Part 7

The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands have no forms of worship, they have no invocations to the gods, their language, indeed, has no original word for “prayer.” They believe firmly, however, in the existence of numerous spirits, not the souls of the deceased, but self-created and undying, who will injure them if they commit certain transgressions, such as to cook turtle or fish by burning a particular kind of wood; to roast a pig instead of boiling it, and so on.[131]

The Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego have been often, though erroneously, quoted as a tribe devoid of religion. Their ceremonial law was rigid. The hairs that fell from the head must be burned, or the individual would fall ill; the name of the dead must not be mentioned, or the ghost would return and plague them; the young ducklings must not be killed, or bad weather would follow.[132]

The _tabu_ in Polynesia, whence it derives its name, was carried to an incredible degree of stringency. The dread of its violation was so vivid, that in itself it was often the cause of the death of the offender.[133]

The second form of the “Word from God” was when it was uttered as a prophecy, a prediction of the future. In this form it appears throughout the world under the innumerable aspects of divination, as oracles, prophetic utterances, forecasts of time to come, second-sight, clairvoyance, and the like.

The essence of every religious rite may be said to be divinatory, inasmuch as its final aim is either to learn or to modify the Will of God, and thus to influence the future of the individual or society by extra-natural agencies.

There is nothing in this derogatory to religion as an element of mind. The constant effort of the reason is to banish the idea of chance from the universe; and he who regards the Will of God as a law of the universe does exclude chance from its events just in proportion as he learns that Will and acts in conformity to it.

Prediction in primitive religions is by two widely different methods, Divination and Prophecy.

The diviner, relying on his own sense and reasoning powers, foretells the future by observation of certain trains of events which he believes reveal the intentions of the gods; the prophet is one inspired by the divine mind itself to speak its own words and to convey directly the thoughts and wishes of deity.

This distinction is visible in early religions. Any one can learn the “signs” and “omens” which will be auspicious or inauspicious for his undertakings; though, of course, to read their full significance one must have made special studies in the art of augury. To become an inspired prophet requires a much more serious preparation, and some form of communion direct with the gods must be established.

III.—THE WORD CONCERNING THE GODS. A brilliant French writer (E. Scherer) has said: “It was the Word that made the gods,” “_Le mot, c’est l’artisan des idoles_.” He but expressed in a pointed apothegm what the profound German mythologist Kuhn stated in more formal terms when he wrote: “The foundation of mythology is to be looked for in the domain of language.”

What, indeed, does the term “myth” itself mean? It is merely the Greek for “a word,” something spoken, and in this general sense it is used by Homer. Later, its connotation became restricted to what was spoken concerning the gods, the narratives of their doings, the descriptions of their abodes and attributes.

Men began to frame such tales the moment they consciously recognised the existence of such unseen agencies. They were founded on visions, dreams, and those vague mental states which, as I have shown, fill up so large a part of savage life. They were not intentional fictions, by any means, for the criteria between the real and unreal fade away in those psychic conditions, and the faintest hold on actuality is enough to guarantee an indefinitely complex fancy.

It was a strange error by one of the most earnest students of primitive religions, the Reverend W. Robertson Smith, when he advocated his theory that the myth was derived from the ritual, not the ritual from the myth.[134] Had he studied the actual religious condition of the rudest tribes, he would have found them with scarcely any ritual but a most abundant mythology; and he would have discovered that where the myth was taken from the ritual, it is when the latter has lost its original meaning, and some other is devised to explain it.

As examples of such notions, I may take the Bushmen of South Africa. They enjoy the general reputation of being the lowest of the human race. They have no temples, no altars, no ritual; yet the missionary Bleek collected among them thousands of tales concerning their gods in their relations to men and animals.[135]

The Andamanese are alleged to have no forms of worship whatever; but they have many myths about the mighty Puluga, self-created and immortal, about the origin of fire, and the transactions of the invisible spirits.

It would be easy to give many other examples, but it is enough to refute such an opinion by referring to the vast body of myths in all religious peoples which have no reference to ritual whatever.

The sources of mythology are psychic. They are not to be traced to the external world, whether ritual or natural. Myths are not figurative explanations of natural phenomena, they are not vague memories of ancestors and departed heroes, they are not philosophic speculations or poetic fancies. They are distinctly religious in origin, and, when genuine, are the fruit of that insight into the divine, that “beatific vision,” on which I have laid such emphasis as the real and only foundation of all religions whatsoever.

They receive their form and expression through spoken language, and are, therefore, intimately associated with, often dependent upon its sounds, and laws. In how many ways this may influence them I may briefly mention.

