Kur-bo-roo is the sage counsellor of the aborigines in all their difficulties. When bent on a dangerous expedition, the men will seek help from this clumsy creature, but in what way his opinions are made known is nowhere recorded.”[1] H. R. Schoolcraft mentions a Red Indian story explaining how “the bear does not die,” but this tale Schoolcraft (like Herodotus in Egypt) “cannot bring himself to relate.” He also gives examples of Iowas conversing with serpents. These may serve as examples of the savage belief in the human intelligence of animals. Man is on an even footing with them, and with them can interchange his ideas. But savages carry this opinion much further. Man in their view is actually, and in no figurative sense, akin to the beasts. Certain tribes in Java “believe that women when delivered of a child are frequently delivered at the same time of a young crocodile.”[2] The common European story of a queen accused of giving birth to puppies shows the survival of the belief in the possibility of such births among civilized races, while the Aztecs had the idea that women who saw the moon in certain circumstances would produce mice. But the chief evidence for the savage theory of man’s close kinship with the lower animals is found in the institution called totemism (q.v.)—the belief that certain stocks of men in the various tribes are descended by blood descent from, or are developed out of, or otherwise connected with, certain objects animate or inanimate, but especially with beasts. The strength of the opinion is proved by its connexion with very stringent marriage laws. No man (according to the rigour of the custom) may marry a woman who bears the same kin name as himself, that is, who is descended from the same inanimate object or animal. Nor may people (if they can possibly avoid it) eat the flesh of animals who are their kindred. Savage man also believes that many of his own tribe-fellows have the power of assuming the shapes of animals, and that the souls of his dead kinsfolk revert to animal forms.
E. W. Lane, in his introduction to the Arabian Nights (i. 58), says he found the belief in these transmigrations accepted seriously in Cairo. H. H. Bancroft brings evidence to prove that the Mexicans supposed pregnant women would turn into beasts, and sleeping children into mice, if things went wrong in the ritual of a certain solemn sacrifice. There is a well-known Scottish legend to the effect that a certain old witch was once fired at in her shape as a hare, and that where the hare was hit there the old woman was found to be wounded. J. F. Lafitau tells the same story as current among his Red Indian flock, except that the old witch and her son took the form of birds, not of hares. A Scandinavian witch does the same in the Egil saga. In Lafitau’s tale the birds were wounded by the magic arrows of a medicine man, and the arrow-heads were found in the bodies of the human culprits. In Japan[3] people chiefly transform themselves into badgers. The sorcerers of Honduras (Bancroft, i. 740) “possessed the power of transforming men into wild beasts.” J. F. Regnard, the French dramatist, found in Lapland (1681) that witches could turn men into cats, and could themselves assume the forms of swans, crows, falcons and geese. Among the Bushmen[4] “sorcerers assume the form of beasts and jackals.” M. Dobrizhofer, a missionary in Paraguay (1717–1791), learned that “sorcerers arrogate to themselves the power of changing men into tigers” (Eng. trans., i. 63). He was present at a conversion of this sort, though the miracle beheld by the people was invisible to the missionary. Near Loanda Livingstone noted that “a chief may metamorphose himself into a lion, kill any one he chooses, and resume his proper form.” The same accomplishments distinguish the Barotse and Balonda.[5] Among the Mayas of Central America sorcerers could transform themselves “into dogs, pigs and other animals; their glance was death to a victim” (Bancroft, ii. 797). The Thlinkeets hold that their shamans have the same powers.[6] A bamboo in Sarawak is known to have been a man. Metamorphoses into stones are as common among Red Indians and Australians as in Greek mythology. Compare the cases of Niobe and the victims of the Gorgon’s head.[7] Zulus, Red Indians, Aztecs,[8] Andaman Islanders and other races believe that their dead assume the shapes of serpents and of other creatures, often reverting to the form of the animal from which they originally descended. In ancient Egypt “the usual prayers demand for the deceased the power of going and coming from and to everywhere under any form they like.”[9] A trace of this opinion may be noticed in the Aeneid. The serpent that appeared at the sacrifice of Aeneas was regarded as possibly a “manifestation” of the soul of Anchises (Aeneid, v. 84)—
| “Dixerat haec, adytis quum lubricus anguis ab imis |
| Septem ingens gyros, septena volumma, traxit,” |
and Aeneas is
| “Incertus, geniumne loci, famulumne parentis |
| Esse putet.” |
On the death of Plotinus, as he gave up the ghost, a snake glided from under his bed into a hole in the wall.[10] Compare Pliny[11] on the cave “in quo manes Scipionis Africani majoris custodire draco dicitur.”
