I.

MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.

“Unchecked by external truth, the mind of man has a fatal facility for ensnaring, entrapping, and entangling itself. But, happily, happily for the human race, some fragment of physical speculation has been built into every false system. Here is the weak point. Its inevitable destruction leaves a breach in the whole fabric, and through that breach the armies of truth march in.”

Sir H. S. Maine.

MYTH: ITS BIRTH AND GROWTH.

§ I.

ITS PRIMITIVE MEANING.

It is barely thirty years ago since the world was startled by the publication of Buckle’s History of Civilisation, with its theory that human actions are the effect of causes as fixed and regular as those which operate in the universe; climate, soil, food, and scenery being the chief conditions determining progress.

That book was a tour de force, not a lasting contribution to the question of man’s mental development. The publication of Darwin’s epoch-making Origin of Species[1] showed wherein it fell short; how the importance of the above-named causes was exaggerated and the existence of equally potent causes overlooked. Buckle probably had not read Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics, and he knew nothing of the profound revolution in silent preparation in the quiet of Darwin’s home; otherwise, his book must have been rewritten. This would have averted the oblivion from which not even its charm of style can rescue it. Its brilliant but defective theories are obscured in the fuller light of that doctrine of descent with modifications by which we learn that external circumstances do not alone account for the widely divergent types of men, so that a superior race, in supplanting an inferior one, will change the face and destiny of a country, “making the solitary place to be glad, and the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose.” Darwin has given us the clue to those subtle and still obscure causes which bring about, stage by stage, the unseen adaptations to requirements varying a type and securing its survival, and which have resulted in the evolution of the manifold species of living things. The notion of a constant relation between man and his surroundings is therefore untenable.

But incomplete as is Buckle’s theory, and all-embracing as is Darwin’s, so far as organic life is concerned, the larger issue is raised by both, and for most men whose judgment is worth anything it is settled. Either man is a part of nature or he is not. If he is not, there is an end of the matter, since the materials lie beyond human grasp, and cannot be examined and placed in order for comparative study. Let Christian, Brahman, Bushman, and South Sea Islander each hold fast his “form of sound words” about man’s origin. One is as good as another where all are irrational and beyond proof. But if he is, then the inquiry concerning him may not stop at the anatomy of his body and the assignment of his place in the succession of life on the globe. His relation, materially, to the simplest, shapeless specks of living matter; structurally, to the highest and more complex organisms, is demonstrated; the natural history of him is clear. This, however, is physical, and for us the larger question is psychical. The theory of evolution must embrace the genesis and development of mind, and therefore of ideas, beliefs, and speculations about things seen and unseen.

In the correction of our old definitions a wider meaning must be given to the word myth than that commonly found in the dictionaries. Opening any of these at random we find myth explained as fable, as something designedly fictitious, whether for amusement only, or to point a moral. The larger meaning which it holds to-day includes much more than this—to wit, the whole area of intellectual products which lie beyond the historic horizon and overlap it, effacing on nearer view the lines of separation. For the myth, as fable only, has no place for the crude fancies and grotesque imaginings of barbarous races of the present day, and of races at low levels of culture in the remote past. And so long as it was looked upon as the vagrant of fancy, with no serious meaning at the heart of it, and as corresponding to no yearning of man after the truth of things, sober treatment of it was impossible. But now that myth, with its prolific offspring, legend and tradition, is seen to be a necessary travailing through which the mind of man passed in its slow progress towards certitude, the study and comparison of its manifold, yet, at the centre, allied forms, and of the conditions out of which they arose, takes rank among the serious inquiries of our time.

Not that the inquiry is a new one. The limits of this book forbid detailed references to the successive stages of that inquiry—in other words, to the pre-Christian, patristic, and pseudo-scientific theories of myth which remained unchallenged, or varied only in non-essential features, till the rise of comparative mythology. But apology for such omission here is the less needful, since the list of ancient and modern vagaries would have the monotony of a catalogue. However unlike on the surface, they are fundamentally the same, being the products of non-critical ages, and one and all vitiated by assumptions concerning gods and men which are to us as “old wives’ fables.”

In short, between these empirical theories and the scientific method of inquiry into the meaning of myth there can be no relation. Because, for the assigning of its due place in the order of man’s mental and spiritual development to myth, there is needed that knowledge concerning his origin, concerning the conditions out of which he has emerged, and concerning the mythologies of lower races and their survival in unsuspected forms in the higher races, which was not only beyond reach, but also beyond conception, until this century.

Except, therefore, as curiosities of literature, we may dismiss the Lemprière of our school-days, and with him “Causabon”-Bryant and his symbolism of the ark and traces of the Flood in everything. Their keys, Arkite and Ophite, fit no lock, and with them we must, in all respect be it added, dismiss Mr. Gladstone, with his visions of the Messiah in Apollo, and of the Logos in Athênê.

The main design of this book is to show that in what is for convenience called myth lie the germs of philosophy, theology, and science, the beginnings of all knowledge that man has attained or ever will attain, and therefore that in myth we have his serious endeavour to interpret the meaning of his surroundings and of his own actions and feelings. In its unbroken sequence we have the explanation of his most cherished and now, for the most part, discredited beliefs, the persistence of which makes it essential and instructive not to deal with the primitive myth apart from its later and more complex phases. Myth was the product of man’s emotion and imagination, acted upon by his surroundings, and it carries the traces of its origin in its more developed forms, as the ancestral history of the higher organisms is embodied in their embryos. Man wondered before he reasoned. Awe and fear are quick to express themselves in rudimentary worship; hence the myth was at the outset a theology, and the gradations from personifying to deifying are too faint to be traced. Thus blended, the one as inevitable outcome of the other, they cannot well be treated separately, as if the myth were earth-born and the theology heaven-sent. And to treat them as one is to invade no province of religion, which is quite other than speculation about gods. The awe and reverence which the fathomless mystery of the universe awakens, which steal within us unbidden as the morning light, and unbroken on the prism of analysis; the conviction, deepening as we peer, that there is a Power beyond humanity, and upon which humanity depends; the feeling that life is in harmony with the Divine order when it moves in disinterested service of our kind—these theology can neither create nor destroy, neither verify nor disprove. They can be bound within no formula that man or church has invented, but undefined

At what epoch in man’s history we are to place the development of the myth-making faculty must remain undetermined. It is of course coincident with the dawn of thought. We cannot credit the nameless savage of the Ancient Stone Age with it. If he had brains and leisure enough to make guesses about things, he has left us no witness of the fact. His relics, and those of his successors to a period which is but as yesterday in the history of our kind, are material only; and not until we possess the symbols of his thought, whether in language or rude picture, do we get an inkling of the meaning which the universe had for him, in the details of his pitiless daily life, in the shapes and motions of surrounding objects, and in the majesty of the heavens above him. Even then the thought is more or less crystallised, and if we would watch it in the fluent form we must have a keen eye for the like process going on among savages yet untouched by the Time-spirit, although higher in the scale than the Papuans and hill tribes of the Vindhya. Although we cannot so far lull our faculty of thought as to realise the mental vacuity of the savage, we may, from survivals nowadays, lead up to reasonable guesses of savage ways of looking at things in bygone ages, and the more so when we can detect relics of these among the ignorant and superstitious of modern times.

What meaning, then, had man’s surroundings to him, when eye and ear could be diverted from prior claims of the body, and he could repose from watching for his prey, and from listening to the approach of wild beast or enemy? He had the advantage, from greater demand for their exercise, in keener senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, than we enjoy; nor did he fail to take in facts in plenty. But there was this vital defect and difference, that in his brains every fact was pigeon-holed, charged with its own narrow meaning only, as in small minds among ourselves we find place given to inane peddling details, and no advance made to general and wide conception of things. In sharpest contrast to the poet’s utterance:

every fact is unrelated to every other fact, and therefore interpreted wrongly.

Man, in his first outlook upon nature, was altogether ignorant of the character of the forces by which he was environed; ignorant of that unvarying relation between effect and cause which it needed the experience of ages and the generalisations therefrom to apprehend, and to express as “laws of nature.” He had not even the intellectual resource of later times in inventing miracle to explain where the necessary relation between events seemed broken or absent.

His first attitude was that of wonder, mingled with fear—fear as instinctive as the dread of the brute for him. The sole measure of things was himself, consequently everything that moved or that had power of movement did so because it was alive. A personal life and will was attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall, ocean, and tree, and the varying phenomena of the sky at dawn or noonday, at gray eve or black-clouded night, were the manifestation of the controlling life that dwelt in all. In a thousand different forms this conception was expressed. The thunder was the roar of a mighty beast; the lightning a serpent darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, the storm demon’s outshot forked tongue; the rainbow a thirsty monster; the waterspout a long-tailed dragon. This was not a pretty or powerful conceit, not imagery, but an explanation. The men who thus spoke of these phenomena meant precisely what they said. What does the savage know about heat, light, sound, electricity, and the other modes of motion through which the Proteus-force beyond our ken is manifest? How many persons who have enjoyed a “liberal” education can give correct answers, if asked off-hand, explaining how glaciers are born of the sunshine, and why two sounds, travelling in opposite directions at equal velocities, interfere and cause silence? The percentage of young men, hailing from schools of renown, who give the most ludicrous replies when asked the cause of day and night, and the distance of the earth from the sun, is by no means small.

