CHAPTERX.MYTHOLOGY (continued).
Philosophical Myths: inferences become pseudo-history—Geological Myths—Effect of doctrine of Miracles on Mythology—Magnetic Mountain—Myths of relation of Apes to Men by development or degeneration—Ethnological import of myths of Ape-men, Men with tails, Men of the woods—Myths of Error, Perversion, and Exaggeration: stories of Giants, Dwarfs, and Monstrous Tribes of men—Fanciful explanatory Myths—Myths attached to legendary or historical Personages—Etymological Myths on names of places and persons—Eponymic Myths on names of tribes, nations, countries, &c.; their ethnological import—Pragmatic Myths by realization of metaphors and ideas—Allegory—Beast-Fable—Conclusion.
Although the attempt to reduce to rule and system the whole domain of mythology would as yet be rash and premature, yet the piecemeal invasion of one mythic province after another proves feasible and profitable. Having discussed the theory of nature-myths, it is worth while to gain in other directions glimpses of the crude and child-like thought of mankind, not arranged in abstract doctrines, but embodied by mythic fancy. We shall find the result in masses of legends, full of interest as bearing on the early history of opinion, and which may be roughly classified under the following headings: myths philosophical or explanatory; myths based on real descriptions misunderstood, exaggerated, or perverted; myths attributing inferred events to legendary or historical personages; myths based on realization of fanciful metaphor; and myths made or adapted to convey moral or social or political instruction.
Man’s craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he surveysis such as it is and no other, is no product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his race down to its lowest stages. Among rude savages it is already an intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep. Even to the Botocudo or Australian, scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience: he has learnt to do definite acts that definite results may follow, to see other acts done and their results following in course, to make inference from the result back to the previous action, and to find his inference verified in fact. When one day he has seen a deer or a kangaroo leave footprints in the soft ground, and the next day he has found new footprints and inferred that such an animal made them, and has followed up the track and killed the game, then he knows that he has reconstructed a history of past events by inference from their results. But in the early stages of knowledge the confusion is extreme between actual tradition of events, and ideal reconstruction of them. To this day there go about the world endless stories told as matter of known reality, but which a critical examination shows to be mere inferences, often utterly illusory ones, from facts which have stimulated the invention of some curious enquirer. Thus a writer in the Asiatick Researches at the end of the18thcentury relates the following account of the Andaman islanders, as a historical fact of which he had been informed: ‘Shortly after the Portuguese had discovered the passage to India round the Cape of Good Hope, one of their ships, on board of which were a number of Mozambique negroes, was lost on the Andaman islands, which were till then uninhabited. The blacks remained in the island and settled it: the Europeans made a small shallop in which they sailed to Pegu.’ Many readers must have had their interest excited by this curious story, but at the first touch of fact it dissolves into a philosophic myth, made by the easy transition from what might have been to what was. So far from the islands having been uninhabited at the time of Vasco de Gama’s voyage, theirpopulation of naked blacks with frizzled hair had been described six hundred years earlier, and the story, which sounded reasonable to people puzzled by the appearance of a black population in the Andaman islands, is of course repudiated by ethnologists aware of the wide distribution of the negroid Papuans, really so distinct from any race of African negroes.[500]Not long since, I met with a very perfect myth of this kind. In a brickfield near London, there had been found a number of fossil elephant bones, and soon afterwards a story was in circulation in the neighbourhood somewhat in this shape: ‘A few years ago, one of Wombwell’s caravans was here, an elephant died, and they buried him in the field, and now the scientific gentlemen have found his bones, and think they have got a præ-Adamite elephant.’ It seemed almost cruel to spoil this ingenious myth by pointing out that such a prize as a living mammoth was beyond the resources even of Wombwell’s menagerie. But so exactly does such a story explain the facts to minds not troubled with nice distinctions between existing and extinct species of elephants, that it was on another occasion invented elsewhere under similar circumstances. This was at Oxford, where Mr. Buckland found the story of the Wombwell’s caravan and dead elephant current to explain a similar find of fossil bones.[501]Such explanations of the finding of fossils are easily devised and used to be freely made, as when fossil bones found in the Alps were set down to Hannibal’s elephants, or when a petrified oyster-shell found near Mont Cenis set Voltaire reflecting on the crowd of pilgrims on their way to Rome, or when theologians supposed such shells on mountains to have been left on their slopes and summits by a rising deluge. Such theoretical explanations are unimpeachable in their philosophic spirit, until further observation may prove themto be unsound. Their disastrous effect on the historic conscience of mankind only begins when the inference is turned upside down, to be told as a recorded fact.
