CHAPTER X.
MYTHOLOGY (continued).
Philosophical Myths: inferences become pseudo-history — Geological Myths — Effect of doctrine of Miracles on Mythology — Magnetic Mountain — Myths of relation of Apes to Men by development or degeneration — Ethnological import of myths of Ape-men, Men with tails, Men of the woods — Myths of Error, Perversion, and Exaggeration: stories of Giants, Dwarfs, and Monstrous Tribes of men — Fanciful explanatory Myths — Myths attached to legendary or historical Personages — Etymological Myths on names of places and persons — Eponymic Myths on names of tribes, nations, countries, &c.; their ethnological import — Pragmatic Myths by realization of metaphors and ideas — Allegory — Beast-Fable — Conclusion.
Although the attempt to reduce to rule and system the whole domain of mythology would as yet be rash and premature, yet the piecemeal invasion of one mythic province after another proves feasible and profitable. Having discussed the theory of nature-myths, it is worth while to gain in other directions glimpses of the crude and child-like thought of mankind, not arranged in abstract doctrines, but embodied by mythic fancy. We shall find the result in masses of legends, full of interest as bearing on the early history of opinion, and which may be roughly classified under the following headings: myths philosophical or explanatory; myths based on real descriptions misunderstood, exaggerated, or perverted; myths attributing inferred events to legendary or historical personages; myths based on realization of fanciful metaphor; and myths made or adapted to convey moral or social or political instruction.
Man's craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he surveys is such as it is and no other, is no product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his race down to its lowest stages. Among rude savages it is already an intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep. Even to the Botocudo or Australian, scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience: he has learnt to do definite acts that definite results may follow, to see other acts done and their results following in course, to make inference from the result back to the previous action, and to find his inference verified in fact. When one day he has seen a deer or a kangaroo leave footprints in the soft ground, and the next day he has found new footprints and inferred that such an animal made them, and has followed up the track and killed the game, then he knows that he has reconstructed a history of past events by inference from their results. But in the early stages of knowledge the confusion is extreme between actual tradition of events, and ideal reconstruction of them. To this day there go about the world endless stories told as matter of known reality, but which a critical examination shows to be mere inferences, often utterly illusory ones, from facts which have stimulated the invention of some curious enquirer. Thus a writer in the Asiatick Researches at the end of the 18th century relates the following account of the Andaman islanders, as a historical fact of which he had been informed: 'Shortly after the Portuguese had discovered the passage to India round the Cape of Good Hope, one of their ships, on board of which were a number of Mozambique negroes, was lost on the Andaman islands, which were till then uninhabited. The blacks remained in the island and settled it: the Europeans made a small shallop in which they sailed to Pegu.' Many readers must have had their interest excited by this curious story, but at the first touch of fact it dissolves into a philosophic myth, made by the easy transition from what might have been to what was. So far from the islands having been uninhabited at the time of Vasco de Gama's voyage, their population of naked blacks with frizzled hair had been described six hundred years earlier, and the story, which sounded reasonable to people puzzled by the appearance of a black population in the Andaman islands, is of course repudiated by ethnologists aware of the wide distribution of the negroid Papuans, really so distinct from any race of African negroes.[1] Not long since, I met with a very perfect myth of this kind. In a brickfield near London, there had been found a number of fossil elephant bones, and soon afterwards a story was in circulation in the neighbourhood somewhat in this shape: 'A few years ago, one of Wombwell's caravans was here, an elephant died, and they buried him in the field, and now the scientific gentlemen have found his bones, and think they have got a præ-Adamite elephant.' It seemed almost cruel to spoil this ingenious myth by pointing out that such a prize as a living mammoth was beyond the resources even of Wombwell's menagerie. But so exactly does such a story explain the facts to minds not troubled with nice distinctions between existing and extinct species of elephants, that it was on another occasion invented elsewhere under similar circumstances. This was at Oxford, where Mr. Buckland found the story of the Wombwell's caravan and dead elephant current to explain a similar find of fossil bones.[2] Such explanations of the finding of fossils are easily devised and used to be freely made, as when fossil bones found in the Alps were set down to Hannibal's elephants, or when a petrified oyster-shell found near Mont Cenis set Voltaire reflecting on the crowd of pilgrims on their way to Rome, or when theologians supposed such shells on mountains to have been left on their slopes and summits by a rising deluge. Such theoretical explanations are unimpeachable in their philosophic spirit, until further observation may prove them to be unsound. Their disastrous effect on the historic conscience of mankind only begins when the inference is turned upside down, to be told as a recorded fact.
In this connexion brief notice may be taken of the doctrine of miracles in its special bearing on mythology. The mythic wonder-episodes related by a savage tale-teller, the amazing superhuman feats of his gods and heroes, are often to his mind miracles in the original popular sense of the word, that is, they are strange and marvellous events; but they are not to his mind miracles in a frequent modern sense of the word, that is, they are not violations or supersessions of recognized laws of nature. Exceptio probat regulam; to acknowledge anything as an exception is to imply the rule it departs from; but the savage recognizes neither rule nor exception. Yet a European hearer, brought up to use a different canon of evidence, will calmly reject this savage's most revered ancestral traditions, simply on the ground that they relate events which are impossible. The ordinary standards of possibility, as applied to the credibility of tradition, have indeed changed vastly in the course of culture through its savage, barbaric, and civilized stages. What concerns us here is that there is an important department of legend which this change in public opinion, generally so resistless, left to a great extent unaltered. In the middle ages the long-accepted practice rose to its height, of allowing the mere assertion of supernatural influence by angels or devils, saints or sorcerers, to override the rules of evidence and the results of experience. The consequence was that the doctrine of miracles became as it were a bridge along which mythology travelled from the lower into the higher culture. Principles of myth-formation belonging properly to the mental state of the savage, were by its aid continued in strong action in the civilized world. Mythic episodes which Europeans would have rejected contemptuously if told of savage deities or heroes, only required to be adapted to appropriate local details, and to be set forth as miracles in the life of some superhuman personage, to obtain as of old a place of credit and honour in history.
From the enormous mass of available instances in proof of this let us take two cases belonging to the class of geological myths. The first is the well-known legend of St. Patrick and the serpents. It is thus given by Dr. Andrew Boorde in his description of Ireland and the Irish in Henry VIII.'s time. 'Yet in Ierland is stupendyous thynges; for there is neyther Pyes nor venymus wormes. There is no Adder, nor Snake, nor Toode, nor Lyzerd, nor no Euyt, nor none such lyke. I haue sene stones the whiche haue had the forme and shap of a snake and other venimus wormes. And the people of the countre sayth that suche stones were wormes, and they were turned into stones by the power of God and the prayers of saynt Patryk. And Englysh marchauntes of England do fetch of the erth of Irlonde to caste in their gardens, to kepe out and to kyll venimus wormes.'[3] In treating this passage, the first step is to separate pieces of imported foreign myth, belonging properly not to Ireland, but to islands of the Mediterranean; the story of the earth of the island of Krete being fatal to venomous serpents is to be found in Ælian,[4] and St. Honoratus clearing the snakes from his island (one of the Lerins opposite Cannes)[5] seems to take precedence of the Irish saint. What is left after these deductions is a philosophic myth accounting for the existence of fossil ammonites as being petrified snakes, to which myth a historical position is given by claiming it as a miracle, and ascribing it to St. Patrick. The second myth is valuable for the historical and geological evidence which it incidentally preserves. At the celebrated ruins of the temple of Jupiter Serapis at Pozzuoli, the ancient Puteoli, the marble columns, encircled half-way up by borings of lithodomi, stand to prove that the ground of the temple must have been formerly submerged many feet below the sea, and afterwards upheaved to become again dry land. History is remarkably silent as to the events demonstrated by this conclusive geological evidence; between the recorded adornment of the temple by Roman emperors from the second to the third century, and the mention of its existence in ruins in the 16th century, no documentary information was till lately recognized. It has now been pointed out by Mr. Tuckett that a passage in the Apocryphal Acts of Peter and Paul, dating apparently more or less before the end of the 9th century, mentions the subsidence of the temple, ascribing it to a miracle of St. Paul. The legend is as follows: 'And when he (Paul) came out of Messina he sailed to Didymus, and remained there one night. And having sailed thence, he came to Pontiole (Puteoli) on the second day. And Dioscorus the shipmaster, who brought him to Syracuse, sympathizing with Paul because he had delivered his son from death, having left his own ship in Syracuse, accompanied him to Pontiole. And some of Peter's disciples having been found there, and having received Paul, exhorted him to stay with them. And he stayed a week in hiding, because of the command of Cæsar (that he should be put to death). And all the toparchs were waiting to seize and kill him. But Dioscorus the shipmaster, being himself also bald, wearing his shipmaster's dress, and speaking boldly, on the first day went out into the city of Pontiole. Thinking therefore that he was Paul, they seized him and beheaded him, and sent his head to Cæsar. ... And Paul, being in Pontiole, and having heard that Dioscorus had been beheaded, being grieved with great grief, gazing into the height of the heaven, said: "O Lord Almighty in Heaven, who hast appeared to me in every place whither I have gone on account of Thine only-begotten Word, our Lord Jesus Christ, punish this city, and bring out all who have believed in God and followed His word." He said to them, therefore, "Follow me." And going forth from Pontiole with those who had believed in the word of God, they came to a place called Baias (Baiæ), and looking up with their eyes, they all see that city called Pontiole sunk into the sea-shore about one fathom; and there it is until this day, for a remembrance, under the sea. ... And those who had been saved out of the city of Pontiole, that had been swallowed up, reported to Cæsar in Rome that Pontiole had been swallowed up with all its multitude.'[6]
Episodes of popular myth, which are often items of the serious belief of the times they belong to, may serve as important records of intellectual history. As an example belonging to the class of philosophical or explanatory myths, let us glance at an Arabian Nights' story, which at first sight may seem an effort of the wildest imagination, but which is nevertheless traceable to a scientific origin; this is the story of the Magnetic Mountain. The Third Kalenter relates in his tale how a contrary wind drove his ships into a strange sea, and there, by the attraction of their nails and other ironwork, they were violently drawn towards a mountain of black loadstone, till at last the iron flew out to the mountain, and the ships went to pieces in the surf. The episode is older than the date when the 'Thousand and One Nights' were edited. When, in Henry of Veldeck's 12th century poem, Duke Ernest and his companions sail into the Klebermeer, they see the rock that is called Magnes, and are themselves dragged in below it among 'many a work of keels,' whose masts stand like a forest.[7] Turning from tale-tellers to grave geographers and travellers who talk of the loadstone mountain, we find El Kazwini, like Serapion before him, believing such boats as may be still seen in Ceylon, pegged and sewn without metal nails, to be so built lest the magnetic rock should attract them from their course at sea. This quaint notion is to be found in 'Sir John Mandeville': 'In an isle clept Crues, ben schippes withouten nayles of iren, or bonds, for the rockes of the adamandes; for they ben alle fulle there aboute in that see, that it is marveyle to spaken of. And gif a schipp passed by the marches, and hadde either iren bandes or iren nayles, anon he sholde ben perishet. For the adamande of this kinde draws the iren to him; and so wolde it draw to him the schipp, because of the iren; that he sholde never departen fro it, ne never go thens.'[8] Now it seems that accounts of the magnetic mountain have been given not only as belonging to the southern seas, but also to the north, and that men have connected with such notions the pointing of the magnetic needle, as Sir Thomas Browne says, 'ascribing thereto the cause of the needle's direction, and conceeving the effluxions from these mountains and rocks invite the lilly toward the north.'[9] On this evidence we have, I think, fair ground for supposing that hypotheses of polar magnetic mountains were first devised to explain the action of the compass, and that these gave rise to stories of such mountains exerting what would be considered their proper effect on the iron of passing ships. The argument is clenched by the consideration that Europeans, who colloquially say the needle points to the north, naturally required their loadstone mountain in high northern latitudes while on the other hand it was as natural that Orientals should place this wondrous rock in the south, for they say it is to the south that the needle points. The conception of magnetism among peoples who had not reached the idea of double polarity may be gathered from the following quaint remarks in the 17th century cyclopædia of the Chinese emperor Kang-hi. 'I now hear the Europeans say it is towards the North pole that the compass turns; the ancients said it was toward the South; which have judged most rightly? Since neither give any reason why, we come to no more with the one side than with the other. But the ancients are the earlier in date, and the farther I go the more I perceive that they understood the mechanism of nature. All movement languishes and dies in proportion as it approaches the north; it is hard to believe it to be from thence that the movement of the magnetic needle comes.'[10]
To suppose that theories of a relation between man and the lower mammalia are only a product of advanced science, would be an extreme mistake. Even at low levels of culture, men addicted to speculative philosophy have been led to account for the resemblance between apes and themselves by solutions satisfactory to their own minds, but which we must class as philosophic myths. Among these, stories which embody the thought of an upward change from ape to man, more or less approaching the last-century theory of development, are to be found side by side with others which in the converse way account for apes as degenerate from a previous human state.
