" Kur-bo-roo is the sage counsellor of the aborigines in all their difficulties. When bent on a dangerous expedition, the men will seek help from this clumsy creature, but in what way his opinions are made known is nowhere recorded." H. R. Schoolcraft mentions a Red Indian story explaining how "the bear does not die," but this tale Schoolcraft (like Herodotus in Egypt) cannot bring himself to relate." He also gives examples of Iowas conversing with serpents. These may serve as examples of the savage belief in the human intelligence of animals. Man is on an even footing with them, and with them can interchange his ideas. But savages carry this opinion much further. Man in their view is actually, and in no figurative sense, akin to the beasts. Certain tribes in Java "believe that women when delivered of a child are frequently delivered at the same time of a young crocodile." The common European story of a queen accused of giving birth to puppies shows the survival of the belief in the possibility of such births among civilized races, while the Aztecs had the idea that women who saw the moon in certain circumstances would produce mice. But the chief evidence for the savage theory of man's close kinship with the lower animals is found in the institution called totemism (q.v.) | -the belief that certain stocks of men in the various tribes are descended by blood descent from, or are developed out of, or otherwise connected with, certain objects animate or inanimate, but especially with beasts. The strength of the opinion is proved by its connexion with very stringent marriage laws. No man (according to the rigour of the custom) may marry a woman who bears the same kin name as himself, that is, who is descended from the same inanimate object or animal. Nor may people (if they can possibly avoid it) eat the flesh of animals who are their kindred. Savage man also believes that many of his own tribe-fellows have the power of assuming the shapes of animals, and that the souls of his dead kinsfolk revert to animal forms. E. W. Lane, in his introduction to the Arabian Nights (i. 58), says he found the belief in these transmigrations accepted seriously in Cairo. H. H. Bancroft brings evidence to prove that the Mexicans supposed pregnant women would turn into beasts, and sleeping children into mice, if things went wrong in the ritual of a certain solemn sacrifice. There is a well-known Scottish legend to the effect that a certain old witch was once fired at in her shape as a hare, and that where the hare was hit there the old woman was found to be wounded. J. F. Lafitau tells the same story as current among his Red Indian flock, except that the old witch and her son took the form of birds, not of hares. A Scandinavian witch does the same in the Egil saga. In Lafitau's tale the birds were wounded by the magic arrows of a medicine man, and the arrow-heads were found in the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan' people chiefly transform themselves into badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras (Bancroft, i. 740) " possessed the power of transforming men into wild beasts." J. F. Regnard, the French dramatist, found in Lapland (1681) that witches could turn men into cats, and could themselves assume the forms of swans, crows, falcons and geese.. Among the Bushmen sorcerers assume the form of beasts and jackals." M. Dobrizhofer, a missionary in Paraguay (1717-1791), learned that "sorcerers arrogate to themselves the power of changing men into tigers" (Eng. trans., i. 63). He was present at a conversion of this sort, though the miracle beheld by the people was invisible to the missionary. Near Loanda Livingstone noted that "a chief may metamorphose himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and resume his proper form." The same accomplishments distinguish the Barotse and Balonda. Among the Mayas of Central America sorcerers could transform themselves "into dogs, pigs and other animals; their glance was death to a victim (Bancroft, ii. 797). The Thlinkeets hold that their shamans have the same powers. A bamboo in Sarawak is known to have been a man. Metamorphoses into stones are as common among Red Indians and Australians as in Greek mythology. Compare the cases of Niobe and the victims of the Gorgon's head. Zulus, Red Indians, Aztecs, Andaman Islanders and other races believe that their dead assume the shapes of serpents and of other creatures, often reverting to the form of the animal from which they originally descended. In ancient Egypt 1 R. Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 446 (1878). J. Hawkesworth, Voyages, iii. 756. Lord Redesdale, Tales of Old Japan (1871). Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 15, 40. W. H. Dall, Alaska, p. 423 (1870). Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions, pp. 130, 134. and Aeneas is "Incertus, geniumne loci, famulumne parentis On the death of Plotinus, as he gave up the ghost, a snake glided from Another fertile source of myth is magic, especially the magic designed to produce fertility, vegetable and animal. From the natives of northern and central Australia to the actors in the ritual of Adonis, or the folk among whom arose the customs of crowning the May king or the king of the May, all peoples have done magic to encourage the breeding of animals as part of the food supply, and to stimulate the growth of plants, wild or cultivated. In the opinion of J. G. Frazer, the human representatives or animal representatives, in the rites, of the spirit of vegetation; of the corn spirit; of the changing seasons, winter or summer, have been developed into many forms of gods, with appropriate myths, explanatory of the magic, and of the sacrifice of the chief performer. In the same way the adoration of living human beings, the deification of living kings-whose title survives in our king or queen of the May, and in the rex nemorensis, the priest of Diana in the grove of Aricia-has been most fruitful in myths of divine beings. These human beings are often sacrificed, for various reasons, actual or hypothetical, and gods and heroes are almost as likely to be explained as spirits of vegetation now, as they were likely to become solar mythological figures in the system of Max Müller. It is certainly true that divine beings in most mythologies are apt to acquire solar with other elemental attributes, including