Modern Mythology Part 18

I now very briefly, and 'under all reserves,' allude to the only modern parallel in our country with which I am acquainted. We have seen that Iamblichus includes insensibility to fire among the privileges of Graeco- Egyptian 'mediums.' {172} The same gift was claimed by Daniel Dunglas Home, the notorious American spiritualist. I am well aware that as Eusapia Paladino was detected in giving a false impression that her hands were held by her neighbours in the dark, therefore, when Mr. Crookes a.s.serts that he saw Home handle fire in the light, his testimony on this point can have no weight with a logical public. Consequently it is not as evidence to the _fact_ that I cite Mr. Crookes, but for another purpose. Mr. Crookes's remarks I heard, and I can produce plenty of living witnesses to the same experiences with D. D. Home:

'I several times saw the fire test, both at my own and at other houses. On one occasion he called me to him when he went to the fire, and told me to watch carefully. He certainly put his hand in the grate and handled the red-hot coals in a manner which would have been impossible for me to have imitated without being severely burnt. I once saw him go to a bright wood fire, and, taking a large piece of red-hot charcoal, put it in the hollow of one hand, and, covering it with the other, blow into the extempore furnace till the coal was white hot, and the flames licked round his fingers. No sign of burning could be seen then or afterwards on his hands.'

On these occasions Home was, or was understood to be, 'entranced,' like the Bulgarian Nistinares. Among other phenomena, the white handkerchief on which Home laid a red-hot coal was not scorched, nor, on a.n.a.lysis, did it show any signs of chemical preparation. Home could also (like the Fijians) communicate his alleged immunity to others present; for example, to Mr. S. C. Hall. But it burned and marked a man I know. Home, entranced, and handling a red-hot coal, pa.s.sed it to a gentleman of my acquaintance, whose hand still bears the scar of the scorching endured in 1867. Immunity was not _always_ secured by experimenters.

I only mention these circ.u.mstances because Mr. Crookes has stated that he knows no chemical preparation which would avert the ordinary action of heat. Mr. Clodd (on the authority of Sir B. W. Richardson) has suggested diluted sulphuric acid (so familiar to Klings, Hirpi, Tongans, and Fijians). But Mr. Clodd produced no examples of successful or unsuccessful experiment. {173} The nescience of Mr. Crookes may be taken to cover these valuable properties of diluted sulphuric acid, unless Mr.

Clodd succeeds in an experiment which, if made on his own person, I would very willingly witness.

Merely for completeness, I mention Dr. Dozous's statement, {174} that he timed by his watch Bernadette, the seer of Lourdes, while, for fifteen minutes, she, in an ecstatic condition, held her hands in the flame of a candle. He then examined her hands, which were not scorched or in any way affected by the fire. This is called, at Lourdes, the Miracle du Cierge.

Here ends my list of examples, in modern and ancient times, of a rite which deserves, though it probably will not receive, the attention of science. The widely diffused religious character of the performance will, perhaps, be admitted as demonstrated. As to the method by which the results are attained, whether by a chemical preparation, or by the influence of a certain mental condition, or by thickness of skin, or whether all the witnesses fable with a singular unanimity (shared by photographic cameras), I am unable even to guess. On May 21, in Bulgaria, a scientific observer might come to a conclusion. At present I think it possible that the Jewish 'Pa.s.sing through the Fire' may have been a harmless rite.

Conclusion as to Fire-walk

In all these cases, and others as to which I have first-hand evidence, there are decided parallels to the Rite of the Hirpi, and to Biblical and ecclesiastical miracles. The savage examples are _rites_, and appear intended to secure good results in food supplies (Fiji), or general well- being, perhaps by expiation for sins, as in the Attic Thargelia. The Bulgarian rite also aims at propitiating general good luck.

Psychical Research

But how is the Fire-walk done? That remains a mystery, and perhaps no philologist, folk-lorist, anthropologist, or physiologist, has seriously asked the question. The medicamentum of Varro, the green frog fat of India, the diluted sulphuric acid of Mr. Clodd, are guesses in the air, and Mr. Clodd has made no experiment. The possibility of plunging the hand, unhurt, in molten metal, is easily accounted for, and is not to the point. In this difficulty Psychical Research registers, and no more, the well-attested performances of D. D. Home (entranced, like the Nistinares); the well observed and timed Miracle du Cierge at Lourdes--Bernadette being in an ecstatic condition; the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace; the researches of Iamblichus; the case of Madame Shchapoff, carefully reported, {175} and other examples. There is no harm in collecting examples, and the question remains, are all those rites, from those of Virgil's Hirpi to Bulgaria of to-day, based on some actual but obscure and scientifically neglected fact in nature? At all events, for the Sora.n.u.s-Feronia rite philology only supplies her competing etymologies, folk-lore her modern rural parallels, anthropology her savage examples, psychical research her 'cases' at first-hand. Anthropology had neglected the collection of these, perhaps because the Fire-walk is 'impossible.'

