CUSTOM AND MYTH
CUSTOM AND MYTH
BY
ANDREW LANG, M.A.
LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1885
TO
E. B. TYLOR
AUTHOR OF 'PRIMITIVE CULTURE* THESE STUDIES OF THE OLDEST STORIES
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION . ... i
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE . • 10 THE BULL-ROARER . .29
THE MYTH OF CRONUS .... . . 45
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE * SUN-FROG' . 64
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE 87
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE 103
STAR MYTHS 121
i
MOLY AND MANDRAGORA .... . 143
THE 'KALEVALA'. . ... . . 156
THE DIVINING ROD 180
HOTTENTOT MYTHOLOGY 197
FETICHISM AND THE INFINITE . . . .212 THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE FAMILY . .245 THE ART OF SAVAGES 276
CUSTOM AND MYTH.
INTRODUCTION.
THOUGH some of the essays in this volume have appeared in various serials, the majority of them were written expressly for their present purpose, and they are now arranged in a designed order. During some years of study of Greek, Indian, and savage myth ologies, I have become more and more impressed with a sense of the inadequacy of the prevalent method of comparative mythology. That method is based on the belief that myths are the result of a disease of language, as the pearl is the result of a disease of the oyster. It is argued that men at some period, or periods, spoke in a singular style of coloured and concrete language, and that their children re tained the phrases of this language after losing hold of the original meaning. The consequence was the growth of myths about supposed persons, whose names had originally been mere ' appellations.' In conformity with this hypothesis the method of com parative mythology examines the proper names which occur in myths. The notion is that these names con tain a key to the meaning of the story, and that, in 1*
2 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
fact, of the story the names are the germs and the oldest surviving part.
The objections to this method are so numerous that it is difficult to state them briefly. The attempt, however, must be made. To desert the path opened by the most eminent scholars is in itself pre sumptuous ; the least that an innovator can do is to give his reasons for advancing in a novel direction. If this were a question of scholarship merely, it would be simply foolhardy to differ from men like Max Miiller, Adalbert Kuhn, Breal, and many others. But a revolutionary mythologist is en couraged by finding that these scholars usually differ from each other. Examples will be found chiefly in the essays styled ' The Myth of Cronus/ ' A Far- travelled Tale,' and ' Cupid and Psyche/ Why, then, do distinguished scholars and mythologists reach such different goals ? Clearly because their method is so precarious. They all analyse the names in myths ; but, where one scholar decides that the name is originally Sanskrit, another holds that it is purely Greek, and a third, perhaps, is all for an Accadian etymology, or a Semitic derivation. Again, even when scholars agree as to the original root from \vhich a name springs, they differ as much as ever as to the meaning of the name in its present place. The inference is, that the analysis of names, on which the whole edifice of philological ' comparative mythology ' rests, is a foundation of shifting sand. The method is called ' orthodox,' but, among those who practise it, there is none of the beauitful unanimity of ortho doxy.
INTRODUCTION. 3
These objections are not made by the unscholarly anthropologist alone. Curtius has especially remarked the difficulties which beset the * etymological opera tion ' in the case of proper names. ' Peculiarly dubious and perilous is mythological etymology. Are we to seek the sources of the divine names in aspects of nature, or in moral conceptions ; in special Greek geographical conditions, or in natural circumstances which are everywhere the same : in dawn with her rays, or in clouds with their floods ; are we to seek the origin of the names of heroes in things historical and human, or in physical phenomena ? ' l Professor Tiele, of Leyden, says much the same thing : ' The uncer tainties are great, and there is a constant risk of taking TRKXZJeuxcF esprit for scientific results.'2 Every name has, if we can discover or conjecture it, a mean ing. That meaning — be it ' large ' or ' small/ ' loud ' or 'bright,' 'wise' or 'dark,' 'swift' or 'slow' — is always capable of being explained as an epithet of the sun, or of the cloud, or of both. Whatever, then, a name may signify, some scholars will find that it originally denoted the cloud, if they belong to one school, or the sun or dawn, if they belong to another faction. Obviously this process is a merejeu d 'esprit. This logic would be admitted in no other science, and, by similar arguments, any name whatever might be shown to be appropriate to a solar hero.
The scholarly method has now been applied for many years, and what are the results ? The ideas attained by the method have been so popularised that
1 Compare De Cara : Essame Critico, xx. i.
2 Revue de VHist. des ReL ii. 136.
4 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
they are actually made to enter into the education of children, and are published in primers and catechisms of mythology. But what has a discreet scholar to say to the whole business ? * The difficult task of interpreting mythical names has, so far, produced few certain results ' — so writes Otto Schrader.1 Though Schrader still has hopes of better things, it is admitted that the present results are highly disputable. In England, where one set of these results has become an article of faith, readers chiefly accept the opinions of a single etymological school, and thus escape the difficulty of making up their minds when scholars differ. But differ scholars do, so widely and so often, that scarcely any solid advantages have been gained in mythology from the philological method.
The method of philological mythology is thus discredited by the disputes of its adherents. The system may be called orthodox, but it is an ortho doxy which alters with every new scholar who enters the sacred enclosure. Even were there more har mony, the analysis of names could throw little light on myths. In stories the names may well be, and often demonstrably are, the latest, not the original feature. Tales, at first told of ' Somebody,' get new names attached to them, and obtain a new local habitation, wherever they wander. * One of the leading personages to be met in the traditions of the world is really no more than — Somebody. There is nothing this wondrous creature cannot achieve ; one only restriction binds him at all — that the name he assumes shall have some sort of congruity with the
1 Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, p. 431.
INTRODUCTION. 5
office he undertakes, and even from this he oftentimes breaks loose! [ We may be pretty sure that the ad ventures of Jason, Perseus, CEdipous, were originally told only of ' Somebody.' The names are later addi tions, and vary in various lands. A glance at the essay on ' Cupid and Psyche ' will show that a history like theirs is known, where neither they nor their counterparts in the Veda, Urvasi and Pururavas, were ever heard of; while the incidents of the Jason legend are familiar where no Greek word was ever spoken. Finally, the names in common use among savages are usually derived from natural phenomena, often from clouds, sky, sun, dawn. If, then, a name in a myth can be proved to mean cloud, sky, sun, or what not (and usually one set of scholars find clouds, where others see the dawn), we must not instantly infer that the myth is a nature-myth. Though, doubtless, the heroes in it were never real people, the names are as much common names of real people in the savage state, as Smith and Brown are names of civilised men.
For all these reasons, but chiefly because of the fact that stories are usually anonymous at first, that names are added later, and that stories naturally crystallise round any famous name, heroic, divine, or human, the process of analysis of names is most pre carious and untrustworthy. A story is told of Zeus-. Zeus means sky, and the story is interpreted by scholars as a sky myth. The modern interpreter forgets, first, that to the myth- maker sky did not at all mean the same thing as it means to him. Sky
1 Prim. Cult. i. 394.
6 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
meant, not an airy, infinite, radiant vault, but a person, and, most likely, a savage person. Secondly, the interpreter forgets that the tale (say the tale of Zeus, Demeter, and the mutilated Ram) may have been originally anonymous, and only later attributed to Zeus, as unclaimed jests are attributed to Sheridan or Talleyrand. Consequently no heavenly phenomena will be the basis and explanation of the story. If one thing in mythology be certain, it is that myths are always changing masters, that the old tales are always being told with new names. Where, for ex ample, is the value of a philological analysis of the name of Jason ? As will be seen in the essay * A Far- travelled Tale/ the analysis of the name of Jason is fanciful, precarious, disputed, while the essence of his myth is current in Samoa, Finland, North America, Madagascar, and other lands, where the name was never heard, and where the characters in the story have other names or are anonymous.
For these reasons, and others teo many to be ad duced here, I have ventured to differ from the current opinion that myths must be interpreted chiefly by philological analysis of names. The system adopted here is explained in the first essay, called ' The Method of Folklore.' The name, Folklore, is not a good one, but 'comparative mythology' is usually claimed exclusively by the philological interpreters.
The second essay, ' The Bull-Roarer,' is intended to show that certain peculiarities in the Greek mys teries occur also in the mysteries of savages, and that on Greek soil they are survivals of savagery.
' The Myth of Cronus ' tries to prove that the first
INTRODUCTION. 7
part of the legend is a savage nature-myth, surviving in Greek religion, while the sequel is a set of ideas common to savages.
' Cupid and Psyche ' traces another Aryan myth among savage races, and attempts to show that the myth may have had its origin in a rule of barbarous etiquette.
* A Far-travelled Tale ' examines a part of the Jason myth. This myth appears neither to be an ex planation of natural phenomena (like part of the Myth of Cronus), nor based on a widespread custom (like Cupid and Psyche.) The question is asked whether the story may have been diffused by slow filtration from race to race all over the globe, as there seems no reason why it should have been invented separately (as a myth explanatory of natural phenomena or of customs might be) in many different places.
' Apollo and the Mouse ' suggests hypothetically, as a possible explanation of the tie between the God and the Beast, that Apollo-worship superseded, but did not eradicate, Totemism. The suggestion is little more than a conjecture.
' Star Myths ' points out that Greek myths of stars are a survival from the savage stage of fancy in which such stories are natural.
' Moly and Mandragora ' is a study of the Greek, the modern, and the Hottentot folklore of magical herbs, with a criticism of a scholarly and philological hypothesis, according to which Moly is the dog-star, and Circe the moon.
* The Kalevala ' is an account of the Finnish national poem ; of all poems that in which the popular,
8 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
as opposed to the artistic, spirit is strongest. The Kalevala is thus a link between Mdrchen and Volks- lieder on one side, and epic poetry on the other.
' The Divining Rod ' is a study of a European and civilised superstition, which is singular in its compara tive lack of copious savage analogues.
' Hottentot Mythology ' is a criticism of the philo logical method, applied to savage myth.
' Fetichism and the Infinite,' is a review of Mr. Max Miiller's theory that a sense of the Infinite is the germ of religion, and that Fetichism is secondary, and a corruption. This essay also contains a defence of the evidence on. which the anthropological method relies.
The remaining essays are studies of the ' History of the Family,' arid of * Savage Art.'
The essay on ' Savage Art ' is reprinted, by the kind permission of Messrs. Cassell & Co., from two num bers (April and May, 1882) of the Magazine of Art. I have to thank the editors and publishers of the Contemporary Review, the Corn/till Magazine, and Eraser's Magazine, for leave to republish ' The Early History of the Family,' ' The Divining Rod,' and ' Star Myths,' and * The Kalevala.' A few sentences in 'The Bull-Roarer,' and 'Hottentot Mythology,' appeared in essays in the Saturday Review, and some lines of ( The Method of Folklore ' in the Guardian. To the editors of those journals also I owe thanks for their courteous permission to make this use of my old articles.
To Mr. E. B. Tylor and Mr. W. R. S. Ralston I must express my gratitude for the kindness with which they have always helped me in all difficulties.
INTRODUCTION. 9
I must apologise for the controversial matter in the volume. Controversy is always a thing to be avoided, but, in this particular case, when a system opposed to the prevalent method has to be advocated, con troversy is unavoidable. My respect for the learning of my distinguished adversaries is none the less great because I am not convinced by their logic, and because my doubts are excited by their differences.
Perhaps, it should be added, that these essays are, so to speak, only flint-flakes from a neolithic work shop. This little book merely skirmishes (to change the metaphor) in front of a much more methodical attempt to vindicate the anthropological interpreta tion of myths. But lack of leisure and other causes make it probable that my * Key to All Mythologies ' will go the way of Mr. Casaubon's treatise.
IO CUSTOM AND MYTH.
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE.
AFTER the heavy rain of a thunderstorm has washed the soil, it sometimes happens that a child, or a rustic, finds a wedge-shaped piece of metal or a few tri angular flints in a field or near a road. There was no such piece of metal, there were no such flints, lying there yesterday, and the finder is puzzled about the origin of the objects on which he has lighted. He carries them home, and the village wisdom determines that the wedge-shaped piece of metal is a ' thunder bolt/ or that the bits of flint are ' elf-shots/ the heads of fairy arrows. Such things are still treasured in remote nooks of England, and the ' thunder-bolt ' is applied to cure certain maladies by its touch.
As for the fairy arrows, we know that even in ancient Etruria they were looked on as magical, for we sometimes see their points set, as amulets, in the gold of Etruscan necklaces. In Perugia the arrow heads are still sold as charms. All educated people, of course, have long been aware that the metal wedge is a celt, or ancient bronze axe-head, and that it was not fairies, but the forgotten peoples of this island who used the arrows with the tips of flint. Thunder is only so far connected with them that the heavy rains
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. I I
loosen the surface soil, and lay bare its long hidden secrets.
There is a science, Archaeology, which collects and compares the material relics of old races, the axes and arrow-heads. There is a form of study, Folklore, which collects and compares the similar but immaterial relics of old races, the surviving superstitions and stories, the ideas which are in our time but not of it. Pro perly speaking, folklore is only concerned with the legends, customs, beliefs, of the Folk, of the people, of the classes which have least been altered by education, which have shared least in progress. But the stu dent of folklore soon finds that these unprogressivc classes retain many of the beliefs and ways of savages, just as the Hebridean people use spindle-whorls of stone, and bake clay pots without the aid of the wheel, like modern South Sea Islanders, or like their own prehistoric ancestors.1 The student of folklore is thus led to examine the usages, myths, and ideas of savages, which are still retained, in rude enough shape, by the European peasantry. Lastly, he observes that a few similar customs and ideas survive in the most conservative elements of the life of educated peoples, in ritual, ceremonial, and religious traditions and myths. Though such remains are rare in England, we may note the custom of leading the dead soldier's horse behind his master to the grave, a relic of days when the horse would have been sacrificed.2 We may
1 A study of the contemporary stone age in Scotland will be found in Mitchell's Past and Present.
8 About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry, killed her deceased husband's horse. When remonstrated with by her
12 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
observe the persistence of the ceremony by which the monarch, at his coronation, takes his seat on the sacred stone of Scone, probably an ancient fetich stone. Not to speak, here, of our own religious traditions, the old vein of savage rite and belief is found very near the surface of ancient Greek religion. It needs but some stress of circumstance, something answering to the storm shower that reveals the flint arrow-heads, to bring savage ritual to the surface of classical religion. In sore need, a human victim was only too likely to be demanded ; while a feast-day, or a mystery, set the Greeks dancing serpent-dances or bear-dances like Red Indians, or swimming with sacred pigs, or leaping about in imitation of wolves, or holding a dog-feast, and offering dog's flesh to the gods.1 Thus the student of folklore soon finds that he must enlarge his field, and examine, not only popular European story and practice, but savage ways and ideas, and the myths and usages of the educated classes in civilised races. In this extended sense the term 'folklore' will fre quently be used in the following essays. The idea of the writer is that mythology cannot fruitfully be studied apart from folklore, while some knowledge of anthropology is required in both sciences.
The science of Folklore, if we may call it a science, finds everywhere, close to the surface of civilised life, the remains of ideas as old as the stone elf-shots, older than the celt of bronze. In proverbs and riddles, and
landlord, she said, ' Would you have my man go about on foot in the next world ? ' She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.
1 At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelp's flesh. (Pliny, ff.N. xxix. 4.)
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 13
nursery tales and superstitions, we detect the relics of a stage of thought, which is dying out in Europe, but which still exists in many parts of the world. Now, just as the flint arrow-heads are scattered every where, in all the continents and isles, and everywhere are much alike, and bear no very definite marks of the special influence of race, so it is with the habits and legends investigated by the student of folklore. The stone arrow-head buried in a Scottish cairn is like those which were interred with Algonquin chiefs. The flints found in Egyptian soil, or beside the tumulus on the plain of Marathon, nearly resemble the stones which tip the reed arrow of the modern Samoyed. Perhaps only a skilled experience could discern, in a heap of such arrow-heads, the specimens which are found in America or Africa from those which are unearthed in Europe. Even in the pro ducts of more advanced industry, we see early pottery, for example, so closely alike, everywhere that, in the British Museum, Mexican vases have, ere now, been mixed up on the same shelf with archaic vessels from 'Greece. In the same way, if a superstition or a riddle were offered to a student of folklore, he would have much difficulty in guessing its prevenance, and naming the race from which it was brought. Suppose you tell a folklorist that, in a certain country, when anyone sneezes, people say ' Good luck to you/ the student cannot say a priori what country you refer to, what race you have in your thoughts. It may be Florida, as Florida was when first discovered ; it may be Zulu- land, or West Africa, or ancient Rome, or Homeric Greece, or Palestine. In all these, and many other
14 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
regions, the sneeze was welcomed as an auspicious omen. The little superstition is as widely distributed as the flint arrow-heads. Just as the object and use of the arrow-heads became intelligible when we found similar weapons in actual use among savages, so the salutation to the sneezer becomes intelligible when we learn that the savage has a good reason for it. He thinks the sneeze expels an evil spirit. Proverbs, again, and riddles are as universally scattered, and the Wolufs puzzle over the same devinettes as the Scotch schoolboy or the Breton peasant. Thus, for instance, the Wolufs of Senegal ask each other, ' What flies for ever, and rests never ? ' — Answer, ' The Wind.' ' Who are the comrades that always fight, and never hurt each other ? ' — ' The Teeth.' In France, as we read in the ' Recueil de Calembours,1 the people ask, •What runs faster than a horse, crosses water, and is not wet ? ' — Answer, ' The Sun.' The Samoans put the riddle, * A man who stands between two ravenous fishes ? ' — Answer, ' The tongue between the teeth.' Again, ' There are twenty brothers, each with a hat on his head ? ' — Answer, < Fingers and toes, with nails for hats.' This is like the French ' unpere a dotizefils ? '- ( /'an.' A comparison of M. Holland's 'Devinettes' with the Woluf conundrums of Boilat, the Samoan examples in Turner's ' Samoa,' and the Scotch enigmas collected by Chambers, will show the identity of peasant and savage humour.
A few examples, less generally known, may be given to prove that the beliefs of folklore are not peculiar to any one race or stock of men. The first case is remarkable : it occurs in Mexico and Ceylon
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 15
—nor are we aware that it is found elsewhere. In Macmillarfs Magazine 1 is published a paper by Mrs. Edwards, called ' The Mystery of the Pezazi.' The events described in this narrative occurred on August 28, 1876, in a bungalow some thirty miles from Badiella. The narrator occupied a new house on an estate called Allagalla. Her native servants soon asserted that the place was haunted by a Pezazi. The English visitors saw and heard nothing extra ordinary till a certain night : an abridged account of what happened then may be given in the words of Mrs. Edwards :—
Wrapped in dreams, I lay on the night in question tranquilly sleeping, but gradually roused to a perception that discordant sounds disturbed the serenity of my slumber. Loth to stir, I still dozed on, the sounds, however, becoming, as it seemed, more determined to make themselves heard ; and I awoke to the consciousness that they proceeded from a belt of adjacent jungle, and resembled the noise that would be produced by some person felling timber.
Shutting my ears to the disturbance, I made no sign,
until, with an expression of impatience, E suddenly
started up, when I laid a detaining grasp upon his arm, murmuring that there was no need to think of rising at present — it must be quite early, and the kitchen cooly was
doubtless cutting fire-wood in good time. E responded,
in a tone of slight contempt, that no one could be cutting fire-wood at that hour, and the sounds were more suggestive of felling jungle ; and he then inquired how long I had been listening to them. Now thoroughly aroused, I replied that I had heard the sounds for some time, at first confusing them with my dreams, but soon sufficiently awakening to
» Nov. 1880.
1 6 CUSTOM AND' MYTH.
the fact that they were no mere phantoms of my imagina tion, but a reality. During our conversation the noises became more distinct and loud ; blow after blow resounded, as of the axe descending upon the tree, followed by the crash of the falling timber. Renewed blows announced the repetition of the operations on another tree, and con tinued till several were devastated.
