Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted
c >>
comparative mythology by John Fiske >> Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18
[7] The same incident is repeated in the story of Hassan of
El-Basrah. See Lane's Arabian Nights, Vol. III p. 452.
It is unnecessary to cite further illustrations. The tales
here quoted are fair samples of the remarkable correspondence
which holds good through all the various sections of Aryan
folk-lore. The hypothesis of lateral diffusion, as we may call
it, manifestly fails to explain coincidences which are
maintained on such an immense scale. It is quite credible that
one nation may have borrowed from another a solitary legend of
an archer who performs the feats of Tell and Palnatoki; but it
is utterly incredible that ten thousand stories, constituting
the entire mass of household mythology throughout a dozen
separate nations, should have been handed from one to another
in this way. No one would venture to suggest that the old
grannies of Iceland and Norway, to whom we owe such stories as
the Master Thief and the Princesses of Whiteland, had ever
read Somadeva or heard of the treasures of Rhampsinitos. A
large proportion of the tales with which we are dealing were
utterly unknown to literature until they were taken down by
Grimm and Frere and Castren and Campbell, from the lips of
ignorant peasants, nurses, or house-servants, in Germany and
Hindustan, in Siberia and Scotland. Yet, as Mr. Cox observes,
these old men and women, sitting by the chimney-corner and
somewhat timidly recounting to the literary explorer the
stories which they had learned in childhood from their own
nurses and grandmas, "reproduce the most subtle turns of
thought and expression, and an endless series of complicated
narratives, in which the order of incidents and the words of
the speakers are preserved with a fidelity nowhere paralleled
in the oral tradition of historical events. It may safely be
said that no series of stories introduced in the form of
translations from other languages could ever thus have
filtered down into the lowest strata of society, and thence
have sprung up again, like Antaios, with greater energy and
heightened beauty." There is indeed no alternative for us but
to admit that these fireside tales have been handed down from
parent to child for more than a hundred generations; that the
primitive Aryan cottager, as he took his evening meal of yava
and sipped his fermented mead, listened with his children to
the stories of Boots and Cinderella and the Master Thief, in
the days when the squat Laplander was master of Europe and the
dark-skinned Sudra was as yet unmolested in the Punjab. Only
such community of origin can explain the community in
character between the stories told by the Aryan's descendants,
from the jungles of Ceylon to the highlands of Scotland.
This conclusion essentially modifies our view of the origin
and growth of a legend like that of William Tell. The case of
the Tell legend is radically different from the case of the
blindness of Belisarius or the burning of the Alexandrian
library by order of Omar. The latter are isolated stories or
beliefs; the former is one of a family of stories or beliefs.
The latter are untrustworthy traditions of doubtful events;
but in dealing with the former, we are face to face with a
MYTH.
What, then, is a myth? The theory of Euhemeros, which was so
fashionable a century ago, in the days of the Abbe Banier, has
long since been so utterly abandoned that to refute it now is
but to slay the slain. The peculiarity of this theory was that
it cut away all the extraordinary features of a given myth,
wherein dwelt its inmost significance, and to the dull and
useless residuum accorded the dignity of primeval history. In
this way the myth was lost without compensation, and the
student, in seeking good digestible bread, found but the
hardest of pebbles. Considered merely as a pretty story, the
legend of the golden fruit watched by the dragon in the garden
of the Hesperides is not without its value. But what merit can
there be in the gratuitous statement which, degrading the
grand Doric hero to a level with any vulgar fruit-stealer,
makes Herakles break a close with force and arms, and carry
off a crop of oranges which had been guarded by mastiffs? It
is still worse when we come to the more homely folk-lore with
which the student of mythology now has to deal. The theories
of Banier, which limped and stumbled awkwardly enough when it
was only a question of Hermes and Minos and Odin, have fallen
never to rise again since the problems of Punchkin and
Cinderella and the Blue Belt have begun to demand solution.
The conclusion has been gradually forced upon the student,
that the marvellous portion of these old stories is no
illegitimate extres-cence, but was rather the pith and centre
of the whole,[8] in days when there was no supernatural,
because it had not yet been discovered that there was such a
thing as nature. The religious myths of antiquity and the
fireside legends of ancient and modern times have their common
root in the mental habits of primeval humanity. They are the
earliest recorded utterances of men concerning the visible
phenomena of the world into which they were born.
[8] "Retrancher le merveilleux d'un mythe, c'est le
supprimer."--Breal, Hercule et Cacus, p. 50.