Central American mythology works out the idea that monkeys were once a human race.[11] In South-East Africa, Father Dos Santos remarked long since that 'they hold that the apes were anciently men and women, and thus they call them in their tongue the first people.' The Zulus still tell the tale of an Amafeme tribe who became baboons. They were an idle race who did not like to dig, but wished to eat at other people's houses, saying, 'We shall live, although we do not dig, if we eat the food of those who cultivate the soil.' So the chief of that place, of the house of Tusi, assembled the tribe, and they prepared food and went out into the wilderness. They fastened on behind them the handles of their now useless digging picks, these grew and became tails, hair made its appearance on their bodies, their foreheads became overhanging, and so they became baboons, who are still called 'Tusi's men.'[12] Mr. Kingsley's story of the great and famous nation of the Doasyoulikes, who degenerated by natural selection into gorillas, is the civilized counterpart of this savage myth. Or monkeys may be transformed aborigines, as the Mbocobis relate in South America: in the great conflagration of their forests a man and woman climbed a tree for refuge from the fiery deluge, but the flames singed their faces and they became apes.[13] Among more civilized nations these fancies have graphic representatives in Moslem legends, of which one is as follows: — There was a Jewish city which stood by a river full of fish, but the cunning creatures, noticing the habits of the citizens, ventured freely in sight on the Sabbath, though they carefully kept away on working-days. At last the temptation was too strong for the Jewish fishermen, but they paid dearly for a few days' fine sport by being miraculously turned into apes as a punishment for Sabbath-breaking. In after times, when Solomon passed through the Valley of Apes, between Jerusalem and Mareb, he received from their descendants, monkeys living in houses and dressed like men, an account of their strange history.[14] So, in classic times, Jove had chastised the treacherous race of the Cercopes; he took from them the use of tongues born but to perjure, leaving them to bewail in hoarse cries their fate, transformed into the hairy apes of the Pithecusæ, like and yet unlike the men they had been: —
'In deforme viros animal mutavit, ut idem Dissimiles homini possent similesque videri.'[15]
1 Dos Santos, 'Ethiopia Oriental,' Evora, 1609, part i. chap. ix.; Callaway, 'Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 177. See also Burton, 'Footsteps in E. Afr.' p. 274; Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 178 (W. Afr.).
2 D'Orbigny, 'L'Homme Américain,' vol. ii. p. 102.
3 Weil, 'Bibl. Leg. der Muselmänner,' p. 267; Lane, 'Thousand and One N.' vol. iii. p. 350; Burton, 'El Medinah, &c.' vol. ii. p. 343.
4 Ovid, 'Metamm.' xiv. 89-100; Welcker, 'Griechische Götterlehre,' vol. iii. p. 108.
Turning from degeneration to development, it is found that legends of the descent of human tribes from apes are especially applied to races despised as low and beast-like by some higher neighbouring people, and the low race may even acknowledge the humiliating explanation. Thus the aboriginal features of the robber-caste of the Marawars of South India are the justification for their alleged descent from Rama's monkeys, as for the like genealogy of the Kathkuri, or catechu-gatherers, which these small, dark, low-browed, curly-haired tribes actually themselves believe in. The Jaitwas of Rajputana, a tribe reckoned politically as Rajputs, nevertheless trace their descent from the monkey-god Hanuman, and confirm it by alleging that their princes still bear its evidence in a tail-like prolongation of the spine; a tradition which has probably a real ethnological meaning, pointing out the Jaitwas as of non-Aryan race.[16] Wild tribes of the Malay peninsula, looked down on as lower animals by the more warlike and civilized Malays, have among them traditions of their own descent from a pair of the 'unka puteh,' or 'white monkeys,' who reared their young ones and sent them into the plains, and there they perfected so well that they and their descendants became men, but those who returned to the mountains still remained apes.[17] Thus Buddhist legend relates the origin of the flat-nosed, uncouth tribes of Tibet, offspring of two miraculous apes, transformed to people the snow-kingdom. Taught to till the ground, when they had grown corn and eaten it their tails and hair gradually disappeared, they began to speak, became men, and clothed themselves with leaves. The population grew closer, the land was more and more cultivated, and at last a prince of the race of Sakya, driven from his home in India, united their isolated tribes into a single kingdom.[18] In these traditions the development from ape to man is considered to have come in successive generations, but the negroes are said to attain the result in the individual, by way of metempsychosis. Froebel speaks of negro slaves in the United States believing that in the next world they shall be white men and free, nor is there anything strange in their cherishing a hope so prevalent among their kindred in West Africa. But from this the traveller goes on to quote another story, which, if not too good to be true, is a theory of upward and downward development, almost thorough enough for a Buddhist philosopher. He says, 'A German whom I met here told me that the blacks believe the damned among the negroes to become monkeys; but if in this state they behave well, they are advanced to the state of a negro again, and bliss is eventually possible to them, consisting in their turning white, becoming winged, and so on.'[19]
To understand these stories (and they are worth some attention for the ethnological hints they contain), it is necessary that we should discard the results of modern scientific zoology, and bring our minds back to a ruder condition of knowledge. The myths of human degeneration and development have much more in common with the speculations of Lord Monboddo than with the anatomical arguments of Professor Huxley. On the one hand, uncivilized men deliberately assign to apes an amount of human quality which to modern naturalists is simply ridiculous. Everyone has heard the story of the negroes declaring that apes really can speak, but judiciously hold their tongues lest they should be made to work; but it is not so generally known that this is found as serious matter of belief in several distant regions — West Africa, Madagascar, South America, &c. — where monkeys or apes are found.[20] With this goes another widely-spread anthropoid story, which relates how great apes like the gorilla and the orang-utan carry off women to their homes in the woods, much as the Apaches and Comanches of our own time carry off to their prairies the women of North Mexico.[21] And on the other hand, popular opinion has under-estimated the man as much as it has over-estimated the monkey. We know how sailors and emigrants can look on savages as senseless, ape-like brutes, and how some writers on anthropology have contrived to make out of the moderate intellectual difference between an Englishman and a negro something equivalent to the immense interval between a negro and a gorilla. Thus we can have no difficulty in understanding how savages may seem mere apes to the eyes of men who hunt them like wild beasts in the forests, who can only hear in their language a sort of irrational gurgling and barking, and who fail totally to appreciate the real culture which better acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man. It is well known that when Sanskrit legend tells of the apes who fought in the army of King Hanuman, it really refers to those aborigines of the land who were driven by the Aryan invaders to the hills and jungles, and whose descendants are known to us as Bhils, Kols, Sonthals, and the like, rude tribes such as the Hindu still speaks of as 'monkey-people.'[22] One of the most perfect identifications of the savage and the monkey in Hindustan is the following description of the bunmanus, or 'man of the woods' (Sanskr. vana=wood, manusha=man). 'The bunmanus is an animal of the monkey kind. His face has a near resemblance to the human; he has no tail, and walks erect. The skin of his body is black, and slightly covered with hair.' That this description really applies not to apes, but to the dark-skinned, non-Aryan aborigines of the land, appears further in the enumeration of the local dialects of Hindustan, to which, it is said, 'may be added the jargon of the bunmanus, or wild men of the woods.'[23] In the islands of the Indian Archipelago, whose tropical forests swarm both with high apes and low savages, the confusion between the two in the minds of the half-civilized inhabitants becomes almost inextricable. There is a well-known Hindu fable in the Hitopadesa, which relates as a warning to stupid imitators the fate of the ape who imitated the carpenter, and was caught in the cleft when he pulled out the wedge; this fable has come to be told in Sumatra as a real story of one of the indigenous savages of the island.[24] It is to rude forest-men that the Malays habitually give the name of orang-utan, i.e., 'man of the woods.' But in Borneo this term is applied to the miyas ape, whence we have learnt to call this creature the orang-utan, and the Malays themselves are known to give the name in one and the same district to both the savage and the ape.[25] This term 'man of the woods' extends far beyond Hindu and Malay limits. The Siamese talk of the khon pa, 'men of the wood,' meaning apes;[26] the Brazilians of cauiari, or 'wood-men,' meaning a certain savage tribe.[27] The name of the Bosjesman, so amusingly mispronounced by Englishmen, as though it were some outlandish native word, is merely the Dutch equivalent for Bush-man, 'man of the woods or bush.'[28] In our own language the 'homo silvaticus' or 'forest-man' has become the 'salvage man' or savage. European opinion of the native tribes of the New World may be judged of by the fact that, in 1537, Pope Paul III. had to make express statement that these Indians were really men (attendentes Indos ipsos utpote veros homines).[29] Thus there is little cause to wonder at the circulation of stories of ape-men in South America, and at there being some indefiniteness in the local accounts of the selvage or 'savage,' that hairy wild man of the woods who, it is said, lives in the trees, and sometimes carries off the native women.[30] The most perfect of these mystifications is to be found in a Portuguese manuscript quoted in the account of Castelnau's expedition, and giving, in all seriousness, the following account of the people called Cuatas: 'This populous nation dwells east of the Juruena, in the neighbourhood of the rivers San Joâo and San Thome, advancing even to the confluence of the Juruena, and the Arinos. It is a very remarkable fact that the Indians composing it walk naturally like the quadrupeds, with their hands on the ground; they have the belly, breast, arms, and legs covered with hair, and are of small stature; they are fierce, and use their teeth as weapons; they sleep on the ground, or among the branches of trees; they have no industry, nor agriculture, and live only on fruits, wild roots, and fish.'[31] The writer of this record shows no symptom of being aware that cuata or coata is the name of the large black Simia Paniscus, and that he has been really describing, not a tribe of Indians, but a species of apes.