It is unnecessary to tell more of the tale. In spite of minute examinations and close search, no solution of the mystery of the noises, on this or any other occasion, was ever found. The natives, of course, attributed the disturbance to the Pezazi, or goblin. No one, perhaps, has asserted that the Aztecs were connected by ties of race with the people of Ceylon. Yet, when the Spaniards conquered Mexico, and when Sahagun (one of the earliest missionaries) collected the legends of the people, he found them, like the Cingalese, strong believers in the mystic tree-felling. We translate Sahagun's account of the ' midnight axe ' .:—
When so any man heareth the sound of strokes in the night, as if one were felling trees, he reckons it an evil boding. And this sound they call youaltepuztli (youalli, night ; and tepuztli, copper), which signifies ' the midnight hatchet' This noise cometh about the time of the first sleep, when all men slumber soundly, and the night is still. The sound of strokes smitten was first noted by the temple- servants, called tlamacazque, at the hour when they go in the night to make their offering of reeds or of boughs of pine, for so was their custom, and this penance they did on the neighbouring hills, and that when the night was far spent Whenever they heard such a sound as one makes when he splits wood with an axe (a noise that may be heard afar
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 1 7
off), they drew thence an omen of evil, and were afraid, and said that the sounds were part of the witchery of Tezeatlipoca, that often thus dismayeth men who journey in the night. Now, when tidings of these things came to a certain brave man, one exercised in war, he drew near, being guided by the sound, till he came to the very cause of the hubbub. And when he came upon it, with difficulty he caught it, for the thing was hard to catch : natheless at last he overtook that which ran before him ; and behold, it was a man without a heart, and, on either side of the chest, two holes that opened and shut, and so made the noise. Then the man put his hand within the breast of the figure and grasped the breast and shook it hard, demanding some grace or gift.
As a rule, the grace demanded was power to make captives in war. The curious coincidence of the 'midnight axe/ occurring in lands so remote as Ceylon and Mexico, and the singular attestation by an English lady of the actual existence of the dis turbance, makes this youaltepuztli one of the quaintest things in the province of the folklorist. But, what ever the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs connected with the noise, may be, no one would explain them as the result of community of race between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered to account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of furniture is an omen of death in a house. Obviously, these opinions are the expression of a common state of superstitious fancy, not the signs of an original community of origin.
Let us take another piece of folklore. All North-country English folk know the Kernababy. The custom of the * Kernababy ' is commonly ob- 2
1 8 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
served in England, or, at all events, in Scotland, where the writer has seen many a kernababy. The last gleanings of the last field are bound up in a rude imitation of the human shape, and dressed in some tag-rags of finery. The usage has fallen into the conservative hands of children, but of old 1 the Maiden' was a regular image of the harvest goddess,'1 which, with a sickle and sheaves in her arms, attended by a crowd of reapers, and accom panied with music, followed the last carts home to the farm.1 It is odd enough that the * Maiden ' should exactly translate KO/DT;, the old Sicilian name of the daughter of Demeter. ' The Maiden ' has dwindled, then, among us to the rudimentary kernababy ; but ancient Peru had her own Maiden, her Harvest Goddess. Here it is easy to trace the natural idea at the basis of the superstitious practice which links the shores of the Pacific with our own northern coast. Just as a portion of the yule-log and of the Christ mas bread were kept all the year through, a kind of nest-egg of plenteous food and fire, so the kerna baby, English or Peruvian, is an earnest that corn will not fail all through the year, till next harvest comes. For this reason the kernababy used to be treasured from autumn's end to autumn's end, though now it commonly disappears very soon after the harvest home. It is thus that Acosta describes, in Grimston's old translation (1604), the Peruvian ker nababy and the Peruvian harvest home : —
1 * Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while she stands smili.ng by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves and poppies in her hands ' (Theocritus, vii. 155-157)-
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 1 9
This feast is made comming from the chacra or farme unto the house, saying certaine songs, and praying that the Mays (maize) may long continue, the which they call Mama cora.
What a chance this word offers to etymologists of the old school : how promptly they would recog nise, in mama mother — ^rrjp, and in cora — /copy, the Mother and the Maiden, the feast of Dermter and Persephone ! However, the days of that old . school of antiquarianism are numbered. To return to the Peruvian harvest home : —
They take a certaine portion of the most fruitefull of the Mays that growes in their farmes, the which they put in a certaine granary which they do calle Pirua, with certaine ceremonies, watching three nightes ; they put this Mays in the richest garments they have, and, being thus wrapped and dressed, they worship this Pirua, and hold it in great venera tion, saying it is the Mother of the Mays of their inheritances, and that by this means the Mays augments and is preserved. In this moneth they make a particular sacrifice, and the witches demand of this Pirua, ' if it hath strength sufficient to continue until the next yeare,' and if it answers ' no,' then they carry this Mays to the farme to burne, whence they brought it, according to every man's power, then they make another Pirua, with the same ceremonies, saying that they renue it, to the ende that the seede of the Mays may not perish.
The idea that the maize can speaK need not surprise us ; the Mexican held much the same belief, accord ing to Sahagun :—
It was thought that if some grains of maize fell on the ground he who saw them lying there was bound to lift them,
20 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
wherein, if he failed, he harmed the maize, which plained itself of him to God, saying, ' Lord, punish this man, who saw me fallen and raised me not again ; punish him with famine, that he may learn not to hold me in dishonour.'
Well, in all this affair of the Scotch kernababy, and the Peruvian Mama com, we need no explanation beyond the common simple ideas of human nature. We are not obliged to hold, either that the Peruvians and Scotch are akin by blood, nor that, at some for gotten time, they met each other, and borrowed each other's superstitions. Again, when we find Odysseus sacrificing a black sheep to the dead,1 and when we read that the Ovahereroes in South Africa also appease with a black sheep the spirits of the de parted, we do not feel it necessary to hint that the Ovahereroes are of Greek descent, or have borrowed their ritual from the Greeks. The connection be tween the colour black, and mourning for the dead, is natural and almost universal.
Examples like these might be adduced in any number. We might show how, in magic, negroes of Barbadoes make clay effigies of their enemies, and pierce them, just as Greeks did in Plato's time, or the men of Accad in remotest antiquity. We might re mark the Australian black putting sharp bits of quartz in the tracks of an enemy who has gone by, that the enemy may be lamed ; and we might point to Boris Godunof forbidding the same practice among the Russians, We might watch Scotch, and Australians, and Jews, and French, and Aztecs spreading dust round the body of a dead man, that the footprints of
1 Odyssey^ xi. 32.
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 21
his ghost, or of other ghosts, may be detected next morning. We might point to a similar device in a modern novel, where the presence of a ghost is sus pected, as proof of the similar workings of the Australian mind and of the mind of Mrs. Riddell. We shall later turn to ancient Greece, and show how the serpent-dances, the habit of smearing the body with clay, and other odd rites of the mysteries, were common to Hellenic religion, and to the religion of African, Australian, and American tribes.
Now, with regard to all these strange usages, what is the method of folklore ? The method is, when an apparently irrational and anomalous custom is found in any country, to look for a country where a similar practice is found, and where the practice is no longer irrational and anomalous, but in harmony with the manners and ideas of the people among whom it prevails. That Greeks should dance about in their mysteries with harmless serpents in their hands looks quite unintelligible. When a wild tribe of Red Indians does the same thing, as a trial of courage, with real rattlesnakes, we understand the Red Man's motives, and may conjecture that similar motives once existed among the ancestors of the Greeks. Our method, then, is to compare the seem ingly meaningless customs or manners of civilised races with the similar customs and manners which exist among the uncivilised and still retain their meaning. It is not necessary for comparison of this sort that the uncivilised and the civilised race should be of the same stock, nor need we prove that they were ever in contact with each other. Similar con-
22 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
ditions of mind produce similar practices, apart from identity of race, or borrowing of ideas and manners.
Let us return to the example of the flint arrow heads. Everywhere neolithic arrow-heads are pretty much alike. The cause of the resemblance is no more than this, that men, with the same needs, the same materials, and the same rude instruments, everywhere produced the same kind of arrow-head. No hypo thesis of interchange of ideas nor of community of race is needed to explain the resemblance of form in the missiles. Very early pottery in any region is, for the same causes, like very early pottery in any other region. The same sort of similarity was explained by the same resemblances in human nature, when we touched on the identity of magical practices and of superstitious beliefs. This method is fairly well es tablished and orthodox when we deal with usages and superstitious beliefs ; but may we apply the same method when we deal with myths ?
Here a difficulty occurs. Mythologists, as a rule, are averse to the method of folklore. They think it scientific to compare only the myths of races which speak lan guages of the same family, and of races which have, in historic times, been actually in proved contact with each other. Thus, most mythologists hold it correct to compare Greek, Slavonic, Celtic, and Indian stories, because Greeks, Slavs, Celts, and Hindoos all speak languages of the same family. Again, they hold it correct to compare Chaldaean and Greek myths, be cause the Greeks and the Chaldseans were brought into contact through the Phoenicians, and by other intermediaries, such as the Hittites. But the same
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 23
mythologists will vow that it is unscientific to com pare a Maori or a Hottentot or an Eskimo myth with an Aryan story, because Maoris and Eskimo and Hottentots do not speak languages akin to that of Greece, nor can we show that the ancestors of Greeks, Maoris, Hottentots, and Eskimo were ever in contact with each other in historical times.
Now the peculiarity of the method of folklore is that it will venture to compare (with due caution and due examination of evidence) the myths of the most widely severed races. Holding that myth is a pro duct of the early human fancy, working on the most rudimentary knowledge of the outer world, the stu dent of folklore thinks that differences of race do not much affect the early mythopceic faculty. He will not be surprised if Greeks and Australian blacks are in the same tale.
In each case, he holds, all the circumstances of the case must be examined and considered. For instance, when the Australians tell a myth about the Pleiades very like the Greek myth of the Pleiades, we must ask a number of questions. Is the Austra lian version authentic ? Can the people who told it have heard it from a European ? If these questions are answered so as to make it apparent that the Australian Pleiad myth is of genuine native origin, we need not fly to the conclusion that the Australians are a lost and forlorn branch of the Aryan race. Two other hypotheses present themselves. First, the human species is of unknown antiquity. In the moderate allowance of 250,000 years, there is time for stories to have wandered all round the world, as
24 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
the Aggry beads of Ashanti have probably crossed the continent from Egypt, as the Asiatic jade (if Asiatic it be) has arrived in Swiss lake-dwellings, as an African trade-cowry is said to have been found in a Cornish barrow, as an Indian Ocean shell has been discovered in a prehistoric bone-cave in Poland. This slow filtration of tales is not absolutely out of the question. Two causes would especially help to trans mit myths. The first is slavery and slave-stealing, the second is the habit of capturing brides from alien stocks, and the law which forbids marriage with a woman of a man's own family. Slaves and captured brides would bring their native legends among alien peoples.
But there is another possible way of explaining the resemblance (granting that it is proved) of the Greek and Australian Pleiad myth. The object of both myths is to account for the grouping and other phenomena of the constellations. May not similar explanatory stories have occurred to the ancestors of the Australians, and to the ancestors of the Greeks, however remote their home, while they were still in the savage condition ? The best way to investigate this point is to collect all known savage and civilised stellar myths, and see what points they have in common. If they all agree in character, though the Greek tales are full of grace, while those of the Australians or Brazilians are rude enough, we may plausibly account for the similarity of myths, as we accounted for the similarity of flint arrow-heads. The myths, like the arrow-heads, resemble each other because they were originally framed to meet the same
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 25
needs out of the same material. In the case of the arrow-heads, the need was for something hard, heavy, and sharp— the material was flint. In the case of the myths, the need was to explain certain phenomena— the material (so to speak) was an early state of the human mind, to which all objects seemed equally endowed with human personality, and to which no metamorphosis appeared impossible.
In the following essays, then, the myths and customs of various peoples will be compared, even when these peoples talk languages of alien families, and have never (as far as history shows us) been in actual contact. Our method throughout will be to place the usage, or myth, which is unintelligible when found among a civilised race, beside the similar myth which is intelligible enough when it is found among savages. A mean term will be found in the folklore preserved by the non-progressive classes in a progres sive people. This folklore represents, in the midst of a civilised race, the savage ideas out of which civilisation has been evolved. The conclusion will usually be that the fact which puzzles us by its presence in civilisation is a relic surviving from the time when the ancestors of a civilised race were in the state of savagery. By this method it is not necessary that * some sort of genealogy should be established ' between the Aus tralian and the Greek narrators of a similar myth, nor between the Greek and Australian possessors of a similar usage. The hypothesis will be that the myth, or usage, is common to both races, not because of original community of stock, not because of contact and borrowing, but because the ancestors of the 2*
26 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Greeks passed through the savage intellectual con dition in which we find the Australians.
The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth ? Do peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other ? The answer is, that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth, if it be race which confers on a people its national genius, and its capacity of becoming civilised. If race does this, then race affects, in the most powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one is likely to confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor either with a myth from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the substance, the original set of ideas, may be much the same. In all three you have anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming ani mal shapes, tricky, capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed with magical powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda, of any of the Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much above the gods of savage mythology. This stuff of myth is quod semper, quod iibique, quod ab omnibus, and is the original gift of the savage intellect. But the final treatment, the ultimate literary form of the myth, varies in each race. Homeric gods, like Red Indian, Thlinkeet, or Australian gods, can assume the shapes of birds. But when we read, in Homer, of the arming of Athene, the hunting of Artemis, the vision of golden Aphrodite, the apparition of Hermes, like a young man when the flower of youth is loveliest, then we recognise the effect of race upon myth, the effect of the Greek genius at work on rude material. Between the Olympians and a Thlinkeet god there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter of Cnidos
THE METHOD OF FOLKLORE. 27
and an image from Easter Island. Again, the Scan dinavian gods, when their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless sacrifices, soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of Vedic and Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into its sacerdotage and priestly second childhood. Thus race declares itself in the ultimate literary form and character of mythology, while the common savage basis and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in the horned, and cannibal, and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of Greece, of India, of the North. They all show their common savage origin, when the poet neglects Freya's command and tells of what the gods did ' in the morning of Time.' As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there must have been much trans mission of myth. The migrations of peoples, the traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing alien women into the families — all these things favoured the migration of myth. But the process lies behind history : we can only guess at it, we can seldom trace a popular legend on its travels. In the case of the cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed they had borrowed their re ligions from each other. When the Greeks first found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they leaped to the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from Egypt. We, who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points in common with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians — people quite unconnected with Egypt — feel less
28 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
confident about the hypothesis of borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later times, too, the Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so forth. But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at least, an innovation. As Tiele remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from the Assyrian Daian nisi, 'judge of men/ a name of the solar god Samas, without ascertaining that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and was a god of the sun. These derivations, * shocking to common sense/ are to be distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning. Some Assyrian scholars actually derive Hades from Bit Edi or Bit Hadi — 'though, unluckily/ says Tiele, ( there is no such word in the Assyrian text/ On the whole topic Tiele's essay l deserves to be consulted. Granting, then, that ele ments in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite, and other gods, may have been imported with the strange ^Egypto-Assyrian vases and jewels of the Sidonians, we still find the same basis of rude savage ideas. We may push back a god from Greece to Phoenicia, from Phoenicia to Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we reach a legend full of myths like those which Bush men tell by the camp-fire, Eskimo in their dark huts, and Australians in the shade of the gunyeh — myths cruel, puerile, obscene, like the fancies of the savage myth-makers from which they sprang.
1 Rev. de VHist. des ReL, vol. ii.
THE BULL-ROARER.
A STUDY OF THE MYSTERIES.
As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains of Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of grey-blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound. Begin ning low, with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it grows louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy roar. If the traveller be a new comer, he is probably puzzled to the last degree. If he be an Englishman, country- bred, he says to himself, ' Why, that is the bull-roarer.' If he knows the colony and the ways of the natives, he knows that the blacks are celebrating their tribal mysteries. The roaring noise is made to warn all women to keep out of the way. Just as Pentheus was killed (with the approval of Theocritus) because he profaned the rites of the women-worshippers of Dionysus, so, among the Australian blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out of the way of female, and women out of the way of male, celebrations.
The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain afar is a toy familiar to English country lads. They call it the bull-roarer. The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which
30 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
anyone can make. I do not, however, recommend it to families, for two reasons. In the first place, it produces a most horrible and unexampled din, which endears it to the very young, but renders it detested by persons of mature age. In the second place, the character of the toy is such that it will almost infallibly break all that is fragile in the house where it is used, and will probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus, I trust, said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting bull-roarers on their parents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the interests of science) to show how the toy is made. Nothing can be less elaborate. You take a piece of the commonest wooden board, say the lid of a packing-case, about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight inches long and three broad, and you sharpen the ends. When finished, the toy may be about the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a ' fish ' used as a counter (that is how. the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be left plain in the centre, and only sharpened towards the extremi ties, as in an Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor. Then tie a strong piece of string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood> and the bull- roarer (the Australian natives call it turndun, and the Greeks called it pop/Sos) is complete. Now twist the end of the string tightly about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round. For a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a bull-roarer. At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled round, and the audience
THE BULL- ROARER. 31
began to fear that the experiment was like those chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country, which contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace. But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name, producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if some supernatural being 1 fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful roar.' Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief experience of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.
The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in folklore. The in strument is found among the most widely severed peoples, savage and civilised, and is used in the cele bration of savage and civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend from the same stock. But the bull-roarer is intro duced here for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere. There is no need for a hypo thesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred object.
The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in many and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred instrument, employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in
32 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Australia, in New Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa ; while, as we have seen, it is a peasant-boy's plaything in England. A number of questions are naturally suggested by the bull-roarer. Is it a thing invented once for all, and carried abroad over the world by wandering races, or handed on from one people and tribe to another ? Or is the bull-roarer a toy that might be accidentally hit on in any country where men can sharpen wood and twist the sinews of animals into string ? Was the thing originally a toy, and is its religious and mystical nature later ; or was it originally one of the properties of the priest, or medicine-man, which in England has dwindled to a plaything ? Lastly, was this mystical instrument at first employed in the rites of a civilised people like the Greeks, and was it in some way borrowed or inherited by South Africans, Australians, and New Mexicans? Or is it a mere savage invention, surviv ing (like certain other features of the Greek mysteries) from a distant stage of savagery ? Our answer to all these questions is that in all probability the presence of the pofipos, or bull-roarer, in Greek mysteries was a survival from the time when Greeks were in the social condition of Australians.
In the first place, the bull-roarer is associated with mysteries and initiations. Now mysteries and initia tions are things that tend to dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation advances, The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret and hidden ; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed, and religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these ceremonies. There are
THE BULL-ROARER. 33
no other initiations or mysteries that civilised modern man is expected necessarily to pass through. On the other hand, looking widely at human history, we find mystic rites and initiations numerous, stringent, severe, and magical in character, in proportion to the lack of civilisation in those who practise them. The less the civilisation, the more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites. The more cruel the rites, the less is the civilisation. The red-hot poker with which Mr. Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the sham masonic rites would have been quite in place, a natural instrument of probationary torture, in the Freemasonry of Australians, Mandans, or Hottentots. In the mysteries of Demeter or Bacchus, in the mys teries of a civilised people, the red-hot poker, or any other instrument of torture, would have been out of place. But in the Greek mysteries, just as in those of South Africans, Red Indians, and Australians, the disgusting practice of bedaubing the neophyte with dirt and clay was preserved. We have nothing quite like that in modern initiations. Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the tortures inflicted on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by the cruel Artemis.1 But Greek mysteries retained the daub ing with mud and the use of the bull-roarer. On the whole, then, and on a general view of the subject, we
1 Pausanias, iii. 15. When the boys were being cruelly scourged, the priestess of Artemis Orthia held an ancient barbaric wooden image of the goddess in her hands. If the boys were spared, the image grew heavy ; the more they were tortured, the lighter grew the image. In Samoa the image (shark's teeth) of the god Taema is consulted before battle. ' If it felt heavy, that was a bad omen ; if light, the sign was good' — the god was pleased (Turner's Samoa, p. 55).
34 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece was a survival from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa is a relic of civilisation.
