Myth, Ritual and Religion

yths, Asian, Australian, African, Melanesian, Indian, Californian, Brazilian, Maori, Samoan — Moon myths, Australian, Muysca, Mexican, Zulu, Macassar, Greenland, Piute, Malay — Thunder myths — Greek a

, Australian and American — The whole natural philosophy of savages expressed in m

ns do the following savage stories arise? he would naturally answer that the minds which conceived the tales were curious, indolent, credulous of magic and witchcraft, capable of drawing no line between things and persons, capable of crediting all things with human passions and resolutions. But, as myths analogous to those of savages, when found among civilised peoples, h

l beings, while others rest on a rude theory of capricious evolution; others, again, invoke the aid of the magic of mortals, and most regard the great natural forces, the heavenly bodies, and the animals, as so many personal characters capable of voluntarily modifyi

ghout the world the sun and moon are alive, and, as it were, human in their nature”.1 The mass of these solar myths is so enormous that only a few examples can be given, chosen almost at random out of the heap. The sun is regarded as a personal being, capable not only of being affected by charms and incantations, but of being trapped and beaten, of appearing on earth, of taking a wife of the daughters of men. Garcilasso de la Vega has a story of an Inca prince, a speculative thinker, who was puzzled by the sun-worship of his ancestors. If the sun be thus all-powerful, the Inca inquired, why is he plainly

n should disappear at intervals. He addressed the sun in an incantation (couched like the Finnish Kalewala in the metre of Longfellow’s Hiawatha); and the incantation is th

ropes. In Mexico we find that the sun himself (like the stars in most myths) was once a human or pre-human devotee, Nanahuatzin, who leapt into a fire to propitiate the gods.5 Translated to heaven as the sun, Nanahuatzin burned so very fiercely that he threatened to reduce the world to a cinder. Arrows were therefore shot at him, and this punishment had as happy an effect as the beatings administered by Maui and Tcha-ka-betch. Among the Bushmen of South Africa the sun was once a man, from whose armpit a limited amount of light was radiated round his hut. Some children threw him up into the sky, and there he stuck, and there he shines.6 In the Homeric hymn to Helios, as Mr. Max Muller observes, “the poet looks on Helios as a half god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth,” which is precisely the view of the Bushmen.7 Among the Aztecs the sun is said to have been attacked by a hunter and grievously wounded by his arrows.8 The Gallinomeros, in Central California, seem at least to know that the sun is material and impersonal. They say that when all was dark in the beginning, the animals were constantly jostling each other. After a painful encounter, the hawk and the coyote collected two balls of inflammable substance; the hawk (Indra was occasionally a hawk) flew up with them into heaven, and

in the heavens.11 Another myth explanatory of the moon’s phases was found by Mr. Meyer in 1846 among the natives of Encounter Bay. According to them the moon is a woman, and a bad woman to boot. She lives a life of dissipation among men, which makes her consumptive, and she wastes away till they drive her from their company. While she is in retreat, she lives on nourishing roots, becomes quite plump, resumes her gay career, and again wastes away. The same tribe, strangely enough, think that the sun also is a woman. Every night she descends among the dead, who stand in double lines to greet her and let her pass. She has a lover among the dead, who has presented her with a red kangaroo skin, and in this she appears at her rising. Such is the view of rosy-fingered Dawn entertained by the blacks of Encounter Bay. In South America, among the Muyscas of Bogota, the moon, Huythac

pursues her, and his face is still blackened with the marks of ashes.15 Gervaise16 says that in Macassar the moon was held to be with child by the sun, and that when he pursued her and wished to beat her, she was delivered of the earth. They are now reconciled. About the alternate appearance of sun and moon a beautifully complete and adequate tale is told

catch them. They flee before him, and are all the time afraid when he is passing through the heavens. When he (their father) appears in the morning, you see all the st

e world, looked down on everything and finished his work, he, the sun, goes into his hole, and he crawls and creeps al