Various reasons may have led to the growth of another quaint group of legends, describing human tribes with tails like beasts. To people who at once believe monkeys a kind of savages, and savages a kind of monkeys, men with tails are creatures coming under both definitions. Thus the Homo caudatus, or satyr, often appears in popular belief as a half-human creature, while even in old-fashioned works on natural history he may be found depicted on the evident model of an anthropoid ape. In East Africa, the imagined tribe of long-tailed men are also monkey-faced,[32] while in South America the coata tapuya, or 'monkey-men,' are as naturally described as men with tails.[33] European travellers have tried to rationalize the stories of tailed men which they meet with in Africa and the East. Thus Dr. Krapf points to a leather appendage worn behind from the girdle by the Wakamba, and remarks, 'It is no wonder that people say there are men with tails in the interior of Africa,' and other writers have called attention to hanging mats or waist-cloths, fly-flappers or artificial tails worn for ornament, as having made their wearers liable to be mistaken at a distance for tailed men.[34] But these apparently silly myths have often a real ethnological significance, deeper at any rate than such a trivial blunder. When an ethnologist meets in any district with the story of tailed men, he ought to look for a despised tribe of aborigines, outcasts, or heretics, living near or among a dominant population, who look upon them as beasts, and furnish them with tails accordingly. Although the aboriginal Miau-tsze, or 'children of the soil,' come down from time to time into Canton to trade, the Chinese still firmly believe them to have short tails like monkeys;[35] the half-civilized Malays describe the ruder forest tribes as tailed men;[36] the Moslem nations of Africa tell the same story of the Niam-Nam of the interior.[37] The outcast race of Cagots, about the Pyrenees, were said to be born with tails; and in Spain the mediæval superstition still survives that the Jews have tails, like the devil, as they say.[38] In England the notion was turned to theological profit by being claimed as a judgment on wretches who insulted St. Augustine and St. Thomas of Canterbury. Horne Tooke quotes thus from that zealous and somewhat foul-mouthed reformer, Bishop Bale: 'Johan Capgrave and Alexander of Esseby sayth, that for castynge of fyshe tayles at thys Augustyne, Dorsett Shyre menne hadde tayles ever after. But Polydorus applieth it unto Kentish men at Stroud by Rochester, for cuttinge of Thomas Becket's horse's tail. Thus hath England in all other land a perpetuall infamy of tayles by theyr wrytten legendes of lyes, yet can they not well tell where to bestowe them truely ...... an Englyshman now cannot travayle in an other land, by way of marchandyse or any other honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his tethe, that al Englishmen have tailes.'[39] The story at last sank into a commonplace of local slander between shire and shire, and the Devonshire belief that Cornishmen had tails lingered at least till a few years ago.[40] Not less curious is the tradition among savage tribes, that the tailed state was an early or original condition of man. In the Fiji Islands there is a legend of a tribe of men with tails like dogs, who perished in the great deluge, while the Tasmanians declared that men originally had tails and no knee-joints. Among the natives of Brazil, it is related by a Portuguese writer of about 1600, after a couple have been married, the father or father-in-law cuts a wooden stick with a sharp flint, imagining that by this ceremony he cuts off the tails of any future grandchildren, so that they will be born tailless.[41] There seems no evidence to connect the occasional occurrence of tail-like projections by malformation with the stories of tailed human tribes.[42]
Anthropology, until modern times, classified among its facts the particulars of monstrous human tribes, gigantic or dwarfish, mouthless or headless, one-eyed or one-legged, and so forth. The works of ancient geographers and naturalists abound in descriptions of these strange creatures; writers such as Isidore of Seville and Roger Bacon collected them, and sent them into fresh and wider circulation in the middle ages, and the popular belief of uncivilized nations retains them still. It was not till the real world had been so thoroughly explored as to leave little room in it for the monsters, that about the beginning of the present century science banished them to the ideal world of mythology. Having had to glance here at two of the principal species in this amazing semi-human menagerie, it may be worth while to look among the rest for more hints as to the sources of mythic fancy.[43]
That some of the myths of giants and dwarfs are connected with traditions of real indigenous or hostile tribes is settled beyond question by the evidence brought forward by Grimm, Nilsson, and Hanusch. With all the difficulty of analyzing the mixed nature of the dwarfs of European folklore, and judging how far they are elves, or gnomes, or such like nature-spirits, and how far human beings in mythic aspect, it is impossible not to recognize the element derived from the kindly or mischievous aborigines of the land, with their special language, and religion, and costume. The giants appear in European folklore as Stone-Age heathen, shy of the conquering tribes of men, loathing their agriculture and the sound of their church-bells. The rude native's fear of the more civilized intruder in his land is well depicted in the tale of the giant's daughter, who found the boor ploughing his field and carried him home in her apron for a plaything — plough, and oxen, and all; but her mother bade her carry them back to where she found them, for, said she, they are of a people that can do the Huns much ill. The fact of the giant tribes bearing such historic names as Hun or Chud is significant, and Slavonic men have, perhaps, not yet forgotten that the dwarfs talked of in their legends were descended from the aborigines whom the Old-Prussians found in the land. Beyond a doubt the old Scandinavians are describing the ancient and ill-used Lapp population, once so widely spread over Northern Europe, when their sagas tell of the dwarfs, stunted and ugly, dressed in reindeer kirtle and coloured cap, cunning and cowardly, shy of intercourse even with friendly Norsemen, dwelling in caves or in the mound-like Lapland 'gamm,' armed only with arrows tipped with stone and bone, yet feared and hated by their conquerors for their fancied powers of witchcraft.[44] Moslem legend relates that the race of Gog and Magog (Yajuj and Majuj) are of tiny stature, but with ears like elephants; they are a numerous people, and ravaged the world; they dwell in the East, separated from Persia by a high mountain, with but one pass; and the nations their neighbours, when they heard of Alexander the Great (Dhû 'l-Karnain) traversing the world, paid tribute to him, and he made them a wall of bronze and iron, to keep in the nation of Gog and Magog.[45] Who can fail to recognize in this a mystified description of the Tatars of High Asia? Professor Nilsson tries to account in a general way for the huge or tiny stature of legendary tribes, as being mere exaggeration of their actual largeness or smallness. We must admit that this sometimes really happens. The accounts which European eye-witnesses brought home of the colossal stature of the Patagonians, to whose waists they declared their own heads reached, are enough to settle once for all the fact that myths of giants may arise from the sight of really tall men;[46] and it is so, too, with the dwarf-legends of the same region, as where Knivet, the old traveller, remarks of the little people of Rio de la Plata, that they are 'not so very little as described.'[47]
Nevertheless, this same group of giant and dwarf myths may serve as a warning not to stretch too widely a partial explanation, however sound within its proper limits. There is plenty of evidence that giant-legends are sometimes philosophic myths, made to account for the finding of great fossil bones. To give but a single instance of such connexion, certain huge jaws and teeth, found in excavating on the Hoe at Plymouth, were recognized as belonging to the giant Gogmagog, who in old times fought his last fight there against Corineus, the eponymic hero of Cornwall.[48] As to the dwarfs, again, stories of them are curiously associated with those long-enduring monuments of departed races — their burial-cysts and dolmens. Thus, in the United States, ranges of rude stone cysts, often only two or three feet long, are connected with the idea of a pygmy race buried in them. In Brittany, the dolmens are the abodes and treasuries of the dwarfs who built them, and likewise in India it is a usual legend of such prehistoric burial-places, that they were dwarfs' houses — the dwellings of the ancient pygmies, who here again appear as representatives of prehistoric tribes.[49] But a very different meaning is obvious in a mediæval traveller's account of the hairy, man-like creatures of Cathay, one cubit high, and that do not bend their knees as they walk, or in an Arab geographer's description of an island people in the Indian seas, four spans high, naked, with red downy hair on their faces, and who climb up trees and shun mankind. If any one could possibly doubt the real nature of these dwarfs, his doubt may be resolved by Marco Polo's statement that in his time monkeys were regularly embalmed in the East Indies, and sold in boxes to be exhibited over the world as pygmies.[50] Thus various different facts have given rise to stories of giants and dwarfs, more than one mythic element perhaps combining to form a single legend — a result perplexing in the extreme to the mythological interpreter.
Descriptions of strange tribes made in entire good faith may come to be understood in new extravagant senses, when carried among people not aware of the original facts. The following are some interpretations of this kind, among which some far-fetched cases are given, to show that the method must not be trusted too much. The term 'noseless' is apt to be misunderstood, yet it was fairly enough applied to flat-nosed tribes, such as Turks of the steppes, whom Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela thus depicts in the twelfth century: — 'They have no noses, but draw breath through two small holes.'[51] Again, among the common ornamental mutilations of savages is that of stretching the ears to an enormous size by weights or coils, and it is thus verbally quite true that there are men whose ears hang down upon their shoulders. Yet without explanation such a phrase would be understood to describe, not the appearance of a real savage with his ear-lobes stretched into pendant fleshy loops, but rather that of Pliny's Panotii, or of the Indian Karnaprâvarana, 'whose ears serve them for cloaks,' or of the African dwarfs, said to use their ears one for mattress and the other for coverlet when they lie down. One of the most extravagant of these stories is told by Fray Pedro Simon in California, where in fact the territory of Oregon has its name from the Spanish term of Orejones, or 'Big-Ears,' given to the inhabitants from their practice of stretching their ears with ornaments.[52] Even purely metaphorical descriptions, if taken in a literal sense, are capable of turning into catches, like the story of the horse with its head where its tail should be. I have been told by a French Protestant from the Nismes district that the epithet of gorgeo negro, or 'black-throat,' by which Catholics describe a Huguenot, was taken so literally that heretic children were sometimes forced to open their mouths to satisfy the orthodox of their being of the usual colour within. On examining the description of savage tribes by higher races, it appears that several of the epithets usually applied only need literalizing to turn into the wildest of the legendary monster-stories. Thus the Burmese speak of the rude Karens as 'dog-men;'[53] Marco Polo describes the Angaman (Andaman) islanders as brutish and savage cannibals, with heads like dogs.[54] Ælian's account of the dog-headed people of India is on the face of it an account of a savage race. The Kynokephali, he says, are so called from their bodily appearance, but otherwise they are human, and they go dressed in the skins of beasts; they are just, and harm not men; they cannot speak, but roar, yet they understand the language of the Indians; they live by hunting, being swift of foot, and they cook their game not by fire, but by tearing it into fragments and drying it in the sun; they keep goats and sheep, and drink the milk. The naturalist concludes by saying that he mentions these fitly among the irrational animals, because they have not articu- late, distinct, and human language.[55] This last suggestive remark well states the old prevalent notion that barbarians have no real language, but are 'speechless,' 'tongueless,' or even mouthless.[56] Another monstrous people of wide celebrity are Pliny's Blemmyæ, said to be headless, and accordingly to have their mouths and eyes in their breasts creatures over whom Prester John reigned in Asia, who dwelt far and wide in South American forests, and who to our mediæval ancestors were as real as the cannibals with whom Othello couples them: —
'The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.'
If, however, we look in dictionaries for the Acephali, we may find not actual headless monsters, but heretics so called because their original head or founder was not known; and when the kingless Turkoman hordes say of themselves 'We are a people without a head,' the metaphor is even more plain and natural.[57] Moslem legend tells of the
1 Ælian, iv. 46; Plin. vi. 35; vii. 2. See for other versions, Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1191; vol. v. p. 901; Cranz, p. 267; Lane, 'Thousand and One Nights,' vol. iii. pp. 36, 94, 97, 305; Davis, 'Carthage,' p. 230; Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 83.
