Chapter VII · DEATH AND BIRTH AS TRANSFORMATION.

In the course of our examination of tales of Supernatural Birth we have more than once found that birth was to the hero merely a new manifestation. He had previously existed in other shapes, and by undergoing birth (preceded sometimes, but not always, by death) he was entering on a new career, he was ascending a new stage of being. The child in the Annamite story of Posthumous Revenge had been an eel, with liberty of metamorphosis into other forms. Marjatta’s child in the half-heathen postscript to the Kalevala had been the creator of the sun and moon. Yehl, the Thlinkit hero-god, repeatedly became the son of ladies, who were beguiled into swallowing a pebble, a blade of grass, or even a drop of water, which was no other than the divinity in disguise. The subject, however, is so important, not merely in the general study of savage ideas, but in relation to the myth of Perseus, especially in its modern forms, that it is necessary to deal with it a little more at length.

The old Scottish ballad of Binnorie belongs to this group, though in all its British variants it has been modernised. Scott’s version, the best known, is only half traditional. The elder sister drowns the younger for the sake of her lover. The body is found by the miller in “the bonny mill-dams of Binnorie.”

“A famous harper passing by

The sweet pale face he chanced to spy.

. . . . . .

“He made a harp of her breast-bone,

Whose sounds would melt a heart of stone.

“The strings he framed of her yellow hair,

Whose notes made sad the listening ear.”

Here the ballad has obviously been manipulated; but a comparison of other versions shows that the sense has been preserved.

“He laid this harp upon a stone,

And straight it began to play alone.

“ ‘O yonder sits my father, the king,

And yonder sits my mother, the queen.

“ ‘And yonder stands my brother Hugh,

And by him my William, sweet and true!’

“But the last tune that the harp played then,

Binnorie, O Binnorie!

Was ‘Woe to my sister, false Helen!’

By the bonny mill-dams of Binnorie.”

“… the young Mondamin,

With his soft and shining tresses,

With his garments green and yellow,

With his long and glossy plumage,”

came and wrestled thrice with one of their heroes. The third time the Ojibway was victorious. His antagonist was overthrown, killed and buried. The victor watched the grave,

“Kept the dark mould soft above it,

Kept it clean from weeds and insects,

Drove away with scoffs and shoutings

Kahgahgee, the king of ravens.

Till at length a small green feather

From the earth shot slowly upward,

Then another and another,

And before the summer ended

Stood the maize in all its beauty,

With its shining robes about it,

And its long, soft, yellow tresses;

And in rapture Hiawatha

Cried aloud: ‘It is Mondamin!

Yes, the friend of man, Mondamin!’ ”

We can now understand the Bulgarian ballad cited in Chapter IV., containing the pathetic narrative of the hyacinths growing out of the dead man’s grave and causing his mother to give birth to another son. The flowers were a new manifestation of the youth who had been untimely slain; and by them he entered again into his mother’s womb and was born. This and others of the tales referred to in the same chapter and that which follows it are parallel with the tale of The Two Brothers in the transformations they present. And both they and many of the practices detailed in the last chapter point very clearly to the belief that a dead person can be born again, if only the right means be taken for that end.

All our illustrations of the doctrine of Transformation have been drawn from cases where the hero is conceived as having begun his career in human shape, whether as man or deity, save in the one instance of the Annamite story of Posthumous Revenge. There his pristine figure was an eel. But if the power of metamorphosis be such that human beings can be changed by means of death and a fresh birth into brute and vegetable form, brutes and vegetables may equally be changed by the same agency into human beings. The märchen of The King of the Fishes displays this power. In the light of the transmutations we have passed in review, it is abundantly evident that the fisherman’s sons, their horses, dogs and life-tokens, are nothing more nor less than the ancestor-fish in a new mould. In previous chapters we have examined cases in which men and women deceased have been held to reappear as human babes without undergoing any intermediate change into lower forms; and we have others yet to examine. What is expressly affirmed in tales where pregnancy is caused by tasting the ashes of a corpse, what is implicit in the disgusting superstitions which lead women to swallow portions of dead bodies, must also be understood in the parallel cases where fishes and fruit are eaten and result in the production of children. Here then we have the real meaning of the tales and superstitions considered in the last three chapters. At their root lies the belief in Transformation. Flowers, fruit, and other vegetables, eggs, fishes, spiders, worms, and even stones, are all capable of becoming human beings. They only await absorption in the shape of food, or in some other appropriate manner, into the body of a woman, to enable the metamorphosis to be accomplished. In some cases, as where drugs and other compounds are used, or where water or sunbeams are the fructifying power, this meaning has been forgotten. The virtue of such means is usually imputed to magical or divine power. But this does not appear to be the original belief. The original belief is intimately bound up with the savage theory of the universe. In that theory no strict line of cleavage runs across Nature. All things may change their shape, some at will, others on the fulfilment of certain conditions, whereof death, as applying to all animal and vegetable life, is perhaps the most usual. Most of the instances of death and new birth we have yet to deal with have little apparent relation to this point. But, so far as they add to the general evidence as to the reappearance of the dead in fresh births, even the least relevant of them are not without value.

