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 THE BIRTH 
 
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 GROWTH OF MYTH 
 
 Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S., 
 
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 The Birth 
 
 and 
 
 Growth of Myth 
 
 By EDWARDJcLODD, F.R.A.S., 
 
 Author of "The Childhood of Religions," "The Childhood 
 of the World," etc. 
 
 ITATURE AS VIEWED BY PRIMITIVE MAN. 
 
 The application of the scientific method 
 
 3 the study of man has given a wider 
 
 leaning to the word " myth " than that 
 
 ommonly found in the dictionaries. 
 
 'hese explain it as fable, as designedly 
 
 ctitious, whether for amusement only, or 
 
 ) point a moral. The larger meaning 
 
 hich it holds to-day includes much more 
 
 ian this — to wit, the whole area of intel- 
 
 ctual products which lie beyond the his- 
 
 >ric horizon and overlap it, effacing on 
 
 sarer view the lines of separation. For 
 
 le myth, as fable only, has no place for 
 
 le crude fancies and grotesque imagin- 
 
 gs of barbarous races of the present 
 
 ioj ly, and of races at low levels of culture 
 
 I the remote past. And so long as it 
 
 as looked upon as the vagrant of fancy, 
 
 ith no serious meaning at the heart of 
 
 i 0I and as corresponding to no yearning 
 
 I man after the truth of things, sober 
 
 j tt satment of it was impossible. But now 
 
 at it, with its prolific offspring, legend 
 
 id tradition, is seen to be a necessary 
 
 availing through which the mind of man 
 
 ssed in its slow progress toward cer- 
 
 ude, the study and comparison of its 
 
 inifold, yet, at the center, allied forms, 
 
 d of the conditions out of which they 
 
 arose, takes rank among the serious in- 
 quiries of our time. 
 
 Not that the inquiry is a new one. Five 
 hundred years before Christ, z.e., in the 
 days of Euripides, the Greeks had identi- 
 fied the gods of their Olympus with the 
 sun and sky, although Anaxagoras was 
 sentenced to death and afterward banished 
 for calling the moon a lump of lifeless 
 matter, and in succeeding times myths 
 were either emptied of their meaning or 
 exalted to historic rank. In the hands of 
 Christian apologists, from the ages of the 
 Fathers to the present day " heathen " 
 mythologies have been cited as witnesses 
 to the corruptions of the faith, and, under 
 the solvent of blundering etymologies, 
 have been made to yield traces of a prim- 
 itive revelation and of the doctrine of a 
 Trinity ! But if the inquiry is not a new 
 one, the method of its prosecution is — a 
 method justified by its works. Because, 
 for the assigning of its due place in the 
 order of man's mental and spiritual de- 
 velopment to myth, there is needed that 
 knowledge concerning his origin, concern- 
 ing the conditions out of which he has 
 emerged, and concerning the mythologies 
 of lower races and their survival in un- 
 suspected forms in the higher races, 
 which was not only beyond the reach, 
 but the conception also, of men until this 
 century. 
 
 rw.*?f;;«J82 
 
2 [244] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 Except, therefore, as curiosities of lit- 
 erature, we may dismiss the Lempriere 
 of our school-days, and with him " Cas- 
 aubon "-Bryant and his key to all the 
 mythologies — a key that fits no lock ; with 
 him, too, in all respect be it added, 
 Mr. Gladstone, with his visions of the 
 Messiah in Apollo, and of the Logos in 
 Athene. 
 
 After this short preface, we may start 
 with the brief and plain statement, to be 
 justified by what follows, that the birth- 
 place of myth is in the endeavor of prim- 
 itive man to interpret the meaning of his 
 surroundings. By primitive man, I do 
 not, of course, mean the nameless savage 
 of the old Stone Age, who, if he had 
 brains and leisure enough to make guesses 
 about things, has left us no witness of 
 the fact. His relics, and those of his 
 successors to a period which is but as yes- 
 terday in the history of our kind, are ma- 
 terial only, and not until we possess the 
 symbols of man's thought, whether in lan- 
 guage or rude picture, do we get an ink- 
 ling of the meaning which the universe 
 had for him, in the detail of his pitiless I 
 daily life, in the shapes and motions of 
 surrounding objects, and in the majesty 
 of the heavens above him. Even then 
 the thought is more or less crystallized, 
 and if we would watch it in the fluent 
 form, we must have keen eye for the like 
 process going on among savages yet 
 untouched by the Time-Spirit, although 
 higher in the scale than the Papuans and 
 hill tribes of the Vindhya. For we can- 
 not so far lull our faculty of thought as 
 to realize the mental vacuity of the sav- 
 age, but we may, from survivals nowa- 
 days, lead up to reasonable guesses of 
 savage ways of looking at things in by- 
 gone ages, and the more so when we can 
 detect relics of these among the ignorant 
 and superstitious of modern times. 
 
 What meaning, then, had primitive 
 man's surroundings to him when eye and 
 ear could be diverted from prior claims 
 of the body, and he could repose from 
 watching for his prey and from listening 
 to the approach of wild beast or enemy r 
 He had the advantage, from greater de- 
 mand for their exercise, in keener senses 
 of sight, hearing, smell, and touch than 
 we enjoy ; nor did he fail to take in facts 
 in plenty. Only there was this vital de- 
 fect and difference, that in his brain every 
 fact was pigeon-holed, charged with its 
 own narrow meaning only, as in small 
 minds among ourselves we find place 
 given to inane, peddling detail, and no 
 advance made to general and wide con- 
 
 ception of things. In sharpest contrast 
 to the poet's utterance — 
 
 " Nothing in this world is single; 
 All things by a law divine 
 In each other's being mingle," 
 
 every fact is unrelated to every other 
 fact, and, therefore, interpreted wrongly. 
 
 Man, in his first outlook upon Nature, 
 was altogether ignorant of the character 
 of the forces by which he was environed ; 
 ignorant of that unvarying relation be- 
 tween effect and cause which it needed 
 the experience of ages and the generaliza- 
 tions therefrom to apprehend, and to ex- 
 press as " laws of nature." He had not 
 even the intellectual resource of later 
 times in inventing miracle to explain where 
 the necessary relation between events 
 seemed broken or absent. 
 
 His first attitude was that of wonder, 
 mingled with fear — fear as instinctive as 
 the dread of the brute for him. The sole 
 measure of things was himself ; conse- 
 quently, everything that moved or that 
 had power of movement, did so because 
 it was alive. A personal life and will was 
 attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, 
 waterfall, ocean, and tree, and the vary- 
 ing phenomena of the sky at dawn or 
 noonday, at gray eve or black-clouded 
 night, were the manifestation of the con- 
 trolling life that dwelt in all. In a thou- 
 sand different forms this conception was 
 expressed. The thunder was the roar of 
 a mighty beast ; the lightning a serpent 
 darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, 
 the storm demon's outshot forked tongue ; 
 the rainbow a thirsty monster ; the water- 
 spout a long-tailed dragon. This was 
 not a pretty or powerful conceit, not im- 
 agery, but an explanation. The men who 
 thus spoke of these phenomena meant 
 precisely what they said. What does the 
 savage know about heat, light, sound, 
 electricity, and the other modes of mo- 
 tion through which the Proteus force be- 
 yond our ken is manifest ? How many 
 persons who have enjoyed a " liberal " 
 education can give correct answer, if 
 asked off-hand, explaining how glaciers 
 are born of the sunshine, and why two 
 sounds, travelling in opposite directions 
 at equal velocities, " interfere " and cause 
 silence? I have been surprised at the 
 number of young men, nailing from 
 schools of renown, who have given me 
 the most ludicrous replies when asked 
 the cause of day and light, and the dis- 
 tance of the earth from the sun. 
 
 That the comparison between things 
 inanimate and animate arising from su- 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [245] 
 
 'perficial analogies is inborn in the savage, 
 is illustrated all the world over. The 
 North American Indians prefer a hook 
 that has caught a big fish to the handful 
 of hooks that have never been tried, and 
 they never lay two nets together, lest 
 they should be jealous of each other. 
 The Bushmen thought that the traveler 
 Chapman's big wagon was the mother of 
 his smaller ones ; and the natives of 
 Tahiti sowed in the ground some iron 
 nails given them by Captain Cook, ex- 
 pecting to obtain young ones. When 
 that ill-fated discoverer's ship was sighted 
 by the New Zealanders, they thought it 
 was a whale with wings. The king of 
 the Coussa Kaffirs, having broken off a 
 piece of the anchor of a stranded ship, soon 
 afterward died, upon which all the Kaffirs 
 made a point of saluting the anchor very 
 respectfully whenever they went near it, 
 regarding it as a vindictive being. But, 
 perhaps, one of the most striking and 
 amusing illustrations is that quoted by 
 Sir John Lubbock from the " Smithsonian 
 Reports," concerning an Indian who had 
 toeen sent by a missionary to a colleague 
 with four loaves of bread, accompanied 
 .by a letter stating their number. The 
 Indian ate some of the bread, and his 
 theft was, of course, found out. He was 
 •sent on a second errand with a similar 
 ■batch of bread and a letter, and repeated 
 the theft, but took the precaution to hide 
 the letter under a stone while he was eat- 
 ing the loaves, so that it might not see 
 him ! 
 
 As the individual is a type of the race, 
 :S0 in the child's nature we find analogy 
 of the mental attitude of the savage ready 
 to hand. To the child everything is 
 alive. With what timidity and wonder 
 he first touches a watch, with its moving 
 hands and clicking works ; with what 
 genuine anger he beats the door against 
 which he has knocked his head, whips 
 the rocking-horse that has flung him, then 
 ikisses and strokes it the next moment in 
 token of forgiveness and affection. Even 
 among civilized adults, as Mr. Grote re- 
 marks, " the force of momentary passion 
 will often suffice to supersede the ac- 
 quired habit, and an intelligent man may 
 be impelled in a moment of agonizing 
 pain to kick or beat the lifeless object 
 from which he has suffered." The men- 
 tal condition which causes the wild na- 
 tive of Brazil to bite the stone he stum- 
 bled over, may, as Dr. Tylor has pointed 
 out in his invaluable work on " Primitive 
 Culture," be traced along the course of 
 history, not merely in impulsive habit, 
 
 but in formally enacted law. If among 
 barbarous peoples we find, for example, 
 the relatives of a man killed by a fall from 
 a tree taking their revenge by cutting the 
 tree down and scattering it in chips, we 
 find a continuity of idea in the action of 
 the court of justice held at the Prytaneum 
 in Athens to try any inanimate object, 
 such as an axe, or a piece of wood, or 
 stone, which had caused the death of any 
 one without proved human agency, and 
 which, if condemned, was cast in solemn 
 form beyond the border. " The spirit of 
 this remarkable procedure reappears in 
 the old English law, repealed only in the 
 present reign, whereby not only a beast 
 that kills a man, but a cart-wheel that 
 runs over him, or a tree that falls on him 
 and kills him, is deodand, or given to God, 
 i.e., forfeited and sold for the poor." 
 Among ancient legal proceedings in 
 France we read of animals condemned to 
 the gallows for the crime of murder, and 
 of swarms of caterpillars which infected 
 certain districts being admonished to take 
 themselves off within a given number of 
 days on pain of being declared accursed 
 and excommunicated. When the New 
 Zealander swallows his dead enemy's eye 
 that he may see further, or gives his child 
 pebbles to make it stony and pitiless of 
 heart ; when the Abipone eats tiger's 
 flesh to increase his courage, such con- 
 fusion in the existence of transferable 
 qualities as these acts imply, has its sur- 
 vivals in the old wives' notion that the eye- 
 bright flower, which resembles the eye, is 
 good for diseases of that organ, in the 
 medical remedy for curing a sword-wound 
 by nursing the weapon that caused it, 
 and in the old adage, " take a hair of the 
 dog that bit you" — as the Scandinavian' 
 Edda says, "Dogs, hairs heal dogs, 
 bites." 
 
 II. 
 
 PERSONIFICATION OF THE POWERS OF 
 
 NATURE. 
 
 In selecting illustrations from the lit- 
 erature of savage mythology, the material 
 overburdens us by its richness. Much of 
 it is old, and, like refuse-heaps in our 
 mining districts, once cast aside as rub- 
 bish, but now made to yield products of 
 value, it has, after long neglect, been 
 found to contain elements of worth, which 
 patience and insight have extracted from 
 its travelers' tales and quaint speculations. 
 That for which it was most prized in the 
 
[246] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 days of our fathers is now of small ac- 
 count; that within it which they passed 
 by we secure as of lasting worth. Much 
 of that literature is, however, new, for the 
 impetus which has in our time been given 
 to the rescue and preservation of archaic 
 forms has reached this, and a host of ac- 
 complished collectors have secured rich 
 specimens of relics, which in the lands of 
 their discovery have still the authority of 
 the past, unimpaired by the critical ex- 
 posure of the present. 
 
 The subject itself is, moreover, so wide 
 reaching, bringing the ancient and the 
 modern into hitherto unsuspected relation, 
 showing how in customs and beliefs, to us 
 unmeaning and irrational, there lurk the 
 degraded representations of old philoso- 
 phies, and in what seems to us burlesque, 
 the survivals of man's most serious 
 thought. 
 
 One feels this difficulty of choice and 
 this temptation to digress in treating of 
 that confusion inherent in the savage 
 mind between things living and not living, 
 which was the main subject of my former 
 paper. By numberless illustrations at 
 hand, this confusion might be shown to 
 extend to the names or images of persons, 
 and to the persons themselves, as well as 
 to other relations which are purely sym- 
 bolical. 
 
 For example, the practice of burning or 
 hanging in effigy, by which a crowd ex- 
 presses its feelings toward any unpopu- 
 lar person, is a relic of the old belief in a 
 real and sympathetic connection between 
 a man and his image ; a belief extant 
 among the unlettered in by-places of civ- 
 ilized countries. When we hear of North 
 American tribes making images of their 
 foes, whose lives they expect to shorten 
 by piercing these images with their arrows, 
 we remember that these barbarous folk 
 have their representatives among us in the 
 Devonshire peasant, who hangs in his 
 chimney a pig's heart stuck all over with 
 thornprickles, so that the heart of his en- 
 emy may likewise be pierced. The prac- 
 tice among the Dyaks of Borneo, of making 
 a wax figure of the foe, so that his body 
 may waste away as the wax is melted, 
 will remind the admirers of Dante Ros- 
 setti, how he finds in a kindred mediaeval 
 superstition the subject of his poem 
 *' Sister Helen," while they who prefer the 
 authority of sober prose may turn to that 
 storehouse of the curious, Brand's " Pop- 
 ular Antiquities." Brand quotes from 
 King James, who, in his " Daemonology," 
 book ii. chap. 5, tells us that "the devil 
 teacheth how to make pictures of wax or 
 
 clay, that by roasting thereof the persons- 
 that they bear the name of may be con- ! 
 tinually melted or dried away by contin- 
 ual sickness ; " and also cites Andrews, ; 
 the author of a " Continuation of Henry's '■ 
 Great Britain," who, speaking of the 
 death of Ferdinand, Earl of Derby, by 
 poison, in the reign of Elizabeth, says : 
 " The credulity of the age attributed his 
 death to witchcraft. The disease was odd, 
 and operated as a perpetual emetic ; and 
 a waxen image, with hair like that of the 
 unfortunate earl, found in his chamber, 
 reduced every suspicion to certainty." 
 The passage from practices born of such 
 beliefs to the use of charms as protectives 
 against the evil-disposed and those in 
 league with the devil, and as cures for 
 divers diseases, is obvious. But upon this 
 it is. not needful to dwell ; what has been 
 said will suffice to show that the super- 
 stitious man is on the same plane as the 
 savage, but, save in rare instances, with- 
 out such excuse for remaining, as Bishop 
 Hall puts it, with " old wives and starres 
 as his counsellors, charms as his physicians, 
 and a little hallowed wax as his antidote 
 for all evils." 
 
 But we have traveled in brief space a 
 long way from our picture of primitive 
 man, weaving out of streams and breezes 
 and the sunshine his crude philosophy of 
 personal life and will controlling all, to the 
 peasant of to-day, his intellectual lineal 
 descendant, with his belief in signs and 
 wonders, his forecast of fate and future by 
 omens, by dreams, and by such pregnant 
 occurrences as the spilling of salt, the 
 howling of dogs, and changes of the 
 moon — in short, by the great mass of 
 superstitions which yet more or less in- 
 fluence the intelligent, terrorize the igno- 
 rant, and delight the student of human de- 
 velopment. 
 
 As, however, a good deal hinges upon 
 the evidences in savage myth-making of 
 the personification of the powers of na- 
 ture, we must return to this for awhile. 
 Obviously, the richest and most suggest- 
 ive material would be supplied by the 
 striking phenomena of the heavens, chiefly 
 in sunrise and sunset, in moon, star, star- 
 group, and meteor, cloud and storm, and, 
 next in importance, by the strange and 
 terrible among phenomena on earth, 
 whether in the restless waters, the un- 
 quiet trees, the grotesquely-shaped rocks, 
 and the fear inspired in man by creatures 
 more powerful than himself. Though 
 the whole range of the lower culture, sun. 
 moon, and constellations are spoken of 
 as living creatures, often as ancestors, he- 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 247] 
 
 roes, and benefactors who have departed 
 to the country above, to heaven, the heaved 
 -uplifted land. The Tongans of the South 
 Pacific say that two ancestors quarreled 
 respecting the parentage of the first born 
 ■of the woman Papa, each claiming the 
 •child as his own. No King Solomon ap- 
 pears to have been concerned in the dis- 
 pute, although at last the infant was cut 
 •in two. Vatea, the husband of Papa, 
 took the upper part as his share and forth- 
 with squeezed it into a ball and tossed it 
 into the heavens, where it became the sun. 
 Tonga-iti sullenly allowed the lower half 
 to remain a day or two on the ground. 
 But seeing the brightness of Vatea's 
 half, he compressed his share into a ball 
 and tossed it into the dark sky, during the 
 absence of the sun in the nether world. 
 Thus originated the moon, whose paleness 
 is owing to the blood having all drained 
 out of Tonga-iti's half as it lay upon the 
 ground. Mr. Gill, from whose valuable col- 
 lection of southern myth this is quoted, says 
 that it seems to have its origin in the alle- 
 gory of an alternating embrace of the fair 
 Earth by Day and Night. But despite the 
 explanations, more or less strained, which 
 some schools of comparative mythologists 
 find for every myth, the savage is not a 
 conscious weaver of allegories, or an em- 
 bryo Cabalist, and we shall find ourselves 
 more in accord with the laws of his intel- 
 lectual growth if, instead of delving for 
 recondite and subtle meanings in his 
 simple-sounding explanations of things, 
 we take the meaning to be that which lies 
 -on the surface. More on this, however, 
 anon. Among the Red Races, one tribe 
 thought that sun, moon, and stars were 
 men and women who went into the 
 sea every night and swam out by the east. 
 The Bushmen say that the sun was once 
 a man who shed light from his body, but 
 only for a short distance, until some chil- 
 dren threw him into the sky while he slept, 
 and thus he shines upon the wide earth. 
 The Australians say that all was darkness 
 around them till one of their many ances- 
 tors, who still shine from the stars, shed- 
 ding good and evil, threw, in pity for them, 
 an emu's egg into space, when it became 
 the sun. Among the Manacicas of Brazil, 
 •the sun was their culture-hero, virgin-born, 
 and their jugglers, who claimed power to 
 fly through the air, said that his luminous 
 figure, as that of a man, could be seen by 
 them, although too dazzling for common 
 mortals. 
 
 The sun has been stayed in his course 
 in other places than Gibeon, although by 
 mechanical means of which Joshua ap- 
 
 pears to have been independent. Among 
 the many exploits of Maui, abounding in 
 Polynesian myth, are those of his capture 
 of the sun. He had like Prometheus, 
 snatched fire from heaven for mortals, and 
 his next task was to cure Ra, the sun-god, 
 of his trick of setting before the day's 
 work was done. So Maui plaited thick 
 ropes of cocoanut fiber, and taking them 
 to the opening through which Ra climbed 
 up from the nether world, he laid a slip- 
 noose for him, placing the other ropes at 
 intervals along his path. Lying in wait 
 as Ra neared, he pulled the first rope, but 
 the noose only caught Ra's feet. Nor 
 could Maui stop him until he reached the 
 sixth rope, when he was caught round the 
 neck and pulled so tightly by Maui that 
 he had to come to terms, and agree to 
 slacken his pace for the future. Maui, 
 however, took the precaution to keep the 
 ropes on him, and they may still be seen 
 hanging from the sun at dawn and eve. 
 In Tahitian myth, Maui is a priest, who, 
 in building a house which must be finished 
 by daylight, seizes the sun by its rays and 
 binds it to a tree till the house is built. 
 In North American myth, a boy had 
 snared the sun, and there was no light on 
 the earth. So the beasts held council who 
 should undertake the perilous task of cut- 
 ting the cord, when the dormouse, then 
 the biggest among them, volunteered. 
 And it succeeded, but so scorched was it 
 by the heat that it was shriveled to the 
 smallest of creatures. Such a group of 
 myths is not easy of explanation ; but 
 when we find the sun regarded as an an- 
 cestor, and as one bound, mill-horselike, 
 to a certain course, the notion of his con- 
 trol and check would arise, and the sun- 
 catchers take their place in tradition 
 among those who have deserved well of 
 their race. It is one among numberless 
 aspects under which the doings of the sun 
 and of other objects in nature are depicted 
 as the doings of mortals, and the crude 
 conceptions of the Ojibwas and the 
 Samoans find their parallel in the mythol- 
 ogies of our Aryan ancestors. Only in 
 the former we see the mighty one shorn 
 of his dignity, with noose round his neck 
 or chains on either side ; whilst in the lat- 
 ter we see him as Herakles, with majesty 
 unimpaired, carrying out the twelve tasks 
 imposed by Eurystheus, and thus winning 
 for himself a place among the immortals. 
 
6 [2481 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 III. 
 
 THE SUN AND MOON IN MYTHOLOGY. 
 
 The names given to the sun in my- 
 thology are as manifold as his aspects and 
 influences, and as the moods of the un- 
 tutored minds that endowed him with 
 the complex and contrary qualities which 
 make up the nature of man. Him, 
 we say, not it, thus preserving in our 
 common speech a relic, not only of the 
 universal personification of things, but of 
 their division into sex. 
 
 The origin of gender is most obscure, 
 but its investment of both animate and 
 inanimate things with sexual qualities 
 shows it to be a product of the mythopoeic 
 stage of man's progress, and demands 
 some reference in these papers. The 
 languages of savages are in a constant 
 state of flux, even the most abiding terms, 
 as numerals and personal pronouns, be- 
 ing replaced by others in a few years. 
 And the changes undergone by civilized 
 speech have so rubbed away and ob- 
 scured its primitive forms that, look where 
 he may, the poverty of the old materials 
 embarrassess the inquirer. If the similar 
 endings to such undoubtedly early words 
 as father, mother, brother, sister, in our 
 own and other related languages, notably 
 Sanskrit, afford any clue, it goes rather to 
 show that gender was a later feature 
 than one might think. But there is no 
 uniformity in the matter. It seem pretty 
 clear that in the early forms of our Indo- 
 European speech there were two genders 
 only, masculine and feminine. The as- 
 signment of certain things conceived of as 
 sexless to neither gender, neutrius generis, 
 is of later origin. Some of the languages 
 derived from Latin, and, to name one of 
 a different family, the Hebrew, have no 
 neuter gender, whilst others, as the an- 
 cient Turkish and Finnish, have no gram- 
 matical gender. In our own, under the 
 organic changes incident to its absorption 
 of Norman and other foreign elements, 
 gender has practically disappeared (al- 
 though ships and nations are still spoken 
 of as feminine), the pronouns he, she, it, 
 being its representative. Such a gain is 
 apparent when we take up the study of 
 the ancestral Anglo-Saxon, with its mas- 
 culine, feminine, and neuter nouns, or of 
 our allied German with its perplexities of 
 sex, as, eg., its masculine spoon, its femi- 
 nine fork, its neuter knife. Turning for a 
 moment to such slight aid as barbaric 
 speech gives, we find in the languages of 
 the hill tribes of South India a curious 
 
 distinction made ; rational beings, as gods 
 and men, being grouped in a " high caste 
 or major gender," and living animals and 
 lifeless things in a"casteless or minor 
 gender." The languages of some North 
 American and South African tribes make 
 a distinction into animate and inanimate 
 gender ; but, as non-living things, the sun,, 
 the thunder, the lightning, are regarded, 
 as persons, they are classed in the ani- 
 mate gender. 
 
 Further research into the radicals of so^ 
 relatively fixed a language as Chinese, 
 and into more mobile languages related 
 to it, may, perhaps, enlighten the present 
 ignorance ; but one thing is certain, that 
 language was " once the scene of an 
 immense personification," and has there- 
 by added vitality to myth. Analogies 
 and conceptions apparent to barbaric 
 man, and in no way occurring to us, 
 caused him to attribute sexual qualities 
 not only to dead as to living things, but 
 to their several parts, as well as, in the 
 course of time, to intellectual and abstract 
 terms. Speaking broadly, things in 
 which were manifest size and qualities, 
 as strength, independence, governing or 
 controlling power, usually attaching to 
 the male, were classed as masculine ; 
 whilst those in which the gentler and 
 more subordinate features were apparent 
 were classed as feminine. Of course, 
 marked exceptions to this will at once 
 occur to us, as, eg., in certain savage 
 and civilized languages, where the sun is 
 feminine and the moon is masculine, but 
 in the main the division holds good. 
 The big is male, and the small is female. 
 The Dyaks of Borneo call a heavy down- 
 pour of rain a he rain ; and, if so strength- 
 imparting a thing as bread is to be 
 classed as either masculine or feminine, 
 we must agree with the negro who, in 
 answer to his master's question, " Sambo, 
 where's the bread ? " replied, " De bread, 
 massa? him lib in de pantry." The 
 mediaeval Persians are said to have dis- 
 tinguished between male and female 
 even in such things as food and cloth, 
 air and water, and prescribed their proper 
 use accordingly ; while, as Dr. Tylor.. 
 from whom the above is quoted, adds, 
 " even we, with our blunted mythologic 
 sense, cannot give an individual name to< 
 a lifeless object, such as a boat or a 
 weapon, without in the very act imagining 
 for it something of a personal nature." 
 
 But we must not stay longer in these 
 attractive byways of philology, however 
 warranted the digression may be, and. 
 must return to the many-titled sun. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [249] 7 
 
 While in the more elaborate my- 
 thologies of classic peoples we find him 
 addressed in exalted terms which are 
 still the metaphors of poetry, we are 
 nearer the rough material out of which 
 all myth is shaped when among races 
 who speak of sun, moon, and stars as 
 father, mother, and children, and who 
 mean exactly what they say. We may 
 find similar relationships in the solar and 
 lunar deities of Egyptian and classic 
 myth, but profound moral elements have 
 entered into these and dissolved the 
 material. We are face -to face with the 
 awful and abiding questions personified 
 in Osiris and Isis, in GZdipus and Jocaste, 
 where for us the sunlight pales and the 
 storm clouds are dispersed before the 
 dazzling mysteries of human life and 
 destiny. 
 
 No such matters confront us when in 
 Indian myth we read that the moon is 
 the sun's sister, an aged, pale-faced 
 woman, who in kindness led to her 
 brother two of the tribe who had sprung 
 arough a chasm in the sky to the pleas- 
 ant moonlit land. Neither do they in 
 Australian myth, which shows that the 
 dwellers on Olympus had no monopoly 
 of conjugal faithlessness. For in it' the 
 moon's motions are explained as the 
 chase of a jealous husband, one of the 
 bright stars, who found the inconstant in 
 the act of eloping with the moon. Among 
 the bushman, the moon has incurred the 
 sun's anger and is hacked smaller and 
 smaller by him, till, begging for mercy, a 
 respite is given. But as soon as he grows 
 larger the sun hacks him again. In 
 Slavonic myth the sun cleaves him 
 through, for loving the morning star. 
 The Indians of the far west say that, 
 when the moon is full, evil spirits begin 
 nibbling at it, and eat a portion every 
 night till it is all gone; then a great 
 spirit makes a new moon, and, weary 
 with his toil, falls asleep, when the bad 
 spirits renew their attack. Another not 
 uncommon group of myths is that which 
 speaks of sun and moon as borne across 
 the heavens on the backs of ancestors, as 
 in Greek myth Atlas supports the world. 
 
