THE IRISH STORY.‘The birds all met together one day, and settled among themselves that whichever of them could fly highest was to be the king of all. Well, just as they were on the hinges of being off, what does the little rogue of a wren do, but hop up and perch himself unbeknown on the eagle’s tail. So they flew and flew ever so high, till the eagle was miles above all the rest, and could not fly another stroke, he was so tired. “Then,” says he, “I’m king of the birds....” “You lie,” says the wren, darting up a perch and a half above the big fellow. Well, the eagle was so mad to think how he was done, that when the wren was coming down, he gave him a stroke of his wing, and from that day to this the wren was never able to fly further than a hawthorn bush.’[372]
THE IRISH STORY.
‘The birds all met together one day, and settled among themselves that whichever of them could fly highest was to be the king of all. Well, just as they were on the hinges of being off, what does the little rogue of a wren do, but hop up and perch himself unbeknown on the eagle’s tail. So they flew and flew ever so high, till the eagle was miles above all the rest, and could not fly another stroke, he was so tired. “Then,” says he, “I’m king of the birds....” “You lie,” says the wren, darting up a perch and a half above the big fellow. Well, the eagle was so mad to think how he was done, that when the wren was coming down, he gave him a stroke of his wing, and from that day to this the wren was never able to fly further than a hawthorn bush.’[372]
It is impossible to assign limits either to the vitality or to the range of a story. If the commerce which has ever prevailed between the different tribes of the world, as it prevails to this day, either by conquest or by barter, has caused so wide a dispersion of the races and products of the earth, the wonder wouldrather be if the products of men’s thoughts and fancies had not prevailed so widely, had not taken so deep root in man’s memory, seeing that they cost nothing either to carry or to keep. For many stories therefore of wide range, agreeing in such minute particulars as to render difficult the theory of their independent origin, the mystery of their resemblance is amply solved by the theory of their gradual dispersion, without their proving anything as to the common origin of those who tell them. The story, for instance, of Faithful John, the central idea of which is, that a friend can only apprise some one of a danger he will incur on his wedding night, by himself incurring suspicion and being turned into stone, is told with little variation in Bohemia, Greece, Italy, and Spain; and the discovery of the leading thought in a story in India makes it possible that it was there originated.[373]In Polynesia, again, the story of stopping the motion of the sun is widely spread; in New Zealand, Maui makes ropes of flax, goes with his brothers to the point where the sun rises, hides from it by day, and when it rises next day succeeds in his purpose before letting it go further. In Tahiti, Maui is a priest, or chief of olden time, who builds a marae which must be finished by the evening, and who therefore seizes the sun by its rays and binds him to a tree till hiswork is finished. In Hawaii Maui stops the sun till evening, because his wife has to finish a certain dress by twilight. In Samoa, Maui appears as Itu, a man who is anxious to build a house of great stones, but is unable to do so because the sun goes too fast; he therefore takes a boat and lays nets in the sun’s path, but as these are broken through, he makes a noose, catches the sun, and only lets it free when his house is finished.[374]Obviously, these stories are all related, but it is impossible to say whether they spread from any one place to the others, or whether they are remnants, retained in altered form, from the primitive mythology of a common Polynesian home. It is, however, worthy of notice that in Wallachian fairy lore also a cow pushes back the sun to the hour of mid-day, to enable a youth who had fallen asleep to accomplish his task,[375]and that the idea of catching the sun is not unknown to the mythology of America.
There is, however, a large class of stories which arise independently, and owe their remarkable family likeness neither to a common descent nor to importation, but to the natural promptings of the imagination. Thus, the idea of a tree so high that it reaches the heavens, and consequently of the heavens as thereby attainable, naturally produces such a story as Jack and the Beanstalk, a story which is said to be foundall over the world, but the versions of which agree in no other single point than in the admission to the sky by dint of climbing.[376]In the same way many of the ideas common to the Indo-European nations, and so often explained as originally derived from the fanciful meteorology of the primitive Aryans, find startling analogues outside the Aryan family, where there is no reason to suppose them anything more than the direct offspring of the dreamer or the story-teller. If the constancy of Penelope to Ulysses, tormented by her suitors, is simply that of the evening light, assailed by the powers of darkness, till the return of her husband the sun in the morning,[377]shall we apply the same interpretation to the story of the wife of the Red Swan, of the Odjibwas, who, when he returns from the discovery of his magic arrows from the abode of the departed spirits, finds that his two brothers have been quarrelling for the possession of his wife, but been quarrelling in vain?[378]If the legend of Cadmus recovering Europa, after she has been carried away by the white bull, the spotless cloud, means that ‘the sun must journey westward until he sees again the beautiful tints which greeted his eyes in the morning,’[379]shall we say the same of a storycurrent in North America, to the effect that a man once had a beautiful daughter whom he forbade to leave the lodge lest she should be carried off by the king of the buffaloes; and that as she sat, notwithstanding, outside the house, combing her hair, ‘all of a sudden the king of the buffaloes came dashing on, with his herd of followers, and taking her between his horns, away he cantered over plains, plunged into a river which bounded his land, and carried her safely to his lodge on the other side,’ whence she was finally recovered by her father?[380]
Again, in Hindu mythology, Urvasi came down from heaven and became the wife of the son of Budha, only on condition that two pet rams should never be taken from her bedside and that she should never behold her lord undressed. The immortals, however, wishing Urvasi back in heaven, contrived to steal the rams; and as the king pursued the robbers with his sword in the dark, the lightning revealed his person, the compact was broken, and Urvasi disappeared.[381]This same story is found in different forms among many people of Aryan and Turanian descent, the central idea being that of a man marrying someone of aerial or aquatic origin, and living happily with her till he breaks the condition on which her residence with him depends. Thus there is the story of Raymondof Toulouse, who chances in the hunt upon the beautiful Melusina at a fountain and lives with her happily till he discovers her fish-nature and she vanishes; but exactly parallel stories come no less from Borneo, the Celebes, or North America than from Ireland or Germany; for which reason it seems sufficient to receive them simply as they stand, as fairy tales natural to every tribe of mankind that has a fixed belief in supernatural beings, rather than to explain these wonderful wives as the ‘bright fleecy clouds of early morning, which vanish as the splendour of the sun is unveiled.’[382]Let us compare the story as it is told in America and Bornoese tradition.
THE BORNOESE STORY.A certain Bornoese, when far from home, once climbed a tree to rest, and whilst there ‘was attracted by the most ravishing music, which ever and anon came nearer and nearer, until it seemingly approached the very roots of the tree, when a pure well of water burst out, at the bottom of which were seven beautiful virgins. Ravished at the sight, and determined to make one of them his son’s wife, he made a lasso of his rattan, and drew her up.’ One day, however, her husband hit herin anger, and she was taken up to the sky.[383]
THE BORNOESE STORY.
