‘The Anthropophagi, and men whose headsDo grow beneath their shoulders.’
‘The Anthropophagi, and men whose headsDo grow beneath their shoulders.’
‘The Anthropophagi, and men whose headsDo grow beneath their shoulders.’
‘The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.’
If, however, we look in dictionaries for theAcephali, we may find not actual headless monsters, but heretics so called because their original head or founder was not known; and when the kingless Turkoman hordes say of themselves ‘We are a people without a head,’ the metaphor is even more plain and natural.[556]Moslem legend tells of theShikk and the Nesnas, creatures like one half of a split man, with one arm, leg, and eye. Possibly it was thence that the Zulus got their idea of a tribe of half-men, who in one of their stories found a Zulu maiden in a cave and thought she was two people, but on closer inspection of her admitted, ‘The thing is pretty! But oh the two legs!’ These realistic fancies coincide with the simple metaphor which describes a savage as only ‘half a man,’semihomo, as Virgil calls the ferocious Cacus.[557]Again, when the Chinese compared themselves to the outer barbarians, they said ‘We see with two eyes, the Latins with one, and all other nations are blind.’ Such metaphors, proverbial among ourselves, verbally correspond with legends of one-eyed tribes, such as the savage cave-dwelling Kyklopes.[558]Verbal coincidence of this kind, untrustworthy enough in these latter instances, passes at last into the vaguest fancy. The negroes called Europeans ‘long-headed,’ using the phrase in our familiar metaphorical sense; but translate it into Greek, and at once Hesiod’sMakrokephaloicome into being.[559]And, to conclude the list, one of the commonest of the monster-tribes of the Old and New World is that distinguished by having feet turned backward. Now there is really a people whose name, memorable in scientific controversy, describes them as ‘having feet the oppositeway,’ and they still retain that ancient name ofAntipodes.[560]
Returning from this digression to the region of philosophic myth, we may examine new groups of explanatory stories, produced from that craving to know causes and reasons which ever besets mankind. When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it, and even if he does not persuade himself that this is a real legend of his forefathers, the story-teller who hears it from him and repeats it is troubled with no such difficulty. Our task in dealing with such stories is made easy when the criterion of possibility can be brought to bear upon them. It has become a mere certainty to moderns that asbestos is not really salamander’s wool; that morbid hunger is not really caused by a lizard or a bird in a man’s stomach; that a Chinese philosopher cannot really have invented the fire-drill by seeing a bird peck at the branches of a tree till sparks came. The African Wakuafi account for their cattle-lifting proclivities by the calm assertion that Engai, that is, Heaven, gave all cattle to them, and so wherever there is any it is their call to go and seize it.[561]So in South America the fierce Mbayas declare they received from the Caracara a divine command to make war on all other tribes, killing the men and adopting the women and children.[562]But though it may be consistent with the notions of these savages to relate such explanatory legends, it is not consistent with our notions to believe them. Fortunately, too, the ex post facto legends are apt to come into collision with more authentic sources of information, or to encroach on the domain of valid history. It is of no use for the Chinese to tell their stupid story of written characters having been invented from the markings on a tortoise’sshell, for the early forms of such characters, plain and simple pictures of objects, have been preserved in China to this day. Nor can we praise anything but ingenuity in the West Highland legend that the Pope once laid an interdict on the land, but forgot to curse the hills, so the people tilled them, this story being told to account for those ancient traces of tillage still to be seen on the wild hill-sides, the so-called ‘elf-furrows.’[563]The most embarrassing cases of explanatory tradition are those which are neither impossible enough to condemn, nor probable enough to receive. Ethnographers who know how world-wide is the practice of defacing the teeth among the lower races, and how it only dies gradually out in higher civilization, naturally ascribe the habit to some general reason in human nature, at a particular stage of development. But the mutilating tribes themselves have local legends to account for local customs; thus the Penongs of Burmah and the Batoka of East Africa both break their front teeth, but the one tribe says its reason is not to look like apes, the other that it is to be like oxen and not like zebras.[564]Of the legends of tattooing, one of the oldest is that told to account for the fact that while the Fijians tattoo only the women, their neighbours, the Tongans, tattoo only the men. It is related that a Tongan, on his way from Fiji to report to his countrymen the proper custom for them to observe, went on his way repeating the rule he had carefully learnt by heart, ‘Tattoo the women, but not the men,’ but unluckily he tripped over a stump, got his lesson wrong, and reached Tonga repeating ‘Tattoo the men, but not the women,’ an ordinance which they observed ever after. How reasonable such an explanation seemed to the Polynesian mind, may be judged from the Samoans having a version with different details, and applied to their own instead of the Tongan islands.[565]
All men feel how wanting in sense of reality is a story with no personal name to hang it to. This want is thus graphically expressed by Sprenger the historian in his life of Mohammed: ‘It makes, on me at least, quite a different impression when it is related that “the Prophet said to Alkama,” even if I knew nothing whatever else of this Alkama, than if it were merely stated that “he said to somebody.”’ The feeling which this acute and learned critic thus candidly confesses, has from the earliest times, and in the minds of men troubled with no such nice historic conscience, germinated to the production of much mythic fruit. Thus it has come to pass that one of the leading personages to be met with in the tradition of the world is really no more than—Somebody. There is nothing this wondrous creature cannot achieve, no shape he cannot put on; one only restriction binds him at all, that the name he assumes shall have some sort of congruity with the office he undertakes, and even from this he oftentimes breaks loose. So rife in our own day is this manufacture of personal history, often fitted up with details of place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle, that it may be guessed how vast its working must have been in days of old. Thus the ruins of ancient buildings, of whose real history and use no trustworthy tradition survives in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth with a builder and a purpose. In Mexico the great Somebody assumes the name of Montezuma, and builds the aqueduct of Tezcuco; to the Persian any huge and antique ruin is the work of the heroic Antar; in Russia, says Dr. Bastian, buildings of the most various ages are set down to Peter the Great, as in Spain to Boabdil or CharlesV.; and European folklore may attribute to the Devil any old building of unusual massiveness, and especially those stone structures which antiquaries now class as præ-historicmonuments. With a more graceful thought, the Indians of North America declare that the imitative tumuli of Ohio, great mounds laid out in rude imitation of animals, were shaped in old days by the great Manitu himself, in promise of a plentiful supply of game in the world of spirits. The New Zealanders tell how the hero Kupe separated the North and South Islands, and formed Cook’s Straits. Greek myth placed at the gate of the Mediterranean the twin pillars of Herakles; in more recent times the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar became one of the many feats of Alexander of Macedon.[566]Such a group of stories as this is no unfair test of the value of mere traditions of personal names which simply answer the questions that mankind have been asking for ages about the origin of their rites, laws, customs, arts. Some such traditions are of course genuine, and we may be able, especially in the more modern cases, to separate the real from the imaginary. But it must be distinctly laid down that, in the absence of corroborative evidence, every tradition stands suspect of mythology, if it can be made by the simple device of fitting some personal name to the purely theoretical assertion that somebody must have introduced into the world fire-making, or weapons, or ornaments, or games, or agriculture, or marriage, or any other of the elements of civilization.
Among the various matters which have excited curiosity, and led to its satisfaction by explanatory myths, are local names. These, when the popular ear has lost their primitive significance, become in barbaric times an apt subject for the myth-maker to explain in his peculiar fashion. Thus the Tibetans declare that their lakeChomoririwas named from a woman (chomo) who was carried into it by the yak she was riding, and cried in terrorri-ri!The Arabs say the founders of the city ofSennaarsaw on the river bank a beautiful woman with teeth glittering like fire,whence they called the placeSinnâr, i.e., ‘tooth of fire.’ The Arkadians derived the name of their townTrapezusfrom the table (trapeza), which Zeus overturned when the wolfish Lykaon served a child on it for a banquet to him.[567]Such crude fancies in no way differ in nature from English local legends current up to recent times, such as that which relates how the Romans, coming in sight of whereExeternow stands, exclaimed in delight,‘Ecce terra!’and thus the city had its name. Not long ago, a curious enquirer wished to know from the inhabitants ofFordingbridge, or as the country people call it,Fardenbridge, what the origin of this name might be, and heard in reply that the bridge was thought to have been built when wages were so cheap that masons worked for a ‘farden’ a day. The Falmouth folks’ story of Squire Pendarvis and his ale is well known, how his servant excused herself for selling it to the sailors, because, as she said, ‘Thepenny comesoquick,’ whence the place came to be calledPennycomequick; this nonsense being invented to account for an ancient Cornish name, probablyPenycumgwic, ‘head of the creek valley.’ Mythic fancy had fallen to a low estate when it dwindled to such remnants as this.
That personal names may pass into nouns, we, who talk ofbroughamsandbluchers, cannot deny. But any such etymology ought to have contemporary document or some equally forcible proof in its favour, for this is a form of explanation taken by the most flagrant myths. David the painter, it is related, had a promising pupil namedChicque, the son of a fruiterer; the lad died at eighteen, but his master continued to hold him up to later students as a model of artistic cleverness, and hence arose the nowfamiliar term ofchic. Etymologists, a race not wanting in effrontery, have hardly ever surpassed this circumstantial canard; the wordchicdates at anyrate from the seventeenth century.[568]Another word with which similar liberty has been taken, iscant. Steele, in the ‘Spectator,’ says that some people derive it from the name of one AndrewCant, a Scotch minister, who had the gift of preaching in such a dialect that he was understood by none but his own congregation, and not by all of them. This is, perhaps, not a very accurate delineation of the real Andrew Cant, who is mentioned in ‘Whitelock’s Memorials,’ and seems to have known how to speak out in very plain terms indeed. But at any rate he flourished about 1650, whereas the verb tocantwas then already an old word. Tocante, meaning to speak, is mentioned in Harman’s ‘List of Rogues’ Words,’ in 1566, and in 1587 Harrison says of the beggars and gypsies that they have devised a language among themselves, which they namecanting, but others ‘Pedlars’ Frenche.’[569]Of all etymologies ascribed to personal names, one of the most curious is that of the DanseMacabre, or Dance of Death, so well known from Holbein’s pictures. Its supposed author is thus mentioned in the‘Biographie Universelle:’ ‘Macaber, poëte allemand, serait tout-à-fait inconnu sans l’ouvrage qu’on a sous son nom.’This, it may be added, is true enough, for there never was such a person at all, the DanseMacabrebeing really ChoreaMachabæorum, the Dance of theMaccabees,a kind of pious pantomime of death performed in churches in the fifteenth century. Why the performance received this name, is that the rite of Mass for the dead is distinguished by the reading of that passage from the twelfth chapter of BookII.of theMaccabees, which relates how the people betook themselves to prayer, and besought the Lord that the sin of those who had been slain among them might be wholly blotted out; for if Judas had not expected that the slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.[570]Traced to its origin, it is thus seen that the DanseMacabreis neither more nor less than the Dance of the Dead.