 But a still larger and more widespread 
 body of myth has its source in the 
 patches on the moon's face. In the 
 Samoan Islands there are said to be a 
 woman, a child, and a mallet. A woman 
 was once hammering out paper cloth, 
 and seeing the moon rise, looking like a 
 great bread-fruit tree, she asked it to 
 come down and let her child eat a piece 
 of it. But the moon was very angry at 
 
 the idea of being eaten, and gobbled up 
 woman, child, and mallet, and there they 
 are to this day. The Selish Indians of 
 North-Western America say that the lit- 
 tle wolf was in love with the toad, and 
 pursued her one moonlight night, till, as a 
 last chance, she made a desperate spring 
 on to the face of the moon, and there 
 she is still. In Greenland myth, the 
 moon was in love with his sister and stole 
 in the dark to caress her. She, wishing 
 to find out who her lover was, blackened 
 her hands so that the marks might be left 
 on him, which accounts for the spots. 
 The Khasias of the Himalaya say that 
 the moon falls in love every month 
 with his mother-in-law, who, like a well- 
 conducted matron, throws ashes in his 
 face. 
 
 Comparing these with our familiar 
 myths, we have our own Man in 
 the Moon, who is said to be the culprit 
 found by Moses gathering sticks on the 
 Sabbath, although his place of banish- 
 ment is a popular addition to the Script- 
 ure narrative. According to the Ger- 
 man legend he was a scoffer who did the 
 same heinous offense on a Sunday, and 
 was given the alternative of being scorch- 
 ed in the sun or frozen in the moon. 
 The Frisians say that he stole cabbages, 
 the load of which he bears on his back. 
 In Icelandic myth the two children famil- 
 iar to us as Jack and Jill were kidnaped 
 by the moon, and there they stand to this 
 day with bucket on pole across their 
 shoulders, falling away one after the 
 other as the moon wanes, — a phase de- 
 scribed in the couplet : 
 
 Jack fell down and broke his crown, 
 And Jill came tumbling after. 
 
 Mr. Baring Gould, whose essay on 
 this subject in his " Curious Myths of the 
 Middle Ages " gives a convenient sum- 
 mary of current legends, contends that 
 Jack and Jill are the Hjuki and Bil of the 
 Edda, and signify the waxing and waning 
 of the moon, their bucket indicating the 
 dependence of rainfall on her phases, — a 
 superstition extant among us yet. 
 
 Poetry has made the man in the moon 
 its theme. Dante calls him Cain : 
 Chaucer describes him 
 
 Bearing a bush of thorns on his back 
 Whiche for his theft might clime so ner the 
 heaven ; 
 
 and Shakespeare refers to him in " Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream " and the " Tem- 
 pest." 
 
 The group of customs observed 
 
8 1250] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 among both barbaric and civilized peo- 
 ples at the changes of the moon, customs 
 which are meaningless except as relics of 
 lunar worship, will be more fitly referred 
 to when we deal with the passage of 
 mythology into religion, of personifying 
 into deifying. 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE THEORIES OF CERTAIN COMPAR- 
 ATIVE MYTHOLOGISTS. 
 
 Manifold are the phases of Nature; 
 manifold is the life of man ; and we must 
 not lend a too willing ear to theories 
 which refer the crude explanations of an 
 unscientific age, when the whole universe 
 is Wonderland, to one source. Cave 
 hominei?i unius libri, says the adage, and 
 we may apply it, not only to the man of 
 one book, but also to the man of one 
 idea, in whom the sense of proportion is 
 lacking, and who sees only that for which 
 he looks. Here such caution is intro- 
 duced as needful of exercise toward the 
 comparative mythologists who, not con- 
 tent with showing — as abundant evidence 
 warrants — that myth has its germs in the 
 investment of the powers of nature with 
 personal life and consciousness, contend 
 that the great epics of our own and kin- 
 dred races are, from their broadest feat- 
 ures to minute detail, but nature-myths 
 obscured and transformed. 
 
 Certain scholars, notably Sir G. W. 
 Cox and Professor de Gubernatis, as in- 
 terpreters of the myths of the Indo-Eu- 
 ropean peoples, and Dr. Goldziher, as an 
 interpreter of Hebrew myth and cognate 
 forms, maintain that the names given in 
 the mythopceic age to the sun, the moon, 
 and the changing scenery of the heaven 
 as the myriad shades and fleeting forms 
 passed over its face, lost their original 
 signification wholly or partially, and came 
 to be regarded as the names of veritable 
 deities and men, whose actions and ad- 
 ventures are the disguised descriptions of 
 the sweep of the thunder-charged clouds 
 and of the victory of the hero-god over 
 their light-engulfing forces. But it is 
 better to state the theory in the words of 
 its exponents, and for that purpose a 
 couple of extracts from Sir George Cox's 
 " Mythology of the Aryan Nations " will 
 suffice. 
 
 " In the spontaneous utterances of thoughts 
 awakened by outward phenomena, we have 
 the source of myths which must be regarded 
 
 as primary. But it is obvious that such 
 myths would be produced only so long as 
 the words employed were used in their orig- 
 inal meaning. If once the meaning of the 
 word were either in part or wholly forgotten, 
 the creation of a new personality under this 
 name would become inevitable, and the 
 change would be rendered both more certain 
 and more rapid by the very wealth of words 
 which were lavished on the sights and ob- 
 jects which most impressed their imagina- 
 tion. A thousand phrases would be used to 
 describe the action of a beneficent or con- 
 suming sun, of the gentle or awful night, of 
 the playful or furious wind ; and every word 
 or phrase become the germ of a new story as 
 soon as the mind lost its hold on the origi- 
 nal force of the name. Thus, in the poly- 
 onymy " (by which term Sir Geo. Cox means 
 the giving of several names to one object) 
 " which was the result of the earliest form of 
 human thought we have the germ of the 
 great epics of later times, and of the count- 
 less legends which make up the rich stores 
 
 of mythical tradition and the legends 
 
 so framed constitute the class of secondary 
 mvths" (p. 42). 
 
 ' :< Henceforth the words which had de- 
 noted the sun and moon would denote not 
 merely living things but living persons. . . . 
 Every word would become an attribute, and 
 all ideas, once grouped round a single object, 
 would branch off into distinct personifica- 
 tions. The sun had been the lord of light, 
 the driver of the chariot of the day; he 
 had toiled and labored for the sons of 
 men, and sunk down to rest, after a hard 
 battle, in the evening. But now the lord of 
 light would be Phoibos Apollon, while He- 
 lios would remain enthroned in his fiery 
 chariot, and his toils and labors and death- 
 struggles would be transferred to Herakles. 
 The violet clouds which greet his rising and 
 his setting would now be represented by- 
 herds of cows which feed in earthly pastures. 
 There would be other expressions which 
 would still remain as floating phrases, not 
 attached to any definite deities. These 
 would gradually be converted into incidents 
 in the life of heroes, and be woven at length 
 into systematic variations. Finally, these 
 gods and heroes, and the incidents of their 
 mythical career, would receive each ' a local 
 habitation and a name.' These would re- 
 main as genuine history when the origin and 
 meaning of the words had been either wholly 
 or in part forgotten" (p. 51). 
 
 Such is the "solar myth" theory, the 
 general principles of which are sound 
 enough, but the unqualified application 
 of which has caused recoil in many minds 
 inclined to its acceptance. " We can 
 hardly," as Mr. Matthew Arnold says, 
 " now look up at the sun without having 
 the sensations of a moth," and if occa- 
 sion has not been given to the adversary 
 to blaspheme, he has been supplied with 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [251] 9 
 
 -ample material for banter and ridicule. 
 Some of the happiest illustrations of this 
 are made by Mr. Foster in his amusing 
 and really informing essay on " Nature 
 Myths in Nursery Rhymes," reprinted in 
 "Leisure Studies," an essay which it 
 seems the immaculate critics took au 
 seriettx / With a little exercise of one's 
 invention, given also ability to parody, it 
 will be found that many noted events, as 
 well as the lives of the chief actors in 
 them, yield results comforting to the so- 
 lar mythologists. Not only the Volsungs 
 and the Iliad, but the story of the Cru- 
 .sades and of the conquest of Mexico ; 
 not only Arthur and Baldr, but Caesar 
 and Bonaparte, may be readily resolved, 
 as Professor Tyndall says we all shall be, 
 " like streaks of morning cloud, into the 
 infinite azure of the past." Dupuis, in 
 his researches into the connection be- 
 tween astronomy and mythology, had 
 suggested that Jesus was the sun, and 
 the twelve apostles the zodiacal signs ; 
 and Goldziher, analyzing the records of 
 a remote period, maintains the same con- 
 cerning Jacob and his twelve sons. M. 
 Senart has satisfied himself that Gau- 
 tama the Buddha, is a sun-myth. Arch- 
 bishop Whately, to confound the skeptics, 
 ingeniously disproved the existence of 
 Bonaparte ; and a French ecclesiastic has 
 by witty etymological analogies shown 
 that Napoleon is cognate with Apollo, 
 the sun, and his mother Letitia identical 
 with Leto, the mother of Apollo ; that his 
 personnel of twelve Marshals were the 
 signs of the zodiac, his retreat from Mos- 
 cow a fiery setting, and his emergence 
 from Elba, to rule for twelve years, and 
 then be banished to St. Helena, the sun 
 rising out of the eastern waters to set in 
 the western ocean after twelve hours' 
 reign in the sky. But upon this solar 
 theory, let us cite what Dr. Tylor, whose 
 soberness of judgment renders him a val- 
 uable guide along the zigzag path of hu- 
 man progress, says : — " The close and 
 deep analogies between the life of nature 
 and the life of man have been for ages 
 dwelt upon by poets and philosophers, 
 who, in simile or in argument, have told 
 of light and darkness, of calm and tem- 
 pest, of birth, growth, change, decay, dis- 
 solution, renewal. But no one-sided in- 
 terpretation can be permitted to absorb 
 into a single theory such endless many- 
 sided correspondences as these. Rash 
 inferences which, on the strength of mere 
 resemblance, derive episodes of myth 
 from episodes of nature, must be re- 
 garded with utter mistrust, for the stu- 
 
 dent who has no more stringent criterion 
 than this for his myths of sun and sky 
 and dawn, will find them wherever it 
 pleases him to seek them." 
 
 The investigations of comparative 
 mythologists, more particularly in this 
 country and Germany, have thrown such 
 valuable light on the history of civiliza- 
 tion that it will be instructive to learn 
 what excited the inquiry, on what facts 
 the solar theory rests, and what other 
 facts its supporters overlook. 
 
 The researches of Niebuhr and his 
 school into the credibility of early history 
 made manifest that the only authority on 
 which the chroniclers relied was tradition. 
 To them — children of an uncritical age — 
 that tradition was venerable with the 
 lapse of time, and binding as a revelation 
 from the gods. To us the charm and in- 
 terest of it lie in detecting within it the 
 ancient deposit of a mythopoeic period, 
 and in deciphering from it what manner 
 of men they must have been among 
 whom such explanation of the beginnings 
 had credence. And in such an inquiry 
 nothing can be "common or unclean," 
 nothing too trivial or puerile for analysis ; 
 for where the most grotesque and impos- 
 sible are found, there we are nearer to 
 the conditions of which we would know 
 more. 
 
 The serious endeavor to get at the fact 
 underlying the fabulous was extended to 
 the great body of mythology which had 
 not been incorporated into history, and 
 the interpretations of which satisfied only 
 those who suggested them. As hinted 
 already, the Greeks had sought out the 
 meaning of their myths, with here and 
 there a glimpse of the truth gained ; but 
 this was confined to the philosophers and 
 poets. Euhemeros degraded them into 
 dull chronicle, making Herakles a thief 
 who carried off a crop of oranges ; Jove 
 a king crushing rebellion ; Atlas an as- 
 tronomer ; Python a freebooter ; ^Eolus 
 a weather-wise seaman, and so on. Plu- 
 tarch tried to " restore " them, but only 
 defaced them, and after centuries of neg- 
 lect they were discovered by Lord Bacon 
 to be allegories with a moral. Then 
 Banier and Lempriere emptied out of 
 them what little life Euhemeros had left, 
 and the believers in Hebrew as the orig- 
 inal speech of mankind saw in them the. 
 fragments of a universal primitive revela- 
 tion ! Even the distinguished scholar, 
 Professor Max Miiller, is so upset by the 
 many loathsome and revolting stories in 
 a mythology current in the land of Ly- 
 kurgos and Solon, that he can account for 
 
10 [252] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 them only by assuming " a period of tem- 
 porary insanity through which the human 
 mind had to pass," and a degradation 
 from lovely metaphor to coarse fact which 
 only a "disease of language" explains. 
 There is, however, no need for assump- 
 tions of this or of any other kind, for lan- 
 guage itself reveals the origin of myth, 
 and shows it to be in keeping with all 
 that is elsewhere established concerning 
 primitive modes of thinking. 
 
 ARYAN MYTHOLOGY. 
 
 We said that language lays bare the 
 mental condition under which myths are 
 formed; in other words, that speech reveals 
 the .limitations of thought. It would be 
 a useful corrective of theories concerning 
 the origin of language to which many are 
 yet wedded to show that not only terms for 
 things material and concrete, but also for 
 things immaterial and abstract, are of 
 purely physical origin — that is to say 
 have been chosen from their analogy to 
 something real. As an example, the 
 several verbs whose relics survive in the 
 substantive verb to be had each a distinct 
 physical meaning. " Am," " are," " is," 
 are derived from as (in Sanskrit asu, 
 " life,"), meaning " to breath " or " sit " ; 
 " was " and " were '' from vas, " abide " ; 
 and in " be " and " been " (from bnit, a 
 Sanskrit cognate with Latin fu, Greek 
 fhy, " to grow ") are contained the idea 
 of growing. But to follow this would 
 take us from the main business of these 
 papers ; enough that, out of manifold 
 combinations of a few inarticulate or un- 
 jointed sounds, the larger proportion of 
 which were imitative, have arisen the lan- 
 guages of the world, from the meager 
 stock of words of the unlearned and the 
 savage, to the nobly and expanding vo- 
 cabularies of educated men. 
 
 Passing to the facts upon which the 
 solar theory of myths rests, the following 
 stands foremost. The researches of 
 scholars, notably of the German Bopp 
 and Jacob Grimm, have shown that the 
 languages spoken in Europe by the Keltic, 
 Teutonic, Slavonic, Greek, and Latin 
 races, and in Asia by the Hindus, Persian, 
 and some lesser people, are the common 
 decendants, under modifications through 
 various causes, of one mother-tongue 
 known as the Aryan (from a Sanskrit 
 
 word cognate with the root ar to 
 plow) a term applied in the Vedas to 
 the dominant occupiers of the soil, the 
 " tillers " in India, who spoke it. The 
 above group of languages is also called 
 the Indo-Germanic, and, with more ap- 
 propriateness, as roughly defining the 
 races included therein, the Indo-European* 
 Of course, wherever the several branches 
 of the old Aryan family finally settled 
 they mixed more or less with the 
 aboriginal races, whom they conquer- 
 ed. But, making such allowances as 
 this demands, it holds good that peo- 
 ple to-day, so unlike in complexion, phy- 
 sique, color of hair, and speech, as the 
 Hindoo and the Icelander, the Russian 
 and the Englishman, the Persian and the 
 German, are the offspring of common an- 
 cestors, of whom, although no material 
 relics survive, language remains to attest 
 what considerable advance from primitive 
 savagery they had made. Wave after 
 wave of immigrants, among the earliest 
 being the Kelt, followed one another 
 westward, to wrestle for the fairest lands ; 
 so that when, centuries later, the veteran 
 legions of Caesar crossed swords with the 
 Belgae in this island, they fought against 
 men remotely kin to themselves both in 
 language and in blood. 
 
 Furthermore, the evidence which has 
 yielded this most interesting fact also 
 shows that the old Aryans, before they 
 separated into tribes, each of varying dia- 
 lect, had a common mythology. This, 
 which had its source, as myth everywhere 
 had, in man's endeavor to interpret the 
 meaning of his surroundings, developed 
 into a deification of the powers of nature, 
 and likewise become the groundwork of 
 traditional history, as well as the source 
 of legend, folk-lore, and folk-tale. So 
 venerable are these last-named in their 
 antiquity, that the nursery stories told in 
 Iceland and in the Tyrol, in the Highlands 
 and in the Deccan, are identical. After 
 allowing for local coloring, and. for 
 changes incident to the lapse of time, they 
 are the variants of stories related to chil- 
 dren in the Aryan fatherland at a period 
 historically remote, and moreover are told 
 in words which are phonetically akin. 
 Their correspondences, often extending to 
 minor detail, are not explained by any 
 theory of borrowing, for no trace of inter- 
 course between Aryans of the East and 
 West occurs until long after the domi- 
 ciling of the stories where we find them. 
 Nor did they, with such close resem- 
 blances as appear between the German 
 Faithful John, and the Hindu Rama, and. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH 
 
 [253] 11 
 
 Luxman, and between our own Cinderella, 
 the German Aschenputtal, and the Hindu 
 Sodrwa Bai, spring native from their re- 
 spective soils. And there is just that un- 
 likeness in certain detail which might be 
 expected from the different positions and 
 products of the several Aryan lands. 
 They explain, for example, the absence 
 from Scandinavian folk-love of creatures 
 like the elephant, the giant ape and turtle, 
 which figure in Brahmanic beast epic. 
 Now, what is true of the folk-tales applies 
 with added force to the mythologies. In 
 the great epics of the Greeks, the Iliad 
 and Odyssey ; of the Norsemen, the Vol- 
 sungs ; of the Germans, the Nibelungs ; 
 of the English, King Arthur and his 
 Round Table Knights ; of the Hindus, 
 the Ramayana and Mahabharata ; of the 
 Persians, the Shah Nameh ; we find sim- 
 ilarities of incident and episode which are 
 inexplicable, except upon the theory of a 
 common origin. So far as the names and 
 characteristics of the heroes and heroines 
 are concerned, their phonetic identity re- 
 veals that common origin, while their 
 analysis explains their common meaning. 
 
 The key to this is the Sanskrit language. 
 In the history of the Indo-European family 
 of speech, it served as the starting-point, 
 because, although not the ancestor, it is 
 the eldest member, and has more than 
 the others preserved its roots and suffixes 
 in a more perfect form. And in the his- 
 tory of Indo-European mythology, it is in 
 the' ancient Vedic texts, chiefly the Rig- 
 Veda, that we find the materials for com- 
 parative study, since in these venerable 
 hymns of a Bible older than our own are 
 preserved the earliest extant forms of 
 Aryan myth. 
 
 The method adopted was to compare a 
 number of the Greek names of gods and 
 heroes of somewhat obscure meaning 
 with names of Vedic deities whose mean- 
 ing is clear. The phonetic relationship 
 between the two sets of names, hidden as 
 it is by the interchange of sounds, is 
 proved by the law which governs such 
 interchange or "permutation of conso- 
 nants," known, after its discoverer, as 
 " Grimm's law." The causes of this are 
 not easy to ascertain, but they are referable 
 to physical influences, as climate and con- 
 ditions of life, which in the course of time 
 bring about changes in the organs of 
 speech — such, for example, as make th so 
 difficult of pronunciation to a German, in 
 whose language d takes its place, as drei 
 for three, durstig for thirsty, dein for 
 thine, etc. We may note tendencies to 
 variation in children of the same house- 
 
 hold, their prattle often affording striking 
 illustration of Grimm's law, and it is easy 
 to see that among semi-civilized and iso- 
 lated tribes, where no check upon the 
 variations is imposed, they would tend to 
 become fixed and give rise to new dialects^ 
 
 The method has been justified by its 
 works. The familiar myth of the birth of 
 Athene gives a good illustration of this. 
 She is said to have been the daughter of 
 Zeus, and to have sprung from his fore- 
 head. Now the Greek Zeu, the Latin 
 Deus (whence the French Dzeu and our 
 deity'), the Lithuanian diewas, and the 
 Sanskrit Dyaus, all come from an old 
 Aryan root div, or dyu, meaning " to 
 shine." The Sanskrit dyu, as a noun, 
 means " sky " or " day," and in the Veda,. 
 Dyaus is the bright sky or heavem 
 Athene is the Sanskrit Atana, one of the 
 many Vedic names for the dawn. Thus 
 the primitive meaning of the myth comes 
 out ; the dawn springs from the forehead 
 of the sky ; the daybreak appears rising 
 from the East. But the Greek, in whose 
 Pantheon Zeus had been exalted as god 
 of gods, did not dream that to his remote, 
 ancestor that god was but the sky person- 
 ified and deified ; even his philosophers 
 had traced it to the root zeu, "to live," 
 and forever lost the track. 
 
 Ouranos, or Uranus, is the Vedic Va- 
 runa, the all-surrounding heaven, from a 
 root var, to veil or cover ; Helen, stolen 
 by Paris (in Sans. Pani, " the deceiver ") 
 from Sparta, is the Vedic Sarama, the 
 dawn, from the root, sar, to creep ; the 
 Charites, or Graces, are the Harits, or 
 bright courses of the sun, from ghar, to 
 shine, whence the idea of splendor in its- 
 transfer to the fair women who attended 
 Aphrodite ; the Erinyes, or Furies, are the 
 Saranyu, or dawn, which brings evil deeds 
 to light. Hence, they who did this became 
 regarded as avengers, whose fury pursued 
 the wrong-doer. 
 
 These comparisons might be followed 
 throughout the whole range of classic as 
 well as of Teutonic and other epic with 
 the like result. They apply equally to 
 the mythical phrases in which the advent- 
 ures and general career of the gods and 
 heroes are narrated, for the details of 
 which my readers are referred to such 
 works as Sir G. W. Cox's " Mythology of 
 the Aryan Nations " and " Tales of 
 Ancient Greece." That these majestic 
 epics have one and all their germs in the 
 phenomena of the natural world and the 
 course of the day and year, seems to me 
 demonstrated. But when the solar my- 
 cologists contend that " there is absolute- 
 
12 [254] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 ly nothing left for furthur analysis in the 
 stories," that every incident has its birth 
 in the journey of the sun, the death of the 
 dawn, the theft of the twilight by the 
 powers of darkness, we rebel against so 
 sweeping an application of the theory. 
 They are nature-myths, but they are much 
 more than that ; the impetus that has 
 shaped them as we now know them came 
 from other forces than clouds and storms, 
 and it is with these that our next paper 
 must be concerned. 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE PRIMITIVE-NATURE MYTH TRANS- 
 FORMED. 
 
 In a former paper, the facts on which 
 the solar theory rests were summarized 
 as witnessing to its inherent soundness, 
 and we must now glance at certain other 
 facts which are overlooked by its expo- 
 nents. A needful task ; because the claims 
 preferred on its behalf to explain every 
 incident in the complex mythology of the 
 Greek and other races has caused a recoil 
 in minds otherwise well disposed toward 
 it. In fact, any one reading, without such 
 caution as this paper is designed to supply, 
 the minute analyses of myths in the writ- 
 ings of those who interpret them solely by 
 the philological method, would conclude 
 that it had laid bare the meteorological ori- 
 gin of every epic and folk-tale among the 
 Indo-European peoples. He would learn 
 that in a way rudely analogous to the su- 
 pernatural guidance of the Christian 
 Church, the several Aryan tribes had re- 
 ceived from the fathers of the race an un- 
 varying canon of interpretation of the prim- 
 itive myths, a canon preserved with the 
 jealous veneration with which the Jew 
 regarded the Thorah and the Brahman 
 the Veda. He would also learn that the 
 details of Norse and classic myth can be 
 traced to the Veda, that these details, not of 
 incident alone, but of thought and expres- 
 sion, survived unimpaired by time and 
 untouched by circumstance, while, strange 
 to say, the more prominent names and 
 the leading characters became obscured 
 in their meaning. Strange indeed, but 
 not true. For what is the fact ? 
 
 Long before the hymns of the Rig- Veda 
 existed as we know them (and they have 
 remained an inviolate sacred text since 
 600 B.C., when every word, verse, and 
 syllable were counted), the Aryan tribes 
 bad swarmed from their parent hive 
 across boundless steppes and over wind- 
 
 ing mountain passes, some westward in- 
 to Europe, others southward into Hindu- 
 stan. Among the slender intellectual cap- 
 ital of which they stood possessed was 
 the common mythology of their ancestors, 
 in which, as we have seen, sun and moon, 
 storm and thunder-cloud, and all other 
 natural phenomena, were credited with 
 personal life and will. But that mythol- 
 ogy had certainly advanced beyond the 
 crude primitive form and entered the he- 
 roic stage, wherein the powers of nature 
 were half human, half divine. Their lan- 
 guage had passed into the inflective, or 
 highest stage, and had undergone such 
 changes that the relationship between its 
 several groups and their origin from one 
 mother-tongue were obscured and re- 
 mained so until laid bare in our day. In 
 short, the Aryan tribes had attained no 
 mean state of civilization, some being 
 more advanced than the others, accord- 
 ing as external circumstances helped or 
 hindered, and, one by one, they passed 
 from the condition of semi-civilized nomads 
 to become fathers and founders of nations 
 that abide to this day. 
 
 These being the facts to which language 
 itself bears witness, how was it possible 
 for their mythologies, i.e., their stock of 
 notions about things, to remain unaf- 
 fected and secure of transmission with- 
 out organic change ? The myths, unfixed 
 in literary form, yielded themselves with 
 ease as vehicles of new ideas ; their an- 
 cient meaning, already faded, paled be- 
 fore the all-absorbing significance of pres- 
 ent facts. These were more potent re- 
 alities than the kisses of the dawn ; the 
 human and the personal, in its struggles of 
 mightier interest than the battle of rosy 
 morn or purple eve with the sons of thun- 
 der ; and Homer's music would long since 
 have died away were Achilles' " baneful 
 wrath " but a passively told tale of the 
 sun's grief for the loss of the morning. 
 
