Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted

c >> comparative mythology by John Fiske >> Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted

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[144] Callaway, Zulu Nursery Tales, pp. 27-30.

In another Zulu legend, a girl is stolen by cannibals, and
shut up in the rock Itshe-likantunjambili, which, like the
rock of the Forty Thieves, opens and shuts at the command of
those who understand its secret. She gets possession of the
secret and escapes, and when the monsters pursue her she
throws on the ground a calabash full of sesame, which they
stop to eat. At last, getting tired of running, she climbs a
tree, and there she finds her brother, who, warned by a dream,
has come out to look for her. They ascend the tree together
until they come to a beautiful country well stocked with fat
oxen. They kill an ox, and while its flesh is roasting they
amuse themselves by making a stout thong of its hide. By and
by one of the cannibals, smelling the cooking meat, comes to
the foot of the tree, and looking up discovers the boy and
girl in the sky-country! They invite him up there; to share in
their feast, and throw him an end of the thong by which to
climb up. When the cannibal is dangling midway between earth
and heaven, they let go the rope, and down he falls with a
terrible crash.[145]

[145] Callaway, op. cit. pp. 142-152; cf. a similar story in
which the lion is fooled by the jackal. Bleek, op. cit. p. 7.
I omit the sequel of the tale.

In this story the enchanted rock opened by a talismanic
formula brings us again into contact with Indo-European
folk-lore. And that the conception has in both cases been
suggested by the same natural phenomenon is rendered probable
by another Zulu tale, in which the cannibal's cave is opened
by a swallow which flies in the air. Here we have the elements
of a genuine lightning-myth. We see that among these African
barbarians, as well as among our own forefathers, the clouds
have been conceived as birds carrying the lightning which can
cleave the rocks. In America we find the same notion
prevalent. The Dakotahs explain the thunder as "the sound of
the cloud-bird flapping his wings," and the Caribs describe
the lightning as a poisoned dart which the bird blows through
a hollow reed, after the Carib style of shooting.[146] On the
other hand, the Kamtchatkans know nothing of a cloud-bird, but
explain the lightning as something analogous to the flames of
a volcano. The Kamtchatkans say that when the mountain goblins
have got their stoves well heated up, they throw overboard,
with true barbaric shiftlessness, all the brands not needed
for immediate use, which makes a volcanic eruption. So when it
is summer on earth, it is winter in heaven; and the gods,
after heating up their stoves, throw away their spare
kindlingwood, which makes the lightning.[147]

[146] Brinton, op. cit. p. 104.

[147] Tylor, op. cit. p. 320.

When treating of Indo-European solar myths, we saw the
unvarying, unresting course of the sun variously explained as
due to the subjection of Herakles to Eurystheus, to the anger
of Poseidon at Odysseus, or to the curse laid upon the
Wandering Jew. The barbaric mind has worked at the same
problem; but the explanations which it has given are more
childlike and more grotesque. A Polynesian myth tells how the
Sun used to race through the sky so fast that men could not
get enough daylight to hunt game for their subsistence. By and
by an inventive genius, named Maui, conceived the idea of
catching the Sun in a noose and making him go more
deliberately. He plaited ropes and made a strong net, and,
arming himself with the jawbone of his ancestress,
Muri-ranga-whenua, called together all his brethren, and they
journeyed to the place where the Sun rises, and there spread
the net. When the Sun came up, he stuck his head and fore-paws
into the net, and while the brothers tightened the ropes so
that they cut him and made him scream for mercy, Maui beat him
with the jawbone until he became so weak that ever since he
has only been able to crawl through the sky. According to
another Polynesian myth, there was once a grumbling Radical,
who never could be satisfied with the way in which things are
managed on this earth. This bold Radical set out to build a
stone house which should last forever; but the days were so
short and the stones so heavy that he despaired of ever
accomplishing his project. One night, as he lay awake thinking
the matter over, it occurred to him that if he could catch the
Sun in a net, he could have as much daylight as was needful in
order to finish his house. So he borrowed a noose from the god
Itu, and, it being autumn, when the Sun gets sleepy and
stupid, he easily caught the luminary. The Sun cried till his
tears made a great freshet which nearly drowned the island;
but it was of no use; there he is tethered to this day.

