Custom and Myth 12

Custom and Myth 12

The great authority for the modern history of the divining rod is a work

published by M. Chevreuil, in Paris, in 1854. M. Chevreuil, probably

with truth, regarded the wand as much on a par with the turning-tables,

which, in 1854, attracted a good deal of attention. He studied the topic

historically, and his book, with a few accessible French tracts and

letters of the seventeenth century, must here be our guide. A good deal

of M. Chevreuil's learning, it should be said, is reproduced in Mr.

Baring Gould's 'Curious Myths of the Middle Ages,' but the French author

is much more exhaustive in his treatment of the topic. M. Chevreuil

could find no earlier book on the twig than the 'Testament du Frere Basil

Valentin,' a holy man who flourished (the twig) about 1413; but whose

treatise is possibly apocryphal. According to Basil Valentin, the twig

was regarded with awe by ignorant labouring men, which is still true.

Paracelsus, though he has a reputation for magical daring, thought the

use of the twig 'uncertain and unlawful'; and Agricola, in his 'De Re

Metallica' (1546) expresses a good deal of scepticism about the use of

the rod in mining. A traveller of 1554 found that the wand was _not_

used--and this seems to have surprised him--in the mines of Macedonia.

Most of the writers of the sixteenth century accounted for the turning of

the rod by 'sympathy,' which was then as favourite an explanation of

everything as evolution is to-day. In 1630 the Baron de Beau Soleil of

Bohemia (his name sounds rather Bohemian) came to France with his wife,

and made much use of the rod in the search for water and minerals. The

Baroness wrote a little volume on the subject, afterwards reprinted in a

great storehouse of this lore, 'La Physique Occulte,' of Vallemont.

Kircher, a Jesuit, made experiments which came to nothing; but Gaspard

Schott, a learned writer, cautiously declined to say that the Devil was

always 'at the bottom of it' when the rod turned successfully. The

problem of the rod was placed before our own Royal Society by Boyle, in

1666, but the Society was not more successful here than in dealing with

the philosophical difficulty proposed by Charles II. In 1679 De Saint

Remain, deserting the old hypothesis of secret 'sympathies,' explained

the motion of the rod (supposing it to move) by the action of

corpuscules. From this time the question became the playing ground of

the Cartesian and other philosophers. The struggle was between theories

of 'atoms,' magnetism, 'corpuscules,' electric effluvia, and so forth, on

one side, and the immediate action of devils or of conscious imposture,

on the other. The controversy, comparatively simple as long as the rod

only indicated hidden water or minerals, was complicated by the revival

of the savage belief that the wand could 'smell out' moral offences. As

long as the twig turned over material objects, you could imagine

sympathies and 'effluvia' at pleasure. But when the wand twirled over

the scene of a murder, or dragged the expert after the traces of the

culprit, fresh explanations were wanted. Le Brun wrote to Malebranche on

July 8, 1689, to tell him that the wand only turned over what the holder

had the _intention_ of discovering. {190} If he were following a

murderer, the wand good-naturedly refused to distract him by turning over

hidden water. On the other hand, Vallemont says that when a peasant was

using the wand to find water, it turned over a spot in a wood where a

murdered woman was buried, and it conducted the peasant to the murderer's

house. These events seem inconsistent with Le Brun's theory of

_intention_. Malebranche replied, in effect, that he had only heard of

the turning of the wand over water and minerals; that it then turned (if

turn it did) by virtue of some such force as electricity; that, if such

force existed, the wand would turn over open water. But it does not so

turn; and, as physical causes are constant, it follows that the turning

of the rod cannot be the result of a physical cause. The only other

explanation is an intelligent cause--either the will of an impostor, or

the action of a spirit. Good spirits would not meddle with such matters;

therefore either the Devil or an impostor causes the motion of the rod,

if it _does_ move at all. This logic of Malebranche's is not agreeable

to believers in the twig; but there the controversy stood, till, in 1692,

Jacques Aymar, a peasant of Dauphine, by the use of the twig discovered

one of the Lyons murderers.

 

Though the story of this singular event is pretty well known, it must

here be briefly repeated. No affair can be better authenticated, and our

version is abridged from the 'Relations' of 'Monsieur le Procureur du

Roi, Monsieur l'Abbe de la Garde, Monsieur Panthot, Doyen des Medecins de

Lyon, et Monsieur Aubert, Avocat celebre.'