 In brief, the complex and varying in- 
 fluences which have transformed the 
 primitive myth, are the important factors 
 which the solar theorists have omitted in 
 their attempted solution of the problem. 
 They have forgotten the part which, to 
 borrow a term from astronomy, " per- 
 sonal equation " has played. They have 
 not examined myth in the light of the 
 history of the race ; and the new elements 
 which it took into itself, while never 
 wholly ridding itself of the old, have es- 
 caped them. They have secured a me- 
 chanical unity whereas, by combination of 
 the historical with their own method, 
 they might have secured a vital unity. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [255] 13 
 
 To all which classic myth itself bears 
 record. The Greeks were of Aryan stock, 
 but when they arrived in Europe is un- 
 known. The period between their set- 
 tlement and the Homeric age was, how- 
 ever, long enough to admit of their ad- 
 vance to the state of a nation rejoicing 
 in the fulness of intellectual life. They 
 remembered not from what rock they 
 were hewn, from what pit they were 
 digged. The nature-gods of their re- 
 mote ancestors had long since changed 
 their meteorological character and ap- 
 peared in the likeness of men — or, at least 
 played very human pranks on Olympus. 
 In the Veda, the primitive-nature myth, 
 although exalted and purified, is persist- 
 ent ; under one name or another it is still 
 the ceaseless battle between the darkness 
 and the light ; Dyaus was still the bright 
 sky, the cattle of Siva were still the clouds. 
 But the Greek of Homer's time and his 
 congener in the far north, had forgotten 
 all that ; the war in heaven was trans- 
 ferred to the strife of gods and men on 
 the shores of the Hellespont and by the 
 bleak seaboard of the Baltic. Their 
 gods and goddesses, improved by age 
 and experience, put off their physical 
 and put on the ethical; the Heaven- 
 father became king of gods and 
 men, source of order, law and justice ; 
 the sun and the dawn, Apollo and Athene, 
 became wisdom, skill, and guardianship 
 incarnate. And the story of human vicis- 
 situdes found in solar myth that " pattern 
 of things in the heavens " which conformed 
 to its design. Thus Homer, in whose 
 day the old nature-myth had become con- 
 fused with the vague traditions of verita- 
 ble deeds of kings and heroes but dimly 
 remembered, touched it as with heavenly 
 fire unquenchable. The siege of Troy, 
 so say the solar mythologists, " is a rep- 
 etition of the daily siege of the east by 
 the solar powers that every evening are 
 robbed of their highest treasures in the 
 west." It is surely with a truer instinct 
 that while we contend for that physical 
 origin of the great epics to which their re- 
 markable agreement witnesses, we also 
 feel that the vitality which inheres in them 
 is due to whatever of human experience, 
 joy, and sorrow are the burden of their 
 immortal song. As to the repulsive feat- 
 ures of Greek myth, one can neither share 
 the distress of the solar theorists nor feel 
 their difficulties. Both are self-created, 
 and are aggravated by the assumption of 
 " periods of temporary insanity through 
 which the human mind had to pass," as 
 the rude health of childhood is checked 
 
 by whooping-cough and measles. They 
 are explained by the persistence with 
 which the lower out of which man has 
 emerged asserts itself, as primary rocks 
 pierce through and overlap later strata. 
 The ancestors of the Aryans were sav- 
 ages in the remote past, and the " old 
 Adam " was never entirely cast out ; in- 
 deed, it is with us still. There are su- 
 perstitions and credulities in our midst, in 
 drawing-rooms as well as gypsy camps, 
 quite as gross in nature, if less coarse in 
 guise, as those extant among the Greeks. 
 The future historian of our time, as he 
 turns over the piles of our newspapers, 
 will find contrasts of ignorance and cult- 
 ure in our midst as startling as any exist- 
 ing in the land of Homer, of Archimedes, 
 and Aristotle. Spirit-rapping and belief 
 in the " evil eye " have their cult among 
 us, although Professor Huxley's " Hume 
 can be bought for two shillings, and 
 knowledge has free course. And it cer- 
 tainly accords best with all that we have 
 learnt as to the mode of human progress 
 to believe that the old lived into the 
 new, than that the old had been cast 
 out, but had gained re-entry, making 
 the last state of the Greeks to be worse 
 than the first. 
 
 In this matter the Vedic hymns do not 
 help us much. They are the products of 
 a relatively highly-civilized time ; the con- 
 ception of sky and dawn as living persons 
 has passed out of its primitive simplicity ; 
 these heavenly powers have become com- 
 plex deities ; there is much confounding 
 of persons — the same god called by one 
 or many names. The thought is that of 
 an age when moral problems have present- 
 ed themselves for solution and the refer- 
 ences to social matters indicate a settled 
 state of things far removed from the fisher 
 and the hunter stage. Nevertheless, there 
 lurk within these sacred writings survivals 
 of the lower culture, traces of coarse rites, 
 bloody sacrifices, of repulsive myths of 
 the gods, and of cosmogonies familiar to 
 the student of barbaric myth and le- 
 gend. 
 
 Enough has been said to show that the 
 extreme and one-sided interpretations of 
 the solar theorists are due to a one-sided 
 method. The philological method has 
 yielded splendid results ; this they have 
 done ; the historical yields results equally 
 rich and fertile ; this they have ieft un- 
 done. Language has given us the key to 
 the kinship between the several mem- 
 bers of the great body of Aryan myths ; 
 the study of the historical evolution of 
 myths, the comparison of these, without 
 
14 [256] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 regard to affinity of speech, will give us 
 the key to the kinship between savage 
 interpretation of phenomena all the world 
 over. The mythology of Greek and Bush- 
 man, of Kaffir and Scandinavian, of the 
 Red Man and the Hindu, springs from 
 the like mental condition. It is tne uni- 
 form and necessary product of the human 
 mind in the childhood of the race. 
 
 VII. 
 
 THE STARS IN MYTHOLOGY. 
 
 "Revenons a nos moutons," as the 
 impatient client who had lost some sheep 
 reminded his rambling advocate. 
 
 In the great body of nature-myth, the 
 stars are prominent members. In their 
 multitude ; their sublime repose in upper 
 calms above the turmoil of the elements ; 
 their varying brilliancy, " one star differing 
 from another star in glory " ; their tremu- 
 lous light ; their scattered positions, which 
 lend themselves to every vagary of the 
 constellation maker ; their slow procession, 
 varied only by sweeping comet and me- 
 teor, or falling showers of shooting stars ; 
 they lead the imagination into gentler 
 ways than do the vaster bodies of the 
 most ancient heavens. Nor, although we 
 may compute their number, weigh their 
 volume, in a few instances reckon their 
 distance, and, capturing the light that has 
 come beating through space for unnum- 
 bered years, make it reveal the secret of 
 their structure, is the imagination less 
 moved by the clear heavens at night, or 
 the feeling of awe and reverence blunted 
 before that " mighty sum of things for- 
 ever speaking." 
 
 In barbaric myth the stars are spoken 
 of as the children of the sun and moon, 
 but more often as men who have lived on 
 the earth, translated without seeing death, 
 The single stars are individual chiefs or 
 heroes ; the constellations are groups of 
 men or animals. To the natives of Aus- 
 tralia the brilliant Jupiter is a chief among 
 the others, and the stars in Orion's belt 
 and scabbard are young men dancing a 
 corroboree, the Pleiades being girls play- 
 ing to them. The Kasirs of Bengal say 
 that the stars are men who climbed to the 
 top of a tree, and were left in the branches 
 by the trunk being cut away. To the 
 Eskimos the stars in Orion are seal-hunt- 
 ers who have missed their way home ; and 
 in German folk-lore they are spoken of as 
 the mowers, because, as Grimm says, 
 
 "they stand in a row, like mowers in 
 a meadow." In North American myth 
 two of the bright stars are twins who 
 have left a home where they were harshly 
 treated, and leaped into the sky, whither 
 their parents followed them, and cease- 
 lessly chase them. In Greek myth the 
 faintest star of the seven Pleiades is 
 Merope, whose light was dimmed because 
 she alone among her sisters married a 
 mortal. In German star-lore, the small 
 star just above the middle one in the shaft 
 of Charles's Wain, is a wagoner who. 
 having given our Saviour a lift, was offered 
 the kingdom of heaven for his reward, but 
 who said he would sooner be driving from 
 east to west to all eternity, and whose de- 
 sire was granted — a curious contrast to 
 the legend of the Wandering Jew, cursed 
 to move unresting over the earth till the 
 day of judgment, because he refused to 
 let Jesus, weary with the weight of the 
 cross, rest for a moment on his doorstep. 
 The Housatonic Indians say that the stars 
 in Charles's Wain are men hunting a bear, 
 and that the chase lasts from spring to 
 autumn, when the bear is wounded, and 
 its dripping blood turns the leaves of the 
 trees red. With this may be cited the 
 myth that the red clouds at morn and eve 
 are the blood of the slain in battle. In the 
 Northern Lights, the Greenlanders see the 
 spirits of the departed dancing, the 
 brighter the flashes of the Aurora the 
 greater the merriment ; while the Daco- 
 tahs say of the meteors that they are 
 spirits flying through the air. 
 
 Of the Milky Way — so called because 
 Here, indignant at the bantling Herakles 
 being put to her breast, spilt her milk 
 along the sky (the solar mythologers say 
 that the " red cow of evening passes 
 during the night across the sky, scattering 
 her milk ") ; the Ottowas say that it was 
 caused by a turtle swimming along the 
 bottom of the sky, and stirring up the mud. 
 According to the Patagonians, it is the 
 track along which the departed tribesmen 
 hunt ostriches ; in African myth it is some 
 wood-ashes long ago thrown up into the 
 sky by a girl, that her people might be 
 able to see their way home at night ; in 
 Eastern myth, it is chaff dropped by a 
 thief in his hurried flight. 
 
 But the idea of a land beyond the sky — 
 be it the happy hunting-ground of the In- 
 dian, or the paradise of Islam, or the new 
 Jerusalem of the Apocalypse — would not 
 fail to be imagined, and in both the Milky 
 Way and the Rainbow barbaric fancy sees 
 the ladders and bridges whereby the de- 
 parted pass from earth to heaven. So we 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [257] 15 
 
 •find in the lower and higher culture alike 
 the beautiful conceptions of the chemin 
 des antes, the Red man's road of the dead 
 to their home in the sun; the ancient 
 Roman path of, or to, the gods ; the road 
 of the birds, in Lithuanian myth, because 
 the winged spirits flit thither to the free 
 and happv land. In prosaic contrast to 
 all this, it' is curious to find among our- 
 selves the Milky Way described as Wat- 
 ling Street ! That famous road, which 
 ran from Richborough through Canter- 
 bury and London to Chester, now gives 
 its name to a narrow, bustling street of 
 Manchester warehousemen in the City. 
 But who the Waetlingas were, and why 
 their name was transferred from Britain 
 to the sky,* we do not know, although the 
 fact is plainly enough set down in old 
 writers, foremost among whom is Chaucer. 
 In his " House of Fame " t he says :— 
 
 "Lo, there, quod he, cast up thine eye, 
 se yonder, to, the galaxie, 
 the whiche men clepe the Milky Way, 
 for it is white, and some parfay 
 ycallin it han Watlingestrete." 
 
 To the savage, the rainbow is a living 
 monster, a serpent seeking whom it may 
 devour, coming to earth to slake its un- 
 quenchable thirst, and preying on the un- 
 wary. But in more poetic myth, its mighty 
 mani-colored arch touching, as it seems 
 to do, the earth itself, is a road to glory. 
 In the Edda it is the three-colored bridge 
 Bifroset, the " quivering track " over which 
 the gods walk, and of which the red is 
 fire, so that the Frost-giants may not 
 cross it. In Persian myth it is Chinvad, 
 the " bridge of the gatherer," flung across 
 the gloomy depths between this world and 
 the home of the blessed ; in Islam it is El- 
 Sirat, the bridge thin as a hair and sharp 
 as a scimitar, stretching from this world 
 to the next; among the Greeks it was 
 Iris, the messenger from Zeus to men, 
 charged with tidings of war and tempest ; 
 to the Finns it was the bow of Tiernes, 
 the god of thunder ; whilst to the Jew it 
 was the messenger of grace from the 
 Eternal, who did set "his bow in the 
 clouds " as the promise that never again 
 should the world be destroyed by flood. 
 Such belief in the heavens as the field of 
 activities profoundly affecting the fortunes 
 of mankind, and in the stars as influenc- 
 ing their destinies, has been persistent in 
 the human mind. The delusions of the 
 
 * Perhaps the converse is true ; if the name was 
 a totem which the family adopted, and which was 
 given, as tribute to an important clan, to one of the 
 main roads of this island. 
 
 t II., 427. 
 
 astrologer are embalmed in language, as 
 when, forgetful of a belief shared not only 
 by sober theologians, but by Tycho Brahe 
 and Kepler, we speak of "disaster," of 
 our friends as " jovial," " saturnine," or 
 "mercurial." But the illusions of the 
 savage or semi-civilized abide as an ani- 
 mating part of many a faith, undisturbed 
 by a science which has swept the skies 
 and found no angels there, and whose 
 keen analysis separates forever the ancient 
 belief in a connection between the planets 
 and man's fate. For convenience' sake, 
 we retain on our celestial maps and 
 globes the men and monsters pictured by 
 barbaric fancy in the star-positions and 
 clusters noting these as interesting exam- 
 ples of survival. Yet we are the willing 
 dupes of illusions nebulous as these, and, 
 charm he never so wisely, the Time-Spirit 
 fails to disenchant us. 
 
 If the sun and moon are the parents of 
 the stars, the heavens and the earth are 
 the parents of all living things. Of this 
 widely-found myth, one of the most 
 striking specimens occurs among the 
 Maoris. From Rangi, the heaven, and 
 Papa, the earth, sprang all living things ; 
 but earth and sky clave together, and 
 darkness rested on them and their chil- 
 dren, who debated whether they should 
 rend them asunder or slay them. Then 
 Tanemahuta, father of forests, reasoned 
 that it was better to rend them so that 
 the heaven might become a stranger, and 
 the earth remain as their nursing-mother. 
 One after another they strove to do this, 
 but in vain, until Tanemahuta, with giant 
 strength and strain, pressed down the 
 earth and thrust upward the heaven. But 
 one of his brothers, father of wind and 
 storm, who had not agreed to this part- 
 ing of his parents followed Rangi into 
 the sky, and thence sent forth his progeny, 
 " the mighty winds, the fierce squalls, the 
 clouds dense and dark, wildly drifting, 
 wildly hunting," himself rushing on his 
 foe, snapping the huge trees that barred 
 his path, and strewing their trunks and 
 branches on the ground, while the sea 
 was lashed into high-crested waves, and 
 all the creatures therein affrighted. The 
 fish darted hither and thither, but the 
 reptiles fled into the forests, causing quar- 
 rel between Tangaron, the ocean-god, 
 and Tane-mahuta for giving them shelter. 
 So the brothers fought, the ocean-god 
 wrecking the canoes and sweeping houses 
 and trees beneath the waters, and had 
 not Papa hidden the gods of the tilled 
 food and the wild within her bosom, they 
 would have perished. Wars of revenge 
 
16 [258] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 followed quickly one upon the other ; the 
 storm-god's anger was not soon appeased ; 
 so that the devastation of the earth was 
 well-nigh complete. But, at last, light 
 arose, and quiet ensued, and the dry land 
 appeared. Rangi and Papa, parted for 
 ever, quarreled no more, but helped the 
 one the other, and " man stood erect and 
 unbroken on his mother Earth." 
 
 VIII. 
 
 MYTHS OF THE DESTRUCTIVE FORCES 
 OF NATURE. 
 
 The beliefs of the ancient Finns in the 
 world as a divided egg, of which the 
 white is the ocean, the yolk the earth, 
 and the arched shell the sky, and of the 
 Polynesians that the universe is the hol- 
 low of a vast cocoanut shell, at the tap- 
 ering bottom of which is the root of all 
 things, are to us so grotesque that it is 
 not easy to regard them as explanations 
 seriously invented by the human mind 
 Yet these, together with the notions of 
 the two halves of the shell of Brahma's 
 egg, and of the two calabashes which 
 form the heaven and the earth in African 
 myth, find their correspondences in the 
 wide-spread conception of the overarch- 
 ing firmament as a hard and solid thing,* 
 with holes (or windows t) to let the rain 
 through, with gates through which angels 
 descend,! or through which prophets 
 peer into celestial mysteries ; § a firma- 
 ment outside which other people live, a: 
 instanced by the Polynesian term for 
 strangers, "papalangi," or "heaven- 
 bursters." 
 
 They are the less refined forms of 
 myths which have held their ground from 
 pre-scientific times till now, and the rude 
 analogies of which are justified by the ap- 
 pearances of things as presented by the 
 senses. Man's intellectual history is the 
 history of his escape from the illusions of 
 the senses, it is the slow and often reluct- 
 ant discovery that nature is quite other 
 than that which it seems to be. And 
 this variance between appearances and 
 realities remained hidden until the intel- 
 lect challenged the report about phenom- 
 
 * " And said the gods, let there be a hammered 
 plate in the midst of the waters, and let it be divid- 
 ing between waters and waters." Gen. i. 6. The 
 verb from which the substantive is derived signifies, 
 among other meanings, " to beat out into thin 
 plates." 
 
 JGen. viii. 2. t Gen. xxviii. 17. 
 
 § Ezekiel i. 1. 7 
 
 ena which the sense-perceptions brought. 
 For in the ages when feeling was domi- 
 nant, and the judgment scarce awak- 
 ened, the simple explanations in venerable 
 legends sung by bard or told by aged 
 crone — legends to which age had given 
 sanctity which finally placed them among 
 the world's sacred literatures — were re- 
 ceived without doubt or question. But, 
 as belief in causality spread, men were 
 not content to rest in the naive explana- 
 tions of an uncritical age. What man 
 had guessed about nature gave place to 
 what nature had to say about herself, and 
 with the classifying of experience sci- 
 ence had its birth. 
 
 Meanwhile, until this quite recent stage 
 in man's progress was reached, the senses 
 told their blundering tale of an earth fiat 
 and fixed, with sun, moon, and stars as 
 its ministering servants, while gods or 
 beasts upbore it, and mighty pillars sup- 
 ported the massive firmament. In Hindoo 
 myth the tortoise which upholds the earth 
 rests upon an elephant, whose legs reach 
 all the way down I In Bogota the culture- 
 god Bochica punishes a lesser and offend- 
 ing deity by compelling him to sustain 
 the part of Atlas, and it is in shifting his 
 burden from shoulder to shoulder that 
 earthquakes are caused. The natives of 
 Celebes say that they are due to the 
 world-supporting Hog as he rubs himself 
 against a tree ; the Thascaltecs that they 
 occur when the deities who hold up the 
 world relieve one another ; the Japanese 
 think that they are caused by huge 
 whales creeping underground, an idea 
 probably confirmed by the discovery of 
 monster fossil bones. 
 
 As the myths about earth-bearers pre- 
 vail in the regions of earthquakes, so do 
 those about subterranean beings in the 
 neighborhood of volcanoes. The super- 
 stitions which mountainous countries 
 especially foster are intensified when the 
 mountains themselves cast forth their 
 awful and devastating progeny, " red ruin " 
 and the other children born of them. 
 Man in his dread, " caring in no wise for 
 the external world, except as it influenced 
 his own destiny ; honoring the lightning 
 because it could strike him, the sea be- 
 cause it could drown him," * could do 
 naught else than people them with malefi- 
 cent beings, and conceive of their sulphur- 
 exhaling mouths as the jaws of a bottom- 
 less pit. 
 
 Indeed, if in freeing ourselves from 
 the tyranny of the " solar " theory we 
 
 Modern Painters," Vol. III., 154. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [259] 17 
 
 shackled ourselves with some other, we j 
 should certainly prefer that which is known 
 as the " meteorological," and which, in the 
 person of Kuhn and other supporters, 
 finds a more rational and persistent 
 source of myth in phenomena which are 
 fitful and startling, such as hurricane and 
 tempest, earthquake and volcanic out- 
 burst. Sunrises and sunsets happen with 
 a regularity which failed to excite any 
 strong emotion or stimulate curiosity, 
 and the remotest ancestor of the prim- 
 itive Aryan soon shook off the habit — if, 
 indeed, he ever acquired it— of going to 
 bed in fear and trembling lest the sun 
 should not come back again. Nature, in 
 her softer aspects and her gracious boun- 
 ties — in the spring-time with its promise, 
 the summer with its glory, the autumn 
 with its gifts — has moved the heart of 
 man to song and festival and procession ; 
 as, by contrast, the frost that nipped the 
 early buds and the fierce heat that with- 
 ered the approaching harvest gave oc- 
 casion for plaintive ditty and somber 
 ceremony. It is in the fierce play and 
 passionate outburst of the elements, in 
 the storm, the lightning, and the thunder, 
 that the feelings are aroused and that the 
 terror-stricken fancy sees the strife of 
 wrathful deities or depicts their dire 
 work among men. Hence, all the world 
 over, the Storm-God and the Wind-God 
 have played a mighty part. 
 
 To the savage, the wind, blowing as it 
 listeth, its whence and whither unknown, 
 itself invisible, yet the sweep and force of 
 ks power manifest and felt, must have 
 ranked among the most striking phe- 
 nomena. And, as will be seen hereafter, 
 the correspondences between wind and 
 breath and the connection between breath 
 and life, added their quota of mystery in 
 man's effort to account for the impalpable 
 element. In the legends of the Quiches, 
 the mysterious creative power is Hurakan 
 (whence hurricane) ; among the Choc- 
 taws the original word for Deity is Hush- 
 toli, the storm wind, and in Peru to kiss 
 the air was the commonest and simplest 
 sign of adoration to the collective divini- 
 ties. The Guayacuans of South America, 
 when a storm arose and there was much 
 thunder or wind, all went out in troops, 
 as it were to battle, shaking their clubs 
 in the air, shooting flights of arrows in 
 that direction whence the storm came.* 
 But we are some steps nearer to the 
 primitive myth when we find the wind 
 conceived of as a mighty bird — which, in- 
 
 deed, is in both old and new world my- 
 thology a common symbol of thunder and 
 lightning also. On this matter Dr. Brin- 
 ton's remarks bear quoting : — 
 
 Like the wind, the bird sweeps through 
 the aerial spaces, sings in the forests, and 
 rustles on its course ; like the cloud, it floats 
 in mid-air, and casts its shadow on the earth ; 
 like the lightning, it darts from heaven to 
 earth to strike its unsuspecting prey. These 
 tropes were truths to savage nations, and led 
 on by that law of language which forced them 
 to conceive everything as animate or inani- 
 mate, itself the product of a deeper law of 
 thought which urges us to ascribe life ta 
 whatever has motion, they found no animat 
 so appropriate for their purpose here as the 
 bird. Therefore the Algonkins say that 
 birds always make the winds, that they cre- 
 ate the waterspouts, and that the clouds are 
 the spreading and agitation of their wings;, 
 the Navajos, that at each cardinal point 
 stands a white swan, who is the spirit of the 
 blasts ; so, also, the Dakotas frequently ex- 
 plain the thunder as the sound of the cloud- 
 bird flapping his wings ; the lightning as the 
 fire that flashes from his tracks, like the 
 sparks which the buffalo scatters when he; 
 scours over a stony plain. 
 
 Turning to the literatures of higher 
 races, we find in the prose Edda, when 
 Gangler asks whence comes the wind, 
 that Har answersjiim : " Thou must know 
 that at the northernmost point in the heav- 
 ens sits a giant, 
 
 " In the guise of an eagle ; 
 And the winds, it is said, 
 Rush down on the earth 
 From his outspreading pinions." 
 
 In the Veda, the Maruts, or Storm-gods, 
 to whom many of the hymns are ad- 
 dressed, " make the rocks to tremble and 
 tear asunder the kings of the forest," like 
 Hermes in his violence and like Boreas 
 in his rage. Whether or no they become 
 in Scandinavian legend the grim and 
 fearful Ogres swiftly sailing in their cloud- 
 ships, we may see in them the " crushers "" 
 and " grinders," * as their name imports, 
 the types of northern deities like Odin* 
 long degraded into the Wild Huntsman- 
 and his phantom crew, whose uncouth, 
 yells the peasant hears in the midnight, 
 air. 
 
 Of this personification of the elements, 
 the following Ojibway folk-tale, cited by 
 Dorman, gives poetic illustration : — 
 " There were spirits from all parts of the 
 country. Some came with crashing steps: 
 
 Dorman's " Primitive Superstitions," p. 350. 
 
 * From Sans, mar, " to grind." Ares and Mars; 
 come from the same root. 
 
18 [260] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 and roaring voice, who directed the 
 whirlwinds which were in the habit of 
 raging about the neighboring country. 
 Then glided in gently a sweet little spirit, 
 which blew the summer gale. Then 
 came in the old sand-spirit, who blew 
 the sand-squalls in the sand-buttes toward 
 the west. He was a great speech-maker, 
 and shook the lodge with his deep-throated 
 voice, as he addressed the spirits of the 
 cataracts and waterfalls, and those of the 
 islands who wore beautiful green blank- 
 ets." 
 
 In his valuable book on the Myths of 
 the Red Race, Dr. Brinton has brought 
 together a mass of evidence in support of 
 a theory that the sanctity in which the 
 number Four is held among that people 
 is due to the adoration of the cardi- 
 nal points, which are identified with the 
 four winds, who, in hero myths, are the 
 four ancestors of the human race. Cer- 
 tainly the illustrations with which the ar- 
 gument is supported are both numerous 
 and valuable; but any elaborate system 
 of mythology based upon a definite num- 
 ber of winds has, like the solar theory, to 
 make the facts square with it, and while 
 it explains much, to leave much unex- 
 plained. Here this bare reference to it 
 must suffice. 
 
 Estimates differ much as to the size of 
 the Thunder-Bird. In one tradition, an 
 Indian found its nest, and secured a 
 feather which was above two hundred 
 feet long, while in another tradition the 
 bird is said to be no bigger than one's 
 little finger! But among the Western 
 Indians he is an immense eagle. " When 
 this aerial monster flaps his wings, loud 
 peals of thunder roll over the prairie ; when 
 he winks his eye it lightens; when he 
 wags his tail the waters of the lake which 
 he carries on his back overflow and pro- 
 duce rain." The old and universal be- 
 lief that stones were hurled by the Thun- 
 der-God is not so far-fetched as we, in 
 our pride of science, might think, for the 
 flints which are mistaken for thunder- 
 bolts, and which become objects of ad- 
 oration as well as charms, produce a flash 
 when struck by the lightning. Mixcoatl, 
 the Mexican Cloud-serpent, as well as 
 Jove, carries his bundle of arrows or 
 thunderbolts, which in the hand of Thor 
 are represented by his mighty club or 
 hammer. 
 
 As in the conflict raging in the sky dur- 
 ing gale or tempest, when the light and 
 the darkness alternately prevail, the bar- 
 baric mind sees war waged between the 
 heroes of the spirit-land who have car- 
 
 ried their unsettled blood-feuds thicher, 
 so in many myths the lightning is no 
 comrade of the thunder, but its foe, the 
 battle of bird with serpent. The resem- 
 blances of the lightning flash to the sharp, 
 sudden, zigzag movements of a creature 
 so mysterious, to barbaric man, in its 
 unlikeness to the beasts of the field, ac- 
 count for the myth, the interest of which 
 lies for us in the correspondences which 
 it suggests with the group of storm-myths 
 and sun-myths of the Aryan race, the 
 battle between Indra and Vritra, Ormuzd 
 and Ahriman, Thor and Midgard, Her- 
 cules and Cacus, Apollo and Python, and 
 St. George and the Dragon. It is with 
 the physical origin and, for us, deep the- 
 ological significance of these, that the 
 succeeding paper will deal. 
 
 IX. 
 
 THE HINDU SUN-AND-CLOUD MYTH. 
 
 These papers would not be worth the 
 reader's attention if they were solely con- 
 cerned with bringing together illustrations 
 of myths from semi-savage races. Their 
 other, and indeed their primary, concern 
 is with the origin and growth of man's 
 effort to understand the nature and mean- 
 ing of things around him, and of his own 
 acts and feelings. In this lies primitive 
 philosophy, theology, and science, the be- 
 ginnings of all knowledge that has been 
 and that ever will be, and in the unbroken 
 sequence of which we find the explanation 
 of the existence of beliefs among us which 
 are discredited whenever examined. It is 
 the persistence of these which has made it 
 increasingly difficult, as these papers pro- 
 ceed, to deal with the primitive myth 
 apart from its later and more serious 
 forms. Myth was the product of man's 
 emotion and imagination, acted upon by 
 his surroundings, and it carries the traces 
 of its origin in its more developed forms, 
 as the ancestral history of the higher or- 
 ganisms is embodied in their embryos. 
 Man wondered before he reasoned. Awe 
 and fear are quick to express themselves 
 in rudimentary worship; hence the myth 
 was at the outset a theology, and the gra- 
 dations from personifying to deifying arc 
 too faint to be traced. Thus blended, the 
 one as inevitable outcome of the other, 
 they cannot well be treated separately, as 
 if the myth was earth-born and the the- 
 ology heaven-sent. And to treat them as 
 one is to invade no province of religion. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 1261] 19 
 
 which is quite other than speculation 
 about gods. The awe and reverence 
 which the fathomless mystery of the uni- 
 verse awakens, which steal within us un- 
 bidden as the morning light, and unbroken 
 on the prism of analysis ; the conviction, 
 deepening as we peer, that there is a 
 Power beyond humanity, and upon which 
 humanity depends ; the feeling that life 
 is in harmony with the Divine order when 
 it moves in disinterested service of our 
 kind — these theology can neither create 
 nor destroy, neither verify nor disprove. 
 They can be bound within no formula 
 that man or church has invented, but 
 undefined — 
 
 "Are yet the fountain life of all our day, 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing." 
 
