Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume II Part 31

* _Revue des Traditions Populaires_, April 25,1887, p. 186.

We have few opportunities of finding examples of remote American _marchen_ recorded so early as this, and generally the hypothesis of recent borrowing from Europeans, or from Negroes influenced by Europeans, is at least possible, and it would be hard to prove a negative. But the case of the Huarochiri throws doubt on the hypothesis of recent borrowing as the invariable cause of the diffusion of _marchen_ in places beyond the reach of historic India.

The only way (outside of direct evidence) to prove borrowing would be to show that ideas and customs peculiarly Indian (for example) occur in the _marchen_ of people dest.i.tute of these ideas. But it would be hard to ask believers in the Indian theory to exhibit such survivals. In the first place, if _contes_ have been borrowed, it seems that a new "local colour" was given to them almost at the moment of transference. The Zulu and Kaffir _marchen_ are steeped in Zulu and Kaffir colour, and the life they describe is rich in examples of rather peculiar native rites and ceremonies, seldom if ever essential to the conduct of the tale. Thus, if stories are "adapted" (like French plays) in the moment of borrowing, it will be cruel to ask supporters of the Indian theory for traces of Indian traits and ideas in European _marchen_. Again, apart from special yet non-essential matters of etiquette (such as the ceremonies with which certain kinsfolk are treated, or the initiation of girls at the marriageable age), the ideas and customs found in marchen are practically universal As has been shown, the super-natural stuff--metamorphosis, equality of man, beasts and things, magic and the like--_is_ universal. Thus little remains that could be fixed on as especially the custom or idea of any one given people. For instance, in certain variants of _Puss in Boots_, Swahili, Avar, Neapolitan, the beast-hero makes it a great point that, when he dies, he is to be _honourably buried_. Now what peoples give beasts honourable burial? We know the cases of ancient Egyptians, Samoans, Arabs and Athenians (in the case, at least, of the wolf), and probably there are many more. Thus even so peculiar an idea or incident as this cannot be proved to belong to a definite region, or to come from any one original centre.*

* See Deulin, Gontes de ma Mire l'Oye, and Reinhold Kohler in Gonzenbach's Siclianische Marchen, No. 65.

By the very nature of the case, therefore, it is difficult for M.

Cosquin and other supporters of the Indian theory to prove the existence of Indian ideas in European marchen. Nor do they establish this point.

They urge that _charity to beasts_ and the _grat.i.tude of beasts_, as contrasted with human lack of grat.i.tude, are Indian, and perhaps Buddhist ideas. Thus the Buddha gave his own living body to a famished tigress. But so, according to Garcila.s.so, were the subjects of the Incas wont to do, and they were not Buddhists. The beasts in marchen, again, are just as often, or even more frequently, helpful to men without any motive of grat.i.tude; nor would it be fair to argue that the notion of grat.i.tude has dropped out, because we find friendly beasts all the world over, totems and manitous, who have never been benefited by man. The favours are all on the side of the totems. It is needless to adduce again the evidence on this topic. M. Cosquin adds that the belief in the equality and interchangeability of attributes and aspect between man and beast is "une idee bien indienne," and derived from the doctrine of metempsychosis, "qui efface la distinction entre l'homme et l'animal, et qui en tout vivant voit un frere". But it has been demonstrated that this belief in the equality and kins.h.i.+p not only of all animate, but all inanimate nature, is the very basis of Australian, Zuni and all other philosophies of the backward races. No idea can be less peculiar to India; it is universal. Once more, the belief that shape-s.h.i.+fting (metamorphosis) can be achieved by skin-s.h.i.+fting, by donning or doffing the hide of a beast, is no more "peculiarly Indian" than the other conceptions. Benfey, to be sure, laid stress on this point;* but it is easy to produce examples of skin-s.h.i.+fting and consequent metamorphosis from Roman, North American, Old Scandinavian, Thlinkeet, Slav and Vogul ritual and myths.** There remains only a trace of polygamy in European marchen to speak of specially Indian influence.*** But polygamy is not peculiar to India, nor is monogamy a recent inst.i.tution in Europe.

* Pantschatantra, I 265.

** Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, pp. lx., lxiv., where examples and authorities are given.

*** Cosquin, op. cit, i., x.x.x.

Thus each "peculiarly Indian" idea supposed to be found in marchen proves to be practically universal. So the whole Indian hypothesis is attacked on every side. _Contes_ are far older than _historic_ India.

Nothing raises even a presumption that they first arose in _prehistoric_ India. They are found in places where they could hardly have travelled from historic India. Their ideas are not peculiarly Indian, and though many reached Europe and Asia in literary form derived from India during the Middle Ages, and were even used as parables in sermons, yet the majority of European folk-tales have few traces of Indian influence.

