Myth, Ritual And Religion Volume I Part 23

His role is that of the great Hare in American myth; he is a kind of demiurge, and his name means "The Master of Things Created," like the Australian Biamban, "Master," and the American t.i.tle of the chief Manitou, "Master of Life",(1) Dr. Muir remarks that, as the Vedic mind advances from mere divine beings who "reside and operate in fire"

(Agni), "dwell and shine in the sun" (Surya), or "in the atmosphere"

(Indra), towards a conception of deity, "the farther step would be taken of speaking of the deity under such new names as Visvakarman and Praj.a.pati". These are "appellatives which do not designate any limited functions connected with any single department of Nature, but the more general and abstract notions of divine power operating in the production and government of the universe". Now the interesting point is that round this new and abstract NAME gravitate the most savage and crudest myths, exactly the myths we meet among Hottentots and Nootkas. For example, among the Hottentots it is Heitsi Eibib, among the Huarochiri Indians it is Uiracocha, who confers, by curse or blessing, on the animals their proper attributes and characteristics.(2) In the Satapatha Brahmana it is Praj.a.pati who takes this part, that falls to rude culture-heroes of Hottentots and Huarochiris.(3) How Praj.a.pati made experiments in a kind of state-aided evolution, so to speak, or evolution superintended and a.s.sisted from above, will presently be set forth.

(1) Bergaigne, iii. 40.

(2) Avila, Fables of the Yncas, p. 127.

(3) English translation, ii. 361.

In the Puranas creation is a process renewed after each kalpa, or vast mundane period. Brahma awakes from his slumber, and finds the world a waste of water. Then, just as in the American myths of the coyote, and the Slavonic myths of the devil and the doves, a boar or a fish or a tortoise fishes up the world out of the waters. That boar, fish, tortoise, or what not, is Brahma or Vishnu. This savage conception of the beginnings of creation in the act of a tortoise, fish, or boar is not first found in the Puranas, as Mr. Muir points out, but is indicated in the Black Yajur Veda and in the Satapatha Brahmana.(1) In the Satapatha Brahmana, xiv. 1, 2, 11, we discover the idea, so common in savage myths--for example, in that of the Navajoes--that the earth was at first very small, a mere patch, and grew bigger after the animal fished it up. "Formerly this earth was only so large, of the size of a span. A boar called Emusha raised her up." Here the boar makes no pretence of being the incarnation of a G.o.d, but is a mere boar sans phrase, like the creative coyote of the Papogas and Chinooks, or the musk-rat of the Tacullies. This is a good example of the development of myths. Savages begin, as we saw, by mythically regarding various animals, spiders, gra.s.shoppers, ravens, eagles, c.o.c.katoos, as the creators or recoverers of the world. As civilisation advances, those animals still perform their beneficent functions, but are looked on as G.o.ds in disguise. In time the animals are often dropped altogether, though they hold their place with great tenacity in the cosmogonic traditions of the Aryans in India. When we find the Satapatha Brahmana alleging(2) "that all creatures are descended from a tortoise," we seem to be among the rude Indians of the Pacific Coast. But when the tortoise is identified with Aditya, and when Adityas prove to be solar deities, sons of Aditi, and when Aditi is recognised by Mr. Muller as the Dawn, we see that the Aryan mind has not been idle, but has added a good deal to the savage idea of the descent of men and beasts from a tortoise.(3)

(1) Muir, 2nd edit., vol. i. p. 52.

(2) Muir, 2nd edit., vol. i. p. 54.

(3) See Ternaux Compans' Nouvelles Annales des Voyages, lx.x.xvi. p. 5.

For Mexican traditions, "Mexican and Australian Hurricane World's End,"

Bancroft, v. 64.