the east. When he, the sun, has so come out, he begins to hunt up through the sky to catch and eat any that he can of the stars, his children, for if he does not so catch and eat he cannot liv

s her husband to sleep her naps. But always she has great fear of the sun, her husband, and when he comes t

ildren, feel safe, and sing and dance as she passes along. But the mother, she cannot help that some of her children must be

ce for to mourn the dead. You see the Piute women put black on their faces when a child is gone. But the dark will wear away from the face of that mother, the moon, a little and

e Egyptian doctrine of the hole under the earth where the sun goes when he passes

men of Jerusalem in the famine), to eat their own children; but the sun swallowed her whole family, while the moon concealed hers. When the sun saw this she was exceedingly angry, and pursued the moon to kill her. Occasionally she gets a bite out of the moon, and that is an eclipse. The

ighten the beast (wolf, pig, dragon, or what not) from his prey. What the hungry monster in the sky is doing when he is not biting the sun or moon we are not informed. Probably he herds with the big bird whose wings, among the Dacotahs of America and the Zulus of Africa, make thunder; or he may associate with the dragons, serpents, cows and other aerial cattle which supply the rain, and show themselves in the waterspout. Chinese, Greenland, Hindoo, Finnish, Lithunian and Moorish examples of the myth about the moon-devouring beasts are vouched for by Grimm.19 A Mongol

blood escaped from the half which is the moon, hence her pallor.21 This tale is an exception to the general rule, but reminds us of the many myths which represent the things in the world as having been made out of a mutilated man, like the Vedic Purusha. It is hardly necessary, except by way of record, to point out that the Greek myths of sun and moon, like the myths of sav

to an absent daughter by the sun; it is but an unconscious repetition of the request of the dy

ian Dawn, with her present of a red kangaroo skin, was not more lightly won than the chaste Selene. Her affection for Endymion is well known, and her cold white glance shines through the crev

pomorphism the marks of the earliest fancy, the fancy of Eskimos and Australians. It seems to be commonly thought that the existence of solar myths is denied by an

same mistaken beliefs? As the savage, barbarous and Greek star-myths (such as that of Callisto, first changed into a bear and then into a constellation) are familiar to most readers, a few examples of Sanskrit star-stories are offered here from the Satapatha Brahmana.27 Fires are not, according to the Brahmana ritual, to be lighted under the stars called Krittikas, the Pleiades. The reason is that the stars were the wives of the bears (Riksha), for the group known in Brahmanic times as the Rishis (sages) were originally called the Rikshas (bears). But the wives of the bears were excluded from the society of their husbands

phrase, they “level up” everything to equality with the human status. Thus Mr. Im Thurn, a very good observer, found that to the Indians of Guiana “all objects, animate or inaminate, seem exactly of the same nature, except that they differ by the accident of bodily form”. Clearly to grasp this entirely natural conception of primitive man, the civilised student must make a great effort to forget for a time all that science has taught him of the differences between the objects which fill the world.3

does with men, mingling his gore with theirs, or smearing both together on a stone;33 while to bury dead animals with sacred rites is as usual among the Bedouins and Malagasies to-day as in ancient Egypt or Attica. In the same way the Ainos of Japan, who regard the bear as a kinsman, sacrifice a bear once a year. But, to propitiate the animal and his connections, they appoint him a “mother,” an Aino girl, who looks after his comforts, and behaves in a way as maternal as possible. The bear is now a kinsman, [greek], and cannot avenge himself within the kin. This, at least, seems to be the humour of it. In Lagarde’s Reliquiae Juris Ecclesiastici Antiquissimae a similar Syrian covenant of kinship with insects is described. About 700 A. D., when a Syrian garden was infested by caterpillars, the maidens were assembled, and one caterpillar was caught. Then one of the virgins was “made its mother,” and the creature was buried with due lamentations. The “mother” was then brought to t

and asked each to tell him its name. They all answered right except the animals of THY sort, and they had forgotten their name! Then Father Adam was very angry, and, taking that forgetful donkey by the ears, he pulled them out, screaming ‘You are called DONKEY!’ And the donkey’s ears have been long

