Edward B. Tylor

“ The battle of the storm against the forest and the ocean is still waged before our eyes; we still look upon the victory of man over the creatures of the land and sea; the food-plants still hide in their mother earth, and the fish and reptiles find shelter in the ocean and the thicket; but the mighty forest-trees stand with their roots firm planted in the ground, while with their branches they push up and up against the sky. And if we have learnt the secret of man’s thought in the childhood of his race, we may still realize with the savage the personal being of the ancestral Heaven and Earth. ”

“ Islanders like the Maoris imagine the souls speeding away from the westernmost cape of New Zealand, just as on the coast of Brittany, where Cape Raz stands out westward into the ocean, there is the “bay of souls,” the launching-place where the departed spirits sail off across the sea. Many rude tribes think the spirit-world to be the pleasant land they see in dreams, where the dead live in their spirit-villages, and there is game and fish in plenty, and the sun always shines; but others fancy it the dim land of shadows, the cavernous under-world of night. ”

“ Our road lies through a forest of pines and oaks, which reaches to the summit of the pass, where stands a wretched little village, La Guarda. There we had a thoroughly Mexican breakfast, with pulque in tall tumblers, and endless successions of tortillas, coming in hot and hot from the kitchen, where we could see brown women with bare arms, and black hair plaited in long tails, kneeling by the charcoal fire, and industriously patting out fresh supplies, and baking them rapidly on a hot plate. ”

“ In Australia, the native hunter will lie in wait behind a screen of boughs near a water-hole till the kangaroos come to drink, or will track one in the open for days, camping by his little fire at night to be ready for the pursuit again at dawn, keeping unseen and to the leeward till at last he can creep near enough to hurl his spear, seldom in vain. ”

“ As we approached Temisco, we saw upon the slopes, immense fields of sugar-cane, now grown into a dense mass, five or six feet high, most pleasant to look upon for the delicate green tint of the leaves that belongs to no other plant. The colour of our English turf is beautiful, and so are the tints of our English woods in spring, but our fields of grain have a dull and dingy green compared to the sugar-cane and the young Indian corn. ”

“ An unshaped divine entity looming vast, shadowy, and calm beyond and over the material world, too benevolent or too exalted to need human worship, too huge, too remote, too indifferent, too supine, too merely existent, to concern himself with the petty race of men,—this is a mystic form of formlessness in which religion has not seldom pictured the Supreme. ”

“ Those can see more justly who have the poet’s gift of throwing their minds back into the world’s older life, like the actor who for a moment can forget himself and become what he pretends to be. Wordsworth, that ‘modern ancient,’ as Max Müller has so well called him, could write of Storm and Winter, or of the naked Sun climbing the sky, as though he were some Vedic poet at the head-spring of his race, ‘seeing’ with his mind’s eye a mythic hymn to Agni or Varuna. Fully to understand an old-world myth needs not evidence and argument alone, but deep poetic feeling. ”

“ The Roman Orcus holds the pallid souls, rapacious Orcus, sparing neither good nor bad. 81Gloomy is the Greek land of Hades, dark dwelling of the images of departed mortals, where the shades carry at once their living features and their dying wounds, and glide and cluster and whisper, and lead the shadow of a life. Like the savage hunter on his ghostly prairie, the great Orion still bears his brazen mace, still chases over the meadows of asphodel the flying beasts he slew of yore in the lonely mountains. ”

“ There is such a thoroughly Spanish air about the place, that it might be a suburb of the real Cordova, were it not for the crowds of brown Indians in their scanty cotton dresses and great flat-brimmed hats, and the Mexican costumes of the whiter folks. Low whitewashed houses, with large windows to the street, protected by the heavy iron-gratings, like cages, that are so familiar to travellers in Southern Europe. Inside the grating are the ladies of the family, outside stand their male acquaintance, and energetic gossiping is going on. ”

“ The wild man of the forest, forgetful of yesterday and careless of to-morrow, lolling in his hammock when his wants are satisfied, has little of the play of memory and foresight which is ever unrolling before our minds the panorama of our own past and future life, and even sets us in thought in the places of our fellows, to partake of their lives and enter into their joys and sorrows. Much of the wrong-doing of the world comes from want of imagination. ”

“ They could see the flame licking its yet undevoured prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the waving sword from hilt to point; they could feel a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god rattling in thunder over the solid firmament. Men to whom these were living thoughts had no need of the schoolmaster and his rules of composition, his injunctions to use metaphor cautiously, and to take continual care to make all similes consistent. ”

“ In Tyrol, the poor souls released from purgatory fire for the night may come and smear their burns with the melted fat of the ‘soul light’ on the hearth, or cakes are left for them on the table, and the room is kept warm for their comfort. Even in Paris the souls of the departed come to partake of the food of the living. In Brittany the crowd pours into the churchyard at evening, to kneel bareheaded at the graves of dead kinsfolk, to fill the hollow of the tombstone with holy water, or to pour libations of milk upon it. ”

“ Some tribes say that the soul continues to haunt the hut where it died, which is accordingly deserted for it; or it hovers near the burial-ground, which is sometimes the place of village resort, so that the souls of ancestors can look on kindly, like the old people sitting round the village green watching the youngsters at their sports; or the ghosts flit away to some region of the dead in the deep forests or on mountain-tops or far-away islands over the sea, or up on the plains above the sky, or down in the depths below the ground where the sun descends at night. ”

