FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[91]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.’[92]This formula occurs among Bushmen and Eskimo (Bleek and Rink).[93]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.)[94]Ralston,Russian Folk Tales, 132; Köhler,Orient und Occident, ii. 107, 114.[95]Ko ti ki, p. 36.[96]Callaway, pp. 51, 53, 64, 145, 228.[97]See also ‘Petrosinella’ in thePentamerone, and ‘The Master-maid’ in Dasent’sTales from the Norse.[98]Folklore Journal, August, 1883.[99]Poetæ Minores Gr., ii.[100]Gr. My., ii. 318.[101]Sonne, Mond und Sterne, pp. 213, 229.[102]This proves that the tale belongs to the pre-Christian cannibal age.[103]Turner’sSamoa, p. 102. In this tale only the names of the daughters are translated; they mean ‘white fish’ and ‘dark fish.’[104]Folklore Journal, August, 1883.[105]Schoolcraft,Algic Researches, ii. 94-104.[106]The Red Indian version of the flight is given in ‘The Red Horse of the Dacotahs,’Century Magazine, 1884.[107]Nature, March 14, 1884.

[91]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.’

[92]This formula occurs among Bushmen and Eskimo (Bleek and Rink).

[93]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.)

[94]Ralston,Russian Folk Tales, 132; Köhler,Orient und Occident, ii. 107, 114.

[95]Ko ti ki, p. 36.

[96]Callaway, pp. 51, 53, 64, 145, 228.

[97]See also ‘Petrosinella’ in thePentamerone, and ‘The Master-maid’ in Dasent’sTales from the Norse.

[98]Folklore Journal, August, 1883.

[99]Poetæ Minores Gr., ii.

[100]Gr. My., ii. 318.

[101]Sonne, Mond und Sterne, pp. 213, 229.

[102]This proves that the tale belongs to the pre-Christian cannibal age.

[103]Turner’sSamoa, p. 102. In this tale only the names of the daughters are translated; they mean ‘white fish’ and ‘dark fish.’

[104]Folklore Journal, August, 1883.

[105]Schoolcraft,Algic Researches, ii. 94-104.

[106]The Red Indian version of the flight is given in ‘The Red Horse of the Dacotahs,’Century Magazine, 1884.

[107]Nature, March 14, 1884.

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 theIliad(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,’Σμινθιακοὶ λόγοι, so styled by Eustathius, the mediæval interpreter of Homer. Following 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 authenticaccount of the old Peruvian beliefs. Garcilasso 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 diligently to collect both their priestly and popular traditions, and his account of them is the more trustworthy as it coincides with what we know to have been true in lands with 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 was not accounted honourable unless he was descended from a fountain, river, or lake, or even from the sea, or from a wild animal, such as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they callcuntur(condor), or some other bird of prey.’[108]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 drewtheirpedigree from the sun, which they adored like thegensof the Aurelii in Rome.[109]Thus every Indian had hispacarissa, or, as the North American Indians say,totem,[110]a natural object from which he claimed descent, and which, in a certain degree, he worshipped. Though sun-worship became the established religion, worship of the animalpacarissaswas still tolerated. The sun-temples also containedhuacas, or images, of the beasts which the Indians had venerated.[111]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.’[112]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,[113]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 aboutmany 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, andtheirchildren, again, are Turtles, or Wolves. Thus there is necessarily 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, sinkingfamily differences and family names, calls itself ‘the Wolves.’ Such tribes were probably, in the beginning, 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) from the flesh of the animal that gave them its name.[114]

It has taken us long to reach the Sacred Mice of Greek religion, but we are now in a position to approach their august divinity. We have seen that the sun-worship superseded, without abolishing, the tribalpacarissasin Peru, and that thehuacas, or images, of the sacred animals were admitted under the roof of the temple of the Sun. Now it is recognised 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 evolution. Just as, in Peru, the tribes adored ‘vile and filthy’ animals, just as the solar worship of the Incas subordinated these, just as thehuacasof 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 animalpacarissas; these were subordinated to the religion (to some extent solar) of Apollo; and thehuacas, or animal idols, survived in Apollo’s temples.

