Custom and Myth 2

Custom and Myth 2

As a rule, the grace demanded was power to make captives in war. The

curious coincidence of the 'midnight axe,' occurring in lands so remote

as Ceylon and Mexico, and the singular attestation by an English lady of

the actual existence of the disturbance, makes this youaltepuztli one of

the quaintest things in the province of the folklorist. But, whatever

the cause of the noise, or of the beliefs connected with the noise, may

be, no one would explain them as the result of community of _race_

between Cingalese and Aztecs. Nor would this explanation be offered to

account for the Aztec and English belief that the creaking of furniture

is an omen of death in a house. Obviously, these opinions are the

__EXPRESSION__ of a common state of superstitious fancy, not the signs of an

original community of origin.

 

Let us take another piece of folklore. All North-country English folk

know the Kernababy. The custom of the 'Kernababy' is commonly observed

in England, or, at all events, in Scotland, where the writer has seen

many a kernababy. The last gleanings of the last field are bound up in a

rude imitation of the human shape, and dressed in some tag-rags of

finery. The usage has fallen into the conservative hands of children,

but of old 'the Maiden' was a regular image of the harvest goddess,

which, with a sickle and sheaves in her arms, attended by a crowd of

reapers, and accompanied with music, followed the last carts home to the

farm. {18} It is odd enough that the 'Maiden' should exactly translate

[Greek], the old Sicilian name of the daughter of Demeter. 'The Maiden'

has dwindled, then, among us to the rudimentary kernababy; but ancient

Peru had her own Maiden, her Harvest Goddess. Here it is easy to trace

the natural idea at the basis of the superstitious practice which links

the shores of the Pacific with our own northern coast. Just as a portion

of the yule-log and of the Christmas bread were kept all the year

through, a kind of nest-egg of plenteous food and fire, so the kernababy,

English or Peruvian, is an earnest that corn will not fail all through

the year, till next harvest comes. For this reason the kernababy used to

be treasured from autumn's end to autumn's end, though now it commonly

disappears very soon after the harvest home. It is thus that Acosta

describes, in Grimston's old translation (1604), the Peruvian kernababy

and the Peruvian harvest home:--

 

This feast is made comming from the chacra or farme unto the house,

saying certaine songs, and praying that the Mays (maize) may long

continue, the which they call Mama cora.

 

What a chance this word offers to etymologists of the old school: how

promptly they would recognise, in mama mother--[Greek], and in

cora--[Greek], the Mother and the Maiden, the feast of Demeter and

Persephone! However, the days of that old school of antiquarianism are

numbered. To return to the Peruvian harvest home:--

 

They take a certaine portion of the most fruitefull of the Mays that

growes in their farmes, the which they put in a certaine granary which

they do calle Pirua, with certaine ceremonies, watching three nightes;

they put this Mays in the richest garments they have, and, being thus

wrapped and dressed, they worship this Pirua, and hold it in great

veneration, saying it is the Mother of the Mays of their inheritances,

and that by this means the Mays augments and is preserved. In this

moneth they make a particular sacrifice, and the witches demand of

this Pirua, 'if it hath strength sufficient to continue until the next

yeare,' and if it answers 'no,' then they carry this Mays to the farme

to burne, whence they brought it, according to every man's power, then

they make another Pirua, with the same ceremonies, saying that they

renue it, to the ende that the seede of the Mays may not perish.

 

The idea that the maize can speak need not surprise us; the Mexican held

much the same belief, according to Sahagun:--

 

It was thought that if some grains of maize fell on the ground, he who

saw them lying there was bound to lift them, wherein, if he failed, he

harmed the maize, which plained itself of him to God, saying, 'Lord,

punish this man, who saw me fallen and raised me not again; punish him

with famine, that he may learn not to hold me in dishonour.'

 

Well, in all this affair of the Scotch kernababy, and the Peruvian Mama

cora, we need no explanation beyond the common simple ideas of human

nature. We are not obliged to hold, either that the Peruvians and Scotch

are akin by blood, nor that, at some forgotten time, they met each other,

and borrowed each other's superstitions. Again, when we find Odysseus

sacrificing a black sheep to the dead, {20} and when we read that the

Ovahereroes in South Africa also appease with a black sheep the spirits

of the departed, we do not feel it necessary to hint that the Ovahereroes

are of Greek descent, or have borrowed their ritual from the Greeks. The

connection between the colour black, and mourning for the dead, is

natural and almost universal.