In this connexion brief notice may be taken of the doctrine of miracles in its special bearing on mythology. The mythic wonder-episodes related by a savage tale-teller, the amazing superhuman feats of his gods and heroes, are often to his mind miracles in the original popular sense of the word, that is, they are strange and marvellous events; but they are not to his mind miracles in a frequent modern sense of the word, that is, they are not violations or supersessions of recognized laws of nature. Exceptio probat regulam; to acknowledge anything as an exception is to imply the rule it departs from; but the savage recognizes neither rule nor exception. Yet a European hearer, brought up to use a different canon of evidence, will calmly reject this savage’s most revered ancestral traditions, simply on the ground that they relate events which are impossible. The ordinary standards of possibility, as applied to the credibility of tradition, have indeed changed vastly in the course of culture through its savage, barbaric, and civilized stages. What concerns us here is that there is an important department of legend which this change in public opinion, generally so resistless, left to a great extent unaltered. In the middle ages the long-accepted practice rose to its height, of allowing the mere assertion of supernatural influence by angels or devils, saints or sorcerers, to override the rules of evidence and the results of experience. The consequence was that the doctrine of miracles became as it were a bridge along which mythology travelled from the lower into the higher culture. Principles of myth-formation belonging properly to the mental state of the savage, were by its aid continued in strong action in the civilized world. Mythic episodes which Europeans would have rejected contemptuously if told of savage deities or heroes, only required to be adapted to appropriate local details, and to be set forth as miracles in the life of some superhuman personage,to obtain as of old a place of credit and honour in history.
From the enormous mass of available instances in proof of this let us take two cases belonging to the class of geological myths. The first is the well-known legend ofSt.Patrick and the serpents. It is thus given by Dr. Andrew Boorde in his description of Ireland and the Irish in HenryVIII.’stime. ‘Yet in Ierland is stupendyous thynges; for there is neyther Pyes nor venymus wormes. There is no Adder, nor Snake, nor Toode, nor Lyzerd, nor no Euyt, nor none such lyke. I haue sene stones the whiche haue had the forme and shap of a snake and other venimus wormes. And the people of the countre sayth that suche stones were wormes, and they were turned into stones by the power of God and the prayers of saynt Patryk. And Englysh marchauntes of England do fetch of the erth of Irlonde to caste in their gardens, to kepe out and to kyll venimus wormes.’[502]In treating this passage, the first step is to separate pieces of imported foreign myth, belonging properly not to Ireland, but to islands of the Mediterranean; the story of the earth of the island of Krete being fatal to venomous serpents is to be found in Ælian,[503]andSt.Honoratus clearing the snakes from his island (one of the Lerins opposite Cannes)[504]seems to take precedence of the Irish saint. What is left after these deductions is a philosophic myth accounting for the existence of fossil ammonites as being petrified snakes, to which myth a historical position is given by claiming it as a miracle, and ascribing it toSt.Patrick. The second myth is valuable for the historical and geological evidence which it incidentally preserves. At the celebrated ruins of the temple of Jupiter Serapis at Pozzuoli, the ancient Puteoli, the marble columns, encircled half-way up by borings of lithodomi, stand to prove that the ground of the temple must have been formerly submergedmany feet below the sea, and afterwards upheaved to become again dry land. History is remarkably silent as to the events demonstrated by this conclusive geological evidence; between the recorded adornment of the temple by Roman emperors from the second to the third century, and the mention of its existence in ruins in the16thcentury, no documentary information was till lately recognized. It has now been pointed out by Mr. Tuckett that a passage in the Apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, dating apparently more or less before the end of the9thcentury, mentions the subsidence of the temple, ascribing it to a miracle ofSt.Paul. The legend is as follows: ‘And when he (Paul) came out of Messina he sailed to Didymus, and remained there one night. And having sailed thence, he came to Pontiole (Puteoli) on the second day. And Dioscorus the shipmaster, who brought him to Syracuse, sympathizing with Paul because he had delivered his son from death, having left his own ship in Syracuse, accompanied him to Pontiole. And some of Peter’s disciples having been found there, and having received Paul, exhorted him to stay with them. And he stayed a week in hiding, because of the command of Cæsar (that he should be put to death). And all the toparchs were waiting to seize and kill him. But Dioscorus the shipmaster, being himself also bald, wearing his shipmaster’s dress, and speaking boldly, on the first day went out into the city of Pontiole. Thinking therefore that he was Paul, they