That prosaic and coldly rational temper with which modern men
are wont to regard natural phenomena was in early times
unknown. We have come to regard all events as taking place
regularly, in strict conformity to law: whatever our official
theories may be, we instinctively take this view of things.
But our primitive ancestors knew nothing about laws of nature,
nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of
cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of
things. There was a time in the history of mankind when these
things had never been inquired into, and when no
generalizations about them had been framed, tested, or
established. There was no conception of an order of nature,
and therefore no distinct conception of a supernatural order
of things. There was no belief in miracles as infractions of
natural laws, but there was a belief in the occurrence of
wonderful events too mighty to have been brought about by
ordinary means. There was an unlimited capacity for believing
and fancying, because fancy and belief had not yet been
checked and headed off in various directions by established
rules of experience. Physical science is a very late
acquisition of the human mind, but we are already sufficiently
imbued with it to be almost completely disabled from
comprehending the thoughts of our ancestors. "How Finn
cosmogonists could have believed the earth and heaven to be
made out of a severed egg, the upper concave shell
representing heaven, the yolk being earth, and the crystal
surrounding fluid the circumambient ocean, is to us
incomprehensible; and yet it remains a fact that they did so
regard them. How the Scandinavians could have supposed the
mountains to be the mouldering bones of a mighty Jotun, and
the earth to be his festering flesh, we cannot conceive; yet
such a theory was solemnly taught and accepted. How the
ancient Indians could regard the rain-clouds as cows with full
udders milked by the winds of heaven is beyond our
comprehension, and yet their Veda contains indisputable
testimony to the fact that they were so regarded." We have
only to read Mr. Baring-Gould's book of "Curious Myths," from
which I have just quoted, or to dip into Mr. Thorpe's treatise
on "Northern Mythology," to realize how vast is the difference
between our stand-point and that from which, in the later
Middle Ages, our immediate forefathers regarded things. The
frightful superstition of werewolves is a good instance. In
those days it was firmly believed that men could be, and were
in the habit of being, transformed into wolves. It was
believed that women might bring forth snakes or poodle-dogs.
It was believed that if a man had his side pierced in battle,
you could cure him by nursing the sword which inflicted the
wound. "As late as 1600 a German writer would illustrate a
thunder-storm destroying a crop of corn by a picture of a
dragon devouring the produce of the field with his flaming
tongue and iron teeth."
Now if such was the condition of the human intellect only
three or four centuries ago, what must it have been in that
dark antiquity when not even the crudest generalizations of
Greek or of Oriental science had been reached? The same
mighty power of imagination which now, restrained and guided
by scientific principles, leads us to discoveries and
inventions, must then have wildly run riot in mythologic
fictions whereby to explain the phenomena of nature. Knowing
nothing whatever of physical forces, of the blind steadiness
with which a given effect invariably follows its cause, the
men of primeval antiquity could interpret the actions of
nature only after the analogy of their own actions. The only
force they knew was the force of which they were directly
conscious,--the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all
the outward world to be endowed with volition, and to be
directed by it. They personified everything,--sky, clouds,
thunder, sun, moon, ocean, earthquake, whirlwind.[9] The
comparatively enlightened Athenians of the age of Perikles
addressed the sky as a person, and prayed to it to rain upon
their gardens.[10] And for calling the moon a mass of dead
matter, Anaxagoras came near losing his life. To the ancients
the moon was not a lifeless ball of stones and clods: it was
the horned huntress, Artemis, coursing through the upper
ether, or bathing herself in the clear lake; or it was
Aphrodite, protectress of lovers, born of the sea-foam in the
East near Cyprus. The clouds were no bodies of vaporized
water: they were cows with swelling udders, driven to the
milking by Hermes, the summer wind; or great sheep with moist
fleeces, slain by the unerring arrows of Bellerophon, the sun;
or swan-maidens, flitting across the firmament, Valkyries
hovering over the battle-field to receive the souls of falling
heroes; or, again, they were mighty mountains piled one above
another, in whose cavernous recesses the divining-wand of the
storm-god Thor revealed hidden treasures. The yellow-haired
sun, Phoibos, drove westerly all day in his flaming chariot;
or perhaps, as Meleagros, retired for a while in disgust from
the sight of men; wedded at eventide the violet light (Oinone,
Iole), which he had forsaken in the morning; sank, as
Herakles, upon a blazing funeral-pyre, or, like Agamemnon,
perished in a blood-stained bath; or, as the fish-god, Dagon,
swam nightly through the subterranean waters, to appear
eastward again at daybreak. Sometimes Phaethon, his rash,
inexperienced son, would take the reins and drive the solar
chariot too near the earth, causing the fruits to perish, and
the grass to wither, and the wells to dry up. Sometimes, too,
the great all-seeing divinity, in his wrath at the impiety of
men, would shoot down his scorching arrows, causing pestilence
to spread over the land. Still other conceptions clustered
around the sun. Now it was the wonderful treasure-house, into
which no one could look and live; and again it was Ixion
himself, bound on the fiery wheel in punishment for violence
offered to Here, the queen of the blue air.