 

Examples like these might be adduced in any number. We might show how,

in magic, negroes of Barbadoes make clay effigies of their enemies, and

pierce them, just as Greeks did in Plato's time, or the men of Accad in

remotest antiquity. We might remark the Australian black putting sharp

bits of quartz in the tracks of an enemy who has gone by, that the enemy

may be lamed; and we might point to Boris Godunof forbidding the same

practice among the Russians. We might watch Scotch, and Australians, and

Jews, and French, and Aztecs spreading dust round the body of a dead man,

that the footprints of his ghost, or of other ghosts, may be detected

next morning. We might point to a similar device in a modern novel,

where the presence of a ghost is suspected, as proof of the similar

workings of the Australian mind and of the mind of Mrs. Riddell. We

shall later turn to ancient Greece, and show how the serpent-dances, the

habit of smearing the body with clay, and other odd rites of the

mysteries, were common to Hellenic religion, and to the religion of

African, Australian, and American tribes.

 

Now, with regard to all these strange usages, what is the method of

folklore? The method is, when an apparently irrational and anomalous

custom is found in any country, to look for a country where a similar

practice is found, and where the practice is no longer irrational and

anomalous, but in harmony with the manners and ideas of the people among

whom it prevails. That Greeks should dance about in their mysteries with

harmless serpents in their hands looks quite unintelligible. When a wild

tribe of Red Indians does the same thing, as a trial of courage, with

real rattlesnakes, we understand the Red Man's motives, and may

conjecture that similar motives once existed among the ancestors of the

Greeks. Our method, then, is to compare the seemingly meaningless

customs or manners of civilised races with the similar customs and

manners which exist among the uncivilised and still retain their meaning.

It is not necessary for comparison of this sort that the uncivilised and

the civilised race should be of the same stock, nor need we prove that

they were ever in contact with each other. Similar conditions of mind

produce similar practices, apart from identity of race, or borrowing of

ideas and manners.

 

Let us return to the example of the flint arrowheads. Everywhere

neolithic arrow-heads are pretty much alike. The cause of the

resemblance is no more than this, that men, with the same needs, the same

materials, and the same rude instruments, everywhere produced the same

kind of arrow-head. No hypothesis of interchange of ideas nor of

community of race is needed to explain the resemblance of form in the

missiles. Very early pottery in any region is, for the same causes, like

very early pottery in any other region. The same sort of similarity was

explained by the same resemblances in human nature, when we touched on

the identity of magical practices and of superstitious beliefs. This

method is fairly well established and orthodox when we deal with usages

and superstitious beliefs; but may we apply the same method when we deal

with myths?

 

Here a difficulty occurs. Mythologists, as a rule, are averse to the

method of folklore. They think it scientific to compare only the myths

of races which speak languages of the same family, and of races which

have, in historic times, been actually in proved contact with each other.

Thus, most mythologists hold it correct to compare Greek, Slavonic,

Celtic, and Indian stories, because Greeks, Slavs, Celts, and Hindoos all

speak languages of the same family. Again, they hold it correct to

compare Chaldaean and Greek myths, because the Greeks and the Chaldaeans

were brought into contact through the Phoenicians, and by other

intermediaries, such as the Hittites. But the same mythologists will vow

that it is unscientific to compare a Maori or a Hottentot or an Eskimo

myth with an Aryan story, because Maoris and Eskimo and Hottentots do not

speak languages akin to that of Greece, nor can we show that the

ancestors of Greeks, Maoris, Hottentots, and Eskimo were ever in contact

with each other in historical times.

 

Now the peculiarity of the method of folklore is that it will venture to

compare (with due caution and due examination of evidence) the myths of

the most widely severed races. Holding that myth is a product of the

early human fancy, working on the most rudimentary knowledge of the outer

world, the student of folklore thinks that differences of race do not

much affect the early mythopoeic faculty. He will not be surprised if

Greeks and Australian blacks are in the same tale.