seized him and beheaded him, and sent his head to Cæsar.... And Paul, being in Pontiole, and having heard that Dioscorus had been beheaded, being grieved with great grief, gazing into the height of the heaven, said: “O Lord Almighty in Heaven, who hast appeared to me in every place whither I have gone on account of Thine only-begotten Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, punish this city, and bring out all who have believed in God and followed His word.” He said to them, therefore, “Follow me.” And going forth from Pontiole with those who had believed in the word of God, they came to a place called Baias (Baiæ), and looking up with their eyes,they all see that city called Pontiole sunk into the sea-shore about one fathom; and there it is until this day, for a remembrance, under the sea.... And those who had been saved out of the city of Pontiole, that had been swallowed up, reported to Cæsar in Rome that Pontiole had been swallowed up with all its multitude.’[505]
Episodes of popular myth, which are often items of the serious belief of the times they belong to, may serve as important records of intellectual history. As an example belonging to the class of philosophical or explanatory myths, let us glance at an Arabian Nights’ story, which at first sight may seem an effort of the wildest imagination, but which is nevertheless traceable to a scientific origin; this is the story of the Magnetic Mountain. The Third Kalenter relates in his tale how a contrary wind drove his ships into a strange sea, and there, by the attraction of their nails and other ironwork, they were violently drawn towards a mountain of black loadstone, till at last the iron flew out to the mountain, and the ships went to pieces in the surf. The episode is older than the date when the ‘Thousand and One Nights’ were edited. When, in Henry of Veldeck’s12thcentury poem, Duke Ernest and his companions sail into the Klebermeer, they see the rock that is called Magnes, and are themselves dragged in below it among ‘many a work of keels,’ whose masts stand like a forest.[506]Turning from tale-tellers to grave geographers and travellers who talk of the loadstone mountain, we find El Kazwini, like Serapion before him, believing such boats as may be still seen in Ceylon, pegged and sewn without metal nails, to be so built lest the magnetic rock should attract them from their course at sea. This quaint notion is to be found in ‘Sir JohnMandeville’: ‘In an isle clept Crues, ben schippes with-outen nayles of iren, or bonds, for the rockes of the adamandes; for they ben alle fulle there aboute in that see, that it is marveyle to spaken of. And gif a schipp passed by the marches, and hadde either iren bandes or iren nayles, anon he sholde ben perishet. For the adamande of this kinde draws the iren to him; and so wolde it draw to him the schipp, because of the iren; that he sholde never departen fro it, ne never go thens.’[507]Now it seems that accounts of the magnetic mountain have been given not only as belonging to the southern seas, but also to the north, and that men have connected with such notions the pointing of the magnetic needle, as Sir Thomas Browne says, ‘ascribing thereto the cause of the needle’s direction, and conceeving the effluxions from these mountains and rocks invite the lilly toward the north.’[508]On this evidence we have, I think, fair ground for supposing that hypotheses of polar magnetic mountains were first devised to explain the action of the compass, and that these gave rise to stories of such mountains exerting what would be considered their proper effect on the iron of passing ships. The argument is clenched by the consideration that Europeans, who colloquially say the needle points to the north, naturally required their loadstone mountain in high northern latitudes while on the other hand it was as natural that Orientals should place this wondrous rock in the south, for they say it is to the south that the needle points. The conception of magnetism among peoples who had not reached the idea of double polarity may be gathered from the following quaint remarks in the17thcentury cyclopædia of the Chinese emperor Kang-hi. ‘I now hear the Europeans say it is towards the North pole that the compass turns; the ancients said it was toward the South; which have judged most rightly? Since neither give any reason why, we come to no more with the one side than with the other. But the ancients arethe earlier in date, and the farther I go the more I perceive that they understood the mechanism of nature. All movement languishes and dies in proportion as it approaches the north; it is hard to believe it to be from thence that the movement of the magnetic needle comes.’[509]
To suppose that theories of a relation between man and the lower mammalia are only a product of advanced science, would be an extreme mistake. Even at low levels of culture, men addicted to speculative philosophy have been led to account for the resemblance between apes and themselves by solutions satisfactory to their own minds, but which we must class as philosophic myths. Among these, stories which embody the thought of an upward change from ape to man, more or less approaching the last-century theory of development, are to be found side by side with others which in the converse way account for apes as degenerate from a previous human state.