A certain Bornoese, when far from home, once climbed a tree to rest, and whilst there ‘was attracted by the most ravishing music, which ever and anon came nearer and nearer, until it seemingly approached the very roots of the tree, when a pure well of water burst out, at the bottom of which were seven beautiful virgins. Ravished at the sight, and determined to make one of them his son’s wife, he made a lasso of his rattan, and drew her up.’ One day, however, her husband hit herin anger, and she was taken up to the sky.[383]
THE AMERICAN STORY.Wampee, a great hunter, once came to a strange prairie, where he heard faint sounds of music, and looking up saw a speck in the sky, which proved itself to be a basket containing twelve most beautiful maidens, who, on reaching the earth, forthwith set themselves to dance. He tried to catch the youngest, but in vain; ultimately he succeeded by assuming the disguise of a mouse. He was very attentive to his new wife, who was really a daughter of one of the stars, but she wished to return home, so she made a wicker basket secretly, and by help of a charm she remembered, ascended to her father.[384]
THE AMERICAN STORY.
Wampee, a great hunter, once came to a strange prairie, where he heard faint sounds of music, and looking up saw a speck in the sky, which proved itself to be a basket containing twelve most beautiful maidens, who, on reaching the earth, forthwith set themselves to dance. He tried to catch the youngest, but in vain; ultimately he succeeded by assuming the disguise of a mouse. He was very attentive to his new wife, who was really a daughter of one of the stars, but she wished to return home, so she made a wicker basket secretly, and by help of a charm she remembered, ascended to her father.[384]
It has been imagined that all the fairy tales of the world may be reduced to certain fundamental story roots; but these story roots we should look for not in the clouds, but upon the earth, not in the various aspects of nature, but in the daily occurrences and surroundings of savage life. The uniformity which appears in so many of the myths or fairy tales of the world would thus simply arise from a uniformity of the experiences of existence. The evidence concerning savage astro-mythology is conclusive, that nothing is conceived of the heavenly bodies that has not its prototype on earth; that the skies do but mirror the events or objects of earth, where the memorable incidents of the chase or the battle are told of the stars: nor is it strange if in a few years such tales should have so gained in the telling, that it is often impossible to separate the fact from the fiction, or to distinguish a crude supposition from the creation of a fanciful myth.
For although it is difficult to lay down the boundaries between the language of metaphor and the language of fact, inasmuch as what is faith to one man is often but fancy to another, there is reason to believethat savages really do very often confuse celestial with terrestrial phenomena, that, for instance, the Zulus, when they speak of the stars as the children of the sky and of the sun as their father, are expressing rather a real belief than a poetical fancy, and that the conception of the sun and moon as physically related is an actual belief quite as much as a merely figurative explanation. If this be true, a large part of mythology must be regarded not as a poetical explanation of things, suggested by the grammatical form of words or by roots that lend similar names to the most diverse conceptions, but as the direct effect of primitive thought in its application to the phenomena of nature. It is more likely that the early thoughts of men should have framed their language than that the form of their language should have preceded their form of thought. And if it be shown (by those who hold that the personification of impersonal things is consequent on the grammatical structure of a language) that the Kafirs and other tribes of South Africa, whose language does not denote sex, are almost destitute of myths and fables, whilst tribes who employ a sex-denoting language have many,[385]it is noticeable that such personification has been shown to exist among the natives of Australia, between the different dialects of whose language it is said to have been one of thepoints of resemblance, that they recognised no distinctions of gender.[386]
A story of the Ottawa Indians (by internal evidence posterior in date to their acquaintance with guns and ships) may be taken as a sample of savage traditions, which prove that the convertibility of mankind with sun, moon, or stars, is as natural a belief to a savage, as that his next-door neighbour may turn at pleasure into a wolf or a snake. Six young men finding themselves on a hill-top in close proximity to the sun, resolved to travel to it. Two of them finally reached a beautiful plain, lighted by the moon, which, as they advanced, appeared as an aged woman with a white face, who spoke to them and promised to conduct them to her brother, then absent on his daily course through the sky. This woman ‘they knew from her first appearance’ to be the moon. When she introduced them to her brother, ‘the sun motioned them with his hand to follow him,’ and they accompanied him with some difficulty till they were restored safe and sound to the earth.[387]So Sir G. Grey, collecting native legends concerning a cave in Australia, found that the only point of agreement was ‘that originallythe moon who was a manhad lived there.’[388]
But, except on the assumption that savages areidiots, it is impossible that such legends should not only obtain currency, but enjoy the vitality of traditions, unless they conform to certain canons of belief, unless they contain nothing inherently incredible. A fairy tale pleases a child, not because it is known to be impossible, but because it carries the mind further afield than actual experience does into the realms of the possible; and a tale understood to be impossible would be as insipid to a savage as it would be to a child. Schoolcraft, in reference to Indian popular tales, speaks of the ‘belief of the narrators and listeners in every wild and improbable thing told;’ and says, ‘Nothing is too capacious for Indian belief.’[389]If, as their stories abundantly show, they feel no difficulty in conceiving the instantaneous transformation of men not merely into something living, but into stones or stumps, the fact ceases to be strange, that in Indian faith ‘many of the planets are transformed adventurers.’[390]What, then, more natural than that all over the world the deeds of great tribesmen should be transferred to the skies, and, under the action of uniform laws of fancy, should in time become so overgrown with fiction as to pass into the domain of the purest mythology, till at last they appear as mere figurative expressions of the daily life of nature, of the strugglebetween the day and the night, of the dispersion of the clouds by the sun?
The condition of things which makes such conceptions of the heavens the natural outcome of primitive speculation may perhaps, to a certain extent, be recovered by observation of the laws conditioning the actually existent thoughts of the savage world.
The first entrance into Wonderland lies through Dreamland. Schoolcraft’s testimony that ‘a dream or a fact is alike potent in the Indian mind’ accords with much other evidence to the effect that, with savages, the sensations of the sleeping or waking life are equally real or but vaguely distinguished. A native of Zululand will leave his work and travel to his home, perhaps a hundred miles away, to test the truth of a dream,[391]and so great is the importance the Zulus attach to such monitions, that ‘he who dreams is the great man of the village;’ whilst the gift to them of ‘sight by night in dreams’ is ascribed to their first ancestor, the great Unkulunkulu.[392]But how far surpassing even the normal experiences of sleep must be the dreams of men in the hunting or nomad state, the law of whose lives is either a want or an excess of food! What richer fund for story-material can be imagined than the dreams of a savage, or what more likely to introduce him to the mysteries of romancethan recollections of those sudden transformations or those weird images, which have haunted the repose of his slumbering hours? And into what strange lands of beauty and plenty, into what secrets of the skies, would not the flights of his sleep give him an insight! In all fairy tales and all mythology a remarkable conformity to the deranged ideas of sleep does thus occur; and especially do the stories of the lower races, as for instance those of Schoolcraft’s ‘Algic Researches,’ read far more like the recollections of bad dreams than like the worn ideas of a once pure religion, or of a poetical interpretation of nature. The most beautiful of the Indian legends, that of the origin of Indian corn, was in native tradition actually referred to a dream, and to a dream purposely resorted to, to gain a clearer insight into the mysteries of nature.[393]And as dreams do but deal with the incidents of the waking life, exaggerating them and contorting them, but never passing beyond them, may not the somewhat uniform incidents of savage life, whether of hunting, fishing, fighting, or travelling, offer some explanation of that general similarity, which is so conspicuous an element in the comparative mythology or the fairy-lore of the world?