vegetable attributes. But that the origins of such mythical beings were, ab initio, either solar or vegetable, or, for that matter, animal, it would often be hard to prove. Frazer's ideas are to be found in a work of immense erudition, The Golden Bough (London, 1900). Two studies by him, pursuing the same set of ideas in more detail, are Adonis, Allis, Osiris (1906) | and Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship (1995). See A. Lang, Magic and Religion (London, 1901), for a criticism in detail of the general theory as set forth in The Golden Bough. Whatever may be said, Frazer has certainly made the most important of recent contributions to the study of mythology. He has fixed the attention of students on a mass of early ideas, previously much neglected save by W. Mannhardt, and on the facts of ritual, which preserve these ideas and represent them in a kind of mystery plays. We are now in a position to sum up the ideas of savages about man's relations to the world. We started on this inquiry because we found that savages regarded sky, wind, sun, earth and so forth as practically men, and we had then to ask, what sort of men, men with what powers? The result of our examination, so far, is that in savage opinion sky, wind, sun, sea and many other phenomena have, being personal, all the powers attributed to real human persons. These powers and qualities are: (1) relationship to animals and ability to be transformed and to transform others into animals and other objects; (2) magical accomplishments, as-(a) power to visit or to procure the visits of the dead; (b) other magical powers, such as control over the weather and over the fertility of nature in all departments. Once more, the great forces of nature, considered as persons, are involved in that inextricable confusion in which men, beasts, plants, stones, stars, are all on one level of personality and animated existence. This is the philosophy of savage life, and it is on these principles that the savage constructs his myths, while these, again, are all the scientific explanations of the universe with which he has been able to supply himself. Examples of Mythology.-Myths of the origin of the world and man are naturally most widely diffused. Man has everywhere asked himself whence things came and how, and his myths are his earliest extant form of answer to this question. So confused and inconsistent are the mythical answers that it is very difficult to classify them according to any system. If we try beginning with myths of creative gods, we find that the world is sometimes represented as pre-existent to the divine race. If we try beginning with myths of the origin of the world, we frequently find that it owes its origin to the activity of preexistent supernatural beings. According to all modern views of creation, the creative mind is prior to the universe which it created. There is no such consistency of opinion in myths, whether of civilized or savage races. Perhaps the plan least open to objection is to begin with myths of the gods. But when we speak of gods, we must not give to the word a modern significance. As used here, gods merely mean non-natural and powerful beings, sometimes "magnified non-natural men," sometimes beasts, birds or insects, sometimes the larger forces and phenomena of the universe conceived of as endowed with human personality and passions. When Plutarch examined the Osirian myth (De Isid. xxv.) he saw that the "gods in the tale were really demons," stronger than men, but having the divine part not wholly unalloyed "-"magnified nonnatural men," in short. And such are the gods of mythology. In examining the myths of the gods we shall begin with the conceptions of the most backward tribes, and advance to the divine legends of the ancient civilized races. It will appear that, while the non-civilized gods are often theriomorphic, made in accordance with the ideas of non-civilized men, the civilized gods retain many characteristics of the savage gods, and these characteristics are the "irrational element "in the divine myths. Myths of Gods: Savage Ideas.-It is not easy to separate the discussion of savage myths of gods from the problem, Whence and how arose the savage belief in gods? The orthodox anthropological explanation has been that of E. B. Tylor, which closely resembles Herbert Spencer's "ghost theory." By reflection on dreams, in which the self, or spirit," of the savage seems to wander free from the bounds of time and space, to see things remote, and to meet and recognize dead friends or foes; by speculation on the experiences of trance and of phantasms of the dead or living, beheld with waking eyes; by pondering on the phenomena of shadows, of breath, of death and life, the savage evolved the idea of a separable soul or spirit capable of surviving bodily death. The spirit of the dead may tenant a material object, a "fetish," or may roam hungry and comfortless and need propitiation by food, for unpropitiated it is dangerous, or may be reincarnated, or may go to its own herd " " in another world. Again, it is naturally kind to its living kinsfolk, and so may be addressed in prayer. These are the doctrines of animism (q.v.), and, according to the usual anthropological theory, these spirits come to thrive to god's estate in favourable circumstances, as where the dead man, when alive, had great mana or wakan, a great share of the ether, so to speak, which, in savage metaphysics, is the viewless vehicle of magical influences. Thus the ghost of the hero or medicine man of a kin or tribe may be raised to divine rank, while again the doctrine of spirits once developed, and spirits once allotted to the great elemental forces and phenomena of nature, sky, thunder, the sea, the forests-we have the beginnings of departmental deities, such as Agni, god of fire; Poseidon, god of the sea; Zeus, god of the sky-though in recent theories Zeus appears to be regarded as primarily the god of the oak tree, a spirit of vegetation. On this theory animism, the doctrine of spirits, is the source of all belief in gods. But it is found that among the lowest or least cultured races, such as the south-eastern tribes of Australia, who do not propitiate ancestral spirits by offerings of food, or address them in prayer, there often exists a belief in an "All-Father," to use Howitt's convenient expression. This being cannot have been