SCORPION

Returning from this digression to the region of philo-
sophic myth, we may examine new groups of explanatory
stories, produced from that craving to know causes and
reasons which ever besets mankind. When the attention
of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to
any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious
reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it, and
even if he does not persuade himself that this is a real
legend of his forefathers, the story-teller who hears it from
him and repeats it is troubled with no such difficulty. Our
task in dealing with such stories is made easy when the
criterion of possibility can be brought to bear upon them.
It has become a mere certainty to moderns that asbestos is
not really salamander's wool ; that morbid hunger is not
really caused by a lizard or a bird in a man's stomach ; that
a Chinese philosopher cannot really have invented the fire-
drill by seeing a bird peck at the branches of a tree till
sparks came. The African Wakuafi account for their cattle-
lifting proclivities by the calm assertion that Engai, that is,
Heaven, gave all cattle to them, and so wherever there is
any it is their call to go and seize it. 2 So in South America
the fierce Mbayas declare they received from the Caracara
a divine command to make war on all other tribes, killing
the men and adopting the women and children. 3 But
though it may be consistent with the notions of these
savages to relate such explanatory legends, it is not con-
sistent with our notions to believe them. Fortunately, too,
the ex post facto legends are apt to come into collision with
more authentic sources of information, or to encroach on
the domain of valid history. It is of no use for the
Chinese to tell their stupid story of written characters
having been invented from the markings on a tortoise's

1 Plin, vii. 2. ; Hum bold t and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81.

58 Krapf, P. 359-

3 Southey, ' Brazil,' vol. iii. p. 390.

EXPLANATORY MYTHS. 393

shell, for the early forms of such characters, plain and
simple pictures of objects, have been preserved in China to
this day. Nor can we praise anything but ingenuity in the
West Highland legend that the Pope once laid an interdict
on the land, but forgot to curse the hills, so the people
tilled them, this story being told to account for those
ancient traces of tillage still to be seen on the wild hill-
sides, the so-called ' elf -furrows.' J The most embarrassing
cases of explanatory tradition are those which are neither
impossible enough to condemn, nor probable enough to
receive. Ethnographers who know how world- wide is the
practice of defacing the teeth among the lower races, and
how it only dies gradually out in higher civilization, natu-
rally ascribe the habit to some general reason in human
nature, at a particular stage of development. But the mu-
tilating tribes themselves have local legends to account for
local customs ; thus the Penongs of Burmah and the Ba-
toka of East Africa both break their front teeth, but the
one tribe says its reason is not to look like apes, the other
that it is to be like oxen and not like zebras. 2 Of the
legends of tattooing, one of the oldest is that told to
account for the fact that while the Fijians tattoo only the
women, their neighbours, the Tongans, tattoo only the men.
It is related that a Tongan, on his way from Fiji to report
to his countrymen the proper custom for them to observe,
went on his way repeating the rule he had carefully learnt
by heart, ' Tattoo the women, but not the men,' but un-
luckily he tripped over a stump, got his lesson wronf , and
reached Tonga repeating ' Tattoo the men, but not the
women,' an ordinance which they observed ever after.
How reasonable such an explanation seemed to the Poly-
nesian mind, may be judged from the Samoans having a
version with different details, and applied to their own
instead of the Tongan islands. 8

1 D. Wilson, ' Archaeology, &c. of Scotland,' p. 1*3.

2 Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 128 ; Livingstone, p. 532.

8 Williams, 4 Fiji,' p. 160 ; Seemann, * Viti,' p. 113 ; Turner, ' Polynesia,'

394 MYTHOLOGY.

All men feel how wanting in sense of reality is a story
with no personal name to hang it to. This want is thus
graphically expressed by Sprenger the historian in his life
of Mohammed : ' It makes, on me at least, quite a different
impression when it is related that " the Prophet said to
Alkama," even if I knew nothing whatever else of this
Alkama, than if it were merely stated that " he said to
somebody." The feeling which this acute and learned
critic thus candidly confesses, has from the earliest times,
and in the minds of men troubled with no such nice his-
toric conscience, germinated to the production of much
mythic fruit. Thus it has come to pass that one of the
leading personages to be met with in the tradition of the
world is really no more than Somebody. There is no-
thing this wondrous creature cannot achieve, no shape he
cannot put on ; one only restriction binds him at all, that
the name he assumes shall have some sort of congruity
with the office he undertakes, and even from this he often-
times breaks loose. So rife in our own day is this manu-
facture of personal history, often fitted up with details of
place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle,
that it may be guessed how vast its working must have been
in days of old. Thus the ruins of ancient buildings, of
whose real history and use no trustworthy tradition survives
in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth with a
builder and a purpose. In Mexico the great Somebody
assumes the name of Montezuma, and builds the aqueduct
of Tezcuco ; to the Persian any huge and antique ruin is
the work of the heroic Antar; in Russia, says Dr. Bastian,
buildings of the most various ages are set down to Peter
the Great, as in Spain to Boabdil or Charles V. ; and
European folklore may attribute to the Devil any old build-
ing of unusual massiveness, and especially those stone
structures which antiquaries now class as prae-historic

p. 182 (a similar legend told by the Samoans). Another tattooing legend
in Latham, ' Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 1 52 ; Bastian, ' Oestl. Asien,' vol. i.

p. 112.

EXPLANATORY MYTHS. 395

monurtients. With a more graceful thought, the Indians of
North America declare that the imitative tumuli of Ohio,
great mounds laid out in rude imitation of animals, were
shaped in old days by the great Manitu himself, in promise
of a plentiful supply of game in the world of spirits. The
New Zealanders tell how the hero Kupe separated the North
and South Islands, and formed Cook's Straits. Greek myth
placed at the gate of the Mediterranean the twin pillars of
Herakles ; in more recent times the opening of the Straits
of Gibraltar became one of the many feats of Alexander of
Macedon. 1 Such a group of stories as this is no unfair test
of the value of mere traditions of personal names which
simply answer the questions that mankind have been asking
for ages about the origin of their rites, laws, customs, arts.
Some such traditions are of course genuine, and we may be
able, especially in the more modern cases, to separate the
real from the imaginary. But it must be distinctly laid
down that, in the absence of corroborative evidence, every
tradition stands suspect of mythology, if it can be made by
the simple device of fitting some personal name to the
purely theoretical assertion that somebody must have intro-
duced into the world fire-making, or weapons, or ornaments,
or games, or agriculture, or marriage, or any other of the
elements of civilization.