Primitive language is predominantly concrete. The connotations of its terms are mainly objective. By this necessity arose the materialisation of the spiritual thought. It had to be expressed under external imagery.

Primitive languages are usually intensely individualising and specific. There is scarcely a native tongue in America in which one could say “hand”; one must always add a pronoun indicating whose hand is meant, “my, thy, his,” hand.

The generic distinctions in such tongues are often far reaching and real, not purely formal, as with us. A word in the masculine or feminine gender is understood to mean that the object to which it refers is positively male or female. Many other distinctions are thus conveyed, as what is animate and inanimate, noble or vulgar, etc.

The result of these distinctions in such languages as the Aryan and Semitic was that the gods perforce were arranged sexually as male and female, and this persists to-day even in our English tongue.

Many myths arose directly from words, through casual similarities between them which were attributed to some divine cause. This is the theory so well known by the advocacy of Professor Max Müller, who is charged, unfairly I believe, with having called mythology a “disease of language.” He, Professor Kuhn, and others lay great and just stress on the influence of “paronomy,” that is, similarity in the sound of words, as the starting-point of myths. They have adduced endless examples from the classical tongues, but I shall content myself with two from wholly primitive sources.

I have just referred to the Andamanese as at the bottom of religious growth, but with an abundant mythology. In their tongue it happens that the word _garub_ means “night” and also a species of caterpillar. It is probably a mere coincidence of sound. But they saw in it much more. Night to them is a depressing period, and it would not have been created by the supreme Puluga without just cause. Evidently the double meaning of the word _garub_ indicated this. And as the wise men proceed on that universally sound opinion that when there is a row there is a woman in it, they perceive that some woman must have wantonly killed a _garub_, a caterpillar, in order that Puluga should have sent _garub_, the night, as a punishment. And this is the sum of a long mythical story.[136]

Another example is from a far distant area, from among the Carrier Indians of British America. The arctic fox which they hunt has a sharp yelp which sounds _khaih_. Their word for “light” is _yekkhaih_. Evidently the fox was the animal who first called for the light and, by the magical power of the word, obtained it. Through what difficulties he accomplished this is told in a long and curious myth obtained from them by Father Morice.[137]

In the development of myths it was, indeed, often the case that those concerning one deity could be told of another—singularly incongruous as it often was,—or that the divine attributes primarily assigned to a deity and drawn from its character could be transferred to a human type, as when those of a flower were placed on the god.[138]

It is equally an error to suppose that myths were at first mere stories and received their religious character later. The true myth has a religious aim from the outset, and is not the product of an idle fancy. Those who have taught otherwise have been misled by a superficial acquaintance with the psychology of savage tribes. Mythology comes from religion, not religion from mythology.

The savage understands perfectly the difference between a sacred and a secular story, between a narrative of the doings of the gods handed down from his ancestors, and the creation of the idle fancy brought forth to amuse a circle of listeners.

I have already referred to the strange similarity in the myths of savage nations far asunder in space and kinship. The explanation of this is not to be found in borrowing or in recollections from a common, remote unity; but in the laws of the human mind. The same myths are found all over the world, with the same symbolism and imagery, woven into cycles dealing with the same great questions of human thought. This is because they arise from identical psychic sources, and find expression under obligatory forms, depending on the relations of man to his environment, and on the unity of mental process throughout the race.

It is not possible for me at the present time to enter far into the vast temple of mythology. I must content myself with selecting a few of the most prominent mythical cycles, aiming by these to show how they form the ground-plan and substructure of the whole edifice of mythical narrative.

I will select seven which are the most prominent, those relating to: 1. the Cosmical Concepts; 2. the Sacred Numbers; 3. the Drama of the Universe; 4. the Earthly Paradise; 5. the Conflict of Nature; 6. the Returning Saviour; and 7. the Journey of the Soul.

_1._ _The Cosmical Concepts._—Wherever man is placed on the earth, he is guided in his movements by space and direction. These are among the earliest notions he derives from the impressions on his senses. His anatomical conformation, the anterior and posterior planes of his body and his right and left sides, lead him to a fourfold division of space, as before him and behind him, to one side or the other. He conceives the earth, therefore, as a plain with four quarters, the chief directions as four, to wit, the cardinal points, and the winds as four principal currents from these points. The sky is to him a solid covering, supported at each of its four corners by a tree, a pillar, or a giant, and is itself divided into four courts or regions like the earth.

These were his cosmical concepts, his primal ideas of the universe, and they entered deeply into his life, his acts, and his beliefs. He founded his social organisation on them, he pitched his tents or built his cities on their model, he oriented his edifices to simulate them, and framed his myths to explain and perpetuate them.