Similar stories are met with in North America. A Dog-Rib
Indian once chased a squirrel up a tree until he reached the
sky. There he set a snare for the squirrel and climbed down
again. Next day the Sun was caught in the snare, and night
came on at once. That is to say, the sun was eclipsed.
"Something wrong up there," thought the Indian, "I must have
caught the Sun"; and so he sent up ever so many animals to
release the captive. They were all burned to ashes, but at
last the mole, going up and burrowing out through the GROUND
OF THE SKY, (!) succeeded in gnawing asunder the cords of the
snare. Just as it thrust its head out through the opening made
in the sky-ground, it received a flash of light which put its
eyes out, and that is why the mole is blind. The Sun got away,
but has ever since travelled more deliberately.[148]

[148] Tylor, op. cit. pp. 338-343.

These sun-myths, many more of which are to be found collected
in Mr. Tylor's excellent treatise on "The Early History of
Mankind," well illustrate both the similarity and the
diversity of the results obtained by the primitive mind, in
different times and countries, when engaged upon similar
problems. No one would think of referring these stories to a
common traditional origin with the myths of Herakles and
Odysseus; yet both classes of tales were devised to explain
the same phenomenon. Both to the Aryan and to the Polynesian
the steadfast but deliberate journey of the sun through the
firmament was a strange circumstance which called for
explanation; but while the meagre intelligence of the
barbarian could only attain to the quaint conception of a man
throwing a noose over the sun's head, the rich imagination of
the Indo-European created the noble picture of Herakles doomed
to serve the son of Sthenelos, in accordance with the
resistless decree of fate.

Another world-wide myth, which shows how similar are the
mental habits of uncivilized men, is the myth of the tortoise.
The Hindu notion of a great tortoise that lies beneath the
earth and keeps it from falling is familiar to every reader.
According to one account, this tortoise, swimming in the
primeval ocean, bears the earth on his back; but by and by,
when the gods get ready to destroy mankind, the tortoise will
grow weary and sink under his load, and then the earth will be
overwhelmed by a deluge. Another legend tells us that when the
gods and demons took Mount Mandara for a churning-stick and
churned the ocean to make ambrosia, the god Vishnu took on the
form of a tortoise and lay at the bottom of the sea, as a
pivot for the whirling mountain to rest upon. But these
versions of the myth are not primitive. In the original
conception the world is itself a gigantic tortoise swimming in
a boundless ocean; the flat surface of the earth is the lower
plate which covers the reptile's belly; the rounded shell
which covers his back is the sky; and the human race lives and
moves and has its being inside of the tortoise. Now, as Mr.
Tylor has pointed out, many tribes of Redskins hold
substantially the same theory of the universe. They regard the
tortoise as the symbol of the world, and address it as the
mother of mankind. Once, before the earth was made, the king
of heaven quarrelled with his wife, and gave her such a
terrible kick that she fell down into the sea. Fortunately a
tortoise received her on his back, and proceeded to raise up
the earth, upon which the heavenly woman became the mother of
mankind. These first men had white faces, and they used to dig
in the ground to catch badgers. One day a zealous burrower
thrust his knife too far and stabbed the tortoise, which
immediately sank into the sea and drowned all the human race
save one man.[149] In Finnish mythology the world is not a
tortoise, but it is an egg, of which the white part is the
ocean, the yolk is the earth, and the arched shell is the sky.
In India this is the mundane egg of Brahma; and it reappears
among the Yorubas as a pair of calabashes put together like
oyster-shells, one making a dome over the other. In Zulu-land
the earth is a huge beast called Usilosimapundu, whose face is
a rock, and whose mouth is very large and broad and red: "in
some countries which were on his body it was winter, and in
others it was early harvest." Many broad rivers flow over his
back, and he is covered with forests and hills, as is
indicated in his name, which means "the rugose or
knotty-backed beast." In this group of conceptions may be seen
the origin of Sindbad's great fish, which lay still so long
that sand and clay gradually accumulated upon its back, and at
last it became covered with trees. And lastly, passing from
barbaric folk-lore and from the Arabian Nights to the highest
level of Indo-European intelligence, do we not find both Plato
and Kepler amusing themselves with speculations in which the
earth figures as a stupendous animal?