Among the various matters which have excited curiosity,
and led to its satisfaction by explanatory myths, are local
names. These, when the popular ear has lost their primi-
tive significance, become in barbaric times an apt subject
for the myth-maker to explain in his peculiar fashion.
Thus the Tibetans declare that their lake Chomoriri was
named from a woman (chomo) who was carried into it by the
yak she was riding, and cried in terror ri-ri I The Arabs
say the founders of the city of Sennaar saw on the river
bank a beautiful woman with teeth glittering like fire,

1 Bastian, ' Mensch,' vol. iii. pp. 167-8 ; Wilkinson in Rawlinson's ' Hero-
dotus,' vol. ii. p. 79 ; Grimm, ' D. M.' pp. 972-6 ; W. G. Palgrave, ' Arabia,'
vol. i. p. 251; Squier and Davis, 'Monuments of Mississippi Valley,'
p. 134 ; Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 258.

39 6 MYTHOLOGY.

whence they called the place Sinndr, i.e., ' tooth of fire.'
The Arkadians derived the name of their town Trapezus
from the table (trapeza), which Zeus overturned when the
wolfish Lykaon served a child on it for a banquet to him. 1
Such crude fancies in no way differ in nature from English
local legends current up to recent times, such as that which
relates how the Romans, coming in sight of where Exeter
now stands, exclaimed in delight, ' Ecce terra ! ' and thus
the city had its name. Not long ago, a curious enquirer
wished to know from the inhabitants of Fordingbridge, or
as the country people call it, Fardenbridge, what the origin
of this name might be, and heard in reply that the bridge
was thought to have been built when wages were so cheap
that masons worked for a ' farden ' a day. The Falmouth
folks' story of Squire Pendarvis and his ale is well known,
how his servant excused herself for selling it to the sailors^
because, as she said, ' The penny come so quick/ whence
the place came to be called Penny comequick ; this nonsense
being invented to account for an ancient Cornish name,
probably Penycumgwic, ' head of the creek valley.' Mythic
fancy had fallen to a low estate when it dwindled to such
remnants as this.

That personal names may pass into nouns, we, who talk
of broughams and bluchers, cannot deny. But any such
etymology ought to have contemporary document or some
equally forcible proof in its favour, for this is a form of ex-
planation taken by the most flagrant myths. David the
painter, it is related, had a promising pupil named Chicque,
the son of a fruiterer ; the lad died at eighteen, but his
master continued to hold him up to later students as a
model of artistic cleverness, and hence arose the now

1 Latham, Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 43 . Lejean in Rev. des Deux Mondes,'
15 Feb. 1862, p. 856; Apollodor. iii. 8. Compare the derivation of Are-
quipa by the Peruvians from the words aril quepay 'yes! remain,'
said to have been addressed to the colonists by the Inca : Markham,
Quichua Gr. and Die. ; ' also the supposed etymology of Dabome, Danb-
bo-men= on the belly of Danh,' from the story of King Dako building
his palace on the body of the conquered King Danh : Burton, in ' Tr. Eth,
Soc.' vol. iii. p. 401.

ETYMOLOGICAL MYTHS. 397

iliar term of chic. Etymologists, a race not wanting
in effrontery, have hardly ever surpassed this circumstantial
canard ; the word chic dates at anyrate from the seventeenth
century. 1 Another word with which similar liberty has
been taken, is cant. Steele, in the ' Spectator,' says that
some people derive it from the name of one Andrew Cant,
a Scotch minister, who had the gift of preaching in such a
dialect that he was understood by none but his own congre-
gation, and not by all of them. This is, perhaps, not a
very accurate delineation of the real Andrew Cant, who is
mentioned in ' Whitelock's Memorials,' and seems to have
known how to speak out in very plain terms indeed. But
at any rate he flourished about 1650, whereas the verb to
cant was then already an old word. To cante t meaning to
speak, is mentioned in Harman's ' List of Rogues' Words/
in 1566, and in 1587 Harrison says of the beggars and
gypsies that they have devised a language among them-
selves, which they name canting, but others ' Pedlars'
Frenche.' 2 Of all etymologies ascribed to personal
names, one of the most curious is that of the Danse Ma-
cabre, or Dance of Death, so well known from Holbein's
pictures. Its supposed author is thus mentioned in the
1 Biographic Universelle : ' ' Macaber, poete allemand, se-
rait tout-a-fait inconnu sans 1'ouvrage qu'on a sous son
nom.' This, it may be added, is true enough, for there
never was such a person at all, the Danse Macabre being
really Chorea Machab&orum, the Dance of the Maccabees,

1 Charnock, ' Verba Nominalia,' s.v. ' chic ; ' see Francisque-Michel,
4 Argot,' s.v.

2 ' Spectator,' No. 147 ; Brand, ' Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. p. 93 ; Hotten, ' Slang
Dictionary,' p. 3 ; Charnock, s.v. ' cant.' As to the real etymology, that
from the beggar's whining cbaunt is defective, for the beggar drops this
tone exactly when he cants, i.e., talks jargon with his fellows. If cant is
directly from Latin cantare, it will correspond with Italian cantare and
French chanter, both used as slang words for to speak (Francisque-Michel,
' Argot '). A Keltic origin is more probable, Gaelic and Irish cainnt, caint
= talk, language, dialect (see Wedgwood ' Etymological Dictionary '). The
Gaelic equivalents for pedlars' French or tramps' slang, are ' Laidionn
nan ceard,' ' cainnt cheard,' i.e., tinkers' Latin or jargon, or exactly
4 cairds' cant.' A deeper connexion between cainnt and cantare does not
affect this.

