Part 2

It is sometimes said that there is as much cruelty to animals in India as anywhere. Some of this cruelty (as it seems to us) is caused directly by reluctance to take life; of the other sort, caused by callousness, it can be only said that the human brute grows under every sky. One great fact is admitted: children are not cruel in India: Victor Hugo could not have written his terrible poem about the tormented toad in India. I think it a mistake to attribute the Indian sentiment towards animals wholly to transmigration; nevertheless, it may be granted that such a belief fosters such a sentiment. Indeed, if it were allowable to look upon the religion of the many as the morality of the one, it would seem natural to suppose that the theory of transmigration was invented by some creature-loving sage on purpose to give men a fellow-feeling for their humbler relations. Even so, many a bit of innocent folk-fable has served as “protective colouration” to beast or bird: the legend of the robin who covered up the Babes in the Wood; the legend of the swallow who did some little service to the crucified Saviour, and how many other such tender fancies. Who invented them, and why?

If Plato had wished simply to find a happy substitute for Hades, he might have found it—had he looked far enough—in the Vedic kingdom of the sun, radiant and eternal, where sorrow is not, where the crooked are made straight, ruled over by Yama the first man to die and the first to live again, death’s bright angel, lord of the holy departed—how far from Pluto and the “Tartarean grey.” It would not have provided a solution to the mystery of being, but it might have made many converts, for after a happy heaven all antiquity thirsted.

It is not sure if the scheme of existence mapped out in soul-wandering is really more consoling for beast than for man. It is a poor compliment to some dogs to say that they have been some men. Then again, it is recognised as easier for a dog to be good than for a man to be good, but after a dog has passed his little life in well-doing he dies with the prospect that his spirit, which by his merits becomes again a man, will be sent down, by that man’s transgressions, to the society of jackals. According to the doctrine of soul-wandering, animals are, in brief, the Purgatory of men. Just as prayers for the dead (which means, prayers for the remission to them of a merited period of probation) represent an important branch of Catholic observances, so prayers for the remission of a part of the time which souls would otherwise spend in animal forms constitute the most vital and essential feature in Brahmanical worship.

Of course, this is also true of Buddhism, to which many people think that the theory of soul-wandering belongs exclusively, unmindful that the older faith has it as well. The following hymn, used in Thibet, shows how accurately the name of Purgatory applies to the animal incarnations of the soul:—

“If we [human beings] have amassed any merit In the three states, We rejoice in this good fortune when we consider The unfortunate lot of the poor [lower] animals, Piteously engulphed in the ocean of misery; On their behalf, we now turn the Wheel of Religion.”

There are grounds for thinking that the purgatorial view of animals was part of the religious beliefs of the highly civilised native races of South America. The Christianised Indians are very gentle in their ways towards animals, while among the savage tribes in Central Peru (which are probably degraded off-shoots from the people of the Incas) the belief still survives that good men become monkeys or jaguars, and bad men parrots or reptiles. For the rest, soul-wandering has an enduring fascination for the human mind.

In January, 1907, Leandro Improta, a young man well furnished with worldly goods, shot himself in a café at Naples. His pocket was found to contain a letter in which he said that the act was prompted by a desire to study metempsychosis; much had been written on the subject, but it pleased him better to discover than to talk: “so I determined to die and see whether I shall be re-born in the form of some animal. It would be delightful to return to this world as a lion or a rat.” It might not prove delightful after all!

II

THE GREEK CONCEPTION OF ANIMALS

“THE heralds brought a sacred hecatomb to the gods through the city and the long-haired Grecians were assembled under the shady grove of far-darting Apollo, but when they had tasted the upper flesh and had drawn it out, having divided the shares, they made a delightful feast.” In this description the poet of the Odyssey not only calls up a wonderfully vivid picture of an ancient fête-day, but also shows the habit of mind of the Homeric Greeks in regard to animal food. They were voracious eaters—although the frequent reference to feasts ought not to make us suppose that meat was their constant diet; rather the reverse, for then it would not have been so highly rated. But when they had the chance, they certainly did eat with unfastidious copiousness and unashamed enjoyment. It is not pleasant to read about, for it sets one thinking of things by no means far away or old; for instance, of the disappearance of half-cooked beef at some Continental _tables d’hôte_. We find that Homer is painfully near us. But in Homeric times the ghost of a scruple had to be laid before the feast could be enjoyed. Animal food was still closely connected with the idea of sacrifice. Sacrifice lends distinction to subject as well as object; it was some atonement to the animal to dedicate him to the gods. He was covered with garlands and attended by long-robed priests; his doom was his triumph. The devoted heifer or firstling of the flock was glorified beyond all its kind. Some late sceptic of the _Anthology_ asked what possible difference it could make to the sheep whether it were devoured by a wolf or sacrificed to Herakles so that he might protect the sheepfold from wolves? But scepticism is a poor thing. From immolation to apotheosis there is but a step; how many human victims willingly bowed their heads to the knife!