Whilst the primary causes determining the production of myths are uniform, the secondary causes, due in the main to different physical surroundings, vary, bringing about unlikeness in subject and detail. Nevertheless, in grouping the several classes of myths, those are obviously to be placed prominently which embrace explanations of the origin of things, from sun and star to man and insect, involving ideas about the powers to whom all things are attributed. But in this book no exhaustive treatment is possible, only some indication of the general lines along which the myth-making faculty has advanced, and for this purpose a few illustrations of barbaric mental confusion between the living and the not living are chosen at the outset. They will, moreover, prepare us for the large element of the irrational present in barbaric myth, and supply a key to the survival of this in the mythologies of civilised races.

§ II.

CONFUSION OF EARLY THOUGHT BETWEEN THE LIVING AND THE NOT LIVING.

In selecting from the literature of savage mythology the material overburdens us by its richness. Much of it is old, and, like refuse-heaps in our mining districts once cast aside as rubbish but now made to yield products of value, has, after long neglect, been found to contain elements of worth, which patience and insight have extracted from its travellers’ tales and quaint speculations. That for which it was most prized in the days of our fathers is now of small account; that within it which they passed by we secure as of lasting worth. Much of that literature is, however, new, for the impetus which has in our time been given to the rescue and preservation of archaic forms has reached this, and a host of accomplished collectors have secured rich specimens of relics which, in the lands of their discovery, have still the authority of the past, unimpaired by the critical exposure of the present.

The subject itself is, moreover, so wide reaching, bringing the ancient and the modern into hitherto unsuspected relation, showing how in customs and beliefs, to us unmeaning and irrational, there lurk the degraded representations of old philosophies, and in what seems to us burlesque, the survivals of man’s most serious thought.

One feels this difficulty of choice and this temptation to digress in treating of the confusion inherent in the savage mind between things living and not living, arising from superficial analogies and its attribution of life and power to lifeless things. The North American Indians prefer a hook that has caught a big fish to the handful of hooks that have never been tried, and they never lay two nets together lest they should be jealous of each other. The Bushmen thought that the traveller Chapman’s big waggon was the mother of his smaller ones; and the natives of Tahiti sowed in the ground some iron nails given them by Captain Cook, expecting to obtain young ones. When that ill-fated discoverer’s ship was sighted by the New Zealanders they thought it was a whale with wings. The king of the Coussa Kaffirs having broken off a piece of the anchor of a stranded ship soon afterwards died, upon which all the Kaffirs made a point of saluting the anchor very respectfully whenever they went near it, regarding it as a vindictive being. But perhaps one of the most striking and amusing illustrations is that quoted by Sir John Lubbock from the Smithsonian Reports concerning an Indian who had been sent by a missionary to a colleague with four loaves of bread, accompanied by a letter stating their number. The Indian ate some of the bread, and his theft was, of course, found out. He was sent on a second errand with a similar batch of bread and a letter, and repeated the theft, but took the precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was eating the loaves, so that it might not see him! As the individual is a type of the race, so in the child’s nature we find analogy of the mental attitude of the savage ready to hand. To the child everything is alive. With what timidity and wonder he first touches a watch, with its moving hands and clicking works; with what genuine anger he beats the door against which he has knocked his head, whips the rocking-horse that has thrown him, then kisses and strokes it the next moment in token of forgiveness and affection.

Even among civilised adults, as Mr. Grote remarks, “the force of momentary passion will often suffice to supersede the acquired habit, and an intelligent man may be impelled in a moment of agonising pain to kick or beat the lifeless object from which he has suffered.” The mental condition which causes the wild native of Brazil to bite the stone he stumbled over may, as Dr. Tylor has pointed out in his invaluable Primitive Culture, be traced along the course of history not merely in impulsive habit, but in formally enacted law. If among barbarous peoples we find, for example, the relatives of a man killed by a fall from a tree taking their revenge by cutting the tree down and scattering it in chips, we find a continuity of idea in the action of the court of justice held at the Prytaneum in Athens to try any inanimate object, such as an axe, or a piece of wood or stone, which has caused the death of any one without proved human agency, and which, if condemned, was cast in solemn form beyond the border. “The spirit of this remarkable procedure reappears in the old English law, repealed only in the present reign, whereby not only a beast that kills a man, but a cart-wheel that runs over him, or a tree that falls on him and kills him, is deodand or given to God, i.e. forfeited and sold for the poor.” Among ancient legal proceedings at Laon we read of animals condemned to the gallows for the crime of murder, and of swarms of caterpillars which infected certain districts being admonished by the Courts of Troyes in 1516 to take themselves off within a given number of days, on pain of being declared accursed and excommunicated.[3]

Barbaric confusion in the existence of transferable qualities in things, as when the New Zealander swallows his dead enemy’s eye that he may see farther, or gives his child pebbles to make it stony and pitiless of heart; and as when the Abipone eats tiger’s flesh to increase his courage, has its survival in the old wives’ notion that the eye-bright flower, which resembles the eye, is good for diseases of that organ, in the mediæval remedy for curing a sword wound by nursing the weapon that caused it, and in the old adage, “Take a hair of the dog that bit you.” As illustrating this, Dr. Dennys[4] tells a story of a missionary in China whose big dog would now and again slightly bite children as he passed through the villages. In such a case the mother would run after him and beg for a hair from the dog’s tail, which would be put to the part bitten, or when the missionary would say jocosely, “Oh! take a hair from the dog yourself,” the woman would decline, and ask him to spit in her hand, which itself witnesses to the widespread belief in the mystical properties of saliva.[5] Among ourselves this survives, degraded enough, in the cabmen’s and boatmen’s habit of spitting on the fare paid them. Treacle (Greek thēriake, from thērion, a name given to the viper) witnesses to the old-world superstition that viper’s flesh is an antidote to the viper’s bite. Philips, in his World of Words, defines treacle as a “physical compound made of vipers and other ingredients,” and this medicament was a favourite against all poisons. The word then became applied to any confection or sweet syrup, and finally and solely to the syrup of molasses.

The practice of burning or hanging in effigy, by which a crowd expresses its feelings towards an unpopular person, is a relic of the old belief in a real and sympathetic connection between a man and his image; a belief extant among the unlettered in by-places of civilised countries. When we hear of North American tribes making images of their foes, whose lives they expect to shorten by piercing those images with their arrows, we remember that these barbarous folk have their representatives among us in the Devonshire peasant, who hangs in his chimney a pig’s heart stuck all over with thorn-prickles, so that the heart of his enemy may likewise be pierced. The custom among the Dyaks of Borneo of making a wax figure of the foe, so that his body may waste away as the wax is melted, will remind the admirers of Dante Rossetti how he finds in a kindred mediæval superstition the subject of his poem “Sister Helen,” while they who prefer the authority of sober prose may turn to that storehouse of the curious, Brand’s Popular Antiquities. Brand quotes from King James, who, in his Dæmonology, book ii. chap. 5, tells us that “the devil teacheth how to make pictures of wax or clay, that by roasting thereof the persons that they bear the name of may be continually melted or dried away by continual sickness;” and also cites Andrews, the author of a Continuation of Henry’s Great Britain, who, speaking of the death of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby, by poison, in the reign of Elizabeth, says, “The credulity of the age attributed his death to witchcraft. The disease was odd, and operated as a perpetual emetic; and a waxen image, with hair like that of the unfortunate earl, found in his chamber, reduced every suspicion to certainty.” A century and half before this the Duchess of Gloucester did penance for conspiring with certain necromancers against the life of Henry VI. by melting a waxen image of him, while, as hinging the centuries together, “only recently a corp cré, or clay image, stuck full of birds’ claws, bones, pins, and similar objects, was found in one of the Inverness-shire rivers. It was a fetish which, as it dissolved away by the action of the stream, was supposed to involve the ‘wearing away’ of the person it was intended to represent.”[6] The passage from practices born of such beliefs to the use of charms as protectives against the evil-disposed and those in league with the devil, and as cures for divers diseases, is obvious. Upon this it is not needful to dwell; the superstitious man is on the same plane as the savage, but, save in rare instances, without such excuse for remaining, as Bishop Hall puts it, with “old wives and starres as his counsellors, charms as his physicians, and a little hallowed wax as his antidote for all evils.”

But we have travelled in brief space a long way from our picture of man, weaving out of streams and breezes and the sunshine his crude philosophy of personal life and will controlling all, to the peasant of to-day, his intellectual lineal descendant, with his belief in signs and wonders, his forecast of fate and future by omens, by dreams, and by such pregnant occurrences as the spilling of salt, the howling of dogs, and changes of the moon; in short, by the great mass of superstitions which yet more or less influence the intelligent, terrorise the ignorant, and delight the student of human development.

§ III.

PERSONIFICATION OF THE POWERS OF NATURE.

(a.) The Sun and Moon.