398 MYTHOLOGY.

a kind of pious pantomime of death performed in churches
in the fifteenth century. Why the performance received
this name, is that the rite of Mass for the dead is distin-
guished by the reading of that passage from the twelfth
chapter of Book II. of the Maccabees, which relates how the
people betook themselves to prayer, and besought the Lord
that the sin of those who had been slain among them might
be wholly blotted out ; for if Judas had not expected that
the slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and
vain to pray for the dead. 1 Traced to its origin, it is thus
seen that the Danse Macabre is neither more nor less than
the Dance of the Dead.

It is not an unusual thing for tribes and nations to be
known by the name of their chief, as in books of African
travel we read of ' Eyo's people/ or ' Kamrazi's people/
Such terms may become permanent, like the name of the
Osmanli Turks taken from the great Othman, or Osman.
The notions of kinship and chieftainship may easily be com-
bined, as where some individual Brian or Alpine may have
given his name to a clan of 0' Briens or Mac Alpines. How
far the tribal names of the lower races may have been
derived from individual names of chiefs or forefathers, is
a question on which distinct evidence is difficult to obtain.
In Patagonia bands or subdivisions of tribes are designated
by the names of temporary chiefs, every roving party having
such a leader, who is sometimes even styled ' yank/ i.e.
' father/ 2 The Zulus and Maoris were races who paid
great attention to the traditional genealogies of their clan-
ancestors, who were, indeed, not only their kinsfolk but their
gods ; and they distinctly recognize the possibility of tribes
being named from a deceased ancestor or chief . The Kafir
tribe of Ama-Xosa derives its name from a chief, U-Xosa;*
and the Maori tribes of Ngate-Wakaue and Nga-Puhi claim

1 See also Francisque-Michel, ' Argot,' s.v. ' maccabe, macchabe"e '=noye\
* Musters, ' Patagonians,' pp. 69, 184.

8 Dohne, 'Zulu Die.' p. 417; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 269 j Waitz,
vol. ii. pp. 349, 352.

EPONYMIC MYTHS.

399

:nt from chiefs called Wakaue and Puhi. 1 Around this
leus of actuality, however, there gathers an enormous
s of fiction simulating its effects. The myth-maker,
curious to know how many people or country gained its name,
L -,d only to conclude that it came from a great ancestor or

ler, and then the simple process of turning a national or
local title into a personal name at once added a new gene-
alogy to historical tradition. In some cases, the name of the
imagined ancestor is invented in such form that the local or
gentile name may stand as grammatically derived from it, as
asually happens in real cases, like the derivation of Ccesarea
from Ccesar, or of the Benedictines from Benedict. But in
the fictitious genealogy or history of the myth-maker, the
Tiere unaltered name of the nation, tribe, country, or city
Dften becomes without more, ado the name of the eponymic
lero. It has to be remembered, moreover, that countries
ind nations can be personified by an imaginative process
.vhich has not quite lost its sense in modern speech. France
s talked of by politicians as an individual being, with par-
.icular opinions and habits, and may even be embodied as a
itatue or picture with suitable attributes. And if one were
:o say that Britannia has two daughters, Canada and
Australia, or that she has gone to keep house for a decrepit
)ld aunt called India, this would be admitted as plain fact
expressed in fantastic language. The invention of ancestries
; 'rom eponymic heroes or name-ancestors has, however, often
lad a serious eifect in corrupting historic truth, by helping
.0 fill ancient annals with swarms of fictitious genealogies,
ifet, when surveyed in a large view, the nature of the epony-
nic fictions is patent and indisputable, and so regular are
heir forms, that we could scarcely choose more telling ex-
unples of the consistent processes of imagination, as shown
n the development of myths.

The great number of the eponymic ancestors of ancient
jreek tribes and nations makes it easy to test them by com-
)arison, and the test is a destructive one. Treat the heroic

1 Shortland, ' Trads. of N. Z.' p. 224.

4OO MYTHOLOGY.

genealogies they belong to as traditions founded on real
history, and they prove hopelessly independent and incom-
patible ; but consider them as mostly local and tribal mythst
and such independence and incompatibility become their!
proper features. Mr. Grote, whose tendency is to treat all
myths as fictions not only unexplained but unexplainable,;
here makes an exception, tracing the eponymic ancestors;
from whom Greek cities and tribes derived their legendary
parentage to mere embodied local and gentile names. Thus,
of the fifty sons of Lykaon, a whole large group consists of 1
personified cities of Arkadia, such as Mantin&us, Phigalos,
Tegeatte, who, according to the simply inverting legend, are
called founders of Mantinea, Phigalia, Tegea. The father
of King ^Eakos was Zeus, his mother his own personified
land, JEgina; the city of Mykenai had not only an ancestress
Mykene, but an eponymic ancestor as well, Myk$neus. Long
afterwards, mediaeval Europe, stimulated by the splendid
genealogies through which Rome had attached herself to
Greece and the Greek gods and heroes, discovered the
secret of rivalling them in the chronicles of Geoffry of
Monmouth and others, by claiming as founders of Paris and
Tours the Trojans Paris andTwmws, and connecting France
and Britain with the Trojan war through Francus, son of
Hector, and Brutus, great grandson of ^Eneas. A remark-
ably perfect eponymic historical myth accounting for the
Gypsies or Egyptians, may be found cited seriously in
' Blackstone's Commentaries : ' when Sultan Selim con-
quered Egypt in 1517, several of the natives refused to sub-
mit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under one Zinganeus,
whence the Turks called them Zinganees, but, being at
length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in
small parties over the world, &c., &c. It is curious to watch
Milton's mind emerging, but not wholly emerging, from the
state of the mediaeval chronicler. He mentions in the
beginning of his ' History of Britain/ the ' outlandish fig-
ment ' of the four kings, Magus, Saron, Druis, and Bardus ;
he has no approval for the giant Albion, son of Neptune, who