[149] Tylor, op. cit. p. 336. November, 1870

VI. JUVENTUS MUNDI.[150]

[150] Juventus Mundi. The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age. By
the Rt. Hon. William Ewart Gladstone. Boston: Little, Brown,
& Co. 1869.

TWELVE years ago, when, in concluding his "Studies on Homer
and the Homeric Age," Mr. Gladstone applied to himself the
warning addressed by Agamemnon to the priest of Apollo,

"Let not Nemesis catch me by the swift ships."

he would seem to have intended it as a last farewell to
classical studies. Yet, whatever his intentions may have been,
they have yielded to the sweet desire of revisiting familiar
ground,--a desire as strong in the breast of the classical
scholar as was the yearning which led Odysseus to reject the
proffered gift of immortality, so that he might but once more
behold the wreathed smoke curling about the roofs of his
native Ithaka. In this new treatise, on the "Youth of the
World," Mr. Gladstone discusses the same questions which were
treated in his earlier work; and the main conclusions reached
in the "Studies on Homer" are here so little modified with
reference to the recent progress of archaeological inquiries,
that the book can hardly be said to have had any other reason
for appearing, save the desire of loitering by the ships of
the Argives, and of returning thither as often as possible.

The title selected by Mr. Gladstone for his new work is either
a very appropriate one or a strange misnomer, according to the
point of view from which it is regarded. Such being the case,
we might readily acquiesce in its use, and pass it by without
comment, trusting that the author understood himself when he
adopted it, were it not that by incidental references, and
especially by his allusions to the legendary literature of the
Jews, Mr. Gladstone shows that he means more by the title than
it can fairly be made to express. An author who seeks to
determine prehistoric events by references to Kadmos, and
Danaos, and Abraham, is at once liable to the suspicion of
holding very inadequate views as to the character of the epoch
which may properly be termed the "youth of the world." Often
in reading Mr. Gladstone we are reminded of Renan's strange
suggestion that an exploration of the Hindu Kush territory,
whence probably came the primitive Aryans, might throw some
new light on the origin of language. Nothing could well be
more futile. The primitive Aryan language has already been
partly reconstructed for us; its grammatical forms and
syntactic devices are becoming familiar to scholars; one great
philologist has even composed a tale in it; yet in studying
this long-buried dialect we are not much nearer the first
beginnings of human speech than in studying the Greek of
Homer, the Sanskrit of the Vedas, or the Umbrian of the
Igovine Inscriptions. The Aryan mother-tongue had passed into
the last of the three stages of linguistic growth long before
the break-up of the tribal communities in Aryana-vaedjo, and
at that early date presented a less primitive structure than
is to be seen in the Chinese or the Mongolian of our own
times. So the state of society depicted in the Homeric poems,
and well illustrated by Mr. Gladstone, is many degrees less
primitive than that which is revealed to us by the
archaeological researches either of Pictet and Windischmann,
or of Tylor, Lubbock, and M'Lennan. We shall gather evidences
of this as we proceed. Meanwhile let us remember that at least
eleven thousand years before the Homeric age men lived in
communities, and manufactured pottery on the banks of the
Nile; and let us not leave wholly out of sight that more
distant period, perhaps a million years ago, when sparse
tribes of savage men, contemporaneous with the mammoths of
Siberia and the cave-tigers of Britain, struggled against the
intense cold of the glacial winters.

