Custom and Myth 8

Custom and Myth 8

The process by which the god ousted the beasts may perhaps be observed in

Samoa. There (as Dr. Turner tells us in his 'Samoa') each family has its

own sacred animal, which it may not eat. If this law be transgressed,

the malefactor is supernaturally punished in a variety of ways. But,

while each family has thus its totem, four or five different families

recognise, in owl, crab, lizard, and so on, incarnations of the same god,

say of Tongo. If Tongo had a temple among these families, we can readily

believe that images of the various beasts in which he was incarnate would

be kept within the consecrated walls. Savage ideas like these, if they

were ever entertained in Greece, would account for the holy animals of

the different deities. But it is obvious that the phenomena which we

have been studying may be otherwise explained. It may be said that the

Sminthian Apollo was only revered as the enemy and opponent of mice. St.

Gertrude (whose heart was eaten by mice) has the same role in France.

{119} The worship of Apollo, and the badge of the mouse, would, on this

principle, be diffused by colonies from some centre of the faith. The

images of mice in Apollo's temples would be nothing more than votive

offerings. Thus, in the church of a Saxon town, the verger shows a

silver mouse dedicated to Our Lady. 'This is the greatest of our

treasures,' says the verger. 'Our town was overrun with mice till the

ladies of the city offered this mouse of silver. Instantly all the mice

disappeared.' 'And are you such fools as to believe that the creatures

went away because a silver mouse was dedicated?' asked a Prussian

officer. 'No,' replied the verger, rather neatly; 'or long ago we should

have offered a silver Prussian.'

 

 

 

 

STAR MYTHS.

 

 

Artemus Ward used to say that, while there were many things in the

science of astronomy hard to be understood, there was one fact which

entirely puzzled him. He could partly perceive how we 'weigh the sun,'

and ascertain the component elements of the heavenly bodies, by the aid

of spectrum analysis. 'But what beats me about the stars,' he observed

plaintively, 'is how we come to know their names.' This question, or

rather the somewhat similar question, 'How did the constellations come by

their very peculiar names?' has puzzled Professor Pritchard and other

astronomers more serious than Artemus Ward. Why is a group of stars

called the Bear, or the Swan, or the Twins, or named after the Pleiades,

the fair daughters of the Giant Atlas? {121} These are difficulties that

meet even children when they examine a 'celestial globe.' There they

find the figure of a bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between

the stars of the constellations, while a very imposing giant is so drawn

that Orion's belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the

heavens, the infant speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the

stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of

Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it

will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal forms

in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the names of

men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial things, it is

true, everyone can behold in the heavens. Corona, for example, is like a

crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it is like a boomerang,

and we can understand why they give it the name of that curious curved

missile. The Milky Way, again, does resemble a path in the sky; our

English ancestors called it Watling Street--the path of the Watlings,

mythical giants--and Bushmen in Africa and Red Men in North America name

it the 'ashen path,' or 'the path of souls.' The ashes of the path, of

course, are supposed to be hot and glowing, not dead and black like the

ash-paths of modern running-grounds. Other and more recent names for

certain constellations are also intelligible. In Homer's time the Greeks

had two names for the Great Bear; they called it the Bear, or the Wain:

and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out, though no

resemblance to a bear is manifest. In the United States the same

constellation is popularly styled the Dipper, and every one may observe

the likeness to a dipper or toddy-ladle.

 