We find these concepts practically universal. The symbolic figures which represent them are scratched in the soil at the _Bora_, or initiation ceremonies of the Australians; they are etched into the pots and jars we dig up in the mounds of the Mississippi valley; they are painted in strange figures on the manuscripts of the Mayas and Mexicans; they reappear in the mysterious symbols of the svastika and the Chinese Ta-Ki; they underlie the foundation stones of Egyptian pyramids, and recur in the lowest strata of Babylonian ziggarats.[139]

_2. The Sacred Numbers._—The cosmical concepts were closely connected with the sacred numbers. Wherever we turn in myth and rite, in symbolism or sacred art, we find certain numbers which have a hallowed priority in religious thought. These numbers are pre-eminently the three and the four, and those derived from them. They are distinctly antithetic in character, arising from contrasting psychical sources, which I will briefly explain.

The number _four_ derives its sacredness in mythology from the cosmical concepts just mentioned. It was, therefore, connected with the objective and phenomenal world, and had a material and concrete origin and applications.

The number _three_, on the other hand, was surrounded with the halo of sanctity from the operations of the mind itself. These, the processes of thinking, are carried on by a triple or rather triune action of the intelligence, which logicians express in the three fundamental “laws of thought,” and in the trilogy of the syllogism. These ever-present laws of thinking impress themselves on the mind and mental acts whether they are recognised or not, and all the more absolutely in that involuntary action in which, as “sub-limital consciousness” or “psychic automatism,” I have revealed to you the true source of the conception of the Divine.[140]

How natural, then, that we should find in so many primitive faiths the belief in the triplicate nature of divinity, should find myths, idols, rites, so devised as to reflect and inculcate this! Such is the case, and it is easy to quote examples, whether we turn to the Indians of America or the Indians of Hindostan, whether we touch on the triads of ancient Egypt or those of the Druids, whether we recall the three Norns of Teutonic myth or the three Fates of the Hellenes. As a writer, who has made the subject his special branch, observes: “It is impossible to study any single system of worship throughout the world, without being struck with the peculiar persistence of the triple number in regard to Divinity.”[141]

The exception to this would naturally be where the concept of the number itself was too feeble to impress itself upon the myth. There are tribes who cannot count four, whose languages have no word for any number beyond two, and yet who are by no means deficient either in mythologies or practical arts.[142] Among these, we should look in vain for the sacredness of numbers.

_3. The Drama of the Universe._—I have already quoted the saying of the wise men of ancient India, “There is no limit to the knowing of the Self that knows.” He who through meditation and prayer has become one with God, knows what God knows. Thus it is that in the rudest tribes we find the story of the beginning of things clearly told as coming from the inspired knowledge of the seers.

This story has many points of similarity, wherever we find it, not owing, I hasten again to say, to any unity of origin in place, but due to the higher unity of the mind of man, and the necessary results of its activity.

Look in what continent we please, we shall find the myth of a Creation or of a primeval construction, of a Deluge or a destruction, and of an expected Restoration. We shall find that man has ever looked on this present world as a passing scene in the shifting panorama of time, to be ended by some cataclysm and to be followed by some period of millennial glory.

Whenever we have a fairly complete body of the mythology of a primitive stock, we discover the same scenario of the vast drama of the universe, varying abundantly in detail and local colour, but true to the grandiose lines of its composition.

It is instructive to analyse its various elements and trace them to their psychic sources. Let us begin with the modes of action of the creative power itself.

This mysterious power is known to man under three forms.

The simplest is that of the moulder or manufacturer, as the potter makes his pots, the shoemaker his shoes. This is the conception which underlies many myths of the Creator, as is shown by the names he bears. Thus the Australians called him Baiame, “the cutter-out,” as one cuts out a sandal from a skin, or a figure from bark. The Maya Indians used the term Patol, from the verb _pat_, to mould, as a potter his clay, Bitol, which has the same meaning, and Tzacol, the builder, as of a house.[143] With the Dyaks of Borneo, the Creator is Tupa, the forger, as one forges a spear-blade[144]; and so on.

The second form is that of creation in the sense of generation, and this is a constant simile in the myths, with reference to the process both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

The Creator is often referred to as the Father, the parent, more or less literally, of all that is. He has many such titles in the myths of America and Polynesia. In bi-sexual myths he is associated with some universal mother as the genetrix.

The third form is more recondite and loftier. In an earlier lecture I have emphasised how man is conscious within himself of the Will as an ultimate source of power. This he clearly recognised in his primitive conditions, and to its exertion repeatedly in his myths did he attribute the origin of things. They were self-evolved in the thought of the primal Being, or, as the native American expression is, they were “created by thought.”