2 Plin. v. 8; vi. 24, 35; vii. 2; Mela, iii. 9; Herberstein in Hakluyt, vol. i. p. 593; Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 483; Davis, l.c.; see 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' p. 77.
3 Plin. v. 8; Lane, vol. i. p. 33; vol. ii. p. 377; vol. iii. p. 81; Eisenmenger, vol. ii. p. 559; Mandeville, p. 243; Raleigh in Hakluyt, vol. iii. pp. 652, 665; Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 176; Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1285; vol. v. p. 901; Isidor. Hispal. s.v. 'Acephali;' Vambéry, p. 310, see p. 436. Shikk and the Nesnas, creatures like one half of a split man, with one arm, leg, and eye. Possibly it was thence that the Zulus got their idea of a tribe of half-men, who in one of their stories found a Zulu maiden in a cave and thought she was two people, but on closer inspection of her admitted, 'The thing is pretty! But oh the two legs!' These realistic fancies coincide with the simple metaphor which describes a savage as only 'half a man,' semihomo, as Virgil calls the ferocious Cacus.[58] Again, when the Chinese compared themselves to the outer barbarians, they said 'We see with two eyes, the Latins with one, and all other nations are blind.' Such metaphors, proverbial among ourselves, verbally correspond with legends of one-eyed tribes, such as the savage cave-dwelling Kyklopes.[59] Verbal coincidence of this kind, untrustworthy enough in these latter instances, passes at last into the vaguest fancy. The negroes called Europeans 'long-headed,' using the phrase in our familiar metaphorical sense; but translate it into Greek, and at once Hesiod's Makrokephaloi come into being.[60] And, to conclude the list, one of the commonest of the monster-tribes of the Old and New World is that distinguished by having feet turned backward. Now there is really a people whose name, memorable in scientific controversy, describes them as 'having feet the opposite
3 Kölle, 'Vei Gr.' p. 229; Strabo, i. 2, 35. The artificially elongated skulls of real (Greek characters) (Hippokrates, 'De Aeris,' 14.) are found in the burial-places of Kertch. way,' and they still retain that ancient name of Antipodes.[61]
Returning from this digression to the region of philosophic myth, we may examine new groups of explanatory stories, produced from that craving to know causes and reasons which ever besets mankind. When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it, and even if he does not persuade himself that this is a real legend of his forefathers, the story-teller who hears it from him and repeats it is troubled with no such difficulty. Our task in dealing with such stories is made easy when the criterion of possibility can be brought to bear upon them. It has become a mere certainty to moderns that asbestos is not really salamander's wool; that morbid hunger is not really caused by a lizard or a bird in a man's stomach; that a Chinese philosopher cannot really have invented the fire-drill by seeing a bird peck at the branches of a tree till sparks came. The African Wakuafi account for their cattle-lifting proclivities by the calm assertion that Engai, that is, Heaven, gave all cattle to them, and so wherever there is any it is their call to go and seize it.[62] So in South America the fierce Mbayas declare they received from the Caracara a divine command to make war on all other tribes, killing the men and adopting the women and children.[63] But though it may be consistent with the notions of these savages to relate such explanatory legends, it is not consistent with our notions to believe them. Fortunately, too, the ex post facto legends are apt to come into collision with more authentic sources of information, or to encroach on the domain of valid history. It is of no use for the Chinese to tell their stupid story of written characters having been invented from the markings on a tortoise's shell, for the early forms of such characters, plain and simple pictures of objects, have been preserved in China to this day. Nor can we praise anything but ingenuity in the West Highland legend that the Pope once laid an interdict on the land, but forgot to curse the hills, so the people tilled them, this story being told to account for those ancient traces of tillage still to be seen on the wild hillsides, the so-called 'elf-furrows.'[64] The most embarrassing cases of explanatory tradition are those which are neither impossible enough to condemn, nor probable enough to receive. Ethnographers who know how world-wide is the practice of defacing the teeth among the lower races, and how it only dies gradually out in higher civilization, naturally ascribe the habit to some general reason in human nature, at a particular stage of development. But the mutilating tribes themselves have local legends to account for local customs; thus the Penongs of Burmah and the Batoka of East Africa both break their front teeth, but the one tribe says its reason is not to look like apes, the other that it is to be like oxen and not like zebras.[65] Of the legends of tattooing, one of the oldest is that told to account for the fact that while the Fijians tattoo only the women, their neighbours, the Tongans, tattoo only the men. It is related that a Tongan, on his way from Fiji to report to his countrymen the proper custom for them to observe, went on his way repeating the rule he had carefully learnt by heart, 'Tattoo the women, but not the men,' but unluckily he tripped over a stump, got his lesson wrong, and reached Tonga repeating 'Tattoo the men, but not the women,' an ordinance which they observed ever after. How reasonable such an explanation seemed to the Polynesian mind, may be judged from the Samoans having a version with different details, and applied to their own instead of the Tongan islands.[66]
All men feel how wanting in sense of reality is a story with no personal name to hang it to. This want is thus graphically expressed by Sprenger the historian in his life of Mohammed: 'It makes, on me at least, quite a different impression when it is related that "the Prophet said to Alkama," even if I knew nothing whatever else of this Alkama, than if it were merely stated that "he said to somebody."' The feeling which this acute and learned critic thus candidly confesses, has from the earliest times, and in the minds of men troubled with no such nice historic conscience, germinated to the production of much mythic fruit. Thus it has come to pass that one of the leading personages to be met with in the tradition of the world is really no more than Somebody. There is nothing this wondrous creature cannot achieve, no shape he cannot put on; one only restriction binds him at all, that the name he assumes shall have some sort of congruity with the office he undertakes, and even from this he oftentimes breaks loose. So rife in our own day is this manufacture of personal history, often fitted up with details of place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle, that it may be guessed how vast its working must have been in days of old. Thus the ruins of ancient buildings, of whose real history and use no trustworthy tradition survives in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth with a builder and a purpose. In Mexico the great Somebody assumes the name of Montezuma, and builds the aqueduct of Tezcuco; to the Persian any huge and antique ruin is the work of the heroic Antar; in Russia, says Dr. Bastian, buildings of the most various ages are set down to Peter the Great, as in Spain to Boabdil or Charles V.; and European folklore may attribute to the Devil any old building of unusual massiveness, and especially those stone structures which antiquaries now class as præ-historic monuments. With a more graceful thought, the Indians of North America declare that the imitative tumuli of Ohio, great mounds laid out in rude imitation of animals, were shaped in old days by the great Manitu himself, in promise of a plentiful supply of game in the world of spirits. The New Zealanders tell how the hero Kupe separated the North and South Islands, and formed Cook's Straits. Greek myth placed at the gate of the Mediterranean the twin pillars of Herakles; in more recent times the opening of the Straits of Gibraltar became one of the many feats of Alexander of Macedon.[67] Such a group of stories as this is no unfair test of the value of mere traditions of personal names which simply answer the questions that mankind have been asking for ages about the origin of their rites, laws, customs, arts. Some such traditions are of course genuine, and we may be able, especially in the more modern cases, to separate the real from the imaginary. But it must be distinctly laid down that, in the absence of corroborative evidence, every tradition stands suspect of mythology, if it can be made by the simple device of fitting some personal name to the purely theoretical assertion that somebody must have introduced into the world fire-making, or weapons, or ornaments, or games, or agriculture, or marriage, or any other of the elements of civilization.
Among the various matters which have excited curiosity, and led to its satisfaction by explanatory myths, are local names. These, when the popular ear has lost their primitive significance, become in barbaric times an apt subject for the myth-maker to explain in his peculiar fashion. Thus the Tibetans declare that their lake Chomoriri was named from a woman (chomo) who was carried into it by the yak she was riding, and cried in terror ri-ri! The Arabs say the founders of the city of Sennaar saw on the river bank a beautiful woman with teeth glittering like fire, whence they called the place Sinnâr, i.e., 'tooth of fire.' The Arkadians derived the name of their town Trapezus from the table (trapeza), which Zeus overturned when the wolfish Lykaon served a child on it for a banquet to him.[68] Such crude fancies in no way differ in nature from English local legends current up to recent times, such as that which relates how the Romans, coming in sight of where Exeter now stands, exclaimed in delight, 'Ecce terra!' and thus the city had its name. Not long ago, a curious enquirer wished to know from the inhabitants of Fordingbridge, or as the country people call it, Fardenbridge, what the origin of this name might be, and heard in reply that the bridge was thought to have been built when wages were so cheap that masons worked for a 'farden' a day. The Falmouth folks' story of Squire Pendarvis and his ale is well known, how his servant excused herself for selling it to the sailors, because, as she said, 'The penny come so quick,' whence the place came to be called Pennycomequick; this nonsense being invented to account for an ancient Cornish name, probably Penycumgwic, 'head of the creek valley.' Mythic fancy had fallen to a low estate when it dwindled to such remnants as this.
That personal names may pass into nouns, we, who talk of broughams and bluchers, cannot deny. But any such etymology ought to have contemporary document or some equally forcible proof in its favour, for this is a form of explanation taken by the most flagrant myths. David the painter, it is related, had a promising pupil named Chicque, the son of a fruiterer; the lad died at eighteen, but his master continued to hold him up to later students as a model of artistic cleverness, and hence arose the now familiar term of chic. Etymologists, a race not wanting in effrontery, have hardly ever surpassed this circumstantial canard; the word chic dates at anyrate from the seventeenth century.[69] Another word with which similar liberty has been taken, is cant. Steele, in the 'Spectator,' says that some people derive it from the name of one Andrew Cant, a Scotch minister, who had the gift of preaching in such a dialect that he was understood by none but his own congregation, and not by all of them. This is, perhaps, not a very accurate delineation of the real Andrew Cant, who is mentioned in 'Whitelock's Memorials,' and seems to have known how to speak out in very plain terms indeed. But at any rate he flourished about 1650, whereas the verb to cant was then already an old word. To cante, meaning to speak, is mentioned in Harman's 'List of Rogues' Words,' in 1566, and in 1587 Harrison says of the beggars and gypsies that they have devised a language among themselves, which they name canting, but others 'Pedlars' Frenche.'[70] Of all etymologies ascribed to personal names, one of the most curious is that of the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, so well known from Holbein's pictures. Its supposed author is thus mentioned in the 'Biographie Universelle:' 'Macaber, poëte allemand, serait tout-à-fait inconnu sans l'ouvrage qu'on a sous son nom.' This, it may be added, is true enough, for there never was such a person at all, the Danse Macabre being really Chorea Machabæorum, the Dance of the Maccabees, a kind of pious pantomime of death performed in churches in the fifteenth century. Why the performance received this name, is that the rite of Mass for the dead is distinguished by the reading of that passage from the twelfth chapter of Book II. of the Maccabees, which relates how the people betook themselves to prayer, and besought the Lord that the sin of those who had been slain among them might be wholly blotted out; for if Judas had not expected that the slain should rise again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead.[71] Traced to its origin, it is thus seen that the Danse Macabre is neither more nor less than the Dance of the Dead.