THE ORIGIN OF DEATH

Yama

This excursus on 'The Fire-walk' has been introduced, as an occasion arose, less because of controversy about a neglected theme than for the purpose of giving something positive in a controversial treatise. For the same reason I take advantage of Mr. Max Muller's remarks on Yama, 'the first who died,' to offer a set of notes on myths of the Origin of Death. Yama, in our author's opinion, is 'the setting sun' (i. 45; ii.

563). Agni (Fire) is 'the first who was born;' as the other twin, Yama, he was also the first who died (ii. 568). As 'the setting sun he was the first instance of death.' Kuhn and others, judging from a pa.s.sage in the Atharva Veda (xviii. 3, 13), have, however, inferred that Yama 'was really a human being and the first of mortals.' He is described in the Atharva as 'the gatherer of men, who died the first of mortals, who went forward the first to that world.' In the Atharva we read of 'reverence to Yama, to Death, who first approached the precipice, finding out the path for many.' 'The myth of Yama is perfectly intelligible, if we trace its roots back to the sun of evening' (ii. 573). Mr. Max Muller then proposes on this head 'to consult the traditions of real Naturvolker'

(savages). The Harvey Islanders speak of dying as 'following the sun's track.' The Maoris talk of 'going down with the sun' (ii. 574). No more is said here about savage myths of 'the first who died.' I therefore offer some additions to the two instances in which savages use a poetical phrase connecting the sun's decline with man's death.

The Origin of Death

Civilised man in a scientific age would never invent a myth to account for 'G.o.d's great ordinance of death.' He regards it as a fact, obvious and necessarily universal; but his own children have not attained to his belief in death. The certainty and universality of death do not enter into the thoughts of our little ones.

For in the thought of immortality Do children play about the flowery meads.

Now, there are still many childlike tribes of men who practically disbelieve in death. To them death is always a surprise and an accident--an unnecessary, irrelevant intrusion on the living world.

'Natural deaths are by many tribes regarded as supernatural,' says Dr.

Tylor. These tribes have no conception of death as the inevitable, eventual obstruction and cessation of the powers of the bodily machine; the stopping of the pulses and processes of life by violence or decay or disease. To persons who regard Death thus, _his_ intrusion into the world (for Death, of course, is thought to be a person) stands in great need of explanation. That explanation, as usual, is given in myths.

Death, regarded as Unnatural

But before studying these widely different myths, let us first establish the fact that death really is regarded as something non-natural and intrusive. The modern savage readily believes in and accounts in a scientific way for _violent_ deaths. The spear or club breaks or crushes a hole in a man, and his soul flies out. But the deaths he disbelieves in are _natural_ deaths. These he is obliged to explain as produced by some supernatural cause, generally the action of malevolent spirits impelled by witches. Thus the savage holds that, violence apart and the action of witches apart, man would even now be immortal. 'There are rude races of Australia and South America,' writes Dr. Tylor, {178} 'whose intense belief in witchcraft has led them to declare that if men were never bewitched, and never killed by violence, _they would never die at all_. Like the Australians, the Africans will inquire of their dead "what sorcerer slew them by his wicked arts."' 'The natives,' says Sir George Grey, speaking of the Australians, 'do not believe that there is such a thing as death from natural causes.' On the death of an Australian native from disease, a kind of magical coroner's inquest is held by the conjurers of the tribe, and the direction in which the wizard lives who slew the dead man is ascertained by the movements of worms and insects. The process is described at full length by Mr. Brough Smyth in his Aborigines of Victoria (i. 98-102). Turning from Australia to Hindustan, we find that the Puwarrees (according to Heber's narrative) attribute all natural deaths to a supernatural cause--namely, witchcraft.

