SCORPION

To the theory of Animism belong those endless tales
which all nations tell of the presiding genii of nature, the
spirits of cliffs ,wells,waterf alls, volcanoes, the elves and wood
nymphs seen at times by human eyes when wandering by
moonlight or assembled at their fairy festivals. Such beings
may personify the natural objects they belong to, as when,
in a North American tale, the guardian spirit of waterfalls

1 Mason, ' Karens,' in ' Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1865, part ii. p. 217.

* Callaway, ' Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 294.

8 Burton, ' Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 148 ; see 242.

R RAINBOW, WATERFALL. 295

hes through the lodge as a raging current, bearing rocks
and trees along in its tremendous course, and then the
guardian spirit of the islands of Lake Superior enters in
the guise of rolling waves covered with silver-sparkling
; foam. 1 Or they may be guiding and power-giving spirits of
nature, like the spirit Fugamu, whose work is the cataract
of the Nguyai, and who still wanders night and day around
it, though the negroes who tell of him can no longer see his
bodily form. 2 The belief prevailing through the lower
culture that the diseases which vex mankind are brought
, by individual personal spirits, is one which has produced
striking examples of mythic development. Thus in Burma
the Karen lives in terror of the mad ' la/ the epileptic ' la,'
and the rest of the seven evil demons who go about seeking
his life ; and it is with a fancy not many degrees removed
from this early stage of thought that the Persian sees in
bodily shape the apparition of Al, the scarlet fever :

' Would you know Al ? she seems a blushing maid,
With locks of flame and cheeks all rosy red.' 3

It is with this deep old spiritualistic belief clearly in view
that the ghastly tales are to be read where pestilence and
death come on their errand in weird human shape. To the
mind of the Israelite, death and pestilence took the personal
, form of the destroying angel who smote the doomed. 4 When
the great plague raged in Justinian's time, men saw on the
sea brazen barks whose crews were black and headless men,
and where they landed, the pestilence broke out. 5 When
the plague fell on Rome in Gregory's time, the saint rising
from prayer saw Michael standing with his bloody sword
on Hadrian's castle the archangel stands there yet in
bronze, giving the old fort its newer name of the Castle of

1 Schoolcraft, ' Algic Res.' vol. ii. p. 148.

2 Du Chaillu, ' Ashango-land,' p. 106.

3 Jas. Atkinson, ' Customs of the Women of Persia,' p. 49.

4 2 Sam. xxiv. 16 ; 2 Kings xix. 35.

8 G. S. Assemanni, ' Bibliotheca Orientalis,' ii. 86.

2Q6 MYTHOLOGY.

St. Angelo. Among a whole group of stories of the pes-
tilence seen in personal shape travelling to and fro in the
land, perhaps there is none more vivid than this Slavonic
one. ' There sat a Russian under a larch-tree, and the
sunshine glared like fire. He saw something coming from
afar ; he looked again it was the Pest-maiden, huge of
stature, all shrouded in linen, striding towards him. He
would have fled in terror, but the form grasped him with
her long outstretched hand. " Knowest thou the Pest ? "
she said ; " I am she. Take me on thy shoulders and carry
me through all Russia ; miss no village, no town, for I
must visit all. But fear not for thyself, thou shalt be safe
amid the dying." Clinging with her long hands, she clam-
bered on the peasant's back ; he stepped onward, saw the
form above him as he went, but felt no burden. First he
bore her to the towns ; they found there joyous dance and
song ; but the form waved her linen shroud, and joy and
mirth were gone. As the wretched man looked round,
he saw mourning, he heard the tolling of the bells, there
came funeral processions, the graves could not hold the
dead. He passed on, and coming near each village heard
the shriek of the dying, saw all faces white in the desolate
houses. But high on the hill stands his own hamlet:
his wife, his little children are there, and the aged parents,
and his heart bleeds as he draws near. With strong gripe
he holds the maiden fast, and plunges with her beneath
the waves. He sank : she rose again, but she quailed before
a heart so fearless, and fled far away to the forest and the
mountain.' l

Yet, if mythology be surveyed in a more comprehensive
view, it is seen that its animistic development falls within a
broader generalization still. The explanation of the course
and change of nature, as caused by life such as the life of
the thinking man who gazes on it, is but a part of a far
wider mental process. It belongs to that great doctrine of

l Hanusch, 'Slav. Mythus,' p. 322. Compare Torquemada, 'Monarquia
Indiana, i. c. 14 ( Mexico) ; Bastian, ' Psychologic,' p. 197.

PESTILENCE. 297

analogy, from which we have gained so much of our appre-
hension of the world around us. Distrusted as it now is by
severer science for its misleading results, analogy is still to
us a chief means of discovery and illustration, while in
earlier grades of education its influence was all but para-
mount. Analogies which are but fancy to us were to men
of past ages reality. They could see the flame licking its
yet undevoured prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent
gliding along the waving sword from hilt to point ; they
could feel a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the
pangs of hunger ; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs
answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god
rattling in thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom
these were living thoughts had no need of the schoolmaster
and his rules of composition, his injunctions to use metaphor
cautiously, and to take continual care to make all similes
consistent. The similes of the old bards and orators were
consistent, because they seemed to see and hear and feel
them : what we call poetry was to them real life, not as to
the modern versemaker a masquerade of gods and heroes,
shepherds and shepherdesses, stage heroines and philosophic
savages in paint and feathers. It was with a far deeper
consciousness that the circumstance of nature was worked
out in endless imaginative detail in ancient days and among
uncultured races.

