represented as at war (in the usual crude dualism of savages) with
“another chief” named Gaunab. The prayers addressed to Tsui-Goab
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 Eibib. Heitsi Eibib was born in a mysterious
way from a cow, as Indra 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 Kχarab in Hahn, p. 61).
The mythology of the Zulus as reported by H. Callaway (Unkūlunkūlu, 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 Unkūlunkūlu as their first ancestor, and sometimes as the creator, or at least as the maker of men. It does not appear they identify Unkūlunkūlu, 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. “It 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 heaven-doctors 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.[1] 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-Stämme; 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 level. An excellent account of the myths of the Banks Islanders and Solomon Islanders was given in Journ. Anthropol. Inst. (Feb. 1881) by the Rev. R. H. Codrington. The Melanesian Savages. article contains a critical description of the difficulty with which missionaries obtain information about the prior creeds. The people of the 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 Greeks, 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.
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 American Savages. 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 Unkūlunkūlu among the Zulus. His name is Quawteaht. He married a pre-existent bird, the thunder-bird 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 Quawteaht 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. Quawteaht 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
- ↑ 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).