If this theory be correct, we shall probably findthe 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.[115]Traces of the Mouse families, and of adoration, if adoration there was of the mouse, would linger on in the following shapes: (1) Places would be named from mice, and mice would be actually 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 would be associated with 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:—

(1) 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 beingσμίνθος. Many places bore this mouse-name, according to Strabo.[116]This is precisely what would have occurred had the Mouse totem, and the Mouse stock, been widely distributed.[117]The Scholiast[118]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’ (Καὶ ἀλλόθι δε πολλαχόθι). Strabo (x. 486) names Caressus, and Poeessa, in Ceos, among the other places which has 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 Ælian. ‘The dwellers in Hamaxitus of the Troad worship mice,’ says Ælian. ‘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.’[119]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 ‘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 Ælian informs us that there stood ‘an effigy of the mouse beside thetripod 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 theIliad.[120]

The mouse is not an 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 plausible conjecture that, just as the Iroquois when they signed treaties with the Europeans used their totems—bear, wolf, and turtle—as seals,[121]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,[122]stamped the mouse on their coins.[123]As there was a temple ofApollo Smintheus in Tenedos, we naturally hear of a mouse on the coins of the island.[124]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 Cumæ employed a mouse dormant. Paoli fancied that certain mice on Roman medals might be connected with the family ofMus, but this is rather guesswork.[125]

We have now shown traces, at least, of various ways in which an early tribal religion of the mouse—the mousepacarissa, as the Peruvians said—may have been perpetuated. When we consider that the superseding 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, thehuaca, 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 thehuacaof 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.[126]According to Herodotus, one Sethos, a priest of Hephæstus (Ptah), was king of Egypt.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.[127]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 Hephæstus, and in the hand of the image a mouse, and there is this inscription, “Let whoso looketh on me be pious.”’

Prof. Sayce[128]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 supposed 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 werethey used as symbols, or found on the monuments.’ To this remark we may suggest some exceptions. Apparently this one mousewasfound on the monuments. 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.[129]This association 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 Athribitæ, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis, are the people to whom he attributes this cult, whom he mentions (xvii. 831) among the other local animal-worships of Egypt.[130]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 the mice gnawing thebowstrings 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.[131]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.[132]Another myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse Apollo on the hypothesis that he had once freed the land from mice, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, whose pipe (still serviceable) is said to have been found in his grave by men who were digging a mine.[133]

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 religious 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 namesamong Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved by Prof. Robertson Smith:[134]‘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 (lxvi.): ‘They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and themouse, 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 unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan, then the mouse was a totem,[135]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, 11), 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 setit 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.[136]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 hisApollo Smintheus. Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics of Apollo. In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of Ganeça, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is represented 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 connection 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 ofDe 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.’[137]This is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows)cannotplay: 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 originally 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;[138]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 theZend 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 interest 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 amouse’s teeth. The hypothesis is ajeu 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 civilised 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 besides the other deities the sculptor set the owl, eagle, wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or whatever creature was the local favourite of the deity.[139]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.[140]

The process by which the god ousted the beasts may perhaps be observed in Samoa. There (as Dr. Turner tells us in hisSamoa) 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, incarnations 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 samerôlein France.[141]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. ‘Our town was overrun with 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.’