It is not an unusual thing for tribes and nations to be known by the name of their chief, as in books of African travel we read of ‘Eyo’s people,’ or ‘Kamrazi’s people.’ Such terms may become permanent, like the name of theOsmanliTurks taken from the greatOthman, orOsman. The notions of kinship and chieftainship may easily be combined, as where some individual Brian or Alpine may have given his name to a clan ofO’BriensorMac Alpines. How far the tribal names of the lower races may have been derived from individual names of chiefs or forefathers, is a question on which distinct evidence is difficult to obtain. In Patagonia bands or subdivisions of tribes are designated by the names of temporary chiefs, every roving party having such a leader, who is sometimes even styled ‘yank,’ i.e. ‘father.’[571]The Zulus and Maoris were races who paid great attention to the traditional genealogies of their clan-ancestors, who were, indeed, not only their kinsfolk but their gods; and they distinctly recognize the possibility of tribes being named from a deceased ancestor or chief. The Kafir tribe ofAma-Xosaderives its name from a chief,U-Xosa;[572]and the Maori tribes ofNgate-WakaueandNga-Puhiclaimdescent from chiefs calledWakaueandPuhi.[573]Around this nucleus of actuality, however, there gathers an enormous mass of fiction simulating its effects. The myth-maker, curious to know how many people or country gained its name, had only to conclude that it came from a great ancestor or ruler, and then the simple process of turning a national or local title into a personal name at once added a new genealogy to historical tradition. In some cases, the name of the imagined ancestor is invented in such form that the local or gentile name may stand as grammatically derived from it, as usually happens in real cases, like the derivation ofCæsareafromCæsar, or of theBenedictinesfromBenedict. But in the fictitious genealogy or history of the myth-maker, the mere unaltered name of the nation, tribe, country, or city often becomes without more ado the name of the eponymic hero. It has to be remembered, moreover, that countries and nations can be personified by an imaginative process which has not quite lost its sense in modern speech.Franceis talked of by politicians as an individual being, with particular opinions and habits, and may even be embodied as a statue or picture with suitable attributes. And if one were to say thatBritanniahas two daughters,CanadaandAustralia, or that she has gone to keep house for a decrepit old aunt calledIndia, this would be admitted as plain fact expressed in fantastic language. The invention of ancestries from eponymic heroes or name-ancestors has, however, often had a serious effect in corrupting historic truth, by helping to fill ancient annals with swarms of fictitious genealogies. Yet, when surveyed in a large view, the nature of the eponymic fictions is patent and indisputable, and so regular are their forms, that we could scarcely choose more telling examples of the consistent processes of imagination, as shown in the development of myths.