EPONYMIC MYTHS. 401

subdued the island and called it after his own name ; he
scoffs at the four sons of Japhet, called Francus, Romanus,
Alemannus, and Britto. But when he comes to Brutus
and the Trojan legends of old English history, his sceptical
courage fails him : ' those old and inborn names of succes-
sive kings, never any to have bin real persons, or don in their
lives at least som part of what so long hath bin remember'd,
cannot be thought without too strict an incredulity/ 1

Among ruder races of the world, asserted genealogies of
this class may be instanced in South American tribes called
the Amoipira and Potyuara* Khond clans called Baska and
Jakso* Turkoman hordes called Yomut, Tekke&ndChaudor,'
all of them professing to derive their designations from
ancestors or chiefs who bore as individuals these very names.
Where criticism can be brought to bear on these genealogies,
its effect is often such as drove Brutus and his Trojans out
of English history. When there appear in the genealogy of
Haussa, in West Africa, plain names of towns like Kano and
Katsena,* it is natural to consider these towns to have been
personified into mythic ancestors. Mexican tradition assigns
a whole set of eponymic ancestors or chiefs to the various
races of the land, as Mexi the founder of Mexico, Chichi-
mecatl the first king of the Chichimecs, and so forth, down to
Otomitt the ancestor of the Otomis, whose very name by its
termination betrays its Aztec invention. 8 The Brazilians
account for the division of the Tupis and Guaranis, by the
legend of two ancestral brothers, Tupi and Guarani, who

1 On the adoption of imaginary ancestors as connected with the fiction of
a common descent, and the important political and religious effects of these
proceedings, see especially Grote, * History of Greece,' vol. i. ; McLennan,
4 Primitive Marriage , ' Maine, ' Ancient Law. 1 Interesting details on epony-
mic ancestors in Pott, ' Anti-Kaulen, oder Mythische Vorstellungen vom
Ursprunge der Volker and Sprachen.'

1 Martius, ' Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 54 ; see p. 283.

3 Macpherson, ' India,' p. 78.

* Vambery, ' Central Asia,' p. 325 ; see also Latham, ' Descr. Eth.' vol. i.
p. 456 (Ostyaks) ; Georgi, ' Reise im Russ, Reich,' vol. i. 242 (Tunguz).

6 Barth, ' N. & Centr. Afr.' vol. ii. p. 71.

J. G. Muller, ' Amer. Urrelig.' p. 574.

402 , MYTHOLOGY.

quarrelled and separated, each with his followers : here an
eponymic origin of the story is made likely by the word
Guarani not being an old national name at all, but merely
the designation of ' warriors ' given by the missionaries to
certain tribes. 1 And when such facts are considered as that
North American clans named after animals, Beaver, Cray-
fish, and the like, account for these names by simply claim-
ing the very creatures themselves as ancestors, 2 the tendency \
of "general criticism will probably be not so much in favour
of real forefathers and chiefs who left their names to their
tribes, as of eponymic ancestors created by backwards
imitation of such inheritance.

The examination of eponymic legend, however, must by
no means stop short at the destructive stage. In fact, when
it has undergone the sharpest criticism, it only displays the
more clearly a real historic value, not less perhaps than if
all the names it records were real names of ancient chiefs.
With all their fancies, blunders, and shortcomings, the heroic
genealogies preserve early theories of nationality, traditions
of migration, invasion, connexion by kindred or intercourse.
The ethnologists of old days, borrowing the phraseology of
myth, stated what they looked on as the actual relations of
races, in a personifying language of which the meaning may
still be readily interpreted. The Greek legend of the twin
brothers Danaos and Mgyptos, founders of the nations of
the Danaoi or Homeric Greeks and of the Egyptians,
represents a distinct though weak ethnological theory.
Their eponymic myth of Hellen, the personified race of the

Hellenes, is another and more reasonable ethnological docu-
ment stating kinship among four great branches of the
Greek race : the three sons of Hellen, it relates, were

Aiolos, Dor os, and Xouthos ; the first two gave their names
to the Molians and Dorians, the third had sons called

Achaios and Ion, whose names passed as a heritage to the

1 Marti us, vol. i. pp. 180-4 ; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 416.
8 Schoolcraft, ' Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 319, part iii. p. 268, see part ii.
p. 49 ; Catlin, vol. ii. p. 128 ; J. G. Miiller, pp. 134, 327.

Acha\

EPONYMIC MYTHS. 403

lioi and lonians. The belief of the Lydians, Mysians,
and Karians as to their national kinship is well expressed
in the genealogy in Herodotus, which traces their descent
from the three brothers Lydos, Mysos, and Kar. 1 The
Persian legend of Feridun (Thraetaona) and his three sons,
Irej, Tur, and Selm, distinguishes the two nationalities of
Iranian and Turanian,i.e. Persian and Tatar. 8 The national
genealogy of the Afghans is worthy of remark. It runs
thus : Melik Talut (King Saul) had two sons, Berkia and
Irmia (Berekiah and Jeremiah), who served David ; the son
of Berkia was Afghan, and the son of Irmia was Usbek.
Thanks to the aquiline noses of the Afghans, and to their
use of Biblical personal names derived from Biblical sources,
the idea of their being descendants of the lost tribes of
Israel found great credence among European scholars up to
the present century. 8 Yet the pedigree is ethnologically
absurd, for the whole source of the imagined cousinship of
the Aryan Afghan and the Turanian Usbek, so distinct both
in feature and in language, appears to be in their union by
common Mohammedanism, while the reckless jumble of
sham history, which derives both from a Semitic source, is
only too characteristic of Moslem chronicle. Among the
Tatars is found a much more reasonable national pedigree ;
in the 13 th century, William of Ruysbroek relates, as sober
circumstantial history, that they were originally called
Turks from Turk the eldest son of Japhet, but one of their
princes left his dominions to his twin sons, Tatar and Mongol
which gave rise to the distinction that has ever since pre-
vailed between these two nations. * Historically absurd, this
legend states what appears the unimpeachable ethnological

1 Grote, ' Hist, of Greece ; ' Pausan. iii. 20 ; Diod. Sic. v. ; Apollodor.
Bibl. i. 7, 3, vi. i, 4 ; Here-dot, i. 171.

* Max Muller in Bunsen, vol. i. p. 338 ; Tabari. part i. ch. xlv., Ixix.