Another feature of savage myths of creation we found to be the introduction of a crude theory of evolution. We saw that among the Potoyante tribe of the Digger Indians, and among certain Australian tribes, men and beasts were supposed to have been slowly evolved and improved out of the forms first of reptiles and then of quadrupeds. In the mythologies of the more civilised South American races, the idea of the survival of the fittest was otherwise expressed. The G.o.ds made several attempts at creation, and each set of created beings proving in one way or other unsuited to its environment, was permitted to die out or degenerated into apes, and was succeeded by a set better adapted for survival.(1) In much the same way the Satapatha Brahmana(2) represents mammals as the last result of a series of creative experiments.

"Praj.a.pati created living beings, which perished for want of food. Birds and serpents perished thus. Praj.a.pati reflected, 'How is it that my creatures perish after having been formed?' He perceived this: 'They perish from want of food'. In his own presence he caused milk to be supplied to b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He created living beings, which, resorting to the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, were thus preserved. These are the creatures which did not perish."

(1) This myth is found in Popol Vuh. A Chinook myth of the same sort, Bancroft, v. 95.

(2) ii. 5, 11; Muir, 2nd edit., i. 70.

The common myth which derives the world from a great egg--the myth perhaps most familiar in its Finnish shape--is found in the Satapatha Brahmana.(1) "In the beginning this universe was waters, nothing but waters. The waters desired: 'How can we be reproduced?' So saying, they toiled, they performed austerity. While they were performing austerity, a golden egg came into existence. It then became a year.... From it in a year a man came into existence, who was Praj.a.pati.... He conceived progeny in himself; with his mouth he created the G.o.ds." According to another text,(2) "Praj.a.pati took the form of a tortoise". The tortoise is the same as Aditya.(3)

(1) xi. 1, 6, 1; Muir, Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, 1863.

(2) Satapatha Brahmana, vii. 4, 3, 5.

(3) Aitareya Brahmana, iii. 34 (11, 219), a very discreditable origin of species.

It is now time to examine the Aryan shape of the widely spread myth about the marriage of heaven and earth, and the fortunes of their children. We have already seen that in New Zealand heaven and earth were regarded as real persons, of bodily parts and pa.s.sions, united in a secular embrace. We shall apply the same explanation to the Greek myth of Gaea and of the mutilation of Cronus. In India, Dyaus (heaven) answers to the Greek Ura.n.u.s and the Maori Rangi, while Prithivi (earth) is the Greek Gaea, the Maori Papa. In the Veda, heaven and earth are constantly styled "parents";(1) but this we might regard as a mere metaphorical expression, still common in poetry. A pa.s.sage of the Aitareya Brahmana, however, retains the old conception, in which there was nothing metaphorical at all.(2) These two worlds, heaven and earth, were once joined. Subsequently they were separated (according to one account, by Indra, who thus plays the part of Cronus and of Tane Mahuta). "Heaven and earth," says Dr. Muir, "are regarded as the parents not only of men, but of the G.o.ds also, as appears from the various texts where they are designated by the epithet Devapatre, 'having G.o.ds for their children'." By men in an early stage of thought this myth was accepted along with others in which heaven and earth were regarded as objects created by one of their own children, as by Indra,(3) who "stretched them out like a hide," who, like Atlas, "sustains and upholds them"(4) or, again, Tvashtri, the divine smith, wrought them by his craft; or, once more, heaven and earth sprung from the head and feet of Purusha. In short, if any one wished to give an example of that recklessness of orthodoxy or consistency which is the mark of early myth, he could find no better example than the Indian legends of the origin of things. Perhaps there is not one of the myths current among the lower races which has not its counterpart in the Indian Brahmanas.

It has been enough for us to give a selection of examples.

(1) Muir, v. 22.

(2) iv. 27; Haug, ii. 308.

(3) Rig-Veda, viii. 6, 5.

(4) Ibid., iii. 32, 8.

CHAPTER IX. GREEK MYTHS OF THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD AND MAN.

The Greeks practically civilised when we first meet them in Homer--Their mythology, however, is full of repulsive features--The hypothesis that many of these are savage survivals--Are there other examples of such survival in Greek life and inst.i.tutions?--Greek opinion was constant that the race had been savage--Ill.u.s.trations of savage survival from Greek law of homicide, from magic, religion, human sacrifice, religious art, traces of totemism, and from the mysteries--Conclusion: that savage survival may also be expected in Greek myths.