Upon the sky above the hill-country of Orissa, Pidzu
Pennu, the Rain-god of the Khonds, rests as he pours down
the showers through his sieve. 1 Over Peru there stands a
princess with a vase of rain, and when her brother strikes
the pitcher, men hear the shock in thunder and see the flash
in lightning. 8 To the old Greeks the rainbow seemed
stretched down by Jove from heaven, a purple sign of war
and tempest, or it was the personal Iris, messenger between
gods and men. 8 To the South Sea Islander it was the

1 Macpherson, ' India,' p. 357.

8 Markham, ' Quichua Gr. and Die.' p. 9.

8 Welcker, ' Griech. Gotterl.' vol. i. p. 690.

298 ' MYTHOLOGY.

heaven-ladder where heroes of old climbed up and down ; l
and so to the Scandinavian it was Bifrost, the trembling
bridge, timbered of three hues and stretched from sky to
earth ; while in German folk-lore it is the bridge where the
souls of the just are led by their guardian angels across to
paradise. 2 As the Israelite called it the bow of Jehovah in
the clouds, it is to the Hindu the bow of Rama, 3 and to
the Finn the bow of Tiermes the Thunderer, who slays
with it the sorcerers that hunt after men's lives ; * it is
imagined, moreover, as a gold-embroidered scarf, a head-
dress of feathers, St. Bernard's crown, or the sickle of an
Esthonian deity. 5 And yet through all such endless varieties
of mythic conception, there runs one main principle, the
evident suggestion and analogy of nature. It has been
said of the savages of North America, that ' there is always
something actual and physical to ground an Indian fancy
on.' 6 The saying goes too far, but within limits it is em-
phatically true, not of North American Indians alone, but
of mankind.

Such resemblances as have just been displayed thrust
themselves directly on the mind, without any necessary in-
tervention of words. Deep as language lies in our mental
life, the direct comparison of object with object, and action
with action, lies yet deeper. The myth-maker's mind shows
forth even among the deaf-and-dumb, who work out just
such analogies of nature in their wordless thought. Again
and again they have been found to suppose themselves
taught by their guardians to worship and pray to sun, moon,
and stars, as personal creatures. Others have described
their early thoughts of the heavenly bodies as analogous to
things within their reach, one fancying the moon made like
a dumpling and rolled over the tree-tops like a marble across

1 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p 231 ; Polack, ' NewZ.' vol. i. p. 273.

2 Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 694-6.

3 Ward, ' Hindoos,' vol. i. p. 140.

4 Castren, ' Finnische Mythologie,' pp. 48, 49.

8 Delbriick in Lazarus and Steinthal's Zeitschrift, vol. iii. p. 269.
6 Schoolcraf t, part iii. p. 520.

MYTHS OF LANGUAGE. 299

a table, and the stars cut out with great scissors and stuck
against the sky, while another supposed the moon a furnace
and the stars fire-grates, which the people above the firma-
ment light up as we kindle fires. 1 Now the mythology of
mankind at large is full of conceptions of nature like these,
and to assume for them no deeper original source than meta-
phorical phrases, would be to ignore one of the great transi-
tions of our intellectual history.

Language, there is no doubt, has had a great share in the
formation of myth. / The mere fact of its individualizing in
words such notions -as winter and summer, cold and heat,
war and peace, vice and virture, gives the myth-maker the
means of imagining these thoughts as personal beings.
Language not only acts in thorough unison with the imagi-
nation whose product it expresses, but it goes on producing
of itself, and thus, by the side of the mythic conceptions in
which language has followed imagination, we have others in
which language has led, and imagination has followed in the
track. These two actions coincide too closely for their
effects to be thoroughly separated, but %y should be dis-
tinguished as far as possible. For myself, I am disposed
to think (differing here in some measure from Professor
Max Miiller's view of the subject) that the mythology of the
lower races rests especially on a basis of real and sensible
analogy, and that the great expansion of verbal metaphor
into myth belongs to more advanced periods of civilization.
In a word, I take material myth to be the primary, and
verbal myth to be the secondary formation. But whether
this opinion be historically sound or not, the difference in
nature between myth founded on fact and myth founded on
word is sufficiently manifest. The want of reality in verbal
metaphorcannot be effectually hidden by the utmoststretch
of imagination. In spite of this essential weakness, however,
the habit of realizing everything that words can describe is

i Sicard, ' Thiorie des Signes, &c.' Paris 1808, vol. ii. p. 634 ; ' Personal
Recollections' by Charlotte Elizabeth, London, 1841, p. 182; Dr. Orpen,
' The Contrast,' p. 25. Compare Meiners, vol. i. p. 4*-