8 Sir W. Jones in * As. Res.' vol. ii. p. 24 ; Vansittart, ibid. p. 67 ; see
Campbell, in * Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1866, part ii. p. 7.

4 Will, de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 23 ; Gabelentz in ' Zeitschr.
fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes,' vol. ii. p. 73 ; Schmidt, ' Volker Mittel-
Asien,' p. 6.

404 MYTHOLOGY.

fact, that the Turks, Mongols, and Tatars are closely-
connected branches of one national stock, and we can only
dispute in it what seems an exorbitant claim on the part
of the Turk to represent the head of the family, the
ancestor of the Mongol and the Tatar. Thus these eponymic
national genealogies, mythological in form but ethnological
in substance, embody opinions of which we may admit or
deny the truth or value, but which we must recognize as
distinctly ethnological documents. 1

It thus appears that early ethnology is habitually ex-
pressed in a metaphorical language, in which lands and
nations are personified, and their relations indicated by
terms of personal kinship. This description applies to
that important document of ancient ethnology, the table of
nations in the loth chapter of Genesis. In some cases it is
a problem of minute and difficult criticism to distinguish
among its ancestral names those which are simply local or
national designations in personal form. But to critics con-
versant with the ethnic genealogies of other peoples, such
as have here been quoted, simple inspection of this national
list may suffice to show that part of its names are not names
of real men, but of personified cities, lands, and races.
The city Zidon (p^) is brother to Heth (nn) the father of
the Hittites, and next follow in person the Jebusite and
the Amorite. Among plain names of countries, Cush or
^Ethiopia (5^0) begets Nimrod, Asshur or Assyria (TI^K)
builds Nineveh, and even the dual Mizraim (onvo), the ' two
Egypts/ usually regarded as signifying Upper and Lower
Egypt, appears in the line of generations as a personal son
and brother of other countries, and ancestor of populations.
The Aryan stock is clearly recognized in personifications
of at least two of its members, Madai (no) the Mede,
and Javan (jv) the Ionian. And as regards the family to
which the Israelites themselves belong, if Canaan (jwa), the
father of Zidon (p*v), be transferred to it to represent the

1 See also Pott, 4 Anti-Kaulen,' pp. 19, 23 ; ' Rassen,' pp. 70, 153 ; and
emarks on colonization-myths in Max Miiller, ' Chips,' vol. ii. p. 68.

EPONYMIC MYTHS. 405

Phoenicians, by the side of Asshur (-MJ>K), A ram
Eber (nar), and the other descendants of Shem, the result
will be mainly to arrange the Semitic stock according
to the ordinary classification of modern comparative
philology.

Turning now from cases where mythologic phrase serves
as a medium for expressing philosophic opinion, let us
quickly cross the district where fancy assumes the sem-
blance of explanatory legend. The mediaeval schoolmen
have been justly laughed at for their habit of translating
plain facts into the terms of metaphysics, and then
solemnly offering them in this scientific guise as explana-
tions of themselves accounting for opium making people
sleep, by its possession of a dormitive virtue. The myth-
maker's proceedings may in one respect be illustrated by
comparing them with this. Half mythology is occupied, as
many a legend cited in these chapters has shown, in shaping
the familiar facts of daily life into imaginary histories of
their own cause and origin, childlike answers to those world-
old questions of whence and why, which the savage asks as
readily as the sage. So familiar is the nature of such de-
scription in the dress of history, that its easier examples
translate off-hand. When the Samoans say that ever since
the great battle among the plantains and bananas, the
vanquished have hung down their heads, while the victor
stands proudly erect, 1 who can mistake the simple metaphor
which compares the upright and the drooping plants to a
conqueror standing among his beaten foes ? In simile just
as obvious lies the origin of another Polynesian legend,
which relates the creation of the coco-nut from a man's
head, the chestnuts from his kidneys, and the yams from
his legs. 2 To draw one more example from the mythology
of plants, how transparent is the Ojibwa fancy of that
heavenly youth with green robe and waving feathers, whom
for the good of men the Indian overcame and buried, and

1 Seemann, ' Viti,' p. 311 ; Turner, ' Polynesia,' p. 252.
8 Ellis, ' Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 69.

406 MYTHOLOGY.

who sprang again from his grave as the Indian corn, Mon-
damin, the ' Spirit's grain.' 1 The New Forest peasant
deems that the marl he digs is still red with the blood of
his ancient foes the Danes ; the Maori sees on the red cliffs
of Cook's Straits the blood-stains that Kupe made when,
mourning for the death of his daughter, he cut his forehead
with pieces of obsidian ; in the spot where Buddha offered
his own body to feed the starved tigress's cubs, his blood
for ever reddened the soil and the trees and flowers. The
modern Albanian still sees the stain of slaughter in streams
running red with earth, as to the ancient Greek the river
that flowed by Byblos bore down in its summer floods the
red blood of Adonis. The Cornishman knows from the red
filmy growth on the brook pebbles that murder has been
done there ; John the Baptist's blood still grows in
Germany on his day, and peasants still go out to search for
it ; the red meal fungus is blood dropped by the flying
Huns when they hurt their feet against the high tower-
roofs. The traveller in India might see on the ruined walls
of Ganga Raja the traces of the blood of the citizens spilt
in the siege, and yet more marvellous to relate, at St.
Denis's church in Cornwall, the blood-stains on the stones
fell there when the saint's head was cut off somewhere else. 1
Of such translations of descriptive metaphor under thin
pretence of history, every collection of myth is crowded
with examples, but it strengthens our judgment of the com-
bined consistency and variety of what may be called the
mythic language, to extract from its dictionary such a group
as this, which in variously imaginative fashion describes
the appearance of a blood-red stain.

1 Schoolcraft, ' Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 122 ; ' Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 320,
part ii. p. 230.

