Andrew Lang

“ His home is in or above the sky, but there was a time when he walked the earth, a potent magic-worker; endowed mankind with such arts and institutions as they possess; and left to them certain rules of life, ethics and ritual. Often he is regarded as the maker of things, or of most things, and of mankind; or mankind are his children, descended from disobedient sons of his, whom he cast out of heaven. Very frequently he is the judge of souls, and sends the good and bad to their own places of reward and punishment. ”

“ Again, because a hero is said to have stolen or brought fire, we need not regard that hero as the personification of fire, and explain all his myth as a fire-myth. The legend of Prometheus has too often been treated in this fashion, though he is really a culture hero, of whose exploits, such as making men of clay, fire-stealing is no more than a single example. ”

“ As there can be no doubt that the ghosts of dead men have been worshipped in many lands, and as the gods of many faiths are tricked out with attributes derived from ancestor-worship, the system of Euemerus retains some measure of plausibility. While we need not believe with Euemerus and with Herbert Spencer that the god of Greece or the god of the Hottentots was once a man, we cannot deny that the myths of both these gods have passed through and been coloured by the imaginations of men who practised the worship of real ancestors. ”

“ Early Explanations of Myths.—The earliest attempts at a crude science of mythology were efforts to reconcile the legends of the gods and heroes with the religious sentiment which recognized in these beings objects of worship and respect. Closely as religion and myth are intertwined, it is necessary to hold them apart for the purposes of this discussion. Religion may here be defined as the conception of divine, or at least supernatural powers entertained by men in moments of gratitude or of need and distress, in hours of weakness, when, as Homer says, “all folk yearn after the gods.” ”

“ When a phenomenon presents itself the savage requires an explanation, and that explanation he makes for himself, or receives from tradition, in the shape of a myth. The basis of these myths, which are just as much a part of early conjectural science as of early religion, is naturally the experience of the savage as construed by himself. ”

“ Once more, if their old legend told them that they came from the rising sun, they will hold, like many races, that they are actually the children of the sun. By this process of forgetfulness and misinterpretation, mountains, rivers, lakes, sun and sea would receive human attributes, while men would degenerate from a more sensible condition into a belief in the personality and vitality of inanimate objects. ”

“ Thus the doctrines of evolution and of creation, or the making of things, stand apart, or blend, in the metaphysics and religion of the lowest and least progressive of known peoples. The question as to which theory came first, whether Alcheringaism is a scientific effort that swept away All-Fatherism, or whether All-Fatherism is a religious reaction in despair of science and of the evolutionary doctrine, is settled by each inquirer in accordance with his personal bias. ”

“ The senseless element in the myths would by this theory be for the most part a “survival.” And the age and condition of human thought from which it survived would be one in which our most ordinary ideas about the nature of things and the limits of possibility did not yet exist, when all things were conceived of in quite other fashion—the age, that is, of savagery. It is universally admitted that “survivals” of this kind do account for many anomalies in out institutions, in law, politics, society, even in dress and manners. ”

“ Leaving the high gods whose functions are so large, while their forms (as of lizard, fish and tree) are often so mean, we come to Maui, the great divine hero of the supernatural race in Polynesia. Maui in some respects answers to the chief of the Adityas in Vedic mythology; in others he answers to Qat, Quawteaht, and other savage divine personages. Like the son of the Vedic Aditi, [36] Maui is a rejected and abortive child of his mother, but afterwards attains to the highest reputation. As Qat brought the hitherto unknown night, so Maui settled the sun and moon in their proper courses. ”

“ Once more, the great forces of nature, considered as persons, are involved in that inextricable confusion in which men, beasts, plants, stones, stars, are all on one level of personality and animated existence. This is the philosophy of savage life, and it is on these principles that the savage constructs his myths, while these, again, are all the scientific explanations of the universe with which he has been able to supply himself. ”

“ It is admitted that Greeks, Romans, Aryans of India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, Egyptians of the Ptolemaic and earlier ages, were as much puzzled as we are by the mythical adventures of their gods. But is there any known stage of the human intellect in which these divine adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and converse with the dead, and all else that puzzles us in the civilized mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life? ”