 If thus far my readers are with me as 
 to the unrelation between religion and 
 formulated theology, and if these papers 
 have shown with any clearness the emer- 
 gence of the latter from primitive specu- 
 lations about the gods and their doings, 
 their sympathetic interest may be reck- 
 aned on in what has now to follow con- 
 cerning the survival of some old weather- 
 myths in beliefs that have had profound 
 and direful influence upon human con- 
 duct and fate. 
 
 All the Aryan nations have among 
 their legends, often exalted into epic 
 themes, the story of a battle between a 
 hero and a monster. In each case the 
 hero conquers, and releases treasures, or 
 ;n some way renders succor to man, 
 :hrough his victory. In Hindu myth this 
 battle is fought between Indra and 
 Vritra. 
 
 Indra, one of the Vedic gods, comes, 
 according to Professor Max Miiller, from 
 :he same root as the Sanskrit indu, drop, 
 sap, but the etymology is doubtful. What 
 B not doubtful is that he is the god of the 
 bright sky, and, although like the other 
 ?ods invoked in the hymns of the Rig- 
 Veda, a departmental or tribal deity, a 
 sort of primus inter pares, of whose many 
 titles, Vritrahan, or " Vritraslayer," is the 
 pre-eminent one. The benefits showered 
 by him upon mortals caused the attribu- 
 tion of moral qualities to him, and he was 
 adored as " lord of the virtues," while 
 the juice of the sacred soma plant was 
 offered in his honor, for which reason he 
 ts also called Somapa, or " soma-drinker." 
 It is his struggle with Vritra which is a 
 constant theme of the Vedic hymns, the 
 burden of which remind us of the praises 
 jffered in the Psalms to Yahweh as a 
 nan of war, as mighty in battle. " The 
 
 gods do not reach thee, nor man, thou 
 overcomest all creatures in strength. . . . 
 Thou, thunderer, hast shattered with thy 
 bolt the broad and massive cloud into 
 fragments, and hast sent down the waters 
 that were confined in it to flow at will ; 
 verily thou alone possessest all power." 
 The primitive physical meaning of the 
 myth is clear. Indra is the sun-god, 
 armed with spears and arrows, for such 
 did the solar rays appear to barbaric 
 fancy. The rain-clouds are imprisoned 
 in dungeons or caverns by Vritra, the " en- 
 veloper," the thief, serpent, wolf, wild 
 boar as he is severally styled in the Rig- 
 Veda. Indra attacks him, hurls his darts 
 at him; they pierce the cloud-caverns, 
 the waters are released, and drop upon* 
 the earth as rain. 
 
 Surely a most rational explanation ; self- 
 consistent as fitting into crude philosophy 
 of personal life and volition jn sun and 
 cloud, and fraught with deep truth of 
 meaning in regions like the Punjaub, where 
 drought brought famine in its train. 
 
 The Aryans were a pastoral people, 
 their wealth being in flocks and herds.* 
 The cow yielded milk for the household ; 
 her dung fertilized the soil; her young 
 multiplied the wealth of the family at an 
 ever-increasing rate, and she naturally be- 
 came the symbol of fruitfulness and pros- 
 perity, ultimately an object of veneration ; 
 while, for the functions which the bull per- 
 formed, he was the type of strength. The. 
 Aryan's enemy was he who stole or injured 
 the cattle ; the Aryan's friend was he who 
 saved them from the robber's clutch. 
 
 Intellectually, the Aryan tribes were in 
 the mythopceic stage, and the personifica- 
 tion of phenomena was rife among them. 
 Their barbaric fancy, as kindred myths 
 all the world over testify, would find ample 
 play in the fleeting and varied scenery of 
 the cloud-flecked heavens, suggestive, as 
 this would be, of bodies celestial and bodies 
 terrestrial. To these children of the plain 
 the heavens were a vast, wide expanse, 
 over which reamed supramundane beasts, 
 the two most prominent figures in their 
 mythical zoology being the cow and the 
 bull. The sun, giver of blessed light, was 
 the bull of majesty and strength ; the white 
 clouds were cows, from whose swelling 
 udders dropped the milk of heaven— the 
 blessed rain. But there were dark clouds 
 also, clouds of night and clouds of storm, 
 and within these lurked the monster rob- 
 
 * Both " pecuniary " and " fee " are, as estab- 
 lished by Grimm's law, from pecu. Lat. pecu-a, pi. 
 pecus, "cattle " ; Sansk. pafit, " cattle " irompac, 
 to fasten (that which is tied up, i.e., domestic cat- 
 tle). Cf. Skeats's Etvmol. Diet, in loc. 
 
20 [262] 
 
 "HE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 ber; into them he lured the herds, and 
 withheld both light and rain from the 
 children of men. To the sun-god, there- 
 fore, who smote the thief-dragon, Vritra, 
 with his shaft, and set free the imprisoned 
 cows, went up the shout of praise, the 
 song of gratitude. This myth, as hinted 
 already, survives, in many legends of the 
 Aryan race, and their family likeness is 
 unmistakable. In its Latin guise, it ap- 
 pears as Hercules * and Cacus, although 
 the preciseness of detail narrated by Virgil, 
 Livy, and other writers, has given it quasi- 
 historical rank. Hercules, after his vic- 
 tory over Geryon, stops to rest by the Ti- 
 ber, and while he is sleeping the three- 
 headed monster, Cacus, steals some of 
 his cattle, dragging them by their tails 
 into his cavern in Mons Avertinus. Their 
 bellowing awakens Hercules, who attacks 
 the cavern, from the mouth of which Cacus 
 vomits flames, and roars as in thunder. 
 But the hero slays him and frees the cat- 
 tle, a victor} 7 which the earlier Romans 
 celebrated with solemn rites at the Ara 
 Maxima. In Greek myth the most famil- 
 iar examples are the struggles between 
 the sun-god, Apollo, and the storm- 
 dragon, Python, and the deliverance of the 
 Princess Andromeda by Perseus from the 
 sea-monster sent by Poseidon to ravage the 
 land. In the northern group we have the 
 battle of Siegfried with the Niflungs, or 
 Niblungs, and of Sigurd with the dragon 
 of Fafnir, who guards golden treasures ; 
 while, in the Eddor, Thor goes fishing 
 with the giant Hymir, and, baiting his 
 hook with a bull's head, catches the great 
 serpent Midgard. Among ourselves, Be- 
 owulf, hero of the poem of that name, at- 
 tacks Grendel, the grim and terrible Jotun 
 that haunts a marsh by the German Ocean 
 (the watery habitat of these monsters is a 
 noticeable common feature"), and carries off 
 young and old alike, so that the land is 
 desolated. With mighty grip Beowulf 
 tears him limb from limb, and when, later 
 on, another "winged worm," devourer of 
 fair damsels and hoarder of stolen riches, 
 appears, Beowulf slays him with his en- 
 chanted sword. 
 
 These brief illustrations would hardly 
 be complete without some reference to 
 our national saint. Opinions differ as to 
 his merits, Gibbon stigmatizing him as a 
 fraudulent army contractor,! while the re 
 
 searches of M. Ganneau seek to establish- 
 his relation to the Egyptian Horus and 
 Typhon. Be this as it may, the stirring 
 old legend tells how George of Cappado- 
 cia delivered the city of Silene from a 
 dragon dwelling in a lake hard by. Noth- 
 ing that the people could give him satis- 
 fied his insatiate maw, and in their despair 
 they cast lots who among their dearest 
 ones should be flung to the dread beast. 
 The lot fell to the king's daughter and 
 she went unflinchingly, like Jephthah's 
 daughter, to her fate. But on the road 
 the hero learns her sad errand, and bid- 
 ding her fear not, he, making sign of the 
 cross, brandishes his lance, attacks and 
 transfixes the dragon, and leading him 
 into Silene, beheads him in sight of all 
 the people, who, with their king, are bap- 
 tized to the glory of Him who made Saint 
 George the victor.* 
 
 While, however, the myth of Indra and 
 Vritra has in its Western variants re- 
 mained for the most part a battle between 
 heroes and dragons, the moral element 
 rarely or never obscuring the undoubted 
 physical features, it gave rise among the 
 Iranians, or ancient Persians, to a defi- 
 nite theology, the strange fortunes of which 
 have profoundly affected Christendom. 
 How this came about needs another paper 
 to tell. 
 
 * Not the same as the Greek Herakles. The 
 similarity of name led the Romans to identify their 
 Hercules, who was a god of boundaries, like Ju- 
 piter Terminus, with the Greek hero. Cacus is not 
 cognate with Gr. AaJtos, bad, but was originally 
 Cactus, the "blinder" or "darkener." 
 
 t" Decline and Fall," vol. iii., c. xxiii., 171. 
 (Smith's Ed.). 
 
 DEMONOLOGY. 
 
 Although in the Vedic hymns the 
 features of the primitive nature-myth re- 
 appear again and again, Indra himself 
 boasting, " I slew Vritra, O Maruts, with 
 might, having grown strong with my own 
 vigor ; I who hold the thunderbolt in my 
 arms, I have made these all-brilliant wa- 
 ters to flow freely for man," we find an 
 approach in them to some conception of 
 that spiritual conflict of which the physi- 
 cal conflict was so complete a symboL 
 Indra, as victor, is an object of adoration 
 and invested with purity and goodness ; 
 Vritra, as the enemy of men, is an object 
 of dread, and invested with malice and 
 evil. 
 
 But while in the Zend-Avesta, the 
 Scriptures of the old Iranian religion, the 
 struggle between Thraetaona and the 
 three-headed serpent Azhi-Dahaka (irr 
 which names are recognizable the Trai- 
 tana and Ahi of the Veda and the FerL 
 
 * See Ralston's " Russian Folk-Tales," p. 347, for 
 similar Bulgarian legend about St. George. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [263] 21 
 
 dum and Zohak of Persian epic) is nar- 
 rated, the normal idea is dominant 
 throughout. The theme is not the attack 
 of the sun-god to recover stolen milch 
 cows from the dragon's cave, but the bat- 
 tle between Ormuzd, the Spirit of Light, 
 and Ahriman, the Spirit of Darkness. 
 The one seeks to mar the earth which the 
 other has made. Into the fair paradise, 
 Airayana-Vaejo, " a delightful spot," as 
 the Avesta calls it, " with good waters 
 and trees," and into other smiling lands 
 which Ormuzd has blessed, Ahriman 
 sends "a mighty serpent .... strong, 
 deadly frost .... buzzing insects, and 
 poisonous plants. . . . toil and poverty," 
 and, worse than all, " the curse of unbe- 
 lief."* Between these two spiritual pow- 
 ers and their armies of good and bad 
 angels the battle rages for supremacy in 
 the universe for possession of the citadel 
 of Mansoul. 
 
 Early in the history of the Aryan tribes 
 there had arisen a quarrel between the 
 Brahminic and Iranian divisions. The 
 latter had become a quiet-loving, agricult- 
 ural people, while the former remained 
 marauding nomads, attacking and har- 
 assing their neighbors. In their plunder- 
 ing inroads they invoked the aid of spells 
 and sacrifices, offering the sacred soma- 
 juice to their gods, and nerving them- 
 selves for the fray by deep draughts of 
 the intoxicating stuff. Not only they, 
 but their gods as well, thereby became 
 objects of hatred to the peaceful Iranians, 
 who forswore all worship of freebooters' 
 deities, and transformed these devas of 
 the old religion into demons. That re- 
 ligion, as common to the Indo-European 
 race, was polytheistic, a worship of deities 
 each ruling over some department of na- 
 ture, but a worship exalting now one, now 
 another god, be it Indra, or Varuna, or 
 Agni, according to the indications of the 
 deity's supremacy, or according to the 
 mood of the worshiper. As remarked 
 by Jacob Grimm, " the idea of the devil 
 is foreign to all primitive religions," ob- 
 viously because in all primitive thought 
 evil and good are alike regarded as the 
 work of deities. In the Old Testament, 
 Yahweh is spoken of as the author of 
 both ; t the angels, whether charged 
 with weal or woe, are his messengers. In 
 the " Iliad," Zeus dispenses both : — 
 
 " Two urns by Jove's high throne have ever 
 stood. 
 The source of evil one, the other good ; 
 
 * Haig's "Essays on the Parsis," tr. Vendidad, 
 ;pp. 225, ft". 
 
 t Cf. Isaiah xlv. 7 ; 1 Kings xxii. 21-23 > Amos iii. 6. 
 
 From thence the cup of mortal man he fills, 
 Blessings to these, to those distribute ills, 
 To most, he mingles both." * 
 
 and 'tis a far way from this to the loftier 
 conception of Euripides : " If the gods do 
 evil, then are they no gods." So there 
 was a monotheistic — or, as Prof. Max 
 Miiller terms it, a henotheistic — element 
 in the Vedic religion which in the Iranian 
 religion, and this mainly through the 
 teaching of the great thinker and reformer, 
 Zarathushtra (Zoroaster), was largely 
 diffused. In his endeavor to solve the old 
 problem of reconciling sin and misery 
 with Omnipotent goodness, he supposes 
 " two primeval causes," one of which pro- 
 duced the "reality," or good mind ; the 
 other the " non-reality," or evil mind. 
 Behind these was developed belief in a 
 philosophical abstraction, " uncreate time," 
 of which each was the product ; but such 
 doctrines were too subtle for the popular 
 grasp, and, wrapped in the old mythologi- 
 cal garb, they appeared in concrete form 
 as dualism. Vritra survived in Ahriman, 
 who, like him, is represented as a serpent ; 
 and in Ormuzd we have the phonetic de- 
 scendant of Ahura-mazdas. 
 
 Now, it was with this dualism, this 
 transformed survival of the sun and cloud 
 myth, that the Jews came into association 
 during their memorable exile in Babylon. 
 Prior to that time, their theology, as hinted 
 above, had no devil in it. But in that 
 belief in spirits which they held in com- 
 mon with all semi-civilized races, as a 
 heritage from barbarous ancestors, there 
 were the elements out of which such a 
 personality might be readily evolved. 
 Their satan, or "accuser," as that word 
 means, is no prince of the demons, like 
 the Beelzebub of later times ; no dragon, 
 or old serpent, as of the Apocalypse,, de- 
 fying Omnipotence and deceiving the 
 whole world ; but a kind of detective who, 
 by direction of Yahweh, has his eye on 
 suspects, and who is sent to test their 
 fidelity. In all his missions he acts as the 
 intelligent and loyal servant of Yahweh. 
 But although therefore not regarded as 
 bad himself the character and functions 
 with which he was credited made easy 
 the transition, from such theories about 
 him to theories of him as inherently evil, 
 as the enemy of goodness, and, therefore, 
 of God. He who, like Vritra, was an 
 object of dread, came to be regarded as 
 the incarnation of evil, the author and 
 abetter of things harmful to man. Per- 
 sian dualism gave concrete form to this 
 
 : " Iliad," Book xxiv. p. 663, ft". 
 
22 [204J 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 conception, and from the time of the 
 Exile we rind Satan as the Jewish Ahri- 
 man, the antagonist of God. Not he 
 alone, for " the angels that kept not their 
 first estate " were the creatures of his 
 evil designs, creatures so numerous that 
 " every one has 10,000 at his right hand 
 and 1000 at his left hand, and because 
 they rule chiefly at night no man should 
 greet another lest he should salute a de- 
 mon. They haunt lonely spots, often 
 assume the shape of beasts, and it is their 
 presence in the bodies of men and 
 women which is the cause of madness 
 and other diseases." * 
 
 From the period when the Apocryphal 
 books, especially those having traces of 
 Persian influence, were written,! this 
 doctrine of an archfiend with his army of 
 demons received increasing impetus. It 
 passed on without check into the Chris- 
 tian religion, and wherever this spread 
 the heathen gods, like the devas of Brah- 
 minism among the Iranians, were de- 
 graded into demons, and swelled the vast 
 crowd of evil spirits let loose to torment 
 and' ruin mankind. 
 
 This doctrine of demonology, it should 
 be remembered, was but the elaborated 
 form of that ancestral belief in spirits re- 
 ferred to above. In the Christian system 
 it was associated with that belief in magic 
 which has its roots in fetishism, and from 
 the two arose belief in witchcraft. The 
 universal belief in demons in early and 
 mediaeval times supplied an easy explana- 
 tion of disasters and diseases ; the sor- 
 cerers and charm-workers, the wizards 
 and enchanters, had passed into the serv- 
 ice of the devil. For power to work 
 their spite and malevolence, they had bar- 
 tered their souls to him, and sealed the 
 bargain with their blood. It was enough 
 for the ignorant and frightened sufferers 
 to accuse some poor, misshapen, squint- 
 ing old woman of casting on them the 
 evil eye, or of appearing in the form of a 
 cat, to secure her trial by torture and her 
 condemnation to an unpitied death. The 
 spread of popular terror led to the issue 
 of Papal bulls and to the passing of stat- 
 utes in England and in other countries 
 against witchcraft, and it was not until 
 late in the eighteenth century that the 
 laws against that imaginary crime were 
 repealed. 
 
 There is no sadder chapter in the an- 
 
 * Vide mv "Jesus of Nazareth," p. 144. 
 
 t Notably '• Tobit"and "Baruch,"and cf. " Hook 
 of Wisdom," II. 24, for earliest indications oi the 
 belief. The Asmodeus of Tobit iii. 8 and 17, ap- 
 pears to be the AcshmG durvO of the Zend-Avesta. 
 
 nals of this tearful world, than this ghastly 
 story of witch-finding and witch-burning. 
 Sprenger computes that during the Chris- 
 tian epoch no less than nine millions of 
 persons, mostly women of the poorer 
 classes, were burned ; victims of the sur- 
 vival into relatively civilized times of an 
 illusion which had its source in primitive 
 thought. It was an illusion which had 
 the authority of Scripture on its side ; * the 
 Church had no hesitation concerning it, 
 such men as Luther, Sir Thomas Browne, 
 and Wesley never doubted it, the evidence 
 of the bewitched was supported by honest 
 witnesses, and judges disposed to mercy 
 and humanity had no qualms in passing 
 the dread sentence of the law on the con- 
 demned.! 
 
 And although it exists not to-day, save 
 in by-places where gross darkness lurks, 
 it was not destroyed by argument, by dis- 
 proof, by direct assault, but only through 
 the growth of the scientific spirit, before 
 which, like the miasma of the Campagna : 
 before the planting of the Eucalvptus, it 
 has dispersed. It could not live in an at- 
 mosphere thus purified, an atmosphere 
 charged with belief in unchanging causa- 
 tion, and in a definite order unbroken by 
 caprice or fitfulness, whether in the sweep 
 of a planet or the pulsations of a human 
 heart. 
 
 Of course the antecedents of the arch- 
 fiend himself could not fail to be the sub- 
 ject of curious inquiry in the time when 
 his existence was no matter of doubt. 
 The old theologians scraped together 
 enough material about him from the sa- 
 cred books of the Jews and Christians to 
 construct an elaborate biography of him ; 
 but in this they would seem to have ex- 
 plained too much in certain directions and 
 not enough in others, thus provoking a 
 reaction which ultimately discredited their 
 painful research. Their genealogy of 
 him was carried further back than they 
 intended or desired, for the popular no- 
 tions credited him with both a mother 
 and grandmother. Their theory of his 
 fall from Heaven gave rise to the droll 
 conception of his lameness and to the le- 
 gends of which the " devil on two sticks " 
 is a type. Their infusion of foreign ele- 
 ment into his nature aided his pictorial 
 presentment in motley form and garb. 
 To Vedic descriptions of Vritra's dark- 
 ness may perchance be traced his murki- 
 ness and blackness ; Greek satyr and 
 German forest-sprite his goat-like body, 
 
 * Exodus xxii. 18. 
 
 + For details of witch trials in this island, cf> 
 Mrs. Lynn Linton's " Witch Stories,*' passim. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [265j 23 
 
 his horns, his cloven hoofs, his tail ; to 
 Thor his red beard and trident, vulgar- 
 ized into a pitchfork ; to dwarfs and gob- 
 lins his red cloak and nodding plume ; to 
 theories of transformation of men and 
 spirits into animals his manifold meta- 
 morphoses, as black cat, wolf, hellhound, 
 and the like. 
 
 But his description was his doom; it 
 was by a natural sequence that the le- 
 gends of mediaeval times present him, 
 not, with the Scotch theologians, as a 
 scholar and a swindler, disguising himself 
 as a parson, but as gullible and stupid, 
 as overreaching himself, and as befooled 
 by mortals. And, like the Trolls of 
 Scandinavian folk-lore who burst at sun- 
 rise, it needed only the full light thrown 
 upon his origin and development by the 
 researches of comparative mythologists to 
 dissipate this creation of man's fears and 
 fancies into the vaporous atmosphere 
 where he had his birth. 
 
 XI. 
 
 METEMPSYCHOSIS AND TRANSFOR- 
 MATION. 
 
 The belief that human beings could 
 change themselves into animals was al- 
 luded to in my remarks on witchcraft, but, 
 in view of its large place in the history of 
 illusions, too incidentally, and it is pro- 
 posed to give it further reference here. 
 
 Superstitions which now excite a smile, 
 or which seem beneath notice, were no 
 sudden phenomena, appearing now and 
 again at the beck and call of willful de- 
 ceivers of their kind. That they survive 
 at all, like organisms, atrophied or degen- 
 erate, which have seen "better days," is 
 evidence of remote antiquity and persist- 
 ence. Every seeming vagary of the mind 
 had serious importance, and answered to 
 some real need of man as a sober attempt 
 to read the riddle of the earth and get to 
 its inmost secret. 
 
 So with this belief. It is the outcome 
 of that early thought of man which con- 
 ceived a common nature and fellowship 
 between himself and brutes, a conception 
 based on rude analogies between his own 
 and other forms of life, as also between 
 himself and things without life, but having 
 motion, be they waterspouts or rivers, 
 trees or clouds, especially these last, when 
 the wind, in violent surging and with 
 howling voice, drove them across the sky. 
 "Where he blindly, timidly groped, we 
 
 walk as in the light, and with love that 
 casts out fear. Where rough resem- 
 blances suggested to him like mental states 
 and actions In man and brute, the science 
 of our time has, under the comparative 
 method, converted the guess into a cer- 
 tainty; not to the confirmation of his 
 conclusions, but to the proof of identity 
 of structure and function, to the demon- 
 strating of a common origin, however 
 now impassable the chasm that separates 
 us from the lower animals. 
 
 The belief in man's power to change 
 his form and nature is obviously nearly 
 connected with the widespread doctrine 
 of metempsychosis, or the passing of the 
 soul at death into one or a series of 
 animals, generally types of the dead man's 
 character, as where the timid enter the 
 body of a hare, the gluttonous that of a 
 swine or vulture. 
 
 " Fills with fresh energy another form, 
 
 And towers an elephant or glides a worm ; 
 Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon ; 
 Or wails a screech-owl to the deaf, cold 
 moon, [and glare, 
 
 Or haunts the brakes where serpents hiss 
 Or hums, a glittering insect, in the air." 
 
 But while in transmigration the soul 
 returns not to the body which it had left, 
 transformation was only for a time, oc- 
 curring at stated periods, and effected by 
 the will of the transformed, or by the aid 
 of sorcery and magic, or sometimes im- 
 posed by the gods as a punishment for 
 impious defiance and sin. 
 
 Other causes, less remote, aided the 
 spread of a belief to which the mind was 
 already inclined. Among these were the 
 hallucinations of men who believed them- 
 selves changed into beasts, and who, re- 
 treating to caves and forests, issued 
 thence howling and foaming, ravening for 
 blood and slaughter ; hallucinations which 
 afflicted not only single persons, as in the 
 case of Nebuchadnezzar, whose milder 
 monomania (he, himself, saying in the 
 famous prize poem : — 
 
 " As he ate the unaccustomed food, 
 It may be wholesome, but it is not good.") 
 
 rather resembled that of the daughters 
 of Praetus, who believed themselves cows, 
 but which also spread as virulent epi- 
 demic among whole classes. It is related 
 that, in 1600, multitudes were attacked by 
 the disease known as lycanthropy, or wolf- 
 madness (from Greek, lukos, a wolf, and 
 anthropos, a man), and that they herded 
 and hunted in packs, destroying and eat- 
 ing children, and keeping in their mount- 
 
24 1260] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 ain fastnesses a cannibal or devil's Sab- 
 bath, like the nocturnal meetings of 
 witches and demons known as the 
 Witches' Sabbath. Hundreds of them 
 were executed on their own confession, 
 but some time elapsed before the frightful 
 epidemic, and the panic which it caused, 
 passed away. Besides such delusions, 
 history down to our own time records 
 instances where a morbid, innate craving 
 for blood, leading sometimes to cannibal- 
 ism, has shown itself. Mr. Baring- 
 Gould, in his " Book of Werewolves," 
 cites a case from Gall of a Dutch priest 
 who had such a desire to kill and to see 
 killed that he became chaplain to a reg- 
 iment for the sake of witnessing the 
 slaughter in battle. But still more ghastly 
 are the notorious cases of Elizabeth, an 
 Hungarian lady of title, who inveigled 
 girls into her castle and murdered them 
 that she might bathe her body in human 
 blood to enhance her beauty ; and of the 
 Marechal de Retz who, cursed with the 
 abnormal desire to murder children, al- 
 lured them with promises of dainties in- 
 to his kitchen, and killed them, inhaling 
 the odor of their blood with delight, and 
 then burned their bodies in the huge fire- 
 place in the one room devoted to these 
 horrors. When the deed was done, the 
 Marechal would lie prostrate with grief 
 " would toss weeping and praying on a 
 bed, or recite fervent prayers and litanies 
 on his knees, only to rise with irresistible 
 craving to repeat the crime." 
 
 Such instances as the foregoing, 
 whether of delusion or morbid desire to 
 destroy, are among secondary causes ; 
 they may contribute, but they do not cre- 
 ate, being inadequate to account for the 
 world-wide existence of transformation 
 myths. The animals which are the sup- 
 posed subject of these vary with the habitat 
 but are always those which have inspired 
 most dread from their ferocity. In Abys- 
 sinia we find the man-hyaena ; in South 
 Africa, the man-lion ; in India, the man- 
 tiger; in Northern Europe, the man-bear; 
 and in other parts of Europe the man-wolf 
 or were-wolf (from A.-S. wer, a man). 
 
 Among the many survivals of primitive 
 thought in the Greek mythology, which 
 are the only key to its coarser features, 
 this of belief in transformation occurs, 
 and, indeed, along the whole line of human 
 development it appears and re-appears in 
 forms more or less vivid and tragic. The 
 gods of the South, as of the North, came 
 down in the likeness of beasts and birds, 
 as well as of men, and among the refer- 
 ences to these myths in classic writers. 
 
 Ovid, in the "Metamorphoses," tells the 
 story of Zeus visiting Lykaon, king of 
 Arcadia, who placed a dish of human flesh 
 before the god to test thereby his om- 
 niscience. Zeus detected the trick, and 
 punished the king by changing him 
 into a wolf, so that his desire might be 
 toward the food which he had impiously 
 offered to his god. 
 
 " In vain he attempted to speak ; from that 
 
 very instant 
 His jaws were bespluttered with foam, and 
 
 only he thirsted 
 For blood, as he raged among flocks and 
 
 panted for slaughter. 
 His vesture was changed into hair, his limbs 
 
 became crooked. 
 A wolf — he retains yet large traces of his 
 
 ancient expression, 
 Hoary he is as afore, his countenance 
 
 rabid, 
 His eyes glitter savagely still, the picture of 
 
 fury." 
 
 But we may pass from this and such- 
 like tales of the ancients to the grim reali- 
 ties of the belief in mediaeval times. 
 
 XII. 
 
 TRANSFORMATION IN THE MIDDLE 
 AGES. 
 
 The closing remarks in my last paper 
 made reference to the terribly real form 
 which belief in transformation assumed 
 in the middle ages. 
 
