Chapter XI · Folklore Philosophy
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To look for consistency in barbaric philosophy is to disqualify ourselves for understanding it, and the theories of it which aim at symmetry are their own condemnation. Yet that philosophy, within its own irregular confines, works not illogically.—Edward Clodd.
None of these stories of shape-shifting, and of being born again, make any allusion to a soul. To revert, for instance, to Ỻew Ỻawgyffes, it is evident that the eagle cannot be regarded as his soul. The decayed state of the eagle’s body seems to imply that it was somehow the same body as that of Ỻew at the time when he was wounded by Gronw’s poisoned spear: the festering of the eagle’s flesh looks as if considered a continuation of the wound. It is above all things, however, to be noted that none of the stories in point, whether Irish or Welsh, contain any suggestion of the hero’s life coming to an end, or in any way perishing; Ỻew lives on to be transformed, under the stroke of Gwydion’s wand, from being an eagle to be a man again; and Tuan mac Cairill persists in various forms till he meets St. Finnen in the sixth century. Then in the case of Étáin, we are told in the Book of the Dun Cow, fo. 129a, that her first-mentioned birth and the next one were separated by more than a thousand years. So practically we may say that these stories implied that men and women were imperishable, that they had no end necessarily to their existence. This sort of notion may be detected in Ỻew’s words when he says, ‘Unless God kill me … it is not easy to kill me.’ The reference to the Almighty may probably be regarded as a comparatively late interpolation due to Christian teaching. A similar instance seems to occur in a poem in the Black Book of Carmarthen, fos. 47b–8b, where Arthur loudly sings the praises of his friend Cai. The couplet in point runs thus:—
Nẏ bei duv ae digonhei.
Oet diheit aghev kei.
Unless it were God that wrought it,
Hard to effect were the death of Cai.
The student of man tells us, as already pointed out, that the reason for the reluctance to disclose one’s name was of the same nature as that which makes savages, and some men belonging to nations above the savage state feel anxious that an enemy should not get possession of anything identified with their persons, such as a lock of one’s hair, a drop of one’s blood, or anything closely connected with one’s person, lest it should give the enemy power over one’s person as a whole, especially if such enemy is suspected of possessing any skill in handling the terrors of magic. In other words, the anthropologist would say that the name was regarded as identified with the person; and, having said this, he has mostly felt satisfied that he has definitively disposed of the matter. Therein, however, he is possibly wrong; for when he says that the name was probably treated as a part of the man, that only leads one to ask the question, What part of the man? At any rate, I can see nothing very unreasonable in such a question, though I am quite willing to word it differently, and to ask: Is there any evidence to show with what part of a man his name was associated?
Now, such is the similarity between Welsh enw, ‘name,’ and enaid, ‘soul,’ that I cannot help referring the two words to one and the same origin, especially when I see the same or rather greater similarity illustrated by the Irish words, ainm, ‘name,’ and anim, ‘soul.’ This similarity between the Irish words so pervades the declension of them, that a beginner frequently falls into the error of confounding them in medieval texts. Take, for instance, the genitive singular, anma, which may mean either animæ or nominis; the nominative plural, anmand, which may be either animæ or nomina; and the gen. anmand, either animarum or nominum, as the dative anmannaib may likewise be either animabus or nominibus. In fact, one is at first sight almost tempted to suppose that the partial differentiation of the Irish forms was only brought about under the influence of Latin, with its distinct forms of anima and nomen. That would be pressing the point too far; but the direct teaching of the Celtic vocables is that they are all to be referred to the same origin in the Aryan word for ‘breath or breathing,’ which is represented by such words as Latin anima, Welsh anadl, ‘breath,’ and a Gothic anan, ‘blow or breathe,’ whence the compound preterite uz-on, twice used by Ulfilas in the fifteenth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel to render ἐξέπνευσε, ‘gave up the ghost.’
Now the lessons which the words here grouped together contain for the student of man is, that the Celts, and certain other widely separated Aryans, unless we should rather say the whole of the Aryan family, were once in the habit of closely associating both the soul and one’s name with the breath of life. The evidence is satisfactory so far as it goes; but let us go a little more into detail, and see as exactly as we can to what it commits us. Commencing at the beginning, we may set out with the axiom that breathing is a physical action, and that in the temperate zone one’s breath is not unfrequently visible. Then one may say that the men who made the words—Welsh, enaid (for an earlier anatio-s), ‘soul’; Irish, anim (from an earlier stem, animon); Latin, anima, also animus, ‘feeling, mind, soul’; and Greek, ἄνεμος, ‘air, wind’—must have in some way likened the soul to one’s breath, which perhaps first suggested the idea. At all events they showed not only that they did not contemplate the soul as a bone, or any solid portion of a man’s frame, or even as a manikin residing inside it: in fact they had made a great advance in the direction of the abstract notion of a spirit, in which some of them may have been helped by another association of ideas, namely, that indicated by speaking of the dead as shades or shadows, umbræ, σκιαί. Similarly, the words in point for ‘name’ seem to prove that some of the ancient Aryans must have, in some way, associated one’s name with the breath of life. On the other hand, we find nothing to show that the name and the soul were directly compared or associated with one another, while the association of the name with the breath represents, probably, a process as much earlier as it is cruder, than likening the soul to the breath and naming it accordingly. This is countenanced to some extent by the general physiognomy, so to say, of words like enaid, anima, as contrasted with enw, ainm, nomen, name. Speaking relatively, the former might be of almost any date in point of comparative lateness, while the latter could not, belonging as they do to a small declension which was not wont to receive accessions to its numbers.
