Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/102

 the reader must already have reflected, this practical living belief in the common confused equality of men, gods, plants, beasts, rivers, and what not, which still regulates savage society, is one of the most prominent features in mythology. Porphyry remarked and exactly described it among the Egyptians,—"common and akin to men and gods they believed the beasts to be." The belief in such equality is alien to modern civilisation. We have shown that it is common and fundamental in savagery. For instance, in the Pacific, we might quote Turner, and for Melanesia, Codrington, while for New Zealand we have Taylor. For the Jakuts, along the banks of the Lena in Northern Asia, we have the evidence of Strahlenberg, who writes: "Each tribe of these people look upon some particular creature as sacred, e.g., a swan, goose, raven, &c., and such is not eaten by that tribe" (implying belief in kinship), though the others may eat it. As the majority of our witnesses were quite unaware that the facts they described were common among races of whom many of them had never even heard, their evidence may surely be accepted as valid, especially as the beliefs testified to express themselves in marriage laws, in the blood-feud, in abstinence from food, on pillars over graves, in rude heraldry, and in other