Volume I Part 14 (1/2)
Selene, the moon, like Helios, the sun, was a person, and amorous.
Beloved by Zeus, she gave birth to Pandia, and Pan gained her affection by the simple rustic gift of a fleece.(1) The Australian Dawn, with her present of a red kangaroo skin, was not more lightly won than the chaste Selene. Her affection for Endymion is well known, and her cold white glance s.h.i.+nes through the crevices of his mountain grave, hewn in a rocky wall, like the tombs of Phrygia.(2) She is the sister of the sun in Hesiod, the daughter (by his sister) of Hyperion in the Homeric hymns to Helios.
(1) Virgil, Georgics, iii. 391.
(2) Preller, Griech. Myth., i. 163.
In Greece the aspects of sun and moon take the most ideal human forms, and show themselves in the most gracious myths. But, after all, these retain in their anthropomorphism the marks of the earliest fancy, the fancy of Eskimos and Australians. It seems to be commonly thought that the existence of solar myths is denied by anthropologists. This is a vulgar error. There is an enormous ma.s.s of solar myths, but they are not caused by ”a disease of language,” and--all myths are not solar!
There is no occasion to dwell long on myths of the same character in which the stars are accounted for as transformed human adventurers.
It has often been shown that this opinion is practically of world-wide distribution.(1) We find it in Australia, Persia, Greece, among the Bushmen, in North and South America, among the Eskimos, in ancient Egypt, in New Zealand, in ancient India--briefly, wherever we look. The Sanskrit forms of these myths have been said to arise from confusion as to the meaning of words. But is it credible that, in all languages, however different, the same kind of unconscious puns should have led to the same mistaken beliefs? As the savage, barbarous and Greek star-myths (such as that of Callisto, first changed into a bear and then into a constellation) are familiar to most readers, a few examples of Sanskrit star-stories are offered here from the Satapatha Brahmana.(2) Fires are not, according to the Brahmana ritual, to be lighted under the stars called Krittikas, the Pleiades. The reason is that the stars were the wives of the bears (Riksha), for the group known in Brahmanic times as the Ris.h.i.+s (sages) were originally called the Rikshas (bears). But the wives of the bears were excluded from the society of their husbands, for the bears rise in the north and their wives in the east. Therefore the wors.h.i.+pper should not set up his fires under the Pleiades, lest he should thereby be separated from the company of his wife. The Brahmanas(3) also tell us that Praj.a.pati had an unholy pa.s.sion for his daughter, who was in the form of a doe. The G.o.ds made Rudra fire an arrow at Praj.a.pati to punish him; he was wounded, and leaped into the sky, where he became one constellation and his daughter another, and the arrow a third group of stars. In general, according to the Brahmanas, ”the stars are the lights of virtuous men who go to the heavenly world”.(4)
(1) Custom and Myth, ”Star-Myths”; Primitive Culture, i. 288, 291; J. G.
Muller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 52, 53.
(2) Sacred Books of the East, i. 283-286.
(3) Aitareya Bramana, iii. 33.
(4) Satapatha Brahmana, vi. 5, 4, 8. For Greek examples, Hesiod, Ovid, and the Catasterismoi, attributed to Eratosthenes, are useful authorities. Probably many of the tales in Eratosthenes are late fictions consciously moulded on traditional data.
Pa.s.sing from savage myths explanatory of the nature of celestial bodies to myths accounting for the formation and colour and habits of beasts, birds and fishes, we find ourselves, as an old Jesuit missionary says, in the midst of a barbarous version of Ovid's Metamorphoses. It has been shown that the possibility of interchange of form between man and beast is part of the working belief of everyday existence among the lower peoples. They regard all things as on one level, or, to use an old political phrase, they ”level up” everything to equality with the human status. Thus Mr. Im Thurn, a very good observer, found that to the Indians of Guiana ”all objects, animate or inaminate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ by the accident of bodily form”. Clearly to grasp this entirely natural conception of primitive man, the civilised student must make a great effort to forget for a time all that science has taught him of the differences between the objects which fill the world.(1) ”To the ear of the savage, animals certainly seem to talk.” ”As far as the Indians of Guiana are concerned, I do not believe that they distinguish such beings as sun and moon, or such other natural phenomena as winds and storms, from men and other animals, from plants and other inanimate objects, or from any other objects whatsoever.” Bancroft says about North American myths, ”Beasts and birds and fishes fetch and carry, talk and act, in a way that leaves even Aesop's heroes quite in the shade”.(2)
(1) Journ. Anthrop. Inst., xi. 366-369. A very large and rich collection of testimonies as to metamorphosis will be found in J. G. Muller's Amerikanischen Urreligionen, p. 62 et seq.; while, for European superst.i.tions, Bodin on La Demonomanie des Sorciers, Lyon, 1598, may be consulted.
(2) Vol. iii. p. 127.