FOOTNOTES:[108]Comm. Real., i. 75.[109]SeeEarly History of the Family,infra.[110]The namesTotemandTotemismhave been in use at least since 1792, among writers on the North American tribes. Prof. Max Müller (Academy, Jan., 1884) says the word should be, notTotem, butOteorOtem. Mr. Tylor’s inquiries among the Red Men support this. Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the wordTotamismin 1792; but Lafitau (1724) had already explained some classical myths as survivals of Totemism.[111]Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.[112]Cieza de Leon, p. 183.[113]Idyllxv.[114]Sayce,Herodotos, p. 344; Herodotus, ii. 42; Wilkinson’sAncient Egyptians(1878, ii. 475, note 2); Plutarch,De Is. et Os., 71, 72; Athenæus, vii. 299; Strabo, xvii. 813.[115]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.[116]xiii. 604. Casaub. 1620.[117]There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete (De Witte,Revue Numismatique, N.S. iii. 3-11).[118]Iliad, i. 39.[119]Ælian,H. A., xii. 5.[120]The bas-relief is published in Paoli’sDella Religi ne de’ Gentili, Naples, 1771, p. 9; also by Fabretti, ad Cal. 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 orprovenance. The book is a mine of mouse-lore.[121]Colden,History of the Five Nations, p. 15 (1727).[122]Onomast., ix. segm. 84.[123]De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here. In theRevue Numismatique, 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.[124]Spanheim, ad Fl. Joseph., vi. 1, p. 312.[125]Della Rel., p. 174.[126]Herodotus, ii. 141.[127]Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 13, quotingJournal 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 distressed 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? The same story of rats gnawing bowstrings recurs, of all places, in theMigration Legend of the Greeks(Brinton, Philadelphia. 1884).[128]Herodotos, p. 204.[129]Wilkinson, iii. 249, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: ‘Thou devourest the abominable rat of Ra, or the Sun.’[130]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 collection. See hisEssay 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.Two examples of scarab substitutes[131]Strabo, xiii. 604.[132]Eustathius onIliad, i. 39.[133]A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of Mice, 1670.[134]Journal of Philol., xvii. p. 96.[135]Leviticus xi. 29.[136]Samuel i. 5, 6.[137]Zool. Myth., ii. 68.[138]Mélusine, N.S. i.[139]De Iside et Osiride, lxxvi.[140]This hypothesis does not maintain that totemism prevailed in Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions a Carianγένος, the Ioxidæ, of Attic descent, which 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 inconsistent with the existence of survivals in religion and ritual.[141]Rolland,Faune populaire.

[108]Comm. Real., i. 75.

[109]SeeEarly History of the Family,infra.

[110]The namesTotemandTotemismhave been in use at least since 1792, among writers on the North American tribes. Prof. Max Müller (Academy, Jan., 1884) says the word should be, notTotem, butOteorOtem. Mr. Tylor’s inquiries among the Red Men support this. Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the wordTotamismin 1792; but Lafitau (1724) had already explained some classical myths as survivals of Totemism.

[111]Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.

[112]Cieza de Leon, p. 183.

[113]Idyllxv.

[114]Sayce,Herodotos, p. 344; Herodotus, ii. 42; Wilkinson’sAncient Egyptians(1878, ii. 475, note 2); Plutarch,De Is. et Os., 71, 72; Athenæus, vii. 299; Strabo, xvii. 813.

[115]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.

[116]xiii. 604. Casaub. 1620.

[117]There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete (De Witte,Revue Numismatique, N.S. iii. 3-11).

[118]Iliad, i. 39.

[119]Ælian,H. A., xii. 5.

[120]The bas-relief is published in Paoli’sDella Religi ne de’ Gentili, Naples, 1771, p. 9; also by Fabretti, ad Cal. 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 orprovenance. The book is a mine of mouse-lore.

[121]Colden,History of the Five Nations, p. 15 (1727).

[122]Onomast., ix. segm. 84.

[123]De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here. In theRevue Numismatique, 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.

[124]Spanheim, ad Fl. Joseph., vi. 1, p. 312.

[125]Della Rel., p. 174.

[126]Herodotus, ii. 141.

[127]Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 13, quotingJournal 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 distressed 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? The same story of rats gnawing bowstrings recurs, of all places, in theMigration Legend of the Greeks(Brinton, Philadelphia. 1884).

[128]Herodotos, p. 204.

[129]Wilkinson, iii. 249, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: ‘Thou devourest the abominable rat of Ra, or the Sun.’

[130]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 collection. See hisEssay 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.Two examples of scarab substitutes

Two examples of scarab substitutes

[131]Strabo, xiii. 604.

[132]Eustathius onIliad, i. 39.

[133]A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of Mice, 1670.

[134]Journal of Philol., xvii. p. 96.

[135]Leviticus xi. 29.

[136]Samuel i. 5, 6.