evolved out of the cult of ancestors, where ancestors are not worshipped; and he is not even regarded as a spirit, but, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, as a magnified non-natural man." He existed before death came into the world, and he still exists. His home is in potent magic-worker; endowed mankind with such arts and instituor above the sky, but there was a time when he walked the earth, a tions as they possess; and left to them certain rules of life, ethics and ritual. Often he is regarded as the maker of things, or of most from disobedient sons of his, whom he cast out of heaven. Very things, and of mankind; or mankind are his children, descended frequently he is the judge of souls, and sends the good and bad to their own places of reward and punishment. He is usually supposed to watch over human conduct, but this is by no means invariably the case. Sometimes he, like the Atnatu of the Kaitish tribe of central Australia, is only vigilant in matters of ritual, such as circumcision, subincision and the use of the sacred bull-roarer, the Greek pouẞos. As an almost universal rule, in the lowest culture, no prayers are addressed to this being; he has no sacrifices, no dwelling made with hands; and the images of him, in clay, that are made and danced round with invocations of his name at the tribal cereIf the name of "god" is denied to such beings because they receive monies of initiation, are destroyed at the close of the performances. little cult, it may still be admitted that the belief might easily develop into a form of theism, independent of and underived from animism, or the ghost theory. The best account of this All-Father belief in the lowest culture is to be read in R. Howitt's Native Races of South-East Australia. Under the names of Baiame, Pundjel, Mulkari, Daramulun and many others, the south-eastern tribes (both those Australlan who reckon descent in the female and those who reckon Savages. attributes varying in various communities. by the male line) have this faith in an All-Father, the The most highly developed All-Father is the Baiame or Byamee of the Euahlayi tribe of north-western New South Wales, to whom prayers for the welfare of the souls of the dead are, or recently were, addressed-the tribe dwelling a hundred miles away from the nearest missionary station (Protestant). In the centre of Australia, Atnatu, self-created, is known, as has been said, to the Kaitish tribe, next neighbours of the Arunta of the Macdonnell Hills. Among the Arunta, Mr Strehlow (Globus, May 1907) finds such a being as Atnatu, and also among some other adjacent tribes, as the Luritja. See, too, Strehlow and von Leonhardi, in Veröffentlichungen aus dem städtischen Völker-Museum (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1907, vol. i.). But Messrs B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, who discovered Atnatu, did not find any trace of an and north-east of the centre. Mr Strehlow's branch of the Arunta All-Father among the Arunta, or any other of the tribes to the north they did not examine. It is plain that the All-Father belief, in favourable circumstances, especially if ghost worship remained undeveloped, might be evolved spirit worship has sprung up and choked the All-Father, who, howinto theism. But all over the savage world, especially in Africa, ever, in most savage regions, abides as a name, receiving no sacrifice, and, save among the Masai, seldom being addressed in prayer. given in Lang's The Making of Religion (1898). Since the publicaA list of such otiose great beings in the background of religion is tion of that book much additional evidence has accrued from Africa and Melanesia, where the belief occurs in a few islands, but, in the majority, is absent or unrecorded. Most of the fresh evidence is given in La Notion de l'être suprême chez les peuples non-civilisés, by René Hoffmann (Geneva, 1907). See also the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (1899-1907), vols. xxix.. xxxii., xxxiv., xxxv., and the works of Miss Mary Kingsley, and Spieth, Die EweStamme, Reimer (Berlin, 1906), and Sundermann in Warneck's Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift, vol. xi. An excellent statement is that of Père Schmidt, S.V.D., in Anthropos, Bd. III., Hit. 3 (1908), pp. 559-611. Tylor's efforts to show that these All-Fathers were derived from missionary or other European influences (Nineteenth 'See Mrs Langloh Parker's The Euahlayi Tribe. Century, 1892) have not been successful (see Lang, Magic and Religion, "The Theory of Loan Gods ") and N.W.Thomas in Man (1905), v., 49 et seq. The All-Father belief is most potent among the lowest races, and always tends to become obsolete under the competition of serviceable ancestral spirits, or gods made in the image of such spirits, who can be bribed by sacrifices or induced by prayers to help man in his various needs. The belief in the All-Father in south-eastern Australia is concealed from the women and children who, at most, know his exoteric name, often meaning Our Father," and is revealed only to the initiate, among whom are a very few white men, like Howitt. Mrs Langloh Parker, of course, was not initiated (indeed, no white man has gone through the actual and very painful rites), but confidences were made to her with great secrecy. The All-Father, even at his best, among the Kurnai, Kamilaroi and Euahlayi, is the centre of many grotesque and sportive myths. He usually has a wife and children, not in all cases born, but rather they are emanations. One of these children is often his mediator with men, and has the charge of the rites and the mystic bull-roarer. The relation is that of Apollo to Zeus in Greek myth. poetic romances appear to have the same origin and shade away into the fairies. The baser Greek myths of the wanderings, amours and adventures of the gods, myths ignored by Homer, are parallel to the adventures of the Alcheringa people, and the fable of the mutilation of Osiris and the search for the lost organ by Isis, actually occurs among the Alcheringa tales of Messrs Spencer and Gillen. Among the Arunta, the Alcheringa folk are part of a strangely elaborate theory of evolution and of animism, which leaves no room for a creative being, or for a future life of the spirit, which is merely reincarnated at intervals. Thus the doctrines of evolution and of creation, or the making