“ Only recently have Sanskrit and the Egyptian and Babylonian languages become books not absolutely sealed. Again, the study of the evolution of human institutions from the lowest savagery to civilization is essentially a novel branch of research, though ideas derived from an unsystematic study of anthropology are at least as old as Aristotle. The new theories of mythology are based on the belief that “it is man, it is human thought and human language combined, which naturally and necessarily produced the strange conglomerate of ancient fable.” ”

“ The baser Greek myths of the wanderings, amours and adventures of the gods, myths ignored by Homer, are parallel to the adventures of the Alcheringa people, and the fable of the mutilation of Osiris and the search for the lost organ by Isis, actually occurs among the Alcheringa tales of Messrs Spencer and Gillen. Among the Arunta, the Alcheringa folk are part of a strangely elaborate theory of evolution and of animism, which leaves no room for a creative being, or for a future life of the spirit, which is merely reincarnated at intervals. ”

“ Only in Brittany do the sad-hearted people think of the land of death as an island of Avalon, with the eternal sunset lingering behind the flowering apple trees, and gleaming on the fountain of forgetfulness. ”

“ We are met by the evidence of sane and credible witnesses, often highly educated, who maintain that they themselves have heard and beheld the unexplained sounds and sights. It appears, therefore, that in considering the phenomena of the poltergeist we are engaged with facts of one sort or another; facts produced either by skilled imposture, or resting on hallucinations of the witnesses; or on a mixture of fraud and of hallucination caused by “suggestion.” There remains the chance that some agency of an unexplored nature is, at least in certain cases, actually at work. ”

“ In New Zealand and in North America the sun is a beast, whom adventurers have trapped and beaten. Medicine has been made with his blood. In the Andaman Islands the Sun is the wife of the Moon (Jour. of Anth. Soc., 1882) . Among aboriginal tribes in India (Dalton, p. 186) the Moon is the Sun’s bride; she was faithless and he cut her in two, but occasionally lets her shine in full beauty. The Andaman Islanders account for the white brilliance of the moon by saying that he is daubing himself with white clay, a custom common in savage and Greek mysteries. ”

“ As generations multiply, the more distant relations split off into other clans, and these clans, which have not lost the sense of primitive kinship, unite once more into tribes. The tribes again, as civilization advances, acknowledge themselves to be subjects of a king, in whose veins the blood of the original family runs purest. ”

“ Men regard phenomena as “supranormal” or “supernatural,” or reject them altogether, till their modus is explained. But it would not be candid to say that the explanation is complete, or nearly complete. The nature of the hypnotic trance itself remains a matter of dispute. The knowledge automatically revealed can by no means always be accounted for, either by latent memory or by the sharpening of the normal faculties of perception, while the limits of telepathy (if it be accepted) are vaguely conjectured. Even the results of simple experiments in “crystal-gazing” are often very perplexing. ”

“ The lowest contemporary savages remember little or nothing of any ancestor farther back than the grandfather. But men in Spencer’s Mythopoeic age had much longer memories. On the other hand, the most ordinary savage does not misunderstand so universal a custom as the imposition of names peculiar to animals or derived from atmospheric phenomena. He calls his own child Dawn or Cloud, his own name is Sitting Bull or Running Wolf, and he is not tempted to explain his great-grandfather’s name of Bright Sun or Lively Raccoon on the hypothesis that the ancestor really was a raccoon or the sun. ”

“ If we are to regard the Egyptian myths about the gods in animal shape, and about the non-natural superhuman heroes, and their wars and loves, as esoteric allegories devised by civilized priests, perhaps we should also explain Pund-jel, Qat, Quawteaht, the Mantis god, the Spider creator, the Coyote and Raven gods as priestly inventions, put forth in a civilized age, and retained by Australians, Bushmen, Hottentots, Ahts, Thlinkeets, Papuans, who preserve no other vestiges of high civilization. ”

“ It has often been suggested that totemism arose when the familiar of an individual became hereditary among his descendants. This could not occur under a system of reckoning descent and inheriting the kin name through women, but as a Tsimshian myth says that a man’s sister adopted his animal familiar, the bear, and transmitted it to her offspring, Hill-Tout supposes that this may have been the origin of totemism in tribes with reckoning of descent in the female line. Instances, however, are not known to exist in practice, and myths are mere baseless savage hypotheses. ”

