Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume I Part 15

Round each crow's neck was hung a piece of fat to serve as food on the journey. Hence the crows have white patches on breast and neck.

(1) Brief Account of Bushmen Folk-Lore, p. 7.

(2) Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874.

In Australia the origins of nearly all animals appear to be explained in myths, of which a fair collection is printed in Mr. Brough Symth's Aborigines of Victoria.(1) Still better examples occur in Mrs. Langloh Parker's Australian Legends. Why is the crane so thin? Once he was a man named Kar-ween, the second man fas.h.i.+oned out of clay by Pund-jel, a singular creative being, whose chequered career is traced elsewhere in our chapter on "Savage 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 pined away and became a mere skeleton. "Thereupon Pund-jel made Kar-ween a crane," and that is why the crane has such attenuated legs. The Kortume, Munkari and Waingilhe, now birds, were once men. The two latter behaved unkindly to their friend Kortume, who shot them out of his hut in a storm of rain, singing at the same time an incantation. The three then turned into birds, and when the Kortume sings it is a token that rain may be expected.

(1) Vol. i. p. 426 et seq.

Let us now compare with these Australian myths of the origin of certain species of birds the Greek story of the origin of frogs, as told by Menecrates and Nicander.(1) The frogs were herdsmen metamorphosed by Leto, the mother of Apollo. But, by way of showing how closely akin are the fancies of Greeks and Australian black fellows, we shall tell the legend without the proper names, which gave it a fict.i.tious dignity.

(1) Antoninus Liberalis, x.x.xv.

THE ORIGIN OF FROGS.

"A woman bore two children, and sought for a water-spring wherein to bathe them. She found a well, but herdsmen drove her away from it that their cattle might drink. Then some wolves 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 turned them all into frogs. She struck their backs and shoulders with a rough stone and drove them into the waters, and ever since that day frogs live in marshes and beside rivers."

A volume might be filled with such examples of the kindred fancies of Greeks and savages. Enough has probably been said to ill.u.s.trate our point, which is that Greek myths of this character were inherited from the period of savagery, when ideas of metamorphosis and of the kins.h.i.+p of 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 both in literature and in the legends of the peasantry. Every one who writes a Christmas tale for children now employs the machinery of metamorphosis, and in European folk-lore, as Fontenelle remarked, stories persist which are precisely similar in kind to the minor myths of savages.

Reasoning in this wise, the Mundas of Bengal thus account for peculiarities of certain animals. Sing Bonga, the chief G.o.d, cast certain people out of heaven; they fell to earth, found 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 spoiled these birds' tails, and blackened the previously white crow, scorched its beak red, and flattened its head.

Sing Bonga burned man, and turned woman into hills and waterspouts.(1)

(1) Dalton, pp. 186, 187.

Examples of this cla.s.s of myth in Indo-Aryan literature are not hard to find. Why is dawn red? Why are donkeys slow? Why have mules no young ones? Mules have no foals because they were severely burned when Agni (fire) 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 never recovered from their exertions in the same race, when the Asvins called on their a.s.ses and landed themselves the winners.(1) And cows are accommodated with horns for a reason no less probable and satisfactory.(2)

(1) Aitareya Brahmana, ii. 272, iv. 9.

(2) iv. 17.

Though in the legends of the less developed peoples men and women are more frequently metamorphosed into birds and beasts than into stones and plants, yet such changes of form are by no means unknown. To the north-east of Western Point there lies a range of hills, inhabited, according to the natives of Victoria, by a creature whose body is made of stone, and weapons make no wound in so st.u.r.dy a const.i.tution. 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 to this day, and I have seen it with my own eyes."(1) Another native, Toolabar, says that the women of the fis.h.i.+ng party cried out yacka torn, "very good". A dog replied yacka torn, and they were all changed into rocks. This very man, Toolabar, once heard a dog begin to talk, whereupon he and his father fled. Had they waited they would have become stones. "We should have been like it, wallung," that is, stones.

(1) Native narrator, ap. Brough Smyth, i. 479.

Among the North American Indians any stone which has a resemblance to the human or animal figure is explained as an example of metamorphosis.