of things, stand apart, or blend, in the metaphysics and religion of the lowest and least progressive of known peoples. The question as to which theory came first, whether Alcheringaism is a scientific effort that swept away All-Fatherism, or whether All-Fatherism is a religious reaction in despair of science and of the evolutionary doctrine, is settled by each inquirer in accordance with his personal bias. It has been argued that All-Fatherism is an advance, conditioned by coastal influences-more rain and more food-concomitant with a social advance to individual marriage, and reckoning of kin in the male line. But tribes far from the sea, as in northern New South Wales and Queensland, have the All-Father belief, with individual marriage and female descent, while tribes of the north coast, with male descent, are credited with no All-Father; and the Arunta, as far as possible from the sea, have no All-Father (save in Strehlow's district), and have individual marriage and male reckoning of descent in matters of inheritance; while the Urabunna and Dieri, with female descent and the custom of pirrauru (called "group marriage" by Howitt), are not credited with the All-Father belief. Thus coastal conditions have clearly no causal influence on the development of the All-Father belief. If they had, the natives of All-Father (Mulkari), and the natives of the northern and northeastern coasts should have an All-Father, who is still to seek. The Arunta of Messrs Spencer and Gillen may have possessed and deposed the Altjira superior being of the Arunta known to Mr Strehlow, like the Atnatu of the adjacent Kaitish, or the All-Father of the neighbouring Luritja; or these beings may be more recent divergences of doctrine, departures from pure Alcheringaism with no AllFather. At present, at least, it is premature to dogmatize on these problems. The chief being among the supernatural characters of Bushman mythology is the insect called the Mantis.2 Cagn or Ikaggen, the Mantis, is sometimes regarded with religious respect as a benevolent god. But his adventures are the merest nightmares of puerile fancy. He has a wife, an adopted daughter, whose real father is the "swallower "in Bushman swallow. ing myths, and the daughter has a son, who is the Ichneumon. The Mantis made an eland out of the shoe of his son-in-law. The moon was also created by the Mantis out of his shoc, and it is red, because the shoe was covered with the red dust of Bushman-land. The Mantis is defeated in an encounter with a cat which happened to be singing a song about a lynx. The Mantis (like Poseidon, Hades, Metis and other Greek gods) was once swallowed, but disgorged alive. The swallower was the monster Ilkhwäi-hemm. Like Heracles when he leaped into the belly of the monster which was about to swallow Hesione, the Mantis once jumped down the throat of a hostile elephant, and so destroyed him. The heavenly bodies are gods among the Bushmen, but their nature and adventures must be discussed among other myths of sun, moon and stars. As a creator Cagn is sometimes said to have "given orders, and caused all things to appear to be made." He struck snakes with his staff and turned them into men, as Zeus did with the ants in Aegina. But the Bushmen's mythical theory of the origin of things must, as far as possible, be kept apart from the fables of the Mantis, the Ichneumon and other divine beings. Though animals, these gods have human passions and character, and possess the usual magical powers attributed to sorcerers. African Many of the wilder myths are the expressions of the sportive and humorous faculties. Some arise naturally thus: Baiame, say, originated everything, therefore he originated the grotesque mummeries and dances of the mysteries. To explain these, myths have been developed to show that they arose in some grotesque incident of Baiame's personal existence on earth. Many Greek myths, most derogatory to the dignity of Demeter, Dionysus, Zeus or Hera, arose in the same way, as explanations of buffooneries in the Eleusinian or other mysteries. In medieval literature the most sacred persons of our religion have grotesque associations attached to them in the same manner. While the All-Father belief is common in the tribes of south-central Queensland, remote from the sea, should not have their eastern Australia, the tribes round Lake Eyre, the Arunta (as known to Messrs Spencer and Gillen), and the other central and northern tribes, are credited with no germs of belief in what is called a supreme, and may truly be styled a superior being. That being, in many cases, but not so commonly in Australia, has a malevolent opposite who thwarts his work, an Ahriman to his Ormuzd. In one district, where the superior being is a crow, his opposite is an eagle-hawk. These two birds in many tribes give names to the two great exogamous and intermarrying divisions; in their case there is a va el vient of divine, human and theriomorphic elements, just as in the Greek myths of Zeus. As a rule, however, the Australian AllFather is anthropomorphic, and fairly well described in the native term when they speak English as "the Big Man," powerful, deathless, friendly," able to go everywhere and do everything," to see whatever you do." The existence of the belief in this being was accepted by T. Waitz, and, though disputed by many squatters and most anthropologists, is now admitted on the strength of the evidence of Howitt, Cameron, Mrs Langloh Parker, Dawson, W. E. Roth in Ethnological Studies, and many other close observers. The belief being esoteric, a secret of the initiated, necessarily escaped casual inquirers. Meanwhile, among some of the Arunta of the centre, among the Dieri and Urabunna tribes near Lake Eyre and their congeners, and among the tribes north by east of the Arunta, no such belief has been discovered by Messrs Spencer and Gillen, from whom the tribes kept no secrets, or by Mr Siebert, a missionary among the now all but extinct Dieri. There is just a trace of a dim sky-dwelling being, Arawotja, possibly an all but obliterated survival of an AllFather. Howitt speaks too of the Dieri Kutchi, who inspires medicine-men with ideas, but about him our information is scanty. Among all these tribes religion now takes another line, the belief in a supernormal race of Titanic beings, with no superior, who were the first dwellers on earth; who possessed powers far exceeding those of the medicine-men of to-day; and who, in one way or another, were connected with, or developed from, the totem animals,vegetables and other objects. These beings modified the face of the country; in Arunta belief rocks and trees arose to mark the places where they finally "went into the ground" (Oknanikilla), and their spirits still haunt certain places such as these; and are reincarnated in native women who pass by. These beings, in Arunta called the people of the Alcheringa, or dream time" (but cf. Strehlow in Globus, ut supra), originated the tribal rites of initiation. In Dieri they are called Mura-Mura, and to them prayers are made for rain, accompanied by rain-making magic ceremonies, which in this case may be a symbolical expression of the prayers. There is a large body of myths about the Alcheringa folk, or Mura-Mura (see. Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, Native Tribes of Northern Australia, and Howitt, Native Tribes of SouthEastern Australia), and the myths of their wanderings, prodigies and institution of rites and magic are represented in the dances of the mysteries. Most of the magic is worked (Intichiuma in Arunta) by the members of cach totem kin or group for the behoof of the totem as an article of food supply. These rites are common in North America, but are worked by members of gilds or societies, not by totem kins. The belief in these Mura-Mura or Alcheringa folk may obviously develop, in favourable circumstances, into a polytheism like that of Greece, or of Egypt, or of the Maoris. The old Irish gods in the Concerning the mythology of the Hottentots and Namas, we have a great deal of information in a book named Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi (1881), by Dr T. Hahn. This author collected the old notices of Hottentot myths, and added material from his own researches. The chief god of the Hottentots is a being named Tsuni-Goam, who is universally regarded by his worshippers as a deceased sorcerer. According to one old believer, Tsui-Goab (an alternative reading of the god's name) was a great powerful chief of the Khoi-Khoi-in fact, he was the first Khoi-Khoib from whom all the Khoi-Khoi tribes took their name." He is always " The drawback to knowledge is the rarity of full acquaintance with native languages. Strehlow, Roth and Ridley seem best equipped on the linguistic side. Spencer and Gillen do not tell us that they have a colloquial knowledge of any Australian language. Gason, author of a work on the Dieri tribe, knew their language well, but several of his statements appear to be inaccurate. Mrs Langloh Parker describes her methods of checking and controlling native statements made in English. Accounts of the Mantis and of his performances will be found in the Cape Monthly Magazine (July 1874), and in Dr Bleek's Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore. " | represented as at war (in the usual crude dualism of savages) with another chief named Gaunab. The prayers addressed to TsuiGoab are simple and natural in character, the" private ejaculations of men in moments of need or distress. As usual, religion is more advanced than mythology. It appears that, by some accounts, Tsui-Goab lives in the red sky and Gaunab in the dark sky. The neighbouring race of Namas have another old chief for god, a being called Heitsi Eibib. His graves are shown in many places, like those of Osiris, which, says Plutarch, abounded in Egypt. He is propitiated by passers-by at his sepulchres. He has intimate relations in peace and war with a variety of animals whose habits are sometimes explained (like those of the serpent in Genesis) as the result of the curse of Heitsi Fibib. Heitsi Eibib was born in a mysterious way from a cow, as Inura in the Black Yajur Veda entered into and was born from the womb of a being who also bore a cow. The Rig-Veda (iv. 18, 1) remarks, " His mother, a cow, bore Indra, an unlicked calf "-probably a metaphorical way of speaking. Heitsi Eibib, like countless other gods and heroes, is also said to have been the son of a virgin who tasted a particular plant, and so became pregnant, as in the German and Gallophrygian märchen of the almond tree, given by Grimm and Pausanias. Incest is one of the feats of Heitsi Eibib. Tsui-Goab, in the opinion of his worshippers, as we have seen, is a deified dead sorcerer, whose name means Wounded Knee, the sorcerer having been injured in the knee by an enemy. Dr Hahn tries to prove (by, philology's "artful aid ") that the name really means "red dawn," and is a Hottentot way of speaking of the infinite. The philological arguments advanced are extremely weak, and by no means convincing. If we grant, however, for the sake of argument, that the early Hottentots worshipped the infinite under the figure of the dawn, and that, by forgetting their own meaning, they came to believe that the words which really meant "red dawn" meant "wounded knee" we must still admit that the devout have assigned to their deity all the attributes of an ancestral sorcerer. In short, their Red Dawn," if red dawn he be, is a person, and a savage person, adored exactly as the actual fathers and grandfathers of the Hottentots are adored. We must explain this legend, then, on these principles, and not as an allegory of the dawn as the dawn appears to civilized people. About Gaunab (the Ahriman to Tsui-Goab's Ormuzd) Dr Hahn gives two distinct opinions. Gaunab was at first a ghost, a mischief-maker and evil-doer " (op. cit. p. 85). But Gaunab he declares to be "the night-sky" (p. 126). Whether we regard Gaunab, Heitsi Eibib and Tsui-Goab as originally mythological representations of natural phenomena, or as deified dead men, it is plain that they are now venerated as non-natural human beings, possessing the customary attributes of sorcerers. Thus of Tsui-Goab it is said, "He could do wonderful things which no other man could do, because he was very wise. He could tell what would happen in future times. He died several times, and several times he rose again" (statement of old Kxarab in Hahn, p. 61). The mythology of the Zulus as reported by H. Callaway (Unkülunkūlu, 1868-1870) is very thin and uninteresting. The Zulus are great worshippers of ancestors (who appear to men in the form of snakes), and they regard a being called Unkulunkulu as their first ancestor, and sometimes as the creator, or