Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/169

MYTHOLOGY 157 island in the midst of the waters, and this island grew into the world. The Navajos and the Digger Indians take earth for granted as a starting-point in their myths. The Winnebagos, not untouched by Christian doctrine, do not go farther back. The Great Manitou awoke and found himself alone. He took a piece of his body and a piece of earth and made a man. Here the existence of earth is assumed (Bancroft, iv. 228). Even in Guatemala, though the younger sons of a divine race succeed in making the earth where the elder son (as usual) failed, they all had a supply of clay as first material. The Pimas, a Central- American tribe, say the earth was made by a powerful being, and at first appeared "like a spider s web." This reminds one of the Ananzi or spider creator of West Africa. The more metaphysical Tacullies of British Columbia say that in the beginning nought existed but water and a musk-rat. The musk- rat sought his food at the bottom of the water, and his mouth was frequently filled with mud. This he kept spitting out, and so formed an island, which developed into the world. Among the Tinnehs, the frame of a dog (which could assume the form of a handsome young man) became the first material of most things. The dog, like Osiris, Dionysus, Purusha, and other gods, was torn to pieces by giants ; the fragments became many of the things in the world (Bancroft, i. 106). Even here the existence of earth for the dog to live in is assumed. Coming to races more advanced in civilization, we find the New Zealanders in possession of ancient hymns in which the origin of things is traced back to nothing, to darkness, and to a metaphysical process from nothing to something, from being to becoming. The hymns may be read in Sir George Grey s Polynesian Mythology, and in Taylor s New Zealand. It has been suggested that these hymns bear traces of Buddhist and Indian influence ; in any case, they are rather metaphysical than mystical. Myth comes in when the Maoris represent Rangi and Papa, Heaven and Earth, as two vast beings, male and female, united in a secular embrace, and finally severed by their children, among whom Tane Mahuta takes the part of Cronus in the Greek myth. The gods were partly elemental, partly animal in character ; tlie lists of their titles show that every human crime was freely attributed to them. In the South Sea Islands, generally, the fable of the union and separation of Heaven and Earth is current ; other forms will be found in Gill s Myths and Songs from the South Pacific. The Greek cosmogonic myths have already been alluded to in the passage on divine myths in Greece. The cosmogonic myths of the Aryans of India are peculiarly inter esting, as we find in the Vcdas and Brahmanas and Puranas almost every fiction familiar to savages side by side with the most abstract metaphysical speculations. We have the theory that earth grew, as in the Iroquois story of the turtle, from a being named Uttanapad (Muir, v. 335). We find that Brahmanaspati "blew the gods forth from his mouth," and one of the gods, Tvashtri, the mechanic among the deities, is credited with having fashioned the earth and the heaven (Muir, v. 354). The " Purusha Sukta," the 90th hymn of the tenth book of the Rig- Veda, gives us the Indian version of the theory that all things were made out of the mangled limbs of Purusha, a magnified non-natural man, who was sacrificed by the gods. As this hymn gives an account of the origin of the castes (which elsewhere are scarcely recognized in the Rig- Veda), it is sometimes regarded as a late addition. But we can scarcely think the main conception late, as it is so widely scattered that it meets us in most mythologies, including those of Chaldaea and Egypt, and various North-American tribes. Not satisfied with this myth, the Aryans of India accounted for the origin of species in the following barbaric style. A being named Purusha was alone in the world. He differentiated himself into two beings, husband and wife. The wife, regarding union with her producer as incest, fled from his embraces as Nemesis did from those of Zeus, and Rhea from Cronus, assuming various animal disguises. The husband pursued in the form of the male of each animal, and from these unions sprang the various species of beasts (Satapatha-Brahmana, xiv. 4, 2 ; Muir, i. 25). The myth of the cosmic egg from which all things were pro duced is also current in the Brahmanas. In the Puranas we find the legend of many successive creations and destructions of the world a myth of world-wide distribution. As a rule, destruction by a deluge (see DELUGE) is the most favourite myth, but destructions by fire and wind and by the wrath of a god are common in Australian, Peruvian, and Egyptian tradi tion. The idea that a boar, or a god in the shape of a boar, fished up a bit of earth which subsequently became the world out of the waters, is very well known to the Aryans of India, and recalls the feats of American musk-rats and coyotes already described. 