But these resemblances take us only a little way towards appellations. We

know that we derive many of the names straight from the Greek; but whence

did the Greeks get them? Some, it is said, from the Chaldaeans; but

whence did they reach the Chaldaeans? To this we shall return later,

but, as to early Greek star-lore, Goguet, the author of 'L'Origine des

Lois,' a rather learned but too speculative work of the last century,

makes the following characteristic remarks: 'The Greeks received their

astronomy from Prometheus. This prince, as far as history teaches us,

made his observations on Mount Caucasus.' That was the eighteenth

century's method of interpreting mythology. The myth preserved in the

'Prometheus Bound' of AEschylus tells us that Zeus crucified the Titan on

Mount Caucasus. The French philosopher, rejecting the supernatural

elements of the tale, makes up his mind that Prometheus was a prince of a

scientific bent, and that he established his observatory on the frosty

Caucasus. But, even admitting this, why did Prometheus give the stars

animal names? Goguet easily explains this by a hypothetical account of

the manners of primitive men. 'The earliest peoples,' he says, 'must

have used writing for purposes of astronomical science. They would be

content to design the constellations of which they wished to speak by the

hieroglyphical symbols of their names; hence the constellations have

insensibly taken the names of the chief symbols.' Thus, a drawing of a

bear or a swan was the hieroglyphic of the name of a star, or group of

stars. But whence came the name which was represented by the

hieroglyphic? That is precisely what our author forgets to tell us. But

he remarks that the meaning of the hieroglyphic came to be forgotten, and

'the symbols gave rise to all the ridiculous tales about the heavenly

signs.' This explanation is attained by the process of reasoning in a

vicious circle from hypothetical premises ascertained to be false. All

the known savages of the world, even those which have scarcely the

elements of picture-writing, call the constellations by the names of men

and animals, and all tell 'ridiculous tales' to account for the names.

 

As the star-stories told by the Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, and other

civilised people of the old world, exactly correspond in character, and

sometimes even in incident, with the star-stories of modern savages, we

have the choice of three hypotheses to explain this curious coincidence.

Perhaps the star-stories, about nymphs changed into bears, and bears

changed into stars, were invented by the civilised races of old, and

gradually found their way amongst people like the Eskimo, and the

Australians, and Bushmen. Or it may be insisted that the ancestors of

Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen were once civilised, like the Greeks and

Egyptians, and invented star-stories, still remembered by their

degenerate descendants. These are the two forms of the explanation which

will be advanced by persons who believe that the star-stories were

originally the fruit of the civilised imagination. The third theory

would be, that the 'ridiculous tales' about the stars were originally the

work of the savage imagination, and that the Greeks, Chaldaeans, and

Egyptians, when they became civilised, retained the old myths that their

ancestors had invented when they were savages. In favour of this theory

it may be said, briefly, that there is no proof that the fathers of

Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen had ever been civilised, while there is

a great deal of evidence to suggest that the fathers of the Greeks had

once been savages. {125} And, if we incline to the theory that the star-

myths are the creation of savage fancy, we at once learn why they are, in

all parts of the world, so much alike. Just as the flint and bone

weapons of rude races resemble each other much more than they resemble

the metal weapons and the artillery of advanced peoples, so the mental

products, the fairy tales, and myths of rude races have everywhere a

strong family resemblance. They are produced by men in similar mental

conditions of ignorance, curiosity, and credulous fancy, and they are

intended to supply the same needs, partly of amusing narrative, partly of

crude explanation of familiar phenomena.

 

Now it is time to prove the truth of our assertion that the star-stories

of savage and of civilised races closely resemble each other. Let us

begin with that well-known group the Pleiades. The peculiarity of the

Pleiades is that the group consists of seven stars, of which one is so

dim that it seems entirely to disappear, and many persons can only detect

its presence through a telescope. The Greeks had a myth to account for

the vanishing of the lost Pleiad. The tale is given in the

'Catasterismoi' (stories of metamorphoses into stars) attributed to

Eratosthenes. This work was probably written after our era; but the

author derived his information from older treatises now lost. According

to the Greek myth, then, the seven stars of the Pleiad were seven

maidens, daughters of the Giant Atlas. Six of them had gods for lovers;

Poseidon admired two of them, Zeus three, and Ares one; but the seventh

had only an earthly wooer, and when all of them were changed into stars,

the maiden with the mortal lover hid her light for shame.

 

Now let us compare the Australian story. According to Mr. Dawson

('Australian Aborigines'), a writer who understands the natives well,

'their knowledge of the heavenly bodies greatly exceeds that of most

white people,' and 'is taught by men selected for their intelligence and

information. The knowledge is important to the aborigines on their night

journeys;' so we may be sure that the natives are careful observers of

the heavens, and are likely to be conservative of their astronomical

myths. The 'Lost Pleiad' has not escaped them, and this is how they

account for her disappearance. The Pirt Kopan noot tribe have a

tradition that the Pleiades were a queen and her six attendants. Long

ago the Crow (our Canopus) fell in love with the queen, who refused to be

his wife. The Crow found that the queen and her six maidens, like other

Australian gins, were in the habit of hunting for white edible grubs in

the bark of trees. The Crow at once changed himself into a grub (just as

Jupiter and Indra used to change into swans, horses, ants, or what not)

and hid in the bark of a tree. The six maidens sought to pick him out

with their wooden hooks, but he broke the points of all the hooks. Then

came the queen, with her pretty bone hook; he let himself be drawn out,

took the shape of a giant, and ran away with her. Ever since there have

only been six stars, the six maidens, in the Pleiad. This story is well

known, by the strictest inquiry, to be current among the blacks of the

West District and in South Australia.

