Part 9

Stories like these, stories attributing some great deliverance to the mouse, or some deliverance from mice to the god, would naturally spring up among people puzzled by their own worship of the mouse-god or of the mouse. We have explained the religious character of mice as the relics of a past age in which the mouse had been a totem and mouse family names had been widely diffused. That there are, and have been, mice totems and mouse family names among Semitic stocks round the Mediterranean is proved by Prof. Robertson Smith:[134] 'Achbor, the mouse, is an Edomite name, apparently a stock name, as the jerboa and another mouse-name are among the Arabs. The same name occurs in Judah.' Where totemism exists, the members of each stock either do not eat the ancestral animal at all, or only eat him on rare sacrificial occasions. The totem of a hostile stock may be eaten by way of insult. In the case of the mouse, Isaiah seems to refer to one or other of these practices (lxvi.): 'They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's flesh, and the abomination, and the _mouse_, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord.' This is like the Egyptian prohibition to eat 'the abominable' (that is, tabooed or forbidden) 'Rat of Ra.' If the unclean animals of Israel were originally the totems of each clan, then the mouse was a totem,[135] for the chosen people were forbidden to eat 'the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind.' That unclean beasts, beasts not to be eaten, were originally totems, Prof. Robertson Smith infers from Ezekiel (viii. 10, 11), where 'we find seventy of the elders of Israel--that is, the heads of houses--worshipping in a chamber which had on its walls the figures of all manner of unclean' (tabooed) 'creeping things, and quadrupeds, _even all the idols of the House of Israel_.' Some have too hastily concluded that the mouse was a sacred animal among the neighbouring Philistines. After the Philistines had captured the Ark and set it in the house of Dagon, the people were smitten with disease. They therefore, in accordance with a well-known savage magical practice, made five golden representations of the diseased part, and five golden mice, as 'a trespass offering to the Lord of Israel,' and so restored the Ark.[136] Such votive offerings are common still in Catholic countries, and the mice of gold by no means prove that the Philistines had ever worshipped mice.

* * * * *

Turning to India from the Mediterranean basin, and the Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian tribes on its coasts, we find that the mouse was the sacred animal of Rudra. 'The mouse, Rudra, is thy beast,' says the Yajur Veda, as rendered by Grohmann in his _Apollo Smintheus_. Grohmann recognises in Rudra a deity with most of the characteristics of Apollo. In later Indian mythology, the mouse is an attribute of Ganeca, who, like Apollo Smintheus, is represented in art with his foot upon a mouse.

Such are the chief appearances of the mouse in ancient religion. If he really was a Semitic totem, it may, perhaps, be argued that his prevalence in connection with Apollo is the result of a Semitic leaven in Hellenism. Hellenic invaders may have found Semitic mouse-tribes at home, and incorporated the alien stock deity with their own Apollo-worship. In that case the mouse, while still originally a totem, would not be an Aryan totem. But probably the myths and rites of the mouse, and their diffusion, are more plausibly explained on our theory than on that of De Gubernatis: 'The Pagan Sun-god crushes under his foot the Mouse of Night. When the cat's away, the mice may play; the shadows of night dance when the moon is absent.'[137] This is one of the quaintest pieces of mythological logic. Obviously, when the cat (the moon) is away, the mice (the shadows) _cannot_ play: there is no light to produce a shadow. As usually chances, the Scholars who try to resolve all the features of myth into physical phenomena do not agree among themselves about the mouse. While the mouse is the night according to M. de Gubernatis, in Grohmann's opinion the mouse is the lightning. He argues that the lightning was originally regarded by the Aryan race as the 'flashing tooth of a beast,' especially of a mouse. Afterwards men came to identify the beast with his teeth, and, behold the lightning and the mouse are convertible mythical terms! Now it is perfectly true that savages regard many elemental phenomena, from eclipses to the rainbow, as the result of the action of animals. The rainbow is a serpent;[138] thunder is caused by the thunder-bird, who has actually been shot in Dacotah, and who is familiar to the Zulus; while rain is the milk of a heavenly cow--an idea recurring in the _Zend Avesta_. But it does not follow because savages believe in these meteorological beasts that all the beasts in myth were originally meteorological. Man raised a serpent to the skies, perhaps, but his interest in the animal began on earth, not in the clouds. It is excessively improbable, and quite unproved, that any race ever regarded lightning as the flashes of a mouse's teeth. The hypothesis is a _jeu d'esprit_, like the opposite hypothesis about the mouse of Night. In these, and all the other current theories of the Sminthian Apollo, the widely diffused worship of ordinary mice, and such small deer, has been either wholly neglected, or explained by the first theory of symbolism that occurred to the conjecture of a civilised observer. The facts of savage animal-worship, and their relations to totemism, seem still unknown to or unappreciated by Scholars, with the exception of Mr. Sayce, who recognises totemism as the origin of the zoomorphic element in Egyptian religion.