It is not an unusual thing for tribes and nations to be known by the name of their chief, as in books of African travel we read of 'Eyo's people,' or 'Kamrazi's people.' Such terms may become permanent, like the name of the Osmanli Turks taken from the great Othman, or Osman. The notions of kinship and chieftainship may easily be combined, as where some individual Brian or Alpine may have given his name to a clan of O'Briens or Mac Alpines. How far the tribal names of the lower races may have been derived from individual names of chiefs or forefathers, is a question on which distinct evidence is difficult to obtain. In Patagonia bands or subdivisions of tribes are designated by the names of temporary chiefs, every roving party having such a leader, who is sometimes even styled 'yank,' i.e. 'father.'[72] The Zulus and Maoris were races who paid great attention to the traditional genealogies of their clan-ancestors, who were, indeed, not only their kinsfolk but their gods; and they distinctly recognize the possibility of tribes being named from a deceased ancestor or chief . The Kafir tribe of Ama-Xosa derives its name from a chief, U-Xosa,[73] and the Maori tribes of Ngate-Wakaue and Nga-Puhi claim descent from chiefs called Wakaue and Puhi.[74] Around this nucleus of actuality, however, there gathers an enormous mass of fiction simulating its effects. The myth-maker, curious to know how many people or country gained its name, had only to conclude that it came from a great ancestor or ruler, and then the simple process of turning a national or local title into a personal name at once added a new genealogy to historical tradition. In some cases, the name of the imagined ancestor is invented in such form that the local or gentile name may stand as grammatically derived from it, as usually happens in real cases, like the derivation of Cæsarea from Cæsar, or of the Benedictines from Benedict. But in the fictitious genealogy or history of the myth-maker, the mere unaltered name of the nation, tribe, country, or city often becomes without more ado the name of the eponymic hero. It has to be remembered, moreover, that countries and nations can be personified by an imaginative process which has not quite lost its sense in modern speech. France is talked of by politicians as an individual being, with particular opinions and habits, and may even be embodied as a statue or picture with suitable attributes. And if one were to say that Britannia has two daughters, Canada and Australia, or that she has gone to keep house for a decrepit old aunt called India, this would be admitted as plain fact expressed in fantastic language. The invention of ancestries from eponymic heroes or name ancestors has, however, often had a serious effect in corrupting historic truth, by helping to fill ancient annals with swarms of fictitious genealogies. Yet, when surveyed in a large view, the nature of the eponymic fictions is patent and indisputable, and so regular are their forms, that we could scarcely choose more telling examples of the consistent processes of imagination, as shown in the development of myths.
The great number of the eponymic ancestors of ancient Greek tribes and nations makes it easy to test them by comparison, and the test is a destructive one. Treat the heroic genealogies they belong to as traditions founded on real history, and they prove hopelessly independent and incompatible; but consider them as mostly local and tribal myths and such independence and incompatibility become their proper features. Mr. Grote, whose tendency is to treat all myths as fictions not only unexplained but unexplainable, here makes an exception, tracing the eponymic ancestors from whom Greek cities and tribes derived their legendary parentage to mere embodied local and gentile names. Thus, of the fifty sons of Lykaôn, a whole large group consists of personified cities of Arkadia, such as Mantinêus, Phigalos, Tegeatês, who, according to the simply inverting legend, are called founders of Mantinêa, Phigalia, Tegea. The father of King Æakos was Zeus, his mother his own personified land, Ægina; the city of Mykênai had not only an ancestress Mykênê, but an eponymic ancestor as well, Mykêneus. Long afterwards, mediæval Europe, stimulated by the splendid genealogies through which Rome had attached herself to Greece and the Greek gods and heroes, discovered the secret of rivalling them in the chronicles of Geoffry of Monmouth and others, by claiming as founders of Paris and Tours the Trojans Paris and Turnus, and connecting France and Britain with the Trojan war through Francus, son of Hector, and Brutus, great grandson of Æneas. A remarkably perfect eponymic historical myth accounting for the Gypsies or Egyptians, may be found cited seriously in 'Blackstone's Commentaries:' when Sultan Selim conquered Egypt in 1517, several of the natives refused to submit to the Turkish yoke, and revolted under one Zinganeus, whence the Turks called them Zinganees, but, being at length surrounded and banished, they agreed to disperse in small parties over the world, &c., &c. It is curious to watch Milton's mind emerging, but not wholly emerging, from the state of the mediæval chronicler. He mentions in the beginning of his 'History of Britain,' the 'outlandish figment' of the four kings, Magus, Saron, Druis, and Bardus; he has no approval for the giant Albion, son of Neptune, who subdued the island and called it after his own name; he scoffs at the four sons of Japhet, called Francus, Romanus, Alemannus, and Britto. But when he comes to Brutus and the Trojan legends of old English history, his sceptical courage fails him: 'those old and inborn names of successive kings, never any to have bin real persons, or don in their lives at least som part of what so long hath bin remember'd, cannot be thought without too strict an incredulity.'[75]
Among ruder races of the world, asserted genealogies of this class may be instanced in South American tribes called the Amoipira and Potyuara,[76] Khond clans called Baska and Jakso,[77] Turkoman hordes called Yomut, Tekke, and Chaudor,[78] all of them professing to derive their designations from ancestors or chiefs who bore as individuals these very names. Where criticism can be brought to bear on these genealogies, its effect is often such as drove Brutus and his Trojans out of English history. When there appear in the genealogy of Haussa, in West Africa, plain names of towns like Kano and Katsena,[79] it is natural to consider these towns to have been personified into mythic ancestors. Mexican tradition assigns a whole set of eponymic ancestors or chiefs to the various races of the land, as Mexi the founder of Mexico, Chichimecatl the first king of the Chichimecs, and so forth, down to Otomitl the ancestor of the Otomis, whose very name by its termination betrays its Aztec invention.[80] The Brazilians account for the division of the Tupis and Guaranis, by the legend of two ancestral brothers, Tupi and Guarani, who quarrelled and separated, each with his followers: here an eponymic origin of the story is made likely by the word Guarani not being an old national name at all, but merely the designation of 'warriors' given by the missionaries to certain tribes.[81] And when such facts are considered as that North American clans named after animals, Beaver, Crayfish, and the like, account for these names by simply claiming the very creatures themselves as ancestors,[82] the tendency of general criticism will probably be not so much in favour of real forefathers and chiefs who left their names to their tribes, as of eponymic ancestors created by backwards imitation of such inheritance.
The examination of eponymic legend, however, must by no means stop short at the destructive stage. In fact, when it has undergone the sharpest criticism, it only displays the more clearly a real historic value, not less perhaps than if all the names it records were real names of ancient chiefs. With all their fancies, blunders, and shortcomings, the heroic genealogies preserve early theories of nationality, traditions of migration, invasion, connexion by kindred or intercourse. The ethnologists of old days, borrowing the phraseology of myth, stated what they looked on as the actual relations of races, in a personifying language of which the meaning may still be readily interpreted. The Greek legend of the twin brothers Danaos and Ægyptos, founders of the nations of the Danaoi or Homeric Greeks and of the Ægyptians, represents a distinct though weak ethnological theory. Their eponymic myth of Hellēn, the personified race of the Hellēnes, is another and more reasonable ethnological document stating kinship among four great branches of the Greek race: the three sons of Hellēn, it relates, were Aiolos, Dōros, and Xouthos; the first two gave their names to the Æolians and Dorians, the third had sons called Achaios and Iōn, whose names passed as a heritage to the Achaioi and Ionians. The belief of the Lydians, Mysians, and Karians as to their national kinship is well expressed in the genealogy in Herodotus, which traces their descent from the three brothers Lydos, Mysos, and Kar.[83] The Persian legend of Feridun (Thraetaona) and his three sons, Irej, Tur, and Selm, distinguishes the two nationalities of Iranian and Turanian, i.e. Persian and Tatar.[84] The national genealogy of the Afghans is worthy of remark. It runs thus: Melik Talut (King Saul) had two sons, Berkia and Irmia (Berekiah and Jeremiah), who served David; the son of Berkia was Afghan, and the son of Irmia was Usbek. Thanks to the aquiline noses of the Afghans, and to their use of Biblical personal names derived from Biblical sources, the idea of their being descendants of the lost tribes of Israel found great credence among European scholars up to the present century.[85] Yet the pedigree is ethnologically absurd, for the whole source of the imagined cousinship of the Aryan Afghan and the Turanian Usbek, so distinct both in feature and in language, appears to be in their union by common Mohammedanism, while the reckless jumble of sham history, which derives both from a Semitic source, is only too characteristic of Moslem chronicle. Among the Tatars is found a much more reasonable national pedigree; in the 13th century, William of Ruysbroek relates, as sober circumstantial history, that they were originally called Turks from Turk the eldest son of Japhet, but one of their princes left his dominions to his twin sons, Tatar and Mongol which gave rise to the distinction that has ever since prevailed between these two nations.[86] Historically absurd, this legend states what appears the unimpeachable ethnological fact, that the Turks, Mongols, and Tatars are closely-connected branches of one national stock, and we can only dispute in it what seems an exorbitant claim on the part of the Turk to represent the head of the family, the ancestor of the Mongol and the Tatar. Thus these eponymic national genealogies, mythological in form but ethnological in substance, embody opinions of which we may admit or deny the truth or value, but which we must recognize as distinctly ethnological documents.[87]
It thus appears that early ethnology is habitually ex- pressed in a metaphorical language, in which lands and nations are personified, and their relations indicated by terms of personal kinship. This description applies to that important document of ancient ethnology, the table of nations in the 10th chapter of Genesis. In some cases it is a problem of minute and difficult criticism to distinguish among its ancestral names those which are simply local or national designations in personal form. But to critics con- versant with the ethnic genealogies of other peoples, such as have here been quoted, simple inspection of this national list may suffice to show that part of its names are not names of real men, but of personified cities, lands, and races. The city Zidon (צידן) is brother to Heth (חת) the father of the Hittites, and next follow in person the Jebusite and the Amorite. Among plain names of countries, Cush or Æthiopia (כוש) begets Nimrod, Asshur or Assyria (אשור) builds Nineveh, and even the dual Mizraim (מצרים), the 'two Egypts,' usually regarded as signifying Upper and Lower Egypt, appears in the line of generations as a personal son and brother of other countries, and ancestor of populations. The Aryan stock is clearly recognized in personifications of at least two of its members, Madai (מדי the Mede, and Javan (יון) the Ionian. And as regards the family to which the Israelites themselves belong, if Canaan (כנען), the father of Zidon (צידן), be transferred to it to represent the Phœnicians, by the side of Asshur (אשור), Aram (ארם), Eber (עבר), and the other descendants of Shem, the result will be mainly to arrange the Semitic stock according to the ordinary classification of modern comparative philology.