 

Mr. Tylor, whose opinion is entitled to the highest respect, thinks that

this may be a European myth, told by some settler to a black in the Greek

form, and then spread about among the natives. He complains that the

story of the loss of the _brightest_ star does not fit the facts of the

case.

 

We do not know, and how can the Australians know, that the lost star was

once the brightest? It appears to me that the Australians, remarking the

disappearances of a star, might very naturally suppose that the _Crow_

had selected for his wife that one which had been the most brilliant of

the cluster. Besides, the wide distribution of the tale among the

natives, and the very great change in the nature of the incidents, seem

to point to a native origin. Though the main conception--the loss of one

out of seven maidens--is identical in Greek and in Murri, the manner of

the disappearance is eminently Hellenic in the one case, eminently savage

in the other. However this may be, nothing of course is proved by a

single example. Let us next examine the stars Castor and Pollux. Both

in Greece and in Australia these are said once to have been two young

men. In the 'Catasterismoi,' already spoken of, we read: 'The Twins, or

Dioscouroi.--They were nurtured in Lacedaemon, and were famous for their

brotherly love, wherefore, Zeus, desiring to make their memory immortal,

placed them both among the stars.' In Australia, according to Mr. Brough

Smyth ('Aborigines of Victoria'), Turree (Castor) and Wanjel (Pollux) are

two young men who pursue Purra and kill him at the commencement of the

great heat. Coonar toorung (the mirage) is the smoke of the fire by

which they roast him. In Greece it was not Castor and Pollux, but Orion

who was the great hunter placed among the stars. Among the Bushmen of

South Africa, Castor and Pollux are not young men, but young women, the

wives of the Eland, the great native antelope. In Greek star-stories the

Great Bear keeps watch, Homer says, on the hunter Orion for fear of a

sudden attack. But how did the Bear get its name in Greece? According

to Hesiod, the oldest Greek poet after Homer, the Bear was once a lady,

daughter of Lycaon, King of Arcadia. She was a nymph of the train of

chaste Artemis, but yielded to the love of Zeus, and became the

ancestress of all the Arcadians (that is, Bear-folk). In her bestial

form she was just about to be slain by her own son when Zeus rescued her

by raising her to the stars. Here we must notice first, that the

Arcadians, like Australians, Red Indians, Bushmen, and many other wild

races, and like the Bedouins, believed themselves to be descended from an

animal. That the early Egyptians did the same is not improbable; for

names of animals are found among the ancestors in the very oldest

genealogical papyrus, {128} as in the genealogies of the old English

kings. Next the Arcadians transferred the ancestral bear to the heavens,

and, in doing this, they resembled the Peruvians, of whom Acosta says:

'They adored the star Urchuchilly, feigning it to be a Ram, and

worshipped two others, and say that one of them is a _sheep_, and the

other a lamb . . . others worshipped the star called the Tiger. _They

were of opinion that there was not any beast or bird upon the earth,

whose shape or image did not shine in the heavens_.'

 

But to return to our bears. The Australians have, properly speaking, no

bears, though the animal called the native bear is looked up to by the

aborigines with superstitious regard. But among the North American

Indians, as the old missionaries Lafitau and Charlevoix observed, 'the

four stars in front of our constellation are a bear; those in the tail

are hunters who pursue him; the small star apart is the pot in which they

mean to cook him.'

 

It may be held that the Red Men derived their bear from the European

settlers. But, as we have seen, an exact knowledge of the stars has

always been useful if not essential to savages; and we venture to doubt

whether they would confuse their nomenclature and sacred traditions by

borrowing terms from trappers and squatters. But, if this is improbable,

it seems almost impossible that all savage races should have borrowed

their whole conception of the heavenly bodies from the myths of Greece.

It is thus that Egede, a missionary of the last century, describes the

Eskimo philosophy of the stars: 'The notions that the Greenlanders have

as to the origin of the heavenly lights--as sun, moon, and stars--are

very nonsensical; in that they pretend they have formerly been as many of

their own ancestors, who, on different accounts, were lifted up to

heaven, and became such glorious celestial bodies.' Again, he writes:

'Their notions about the stars are that some of them have been men, and

others different sorts, of animals and fishes.' But every reader of Ovid

knows that this was the very mythical theory of the Greeks and Romans.