Then the fact that the dead reappear in dreams at that season of the night in which also the stars areseen, would tend to confirm the idea of some community of nature between the dead and the stars, such community as is indeed not unfrequently found, as where the Aurora Borealis or the Milky Way are identified with the souls of the departed. So, too, a Californian tribe is mentioned as having believed that chiefs and medicine-men became heavenly bodies after their death,[394]and even Tasmanians could point to the stars they would go to at death.[395]
But there is another reason which would still further create a mental confusion between the deeds of a mortal on earth and the motions of some luminary in heaven, and that is the language of adulation, which, from ascribing the possession of the sky to a chief, in order to gratify him, becomes imperceptibly the language of belief. It is common for the Zulus to say of a chief, ‘That man is the owner of heaven and everything is his,’ and a native once expressed his gratitude to a missionary by pointing to the heaven and saying, ‘Sir, the sun is yours.’ ‘It does not suffice them to honour a great man unless they place the heaven on his shoulders; they do not believe what they say, they merely wish to ascribe all greatness to him.’ If when a chief goes to war the sky becomes overcast, they say, ‘The heaven of the chief feels that the chief is suffering.’ Nor was any chief known todeprecate the use of such language; he ‘expected to have it said always that the heaven was his.’[396]
Obviously, however, there is no fast line between the language of flattery and the language of fact. From the Tahitians, who would speak of their kings’ houses as the clouds of heaven, or the Kafirs of Ethiopia, who called their kings lords of the sun and moon, it is easy to trace the progress of thought which actually led the latter people to pray to their kings for rain, fine weather, or the cessation of storms.[397]The Zulus, like many other savages, think of the sky as at no great distance from the earth, and thus as the roof of their king’s palace in the same way that the earth is its floor. ‘Utshaka claimed to be king of heaven as well as earth, and ordered the rain-doctors to be killed, because in assuming power to control the weather they were interfering with his royal prerogative.’[398]But if such confusion between royalty and divinity can exist in the savage mind whilst the king is on earth, how natural is it that a man, associated for so long in his lifetime with power over the elements, should, after his removal from earth and from sight, become still more mixed up with elemental forces, or perhaps even localised in some point of space! The word Zulu actually means the Heavens, and in Zululand King of the Zulusmeans king of the heavens,[399]so that when the king is drawn in his waggon to the centre of the kraal, it is not surprising that, among the other acclamations, such as ‘Lion, King of the World,’ with which his creeping subjects salute him, they should actually salute him as Zulu, Heaven.[400]It can only be from the use of such language that among the Zulus ‘rain, storm, sunshine, earthquakes, and all else which we ascribe to natural causes are brought about or retarded byvarious peopleto whom this power is ascribed. Every rain that comes is spoken of as belonging to somebody, and in a drought they say that the owners of rain are at variance among themselves.’[401]
That in aftertime, from these modes of thinking and speaking, the attributes of a Zulu or Tahitian chief might become those of a heaven-supporter, such as Atlas, or of a cloud-gatherer, such as Zeus, or that, according as his body was consigned to the earth or the sea, such a chief might become the earth-shaker or the ocean-ruler, is not only what might be expectedà priori, but what is to some extent justified by facts. In South Africa the word which the missionaries have adopted for both Hottentots and Kafirs as the name for the Deity, from its being the nearest approach to the Christian conception, is believed to be derived from two words signifying Wounded Knee, a term applied generations back to a Hottentot sorcerer ofgreat fame and skill, who happened to have sustained some injury to his knees. ‘Having been held in high repute for extraordinary powers during life, he (Utixo) continued to be invoked even after death as one who could still relieve and protect; and hence in process of time he became nearest to their first conceptions of God.’[402]And the legend of Mannan Mac Lear, mythical first inhabitant and first legislator of the Isle of Man, discloses a germ of similar origin underlying the myth of a culture-hero, as his story preserved in the following lines will show:
‘This merchant Manxman of the solemn smile,First legislator of our rock-throned isle,Dwelt in a fort (withdrawn from vulgar sight),Cloud-capped Baroole, upon thy lofty height.From New Year tide round to the Ides of Yule,Nature submitted to his wizard rule.Her secret force he could with charms compelTo brew a storm or raging tempests quell;Make one man seem like twenty in a fray,And drive the stranger (i.e.Scotch invaders) over seas away.’[403]
‘This merchant Manxman of the solemn smile,First legislator of our rock-throned isle,Dwelt in a fort (withdrawn from vulgar sight),Cloud-capped Baroole, upon thy lofty height.From New Year tide round to the Ides of Yule,Nature submitted to his wizard rule.Her secret force he could with charms compelTo brew a storm or raging tempests quell;Make one man seem like twenty in a fray,And drive the stranger (i.e.Scotch invaders) over seas away.’[403]
‘This merchant Manxman of the solemn smile,
First legislator of our rock-throned isle,
Dwelt in a fort (withdrawn from vulgar sight),
Cloud-capped Baroole, upon thy lofty height.
From New Year tide round to the Ides of Yule,
Nature submitted to his wizard rule.
Her secret force he could with charms compel
To brew a storm or raging tempests quell;
Make one man seem like twenty in a fray,
And drive the stranger (i.e.Scotch invaders) over seas away.’[403]
In other words, he was a great sorcerer and a great warrior, whose deeds lived after him in story, and whose name lent itself as a nucleus, like that of Charlemagne or of Alfred, for every adventure that was strange, for every imagination that was wonderful.