[137]Zool. Myth., ii. 68.

[138]Mélusine, N.S. i.

[139]De Iside et Osiride, lxxvi.

[140]This hypothesis does not maintain that totemism prevailed in Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions a Carianγένος, the Ioxidæ, of Attic descent, which 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 inconsistent with the existence of survivals in religion and ritual.

[141]Rolland,Faune populaire.

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 ofspectrumanalysis. ‘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 question, ‘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 theBear, or theSwan, or theTwins, or named after thePleiades, the fair daughters of the Giant Atlas?[142]These are difficulties 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 infantspeculator 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, every one can behold in the heavens.Corona, for example, 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. TheMilky Way, again, does resemble a path in the sky; our English ancestors called itWatling 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 supposed 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 theGreat Bear; they called it theBear, or theWain: 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 theDipper, 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; butwhence did the Greeks get them? Some, it is said, from the Chaldæans; but whence did they reach the Chaldæans? To this we shall return later, but, as to early Greek star-lore, Goguet, the author ofL’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.’ That was the eighteenth century’s method of interpreting mythology. The myth preserved in the ‘Prometheus Bound’ of Æschylus 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 scientific 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 astronomical 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 forgotten, and ‘the symbols gave rise to all the ridiculoustales 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 hypothesis 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 work of the savage imagination, and that the Greeks, Chaldæans, 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 fathersof 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.[143]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 products, 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 thePleiades. The peculiarity of thePleiadesis 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 theCatasterismoi(stories of metamorphoses into stars) attributed to Eratosthenes.This work was probably written after our era; but the author derived his information from older treatises 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. According to Mr. Dawson (Australian Aborigines), a writer who understands the natives well, ‘their knowledge of the heavenly bodies greatly exceeds that of most white people,’ and ‘is taught by men selected for their intelligence and information. The knowledge is important to the aborigines on their night journeys;’ so we may be sure that the natives are careful observers of the heavens, and are likely to be conservative of their astronomical myths. The ‘Lost Pleiad’ has not escaped them, and this is how they account for her disappearance. ThePirt Kopan noottribe have a tradition that thePleiadeswere a queen and her six attendants. Long ago theCrow(ourCanopus) fell in love with the queen, who refused to be his wife. TheCrowfound that the queen and her six maidens, like other Australiangins, were in the habit of hunting for white edible grubs in the bark of trees. TheCrowat once changed himself into a grub (just as Jupiter and Indra used to change into swans, horses, ants, or what not) and hid in the bark of a tree. The six maidens sought to pick him out with their wooden hooks, buthe broke the points of all the hooks. Then came the queen with her pretty bone hook; he let himself be drawn out, took the shape of a giant, and ran away with her. Ever since there have only been six stars, the six maidens, in thePleiad. This story is well known, by the strictest inquiry, to be current among the blacks of the West District and South Australia.

Mr. Tylor, whose opinion is entitled to the highest respect, thinks that this may be a European myth, told by some settler to a black in the Greek form, and then spread about among the natives. He complains that the story of the loss of thebrighteststar does not fit the facts of the case.