 If wolves abounded, much more did 
 the were-wolf abound. According to 
 Olaus Magnus, the sufferings which the 
 inhabitants of Prussia and neighboring 
 nations endured from wolves were trivial 
 compared with the ravages wrought by 
 men turned into wolves. On the feast of 
 the Nativity, these monsters were said to 
 assemble and then disperse in companies 
 to kill and plunder. Attacking lonely 
 houses, they devoured all the human be- 
 ings and every other animal found there- 
 in. " They burst into the beer-cellars 
 and there they empty the tuns of beer or 
 mead, and pile up the empty casks one 
 above another in the middle of the cellar, 
 thus showing their difference from natural 
 wolves." In Scandinavia it was believed 
 that some men had a second skin, out of 
 which they could slip and appear in the 
 shape of a beast. Perhaps the phrase 
 " to jump out of one's skin " is a relic of 
 this notion. The Romans believed that 
 the were-wolf simply effected the change 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 by turning his skin inside out, hence the 
 term " versipellis," or "skin-changer." 
 So in mediaeval times it was said that 
 the wolf's skin was under the human, and 
 the unhappy suspects were hacked and 
 tortured for signs of such hairy growth. 
 Sometimes the change was induced, it is 
 said, by putting on a girdle of human 
 skin round the waist ; sometimes by the 
 use of magical ointment. Whatever the 
 animal whose shape a man took could do, 
 that he could do, plus such power as he 
 possessed in virtue of his manhood or ac- 
 quired by sorcery, his eyes remaining as 
 the only features by which he could be 
 recognized. If he was not changed him- 
 self, some charm was wrought on the 
 eyes of onlookers whereby they could see 
 him only in the shape which he was sup- 
 posed to assume. The genuine mono- 
 maniacs aided such an illusion. The 
 poor demented one who conceived himself 
 a dog or a wolf, who barked, and snapped, 
 and foamed at the mouth, and bit savagely 
 at the flesh of others, was soon clothed 
 by a terror-stricken fancy in the skin of 
 either brute, and believed to have the 
 canine or lupine appetite in addition to 
 his human cunning. The imagination 
 thus projects in visible form the specters 
 of its creation ; the eye in this, as in so 
 much else, sees the thing for which it 
 looks. Some solid foundation for the 
 belief would, however, exist in the cus- 
 tom among warriors of dressing them- 
 selves in the skins of beasts to add to 
 their ferocious appearance. And it was 
 amid such that the remarkable form of 
 mania in Northern Europe known as the 
 Berserkr rage (" bear-sark " or " bear- 
 skin " wearer) arose. Working them- 
 selves by the aid of strong drink or drugs 
 and contagious excitement into a frenzy, 
 these freebooters of the Northland sallied 
 forth to break the back bones and cleave the 
 skulls of quiet folk and unwary travelers. 
 As with flashing eyes and foaming mouth 
 they yelled and danced, seemingly en- 
 dowed with magic power to resist as- 
 sault by sword or club, they aroused in 
 the hysterically disposed a like madness, 
 which led to terrible crimes, and which 
 died away only as the killing of one's 
 fellows became less the business of life. 
 
 During the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries, the belief in men-beasts 
 reached its maximum, and met with no 
 tender treatment at the hands of a 
 Church whose Founder had manifested 
 such soothing pity toward the "pos- 
 sessed " of Galilee and Judasa. That 
 Church had a cut-and-dried explanation 
 
 [267] 25 
 
 of the whole thing, and applied a sharp 
 and pitiless remedy. If the devil, with 
 countless myrmidons at his command, 
 was " going to and fro" in the earth, and 
 walking up and down in it," what limit 
 could be put to his ingenuity and arts ? 
 Could he not as easily change a man into 
 a wolf or a bear, as a woman into a cat; 
 and had not each secured this by a com- 
 pact with him, the foe of God and His 
 Church? The evidence in support of 
 the one was as clear and cogent as in sup- 
 port of the other ; hence were-wolf hunt- 
 ing and burning became as Christian a 
 duty and as paying a profession as witch- 
 smelling and torturing. Any cruelty was 
 justified by its perpetrators when the ob- 
 ject in view was the vindication of the 
 majesty of God ; and not until the ad- 
 vancing intelligence of men recoiled 
 against the popular explanations of witch- 
 craft and lycanthropy were the laws 
 against both repealed. 
 
 Those explanations were survivals of 
 savage mental philosophy blended with a 
 crude theology. To the savage, all 
 diseases are the work of evil spirits. If a 
 man hurts himself against a stone, the 
 demon in the stone is the cause. If the 
 man falls suddenly ill, writhes or shrieks 
 in his pain, the spirit which has smuggled 
 itself in with the food or the drink or the 
 breath is twisting or tearing him ; if he 
 has a fit, the spirit has flung him ; if he is 
 in the frenzy of hysteria, the spirit within 
 him is laughing in fiendish glee. And 
 when the man suddenly loses his reason, 
 goes, as people say, " out of his mind," 
 acts and looks no longer like his former 
 self, still more does this seem the work of 
 an evil agent within him. It is kindred 
 with the old belief that the sickly and 
 ugly infant had been left in the cradle by 
 the witch in place of the child which 
 she had stolen before its baptism.* And 
 the thing to do is to find some mode of 
 conjuring or frightening or forcing the 
 demon out of the man just as it became 
 a sacred duty to watch over the newly 
 born until the sign of the Cross had been 
 made on its forehead, and the regenerat- 
 ing water sprinkled over it. 
 
 " Presbyter is but old priest writ large." 
 And the theory of demoniacal agency 
 was but the savage theory in a more elab- 
 orate guise. To theologians and jurists 
 it was a sufficing explanation ; it fitted in 
 with the current notions of the govern- 
 ment of the universe, and there was no 
 
 * Spenser says: — 
 " Such, men do changelings call, so changed by 
 fairies' theft." 
 
26 [26S] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 need to frame any other. Body and 
 mind were to them as separate entities, 
 as they are to the savage and the igno- 
 rant. Each regarded the soul as inde- 
 pendent of the body, and framed his 
 theories of occasional absence therefrom 
 accordingly. But science has taught us 
 to know ourselves not as dual, but as one. 
 She lays her finger on the subtle, intricate 
 framework of man's nervous system, and 
 finds in the derangement of this the secret 
 of those delusions and illusions which have 
 been so prolific in agony and suffering. 
 She makes clear how the yielding to mor- 
 bid tendencies can still foster delusions, 
 which, if no longer the subject of pains 
 and penalties in the body politic, are 
 themselves ministers of vengeance in the 
 body where they arise. And in the recog- 
 nition of a fundamental unity between 
 the physical and the mental, in the 
 healthy working of the one as dependent 
 on the wholesome care of the other, she 
 finds not only the remedy against mental 
 derangement and all forms of harmful 
 excitement, but also the prevention which 
 is better than cure. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE BELIEF IN TRANSFORMATION 
 UNIVERSAL. 
 
 Traditions of transformation of men 
 into beasts are not confined to the Old 
 World. In Dr. Rink's "Tales of the 
 Eskimo " there are numerous stories both 
 of men and women who have assumed 
 animal form at will, as also incidental ref- 
 erences to the belief in stories such as 
 that telling how an Eskimo got inside a 
 walrus skin, so that he might lead the life 
 of that creature. And among the Red 
 Races, that rough analogy which led to 
 the animal being credited with life 
 and consciousness akin to the human, 
 still expresses itself in thought and 
 act. If even now it is matter of popu- 
 lar belief in the wilds of Norway that Finns 
 and Lapps, who from remote times have 
 passed as skillful witches and wizards, can 
 at pleasure assume the shape of bears, 
 the common saying, according to Dr. Da- 
 sent, about an unusually daring and sav- 
 age beast being, " that can be no Chris- 
 tian bear," we may not be surprised that 
 lower races still ascribe power of inter- 
 change to man and brute. The werewolf 
 superstition is extant among the North 
 Western Indians, but free from those dia 
 
 bolical features which characterized it in 
 mediaeval times among ourselves. It takes 
 its place in barbaric myth generally, and 
 although it may have repellant or cruel 
 elements, it was never blended with be- 
 lief in the demoniacal. The Ahts say 
 that men go into the mountains to seek 
 their manitou (that is, the personal deity, 
 generally the first animal seen by the na- 
 tive in the dream produced by his fasting 
 on reaching manhood), and, mixing with 
 wolves, are after a time changed into these 
 creatures. Although the illustration bears 
 more upon what has to be said concern- 
 ing the barbaric belief in animal ances- 
 tors, it has some reference to the matter 
 in hand to cite the custom among the 
 Tonkanays, a wild and unruly tribe in 
 Texas, of celebrating their origin by a 
 grand annual dance. One of them, naked 
 as he was born, is buried in the earth, 
 then the others, clothed in wolfskins, walk 
 over him, sniff around him, howl in wolf- 
 ish style, and then dig him up with their 
 nails. The leading wolf solemnly places 
 a bow and arrow in his hands, and, to his 
 inquiry as to what he must do for a living, 
 advises him " to do as the wolves do — rob, 
 kill, and rove from place to place, never 
 cultivating the soil." Dr. Brinton, in quot- 
 ing the above from Schoolcraft, refers to a 
 similar custom among the ancient dwell- 
 ers on Mount Soracte. 
 
 As in past times among ourselves, so 
 in times present among races such as the 
 foregoing, their wizards and shamans are 
 believed to have power to turn themselves 
 as they choose into beasts, birds, or rep- 
 tiles. By whatever name these profes- 
 sional impostors are known, whether as 
 medicine-men, or, as in Cherokee, by the 
 high-sounding title of " possessors of the 
 divine fire," they have traded, and wher- 
 ever credulity or darkest ignorance abide, 
 still trade, on the fears and fancies of 
 their fellows by disguising themselves in 
 voice and gait and covering as the animal 
 which they pretend to be. Among races 
 believing in transformation such tricks 
 have free course, and the more dexterous 
 the sorcerer who could play bear's antics 
 in a bear's skin proved himself in throw- 
 ing off the disguise and appearing sud- 
 denly as a man, the greater his success, 
 and he more firmly grounded the belief. 
 
 The whole subject, although presented 
 here only in the barest outline, would not 
 be fitly dismissed without some reference 
 to the survival of the primitive belief in 
 men-animals in the world-wide stories 
 known as Beast-fables, in which animals 
 | act and talk like human beings. When 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 27 
 
 to us all Nature was wonderland, and 
 among our playfellows were the four- 
 footed, the birds, and the fishes ; when in 
 fireside tale and rhyme they spoke our 
 language and lived that free life which we 
 then shared and can never share again, 
 the feeling of kinship to which the old 
 fables gave expression may have checked 
 mady a wanton act, and, if we learned it 
 not fully then, at least have taken the 
 lesson to heart since, 
 Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
 With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives. 
 
 And then those " Fables " of JEsop, even 
 with the tedious drawback of _ the 
 " moral," as powder beneath the jam, 
 did they not lighten for us in school-days 
 the dark passages through our Valpy (for 
 the omniscient Dr. William Smith was 
 not then the tyro's dread), and again give 
 us communion with the fowl of the air 
 and the beast of the field ? Now, our 
 mature thought may interest itself in fol- 
 lowing the beast-myths to the source 
 whence Babrius and Phsedrus, knowing 
 not its springhead and antiquity, drew 
 their vivid presentments of the living 
 world, and find in the storied East the 
 wellspring that fed the imagination of 
 youngsters thousands of years ago. With 
 some authorities the Egyptians have the 
 credit of first inventing the beast-fable, 
 but among them, as among every other ad- 
 vanced race, such stories are the remains 
 of an earlier deposit ; relics of a primitive 
 philosophy, in which wisdom, and skill, 
 and cunning are no monopoly of man's. 
 The fondness of the negro races, whose 
 traditions are not limited to South and Cen- 
 tral Africa, for such fables is well known, 
 as witness the tales of which " Uncle 
 Remus " is a type, and it is strikingly 
 illustrated in the history of the Vai tribe, 
 who having, partly through contact with 
 wh*tes elaborated a system of writing, 
 made the beast-fable their earliest essay 
 in composition* 
 
 In former papers, the evidence in sup- 
 port of the common ancestry of the lan- 
 guages spoken by the leading peoples in 
 Europe, and by such important historical 
 races in Asia as the Hindu and the Per- 
 sian, has been summarized. That evi- 
 dence is likewise conclusive, not only as 
 to the origin of the myths on which the 
 great Indo-European epics are founded, 
 but also as to the possession by the 
 several clans of a common stock of folk- 
 lore and folk-tale, in which, of course, the 
 
 * Cf. Mahaffy's " Prolegomena to Ancient His- 
 tory," p. 392. 
 
 beast-fable is included, these being the 
 relics in didactic or humorous guise of that 
 serious philosophy concerning the life of 
 man and beast among the barbaric ances- 
 tors of the Indo-Europeans, upon which 
 stress enough has been laid. 
 
 Even if the common origin could be 
 disproved, the evidence would merely be 
 shifted from local to general foundations, 
 because the uniform attitude of mind be- 
 fore the same phenomena would be prov- 
 en; but the resemblances are too mi- 
 nute in detail to be explained by a theory 
 of independent creation of the tales where 
 now we find then. The likenesses are 
 many ; the unlikenesses are few, be- 
 ing the result of local coloring, his- 
 torical fact blended with the fiction, 
 popular belief, and superstition, all affect- 
 ed by the skill of the professional story- 
 teller. As in the numerous variants of 
 the familiar Cinderella, Beauty and the 
 Beast, Punchkin, and the like, the same 
 fairy prince or princess, the same wicked 
 magician and clever, versatile Boots peep 
 through, disclosing the near relationship 
 of Hindu nursery tales to the folk-tales 
 of Norway and the Highlands, of Iceland 
 and Ceylon, of Persia and Serbia, of 
 Russia and the lands washed by the Med- 
 iterranean. In the venerable collection 
 of " Buddhist Birth Stories," now in course 
 of translation by Dr. Rhys Davids,* and 
 to which he has prefaced an interesting 
 introduction on the source and migration 
 of folk-tales, we are face to face with 
 many a fable familiar to us in the " ^Esop " 
 of our school-days. There is the story 
 of the Ass in the Lion's Skin, not in which, 
 as ^Esop has it, the beast dressed himself, 
 but which the hawker put on him to 
 frighten the thieves who would steal his 
 goods. Left one day to browse in a 
 field while his master refreshed himself 
 at an inn, some watchmen saw him, and, 
 raising hue and cry, brought out the vil- 
 lagers, armed with their rude implements. 
 The ass, fearing death, made a noise like 
 an ass, and was killed. Long might he; 
 adds the ancient moral, 
 
 Clad in a lion's skin 
 Have fed on the barley green ; 
 But he brayed ! 
 And that moment he came to ruin. 
 
 The variants of this old fable are found 
 in mediaeval, in French, German, Indian, 
 and Turkish folk-lore, as are also those 
 of the tortoise who lost his life through 
 
 * Vol. I. Trubner & Co. See also, for some val- 
 uable illustrations from early English and other 
 sources, an article by Rev. Dr. Morris, in Conte7np. 
 Rev., May, 1881. 
 
28 1270J 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 " much speaking." Desiring to emigrate, 
 two ducks agreed to carry him, he seiz- 
 ing hold of a stick which they held be- 
 tween their beaks. As they passed over 
 a village, the people shouted and jeered, 
 whereupon the irate tortoise retorted, 
 " What business is it of yours ? " and, of 
 course, thereby let go the stick and, fall- 
 ing down, split in two. Therefore 
 
 Speak wise words not out of season ; 
 You see how, by talking overmuch, 
 The tortoise fell." 
 
 In JEsop, the tortoise asks an eagle to teach 
 him to fly ; in Chinese folk-lore he is car- 
 ried by geese. 
 
 Jacob Grimm's researches concerning 
 the famous mediaeval fable of " Reynard 
 the Fox," revealed the ancient and scat- 
 tered materials out of which that wonder- 
 ful satire was woven, and there is no feat- 
 ure of the story which reappears more 
 often in Eastern and Western folk-lore 
 than that cunning of the animal which 
 has been for the lampooner and the sat- 
 irist the type of self-seeking monk and 
 ecclesiastic. When Chanticleer proudly 
 takes an airing with his family, he meets 
 master Reynard, who tells him he has 
 become a " religious," and shows him 
 his beads, and his missal, and his hair 
 shirt, adding in a voice " that was child- 
 like and bland," that he had vowed never 
 to eat flesh. Then he went off singing 
 his Credo, and slunk behind a hawthorn. 
 Chanticleer, thus thrown off his guard, 
 continues his airing, and the astute hypo- 
 crite, darting from his ambush, seizes the 
 plump hen Coppel. So in Indian folk- 
 tale, a wolf living near the Ganges is cut 
 off from food by the surrounding water. 
 He decides to keep holy day, and the god 
 Sakka, knowing his lupine weakness, re- 
 solves to have some fun with him, and 
 turns himself into a wild goat. " Aha ! " 
 says the wolf, " I'll keep the fast another 
 day," and springing up he tried to seize 
 the goat, who skipped about so that he 
 couldn't be taken. So Lupus gives it up, 
 and says as his solatium : " After all, I've 
 not broken my vow." 
 
 The Chinese have a story of a tiger who 
 desired to eat a fox, but the latter claimed 
 exemption as being superior to the other 
 animals, adding that if the tiger doubted 
 his word, he could easily judge for him- 
 self. So the two set forth, and, of course, 
 every animal fled at sight of the tiger, 
 who, too stupid to see how he had been 
 gulled, conceived high respect for the fox, 
 and spared his life. 
 
 Sometimes the tables are turned. 
 
 Chanticleer gets his head out of Rey- 
 nard's mouth by making him answer the 
 farmer, and in the valuable collection of 
 Hottentot tales which the late Dr. Bleek, 
 with some warrant, called " Reynard in 
 South Africa," the cock makes the jackal 
 say his prayers, and flies off while the 
 outwitted beast folds his hands and shuts 
 his eyes. 
 
 But I must forbear quoting further. 
 Enough if it is made clear to the read- 
 er that the beast-fable is the lineal de- 
 scendant of barbaric conceptions of a life 
 shared in common by man and brute, 
 and another link thus added to the length- 
 ening chain of the continuity of human 
 history. 
 
 XIV. 
 
 BEAST-FABLES. 
 
 The beast-fables cited in my last paper 
 were drawn from widely-severed sources, 
 as illustrative of ideas common to all bar- 
 barous races, concerning the community 
 of life in man and brute. 
 
 They are thus shown to embalm the 
 relics of a serious philosophy, and the like 
 is true of the great mass of folk-tales of 
 which they are a branch. The connection 
 of the two is, indeed, manifest in the 
 group of which " Beauty and the Beast " 
 is a well-known example, in which the 
 husband or wife is of fair human form by 
 night and a hideous monster by day, un- 
 til freed from the sorcerer's enchantment. 
 Such tales have not fallen in the East to 
 the low level which they have reached 
 here, because they yet accord in some de- 
 gree with extant superstitions in India, 
 whereas in Europe they find little or noth- 
 ing to which they correspond. But, dis- 
 missing these, we will deal with a group 
 of stories culled from various collections, 
 the leading idea of which is the dwelling 
 apart of the soul or heart, as the seat of 
 life, from the body, in some secret place, 
 as in an egg, or a necklace, or a flower ; 
 the destruction of the soul involving that 
 of the body. 
 
 In the Norse tale of " The giant who 
 had no heart in his body," the monster 
 turns six princes and their wives into 
 stone, whereupon the seventh and only 
 surviving son, Boots, sets out to avenge 
 their fate. On his journey he saves the 
 lives of a raven, a salmon, and a wolf, and 
 the wolf, having eaten his horse, compen- 
 sates Boots by carrying him to the giant's 
 castle, where the lovely princess who is 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [271] 29 
 
 to be his bride is confined. She promises 
 to find out where the giant keeps his 
 heart, and by blandishments and divers 
 arts known to the fair sex both before and 
 since the time of Delilah, she worms out 
 the secret. He tells her that " far, far, away 
 in a lake lies an island ; on that island 
 stands a church ; in that church is a well ; 
 in that well swims a duck ; in that duck is 
 an egg ; and in that egg there lies my heart, 
 you darling ! " Boots, taking fond fare- 
 well of the princess, rides on the wolf's 
 back to the island. Then the raven he 
 had befriended flies to the steeple and 
 fetches the key of the church ; the salmon, 
 in like return for kindness, brings him the 
 egg from the well where the duck had 
 dropped it. 
 
 Then the wolf told him to squeeze the egg, 
 and as soon as ever he did so, the giant 
 screamed out. " Squeeze it again," said the 
 wolf ; and when the prince did so, the giant 
 screamed still more piteously, and begged 
 and prayed so prettily to be spared, saying he 
 would do all that the prince wished if he 
 would only not squeeze his heart in two. 
 " Tell him if he will restore to life again your 
 six brothers and their brides, you will spare 
 his life," said the wolf. Yes, the giant was 
 ready to do that, and he turned the six broth- 
 ers into kings' sons again, and their brides into 
 kings' daughters. "Now squeeze the egg 
 in two," said the wolf. With questionable 
 morality, doing evil that good might come, 
 Boots squeezed the egg to pieces, and the 
 giant burst at once. 
 
 Some interesting variants of this story 
 are given by Mr. Ralston in his " Russian 
 Folk-Tales," in which Koshchei is the 
 counterpart of the giant, his death being 
 brought about by the destruction of the 
 object in which his soul is hidden. In one 
 story he is killed by a blow on the fore- 
 head inflicted by the mysterious egg — that 
 last link in the magic chain by which his 
 life is darkly bound. In another version 
 the fatal blow is struck by a small stone 
 found in the yolk of an egg, which is in- 
 side a duck, which is inside a hare, which 
 is inside a stone, which is on an island. 
 In another variant, Koshchei attempts to 
 deceive his fair captive, pretending that 
 his " death " resides in a besom, or in a 
 fence, both of which she adorns with gold 
 in token of her love. Then he confesses 
 that his " death " really lies in an egg, in- 
 side a duck, inside a log which is floating 
 on the sea. Prince Ivan gets hold of the 
 egg, and shifts it from one hand to the 
 other. Koshchei rushes wildly from side 
 to side of the room. At last the prince 
 breaks the egg, and Koshchei falls on the 
 floor and dies. 
 
 In Serbian folk-tale the strength of a 
 baleful being who had stolen a princess 
 lies in a bird which is inside the heart of 
 a fox, and when the bird was taken out 
 of the heart and set on fire, that moment 
 the wife stealer falls down dead, and the 
 prince regains his bride. In Bohemian, 
 Gaelic, Greek, Finnish, as also among the 
 Hottentot and Samoyed folk-tales, the 
 same incident occurs of an external soul, 
 generally hidden in an egg, the breaking 
 of which ends the life of giant or other 
 monster. In the " Arabian Nights " the 
 Jinni's soul is enclosed in the crop of a 
 sparrow, and the sparrow is imprisoned 
 in a small box, and • this again in seven 
 other boxes, which are put into seven 
 chests, contained in a coffer of marble, 
 which is sunk in the ocean that surrounds 
 the world. Seyfel-Mulook raises the cof- 
 fer by the aid of Suleyman's seal-ring, and 
 having extricated the sparrow, strangles 
 it, whereupon the Jinni's body is convert- 
 ed into a heap of black ashes. 
 
 The most venerable form in which we 
 possess the myth of a man's soul outside 
 his body comes to us from the valley of 
 the Nile, but before narrating this we 
 must seek in the " storied East " the close 
 parallels to the folk-lore of the Western 
 Aryans. As in the Rig- Veda we are in 
 certain respects nearer to the older forms 
 of the parent language of the Indo-Euro- 
 pean peoples, so in the folk-tales of Ben- 
 gal and the Deccan we are nearer the 
 earliest forms of the fireside stories of 
 both east and west. 
 
 In the story of " Punchkin " given in 
 Miss Frere's " Old Deccan Days," a Rajah 
 has seven daughters, and his wife dying 
 when they were quite children, he marries 
 the widow of his prime minister. Her 
 cruelty to his children made them run off 
 to a jungle, where seven neighboring 
 princes, who were out hunting, found 
 them, and each took one of them to wife. 
 After a time they again went hunting, and 
 did not come back. So when the son of 
 the youngest princess, who had also been 
 enchanted away, grew up, he set out in 
 search of his mother and father and 
 uncles, and at last discovered that the 
 seven princes had been turned into stone 
 by the magician Punchkin, who had shut 
 up the princess in a tower because she 
 would not marry him. Recognizing her 
 son, she plotted with him to feign agree- 
 ment to marry Punchkin if he would tell 
 her where the secret of his life was hid- 
 den. Overjoyed at her yielding to his 
 wish, the magician told her that it was 
 true that he was not as others. 
 
20 [272] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 Far, far away, hundreds of thousands of 
 miles from this, there lies a desolate country 
 covered with thick jungle. In the midst of 
 the jungle grows a circle of palm-trees, and 
 in the center of the circle stand six chattees 
 full of water, piled one above another ; below 
 the sixth chattee is a small cage which con- 
 tains a little green parrot ; on the life of the 
 parrot depends my life, and if the parrot is 
 killed I must die. But, he added, this was 
 not possible, because thousands of genii " sur- 
 round the palm-trees, and kill all who ap- 
 proach the place." 
 
 The princess told her son this, and he 
 set forth on his journey. On the way he 
 rescued some young eagles from a ser- 
 pent, and the grateful birds carried him 
 until they reached the jungle, where, the 
 genii being overcome with sleep by the 
 heat, the eaglets swooped down. " Down 
 jumped the prince ; in an instant he had 
 overthrown the chattees full of water and 
 seized the parrot, which he rolled up in 
 his cloak," then mounted again into'the 
 air and was carried back to Punchkin's 
 palace. Punchkin was dismayed to see 
 the parrot in the prince's hands, and asked 
 him to name any price he willed for it, 
 whereupon the prince demanded the res- 
 toration of his father and his uncles to 
 life. This was done ; then he insisted on 
 Punchkin doing the like to " all whom he 
 had thus imprisoned," when, at the wav- 
 ing of the magician's wand, the whole 
 garden became suddenly alive. 
 
 " Give me my parrot ! " cried Punchkin. 
 Then the boy took hold of the parrot, and 
 tore off one of his wings ; and as he did 
 so the magician's right arm fell off. He 
 then pulled off the parrot's second wing, 
 and Punchkin's left arm fell off; then he 
 pulled off the bird's legs, and down fell 
 the magician's right leg and left leg. 
 Nothing remained of him save the limb- 
 less body and the head ; but still he rolled 
 his eyes, and cried, " Give me my parrot ! " 
 " Take your parrot, then," cried the boy, 
 and with that he wrung the bird's neck, 
 and threw it at the magician, and as he 
 did so, Punchkin's head twisted round, 
 and, with a fearful groan he died. Of 
 course, all the rest " lived very happily 
 ever afterward," as they do in the plays 
 and the novels. 
 
 In the story of " Sodewa Bai," the 
 Hindu Cinderella, the heroine's soul is 
 contained in a string of golden beads, 
 and in the Bengali tale, " Life's Secret," 
 a Rajah's favorite wife gives birth mirac- 
 ulously to a boy, whose soul is bound up 
 in a necklace in the stomach of a boal- 
 fish. In both instances the jewels are 
 stolen, and while they are worn by the 
 
 thieves, prince and princess alike are life- 
 less, while with the recovery of the jewels, 
 life returned to each. 
 
 The family likeness of these Indian 
 folk-tales to those given above is expli- 
 cable on no theory of borrowing, and 
 finds its sole and rational explanation in 
 the possession of a common stock of folk- 
 lore by the several ancestors of the Indo- 
 European races. As Sir G. W. Cox re- 
 marks, " the substantial identity of stories 
 told in Italy, Norway, and India can but 
 prove that the treasure-house of mythol- 
 ogy was more abundantly filled before the 
 dispersion of the Aryan tribes than we 
 had taken it to be." 
 