.36 To these myths of the origin of various animals we shall return, but we must not forget the black and white Australian pelican. Why is the pelican parti-coloured?37 For this reason: After the Flood (the origin of which is variously explained by the Murri), the pelican (who had been a black fellow) made a canoe, and went about like a kind of Noah, trying to save the drowning. In the course of his benevolent mission he fell in love with a woman, but she and her friends played him a trick and escaped from him.

t savage description, a story reported by Apollodorus, though Homer39 refers to another, and, as usual, to a gentler and more refined form of the myth. Here is the version of Apollodorus. “Pandion” (an early king of Athens) “married Zeuxippe, his mother’s sister, by whom he had two daughters, Procne and Philomela, and two sons, Erechtheus and Butes. A war broke out with Labdas about some debatable land, and Erechtheus invited the alliance of Tereus of Thrace, the son of Ares. Having brought the war, with the aid of Tereus, to a happy end, he gave him his daughter Procne to wife. By Procne, Tereus had a son, Itys, and thereafter fell in love with Philomela, whom he seduced, pretending that Procne was dead, whereas he ha

ceasing musical wail of the nightingale and the shrill cry of the swallow were explained by a Greek story. The

insulted the god. But because the dolphin found the hidden sea-goddess whom Poseidon loved, the dolphin, too, was raised by the grateful sea-god to the stars.45 The vulture and the heron, according to Boeo (said to have been a priestess in Delphi and the author of a Greek treatise on the traditions about birds), were once a man named Aigupios (vulture) and his mother, Boulis. They sinned inadvertently, like Oedipus and Jocasta; wherefore Boulis, becoming aware of the guilt, was about to put out the eyes of her son and slay herself. Then they were changed, Boulis into the heron, “which tears out and feeds on the eyes of snakes, birds and fishes, and Aigupios into the vulture which bears his name”. This story, of which the more repulsive details are suppressed, is much less pleasing and more savage than the Hervey Islanders’ myth of the origin of pigs. Maaru was an old blind man who lived with his son Kationgia. There came a year of famine, and Kationgia had great difficulty in finding food for himself and his father. He gave the blind ol

s, Leucippe, Arsippe and Alcathoe, most industrious women, who declined to join the wild mysteries of Dionysus. The god took the shape of a maiden, and tried to win them to his worship. They refused, and he assumed the form of a bull, a lion, and a leopard as easily as the chiefs of the Abipones become tigers, or as the chiefs among the African Barotse and Balonda metamorph

9 Speculative Bushmen seem to have been puzzled to account for the wildness of the eland. It would be much more convenient if the eland were tame and could be easily captured. They explain its wildness by saying that the eland was “spoiled” before Cagn, the creator, or rather maker of most things, had quite finished it. Cagn’s relations came and hunted the first eland too soon, after which all other elands grew wild. Cagn then said,

age Myths of the Origin of the World and of Man”. Kar-ween and Pund-jel had a quarrel about the wives of the former, whom Pund-jel was inclined to admire. The crafty Kar-ween gave a dance (jugargiull, corobboree), at which the creator Pund-jel was disporting himself gaily (like the Great Panjandrum), when Kar-ween pinned him with a spear. Pund-jel threw another which took Kar-ween in the knee-joint, so that he could not walk, but soon pi

Menecrates and Nicander.52 The frogs were herdsmen metamorphosed by Leto, the mother of Apollo. But, by way of showing how closely akin ar

IGIN O

lves met her and led her to a river, of which she drank, and in its waters she bathed her children. Then she went back to the well where the herdsmen were now bathing, and she tu

f men and beasts were real practical beliefs. Events conceived to be common in real life were introduced into myths, and these myths were savage science, and were intended to account for the Origin of Species. But when once this train of imagination has been fired, it burns on bot

nd iron ore, and began smelting it. The black smoke displeased Sing Bonga, who sent two king crows and an owl to bid people cease to pollute the atmosphere. But the iron smelters sp

ire) drove them in a chariot race. Dawn is red, not because (as in Australia) she wears a red kangaroo cloak, but because she competed in this race with red cows for her coursers. Donkeys are slow because they nev

