Metamorphoses

“ After their death they became flowers. Such myths of metamorphoses, as has been shown, are an universal growth of savage fancy, and spring from the want of a sense of difference between men and things. ”

“ For millions of millions of ages must we shiver in tempests of fire: then shall we enter anew into some slime primordial,—there to quicken, and again writhe upward through all foul dumb blind shapes. Innumerable the metamorphoses!—immeasurable the agonies!... ”

“ But it has been observed that, among most savage races, metamorphoses like that of Daphne not only exist in mythology, but are believed to occur very frequently in actual life. Men and women are supposed to be capable of turning into plants (as the bamboo in Sarawak) , into animals, and stones, and stars, and those metamorphoses happen as contemporary events—for example, in Samoa. ”

“ The product will appear as in infinite metamorphosis.
(From the stand-point of reflection, as continually on the leap from fluid to solid, without ever reaching, however, the required form.—Organizations that do not live in the grosser element, at least live on the deep ground of the aërial sea—many pass over, by metamorphoses, from one element into another; and what does the animal, whose vital functions almost all consist in contractions, appear to be, other than such a leap?) ”

“ Two other remarkable circumstances of our dreaming ideas are their inconsistency, and the total absence of surprise. Thus we seem to be present at more extraordinary metamorphoses of animals or trees, than are to be met with in the fables of antiquity ”

“ THE Method I propose in writing this Preface, is to take Notice of some of the Beauties of the Metamorphoses, and also of the Faults, and particular Affectations. After which I shall proceed to hint at some Rules for Translation in general; and shall give a short Account of the following Version.
I shall not pretend to impose my Opinion on others with the magisterial Authority of a Critic; but only take the Liberty of discovering my own Taste. ”

“ Therefore the mythologists whose case we are stating, when they find identical metamorphoses in the classical mythologies, conjecture that these were first invented when the ancestors of the Aryans were in the imaginative condition in which a score of rude races are to-day. ”

“ To a naturalist, metamorphosis is simply growth; and in that sense the different stages of development in animals that undergo their successive changes within the egg are as much metamorphoses as the successive phases of life in those animals that complete their development after they are hatched. ”

“ Natural as may seem the assemblage included under Arthropoda, there is no group in which adaptive modifications have introduced so much diversity of anatomical and physiological relations. Metamorphoses, the changes of form which changes of external conditions have promoted, are met with of very various amount. The progress of the embryo from the first appearance of the blastoderm up to sexual maturity of the adult may be direct, without metamorphosis, or may be retarded by changes of form and habit, rendering the young animal capable of sustaining life under very various conditions. ”

“ Such things are mostly optical delusions to us inferior creatures. Metamorphoses are the business of the gods: the transformations and the contingent disorders of great persons who float above us are clouds impossible to comprehend and perilous to study. ”

“ In this group we find the most striking metamorphoses in the life of the same individual. Passed out of the mere embryo, the larval form resembles more an ordinary macrourous decapod than the entomostracous its nearest relations. ”

“ It is admitted that Greeks, Romans, Aryans of India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, and 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 similar adventures, and the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and all else that puzzles us in the civilised mythologies, are regarded as possible incidents of daily human life? ”

“ The Metamorphoses of Ovid are a compendium of the Mythological narratives of ancient Greece and Rome, so ingeniously framed, as to embrace a large amount of information upon almost every subject connected with the learning, traditions, manners, and customs of antiquity, and have afforded a fertile field of investigation to the learned of the civilized world. To present to the public a faithful translation of a work, universally esteemed, not only for its varied information, but as being the masterpiece of one of the greatest Poets of ancient Rome, is the object of the present volume. ”

“ And, advancing to savage theory and its correlative customs, I hope I have made it plain that stories of metamorphosis, whether märchen or sagas, have been founded upon the belief that at death men are not annihilated, but pass into fresh forms, sometimes appearing as plants and trees, sometimes as animals of the lower creation, and sometimes as men and women born again into their own kindred or among strangers. ”

“ It would be easy to show at even greater length that the medicine-man has everywhere the power of metamorphosis. He can assume the shapes of all beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and inorganic matters, and he can subdue other people to the same enchantment. This belief obviously rests on the lack of recognised distinction between man and the rest of the world, which we have so frequently insisted on as a characteristic of savage and barbarous thought. Examples of accredited metamorphosis are so common everywhere, and so well known, that it would be waste of space to give a long account of them. ”

“ With frightful lucidity, she had the vision of her corpse, and she passed her hands over her whole body in order to probe to the bottom an idea which, though simple, had never yet occurred to her—that she bore her skeleton within her, that it was not a result of death, a metamorphosis, a culmination, but a thing one carries about, a spectre inseparable from the human form, and that the framework of life is already the symbol of the tomb. ”

“ The most familiar examples of metamorphosis are the abrupt changes which occur at the end of the larval history of the frog and of many insects. In both these cases there is a sudden and great change of environment; there is a sudden demand for new organs which would have been quite useless in the old environment, and organs which were of use in the, old environment and are of no use in the new have to be eliminated. The two examples we have chosen have the advantage of showing us the two methods by which the crisis in the life-history is met. ”

“ The old significance of the word metamorphosis—the fabled transformation of one individual into another, in which so much of the imagination and poetical culture of the ancients found expression—still clings to us; and where the different phases of the same life assume such different external forms, we are apt to overlook the fact that it is one single continuous life. ”

