Custom and Myth 7

Custom and Myth 7

The conclusion appears to be that the central part of the Jason myth is

incapable of being explained, either as a nature-myth, or as a myth

founded on a disease of language. So many languages could not take the

same malady in the same way; nor can we imagine any series of natural

phenomena that would inevitably suggest this tale to so many diverse

races.

 

We must suppose, therefore, either that all wits jumped and invented the

same romantic series of situations by accident, or that all men spread

from one centre, where the story was known, or that the story, once

invented, has drifted all round the world. If the last theory be

approved of, the tale will be like the Indian Ocean shell found lately in

the Polish bone-cave, {102a} or like the Egyptian beads discovered in the

soil of Dahomey. The story will have been carried hither and thither, in

the remotest times, to the remotest shores, by traders, by slaves, by

captives in war, or by women torn from their own tribe and forcibly

settled as wives among alien peoples.

 

Stories of this kind are everywhere the natural property of mothers and

grandmothers. When we remember how widely diffused is the law of

exogamy, which forbids marriage between a man and woman of the same

stock, we are impressed by the number of alien elements which must have

been introduced with alien wives. Where husband and wife, as often

happened, spoke different languages, the woman would inevitably bring the

hearthside tales of her childhood among a people of strange speech. By

all these agencies, working through dateless time, we may account for the

diffusion, if we cannot explain the origin, of tales like the central

arrangement of incidents in the career of Jason. {102b}

 

 

 

 

APOLLO AND THE MOUSE.

 

 

Why is Apollo, especially the Apollo of the Troad, he who showered the

darts of pestilence among the Greeks, so constantly associated with a

mouse? The very name, Smintheus, by which his favourite priest calls on

him in the 'Iliad' (i. 39), might be rendered 'Mouse Apollo,' or 'Apollo,

Lord of Mice.' As we shall see later, mice lived beneath the altar, and

were fed in the holy of holies of the god, and an image of a mouse was

placed beside or upon his sacred tripod. The ancients were puzzled by

these things, and, as will be shown, accounted for them by

'mouse-stories,' [Greek], so styled by Eustathius, the mediaeval

interpreter of Homer. Following our usual method, let us ask whether

similar phenomena occur elsewhere, in countries where they are

intelligible. Did insignificant animals elsewhere receive worship: were

their effigies elsewhere placed in the temples of a purer creed? We find

answers in the history of Peruvian religion.

 

After the Spanish conquest of Peru, one of the European adventurers, Don

Garcilasso de la Vega, married an Inca princess. Their son, also named

Garcilasso, was born about 1540. His famous book, 'Commentarias Reales,'

contains the most authentic account of the old Peruvian beliefs.

Garcilasso was learned in all the learning of the Europeans, and, as an

Inca on the mother's side, had claims on the loyalty of the defeated

race. He set himself diligently to collect both their priestly and

popular traditions, and his account of them is the more trustworthy as it

coincides with what we know to have been true in lands with which

Garcilasso had little acquaintance.

 

* * * * *

 

To Garcilasso's mind, Peruvian religion seems to be divided into two

periods--the age before, and the age which followed the accession of the

Incas, and their establishment of sun-worship as the creed of the State.