The great number of the eponymic ancestors of ancient Greek tribes and nations makes it easy to test them by comparison, and the test is a destructive one. Treat the heroicgenealogies they belong to as traditions founded on real history, and they prove hopelessly independent and incompatible; but consider them as mostly local and tribal myths and such independence and incompatibility become their proper features. Mr. Grote, whose tendency is to treat all myths as fictions not only unexplained but unexplainable, here makes an exception, tracing the eponymic ancestors from whom Greek cities and tribes derived their legendary parentage to mere embodied local and gentile names. Thus, of the fifty sons of Lykaôn, a whole large group consists of personified cities of Arkadia, such asMantinêus,Phigalos,Tegeatês, who, according to the simply inverting legend, are called founders ofMantinêa,Phigalia,Tegea. The father of King Æakos was Zeus, his mother his own personified land,Ægina; the city ofMykênaihad not only an ancestressMykênê, but an eponymic ancestor as well,Mykêneus. Long afterwards, mediæval Europe, stimulated by the splendid genealogies through which Rome had attached herself to Greece and the Greek gods and heroes, discovered the secret of rivalling them in the chronicles of Geoffry of Monmouth and others, by claiming as founders ofParisandToursthe TrojansParisandTurnus, and connectingFranceandBritainwith the Trojan war throughFrancus, son of Hector, andBrutus, great grandson of Æneas. A remarkably perfect eponymic historical myth accounting for the Gypsies or Egyptians, may be found cited seriously in ‘Blackstone’s Commentaries:’ when Sultan Selim conquered Egypt in 1517, several of the natives refused to submit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under oneZinganeus, whence the Turks called themZinganees, but, being at length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in small parties over the world, &c., &c. It is curious to watch Milton’s mind emerging, but not wholly emerging, from the state of the mediæval chronicler. He mentions in the beginning of his ‘History of Britain,’ the ‘outlandish figment’ of the four kings,Magus,Saron,Druis, andBardus; he has no approval for the giantAlbion, son of Neptune, whosubdued the island and called it after his own name; he scoffs at the four sons of Japhet, calledFrancus,Romanus,Alemannus, andBritto. But when he comes toBrutusand the Trojan legends of old English history, his sceptical courage fails him: ‘those old and inborn names of successive kings, never any to have bin real persons, or don in their lives at least som part of what so long hath bin remember’d, cannot be thought without too strict an incredulity.’[574]
Among ruder races of the world, asserted genealogies of this class may be instanced in South American tribes called theAmoipiraandPotyuara,[575]Khond clans calledBaskaandJakso,[576]Turkoman hordes calledYomut,Tekke, andChaudor,[577]all of them professing to derive their designations from ancestors or chiefs who bore as individuals these very names. Where criticism can be brought to bear on these genealogies, its effect is often such as drove Brutus and his Trojans out of English history. When there appear in the genealogy of Haussa, in West Africa, plain names of towns likeKanoandKatsena,[578]it is natural to consider these towns to have been personified into mythic ancestors. Mexican tradition assigns a whole set of eponymic ancestors or chiefs to the various races of the land, asMexithe founder ofMexico,Chichimecatlthe first king of theChichimecs, and so forth, down toOtomitlthe ancestor of theOtomis, whose very name by its termination betrays its Aztec invention.[579]The Brazilians account for the division of theTupisandGuaranis, by the legend of two ancestral brothers,TupiandGuarani, whoquarrelled and separated, each with his followers: here an eponymic origin of the story is made likely by the wordGuaraninot being an old national name at all, but merely the designation of ‘warriors’ given by the missionaries to certain tribes.[580]And when such facts are considered as that North American clans named after animals,Beaver,Crayfish, and the like, account for these names by simply claiming the very creatures themselves as ancestors,[581]the tendency of general criticism will probably be not so much in favour of real forefathers and chiefs who left their names to their tribes, as of eponymic ancestors created by backwards imitation of such inheritance.
The examination of eponymic legend, however, must by no means stop short at the destructive stage. In fact, when it has undergone the sharpest criticism, it only displays the more clearly a real historic value, not less perhaps than if all the names it records were real names of ancient chiefs. With all their fancies, blunders, and shortcomings, the heroic genealogies preserve early theories of nationality, traditions of migration, invasion, connexion by kindred or intercourse. The ethnologists of old days, borrowing the phraseology of myth, stated what they looked on as the actual relations of races, in a personifying language of which the meaning may still be readily interpreted. The Greek legend of the twin brothersDanaosandÆgyptos, founders of the nations of theDanaoior Homeric Greeks and of theÆgyptians, represents a distinct though weak ethnological theory. Their eponymic myth ofHellēn, the personified race of theHellēnes, is another and more reasonable ethnological document stating kinship among four great branches of the Greek race: the three sons ofHellēn, it relates, wereAiolos,Dōros, andXouthos; the first two gave their names to theÆoliansandDorians, the third had sons calledAchaiosandIōn, whose names passed as a heritage to theAchaioiandIonians. The belief of theLydians,Mysians, andKariansas to their national kinship is well expressed in the genealogy in Herodotus, which traces their descent from the three brothersLydos,Mysos, andKar.[582]The Persian legend of Feridun (Thraetaona) and his three sons,Irej,Tur, andSelm, distinguishes the two nationalities ofIranianandTuranian, i.e. Persian and Tatar.[583]The national genealogy of the Afghans is worthy of remark. It runs thus: Melik Talut (King Saul) had two sons, Berkia and Irmia (Berekiah and Jeremiah), who served David; the son of Berkia wasAfghan, and the son of Irmia wasUsbek. Thanks to the aquiline noses of the Afghans, and to their use of Biblical personal names derived from Biblical sources, the idea of their being descendants of the lost tribes of Israel found great credence among European scholars up to the present century.