According to the classical mythology, when Orion’s two daughters sacrificed themselves for Thebes, two young men sprang from their ashes. Ovid describes the goblet presented by Anius, the priest-king of Delos, to Æneas, as carved with a representation of the scene:

“Out of their maiden embers, lo! twin youths,

Lest the race fail, arise, Coronæ named,

Like the story of the great monarch Akbar, that of Shêduir Van has probably been influenced by Buddhistic thought. But in both cases the influence would be that of Buddhistic thought only as popularly understood. The common people of India, we may safely assume—still less the tribes of Tibet and the practical Chinese—never absorbed into their minds the abstract doctrines of Karma and the Skandhas. It is, indeed, more than doubtful whether these philosophical speculations have ever penetrated the intellects of the greatest doctors of the Northern Church. The current belief is illustrated in the Chinese tales I have quoted. Even more strikingly is it exemplified in the successive incarnations which provide a perpetual succession of Grand Lamas at Lhasa, and of skooshoks for minor monasteries. While as to the Southern Church, we are not dependent for our assumption upon the folklore and the general culture of the Cingalese and the peoples of Further India. In the Játakas, or parables attributed to Gautama, we have irrefragable witness of the teaching current from a very early period in Buddhist history. They are apologues, most of them probably of much older date, which have acquired sacredness by being fitted to alleged events in the ministry of the Buddha. The Master is represented as taking occasion, from some remark made by his disciples upon a passing occurrence, to declare that in a former birth the same things had happened to them; and in illustration of his statement he tells the tale. The following may stand for a typical conclusion or application. It is that of the parable of the cruel crane outwitted by the crab: “When the Teacher had finished this discourse showing that ‘Not now only, O mendicants, has this man been outwitted by the country robe-maker, long ago he was outwitted in the same way,’ he established the connection, and summed up the Játaka, by saying, ‘At that time he [the crane] was the Jetavana robe-maker, the crab was the country robe-maker, but the Genius of the Tree was I myself.’ ” To the personages of the tale is thus ascribed complete identity with the Buddha and his contemporaries. Transmigration, in short, as conceived in popular Buddhism, was no product of the subtleties of Hindu metaphysics. It was no refined philosophical doctrine. It is undiscoverable in the Rig-Veda, the earliest sacred book of the Sanskrit-speaking conquerors of India. Its ethical value, even, if we may judge from the Játakas, was of the smallest. Such as it was, Transmigration was a direct evolution of the more savage belief in Transformation, as we have seen that belief exemplified in the present chapter, and hardly distinguishable from it, either in its terms or in its consequences.

Far in the west the Celts are reported to have held the dogma of Transmigration. This report, coming to us from writers imbued with Greco-Roman philosophy, and interpreting, according to the custom of classical antiquity, the religions of barbarous races in the terms of their own, has been understood to imply an elaborate philosophical system such as those of Pythagoras and Buddha. That the Celts had imbibed Buddhist theories we cannot suppose. The doctrines of Pythagoras may, indeed, have penetrated into Gaul by commercial routes or by contact with Greek colonies. Yet, if they did, it is strange that no other vestige of the Pythagorean philosophy is imputed to the Celts, and that the Druidical religion, whereof we are told the dogma in question was part, blossomed, as it is said to have done, most perfectly in Britain, where it was furthest removed from all foreign influences. We know directly little concerning Druidism. Our knowledge, as far as it goes, leads us to think the religion of the ancient Britons and Gauls was of the same general character as other barbarous cults. Arising thus from the common ground of savagery, there is no reason why Celtic opinion may not have begun to develop in the same direction as popular Buddhism. Neither Celtic mythology, however, as known to us, nor Celtic folklore, as reported by mediæval and modern writers, affords ground for supposing that metempsychosis in any philosophical sense was part of the ancient Celtic creed. In touching, a few pages back, on Barguests, as ghosts in animal mould are technically called, we disposed of the most salient point of modern Celtic folklore, for we found it to be an expression, in no way divergent from that of other uncultivated peoples, of the universal doctrine of Transformation. We shall now briefly discuss the examples to be found in what remains to us of the ancient mythology.