Some examples of this influence, as when the "frame-work" of an Oriental collection has acquired popular circulation, will be found in Professor Crane's interesting book, _Italian Popular Tales_, pp. 168, 359. But to admit this is very different from a.s.serting that German _Hausmarchen_ are all derived from "Indian and Arabian originals, with necessary changes of costume and manners," which is, apparently, the opinion of some students.

What remains to do is to confess ignorance of the original centre of the _marchen_, and inability to decide dogmatically which stories must have been invented only once for all, and which may have come together by the mere blending of the universal elements of imagination. It is only certain that no limit can be put to a story's power of flight _per ora virum_. It may wander wherever merchants wander, wherever captives are dragged, wherever slaves are sold, wherever the custom of exogamy commands the choice of alien wives. Thus the story flits through the who let race and over the whole world. Wherever human communication is or has been possible, there the story may go, and the s.p.a.ce of time during which the courses of the sea and the paths of the land have been open to story is dateless and unknown. Here the story may dwindle to a fireside tale; there it may become an epic in the mouth of Homer or a novel in the hands of Madame D'Aulnoy or Miss Thackeray. The savage makes the characters beasts or birds; the epic poet or saga-man made them heroic kings, or lovely, baleful sorceresses, daughters of the Sun; the French Countess makes them princesses and countesses. Like its own heroes, the popular story can a.s.sume every shape; like some of them, it has drunk the waters of immortality.*

* A curious essay by Mr. H. E. Warner, on "The Magical Flight," urges that there is no plot, but only a fortuitous congeries of story-atoms (Scribner's Magazine, June, 1887).

There is a good deal to be said, in this case, for Mr.

Warner's conclusions.

APPENDIX A. Fontenelle's forgotten common sense

In the opinion of Aristotle, most discoveries and inventions have been made time after time and forgotten again. Aristotle may not have been quite correct in this view; and his remarks, perhaps, chiefly applied to politics, in which every conceivable and inconceivable experiment has doubtless been attempted. In a field of less general interest--namely, the explanation of the absurdities of mythology--the true cause was discovered more than a hundred years ago by a man of great reputation, and then was quietly forgotten. Why did the ancient peoples--above all, the Greeks--tell such extremely gross and irrational stories about their G.o.ds and heroes? That is the riddle of the mythological Sphinx. It was answered briefly, wittily and correctly by Fontenelle; and the answer was neglected, and half a dozen learned but impossible theories have since come in and out of fas.h.i.+on. Only within the last ten years has Fontenelle's idea been, not resuscitated, but rediscovered. The followers of Mr. E. B. Taylor, Mannhardt, Gaidoz, and the rest, do not seem to be aware that they are only repeating the notions of the nephew of Corneille.

The Academician's theory is stated in a short essay, De l'Origine des Fables (OEuvres: Paris, 1758, vol. iii. p.270). We have been so accustomed from childhood, he says, to the absurdities of Greek myth, that we have ceased to be aware that they are absurd. Why are the legends of men and beasts and G.o.ds so incredible and revolting? Why have we ceased to tell such tales? The answer is, that early men were in "a state of almost inconceivable savagery and ignorance," and that the Greek myths are inherited from people in that condition. "Look at the Kaffirs and Iroquois," says Fontenelle, "if you wish to know what early men were like; and remember that even the Iroquois and Kaffirs are people with a long past, with knowledge and culture (_politesse_) which the first men did not enjoy." Now the more ignorant a man is, the more prodigies he supposes himself to behold. Thus the first narratives of the earliest men were full of monstrous things, "parce qu'ils etoient faits par des gens sujets a voir bien des choses qui n'etaient pas".

This condition answers, in Mr. Tylor's system, to the confusion the savage makes between dreams and facts, and to the hallucinations which beset him when he does not get his regular meals. Here, then, we have a groundwork of irresponsible fancy.

The next step is this: even the rudest men are curious, and ask "the reason why" of phenomena. "II y a eu de la philosophie meme dans ces siecles grossiers;" and this rude philosophy "greatly contributed to the origin of myths ". Men looked for causes of things. "'Whence comes this river?' asked the reflective man of those ages--a queer philosopher, yet one who might have been a Descartes did he live to-day. After long meditation, he concluded that some one had always to keep filling the source whence the stream springs. And whence came the water? Our philosopher did not consider so curiously. He had evolved the myth of a water-nymph or naiad, and there he stopped. The characteristic of these mythical explanations--as of all philosophies, past, present and to come--was that they were limited by human experience. Early man's experience showed him that effects were produced by conscious, sentient, personal causes like himself. He sprang to the conclusion that all hidden causes were also persons. These persons are the _dramatis personae_ of myth. It was a person who caused thunder, with a hammer or a mace; or it was a bird whose wings produced the din.