Our explanation, whether adequate or not, is not founded on an isolated case. If Apollo superseded and absorbed the worship of the mouse, he did no less for the wolf, the ram, the dolphin, and several other animals whose images were associated with his own. The Greek religion was more refined and anthropomorphic than that of Egypt. In Egypt the animals were still adored, and the images of the gods had bestial heads. In Greece only a few gods, and chiefly in very archaic statues, had bestial heads; but besides the other deities the sculptor set the owl, eagle, wolf, serpent, tortoise, mouse, or whatever creature was the local favourite of the deity.[139] Probably the deity had, in the majority of cases, superseded the animal and succeeded to his honours. But the conservative religious sentiment retained the beast within the courts and in the suit and service of the anthropomorphic god.[140]

The process by which the god ousted the beasts may perhaps be observed in Samoa. There (as Dr. Turner tells us in his _Samoa_) each family has its own sacred animal, which it may not eat. If this law be transgressed, the malefactor is supernaturally punished in a variety of ways. But, while each family has thus its totem, four or five different families recognise, in owl, crab, lizard, and so on, incarnations of the same god, say of Tongo. If Tongo had a temple among these families, we can readily believe that images of the various beasts in which he was incarnate would be kept within the consecrated walls. Savage ideas like these, if they were ever entertained in Greece, would account for the holy animals of the different deities. But it is obvious that the phenomena which we have been studying may be otherwise explained. It may be said that the Sminthian Apollo was only revered as the enemy and opponent of mice. St. Gertrude (whose heart was eaten by mice) has the same _role_ in France.[141] The worship of Apollo, and the badge of the mouse, would, on this principle, be diffused by colonies from some centre of the faith. The images of mice in Apollo's temples would be nothing more than votive offerings. Thus, in the church of a Saxon town, the verger shows a silver mouse dedicated to Our Lady. 'This is the greatest of our treasures,' says the verger. 'Our town was overrun with mice till the ladies of the city offered this mouse of silver. Instantly all the mice disappeared.' 'And are you such fools as to believe that the creatures went away because a silver mouse was dedicated?' asked a Prussian officer. 'No,' replied the verger, rather neatly; 'or long ago we should have offered a silver Prussian.'

FOOTNOTES:

[108] _Comm. Real._, i. 75.

[109] See _Early History of the Family_, _infra_.

[110] The names _Totem_ and _Totemism_ have been in use at least since 1792, among writers on the North American tribes. Prof. Max Mueller (_Academy_, Jan., 1884) says the word should be, not _Totem_, but _Ote_ or _Otem_. Mr. Tylor's inquiries among the Red Men support this. Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the word _Totamism_ in 1792; but Lafitau (1724) had already explained some classical myths as survivals of Totemism.

[111] Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.

[112] Cieza de Leon, p. 183.

[113] _Idyll_ xv.

[114] Sayce, _Herodotos_, p. 344; Herodotus, ii. 42; Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_ (1878, ii. 475, note 2); Plutarch, _De Is. et Os._, 71, 72; Athenaeus, vii. 299; Strabo, xvii. 813.

[115] The Mouse, according to Dalton, is still a totem among the Oraons of Bengal. A man of the Mouse 'motherhood,' as the totem kindred is locally styled, may not eat mice (esteemed a delicacy), nor marry a girl who is a Mouse.

[116] xiii. 604. Casaub. 1620.

[117] There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete (De Witte, _Revue Numismatique_, N.S. iii. 3-11).

[118] _Iliad_, i. 39.

[119] AElian, _H. A._, xii. 5.

[120] The bas-relief is published in Paoli's _Della Religi ne de' Gentili_, Naples, 1771, p. 9; also by Fabretti, ad Cal. Oper. _de Colum. Trajan._, p. 315. Paoli's book was written after the discovery in Neapolitan territory of a small bronze image, hieratic in character, representing a man with a mouse on his hand. Paoli's engraving of this work of art, unluckily, does not enable us to determine its date or _provenance_. The book is a mine of mouse-lore.

[121] Colden, _History of the Five Nations_, p. 15 (1727).

[122] _Onomast._, ix. segm. 84.

[123] De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here. In the _Revue Numismatique_, N.S. iii., De Witte publishes coins of Alexandria, the more ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad. The Sminthian Apollo is represented with his bow, and the mouse on his hand. Other coins show the god with the mouse at his foot, or show us the lyre of Apollo supported by mice. A bronze coin in the British Museum gives Apollo with the mouse beside his foot.

[124] _Spanheim_, ad Fl. Joseph., vi. 1, p. 312.

[125] _Della Rel._, p. 174.

[126] Herodotus, ii. 141.