 The Egyptian tale of the " Two Broth- 
 ers " is of great value on account of its 
 high antiquity, and, moreover, specially 
 interesting as recording an incident simi- 
 lar to that narrated in the life of Joseph. 
 It is contained in the d'Orbiney papyrus 
 preserved in the Bibliotheque Imperiale, 
 the date being about the fourteenth or fif- 
 teenth century B.C. 
 
 There were two brothers, Anepou and 
 Satou, joined as one in love and labor. 
 One day Satou was sent to fetch seed- 
 corn from Anepou 's house, where he 
 found his brother's wife adorning her 
 hair. She urged him to stay with her, 
 but he refused, promising, however, to 
 keep her wickedness secret. When 
 Anepou returned at even, she, being 
 afraid, " made herself to seem as a wom- 
 an that had suffered violence," and told him 
 exactly the reverse of what had happened. 
 Anepou's wrath was kindled against 
 Satou, and he went out to slay him ; but 
 Satou called on Phra to save him, and 
 the god placed a river between the broth- 
 ers, so that when day dawned Anepou 
 might hear the truth. At sunrise Satou 
 tells his story, and, mutilating himself, he 
 says that he will leave Anepou and go to 
 the valley of the cedar, in the cones of 
 which he will deposit his heart, " so that 
 if the tree be cut, his heart would fall to 
 the earth, and he must die." 
 
 Space forbids further outline of the 
 venerable story, which finally ends with 
 the reconciliation of the two brothers. 
 
 For us the value of these folk-tales lies 
 in the relics of barbaric notions concern- 
 ing the nature of man and his relation to 
 external things which they preserve. 
 They have amused our youthhood : they 
 may instruct our manhood. Not if we 
 go to the solar mythologist for their in- 
 terpretation. We shall learn from Sir G. 
 W. Cox that " the magician Punchkin and 
 the heartless giant are only other forms 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [2Td] 31 
 
 of the Panis who steal bright treasures 
 from the gleaming west," that "Balna 
 herself is Helen shut up in Ilion ... the 
 eagles the bright clouds," * and from Pro- 
 fessor de Gubernatis that the duck is the 
 dawn and the egg the sun. 
 
 These venerable tales have a larger, 
 richer meaning than this, expressive of 
 the wonder deep-seated in the heart of 
 man. Like the beautiful prisms of topaz 
 and beryl revealed when a " drusy " cav- 
 ity in granitic rock is broken open, they 
 hold within them the crystallized thought 
 of the past. The soul existing apart from 
 the body, whether in bird or casket, and 
 determining its fate, is the relic of bar- 
 baric belief in one or more entities in the 
 body, yet not of it — a belief extant among 
 tribes still uncivilized, and surviving in 
 unsuspected forms among more advanced 
 races. 
 
 XV. 
 
 TOTEMISM. 
 
 In addition to the beliefs in the trans- 
 formation of men into animals and in the 
 transmigration of souls into the bodies of 
 animals, we find among barbarous peo- 
 ples a belief which is probably the parent 
 of one and certainly nearly related to both, 
 namely, in descent from the animal or 
 plant, more often the former, whose name 
 they bear. Its connection with transmi- 
 gration is seen in the belief of the Moquis, 
 an Indian tribe, that after death they live 
 in the form of their totemic animal, those 
 of the Deer family becoming deer, and so 
 on through the several clans. The belief 
 survives in its most primitive and vivid 
 forms among two races, the aborigines of 
 Australia and the North American In- 
 dians. The word " totemism," given to 
 it both in its religious and social aspects, 
 is derived from the Algonquin " dodaim " 
 or " dodhaim," meaning " clanmark." 
 Among the Australians, the word "ko- 
 bong," meaning " friend " or " protector," 
 is the generic term for the animal or plant 
 by which they are known. It is akin in 
 significance to the Indian words " mani- 
 tou," ''oki," etc., comprehending "the 
 manifestations of the unseen world, yet 
 conveying no sense of personal unity," 
 which are commonly translated by the 
 misleading word " medicine ; " hence, 
 " medicine-men." 
 
 The family name, or second name borne 
 
 * "Mythology of the Aryan Nations, 1 
 p. 140, n. 
 
 by all the tribes in lineal descent, and 
 which corresponds to our surname, i.e., 
 super nomen, or " over-name," is derived 
 from names of beasts, birds, etc., around 
 which traditions of their transformation 
 into men linger. Sir Geo. Grey* says 
 that there is a mysterious connection be- 
 tween a native and his kobong. It is his 
 protecting angel, like the " daimon " of 
 Socrates, like the " genius " of the early 
 Italian. " If it is an animal, he will not 
 kill one of the species to which it belongs, 
 should he find it asleep, and he always 
 kills it reluctantly and never without af- 
 fording it a chance of escape. The fam- 
 ily belief is that some one individual of 
 the species is their dearest friend, to kill 
 whom would be a great crime," as, in 
 Hindu belief, when a Rajah was said to 
 have entered at death into the body of a 
 fish, a " close time " was at once decreed. 
 Among the Indian tribes we find well- 
 nigh the whole fauna represented, their 
 totem being the Bear, Turtle, Deer, Hawk, 
 Eagle, Pike, Buffalo, etc. Like the Aus- 
 tralians, these tribes regarded themselves 
 as being of the breed of their particular 
 animal-totem, and avoided hunting, slay- 
 ing and eating (of which more presently) 
 the creature under whose form the ances- 
 tor was thought to be manifest. The 
 Chippaways carried their respect even 
 further. Deriving their origin from the 
 dog, they at one time refrained from 
 employing their supposed canine ances- 
 tors in dragging their sledges. The Be- 
 chuana and other people of South Africa 
 will avoid eating their tribe-animal or 
 wearing its skin. The same prohibitions 
 are found among tribes in Northern Asia, 
 and the Vogulitzi of Siberia, when they 
 have killed a bear, address it formally, 
 maintaining " that the blame is to be laid 
 on the arrows and iron, which were made 
 and forged by the Russians ! " Among 
 the Delawares the Tortoise gens claimed 
 supremacy over the others, because their 
 ancestor, who had become a fabled mon- 
 ster in their mythology, bore their world 
 on his back. The Californian Indians are 
 in interesting agreement with Lord Mon- 
 boddo when, in claiming descent from the 
 prairie wolf, they account for the loss of 
 their tails by the habit of sitting, which, in 
 course of time, wore them down to the 
 stump ! The Kickapoos say their ances- 
 tors had tails, and that when they lost 
 them the " impudent fox sent every morn- 
 ing to ask how their tails were, and the 
 bear shook his fat sides at the joke." 
 
 * " Travels in N. W. and W. Australia," Vol. 
 II., 229. 
 
32 [-74] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 The Patagonians are said to have a num- 
 ber of animal deities, creators of the sev- 
 eral tribes, some being of the caste of the 
 guanaco, others of the ostrich, etc. In 
 short, the group of beliefs and practices 
 found among races in the lower stages of 
 culture point to a widespread common at- 
 titude toward the mystery of life around 
 them. In speaking of totemism among 
 the Red Races, Dr. Brinton thinks that 
 the free use of animate symbols to express 
 abstract ideas, which he finds so frequent, 
 is the source of a confusion which has led 
 to their claiming literal descent from wild 
 beasts. But the barbaric mind bristles 
 with contradictions and mutually destruct- 
 ive conceptions ; nothing is too wonder- 
 ful, too bizarre lor its acceptance, and the 
 belief in actual animal descent is not the 
 most remarkable or far-fetched among the 
 articles of its creed. 
 
 The subject of totemism is full of in- 
 terest both on its religious and social 
 side : — 
 
 On its religious side it has given rise, 
 or, if this be not conceded, impetus, to 
 that worship of animals which assuredly 
 had its source in the attribution of myste- 
 rious power through some spirit within 
 them, making them deity incarnate. 
 
 On its social side it has led to prohibi- 
 tions which are inwoven among the cus- 
 toms and prejudices of civilized communi- 
 ties. But before speaking of these prohi- 
 bitions, the barbaric mode of reckoning 
 descent should be noticed. 
 
 The family name borne by any Austra- 
 lian tribe is perpetuated by the children, 
 whether boys or girls, taking their mother's 
 name. Precisely the same custom is found 
 among the American Indians — the chil- 
 dren of both sexes being of the mother's 
 clan. Now, the family, as we define it, 
 does not exist in savage communities, nor, 
 as Mr. McLennan says in his very re- 
 markable work on " Primitive Marriage," 
 had " the earliest human groups any idea 
 of kinship, . . . the physical root of which 
 could be discerned only through observa- 
 tion and reflection." Where the relations 
 of the sexes were confused and promis- 
 cuous, the oldest system in which the idea 
 of blood-ties was expressed was a system 
 of kinship through the mother. The hab- 
 its of the " much-married " primitive men 
 made mistake about any one's mother 
 less likely than mistake about his father ; 
 and, if in civilized times it is, as the saying 
 goes, a wise child that knows its own 
 father, he was, in barbarous times, a wise 
 father who knew his own child. Exam- 
 ples tracing the kinship through females, 
 
 father and offspring being never of the 
 same clan, abound in both ancient and 
 modern authorities, and perhaps the most 
 amusing one that can be given is found in 
 Dr. Morgan's "Systems of Consanguin- 
 ity." He says that the " natives of the 
 province of Keang-se are celebrated 
 among the natives of the other Chinese 
 provinces for the mode, or form, used by 
 them in address, namely, ' Laon peaon,' 
 which, freely translated, means, ' Oh, you 
 old fellow, brother mine by some of the 
 ramifications of female relationship ! ' " 
 
 The prohibitions arising out of totemism 
 are two: i. Against intermarriage be- 
 tween those of the same name or crest. 
 2. Against the eating of the totem by any 
 member of the tribe called after it. 
 
 I. Among both Australians and Indians 
 a man is forbidden to marry his own clan, 
 z.e., any woman of his own surname or 
 badge, no matter where she was born or 
 however distantly related to him. 
 
 Were this practice of "Exogamy," as 
 marriage outside the tribe is called, lim- 
 ited to one or two places, it might be 
 classed among exceptional local customs 
 based on a tradition, say, of some heated 
 blood-feud between the tribes. But its 
 prevalence among savage or semi-savage 
 races all the world over points to reasons 
 the nature of which is still a crux to the 
 anthropologists. The late Mr. McLennan, 
 whose opinion on such a matter is enti- 
 tled to the most weight, connects it with 
 the custom of female infanticide, which, 
 rendering women scarce, led at once to 
 polyandry, or one female to several males, 
 within the tribe, and to the capturing of 
 women from other tribes. This last- 
 named practice strengthens Mr. Mc- 
 Lennan's theory. He cites numerous in- 
 stances from past and present barbarous 
 races, and traces its embodiment in formal 
 code until we come to the mock relics of 
 the custom in modern times — as, for ex- 
 ample, that harmless " survival " in bride- 
 lifting, that is, stealing, as in the word 
 " cattle-lifting." 
 
 Connected with this custom is the 
 equally prevailing one which forbids in- 
 tercourse between relations, as especially 
 between a couple and their fathers and 
 mothers-in-law, and which also forbids 
 mentioning their names. (I have, by the 
 way, heard more than one cynical son-in- 
 law express regret that certain features of 
 this custom had not survived among our- 
 selves.) So far as the aversion which the 
 savage has to telling his own name, or ut- 
 tering that of any person (especially the 
 dead), or thing feared by him is concerned, 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [275] 33 
 
 the reason is not far to seek. It lies in 
 that confusion between names and things 
 which marks all primitive thinking. The 
 savage, who shrinks from having his like- 
 ness taken in the fear that a part of him- 
 self is being carried away thereby, regards 
 his name as something through which he 
 may be harmed. So he will use all sorts 
 of roundabout phrases to avoid saying it, 
 and even change it that he may elude his 
 foes, and puzzle or cheat Deatn when he 
 com'es to look for him. But why a son- 
 in-law should not see the face of his 
 mother-in-law, for so it is among the 
 Aranaks of South America, the Caribs 
 and other tribes of more northern regions, 
 the Fijians, Sumatrans, Dayaks, the na- 
 tives of Australia, the Zulus, in brief, 
 along the range of the lower culture, is a 
 question to which no satisfactory answer 
 has been given, and to which reference is 
 here made because of its connection with 
 totemism. 
 
 II. That the animal which is the totem 
 of the tribe should not be eaten, even 
 where men did not hesitate to eat their 
 fellows, is a custom for which it is less hard 
 to account. The division of flesh into two 
 classes of forbidden and permitted, of 
 clean and unclean, with the resulting ar- 
 tificial liking or repulsion for food which 
 custom arising out of that division has 
 brought about, is probably referable to 
 old beliefs in the inherent sacredness of 
 certain animals. The Indians of Char- 
 lotte Island never eat crows, because they 
 believe in crow-ancestors, and they smear 
 themselves with black paint in memory of 
 that tradition ; the Dacotahs would neither 
 kill nor eat their totems, and if necessity 
 compels these and like barbarians to 
 break the law, the meal is preceded by 
 profuse apologies and religious ceremo- 
 nies over the slain. The abstention of 
 the Brahmins from meat, the pseudo- 
 revealed injunction to the Hebrews against 
 certain flesh-foods (that against pork has 
 its origin, it has been suggested, in the 
 tradition of descent from a boar) need no 
 detailing here. But, as parallels, some 
 restrictions among the ancient dwellers 
 in these islands are of value. It was, ac- 
 cording to Caesar,* a crime to eat the do- 
 mestic fowl, or goose, or hare, and to this 
 day the last-named is an object of disgust 
 in certain parts of Russia and Brittany. 
 The oldest Welsh laws contain several 
 allusions to the magical character of the 
 hare, which was thought to change its sex 
 every month or year, and to be the cora- 
 
 *"De Bell. Gall.," V., c. 12. 
 
 panion of the witches, who often assumed 
 its shape* The revulsion against horse- 
 flesh as food may have its origin in the 
 sacredness of the white horses, which, as 
 Tacitus remarks,! were kept by the Ger- 
 mans at the public cost in groves holy to 
 the gods, whose secrets they knew, and 
 whose decrees regarding mortals their 
 neighings interpreted. That this animal 
 was a clan-totem among our forefathers 
 there can be no doubt, and the proofs are 
 with us in the white horses carved in out- 
 line on the chalk hills of Berkshire and 
 the west, as in the names and crests of 
 clan descendants. 
 
 The survival of the totem in heraldry is 
 worth more than a passing remark, and 
 will have further reference in a succeeding 
 chapter. 
 
 XVI. 
 
 HERALDRY : ANCESTOR-WORSHIP. 
 
 As we have seen, the totem is the clan- 
 name indicating descent from a common 
 ancestor. It is also the clan-symbol, 
 badge, or crest. Where the tribes among 
 whom it is found are still in the picture- 
 writing stage, i.e., when the idea is ex- 
 pressed by a portrait of the thing itself 
 instead of by some sound-sign — a stage 
 in writing corresponding to the primitive 
 stage in language, when words were imi- 
 tative — there we find the rude hiero- 
 glyphic of the totem a means of inter- 
 course between different tribes, as well as 
 with whites. A striking example of this 
 is given in the sketch (Fig. 1), which is a 
 copy of a petition sent by some Western 
 Indian tribes to the United States Con- 
 gress for the right to fish in certain small 
 lakes near Lake Superior. 
 
 The bird represents the leading clan* 
 the crane ; then follow three martens, as. 
 totems of three tribes ; then the bear, the 
 man-fish, and the cat-fish, also totems, 
 From the eye and heart of each of the 
 animals runs a line connecting them with 
 the eye and heart of the crane, to show 
 that they are all of one mind, and the eye 
 of the crane has also a line connecting it 
 with the lakes on which the tribes have 
 their eyes, and another line running to- 
 ward Congress. 
 
 In the barbaric custom of painting or 
 carving the totem on oars, on the bows 
 and sides of canoes, on weapons, on pil- 
 lars in the front of houses, and on the 
 
 * Elton's " Origins of English History," p. 297. 
 t Germania, IX., 10, 
 
34 [276] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 houses themselves ; in tattooing it on va- 
 rious parts of the body (in the latter case, 
 in some instances, together with pictures 
 of exploits ; so that the man carries on his 
 person an illustrated history of his own 
 life) we have the remote and forgotten 
 origin of heraldic emblems. The symbols 
 of civilized nations, as, eg., the Imperial 
 eagle, which so many states of ancient 
 and modern renown have chosen; the 
 crests of families of rank, with their fab- 
 ulous monsters, as the cherub, the Greek 
 gryps, surviving in the griffin, the dragon, 
 the unicorn; which, born of rude fancy or 
 terrified imagination, are now carved on 
 
 ranee then and till recently existing as to 
 the origin of crests, and also the discredit 
 into which a seemingly meaningless van- 
 ity had fallen, have made it difficult to 
 trace the survival of the totem in the 
 crests even of that numerous company of 
 the Upper Ten who claim descent from 
 warriors who came over with the Con- 
 queror. But there is no doubt that an 
 inquiry conducted on the lines suggested 
 above, and not led into by-paths by false 
 analogies, would yield matter of interest 
 and value. It would add to the evidence 
 of that common semicivilized stage out of 
 which we have risen. Such names as the 
 
 the entrance-gates to the houses of the 
 great ; the armorial bearings on cariages ; 
 the crest engraven on ring or embossed 
 on writing-paper, these are the lineal de- 
 scendants of the totem ; and the Indians, 
 who could see no difference between their 
 system of manitous and those of the 
 white people, with their spread-eagle 
 or their lion-rampant, made a shrewd 
 guess that would not occur to many a 
 parvenu applying at the Heralds's Col- 
 lege for a crest. The continuity is trace- 
 able in the custom of the Mexicans and 
 other civilized nations of painting the to- 
 temic animals on their banners, flags, 
 crests, and other insignia ; and it would 
 seem that we have in the totem the key 
 to the mystery of those huge animal- 
 shaped mounds which abound on the 
 North American continent. 
 
 The arbitrary selection in the " ages of 
 chivalry" of such arms as pleased the 
 knightly fancy, or ministered to its pride, 
 or, as was often the case, resembled the 
 name in sound, together with the igno- 
 
 Horsings, the Wylfings, the Derings, the 
 Ravens, the Griffins, may hold within 
 themselves traces of the totem name of 
 the horse, wolf, deer, raven, and that 
 " animal fantasticall," the griffin. In 
 Scotland we find the clan Chattan, or the 
 wildcat; in Ireland "the men of Osory 
 were called by a name signifying the 
 wild red deer." On the other hand such 
 names may have been given merely as 
 nicknames (i.e., ekename, or the added 
 name, from eke, " also," or " to aug- 
 ment "), suggested by the physical or 
 mental likeness to the thing after which 
 they are called. 
 
 But it is time to turn to the religious 
 significance of the totem, as shown among 
 races worshiping the animal which is 
 their supposed ancestor. 
 
 At first glance this seems strong argu- 
 ment in support of Mr. Herbert Spencer's 
 Jheory that all forms of religion (and all 
 myth) have their origin in ancestor-wor- 
 ship. The mysterious power of stimula- 
 tion, of excitation to frenzy, or of heal- 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [2771 35 
 
 ing and soothing, or of poisoning, which 
 -certain plants possess, has been attributed 
 to indwelling spirits, which, as Mr. Spen- 
 cer contends, are regarded as human and 
 ancestral. Very many illustrations of 
 this occur, as, e.g„ the worship of the 
 Soma plant, and its promotion as a deity 
 among the Aryans ; the use of tobacco in 
 religious ceremonies among the tribes of 
 both Americas ; while now and again we 
 find plants as totems. The Pueblos have 
 a tribe called the tobacco-plant, and also 
 one called the red grass. One of the 
 Peruvian Incas was called after the native 
 name of the tobacco-plant; and among 
 the Ojibways the buffalo grass was carried 
 as a charm, and its god said to cause 
 madness. Its manlike character is seen 
 in the accompanying picture (Fig. 2). 
 
 Fig. 2. 
 
 The worship of animals is on the like 
 theory explained as due to the giving of a 
 nick-name of some beast or bird to a re- 
 mote ancestor, the belief arising in course 
 of time that such animal was the actual 
 progenitor, hence its worship. We call a 
 man a bear, a pig, or a vampire, in sym- 
 bolic phrase, and the figure of speech re- 
 mains a figure of speech with us. But 
 the savage loses the metaphor and it 
 crystallizes into hard matter-of-fact. So 
 the traditions have grown, and Black 
 Eagle, Strong Buffalo, Big Owl, Tortoise, 
 etc., take the shape of the actual forefa- 
 thers of the tribe having their name and 
 crest. _ According to the same theory, the 
 adoration of sun, moon, and mountains, 
 etc., is due to a like source. Some fa- 
 mous chief was called the Sun ; the met- 
 aphor was forgotten; the personal and 
 concrete, as the more easily apprehended, 
 remained ; hence, worship of the powers 
 of nature " is a form of ancestor- worship, 
 which has lost in a still greater degree 
 the character of the original."* 
 
 The objection raised in former papers 
 ■of this series to the extreme application 
 
 ♦"Principles of Sociology," p. 413. 
 
 of the solar theory applies, so it seems to 
 me, with equal force to Mr. Spencer's 
 limitation of the origin of myth and relig- 
 ion to one source. Having cleared 
 Scylla, we must not dash against Charyb- 
 dis. Religion has its origin neither in 
 fear of ghosts, as Mr. Spencer's theory 
 assumes, nor in a perception of the Infi- 
 nite inherent in man, as Professor Max 
 Miiller holds. Rather does it lie in man's 
 sense of vague wonder in the presence of 
 powers whose force he cannot measure, 
 and his expressions toward which are 
 manifest. There is underlying unity, but 
 there are, to quote St. Paul, " diversities 
 of operation." There is just that surface 
 unlikeness which we might expect from 
 the different physical conditions and their 
 resulting variety of subtle influences sur- 
 rounding various races ; influences snapp- 
 ing for them their gods, their upper and 
 nether worlds ; influences of climate and 
 soil which made the hell of volcanic 
 countries an abyss of sulphurous, stifling 
 smoke and everlasting fire, and the hell 
 of cold climates a place of deadly frost ; 
 which gave to the giant-gods of northern 
 zones their rugged awfulness, and to the 
 goddesses of the sunny south their soft 
 and stately grace. The theory of ances- 
 tor-worship as the basis of every form of 
 religion does not allow sufficient play for 
 the vagaries in which the same thing' will 
 be dressed by the barbaric fear and fancy, 
 nor for the imagination as a creative force 
 in the primitive mind even at that lowest 
 at which we know it. And of course be- 
 neath that lowest lies a lower never to be 
 fathomed. We are apt to talk of primi- 
 tive man as if his representatives were 
 with us in the black fellows who are at 
 the bottom of the scale, forgetting that 
 during unnumbered ages he was a brute 
 in everything but the capacity by which 
 at last the ape and tiger were subdued 
 within him. of the beginnings of his 
 thought we can know nothing, but the 
 fantastic forms in which it is first mani- 
 fest compel us to regard him as a being 
 whose feelings were uncurbed by reason. 
 That ancestor-worship is one mode 
 among others of man's attitude toward 
 the awe-begetting, mystery-inspiring uni- 
 verse, none can deny. That his earliest 
 temples, as defined sacred spots, were 
 tombs ; that he prayed to his dead dear 
 ones, or his dead feared ones, as the case 
 might be, is admitted. From its strong 
 personal character, ancestor-worship was, 
 without doubt, one of the earliest expres- 
 sions of man's attitude before the world 
 which his fancy filled with spirits. It 
 
no [2TO] 
 
 THE 1IIRTII AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 flourishes among barbarous races to-day ; 
 it was the prominent feature of the old 
 Aryan religion ; it has entered into Chris- 
 tian practice in the worship of the saints, 
 and perhaps the only feature of religion 
 which the modern Frenchman has re- 
 tained is the culte des morts. That it 
 was a part of the belief of the Emperor 
 Napoleon III. the following extract from 
 his will shows : — " We must remember 
 that those we love look down upon us 
 from heaven and protect us. It is the 
 soul of my great-uncle which has always 
 guided and supported me. Thus will it 
 be with my son also if he proves worthy 
 of his name. 
 
 But the worship of ancestors is not pri- 
 mal. The remarks in my former paper 
 on the late recognition of kinship by sav- 
 ages, among whom some rude form of re- 
 ligion existed, tell against it as the ear- 
 liest mode of worship. Moreover, nature 
 is bigger than man, and this he was not 
 slow to feel. Even if it be conceded that 
 sun-myth and sun-worship once arose 
 through the nick-naming of an ancestor 
 as the Sun : we must take into account the 
 force of that imagination which enabled 
 the unconscious myth-maker, or creed- 
 maker, to credit the moving orbs of heav- 
 en with personal life and will. The fac- 
 ulty which could do that might well ex- 
 press itself in awe-struck forms without 
 intruding the ancestral ghost. Further, 
 the records of the classic religions, them- 
 selves preserving many traces of a primi- 
 tive nature-worship, point to an adoration 
 of the greatness and bounty, as well as 
 to a sense of the maleficent and fateful, 
 in earth and heaven which seem prior to 
 the more concrete worship of forefathers 
 and chieftains. 
 
 If for the worship of these last we sub- 
 stitute a general worship of spirits, there 
 seems little left on which to differ. As 
 .aid to the explanation of the belief in ani- 
 mal ancestors and their subsequent deifi- 
 cation and worship, as of the lion, the 
 bull, the serpent, etc., we have always 
 present in the barbaric mind the tendency 
 to credit living things, and indeed lifeless, 
 but moving ones, with a passion, a will, 
 and a power to help or harm immeasur- 
 ably greater than man's. This is part 
 and parcel of that belief in spirits every- 
 where, which is the key to savage philos- 
 ophy, and the growth of which is fostered 
 by such secondary causes as the worship 
 of ancestors. 
 
 XVII. 
 
 SURVIVAL OF MYTH IN HISTORICAL 
 NARRATIVES. 
 
 Before bringing this series of papers- 
 to an end, it may be well to give an illus- 
 tration or two of the survival of myth in 
 historical narrative. 
 
 For proofs of the emergence of the 
 higher out of the lower in philosophy and 
 religion, to say nothing of less exalted 
 matters, whether the beast-fable or the 
 nursery rhyme as holding barbaric thought 
 in solution, examples have necessarily 
 been drawn from the mythology of past 
 and present savage races. But these are 
 too remote in time or standpoint to stir 
 other than a languid interest in the read- 
 er's mind ; their purpose is served when 
 they are cited and classified as specimens. 
 Not thus is it with examples drawn nearer 
 home from sources at which our young 
 thirst for the stirring and romantic was 
 slaked. When we learn that famous 
 names and striking episodes are in some 
 instances only transformed and personi- 
 fied natural phenomena, or, as occurring 
 everywhere, possibly variants of a common 
 legend, the far-reaching influence of prim- 
 itive thought comes to us in more vivid 
 and exciting form. And although one 
 takes in hand this work of disenchant- 
 ment in no eager fashion, the loss is more 
 seeming than real. Whether the particu- 
 lar tale of bravery, of selflessness, of faith- 
 fulness, has truth of detail, matters little 
 compared with the fact that its reception 
 the wide world over witnesses to human 
 belief, even at low levels, in the qualities 
 which have given man empire over him- 
 self and ever raised the moral standard 
 of the race. Moreover, in times like these, 
 when criticism is testing without fear or 
 favor the trustworthiness of records of 
 the past, whether of Jew or Gentile, the 
 knowledge of the legendary origin of 
 events woven into sober history prepares 
 us to recognize how the imagination has 
 fed the stream of tradition, itself no mean 
 tributary of that larger stream of history, 
 the purity of which is now subject of anal- 
 ysis. As a familiar and interesting exam- 
 ple let us take the story of William Tell. 
 