 

In each case, he holds, all the circumstances of the case must be

examined and considered. For instance, when the Australians tell a myth

about the Pleiades very like the Greek myth of the Pleiades, we must ask

a number of questions. Is the Australian version authentic? Can the

people who told it have heard it from a European? If these questions are

answered so as to make it apparent that the Australian Pleiad myth is of

genuine native origin, we need not fly to the conclusion that the

Australians are a lost and forlorn branch of the Aryan race. Two other

hypotheses present themselves. First, the human species is of unknown

antiquity. In the moderate allowance of 250,000 years, there is time for

stories to have wandered all round the world, as the Aggry beads of

Ashanti have probably crossed the continent from Egypt, as the Asiatic

jade (if Asiatic it be) has arrived in Swiss lake-dwellings, as an

African trade-cowry is said to have been found in a Cornish barrow, as an

Indian Ocean shell has been discovered in a prehistoric bone-cave in

Poland. This slow filtration of tales is not absolutely out of the

question. Two causes would especially help to transmit myths. The first

is slavery and slave-stealing, the second is the habit of capturing

brides from alien stocks, and the law which forbids marriage with a woman

of a man's own family. Slaves and captured brides would bring their

native legends among alien peoples.

 

But there is another possible way of explaining the resemblance (granting

that it is proved) of the Greek and Australian Pleiad myth. The object

of both myths is to account for the grouping and other phenomena of the

constellations. May not similar explanatory stories have occurred to the

ancestors of the Australians, and to the ancestors of the Greeks, however

remote their home, while they were still in the savage condition? The

best way to investigate this point is to collect all known savage and

civilised stellar myths, and see what points they have in common. If

they all agree in character, though the Greek tales are full of grace,

while those of the Australians or Brazilians are rude enough, we may

plausibly account for the similarity of myths, as we accounted for the

similarity of flint arrow-heads. The myths, like the arrow-heads,

resemble each other because they were originally framed to meet the same

needs out of the same material. In the case of the arrow-heads, the need

was for something hard, heavy, and sharp--the material was flint. In the

case of the myths, the need was to explain certain phenomena--the

material (so to speak) was an early state of the human mind, to which all

objects seemed equally endowed with human personality, and to which no

metamorphosis appeared impossible.

 

In the following essays, then, the myths and customs of various peoples

will be compared, even when these peoples talk languages of alien

families, and have never (as far as history shows us) been in actual

contact. Our method throughout will be to place the usage, or myth,

which is unintelligible when found among a civilised race, beside the

similar myth which is intelligible enough when it is found among savages.

A mean term will be found in the folklore preserved by the

non-progressive classes in a progressive people. This folklore

represents, in the midst of a civilised race, the savage ideas out of

which civilisation has been evolved. The conclusion will usually be that

the fact which puzzles us by its presence in civilisation is a relic

surviving from the time when the ancestors of a civilised race were in

the state of savagery. By this method it is not necessary that 'some

sort of genealogy should be established' between the Australian and the

Greek narrators of a similar myth, nor between the Greek and Australian

possessors of a similar usage. The hypothesis will be that the myth, or

usage, is common to both races, not because of original community of

stock, not because of contact and borrowing, but because the ancestors of

the Greeks passed through the savage intellectual condition in which we

find the Australians.

 