We do not know, and how can the Australians know, that the lost star was once the brightest? It appears to me that the Australians, remarking the disappearance of a star, might very naturally suppose that theCrowhad selected for his wife that one which had been the most brilliant of the cluster. Besides, the wide distribution of the tale among the natives, and the very great change in the nature of the incidents, seem to point to a native origin. Though the main conception—the loss of one out of seven maidens—is identical in Greek and inMurri, the manner of the disappearance is eminently Hellenic in the one case, eminently savage in the other. However this may be, nothing of course is proved by a single example. Let us next examine the starsCastorandPollux. Both in Greece and in Australia these are said once to have been two young men. In theCatasterismoi, already spoken of, we read: ‘TheTwins, orDioscouroi.—They were nurtured inLacedæmon, and were famous for their brotherly love, wherefore, Zeus, desiring to make their memory immortal, placed them both among the stars.’ In Australia, according to Mr. Brough Smyth (Aborigines of Victoria),Turree(Castor) andWanjel(Pollux) are two young men who pursuePurraand kill him at the commencement of the great heat.Coonar toorung(the mirage) is the smoke of the fire by which they roast him. In Greece it was not Castor and Pollux, butOrionwho was the great hunter placed among the stars. Among the Bushmen of South Africa,CastorandPolluxare not young men, but young women, the wives of the Eland, the great native antelope. In Greek star-stories theGreat Bearkeeps watch, Homer says, on the hunter Orion for fear of a sudden attack. But how did the Bear get its name in Greece? According to Hesiod, the oldest Greek poet after Homer, the Bear was once a lady, daughter of Lycaon, King of Arcadia. She was a nymph of the train of chaste Artemis, but yielded to the love of Zeus, and became the ancestress of all the Arcadians. Changed by Zeus to a bestial form, she was shot by Artemis, and then translated by Zeus to the stars (Apollod., iii. 8; Eustath., 1156; Bachofen,Der Bär, p. 14).[144]Here we must notice first, that the Arcadians, like Australians, Red Indians, and other wild races, and like the Bedouins, believed themselves to be descended from a girl who became an animal.That the early Egyptians did the same is not improbable; for names of animals are found among the ancestors in the very oldest genealogical papyrus,[145]as in the genealogies of the old English kings. Next the Arcadians transferred the ancestral bear to the heavens, and, in doing this, they resembled the Peruvians, of whom Acosta says: ‘They adored the starUrchuchilly, feigning it to be aRam, and worshipped two others, and say that one of them is asheep, and the other a lamb ... others worshipped the star called theTiger.They were of opinion that there was not any beast or bird upon the earth, whose shape or image did not shine in the heavens.’

But to return to our bears. The Australians have, properly speaking, no bears, though the animal called the native bear is looked up to by the aborigines with superstitious regard. But among the North American Indians, as the old missionaries Lafitau and Charlevoix observed, ‘the four stars in front of our constellation are a bear; those in the tail are hunters who pursue him; the small star apart is the pot in which they mean to cook him.’

It may be held that the Red Men derived their bear from the European settlers. But, as we have seen, an exact knowledge of the stars has always been useful if not essential to savages; and we venture to doubt whether they would confuse their nomenclature and sacred traditions by borrowing terms from trappers and squatters. But, if this is improbable, it seems almost impossible that all savage races should have borrowed their wholeconception of the heavenly bodies from the myths of Greece. It is thus that Egede, a missionary of the last century, describes the Eskimo philosophy of the stars: ‘The notions that the Greenlanders have as to the origin of the heavenly lights—as sun, moon, and stars—are very nonsensical; in that they pretend they have formerly been as many of their own ancestors, who, on different accounts, were lifted up to heaven, and became such glorious celestial bodies.’ Again, he writes: ‘Their notions about the stars are that some of them have been men, and others different sorts of animals and fishes.’ But every reader of Ovid knows that this was the very mythical theory of the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptians, again, worshipped Osiris, Isis, and the rest asancestors, and there are even modern scholars, like Mr. Loftie in hisEssay of Scarabs, who hold Osiris to have been originally a real historical person. But the Egyptian priests who showed Plutarch the grave of Osiris, showed him, too, the stars into which Osiris, Isis, and Horus had been metamorphosed. Here, then, we have Greeks, Egyptians, and Eskimo, all agreed about the origin of the heavenly lights, all of opinion that ‘they have formerly been as many of their own ancestors.’

The Australian general theory is: ‘Of the good men and women, after the deluge, Pundjel (a kind of Zeus, or rather a sort of Prometheus of Australian mythology) made stars. Sorcerers (Biraark) can tell which stars were once good men and women.’ Here the sorcerers have the same knowledge as the Egyptian priests. Again, just as among the Arcadians,‘the progenitors of the existing tribes, whether birds, or beasts, or men, were set in the sky, and made to shine as stars.’[146]

We have already given some Australian examples in the stories of thePleiades, and ofCastorandPollux. We may add the case of theEagle. In Greece theEaglewas the bird of Zeus, who carried off Ganymede to be the cup-bearer of Olympus. Among the Australians this same constellation is calledTotyarguil; he was a man who, when bathing, was killed by a fabulous animal, a kind of kelpie; as Orion, in Greece, was killed by theScorpion. Like Orion, he was placed among the stars. The Australians have a constellation namedEagle, but he is ourSirius, orDog-star.