[127] Liebrecht (_Zur Volkskunde_, p. 13, quoting _Journal Asiatique_, 1st series, 3, 307) finds the same myth in Chinese annals. It is not a god, however, but the king of the rats who appears to the distressed monarch in his dream. Rats then gnaw the bowstrings of his enemies. The invaders were Turks, the rescued prince a king of Khotan. The king raised a temple, and offered sacrifice--to the rats? The same story of rats gnawing bowstrings recurs, of all places, in the _Migration Legend of the Greeks_ (Brinton, Philadelphia. 1884).

[128] _Herodotos_, p. 204.

[129] Wilkinson, iii. 249, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: 'Thou devourest the abominable rat of Ra, or the Sun.'

[130] Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the throne-name of Thothmes III. The animals thus used as substitutes for scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all represented in Mr. Loftie's collection. See his _Essay of Scarabs_, p. 27. It may be admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the religion of the Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed.

[131] Strabo, xiii. 604.

[132] Eustathius on _Iliad_, i. 39.

[133] _A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of Mice_, 1670.

[134] _Journal of Philol._, xvii. p. 96.

[135] Leviticus xi. 29.

[136] Samuel i. 5, 6.

[137] _Zool. Myth._, ii. 68.

[138] _Melusine_, N.S. i.

[139] _De Iside et Osiride_, lxxvi.

[140] This hypothesis does not maintain that totemism prevailed in Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions a Carian ~genos~, the Ioxidae, of Attic descent, which revered asparagus, it is probable that genuine totemism had died out of Greece many hundreds of years before even Homer's time. But this view is not inconsistent with the existence of survivals in religion and ritual.

[141] Rolland, _Faune populaire_.

_STAR MYTHS._

Artemus Ward used to say that, while there were many things in the science of astronomy hard to be understood, there was one fact which entirely puzzled him. He could partly perceive how we 'weigh the sun,' and ascertain the component elements of the heavenly bodies, by the aid of _spectrum_ analysis. 'But what beats me about the stars,' he observed plaintively, 'is how we come to know their names.' This question, or rather the somewhat similar question, 'How did the constellations come by their very peculiar names?' has puzzled Professor Pritchard and other astronomers more serious than Artemus Ward. Why is a group of stars called the _Bear_, or the _Swan_, or the _Twins_, or named after the _Pleiades_, the fair daughters of the Giant Atlas?[142] These are difficulties that meet even children when they examine a 'celestial globe.' There they find the figure of a bear, traced out with lines in the intervals between the stars of the constellations, while a very imposing giant is so drawn that Orion's belt just fits his waist. But when he comes to look at the heavens, the infant speculator sees no sort of likeness to a bear in the stars, nor anything at all resembling a giant in the neighbourhood of Orion. The most eccentric modern fancy which can detect what shapes it will in clouds, is unable to find any likeness to human or animal forms in the stars, and yet we call a great many of the stars by the names of men and beasts and gods. Some resemblance to terrestrial things, it is true, every one can behold in the heavens. _Corona_, for example, is like a crown, or, as the Australian black fellows know, it is like a boomerang, and we can understand why they give it the name of that curious curved missile. The _Milky Way_, again, does resemble a path in the sky; our English ancestors called it _Watling Street_--the path of the Watlings, mythical giants--and Bushmen in Africa and Red Men in North America name it the 'ashen path' or 'the path of souls.' The ashes of the path, of course, are supposed to be hot and glowing, not dead and black like the ash-paths of modern running-grounds. Other and more recent names for certain constellations are also intelligible. In Homer's time the Greeks had two names for the _Great Bear_; they called it the _Bear_, or the _Wain_: and a certain fanciful likeness to a wain may be made out, though no resemblance to a bear is manifest. In the United States the same constellation is popularly styled the _Dipper_, and every one may observe the likeness to a dipper or toddy-ladle.

But these resemblances take us only a little way towards appellations. We know that we derive many of the names straight from the Greek; but whence did the Greeks get them? Some, it is said, from the Chaldaeans; but whence did they reach the Chaldaeans? To this we shall return later, but, as to early Greek star-lore, Goguet, the author of _L'Origine des Lois_, a rather learned but too speculative work of the last century, makes the following characteristic remarks: 'The Greeks received their astronomy from Prometheus. This prince, as far as history teaches us, made his observations on Mount Caucasus.' That was the eighteenth century's method of interpreting mythology. The myth preserved in the 'Prometheus Bound' of AEschylus tells us that Zeus crucified the Titan on Mount Caucasus. The French philosopher, rejecting the supernatural elements of the tale, makes up his mind that Prometheus was a prince of a scientific bent, and that he established his observatory on the frosty Caucasus. But, even admitting this, why did Prometheus give the stars animal names? Goguet easily explains this by a hypothetical account of the manners of primitive men. 'The earliest peoples,' he says, 'must have used writing for purposes of astronomical science. They would be content to design the constellations of which they wished to speak by the hieroglyphical symbols of their names; hence the constellations have insensibly taken the names of the chief symbols.' Thus, a drawing of a bear or a swan was the hieroglyphic of the name of a star, or group of stars. But whence came the name which was represented by the hieroglyphic? That is precisely what our author forgets to tell us. But he remarks that the meaning of the hieroglyphic came to be forgotten, and 'the symbols gave rise to all the ridiculous tales about the heavenly signs.' This explanation is attained by the process of reasoning in a vicious circle from hypothetical premises ascertained to be false. All the known savages of the world, even those which have scarcely the elements of picture-writing, call the constellations by the names of men and animals, and all tell 'ridiculous tales' to account for the names.

