Edward Clodd

“ The Stars.
In the great body of nature-myth the stars are prominent members. In their multitude; their sublime repose in upper calms above the turmoil of the elements; their varying brilliancy, “one star differing from another star in glory”; their tremulous light; their scattered positions, which lend themselves to every vagary of the constellation-maker; their slow procession, varied only by sweeping comet and meteor, or falling showers of shooting stars; they lead the imagination into gentler ways than do the vaster bodies of the most ancient heavens. ”

“ But there were dark clouds also, clouds of night and clouds of storm, and within these lurked the monster-robber; into them he lured the herds, and withheld both light and rain from the children of men. To the sun-god, therefore, who smote the thief-dragon, Vritra, with his shaft, and set free the imprisoned cows, went up the shout of praise, the song of gratitude. This myth survives in many legends of the Aryan race, and their family likeness is unmistakable. ”

“ So with this belief. It is the outcome of that early thought of man which conceived a common nature and fellowship between himself and brutes, a conception based on rude analogies between his own and other forms of life, as also between himself and things without life, but having motion, be they waterspouts or rivers, trees or clouds, especially these last, when the wind, in violent surging and with howling voice, drove them across the sky. Where he blindly, timidly groped, we walk as in the light, and with love that casts out fear. ”

“ A personal life and will was attributed to sun, moon, clouds, river, waterfall, ocean, and tree, and the varying phenomena of the sky at dawn or noonday, at gray eve or black-clouded night, were the manifestation of the controlling life that dwelt in all. In a thousand different forms this conception was expressed. The thunder was the roar of a mighty beast; the lightning a serpent darting at its prey, an angry eye flashing, the storm demon’s outshot forked tongue; the rainbow a thirsty monster; the waterspout a long-tailed dragon. ”

“ Sunrises and sunsets happen with a regularity which failed to excite any strong emotion or stimulate curiosity, and the remotest ancestor of the primitive Aryan soon shook off the habit—if, indeed, he ever acquired it—of going to bed in fear and trembling lest the sun should not come back again. Nature, in her softer aspects and her gracious bounties, in the spring-time with its promise, the summer with its glory, the autumn with its gifts, has moved the heart of man to song and festival and procession ”

“ Meanwhile, until this quite recent stage in man’s progress was reached, the senses told their blundering tale of an earth flat and fixed, with sun, moon, and stars as its ministering servants, while gods or beasts upbore it, and mighty pillars supported the massive firmament In Hindu myth the tortoise which upholds the earth rests upon an elephant, whose legs reach all the way down! In Bogotà the culture-god Bochica punishes a lesser and offending deity by compelling him to sustain the part of Atlas, and it is in shifting his burden from shoulder to shoulder that earthquakes are caused. ”

“ It confirms a momentous canon of modern science, that the laws of evolution in the spiritual world are as determinable as they are in the physical. To this we, for the enrichment of our life and helpful service of our kind, do well to give heed. Wherever we now turn eye or ear the unity of things is manifest, and their unbroken harmony heard. With the theory of evolution in our hands as the master-key, the immense array of facts that seemed to lie unrelated and discrete are seen to be interrelated and in necessary dependence—“a mighty sum of things for ever speaking.” ”

“ But we have travelled in brief space a long way from our picture of man, weaving out of streams and breezes and the sunshine his crude philosophy of personal life and will controlling all, to the peasant of to-day, his intellectual lineal descendant, with his belief in signs and wonders, his forecast of fate and future by omens, by dreams, and by such pregnant occurrences as the spilling of salt, the howling of dogs, and changes of the moon ”

“ And to treat them as one is to invade no province of religion, which is quite other than speculation about gods. The awe and reverence which the fathomless mystery of the universe awakens, which steal within us unbidden as the morning light, and unbroken on the prism of analysis; the conviction, deepening as we peer, that there is a Power beyond humanity, and upon which humanity depends; the feeling that life is in harmony with the Divine order when it moves in disinterested service of our kind—these theology can neither create nor destroy, neither verify nor disprove. ”

“ The beliefs of the ancient Finns, as described in the Kalevala, in the world as a divided egg, of which the white is the ocean, the yolk the sun, the arched shell the sky, and the darker portions the clouds; and of the Polynesians that the universe is the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, at the tapering bottom of which is the root of all things, are to us so grotesque that it is not easy to regard them as explanations seriously invented by the human mind. ”

“ Body and mind were to them as separate entities as they are to the savage and the ignorant. Each regarded the soul as independent of the body, and framed his theories of occasional absence therefrom accordingly. But science has taught us to know ourselves not as dual, but as one. She lays her finger on the subtle, intricate framework of man’s nervous system, and finds in the derangement of this the secret of those delusions and illusions which have been so prolific in agony and suffering. ”

“ Still more complete in the mimicry is the reflection of the body in water or mirror, the image repeating every gesture and adopting every colour, whilst in the echoes which forest and hillside fling back, the savage hears confirmation of his belief in the other self, as well as in the nearness of the spirits of the dead. ”

“ But the discoveries which had disproved belief in the earth’s supremacy in the universe, and in its creation in six days, led the way to researches into the history of the life upon its surface, and especially of that which, in the language of ancient writ, was “made in the image of God.” When the long-forbidding line, imaginary as the equator and lacking its convenience, was crossed, there was found the evidence of the conditions under which man emerged from a state quite other than that which had formed the burden of legends sacred with the hoariness of time. ”