Nevertheless, though the Homeric age appears to be a late one
when considered with reference to the whole career of the
human race, there is a point of view from which it may be
justly regarded as the "youth of the world." However long man
may have existed upon the earth, he becomes thoroughly and
distinctly human in the eyes of the historian only at the
epoch at which he began to create for himself a literature. As
far back as we can trace the progress of the human race
continuously by means of the written word, so far do we feel a
true historical interest in its fortunes, and pursue our
studies with a sympathy which the mere lapse of time is
powerless to impair. But the primeval man, whose history never
has been and never will be written, whose career on the earth,
dateless and chartless, can be dimly revealed to us only by
palaeontology, excites in us a very different feeling. Though
with the keenest interest we ransack every nook and corner of
the earth's surface for information about him, we are all the
while aware that what we are studying is human zoology and not
history. Our Neanderthal man is a specimen, not a character.
We cannot ask him the Homeric question, what is his name, who
were his parents, and how did he get where we found him. His
language has died with him, and he can render no account of
himself. We can only regard him specifically as Homo
Anthropos, a creature of bigger brain than his congener Homo
Pithekos, and of vastly greater promise. But this, we say, is
physical science, and not history.

For the historian, therefore, who studies man in his various
social relations, the youth of the world is the period at
which literature begins. We regard the history of the western
world as beginning about the tenth century before the
Christian era, because at that date we find literature, in
Greece and Palestine, beginning to throw direct light upon the
social and intellectual condition of a portion of mankind.
That great empires, rich in historical interest and in
materials for sociological generalizations, had existed for
centuries before that date, in Egypt and Assyria, we do not
doubt, since they appear at the dawn of history with all the
marks of great antiquity; but the only steady historical light
thrown upon them shines from the pages of Greek and Hebrew
authors, and these know them only in their latest period. For
information concerning their early careers we must look, not
to history, but to linguistic archaeology, a science which can
help us to general results, but cannot enable us to fix dates,
save in the crudest manner.

We mention the tenth century before Christ as the earliest
period at which we can begin to study human society in general
and Greek society in particular, through the medium of
literature. But, strictly speaking, the epoch in question is
one which cannot be fixed with accuracy. The earliest
ascertainable date in Greek history is that of the Olympiad of
Koroibos, B. C. 776. There is no doubt that the Homeric poems
were written before this date, and that Homer is therefore
strictly prehistoric. Had this fact been duly realized by
those scholars who have not attempted to deny it, a vast
amount of profitless discussion might have been avoided.
Sooner or later, as Grote says, "the lesson must be learnt,
hard and painful though it be, that no imaginable reach of
critical acumen will of itself enable us to discriminate fancy
from reality, in the absence of a tolerable stock of
evidence." We do not know who Homer was; we do not know where
or when he lived; and in all probability we shall never know.
The data for settling the question are not now accessible, and
it is not likely that they will ever be discovered. Even in
early antiquity the question was wrapped in an obscurity as
deep as that which shrouds it to-day. The case between the
seven or eight cities which claimed to be the birthplace of
the poet, and which Welcker has so ably discussed, cannot be
decided. The feebleness of the evidence brought into court may
be judged from the fact that the claims of Chios and the story
of the poet's blindness rest alike upon a doubtful allusion in
the Hymn to Apollo, which Thukydides (III. 104) accepted as
authentic. The majority of modern critics have consoled
themselves with the vague conclusion that, as between the two
great divisions of the early Greek world, Homer at least
belonged to the Asiatic. But Mr. Gladstone has shown good
reasons for doubting this opinion. He has pointed out several
instances in which the poems seem to betray a closer
topographical acquaintance with European than with Asiatic
Greece, and concludes that Athens and Argos have at least as
good a claim to Homer as Chios or Smyrna.