“ The son of Jove was astounded at her beauty, and hanging in mid-air he caught the flames of love; as when a leaden bullet is thrown by a Balearic sling, it flies along, is heated by its motion, and finds heat in the clouds which it had not before, Mercury now turns his course, leaves the air and flies to earth, nor seeks to disguise himself; such is the confidence of beauty. Yet though that trust be lawful, he assists it none the less with pains ”

“ Metamorphosis is the universal law, exemplified throughout the Heavens and on the Earth: especially throughout the organic world; and above all in the animal division of it. No creature, save the simplest and most minute, commences its existence in a form like that which it eventually assumes; and in most cases the unlikeness is great—so great that kinship between the first and the last forms would be incredible were it not daily demonstrated in every poultry-yard and every garden. ”

“ Here on the surface and there deeply embedded in the ground are things that have been transmuted in substance—changed from flesh to stone, from wood to flint. Living bodies on all sides exemplify metamorphosis in ways marvelous enough to the instructed, and to the primitive man quite incomprehensible. And this protean character which so many things around him exhibit, and which familiarize him with the notion that there are two or more interchangeable states of existence, is again impressed on him by such phenomena as shadows, reflections, and echoes. ”

“ The essential features of metamorphosis, as exhibited in the great class we are writing of, appear to be the separation in time of growth and development, and the limitation of the reproductive processes to a short period at the end of the individual life. ”

“ As the belief in metamorphosis,and in beasts which are rational and loquacious, is world wide, and is the natural result of the ideas of "primary myth-makers," or savages, Sir George Cox's theory, that such notions are all to be traced to forgetfulness of the meaning of words denoting natural phenomena, is too narrow, and is too devoid of evidence. ”

“ The bosom, which nature has formed with exquisite symmetry in itself, and admirable adaptation to the parts of the figure to which it is united, has been transformed into a shape, and transplanted to a place, which deprives it of its original beauty and harmony with the rest of the person. This hideous metamorphosis has been effected by means of newly-invented stays, or corsets, which, by an extraordinary construction and force of material, force the figure of the wearer into whatever form the artist pleases. ”

“ M. Junod seems to me to overrate the conscious artistic purpose in the narrators of these tales: the native mind is quite ready to assume that animals think and act in much the same way as human beings, and this attitude makes it easy to forget the outward distinctions when they appear as actors in a story. No doubt this haziness of view is increased by the popular conception of metamorphosis as a possible occurrence in everyday life. ”

“ Among the North American Indians any stone which has a resemblance to the human or animal figure is explained as an example of metamorphosis. Three stones among the Aricaras were a girl, her lover, and her dog, who fled from home because the course of true love did not run smooth, and who were petrified. ”

“ What we call “death,” is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.
P. But of the worm’s metamorphosis we are palpably cognizant.
V. We, certainly—but not the worm. The matter of which our rudimental body is composed, is within the ken of the organs of that body; or, more distinctly, our rudimental organs are adapted to the matter of which is formed the rudimental body ”

“ To metamorphosis he only allowed a logical value, as explaining the natural classification; the only real, existent metamorphosis he saw in the development of the individual from its embryonic stage. Still more distinctly did he contravene the general tendency of scientific explanation. “It is held the triumph of science to recognize in the general process of the earth the same categories as are exhibited in the processes of isolated bodies. This is, however, an application of categories from a field where the conditions are finite to a sphere in which the circumstances are infinite.” ”

“ In my opinion, the Greek word metanoia concealed a most profound meaning—a meaning of prodigious compass—which bore no allusion to any ideas whatever of repentance. The meta carried with it an emphatic expression of its original idea—the idea of transfer, of translation, of transformation; or, if we prefer a Grecian to a Roman apparelling, the idea of a metamorphosis. ”

“ There are, moreover, an endless number of facts which prove the independence of the individual stages of development—I refer to the multitudinous phenomena presented by metamorphosis itself. The existence of that form of development which we designate as metamorphosis is alone sufficient to prove incontestably that the single stages are able to change independently of one another to a most remarkable extent. ”

“ Not every change of form, however, is a metamorphosis. The change of a kitten into a cat, of a child into a grown-up, of a small fish into a large fish are not examples of metamorphosis, at least not of what is called metamorphosis. There must be something spectacular or unexpected about the change, as in the transformation of the tadpole into a frog, the change of the wormlike caterpillar into a moth, or of a maggot into a fly. ”

“ The repose of death, and the sharp pencil which resides in the small lens, will place before the student’s eye the skeleton, clothed or unclothed, in accurate perspective and true relief, while he contemplates with wonder, in their true apparent magnitude, the gigantic Mastodon, the colossal Megatherion, and the huge Dinornis, or examines the crushed remains of the lengthened Saurian, or the hollow footsteps which ancient life has impressed on the massive sandstone or the indurated clay. ”

“ All the statues, the carved and painted tombs, all the curious little model boats and workshops, all the painted mummies, all the amulets, the scarabs, the little funerary statuettes,—all this mummery which seems to be so characteristic and so essential, is only the means to an end, and an ever changing means to secure a successful comfortable existence of the spirit in the life after death,—in the ghostly duplicate of life on earth. ”

“ During this evolution, or, should one say, metamorphosis, in the perception of art, the tendency must necessarily be to smooth out the irregular and unsymmetrical contours of Nature and bring the design down to as nearly geometrical as possible. ”