Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/158

146 MYTHOLOGY so exhaustively treated by Mr Tylor in his Primitive Cul ture, and the evidence so fully set forth, that we need do little more than set on record the general facts. With the savage natural death is not a universal and inevitable ordinance. " All men must die " is a generalization which he has scarcely reached ; in his philosophy the proposition is more like this, " all men who die die by violence." A .natural death is explained as the result of a sorcerer s spirit- ual violence, and the disease is attributed to magic, or to the action of hostile spirits. After death the man survives as a spirit, sometimes taking an animal form, sometimes invisible, sometimes to be observed "in his habit as he lived." As to the origin of the belief in the continued existence and activity of the dead, the current theories will be found in the article APPARITIONS. The philosophy is shortly put in the speech of Achilles (Iliad, xxiii. 103) after he has beheld the dead Patroclus in a dream : "Ay me, there remaineth then even in the house of Hades a spirit and phantom of the dead, for all night long hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and making moan." It is almost superfluous to quote here the voluminous evidence for the intercourse with spirits which savage chiefs and medicine men are believed to maintain. They can call up ghosts, or can go to the ghosts, in Australia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, North America, Zulu-land, among the Eskimo, and generally in every quarter of the globe. The men who enjoy this power are the same as they who can change themselves and others into animals. They too command the weather, and, says an old French missionary, " are regarded as very Jupiters, having in their hands the lightning and the thunder " (Relations, loc. cit.). They make good or bad seasons, and control the vast animals who, among ancient Persians and Aryans of India, as among Zulus and Iroquois, are supposed to grant or withhold the rain, and to thunder with their enormous wings in the region of the clouds. 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, (6) other magical powers, such as control over the weather. 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 pre-existent 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 non- natural men," in short. And such are the gods of mytho logy. In examining the myths of the gods we propose to begin with the conceptions of the most backward tribes, and to advance to the divine legends of the ancient civil ized 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. The Boo-noo-rong, an Australian coast-tribe, regard as an early creative god a being named Bun-jel or Pund-jel. He is the chief of a supernatural set of beings, earlier than men, with human relationships. He has a wife whose face (in accordance with a widely-diffused scruple of savage etiquette) he has never seen, any more than Urvasi in the Vedic myth was allowed to see Pururavas without his garments, " for such is the custom " (says the Veda) " of women." The name Bun-jel means "eagle-hawk," and the eagle-hawk is a " totem," or worshipful ancestral animal, among certain Australian tribes. Conceived as a supernatural bird-god, Pund-jel answers to the birds as they describe themselves in Aristophanes (Aves, 703) He belongs to the age of birds, "altogether wiser and more skilful in all things than men," " by far the most ancient of all gods." In an anthropomorphic myth of the Kurnai, Pund-jel figures as "an old man who lives at the sources of the Yarra river" and is rich in cattle. The term Bun-jel is also used as a kind of title of honour be stowed on the older men of the Kurnai and Briakolung, some of whom have magical powers. In the northern parts of Victoria the aborigines believe in Pund-jel in his bird-form as a creative Eagle. Pund-jel takes the part, not only of a creator, but of an instructor a "culture-hero," to use a fashionable compound term. He instructed man in the arts of life, taught the males how to spear kangaroos, and the women how to dig roots. Pund-jel disappeared from the world he had made when a rival power, the Jay, opened certain great bags of wind he possessed, and blew Pund-jel into the heavens. The Australians draw no very hard-and-fast line between their "birraarks," or sorcerers, and their gods. The Kurnai give the name of Brewin to a powerful spirit, but the name was also conferred on a birraark who disappeared for many days, holding converse with the invisible. The native bear is a beast they adore, and they have given his name to a famous sorcerer. The West Wind is the name of a human sorcerer who happens to be able to make the west wind blow with violence. There is thus a come and go of titles, powers, and attributes be tween sorcerers, totems, and vague powerful spirits, and in this medley of beliefs a god may have the form of a bird, a man the attributes of a god, so that every sort of irrational transformation is not only not unnatural but is inevitable in such a system. The basis of that system,