 Everybody has heard how, in the year 
 1307 (or, as some say, 1296) Gessler, Vogt 
 (or governor) of the Emperor Albert of 
 Hapsburg, set a hat on a pole as symbol 
 of the Imperial power, and ordered every 
 one who passed by to do obeisance to it ; 
 and how a mountaineer named Wilhelm 
 Tell, who hated Gessler and the tyranny 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [279 1 ST 
 
 -which the symbol expressed, passed by 
 without saluting the hat, and was at once 
 seized and brought before Gessler, who 
 -ordered that, as punishment, Tell should 
 shoot an apple off the head of his own 
 son. As resistance was vain, the apple 
 was placed on the boy's head, when Tell 
 bent his bow, and the arrow, piercing the 
 apple, fell with it to the ground. Gess- 
 ler saw that Tell, before shooting, had 
 stuck a second arrow in his belt, and, ask- 
 ing the reason, received this for answer : 
 " It was for you ; had I shot my child, 
 know that this would have pierced your 
 heart." 
 
 Now, this story first occurs in the chron- 
 icle of Melchior Russ, who wrote at the 
 end of the fifteenth century, i.e., about one 
 hundred and seventy years after its re- 
 puted occurrence. The absence of any 
 reference to it in contemporary records 
 caused doubt to be thrown upon it three 
 centuries ago. Guillimann, the author of 
 a work on Swiss Antiquities, published in 
 1598, calls it a fable, but subscribes to the 
 current belief in it, because the tale is so 
 popular ! The race to which he belonged 
 is not yet extinct. A century and a half 
 later, a more fearless skeptic, who said 
 that the story was of Danish origin, was 
 condemned by the Canton of Uri to be 
 burnt alive, and in the well-timed absence 
 of the offender, his book was ordered to 
 be burnt by the common hangman. But 
 the truth is great, and prevails. G. von 
 Wyss, the Swiss historian, has pointed out 
 that the name of Wilhelm Tell does not 
 occur even once in the history of the three 
 cantons, neither is there any trace that a 
 " Vogt " named Gessler ever served the 
 house of Hapsburg there. Moreover, the 
 legend does not correspond to any fact 
 of a period of oppression of the Swiss at 
 the hands of their Austrian rulers. 
 
 " There exist in contemporary records 
 no instances of wanton outrage and inso- 
 lence on the Hapsburg side. It was the 
 object of that power to obtain political as- 
 cendency, not to indulge its representatives 
 in lust or wanton insult," and, where rec- 
 ords of disputes between particular per- 
 sons occur, " the symptoms of violence, 
 as is natural enough, appear rather on the 
 side of the Swiss than on that of the ag- 
 grandizing imperial house." * 
 
 Candor, however, requires that the 
 evidence in support of the legend should 
 be stated. There is the fountain on the 
 supposed site of the lime-tree in the mar- 
 
 * Edinburgh Review, January, 1869, p. 134. Arti- 
 cle on Rilliet s " Origines de la Confederation Suisse : 
 Histoire et Legende." 
 
 ket-place at Altdorf by which young Tell 
 stood, as well as the colossal plaster stat- 
 ue of the hero himself which confronts us 
 as we enter the quaint village. But more 
 than this, the veritable cross-bow itself is 
 preserved in the arsenal at Zurich ! 
 
 However, although the little Tell's 
 chapel, as restored, " was opened with a 
 national /<?/<? in the presence of two mem- 
 bers of the Federal Council, in June last," * / 
 the Swiss now admit in their school-teach- 
 ing that the story of the Apfelschusz is 
 legendary. 
 
 Freudenberger, who earned his death- 
 sentence for affirming that the story came 
 from Denmark, was on the right track, 
 for the following variant of it is given by 
 Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish writer of 
 the twelfth century, who puts it as happen- 
 ing in the year 950 : — 
 
 " Nor ought what follows to be envel- 
 oped in silence. Palnatoki, for some time 
 in the body-guard of King Harold (Har- 
 old Gormson, or Bluetooth), had made 
 his bravery odious to many of his fellow- 
 soldiers by the zeal with which he sur- 
 passed them. One day, when he had 
 drunk too much, he boasted that he was 
 so skilled a bowman that he could hit the 
 smallest apple, set on the top of a stick 
 some way off, at the first shot, which 
 boast reached the ears of the king. This 
 monarch's wickedness soon turned the 
 confidence of the father to the peril of the 
 son, for he commanded that this dearest 
 pledge of his life should stand in place of 
 the stick, adding a threat that if Palnatoki 
 did not at his first shot strike off the ap- 
 ple, he should with his head pay the pen- 
 alty of making an empty boast. This 
 command forced him to attempt more 
 than he had promised, and what he had 
 said, reported by slanderous tongues, 
 bound him to accomplish what he had 
 not said. Yet did not his sterling courage, 
 though caught in the snare of slander, 
 suffer him to lay aside bis firmness of 
 heart. As soon as the boy was led forth, 
 Palnatoki warned him to await the speed- 
 ing of the arrow with calm ears and un- 
 bent head, lest by any slight movement of 
 the body he should frustrate the archer's 
 well-tried skill. He then made him stand 
 with his back toward him, lest he should 
 be scared at the sight of the arrow. Then 
 he drew three arrows from his quiver, 
 and with the first that he fitted to the 
 string he struck the apple. When the 
 king asked him why he had taken more 
 than one arrow from his quiver, when he 
 
 * London Times' s telegram from Geneva, June 
 25, 1883. 
 
38 [2S0J 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 was to be allowed to make but one trial 
 with his bow, he made answer, " That I 
 might avenge on thee the swerving of the 
 first by the points of the others, lest per- 
 chance my innocence might have been 
 punished, while your violence escaped 
 scot-free.' " * 
 
 Going further northward we find tales 
 corresponding in their main features to 
 the above, in the Icelandic Saga, the Vil- 
 kina; in the Norse Saga of Saint Olaf 
 or Thidrik ; and in the story of Harold, 
 son of Sigurd. In the Olaf Saga it is 
 said that the saint or king, desiring the 
 conversion of a brave heathen, named 
 Eindridi, competed with him in various 
 athletic sports, swam with him, wrestled 
 with him, and then shot with him. Olaf 
 then dared Eindridi to strike a writing- 
 tablet from off his son's head with an 
 arrow, and bade two men bind the eyes 
 of the child and hold the napkin so that 
 the boy might not move when he heard 
 the whizz of the arrow. Olaf aimed first, 
 and the arrow grazed the lad's head. 
 Eindridi then prepared to shoot, but the 
 mother of the boy interfered and per- 
 suaded the king to abandon this danger- 
 ous test of skill. The story adds that 
 had the boy been injured, Eindridi would 
 have revenged himself on the king.f 
 
 Somewhat like this, as from the locality 
 might be expected, is the Faroe Isles 
 variant. King Harold challenges Geyti, 
 son of Aslak, and, vexed at being beaten 
 in a swimming match, bids Geyti shoot 
 a hazel-nut from off his brother's head. 
 He consents, and the king witnesses the 
 feat, when Geyti 
 
 " Shot the little nut away, 
 Nor hurt the lad a hair." 
 
 Next day Harold sends for the archer, 
 
 and says : — 
 
 " List thee, Geyti, Aslak's' son, 
 And truly tell to me, 
 Wherefore hadst thou arrows twain 
 In the wood yestreen with thee ? " 
 
 To which Geyti answers : — 
 
 " Therefore had I arrows twain 
 Yestreen in the wood with me, 
 Had I but hurt my brother dear 
 The other had pierced thee." 
 
 With ourselves it is the burden of the 
 ballad of William of Cloudeslee, where 
 the brave archer says : — 
 
 * Bk. x., p. 166. Cf. Baring Gould's " Curious 
 Myths," p. 117; and Kiskc's ''Myths and Myth- 
 makers," p. 4. 
 
 t Baring Gould, p. 119. 
 
 " I have a sonne seven years old ; 
 Hee is to me full deere ; 
 I will tye him to a stake — 
 All shall see him that bee here — 
 And lay an apple upon his head, 
 And goe six paces him froe ; 
 And I myself with a broad arroe 
 Shall cleave the apple in towe." 
 
 In the Malleus Maleficarum, Puncher,, 
 a magician on the Upper Rhine, is re- 
 quired to shoot a coin from off a lad's 
 head ; while traveling eastward, as far 
 as Persia, we find the Tell myth as an in- 
 cident in the poem " Mantic Ultralr," a 
 work of the twelfth century. 
 
 Thus far I have spoken of the variants 
 of the legend found among Aryan peo- 
 ples, and it is tempting to base upon this 
 diffusion of a common incident a theory 
 of its origin among the Central Asian an- 
 cestors of the Swiss and the Norseman,, 
 the Persian and the Icelander. But it 
 is found among non-Aryans also. The- 
 ethnologist, Castren, whose researches in 
 Finland have secured a valuable mass of 
 fast-perishing materials, obtained this 
 tale in the village Ultuwa. " A fight 
 took place between some freebooters and 
 the inhabitants of the village of AlajaraL 
 The robbers plundered every house, and 
 carried off among their captives an old 
 man. As they proceeded with their 
 spoils along the strand of the lake, a lad 
 of twelve years old appeared from among 
 the reeds on the opposite bank, armed 
 with a bow and amply provided with ar- 
 rows ; he threatened to shoot down the 
 captors unless the old man, his father, 
 was restored to him. The robbers mock- 
 ingly replied that the aged man would be 
 given to him if he could shoot an apple 
 off his head. The boy accepted the chal- 
 lenge, pierced the apple, and freed his 
 father." Among a people in close con- 
 tact with an Aryan race as the Finns are 
 in contact with both Swedes and Rus- 
 sians, the main incident of the Tell story 
 may easily have been woven into their 
 native tales. But in reference to other 
 non-Aryan races Sir George Dasent, who 
 has treated of the diffusion of the Tell 
 story very fully in the Introduction to his 
 " Popular Tales from the Norse " (a re- 
 print of which would be a boon to stu- 
 dents of folk-lore), says that it is common 
 to the Turks and Mongolians, and a le- 
 gend of the wild Samoyedes, who never 
 heard of Tell or saw a book in their 
 lives, relates it, chapter and verse, of one 
 of their marksmen. What shall we say, 
 then, but that " the story of this bold 
 master-shot was prominent among many 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [281] 3i> 
 
 tribes and races, and that it only crys- 
 tallized itself round the great name of 
 Tell by that process of attraction which 
 invariably leads a grateful people to 
 throw such mythic wreaths, such garlands 
 of bold deeds of precious memory, 
 around the brow of its darling cham- 
 pion." * Of course the solar mythologists 
 see in Tell the sun or cloud deity ; in his 
 bow the storm-cloud or the iris ; and in 
 his arrows the sun-rays or lightning 
 darts. 
 
 This is a question which we might 
 leave to the champions concerned to set- 
 tle. Apart from the evidence of the sur- 
 vival of legend in history, and the lesson 
 of caution in accepting any ancient record 
 as gospel which we should learn there- 
 from, it is the human element in the ven- 
 erable tale v/hich interests us most. 
 
 Remote in time, far away in place, as its 
 origin it moves us yet. The ennobling 
 qualities incarnated in some hero (whether 
 he be real or ideal matters not) meet 
 with admiring response in the primitive 
 listeners to the story, else it would have 
 been speedily forgotten. Thus does it re- 
 tain for us witness to the underlying one- 
 ness of the human heart beneath all sur- 
 face differences. 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 MYTHS OF KING ARTHUR AND LLEW- 
 ELLYN. 
 
 Widespread as a myth may be, it 
 takes depth of root according to the more 
 or less congenial soil where it is dropped. 
 That about Tell found favorable home in 
 the uplands and the free air of Switzer- 
 land , with us, S. George, falling on times 
 of chivalry, had abiding place, as also, 
 less rugged of type than the Swiss marks- 
 man, had Arthur, the " Blameless King," 
 who, if he ever existed, is smothered in 
 overgrowth of legends both native and 
 imported. 
 
 For such cycle of tales as gathered 
 round the name of Arthur, and on which 
 our youthhood was nourished, is as myth- 
 ical as the wolf that suckled Romulus and 
 Remus. Modern criticism and research 
 have thoroughly sifted the legendary from 
 the true, and if the . past remains vague 
 and shadowy, we at least know how far 
 the horizon of certainty extends. The 
 criticism has made short work of the ro- 
 
 mancing chronicles which so long did 
 duty for sober history, and has shown 
 that no accurate knowledge of the se- 
 quence of events is obtainable until late 
 in the period of the English invasions. 
 SaVe in scattered hints here and there, 
 we are quite in the dark as to the condi- 
 tion of this island during the Roman oc- 
 cupation, while for anything that is 
 known of times prior to this, called for 
 convenience "pre-historic," we are de- 
 pendent upon unwritten records preserved 
 in tombs and mounds. The information 
 gathered from these has given us some 
 clue to what manner of men they were 
 who confronted the first Aryan immi- 
 grants, and, enriched by researches of the 
 ethnologist and philologist, enabled us to 
 trace the movements of races westward, 
 until we find old and new commingled as 
 one English-speaking folk. 
 
 All or any of which could not be known 
 to the earlier chronicles. When Geoffry 
 of Monmouth set forth the glory and re- 
 nown of Arthur and his court, he re- 
 corded and embellished traditions six 
 hundred years old, without thought of 
 weighing the evidence or questioning the 
 credibility of the transmitters. Whether 
 there was a king of that name who ruled 
 over the Silures, and around whom the 
 remnant of brave Kelts rallied in their 
 final struggle against the invading hordes, 
 and who, wounded in battle, died at 
 Glastonbury, and was buried, or rather 
 sleeps, as the legend has it, in the Vale 
 of Avilion, "hath been," as Milton says, 
 " doubted heretofore, and may again, with 
 good reason, for the Monk of Malmes- 
 bury and others, whose credit hath 
 swayed most with the learned sort, we 
 may well perceive to have known no 
 more of this Arthur nor of his doings 
 than we now living." 
 
 The comparative mythologists say that 
 he is a myth pure and simple ; a variant 
 of Sigurd and Perseus ; the winning of 
 his famous sword but a repetition of the 
 story of the Teutonic and Greek heroes ; 
 the gift of Guinevere as fatal to him as 
 Helen to Menelaus ; his knights but re- 
 productions of the Achaian hosts. Much 
 of which is doubtless true. But the ro- 
 mance corresponded to some probable 
 event ; it fitted in with the national tradi- 
 tions. There were struggles between the 
 Kelts and subsequent invaders — Romans, 
 Angles, Saxons, Jutes. There were brave 
 chieftains who led forlorn hopes or fought 
 to the death in their fastnesses. There 
 were, in the numerous tribal divisions, 
 petty kings and queens ruling over mimic 
 
THE r.IUTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 courts, with retinues of knights bent on 
 chivalrous, unselfish service. These were 
 the nuclei of stories which were the early 
 annals of the tribe, the glad theme of 
 bards and minstrels, and from which a 
 long line of poets, to the latest singer of 
 the " Idylls of the King," have drawn the 
 materials of their epics. The fascination 
 which such a cycle of tales had for the 
 people, especially in days when the bal- 
 lad was history and poetry and all litera- 
 ture rolled into one, was so strong, that 
 the Church wisely imported an element 
 which gave loftier meaning to the 
 knightly life, and infused religious ardor 
 into the camp and court. To the stories 
 of Tristram and Gawayne already woven 
 into the old romance, she added the half- 
 Christian, half-pagan, legend of the 
 knights who left the feast at the Round 
 Table to travel across land and sea that 
 they might free the enslaved, remove the 
 spell from the enchanted, and deliver fair 
 women from the monsters of tyranny and 
 lust, set forth on what in her eyes was a 
 nobler quest — to seek and look upon the 
 San Graal, or Holy Vessel used by Jesus 
 at the Last Supper, and into which 
 Joseph of Arimathea collected the blood 
 and water that streamed from the side of 
 the crucified Jesus. This mystic cup, in 
 which we have probably a sacrificial relic 
 of the old British religion imported into 
 the Christian incident with which it 
 blended so well, floated, according to 
 Arthurian legend, suddenly into the pres- 
 ence of the King and his Round Table 
 knights at Camelot as they sat at supper, 
 and was as suddenly borne away, to be 
 henceforth the coveted object of knightly 
 endeavor. Only the baptized could hope 
 to behold it; to the unchaste it was 
 veiled; hence only they among the 
 knights who were pure in heart and life 
 vowed to go in quest of the San Graal, 
 and return not until they had seen it. So 
 to Sir Galahad, the " just and faithful," 
 Tennyson sings how the sacred cup ap- 
 peared, 
 
 " Sometimes on lonely mountain meres 
 I find a magic bark ; 
 I leap on board : no helmsman steers : 
 I float till all is dark. 
 A gentle sound, an awful light! 
 Three angels bear the holy Grail : 
 With folded feet, in stoles of white, 
 On sleeping wings they sail. 
 Ah, blessed vision ! blood of God ! 
 My spirit beats her mortal bars, 
 As down dark tides the glory slides, 
 And, star-like, mingles with the stars." 
 
 \'hile in such legends as the Arthurian 
 
 group the grain of truth, if it exists, is so 
 imbedded as to be out of reach, there are 
 others concerning actual personages, no- 
 tably Cyrus and Charlemagne, not to 
 quote other names from both " profane " 
 and sacred history, in which the fable can 
 be separated from the fact without diffi- 
 culty. Enough is known of the life and 
 times of such men to detach the certain 
 from the doubtful, as, eg., when Charle- 
 magne is spoken of as a Frenchman and 
 as a Crusader before there was a French 
 nation, or the idea of Crusades had en- 
 tered the heads of Most Christian Kings ; 
 and as in the legends of the infancy of 
 Cyrus, which are of a type related to like 
 legends of the wonderful round the early 
 years of the famous. 
 
 This, however, by the way, since, leav- 
 ing illustration of the fabulous in heroic 
 story, it will be interesting to trace it 
 through such a tale of pathos and domes- 
 tic life as the well-known one of Llew- 
 ellyn and his faithful hound, Gellert. 
 
 Whose emotions have not been stirred 
 by the story of Llewellyn the Great going 
 out hunting, and missing his favorite dog ; 
 of his return, to be greeted by the creat- 
 ure with more than usual pleasure in his 
 eye, but with jaws besmeared with blood ; 
 of the anxiety with which Llewellyn 
 rushed into the house, to find the cradle 
 where had lain his beautiful boy upset, 
 and the ground around it soaked with 
 blood ; of his thereupon killing the dog, 
 and then seeing the child lying unharmed 
 beneath the cradle, and sleeping by the 
 side of a dead wolf, from whose ravenous 
 maw the faithful Gellert had delivered it ? 
 Most of us, in our visits to North Wales, 
 have stood by Gellert's grave at Beddge- 
 lert, little suspecting that the affecting 
 story occurs in the folk-lore of nearly 
 every Aryan people, and of several non- 
 Aryan races, as the Egyptians and Chi- 
 nese. 
 
 Probably it comes to us as many other 
 tales have come, through collections like 
 the well-known "Gesta Romanorum," 
 compiled by mediaeval monks for popular 
 entertainment. In the version given in 
 that book, the knight who corresponds to 
 Llewellyn, after slaying his dog, discovers 
 that it had saved his child from a serpent, 
 and thereupon breaks his sword and de- 
 parts on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. 
 But the monks were no inventors of such 
 tales; they recorded those that came to 
 them through the pilgrims, students, 
 traders, and warriors who traveled from 
 West to East and from East to West in 
 the Middle Ages, and it is in the native 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [283] 41 
 
 home of fable and imagery, the storied 
 Orient, that we must seek for the earliest 
 forms of the Gellert legend. In the 
 Panchatantra, the oldest and most cele- 
 brated Sanskrit fable book, the story takes 
 this form : — An infirm child is left by its 
 mother while she goes to fetch water, and 
 she charges the father, who is a Brahman, 
 to watch over it. But he leaves the house 
 to collect alms, and soon after this a 
 snake crawls toward the child. In the 
 house was an ichneumon, a creature often 
 cherished as a house pet, who sprang at 
 the snake and throttled it. When the 
 mother came back, the ichneumon went 
 gladly to meet her, his jaws and face 
 smeared with the snake's blood. The 
 horrified mother, thinking it had killed 
 her child, threw her water-jar at it, and 
 killed it ; then seeing the child safe be- 
 side the mangled body of the snake, she 
 beat her breast and face with grief, and 
 scolded her husband for leaving the house. 
 "We find the same story, with the slight 
 difference that the animal is an otter, in 
 a later Sanskrit collection, the Hitopa- 
 desa, but we can track it to that fertile 
 source of classic and mediaeval fable, the 
 Buddhist Jatakas, or Birth Stories, a very 
 ancient collection of fables, which, pro- 
 fessing to have been told by Buddha, 
 narrates his exploits in the 550 births 
 through which he passed before attaining 
 Buddhahood. In the Vinaya Pitaka of 
 the Chinese Buddhist collection, which, 
 according to Mr. Beal, dates from the 
 fifth century A.D., and is translated from 
 original scriptures supposed to have ex- 
 isted near the time of Asoka's council in 
 the third century B.C., we have the earli- 
 est extant form of the tale. That in the 
 Panchatantra is obviously borrowed from 
 it, the differences being in unimportant 
 detail, as, for example, the nakula, or 
 mongoose, is killed by the Brahman on his 
 return home, the wife having neglected to 
 take the child with her as bidden by him. 
 He is filled with sorrow, and then a Deva 
 continues the strain : — 
 
 Let there be due thought and consideration, 
 Give not way to hasty impulse, 
 By forgetting the claims of true friendship 
 You may heedlessly injure a kind heart (per- 
 son) 
 As the Brahman killed the nakula. 
 
 The several versions of the story which 
 could be cited from German, Russian, 
 Persian, and other Aryan folk-lore, would 
 merely present certain variations due to 
 local coloring and to the inventiveness of 
 the narrators or transcribers ; and, omit- 
 
 ting these at the demand of space, it will 
 suffice to give the Egyptian variant or 
 corresponding form, in which the tragical 
 has given place to the amusing, save, per- 
 haps, in the opinion of the Wali. This 
 luckless person " once smashed a pot full 
 of herbs which a cook had prepared. 
 The exasperated cook thrashed the well- 
 intentioned but unfortunate Wali within 
 an inch of his life, and when he returned, 
 exhausted with his efforts at belaboring 
 the man, he discovered among the herbs 
 a poisonous snake." 
 
 In pointing to the venerable Buddhist 
 Birth Stories as the earliest extant source 
 of Aryan fables, it should be added that 
 these were with Buddha and his disciples 
 the favorite vehicle of carrying to the 
 hearts of men those lessons of gentleness 
 and tenderness toward all living things 
 which are a distinctive feature of that 
 non-persecuting religion, and thus of dif- 
 fusing a spirit which would have us. 
 
 Never to blend our pleasure or our pride 
 With sorrow of the meanest thing that lives* 
 
 XIX. 
 
 SEMITIC MYTHS AND LEGENDS. 
 
 With the important exception of refer- 
 ence to the change effected in the Jewish 
 doctrines of spirits, and its resulting influ- 
 ence on Christian theology, by the trans- 
 formation of the mythical Ahriman of the 
 old Persian religion into the archfiend 
 Satan, but slight allusion has been made 
 in these pages to the myths and legends 
 of the Semitic race. Under this term, 
 borrowed from the current belief in their 
 descent from Shem, are included extant 
 and extinct people, the Assyrians, Chal- 
 deans or Babylonians, Phoenicians, Arabs, 
 Syrians, Jews and Ethiopians. 
 
 The mythology of the Aryan nations 
 has had the advantage of the most schol- 
 arly criticism, and the light which this has 
 thrown upon the racial connection of peo- 
 ples between whom all superficial likeness 
 had long disappeared, as well as upon the 
 early condition of their common ancestors, 
 is of the greatest value as aid to our knowl- 
 edge of the mode of man's intellectual and 
 spiritual growth. And the comparisons 
 made between the older and cruder forms 
 underlying the elaborated myth and the 
 myths of semi-barbarous races have sup- 
 ported conclusions concerning man's 
 primitive state identical with those de- 
 
42 [284] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 duced from the material relics of the An- 
 cient and Newer Stone Ages, namely, that 
 the savage races of to-day represent not a 
 degradation to which man has sunk, but a 
 condition out of which all races above the 
 savage have, through much tribulation, 
 emerged. An important exception to this 
 has, however, been claimed on behalf of 
 at least one branch of the Semitic race- 
 namely, the Hebrews or Jews. This claim 
 has rested on their assumed selection by 
 the Deity for a definite purpose in the or- 
 dering and directing of human affairs ; a 
 theory of the divine government which 
 this journal is concerned neither to defend 
 nor deny. No assumption of supernat- 
 ural origin can screen documents of dis- 
 puted authorship and uncertain meaning 
 from the investigation applied to all an- 
 cient records ; nor can the materials elude 
 dissection because hitherto regarded as 
 organic parts of revelation. The real dif- 
 ficulties are in the structure of the lan- 
 guage and in the scantiness of the mate- 
 rial as contrasted with the flexile and copi- 
 ous mythology of the Aryan race. And 
 the investigation has been in some degree 
 checked by the mistaken dicta of author- 
 ities such as M. Renan and the late Baron 
 Bunsen ; the former contending that " the 
 Semites never had a mythology," and the 
 latter (although any statement of his 
 carries far less weight) that " it is the 
 grand, momentous, and fortunate self- 
 denial of Judaism to possess none." 
 
 But, independently of the refusal of the 
 student of history to admit that excep- 
 tional place has been of direct Divine pur- 
 pose accorded to any particular race, the 
 discoveries of literatures much older than 
 the Hebrew, and in which legends akin to 
 those in the earlier books of the Old Test- 
 ament are found, together with the proofs 
 of historical connection between the peo- 
 ples having these common legends, have 
 given the refutation to the distinctive char- 
 acter of the Semitic race claimed by M. 
 Renan. That a people dwelling for cent- 
 uries, as the Hebrews did, in a land which 
 was the common highway between the 
 great nations of antiquity ; a people sub- 
 ject to vicissitudes bringing them, as the 
 pipkin between iron pots, into collision 
 and subject relations to Egyptians, Per- 
 sians, and other powerful folk, should 
 remain uninfluenced in their intellectual 
 speculations and religious beliefs, would 
 indeed be a greater miracle than that 
 which makes their literature inspired in 
 every word and vowel-point. The remark- 
 able collection of cuneiform inscriptions 
 (so called from their wedge-like shape : 
 
 Lat. cuneus, a wedge) on the baked clay 
 cylinders and tablets of the vast libraries 
 of Babylon and Nineveh, has brought out 
 one striking fact, namely, that the Semitic 
 civilization, venerable as that is, was the 
 product of, or at least greatly influenced 
 by, the culture of a non-Semitic people 
 called the Akkadians, from a word mean- 
 ing " highlanders." These more ancient 
 dwellers in the Euphrates valley and up- 
 lands were not only non-Semitic, but non- 
 Aryan, and probably racionally connected 
 with the complex group of peoples em- 
 bracing the Tartar-Mongolians, the dis- 
 tinguishing features of whose religion are 
 Shamanistic, with belief in magic in its 
 manifold forms. "In Babylonia, under 
 the non-Semitic Akkadian rule, the dom- 
 inant creed was the fetish worship, with 
 all its ritual of magic and witchcraft ; and 
 when the Semites conquered the country,, 
 the old learning of the land became the 
 property of the priests and astrologers, 
 and the Akkadian language the Latin of 
 the Empire." * 
 
 It was during the memorable period of 
 the Exile that the historical records of the 
 Jews underwent revision, and from that 
 time dates the incorporation into them of 
 legends and traditions which, invested 
 with a purity and majesty distinctively He- 
 brew, were borrowed from the Babyloni- 
 ans, although primarily Akkadian. They 
 are here, as elsewhere, the product of the 
 childhood of the race, when it speculates 
 and invents, framing its theory of the be- 
 ginnings, their when and how; when it 
 prattles of the Golden Age, which seems 
 to lie behind, in the fond and. not extinct 
 delusion that " the old is better ; " when 
 it frames its fairy tales, weird or winsome, 
 in explanation of the uncommon, the un- 
 known, and the bewildering. 
 