A good deal hinges upon the evidences in savage myth-making of the personification of the powers of nature. Obviously, the richest and most suggestive material would be supplied by the striking phenomena of the heavens, chiefly in sunrise and sunset, in moon, star, star-group and meteor, cloud and storm, and, next in importance, by the strange and terrible among phenomena on earth, whether in the restless waters, the unquiet trees, the grotesquely-shaped rocks, and the fear inspired in man by creatures more powerful than himself. Through the whole range of the lower culture, sun, moon, and constellations are spoken of as living creatures, often as ancestors, heroes, and benefactors who have departed to the country above, to heaven, the heaved, up-lifted land. The Tongans of the South Pacific say that two ancestors quarrelled respecting the parentage of the first-born of the woman Papa, each claiming the child as his own. No King Solomon appears to have been concerned in the dispute, although at last the infant was cut in two. Vatea, the husband of Papa, took the upper part as his share, and forthwith squeezed it into a ball and tossed it into the heavens, where it became the sun. Tonga-iti sullenly allowed the lower half to remain a day or two on the ground, but, seeing the brightness of Vatea’s half, he compressed his share into a ball and tossed it into the dark sky, during the absence of the sun in the nether world. Thus originated the moon, whose paleness is owing to the blood having all drained out of Tonga-iti’s half as it lay upon the ground. Mr. Gill, from whose valuable collection of southern myth this is quoted, says that it seems to have its origin in the allegory of an alternating embrace of the fair Earth by Day and Night. But despite the explanations, more or less strained, which some schools of comparative mythologists find for every myth, the savage is not a conscious weaver of allegories, or an embryo Cabalist, and we shall find ourselves more in accord with the laws of his intellectual growth if, instead of delving for recondite and subtle meanings in his simple-sounding explanations of things, we take the meaning to be that which lies on the surface. More on this, however, anon. Among the Red races one tribe thought that sun, moon, and stars were men and women who went into the sea every night and swam out by the east. The Bushmen say that the sun was once a man who shed light from his body, but only for a short distance, until some children threw him into the sky while he slept, and thus he shines upon the wide earth. The Australians say that all was darkness around them till one of their many ancestors, who still shine from the stars, shedding good and evil, threw, in pity for them, an emu’s egg into space, when it became the sun. Among the Manacicas of Brazil, the sun was their culture-hero, virgin-born, and their jugglers, who claimed power to fly through the air, said that his luminous figure, as that of a man, could be seen by them, although too dazzling for common mortals.

The sun has been stayed in his course in other places than Gibeon, although by mechanical means of which Joshua appears to have been independent. Among the many exploits of Maui, abounding in Polynesian myth, are those of his capture of the sun. He had, like Prometheus, snatched fire from heaven for mortals, and his next task was to cure Ra, the sun-god, of his trick of setting before the day’s work was done. So Maui plaited thick ropes of cocoa-nut fibre, and taking them to the opening through which Ra climbed up from the nether world, he laid a slip-noose for him, placing the other ropes at intervals along his path. Lying in wait as Ra neared, he pulled the first rope, but the noose only caught Ra’s feet. Nor could Maui stop him until he reached the sixth rope, when he was caught round the neck and pulled so tightly by Maui that he had to come to terms, and agree to slacken his pace for the future. Maui, however, took the precaution to keep the ropes on him, and they may still be seen hanging from the sun at dawn and eve. In Tahitian myth Maui is a priest, who, in building a house which must be finished by daylight, seizes the sun by its rays and binds it to a tree till the house is built. In North American myth a boy had snared the sun, and there was no light on the earth. So the beasts held council who should undertake the perilous task of cutting the cord, when the dormouse, then the biggest among them, volunteered. And it succeeded, but so scorched was it by the heat that it was shrivelled to the smallest of creatures. Such a group of myths is not easy of explanation; but when we find the sun regarded as an ancestor, and as one bound, mill-horse like, to a certain course, the notion of his control and check would arise, and the sun-catchers take their place in tradition among those who have deserved well of their race. It is one among numberless aspects under which the doings of the sun and of other objects in nature are depicted as the doings of mortals, and the crude conceptions of the Ojibwas and the Samoans find their parallel in the mythologies of our Aryan ancestors. Only in the former we see the mighty one shorn of his dignity, with noose round his neck or chains on either side; whilst in the latter we see him as Herakles, with majesty unimpaired, carrying out the twelve tasks imposed by Eurystheus, and thus winning for himself a place among the immortals.

The names given to the sun in mythology are as manifold as his aspects and influences, and as the moods of the untutored minds that endowed him with the complex and contrary qualities which make up the nature of man. Him, we say, not it, thus preserving in our common speech a relic not only of the universal personification of things, but of their division into sex.

The origin of gender is most obscure, but its investment of both animate and inanimate things with sexual qualities shows it to be a product of the mythopœic stage of man’s progress, and demands some reference in these pages. The languages of savages are in a constant state of flux, even the most abiding terms, as numerals and personal pronouns, being replaced by others in a few years. And the changes undergone by civilised speech have so rubbed away and obscured its primitive forms that, look where he may, the poverty of the old materials embarrasses the inquirer. If the similar endings to such undoubtedly early words as father, mother, brother, sister, in our own and other related languages, notably Sanskrit, afford any clue, it goes rather to show that gender was a later feature than one might think. But there is no uniformity in the matter. It seems pretty clear that in the early forms of our Indo-European speech there were two genders only, masculine and feminine. The assignment of certain things conceived of as sexless to neither gender, neutrius generis, is of later origin. Some of the languages derived from Latin, and, to name one of a different family, the Hebrew, have no neuter gender, whilst others, as the ancient Turkish and Finnish, have no grammatical gender. In our own, under the organic changes incident to its absorption of Norman and other foreign elements, gender has practically disappeared (although ships and nations are still spoken of as feminine), the pronouns he, she, it, being its representatives. Such a gain is apparent when we take up the study of the ancestral Anglo-Saxon, with its masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, or of our allied German with its perplexities of sex, as, e.g., its masculine spoon, its feminine fork, and its neuter knife. Turning for a moment to such slight aid as barbaric speech gives, we find in the languages of the hill tribes of South India a curious distinction made; rational beings, as gods and men, being grouped in a “high-caste or major gender,” and living animals and lifeless things in a “casteless or minor gender.” The languages of some North American and South African tribes make a distinction into animate and inanimate gender; but as non-living things, the sun, the thunder, the lightning, are regarded as persons, they are classed in the animate gender.

Further research into the radicals of so relatively fixed a language as Chinese, and into more mobile languages related to it, may, perhaps, enlighten the present ignorance; but one thing is certain, that language was “once the scene of an immense personification,” and has thereby added vitality to myth. Analogies and conceptions apparent to barbaric man, and in no way occurring to us, caused him to attribute sexual qualities not only to dead as to living things, but to their several parts, as well as, in the course of time, to intellectual and abstract terms. Speaking broadly, things in which were manifest size and qualities, as strength, independence, governing or controlling power, usually attaching to the male, were classed as masculine; whilst those in which the gentler and more subordinate features were apparent were classed as feminine. Of course marked exceptions to this will at once occur to us, as, e.g., in certain savage and civilised languages, where the sun is feminine and the moon is masculine, but in the main the division holds good. The big is male and the small is female. The Dyaks of Borneo call a heavy downpour of rain a he rain; and, if so strength-imparting a thing as bread is to be classed as either masculine or feminine, we must agree with the negro who, in answer to his master’s question, “Sambo, where’s the bread?” replied, “De bread, massa? him lib in de pantry.” The mediæval Persians are said to have distinguished between male and female even in such things as food and cloth, air and water, and prescribed their proper use accordingly; while, as Dr. Tylor, from whom the above is quoted, adds, “even we, with our blunted mythologic sense, cannot give an individual name to a lifeless object, such as a boat or a weapon, without in the very act imagining for it something of a personal nature.”

But we must not stay longer in these attractive byways of philology, however warranted the digression may be, and must return to the many-titled sun.

Whilst in the more elaborate mythologies of classic peoples we find him addressed in exalted terms which are still the metaphors of poetry, we are nearer the rough material out of which all myth is shaped when among races who speak of sun, moon, and stars as father, mother, and children, and who mean exactly what they say. We may find similar relationships in the solar and lunar deities of Egyptian and classic myth, but profound moral elements have entered into these and dissolved the material. We are face to face with the awful and abiding questions personified in Osiris and Isis, in Œdipus and Jocaste, where for us the sunlight pales and the storm clouds are dispersed before the dazzling mysteries of human life and destiny.

No such matters confront us when in Indian myth we read that the moon is the sun’s sister, an aged, pale-faced woman, who in kindness led to her brother two of the tribe who had sprung through a chasm in the sky to the pleasant moonlit land. Neither do they in Australian myth, which shows that the dwellers on Olympus had no monopoly of conjugal faithlessness. For in it Mityan, the moon, is a native cat, who fell in love with somebody else’s wife, and has been driven to wander ever since. Among the Bushmen, the moon has incurred the sun’s anger, and is hacked smaller and smaller by him, till, begging for mercy, a respite is given. But as soon as he grows larger the sun hacks him again. In Slavonic myth the sun cleaves him through for loving the morning star. The Indians of the far west say that, when the moon is full, evil spirits begin nibbling at it, and eat a portion every night till it is all gone; then a great spirit makes a new moon, and, weary with his toil, falls asleep, when the bad spirits renew their attack. Another not uncommon group of myths is that which speaks of sun and moon as borne across the heavens on the backs of ancestors, as in Greek myth Atlas supports the world, or as in ceaseless flight, dogged by some pursuer, moon-dog, or “sun-wolf,” as parhelion is called in Swedish. The group of kindred myths to which eclipses gave rise, when the cloud-dragon or serpent tries to swallow sun or moon, and for a time succeeds, is too well known to need other than passing reference here.