It is far more desirable that we should form an approximate
opinion as to the date of the Homeric poems, than that we
should seek to determine the exact locality in which they
originated. Yet the one question is hardly less obscure than
the other. Different writers of antiquity assigned eight
different epochs to Homer, of which the earliest is separated
from the most recent by an interval of four hundred and sixty
years,--a period as long as that which separates the Black
Prince from the Duke of Wellington, or the age of Perikles
from the Christian era. While Theopompos quite preposterously
brings him down as late as the twenty-third Olympiad, Krates
removes him to the twelfth century B. C. The date ordinarily
accepted by modern critics is the one assigned by Herodotos,
880 B. C. Yet Mr. Gladstone shows reasons, which appear to me
convincing, for doubting or rejecting this date.

I refer to the much-abused legend of the Children of Herakles,
which seems capable of yielding an item of trustworthy
testimony, provided it be circumspectly dealt with. I differ
from Mr. Gladstone in not regarding the legend as historical
in its present shape. In my apprehension, Hyllos and Oxylos,
as historical personages, have no value whatever; and I
faithfully follow Mr. Grote, in refusing to accept any date
earlier than the Olympiad of Koroibos. The tale of the "Return
of the Herakleids" is undoubtedly as unworthy of credit as the
legend of Hengst and Horsa; yet, like the latter, it doubtless
embodies a historical occurrence. One cannot approve, as
scholarlike or philosophical, the scepticism of Mr. Cox, who
can see in the whole narrative nothing but a solar myth. There
certainly was a time when the Dorian tribes--described in the
legend as the allies of the Children of Herakles--conquered
Peloponnesos; and that time was certainly subsequent to the
composition of the Homeric poems. It is incredible that the
Iliad and the Odyssey should ignore the existence of Dorians
in Peloponnesos, if there were Dorians not only dwelling but
ruling there at the time when the poems were written. The
poems are very accurate and rigorously consistent in their use
of ethnical appellatives; and their author, in speaking of
Achaians and Argives, is as evidently alluding to peoples
directly known to him, as is Shakespeare when he mentions
Danes and Scotchmen. Now Homer knows Achaians, Argives, and
Pelasgians dwelling in Peloponnesos; and he knows Dorians
also, but only as a people inhabiting Crete. (Odyss. XIX.
175.) With Homer, moreover, the Hellenes are not the Greeks in
general but only a people dwelling in the north, in Thessaly.
When these poems were written, Greece was not known as Hellas,
but as Achaia,--the whole country taking its name from the
Achaians, the dominant race in Peloponnesos. Now at the
beginning of the truly historical period, in the eighth
century B. C., all this is changed. The Greeks as a people are
called Hellenes; the Dorians rule in Peloponnesos, while their
lands are tilled by Argive Helots; and the Achaians appear
only as an insignificant people occupying the southern shore
of the Corinthian Gulf. How this change took place we cannot
tell. The explanation of it can never be obtained from
history, though some light may perhaps be thrown upon it by
linguistic archaeology. But at all events it was a great
change, and could not have taken place in a moment. It is fair
to suppose that the Helleno-Dorian conquest must have begun at
least a century before the first Olympiad; for otherwise the
geographical limits of the various Greek races would not have
been so completely established as we find them to have been at
that date. The Greeks, indeed, supposed it to have begun at
least three centuries earlier, but it is impossible to collect
evidence which will either refute or establish that opinion.
For our purposes it is enough to know that the conquest could
not have taken place later than 900 B. C.; and if this be the
case, the MINIMUM DATE for the composition of the Homeric
poems must be the tenth century before Christ; which is, in
fact, the date assigned by Aristotle. Thus far, and no
farther, I believe it possible to go with safety. Whether the
poems were composed in the tenth, eleventh, or twelfth century
cannot be determined. We are justified only in placing them
far enough back to allow the Helleno-Dorian conquest to
intervene between their composition and the beginning of
recorded history. The tenth century B. C. is the latest date
which will account for all the phenomena involved in the case,
and with this result we must be satisfied. Even on this
showing, the Iliad and Odyssey appear as the oldest existing
specimens of Aryan literature, save perhaps the hymns of the
Rig-Veda and the sacred books of the Avesta.