The Indians of the Amazon are in one tale with the Australians and Eskimo. ‘Dr. Silva de Coutinho informs me,’ says Professor Hartt,[147]‘that the Indians of the Amazonas not only give names to many of the heavenly bodies, but also tell stories about them. The two stars that form the shoulders of Orion are said to be an old man and a boy in a canoe, chasing apeixe boi, by which name is designated a dark spot in the sky near the above constellation.’ The Indians also know monkey-stars, crane-stars, and palm-tree stars.

The Bushmen, almost the lowest tribe of South Africa, have the same star-lore and much the same myths as the Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, and Eskimo. According to Dr. Bleek, ‘stars, and even the sun and moon, were once mortals on earth, or even animals or inorganic substances, which happenedto get translated to the skies. The sun was once a man whose arm-pit radiated a limited amount of light round his house. Some children threw him into the sky, and there he shines.’ The Homeric hymn to Helios, in the same way, as Mr. Max Müller observes, ‘looks on the sun as a half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth.’ The pointers of the Southern Cross were ‘two men who were lions,’ just as Callisto, in Arcadia, was a woman who was a bear. It is not at all rare in those queer philosophies, as in that of the Scandinavians, to find that the sun or moon has been a man or woman. In Australian fable the moon was a man, the sun a woman of indifferent character, who appears at dawn in a coat of red kangaroo skins, the present of an admirer. In an old Mexican text the moon was a man, across whose face a god threw a rabbit, thus making the marks in the moon.[148]

Many separate races seem to recognise the figure of a hare, where we see ‘the Man in the Moon.’ In a Buddhist legend, an exemplary and altruistic hare was translated to the moon. ‘To the common people in India the spots on the moon look like a hare, and Chandras, the god of the moon, carries a hare: hence the moon is calledsasinorsasanka, hare-mark. The Mongolians also see in these shadows the figure of a hare.’[149]Among the Eskimo, the moon is a girl, who always flees from her cruel brother, the sun, because he disfigured her face. Elsewhere the sun is the girl, beloved by her own brother, the moon; she blackens her face to avert his affection. On the Rio Branco, and among the Tomunda, the moon is a girl wholoved her brother and visited him in the dark. He detected her wicked passion by drawing his blackened hand over her face. The marks betrayed her, and, as the spots on the moon, remain to this day.[150]

Among the New Zealanders and North American Indians the sun is a great beast, whom the hunters trapped and thrashed with cudgels. His blood is used in some New Zealand incantations; and, according to an Egyptian myth, was kneaded into clay at the making of man. But there is no end to similar sun-myths, in all of which the sun is regarded as a man, or even as a beast.

To return to the stars—

The Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, ‘hold many of the planets to be transformed adventurers.’ The Iowas ‘believed stars to be a sort of living creatures.’ One of them came down and talked to a hunter, and showed him where to find game. The Gallinomeros of Central California, according to Mr. Bancroft, believe that the sun and moon were made and lighted up by the Hawk and the Coyote, who one day flew into each other’s faces in the dark, and were determined to prevent such accidents in the future. But the very oddest example of the survival of the notion that the stars are men or women is found in the ‘Pax’ of Aristophanes. Trygæus in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven. A slave meets him, and asks him, ‘Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we die?’ The answer is, ‘Certainly’; and Trygæus points out the star into which Ios of Chios has just been metamorphosed.Aristophanes is making fun of some popular Greek superstition. But that very superstition meets us in New Zealand. ‘Heroes,’ says Mr. Tylor, ‘were thought to become stars of greater or less brightness, according to the number of their victims slain in fight.’

