Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/159

Rh MYTHOLOGY 147 of course, is the belief in the equal personality and com mon kindred of all things. Pund-jel, and his rivals the Crow and the Jay, appear to belong to the supernatural prehuman race of Nurrumbunguttias, or &quot; old spirits,&quot; answering to the divine races of Titans and gods in Greece, and to the Calif ornian and Ovaherero &quot; old ones in heaven.&quot; l Before leaving the Australian divine myths it should be remarked that the widely -spread dualistic myth is found among the Australians. &quot; Why do things go wrong 1 &quot; men ask, and answer, in Australia as in Persia, by the myth of the mischievous power who thwarted the maker of things. Among the Australians the Crow was always at war with the creative Eagle. The Eagle, by the way (like the elder brothers of Zeus), was once swallowed by a powerful god who afterwards became the moon, and was disgorged alive. The Eagle s adventures as a creator will more properly be considered among cosmogonic myths. His share in the dispersion of mankind, and in causing the deluge, cannot but be regarded with some suspicion, though they bear but distant resemblances to the Biblical narratives. The chief being among the supernatural characters of Bushman mythology is the insect called the Mantis. 2 Cagn or Ikaggen, the Mantis, is sometimes regarded with religious respect as a benevolent god. But his adventures are the merest nightmares of puerile fancy. He has a wife, an adopted daughter, whose real father is the &quot; swallower &quot; in Bushman swallowing-myths, and the daughter has a son, who is the Ichneumon. The Mantis made an eland out of the shoe of his son-in-law. The moon was also created by the Mantis out of his shoe, and it is red, because the shoe was covered with the red dust of Bushman-land. The Mantis is defeated in an encounter with a cat which happened to be singing a song about a lynx. The Mantis (like Poseidon, Hades, Metis, and other Greek gods) was once swallowed, but disgorged alive. The swallower was the monster Ilkhwai-hemm. Like Heracles when he leaped into the belly of the monster which was about to swallow Hesione, the Mantis once jumped down the throat of a hostile elephant, and so destroyed him. The heavenly bodies are gods among the Bushmen, but their nature and adventures must be dis cussed among other myths of sun, moon, and stars. As a creator, Cagn is sometimes said to have &quot; given orders, and caused all things to appear and be made.&quot; He struck snakes with his staff and turned them into men, as Zeus did with the ants in ^Egina. But the Bushmen s mythical theory of the origin of things must, as far as possible, be kept apart from the fables of the Mantis, the Ichneumon, and other divine beings. Though animals, these gods have human passions and character, and possess the usual magical powers attributed to sorcerers. Concerning the mythology of the Hottentots and Namas, we have a great deal of information in a book named Tsuni-Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi (1881), by Dr T. Hahn. This author has collected the old notices of Hottentot myths, and has added material from his own researches. The chief god of the Hottentots is a being named Tsuni-Goam, who is universally regarded by his worshippers as a deceased sorcerer. According to one old believer, &quot;Tsui-Goab&quot; (an alternative reading of the god s name) &quot; was a great powerful chief of the Khoi-Khoi in fact, he was the first Khoi-Khoib from whom all the Khoi-Khoi tribes took their name.&quot; He is 1 The chief sources iised here are Fison and Ridley s Kamilaroi and Kurnai, with Brough Smyth s Aborigines of Victoria. Dawson s work, and Gason on the Dieyries, with Sir George Grey s Travels, may also be consulted. 2 Accounts of the Mantis and of his performances will be found in the Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874, and in Dr Bleek s Brief Account of Bushinan Folk-Lore. always represented as at war (in the usual crude dualism of savages) with &quot;another chief&quot; named Gaunab. The prayers addressed to Tsui-Goab are simple and natural in character, the &quot; private ejaculations &quot; of men in moments of need or distress. As usual, religion is more advanced than mythology. It appears that, by some accounts, Tsui-Goab lives in the red sky and Gaunab in the dark sky. The neighbouring race of Namas have another old chief for god, a being called Heitsi Eibib. His graves are shown in many places, like those of Osiris, which, says Plutarch, abounded in Egypt. He is propitiated by passers-by at his sepulchres. He has intimate relations in peace and war with a variety of animals whose habits are sometimes explained (like those of the serpent in Genesis) as the result of the curse of Heitsi Eibib. Heitsi Eibib was born in a mysterious way from a cow, as Indra in the Black Yajur-Veda entered into and was born from the womb of a being who also bore a cow. The Rig -Veda (iv. 18, 1) remarks, &quot;His mother, a cow, bore Indra, an unlicked calf,&quot; probably a metaphorical way of speaking. Heitsi Eibib, like countless other gods and heroes, is also said to have been the son of a virgin who tasted a parti cular plant, and so became pregnant, as in the German and Gallophrygian marchen of the almond tree, given by Grimm and Pausanias. Incest is one of the feats of Heitsi Eibib. Tsui-Goab, in the opinion of his worshippers, as we have seen, is a deified dead sorcerer, whose name means Wounded Knee, the sorcerer 1 having been injured in the knee by an enemy. Dr Hahn tries to prove (by philology s &quot; artful aid &quot;) that the name really means &quot; red dawn,&quot; and is a Hottentot way of speaking of the infinite. The philological arguments advanced are extremely weak, and by no means convincing. If we grant, however, for the sake of argument, that the early Hottentots worshipped the infinite under the figure of the dawn, and that, by forgetting their own meaning, they came to believe that the words which really meant &quot;red dawn&quot; meant &quot;wounded knee,&quot; we must still admit that the devout have assigned to their deity all the attributes of an ancestral sorcerer. In short, their &quot;Red Dawn,&quot; if red dawn he be, is a person, and a savage person, adored exactly as the actual fathers and grandfathers of the Hottentots are adored. We must explain his legend, then, on these principles, and not as an allegory of the dawn as the dawn appears to civilized people. About Gaunab (the Ahriman to Tsui-Goab s Ormuzd) Dr Hahn gives two dis tinct opinions. &quot; Gaunab was at first a ghost, a mischief- maker and evil-doer &quot; (op. cit., p. 85). But Gaunab he declares to be &quot;the night-sky&quot; (p. 126). Whether we regard Gaunab, Heitsi Eibib, and Tsui-Goab as originally mythological representations of natural phenomena, or as deified dead men, it is plain that they are now venerated as non-natural human beings, possessing the customary attributes of sorcerers. Thus of Tsui-Goab it is said, &quot; He could do wonderful things which no other man could do, because he was very wise. He could tell what would happen in future times. He died several times, and several times he rose again &quot; (statement of old Kxarab in Hahn, p. 61). The mythology of the Zulus as reported by Callaway (Unkulunkulu, 1868-70) is very thin and uninteresting. The Zulus are great worshippers of ancestors (who appear to men in the form of snakes), and they regard a being called Unkulunkiilu as their first ancestor, and sometimes as the creator, or at least as the maker of men. It does not appear they identify Unkulunkillu, as a rule, with &quot; the lord of heaven,&quot; who, like Indra, causes the thunder. The word answering to our lord is also applied &quot; even to beasts, as the lion and the boa.&quot; The Zulus, like many distant races, sometimes attribute thunder to the &quot;thunder-