The sacrificial aspect of the slaughter of domestic animals took a strong hold of the popular imagination. It is still suggested by the procession of garlanded beasts which traverses the Italian village on the approach of Easter: the only time of year when the Italian peasant touches meat. In the tawdry travesty of the _Bœuf gras_, though the origin is the same, every shred of the old significance is lost, but among simple folk south of the Alps, unformed thoughts which know not whence they come still contribute a sort of religious glamour to that last pageant. Far back, indeed, stretches the procession of the victims, human and animal—for wherever there was animal sacrifice, at some remote epoch, “the goat without horns” was also offered up.

The Homeric Greeks had no butchers; they did the slaying of beasts themselves or their priests did it for them. Agamemnon kills the boar sacrificed to Zeus with his own hands, which are first uplifted in prayer. The commonest meat was the flesh of swine, as may be seen by the pig of Æsop which replied, on being asked by the sheep why he cried out when caught, “They take you for your wool or milk, but me for my life.” In Homer, however, there is much talk of fatted sheep, kids and oxen, and there is even mention of killing a cow. The Athenians had qualms about slaughtering the ox, the animal essential to agriculture—though they did it—but the Homeric Greek was not troubled by such thoughts. He was not over nice about anything; he was his own cook, and he did not lose his appetite while he roasted his bit of meat on the spit. A Greek repast of that age would have shocked the abstemious Indian as much as the Hindu reformer, Keshub Chunder Sen, confessed to have been shocked by the huge joints on English sideboards.

Putting aside his meat-eating proclivities, for which we cannot throw stones at him, the Greek of the Iliad and of the Odyssey is the friend of his beast. He does not regard it as his long-lost brother, but he sees in it a devoted servant; sometimes more than human in love if less than human in wit. His point of view, though detached, was appreciative. Practically it was the point of view of the twentieth century. Homer belongs to the Western world, and in a great measure to the modern Western world. He had no racial fellow-feeling with animals; yet he could feel for the sparrow that flutters round its murdered young ones and for the vulture that rends the air with cries when the countryman takes its fledglings from the nest. He could shed one immortal tear over the faithful hound that recognises his master and dies. “There lay the dog Argus, full of vermin.” If it had not been a living creature, what sight could have more repelled human eyes? But with dog as with man, the miserable body is as naught beside—what in the man we call the soul. “He fawned with his tail and laid down both his ears, but he could no more come nearer his master.” All the sense of disgust is gone and there is something moist, perhaps, in our eyes too, though it is not the ichor of immortality.

Giving names to animals is the first instinctive confession that they are not _things_. What sensible man ever called his table Carlo or his inkpot Trilby? Homer gives his horses the usual names of horses in his day; this is shown by the fact that he calls more than one horse by the same name. Hector’s steeds were Xanthus, Æthon and noble Lampus; often would Andromache mix wine for them even before she attended to the wants of her husband, or offer them the sweet barley with her own white hands. Æthe is the name of Agamemnon’s graceful and fleet-footed mare. Xanthus and Balius, offspring of Podarges, are the horses which Achilles received from his father. He bids them bring their charioteer back in safety to the body of the Greeks—and then follows the impressive incident of the warning given to him of his impending fate. The horse Xanthus bends low his head: his long mane, which is collected in a ring, droops till it touches the ground. Hera gives him power of speech and he tells how, though the steeds of Achilles will do their part right well, not all their swiftness, not all their faithful service can save their master from the doom that even now is drawing near. “The furies restrain the voice”: the laws which govern the natural order of things must not be violated. “O Xanthus,” cries Achilles, “O Xanthus, why dost thou predict my death?... Well do I know myself that it is my fate to perish here, far away from my dear father and mother!” It is the passionate cry of the Greek, the lover of life as none has loved it, the lover of the sweet air gladdened by the sun.