A widespread body of myth has its source in the patches on the moon’s face. In the Samoan Islands these are said to be a woman, a child, and a mallet. A woman was once hammering out paper-cloth, and seeing the moon rise, looking like a great bread-fruit, she asked it to come down and let her child eat a piece of it. But the moon was very angry at the idea of being eaten, and gobbled up the woman, child, and mallet, and there they are to this day. The Selish Indians of North-Western America say that the little wolf was in love with the toad, and pursued her one moonlight night, till, as a last chance, she made a desperate spring on to the face of the moon, and there she is still. People in the East see the figure of a hare in the patches, and both in Buddhist Jâtakas and Mongolian myth that animal is carried by the moon. In Greenland myth the moon was in love with his sister, and stole in the dark to caress her. She, wishing to find out who her lover was, blackened her hands so that the marks might be left on him, which accounts for the spots. The Khasias of the Himâlaya say that the moon falls in love every month with his mother-in-law, who, like a well-conducted matron, throws ashes in his face. Grimm quotes a mediæval myth that the moon is Mary Magdalene, and the spots her tears of repentance, whilst in Chaucer’s Testament of Cressida the moon is Lady Cynthia.—

Comparing these with more familiar myths, we have our own man in the moon, who is said to be the culprit found by Moses gathering sticks on the Sabbath, although his place of banishment is a popular addition to the Scripture narrative. According to the German legend he was a scoffer who did the same heinous offence on a Sunday, and was given the alternative of being scorched in the sun or frozen in the moon. The Frisians say that he stole cabbages, the load of which he bears on his back. He does not appear as a member of the criminal classes in China, his function being that of celestial matchmaker, who ties together future couples with an invisible silken cord which breaks not during life. In Icelandic myth the two children familiar to us as Jack and Jill were kidnapped by the moon, and there they stand to this day with bucket on pole across their shoulders, falling away one after the other as the moon wanes,—a phase described in the couplet:—

Mr. Baring Gould, whose essay on this subject in his Curious Myths of the Middle Ages gives a convenient summary of current legends, contends that Jack and Jill are the Hjuki and Bil of the Edda, and signify the waxing and waning of the moon, their bucket indicating the dependence of rainfall on her phases—a superstition extant among us yet.

The group of customs observed amongst both barbaric and civilised peoples at the changes of the moon, customs which are meaningless except as relics of lunar worship, belong to the passage of mythology into religion, of personifying into deifying.

(b.) The Stars.

In the great body of nature-myth the stars are prominent members. In their multitude; their sublime repose in upper calms above the turmoil of the elements; their varying brilliancy, “one star differing from another star in glory”; their tremulous light; their scattered positions, which lend themselves to every vagary of the constellation-maker; their slow procession, varied only by sweeping comet and meteor, or falling showers of shooting stars; they lead the imagination into gentler ways than do the vaster bodies of the most ancient heavens. Nor, although we may compute their number, weigh their volume, in a few instances reckon their distance, and, capturing the light that has come beating through space for unnumbered years, make it reveal the secret of their structure, is the imagination less moved by the clear heavens at night, or the feeling of awe and reverence blunted before that “mighty sum of things for ever speaking.”

In barbaric myth the stars are spoken of as young suns, the children of the sun and moon, but more often as men who have lived on the earth, translated without seeing death. The single stars are individual chiefs or heroes; the constellations are groups of men or animals. To the natives of Australia the brilliant Jupiter is a chief among the others; and the stars in Orion’s belt and scabbard are young men dancing a corroboree, the Pleiades being girls playing to them. The Kasirs of Bengal say that the stars are men who climbed to the top of a tree, and were left in the branches by the trunk being cut away. To the Eskimos the stars in Orion are seal-hunters who have missed their way home. And in German folk-lore they are spoken of as the mowers, because, as Grimm says, “they stand in a row like mowers in a meadow.” In North American myth two of the bright stars are twins who have left a home where they were harshly treated, and leapt into the sky, whither their parents followed them and ceaselessly chase them. In Greek myth the faintest star of the seven Pleiades is Merope, whose light was dimmed because she alone among her sisters married a mortal. The New Zealanders say that those stars are seven chiefs who fell in battle, and of whom only one eye of each is now visible. In Norse myth Odin having slain a giant, plucks out his eyes and flings them up to the sky, where they become two stars. In German star-lore the small star just above the middle one in the shaft of Charles’s Wain, is a waggoner who, having given our Saviour a lift, was offered the kingdom of heaven for his reward, but who said he would sooner be driving from east to west to all eternity, and whose desire was granted—a curious contrast to the wandering Jew, cursed to move unresting over the earth until the day of judgment, because he refused to let Jesus, weary with the weight of the cross, rest for a moment on his doorstep. The Housatonic Indians say that the stars in Charles’s Wain are men hunting a bear, and that the chase lasts from spring to autumn, when the bear is wounded and its dripping blood turns the leaves of the trees red. With this may be cited the myth that the red clouds at morn and eve are the blood of the slain in battle. In the Northern Lights the Greenlanders see the spirits of the departed dancing, the brighter the flashes of the Aurora the greater the merriment, whilst the Dacotas say of the meteors that they are spirits flying through the air.

Of the Milky Way—so called because Hêrê, indignant at the bantling Herakles being put to her breast, spilt her milk along the sky (the solar mythologers say that the “red cow of evening passes during the night across the sky scattering her milk”)—the Ottawas say that it was caused by a turtle swimming along the bottom of the sky and stirring up the mud. According to the Patagonians it is the track along which the departed tribesmen hunt ostriches, the clouds being their feathers; in African myth it is some wood-ashes long ago thrown up into the sky by a girl, that her people might be able to see their way home at night; in Eastern myth it is chaff dropped by a thief in his hurried flight.

The idea of a land beyond the sky—be it the happy hunting-ground of the Indian, or the Paradise of Islam, or the new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse—would not fail to arise, and in both the Milky Way and the Rainbow barbaric fancy sees the ladders and bridges whereby the departed pass from earth to heaven. So we find in the lower and higher culture alike the beautiful conceptions of the chemin des ames, the Red man’s road of the dead to their home in the sun; the ancient Roman path of, or to, the gods; the road of the birds, in both Lithuanian and Finnish myth, because the winged spirits flit thither to the free and happy land. In prosaic contrast to all this, it is curious to find among ourselves the Milky Way described as Watling Street! That famous road, which ran from Richborough through Canterbury and London to Chester, now gives its name to a narrow bustling street of Manchester warehousemen in the City. But who the Wætlingas were—whether giants, gods, or men—and why their name was transferred from Britain to the sky, we do not know,[7] although the fact is plainly enough set down in old writers, foremost among whom is Chaucer. In his House of Fame[8] he says:—

To the savage the rainbow is a living monster, a serpent seeking whom it may devour, coming to earth to slake its unquenchable thirst, and preying on the unwary. But in more poetic myth, its mighty many-coloured arch touching, as it seems to do, the earth itself, is a road to glory. In the Edda it is the three-coloured bridge Bifröst, “the quivering track” over which the gods walk, and of which the red is fire, so that the Frost-giants may not cross it. In Persian myth it is Chinvad, the “bridge of the gatherer,” flung across the gloomy depths between this world and the home of the blessed; in Islam it is El-Sirat, the bridge thin as a hair and sharp as a scimitar, stretching from this world to the next; among the Greeks it was Iris, the messenger from Zeus to men, charged with tidings of war and tempest; to the Finns it was the bow of Tiernes, the god of thunder; whilst to the Jew it was the messenger of grace from the Eternal, who did set “his bow in the clouds” as the promise that never again should the world be destroyed by flood. Such belief in the heavens as the field of activities profoundly affecting the fortunes of mankind, and in the stars as influencing their destinies, has been persistent in the human mind. The delusions of the astrologer are embalmed in language, as when, forgetful of a belief shared not only by sober theologians, but by Tycho Brahe and Kepler, we speak of “disaster,” and of our friends as “jovial,” “saturnine,” or “mercurial.” But the illusions of the savage or semi-civilised abide as an animating part of many a faith, undisturbed by a science which has swept the skies and found no angels there, and whose keen analysis separates for ever the ancient belief in a connection between the planets and man’s fate. For convenience’ sake, we retain on our celestial maps and globes the men and monsters pictured by barbaric fancy in the star-positions and clusters, noting these as interesting examples of survival. Yet we are the willing dupes of illusions nebulous as these, and, charm he never so wisely, the Time-spirit fails to disenchant us.

(c.) The Earth and Sky.