300 MYTHOLOGY.

one which has grown and flourished in the world. Descrip-j
tive names become personal, the notion of personality)
stretches to take in even the most abstract notions to which j
a name may be applied, and realized name, epithet, andJ
metaphor pass into interminable mythic growths by thei
process which Max Miiller has so aptly characterized as ' a]
disease of language/ It would be difficult indeed to define i
the exact thought lying at the root of every mythic concep- 1
tion, but in easy cases the course of formation can be quite i
well followed. [North American tribes have personified ;
Nipinukhe and Pipiinukhe, the beings who bring the spring j
(nipin) and the winter (pipun) ; Nipinukhe brings the heat
and birds and verdure, Pipunukhe ravages with his cold
winds, his ice and snow ; one comes as the other goes, and
between them they divide the world. 1 Just such personifi-
cation as this furnishes the staple of endless nature-
metaphor in our own European poetry. In the springtime
it comes to be said that May has conquered Winter, his
gate is open, he has sent letters before him to tell the fruit
that he is coming, his tent is pitched, he brings the woods
their summer clothing. Thus, when Night is personified,
we see how it comes to pass that Day is her son, and how
each in a heavenly chariot drives round the world. To
minds in this mythologic stage, the Curse becomes a per-
sonal being, hovering in space till it can light upon its
victim ; Time and Nature arise as real entities ; Fate and
Fortune become personal arbiters of our lives. But at
last, as the change of meaning goes on, thoughts that
once had a more real sense fade into mere poetic forms
of speech. We have but to compare the effect of ancient
and modern personification on our own minds, to under-
stand something of what has happened in the interval.
Milton may be consistent, classical, majestic, when he tells
how Sin and Death sat within the gates of hell, and
how they built their bridge of length prodigious across
the deep abyss to earth. Yet such descriptions leave

1 Le Jeune, in ' Rel. des J6s. dans la Nouvelle France,' 1634, p. 13.

PERSONIFICATION. 30!

but scant sense of meaning on modern minds, and we
are apt to say, as we might of some counterfeit bronze
from Naples, ' For a sham antique how cleverly it is
done.' Entering into the mind of the old Norseman,
we guess how much more of meaning than the cleverest
modern imitation can carry, lay in his pictures of Hel,
the death-goddess, stern and grim and livid, dwelling
in her high and strong-barred house, and keeping in
her nine worlds the souls of the departed ; Hunger
is her dish, Famine is her knife, Care is her bed, and
Misery her curtain. When such old material descriptions
are transferred to modern times, in spite of all the
accuracy of reproduction their spirit is quite changed.
The story of the monk who displayed among his relics
the garments of St. Faith is to us only a jest ; and we
call it quaint humour when Charles Lamb, falling old
and infirm, once wrote to a friend, ' My bed-fellows are
Cough and Cramp; we sleep three in a bed.' Perhaps
we need not appreciate the drollery any the less for
seeing in it at once a consequence and a record of a past
intellectual life.

The distinction of grammatical gender is a process
intimately connected with the formation of myths. Gram-
matical gender is of two kinds. What may be called sexual
gender is familiar to all classically-educated Englishmen
though their mother tongue has mostly lost its traces.
Thus in Latin not only are such words as /wwo.and femina
classed naturally as masculine and feminine, but such words
as pes and gladius are made masculine, and biga and navis
feminine, and the same distinction is actually drawn
between such abstractions as honos and fides. That sexless
objects and ideas should thus be classed as male and female,
in spite of a new gender the neuter or ' neither ' gender
having been defined, seems in part explained by consider-
ing this latter to have been of later formation, and the
original Indo-European genders to have been only masculine
and feminine, as is actually the case in Hebrew. Though

3O2 MYTHOLOGY.

the practice of attributing sex to objects that have none is
not easy to explain in detail, yet there seems nothing
mysterious in its principles, to judge from one at least of
its main ideas, which is still quite intelligible. Language
makes an admirably appropriate distinction between strong
and weak, stern and gentle, rough and delicate, when it
contrasts them as male and female. It is possible to under-
stand even such fancies as those which Pietro della Valle
describes among the mediaeval Persians, distinguishing be-
tween male and female, that is to say, practically between
robust and tender, even in such things as food and cloth,
air and water, and prescribing their proper use accordingly. 1
And no phrase could be more plain and forcible than that
of the Dayaks of Borneo, who say of a heavy downpour of
rain, ' ujatn arai, 'sa ! ' ' a he rain this ! ' 2 Difficult as
it may be to decide how far objects and thoughts were
classed in language as male and female because they were
personified, and how far they were personified because they
were classed as male and female, it is evident at any rate
that these two processes fit together and promote each
other. 8

Moreover, in studying languages which lie beyond the
range of common European scholarship, it is found that the
theory of grammatical gender must be extended into a wider
field. The Dravidian languages of South India make the
interesting distinction between a ' high-caste or major
gender,' which includes rational beings, i.e. deities and
men, and a ' caste-less or minor gender/ which includes
irrational objects, whether living animals or lifeless things. 4
The distinction between an animate and an inanimate
gender appears with especial import in a family of North
American Indian languages, the Algonquin. Here not only

1 Pietro della Valle, ' Viaggi,' letter xvi.

2 ' Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. xxvii.