We find this in the rudest tribes of North America; and among the sedentary Zuñis of New Mexico, it is said of their demiurge Awonawilona that at the beginning “he conceived within himself and thought outward in space,” in order to bring nature into existence. We see the connection in the Vitian dialect of Polynesian, in which _mania_ is “to think”; _mana_, a miracle, and the power to perform one. According to the myths of Hawaii, it was “by an act of the will” that their triple-natured Creator “broke up the night” (Po), and from its fragments evoked into being the world of light and life.[145]

Whatever the mode of creation, it was felt that it did not tell the whole story. The conceptions of time and space are in their essence limitless, and any creation must have been within them. Thus in Polynesian myth, Po represents not a dateless chaos but the debris of some former state of things; and in Algonquin legend the primeval ocean had engulfed some older world.[146]

This psychic molimen, ceaselessly acting, led in more developed mythologies to some defined fancies of these earlier periods of cosmic existence and thus to the myths of the Ages of the World or the Epochs of Nature. These are clearly outlined among the Mexicans, Mayas, Peruvians, and other tribes of the New World and among many on the Eastern Hemisphere. The Aztecs count them as four, each followed by a formidable catastrophe, nearly or quite destroying all that lived.

The last of these destructions was generally blended with the notion of the emergence of the solid land from the primeval waters; and this is the origin of the Deluge Myth, the story of the Universal Flood, which we find in so many primitive peoples. It has excited especial attention, and by writers has been explained as the remembrance of some local overflow, or the recollection of the Hebrew tradition. Its real origin, purely psychic and derived from the myth of the Epochs of Nature, I explained thirty years ago in discussing its prevalence among American tribes.[147]

_4. The Earthly Paradise._—Associated with this cycle is the myth of the terrestrial Paradise, watered by its four rivers, and enclosing the tree of life,—the happy abode of early man. The four rivers are the celestial streams from the four corners of the earth, watering the tree as the emblem of life. Thus we find it among the American Indians, the Sioux and the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Polynesians, the ancient Aryans and Semites, etc.[148] Its origin is purely psychic, and though we can easily understand how the writer of the Book of Genesis sought to identify these mythical streams with some known to him, it is strangely out of date for scholars of to-day to follow his footsteps in that vain quest.[149]

_5. The Conflict of Nature._—Another great cycle of psychic myths arose from the conflict of nature as apprehended by the primitive mind. Everywhere it seems to be raging around us. The hourly struggle of light with darkness; of day with night; of sunshine with storm; of summer with winter; of youth with age, of health with disease; of life with death; of all that makes toward good with all that makes toward evil—this endless battle of two principles underlies all movement and is forever stirring the soul to throw itself into the fray.

In a thousand forms this eternal combat was portrayed in myths, all pregnant with one meaning, bodying it forth in varied symbol and expression. The world-wide stories of the conflict of the first two brothers, of men with gods, of giants with heroes, of the deities among themselves, arose from this perception of the unceasing interaction of natural forces, imagined as a war between conscious existences.

_6. The Returning Saviour._—Out of this imagined turmoil and slaughter grew the wonderful mythical cycles concerning the Deliverer and Saviour. He would come from afar, out of the morning light or the distant sky, or he would be born of a virgin and the son of a god. He would lead his people to happiness and power, crushing by his might the enemies who afflicted them, whether on earth or among the envious gods. Blond-bearded and light-haired, even among Polynesians and Americans, we cannot err in seeing in this majestic figure the personified idea of Light, transferred from the plane of physical phenomena into that of psychical anticipation.[150]

_7. The Journey of the Soul._—Lastly, I mention the cycle which describes the journey of the soul after death. The extraordinary similarity which I and others have pointed out between the opinions on this subject among Egyptians, Greeks, ancient Celts, and North American Indians,[151] is not to be explained by any theory of inter-communication, nor “by chance,” as some have argued, but by fixed psychic laws, working over the same material under similar conditions.

The soul passes toward the west, crosses a sea or river to the abode of the departed, and meets everywhere nearly the same obstacles, to be overcome by proper preparations and mortuary ceremonies. I need not rehearse the details. They can be compared elsewhere. But their substantial identity confirms in an emphatic manner the thesis I am advocating, that in these universal mythical cycles we are dealing not with fragments of some one set of fancies borrowed from a common source, but with independent creations of the human intellect, framed under laws common to it everywhere, and which tend always to produce fruits generically everywhere the same.

LECTURE IV.

Primitive Religious Expression: In the Object.