at least as the maker of men. It does not appear they identify Unkulunkulu, as a rule, with "the lord of heaven," who, like Indra, causes the thunder. The word answering to our lord is also applied," even to beasts, as the lion and the boa." The Zulus, like many distant races, sometimes attribute thunder to the "thunder-bird," which, as in North America, is occasionally seen and even killed by men. is said to have a red bill, red legs and a short red tail like fire. The bird is boiled for the sake of the fat, which is used by the heavendoctors to puff on their bodies, and to anoint their lightning-rods." The Zulus are so absorbed in propitiating the shades of their dead (who, though in serpentine bodies, have human dispositions) that they appear to take little pleasure in mythological narratives. At the same time, the Zulus have many "nursery tales," the plots and incidents of which often bear the closest resemblance to the heroic myths of Greece, and to the märchen of European peoples. These indications will give a general idea of African divine myths. On the west coast the "ananzi "or spider takes the place of the mantis insect among the Bushmen. For some of his exploits Dasent's Tales from the Norse (2nd ed., Appendix) may be consulted. For South African religion see Lang. Magic and Religion; Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind; Junod, Les Barotsa; Spieth, Die Ewe-Stamme; Frazer, The Golden Bough. Turning from the natives of Australia, and from African races of various degrees of culture, to the Papuan inhabitants of Melanesia, we find that mythological ideas are scarcely on a higher Melanesian level. An excellent account of the myths of the Banks Savages. Islanders and Solomon Islanders was given in Journ. Anthropol. Inst. (Feb. 1881) by the Rev. R. H. Codrington. The article contains a critical description of the difficulty with which missionaries obtain information about the prior creeds. The people of the "It These are collected by Callaway, Zulu Nursery Tales (1868). Similar Kafir stories, also closely resembling the popular fictions of European races, have been published by Theal. Many other examples are published in the South African Folk-Lore Journal (1879, 1880). Banks Islands are chiefly ancestor-worshippers, but they also believe in, and occasionally pray to, a being named I Qat, one of the prehuman race endowed with supernatural powers who here, as elsewhere, do duty as gods. Here is an example of a prayer to Qat―the devotee is supposed to be in danger with his canoe: "Qate! Marawa! look down on me, smooth the sea for us two that I may go safely on the sea. Beat down for me the crests of the tide-rip; let the tide-rip settle down away from me, beat it down level that it may sink and roll away, and I may come to a quiet landing-place." Compare the prayer of Odysseus to the river, whose mouth he had reached after three days' swimming on the tempestuous sea. "Hear me, O king, whosoever thou art, unto thee I am come as to one to whom prayer is made... nay, pity me, O king, for I avow myself thy suppliant.' So spake he, and the god stayed his stream, and withheld his waves, and made the water smooth before him" (Odyssey v. 450). The prayer of the Melanesian is on rather a higher religious level than that of the Homeric hero. The myths of Qat's adventures, however, are very crude, though not so wild as some of the Scandinavian myths about Odin and Loki, while they are less immoral than the adventures of Indra and Zeus. Qat was born in the isle of Vanua Levu; his mother was either a stone at the time of his birth, or was turned into a stone afterwards, like Niobe. The mother of Apollo, according to Aelian, had the misfortune to be changed into a wolf. Qat had eleven brothers, not much more reputable than the Osbaldistones in Rob Roy. The youngest brother was "Tangaro Loloqong, the Fool." His pastime was to make wrong all that Qat made right, and he is sometimes the Ahriman to Qat's Ormuzd. The creative achievements of Qat must be treated of in the next section. Here it may be mentioned that, like the hero in the Breton märchen, Qat "brought the dawn" by introducing birds whose notes proclaimed the coming of morning. Before Qat's time there had been no night, but he purchased a sufficient allowance of darkness from I Qong, that is, night considered as a person in accordance with the law of savage thought already explained. Night is a person in Greek mythology, and in the fourteenth book of the Iliad we read that Zeus abstained from punishing Sleep "because he feared to offend swift Night." Qat produced dawn, for the first time, by cutting the darkness with a knife of red obsidian. Afterwards "the fowls and birds showed the morning." On one occasion an evil power (Vui) slew all Qat's brothers, and hid them in a food-chest. As in the common "swallowing-myths ' which we have met among bushmen and Australians, and will find among the Grecks, Qat restored his brethren to life. Qat is always accompanied by a powerful supernatural spider named Marawa. He first made Marawa's acquaintance when he was cutting down a tree for a canoe. Every night (as in the common European story about bridge-building and church-building) the work was all undone by Marawa, whom Qat found means to conciliate. In all his future adventures the spider was as serviceable as the cat in Puss in Boots or the other grateful animals in European legend. Qat's great enemy, Qasavara, was dashed against the hard sky, and was turned into stone, like the foes of Perseus. The stone is still shown in Vanua Levu, like the stone which was Zeus in Laconia. Qat, like so many other "culture-heroes," disappeared mysteriously, and white men arriving in the island have been mistaken for Qat. His departure is sometimes connected with the myth of the deluge. In the New Hebrides, Tagar takes the rôle of Qat, and Suqe of the bad principle, Loki, Ahriman, Tangaro Loloqong, the Australian Crow and so forth. These are the best known divine myths of the Melanesians. For their All-Fathers see Holmes, J. A. I., vol. xxxv., and O'Farrell, J. A. I., vol. xxxiv., with Sundermann in Warneck's Allgemeine Missionszeitschrift, vol. xi. 1884. American Savages, It is a far cry " from Vanua Levu to Vancouver Island, and, ethnologically, the Ahts of the latter region are extremely remote from the Papuans with their mixture of Malay and Polynesian