3 See remarks on the tendency of sex-denoting language to produce myth
in Africa, in W. H. Bleek. ' Reynard the Fox in S. Afr.' p. xx. ; ' Origin of
Lang.' p. xxiii.

4 Caldwell, ' Comp. Gr. of Dravidian Langs.' p. 172.

GENDER, NAME. 303

do all animals belong to the animate gender, but also the
sun, moon, and stars, thunder and lightning, as being
personified creatures. The animate gender, moreover,
includes not only trees and fruits, but certain exceptional
lifeless objects which appear to owe this distinction to their
special sanctity or power ; such are the stone which serves
as the altar of sacrifice to the manitus, the bow, the eagle's
feather, the kettle, tobacco-pipe, drum, and wampum.
Where the whole animal is animate, parts of its body
considered separately may be inanimate hand or foot,
beak or wing. Yet even here, for special reasons, special
objects are treated as of animate gender ; such are the
eagle's talons, the bear's claws, the beaver's castor, the
man's nails, and other objects for which there is claimed a
peculiar or mystic power. 1 If to anyone it seems surprising
that savage thought should be steeped through and through
in mythology, let him consider the meaning that is involved
in a grammar of nature like this. Such a language is the
very reflexion of a mythic world.

There is yet another way in which language and mytho-
logy can act and re-act on one another. Even we, with
our blunted mythologic sense, cannot give an individual
name to a lifeless object, such as a boat or a weapon, with-
out in the very act imagining for it something of a personal
nature. Among nations whose mythic conceptions have
remained in full vigour, this action may be yet more vivid.
Perhaps very low savages may not be apt to name their
implements or their canoes as though they were live people,
but races a few stages above them show the habit in perfec-
tion. Among the Zulus we hear of names for clubs,
Igumgehle or Glutton, U-nothlola-mazibuko or He-who-
watches-the-fords ; among names for assagais are Imbubuzi
or Groan-causer, U-silo-si-lambile or Hungry Leopard, and
the weapon being also used as an implement, a certain

1 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part ii. p. 366. For other cases see especially
Pott in Ersch and Gruber's ' Allg. Encyclop.' art. ' Geschlecht ;' also D.
Forbes, ' Persian Gr.' p. 26 ; Latham, ' Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 60.

304 MYTHOLOGY.

assagai bears the peaceful name of U-simbela-banta-bami,
He-digs-up-for-my-children. 1 A similar custom prevailed
among the New Zealanders. The traditions of their
ancestral migrations tell how Ngahue made from his jasper
stone those two sharp axes whose names were Tutauru and
Hauhau-te-rangi ; how with these axes were shaped the
canoes Arawa and Tainui ; how the two stone anchors of
Te Arawa were called Toka-parore or Wrystone, and
Tu-te-rangi-haruru or Like-to-the-roaring-sky. These
legends do not break off in a remote past, but carry on a
chronicle which reaches into modern times. It is only
lately, the Maoris say, that the famous axe Tutauru was
lost, and as for the ear-ornament named Kaukau-matua,
which was made from a chip of the same stone, they declare
that it was not lost till 1846, when its owner, Te Heuheu,
perished in a landslip. 2 Up from this savage level the same
childlike habit of giving personal names to lifeless objects
may be traced, as we read of Thor's hammer, Miolnir,
whom the giants know as he comes flying through the air,
or of Arthur's brand, Excalibur, caught by the arm clothed
in white samite when Sir Bedivere flung him back into the
lake, or of the Cid's mighty sword Tizona, the Firebrand,
whom he vowed to bury in his own breast were she over-
come through cowardice of his.

The teachings of a childlike primaeval philosophy ascrib-
ing personal life to nature at large, and the early tyranny
of speech over the human mind, have thus been two great
and, perhaps, greatest agents in mythologic development.
Other causes, too, have been at work, which will be noticed
in connexion with special legendary groups, and a full list,
could it be drawn up, might include as contributories many
other intellectual actions. It must be thoroughly under-
stood, however, that such investigation of the processes of
myth-f ormation demands a lively sense of the state of men's

1 Callaway, ' Relig. of Amazulu,' p. 166.

2 Grey, ' Polyn. Myth.' pp. 132, &c., 211; Shortland, 'Traditions of
N.Z.'p. 15.

POETIC IMAGINATION. 305

minds in the mythologic period. When the Russians in
Siberia listened to the talk of the rude Kirgis, they stood
amazed at the barbarians' ceaseless flow of poetic improvisa-
tion, and exclaimed, ' Whatever these people see gives
birth to fancies ! ' Just so the civilized European may
contrast his own stiff orderly prosaic thought with the wild
shifting poetry and legend of the old myth-maker, and may
say of him that everything he saw gave birth to fancy.
Wanting the power of transporting himself into this imagi-
native atmosphere, the student occupied with the analysis
of the mythic world may fail so pitiably in conceiving its
depth and intensity of meaning, as to convert it into stupid
fiction. Those can see more justly who have the poet's gift
of throwing their minds back into the world's older life, like
the actor who for a moment can forget himself and become
what he pretends to be. Wordsworth, that ' modem
ancient,' as Max Miiller has so well called him, could write
of Storm and Winter, or of the naked Sun climbing the
sky, as though he were some Vedic poet at the head-spring
of his race, ' seeing ' with his mind's eye a mythic hymn
to Agni or Varuna. Fully to understand an old-world
myth needs not evidence and argument alone, but deep
poetic feeling.