1 The tortoise from which all things sprang, in a myth of the Satapatha- Brahmana, reminds us of the Iroquois turtle. The Greek and Mangaian myth of the marriage of Heaven and Earth and its dis solution is found in the Aitarcya-Brahmana (Haug s trans., ii. 308 ; Rig- Veda, i. Ixii.). So much for the Indian cosmogonic myths, which are a collection i Slack Yajur-Veda and Satapatha-Brahmana ; Muir, i. 52. of ideas familiar to savages, blended with sacerdotal theories and ritual mummeries. The philosophical theory of the origin of things, a hymn of remarkable stateliness, is in liig-Veda, x. 129. The Scandinavian cosmogonic myth starts from the abyss, Ginnungagap, a^cbaos of ice, from which, as it thawed, was produced the giant Ymir. Ymir is the Scandinavian Purusha. A man and woman sprang from his armpit, like Athene from the head of Zeus. A cow licked the hoar-frost, whence rose Bur, whose children, Odin, Vile, and Ve, slew the giant Ymir. Of his flesh they formed the earth, of his blood seas and waters, of his bones mountains, of his teeth rocks and stones, of his hair all manner of plants." This is the story in the Prose Edda, derived from older songs, such as the Grimnersmal. However the distribution of this singular myth may be explained, its origin can scarcely be sought in the imagina tion of races higher in culture than the Tinnehs and Tacullies, among whom dogs and beavers are the theriomorphic form of Purusha or Ymir. Mytlis of the Origin of Man. These partake of the conceptions of evolution and of creation. Man was made out of clay by a super natural being. Australia : man was made by Pund-jel. New Zealand : man was made by Tiki ; " he took red clay, and kneaded it with his own blood. " Mangaia : the woman of the abyss made a child from a piece of flesh plucked out of her own side. Melanesia : man was made of clay, red from the marshy side of Vanua Levu ; " woman was made by Qat of willow twigs. Greece : men were TrXdcr/xara TTTjAoO, figures baked in clay by Prometheus. 2 India : men were made after many efforts, in which the experimental beings did not har monize with their environment, by Prajapati. In another class of myths, man was evolved out of the lower animals, lizards in Aus tralia ; coyotes, beavers, apes, and other beasts in America. The Greek myths of the descent of the Arcadians, Myrmidons, children of the swan, the cow, and so forth, may be compared. Yet again, men came out of trees or plants or rocks : as from the Australian wattle gum, the Zulu bed of reeds, the great tree of the Ovahereros, the rock of the tribes in Central Africa, the cave of Bushman and North- American and Peruvian myth, "from tree or stone" (Odyssey, xix. 163). This view was common among the Greeks, who boasted of being autochthonous. The Cephisian marsh was one scene of man s birth according to a fragment of Pindar, who mentions Egyptian and Libyan legends of the same description. Myths of the Arts of Life. These are almost unanimously attri buted to "culture-heroes," beings theriomorphic or anthropomorphic, who, like Pund-jel, Qat, Quawteaht, Prometheus, Manabozho, Quet- zalcoatl, Cagn, and the rest, taught men the use of the bow, the processes (where known) of pottery, agriculture (as Demeter), the due course of the mysteries, divination, and everything else they knew. Commonly the teacher disappears mysteriously. He is often regarded by modern mythologists as the sun. Star Myths. "The stars came otherwise," says Mr Browning s Caliban. In savage and civilized myths they are usually meta morphosed men, women, and beasts. In Australia, the Pleiades, as in Greece, were girls. Castor and Pollux in Greece, as in Australia, were young men. Our Bear was a bear, according to Charlevoix and Lafitau, among the North - American Indians; the Eskimo, according to Egede, who settled the Danish colony in Greenland, regarded the stars "very nonsensically," as "so many of their ancestors ; " the Egyptian priests showed Plutarch the stars that had been Isis and Osiris. Aristophanes, in the Pay, shows us that the belief in the change of men into stars survived in his own day in Greece. The Bushmen (Bleek) have the same opinion. The Salajiatha-Brahmana (Sacred Books of the East, xii. 284) shows how Prajapati, in his incestuous love, turned himself into a roe buck, his daughter into a doe, and how both became constellations. This is a thoroughly good example of the savage myths (as in Peru, according to Acosta) by which beasts and anthropomorphic gods and stars are all jumbled together. 3 The Rig- Veda contains examples of the idea that the good become stars. Solar and Lunar Myths. These are universally found, and are too numerous to be examined here. The sun and moon, as in the Bulgarian ballad of the Sun s Bride (a mortal girl), are looked on as living beings. In Mexico they were two men, or gods of a human character who were burned. The Eskimo know the moon as a man who visits earth, and, again, as a girl who had her face spotted by ashes which the Sun threw at her. The Khasias make the sun a woman, who daubs the face of the moon, a man. The Homeric hymn to Helios, as Mr Max Miiller observes, "looks on the sun as a half-god, almost a hero, who had once lived on earth. " This is precisely the Bushman view ; the sun was a man who irradiated light from his armpit. In New Zealand and in North America the sun is a beast, whom adventurers have trapped and beaten. Medicine has been made with his blood. In the Andaman Islands the Sun is the wife of the Moon (Jour. ofAnth. Soc.,, 1882). Among aboriginal tribes in India (Dalton, p. 186) the Moon is the Sun s bride ; she was faithless and he cut her in two, but occasionally 2 Aristophanes, Aves, 686 ; Etym. Magn., s.v. Jjc6ru. Pausanias saw the clay (Paus. x. iv.). The story is also quoted by Lactautius from Hesiod. 3 See also Vishnu Purana, i. 131.