[9] "No distinction between the animate and inanimate is made
in the languages of the Eskimos, the Choctaws, the Muskoghee,
and the Caddo. Only the Iroquois, Cherokee, and the
Algonquin-Lenape have it, so far as is known, and with them it
is partial." According to the Fijians, "vegetables and stones,
nay, even tools and weapons, pots and canoes, have souls that
are immortal, and that, like the souls of men, pass on at last
to Mbulu, the abode of departed spirits."--M'Lennan, The
Worship of Animals and Plants, Fortnightly Review, Vol. XII.
p, 416.
[10] Marcus Aurelius, V. 7.
This theory of ancient mythology is not only beautiful and
plausible, it is, in its essential points, demonstrated. It
stands on as firm a foundation as Grimm's law in philology, or
the undulatory theory in molecular physics. It is philology
which has here enabled us to read the primitive thoughts of
mankind. A large number of the names of Greek gods and heroes
have no meaning in the Greek language; but these names occur
also in Sanskrit, with plain physical meanings. In the Veda we
find Zeus or Jupiter (Dyaus-pitar) meaning the sky, and
Sarameias or Hermes, meaning the breeze of a summer morning.
We find Athene (Ahana), meaning the light of daybreak; and we
are thus enabled to understand why the Greek described her as
sprung from the forehead of Zeus. There too we find Helena
(Sarama), the fickle twilight, whom the Panis, or
night-demons, who serve as the prototypes of the Hellenic
Paris, strive to seduce from her allegiance to the solar
monarch. Even Achilleus (Aharyu) again confronts us, with his
captive Briseis (Brisaya's offspring); and the fierce Kerberos
(Carvara) barks on Vedic ground in strict conformity to the
laws of phonetics.[11] Now, when the Hindu talked about Father
Dyaus, or the sleek kine of Siva, he thought of the
personified sky and clouds; he had not outgrown the primitive
mental habits of the race. But the Greek, in whose language
these physical meanings were lost, had long before the Homeric
epoch come to regard Zeus and Hermes, Athene, Helena, Paris,
and Achilleus, as mere persons, and in most cases the
originals of his myths were completely forgotten. In the Vedas
the Trojan War is carried on in the sky, between the bright
deities and the demons of night; but the Greek poet,
influenced perhaps by some dim historical tradition, has
located the contest on the shore of the Hellespont, and in his
mind the actors, though superhuman, are still completely
anthropomorphic. Of the true origin of his epic story he knew
as little as Euhemeros, or Lord Bacon, or the Abbe Banier.
[11] Some of these etymologies are attacked by Mr. Mahaffy in
his Prolegomena to Ancient History, p. 49. After long
consideration I am still disposed to follow Max Muller in
adopting them, with the possible exception of Achilleus. With
Mr. Mahaffy s suggestion (p. 52) that many of the Homeric
legends may have clustered around some historical basis, I
fully agree; as will appear, further on, from my paper on
"Juventus Mundi."
After these illustrations, we shall run no risk of being
misunderstood when we define a myth as, in its origin, an
explanation, by the uncivilized mind, of some natural
phenomenon; not an allegory, not an esoteric symbol,--for the
ingenuity is wasted which strives to detect in myths the
remnants of a refined primeval science,--but an explanation.