“ These ranches are the merest huts of canes, thatched with palm-leaves; and close by each a little patch of ground is enclosed by a fence of prickly cactus, within which are growing plantains, with their large smooth leaves and heavy ropes of fruit, the great staple of the “tierra caliente.”
Our road winds along valleys and through pass after pass; and now and then a long zig-zag brings us out of a valley, up to a higher level. The air grows cooler, we are rapidly changing our climate, and afternoon finds us in the region of the sugar-cane and the coffee-plant. ”

“ The ordeal of the Key and Bible, still in use, is a survival; the Midsummer bonfire is a survival; the Breton peasants’ All Souls’ supper for the spirits of the dead is a survival. The simple keeping up of ancient habits is only one part of the transition from old into new and changing times. The serious business of ancient society may be seen to sink into the sport of later generations, and its serious belief to linger on in nursery folk-lore, while superseded habits of old-world life may be modified into new-world forms still powerful for good and evil. ”

“ Seeing how the Iroquois at their festivals could thank the invisible aids or good spirits, and with them the trees, shrubs, and plants, the springs and streams, the fire and wind, the sun, moon, and stars—in a word, every object that ministered to their wants—we may judge what real personality they attached to the myriad spirits which gave animated life to the world around them. ”

“ The best poetry of our own day is full of quaint fancy and delicate melody, the setting of lovely thought in harmonious language, at once pictures for the imagination and [290] music for the ear. But besides this, it has a curious interest to the student of history, as keeping alive in our midst the ways of thought of the most ancient world. Much of poetic art lies in imitating the expressions of earlier stages of culture, when poetry was the natural utterance of any strong emotion, the natural means to convey any solemn address or ancestral tradition. ”

“ Language, there is no doubt, has had a great share in the formation of myth. The mere fact of its individualizing in words such notions as winter and summer, cold and heat, war and peace, vice and virtue, gives the myth-maker the means of imagining these thoughts as personal beings. Language not only acts in thorough unison with the imagination whose product it expresses, but it goes on producing of itself, and thus, by the side of the mythic conceptions in which language has followed imagination, we have others in which language has led, and imagination has followed in the track. ”

“ On the geographical significance of sun-worship, D’Orbigny has made a remark, suggestive if not altogether sound, connecting the worship of the sun not so much with the torrid regions where his glaring heat oppresses man all day long, and drives him to the shade for refuge, as with climates where his presence is welcomed for his life-giving heat, and nature chills at his departure. ”

“ Looking at their ancient civilization, it seems to have been formed by men whose minds worked much like our own. No super-human powers were required for the work, but just human nature groping on by roundabout ways, reaching great results, yet not half knowing how to profit by them when reached; solving the great problem of writing, yet not seeing how to simplify the clumsy hieroglyphics into letters; devoting earnest thought to religion and yet keeping up a dog and cat worship which was a jest even to the ancients; cultivating astronomy and yet remaining mazed in the follies of astrology. ”

“ Yet if it is our mood to bewail the slowness with which knowledge penetrates the mass of mankind, there stand dismal proofs before us here. The eclipse remained an omen of fear almost up to our own century, and could rout a horror-stricken army, and fill Europe with dismay, a thousand years after Pliny had written in memorable words his eulogy of the astronomers; those great men, he said, and above ordinary mortals, who, by discovering the laws of the heavenly bodies, had freed the miserable mind of men from terror at the portents of eclipses. ”

“ Then the well-worn thoughts come back fresh to him, of the stream’s life that is so like his own; once more he can see the rill leap down the hillside like a child, to wander playing among the flowers; or can follow it as, grown to a river, it rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in sluggish strength to carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all that water does, the poet’s fancy can discern its personality of life. It gives fish to the fisher, and crops to the husbandman; it swells in fury and lays waste the land ”

“ Among the relics of the ancient cave-men of Europe are hollowed stones, which were their primitive mortars for grinding the ochre and other colours for painting themselves. Indeed, few habits mark the lower stages of human life so well as the delight in body-patterns of bold spots and stripes in striking colours, familiar to us in pictures of Australians dancing at a corroboree, or Americans working themselves up to frenzy in the scalp-dance. ”

“ Why, they ask, are the gods and giants and monsters no longer seen to lead their prodigious lives on earth—is it perchance that the course of things is changed since the old days? Thus it seemed to Pausanias the historian, that the wide-grown wickedness of the world had brought it to pass that times were no longer as of old, when Lykaon was turned into a wolf, and Niobe into a stone, when men still sat as guests at table with the gods, or were raised like Herakles to become gods themselves. ”

“ In Mexico, idolatry had attained to its full barbaric development. As in the Aztec mind the world swarmed with spiritual deities, so their material representatives, the idols, stood in the houses at the corners of the streets, on every hill and rock, to receive from passers-by some little offering—a nosegay, a whiff of incense, a drop or two of blood; while in the temples more huge and elaborate images enjoyed the dances and processions in their honour, were fed by the bloody sacrifice of men and beasts, and received the tribute and reverence paid to the great national gods. ”