The apparent difficulty of preserving such long poems for
three or four centuries without the aid of writing may seem at
first sight to justify the hypothesis of Wolf, that they are
mere collections of ancient ballads, like those which make up
the Mahabharata, preserved in the memories of a dozen or
twenty bards, and first arranged under the orders of
Peisistratos. But on a careful examination this hypothesis is
seen to raise more difficulties than it solves. What was there
in the position of Peisistratos, or of Athens itself in the
sixth century B. C., so authoritative as to compel all Greeks
to recognize the recension then and there made of their
revered poet? Besides which the celebrated ordinance of Solon
respecting the rhapsodes at the Panathenaia obliges us to
infer the existence of written manuscripts of Homer previous
to 550 B. C. As Mr. Grote well observes, the interference of
Peisistratos "presupposes a certain foreknown and ancient
aggregate, the main lineaments of which were familiar to the
Grecian public, although many of the rhapsodes in their
practice may have deviated from it both by omission and
interpolation. In correcting the Athenian recitations
conformably with such understood general type, Peisistratos
might hope both to procure respect for Athens and to
constitute a fashion for the rest of Greece. But this step of
'collecting the torn body of sacred Homer' is something
generically different from the composition of a new Iliad out
of pre-existing songs: the former is as easy, suitable, and
promising as the latter is violent and gratuitous."[151]

[151] Hist. Greece, Vol. II. p. 208.

As for Wolf's objection, that the Iliad and Odyssey are too
long to have been preserved by memory, it may be met by a
simple denial. It is a strange objection indeed, coming from a
man of Wolf's retentive memory. I do not see how the
acquisition of the two poems can be regarded as such a very
arduous task; and if literature were as scanty now as in Greek
antiquity, there are doubtless many scholars who would long
since have had them at their tongues' end. Sir G. C. Lewis,
with but little conscious effort, managed to carry in his head
a very considerable portion of Greek and Latin classic
literature; and Niebuhr (who once restored from recollection a
book of accounts which had been accidentally destroyed) was in
the habit of referring to book and chapter of an ancient
author without consulting his notes. Nay, there is Professor
Sophocles, of Harvard University, who, if you suddenly stop
and interrogate him in the street, will tell you just how many
times any given Greek word occurs in Thukydides, or in
AEschylos, or in Plato, and will obligingly rehearse for you
the context. If all extant copies of the Homeric poems were to
be gathered together and burnt up to-day, like Don Quixote's
library, or like those Arabic manuscripts of which Cardinal
Ximenes made a bonfire in the streets of Granada, the poems
could very likely be reproduced and orally transmitted for
several generations; and much easier must it have been for the
Greeks to preserve these books, which their imagination
invested with a quasi-sanctity, and which constituted the
greater part of the literary furniture of their minds. In
Xenophon's time there were educated gentlemen at Athens who
could repeat both Iliad and Odyssey verbatim. (Xenoph.
Sympos., III. 5.) Besides this, we know that at Chios there
was a company of bards, known as Homerids, whose business it
was to recite these poems from memory; and from the edicts of
Solon and the Sikyonian Kleisthenes (Herod., V. 67), we may
infer that the case was the same in other parts of Greece.
Passages from the Iliad used to be sung at the Pythian
festivals, to the accompaniment of the harp (Athenaeus, XIV.
638), and in at least two of the Ionic islands of the AEgaean
there were regular competitive exhibitions by trained young
men, at which prizes were given to the best reciter. The
difficulty of preserving the poems, under such circumstances,
becomes very insignificant; and the Wolfian argument quite
vanishes when we reflect that it would have been no easier to
preserve a dozen or twenty short poems than two long ones.
Nay, the coherent, orderly arrangement of the Iliad and
Odyssey would make them even easier to remember than a group
of short rhapsodies not consecutively arranged.

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