The Aryan race is seldom far behind, when there are ludicrous notions to be credited or savage tales to be told. We have seen that Aristophanes, in Greece, knew the Eskimo doctrine that stars are souls of the dead. The Persians had the same belief,[151]‘all the unnumbered stars were reckoned ghosts of men.’[152]The German folklore clings to the same belief, ‘Stars are souls; when a child dies God makes a new star.’ Kaegi quotes[153]the same idea from the Veda, and from the Satapatha Brahmana the thoroughly Australian notion that ‘good men become stars.’ For a truly savage conception, it would be difficult, in South Africa or on the Amazons, to beat the following story from theAitareya Brahmana(iii. 33). Pragapati, the Master of Life, conceived an incestuous passion for his own daughter. Like Zeus, and Indra, and the Austrian wooer in the Pleiad tale, he concealed himself under the shape of a beast, a roebuck, and approached his own daughter, who had assumed the form of a doe. The gods, in anger at the awful crime, made a monster to punish Pragapati. The monster sent an arrow through the god’s body; he sprang into heaven, and, like the Arcadian bear, this Aryan roebuck became a constellation. He is among the stars of Orion, and his punisher, alsonow a star, is, like the Greek Orion, a hunter. The daughter of Pragapati, the doe, became another constellation, and the avenging arrow is also a set of stars in the sky. What follows, about the origin of the gods called Adityas, is really too savage to be quoted by a chaste mythologist.

It would be easy to multiply examples of this stage of thought among Aryans and savages. But we have probably brought forward enough for our purpose, and have expressly chosen instances from the most widely separated peoples. These instances, it will perhaps be admitted, suggest, if they do not prove, that the Greeks had received from tradition precisely the same sort of legends about the heavenly bodies as are current among Eskimo and Bushmen, New Zealanders and Iowas. As much, indeed, might be inferred from our own astronomical nomenclature. We now give to newly discovered stars names derived from distinguished people, asGeorgium Sidus, orHerschel; or, again, merely technical appellatives, asAlpha,Beta, and the rest. We should never think when ‘some new planet swims into our ken’ of calling itKangaroo, orRabbit, or after the name of some hero of romance, asRob Roy, orCount Fosco. But the names of stars which we inherit from Greek mythology—theBear, thePleiades,CastorandPollux, and so forth—are such as no people in our mental condition would originally think of bestowing. When Callimachus and the courtly astronomers of Alexandria pretended that the golden locks of Berenice were raised to the heavens, that was a mere piece of flattery constructed on the inherited model of legendsabout the crown (Corona) of Ariadne. It seems evident enough that the older Greek names of stars are derived from a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were in the mental and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas, Bushmen, Murri, and New Zealanders. All these, and all other savage peoples, believe in a kind of equality and intercommunion among all things animate and inanimate. Stones are supposed in the Pacific Islands to be male and female and to propagate their species. Animals are believed to have human or superhuman intelligence, and speech, if they choose to exercise the gift. Stars are just on the same footing, and their movements are explained by the same ready system of universal anthropomorphism. Stars, fishes, gods, heroes, men, trees, clouds, and animals, all play their equal part in the confused dramas of savage thought and savage mythology. Even in practical life the change of a sorcerer into an animal is accepted as a familiar phenomenon, and the power of soaring among the stars is one on which the Australian Biraark, or the Eskimo Shaman, most plumes himself. It is not wonderful that things which are held possible in daily practice should be frequent features of mythology. Hence the ready invention and belief of star-legends, which in their turn fix the names of the heavenly bodies. Nothing more, except the extreme tenacity of tradition and the inconvenience of changing a widely accepted name, is needed to account for the human and animal names of the stars. The Greeks received from the dateless past of savage intellect the myths, and the names of the constellations, and we have taken them, without inquiry,from the Greeks. Thus it happens that our celestial globes are just as queer menageries as any globes could be that were illustrated by Australians or American Indians, by Bushmen or Peruvian aborigines, or Eskimo. It was savages, we may be tolerably certain, who first handed to science the names of the constellations, and provided Greece with the raw material of her astronomical myths—as Bacon prettily says, that we listen to the harsh ideas of earlier peoples ‘blown softly through the flutes of the Grecians.’

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