Yet such of us as share but very little in this rare gift,
may make shift to let evidence in some measure stand in its
stead. In the poetic stage of thought we may see that
ideal conceptions once shaped in the mind must have
assumed some such reality to grown-up men and women as
they still do to children. I have never forgotten the vivid-
ness with which, as a child, I fancied I might look through
a great telescope, and see the constellations stand round the
sky, red, green, and yellow, as I had just been shown them
on the celestial globe. The intensity of mythic fancy may
be brought even more nearly home to our minds by com-
paring it with the morbid subjectivity of illness. Among
the lower races, and high above their level, morbid ecstasy
brought on by meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or

306 MYTHOLOGY.

disease, is a state common and held in honour among the
very classes specially concerned with mythic idealism, and
under its influence the barriers between sensation and
imagination break utterly away. A North American Indian
prophetess once related the story of her first vision : At her
solitary fast at womanhood she fell into an ecstasy, and at
the call of the spirits she went up to heaven by the path
that leads to the opening of the sky ; there she heard a
voice, and, standing still, saw the figure of a man standing
near the path, whose head was surrounded by a brilliant
halo, and his breast was covered with squares ; he said,
' Look at me, my name is Oshauwauegeeghick, the Bright
Blue Sky ! ' Recording her experience afterwards in the
rude picture-writing of her race, she painted this glorious
spirit with the hieroglyphic horns of power and the brilliant
halo round his head. 1 We know enough of the Indian
pictographs to guess how a fancy with these familiar details
of the picture-language came into the poor excited crea-
ture's mind ; but how far is our cold analysis from her
utter belief that in vision she had really seen this bright
being, this Red Indian Zeus. Far from being an isolated
case, this is scarcely more than a fair example of the rule
that any idea shaped and made current by mythic fancy,
may at once acquire all the definiteness of fact. Even if to
the first shaper it be no more than lively imagination, yet
when it comes to be embodied in words and to pass from
house to house, those who hear it become capable of the
most intense belief that it may be seen in material shape,
that it has been seen, that they themselves have seen it.
The South African who believes in a god with a crooked leg
sees him with a crooked leg in dreams and visions. 2 In the
time of Tacitus it was said, with a more poetic imagination,
that in the far north of Scandinavia men might see the very
forms of the gods and the rays streaming from their heads.*

1 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 391 and pi. 55.
8 Livingstone, * S. Afr.' p. 124.
8 Tac. German! a, 45.

ECSTATIC IMAGINATION. 307

n the 6th century the famed Nile-god might still be seen,
in gigantic human form, rising waist-high from the waters
of his river. 1 Want of originality indeed seems one of the
most remarkable features in the visions of mystics. The
stiff Madonnas with their crowns and petticoats still
transfer themselves from the pictures on cottage walls to
appear in spiritual personality to peasant visionaries, as the
saints who stood in vision before ecstatic monks of old were
to be known by their conventional pictorial attributes.
When the devil with horns, hoofs, and tail had once become
a fixed image in the popular mind, of course men saw him
in this conventional shape. So real had St. Anthony's
satyr-demon become to men's opinion, that there is a grave
1 3th century account of the mummy of such a devil being
exhibited at Alexandria ; and it is not fifteen years back
from the present time that there was a story current at
Teignmouth of a devil walking up the walls of the houses,
and leaving his fiendish backward footprints in the snow.
Nor is it vision alone that is concerned with the delusive
realization of the ideal; there is, as it were, a conspiracy of
all the senses -to give it proof. To take a striking instance :
there is an irritating herpetic disease which gradually
encircles the body as with a girdle, whence its English name
of the shingles (Latin, cingulum). By an imagination not
difficult to understand, this disease is attributed to a sort of
coiling snake ; and I remember a case in Cornwall where a
girl's family waited in great fear to see if the creature
would stretch all round her, the belief being that if the
snake's head and tail met, the patient would die. But a yet
fuller meaning of this fantastic notion is brought out in an
account by Dr. Bastian of a physician who suffered in a
painful disease, as though a snake were twined round him,
and in whose mind this idea reached such reality that in
moments of excessive pain he could see the snake and touch
its rough scales with his hand.
The relation of morbid imagination to myth is peculiarly

1 Maury, ' Magie, &c.' p. 175.

308 , MYTHOLOGY.