In the earlier period, the pre-Inca period, he tells us 'an Indian was

not accounted honourable unless he was descended from a fountain, river,

or lake, or even from the sea, or from a wild animal, such as a bear,

lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur (condor), or some other

bird of prey.' {104a} To these worshipful creatures 'men offered what

they usually saw them eat' (i. 53). But men were not content to adore

large and dangerous animals. 'There was not an animal, how vile and

filthy soever, that they did not worship as a god,' including 'lizards,

toads, and frogs.' In the midst of these superstitions the Incas

appeared. Just as the tribes claimed descent from animals, great or

small, so the Incas drew _their_ pedigree from the sun, which they adored

like the gens of the Aurelii in Rome. {104b} Thus every Indian had his

pacarissa, or, as the North American Indians say, totem, {105a} a natural

object from which he claimed descent, and which, in a certain degree, he

worshipped. Though sun-worship became the established religion, worship

of the animal pacarissas was still tolerated. The sun-temples also

contained huacas, or images, of the beasts which the Indians had

venerated. {105b} In the great temple of Pachacamac, the most spiritual

and abstract god of Peruvian faith, 'they worshipped a she-fox and an

emerald. The devil also appeared to them, and spoke in the form of a

tiger, very fierce.' {105c} This toleration of an older and cruder, in

subordination to a purer, faith is a very common feature in religious

evolution. In Catholic countries, to this day, we may watch, in Holy

Week, the Adonis feast described by Theocritus, {105d} and the procession

and entombment of the old god of spring.

 

'The Incas had the good policy to collect all the tribal animal gods into

their temples in and round Cuzco, in which the two leading gods were the

Master of Life, and the Sun.' Did a process of this sort ever occur in

Greek religion, and were older animal gods ever collected into the

temples of such deities as Apollo?

 

* * * * *

 

While a great deal of scattered evidence about many animals consecrated

to Greek gods points in this direction, it will be enough, for the

present, to examine the case of the Sacred Mice. Among races which are

still in the totemistic stage, which still claim descent from animals and

from other objects, a peculiar marriage law generally exists, or can be

shown to have existed. No man may marry a woman who is descended from

the same ancestral animal, and who bears the same totem-name, and carries

the same badge or family crest, as himself. A man descended from the

Crane, and whose family name is Crane, cannot marry a woman whose family

name is Crane. He must marry a woman of the Wolf, or Turtle, or Swan, or

other name, and her children keep her family title, not his. Thus, if a

Crane man marries a Swan woman, the children are Swans, and none of them

may marry a Swan; they must marry Turtles, Wolves, or what not, and

_their_ children, again, are Turtles, or Wolves. Thus there is

necessarily an eternal come and go of all the animal names known in a

district. As civilisation advances these rules grow obsolete. People

take their names from the father, as among ourselves. Finally the

dwellers in a given district, having become united into a local tribe,

are apt to drop the various animal titles and to adopt, as the name of

the whole tribe, the name of the chief, or of the predominating family.

Let us imagine a district of some twenty miles in which there are Crane,

Wolf, Turtle, and Swan families. Long residence together, and common

interests, have welded them into a local tribe. The chief is of the Wolf

family, and the tribe, sinking family differences and family names, calls

itself 'the Wolves.' Such tribes were probably, in the beginning, the

inhabitants of the various Egyptian towns which severally worshipped the

wolf, or the sheep, or the crocodile, and abstained religiously (except

on certain sacrificial occasions) from the flesh of the animal that gave

them its name. {107}

 

* * * * *

 

It has taken us long to reach the Sacred Mice of Greek religion, but we

are now in a position to approach their august divinity. We have seen

that the sun-worship superseded, without abolishing, the tribal

pacarissas in Peru, and that the huacas, or images, of the sacred animals

were admitted under the roof of the temple of the Sun. Now it is

recognised that the temples of the Sminthian Apollo contained images of

sacred mice among other animals, and our argument is that here, perhaps,

we have another example of the Peruvian religious evolution. Just as, in

Peru, the tribes adored 'vile and filthy' animals, just as the solar

worship of the Incas subordinated these, just as the huacas of the beasts

remained in the temples of the Peruvian Sun; so, we believe, the tribes

along the Mediterranean coasts had, at some very remote prehistoric

period, their animal pacarissas; these were subordinated to the religion

(to some extent solar) of Apollo; and the huacas, or animal idols,

survived in Apollo's temples.

 

* * * * *

 

If this theory be correct, we shall probably find the mouse, for example,

revered as a sacred animal in many places. This would necessarily

follow, if the marriage customs which we have described ever prevailed on

Greek soil, and scattered the mouse-name far and wide. {108a} Traces of

the Mouse families, and of adoration, if adoration there was of the

mouse, would linger on in the following shapes:--(1) Places would be

named from mice, and mice would be actually held sacred in themselves.