The Greeks, when we first make their acquaintance in the Homeric poems, were a cultivated people, dwelling, under the government of royal families, in small city states. This social condition they must have attained by 1000 B.C., and probably much earlier. They had already a long settled past behind them, and had no recollection of any national migration from the "cradle of the Aryan race". On the other hand, many tribes thought themselves earth-born from the soil of the place where they were settled. The Maori traditions prove that memories of a national migration may persist for several hundred years among men ignorant of writing. Greek legend, among a far more civilised race, only spoke of occasional foreign settlers from Sidon, Lydia, or Egypt. The Homeric Greeks were well acquainted with almost all the arts of life, though it is not absolutely certain that they could write, and certainly they were not addicted to reading. In war they fought from chariots, like the Egyptians and a.s.syrians; they were bold seafarers, being accustomed to harry the sh.o.r.es even of Egypt, and they had large commercial dealings with the people of Tyre and Sidon. In the matter of religion they were comparatively free and unrestrained. Their deities, though, in myth, capricious in character, might be regarded in many ways as "making for righteousness". They protected the stranger and the suppliant; they sanctioned the oath, they frowned on the use of poisoned arrows; marriage and domestic life were guarded by their good-will; they dispensed good and evil fortune, to be accepted with humility and resignation among mortals.

The patriarchal head of each family performed the sacrifices for his household, the king for the state, the ruler of Mycenae, Agamemnon, for the whole Achaean host encamped before the walls of Troy. At the same time, prophets, like Calchas, possessed considerable influence, due partly to an hereditary gift of second-sight, as in the case of Theoclymenus,(1) partly to acquired professional skill in observing omens, partly to the direct inspiration of the G.o.ds. The oracle at Delphi, or, as it is called by Homer, Pytho, was already famous, and religion recognised, in various degrees, all the G.o.ds familiar to the later cult of h.e.l.las. In a people so advanced, so much in contact with foreign races and foreign ideas, and so wonderfully gifted by nature with keen intellect and perfect taste, it is natural to expect, if anywhere, a mythology almost free from repulsive elements, and almost purged of all that we regard as survivals from the condition of savagery. But while Greek mythology is richer far than any other in beautiful legend, and is thronged with lovely and majestic forms of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, nymphs and oreads ideally fair, none the less a very large proportion of its legends is practically on a level with the myths of Maoris, Thlinkeets, Cahrocs and Bushmen.

(1) Odyssey, xx. 354.

This is the part of Greek mythology which has at all times excited most curiosity, and has been made the subject of many systems of interpretation. The Greeks themselves, from almost the earliest historical ages, were deeply concerned either to veil or explain away the blasphemous horrors of their own "sacred chapters," poetic traditions and temple legends. We endeavour to account for these as relics of an age of barbarism lying very far behind the time of Homer--an age when the ancestors of the Greeks either borrowed, or more probably developed for themselves, the kind of myths by which savage peoples endeavour to explain the nature and origin of the world and all phenomena.

The correctness of this explanation, resting as it does on the belief that the Greeks were at one time in the savage status, might be demonstrated from the fact that not only myths, but Greek life in general, and especially Greek ritual, teemed with surviving examples of inst.i.tutions and of manners which are found everywhere among the most backward and barbarous races. It is not as if only the myths of Greece retained this rudeness, or as if the Greeks supposed themselves to have been always civilised. The whole of Greek life yields relics of savagery when the surface is excavated ever so slightly. Moreover, that the Greeks, as soon as they came to reflect on these matters at all, believed themselves to have emerged from a condition of savagery is undeniable. The poets are entirely at one on this subject with Moschion, a writer of the school of Euripides. "The time hath been, yea, it HATH been," he says, "when men lived like the beasts, dwelling in mountain caves, and clefts unvisited of the sun.... Then they broke not the soil with ploughs nor by aid of iron, but the weaker man was slain to make the supper of the stronger," and so on.(1) This view of the savage origin of mankind was also held by Aristotle:(2) "It is probable that the first men, whether they were produced by the earth (earth-born) or survived from some deluge, were on a level of ignorance and darkness".(3) This opinion, consciously held and stated by philosophers and poets, reveals itself also in the universal popular Greek traditions that men were originally ignorant of fire, agriculture, metallurgy and all the other arts and conveniences of life, till they were instructed by ideal culture-heroes, like Prometheus, members of a race divine or half divine. A still more curious Athenian tradition (preserved by Varro) maintained, not only that marriage was originally unknown, but that, as among Australians and some Red Indians, the family name, descended through the mother, and kinship was reckoned on the female side before the time of Cecrops.(4)