Central American mythology works out the idea that monkeys were once a human race.[510]In South-East Africa, Father Dos Santos remarked long since that ‘they hold that the apes were anciently men and women, and thus they call them in their tongue the first people.’ The Zulus still tell the tale of an Amafeme tribe who became baboons. They were an idle race who did not like to dig, but wished to eat at other people’s houses, saying, ‘We shall live, although we do not dig, if we eat the food of those who cultivate the soil.’ So the chief of that place, of the house of Tusi, assembled the tribe, and they prepared food and went out into the wilderness. They fastened on behind themthe handles of their now useless digging picks, these grew and became tails, hair made its appearance on their bodies, their foreheads became overhanging, and so they became baboons, who are still called ‘Tusi’s men.’[511]Mr. Kingsley’s story of the great and famous nation of the Doasyoulikes, who degenerated by natural selection into gorillas, is the civilized counterpart of this savage myth. Or monkeys may be transformed aborigines, as the Mbocobis relate in South America: in the great conflagration of their forests a man and woman climbed a tree for refuge from the fiery deluge, but the flames singed their faces and they became apes.[512]Among more civilized nations these fancies have graphic representatives in Moslem legends, of which one is as follows:—There was a Jewish city which stood by a river full of fish, but the cunning creatures, noticing the habits of the citizens, ventured freely in sight on the Sabbath, though they carefully kept away on working-days. At last the temptation was too strong for the Jewish fishermen, but they paid dearly for a few days’ fine sport by being miraculously turned into apes as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking. In after times, when Solomon passed through the Valley of Apes, between Jerusalem and Mareb, he received from their descendants, monkeys living in houses and dressed like men, an account of their strange history.[513]So, in classic times, Jove had chastised the treacherous race of the Cercopes; he took from them the use of tongues born but to perjure, leaving them to bewail in hoarse cries their fate, transformed into the hairy apes of the Pithecusæ, like and yet unlike the men they had been:—
‘In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idemDissimiles homini possent similesque videri.’[514]
‘In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idemDissimiles homini possent similesque videri.’[514]
‘In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idemDissimiles homini possent similesque videri.’[514]
‘In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idem
Dissimiles homini possent similesque videri.’[514]
Turning from degeneration to development, it is found that legends of the descent of human tribes from apes are especially applied to races despised as low and beast-like by some higher neighbouring people, and the low race may even acknowledge the humiliating explanation. Thus the aboriginal features of the robber-caste of the Marawars of South India are the justification for their alleged descent from Rama’s monkeys, as for the like genealogy of the Kathkuri, or catechu-gatherers, which these small, dark, low-browed, curly-haired tribes actually themselves believe in. The Jaitwas of Rajputana, a tribe reckoned politically as Rajputs, nevertheless trace their descent from the monkey-god Hanuman, and confirm it by alleging that their princes still bear its evidence in a tail-like prolongation of the spine; a tradition which has probably a real ethnological meaning, pointing out the Jaitwas as of non-Aryan race.[515]Wild tribes of the Malay peninsula, looked down on as lower animals by the more warlike and civilized Malays, have among them traditions of their own descent from a pair of the ‘unka puteh,’ or ‘white monkeys,’ who reared their young ones and sent them into the plains, and there they perfected so well that they and their descendants became men, but those who returned to the mountains still remained apes.[516]Thus Buddhist legend relates the origin of the flat-nosed, uncouth tribes of Tibet, offspring of two miraculous apes, transformed to people the snow-kingdom. Taught to till the ground, when they had grown corn and eaten it their tails and hair gradually disappeared, they began to speak, became men, and clothed themselves with leaves. The population grew closer, the land was more and more cultivated, and at last a prince of the race of Sakya, driven from his home in India, united their isolated tribes into a single kingdom.[517]In these traditions the developmentfrom ape to man is considered to have come in successive generations, but the negroes are said to attain the result in the individual, by way of metempsychosis. Froebel speaks of negro slaves in the United States believing that in the next world they shall be white men and free, nor is there anything strange in their cherishing a hope so prevalent among their kindred in West Africa. But from this the traveller goes on to quote another story, which, if not too good to be true, is a theory of upward and downward development, almost thorough enough for a Buddhist philosopher. He says, ‘A German whom I met here told me that the blacks believe the damned among the negroes to become monkeys; but if in this state they behave well, they are advanced to the state of a negro again, and bliss is eventually possible to them, consisting in their turning white, becoming winged, and so on.’[518]