Many a soldier may have spoken to his horse, half in jest, as Achilles spoke to Xanthus and Balius: “bring me safely out of the fray.” The supernatural and terrible reply comes with the shock of the unforeseen, like a clap of thunder on a calm day. This incident is a departure from the usual Homeric conventionality, for it takes us into the domain of real magic. The belief that animals know things that we know not, and see things that we see not, is scattered over all the earth. Are there not still good people who feel an “eerie” sensation when a cat stares fixedly into vacancy in the twilight? “Eerie” sensations count for much in early beliefs, but what counts for more is the observation of actual facts which are not and, perhaps, cannot be explained. The uneasiness of animals before an earthquake, or the refusal of some animals to go to sea on ships which afterwards come to grief—to refer to only two instances of a class of phenomena the existence of which cannot be gainsaid—would be sufficient to convince any savage or any primitive man that animals have foreknowledge. If they know the future on one point, why should they not know it on others? The primitive man generally starts from something which he deems _certain_; he deals in “certainties” far more than in hypotheses, and when he has seized a “certainty” in his own fashion he draws logical deductions from it. Savages and children have a ruthless logic of their own.

The prophetic power of animals has important bearings on the subject of divination. In cases of animal portents the later theory may have been that the animal was the passive instrument or medium of a superior power; but it is not likely that this was the earliest theory. The goddess did not use Xanthus as a mouthpiece: she simply gave him the faculty of speech so that he could say what he already knew. The second sight of animals was believed to be communicable to man through their flesh, and especially through their blood. Porphyry says plainly that diviners fed on the hearts of crows, vultures, and moles (the heart being the fountain of the blood), because in this manner they partook of the souls of these animals, and received the influence of the gods who accompanied these souls. The blood conveyed the qualities of the spirit. In my opinion the Hebrew ordinance against partaking of the blood was connected with this idea; the soul was not to be meddled with. I do not know if attention has been paid to the remarkable juxtaposition of the blood prohibition with enchantment in Leviticus xix. 26. The Institutes of Manu clearly indicate that the blood was not to be swallowed because, by doing so, could be procured an illicit mixing up of personality: the most awful of sins, more awful because so much more mysterious than our mediæval “pact,” or selling the soul to the devil. A knowledge of magic is essential to the true comprehension of all sacred writings.

That animals formerly talked with human voices was the genuine belief of most early races, but there are few traces of it in Greek literature. A hint of a real folk-belief is to be found, perhaps, in the remark of Clytemnestra, who says of Cassandra, when she will not descend from the car that has brought her, a prisoner, to Agamemnon’s palace:—

“I wot—unless like swallows she doth use _Some strange barbarian tongue from over sea_, My words must bring persuasion to her soul.”

But such hints are not frequent. The stories of “talking beasts” which enjoyed an immense popularity in Greece were founded on as conscious “make-believe” as the Beast tales of the Middle Ages. From the “Battle of the Frogs and Mice” to Æsop’s fables, and from these to the comedies of Aristophanes, the animals are meant to hold up human follies to ridicule or human virtues to admiration. The object was to instruct while amusing when it was not to amuse without instructing. Æsop hardly asks the most guileless to believe that his stories are of the “all true” category—which is why children rarely quite take them to their hearts. At the same time, he shows a close study of the idiosyncrasies of animals, so close that there is little to alter in his characterisation. Out of the mass of stories in the collection attributed to him, one or two only seem to carry us back to a more ingenuous age. The following beautiful little tale of the “Lion’s Kingdom” is vaguely reminiscent of the world-tradition of a “Peace in Nature.”

“The beasts of the field and forest had a lion as their king. He was neither wrathful, cruel, nor tyrannical, but just and gentle as a king could be. He made during his reign a proclamation for a general assembly of all the birds and beasts, and drew up conditions for an universal league in which the Wolf and the Lamb, the Panther and the Kid, the Tiger and the Stag, the Dog and the Hare, should live together in perfect peace and amity. The Hare said, ‘Oh, how I have longed to see this day, in which the weak shall take their place with impunity by the side of the strong.’”

The temper of a people towards animals can be judged from its sports. It has been well said, Who could imagine Pericles presiding over a “Roman holiday”? Wanton cruelty to animals seemed to the Greeks an outrage to the gods. The Athenians inflicted a fine on a vivisector of the name of Xenocrates (he called himself a “philosopher”) who had skinned a goat alive. In Greece, from Homeric times downwards, the most favourite sport was the chariot-race which, at first, possessed the importance of a religious event, and always had a dignity above that of a mere pastime. The horses received their full share of honour and glory; for many centuries the graves of Cimon’s mares, with which he had thrice conquered at the Olympian games, were pointed out to the stranger, near his own tomb.