(2) The mouse-name would be given locally to the god who superseded the

mouse. (3) The figure of the mouse would be associated with the god, and

used as a badge, or a kind of crest, or local mark, in places where the

mouse has been a venerated animal. (4) Finally, myths would be told to

account for the sacredness of a creature so undignified.

 

Let us take these considerations in their order:--

 

(1) If there were local mice tribes, deriving their name from the

worshipful mouse, certain towns settled by these tribes would retain a

reverence for mice.

 

In Chrysa, a town of the Troad, according to Heraclides Ponticus, mice

were held sacred, the local name for mouse being [Greek]. Many places

bore this mouse-name, according to Strabo. {108b} This is precisely what

would have occurred had the Mouse totem, and the Mouse stock, been widely

distributed. {108c} The Scholiast {109a} mentions Sminthus as a place in

the Troad. Strabo speaks of two places deriving their name from

Sminthus, or mouse, near the Sminthian temple, and others near Larissa.

In Rhodes and Lindus, the mouse place-name recurs, 'and in many other

districts' ([Greek]). Strabo (x. 486) names Caressus, and Poeessa, in

Ceos, among the other places which had Sminthian temples, and,

presumably, were once centres of tribes named after the mouse.

 

Here, then, are a number of localities in which the Mouse Apollo was

adored, and where the old mouse-name lingered. That the mice were

actually held sacred in their proper persons we learn from AElian. 'The

dwellers in Hamaxitus of the Troad worship mice,' says AElian. 'In the

temple of Apollo Smintheus, mice are nourished, and food is offered to

them, at the public expense, and white mice dwell beneath the altar.'

{109b} In the same way we found that the Peruvians fed their sacred

beasts on what they usually saw them eat.

 

(2) The second point in our argument has already been sufficiently

demonstrated. The mouse-name 'Smintheus' was given to Apollo in all the

places mentioned by Strabo, 'and many others.'

 

(3) The figure of the mouse will be associated with the god, and used as

a badge, or crest, or local mark, in places where the mouse has been a

venerated animal.

 

The passage already quoted from AElian informs us that there stood 'an

effigy of the mouse beside the tripod of Apollo.' In Chrysa, according

to Strabo (xiii. 604), the statue of Apollo Smintheus had a mouse beneath

his foot. The mouse on the tripod of Apollo is represented on a

bas-relief illustrating the plague, and the offerings of the Greeks to

Apollo Smintheus, as described in the first book of the 'Iliad.' {110a}

 

* * * * *

 

The mouse is a not uncommon local badge or crest in Greece. The animals

whose figures are stamped on coins, like the Athenian owl, are the most

ancient marks of cities. It is a plausible conjecture that, just as the

Iroquois when they signed treaties with the Europeans used their

totems--bear, wolf, and turtle--as seals, {110b} so the animals on

archaic Greek city coins represented crests or badges which, at some far

more remote period, had been totems.

 

The Argives, according to Pollux, {110c} stamped the mouse on their

coins. {110d} As there was a temple of Apollo Smintheus in Tenedos, we

naturally hear of a mouse on the coins of the island. {111a} Golzio has

published one of these mouse coins. The people of Metapontum stamped

their money with a mouse gnawing an ear of corn. The people of Cumae

employed a mouse dormant. Paoli fancied that certain mice on Roman

medals might be connected with the family of Mus, but this is rather

guesswork. {111b}

 

We have now shown traces, at least, of various ways in which an early

tribal religion of the mouse--the mouse pacarissa, as the Peruvians

said--may have been perpetuated. When we consider that the superseding

of the mouse by Apollo must have occurred, if it did occur, long before

Homer, we may rather wonder that the mouse left his mark on Greek

religion so long. We have seen mice revered, a god with a mouse-name,

the mouse-name recurring in many places, the huaca, or idol, of the mouse

preserved in the temples of the god, and the mouse-badge used in several

widely severed localities. It remains (4) to examine the myths about

mice. These, in our opinion, were probably told to account for the

presence of the huaca of the mouse in temples, and for the occurrence of

the animal in religion, and his connection with Apollo.