2 J. R. Wise, ' The New Forest,' p. 160 ; Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 268 ;
Max Muller, ' Chips,' vol. i. p. 249 ; M. A. Walker, ' Macedonia,' p. 192 ;
Movers, ' Phonizier,' vol. i. p. 665 ; Lucian. de Dea Syria, 8 ; Hunt, ' Pop.
Rom.' znd Series, p. 15 ; Wuttke, ' Volksaberglaube,' pp. 16, 94 ; Bastian,
' Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 59, vol. iii. p. 185 ; Buchanan, ' Mysore, &c.' in Pinker-
ion; vol. viii. p. 714.

I REALIZED METAPHORS. 407

merest shadowy fancy or broken-down metaphor,
, wnen once it gains a sense of reality, may begin to be
spoken of as an actual event. The Moslems have heard the
very stones praise Allah, not in simile only but in fact, and
among them the saying that a man's fate is written on his
' forehead has been materialized into a belief that it can be
i deciphered from the letter-like markings of the sutures of
his skull. One of the miraculous passages in the life of
Mohammed himself is traced plausibly by Sprenger to
such a pragmatized metaphor. The angel Gabriel, legend
declares, opened the prophet's breast, and took a black
clot from his heart, which he washed with Zemzem water
and replaced; details are given of the angel's dress and
golden basin, and Anas ibn Malik declared he had seen the
very mark where the wound was sewn up. We may venture
with the historian to ascribe this marvellous incident to the
familiar metaphor that Mohammed's heart was divinely
opened and cleansed, and indeed he does say in the Koran
that God opened his heart. 1 A single instance is enough to
represent the same habit in Christian legend. Marco Polo
relates how in 1225 the Khalif of Bagdad commanded the
Christians of his dominions, under penalty of death or
Islam, to justify their Scriptural text by removing a certain
mountain. Now there was among them a shoemaker, who,
having been tempted to excess of admiration for a woman,
had plucked out his offending eye. This man commanded
the mountain to remove, which it did to the terror of the
Khalif and all his people, and since then the anniversary of
the miracle has been kept holy. The Venetian traveller,
after the manner of mediaeval writers, records the story
without a symptom of suspicion; 1 yet to our minds its
whole origin so obviously lies in three verses of St.
Matthew's gospel, that it is needless to quote them. To
modern taste such wooden fictions as these are far from
attractive. In fact the pragmatizer is a stupid creature ;

1 Sprenger, ' Leben des Mohammad,' vol. i. pp. 78, 1 19, 162, 310.
8 Marco Polo, book i. ch. viii.

408 MYTHOLOGY.

nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull and
vulgar by his touch, for it is through the very incapacity of
his mind to hold an abstract idea that he is forced to
embody it in a material incident. Yet wearisome as he
may be, it is none the less needful to understand him, to
acknowledge the vast influence he has had on the belief of
mankind, and to appreciate him as representing in its
extreme abuse that tendency to clothe every thought in a
concrete shape, which has in all ages been a mainspring of
mythology.

Though allegory cannot maintain the largp place often
claimed for it in mythology, it has yet had too much influ-
ence to be passed over in this survey. It is true that the
search for allegorical explanation is a pursuit that has led
many a zealous explorer into the quagmires of mysticism.
Yet there are cases in which allegory is certainly used with
historical intent, as for instance in the apocryphal Book of
Enoch, with its cows and sheep which stand for Israelites,
and asses and wolves for Midianites and Egyptians, these
creatures figuring in a pseudo-prophetic sketch of Old
Testament chronicles. As for moral allegory, it is im-
mensely plentiful in the world, although its limits are
narrower than mythologists of past centuries have sup-
posed. It is now reasonably thought preposterous to inter-
pret the Greek legends as moral apologues, after the manner
of Herakleides the philosopher, who could. discern a parable
of repentant prudence in Athene seizing Achilles when just
about to draw his sword on Agamemnon. 1 Still, such a
mode of interpretation has thus much to justify it, that
numbers of the fanciful myths of the world are really alle-
gories. There is allegory in the Hesiodic myth of Pandora,
whom Zeus sent down to men, decked with golden band
and garland of spring flowers, fit cause of longing and the
pangs of love, but using with a dog-like mind her gifts of
lies and treachery and pleasant speech. Heedless of his
wiser brother's words, the foolish Epimetheus took her ;

1 Grote, vol. i. p. 347.

ALLEGORY. 409

she raised the lid of the great cask and shook out the evils
that wander among mankind, and the diseases that by day
and night come silently bringing ill ; she set on the lid
again and shut hope in, that evil might be ever hopeless to
mankind. Shifted to fit a different moral, the allegory
remained in the later version of the tale, that the cask held
not curses but blessings ; these were let go and lost to men
when the vessel was too curiously opened, while Hope alone
was left behind for comfort to the luckless human race. 1
Yet the primitive nature of such legends underlies the
moral shape upon them. Zeus is no allegoric fiction, and
Prometheus, unless modern mythologists judge him very
wrongly, has a meaning far deeper than parable. Xenophon
tells (after Prodikos) the story of Herakles choosing between
the short and easy path of pleasure and the long and toil-
some path of virtue, 8 but though the mythic hero may thus
be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so
little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the
reader's mind.

The general relation of allegory to pure myth can hardly
be brought more clearly into view than in a class of stories
familiar to every child, the Beast-fables. From the ordinary
civilized point of view the allegory in such fictions seems
fundamental, the notion of a moral lesson seems bound up
with their very nature, yet a broader examination tends to
prove the allegorical growth as it were parasitic on an older
trunk of myth without moral. It is only by an effort of
intellectual reaction that a modern writer can imitate in
parable the beast of the old Beast-fable. No wonder, for
the creature has become to his mind a monster, only con-
ceivable as a caricature of man made to carry a moral lesson
or a satire. But among savages it is not so. To their
minds the semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, in-
vented to preach or sneer, he is all but a reality. Beast-
fables are not nonsense to men who ascribe to the lower
animals a power of speech, and look on them as partaking

1 Welckcr, vol. i. p. 756. 8 Xenoph. Memorabilia, ii. i.

4IO , MYTHOLOGY.