There seems, indeed, no reason to seek for anyhigher genesis than this for any of the culture-heroes of any mythology, notwithstanding that they have with so much unanimity been forced into identification with the sun. Zeus himself means but the same thing as Zulu, namely, the Sky or Heaven, so that it is only natural that nothing that could be told of the sky ‘was not in some form or other ascribed to Zeus,’[404]just as we see that modern Zulus ascribe to their chiefs all atmospheric phenomena, and actually confer on them the appellation, Zulu. There is indeed nothing in which Zeus differs essentially from Manabozho of North American mythology, from Krishna of the Hindus, from Maui of the Polynesians, from Quawteaht of the rude Ahts, or from Kutka of the still ruder Kamschadals. The stories told of one may be more refined than those told of another, but in no case are these divinities more than names, which serve as convenient centres for the grouping of memorable feats or fictions. Such names serve also, when once men have begun to reflect on the arts or customs of their lives, as sufficient explanations of their origin; and just as we find the institution of marriage attributed in China, or Greece, or India to some mythical hero, so we find the discovery of fire and light, or the invention of remarkable arts, duly ascribed to some hypothetical originator. In Polynesian mythology, Maui, in Thlinkeet Indian mythology,Yehl, played the part of Prometheus in procuring fire for the use of men. From seeing a spider make its web, Manabozho invented the art of making fishing nets; and Kutka (who, like Manabozho, is also in some sense the maker of all things) taught the Kamschadals how to build huts, how to catch birds, and beasts, and fish.[405]The supreme deity of Finnish mythology not only brought fire for men from heaven but was the inventor of music; yet like the other gods he was but a magician, able to destroy the world at pleasure, to hold the sun captive in a box, to conquer all monsters and heal all diseases.[406]
American mythology abounds in culture-heroes, mythical personages who taught men useful arts and laws, and left, in the reverence attached to their memory, a quasi-religious system for their posterity.[407]These too have been resolved into observation of the phenomena of the sun or the dawn. Manabozho or Michabo, the ancestor of the Algonquins, whose name literally means the Great Hare, and conferred peculiar respect on the clan who bore it as their totem, means in reality (according to this theory) the Great Light, the Spirit of Dawn, or under another aspect the North-west Wind; the confusion between the hare andthe dawn being supposed to have arisen from a rootwab, which gave two words, one meaningwhiteand the otherhare, so that what was originally told of the White Light came to be told of a Hare, and what was at first but a personification of natural phenomena became a tissue of inconsistent absurdities.[408]Ingenious, however, as such a solution undoubtedly is, it is easier to believe that the stories of the Great Hare have grown round a man, called, in complete accordance with American custom, after the hare, and once a famous sorcerer or warrior like Mannan Mac Lear; for in all the more recent traditions of him, there is much more of the magician or shaman than of the wind or the dawn. He turns at will into a wolf or an oak stump, he converses with all creation, he outwits serpents by his cunning, he has a lodge from which he utters oracles; as brother of the winds, by reason of his swiftness, there is no incongruity in the idea that since his death he is the director of storms, and resides in the region of his brother, the North Wind. It is curious that he is swallowed up by the king of the fish, in this resembling in Aryan mythology Pradyumna, the son of Vishnu, who after being swallowed by a fish is ultimately restored to life,[409]or in Polynesian mythology Maui, who is rescued by the sky from the embrace of the jelly fish. Maui, like Tell, Sigurd, Hercules, andothers, has recently been discovered to be the sun, the fish which swallows him signifying really the earth; for does not the earth swallow the sun every night, and is not the sun only freed by the eastern sky in the morning?[410]Doubtless, on such a reading of his life, Manabozho has as just a claim as Mani to a place in the solar system; but then—who that has ever lived and died but has the same?
Samé, the great name of Brazilian legend, came across the ocean from the rising sun; he had power over the elements and tempests; the trees of the forests would recede to make room for him, the animals used to crouch before him; lakes and rivers became solid for him; and he taught the use of agriculture and magic. Like him, Bochica, the great lawgiver of the Muyscas and son of the sun, he who invented for them their calendar and regulated their festivals, had a white beard, a detail in which all the American culture-heroes agree.[411]It is not, however, on this particular feature, so much as on theirwhitenessin general that stress has been laid to identify them with the great White Light of Dawn. Of the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, Dr. Brinton says, ‘Like all the dawn heroes he, too, was represented of white complexion, clothedin long white robes.’ The white is the emphatic thing about them. So the name Viracocha of the Peruvians, translated by Oviedo, ‘the foam of the sea,’ is, we are to believe, a metaphor: ‘the dawn rises above the horizon as the snowy foam on the surface of the lake.’[412]But Peruvian tradition was confused as to whether Viracocha was the highest god and creator of the world, or only the first Inca; and such confusion between humanity and divinity, which is everywhere the normal result of the deification of the dead, is at least a more natural account of the origin of his worship than a fancied resemblance between the sea-foam and the dawn.[413]Heitsi Eibip, whom the Namaqua Hottentots call their Great Father, and on whose graves they throw stones for luck, so far resembles a solar hero that he is believed to have come like Samé from the East; yet, though much that is wonderful already attaches to his memory, he has not yet thrown off his human personality, but is known to have been merely a sorcerer of great fame;[414]so that in his deification we have almost living evidence of the process here assumed to have operated widely in the formation of the world’s mythology.
