Again, Pythagoras believed that an earthquake was caused by the dead men fighting with each other underground, and so shaking the earth.[1] I have collected many savage explanations of earthquakes, but none, perhaps, quite so savage as this of Pythagoras. The nearest approaches to it are the following. The Tlinkeet Indians on the north-west coast of America suppose that the earth rests upon a pillar which is guarded by a woman; so, when the gods fight with the woman for the possession of the pillar, in order that they may destroy the earth and its inhabitants, the pillar shakes, and this produces an earthquake.[2] The Andaman islanders, who long ranked, though unjustly, amongst the lowest of savages, think that earthquakes are caused by the spirits of the dead, who, impatient at the delay of the resurrection, shake the palm-tree on which they believe the earth to rest.[3] When the people of Timor, an East Indian island, feel the shock of an earthquake, they knock on the ground and call out, “We are still here,” to let the souls of the dead who are struggling to get up, know that there is no room for them on the surface of the earth.[4] Even this, however, is a shade less savage than the view of Pythagoras that the dead could not even keep the peace amongst themselves. In Lucian’s “Dialogues of the Dead” the soldier ghost who draws near the ferry, his bright armour flashing through the gloom, is bidden by Hermes to leave his arms behind him on the hither side of the river, “because there is peace in the grave”.[5] Clearly Hermes was not a Pythagorean.
But passing from Pythagoras’ views of physical causa-
- ↑ Ælian, Var. Hist., iv, 17.
- ↑ Holmberg, “Ethnographische Skizzen über die Völker des Russischen Amerika,” Actas societatis scientiarum Fennicæ, iv (Helsingfors, 1856), p. 346 seq.
- ↑ E. H. Man, Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, p. 86.
- ↑ A. Bastian, Indonesien, ii, p. 3. Cp. id., in Verhandl. d. Berlin. GeselL f. Anthropol., 1881, p. 157; J. G. F. Riedel, De sluik- en kroesharige rassen tusschen Selebes en Papua, 330, 428 seq.
- ↑ Lucian, Dial Mort., x, 7.