The Egyptians, again, worshipped Osiris, Isis, and the rest as

_ancestors_, and there are even modern scholars, like Mr. Loftie in his

'Essay of Scarabs,' who hold Osiris to have been originally a real

historical person. But the Egyptian priests who showed Plutarch the

grave of Osiris, showed him, too, the stars into which Osiris, Isis, and

Horus had been metamorphosed. Here, then, we have Greeks, Egyptians, and

Eskimo, all agreed about the origin of the heavenly lights, all of

opinion that 'they have formerly been as many of their own ancestors.'

 

The Australian general theory is: 'Of the good men and women, after the

deluge, Pundjel (a kind of Zeus, or rather a sort of Prometheus of

Australian mythology) made stars. Sorcerers (Biraark) can tell which

stars were once good men and women.' Here the sorcerers have the same

knowledge as the Egyptian priests. Again, just as among the Arcadians,

'the progenitors of the existing tribes, whether birds, or beasts, or

men, were set in the sky, and made to shine as stars.' {130}

 

We have already given some Australian examples in the stories of the

Pleiades, and of Castor and Pollux. We may add the case of the Eagle. In

Greece the Eagle was the bird of Zeus, who carried off Ganymede to be the

cup-bearer of Olympus. Among the Australians this same constellation is

called Totyarguil; he was a man who, when bathing, was killed by a

fabulous animal, a kind of kelpie; as Orion, in Greece, was killed by the

Scorpion. Like Orion, he was placed among the stars. The Australians

have a constellation named Eagle, but he is our Sinus, or Dog-star.

 

The Indians of the Amazon are in one tale with the Australians and

Eskimo. 'Dr. Silva de Coutinho informs me,' says Professor Hartt, {131}

'that the Indians of the Amazonas not only give names to many of the

heavenly bodies, but also tell stories about them. The two stars that

form the shoulders of Orion are said to be an old man and a boy in a

canoe, chasing a peixe boi, by which name is designated a dark spot in

the sky near the above constellation.' The Indians also know

monkey-stars, crane-stars, and palm-tree stars.

 

The Bushmen, almost the lowest tribe of South Africa, have the same star-

lore and much the same myths as the Greeks, Australians, Egyptians, and

Eskimo. According to Dr. Bleek, 'stars, and even the sun and moon, were

once mortals on earth, or even animals or inorganic substances, which

happened to get translated to the skies. The sun was once a man, whose

arm-pit radiated a limited amount of light round his house. Some

children threw him into the sky, and there he shines.' The Homeric hymn

to Helios, in the same way, as Mr. Max Muller observes, 'looks on the sun

as a half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth.' The pointers

of the Southern Cross were 'two men who were lions,' just as Callisto, in

Arcadia, was a woman who was a bear. It is not at all rare in those

queer philosophies, as in that of the Scandinavians, to find that the sun

or moon has been a man or woman. In Australian fable the moon was a man,

the sun a woman of indifferent character, who appears at dawn in a coat

of red kangaroo skins, the present of an admirer. In an old Mexican text

the moon was a man, across whose face a god threw a rabbit, thus making

the marks in the moon. {132a}

 

Many separate races seem to recognise the figure of a hare, where we see

'the Man in the Moon.' In a Buddhist legend, an exemplary and altruistic

hare was translated to the moon. 'To the common people in India the

spots on the moon look like a hare, and Chandras, the god of the moon,

carries a hare: hence the moon is called sasin or sasanka, hare-mark. The

Mongolians also see in these shadows the figure of a hare.' {132b} Among

the Eskimo, the moon is a girl, who always flees from her cruel brother,

the sun, because he disfigured her face. Elsewhere the sun is the girl,

beloved by her own brother, the moon; she blackens her face to avert his

affection. On the Rio Branco, and among the Tomunda, the moon is a girl

who loved her brother and visited him in the dark. He detected her

wicked passion by drawing his blackened hand over her face. The marks

betrayed her, and, as the spots on the moon, remain to this day. {133}

 

Among the New Zealanders and North American Indians the sun is a great

beast, whom the hunters trapped and thrashed with cudgels. His blood is

used in some New Zealand incantations; and, according to an Egyptian

myth, was kneaded into clay at the making of man. But there is no end to

similar sun-myths, in all of which the sun is regarded as a man, or even

as a beast.