To the influence of the language of adulation inthe formation of mythology, may also be added that of the language of affection or of ridicule. Nicknames, taken at hazard from the animal world, or from any object of earth, air, or water, would be obvious sources of improbable stories, tending to the completest confusion between the doings of a man and the attributes of the thing after which he was named. Nicknames of affection would produce the same result; and if, as is likely, other people besides the Finns call their daughters Moon, Sunshine, or Water-glimmer, it is easy to see how, for instance, the departure of Sunshine as a bride might come afterwards to be explained as a myth of the dawn or of twilight, and in the same way anything else that happened to her.[415]
An elemental explanation has been applied with such uniform effect, first to Aryan and then to Polynesian and American mythology, that in the resort to a more natural, albeit less poetical hypothesis, there may be danger of carrying opposing theories too far. There are, however, certain obvious limits; nor, if we doubt whether man in a primitive state really had the poetical views of nature so generally claimed for him, need we deny to him all poetical origination in the construction of his mythology.Take, for instance, this typical Aryan passage, ‘By the early Aryan mind the howling wind was conceived as a great dog or wolf. As the fearful beast was heard speeding by the windows or over the house-top, the inmates trembled, for none knew but his own soul might forthwith be required of him. Hence to this day, among ignorant people, the howling of a dog is supposed to portend a death in the family.’[416]When we find that a dog’s howling portends the death of its master among the Nubians,[417]and is regarded as a dreaded omen by the Kamschadals,[418]as well as by the Fijians,[419]and that the Esquimaux lay a dog’s head by the grave of a child to show it the way to the land of souls, we may safely reject the Aryan pedigree of the superstition, nor go any farther for its explanation than the nature of the sound itself. But though Aryan mythology may be taken to have grown, like any other, round human personalities, and though popular superstitions are in many instances the primary products of the laws of psychology, ranking rather among the sources than thedébrisof mythology, there is proof from the fairy-lore of savages that some of them have so far advanced in thought as to be not incapable of personifying abstract ideas. Dr. Rink alludes to the tendency of theEsquimaux to give figurative explanations of things, to personify, for instance, human qualities, just as they are personified in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’[420]The Chippewya Indians personified sleep as Weeng, a giant insect that was once seen on a tree in a wood, where it made a murmuring sound with its wings; and it was generally conceived to cause sleep by sending a number of little fairies to beat drowsy foreheads with their tiny clubs.[421]And the Odjibwas, with a fancy which has been so poetically preserved by Longfellow, identified Winter with an old hoary-headed man called Peboan, Spring with a young man of quick step and rosy face called Segwun.[422]
The testimony, therefore, afforded by the observation of modern savage races as to the growth of mythology discloses several ways in which, as it is being formed now, we may infer that it was formed thousands of years ago. The evidence of Steller that the Kamschadals explained everything to themselves according to the liveliness of their fancy, letting nothing escape their examination,[423]accords with evidence concerning other races to the effect that some intellectual curiosity enters as a constituent into thelowest human intelligence, giving birth to explanations which are as absurd to us as they are natural to their original framers. A ready capacity for invention is no rare trait of the savage character. Sir G. Grey found that the capability of Australian natives to invent marvels and wonders was proportioned to the quantity of food he offered them, and that rather than confess ignorance of a thing they wouldinventa tradition;[424]whilst in the fondness of the Koranna Hottentots, as they sit round their evening fires, of relating fictitious adventures, lies a source of legendary lore which is not likely to be limited to South Africa, and is probably aided elsewhere as it is there by the knowledge, common to so many savage tribes, of the preparation of intoxicating drinks.[425]If to these sources of mythology be added the help supplied by dreams to the elaboration of fiction; the misconceptions effected in traditions by the language of flattery, of affection, or of ridicule; and, lastly, the tendency, probably consequent on such confusion, to personify things or even abstract ideas; the wonder will no longer be that the mythology of the different races of the world displays so much uniformity, but that uniformity within limited ranges should ever have been taken as a proof of a common ethnological origin.
Folk-lore is often explained as the remains of ancient mythology, but the explanation, though perhaps true of some traditional lore still surviving in legends and fairy tales, seems of doubtful application to those popular superstitions yet so prevalent among us, of which our kitchens, our cottages, and our nurseries are the chief depositories. Beliefs, fancies, and customs, however trivial in themselves, and locally absurd, gain an interest from the area they cover and the races they connect; suggesting past unions between nations now remote, in the same way as the smallest weeds are capable of telling, by their geographical dispersion, of lands that once stretched where seas now roll. To take some instances. The English tradition that a swallow’s nest is lucky, and its life protected by imaginary penalties, is one that in isolation we should naturally and rightly disregard. But when we find that thebelief belongs to Germany, and that the supposed penalties are the same in Yorkshire as they are in Swabia, our wonder is aroused; and when we further learn that in China, too, the swallow’s nest is lucky and its life inviolate, we become aware of a possible history and antiquity attaching to the superstition, which offer an inviting field for speculation and study. The belief, that the first appearance of mice in a house betokens death, becomes of interest when we find it in Russia as well as in Devonshire. Mothers there are both in Germany and in England who fear their children may grow up to be thieves if their nails are cut before their first year is over. Such superstitions, as we call them, had, without doubt, once a reason; in some cases still to be traced, in others effaced by the wear and tear of time. By the application to them of the comparative method not only may we hope to explain and connect ideas otherwise inexplicable, but also to come to conclusions not uninteresting from an archæological point of view. For if it can be shown that they are the remains of ancient barbarism rather than of ancient mythology, their testimony may be added to that, long since given by the more material relics and witnesses of early times, concerning the general history of civilisation.
For the existence of similar traditions as of similar fairy-tales in widely remote districts there are threepossible hypotheses. These are, migration, community of origin, or similarity of development. Either they have spread from one place to another, or they are the legacies of times when the people possessing them were actually united, or they have sprung up independently in different localities, in virtue of the natural laws of mental growth. It may be difficult of any given belief to say to which of these three classes it belongs; but there are many beliefs, so alike in general features, yet so divergent in detail, as best to accord with the theory of a common descent or a common development. Some, for instance, may be so common to the different nations of one stock, as to be traceable to periods anterior to their dispersion; whilst others, yet more widely spread than these, suggest relationships between races of men more fundamental and remote than can be detected in language, and point to an affinity that is older and stronger than mere affinity of blood, an affinity, that is, in the conceptions and fancies of primitive thought. For where actual relationship is not proved by language, analogies in tradition are better accounted for by supposing similar grooves of mental development than by any other theory. Philology may prove a relationship between, let us say, the Nixens of Germany and the Nisses of Scandinavia: but there is no relationship beyond similarity of conception between the Nereids of antiquity and themermaids of the North, or between the Brownies of Scotland and the Lares of Latium. Children, of whatever race or country they may be, dislike the dark, nor is it thought necessary to account for this common trait by any theory of connection or descent. So it is with nations. They are or were, in the face of nature, but as children in the dark, and the nearly similar phenomena of sun and storm, breeze and calm, have sufficed to create for them, in their several homes, many of those fears and fancies we find common to them all.
