Volume I Part 16 (1/2)
As to interchange of shape between men and women and PLANTS, our information, so far as the lower races are concerned, is less copious.
It has already been shown that the totems of many stocks in all parts of the world are plants, and this belief in connection with a plant by itself demonstrates that the confused belief in all things being on one level has thus introduced vegetables into the dominion of myth. As far as possessing souls is concerned, Mr. Tylor has proved that plants are as well equipped as men or beasts or minerals.(1) In India the doctrine of transmigration widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being animated by human souls. In the well-known ancient Egyptian story of ”The Two Brothers,”(2) the life of the younger is practically merged in that of the acacia tree where he has hidden his heart; and when he becomes a bull and is sacrificed, his spiritual part pa.s.ses into a pair of Persea trees. The Yarucaris of Bolivia say that a girl once bewailed in the forest her loverless estate. She happened to notice a beautiful tree, which she adorned with ornaments as well as she might. The tree a.s.sumed the shape of a handsome young man--
She did not find him so remiss, But, lightly issuing through, He did repay her kiss for kiss, With usury thereto.(3)
J. G. Muller, who quotes this tale from Andree, says it has ”many a.n.a.logies with the tales of metamorphosis of human beings into trees among the ancients, as reported by Ovid”. The wors.h.i.+p of plants and trees is a well-known feature in religion, and probably implies (at least in many cases) a recognition of personality. In Samoa, metamorphosis into vegetables is not uncommon. For example, the king of Fiji was a cannibal, and (very naturally) ”the people were melting away under him”. The brothers Toa and Pale, wis.h.i.+ng to escape the royal oven, adopted various changes of shape. They knew that straight timber was being sought for to make a canoe for the king, so Pale, when he a.s.sumed a vegetable form, became a crooked stick overgrown with creepers, but Toa ”preferred standing erect as a handsome straight tree”. Poor Toa was therefore cut down by the king's s.h.i.+pwrights, though, thanks to his brother's magic wiles, they did not make a canoe out of him after all.(4) In Samoa the trees are so far human that they not only go to war with each other, but actually embark in canoes to seek out distant enemies.(5) The Ottawa Indians account for the origin of maize by a myth in which a wizard fought with and conquered a little man who had a little crown of feathers. From his ashes arose the maize with its crown of leaves and heavy ears of corn.(6)
(1) Primitive Culture, i. 145; examples of Society Islanders, Dyaks, Karens, Buddhists.
(2) Maspero, Contes Egyptiens, p. 25.
(3) J. G. Muller, Amerik. Urrel., p. 264.
(4) Turner's Samoa, p. 219.
(5) Ibid.. p. 213.
(6) Amerik. Urrel., p. 60.
In Mangaia the myth of the origin of the cocoa-nut tree is a series of transformation scenes, in which the persons s.h.i.+ft shapes with the alacrity of medicine-men. Ina used to bathe in a pool where an eel became quite familiar with her. At last the fish took courage and made his declaration. He was Tuna, the chief of all eels. ”Be mine,” he cried, and Ina was his. For some mystical reason he was obliged to leave her, but (like the White Cat in the fairy tale) he requested her to cut off his eel's head and bury it. Regretfully but firmly did Ina comply with his request, and from the buried eel's head sprang two cocoa trees, one from each half of the brain of Tuna. As a proof of this be it remarked, that when the nut is husked we always find on it ”the two eyes and mouth of the lover of Ina”.(1) All over the world, from ancient Egypt to the wigwams of the Algonkins, plants and other matters are said to have sprung from a dismembered G.o.d or hero, while men are said to have sprung from plants.(2) We may therefore perhaps look on it as a proved point that the general savage habit of ”levelling up” prevails even in their view of the vegetable world, and has left traces (as we have seen) in their myths.
(1) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 79.
(2) Myths of the Beginning of Things.
Turning now to the mythology of Greece, we see that the same rule holds good. Metamorphosis into plants and flowers is extremely common; the instances of Daphne, Myrrha, Hyacinth, Narcissus and the sisters of Phaethon at once occur to the memory.
Most of those myths in which everything in Nature becomes personal and human, while all persons may become anything in Nature, we explain, then, as survivals or imitations of tales conceived when men were in the savage intellectual condition. In that stage, as we demonstrated, no line is drawn between things animate and inanimate, dumb or ”articulate speaking,” organic or inorganic, personal or impersonal. Such a mental stage, again, is reflected in the nature-myths, many of which are merely ”aetiological,”--a.s.sign a cause, that is, for phenomena, and satisfy an indolent and credulous curiosity.