Turning now from cases where mythologic phrase serves as a medium for expressing philosophic opinion, let us quickly cross the district where fancy assumes the semblance of explanatory legend. The mediæval schoolmen have been justly laughed at for their habit of translating plain facts into the terms of metaphysics, and then solemnly offering them in this scientific guise as explanations of themselves — accounting for opium making people sleep, by its possession of a dormitive virtue. The myth-maker's proceedings may in one respect be illustrated by comparing them with this. Half mythology is occupied, as many a legend cited in these chapters has shown, in shaping the familiar facts of daily life into imaginary histories of their own cause and origin, childlike answers to those world-old questions of whence and why, which the savage asks as readily as the sage. So familiar is the nature of such description in the dress of history, that its easier examples translate off-hand. When the Samoans say that ever since the great battle among the plantains and bananas, the vanquished have hung down their heads, while the victor stands proudly erect,[88] who can mistake the simple metaphor which compares the upright and the drooping plants to a conqueror standing among his beaten foes? In simile just as obvious lies the origin of another Polynesian legend, which relates the creation of the coco-nut from a man's head, the chestnuts from his kidneys, and the yams from his legs.[89] To draw one more example from the mythology of plants, how transparent is the Ojibwa fancy of that heavenly youth with green robe and waving feathers, whom for the good of men the Indian overcame and buried, and who sprang again from his grave as the Indian corn, Mondamin, the 'Spirit's grain.'[90] The New Forest peasant deems that the marl he digs is still red with the blood of his ancient foes the Danes; the Maori sees on the red cliffs of Cook's Straits the blood-stains that Kupe made when, mourning for the death of his daughter, he cut his forehead with pieces of obsidian; in the spot where Buddha offered his own body to feed the starved tigress's cubs, his blood for ever reddened the soil and the trees and flowers. The modern Albanian still sees the stain of slaughter in streams running red with earth, as to the ancient Greek the river that flowed by Byblos bore down in its summer floods the red blood of Adonis. The Cornishman knows from the red filmy growth on the brook pebbles that murder has been done there; John the Baptist's blood still grows in Germany on his day, and peasants still go out to search for it; the red meal fungus is blood dropped by the flying Huns when they hurt their feet against the high tower-roofs. The traveller in India might see on the ruined walls of Ganga Raja the traces of the blood of the citizens spilt in the siege, and yet more marvellous to relate, at St. Denis's church in Cornwall, the blood-stains on the stones fell there when the saint's head was cut off somewhere else.[91] Of such translations of descriptive metaphor under thin pretence of history, every collection of myth is crowded with examples, but it strengthens our judgment of the combined consistency and variety of what may be called the mythic language, to extract from its dictionary such a group as this, which in variously imaginative fashion describes the appearance of a blood-red stain.
The merest shadowy fancy or broken-down metaphor, when once it gains a sense of reality, may begin to be spoken of as an actual event. The Moslems have heard the very stones praise Allah, not in simile only but in fact, and among them the saying that a man's fate is written on his forehead has been materialized into a belief that it can be deciphered from the letter-like markings of the sutures of his skull. One of the miraculous passages in the life of Mohammed himself is traced plausibly by Sprenger to such a pragmatized metaphor. The angel Gabriel, legend declares, opened the prophet's breast, and took a black clot from his heart, which he washed with Zemzem water and replaced; details are given of the angel's dress and golden basin, and Anas ibn Malik declared he had seen the very mark where the wound was sewn up. We may venture with the historian to ascribe this marvellous incident to the familiar metaphor that Mohammed's heart was divinely opened and cleansed, and indeed he does say in the Koran that God opened his heart.[92] A single instance is enough to represent the same habit in Christian legend. Marco Polo relates how in 1225 the Khalif of Bagdad commanded the Christians of his dominions, under penalty of death or Islam, to justify their Scriptural text by removing a certain mountain. Now there was among them a shoemaker, who, having been tempted to excess of admiration for a woman, had plucked out his offending eye. This man commanded the mountain to remove, which it did to the terror of the Khalif and all his people, and since then the anniversary of the miracle has been kept holy. The Venetian traveller, after the manner of mediæval writers, records the story without a symptom of suspicion;[93] yet to our minds its whole origin so obviously lies in three verses of St. Matthew's gospel, that it is needless to quote them. To modern taste such wooden fictions as these are far from attractive. In fact the pragmatizer is a stupid creature; nothing is too beautiful or too sacred to be made dull and vulgar by his touch, for it is through the very incapacity of his mind to hold an abstract idea that he is forced to embody it in a material incident. Yet wearisome as he may be, it is none the less needful to understand him, to acknowledge the vast influence he has had on the belief of mankind, and to appreciate him as representing in its extreme abuse that tendency to clothe every thought in a concrete shape, which has in all ages been a mainspring of mythology.
Though allegory cannot maintain the largp place often claimed for it in mythology, it has yet had too much influence to be passed over in this survey. It is true that the search for allegorical explanation is a pursuit that has led many a zealous explorer into the quagmires of mysticism. Yet there are cases in which allegory is certainly used with historical intent, as for instance in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, with its cows and sheep which stand for Israelites, and asses and wolves for Midianites and Egyptians, these creatures figuring in a pseudo-prophetic sketch of Old Testament chronicles. As for moral allegory, it is immensely plentiful in the world, although its limits are narrower than mythologists of past centuries have supposed. It is now reasonably thought preposterous to interpret the Greek legends as moral apologues, after the manner of Herakleides the philosopher, who could discern a parable of repentant prudence in Athene seizing Achilles when just about to draw his sword on Agamemnon.[94] Still, such a mode of interpretation has thus much to justify it, that numbers of the fanciful myths of the world are really allegories. There is allegory in the Hesiodic myth of Pandora, whom Zeus sent down to men, decked with golden band and garland of spring flowers, fit cause of longing and the pangs of love, but using with a dog-like mind her gifts of lies and treachery and pleasant speech. Heedless of his wiser brother's words, the foolish Epimetheus took her; she raised the lid of the great cask and shook out the evils that wander among mankind, and the diseases that by day and night come silently bringing ill; she set on the lid again and shut hope in, that evil might be ever hopeless to mankind. Shifted to fit a different moral, the allegory remained in the later version of the tale, that the cask held not curses but blessings; these were let go and lost to men when the vessel was too curiously opened, while Hope alone was left behind for comfort to the luckless human race.[95] Yet the primitive nature of such legends underlies the moral shape upon them. Zeus is no allegoric fiction, and Prometheus, unless modern mythologists judge him very wrongly, has a meaning far deeper than parable. Xenophon tells (after Prodikos) the story of Herakles choosing between the short and easy path of pleasure and the long and toilsome path of virtue,[96] but though the mythic hero may thus be made to figure in a moral apologue, an imagination so little in keeping with his unethic nature jars upon the reader's mind.
The general relation of allegory to pure myth can hardly be brought more clearly into view than in a class of stories familiar to every child, the Beast-fables. From the ordinary civilized point of view the allegory in such fictions seems fundamental, the notion of a moral lesson seems bound up with their very nature, yet a broader examination tends to prove the allegorical growth as it were parasitic on an older trunk of myth without moral. It is only by an effort of intellectual reaction that a modern writer can imitate in parable the beast of the old Beast-fable. No wonder, for the creature has become to his mind a monster, only conceivable as a caricature of man made to carry a moral lesson or a satire. But among savages it is not so. To their minds the semi-human beast is no fictitious creature, invented to preach or sneer, he is all but a reality. Beast-fables are not nonsense to men who ascribe to the lower animals a power of speech, and look on them as partaking of moral human nature; to men in whose eyes any hyæna or wolf may probably be a man-hyæna or a werewolf; to men who so utterly believe 'that the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird' that they will really regulate their own diet so as to avoid eating an ancestor; to men an integral part of whose religion may actually be the worship of beasts. Such beliefs belong even now to half mankind, and among such the beast-stories had their first home. Even the Australians tell their quaint beast-tales, of the Rat, the Owl, and the fat Blackfellow, or of Pussy-brother who singed his friends' noses while they were asleep.[97] The Kamchadals have an elaborate myth of the adventures of their stupid deity Kutka with the Mice who played tricks upon him, such as painting his face like a woman's, so that when he looked in the water he fell in love with himself.[98] Beast-tales abound among such races as the Polynesians and the North American Indians, who value in them ingenuity of incident and neat adaptation of the habits and characters of the creatures. Thus in a legend of the Flathead Indians, the Little Wolf found in Cloudland his grand-sires the Spiders with their grizzled hair and long crooked nails, and they spun balls of thread to let him down to earth; when he came down and found his wife the Speckled Duck, whom the Old Wolf had taken from him, she fled in confusion, and that is why she lives and dives alone to this very day.[99] In Guinea, where beast-fable is one of the great staples of native conversation, the following story is told as a type of the tales which in this way account for peculiarities of animals. The great Engena-monkey offered his daughter to be bride of the champion who should perform the feat of drinking a whole barrel of rum. The dignified Elephant, the graceful Leopard, the surly Boar, tried the first mouthful of the fire-water, and retreated. Then the tiny Telinga-monkey came, who had cunningly hidden in the long grass thousands of his fellows; he took his first glass and went away, but instead of his coming back, another just like him came for the second, and so on till the barrel was emptied and Telinga walked off with the Monkey-king's daughter. But in the narrow path the Elephant and Leopard attacked him and drove him off and he took refuge in the highest boughs of the trees, vowing never more to live on the ground and suffer such violence and injustice. This is why to this day the little telingas are only found in the highest tree-tops.[100] Such stories have been collected by scores from savage tradition in their original state, while as yet no moral lesson has entered into them. Yet the easy and natural transition from the story into the parable is made among savages, perhaps without help from higher races. In the Hottentot Tales, side by side with the myth of the cunning Jackal tricking the Lion out of the best of the carcase, and getting the black stripe burnt on his own back by carrying off the Sun, there occurs the moral apologue of the Lion who thought himself wiser than his Mother, and perished by the Hunter's spear, for want of heed to her warning against the deadly creature whose head is in a line with his breast and shoulders.[101] So the Zulus have a thorough moral apologue in the story of the hyrax, who did not go to fetch his tail on the day when tails were given out, because he did not like to be out in the rain; he only asked the other animals to bring it for him, and so he never got it.[102] Among the North American legends of Manabozho, there is a fable quite Æsopian in its humour. Manabozho, transformed into a Wolf, killed a fat moose, and being very hungry sat down to eat. But he fell into great doubts as to where to begin, for, said he, if I begin at the head, people will laugh and say, he ate him backwards, but if I begin at the side they will say, he ate him sideways. At last he made up his mind, and was just putting a delicate piece into his mouth, when a tree close by creaked. Stop, stop! said he to the tree, I cannot eat with such a noise, and in spite of his hunger he left the meat and climbed up to quiet the creaking, but was caught between two branches and held fast, and presently he saw a pack of wolves coming. Go that way! Go that way! he cried out, whereupon the wolves said, he must have something there, or he would not tell us to go another way. So they came on, and found the moose, and ate it to the bones while Manabozho looked wistfully on. The next heavy blast of wind opened the branches and let him out, and he went home thinking to himself, 'See the effect of meddling with frivolous things when I had certain good in my possession.'[103]
In the Old World, the moral Beast-fable was of no mean antiquity, but it did not at once supplant the animal-myths pure and simple. For ages the European mind was capable at once of receiving lessons of wisdom from the Æsopian crows and foxes, and of enjoying artistic but by no means edifying beast-stories of more primitive type. In fact the Babrius and Phædrus collections were over a thousand years old, when the genuine Beast-Epic reached its fullest growth in the incomparable 'Reynard the Fox,' traceable in Jakob Grimm's view to an original Frankish composition of the 12th century, itself containing materials of far earlier date.[104] Reynard is not a didactic poem, at least if a moral hangs on to it here and there it is oftenest a Macchiavellian one; nor is it essentially a satire, sharply as it lashes men in general and the clergy in particular. Its creatures are incarnate qualities, the Fox of cunning, the Bear of strength, the Ass of dull content, the Sheep of guilelessness. The charm of the narrative, which every class in mediæval Europe delighted in, but which we have allowed to drop out of all but scholars' knowledge, lies in great measure in the cleverly sustained combination of the beast's nature and the man's. How great the influence of the Reynard Epic was in the middle ages, may be judged from Reynard, Bruin, Chanticleer, being still names familiar to people who have no idea of their having been originally names of the characters in the great beast-fable. Even more remarkable are its traces in modern French. The donkey has its name of baudet from Baudoin, Baldwin the Ass. Common French dictionaries do not even contain the word goupil (vulpes), so effectually has the Latin name of the fox been driven out of use by his Frankish title in the Beast-Epic, Raginhard the Counsellor, Reinhart, Reynard, Renart, renard. The moralized apologues like Æsop's which Grimm contemptuously calls 'fables thinned down to mere moral and allegory,' 'a fourth watering of the old grapes into an insipid moral infusion,' are low in æsthetic quality as compared with the genuine beast-myths. Mythological critics will be apt to judge them after the manner of the child who said how convenient it was to have 'Moral' printed in Æsop's fables, that everybody might know what to skip.