blood. The Ahts, however, differ but little in their mythological beliefs from the races of the Banks Islands or of the New Hebrides. In Sproat's Scenes from Savage Life (1868) there is a good account of Aht opinions by a settler who had won the confidence of the natives between 1860 and 1868. "There is no end to the stories which an old Indian will relate," says Mr Sproat, when "one quite possesses his confidence." "The first Indian who ever lived" is a divine being, something of a creator, something of a first father, like Unkulunkulu among the Zulus. His name is Quawteaht. He married a pre-existent bird, the thunderbird Tootah (we have met him among the Zulus), and by the bird he became the father of Indians. Wispohahp is the Aht Noah, who, with his wife, his two brothers and their wives escaped from the deluge in a canoe. Quawteaht is inferior as a deity to the Sun and Moon. He is the Yama of an Aht paradise, or home of the dead, where "everything is beautiful and abundant." From all that is told of Quawtcaht he seems to be an ideal and powerful Aht, imaginatively placed at the beginning of things, and quite capable of intermarriage with a bird. His creative exploits must be considered later. Quawtcaht is the Aht Prometheus Purphoros, or fire-stealer. Passing down the American continent from the north-west, we find Yehl the chief hero-god and mythical personage among the Tlingits. Like many other heroes or gods, Yehl had a miraculous birth. His mother, a Tlingit woman, whose sons had all been slain, met a friendly dolphin, which advised her to swallow a pebble and a little sea-water. The birth of Yehl was the result. In his youth he shot a supernatural crane, and can always fly about in its feathers, like Odin and Loki in Scandinavian myth. He is usually, however, regarded as a raven, and holds the same relation to men and the world as the eagle-hawk Pund-jel does in Australia. His great opponent (for the eternal dualism comes in) is Khanukh, who is a wolf, and the ancestor or totem of the wolf-race of men as Yehl is of the raven. The opposition between the Crow and Eagle-hawk in Australia will be remembered. Both animals or men or gods take part in creation. Yehl is the Prometheus Purphoros of the Tlingits, but myths of the fire-stealer would form matter for a separate section. Yehl also stole water, in his bird-shape, exactly as Odin stole "Suttung's mead" when in the shape of an eagle.1 Yehl's powers of metamorphosis and of flying into the air are the common accomplishments of sorcerers, and he is a rather crude form of first father, culture-hero" and creator. Among the Karok Indians we find the great hero and divine benefactor in the shape of, not a raven, nor an eagle-hawk, nor a mantis insect, nor a spider, but a coyote. Among both Karok and Navaho the coyote is the Prometheus Purphoros, or, as the Aryans of India call him, Matarisvan the fire-stealer. Among the Papagos, on the eastern side of the Gulf of California, the coyote or prairie wolf is the creative hero and chief supernatural being. In Oregon the coyote is also the "demiurge," but most of the myths about him refer to his creative exploits, and will be more appropriately treated in the next section." Moving up the Pacific coast to British Columbia, we find the musk-rat taking the part played by Vishnu, when in his avatar as a boar he fished up the earth from the waters. Among the Tinneh a miraculous dog, who, like an enchanted fairy prince, could assume the form of a handsome young man, is the chief divine being of the myths. He too is chiefly a creative or demiurgic being, answering to Purusha in the Rig Veda. So far the peculiar mark of the wilder American tribe legends is the bestial character of the divine beings, which is also illustrated in Australia and Africa, while the bestial clothing, feathers or fur, drops but slowly off Indra, Zeus and the Egyptian Ammon, and the Scandinavian Odin. All these are more or less anthropomorphic, but retain, as will be seen, numerous relics of a theriomorphic condition. See C. Hill-Tout and F. Boas in various publications, and, generally, the volumes of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, U.S.A. For Ti-ra-wa, "the Ruler of the Universe," also styled A-ti-us, "father," among the Pawnees, see G. B. Grinnell, Pawnee Hero Stories (1893). Maori and Polynesian Beliefs.-Passing from the lower savage myths, of which space does not permit us to offer a larger selection, we turn to races in the upper strata of barbarism. Among these the Maoris of New Zealand, and the Polynesian people generally, are remarkable for a mythology largely intermixed with early attempts at more philosophical speculation. The Maoris and Mangaians, and other peoples, have had speculators among them not very far removed from the mental condition of the earliest Greek philosophers, Empedocles, Anaximander, and the rest. In fact the process from the view of nature which we call personalism to the crudest theories of the physicists was apparently begun in New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans. In Maori mythology it is more than usually difficult to keep apart the origin of the world and the origin and nature of the gods. Long traditional hymns give an account of the "becoming out of nothing" which resulted in the evolution of the gods and the world. In the beginning (as in the Greek myths of Uranus and Gaea), Heaven (Rangi, conceived of as a person) was indissolubly united to his wife Earth (Papa), and between them they begat gods which necessarily dwelt in darkness. These gods were some in vegetable, some in animal form; some traditions place among these gods Tiki the demiurge, who (like Prometheus) made men out of clay. The offspring of Rangi and Papa (kept in the dark as they were) held a council to determine how they should treat their parents, "Shall we slay them, or shall we separate them?" In the Hesiodic fable, Cronus separates the heavenly pair by mutilating his oppressive father Uranus. Among the Maoris the god Tutenganahan cut the sinews which united Earth and Heaven, and Tane Mahuta wrenched them apart, and kept them eternally asunder. The new dynasty now had earth to themselves, but Tawhiramatea, the wind, abode aloft with his father. Some of the gods were in the forms of lizards and fishes; some went to the land, some to the water. As among the gods and Asuras of the Vedas, there were many wars in the divine race, and as the incantations of the Indian Brahmanas are derived from those old experiences of the Vedic gods, so are the incantations of the Maoris. The gods of New Zealand, the greater gods at least, may be called "departmental "; each person who is an elementary force is also the god of that force. As Te Heu, a powerful chief, said, there is division of labour among men, and so there is among gods. "One made this, another that; Tane made trees, Ru mountains, Tanga-roa fish, and so forth." 