[584]Yet the pedigree is ethnologically absurd, for the whole source of the imagined cousinship of the AryanAfghanand the TuranianUsbek, so distinct both in feature and in language, appears to be in their union by common Mohammedanism, while the reckless jumble of sham history, which derives both from a Semitic source, is only too characteristic of Moslem chronicle. Among the Tatars is found a much more reasonable national pedigree; in the13thcentury, William of Ruysbroek relates, as sober circumstantial history, that they were originally calledTurksfromTurkthe eldest son of Japhet, but one of their princes left his dominions to his twin sons,TatarandMongolwhich gave rise to the distinction that has ever since prevailed between these two nations.[585]Historically absurd, this legend states what appears the unimpeachable ethnologicalfact, that theTurks,Mongols, andTatarsare closely-connected branches of one national stock, and we can only dispute in it what seems an exorbitant claim on the part of theTurkto represent the head of the family, the ancestor of theMongoland theTatar. Thus these eponymic national genealogies, mythological in form but ethnological in substance, embody opinions of which we may admit or deny the truth or value, but which we must recognize as distinctly ethnological documents.[586]
It thus appears that early ethnology is habitually expressed in a metaphorical language, in which lands and nations are personified, and their relations indicated by terms of personal kinship. This description applies to that important document of ancient ethnology, the table of nations in the10thchapter of Genesis. In some cases it is a problem of minute and difficult criticism to distinguish among its ancestral names those which are simply local or national designations in personal form. But to critics conversant with the ethnic genealogies of other peoples, such as have here been quoted, simple inspection of this national list may suffice to show that part of its names are not names of real men, but of personified cities, lands, and races. The cityZidon(צידן) is brother to Heth (חת) the father of theHittites, and next follow in person the Jebusite and the Amorite. Among plain names of countries,Cushor Æthiopia (כוש) begets Nimrod,AsshurorAssyria(אשור) builds Nineveh, and even the dualMizraim(מצרים), the ‘two Egypts,’ usually regarded as signifying Upper and Lower Egypt, appears in the line of generations as a personal son and brother of other countries, and ancestor of populations. The Aryan stock is clearly recognized in personifications of at least two of its members,Madai(מדי) theMede, andJavan(יון) theIonian. And as regards the family to which the Israelites themselves belong, ifCanaan(כנען), the father ofZidon(צידן), be transferred to it to represent thePhœnicians, by the side ofAsshur(אשור),Aram(ארם),Eber(עבר), and the other descendants of Shem, the result will be mainly to arrange the Semitic stock according to the ordinary classification of modern comparative philology.
Turning now from cases where mythologic phrase serves as a medium for expressing philosophic opinion, let us quickly cross the district where fancy assumes the semblance of explanatory legend. The mediæval schoolmen have been justly laughed at for their habit of translating plain facts into the terms of metaphysics, and then solemnly offering them in this scientific guise as explanations of themselves—accounting for opium making people sleep, by its possession of a dormitive virtue. The myth-maker’s proceedings may in one respect be illustrated by comparing them with this. Half mythology is occupied, as many a legend cited in these chapters has shown, in shaping the familiar facts of daily life into imaginary histories of their own cause and origin, childlike answers to those world-old questions of whence and why, which the savage asks as readily as the sage. So familiar is the nature of such description in the dress of history, that its easier examples translate off-hand. When the Samoans say that ever since the great battle among the plantains and bananas, the vanquished have hung down their heads, while the victor stands proudly erect,[587]who can mistake the simple metaphor which compares the upright and the drooping plants to a conqueror standing among his beaten foes? In simile just as obvious lies the origin of another Polynesian legend, which relates the creation of the coco-nut from a man’s head, the chestnuts from his kidneys, and the yams from his legs.[588]To draw one more example from the mythology of plants, how transparent is the Ojibwa fancy of that heavenly youth with green robe and waving feathers, whom for the good of men the Indian overcame and buried, andwho sprang again from his grave as the Indian corn, Mondamin, the ‘Spirit’s grain.’[589]The New Forest peasant deems that the marl he digs is still red with the blood of his ancient foes the Danes; the Maori sees on the red cliffs of Cook’s Straits the blood-stains that Kupe made when, mourning for the death of his daughter, he cut his forehead with pieces of obsidian; in the spot where Buddha offered his own body to feed the starved tigress’s cubs, his blood for ever reddened the soil and the trees and flowers. The modern Albanian still sees the stain of slaughter in streams running red with earth, as to the ancient Greek the river that flowed by Byblos bore down in its summer floods the red blood of Adonis. The Cornishman knows from the red filmy growth on the brook pebbles that murder has been done there; John the Baptist’s blood still grows in Germany on his day, and peasants still go out to search for it; the red meal fungus is blood dropped by the flying Huns when they hurt their feet against the high tower-roofs. The traveller in India might see on the ruined walls of Ganga Raja the traces of the blood of the citizens spilt in the siege, and yet more marvellous to relate, atSt.Denis’s church in Cornwall, the blood-stains on the stones fell there when the saint’s head was cut off somewhere else.[590]Of such translations of descriptive metaphor under thin pretence of history, every collection of myth is crowded with examples, but it strengthens our judgment of the combined consistency and variety of what may be called the mythic language, to extract from its dictionary such a group as this, which in variously imaginative fashion describes the appearance of a blood-red stain.