That is, the Puwarrees do not yet believe in the universality and necessity of Death. He is an intruder brought by magic arts into our living world. Again, in his Ethnology of Bengal (pp. 199, 200), Dalton tells us that the Hos (an aboriginal non-Aryan race) are of the same opinion as the Puwarrees. 'They hold that all disease in men or animals is attributable to one of two causes: the wrath of some evil spirit or the spell of some witch or sorcerer. These superst.i.tions are common to all cla.s.ses of the population of this province.' In the New Hebrides disease and death are caused, as Mr. Codrington found, by tamates, or ghosts. {179} In New Caledonia, according to Erskine, death is the result of witchcraft practised by members of a hostile tribe, for who would be so wicked as to bewitch his fellow-tribesman? The Andaman Islanders attribute all natural deaths to the supernatural influence of e rem chaugala, or to jurn-win, two spirits of the jungle and the sea. The death is avenged by the nearest relation of the deceased, who shoots arrows at the invisible enemy. The negroes of Central Africa entertain precisely similar ideas about the non-naturalness of death. Mr. Duff Macdonald, in Africana, writes: 'Every man who dies what we call a natural death is really killed by witches.' It is a far cry from the Blantyre Mission in Africa to the Eskimo of the frozen North; but so uniform is human nature in the lower races that the Eskimo precisely agree, as far as theories of death go, with the Africans, the aborigines of India, the Andaman Islanders, the Australians, and the rest. Dr. Rink {180a} found that 'sickness or death coming about in an accidental manner was always attributed to witchcraft, and it remains a question whether death on the whole was not originally accounted for as resulting from magic.' Pere Paul le Jeune, writing from Quebec in 1637, says of the Red Men: 'Je n'en voy mourir quasi aucun, qui ne pense estre ensorcele.'

{180b} It is needless to show how these ideas survived into civilisation. Bishop Jewell, denouncing witches before Queen Elizabeth, was, so far, mentally on a level with the Eskimo and the Australian. The familiar and voluminous records of trials for witchcraft, whether at Salem or at Edinburgh, prove that all abnormal and unwonted deaths and diseases, in animals or in men, were explained by our ancestors as the results of supernatural mischief.

It has been made plain (and the proof might be enlarged to any extent) that the savage does not regard death as 'G.o.d's great ordinance,'

universal and inevitable and natural. But, being curious and inquisitive, he cannot help asking himself, 'How did this terrible invader first enter a world where he now appears so often?' This is, properly speaking, a scientific question; but the savage answers it, not by collecting facts and generalising from them, but by inventing a myth.

That is his invariable habit. Does he want to know why this tree has red berries, why that animal has brown stripes, why this bird utters its peculiar cry, where fire came from, why a constellation is grouped in one way or another, why his race of men differs from the whites--in all these, and in all other intellectual perplexities, the savage invents a story to solve the problem. Stories about the Origin of Death are, therefore, among the commonest fruits of the savage imagination. As those legends have been produced to meet the same want by persons in a very similar mental condition, it inevitably follows that they all resemble each other with considerable closeness. We need not conclude that all the myths we are about to examine came from a single original source, or were handed about--with flint arrow-heads, seeds, sh.e.l.ls, beads, and weapons--in the course of savage commerce. Borrowing of this sort may--or, rather, must--explain many difficulties as to the diffusion of some myths. But the myths with which we are concerned now, the myths of the Origin of Death, might easily have been separately developed by simple and ignorant men seeking to discover an answer to the same problem.

Why Men are Mortal

The myths of the Origin of Death fall into a few categories. In many legends of the lower races men are said to have become subject to mortality because they infringed some mystic prohibition or taboo of the sort which is common among untutored peoples. The apparently untrammelled Polynesian, or Australian, or African, is really the slave of countless traditions, which forbid him to eat this object or to touch that, or to speak to such and such a person, or to utter this or that word. Races in this curious state of ceremonial subjection often account for death as the punishment imposed for breaking some taboo. In other cases, death is said to have been caused by a sin of omission, not of commission. People who have a complicated and minute ritual (like so many of the lower races) persuade themselves that Death burst on the world when some pa.s.sage of the ritual was first omitted, or when some custom was first infringed. Yet again, Death is fabled to have first claimed us for his victims in consequence of the erroneous delivery of a favourable message from some powerful supernatural being, or because of the failure of some enterprise which would have resulted in the overthrow of Death, or by virtue of a pact or covenant between Death and the G.o.ds.