Perhaps the reader will not regard it as wholly irrelevant if here I change the subject for a while from one’s name to other words and locutions in so far as they may be regarded as illustrative of the mental surroundings in which the last paragraph leaves the name. I allude especially to the exaggerated influence associated with a form of words, more particularly among the Irish Celts. O’Curry gives a tragic instance: the poet Néde mac Adnai, in order to obtain possession of the throne of Connaught, asked an impossible request of the king, who was his own father’s brother and named Caier. When the king declared his inability to accede to his demand the poet made the refusal his excuse for composing on the king what was called in Irish an áir or áer, written later aor, ‘satire,’ which ran approximately thus:—
Evil, death, short life to Caier!
May spears of battle wound Caier!
Caier quenched, Caier forced, Caier underground!
Under ramparts, under stones with Caier!
‘To both the hurtful and curative effects of the emotions M. Féré devotes much attention, and on these points makes some interesting remarks. That the emotions act on the body, more by their effects on the circulation than by anything else, is no new thesis, but M. Féré is developing some new branches of it. That the heart may be stopped for a few seconds, and that there may be localised flush and pallor of the skin, owing to almost any strong emotion, whether it be joy, anger, fear, or pain, is a matter of common observation; and that there may be many changes of nutrition due to vaso-motor disturbance is a point easy to establish. The skin is particularly easily affected; passion and pain may produce a sweat that is truly hemorrhagic (Parrot); and the scientific world is obliged to admit that in the stigmata of Louise Lateau the blood vessels were really broken, and not broken by anything else than an emotional state as cause. In a shipwreck Follain tells us that the pilot was covered in an hour with pustules from his fear; and the doctor sees many dermato-neuroses, such as nettle-rash, herpes, pemphigus, vitiligo, &c, from the choc moral.’
I can illustrate this from my own observation: when I was an undergraduate there was with me at college a Welsh undergraduate, who, when teased or annoyed by his friends, was well known to be subject to a sort of rash or minute pustules on his face: it would come on in the course of an hour or so. There is a well-known Welsh line on this subject of the face which is to the point:—
Ni chel gruđ gystuđ càlon.
The cheek hides not the heart’s affliction.
So a man who was insulted, or whose honour was assailed, might be said to be thereby put to the blush or to be otherwise injured in his face; and the Irish word enech, ‘face,’ is found commonly used as a synonym for one’s honour or good name. The same appears to have been the case with the Welsh equivalent, wyneb, ‘face,’ and dyn di-wyneb, literally ‘a faceless man,’ appears to be now used in Carnarvonshire and Glamorgan in the sense of one who is without a sense of honour, an unprincipled fellow. So when Welsh law dealt with insults and attacks on one’s honour the payment to be made to the injured person was called gwynebwerth, ‘the price of one’s face,’ or gwynebwarth, ‘the payment for disgracing one’s face.’ Irish law arranged for similar damages, and called them by analogous names, such as enech-gris, ‘a fine for injuring or raising a blush on the face,’ and enech-lóg or enech-lann, ‘honour price’; compare also enech-ruice, ‘a face-reddening or blushing caused by some act or scandal which brought shame on a family.’ Possibly one has to do with traces of somewhat the same type of ‘face,’ though it has faded away to the verge of vanishing, when one speaks in English of keeping another in countenance.
It has been suggested that if a magician got a man’s name he could injure him by means of his arts: now the converse seems to have been the case with the Irish áer or satire, for to be effective it had, as in the instance of Caier, to mention the victim’s name; and a curious instance occurs in the Book of Leinster, fo. 117, where the poet Atherne failed to curse a person whose name he could not manipulate according to the rules of his satire. This man Atherne is described as inhospitable, stingy, and greedy to the last degree. So it is related how he sallied forth one day, taking with him a cooked pig and a pot of mead, to a place where he intended to gorge himself without being observed. But no sooner had he settled down to his meal than he saw a man approaching, who remarked to him on his operating on the food all alone, and unceremoniously picked up the porker and the pot of mead. As he was coolly walking away with them, Atherne cried out after him, ‘What is thy name?’ The stranger replied that it was nothing very grand, and gave it as follows:—
Sethor . ethor . othor . sele . dele . dreng gerce
Mec gerlusce . ger ger . dír dír issed moainmse.
Sethor-Ethor-Othor-Sele-Dele-Dreng gerce
Son of Gerlusce ger-ger-dír-dír, that is my name.
The story goes on to say that Atherne neither saw his meal any more nor succeeded in making a satire on the name of the stranger, who accordingly got away unscathed. It was surmised, we are told, that he was an angel come from God to teach the poet better manners. This comic story brings us back to the importance of the name, as it implies that the cursing poet, had he been able to seize it and duly work it into his satire, could not have failed to bring about the intruder’s discomfiture. The magician and folklore philosopher, far from asking with Juliet, ‘What’s in a name?’ would have rather put it the other way, ‘What’s not in a name?’ At any rate the ancients believed that there was a great deal in a name, and traces of the importance which they gave it are to be found in modern speech: witness the article on name or its equivalent in a big dictionary of any language possessed of a great literature.