No one who has not turned special attention to the subject, can form any conception of the mass of purely pagan ideas, which, varnished over by Christianity, but barely hidden by it, grow in rank profusion in our very midst and exercise a living hold, which it is impossible either to realise or to fathom, on the popular mind. Like old Roman or British remains, buried under subsequent accumulations of earth and stones, or superficially concealed by an overgrowth of herbage, uninjured during all the length of time they have lain unobserved, there they lie just beneath the surface of nineteenth-century life, as indelible records of our mental history and origin. Only in the higher social strata can they be deemed extinct; but if it can no longer be said, as it was in the seventeenth century, that most houses of the West-end of London have the horse-shoeon the threshold,[426]yet it may still be said of many a farm or cottage in the country. The astronomer Tycho Brahe, if he met an old woman or hare on leaving home, would take the hint to turn back: but it seems to be only the working population of England, Scotland, or Germany who still do the same. Statistics show that the receipts of omnibus and railway companies in France are less on Friday than on any other day; and many a German that lay dead on the carnage fields of the late war was found to have carried his word-charm as his safest shield against sword or bullet. Most English villages still have their wise men or women, whose powers range, like those of the shamans in savage tribes, from ruling the planets to curing rheumatics or detecting thieves; and witchcraft still has its believers, occasionally its victims, as of yore.[427]
We who have been brought up to look upon the classification of things into animal, vegetable, andmineral, as primary, or indeed intuitive, are apt to forget that savages never classify, and that animate and inanimate to them are both alike. Sir John Lubbock has collected conclusive evidence that so inconceivable a confusion of thought exists.[428]The Tahitians, who sowed some iron nails that young ones might grow from them; the Esquimaux, who thought a musical-box the child of a small hand-organ; the Bushmen, who mistook a large waggon for the mother of some smaller ones, show the tendency of savages to identify motion with life, and to attribute feelings and relations such as actuate or connect themselves to everything that moves of itself or is capable of being moved. A native sent by one missionary to another with some loaves, and a letter stating the number, having eaten two of them and been detected through the letter, took the precaution the next time to put the letter under a stone that it might notseethe theft committed.[429]Now there are numerous superstitions, which there is reason to think are relics of this savage state of thought, when all that existed existed under the same conditions as man himself, capable of the same feelings, and subject to the same wants and sorrows. Take, for example, bees. Bees are credited with a perfect comprehension of all that men do and utter, and, as members themselves of the family they belong to,they must be treated in every way as human in their emotions. On the day of the Purification in France it is customary in some parts for women to read the Gospel of the day to the bees.[430]French children are taught that the inmates of the hive will come out to sting them for any bad language uttered within their hearing; and in South Russia it is believed ‘that if any robbery be committed where a number of hives are kept, the whole stock will gradually diminish, and in a short time die; for bees, they say, will not suffer thieving.’[431]Many persons have probably at some time of their lives, on seeing a crape-covered hive, learnt on inquiry that the bees were in mourning for some member of their owner’s family. In Suffolk, when a death occurs in a house, the inmates immediately tell the bees, ask them formally to the funeral, and fix crape on their hives; otherwise it is believed they would die or desert. And the same custom, for the same reason, prevails, with local modifications, not only in nearly every English county, but very widely over the continent. In Normandy and Brittany may be seen, as in England, the crape-set hives; in Yorkshire some of the funeral bread, in Lincolnshire some cake and sugar, may be seen at the hive door; and a Devonshire nurse on her way to a funeral has been known to send back a child to perform the duty sheherself had forgotten, of telling the bees. The usual explanation of these customs and ideas is that they originated long ago with the death or flight of some bees, consequent on the neglect they incurred when the hand that once tended them could do so no longer. Yet a wider survey of analogous facts leads to the explanation above suggested; for, not to dwell on the fact that in some places in England they are informed of weddings as well as of funerals, and their hives are decorated with favours as well as with crape, the practice of giving information of deaths extends in some parts not only to other animals as well, but, in addition, to inanimate things. In Lithuania, deaths are announced, not only to the bees, but to horses and cattle, by the rattling of a bunch of keys, and the same custom is reported from Dartford in Kent. In the North Riding, not long since, a farmer gravely attributed the loss of a cow to his not having told it of his wife’s death. In Cornwall, the indoor plants are often put into mourning as well as the hives; and at Rauen, in North Germany, not only are the bees informed of their master’s death, but the trees also, by means of shaking them. Near Speier, not only must the bees be moved, but the wine and vinegar must be shaken, if it is wished that they shall not turn bad. Near Würtemburg, the vinegar must be shaken, the bird-cage hung differently, the cattle tied up differently, and the beehivetransposed. Near Ausbach the flower-pots must also be moved, and the wine-casks knocked three times; while at Gernsheim, not only must the wine in the cellar be shaken, to prevent it turning sour, but the corn in the loft must be moved if the sown corn is to sprout.[432]But all these customs, being too much alike to be unrelated, and too widely spread to have sprung up without some reason, by some mere caprice or coincidence, it is difficult to suggest any other reason for them than that they go back to a time when not only bees and cattle, but trees and flowers, vinegar and wine, were, like human beings, considered liable to take offence, and capable also of being pacified by kind treatment, since, according as their several temperaments predisposed them, they were able, by deserting, dying, turning sour, or other untoward conduct, to resent neglect or disrespect on the part of their owners. Such beliefs belong to the lowest state of mental development, to a time when the most obvious marks of natural differentiation were as yet insufficient to produce corresponding distinctions in the minds of their beholders.
Other popular traditions strengthen this interpretation. In Normandy and Brittany it is thought that bees will not suffer themselves to be bought or sold;in other words, that they would take offence if made the subjects of sale and barter.[433]The same belief prevails in Cheshire, Suffolk, Hampshire, Cornwall, and Devonshire, like the old Russian rule that sacred images might not be spoken of as ‘bought’ but only as ‘exchanged for money.’[434]The value of bees is measured, not by money, but by corn, hay, or some other exchangeable commodity; in Sussex, if any money is given for bees, it must be gold. Connected with this idea of the quasi-humanity of bees is the world-wide fear of slighting dangerous animals by calling them by their customary names. Mahometan women dare not call a snake a snake lest they should be bitten by one; Swedish women avert the wrath of bears by speaking of them as old men. Livonian fishermen, when at sea, fear to endanger their nets by calling any animal by its common name. At Mecklenburg, in the twelve days after Christmas, the fox goes by the appellation of the ‘Long Tail;’ even the timid mouse by that of the ‘Floor-runner.’ The Esthonians at all times call the fox ‘Gray Coat,’ the bear ‘Broad-foot,’ and should they take the liberty of too often mentioning the hare, their flax crops, they fear, would be in peril. In Sweden people dare not mention to anyone in the course of the day the number of fish they have caught, if they would catch any more; a feeling towhich is probably related the North-Country prejudice against counting one’s fish before the day’s sport is over.
Witchcraft, although it represents a very low stage of religious conception, yet in its primary idea of a sympathy or identity existing between an original and its image, manifests some degree of intellectual advancement. For the idea of vicarious or representative influence, that if you wish to injure a man you can do so by an injury to a bit of his clothing or a lock of his hair, is, so far as it goes, a spiritual idea, presupposing notions about the interdependence of nature, and as far as possible removed from what we understand by mere materialism. Materialism indeed is one of the latest growths of the human mind, whilst spiritualism is one of its earliest. For to a savage, everything that exists lives and feels like himself, and the unseen spirits that surround and affect him are as the motes in a sunbeam for variety and number. The native Indian speaks of the earth as ‘the big plate where all the spirits eat.’[435]Yet the fetichistic mode of thought is undoubtedly a low, and to us an absurd one. Burnings in effigy may probably be traced to it, and the stories so common in the annals of witchcraft of waxen images stuck with pins or burned, in order to injure the person they represented, undoubtedly belong to it. In America Kane foundan Indian tribe who believed that the hair of an enemy confined with a frog in a hole would cause the owner of the hair to suffer the torments of the frog.[436]In the Fiji Islands the health of a person can be made to fail with the decay of a cocoa-nut buried under a temple.[437]The Finns are said to this day to shoot in the water at images of their absent enemies. But our own country has its analogies. In Suffolk, in the last century, if an animal was thought to be bewitched, it was burned over a large fire, under the idea that as it consumed away the author of its bewitchment would consume away too. In Anglesey it is still believed that the name of a person inscribed on a pipkin, containing a live frog stuck full of pins, will injuriously affect the bearer of the name.