The blacks refuse to visit the range haunted by the mythic stone beast. “Some black fellows were once camped at the lakes near Shaving Point. They were cooking their fish when a native dog came up. They did not give him anything to eat. He became cross and said, ‘You black fellows have lots of fish, but you give me none’. So he changed them all into a big rock. This is quite true, for the big rock is there

o kill people who came near her, and is even now approached with great respect. The Oneidas and Dacotahs claim descent from stones to which they ascribe animation.58 Montesinos speaks of a sacred stone which was removed from a mountain by one of the Incas. A parrot flew out of it and lodged in another stone, which the natives still worship.59 The Breton myth about one of the great stone circles (the stones were peasants who danced on a Sunday) is a well-known example of this kind of myth surviving in folk-lore. There is a kind of stone Actaeon60 near Little Muniton Creek, “resembling the bust of a man whose head is decorated with the horns of a stag”.61 A crowd of myths of metamorphosis into stone will be found among the Iroquois legends in Report of Bureau of Ethnology, 1880-81. If men may become stones, on the other hand, in Samoa (as in the Greek myth of Deucalion), stones may become men.62 Gods, too, especially when these gods happen to be cuttlefish, might be petrified. Th

urn. Anthrop. Ins

rgon,” sings Pindar, “and bare home her head, with serpent tresses decked, to the island folk a stony death.” Observe Pindar’s explanatory remark: “I ween there is no marvel impossible if gods have wrought thereto”. In the same pious spirit a Turk in an isle of the Levant once told Mr. Newton a story of how a man hunted a stag, and the stag spoke to him. “The stag spoke?” said Mr. Newton. “Yes, by

re now, among lo

where couch the

all day by Ac

oud mother lies,

reast broods o’er

— Prometheus

be observed in a fragment of Philemon, the comic poet. “Never, by the gods, have I believed, nor will believe, that Niobe the

a great marvel, and changed into a stone the serpent which swallowed the young of the sparrow. Changes into stone, though less common than changes into fishes, bir

dominion of myth. As far as possessing souls is concerned, Mr. Tylor has proved that plants are as well equipped as men or beasts or minerals.69 In India the doctrine of transmigration widely and clearly recognises the idea of trees or smaller plants being animated by human souls. In the well-known ancient Egyptian story of “The Two Brothers,”70 the life of the younger is practically merged i

not find hi

ightly issu

repay her ki

h usury

people were melting away under him”. The brothers Toa and Pale, wishing to escape the royal oven, adopted various changes of shape. They knew that straight timber was being sought for to make a canoe for the king, so Pale, when he assumed a vegetable form, became a crooked stick overgrown with creepers, but Toa “preferred standing erect as a handsome straight tree”. Poor Toa was therefore cut down by the king’s shipwrights, though, thanks to his

d to leave her, but (like the White Cat in the fairy tale) he requested her to cut off his eel’s head and bury it. Regretfully but firmly did Ina comply with his request, and from the buried eel’s head sprang two cocoa trees, one from each half of the brain of Tuna. As a proof of this be it remarked, that when the nut is husked we always find on it “the two eyes and mouth of the lover of Ina”.75 All o

morphosis into plants and flowers is extremely common; the instances of Daphne, My

were in the savage intellectual condition. In that stage, as we demonstrated, no line is drawn between things animate and inanimate, dumb or “articulate speaking,” organic or inorganic, personal or im

. of which they are intimately conscious”.77 Now they believe themselves to be conscious of magical and supernatural powers, which they do not, of course, possess. These powers of effecting metamorphosis, of “shape-shifting,” of flying, of becoming invisible at will, of conversing with the dead, of miraculously healing the sick, savages pass on to their gods (as will be shown in a later chapter), and the gods of myth survive and retain the miraculous gifts after their worshippers (become more reasonable) have quite