To understand these stories (and they are worth some attention for the ethnological hints they contain), it is necessary that we should discard the results of modern scientific zoology, and bring our minds back to a ruder condition of knowledge. The myths of human degeneration and development have much more in common with the speculations of Lord Monboddo than with the anatomical arguments of Professor Huxley. On the one hand, uncivilized men deliberately assign to apes an amount of human quality which to modern naturalists is simply ridiculous. Everyone has heard the story of the negroes declaring that apes really can speak, but judiciously hold their tongues lest they should be made to work; but it is not so generally known that this is found as serious matter of belief in several distant regions—West Africa, Madagascar, South America, &c.—where monkeys or apes are found.[519]With this goes anotherwidely-spread anthropoid story, which relates how great apes like the gorilla and the orang-utan carry off women to their homes in the woods, much as the Apaches and Comanches of our own time carry off to their prairies the women of North Mexico.[520]And on the other hand, popular opinion has under-estimated the man as much as it has over-estimated the monkey. We know how sailors and emigrants can look on savages as senseless, ape-like brutes, and how some writers on anthropology have contrived to make out of the moderate intellectual difference between an Englishman and a negro something equivalent to the immense interval between a negro and a gorilla. Thus we can have no difficulty in understanding how savages may seem mere apes to the eyes of men who hunt them like wild beasts in the forests, who can only hear in their language a sort of irrational gurgling and barking, and who fail totally to appreciate the real culture which better acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man. It is well known that when Sanskrit legend tells of the apes who fought in the army of King Hanuman, it really refers to those aborigines of the land who were driven by the Aryan invaders to the hills and jungles, and whose descendants are known to us as Bhils, Kols, Sonthals, and the like, rude tribes such as the Hindu still speaks of as ‘monkey-people.’[521]One of the most perfect identifications of the savage and the monkey in Hindustan is the following description of thebunmanus, or ‘man of the woods’ (Sanskr.vana= wood,manusha= man). ‘Thebunmanusis an animal of the monkey kind. His face has a near resemblance tothe human; he has no tail, and walks erect. The skin of his body is black, and slightly covered with hair.’ That this description really applies not to apes, but to the dark-skinned, non-Aryan aborigines of the land, appears further in the enumeration of the local dialects of Hindustan, to which, it is said, ‘may be added the jargon of the bunmanus, or wild men of the woods.’[522]In the islands of the Indian Archipelago, whose tropical forests swarm both with high apes and low savages, the confusion between the two in the minds of the half-civilized inhabitants becomes almost inextricable. There is a well-known Hindu fable in the Hitopadesa, which relates as a warning to stupid imitators the fate of the ape who imitated the carpenter, and was caught in the cleft when he pulled out the wedge; this fable has come to be told in Sumatra as a real story of one of the indigenous savages of the island.[523]It is to rude forest-men that the Malays habitually give the name oforang-utan, i.e., ‘man of the woods.’ But in Borneo this term is applied to the miyas ape, whence we have learnt to call this creature the orang-utan, and the Malays themselves are known to give the name in one and the same district to both the savage and the ape.[524]This term ‘man of the woods’ extends far beyond Hindu and Malay limits. The Siamese talk of thekhon pa, ‘men of the wood,’ meaning apes;[525]the Brazilians ofcauiari, or ‘wood-men,’ meaning a certain savage tribe.[526]The name of theBosjesman, so amusingly mispronounced by Englishmen, as though it were some outlandish native word, is merely the Dutch equivalent forBush-man, ‘man of the woods or bush.’