If the sun and moon are the parents of the stars, the heavens and the earth are the parents of all living things. Of this widely-found myth, one of the most striking specimens occurs among the Maoris. From Rangi, the heaven, and Papa, the earth, sprang all living things; but earth and sky clave together, and darkness rested on them and their children, who debated whether they should rend them asunder or slay them. Then Tane-mahuta, father of forests, reasoned that it was better to rend them, so that the heaven might become a stranger, and the earth remain as their nursing-mother. One after another they strove to do this, but in vain, until Tane-mahuta, with giant strength and strain, pressed down the earth and thrust upward the heaven. But one of his brothers, father of wind and storm, who had not agreed to this parting of his parents, followed Rangi into the sky, and thence sent forth his progeny, “the mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the clouds dense and dark, wildly drifting, wildly hunting,” himself rushing on his foe, snapping the huge trees that barred his path, and strewing their trunks and branches on the ground, while the sea was lashed into high-crested waves, and all the creatures therein affrighted. The fish darted hither and thither, but the reptiles fled into the forests, causing quarrel between Tangaroa, the ocean-god, and Tane-mahuta for giving them shelter. So the brothers fought, the ocean-god wrecking the canoes and sweeping houses and trees beneath the waters, and had not Papa hidden the gods of the tilled food and the wild within her bosom, they would have perished. Wars of revenge followed quickly one upon the other; the storm-god’s anger was not soon appeased; so that the devastation of the earth was well-nigh complete. But, at last, light arose and quiet ensued, and the dry land appeared. Rangi and Papa, parted for ever, quarrelled no more, but helped the one the other, and “man stood erect and unbroken on his mother Earth.”

The myth of Cronus will at once occur to the reader. Heaven (Uranus) and Earth (Gaea) were husband and wife, and their many children all hated their father for concealing them between the hollows of their mother’s breasts, so that they were shut out from light. Gaea sided with them and provided Cronus, the youngest, with an iron sickle wherewith he unmanned Uranus and separated him from Gaea. Cronus married his sister Rhea, and, at the advice of his parents, swallowed his children one by one as they were born, lest they grew up and usurped his place among the Immortals. But when Zeus was born, and Cronus asked for the child, Rhea deceived him by giving him a stone wrapped in swaddling bands. When Zeus grew up he gave his father an emetic, whereupon the children were all disgorged, and with them the stone, which became a sacred object at Delphi. There is no such being as Cronus in Sanskrit, but what may be called the Vedic variant of the myth is that in which Dyaus (Heaven) and Prithivî (Earth), were once joined and subsequently separated.

In China we find a legend of “a person called Puangku, who is said to have separated the heaven and the earth, they formerly being pressed down close together,” and, as one might expect, such a transparent nature-myth of the rending asunder of the world and sky is widespread.

The solar mythologists were perplexed at its presence among the refined and cultured Greeks. “How can we imagine that a few generations before the time of Solon the highest notions of the Godhead among the Greeks were adequately expressed by the story of Uranus maimed by Cronus, of Cronus eating his own children, swallowing a stone, and vomiting out alive his own progeny. Among the lowest tribes of Africa and America we hardly find anything more hideous and revolting.” So the moral character of the Greeks and the exclusive comparative method of Professor Max Müller and his adherents were vindicated by the discovery that as Cronus means time, the apparently repulsive myth simply means that time swallows up the days which spring from it; “and,” remarks Sir G. W. Cox in his Manual of Mythology, “the old phrase meant simply this and nothing more, although before the people came to Greece they had forgotten its meaning.”[9] Cronus is a more than usually troublesome crux to the etymologists.

Here, as elsewhere, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life;” and we may turn to the fundamental idea resident in the myth. The savage, in the presence of recurring light and darkness, of the clouds lifting and dispersing before the sunrise, has his legend of a time when this was not so, but when heaven and earth were closed-in one upon the other till some hero thrust them apart. And, to his rude intelligence, the conception of night as a devouring monster, might easily “start the notion of other swallowing and disgorging beings.” In brief, to quote Mr. Andrew Lang, “just as the New Zealander had conceived of heaven and earth as at one time united, to the prejudice of their children, so the ancestors of the Greeks had believed in an ancient union of heaven and earth. Both by Greeks and Maoris, heaven and earth were thought of as living persons, with human parts and passions. Their union was prejudicial to their children, and so the children violently separated their parents.”[10]

The beliefs of the ancient Finns, as described in the Kalevala, in the world as a divided egg, of which the white is the ocean, the yolk the sun, the arched shell the sky, and the darker portions the clouds; and of the Polynesians that the universe is the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, at the tapering bottom of which is the root of all things, are to us so grotesque that it is not easy to regard them as explanations seriously invented by the human mind. Yet these, together with the notions of the two halves of the shell of Brahma’s egg, and of the two calabashes which form the heaven and the earth in African myth, find their correspondences in the widespread conception of the over-arching firmament as a hard and solid thing,[11] with holes (or windows[12]) to let the rain through, with gates through which angels descend,[13] or through which prophets peer into celestial mysteries;[14] a firmament outside which other people live, as instanced by the Polynesian term for strangers, “papalangi,” or “heaven-bursters.” In Esthonian myth Ilmarine hammers steel into a vault which he strained like a tent over the earth, nailing thereon the silver stars and moon, and suspending the sun from the roof of the tent with machinery to lift it up and let it down. The like achievement is recorded of Ilmarinen in the Kalevala, the cosmogony of which corresponds to that of the Esthonian Kalevipöeg.

These are the less refined forms of myths which have held their ground from pre-scientific times till now, and the rude analogies of which are justified by the appearances of things as presented by the senses. Man’s intellectual history is the history of his escape from the illusions of the senses, it is the slow and often tardily accepted discovery that nature is quite other than that which it seems to be. And this variance between appearances and realities remained hidden until the intellect challenged the report about phenomena which the sense-perceptions brought. For in the ages when feeling was dominant, and the judgment scarce awakened, the simple explanations in venerable legends sung by bard or told by aged crone—legends to which age had given sanctity which finally placed them among the world’s sacred literatures—were received without doubt or question. But, as belief in causality spread, men were not content to rest in the naïve explanations of an uncritical age. What man had guessed about nature gave place to what nature had to say about herself, and with the classifying of experience science had its birth.

Meanwhile, until this quite recent stage in man’s progress was reached, the senses told their blundering tale of an earth flat and fixed, with sun, moon, and stars as its ministering servants, while gods or beasts upbore it, and mighty pillars supported the massive firmament In Hindu myth the tortoise which upholds the earth rests upon an elephant, whose legs reach all the way down! In Bogotà the culture-god Bochica punishes a lesser and offending deity by compelling him to sustain the part of Atlas, and it is in shifting his burden from shoulder to shoulder that earthquakes are caused. The natives of Celebes say that these are due to the world-supporting Hog as he rubs himself against a tree; the Thascaltecs that they occur when the deities who hold up the world relieve one another; the Japanese think that they are caused by huge dragons wriggling underground, an idea probably confirmed by the discovery of monster fossil bones. In Algonquin myth the mighty man Earthquake “can pass along under the ground, and make all things shake and tremble by his power.”

As the myths about earth-bearers prevail in the regions of earthquakes, so do those about subterranean beings in the neighbourhood of volcanoes. The superstitions which mountainous countries especially foster are intensified when the mountains themselves cast forth their awful and devastating progeny, “red ruin” and the other children born of them. Man in his dread, “caring in no wise for the external world, except as it influenced his own destiny; honouring the lightning because it could strike him, the sea because it could drown him,”[15] could do naught else than people them with maleficent beings, and conceive of their sulphur-exhaling mouths as the jaws of a bottomless pit.

(d.) Storm and Lightning, etc.

If in freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the “solar” theory we shackled ourselves with some other, we should certainly prefer that which is known as the “meteorological,” and which, in the person of Kuhn and other supporters, finds a more rational and persistent source of myth in phenomena which are fitful and startling, such as hurricane and tempest, earthquake and volcanic outburst. Sunrises and sunsets happen with a regularity which failed to excite any strong emotion or stimulate curiosity, and the remotest ancestor of the primitive Aryan soon shook off the habit—if, indeed, he ever acquired it—of going to bed in fear and trembling lest the sun should not come back again. Nature, in her softer aspects and her gracious bounties, in the spring-time with its promise, the summer with its glory, the autumn with its gifts, has moved the heart of man to song and festival and procession; as, by contrast, the frosts that nipped the early buds and the fierce heat that withered the approaching harvest gave occasion for plaintive ditty and sombre ceremony. It is in the fierce play and passionate outbursts of the elements, in the storm, the lightning, and the thunder, that the feelings are aroused and that the terror-stricken fancy sees the strife of wrathful deities, or depicts their dire work amongst men. Hence, all the world over, the storm-god and the wind-god have played a mighty part.

To the savage, the wind, blowing as it listeth, its whence and whither unknown, itself invisible, yet the sweep and force of its power manifest and felt, must have ranked amongst the most striking phenomena. And, as will be seen hereafter, the correspondences between wind and breath, and the connection between breath and life, added their quota of mystery in man’s effort to account for the impalpable element. Of this personification of the elements the following Ojibway folk-tale, cited by Dorman, gives poetic illustration:—“There were spirits from all parts of the country. Some came with crashing steps and roaring voice, who directed the whirlwinds which were in the habit of raging about the neighbouring country. Then glided in gently a sweet little spirit, which blew the summer gale. Then came in the old sand-spirit, who blew the sand-squalls in the sand-buttes toward the west. He was a great speech-maker, and shook the lodge with his deep-throated voice, as he addressed the spirits of the cataracts and waterfalls, and those of the islands who wore beautiful green blankets.”

