Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/160

148 MYTHOLOGY 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 inci dents of which often bear the closest resemblance to the heroic myths of Greece, and to the marchen 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 (2d ed., Appendix) may be consulted. Turning from the natives of Australia, and from African races of various degrees of culture, to the Papuan inhabit ants of Melanesia, we find that mythological ideas are scarcely on a higher level. There is an excellent account of the myths of the Banks Islanders and Solomon Islanders in Journ. Anthropol. Inst. (February 1881), by the Rev. R. H. Codrington. The article contains a critical descrip tion of the difficulty with which missionaries obtain infor mation 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, 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 ./Elian, 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 marchen, 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 1 These are collected by Ca.lla.va.y, Zulu Nursery Tales, 1868. Simi lar Kaffre stories, also closely resembling the popular fictions of Euro pean races, have been published by Theal. Many other examples are published in the South African Folk-Lore Journal, 1879, 1880. 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 acquaint ance 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 role 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, and it is obvious that such gods as exist there are magnified non-natural men or animals with the powers of sorcerers. So far there seems to be no good reason for connecting the gods (if gods they can be called) with the elemental phenomena. It is " a far cry " from Vanua Levu to Vancouver s 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 Unkulunkxilu 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 inter marriage with a bird. His creative exploits must be con sidered 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 per sonage among the Thlinkeets. Like many other heroes or gods, Yehl had a miraculous birth. His mother, a Thlinkeet 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 Scandi-