Three stones among the Aricaras were a girl, her lover and her dog, who fled from home because the course of true love did not run smooth, and who were petrified. Certain stones near Chinook Point were sea-giants who swallowed a man. His brother, by aid of fire, dried up the bay and released the man, still alive, from the body of the giant. Then the giants were turned into rocks.(1) The rising sun in Popol Vuh (if the evidence of Popol Vuh, the Quichua sacred book, is to be accepted) changed into stone the lion, serpent and tiger G.o.ds. The Standing Rock on the Upper Missouri is adored by the Indians, and decorated with coloured ribbons and skins of animals. This stone was a woman, who, like Niobe, became literally petrified with grief when her husband took a second wife. Another stone-woman in a cave on the banks of the Kickapoo was wont to 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.(2) 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 wors.h.i.+p.(3) 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 Actaeon(4) near Little Muniton Creek, "resembling the bust of a man whose head is decorated with the horns of a stag".(5) 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.(6) G.o.ds, too, especially when these G.o.ds happen to be cuttlefish, might be petrified. They were chased in Samoa by an Upolu hero, who caught them in a great net and killed them. "They were changed into stones, and now stand up in a rocky part of the lagoon on the north side of Upolu."(7) Mauke, the first man, came out of a stone.

In short,(8) men and stones and beasts and G.o.ds and thunder have interchangeable forms. In Mangaia(9) the G.o.d Ra was tossed up into the sky by Maui and became pumice-stone. Many samples of this petrified deity are found in Mangaia. In Melanesia matters are so mixed that it is not easy to decide whether a wors.h.i.+pful stone is the dwelling of a dead man's soul or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether "the stone is the spirit's outward part or organ". The Vui, or spirit, has much the same relations with snakes, owls and sharks.(10) Qasavara, the mythical opponent of Qat, the Melanesian Prometheus, "fell dead from heaven"

(like Ra in Mangia), and was turned into a stone, on which sacrifices are made by those who desire strength in fighting.

(1) See authorities ap. Dorman, Primitive Superst.i.tions, pp. 130-138.

(2) Dorman, p. 133.

(3) Many examples are collected by J. G. Muller, Amerikanischen Urreligionen, pp. 97, 110, 125, especially when the stones have a likeness to human form, p. 17a. "Im der That werden auch einige in Steine, oder in Thiere and Pflanzen verwandelt." Cf. p. 220. Instances (from Balboa) of men turned into stone by wizards, p. 309.

(4) Preller thinks that Actaeon, devoured by his hounds after being changed into a stag, is a symbol of the vernal year. Palaephatus (De Fab. Narrat.) holds that the story is a moral fable.

(5) Dorman, p. 137.

(6) Turner's Samoa, p. 299.

(7) Samoa, p. 31.

(8) Op. cit., p. 34.

(9) Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 60.

(10) Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst., February, 1881.

Without delaying longer among savage myths of metamorphosis into stones, it may be briefly shown that the Greeks retained this with all the other vagaries of early fancy. Every one remembers the use which Perseus made of the Gorgon's head, and the stones on the coast of Seriphus, which, like the stones near Western Point in Victoria, had once been men, the enemies of the hero. "Also he slew the Gorgon," 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 G.o.ds 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 Allah's will," replied the Turk. Like Pindar, he was repeating an incident quite natural to the minds of Australians, or Bushmen, or Samoans, or Red Men, but, like the religious Pindar, he felt that the affair was rather marvellous, and accounted for it by the exercise of omnipotent power.(1) The Greek example of Niobe and her children may best be quoted in Mr. Bridges' translation from the Iliad:--

And somewhere now, among lone mountain rocks On Sipylus, where couch the nymphs at night Who dance all day by Achelous' stream, The once proud mother lies, herself a rook, And in cold breast broods o'er the G.o.ddess' wrong.

--Prometheus the fire-bringer.(2)

In the Iliad it is added that Cronion made the people into stones. The att.i.tude of the later Greek mind towards these myths may be observed in a fragment of Philemon, the comic poet. "Never, by the G.o.ds, have I believed, nor will believe, that Niobe the stone was once a woman. Nay, by reason of her calamities she became speechless, and so, from her silence, was called a stone."(3)

(1) Pindar, Pyth. x., Myers's translation.

(2) xxiv. 611.

(3) The Scholiast on Iliad, xxiv. 6, 7.

There is another famous petrification in the Iliad. When the prodigy of the snake and the sparrows had appeared to the a.s.sembled Achaeans at Aulis, Zeus displayed 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, birds and beasts, were thus obviously not too strange for the credulity of Greek mythology, which could also believe that a stone became the mother of Agdestis by Zeus.