Zealand myth, describ-
ing the battle of the Tempest against the Forest, tells how
the Rainbow arose and placed his mouth close to Tane-ma-
huta, the Father of Trees, and continued to assault him till
his trunk was snapt in two, and his broken branches strewed
the ground. 4 It is not only in mere nature-myth like this,
but in actual awe-struck belief and terror, that the idea of the

1 Lane, ' Thousand and one N.' vol. i. p. 30, 7.
* Krapf, * Travels,' p. 198.

3 Lane, ibid. pp. 30, 42 ; Burton, ' El Medinah and Meccah,' vol. ii. p. 69 ;
' Lake Regions,' vol. i. p. 297 ; J. D. Hooker, ' Himalayan Journals,' vol. i.
P- 79 > Tylor, 'Mexico,' p. 30; Tyerman and Bennet, vol. ii. p. 362. [Hindu
pi$acha== demon, whirlwind.]

4 Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 121.
I.-U

294 ' MYTHOLOGY.

live Rainbow is worked out. The Karens of Burma say it is
a spirit or demon. 'The Rainbow can devour men. . . .
When it devours a person, he dies a sudden or violent
death. All persons that die badly, by falls, by drowning,
or by wild beasts, die because the Rainbow has devoured
their ka-la, or spirit. On devouring persons it becomes
thirsty and comes down to drink, when it is seen in the sky
drinking water. Therefore when people see the Rainbow,
they say, " The Rainbow has come to drink water. Look
out, some one or other will die violently by an evil death."
If children are playing, their parents will say to them, " The
Rainbow has come down to drink. Play no more, lest some
accident should happen to you." And after the Rainbow
has been seen, if any fatal accident happens to anyone, it is
said the Rainbow has devoured him.' f The Zulu ideas
correspond in a curious way with these? The Rainbow lives
with a snake, that is, where it is there is also a snake ; or
it is like a sheep, and dwells in a pool. When it touches
the earth, it is drinking at a pool. Men are afraid to
wash in a large pool ; they say there is a Rainbow in it, and
if a man goes in, it catches and eats him. The Rainbow,
coming out of a river or pool and resting on the ground,
poisons men whom it meets, affecting them with eruptions.
Men say, ' The Rainbow is disease. If it rests on a man,
something will happen to him/ 2 Lastly in Dahome, Danh
the Heavenly Snake, which makes the Popo beads and
confers wealth on man, is the Rainbow. 3