Babylonian-Assyrian Birth-Omens and Their Cultural Significance Part 7

But despite the results of scientific investigation which so strikingly justify Aristotle's protest against regarding abnormal phenomena in the young of animals and of infants as =contra naturam=, the strong desire for the marvellous still helps to maintain at least the belief in monsters, even if the corollary that the monster is a birth-omen has disappeared.

The believers of the Middle Ages have been succeeded by the deceivers of the 19th and 20th centuries--the naive Lycosthenes by the shrewder Barnums[252] who in order to supply the demand created by the love of the marvellous have manufactured their monsters. To be sure even this is not quite new under the sun, for Pliny[253] tells us that he saw a hippocentaur which was brought to Rome from Thessalonica at the order of the Emperor Claudius and which, as it subsequently turned out, was the embalmed body of a horse to which a human foetus had been skillfully attached. The latest companion piece to this neat bit of trickery is to be found in a description of a fish with the head of a man that was exhibited in the Crimea in 1911--fished up in the Pacific Ocean[254]!

XI

To sum up the results of our investigations in a series of propositions:

1. The Babylonian-a.s.syrian birth-omens which can be traced back to at least 2000 B. C. rest on the impression made by the mystery of a new life emerging from another.

2. A leading factor in the interpretation of the omens was the recognized resemblance--often striking--between the features of an infant and that of some animal, or of an animal to some other.

3. As Babylonian-a.s.syrian hepatoscopy led to the study of the anatomy of the liver, and Babylonian-a.s.syrian astrology to the study of the phenomena in the heavens, so the resemblance between man and animals became the basis for the study of Human Physiognomy, which when it came to the Greeks and Romans was made a means of determining the character of the individual, just as Babylonian-a.s.syrian astrology when transferred to Greece and Rome was applied to the individual as a means of casting his horoscope, i. e., for determining the general course of his life.

4. This same factor of the resemblance between men and animals in conjunction with the ignorance as to the processes of nature led to the belief in all kinds of hybrid creatures, composed of human and animal organs or features.

5. This belief underlies the fabulous creatures of Greek and Roman mythology, and also helps to explain the representation of G.o.ds as partly animalic in Egypt, in India and in China.

6. The recognition of a resemblance between man and animals is universal, and besides leading in connection with birth-omens to the belief in the actual existence of beings composed of partly human and partly animal organs or parts of the body, developed quite independently of such a.s.sociations also in three other directions, leading on the one hand to the belief in the descent of a clan or group from some animal, and on the other to the belief in a transformation of a human being into an animal and =vice versa=, and thirdly to the Beast Fables of India in which beasts that talk like human beings are introduced.

7. The theory set forth in Berosus of a time when mixed creatures of all kinds existed reflects the fanciful combinations found in the collections of the =baru=-priests.

8. The Roman view of a monster as a 'sign' (monstrum), sent as an indication of some event of a disastrous character, is directly traceable to the Babylonian-a.s.syrian point of view of malformations of all kinds and deviations from the normal as birth-omens.

9. From Rome this view pa.s.sed over to mediaeval Europe, where under Christian influence the monster became a 'sign' sent by an angered deity as a warning and as a punishment for sins.

10. The pristine ignorance of the course of nature, leading to the a.s.sumption that conception could take place without s.e.xual intercourse, had its natural outcome in the belief that women giving birth to monstrosities had intercourse--wilful or unknown to them--with demons as emissaries of the devil, or with the devil himself. This att.i.tude served to maintain the belief in monsters down to the threshhold of modern science.

11. The Roman law of burning the monstrous birth or of throwing it into the sea was maintained for a long time and led also to the punishment of the woman who through supposed intercourse with a demon had given birth to a monster.

12. The view taken of monsters as a sign sent by an angered Deity had much to do with preventing the rise of a scientific theory to account for actual malformations of all kinds.

13. The rise of Teratology as a branch of medical science in the 19th century represents the closing chapter in the history of monsters, which is thus to be traced back to Babylonian-a.s.syrian birth-omens--one of the three chief branches of Babylonian-a.s.syrian divination that all made their way with the spread of the influence of Euphratean culture throughout Asia Minor and westwards to Greece and Rome, and that may also have pa.s.sed to the distant East.

[=Addendum=, to page 43, Note 2.]

Porta, who in his =Della Fisonomia dell' Huomo= (Venice edition, 1648, chapters XIII and XIV, or Latin edition =De Humana Physiognomia=, Frankfurt 1618, chapter IX) ascribes to Plato the opinion that a man who resembles an animal is likely to have the traits of that animal, appears to base this view on such a pa.s.sage as Phaedo -- 31, referred to in the note, and which is given as the reference in the German translation of Porta's work. The pa.s.sage, however, hardly admits of this interpretation, though it would appear from Porta, who evidently does not stand alone in his opinion, that from Plato's view that according to the life led by a man his soul will be transferred into an animal having the traits manifested by the individual, the corollary was drawn that a man who resembles an animal has a soul which shows the traits of the animal which he resembles.