In New Zealand the priest, after certain ceremonies, first recited to the child the following stave:

“Wait till I pronounce your name.

What is your name?

Listen to your name,

This is your name——”

We have now reviewed a large number of märchen wherein the hero or heroine is said to have suffered by death and new birth transfiguration into a variety of forms, both brute and human. We have, moreover, found the same plot in sagas in both hemispheres. And, advancing to savage theory and its correlative customs, I hope I have made it plain that stories of metamorphosis, whether märchen or sagas, have been founded upon the belief that at death men are not annihilated, but pass into fresh forms, sometimes appearing as plants and trees, sometimes as animals of the lower creation, and sometimes as men and women born again into their own kindred or among strangers. This is a creed held so widely that—though subject, perhaps, to varying stress, according to the degree and direction of the evolving civilisation, or, possibly yet more, to the different capacities and opportunities of travellers who report the characteristics of savage life and thought often far removed from their own—it may yet be regarded as practically universal. I have not attempted to distinguish between Transformation and Transmigration. When a man, either without passing through death and birth, or passing through death only, changes into a wolf or an ant, it is no more than Transformation. But if the metamorphosis be effected by death and growth into a tree, or a fresh birth from brute or human mother, it is obvious that there is more difficulty in affirming identity between the new substance and the old. In some cases, if we may trust our authorities, and if we rightly interpret the tales and ritual and beliefs they report, the savage sets this difficulty at defiance: the proofs of identity overcome it. Oftener, it may be, the identity established is of an inner and more elusive self. For want of a better word we call this kernel of a man his soul, or spirit, both of which words connote to us an immaterial object, with none of the attributes of physical existence. To the savage, however, as to our own forefathers, and to the folk of all civilised countries still, the idea of an incorporeal soul is incomprehensible. He may not be able to see it at all times; he may not be able to handle it when he will: but this kernel, this inner self, of friend or foe, comes to him in dreams; he beholds it in the snake or the toad, the insect or the dove, that haunts the tomb of one who was dear to him, or in the rose-bush or the lily growing upon the grave; or he fetches it back in the shape of a white stone to his beloved child, who has sickened at its absence, and is like to die. Thus it is everywhere in the lower culture conceived as material, though capable of changing its form and appearance without losing its identity. And this identity is the real identity of the man, suffusing and transfusing his entire being. Hence the dividing line between Transformation and Transmigration is frequently so thin and faint. Transmigration as popularly understood (for I am not speaking of the speculations of philosophers, whether Indian or Greek) is a natural and imperceptible development of Transformation. As regards the popular Buddhistic belief of ancient Hindustan I have already shown this from the Játakas; and what is true of that holds good of other popular forms of belief, at all events where Judaism and its daughter-faiths, Christianity and Mohammedanism, have not too deeply penetrated.

Some races, as we have seen, divide the soul into two or more entities, whereof one alone may be capable of re-manifestation. To discuss the reason for this would lead us away from our subject. It will be enough to suggest that it is an attempt to escape from the dilemma imposed by the meeting of two or more lines of speculation as to the future life. A reconciliation must be attained between the reasoning which would lead to the belief in a place of the dead elsewhere than here, and that which inclines to the opinion that the deceased remains among his friends, or amid his decaying dust, ready and eager to appear again. The divisibility of the inner self succeeds in this object; and if we meet with such a device less frequently than we might expect, it is no doubt because the savage mind, unaccustomed to consecutive and abstract thought, is slow in realising a contradiction, and unwilling to solve the difficulty, unless where circumstances have compelled the attention and the necessary effort.

The study of the belief in the re-incorporation of the soul in a human body has no direct bearing on the legend of Perseus, but some account of it was required to complete our view of savage thought upon the subject of Transformation by means of death and birth—a subject necessary to be understood in approaching the incident of the Life-token. To that incident we have next to address ourselves.

[End of vol. I]