 

A singular mouse-myth, narrated by Herodotus, is worth examining for

reasons which will appear later, though the events are said to have

happened on Egyptian soil. {111c} According to Herodotus, one Sethos, a

priest of Hephaestus (Ptah), was king of Egypt. He had disgraced the

military class, and he found himself without an army when Sennacherib

invaded his country. Sethos fell asleep in the temple, and the god,

appearing to him in a vision, told him that divine succour would come to

the Egyptians. {112a} In the night before the battle, field-mice gnawed

the quivers and shield-handles of the foe, who fled on finding themselves

thus disarmed. 'And now,' says Herodotus, 'there standeth a stone image

of this king in the temple of Hephaestus, and in the hand of the image a

mouse, and there is this inscription, "Let whoso looketh on me be

pious."'

 

Prof. Sayce {112b} holds that there was no such person as Sethos, but

that the legend 'is evidently Egyptian, not Greek, and the name of

Sennacherib, as well as the fact of the Assyrian attack, is correct.' The

legend also, though Egyptian, is 'an echo of the biblical account of the

destruction of the Assyrian army,' an account which omits the mice. 'As

to the mice, here,' says Prof. Sayce, 'we have to do again with the Greek

dragomen (sic). The story of Sethos was attached to the statue of some

deity which was supposed to hold a mouse in its hand.' It must have been

easy to verify this supposition; but Mr. Sayce adds, 'mice were not

sacred in Egypt, nor were they used as symbols, or found on the

monuments.' To this remark we may suggest some exceptions. Apparently

this one mouse _was_ found on the monuments. Wilkinson (iii. 264) says

mice do occur in the sculptures, but they were not sacred. Rats,

however, were certainly sacred, and as little distinction is taken, in

myth, between rats and mice as between rabbits and hares. The rat was

sacred to Ra, the Sun-god, and (like all totems) was not to be eaten.

{113a} This association of the rat and the Sun cannot but remind us of

Apollo and his mouse. According to Strabo, a certain city of Egypt did

worship the shrew-mouse. The Athribitae, or dwellers in Crocodilopolis,

are the people to whom he attributes this cult, which he mentions (xvii.

813) among the other local animal-worships of Egypt. {113b} Several

porcelain examples of the field-mouse sacred to Horus (commonly called

Apollo by the Greeks) may be seen in the British Museum.

 

That rats and field-mice were sacred in Egypt, then, we may believe on

the evidence of the Ritual, of Strabo, and of many relics of Egyptian

art. Herodotus, moreover, is credited when he says that the statue 'had

a mouse on its hand.' Elsewhere, it is certain that the story of mice

gnawing the bowstrings occurs frequently as an explanation of

mouse-worship. One of the Trojan 'mouse-stories' ran--That emigrants had

set out in prehistoric times from Crete. The oracle advised them to

settle 'wherever they were attacked by the children of the soil.' At

Hamaxitus in the Troad, they were assailed in the night by mice, which

ate all that was edible of their armour and bowstrings. The colonists

made up their mind that these mice were 'the children of the soil,'

settled there, and adored the mouse Apollo. {114a} A myth of this sort

may either be a story invented to explain the mouse-name; or a Mouse

tribe, like the Red Indian Wolves, or Crows, may actually have been

settled on the spot, and may even have resisted invasion. {114b} Another

myth of the Troad accounted for the worship of the mouse Apollo on the

hypothesis that he had once freed the land from mice, like the Pied Piper

of Hamelin, whose pipe (still serviceable) is said to have been found in

his grave by men who were digging a mine. {114c}

 

Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the

mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally spring

up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god or of the

mouse. We have explained the religious character of mice as the relics

of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse family names

had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been, mice totems and

mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved

by Prof. Robertson Smith: {115a} 'Achbor, the mouse, is an Edomite name,

apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and another mouse-name are among

the Arabs. The same name occurs in Judah.' Where totemism exists, the

members of each stock either do not eat the ancestral animal at all, or

only eat him on rare sacrificial occasions. The totem of a hostile stock

may be eaten by way of insult. In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to

refer to one or other of these practices (lxvi.): 'They that sanctify

themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the

midst, eating swine's flesh, and the abomination, and the _mouse_, shall

be consumed together, saith the Lord.' This is like the Egyptian

prohibition to eat 'the abominable' (that is, tabooed or forbidden) 'Rat

of Ra.' If the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of

each clan, then the mouse was a totem, {115b} for the chosen people were

forbidden to eat 'the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his

kind.' That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally

totems, Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where

'we find seventy of the elders of Israel--that is, the heads of

houses--worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures of

all manner of unclean' (tabooed) 'creeping things, and quadrupeds, _even

all the idols of the House of Israel_.' Some have too hastily concluded

that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring Philistines.

After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set it in the house of

Dagon, the people were smitten with disease. They therefore, in

accordance with a well-known savage magical practice, made five golden

representations of the diseased part, and five golden mice, as 'a

trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,' and so restored the Ark. {116}

Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic countries, and the

mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines had ever worshipped

mice.

 

* * * * *

 

Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic,

and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the sacred

animal of Rudra. 'The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast,' says the Yajur Veda,

as rendered by Grohmann in his 'Apollo Smintheus.' Grohmann recognises

in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics of Apollo. In later

Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of Ganeca, who, like Apollo

Smintheus, is represented in art with his foot upon a mouse.

 

Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion. If he

really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his

prevalence in connection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven in

Hellenism. Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at

home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own

Apollo-worship. In that case the mouse, while still originally a totem,

would not be an Aryan totem. But probably the myths and rites of the

mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our theory

than on that of De Gubernatis: 'The Pagan sun-god crushes under his foot

the Mouse of Night. When the cat's away, the mice may play; the shadows

of night dance when the moon is absent.' {117a} This is one of the

quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when the cat (the

moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) _cannot_ play: there is no light to

produce a shadow. As usually chances, the scholars who try to resolve

all the features of myth into physical phenomena do not agree among

themselves about the mouse. While the mouse is the night, according to

M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's opinion the mouse is the lightning. He

argues that the lightning was originally regarded by the Aryan race as

the 'flashing tooth of a beast,' especially of a mouse. Afterwards men

came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold, the lightning and

the mouse are convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that

savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as

the result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent; {117b}

thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in

Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a

heavenly cow--an idea recurring in the 'Zend Avesta.' But it does not

follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all

the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a serpent

to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on earth, not

in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite unproved, that

any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a mouse's teeth. The

hypothesis is a jeu d'esprit, like the opposite hypothesis about the

mouse of Night. In these, and all the other current theories of the

Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship of ordinary mice, and such

small deer, has been either wholly neglected, or explained by the first

theory of symbolism that occurred to the conjecture of a civilised

observer. The facts of savage animal-worship, and their relations to

totemism, seem still unknown to or unappreciated by scholars, with the

exception of Mr. Sayce, who recognises totemism as the origin of the

zoomorphic element in Egyptian religion.

 

Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an isolated

case. If Apollo superseded and absorbed the worship of the mouse, he did

no less for the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, and several other animals

whose images were associated with his own. The Greek religion was more

refined and anthropomorphic than that of Egypt. In Egypt the animals

were still adored, and the images of the gods had bestial heads. In

Greece only a few gods, and chiefly in very archaic statues, had bestial

heads; but beside the other deities the sculptor set the owl, eagle,

wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or whatever creature was the local

favourite of the deity. {118a} Probably the deity had, in the majority

of cases, superseded the animal and succeeded to his honours. But the

conservative religious sentiment retained the beast within the courts and in the suit and service of the anthropomorphic god.