“ And to the student of the history of humanity who rejoices in the sure foundation on which, tested in manifold ways, the convictions of the highest and noblest of the race rest, the value of myth is increased in its being a natural outgrowth of the mind when, having advanced to the point at which curiosity concerning the causes of surrounding things arises, it frames its crude explanations. ”

“ Let it not be thought that because science explains the earth-born origin of some of man’s loftiest hopes, she makes claim to have spoken the last word, and forbids utterance from any other quarter. The theologian is not less free to assume such miraculous intervention in man’s development as marks him nearer to the angel than to the ape, only his assumptions lie beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. And it should be noted that whilst science takes away, she gives with no niggard hand, so that the loss is more seeming than real. ”

“ The things dreamed about respecting the land of spirits and their occupations are woven of the materials of daily life. Whether to the sleeping barbarian in his wigwam, or to the seer banished in Patmos; whether to the Indian travelling in his dreams to the happy hunting-ground, or to the apostle caught up in trance into paradise; earth, and earth alone, supplies the materials out of which man everywhere has shaped his heaven. ”

“ Here, as elsewhere, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life;” and we may turn to the fundamental idea resident in the myth. The savage, in the presence of recurring light and darkness, of the clouds lifting and dispersing before the sunrise, has his legend of a time when this was not so, but when heaven and earth were closed-in one upon the other till some hero thrust them apart. And, to his rude intelligence, the conception of night as a devouring monster, might easily “start the notion of other swallowing and disgorging beings.” ”

“ A good deal hinges upon the evidences in savage myth-making of the personification of the powers of nature. Obviously, the richest and most suggestive material would be supplied by the striking phenomena of the heavens, chiefly in sunrise and sunset, in moon, star, star-group and meteor, cloud and storm, and, next in importance, by the strange and terrible among phenomena on earth, whether in the restless waters, the unquiet trees, the grotesquely-shaped rocks, and the fear inspired in man by creatures more powerful than himself. ”

“ Among the slender intellectual capital of which they stood possessed was the common mythology of their savage ancestors, in which, as we have seen, sun and moon, storm and thunder-cloud, and all other natural phenomena, were credited with personal life and will. But that mythology had certainly advanced beyond the crude primitive form and entered the heroic stage, wherein the powers of nature were half human, half divine. ”

“ Moreover, in times like these, when criticism is testing without fear or favour the trustworthiness of records of the past, whether of Jew or Gentile, the knowledge of the legendary origin of events woven into sober history prepares us to recognise how the imagination has fed the stream of tradition, itself no mean tributary of that larger stream of history, the purity of which is now subject of analysis. ”

“ Odd and out-of-the-way events have happened to the dreamer; he has been to strange places and seen strange doings, but waking up, he knows that he is in the same wigwam where he laid down to sleep, and can be convinced by his squaw that he has not moved therefrom all night. Therefore it is the other self, this phantom-soul, which has been away for a time, seeing and taking part in things both new and old. We civilised folk, as Dr. Wendell Holmes remarks, not rarely find our personality doubled in our dreams, and do battle with ourselves, unconscious that we are our own antagonists. ”

“ As in the conflict raging in the sky during gale or tempest, when the light and the darkness alternately prevail, the barbaric mind sees war waged between the heroes of the spirit-land who have carried their unsettled blood feuds thither, so in many myths the lightning is no comrade of the thunder, but its foe, the battle of bird with serpent. ”

“ More graceful is the conception which makes the soul spring up as a flower or cleave the air as a bird. It is, of course, the purified survival of the primitive thought which did not limit its belief in an indwelling spirit to man, but extended it to brutes and plants, and even to lifeless things. For the lower creatures manifested the phenomena from which the belief in spirits in higher creatures was inferred. They moved and breathed, their life ceased with their breath ”

“ Among the Red races one tribe thought that sun, moon, and stars were men and women who went into the sea every night and swam out by the east. The Bushmen say that the sun was once a man who shed light from his body, but only for a short distance, until some children threw him into the sky while he slept, and thus he shines upon the wide earth. The Australians say that all was darkness around them till one of their many ancestors, who still shine from the stars, shedding good and evil, threw, in pity for them, an emu’s egg into space, when it became the sun. ”

“ The Housatonic Indians say that the stars in Charles’s Wain are men hunting a bear, and that the chase lasts from spring to autumn, when the bear is wounded and its dripping blood turns the leaves of the trees red. With this may be cited the myth that the red clouds at morn and eve are the blood of the slain in battle. In the Northern Lights the Greenlanders see the spirits of the departed dancing, the brighter the flashes of the Aurora the greater the merriment, whilst the Dacotas say of the meteors that they are spirits flying through the air. ”

“ Although we cannot so far lull our faculty of thought as to realise the mental vacuity of the savage, we may, from survivals nowadays, lead up to reasonable guesses of savage ways of looking at things in bygone ages, and the more so when we can detect relics of these among the ignorant and superstitious of modern times.
What meaning, then, had man’s surroundings to him, when eye and ear could be diverted from prior claims of the body, and he could repose from watching for his prey, and from listening to the approach of wild beast or enemy? ”

“ The comparatively late recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship. Moreover, Nature is bigger than man, and this he was not slow to feel. Even if it be conceded that sun-myth and sun-worship once arose through the nicknaming of an ancestor as the Sun, we must take into account the force of that imagination which enabled the unconscious myth-maker, or creed-maker, to credit the moving orbs of heaven with personal life and will. ”