Primitive men had no profound science to perpetuate by means
of allegory, nor were they such sorry pedants as to talk in
riddles when plain language would serve their purpose. Their
minds, we may be sure, worked like our own, and when they
spoke of the far-darting sun-god, they meant just what they
said, save that where we propound a scientific theorem, they
constructed a myth.[12] A thing is said to be explained when
it is classified with other things with which we are already
acquainted. That is the only kind of explanation of which the
highest science is capable. We explain the origin, progress,
and ending of a thunder-storm, when we classify the phenomena
presented by it along with other more familiar phenomena of
vaporization and condensation. But the primitive man explained
the same thing to his own satisfaction when he had classified
it along with the well-known phenomena of human volition, by
constructing a theory of a great black dragon pierced by the
unerring arrows of a heavenly archer. We consider the nature
of the stars to a certain extent explained when they are
classified as suns; but the Mohammedan compiler of the
"Mishkat-ul-Ma'sabih" was content to explain them as missiles
useful for stoning the Devil! Now, as soon as the old Greek,
forgetting the source of his conception, began to talk of a
human Oidipous slaying a leonine Sphinx, and as soon as the
Mussulman began, if he ever did, to tell his children how the
Devil once got a good pelting with golden bullets, then both
the one and the other were talking pure mythology.
[12] Les facultes qui engendrent la mythologie sont les memes
que celles qui engendront la philosophie, et ce n'est pas sans
raison que l'Inde et la Grece nous presentent le phenomene de
la plus riche mythologie a cote de la plus profonde
metaphysique. "La conception de la multiplicite dans
l'univers, c'est le polytheisme chez les peuples enfants;
c'est la science chez les peuples arrives a l'age mur.--Renan,
Hist. des Langues Semitiques, Tom. I. p. 9.
We are justified, accordingly, in distinguishing between a
myth and a legend. Though the words are etymologically
parallel, and though in ordinary discourse we may use them
interchangeably, yet when strict accuracy is required, it is
well to keep them separate. And it is perhaps needless, save
for the sake of completeness, to say that both are to be
distinguished from stories which have been designedly
fabricated. The distinction may occasionally be subtle, but is
usually broad enough. Thus, the story that Philip II. murdered
his wife Elizabeth, is a misrepresentation; but the story that
the same Elizabeth was culpably enamoured of her step-son Don
Carlos, is a legend. The story that Queen Eleanor saved the
life of her husband, Edward I., by sucking a wound made in his
arm by a poisoned arrow, is a legend; but the story that
Hercules killed a great robber, Cacus, who had stolen his
cattle, conceals a physical meaning, and is a myth. While a
legend is usually confined to one or two localities, and is
told of not more than one or two persons, it is characteristic
of a myth that it is spread, in one form or another, over a
large part of the earth, the leading incidents remaining
constant, while the names and often the motives vary with each
locality. This is partly due to the immense antiquity of
myths, dating as they do from a period when many nations, now
widely separated, had not yet ceased to form one people. Thus
many elements of the myth of the Trojan War are to be found in
the Rig-Veda; and the myth of St. George and the Dragon is
found in all the Aryan nations. But we must not always infer
that myths have a common descent, merely because they resemble
each other. We must remember that the proceedings of the
uncultivated mind are more or less alike in all latitudes, and
that the same phenomenon might in various places independently
give rise to similar stories.[13] The myth of Jack and the
BeanStalk is found not only among people of Aryan descent, but
also among the Zulus of South Africa, and again among the
American Indians. Whenever we can trace a story in this way
from one end of the world to the other, or through a whole
family of kindred nations, we are pretty safe in assuming that
we are dealing with a true myth, and not with a mere legend.
[13] Cases coming under this head are discussed further on, in
my paper on "Myths of the Barbaric World."
Applying these considerations to the Tell myth, we at once
obtain a valid explanation of its origin. The conception of
infallible skill in archery, which underlies such a great
variety of myths and popular fairy-tales, is originally
derived from the inevitable victory of the sun over his
enemies, the demons of night, winter, and tempest. Arrows and
spears which never miss their mark, swords from whose blow no
armour can protect, are invariably the weapons of solar
divinities or heroes. The shafts of Bellerophon never fail to
slay the black demon of the rain-cloud, and the bolt of
Phoibos Chrysaor deals sure destruction to the serpent of
winter. Odysseus, warring against the impious night-heroes,
who have endeavoured throughout ten long years or hours of
darkness to seduce from her allegiance his twilight-bride, the
weaver of the never-finished web of violet clouds,--Odysseus,
stripped of his beggar's raiment and endowed with fresh youth
and beauty by the dawn-goddess, Athene, engages in no doubtful
conflict as he raises the bow which none but himself can bend.