[527]In our own language the‘homosilvaticus’ or ‘forest-man’ has become the ‘salvageman’ orsavage. European opinion of the native tribes of the New World may be judged of by the fact that, in 1537, Pope PaulIII.had to make express statement that these Indians were really men (attendentes Indos ipsos utpote veros homines).[528]Thus there is little cause to wonder at the circulation of stories of ape-men in South America, and at there being some indefiniteness in the local accounts of theselvageor ‘savage,’ that hairy wild man of the woods who, it is said, lives in the trees, and sometimes carries off the native women.[529]The most perfect of these mystifications is to be found in a Portuguese manuscript quoted in the account of Castelnau’s expedition, and giving, in all seriousness, the following account of the people calledCuatas: ‘This populous nation dwells east of the Juruena, in the neighbourhood of the rivers San Joâo and San Thome, advancing even to the confluence of the Juruena, and the Arinos. It is a very remarkable fact that the Indians composing it walk naturally like the quadrupeds, with their hands on the ground; they have the belly, breast, arms, and legs covered with hair, and are of small stature; they are fierce, and use their teeth as weapons; they sleep on the ground, or among the branches of trees; they have no industry, nor agriculture, and live only on fruits, wild roots, and fish.’[530]The writer of this record shows no symptom of being aware thatcuataorcoatais the name of the large black Simia Paniscus, and that he has been really describing, not a tribe of Indians, but a species of apes.
Various reasons may have led to the growth of another quaint group of legends, describing human tribes with tailslike beasts. To people who at once believe monkeys a kind of savages, and savages a kind of monkeys, men with tails are creatures coming under both definitions. Thus the Homo caudatus, or satyr, often appears in popular belief as a half-human creature, while even in old-fashioned works on natural history he may be found depicted on the evident model of an anthropoid ape. In East Africa, the imagined tribe of long-tailed men are also monkey-faced,[531]while in South America thecoata tapuya, or ‘monkey-men,’ are as naturally described as men with tails.[532]European travellers have tried to rationalize the stories of tailed men which they meet with in Africa and the East. Thus Dr. Krapf points to a leather appendage worn behind from the girdle by the Wakamba, and remarks, ‘It is no wonder that people say there are men with tails in the interior of Africa,’ and other writers have called attention to hanging mats or waist-cloths, fly-flappers or artificial tails worn for ornament, as having made their wearers liable to be mistaken at a distance for tailed men.[533]But these apparently silly myths have often a real ethnological significance, deeper at any rate than such a trivial blunder. When an ethnologist meets in any district with the story of tailed men, he ought to look for a despised tribe of aborigines, outcasts, or heretics, living near or among a dominant population, who look upon them as beasts, and furnish them with tails accordingly. Although the aboriginal Miau-tsze, or ‘children of the soil,’ come down from time to time into Canton to trade, the Chinese still firmly believe them to have short tails like monkeys;[534]the half-civilized Malays describe the ruder forest tribes as tailed men;[535]the Moslem nations of Africa tell the same story of the Niam-Namof the interior.[536]The outcast race of Cagots, about the Pyrenees, were said to be born with tails; and in Spain the mediæval superstition still survives that the Jews have tails, like the devil, as they say.[537]In England the notion was turned to theological profit by being claimed as a judgment on wretches who insultedSt.Augustine andSt.Thomas of Canterbury. Horne Tooke quotes thus from that zealous and somewhat foul-mouthed reformer, Bishop Bale: ‘Johan Capgrave and Alexander of Esseby sayth, that for castynge of fyshe tayles at thys Augustyne, Dorsett Shyre menne hadde tayles ever after. But Polydorus applieth it unto Kentish men at Stroud by Rochester, for cuttinge of Thomas Becket’s horse’s tail. Thus hath England in all other land a perpetuall infamy of tayles by theyr wrytten legendes of lyes, yet can they not well tell where to bestowe them truely ... an Englyshman now cannot travayle in an other land, by way of marchandyse or any other honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his tethe, that al Englishmen have tailes.’[538]The story at last sank into a commonplace of local slander between shire and shire, and the Devonshire belief that Cornishmen had tails lingered at least till a few years ago.[539]Not less curious is the tradition among savage tribes, that the tailed state was an early or original condition of man. In the Fiji Islands there is a legend of a tribe of men with tails like dogs, who perished in the great deluge, while the Tasmanians declared that men originally had tails and no knee-joints. Among the natives of Brazil, it is related by a Portuguese writer of about 1600, after a couple have been married, the father or father-in-law cuts a wooden stick with a sharp flint, imagining that by this ceremony he cuts off the tails of any future grandchildren, sothat they will be born tailless.[540]There seems no evidence to connect the occasional occurrence of tail-like projections by malformation with the stories of tailed human tribes.[541]