3 The departmental arrangement prevails among the polytheism of civilized peoples, Dasent, Bragi's Telling: Younger Edda, p. 94. * Bancroft, vol. iv. " • Taylor, New Zealand, p. 108 and is familiar to all from the Greek examples. Leaving the high gods whose functions are so large, while their forms (as of lizard, fish and tree) are often so mean, we come to Maui, the great divine hero of the supernatural race in Polynesia. Maui in some respects answers to the chief of the Adityas in Vedic mythology; in others he answers to Qat, Quawteaht, and other savage divine personages. Like the son of the Vedic Aditi, Maui is a rejected and abortive child of his mother, but afterwards attains to the highest reputation. As Qat brought the hitherto unknown night, so Maui settled the sun and moon in their proper courses. He induced the sun to move orderly by giving him a violent beating. A similar feat was performed by the Sun-trapper, a famous Red Indian chief. These tales belong properly to the department of solar myths. Maui himself is thought by E. B. Tylor to be a myth of the sun, but the sun could hardly give the sun a drubbing. Maui slew monsters, invented barbs for fish-hooks, frequently adopted the form of various birds, acted as Prometheus Purphoros the fire-stealer, drew a whole island up from the bottom of the deep; he was a great sorcerer and magician. Had Maui succeeded in his attempt to pass through the body of Night (considered as a woman) men would have been immortal. But a little bird which sings at sunset wakened Night, she snapped up Maui, and men die. This has been called a myth of sunset, but the sun does what Maui failed to do, he passes through the body of Night unharmed. The adventure is one of the myths of the origin of death, which are almost universally diffused. Maui, though regarded as a god, is not often addressed in prayer. The whole system, as far as it can be called a system, of Maori mythology is obviously based on the savage conceptions of the world which have already been explained. The Polynesian system differs mainly in detail; we have the separation of heaven and earth, the animal-shaped gods, the fire-stealing, the exploits of Maui, and scores of minor myths in W. W. Gill's Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, in the researches of W. Ellis, of Williams, in G. Turner's Polynesia, and in many other accessible works. Mexican and Peruvian Beliefs.-The Maoris and other Polynesian peoples are perhaps the best examples of a race which has risen far above the savagery of Bushmen and Australians, but has not yet arrived at the stage in which great centralized monarchies appear. The Mexican and Peruvian civilizations were far ahead of Maori culture, in so far as they possessed the elements of a much more settled and highly-organized society. Their religion had its fine lucid intervals, but their mythology and ritual were little better than savage ideas, elaborately worked up by the imagination of a cruel and superstitious priesthood. In cruelty the Aztecs surpassed perhaps all peoples of the Old World, except certain Semitic stocks, and their gods, of course, surpassed almost all other gods in bloodthirstiness. But in grotesque and savage points of faith the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Vedic Indians ran even the Aztecs pretty close. 44 Bernal Diaz, the old "conquistador," has described the hideous aspect of the idols which Cortes destroyed, "idols in the shape of hideous dragons as big as calves," idols half in the form of men, half of dogs, and serpents which were worshipped as divine. The old contemporary missionary Sahagun has left one of the earliest detailed accounts of the natures and myths of these gods, but, though Sahagun took great pains in collecting facts, his speculations must be accepted with caution. He was convinced (like Caxton in his Destruction of Troy, and like St Augustine) that the heathen gods were only dead men worshipped. Ancestor-worship is a great force in early religion, and the qualities of dead chiefs and sorcerers are freely attributed to gods, but it does not follow that each god was once a real man, as Sahagun supposes. Euemerism cannot be judiciously carried so far as this. Of Huitzilopochtli, the famed god, Sahagun says that he was a necromancer, loved shapeshifting," like Odin, metamorphosed himself into animal forms, was miraculously conceived, and, among animals, is confused with the humming-bird, whose feathers adorned his statues." This humming-bird god should be compared with the Roman Picus (Servius, 189). That the humming-bird (Nuitziton), which was the god's old shape, should become merely his attendant (like the owl of Pallas, the mouse of Apollo, the goose of Priapus, the cuckoo of Hera), when the god received anthropomorphic form, is an example of a process common in all mythologies.. Plutarch observes that the Greeks, though accustomed to the conceptions of the animal attendants of their own gods, were amazed when they found animals worshipped as gods by the Egyptians. Müller mentions the view that the humming-bird, as the most beautiful flying thing, is a proper symbol of the heaven, and so of the heaven-god, Huitzilopochtli. This vein of symbolism is so easy to work that it must be regarded with distrust. Perhaps it is safer to attribute theriomorphic shapes of Rig Veda, x. 72, 1, 8; Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv. 13, where the fable from the Satapatha-Brahmana is given. The best authorities for the New Zealand myths are the old traditional priestly hymns, collected and translated in the works of Sir George Grey, in Taylor's New Zealand, in Shortland's Traditions of New Zealand (1857), in Bastian's Heilige Sage der Polynesier, and in White's Ancient History of the Maori, i. 8-13. See also Bancroft, iii. 288-290, and Acosta, pp. 352-361. |