well instanced in the history of a widespread belief, extend-
ing through savage, barbaric, classic, oriental, and mediaeval
life, and surviving to this day in European superstition.
This belief, which may be conveniently called the Doctrine
of Werewolves, is that certain men, by natural gift or magic
art, can turn for a time into ravening wild beasts. The
origin of this idea is by no means sufficiently explained.
What we are especially concerned with is the fact of its pre-
valence in the world. It may be noticed that such a notion
is quite consistent with the animistic theory that a man's
soul may go out of his body and enter that of a beast or
bird, and also with the opinion that men maybe transformed
into animals ; both these ideas having an important place in
the belief of mankind, from savagery onward. The doctrine
of werewolves is substantially that of a temporary metem-
psychosis or metamorphosis. Now it really occurs that, in
various forms of mental disease, patients prowl shyly, long
to bite and destroy mankind, and even fancy themselves
transformed into wild beasts. Belief in the possibility of
such transformation may have been the very suggesting
cause which led the patient to imagine it taking place in his
own person. But at any rate such insane delusions do occur,
and physicians apply to them the mythologic term of lycan-
thropy. The belief in men being werewolves, man-tigers,
and the like, may thus have the strong support of the very
witnesses who believe themselves to be such creatures.
Moreover, professional sorcerers have taken up the idea, as
they do any morbid delusion, and pretend to turn them-
selves and others into beasts by magic art. Through the
mass of ethnographic details relating to this subject, there
is manifest a remarkable uniformity of principle.

Among the non- Aryan indigenes of India, the tribes of the
Garo Hills describe as ' transformation into a tiger ' a kind
of temporary madness, apparently of the nature of delirium
tremens, in which the patient walks like a tiger, shunning
society. 1 The Khonds of Orissa say that some among them

1 Eliot in ' As. Res.' vol. iii. p. 32.

LYCANTHROPY. 309

have the art of ' mleepa,' and by the aid of a god become
' mleepa ' tigers for the purpose of killing enemies, one of
the man's four souls going out to animate the bestial form.
Natural tigers, say the Khonds, kill game to benefit men,
who find it half devoured and share it, whereas man-killing
tigers are either incarnations of the wrathful Earth-goddess,
or they are transformed men. 1 Thus the notion of man-
tigers serves, as similar notions do elsewhere, to account for
the fact that certain individual wild beasts show a peculiar
hostility to man. Among the Ho of Singbhoom it is related,
as an example of similar belief, that a man named Mora saw
his wife killed by a tiger, and followed the beast till it led him
to the house of a man named Poosa. Telling Poosa's rela-
tives of what had occurred, they replied that they were
aware that he had the power of becoming a tiger, and
accordingly they brought him out bound, and Mora deli-
berately killed him. Inquisition being made by the authori-
ties, the family deposed, in explanation of their belief, that
Poosa had one night devoured an entire goat, roaring like a
tiger whilst eating it, and that on another occasion he told
his friends he had a longing to eat a particular bullock, and
that very night that very bullock was killed and devoured
by a tiger. 2 South-eastern Asia is not less familiar with the
idea of sorcerers turning into man-tigers and wandering
after prey ; thus the Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula believe
that when a man becomes a tiger to revenge himself on his
enemies, the transformation happens just before he springs,
and has been seen to take place. 8

How vividly the imagination of an excited tribe, once
inoculated with a belief like this, can realize it into an event,
is graphically told by Dobrizhoffer among the Abipones of
South America. When a sorcerer, to get the better of an
enemy, threatens to change himself into a tiger and tear his

1 Macpherson, ' India,' pp. 92, 99, 108.

8 Dalton, ' Kols of Chota-Nagpore ' in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 32.
8 J. Cameron, ' Malayan India,' p. 393 ; Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. i.
p. 1 19 ; vol. iii. pp. 261, 273 } ' As. Res.' vol. vi. p. 173.

i. x

310 MYTHOLOGY.

tribesmen to pieces, no sooner does he begin to roar, than
all the neighbours fly to a distance ; but still they hear the
feigned sounds. ' Alas ! ' they cry, ' his whole body is
beginning to be covered with tiger-spots ! ' ' Look, his
nails are growing ! ' the fear-struck women exclaim, although
they cannot see the rogue, who is concealed within his tent,
but distracted fear presents things to their eyes which have
no real existence. ' You daily kill tigers in the plain with-
out dread,' said the missionary ; ' why then should you
weakly fear a false imaginary tiger in the town ? ' ' You
fathers don't understand these matters,' they reply with a
smile. ' We never fear, but kill tigers in the plain, because
we can see them. Artificial tigers we do fear, because they
can neither be seen nor killed by us.' 1 The sorcerers who
induced assemblies of credulous savages to believe in this
monstrous imposture, were also the professional spiritualistic
mediums of the tribes, whose business it was to hold inter-
course with the spirits of the dead, causing them to appear
visibly, or carrying on audible dialogues with them behind a
curtain. Africa is especially rich in myths of man-lions,
man-leopards, man-hyaenas. In the Kanuri language of
Bornu, there is grammatically formed from the word
' bultu,' a hyaena, the verb * bultungin,' meaning ' I trans-
form myself into a hyaena ; ' and the natives maintain that
there is a town called Kabutiloa, where every man possesses
this faculty. 2 The tribe of Budas in Abyssinia, iron-workers
and potters, are believed to combine with these civilized
avocations the gift of the evil eye and the power of turning
into hyaenas, wherefore they are excluded from society and
the Christian sacrament. In the ' Life of Nathaniel Pearce,'
the testimony of one Mir. Coffin is printed. A young Buda,
his servant, came for leave of absence, which was granted ;
but scarcely was Mr. Coffin's head turned to his other