There are a numerous set of popular traditions which clearly relate to the same state of thought. There is a feeling so wide that it may be called European, that cut hair should always be burned, never thrown away: the reason given in France, in the Netherlands, in Denmark, and near Saalfeld in Germany, being, that its discovery by a witch would subject its owner to sorcery; that generally given in England and also in Swabia being, that if a bird took any of it for its nest the bearer would suffer from headache or lose the rest of his hair. A similar ideaprevails about teeth: all over England children are taught to throw extracted teeth into the fire, lest a dog by swallowing them should induce the toothache. So with the nail that has scratched you, or the knife that has cut you,—keep the nail or knife free from rust, and the wound will not fester. But all such ideas are explained by those actually existent in savage parts, by the custom, for instance, of the Fijians of hiding their cut hair in the thatch of the house, that it may not be used against them in witchcraft, or by the practice of Zulu sorcerers to destroy their victims by burying some of his hair, his nails, or his dress in a secret place, that the decay of the one may ensure that of the other. And a similar philosophy lies at the root of most popular charms for certain complaints. The remedies for warts, for instance, are all vicarious. Both at home and abroad the most usual method is to rub a black snail on the wart, and then to hang it on a hedge, trusting to the sympathetic decay of the wart and snail. But a piece of stolen raw meat, a stalk of wheat or a hair with as many knots in them as there are warts on the hand, or two apple halves tied together, will, if applied to the part and then buried, cause effectual relief. The essential thing is to ensure the decay of the representative object. In Somersetshire a good ague cure is to shut up a large black spider in a box and leave it to perish, that spider and ague may disappear together. In many places,it is thought that the whooping-cough may be transferred to a hairy caterpillar tied in a bag round the neck: as the insect dies the cough will go. And in Devonshire some of the patient’s hair is given to a dog between two slices of buttered bread, that the dog may take the hair and the cough together; whilst in Sunderland the head is shaved and the hair (risking we must suppose a headache) left on a bush for the birds to carry off, that the cough itself may pass to them. May it not be said that such customs and fancies betray a mental constitution radically different from our present one, taking us back and ever reminding us of the savagery of our lineage as surely as do flint-flakes or bone-needles, and teaching us that only by the slowest degrees can emancipation be achieved from the superstitions, or, as some think, from the poetry, of ignorance?
Again, trees, stones, waters, stars, serpents, or animals, are all to this day worshipped far and wide by uncivilised races, and the marks of a similar object-worship by our own race still survive in many a popular tradition. A law of Canute earnestly forbade the heathenship of reverencing ‘the sun or moon, fire or flood, waterwhylls, or stones, or trees of the wood of any sort;’ yet, if such things are no longer worshipped, it may be certainly said that some of them are still reverenced. To take, for instance, tree-worship. Both in Guiana and Africa the natives have sosuperstitious a reverence for the silk cotton tree that they fear to cut it down lest death should ensue.[438]In New Zealand mythology, Rata was rebuked and put to shame by the spirits of the forest for cutting down a tall tree-divinity for making his canoe.[439]The trees which occupy the most prominent place in European folk-lore are the elder, the thorn, and the rowan or mountain ash. In Denmark a twig of elder placed silently in the ground is a popular cure for toothache or ague, whilst no furniture, least of all a cradle, may be made of its wood; for the tree is protected by the Elder-mother, without whose consent not a leaf may be touched, and who would strangle the baby as it lay asleep. So also about Chemnitz, elder boughs fixed before stalls keep witchcraft from the cattle; and wreaths of it hung up in houses on Good Friday, after sunset, are believed to confer immunity from the ravages of caterpillars. In Suffolk, it is the safest tree to stand under in a thunderstorm, and misfortune will ensue if ever it is burned. The legend that the cross was made of its wood is evidently an aftergrowth, an attempt, of which we have so many examples, to give a Christian colour to a heathen practice; for the elder was the tree under which, in pre-Christian times, the old Prussian Earth-god was fabled to dwell. Like the elder, the whitethorn was once an object of worship,for it too is held to be scatheless in storms; and how else can we account for the fact that in Switzerland, as in the Eastern counties of England, to bring its flowers into a house is thought to bring death, than by supposing it was once a tree too sacred to be touched, and likely to avenge in some way the profanation that was done to it? Too deeply rooted in popular veneration for its sacred character to disappear, the Church, in course of time, wound its own legend round it, and by the fiction that its wood had composed the Crown of Thorns, deprived the worship of its heathen sting. But if round the elder and the thorn feelings of reverence once gathered and still linger, yet more is it true of the rowan. In England, Germany, and Sweden its leaves are still the most potent instrument against the darker powers: Highlanders still insert crosses of it with red thread in the lining of their clothes, and Cornish peasants still carry some in their pocket and wind it round the horns of their cattle in order to keep off evil eyes. In Lancashire sprigs of it are for the same reason hung up at bedheads, and the churn staff is generally made of its wood. It used to stand in nearly every churchyard in Wales, and crosses of it were regularly distributed on Christian festivals as sure preservatives against evil spirits. But this is another attempt to Christianise what was heathen, for the ancient Danes always used some of it for their ships, to secure them againstthe storms which Rân, the great Ocean God’s wife, with her net for capsized mariners, was ever ready and desirous to raise. The rowan in heathen mythology was called Thor’s Helper, because it bent to his grasp in his passage over a flooded river on his way to the land of the Frost Giants; and it has been thought that the later sanctity of the tree may be due to the place it occupied in mythological fancy. Yet it seems more reasonable to trace the myth to a yet older superstition than to trace the superstition to the myth. For from the exceeding beauty of their berries the rowan and the elder and the thorn would naturally impress the savage mind with the feelings of actual divinity, and would consequently lend themselves to the earliest imaginings about the universe of things. It is more likely that they progressed from a divinity on earth to their position in mythology than from their position in mythology to a divinity on earth, for the mind is capable of employing things for worship long before it is capable of employing them for fable. Worship is the product of fear, and fable of fancy; and before men can indulge in fancy they must to some extent have cast off fear.