The savage tendency is to see in inanimate things animals, and in animals disguised men. M. Reville quotes in his Religions des Peuples Non-Civilise's, i. 64, the story of some Negroes, who, the first time they were shown a cornemuse, took the instrument for a beast, the two holes for its eyes. The Highlander who looted a watch at Prestonpans, and observing, ”She's teed,” sold it cheap when it ran down, was in the same psychological condition. A queer bit of savage science is displayed on a black stone tobacco-pipe from the Pacific Coast.(1) The savage artist has carved the pipe in the likeness of a steamer, as a steamer is conceived by him. ”Unable to account for the motive power, he imagines the paddle to be linked round the tongue of a coiled serpent, fastened to the tail of the vessel,” and so he represents it on the black stone pipe. Nay, a savage's belief that beasts are on his own level is so literal, that he actually makes blood-covenants with the lower animals, as he does with men, mingling his gore with theirs, or smearing both together on a stone;(2) while to bury dead animals with sacred rites is as usual among the Bedouins and Malagasies to-day as in ancient Egypt or Attica. In the same way the Ainos of j.a.pan, who regard the bear as a kinsman, sacrifice a bear once a year. But, to propitiate the animal and his connections, they appoint him a ”mother,” an Aino girl, who looks after his comforts, and behaves in a way as maternal as possible. The bear is now a kinsman, (Greek text omitted), and cannot avenge himself within the kin. This, at least, seems to be the humour of it. In Lagarde's Reliquiae Juris Ecclesiastici Antiquissimae a similar Syrian covenant of kins.h.i.+p with insects is described. About 700 A. D., when a Syrian garden was infested by caterpillars, the maidens were a.s.sembled, and one caterpillar was caught. Then one of the virgins was ”made its mother,” and the creature was buried with due lamentations. The ”mother”
was then brought to the spot where the pests were, her companions bewailed her, and the caterpillars perished like their chosen kinsman, but without extorting revenge.(3) Revenge was out of their reach.
They had been brought within the kin of their foes, and there were no Erinnyes, ”avengers of kindred blood,” to help them. People in this condition of belief naturally tell hundreds of tales, in which men, stones, trees, beasts, s.h.i.+ft shapes, and in which the modifications of animal forms are caused by accident, or by human agency, or by magic, or by metamorphosis. Such tales survive in our modern folk-lore. To make our meaning clear, we may give the European nursery-myth of the origin of the donkey's long ears, and, among other ill.u.s.trations, the Australian myth of the origin of the black and white plumage of the pelican. Mr. Ralston has published the Russian version of the myth of the donkey's ears. The Spanish form, which is identical with the Russian, is given by Fernan Caballero in La Gaviota.
(1) Magazine of Art, January, 1883.
(2) ”Malagasy Folk-Tales,” Folk-Lore Journal, October, 1883.
(3) We are indebted to Professor Robertson Smith for this example, and to Miss Bird's Journal, pp. 90, 97, for the Aino parallel.
”Listen! do you know why your ears are so big?” (the story is told to a stupid little boy with big ears). ”When Father Adam found himself in Paradise with the animals, he gave each its name; those of THY species, my child, he named 'donkeys'. One day, not long after, he called the beasts together, and asked each to tell him its name. They all answered right except the animals of THY sort, and they had forgotten their name!
Then Father Adam was very angry, and, taking that forgetful donkey by the ears, he pulled them out, screaming 'You are called DONKEY!' And the donkey's ears have been long ever since.” This, to a child, is a credible explanation. So, perhaps, is another survival of this form of science--the Scotch explanation of the black marks on the haddock; they were impressed by St. Peter's finger and thumb when he took the piece of money for Caesar's tax out of the fish's mouth.
Turning from folk-lore to savage beliefs, we learn that from one end of Africa to another the honey-bird, schneter, is said to be an old woman whose son was lost, and who pursued him till she was turned into a bird, which still shrieks his name, ”Schneter, Schneter”.(1) In the same way the manners of most of the birds known to the Greeks were accounted for by the myth that they had been men and women. Zeus, for example, turned Ceyx and Halcyon into sea-fowls because they were too proud in their married happiness.(2) To these myths of the origin of various animals we shall return, but we must not forget the black and white Australian pelican. Why is the pelican parti-coloured?(3) For this reason: After the Flood (the origin of which is variously explained by the Murri), the pelican (who had been a black fellow) made a canoe, and went about like a kind of Noah, trying to save the drowning. In the course of his benevolent mission he fell in love with a woman, but she and her friends played him a trick and escaped from him. The pelican at once prepared to go on the war-path. The first thing to do was to daub himself white, as is the custom of the blacks before a battle. They think the white pipe-clay strikes terror and inspires respect among the enemy. But when the pelican was only half pipe-clayed, another pelican came past, and, ”not knowing what such a queer black and white thing was, struck the first pelican with his beak and killed him. Before that pelicans were all black; now they are black and white. That is the reason.”(4)