"From this rough philosophy which prevailed in the early ages were born the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses"--deities made not only in the likeness of man, but of savage man as he, in his ignorance and superst.i.tion, conceived himself to be. Fontenelle might have added that those fancied personal causes who became G.o.ds were also fas.h.i.+oned in the likeness of the beasts, whom early man regarded as his equals or superiors. But he neglects this point. He correctly remarks that the G.o.ds of myth appear immoral to us because they were devised by men whose morality was all unlike ours--who prized justice less than power, especially (he might have added) magical power. As morality ripened into self-consciousness, the G.o.ds improved with the improvement of men; and "the G.o.ds known to Cicero are much better than those known to Homer, because better philosophers have had a hand at their making". Moreover, in the earliest speculations an imaginative and hair-brained philosophy explained all that seemed extraordinary in nature; while the sphere of philosophy was filled by fanciful narratives about facts. The constellations called the Bears were accounted for as metamorphosed men and women. Indeed, "all the metamorphoses are the physical philosophy of these early times,"

which accounted for every fact by what we now calletiological nature-myths. Even the peculiarities of birds and beasts were thus explained. The partridge flies low because Daedalus (who had seen his son Icarus perish through a lofty flight) was changed into a partridge.

This habit of mind, which finds a story for the solution of every problem, survives, Fontenelle remarks, in what we now call folk-lore--popular tradition. Thus, the elder tree is said to have borne as good berries as the vine does till Judas Iscariot hanged himself from its branches. This story must be later than Christianity; but it is precisely identical in character with those ancient metamorphoses which Ovid collected. The kind of fancy that produced these and other prodigious myths is not peculiar, Fontenelle maintains, to Eastern peoples. "It is common to all men," at a certain mental stage--"in the tropics or in the regions of eternal ice." Thus the world-wide similarities of myths are, on the whole, the consequence of a worldwide uniformity of intellectual development.

Fontenelle hints at his proof of this theory. He compares the myths of America with those of Greece, and shows that distance in s.p.a.ce and difference of race do not hinder Peruvians and Athenians from being "in the same tale". "For the Greeks, with all their intelligence, did not, in their beginnings, think more rationally than the savages of America, who were also, apparently, a rather primitive people (_a.s.sez nouveau_)."

He concludes that the Americans might have become as sensible as the Greeks if they had been allowed the leisure.

With an exception in the Israelites, Fontenelle decides that all nations made the astounding part of their myths while they were savages, and retained them from custom and religious conservatism. But myths were also borrowed and interchanged between Phoenicia, Egypt and Greece. Further, Greek misunderstandings of the meanings of Phoenician and other foreign words gave rise to myths. Finally, myths were supposed to contain treasures of antique mysterious wisdom; and mythology was explained by systems which themselves are only myths, stories told by the learned to themselves and to the public.

"It is not science to fill one's head with the follies of Phoenicians and Greeks, but it is science to understand what led Greeks and Phoenicians to imagine these follies." A better and briefer system of mythology could not be devised; but the Mr. Casaubons of this world have neglected it, and even now it is beyond their comprehension.

APPENDIX B. Reply to Objections

In a work which perhaps inevitably contains much controversial matter, it has seemed best to consign to an Appendix the answers to objections against the method advocated. By this means the attention is less directed from the matter in hand, the exposition of the method itself.

We have announced our belief that a certain element in mythology is derived from the mental condition of savages. To this it is replied, with perfect truth, that there are savages and savages; that a vast number of shades of culture and of nascent or retrograding civilisation exist among the races to whom the term "savage" is commonly applied.

This is not only true, but its truth is part of the very gist of our theory. It is our contention that myth is sensibly affected by the varieties of culture which prevail among so-called savage tribes, as they approach to or decline from the higher state of barbarism. The anthropologist is, or ought to be, the last man to lump all savages together, as if they were all on the same level of culture.

When we speak of "the savage mental condition," we mean the mental condition of all uncultivated races who still fail to draw any marked line between man and the animate or inanimate things in the world, and who explain physical phenomena on a vague theory, more or less consciously held, that all nature is animated and endowed with human attributes. This state of mind is nowhere absolutely extinct; it prevails, to a limited extent, among untutored European peasantry, and among the children of the educated cla.s.ses. But this intellectual condition is most marked and most powerful among the races which ascend from the condition of the Australian Murri and the Bushmen, up to the comparatively advanced Maoris of New Zealand and Algonkins or Zunis of North America. These are the sorts of people who, for our present purpose, must be succinctly described as still in the savage condition of the imagination.