The merest shadowy fancy or broken-down metaphor, when once it gains a sense of reality, may begin to be spoken of as an actual event. The Moslems have heard the very stones praise Allah, not in simile only but in fact, and among them the saying that a man’s fate is written on his forehead has been materialized into a belief that it can be deciphered from the letter-like markings of the sutures of his skull. One of the miraculous passages in the life of Mohammed himself is traced plausibly by Sprenger to such a pragmatized metaphor. The angel Gabriel, legend declares, opened the prophet’s breast, and took a black clot from his heart, which he washed with Zemzem water and replaced; details are given of the angel’s dress and golden basin, and Anas ibn Malik declared he had seen the very mark where the wound was sewn up. We may venture with the historian to ascribe this marvellous incident to the familiar metaphor that Mohammed’s heart was divinely opened and cleansed, and indeed he does say in the Koran that God opened his heart.[591]A single instance is enough to represent the same habit in Christian legend. Marco Polo relates how in 1225 the Khalif of Bagdad commanded the Christians of his dominions, under penalty of death or Islam, to justify their Scriptural text by removing a certain mountain. Now there was among them a shoemaker, who, having been tempted to excess of admiration for a woman, had plucked out his offending eye. This man commanded the mountain to remove, which it did to the terror of the Khalif and all his people, and since then the anniversary of the miracle has been kept holy. The Venetian traveller, after the manner of mediæval writers, records the story without a symptom of suspicion;[592]yet to our minds its whole origin so obviously lies in three verses ofSt.Matthew’s gospel, that it is needless to quote them. To modern taste such wooden fictions as these are far from attractive. In fact the pragmatizer is a stupid creature;nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull and vulgar by his touch, for it is through the very incapacity of his mind to hold an abstract idea that he is forced to embody it in a material incident. Yet wearisome as he may be, it is none the less needful to understand him, to acknowledge the vast influence he has had on the belief of mankind, and to appreciate him as representing in its extreme abuse that tendency to clothe every thought in a concrete shape, which has in all ages been a mainspring of mythology.
Though allegory cannot maintain the large place often claimed for it in mythology, it has yet had too much influence to be passed over in this survey. It is true that the search for allegorical explanation is a pursuit that has led many a zealous explorer into the quagmires of mysticism. Yet there are cases in which allegory is certainly used with historical intent, as for instance in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, with its cows and sheep which stand for Israelites, and asses and wolves for Midianites and Egyptians, these creatures figuring in a pseudo-prophetic sketch of Old Testament chronicles. As for moral allegory, it is immensely plentiful in the world, although its limits are narrower than mythologists of past centuries have supposed. It is now reasonably thought preposterous to interpret the Greek legends as moral apologues, after the manner of Herakleides the philosopher, who could discern a parable of repentant prudence in Athene seizing Achilles when just about to draw his sword on Agamemnon.[593]Still, such a mode of interpretation has thus much to justify it, that numbers of the fanciful myths of the world are really allegories. There is allegory in the Hesiodic myth of Pandora, whom Zeus sent down to men, decked with golden band and garland of spring flowers, fit cause of longing and the pangs of love, but using with a dog-like mind her gifts of lies and treachery and pleasant speech. Heedless of his wiser brother’s words, the foolish Epimetheus took her;she raised the lid of the great cask and shook out the evils that wander among mankind, and the diseases that by day and night come silently bringing ill; she set on the lid again and shut hope in, that evil might be ever hopeless to mankind. Shifted to fit a different moral, the allegory remained in the later version of the tale, that the cask held not curses but blessings; these were let go and lost to men when the vessel was too curiously opened, while Hope alone was left behind for comfort to the luckless human race.[594]Yet the primitive nature of such legends underlies the moral shape upon them. Zeus is no allegoric fiction, and Prometheus, unless modern mythologists judge him very wrongly, has a meaning far deeper than parable. Xenophon tells after Prodikos the story of Herakles choosing between the short and easy path of pleasure and the long and toilsome path of virtue,[595]but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the reader’s mind.