The questions may be asked, Has race nothing, then, to do with myth? Do

peoples never consciously borrow myths from each other? The answer is,

that race has a great deal to do with the development of myth, if it be

race which confers on a people its national genius, and its capacity of

becoming civilised. If race does this, then race affects, in the most

powerful manner, the ultimate development of myth. No one is likely to

confound a Homeric myth with a myth from the Edda, nor either with a myth

from a Brahmana, though in all three cases the substance, the original

set of ideas, may be much the same. In all three you have

anthropomorphic gods, capable of assuming animal shapes, tricky,

capricious, limited in many undivine ways, yet endowed with magical

powers. So far the mythical gods of Homer, of the Edda, of any of the

Brahmanas, are on a level with each other, and not much above the gods of

savage mythology. This stuff of myth is quod semper, quod ubique, quod

ab omnibus, and is the original gift of the savage intellect. But the

final treatment, the ultimate literary form of the myth, varies in each

race. Homeric gods, like Red Indian, Thlinkeet, or Australian gods, can

assume the shapes of birds. But when we read, in Homer, of the arming of

Athene, the hunting of Artemis, the vision of golden Aphrodite, the

apparition of Hermes, like a young man when the flower of youth is

loveliest, then we recognise the effect of race upon myth, the effect of

the Greek genius at work on rude material. Between the Olympians and a

Thlinkeet god there is all the difference that exists between the Demeter

of Cnidos and an image from Easter Island. Again, the Scandinavian gods,

when their tricks are laid aside, when Odin is neither assuming the shape

of worm nor of raven, have a martial dignity, a noble enduring spirit of

their own. Race comes out in that, as it does in the endless sacrifices,

soma drinking, magical austerities, and puerile follies of Vedic and

Brahmanic gods, the deities of a people fallen early into its sacerdotage

and priestly second childhood. Thus race declares itself in the ultimate

literary form and character of mythology, while the common savage basis

and stuff of myths may be clearly discerned in the horned, and cannibal,

and shape-shifting, and adulterous gods of Greece, of India, of the

North. They all show their common savage origin, when the poet neglects

Freya's command and tells of what the gods did 'in the morning of Time.'

 

As to borrowing, we have already shown that in prehistoric times there

must have been much transmission of myth. The migrations of peoples, the

traffic in slaves, the law of exogamy, which always keeps bringing alien

women into the families--all these things favoured the migration of myth.

But the process lies behind history: we can only guess at it, we can

seldom trace a popular legend on its travels. In the case of the

cultivated ancient peoples, we know that they themselves believed they

had borrowed their religions from each other. When the Greeks first

found the Egyptians practising mysteries like their own, they leaped to

the conclusion that their own rites had been imported from Egypt. We,

who know that both Greek and Egyptian rites had many points in common

with those of Mandans, Zunis, Bushmen, Australians--people quite

unconnected with Egypt--feel less confident about the hypothesis of

borrowing. We may, indeed, regard Adonis, and Zeus Bagaeus, and

Melicertes, as importations from Phoenicia. In later times, too, the

Greeks, and still more the Romans, extended a free hospitality to alien

gods and legends, to Serapis, Isis, the wilder Dionysiac revels, and so

forth. But this habit of borrowing was regarded with disfavour by pious

conservatives, and was probably, in the width of its hospitality at

least, an innovation. As Tiele remarks, we cannot derive Dionysus from

the Assyrian Daian nisi, 'judge of men,' a name of the solar god Samas,

without ascertaining that the wine-god exercised judicial functions, and

was a god of the sun. These derivations, 'shocking to common sense,' are

to be distrusted as part of the intoxication of new learning. Some

Assyrian scholars actually derive Hades from Bit Edi or Bit Hadi--'though,

unluckily,' says Tiele, 'there is no such word in the Assyrian text.' On

the whole topic Tiele's essay {28} deserves to be consulted. Granting,

then, that elements in the worship of Dionysus, Aphrodite, and other

gods, may have been imported with the strange AEgypto-Assyrian vases and

jewels of the Sidonians, we still find the same basis of rude savage

ideas. We may push back a god from Greece to Phoenicia, from Phoenicia

to Accadia, but, at the end of the end, we reach a legend full of myths

like those which Bushmen tell by the camp-fire, Eskimo in their dark

huts, and Australians in the shade of the gunyeh--myths cruel, puerile,

obscene, like the fancies of the savage myth-makers from which they

sprang.

 

 

 

 

THE BULL-ROARER.

A Study of the Mysteries.

 

 

As the belated traveller makes his way through the monotonous plains of

Australia, through the Bush, with its level expanses and clumps of grey-

blue gum trees, he occasionally hears a singular sound. Beginning low,

with a kind of sharp tone thrilling through a whirring noise, it grows

louder and louder, till it becomes a sort of fluttering windy roar. If

the traveller be a new comer, he is probably puzzled to the last degree.

If he be an Englishman, country-bred, he says to himself, 'Why, that is

the bull-roarer.' If he knows the colony and the ways of the natives, he

knows that the blacks are celebrating their tribal mysteries. The

roaring noise is made to warn all women to keep out of the way. Just as

Pentheus was killed (with the approval of Theocritus) because he profaned

the rites of the women-worshippers of Dionysus, so, among the Australian

blacks, men must, at their peril, keep out of the way of female, and

women out of the way of male, celebrations.