Again, it is constantly objected to our method that we have no knowledge of the past of races at present in the savage status. "The savage are as old as the civilised races, and can as little be named primitive,"

writes Dr. Fairbairn.* Mr. Max Muller complains with justice of authors who "speak of the savage of to-day as if he had only just been sent into the world, forgetting that, as a living species, he is probably not a day younger than ourselves".** But Mr. Max Muller has himself admitted all we want, namely, _that savages or nomads represent an earlier stage of culture than even the ancient Sanskrit-speaking Aryans_, This follows from the learned writer's a.s.sertion that savage tongues, Kaffir and so forth, are still in the childhood which Hebrew and the most ancient Sanskrit had long left behind them.*** "We see in them" (savage languages) "what we can no longer expect to see even in the most ancient Sanskrit or Hebrew. We watch the childhood of language with all its childish pranks." These "pranks" are the result of the very habits of savage thought which we regard as earlier than "the most ancient Sanskrit".

* Academy, 20th July, 1878. a

** Hibb. Lect., p. 66.

*** Lectures on Science of Language, 2nd series, p. 41.

Thus Mr. Max Muller has admitted all that we need--admitted that savage language (and therefore, in his view, savage thought) is of an earlier stratum than, for example, the language of the Vedas. No more valuable concession could be made by a learned opponent.

Objections of an opposite character, however, are pushed, along with the statement that we have no knowledge of the past of savages. Savages were not always what they are now; they may have degenerated from a higher condition; their present myths may be the corruption of something purer and better; above all, savages are not _primitive_.

All this contention, whatever its weight, does not affect the thesis of the present argument. It is quite true that we know nothing directly of the condition, let us say, of the Australian tribes a thousand years ago except that it has left absolutely no material traces of higher culture.

But neither do we know anything directly about the condition of the Indo-European peoples five hundred years before Philology fancies that she gets her earliest glimpse of them. We must take people as we find them, and must not place too much trust in our attempts to reconstruct their "dark backward". As to the past of savages, it is admitted by most anthropologists that certain tribes have probably seen better days. The Fuegians and the Bushmen and the Digger Indians were probably driven by stronger races out of seats comparatively happy and habits comparatively settled into their present homes and their present makes.h.i.+ft wretchedness.*

* The Fuegiaus are not (morally and socially) so black as they have occasionally been painted. But it is probable that they "have seen better days". If the possession of a language with, apparently, a very superfluous number of words is a proof of high civilisation in the past, then the Fuegians are degraded indeed. But the finding of one piece of native pottery in an Australian burial-mound would prove more than a wilderness of irregular verbs.

But while degeneration is admitted as an element in history, there seems no tangible reason for believing that the highest state which Bushmen, Fuegians, or Diggers ever attained, and from which they can be thought to have fallen, was higher than a rather more comfortable savagery.

There are ups and downs in savage as in civilised life, and perhaps "crowned races may degrade," but we have no evidence to show that the ancestors of the Diggers or the Fuegians were a "crowned race". Their descent has not been comparatively a very deep one; their presumed former height was not very high. As Mr. Tylor observes, "So far as history is to be our criterion, progression is primary and degradation secondary; culture must be gained before it can be lost". One thing about the past of savages we do know: it must have been a long past, and there must have been a period in it when the savage had even less of what Aristotle calls (------) even less of the equipment and provision necessary for a n.o.ble life than he possesses at present. His past must have been long, because great length of time is required for the evolution of his exceedingly complex customs, such as his marriage laws and his minute etiquette. Mr. Herbert Spencer has deduced from the multiplicity, elaborateness and wide diffusion of Australian marriage laws the inference that the Australians were once more civilised than they are now, and had once a kind of central government and police. But to reason thus is to fail back on the old Greek theory which for every traditional custom imagined an early legislative hero, with a genius for devising laws, and with power to secure their being obeyed. The more generally accepted view of modern science is that law and custom are things slowly evolved under stress of human circ.u.mstances. It is certain that the usual process is from the extreme complexity of savage to the clear simplicity of civilised rules of forbidden degrees. Wherever we see an advancing civilisation, we see that it does not put on new, complex and incomprehensible regulations, but that it rather sloughs off the old, complex and incomprehensible regulations bequeathed to it by savagery.