We may be asked again, ”But how did this intellectual condition come to exist?” To answer that is no part of our business; for us it is enough to trace myth, or a certain element in myth, to a demonstrable and actual stage of thought. But this stage, which is constantly found to survive in the minds of children, is thus explained or described by Hume in his Essay on Natural Religion: ”There is an universal tendency in mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities... of which they are intimately conscious”.(1) Now they believe themselves to be conscious of magical and supernatural powers, which they do not, of course, possess. These powers of effecting metamorphosis, of ”shape-s.h.i.+fting,” of flying, of becoming invisible at will, of conversing with the dead, of miraculously healing the sick, savages pa.s.s on to their G.o.ds (as will be shown in a later chapter), and the G.o.ds of myth survive and retain the miraculous gifts after their wors.h.i.+ppers (become more reasonable) have quite forgotten that they themselves once claimed similar endowments. So far, then, it has been shown that savage fancy, wherever studied, is wild; that savage curiosity is keen; that savage credulity is practically boundless. These considerations explain the existence of savage myths of sun, stars, beasts, plants and stones; similar myths fill Greek legend and the Sanskrit Brahmanes. We conclude that, in Greek and Sanskrit, the myths are relics (whether borrowed or inherited) of the savage mental STATUS.
(1) See Appendix B.
CHAPTER VI. NON-ARYAN MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND OF MAN.
Confusions of myth--Various origins of man and of things--Myths of Australia, Andaman Islands, Bushmen, Ovaherero, Namaquas, Zulus, Hurons, Iroquois, Diggers, Navajoes, Winnebagoes, Chaldaeans, Thlinkeets, Pacific Islanders, Maoris, Aztecs, Peruvians--Similarity of ideas pervading all those peoples in various conditions of society and culture.
The difficulties of cla.s.sification which beset the study of mythology have already been described. Nowhere are they more perplexing than when we try to cla.s.sify what may be styled Cosmogonic Myths. The very word cosmogonic implies the pre-existence of the idea of a cosmos, an orderly universe, and this was exactly the last idea that could enter the mind of the myth-makers. There is no such thing as orderliness in their mythical conceptions, and no such thing as an universe. The natural question, ”Who made the world, or how did the things in the world come to be?” is the question which is answered by cosmogonic myths. But it is answered piecemeal. To a Christian child the reply is given, ”G.o.d made all things”. We have known this reply discussed by some little girls of six (a Scotch minister's daughters, and naturally metaphysical), one of whom solved all difficulties by the impromptu myth, ”G.o.d first made a little place to stand on, and then he made the rest”. But savages and the myth-makers, whose stories survive into the civilised religions, could adhere firmly to no such account as this. Here occurs in the first edition of this book the following pa.s.sage: ”They (savages) have not, and had not, the conception of G.o.d as we understand what we mean by the word. They have, and had at most, only the small-change of the idea G.o.d,”--here the belief in a moral being who watches conduct; here again the hypothesis of a pre-human race of magnified, non-natural medicine-men, or of extra-natural beings with human and magical attributes, but often wearing the fur, and fins, and feathers of the lower animals. Mingled with these faiths (whether earlier, later, or coeval in origin with these) are the dread and love of ancestral ghosts, often trans.m.u.ting themselves into wors.h.i.+p of an imaginary and ideal first parent of the tribe, who once more is often a beast or a bird.
Here is nothing like the notion of an omnipotent, invisible, spiritual being, the creator of our religion; here is only la monnaie of the conception.”
It ought to have occurred to the author that he was here traversing the main theory of his own book, which is that RELIGION is one thing, myth quite another thing. That many low races of savages entertain, in hours of RELIGIOUS thought, an elevated conception of a moral and undying Maker of Things, and Master of Life, a Father in Heaven, has already been stated, and knowledge of the facts has been considerably increased since this work first appeared (1887). But the MYTHICAL conceptions described in the last paragraph coexist with the religious conception in the faiths of very low savages, such as the Australians and Andamanese, just as the same contradictory coexistence is notorious in ancient Greece, India, Egypt and Anahuac. In a sense, certain low savages HAVE the ”conception of G.o.d, as we understand what we mean by the word”. But that sense, when savages come to spinning fables about origins, is apt to be overlaid and perplexed by the frivolity of their mythical fancy.