Anthropology, until modern times, classified among its facts the particulars of monstrous human tribes, gigantic or dwarfish, mouthless or headless, one-eyed or one-legged, and so forth. The works of ancient geographers and naturalists abound in descriptions of these strange creatures; writers such as Isidore of Seville and Roger Bacon collected them, and sent them into fresh and wider circulation in the middle ages, and the popular belief of uncivilized nations retains them still. It was not till the real world had been so thoroughly explored as to leave little room in it for the monsters, that about the beginning of the present century science banished them to the ideal world of mythology. Having had to glance here at two of the principal species in this amazing semi-human menagerie, it may be worth while to look among the rest for more hints as to the sources of mythic fancy.[542]
That some of the myths of giants and dwarfs are connected with traditions of real indigenous or hostile tribes is settled beyond question by the evidence brought forward by Grimm, Nilsson, and Hanusch. With all the difficulty of analyzing the mixed nature of the dwarfs of European folklore, and judging how far they are elves, or gnomes, or such like nature-spirits, and how far human beings in mythic aspect, it is impossible not to recognize the element derivedfrom the kindly or mischievous aborigines of the land, with their special language, and religion, and costume. The giants appear in European folklore as Stone-Age heathen, shy of the conquering tribes of men, loathing their agriculture and the sound of their church-bells. The rude native’s fear of the more civilized intruder in his land is well depicted in the tale of the giant’s daughter, who found the boor ploughing his field and carried him home in her apron for a plaything—plough, and oxen, and all; but her mother bade her carry them back to where she found them, for, said she, they are of a people that can do the Huns much ill. The fact of the giant tribes bearing such historic names as Hun or Chud is significant, and Slavonic men have, perhaps, not yet forgotten that the dwarfs talked of in their legends were descended from the aborigines whom the Old-Prussians found in the land. Beyond a doubt the old Scandinavians are describing the ancient and ill-used Lapp population, once so widely spread over Northern Europe, when their sagas tell of the dwarfs, stunted and ugly, dressed in reindeer kirtle and coloured cap, cunning and cowardly, shy of intercourse even with friendly Norsemen, dwelling in caves or in the mound-like Lapland ‘gamm,’ armed only with arrows tipped with stone and bone, yet feared and hated by their conquerors for their fancied powers of witchcraft.[543]Moslem legend relates that the race of Gog and Magog (Yajuj and Majuj) are of tiny stature, but with ears like elephants; they are a numerous people, and ravaged the world; they dwell in the East, separated from Persia by a high mountain, with but one pass; and the nations their neighbours, when they heard of Alexander the Great (Dhû ’l-Karnain) traversing the world, paid tribute to him, and he made them a wall of bronze and iron, to keep in the nation of Gog and Magog.[544]Who can fail to recognize in this a mystified description of the Tatars of High Asia? Professor Nilsson tries to account in a general way for the huge or tiny stature of legendary tribes, as being mere exaggeration of their actual largeness or smallness. We must admit that this sometimes really happens. The accounts which European eye-witnesses brought home of the colossal stature of the Patagonians, to whose waists they declared their own heads reached, are enough to settle once for all the fact that myths of giants may arise from the sight of really tall men,[545]and it is so, too, with the dwarf-legends of the same region, as where Knivet, the old traveller, remarks of the little people of Rio de la Plata, that they are ‘not so very little as described.’[546]