 

On July 5, 1692, a vintner and his wife were found dead in the cellar of

their shop at Lyons. They had been killed by blows from a hedging-knife,

and their money had been stolen. The culprits could not be discovered,

and a neighbour took upon him to bring to Lyons a peasant out of

Dauphine, named Jacques Aymar, a man noted for his skill with the

divining rod. The Lieutenant-Criminel and the Procureur du Roi took

Aymar into the cellar, furnishing him with a rod of the first wood that

came to hand. According to the Procureur du Roi, the rod did not move

till Aymar reached the very spot where the crime had been committed. His

pulse then rose, and the wand twisted rapidly. 'Guided by the wand or by

some internal sensation,' Aymar now pursued the track of the assassins,

entered the court of the Archbishop's palace, left the town by the bridge

over the Rhone, and followed the right bank of the river. He reached a

gardener's house, which he declared the men had entered, and some

children confessed that three men (_whom they described_) had come into

the house one Sunday morning. Aymar followed the track up the river,

pointed out all the places where the men had landed, and, to make a long

story short, stopped at last at the door of the prison of Beaucaire. He

was admitted, looked at the prisoners, and picked out as the murderer a

little hunchback (had the children described a hunchback?) who had just

been brought in for a small theft. The hunchback was taken to Lyons, and

he was recognised, on the way, by the people at all the stages where he

had stopped. At Lyons he was examined in the usual manner, and confessed

that he had been an accomplice in the crime, and had guarded the door.

Aymar pursued the other culprits to the coast, followed them by sea,

landed where they had landed, and only desisted from his search when they

crossed the frontier. As for the hunchback, he was broken on the wheel,

being condemned on his own confession. It does not appear that he was

put to the torture to make him confess. If this had been done his

admissions would, of course, have been as valueless as those of the

victims in trials for witchcraft.

 

This is, in brief, the history of the famous Lyons murders. It must be

added that many experiments were made with Aymar in Paris, and that they

were all failures. He fell into every trap that was set for him;

detected thieves who were innocent, failed to detect the guilty, and

invented absurd excuses; alleging, for example, that the rod would not

indicate a murderer who had confessed, or who was drunk when he committed

his crime. These excuses seem to annihilate the wild contemporary theory

of Chauvin and others, that the body of a murderer naturally exhales an

invisible matiere meurtriere--peculiar indestructible atoms, which may be

detected by the expert with the rod. Something like the same theory, we

believe, has been used to explain the pretended phenomena of haunted

houses. But the wildest philosophical credulity is staggered by a

matiere meurtriere which is disengaged by the body of a sober, but not by

that of an intoxicated, murderer, which survives tempests in the air, and

endures for many years, but is dissipated the moment the murderer

confesses. Believers in Aymar have conjectured that his real powers were

destroyed by the excitements of Paris, and that he took to imposture; but

this is an effort of too easy good-nature. When Vallemont defended Aymar

(1693) in the book called 'La Physique Occulte,' he declared that Aymar

was physically affected to an unpleasant extent by matiere meurtriere,

but was not thus agitated when he used the rod to discover minerals. We

have seen that, if modern evidence can be trusted, holders of the rod are

occasionally much agitated even when they are only in search of wells.

The story gave rise to a prolonged controversy, and the case remains a

judicial puzzle, but little elucidated by the confession of the

hunchback, who may have been insane, or morbid, or vexed by constant

questioning till he was weary of his life. He was only nineteen years of

age.

 

The next use of the rod was very much like that of 'tipping' and turning

tables. Experts held it (as did Le Pere Menestrier, 1694), questions

were asked, and the wand answered by turning in various directions. By

way of showing the inconsistency of all philosophies of the wand, it may

be said that one girl found that it turned over concealed gold if she

held gold in her hand, while another found that it indicated the metal so

long as she did _not_ carry gold with her in the quest. In the search

for water, ecclesiastics were particularly fond of using the rod. The

Marechal de Boufflers dug many wells, and found no water, on the

indications of a rod in the hands of the Prieur de Dorenic, near Guise.

In 1700 a cure, near Toulouse, used the wand to answer questions, which,

like planchette, it often answered wrong. The great sourcier, or water-

finder, of the eighteenth century was one Bleton. He declared that the

rod was a mere index, and that physical sensations of the searcher

communicated themselves to the wand. This is the reverse of the African

theory, that the stick is inspired, while the men who hold it are only

influenced by the stick. On the whole, Bleton's idea seems the less

absurd, but Bleton himself often failed when watched with scientific care

by the incredulous. Paramelle, who wrote on methods of discovering

wells, in 1856, came to the conclusion that the wand turns in the hands

of certain individuals of peculiar temperament, and that it is very much

a matter of chance whether there are, or are not, wells in the places

where it turns.