Let us next observe a remarkable peculiarity of the turndun, or Australian bull-roarer. The bull- roarer in England is a toy. In Australia, according to Howitt and Fison,1 the bull-roarer is regarded with re ligious awe. * When, on lately meeting with two of the surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then answered me in undertones.' The chief peculiarity in connection with the turndun is that women may never look upon it. The Chepara tribe, who call it bribbun, have a custom that, ' if seen by a woman, or shown by a man to a woman, the punishment to both is death'
Among the Kurnai, the sacred mystery of the turndun is preserved by a legend, which gives a super natural sanction to secrecy. When boys go through the mystic ceremony of initiation they are shown turnduns, or bull-roarers, and made to listen to their hideous din. They are then told that, if ever a woman is allowed to see a turndun, the earth will open, and water will cover the globe. The old men point spears at the boy's eyes, saying : 'If you tell this to any woman you will die, you will see the ground broken up and like the sea ; if you tell this to any woman, or to any child, you will be killed ! ' As in Athens, in Syria, and among the Mandans, the deluge-tradition of Australia is connected with the
1 Kamilaroi and Kurnai^ p. 268.
THE BULL-ROARER. 35
mysteries. In Gippsland there is a tradition of the deluge. ' Some children of the Kurnai in playing about found a turndun, which they took home to the camp and showed the women. Immediately the earth crumbled away, and it was all water, and the Kurnai were drowned.'
In consequence of all this mummery the Aus tralian women attach great sacredness to the very name of the turndun. They are much less instructed in their own theology than the men of the tribe. One woman believed she had heard Pundjel, the chief supernatural being, descend in a mighty rushing noise, that is, in the sound of the turndun, when boys were being ' made men/ or initiated.1 On turnduns the Australian sorcerers can fly up to heaven. Turn- duns carved with imitations of water-flowers are used by medicine-men in rain- making. New Zealand also has her bull-roarers ; some of them, carved in relief, are in the Christy Museum, and one is engraved here. I have no direct evidence as to the use of these Maori bull-roarers in the Maori mysteries. Their em ployment, however, may per haps be provisionally inferred.
One can readily believe that the New Zealand bull-roarer may be whirled by any man who is re peating a Karakia, or ' charm to raise the wind ' : —
1 Fison, Journal Anthrop. Soc., Nov. 1883.
36 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Loud wind,
Lasting wind,
Violent whistling wind,
Dig up the calm reposing sky,
Come, come.
In New Zealand * ' the natives regarded the wind as an indication of the presence of their god/ a super stition not peculiar to Maori religion. The ' cold wind ' felt blowing over the hands at spiritualistic seanc.es is also regarded (by psychical researchers) as an indication of the presence of supernatural beings. The windy roaring noise made by the bull-roarer might readily be considered by savages, either as an invitation to a god who should present himself in storm, or as a proof of his being at hand. We have seen that this view was actually taken by an Austra lian woman. The hymn called ' breath/ or haha, a hymn to the mystic wind, is pronounced by Maori priests at the moment of the initiation of young men in the tribal mysteries. It is a mere conjecture, and possibly enough capable of disproof, but we have a suspicion that the use of the mystica vannus laccJii was a mode of raising a sacred wind analogous to that employed by whirlers of the turndun.2
Servius, the ancient commentator on Virgil, men-
1 Taylor's New Zealand, p. 181.
2 This is not the view of le Pere Lafitau, a learned Jesuit missionary in North America, viho wrote (1724) a work on savage manners, com pared with the manners of heathen antiquity. Lafitau, who was greatly struck with the resemblances between Greek and Iroquois or Carib initiations, takes Servius's other explanation of the mystica vannus, « an osier vessel containing rural offerings of first fruits.' This exactly answers, says Lafi^au, to the Carib Matoutou, on which they offer sacred cassava cakes.
THE BULL-ROARER. 37
tions, among other opinions, this — that the vannus was a sieve, and that it symbolised the purifying effect of the mysteries. But it is clear that Servius was only guessing ; and he offers other explanations, among them that the vannus was a crate to hold offerings, pnmitias frugum.
We have studied the bull-roarer in Australia, we have caught a glimpse of it in England. Its exist ence on the American continent is proved by letters from New Mexico, and by a passage in Mr. Frank Cushing's * Adventures in Zuni.' 1 In Zuni, too, among a semi-civilised Indian tribe, or rather a tribe which has left the savage for the barbaric condition, we find the bull-roarer. Here, too, the instrument— a ' slat,' Mr. Gushing calls it — is used as a call to the ceremonial observance of the tribal ritual. The Zunis have various ( orders of a more or less sacred and sacerdotal character.' Mr. Gushing writes :—
These orders were engaged in their annual ceremonials, of which little was told or shown me ; but, at the end of four days, I heard one morning a deep whirring noise. Running out, I saw a procession of three priests of the bow, in plumed helmets and closely-fitting cuirasses, both of thick buckskin — gorgeous and solemn with sacred embroideries and war-paint, begirt with bows, arrows, and war-clubs, and each distinguished by his badge of degree — coming down one of the narrow streets. The principal priest carried in his arms a wooden idol, ferocious in aspect, yet beautiful with its decorations of shell, turquoise, and brilliant paint. It was nearly hidden by symbolic slats and prayer-sticks most elaborately plumed. He was preceded by a guardian with
1 The Century Magazine^ May 1883.
38 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
drawn bow and arrows, while another followed, twirling the sounding slat, which had attracted alike my attention and that of hundreds of the Indians, who hurriedly flocked to the roofs of the adjacent houses, or lined the street, bowing their heads in adoration, and scattering sacred prayer-meal on the god and his attendant priests. Slowly they wound their way down the hill, across the river, and off toward the mountain of Thunder. Soon an identical procession followed and took its way toward the western hills. I watched them long until they disappeared, and a few hours afterward there arose from the top of ' Thunder Mountain ' a dense column of smoke, simultaneously with another from the more distant western mesa of 'U-ha-na-mi,' or 'Mount of the Beloved.'
Then they told me that for four days I must neither touch nor eat flesh or oil of any kind, and for ten days neither throw any refuse from my doors, nor permit a spark to leave my house, for 'This was the season of the year, when the " grandmother of men " (fire) was precious.'
Here then, in Zuni, we have the bull-roarer again, and once more we find it employed as a summons to the mysteries. We do not learn, however, that women in Zuni are forbidden to look upon the bull-roarer. Finally, the South African evidence, which is supplied by letters from a correspondent of Mr. Tylor's, proves that in South Africa, too, the bull-roarer is em ployed to call the men to the celebration of secret functions. A minute description of the instrument, and of its magical power to raise a wind, is given in Theal's ' Kaffir Folklore,' p. 209. The bull-roarer has not been made a subject of particular research ; very probably later investigations will find it in other parts of the modern world besides America, Africa,
THE BULL-ROARER. 39
New Zealand, and Australia. I have myself been fortunate enough to encounter the bull-roarer on the soil of ancient Greece and in connection with the Dionysiac mysteries. Clemens of Alexandria, and Arnobius, an early Christian father who follows Clemens, describe certain toys of the child Dionysus which were used in the mysteries. Among these are turbines, KWVOI, and po^oi. The ordinary dic tionaries interpret all these as whipping-tops, adding that p6fjL/3o$ is sometimes ' a magic wheel.' The ancient scholiast on Clemens, however, writes : ' The KWVOS is a little piece of wood, to which a string is fastened, and in the mysteries it is whirled round to make a roaring noise.' * Here, in short, we have a brief but complete description of the bull-roarer of the Australian turndun. No single point is omitted. The KWVOS, like the turndun, is a small object of wood, it is tied to a string, when whirled round it produces a roaring noise, and it is used at initiations. This is not the end of the matter.
In the part of the Dionysiac mysteries at which the toys of the child Dionysus were exhibited, and during which (as it seems) the KWVOS, or bull-roarer, was whirred, the performers daubed themselves all over with clay. This we learn from a passage in which Demosthenes describes the youth of his hated adversary, ^Eschines-. The mother of ^Eschines, he says, was a kind of ' wise woman,' and dabbler in mysteries. ^Eschines used to aid her by bedaubing
1 Kwvos £v\dpiov ou e'l^Trrat rb airapTiov Kal eV rats reAerats 'it/a £01(77. Lobeck, Aglaophamus (i. p. 700).
40 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
the initiate over with clay and bran.1 The word aTTo/jidTTow, here used by Demosthenes, is explained by Harpocration as the ritual term for daubing the initiated. A story was told, as usual, to explain this rite. It was said that, when the Titans attacked Dionysus and tore him to pieces, they painted them selves first with clay, or gypsum, that they might not be recognised. Nonnus shows, in several places, that down to his time the celebrants of the Bacchic mysteries retained this dirty trick. Precisely the same trick prevails in the mysteries of savage peoples. Mr. Winwood Reade 2 reports the evidence of Mongi- lomba. When initiated, Mongilomba was ' severely flogged in the Fetich House ' (as young Spartans were flogged before the animated image of Artemis), and then he was ' plastered over with goat-dung.' Among the natives of Victoria,3 the ' body of the initiated is bedaubed with clay, mud, charcoal powder, and filth of every kind.' The girls are plastered with charcoal powder and white clay, answering to the Greek gypsum. Similar daubings were performed at the mysteries by the Mandans, as described by Catlin ; and the Zunis made raids on Mr. Cushing's black paint and Chinese ink for like purposes. On the Congo, Mr. Johnson found precisely the same ritual in the initiations. Here, then, not to multiply examples, we discover two singular features in common between Greek and
1 De Corona, p. 313.
2 Savage Africa. Captain Smith, the lover of Pocahontas, men tions the custom in his work on Virginia, pp. 245-248.
3 Brough Smyth, i. 60, using evidence of Howitt, Taplin, Thomas, and Wilhelmi.
THE BULL-ROARER. 4!
savage mysteries. Both Greeks and savages employ the bull-roarer, both bedaub the initiated with dirt or with white paint or chalk. As to the meaning of the latter very un-Aryan practice, one has no idea. It is only certain that war parties of Australian blacks bedaub themselves with white clay to alarm their enemies in night attacks. The Phocians, accord ing to Herodotus (viii. 27), adopted the same 'aisy stratagem/ as Captain Costigan has it. Tellies, the medicine- man (jidvTis), chalked some sixty Phocians, whom he sent to make a night attack on the Thessa- lians. The sentinels of the latter were seized with supernatural horror, and fled, * and after the sentinels went the army.' In the same way, in a night attack among the Australian Kurnai,1 'they all rapidly painted themselves with pipe-clay : red ochre is no use, it cannot frighten an enemy.' If, then, Greeks in the historic period kept up Australian tactics, it is probable that the ancient mysteries of Greece might retain the habit of daubing the initiated which occurs in savage rites.
' Come now/ as Herodotus would say, * I will show once more that the mysteries of the Greeks resemble those of Bushmen.' In Lucian's Treatise on Dancing,2 we read, ' I pass over the fact that you cannot find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing. .... To prove this I will not mention the secret acts of worship, on account of the uninitiated. But this much all men know, that most people say of those who reveal the mysteries, that they " dance them out." '
1 Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 214. - riept opx^°"e&>s5 c. 15.
42 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Here Liddell and Scott write, rather weakly, * to dance out, let out, betray, probably of some dance which burlesqued these ceremonies.' It is extremely im probable that, in an age when it was still forbidden to reveal the opjia, or secret rites, those rites would be mocked in popular burlesques. Lucian obviously intends to say that the matter of the mysteries was set forth in ballets a" action. Now this is exactly the case in the surviving mysteries of the Bushmen. Shortly after the rebellion of Langalibalele's tribe, Mr. Orpen, the chief magistrate in St. John's Territory, made the acquaintance of Qing, one of the last of an all but exterminated tribe. Qing ' had never seen a white man, except fighting,' when he became Mr. Orpen's guide. He gave a good deal of information about the myths of his people, but refused to answer certain questions. ' You are now asking the secrets that are not spoken of.' Mr. Orpen asked, (Do you know the secrets ? ' Qing replied, f No, only the initiated men of that dance know these things.' To ' dance ' this or that means, ' to be acquainted with this or that mystery ; ' the dances were originally taught by Cagn, the mantis, or grasshopper god. In many mysteries, Qing, as a young man, was not initiated. He could not ( dance them out.' 1
There are thus undeniably close resemblances between the Greek mysteries and those of the lowest contemporary races.
As to the bull-roarer, its recurrence among Greeks, Zunis, Kamilaroi, Maoris, and South African races would be regarded, by some students, as a proof that
1 Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874.
THE BULL-ROARER. 43
all these tribes had a common origin, or had borrowed the instrument from each other. But this theory is quite unnecessary. The bull-roarer is a very simple invention. Anyone might find out that a bit of sharpened wood, tied to a string, makes, when whirred, a roaring noise. Supposing that discovery made, it is soon turned to practical use. All tribes have their mysteries. All want a signal to summon the right persons together and warn the wrong persons to keep out of the way. The church bell does as much for us, so did the shaken seistron for the Egyptians. People with neither bells nor seistra find the bull- roarer, with its mysterious sound, serve their turn. The hiding of the instrument from women is natural enough. It merely makes the alarm and absence of the curious sex doubly sure. The stories of super natural consequences to follow if a woman sees the turndun lend a sanction. This is not a random theory, without basis. In Brazil, the natives have no bull- roarer, but they have mysteries, and the presence of the women at the mysteries of the men is a terrible impiety. To warn away the women, the Brazilians make loud ' devil-music ' on what are called 'jurupari pipes.' Now, just as in Australia, the women may not see the jurupari pipes on pain of death. When the sound of the jurupari pipes is heard, as when the turndun is heard in Australia, every woman flees and hides herself. The women are always executed if they see the pipes. Mr. Alfred Wallace bought a pair of these pipes, but he had to embark them at a distance from the village where they were procured. The seller was afraid that some unknown misfortune
44 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
would occur if the women of his village set eyes on the juruparis.1
The conclusion from all these facts seems obvious. The bull-roarer is an instrument easily invented by savages, and easily adopted into the ritual of savage mysteries. If we find the bull-roarer used in the mysteries of the most civilised of ancient peoples, the most probable explanation is, that the Greeks retained both the mysteries, the bull-roarer, the habit of bedaubing the initiate, the torturing of boys, the sacred obscenities, the antics with serpents, the dances, and the like, from the time when their ancestors were in the savage condition. That more refined and religious ideas were afterwards introduced into the mysteries seems certain, but the rites were, in many cases, simply savage. Unintelligible (except as sur vivals) when found among Hellenes, they become intelligible enough among savages, because they cor respond to the intellectual condition and magical fancies of the lower barbarism. The same sort of comparison, the same kind of explanation, will account, as we shall see, for the savage myths as well as for the savage customs which survived among the Greeks.
1 Wallace, Travels on the Amazon, p. 349.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS.
IN a Maori pah, when a little boy behaves rudely to his parents, he is sometimes warned that he is 'as bad as cruel Tutenganahau.' If he asks who Tuten ganahau was, he is told the following story :—
' In the beginning, the Heaven, Rangi, and the Earth, Papa, were the father and mother of all things. " In these days the Heaven lay upon the Earth, and all was darkness. They had never been separated." Heaven and Earth had children, who grew up and lived in this thick night, and they \vere unhappy because they could not see. Between the bodies of their parents they were imprisoned, and there was no light. The names of the children were Tumatuenga, Tane Mahuta, Tutenganahau, and some others. So they all consulted as to what should be done with their parents, Rangi and Papa. " Shall we slay them, or shall we separate them ? " " Go to," said Tumatuenga, "let us slay them." " No," cried Tane Mahuta, " let us rather separate them. Let one go upwards, and be come a stranger to us ; let the other remain below, and be a parent to u§." Only Tawhiri Matea (the wind) had pity on his own father and mother. Then
46 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
the fruit-gods, and the war-god, and the sea-god (for all the children of Papa and Rangi were gods) tried to rend their parents asunder. Last rose the forest- god, cruel Tutenganahau. He severed the sinews which united Heaven and Earth, Rangi and Papa. Then he pushed hard with his head and feet. Then wailed Heaven and exclaimed Earth, " Wherefore this murder ? Why this great sin ? Why destroy us ? Why separate us ? " But Tane pushed and pushed : Rangi was driven far away into the air. " They be came visible, who had hitherto been concealed between the hollows of their parents' breasts." Only the storm- god differed from his brethren : he arose and fol lowed his father, Rangi, and abode with him in the open spaces of the sky.'
This is the Maori story of the severing of the wedded Heaven and Earth. The cutting of them asunder was the work of Tutenganahau and his brethren, and the conduct of Tutenganahau is still held up as an example of filial impiety.1 The story is preserved in sacred hymns of very great antiquity, and many of the myths are common to the other peoples of the Pacific.2
Now let us turn from New Zealand to Athens, as she was in the days of Pericles. Socrates is sitting in the porch of the King Archon, when Euthyphro comes up and enters into conversation with the phi losopher. After some talk, Euthyphro says, ' You
1 New Zealand, Taylor, pp. 119-121. Die heilige Sage der Poly - nesier, Bastian, pp. 36-39.
2 A crowd of similar myths, in one of which a serpent severs Heaven and Earth, are printed in Turner's Samoa.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 4/
will think me mad when I tell you whom I am pro secuting and pursuing ! ' ' Why, has the fugitive wings ? ' asks Socrates. ' Nay, he is not very volatile at his time of life ! ' ' Who is he ? ' 'My father.' ' Good heavens ! you don't mean that. What is he accused of ? ' ' Murder, Socrates.' Then Euthyphro explains the case, which quaintly illustrates Greek civilisation. Euthyphro's father had an agricultural labourer at Naxos. One day this man, in a drunken passion, killed a slave. Euthyphro's father seized the labourer, bound him, threw him into a ditch, 'and then sent to Athens to ask a diviner what should be done with him.' Before the answer of the diviner arrived, the labourer literally ' died in a ditch ' of hunger and cold. For this offence, Euthyphro was prosecuting his own father. Socrates shows that he disapproves, and Euthyphro thus defends the piety of his own conduct : ' The impious, whoever he may be, ought not to go unpunished. For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most righteous of gods ? Yet even they admit that Zeus bound his own father Cronus, because he wickedly devoured his sons ; and that Cronus, too, had punished his own father, Ura nus, fora similar reason, in a nameless manner. And yet when / proceed against my father, people are angry with me. This is their inconsistent way of talking, when the gods are concerned, and when I am concerned.'
Here Socrates breaks in. He ' cannot away with these stories about the gods,' and so he has just been accused of impiety, the charge for which he died. Socrates cannot believe that a god, Cronus, mutilated
48 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
his father Uranus, but Euthyphro believes the whole~ affair : ' I can tell you many other things about the gods which would quite amaze you.' 1
We have here a typical example of the way in which mythology puzzled the early philosophers of Greece. Socrates was anxious to be pious, and to respect the most ancient traditions of the gods. Yet at the very outset of sacred history he was met by tales of gods who mutilated and bound their own parents. Not only were such tales hateful to him, but they were of positively evil example to people like Euthyphro. The problem remained, how did the fathers of the Athenians ever come to tell such myths ?