Nor is there less virtue in the spear of Achilleus, in the
swords of Perseus and Sigurd, in Roland's stout blade
Durandal, or in the brand Excalibur, with which Sir Bedivere
was so loath to part. All these are solar weapons, and so,
too, are the arrows of Tell and Palnatoki, Egil and Hemingr,
and William of Cloudeslee, whose surname proclaims him an
inhabitant of the Phaiakian land. William Tell, whether of
Cloudland or of Altdorf, is the last reflection of the
beneficent divinity of daytime and summer, constrained for a
while to obey the caprice of the powers of cold and darkness,
as Apollo served Laomedon, and Herakles did the bidding of
Eurystheus. His solar character is well preserved, even in the
sequel of the Swiss legend, in which he appears no less
skilful as a steersman than as an archer, and in which, after
traversing, like Dagon, the tempestuous sea of night, he leaps
at daybreak in regained freedom upon the land, and strikes
down the oppressor who has held him in bondage.
But the sun, though ever victorious in open contest with his
enemies, is nevertheless not invulnerable. At times he
succumbs to treachery, is bound by the frost-giants, or slain
by the demons of darkness. The poisoned shirt of the
cloud-fiend Nessos is fatal even to the mighty Herakles, and
the prowess of Siegfried at last fails to save him from the
craft of Hagen. In Achilleus and Meleagros we see the unhappy
solar hero doomed to toil for the profit of others, and to be
cut off by an untimely death. The more fortunate Odysseus, who
lives to a ripe old age, and triumphs again and again over all
the powers of darkness, must nevertheless yield to the craving
desire to visit new cities and look upon new works of strange
men, until at last he is swallowed up in the western sea. That
the unrivalled navigator of the celestial ocean should
disappear beneath the western waves is as intelligible as it
is that the horned Venus or Astarte should rise from the sea
in the far east. It is perhaps less obvious that winter should
be so frequently symbolized as a thorn or sharp instrument.
Achilleus dies by an arrow-wound in the heel; the thigh of
Adonis is pierced by the boar's tusk, while Odysseus escapes
with an ugly scar, which afterwards secures his recognition by
his old servant, the dawn-nymph Eurykleia; Sigurd is slain by
a thorn, and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistletoe; and in the
myth of the Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her
long winter sleep when pricked by the point of the spindle. In
her cosmic palace, all is locked in icy repose, naught
thriving save the ivy which defies the cold, until the kiss of
the golden-haired sun-god reawakens life and activity.
The wintry sleep of nature is symbolized in innumerable
stories of spell-bound maidens and fair-featured youths,
saints, martyrs, and heroes. Sometimes it is the sun,
sometimes the earth, that is supposed to slumber. Among the
American Indians the sun-god Michabo is said to sleep through
the winter months; and at the time of the falling leaves, by
way of composing himself for his nap, he fills his great pipe
and divinely smokes; the blue clouds, gently floating over the
landscape, fill the air with the haze of Indian summer. In the
Greek myth the shepherd Endymion preserves his freshness in a
perennial slumber. The German Siegfried, pierced by the thorn
of winter, is sleeping until he shall be again called forth to
fight. In Switzerland, by the Vierwald-stattersee, three Tells
are awaiting the hour when their country shall again need to
be delivered from the oppressor. Charlemagne is reposing in
the Untersberg, sword in hand, waiting for the coming of
Antichrist; Olger Danske similarly dreams away his time in
Avallon; and in a lofty mountain in Thuringia, the great
Emperor Yrederic Barbarossa slumbers with his knights around
him, until the time comes for him to sally forth and raise
Germany to the first rank among the kingdoms of the world. The
same story is told of Olaf Tryggvesson, of Don Sebastian of
Portugal, and of the Moorish King Boabdil. The Seven Sleepers
of Ephesus, having taken refuge in a cave from the
persecutions of the heathen Decius, slept one hundred and
sixty-four years, and awoke to find a Christian emperor on the
throne. The monk of Hildesheim, in the legend so beautifully
rendered by Longfellow, doubting how with God a thousand years
ago could be as yesterday, listened three minutes entranced by
the singing of a bird in the forest, and found, on waking from
his revery, that a thousand years had flown. To the same
family of legends belong the notion that St. John is sleeping
at Ephesus until the last days of the world; the myth of the
enchanter Merlin, spell-bound by Vivien; the story of the
Cretan philosopher Epimenides, who dozed away fifty-seven
years in a cave; and Rip Van Winkle's nap in the
Catskills.[14]
Pages:
1 | 2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18