 

On the whole, the evidence for the turning of the wand is a shade better

than that for the magical turning of tables. If there are no phenomena

of this sort at all, it is remarkable that the belief in them is so

widely diffused. But if the phenomena are purely subjective, owing to

the conscious or unconscious action of nervous patients, then they are

precisely of the sort which the cunning medicine-man observes, and makes

his profit out of, even in the earliest stages of society. Once

introduced, these practices never die out among the conservative and

unprogressive class of peasants; and, every now and then, they attract

the curiosity of philosophers, or win the belief of the credulous among

the educated classes. Then comes, as we have lately seen, a revival of

ancient superstition. For it were as easy to pluck the comet out of the

sky by the tail, as to eradicate superstition from the mind of man.

 

Perhaps one good word may be said for the divining rod. Considering the

chances it has enjoyed, the rod has done less mischief than might have

been expected. It might very well have become, in Europe, as in Asia and

Africa, a kind of ordeal, or method of searching for and trying

malefactors. Men like Jacques Aymar might have played, on a larger

scale, the part of Hopkins, the witch-finder. Aymar was, indeed,

employed by some young men to point out, by help of the wand, the houses

of ladies who had been more frail than faithful. But at the end of the

seventeenth century in France, this research was not regarded with

favour, and put the final touch on the discomfiture of Aymar. So far as

we know, the hunchback of Lyons was the only victim of the 'twig' who

ever suffered in civilised society. It is true that, in rural England,

the movements of a Bible, suspended like a pendulum, have been thought to

point out the guilty. But even that evidence is not held good enough to

go to a jury.

 

 

 

 

HOTTENTOT MYTHOLOGY.

 

 

'What makes mythology mythological, in the true sense of the word, is

what is utterly unintelligible, absurd, strange, or miraculous.' So says

Mr. Max Muller in the January number of the Nineteenth Century for 1882.

Men's attention would never have been surprised into the perpetual study

and questioning of mythology if it had been intelligible and dignified,

and if its report had been in accordance with the reason of civilised and

cultivated races. What mythologists wish to discover is the origin of

the countless disgusting, amazing, and incongruous legends which occur in

the myths of all known peoples. According to Mr. Muller--

 

There are only two systems possible in which the irrational element in

mythology can be accounted for. One school takes the irrational as a

matter of fact; and if we read that Daphne fled before Phoebus, and

was changed into a laurel tree, that school would say that there

probably was a young lady called Aurora, like, for instance, Aurora

Konigsmark; that a young man called Robin, or possibly a man with red

hair, pursued her, and that she hid behind a laurel tree that happened

to be there. This was the theory of Euhemeros, re-established by the

famous Abbe Bernier [Mr. Muller doubtless means Banier], and not quite

extinct even now. According to another school, the irrational element

in mythology is inevitable, and due to the influence of language on

thought, so that many of the legends of gods and heroes may be

rendered intelligible if only we can discover the original meaning of

their proper names. The followers of this school try to show that

Daphne, the laurel tree, was an old name for the dawn, and that

Phoibos was one of the many names of the sun, who pursued the dawn

till she vanished before his rays. Of these two schools, the former

has always appealed to the mythologies of savage nations, as showing

that gods and heroes were originally human beings, worshipped after

their death as ancestors and as gods, while the latter has confined

itself chiefly to an etymological analysis of mythological names in

Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, and other languages, such as had been

sufficiently studied to admit of a scientific, grammatical, and

etymological treatment.

 

This is a long text for our remarks on Hottentot mythology; but it is

necessary to prove that there are not two schools only of mythologists:

that there are inquirers who neither follow the path of the Abbe Banier,

nor of the philologists, but a third way, unknown to, or ignored by Mr.

Muller. We certainly were quite unaware that Banier and Euhemeros were

very specially concerned, as Mr. Muller thinks, with savage mythology;

but it is by aid of savage myths that the school unknown to Mr. Muller

examines the myths of civilised peoples like the Greeks. The disciples

of Mr. Muller interpret all the absurdities of Greek myth, the gods who

are beasts on occasion, the stars who were men, the men who become

serpents or deer, the deities who are cannibals and parricides and

adulterers, as the result of the influence of Aryan speech upon Aryan

thought. Men, in Mr. Muller's opinion, had originally pure ideas about

the gods, and expressed them in language which we should call figurative.