Let us now examine the myth of Cronus, and the explanations which have been given by scholars. Near the beginning of things, according to Hesiod (whose cosmogony was accepted in Greece), Earth gave birth to Heaven. Later, Heaven, Uranus, be came the husband of Gsea, Earth. Just as Rangi and Papa, in New Zealand, had many children, so had Uranus and Gaea. As in New Zealand, some of these children were gods of the various elements. Among them were Oceanus, the deep, and Hyperion, the sun — as among the children of Earth and Heaven, in New Zealand, were the Wind and the Sea. The youngest child of the Greek Heaven and Earth was 1 Cronus of crooked counsel, who ever hated his mighty sire.' Now even as the children of the Maori
1 The translation used is Jowett's.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 49
Heaven and Earth were ' concealed between the hollows of their parents' breasts/ so the Greek Heaven used to ' hide his children from the light in the hollows of Earth.' Both Earth and her children resented this, and, as in New Zealand, the children conspired against Heaven, taking Earth, however, into their counsels. Thereupon Earth produced iron, and bade her children avenge their wrongs.1 Now fear fell on all of them, except Cronus, who, like Tutenganahau, was all for action. Cronus determined to end the embraces of Heaven and Earth. But, while the Maori myth con ceives of Heaven and Earth as of two beings which have never been separated before, Hesiod makes Heaven amorously approach his wife from a distance. Then Cronus stretched out his hand, armed with a sickle of iron, or steel, and mutilated Uranus. Thus were Heaven and Earth practically divorced. But as in the Maori myth one of the children of Heaven clave to his sire, so, in Greek, Oceanus remained faithful to his father.2
This is the first portion of the Myth of Cronus. Can it be denied that the story is well illustrated and explained by the New Zealand parallel, the myth of the cruelty of Tutenganahau ? By means of this com parison, the meaning of the myth is made clear enough. Just as the New Zealanders had conceived of Heaven and Earth as at one time united, to the prejudice of their children, so. the ancestors of the Greeks had believed in an ancient union of Heaven and Earth. Both by Greeks and Maoris, Heaven and Earth were thought of as living persons, with human parts and 1 Theog., 166. 2 Apollodorus, i. 15.
3*
5<D CUSTOM AND MYTH.
passions. Their union was prejudicial to their children, and so the children violently separated the parents. This conduct is regarded as impious, and as an awful example to be avoided, in Maori pahs. In Naxos, on the other hand, Euthyphro deemed that the con duct of Cronus deserved imitation. If ever the Maoris had reached a high civilisation, they would probably have been revolted, like Socrates, by the myth which survived from their period of savagery. Mr. Tylor well says,1 ' Just as the adzes of polished jade, and the cloaks of tied flax-fibre, which these New Zealanders were using but yesterday, are older in their place in history than the bronze battle-axes and linen mummy- cloths of ancient Egypt, so the Maori poet's shaping of nature into nature-myth belongs to a stage of in tellectual history which was passing away in Greece five-and-twenty centuries ago. The myth-maker's fancy of Heaven and Earth as father and mother of all things naturally suggested the legend that they in old days abode together, but have since been torn asunder.'
That this view of Heaven and Earth is natural to early minds, Mr. Tylor proves by the presence of the myth of the union and violent divorce of the pair in China.2 Puang-ku is the Chinese Cronus, or Tuten- ganahau. In India,3 Dyaus and Prithivi, Heaven and Earth, were once united, and were severed by Indra, their own child.
1 Primitive Culture, i. 325.
^ Pauthier, Livres sacres de V Orient, p. 19.
3 Muir's Sanskrit Texts, v. 23. Aitareya Brahmana.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 51
This, then, is our interpretation of the exploit of Cronus. It is an old surviving nature-myth of the sever ance of Heaven and Earth, a myth found in China, India, New Zealand, as well as in Greece. Of course it is not pretended that Chinese and Maoris borrowed from Indians and Greeks, or came originally of the same stock. Similar phenomena, presenting them selves to be explained by human minds in a similar stage of fancy and of ignorance, will account for the parallel myths.
The second part of the myth of Cronus was, like the first, a stumbling-block to the orthodox in Greece. Of the second part we offer no explanation beyond the fact that the incidents in the myth are almost universally found among savages, and that, therefore, in Greece they are probably survivals from savagery. The sequel of the myth appears to ac count for nothing, as the first part accounts for the severance of Heaven and Earth. In the sequel a world-wide Marchent or tale, seems to have been attached to Cronus, or attracted into the cycle of which he is centre, without any particular reason, beyond the law which makes detached myths crystal lise round any celebrated name. To look further is, perhaps, chercher raison ou il riy en a pas.
The conclusion of the story of Cronus runs thus : — He wedded his sister, Rhea, and begat children — Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and, lastly, Zeus. 'And mighty Cronus swallowed down each of them, each that came to their mother's knees from her holy womb, with this intent, that none other of the proud children of Uranus should hold kingly sway among
52 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
the Immortals.' Cronus showed a ruling father's usual jealousy of his heirs. It was a case of Friedrich Wilhelm and Friedrich. But Cronus (acting in a way natural in a story perhaps first invented by cannibals) swallowed his children instead of merely imprisoning them. Heaven and Earth had warned him to beware of his heirs, and he could think of no safer plan than that which he adopted. When Rhea was about to become the mother of Zeus, she fled to Crete. Here Zeus was born, and when Cronus (in pursuit of his usual policy) asked for the baby, he was presented with a stone wrapped up in swaddling bands. After swallowing the stone, Cronus was easy in his mind ; but Zeus grew up, administered a dose to his father, and compelled him to disgorge. ' The stone came forth first, as he had swallowed it last.' ] The other children also emerged, all alive and well. Zeus fixed the stone at Delphi, where, long after the Christian era, Pausanias saw it.2 It was not a large stone, Pausanias tells us, and the Delphians used to anoint it with oil and wrap it up in wool on feast-days All Greek temples had their fetich-stones, and each stone had its legend. This was the story of the Delphian stone, and of the fetichism which survived the early years of Christianity. A very pretty story it is. Savages more frequently smear their fetich- stones with red paint than daub them with oil, but the latter, as we learn from Theophrastus's account of the ' superstitious man,' was the Greek ritual.
This anecdote about Cronus was the stumbling-
1 Hesiod, Theog., 497. 2 Paus. x. 24.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 53
block of the orthodox Greek, the jest of the sceptic, and the butt of the early Christian controversialists. Found among Bushmen or Australians the narrative might seem rather wild, but it astonishes us still more when it occurs in the holy legends of Greece. Our explanation of its presence there is simple enough. Like the erratic blocks in a modern plain, like the flint-heads in a meadow, the story is a relic of a very distant past. The glacial age left the boulders on the plain, the savage tribes of long ago left the arrow heads, the period of savage fancy left the story of Cronus and the rites of the fetich-stone. Similar rites are still notoriously practised in the South Sea Islands, in Siberia, in India and Africa and Mela nesia, by savages. And by savages similar tales are still told.
We cannot go much lower than the Bushmen, and among Bushman divine myths is room for the * swal lowing trick ' attributed to Cronus by Hesiod. The chief divine character in Bushman myth is the Mantis insect. His adopted daughter is the child of Kwai Hemm, a supernatural character, 'the all-devourer.' The Mantis gets his adopted daughter to call the swallower to his aid ; but Kwai Hemm swallows the Mantis, the god-insect. As Zeus made his own wife change herself into an insect, for the convenience of swallowing her, there is not much difference between Bushman and early Greek mythology. Kwai Hemm is killed by a stratagem, and all the animals whom he has got outside of, in a long and voracious career, troop forth from him alive and well, like the swallowed
54 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
gods from the maw of Cronus.1 Now, story for story, the Bushman version is much less offensive than that of Hesiod. But the Bushman story is just the sort of story we expect from Bushmen, whereas the Hesiodic story is not at all the kind of tale we look for from Greeks. The explanation is, that the Greeks had advanced out of a savage state of mind and society, but had retained their old myths, myths evolved in the savage stage, and in harmony with that condition of fancy. Among the Kaffirs 2 we find the same ' swallow-myth.' The Igongqongqo swal lows all and sundry ; a woman cuts the swallower with a knife, and * people came out, and cattle, and dogs.' In Australia, a god is swallowed. As in the myth preserved by Aristophanes in the ' Birds,' the Austra lians believe that birds were the original gods, and the eagle, especially, is a great creative power. The Moon was a mischievous being, who walked about the world, doing what evil he could. One day he swallowed the eagle-god. The wives of the eagle came up, and the Moon asked them where he might find a well. They pointed out a well, and, as he drank, they hit the Moon with a stone tomahawk, and out flew the eagle.3 This is oddly like Grimm's tale of ' The Wolf and the Kids.' The wolf swallowed the kids, their mother cut a hole in the wolf, let out the kids, stuffed the wolf with stones, and sewed him up again. The wolf went to the well to drink, the weight of the stones pulled him in, and he was
1 Bleek, Bushman Folklore, pp. 6-8.
2 Theal, Kaffir Folklore, pp. 161-167.
3 Brough Smith, i. 432-433.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 55
drowned. Similar stories are common among the Red Indians, and Mr. Im Thurn has found them in Guiana. How savages all over the world got the idea that men and beasts could be swallowed and disgorged alive, and why they fashioned the idea into a divine myth, it is hard to say. Mr. Tylor, in
* Primitive Culture,' l adds many examples of the narrative. The Basutos have it ; it occurs some five times in Callaway's 'Zulu Nursery Tales.' In Green land the Eskimo have a shape of the incident, and we have all heard of the escape of Jonah.
It has been suggested that night, covering up the world, gave the first idea of the swallowing myth. Now in some of the stories the night is obviously conceived of as a big beast which swallows all things. The notion that night is an animal is entirely in har mony with savage metaphysics. In the opinion of the savage speculator, all things are men and animals.
* Us se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees,' says one of the old Jesuit mis sionaries in Canada.2 ' The wind was formerly a person ; he became a bird,' say the Bushmen.
G* oo ka! Kui (a very respectable Bushman, whose name seems a little hard to pronounce), once saw the wind-person at Haarfontein. Savages, then, are persuaded that night, sky, cloud, fire, and so forth, are only the sckein, or sensuous appearance, of things that, in essence, are men or animals. A good example is the bringing of Night to Vanua Lava, by Qat, the
* culture- hero ' of Melanesia. At first it was always
1 i. 338. 2 Rcl. de la Nouvelle- France (1636), p. 114.
56 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
day, and people tired of it. Qat heard that Night was at the Torres Islands, and he set forth to get some. Qong (Night) received Qat well, blackened his eye brows, showed him Sleep, and sent him off with fov/ls to bring Dawn after the arrival of Night should make Dawn a necessary. Next day Qat's brothers saw the sun crawl away west, and presently Night came creep ing up from the sea. ' What is this ? ' cried the brothers. 1 It is Night,' said Qat ; * sit down, and when you feel something in your eyes, lie down and keep quiet.' So they went to sleep. 'When Night had lasted long enough, Qat took a piece of red obsidian, and cut the darkness, and the Dawn came out.' '
Night is more or less personal in this tale, and solid enough to be cut, so as to let the Dawn out. This savage conception of night, as the swallower and disgorger, might start the notion of other swal lowing and disgorging beings. Again the Bushmen, and other savage peoples, account for certain celestial phenomena by saying that * a big star has swallowed his daughter, and spit her out again.' While natural phenomena, explained on savage principles, might give the data of the swallow-myth, we must not con clude that all beings to whom the story is attached are, therefore, the Night. On this principle Cronus would be the Night, and so would the wolf in Grimm.
1 Codrington, in Journal Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1881. There is a Breton Mdrchen of a land where people had to ' bring the Dawn ' daily with carts and horses. A boy, whose sole property was a cock, sold it to the people of this country for a large sum, and now the cock brings the dawn, with a great saving of trouble and ex pense. The Marchen is a survival of the state of mind of the Solomon Islanders.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 57
For our purposes it is enough that the feat of Cronus is a feat congenial to the savage fancy and repug nant to the civilised Greeks who found themselves in possession of the myth. Beyond this, and beyond the inference that the Cronus myth was first evolved by people to whom it seemed quite natural, that is, by savages, we do not pretend to go in our inter pretation.
To end our examination of the Myth of Cronus, we may compare the solutions offered by scholars. As a rule, these solutions are based on the philo logical analysis of the names in the story. It will be seen- that very various and absolutely inconsistent etymologies and meanings of Cronus are suggested by philologists of the highest authority. These con tradictions are, unfortunately, rather the rule than the exception in the etymological interpretation of myths.
The opinion of Mr. Max Miiller has always a right to the first hearing from English inquirers. Mr. Miiller, naturally, examines first the name of the god whose legend he is investigating. He writes : ' There is no such being as Kronos in Sanskrit. Kronos did not exist till long after Zeus in Greece. Zeus was called by the Greeks the son of Time (Kpoz'os'). This is a very simple and very common form of mythological expression. It meant originally, not that time was the origin or source of Zeus, but 'Kpovicov or KpovlSrjs was used in the sense of " con nected with time, representing time, existing through
58 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
all time." Derivatives in -icov and -iSrjs took, in later times, the more exclusive meaning of patronymics. . . . When this (the meaning of KpovlBrjs as equivalent to Ancient of Days) ceased to be understood, . . . people asked themselves the question, Why is Zsvs called KpoviSrjs ? And the natural and almost inevit able answer was, Because he is the son, the offspring of a more ancient god, Kpovos. This may be a very old myth in Greece ; but the misunderstanding which gave rise to it could have happened in Greece only. We cannot expect, therefore, a god Kpovos in the Veda.' To expect Greek in the Veda would certainly be sanguine. ' When this myth of Kpovos had once been started, it would roll on irresistibly. If Zsvs had once a father called Kpovos, Kpovos must have a wife.' It is added, as confirmation, that ' the name of KpovlBrjs belongs originally to Zeus only, and not to his later ' (in Hesiod elder) * brothers, Poseidon and Hades.' T
Mr. Mliller says, in his famous essay on ' Com parative Mythology ' 2 : ' How can we imagine that a few generations before that time ' (the age of Solon) ' the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were adequately expressed by the story of Uranos maimed by Kronos, — of Kronos eating his children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive his whole progeny. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America, we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.' We have found a good deal of the sort in Africa and America, where it seems not out of place.
1 Selected Essays,, i. 460. 2 Ibid. i. 311.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 59
One objection to Mr. M tiller's theory is, that it makes the mystery no clearer. When Greeks were so advanced in Hellenism that their own early lan guage had become obsolete and obscure, they invented the god Kpovos, to account for the patronymic (as they deemed it) KpoviSrjs, son of Kpovos. But why did they tell such savage and revolting stories about the god they had invented ? Mr. M tiller only says the myth ' would roll on irresistibly.' But why did the rolling myth gather such very strange moss ? That is the problem ; and, while Mr. Mtiller's hypo thesis accounts for the existence of a god called Kpovos, it does not even attempt to show how full blown Greeks came to believe such hideous stories about the god.
This theory, therefore, is of no practical service. The theory of Adalbert Kuhn, one of the most famous of Sanskrit scholars, and author of ' Die Herabkunft des Feuers,' is directly opposed to the ideas of Mr Mtiller. In Cronus, Mr. Mtiller recognises a god who could only have come into being among Greeks, when the Greeks had begun to forget the original meaning of 'derivatives in -iwv and -ifys.' Kuhn, on the other hand, derives Kpovos from the same root as the Sanskrit Krana.1 Krdna means, it appears, der fur sick sckaffende, he who creates for himself, and Cronus is compared to the Indian Pragapati, about whom even more abominable stories are told than the myths which circulate to the pre judice of Cronus. According to Kuhn, the ' swallow-
1 Ueber Entivickhmgsstttfen der Mythenbildung (1%*]^}, p. 148.
6O CUSTOM AND MYTH.
myth ' means that Cronus, the lord of light and dark powers, swallows the divinities of light. But in place of Zeus (that is, according to Kuhn, of the daylight sky) he swallows a stone, that is, the sun. When he disgorges the stone (the sun), he also disgorges the gods of light whom he had swallowed.
I confess that I cannot understand these distinc tions between the father and lord of light and dark (Cronus) and the beings he swallowed. Nor do I find it easy to believe that myth-making man took all those distinctions, or held those views of the Creator. However, the chief thing to note is that Mr. Muller's etymology and Kuhn's etymology of Cronus can hardly both be true, \vhich, as their systems both depend on etymological analysis, is somewhat discomfiting.
The next etymological theory is the daring speculation of Mr. Brown. In * The Great Dionysiak Myth'1 Mr. Brown writes: 'I regard Kronos as the equivalent of Karnos, Karnaios, Karnaivis, the Horned God ; Assyrian, KaRNu ; Hebrew, KeReN, horn ; Hellenic, KRoNos, or KaRNos.' Mr. Brown seems to think that Cronus is 'the ripening power of harvest/ and also 'a wily savage god,' in which opinion one quite agrees with him. Why the name of Cronus should mean 'horned,' when he is never re presented with horns, it is hard to say. But among the various foreign gods in whom the Greeks recog nised their own Cronus, one Hea, ' regarded by Berosos as Kronos,' seems to have been ' horn- wearing.' 2 Horns are lacking in Seb and II, if not 1 ii. 127, 2 G. D. M., ii. 127, 129.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 6 1
in Baal Hamon, though Mr. Brown would like to behorn them.
Let us now turn to Preller.1 According to Preller, Kpovos is connected with icpaivco, to fulfil, to bring to completion. The harvest month, the month of ripening and fulfilment, was called Kpoviwv in some parts of Greece, and the jolly harvest-feast, with its memory of Saturn's golden days, was named Kpbvia. The sickle of Cronus, the sickle of harvest- time, works in well with this explanation, and we have a kind of pun in Homer which points in the direction of Preller's derivation from /cpaivco : —
ov (pa 7T<o 01 CTreKpcuau/e
and in Sophocles ('Tr.' 126) —
6 TTCU TO, KpaiVcov /?acnAeu5
Preller illustrates the mutilation of Uranus by the Maori tale of Tutenganahau. The child- swallow ing he connects with Punic and Phoenician influence, and Semitic sacrifices of men and children. Por phyry2 speaks of human sacrifices to Cronus in Rhodes, and the Greeks recognised Cronus in the Carthaginian god to whom children were offered up.
Hartung3 takes Cronus, when he mutilates Uranus, to be the fire of the sun, scorching the sky of spring. This, again, is somewhat out of accord with Schwartz's idea, that Cronus is the storm-god, the cloud-swallowing deity, his sickle the rainbow, and the blood of Uranus the lightning.4 According
1 Gr. My.t'\. 144.
- De Abst.t ii. 202, 197. 3 Rel. und Myth., ii. 3.
« Ursprung der Myth.) pp. 133, 135, 139, 149.
62 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
to Prof. Sayce, again,1 the blood-drops of Uranus are rain-drops. Cronus is the sun-god, piercing the dark cloud, which is just the reverse of Schwartz's idea. Prof. Sayce sees points in common between the legend of Moloch, or of Baal under the name of Moloch, and the myth of Cronus. But Moloch, he thinks, is not a god of Phoenician origin, but a deity borrowed from * the primitive Accadian population of Babylonia.' Mr. Isaac Taylor, again, explains Cronus as the sky which swallows and reproduces the stars. The story of the sickle may be derived from the crescent moon, the ' silver sickle/ or from a crescent-shaped piece of meteoric iron — for, in this theory, the fetich-stone of Delphi is a piece of that substance.
It will be observed that any one of these theories, if accepted, is much more ' minute in detail ' than our humble suggestion. He who adopts any one of them, knows all about it. He knows that Cronus is a purely Greek god, or that he is connected with the Sanskrit Krana^ which Tiele,2 unhappily, says is 'a very dubious word.' Or the mythologist may be quite confident that Cronus is neither Greek nor, in any sense, Sanskrit, but Phoenician. A not less adequate interpretation assigns him ultimately to Accadia. While the inquirer who can choose a system and stick to it knows the exact nationality of Cronus, he is also well acquainted with his character as a nature- god. He may be Time, or perhaps he is the Summer Heat, and a horned god ; or he is the harvest-god, or
1 Contemporary Review, Sept. 1883. " Rev. deVHist. reL i. 179.
THE MYTH OF CRONUS. 63
the god of storm and darkness, or the midnight sky, — the choice is wide ; or he is the lord of dark and light, and his children are the stars, the clouds, the summer months, the light-powers, or what you will. The mythologist has only to make his selection.
The system according to which we tried to inter pret the myth is less ondoyant et divers. We do not even pretend to explain everything. We do not guess at the meaning and root of the word Cronus. We only find parallels to the myth among savages, whose mental condition is fertile in such legends. And we only infer that the myth of Cronus was originally evolved by persons also in the savage intel lectual condition. The survival we explain as, in a previous essay, we explained the survival of the bull- roarer by the conservatism of the religious instinct.