In the legends of the Quiches, the mysterious creative power is Hurakan (whence hurricane), among the Choctaws the original word for Deity is Hushtoli, the storm-wind, and in Peru to kiss the air was the commonest and simplest sign of adoration of the collective divinities. The Guayacuans of South America, when a storm arose and there was much thunder or wind, all went out in troops, as it were to battle, shaking their clubs in the air, shooting flights of arrows in that direction whence the storm came.[16]

The Araucanians thought that gales and thunderstorms were the battles fought between the spirits of the dead and their foes.

Turning to the literatures of higher races, we find in the prose Edda, when Gangler asks whence comes the wind, that Ha answers him: “Thou must know that at the northernmost point in the heavens sits a giant,

In Finnish myth the north wind Pulmri, father of the frost, is sometimes imaged as an eagle.

“The Indians believe in a great bird called by them Wochowsen or Wuchowsen, meaning Wind-Blow or the Wind-Blower, who lives far to the north, and sits upon a great rock at the end of the sky. And it is because whenever he moves his wings the wind blows they of old times called him that.” And in another Algonquin myth: “Ga-oh is the Spirit of the Winds. He moves the winds, but he is chained to a rock. The winds trouble him, and he tries very hard to get free. When he struggles the winds are forced away from him, and they blow upon the earth. Sometimes he suffers terrible pain, and then his struggles are violent. This makes the winds wild, and they do damage on the earth. Then he feels better and goes to sleep, and the winds become quiet also.”[17]

In the Veda the Maruts or Storm-gods, to whom many of the hymns are addressed, “make the rocks to tremble and tear asunder the kings of the forest,” like Hermes in his violence and like Boreas in his rage. Whether or no they become in Scandinavian legend the grim and fearful Ogres swiftly sailing in their cloud-ships, we may see in them the “crushers” and “grinders,”[18] as their name imports, the types of northern deities like Odin, long degraded into the Wild Huntsman and his phantom crew, whose uncouth yells the peasant hears in the midnight air.[19] Among the Aztecs Cuculkan, the bird-serpent, was a personification of the wind, especially of the east wind, as bringer of the rain. It was at one of his shrines, to which pilgrimages were made from great distances, that the Spaniards first saw to their surprise a cross surmounting the temple of this god of the wind, whence arose a legend that the Apostle Thomas had evangelised America. But, in fact, the pagan cross of Central America and Mexico was the symbol of the four cardinal points.

In his valuable book on the Myths of the Red Race Dr. Brinton has brought together a mass of evidence in support of a theory that the sanctity in which the number four is held by the American races is due to the adoration of the cardinal points, which are identified with the four winds, who in hero-myths are the four ancestors of the human race. The illustrations with which the argument is supported are numerous and valuable, but the argument itself is made to rest too strongly on an assumed primitive symbolism, whereas it suffices to show how the early notion of the flat world, as also square, would lead to the myth of the four winds blowing from the four corners, a myth often illustrated in ancient maps with an angel at each corner from whose mouth the wind issues. The official title of the Incas was “Lord of the four quarters of the earth,” and the number appears in all sorts of combinations, but the theory may be pushed to extremes in compelling every fact to square with it.[20] As the illustrations given above show, we are some steps nearer to the primitive myth when we find the wind conceived of as a mighty bird, which indeed is in both old and new world mythology a common symbol of thunder and lightning also. On this matter Dr. Brinton’s remarks bear quoting.

Like the wind the bird sweeps through the aërial spaces, sings in the forests, and rustles on its course; like the cloud it floats in mid-air, and casts its shadow on the earth; like the lightning it darts from heaven to earth to strike its unsuspecting prey. These tropes were truths to savage nations, and led on by that law of language which forced them to conceive everything as animate or inanimate, itself the product of a deeper law of thought which urges us to ascribe life to whatever has motion, they found no animal so appropriate for their purpose here as the bird. Therefore the Algonquins say that birds always make the winds, that they create the waterspouts, and that the clouds are the spreading and agitation of their wings; the Navajos that at each cardinal point stands a white swan, who is the spirit of the blasts; so also the Dakotas frequently explain the thunder as the sound of the cloud-bird flapping his wings; the lightning as the fire that flashes from his tracks, like the sparks which the buffalo scatters when he scours over a stony plain.

Estimates differ much as to the size of the Thunder-Bird. In one tradition an Indian found its nest, and secured a feather which was above two hundred feet long, while in another tradition the bird is said to be no bigger than one’s little finger. But among the Western Indians he is an immense eagle. “When this aërial monster flaps his wings loud peals of thunder roll over the prairie; when he winks his eye it lightens; when he wags his tail the waters of the lake which he carries on his back overflow and produce rain.” Mixcoatl, the Mexican Cloud-Serpent, as well as Jove, carries his bundle of arrows or thunderbolts, which in the hand of Thor are represented by his mighty club or hammer. The old and universal belief that stones were hurled by the Thunder-God is not so far-fetched as we, in our pride of science, might think, for the flints which are mistaken for thunderbolts, and which become objects of adoration as well as charms, produce a flash when struck by the lightning. In the lightning flash man would see the descent of fire from heaven for his needs. That he should regard it, like water, as a living creature, with power to hurt or help him, is in keeping with attribution of life to all that moved. Its apparent connection with the great source of heat would foster the feeling which expressed itself in fire-worship, with its curious survivals to modern times. No element was more calculated to excite awe in its seeming unrelation to the objects which produced it. Once secured, to guard it from extinction or theft was a serious duty, and everything from which it issued, trees as its hiding-place, since it came from the wood when rubbed, stones also, since sparks shot from them when struck, were held sacred. In the manifold myths about its origin one feature is common, that its seed was stolen, the chief agents (probably as the messengers between earth and sky) being birds, or men assuming the form of birds. The Sioux Indians say that their first ancestor procured his fire from the sparks which a panther struck from the rocks as he bounded up a hill. But of examples from the lower culture, forerunners of the Zeus-defying Prometheus, Mr. Gill’s Myths of the South Pacific supplies one which may be taken as a sample of the rest. Maui, a famous South Sea hero, finding some cooked food in a basket brought by Buataranga from the nether world, and relishing it more than raw food, determines to steal the fire, and flying to the Buataranga’s realm frightens the fire-god by threats and blows into revealing the secret. Then wresting the fire-sticks from him he sets the under-world in flames, and returns with his prize to the upper-world; thenceforth “all the dwellers there used fire-sticks, and enjoyed the luxuries of light and of cooked food.”

(e.) Light and Darkness.

As in the conflict raging in the sky during gale or tempest, when the light and the darkness alternately prevail, the barbaric mind sees war waged between the heroes of the spirit-land who have carried their unsettled blood feuds thither, so in many myths the lightning is no comrade of the thunder, but its foe, the battle of bird with serpent. The resemblance of the lightning flash to the sharp, sudden, zigzag movements of the serpent, a creature so mysterious to barbaric man in its unlikeness to the beasts of the field, accounts for a myth the influence of which as a terrorising agent on human conduct is in course of rapid decay. Its importance in the history of belief in the supernatural is too far-reaching to be passed over, and in tracing its course it is necessary to show its connection with the group of storm-myths and sun-myths of the Aryan race in the battles between Indra and Vritra, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Thor and Midgard, Hercules and Cacus, Apollo and Pythôn, and St. George and the Dragon.

All the Aryan nations have among their legends, often exalted into epic themes, the story of a battle between a hero and a monster. In each case the hero conquers, and releases treasures, or in some way renders succour to man, through his victory. In Hindu myth this battle is fought between Indra and Vritra.

Indra, one of the Vedic gods, comes, according to Professor Max Müller, from the same root as the Sanskrit indu, drop, sap, but the etymology is doubtful. What is not doubtful is that he is the god of the bright sky, and although, like the other gods invoked in the hymns of the Rig-Veda, a departmental or tribal deity, he is a sort of primus inter pares, of whose many titles, Vritrahan or “Vritra-slayer” is the pre-eminent one. The benefits showered by him upon mortals caused the attribution of moral qualities to him, and he was adored as “lord of the virtues,” while the juice of the sacred soma plant was offered in his honour, for which reason he is also called Somapâ or “soma-drinker.” It is his struggle with Vritra which is a constant theme of the Vedic hymns, the burden of which remind us of the praises offered in the Psalms to Yahweh as a man of war, as mighty in battle. “The gods do not reach thee, nor men, thou overcomest all creatures in strength.... Thou thunderer, hast shattered with thy bolt the broad and massive cloud into fragments, and has sent down the waters that were confined in it to flow at will; verily thou alone possessest all power.” The primitive physical meaning of the myth is clear. Indra is the sun-god, armed with spears and arrows, for such did the solar rays sometimes appear to barbaric fancy. The rain-clouds are imprisoned in dungeons or caverns by Vritra, the “enveloper,” the thief, serpent, wolf, wild boar, as he is severally styled in the Rig-Veda. Indra attacks him, hurls his darts at him, they pierce the cloud-caverns, the waters are released, and drop upon the earth as rain.

This explanation, which has many parallels in savage myth, is self-consistent as fitting into crude philosophy of personal life and volition in sun and cloud, and is fraught with deep truth of meaning in regions like the Punjaub, where drought brought famine in its train.

