Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/156

Rh 144 MYTHOLOGY of things, with what we may call &quot; savage metaphysics.&quot; Now early man, as Mr Miiller says, &quot;not only did not think as we think, but did not think as we suppose he ought to have thought.&quot; The chief distinction between his mode of conceiving the world and ours is his vast extension of the theory of personality. The history of thought is the history of the process of narrowing the range and intensifying the conception of personality. To civilized man only human beings seem personal. We scarcely regard each of the more intelligent lower creatures as &quot;an I,&quot; and we can hardly be said to attribute definite personality at all to the less intelligent creatures, such as fishes. It is only by the half-conscious survival of older thought in poetry that we attribute personality to the sun or the wind, or say, &quot;at one stride comes the Dark.&quot; But to the savage, and apparently to men more backward than the most backward peoples we know, all nature was a congeries of animated personalities. The savage s notion of personality is more a universally diffused feeling than a reasoned conception, and this feeling of a personal self he impartially distributes all over the world as known to him. One of the Jesuit missionaries in North America thus describes the Red Man s philosophy : l &quot; Les sauvages se persuadent que non seulement les hommes et les autres animaux, mais aussi que toutes les autres choses sont animees.&quot; Crevaux, in the Andes, found that the Indians believed that the beasts have piays (sorcerers and doctors) like themselves. 2 This opinion we may name personalism, and it is the necessary condition of savage (and, as will be seen, of civilized) mythology. The Jesuits could not under stand how spherical bodies like sun and moon could be mistaken for human beings. Their catechumens put them off with the answer that the drawn bows of the heavenly bodies gave them their round appearance. &quot;The wind was formerly a person ; he became a bird,&quot; say the Bush men, and god ka ! kai, a respectable Bushman once saw the personal wind at Haarfontein. 3 The Egyptians, ac cording to Herodotus (iii. 16), believed fire to be 6^piov e/xi/ u^ov, a live beast. The Bushman who saw the Wind meant to throw a stone at it, but it ran into a hill. From the wind as a person the Bhinyas in India (Dalton, p. 140) claim descent, and in Indian epic tradition the leader of the ape army was a son of the wind. The Wind, by certain mares, became the father of wind-swift steeds men tioned in the Iliad. The loves of Boreas are well known. These are examples of the animistic theory applied to what, in our minds, seems one of the least personal of natural phenomena. The sky (which appears to us even less personal) has been regarded as a personal being by Samoyeds, Red Indians, Zulus, 4 and traces of this belief survive in Chinese, Greek, and Roman religion. Thus the savage mind regards even the most abstract phenomena as persons, with human parts and passions. That idea alone will account for much that is strange in mythology. But we must remember that, to the savage, Sky, Sun, Sea, Wind are not only persons, but they are savage persons. Their conduct is not what civilized men would attribute to characters so august ; it is what un civilized men think probable and befitting among beings like themselves. Now savage man s view of his own place and his own powers in the world is so unlike our modern view of human relations to the universe that it requires a separate explanation. Savage Theory of Man s Relations with the World. It has already been shown that the savage regards even the most abstract phenomena (sky, earth, wind, and so forth) as animated and personal. It must be added that he has 1 Relations, 1636, p. 114. 2 Voyages, p. 159. 3 South African Folk-Lore Journal, May 1880. 4 Tylor, dp. tit., ii. 256. the same opinion of the personality and human character of all animals. &quot; Us tiennent les poissons raisonnables, comme aussi les cerfs,&quot; says a Jesuit father about the North -American Indians (Relations, loc. cit.}. In Aus tralia the natives believe that the wild dog has the power of speech, like the cat of the Coverley witch in the Spec tator. The Breton peasants, according to M. S6billot, credit all birds with language, which they even attempt to interpret. The old English and the Arab superstitions about the language of beasts are examples of this opinion surviving among civilized races. The bear in Norway is regarded as almost a man, and his dead body is addressed and his wrath deprecated by Samoyeds and Red Indians. &quot; The native bear Kur-bo-roo is the sage counsellor of the aborigines in all their difficulties. When bent on a danger ous expedition, the men will seek help from this clumsy creature, but in what way his opinions are made known is nowhere recorded.&quot; 5 Schoolcraft mentions a Red Indian story explaining how &quot; the bear does not die,&quot; but this tale Mr Schoolcraft (like Herodotus in Egypt) &quot;cannot bring himself to relate.&quot; He also gives examples of lowas conversing with serpents. These may serve as examples of the savage belief in the human intelligence of animals. Man is on an even footing with them, and with them can interchange his ideas. But savages carry this opinion much further. Man in their view is actually, and in no figurative sense, akin to the beasts. Certain tribes in Java &quot; believe that women when delivered of a child are fre quently delivered at the same time of a young crocodile.&quot; The common European story of a queen accused of giving birth to puppies shows the survival of the belief in the possibility of such births among civilized races, while the Aztecs had the idea that women who saw the moon in certain circumstances would produce mice. But the chief evidence for the savage theory of man s close kinship with the lower animals is found in the institution called totemism. This is not the place to discuss totemism in all its bearings. It is, roughly speaking, the belief that certain stocks of men in the various tribes are descended by blood descent from certain objects animate or inani mate, but especially from beasts. The strength of the opinion is proved by its connexion with very stringent marriage laws. No man (according to the rigour of the custom) may marry a woman who bears the same family name as himself, that is, who is descended from the same inanimate object or animal. Nor may people (if they can possibly avoid it) eat the flesh of animals who are their kindred. We have only space to indicate briefly here the wide diffusion of this extraordinary belief. Among the Murri, or natives of Australia, the local tribes are divided into stocks which may not intermarry, and Avhich regard themselves as being descended from kangaroos, cockatoos, emus, pelicans, and other animals. A man and a woman who both claim descent from the same animal consider themselves as &quot;of one flesh,&quot; brother and sister in the emu or kangaroo stock, and therefore may not inter marry (Dawson, p. 26). As the cannibals of New Cale donia do not eat their own tribesmen, so these stocks abstain from the flesh of their animal tribe-fellow. The Australians have a still more curious division of all nature into groups of kindred, so that one man may be descended, indeed, from the fish-hawk, but he also counts cousins with smoke and the honeysuckle tree. Again, the kangaroo and men-kangaroos are akin to summer, the wind, and the shevak tree. &quot; The South Australian savage looks upon the world as the Great Tribe, to one of whose divisions he himself belongs, and all things, animate or inanimate, which belong to his class are parts of the body corporate 5 Broucrh Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 446, 1878. 6 Hawkesworth, Voyages, iii. 756.