The figures remained, when their meaning was lost; the names were then

supposed to be gods, the nomina became numina, and out of the

inextricable confusion of thought which followed, the belief in cannibal,

bestial, adulterous, and incestuous gods was evolved. That is Mr.

Muller's hypothesis; with him the evolution, a result of a disease of

language, has been from early comparative purity to later religious

abominations. Opposed to him is what may be called the school of Mr.

Herbert Spencer: the modern Euhemerism, which recognises an element of

historical truth in myths, as if the characters had been real characters,

and which, in most gods, beholds ancestral ghosts raised to a higher

power.

 

There remains a third system of mythical interpretation, though Mr.

Muller says only two methods are possible. The method, in this third

case, is to see whether the irrational features and elements of civilised

Greek myth occur also in the myths of savages who speak languages quite

unlike those from whose diseases Mr. Muller derives the corruption of

religion. If the same features recur, are they as much in harmony with

the mental habits of savages, such as Bushmen and Hottentots, as they are

out of accord with the mental habits of civilised Greeks? If this

question can be answered in the affirmative, then it may be provisionally

assumed that the irrational elements of savage myth are the legacy of

savage modes of thought, and have survived in the religion of Greece from

a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were savages. But inquirers who

use this method do not in the least believe that either Greek or savage

gods were, for the more part, originally real men. Both Greeks and

savages have worshipped the ghosts of the dead. Both Greeks and savages

assign to their gods the miraculous powers of transformation and magic,

which savages also attribute to their conjurers or shamans. The mantle

(if he had a mantle) of the medicine-man has fallen on the god; but Zeus,

or Indra, was not once a real medicine-man. A number of factors combine

in the conception of Indra, or Zeus, as either god appears in Sanskrit or

Greek literature, of earlier or later date. Our school does not hold

anything so absurd as that Daphne was a real girl pursued by a young man.

But it has been observed that, among most savage races, metamorphoses

like that of Daphne not only exist in mythology, but are believed to

occur very frequently in actual life. Men and women are supposed to be

capable of turning into plants (as the bamboo in Sarawak), into animals,

and stones, and stars, and those metamorphoses happen as contemporary

events--for example, in Samoa. {200}

 

When Mr. Lane was living at Cairo, and translating the 'Arabian Nights,'

he found that the people still believed in metamorphosis. Any day, just

as in the 'Arabian Nights,' a man might find himself turned by an

enchanter into a pig or a horse. Similar beliefs, not derived from

language, supply the matter of the senseless incidents in Greek myths.

 

Savage mythology is also full of metamorphoses. Therefore the

mythologists whose case we are stating, when they find identical

metamorphoses in the classical mythologies, conjecture that these were

first invented when the ancestors of the Aryans were in the imaginative

condition in which a score of rude races are to-day. This explanation

they apply to many other irrational elements in mythology. They do not

say, 'Something like the events narrated in these stories once occurred,'

nor 'A disease of language caused the belief in such events,' but 'These

stories were invented when men were capable of believing in their

occurrence as a not unusual sort of incident'

 

Philologists attempt to explain the metamorphoses as the result of some

oblivion and confusion of language. Apollo, they say, was called the

'wolf-god' (Lukeios) by accident: his name really meant the 'god of

light.' A similar confusion made the 'seven shiners' into the 'seven

bears.' {201} These explanations are distrusted, partly because the area

to be covered by them is so vast. There is scarcely a star, tree, or

beast, but it has been a man or woman once, if we believe civilised and

savage myth. Two or three possible examples of myths originating in

forgetfulness of the meaning of words, even if admitted, do not explain

the incalculable crowd of metamorphoses. We account for these by saying

that, to the savage mind, which draws no hard and fast line between man

and nature, all such things are possible; possible enough, at least, to

be used as incidents in story. Again, as has elsewhere been shown, the

laxity of philological reasoning is often quite extraordinary; while,

lastly, philologists of the highest repute flatly contradict each other

about the meaning of the names and roots on which they agree in founding

their theory. {202a}

 

By way of an example of the philological method as applied to savage

mythology, we choose a book in many ways admirable, Dr. Hahn's 'Tsuni

Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi Khoi.' {202b} This book is sometimes

appealed to as a crushing argument against the mythologists who adopt the

method we have just explained. Let us see if the blow be so very

crushing. To put the case in a nutshell, the Hottentots have commonly

been described as a race which worshipped a dead chief, or conjurer--Tsui

Goab his name is, meaning Wounded Knee, a not unlikely name for a savage.