As the star-stories told by the Greeks, the ancient Egyptians, and other civilised people of the old world, exactly correspond in character, and sometimes even in incident, with the star-stories of modern savages, we have the choice of three hypothesis to explain this curious coincidence. Perhaps the star-stories, about nymphs changed into bears, and bears changed into stars, were invented by the civilised races of old, and gradually found their way amongst people like the Eskimo, and the Australians, and Bushmen. Or it may be insisted that the ancestors of Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen were once civilised, like the Greeks and Egyptians, and invented star-stories, still remembered by their degenerate descendants. These are the two forms of the explanation which will be advanced by persons who believe that the star-stories were originally the fruit of the civilised imagination. The third theory would be, that the 'ridiculous tales' about the stars were originally the work of the savage imagination, and that the Greeks, Chaldaeans, and Egyptians, when they became civilised, retained the old myths that their ancestors had invented when they were savages. In favour of this theory it may be said, briefly, that there is no proof that the fathers of Australians, Eskimo, and Bushmen had ever been civilised, while there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the fathers of the Greeks had once been savages.[143] And, if we incline to the theory that the star-myths are the creation of savage fancy, we at once learn why they are, in all parts of the world, so much alike. Just as the flint and bone weapons of rude races resemble each other much more than they resemble the metal weapons and the artillery of advanced peoples, so the mental products, the fairy tales, and myths of rude races have everywhere a strong family resemblance. They are produced by men in similar mental conditions of ignorance, curiosity, and credulous fancy, and they are intended to supply the same needs, partly of amusing narrative, partly of crude explanation of familiar phenomena.

Now it is time to prove the truth of our assertion that the star-stories of savage and of civilised races closely resemble each other. Let us begin with that well-known group the _Pleiades_. The peculiarity of the _Pleiades_ is that the group consists of seven stars, of which one is so dim that it seems entirely to disappear, and many persons can only detect its presence through a telescope. The Greeks had a myth to account for the vanishing of the lost Pleiad. The tale is given in the _Catasterismoi_ (stories of metamorphoses into stars) attributed to Eratosthenes. This work was probably written after our era; but the author derived his information from older treatises now lost. According to the Greek myth, then, the seven stars of the Pleiad were seven maidens, daughters of the Giant Atlas. Six of them had gods for lovers; Poseidon admired two of them, Zeus three, and Ares one; but the seventh had only an earthly wooer, and when all of them were changed into stars, the maiden with the mortal lover hid her light for shame.

Now let us compare the Australian story. According to Mr. Dawson (_Australian Aborigines_), a writer who understands the natives well, 'their knowledge of the heavenly bodies greatly exceeds that of most white people,' and 'is taught by men selected for their intelligence and information. The knowledge is important to the aborigines on their night journeys;' so we may be sure that the natives are careful observers of the heavens, and are likely to be conservative of their astronomical myths. The 'Lost Pleiad' has not escaped them, and this is how they account for her disappearance. The _Pirt Kopan noot_ tribe have a tradition that the _Pleiades_ were a queen and her six attendants. Long ago the _Crow_ (our _Canopus_) fell in love with the queen, who refused to be his wife. The _Crow_ found that the queen and her six maidens, like other Australian _gins_, were in the habit of hunting for white edible grubs in the bark of trees. The _Crow_ at once changed himself into a grub (just as Jupiter and Indra used to change into swans, horses, ants, or what not) and hid in the bark of a tree. The six maidens sought to pick him out with their wooden hooks, but he broke the points of all the hooks. Then came the queen with her pretty bone hook; he let himself be drawn out, took the shape of a giant, and ran away with her. Ever since there have only been six stars, the six maidens, in the _Pleiad_. This story is well known, by the strictest inquiry, to be current among the blacks of the West District and South Australia.

Mr. Tylor, whose opinion is entitled to the highest respect, thinks that this may be a European myth, told by some settler to a black in the Greek form, and then spread about among the natives. He complains that the story of the loss of the _brightest_ star does not fit the facts of the case.