1 Dobrizhoffer, ' Abipones,' vol. ii. p. 77. See J. G. Miiller, ' Amer.
Urrelig.' p. 63; Martius, 'Ethn. Amer.' vol. i. p. 652; Oviedo, 'Nicaragua,'
p. 229 ; Piedrahita, ' Nuevo Reyno de Granada,' part i. lib. c. 3.

z Kolle, ' Afr. Lit. and Kanuri Vocab.' p. 275.

LYCANTHROPY. 311

lervants, when some of them called out, pointing in the
flirection the Buda had taken, ' Look, look, he is turning
u'mself into a hyaena.' Mr. Coffin instantly looked round,
he young man had vanished, and a large hyaena was
: unning off at about a hundred paces' distance, in full light
jm the open plain, without tree or bush to intercept the
rdew. The Buda came back next morning, and as usual
ather affected to countenance than deny the prodigy. Coffin
* ,ays, moreover, that the Budas wear a peculiar gold ear-
ing, and this he has frequently seen in the ears of hyaenas
;hot in traps, or speared by himself and others ; the Budas
ire dreaded for their magical arts, and the editor of the book
suggests that they put ear-rings in hyaenas' ears to encourage
H profitable superstition. 1 Mr. Mansfield Parkyns' more
recent account shows how thoroughly this belief is part
and parcel of Abyssinian spiritualism. Hysterics, lethargy,
; morbid insensibility to pain, and the ' demoniacal posses-
sion,' in which the patient speaks in the name and language
Df an intruding spirit, are all ascribed to the spiritual agency
Df the Budas. Among the cases described by Mr. Parkyns
was that of a servant-woman of his, whose illness was set
down to the influence of one of these blacksmith-hyaenas,
who wanted to get her out into the forest and devour her.
One night, a hyaena having been heard howling and laughing
near the village, the woman was bound hand and foot and
closely guarded in the hut, when suddenly, the hyaena calling
close by, her master, to his astonishment, saw her rise
' without her bonds ' like a Davenport Brother, and try to
escape. 2 In Ashango-land, M. Du Chaillu tells the follow-
ing suggestive story. He was informed that a leopard had
killed two men, and many palavers were held to settle the
affair ; but this was no ordinary leopard, but a transformed
man. Two of Akondogo's men had disappeared, and only

ll Life and Adventures of Nathaniel Pearce' (1810-9), ed. by J. J. Halls,
London, 1831, vol. i. p. 286; also ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. vi. p. 288; Waitz,
vol. ii. p. 504.

2 Parkyns, * Life in Abyssinia ' (1853), vol. ii. p. 146.

312 t MYTHOLOGY.

their blood was found, so a great doctor was sent for, whj
said it was Akondogo's own nephew and heir Akosho. Th
lad was sent for, and when asked by the chief, answere*;
that it was truly he who had committed the murders, that h
could not help it, for he had turned into a leopard, and hi
heart longed for blood, and after each deed he had turne(,
into a man again. Akondogo loved the boy so much that h<
would not believe his confession, till Akosho took him to 51
place in the forest, where lay the mangled bodies of the tw(
men, whom he had really murdered under the influence o
this morbid imagination. He was slowly burnt to death, al
the people standing by. 1

Brief mention is enough for the comparatively well
known European representatives of these beliefs. Whal
with the mere continuance of old tradition, what with tht
tricks of magicians, and what with cases of patients under
delusion believing themselves to have suffered transforma-
tion, of which a number are on record, the European series!
of details from ancient to modern ages is very complete. 1
Virgil in the Bucolics shows the popular opinion of his
time that the arts of the werewolf, the necromancer or
' medium,' and the witch, were different branches of one
craft, where he tells of Moeris as turning into a wolf by the
use of poisonous herbs, as calling up souls from the tombs,
and as bewitching away crops :

' Has herbas, atque haec Ponto mihi lecta venena
Ipse dedit Moeris ; nascuntur plurima Ponto.
His ego saepe lupum fieri, et se condere sylvis
Moerin, saepe animas imis excire sepulcris,
Atque satas alid vidi traducere messes.' *

Of the classic accounts, one of the most remarkable is
Petronius Arbiter's story of the transformation of a ' versi-
pellis ' or ' turnskin ; ' this contains the episode of the

1 Du Chaillu, ' Ashango-land,' p. 52. For other African details, see Waitz,
vol. ii. p. 343 ; J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' pp. 222, 365, 398 ; Burton, ' E. Afr.'
p. 57 j Livingstone, ' S. Afr.' pp. 615, 642 ; Magyar, ' S. Afr.' p. 136.