This process is especially manifest in the laws of forbidden degrees in marriage--laws whose complexity among the Australians or North American Indians "might puzzle a mathematician," and whose simplicity in a civilised country seems transparent even to a child. But while the elaborateness and stringency of savage customary law point to a more, and not a less barbarous past, they also indicate a past of untold duration. Somewhere in that past also it is evident that the savage must have been even worse off materially than he is at present. Even now he can light a fire; he has a bow, or a boomerang, or a blowpipe, and has attained very considerable skill in using his own rough tools of flint and his weapons tipped with quartz. Now man was certainly not born in the possession of fire; he did not come into the world with a bow or a boomerang in his hand, nor with an instinct which taught him to barb his fis.h.i.+ng-hooks. These implements he had to learn to make and use, and till he had learned to use them and make them his condition must necessarily have been more dest.i.tute of material equipment than that of any races known to us historically. Thus all that can be inferred about the past of savages is that it was of vast duration, and that at one period man was more materially dest.i.tute, and so far more struggling and forlorn, than the Murri of Australia were when first discovered by Europeans. Even then certain races _may_ have had intellectual powers and potentialities beyond those of other races. Perhaps the first fathers of the white peoples of the North started with better brains and bodies than the first fathers of the Veddahs of Ceylon; but they all started naked, tool-less, fire-less. The only way of avoiding these conclusions is to hold-that men, or some favoured races of man, were created with civilised instincts and habits of thought, and were miraculously provided with the first necessaries of life, or were miraculously instructed to produce them without pa.s.sing through slow stages of experiment, invention and modification. But we might as well a.s.sume, with some early Biblical commentators, that the naked Adam in Paradise was miraculously clothed in a vesture of refulgent light.

Against such beliefs we have only to say that they are without direct historical confirmation of any kind.

But if, for the sake of argument, we admit the belief that primitive man was miraculously endowed, and was placed at once in a stage of simple and happy civilisation, our thesis still remains unaffected. Dr.

Fairbairn's saying has been quoted, "The savage are as old as the civilised races, and can as little be called primitive". But we do not wish to call savages primitive. We have already said that savages have a far-stretching unknown history behind them, and that (except on the supposition of miraculous enlightenment followed by degradation) their past must have been engaged in slowly evolving their rude arts, their strange beliefs and their elaborate customs. Undeniably there is nothing "primitive" in a man who can use a boomerang, and who must a.s.sign each separate joint of the kangaroo he kills to a separate member of his family circle, while to some of those members he is forbidden by law to speak. Men were not born into the world with all these notions. The lowest savage has sought out or inherited many inventions, and cannot be called "primitive". But it never was part of our argument that savages _are_ primitive. Our argument does not find it necessary to claim savagery as the state from which all men set forth. About what was "primitive," as we have no historical information on the topic, we express no opinion at all. Man may, if any one likes to think so, have appeared on earth in a state of perfection, and may have degenerated from that condition. Some such opinion, that purity and reasonableness are "nearer the beginning" than absurdity and unreasonableness, appears to be held by Mr. Max Muller, who remarks, "I simply say that in the Veda we have a nearer approach to a beginning, and an intelligible beginning, than in the wild invocations of Hottentots or Bushmen".*

* Lectures on India.

Would Mr. Muller add, "I simply say that in the arts and political society of the Vedic age we have a nearer approach to a beginning than in the arts and society of Hottentots and Bushmen"? Is the use of chariots, horses, s.h.i.+ps--are kings, walled cities, agriculture, the art of weaving, and so forth, all familiar to the Vedic poets, nearer the beginning of man's civilisation than the life of the naked or skin-clad hunter who has not yet learned to work the metals, who acknowledges no king, and has no certain abiding-place? If not, why is the religion of the civilised man nearer the beginning than that of the man who is not civilised? We have already seen that, in Mr. Max Muller's opinion, his language is much farther from the beginning.

Whatever the primitive condition of man may have been, it is certain that savagery was a stage through which he and his inst.i.tutions have pa.s.sed, or from which he has copiously borrowed. He may have degenerated from perfection, or from a humble kind of harmless simplicity, into savagery. He may have risen into savagery from a purely animal condition. But however this may have been, modern savages are at present in the savage condition, and the ancestors of the civilised races pa.s.sed through or borrowed from a similar savage condition. As Mr. Tylor says, "It is not necessary to inquire how the savage state first came to be upon the earth. It is enough that, by some means or other, it has actually come into existence."* It is a stage through which all societies have pa.s.sed, or (if that be contested) a condition of things from which all societies have borrowed. This view of the case has been well put by M. Darmesteter.**

* Prim. Cult., i 37.

** Revue Critique, January, 1884.