The general relation of allegory to pure myth can hardly be brought more clearly into view than in a class of stories familiar to every child, the Beast-fables. From the ordinary civilized point of view the allegory in such fictions seems fundamental, the notion of a moral lesson seems bound up with their very nature, yet a broader examination tends to prove the allegorical growth as it were parasitic on an older trunk of myth without moral. It is only by an effort of intellectual reaction that a modern writer can imitate in parable the beast of the old Beast-fable. No wonder, for the creature has become to his mind a monster, only conceivable as a caricature of man made to carry a moral lesson or a satire. But among savages it is not so. To their minds the semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, invented to preach or sneer, he is all but a reality. Beast-fables are not nonsense to men who ascribe to the lower animals a power of speech, and look on them as partakingof moral human nature; to men in whose eyes any hyæna or wolf may probably be a man-hyæna or a werewolf; to men who so utterly believe ‘that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird’ that they will really regulate their own diet so as to avoid eating an ancestor; to men an integral part of whose religion may actually be the worship of beasts. Such beliefs belong even now to half mankind, and among such the beast-stories had their first home. Even the Australians tell their quaint beast-tales, of the Rat, the Owl, and the fat Blackfellow, or of Pussy-brother who singed his friends’ noses while they were asleep.[596]The Kamchadals have an elaborate myth of the adventures of their stupid deity Kutka with the Mice who played tricks upon him, such as painting his face like a woman’s, so that when he looked in the water he fell in love with himself.[597]Beast-tales abound among such races as the Polynesians and the North American Indians, who value in them ingenuity of incident and neat adaptation of the habits and characters of the creatures. Thus in a legend of the Flathead Indians, the Little Wolf found in Cloudland his grandsires the Spiders with their grizzled hair and long crooked nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to earth; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled Duck, whom the Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in confusion, and that is why she lives and dives alone to this very day.[598]In Guinea, where beast-fable is one of the great staples of native conversation, the following story is told as a type of the tales which in this way account for peculiarities of animals. The great Engena-monkey offered his daughter to be bride of the champion who should perform the feat of drinking a whole barrel of rum. The dignified Elephant, the graceful Leopard, the surly Boar, tried the first mouthful of the fire-water, and retreated. Then the tiny Telinga-monkey came, who had cunningly hidden inthe long grass thousands of his fellows; he took his first glass and went away, but instead of his coming back, another just like him came for the second, and so on till the barrel was emptied and Telinga walked off with the Monkey-king’s daughter. But in the narrow path the Elephant and Leopard attacked him and drove him off and he took refuge in the highest boughs of the trees, vowing never more to live on the ground and suffer such violence and injustice. This is why to this day the little telingas are only found in the highest tree-tops.[599]Such stories have been collected by scores from savage tradition in their original state, while as yet no moral lesson has entered into them. Yet the easy and natural transition from the story into the parable is made among savages, perhaps without help from higher races. In the Hottentot Tales, side by side with the myth of the cunning Jackal tricking the Lion out of the best of the carcase, and getting the black stripe burnt on his own back by carrying off the Sun, there occurs the moral apologue of the Lion who thought himself wiser than his Mother, and perished by the Hunter’s spear, for want of heed to her warning against the deadly creature whose head is in a line with his breast and shoulders.[600]So the Zulus have a thorough moral apologue in the story of the hyrax, who did not go to fetch his tail on the day when tails were given out, because he did not like to be out in the rain; he only asked the other animals to bring it for him, and so he never got it.[601]Among the North American legends of Manabozho, there is a fable quite Æsopian in its humour. Manabozho, transformed into a Wolf, killed a fat moose, and being very hungry sat down to eat. But he fell into great doubts as to where to begin, for, said he, if I begin at the head, people will laugh and say, he ate him backwards,but if I begin at the side they will say, he ate him sideways. At last he made up his mind, and was just putting a delicate piece into his mouth, when a tree close by creaked. Stop, stop! said he to the tree, I cannot eat with such a noise, and in spite of his hunger he left the meat and climbed up to quiet the creaking, but was caught between two branches and held fast, and presently he saw a pack of wolves coming. Go that way! Go that way! he cried out, whereupon the wolves said, he must have something there, or he would not tell us to go another way. So they came on, and found the moose, and ate it to the bones while Manabozho looked wistfully on. The next heavy blast of wind opened the branches and let him out, and he went home thinking to himself, ‘See the effect of meddling with frivolous things when I had certain good in my possession.’[602]
In the Old World, the moral Beast-fable was of no mean antiquity, but it did not at once supplant the animal-myths pure and simple. For ages the European mind was capable at once of receiving lessons of wisdom from the Æsopian crows and foxes, and of enjoying artistic but by no means edifying beast-stories of more primitive type. In fact the Babrius and Phædrus collections were over a thousand years old, when the genuine Beast-Epic reached its fullest growth in the incomparable ‘Reynard the Fox,’ traceable in Jakob Grimm’s view to an original Frankish composition of the12thcentury, itself containing materials of far earlier date.[603]Reynard is not a didactic poem, at least if a moral hangs on to it here and there it is oftenest a Macchiavellian one; nor is it essentially a satire, sharply as it lashes men in general and the clergy in particular. Its creatures are incarnate qualities, the Fox of cunning, the Bear of strength, the Ass of dull content, the Sheep of guilelessness. The charm of the narrative, which every class in mediæval Europe delighted in, but which we have allowed to drop out of all but scholars’ knowledge, lies in great measure inhe cleverly sustained combination of the beast’s nature and the man’s. How great the influence of the Reynard Epic was in the middle ages, may be judged fromReynard,Bruin,Chanticleer, being still names familiar to people who have no idea of their having been originally names of the characters in the great beast-fable. Even more remarkable are its traces in modern French. The donkey has its name ofbaudetfromBaudoin, Baldwin the Ass. Common French dictionaries do not even contain the wordgoupil(vulpes), so effectually has the Latin name of the fox been driven out of use by his Frankish title in the Beast-Epic,Raginhardthe Counsellor,Reinhart,Reynard,Renart,renard. The moralized apologues like Æsop’s which Grimm contemptuously calls ‘fables thinned down to mere moral and allegory,’ ‘a fourth watering of the old grapes into an insipid moral infusion,’ are low in æsthetic quality as compared with the genuine beast-myths. Mythological critics will be apt to judge them after the manner of the child who said how convenient it was to have ‘Moral’ printed in Æsop’s fables, that everybody might know what to skip.