The Aryans were a pastoral people, their wealth being in flocks and herds.[21] The cow yielded milk for the household; her dung fertilised the soil; her young multiplied the wealth of the family at an ever-increasing rate, and she naturally became the symbol of fruitfulness and prosperity, ultimately an object of veneration; while, for the functions which the bull performed, he was the type of strength. The Aryan’s enemy was he who stole or injured the cattle; the Aryan’s friend was he who saved them from the robber’s clutch.

Intellectually, the Aryan tribes were, speaking broadly, in the mythopœic stage, and the personification of phenomena was rife among them. Their barbaric fancy, as kindred myths all the world over testify, would find ample play in the fleeting and varied scenery of the cloud-flecked heavens, suggestive, as this would be, of bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial. To these children of the plain the heavens were a vast, wide expanse, over which roamed supra-mundane beasts, the two most prominent figures in their mythical zoology being the cow and the bull. The sun, giver of blessed light, was the bull of majesty and strength; the white clouds were cows, from whose swelling udders dropped the milk of heaven—the blessed rain. But there were dark clouds also, clouds of night and clouds of storm, and within these lurked the monster-robber; into them he lured the herds, and withheld both light and rain from the children of men. To the sun-god, therefore, who smote the thief-dragon, Vritra, with his shaft, and set free the imprisoned cows, went up the shout of praise, the song of gratitude. This myth survives in many legends of the Aryan race, and their family likeness is unmistakable. In its Latin guise it appears as Hercules[22] and Cacus, although the preciseness of detail narrated by Virgil, Livy, and other writers, has given it quasi-historical rank. Hercules, after his victory over Geryon, stops to rest by the Tiber, and while he is sleeping the three-headed monster, Cacus, steals some of his cattle, dragging them by their tails into his cavern in Mons Avertinus. Their bellowing awakens Hercules, who attacks the cavern, from the mouth of which Cacus vomits flames, and roars as in thunder. But the hero slays him and frees the cattle, a victory which the earlier Romans celebrated with solemn rites at the Ara Maxima. In Greek myth the most familiar examples are the struggles between the sun-god, Apollo, and the storm-dragon, Pythôn, and the deliverance of the Princess Andromeda by Perseus from the sea-monster sent by Poseidôn to ravage the land. In the northern group we have the battle of Siegfried with the Niflungs, or Niblungs, and of Sigurd with the dragon Fafnir, who guards golden treasures; while, in the Edda, Thor goes fishing with the giant Hymir, and catches the demon Loki, whose foul brood are Hell, the wolf Fenri, and the Earth-girdling Serpent. Amongst ourselves, Beowulf, hero of the poem of that name, attacks the dragon or fire-drake Grendel, who, with his troll-mother, haunts a gloomy marsh-land. Thence he stole forth at night to seize sleeping champions, taking them to his dwelling-place to devour them, and this in such numbers that scarce a man was left. One pale night, Beowulf awaited the coming of the monster, and, gripping him tightly, snapped his limbs asunder, so that he died.

These brief illustrations would hardly be complete without some reference to our national saint. Opinions differ as to his merits, Gibbon stigmatising him as a fraudulent army contractor,[23] while the researches of M. Ganneau seek to establish his relation to the Egyptian Horus and Typhon. Be this as it may, the stirring old legend tells how George of Cappadocia delivered the city of Silene from a dragon dwelling in a lake hard by. Nothing that the people could give him satisfied his insatiate maw, and in their despair they cast lots who among their dearest ones should be flung to the dread beast. The lot fell to the king’s daughter, and she went unflinchingly, like Jephthah’s daughter, to her fate. But on the road the hero learns her sad errand, and bidding her fear not, he, making sign of the cross, brandishes his lance, attacks and transfixes the dragon, and leading him into Silene, beheads him in sight of all the people, who, with their king, are baptized to the glory of Him who made St. George the victor.[24]

(f.) The Devil.

While, however, the myth of Indra and Vritra has in its western variants remained for the most part a battle between heroes and dragons, the moral element rarely obscuring the physical features, it gave rise among the Iranians or ancient Persians to a definite theology, the strange fortunes of which have, as remarked above, profoundly affected Christendom.

Although in the Vedic hymns the features of the primitive nature-myth reappear again and again, Indra himself boasting, “I slew Vritra, O Maruts, with might, having grown strong with my own vigour; I who hold the thunderbolt in my arms, I have made these all-brilliant waters to flow freely for man,” we find an approach in them to some conception of that spiritual conflict of which the physical conflict was so complete a symbol. Indra as victor, is an object of adoration and invested with purity and goodness; Vritra, as the enemy of men, is an object of dread, and invested with malice and evil.

But while in the Zend-Avesta, the Scriptures of the old Iranian religion, the struggle between Thraetaôna and the three-headed serpent Azhi-Dahâka (in which names are recognisable the Traitana and Ahi of the Veda and the Feridun and Zohak of Persian epic) is narrated, the moral idea is dominant throughout. The theme is not the attack of the sun-god to recover stolen milch cows from the dragon’s cave, but the battle between Ormuzd, the Spirit of Light, and Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness. The one seeks to mar the earth which the other has made. Into the fair paradise, Airayana-Vaêjô, “a delightful spot,” as the Avesta calls it, “with good waters and trees,” and into other smiling lands which Ormuzd has blessed, Ahriman sends “a mighty serpent ... strong, deadly frost ... buzzing insects, and poisonous plants ... toil and poverty,” and, worse than all, “the curse of unbelief.”[25] Between these two spiritual powers and their armies of good and bad angels the battle rages for supremacy in the universe, for possession of the citadel of Mansoul.

Early in the history of the Asiatic Aryan tribes there had arisen a quarrel between the Brahmanic and Iranian divisions. The latter had become a quiet-loving, agricultural people, while the former remained marauding nomads, attacking and harassing their neighbours. In their plundering inroads they invoked the aid of spells and sacrifices, offering the sacred soma-juice to their gods, and nerving themselves for the fray by deep draughts of the intoxicating stuff. Not only they, but their gods as well, thereby became objects of hatred to the peaceful Iranians, who foreswore all worship of freebooter’s deities, and transformed these devas of the old religion into demons. That religion, as common to the Indo-European race, was polytheistic, a worship of deities each ruling over some department of nature, but a worship exalting now one, now another god, be it Indra, or Varuna, or Agni, according to the indications of the deity’s supremacy, or according to the mood of the worshipper. As remarked by Jacob Grimm, “the idea of the devil is foreign to all primitive religions,” obviously because in all primitive thought evil and good are alike regarded as the work of deities. In the Old Testament, Yahweh is spoken of as the author of both;[26] the angels, whether charged with weal or woe, are his messengers. In the Iliad Zeus dispenses both:—

and ’tis a far cry from this to the loftier conception of Euripides: “If the gods do evil, then are they no gods.” So there was a monotheistic—or, as Professor Max Müller terms it, a henotheistic—element in the Vedic religion which in the Iranian religion, and this mainly through the teaching of the great thinker and reformer Zarathushtra (Zoroaster), was largely diffused. In his endeavour to solve the old problem of reconciling sin and misery with omnipotent goodness, he supposes “two primeval causes,” one of which produced the “reality,” or good mind; the other the “non-reality,” or evil mind. Behind these was developed belief in a philosophical abstraction, “uncreate time,” of which each was the product; but such doctrines were too subtle for the popular grasp, and, wrapped in the old mythological garb, they appeared in concrete form as dualism. Vritra survived in Ahriman, who, like him, is represented as a serpent; and in Ormuzd we have the phonetic descendant of Ahura-mazda.

Now, it was with this dualism, this transformed survival of the sun and cloud myth, that the Jews came into association during their memorable exile in Babylon. Prior to that time their theology, as hinted above, had no devil in it. But in that belief in spirits which they held in common with all semi-civilised races, as a heritage from barbarous ancestors, there were the elements out of which such a personality might be readily evolved. Their satan, or “accuser,” as that word means, is no prince of the demons, like the Beelzebul of later times; no dragon or old serpent, as of the Apocalypse, defying Omnipotence and deceiving the whole world; but a kind of detective who, by direction of Yahweh, has his eye on suspects, and who is sent to test their fidelity. In all his missions he acts as the intelligent and loyal servant of Yahweh. But although therefore not regarded as bad himself, the character and functions with which he was credited made easy the transition from such theories about him to theories of him as inherently evil, as the enemy of goodness, and, therefore, of God. He who, like Vritra, was an object of dread, came to be regarded as the incarnation of evil, the author and abettor of things harmful to man. Persian dualism gave concrete form to this conception, and from the time of the Exile we find Satan as the Jewish Ahriman, the antagonist of God. Not he alone, for “the angels that kept not their first estate” were the ministers of his evil designs, creatures so numerous that every one has 10,000 at his right hand and 1000 at his left hand, and because they rule chiefly at night no man should greet another lest he salute a demon. They haunt lonely spots, often assume the shape of beasts, and it is their presence in the bodies of men and women which is the cause of madness and other diseases.[28]

From the period when the Apocryphal books, especially those having traces of Persian influence, were written,[29] this doctrine of an arch-fiend with his army of demons received increasing impetus. It passed on without check into the Christian religion, and wherever this spread the heathen gods, like the devas of Brahmanism among the Iranians, were degraded into demons, and swelled the vast crowd of evil spirits let loose to torment and ruin mankind.