Certain traditions relating to birds and beasts are only explicable on the supposition that they were once objects of divination or worship. The old Germans, we know from Tacitus, used white horses, as the Romans used chickens, for purposes of augury, anddivined future events from different intonations of neighings. Hence it probably is that the discovery of a horse-shoe is so universally thought lucky, some of the feelings that once attached to the animal still surviving round the iron of its hoof. For horses, like dogs or birds, were invariably accredited with a greater insight into futurity than man himself; and the many superstitions connected with the flight or voice of birds resolve themselves into the fancy, not inconceivable among men surrounded on all sides by unintelligible tongues, that birds were the bearers of messages and warnings to men, which skill and observation might hope to interpret. Why is the robin’s life and nest sacred, and why does an injury to either bring about bloody milk, lightning, or rain? It has been suggested that the robin, on account of its colour, was once sacred to Thor, the god of lightning; but it is possible that its red breast singled it out for worship from among birds, just as its red berries the rowan from among trees, long before its worshippers had arrived at any ideas of abstract divinities. All over the world there is a regard for things red. Captain Cook noticed a predilection for red feathers throughout all the islands of the Pacific.[440]In the Highlands women tie some red thread round the cows’ tails before turning them out to grass in spring, and tie red silk round their own fingers to keep offthe witches: and just as in Esthonia, mothers put some red thread in their babies’ cradles, so in China they tie some round their children’s wrists, and teach them to regard red as the best known safeguard against evil spirits.
One, indeed, of the chief lessons of Comparative Folk-Lore is a caution against the theory which deduces popular traditions from Aryan or other mythology. The fact has been already alluded to, that in parts of China the same feelings prevail about the swallow as in England or Germany. But there are yet other analogies between the East and the West. A crowing hen is an object of universal dislike in England and Brittany; and few families in China will keep a crowing hen.[441]The owl’s voice is ominous of death or other calamity in England and Germany, as it was in Greece (except at Athens); but in the Celestial Empire also it presages death, and is regarded as the bird which calls for the soul. And the crow also is in China a bird of ill omen. Is it not therefore likely that all popular fancies about birds and animals have begun in the same way, among the same or different races of the globe, and were subsequently adopted but never originated by mythology? May it not be that certain birds or animals became prominent in mythology because they had already beenprominent in superstition, rather than that they became prominent in superstition because they previously had been prominent in mythology? For instance, instead of tracing a dog’s howling as a death omen to an Aryan belief that the dog guided the soul from its earthly tenement to its abode in heaven, may we not suppose that the myth arose from an already existing omen, and that the latter arose, as omens still do, from a coincidence which suggested a connection, subsequently sustained by superficial observation? The St. Swithin fallacy, which arose within historical memory and still holds its ground in an age of scientific observation, well illustrates how one striking coincidence may grow into a belief, which no amount of later evidence can weaken or destroy. Just so, if it happened that a dog howled shortly before some calamity occurred to our Aryan forefathers, thousands and thousands of years ago, long before they had attained to any thoughts of soul or heaven, we can well imagine that the dog, thus thought to betoken death, should, when they came to frame the myth, be conceived as the guide which was waiting for the soul to take it to heaven, and that the belief thus perpetuated by the myth might survive to the latest ages.
There is abundant evidence in the practices to this very day, or till lately, prevalent in England and Europe, that the worship of the sun or of fire fills a large part in primitive religion. The passing ofchildren through the fire is not only a Semitic custom, but extends wherever the human mind has attained to the idea of purification and sacrifice. Some North American tribes used to burn to the sun a man-offering in the spring, to the moon a woman-offering in the autumn, expressing thereby their sense of the blessings of light and a desire for their continuance. And traces of such fire-worship and of its accompanying human sacrifices lasted in Europe into the very heart of this century, and in many places still survive. The similarity that exists between them, both in their seasons and mode of observance, illustrates the marvellous sameness of ideas which may so often be found among people in widely remote districts of the globe.
The three great festivals of the Druids took place on Mayday Eve, on Midsummer Eve, and on All Hallow-e’en. On those days went up from cairns, foothills, and Belenian heights fires and sacrifices to the sun-god Beal: and from such fires the lord of the neighbourhood would take the entrails of the sacrificed animal, and, walking barefoot over the ashes, carry them to the Druid who presided over the ceremonies. These fires have descended to us as the famous Beltane fires, lit still, or till lately, in Ireland, Scotland, Northern England, and Cornwall, on the eve of the summer solstice and at the equinoxes, usually on hill tops, with rejoicing and merriment and leaping through the flames on the part of all ages andsexes of the population.[442]It is possible that this leaping through the flames is a relic of the time when men fell victims to them, a modification of the more barbarous custom. In the Highlands, where at the Beltane feast an oatmeal cake is toasted and portions of it drawn for blindfold by the company as they sit in a trench round a grass table, whosoever is the drawer of that portion which has been purposely toasted black is devoted to Baal to be sacrificed, and must leap perforce three times through the flames. In the same country it is, or was, customary on Yeule or Christmas Eve to burn in a cartload of lighted peat the stump of an old tree, which went by the name of Callac Nollic, or Christmas Old Wife. And in several Continental traditions we find the memoryof a sacrifice still adhering to Midsummer Eve, or St. John the Baptist’s Vigil. On that day, in Livonia, one or two old boats were burned to the songs and dances of young and old; whilst at Reichenbach, in the Voightland, a May-pole, planted on the green, was, after similar festivities, thrown into the water. On the same day many watermen still refrain from committing themselves to the Elbe, the Unstrut, or the Elster, from the belief that upon that day those rivers require a sacrifice; and the Saale is avoided for the same reason on Walpurgis, or Mayday Eve, as well. From the latter cases we may infer that, where rivers flowed near, a sacrifice by water was as usual as one by fire, which possibly explains the custom so common in many places in connection with these Beltane fires of rolling something lighted down a hill, and, if possible, into a river. At Conz, on the Moselle, a burning wheel was rolled down the hill into the river, and Scotch children at the Beltane feast used to roll their bannocks three times down a hill before consuming them round a good fire of heath and brushwood. So in Swabia, wheels of lighted straw were rolled down the Frauenberg, and on Scheiblen-Sonntag the young people still go by night to a hill, and after dancing and singing round a fire, swing wooden wheels by means of a stick round and round till they are thoroughly alight, and then fling them down the hill. In North Germany, where the fires take place atEaster instead of at Midsummer, lighted tar-barrels are rolled down the Osterberge. The Church, to sanctify these fires, made the day of John the Baptist coincident with Midsummer-day, and taught that the heathen customs were symbolical of Christian doctrine. The fires themselves signified the Baptist, that burning and shining light who was to precede the true light; whilst the rolling wheels, as they represented the gradual descent of the sun in heaven after it had reached the highest point, so they illustrated the diminution of the fame of John, who was at first thought to be the real Messiah, till on his own testimony he said, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ It has even been attempted in recent times to show that the Midsummer fires, in spite of all their heathen surroundings, were really of Christian origin, and in some way connected with John the Baptist. The two chief objections to this theory are, the survival of heathen names for the fires, as for instance, among others, the name Himmelsfeuer, and not the usual Johannisfeuer, in one of the districts of Upper Swabia, and also the close analogy, both in the idea and mode of purification, which exists between the Midsummer fire for men and the Needfires for cattle.