The want of power of abstraction which has ever had such disastrous effect on the beliefs of mankind, confounding myth and chronicle, and crushing the spirit of history under the rubbish of literalized tradition, comes very clearly into view in the study of parable. The state of mind of the deaf, dumb, and blind Laura Bridgman, so instructive in illustrating the mental habits of uneducated though full-sensed men, displays in an extreme form the difficulty such men have in comprehending the unreality of any story. She could not be made to see that arithmetical problems were anything but statements of concrete fact, and when her teacher asked her, 'If you can buy a barrel of cider for four dollars, how much can you buy for one dollar?' she replied quite simply, 'I cannot give much for cider, because it is very sour.'[105] It is a surprising instance of this tendency to concretism, that among people so civilized as the Buddhists, the most obviously moral beast-fables have become literal incidents of sacred history. Gautama, during his 550 jatakas or births, took the form of a frog, a fish, a crow, an ape, and various other animals, and so far were the legends of these transformations from mere myth to his followers, that there have been preserved as relics in Buddhist temples the hair, feathers, and bones of the creatures whose bodies the great teacher inhabited. Now among the incidents which happened to Buddha during his series of animal births, he appeared as an actor in the familiar fable of the Fox and the Stork, and it was he who, when he was a Squirrel, set an example of parental virtue by trying to dry up the ocean with his tail, to save his young ones whose nest had drifted out to sea, till his persevering courage was rewarded by a miracle.[106] To our modern minds, a moral which seems the very purpose of a story is evidence unfavourable to its truth as fact. But if even apologues of talking birds and beasts have not been safe from literal belief, it is clear that the most evident moral can have been but slight protection to parables told of possible and life-like men. It was not a needless precaution to state explicitly of the New Testament parables that they were parables, and even this guard has not availed entirely. Mrs. Jameson relates some curious experience in the following passage: — 'I know that I was not very young when I entertained no more doubt of the substantial existence of Lazarus and Dives than of John the Baptist and Herod; when the Good Samaritan was as real a personage as any of the Apostles; when I was full of sincerest pity for those poor foolish Virgins who had forgotten to trim their lamps, and thought them — in my secret soul — rather hardly treated. This impression of the literal actual truth of the parables I have since met with in many children, and in the uneducated but devout hearers and readers of the Bible; and I remember that when I once tried to explain to a good old woman the proper meaning of the word parable, and that the story of the Prodigal Son was not a fact, she was scandalized — she was quite sure that Jesus would never have told anything to his disciples that was not true. Thus she settled the matter in her own mind, and I thought it best to leave it there undisturbed.'[107] Nor, it may be added, has such realization been confined to the minds of the poor and ignorant. St. Lazarus, patron saint of lepers and their hospitals, and from whom the lazzarone and the lazzaretto take their name, obviously derives these qualities from the Lazarus of the parable.
The proof of the force and obstinacy of the mythic faculty, thus given by the relapse of parable into pseudo-history, may conclude this dissertation on mythology. In its course there have been examined the processes of animating and personifying nature, the formation of legend by exaggeration and perversion of fact, the stiffening of metaphor by mistaken realization of words, the conversion of speculative theories and still less substantial fictions into pretended traditional events, the passage of myth into miracle-legend, the definition by name and place given to any floating imagination, the adaptation of mythic incident as moral example, and the incessant crystallization of story into history. The investigation of these intricate and devious operations has brought ever more and more broadly into view two principles of mythologic science. The first is that legend, when classified on a sufficient scale, displays a regularity of development which the notion of motiveless fancy quite fails to account for, and which must be attributed to laws of formation whereby every story, old and new, has arisen from its definite origin and sufficient cause. So uniform indeed is such development, that it becomes possible to treat myth as an organic product of mankind at large, in which individual, national, and even racial distinctions stand subordinate to universal qualities of the human mind. The second principle concerns the relation of myth to history. It is true that the search for mutilated and mystified traditions of real events, which formed so main a part of old mythological researches, seems to grow more hopeless the farther the study of legend extends. Even the fragments of real chronicle found embedded in the mythic structure are mostly in so corrupt a state, that, far from their elucidating history, they need history to elucidate them. Yet unconsciously, and as it were in spite of themselves, the shapers and transmitters of poetic legend have preserved for us masses of sound historical evidence. They moulded into mythic lives of gods and heroes their own ancestral heirlooms of thought and word, they displayed in the structure of their legends the operations of their own minds, they placed on record the arts and manners, the philosophy and religion of their own times, times of which formal history has often lost the very memory. Myth is the history of its authors, not of its subjects; it records the lives, not of superhuman heroes, but of poetic nations.
- ↑ Hamilton in 'As. Res.' vol. ii. p. 344; Colebrooke, ibid. vol. iv. p. 385; Earl in 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii. p. 682; vol. iv. p. 9. See Renaudot, 'Travels of Two Mahommedans,' in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 183.
- ↑ F. Buckland, 'Curiosities of Nat. Hist.' 3rd series, vol. ii. p. 39.
- ↑ Andrew Boorde, 'Introduction of Knowledge,' ed. by F. J. Furnivall, Early Eng. Text Soc. 1870, p. 133.
- ↑ Ælian, De Nat. Animal, v. 2, see 8.
- ↑ Acta Sanctorum Bolland. Jan. xvi.
- ↑ 'Acts of Peter and Paul,' trans. by A. Walker, in Ante-Nicene Library, vol. xvi. p. 257; F. F. Tuckett in 'Nature,' Oct. 20, 1870. See Lyell, 'Principles of Geology,' ch. xxx.; Phillips, 'Vesuvius,' p. 244.
- ↑ Lane, 'Thousand and One N.' vol. i. pp. 161, 217; vol. iii. p. 78; Hole, 'Remarks on the Ar. N.' p. 104; Heinrich von Veldeck, 'Herzog Ernst's von Bayern Erhöhung, &c.' ed. Rixner, Amberg, 1830, p. 65; see Ludlow, 'Popular Epics of Middle Ages,' p. 221.
- ↑ Sir John Maundevile, 'Voiage and Travaile.'
- ↑ Sir Thomas Browne, 'Vulgar Errours,' ii. 3.
- ↑ 'Mémoires conc. l'Hist., &c., des Chinois,' vol. iv. p. 457. Compare the story of the magnetic (?) horseman in 'Thousand and One N.' vol. iii. p. 119, with the old Chinese mention of magnetic cars with a movable-armed pointing figure, A. v. Humboldt, 'Asie Centrale,' vol. i. p. xl.; Goguet, vol. iii. p. 284. (The loadstone mountain has its power from a turning brazen horseman on the top.)
- ↑ Brasseur, 'Popol Vuh,' pp. 23-31. Compare this Central American myth of the ancient senseless mannikins who become monkeys, with a Pottowatomi legend in Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 320.
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ 4
- ↑ Campbell in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1866, part ii. p. 132; Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. ii. p. 456; Tod, 'Annals of Rajasthan,' vol. i. p. 114.
- ↑ Bourien in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 73; see 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 271.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 435; 'Mensch,' vol. iii. pp. 347, 349, 387; Koeppen, vol. ii. p. 44; J. J. Schmidt, 'Völker Mittel-Asiens,' p. 210.
- ↑ Froebel, 'Central America,' p. 220; see Bosman, 'Guinea,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 401. For other traditions of human descent from apes, see Farrar, 'Chapters on Language,' p. 45.
- ↑ Bosman, 'Guinea,' p. 440; Waitz, vol. ii. p. 178; Cauche, 'Relation de Madagascar,' p. 127; Dobrizhoffer, 'Abipones,' vol. i. p. 288; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 44; Pouchet, 'Plurality of Human Race,' p. 22.
- ↑ Monboddo, 'Origin and Progress of Lang.' 2nd ed. vol. i. p. 277; Du Chaillu, 'Equatorial Africa,' p. 61; St. John, 'Forests of Far East,' vol. i. p. 17; vol. ii. p. 239.
- ↑ Max Müller in Bunsen, 'Phil. Univ. Hist.' vol. i. p. 340; 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' vol. xxiv. p. 207. See Marsden in 'As. Res.' vol. iv. p. 226; Fitch in Pinkerton, vol. ix. p. 415; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 465; vol. ii. p. 201.
- ↑ Ayeen Akbaree, trans, by Gladwin; 'Report of Ethnological Committee Jubbulpore Exhibition, 1866-7,' part i. p. 3. See the mention of the banmanush in 'Kumaon and Nepal,' Campbell; 'Ethnology of India,' in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1866, part ii. p. 46.
- ↑ Marsden, 'Sumatra,' p. 41.
- ↑ Logan in 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. i. p. 246; vol. iii. p. 490; Thomson, ibid. vol. i. p. 350; Crawfurd, ibid. vol. iv. p. 186.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 123; vol. iii. p. 435.
- ↑ Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. pp. 425, 471.
- ↑ Its analogue is bosjesbok, 'bush-goat,' the African antelope. The derivation of the Bosjesman's name from his nest-like shelter in a bush, given by Kolben and others since, is newer and far-fetched.
- ↑ Martius, vol. i. p. 50.
- ↑ Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81; Southey, 'Brazil,' vol. i. p. xxx.; Bates, 'Amazons,' vol. i. p. 73; vol. ii. p. 204.
- ↑ Castelnau, 'Exp. dans l'Amér. du Sud,' vol. iii. p. 118. See Martius, vol. i. pp. 248, 414, 563, 633.
- ↑ Petherick, 'Egypt, &c.' p. 367.
- ↑ Southey, 'Brazil,' vol. i. p. 685; Martius, vol. i. pp. 425, 633.
- ↑ Krapf, p. 142; Baker, 'Albert Nyanza,' vol. i. p. 83; St. John, vol. i. pp. 51, 405; and others.
- ↑ Lockhart, 'Abor. of China,' in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 181.
- ↑ 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. ii. p. 358; vol. iv. p. 374; Cameron, 'Malayan India,' p. 120; Marsden, p. 7; Antonio Galvano, pp. 120, 218.
- ↑ Davis, 'Carthage,' p. 230; Bostock and Riley's Pliny (Bohn's ed.), vol. ii. p. 134, note.
- ↑ Francisque-Michel, 'Races Maudites,' vol. i. p. 17; 'Argot,' p. 349; Fernan Caballero, 'La Gaviota,' vol. i. p. 59.
- ↑ Horne Tooke, 'Diversions of Purley,' vol. i. p. 397.
- ↑ Baring-Gould, 'Myths,' p. 137.
- ↑ Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 252; Backhouse, 'Austr.' p. 557; Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1290; De Laet, 'Novus Orbis,' p. 543.