Thus it will be seen that death is often (though by no means invariably) the penalty of infringing a command, or of indulging in a culpable curiosity. But there are cases, as we shall see, in which death, as a tolerably general law, follows on a mere accident. Some one is accidentally killed, and this 'gives Death a lead' (as they say in the hunting-field) over the fence which had hitherto severed him from the world of living men. It is to be observed in this connection that the first of men who died is usually regarded as the discoverer of a hitherto 'unknown country,' the land beyond the grave, to which all future men must follow him. Bin dir Woor, among the Australians, was the first man who suffered death, and he (like Yama in the Vedic myth) became the Columbus of the new world of the dead.

Savage Death-Myths

Let us now examine in detail a few of the savage stories of the Origin of Death. That told by the Australians may be regarded with suspicion, as a refraction from a careless hearing of the narrative in Genesis. The legend printed by Mr. Brough Smyth {183a} was told to Mr. Bulwer by 'a black fellow far from sharp,' and this black fellow may conceivably have distorted what his tribe had heard from a missionary. This sort of refraction is not uncommon, and we must always guard ourselves against being deceived by a savage corruption of a Biblical narrative. Here is the myth, such as it is:--'The first created man and woman were told' (by whom we do not learn) 'not to go near a certain tree in which a bat lived. The bat was not to be disturbed. One day, however, the woman was gathering firewood, and she went near the tree. The bat flew away, and after that came Death.' More evidently genuine is the following legend of how Death 'got a lead' into the Australian world. 'The child of the first man was wounded. If his parents could heal him, Death would never enter the world. They failed. Death came.' The wound in this legend was inflicted by a supernatural being. Here Death acts on the principle ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute, and the premier pas was made easy for him. We may continue to examine the stories which account for death as the result of breaking a taboo. The Ningphos of Bengal say they were originally immortal. {183b} They were forbidden to bathe in a certain pool of water. Some one, greatly daring, bathed, and ever since Ningphos have been subject to death. The infringement, not of a taboo, but of a custom, caused death in one of the many Melanesian myths on this subject.

Men and women had been practically deathless because they cast their old skins at certain intervals; but a grandmother had a favourite grandchild who failed to recognise her when she appeared as a young woman in her new skin. With fatal good-nature the grandmother put on her old skin again, and instantly men lost the art of skin-shifting, and Death finally seized them. {184}

The Greek Myth

The Greek myth of the Origin of Death is the most important of those which turn on the breaking of a prohibition. The story has unfortunately become greatly confused in the various poetical forms which have reached us. As far as can be ascertained, death was regarded in one early Greek myth as the punishment of indulgence in forbidden curiosity. Men appear to have been free from death before the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus. In consequence of this quarrel Hephaestus fashioned a woman out of earth and water, and gave her to Epimetheus, the brother of the t.i.tan. Prometheus had forbidden his brother to accept any gift from the G.o.ds, but the bride was welcomed nevertheless. She brought her tabooed coffer: this was opened; and men--who, according to Hesiod, had hitherto lived exempt from 'maladies that bring down Fate'--were overwhelmed with the 'diseases that stalk abroad by night and day.' Now, in Hesiod (Works and Days, 70-100) there is nothing said about unholy curiosity. Pandora simply opened her casket and scattered its fatal contents. But Philodemus a.s.sures us that, according to a variant of the myth, it was Epimetheus who opened the forbidden coffer, whence came Death.

Leaving the myths which turn on the breaking of a taboo, and reserving for consideration the New Zealand story, in which the Origin of Death is the neglect of a ritual process, let us look at some African myths of the Origin of Death. It is to be observed that in these (as in all the myths of the most backward races) many of the characters are not G.o.ds, but animals.

The Bushman story lacks the beginning. The mother of the little Hare was lying dead, but we do not know how she came to die. The Moon then struck the little Hare on the lip, cutting it open, and saying, 'Cry loudly, for your mother will not return, as _I_ do, but is quite dead.' In another version the Moon promises that the old Hare shall return to life, but the little Hare is sceptical, and is. .h.i.t in the mouth as before. The Hottentot myth makes the Moon send the Hare to men with the message that they will revive as he (the Moon) does. But the Hare 'loses his memory as he runs' (to quote the French proverb, which may be based on a form of this very tale), and the messenger brings the tidings that men shall surely die and never revive. The angry Moon then burns a hole in the Hare's mouth. In yet another Hottentot version the Hare's failure to deliver the message correctly caused the death of the Moon's mother (Bleek, Bushman Folklore). {185} Compare Sir James Alexander's Expedition, ii. 250, where the Namaquas tell this tale. The Fijians say that the Moon wished men to die and be born again, like herself. The Rat said, 'No, let them die, like rats;' and they do. {186}

The Serpent