This doctrine of demonology, it should be remembered, was but the elaborated form of ancestral belief in spirits referred to above. In the Christian system it was associated with that belief in magic which has its roots in fetishism, and from the two arose belief in witchcraft. The universal belief in demons in early and mediæval times supplied an easy explanation of disasters and diseases; the sorcerers and charm-workers, the wizards and enchanters, had passed into the service of the devil. For power to work their spite and malevolence they had bartered their souls to him, and sealed the bargain with their blood. It was enough for the ignorant and frightened sufferers to accuse some poor, misshapen, squinting old woman of casting on them the evil eye, or of appearing in the form of a cat, to secure her trial by torture and her condemnation to an unpitied death. The spread of popular terror led to the issue of Papal bulls and to the passing of statutes in England and in other countries against witchcraft, and it was not until late in the eighteenth century that the laws against that imaginary crime were repealed.

There is no sadder chapter in the annals of this tearful world than this ghastly story of witch-finding and witch-burning. Sprenger computes that during the Christian epoch no less than nine millions of persons, mostly women of the poorer classes, were burned; victims of the survival into relatively civilised times of an illusion which had its source in primitive thought. It was an illusion which had the authority of Scripture on its side;[30] the Church had no hesitation concerning it; such men as Luther, Sir Thomas Browne, and Wesley never doubted it; the evidence of the bewitched was supported by honest witnesses; and judges disposed to mercy and humanity had no qualms in passing the dread sentence of the law on the condemned.[31]

And although it exists not to-day, save in by-places where gross darkness lurks, it was not destroyed by argument, by disproof, by direct assault, but only through the quiet growth and diffusion of the scientific spirit, before which it has dispersed. It could not live in an atmosphere thus purified, an atmosphere charged with belief in unchanging causation and in a definite order unbroken by caprice or fitfulness, whether in the sweep of a planet or the pulsations of a human heart.

Of course the antecedents of the arch-fiend himself could not fail to be the subject of curious inquiry in the time when his existence was no matter of doubt. The old theologians scraped together enough material about him from the sacred books of the Jews and Christians to construct an elaborate biography of him; but in this they would seem to have explained too much in certain directions and not enough in others, thus provoking a reaction which ultimately discredited their painful research. Their genealogy of him was carried farther back than they intended or desired, for the popular notions credited him with both a mother and grandmother. Their theory of his fall from heaven gave rise to the droll conception of his lameness and to the legends of which the “devil on two sticks” is a type. Their infusion of foreign element into his nature aided his pictorial presentment in motley form and garb, as seen in the old miracle-plays. To Vedic descriptions of Vritra’s darkness may perchance be traced his murkiness and blackness; to Greek satyr and German forest-sprite his goat-like body, his horns, his cloven hoofs, his tail; to Thor his red beard; to dwarfs and goblins his red cloak and nodding plume; to theories of transformation of men and spirits into animals his manifold metamorphoses, as black cat, wolf, hellhound, and the like.

But his description was his doom; it was by a natural sequence that the legends of mediæval times present him, not, with the Scotch theologians, as a scholar and a swindler, disguising himself as a parson, but as gullible and stupid, as over-reaching himself and as befooled by mortals. And, like the Trolls of Scandinavian folk-lore who burst at sunrise, it needed only the full light thrown upon his origin and development by the researches of comparative mythologists to dissipate this creation of man’s fears and fancies into the vaporous atmosphere where he had his birth.

§ IV.

THE SOLAR THEORY OF MYTH.

The cogency of the evidence concerning the development of belief in Satan out of light-and-darkness myths is generally admitted, but it is of a kind that must not be pushed too far. For the phases of Nature are manifold; manifold also is the life of man; and we must not lend a too willing ear to theories which refer the crude explanations of an unscientific age, when the whole universe is Wonderland, to one source. Cave hominem unius libri, says the adage, and we may apply it, not only to the man of one book, but also to the man of one idea, in whom the sense of proportion is lacking, and who sees only that for which he looks. Here such caution is introduced as needful of exercise against the comparative mythologists who, not content with showing—as abundant evidence warrants—that myth has its germs in the investment of the powers of nature with personal life and consciousness, contend that the great epics of our own and kindred races are, from their broadest features to minutest detail, but nature-myths obscured and transformed.

Certain scholars, notably Professor Max Müller, Sir G. W. Cox, and Professor de Gubernatis, as interpreters of the myths of the Indo-European peoples, and Dr. Goldziher, as an interpreter of Hebrew myth and cognate forms, maintain that the names given in the mythopœic age to the sun, the moon, and the changing scenery of the heaven as the fleeting forms and myriad shades passed over its face, lost their original signification wholly or partially, and came to be regarded as the names of veritable deities and men, whose actions and adventures are the disguised descriptions of the sweep of the thunder-charged clouds and of the victory of the hero-god over their light-engulfing forces. But it is better to state the theory in the words of its exponents, and for that purpose a couple of extracts from Sir George Cox’s Mythology of the Aryan Nations will suffice.

In the spontaneous utterances of thoughts awakened by outward phenomena, we have the source of myths which must be regarded as primary. But it is obvious that such myths would be produced only so long as the words employed were used in their original meaning. If once the meaning of the word were either in part or wholly forgotten, the creation of a new personality under this name would become inevitable, and the change would be rendered both more certain and more rapid by the very wealth of words which were lavished on the sights and objects which most impressed their imagination. A thousand phrases would be used to describe the action of a beneficent or consuming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of the playful or furious wind; and every word or phrase become the germ of a new story as soon as the mind lost its hold on the original force of the name. Thus, in the polyonymy (by which term Sir George Cox means the giving of several names to one object), which was the result of the earliest form of human thought, we have the germ of the great epics of later times, and of the countless legends which make up the rich stores of mythical tradition ... and the legends so framed constitute the class of secondary myths (p. 42).

Henceforth the words which had denoted the sun and moon would denote not merely living things but living persons.... Every word would become an attribute, and all ideas, once grouped round a single object, would branch off into distinct personifications. The sun had been the lord of light, the driver of the chariot of the day; he had toiled and laboured for the sons of men, and sunk down to rest, after a hard battle, in the evening. But now the lord of light would be Phoibos Apollôn, while Helios would remain enthroned in his fiery chariot, and his toils and labours and death-struggles would be transferred to Heraklês. The violet clouds which greet his rising and his setting would now be represented by herds of cows which feed in earthly pastures. There would be other expressions which would still remain as floating phrases, not attached to any definite deities. These would gradually be converted into incidents in the life of heroes, and be woven at length into systematic variations. Finally, these gods and heroes, and the incidents of their mythical career, would receive each “a local habitation and a name.” These would remain as genuine history when the origin and meaning of the words had been either wholly or in part forgotten (p. 51).

Such is the “solar myth” theory. “We can hardly,” as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, “now look up at the sun without having the sensations of a moth,” and if occasion has not been given to the adversary to blaspheme, he has been supplied with ample material for banter and ridicule. Some of the happiest illustrations of this are made by Mr. Foster in his amusing and really informing essay on “Nature Myths in Nursery Rhymes,” reprinted in Leisure Readings,[32] an essay which it seems the immaculate critics took au sérieux! With a little exercise of one’s invention, given also ability to parody, it will be found that many noted events, as well as the lives of the chief actors in them, yield results comforting to the solar mythologists. Not only the Volsungs and the Iliad, but the story of the Crusades and of the conquest of Mexico; not only Arthur and Baldr, but Cæsar and Bonaparte, may be readily resolved, as Professor Tyndall says we all shall be, “like streaks of morning cloud, into the infinite azure of the past.” Dupuis, in his researches into the connection between astronomy and mythology, had suggested that Jesus was the sun, and the twelve apostles the zodiacal signs; and Goldziher, analysing the records of a remote period, maintains the same concerning Jacob and his twelve sons. M. Senart has satisfied himself that Gotama, the Buddha, is a sun-myth. Archbishop Whately, to confound the sceptics, ingeniously disproved the existence of Bonaparte; and a French ecclesiastic has, by witty etymological analogies, shown that Napoleon is cognate with Apollo, the sun, and his mother Letitia identical with Leto, the mother of Apollo; that his personnel of twelve marshals were the signs of the zodiac; that his retreat from Moscow was a fiery setting, and that his emergence from Elba, to rule for twelve months, and then be banished to St. Helena, is the sun rising out of the eastern waters to set in the western ocean after twelve hours’ reign in the sky. But upon this solar theory let us cite what Dr. Tylor, whose soberness of judgment renders him a valuable guide along the zigzag path of human progress, says: “The close and deep analogies between the life of nature and the life of man have been for ages dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, who, in simile or in argument, have told of light and darkness, of calm and tempest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dissolution, renewal. But no one-sided interpretation can be permitted to absorb into a single theory such endless many-sided correspondences as these. Rash inferences which, on the strength of mere resemblance, derive episodes of myth from episodes of nature, must be regarded with utter mistrust, for the student who has no more stringent criterion than this for his myths of sun and sky and dawn, will find them wherever it pleases him to seek them.”