The last peculiarity in savage philosophy to which we need call attention here is the belief in spirits and in human intercourse with the shades of the dead. With the savage natural death is not a universal and inevitable ordinance. “All men must die” is a generalization which he has scarcely reached; in his philosophy the proposition is more like this—“all men who die die by violence.” A natural death is explained as the result of a sorcerer’s spiritual violence, and the disease is attributed to magic or to the action of hostile spirits. After death the man survives as a spirit, sometimes taking an animal form, sometimes invisible, sometimes to be observed “in his habit as he lived” (see Apparitions). The philosophy of the subject is shortly put in the speech of Achilles (Iliad, xxiii. 103) after he has beheld the dead Patroclus in a dream: “Ay me, there remaineth then even in the house of Hades a spirit and phantom of the dead, for all night long hath the ghost of hapless Patroclus stood over me, wailing and making moan.” It is almost superfluous to quote here the voluminous evidence for the intercourse with spirits which savage chiefs and medicine men are believed to maintain. They can call up ghosts, or can go to the ghosts, in Australia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, North America, Zululand, among the Eskimo, and generally in every quarter of the globe. The men who enjoy this power are the same as they who can change themselves and others into animals. They too command the weather, and, says an old French missionary, “are regarded as very jupiters, having in their hands the lightning and the thunder” (Relations, loc. cit.). They make good or bad seasons, and control the vast animals who, among ancient Persians and Aryans of India, as among Zulus and Iroquois, are supposed to grant or withhold the rain, and to thunder with their enormous wings in the region of the clouds.
Another fertile source of myth is magic, especially the magic designed to produce fertility, vegetable and animal. From the natives of northern and central Australia to the actors in the ritual of Adonis, or the folk among whom arose the customs of crowning the May king or the king of the May, all peoples have done magic to encourage the breeding of animals as part of the food supply, and to stimulate the growth of plants, wild or cultivated. In the opinion of J. G. Frazer, the human representatives or animal representatives, in the rites, of the spirit of vegetation; of the corn spirit; of the changing seasons, winter or summer, have been developed into many forms of gods, with appropriate myths, explanatory of the magic, and of the sacrifice of the chief performer. In the same way the adoration of living human beings, the deification of living kings—whose title survives in our king or queen of the May, and in the rex nemorensis, the priest of Diana in the grove of Aricia—has been most fruitful in myths of divine beings. These human beings are often sacrificed, for various reasons, actual or hypothetical, and gods and heroes are almost as likely to be explained as spirits of vegetation now, as they were likely to become solar mythological figures in the system of Max Müller. It is certainly true that divine beings in most mythologies are apt to acquire solar with other elemental attributes, including vegetable attributes. But that the origins of such mythical beings were, ab initio, either solar or vegetable, or, for that matter, animal, it would often be hard to prove.
Frazer’s ideas are to be found in a work of immense erudition, The Golden Bough (London, 1900). Two studies by him, pursuing
- ↑ R. Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 446 (1878).
- ↑ J. Hawkesworth, Voyages, iii. 756.
- ↑ Lord Redesdale, Tales of Old Japan (1871).
- ↑ Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Folk-Lore, pp. 15, 40.
- ↑ Missionary Travels, pp. 615, 642.
- ↑ W. H. Dall, Alaska, p. 423 (1870).
- ↑ Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions, pp. 130, 134.
- ↑ Sahagun, French trans., p. 226.
- ↑ Records of the Past, x. 10.
- ↑ Plotini vita, pp. 2, 95.
- ↑ H. N. xv. 44, 85.
