Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/384

 344 Reviews.

existing processes set forth as actions of those personifications, are to my mind likely to have preceded creation myths properly so called. Primitive man, so I should think, would tell stories about the brother and sister who perpetually chase each other across the sky, or about the being who pops into a hole in the earth at night and comes up out of another hole in the morning, before he told stories to explain why a wolf is a wolf or Mount Shasta is Mount Shasta. In other words, he must surely have accepted the facts of nature as facts, using them as the material of those dramatic imaginings we term myth, before he speculated concerning their origin and essence.

Accept Mr. Curtin's view and then turn to the stories them- selves. The actors, the first people, apparently figure as human in form and circumstance, and although the tale itself sometimes says that so and so was changed into a particular animal or object, yet in many cases this is neither stated nor implied and we have simply Mr. Curtin's warrant for the fact. It rests of course upon native information, but surely further knowledge could then have been gained respecting the psychology of the mythic person postu- lated. How did the narrator conceive of the being who after- wards became a lamprey eel or a block of flint ? He can hardly, to account for the existing universe, have postulated one which changed into it, and which yet was seemingly identical with it. But if we accept tale and theory together this is the conclusion we must come to. I may note in passing that the tales hardly bear out Mr. Curtin's assertion " that the resultant beast always corresponds in some power of mind or in some leading quality of character with the god, from whose position it has fallen." On the contrary one cannot but be struck by the frequent want of connec- tion between the incidents of the tale and the final metamorphosis. In this respect these stories are far less self-explanatory than, for instance, Mrs. Parker's Australian Tales, and, although they often avow an ^etiological intent, leave the impression that their original purport was not aetiological at all.

Perhaps the most pregnant and remarkable tale in the book is that entitled " Sedit and the two brothers Hus." The brothers are commissioned by Olelbis, a kind of supreme god, to make a stair- way from earth to the upper sky. The result will be that the new race of men will always have access to the upper world, can obtain rejuvenescence and perpetual life, need not propagate, and will