64 CUSTOM AND MYTH,
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE 'SUN-FROG:
' ONCE upon a time there lived a king and a queen,' says the old woman in Apuleius, beginning the tale of Cupid and Psyche with that ancient formula which has been dear to so many generations of children. In one shape or other the tale of Cupid and Psyche, of the woman who is forbidden to see or to name her hus band, of the man with the vanished fairy bride,is known in most lands, ( even among barbarians.' According to the story the mystic prohibition is always broken : the hidden face is beheld ; light is brought into the darkness ; the forbidden name is uttered ; the bride is touched with the tabooed metal, iron, and the union is ended. Sometimes the pair are re-united, after long searchings and wanderings ; sometimes they are severed for ever. Such are the central situations in tales like that of Cupid and Psyche.
In the attempt to discover how the ideas on which this myth is based came into existence, we may choose one of two methods. We may confine our investigations to the Aryan peoples, among whom the story occurs both in the form of myth and of household tale. Again, we may look for the shapes of the legend which hide like Peau d'Ane in disguise,
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG.' 65
among the rude kraals and wigwams, and in the strange and scanty garb of savages. If among savages we find both narratives like Cupid and Psyche, and also customs and laws out of which the myth might have arisen, we may provisionally conclude that similar customs once existed among the civilised races who possess the tale, and that from these sprang the early forms of the myth.
In accordance with the method hitherto adopted we shall prefer the second plan, and pursue our quest beyond the limits of the Aryan peoples.
The oldest literary shape of the tale of Psyche and her lover is found in the Rig Veda (x. 95). The characters of a singular and cynical dialogue in that poem are named Urvasi and Pururavas. The former is an Apsaras, a kind of fairy or sylph, the mistress (and a folle maitresse, too) of Pururavas, a mortal man.1 In the poem Urvasi remarks that when she dwelt among men she ' ate once a day a small piece of butter, and therewith well satisfied went away.' This slightly reminds one of the common idea that the living may not eat in the land of the dead, and of Persephone's tasting the pome granate in Hades.
Of the dialogue in the Rig Veda it may be said, in the words of Mr. Toots, that ' the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure.' We only gather that Urvasi, though she admits her sensual content in the society of Pururavas, is leaving him ( like the
1 That Pururavas is regarded as a mortal man, in relations with some sort of spiritual mistress, appears from the poem itself (v. 8, 9, 18). The human character of Pururavas also appears in R. V. i. 31, 4.
66 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
first of the dawns ' ; that she ' goes home again, hard to be caught, like the winds.' She gives her lover some hope, however — that the gods promise immor tality even to him, ' the kinsman of Death ' as he is. ' Let thine offspring worship the gods with an obla tion ; in Heaven shalt thou too have joy of the festival.'
In the Rig Veda, then, we dimly discern a part ing between a mortal man and an immortal bride, and a promise of reconciliation.
The story, of which this Vedic poem is a partial dramatisation, is given in the Brahmana of the Yajur Veda. Mr. Max Miiller has translated the passage.1 According to the Brahmana, ' Urvasi, a kind of fairy, fell in love with Pururavas, and when she met him she said : Embrace me three times a day, but never against my will, and let me never see you without your royal garments, for this is the manner of women? 2 The Gandharvas, a spiritual race, kinsmen of Urvasi, thought she had lingered too long among men. They therefore plotted some way of parting her from Puru ravas. Her covenant with her lord declared that she was never to see him naked. If that compact were broken she would be compelled to leave him. To make Pururavas break this compact the Gandharvas stole a lamb from beside Urvasi's bed : Pururavas sprang up to rescue the lamb, and, in a flash of light-
1 Selected Essays, i. 408.
2 The Apsaras is an ideally beautiful fairy woman, something * between the high gods and the lower grotesque beings,' with 'lotus eyes ' and other agreeable characteristics. A list of Apsaras known by name is given in Meyer's Gandharven-Kentauren> p. 28. They are often regarded as cloud-maidens by mythologists.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG/ 67
ning, Urvasi saw him naked, contrary to the manner of women. She vanished. He sought her long, and at last came to a lake where she and her fairy friends were playing in the shape of birds. Urvasi saw Puru- ravas, revealed herself to him, and, according to the Brahmana, part of the strange Vedic dialogue was now spoken. Urvasi promised to meet him on the last night of the year : a son was to be the result of the interview. Next day, herkins folk, the Gand- harvas, offered Pururavas the wish of his heart. He wished to be one of them. They then initiated him into the mode of kindling a certain sacred fire, after which he became immortal and dwelt among the Gandharvas.
It is highly characteristic of the Indian mind that the story should be thus worked into connection with ritual. In the same way the Bhagavata Purana has a long, silly, and rather obscene narrative about the sacrifice offered by Pururavas, and the new kind of sacred fire. Much the same ritual tale is found in the Vishnu Purana (iv. 6, 19).
Before attempting to offer our own theory of the legend, we must examine the explanations presented by scholars. The philological method of dealing with myfhs is well known. The hypothesis is that the names in a myth are ' stubborn things,' and that, as the whole narrative has probably arisen from forgetfulness of the meaning of language, the secret of a myth must be sought in analysis of the proper names of the persons. On this principle Mr. Max Miiller interprets the myth of Urvasi and Pururavas, their loves, separation, and reunion. Mr. Miiller says that
68 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
the story ' expresses the identity of the morning dawn and the evening twilight.' 1 To prove this, the names are analysed. It is Mr. M tiller's object to show that though, even in the Veda, Urvasi and Pururavas are names of persons, they were originally ' appellations ' ; and that Urvasi meant ' dawn,' and Pururavas ' sun.' Mr. Muller's .opinion as to the etymological sense of the names would be thought decisive, naturally, by lay readers, if an opposite opinion were not held by that other great philologist and comparative mythologist, Adalbert Kuhn. Admitting that * the etymology of Urvasi is difficult,' Mr. M tiller derives it from ' uru, wide (evpv), and a root as = to pervade.' Now the dawn is ' widely pervading,' and has, in Sanskrit, the epithet uru/^i, 'far- going.' Mr. Miiller next assumes that ' Eurykyde,' ' Eurynome,' ' Eurydike,' and other heroic Greek female names, are ' names of the dawn ' ; but this, it must be said, is merely an assumption of his school. The main point of the argument is that Urvasi means ' far-going,' and that * the far and wide splendour of dawn ' is often spoken of in the Veda. ' However, the best proof that Urvasi was the dawn is the legend told of her and of her love to Pururavas, a story that is true only of the sun and the dawn ' (i. 407).
We shall presently see that a similar story is told of persons in whom the dawn can scarcely be recognised, so that 'the best proof is not very good.
The name of Pururavas, again, is ' an appropriate name for a solar hero.' . . . Pururavas meant the same as HoXvSsv/cTjs, ' endowed with much light,' for,
1 Selected Essays, i. p. 405.
CUPID, TSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG.' 69
though rava is generally used of sound, yet the root rut which means originally * to cry,' is also applied to colour, in the sense of a loud or crying colour, that is, red.1 Violet also, according to Sir G. W. Cox,2 is a loud or crying colour. * The word (ios), as applied to colour, is traced by Professor Max Miiller to the root iy as denoting a " crying hue," that is, a loud colour.' It is interesting to learn that our Aryan fathers spoke of ' loud colours,' and were so sensi tive as to think violet ' loud.' Besides, Pururavas calls himself Vasistha, which, as we know, is a name of the sun ; and if he is called Aido, the son of Ida, the same name is elsewhere given 3 to Agni, the fire.
* The conclusion of the argument is that antiquity spoke of the naked sun, and of the chaste dawn hiding her face when she had seen her husband. Yet she says she will come again. And after the sun has travelled through the world in search of his beloved, when he comes to the threshold of Death and is going to end his solitary life, she appears again, in the gloaming, the same as the dawn, as Eos in Homer, begins and ends the day, and she carries him away to the golden seats of the Immortals.'4
Kuhn objects to all this explanation, partly on what we think the inadequate ground that there is no necessary connection between the story of Urvasi (thus interpreted) and the ritual of sacred fire-
1 Cf. rubcr, nfftts, O. H. G. rfit, rudhira, fpvOpos ; also Sanskrit, ravt, sun.
2 Myth. Ar. Nat., ii. 81. 3 R. V. iii. 29, 3.
4 The passage alluded to in Homer does not mean that dawn
* ends ' the day, but ' when the fair-tressed Dawn brought the full light of the third day ' (Od. v. 390).
70 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
lighting. Connections of that sort were easily in vented at random by the compilers of the Brahmanas in their existing form. Coming to the analysis of names, Kuhn finds in Urvasi 'a weakening of Urvanki (uru + cine), like yuvaqa from yuvanka, Latin juvencus .... the accent is of no decisive weight.' Kuhn will not be convinced that Pururavas is the sun, and is unmoved by the ingenious theory of * a crying colour,' denoted by his name, and the inference, supported by such words as rufus, that crying colours are red, and therefore appropriate names of the red sun The connection between Pururavas and Agni, fire, is what appeals to Kuhn — and, in short, where Mr. Miiller sees a myth of sun and dawn, Kuhn recognises a fire-myth. Roth, again (whose own name means red), far from thinking that Urvasi is * the chaste dawn,' interprets her name as die geile, that is, ' lecherous, lascivious, lewd, wanton, obscene ' ; while Pururavas, as ' the Roarer,' suggests ' the Bull in rut' In accordance with these views Roth explains the myth in a fashion of his own.1
Here, then, as Kuhn says, ' we have three essentially different modes of interpreting the myth,' 2 all three founded on philological analysis of the names in the story. No better example could be given to illustrate the weakness of the philological method. In the first place, that method relies on names as the primitive relics and germs of the tale, although the tale may occur where the names have never been
1 Liebrecht {Zur Volkskiinde, 241) is reminded by Pururavas (in Roth's sense older Br tiller) of loud-thundering Zeus,
2 Herabknnft des Fetters, p. 86-89.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG.' 71
heard, and though the names are, presumably, late additions to a story in which the characters were originally anonymous. Again, the most illustrious etymologists differ absolutely about the true sense of the names. Kuhn sees fire everywhere, and fire- myths ; Mr. Mu'ller sees dawn and dawn-myths ; Schwartz sees storm and storm-myths, and so on. As the orthodox teachers are thus at variance, so that there is no safety in orthodoxy, we may attempt to use our heterodox method.
None of the three scholars whose views we have glanced at — neither Roth, Kuhn, nor Mr. Miiller — lays stress on the saying of Urvasi, ' never let me see you without your royal garments, for this is the custom of women' 1 To our mind, these words contain the gist of the myth. There must have been, at some time, a custom which forbade women to see their husbands without their garments, or the words have no mean ing. If any custom of this kind existed, a story might well be evolved to give a sanction to the law. * You must never see your husband naked : think what happened to Urvasi— she vanished clean away ! ' This is the kind of warning which might be given. If the customary prohibition had grown obsolete, the punishment might well be assigned to a being of another, a spiritual, race, in which old human ideas lingered, as the neolithic dread of iron lingers in the Welsh fairies.
1 Liebreclit (Zur Volkskunde, p. 241) notices the reference to the 'custom of women.' But he thinks the clause a mere makeshift, introduced late to account for a prohibition of which the real meaning had been forgotten. The improbability of this view is indicated by the frequency of similar prohibitions in actual custom.
72 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Our method will be, to prove the existence of singular rules of etiquette, corresponding to the etiquette accidentally infringed by Pururavas. We shall then investigate stories of the same character as that of Urvasi and Pururavas, in which the infringe ment of the etiquette is chastised. It will be seen that, in most cases, the bride is of a peculiar and per haps supernatural race. Finally, the tale of Urvasi will be taken up again, will be shown to conform in character to the other stories examined, and will be explained as a myth told to illustrate, or sanction, a nuptial etiquette.
The lives of savages are bound by the most closely-woven fetters of custom. The simplest acts are ' tabooed,' a strict code regulates all intercourse. Married life, especially, moves in the strangest fetters. There will be nothing remarkable in the wide dis tribution of a myth turning on nuptial etiquette, if this law of nuptial etiquette proves to be also widely distributed. That it is widely distributed we now propose to demonstrate by examples.
The custom of the African people of the kingdom of Futa is, or was, even stricter than the Vedic custom of women — 'wives never permit their husbands to* see them unveiled for three years after their marriage.' l
In his * Travels to Timbuctoo ' (i. 94), Caillie says that the bridegroom ' is not allowed to see his
1 Astley, Collection of Voyages, ii. 24. This is given by Bluet and Moore on the evidence of one Job Ben Solomon, a native of Bunda in Futa. ' Though Job had a daughter by his last wife, yet he never saw her without her veil, as having been married to her only two years.' Excellently as this prohibition suits my theory, yet I confess I do not like Job's security.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG.' 73
intended during the day.' He has a tabooed hut apart, and ' if he is obliged to come out he covers his face/ He * remains with his wife only till daybreak ' —like Cupid- and flees, like Cupid, before the light. Among the Australians the chief deity, if deity such a being can be called, Pundjel, ' has a wife whose face he has never seen,' probably in compliance with some primaeval etiquette or taboo.1
Among the Yorubas 'conventional modesty for bids a woman to speak to her husband, or even to see him, if it can be avoided.' 2 Of the Iroquois Lafitau says : ' Us n'osent aller dans les cabanes par- ticulieres ou habitent leurs epouses que durant 1'obscurite de la nuit.' 3 The Circassian women live on distant terms with their lords till they become mothers.4 Similar examples of reserve are reported to be customary among the Fijians.
In backward parts of Europe a strange custom forbids the bride to speak to her lord, as if in memory of a time when husband and wife were always of alien tribes, and, as among the Caribs, spoke different languages.
In the Bulgarian l Volkslied,' the Sun marries Grozdanka, a mortal girl. Her mother addresses her thus :—
Grozdanka, mother's treasure mine, For nine long years I nourished thee, For nine months see thou do not speak To thy first love that marries thee.
1 Brough Smyth, i. 423. 2 Bowen, Central Africa, p. 303.
3 Lafitau, i. 576.
4 Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation (1875), P- 75-
4*
74 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
M. Dozon, who has collected the Bulgarian songs, says that this custom of prolonged silence on the part of the bride is very common in Bulgaria, though it is beginning to yield to a sense of the ludicrous.1 In Sparta and in Crete, as is well known, the bridegroom was long the victim of a somewhat similar taboo, and was only permitted to seek the company of his wife secretly, and in the dark, like the Iroquois described by Lafitau.
Herodotus tells us (i. 146) that some of the old Ionian colonists ' brought no women with them, but took wives of the women of the Carians, whose fathers they had slain. Therefore the women made a law for themselves, and handed it down to their daughters, that they should never sit at meat with their husbands, and that none should ever call her husband by his name' In precisely the same way, in Zululand the wife may not mention her husband's name, just as in the Welsh fairy tale the husband may not even know the name of his fairy bride, on pain of losing her for ever. These ideas about names, and freakish ways of avoiding the use of names, mark the childhood of languages, according to Mr. Max Muller,2 and, therefore, the childhood of Society. The Kaffirs call this etiquette ' Hlonipa.' It applies to women as well as men. A Kaffir bride is not called by her own name in her husband's village, but is spoken of as ' mother of so and so,' even before she has borne a child. The universal superstition about names is at the bottom of this custom. The
1 Chansons Pop. Bulg., p. 172.
2 Lect-ires on Language, Second Series, p. 41.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG.' 75
Aleutian Islanders, according to Dall, are quite dis tressed when obliged to speak to their wives in the presence of others. The Fijians did not know where to look when missionaries hinted that a man might live under the same roof as his wife.1 Among the Turkomans, for six months, a year, or two years, a husband is only allowed to visit his wife by stealth.
The number of these instances could probably be increased by a little research. Our argument is that the widely distributed myths in which a husband or a wife transgresses some * custom ' — sees the other's face or body, or utters the forbidden name — might well have arisen as tales illustrating the punishment of breaking the rule. By a very curious coincidence, a Breton sailor's tale of the ' Cupid and Psyche ' class is confessedly founded on the existence of the rule of nuptial etiquette.2
In this story the son of a Boulogne pilot marries the daughter of the King of Naz — wherever that may be. In Naz a man is never allowed to see the face of his wife till she has borne him a child — a modifi cation of the Futa rule. The inquisitive French husband unveils his wife, and, like Psyche in Apu- leius, drops wax from a candle on her cheek. When the pair return to Naz, the king of that country discovers the offence of the husband, and, by the aid of his magicians, transforms the Frenchman into a monster. Here we have the old formula — the in fringement of a ' taboo,' and the magical punishment — adapted to the ideas of Breton peasantry. The
1 J. A. Fairer, Primitive Manners, p. 202, quoting Seemann.
2 Sebillot, Contes Pop. de la Haute- Bretagne, p. 183.
76 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
essential point of the story, for our purpose, is that the veiling of the bride is ' the custom of women/ in the mysterious land of Naz. ' C'est 1'usage du pays : les maris ne voient leurs femmes sans voile que lorsqu'elles sont devenues meres.' Now our theory of the myth of Urvasi is simply this : ' the custom of women,' which Pururavas transgresses, is probably a traditional Aryan law of nuptial etiquette, V usage du pays, once prevalent among the people of India.
If our view be correct, then several rules of etiquette, and not one alone, will be illustrated in the stories which we suppose the rules to have suggested. In the case of Urvasi and Pururavas, the rule was, not to see the husband naked. In ' Cupid and Psyche,' the husband was not to be looked upon at all. In the well-known myth of Melusine, the bride is not to be seen naked. Melusine tells her lover that she will only abide with him dum ipsam nudam non viderit.1 The same taboo occurs in a Dutch Mdrchen?
We have now to examine a singular form of the myth, in which the strange bride is not a fairy, or spiritual being, but an animal. In this class of story the husband is usually forbidden to perform some act which will recall to the bride the associations of her old animal existence. The converse of the tale is the well-known legend of the Forsaken Merman. The king of the sea permits his human wife to go to church. The ancient sacred associations are revived, and the woman returns no more.
She will not come though you call all day Come away, come away. 1 Gervase of Tilbury. 2 Kuhn, Hcrabkunft, p. 92.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG/ 77
Now, in the tales of the animal bride, it is her associatiohs with her former life among the beasts that are not to be revived, and when they are re awakened by the commission of some act which she has forbidden, or the neglect of some precaution which she has enjoined, she, like Urvasi, disappears.
The best known example of this variant of the tale is the story of Bheki, in Sanskrit. Mr. Max Miiller has interpreted the myth in accordance with his own method.1 His difficulty is to account for the belief that a king might marry a frog. Our ancestors, he remarks, * were not idiots,' how then could they tell such a story ? We might reply that our ancestors, if we go far enough back, were savages, and that such stories are the staple of savage myth. Mr. Miiller, however, holds that an accidental corrup tion of language reduced Aryan fancy to the savage level. He explains the corruption thus : ' We find, in Sanskrit, that Bheki, the frog, was a beautiful girl, and that one day, when sitting near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked her to be his wife. She consented, on condition tJiat he shvuld never show her a drop of water. One day, being tired, she asked the king for water ; the king forgot his promise, brought water, and Bheki disappeared. \ This myth, Mr. Miiller holds, ' began with a short saying, such as that " Bheki, the sun, will die at the sight of water," as we should say that the sun will set, when it approaches the water from which it rose in the morning.' But how did the sun come to be called
1 Chips, ii. 251.
7 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Bheki, ' the frog ' ? Mr. Miiller supposes that this name was given to the sun by some poet or fisherman. He gives no evidence for the following statement : 1 It can be shown that " frog " was used as a name for the sun. Now at sunrise and sunset, when the sun was squatting on the water, it was called the " frog." ' At what historical period the Sanskrit-speaking race was settled in seats where the sun rose and set in water, we do not know, and * chapter and verse ' are needed for the statement that * frog ' was actually a name of the sun. Mr. Muller's argument, however, is that the sun was called ' the frog,' that people forgot that the frog and sun were identical, and that Frog, or Bheki, was mistaken for the name of a girl to whom was applied the old saw about dying at sight of water. ' And so/ says Mr. Miiller, * the change from sun to frog, and from frog to man, which was at first due to the mere spell of language, would in our nursery tales be ascribed to miraculous charms more familiar to a later age.' As a matter of fact, magical metamorphoses are infinitely more familiar to the lowest savages than to people in a ( later age.' Magic, as Castren observes, 'belongs to the lowest known stages of civilisation.' Mr. Muller's theory, how ever, is this — that a Sanskrit-speaking people, living where the sun rose out of and set in some ocean, called the sun, as he touched the water, Bheki, the frog, and said he would die at the sight of water. They ceased to call the sun the frog, or Bheki, but kept the saying, 'Bheki will die at sight of water.' Not knowing who or what Bheki might be, they took her for a frog, who also was a pretty wench. Lastly,
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG. 79
they made the story of Bheki's distinguished wedding and mysterious disappearance. For this interpreta tion, historical and linguistic evidence is not offered. When did a Sanskrit-speaking race live beside a great sea ? How do we know that ' frog ' was used as a name for { sun ' ?