 

To return to the stars--

 

The Red Indians, as Schoolcraft says, 'hold many of the planets to be

transformed adventurers.' The Iowas 'believed stars to be a sort of

living creatures.' One of them came down and talked to a hunter, and

showed him where to find game. The Gallinomeros of Central California,

according to Mr. Bancroft, believe that the sun and moon were made and

lighted up by the Hawk and the Coyote, who one day flew into each other's

faces in the dark, and were determined to prevent such accidents in the

future. But the very oddest example of the survival of the notion that

the stars are men or women is found in the 'Pax' of Aristophanes. Trygaeus

in that comedy has just made an expedition to heaven. A slave meets him,

and asks him, 'Is not the story true, then, that we become stars when we

die?' The answer is 'Certainly;' and Trygaeus points out the star into

which Ios of Chios has just been metamorphosed. Aristophanes is making

fun of some popular Greek superstition. But that very superstition meets

us in New Zealand. 'Heroes,' says Mr. Taylor, 'were thought to become

stars of greater or less brightness, according to the number of their

victims slain in fight.' The Aryan race is seldom far behind, when there

are ludicrous notions to be credited or savage tales to be told. We have

seen that Aristophanes, in Greece, knew the Eskimo doctrine that stars

are souls of the dead. The Persians had the same belief, {134a} 'all the

unnumbered stars were reckoned ghosts of men.' {134b} The German

folklore clings to the same belief, 'Stars are souls; when a child dies

God makes a new star.' Kaegi quotes {134c} the same idea from the Veda,

and from the Satapatha Brahmana the thoroughly Australian notion that

'good men become stars.' For a truly savage conception, it would be

difficult, in South Africa or on the Amazons, to beat the following story

from the 'Aitareya Brahmana' (iii. 33.) Pragapati, the Master of Life,

conceived an incestuous passion for his own daughter. Like Zeus, and

Indra, and the Australian wooer in the Pleiad tale, he concealed himself

under the shape of a beast, a roebuck, and approached his own daughter,

who had assumed the form of a doe. The gods, in anger at the awful

crime, made a monster to punish Pragapati. The monster sent an arrow

through the god's body; he sprang into heaven, and, like the Arcadian

bear, this Aryan roebuck became a constellation. He is among the stars

of Orion, and his punisher, also now a star, is, like the Greek Orion, a

hunter. The daughter of Pragapati, the doe, became another

constellation, and the avenging arrow is also a set of stars in the sky.

What follows, about the origin of the gods called Adityas, is really too

savage to be quoted by a chaste mythologist.

 

It would be easy to multiply examples of this stage of thought among

Aryans and savages. But we have probably brought forward enough for our

purpose, and have expressly chosen instances from the most widely

separated peoples. These instances, it will perhaps be admitted,

suggest, if they do not prove, that the Greeks had received from

tradition precisely the same sort of legends about the heavenly bodies as

are current among Eskimo and Bushmen, New Zealanders and Iowas. As much,

indeed, might be inferred from our own astronomical nomenclature. We now

give to newly discovered stars names derived from distinguished people,

as Georgium Sidus, or Herschel; or, again, merely technical appellatives,

as Alpha, Beta, and the rest. We should never think when 'some new

planet swims into our ken' of calling it Kangaroo, or Rabbit, or after

the name of some hero of romance, as Rob Roy, or Count Fosco. But the

names of stars which we inherit from Greek mythology--the Bear, the

Pleiads, Castor and Pollux, and so forth--are such as no people in our

mental condition would originally think of bestowing. When Callimachus

and the courtly astronomers of Alexandria pretended that the golden locks

of Berenice were raised to the heavens, that was a mere piece of flattery

constructed on the inherited model of legends about the crown (Corona) of

Ariadne. It seems evident enough that the older Greek names of stars are

derived from a time when the ancestors of the Greeks were in the mental

and imaginative condition of Iowas, Kanekas, Bushmen, Murri, and New

Zealanders. All these, and all other savage peoples, believe in a kind

of equality and intercommunion among all things animate and inanimate.

Stones are supposed in the Pacific Islands to be male and female and to

propagate their species. Animals are believed to have human or

superhuman intelligence, and speech, if they choose to exercise the gift.

Stars are just on the same footing, and their movements are explained by

the same ready system of universal anthropomorphism. Stars, fishes,

gods, heroes, men, trees, clouds, and animals, all play their equal part

in the confused dramas of savage thought and savage mythology. Even in

practical life the change of a sorcerer into an animal is accepted as a

familiar phenomenon, and the power of soaring among the stars is one on

which the Australian Biraark, or the Eskimo Shaman, most plumes himself.

It is not wonderful that things which are held possible in daily practice

should be frequent feature