Nevertheless, this same group of giant and dwarf myths may serve as a warning not to stretch too widely a partial explanation, however sound within its proper limits. There is plenty of evidence that giant-legends are sometimes philosophic myths, made to account for the finding of great fossil bones. To give but a single instance of such connexion, certain huge jaws and teeth, found in excavating on the Hoe at Plymouth, were recognized as belonging to the giant Gogmagog, who in old times fought his last fight there against Corineus, the eponymic hero of Cornwall.[547]As to the dwarfs, again, stories of them are curiously associated with those long-enduring monuments of departed races—their burial-cysts and dolmens. Thus, in the United States, ranges of rude stone cysts, often only two or three feet long, are connected with the idea of a pygmy race buried in them. In Brittany, the dolmens are the abodes and treasuriesof the dwarfs who built them, and likewise in India it is a usual legend of such prehistoric burial-places, that they were dwarfs’ houses—the dwellings of the ancient pygmies, who here again appear as representatives of prehistoric tribes.[548]But a very different meaning is obvious in a mediæval traveller’s account of the hairy, man-like creatures of Cathay, one cubit high, and that do not bend their knees as they walk, or in an Arab geographer’s description of an island people in the Indian seas, four spans high, naked, with red downy hair on their faces, and who climb up trees and shun mankind. If any one could possibly doubt the real nature of these dwarfs, his doubt may be resolved by Marco Polo’s statement that in his time monkeys were regularly embalmed in the East Indies, and sold in boxes to be exhibited over the world as pygmies.[549]Thus various different facts have given rise to stories of giants and dwarfs, more than one mythic element perhaps combining to form a single legend—a result perplexing in the extreme to the mythological interpreter.
Descriptions of strange tribes made in entire good faith may come to be understood in new extravagant senses, when carried among people not aware of the original facts. The following are some interpretations of this kind, among which some far-fetched cases are given, to show that the method must not be trusted too much. The term ‘nose-less’ is apt to be misunderstood, yet it was fairly enough applied to flat-nosed tribes, such as Turks of the steppes, whom Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela thus depicts in the twelfth century:—‘They have no noses, but draw breath through two small holes.’[550]Again, among the common ornamentalmutilations of savages is that of stretching the ears to an enormous size by weights or coils, and it is thus verbally quite true that there are men whose ears hang down upon their shoulders. Yet without explanation such a phrase would be understood to describe, not the appearance of a real savage with his ear-lobes stretched into pendant fleshy loops, but rather that of Pliny’sPanotii, or of the IndianKarnaprâvarana, ‘whose ears serve them for cloaks,’ or of the African dwarfs, said to use their ears one for mattress and the other for coverlet when they lie down. One of the most extravagant of these stories is told by Fray Pedro Simon in California, where in fact the territory ofOregonhas its name from the Spanish term ofOrejones, or ‘Big-Ears,’ given to the inhabitants from their practice of stretching their ears with ornaments.[551]Even purely metaphorical descriptions, if taken in a literal sense, are capable of turning into catches, like the story of the horse with its head where its tail should be. I have been told by a French Protestant from the Nismes district that the epithet ofgorgeo negro, or ‘black-throat,’ by which Catholics describe a Huguenot, was taken so literally that heretic children were sometimes forced to open their mouths to satisfy the orthodox of their being of the usual colour within. On examining the description of savage tribes by higher races, it appears that several of the epithets usually applied only need literalizing to turn into the wildest of the legendary monster-stories. Thus the Burmese speak of the rude Karens as ‘dog-men;’[552]Marco Polo describes the Angaman (Andaman) islanders as brutish and savage cannibals, with heads like dogs.[553]Ælian’s account of the dog-headed people of India is on the face of it an account of a savage race. The Kynokephali, he says, are so called fromtheir bodily appearance, but otherwise they are human, and they go dressed in the skins of beasts; they are just, and harm not men; they cannot speak, but roar, yet they understand the language of the Indians; they live by hunting, being swift of foot, and they cook their game not by fire, but by tearing it into fragments and drying it in the sun; they keep goats and sheep, and drink the milk. The naturalist concludes by saying that he mentions these fitly among the irrational animals, because they have not articulate, distinct, and human language.[554]This last suggestive remark well states the old prevalent notion that barbarians have no real language, but are ‘speechless,’ ‘tongueless,’ or even mouthless.[555]Another monstrous people of wide celebrity are Pliny’s Blemmyæ, said to be headless, and accordingly to have their mouths and eyes in their breasts creatures over whom Prester John reigned in Asia, who dwelt far and wide in South American forests, and who to our mediæval ancestors were as real as the cannibals with whom Othello couples them:—