ways. The missionary is sometimes anxious to prove that religion
can only come by revelation, and that certain tribes, having received
no revelation, have no religion or religious myths at all. Sometimes
the missionary, on the other hand, is anxious to demonstrate that
the myths of his heathen flock are a corrupted version of the Biblical
narrative. In the former case he neglects the study of savage
myths; in the latter he unconsciously accommodates what he hears
to what he calls “the truth.” The traveller who is not a missionary
may either have the same prejudices, or he may be a sceptic about
revealed religion. In the latter case he is perhaps unconsciously
moved to put burlesque versions of Biblical stories into the mouths
of his native informants, or to represent the savages as ridiculing
the Scriptural traditions which he communicates to them. Yet
again we must remember that the leading questions of a European
inquirer may furnish a savage with a thread on which to string
answers which the questions themselves have suggested. “Have
you ever had a great flood?” “Yes” “Was any one saved?”
The question starts the invention of the savage on a deluge-myth,
of which, perhaps, the idea has never before entered his mind. There
still remain the difficulties of all conversation between civilized
men and unsophisticated savages, the tendency to hoax, and other
sources of error and confusion. By this time, too, almost every
explorer of savage life is a theorist. He is a Spencerian, or a believer
in the universal prevalence of the faith in an “All-Father,” or he
looks everywhere for gods who are “spirits of vegetation.” In
receiving this kind of evidence, then, we need to know the character
of our informant, his means of communicating with the heathen,
his power of testing evidence, and his good faith. His testimony
will have additional weight if supported by the “undesigned
coincidences” of other evidence, ancient and modern. If Strabo and
Herodotus and Pomponius Mela, for example, describe a custom,
rite or strange notion in the Old World, and if mariners and missionaries
find the same notion or custom or rite in Polynesia or Australia
or Kamchatka, we can scarcely doubt the truth of the reports.
The evidence is best when given by ignorant men, who are astonished
at meeting with an institution which ethnologists are familiar with
in other parts of the world.
Another method of obtaining evidence is by the comparative study of savage laws and institutions. Thus we find in Asia, Africa, America and Australia that the marriage laws of the lower races are connected with a belief in kinship or other relationship with animals. The evidence for this belief is thus entirely beyond suspicion. We find, too, that political power, sway and social influence are based on the ideas of magic, of metamorphosis, and of the power which certain men possess to talk with the dead and to visit the abodes of death. All these ideas are the stuff of which myths are made, and the evidence of savage institutions, in every part of the world, proves that these ideas are the universal inheritance of savages.
Savage men are like ourselves in curiosity and anxiety causas cognoscere rerum, but with our curiosity they do not possess our powers of attention. They are as easily satisfied with an explanation of phenomena as they are eager to possess an explanation. Inevitably they furnish themselves with their philosophy out of their scanty stock Savage Ideas about the World. of acquired ideas, and these ideas and general conceptions seem almost imbecile to civilized men. Curiosity and credulity, then, are the characteristics of the savage intellect. When a phenomenon presents itself the savage requires an explanation, and that explanation he makes for himself, or receives from tradition, in the shape of a myth. The basis of these myths, which are just as much a part of early conjectural science as of early religion, is naturally the experience of the savage as construed by himself. Man's craving to know “the reason why” is already “among rude savages an intellectual appetite,” and “even to the Australian scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience.”[1] How does he try to satisfy this craving? E. B. Tylor replies, “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.” Against this statement it has been urged that men in the lower stages of culture are not curious, but take all phenomena for granted. If there were no direct evidence in favour of Tylor’s opinion, it would be enough to point to the nature of savage myths themselves. It is not arguing in a circle to point out that almost all of them are nothing more than explanations of intellectual difficulties, answers to the question, How came this or that phenomenon to be what it is? Thus savage myths answer the questions—What was the origin of the world, and of men, and of beasts? How came the stars by their arrangement and movements? How are the motions of sun and moon to be accounted for? Why has this tree a red flower, and this bird a black mark on the tail? What was the origin of the tribal dances, or of this or that law of custom or etiquette? Savage mythology, which is also savage science, has a reply to all these and all similar questions, and that reply is always found in the shape of a story. The answers cannot be accounted for without the previous existence of the questions.
We have now shown how savages come to have a mythology. It is their way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity, their way of realizing the world in which they move. But they frame their stories, necessarily and naturally, in harmony with their general theory of things, with what we may call “savage metaphysics.” Now early man, as Max Müller says, “not only did not think as we think, but did not think as we suppose he ought to have thought.” The chief distinction between his mode of conceiving the world and ours is his vast extension of the theory of personality. To the savage, and apparently to men more backward than the most backward peoples we know, all nature was a congeries of animated personalities. The savage’s notion of personality is more a universally diffused feeling than a reasoned conception, and this feeling of a personal self he impartially distributes all over the world as known to him. One of the Jesuit missionaries in North America thus describes the Red Man’s philosophy:[2] “Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animées.” Crevaux, in the Andes, found that the Indians believed that the beasts have piays (sorcerers and doctors) like themselves.[3] This opinion we may name personalism, and it is the necessary condition of savage (and, as will be seen, of civilized) mythology. The Jesuits could not understand how spherical bodies like sun and moon could be mistaken for human beings. Their catechumens put them off with the answer that the drawn bows of the heavenly bodies gave them their round appearance. “The wind was formerly a person; he became a bird,” say the Bushmen, and g′ ōō ka! kai, a respectable Bushman once saw the personal wind at Haarfontein.[4] The Egyptians, according to Herodotus (iii. 16), believed fire to be θηρίον ἔμψυχον, a live beast. The Bushman who saw the Wind meant to throw a stone at it, but it ran into a hill. From the wind as a person the Bhinyas in India (Dalton, p. 140) claim descent, and in Indian epic tradition the leader of the ape army was the son of the wind. The Wind, by certain mares, became the father of wind-swift steeds mentioned in the Iliad. The loves of Boreas are well known. These are examples of the animistic theory applied to what, in our minds, seems one of the least personal of natural phenomena. The sky (which appears to us even less personal) has been regarded as a personal being by Samoyeds, Red Indians, Zulus,[5] and traces of this belief survive in Chinese, Greek and Roman religion.
We must remember, however, that to the savage, Sky, Sun, Sea, Wind, are not only persons, but they are savage persons. Their conduct is not what civilized men would attribute to characters so august; it is what uncivilized men think probable and befitting among beings like themselves.
The savage regards all animals as endowed with personality. “Ils tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs,” says a Jesuit father about the North-American Indians (Relations, loc. cit.). In Australia the natives believe that the wild dog has the power of speech, like the cat of the Coverley witch in the Savage Theory of Man’s Rela-tions with the World. Spectator. The Breton peasants, according to P. Sébillot, credit all birds with language, which they even attempt to interpret. The old English and the Arab superstitions about the language of beasts are examples of this opinion surviving among civilized races. The bear in Norway is regarded as almost a man, and his dead body is addressed and his wrath deprecated by Samoyeds and Red Indians. “The native bear