of moral human nature ; to men in whose eyes any hyaena i
or wolf may probably be a man-hyaena or a werewolf ; to
men who so utterly believe ' that the soul of our grandam
might haply inhabit a bird ' that they will really regulate j
their own diet so as to avoid eating an ancestor; to men an i
integral part of whose religion may actually be the worship
of beasts. Such beliefs belong even now to half mankind,
and among such the beast-stories had their first home.
Even the Australians tell their quaint beast-tales, of the
Rat, the Owl, and the fat Blackfellow, or of Pussy-brother
who singed his friends' noses while they were asleep. 1
The Kamchadals have an elaborate myth of the adventures
of their stupid deity Kutka with the Mice who played tricks
upon him, such as painting his face like a woman's, so that
when he looked in the water he fell in love with himself. 8
Beast-tales abound among such races as the Polynesians
and the North American Indians, who value in them inge-
nuity of incident and neat adaptation of the habits and
characters of the creatures. Thus in a legend of the Flat-
head Indians, the Little Wolf found in Cloudland his grand-
sires the Spiders with their grizzled hair and long crooked
nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to
earth ; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled
Duck, whom the Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in
confusion, and that is why she lives and dives alone to this
very day. 3 In Guinea, where beast-fable is one of the great
staples of native conversation, the following story is told as
a type of the tales which in this way account for peculiari-
ties of animals. The great Engena-monkey offered his
daughter to be bride of the champion who should perform
the feat of drinking a whole barrel of rum. The dignified
Elephant, the graceful Leopard, the surly Boar, tried the
first mouthful of the fire-water, and retreated. Then the
tiny Telinga-monkey came, who had cunningly hidden in

1 Oldfield in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 259.

1 S teller, * Kamtschatka,' p. 255,

8 Wilson in ' Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 306.

BEAST FABLES. 411


long grass thousands of his fellows ; he took his first
glass and went away, but instead of his coming back, an-
other just like him came for the second, and so on till the
barrel was emptied and Telinga walked off with the Monkey-
king's daughter. But in the narrow path the Elephant and
Leopard attacked him and drove him off and he took refuge
in the highest boughs of the trees, vowing never more to
live on the ground and suffer such violence and injustice.
This is why to this day the little telingas are only found in
the highest tree-tops. 1 Such stories have been collected by
scores from savage tradition in their original state, while as
yet no moral lesson has entered into them. Yet the easy
and natural transition from the story into the parable is
made among savages, perhaps without help from higher
races. In the Hottentot Tales, side by side with the myth
of the cunning Jackal tricking the Lion out of the best of
the carcase, and getting the black stripe burnt on his own
back by carrying off the Sun, there occurs the moral
apologue of the Lion who thought himself wiser than his
Mother, and perished by the Hunter's spear, for want of
heed to her warning against the deadly creature whose head
is in a line with his breast and shoulders. 8 So the Zulus
have a thorough moral apologue in the story of the hyrax,
who did not go to fetch his tail on the day when tails were
given out, because he did not like to be out in the rain ; he
only asked the other animals to bring it for him, and so he
never got it. 3 Among the North American legends of
Manabozho, there is a fable quite ^sopian in its humour.
Manabozho, transformed into a Wolf, killed a fat moose,
and being very hungry sat down to eat. But he fell into
great doubts as to where to begin, for, said he, if I begin at
the head, people will laugh and say, he ate him backwards,

1 J. L. Wilson, ' W. Afr.' p. 382.

* Bleek, ' Reynard in S. Afr.' pp. 5, 47, 67 (these are not among the
stones which seem recently borrowed from Europeans). See * Early History
of Mankind,' p. 10.

8 Callaway, 4 Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 355.

412 MYTHOLOGY.

but if I begin at the side they will say, he ate him sideways.
At last he made up his mind, and was just putting a delicate
piece into his mouth, when a tree close by creaked. Stop,
stop ! said he to the tree, I cannot eat with such a noise,'
and in spite of his hunger he left the meat and climbed up
to quiet the creaking, but was caught between two branches
and held fast, and presently he saw a pack of wolves coming.
Go that way ! Go that way ! he cried out, whereupon the
wolves said, he must have something there, or he would not
tell us to go another way. So they came on, and. found the
moose, and ate it to the bones while Manabozho looked
wistfully on. The next heavy blast of wind opened the
branches and let him out, and he went home thinking to
himself, ' See the effect of meddling with frivolous things
when I had certain good in my possession.' 1

In the Old World, the moral Beast-fable was of no mean
antiquity, but it did not at once supplant the animal-myths
pure and simple. For ages the European mind was capable
at once of receiving lessons of wisdom from the ^Esopian
crows and foxes, and of enjoying artistic but by no means
edifying beast-stories of more primitive type. In fact the
Babrius and Phaedrus collections were over a thousand years
old, when the genuine Beast-Epic reached its fullest growth
in the incomparable ' Reynard the Fox/ traceable in Jakob
Grimm's view to an original Prankish composition of the
I2th century, itself containing materials of far earlier date.*
Reynard is not a didactic poem, at least if a moral hangs oo
to it here and there it is oftenest a Macchiavellian one ;
nor is it essentially a satire, sharply as it lashes men in
general and the clergy in particular. Its creatures are in-
carnate qualities, the Fox of cunning, the Bear of strength
the Ass of dull content, the Sheep of guilelessness. The
charm of the narrative, which every class in medieval
Europe delighted in, but which we have allowed to drop
out of all but scholars' knowledge, lies in great measure in

1 Schoolcraft, Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 160 ; see pp. 43, a,
8 Jakob Grimm, Reinhart Fuchs,' Introd.