“ As a rule, destruction by a deluge is the most favourite myth, but destructions by fire and wind and by the wrath of a god are common in Australian, Peruvian and Egyptian tradition. The idea that a boar, or a god in the shape of a boar, fished up a bit of earth, which subsequently became the world, out of the waters, is very well known to the Aryans of India, and recalls the feats of American musk-rats and Coyotes already described. ”

“ Our argument is, that all these legends about Indra, of which only a sample is given, have no necessary connexion with the worship of a pure nature-god as a nature-god would now be constructed by men. The legends are survivals of a time in which natural phenomena were regarded, not as we regard them, but as persons, and savage persons, Alcheringa folk, in fact, and became the centres of legends in the savage manner. ”

“ Very early indeed in the history of human thought men awoke to the consciousness that their religious stories were much in want of explanation. The myths of civilized peoples, as of Greeks and the Aryans of India, contain two elements, the rational and what to modern minds seems the irrational. The rational myths are those which represent the gods as beautiful and wise beings. ”

“ Our first question will be, Is there any stage of human society, and of the human intellect, in which facts that appear to us to be monstrous and irrational are accepted as ordinary occurrences of every day life? ”

“ By popular songs we understand what the Germans call Volkslieder, that is, songs with words composed by members of the people, for the people, handed down by oral tradition, and in style, taste and even incident, common to the people in all European countries. The beauty of these purely popular ballads, their directness and freshness, has made them admired even by the artificial critics of the most artificial periods in literature. ”

“ All these ideas are the stuff of which myths are made, and the evidence of savage institutions, in every part of the world, proves that these ideas are the universal inheritance of savages.
Savage men are like ourselves in curiosity and anxiety causas cognoscere rerum, but with our curiosity they do not possess our powers of attention. They are as easily satisfied with an explanation of phenomena as they are eager to possess an explanation. Inevitably they furnish themselves with their philosophy out of their scanty stock Savage Ideas about the World. ”

“ It is natural to conjecture that, if we find identical ballads in Scotland, and in Greece and Italy, and traces of identical customs—customs crushed by the Reformation, by Puritanism, by modern so-called civilization,—the ballads sprang out of the institution of dances, as they still do in warmer and pleasanter climates. It may be supposed that legends on which the ballads are composed, being found as they are from the White Sea to Cape Matapan, are part of the stock of primitive folk-lore. ”

“ Thus the ghost of the hero or medicine man of a kin or tribe may be raised to divine rank, while again—the doctrine of spirits once developed, and spirits once allotted to the great elemental forces and phenomena of nature, sky, thunder, the sea, the forests—we have the beginnings of departmental deities, such as Agni, god of fire ”

“ As Spencer thinks ancestor-worship the first form of religion, and as he holds that persons with such names as sun, moon and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural phenomena—dawn, wind, sky, night and the rest—are a kind of transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real men and women. ”

“ Moreover, it is proved that certain persons can, as it were, hypnotize themselves, even unwittingly, and pass into trance. In these secondary conditions of trance, such persons are not only amenable to “suggestion,” but occasionally evolve what are called secondary personalities: they speak in voices not their own, and exhibit traits of character not theirs, but in harmony with the impersonation. The popular, savage and ancient theory of these phenomena was that the people thus affected were inspired by a god or spirit, or “possessed ” by a demon or a dead man. ”

“ It has already been shown that the lowest and least intellectual races indulge in local animal-worship, each stock having its parent bird, beast, fish, or even plant, or inanimate object. It has also been shown that these backward peoples recognize a non-natural race of men or animals, or both, as the first fathers, heroes, and, in a sense, gods. Such ideas are consonant with, and may be traced to the confused and nebulous condition of, savage thought. ”

“ Religion is always forgetting, or explaining away, or apologizing for these stories. Now the Vedic deities, so imposing when regarded as vast natural forces (as such forces seem to us) , so benignant when appealed to as forgivers of sins, have also their mythological aspect. In this aspect they are natural phenomena still, but phenomena as originally conceived of by the personifying imagination of the savage, and credited, like the gods of the Maori or the Australian, with all manner of freaks, adventures and disguises. ”