1 Virg. Bucol. ed. viii. 95.
LYCANTHROPY. 313

If being wounded and the man who wore its shape found
with a similar wound, an idea not sufficiently proved to
belong originally to the lower races, but which becomes a
familiar feature in European stories of werewolves and
witches. In Augustine's time magicians were persuading
their dupes that by means of herbs they could turn them to
wolves, and the use of salve for this purpose is mentioned
at a comparatively modern date. Old Scandinavian sagas
have their werewolf warriors, and shape-changers (ham-
ramr) raging in fits of furious madness. The Danes still
'know a man who is a werewolf by his eyebrows meeting,
and thus resembling a butterfly, the familiar type of the
soul, ready to fly off and enter some other body. In the
last year of the Swedish war with Russia, the people of
Kalmar said the wolves which overran the land were trans-
formed Swedish prisoners. From Herodotus' legend of the
Neuri who turned every year for a few days to wolves, we
follow the idea on Slavonic ground to where Livonian
sorcerers bathe yearly in a river and turn for twelve days to
wolves ; and widespread Slavonic superstition still declares
that the wolves that sometimes in bitter winters dare to
attack men, are themselves ' wilkolak,' men bewitched into
wolf's shape. The modern Greeks instead of the classic
AvKavtfpwTTos adopt the Slavonic term /3pv*oA.aKa<? (Bulga-
rian ' vrkolak ') ; it is a man who falls into a cataleptic
state, while his soul enters a wolf and goes ravening for
blood. Modern Germany, especially in the north, still
keeps up the stories of wolf-girdles, and in December you
must not ' talk of the wolf ' by name, lest the werewolves
tear you. Our English word ' werewolf,' that is ' man-
wolf ' (the ' verevulf ' of Cnut's Laws), still reminds us of
the old belief in our own country, and if it has had for
centuries but little place in English folklore, this has been
not so much for lack of superstition, as of wolves. To
instance the survival of the idea, transferred to another
animal, in the more modern witch-persecution, the following
Scotch story may serve. Certain witches at Thurso for a

314 MYTHOLOGY.

long time* tormented an honest fellow under the usual form
of cats, till one night he put them to flight with his broad-
sword, and cut off the leg of one less nimble than the rest ;
taking it up, to his amazement he found it to be a woman's
leg, and next morning he discovered the old hag its owner
with but one leg left. In France the creature has what is
historically the same name as our ' werewolf ; ' viz. in
early forms ' gerulphus/ ' garoul/ and now pleonastically
' loup r garou/ The parliament of Franche-Comte made a'
law in 1573 to expel the werewolves ; in 1598 the werewolf
of Angers gave evidence of his hands and feet turning to
wolf's claws ; in 1603, in the case of Jean Grenier, the
judge declared lycanthropy to be an insane delusion, not a
crime. In 1658, a French satirical description of a magi-
cian could still give the following perfect account of the
witch-werewolf : ' I teach the witches to take the form of
wolves and eat children, and when anyone has cut off one of
their legs (which proves to be a man's arm) I forsake them
when they are discovered, and leave them in the power of
justice/ Even in our own day the idea has by no means
died out of the French peasant's mind. Not ten years ago
in France, Mr. Baring-Gould found it impossible to get a
guide after dark across a wild place haunted by a loup-
garou, an incident which led him afterwards to write his
' Book of Werewolves/ a monograph of this remarkable
combination of myth and madness. 1

If we judged the myths of early ages by the unaided
power of our modern fancy, we might be left unable to
account for their immense effect on the life and belief of
mankind. But by the study of such evidence as this, it

1 For collections of European evidence, see W. Hertz, ' Der Werwolf ;'
Baring-Gould, 'Book of Werewolves;' Grimm, *D. M.' p. 1047; Dasent,
4 Norse Tales,' Introd. p. cxix. ; Bastian, ' Mensch.' vol. ii. pp. 32, 566 ;
Brand, * Pop. Ant.' vol. i. p. 312, vol. iii. p. 32 ; Lecky, ' Hist, of Rationalism,'
vol. i. p. 82. Particular details in Petron. Arbiter, Satir. Ixii. ; Virgil. Eclog.
viii. 97; Plin. viii. 34; Herodot. iv. 105; Mela ii. i; Augustin. De Civ.
Dei, xviii. 17 ; Hanusch, * Slav. Myth.' pp. 286, 320 ; Wuttke, ' Deutsche
Volksaberglaube,' p. 118.

PHANTASY AND FANCY. 315

becomes possible to realize a usual state of the imagination
among ancient and savage peoples, intermediate between
the conditions of a healthy prosaic modern citizen and of a
raving fanatic or a patient in a fever-ward. A poet of our
own day has still much in common with the minds of
uncultured tribes in the mythologic stage of thought. The
rude man's imaginations may be narrow, crude, and
repulsive, while the poet's more conscious fictions may be
highly wrought into shapes of fresh artistic beauty, but
both share in that sense of the reality of ideas, which fortu-
nately or unfortunately modern education has proved so
powerful to destroy. The change of meaning of a single
word will tell the history of this transition, ranging from
primaeval to modern thought. From first to last, the
processes of phantasy have been at work ; but where the
savage could see phantasms, the civilized man has come to
amuse himself with fancies.