BEAST FABLES. 413

the cleverly sustained combination of the beast's nature and
the man's. How great the influence of the Reynard Epic
was in the middle ages, may be judged from Reynard, Bruin,
Chanticleer, being still names familiar to people who have
no idea of their having been originally names of the cha-
racters in the great beast-fable. Even more remarkable
are its traces in modern French. The donkey has its name
of baudet from Baudoin, Baldwin the Ass. Common French
dictionaries do not even contain the word goupil (vulpes),
so effectually has the Latin name of the fox been driven out
of use by his Prankish title in the Beast-Epic, Raginhard
the Counsellor, Reinhart, Reynard, Renart, renard. The
moralized apologues like ^Esop's which Grimm con-
temptuously calls ' fables thinned down to mere moral
and allegory/ ' a fourth watering of the old grapes into an
insipid moral infusion/ are low in aesthetic quality as com-
pared with the genuine beast-myths. Mythological critics
will be apt to judge them after the manner of the child who
said how convenient it was to have ' Moral ' printed in
Esop's fables, that everybody might know what to skip.

The want of power of abstraction which has ever had
such disastrous effect on the beliefs of mankind, confound-
ing myth and chronicle, and crushing the spirit of history
under the rubbish of literalized tradition, comes very clearly
into view in the study of parable. The state of mind of
the deaf, dumb, and blind Laura Bridgman, so instructive
in illustrating the mental habits of uneducated though full-
sensed men, displays in an extreme form the difficulty such
men have in comprehending the unreality of any story.
She could not be made to see that arithmetical problems
were anything but statements of concrete fact, and when
tier teacher asked her, ' If you can buy a barrel of cider
for four dollars, how much can you buy for one dollar ? '
she replied quite simply, ' I cannot give much for cider,
because it is very sour/ l It is a surprising instance of
this tendency to concretism, that among people so civilized

1 Account of Laura Bridgman, p. 120.

414 ' MYTHOLOGY.

as the Buddhists, the most obviously moral beast-fable
have become literal incidents of sacred history. Gautai
during his 550 jatakas or births, took the form of a frog,
fish, a crow, an ape, and various other animals, and so
were the legends of these transformations from mere nr
to his followers, that there have been preserved as
in Buddhist temples the hair, feathers, and bones of tl
creatures whose bodies the great teacher inhabited. Now
among the incidents which happened to Buddha during
his series of animal births, he appeared as an actor in the
familiar fable of the Fox and the Stork, and it was he who,
when he was a Squirrel, set an example of parental virtue
by trying to dry up the ocean with his tail, to save his
young ones whose nest had drifted out to sea, till his per-
severing courage was rewarded by a miracle. 1 To our
modern minds, a moral which seems the very purpose of a
story is evidence unfavourable to its truth as fact. But if
even apologues of talking birds and beasts have not been
safe from literal belief, it is clear that the most evident
moral can have been but slight protection to parables told
of possible and life-like men. It was not a needless pre-
caution to state explicitly of the New Testament parables
that they were parables, and even this guard has not availed
entirely. Mrs. Jameson relates some curious experience in
the following passage: 'I know that I was not very
young when I entertained no more doubt of the substantial
existence of Lazarus and Dives than of John the Baptist
and Herod ; when the Good Samaritan was as real a per-
sonage as any of the Apostles ; when I was full of sincerest
pity for those poor foolish Virgins who had forgotten to
trim their lamps, and thought them in my secret soul
rather hardly treated. This impression of the literal actual
truth of the parables I have since met with in many children,
and in the uneducated but devout hearers and readers of

1 Bowring, ' S Jam,' vol. i. p. 3 1 3 ; Hardy, ' Manual of Budhism,' p. 98. See
the fable of the ' Crow and Pitcher,' in Plin. x. 60, and Bastian, ' Mensch,
vol. i. p. 76.

PARABLES. 415

the Bible ; and I remember that when I once tried to
explain to a good old woman the proper meaning of the
word parable, and that the story of the Prodigal Son was
not a fact, she was scandalized she was quite sure that
Jesus would never have told anything to his disciples that
was not true. Thus she settled the matter in her own mind,
and I thought it best to leave it there undisturbed.' x Nor,
it may be added, has such realization been confined to
the minds of the poor and ignorant. St. Lazarus, patron
saint of lepers and their hospitals, and from whom the
lazzarone and the lazzaretto take their name, obviously
derives these qualities from the Lazarus of the parable.

The proof of the force and obstinacy of the mythic faculty,
thus given by the relapse of parable into pseudo-history,
may conclude this dissertation on mythology. In its course
there have been examined the processes of animating and
personifying nature, the formation of legend by exaggera-
tion and perversion of fact, the stiffening of metaphor by
mistaken realization of words, the conversion of speculative
theories and still less substantial fictions into pretended
traditional events, the passage of myth into miracle-legend,
the definition by name and place given to any floating
imagination, the adaptation of mythic incident as moral
example, and the incessant crystallization of story into
history. The investigation of these intricate and devious
operations has brought ever more and more broadly into
view two principles of mythologic science. The first is that
legend, when classified on a sufficient scale, displays a
regularity of development which the notion of motiveless
fancy quite fails to account for, and which must be attri-
buted to laws of formation whereby every story, old and
new, has arisen from its definite origin and sufficient cause.
So uniform indeed is such development, that it becomes
possible to treat myth as an organic product of mankind at
large, in which individual, national, and even racial dis-
tinctions stand subordinate to universal qualities of the

1 Jameson, * History of Our Lord in Art,' vol. i. p. 375.

416 MYTHOLOGY.

human mind. The second principle concerns the relation
of myth to history. It is true that the search for mutilated
and mystified traditions of real events, which formed so
main a part of old mythological researches, seems to grow
more hopeless the farther the study of legend extends.
Even the fragments of real chronicle found embedded in
the mythic structure are mostly in so corrupt a state, that,
far from their elucidating history, they need history to
elucidate them. Yet unconsciously, and as it were in spite
of themselves, the shapers and transmitters of poetic legend
have preserved for us masses of sound historical evidence.
They moulded into mythic lives of gods and heroes their
own ancestral heirlooms of thought and word, they displayed
in the structure of their legends the operations of their own
minds, they placed on record the arts and manners, the
philosophy and religion of their own times, times of which
formal history has often lost the very memory. Myth is
the history of its authors, not of its subjects ; it records the
lives, not of superhuman heroes, but of poetic nations.