The want of power of abstraction which has ever had such disastrous effect on the beliefs of mankind, confounding myth and chronicle, and crushing the spirit of history under the rubbish of literalized tradition, comes very clearly into view in the study of parable. The state of mind of the deaf, dumb, and blind Laura Bridgman, so instructive in illustrating the mental habits of uneducated though full-sensed men, displays in an extreme form the difficulty such men have in comprehending the unreality of any story. She could not be made to see that arithmetical problems were anything but statements of concrete fact, and when her teacher asked her, ‘If you can buy a barrel of cider for four dollars, how much can you buy for one dollar?’ she replied quite simply, ‘I cannot give much for cider, because it is very sour.’[604]It is a surprising instance of this tendency to concretism, that among people so civilizedas the Buddhists, the most obviously moral beast-fables have become literal incidents of sacred history. Gautama, during his 550 jatakas or births, took the form of a frog, a fish, a crow, an ape, and various other animals, and so far were the legends of these transformations from mere myth to his followers, that there have been preserved as relics in Buddhist temples the hair, feathers, and bones of the creatures whose bodies the great teacher inhabited. Now among the incidents which happened to Buddha during his series of animal births, he appeared as an actor in the familiar fable of the Fox and the Stork, and it was he who, when he was a Squirrel, set an example of parental virtue by trying to dry up the ocean with his tail, to save his young ones whose nest had drifted out to sea, till his persevering courage was rewarded by a miracle.[605]To our modern minds, a moral which seems the very purpose of a story is evidence unfavourable to its truth as fact. But if even apologues of talking birds and beasts have not been safe from literal belief, it is clear that the most evident moral can have been but slight protection to parables told of possible and life-like men. It was not a needless precaution to state explicitly of the New Testament parables that they were parables, and even this guard has not availed entirely. Mrs. Jameson relates some curious experience in the following passage:—‘I know that I was not very young when I entertained no more doubt of the substantial existence of Lazarus and Dives than of John the Baptist and Herod; when the Good Samaritan was as real a personage as any of the Apostles; when I was full of sincerest pity for those poor foolish Virgins who had forgotten to trim their lamps, and thought them—in my secret soul—rather hardly treated. This impression of the literal actual truth of the parables I have since met with in many children, and in the uneducated but devout hearers and readers ofthe Bible; and I remember that when I once tried to explain to a good old woman the proper meaning of the word parable, and that the story of the Prodigal Son was not a fact, she was scandalized—she was quite sure that Jesus would never have told anything to his disciples that was not true. Thus she settled the matter in her own mind, and I thought it best to leave it there undisturbed.’[606]Nor, it may be added, has such realization been confined to the minds of the poor and ignorant.St.Lazarus, patron saint of lepers and their hospitals, and from whom thelazzaroneand thelazzarettotake their name, obviously derives these qualities from the Lazarus of the parable.
The proof of the force and obstinacy of the mythic faculty, thus given by the relapse of parable into pseudo-history, may conclude this dissertation on mythology. In its course there have been examined the processes of animating and personifying nature, the formation of legend by exaggeration and perversion of fact, the stiffening of metaphor by mistaken realization of words, the conversion of speculative theories and still less substantial fictions into pretended traditional events, the passage of myth into miracle-legend, the definition by name and place given to any floating imagination, the adaptation of mythic incident as moral example, and the incessant crystallization of story into history. The investigation of these intricate and devious operations has brought ever more and more broadly into view two principles of mythologic science. The first is that legend, when classified on a sufficient scale, displays a regularity of development which the notion of motiveless fancy quite fails to account for, and which must be attributed to laws of formation whereby every story, old and new, has arisen from its definite origin and sufficient cause. So uniform indeed is such development, that it becomes possible to treat myth as an organic product of mankind at large, in which individual, national, and even racial distinctions stand subordinate to universal qualities of thehuman mind. The second principle concerns the relation of myth to history. It is true that the search for mutilated and mystified traditions of real events, which formed so main a part of old mythological researches, seems to grow more hopeless the farther the study of legend extends. Even the fragments of real chronicle found embedded in the mythic structure are mostly in so corrupt a state, that, far from their elucidating history, they need history to elucidate them. Yet unconsciously, and as it were in spite of themselves, the shapers and transmitters of poetic legend have preserved for us masses of sound historical evidence. They moulded into mythic lives of gods and heroes their own ancestral heirlooms of thought and word, they displayed in the structure of their legends the operations of their own minds, they placed on record the arts and manners, the philosophy and religion of their own times, times of which formal history has often lost the very memory. Myth is the history of its authors, not of its subjects; it records the lives, not of superhuman heroes, but of poetic nations.