 

The instrument which produces the sounds that warn women to remain afar

is a toy familiar to English country lads. They call it the bull-roarer.

The common bull-roarer is an inexpensive toy which anyone can make. I do

not, however, recommend it to families, for two reasons. In the first

place, it produces a most horrible and unexampled din, which endears it

to the very young, but renders it detested by persons of mature age. In

the second place, the character of the toy is such that it will almost

infallibly break all that is fragile in the house where it is used, and

will probably put out the eyes of some of the inhabitants. Having thus,

I trust, said enough to prevent all good boys from inflicting

bull-roarers on their parents, pastors, and masters, I proceed (in the

interests of science) to show how the toy is made. Nothing can be less

elaborate. You take a piece of the commonest wooden board, say the lid

of a packing-case, about a sixth of an inch in thickness, and about eight

inches long and three broad, and you sharpen the ends. When finished,

the toy may be about the shape of a large bay-leaf, or a 'fish' used as a

counter (that is how the New Zealanders make it), or the sides may be

left plain in the centre, and only sharpened towards the extremities, as

in an Australian example lent me by Mr. Tylor. Then tie a strong piece

of string, about thirty inches long, to one end of the piece of wood and

the bull-roarer (the Australian natives call it turndun, and the Greeks

called it [Greek]) is complete. Now twist the end of the string tightly

about your finger, and whirl the bull-roarer rapidly round and round. For

a few moments nothing will happen. In a very interesting lecture

delivered at the Royal Institution, Mr. Tylor once exhibited a

bull-roarer. At first it did nothing particular when it was whirled

round, and the audience began to fear that the experiment was like those

chemical ones often exhibited at institutes in the country, which

contribute at most a disagreeable odour to the education of the populace.

But when the bull-roarer warmed to its work, it justified its name,

producing what may best be described as a mighty rushing noise, as if

some supernatural being 'fluttered and buzzed his wings with fearful

roar.' Grown-up people, of course, are satisfied with a very brief

experience of this din, but boys have always known the bull-roarer in

England as one of the most efficient modes of making the hideous and

unearthly noises in which it is the privilege of youth to delight.

 

The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most

extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in

folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed peoples,

savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage and

civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on this a

hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend

from the same stock. But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very

purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards

similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere.

There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to

account for this widely diffused sacred object.

 

The bull-roarer has been, and is, a sacred and magical instrument in many

and widely separated lands. It is found, always as a sacred instrument,

employed in religious mysteries, in New Mexico, in Australia, in New

Zealand, in ancient Greece, and in Africa; while, as we have seen, it is

a peasant-boy's plaything in England. A number of questions are

naturally suggested by the bull-roarer. Is it a thing invented once for

all, and carried abroad over the world by wandering races, or handed on

from one people and tribe to another? Or is the bull-roarer a toy that

might be accidentally hit on in any country where men can sharpen wood

and twist the sinews of animals into string? Was the thing originally a

toy, and is its religious and mystical nature later; or was it originally

one of the properties of the priest, or medicine-man, which in England

has dwindled to a plaything? Lastly, was this mystical instrument at

first employed in the rites of a civilised people like the Greeks, and

was it in some way borrowed or inherited by South Africans, Australians,

and New Mexicans? Or is it a mere savage invention, surviving (like

certain other features of the Greek mysteries) from a distant stage of

savagery? Our answer to all these questions is that in all probability

the presence of the [Greek], or bull-roarer, in Greek mysteries was a

survival from the time when Greeks were in the social condition of

Australians.

 

In the first place, the bull-roarer is associated with mysteries and

initiations. Now mysteries and initiations are things that tend to

dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation

advances. The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret and

hidden; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed, and

religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these ceremonies. There

are no other initiations or mysteries that civilised modern man is

expected necessarily to pass through. On the other hand, looking widely

at human history, we find mystic rites and initiations numerous,

stringent, severe, and magical in character, in proportion to the lack of

civilisation in those who practise them. The less the civilisation, the

more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites. The more cruel the