In the ancient Greek as in the modern world, while the majority held the views about animals which I have briefly sketched, a small minority held views of quite a different kind. It may be that no outward agency is required to cause the periodical appearance of men who are driven from the common road by the nostalgia of a state in which the human creature had not learnt to shed blood. The earliest tradition agrees with the latest science in testifying that man did not always eat flesh. It seems as if sometimes, in every part of the earth, an irresistible impulse takes hold of him to resume his primal harmlessness. It is natural, however, that students should have sought some more definite explanation for the introduction of the Orphic sect into Greece, where it can be traced to about the time generally given to Buddha—the sixth century B.C. Some have conjectured that dark-skinned, white-robed missionaries from India penetrated into Europe as we know that they penetrated into China, bringing with them the gospel of the unity of all sentient things. Others agree with what seems to have been thought by Herodotus: that wandering pilgrims brought home treasured secrets from the temple of Ammon or some other of those Egyptian shrines with which the Greeks constantly kept up certain _rapports_. It may be, now, that these two theories will be abandoned in favour of a third which would refer the origin of the Orphists to Ægean times and suppose them to be the last followers of an earlier faith. When they do come into history, it is as poor and ignorant people—like the Doukhobors of to-day—whose obscurity might well account for their having remained long unobserved. But this is no reason for concluding that their beginnings were obscure.

What is best understood about them is that they abstained rigorously from flesh except during the rare performance of some rite of purification, in which they tasted the blood of a bull which was supposed to procure mystic union with the divine. As happened with the performers of other cruel or horrid rites, the transcendent significance they ascribed to the act paralysed their power of recognising its revolting nature. A diseased spiritualism which ignores matter altogether is the real key to such phenomena. It is too soon to say whether any link can be established between the Orphic practices and the so-called “bull-fights” of which traces have been found in Crete. Despised and tabooed though they were in historical Greece, the Orphists are still held to have exercised some sure though undefined influence on the development of the greatest spiritual fact of Hellenic civilisation, the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The popular description of Orpheus as founder of the Orphists must be taken for what it is worth. The sect may have either evolved or borrowed the legend. Christianity itself appropriated the myth of Orpheus, pictorially, at least, in those rude tracings in the Roman catacombs showing the Good Shepherd in that character, which inspired Carlyle to write one of the most impassioned passages in English prose. The sweet lute-player who held entranced lion and lamb till the one forgot his wrath and the other his fear, was the natural symbol of the prototype of a humane religion.

Out of the nebulous patches of Greek enthusiasts who cherished tender feelings towards animals, emerges the intellectual sun of the Samian sage. It is difficult not to connect Pythagoras in some way with the Orphists, nor would such a connexion make it the less probable that he journeyed to the sacred East in search of fuller knowledge. Little, indeed, do we know about this moulder of minds. He passed across the world’s stage dark “with excess of light”—an influence rather than a personality. Yet he was as far as possible from being only a dreamer of dreams; he was the Newton, the Galileo, perhaps the Edison and Marconi of his epoch. And it was this double character of moral teacher and man of science which caused the extraordinary reverence with which he was regarded. Science and religion were not divorced then; the Prophet could present no credentials so valid as an understanding of the laws which govern the universe. Mathematics and astronomy were revelations of divine truth. It was the scientific insight of Pythagoras, the wonderful range and depth of which is borne out more and more by modern discoveries, that lent supreme importance to whatever theories he was known to have held. The doctrine of transmigration had not been treated seriously while it was only preached by the Orphists, but after it was adopted by Pythagoras it commanded a wide attention, though it never won a large acceptance. One expounder it had, who was too remarkable an original thinker to be called a mere disciple—the greatly-gifted Empedocles, who denounced the eaters of flesh as no better than cannibals, which was going further than Pythagoras himself had ever gone.

Even in antiquity, there were some who suspected that at the bottom of the Pythagorean propaganda was the wish to make men more humane. Without taking that view, it may be granted that a strong love of animals prepares the mind to think of them as not so very different from men. A thing that tends in the same direction is the unfavourable comparison of some men with some beasts: the sort of sentiment which made Madame de Staël say that the more she knew of men the more she liked dogs. Did not Darwin declare that he would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his dreaded enemy to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs, as from various still extant races of mankind? Darwinism is really the theory of Pythagoras with the supernatural element left out. The homogeneity of living things is one of the very old beliefs from which we strayed and to which we are returning.