We have already given our explanation. To the savage intellect, man and beast are on a level, and all savage myth makes men descended from beasts ; while stories of the loves of gods in bestial shape, or the unions of men and animals, incessantly occur. * Un natural ' as these notions seem to us, no ideas are more familiar to savages, and none recur more fre quently in Indo-Aryan, Scandinavian, and Greek mythology. An extant tribe in North-W7est America still claims descent from a frog. The wedding of Bheki and the king is a survival, in Sanskrit, of a tale of this kind. Lastly, Bheki disappears, when her associations with her old amphibious life are re vived in the manner she had expressly forbidden.
Our interpretation may be supported by an Ojib- way parallel. A hunter named Otter-heart, camping near a beaver lodge, found a pretty girl loitering round his fire. She keeps his wigwam in order, and ' lays his blanket near the deerskin she had laid for herself. " Good," he muttered, " this is my wife." ' She refuses to eat the beavers he has shot, but at night he hears a noise, ' krch, krch, as if beavers were gnawing wood.' He sees, by the glimmer of the fire, his wife nibbling birch twigs. In fact, the good
8o CUSTOM AND MYTH.
little wife is a beaver, as the pretty Indian girl was a frog. The pair lived happily till spring came and the snow melted and the streams ran full. Then his wife implored the hunter to build her a bridge over every stream and river, that she might cross dry- footed. ' For,' she said, ' if my feet touch water, this would at once cause thee great sorrow.' The hunter did as she bade him, but left unbridged one tiny runnel. The wife stumbled into the water, and, as soon as her foot was wet, she immediately resumed her old shape as a beaver, her son became a beaver- ling, and the brooklet, changing to a roaring river, bore them to the lake. Once the hunter saw his wife again among her beast kin. ' To thee I sacrificed all,' she said, ' and I only asked thee to help me dry- footed over the waters. Thou didst cruelly neglect this. Now I must remain for ever with my people.'
This tale was told to Kohl by ' an old insignificant squaw among the Ojibways.' l Here we have a precise parallel to the tale of Bheki, the frog-bride, and here the reason of the prohibition to touch water is made perfectly unmistakable. The touch magically revived the bride's old animal life with the beavers. Or was the Indian name for beaver (tetnakse] once a name for the sun ? 2
A curious variant of this widely distributed Mdrchen of the animal bride is found in the mythical
1 Kitchi Garni, p. 105.
2 The sun-frog occurs seven times in Sir G. W. Cox's Mythology of the Aryan Peoples, and is used as an example to prove that animals in myth are usually the' sun, like Bheki, « the sun-frog.'
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG.' 8 1
genealogy of the Raja of Chutia Nagpur, a chief of the Naga, or snake race. It is said that Raja Janameja prepared a yajnya, or great malevolently magical incantation, to destroy all the people of the serpent race. To prevent this annihilation, the super natural being, Pundarika Nag, took a human form, and became the husband of the beautiful Parvati, daughter of a Brahman. But Pundarika Nag, being a serpent by nature, could not divest himself, even in human shape, of his forked tongue and venomed breath. And, just as Urvasi could not abide with her mortal lover, after he transgressed the prohibition to appear before her naked, so Pundarika Nag was compelled by fate to leave his bride, if she asked him any questions about his disagreeable peculiarities. She did, at last, ask questions, in circumstances which made Pundarika believe that he was bound to answer her. Now the curse came upon him, he plunged into a pool, like the beaver, and vanished. His wife became the mother of the serpent Rajas of Chutia Nagpur. Pundarika Nag, in his proper form as a great hooded snake, guarded his first-born child. The crest of the house is a hooded snake with human face.1
Here, then, we have many examples of the dis appearance of the bride or bridegroom in consequence of infringement of various mystic rules. Sometimes the beloved one is seen when he or she should not be seen. Sometimes, as in a Maori story, the bride vanishes, merely because she is in a bad temper.2
1 Dalton's Ethnol. of Bengal ', pp. 165, 1 66.
2 Taylor, New Zealand, p. 143.
82 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Among the Red Men, as in Sanskrit, the taboo on water is broken, with the usual results. Now for an example in which the rule against using names is infringed.1
This formula constantly occurs in the Welsh fairy tales published by Professor Rhys.2 Thus the heir of Corwrion fell in love with a fairy : ' They were married on the distinct understanding that the hus band was not to know her name, . . . and was not to strike her with iron, on pain of her leaving him at once.' Unluckily the man once tossed her a bridle, the iron bit touched the wife, and ' she at once flew through the air, and plunged headlong into Corwrion Lake/
A number of tales turning on the same incident are published in ' Cymmrodor,' v. I. In these we have either the taboo on the name, or the taboo on the touch of iron. In a widely diffused superstition iron * drives away devils and ghosts/ according to the Scholiast on the eleventh book of the ' Odyssey/ and the Oriental Djinn also flee from iron.3 Just as water is fatal to the Aryan frog-bride and to the Red Indian beaver-wife, restoring them to their old animal forms, so the magic touch of iron breaks love between the Welshman and his fairy mistress, the representative of the stone age.
In many tales of fairy-brides, they are won by a kind of force. The lover in the familiar Welsh and German Mdrchen sees the swan-maidens throw off their swan plumage and dance naked. He steals the
1 Liebrecht gives a Hindoo example, Zur Volkskunde, p. 239.
2 Cymmrodor, -iv. pt. 2. 3 Prim. Cnlt.% i. 140.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG/ 83
feather-garb of one of them, and so compels her to his love. Finally, she leaves him, in anger, or be cause he has broken some taboo. Far from being peculiar to Aryan mythology, this legend occurs, as Mr. Farrer has shown,1 in Algonquin and Bornoese tradition. The Red Indian story told by School- craft in his ' Algic Researches ' is most like the Aryan version, but has some native peculiarities. Wampee was a great hunter, who, on the lonely prairie, once heard strains of music. Looking up he saw a speck in the sky : the speck drew nearer and nearer, and proved to be a basket containing twelve heavenly maidens. They reached the earth and began to dance, inflaming the heart of Wampee with love. But Wampee could not draw near the fairy girls in his proper form without alarming them. Like Zeus in his love adventures, Wampee exercised the medi cine-man's power of metamorphosing himself. He assumed the form of a mouse, approached unobserved, and caught one of the dancing maidens. After living with Wampee for some time she wearied of earth, and, by virtue of a * mystic chain of verse/ she ascended again to her heavenly home.
Now is there any reason to believe that this in cident was once part of the myth of Pururavas and Urvasi ? Was the fairy-love, Urvasi, originally caught and held by Pururavas among her naked and strug gling companions ? Though this does not appear to have been much noticed, it seems to follow from a. speech of Pururavas in the Vedic dialogue 2 (x. 95, 8, 9).
1 Primitive Manners, p. 256.
2 See Meyer, Gandharven-Kentauren, Benfey, Pantsch., i. 263.
84 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Mr. Max Miiller translates thus : ' When I, the mortal, threw my arms round those flighty immortals, they trembled away from me like a trembling doe, like horses that kick against the cart' l Ludwig's ren dering suits our view — that Pururavas is telling how he first caught Urvasi — still better: 'When I, the mortal, held converse with the immortals who had laid aside their raiment, like slippery serpents they glided from me, like horses yoked to the car.' These words would well express the adventure of a lover among the naked flying swan-maidens, an adventure familiar to the Red Men as to Persian legends of the Peris.
To end our comparison of myths like the tale of * Cupid and Psyche,' we find an example among the Zulus. Here 2 the mystic lover came in when all was dark, and felt the damsel's face. After certain rites, ' in the morning he went away, he speaking continu ally, the girl not seeing him. During all those days he would not allow the girl (sic), when she said she would light a fire. Finally, after a magical cere mony, he said, " Light the fire ! " and stood before her revealed, a shining shape.' This has a curious resemblance to the myth of Cupid and Psyche ; but a more curious detail remains. In the Zulu story of Ukcombekcansini, the friends of a bride break a taboo and kill a tabooed animal. Instantly, like Urvasi and her companions in the Yajur Veda, the bride and her maidens disappear and are turned into birds! 3 They are afterwards surprised in human shape, and the bride is restored to her lover.
1 Selected Essays, i. 411, 2 Galloway, p. 63. 3 Ibid., p. 119.
CUPID, PSYCHE, AND THE ' SUN-FROG.' 85
Here we conclude, having traced parallels to Cupid and Psyche in many non- Aryan lands. Our theory of the myth does not rest on etymology. We have seen that the most renowned scholars, Max Miiller, Kuhn, Roth, all analyse the names Urvasi and Pururavas in different ways, and extract different interpretations. We have found the story where these names were probably never heard of. We interpret it as a tale of the intercourse between mortal men and immortal maids, or between men and meta morphosed animals, as in India and North America. We explain the separation of the lovers as the result of breaking a taboo, or law of etiquette, binding among men and women, as well as between men and fairies.
The taboos are, to see the beloved unveiled, to utter his or her name, to touch her with a metal ' terrible to ghosts and spirits/ or to do some action which will revive the associations of a former life. We have shown that rules of nuptial etiquette resembling these in character do exist, and have existed, even among Greeks — as where the Milesian, like the Zulu, women made a law not to utter their husbands' names. Finally, we think it a reasonable hypothesis that tales on the pattern of * Cupid and Psyche ' might have been evolved wherever a curious nuptial taboo required to be sanctioned, or explained, by a myth. On this hypothesis, the stories may have been separately invented in different lands ; but there is also a chance that they have been transmitted from people to people in the unknown past of our scattered
86 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
and wandering race. This theory seems at least as probable as the hypothesis that the meaning of an Aryan proverbial statement about sun and dawn was forgotten, and was altered unconsciously into a tale which is found among various non-Aryan tribes. That hypothesis again, learned and ingenious as it is, has the misfortune to be opposed by other scholarly hypotheses not less ingenious and learned.
As for the sun-frog, we may hope that he has sunk for ever beneath the western wave.
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE.
A MODERN NOVELIST has boasted that her books are read ' from Tobolsk to Tangiers.' This is a wide circulation, but the widest circulation in the world has probably been achieved by a story whose author, unlike Ouida, will never be known to fame. The tale which we are about to examine is, perhaps, of all myths the most widely diffused, yet there is no ready way of accounting for its extraordinary popu larity. Any true * nature-myth,' any myth which accounts for the processes of nature or the aspects of natural phenomena, may conceivably have been in vented separately, wherever men in an early state of thought observed the same facts, and attempted to explain them by telling a story. Thus we have seen that the earlier part of the Myth of Cronus is a nature-myth, setting forth the cause of the separation of Heaven and Earth. Star-myths again, are every where similar, because men who believed all nature to be animated and personal, accounted for the group ing of constellations in accordance with these crude beliefs.1 Once more, if a story like that of ' Cupid and Psyche ' be found among the most diverse races, the
1 Primitive Culture, i. 357 : ' The savage sees individual stars as animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial creatures, or limbs of them, or objects connected with them.'
88 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
distribution becomes intelligible if the myth was in vented to illustrate or enforce a widely prevalent custom. But in the following story no such explana tion is even provisionally acceptable.
The gist of the tale (which has many different c openings/ and conclusions in different places) may be stated thus : A young man is brought to the home of a hostile animal, a giant, cannibal, wizard, or a malevo lent king. He is put by his unfriendly host to various severe trials, in which it is hoped that he will perish. In each trial he is assisted by the daughter of his host. After achieving the adventures, he elopes with the girl, and is pursued by her father. The runaway pair throw various common objects behind them, which are changed into magical obstacles and check the pursuit of the father. The myth has various endings, usually happy, in various places. Another form of the narrative is known, in which the visitors to the home of the hostile being are, not wooers of his daughter, but brothers of his wife.1 The incidents of the flight, in this variant, are still of the same character. Finally, when the flight is that of a brother from his sister's malevolent ghost, in Hades (Japan), or of two sisters from a cannibal mother or step-mother (Zulu and Samoyed), the events of the flight and the magical aids to escape remain little altered. We shall after wards see that attempts have been made to interpret one of these narratives as a nature-myth ; but the attempts seem unsuccessful. We are therefore at a loss to account for the wide diffusion of this tale, unless it has been transmitted slowly from people to
1 This formula .occurs among Bushmen and Eskimo (Bleek and Rink).
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE. 89
people, in the immense unknown prehistoric past of the human race.
Before comparing the various forms of the myth in its first shape — that which tells of the mortal lover and the giant's or wizard's daughter— let us give the Scottish version of the story. This version was written down for me, many years ago, by an aged lady in Morayshire. I published it in the 'Revue Celtique ' ; but it is probably new to story-comparers, in its broad Scotch variant.
NICHT NOUGHT NOTHING.
There once lived a king and a queen. They were long married and had no bairns; but at last the queen had a bairn, when the king was away in far countries. The queen would not christen the bairn till the king came back, and she said, 'We will just call him Nicht Nought Nothing until his- father conies home.' But it was long before he came home, and the boy had grown a nice little laddie. At length the king 4vas on his way back ; but he had a big river to cross, and there was a spate, and he could not get over the water. But a giant came up to him, and said, ' If you will give me Nicht Nought Nothing, I will carry you over the water on my back. The king had never heard that his son was called Nicht Nought Nothing, and so he promised him. When the king got home again, he was very happy to see his wife again, and his young son. She told him that she had not given the child any name but Nicht Nought Nothing, until he should come home again himself. The poor king was in a terrible case. He said, ' What have I done ? I promised to give the giant who carried me over the river on his back, Nicht Nought Nothing.' The king and the queen were sad and sorry, but they said, ' When the giant comes 5
9O CUSTOM AND MYTH.
we will give him the hen-wife's bairn ; he will never know the difference.' The next day the giant came to claim the king's promise, and he sent for the hen-wife's bairn ;' and the giant went away with the bairn on his back. He travelled till he came to a big stone, and there he sat down to rest. He said,
' Hidge, Hodge, on my back, what time of day is it ? ' The poor little bairn said, ' It is the time that my mother, the hen -wife, takes up the eggs for the queen's breakfast'
The giant was very angry, and dashed the bairn on the stone and killed it.
The same adventure is repeated with the gardeners son.
Then the giant went back to the king's house, and said he would destroy them all if they did not give him Nicht Nought Nothing this time. They had to do it ; and when he came to the big stone, the giant said, ' What time of day is it?' Nicht Nought Nothing said, 'It is the time that my father the king will be sitting down to supper.' The giant said, ' I've got the richt ane noo ; ' and took Nicht Nought Nothing to his own house and brought him up till he was a man.
The giant had a bonny dochter, and she and the lad grew very fond of each other. The giant said one day to Nicht Nought Nothing, ' I've work for you to-morrow. There is a stable seven miles long and seven miles broad, and it has not been cleaned for seven years, and you must clean it to-morrow, or I will have you for my supper.'
The giant's dochter went out next morning with the lad's breakfast, and found him in a terrible state, for aye as he cleaned out a bit, it aye fell in again. The giant's dochter said she would help him, and she cried a1 the beasts of the field, and a' the fowls o' the air, and in a minute they a'
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE. 91
came, and carried awa' everything that was in the stable and made a' clean before the giant came home. He said, ' Shame for the wit that helped you ; but I have a worse job for you to-morrow.' Then he told Nicht Nought Nothing that there was a loch seven miles long, and seven miles deep, and seven miles broad, and he must drain it the next day, or else he would have him for his supper. Nicht Nought Nothing began early next morning and tried to lave the water with his pail, but the loch was never getting any less, and he did no ken what to do ; but the giant's dochter called on all the fish in the sea to come and drink the water, and very soon they drank it dry. When the giant saw the work done he was in a rage, and said, ' I've a worse job for you to-morrow ; there is a tree seven miles high, and no branch on it, till you get to the top, and there is a nest, and you must bring down the eggs without break ing one, or else I will have you for my supper.7 At first the giant's dochter did not know how to help Nicht Nought Nothing ; but she cut off first her fingers and then her toes, and made steps of them, and he clomb the tree, and got all the eggs safe till he came to the bottom, and then one was broken. The giant's dochter advised him to run away, and she would follow him. So he travelled till he came to a king's palace, and the king and queen took him in and were very kind to him. The giant's dochter left her father's house, and he pursued her and was drowned. Then she came to the king's palace where Nicht Nought Nothing was. And she went up into a tree to watch for him. The gardener's dochter, going to draw water in the well, saw the shadow of the lady in the water, and thought it was herself, and said, ' If I'm so bonny, if I'm so brave, do you send me to draw water ? ' The gardener's wife went out, and she said the same thing. Then the gardener went himself, and brought the lady from the tree, and led her in. And he told her that a stranger was to marry the king's
Q2 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
dochter, and showed her the man : and it was Nicht Nought Nothing asleep in a chair. And she saw him, and cried to him, ' Waken, waken, and speak to me ! ' But he would not waken, and syne she cried,
' I cleaned the stable, I laved the loch, and I clamb the tree, And all for the love of thee, And thou wilt not waken and speak to me. '
The king and the queen heard this, and came to the bonny young lady, and she said,
' I canna get Nicht Nought Nothing to speak to me for all that I can do.'
Then were they greatly astonished when she spoke of Nicht Nought Nothing, and asked where he was, and she said, 'He that sits there in the chair.' Then they ran to him and kissed him and called hirn their own dear son, and he wakened, and told them all that the giant's dochter had done for him, and of all her kindness. Then they took her in their arms and kissed her, and said she should now be their dochter, for their son should marry her.
And they lived happy all their days.
In this variant of the story, which we may use as our text, it is to be noticed that a lacuna exists. The narrative of the flight omits to mention that the runaways threw things behind them which became obstacles in the giant's way. One of these objects probably turned into a lake, in which the giant was drowned.1 A common incident is the throwing behind of a comb, which changes into a thicket. The formula of leaving obstacles behind occurs in the Indian collection, the ' Kathasarit sagara' (vii. xxxix.).
1 The events of the flight are recorded correctly in the Gaelic variant 'The Battle of the Birds.' (Campbell, Tales of the West Highlands > vol. i. p. 25.)