 The Babylonian origin of the early 
 biblical stories is now generally admitted,, 
 although the dogmas based upon certain 
 of them still retard the acceptance of this 
 result of modern inquiry in some quar- 
 ters. That reluctance is suggestively 
 illustrated in Dr. Wm. Smith's " Diction- 
 ary of the Bible," where, turning to the 
 heading " Deluge," the reader is referred 
 to " Flood " and hence to " Noah ! " 
 
 So much for the legendary; but the 
 analysis, of the more strictly mythical, 
 the names of culture-ancestors and heroes, 
 sons of Anak and of God, scattered over 
 the Pentateuch, is not so easy a matter. 
 The most important work in this direc- 
 tion has been attempted by Dr. Gold- 
 
 Acactemy, Nov. 17, 1877, p. 472. 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [285] 43 
 
 ziher,* but even his scholarship has failed 
 to convince sympathetic readers that 
 Abraham and Isaac are sun-myths, and 
 that the twelve sons of Jacob are the zo- 
 diacal signs ! Under the Professor's 
 etymological solvent the personality of 
 the patriarchs disappears, and the charm- 
 ing idylls and pastorals of old Eastern 
 life become but phases of the sun and 
 the weather. The Hebrew, like the 
 Aryan myth-maker, speaks of the rela- 
 tions of day and night, of gray morning 
 and sunrise, of red sunset and the dark- 
 ness of night, as of love and union, or 
 strife and pursuit, or gloomy desire and 
 coy evasion. Abh-ram is the High or 
 Heaven-Father (from ram, " to be high ") 
 with his numberless host of descendants. 
 Yis-chak, commonly called Isaac, denotes 
 " he who laughs," and so the Laughing 
 one, whom the High Father intends to 
 slay, is the smiling day or the smiling 
 sunset, which gets the worst of the con- 
 test with the night sky and disappears. 
 Sarah signifies princess, or the moon, the 
 queen who rules over the great army 
 glittering amid the darkness. The ex- 
 pulsion of Hagar (derived from a root 
 hajara, meaning " to fly," and yielding 
 the word hijra or " flight," whence the 
 Mohammedan Hegira) is the Semitic 
 variant of the inexhaustible theme of all 
 mythology, the battle of Day and Night ; 
 Hagar flying before the inconstant sun 
 and the jealous moon. And so on 
 through the whole range of leading 
 characters in Hebrew history ; Cain and 
 Abel, in which the critic overlooks the 
 more likely explanation of the story as a 
 quarrel between nomads and tillers of the 
 soil ; Jephthah, in which the sun-god 
 kills at mid-day the dawn, his own off- 
 spring ; Samson, or more correctly Shim- 
 shon, from the Hebrew word for sun, 
 the incidents of whose life, as expounded 
 by Professor Steinthal.f are more clearly 
 typical of the labors of the sun ; 
 Jonah and the fish, a story long ago 
 connected with the myth of Herakles 
 and Hesione ; " as on occasion of the 
 storm the dragon or serpent swallows the 
 sun, so when he sets he is swallowed by 
 a mighty fish, waiting for him at the bot- 
 tom of the sea. Then when he appears 
 again on the horizon, he is spat out on 
 the shore by the sea-monster." J 
 
 These bare references must suffice to 
 
 * " Mythology among the Hebrews, and its 
 Historical Development." London ; L 
 
 1877. 
 
 t " Goldziher," pp. 392, ff. 
 % Ibid. p. 103. 
 
 Longmans. 
 
 show that there is in Hebrew literature a 
 large body of material which must under- 
 go the sifting and the criticism which 
 has been applied with success to Indo- 
 European and non-Aryan myth. This 
 done, the Semitic race will contribute its 
 share of evidence in support of those con- 
 ditions under which it has been the main 
 purpose of these papers to show that 
 myth has its birth and growth. 
 
 XX. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The serial form of publication * has its 
 advantages in these run-and-read days in 
 compelling the writer to pack his thoughts 
 closely together, but it has its disadvan- 
 tages in breaking their sequence, and 
 compelling the reader to turn to back num- 
 bers for the missing links. 
 
 The multitude of subjects traversed in 
 these chapters compelled presentment in 
 so concise a form that any attempt to- 
 gather into a few sentences the sum of 
 things said would be as a digest of a di- 
 gest, and it is, therefore, better to briefly 
 emphasize the conclusions to which the 
 gathered evidence points. It was re- 
 marked at the outset, when laying stress 
 on the serious meaning which lies at the 
 heart of myths, that they have their origin 
 in the endeavor of barbaric man to ex- 
 plain his surroundings. The mass of fact 
 brought together illustrates and confirms 
 this view, and has thereby tended to raise- 
 what was once looked upon as fantastic, 
 curious, and lawless, to the level of a sub- 
 ject demanding sober treatment and ex- 
 amination on strictly scientific methods. 
 
 Archbishop Trench, in his " Study of 
 Words," quotes Emerson's happy char- 
 acterization of language as fossil poetry 
 and fossil history : " Just as in some fossil, 
 curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable 
 or animal life, the graceful fern, or the 
 linely-vertebrated lizard, such as have been 
 extinct for thousands of years, are per- 
 manently bound up with the stone, so in 
 words are beautiful thoughts and images,, 
 the imagination and the feeling of past 
 ages of men long since in their graves, of 
 men whose very names have perished,, 
 preserved and made safe forever." f In. 
 like manner, we may speak of myths as. 
 
 * These papers were originally published in Mr. R. 
 A. Proctor's weekly scientific magazine, Knowledge. 
 
 t " Study of Words," Humboldt Library, No. 30 T , 
 p. 2. 
 
44 [286] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 fossil ethics and fossil theology, but, with 
 more appositeness, as embryonic ethics 
 and theology, since they contain poten- 
 tially all the philosophies and theologies 
 " that man did ever find." 
 
 And to the student of the history of 
 humanity who rejoices in the sure foun- 
 dation on which, tested in manifold ways, 
 the convictions of the highest and no- 
 blest of the race rest, the value of myth is 
 increased in its being a natural outgrowth 
 of the mind when, having advanced to 
 the point at which curiosity concerning j 
 the causes of surrounding things arises, 
 it frames its crude explanations. For not 
 that which man claims to have received 
 as a message from the gods, as a revela- 
 tion from heaven, but that which he has 
 learned by experience often painful and 
 bitter, and which succeeding generations 
 have either verified or improved upon, or 
 disproved altogether, is, in the long run, 
 of any worth. Through it alone, as we 
 follow the changes wrought in the proc- 
 ess from guess to certainty, can we de- 
 termine what was the intellectual stage 
 of man in his mental infancy, and how 
 far it finds correspondences in the intel- 
 lectual stage of existing barbaric races. 
 
 Thus, the study of myth is nothing less 
 than the study of the mental and spiritual 
 history of mankind. It is a branch of 
 that larger, vaster science of evolution 
 which so occupies our thoughts to-day 
 and with which the philosopher and the 
 theologian must reckon. The evidence 
 which it brings from the living and dead 
 mythologies of every race is in accord 
 with that furnished by their more tan- 
 gible relics, that the history of mankind 
 is a history of slow but sure advance from 
 a lower to a higher ; of ascent, although 
 with backslidings oft. It confirms a 
 momentous canon of modern science, 
 that the laws of evolution in the spiritual 
 world are as determinable as they are 
 in the physical. To this we, for the en- 
 richment of our life and helpful service 
 of our kind, do well to give heed. Wher- 
 ever we now turn eye or ear the unity 
 of things is manifest, and their un- 
 broken harmony heard. With the theory 
 of evolution in our hands as the master- 
 key, the immense array of facts that 
 seemed to lie unrelated and discrete, are 
 seen to be interrelated and in necessary 
 dependence — "a mighty sum of things 
 forever speaking." That undisturbed 
 relation of cause and effect which science 
 has revealed and confirmed, extends back- 
 ward as well as reaches forward ; its 
 continuity involves the inclusion of man 
 
 as a part of nature, and the study of his 
 development as one in which both the 
 biologist and the mythologist engage 
 toward a common end.' 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 AN AMERICAN INDIAN MYTH. 
 
 [This interesting mythic tale is taken from 
 J. W. Powell's " Mythology of the North 
 American Indians " (First Annual Report 
 of the Bureau of Ethnology). It is entitled 
 " Ta-vwots' has a fight with the Sun."] 
 
 Ta-vwots', the little rabbit, was wont 
 to lie with his back to the sun when he 
 slept. One day he thus slept in camp 
 while his children played around him. 
 After a time they saw that his back was 
 smoking, and they cried out, " What is the 
 matter with your back, father ? " Startled 
 from his sleep, he demanded to know the 
 cause of the uproar. " Your back is cov- 
 ered with sores, and full of holes," they 
 replied. Then Ta-vwots' was very an- 
 gry, for he knew that Ta'-vi, the sun, had 
 burned him, and he sat down by the fire 
 for a long time in solemn mood, ponder- 
 ing on the injury and insult he had re- 
 ceived. At last, rising to his feet, he said, 
 " My children, I must go and make war 
 upon Ta'-vi." And straightway he de- 
 parted. 
 
 Now his camp was in the valley of the 
 Mo-a-pa [a stream in South-eastern Ne- 
 vada]. On his journey he came to a hill, 
 and standing on its summit he saw in a 
 valley to the east a beautiful stretch of 
 verdure, and he greatly marveled at the 
 sight, and desired to know what it was. 
 On going down to the valley he found a 
 cornfield, something he had never before 
 seen, and the ears were ready for roast- 
 ing. When he examined them, he saw 
 that they were covered with beautiful hair, 
 and he was much astonished. Then he 
 opened the husk, and found within soft 
 white grains of corn, which he tasted. 
 Then he knew that it was corn, and good 
 to eat. Plucking his arms full he carried 
 them away, roasted them on a fire, and 
 ate until he was filled. 
 
 Now when he had done all this, he re- 
 flected that he had been stealing, and he 
 was afraid ; so he dug a hole in which to 
 hide himself. 
 
 Cin-au'-ai' was the owner of this field, 
 and when he walked through and saw 
 that his corn had been stolen he was ex- 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [287] 4.5- 
 
 ceedingly wroth, and said, " I will slay 
 this thief Ta-vwots' ; I will kill him, I 
 will kill him." And straightway he 
 called his warriors to him and made 
 search for the thief, but could not find 
 him, for he was hid in the ground. 
 After a long time they discovered the 
 hole, and tried to shoot Ta-vwots' as he 
 was standing in the entrance, but he 
 blew their arrows back. This made Cin- 
 an'-dv's people very angry, and they shot 
 many arrows, but Ta-vwots' 's breath 
 was as a warder against them all. Then 
 with one accord they ran to snatch him 
 up with their hands, but, all in confusion, 
 they only caught each other's fists, for 
 with agile steps Ta-vwots dodged into his 
 retreat. Then they began to dig, and 
 said they would drag him out. And 
 they labored with great energy, all the 
 time taunting him with shouts and jeers. 
 But Ta-vwots' had a secret passage from 
 the main chamber of his retreat, which 
 opened by a hole above the rock over- 
 hanging the entrance where they were at 
 work. 
 
 When they had proceeded with this 
 digging until they were quite under 
 ground, Ta-vwots', standing on the rock 
 above, hurled the magical ball which he 
 was accustomed to carry with him, and 
 striking the ground above the diggers, it 
 caved .the earth in, and they were all 
 buried. " Aha," said he, " why do you 
 wish to hinder me on my way to kill the 
 Sun ? A' -titer ti-tik-a-nilmp kwaik-ai'- 
 gar (fighting is my eating tool, I say ; that's 
 so)," and he proceeded on his way musing, 
 " I have started out to kill ; vengeance is 
 my work ; every one I meet will be an 
 enemy. It is well ; no one shall escape 
 my wrath." 
 
 The next day he saw two men making 
 arrow-heads of hot rocks, and drawing 
 near he observed their work for a time 
 from a position where he could not be 
 seen. Then stepping forth he said, " Let 
 me help you," and when the rocks were 
 on the fire again and were hot to redness he 
 said, " Hot rocks will not burn me." 
 And they laughed at him. " May be you 
 would have us believe that you are a 
 ghost ? " " I am not a ghost," said he, " but 
 I am a better man than you are. Hold me 
 on these hot rocks, and if I do not burn you 
 must let me do the same to you." To this 
 they readily agreed, and when they had 
 tried to burn him on the rocks, with his 
 magic breath he kept them away at a dis- 
 tance so slight they could not see but that 
 the rocks did really touch him. When 
 they perceived that he was not burned 
 
 they were greatly amazed, and trembled 
 with fear. But having made the promise 
 that he should treat them in like manner, 
 they submitted themselves to the torture, 
 and the hot rocks burned them until, with 
 great cries, they struggled to get free, but 
 unrelenting Ta-vwots' held them until the 
 rocks had burned through their flesh into 
 their entrails, and so they died. " Aha," 
 said Ta-vwots', " lie there until you can get 
 up again. I am on my way to kill the 
 Sun. A'-nier ti-tik-a-nihnp kwazk-az'- 
 gar." And sounding the war-whoop he 
 proceeded on his way. 
 
 The next day he came to where two 
 women were gathering berries in baskets, 
 and when he sat down they brought him 
 some of the fruit and placed it before him. 
 He saw there were many leaves and 
 thorns among the berries, and he said r 
 " Blow these leaves and thorns into my 
 eyes," and they did so, hoping to blind 
 him ; but with his magic breath he kept 
 them away, so that they did not hurt him. 
 
 Then the women averred that he was a 
 ghost. " I am no ghost," said he, " but a 
 common person. Do you not know that 
 leaves and thorns cannot hurt the eye ? 
 Let me show you ; " and they consented, 
 and were made blind. Then Ta-vwots' 
 slew them with his pa-nhn'-o-kwi. 
 " Aha," said he, " you are caught with 
 your own chaff. I am on my way to kill the 
 Sun. This is good practice — I must learn 
 how. A'-nier ti-tik'-a-mhnp kwaz'k-az"- 
 gar." And sounding the war-whoop he 
 proceeded on his way. 
 
 The next day he saw some women 
 standing on the Hurricane Cliff, and as he 
 approached he heard them say to each 
 other that they would roll rocks down 
 upon his head and kill him as he passed ; 
 and drawing near, he pretended to be 
 eating something and enjoying it with 
 great gusto ; so they asked him what it 
 was, and he said it was something very 
 sweet, and they begged that they might 
 be allowed to taste of it also. " I will 
 throw it up to you," said he ; "come to 
 the brink and catch it." When they had 
 done so, he threw it up so that they could 
 not quite reach it, and he threw it in this 
 way many times, until, in their eagerness 
 to secure it, they all crowded too near the 
 brink, fell, and were killed. " Aha," said 
 he, " you were killed by your own eager- 
 ness. I am on my way to kill the Sun. 
 A'-nier ti-tik '-a-mhnp kwaik-ai'-gar." 
 And sounding the war-whoop he passed 
 on. 
 
 The following day he saw two women 
 fashioning water-jugs, which are made of 
 
46 1288] 
 
 THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 willow-ware, like baskets, and afterward 
 lined with pitch. When afar off he could 
 hear them converse, for he had a wonder- 
 ful ear. " Here comes that bad Ta- 
 vwots'," said they ; " how shall we destroy 
 him ? " When he came near, he said, 
 " What was that you were saying when 
 I came up ? " " Oh, we were only saying, 
 * Here comes our grandson,' " * said they. 
 " Is that all ? " replied Ta-vwots', and 
 looking around he said, " Let me go into 
 your water-jug ; " and they allowed him 
 to do so. " Now braid the neck." This 
 they did, making the neck very small ; 
 then they laughed with great glee, for 
 they supposed he was entrapped. But 
 with his magic breath he burst the jug 
 and stood up before them ; and they 
 •exclaimed, " You must be a ghost ! " but 
 he answered, " I am no ghost. Do you not 
 know that jugs were made to hold water, 
 but cannot hold men and women ? " At 
 this they wondered greatly, and said he 
 was wise. Then he proposed to put them 
 in jugs in the same manner, in order to 
 •demonstrate to them the truth of what he 
 had said ; and they consented. When he 
 had made the necks of the jugs and 
 filled them with pitch he said, " Now jump 
 ■out ; " but they could not. It was now 
 his turn to deride ; so he rolled them 
 about and laughed greatly, while their 
 half-stifled screams filled the air. When 
 he had sported with them in this way 
 until he was tired he killed them with his 
 magical ball. " Aha," said he, " you are 
 bottled in your own jugs. I am on my 
 way to kill the Sun ; in good time I shall 
 learn how. A'-nier ti-tifc-a-nilmp kwaik- 
 ai' 7 gar." And sounding the war-whoop 
 he passed on. 
 
 The next day he came upon Kwi'-ats, 
 the bear, who was digging a hole in 
 which to hide, for he had heard of the 
 fame of Ta-vwots' and was afraid. When 
 the great slayer came to Kwi'-ats he said, 
 " Don't fear, my great friend, I am not 
 the man from whom to hide. Could a 
 little fellow like me kill so many people ? " 
 And the bear was assured. " Let me 
 help you dig," said Ta-vwots', " that we 
 may hide together, for I also am fleeing 
 from the great destroyer. So they made 
 a den deep in the ground, with its en- 
 trance concealed by a great rock. Now 
 Ta-vwots' secretly made a private pas- 
 sage from the den out to the side of the 
 mountain, and when the work was com- 
 pleted the two went out together to the 
 
 * This is a very common term of endearment 
 used by elder to younper persons. 
 
 hill-top to watch for the coming of the 
 enemy. Soon Ta-vwots' pretended that 
 he saw him coming, and they ran in 
 great haste to the den. The little one 
 outran the greater, and going into the 
 den hastened out again through his secret 
 passage. 
 
 When Kwi'-ats entered he looked 
 about, and not seeing his little friend he 
 searched for him for some time, and still 
 not finding him, he supposed that he 
 must have passed him on the way, and 
 went out again to see if he had stopped or 
 been killed. By this time Ta-7/wots' had 
 perched himself on the rock at the en- 
 trance of the den, and when the head of 
 the bear protruded through the hole be- 
 low he hurled his pa-rtim'-o-kwi and 
 killed him. " Aha," said Ta-vwots', " I 
 greatly feared this renowned warrior, 
 but now he is dead in his own den. I am 
 going to kill the Sun. A'-nier ti-tik'-a- 
 niimp kwaik-ai'-gar." And sounding the 
 war-whoop he went on his way. 
 
 The next day he met Ku-mi'-a-pots, the 
 tarantula. Now this knowing personage 
 had heard of the fame of Ta-vwots' and 
 determined to outwit him. He was pos- 
 sessed of a club with such properties 
 that, although it was a deadly weapon 
 when used against others, it could not be 
 made to hurt himself, though wielded by 
 a powerful arm. 
 
 As Ta-vwots 1 came near, Ku-mi'-a- 
 pots complained of having a headache ; 
 moaning and groaning, he said there was 
 an u-nu'-pits, or little evil spirit, in his 
 head, and he asked Ta-inuots' to take the 
 club and beat it out. Ta-vwots' obeyed, 
 and struck with . all his power, and won- 
 dered that Ku-mi'-a-pots was not killed ; 
 but he urged Ta-vwots to strike harder. 
 At last Ta-vwots' understood the nature 
 of the club and guessed the wiles of Ku- 
 mi'-a-pots, and raising the weapon as if 
 to strike again, he dexterously substitu- 
 ted his magic ball and slew him. " Aha," 
 said he, " that is a blow of your own seek- 
 ing, Ku-mi'-a-pots. I am on my way to 
 kill the Sun ; now I know that I can do 
 it. A'-nicr ti-tih J -a-nilmp kwaik-ai'-gar." 
 And sounding his war-whoop he went on 
 his way. 
 
 The next day he came to a cliff which 
 is the edge or boundary of the world on 
 the east, where careless persons have fal- 
 len into unknown depths below. Now to 
 come to the summit of this cliff it is nec- 
 essary to climb a mountain, and Ta-vwots' 
 could see three gaps or notches in the 
 mountain, and he went up into the one 
 on the left ; and he demanded to know 
 
THE BIRTH AND GROWTH OF MYTH. 
 
 [289] 47 
 
 of all the trees which were standing by 
 of what use they were. Each one in turn 
 praised its own qualities, the chief of 
 which in every case was its value as fuel. 
 Ta-vwots' shook his head and went into 
 the center gap, and had another conver- 
 sation with the trees, receiving the same 
 answer. Finally he went into the third 
 gap — that on the right. After he had 
 questioned all the trees and bushes, he 
 came at last to a little one called yu?-£- 
 nump, which modestly said it had no use, 
 that it was not even fit for fuel. "Good," 
 said Ta-vwots', and under it he lay down 
 to sleep. 
 
 When the dawn came into the sky Ta- 
 vwots' arose and stood on the brink over- 
 hanging the abyss from which the Sun 
 was about to rise. The instant it ap- 
 peared he hurled his pa-rtbn-o-kwi, and 
 •striking it full in the face shattered it into 
 
 innumerable fragments, and these frag- 
 ments were scattered over all the world 
 and kindled a great conflagration. Ta- 
 vwots' ran and crept under the yn'-i-nianp 
 to obtain protection. At last the fire 
 waxed very hot over all the world, and 
 soon Ta-vwots' began to suffer and tried 
 to run away ; but as he ran his toes were 
 burned off, and then slowly, inch by inch, 
 his legs, and then his body, so that he 
 walked on his hands; and these were 
 burned, and he walked on the stumps of 
 his arms ; and these were burned, until 
 there was nothing left but his head. And 
 now, having no other means of progres- 
 sion, his head rolled along the ground 
 until his eyes, which were much swollen, 
 burst by striking against a rock, and the 
 tears gushed out in a great flood which 
 spread out over all the land and extin- 
 guished the conflagration. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. Nature as viewed by Primitive Man r 
 
 II. Personification of the Powers of Nature J 
 
 III. The Sun and Moon in Mythology 6 
 
 IV. The Theories of Certain Comparative Mythologists 8 
 
 V. Aryan Mythology 10 
 
 VI. The Primitive-Nature Myth Transformed 12 
 
 VII. The Stars in Mythology 14 
 
 VIII. Myths of the Destructive Forces of Nature 16 
 
 IX. The Hindu Sun-and-Cloud Myth 18 
 
 X. Demonology . .• 20 
 
 XI. Metempsychosis and Transformation 23 
 
 XII. Transformation in the Middle Ages 24 
 
 XIII. The Belief in Transformation Universal 26 
 
 XIV. Beast-Fables 28 
 
 XV. Totemism 31 
 
 XVI. Heraldry : Ancestor Worship 33 
 
 XVII. Survival of Myth in Historical Narratives 36 
 
 XVIII. Myths of King Arthur and Llewellyn 39 
 
 XIX. Semitic Myths and Legends 41 
 
 XX. Conclusion 43 
 
 Appkxuix 44 
 
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 No. i. LIGHT SCIENCE FOR LEISURE 
 HOURS. 
 ByRiCHARD A. Proctor. 
 No. 2. THE FORMS OF WATER (illustrated). 
 
 By John Tvndall. 
 No. 3. PHYSICS AND POLITICS. 
 
 By Walter Bagehot. 
 No. 4 . MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE (illustra- 
 ted.) 
 By Thomas H. Huxlby. 
 No.,. EDUCATION- INTELLECTUAL, MOR- 
 AL AND PHYSICAL. 
 By HRRBBRf Spencer 
 No. 6. *TOWN GEOLOGY. 
 
 By Rev. Charles Kingslky. 
 No. 7. *THE CONSERVATION OF ENERGY 
 (illustrated). 
 By Balfour Stewart. 
 No 8. THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES. 
 
 By C. Marcel. 
 No 9. THE DATA OF ETHICS. 
 
 By Herbert Spencer. 
 No. io. THE THEORY OF SOUND AND MU- 
 SIC (illustrated) 
 By P. Blaserna. 
 No ii. I THE NATURALIST ON THE RIV- 
 
 \ ER AMAZON& 
 No. 12 I By Henry Walter Bates. 
 No. 13. *MIND AND BODY. 
 By Alexander Bain. 
 No. 14. THE WONDERS OF THE HEAVENS 
 (illustrated ) 
 By Camille Flammarion. 
 No. 15. LONGEVITY: THE MEANS OF PRO- 
 LONGING LIFE AFTER MIDDLE 
 AGE 
 By Dr. John Gardner. 
 No. 16 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 
 
 By Thomas H. Huxley. 
 No. 17. PROGRESS : ITS LAW AND CAUSE. 
 With other Disquisitions. 
 By Herbert Spencer. 
 No. 18. LESSONS IN ELECTRICITY (illustra- 
 ted.) 
 By John Tvndall. 
 No. 10. 'FAMILIAR ESSAYS ON SCIENTIFIC 
 SUBJECTS. 
 By Richard A. Proctor. 
 No. ao. THE ROMANCE OF ASTRONOMY. 
 
 By R. KalleY Miller. 
 No. at. 'THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE; 
 with other Essays. 
 By Thomas H. Huxley. 
 No. 12. 'SEEING AND THINKING. 
 
 By Ww. Kingdon Clifford. 
 No. « 3 . "SCIENTIFIC SOPHISMS. 
 
 By Rev. Samuel Wainwwight. 
 No 24. 'POPULAR SCIENTIFIC LECTURES 
 (illustrated.) 
 By kl. HM.MHOLTZ. 
 
 No. 25. THE ORIGIN OF NATIONS. 
 
 By George Rawlinson. 
 No. t6. THE EVOLUTIONIST AT LARGE. 
 
 By Grant Allen. 
 No. 27 LANDHOLDING IN ENGLAND. 
 
 By Joseph Fisher. 
 No. 28. FASHION IN DEFORMITY, as illu». 
 trated in the Customs of Barbarous and 
 Civilized Races. (Numerous illustrm- 
 tions.) 
 By Wm. Henry Flower. 
 
 No. 20. FACTS AND FICTIONS ' OF ZO- 
 OLOGY. 
 By Andrew Wilson. 
 No. 30. (THE STUDY OF WORDS. 
 No. 31. I By Richard Chenbvix Trench. 
 No. 32. HEREDITARY TRAITS ; with other es- 
 says. 
 By Richard A. Proctor. 
 No. 33. VIGNETTES FROM NATURE. 
 
 By Grant Allen. 
 No. 34. THE PHILOSOPHY OF STYLE. 
 
 By Herbert Spencer. 
 No. 35. ORIENTAL RELIGIONS. 
 By John Caird and others. 
 No. 36. LECTURES ON EVOLUTION, (Mm*. 
 trated.) 
 By Thomas H. Huxley. 
 No. 37. SIX LECTURES ON LIGHT, (illtuJ 
 trated.) 
 By John Tynqall. 
 ►o. 38. ( GEOLOGICAL SKETCHES. 
 No. 39 ( By Archibald Gbikie. 
 No. 40. THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE Of 
 ORGANIC EVOLUTION. , 
 By George J. Romanes. 
 No. 41. CURRENT DISCUSSIONS IN SClt 
 EN£E. 
 By WT M.Williams. 
 
 No. 42. THE HISTORV OF THE SCIENCE 
 OF POLITICS. 
 By Frederick PoLbocK. 
 
 No. 43. DARWIN AND HUMBOLDT. 
 
 By T. H. Huxley, L. Agas&iz and otbem. 
 
 No. 44. (THE DAWN OF HISTORY. 
 
 ■{ Edited by C. F. Krary, of the Brisish 
 No. 45- ( Museum. 
 No. 46. THE DISEASES OF MEMORY. 
 
 By Th. Ribot. Translated by J. F«¥- 
 
 GERAI.l). 
 
 No. 47. THE CHILDHOOD OF RELIGIONS. 
 
 By Edward Clodd. 
 No. 48. LIFE IN NATURE, (illustrated ) 
 
 By James Hinton. 
 
 No. 49. THE SUN: Its Constitution, its Phenome- 
 na, etc. 
 By N. T. Carr, Judge Ninth Judicial Cir- 
 cuit of Indiana. 
 
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