- ↑ For various other stories of tailed men, see 'As. Res.' vol. iii. p. 149; 'Mem. Anthrop. Soc.' vol. i. p. 454; 'Journ. Ind. Archip.' vol. iii p. 261, &c. (Nicobar Islands); Klemm, 'C. G.' vol. ii. pp. 246, 316 (Sarytschew Is.); 'Letters of Columbus,' Hakluyt Soc. p. 11 (Cuba), &c., &c.
- ↑ Details of monstrous tribes have been in past centuries specially collected in the following works: 'Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transformed, or the Artificiall Changeling, &c.,' scripsit J. B. cognomento Chirosophus, M.D., London, 1653; Calovius, 'De Thaumatanthropologia, vera pariter atque ficta tractatus historico-physicus,' Rostock, 1685; J. A. Fabricius, 'Dissertatio de hominibus orbis nostri incolis, &c.,' Hamburg, 1721. Only a few principal references are here given.
- ↑ Grimm, 'D. M.' ch. xvii. xviii.; Nilsson, 'Primitive Inhabitants of Scandinavia,' ch. vi.; Hanusch, 'Slaw. Myth.' pp. 230, 325-7; Wuttke, 'Volksabergl.' p. 231.
- ↑ 'Chronique de Tabari,' tr. Dubeux, part i. ch. viii. See Koran, xviii. 92.
- ↑ Pigafetta in Pinkerton, vol. xi. p. 314. See Blumenbach, 'De Generis Humanæ Varietate;' Fitzroy, 'Voy. of Adventure and Beagle,' vol. i.; Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. iii. p. 488.
- ↑ Knivet in Purchas, vol. iv. p. 1231; compare Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 564, with Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' p. 424; see also Krapf, 'East Africa,' p. 51; Du Chaillu, 'Ashango-land,' p. 319.
- ↑ 'Early Hist. of Mankind,' ch. xi.; Hunt, 'Pop. Rom.' 1st series, pp. 18, 304.
- ↑ Squier, 'Abor. Monuments of N. Y.' p. 68; Long's 'Exp.' vol. i. pp. 62, 275; Hersart de Villemarqué, 'Chants Populaires de la Bretagne,' p. liv., 35; Meadows Taylor in 'Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 157.
- ↑ Gul. de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 69; Lane, 'Thousand and One N.' vol. iii. pp. 81, 91, see 24, 52, 97; Hole, p. 63; Marco Polo, book iii. ch. xii.
- ↑ Benjamin of Tudela, 'Itinerary,' ed. and tr. by Asher, 83; Plin. vii. 2. See Max Müller in Bunsen, 'Philos. Univ. Hist.,' vol. i. pp. 346, 358.
- ↑ Plin. iv. 27; Mela, iii. 6; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 120; vol. ii. p. 93; St. John, vol. ii. p. 117; Marsden, p. 53; Lane, 'Thousand and One N.' vol. iii. pp. 92, 305; Petherick, 'Egypt, &c.' p. 367; Burton, 'Central Afr.' vol. i. p. 235; Pedro Simon, 'Indias Occidentales,' p. 7.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol i. p. 133.
- ↑ Marco Polo, book iii. ch. xviii.
- ↑ 1
- ↑ 2
- ↑ 3
- ↑ Lane, vol. i. p. 33; Callaway, 'Zulu Tales,' vol. i. pp. 199, 202. Virg. Æn. viii. 194; a similar metaphor is the name of the Nimchas, from Persian nim — half, 'Journ. Eth. Soc.' vol. i. p. 192, cf. French demi-monde. Compare the 'one-legged' tribes, Plin. vii. 2; Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part iii. p. 521; Charlevoix, vol. i. p. 25. The Australians use the metaphor 'of one leg' (matta gyn) to describe tribes as of one stock, G. F. Moore, 'Vocab.' pp. 5, 71.
- ↑ Hayton in Purchas, vol. iii. p. 108; see Klemm, 'C. G.' vol. vi. p. 129; Vambéry, p. 49; Homer. Odyss. ix.; Strabo, i. 2, 12; see Scherzer, 'Voy. of Novara,' vol. ii. p. 40; C. J. Andersson, 'Lake Ngami, &c.,' p. 453; Du Chaillu, 'Equatorial Africa,' p. 440; Sir J. Richardson, 'Polar Regions,' p. 300. For tribes with more than two eyes, see Pliny's metaphorically explained Nisacæthæ and Nisyti, Plin. vi. 35; also Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 414; 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. pp. 25, 76; Petherick, l.c.; Bowen, 'Yoruba Gr.' p. xx.; Schirren, p. 196.
- ↑ 3
- ↑ Plin, vii. 2.; Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. v. p. 81.
- ↑ Krapf, p. 359.
- ↑ Southey, 'Brazil,' vol. iii. p. 390.
- ↑ D. Wilson, 'Archæology, &c. of Scotland,' p. 123.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 128; Livingstone, p. 532.
- ↑ Williams, 'Fiji,' p. 160; Seemann, 'Viti,' p. 113; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 182 (a similar legend told by the Samoans). Another tattooing legend in Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 152; Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. i. p. 112.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. pp. 167-8; Wilkinson in Rawlinson's 'Herodotus,' vol. ii. p. 79; Grimm, 'D. M.' pp. 972-6; W. G. Palgrave, 'Arabia,' vol. i. p. 251; Squier and Davis, 'Monuments of Mississippi Valley,' p. 134; Taylor, 'New Zealand,' p. 258.
- ↑ Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 43; Lejean in 'Rev. des Deux Mondes,' 15 Feb. 1862, p. 856; Apollodor. iii. 8. Compare the derivation of Arequipa by the Peruvians from the words ari! quepay 'yes! remain,' said to have been addressed to the colonists by the Inca: Markham, 'Quichua Gr. and Dic.;' also the supposed etymology of Dahome, Danh-ho-men = 'on the belly of Danh,' from the story of King Dako building his palace on the body of the conquered King Danh: Burton, in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 401.
- ↑ Charnock, 'Verba Nominalia,' s.v. 'chic;' see Francisque-Michel, 'Argot,' s.v.
- ↑ 'Spectator,' No. 147; Brand, 'Pop. Ant.' vol. iii. p. 93; Hotten, 'Slang Dictionary,' p. 3; Charnock, s.v. 'cant.' As to the real etymology, that from the beggar's whining chaunt is defective, for the beggar drops this tone exactly when he cants, i.e., talks jargon with his fellows. If cant is directly from Latin cantare, it will correspond with Italian cantare and French chanter, both used as slang words for to speak (Francisque-Michel, 'Argot'). A Keltic origin is more probable, Gaelic and Irish cainnt, caint = talk, language, dialect (see Wedgwood 'Etymological Dictionary'). The Gaelic equivalents for pedlars' French or tramps' slang, are 'Laidionn nan ceard,' 'cainnt cheard,' i.e., tinkers' Latin or jargon, or exactly 'cairds' cant.' A deeper connexion between cainnt and cantare does not affect this.
- ↑ See also Francisque-Michel, 'Argot,' s.v. 'maccabe, macchabée'=noyé.
- ↑ Musters, 'Patagonians,' pp. 69, 184.
- ↑ Döhne, 'Zulu Dic.' p. 417; Arbousset and Daumas, p. 269; Waitz, vol. ii. pp. 349, 352.
- ↑ Shortland, 'Trads. of N. Z.' p .224.
- ↑ On the adoption of imaginary ancestors as connected with the fiction of a common descent, and the important political and religious effects of these proceedings, see especially Grote, 'History of Greece,' vol. i.; McLennan, 'Primitive Marriage,' Maine, 'Ancient Law.' Interesting details on eponymic ancestors in Pott, 'Anti-Kaulen, oder Mythische Vorstellungen vom Ursprunge der Völker und Sprachen.'
- ↑ Martius, 'Ethnog. Amer.' vol. i. p. 54; see p. 283.
- ↑ Macpherson, 'India,' p. 78.
- ↑ Vambéry, 'Central Asia,' p. 325; see also Latham, 'Descr. Eth.' vol. i. p. 456 (Ostyaks); Georgi, 'Reise im Russ. Reich,' vol. i. 242 (Tunguz).
- ↑ Barth, 'N. & Centr. Afr.' vol. ii. p. 71.
- ↑ J. G. Müller, 'Amer. Urrelig.' p. 574.
- ↑ Martius, vol. i. pp. 180-4; Waitz, vol. iii. p. 416.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 319, part iii. p. 268, see part ii. p. 49; Catlin, vol. ii. p. 128; J. G. Müller, pp. 134, 327.
- ↑ Grote, 'Hist. of Greece;' Pausan. iii. 20; Diod. Sic. v.; Apollodor. Bibl. i. 7, 3, vi. 1, 4; Herodot, i. 171.
- ↑ Max Müller in Bunsen, vol. i. p. 338; Tabari, part i. ch. xlv., lxix.
- ↑ Sir W. Jones in 'As. Res.' vol. ii. p. 24; Vansittart, ibid. p. 67; see Campbell, in 'Journ. As. Soc. Bengal,' 1866, part ii. p. 7.
- ↑ Will. de Rubruquis in Pinkerton, vol. vii. p. 23; Gabelentz in 'Zeitschr. für die Kunde des Morgenlandes,' vol. ii. p. 73; Schmidt, 'Völker Mittel-Asien,' p. 6.
- ↑ See also Pott, 'Anti-Kaulen,' pp. 19, 23; 'Rassen,' pp. 70, 153; and remarks on colonization-myths in Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. ii. p. 68.
- ↑ Seemann, 'Viti,' p. 311; Turner, 'Polynesia,' p. 252.
- ↑ Ellis, 'Polyn. Res.' vol. i. p. 69.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 122; 'Indian Tribes,' part i. p. 320, part ii. p. 230.
- ↑ J. R. Wise, 'The New Forest,' p. 160; Taylor, ' New Zealand,' p. 268; Max Müller, 'Chips,' vol. i. p. 249; M. A. Walker, 'Macedonia,' p. 192; Movers, 'Phönizier,' vol. i. p. 665; Lucian. de Deâ Syriâ, 8 ; Hunt, 'Pop. Rom.' 2nd Series, p. 15; Wuttke, 'Volksaberglaube,' pp. 16, 94; Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 59, vol. iii. p. 185; Buchanan, 'Mysore, &c.' in Pinkerion; vol. viii. p. 714.
- ↑ Sprenger, 'Leben des Mohammad,' vol. i. pp. 78, 119, 162, 310.
- ↑ Marco Polo, book i. ch. viii.
- ↑ Grote, vol. i. p. 347.
- ↑ Welcker, vol. i. p. 756.
- ↑ Xenoph. Memorabilia, ii. 1.
- ↑ Oldfield in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 259.
- ↑ Steller, 'Kamtschatka,' p. 255.
- ↑ Wilson in 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iv. p. 306.
- ↑ J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' p. 382.
- ↑ Bleek, 'Reynard in S. Afr.' pp. 5, 47, 67 (these are not among the stories which seem recently borrowed from Europeans). See 'Early History of Mankind,' p. 10.
- ↑ Callaway, 'Zulu Tales,' vol. i. p. 355.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, 'Algic Res.' vol. i. p. 160; see pp. 43, 51.
- ↑ Jakob Grimm, 'Reinhart Fuchs,' Introd.
- ↑ Account of Laura Bridgman, p. 120.
- ↑ Bowring, 'Siam,' vol. i. p. 313; Hardy, 'Manual of Budhism,' p. 98. See the fable of the 'Crow and Pitcher,' in Plin. x. 60, and Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. i. p. 76.
- ↑ Jameson, 'History of Our Lord in Art,' vol. i. p. 375.