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE. 93
The ' Battle of the Birds/ in Campbell's ' Tales of the West Highlands/ is a very copious Gaelic variant. Russian parallels are ' Vasilissa the Wise and the Water King,' and ' The King Bear.' l The incident of the flight and the magical obstacles is found in Japanese mythology.2 The ' ugly woman of Hades ' is sent to pursue the hero. He casts down his black head-dress, and it is instantly turned into grapes ; he fled while she was eating them. Again, * he cast down his multitudinous and close-toothed comb, and it instantly turned into bamboo sprouts.' In the Gaelic version, the pursuer is detained by talkative objects which the pursued leave at home, and this marvel recurs in Zululand, and is found among the Bushmen. The Zulu versions are numerous.3 Oddly enough, in the last variant, the girl performs no magic feat, but merely throws sesamum on the ground to delay the cannibals, for cannibals are very fond of sesamum.4
Here, then, we have the remarkable details of the flight, in Zulu, Gaelic, Norse, Malagasy,5 Russian, Italian, Japanese. Of all incidents in the myth, the incidents of the flight are most widely known. But the whole connected series of events — the coming of the wooer ; the love of the hostile being's daughter ; the tasks imposed on the wooer ; the aid rendered by the daughter ; the flight of the pair ; the defeat or
1 Ralston, Russian Folk Tales, 132 ; Kohler, Orient und Occident, ii. 107, 114. 2 Ko ti ki, p. 36.
3 Callaway, pp. 51, 53, 64, 145, 228.
4 See also ' Petrosinella ' in the Pentamerone, and ' The Mastermaid ' in Dasent's Tales from the Norse.
5 Folk- Lore Journal, August 1883.
94 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
destruction of the hostile being — all these, or most of these, are extant, in due sequence, among the follow ing races. The Greeks have the tale, the people of Madagascar have it, the Lowland Scotch, the Celts, the Russians, the Italians, the Algonquins, the Finns, and the Samoans have it. Now if the story were confined to the Aryan race, we might account for its diffusion, by supposing it to be the common heritage of the Indo-European peoples, carried everywhere with them in their wanderings. But when the tale is found in Madagascar, North America, Samoa, and among the Finns, while many scattered incidents occur in even more widely severed races, such as Zulus, Bushmen, Japanese, Eskimo, Samoyeds, the Aryan hypothesis becomes inadequate.
To show how closely, all things considered, the Aryan and non-Aryan possessors of the tale agree, let us first examine the myth of Jason.
The earliest literary reference to the myth of Jason is in the ' Iliad ' (vii. 467, xxiii. 747). Here we read of Euneos, a son whom Hypsipyle bore to Jason in Lemnos. Already, even in the ' Iliad/ the legend of Argo's voyage has been fitted into certain well- known geographical localities. A reference in the ' Odyssey ' (xii. 72) has a more antique ring : we are told that of all barques Argo alone escaped the jaws of the Rocks Wandering, which clashed together and destroyed ships. Argo escaped, it is said, * because Jason was dear to Hera.' It is plain, from various fragmentary notices, that Hesiod was familiar with several of the. ad ventures in the legend of Jason. In
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE. 95
the ' Theogony ' (993-998) Hesiod mentions the essential facts of the legend : how Jason carried off from y£etes his daughter, ' after achieving the adven tures, many and grievous/ which were laid upon him. At what period the home of yEetes was placed in Colchis, it is not easy to determine. Mimnermus, a contemporary of Solon, makes the home of .^Eetes lie 'on the brink of ocean,' a very vague description.1 Pindar, on the other hand, in the splendid Fourth Pythian Ode, already knows Colchis as the scene of the loves and flight of Jason and Medea.
' Long were it for me to go by the beaten track,' says Pindar, ' and I know a certain short path.' Like Pindar, we may abridge the tale of Jason. He seeks the golden fleece in Colchis : vEetes offers it to him as a prize for success in certain labours. By the aid of Medea, the daughter of yEetes, the wizard-king, Jason tames the fire-breathing oxen, yokes them to the plough, and drives a furrow. By Medea's help he conquers the children of the teeth of the dragon, subdues the snake that guards the fleece of gold, and escapes, but is pursued by ^Eetes. To detain ^Eetes, Medea throws behind the mangled remains of her own brother, Apsyrtos, and the Colchians pursue no further than the scene of this bloody deed. The savagery of this act survives even in the work of a poet so late as Apollonius Rhodius (iv. 477), where we read how Jason performed a rite of savage magic, mutilating the body of Apsyrtos in a manner which was believed to appease the avenging ghost of the
1 Poetce Minores Gr. ii.
96 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
slain. ' Thrice he tasted the blood, thrice spat it out between his teeth/ a passage which the Scholiast says contains the description of an archaic custom popular among murderers.
Beyond Tomi, where a popular etymology fixed the ' cutting up ' of Apsyrtos, we need not follow the fortunes of Jason and Medea. We have already seen the wooer come to the hostile being, win his daughter's love, achieve the adventures by her aid, and flee in her company, delaying, by a horrible device, the advance of the pursuers. To these incidents in the tale we confine our attention.
Many explanations of the Jason myth have been given by Scholars who thought they recognised ele mental phenomena in the characters. As usual these explanations differ widely. Whenever a myth has to be interpreted, it is certain that one set of Scholars will discover the sun and the dawn, where another set will see the thunder-cloud and lightning. The moon is thrown in at pleasure. Sir G. W. Cox determines l ' that the name Jason (lason) must be classed with the many others, lasion, lamus, lolaus, laso, belong ing to the same root.' Well, what is the root ? Apparently the root is ' the root z, as denoting a cry ing colour, that is, a loud colour' (ii. 81). Seemingly (i. 229) violet is a loud colour, and, wherever you have the root z, you have ' the violet-tinted morning from which the sun is born.' Medea is ' the daughter of the sun,' and most likely, in her 'beneficent aspect,' is the dawn. But (ii. 81, note) ios has another mean ing, ' which, as a spear, represents the far-darting ray
1 MythoL Ar., ii. 150.
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE. 97
of the sun ' ; so that, in one way or another, Jason is connected with the violet-tinted morning or with the sun's rays. This is the gist of the theory of Sir George Cox.
Preller l is another Scholar, with another set of etymologies. Jason is derived, he thinks, from ldofj.ai, to heal, because Jason studied medicine under the Centaur Chiron. This is the view of the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius (i. 554). Jason, to Preller's mind, is a form of Asclepius, 'a spirit of the spring with its soft suns and fertile rains.' Medea is the moon. Medea, on the other hand, is a lightning goddess, in the opinion of Schwartz.2 No philological reason is offered. Meanwhile, in Sir George Cox's system, the equivalent of Medea, ' in her beneficent aspect/ is the dawn.
We must suppose, it seems, that either the soft spring rains and the moon, or the dawn and the sun, or the lightning and the thunder-cloud, in one arrangement or another, irresistibly suggested, to early Aryan minds, the picture of a wooer, arriving in a hostile home, winning a maiden's love, achieving adventures by her aid, fleeing with her from her angry father and delaying his pursuit by various devices. Why the spring, the moon, the lightning, the dawn — any of them or all of them — should have suggested such a tale, let Scholars determine when they have reconciled their own differences. It is more to our purpose to follow the myth among Samoans, Algonquins, and Finns. None of these races speak an Aryan language, and none can have
1 Gr. My.t ii. 3/8. 2 Sonne, Mond und Sterne t pp. 213. 229. 5*
98 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
been beguiled into telling the same sort of tale by a disease of Aryan speech.
Samoa, where we find our story, is the name of a group of volcanic islands in Central Polynesia. They are about 3,000 miles from Sidney, were first observed by Europeans in 1722, and are as far removed as most spots from direct Aryan influences. Our posi tion is, however, that in the shiftings and migrations of peoples, the Jason tale has somehow been swept, like a piece of drift-wood, on to the coasts of Samoa. In the islands, the tale has an epical form, and is chanted in a poem of twenty-six stanzas. There is something Greek in the free and happy life of the Samoans— something Greek, too, in this myth of theirs. There was once a youth, Siati, famous for his sing ing, a young Thamyris of Samoa. But as, according to Homer, ' the Muses met Thamyris the Thracian, and made an end of his singing, for he boasted and said that he would vanquish even the Muses if he sang against them,' so did the Samoan god of song envy Siati. The god and the mortal sang a match : the daughter of the god was to be the mortal's prize if he proved victorious. Siati won, and he set off, riding on a shark, as Arion rode the dolphin, to seek the home of the defeated deity. At length he reached the shores divine, and thither strayed Puapae, daughter of the god, looking for her comb which she had lost. ' Siati/ said she, ' how earnest thou hither ? ' ( I am come to seek the song-god, and to wed his daughter.' ' My father,' said the maiden, ' is more a god than a man ; eat nothing he hands you, never sit on a high seat, lest death follow.' So they were
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE. 99
united in marriage. But the god, like y£etes, was wroth, and began to set Siati upon perilous tasks : ' Build me a house, and let it be finished this very day, else death and the oven await thee.' l
Siati wept, but the god's daughter had the house built by the evening. The other adventures were to fight a fierce dog, and to find a ring lost at sea. Just as the Scotch giant's daughter cut off her fingers to help her lover, so the Samoan god's daughter bade Siati cut her body into pieces and cast her into the sea. There she became a fish, and recovered the ring. They set off to the god's house, but met him pursuing them, with the help of his other daughter. * Puapae and Siati threw down the comb, and it became a bush of thorns in the way to intercept the god and Puanli/ the other daughter. Next they threw down a bottle of earth which became a mountain ; ' and then followed their bottle of water, and that became a sea, and drowned the god and Puanli.' 2
This old Samoan song contains nearly the closest savage parallel to the various household tales which find their heroic and artistic shape in the Jason saga. Still more surprising in its resemblances is the Malagasy version of the narrative. In the Malagasy story, the conclusion is almost identical with the winding up of the Scotch fairy tale. The girl hides in a tree ; her face, seen reflected in a well, is mistaken by women for their own faces, and the recognition follows in due course.3
1 This proves that the tale belongs to the pre-Christian cannibal age.
2 Turner's Samoa, p. 102. In this tale only the names of the daughters are translated ; they mean ' white fish ' and * dark fish.'
3 Folk-Lore Journal, August 1883.
100 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
Like most Red Indian versions of popular tales, the Algonquin form of the Jason saga is strongly marked with the peculiarities of the race. The story is recognisable, and that is all.
The opening, as usual, differs from other openings. Two children are deserted in the wilderness, and grow up to manhood. One of them loses an arrow in the water ; the elder brother, Panigwun, wades after it. A magical canoe flies past : an old magician, who is alone in the canoe, seizes Panigwun and carries him off. The canoe fleets along, like the barques of the Phaeacians, at the will of the magician, and reaches the isle where, like the Samoan god of song, he dwells with his two daughters. ' Here, my daughter,' said he, 'is a young man for your husband.' But the daughter knew that the proposed husband was but another victim of the old man's magic arts. By the daughter's advice, Panigwun escaped in the magic barque, consoled his brother, and returned to the island. Next day the magician, Mishosha, set the young man to hard tasks and perilous adventures. He was to gather gulls' eggs ; but the gulls attacked him in dense crowds. By an incantation he subdued the birds, and made them carry him home to the island. Next day he was sent to gather pebbles, that he might be attacked and eaten by the king of the fishes. Once more the young man, like the Finnish Ilmarinen in Pohjola, subdued the mighty fish, and went back triumphant. The third adventure, as in 'Nicht Nought Nothing,' was to climb a tree of extraordinary height in search of a bird's nest. Here, again, the youth succeeded, and finally conspired with the daughters
A FAR-TRAVELLED TALE. IOI
to slay the old magician. Lastly the boy turned the magician into a sycamore tree, and won his daughter. The other daughter was given to the brother who had no share in the perils.1 Here we miss the incident of the flight ; and the magician's daughter, though in love with the hero, does not aid him to perform the feats. Perhaps an Algonquin brave would scorn the assistance of a girl. In the * Kalevala,' the old hero, Wainamoinen, and his friend Ilmarinen, set off to the mysterious and hostile land of Pohjola to win a bride. The maiden of Pohjola loses her heart to Ilmarinen, and, by her aid, he bridles the wolf and bear, ploughs a field of adders with a plough of gold, and conquers the gigantic pike that swims in the Styx of Finnish mythology. After this point the story is interrupted by a long sequel of popular bridal songs, and, in the wandering course of the rather aimless epic, the flight and its incidents have been forgotten, or are neglected. These incidents recur, however, in the thread of some what different plots. We have seen that they are found in Japan, among the Eskimo, among the Bushmen, the Samoyeds, and the Zulus, as well as in Hungarian, Magyar, Celtic, and other European household tales.
The conclusion appears to be that the central part of the Jason myth is incapable of being explained, either as a nature-myth, or as a myth founded on a disease of language. So many languages could not take the same malady in the same way ; nor can we imagine any series of natural phenomena that would inevitably suggest this tale to so many diverse races.
1 Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, ii. 94-104.
1O2 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
We must suppose, therefore, either that all wits jumped and invented the same romantic series of situations by accident, or that all men spread from one centre, where the story was known, or that the story, once invented, has drifted all round the world. If the last theory be approved of, the tale will be like the Indian Ocean shell found lately in the Polish bone-cave,1 or like the Egyptian beads discovered in the soil of Dahomey. The story will have been carried hither and thither, in the remotest times, to the re motest shores, by traders, by slaves, by captives in war, or by women torn from their own tribe and forcibly settled as wives among alien peoples.
Stories of this kind are everywhere the natural property of mothers and grandmothers. When we remember how widely diffused is the law of exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the same stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must have been introduced with alien wives. Where husband and wife, as often hap pened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably bring the hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange speech. By all these agencies, working through dateless time, we may account for the diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of tales like the central arrangement of inci dents in the career of Jason.2
1 Nature, March 14, 1884.
- The earlier part of the Jason cycle is analysed in the author's preface to Grimm's Mdrchen (Bell & Sons).
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE.
WHY is Apollo, especially the Apollo of the Troad, he who showered the darts of pestilence among the Greeks, so constantly associated with a mouse ? The very name, Smintheus, by which his favourite priest calls on him in the * Iliad ' (i. 39), might be rendered ' Mouse Apollo/ or ' Apollo, Lord of Mice.' As we shall see later, mice lived beneath the altar, and were fed in the holy of holies of the god, and an image of a mouse was placed beside or upon his sacred tripod. The ancients were puzzled by these things, and, as will be shown, accounted for them by ' mouse-stories,' SfuvGiaicoi, \6yoi, so styled by Eusta- thius, the mediaeval interpreter of Homer. Follow ing our usual method, let us ask whether similar phenomena occur elsewhere, in countries where they are intelligible. Did insignificant animals elsewhere receive worship : were their effigies elsewhere placed in the temples of a purer creed ? We find answers in the history of Peruvian religion.
After the Spanish conquest of Peru, one of the European adventurers, Don Garcilasso de la Vega, married an Inca princess. Their son, also named Garcilasso, was born about 1540. His famous book, ' Commentarias Reales,' contains the most authentic
104 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
account of the old Peruvian beliefs. Gardlasso was learned in all the learning of the Europeans, and, as an Inca on the mother's side, had claims on the loyalty of the defeated race. He set himself dili gently to collect both their priestly and popular traditions, and his account of them is the more trust worthy as it coincides with what we know to have been true in lands writh which Garcilasso had little acquaintance.
To Garcilasso's mind, Peruvian religion seems to be divided into two periods — the age before, and the age which followed the accession of the Incas, and their establishment of sun-worship as the creed of the State. In the earlier period, the pre-Inca period, he tells us * an Indian \vas not accounted honourable unless he was descended from a fountain, river, or lake, or even from the sea, cr from a wild animal, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur (condor), or some other bird of prey.' l To these worshipful creatures ( men offered what they usually saw them eat' (i. 53). But men were not content to adore large and dangerous animals. ' There was not an animal, how vile and filthy soever, that they did not worship as a god,' including ' lizards, toads, and frogs.' In the midst of these superstitions the Incas appeared/ Just as the tribes claimed descent from animals, great or small, so the Incas drew their pedi gree from the sun, which they adored like the gens of the Aurelii in Rome.2 Thus every Indian had his
1 Comm. Real. i. 75.
2 See Early History of the Family, infra.
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. 1 05
pacarissa, or, as the North American Indians say, totem,1 a natural object from which he claimed de scent, and which, in a certain degree, he worshipped. Though sun-worship became the established religion, worship of the animal pacafissas was still tolerated. The sun-temples also contained Jmacas, or images, of the beasts which the Indians had venerated.2 In the great temple of Pachacamac, the most spiritual and abstract god of Peruvian faith, ' they worshipped a she-fox and an emerald. The devil also appeared to them, and spoke in the form of a tiger, very fierce.' 3 This toleration of an older and cruder, in subordination to a purer, faith is a very common feature in religious evolution. In Catholic countries, to this day, we may watch, in Holy Week, the Adonis feast described by Theocritus,4 and the procession and entombment of the old god of spring.
' The Incas had the good policy to collect all the tribal animal gods into their temples in and round Cuzco, in which the two leading gods were the Master of Life, and the Sun.' Did a process of this sort ever occur in Greek religion, and were older animal gods ever collected into the temples of such deities as Apollo ?
While a great deal of scattered evidence about
1 The names Totem and Totemism have been in use at least since 1792, among writers on the North American tribes. Prof. Max Miiller (Academy, Jan. 1884) says the word should be, not Totem, but Ote or Oteni. Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the word Totamism in 1792.
2 Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.
8 Cieza de Leon, p. 183. 4 Idyll xv.
106 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
many animals consecrated to Greek gods points in this direction, it will be enough, for the present, to examine the case of the Sacred Mice. Among races which are still in the totemistic stage, which still claim descent from animals and from other objects, a peculiar marriage law generally exists, or can be shown to have existed. No man may marry a woman who is descended from the same ancestral animal, and who bears the same totem -name, and carries the same badge or family crest, as himself. A man descended from the Crane, and whose family name is Crane, cannot marry a woman whose family name is Crane. He must marry a woman of the Wolf, or Turtle, or Swan, or other name, and her children keep her family title, not his. Thus, if a Crane man marries a Swan woman, the children are Swans, and none of them may marry a Swan ; they must marry Turtles, Wolves, or what not, and their children, again, are Turtles, or Wolves. Thus there is neces sarily an eternal come and go of all the animal names known in a district. As civilisation advances these rules grow obsolete. People take their names from the father, as among ourselves. Finally the dwellers in a given district, having become united into a local tribe, are apt to drop the various animal titles and to adopt, as the name of the whole tribe, the name of the chief, or of the predominating family. Let us imagine a district of some twenty miles in which there are Crane, Wolf, Turtle, and Swan families. Long residence together, and common interests, have welded them into a local tribe. The chief is of the Wolf family, and the tribe, sinking
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. 1 07
family differences and family names, calls itself ' the Wolves.' Such tribes were probably, in the begin ning, the inhabitants of the various Egyptian towns which severally worshipped the wolf, or the sheep, or the crocodile, and abstained religiously (except on certain sacrificial occasions) torn the flesh of the animal that gave them its name.1
It has taken us long to reach the Sacred Mice of Greek religion, but \ve are now in a position to approach their august divinity. We have seen that the sun-worship superseded, without abolishing, the tribal pacarissas in Peru, and that the huacas> or images, of the sacred animals were admitted under
o
the roof of the temple of the Sun. Now it is recog nised that the temples of the Sminthian Apollo contained images of sacred mice among other animals, and our argument is that here, perhaps, we have another example of the Peruvian religious evolu tion. Just as, in Peru, the tribes adored ' vile and filthy' animals, just as the solar worship of the Incas subordinated these, just as the huacas of the beasts remained in the temples of the Peruvian Sun ; so, we believe, the tribes along the Mediterranean coasts had, at some very remote prehistoric period, their animal pacarissas ; these were subordinated to the religion (to some extent solar) of Apollo ; and the huacas^ or animal idols, survived in Apollo's temples.
If this theory be correct, we shall probably find
1 Sayce, Herodotos, p. 344 ; Herodotus, ii. 42 ; Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians (1878, ii. 475, note 2) ; Plutarch, De Is. et Os., 71, 72 ; Athenasus, vii. 299 ; Strabo, xvii. 813.
1O8 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
the mouse, for example, revered as a sacred animal in many places. This would necessarily follow, if the marriage customs which we have described ever prevailed on Greek soil, and scattered the mouse- name far and wide.1 Traces of the Mouse families, and of adoration, if adoration there was of the mouse, would linger on in the following shapes : — (i) Places would be named from mice, and mice would be actu ally held sacred in themselves. (2) The mouse-name would be given locally to the god who superseded the mouse. (3) The figure of the mouse \vould be associated writh the god, and used as a badge, or a kind of crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has been a venerated animal. (4) Finally, myths would be told to account for the sacredness of a creature so undignified.
Let us take these considerations in their order :— (i) If there were local mice tribes, deriving their name from the worshipful mouse, certain towns settled by these tribes would retain a reverence for mice.