(1) Moschion; cf. Preller, Ausgewahlte Aufsatze, p. 206.

(2) Politics, ii. 8-21; Plato, Laws, 667-680.

(3) Compare Horace, Satires, i. 3, 99; Lucretius, v. 923.

(4) Suidas, s.v. "Prometheus"; Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xviii. 9.

While Greek opinion, both popular and philosophical, admitted, or rather a.s.serted, that savagery lay in the background of the historical prospect, Greek inst.i.tutions retained a thousand birth-marks of savagery. It is manifest and undeniable that the Greek criminal law, as far as it effected murder, sprang directly from the old savage blood-feud.(1) The Athenian law was a civilised modification of the savage rule that the kindred of a slain man take up his blood-feud.

Where homicide was committed WITHIN the circle of blood relationship, as by Orestes, Greek religion provided the Erinnyes to punish an offence which had, as it were, no human avenger. The precautions taken by murderers to lay the ghost of the slain man were much like those in favour among the Australians. The Greek cut off the extremities of his victim, the tips of the hands and feet, and disposed them neatly beneath the arm-pits of the slain man.(2) In the same spirit, and for the same purpose, the Australian black cuts off the thumbs of his dead enemy, that the ghost too may be mutilated and prevented from throwing at him with a ghostly spear. We learn also from Apollonius Rhodius and his scholiast that Greek murderers used thrice to suck in and spit out the gore of their victims, perhaps with some idea of thereby partaking of their blood, and so, by becoming members of their kin, putting it beyond the power of the ghosts to avenge themselves. Similar ideas inspire the worldwide savage custom of making an artificial "blood brotherhood" by mingling the blood of the contracting parties. As to the ceremonies of cleansing from blood-guiltiness among the Greeks, we may conjecture that these too had their primitive side; for Orestes, in the Eumenides, maintains that he has been purified of his mother's slaughter by sufficient blood of swine. But this point will be ill.u.s.trated presently, when we touch on the mysteries.

(1) Duncker, History of Greece, Engl. transl., vol. ii. p. 129.

(2) See "Arm-pitting in Ancient Greece," in the American Journal of Philology, October, 1885, where a discussion of the familiar texts in Aeschylus and Apollonius Rhodius will be found.

Ritual and myth, as might be expected, retained vast ma.s.ses of savage rites and superst.i.tious habits and customs. To be "in all things too superst.i.tious," too full of deisidaimonia, was even in St. Paul's time the characteristic of the Athenians. Now superst.i.tion, or deisidaimonia, is defined by Theophrastus,(1) as "cowardice in regard to the supernatural" ((Greek text omitted)). This "cowardice" has in all ages and countries secured the permanence of ritual and religious traditions.

Men have always argued, like one of the persons in M. Renan's play, Le Pretre de Nemi, that "l'ordre du monde depend de l'ordre des rites qu'on observe". The familiar endurable sequence of the seasons of spring, and seed-sowing, and harvest depend upon the due performance of immemorial religious acts. "In the mystic deposits," says Dinarchus, "lies the safety of the city."(2) What the "mystic deposits" were n.o.body knows for certain, but they must have been of very archaic sanct.i.ty, and occur among the Arunta and the p.a.w.nees.

(1) Characters.

(2) Ap. Hermann, Lehrbuch, p. 41; Aglaophamus, 965.