Dr. Hahn, on the other hand, labours to show that the Hottentots

originally worshipped no dead chief, but (as a symbol of the Infinite)

the Red Dawn. The meaning of the name Red Dawn, he says, was lost; the

words which meant Red Dawn were erroneously supposed to mean Wounded

Knee, and thus arose the adoration and the myths of a dead chief, or

wizard, Tsui Goab, Wounded Knee. Clearly, if this can be proved, it is

an excellent case for the philological school, an admirable example of a

myth produced by forgetfulness of the meaning of words. Our own opinion

is that, even if Tsui Goab originally meant Red Dawn, the being, as now

conceived of by his adorers, is bedizened in the trappings of the dead

medicine-man, and is worshipped just as ghosts of the dead are

worshipped. Thus, whatever his origin, his myth is freely coloured by

the savage fancy and by savage ideas, and we ask no more than this

colouring to explain the wildest Greek myths. What truly 'primitive'

religion was, we make no pretence to know. We only say that, whether

Greek religion arose from a pure fountain or not, its stream had flowed

through and been tinged by the soil of savage thought, before it widens

into our view in historical times. But it will be shown that the logic

which connects Tsui Goab with the Red Dawn is far indeed from being

cogent.

 

Tsui Goab is thought by the Hottentots themselves to be a dead man, and

it is admitted that among the Hottentots dead men are adored. 'Cairns

are still objects of worship,' {203a} and Tsui Goab lies beneath several

cairns. Again, soothsayers are believed in (p. 24), and Tsui Goab is

regarded as a deceased soothsayer. As early as 1655, a witness quoted by

Hahn saw women worshipping at one of the cairns of Heitsi Eibib, another

supposed ancestral being. Kolb, the old Dutch traveller, found that the

Hottentots, like the Bushmen, revered the mantis insect. This creature

they called Gaunab. They also had some moon myths, practised adoration

of the moon, and danced at dawn. Thunberg (1792) saw the cairn-worship,

and, on asking its meaning, was told that a Hottentot lay buried there.

{203b} Thunberg also heard of the worship of the mantis, or grey

grasshopper. In 1803 Liechtenstein noted the cairn-worship, and was told

that a renowned Hottentot doctor of old times rested under the cairn.

Appleyard's account of 'the name God in Khoi Khoi, or Hottentot,'

deserves quoting in full:--

 

Hottentot: Tsoei'koap.

Namaqua: Tsoei'koap.

Koranna: Tshu'koab, and the author adds: 'This is the word from which

the Kafirs have probably derived their u-Tixo, a term which they have

universally applied, like the Hottentots, to designate the Divine

Being, since the introduction of Christianity. Its derivation is

curious. It consists of two words, which together mean the "wounded

knee." It is said to have been originally applied to a doctor or

sorcerer of considerable notoriety and skill amongst the Hottentots or

Namaquas some generations back, in consequence of his having received

some injury in his knee. Having been held in high repute for

extraordinary powers during life, he appeared to be invoked even after

death, as one who could still relieve and protect; and hence, in

process of time, he became nearest in idea to their first conceptions

of God.'

 

Other missionaries make old Wounded Knee a good sort of being on the

whole, who fights Gaunab, a bad being. Dr. Moffat heard that 'Tsui Kuap'

was 'a notable warrior,' who once received a wound in the knee. Sir

James Alexander {204} found that the Namaquas believed their 'great

father' lay below the cairns on which they flung boughs. This great

father was Heitsi Eibib, and, like other medicine-men, 'he could take

many forms.' Like Tsui Goab, he died several times and rose again. Hahn

gives (p. 61) a long account of the Wounded Knee from an old chief, and a

story of the battle between Tsui Goab, who 'lives in a beautiful heaven,'

and Gaunab, who 'lives in a dark heaven.' As this chief had dwelt among

missionaries very long, we may perhaps discount his remarks on 'heaven'

as borrowed. Hahn thinks they refer to the red sky in which Tsui Goab

lived, and to the black sky which was the home of Gaunab. The two