In Chrysa, a town of the Troad, according to Heraclides Ponticus, mice were held sacred, the local name for mouse being o-^ivOos. Many places bore this mouse-name, according to Strabo.2 This is precisely what would have occurred had the Mouse totem, and the Mouse stock, been widely distributed.3
1 The Mouse, according to Dalton, is still a totem among the Oraons of Bengal. A man of the Mouse * motherhood,' as the totem kindred is locally styled, may not eat mice (esteemed a delicacy), nor marry a girl who is a Mouse. 2 xiii. 604. Casaub. 1620.
3 There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete (De Witte, Revue Numismatique, N.S. iii. 3-1 1).
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. IOQ
The Scholiast * mentions Sminthus as a place in the Troad. Strabo speaks of two places deriving their name from Sminthus, or mouse, near the Sminthian temple, and others near Larissa. In Rhodes and Lindus, the mouse place-name recurs, * and in many other districts ' (Kal a\\60i Ss iroXXa^oOi). Strabo (x. 486) names Caressus, and Poeessa, in Ceos, among the other places which had Sminthian temples, and, presumably, were once centres of tribes named after the mouse.
Here, then, are a number of localities in which the Mouse Apollo was adored, and where the old mouse-name lingered. That the mice were actually held sacred in their proper persons we learn from ydian. ' The dwellers in Hamaxitus of the Troad worship mice,' says ^Elian. ' In the temple of Apollo Smintheus, mice are nourished, and food is offered to them, at the public expense, and white mice dwell beneath the altar.' 2 In the same way we found that the Peruvians fed their sacred beasts on what they usually saw them eat.
(2) The second point in our argument has already been sufficiently demonstrated. The mouse-name 1 Smintheus ' was given to Apollo in all the places mentioned by Strabo, ' and many others.'
(3) The figure of the mouse will be associated with the god, and used as a badge, or crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has been a venerated animal.
The passage already quoted from ^Elian informs us that there stood ' an effigy of the mouse beside the 1 Iliad, i. 39. 2 ./Elian, H. A. xii. 5,
110 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
tripod of Apollo.' In Chrysa, according to Strabo (xiii. 604), the statue of Apollo Smintheus had a mouse beneath his foot. The mouse on the tripod of Apollo is represented on a bas-relief illustrating the plague, and the offerings of the Greeks to Apollo Smintheus, as described in the first book of the 'Iliad.'1
The mouse is a not uncommon local badge or crest in Greece. The animals whose figures are stamped on coins, like the Athenian owl, are the most ancient marks of cities. It is a plausible con jecture that, just as the Iroquois when they signed treaties with the Europeans used their totems — bear, wolf, and turtle — as seals,2 so the animals on archaic Greek city coins represented crests or badges which, at some far more remote period, had been totems.
The Argives, according to Pollux,3 stamped the mouse on their coins.4 As there was a temple of
1 The bas-relief is published in Paoli's Delia Religione de' Gcntili, Naples, 1771, p. 9 ; also by Fabretti, AdCal. Oper. de Colum. Trajan. p. 315. Paoli's book was written after the discovery in Neapolitan territory of a small bronze image, hieratic in character, representing a man with a mouse on his hand. Paoli's engraving of this work of art, unluckily, does not enable us to determine its date or provenance. The book is a mine of mouse-lore.
2 Golden, History of the Five Nations ^ p. 15 (1727).
3 Onomast., ix. 6, segm. 84, p. 1066.
4 De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here. In the Revue Nuniismatique, N.S. iii., De Witte publishes coins of Alexandria, the more ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad. The Sminthian Apollo is represented with his bow, and the mouse on his hand. Other coins show the god with the mouse at his foot, or show us the lyre of Apollo supported by mice. A bronze coin in the British Museum gives Apollo with the mouse beside his foot.
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. I I I
Apollo Smintheus in Tenedos, we naturally hear of a mouse on the coins of the island.1 Golzio has published one of these mouse coins. The people of Metapontum stamped their money with a mouse gnawing an ear of corn. The people of Cumae em ployed a mouse dormant. Paoli fancied that certain mice on Roman medals might be connected with the family of Mus, but this is rather guesswork.2
We have now shown traces, at least, of various ways in which an early tribal religion of the mouse — the mouse pacarissa, as the Peruvians said — may have been perpetuated. When we consider that the super seding of the mouse by Apollo must have occurred, if it did occur, long before Homer, we may rather wonder that the mouse left his mark on Greek religion so long. We have seen mice revered, a god with a mouse-name, the mouse-name recurring in many places, the huaca, or idol, of the mouse preserved in the temples of the god, and the mouse-badge used in several widely severed localities. It remains (4) to examine the myths about mice. These, in our opinion, were probably told to account for the presence of the huaca of the mouse in temples, and for the occurrence of the animal in religion, and his connection with Apollo.
A singular mouse-myth, narrated by Herodotus, is worth examining for reasons which will appear later, though the events are said to have happened on Egyptian soil.3 According to Herodotus, one Sethos, a priest of Hephaestus (Ptah), was king of Egypt
1 Spanheini) ad Fl. Joseph., vi. I, p. 312.
2 Delia Ret., p. 174. 3 Herodotus,
1 I 2 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
He had disgraced the military class, and he found himself without an army when Sennacherib invaded his country. Sethos fell asleep in the temple, and the god, appearing to him in a vision, told him that divine succour would come to the Egyptians.1 In the night before the battle, field-mice gnawed the quivers and shield-handles of the foe, who fled on finding themselves thus disarmed. ' And now,' says Herodotus, ' there standeth a stone image of this king in the temple of Hephaestus, and in the hand of the image a mouse, and there is this inscription, " Let whoso looketh on me be pious." '
Prof. Sayce ~ holds that there was no such person as Sethos, but that the legend ' is evidently Egyptian, not Greek, and the name of Sennacherib, as well as the fact of the Assyrian attack, is correct.' The legend also, though Egyptian, is * an echo of the biblical account of the destruction of the Assyrian army,' an account which omits the mice. As to the mice, here,' says Prof. Sayce, ' we have to do again with the Greek dragomen (sic). The story of Sethos was attached to the statue of some deity which was sup posed to hold a mouse in its hand.' It must have been easy to verify this supposition ; but Mr. Sayce adds, 'mice were not sacred in Egypt, nor were they used as symbols, or found on the monuments.'
1 Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 13, quoting Journal Asiatique, 1st series, 3, 307) finds the same myth in Chinese annals. It is not a god, however, but the king of the rats, who appears to the dis tressed monarch in his dream. Rats then gnaw the bowstrings of his enemies. The invaders were Turks, the rescued prince a king of Khotan. The king raised a temple, and offered sacrifice— to the rats ?
* Herodotos, .p. 204.
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. 113
To this remark we may suggest some exceptions. Apparently this one mouse was found on the monu ments. Wilkinson (iii. 264) says mice do occur in the sculptures, but they were not sacred. Rats, however, were certainly sacred, and as little distinction is taken, in myth, between rats and mice as between rabbits and hares. The rat was sacred to Ra, the Sun-god, and (like all totems) was not to be eaten.1 This asso ciation of the rat and the Sun cannot but remind us of Apollo and his mouse. According to Strabo, a certain city of Egypt did worship the shrew-mouse. The Athribitae, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis, are the people to whom he attributes this cult, which he mentions (xvii. 813) among the other local animal- worships of Egypt.2 Several porcelain examples of the field-mouse sacred to Horus (commonly called Apollo by the Greeks) may be seen in the British Museum.
That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on the evidence of the Ritual, of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian art. Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue ' had a mouse on its hand.' Elsewhere, it is certain that the story of mice gnawing the
1 Wilkinson, iii. 294, quoting the Ritual xxxiii. : ' Thou devourest the abominable rat of Ra, or the sun.'
2 Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the throne-name of Thothmes III. The animals thus used
as substitutes for scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all represented in Mr. Loftie's col lection. See his Essay of Scarabs, p. 27. It may be admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the religion of the Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed.
114 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation of mouse-worship. One of the Trojan * mouse-stories ' ran — That emigrants had set out in prehistoric times from Crete. The oracle advised them to settle ' wherever they were attacked by the children of the soil.' At Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night by mice, which ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings. The colonists made up their mind that these mice were ' the children of the soil,' settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo.1 A myth of this sort may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name ; or a Mouse tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have been settled on the spot, and may even have resisted invasion.2 Another myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse Apollo on the hypo thesis that he had once freed the land from mice, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose pipe (still service able) is said to have been found in his grave by men who were digging a mine.3
Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally spring up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse- god or of the mouse. We have explained the reli gious character of mice as the relics of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse family names had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been, mice totems and mouse family names
1 Strabo, xiii. 604. - Eustathius on Iliad, i. 39.
3 A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of Mice, 1670.
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. I 15
among Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved by Prof. Robertson Smith : 1 ' Achbor, the mouse, is an Edomite name, apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and another mouse-name are among the Arabs. The same name occurs in Judah.' Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial occasions. The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult. In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to refer to one or other of these practices (Ixvi.) : ' They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord.' This is like the Egyptian prohibition to eat ' the abominable ' (that is, tabooed or forbidden) ' Rat of Ra.' If the un clean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan, then the mouse was a totem,2 for the chosen people were forbidden to eat ' the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.' That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally totems, Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, n), where ' we find seventy of the elders of Israel — that is, the heads of houses — worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls' the figures of all manner of unclean ' (tabooed) ( creeping things, and quadrupeds, even all the idols of the House of Israel' Some have too hastily concluded that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring Philistines. After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set
1 Journal of PhiloLi xvii. p. 96. 2 Leviticus xi. 29.
Il6 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
it in the house of Dagon, the people were smitten with disease. They therefore, in accordance with a well-known savage magical practice, made five golden representations of the diseased part, and five golden mice, as ' a trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,' and so restored the Ark.1 Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic countries, and the mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines had ever worshipped mice.
•
Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the sacred animal of Rudra. ' The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast/ says the Yajur Veda, as rendered by Grohmann in his 'Apollo Smintheus.' Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics of Apollo. In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of Ganega, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is repre sented in art with his foot upon a mouse.
Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion. If he really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his prevalence in con nection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven in Hellenism. Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own Apollo-worship. In that case the mouse, while still originally a totem, would not be an Aryan totem. But probably the myths and rites of the mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our theory than on that of
1 Samuel i. 5, 6. b
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. 117
De Gubernatis : ' The Pagan sun-god crushes under his foot the Mouse of Night, When the cat's away, the mice may play ; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.' l This is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) cannot play : there is no light to produce a shadow. As usually chances, the scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical phenomena- do not agree among themselves about the mouse. While the mouse is the night, according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's opinion the mouse is the lightning. He argues that the lightning was origin ally regarded by the Aryan race as the ' flashing tooth of a beast/ especially of a mouse. Afterwards men came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold, the lightning and the mouse are convertible mythical terms ! Now it is perfectly true that savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent ; 2 thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus ; while rain is the milk of a heavenly cow — an idea recurring in the 'Zend Avesta.' But it does not follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his in terest in the animal began on earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a
1 ZooL Myth, ii. 68. 2 Mtlusine, N.S. i.
Il8 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
mouse's teeth. The hypothesis is a jeu d> esprit, like the opposite hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship of ordinary mice, and such small deer, has been either wholly neglected, or explained by the first theory of symbolism that occurred to the conjecture of a civil ised observer. The facts of savage animal-worship, and their relations to totemism, seem still unknown to or unappreciated by scholars, with the exception of Mr. Sayce, who recognises totemism as the origin of the zoomorphic element in Egyptian religion.
Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an isolated case. If Apollo superseded and absorbed the worship of the mouse, he did no less for the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, and several other animals whose images were associated with his own. The Greek religion was more refined and anthropomorphic than that of Egypt. In Egypt the animals were still adored, and the images of the gods had bestial heads. In Greece only a few gods, and chiefly in very archaic statues, had bestial heads ; but beside the other deities the sculptor set the owl, eagle, wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or what ever creature wras the local favourite of the deity.1 Probably the deity had, in the majority of cases, superseded the animal and succeeded to his honours. But the conservative religious sentiment retained the beast within the courts and in the suit and service of the anthropomorphic god.2
1 De Iside et Osiride, Ixxvi.
2 This hypothesis does not f maintain that totemism prevailed in
APOLLO AND THE MOUSE. IIQ
The process by which the god ousted the beasts may perhaps be observed in Samoa. There (as Dr. Turner tells us in his * Samoa ') each family has its own sacred animal, which it may not eat. If this law be transgressed, the malefactor is supernaturally punished in a variety of ways. But, while each family has thus its totem, four or five different families recognise, in owl, crab, lizard, and so on, in carnations of the same god, say of Tongo. If Tongo had a temple among these families, we can readily believe that images of the various beasts in which he was incarnate would be kept within the consecrated walls. Savage ideas like these, if they were ever entertained in Greece, would account for the holy animals of the different deities. But it is obvious that the phenomena which we have been studying may be otherwise explained. It may be said that the Sminthian Apollo was only revered as the enemy and opponent of mice. St. Gertrude (whose heart was eaten by mice) has the same role in France.1 The worship of Apollo, and the badge of the mouse, would, on this principle, be diffused by colonies from some centre of the faith. The images of mice in Apollo's temples would be nothing more than votive offerings. Thus, in the church of a Saxon town, the verger shows a silver mouse dedicated to Our Lady. ' This is the greatest of our treasures,' says the verger.
Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions an Athenian 7eVos, the loxidse, which claimed descent from and revered asparagus, it is probable that genuine totemism had died out of Greece many hundreds of years before even Homer's time. But this view is not in consistent with the existence of survivals in religion and ritual. 1 Holland, Faune popidaire.
120 CUSTOM AND MYTH.
' Our town was overrun \vith mice till the ladies of the city offered this mouse of silver. Instantly all the mice disappeared.' ' And are you such fools as to believe that the creatures went away because a silver mouse was dedicated ? ' asked a Prussian officer. ' No/ replied the verger, rather neatly ; ' or long ago we should have offered a silver Prussian.'
STAR MYTHS.
ARTEMUS WARD used to say that, while there were many things in the science of astronomy hard to be understood, there was one fact which entirely puzzled him. He could partly perceive how we ' weigh the sun/ and ascertain the component elements of the heavenly bodies, by the aid of spectrum analysis. ' But what beats me about the stars/ he observed plaintively, ' is how we come to know their names.' This question, or rather the somewhat similar ques tion, ' How did the constellations come by their very peculiar names ?' has puzzled Professor Pritchard and other astronomers more serious than Artemus Ward. Why is a group of stars called the Bear, or the Swan, or the Tzvins, or named after the Pleiades, the fair daughters of the Giant Atlas ? J These are diffi culties that meet even children when they examine a ' celestial globe.' There they find the figure of a bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between the stars of the constellations, while a very imposing giant is so drawn that Orion's belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the heavens, the infant
1 The attempt is not to explain the origin of each separate name but only of the general habit of giving animal or human names to Stars.
6*
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speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal forms in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the names of men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial things, it is true, everyone can behold in the heavens. Corona, for ex ample, is like a crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it is like a boomerang, and we can understand why they give it the name of that curious curved missile. The Milky Way, again, does resemble a path in the sky ; our English ancestors called it Waiting Street — the path of the Watlings, mythical giants — and Bushmen in Africa and Red Men in North America name it the ' ashen path,' or * the path of souls.' The ashes of the path, of course, are sup posed to be hot and glowing, not dead and black like the ash-paths of modern running-grounds. Other and more recent names for certain constellations are also intelligible. In Homer's time the Greeks had two names for the Great Bear] they called it the Bear, or the Wain : and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out, though no resemblance to a bear is manifest. In the United States the same constellation is popularly styled the Dipper, and every one may observe the likeness to a dipper or toddy- ladle.
But these resemblances take us only a little way towards appellations. We know that we derive many of the names straight from the Greek ; but
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whence did the Greeks get them ? Some, it is said, from the Chaldaeans ; but whence did they reach the Chaldaeans ? To this we shall return later, but, as to early Greek star-lore, Goguet, the author of ' L'Origine des Lois,' a rather learned but too speculative work of the last century, makes the following characteristic remarks : ' The Greeks received their astronomy from Prometheus. This prince, as far as history teaches us, made his observations on Mount Caucasus.5 That was the eighteenth century's method of interpreting mythology. The myth preserved in the * Prometheus Bound ' of ^Eschylus tells us that Zeus crucified the Titan on Mount Caucasus. The French philosopher, rejecting the supernatural elements of the tale, makes up his mind that Prometheus was a prince of a scien tific bent, and that he established his observatory on the frosty Caucasus. But, even admitting this, why did Prometheus give the stars animal names ? Goguet easily explains this by a hypothetical account of the manners of primitive men. ' The earliest peoples,' he says, ' must have used writing for purposes of astro nomical science. They would be content to design the constellations of which they wished to speak by the hieroglyphical symbols of their names ; hence the constellations have insensibly taken the names of the chief symbols.' Thus, a drawing of a bear or a swan was the hieroglyphic of the name of a star, or group of stars. But whence came the name which was represented by the hieroglyphic ? That is precisely what our author forgets to tell us. But he remarks that the meaning of the hieroglyphic came to be for gotten, and ' the symbols gave rise to all the ridiculous
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tales about the heavenly signs.' This explanation is attained by the process of reasoning in a vicious circle from hypothetical premises ascertained to be false. All the known savages of the world, even those which have scarcely the elements of picture-writing, call the constellations by the names of men and animals, and all tell ' ridiculous tales ' to account for the names.
As the star- stories told by the Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, and other civilised people of the old world, exactly correspond in character, and sometimes even in incident, with the star-stories of modern savages, we have the choice of three hypotheses to explain this curious coincidence. Perhaps the star-stories, about nymphs changed into bears, and bears changed into stars, were invented by the civilised races of old, and gradually found their way amongst people like the Eskimo, and the Australians, and Bushmen. Or it may be insisted that the ancestors of Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen were once civilised, like the Greeks and Egyptians, and invented star-stories, still remembered by their degenerate descendants. These are the two forms of the explanation which will be advanced by persons who believe that the star-stories were originally the fruit of the civilised imagination. The third theory would be, that the ' ridiculous tales ' about the stars were originally the \vork of the savage imagination, and that the Greeks, Chaldaeans, and Egyptians, when they became civilised, retained the old myths that their ancestors had invented when they were savages. In favour of this theory it may be said, briefly, that there is no proof that the fathers I
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of Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen had ever been civilised, while there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the fathers of the Greeks had once been savages. l And, if we incline to the theory that the star-myths are the creation of savage fancy, we at once learn why they are, in all parts of the world, so much alike. Just as the flint and bone weapons of rude races resemble each other much more than they resemble the metal weapons and the artillery of advanced peoples, so the mental pro ducts, the fairy tales, and myths of rude races have everywhere a strong family resemblance. They are produced by men in similar mental conditions of ignorance, curiosity, and credulous fancy, and they are intended to supply the same needs, partly of amusing narrative, partly of crude explanation of familiar phenomena.
Now it is time to prove the truth of our assertion that the star-stories of savage and of civilised races closely resemble each other. Let us begin with that well-known group the Pleiades. The peculiarity of the Pleiades is that the group consists of seven stars, of which one is so dim that it seems entirely to disappear, and many persons can only detect its presence through a telescope. The Greeks had a myth to account for the vanishing of the lost Pleiad. The tale is given in the ' Catasterismoi ' (stories of metamorphoses into stars) attributed to Eratosthenes.
1 Mr. Herbert Spencer believes that the Australians were once more civilised than at present. But there has never been found a trace of pottery on the Australian continent, which says little for their civilisation in the past.
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This work was probably written after our era ; but the author derived his information from older trea tises now lost. According to the Greek myth, then, the seven stars of the Pleiad were seven maidens, daughters of the Giant Atlas. Six of them had gods for lovers ; Poseidon admired two of them, Zeus three, and Ares one ; but the seventh had only an earthly wooer, and when all of them were changed into stars, the maiden with the mortal lover hid her light for shame.
Now let us compare the Australian story. Accord ing to Mr. Dawson ('Australian Aborigines '), a writer who understands